If you’ve opened YouTube or Instagram in the last few years and have any interest in food, odds are high that you’ve encountered a video set in a mountain village where a guy, say, roasts an entire camel in a pit in the ground, or deep fries a whole ostrich, or cooks a Wagyu steak aged for 30 days in peanut butter. (Is it good? Apparently.)

This is Wilderness Cooking, a viral YouTube channel with 1.8 billion views and counting — statistically somewhere between MythBusters and The Eagles in terms of total views — where each dish, cooked in the great outdoors, seems more outrageous than the last. Other channels filmed nearby, like Sweet Village or Faraway Village, feature scenic footage of rustic villagers milking sheep, foraging for wild herbs, or making homemade jam.

Yes, this is a niche part of the internet, but not that niche. Wilderness Cooking alone has more than 6 million subscribers — that’s three times as many as the U.S. White House official account. Or, to put it another way, that’s 60% of the population of Azerbaijan, where the channel is based (a small, oil-rich country nestled between Russia, Armenia, and Iran). These videos tap into a global online trend of “simple living” that includes all manner of outdoor cooking shows, and styles like “cottagecore” and “farmfluencing.” As Kaila Yu writes in an Offrange piece on Chinese farm influencers, “the challenges of modern urban life have led countless millions to yearn for something simpler, more picturesque.”

In this particular case, what’s picturesque turns out to be simple meals, usually cooked over an open flame and accompanied by a soundtrack of roosters crowing, gurgling streams, and distant birdsong. But something deeper than urban fascination with country life is at play here too: a sense of wonder at our interconnected world. “I’m sitting on my couch in Alaska watching a man in Azerbaijan cook fish in the mountains,” writes one YouTube commenter. “What a time to be alive.”

Like the viewer in Alaska, I couldn’t get enough of this cooking show. The fact that there’s no speaking, paired with the unfamiliar scenery, gives it a documentary feel. A lot of rural lifestyle content on social media has an air of inauthenticity about it. As in Cottagecore or Tradwifing, visions of a simple rural life often played by urbanites can feel like watching a model trying on ill-fitting clothing.

With Wilderness Cooking, viewers can indulge in a different kind of fantasy: the idea that the people on screen are real old timers, rooted in place, part of an unbroken tradition in a less developed part of the world. But eventually I had to wonder what really lay behind the whimsical shots. Was this a real village? Was it documentary, fiction, or something in between?

I wrote to the channel’s founder on Instagram, and soon, thanks to a Yale Global Food Fellowship, found myself traveling to the place where the content is made, in the foothills of the Caucasus mountains. The village, with stone houses clinging to the mountainside, is at the north end of the country, just miles from the Russian border, and a world away from the opulent skyscrapers of the coastal capital.

After hours on desert roads in a rented Lada with struggling A/C, periodically swerving to dodge cows, I arrived at the mountains. Getting to Qamarvan itself took another several miles lurching in low gear up steep gravel roads along a roaring mountain river, following the film crew. My destination was a house with a large whitewashed porch and dusty courtyard filled with sheep and calves, a home that — for today at least — would double as the setting for the next Sweet Village cooking video. It normally functions as the summer home for the family that stars on the channel.

The broad appeal of outdoor cooking is clear, but what is less apparent is how our taste in online content drives change in the rural economy on the other side of the screen. I may have been the first American to visit in person, but this mountainous community draws millions of views from the United States. For fewer than 2,000 residents, 30 million subscribers across all channels is a massive audience.

On set, a grandmother peeled garlic from her garden while the grandkids tried their best to be quiet. Around the edges of the scene, millennials in branded t-shirts filmed with an iPhone on a tripod. Like with any cooking show, there was lots of starting and stopping.

Tomorrow most of the film crew would be back in a brightly lit office in the capital of Baku, sitting in cubicles and working on post-production, monetization, and content strategy. They’re employed by a small media empire called OkayTube, founded by entrepreneur Gadzhi Ziyadov, who spent a large part of his childhood in the village he’s made famous. Many of the faces on camera — like the old woman peeling garlic — are from Ziyadov’s extended family. All told, the company employs over 100 people, about half of them in the capital city.

It’s the ideal situation for a content creation company: Production costs are low, but having an American audience means that ad revenue stays high. The economic reality is that each view from the U.S. is more valuable than a view from, say, India. “As we know,” said Ziyadov, in a featured speech at the BUR Marketing Summit in Berlin, “the English-language audience — the American audience — is the most lucrative.” Merch like Acacia wood bowls and Damascus steel chef knives, sold in USD and prominently featured in reels and videos, helps convert loyal subscribers to paying customers. Indirectly, the U.S. (and other countries, too) have economic power to influence the content and style of videos from countries many of us can’t find on a map.

For intstance, the classic Azerbaijani meat dishes are lamb, but steak does better with American audiences, so there’s a whole beef playlist on the main page of the channel. “Americans like to see steak,” said Ziyadov. Similarly, the national drink of choice for Azeris is black tea, but one of the recent Instagram reels on the Sweet Village channel is captioned “Rustic Coffee-Infused Steaks Cooked in the Village!”

The ad dollar imbalance does more than influence local trends or introduce new flavors. YouTube views are also transforming the village economy in Qamarvan by providing a new type of employment opportunity. Paradoxically, the globalized digital economy may actually help keep young people in the village. Ziyadov said the channel tries to hire locally and teach young people video shooting skills. “Even if the director is from Baku, next to him there’s always a young guy from our village who’s learning the craft.”

Ziyadov doesn’t think YouTube has the power to reverse urbanization, or anything like that. But now, instead of heading to Baku to look for work, more young people have the chance to learn cinematography or set design right at home. Ziyadov states the obvious: “The more people stay in a village, the longer the village will survive.” The long-term effects of this relatively new digital economy (Wilderness Cooking premiered in 2020) remain to be seen. For now, most people in the village still make their living off a combination of sheep herding and tourism. The regular YouTube shoots bring another stream of income, and great entertainment for the local children, but they haven’t fundamentally changed the rhythm of rural life.

Back on the set of Sweet Village, the success of the approach was evident, but it was unclear how long it would last. One of the young men filming admitted that his dream was to go to Hollywood. Meanwhile, the grandfather, Malik, was getting restless. He wasn’t on camera that day, and the constant stopping and starting, along with the necessity to be silent — had him itching to get out. He asked if I wanted to get out above the village and see the mountains. Of course I did.

After 15 minutes up some roads I would never have braved on my own, we emerged into the open grazing land overlooking the village. As Malik spryly strode up the narrow sheep trails, despite being in his late 70s, I asked whether he found it strange that while many people in Qamarvan want to go to America, in America people were wishing they were here.

Malik’s face betrayed no emotion. “It’s normal,” he said. “Take these mountains, for instance. To you they’re breathtaking, because you’re seeing them for the first time. To me, they’re ordinary. It’s like that.”

The maple syrup industry was trying to make things easier, really they were. After all, the world of food labeling is a quagmire — it is the rare consumer who has really studied the difference between “cage-free” and “pasture-raised” eggs, who understands what separates “natural” from “artificial” flavors.

But somehow, maple syrup was even more complicated, with labels differing between not just countries, but individual states. (Vermont has a team of state inspectors to enforce its grading system.) In any store or sugarhouse, you could find things like Grade A Fancy, Grade A Amber, or Grade B. But a bottle of “Grade A Medium Amber” in Vermont was the same product as “No. 1 Light” in Canada.

How did that make any sense?

These labels, regulated either by the USDA, Canadian law, or state requirements, were all meant to convey the color and flavor of the syrups. For example, Grade A Light Amber was thinner and clearer; Grade B was dark and intense. But in Canada, which used a numerical system, No. 1 could range from light to medium, while a darker No. 2 could also be named “Ontario Amber” in some places. The same product could be labeled “Grade A Light Amber” if produced in Maine, and “Vermont Fancy” in Vermont.

So the maple syrup industry — specifically the International Maple Syrup Institute (IMSI), a trade group representing the industry in both the U.S. and Canada — proposed a solution, and released a new plan in 2011. Gone would be Canadian No. 1 and No. 2, and Grade A and Grade B in the U.S. Instead, all manufacturers would label their syrups “Grade A,” and specify the color and taste as ranging from “Golden Color With Delicate Taste” to “Very Dark Color With Strong Taste.” This way, in theory, customers could choose maple syrup based on whether they wanted something lighter or more robust, rather than the perceived quality — the assumption being that no one would buy Grade B if a Grade A were available.

Of course, some customers never needed convincing. I grew up in a Grade B maple syrup household, which was essentially maple syrup for Real Heads. It was the most maple syrupy syrup you could get, viscous like toffee, like licking a sweet tree. Knowing Grade B was a good product made you feel like you were in on something. There was a punk edge to buying it, publicly declaring your love for something that sounded worse in comparison to its counterparts, but that you knew was better. Amateurs could have their Fancy Grade As — basically sugar water — in a novelty maple leaf-shaped bottle. The real ones, who understood pancakes were only a vehicle for the good stuff, knew Grade B.

The new grading system was accepted, and has been in place since 2015. At any grocery store or farmer’s market, you’ll find a range of Grade A jugs of maple syrup, the only difference being an adjective to tell you whether you’re getting a lighter or darker product. But despite it being over a decade since the change, some consumers are still not over it.

The maple syrup industry insists Grade B has just been replaced with Grade A Dark or Very Dark, that the same great product is there under a different name. In fact, they were trying to save Grade B when they made the change. “There are many consumers who prefer good quality Grade B or Canada No. 2 Amber or even darker coloured syrup. The new system would place all colours of maple syrup on equal footing in the retail market, provided they meet taste and quality standards,” wrote the IMSI in its 2011 regulatory proposal.

In theory, the change could even help more customers discover the benefits of darker syrup. “Some dark syrup with bold flavor had been labeled as Grade B for reprocessing and not intended for retail sale. But, the USDA said there’s more demand for dark syrup for cooking and table use,” wrote Today at the time of the change. Instead of seeing “Grade B” and thinking it was an inferior product, renaming it “Grade A Dark” would hopefully get more customers to buy it.

Grade B was the most maple syrupy syrup you could get, viscous like toffee, like licking a sweet tree.

Pam and Rich Green of Green’s Sugarhouse in Poultney, Vermont, have seen the positive impact of the labeling changes in the past decade. “People would pick up ‘Fancy’ thinking it was the best, and then they didn’t like it because it had a very delicate flavor,” said Rich Green of the old labeling. Now the labels are more tied to the flavor you get in the bottle, so “if they like dark roast coffee or dark chocolate, then maybe they’ll like dark robust.”

Having them all labeled Grade A, they argue, is just assuring the customer that they are getting the same quality regardless of color. Plus it sounds better. “You wouldn’t buy grade B eggs or grade B meat,” said Pam. (Grade B eggs do exist, but are typically not sold in grocery stores).

But some fans of Grade B say they never equated the name with quality. “I liked that intensity just for regular use. I felt like I was getting more of the tree,” said Michael Metivier, who started buying Grade B in the Berkshires when he and his wife lived in Western Massachusetts. And the new naming system, for him, presents as many problems as the old one. “Having a range of Grade As with different labels seems unwieldy while Grade B felt pretty clear … It felt more like ‘This is the serious stuff.’”

This would all be easy enough to navigate if consumers knew they were getting the same product under a different name. But some consumers say it’s still not the same. “The commercial Grade As that I’ve tried that are supposed to be the most like Grade B still look too light to my eye and taste a little thinner, less interesting somehow,” said Erin Keane, who started seeking out Grade B syrup after attending a maple syrup festival in Indiana about 15 years ago. She’s mostly chalked it up to memory clouding her experience, but she very well could be right.

“People would pick up ‘Fancy’ thinking it was the best, and then they didn’t like it because it had a very delicate flavor.”

The change in labeling also came with a change in which syrup goes into which category. To be legally categorized as maple syrup (as opposed to a “pancake syrup” or other maple imitator), the product must be produced by the concentration of maple sap, and have soluble solids (mainly sugar) between 66% and 68.9%. The different grades are then judged by light transmittance, or how transparent it is.

Producers sometimes advertise that Grade A Very Dark used to be called Grade B, but that’s not entirely true. What was sold as Grade B in Vermont and Ohio, or Canada No 2. Amber, had to have 27-43.9% light transmittance, while anything below 27% was sold as “Commercial Grade” or “No. 3.” But the change in naming also came with a change in light transmittance classification. Now, Grade A Dark is a wider range of 25-49.9% light transmittance, while Grade A Very Dark is anything below 25%. It seems minor, but now that means it’s possible to buy a Grade A Dark syrup that is lighter than what Grade B used to be.

It also could be possible to buy Grade A Very Dark that is darker than formerly Grade B syrups, but in all likelihood that’s not happening. According to Tasting Table, Grade A Amber is the most popular, and a quick scan of a few local grocery store shelves confirmed that even when there were a range of maple syrup brands, Grade A Amber was by far the most common grade available. And a look around at individual producers show some don’t even make Grade A Very Dark. Like any other business, maple syrup sales work by supply and demand.

Both Kaylie Stuckey, executive director of IMSI, and Peter Christopher, IMSI’s vice president, agree that while there are no official statistics, Grade A Amber is the crowd pleaser. This makes an intuitive sense — it’s not too dark and not too light, suitable for both baking and drizzling on waffles, the kind of syrup most people would be happy enough with. If you’re stocking shelves for the general public, it’s what will sell.

It’s also the easiest to stock because that’s what maple syrup producers make the most of. Golden Delicate syrup is produced at the very beginning of the season, while Very Dark syrup is produced right at the end, so less of each is made. “I have to have enough volume on the shelf to put out a product,” said Christopher, who is also the plant manager at Maple Grove Farms of Vermont. So Amber and Dark go out for mass consumption, while the rest is usually bottled and sold at sugaring houses.

What I and other Grade B fans want is credit for knowing the band before they got big, as it were.

There is an inherent tension in trying to label and classify a natural product. Just as the same wine will taste different year over year, maple syrup changes with the seasons, with the soil, and across geographical zones — even if it carries the same name. This was the case then and now, whether it was called Grade B or Grade A Very Dark. But those who miss Grade B don’t necessarily miss a specific product, but a phrase that symbolized they were different, an identity that made them unique from other consumers.

But perhaps they’re not so unique anymore. It’s clear the Dark and Very Dark syrups are enjoyed by those who try them — some producers are saying they’re becoming more popular, and perhaps some of that is indeed because of the naming change. “If you don’t know maple syrup, I think you’re automatically drawn to the lighter colors, but then I find once you actually get to know syrup and you taste enough of it, you’ll find that the darker flavors are more robust,” said Stuckey. It’s just that because of the quirks of maple syrup production, you have to be the kind of maple syrup fan who actively seeks them out, rather than casually picks up whatever’s in the syrup aisle.

This whole grading change was an exercise in public education, to convert casual grocery shoppers into the kind of people who know more and seek out exactly what they want. Which is precisely what chafes. That the same syrup can be bought and enjoyed is not the point (though let’s be honest, everything being called “Grade A” is kind of silly).

What I and other Grade B fans want is credit for knowing the band before they got big, as it were. For seeing the value in Grade B before it got a makeover to appeal to the people who previously never gave it a chance. Then again, regardless of the name, you still have to know where to look for it. Nothing feels more punk than that.

Half of North American bee species are in decline and a quarter at risk of extinction, as bee populations face daunting challenges like habitat loss, pesticides, and disease. This is a problem for ecosystem health, but it’s particularly acute for many of our edible crops.

In the United States, honeybees, which do the bulk of agricultural pollination, are shipped to California in February for almond season, then to Washington two months later when the apples bloom as the beekeepers try to match the demand. When sunflower and canola season falls later in the summer, the bees need to be moved back.

“There’s a supply and demand issue,” said James Strange, professor of entomology at Ohio State University. “Demand for food has grown, [which] means that we need hives of bees moved to places where plants are blooming at that moment.”

Or we can turn to robots.

In the U.S., the dinner plate-sized Dropcopter drone can now be seen releasing dry pollen from what looks like a WW2 aircraft ball turret under its belly. One person can manually pollinate five to 10 trees a day, while Dropcopter will cover 40 acres in around four hours. Since the robot bee was first used in 2017 to pollinate almond orchards in New York, it has been used to pollinate almond, apple, cherry, and pistachio orchards from California to Brazil.

In 2017, Dropcopter co-founder Matt Koball and Adam Fine visited a food conference in San Francisco. Fine was about to launch a drone food delivery company, but when they were at the conference, they heard an almond grower complaining about the increase in beehive rental costs during the pollination season. At that time the rental fee had risen from $150 to $175 per hive. Now in 2025, it can cost up to $225 a hive during peak pollen season.

Koball was an olive farmer, so he was aware how the almond growers used bees to pollinate their trees. “They put trays of pollen in front of the beehives. The bees [collect] a load of pollen on their way out to the field,” said Koball. “I started thinking about doing this with a drone and we went from delivering food to delivering pollen.”

The duo spent the next four months in a garage creating a rudimentary robot bee using an upturned salsa pot filled with pollen that would sit underneath a drone. The robot would fly high above the orchard and scatter frozen pollen over the trees. They trialed the robot bee in an almond orchard as it is the first to blossom in the United States; it’s also one of the hardest trees to pollinate.

After joining an incubator program, Koball and Fine ended up building a patented device that was able to meter out pollen at a specific rate and a steady speed. The Dropcopter team expanded to working with cherries and apples, which proved to be even more successful than almonds. Koball says the almond orchards saw a 25% yield increase while cherry orchards saw a 45% increase. They now rent out Dropcopters for up to $375 an acre.

The almond orchards saw a 25% yield increase while cherry orchards saw a 45% increase.

Of course, Dropcopter is not the only company working on robot bee technology. Singapore-based company Polybee is using robot bees to pollinate fruit farms in Australia and Europe. When its founder Siddharth Jadhav was studying drone tech in 2019 at the National University of Singapore, food security and vertical farms were a large part of the national conversation.

Singapore, which launched the world’s first vertical farm in 2012, imports 97% of its food. Jadhav decided to see how his drones could help vertical farms. When the autonomous Polybee hovers above self-pollinating plants such as tomatoes and strawberries, the downforce from the drone causes the plants to shake and the flowers release their pollen.

Robot bees were of particular interest to the indoor farmers in Australia as the country doesn’t have native bumblebees, so they need to pollinate indoor plants by hand. This can mean tapping the plant, brushing by hand, or even using leaf blowers.

Polybee’s software pilots the drone and uses the robot bee’s camera to recognise flowers and fruit. It also enables multiple robot bees to fly at one time without bumping into one another. Just two robot bees can pollinate a hectare of plants in a greenhouse within a few hours.

The robot bee can not only pollinate the plant, but help the farmer forecast yield and detect disease or nutritional deficiency. “What we’re doing at Polybee is [turning] unpredictable farms into data-driven factories,” said Jadhav.

Mark Fielden, CEO of Borotto Farms in Victoria, Australia, has been using Polybee’s robot bees not for pollination, but to analyze yields within its 400-acre farm. At one time the team would have walked the paddocks themselves, assessed the crop, and had their own opinions on whether it was the right time to harvest. “At $3 a kilo [for a spinach crop] you can be looking at $1,200 an acre a day if you get it wrong,” said Fielden. “[Polybee] flies itself every day over fields and paddocks. It measures all the leaves and gives you an objective view.”

Just two robot bees can pollinate a hectare of plants in a greenhouse in a few hours.

A swarm of other robot bees are also being created in labs, and they seem to be as varied as the ones in nature. In the Netherlands, startup Flapper Drones has designed a robot bee that can be used for pollination, with wings made from lightweight space blankets. This helps keep people safe as they work in proximity to the robots.

In 2017, researchers at the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology created a robot bee using a 4 cm-long toy drone covered in horsehair bristles and a sticky gel. While the pollen was transferred between the lily plants, it was reported the drone’s wings damaged the petals. In 2020, the team trialed another form of pollen dispersal by fitting the robot bee with a delivery system that would fire pollen-filled soap bubbles onto flowers.

A different project in the United States seems to have solved the problem of having the robot bees damage high-value crops. Associate professor Kevin Chen, head of the Soft and Micro Robotics Lab at MIT, has designed a bee that will land as softly as a water boatman upon a petal. Building on the work of the RoboBee team in the Wyss Institute at Harvard, Chen has designed artificial muscles that contract when voltage is applied.

Chen’s robot bee, which is tethered to a power source, is currently limited to flying between plastic flowers in the lab, but the robot engineer can see its potential. “Bees are doing great in terms of open-field farming,” said Chen, a statement some would surely disagree with. “But there is one potential type of pollination I think we can consider in the longer team, which is indoor farming.”

Entomologist professor Strange said: “The nice thing about putting a hive of [actual] bees into a greenhouse is they find the flowers themselves. You don’t have to worry about them getting caught up in the ropes or hitting the lights. [But] as drone technology gets better that might be an area where I actually would say, ‘Okay, that makes sense.’”

We’re not anywhere near a point in bee decline [where] some of our crop plants are going to go extinct. But we’re definitely at a point where we are looking at increases in costs for beekeepers, orchards, [and] farmers. Those are going to go up, so we’re going to pay more.”

When Bernard Kratky left his Hawaiian home and horticulture research in the ‘80s, he went to learn from another island across the planet with similar challenges. Taiwan, and its Asian Vegetable Research and Development Center, was running ambitious experiments to grow resilient crops in developing countries.

Breeding sweet potatoes and mung beans, developing disease-resistant tomatoes, and reducing fertilizer inputs were some of their priorities. Among all of the vegetable excitement, Kratky saw researchers growing crops without soil, hydroponically. He had grown some crops this way before, but in Taiwan he saw something new: hydroponics using no electricity or aeration whatsoever. This ran contrary to every growing system of the time, so he dismissed it and focussed on other research. But its memory stuck with him when he returned to Hawai’i. Now, almost 40 years later, people worldwide know the style of growing hydroponics without any aeration as the Kratky method.

Back at his home and work at the Volcano Agricultural Experiment Station in Hawai’i, Kratky encountered the same farm struggles that the islands have always had to deal with: weeds, nematodes, and extremely depleted soils. On top of that, certain areas didn’t have access to power, and he needed to grow successfully while leaving for extended periods. Frustrated with these pervasive challenges and informed by his observations in Taiwan, he and a farm foreman removed a door from an old refrigerator and laid the fridge on its back. He filled it with water nearly to the top, added a makeshift cover, and suspended young tomato plants above the nutrient solution, dangling their dainty roots into the water below. Unlike other hydroponics at the time, this system had no pumps and no power.

Kratky left for a trip and didn’t think much of the experiment. When he returned, he was surprised to find the tomatoes flourishing with their roots reaching deep into the baby blue fridge’s now-depleted reservoir, surviving without additional inputs or supervision.

Kratky began publishing his findings on non-circulating systems in 1990, but it didn’t gain much popularity until the internet got ahold of it in the mid-2000s. Today it is proliferating among growers around the world where infrastructure and inputs are more limited. What began as a practical response to Hawai‘i’s production barriers is gaining traction in places where simplicity is not a weakness but a necessity.

How It Works

The principle is disarmingly simple. Plant roots require oxygen to function, so when hydroponic growers fully submerge the roots in water, they also submerge a weighted bubbler connected to an air pump. By contrast, in the Kratky method, the container is filled once with nutrient solution and water. As the suspended plant sucks the water, the exposed upper roots switch from processing the nutrient solution to processing the air between the water and the container’s cover.

Kratky summarizes the streamlined system as a tank, a cover, and net pots. The nutrient solution is put in place “at the time of planting or transplanting” and then left alone. There is no electricity, no circulation, and no moving parts.

“Typical hydroponic growers are on call 24 hours per day and always checking on the operation,” he wrote. “However, Kratky hydroponic growers normally just fill the tanks with nutrient solution, plant or transplant the crop, and do nothing until harvest.” Growers can leave for five weeks and return to find lettuce ready for harvest.

A recent study from Uganda found that the vertical Kratky system produced lettuce yields similar to those grown in soil-filled grow bags and allowed producers to grow in multiple vertically stacked racks. The authors argued that the system could support urban food production and income generation in developing countries, especially given the lack of electricity requirements.

Why the Industry Dismissed It

While the history of hydroponics dates back to ancient systems in Babylon and the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan, modern hydroponics is generally considered to have emerged in the 1930s from UC Berkeley professor William F. Gericke and his nutrient solutions. Then in the 1970s, plastics became more commercially available, and they allowed commercial growers to scale up for the first time. The containers, gutters, tubes, and other parts that used to require glass, ceramics, and stainless steel could now be fabricated quickly and cheaply for hydroponic farms.

Both universities and large farms had something in common. They both had access to plenty of infrastructure and electricity. So when these resource-rich growers then wrote books and taught the world how to grow food without soil, they declared that pumps and aeration were essential for plant growth.

As a result, Kratky said his early work did not receive much attention from professional hydroponic circles; his first manuscripts were rejected from publication. Then at a 2005 hydroponics conference in New Zealand, two scientists publicly objected to his findings and insisted that Kratky systems could not have similar yields to those with supplemental oxygen. The skepticism was based not on specific data but on assumptions already entrenched in the field.

Nathaniel Heiden, plant pathologist and research director at Levo International, a nonprofit farm based in Connecticut, said that when he first encountered Kratky’s papers in 2016, the method still generated little discussion. “I sometimes talk now with hydroponic growers and experts who write off the Kratky method and assume that you need an air stone [an oxygenating air pump] to get optimal yields,” he said. The belief that dissolved oxygen must be mechanically supplied was widespread enough that Heiden and collaborators at Cornell, Ohio State University, and the University of Connecticut designed trials to compare systems directly.

“We were shocked to find repeatedly that Kratky systems with and without air stones performed similarly and that Kratky systems even performed similarly to more intensively monitored deep water culture systems,” he said. Their core findings, one of the first scaled up experiments to directly compare yields between Kratky and conventional hydroponics, showed that hydroponics with no power can produce almost the same yield, as long as some of the roots are exposed to absorb oxygen.

“Most areas of farm fields and even most backyards don’t have available electrical power so Kratky hydroponics can easily be done in places that would require a lot of infrastructure investment.“

Joe Swartz, senior vice president at American Hydroponics, has been growing with commercial hydroponic systems for more than 40 years with large growers. When asked about the Kratky method’s possible applicability in large farms, he said, “Unfortunately, no, not in a commercial application. Aeration is only one of the challenges. Root systems produce waste products, such as ammonia, which in the soil or other hydroponic systems is either carried away by nutrient flow or broken down by beneficial microbes. In a Kratky system, the plant produces ‘air roots,’ but the nutrient solution can become quite stagnant, which inhibits these microbes. The microbes die, ammonia builds up and the plant can begin to literally poison itself.”

Kratky himself acknowledges these limitations. He estimates that circulated and aerated systems can achieve roughly one-third higher yields when perfectly managed.

Still, setup of Kratky’s system is quick and inexpensive, safety worries about electrical power are eliminated, and there is no concern over breakdown of equipment or loss of power. Yes, a tank leak could cause a failure, but that could also happen with an aerated or circulated system. And Kratky said little experience is needed as he has taught this system to elementary school students. Additionally, he said, “Most areas of farm fields and even most backyards don’t have available electrical power so Kratky hydroponics can easily be done in places that would require a lot of infrastructure investment for conventional hydroponics.

Typical hydroponic growers are on call 24/7 and usually perform some maintenance operations during the crop growing period. However, Kratky hydroponic growers normally just fill the tanks with nutrient solution, plant or transplant the crop and do nothing until harvest.”

Where the Method Has Taken Hold

The Kratky method has struggled for acceptance in large-scale operations in the United States, but its adoption elsewhere tells a different story.

Heiden and Levo International describe using Kratky systems in Hartford, Connecticut, at a scale sufficient to supply their CSA farm and market stand. The systems have also been central to their work in Haiti, where electricity is unavailable or unreliable in many communities. In those settings, Heiden said, the method was “the only hydroponic approach that can be successful with a set-it-and-forget-it approach.”

Levo’s lead Haitian researcher, Girlo Augustin, has used the systems to test nutrient sources and substrates that can be produced locally. Heiden noted that their team has grown crops ranging from peppers to spinach in these Kratky systems, known locally as Bokits.

The MethodsX study from Uganda points to a similar pattern. The authors frame their vertical Kratky system as a tool to address urban land scarcity and to provide fresh vegetables where soil cultivation is constrained. They describe the method as low-cost, low-tech, and potentially transformative for food access in developing countries.

The common thread is not yield maximization but accessibility. In Hawai‘i, non-circulating hydroponics offered an escape from nematodes and poor soils in remote areas. In Hartford, it provided an affordable entry point for community-based production. In Haiti and Uganda, it offered a way to grow food where electricity, inputs, or infrastructure were unavailable.

Growing Outside the Frame

Kratky didn’t name the method after himself. but it became popular after a MHP Gardener, a grower on YouTube, released a video entitled “Easy Hydroponics — Anybody Can Do This,” that became viral in hobbyist hydroponic circles. Other hobbyists began experimenting, posting videos, and reaching large audiences, using the term themselves.

“The name stuck,” Kratky said.

Today, the method is thriving in an interactive, scientific community on YouTube with hundreds of growers reviewing and adapting each others’ systems. As the Kratky method grew in popularity, the academic community has responded by quantifying and publishing results on the method — despite initially dismissing it.

The Kratky method is unlikely to shift large-scale commercial operations, but it has created a simpler option for growers in very different situations. It begs the question: What other technologies and techniques seem too simple to work? Frustrated scientists, stubborn hobbyists, and YouTube may hold the keys to adapting new agricultural technologies to widespread applications beyond what the universities and commercial industry consider viable today.

Lauren Bailey answered the phone just a few hours after she’d picked up her annual quarter cow. The butchers at her local shop in Eugene, Oregon, are always slammed, and that November day was no different. She waited as six workers ran around, cutting and processing meat. Eventually they cashed her out (around $900) and loaded up her car with roughly 125 pounds of frozen beef — enough to last Bailey and her husband the entire year, if not longer.

She acknowledges that the upfront cost might deter many, as would the inflexibility in choosing which cuts you take home. (A quarter of beef only has so many ribeyes, for example.) But it’s much cheaper than if she bought meat throughout the year from the supermarket, she told Offrange. And the stockpile of protein gives her freedom.

“I grew up pretty poor,” she said over the phone. “But to know I have a freezer full of meat, that I have a year’s worth of meals, is really helpful.”

For the majority of U.S. meat-eaters today, this approach is foreign. Most consumers know their meat as the pre-portioned plastic-bound flesh lining rows of grocery store refrigerated shelves. But with increasing social, political, and economic instability, some are predicting more Americans will attempt to insulate their pantries and wallets by adopting Bailey’s style of purchasing: buying their meat in bulk directly from farmers.

Michele Thorne is one of those believers; she leads a nonprofit, the Good Meat Project, that’s committed to making more ethically produced meat accessible to the average American. Buying in bulk, she said, is a consumer- and farmer-friendly approach that skirts many of the pitfalls of the meat market today. Almost six years after pandemic disruptions laid bare the fragility of our food supply chains, meat remains especially unstable.

Beef prices are “near record levels,” according to the The New York Times, in part because drought-afflicted herds are shrinking. In November, the Trump administration green-lit low-tariff beef imports from Argentina, claiming it would lower beef prices in the U.S., but so far cattle ranchers say the move “hurts U.S. farmers,” according to CNN. Two major meat processing corporations have recently agreed to pay millions to settle a 2019 beef price-fixing lawsuit filed on behalf of consumers, according to NBC News. And meanwhile, record stagflation has sent grocery prices soaring, while millions of SNAP users’ benefits — wielded as political pawns during the recent government shutdown — were not guaranteed for a portion of this year, contributing to overall unease.

Amid this uncertainty, buying in bulk can be a balm. Bulk shoppers like Bailey pay one price per pound for everything, whereas the price per pound at supermarkets will have “such a huge range,” Thorne told Offrange. And it’s better for producers, too. “I enjoy supporting a local farm, because I know that my money is staying in the community, in the state,” she said. “It’s a money multiplier, it boosts the local food system.”

“The timing was right during Covid because people couldn’t get stuff at stores, people were searching for farms they could buy directly from.”

For Bailey, her “local” farm, Butler Creek, is actually about two hours away, closer to the Oregon coast. It’s managed by an old friend of hers, Nadja Sanders, who also lives in Eugene, and whose family has managed Butler Creek Farm for close to 150 years. About 25 years ago, Sanders introduced bulk purchasing options and cow-shares. Since then, the customer base has grown entirely by word of mouth, with the advent of the internet making it easier for people like Bailey to place orders.

Because of the farm’s remote location, Sanders has few options for butchers. She partners with a Eugene-based mobile butcher, 4-Star, which will typically slaughter about 13 cows for them, once a year, around October.

“We’re about as far as they wanna go,” Sanders told Offrange of 4-Star. “They’re super willing and super efficient,” though she caveated that their customer service isn’t always the … gentlest. Sometimes they can be a little “gruff,” she admitted, but only because they’re always busy. They’re so slammed, in fact, that Sanders has to make arrangements for her butcher dates at least a year in advance. When she spoke with Offrange, she had just set the butcher date for October 2026.

But 4-Star isn’t an outlier. This country’s butchering industry has been shrinking for the last half-century, stretching the remaining butchers to their limits. In her professional spheres, master meat-cutter and fifth generation butcher Kari Underly talks a lot about the “missing middle,” or the slow disappearance of the butcher trade. It’s a trend that’s been disastrous for farmers and ranchers, who rely on butchers to connect them to the consumer — and who make bulk purchasing from small, independent farms possible. For example, 4-Star handles the slaughtering, processing, and final point of purchase for Butler Creek customers like Bailey.

Small- and medium-sized meat processors are increasingly outcompeted by the “Big Four” meat companies — Tyson, Cargill, National Beef, and JBS Foods — which “dominate the industry and have the resources to control every aspect of the meat supply chain from animal feed to meat processing to distribution,” according to sustainability nonprofit The Lexicon. These corporations, which receive government subsidies, are able to process exponentially more animals at a time and undercut the costs of smaller producers, contributing to the loss of local butchers in communities around the country.

As the market value of skilled meat-cutters has declined, Underly said, so has the skilled labor pool — and companies have supplemented with undocumented immigrants who are frequently paid and treated worse. As of 2024, it was estimated that anywhere from 30 to 50 percent of meatpackers in the U.S. were undocumented, in some cases making poverty wages. This year’s tornado of ICE raids has led to the detention of many of those workers and pushed others into hiding, further decimating the meat processing workforce, Underly noted.

On the consumer side, the upfront cost is a deterrent, even if bulk-buying saves money over time.

She agreed with Thorne that a widespread transition of American families buying their meat in bulk directly from farmers would go a long way towards patching up the meat industry’s problems. But without more butchers helping to connect customers directly to their local farmers and ranchers, she said, it’s unlikely to gain ground with the average household.

For its part, the Good Meat Project is trying to address the access gap with a tool called the Good Meat Finder, which maps out farms that offer direct purchasing by region. They also hold marketing workshops and seminars for farmers and ranchers on how to transition to these types of direct sales.

Still, on the consumer side, the upfront cost is a deterrent, even if bulk-buying saves money over time. It’s an investment, Thorne said. She spends the whole year leading up to her annual half or whole cow purchase from Butler Creek Farm financially preparing. “Instead of paying $6,000 a year on meat, I’m reducing my costs by 25 or 30 percent every year by buying in bulk,” she said. “It’s a discipline like anything else you’re saving money for, like a house, or a car.”

“It really is a shift in purchasing decisions,” she said.

To dampen the sticker shock, some people go in on an order with other family members or neighbors — or sometimes even people they don’t know, not dissimilar to a CSA. Thorne, for example, split her first bulk purchase from Butler Creek with a stranger.

Resource-pooling might not come as naturally to those of us living relatively isolated 21st century lives. But, as Thorne pointed out, it was only two or three generations ago that it was more common — like in the 1970s, when her parents, aunts, and uncles all split meat boxes. They got “hundreds and hundreds of pounds of meat” that none of them would have been able to afford individually, she said.

But the average American has moved pretty far from that model. Community bonds are frayed, butchers are in short supply, and being precious about where your meat comes from is likely to come off as “elitist,” as Underly called it. And in order for bulk buying to catch on at a larger scale, consumers would need a serious meat re-education, too. Unlike at a typical grocery store, you can’t drop in at random and select the cuts you want. Buying a quarter of beef means you’re going to get all sorts of cuts — not just 50 pounds of steaks.

“It’s a discipline like anything else you’re saving money for, like a house, or a car. It really is a shift in purchasing decisions.”

At May Hill Farm in Campbellsport, Wisconsin, Carrie Stevens has gotten very good at managing customer expectations, though it’s yet another layer of labor on top of her already-demanding workload. Without a mobile butcher nearby, she and her husband haul their own animals to a handful of carefully vetted butchers in their region, who then handle the slaughter and processing. Stevens said next year they’re targeting 50 cows for butchering, and they’ve seen a steady increase in demand each year since the pandemic, when they began marketing meat directly to consumers. (They also raise pigs and chickens.)

“The timing was right during Covid because people couldn’t get stuff at stores, people were searching for farms they could buy directly from,” she told Offrange. And now with beef prices as volatile as they are, the bulk orders for quarter and half cows have been rolling in. But some of her customers need a lot of hand-holding.

“Buying in bulk is really different if you’re used to going to the grocery store,” Stevens said. “There’s only one tongue on a beef, only one heart, only one oxtail.” Some of her customers in the Milwaukee area ask for “like, 10 beef cheeks” at a time, apparently not grasping what it means to purchase a section of a steer.

But while some may feel deprived of their favorite cuts, Bailey happens to love that her annual quarter of beef lets her try meat she wouldn’t otherwise find at the local supermarket, like rump roasts, half briskets, and heart. Sure, she only gets a limited amount of steaks per order, but she chooses to look at the glass as half-full: Buying in bulk lets her experiment.

There are plenty of reasons the average family might not be able to buy meat the way Bailey and Thorne do it. Prohibitive upfront costs, the surrendering of total choice over cuts, the sheer weight of all that meat, and the challenge of actually storing it (between chest freezers, standup freezers, and fridge freezers, Thorne, for example, has five working freezers and one she plans on fixing up). But the experience of buying meat directly from a farmer instead of shrink-wrapped at the grocery store would seem to outweigh the negatives for many.

“We serve a lot of families, and people who maybe grew up with farming in their family,” Stevens said. “They say things like, ‘This pork tastes like the pork my grandma used to make.’ They really can tell the difference, and they appreciate that.”

Thorne believes that, if nothing else, buying directly from farmers and butchers goes a long way toward strengthening the overall community fabric. “There’s ways to get closer to your food, to get to know your butcher, to be in relationship with your farmers and local meat supply chain and meet the faces of the people who are working so hard to keep their product so quality,” she said. She’s befriended her local butcher, who gives her free bones for her dogs, and she’s known the folks at Butler Creek Farm for years.

Buying her meat this way just feels good, she said. “It’s like Christmas when I pick up my meat from my butcher.”

The flames, distant at first, move fast as they consume tall, thick tufts of brown cogongrass, an invasive plant native to southeast Asia. The flames burn so high and so hot that when they approach an outcropping of pine trees, the trees don’t stand a chance. In an instant, fire has enveloped the lower branches, then the crowns, denuding the trees and turning their trunks into sooty spikes.

Prescribed burns, in which humans purposely set fire to a landscape to boost native plants and minimize non-natives, have long been embraced by Indigenous fire stewards. The practice has also slowly gained favor with the U.S. agencies tasked with protecting people and property from devastating wildfires.

But around the country, worsening incursions of intensely flammable weeds like cogongrass complicate the idea that prescribed burns are always a commonsensical, cost-effective fix for decades of misguided fire suppression. These invasive plants, some of which can withstand much hotter and more frequent fires than the natives they easily outcompete, are morphing ecosystems to favor themselves, making them ever-more more prone to the wildfires that help them proliferate.

It’s an endlessly repeating feedback loop.

Nationwide, one likely underestimate finds that invasive plants have taken over 133 million U.S. acres and are consuming 1.7 million more acres every year — costing some $26 billion in management, damages, and lost productivity. Although many native plants benefit from low- and moderate-intensity fires, which crack open their seeds and trigger germination, some non-natives can withstand hotter, more frequent flames.

“That’s how they’re spreading so well,” said Jutta Burger, science program director at the California Invasive Plant Council (Cal-IPC). If you use controlled burns where these plants have taken hold, she said, “You’ve just stimulated billions of [invasive] seeds to emerge from the seed bank.” In some cases, the practice has become “a very limited tool,” if not an ecological detriment. “If you have an environment where you’ve already got an infestation,” Burger said, “and you put a controlled burn through it, you need to be thinking about, is that the best thing to do?”

Over millennia, fire return intervals — that is, how frequently wildfires scorch an area — evolved with plants. Northern Wisconsin’s black spruce forests once experienced fire every 105 to 145 years so it’s no surprise that they are largely pyrophobic — fire thwarts their flourishing. On the other hand, prairie flowers of the northern Nebraska Sandhills were rejuvenated by a five-year fire cycle that cleared piles of dead grasses to let in sun and turned soil nutrients to beneficial ash. Invasives can usher in type conversion — that is, transforming a deep-rooted perennial system that experiences infrequent fires to, say, an annual dominated system that’s rejuvenated by frequent fire and “doesn’t need anything except for light and water,” Burger said.

One such plant is cheatgrass, whose “entire goal in life is to produce more seed to continue the population,” said Brian Mealor, rangeland weed scientist at the University of Wyoming. “It matures very early in the growing season, and as it senesces and dies off, it produces a continuous fine fuel load that is very flashy and easily ignitable.”

“If you’ve already got an infestation and you put a controlled burn through it, you need to be thinking about, is that the best thing to do?”

Introduced accidentally to the United States in the mid 1800s, cheatgrass has consumed huge portions of the Great Basin’s sagebrush steppe. This ecosystem, which stretches across most of Nevada and parts of Utah, Idaho, California, and Oregon, was accustomed to fire every 50 to 100 years; it’s declined by about 50 percent since cogongrass turned up. Prescribed burns have been used to improve rangeland for cattle (cheatgrass makes for poor forage) and to boost native steppe plants more generally. Since these do not re-sprout after fire, they have to “re-establish from seed,” Mealor said, “and it takes a long time.” Current fire interval: every three to five years, which has only ushered in more cheatgrass and fire.

To help land managers understand how to tackle invasions, researchers have collaborated for years to map the steppe and its ecoregions, overlaid with microclimates, aridity, and both native and invasive plant communities. This work shows that patches of the lower, warmer, and drier elevations of the southernmost Central Basin region are the areas most imperiled by prescribed burning; the practice should be suspended in them.

“You need to have a healthy ecosystem to be ready for fire,” said Eva Strand, professor emerita of rangeland and landscape ecology at the University of Idaho, who has worked with the sagebrush strategy group. That means having at least 20 percent of the land covered in native grasses to ensure there’s enough of their seed in the soil to out-compete cheatgrass after a burn. Katherine Wollstein, rangeland ecologist at Oregon State University, encourages the ranchers she works with to think in a nuanced way about eradicating cheatgrass on their grazing lands. “What plants can tolerate the level of disturbance that prescribed fire creates? What is going to be that plant community’s response to fire? If it is negative … then prescribed fire [maybe] isn’t the right tool for you.”

Meanwhile on the East Coast, invasive cogongrass and stiltgrass are blazing through deciduous forests. Attempting to eradicate them with burns can be a fool’s errand. Luke Flory, invasion ecologist at the University of Florida, conducted a study in the Big Oaks National Wildlife Refuge in Indiana, where prescribed burns are common. He found that stiltgrass made those fires burn extra-hot and long, significantly inhibiting native tree regeneration — and likely favoring more stiltgrass invasion.

But stiltgrass, Flory says, is benign compared to cogongrass. “The density of invasions, the amount of biomass, the fuel loads … If you get a prescribed fire that goes into a cogongrass-invaded area, it can kill every tree, it can kill huge trees.” Flory ran an experiment to test how drought and cogongrass invasion interacted when longleaf pine forests burned. One of the most endangered forest ecosystems in the U.S., longleaf pines evolved with frequent, low-intensity fires.

“If you get a prescribed fire that goes into a cogongrass-invaded area, it can kill every tree, it can kill huge trees.”

But in recent decades, the rapid spread of cogongrass, bolstered by climate-change-induced drought, has made any fire dangerous to these trees. First, drought causes the trees to grow shorter than usual. Then when fire is set to the cogongrass in the understory, flames surge to engulf treetops. Almost half of the longleaf pines exposed to fire in Flory’s experiment died from these extreme conditions.

The threat of invasives is even more dire in Hawai’i. Introduced by humans and helped along by habitat disruption, non-native plants now occupy almost one-quarter of the land in the state. One of the widest-spread invasives on the Big Island is fountain grass, an African ornamental that skipped out into the wild from where it was being cultivated and now has consumed at least 200,000 acres. The grass is pyrophytic (it adapted to resist fire), ranking .99 on a scale of 0 to 1 on the Hawai’i Weed Fire Risk Assessment. In a region where wildfires were once uncommon, areas dominated by fountain grass now burn roughly every eight years, contributing to the loss of 90 percent of Hawaii’s dry forest.

Research suggests that some prescribed fire might help control fountain grass. But the Hawaiian islands are home to so many rare plants — 366 are federally listed as threatened or endangered — that burning is often too dangerous to attempt. A’e trees are one of those rarities, with only eight left in the wild. One fire set to surrounding invasive grasses, said Elliott Parsons, a specialist with the Pacific Regional Invasive Species and Climate Change Management Network, based at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa, “could lead to the extinction of the species.”

So what tools are available to rein in these greedy, combustible plants — and lessen wildfire risk in the process? “We know roads are starting points for invasive plants to get established,” says Cal-IPC’s Burger, “so have a botanist or citizen science person [scout] them regularly.” In a similar vein, Parsons says the community-science app iNaturalist has become a favorite early-detection tool for land managers, who send taxonomic experts to patrol places with invasive sightings, to tamp the weeds down before they proliferate.

Intensive livestock grazing that specifically targets invasives might stimulate more native plant growth in some scenarios. Fire-resilient buffelgrass is now ubiquitous across West Texas’s Trans-Pecos grazinglands, where it’s pushing out natives like little blue stemgrass. Buffelgrass “grows in heavy clumps that take out nutrients and water meant for native grasses,” said David Brooke, prescribed fire coordinator for Texas A&M’s Department of Rangeland, Wildlife and Fisheries Management. But he’s seen progress in weakening it with cattle grazing, followed by applications of grass-specific herbicides.

Livestock, though, can degrade landscapes. So, for a restoration of Hawai’i’s Pu’uwa’awa’a Ahupua’a State Forest Reserve, miles of fencing was built to exclude livestock from areas that contained endangered plants; fountain grass was also cut with a weed whacker and native seedlings were planted to push non-natives out. After a multi-year effort, fountain grass was largely vanquished from some restoration areas after much labor, time, and expense. But “the phenomenon of re-invasions is real,” said Parsons, with invasives just waiting for a brief span of human inattention to attack again. He notices new fountain grass sprouts in restoration areas every year. “It’s something you can never walk away from,” he said.

Benton County, Indiana, may be over 900 miles from the Atlantic Ocean — and smack dab in the middle of the Midwest — but it’s also home to a saltwater shrimp farm that’s been supplying local communities and restaurants for the past 15 years.

“We sell them out faster than we can grow them,” said Karlanea Brown, who started RDM Aquaculture LLC in 2010 with her husband, Darryl. “Each of my 14-foot tanks will produce anywhere from 125 to about 150 pounds of shrimp every 90 days.”

There are 51 saltwater shrimp farmers in the U.S., according to the USDA’s 2023 Census of Aquaculture; the majority of them are located in traditional coastal states like Florida or Texas. Brown is one of only seven saltwater shrimp farms located inland with the others found in Iowa, Kentucky, Minnesota, and Missouri.

By raising saltwater shrimp hundreds of miles from the coast, these Midwest operations are challenging long-held assumptions about where seafood can be grown, and testing whether inland aquaculture can play a bigger role in the future of U.S. food production while potentially reducing reliance on imports.

“We’re still kind of small,” said Brown, noting that theirs is a two-person operation with 19 production tanks, seven intermediate tanks and between six and 10 nursery tanks, depending on the time of year.

A self-described “city girl,” Brown said she’d never “met a pig or cow in her life” until she met her husband, a third-generation pig farmer, decades ago. When they married and decided to start their own farm, their original plan was to follow in his family’s hog-shaped footprints, but that changed during the 1990s when the pork market hit a price collapse that pushed thousands of independent producers out of business.

“We literally poured the concrete for the pits and the slats for the first two hog barns and the price bottomed down,” said Brown.

This forced them to pivot to another type of livestock farming both were curious about: aquaculture, one of the fastest-growing forms of both U.S. and global food production. Their initial research brought them in contact with someone who not only had a tilapia system they could check out, but also a shrimp system. Brown said her love of shrimp influenced her to create their land-locked farm — but the fact that it was also cheaper than growing tilapia didn’t hurt either.

Shrimp: It’s What’s for Dinner

Shrimp is a perennially popular protein among Americans, due to their flavor, their nutritional value, and their versatility when it comes to preparation — they can be grilled, boiled, steamed, sautéed . In fact, shrimp accounts for about 38% of all seafood eaten in the U.S., according to Sustainable Fisheries, and the average American consumes roughly 5.5 pounds each year, which adds up to more than 1.5 billion pounds annually.

That level of popularity — and the potential for dibs in a growing U.S. market — is what made shrimp farming appealing to Landon Loftsgard.

“Shrimp’s the number one seafood consumed in the U.S. and we import about 90% of it,” said Loftsgard, who operates LandGrown with his wife. “We see an opportunity to eat into some of that 90% and provide a high-quality, local product. How cool is it that we can grow it in Iowa?”

Loftsgard’s operation is based near Redfield, Iowa, and consists of a 15,000-gallon system that takes up two 17-foot tanks where the Pacific white shrimp are grown and three tanks for water treatment in roughly a 1,200-square-foot barn. However, it utilizes a patent-pending, closed-loop Recirculating Aquaculture System (RAS) created by Midland Co. that uses algae to process shrimp waste, minimizing the environmental impact and reducing water loss from evaporation.

“I wouldn’t say that theirs is a booming industry at the moment. I think that there is promise of good things to come.“

Brown’s setup isn’t the same as Loftsgard’s. She uses an RAS with heterotrophic bacteria-based water that the Browns redesigned to run on an air pump after the motorized pump failed. Heterotrophic bacteria break down shrimp waste, converting ammonia into nitrite and then nitrate, allowing the same water to be reused for years, adding to the sustainability of raising shrimp in Indiana.

And for both, it’s all about the water quality when it comes to the shrimp they raise.

“We actually do nine tests on our tanks every day,” said Brown. “I learned the hard way when we first started. I didn’t test for four days and it cost me 400 pounds of shrimp in one day.”

The Medication Behind the Crustacean

One of the key differences between U.S. farmed shrimp and global aquaculture operations is the lack of added antibiotics, chemicals, or hormones. Last year, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) refused 81 shipments of foreign shrimp because of antibiotic contamination — the highest refusal rate since 2016. The kicker? According to Seafood Source, “Many of the refused shipments came from Best Aquaculture Practices-certified producers and processors.”

“They’re at such a mass scale that they have to use those antibiotics, they have to use those chemicals to control for disease,” noted Loftsgard, adding, “It was funny, the first time we harvested, that week was the same week as when the radioactive shrimp recall came out.”

Antibiotics commonly used in global shrimp production are banned for use in the U.S.

“If you put an antibiotic in a pig or cow, you cannot sell that pig or cow until that antibiotic’s run its course, but in imported shrimp, it’s in their food, it’s in their water,” said Brown. “They literally just harvest it at that time, then freeze it, so now it’s frozen in their bodies when you thaw it out and cook it.”

Brown’s point is clear: “You’re literally cooking [the antibiotics] into the meat.”

Is Shrimp America’s Next Great Commodity?

Shrimp farmers like Brown and Loftsgard begin each growing cycle with a delivery of postlarvae (PL) shrimp — juvenile shrimp that have completed their larval stage — that are usually only a few millimeters in length. The quality of the PL shrimp is crucial because it directly influences their growth and ability to resist disease.

Most come in shipments direct from the Gulf, according to Thomas Detmer, an assistant professor in the department of natural resource ecology and management at Iowa State University and director of its North Central Regional Aquaculture Center.

Brown said she gets hers from a supplier in Florida.

“We typically get them in groups of approximately 40,000 PLs at a time, which we hope to turn into about a thousand pounds harvested,” said Loftsgard, noting that the shrimp at this stage are about the size of an eyelash, filling large, grocery-store-like bags that are transferred to grow tanks for several months.

“After about 90 days, we harvest them as 20-gram shrimp, which is basically like a jumbo-size shrimp,” said Loftsgard.

U.S. shrimp fall under the same umbrella as all American aquaculture processors and are regulated by the FDA. To date, there are no future FDA or USDA regulations targeting shrimp farmers, according to Detmer, likely because there are so few producers in the country.

“I wouldn’t say that theirs is a booming industry at the moment,” said Detmer. “I think that there is promise of good things to come as there are some creative new approaches that would improve sustainability in the region in more ways than one.”

“Demand for shrimp in the U.S. far exceeds domestic production, so most shrimp is imported and can lack consistency and sustainability.”

One of the biggest barriers, according to Detmer, is competing with overseas shrimp “that are produced with limited/no regulations and under poor working conditions.”

“It has not been a particularly sticky industry in that there have been several ventures that have not persisted in the last decade,” he added, noting however that U.S. shrimp aquaculture could be a way for farmers to diversify income streams when there are stresses in other sectors.

The price is also a factor as well as availability. Brown sells direct-to-consumer at $22 per pound and relies on repeat customers and referrals for business. Loftsgard, who sells his shrimp at $20 per pound, also sells direct-to-consumer, but with an online order form on his website. He’s branched out by selling his shrimp under the Midland Co. brand in several central Iowa stores like Fareway Meat & Grocery. Loftsgard anticipates a mid-30% profit margin once they’re in full production.

“We are higher priced than frozen imports, but it’s really hard to compare the two, in my opinion,” said Loftsgard. “Frozen imported shrimp is really a commodity product while fresh domestic shrimp is a premium product. We see positioning it similar to high-quality beef versus frozen.”

For both, the shrimp people buy is never frozen and always fresh — quality that Brown hopes makes the cost worthwhile compared to imported shrimp sold at major retailers that averages between $8 and $14 per pound, depending on whether it’s farmed or wild-caught.

“The barriers that jump out in conversations are economics, permitting, and a supply chain built around frozen (not fresh) products.”

“Demand for shrimp in the U.S. far exceeds domestic production, so most shrimp is imported and can lack consistency and sustainability,” said Detmer. “That creates opportunity for domestic farms to compete on freshness, traceability, and high environmental standards. The barriers that jump out in conversations are economics, permitting, and a supply chain built around frozen (not fresh) products. Even so, the industry appears to be evolving quickly with several farmers demonstrating exciting new approaches.”

While Brown’s not looking to expand her operations, she has turned her focus to consulting on top of shrimp farming, and has helped train other potential shrimp farmers — both nationally and internationally.

Loftsgard is eager to see how the future of shrimp aquaculture will pan out — from an increase in his direct-to-consumer sales as well as other interesting shrimp-byproduct avenues.

“Shrimp molts have some pretty interesting potential byproduct uses … in medical like wound dressing,” said Loftsgard. “We’re hoping we can actually sell that, too, if we end up with the right volume.”

Chris Smaje is remarkably mild-mannered for a prophet of catastrophe. Once a university-based social scientist, now a self-described “aspiring woodsman, stockman, gardener, and peasant” in rural England, his writing combines an academic’s gentle persuasion with an understated wit that is quintessentially British.

Nonetheless, Smaje speaks doom. His latest work, Finding Lights in a Dark Age: Sharing Land, Work and Craft, does not shy away from proclaiming that the end — at least, the end of modernity as we know it — is nigh. Given the combined pressures of climate change, unsustainable economic systems, and delusional technology worship, he argues, Western civilization is all but certain to face “disorder and uncoordinated breakdown” over the coming decades.

Apocalyptic narratives are not hard to find these days. Less common are visions for what forms of human flourishing might emerge as existing social structures crumble into irrelevance. These are the proverbial “lights” Smaje works to illuminate throughout the book. Offrange readers will be pleased to learn that, by his account, farmers will be vital to keep the hopeful beacons blazing.

When some sort of societal collapse inevitably occurs, Smaje argues, it will likely hit cities the hardest: places that depend on cheap fossil fuels, complex logistics, and orderly government to import raw materials and export waste. As those conditions disappear, urbanites will be pushed to seek refuge in what he calls “open country,” places where it’s feasible to make a living directly from the land.

“Improbable dreams of renewable energy transition, ‘farm-free’ manufactured food and extensive rewilding reflect at best a smugly superior and improbably dematerialized urbanism,” writes Smaje. “Ultimately, there is no better lifehouse than a farm.”

He explores the implications of this big idea in a book that, while difficult to characterize, rarely fails to be lucid and thought-provoking. Smaje roams from imaginary travelogue to personal memoir, philosophical treatise to anthropological field note, in all cases referencing a formidably broad pool of thinkers. His citations include permaculture cofounder David Holmgren, social ecologist Murray Bookchin, Catholic distributist G.K. Chesterton, agrarian luminary Wendell Berry, and Australian Aboriginal scholar Tyson Yunkaporta. Anyone designing a crash course on sustainability thought leaders would be hard-pressed to improve on Smaje’s bibliography.

Farmers tend toward a spiritual worldview, informed by their real experience with the land, that serves as a valuable corrective.

Perhaps it’s best to think of Finding Lights in a Dark Age as a collection of essays, attempts to provide searching inquiry against an uncertain future. Chapters with titles like “Home Economics: Caring” and “Politics of the People” address different dimensions of the post-collapse world, in many cases showing how farmers are most likely to embody the skills and attitudes most needed for the new reality. (Smaje writes less here on the specific types of farming he believes will dominate, but he covers that topic extensively in 2020’s A Small Farm Future.)

Beyond their practical understanding of land and its potential, Smaje points out, farmers are already used to thinking of the household as a place to meet local needs rather than a mere locus of consumption. They’re familiar with non-monetary ways of organizing labor, like apprenticeships and trading favors among neighbors. And they often have a populist political streak — as explored by Sarah Mock in Offrange’s The Only Thing That Lasts podcast — that seeks to protect local livelihoods against outside interference.

Smaje is clear-eyed about the potential for such interference as society breaks down. Existing governments may scramble to maintain their former glory through authoritarian diktat over rural areas; bands of refugees from failing cities may overrun small communities. Yet he believes there’s room for new, mutually beneficial social arrangements, especially as the loss of cheap energy favors job-rich, small-scale forms of agriculture.

“In all of these scenarios, there’s enormous scope for factionalism, power politics and tyranny,” he writes. “There’s also enormous scope for co-operation, care and benevolence.”

Perhaps most importantly, Smaje argues, farmers tend toward a spiritual worldview, informed by their real experience with the land, that serves as a valuable corrective to modern “Promethean, growth-oriented techno-salvation narratives.” This isn’t necessarily a formal religious faith, but instead an understanding of “immanence,” a sense that the world has its own intrinsic value and inviolable dignity. “The main point of being a pig-keeper isn’t to produce more pork, and the main point of being a person isn’t to get maximum cheapness and convenience,” he offers in pithy summary.

Finding Lights’ final chapter features a vividly imagined pilgrimage out of late-21st-century London by a disaffected laborer to an agrarian outpost in western England. Smaje is careful not to call it a prediction, but instead “a dark thrutopia embodying aspects of arguments made earlier in the book.”

“People used to say ‘this is the twenty-first century’ when they were shocked about bad stuff happening. Now we say it like an amen when it does.”

The big city is beset by malaria and flooding, holding on to scraps of self-importance through policing and land seizures. Regional cities like Bristol have more or less divorced from the national government to run their own local affairs. In the community where the London laborer eventually ends up, the electric grid is a distant memory, sheepskins and apple brandy are more common currency than pounds, and New Age nomads mediate arguments between cattle farmers. It’s a collapsed society, but one where people can still find joy in harvest festivals and the village church. A dark age, with points of light.

This vision felt both plausible and strangely compelling to me — especially as a resident of Asheville, North Carolina, which spent two weeks in 2024 essentially off-grid thanks to the climate-change-enhanced Hurricane Helene. I saw how a community can choose not to devolve into chaos when times get tough; I saw local growers and livestock producers organize to provide water and food to people in need.

The late 21st century feels like a long ways off, but if my four-year-old daughter is lucky, it’ll be within her lifetime. To read Finding Lights gives me some optimism that, in her old age, there will still be a society worth engaging with, growing from the seeds of resilience and realism that farmers are planting today.

Still, I’m haunted by a line Smaje attributes to an old man in his future London. It felt like something on the tip of my tongue, even today: “People used to say ‘this is the twenty-first century’ when they were shocked about bad stuff happening. Now we say it like an amen when it does.”

On any given Saturday here in the Pacific Northwest, the farmer’s market looks like a postcard of American agrarian nostalgia. Baskets of heirloom tomatoes glow like jewels. Children clutch Rainier cherries dripping with dew. A street performer strums a guitar under a tent that’s losing its battle with the wind. Shoppers drift from booth to booth with tote bags and good intentions, telling farmers how grateful they are for “local food” — a phrase that has become equal parts praise, aspiration, and political statement.

But behind the tables, the view can be different. The farmer who woke at 3:45 a.m. to pick, pack, and drive his product to the market is doing quiet math: stall fees, fuel costs, labor hours, the percentage of product that won’t sell.

The farmer’s market has become a symbol in today’s political and literal climate: celebrated, scrutinized, and often misunderstood. Some say it’s a feel-good outlet for consumers who want to believe they’re supporting a better food system. Others argue it’s one of the few remaining spaces where small family farms can still carve out a livelihood and potentially grow. The truth, as usual in agriculture, lives in the tension between those two ideas.

Like any self-respecting locavore who grew up in a food desert, I was over the moon when I moved to western Washington five years ago, surrounded by what seemed like an endless supply of farmer’s markets. But the more I shopped at, talked with, and wrote about these growers, the question kept surfacing: Do farmer’s markets genuinely strengthen local farming communities, or are they just a comforting story we like to tell ourselves—one that often overlooks the realities of farm labor, risk, and economics?

There’s no question that farmers‘ markets hold a special place in our hearts. Today, they account for a distinct-but-modest share of the nation’s overall food supply — roughly 3 to 8 percent by calories. While most households still rely on large supermarkets for more than 60 percent of what they eat, the role of direct-to-consumer markets is firmly established.

Even so, farmer’s markets remain essential for many small family farms, providing opportunities for these growers to shine. For small-scale producers — typically family-owned with a gross income under $350,000 — these markets provide the primary platform for direct-to-consumer sales. Rather than navigating complex global supply chains, these growers rely on the market as a vital source of income, allowing them to sell the majority of their products directly to the community.

Caleb Poppe of Sundowner Farm has been selling at the Olympia Farmers Market for three years, but his connection to the market began long before he ever imagined becoming a farmer. For years, he was a loyal shopper — buying produce, browsing craft stalls, and admiring the farmers who felt like “local celebrities.” That early admiration shaped how he saw the market community. Today, his stall is a vibrant display of carrots, chicories, greens, and heirloom tomatoes. He has also carved out a unique niche by growing Caraflex cabbage — a pointed, tender variety that no one else in the region currently produces.

Caleb approached farming with intention and patience, and his first two seasons were focused entirely on building a CSA program while he finished college. Easing into the market slowly by selling only on Fridays, he quickly expanded to the weekend, selling out each day.

They act as a living billboard, helping establish a level of community trust that is difficult to achieve through digital marketing alone.

Today, farmer’s markets remain his most important income stream. “Starting out with a CSA provided me with crucial early-season income, and it’s still a contributor to my success,” Caleb shared. Those upfront payments are invaluable before market sales pick up at the beginning of the season, but he feels farmer’s markets play an important role in supporting small and mid-sized farms. They act as a living billboard, helping smaller farms build a broader customer base and establish a level of community trust that is difficult to achieve through digital marketing alone.

“Let’s face it, farming can be lonely,” Caleb said. Unlike wholesale or CSA deliveries, selling face-to-face allows him to see people’s reactions, hear their comments, and share in their excitement over the food he’s worked so hard to produce. That interaction lets him educate customers, build trust, and feel part of a shared experience.

Next season, Caleb is preparing for significant growth. He plans to expand his production by taking on three additional acres and, for the first time, hiring two full-time employees. The move marks a major step forward — one that he says could only have come because of the market. With more land, more labor, and more responsibility, he sees the expansion as the next evolution of his farm and a commitment to the future he’s building.

When I asked Koji Pingry of Makanai Farm, a no-till farm north of Seattle, why he and his wife, Lizzie Jansen, pivoted from the restaurant industry to farming, he laughed, “That’s a question we were asking ourselves seven years ago, too.” He admits farming wasn’t their original plan. “I remember reading an article questioning whether farmer’s markets could ever truly sustain small-scale agriculture. The odds didn’t seem too promising.”

Still, driven by a shared belief in food’s power to connect people, Koji and Lizzie leaned into farming. Restaurants supported them financially while Lizzie worked on local farms and Koji finished college, and Koji found joy in the rhythm and camaraderie of the kitchen. Those same skills, he says, carry over to farming: “It has its own version of a dinner rush — just slower.”

Unlike wholesale or CSA deliveries, selling face-to-face allows him to see people’s reactions, hear their comments, and share in their excitement.

Like Caleb, Koji and Lizzie first launched a small CSA program, initially serving 30 members and eventually growing to over 100 — all on a single intensively managed acre. Their no-till approach was intentional, aimed at building soil health and nutrient density while pushing the limits of what small-scale land can produce.

“We avoided farmer’s markets at first,” said Koji. “Working with growers in the restaurant industry, I’d heard how grueling the model could be.” Loading and hauling produce, setting up a booth for a single day of sales, paying market fees, and hoping the numbers penciled out: At their scale, it didn’t seem worth it.

What finally changed their minds was community. For Koji and Lizzy, farmer’s markets have an undeniable cultural impact: They’re hubs for education, connection, and mutual support among growers. Their decision to join the market was also deeply personal.

For three decades, a Japanese farmer at Mair-Taki Farm — someone Koji grew up admiring and whose vegetables his mother revered — had anchored the market with some of the same Japanese vegetables Koji and Lizzy now grow. They often joked that they’d only take on a market stall if he ever retired. When he stepped away earlier than expected, he offered them his space, a gesture that felt like both an honor and an invitation to continue his legacy.

Koji and Lizzy are still newcomers to the farmer’s market world: This past season was their first. To make room for the shift, they cut their CSA membership in half — from 100 shares to 50 — and added a weekly Saturday market showing at the University District Farmers Market in Seattle. Surprisingly, the revenue they earned at the market balanced almost exactly the 50 CSA shares they gave up. This balance proved that while a CSA can sustain a farm’s start, the market provided the immediate scalability and brand awareness they needed to justify moving to a larger piece of land.

While the farmer’s market clearly seems to be working out for Caleb, Koji, and Lizzie, it’s not all beer and skittles. Still basking in the warm, soft glow of farmer’s market shopping, I read Sarah Mock’s two books, Farm (and Other F Words): The Rise and Fall of the Small Family Farm and Big Team Farms. Sarah gently, but firmly, brought me back to reality as she shared example after example of small farms that had transitioned away from selling directly to consumers at farmer’s markets for a variety of unsavory reasons:

• Labor demand to work the market is hard for smaller growers to manage alone

• Risk: unsold inventory, failed crops

• Transportation costs

• Emotional toll

• Weather

The pain point that weighs most heavily on Caleb is the inherent exclusivity of farmer’s markets. Even with incentives like Washington’s SNAP/EBT match program, markets remain financially out of reach for many. “If I’m being honest,” said Caleb, “I can’t afford to buy the produce I sell, and it troubles me knowing that many people today face that same barrier.”

Pricing deepens that challenge. Farmers can’t legally coordinate prices, and each grower sets them independently based on costs. Caleb often charges some of the lowest prices at the market, partly because his overhead is lower and partly to remain accessible, but affordability has limits within a system that leaves farmers to navigate inequity on their own.

For Koji and Lizzie, those limits appear as sustainability rather than access. Early on, they learned that an estimated 70–80 percent of small-farm household income comes from off-farm work — a reality that continues to shape their decisions.

“We keep our living expenses low, and diversifying between the CSA, the market, and restaurant sales helps,” said Koji, “but we’re in our early 30s, and we still lease our land.” One of them taking an off-farm job is becoming part of their long-term plan — less out of defeat, Koji said, than out of realism. Supplemental income would relieve pressure and allow them to keep farming in line with their values.

While their CSA provides upfront stability and the market is currently strong, uncertainty remains week-to-week. Koji has seen that farmers who succeed long-term in market-driven models often own their land and farm three to eight acres — conditions that underscore how fragile sustainability can be without assets.

Sustaining small farms requires consistent customer turnout, fair pricing, and policies that prioritize farm viability.

Yet even with these contradictions and compromises, farmers keep showing up at the market, and shoppers like me keep returning to support them. For growers, these direct sales can mean survival. But more than that, a market is where a community decides whether its farmers truly matter.

Perhaps we should stop asking farmer’s markets to fix our broken food system. Markets do matter — but they are not a panacea. Their true impact depends on economic realities, community investment, and policy support, not just a locavore’s enthusiasm.

Farmer’s markets have the potential to bolster local agriculture, but only when the warm, community-focused narrative is matched by genuine support for the farmers themselves. The charm of open-air stalls and face-to-face connections can only go so far; sustaining small farms requires consistent customer turnout, fair pricing, and policies that prioritize farm viability. Without that deeper commitment, the feel-good story of shopping local risks becoming just that — a story, rather than a meaningful investment in the future of local food.

This Perspective piece does not represent the views of Offrange or Ambrook, its parent company.

Forty minutes into an Agri-Pulse panel titled Scaling Sustainable Supply Chains, I began to notice that both “scale” and “sustainability” were remarkably flexible terms. The conference room in downtown Washington, D.C., bustled with journalists, farmers, interested citizens, and policy wonks, clustered around tables like pale lily pads. On stage sat a vice president of global public policy from a major food company, alongside a representative from the Soil and Water Outcomes Fund (SWOF), a grant-issuing organization affiliated with the Iowa Soybean Association, and two Iowa corn and soybean farmers.

Agri-Pulse had brought them all together to discuss a set of recent corporate conservation initiatives. The food and beverage company has been investing in direct payments to its farmers for planting cover crops through SWOF, as one of the fund’s largest corporate partners. Midwestern growers can apply to receive $30−$40 per acre annually. Half the money is offered up front, and the rest is paid after an inspection the following year, to ensure that cover crops were actually planted. This program dominated the panel’s discussion, though they applied many variations to the theme: Why should farmers work with corporate sustainability initiatives? Why not other programs? What advantages do private-sector partnerships offer?

To be fair, these initiatives do deserve some plaudits. Cover crops such as rye or oats are crucial for reducing erosion and improving soil health. It’s hard to dispute the immediate benefits of the SWOF framework, which lets companies pay to protect their own supply chain and bottom line, while also reducing the up-front cost for farmers, many of whom may be reluctant to invest in conservation practices that don’t yield profits for several years. At the same time, however, a faint sense of unease nagged at me. We were ostensibly here for a discussion of sustainability, after all; yet almost an hour into the panel, climate change and greenhouse gases had not even been mentioned.

The dangers of more severe droughts, storms, and more volatile seasons for farmers’ lives and livelihoods are hard to overstate, as Offrange has reported. Because of this, understanding the complex relationship between agriculture and climate change is critical to making our food industry less extractive and more resilient. But when the Agri-Pulse panel did finally allude to climate impacts, it was only to deride the arbitrary emission standards of “the carbon gods.” The panel closed by asking each member where they expected the future of agriculture to lead, with a pointed reminder to keep the tone hopeful. One of the Iowa farmers replied that he’s heartened that bleak environmental headlines today are unchanged from those of 60 years ago, yet “we’re still here.” As he saw it, “the future is as bright as you want it to be.”

This was embodied most poignantly in the mantra of the day, repeated more times than I could count: Scaling Sustainability.

It’s quite a claim in an era when billions of people are threatened by climate change and fossil fuel pollution, but it is also, in a way, hardly surprising. Corporations have strong incentives to support conservation techniques up to the point that they measurably boost returns, and to treat any more ambitious approach — particularly government regulation — as a threat.

But overt opposition risks public backlash, as two-thirds of Americans believe corporations are doing too little to reduce emissions. Instead, some companies display enthusiastic support to gain credibility in these discussions — as fossil fuel companies have at UN climate summits. Shifts in the food industry to embrace emission accounting efforts have likewise been criticized for potential greenwashing.

All of this was embodied most poignantly in the mantra of the day, repeated more times than I could count: Scaling Sustainability. The two words certainly sound exciting, but each of them was gradually whittled down over the course of the event. “Sustainability” came to include only those projects and programs that coincide with corporate profitability. The nearer the financial dividends, the more sustainable a given investment was judged to be. Never mind such nebulous notions as a common good.

The approach to “scale” was similarly striking. The panel portrayed government action, both regulatory and incentive-based, as being too large and clunky, too top-down and one-size-fits-all. Simultaneously, however, it was taken as a given that conservation solutions are only worthwhile if they can be implemented on the order of millions of acres, ruling out most individual or community-based efforts by default. The only survivors, occupying the tenuous Goldilocks Zone between ‘too huge’ and ‘too local,’ were corporate programs.

These terminological shifts underlie and complicate the plainly positive impacts of SWOF’s corporate cover crop investments. If we don’t intentionally reckon with the causes, we all risk following suit unconsciously. On one hand, when such programs exceed empty commitments, they can be remarkably effective. Researchers at NYU have found that profit motives alone can sometimes lead large firms to make significant climate investments, which in turn guide the market and policymakers to offer more of those incentives.

Any company has strong incentives to support conservation techniques up to the point that they measurably boost its returns, and to treat any more ambitious approach as an existential threat.

But to treat corporate partnerships as the only effective form of disaster mitigation and sustainability — as was the decided tone of the Agri-Pulse event — is to abandon any of the countless vital efforts that fall outside the margins of a given company’s demonstrable profitability. The same NYU research showed that much private environmental action depends on enacting carbon tax policy, for instance. Once again, corporations are incentivized to ensure that we over-rely on their voluntary actions; hence their portrayal of government programs as clumsy and outdated, and of local and community conservation efforts as doomed from the start.

To get a broader perspective on what “scaling sustainability” could mean instead, I spoke with Neil Gormley, founder and executive director of Wild Potomac, a Maryland non-profit. They work to restore the Potomac River’s watershed through volunteer tree-plantings, stream cleanups, and exchanges of sustainable produce that “build a bioregional gift economy.” Gormley firmly disagreed with the premise that effective work at scale has to come at the expense of a hyper-local focus.

On the contrary, he argued that bureaucratic and larger programs are often forced to ignore meaningful features of each ecosystem they manage. “You’re going to be focusing on just a few metrics,” Gormley said, “and you’re going to be leaving a lot out.” By grounding his work locally, on the other hand, he aims to “engage with an ecosystem as the complex being that it is.” That doesn’t mean giving up on national impacts. In fact, Gormley agreed with the importance of scalability, but he added an important twist for work at an ecosystem or watershed level: “Those solutions can scale in a different sense … They have to scale fractally.”

A fractal pattern, like the branching of a tree or river, repeats smaller structures as it grows and becomes more complex. In other words, Gormley wants local conservation projects to increase their impact by inspiration and iteration rather than simply becoming larger themselves.

One way a project might “scale fractally” is to be widely implemented across state or county governments. Even if the funds are federal, this allows each instance to be specialized for its region. On my own family’s farm, for example, we’ve planted trees through Maryland’s Healthy Soils Competitive Fund, a grant program with a striking resemblance to corporate investments through SWOF. Notably, however, it lacks the latter’s profit-driven incentives to obstruct more ambitious conservation work. As a government program, it is designed to serve the general public, unlike a company’s sole commitment to its financial shareholders.

What is it that we want to sustain? The answers will look different for every person, every year, on every plot of land.

I also met with The Land Institute, a nonprofit focused on developing and promoting perennial grains for regenerative agriculture. Their work offers another alternative model of scalability alongside corporate support. Tammy Kimbler, their chief communications officer, and Jen Mayer, director of crop stewardship, agreed that “scaling sustainability” is an important aspiration. In fact, the Land Institute’s website includes a page on precisely that. But both Mayer and Kimbler echoed Gormley’s point about what scale really means. Kimbler emphasized “local specialization,” rather than top-down funding and enforcement.

They also cited General Mills’ support of Kernza, a perennial grain created by The Land Institute, as emblematic of the way that corporate funds can be used with less risk of creating perverse incentives. There are many obstacles to the widespread adoption of Kernza and other new grains. Yet their non-profit inception and potential for boosting soil health and resilience highlight what was all but overlooked at the Agri-Pulse conference: that private-sector programs alone cannot possibly address our climate and sustainability crises. Rather, we should recognize the benefits of resources like corporate funding of cover crop funds, and insist on comprehensive government action, and support local conservation in agriculture — all while being wary of any attempt to narrow the scope of these solutions. As Mayer put it, “It can be a trap to think of one approach as achieving scale.”

As climate change continues to outpace predictions, farmers must somehow prepare for harsher conditions, reduce their own emissions, and protect their land, all while continuing to turn a profit in harsh economic straits. Corporate funds can be extremely useful in that transition, as the SWOF-backed cover crop initiative is. Yet by their very nature, companies will never have sufficient incentives to solve all of our ecological problems for us. Taking advantage of private programs should not mean ignoring the importance of many other avenues: governmental and non-profit, local and national, regulatory and grant-based. The Agri-Pulse panel illustrates how easy it can be to ignore the fundamental multiplicity of sustainability at scale.

During our conversation, Gormley asked a question that’s stuck with me: “What is it that we want to sustain?” For him, the answers are things that we can’t put a price tag on: clean air, beautiful natural spaces, accessible food, connection to the land, hope for a stable future — the unquantifiables that can fall through the cracks in larger programs, or even more troublingly, may be deliberately excluded from the definition of sustainability in the first place.

What is it that we want to sustain? The responses will vary for every person, every year, on every plot of land. But for multinational corporations, the answer will always be themselves.

About 40 minutes south of Miami, gleaming high-rises and snarled traffic give way to country roads lined with lush greenery. Here, sprawling out from the agricultural town of Homestead, is the center of South Florida’s tropical fruit industry, which produces specialty crops that thrive in the hot and humid climate.

On a balmy afternoon in November, I drove past farms with names like “Tropical Sugar” and “Vietnamese Fruits Garden” to reach the University of Florida’s Tropical Research And Education Center, or TREC. The center’s associate director, Jonathan Crane, showed off row after row of fruit trees on the facility’s 160-acre campus. Some, like papaya, guava, and lychee, I recognized, while others — mamey sapote, carambola, sapodilla — I had never heard of.

As the only place in the continental United States where it almost never freezes (Crane cautioned that though rare, occasional freezes do happen, so growers shouldn’t get too complacent), South Florida can support the kinds of fruits usually only found in the tropics, which start about 1,000 miles to the south, below the Tropic of Cancer. And thanks to new advances in plant breeding as well as growing interest from consumers, the tropical fruit industry here is booming.

For anyone interested in cutting-edge plant research and growing new varieties commercially, Crane told me: “South Florida’s the place to be.”

Florida is famous for its citrus industry, which once raked in billions of dollars annually. The state has long sold its renowned fruit around the country, with marketing campaigns promoting products such as Florida’s Natural orange juice. But starting in the mid-2000s, a bacterial disease called Huanglongbing, or HLB (also known as citrus greening), tore through the state’s orange groves, crippling trees and reducing yields by over 90 percent. As citrus has moved out, tropical fruits have moved in, Crane said, offering growers alternative crops that allow them to continue working with trees — though not nearly to the same extent as before.

Though oranges remain Florida’s top fruit crop, generating $197 million in revenue each year, the tropical fruit industry, which consists of higher-value crops like avocadoes and mangoes as well as more niche fruits like starfruit and guava, isn’t far behind. The state’s 15,000 acres of tropical fruit groves rake in $100 million in annual revenue, up from 12,000 acres and $74 million two decades ago. That’s still small compared to ornamental plants and vegetables, the state’s other top agricultural commodities, but the industry has potential because of the uniquely high value of its crops, Crane told me.

Vanilla, for example, is one of the most expensive spices in the world, because the plants have to be pollinated by hand and are susceptible to disease. The vanilla industry is currently concentrated in Madagascar, but TREC is working on developing a variety of self-pollinating, disease-resistant vanilla that could provide valuable opportunities for Florida growers.

Using conventional breeding as well as genetic modification techniques, researchers at TREC are working to introduce other varieties of tropical fruits, such as papayas, mangoes, dragonfruit, and avocados, which could become agricultural commodities in the region. They share their knowledge as well as access to these varieties with farmers through the university’s agricultural extension service, Crane explained. The goal, he said, is to encourage growers to diversify their production, making operations more resistant to fluctuations in the climate and the market.

South Florida can support the kinds of fruits usually only found in the tropics, which start about 1,000 miles to the south.

“[Growers say:] you’re telling me to diversify — so, what do I grow?” Crane said. “By us testing and developing these alternative crops, it helps them figure out [their options].”

Even if these fruits can be grown in Florida, however, questions remain about how to get consumers interested in them, or how to ship them to other states. So far, many customers have come from immigrant communities around the U.S. who already know about niche tropical fruits and are willing to pay a premium to ship them quickly — before they spoil. Other fruits can only be bought from in-state or local customers, as they need to be eaten shortly after harvest.

Still, as the tropical fruit industry grows in South Florida, it’s also attracting tourists who come specifically to experience produce they can’t find anywhere else in the continental U.S. The Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden, just south of Miami, hosts an annual mango festival in the summer, while the Truman’s Tropical Fruit Festival at the former president’s home in Key West offers tropical fruit trees for sale. Miami-Dade County’s Fruit & Spice Park, a 37-acre botanical garden home to over 500 varieties of fruits, vegetables, spices, and herbs, allows visitors to collect as many fruits as they want from the ground with the price of admission.

A few miles down the road from the TREC facility, I stopped by the Robert Is Here fruit stand, a south Florida institution founded in 1959 and still run to this day by 72-year-old Robert Moehling and his family. True to the name, Moehling was there when I arrived, carving up fruit behind the counter and suggesting the ripest passion fruit for customers to choose. (Tip: “The worse they look, the sweeter they taste.”) He told me that since the citrus greening disease claimed almost all of Florida’s citrus, tropical fruit is “all we’ve got left.”

Although it’s expanding now, the tropical fruit industry isn’t new to Florida, with curious growers planting crops like mango, avocado, lychee, pineapple, and key lime as far back as the mid-19th-century. David Fairchild, a botanist responsible for bringing more than 200,000 varieties of plants into the United States from around the world (and for whom the Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden is named), introduced many of these species to the state, seeing that its climate could support plants incapable of growing elsewhere in the country.

Many customers have come from immigrant communities around the U.S. who already know about niche tropical fruits.

Some growers are now taking advantage of newfound consumer interest to build on South Florida’s long history with these crops. The family of Alexandria Garner, a 17-year-old senior at the Palmer Trinity School in Palmetto Bay, Florida, grows over 70 varieties of mangoes, along with dozens of other rare tropical fruits, on their farm in Homestead, called Jamy Mango. Garner, who plans to take over the 15-acre operation after finishing college, showed me around. The mango trees here were planted in 1949, and her parents bought the land in 2022, seeking a future in agriculture after serving in the military.

In the past few years, they’ve seen demand for online fruit sales skyrocket, particularly for lychees and jamun, a type of tropical berry native to Southeast Asia and known as the “Java plum.” Much of it comes from immigrant communities living in the U.S. who seek fruits they grew up with in Vietnam or Bangladesh, but which are difficult to import and impossible to grow outside of Florida’s tropical climate.

“We’ve had people write poems for us about a specific fruit” that they haven’t been able to eat since leaving their home countries, Garner said. “They reminisce — like wow, I had this as a child.”

Other people have developed a taste for so-called “designer” mangoes — new varieties bred for their unique flavors, many of which were developed by Florida horticulturalist Gary Zill. “Orange sherbet” mangoes are said to taste like creamsicles; “cotton candy” varieties evoke spun sugar. Connoisseurs of these rare breeds (who, within the community, refer to themselves self-consciously as “mango snobs”) are willing to pay premium prices of more than $25 per pound.

“We’ve had people write poems for us about a specific fruit. They reminisce — like wow, I had this as a child.”

Florida mangoes have another leg up on their competitors from abroad thanks to the USDA’s imported fruit screenings. All mangoes shipped into the U.S. must be disinfected to prevent foreign pests or diseases from entering the country and threatening the domestic agricultural industry. That process involves either boiling the fruit or zapping it with radiation, which tends to leach out nearly all of its flavor. (Some enthusiasts bypass these screenings by purchasing their mangoes from smugglers on WhatsApp.)

Crane said that although climate change is opening up opportunities for growing fully tropical fruits such as guanabanas or papayas — which tend not to like weather below 60 degrees — in southern Florida, it’s also making it harder to produce others. Lychees, for example, require exposure to “cool, non-freezing temperatures” between 32 and 59 degrees, without which they have difficulty flowering. “Down here, it’s gotten harder and harder to have cool temperatures because the climate is warming,” Crane said.

The Florida tropical fruit industry faces other challenges, too. Developers are swallowing up more and more farmland each year to build homes for the state’s rapidly growing population, while fruit growers struggle to compete with low-cost imports. Farms like Garner’s also suffer from diseases and pests, while hurricanes can batter mangoes to the point that some people may not want to buy them.

At the same time, she’s excited about the potential for growth in the future, especially for mangoes. Garner said she’s planning on grafting some of the specialty varieties, like orange sherbet, onto the nearly century-old mango trees in her family’s plot to increase production. Jamy Mango also just received its organic certification from the USDA, and Garner believes fruits grown without chemical fertilizers or pesticides will draw in a dedicated customer base.

“People really want organic, straight-from-the-tree fruit,” Garner said. By buying imported fruits from the grocery store, she added, “we are just losing so much flavor out of our fruit that we don’t even know what we’re missing out on.”

For the thrifty and waste-conscious farmer, grease is never garbage. Household and restaurant grease can be made into hog feed, for instance, or processed into biodiesel for farm machinery.

At Small Acres Farm, a mixed-vegetable organic farm in Washington state, the farm is almost entirely renewably run; in addition to on-farm solar panels and wind turbines that provide power, they’ve been using biodiesel — a renewable, biodegradable fuel made from vegetable oils, animal fats, or recycled grease— for more than a decade. Once a year, they purchase 275 gallons from a company in Seattle and use it to power their tractors and a delivery truck.

They’re not alone in seeing the potential in biodiesel. In the last two decades, as governments have sought to shift more people off fossil fuels, biofuel use has increased significantly, particularly for transportation (and increasingly, in home heating and electricity generation). That’s driven an increase in demand for used cooking oil — and in turn, hundreds of millions of dollars-worth of thefts.

Companies and industry groups say that these thefts are often connected to money laundering, as well as efforts to pass virgin oil off as recycled grease, as the latter type has become the more valuable of the two.

“There’s a lot of people making a lot of money,” said Sumit Majumdar, CEO of Buffalo Biodiesel, a used cooking oil recycler based in the U.S. and Canada. “It’s the legitimate operators that are getting pushed out.”

Cue the puns — and prepare to enter the greasy world of used cooking oil.

Greasy Gold

According to some estimates, per-capita consumption of fresh vegetable cooking oil in the United States is prolific, totalling roughly 10 gallons per year. In recent decades, the resulting glut of used cooking oil, once a liability for restaurants and other high-volume producers, has become a valuable commodity.

Often, the destination for used cooking oil is biofuels — displacing fossil fuels for trucks, tractors, and other machinery with a product that would otherwise go to waste.

At the level of values, that appeals to operators like Small Acres co-owner Chris Devine. Devine said it isn’t always easy to run machinery off biodiesel, but choosing to do so is in line with their ideals. “We’re choosing to do that because we want to not be purchasing fossil fuels for our farming operation,” he said.

“It’s more expensive — you get slightly less power out of the fuel than you would conventional diesel, and having to drive 200 miles to fill up the thing … is inconvenient. So that’s just strictly a value decision.”

In between being emptied out of the fryer and powering a tractor, crime is interceding.

At Buffalo Biodiesel, they’re focused on collecting used cooking oil from thousands of restaurants and other sources across the northeastern U.S., which they then sell as a feedstock to refineries producing sustainable aviation fuel and green diesel.

Twenty years ago, there were hundreds of small producers of biodiesel, Majumdar said, but over time, the industry has consolidated, with the remaining players being mostly major petroleum companies like British Petroleum and Chevron.

But in between being emptied out of the fryer and powering a tractor, crime is interceding.

In recent years, used cooking oil has become a target of organized theft rings, with dozens of people being charged with stealing cooking oil and laundering the proceeds through various channels. The way it works, according to Majumdar, is that organized crime groups pay cash for stolen cooking oil, which is sold to refineries; the refineries then pay the crime group for the oil, laundering the money.

“2025 losses are going to touch about $30 million. So that’s about 50 percent of our supply.”

The North American Renderer’s Association, an industry group, estimates that theft of used cooking oil totals around $500 million annually — and potentially as much $1 billion — up exponentially from $75 million in 1980. NARA executive director Kent Swisher confirmed suspicions that organized crime is involved. “It’s tied to money laundering, RICO stuff … human trafficking — it’s an income source for people doing all this other stuff.”

As an example, Swisher points to a case from mid-December, when a federal grand jury indicted 13 Chinese nationals on charges related to used cooking oil stolen from restaurant collection tanks in Iowa, Tennessee, and several other states. The 9-count indictment included money laundering, racketeering, and transporting stolen goods across state lines.

Majumdar said his own company’s losses will total in the millions of dollars this year, with thefts from restaurant storage tanks that number in the thousands. “2025 losses are going to touch about $30 million. So that’s about 50 percent of our supply.”

Behind those thefts is a well-intentioned attempt to make fuel more sustainable.

Industry Cleanup

One of these attempts is California’s Low Carbon Fuel Standard, said Andrew Swanson, professor in the department of agricultural economics at Montana State University. California provides subsidies for diesel from non-crop-based feedstocks, which includes used cooking oil and beef tallow, as they’re especially low-carbon, having been recycled. Thanks to this, used cooking oil provides the basis for 15-20 percent of the entire diesel market in the state (which in 2024 totaled 3.5 billion gallons).

At the federal level, there’s also the EPA’s Renewable Fuel Standard — which initially focused on corn ethanol, but has more recently shifted to alternative diesels including used cooking oil. This has increased the targets for the amount of biodiesel that producers are required to blend into petroleum diesel.

This shift significantly increased demand for feedstocks, fueling the black market. But — stolen or not — domestic production of used cooking oil is “nowhere near” enough to meet demand, said Swanson. (Though some estimates suggest only a quarter of vegetable oil used in food is recovered, often due to difficulties with collection.) As a result, imports of used cooking oil have increased significantly in recent years, particularly from China, Malaysia, and Indonesia.

This has its own problems. At times, the additional subsidies provided for used cooking oil have made it more valuable than virgin palm oil, creating an incentive for importers to pass virgin oil off as its used counterpart.

This means subsidies meant to encourage more sustainable fuels could instead be driving deforestation in places like Indonesia — a concern highlighted in 2024, when a group of U.S. senators issued a letter urging a crackdown on cooking oil imports, amidst concerns they could be mixed with virgin palm oil.

Stolen or not, domestic production of used cooking oil is “nowhere near” enough to meet demand.

A recent shift in federal policy, including a tax credit finalized under Biden and modified in the One Big Beautiful Bill, will shift demand away from imported feedstocks, Swanson said. (Among other changes, the Trump administration banned foreign feedstocks for biofuels, so that only feedstocks from Canada, Mexico, and the U.S. are eligible for the tax credit.)

This shift is ultimately aimed at helping domestic soybean producers, Swanson said — but it has implications for used cooking oil supplies as well. “With the restriction on imports, that means all domestic sources and feedstocks are going to become more valuable.”

Demand for biofuels is also likely to keep increasing. For something like sustainable aviation fuel alone — for which used cooking oil and other biofuel feedstocks are the only viable path, researchers say — the Biden administration had set a target of producing 3 billion gallons by 2030, up from 30 million today. “That is a possibility that a lot of biofuel producers … would like to see happen.”

Without sufficient regulatory oversight, Sumit Majumdar said this increase in demand will mean that taxpayer money dedicated to reducing emissions is instead continuing to subsidize organized crime. He added that improved regulation could look like collectors being registered federally in both Canada and the U.S., which would enhance traceability.

“The hope is that … a federal agency will get involved in regulating the industry.“

“You’ll eliminate most of the organized criminal gang activity because the stolen oil will be worthless,” he said. “The hope is that … a federal agency will get involved in regulating the industry, and deliver to the public that’s paying the [price], the sustainability and the traceability. And once that happens, I think that’s going to fix the problem.”

In the meantime, Buffalo Biodiesel is working on technology to address break-ins, Mujamdar said, including adding devices to monitor the amount of oil in their storage tanks, for theft prevention; so far, they haven’t stopped thieves, he admits, but it’s made their collection more efficient.

As for Chris Devine, he said he’s surprised that people would bother to steal something as messy and seemingly low-value as used cooking oil. He notes that biodiesel itself has its issues — in addition to being hard to source, it degrades natural rubber over time, which meant they had to replace the fuel lines in their tractors. Biodiesel also doesn’t work as well in cold temperatures, and has to be blended with petroleum diesel to work in modern engines.

But at least for now, biodiesel offers a way for small producers to reduce their emissions, and Devine’s example has prompted some other local farms to follow suit. “[It’s] not that much more expensive and you feel a little better about it.”

An artificially intelligent robot with an orbital saw capable of speedily processing an 800-pound cow carcass can feel reminiscent of the Terminator movies — but we might just have to get used to it.

Like other agricultural sectors, the meatpacking industry is not an exception to the automating economy. While mainstream meats like poultry and pork have seen decades of increasing automation — alongside a simultaneous reduction in the labor force — the process of turning a side of beef into store-ready meats has resisted simpler robotics.

Unlike smaller-sized animals, two cattle from the same origin can have a weight difference on the scale of hundreds of pounds. Up until the AI boom, designing systems that could handle the variety of beef carcasses coming down a processing line had been out of reach. Meanwhile human labor is challenging, extremely physical, and rife with labor violations and shortages. But new AI-enabled technologies have brought the potential for sweeping changes to the industry.

Robots Dream of Electric Beef

Australia’s Intelligent Robotics is among the companies developing new meatpacking technology. In partnership with 3D machine vision lab PhotoNeo, the firm invented an AI-driven beef rig in 2023, and are now furthering a transformation that started with smaller-weight proteins like chicken and pork. And Scott, a New Zealand robotics company with clients in automotive, appliance, and healthcare, provides a mix of fully automated and manually operated mechanical systems for the butchering of lamb, beef, and poultry.

“The beef industry … is the protein area which has the least amount of automation so far. Part of the reason for that is the sheer variation in size that you get in beef, relative to [poultry or pork],“ said said Jonathan Cook, general manager of Intelligent Robotics. ”You might have a 160-pound side coming through one second, and then the next side of beef will be 800 pounds, and you’ll get everything in between.”

The step of the meatpacking process that Intelligent Robotics has developed technology for is known as “beef scribing,” or the breakdown of whole sides of cattle into more manageable sections that can be further cut into portions —think brisket, rib, or chuck — that can be sold to grocery stores. Typically, sides are hung on hooks and cut along the skeletal structure by employees using electric saws. The assembly-line work is physically demanding and repetitive.

In the plants that Intelligent Robotics supports, the large-scale cuts produced by the automated process are sent to be further butchered by laborers who perform tasks that require more dexterity. Still, Cook would like an entry point into automating technologies for producing these smaller, more complicated cuts “within the next couple of years.”

Whereas prior technology couldn’t accommodate the many challenges of butchering such a large and variable animal as a cow, AI possibly can. “Using a rules-based … system becomes very complex, [and] that’s the area where AI shines,” Cook said.

Labor on the Line

A 2024 cost-benefit analysis of the beef scribing technology at a KGF Kilcoy beef processing plant found that automated beef scribes were more accurate in their cuts than laborers across all cutting lines. With increased butcher accuracy, less meat left on carcass bones translates to higher repeated profits. And since these robots are fully autonomous, they obviously do not require the cost of labor.

Robotics boosters suggest that the jobs aren’t all that desirable to begin with: Scribing is dangerous, tiresome, and extremely repetitive. Conditions may have improved significantly since The Jungle exposed America’s slaughterhouses in 1905, but that isn’t saying so much. Slaughterhouse workers were among the essential workers very negatively impacted by the Covid-19 pandemic, with some of the worst workplace outbreaks in the United States. The job remains undesirable to many, and staffing remains an issue. In 2023, Iowa passed a law to allow 14-year-olds work in meatpacking plants, and recent waves of deportations have left fewer laborers for the industry.

Megan Elias, associate food studies professor at Boston University, noted that the initial turn towards mechanization at the beginning of the 1900s is to blame for many of these dangers in the meatpacking workplace. “In the days when you just had your local butcher chopping things up at his own pace, it was not dangerous at all,” Elias said. But as the United States urbanized, food producers moved farther away from food consumers.

In 1900, 40% of Americans were agricultural workers; now, about 1% are. The history of American agriculture is the history of automation, Elias remarked. “When people are rounded up and taken out of the country, nobody will save those positions because [they’re] difficult. And so that seems like a problem for AI … if nobody wants to make the potatoes, can AI do it?”

AI Gets Physical

The shift towards robotic beef meatpacking is part of the larger movement to implement “physical AI”: Think self-driving Waymos, humanoid Amazon workers, and unmanned surgery. Unlike a large language model like ChatGPT, physical AI utilizes a “digital twin” — a virtual model of a real-life object that is updated in real-time with input from motion imaging and other sensors.

Cameron Bergen, CEO of Mode40, a Canadian consultancy, works with a range of manufacturing companies in both the United States and Canada. Bergen believes that the Canadian sector is far outpaced by American industrial adoption of new, automated business practices.

“The AI-robotic innovations entering meatpacking draw the principals heavily from other sectors like surgical robotics, automotive manufacturing, and advanced material-handling systems,” he said. “The difference is that those industries have massive economies of scale that drive rapid iteration and standardization. Meat processing doesn’t.” Adoption of automation in beef meatpacking has lagged behind other industries because “the technology hasn’t been configurable, adaptable, or affordable enough for high-mix, variable raw inputs,” according to Bergen.

Cow Crisis

As the beef plant undergoes structural changes, economic trouble has hit the U.S. market. Ground beef is 51% more expensive than it was in February 2020, a spike created by a classic supply and demand dilemma: Just as demand for red meat is going up (and TikTokers are eating their steak off cutting boards), a drought cut the American cattle herd to the smallest supply it’s been in 75 years.

The cattle market is facing a historic supply low, and as a result, meat giant Tyson Foods announced that it would be closing their Lexington, Nebraska, beef slaughterhouse, eliminating 3,200 jobs in a town of 11,000, and eliminating one of two shifts in their Amarillo, Texas, plant. These moves will reduce the nationwide beef processing capacity by 7-9%. In 2025, Tyson Foods expects a $600 million operating loss on beef.

In 2023, Tyson committed to invest $1.3 billion to automate meatpacking processes.

What the Consumer Wants

While price optimization is the primary driver of automated meatpacking, not all consumers are interested in the cheapest version of their favorite cut of meat. As specialty grocers become more popular in high-spend metros — and as protein-loading continues to dominate diet trends — a demand for independent butcher shops may follow suit.

Bradley Darr, a veteran whole-animal butcher at The Meat Hook in Columbia County, New York, came into the trade after decades in the restaurant industry. The art of whole animal butchery, he said, includes an attention to detail that machines will find hard to match. While a mass return to mom-and-pop butcher shops is an unlikely fantasy, the option to shop from local operations does have demand from consumers seeking a higher quality cut.

“There are so many hidden gem steaks that you are never going to see outside of all animal butcher shops. [For instance,] two little steaks sit in the hip joint: they’re called oyster steaks or spider steaks. They’re so small, you’ll never see them in a grocery store.”

Independent butcher shops are not going to be able to offer prices that match the machine-slaughtered meat available in chain grocery stores. And there are many other signs of automation in the food supply chain that have become visible over decades of industry shifts. While white-collar, “knowledge economy” jobs are considered first in conversations about AI disruption and job instability, physical labor — often staffed by immigrants and people of color — is just as susceptible, if not more so, to replacement by machines.

Apple people are a spirited sort, able to talk fervently about the aging qualities of an Albemarle Pippin, the rock hard crunch of an Arkansas Black, the complexity of an Esopus Spitzenburg, the sweet-yet-acidic bite of a Mullins‘ Yellow Seedling. They’ll take road trips through Maine to seek out rare apple varieties; they’ll dedicate their labor to documenting and preserving wild seedlings. Apple people make films that rival Wes Anderson. They drive seven hours, one way, from their home in Denver to the very southwest corner of Colorado just to pick up a Pewaukee apple tree. (Okay, that last one was me.)

Beloved though they may be, fresh apple consumption has trended down by about 2.2 pounds per person since the 1990s, despite popular newer varieties like Honeycrisp and Cosmic Crisp. “Something’s gone wrong where we haven’t been able to increase the per capita consumption despite how good ... many of the most recently developed varieties are,” said Luke Tonnemaker, a fourth generation farmer near Royal City, Washington.

As orchards consolidate, increase yields per acre, and vertically integrate, entire regions have become very efficient at growing apples. But the domestic and export market for the fruit continues to diminish. Cosmetically imperfect apples remain unpicked on trees, and the cost to grow apples — from inputs all the way to labor — keeps increasing.

“I feel like we’ve lost the plot a little bit and that’s one of the reasons that we’re seeing apple consumption, both fresh and processed, go down,” said Ben Wenk, a seventh generation apple grower in Adams County, Pennsylvania. “The whole experience has been so consolidated and so driven by capitalism, and in some ways it’s very shortsighted.”

–

Tonnemaker grew up eating Honeycrisp grown on his family’s 126-acre farm. The beloved apple, developed in the 1980s by the University of Minnesota’s apple breeding program and released to apple growers in 1991, changed consumer expectations of what an apple can be. “For better or worse there’s been such a big push to develop new apple varieties since Honeycrisp raised the bar on the apple eating experience,” he said.

Even though people still like the cultivar, “It feels like everyone’s looking for the next Honeycrisp,” said Wenk. New varieties flooding the market, often crossbred with Honeycrisp, are in effect different versions of the same thing: juicy, flavorful, sweet with enough acidity to be considered tangy.

Since Honeycrisp are notoriously tricky to grow, many producers would love an alternative that can, in theory, fetch a premium price. (“In theory” because from August 2023 to July 2024, the price that a grower could fetch for a 40-pound box of Honeycrisp dropped from $67.85 to $30.55.)

“It’s hard to understand how the least valuable component of a bottle of apple juice is the apples.”

But consumers? “I don’t really know which of these new varieties that are trying to reinvent the wheel — or you know, put the toothpaste back in the tube, however you want to talk about it — I’m not sure which of those has a realistic chance of having that effect,” said Wenk.

It is in this spirit that I bring up Cosmic Crisp, launched in 2019 and patented and trademarked to be grown exclusively in Washington. I’m not here to malign the apple nor the Washington State University breeding program that produced it.

But here’s my bias: Although I grew up 80 miles east of Wenatchee, the apple-growing center of Washington, the nation’s top-producing state (valued this year at approximately $2.3 billion), I grew up on Red Delicious, which Washington can grow very well. The quintessential apple was once sweet with the taste of muskmelon — it forever changed the apple industry.

But since I mostly ate flavorless and mealy mainstream Red Delicious, I did not truly appreciate or even like apples until I spent 10 years selling fruit for a small, south-central Pennsylvania farm at a farmers market. There I realized apples are like basically any other agricultural product — good enough from a grocery store but potentially transcendent when sourced from a farmer who values quality and flavor over quantity and appearance. “Apples to apples” becomes a useless idiom when removed from its standardized implication.

Cosmic Crisp apples, a cross of Honeycrisp and Enterprise, have their ardent fans; they also have their detractors. (“It’s a big nothing sandwich, as far as I’m concerned,” said Wenk.)

Washington may be good at growing them, but it’s a state that has flooded the market with apples in a marketplace “already rife with overproduction and price stagnation and typical economic hardship,” said Wenk. (And tariffs, which already impacted the apple industry in 2018, continue to be an issue.) According to the orchard- and vineyard-focused magazine Good Fruit Grower, this year in Washington, growers are harvesting an estimated 125 to 137 million boxes of apples. Per the USApple Industry Outlook 2025, Cosmic Crisp increased in production by a whopping 798 percent compared to the 2020/21 season.

“If you knew how little apples were selling for ... you would wonder why you’re paying $2 or $3 a pound.”

An abundance of apples hasn’t led to cheaper prices for consumers, and it hasn’t meant more profits for farmers. (Even though there’s plenty of product, the inputs to produce them are more costly and grocery stores can set prices however they please.) “If you knew how little apples were selling for, how much the growers were getting from the system that is ending up in grocery stores, you would wonder why you’re paying $2 or $3 a pound,” said Tonnemaker.

(Putting aside waste and potential solutions, even selling fruit to a processor isn’t a viable option for farmers when offers are shockingly low, like the two cents per pound that Tonnemaker was quoted within the last few years. “They put it at that price to discourage you from bringing it in because they don’t even want it,” he said. “It’s hard to understand how the least valuable component of a bottle of apple juice is the apples.”)

Meanwhile in the grocery store, we haven’t progressed too much beyond the homogeny of Red Delicious, Yellow Delicious, and Granny Smith. “That’s a weakness of the supermarket model,” said Tonnemaker. Big stores count on brand or variety recognition since they don’t have staff to talk to customers about every single apple, to explain each variety and which ones are best for pie and baked goods, which ones improve with age, which ones make a velvety sauce. “Apples are so diverse and can be used in so many different ways,” said Wenk, “and then grocery store produce aisles are restricting the diversity of the apple down to six or seven varieties.”

“I think a lot of us are looking to these true heirloom varieties and trying to educate people that of course you can make a pie with a Gala, but there’s all these apples that are specific for baking that just make it that much better,” he added.

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Apples used to be regional and use-specific. Now they’re everywhere, all the time, seasonality be damned. For those who want to go out of their way to find unique apple varieties, there’s much to discover, said Wenk. “It feels like this kind of niche, underground apple counterculture, those of us who are real nerds about it.”

So are the worlds of heirloom apples and big time plant breeding in tension, or are they different slices of the same pie?

“I don’t think that new apple breeding and old apple discovery have to be opposed to each other at all,” said Jude Schuenemeyer. He and his wife Addie run the Montezuma Orchard Restoration Project near Cortez, Colorado, the source of my Pewaukee tree. “Cultivars are cultivars because somebody found a seedling and decided to take a cutting and graft it,” he added. Human interaction with trees prevents certain cultivars from going extinct; plant breeders creating new apples are part of that process.

“It feels like this kind of niche, underground apple counterculture, those of us who are real nerds about it.”

Tonnemaker sees Cosmic Crisp as having the potential to save the small and midsize apple orchard in Washington. “If Cosmic can help provide an apple that gives people a consistently good eating experience in the store like it should, maybe we can get that apple consumption number back up,” he said. “And if it’s economical to grow, which I think it is in comparison to other varieties, you can get a better price back to growers.”

Schuenemeyer also points to downstream effects from the cider industry: “The reason why any cider has grocery store or liquor store shelf space is because of Angry Orchard.” Sometimes you need a mass-produced product to get your foot in the door. And while fresh consumption of apples is down, “It’s better to have people that decide that they like apples,” said Schuenemeyer. “The next step, though, is how do you introduce them to the other ones?”

Apple varieties already exist that excel at varying applications, whether it’s fresh eating, baking, drying, saucing, juicing, or fermenting into cider. “All those apples are being largely overlooked in a quest for some new sameness,” said Wenk. “The ‘same thing but new’ seems to be trumping ‘it’s different but old.’”

It’s true for so many things beyond produce, but perfectly good — great, even — varieties of apples lose their luster once they become too popular. Take the Mullins’ Yellow Seedling, discovered accidentally in 1891 in Clay County, West Virginia. Sweet like honey, with a little spice and acid for balance, the yellow apple is juicy, crunchy, and excellent for fresh eating and turning into sauce or butter. It grows well all over the country, bears plenty of fruit, and produces ample pollen to pollinate other varieties.

“Consumers love stories, right? With these older cultivars, you open up a whole world that most of them never knew existed.”

You’ve probably even tasted this apple. In 1914, horticultural company Stark Bro’s introduced it as Golden Delicious. If it were discovered yesterday, it’d be a runaway success, said Wenk, but “it’s not weird enough to be an heirloom and it’s so ubiquitous that it gets lost in the shuffle.” I tried a Colorado-grown Golden Delicious this season and was blown away by its burst of juice and complex flavor.

While new apple varieties can benefit growers in certain regions, the old ones still have potential. “If you can’t access the same new and zippy product that everybody else has, or that the big boys have, how do you keep that farmland viable farmland?” asked Schuenemeyer.

For some growers to have a future, it won’t be on new patented and trademarked varieties, especially in locations like Colorado, which once boasted a vibrant apple economy, but where growers might not be able to afford access to managed varieties. “But we can access the old cultivars that were proven to grow well here for a long, long time,” said Schuenemeyer. “Consumers love stories, right? With these older cultivars, you open up a whole world that most of them never knew existed.”

And as farmland gets more expensive, less attainable and consolidated by corporations and private equity, styles of farming that work on small acreage present an opportunity. “We really feel like orchards can be successful on an acre or three acres or 10 acres, that they can be viable commercial enterprises,” said Schuenemeyer. “That’s really what we’re looking at, is the ability of people to keep agricultural land. We are so removed from farmers to consumers that I think most people no longer understand the value of farmland until that barn in the field is now the barn surrounded by houses, and the field or the orchard is no longer there.”

“Life-changing money.” That’s how Wendy Reigel describes the windfall developers are offering farmers for their land, potential sites for hyperscale data centers to meet AI’s massive processing needs. Reigel is a grassroots anti-data-center activist who successfully fought the building of a center just 300 feet from her house in Chesterton, Indiana; she now helps other communities mobilize against data center incursions. She can only make an educated guess as to how much money is on offer — almost everything about these facilities is shrouded in secrecy.

“$20,000 an acre would be low-balling it,” Reigel said. “$40,000 would be maybe a starting point. And I’ve heard as high as $90,000.”

From the Pacific Northwest to the Northeast, communities are seeing a surge of tech-center buildouts as American tech leaders embark upon what Wired magazine called a “battle for AI dominance.” New executive orders from the Trump administration will eventually ease environmental permitting and other barriers to these builds — there have been three such orders since January 2025. And with this wind beneath their sails, AI-giddy companies like Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, and Oracle have embarked on a national land grab.

Legislators often welcome data centers for their promise of jobs, infrastructure development, and increased tax revenue and property values — rewarding developers with tax breaks and weak regulations. Meanwhile local residents decry them for guzzling water, driving up energy costs, fouling the air, churning out noise pollution, and causing land prices to skyrocket. (In some instances, land prices surpass Reigel’s guesstimates: Developers are paying $150,000 an acre for farmland in Ohio, $400,000 an acre in Utah.)

Some farmers are loath to condemn fellow farmers who sell their land for this purpose. They don’t begrudge life-changing money to anyone who’s contended with their industry’s often brutal fiscal realities, although a farmer in Michigan who sold his land for an “astronomical” sum — in the interest of what he called progress — says his neighbors don’t wave at him anymore. With or without the animus, farmers who opt not to sell are left to contend with the potential destruction of their operations and their lives. “It ruins all our little farms around here that we worked all our lives on,” a couple in Coweta, Oklahoma, told the local news.

There are data centers popping up almost everywhere, from Oregon and Nevada to Georgia and Virginia. (Loudon County is our country’s “data center alley.”) But Indiana has become an especial target for hyperscale facilities, of which there are an estimated 1,130 globally; since Indiana produces a lot of corn, soy, and hogs, it’s also illustrative of the challenges that farmers in particular are up against.

“It ruins all our little farms around here that we worked all our lives on.”

“Of the 40-something [data centers] that we’re tracking” in the state, “most of them are in ag areas,” said Bryce Gustafson, program organizer for environmental nonprofit Citizens Action Coalition (CAC). He’s not sure what the exact implications are for food security although he noted, “Last I checked, we can’t eat data or AI.”

Even before data center developers started to swarm, farmland in Indiana was going for about $15,000 an acre, according to Kiley Blalock, who married into a third-generation row crop and beef-producing family some 30 miles east of Indianapolis. At first, she said, private equity firms were the eager buyers.

“That hurts us, because they’re paying a higher price than market value for the land; that drives property values up, then farmers are struggling to pay their taxes,” Blalock said. That price is also “completely out of reach” for any farmers starting out or looking to expand their operations. When data centers are willing to quadruple or quintuple an already-inflated price, affordability for farmers goes up in smoke.

Morgan Butler is a senior attorney at the Southern Environmental Law Center, who helped the tobacco- and dairy-producing community of Pittsylvania County, Virginia, fight off a 1,000-acre AI facility. He said developers are drawn to farmland because “They see a huge area. In their eyes there’s nothing on it, nothing particularly valuable, there aren’t that many residents so hopefully they won’t kick up a firestorm of public opposition.”

That rural “nothingness,” though, is precisely what community members opposed to data centers hope to preserve. One farmer in Kentucky turned down an $8 million offer for his land, citing his family’s sentimental ties to it and the community’s fondness for the landscape as it is. However, one bitter truth for farmers is that much of their net worth can be tied up in their land; retirement might necessitate selling property because they have few or no other assets, making a generous offer for acreage hard to refuse.

“They’re paying a higher price than market value for the land; that drives property values up, then farmers are struggling to pay their taxes.”

Blalock is currently fighting a proposed 585-acre data center that abuts some of her farmland in Henry County. The facility would be built on land sold by the property’s non-farming heirs — no one knows for how much. Many sellers sign NDAs because companies “don’t want them knowing that maybe the next project down the way is getting double,” said CAC’s Gustafson.

A hyperscale data center can use upwards of 8 million gallons of water per year, mostly for cooling its servers. “We don’t have the water supply” to meet those needs, said farmer Bart Snyder. Snyder lives in Wolcott, an ag-centric town 135 miles northwest of Henry County, where Amazon is scouting a 330-acre facility 1,000 feet from one of his farm properties. He’s suing his town’s commissioner and redevelopment committee members (all of whom signed NDAs) for approving a farm-to-industrial land rezoning on behalf of that facility. “To consume that much water would absolutely devastate our row crops” and potentially create a deficit for Snyder’s 30 beef calves, which each drink 15 gallons of water daily. “People are literally scared to death,” he said.

Blalock is concerned that if a data center is approved in her county, it could deplete the local aquifer, causing neighbors’ wells to run dry and preventing her family from ever drilling one of their own for their cattle. She said that would put them out of business and leave their land valueless. “No one has answers for us about, what’s our backup plan? What if people lose water? You can take your family to go stay in a hotel but it’s not like doggy daycare; you can’t show up with 50 head of cattle.” And she worries: “Are we going to be the generation that loses the farm?”

Farmer anxiety doesn’t end with water use and property values. Data centers require enormous amounts of energy to run — worldwide, they consume 55 gigawatts per year, with 14 percent of that used by AI. They’re projected to gobble 84 gigawatts by 2027, with 27 percent used by AI; for reference, one gigawatt can power 876,000 homes. And they’re driving up the cost of electricity for users who live nearby, by 267 percent a month.

Snyder uses electricity to grind and dispense cattle feed and he doesn’t relish the idea of a price spike if a data center moves in. Even worse, these facilities tend to have emergency generators, for which they store hundreds of thousands of gallons of diesel onsite. What happens if the facility catches fire? In Wolcott, population 952, “The local fire department is all volunteers. We don’t have anything to fight a fire like that,” Snyder said.

“Are we going to be the generation that loses the farm?”

Over in Blalock’s part of the state, developers want to connect the proposed data center to a nearby natural gas pipeline, to generate what she calls “clean-er” energy — Indiana got 42 percent of its energy from coal in 2024. “We’re talking about VOCs [volatile organic compounds] and methane that are going to be released,” she said. “Is that going to create a heat island that’s important to anybody that grows corn?”

Blalock explains: “Night temperatures for corn, they need to drop. That helps with the development of the kernels. If nighttime temperatures remain elevated, it can drop yields up to 10 percent. We have hot summer nights; it’s Mother Nature, she’s her own thing and we can’t control her. But this is manmade.” The data center is in her county’s power to control — but planning commissioners have voted to recommend it, with no environmental review or guarantees the company will be held accountable for much of anything.

There’s also the hum. Data centers “emit low-frequency noise 24/7 through their fans and their diesel generators,” said activist Reigel. Both Snyder and Blalock are quick to point out that no one knows how this affects livestock. “We live out here with grain bins and when we harvest, they have heaters and blowers on them to dry the grain, but they’re only going to run for a few weeks,” Blalock said. “I’ve seen studies that show that even just with fans in barns, that can impact cattle” — elevated noise is connected to lowered milk production, and fertility disorders in bulls. “But again, these are more questions that we have that nobody can answer.”

What’s being offered to communities in lieu of answers are promises — rarely backed up in clear, detailed, contractual writing, say critics. There are promises that an incoming company will pay for infrastructure upgrades, or that water quality and amounts will remain stable, or that economic benefits will pour into rural towns.

SELC’s Butler says that for this reason, his organization is encouraging communities to make sure they’re requiring permitting for data centers — something that’s often bypassed in these transactions. (Permitting currently tends to fall under state and local jurisdiction, although in December of 2025 the House passed a bill that would make federal permitting easier.) Butler would also like to see states offer guidance and legislation to help small communities better understand both the pros and cons of what data centers bring with them.

“The developers say, ‘Oh, we promise we won’t do that. We promise we will do this. We promise, promise, promise, promise.’ But there’s nothing binding them to that,” said Blalock. She scoffs at a developer offering a million dollars to the local school system, although in one Michigan township, a data center will pay an estimated $8.1 million annually in school taxes, which is nothing to sneeze at; it will also pay $14 million for a farmland preservation trust.

Still, Blalock and others remain unconvinced of data centers’ benefits. “The town is thinking in terms of, what is the tax revenue going to be?” she said. “They’re not thinking about, how does this uplift every individual in town? And it doesn’t.”

Offrange writers produced some excellent stories in 2025, ranging from the thoughtful and compelling to the heart-breaking and dramatic. That said, in journalism, we so often focus on the words at the expense of the visuals. But our designer Adam puts considerable care and attention into designing original artwork for every Offrange story; our inbox is filled with reader praise for his work. We also have commissioned some original photography that turned out quite nicely.

So this year, in lieu of a traditional “Best of 2025” roundup, we asked our regular writers to share their favorite Offrange art from the year. Enjoy!

Bringing Oyster Farming Into the 21st Century

I really love that the aesthetic for Offrange stories leans to looking a bit older and timeless instead of prompt, like breaking news. The art does a good amount of work in helping the reader register that these themes and conversations remain evergreen over time, and that agriculture is a cyclical sector connected to generations of knowledge and conversation.

-Karen Fischer

Turkeys Grazing Under Solar Panels

I love the photographs in the article “Turkeys Grazing Under Solar Panels” because I admire their composition, and they perfectly represent the story’s content. They also grab readers‘ attention since they depict an unusual scene.

-Maggie Gigandet

Floods, Then Floods, Then More Floods, Then Drought

This is such an important article about the critical interaction of climate and agriculture and the art has an antique tinge to it that makes me think about the time before climate chaos. It features water, which is the crux of the problem so many of us farmers are dealing with right now, and which is only getting worse. The art shows the natural beauty of Vermont and the USA, which is something most farmers and most Offrange readers presumably want to protect.

-Leah Mack

Drones vs Wolves

The wolf is one of man’s most archetypal foes, a figure of real danger to livestock and storybook menace alike. The stark, elemental color palette of the illustration here evokes those deeply rooted feelings. And the stylistic contrast between the quick-sketched lupine and photorealistic quadcopter highlights the way some are trying to assuage those instinctual fears through technology.

-Daniel Walton

Black and Blue in the Barrens

I’ll pick Ben Seal’s “Black and Blue in the Barrens” piece from August. I’m a huge fan of Adam Dixon’s illustration style, particularly the fusion of natural images and data that he often employs. The header art for this article exemplifies how effective that juxtaposition can be. The organic reaching of the blueberry bush and the orderly march of the climate graph complement each other both conceptually and aesthetically.

-Davin Faris

Bears in the Boneyard

“Bears in the Boneyard” has to be my favorite cover art from this year! It’s so dramatic looking, so historic and fits the article so well, which has some historic talk about predator fears in the West... (I’m trying to think of something more intelligent to say about why, but visually it is just a very appealing artwork to me!)

-Claire Carlson

U.S. Sorghum Farmers Look to Africa

I love the art that accompanied the sorghum story. I just think it’s gorgeous!

-Katarina Zimmer

Your Land, My Land

I really loved the original photography in the Imperial Valley feature. It’s got a kind of epic feel. The photos (especially the landscapes) have a gorgeous sparseness and austerity that helps convey the mood of the story. The washed-out color palette of denim blue and sandy brown make you feel the baking heat. And they do that difficult photojournalism task of telling a story without being overly literal (i.e., simply illustrating what the writing itself is already telling the reader).

-Katie Cusumano

So many stories about the food system are really about how we use our land. Christina Yergat’s photos of the Imperial Valley, taken for her story with Carina Imbornone about that agricultural region’s looming lithium mines, made that reality immediately clear — in sun-drenched style. Even though I’m a words-first person, these photos reminded me how valuable it is to see change with our own eyes.

-Ben Seal

Changing the Weather Is for Farms, Not Evil

Love all of the art and illustrations, but if I have to choose one I’d say my story on “Changing the Weather Is For Farms, Not Evil.“ The graphic perfectly captures the idea of chemtrail conspiracies that’s been linked to cloud seeding, while also being reminiscent of the Illuminati. It’s very tongue in cheek — sometimes with a story like this, it’s good to have a little fun!

-Diana Kruzman

Taking Your Farm

Adam’s graphic on my eminent domain piece was fantastic. He perfectly captured the shadow cast by the government on farms when eminent domain laws rear their head, and it was simple artwork, in a way, but so poignant and striking.

-David Silverberg

If You’re a Farmer, NASA Wants a Word

I loved the art on my NASA story from earlier this year. The astronaut with a pitchfork in hand was super cool and captured the unexpected nature of the space agency’s partnership with farmers.

-Donavyn Coffey

Do Farmers Dream of Electric Tractors?

I really like the art in “Do Farmers Dream of Electric Tractors?” It’s clean, simple, and nostalgic, which is a good fit for this forward-looking topic.

-Amanda Loudin

To Burn or Not to Burn

and

Wildfire Lessons From Texas Hill Country

I always love the surprise that comes with one of my Offrange stories going live and getting to see the art that’s been created to accompany it. This year my favorite was a sort of magical-realist illustration of flames surrounding a farm that went along with my story To Burn or Not to Burn. It was evocative, a little weird and best of all, had a corollary in another fire-related story that pubbed the same week: Wildfire Lessons From Texas Hill Country by Serina DeSalvio, which came with a very cool moving graphic of fire consuming a surreal sort of cube of trees. I loved them individually but together they were really visually striking.

Mercury Moves Up the Food Chain

This is a very, very tough call because Adam rarely misses but I’m going to go with my gut and choose this story about mercury in American alligators. The art is creepy and murky and perfectly captures *swamp,* but it’s also bold and beautiful (my favorite shade of green) and delightfully minimalist. It’s hard not to lock eyes with that heavy-metal-riddled gator and contemplate the weight of the crimes we’ve committed against our four-legged family. Plus, that all-knowing gaze pulls you right into the story, like boots sinking into a puddle of muck.

-Emma Glassman-Hughes

(Editor’s Note: This was also Adam’s favorite piece of the year.)

Pork-Infused Soybeans and Beef-Infused Peas

It is for a story I wrote, so I may be biased, but I truly love the art on the Pork-Infused Soybeans and Beef-Infused Peas story. The design, to me, has a retrofuturism feel that I think does a good job of highlighting the food technology angle of the story. The colors and the cans remind me of a 1950s magazine ad for canned food, with the added twist that the soybeans are infused with pork. The pig floating next to the soybeans in the center can is also such a cute touch. And, there’s something humorous/ironic to me about having a can of soy beans, which you often associate with the intentional choice NOT to eat meat, bearing a sticker that says “now infused with real pork.”

-Katie Watkins

Irrigating With Oil Waste

and

Make Your Own Micro Forest

I don’t have children, but I feel like this ask is like choosing among my children. There were many excellent artworks this year in Offrange. My favorite is probably the greenhouse from Irrigating with Oil Waste, maybe because of the same type of simple treatment of the centrality of concept. My runner-up is the textured paper from Make Your Own Micro Forest, mostly as a request to Adam to play with more textures next year because they’re lovely. (Editor’s Note: Seconded on the micro forest art.)

-Mackenzie Burnett, Offrange publisher

Racing to Buy Farmland

This story was nominally about the Farm Olympics, a convivial annual event in Tennessee; its true focus was on the steep challenges young farmers face in trying to acquire their own property. Adam did such a great job here using old video game aesthetics to create cheeky artwork that didn’t detract from the gravity of the subject matter.

-Jesse Hirsch, Offrange editor

I grew up in the rural West, a beautiful-yet-desolate place of proud independence, all-enduring grit, and hard-to-crack personalities. The culture could be intimidating, if you let it. I lived in town, in a comfortable, not-too-big house in a well-respected neighborhood, within walking distance of my dad’s small engine repair and retail shop. Many of my classmates lived far outside of town, down dusty, unpaved roads, miles from the nearest house. They had this Wyoming life figured out, I always thought. They were the definition of the grit and hardship that chiseling a life in such unforgiving country required.

I never really talked to them, these ranch kids whose lives were so different from mine. Part of me held a high respect for them — because, to me, they were undaunted by the work, the weather, the untameable land. I was the same, yet I could never admit it.

Until I started talking to a longtime local rancher. And I realized, we are more alike than we are different.

There is a certain brag worthiness to saying you’re from Pinedale, Wyoming. When I was growing up there, it belonged to the least populated county (Sublette) in the least populated state. My mom liked to say that Pinedale was the farthest town from a railroad track in the country. (When I researched “farthest town from a railroad track in the United States,” for this story, Google’s AI overview quickly informed me: “There is no single ‘farthest town from a railroad track’ in the United States, because the answer depends on how you define ‘farthest’ and what type of track you are measuring from.”)

The roads stretched on, narrow and hemmed in by solid walls of plowed snow that spanned miles. My high school mascot was the Wrangler, a cowboy who takes charge of the horses, and our number-one rival was the Big Piney Punchers. Only recently did I learn what a puncher is: It’s one who “punches” — or drives — cows from one location to another.

Yet even as I claim Pinedale as my hometown, I know I represent just a sliver of the tough-as-nails, self-reliant culture that comes with living in the rural West. I was scared to death of horses. I had never been invited to a branding (and if I had, I would likely have declined). Telling people where I grew up still generally brings an excited or intrigued reaction. But the truth is, I never really felt like I fit there.

There was, while I was growing up, an unspoken divide between the “townies” and the ranchers. As a townie, I always felt less-than, not tough enough. I respected the sun-up-to-sun-down work of the local ranchers from afar, but I never wanted to be one.

I had never been invited to a branding (and if I had, I would likely have declined).

Yet it wasn’t until I was an adult that I understood there is another side to the story. It had never occurred to me that, just as I struggled with how exactly I “fit” into the rural Wyoming lifestyle, a rancher might, too.

“My [family’s] story is the opposite of yours,” said Ann Noble, who grew up in the more populated Rock Springs, 100 miles south of Pinedale, and married a longtime Sublette County rancher. Ann learned the ranch life and raised 4 girls — all of whom run big equipment and “know how to pull a calf.”

“The rancher-townie divide was very much a part of our lives [as our kids were] growing up,” Ann said. “We raised ranch kids. They were made to not fit in with the townies.”

Her comment caught me off guard. How is it that I felt like I didn’t fit in with the rural Wyoming lifestyle — but that her family, the very ranchers who I thought carved that way of life — didn’t either?

The sharp divide between the ranchers and the townies has existed for generations. But — as I came to learn in my visits with Ann and my own family members — it’s not a divide that clearly defines winners and losers. Instead, it’s a deep-seated story about people trying to eke out a living in hard and desolate country.

As a townie, I always felt less-than, not tough enough.

My grandparents grew up working on Sublette County ranches — my grandpa as a cowboy, my grandma as a cook for the ranch crews. Ranch wages were poor at best, even with room and board included. They continued to pursue ranch work after they were married but couldn’t make ends meet. In the winter, little snowdrifts would appear here and there throughout the cabin they were given to live in. The cabin’s roof had so many holes they could never seem to patch them all before another snowdrift escaped through.

At a loss for what to do, my grandpa came to town looking for work. He walked into Isaac Trucking and asked for a job. The head mechanic hired him and taught him the trade.

By the time my dad was born, his parents were living in town. My dad, by default, grew up a townie.

Ann’s husband, Dave, grew up in my dad’s generation, a rancher. They attended the same school. My dad excelled as a track star. Dave went out for the high school basketball team, but he quit after his dad’s nightly trips into town from the ranch to pick him up became too much for the family.

“Townies could just walk to practice, or walk to school,” Ann said. “But if [your cows are] calving, it’s [ranch work] 24 hours a day.”

The divide has grown sharper with each passing generation. But back in the 1930s and ‘40s, the local school calendar was built around haying season. “[The townies] were very much attuned to the lives of the ranch kids because they were all tied in together,” Ann said.

“Townies could just walk to practice, or walk to school. But if your cows are calving, it’s ranch work 24 hours a day.”

Ranch kids would stay in town for the week to attend school and then ride horses back home on the weekends. Ranchers depended on students and teachers to help with haying during the summer months.

In the 1960s, my dad remembers staying the night at the home of his rancher friend, Louie, and helping Louie’s family punch cows before dawn.

“I remember Louie’s sister screaming,” he told me. Louie’s sister had been awakened in the middle of the night by her father threatening to use the electric cattle prodder on her if she didn’t get out of bed to start the ranch work. “Louie whispered to me, ‘We’d better get up before he gets to us.’”

There is that Wyoming brag worthiness. A story worth telling.

My go-to tales about growing up in rural Wyoming center around turning the hubcaps to 4-wheel drive on my 1991 Ford Ranger during blizzards and hanging snowpants to dry next to the wood-burning fireplace in our kitchen. The guy next door left his diesel truck running 24/7 through the winter months for fear that if he turned the motor off, it would never start again.

The question pulses just beneath the surface: Who are we and where do we belong?

The Nobles’ four daughters represented the third generation to attend Pinedale High School, in the 2000s. Of the 60-plus kids in her graduating class, the oldest daughter, Meredith, was one of two who hayed every season. She drove her dad’s beat-up old pickup to town for school each day, parking alongside brand new $45,000 diesel pickups that the townies (many whose parents worked in the gasfields south of town) drove.

Meredith had discovered long-distance running, and, like my dad, she excelled at it. She became the star of the Pinedale High School track team.

Then, the Nobles’ top ranch hand hung himself during spring calving season, leaving Ann and Dave in serious need of help. Meredith gave up her top spot on the cross-country team to help with spring calving. The coach was livid; her absence from the team wrecked their shot at going to the State cross-country meet.

“It was unbelievable rejection,” Ann said. “There was no support for [Meredith] choosing her family and her ranch.”

Recently, Dave attended his 50th high school reunion. The reunion was at Stockman’s — one of Pinedale’s oldest and most established restaurants. The ranchers sat at the bar. The townies sat at tables.

“They were still hanging out in their cliques,” Ann said.

*****

I knew, even as I was growing up, that I would leave Pinedale when I turned 18. As a townie, I lived on the fringes of the gritty, fiercely independent way of life necessary to succeed in such a far-flung place. While I respected the people who doggedly worked the land and its livestock, I knew I would never be one of them. I wanted an easier way of life, a tamer place. I knew there was a wider world to explore.

It took a long time for me to come to terms with it, but looking back, I can confidently say that we all possess different gifts. My gift is not that of a hands-on rancher, but rather that of a storyteller — of tilling memory and nurturing conversations to pull out stories that help make sense of the world and our places within it.

The ranchers in Sublette County are doing that in their own ways — making sense of the world and their places within it. And I think for all of us, the question pulses just beneath the surface: Who are we and where do we belong?

On a 30-by-15-foot patch of suburban ryegrass, Peter Lovenheim changed his regular mowing routine into a plan for sowing and threshing. For five seasons, Lovenheim transformed his Rochester, New York, backyard — just 425 square feet — into a small field of hard red winter wheat.

Each season, he and his young children threshed wheatberries into grain kernels, ground them into flour, and used it in their baking, a significantly different rhythm than his other gardening. The patch could produce roughly 30 pounds of wheat, about half a bushel, supplying a portion of the families yearly wheat supply.

Backyard wheat has long been tucked away in horticultural guidebooks for dedicated gardeners, and hobbyists fascinated by ancient grains. But this niche practice could revive a fading tradition: wheat production in the United States.

Peaking in 1981, U.S. wheat acreage has since declined by 42 million acres, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. While rising yields have partly offset this decline, global trends tell another story. European precipitation and yield gains have made wheat more competitive, pushing the American commodity market toward other crops — corn and soybeans chief among them.

One of the practice’s earliest advocates, Gene Logsdon, a farm writer from northern Ohio explained: “The reason Americans find it a bit weird to grow small plots of rows of grain in gardens is that they are not used to thinking of grains as food directly derived from the plant, the way they view fruits and vegetables.“

Not limited by yield like a commercial grower, master gardeners have experimented with almost every variety of wheat. Lovenheim’s family harvested their crop each summer, storing kernels for flour blends. When it came time to bake, they poured the grain into a tabletop grinder to make flour for muffins and other baked goods.

“We’re not growing the grains that are necessarily the highest yielding, but they have the best flavor.”

Their first-season harvest party puzzled neighbors unfamiliar with homegrown grain. “Children raised in cities and suburbs typically have no hands-on understanding of where their bread, muffin, cereal — even their oat milk — comes from, unless we show them,” Lovenheim said.

The exact planting routine, depth, and planting density vary depending on whether you access your info from online sources, or Lovenheim’s guide. Ask today’s extension agents or horticulture professors, and most cannot name anyone currently growing backyard wheat. YouTubers and bloggers — some of the newest forms of instant extension — can, however.

As a top five exporter in the world, the U.S. still imports wheat, mainly from Canada, varieties that climatically work better in the North: hard red spring and durum wheatclasses. On the East Coast, white winter wheat for pastries dominate; Kansas and Nebraska rely on hard red winter wheat for bread or all-purpose flour; while the Dakotas grow high-protein spring wheat and pockets of durum for pasta.

The choice of spring versus winter wheat, your environment and soil conditions, and harvesting efficiency all influence the final yield. Just like a high-priced combine cuts, threshes, and winnowing grain crops, the same process happens by hand.

Backyard growers choose their preferred harvesting tools including sickles, scythes, or any curved blade for gathering stalks and cutting. For Lovenheim, that included garden shears. Grains are threshed, which detached kernels from their stalk. Finally winnowing, or the fanning process, separates the edible grain kernels from unwanted chaff.

“Americans find it a bit weird to grow small plots of rows of grain in gardens because they are not used to thinking of grains as food directly derived from the plant.”

In later years, Lovenheim’s plot rotated through buckwheat, oats, soybeans, alfalfa, quinoa, millet, and flax.

Logsdon, a writer and chief gardner, published some of his finest niche books on small grains, like Small-Scale Grain Raising in 1977 and Holy Shit, about manure in the garden. His writing coined the term “pancake patch” — growing enough wheat that a single bundle of harvested wheat could produce a stack of pancakes. At the end of each chapter of his book, he included a pancake recipe using flour made from that grain.

The book’s core principles — choosing varieties based on location and use — haven’t changed, nor have the pancake recipes. But reaching a broader audience for local grain remains a challenge, even though grain still makes up about half of our daily diet.

For consumers, Logsdon explained, “Flour … is purchased like automobiles and pianos,” without a thought of how it’s made. To remedy an agricultural literacy gap like understanding wheat production, small farmers often partner with millers and bakers.

Thor Oechsner farms regenerative organic small grains outside of Newfield, New York. Just like backyard growers, he started with the same experimental mindset on 15 acres. “We’re not growing the grains that are necessarily the highest yielding, but they have the best flavor,” Oechsner said.

“Flour is purchased like automobiles and pianos,” without a thought of how it’s made.

While a lot of wheat production has shifted abroad, specialty markets and local interest keep the crop alive in New York. “We want to grow it closer to where people are using it and revitalize this lost part of New York’s agricultural heritage,” he said.

When the farm started, Oechsner estimated he would need about 400 acres to make the operation viable full-time. When delivering products to any size customer, he admitted there is an undeniable truth. “It’s all about economies of scale,” said Oechsner. His farm now grows about 150 acres each of winter and spring wheat, buckwheat, rye, corn, and soybeans in rotation.

While Oechsner flours are sold to wholesale retailers, supermarket prices on his type of product ring out to almost double the cost than all-purpose flour. Central New Yorkers know his farm and its end product through Wide Awake Bakery, the organic bakery in Ithaca that uses Oechsner-blended bread flours. His farm also stands out for producing spring wheat in New York, a wheat class typically grown in the Dakotas for its short season and high protein content.

But local grain growing, milling, or even backyard production rely on a specific audience: people willing to grow it of all sizes or buy it. Oechsner doesn’t see that demand fading. “Consumers are more discerning than we give them credit for,” he said.

This November, in a rare act of singlemindedness, the U.S. Senate voted unanimously to pass a bill that would allow whole and 2 percent milk to be served in schools. On December 15, the legislation passed the House and now awaits a presidential signature. Now, nutritional guidelines that since 2012 have mandated that only fat-free and 1 percent milk be offered at school meals will soon be overridden. “Kids are gonna love it, it’s just gonna be fantastic for them,” said Tim Hawk, a vice president at Dairy Farmers of America (DFA), echoing a common pro-fattier-milk sentiment across the industry.

Having experienced a steady downward spiral of milk prices and small farm losses since the 1970s — concurrent with a large drop in milk consumption — dairy farmers take this potential return to “real” milk as a big win. Although they offer differing opinions on the ultimate benefit. Some see it as industry salvation — a way to get more money in farmers’ pockets. Others view it more as a corrective to a poor nutritional decision, enacted during the Obama administration, that they say has had adverse effects on children’s health. Both groups, though, feel victim to what one insider called a “rigged system,” in which a less tasty and desirable product (fat-free milk) turned public sentiment against them, contributing to dairy’s ongoing crisis.

Thanks to 13 years of low- and no-fat milk in the National School Lunch Program (NSLP), “We lost two generations of milk drinkers,” said Nelson Troutman, a fifth-generation, semi-retired dairyman in Berks County, Pennsylvania.

Back in 2019, Troutman kicked off a one-man grassroots campaign with hand-painted hay bales meant to drum up public fervor for whole milk. He and several other Northeast farmers now spearhead a nonprofit called 97 Milk, a reference to store-bought whole milk’s three-ish percent milkfat content. “So many people we’ve talked to think whole milk is 100 percent fat,” Troutman said. “Now come on! Ice cream is 8 to 15 percent butter fat ... but that’s what you see on the internet.” And what Troutman’s hay bales — which proclaim whole milk to be 97 percent fat-free — aim to counteract.

Troutman believes that by providing higher-fat milks in schools, demand for them will naturally rise and boost lethargic milk sales. “Long-term, when the kids start drinking good milk in schools, they’re going to want good milk at home,” he said. That “would help the farmer that’s producing the milk.”

“As a kid, my mom was entirely on the low-fat bandwagon; she bought ‘white water,’ is what we used to call it.”

Jay Hoyt grew up on a Northeastern dairy farm and has been driving a feed truck since 1972. In Washington County, New York, where he moved after graduating from college, “There [were] over 600 dairy farmers and now that it is 50 years later, there’s only like 35 or so left,” he said. He partly blames processors who reap profits while paying out low milk prices to farmers for this demise, and who make extra money by skimming the fat off whole milk and selling it for ice cream, butter, and cheese — extra money the farmer never sees.

Hoyt volunteers with Troutman’s 97 Milk campaign, spurred in part by a desire to help dairy farmers survive. However, “I’ve come to the conclusion I probably can’t save [any] farms,” he said. Instead, he’s now focused on “saving these kids from bad nutrition and maybe giving them a little more healthy product. Now I’m not trying to tell you that skim milk is bad nutrition. I’m just telling you that 50 percent of that milk goes in the garbage after the kid takes it at school.” (One research estimate puts milk waste at 45 million gallons per year.) “That may count — as far as the government’s concerned — as nutrition, but at the end of the line, there is no nutrition in what goes in the garbage.”

Shane St. Cyr is a co-owner of Adirondack Farms in Clinton County, New York, and a board member of the Northeast Dairy Producers Association — an organization he said felt “really great” about efforts to get whole milk back in schools. It’s “full of nutrients, full of vitamins and minerals that kids need, and it’s naturally made, it’s readily available, and it’s healthy.” Was he suggesting that lower-fat milks were not nutritious or healthy? “I’m not a nutritionist, so I can’t really speak to that,” he said. “I do know that I think there’s a lot of products out there that have much higher levels of things that are not healthy and not nutritious.”

Better nutrition is, in fact, a huge talking point across the whole-milk campaign, including among some cheerleaders of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement. They’ve argued that there’s no link between childhood obesity or other poor health outcomes and full-fat milk — the impetus for removing it from the NSLP in the first place. Recent studies have both seemingly backed up and contradicted this claim, and public health experts are similarly at odds on the matter.

Many balk at the idea of subjecting kids to any extra saturated fat when they’re already consuming too much, while influential Tufts University nutrition professor Dariush Mozaffarian has asserted that there’s no evidence that whole-fat dairy is “worse” than low-fat dairy.

Largely left out of the nutrition conversation as it relates to school meals: organic milk, which is produced without antibiotics and growth hormones, and pesticides in feed, and which has been shown to have higher levels of healthier fats. But as New York organic dairy farmer Samantha Kemnah pointed out, the rates that the USDA reimburses schools for food are already so low that nutrition directors don’t have the capacity to pay extra for organic.

“At the end of the line, there is no nutrition in what goes in the garbage.”

“The only [organic milk] initiatives that have gone anywhere have been grant-funded,” she said, alluding to a $1.75 million USDA grant issued in the spring of 2025 — arguably a pittance — meant to boost organic dairy sales to schools in 11 Northeastern states.

Still, Kemnah, like her conventional dairy colleagues, expressed support for getting fattier milks back in schools, and a nostalgic personal preference for them. “As a kid, my mom was entirely on the low-fat bandwagon; she bought ‘white water,’ is what we used to call it,” Kemnah said. “And then I went to a friend’s house where they bought whole milk and it was a revelation.” Like other dairy farmers interviewed here, she also expressed skepticism that the big players in the industry actually wanted to see this switch happen. “I would love to see whole milk in schools. Will the industry, which is behemoth, let that happen?” she mused.

In fact, DFA has come out in strong support of whole and 2 percent milk in schools, as have the Farm Bureau and other industry players. DFA’s Hawk said that his organization has been celebrating the recent Senate win and that they kept “working with legislators to move this through the House of Representatives for a vote so every child can have the access to the milk that they love and need.”

In true farmer spirit, Troutman remains dubious even amid industry enthusiasm. “They’re going to do whole milk, they claim. But see, they have the power to say, Oh, you got to take 2 percent milk, we don’t have whole milk because we’re low in processing. They do stuff like that.” And he believes that when they do sell whole milk, they’ll push extended shelf life, or ESL, milk, which he called “horrible.”

“With fresh milk, you have to take it [to a school] maybe twice a week,” Troutman said, “where, with the ESL, they can take a whole tractor trailer load there and set it on the dock and it [doesn’t] need to be refrigerated.” That means lower delivery costs.

Hawk, in response, spun ESL as a win. “Anything in whole milk, whether it’s ESL or whether it’s fresh, tastes better, feels better on the tongue, and those higher fat items just taste better to the human experience. We have a real pathway to having the right product and the right packaging delivered to the kids in any format and flavor.”

Should the whole milk in schools legislation garner a presidential signature, industry insiders expect that whole milk could make it to school lunch trays in the New Year.

Authorities in Denmark are investigating claims that Bovaer, a relatively new supplement intended to reduce methane emissions in cows, has sickened animals and reduced milk production in their herds. But separating the conspiracy theories from any actual ill effects could take years, as scientific study of the supplement continues.

Large numbers of Danish farmers began to use Bovaer on Oct. 1 of this year to comply with a new rule in the country’s Livestock Approval Regulation, according to a November 22 statement by the Danish Veterinary & Food Administration that has since been moved or removed from the agency’s website. As of Nov. 17, according to an official tally, some 400 Danish farmers have reported issues such as diarrhea, fever, “poisoning symptoms,” and other signs of disease in their cows.

Accounts from farmers on social media suggest cows fell ill within days of receiving their first full dose of the Bovaer supplement, becoming unwilling or unable to stand after several days of refusing to eat. But other accounts which frequently express skepticism about climate soon amplified these reports with incendiary language calling Bovaer poison and alleging climate mandates will destroy farming.

Bovaer is no stranger to controversy; dairy products from cows fed the supplement have been subject to boycotts in the UK, mostly driven by conspiracy theories about climate change and tenuous connections to the software mogul Bill Gates, who has invested in other climate-related technologies. Some of those boycotting milk produced from cows using the supplement claimed — without supporting evidence — that it could harm human health.

But Denmark is the first country to experience widespread complaints of health effects in cows since using of the supplement. Aarhus University, a leading Danish educational institution, had launched a study of the supplement’s impact on animal feeding behaviors and welfare earlier this year, before the rash of complaints emerged.

According to SEGES Innovation, a private research firm that is collecting data on the reported illnesses, 419 Danish dairy farmers have reported that their cows are eating less since they began using the supplement. Another 58 farmers report their cows are producing less milk since supplementation began, while 376 farmers say their cows are both eating less and producing less milk. Thirty-nine percent of Danish dairies with more than 50 cows had responded to the SEGES Innovation survey as of Nov. 17.

About three-fourths of survey respondents say the supplement has had a negative effect on their cows, though SEGES Innovation noted on its website that this is likely because the herds that haven’t experienced problems are less likely to report.

About three-fourths of survey farmers say the supplement has had a negative effect on their cows.

Cows produce methane, a potent but short-lived greenhouse gas, as a side effect of their digestive processes. A Danish mandate requiring dairy farmers to use Bovaer or other dietary supplements known to reduce methane production took effect earlier this year.

Reports of health effects surged in October, when most Danish dairy farmers began to use Bovaer to comply with the mandate, according to SEGES Innovation. Although the supplement was used by farmers prior to October, SEGES collected just 118 complaints regarding the supplement from January to August of this year, and 124 complaints from September.

A spokesperson for dsm-firmenich, the company that manufactures Bovaer, noted that the supplement has undergone 15 years of scientific research and has been approved for use by the European Food Safety Authority. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration also approved Bovaer as safe and effective, and the supplement has been used successfully in diets for more than 500,000 cows in 25 countries, including the U.S., France, the UK, and Spain, according to dsm.

To date, dsm has not received complaints of health effects tied to Bovaer in herds outside Denmark. Additionally, some 400 Danish dairy farmers used Bovaer prior to October 2025 without reporting any ill effects, the company spokesperson said. SEGES Innovation has itself previously conducted trials of Bovaer that showed no signs of negative effects.

“We fully support the Danish Veterinary & Food Administration and Aarhus University’s investigation and encourage all stakeholders to await official findings before drawing conclusions,” the company said in a statement to Offrange. “We agree with the minister that animal welfare is a top priority. We will work with the ministry, farmers, and other stakeholders to get to the bottom of the concerns of these farmers and ensure that we move forward based on the factual evidence.”

“It matters how and under what conditions a feed additive like Bovaer is used in practice.”

Studies of the supplement to date, including those previously conducted by Aarhus University, never identified “the pattern of disease now being described in the media — with fever, diarrhea, and in some cases, dead cows,” Charlotte Lauridsen, head of the department of animal and veterinary sciences at the university, said in a statement when the reports of sick cows began to emerge.

However, a handful of studies, including some conducted at Aarhus, had collected data to suggest that feeding Bovaer might cause cows to eat less feed. Scientists there pushed for a closer look at feeding behavior because “reduced [feed] intake can be an indication of welfare issues,” Jesper Emborg, head of communications for Aarhus University, said in an email to Offrange.

Now, with the results of that study due out in 2028, “I think we would have all liked to be closer to a result,” Emborg said.

Lauridsen said it is possible that differences between real-world scenarios and research trials, which take place under carefully controlled conditions, could result in different outcomes in commercial settings. Factors such as feed composition, management, housing environment, and individual animal temperament could influence how the supplement performs — as could the way in which the supplement itself is dosed and administered.

“You can compare it to being prescribed medication,” Lauridsen said in a statement emailed to Offrange. “If I’m given four pills by my doctor, it’s crucial that I read the leaflet to see whether I should take them all at once or spread them out during the day. Such details make a big difference in how the medicine works. In the same way, it matters how and under what conditions a feed additive like Bovaer is used in practice.”

It’s a common adage in ranching that one doesn’t name their livestock. It makes the act of slaughter for food harder, and blurs the line between farmed animal and pet. Yet one type of rancher is built differently: reindeer herders. They’re accustomed to naming their animals precisely because this sector of the agritainment industry is built on tourism and visitors returning year after year, mostly around Christmastime. That gives herders a lot of time the rest of the years to care for their creatures and become quietly enamoured by them.

“It’s very different from elk, or other deer farming,” said Jane Atkinson, owner of Running Reindeer Ranch in Fairbanks, Alaska.

In North America, reindeer are often considered a cousin to caribou because while they are domesticated, caribou are their wild counterpart. But part of it is also semantics: While they are the same species, Rangifer tarandus, the word caribou is only used on this continent. The rest of the world calls various caribou subspecies reindeer. Caribou are native to Alaska, and reindeer are native to Eurasia, from countries such as Finland, Norway, and Russia.

But both animals are in deep trouble. An August analysis found that by 2100, caribou populations in North America could decline by up to 80 percent due to global warming. There are nine million reindeer and caribou grazing throughout the Arctic Circle today, but the future outlook became increasingly dire when the Trump administration announced that it was re-opening oil and gas drilling leases in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge — deep in the state’s far-North caribou range.

Reindeer herders who make their living through holiday tourism under no circumstances slaughter their livestock; this festive corner of ranching has everything to do with their conservation.

Eating Rudolph?

Often, there is an interplay between mammal conservation and human consumption. Some animals, such as bison, have been buoyed off of the edge of extinction by becoming a protein that can be raised, ranched, and slaughtered for food. But reindeer are not thought of as a food product in the United States for a simple fact: They’re far too expensive to eat.

“When I bought my first two reindeer [in 2015], they were a fifth of the price of one reindeer now,” said Cassandra Hoover, a reindeer farmer in the Poconos in Pennsylvania. “So in 10 years, the price of them has gone up exponentially.”

Lauren Waite, the farm manager of the Williams Reindeer Farm in Palmer, Alaska, said that when her grandfather was working their family reindeer farm 25 years ago, reindeer sold locally for $500. Now, they easily go between $15,000 to $30,000 each.

It wasn’t always this way. The first reindeer entered the United States in 1892 from the Russian Far East as a source of meat for Indigenous tribes who lived in the Arctic. These groups had always been subsistence hunters, not herders, but Presbyterian Minister Sheldon Jackson argued that herding animals would provide a greater economic livelihood for Arctic peoples.

Reindeer are not thought of as a food product in the United States for a simple fact: They’re far too expensive to eat.

But the experiment of importing reindeer as a food source was a fraught one because more animals fell into ownership by missionary groups than tribal communities. In 1937, Alaska responded with the Reindeer Act, which restricted animal ownership to solely Native populations. In those years, Canada bought thousands of head of reindeer stock from Alaska, and established its own herding communities.

But things changed by the 1980s, Atkinson says, when ranchers identified a loophole: If a reindeer was imported into Alaska from Canada, anyone could own it, not just Native peoples. “It’s really only been 30 years since non-Native people have been able to own reindeer in the state,” Atkinson said. Due to that, the larger agritainment industry in the Arctic has slowly but surely emerged over the past generation or so.

For example, when Waite’s family began their farm, the original intention was to raise reindeer for meat, but the family fell in love with them. Now, they have about 120 reindeer, which is the largest captive herd in North America, Waite said. The business sustains itself through selling live reindeer to other herders and from agritourism to the farm. 

Seeing Is Believing

In 2019, the last wild caribou in the lower 48 that migrated from the far north was captured and transferred to Canada to await rejoining another herd. The only place to see these animals in the continental United States now is at reindeer farms, and the only state where you can still see caribou in the wild is Alaska. The question is for how long.

Knowledge and conservation advocacy are a chain of events, Waite said. A family may be watching TV one night, and see wild caribou or reindeer on a show. From there, they may visit a reindeer farm and actually get to interact with the animal in-person. Before long, maybe they take their annual vacation to Denali National Park, and see that these animals do have a place, still, in wild ecosystems.

“From my perspective as a reindeer farmer, I would love for more wild caribou to be preserved,” she said. “That’s what we think contributes to conservation today, that people have positive experiences with our animals.“

“That’s what we think contributes to conservation today, that people have positive experiences with our animals.“

Reindeer have many idiosyncrasies, which contributes to a passionate subculture and community of herders. For example, when there is a herd of reindeer and a threat is detected, they immediately move the babies and weak members of the herd into the middle of the group, and run circles around them, like a clock, to confuse predators until they give up. Their antlers are like a fingerprint, and each animal (typically) grows back the same rack year after year. The long hair on their necks protects them from the Arctic cold, but also serves as an optical illusion: Their necks look lower than they actually are, so if a predator jumps to bite into their throat, they’ll miss by a few inches, giving them time to run away.

“There is a lot of divine design around reindeer,” said Hoover.

Atkinson argues that her business is different from a zoo where people can run from one exhibit to the next. People have to learn about the reindeer if they come on a tour to her farm, she says, which is important to her. There is so much to understand about wild animals, a changing climate, laws, and regulations. A single tour may barely scratch the surface, but people are interested in taking on that responsibility.

“By sharing that information, us herders help conservation in that way,” Atkinson said. “We donate a lot of money to caribou conservation, [...] and only through that education do people understand what is really going on.”

It was around 2018 and David McDaniel was disgusted. He was starting to reckon with the sheer tonnage of plastic used on his and his wife’s 181-acre Earth Dharma Farm in northern Maine. Sheets of black plastic mulch covered his soils to suppress weeds while floating row cover, a woven plastic, protected his vegetables from frost.

One spring, he walked under one of his plastic greenhouses to pick up a roll of old floating row cover. Upon touching it, a cloud of particles erupted into the air. What McDaniel had just inhaled — and was probably all over his fields — was microplastic dust. “If you actually see this stuff turn to dust in front of you, if you know about the dangers of plastic and all the chemicals in them, it will revolt you.”

Reliance on plastic is an unfortunate reality of modern farming. One September 2025 study estimated that U.S. farmers account for 2.7% of the country’s plastic use, going through nearly 1.6 million tons every year. And ironically, organic farmers in northern latitudes like McDaniel are especially reliant on products like mulch so they can extend the growing season as well as avoid using herbicides.

Much agricultural plastic is used only once and ends up in landfills — but it could also cause harm long before then; scientists are learning that, when it breaks down into tiny microplastics in the field, these can harm the health of earthworms, breed antibiotic-resistant bacteria, and perhaps even contaminate crops themselves.

Yet breaking farming’s plastic addiction is easier said than done. Agricultural plastics are notoriously difficult to recycle because they’re so dirty, though recycling options are growing. Scientists are developing biodegradable versions of products like mulch, but so far, few viable alternatives exist. Until broader systemic solutions are put into place, some organic farmers are taking matters into their own hands. By finding more sustainable alternatives and changing their practices, they’re decreasing their reliance on plastic little by little.

“We do still use plastic, but we don’t use anything that’s single-use anymore,” said Chad Gard, co-founder of the 35-acre Hole in the Woods Farm in Culver, Indiana. That said, “it’s a genuine problem that doesn’t have simple answers.”

“If you actually see this stuff turn to dust in front of you, if you know about the dangers of plastic and all the chemicals in them, it will revolt you.”

McDaniel, the farmer in Maine, has first-hand experience with the challenges of recycling agricultural plastics. Around 2018, he joined the board of a regional recycling center and became the chair of an agricultural plastics recycling committee as part of the University of Maine’s Cooperative Extension, in an effort to develop recycling programs. But, except for one company willing to buy used greenhouse plastic — one of the cleaner agricultural plastics as it never touches the soil — he struggled to find practical solutions. And many kinds of ag plastics were simply too dirty.

“Any ag plastic is going to have some dirt, rocks, gravel … and some silage and haylage and that kind of stuff,” which typically amounts to much more than the 5% maximum contamination rate that most recyclers can handle, said Jean Bonhotal, a waste management specialist at Cornell.

Bonhotal was part of a landmark recycling effort led by Cornell University that, between 2013 and 2016, collected 2 million tons of plastic from farms across New York state. Some of it was melted down into plastic lumber or pellets to make products like parking lot stoppers, while nearly 816,000 pounds was sent to a company in New York City that processed it into trash bags. But for the most part, “things just didn’t last more than, like, six months,” Bonhotal said. Much of the collected plastic had nowhere to go and is probably still in fields or ended up in landfills, she added.

On top of contamination, which harmed the integrity of the final products, fluctuations in oil prices often made it cheaper for manufacturers to use fresh virgin plastic instead of recycled plastic, making recycling economically unviable. Two chemical plants tasked with converting agricultural plastics back into oil — for energy or to make new plastics — also floundered when dips in oil prices made it cheaper to buy new crude oil instead, Bonhotal said.

However, some recycling programs for the least-contaminated plastics are managing to persevere in spite of such challenges, including the low cost of virgin plastic resin. The Ag Container Recycling Council (ACRC), which has been running since 1992, collects used containers for pesticides and other agricultural chemicals. The council’s members — largely agricultural chemical companies — fund the collection of the plastics, and collectors make additional cash by selling the material to recycling companies. The resin then gets turned into products like drain pipes, plant pots, and underground electrical conduit.

Much of the collected plastic had nowhere to go and is probably still in fields or ended up in landfills.

Since its inception, the program has recycled roughly 260 million pounds of plastic from thousands of farms and other chemical users across 47 states, said Mark Hudson, ACRC’s executive director. In some states there are also recycling programs for used drip irrigation tubing, plant nursery pots and trays, and twine and hay wrap, Hudson said. “There definitely is a growing network of both companies and associations like ours who are trying to help solve this problem.”

But the drawback of such recycling programs is that they usually convert ag plastics into other products that eventually get thrown away anyway. Another challenge is that many farms aren’t anywhere near recycling centers or collection points. And importantly, there are few outlets for the dirtiest agricultural plastic of all: mulch. Some biodegradable mulches exist, but they’re not approved for use in organic farming because they contain materials like fossil fuel-derived substances alongside materials derived from biological sources like plants or fungi; the National Organic Program requires them to be 100% bio-based.

Studies are lacking on whether and how plastic mulches influence long-term soil health, said Lisa DeVetter, a fruit horticulture expert at Washington State University. In an effort to give farmers more options, she and her colleagues are developing a new biodegradable, sprayable mulch that consists only of plant-based materials: shredded paper and sugar gum. Though this meets the certification criteria for organic farming — and research suggests it has some benefits for crop growth — it’s expensive, and not yet effective in suppressing weeds, DeVetter said. “We’re just not at the level where we feel confident that it’s going to work on grower farms.”

In the absence of good solutions, McDaniel became quite jaded about solving the plastics problem — and was glad when he and his wife got the chance to shift away from producing vegetables that require mulch and floating row cover and to growing garlic and winemaking instead. “I no longer have to deal with plastic mulch,” he said. Garlic can be mulched with straw, and because vines are long-lived, he plants grasses underneath them to suppress weed growth.

Gard, meanwhile, said that many farms his size use plastic landscape fabric to suppress weeds. But although that fabric can be used for multiple years, it sheds microplastics and wasn’t effective against the kinds of weeds that grow on his farm. Gard ended up turning to old-school weeding techniques like dragging rakes or wire weeders through the beds on foot or using a tractor cultivator. He’s also planted clover around multi-year crops to deter weeds. “You can keep things fairly weed-free … as long as you keep up with it and don’t get behind on things,” he said. But the extra work is offset by not having to use plastic mulch, which requires equipment to lay down and remove, he added.

They are developing a new biodegradable, sprayable mulch that consists only of plant-based materials: shredded paper and sugar gum.

For growing young seedlings, Gard switched to a paper pot transplanter system that was originally developed for Japanese sugar beet farmers. This consists of a durable plastic tray that lies underneath a chain of paper pots that expand out into 266 cells, one for each seedling. A special hand-pulled machine is used to plant these into the soil with appropriate spacing between plants. “The paper chains decompose right there in the field,” Gard said. Though more expensive than plastic pots, they save him a lot of work. “Transplanting a bed of lettuce would take us four to six hours before, and it takes about 10 minutes now with the paper pot transplanter.”

Gard has even tackled the plastic packaging for produce, opting for home-compostable corn-based produce bags, paper packaging, and plant-based clamshells. Though they are more expensive, “We’ve cultivated a customer base that values the plastic reduction,” Gard said. Through tweaks like these, he’s been able to rid his farm of virtually all single-use plastic; the plastic piping he uses for irrigation lasts multiple years.

Many farmers, however, remain reliant on single-use plastic due to its convenience and low cost. “Farmers make very little money and overhead, so they need every edge they can get,” McDaniel said. In his view, there should be subsidies to help farmers buy more sustainable glass greenhouses or hay choppers to make biodegradable mulch, for instance. Extended Product Responsibility (EPR) Laws, which make manufacturers responsible for the entire life cycle of their products, would also help.

In Oregon, which recently introduced such a law for plastic packaging, members of the ACRC are exempted, as they’re already paying to have their chemical containers collected; such frameworks could incentivize more companies to join recycling programs like the ACRC’s, Hudson said. Technological improvements in recycling that allow products to be recycled back into the same products — and not just into other single-use items — would do wonders to make recycling systems truly circular. “Very hopefully, within the next two or three years, we’ll be able to recycle our plastic into new containers,” Hudson said.

In the meantime, it’s left to farmers — especially organic farmers, devoted to sustainability yet reliant on certain plastics — to push for wider changes. If customers can help cover the extra cost of plastic alternatives, “we can get to a point where we don’t use so much plastic,” Gard said. “But somebody needs to lead the way and show that it’s possible. And if it’s not organic produce farmers, who’s it going to be?”

On Labor Day weekend 2020, multiple wildfires broke out across Oregon. When it was all over, they had killed 11 people, burned more than 1 million acres, and blanketed the entire region in apocalyptic levels of smoke.

It was the worst spate of wildfires the state had ever seen, and it marked a significant shift in Pacific Northwest agriculture. In the five years since, wildfire smoke has become a persistent fact of life in the region, impacting not just the people who live there but the crops that are grown.

Hops are a crucial part of the region’s agriculture — more than 98% of U.S. hops are grown in the Pacific Northwest, with a 2024 farm gate value of $450 million, according to Maggie Elliot, science and communications director for Hop Growers of America, an industry group. They are also particularly susceptible to smoke taint.

While the 2020 fires were immediately concerning for wine grapes, there was initially less attention paid to hops. So Tom Shellhammer, professor of fermentation science at Oregon State University (OSU), set out to change that. Since 2022, Shellhammer has received around $250,000 in funding from the Hop Research Council to study how wildfire smoke affects hops — and, by extension, how it impacts the taste of beer.

As climate change has made wildfires more frequent and more intense, it’s increasingly important to understand how the plants and the resulting beer are affected. “Smoke has been persistent enough with hop growers that it’s not an occasional thing,” said Shellhammer. “It’s almost like a smoke season.”

If you drive through certain regions in Oregon, Washington, or Idaho, you’ll likely see fields of hops. Grown on a trellis system, the delicate-looking strands, called bines, stretch 18 feet in the air and wind along the upper wire. Each bine can yield more than 1,000 cones, which look a little like a miniature green pinecone, except light and papery and just an inch or two long. What growers are after is the lupulin inside the cone, which contains the resins and aromatic oils that give hops their bitterness, aroma, and flavor. (They’re also what can make hops smell like weed, as they share some similar compounds.)

After being harvested (typically from mid-August to mid-September), they’re taken almost immediately to the kiln to be dried, which happens onsite at the farm. These spaces are typically around 1,000 square feet and a farm will have many of them onsite; some growers can process up to 100,000 pounds of hops a day. The cones come in with about 80% moisture and are spread out onto a massive cloth bed. Hot air is then pumped into the building until the hops are dried to 8-12% moisture, which typically takes 6-8 hours.

If the air outside is smoky, it gets pumped in and essentially blasted right at the cones. “This crop that you’ve cultivated for the year is now, because of the weather, at a very high risk of being rejected due to smoke taint,” said Elliot.

After hops are dried, they’re typically sold to a hop merchant, who turns the bales into pellets or extracts and sells them to brewers, who use hops at two stages. Most add it when they’re boiling the wort (the sugary liquid that comes from grain); this adds a bit of flavor but is primarily used for bitterness. But if brewers are looking for intensely aromatic or really hoppy beers, they also add it after fermentation, essentially making “a hop tea with beer,” Shellhammer said.

If hops smell smoky, they can be rejected, which means farmers must try to recoup their losses through crop insurance, said Max Coleman, farm operations manager at Coleman Agriculture, which has had bales rejected for smoke taint. “Sometimes farmers can get a reduced price rather than an outright rejection, but you definitely make quite a bit less money.”

There aren’t industrywide numbers on how many hops are rejected because of smoke damage, but Elliot said that after 2020, farmers started “ringing alarm bells.”

Right now, it’s more about planning for eventualities, Shellhammer said. “The losses have been real, but not devastating,” he said. “The industry knows that it’s going to be a persistent problem. They just don’t know how much.”

Shellhammer has been working with a handful of farms in the Pacific Northwest to test three stages in hop development: the impact of smoke while hops are still growing, the impact while they’re being dried, and how smoky hops affect the brewing process.

To test hops in the field, he and his team built a greenhouse-like structure over the hop plants and pumped in smoke from a Traeger grill. For this phase, they worked with two Oregon farms: Coleman Agriculture, which is the state’s largest hops producer, and Westwood Farms.

For the drying phase, Shellhammer took a similar approach, using a grill to pump smoke into a pilot kiln at Elk Mountain Farm in Idaho, which supplies hops to Anheuser-Busch.

It’s still too early to be definitive, especially since both sets of experiments were done in controlled environments, but Shellhammer feels reasonably confident that the kilning phase is when the hops get the most smoke exposuret. “It’s sort of logical,” he said “If you think about really peaty Scotch whiskeys, during the drying process, they pump a bunch of smoke through it.”

There’s potentially a silver lining to these findings, since growers may be able to slightly adjust their kiln time. But even that is limited, as hops need to be dried within 12 hours of being picked. “Hop varieties mature at very specific periods of time,” Elliot said. “They might only be the perfect ripeness for two to three days, so there’s just not a lot of wiggle room.”

If the hop cones get overly ripe, she said they start to smell like onion and garlic — not qualities that brewers want in their beer. “[Farms] might be able to pause here and there,” she said. “But that’s very dependent on every farm and what variety they’re looking at.”

There have also been discussions about adding filters to the kilning rooms, said Coleman, but it ultimately comes down to the ROI since the kilns would require a pretty massive filter — about 32 square feet on each side of the opening, according to Shellhammer. The retail price for each panel is about $300 to $400, and large farms would need dozens if they wanted to outfit all their kilns

His team actually ran trials using filters at Elk Mountain Farm, and while they haven’t analyzed all of the data, he said it didn’t impact drying time. This may be a direction farmers move in, especially since one rejected bale could easily be a $1,000 loss, and one lot can contain hundreds of bales, according to Elliot.

“But what’s it worth if you can save 100,000 pounds of hops from being possibly rejected by spending X amount on a filter?” Coleman said. “It’s a math problem.”

Shellhammer is also looking at whether certain varieties may be more susceptible to smoke than others, depending on the shape and properties of the different hop cones. It’s an area he’s continuing to research, as he tests mosaic hops samples that were collected from Westwood Farms over the summer.

The final piece of Shellhammer’s research is how smoke-tainted hops affect beer. This is particularly thorny because the hop cones and pellets might smell fine, but when they’re used to make beer, they could start releasing smoky aromas. Shellhammer compares this to wine grapes, which attach sugar molecules to the smoke particles, essentially neutralizing the smoky compounds.

But when the grapes are fermented, the yeast eats the sugar and the smoke molecule reappears. “So what you see with wine grapes is that the must doesn’t smell that smoky, but during fermentation, you start getting this evolution, and particularly during aging, this intense smokiness comes out,” Shellhammer said.

Shellhammer said there’s some preliminary evidence that the same thing happens with hops, and he’s heard from brewers that smoky flavors may continue to develop even after the beer is on the market.

And hops affect the beer differently depending on when they’re used. Shellhammer said those that are added during the pre-fermentation process tend to transfer less smoke, both because there are fewer hops and because the high heat might strip out the smoky compounds.

But the latter stage, known as dry hopping, uses far more hops to give beers their unique aromas and flavor profiles. “When you have low inclusion rates, it’s fine,” he said. “But as you have higher inclusion rates, you start to see that aroma signature come through in the finished beer.”

Shellhammer is doing brewing trials onsite at OSU, testing with different amounts of smoky hops. He plans to start releasing some of his findings in the coming months. Ultimately, he hopes to offer more definitive recommendations when it comes to adding hops in the brewing process; for instance, X amount of smoky hops are OK to use at Y stage.

He’s also hoping to be able to give growers some guidance tied to the Air Quality Index; for instance, if the AQI is above 150, farmers should avoid picking and drying hops (if they’re able).

Elliot said any findings that help give growers a bit more control would be welcome.

“The industry has taken a lot of progressive steps to try to understand how to grapple with the problem,” she said. “But at the end of the day, it still feels like it’s a problem that’s out of our control, because it’s really just [the result] of the environmental consequences.”

Morris, Minnesota, a small city surrounded by farmland, is flanked to the north and south by two wind turbines. Stretching 82 meters across, their blades harness the gusts of wind that sweep across the city, and bring that energy to a modular building on the University of Minnesota’s West Central Research and Outreach Center (WCROC). There, it powers the process to create a low-carbon ammonia that’s used to make fertilizer.

“It’s an elegant concept when we thought about it,” said Michael Reese, the Renewable Energy Director at WCROC. “That you could have these wind turbines on farmers‘ land, and then they could produce a product that could be used on the fields right below the wind farms.”

When the pilot project went online in 2013, it was the first in the world to use wind energy to produce ammonia. Since then, dozens of projects have sprung up across the globe that aim to make lower-carbon “green” ammonia, most of which is used for fertilizer.

Ammonia is a vital component of the nitrogen fertilizer industry, and its production currently accounts for about 1.8% of the world’s carbon emissions each year. One study found that swapping in green ammonia could reduce the carbon footprint of corn by 33% in the Corn Belt, without requiring farmers to make changes to their current practices.

Along with slashing emissions, supporters say localized green ammonia plants could help shorten supply chains and stabilize prices in an industry known for its volatility. “You could decarbonize agriculture, have security of supply for nitrogen fertilizer, cut down the risk associated with transport, and keep dollars in our local communities,” said Reese.

But creating green ammonia in a way that’s efficient and cost-competitive isn’t straightforward, especially since fossil fuels are conventionally used in multiple parts of its production.

“Ammonia has been manufactured pretty much with the same process over the last 100 years or so,” said Lea Winter, professor of chemical and environmental engineering at Yale University. “It’s an interesting scientific challenge to figure out how we can make a better process compared to the one that’s been around for 100 years.”

Swapping Natural Gas for Water — and Price Stability

The first step in making ammonia is to produce hydrogen, usually by extracting it from natural gas or coal, which releases carbon dioxide. After that, the hydrogen is combined with nitrogen from the air at a high temperature and high pressure to produce ammonia.

The second part of the process tends to require a lot of energy and is most efficiently done at a large-scale, which is why traditional ammonia plants are big industrial operations, according to Winter. In the short term, the easiest way to slash emissions when making ammonia fertilizer is to focus on the first step and change the way the hydrogen is made.

“Ammonia has been manufactured pretty much with the same process over the last 100 years or so.”

“An attractive, more sustainable approach is to use hydrogen coming from water, typically through water electrolysis,” said Winter. Then, the rest of the process stays the same.

That’s what the Minnesota researchers did for their pilot plant. Reese said that removing natural gas from the equation has a huge impact on price stability.

“Farmers are subject to current market swings on ammonia, and the general consensus is that almost 90% of the cost of conventional ammonia is from natural gas. When natural gas goes up, so does ammonia,” he said. The price of ammonia fertilizer in the U.S. has ranged from about $500 to $1,600 per ton over the past 5 years.

Renewable energy contracts, on the other hand, tend to be for longer periods of time, usually at least 10 years to upwards of 25. That means companies can offer green ammonia at a consistent price, according to Reese. In 2024, long-term contracts for green ammonia in the U.S. Gulf Coast were about $600-$800 per ton.

“If you overlay the price of conventional ammonia and how volatile it is, basically you find that green ammonia will be kind of right in the middle. And so sometimes it’s cheaper, and sometimes it’s not, but it’ll be more stable,” said Reese. “It’s an advantage that farmers can budget, and then they can market their grain, their crops, accordingly. Whereas, if you don’t know what the fertilizer prices are going to be in the spring, how do you manage that essentially?”

“So sometimes [green fertilizer] cheaper, and sometimes it’s not, but it’ll be more stable.”

On top of price fluctuations from natural gas, the fertilizer supply chain is also notorious for its volatility, and farmers in the U.S. have experienced disruptions in recent years from both the war in Ukraine and drought along the Mississippi. Stakeholders have also raised concerns about the long-term sustainability of phosphorus, another key nutrient in fertilizer.

The desire to provide locally produced, affordable fertilizer to farmers is what inspired Hiro Iwanaga to start TalusAg, a company that manufactures and deploys modular green ammonia systems.

TalusAg’s first project was in sub-Saharan Africa, where supply chains are even more tenuous and farmers pay significantly more for fertilizer. At the Kenya Nut Farm, the modular system uses on-site solar panels to produce hydrogen from water instead of natural gas.

“Access to reliable and affordably priced fertilizer is absolutely paramount to any farmer,” said Iwanaga. “Because our systems can locally produce that basic fertilizer, we can avoid what can be a 10,000-kilometer-long, expensive, unreliable supply chain.”

“Access to reliable and affordably priced fertilizer is absolutely paramount to any farmer.”

But he soon recognized there was a market in the U.S. too, in part because of the falling cost of renewable energy and the government’s clean hydrogen manufacturing tax credit that went into effect in 2022. “We are cost-competitive in the United States because we have the clean hydrogen production tax credit. In the rest of the world, we’re cheaper because their logistics costs are just so much higher,” Iwanaga said.

The tax credit is set to expire in 2027, but will cover any projects that have started construction before then.

TalusAg recently began operating a green ammonia production system in Iowa in partnership with a local agricultural cooperative, and has plans to open 74 more in the U.S. over the next few years, focusing on locations like South Dakota and Arizona, where fertilizer costs tend to be higher. Each of their modular units can produce about 7,000 tons of ammonia per year, with some sites having up to seven units on them.

“We deploy projects only when we can be cheaper, more reliable, and more sustainable,” he said.

Reinventing the Other Part of the Process

Though swapping natural gas for water to make hydrogen and powering that process with renewables is one way to make lower-carbon ammonia, other scientists are working on reinventing the second half of the process.

That decades-old procedure is known as the Haber Bosch process, during which nitrogen and hydrogen react at high temperatures and pressure. It’s very energy-intensive and hard to scale down in an efficient way.

A research team at Stanford University recently created a prototype device that uses a different process, producing ammonia by drawing air through a catalyst-coated mesh, with the nitrogen and hydrogen coming from water vapor.

It operates at room temperature, standard atmospheric pressure, and relies on microdroplet chemistry, the idea that “little water droplets or air bubbles in water are highly reactive at the interface,” according to Richard Zare, professor of physics at Stanford.

“I would like ... when the farmer waters his or her crop, what comes out contains fertilizer dissolved already in the water.“

The initial prototype produced enough ammonia to work as a hydroponic fertilizer in a greenhouse setting, but more work is needed for it to scale up and become market-ready. “I would like to be able to put it into farmer’s hands, in a way that when the farmer waters his or her crop, what comes out contains fertilizer dissolved already in the water,“ said Zare. ”That, to me, would be ideal.”

Other approaches have the same idea. Lea Winter, the Yale professor, is most excited by a method that uses plasma technology to create fertilizer. The plasma reactor acts like a controlled “low-temperature lightning” strike to create the reaction, and only needs air, water, and electricity for the process, she explained.

“It allows us to be able to directly take air, water, and renewable electricity and turn it into fertilizer compounds in water,” Winter said. “It’s something that we’re still discovering a lot about, but it opens up a lot of opportunities.”

There are several startups focused on this technology, and one group of researchers found that it increased tomato plant growth. Still, others are looking at methods to use human wastewater as fertilizer, since it’s high in nutrients like nitrogen.

Beyond carbon emissions from the production process, ammonia fertilizer also has other negative environmental impacts during its application. Up to 60% of the fertilizer applied can get lost to the environment, contaminating the air and groundwater, and harming aquatic life.

“Being able to make ammonia is really essential for food security.”

“Instead of going into the plants to help them build up plant matter and make food, it ends up in the air or lost to the soil, lost to the water, and then ends up contaminating groundwaters,” said Winter.

She said part of that is because synthetic fertilizers often get applied in excess. “If you have these concentrated, solid fertilizers that you’re purchasing that are delivered to your farm, and you’re only able to apply them a couple times a year, then that leads to this over-application and the resulting waste,” Winter said.

Winter said she hopes some of the localized innovations, like diluting ammonia in water and spreading it through irrigation systems, could help apply ammonia fertilizer more efficiently and on-demand, leading to less waste and environmental pollution. Other ways to reduce synthetic fertilizer use include planting cover crops, no-till farming, and using natural methods like compost.

“Being able to make ammonia is really essential for food security,” said Winter. “It’s this important challenge where you can make a lot of impact in terms of mitigating carbon emissions. And if we could come up with a process that can be more accessible to global populations, where you don’t need to have the capital to build an enormous new ammonia plant, or figure out how to break through challenges with transportation networks, then you could also have a big impact on augmenting food security.”

In 2016, the Osage Nation bought a 43,000 acre ranch from Ted Turner, the media mogul who founded CNN. The purchase made the tribe one of the largest landholders in Osage County, where it once owned every acre.

On the rolling prairies, the Osage Nation raises bison and cattle, with a large herd owned by its for-profit arm and a smaller one controlled by the tribe’s Department of Natural Resources. When the Covid-19 pandemic disrupted supply chains across America, the tribe found itself with no meat to feed the children in its daycare program or the elderly members who depended on food assistance.

“The chief was asking, ‘If we have cattle, why don’t we have meat?” said Jann Hayman, secretary of natural resources for the Osage Nation.

The answer was that the tribe, like many ranchers during the pandemic, had nowhere to slaughter and process its cattle.

Consolidation of the U.S. meatpacking industry accelerated rapidly in the final decades of the 20th century. Today, four companies control 85% of America’s beef processing. Many of their massive plants, which can slaughter more than a million head of cattle each year, shut down during the pandemic when Covid spread through their workforce. In Oklahoma, smaller meat processing plants often did not slaughter beef, and those that did had wait times of up to a year.

The Osage made a decision that they could not depend on others to feed their people: They would build their own USDA-inspected meat processing plants. They were not alone. Since the pandemic, five tribes — the Osage, the Cherokee Nation, the Choctaw Nation, the Miami Nation, and Muscogee Nation — invested in processing plants across Oklahoma, the state with both the second-largest Indigenous population and the second-largest beef cattle industry.

“Give them credit for being first. They saw the direct demand during Covid and were the first to react to the problem,” said Chris Roper, who works with the Native-owned nonprofit Flower Hill Institute to help tribes develop processing facilities.

The Oklahoma tribes had the advantage of a nearby, successful model from the Quapaw Nation, which opened the nation’s first tribally owned meat processing plant in 2017.

Across the country, an estimated 18 tribes now operate plants that process meat and seafood, according to Roper. Nearly all those plants have opened since the pandemic. But that’s not all — Roper knows of dozens of other tribes that are planning to open their own processing plants.

Meat processing plants are expensive to build. The business has thin margins. The competition from large processors is stiff. But the tribes are finding ways to be successful through vertical integration. They own the animals and then sell the meat to their casinos or food assistance programs. And they do not always define success in dollars like a private business. Bringing good jobs to rural areas and meat to food deserts is part of the goal.

The Covid pandemic also exposed the vulnerability of America’s overall meat supply. The shutdown of one massive facility could lead to a region-wide shortage. Supply chains proved to lack resilience. Tribes, often in remote areas, felt these disruptions acutely. And many tribal communities relied on food assistance that was only delivered once a month.

Many tribes recognized the urgency of taking control of their food supply so they could always ensure their people would be fed. “It’s been a revolution,” Roper said.

The Osage invested nearly $10 million to build its meat processing facility, which harvested its first cattle and bison in February 2021. Today, Butcher House Meats, a 19,000 square-foot brick-red building, slaughters and butchers around 60 animals each month, including hogs and deer during hunting season, for both the tribe and other local community members.

The Business of Beef

On a stretch of U.S. Highway 259 in southeastern Oklahoma, close to the Arkansas border, the large, tidy white building emblazoned with the Three Rivers Meat Company logo stands out among the surrounding pastures and pine trees. The store and processing plant sits in a rural corner of the nearly 11,000 square miles that fall within the boundaries of the Choctaw Nation, which owns 65% of Three Rivers in a partnership with private investors.

Inside the gleaming space, with walls of blond wood planks and a patinated ceiling fan that looks salvaged from a windmill, you might smell burgers on the grill or the meat smoker in the back. There are tables for café customers. Cases are filled with deli meats, hot dogs, and summer sausage — all made on site and branded with the Three Rivers logo — along with roasts, ribeye steaks, and ground beef. The shelves are stocked with supplies for boaters headed south to nearby Beavers Bend State Park.

“We wanted to be part of that community over there, that rural community,” said Evan Whitley, executive director of agriculture and natural resources for the Choctaw Nation.

The tribe got serious about ranching a decade ago. They started paying more attention to the breeding of their cattle and the management of 65,000 acres spread across eight ranches. These ranches were assigned to its commerce division, which also runs casinos and a chain of gas stations.

Whitley, who had experience both with the Noble Research Institute, which works with farmers to improve profitability and soil health, and the commercial grass-fed beef producer Dakota Beef, was hired to manage the operation. Today, the tribe’s herd numbers around 2,500 head of Angus-based cattle and a handful of bison. That makes the Choctaw Nation one of the top five cattle producers in Oklahoma, according to Whitley.

Three Rivers, financed without federal funds, was built to support the tribe’s cattle business while taking care of the surrounding community. Owning Three Rivers also ensures the Choctaw’s beef business will not be interrupted by a future emergency.

“We learned in Covid that we are very vulnerable,” Whitley said.

Unlike many startup businesses, Three Rivers already had a ready buyer for its products: The restaurants inside the Choctaw casinos.

“When I was working at Dakota Beef, most of our conversations were, ‘How do we capture more market share?’ These conversations are, ‘How do we make sure we leverage the market share we already have?’” Whitley said.

“We learned in Covid that we are very vulnerable.”

The Choctaws are vertically integrated. Their cows graze on their ranches, are butchered by their processor, and then are sold to their businesses. At the Choctaw casinos, the prime cuts end up on the steakhouse menu for high rollers, while the ground beef gets made into burgers.

The bottom line for the tribe’s businesses, however, is not just measured in dollars. Paying a little more for beef can make sense when the money stays in the family.

“It’s incumbent on me to provide a competitive price, but we can’t be food sovereign at Sysco prices,” Whitley said. “The goal here is not to make money at the demise of our food and beverage [department].”

In the last two years, Whitley has also grown the Choctaw’s “freezer beef program,” which offers retail customers a quarter, half, or whole carcass, from 150 to 600 pounds of butchered beef. And the tribe took advantage of the USDA’s Local Food Program Assistance Cooperative Agreement Program, which let states and tribes buy local products for their food aid initiatives. Nearly 180,000 pounds of Choctaw ground beef was distributed to community members through the program.

Built for Bison

From the remote dirt road, an array of solar panels blocks from view the Quapaw Food Services Authority, the Quapaw Nation’s meat processing plant in Miami, Oklahoma. The entire plant is arranged in a logical straight line, with the kill floor in one corner and a clean room for ready-to-eat products at the other end. Along an antiseptic hallway decorated with photos of grazing bison, picture windows reveal what happens in each room. Since opening, Quapaw Food Services Authority has given thousands of tours to students, potential customers, and other tribes.

On a recent October day, the plant was processing bison, which had come all the way from a private South Texas ranch that sells the meat online. From the kill floor observation window, the live bison were hidden inside the knock box, which is heavy steel on the outside and well-padded inside. Bison are fierce. When they encounter a wall, they may break their neck trying to charge through it.

From a platform above, a worker aimed a .223 bolt-action rifle at a knot on the back of the bison’s neck and fired one shot. A few minutes later, a panel opened and the lifeless bison tumbled onto the floor. The crew, wearing hardhats and yellow aprons, got to work with knives and air skinners to break down the beast.

“Everything about a bison is harder than beef,” said Jeff Mitchell, plant operations manager. “But once you get used to it, it’s not that bad.”

The crew, wearing hardhats and yellow aprons, got to work with knives and air skinners to break down the beast like an automotive assembly line running in reverse.

“Everything about a bison is harder than beef. But once you get used to it, it’s not that bad.”

Bison was a main reason the Quapaw Nation opened a meat processing plant in 2017. The tribe in 2010 had brought bison back to northeastern Oklahoma on the land surrounding its Downstream Casino Resort. The bison were a living symbol of the Choctaw’s history and culture. Managing the herd required culling bison that were crossbred with cattle, not genetically pure. And selling those culled bison could generate income.

“You need to sell some to pay for the feed, pay for the program,” said Roper, who at the time was a full-time consultant for the Quapaw Nation.

The tribe added cattle to their ranching operation in 2014.

Quapaw Food Services Authority, financed mainly with private loans along with some federal HUD funds, now ranks as the top small processor for bison in the country. The facilities, designed in consultation with famed animal-welfare expert Temple Grandin, were built stout enough to handle bison. The butchers are trained for the challenge. And, since 2024, the Quapaw are reimbursed for the USDA’s bison inspection fees, one of the only advantages a tribally owned meat processor has over other facilities. The Quapaw refund that fee to their customers.

Bison, though, remains a niche. In August, only 5559 bison were processed in USDA-inspected plants. That same month, for contrast, 2.33 million cattle were slaughtered. And cattle still account for roughly three quarters of the 40 to 80 animals that pass through the Quapaw Food Services Authority each week.

As the first tribally owned meat processor, the Quapaw had no examples to follow. The tribe built a 25,000 square-foot facility, far more space than the seven-member opening crew needed. “We were great at getting the cart before the horse, so to speak,” said Mitch Albright, director of agriculture for the Quapaw Nation.

A steady customer for the Quapaw beef is the tribe’s own Food Sovereignty Department, which gives away 20,000 pounds of beef or bison every quarter.

The Quapaw Food Services Authority did eventually outgrow the space that once seemed overbuilt. Since opening, the plant has expanded to 30,000 square feet and more additions are planned.

Albright stressed that profit margins are always thin in meat processing. And the tribe’s policy of offering a $15 minimum wage with benefits means they spent more on labor than their local competitors. But one mission of the plant is to provide good jobs in the rural region.

A steady customer for the Quapaw beef is the tribe’s own Food Sovereignty Department, which gives away 20,000 pounds of beef or bison every quarter to tribe members. The most recent distribution in September provided each head of household, regardless of need, with 10 pounds of ground beef and two roasts.

“I think we hit a point where the tribe feels we’re certainly an asset,” Albright said.

Looking Ahead

A few dozen relatively small meat processing plants cannot replace America’s consolidated system of massive plants. But they can help feed a community.

“If you have 400 pounds of meat, and divide that out by six-ounce servings, how many meals is one animal providing? For most of the tribes, they’re trying to feed their people, and they’re trying to make sure that their grocery store shelves aren’t empty in the next pandemic,” said Roper of Flower Hill Institute.

Owning the plants that process meat is not just about food security, making sure that tribal members can eat. It is also an important step towards food sovereignty — controlling the food supply and deciding what they will eat. And sovereignty, the power to govern themselves, is a right that tribes have long fought to preserve.

Food sovereignty means tribes can decide if profit matters most, or if breaking even while giving back to members is the goal. One tribe can support other tribes, processing their cattle, hog, bison, or the deer that individual members hunt. If they have a retail outlet, they can offer tribal discounts or accept SNAP benefits.

They are preparing for the next time the system fails them.

At the retail shop for Butcher House Meats, the cases always have suet, which Osage members use to make meat pies. Sometimes customers ask for stew meat cut a certain way for a dish to be served at a funeral or a tribal dance. Or carvers want bison bones to turn into traditional dice.

Some tribes that Roper works with prefer to slaughter their livestock in the fields where they lived. Others make sure to say a prayer before ending the animal’s life.

As he works across the country, Roper sees more tribes taking control of their food systems, not just beef production. The tribes are stepping up in the rural areas that private businesses have abandoned. They are finding ways to supply food assistance programs, so money stays within the tribes. And they are preparing for the next time the system fails them.

If you eat peanut butter, wash your hair, or brush your teeth, you’re most likely a palm oil consumer. For food and personal care companies, its versatility and low cost makes it a wonder ingredient.

Palm oil is present in 50% of packaged goods, from crackers to chocolate to detergent to skin cream: It can be used to enhance spreadability, as an emulsifier, a moisturizer, or to provide a pleasant texture. Palm oil is the world’s most prolific oil crop per acre — but it also has deforestation and labor exploitation baggage that has severely damaged its global reputation. It only grows in sensitive tropical climates near the equator, leading to heavy deforestation in the 1990s that accelerated during the aughts.

In the bad old days of 2012, over 850 square miles of forest was bulldozed and burnt in Indonesia alone (that’s an area one and a half times the size of Los Angeles). The resulting plunge in populations among endangered orangutans and pygmy elephants became a flashpoint for global outrage, prompting consumer boycotts. The industry reacted by founding the Roundtable for Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO), which certifies products as having been produced without destroying rainforests or exploiting laborers. Deforestation in Indonesia, the world’s largest palm oil producer, is just 18% of its all-time highs, though it is ticking up slightly.

With palm oil prices per ton having doubled from about $500 to over $1,000 since 2019, the question is whether the improved palm oil industry will lean into sustainability and avoid another frenzy of deforestation — or if the product can be replaced by something else entirely. On the alternative side, a handful of companies around the world have focused on creating oil alternatives using advanced biochemistry. The most common technique is called precision fermentation, in which scientists feed sugar or another feedstock to specialized microbes, which then ferment it into oil. The process resembles making beer.

With high palm oil prices creating large financial incentives to ignore deforestation guidelines, these biotech companies see an opening — by starting with the higher-end market for specialty oils in food and cosmetics. Established palm oil analysts scoff that the tiny volumes produced in the lab will be able to scale up and compete with the 72 million tons of conventionally grown palm oil brought to market each year. They say that makers of biochemical replacements for palm oil underestimate the enormous economies of scale built into the price of every ton produced.

“Maybe one day in the not too distant future, these technologies will play a role in the replacement for the palm oil industry,” said Jack Ellis, an independent consultant based in Vancouver who has written about agriculture and green technology. “But at the moment, it’s still very early, and it’s not clear how they get to the scale of this huge palm oil industry that we already have.”

The Alternatives

Lars Langhout is the CEO of a Dutch company called NoPalm Ingredients that ferments agricultural waste into an oil that can be used in food or cosmetics production. His stated goal is not to replace the 73 million-ton giant that is the palm oil industry, but to halt additional growth that would cause more deforestation.

“The ‘dragon’ we are slaying is not the existing volume, it is the growth,” he said. “Palm oil demand is increasing by roughly 4% per year, which adds 3 million tons of demand. Today, there is no sustainable strategy to supply this growth. Indeed, only 20% is even certified sustainable. This drives deforestation and biodiversity loss as well as price volatility and long-term supply risk for our customers.”

Bryan Quoc Le, a food scientist and author of 150 Food Science Questions Answered, noted that most large palm oil producers depend on cheap labor, which will make it hard for biochemistry alternatives like Langhout’s to compete. A recent study found that the minimum wage in Jambi province, on the palm oil powerhouse island of Sumatra, was about $200 per month. Even so, 59% of workers in the province reported making even less than minimum wage. “I think [synthetic oil producers] will have to switch to more lucrative industries, like cosmetics or skincare,” Le said. “The food industry does not provide nearly enough returns where a high-grade palm oil is worth producing.”

“The food industry does not provide nearly enough returns where a high-grade palm oil is worth producing.”

Shara Ticku is the CEO of C16 Biosciences, an NYC-based biochemistry company doing just that. Ticku says that six different cosmetics brands have launched this year using her company’s “torula oil” product, a palm oil replacement made when torula yeast ferments sugar. That includes the recent announcement of an Estee Lauder-owned brand called NIOD that uses torula oil to make a skin cleanser.

Ticku notes that food companies typically have razor-thin gross profit margins, whereas cosmetics brands have margins of 50% or higher. That gives them more financial wiggle room to try a new, ecologically friendly ingredient. And it’s not just a marketing gimmick — cosmetics already use dozens of palm-derived ingredients. Making oil in the lab allows the creation of entirely new compounds that do things that ordinary palm derivatives cannot. And that can fetch higher prices.

“With precision fermentation, you can create novel profiles. So we create novel carotenoids that come from our yeast,” Ticku said. “They do great things for skin health, and that’s why a lot of the beauty brands want to use it. And they do pay much higher prices than they would pay for, say, just a functional palm thing.”

Has Palm Oil Cleaned Up Its Act?

For the champions of sustainable palm oil, lab-grown oil companies are “fighting the last war” of early aughts deforestation, rather than focusing on 2025 reality. They argue that the palm oil industry has made substantial progress since its time as one of the world’s chief environmental villains.

Consultant Judith Murdoch, who helps large palm oil producers through RSPO audits, said we should focus on fixing supply chains to be sustainable. Instead of boycotting or replacing palm oil, she argues that we should focus on preventing additional deforestation. It’s a “mend it, don’t end it” approach.

“No, there’s not going to be alternatives at scale,” Murdoch said. “Maybe in 50 years, there might be. But where’s the population at that point? Your only alternative now is to ensure that it is grown sustainably.”

Palm oil remains a major cash crop in Indonesia and other equatorial countries, including Malaysia, Thailand, Nigeria, and Colombia, with millions of low-income laborers and smallholders — not to mention wealthy landowners and corporate executives — depending on it for their livelihoods. If European or American environmentalists boycott the Indonesian product, for example, Murdoch believes the country will be happy to use it to create biofuel. Indonesia currently has a mandate to create biodiesel with 35% palm oil content, and may bump up the requirement as high as 50% next year. This has helped commodity prices double since 2019.

Felipe Guerrero, vice-president of a sustainable palm company based in Colombia called Daabon, said his company has been focused on reducing ecological and labor harms for the past three decades. Satellite imagery and remote sensors help the company watch existing rainforests, making sure that palm is grown only on existing pastureland and that no one among their suppliers destroys additional ecosystems. The company uses no-till farming, crop rotation, and cover crops to prevent soil depletion, and their farms became the first palm oil producers to be Regenerative Organic Certified in 2023. (They also received Rainforest Alliance Certification in 2012, and RSPO NXT certification in 2017.)

Daabon creates connecting sections of forests known as “biodiversity corridors” to allow wildlife to travel freely, and has restored sensitive turtle habitat near rivers as well as depleted mangroves. A family-owned business that produces more than 70,000 tons of sustainable palm oil annually, Daabon ships approximately 40% of its product to the U.S., where it has an office in Miami. As the umbrella term “sustainable” has expanded to encompass deforestation and labor standards, the company has been happy to adapt. In 1999, they launched an “Alianzas” program to purchase sustainable palm oil from small landholders — and they became the first palm oil producer to receive Fair Trade USA certification in 2016.

“It was thought that organic was ‘sustainable,’” Guerrero said. “But then having smallholders was sustainable. But then having ecosystem protection was being sustainable. And then human rights was being sustainable. So it has grown.”

With most palm oil grown on land that wasn’t deforested recently, even the biodiversity champions at the World Wildlife Fund argue against boycotting palm oil entirely — instead, they say we should focus on stopping additional deforestation and buying sustainable palm oil. And it’s not just to protect jobs in developing countries.

One of the reasons for the popularity of palm is that in these rare tropical ecosystems, the plant yields an extraordinary 3.06 tonnes of oil per hectare, making it more than four times as prolific as sunflower oil and more than seven times as prolific as soybean oil. And that’s before you get into its physical qualities that are so useful in food science and cosmetics, including spreadability, melting behavior, and texture.

With a boycott, you need to find an alternative. Switching to soybean from palm oil, for example, would require more than seven times as much land to yield the same amount of oil — which paradoxically could cause even more deforestation. (Even though soy grows in a much wider variety of climates.) And soy oil lacks some of palm oil’s desirable qualities for taste and texture: It is liquid at room temperature, is more likely to allow food to become rancid, and is not as stable at high temperatures.

Palm Oil Riches Are Hard to Resist

Not all producers are as conscientious as Daabon though. And high prices will always provide a strong incentive to cheat — there have been multiple recent cases of large palm oil producers using shell companies to circumvent deforestation or labor regulations. And besides, it’s not like the minority the palm oil crop marketed as “sustainable” is a magic bullet. One 2020 study found that 75% of Indonesian and Malaysian plantations certified as sustainable by the RSPO are located in places that were deforested in just the past 30 years — some would argue a “sustainability” label greenwashes that semi-recent deforestation.

There’s also what oil entrepreneur Lars Langhout calls “long-term supply” risk. Food scientist Le noted that global warming could lead to reduced palm oil yields in sensitive equatorial regions. “With increasing challenges from climate change, the palm tree will eventually suffer serious deficiencies in their ability to produce palm oil or even outright loss of their habitat. And of course, the demand for palm oil will only increase with more applications in the food industry, as the need for an oil that can solidify at room temperature is paramount to the mouthfeel and texture for many food products.”

Langhout said that No Palm Ingredients is indeed focusing on the market for specialty fats in both food and cosmetics because these are markets where texture and melting behavior are particularly important. But he doesn’t feel he can ask consumers to pay more for his product, just because it generates 90% less carbon dioxide and uses 99% less land than conventional palm oil.

Take it from the makers of plant-based meat, who have seen their product boom and then bust: Though a subsection of consumers are willing to pony up, most products struggle when they add on a “green premium.”

“With increasing challenges from climate change, the palm tree will eventually suffer serious deficiencies in their ability to produce palm oil.“

What makes No Palm Ingredients different from other lab-based oil makers is that it uses agricultural byproducts, rather than relatively expensive sugar, as the feedstock. In a facility under construction in the Dutch town of Ede, Langhout uses whey permeate, a sidestream from mozzarella production. Provided by Milcobel, the largest dairy co-op in Belgium, the whey permeate would otherwise be a low-value product sold as animal feed or for biogas production. Or Milcobel might have to pay to have it dumped in a landfill.

Though Langhout’s process could also work with potato peels or brewery waste, using a single uniform sidestream like whey permeate makes the biochemistry more reliable. It also saves money, because it costs about 50% less than the food-grade sugars used by many of his competitors. When completed next year, the factory will yield up to 1,200 tons annually of “no palm” oil.

But he’s not going to ask buyers to pay more for his product.

“They should choose it because it performs, is circular, and avoids the deforestation risk at price parity,” he said. “We don’t believe in a green premium.”

The only hint that something was amiss came from the leaves: muted yellows and browns instead of the usual flame tones of a crisp Vermont autumn afternoon. That is, until you started talking to farmers.

Sighing deeply between sentences, they connected the dots between the vaguely un-vibrant trees and the catastrophe brewing across their acreages: drought, which began this June and, as it evolved over the summer and into the fall, shriveled grass pastures and taxed wells and waterways. As of this writing, more than half the state had finally emerged from drought and the effects of too many months with too little water, down from 89 percent just a few days earlier, in mid-November.

“We can count on a six-week period, usually by August, that’s going to be dry — it’s pretty consistent,” said Ben Haigh, who owns a direct-to-consumer beef, lamb and butter operation called Rolling Bale Farm in Shoreham, in the Champlain Valley. “This year was different, because all the plants just completely went dormant and everything was brown. We’re used to periods of reduced growth. We’re just not used to this whole no growth.”

Heading into winter with too little feed for their animals, over 160 producers have so far reported more than 65,000 acres affected — one quarter “severely” — with $16.5 million in estimated losses. Thirty-one percent foretold poor, severe, or critical financial health for the coming year. The state appealed to the feds for a disaster designation in early October but due to the government shutdown, any potential aid was likely to be “too late for some farmers,” according to Valley News.

Not that Haigh was holding out much hope for federal relief: “You have to get presidential approval on those designations and Trump is not a fan of Vermont,” he said, referencing the president’s refusal to release aid in response to flooding earlier this summer — the third consecutive year in which severe rainstorms washed out portions of the state.

This August in Vermont was the driest there since 1895 but it’s also these extreme swings in weather, from severely dry to overwhelmingly wet, that are harbingers of a more challenging farming future under climate change. Such swings are also causing corn yields to drop in North Carolina, and soybeans and other crops to falter in Minnesota and Iowa.

“If this happens again next year, we are done if we don’t make any changes.”

Jamie Hamilton, a first-generation grassfed-and-finished beef producer in Western Vermont, walked Offrange through the unusual and devastating effects of weather on his operation — recounting a series of events echoed by many other local livestock farmers: “It rained fairly regularly through May and into early June, and that prevented us from getting our first-cut hay off in a timely manner,” he said.

The rain also compelled him to keep his 400 head of cattle off pasture in those months, to avoid them destroying the muddy fields; supplementally feeding them during that time was an unexpected expense. “Then the water just shut off, and it didn’t come back on until” mid-October, Hamilton said. “By the time that we had enough dry weather to get the hay off, the heat and drought kicked in.” The hay grew back poorly after it was first cut, which meant when it was cut for the second time later in summer, “We ran about a 30 percent yield … compared to what we normally do, which is brutal.”

Recognizing the pending emergency, Hamilton started buying up feed here and there from hay farmers “kind of early,” he said. But as he’d also had to supplementally feed in the early fall to try to give his parched and stunted fields a chance to bounce back, he’s still short about 100 round bales. (He feeds 10 to 12 of these a day throughout the winter.) With every other livestock farmer in Vermont in pretty much the same boat, he said, “Getting quality hay is going to be the biggest challenge.”

Diversified farmers like Margaret Loftus, who raises vegetables and poultry, pigs, sheep, and cattle in West Corinth, near the New Hampshire border, are faring somewhat better than their livestock-only peers. The advantage of being diversified, she said, “is if something doesn’t go well, something else is going” alright. Her potatoes, for example, had skins that didn’t set; Loftus left them in the ground longer than normal and they got hit by a freeze before the onset of drought. “Our potato crop was horrible,” she said, “but then the dryness was the perfect timing for squash.”

She’s had the same feed challenges for her ruminants as Hamilton — compounded by the sheep, which “were not crazy about eating hay when they could see grass around” during the rains, she said. “They waste hay because they don’t want to eat it; they have opinions.” The laying hens are fine, however, despite a late arrival thanks to a bird-flu related chick shortage.

“You have to get presidential approval on those [disaster] designations and Trump is not a fan of Vermont.”

“There are days that we wake up and we say, ’Oh my god, we have too many balls in the air, why are we doing it this way?’” Loftus said. “And then years like this, you’re like, Okay, we had a really good agritourism year because it never rained. All of our other vegetables, there was no disease pressure because it wasn’t raining. It’s been rocky but we’re doing okay.” The fact that her farm’s got two drilled wells, from which she could irrigate despite the high cost, helped her survive the season, too, even as some of her neighbors with shallower dug wells have seen them run dry and have had to get water trucked in. “Without the wells, we would have been out of business,” Loftus said.

The extreme swings of the past three years have got Haigh thinking about some diversification, too. “Because if this happens again next year, we are done if we don’t make any changes,” he said. He’s got a $21,000 USDA loan about to come due (and no FSA officer available during the shutdown to answer questions about what happens in the event of a default); a plan to apply for another loan to purchase some land he’s currently leasing; and a negative cash flow from early spending on feed for his 45 cattle.

Still, Haigh is planning to bring on some pigs this winter to bolster his income, and he just plowed up 20 percent of his owned pasture to plant triticale and other winter grains. “We can usually count on having moisture in the fall for that to germinate and grow,” he explained. “As of June, it’s going to switch over to seed heads, and at that point drought is actually favorable to desiccate the crop, so you can harvest.”

Haigh’s sheep “have never had grain before but our ideals are gonna have to shift away from all this permanent grass — we have to use all the tools,” he said. Raising prices isn’t an option — chefs who buy his butter are already paying $22 to $27 a pound, for example — “so we’re definitely trying to farm our way out of this mess.”

“Seeing our peers get out of farming, that’s more unnerving than the drought.”

In the absence of federal help, the state of Vermont has been spurred to action — albeit slowly. It’s been working since 2009 on a roadmap that envisions full food security for its residents by 2035, for which funding farmers to keep them in business in the face of climatic disruptions is seen as “essential.”

Loftus is on the policy and organizing committee for NOFA-VT, which is spearheading a related a $20 million Farm Security Special Fund that would give out grants to farmers affected by adverse weather; it passed the Vermont Senate in March 2025, then was passed on to the House appropriations committee in April, which is expected to pick it up sometime after it reconvenes in January 2026. The point, said Loftus, “is that it would be nimble enough to respond to farms like ours — that aren’t eligible for crop insurance. We don’t grow enough of one thing — in farm time.”

Loftus has been heartened to see her community coming together this year: farm store patrons purchasing gift cards for neighbors who lost access to SNAP funds during the shutdown, and farmers helping with “advice on what cover crop is good to plant, because I got to plant something here, but I don’t want to have to irrigate it, and it’s not raining,” she said. “If you have water that you can donate to someone, you call this person; if you need water, you call this other person, and they’ll coordinate.”

But that communal spirit isn’t always enough to tamp a mounting sensation of foreboding. “There was a whole cohort of six farms that started farming around the same time as us,” in 2014, Haigh said, “and there’s two of us that are still in it as of the last two years” because of the ceaseless weather challenges. “Seeing our peers get out of farming, that’s more unnerving than the drought,” Haigh said.

Evan Carpenter’s fifth year growing turkeys looks a little different from all the others. Roaming three acres enclosed by electric fence netting and grazing down vegetation, the turkeys are now contracted employees of a solar company in Central New York — and they are likely the only “employees,” of sorts, in the business.

To get the job, they outcompeted a contract usually held by traditional lawn companies, or goats and sheep. Starting their lifespan in a warm room with a heat lamp until their feathers grew out, the flock of 650 spent the rest of their 14-week lifespan under solar panels. Feeders hang under the panels, moved week to week to even out the grazing. The weekend before Thanksgiving, the last batch of almost 150 direct-market fresh birds were processed for local residents.

Turkeys at Carpenter’s WideAwake Farms find shade under the panels and have become part of a dual-use agrivoltaic system, one that integrates solar energy production with food production. The farm has 25 acres leased under a commercial solar operation and manages, via sheep and cattle grazing, an additional 65 acres.

His region faces yearly arguments about the next commercial operation — solar and new data centers — that will be built in New York’s highest-producing agricultural regions. “They like the idea of not using fossil fuels for their electricity, but they don’t like looking at the solar panels,” said Carpenter about his community.

Tompkins County, New York, a renewable energy–forward county, is known for being an early adopter of residential solar, but it’s still finding its boundaries as Central New York is targeted as a key renewable-energy production site. Home to Cornell University, the town sits in a hotbed of research which is also expanding university solar fields, regardless of local public opinion.

Solar arrays make up 7 percent of America power production, with livestock grazing on nearly 130,000 of those acres of production, according to the United States Solar Grazing 2024 Census. But grazing doesn’t stop at sheep.

When he sold off the cows on his New York dairy farm in 2016, Carpenter began leasing some of the land to a commercial solar site, a contract paying enough to gradually cover the rest of his farm mortgage. But he knew farming wasn’t over for him; his next form of farm income would be from the same solar company that is leasing his land, but through a vegetation contract. “Agrivoltaic ideas have gone through my head for years,” he said.

With five years of free-range turkey experience, Carpenter grew his flock and used the land he was already letting his sheep graze on. “We’ve been wanting to have more of a market for them — just haven’t gotten there,” he said. With the help of a 4-H student, 150 birds are being marketed locally and the rest going to a specialty processor.

The data and results of this trial flock will be shared with project collaborators United Agrivoltaics and Cornell University, to study the feasibility and business model of Carpenter’s project to scale dual-use income land.

Caleb Scott, owner of United Agrivoltaics, a company that connects farmers directly with vegetation contracts from solar companies, said farmers are earning the same as landscapers, but with a few added benefits. “They’re providing food off the same land that electricity is being provided off from, and they’re doing a significantly better job than the lawnmowers,” he said.

“It’s natural for a farmer to look at the best way to maximize the use of land. That’s what they’ve always done.”

Around the country, Scott oversees 184 projects and 64,000 sheep. He explained that while sheep are practically custom-made for this work — perfectly sized, docile, shade-loving animals — the turkeys “make it look like a golf course.” Scott also calls WideAwake’s operation the largest turkey agrivoltaic operation in the world.

Poultry grazing is far from common, said Stacie Peterson, executive director of the American Solar Grazing Association. She noted that while the 500 solar sites — 40 percent being utility projects — report using sheep in their vegetation management, “It’s natural for a farmer to look at the best way to maximize the use of land. That’s what they’ve always done.”

Funding and innovation in agrivoltaics is catching up with Carpenter’s operation. The New York State Energy Research and Development Authority recently awarded $750,000 to United Agrivoltaics to explore adding pigs, poultry, and specialty crops at existing solar sites on more than 100 acres. “Farmers are the best site planters for the solar industry. The solar industry just hasn’t figured that out yet,” Scott said.

It’s one of many investments New York state is making in the solar industry, despite a federal shift away from incentivizing renewable energy production. The Trump administration’s political will to reduce renewable-energy protections, combined with Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins’ actions to protect and preserve farmland from solar conversion, has resulted in the end of all forms of renewable-energy tax credits and loans. The decision sent shock waves through renewable business communities, leaving some out to dry.

Projects must be under construction by July to remain eligible for federal tax credits like the Investment Tax Credit and Clean Electricity Investment Credit, which Congress voted this summer to eliminate in the One Big Beautiful Bill. As a result, Scott said, there is now a race to acquire land, install solar panels, and contract solar grazers.

The tax credit cut is anticipated to reduce the amount of renewable projects in the long run, but in the short term, the solar industry is not as concerned. The New York Times reports companies stockpiling solar panels and supplies to show the Internal Revenue Service that their projects are underway. Research firms are also increasing their forecasted wind and solar battery capacity by 10 percent through 2027.

Peterson expects that, even after the tax credits end, there will still continue to be huge growth in the solar industry. “It is the cheapest form of energy,” she said. Her organization is ramping up certification programs with solar companies to take on vegetation contracts, companies that otherwise wouldn’t know livestock can do the job of mowers.

Peterson, who started the agri-solar clearinghouse in the U.S. Department of Energy earlier in her career, has worked directly with livestock grazers since 2018, when ASGA was created. “I watch people in real time change their minds about what possibility there is and what this could be for farmers,” she said.

A 2022 study in Michigan found that over 80 percent of respondents would be more likely to support solar development if it integrated agricultural production. While some argue that ecological and community benefits outweigh methane emissions, overall acceptance of solar still remains contentious.

WideAwake Farms will have even more turkeys next year, farming in a system that may not be common across the country. They are considering more crops into their agrivoltaic system like pumpkins below the solar canopy and apple trees surrounding the property.

“This solar project isn’t seen from the road because of the crops we grow on three sides of it, 75 percent of the year,” said Carpenter. But whether most people realize it or not, Central New York is getting a taste of agrivoltaics this Thanksgiving.

Kelly Ingalls is a third-generation Montana sheep producer; he runs a flock of more than 1,000 in Broadwater County. In summer he trails them east to the Big Belt Mountains. In fall he brings them home, separates out the lambs, then takes the ewes southwest to the Elkhorn Mountains, where they’ll spend the winter on a mix of federal and private land.

The Elkhorns are also home to a herd of wild bighorn sheep. Occasionally one of the bighorns will get curious about the domestic sheep, or a ram is attracted to the ewes. Ingalls does his utmost to make sure that they don’t get too close. He employs herders who are always on the alert, plus he keeps guard dogs. “They are very very good at chasing things off,” Ingalls said.

At one time, bighorn sheep — named for the males’ bulky curving horns — graced rugged mountainous terrain across Western North America. But over many decades habitat loss, hunting, and disease decimated populations, which dropped from historic highs of one to two million to just 20,000 in the early 1900s, according to some estimates. Following extensive conservation and restoration efforts, the bighorn numbers across North America now sit at nearly 70,000. But they still haven’t bounced back in the same way as other species like elk or deer, said Emily Almberg, disease ecologist at Montana Fish, Wildlife & Parks.

One of the major reasons is a bacteria called Mycoplasma ovipneumoniae (M. ovi). Domestic sheep and goats often carry M. ovi in their nasal cavities, and it causes them few, if any, problems. But wild sheep and goats, including bighorns, do not have the same level of resistance. The bacteria attacks the protective cilia in their nostrils, leaving them open to other respiratory pathogens. If domestic and wild sheep mingle, the bacteria can be transmitted from the domestic to wild sheep, leading to pneumonia outbreaks. Whole herds can be virtually wiped out, followed by low lamb survival for years (though there is some variation in mortality rates that’s not yet fully understood).

“It’s so frustrating when you spend years and literally millions of dollars trying to bolster your bighorn herds, and then they can crash in, you know, a matter of months,” Almberg said.

Many say the best way to prevent transmission is strict separation between domestic and wild sheep. But in a multi-use landscape like Montana, maintaining the recommended 9-mile buffer around bighorn herds isn’t easy, according to Jared Beaver, assistant professor and extension wildlife specialist at Montana State University (MSU). That’s stalling recovery plans, and has led to tension between conservationists, who want to see bighorn recovery, and producers, who must take precautions to prevent transmission yet may feel blamed when disease outbreak occurs.

“It’s so frustrating when you spend years and literally millions of dollars trying to bolster your bighorn herds, and then they can crash in a matter of months.”

Now, a new research project led by MSU and Montana FWP and collaboratively created with input from producers, land managers, and biologists, is trying to figure out what makes comingling between domestic sheep and bighorns more likely.

“If we can get a better understanding of those patterns and risk factors, then we can start to develop more flexible and adaptive strategies that will help both wild and domestic sheep thrive on the landscape,” Beaver said. “At the end of the day, it’s not about choosing sides. It’s about finding shared solutions.”

The project is focused on eight bighorn herds where Montana FWP has ongoing research. Within these herds, bighorn sheep have been fitted with GPS collars that record position data at set intervals. The collars have also been programmed with a virtual fence that alerts the research team when the animals get within 200 meters of a domestic sheep flock or pasture.

One of the team can usually get there within about four hours and will collect data on things like the sex and age of the bighorns, their behavior, and if the producers have recently put out any potential attractants like hay. That will help researchers figure out what factors or management practices encourage or discourage mingling.

So far the team has recorded more “contact events” than expected. “When we were designing the project, I think one of my personal fears was that we’d have a whole lot of zeros and there’d be no contact to work with. So that’s not the case. And I think [contact] is happening more than we realize,” Almberg said.

About a third of the producers asked were not aware of M. ovi or the danger it posed to wildlife herds.

These contact events do not mean there’s been disease transmission, the researchers note. M. ovi is carried through respiratory droplets and is thought to be transmitted at distances up to 39-49 feet. But understanding where, when, and why domestic and wild sheep overlap will give researchers a better idea of where there’s risk.

Preliminary data also shows that contact isn’t just occurring during the late fall rut (aka, mating season), as was previously hypothesized. Nevertheless, contact was confined to a small subset of domestic sheep operations, just 3% of those within that recommended 9-mile buffer zone, said Smith Wells, research associate at MSU.

These appear to be mostly those with smaller flocks, whose pastures butt up against bighorn habitat. “This shows that disease risk is variable across the landscape and may be higher in certain areas or circumstances,” Smith said. “So that’s what we’re trying to look at. What are those underlying factors that are least resulting in that variability in risk?”

Ingalls is not involved in the study, as the Elkhorn Mountains, near his grazing allotment, are not in the study area. But he hopes the research will provide new insights. Ingalls has seen the impact of M. ovi on bighorn sheep firsthand. Back in 2007, an M. ovi-connected pneumonia outbreak killed 90% of the Elkhorn bighorn herd, leaving just 20 animals. Today the herd is slowly recovering and is now up to an estimated 75 animals, according to Adam Grove, wildlife biologist with Montana Fish, Wildlife & Parks.

Yet M. ovi is an everpresent danger. Ingalls still worries about the possibility of contact between his sheep and bighorns, despite the preventative measures he has in place. “The more we understand about how the interaction [between domestic sheep and bighorns] can occur, we might be able to prevent that from happening in the future,” Ingalls said. “That gives you a better tool.”

One study found that M. ovi infection could cost producers 4.3% in lamb productivity per year.

The new research project is also highlighting the need for more awareness; about a third of the producers asked were not aware of M. ovi or the danger it posed to wildlife herds. That lack of awareness has been an ongoing problem, said Brent Roeder, sheep and wool extension specialist at MSU.

National and regional organizations like the Montana Wool Growers Association do a good job educating their members about M. ovi, he said. But it’s hard to reach very small producers, those that have just a few sheep. (Don’t call them hobby farmers, Roeder warned.) “Fifteen years ago, we were discussing the same issue, how do we educate the small and very small scale producers on the topic,” Roeder said.

There are still a lot of unknowns when it comes to M. ovi, including why it impacts some bighorn populations much more vigorously than others, said Helen Schwantje, eremitus wildlife veterinarian for British Columbia.

Most producers — and even veterinarians — also don’t know much about the impact of M. ovi on domestic sheep, she said. Yet one study found that M. ovi infection could cost producers 4.3% in lamb productivity per year.

In Canada, the long-running British Columbia Sheep Separation Program, started by Schwantje, offers producers free M. ovi testing, and advice on how to improve separation. She said that paying more attention to disease will bring benefits to both producers and wild sheep.

“Everyone involved, producers, wildlife managers, researchers, conservationists, we want the same thing. We want healthy herds.“

“If I was raising sheep where there was a likelihood of contact with wild sheep, I would test my sheep and ensure that they were mycoplasma [M. ovi] free … That will give you a better product, healthier animals, and reduce the risk to wildlife,” Schwantje said.

Diane Bimczok, professor of microbiology and immunology at MSU, is also trying to figure out ways to treat or prevent M. ovi infection in domestic sheep. Her recent trials with autogenic vaccines, a type of bespoke vaccine that can be rapidly developed from particular bacteria, are showing promise. In lab trials, which finished in September, researchers detected significant antibody response, though data analysis is ongoing, Bimczok said.

In the meantime, MSU researchers hope their work can help develop new strategies to prevent mingling and disease transmission between domestic and wild sheep.

“Everyone involved, producers, wildlife managers, researchers, conservationists, we want the same thing. We want healthy herds. We want resilient landscapes. And we want solutions that work.” Beaver said.

For over a year now, I’ve been mulling over Lauren David’s thought-provoking article on whether we’ve outgrown the CSA model. I have to admit she made some excellent points, especially about the appeal of models that offer more choice to consumers than traditional CSAs and, often, a discount over farmer’s market and supermarket prices. But the traditional CSA model has features I would hate to give up, especially in the urban environment where my own program operates.

I run the volunteer core group of the Clinton Hill CSA, which has served residents of three neighborhoods in Brooklyn, New York, since 2002. This past year, our 230 members included owners of multi-million-dollar brownstones as well as those who qualify for SNAP benefits. We offer sliding-scale pricing, where members pay more or less depending on their income.

Our farmer, Ted Blomgren of Windflower Farm, has been with us from the start; he supplies nine CSAs in NYC as well as a 10th CSA based on his farm, four hours north of the city. He works with core groups of volunteers at all of his New York City CSAs, since it would be impossible for him to run his farm while recruiting members, supervising the weekly distribution, and maintaining the deep neighborhood ties that allow these urban CSAs to thrive. The 10 volunteers in our core group handle recruitment and payments; monitor our website, databases, and social media; produce a weekly newsletter; and run our weekly distribution.

Let me take you through a year in the life of our traditional CSA, operated with a core group of volunteers. I believe the value it provides should be clear.

Mid-February

Most of the core group are sitting around Sarah’s kitchen table, eating brownies. Farmer Ted has just sent the season’s pricing, and I’ve been working out the master equation that lets us subsidize SNAP-eligible members while not overburdening those who pay more. If we get it wrong, we might have to reimburse the farmer from our own funds.

This year, our farmer has raised prices by 2.2%, and we’ve allocated the increase proportionally to our three membership tiers. Our highest-income members pay what works out to $35 per weekly pickup. Members at the middle-income tier pay $21.36, and our SNAP-eligible members pay $9.36. As with most CSA models, members pay up front in the spring, when the farmer needs the cash. Without retailers and wholesalers, the cost of the CSA is quite a bit less than one would pay for comparable produce at the farmer’s market or the local supermarket.

In addition to certified organic vegetables, Ted offers fruit, egg, maple, and grain shares, some of which he sources from other local growers. This spring, egg prices are sky-high, so we know the egg share will be extra popular.

At least 60 CSAs in New York City operate with a core model like ours. Since most of our farmers are at least two hours outside the city and can’t staff the weekly distribution, the core group of volunteers partners with the farmer to run the CSA. Freed from having to recruit members, find a site, supervise distribution, and handle most payments, the farmer can devote more time to growing the produce. In return for a substantial commitment of time (typically 30-50 hours over the season and sometimes many more), core members usually receive a free or reduced-price vegetable share.

Beyond the fact that our farmers simply can’t supervise distribution in the city, what are the advantages of a core group? With deep knowledge of our neighborhoods, we can reach out to various networks and put together a membership that’s diverse in so many ways. Most of our core, all of whom work for a living, also volunteer with other groups: a mutual aid society that sprang to life during the COVID pandemic, community gardens, an organization that keeps street trees healthy, the neighborhood food co-op. I’m on the advisory board of Just Food, a nonprofit that works for food justice and loosely oversees community supported agriculture in New York City.

April

I walk over to our distribution site to meet Nadia, a social worker at the nonprofit that hosts our distribution. She wants me to speak about CSA programs to some of the formerly homeless people who live there. During the season, Nadia distributes some of our extra produce to them, and we’re curious if they might be interested in becoming members. Not this time — this group has been through a lot. They ask questions, but the prospect of membership might be too much of a commitment, and I know many of them are worried about their SNAP benefits. We’ll try again later.

Every fall we survey our members. In addition to questions about the quality and quantity of the produce, we ask everyone what they value most about the CSA. We have a lot of churn in the first few years of membership, as people move away or decide the CSA model isn’t for them. They may decide they prefer to eat out more or they just want to choose their own produce at the farmer’s market (our local farmer’s market hosts a spend-down CSA). But those members who stay for three years tend to be in it for the long haul, and in the annual surveys, many of them mention our community as particularly important.

Late May

Don’s been driving the farmer’s truck forever; he’s an artist who also drives a school bus to pay the bills. Our members start their volunteer shifts next week; today, those of us on the core greet Don and his helper, Daniel. We unload the truck, arrange the plastic bins on patio tables, put out sign-in sheets. This early in the season, the share is mostly greens, spring onions, potted basil. Members start trickling in.

Chad, one of our distribution managers, turns on a portable speaker and puts out a swap box for items members don’t want, which soon fills with chard. (Sigh. As a chard-lover, I’ll never understand this.). Herman, a retired school principal who may be our oldest member, arrives with a big smile. He’s one of a collection of people who’ve been there from the start: Roy, Jenny, Bianca, others. In our early days members signed up for volunteer shifts on a clipboard, and we took all of our payments by check. When the terrible blackout hit the Northeast in 2003 and we had to cancel distribution, we called our members on landlines.

Tonight, everything works beautifully; a few members Venmo outstanding payments after we check the online spreadsheet to verify what they owe. Our outreach coordinator, Chelsea, talks to new members, jiggling her newborn, while her 3-year-old zips around on a scooter. At the end of the evening, Pastor Valerie arrives with her grandson to take half the leftover produce, whatever doesn’t go to Nadia’s group, for her church’s soup kitchen.

The CSA wouldn’t retain as many members as we do if the weekly pick-ups weren’t enjoyable, if people didn’t feel they could linger, ask the hard questions about what to do with garlic scapes and kohlrabi, chat with neighbors, let their kids painstakingly count out and choose the carrots, and give their dog a drink from the water dish by the main entrance.

All of our members volunteer a few hours during the season, and our distribution managers work to make that a pleasant experience. And though Farmer Ted rarely makes it to the site himself, our members value their connection with him, in part because his “Letter From the Farm” is the centerpiece of our weekly newsletter. For our members, the CSA functions as a third place, separate from home and work, where the anonymous city falls away, and people feel recognized.

Until the pandemic, we struggled to find low-income members. We have always been able to sign up affluent food-lovers without trouble, but reaching SNAP-eligible neighborhood residents was a challenge. But in 2020, as job losses mounted and food insecurity became a new fact of life for many New Yorkers, our membership at the lowest income tier tripled. Since that time, it has continued to grow through dedicated outreach and word of mouth. The city can feel siloed, a place where people rarely interact outside of their established social groups, but every week, CSA members of all income levels might find themselves smiling at a toddler’s first taste of a strawberry or in serious discussion about how to cook an eggplant.

Competition for the food dollar in high-income urban neighborhoods is intense, with upscale farmers markets and various farm box and subscription models offering the convenience of home delivery and a la carte options — but not the personal ties to a farmer that come with a genuine CSA. On the other hand, a portfolio of sliding-scale CSAs in demographically mixed neighborhoods offers a stable model for our farmers. My own farmer makes his living entirely off his CSAs, all but one in the city.

In 2003, our second year, one of our members painted the banner that we hang on the fence outside. To finish it off, we asked all the kids who showed up one week to dip their hands in paint and put prints on the banner. The toddlers — including my son — whose handprints are on that banner are grown up and in the world. But now, in June, I’m pleased to see many new, young-adult members who look as if they could be my son’s age. Our farmer’s son, Nate, is working on the farm and probably will take it over at some point. We’re not running the CSA right unless we’re reaching out to new members, ensuring continuity.

June

The swap box is a reliable source of newsletter inspiration, and this week Veronica, our newsletter editor, has added recipes for chard. Our farmer’s letter starts exuberantly: “On Friday of last week, in one spectacular day, three of our staff planted ‘Panisse’ and ‘Tropicana’ lettuce, ‘Red Russian’ kale, ‘Giant of Italy’ parsley, and ‘Prospera’ basil, some 15,000 plants in all.” It would be uncharacteristic for a farmer (any farmer) not to throw in a word of caution, and he adds, “Weather, the fickle managing partner of our farm, has been particularly out of step with the plans I made for this season.” We shall see.

October

With torrential rains on the last night of the season, we’ve cancelled our annual potluck, though a plastic pumpkin filled with Halloween candy offers consolation. Juggling tote bags and dripping umbrellas, members pick up their shares and leave quickly. Climate change has made the year a challenging one for our farmer. With the government shutdown, we know many local people are worried about SNAP benefits, and our core group arranges to donate a large shipment of extra produce to our host group and a nearby food pantry. We hope some of those who benefit might try a subsidized CSA membership next year. We regularly hear from farmers who are new to the CSA model and eager to give it a try.

There’s no doubt the core model CSA is more work at the outset, and I suspect it’s not for those communities with affordable farmer’s markets or multiple produce stands in easy driving distance. But here in the city, our CSA offers value for farmers who are geographically removed from their customers, and it brings tangible benefits to high- and low-income urban residents who appreciate knowing where their produce comes from and enjoy the community that develops around the weekly distribution.

We certainly have other CSA models to choose from, including farm boxes and spend-down CSAs that operate out of farmer’s markets. But the core group model has proved durable here in the city; it’s worth growing and studying for the real benefits it offers, including — maybe especially — the “community” in “Community Supported Agriculture.”

John Duff has watched the global sorghum market for decades, but he has never seen American farmers in a bind like this.

At the start of September, he noted that producers across the Great Plains were holding more than 200 million bushels of unsold sorghum, grain piling up in bins and elevators with nowhere to go. The cause is the trade war with China that cut off access to a market that purchased 1.2 billion dollars‘ worth of American sorghum just the previous year.

For U.S. farmers who planted their fields counting on that demand, the result has been devastating.

Duff, chairman of Sero Ag Strategies and former executive vice president of the National Sorghum Producers, wrote in a blog post that what is happening at the moment is much worse than Trump’s last trade war. “We haven’t seen a picture this dire since the Chinese investigation of U.S. sorghum farmers in 2018-2019. Today is worse.”

The crisis has left Kansas sorghum farmers scrambling for alternative buyers. But behind this emergency lies a more complex story that involves the collapse of traditional export markets, the fragility of agricultural trade policy, and an unexpected opportunity emerging in sub-Saharan Africa that could reshape American farming for years to come.

China’s withdrawal from the sorghum market, driven by escalating tariffs and political tensions, has exposed how vulnerable American producers are to geopolitical instability. This is happening against a backdrop where sub-Saharan Africa faces a severe food crisis. More than 178 million people are experiencing food insecurity, and grain demand is projected to grow by 2.2 percent each year, while local production increases at only 1.6 percent.

The convergence of these challenges, American oversupply and African need, has created what agricultural economists describe as a rare opportunity to rebuild trade relationships.

Yet taking advantage of it will require navigating trade barriers, restoring international aid programs that have been weakened by budget cuts, and persuading wary African governments to open their markets.

The China Problem

The roots of the current crisis run deep. For years, China served as the anchor market for U.S. sorghum exports, providing the kind of reliable, high-volume demand that allowed American farmers to make their planting decisions with confidence. But when the Trump administration’s renewed trade war with China escalated this year, sorghum came under fire. The subsequent tariffs all but shuttered a $1B+ annual market, stoking U.S. agricultural tensions.

William Ridley, associate professor of agricultural and consumer economics at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, who researches international trade, explained the situation saying, “the elephant in the room remains the potential loss of the Chinese export market.” He added that if trade tensions with China were resolved and grain exports were to resume as before, that that would go a long way “to boost sorghum’s continued viability as a major export commodity.”

In October, Trump’s meeting with President Xi then enabled the first sorghum shipment there since the trade war peaked.

Unlike wheat or corn, where domestic demand provides a cushion, U.S. sorghum producers are heavily dependent on exports, making them especially vulnerable when international markets shut down. The impact on farm economics has been immediate and severe. Basis levels, the price difference between local cash prices and futures contracts, collapsed as oversupply flooded local markets.

Farmers who had locked in production costs based on expected Chinese demand are now finding themselves in a financial crisis. Storage facilities are additionally beginning to fill up beyond capacity.

The convergence of these challenges has created what agricultural economists describe as a rare opportunity to rebuild trade relationships.

Farmers need to move this grain, Duff explained, noting that “expanded food aid moves inventory quickly, because USDA and USAID purchase U.S.-grown commodities in truck- and vessel-scale lots and deliver them on fixed timetables.” But with international aid programs under political duress, that safety valve has become less reliable.

The Food for Peace initiative, a seven-decade-old program that purchased American grain to feed hungry populations abroad, had long provided a steady, if modest, revenue stream for U.S. farmers. But when the Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) targeted foreign aid for cuts, Food for Peace landed on the chopping block. The Republican-controlled House initially passed legislation to abolish the program entirely.

The move triggered panic among farm-state representatives, who suddenly realized their constituents were about to lose one of their few remaining export outlets. Media coverage amplified the alarm, with The New York Times reporting on Kansas farmers who had lost Food for Peace contracts and were exploring dog food production as an alternative market for their grain.

Facing constituent pressure and media scrutiny, Congress amended its approach, preserving some food aid programs while transferring others from USAID to the USDA. By September, the USDA announced it would invest $480 million through programs like McGovern-Dole Food for Education to purchase commodities for school meals and nutrition projects in countries including Benin, Mozambique, and Senegal. A separate announcement indicated plans to spend more than $2 billion on grain purchases for international food aid across sub-Saharan Africa and elsewhere.

For sorghum farmers, these purchases offer immediate relief, clearing bin space and stabilizing prices ahead of the next harvest. But aid alone cannot solve the structural problem. What American sorghum farmers need is sustainable commercial markets, the kind that food aid programs can open but not replace.

The African Opportunity

Sub-Saharan Africa imports significant quantities of grain to supplement local production that can’t keep pace with population growth. Sorghum is especially valued there, not as animal feed, as it’s often used in the United States, but as an ingredient deeply woven into local cuisines.

In Ethiopia, it is the base for injera and other traditional dishes. Across West Africa, it is processed into porridge and beer. The World Food Programme (WFP) distributed more than 772,000 tons of American-grown sorghum valued at nearly $400 million between 2020 and 2025 in Chad, Ethiopia, Nigeria, Somalia, South Sudan, and Sudan.

“Sorghum is a culturally accepted and widely consumed staple [in Ethiopia],” Claire Nevill, spokesperson at WFP Ethiopia, said. And “red sorghum enhances the bioavailability of iron and zinc, two minerals often deficient in communities where WFP works,” according to Djaounsede Madjiangar, spokesperson at WFP West Africa.

East Africa, representing up to 10 countries, has been the third-largest destination for U.S. sorghum since 2014, behind only China and Mexico. Nigeria imported $10 million worth of U.S. sorghum in 2023, its largest amount from any country, making the United States its fastest-growing sorghum supplier. The potential for expansion now seems obvious, as Africa needs grain and American farmers need markets. But turning humanitarian food aid into commercial trade relationships has proved extraordinarily difficult.

In Nigeria, high import duties and foreign exchange controls make grain imports both expensive and bureaucratically complex. Ethiopia imposes tight controls on foreign exchange allocation and requires high collateral for commodity-related imports, according to Samson Tizazu, an international trade advisor at Proma Partners PLC who works regularly with banks and commodity importers.

Sorghum is especially valued there, not as animal feed, as it’s often used in the United States, but as an ingredient deeply woven into local cuisines.

The barriers reflect more than protectionism. Muhammed Waziri, senior lecturer of botany at the University of Maiduguri in Nigeria, told Offrange that Nigeria has “the land, talent, and manpower to produce food grains to meet all our local needs.”

“If the intentions are genuine, I believe we can cover this production gap, if not entirely, at least reduce importation to the barest minimum with Nigeria’s capacity.“

During the Goodluck Jonathan administration in Nigeria from 2010 to 2015, Waziri recalled, “there was a famous and widespread campaign that we should be substituting wheat bread with cassava bread. This campaign gathered a lot of attention.”

The politically driven push made it “economically unfavorable for even local farmers to produce wheat, causing them to switch focus to sorghum and other staples that were more in demand.”

Yet despite these aspirations, African production continues to fall short. Grain production in sub-Saharan Africa is projected to grow at only 1.6% annually, while demand is expected to reach 2.2% annually due to population growth. Climate change, drought, violence, and economic troubles continue to undermine local agricultural efforts.

“For now, we cannot talk of stopping importation, because doing so would compound the issues,” Waziri acknowledged. “The best thing for Nigeria to do is to make a plan. The government should have a plan to reduce the rate of importation while encouraging increased local production.”

What U.S. Farmers Need to Compete

Ridley believes Africa represents a critical opportunity for American sorghum producers, “if the United States can negotiate access.”

“Market development and securing more favorable market access such as Nigeria are key for making sorghum a viable export commodity, particularly as exports to China have fallen off a cliff,” Ridley said. “Consequently, I strongly recommend pursuing trade agreements to open the doors for U.S. commodities such as sorghum and other products.”

But he’s not optimistic about the current trajectory.

“As far as accessing new export markets in Asia and Africa, U.S. sorghum has its work cut out for it. Such countries typically have high barriers to agricultural imports, either in the form of high tariffs or quantitative restrictions that severely restrict the volume of imports.”

“As far as accessing new export markets in Asia and Africa, U.S. sorghum has its work cut out for it.“

Worse, he added, “the United States has mostly sat on the sidelines when it comes to establishing new [agricultural] trade agreements. The last big one was the US-Japan Trade Agreement of 2019.”

The USDA announced in September that it plans to pursue commodity purchases that would “remove trade barriers and ensure market access for U.S. agricultural exports in Ethiopia, Kenya, and Nigeria, among others.” But the context surrounding that announcement complicates the mission. The United States allowed the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA), which provided duty-free access to U.S. markets for thousands of products from selected sub-Saharan African countries, to expire without renewal in September. At the same time, the U.S. imposed high tariffs — 10% on Kenya, 15% on Nigeria.

African leaders have responded by signaling renewed interest in the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA), an intra-regional free trade agreement that would prioritize trade within the continent, potentially at the expense of American agricultural exports.

Beyond Trade Policy

Duff identified another domestic priority in the U.S.: “Finalizing year-round E15 access and clarifying regulations on it.”

E15, gasoline consisting of up to 15% ethanol and 85% petroleum, currently faces seasonal restrictions due to air quality concerns.

Year-round availability would allow ethanol plants that use sorghum to “operate consistently and support local prices,” Duff explained, providing a domestic demand floor that would make export market volatility less devastating.

The ethanol angle matters more than it might seem. As biofuel mandates have evolved, sorghum has become an increasingly important feedstock for ethanol production, offering farmers a domestic market that does not depend on the whims of foreign governments.

Strengthening that domestic foundation would give producers more leverage in international negotiations and the security to walk away from unfavorable trade terms, because they have alternatives at home.

Strengthening that domestic foundation would give producers more leverage in international negotiations.

Moreover, if American sorghum is going to compete successfully in African markets, it will need to offer superior quality and specific characteristics tailored to African needs and conditions.

Gunvant Patil, associate professor of plant genomics and soil sciences at Texas Tech University, argues that genomics and seed quality improvements should be the priority.

“The U.S. sorghum community should prioritize high-performing hybrids that combine early maturity with improved seed composition, better protein digestibility, higher lysine content, and reduced tannin levels,” he said. Additional innovations like dhurrin-free sorghum varieties (which improve livestock feed safety) and herbicide-tolerant lines “further improve integrated weed management,” he noted.

What Happens Next

The coming months will reveal whether American sorghum farmers can navigate the transition from dependence on China to a more diversified export portfolio centered on Africa to help mitigate its food insecurity challenges.

The USDA’s $2 billion commitment to grain purchases for international aid programs provides immediate breathing room, clearing inventory and stabilizing prices. But those purchases are, by definition, temporary crisis management rather than long-term strategy.

For now, American sorghum farmers are caught in an uncomfortable limbo: too much grain, too few buyers, and a future that depends on trade negotiations and aid programs beyond their control.

For now, American sorghum farmers are caught in an uncomfortable limbo.

Some may diversify into other crops. Some may leave farming altogether. Still others are betting that Africa, despite all the obstacles, represents the next chapter in American agricultural exports.

“Hunger is rising as conflict, shocks, and instability drive a food crisis of unprecedented scale,” the WFP noted in an email to Offrange. “Increased support, including the provision of sorghum, would enhance WFP’s ability to deliver emergency, life-saving assistance, prevent widespread hunger, and protect the most vulnerable.”

That need creates a mutually beneficial opportunity. Whether American farmers and policymakers can seize it remains to be seen. But with hundreds of millions of unsold grain and Chinese markets effectively closed, they may not have much choice but to try to work with African policymakers.

This story was produced in collaboration with Egab.

In 2017, the Food and Drug Administration banned the usage of antibiotics as growth enhancement for livestock. This was enacted to stem the growing resistance of bacteria to antibiotics, which had manifested into a significant global public health threat. We’ve seen the development of antibiotic-resistant bacteria (ARB) and antibiotic-resistant genes (ARGs), which reduce the effectiveness of critical medicines on humans.

Now, a team of researchers has found significant evidence of global health risks in livestock waste or manure, posing as an important vector for ARGs. When animals are given antibiotics, resistant bacteria and their resistance genes can build up in their guts, which is then excreted into manure.

“Livestock manure carries antibiotic resistance genes that can defeat every major class of antibiotics used in human medicine — including those considered ‘last resort,’” said Xun Qian, professor at the department of environmental science at China-based Northwest A&F University, one of the authors of the study. This makes manure one of the most concerning reservoirs of resistant bacteria in the environment, he added.

ARGs are zoonotic pathogens that can be transmitted to humans through food. What was most worrying for the authors was that the genes were often located on mobile DNA elements, which meant they could move from harmless bacteria in manure to dangerous pathogens, potentially creating “superbugs that are hard to treat.” The authors analyzed over 4,000 livestock metagenomes — a study of genetic material from organisms — in 26 countries, and devised a comprehensive catalog of livestock ARGs. The United States and Brazil, leading global beef producers, showed the highest resistome abundance in cattle manure when compared to other countries.

How manure is managed makes a huge difference, according to Siddhartha Thakur, veterinarian and executive director of Global One Health Academy, a research organization at North Carolina State University. One of the ways bacteria are commonly transmitted is through food. When arable land is treated with manure that is not properly composted, crops grown underground and even above-ground plants like tomatoes become susceptible. For example, salmonella can grow inside a tomato, which means washing it externally is not going to help when the tomato is consumed raw, said Thakur, who has over two decades of experience in the study of antibiotic-resistant foodborne pathogens.

“Livestock manure carries antibiotic resistance genes that can defeat every major class of antibiotics used in human medicine — including those considered ‘last resort.’”

Leafy greens have been associated with a fair share of foodborne illnesses. A 2023 listeria outbreak was linked to lettuce, while kale and spinach emerged as culprits behind a 2021 E. coli outbreak. A recent paper put things in perspective when the authors attributed 9.18% of foodborne illnesses to pathogens associated with leafy greens, which meant these greens accounted for almost 2.3 million illnesses — the costs of which can rise as high as $5.2 billion annually.

These outbreaks often stem from the usage of water contaminated with faecal matter of cattle to irrigate crops, illustrating the magnitude of the threat outlined by the study’s authors.

Further, the global disease burden for antimicrobial resistance remains high. In 2021, a study published in The Lancet estimated that 4.71 million deaths were associated with anti-microbial resistance between 1990 and 2021. This death toll is estimated to reach almost 10 million by 2050. Given this, the Chinese scientists intend for their new research to help governments target surveillance, policy, and interventions where they are needed the most.

One of the major challenges with ARG-related deaths is the issue of underreporting, Thakur pointed out. “Surveillance programs figure out how many people died. [In] many of the low to low-medium-income countries, the surveillance programs are not robust enough to catch the people who have died,” he added, stating that we might already be inching closer to the 10 million threshold.

Xun also mentioned that applying untreated manure to fertilize farm fields can increase transmission risks. One of the best ways to reduce this risk, he noted, is to reserve antibiotic usage for treating actual infections.

4.71 million deaths were associated with anti-microbial resistance between 1990 and 2021. This death toll is estimated to reach almost 10 million by 2050.

This holds true for Bill Niman of Niman Ranch, who made that choice in 1975. He told Offrange that they use antibiotics only when necessary — when animals get sick. To avoid frequent sickness, the ranch keeps a lower number of animals, which affords the pigs and cattle more space. And while he believes in treating sick animals with antibiotics, he found no reason to feed the cattle the drugs otherwise. “[Antibiotic usage] only works as a compelling business model,” the 80-year-old said — the cons to growth enhancement far outweigh the pros.

Meanwhile the regulations governing antibiotic usage in livestock have been getting tighter. “The Food and Drug Authority guidelines (209 and 213) prevented the over-the-counter sale of medicated feeds and prevented growth promotion use of medically important drugs,” said Thakur. He also noted that over the last 10 years, there has been a 37% decrease in drugs that are medically important for human use in the food animal industry.

Notably, we observed a decline in ARG abundance in U.S. swine manure between 2016 and 2018, which may be linked to the implementation of the Veterinary Feed Directive (VFD) in 2017,” Xun said. “This provides encouraging evidence that well-designed regulations can effectively reduce resistance pressure in livestock systems.“

Route 30 has been carrying vehicles across Pennsylvania for nearly a century. It’s the fastest way to travel east-west across the southern portion of the state, a divided four-lane highway that never stops making noise. For the Horn Farm Center for Agricultural Education in York, the endless roar of cars and trucks speeding past — not to mention the pollution they cough up — had long disrupted an otherwise peaceful site for regenerative farming and community programming.

If only there were a forest to serve as a buffer, the organization’s staff thought. So they planted one.

Trees move at their own pace, often taking decades to reach maturity once planted, but Horn Farm didn’t want to wait that long to address its concerns. Instead, it opted to experiment with the Miyawaki method, an approach to reforestation developed by a Japanese botanist. It places a dense, diverse assortment of native species in close proximity to one another in an effort to rapidly regenerate degraded land. Andrew Leahy, the farm’s education and outreach specialist, describes it as “the marriage of competition and collaboration,” a riot of trees fighting for and sharing resources as they grow.

Miyawaki forests — alternately described as micro, tiny, or pocket forests because of their small stature — have been spreading internationally for years. Katherine Pakradouni, a horticulturalist who has planted several in Los Angeles through her landscaping and restoration business, Seed to Landscape, says the movement “has altered the way people think about reforestation.” The method is still building steam in the U.S., where supporters admire it for quickly establishing young forests with myriad environmental benefits and the ability to reconnect people with nature.

In 2019, Horn Farm planted what it believes was the first Miyawaki-style forest in the Eastern U.S. — more than 500 native trees in a 12-foot-wide strip along Route 30. Roughly 100 feet long, it features five major species and 23 supporting species. Six years later, a thriving overstory of oaks, hickories, and sycamores stands nearly 30 feet tall, surrounded by redbuds, dogwoods, and shrubs including elderberry and viburnum. Bluejays and robins nest in the branches, pollinators gather among their host plants, and predators like wasps feed on agricultural pests. On a bright morning in early October, the forest was thick enough to nearly drown out the sights and sounds of the highway just a few paces away. It’s “infinitely eye-catching” for anyone who spends time near it, Leahy says, but more importantly it’s a haven for biodiversity and a boon for soil, air, and water remediation.

Although Miyawaki forests are often found in urban settings, where land is precious and trees are hard to come by, Leahy says they could be a welcome complement for agriculture, particularly on farms with a regenerative bent.

“As opposed to creating systems where we’re farming in a vacuum and then relying on insecticides and chemicals to make it possible to grow things, why not foster the habitat needed by the very predators that naturally keep those things in balance?” he says.

Horn Farm has gone on to apply the method to other sections of its land, including a flood-prone plot that also borders Route 30. With root systems in place, it stopped flooding, instead serving as a sponge that absorbs water during storms. The forest helps prevent run-off and soil erosion, while supporting the farm’s effort to rehabilitate a nearby stream that feeds the Susquehanna River. To make way for its young forests, Horn Farm first decompacted and aerated soil that had been used for conventional agriculture for decades, then planted its seedlings and gave them a heavy mulching, including inches of leaf litter gathered by the surrounding township.

He describes it as “the marriage of competition and collaboration,” a riot of trees fighting for and sharing resources as they grow.

“It’s a cool thing to say we took all the leaves from the community and built a forest with them,” Leahy says.

Reforestation is a global undertaking, backed by a vast assortment of governments, nonprofits, and private companies seeking to address habitat loss and respond to climate change. There’s no shortage of opportunity: 482 million acres globally could support reforestation, according to a recent study by The Nature Conservancy. U.S. nurseries produce 1.3 billion trees annually, enough to plant around 2.5 million acres. For its part, the Forest Service reforests about 190,000 acres annually, partly by planting trees and partly through projects that support the natural regeneration of forests. In traditional reforestation efforts, seedlings are planted some 10 to 12 feet apart to allow each one to thrive. The Miyawaki method applies a much different approach to a much different context.

Akira Miyawaki developed his namesake reforestation technique in the 1970s, inspired by the small protected forests of indigenous trees that surround Shinto shrines and the need for Japan to address the mounting threat of industrial pollution. The method was organized around the concept of “potential natural vegetation” — the overstory, understory, shrubs, and herbaceous species that would occupy a given piece of land if not for human intervention.

Facing the rapid rise of environmental degradation, he also emphasized urgency. His method — simple as it may be — was to identify the species that might once have populated a swath of land, prepare the soil to support their addition, and plant densely so competition for light, water, and nutrients can encourage growth. Some trees won’t make it, but “death is built into the system,” Leahy says. When a tree falls, it feeds the growth of its neighbors.

Miyawaki honed his technique on the campuses of corporations like Nippon Steel and Honda Motor, eventually planting more than 30 million trees across 1,500 sites and winning the Blue Planet Prize — the environmental equivalent of the Nobel Prize. When he spoke at the Toyota plant in India in 2009, he inspired the industrial engineer Shubhendu Sharma to found Afforestt, a for-profit social enterprise that has honed Miyawaki’s principles with a manufacturer’s eye for efficiency. The company has planted well over 100 tiny forests in at least 10 countries, carrying Miyawaki’s method around the world.

“If you see truth in a very simple language, it gets inside your heart,” says Gaurav Gurjar, a jungle tree expert at Afforestt. “And that has happened. People have connected with this method.”

It can be hard to convince grant funders and conservationists that such small-scale restoration is worth supporting when acreage is often the currency of the realm.

The most challenging part of growing a Miyawaki forest is reading the landscape, Gurjar says, in part because most of the world has been so deforested that finding pristine land to mimic is rarely possible. The world has lost over one-third of its forests and half of that loss has come in the last century; an additional 25 million acres are estimated to be cut down each year. Micro forests can’t make up for all that loss, but they can still serve an important role.

“It gives people hope and it empowers them,” Gurjar says.

In Los Angeles, Pakradouni’s experiments with Miyawaki-style planting began with a 1,000-square foot forest in Griffith Park in 2021 and expanded with the development of a 10,000-square foot forest in Ascot Hills Park — about one-sixth the size of a football field — that features 850 native plants sourced from local nonprofits. She sees micro forests as an opportunity for ecological reconnection.

“The world is way bigger than the concrete and the cars and the bills and the news,” Pakradouni says. “There’s something much more essential and close to our souls — that is, the natural world. We can uncover that and be exposed to it and experience it in lots of places we didn’t think we could before.”

Demian Willette, an applied ecologist at Loyola Marymount University, has been studying the Ascot Hills forest, using a neighboring plot as a control and tracking changes based on environmental DNA, remote sensing, and hands-on measurement. The plant survival rate is 89 percent — well above the standard on park land, he says — and in less than two years the forest is already home to 51 percent more biodiversity than its counterpart.

“Biodiversity begets biodiversity,” he says. The forest has also sequestered roughly one ton of carbon dioxide, allowing Willette to project that in 20 years’ time it will be trapping 55 tons annually — not the primary purpose of the Miyawaki method, but a significant climate benefit nonetheless. Leahy suggests micro forests could help farms offset carbon-intensive aspects of their work.

For Willette, Miyawaki-style forests can bring the unwieldy work of biodiversity restoration and climate resilience down to an approachable scale. By gathering communities together for planting and creating unexpected opportunities to engage with nature, they can serve as “a gateway to environmental thinking,” he says. And as his research is showing, their rapid emergence can lead to rapid results.

“It’s actually working,” Willette says. “It’s real and it’s worth the effort. It’s not just hopes and dreams.”

“It’s actually working. It’s real and it’s worth the effort. It’s not just hopes and dreams.”

The accelerated growth rate of a Miyawaki-style forest resembles what sometimes occurs following an avalanche or a forest fire, says Ethan Bryson, the founder of Natural Urban Forests, an Afforestt partner that has planted dozens of forests, beginning in the Pacific Northwest and expanding as far as New Zealand. He likens the forests to “urban acupuncture.”

The costs involved can be significant. An average micro forest typically runs around $25,000, Bryson says, while the Ascot Hills forest cost $35,000. Because juvenile trees aren’t planted in the shelter tubes often used for protection against hungry animals in a tree’s early years, adequate fencing is an important — and costly — consideration for getting a forest to take root in an agricultural setting, Leahy says.

And as he notes, it can be hard to convince grant funders and conservationists that such small-scale restoration is worth supporting when acreage is often the currency of the realm. Micro forests are so densely planted that there’s hardly any space for humans among them, which can deter supporters in urban settings who want to keep park space available for public use, Pakradouni says. Although the Miyawaki method is catching on in the Western world, it still represents a niche within reforestation and ecosystem restoration whose effectiveness will take time to prove out.

But evidence is growing, including research from the UK that found Miyawaki plots had a 79 percent survival rate, even through drought, compared with control plots that averaged 47 percent. Growth rates, too, far outpaced control plots. And despite the higher upfront costs tied to planting densely, the cost per surviving tree ended up lower in Miyawaki plots than in those planted conventionally. Given the range of environmental concerns trees can help ameliorate, the Miyawaki method is “an exciting tool for addressing a lot of the urgent challenges we’re facing,” Bryson says.

Those environmental attributes can make the Miyawaki method an asset for farms, where it can help rebuild soil health, protect crops, and serve as part of a broader water management system, perhaps in the form of a riparian buffer, Leahy says. More than anything, though, he sees it as a reminder that reforestation and restoration can be engaging work, rather than something done from a distance to revive degraded land.

“It restores our sense of being woven into the ecosystem and being active practitioners in the ecosystem. Restoration isn’t about removing ourselves,” Leahy says, “but actually about bringing ourselves back.”

Several years ago, when Andrea LeFevre was reading to her kids at bedtime, she often chose titles about agriculture. After all, she grew up on a farm, works on a farm today, and sought to give her children a glimpse into that lifestyle.

But managing a soybean and corn farm with her husband in Northern Illinois, LeFevre noticed something concerning with the books she selected.

“They all had the same plot,” said LeFevre, “where the farm dad took his kids to do all the fun things, like feeding the cows and collecting chicken eggs, and at the end of the day, on the last page of the book, there’s the mother finally entering the story because she has supper ready for everyone.”

She sighed, as if reflecting on that hurtful moment, and then said, “It was like a dagger to my heart because being a farm wife, a daughter of a farmer, I knew that I contributed a lot more than just making meals. I felt like I needed to write a book on all the things that women on farms actually do.”

LeFevre’sdebut kid-lit book, On the Farm with Mama: Harvest Edition, reveals the unspoken work farm wives take on around the crops and barns, ranging from driving tractors to fixing broken equipment to encouraging her kids to participate in daily upkeep and maintenance activities.

“There is a big trend of authors writing kid books about farming, and it’s great to be part of this growing community,” she said.

LeFevre is one of many U.S. kid-lit authors who are attempting to teach kids about farming and food without using well-worn tropes of old male farmers with a cob pipe between their teeth. Instead, these writers want to show young readers the diversity in farming today while also educating them on where their food comes from — and academic research has revealed these books can help shape a kid’s diet.

Breaking Stereotypes

“Miss MacDonald has a farm. She loves that things grow. And on that farm she has some lettuce. E-I-E-I Grow! With a seed-seed there, and a sow-thrown there, here it shoots, here it sprouts, everywhere it sprouts-sprouts…”

This beginning to Kalee Gwarjanski’s take on the Old MacDonald refrain forms the thread running through Miss MacDonald Has a Farm, the Maine writer’s first children’s book. A self-described hobby farmer with 15 chickens and a garden brimming with lettuce, peas, and tomatoes, Gwarjanski echoed LeFevre’s motivation: She was tired of seeing the same-old farming stories taught to children, and she wanted to bring more veggies into the agricultural narrative.

“I also used to think books on farms were just about raising cows and pigs and not much vegetables, a simple farm,” she said, “but in my book I wanted to focus on quality produce.”

“I think kids should see that agriculture is an area that could be a career choice for them.”

Lisl Detlefsen, a Wisconsin mother, writer, and wife of a cranberry farmer, recalls reading too many children’s books “with negative stereotypes, with a farmer wearing overalls, corn cob pipe in his mouth, and his animals always pulling one over him because he’s portrayed as unintelligent. When I met my husband, he defied all those stereotypes.”

Detlefsen has written several books on farming and food for young readers. One standout is Time for Cranberries. It tells the story of how cranberries are farmed, a process that amazed Detlefsen when her husband first introduced her to the crop.

“I always describe it as Dorothy stepping into Oz,” she said, “because the color is incredible. You’ve got these beautiful crimson berries bobbing along the water, and it’s just beautiful, a really magical experience.”

Detlefsen also wrote Farm Boots, which follows farming families as they work and play in boots; Still There was Bread, a story about a grandmother teaching her granddaughter how to bake bread; and Right This Very Minute, which won the 2019 American Farm Bureau Foundation for Agriculture Book of the Year. The explores the journey of food from the farm to the table, a concept that Detlefsen contends more children should learn about whether at home or in the classroom.

“Kids come up to me and say they saw themselves in my books. They tell me how their friends or cousins can now understand what a harvest is.“

“It’s important to understand and appreciate and value our food system,” she said, “and we can have blinders on thinking there is one way to live. I think kids should see that agriculture is an area that could be a career choice for them.”

She points to an idea that rarely gets mentioned when discussing children’s books and agriculture: Kids can learn the origin stories of their favorite foods in these books, and their approach to eating could also shift. This isn’t an unfounded assertion. Stories depicting healthy food choices often encourage children to make those nutritious decisions in person, according to a 2024 study led by German-Nigerian researchers and published in the journal Appetite.

Another recent study noted that promoting food literacy from an early age is associated with developing healthier and more sustainable eating habits later in life. And research going as far back as 2009 has demonstrated the positive impact of picture books on children’s willingness to taste, try, and like the vegetables seen in the books.

“We Need Books About Agriculture for Kids”

Jacqueline Briggs Martin recognized the responsibility she took on when she wrote books on food systems and revealing where our food comes from, ideal for tweens and older. To use her first book as an example, the Iowa-based author and daughter of a farming family profiled an urban farmer and former NBA player who could be a model for “how they could live in the world,” she said about Farmer Will Allen and the Growing Table.

She wrote about his story from athlete to urban farmer while also giving readers details on a closed-loop aquaculture system. “He used the water from the tilapia tank to fertilize vegetables, and the water dripped down through the veggies into the soil, which cleaned the water, and he had a closed loop of water to bring back to the fish tank, and that’s something kids can see, can learn about,” she said.

Martin also showcased the story of Chef Alice Waters, well-known for helming Chez Panisse restaurant and sourcing fresh ingredients from farms. “With Alice Waters and the Trip to Delicious, I loved writing about how Alice was looking for the most delicious peach, or the best carrot, and so she established relationships with farmers,” Martin said.

Her books also aim to place readers in an environment that might be miles away from their upbringing. “The farm was always a good place for me to be when I was growing up,” she said. “There were smells of hay, the earth thawing out, the flowers and trees, and I loved being outside as much as possible.”

“I worked closely with my art director to make sure this or that produce was its actual color and shape instead of having cartoony tomatoes that are perfectly round.“

Gwarjanski’s work seeks to show the realistic look of veggies and fruits, a step toward respecting young readers and inspiring them to learn more about food as it’s truly represented. She recalled, “I worked closely with my art director to make sure this or that produce was its actual color and shape instead of having cartoony tomatoes that are perfectly round. This is what kids remember.”

Gwarjanski loves the reception when she reads Miss MacDonald Has a Farm aloud at libraries or schools. “To see all these children get into it with the sing-song voices, and to hear later from parents that their children constantly request my book at bedtime, well, I love that a book on celebrating veggies is getting parents and their kids thinking about what they’re eating,” Gwarjanski said.

When children can relate to what’s between the pages, these authors earn another internal gold star. “Kids come up to me and say they saw themselves in my books,” Detlefsen said. “They tell me how their friends or cousins can now understand what a harvest is. I think we need books about agriculture for kids who grew up on a farm so they feel represented in these books.”

Drive southbound from Joshua Tree on the 111 and find, to your right, the Salton Sea, the behemoth salt lake. Hydrogen sulfide gas clouds the far rim, vanishing point obliviated. To your left, the Chocolate Mountains appear like a shadow above the desert’s boundless microwave. Gold mines with names like American Girl and Picacho once attracted hotshot prospectors; today, the Chemgold corporation owns the latter, and the former is defunct. Now, these ranges host Marines from Yuma who come to practice their aim. Driving the 35-mile lakefront on the hottest day in August, the daytime temperature registers 118℉. In the pitch of night, respite is 100℉. With the air conditioning turned up, the interior of my windshield burns my hand. On this single-lane highway, there are no floodlights and few exits; on the left bank’s similar Highway 86, neon bright gas stations serve as de facto beacons.

You’d be forgiven for not believing that you are on your way to some of the most productive farmland in the world. Almost all the produce Americans eat in the winter — and much of the alfalfa and Bermuda grass that is baled and fed to cows across the country — grow on Imperial County’s’s 425,000 irrigable acres, where water is available on demand. On this drive, maybe it would also surprise you to know that you’d likely just passed enough untapped lithium to provide the requisite battery materials for every single person in the United States to own an electric vehicle.

Though the Imperial Valley is one of the biggest producers in the American food supply chain and is poised to alter the global trade of lithium, it also has some of the highest unemployment rates in the country. And it’s likely many Americans have never heard of it. “I would say absolutely that this area is unknown. Whenever I try to explain where it’s at, I say, well, it’s kind of by San Diego, kind of by Palm Springs, kind of by Yuma,” says Tyler Brinkerhoff, Imperial Valley historian. “And people are like, so Salvation Mountain? Well, you’re getting close.”

One Hundred Years of Farming the Desert

This perennially warm section of the Yuha and Colorado Deserts — and its position below sea level and downstream of the Colorado River — lent itself to becoming a suitable American winter breadbasket in the early 1900s. That’s when the Imperial Land Company encouraged global settlers to immigrate to the valley and stake a claim on the richly productive land. Before capital development, the river would flood and dry unpredictably, challenging the new farming community.

But in 1928, the Boulder Canyon Project Act both built the Hoover Dam and the All-American Canal, an 82-mile-long aqueduct that stretches from the Colorado River, which delineates Arizona and California, all the way to Imperial County. The resultant engineering allows a farmer today to order water in the afternoon and have it flow to their fields via the irrigation ditches that line the square plots of field the next day.

It becomes clear that Imperial County is a sandbox of extremes, a place where land use can quickly turn into a lose-lose game. In 1905, torrential rainfall caused the irrigation canals that branched from the Colorado River to flood. Two hundred feet below sea level, the Salton Sea was the resultant farming accident. By the 1990s, polluting runoff turned the vacation spot into one of the grandest ecological disasters in the country.

Today, the bones of dead fish dress the waterfront like the pebbles lining the shore. Very few live on the sea now, in abandoned Bombay Beach. The nearest town, Niland, had 452 residents in 2021, after a brush fire destroyed 40 homes; but here, just as things contract fast they also expand, and by 2023, the population had risen above pre-fire levels. On the edge of Niland, the anarchist community Slab City — and its tourist attraction, the technicolor Christo-psychedelic land sculpture Salvation Mountain — hangs like a dreamy, lawless tumor off the edge of the town. Past Niland and Slab City, tractors drive on the side of the road, and farm country begins in earnest. In this border county, a supermajority of Imperial County residents are Latino. The twin cities Mexicali and Calexico straddle the wall, which day laborers pass through on their commutes.

At his garage in El Centro, I meet Trevor Tagg, who operates the nearly 3,400 acre West-Gro Farms with his father and brother. He’s been awake for 35 hours straight, baling hay by night, but he still wants to drive me around in his truck. “I’m going to take you down to what we call our ‘island,’” he says, driving straight to the Mexican-American border. His plot of land is a verdant rectangle ringed by a wash of blue-gray solar panels. There’s more profit per acre in solar farming — and virtually no need for labor — compared to traditional farming. But unlike the rest of his family, Tagg refused to sell out his share of the land.

After creeping along the border and the All-American Canal that lines it, we head back. “What’s literally a half a mile down the road takes me eight miles to get to because the bridge is closed and has been for 10 or 12 years,” Tagg says. He is vehement that farmers are the most hated people in California. “It’s been a slow burn down the toilet. It’s why I don’t have any peers, any young people. I don’t have any competition in agriculture down here … I’m the youngest person in every meeting I sit in by 20 years.”

When one of the county’s several hundred independently run farms quits the business, Tagg says that newcomers are seldom interested in joining the industry; starting a new operation is extremely cash-intensive, profit margins are slim, and the desert is an isolating, hot environment.

Tagg has just come off what he describes as a two-to-three year produce “bloodbath.” He has many objections to Californian government policy. The cost of labor and gas are more than he’d like to bear. “It’s arguably the most productive farm ground on Earth, because we order water and get it the next day. I just can’t pick up 3,000 acres and move to Texas or Missouri. Tagg cites the cost of labor and other expenses in California as primary roadblocks for his operation and for other local farms.

One such operation, the Spreckels Sugar Company, a 28,000-acre sugar beet plant with a century-long history and payroll of 400 workers, closed down this year. The sugar beets that are in the ground now may be the last ever grown in Imperial County. At the peak of dairy farming in the valley, there were 1,800 dairies; now there’s just one. Local plant closures, transportation fees, and cow-cooling costs influenced these sites to be replaced by dairies in Chino, California; now, those dairies are bygone too. In frustration at the relative profit margins of his Californian industry against that of Silicon Valley, Tagg says, “You can’t eat an iPhone,” talking to me on his own.

One of Tagg’s first jobs was working for Bryan Ashurst, a fifth-generation beekeeper in the valley. The Ashurst Bee Company was established in 1918 to support the area’s growing agriculture industry. Because North American bee populations are dying at an outsized rate due to neonicotinoid pesticide adoption, parasitic disease, and habitat loss, beekeeping has become a hard business. Now, the average beekeeper simply produces more honeybees to offset this colony collapse. Fifty to 70 percent of Ashurst’s bees will die per year. “You should lose 10 percent,” he says.

As a child, Ashurst and his friends would play in the irrigation pipes surrounding the growing fields. He drives into the fields and shows us the Mullins Pipe, where he earned a scar on his scalp from a childhood dive. He’s remained on this same land at the family beekeeping operation.

For the farmers that grew up in the Imperial Valley on family-owned farms, the past decade has not been simple. Many of these operators say that rising labor costs, regulatory constraints, water restrictions, and an overall rising cost of doing business are contributing to the fear that the Imperial Valley farm business is not delivering local residents the promise of bounty that it was sold on a hundred years ago.

At the same time, the county has become a key player in the national food supply chain: American consumers will still need winter produce (and cows, their hay). These lithium mines, which are slated to line the Salton Sea, 20 miles away from Brawley, the town at the approximate geographic center of farm country,are still in early stages of development.

One of these mine projects, Controlled Thermal Resources’ Hell’s Kitchen, plans to engineer small-physical-footprint, closed-loop mines with nearly no carbon emissions. Unlike open pit mining, CTR’s planned process is one of the cleanest lithium mining proposals in the country, and perhaps the world. Even with the promise of sustainable design, the process would require a modest allotment of water from the Imperial Irrigation District.

In 2020, CTR signed a contract with the IID to provide a 25-year term supply of 40 megawatts of geothermal energy yearly from their yet unbuilt Hell’s Kitchen facility. Even if mines like Hell’s Kitchen have little environmental impact on the valley, the economic conditions created within a region Governor Gavin Newsom once called “the Saudi Arabia of Lithium” are of local concern.

Nobody knows what will happen next.

It must be strange, I think, to spend your life among the lettuce, carrots, onions, and spinach that are destined to end up on dinner tables across the country. Farmers send the product of their labor to such varied locations, but cannot themself move their means of production. As costs continue to punch the sustainability of the farming business down, these farmers struggle with the location of their land. “I guess we’re paying the penalty for being here,” Ashurst says.

On lithium: “Okay, I don’t like it. It worries me a little bit.” In the wake of so many existing challenges, Ashurst’s not sure how the county will react to the new lithium industry. He considers Montana, where he runs another pollination-and-honey operation. There, he says, “You can’t hire locals. They don’t work for you because they either work on their own farm, or the family farm, while [the locals] work in the oil field.” The presence of a new commodity industry in farm country has the ability to quickly impact what are often fairly small local labor markets.

The White Gold Rush

By the bulbous eastern tip of the Salton Sea, I drive three and a half miles down a gravel road to visit an unmarked test site. An oxidized metal structure seated on otherwise blank, unfootprinted desert land, the two brine straws and sole extraction rig looking like a Richard Serra sculpture of a mine, rather than a mine itself. It’s so hot that standing outside for 15 minutes causes my phone to overheat and shut down. (The first time I visited the Salton Sea, in January, the weather was pleasantly warm, and the land was covered in shocking miles of unmanned vegetation. During this winter drive, the Salton Sea’s chemical haze made the body of water look endless. I felt alone enough that I could fall off the edge of the earth into the toxic lake.)

I’ve been invited here by Jim Turner, president of CTR, the developer of Hell’s Kitchen (named after a mid-century Salton Sea dance hall) mining and geothermal energy project, one of three new endeavors to mine lithium in Imperial County. BHE Renewables (a subsidiary of Berkshire Hathaway Energy) and Energy Source Minerals are the other two players in the region. Turner is soft spoken, but he’s grown used to teaching local residents about what’s happening in this corner of the country he’s found his career in. “There’s no reason to bring your bathing suit and go to the Salton Sea,” he says, “so it’s ... [a matter of] constant education.”

Every chart that shows the past tally and the future growth of the global demand for lithium displays a comically impressive exponential curve. The transformation of the car market means that now 90 percent of lithium mined is now used in the electric vehicle battery production. Once responsible for a third of the world’s lithium production, the United States is now only responsible for a sliver of the total mined supply; Australia, Chile, and China now export the majority of what’s commercially available. But across the United States, new mining outfits have thrown their hat in the ring to meet rising demand.

Since the 1980s, the region’s lithium brine has been used for geothermal energy, but not mined. Imperial’s motherlode — estimated to contain 127,000 metric tons of lithium carbonate equivalent per year — was discovered underneath the briny, earthen crust alongside the Salton Sea. In one CTR brochure, a terminal proposed project stage claims between 175,000 and 250,000 tons per year are capable of being produced. That’s a greater planned yearly output than what was proposed by Nevada’s Thacker Pass, which boasts that it sits on the “world’s largest known measured lithium Resource and Reserve.” Basically, there’s a hell of a lot of lithium.

But neither Thacker Pass nor Hell’s Kitchen have yet come into operation. Currently working with a California Entitlement Permit, CTR is seeking the federal permit that will enable them to complete their multi-billion dollar equity raise. The longer the permit process, the bigger the worry.

Despite this, Turner says that he has an excellent relationship with the government’s office. Gavin Newsom has even come to visit. It’s a far cry from Tagg’s understanding of Californian government policy: “a parasitic load on us.” Stellantis and General Motors have already developed working relationships as buyers of the new lithium. Across the United States, the white gold rush has begun.

Pending permitting and subsequent equity raises, CTR’s extraction rig is slated to be a dual geothermal energy and lithium mineral mining outfit. S-shaped pipes pump 700 degree brine to the surface, where the heat energy is converted to electricity. The Hell’s Kitchen project plans to collaborate with the energy developer Baker Hughes to power AI data centers across the country.

These rigs will need a water allotment to function — about 4,000 acre-feet a year. These water batches, Turner stresses, would be reused multiple times in the cooling cycle. Unlike in strict geothermal operations, where the heated brine is not used to make commodity-grade lithium, Hell’s Kitchen will be optimized for lithium production. “When we evaporate water, we’ll grab it, condense it back to a liquid, we’ll use it somewhere else.” But even though the need is relatively small, water in Imperial Valley is a precious resource, and any new claim to it is cause for review.

California, Manifested

In this downward corner of the United States, a new mining industry springing from the ground will likely be a transformative vector for the local environment and economy. The mines, with their promise of well-paying, local-hire jobs, could change the course of economic prospects in the Imperial Valley.

Exactly how things will transform, though, is unpredictable; if past attempts to re-address the Imperial Valley prove illustrative, whatever the intention of change, troublesome externalities follow. The offspring of settlers who came from around the world to find prosperity in the desert now find themselves wishing they could move their land to another state. Canals built to facilitate crop growth overflowed and spawned a man-made pool larger than Lake Tahoe. The Salton Sea’s Bombay Beach was once a waterski paradise for mid-century Hollywood stars; now, it is an asthma-inducing, ecologically crippled ghost town. As the county’s farmers struggle for economic viability, who knows if a yet-unbuilt lithium mine will save things or tear them further down.

But it is certain that these mines will change the story of the Imperial Valley. Gavin Newsom, has already overwritten the valley’s name altogether: “We’re advancing a vision for Lithium Valley that promises to become a global source of critical minerals while also powering a new economic boom for the region.” In a June op-ed, Brawley mayor Gil Rebollar wrote, “During [Newsom’s] last visit, [he] declared, “The future happens here first …” He was talking about Lithium Valley, and he was bold and on point in proclaiming our potential to lead the transition to a greener economy. [But] we cannot ignore what is already here: The invisible people connected by our waning cornerstone agriculture industry.”

In the Imperial Valley’s century-long history of American expansionism, ecological disaster, and resource prospecting, transformation is certain, especially the kind of change that threatens to overwrite local ways of life. The century-long history of commercial farming in the Imperial Valley feels susceptible to being superseded by a new mineral future.

What I know is that the Imperial Valley, of all isolated American counties, contains an extreme capacity for American desire to extract from the land. This manifestive agita pools like water runoff in the ancient Colorado Desert. In this singular 4,500-square mile area, gold has been dug up; geothermal and solar energy have been developed at scale; the food you eat, and, quite possibly, the car you drive, will be indebted to this dirt.

I’m repeatedly told that Imperial Valley farmers don’t like to play around with landowner rights — you can do whatever you want on your own lawn — but it’s clear that the polycrises of the commodities market can make or break the economic sustainability of the whole valley. Even in this untouristed, secretive corner of the Southwest, the needs and interests of others impinge and overlap and collaborate; no person gets to be truly alone.

From the Appalachians to the coastal plains, North Carolina’s farming landscape has been dominated by the expected giants: tobacco, soybeans, corn. A team at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University, however, has spent the last decade advocating for the potential of the Tarheel State to adopt a spicy, aromatic root more known in the tropics than the Piedmont.

Domestic ginger production has, historically, not been common within driving distance of the Great Smoky Mountains. Humans first domesticated the fibrous, underground stem in Southeast Asia 5,000 years ago, where it became lauded for its myriad health benefits. Polynesian settlers brought the first cultivators east to Hawai’i as a “canoe crop,” along with other subsistence staples like taro, sweet potato, and coconuts. The archipelago’s moist and accommodating soil produced thousands of tons of the root, until bacterial wilt kneecapped the industry over the past couple of decades.

Even at peak production, however, Hawai’i hardly made a dent in global demand. It now produces mere hundreds of tons a year, connected to a mainland that imports as much as one hundred thousand tons annually (and in a world that consumes as much as five million yearly tons).

Seeing the scale of the potential market, an agricultural cadre at North Carolina A&T set to work. They did so under the guiding hand of Guochen Yang — a man who, for four decades of research, recently got dubbed by the American Society for Horticultural Science as a “HortLegend.”

“When I first started, it was basically one bench in the greenhouse and two rows in a high tunnel,” explained Julia Robinson, Yang’s research technician, lab manager, and “right hand” who also researches black cohosh, a plant native to the region and whose biology serves as a helpful ginger analog. Ten years down the road these modest beginnings have expanded to two high tunnels, studies on what color shade helps encourage ginger’s growth, explorations of its viability in wooded areas, and development of one of Yang’s scientific specialties, known as “micropropagation.”

As a form of tissue culture, micropropagation utilizes small batches of cells from a parent plant to produce genetically uniform flora, often on a mass-produced scale. It’s a wheelhouse that may prove exceedingly useful when trying to instigate a novel agricultural market — especially for a root that could inhabit pockets of mountainous, textured terrain in the U.S. Southeast.

The white-coated world of academic inquiry comes with substantially more guardrails and margin for error than anxious farmers tend to enjoy.

Yang’s “left hand,” meanwhile, has been with him for even longer: William Lashley IV has been part of Yang’s lab for the past 12 years, from some of the earliest days of his undergraduate career, even receiving tuition assistance out of Yang’s own grant money. When colloquially described as Lashley’s “Greensboro uncle,” Yang and Lashley quickly moved to clarify.

“Not ‘uncle,’ that’s a too-little title,” Yang laughed. “Greensboro dad.”

Ginger makes for a fertile field for experimentation. “It’s been a very exciting process to see the research evolve, from the basic questions to where we are today,” Lashley said. For his own PhD, one of Lashley’s objectives has been to investigate how various shades and intensities of light — red, blue, yellow, and green — can impact the growth, yields, and physiology of ginger.

But the white-coated world of academic inquiry comes with substantially more guardrails and margin for error than anxious farmers tend to enjoy. “Even though we are promoting and advocating for this, we try to — as a public institution — make some mistakes before the farmers do,” Yang explained. “You have to really evaluate, because each farm has a different situation: what type of soil you have, what kind of facility, your labor force. It really does need intensive care.”

Translating these insights from the lab to the field, meanwhile, often requires some skilled interpretation. Yang’s former student, Trequan McGee, often provides this critical interface in his work as a horticulture extension specialist — especially in the university’s “Ginger Field Days,” which has hosted as many as a hundred rhizome-curious growers. There, folks like McGee stand by to explain the nitty-gritty details of tending to a novel crop that can fetch as much as 18 dollars a pound, and appear in “value-added products” like teas, candies, ice creams, and even beer.

Another of Yang’s former students, Michael Rayburn, has also been at the front lines of boosting the rhizome’s budding profile. After starting Rayburn Farms as a pumpkin patch in 2014 (with his partner Lauren, also an NC A&T alum), Michael’s work connected him with local brewers whose experimental beer flavors would help kickstart a North Carolina-born model now known as “plow to pint,” in which breweries fill their vats with the harvest of local farmers.

At local farmer’s markets, ginger had long gone unappreciated as a viable crop in its own right, often serving merely as an asymmetric splash of color on vendors’ tables.

At local farmer’s markets, ginger had long gone unappreciated as a viable crop in its own right, often serving merely as an asymmetric splash of color on vendors’ tables. And as Rayburn’s growing rolodex of brewery contacts worked to spice up their beverages with home-grown herbs, he slowly learned to navigate the knobby crop’s logistical idiosyncrasies from the ground up (or down, rather).

“It’s more labor-intensive in both weeding and harvesting,” Rayburn cautioned. “You can’t weed it with a hoe, because the rhizomes don’t grow in a predictable way: They go in all different directions, and you can easily nick them, so you kind of have to get in there and hand weed. That takes time.”

Ginger’s versatility, however, may still prove ideal for smaller, resourceful farmers: a small footprint per plant; flesh that can be used for candies or tea; and sap that can be utilized by everyone from breweries to chocolatiers. On a commercial scale, meanwhile, Rayburn suspects that larger Southeastern farms might eventually be able to compete with international competitors like Brazil and Peru, even with a shorter growing season. He is quick to point out, however, that ginger should not be viewed as a “new golden ticket,” as many novel high-value crops can sometimes be portrayed.

“With a crop like ginger, I wouldn’t suggest someone to go and plant any large acreage [without first] getting your hands dirty. Get some experience, get familiar with it, before you expand that production,” McGee said. “But what we’ve seen is that, overall, it’s a pretty resilient crop. It really has adaptability.”

That’s not to say that the region doesn’t face its own unique challenges. In the wake of Hurricane Helene stressing the soil (and traumatizing local farmers), Rayburn almost declined to plant any ginger at all this year. Yang’s lab, however, stepped in to provide him with enough seed that Rayburn can comfortably supply a local soda company, Waynesville Soda Jerks.

Even a decade into his ginger journey — and with Lashley having just defended his thesis, as the first ever PhD in the university’s horticulture program — Yang and his team feel like they are only just getting started, both in their research and ginger’s Tarheel potential. “There are so many scientific questions that need to be answered: diseases, pests, nutrient level, irrigation and watering, phytochemical context under different lighting conditions. All those details,” Yang explained.

“Even though I’m old, I’m very active and very sharp,” Yang declared. “For ginger research, I will not change direction, because there are so many questions I can see that need to be answered.”

When a rancher’s cow dies in southwest Montana’s Madison Valley, Linda Owens is usually the one they call.

A rancher herself, Owens has lived and worked in the valley the majority of her life, raising cattle on her family’s farm outside of the small town of McAllister. In 2017, she joined Madison Valley Ranchlands Group, a local rancher-led nonprofit, as a project director.

The project she leads? It’s a carcass pickup and composting program that removes dead livestock from ranches in order to mitigate attacks from grizzlies, wolves, and mountain lions.

Before the program, ranchers would dispose of any dead animals (an inevitability of ranching) in boneyards, where they would slowly decompose. But these boneyards are smelly and attract vultures, scavenging critters, and large carnivores, too.

This issue has grown in recent years as grizzlies and wolves repopulated Western Montana due to protection through the Endangered Species Act and wolf reintroduction to Yellowstone National Park. Over the past three decades, their numbers have slowly but surely ticked up, requiring some ranchers to implement new management strategies for their operations. That’s where Owens’ program comes into play.

“The carcass pickup is a proactive tool,” Owens said. “What we’re trying to do is not draw [grizzlies and wolves] in and make them feast on something that, even if it’s just scavenging, it’ll get them in trouble.” If the predators start hanging around boneyards and attacking livestock, it could mean their death if a rancher has reason to think they’re a threat. In Montana, it’s legal to shoot a bear if it is attacking or threatening livestock.

That’s the trouble Owens wants to keep grizzlies and wolves out of.

When she gets a call for a pickup, Owens usually shows up same-day to the ranch with a trailer and a winch to haul the carcass out. The cause of death varies, but this year she’s picked up several cows who were struck by lightning.

After loading the carcass into the trailer, which is lined with a biodegradable spill mat to catch any seeping carcass fluids, Owens transports them to a two-acre composting facility surrounded by electric fencing to keep scavengers out. The carcasses (and spill mat!) are covered with soil, manure and straw, sprayed with water, and left to decompose for several months. Unlike the boneyards, there’s hardly any smell, which Owens said helps keep the neighbors happy.

The service is free to ranchers, paid for by private grants from places like the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation and Vital Ground Foundation. Owens takes donations, but her perspective is that the service should not come at a cost to ranchers. “I am a firm believer that my ranchers should not be paying for this,” she said. “We are not the ones that asked for the wolves and the grizzly bears.”

Some History

Throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, wolves and grizzlies were extirpated from much of the West with the introduction of cattle and loss of native prey animals like bison and elk.

Ranchers became accustomed to ranching without these large carnivores on the landscape, so their return has been a difficult transition for some. Wolves have been a particularly contentious topic for Montana and other states like Colorado, where they were reintroduced through a ballot measure in 2023.

Matt Barnes, a wildlife scientist who works with organizations like Northern Rockies Conservation Cooperative to help ranchers implement predator management, credits the ongoing debate to the legacy of cowboy culture in the American West.

“I am a firm believer that my ranchers should not be paying for this. We are not the ones that asked for the wolves and the grizzly bears.”

“If you’re the descendant, either literally or figuratively, of the pioneers, the fact that we are now restoring the very species your ancestors worked so hard to get rid of, probably feels like a repudiation of your cultural history,” Barnes said.

The settlement of the West, Barnes said, is often framed as a heroic epic of scrappy young cowboys making a life for themselves on the range and removing predators in the process. But that narrative leaves out the wholesale removal of native wildlife and widespread ecological destruction.

As wolves and grizzlies repopulate their historic habitat, efforts to mitigate conflict with livestock make up the latest chapter in the long story of ranching in the West. While carcass removal won’t ever be a silver bullet to end livestock depredation — experts say there will likely always be some amount of it when ranching in carnivore country — it’s one of the most effective strategies ranchers can employ to protect their livestock.

The Challenges

But getting these carcass removal programs off the ground is not always easy.

In the Madison Valley, it took several years to get approval from county health officials to build their composting facility. Even after they got the green light, finding a location for it proved to be tricky. In the end, they built the facility on private land offered to them by Matt Moen, owner of Bar MZ Ranch. In 2018, they finally started picking up and composting carcasses.

“Departments of health or environmental quality can have some pretty strict laws that make it really challenging to set up these carcass composting sites,” said Matt Collins, the Working Wild Challenge manager at the non-profit Western Landowners Alliance. “Just years and years of red tape and different permitting to get them going.”

Seven years into the program, Owens of the Madison Valley Ranchlands Group said county officials have finally come around to the idea of the composting facility. She’s helped assuage some of their concerns over disease by getting the compost tested twice per year for pathogens like E. coli, salmonella, and brucellosis. Since they started operating in 2018, they have not yet removed the compost to be used anywhere outside the facility.

In the Blackfoot Valley, about 175 miles north of the Madison Valley, the non-profit Blackfoot Challenge has led a similar program since 2003 with great success: About 90% of the valley’s ranchers participate. Their pickup program is also free to use, but runs in partnership with the Montana Department of Transportation and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. That means their composting facility also takes roadkill.

“The fact that we are now restoring the very species your ancestors worked so hard to get rid of, probably feels like a repudiation of your cultural history.”

But with the rise of chronic wasting disease — a fatal neurological disease affecting deer, elk, and moose — some worry the compost the facility produces could spread the proteins that carry the disease. The state has stopped using their wildlife compost to grow roadside vegetation because of this concern, according to the Blackfoot Challenge.

“In one sense, integrating the wildlife and livestock compost can be helpful because these communities have a lot of roadkill,” Collins said. Removing roadside carcasses also protects scavengers like golden eagles and vultures from getting hit by cars as they feast. But limiting the compost pile solely to livestock has alleviated chronic wasting disease concerns. That’s the system Owens has going, and so far it’s working well.

During her first year in operation, Owens wrote out objectives for the program. She hoped for long-term project viability through partnerships with a diverse group of agencies and people, and a healthier and safer landscape for both animals and people.

When asked if she thinks she’s met these objectives yet, Owens was hesitant to say absolutely yes or no. To her, it’s an ongoing process, but a gratifying one. Even if just one cow or one wolf is saved because of the program, she said that makes her work worth it.

“It takes a lot of time, but I feel I’m actually providing something that [the valley] can see a benefit from,” Owens said.

Late one night on a trip with his parents to Kansas City, six-year-old Tony Troia encountered a couple of strange satchels lying on the hotel kitchenette counter. Confused, he asked his mom what he’d found. It’s tea, she replied. “‘You put it in hot water and drink it.’”

So he did.

The next thing Troia knew, he had taken every chair in the suite and lined them up like a playground obstacle course, clambering over backs and under legs with inexhaustible energy. “I remember distinctly being like, ‘Tea is crazy!’” he said with a manic grin. “I’ve just been chasing the dragon ever since.”

The wiry, bushily bearded Troia still exudes a caffeinated aura as he presents a cup to Offrange. He pursued his childhood feeling all the way from his Nebraska hometown to North Carolina, where he eventually found a way to get high on his own supply. On an acre of forested southwest-facing slope outside Asheville, he and business partner Amelia Stuetzel have been growing, harvesting, and processing Camellia sinensis as Red Sun Tea since 2022.

The result is delightful — a vibrant, reddish-brown brew with deeply toasty robustness. And it fetches a premium price: $16 per ounce, compared with about $1.25-$3 per ounce for most grocery store blends.

In the broad scope of the agricultural economy, however, Red Sun and the handful of other American growers who have taken up tea are curious outliers. The U.S. imported over $550 million of tea in 2024, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Foreign Agricultural Service; USDA doesn’t even bother to track domestic tea production. (Troia said he raises about 25 pounds per year, with plans to eventually reach 125 pounds.)

As its scientific name suggests, tea originated in southeastern China, and the vast majority of tea production takes place in tropical or subtropical regions such as Sri Lanka and Kenya. Although Americans have experimented with the crop since colonial days, particularly in the Southeast, concerns over climate and labor costs kept it from finding a foothold. The only substantial U.S. tea farm is the 127-acre Charleston Tea Garden in South Carolina, the remnant of a failed experiment by the Lipton Tea Company.

Yet American consumer interest in tea continues to grow: consulting firm Grand View Research projects the U.S. market to increase by 6.2% annually through 2030, outpacing coffee. Roughly 86% of that is black tea and 75 to 80% is served iced, according to the Tea Association of the U.S.A., but hot tea is becoming more popular, particularly among millennials and health-conscious consumers. And while traditional tea-growing areas around the globe face increasingly hostile weather due to climate change, some researchers are now revisiting domestic possibilities for the crop.

A domestic tea industry might end up looking closest to that of Japan.

There’s been particular momentum in Troia’s own North Carolina. He sourced his plants from the Camellia Forest Nursery in Chapel Hill, which, over the past few decades, has become the country’s premier provider of tea starts. And earlier this year, the state’s agriculture department awarded over $218,000 to scientists with North Carolina State University working on tea.

The academic research follows two main tracks. The first, immodestly titled “Carolina Super Teas,” aims to breed plants suitable for the American South. With the right varieties in hand, farmers and gardeners could diversify their crops, develop specialty markets, and lay the groundwork to scale domestic production in the event of disrupted imports.

Tom Ranney, a professor of horticultural science at NCSU, said the key trait that needs improvement is cold tolerance. Many commercial tea cultivars, he explained, start dying off around 15 degrees Fahrenheit, but parts of the North Carolina mountains where he’s based have hit 0 degrees for five years in a row.

To that end, Ranney’s research specialist John Nix has been casting a wide net for existing Camellia varieties with potential to tough out the cold. He’s sourced tea plants from the mountain highlands of Korea and the shores of the Black Sea in Russia, bringing them back to the U.S. and crossing them in search of ever-greater hardiness.

Early results have been promising, with several new hybrids showing full hardiness at 0 degrees. Further breeding will focus on ensuring their caffeine content and flavor remain commercially viable. Ranney notes that in citrus breeding, cold tolerance can be linked with sourness, but he hasn’t yet encountered a similar issue with tea.

(Nix and Ranney have also been experimenting with tea’s Western Hemisphere cousins. They say crosses between yaupon, a caffeinated plant native to the U.S., and South American yerba mate could someday yield a “Carolina Mate” with the vigor of the former and flavor of the latter.)

The other research push, led by extension specialist and assistant professor of horticultural science Emmanuel Torres, is focused on honing in agricultural practices for American tea production. He said the answers to basic questions like when to propagate tea plants, how much fertilizer to use, and what pests pose problems vary between existing tea regions, and Southern farmers need more data before they consider taking a risk.

Domestic farmers are likely to struggle to make headway in a market dominated by imports.

With those best practices in hand, Torres suggests, a domestic tea industry might end up looking closest to that of Japan. The country has niches for both larger-scale, conventional tea farming and smaller-scale, boutique operations that blend sales with agritourism.

“Something that we notice in Japan is that they use the tea farms as a way to not only sell the tea, but bring people to the farm so they can experience how to make their own tea, how to do tea tastings,” Torres explained. “It becomes an experience that the farmer is going to charge for, and in those settings, the general public likes the idea of a farm that is more sustainable and organic.”

Torres acknowledges that he and his colleagues aren’t looking into the economics of American tea at this point. But for the time being, domestic farmers are likely to struggle to make headway in a market dominated by imports.

That’s true even with smaller companies that pride themselves on careful sourcing. Jessie Dean is the founder and CEO of Asheville Tea Company, which highlights the Southeast origin of the ginger it works into its “Mountain Chai” and the chrysanthemum flowers in its “Jasmine Gold.” But its black and green teas come primarily from India and Nepal.

Dean said she’s looked into buying U.S. teas, but prices have been simply prohibitive. She buys direct from organic, regenerative growers abroad, paying about $15 per pound — a good deal more than the $4 per pound she’s seen for some conventionally grown bulk tea, but far below the $100 or more per pound she’s been quoted by American growers. And while her demand of 1,200-2,500 pounds per year is small compared with national tea companies, it’s still far beyond the current capacity of niche U.S. producers like Troia’s Red Sun.

Still, Dean said she’s open to the possibility as the market evolves. She notes that her customers have started asking if U.S. tea is possible. And as a connoisseur, she’s eager to taste the new American way. It’s exciting, she said, “that we have this opportunity to learn and develop what the terroir for tea might be like here in the U.S.”

William Harrison tells a quaint story about a pink-hued mineral. In 2008, the research director of the Michigan Geological Repository for Research and Education got a call from an intern at a company that had built, then sold, a mine in the western part of the state. Did Harrison want their historic collection of core samples? Harrison turned up in his too-small pickup to find 4,000 boxes filled with cores drilled over a mile deep from a mineral deposit known as the Borgen Bed. Once (arduously) stored, the boxes were visited by representatives of another would-be mining outfit. Scientific analysis revealed that the samples were replete with high-quality potassium chloride. When processed to remove impurities, this becomes potash — a fertilizer rich in potassium, which is a primary nutrient for plant growth. And thus, the Michigan Potash and Salt mining company was born.

Certain members of the farming community expressed elation over the venture. Agriculture publication FarmProgress enthused over the company’s proposed operation for its “potential to reduce imports of potash, improve the nation’s trade balance, create jobs, greatly increase the state’s tax base, improve the rural economy, and provide farmers with an easily accessible U.S. product”; CropLife deemed it essential to national security. Michigan Potash’s new plant was supposed to come online sometime around 2017, provide a few hundred jobs, and produce over half a million tons of potash a year (eventually upgraded to 1 million tons). Nine years later, construction has yet to begin.

But a March 2025 executive order from the White House designating potash a “critical” mineral; a promise of some $1.4 billion in federal and state loan guarantees, tax-exempt bonds, and subsidies; and a sudden flurry of expedited permits means that this mining operation might come into being after all. It’s a possibility that some, like Ken Ford, a forester and member of action group Michigan Citizens for Water Conservation, are less than thrilled about, because of the potential for the mine to pollute drinking water and impact wildlife. “People around here want to know exactly what’s going on,” he told Offrange, and they don’t like what they’re hearing.

“Simply replacing foreign-made inputs with domestic ones only partly addresses the issue.”

U.S. farmers use 4.75 million tons of potash fertilizer a year, mostly on corn and soybeans, to help with photosynthesis, starch formation, root growth, and other plant functions. Not every farmer believes potash mining on American soil or elsewhere is worth the expense, effort, and environmental cost. “Nobody that values soil as a regenerative resource — a capital investment — who respects the land, would use refined potash on soil, any more than they would use urea in production farming,” one California farmer told Offrange.

Lara Fornabaio, a food and environmental lawyer at the Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment, agrees. “Simply replacing foreign-made inputs with domestic ones only partly addresses the issue,” she said. “Inputs remain costly, and over time their impacts on soils and ecosystems can actually undermine the very productivity farmers depend on.”

According to a new USDA report on the fertilizer market, the U.S. is “heavily dependent on imports to meet potash fertilizer demand.” The small amount of domestic potash we use comes from mines in New Mexico and Utah, and our reserves of the stuff are around 220 million metric tons. We export zero potash. The remainder is imported mostly from Canada (75% in 2021, now subject to a 10% tariff), Russia (despite the war in Ukraine), and Belarus (currently sanctioned).

Michigan Potash’s founder, Ted Pagano (who did not respond to Offrange’s requests for comment), told the Kalamazoo Gazette back in 2013 that his plant would produce “a Michigan product for Michigan farmers that would dramatically reduce the expensive transport costs on the more than 300,000 tons of potash consumed in our state annually.” In the intervening years, another 700,000 tons has apparently found an eventual buyer in Illinois-based food processor ADM, according to Forbes.

Pagano also insisted to that outlet that his mine would be virtually imperceptible on the ground, an idea that makes Ford balk. The operation has leased 14,500 rural acres, about 80 of which are earmarked for the mines themselves, and the refinery. A neighbor was reportedly told by Pagano himself, “You’re going to smell it, you’re going to hear it, and in fact, you’re going to see it.” Transporting potash away from the plant — which will be sited amid 50 pristine wetlands — will require, by the estimate of one local county’s road commission, about 80 round-trip semis a day, “roaring through our peaceful little neighborhood,” said Ford. This means no one in the community is a “real happy camper.” In fact, Ford’s organization petitioned the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s oversight body, the Environmental Appeals Board, to review six permits that it believes were granted to the company without proper environmental review.

Steven Emerman is a hydrologist and mining consultant based in Utah. He said that solution mining, which is what Michigan Potash intends to use in its operation, is, “on the scale of mining operations, getting toward the more benign end. That doesn’t mean there’s no problems.” Water — in this case, almost 2 million gallons a day, drawn from an aquifer separated by only 170 feet of clay and sand and gravel from another aquifer that supplies drinking water to two counties — is pumped into the ground to dissolve potassium rock. The resulting salty solution is pumped back up and the water is evaporated; what’s left behind are potash crystals. In the case of Michigan Potash, any waste, known as tailings, would be injected deep underground via disposal wells, the likes of which have a habit of leaking.

Emerman’s worried that pipelines transporting corrosive brine, which have a high failure rate, could effectively poison drinking water. “Do you actually have a safe route where a rupture is not going to destroy anyone’s water supply? What rivers are you going to cross? That’s all of what should be in an environmental impact study,” he said. Michigan Citizens for Water Conservation’s petition to EPA alleges that the agency’s environmental review was inadequate to protect community water sources; since then, EPA confirms the permits for the company have been withdrawn. MCWC’s counsel hopes this will trigger a new application and review process, which EPA declined to comment on.

Emerman’s also concerned about the ground sinking as material is extracted, known as subsidence. According to Harrison, potash will be taken from a depth of 7,600 feet, where “the structure of the earth is much more stable.” Countered Emerman, “If someone says there’s no subsidence, where’s the report, where’s the study? And if there’s no report, then it’s just gossip. It’s a rumor.” The materials supplied by the company are unpersuasive, he said. Ford fears that subsidence could cause the lower aquifer, which contains salts and arsenic, to leak its contents into the drinking-water aquifer above.

Emerman has greater concerns over another planned potash mine in a proposed wilderness area and critical bird migration stop in Western Utah. Similar to Michigan Potash, Peak Minerals has been trying to launch its mine for over a decade, on the Sevier Playa. Its website promises a “positive environmental impact,” although it plans to use a destructive method of brine mining, in which deep trenches are opened up and filled with fresh water to create a potassium chloride brine, which then evaporates in ponds. Similar mines contain waste behind earthen dams that have a history of failure, with devastating environmental results.

“This is very, very much a surface-disturbing operation,” said Hanna Larsen, staff attorney at the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance. The plan here is to extract increasing tons of potash over 50 years, starting at 215,000 tons a year and eventually hitting 474,000 tons. A representative of Peak Minerals told Offrange that intended purchasers of their potash include specialty crop farmers in California and the Pacific Northwest.

Emerman worries about the company’s consumption of surface water in an arid area, and how that might affect the surrounding ecosystem. The Bureau of Land Management’s own environmental analysis found that the mine would worsen dust pollution in the region and decrease aquifer water levels — although, according to Peak Minerals’s spokesperson, this analysis also showed improved aquifer health, expanded wetlands and riparian habitat, and support of wildlife during mining operations. But groundwater pumping will have “much longer-term impacts far beyond the life of the project,” Larsen countered.

“You’re going to smell it, you’re going to hear it, and in fact, you’re going to see it.”

Larsen is spearheading a lawsuit against BLM for its failure to conduct an updated environmental analysis after the company amended its mining plan in 2025, and for the original environmental analysis it conducted in 2019, which she calls arbitrary, capricious, and in violation of the National Environmental Policy Act.

“I think it’s that attitude of, this has to happen now, it’s got to happen quickly, President Trump says so, so we’re going to do it,” Larsen said. (In an email, a BLM spokesperson said the agency would not comment on litigation matters.)

Peak Minerals claims it will create over 200 jobs during its construction phase and 175 jobs thereafter. Larsen is skeptical. “Milford or Delta would be the [very small] towns that people would be living in if they were gonna go work on this. It’s pretty far from those towns” — over an hour’s drive in each instance — “so I don’t know whether it would have economic appeal for people to pick up and move to these areas,” she said.

Many experts are wondering how to balance what Farm Bureau and related organizations are saying — that we need to boost American potash production to defray costs to producers — with community and environmental needs. Omanjana Goswami, a food and environmental scientist with the Union of Concerned Scientists, points out that, as a nutrient, “potash has no replacement or alternatives in nature.” But its manufacture comes with enormous environmental costs. Consequently, she’s urging farmers to reduce reliance on potash by “adopting practices that build soil health and improve the ability of soil to sequester nutrients naturally.”

Similarly, CCSI’s Fornabaio advocates for farmers “shifting toward less intensive — and, where possible, regenerative — practices [that bring] multiple benefits, including lowering farmers’ costs for fertilizers and other agrochemicals.” It’s even a concept supported (at least on paper) by one branch of the Farm Bureau, in Iowa.

Emerman’s idea for a different (if unlikely) model involves a collective of farmers that agrees to build a potash mine on their collective land. “We’ll get the benefits, we’ll assume the risks. That would be a utopian idea, okay, but that would be the ideal,” he said.

Because as it stands with these mines, he said, farmers and other community members are being forced to assume all the risks while the companies reap the benefits. “Is it really that simple that potash from a [U.S.] mine is going to supply what a local farmer needs at a cheaper price than he would have got it from Saskatchewan?” Emerman asked, citing the case of the Oak Flat copper mine, which is being fast-tracked to produce copper concentrate destined for export to China. “What’s American about that?”

Like most farmers, Jason Amundsen spends a lot of time thinking about water.

Amundsen, who produces berries and pasture-raised eggs on a farm half an hour outside of Duluth, Minnesota, has experienced inconsistent moisture in recent years: In 2023, his land suffered a drought, though lately it’s had too much rain.

Through his reading, he knew water scarcity didn’t just affect him. So in 2022, he wrote the college of engineering at the University of Minnesota Duluth with a question: “Can you take the power of a car battery and make water?”

For a liquid, water is strangely inflexible. The proportion of global water that’s fresh and easily accessible is tiny, and competition for it is increasing, as demand rises due to population growth and industrial activities.

Yet no industry is thirstier than agriculture. Roughly 70% of freshwater used globally goes to agriculture, depleting aquifers faster than they can be replenished. Meanwhile, for the vast majority of farmers who rely on rain, climate change is driving longer and more intense droughts, spurring reliance on irrigation — and crop failures.

This has consequences for billions of people worldwide: A 2024 report estimated that in regions responsible for half the world’s food production, water storage (reserves either on or beneath the earth’s surface) is projected to decline sharply by 2050.

But now, a growing number of farmers like Amundsen — who is developing a low-power, small-scale system (hence the car battery) that can be replicated for other farmers — as well as researchers and entrepreneurs, are investigating ways to pull water from the atmosphere to provide for an agricultural sector facing catastrophic water shortages.

“We’ve gotten really good at moving surface water, and really good at treating wastewater to irrigate crops, and even desalination of oceans to irrigate,” said Paul Westerhoff, an environmental engineer at Arizona State University. He’s also the president of the International Atmospheric Water Harvesting Association, which was established this past summer as a way to coordinate the burgeoning industry. Atmospheric water harvesting, he told Offrange, is a “more intentional way” to take water out of the air.

The approach faces hurdles, from high costs to energy intensiveness. But proponents say the risk of water shortages — and the potential for profit, with the atmospheric water harvesting market already valued at more than $2 billion a year — make the prospect worth pursuing.

If atmospheric water harvesting sounds familiar, that’s perhaps because it’s a staple of science fiction. In “Star Wars,” Luke Skywalker’s adoptive family ekes out a life as moisture farmers, sucking water from the dry desert atmosphere of Tatooine. In Frank Herbert’s “Dune,” characters wear suits that harvest precious drops of moisture from the air.

Atmospheric water harvesting on this planet takes advantage of the earth’s hydrologic cycle, whereby water travels from the atmosphere to the surface and back again.

The atmosphere has more water in it than all the rivers of the world combined.

In between bouts of evaporation and precipitation, water hovers in the atmosphere for about 10 days. “The atmosphere has more water in it than all the rivers of the world combined,” Westerhoff said. “There’s a lot of water and it’s turning over pretty quickly.”

That volume (roughly 3,100 cubic miles of water at any given time) makes it a nearly inexhaustible resource. And unlike draining an aquifer, tapping into an atmospheric source — say, to grow plants — doesn’t remove water for an extended time; instead, water absorbed by those plants is released back into the atmosphere as they grow, maintaining the cycle.

Harvesting that water takes three forms, Westerhoff said. One involves capturing water from fog and dew, using nets or other surfaces to harness water droplets. This method has a long history — though it’s being updated with high tech materials — and works in coastal and mountain locations (such as the Canary Islands). But because this method requires a soggy atmosphere, it isn’t effective everywhere.

Another involves devices that use condensation, akin to household dehumidifiers, where warm air is sucked in and run over a cold surface. Removing the heat condenses the water, turning it into water droplets that can then be used for drinking water and other purposes. (Crucially, though, a regular dehumidifier does not produce water that’s safe to drink.)

The third type — “the one that’s really been changing the landscape over the last 10 years,” Westerhoff said — uses desiccants (like the little bags of silica found in some food and clothing packaging) to absorb water from the air, and expel it again when the desiccant is heated up.

Amundsen has been exploring an option that uses devices similar to household dehumidifiers.

Working with the University of Minnesota Duluth and the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Amundsen is prototyping a device resembling a mini fridge, which uses a power source — either car batteries or solar panels — that’s small enough to be moved around easily to a field or an orchard. There, it can produce up to 45 liters of water from air a day, at a relative humidity level comparable to that of New York City. “Our approach to solving the problem is, you know, how do we make this small? How do we make this portable?”

Other organizations are trying the condensation-based approach at a larger scale. For the last decade, the Moses West Foundation, founded by a former army captain, has been working with units that can harvest up to 5,000 liters a day, for military deployments and communities facing water crises, such as Flint, Michigan, as well as in regions affected by natural disasters like Hurricane Maria.

Using solar power, these machines pull moist air out of the environment, pass it over cold steel, and filter the resulting water to make it drinkable.

“The tech is not all that complicated,” chief business officer Colin Hutzler said. “I think [atmospheric water harvesting] is the only long-term solution for the current water crisis, which is getting worse by the day.”

“Clean water from air… As a reasonable person, anyone would hear that and say that’s crazy.”

The foundation’s current focus is drinking water, but Hutzler said there’s room to expand. “Agriculture is huge for us,” he said, particularly in vertical farming (though they’re not yet working in conventional agriculture).

“Clean water from air… As a reasonable person, anyone would hear that and say that’s crazy. But it’s been done and it is being done and it will continue to be done, and the tech is only getting better.”

In Nevada — currently experiencing the worst megadrought in 1,200 years — a startup called WAVR Technologies is pursuing the desiccant-based model, using an approach inspired by Australian tree frogs, who absorb water through their skin rather than drinking. The process draws ambient humidity through a membrane called a hydrogel, and stores that water in a liquid salt solution until it’s released by applying heat.

Rich Sloan, WAVR co-founder, said the approach works down to 10% relative humidity, which is drier than the Sahara Desert. Currently, the system is producing just a single liter per day, though the company is in the process of engineering 10,000-liter-a-day units.

Sloan said the company is targeting industrial users of water, including within agriculture, as they wanted to focus on applications that will have the greatest impact on water usage. In agriculture, the most likely application would be in processing food and other agricultural products, where waste heat from a processing facility can be used to help extract water from the salt solution, driving costs down.

“Agriculture is extremely cost-sensitive. Margins are already stressed. So we think that a breakthrough approach like ours moves us closer to economic feasibility, and therefore hopefully proliferation of this incremental source of water.”

Anjali Mulchandani, assistant professor in the department of engineering at the University of New Mexico, has analyzed the economic viability of a dehumidifier-like system for atmospheric water harvesting. In her analysis, atmospheric water harvesting can be cheaper than bottled water, though it’s orders of magnitude more expensive than desalinated water.

Ultimately, the technology is not complicated, Mulchandani said. It’s the power to run it, and the conditions it’s deployed in, that determine whether it’s viable.

“To me the real-world equation questions are, like, reasonably what climates can you do this in? Reasonably where does your power come from? And then what will your water quality be?”

Mulchandani said she could see atmospheric water harvesting being used in agriculture, but the cost of the water is so high it would be a tough sell to farmers.

But farmers like Amundsen still see potential.

He’s started offering the device to farmers across the country to test (and is seeking more farmers willing to give it a spin), though he stresses that they’re still at an early stage. But with the specter of catastrophic water shortages looming ever closer — the Global Commission on the Economics of Water projects that freshwater use will exceed supply by 2030 — the time to try something different is now.

“None of this is proven,” Amundsen said. “But we think we’re holding out a solution.”

When whispers of lab-grown, cell-cultivated meat first hit the media in 2013, a clash between the livestock industry and food system reformers was widely anticipated.

More than a decade later, that clash is unfolding — remarkably, even before lab-grown products have reached grocery store shelves. On May 20, livestock powerhouse Nebraska became the sixth state to preemptively ban the sale of cultivated meat.

Nebraska joined Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Montana, and Indiana as states that have enacted lab-grown meat bans. Florida was the first to pass such a law, and in several cases, companies like UPSIDE Foods already filed lawsuits challenging these restrictions on constitutional and commerce grounds.

Nebraska Governor Jim Pillen, a Republican and hog farmer, framed the law as a measure to “protect and preserve our state’s vital ag industry as well as our consumers” adding that such food products are “unproven, dishonestly labeled.”

Yet many Nebraska beef producers reject a need for legislative protection, believing livestock can go toe-to-toe against their petri dish counterparts in both sustainability and consumer preference. Statewide industry advocates like the Nebraska Farm Bureau, Nebraska Cattlemen’s Association, and Nebraska Pork Producers have all indicated they do not see such products as any real competitive threat.

While laboratory meat products are indeed made from real cattle cells, they give pause to many. (It’s noteworthy that nearly 49% of Americans say they’re eating more fresh, minimally processed food and 80% check processing levels before buying.) Creating cultivated meat involves growing cells with a nutritional media in bioreactors, producing a highly processed product far removed from traditional beef.

To ranchers like Ron Sealock of Sealock Livestock in south central Nebraska, concern over this reflects a growing consumer desire for wholesome, natural food — something he believes conventional beef already offers. Sealock and his family run a small cow-calf operation, selling feeder calves into the conventional beef market. But while the endpoint of their cattle may be a feedlot, Sealock’s own practices are what he calls “regenerative grazing before regenerative grazing was cool.”

“We’re grazing the ‘dreaded cow,’ but doing it in a way that takes care of the planet. I just don’t buy that what’s made in a lab is going to be better.”

“When I look out the window, I see butterflies, bees, rabbits, bats, and owls,” he said. “We’re grazing the ‘dreaded cow,’ but doing it in a way that takes care of the planet. I just don’t buy that what’s made in a lab is going to be better.”

He believes regulators and consumers alike should be cautious in accepting cultivated meat’s promises at face value. And still, Sealock stops short of supporting a full ban on cultivated meat, “I’m a capitalist. I believe in the free market.”

One of the ban’s loudest supporting voices is the Center for the Environment and Welfare (CEW). Founded in 2023, CEW positions itself as a science-based watchdog group providing issue briefs and commentary to food industry stakeholders, especially those facing pressure from activist groups or investor campaigns related to sustainability and ethics. No clear evidence ties the group directly to beef or meat industry lobbying, but this has been raised as a question by critics.

“Food companies might only get one side of the story when they’re asked to weigh in on controversial issues,” explained CEW research director Will Coggin.

While CEW describes itself as pro-consumer choice in general, Coggin says the group views cultivated meat differently. “This is a food that nobody’s ever eaten before,” he said. “There’s a number of very legitimate questions about whether this food is safe to consume.” CEW’s chief concern is the regulatory pathway itself.

Under a 2019 joint agreement, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) share oversight of cultivated meat. The FDA evaluates the production process and final product under the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act. USDA then takes over for labeling and facility inspections under the Federal Meat Inspection Act.

“Every cultivated meat product sold in the U.S. must go through a multi-year FDA consultation process, with oversight of everything,” said Madeline Cohen, associate director of regulatory affairs at GFI. “The FDA publishes its findings, the company’s safety dossier and a full scientific memo. That’s far more transparency than most conventional food products receive.”

“Every cultivated meat product sold in the U.S. must go through a multi-year FDA consultation process, with oversight of everything. That’s far more transparency than most conventional food products receive.”

The Good Food Institute (GFI), a nonprofit think tank that promotes alternative proteins as part of a more sustainable food system, defends the oversight process for lab-grown meat as comprehensive and transparent.

“Every cultivated meat product sold in the U.S. must go through a multi-year FDA consultation process, with oversight of everything,” said Madeline Cohen, senior regulatory attorney at GFI. “The FDA publishes its findings, the company’s safety dossier and a full scientific memo. That’s far more transparency than most conventional food products receive.”

During review, companies must submit data showing how their cells are grown, harvested, and tested for allergens, nutritional composition, and contaminants. If FDA determines the data supports safety, it issues a “no questions” letter indicating it sees no need to challenge the company’s conclusions.

But Coggins of CEW points to a whistleblower complaint submitted to the FDA by a former cultivated meat company scientist, which reportedly included product samples with 20 times the lead and eight times the cholesterol of conventional chicken. The complaint, totaling more than 250 pages, has reportedly not been made public despite FOIA requests.

Another concern involves immortalized cell lines, those which are genetically modified to divide indefinitely and commonly used in pharmaceutical testing and never approved in food before. “We’re not saying it’s unsafe,” Coggin said. “We’re saying we don’t know; and that’s a problem.”

Cultivated meat supporters argue this is an overstatement.

“I believe in consumer choice. But these products need to be clearly labeled and thoroughly overseen. Beef can stand on its own.”

“It’s important to remember that cultivated meat is real meat (and) real animal tissue, not a meat substitute,” said Tamar Lieberman, GFI’s senior director of policy. “It’s grown in a controlled, sterile environment … And in many ways, they go further than those for the foods we already eat daily.”

Legal scholars suggest CEW’s framing reflects political dynamics as much as scientific concern. Trevor Findley, attorney and clinical instructor at the Harvard Law School Food Law and Policy Clinic, noted that states have broad authority to regulate food, regardless of FDA approval.“States have quite a bit of leeway in terms of deciding what foods are allowed to be sold within their state boundaries,” he said, citing the 2023 Supreme Court ruling that upheld California’s pork production standards.

Still, Findley cautioned the line between public health and economic protectionism is often blurred.

Nebraska rancher co-owning Flying Diamond Beef and former chair of international trade with the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association Jaclyn Wilson echoed the importance of state authority and clear oversight. While initially open to the concept of cell-cultivated meat, she said her views shifted after considering the precedent that premature approval or unclear labeling might set.

“I believe in consumer choice,” she said. “But these products need to be clearly labeled and thoroughly overseen. Beef can stand on its own.”

“Why should consumers be asked to eat something when the science just isn’t there yet?”

Wilson noted that her concern isn’t about the science itself but about the process. “If these products are still being developed and studied, then it makes sense that we take the time to make sure they meet the same standards traditional producers have to meet,” she said. However, “Until they’re actually on store shelves, there’s no reason to rush policy one way or another.”

Wilson also highlighted that alternative proteins aren’t immune to market challenges. “Look at the Impossible Beef situation,”* she added. “Their stock share is down to nothing. That’s proof the marketplace will ultimately decide.”

For CEW, the issue remains one of due diligence. “We’re not in a rush,” Coggin stressed. “Why should consumers be asked to eat something when the science just isn’t there yet?”

But supporters say cultivated meat is the result of years of careful development and evolving transparency standards.

“This isn’t science fiction anymore,” says Cohen. “These products are moving through the most rigorous safety frameworks we have for food. If anything, they offer an opportunity to improve how we feed people more safely, more sustainably.”

While supporters and critics remain divided in cattle country, one point of consensus is clear. The public conversation around cultivated meat is just getting started, and the decisions made today could shape food systems for decades to come.

*Note: Wilson was likely referring to Beyond Meat, as Impossible is not a publicly traded company.

Whether you’re in the country, city, or suburbs, chances are you’ll see a flock of Canada geese. Found widely throughout North America, these birds are everywhere — from the Gulf of Mexico to the Canadian Arctic, spanning all flyways between the Atlantic and Pacific. That’s because they’re an adaptable species. In fact, their global breeding population is estimated at 7.6 million, according to Partners in Flight, and the species has experienced a continual uptick in numbers since the North American Breeding Bird Survey began in 1966.

Canada geese are native to North America and, in the early 1900s, the loss of habitat and unregulated hunting led to a massive decline in numbers. As a result, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) ran large-scale conservation and reintroduction programs in the 1960s and 1970s that brought numbers back into a sustainable range.

However, while thousands migrate each year, flying in their trademark V formation between summer and winter ranges, the number of resident Canada geese — aka non-migratory — has increased — and is the cause of many geese-related problems. Thanks to mild winters and urban adaptation, you’ll spot many geese congregating in areas with abundant lawns, golf courses, and parks since these areas provide easy access to both food and water.

These year-round stays are now causing public nuisance complaints, agricultural damage, and ecological impacts. Further, the abundance of geese — and the abundance of goose poop — is infiltrating waterways used for agriculture, recreation (think public beaches), and drinking water, increasing the spread of disease and the worry of what that means for public and animal health.

“Canada geese have long been known to be potential spreaders of campylobacter — which is a bacteria that causes dysentery kind of illnesses — Cryptosporidium, giardia and salmonella,” said Tom Langen, biology professor and associate dean of the Lewis School of Health & Life Sciences at Clarkson University.

They’re also known carriers of Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza (HPAI), aka avian flu, infecting other birds and animals (like these Nevada dairy cows) that come into contact with infected saliva, nasal discharges, and/or feces.

“The 2016 outbreak in North America and the current outbreak in North America were brought by migratory birds,” said Langen, noting that waterfowl like Canada geese, mallards, and widgets seem to be the primary carriers.

What Is It About This Species (and Their Feces)?

If the average goose consumes about four pounds of grass per day, resulting in roughly three pounds of fecal matter, think about how many pounds an entire flock produces. Further, that fecal matter contains 76% carbon, 4.4% nitrogen, and 1.3% phosphorus, which can lead to algal blooms and excessive plant growth in lakes.

And how long geese feces lasts in the environment is “still an area of research,” according to Langen. On land, it can take geese feces about a month to break down and disappear, but the residual bacteria and parasites can survive for several weeks, depending on the weather. Near water, it can last for weeks, said Langen, fermenting into the perfect bacterial cocktail for anyone who comes in contact with it.

In Michigan, where geese congregate along the shores of the Great Lakes as well as other waterways, causing months-long closures of public beaches and lakes, a network of labs called the Michigan Network for Environmental Health and Technology test beach water regularly for “fecal contamination and genetic makers of hosts that contribute to the contamination,” according to Shannon Briggs, a toxicologist with the Michigan Department of Environment, Great Lakes, and Energy.

While Langen notes that there’s “a lot of uncertainty in the literature” about the frequency of the bacteria carried by Canada geese affecting humans, he acknowledged, “It’s pretty clear that Canada geese are a source of at least some of these waterborne microbes that cause illness.”

Beyond the Poop: Crop Damage

But it’s not just the abundance of goose poop infiltrating waterways. Across farm fields, geese also create excessive damage to agricultural fields and crop production — with the unfortunate bonus of leaving residual feces behind. That’s due to their feeding habits, which include grazing on grass and grains, and their constant foraging and flocking causing significant damage to crops and cropland. Canada geese, specifically, will graze on seeds, young sprouts, and full plants, resulting in halted growth that can lead to disrupted crop production — and an economic loss for the farmer.

In a 2025 paper published in the journal Agriculture, Ecosystems & Environment, researchers discovered that fields used for livestock feed productions like pastures were most popular among geese in spring and summer. Post-harvest fields were selected in fall and winter, and cereal crops were generally selected in both winter and spring as good food sources for geese.

Potential solutions for “reducing goose grazing and potential damage to growing crops” was to “leave harvest residues in untilled fields for as long as possible” in both the fall and early winter. Another suggestion was to sow in the spring instead of the fall, which could reduce grazing “specifically on cereals during winter and early spring.” The bottom line: With the abundance of geese — and their ability to traverse multiple regions and seasons — reducing crop risk damage is an ongoing issue that has to be tailored to the specific type of goose, region, and season.

Getting Rid of Problem Geese

In California, one community is focusing on non-lethal Canada goose population control. Foster City is home to a steadily resident population that causes overgrazing, excessive fecal accumulations, aggressive nesting behavior, and pose both a health and safety hazard. To combat that, the city is planning a $400,000 pilot project that will use drones, dogs, and lasers to haze the birds away.

Scare tactics may work as well, particularly in agricultural fields where a kite, scarecrow ,or inflatable man can be employed, though researchers noted in a 2024 study published in the journal Crop Protection that “since geese continue to graze during scaring, we conclude that scaring alone is not a final solution to mitigate crop damage.”

In Michigan, according to Briggs, the state has adjusted landscaping to deter geese from staying in the area by planting dense, native vegetation like coneflowers that create a visual barrier while also creating a native buffer strip that benefits shoreline health and reduces mowing.

Langen points to man’s best friend as a potential deterrent to overly-comfortable geese.

“These birds learn,” noted Langen. “They habituate to things that aren’t scary, or that don’t do harm. You can’t put out a statue or a model of somebody with a shotgun and have them permanently deterred. Noises and poppers don’t work very well either. They eventually get used to those. But a dog, a barking dog that’s chasing, that works.”

“These birds learn. They habituate to things that aren’t scary, or that don’t do harm. You can’t put out a statue or a model of somebody with a shotgun and have them permanently deterred.“

Of course, not all areas approach managing geese populations with nonlethal measures. Cities across North America have held Canada geese culls, with Windsor, Ontario, recently making headlines after obtaining a permit and hiring an independent contractor to round up 150 goose eggs and destroy their nests.

Lethal measures are often a last resort when it comes to depopulating popular geese areas. There is typically controversy that surrounds culling large numbers of wildlife — even if the culled geese are repurposed for a good reason like when Denver worked with the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) in 2019 and 2020, killing more than 2,000 birds and donating the processed meat to local charities serving hungry families.

To move forward with lethal removal, a city or municipality is required to obtain a federal permit after registering for the Resident Canada Goose Nuisance Control Program or applying for a Migratory Bird Depredation Permit through the USFWS. The permit, which involves getting technical assistance from the USDA, allows for destroying nests and eggs and culling birds — after documenting geese are causing harm to human health, property, or agriculture.

Of course, there’s always hunters to help manage Canada geese populations. Across the U.S., an average of 1,853,192 Canada geese were harvested in the U.S. during the 2019 through 2022 hunting seasons, according to Ducks Unlimited. And yet the population continues to grow.

This essay is from our Perspective section. The opinions presented do not represent those of Offrange or Ambrook, its parent company.

For a brief moment, after Hamilton first crashed headlong into pop culture, every immigrant and child-of-immigrants I know (self included) clung to one line: “Immigrants, we get the job done.” Echoed in the decade since by protesters and politicians (the Hispanic Foundation recently launched a coalition named for the lyric), it’s the sort of rallying cry that can wend its way through liberal society. It doesn’t specify which immigrants or which jobs, but simply the self-contained argument that immigrants work hard, and America values hard work. Ipso facto, immigrants are good.

As ICE and other masked gunmen have been empowered to upend America’s immigrant communities, there’s been increased calls to understand the role they play in America’s economic systems, especially its foodways. The focus of these calls is often on the hard work these immigrants do, work like seasonal fruit picking and factory butchering that few others would take on in their absence. But in the attempts to rally support from those not directly threatened by these brutal immigration policies, they — perhaps inadvertently — strip immigrants of their humanity, reducing them to how many tomatoes they can harvest, how fast they can man the assembly line. Which indeed, has always been the problem.

On July 10, local news outlet L.A. Taco posted videos of federal agents tear gassing farmworkers in Camarillo and Oxnard, California. In one, white smoke billows across a field as adults and children run from the danger. In another, a child with a megaphone cries to agents: “Why are you taking the parents away?” The horror is self-evident — families being torn apart, people dying as a result of the raids.

And yet, many arguments against ICE and Trump’s immigration policies center not the people being harmed, but the results of their labor. “If the Trump administration follows through on its most ambitious mass deportation plans, who exactly will replace these essential workers?” asks Politico, saying the lack of undocumented immigrants would “blow up the food system.” The Guardian built a visualizer to illustrate the percentage of immigrant workers in various food industries, saying deportation would lead to “major disruptions.” A New York Times op-ed from California officials opens its argument with warnings of “wilted lettuce” and “rotten strawberries,” and stresses that ICE raids “will have real consequences for all Americans, very likely including higher grocery prices and fewer options in the produce aisle.”

All of this is true: Our food production system is fundamentally broken. America’s foodways are propped up on underpaid, sometimes underaged workers who are overwhelmingly migrants. And if enough of these workers are sent away, it’ll be almost impossible for everyone else to eat. There is nothing wrong with acknowledging that these actions have consequences beyond the immediate targets. But these pieces tend to frame the visceral horrors immigrants are facing as almost an afterthought, positioning these humans as perpetual “others.” The assumption, perhaps, is that readers wouldn’t be moved by the idea of a child stranded in a field with no idea where his parents have been taken.

Even immigration advocates have been framing the issue as one of economics. “All of this will have a huge impact on the rest of us because the immigrant community contributes much more than their labor; they pay taxes,” Elizabeth Rodriguez, director of farmworker advocacy with National Farm Worker Ministry, told The Guardian.

“There’s a lot of moral hazards if the implication is that we should run our agricultural labor policy solely on the basis of what’s the cheapest price of food possible.”

“We are in a time where people only worry about something when it affects them,” Teresa Romero, president of United Farm Workers (UFW), which represents farm workers in California, Oregon, and Washington, told Offrange. Part of this is due to Americans’ inclination to view ourselves primarily as consumers. “Most people don’t spend much time thinking about, say, monetary policy, but they make many choices every day about what to buy or not buy, who to hire or who not to hire, what they can afford and what they can’t afford,” Ethan Porter, author of The Consumer Citizen, told Vox. Americans are deeply inclined to view ourselves through the lens of our purchasing decisions, something politicians have taken advantage of by insisting that running a country should be like running a business, and that shopping is our national duty (think of the post-9/11 “Market Patriotism”).

Knowing how food systems work is my actual job — now it feels like it’s everybody’s. People who previously couldn’t tell you what a tariff was are now hyper-aware of each declaration threatening the price of coffee or cinnamon, and the exact way pistachios from California get into a latte in New York. But by focusing solely on the price and availability of food, these arguments covertly suggest that our system of labor is fine, as long as some imagined ideal of the American consumer is happy. For Antonio De Loera-Bust, communications director at UFW, this creates a slippery slope: “There’s a lot of moral hazards if the implication is that we should run our agricultural labor policy solely on the basis of what’s the cheapest price of food possible.”

Besides, it’s not like the increase in prices at grocery store has corresponded to an increase in wages in the fields. “Companies make money. If consumers have more expenses, it’s because of tariffs, not because of what we’re paying workers,” said Romero. Instead, what’s happening is bosses using the threat of deportation to keep workers from fighting for their rights, reporting things like abuse and wage theft.

It is good to be reminded that we all have skin in the game. None of us are free until all of us are free, after all. But the freedom to keep buying off-season strawberries on the East Coast is very different from the freedom to walk outside and not fear ICE chasing you down, or to stand up for your rights as a worker. Our food systems have been built on depressed wages and subpar conditions, and indeed, it has been overwhelmingly immigrants who have gotten those jobs done. By focusing solely on grocery prices, we tie the value of human life to production capability, which only aids in ICE’s project of dehumanization and fear.

To fight these horrors, we have to remember who — not what — the fight is for.

This essay is from our Perspective section. The opinions presented do not represent those of Offrange or Ambrook, its parent company.

Many farmers view putting solar panels on their land as a decision with only net positives. There is significantly less labor in renting land to an energy company than planting and harvesting a crop; you’re helping create clean energy; and, best of all, when the lease ends, the land is returned to the farmers’ use. For many aging Wisconsin farmers, of which there are many— the state average is 56.7 years old — leasing land to an energy company allows them to keep their land and reduce the labor required to make a living.

But when large-scale utility developments — whether they are solar, wind, or power infrastructure — try to build in rural areas, neighbors often push back. Though it’s easy to brush this off as base NIMBYism, there can be legitimate concerns about solar projects from rural neighbors.

My dairy farming friends Gary Swain and his wife, Dana, have learned firsthand how large-scale solar developments could possibly impact their farm and their neighbors. They’ve also discovered how little they can do to stop it.

Three years ago a solar company proposed a roughly 4,600-acre solar development in the Wisconsin township where Gary, Dana, and their family farm. Both of them grew up on dairy farms and showed their livestock in 4-H (where I met them). They also both have off-farm jobs — a necessity for most people who work in ag. Gary milks about 30 cows with his brother; they have roughly 60 young stock on the farm. In addition to their livestock, they grow the alfalfa and corn used to feed them — their families have been farming continuously in the township for 180 years.

The proposed development near their property has leased 4,600 acres of farmland for a 2,400-acre solar array in the towns of Christiana and Deerfield. The project would generate 300 megawatts of solar, enough to power 90,000 homes and provide 165 megawatts of battery storage; it would be the largest solar project in Wisconsin. Gary and Dana, along with their neighbors, were surprised to learn that the process for approving or denying a development like this doesn’t reside in local decisions made by town boards. The Wisconsin Public Service Commission (PSC) decided how much weight to give the viewpoints of neighbors impacted by large utility developments.

Gary, Dana, and their neighbors have concerns about this large of a solar development being built around their farms, homes, and a school. Gary is concerned about stray voltage from the energy transmission and large energy storage batteries affecting his cows and their milk production, as noted in this Wisconsin Public Radio article. There are additional worries about wildlife being impacted — will large numbers of deer, turkeys, and other wildlife move their routes to go through other farmer’s fields if they can’t access the typical paths now blocked by the solar array?

Gary and Dana requested an agricultural impact study to quantify these effects, but both the PSC and the Wisconsin Department of Agriculture, Trade and Consumer Protection declined to conduct one. Is there enough known about the effects of solar panels on the soil and groundwater? What about the risk of fire from the large batteries storing energy? How will local roads hold up under heavy truck traffic for the building of a roughly 3,400-acre solar development?

The uncertain answers to these questions highlight a lack of research into the effects of large solar developments, especially on prime agricultural land in the Midwest. Most large-scale solar projects in the U.S. are in the West, on arid land that is unsuitable for farming. This limits the applicability of these studies — such as this or this — to the temperate Midwest. The lack of applicable research regarding the effects of large solar development on Midwestern wildlife is noted in the PSC’s environmental assessment of the project.

Nationally, opposition to large-scale solar development from farmers and rural neighbors has been growing and becoming organized.

What research there is presents a mixed bag on the effects of solar developments on the environment. On one hand, there are confirmed negative effects on certain species of wildlife, such as aquatic habitat birds (ducks, geese, loons, etc.) that confuse reflective solar panels for water and try to land and collide with the solar panels. Research is being done by the United States Geological Survey into this phenomena, called the Lake Effect Hypothesis.

Research from Murdoch University found that large solar developments can attract insects, which create new feeding areas for birds and bats. However, this can cause birds and bats to fly off course as the solar panels mimic large bodies of water, as well as increase the risk of collisions. Additionally, migratory species may find their typical routes blocked, which disrupts nesting and feeding patterns. Although some negative impacts to wildlife can be mitigated by wildlife-friendly design, such as one in Nevada which preserved native plants and left openings in fences, implementing these measures is rare.

Results are also mixed for pollinators. One study found that the building of solar developments may contribute to pollinator loss because of vegetation removal. Another study found that establishing pollinator-friendly habitats in solar developments may result in positive effects such as increasing flower diversity, pollinator abundance, and diversity. Many of these studies emphasize that more research is required to fully understand the relationship between solar energy infrastructure and wildlife. This is a key point for resistant rural communities — we don’t yet know enough about the consequences to approve these massive solar projects.

Soil degradation can also be a problem for large-scale solar, in the form of erosion when solar companies do not mitigate this risk. This is evidenced by a $135.5 million settlement for damages caused by erosion and lack of sediment control after clearing and grading 1,000 acres of timber and farmland near a Georgia landowner’s property. And although the heavy metals used in solar panel infrastructure are said to be safe and pose no significant threat to soil quality, a study in 2021 found that ongoing monitoring is required to ensure this.

Here in Wisconsin, local news coverage has presented the project’s positives and glossed over the concerns of neighbors as NIMBYism. Wisconsin Public Radio quotes Michael Vickerman, policy director of RENEW Wisconsin, a non-profit environmental organization: “This lawsuit is the result of a couple of individuals and Town of Christiana government that just don’t like solar on agricultural land. That’s all it comes down to.” Vickerman added that large solar farms are operating in Wisconsin without causing any environmental damage (an unverified claim).

“This is good land that has grown crops for hundreds of years. Why do they need to put it here?”

Like several large-scale utility projects in Wisconsin, this development is being appealed in circuit court. The townships of Christiana and Deerfield are suing the PSC to stop the project, citing the land leases by the private utility exceeding the 15-year term of leases spelled out in Wisconsin’s Constitution.

Nationally, opposition to large-scale solar development from farmers and rural neighbors has been growing and becoming organized. A non-profit formed in 2018, Citizens for Responsible Solar, helps rural communities in fighting large-scale solar development on agricultural or forestry-zoned land. In the Catskill region of New York, for instance, opponents purchased 60 acres of a proposed solar development in an effort to stop the 267-acre solar project.

In Southwest Colorado, residents have organized and had success in opposing a solar development located on an important cultural landmark, Wright’s Mesa, through establishing local regulations. A current bill in the Wisconsin legislature would require similar local approval of major solar or wind projects before the PSC can decide on them.

Gary and Dana can find common cause with ranchers in Colorado, all asking questions about putting solar on farmland. Said Dana, “This is good land that has grown crops for hundreds of years. Why do they need to put it here?”

At this point, though, her question might be moot. In the town of Christiana, construction has already started on the solar array, with semis hauling large excavators following local tractors and grain carts as they bring in this year’s harvest.

A hundred miles west of the North Carolina coast, Adrian Locklear farms 4000 acres of soybeans; he swears by using microbial inoculants on his seeds every year. “Whenever we dig our plants up, we’re looking at our roots, there’s just so much more nodulation starting on the soybeans so much earlier, and they look so much more healthier, than if we did not inoculate,” he said.

Locklear farms in the coastal plains of southeastern North Carolina, which are known for their sandy well-draining soils, deposited there millions of years ago when the sea level was much higher. This soil has made it really challenging for Locklear to grow soybeans.

The nodules on the roots of soybean are essential to their nutrient content. Nodules are root growths that house nitrogen-fixing bacteria from the soil and in return the soybean receives nitrogen from the bacteria. However, these bacteria occur in extremely low quantities or are completely absent from sandy soils.

“A lot of times you dug plants up and you looked at the nodules, there wasn’t a lot of nodules on the plants. I could see it visually in the plant. They were a pale green and they didn’t quite have the vigor that some of the other plants had,” said Locklear.

Now that he uses seed inoculants he’s seen a vast improvement in yield. “I really think on a large scale, I think we’ve seen maybe a two-bushel increase.”

These types of seed inoculants are part of a growing market of biologicals — products containing microbes or biologically derived compounds that benefit crops — and are expected to grow into a $31.84 billion industry by 2029, according to Markets and Markets.

But do these products live up to the hype?

“The Wild West”

Biologicals are divided into four major groups: biopesticides, pathogen controls, biofertilizers, and biostimulants (which improve growth overall). There are also a variety of application techniques including a powder coated on the seed, a liquid applied in furrow, or sprayed directly onto plants. Some seeds are even sold pre-coated in an inoculant.

The mechanisms by which these products work are as varied as their application methods. Biofertilizers and biostimulants directly improve plant health by increasing nutrient uptake, root growth, yield, and vigor by forming partnerships with different microbes present in an inoculant.

Some types of biologicals, such as biopesticides, have been around since the 1930s. However, the reliability of newly developed biofertilizers and biostimulants has been met with some skepticism due to variability in success.

Piran Cargeeg has been working at the agrochemical company BASF for 35 years, focused on research and development of seed and soil biotechnologies, including biologicals. Cargeeg affirms that when biologicals first hit the market it was the Wild West of products and claims.

“I would agree that numerous early pioneering biologicals lacked performance consistency. Typically, for small and mid-range enterprises at this time — the drive to market and profitability were important for survival. Performance sometimes ‘lacked luster’ — generally as a result of reduced understanding of topic and technology, as well as not setting the correct expectations.” Cargeeg believes that in the rush to be a part of the expanding biologicals market, some smaller companies pushed products that had only been minimally tested and not marketed correctly, creating distrust among farmers.

In the rush to be a part of the expanding biologicals market, companies pushed products that had only been minimally tested and not marketed correctly, creating distrust among farmers.

But even with current improvements to biologicals technology, some are still concerned about their efficacy and consistency. Mallory Choudoir is an assistant professor and extension specialist at North Carolina State University who studies soil-microbe interactions in agriculture. “There’s this expanding market of biostimulants. And it’s just this immense commercial market and there’s very little regulation.”

In 2024, she tested the effects of four seed biostimulants on soybeans in the field. The claims of these products seemed too good to be true. One of the products in the study claimed up to a 10x return on investment and improved yield. However, Choudoir found no difference in yield between treated and untreated soybean. She reasons that perhaps nutrient-rich soil and efficient plant breeding have something to do with the biostimulants’ failure to perform. “In the field, we are evaluating these products in high-yield environments. And for the most part, we’ve bred plant varieties to perform well under high-nutrient conditions. So, there’s not really a need to establish relationships with microbes.”

Despite these lackluster results, she is hopeful that microbes could serve as an amendment for current fertilizer use, especially for more sustainable soil practices.

“I think biologicals will continue to improve. I don’t see this as this dichotomy between biologicals and chemistry, but I think there’s the opportunity to specifically reduce synthetic fertilizer inputs.”

Do Your Own Research

On the other hand, Adrian Locklear is glad that using biological inoculants has been worth his investment.

“When you talk about inoculants on the farm, that’s one of the cheapest things that you can put out to the plant. Anytime I can get a two-bushel increase on a $4-an-acre investment, I think I’m doing pretty good.”

Despite his personal success, Locklear suggests that other farmers should use biologicals on a case-by-case basis. “I mean, I know all regions of the country are different, different soil types, different microbes in your soil. But I think we have to look at it on a farm-by-farm basis and see how different soil types work. It’s like anything else; it might not work every single year on every single farm. That’s why I think you need to do your own research and study.”

Introducing biologicals is not only an additional monetary cost to growers but also another cost in the time growers need to research these innovative technologies. Cargeeg from BASF suggests that growers should consider all local data available before committing to a product.

“For any product, I would recommend to the grower to ask for field data generated in your local area across at least two growing seasons.”

“Anytime I can get a two-bushel increase on a $4-an-acre investment, I think I’m doing pretty good.”

Choudoir agrees. “Locally relevant field data is important. Some companies provide more information on the type of microbe, maybe where that microbe was sourced from, the specific mechanism of that microbe, whether that’s phosphorus solubilizing or nitrogen fixing. So those more specific modes of action can be a helpful way to at least include [biologicals] and evaluate. But certainly, it’s a cost.” Companies that not only market the benefits but also the mechanism by which these products work would allow farmers to make informed decisions based on the nutrient needs of their crops.

But even if biological companies provide product data, many farmers just don’t have the time to do the research needed to choose the right biological product. The Certified Biostimulant Program provides a solution to this problem. The program certifies there is data to support the claims made for a product, based on United States biostimulant industry guidelines. However this program is still in its infancy and only has 10 products registered.

The current best resource for farmers is to bring their questions about biologicals to their local extension office as Locklear did before he decided to use inoculants. “I talked to my local extension agent here in the county and about treating seed with some inoculants. And I guess we both agreed in our sanity and souls that that’d be a good practice for us to start doing.”

Looking to the Future

Consumers now not only demand that their food be healthy but also that the practices used to make those crops are sustainable. In a 2025 global consumer survey by PWC management they found 44% of consumers would be willing to pay more for food to support “actions taken to improve the health of the land and the environment.” Advocates argue that biologicals can provide a safer alternative to synthetic chemicals in terms of the effects on human health and soil health. Choudoir hopes as the possible benefits of biologicals increases, that biotechnology companies begin to target other aspects of sustainability and soil health.

“I think targeting all those processes that contribute to soil health, whether that’s nutrient cycling and reduced nutrient loss, reduced greenhouse gas emissions, potentially some carbon soil aggregation. There’s a lot of opportunities there.”

Locklear just hopes for an improvement to ease of use in inoculant technology overall.

“Putting it on the seed is pretty easy, but it’s a little messy trying to get it coated evenly. I would probably like to see more liquid, so I can do more and firmer products. A lot of times with the coating stuff, you got to mix it really well to get a good even coat.”

Meanwhile Cargeeg is optimistic that biologicals can one day become just another part of what a farmer uses to improve yield.

“Biologicals are increasingly finding their place as a tool in the agronomic toolbox. Definitely not silver bullets, but if used judiciously with the correct expectation setting, the right biologicals will provide value to the grower.”

Last summer, Marshal P., a prisoner and cook at the Marble Valley Regional Correctional Facility (MVRCF) in Rutland, Vermont, prepared tomato sauce from scratch, using 300 pounds of tomatoes grown at a farm nearby. “It’s actually cool to make it all fresh,” he said.

Marshal, who patronized farmstands prior to being incarcerated, was pleased by the positive response from fellow prisoners to his homemade meals. “Guys will come by and say, ‘Hey, dinner was great!’” he reported.

Using nutritious, local ingredients in a prison setting to cook food from scratch is far from the norm. Yet MVRCF is one of a handful of correctional facilities throughout the country serving fresh food crafted from area products, reshaping the unhealthy, tasteless, even toxic diet that has historically been served to people in prison.

“Food is so much more than what is on the tray,” said Leslie Soble of Impact Justice, a nonprofit prison reform organization which released a groundbreaking report in 2020 on the food served in United States prisons. It starkly details aspects like maggots found in meat and quotes those formerly incarcerated: “The food there was designed to slowly break your body and mind.”

Against the backdrop of George Floyd’s murder and the hot topics of public health and food security and access, the findings brought a newfound awareness to this issue, offering fresh approaches and fueling conversations and nascent change.

“Obviously there is the nutritional aspect, physical health, mental health, but also how do people absorb a sense of identity, what’s being communicated through food?,” said Soble, the report’s lead author. “Is there a way that food could support re-entry?”

Better food and nutrition hopefully translates into an improved rehabilitative experience, along with lower health care costs for the state and taxpayers, said Isaac Dayno, public policy director for Vermont’s Department of Corrections (DOC). Correctional facilities “have a moral obligation,” he added, “to support our {agricultural} communities and to make sure we’re getting folks healthy, fresh food.”

Over the past decade, amid the recognition that access to healthy food is a human right, there have been efforts to overhaul institutional food at hospitals and schools — but not at prisons and jails. “Correctional facilities,” said Dayno, “have always been a place where we put people we don’t want to think about, where we kind of disappear folks who society has deemed are too much trouble to be dealt with in the public sphere.”

“When you get the fresher stuff, you notice the difference daily on how your body is feeling.”

Kyle Moore, MVRCF’s food service supervisor, was purchasing local corn and apples before Vermont’s DOC instituted a strategic plan prioritizing health and wellness in 2024. Moore said now they’re considering how the food served affects “the way people perceive themselves, where they’re better nourished and feeling like they can then go and do things that they can better accomplish their goals.”

Discovering that Vermont’s procurement contracts allowed some discretionary purchasing, Moore visited over 50 farms across the state, developing relationships with producers. His experience highlights a prominent hurdle: Each state possesses different, often cumbersome, and poorly understood procurement policies.

California’s application is 32 pages long, said Hope Sippola, farmer and co-owner of Spork Food Hub in Davis, California, which supplies food from area farmers to institutions like schools, prisons, and prison hospitals. Spork is part of “Harvest of the Month” (HOTM), a pilot program of Impact Justice and the California DOC which delivers a California-grown product like persimmons and asparagus to the state’s adult facilities monthly.

“It always aligned with our mission to improve the food in the places that need it most,” said Sippola. HOTM is part of Impact Justice’s farm to corrections program, which also holds trauma-informed nutrition education classes for those formerly imprisoned. Fresh produce exposes those inside to new foods, tastes, ideas, and understanding about food, said Heile Gantan-Keo, who oversees the program. It launched in three sites in July 2023; by year’s end, all 31 will be participating. Impact Justice’s other projects include advocacy work and recommending best kitchen practices.

Because Spork aggregates products from mid-size and smaller farms to assemble enough to meet an institution’s needs, producers are able to access markets they might not be able to otherwise. The food hub model is also key to managing the procurement process, as most farmers do not have the time nor bandwidth for the intensive application.

Sippola notes the program’s value to farmers, who need high-volume, consistent year-round sales — particularly over the summer, when produce is most abundant.

Sippola notes HOTM’s value to farmers, who need high-volume, consistent year-round sales — particularly over the summer, when produce is most abundant. Legislation requiring that, by 2026, 60% of agricultural food products purchased by California government agencies be produced in-state, offers real opportunity for market expansion. But winning a contract is lengthy, unwieldy, and unguaranteed; agencies are required to review at least three bids for any item.

Moreover, correctional facilities’ food budgets often only allot under three dollars per person per day according to Impact Justice. California-grown produce costs nearly 20-30 cents more per serving than distributor offerings from Mexico.

Surprisingly though, purchasing nearby can often be less expensive, said Mark McBrine. A farm owner and director of farm to table programs at Maine’s DOC, McBrine pioneered creative, local purchasing while establishing the same self-described “scratch cooking, whole foods approach” that he used at home. He believes that eating convenient, processed foods has wrought a health crisis in America.

Under McBrine’s ovesight, Mountain View Correctional Facility (MVCF) uses Maine Grain Alliance’s literal “run of the mill” flour. This product results from the two or three initial runs of the stone mill to fine tune the consistency of a particular grind, at a considerable discount. Baking a sub roll in-house costs 5.8 cents, versus 33 cents for one purchased via a state contract. Instead of paying for convenience, said McBrine, “We’re able to do this very efficiently and save a tremendous amount of money. And it’s a lot better product.”

Moore sometimes purchases seconds or an oversupply at lesser cost. His staff is testing products from Salvation Farms, an enterprise using agricultural surplus to build a resilient food system in Vermont. Salvation is developing a line of minimally processed frozen foods like cubed winter squash crafted from seconds and gleaned produce that can be easily incorporated into institutional meal plans.

Moore has also teamed with Farm to Institution New England (FINE), which works to support a healthy, equitable, local food supply chain. The organization brings together a diverse network of partners ranging from producers and processors to colleges and carceral institutions. It is currently surveying his area expenditures, about $35,000, to offer suggestions for establishing local procurement at Vermont’s other correctional facilities.

“The world of people doing this work is still very small and tight knit, but it has expanded exponentially in the last five years.”

FINE also conducts research, hosts a biennial summit, and facilitates Zoom calls and communities of practice for the region’s prisons for networking and idea sharing.

Some takeaways are as simple as working with a facility dietician to develop purchasing flexibility by adjusting a menu item description from, say, broccoli salad to seasonal salad. Other, bigger shifts, like seasonal menu planning, procurement changes, and increased budgets, will take time, effort, and likely, political will.

Along with the changes to the food served in prisons, facilities in other states like Michigan and Oregon have developed high-quality kitchen and gardening apprenticeships in which participants receive certifications and can sometimes be paid. Others, however, have come under fire for abusive prison labor programs. MCVF’s program supplies the prison, has a regenerative focus, and is even the subject of a documentary, Seeds of Change.

Reforming the food served in prisons is an uphill battle — there are at least 6245 correctional facilities in the United States — and the topic is getting another spotlight with reports of moldy, expired food being served at ICE detention centers. Soble is encouraged not just by the outlier efforts taking root, but also the willingness of policy makers and those working in corrections to being more open to considering avenues for change. “The world of people doing this work is still very small and tight knit, but it has expanded exponentially in the last five years,” she said. “Even if we’re not seeing a ton of concrete, on-the-ground change, I do feel there in the past five years has certainly been a shift in the way we talk about this issue and a shift in who is participating in those conversations.”

“Before,” said Marshal P., “you were always feeling like you were missing something, even taking vitamins.” He mentions MVRCF’s shift from powdered to fresh milk. “When you get the fresher stuff, you notice the difference daily on how your body is feeling.” He appreciates the benefits to him, others who are incarcerated, and to farms, too. Said Marshal, “It feels good all around.”

Elk are blessed with a unique physical feature that has been a point of delight around the world for thousands of years: They grow velvet every year.

The first wave is velvet on their baby horns, which naturally drop between February to April. The next velvet comes in on their full-fledged antlers, which also drop every subsequent year. Velvet is actually a sensitive skin with blood vessels, with full sensation. When their antlers are full-grown in August, they wander around and scrape the velvet off on tree trunks to reveal the bone underneath. It’s a rite of passage.

Velvet is one of the many reasons why Diana Molenaar loves raising elk. They’re smart, they don’t smell bad, they’re large — 800 to 1,300 pounds apiece — “and they’re pretty,” she says.

She and her husband own the Timber Butte Elk Ranch one hour north of Boise. They have 84 acres on high, dry land. About 37 acres are fenced, which is where her 100 head of elk live. The elk eat on fresh grass pasture for six to eight weeks in the spring, and feed on alfalfa the rest of the year. Those first velvet sheds also serve a unique purpose: They’re collected and cut up for dog chews.

This is one of many applications of elk. The industry is strong, and the price of elk is solid and high. But the future of the elk market is at a crossroads, and could end up being many different things that appeal to different people.

What would it mean for the elk industry to shed its own velvet, and keep growing?

Historic Distribution

Elk, much like bison, are native to the United States. Their historic distribution was vast, from New Jersey to California. The only places they were not native to were Florida and New England. In the wild, their biggest threat is encroaching humans. The elk industry was booming in the 1990s because for thousands of years, elk antlers sheathed in velvet have been a component of Chinese medicine, and sold for between $35 to $110 a pound. Elk meat was also higher than beef back then, and was about $4.50 per pound versus $0.80 for beef. But the real moneymaker was the antlers.

But the bubble burst across the global market, even with plenty of sales, when elk started to get sick with conditions like chronic wasting disease. Combined with continental drought that forced farmers to pay more for feed, elk farmers exited the market, and only a few are left standing.

One curious aspect of elk meat is that any elk raised in captivity has long been separated from their wild counterparts. Elk raised for meat aren’t wild anymore, and their previous generations have been domesticated for decades. There is a hard line between wild elk in the Yellowstone Valley and what is harvested at an elk ranch or farm. Those animals have no relation, and it is illegal to capture and breed any wild elk.

“It’s really hard to compete with [New Zealand] supply-wise. We don’t have enough to sustain U.S. demand. We just don’t.”

Robert Northrup, an elk farmer in Luddington, Michigan, has 130 acres with about 110 elk roaming throughout the year. The farm is open to the public in the summer when there are wagon rides to see the animals. But the farm isn’t for elk meat. 

“Our primary goal is to raise breeding stock,” he says. When it comes time for animals to be sold, a good amount stay in Michigan, but others go as far as Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma, and Idaho. Most of the stock goes into the shooting market for hunts. That means that a high-fenced elk hunting outfitter in the larger Yellowstone region may very well be stocked with trophy elk raised in Michigan — they would be significantly easier to hunt.

That’s because elk raised in captivity tend to be bigger. Elk are measured by inches of antler, and one of Northrup’s elk is typically 600 inches. If one finds a 400-inch elk running in the wild, that’s “extraordinary,” he says. The size of the antlers is the big draw for hunting lodges and outfitters.

However, the deviation between domesticated and wild stock is a big headache for hunters. If a domesticated elk or deer breaks out of its fence and mates with a wild one, diseases can be spread between herds. That means that sick domesticated elk have to be culled at the owner’s expense, and wild counterparts can continue spreading different genetic variations that the population doesn’t have.

Plus, domesticated elk aren’t afraid of humans, so they and their young may not have the same instinct to hide or run from a hunter. Fencing can also be problematic because private elk ranches can border public grazing lands that wild herds would otherwise use, but don’t have access to. Some hunters argue that the very existence of commercialized elk and deer ranching is deteriorating the richness of those wild creatures and their habitats.

Dollars and Cents

“The elk market is extremely strong,” Northrup says of the live sales sector for breeding and hunting. One reason for that is the elongated breeding season. An elk can’t have a calf until they are two years old, and when they do give birth, it’s typically to a single calf. It takes time for more stock, whether live animals or meat, to enter the market. Northrup has been sold out of birthing cows for six years straight, and has a waiting list. The market for shooter bulls is also strong because there is a shortage.

On the other end of the spectrum, Morgan Cummons, an elk farmer and rancher from Del Norte, Colorado, has about 190 elk in 140 fenced acres. She raises elk for meat, and her team ships out elk, bison, rabbit, whitetail deer, and goat meat. Yet for all of the different products she carries, elk is the bread and butter and constitutes about 65 percent of sales — much of it online, from around the country.

“There aren’t a lot of outlets for elk meat. We definitely have a niche market, and are one of the top competitors,” she says. Her ground meat ranges between $10.95 and $12.50 a pound.

Similarly, Molenaar says that every time she processes elk meat, she sells out. She typically charges $16.98 for a pound of grind. New York steaks go for about $34 a pound, and tenderloins $40 a pound. Molenaar knows it’s expensive, but she sells out within three weeks every year.

The big global competitor for elk is New Zealand, Cummons says. They’re able to raise a large amount of elk and red deer, so when one orders an elk steak at a restaurant, it’s likely from there. “It’s really hard to compete with them supply-wise,” Cummons says. “We don’t have enough to sustain U.S. demand. We just don’t.”

So What’s in the Way?

Molenaar says that a big barrier to entry to growing the elk industry, no matter how strong prices are now, is cost. For example, game fencing is different from typical fences. It’s eight feet high because an elk can generally jump about seven feet alone, and consists of squares. It’s about $500 for a roll of 330 yards. Ranchers also need to have substantial acreage for the animals to graze, but the rate of land per animal is actually quite similar to cattle: Both elk and cattle need about one acre per animal.

In Michigan, Northrup says that the regulatory mechanisms can add up, though they’re not entirely prohibitive. The license for the facility is about $770 every three years, and medical testing for chronic wasting disease across the whole herd is about $3,000 every three years. An annual inspection costs about $600, and any elk transported out of state costs $500 for a veterinary visit.

Part of the barrier to more growth in the industry could very well be the same thing that makes the price per pound so astronomical: It’s niche. People don’t really consider raising elk when compared to other proteins, and people that don’t eat elk may not have an easy way to try it. Molenaar doesn’t see the industry exactly dropping its velvet any time soon.

“It’s kind of stagnant … Information doesn’t get out,” she says. “Unfortunately I don’t think it’s an industry that will thrive, which is too bad. It’s rewarding.”

Cummons is more optimistic.

“I think [the field] is going to grow still. I really do,” she says. She’s involved with the North American Elk Breeders Association, and sees new faces at every meeting. The late 1990s may have been booming, but she thinks it’s coming back. “We have the potential to get there.”

Growing up in the Bay Area, Dungeness crab was found on the dinner table every holiday season. On Christmas Eve, with friends and family, we waited excitedly for the night to fall and consume crab and butter accompanied by my family’s homemade Caesar salad. We’d debate over the best sauce, who would eat the most, and, importantly, if it was best to pile the meat or eat as you go. It was a longstanding tradition, not only in our household, but in households across the greater Bay Area.

“I moved here in 1996 and only then learned about how San Francisco celebrated Thanksgiving, Christmas Eve, and New Year’s Eve with Dungeness crab,” said Kenny Belov, part owner of Fish Restaurant and TwoXSea fish distributor in Sausalito, California.

But in recent years, this tradition has been put in peril.

“With the ups and downs and the seasons of late, that tradition of having local crab for the holiday season has become a thing of the past, which is very hard for me to stomach,” Belov said. “There’s a full generation of people now who know nothing about that tradition.”

What was a cherished local winter staple and a critical source of income for local fishermen and their communities has slowly evolved into an annual struggle. Over the past six years the local California Dungeness crab fishery has been mired by late starts and early closures. The cause? An increase in whales becoming entangled in the lines of crab traps and other fishing gear. The delays have turned an historically six-month fishery into just a four-month one. Crabbing for Dungeness will likely have a late start again, in early to mid-January, entirely missing the lucrative holiday season.

Whale entanglements have been part of fishing off the California coast for many years. In fact, in 2016, entanglements rose to their highest numbers ever. They used to typically happen in spring, as hungry whales returned to their feeding grounds. However, it wasn’t until 2019 when entanglements began to occur more commonly in the winter, leading the California Department of Fish and Wildlife — which oversees the management of California fisheries — to delay the crabbing season to reduce the amount of fishing gear in the water entangling whales. Since then, there have only been two on-time starts to the season, almost entirely due to whale entanglements.

Whale entanglements are what happens when a whale gets caught up in any kind of fishing gear. This can cause something as mild as strain on the animal, but often can lead to death from getting trapped. Usually this is from vertical lines, long ends of rope, propped to the surface with a buoy and fixed to the ocean floor by the weight of a crab trap, often referred to as a pot.

“It used to be that we rarely would see a whale,” said Dick Ogg, Bodega Bay-based fisherman and a member of the Dungeness Crab Task Force, a working group between state and federal agencies, conservation groups, and crabbers. “Now we see them all the time, everywhere we go.”

“With all the delays and closures, it feels like a ghost town now during what used to be our busiest season.”

For many observers, this shows that whale conservation efforts are proceeding well. This may not be entirely true. From 2012 to 2021, scientists observed a decrease in the population of humpback whales by nearly 7,000 individuals, or close to a quarter of their population. Scientists widely believed this was caused by a massive marine heatwave in the region, ominously called “The Blob,” which impacted what they ate, and in turn harmed their numbers. After this event their numbers began to rise, but scientists noticed that the whales were coming closer to the coastlines to search for food, putting them in contact more often with Dungeness crab traps and other fishery lines. This has created the situation the Dungeness crab fishery is in today: a shortened crabbing season leaving many crabbers — who might only catch Dungeness crabs and may not have knowledge of other fisheries — out of work.

As the years have gone on, Ogg said, the crab fishery has been doing much better to avoid whale entanglements by spreading out where they place their lines, ideally leaving more room for whales to pass. The Dungeness fishery is so popular, however, that this is not always possible.

“There is not one fisherman that would say, ‘Oh, yeah, I want to go out and entangle an animal,’” said Ogg. “We’re doing everything we can to minimize our potential interaction.”

It is important to note that many other fisheries cause entanglements as well. That said, the Dungeness crab fishery has historically been the most detrimental to whales due to the sheer number of crabbers going out during the first days of the season. According to the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, the Dungeness crabbing season gives out anywhere from 350 to 700 permits any given season accounting for many thousands of traps and lines in the water, making around $40 million in a decent year. Compare this with one of California’s other lucrative fisheries, market squid, which makes on average $60 million, but usually gives out 150 permits.

In a recent press release from NOAA fisheries, confirmed whale entanglements in 2024 were up to 95. “This is higher than the 64 confirmed large whale entanglement cases in 2023. It is also above the average annual number of confirmed entanglements over the previous 17 years, which was 71.4,” the press release states. These numbers are a total for the whole of the United States, but 25 percent, the greatest contribution from any region, occurred off the West Coast in California waters.

For Belov, the delays impact his sales during the winter; luckily his businesses have gained back those lost months in February.

“There is not one fisherman that would say, ‘Oh, yeah, I want to go out and entangle an animal.’”

“I’m now, as a wholesaler, selling Valentine’s Day crab,” Belov says. “For our first 15 years of business, we never saw our fleet fishing through Valentine’s Day. They were long done by then, getting ready for salmon. So it’s not so much that we’ve lost sales. We’ve just shifted when we have those sales.”

He also emphasized the importance of accepting and moving with the changes in a shifting market. “I am a huge proponent of change, and that you always have to be growing your businesses and adapting to changing conditions. Doesn’t matter what business you’re in,” said Belov. “You always have to have an eye on the future. And if you don’t have an eye on the future, you’re going to be left behind.”

Belov, however, is fortunate to have a restaurant in Sausalito, a wealthy suburb and tourist destination just outside San Francisco. Having so many more potential customers to serve on a weekly basis may mean that he is in a more fortunate position than others.

For decades, the crabbing season brought in vital tourism to more remote coastal communities across the Bay Area. Gurpreet Singh, owner of Fishermen’s Cove restaurant and tackle shop in Bodega Bay, said he has lost around half of his revenue during the November through January holiday season due to entanglements.

“With all the delays and closures, it feels like a ghost town now during what used to be our busiest season,” said Singh. “It’s affected a lot of people’s livelihoods, including ours.”

“You always have to be growing your businesses and adapting to changing conditions. Doesn’t matter what business you’re in.”

With a late start this means that, rather than make that money back later in the season, Singh just outright loses it. Since Bodega Bay is a small town far away from the urban hubs of the Bay Area, businesses there rely heavily on tourist dollars to stimulate the economy. As the holiday season is the most common travel time for people around the country, this is a very important time of year for restaurants and businesses in the North Bay. Losing out on the crabs has meant that the whole of the community is impacted.

While the impacts of the entanglements are great, solutions are on the horizon. Conservationists and a growing number of fishermen believe that the relatively new technology of pop-up crab pots may be the answer to the issue of entanglements.

Since 2018 many crabbers in conjunction with conservation groups and fisheries have been experimenting with this new technology during the spring season. Crab pots are dropped to the bottom of the ocean with a long rope, often with a buoy attached to the top for easier retrieval. This line, as noted earlier, is the key cause of entanglements. Pop-up pots are simply crab traps with no vertical line, thus reducing the threat of entanglements. This new kind of pot drops to the ocean floor with a line and buoy trapped inside of it. When the crabber is ready to haul in the pots, they can release the buoy via a sonar signal, bringing up the rope only for the necessary moment of retrieving the traps, greatly reducing the chances for whales to get trapped in the gear.

Over years of experimentation under experimental fishing permits, many crabbers have found it to work fairly well. However, this tech is only for the spring season, when the waters are less choppy, and the chances of whale entanglements are typically greater.

“This was never going to be solved by the government, by, you know, the people making the technology, by the NGOs, right? It was really a few fishermen that decided to step up.”

Oceana, an ocean conservation organization, recently released results of a study of pop-up crab pots and their economic viability for the spring. It shows that across California during this last spring season, when the waters were closed for conventional crab traps, pop-up pots brought in 1.4 million dollars of crab, showing that the traps can be economically effective while an area may be full of whales.

“This was never going to be solved by the government, by, you know, the people making the technology, by the NGOs, right? It was really a few fishermen that decided to step up,” said Geoff Shester, California campaign director for Oceana. “And I think a lot of fishermen took a big risk by going out there and trying this — a financial risk, a risk within their own community. And they really brought this from a concept to something that now looks like it really could be the future for the fishery.”

Fishermen are still hesitant about using ropeless pots in the winter, due to large swells and safety concerns. Regardless, it is a cause for hope that, at least for the spring season, the crabbers could remit their losses slightly as more of them take on this new style of equipment.

The crab fishery itself has been remarkably stable since it began to be regulated by the state in 1895. However, as the climate begins to warm, these sorts of impacts will increase. What we know currently is that the season has shortened. Along with that we are watching the local environment change alongside local economies and traditions.

INTRODUCTION

Sarah Mock: The first time I learned about “the little death,” I was so confused. I was a kid, reading The Carnivorous Carnival, a “Series of Unfortunate Events” book by Lemony Snicket. And he mentioned the French version of the phrase– La Petit Mort– which he defined as “a feeling like a part of you has died.”

But as a precocious adolescent, I thought I’d look it up myself to be sure, and I found out that “the little death” might literally meet that definition, but that it usually references the moment immediately after an orgasm when a person experiences a brief loss of consciousness or awareness of the world. As you can imagine, thirteen-year-old me was scandalized. I mean, also fascinated and titillated, but also scandalized.

So after finding out that a “little death” is a good thing, you can imagine my further confusion to learn that when someone has “bought the farm,” they’ve died. As a kid who grew up on a farm, I couldn’t make sense of why purchasing farmland would be comparable to a person’s demise– though it did help me connect the dots on why a dog or a horse gets “sent to a farm Upstate” when they’ve reached the end of their life.

So on the one hand, I learned about the idiom of the “death” of sex, on the other “farmland ownership” of death. In this syntactic equation, it felt like I could cancel out the deaths, and maybe create a new idiom, wherein having “bought the farm” is the sex metaphor, given the shared feeling of safety, satiation, and contented accomplishment that comes with both orgasm and, I imagine, property acquisition.

In that alternate reality, to declare that someone you know and love has “bought the farm” would be a cause for festivities rather than a funeral.

[MUSICAL INTERLUDE]

But in this reality, we do not often get to celebrate people having “bought the farm,”not figuratively, or even literally, because so few people literally get to do it these days. And it’s not just new and beginning farmers that struggle to buy farmland, it’s almost everyone else. With the possible exception being the rapidly growing group of institutional investors from the worlds of banking, insurance, private equity, and beyond, that have flocked to buying American farmland, especially since 2008. But the origins of modern farmland’s affordability crisis began way earlier than that, and can be traced pretty directly to the 1970s and ‘80s, a time during which farmland was transformed from the home of farmers into one of the world’s most rewarding and stable financial assets.

So today we’re going to explore the intersection of farmland and finance. We’ll follow one farmer on their journey to farmland ownership, as they reflect on the pleasure and pain of buying and caring for land, and we’ll gain a deeper understanding of how large-scale farmland investing earns your retirement account a good return, while making farmers vulnerable to the whims of speculators. Through all of this, I’ll be on the lookout for insight as to why “buying the farm” seems an obvious source of pleasure and satisfaction, but has instead become a symbol of loss and pain.

In other words– why do we dread having “bought the farm?”

That’s today on The Only Thing That Lasts. I’m Sarah Mock.

[MUSICAL INTERLUDE]

PART 1: The Farmland Gambit

SM: I want to start off by introducing you to Jackson Rolett. He’s a family farmer who’s lived and farmed most of his life in South Central Kentucky. He’s also a first generation farmer, and in many ways the exact kind of farmer that I think many dream about. He’s young and enthusiastic with a strong ethic around land and animal care. He’s a student of Wendell Berry and gets excited about growing healthy, organic food for his community, but he also needs to provide for his growing family, and wants to engage his children in the wonder of living close to the land.

Jackson’s farming career also, I think, reflects our collective aspiration that a person can start from anywhere, and through a combination of hardwork, grit, and entrepreneurial spirit, start a farming legacy.

Jackson realized he wanted to farm in college, and his journey to the land started as soon as he graduated. Without a farm in his own family to start on, he began the slow work of learning as a farm employee– first as an apprentice and then a farm manager while also working another job to make ends meet. After years of building skill, he was eventually able to bring together the money and confidence to lease land and start his own farm. And then, years of careful saving and planning later, he achieved the near impossible. He had the opportunity to buy his own farm, with the help of a USDA-backed beginning farmer loan.

Jackson Rolett: It was one of those moments when we signed the paperwork that we thought we just bought the place we are going to be buried in, it was 10 acres. It was close to neighbors that we knew it was plenty of room for us. The house– it wasn’t great, but it was a house. And we thought that this is where we are going to spend the rest of our life. We envision the grandkids coming back here to like the family farm, right?

SM: As we discussed last episode– actually achieving the dream of farm ownership is incredibly hard for young farmers, and for a number of reasons. A low volume of farmland for sale at any given time means prices are constantly rising. Plus there’s costly interest involved in financing farmland, and farmers who can’t pay cash need to make as much as a 50% down payment. In short, without a lot of money already in the bank, buying the farm often doesn’t pencil out.

And yet, Jackson and his family made it happen– they bought the farm. Literally.

But in the course of just a few years, things started to go sideways. Jackson’s high-value organic vegetables were repeatedly contaminated by herbicide drift from neighboring farms– devastating his crop and leaving what survived unsellable. When Jackson tried to address these issues with the adjacent landowners, most were unreceptive to changing anything about the way they were farming. And in a few cases, Jackson couldn’t even get ahold of the neighbors, as some parcels were controlled by absentee owners, and tracking down the ultimate decision-maker for a conversation proved impossible. Year after year, Jackson’s rows of fresh vegetables and herbs suffered the damages inflicted by these neighbors, until it simply became untenable.

JR: We ended up selling that farm and it felt bold, and scary. Like, I thought we did the thing, I thought we apprenticed and leased and bought the farm and that was the end of the journey. There was nothing else after that. So it felt like going backwards, starting back over from square one.

SM: If having “bought the farm” is a type of death, maybe having “sold the farm” is a kind of rebirth– a sad one, for sure– but one that opens up new possibilities, as it did for Jackson and his family.

Selling the farm in 2021 meant they were able to get a good price for the land, and they immediately set about looking for another farm to settle down on. The problem was, all the other properties they might have moved to had also become significantly more expensive. Especially for what they were looking for– five to ten acres of land that would be good enough for growing vegetables, but also with a home where the family could live. Jackson wasn’t looking for a palatial estate, thousands of acres, or a swimming pool. Just a small farm, that not so long ago, would have been affordable for a farmer. And yet today–

JR: A lot of realtors told us that’s rare and you’re going to pay a lot of money for it because that’s like a luxury property now to have a home with that much land around it and it not either go with a larger parcel, like a larger land purchase or not be subdivided into a subdivision.

SM: Though he was able to sell the first farm for more than they bought for, Jackson’s family hadn’t lived there long enough to build up extensive equity. They were in a healthy financial position after the sale, but still not rich enough to compete with, say, a stock broker looking for a country estate or a developer looking to build a planned community in the same corner of Kentucky where he intended to farm.

[MUSICAL INTERLUDE]

Jackson’s difficulty in finding a farm to fit his needs is not unique in agriculture. Partly this is due to the nature of the farmland market itself. On average, only about 1-2% of farmland turns over every year. Or put another way– in America, a farm generally only sells on the open market once every three to four generations.

PART 2: The History of Competing with Farmers for Land

SM: But beyond the fact that farmland is so rarely for sale, and that competition for land in general from uses like urban development is stiff, we often hear about another culprit, who’s guilty of buying prime agricultural acres and jacking up prices in farmland markets. These are the institutional farmland investors. 

Whether we’re talking about hedge funds and companies, individuals like Bill Gates and institutions like the Mormon church, or even foreign entities and nations, it seems like the epidemic of non-farmers, especially corporations, buying and holding, or in other words, speculating, in farmland rose from almost nothing to crisis levels in just the last decade or two.

Frankly, that is kind of true– but also, it’s more complicated than that.

Madeleine Fairbairn: There had been of course farmland investment forever.

SM: That’s Madeleine Fairbairn, an associate professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She literally wrote the book on farmland investing- it’s called Fields of Gold: Financing the Global Land Rush.

MF: But the 2008 moment seemed to be a moment in which the farmland investment industry really crystallized as a thing. You start to see a lot of new entities being created, a lot of new asset management companies that specialized in farmland investment as well as a lot of existing asset management companies making farmland funds just really fast.

SM: Twenty years ago, when Madeleine first started to learn more about why these changes were happening, she discovered that it was no accident that 2008 was the moment that farmland got on the radar of so many in the investing class.

MF: In a way it’s around 2008, this kind of financialization of land started in large part because of market uncertainty, because people were freaking out about the global financial crisis and looking for real assets where they could park their wealth and feel confident that it was safe.

SM: This confidence in farmland didn’t come from nowhere. It’s something of a “truth universally acknowledged” by some of the very biggest and oldest financial institutions in the country, that farmland is an excellent growth investment, as long as you have time to wait. This is in part because of some key features of farmland– for example, the supply is fixed. As Mark Twain famously quipped, “God isn’t making any more of it,” and in fact, between environmental and industrial impacts, the total quantity of possible farmland is shrinking slightly– as we explored in Episode One. This limited and/or shrinking supply means that what’s left gets more and more valuable all the time.

Another feature of farmland– it can be rented out, like rooms in an apartment building, but unlike an apartment building, farmland does not depreciate. There are no lightbulbs to replace, carpets to upgrade, or units to renovate, and there never will be. Farmland, then, carries on accumulating rents while very rarely requiring any additional investments from the landlord.

Investors realized long before 2008 that farmland is both an investment that appreciates purely by nature of its rareness, like gold, and one that yields cost-free rental income on top of that appreciation. These investors realized that farmland could outdo even the old folktale– this asset was a goose laying golden eggs, but the goose itself was also made of gold.

[MUSICAL INTERLUDE]

It wasn’t Goldman Sachs or the Bill Gates of the world who first discovered this insight. To understand who did, and how, we’ll have to rewind a bit, to a time before companies bought farmland at all. In this era, the only companies involved in farmland markets didn’t own the dirt, they earned interest by lending money to regular people who wanted to buy farmland. In other words, they invested in farmland by giving loans to farmers.

MF: Life insurance companies had been doing tons of farm mortgage lending for ages. And it made sense because they have these really long-term liabilities that are quite predictable out into the future, and farm mortgages are similar.

SM: So the business of life insurance works like this: An insurance customer gives a company a little bit of money over a long period of time, so that if they die, their family can receive some substantial payout. The idea for the buyer of the life insurance is that if they, you know, figuratively “buy the farm”– their family will get much more money out than they ever paid in.

This business model only works because thousands or millions of people are paying into the insurance scheme all at once, and many fewer than that are making a claim at any given time. But it also works because insurance companies are taking the millions they receive and investing it in assets and ideas that will help them grow the pot overall. That means when policies need to pay out, an insurance company has both premium income and investment income to ensure they remain solvent.

Nearly 100 years before 2008, insurance companies had already realized that farm mortgages were a good asset to invest their premiums in, because farm mortgages both led to regular income in the form of mortgage payments, and if the farmer couldn’t pay back their loan, the whole deal was backed by a hard asset– the farmland– which the insurance company could foreclose on and then sell to recover the rest of their money. Compared to investing in companies or stocks, which could go belly-up and leave investors with nothing, farmland loans seemed almost risk-free.

For years, insurance companies were some of the only institutional investors engaged in this kind of lending. After all, a company would have to have a lot of assets, and a very long time horizon on which to grow them, to make investing in farmland in the 1930s, 40s, and 50s pencil out as a business.

But then the 1970s hit, and everything changed. In the year 1970, an acre of Midwestern farmland might’ve sold for about $200. By 1980, just 10 years later, the same acre would have sold for over $2,000. For a farmer with a thousand acres of farmland, this was a nearly unfathomable growth in net worth, and suddenly investors well beyond the life insurance space were starting to take notice. This was absolutely a “dollar signs in the eyes” era, but beyond the huge returns farmland was creating was the fact that farmland was also becoming massively more valuable during an of hyper-inflation in the rest of the economy. So while companies, stocks, and goods were becoming less valuable due to financial conditions, farmland was not only holding but growing its value. It became clear that farmland provided a hedge against inflation, and institutional investors were champing at the bit to get their hands on it.

So some big institutional investors started to put out proposals about how they planned to enter the farmland market.

MF: The big one was 1977 when the Merrill Lynch Hubbard and this Chicago bank proposed to create this entity called Agland Trust that was specifically for investing pension capital into farmland. And it was just panned, like there were congressional hearings called all kinds of Congress people across the aisle, like Chuck Grassley’s there, are just horrified.

SM: In the late 1970s, politicians and the general public were shocked and incensed by the idea that companies, rather than farmers, would attempt to buy farmland. Lending farmers money and collecting interest was one thing, but actually owning the land themselves, and thus turning the independent American farmer into tenants and workers, forced to share his harvest with Wall Street fat cats? That was a step too far. The public backlash back then to this proposal would have been familiar to many of us today. The public said clearly, “farmland is for farmers, not companies and investors.” And so for many would-be institutional investors of the era, their proposals bought the farm.

By the mid-1980s though, these banks and funds were counting their blessings, because the 1980s farm crisis that came on the heels of the 1970s boom hit farmland prices particularly hard. Land values collapsed, and tens of thousands of farmers went bankrupt.

In a cruel twist of fate for many farmers that became a lucrative one for their lenders, the economic carnage of the 1980s farm crisis left the insurance companies, who held many of these farm mortgages, as the owners of quite a bit of farmland. Had the insurance companies sold all their new farmland in the ‘80s, they’d have taken a bath on their investment, but they knew– from decades of experience– that if they could just hold it for a few years, the value would return. So these companies decided to keep the land in the meantime and rent it out. They were carrying out the exact plan the public rejected in the 1970s, but this time, there were no splashy proposed announcements or congressional hearings. It all happened very quietly, behind closed doors.

The companies that pioneered this in-house farmland management in the 1980s became the grandfathers of the farmland investing space, so that by the time 2008 rolled around, they were well-established, well-respected, and ready to do what couldn’t be done 40 years before.

As the Great Recession struck, these managers presented farmland as a palatable and convenient asset class for anyone looking for a long-term, reliable investment, in hard assets, that hedge against inflation.

They could show that during 2008, farmland values on average rose 16%, while the S&P 500 lost 37% of its value. Plus, rental income makes farmland a short-term win, asset appreciation makes it a long-term win. And the only difficulty was owning and managing it, but farmland managers could now do that for you.

“Farmland,” they promised, was, “the ultimate blue chip stock,” and they could help you buy it as seamlessly as you buy shares of Boeing or GE. New investment vehicles were quickly emerging to help– from public farmland REITs to real estate investment funds, crowdfunding vehicles and more. And then came the tech solutions of the 2010s, and all of that has led to right now, where I can get on an app and invest $10,000 in a farm in Missouri– without ever setting foot in the state or talking to a farmer. Or, you know, getting up from my desk.

[MUSICAL INTERLUDE]

It’s worth noting that, especially amongst very large investors, they generally want only a small part of their overall portfolio to be invested in farmland, because farmland still grows relatively more slowly, if more consistently, than say, Tesla stock or Bitcoin, and because the cost to acquire farmland, to go out and identify properties, and actually do real estate deals, is higher than the cost of acquiring stock or other financial assets.

But as Madeleine points out, when a fund has a trillion dollars under management, 1% invested in farmland means hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of acres owned. Much of the eventual value of that farmland rent and appreciation goes into the bank accounts of extremely wealthy investors and hedge fund managers, but some of it might go to you, too. If you invest in a 401K, a life insurance policy, or benefit from a pension through your employer, there’s a good chance that you, too, are accumulating some of the value of farmland.

Again, it’s not that people had just discovered these benefits of farmland investing in 2008. But what changed between the 1970s and ‘80s and 2008 was that in the later era, the American public didn’t stand up in protest to insist that “farmland is for farmers.”

There’s surely many reasons for this lack of resistance– for one, the public was a little too occupied with a home mortgage crisis at the time to be focused specifically on farmland ownership issues.

There was also the fact that companies had now owned farmland since the 1980s, and for many it surely felt like it was too late to turn the bus around. Madeleine also suggests that in the time between the 1980s and 2008, the American public just got a lot more comfortable with financiers owning everything– from beloved brands to newspapers to single family homes. So why would farmland had been any different.

But then again, Madeleine adds, though Americans might have gotten more desensitized to corporate ownership of farmland, they didn’t actually change their feelings about it. Even today, many still believe that farmers, not corporations, should own farmland. Madeleine thinks one of the big changes that occurred is not among the public but politicians, who have radically changed their strategy for addressing these feelings.

MF: The one thing that it seems that quite a lot of politicians are willing to propose is restricting foreign land ownership. These laws are politically palatable across the spectrum, in a way that allows politicians to respond to public anxiety about land changing hands in this way, land concentration, in a way that is not possible when it comes to dealing with corporate land.

SM: To Madeleine’s mind, the political obsession with foreign farmland ownership that we hear about regularly today is a kind of proxy war. Foreign nationals are the one group of non-farmer farmland owners that politicians can safely attack without alienating absentee landowners in urban centers or potential political donors within corporations. 

But the fact reminds that the amount of foreign landownership in the U.S. is miniscule. Only about 2% of all land in the U.S. is owned by foreigners, and less than half of that is farmland. Plus, despite alarming and xenophobic rhetoric about Chinese, Russian, or Iranian land purchases, the vast majority of foreign-owned U.S. land is owned by Canadians and Western Europeans, especially Germans, Dutch, and English people– who all hail from countries in which Americans own a lot of land, and thus the foreign ownership is largely mutual.

And yet, 30 states have passed over fifty pieces of legislation aimed at banning or limiting the rights of foreign farmland owners, in the last five years alone. The outlines of these state-level rules vary a lot, but most are framed with alarmist arguments about national security, the safety of the U.S. food supply, and even the integrity of our national borders.

I’ve asked many of the experts I’ve talked to for this podcast about the foreign farmland ownership question, but the best answer I’ve gotten was the first, from Bruce Sherrick,

the farmland researcher who you last heard from in our very first episode. I’ll warn you, this is a bit of a long quote for us. But I really appreciate the way that Bruce just absolutely puts the question of foreign farmland ownership to bed.

Bruce Sherrick: So if I’m a Chinese citizen and I buy a bunch of land in Illinois and then we go to war with China, I think we can just confiscate assets of a foreign adversary rather directly. Next, where do you suppose the production from that land goes? Third, who do you suppose farms it if it’s an absentee owner?

So once you start peeling it back, it becomes a different set of questions altogether. They’re legitimate questions. They’re great questions. They’re complicated. And should we modernize our reporting and understanding system? Yeah, we should. Public ownership records are a backbone issue to many, many people. Have we kept up with the ability to do modern reporting on that? No, we haven’t. Yeah, should we revise? Sure. But let’s not take grandstanding kinds of positions that are completely antithetical to the ability of U.S. citizens to also own and operate in a global world. It’s just... it’s silly to have that hugely, scare tactic-based approach to legislating anything, I find, and it’s really counterproductive to U.S. agriculture in the long run.

[MUSICAL INTERLUDE]

SM: Bruce went on to argue that it’s not only foreign farmland ownership that is an overhyped problem, but also institutional farmland ownership. His evidence? The fact that today, about 90% of U.S. farmland is still owned by families and individuals. Of course, that doesn’t mean that all of these individuals and families are farmers themselves. The rate of absentee land ownership is on the rise, and has been for a while. But I think that Bruce would argue that that makes sense historically, given that more people leave production agriculture every year than enter it, and that old farmers still have the right to will their land to children and grandchildren even if they don’t farm themselves.

Then the question becomes– is it wrong that the grandchildren of farmers sit in their offices and apartments in New York and Miami and San Francisco, pocketing annual farmland rents and watching their net worth grow as their farmland inheritance appreciates? I think Bruce would argue that this isn’t wrong, and that it’s not wrong for other investors to take advantage of this system either.

[LONGER PAUSE]

So these are the barriers, and the realities of farmland financialization, that were standing between Jackson Rolette and a new farm. And on top of all of this, Jackson faced a new set of pressures too. A burgeoning interest in rural properties motivated by the pandemic, with more people looking for private outdoor recreation properties, and even market pressures related to environmental conservation efforts– as we discussed last episode.

With all of these chips stacked against him, and since he’d already been– figuratively at least– set back at square one, Jackson decided to rethink some of his base assumptions about what his dream farm might look like.

How Jackson decided not to buy the farm at all. That’s after the break.

[BREAK]

Intro:

This podcast is made possible by Ambrook. Ambrook builds financial management software for farms, ranches, and businesses across the American supply chain. It’s an all-in-one platform that simplifies accounting, record-keeping, and payments workflows while empowering operators with visibility into the health of their business. Here’s Jeff Anders, Head of Design at Ambrook, on how his team works to make Ambrook tools easy to use, engaging and inspiring:

Outro:

That was Jeff, a design leader at Ambrook, on how Ambrook supports customer success. Tune in to the rest of the season to hear from other members of the Ambrook team on why they chose to join and what motivates them to build the financial layer powering American industry.

Now, back to the show.

[END BREAK]

PART 3: A Different Way to Not Own the Farm

SM: With no available farms that fit his needs, Jackson started to wonder why owning the farm always seemed to be a “given” for new and beginning farmers. So he sharpened his pencil and put on his analyst hat, and took a hard look at the real value farmland offered him, and his explorations took him far and wide throughout the food system.

Jackson Rolett: You know, restaurants never own their buildings. Never. That’s a stupid thing for a restaurant to do. To own the building that they operate out of, and that’s interesting that in another section of the food industry, that’s the case. Whereas farms are always intent on owning the land first. But then you tie up a lot of your capital. Say, if you have to make a down payment on that.

SM: I’ll add some nuance here to say– it’s not that restaurants never own their own buildings. In fact, the restaurant chain McDonald’s has built its global empire on a foundation of property ownership. But Jackson is correct that it is much more common for small and independent restaurants to rent space, rather than buying it.

But as Jackson worked to integrate this perspective and disentangle it from the advice he’d always gotten to buy land as soon as you can– he realized that if he didn’t tie up all his capital in purchasing the land, he could use it instead to get the farm cash flowing, or even to profitability, faster. He also realized that so much of what he felt about owning farmland was, just that– feelings. But the more he thought about the reality of it, the more he realized that for all the good feelings he’d come to associate with farmland ownership, there were also bad ones.

JR: That trope farmers are only rich when they’re dead. I don’t want my worldly wealth to be tied up in something that’s value is only realized if it’s sold. So, I don’t know what the answer is. I’m interested in gaming out what happens if you just don’t buy the land. But you own the business and you are able to put equity into the business and then maybe even cash that equity out as it’s transitioned to another farmer.

[MUSICAL INTERLUDE]

SM: Jackson did game out what happens, and part of that work led him to where he is today, pouring his farming efforts, not into owned farmland, but into a 10-acre market garden at his church in the middle of Bowling Green, Kentucky. As a member of the congregation, he looked around at the empty acres around the church building, and proposed starting a farm. He offered that the first 10% of proceeds would go to the church, and the rest go to pay Jackson and back into building out the farm itself.

This is a job for Jackson, and it’s also a labor of community, faith, and love– as he’s been able to share not just funds and food with his flock, but also his knowledge and skills with the volunteers who help the farm run.

So far, he’s been pleasantly surprised to discover that not owning the land he works doesn’t take away from the joy of farming, and that not having a huge farm mortgage hanging over his head has made it all more fun too.

[PAUSE]

But that trope Jackson mentioned– that “farmers are only rich when they’re dead,” offers an interesting counter to the “bought the farm” idea. Selling the farm, not buying it, is the real world sign that someone has died. And that someone’s children don’t plan to continue the family tradition.

But looking past the death of it– the other surprising part of this trope is the word “rich.” I don’t think most people would think of farmers as “rich.” After all, food is cheap and tractors and farmland are expensive. But given the background we learned about the financialization of farmland, if they own their land, they still get to enjoy the benefits of farmland appreciation. Even if they can’t really access that wealth as long as they want to keep farming the land.

This very dilemma, that farmers have a bunch of money locked into farmland that they can’t access without selling off their business assets, was the insight that led Ben Gordon to found his company, Fractal Ag.

Ben Gordon: Fractal is essentially equity capital or financing for farmers. So, it is a minority investment in a piece of land that a farmer owns.

SM: Ben is an institutional farmland investor. But he’s probably not the one you’re imagining. He’s not an old Wall Street tycoon or an Ivy League investment bro. He grew up around agriculture in North Dakota before he headed off to an early career in the Army. Through the years he stayed connected to family roots on the farm, which eventually brought him back to a career in agriculture, and finally to starting Fractal.

But what does Ben mean, exactly, when he says that Fractal makes ‘a minority investment in a piece of land?’ Well the theory is actually pretty straightforward. Say a farmer owns a 500-acre field– which could easily be worth a million dollars. A farmer looking for capital can approach Fractal and offer to sell a share– say 40% of this field for $400,000. Fractal pays the cash, which the farmer can then use to shore up their business, buy new equipment, or buy more land, while the farmer maintains majority ownership over the whole parcel.

After that, Fractal gets to participate in the appreciation of the land, and they get a bit of rent. Fractal’s spin on the traditional model is that they work with farmers who’ve integrated regenerative practices, on the principle that better practices lead to better outcomes for farmers and the land, which enriches everyone’s investment both year to year and over the long term.

For laypeople– maybe this seems silly. If a farmer already owns their land, why would they want to sell part of it off, even if it is just a minority part of it? But the fact is, farmers often need cash, especially when they want to buy more farmland.

BG: If you look at the amount of generational transition, there’s just gonna be a lot of land that’s gonna come for sale and a couple things are gonna happen. One is, outsiders are just gonna own that land anyway. So it doesn’t matter what I do. There’s gonna be a lot of outside investment, whether that’s institutional investors or others. And we really want to have farmers owning it. The second is that, like, farmers will have to like, massively over leverage themselves and then eventually they’ll go under because they’re not positioned with a capital partner to go in or third, the whole like thing just blows up.

SM: The generational transition that Ben is referring to is already underway. By some estimates, as much as 40% of all U.S. farmland will go up for sale or be willed to another generation before 2040. In Ben’s experience, forward-looking farmers are already out in the market, seeking financial partnerships that will help them be able to buy this farmland when it comes up for sale. From Ben’s perspective, farmers need this help because banks usually require a significant down payment in order to finance land purchases. High quality Midwest cropland can go for more than $30,000 an acre, and land like the kind Jackson is looking for, good for specialty crops and near to a city, can go for $100,000 an acre. That means 100 acres of Iowa farmland might go for $3 million, and 10 acres good for vegetables for a million. When a farmer needs to put 50% cash up front, farmers simply can’t hang without help.

I think it’s easy to argue that Ben’s solution is a bit of a Bandaid over a bullet hole. Because the problem isn’t really that farmers need more access to money and financing, but that farmland has simply become too expensive.

But farmland did not become this expensive by accident. We made it this way. Over the course of this podcast, we’ve touched on so many things that have, directly and indirectly, driven up the price of American farmland. From the enforcement of private property protections to federal farm policy, from new farm technology to the rise of environmental conservation, in every generation, we’ve worked to make farmland more valuable, which has made it more desirable and more and more expensive.

BG: Essentially, anytime a government program, or a new technology comes in, that increases the profitability. It just goes right into the land. 

SM: In other words, one of the key reasons that farmland is so expensive today is because farms have gotten more profitable over time. As farmers become more profitable, they have more cash to spend to buy land. That means that farmland values get bid up as more farmers become more profitable, and at the same time, farmland renters see their rents raised as well, because owners want to realize the benefit of that increased productivity too.

BG: Because there’s just this cycle where the landowner gets it. And this is actually one of the reasons we really want farmers to own their assets. So they don’t just become this like contractor class like we’ve seen in other parts. And not that there’s anything wrong with being a hardworking person who happens to be a contractor. I just like the incentive alignment of long-term management with owning the asset and realizing that value. Plus, I like having a little bit of wealth in rural communities.

[MUSICAL INTERLUDE]

SM: Throughout our conversations, I was always struck by Ben’s ability to move back and forth between his personal motivation for farmland investing, which centers on helping farmers, enriching rural communities, and reducing agriculture’s environmental footprint, and his hardnosed commitment to making money for the people who contribute capital to his investment fund.

In a lot of ways, I think, farmers are also being asked to walk this line– because in today’s farmland market, it’s not enough for farmland to be home, legacy, and livelihood. If a farmer is going to get a loan from a financier, they also have to prove that farmland will be a profitable investment.

For a farmer, though, farmland profitability is vulnerable to interest rates, federal payments, commodity prices, and trade conditions. And farmers don’t usually have the flexibility investors do, when markets turn against them.

BG: Whenever we have a down cycle in agriculture, they have to ride that out. They have to see their working capital and their balance sheet decline. I or any other investor, I get to go raise money and say, this is a great vintage opportunity. Land has come down, there’s a great investment case. So the investor inherently has this massive advantage over a farmer.

SM: The point Ben is making here goes back to what Madeleine taught us– that to institutional investors, farmland is a golden goose that lays golden eggs. When the markets are down and times are tough in agriculture, the geese are on sale, and for folks with money and income from outside agriculture, that’s a tremendous opportunity. But for farmers, with all their wealth and income tied up in farming, it doesn’t matter how cheap the golden farmland is– they don’t have the money to buy it.

Since the 1980s, this financialization of farmland has also forced farms to evolve, from small scale family operations towards being more sophisticated and diversified businesses, if for no other reason than to compete with gigantic corporations that are encroaching on the farmland they need. And from Ben’s perspective, that transition for farmers is far from over.

BG: If 2010s was the professionalization of like I used to be in a lifestyle, now I run a business. I think the 2020s and 2030s will be, I don’t just run a business, I am running a corporation, albeit a small regional or local corporation. But it’s gonna have to have HR, it’s gonna have to have good managerial accounting, it’s gonna have to have leadership and that’s a big leap.

SM: In a lot of ways, this feels like where the question of farmland financialization comes full circle. On the one hand, the public has never liked the idea of businesses owning farmland. After all, we want farmland to be for farmers. But farmland is not just for farmers anymore. It’s for anyone who can afford it. And that means that farmers have to become more like their competitors, more like the institutional investors, if they want to compete. When farmers don’t or can’t become more corporate, they’re left out in the cold, with too few resources to buy into the game.

This, I think, was part of Jackson’s realization. If he wanted to make farmland ownership work, it would require him to focus on scale, on efficiency, on bigger markets and customers that would require him to move away from the land ethic and community ethos that had brought him to farming in the first place. If he didn’t want to make that tradeoff, he realized, he was going to have to find a different model, one that didn’t center farmland ownership. And as he worked towards building one, he decided not to put something else first, to center his future, his kids, and questions about retirement and security. He questioned whether owning farmland was inherently good for him as a farmer to determine whether some other option might better suit his goals and circumstances.

JR: And I just keep thinking that I don’t take any of this with me, you know? What is it that I want to leave behind? And when I think about it in that way, owning farmland, unless it’s a vessel for wealth for my children, just doesn’t seem as important anymore. And that’s one of the reasons why we’ve set this current garden that I’m working in up the way that we have. If I’m starting something and I’m investing my time and my money into something that, God willing, will continually, even as I leave. generate 10 percent of its revenue for a church that I believe in because it has so positively impacted our life. Like I want that for other families and I want that for my kids when I’m dead. I want that church to be there. So to me, it’s oh, that’s investment.

[MUSICAL INTERLUDE]

SM: I think most farmers today still want to own farmland. But I think Jackson’s story speaks to a quiet trend that’s emerging across rural landscapes. The fact is that today, on top of all the other challenges farmers face, farmland itself has become a commodity, and in order to buy the thing they need to do their work, they have to go toe-to-toe with multinational companies, Wall Street funds, and some of the richest people in the world. Farmers that lack substantial financial resources lose those competitions, and the farmers that win are increasingly pressured towards massive-scale commoditized production. From Ben’s perspective, this is simply the reality of the situation, there’s no putting the farmland back in the “asset for the people” tube, which is why he sees his work at Fractal as a way of arming farmers for the fight.

BG: So I guess I am pragmatic where like I am going to operate within the world that exists and so I think like the real question is do you want to just have a hopes and dreams approach to a future? Regardless if you want better, stronger rural communities or you want a more environmentally sustainable agricultural system, or you’re actually gonna do something about it that’s realistic. And what I get really frustrated about is going to a conference, someone’s oh, we should have an agricultural system like this. And, there’s no realistic path for a farmer or anyone to participate in the next five years in what you’re saying. And you’re talking about philanthropic dollars that’ll get us to 0.000001% of the market. Thank you for what you’re doing. It matters. But it’s not gonna matter to anyone I grew up with.

SM: I think what Ben is getting at here, and what Jackson, even, agrees with in his own way, is that farmers exist in a financial world that does not serve them, but within which they must survive. All the other hopes and dreams we have for farmland or agriculture writ large are admirable and important, but if farmers’ leases aren’t being renewed and they can’t find a new place to set up shop, if chemical drift or a bad pest outbreak or a catastrophic storm has made it so they can’t pay their mortgage, then all of these admirable and important goals go right out the window.

In short, if farmers can’t afford to rent or own farmland, they can’t afford to farm. And no matter how talented or admired they are, if farmers can’t afford to farm, they won’t. End of story.

[MUSICAL INTERLUDE]

CONCLUSION

SM: The financialization of farmland may be reaching a fever pitch today, but it has been an ongoing project since Europeans first arrived on this continent. Everything we’ve talked about over the last eight episodes has brought us right here. From colonization and the establishment of a legal system of property rights, to the dispossession of the land’s existing occupants who were replaced with pioneers via the Homestead Act– these were all steps along the road towards Bill Gates owning a quarter of a million acres of farmland as a purely financial investment. Agrarian populism might have temporarily arrested the slide towards titans of industry owning all the land, but the Farm Bill, technology, and even some environmental actions have made the slide more slippery, and have only served to make farmland a lucrative, accessible, and secure investment. Today, questions about foreign farmland ownership cloud our vision, distracting the American public from the fact that it’s Americans that own the vast majority of farmland, and though some of it is owned by corporations, most of it is owned by farmers. Farms that look more and more like corporations all the time.

Small and mid-sized farmers are increasingly being squeezed out of this picture altogether. Some, like Jackson, still figure out how to make the dream work– they crowdfund, they take on loans, they work second and third jobs to save up enough to buy their farm. And others, also like Jackson, come to the conclusion that the dream doesn’t actually work, and that if they do manage to get a mortgage, they’ll be risking financial ruin with every hailstorm and market downturn.

Many of these farmers will, like Jackson, quit the farmland ownership dream and instead rent or lease farm ground, making themselves into the caretaker for the landowner’s golden goose of farmland appreciation, and paying for the privilege with their rent.

[MUSICAL INTERLUDE]

Jackson talked to me a lot about how difficult it was to part with the dream of farmland ownership. Hearing him talk about it made me realize, more than anything else, why “buying the farm” is a metaphor for death.

Death is the end of the road, the final place, beyond the stress and uncertainty of ordinary life.

In that way, death is a final retreat and to us Americans, a farm is a place where, to quote George Washington– “Everyone shall sit in safety under his own vine and fig tree and there shall be none to make him afraid.” And in death too, we seek this same peace and repose.

For the Founding Fathers, small farms owned by the mass of American citizens was to be the bedrock of the country they imagined. This was the basis of their revolution, a dramatic break from the European practice of a small elite holding all the land. But as farmland ownership becomes increasingly out of reach for the majority of American citizens, farmers like Jackson are starting to wrestle with what farmland means to farmers today.

Jackson Rolett: I feel like ownership can very much distort our perception of what land is and what it is for, and now that I don’t own it anymore, I feel like our economy is treated land as a store of value. And I feel like that’s dangerous. That’s not what it is. That’s not what it is intended for. I’m not saying capitalism’s wrong. I’m not saying investing in things is wrong. But treating land as a store of value is what has made it inaccessible. 

SM: Throughout our discussions, Jackson was quick to challenge me about the definition of words like wealth and value, investment and security. Again, another place where he and Ben Gordon would agree is that wealth is not a measure of numbers in a bank account. Wealth is more than that, it’s about the wellbeing of communities, especially rural ones. Investment is not just where a rich person parks their money, it’s the ideas and projects we spend our time and attention on, and security too, is not just about the money socked away in a retirement fund, it’s about the resiliency of the people around us– it’s not about knowing that nothing will happen to what’s yours, it’s about knowing that the people and things you’ve poured your life into will be able to continue– even after you’ve bought the farm.

The other thing that struck me about Jackson was his openness about the role his faith has played, and continues to play, in his farming work. Jackson has been a farmer longer than he’s been a Christian. He discovered his faith alongside his work in the field. It’s so clear that the teaching of his church has shaped the way he thinks about the role of land and wealth, versus the role of people and his community.

JR: This ethos of “I need to own this farm or this land” is counterproductive to the attitudes that I feel I should have about it. There was some saint of the early church and talking about material wealth. And essentially he says, instead of building more barns to house more grain, to store your wealth, why don’t you let your barns be the bellies of the poor? And you could store infinite wealth there. And that in a phrase has exploded my conception of, yeah, we need to own the family farm. 

[MUSICAL INTERLUDE]

SM: Many episodes ago, we learned that farmland is more than a financial asset, it’s an emotional asset. And speaking with Jackson, I saw this fact even more clearly. For him, buying his first farm was an ecstatic experience, and having to sell that farm felt like being forced out of the peace and safety of a final resting place back into the rat-racing world. And now, at this mid-point in his life, I think Jackson can see both things at once– the space and security and the albatross around the neck of it. But the thing he sees most clearly, I think, is that true wealth of farmland comes not from its dollar valuation, but from the fact that farmers use land to feed people.

In some ways, this brings us all the way back around to where we started this season, with questions about the relationship between farmland and food. And the reality is, that the kind of farmland that the folks at American Farmland Trust talked about in the first episode, the kind that we’re worried about running out of, is the exact kind of farmland that Jackson can’t find. In that way, it’s true, we are running out of it, but not because it’s being ripped up by hurricanes or paved over by parking lots.

We’re running out farmland because so many farmers can’t afford to buy it. And farmers can’t afford to buy it because of the cumulative impact of 300 years of farm, land, and economic policy.

Of course, the problem of land affordability is not unique to agriculture. But the reality is that if we want the condition of American farmland to change, it’s up to us– the self-governing American people– who have to change those conditions. And that’s what we’re going to focus on in our next and final episode.

Landon: Farmland is so expensive. It is inaccessible for young farmers. If you get really far out from the cities though, there’s stuff there and there’s a lot of other people who’d want to go into it and I think there’s unique ways that that could be possible as more interest comes.

SM: After 300 years of farmland in the United States, what else could farmland be, and how do we turn these other possibilities into realities? Next time, on The Only Thing That Lasts.

SIGN OFF

SM: Before we sign off, I talked through information from a number of sources and experts today, so if you want to dig into it yourself, check out the shownotes, or our website for links.

While you’re there, make sure you head over to ambrook.com SLASH offrange to stay up on the latest reporting from the Offrange team on agriculture, land, and environmental issues like the ones we talk about here on the show. After you subscribe to the podcast, don’t forget to sign up for the newsletter, and follow Offrange on socials for news about upcoming projects and stories. And we can’t wait to hear what you think! If you like what we’re doing, let us know, and don’t forget to share.

The Only Thing That Lasts is now an Offrange production. This podcast is written, produced, and mixed by Sarah Mock. Our editor is Jesse Hirsch, with support by Ali Aas. Technical support by Dan Schlosser, and general support by Mackenzie Burnett and the whole team at Ambrook.

A final note, Offrange, the media outlet that produced this podcast, is 100% editorially independent from Ambrook, the fintech company that funds it.

When determining the canary in the coalmine for the toxic chemicals being released into our environment, we may need to look at the world’s largest predators. In Georgia, it’s an unlikely ancient creature ringing the bell — their American alligators have been found to harbor large amounts of mercury in their blood.

This discovery from researchers at the University of Georgia (UGA) not only shows the prevalence of mercury in local waterways, it also raises questions about the amount of chemicals in the fish the gators eat, as well as other creatures that share the rivers and swamps. Older gators were shown to be consuming and retaining significantly more mercury than before; it was also being passed into their eggs.

A neurotoxin that is naturally present in the ground, mercury has been used for centuries for paint, mining, thermometers, contraceptives, detonators, lightbulbs, and batteries, among other novel uses. It has also been named by the World Health Organization as one of the top 10 chemicals presenting a hazard to human health.

Many industries have evolved to eliminate this hazardous substance from their processes or worked to reduce it, but the question remains: Why are such large quantities showing up in the food chain? There are a myriad of reasons for this phenomenon, but our changing climate has been identified by researchers as a key factor.

What the Alligators Tell Us

Kristen Zemaitis is a biologist and the lead author of the alligator study at the University of Georgia, focusing on Okefenokee Swamp, Jekyll Island, and the Yawkey Wildlife Center. She looked at alligators because they are an apex predator that consumes smaller animals over a long lifespan, leading to long-term mercury accumulation in the blood.

Blood samples were taken from alligators of different ages in the area and tested to ascertain their mercury levels. The study found that accumulations varied across sites, but the ecology and age of the animal affect the toxin burden that mercury places on the animals from birth into old age.

While the health of alligators is less directly affected than in small mammals or birds, wildlife like this is certainly impacted. “Some of those health issues include issues with reproduction, cognitive behavior in animals. Especially, we see issues with how fast they’re reacting, or how they’re hunting, and eventually it can lead to poisoning and death,” Zemaitis said.

“We think about all these interactions they’re having with these different food webs and ecosystems throughout their lifetime. They could be getting things like contaminants into their system and then also spreading them throughout the ecosystem.” And while the swamp is in an isolated area, it can still have human impacts. “It’s not just fishing, it could also be hunting, just because of the interconnectedness of the food web,” Zemaitis concluded.

Mercury and the Environment

Swamps like the one in the alligator study function like wetlands — with saturated soils and slow-moving waters fed partly by precipitation — which allows mercury to accumulate. “It’s most likely coming from the burning of coal, which happens at our coal-fired power plants, because that’s by far the biggest user,” said Jeb Byers, research professor at the University of Georgia, who contributed to the study.

He explained the climate change connection related to using fossil fuels. “So burning coal is fostering greenhouse gases, and it’s also putting mercury into the atmosphere, because the mercury is trapped inside the coal and released when it gets burned. So they come together.”

Climate change puts stress on marine life, with warmer temperatures forcing fish to consume more food in order to grow, resulting in a higher mercury intake. This chemical has staying power too, persisting in the oceans for 300 years, making it a particular problem in the Arctic, where it is bioaccumulated and magnified. Mercury that has made its way there through water and air is being released as the ice melts due to higher-than-average temperatures.

Despite concerns about air and water, soil has been found to be the best incubator for mercury pollution, holding three times as much as the ocean and 150 times more than the atmosphere. Hot temperatures increase plant growth, so the decomposition then deposits more mercury back into the earth.

Farmed animals like cows, sheep, or pigs can potentially ingest more mercury from grazing on contaminated soil.

Farmed animals like cows and sheep can potentially ingest more mercury from grazing on contaminated soil. A study into these effects concluded that heavy metal poisoning is one of the biggest reasons for non-disease-related illnesses in livestock. It also affects both productivity and reproduction, making contaminated animals an economic issue as well as a public health concern.

Increased flood events also introduce more mercury into water courses as contaminated soil is washed into the ocean. This mud obscures light levels and means that there are fewer phytoplankton and more bacteria in aquatic environments, leading to higher mercury concentrations. Researchers found that this is more of an issue in estuaries and lakes than in the ocean, where it will be less concentrated.

Human Impacts

According to the EPA, eating fish is the most common way for people in the U.S. to be exposed to mercury, although its prevalence means that almost everyone has some amount inside them. People particularly at risk are those in the Arctic, tropical riparian communities like those in the Amazon, coastal or sea-fishing communities, and those close to mines.

Bacteria also interact with mercury to turn it into a more toxic form, known as methylmercury. It is this that inhabits the food chain, and high levels, such as those in mining towns in Ethiopia, can kill. As well as neurological problems, it can cause cancer, miscarriage, blindness, and deafness in adults. Unborn babies and newborns are particularly at risk as mercury crosses the placenta, and it is passed via human or animal milk.

Megan Weil Latshaw is an associate teaching professor at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health who has studied the environmental effects of mercury and other heavy metals.

“Mercury impacts both the nervous system (including the brain) and the cardiovascular system (including the heart), so older people might be more sensitive to mercury,” she said. “This is especially true as doctors might recommend older people eat less red meat (which is good for their cardiovascular system) and eat more fish (which might be high in mercury).”

“Mercury can travel pretty far in the environment, so you don’t need to live near a source of mercury to be exposed to it,” Latshaw added.

The Geographical Lottery

In the Northeastern United States, where incinerators, electrical facilities, and industrial processes are still releasing mercury into the atmosphere, an oft-mentioned aim is to reduce these by 70%. Fish like yellow perch have shown accumulations that well exceed safe consumption levels.

The continuation of mercury emissions in the U.S. is estimated to have created three times the amount of concentration in the marine environment when compared with pre-industrial times. How much it bioaccumulates can vary wildly, according to a U.S. study that looked at aquatic marsh, river, estuary, and shelf systems.

The researchers involved in the alligator study suggest it shows a clear need to pinpoint the sources of this mercury output. They believe that it is human-made mercury and that it is getting into the food chain with wider implications for the rest of us. As reptiles are cold-blooded and process toxins differently, they warn that what can be tolerated by an alligator may be lethal for a bird or a small mammal. Similarly, humans are mammals who can also be sensitive to unknown dosages when we don’t know where this toxin is coming from.

The Future of Mercury in the Food Chain

Much like any other pervasive heavy metal or forever chemical, mercury needs to be measured on a global level, and not just the U.S. This is why the UN Environment Programme proposed the Minamata Convention on Mercury in 2017, whereby 145 countries have pledged to reduce anthropogenic (human-made) sources of the metal.

Researchers have created a map of mercury biota called the Global Biotic Mercury Synthesis (GBMS) database to track its concentrations and exposures. They have, however, found that biomonitoring needs to improve to provide a better picture, especially in African countries, Australia, the Indo-Pacific, the Middle East, and the South Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.

There may be no end in sight for the natural degradation of mercury, but keeping it out of the food chain is a public health provision that is increasingly difficult to ignore in light of our changing climate.

In 2023, Jim Beam hosted 126,000 visitors at their expanded distillery in Clermont, Kentucky. Their other local distillery, a 15-minute drive away in the town of Boston, isn’t open for public tours, but they’re planning to make dinner for a few billion guests by the end of the year.

The guests are their tiny new neighbors: Bacteria and other microorganisms will live in tanks across the street eating “whole stillage” piped over from the distillery.

Whole stillage is the watery, cloudy mixture with around 10 percent solids that is left over after corn and other grains are fermented and alcohol is separated out during distillation. For every gallon of bourbon made, around 10 gallons of whole stillage are produced — an estimated one billion gallons annually in Kentucky.

The American whiskey industry has been scaling up over the last decade, and its distillers have been planning for better and more efficient ways to get rid of — and/or profit from — all that stillage. Kentucky Bourbon production increased 475% between 1999 and 2021. In 2022, Jim Beam announced they’d be increasing their distilling capacity at the Boston facility by 50 percent. Buffalo Trace completed a 1.2-billion-dollar, 10-year expansion in early 2025. Heaven Hill, Bulleit, and the other largest producers also greatly increased capacity or built additional distilleries. That’s a lot more whiskey on the market, and a lot more stillage to process.

The tiny critters that will live in tanks next to the Jim Beam distillery are being brought in to help. The stillage will pass from one tank to another in an anaerobic digester system, and then to a huge rectangular covered storage pond. There, the liquid — now with only around two percent solids remaining — can be trucked away for use as liquid fertilizer. Along the way, hungry microbes consume the stillage and release methane gas to be collected from the top of the tanks and pond.

Anaerobic digester systems are used to manage waste in many different industries, but the methane is often flared off — those fire spouts you see driving by industrial sites at night — rather than captured. But Jim Beam’s neighboring facility is owned and operated by 3 Rivers Energy Partners, a renewable energy company whose founders have roots in energy infrastructure.

They’ll transform the methane into “pipeline quality” renewable natural gas (RNG), which will then be sent back across the street to power the distillery. The companies predict that the Beam distillery will be 65% powered by RNG from those microbes in the future. Welcome to the neighborhood.

Cows, Fields, Fish, and Flies

Whole stillage has to be dealt with one way or another — if the tanks that store it fill up, the distillery can’t keep making more whiskey. Smaller producers have reported having to shut down production when snowstorms prevented trucks from hauling it away.

The low-tech way to get rid of stillage is to “land apply” it to fields as fertilizer/compost, or run it into a trough and feed it to cattle. Whole stillage is mostly water and spoils in a few days, so it needs to get to the animals quickly before that happens. In fertilizer use, it should be turned into the soil soon after application.

As the amount of stillage increases with increased whiskey production, the more land and animals are needed. Eventually that becomes an issue. Joseph W. Ward, executive director of the Indiana-based Distillers Technology Council (DTC), says, “There’s only so much land that you could land-apply it. There are only so many people that could take it wet.”

Whole stillage has to be dealt with one way or another — if the tanks that store it fill up, the distillery can’t keep making more whiskey.

The DTC was founded in the 1940s (as the Distillers Feed Research Council) to work on the same problem that whiskey makers are facing today — to “develop uses for their non-fermentable waste materials.”

A solution developed in that post-war era was to evaporate much of the water from whole stillage, and dry out the solids with steam tube dryers — huge, short, thick pipes, through which wet grains pass into one end and come out dry on the other as DDGS, for “distillers dried grain with solubles.”

Evaporating all that water is energy-intensive, and alcoholic beverage producers have made sustainability initiatives a larger part of their marketing. As the whiskey industry was booming earlier this decade, industry leaders finally acknowledged that they too needed to get with the times and come up with better and more forward-looking solutions to the increased quantities of their byproducts.

Bourbon Gets In On It

In 2021, the Distillers Technology Council, along with other industry and economic groups like the James B. Beam Institute for Kentucky Spirits at the University of Kentucky, sponsored a “reverse pitch” competition. Entrepreneurs and engineering firms were invited to submit proposals with winners invited to pitch at a DTC conference ways “to implement their ideas for surplus stillage usage.” The first criteria listed for consideration was that proposals should “prioritize sustainability and environmental impact.”

One submission proposed making high-protein material by feeding spent grains to black soldier fly larvae and red wiggler worms. Another suggested using the grains to produce the low-calorie sweetener xylose, plus activated carbon. One applicant proposed a centralized facility to make high-protein products like dog and fish foods, which could be used by several smaller distillers.

The competition may have helped put some projects into motion, only to encounter recent roadblocks. “Unfortunately, I think they haven’t moved as quickly as their plan was because of what’s happened in the last, you know, eight or nine months,” said DTC’s Ward.

Under the current administration, tariffs and stressed international relations could impact trade in animal feed ingredients, as well as American whiskey, but some big projects are still in the works. Buffalo Trace announced this July a partnership with Meridian Biotech, an entrant from the reverse pitch competition, in which the company would take a direct pipeline of stillage from the distillery and convert it to “multifunctional alternative proteins.”

“We’re ramping up. We have to feed the biology, slowly, and build out the bacteria colonies.”

Meridian’s website lists four products: a yeast product for pet foods, a mixed microbial ingredient for aquaculture feeds, a dietary fiber gel usable in human food, and a high-phosphorus, slow-releasing fertilizer. Construction on the project is set to begin later in 2025.

The RNG projects that produce gas instead of protein products are going ahead as well. Louis Buck, SVP of public affairs for 3 Rivers, said that as of early August, “Jim Beam is receiving stillage now, but very little. We’re ramping up. We have to feed the biology, slowly, and build out the bacteria colonies. So the valve is open — it’s been commissioned.”

A second 3 Rivers facility is being constructed near Jack Daniel’s in Tennessee, which Buck says is “about a month or six weeks behind” the Beam project. The projects look similar on paper, but the RNG from Jim Beam will be used to power the distillery, while the Jack Daniel’s project RNG will be fed into the local pipeline to heat houses and the like.

These RNG facilities rely on a constant supply of stillage to feed the microbes, which is why they’re not often suitable for small distilleries — or ones that may close during flagging markets like the one the American whiskey industry is suddenly facing.

Enough of a Good Thing?

All that quick growth may have resulted in a whiskey glut. In 2025, several high-profile new American whiskey distilleries have closed, and other major brands have reported a decrease in sales. In late September, The Spirits Business reported that global liquor giant Diageo was pausing distilling operations at its Balcones distillery in Waco, Texas, through June of 2026, and pausing distillation at their George Dickel distillery in Tennessee “through this fiscal.”

Even the huge new carbon-neutral distillery in Lebanon, Kentucky, built to produce Bulleit bourbon, paused production earlier this year. The company has an existing distillery in Shelbyville in which to keep making Bulleit, but had they installed anaerobic digesters on-site they would have had to make alternate plans.

But for the big American companies still actively making whiskey, these new facilities could be proof of concept for the distillery-RNG facility partnership that is common in Scotland. Buck of 3 Rivers noted, “Although the forecasts are down for our two partners, their corporates have other brands nearby.”

One of those brands is Maker’s Mark, owned by Suntory Global Spirits, the parent company of Jim Beam. Maker’s gave AD digesters a try in 2008 to produce “methane-rich biogas,” but Buck said that Maker’s does not currently have a functional anaerobic digester on site. “They’re fully exploring, including with us, if they want another one. So, we’re optimistic. We look good. We’re gonna make our money. We’re gonna be profitable,” he said.

There’s a current sales hiccup for sure, but there will always be more American whiskey being made, and a need for energy sources. Starting with the biggest distilleries may be the way to go.

Buck said, “We’re not going out of business, and neither is Jim or Jack.”

The barn doesn’t look like much yet. The white exterior still bears the name of its former owners, the Atwaters, who once packed it with seed potatoes. The dusty interior has been stripped down enough to reveal a timber frame that dates, in part, to the 18th century. In the early days of summer, just shy of the Vermont border in Salem, New York, there’s little more inside than roosting pigeons and 6,000 square feet of empty ground on which to build.

But two years from now — or sooner, if Russell Wallack has his way — this will become the largest chestnut processing facility in the country. With help from a $2 million U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) grant targeting the development of new organic markets, Wallack and his colleagues at Breadtree Farms are converting the barn, aiming to turn it into a regional hub for growers to ready their chestnuts for sale. Their vision is aligned with a growing movement of farmers and gatherers leaning on cooperative models to overcome the prohibitive costs associated with processing chestnuts and other tree nuts as their markets materialize in the eastern United States.

The ambitious goal is nothing short of reimagining woodland landscapes as a source of abundance — a haven for perennial, climate-friendly foods that can feed local communities and offer opportunity to farmers looking to break free from the corn-and-soy paradigm.

“Chestnuts are the tentpole of everything we hope to accomplish,” Wallack says.

Among several crops attracting renewed interest from farmers focused on regenerative agriculture systems, the chestnut stands tall. It offers potential as a sweet, starchy carbohydrate with a nutritional composition similar to corn and other annual grains but a vastly superior environmental profile. It can be eaten fresh or ground into flour to make polenta, bread, and necci, an ancient Italian cross between a crepe and a tortilla. It also has a global market surpassing $5 billion, according to the Savanna Institute, an agroforestry nonprofit, and a long history as an everyday food in this country — one that was interrupted by a 20th century blight that killed billions of trees.

Biologists, conservationists, and environmental activists are working to bring the iconic American chestnut — distinct from the chestnut trees at Breadtree — back to its native range, which spans most of the eastern U.S., including much of New York. The American Chestnut Foundation, founded in 1983, uses plant breeding and genetic engineering to develop disease-resistant, genetically diverse chestnuts with the goal of wide-scale restoration to the landscape.

With that work in the background, Breadtree is hoping to revive the chestnut’s standing among American farmers and consumers. When the native chestnuts died off, so did the culture that had grown around them; the average American now eats a paltry 0.1 pounds each year, compared with one pound in Europe and four in Korea. China, whose own native species never suffered the fate of the American chestnut, dominates the global market, producing more than 80 percent of the world’s crop. Most of the roughly 3,000 tons the U.S. imports, meanwhile, comes from Italy. Breadtree wants to build a domestic alternative, using trees that include a mix of Chinese, Japanese, European, and American genetics.

Doing so will only be possible with the right equipment and the right partners — and a surge in consumer interest. Breadtree aims to bring all three to its region, joining others who are laying the groundwork for an approach to agriculture that they believe can be both environmentally and economically sustainable. Although the farm isn’t organized as a cooperative, the facility it’s building will be spacious enough to handle 10 times the quantity of nuts it expects to produce on its own land. By providing a reliable place for processing, Wallack and his team want to encourage other growers to plant their own nuts, so they can expand the industry together. And expansion is possible, according to the Savanna Institute, which estimates a market opportunity of around 120,000 acres in the U.S., about 30 times the current size.

From New York and Pennsylvania to Ohio and North Carolina, growers and gatherers have established small cooperatives with a similar ethos in mind. Whether the focus is chestnuts, black walnuts, acorns, or hickory nuts, the easiest way to move forward is collaboratively, given the tens of thousands of dollars in crackers, sorters, mills, and presses — not to mention land — necessary to operate at any kind of scale.

It will take more than just motivation to turn tree nuts like these into the staple crops their backers believe they can be. In working to develop the supply chain, “the missing link is processing,” says Matt Grason, a member of Pennsylvania’s Keystone Tree Crops Cooperative, which last year produced its first modest run of hickory oil — 70 bottles’ worth.

Inside its repurposed barn, Breadtree is building that missing link.

Until 2019, Wallack, who has a master’s in ecological design from The Conway School in Western Massachusetts, was a consultant to food companies and landowners, whom he regularly implored to plant chestnuts as an environmentally sound investment for the future. He wanted to see hundreds of acres of trees spread across New England, bearing two to three thousand pounds of nutritious, profitable chestnuts per acre, year after year. But he soon realized urging others to buy in “wasn’t a strong theory of change,” so he started searching for land where he could help prove the viability of a farming system that shared his principles.

Wallack scoured the Northeast for a landowner willing to enter a long-term lease. Trees typically begin bearing nuts after about five years and don’t reach maturity for 15 or 20; Wallack estimates the break-even point on an investment at 10 to 12, provided a grower has what they need for processing. With that in mind, he eventually found a recently retired fifth-generation dairy farmer who was open to a 30-year agreement. With help from family and friends, he planted Breadtree’s first 800 chestnuts in the spring and summer of 2019, acquired at a discount after someone else bailed on their purchase.

“This is something that’s good for the planet, good for the grower, and good for the consumer. The constraint is you have to make money or it’ll never happen.”

Since then, Breadtree has used around $2 million from investors to expand its operation to several sites spanning 600 acres, mostly in Washington County, New York, nearly half of which is occupied by orchards and silvopasture. Around 85 acres will bear some quantity of nuts this fall, already surpassing the country’s total for organic chestnuts, Wallack says. Hundreds more young trees dot Breadtree’s properties, still sheltered in white tubes. Soon, they will join the fray, and the harvest will grow exponentially.

Considering the present scale of Breadtree’s operation — last year’s crop was about 1,000 pounds and this year should double it — the equipment needed for processing remains minimal. Even meeting Breadtree’s own needs several years down the line would only have required a facility capable of handling 50,000 to 100,000 pounds a year.

But the USDA’s backing will allow the farm to build a million-pound processing facility that dwarfs any other in the country, complete with a pass-through for nuts delivered from around the region, where more than 150 current or aspiring growers have already expressed interest in partnering with the farm. The grant is also supporting outreach, education, and product development to broaden the chestnut’s market — a pivotal, if uncertain, part of the vision — as well as a feasibility study to guide others in building something similar. A tour of processing facilities in Italy, where the chestnut is so engrained that some simply refer to it as “the tree,” informed the farm’s preparations.

Wallack considers chestnuts “a foot in the door” for a broader vision of agroforestry, a “somewhat bankable” way to begin establishing landscapes that can yield a range of tree crops and products including acorn flour and hickory oil. For Noah Simon, who started planting trees with Wallack in 2020 and soon became a partner in the farm, their work is focused on facilitating a better future for a generation of farmers who “don’t really have a good menu of viable perennial agriculture” that makes sense economically. He points to Organic Valley, the Wisconsin-based dairy and produce cooperative owned by more than 1,600 farms, as a model for what Breadtree wants to build. Organic Valley, of course, sells a range of popular dairy products that don’t need any help with market development.

“I hope that over the next 10 to 15 years, with partners, we can help to develop many of those missing pieces as steps towards a cooperative industry where people can do this work and do it together,” Simon says, “so it can actually impact the food system and not just be a marginal, niche thing.”

Bug Nichols, who began planting with Breadtree as a volunteer in 2020 and later became its first employee, says she and her colleagues are under no false pretenses about their certainty of success.

“Our business could fail,” she says. “But all of us think that even if our business did fail, it would have been helping take another step toward trying out new ways of farming in our region.”

Breadtree’s seemingly niche idea is based on millennia of history in which chestnuts and other tree crops fed people in New York and other places where they were grown. Restoring that approach to agriculture and reaping the environmental benefits — carbon sequestration, abundant wildlife habitat, improved soil health and water quality — will require cooperation and collaboration across a developing industry, as well as an openness to long-term thinking. It takes patience, but patience is the path to a healthier and more sustainable food system.

“Until there are people who want to finance agriculture on a decade timescale, we won’t have agriculture that works on a century timescale,” Wallack says.

Greg Miller has several decades invested in his chestnuts in Carrollton, Ohio, an hour southeast of Akron. His father began planting them in 1957 and kept them as a hobby until the ’80s, when Miller started Empire Chestnut Co. with several hundred trees already bearing. In the early 2000s he began marketing the nuts grown by three of his neighbors, who joined him in establishing the Route 9 Cooperative in 2009 after a bumper crop delivered 60,000 pounds — well more than Miller could handle. The co-op’s members invested about $180,000 into a 5,000 square foot steel-framed facility on Miller’s property and have been in business together ever since, now selling around 100,000 pounds of fresh nuts in the shell every year.

It costs about $2 per pound to grow Route 9’s chestnuts, which wholesale for $4 to $5 and wholesale at twice that, Miller says. Margins go up in concert with volume, so operating as a cooperative is a boon for members. It helps that demand outstrips supply, particularly among immigrants whose home countries retain a strong chestnut culture. In 1994 a Korean couple backed their truck up to Miller’s door and asked to buy his entire crop, he says. Business hasn’t slowed since.

“Once people find out that we have them, they clamor to get them,” Miller says.

Beyond the economic benefits of the cooperative model, Miller has found that a collaborative spirit helps move the operation forward. Periodical meetings allow farmers to learn from one another, sharing knowledge about growing and harvesting methods and proposing new ideas for how to best run the business. There’s something to be said for not having to go it alone, he says.

“I hope that over the next 10 to 15 years, we can help to develop many of those missing pieces as steps towards a cooperative industry.“

To that end, Miller has spent years serving as mentor for chestnut farmers and hobbyists, including the farmers at Breadtree and others establishing co-ops. During the busiest weekend of the annual harvest, in early October, Route 9 hosts what Miller has dubbed “Chestnut Woodstock,” inviting as many as 50 people to camp in the orchard, help out with the harvest and learn about the ins and outs of growing nuts. At the end of it all, he delivers what his daughter, Amy, calls his “chestnut sermon,” a treatise on the philosophy behind shifting from annual grain production to perennial tree crops. Anybody who fairly examines annual agriculture will conclude that “it’s just not a sustainable practice,” Miller says. Chestnuts and other tree crops, though, can be.

“This is something that’s good for the planet, good for the grower, and good for the consumer,” Miller, now 70, says. “The constraint is you have to make money or it’ll never happen.”

Cooperatives offer an answer to that conundrum, as Justin Holt and his colleagues at North Carolina’s Asheville Nuttery have found. Since 2017, the cooperative has been wild harvesting black walnuts, bitternut hickory and acorns, as well as buying them from community members. A separate but related cooperative called the Nutty Buddy Collective manages two four-acre orchards set up with 99-year leases signed in exchange for a share of their eventual yields.

The Nuttery processes its nuts in a facility stocked with equipment amassed through Kickstarter funding and a secondhand purchase from an Ohio grower. (That grower, Kurt Belser, explored nut crop production with a USDA Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education grant and determined it can be economically viable as long as farmers band together.) Last year, the co-op started selling holiday boxes stuffed with a dozen products, including fresh nuts, oils, acorn cookies, and black walnut salad dressing.

Like many growers, there’s something spiritual about Holt’s relationship with nuts. He still savors his first encounter with a hickory nut, cracking it open as the aroma of banana nut bread wafted out. “It was dizzying. It went straight to my heart,” he says. “It was like I saw God in some way.”

“All of us think that even if our business did fail, it would have been helping take another step toward trying out new ways of farming in our region.”

Holt believes growing tree nuts can help address “the deleterious effects our diets have on us and our planet,” and he sees how compelling the notion can be for like-minded individuals. “The foods themselves are interesting and delicious and expand our palates and what it means to eat from our places,” he says. “And there’s other levels to it: the need for togetherness, to feel like you’re part of something and that you’re contributing to a promising, hopeful vision for the future. There’s a hunger for that.”

But that doesn’t mean the work is easy, Holt admits. He’s spent the last decade wrapped up in the promise of it all, only to find himself burnt out from the uphill battle of changing even a small corner of the food system. For those willing to forge ahead, it’s only possible with partners.

“If anyone is actually willing to do it they come up against limitations real quick,” Holt says. “Land is impossibly expensive. There’s nowhere to process. You’ve got to figure this all out on your own. That’s the reason people turn to cooperative approaches. How can we get together and figure out how to do this?”

At Keystone, Grason and about a dozen fellow members bring a similar communal approach to nut harvesting. They’re focused on hickory oil but also plan to buy chestnuts, hazelnuts, and black walnuts to turn into value-added products, aiming to develop the market for tree crops with support from a Climate-Smart Commodities grant that delivered around $50,000 before being frozen by the Trump administration. (Breadtree’s USDA grant was also temporarily frozen before being reinstated; the pause will likely delay the facility’s opening by a year, shifting the goalpost to the 2027 harvest.)

The New York Tree Crops Alliance, meanwhile, shares Keystone’s vision, emphasizing hazelnuts and chestnuts, although member Brian Caldwell says Breadtree will serve as the region’s primary hub for the latter. There’s a sense of unity among those invested in seeing tree crops flourish, which feeds into the cooperative approach taking root, he says. “It self-selects for a certain kind of person,” he adds. The kind of person who sees an opportunity to reorient agriculture by establishing local economies based around perennial systems in places that currently produce relatively little of their own food — even if, as he acknowledges, growing demand alongside supply may be harder than growing the nuts themselves.

“It’s kind of like a fallow field,” Breadtree’s Simon says. “It’s fertile ground for something new to be done.”

When Breadtree’s farmers visited Italy’s chestnut region last fall, they witnessed what it could look like to achieve what they’ve set out to do. Nichols recalls walking through orchards that have been stewarded by families for centuries, their trees producing nuts in a seemingly endless cycle. Working with tree crops encourages people to consider their work from a generational perspective, she says, and the only way to do that is in community with others.

As Holt says of the tree crops movement, “the long-term vision is something on the time scale of an oak tree.”

It seems fitting, then, that Breadtree is pinning its future on a barn that has stood the test of time. Adaptive reuse is a complex proposition, Simon admits, “but it’s also part of our heritage.” Demolition began last winter, clearing off inches of dust and debris that had accumulated over nearly a decade of disuse and breaking down the interior so it can be built back up. Along the way, Breadtree will continue leaning on the wisdom of their compatriots. Miller, the Route 9 veteran, says that’s the only way to proceed. Work with tree crops moves too slowly for anyone to answer all the questions that arise in one lifetime, so collaboration is essential.

“Nobody can do this on their own,” he says.

Each summer, thousands of teenagers across the Midwest step into rows of seed corn fields before sunrise. In an age-old tradition, these teens have ridden buses from small towns and city centers to lace up their tennis shoes, fan out across the field, and perform one of agriculture’s youth-labeled jobs: corn detasseling.

Detasseling is a step in seed corn production that involves manually removing the male tassel from the female corn plant to prevent self-pollination. It’s a vital part of a massive Midwestern industry, usually happening during July. In Nebraska, Matt Schulte grew up in Grand Island detasseling corn in the late 1990s. He was a part of a seasonal workforce that still stretches across the Corn Belt today, working just one month a year.

Schulte learned hard work and the realities of farm life, plus what residents call the “Midwestern Spirit.” Now a father, pastor, and county commissioner, he passed that experience down to his own three kids. “The place where I drop off my kids each morning … there are six buses that pick up kids just at one site.” Just as students everywhere load buses for sports, Nebraska kids climb aboard the same buses in summer, bound for the cornfields. One company alone picks up teen workers at five different locations around Omaha, Schulte said.

More than 7,000 people detassel each year in Nebraska, according to the state; 80 percent of them are under 18. Row crop production pairs well with the availability of rural farm kids, who have long performed chores before they ever clock hours onto a timesheet. In an era of labor shortages, mechanization, and shifting youth priorities, these teen workers serve as a rare, essential link in the farm labor chain.

The national shortage of skilled workers has always left the door open for entry-level job seekers. Roughly 70 percent of agriculture businesses report needing to hire and train inexperienced employees, according to the Midwest Food, Agriculture and Forestry Workforce Needs Assessment. Enter youth labor in agriculture. An estimated 600,000 workers are in agriculture under the age of 18, according to the most recent Childhood Agricultural Injury Survey.

With parental consent, children as young as 12 can work in non-hazardous farm jobs, typically outside of school hours. At 14, teens may work in a wider range of non-hazardous farm roles. At 16, they may perform hazardous agricultural work without restrictions on hours. At 18, they can work in dangerous jobs across both agricultural and non-agricultural industries.

Federal regulations under the Fair Labor Standards Act set the national minimum for child labor protections, but agricultural exemptions allow states to loosen youth employment rules — with exact regulations varying from state to state.

Around the country, children are picking strawberries, baling hay, cleaning pens, and feeding livestock. But in row crop country, detasseling is king. The detasseling process is controlled, allowing for cross-pollination between selected parent plants, enabling the production of hybrid seed. Machines remove about 75 percent of the male tassels, but workers must walk miles of rows to identify and pull the rest by hand. Timing is critical because removing them too early and your yield suffers; too late, and the corn pollinates itself.

Nick Grandstaff is an Iowa native who detasseled for DuPont Pioneer in his younger years. Come the end of June, “Everyone in town either opted into detasseling or found another job,” he said. Reflecting on why the market exists, Grandstaff pointed to regions like North Central Iowa, where fertile soil and nearby seed processing plants create the right business conditions. In those towns, all youth, regardless of background, took part.

“Mechanization can only go so far in detasseling,” he said. “Well-motivated youth get the job done.”

For many teens, detasseling is a summer side job — a way to earn spending money. But in the broader under‑16 farm workforce around the country, many have low-income family responsibilities that extend beyond pocket money. According to the Lawyers for Good Government, over 90 percent of children agricultural workers are persons of color. Within that percentage, 83 are identified as Hispanic.

The USDA reports that up to 7% of crop production workers are aged 14 to 19. The size of this child labor population complicates assumptions that teen wages rarely contribute to household needs, undercutting opponents of minimum wage spikes. Bureau of Labor Statistics data show that nearly 45 percent of minimum-wage jobs are held by workers ages 16 to 24.

“The original idea behind farm exemptions in youth labor law was to help family farms survive.”

As demand for cheaper labor grows, the detasseling capital of America is outsourcing to migrant crews that follow harvests from south to north, replacing thousands of teen jobs with lower-paid adults whose wages must still meet the federal minimum.

Nebraska county commissioner Schulte took issue with that when he published an op-ed protesting reduced detasseling access for local teens. “Large seed producers have found that they can improve their bottom line by outsourcing detasseling and rogueing to migrant worker companies,” he said.

Companies like Bayer, Syngenta, and Remington Seeds all utilized the H-2A visa program to fill these labor crews. Adults over the age of 18 years old qualify for H-2A visas, but their children or dependents are not authorized to work themselves, under the H-4 visa — a rule often broken.

Starting in 2019, the United States Department of Labor and state of Nebraska feuded when the state argued its teens were ready to detassel corn, while the federal agency continued approving H-2A visas for migrant crews.

The model is not new — migrant crews have long filled agricultural labor gaps — but outsourcing a job historically held by local teens has sparked concern. In 2024, Nebraska lawmakers passed LB844, a bill requiring seed companies to make documented efforts, submitted to the state, to recruit local youth before hiring out-of-state migrant crews. The law adds steps beyond the H-2A program’s basic recruitment strategies like newspaper posting.

Defending teen access to tough farm jobs is neither politically easy nor popular. But advocates argue the bill does more than protect jobs — it preserves young people’s exposure to agriculture. “We need to protect migrant workers from these unhealthy, harsh conditions,” Schulte said about the traveling team who work all year-round. “We need to protect Nebraska jobs,” he also said, revealing a complicated dichotomy: Should the unhealthy, harsh conditions be reserved for native-born youth?

Schulte says his eldest son earned $12,000 over his years detasseling, enough to buy a pickup truck outright. “Every dollar he used to pay for that thing came from those fields,” he said. “Once he realized how much he could make, he was all in.”

The broader farm workforce is also “all in”— but only if they’re allowed to stay in the country to work. In July 2025, Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins doubled down on a zero-amnesty policy for foreign labor, calling for a fully American farm workforce. She pointed to Medicaid recipients as potential replacements for the millions of farmworkers her administration has sought to deport; differing state laws could expand the role of teen workers even further.

Youth labor protections in agriculture were created to shield minors from hazardous work, prevent exploitation, and ensure children stay in school. Even for the youngest workers, the law sets age minimums, mandates breaks in some states, and limits tasks based on risk, said Jeffrey Lewis, an attorney with Ohio State University’s Agricultural & Resource Law Program.

But enforcement and legal standards vary widely by state and often depend on how each job is classified. And right now, various states are both strengthening and loosening their child labor protections.

“Mechanization can only go so far in detasseling. Well-motivated youth get the job done.”

In Iowa, lawmakers recently introduced legislation that would allow 14-year-olds to work in meatpacking plants under certain conditions. In Ohio on the other hand, a new rule bars youth under 18 from handling restricted-use pesticides, a change expected to directly affect small grain and row crop farms.

This patchwork of regulation has created inconsistencies in how, and whether, youth can participate in farm work legally. “Youth employment is particularly nuanced in employment law,” Lewis said. “The distinction matters.” Field labor, meatpacking, and equipment use each fall under different legal categories and are not governed by a single standard when state law superseded federal law.

Some critics note that detasseling is often done in peak July heat for eight hours a day, and is too demanding for minors. Their concerns are backed by a 2018 U.S. Government Accountability Office report, which found that more than half of all work-related youth fatalities occurred in agriculture.

The Fair Labor Standards Act sets a national baseline, but states can impose stricter rules — or attempt to loosen them. Fieldwork like corn detasseling qualifies as “agricultural labor,” which is broadly exempt from many child labor restrictions. By contrast, meatpacking, though often discussed in the same context, is not considered agricultural labor under federal law. Instead, it is classified as manufacturing and processing, industries deemed too hazardous for workers under 18.

Illegal child labor in meat processing remains common. In 2025, JBS USA settled for $4 million dollars with the Department of Labor. In 2024, 11 children, some as young as 13, were found working at Seaboard Triumph in Iowa. Regardless, many states have further legislated to operate with a younger workforce; Iowa, for example, allows work permits for children as young as 14 to work in meat coolers and industrial laundries, restricted workplaces under federal law.

“The original idea behind farm exemptions in youth labor law was to help family farms survive,” Lewis explained. But today, those exemptions now apply on a much broader scale across the economy. One of the big conversations now is whether we are doing enough to protect young workers, he said.

Depending on who you ask, you might get very different answers.

At a May 12 town hall meeting for Cranbury Township in Middlesex County, New Jersey, anger was thick in the air.

“How would you feel if someone did this to your home!” shouted one woman.

More than 16 people took to the podium in the open comment portion of the meeting, double the usual amount. One resident angrily told the committee there was a lack of transparency in what was going on here. Weeks earlier, voicemail messages left on the committee’s public phone number included outcries such as, “You’re just stealing from the taxpayer, you need to give that f*cking farm back.”

This vitriol was aimed at the township for approving a housing project that would tear up a 175-year-old, 21-acre cattle ranch due to eminent domain, which allows governments (from municipal to federal) to seize property for public use and interest — even if the owner doesn’t want to sell. Cranbury Township is seeking to redevelop 11 acres of the ranch to install a range of affordable units, just minutes away from the busy New Jersey turnpike.

Ranch owner Andy Henry pleaded his case at the meeting, clarifying he wants to keep the property in his family and that it isn’t an investment. While he lives in New Mexico now, still owning the property with his brother and leasing it out to a farmer, he has consistently rebuffed $1 million-per-acre offers from other buyers over the past few decades. But this eminent domain ruling has felt like quicksand he can’t get out of.

Henry’s case is one of many pitting farmers and ranchers against the government right now. In the past, this law has commonly applied to public infrastructure upgrades such as installing new transit yards or widening highways. Utilities companies use eminent domain issuances to, say, build transmission lines across several counties, a situation adding drama to city council meetings in Maryland.

But eminent domain cases have seen marked expansion in their definition. In Southwest Iowa, a school district wants to acquire five acres from a 100-year-old farm to build a 10,000-square-foot bus barn with maintenance and wash bays, a concrete apron, and parking for bus drivers.

“This is a steamroll job by county officials… The whole thing stinks and they know it.”

In Iowa, farmer opposition has been quite effective against three proposed CO₂ pipelines that would capture carbon dioxide from ethanol plants and transport it out of state for sequestration. Private pipeline companies attempted using eminent domain to acquire easements across private farmland, in the hope of securing lucrative Inflation Reduction Act tax credits, with the Iowa ethanol industry claiming the pipeline is necessary to remain competitive in markets adopting low-carbon fuel standards. In March, the Iowa legislature voted to ban eminent domain for this type of project.

In Northeast Virginia, county government officials want to construct a 14-million-gallon per day water intake plant and adjoining pipeline on Garrett Farms’ riverfront acreage, using eminent domain leverage. Owner Cory Garrett told AgWeb in December, “This is a steamroll job by county officials … The whole thing stinks and they know it.”

Lawyers familiar with eminent domain cases have seen a surge in these rulings as infrastructure projects ramp up. “When you hear about these big bills to allocate trillions of dollars to highway improvement projects, for example, that means local transportation departments are putting in transmissions lines and need land for all of this, so they need to condemn more property,” said Sean Sherlock, a partner at Snell & Wilmer in Orange County, California.

The municipality or government body issuing the eminent domain letters to property owners may seem to be holding all the cards but their rights aren’t unlimited. Their eminent domain issuance can be taken to court where judges can reverse rulings and ensure the owner’s property is free from any development.

In any eminent domain case, compensation has to be given to the property owner, which can still be complicated due to how the owner and the government will each hire appraisers who may come up with very different amounts. “Government agencies often have an initial inadequate number, I’ve found,” said Sherlock, “and they don’t consider severance damages.”

“Government agencies often have an initial inadequate number, I’ve found, and they don’t consider severance damages.”

Say a municipality wants to seize 20 acres of a 160-acre property, at $10,000 an acre, he said. The owner may get $200,000 but those remaining 140 acres have lost value immediately, especially if some of those seized 20 acres are on top of an entry point.

Henry’s lawyer Tim Duggan filed a lawsuit against Cranbury Township, claiming their ordinance is not based on “sound legal and factual precedent.”

“These housing developments are in the middle of nowhere, so is that really in the public interest?” Duggan added.

Cranbury is using eminent domain in this situation due to an encroaching deadline. It had until June 30 to present a plan for adding 265 affordable housing units over the next decade, a requirement for every New Jersey community under the Mount Laurel doctrine. This series of state Supreme Court decisions, going back to 1975, mandates each municipality provide its “fair share” of affordable housing based on its population.

Henry said, “When I got that eminent domain letter in April, I was shocked, I had no clue it was coming. Cranbury didn’t reach out to me at all to even ask me to sell any acres to them.”

This is actually the second time Henry’s family had to fight to preserve their property. In the 1960s, the same township wanted to lay a road down through the family acreage, cutting through his family’s 2,300-square-foot farmstead.

“I remember hearing how our family and everyone in the community was going into town to fight off that ruling, and we obviously won,” Henry said, “and I hope for the same here.”

When Baltimore restaurateur Jasmine Norton set out to partner with a Black oyster farmer, sourcing was a lot more difficult than she’d imagined.

“There generally isn’t a lot of widespread coverage of Black oyster economies and farmers,” said Norton, chef and owner of Baltimore’s The Urban Oyster Bar, the country’s only Black-and-woman-owned oyster restaurant. “A lot of our industry connections are made by word of mouth and the legacies are often shared through the oral tradition, but not much has been written down or documented in a way that gives new generations access to this information,” she continued.

Norton acknowledged that her own path to oysters was forged by a legacy of Black oystermen and women — shuckers, dredgers, and especially farmers — who helped build today’s billion-dollar industry in the United States.

Similarly, in other coastal regions of the United States such as New Orleans, Maryland’s Eastern Shore, South Carolina, and Georgia, the contributions and expertise of Black oystermen and women during The Gilded Age were critical in building the American oyster industry. According to the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations, in the 1880s, oyster farming peaked to around 27 million bushels per year. Oysters were a common food, especially throughout the East Coast and Midwest. Thousands of industry workers were involved in the process from harvesting to shucking, dredging, canning, packing, and transporting.

However, many Black oystermen and women during this time traced their involvement in the industry back to the pre-and-during Civil War era when Blacks and Whites often worked the waterways together. Still, Black oystermen and women of coastal communities were often taken advantage of by enslavers who used them to farm, sell, clean, and prepare oysters, but paid them little to nothing at all.

In the Netflix docu-series High on the Hog: How African American Cuisine Transformed America, host Stephen Satterfield highlights Thomas Downing, “The Oyster King of New York,” who became famous for his NYC oyster business in the late 1800s. Learning the ropes from growing up on Virginia’s eastern shore, Downing’s Broad Street oyster cellar assisted in elevating the business of oysters, taking them from cheap, easy-to-afford eats for the working class to fine-dining delicacies. Located near Five Points and the center of the city’s bustling business district, oysters ironically became inaccessible to the very people who helped to build their popularity.

Despite his own community’s lack of access to oysters, Downing expanded his business to include catering and shipping nationwide. His pickled oysters even made their way to Queen Elizabeth in Europe. The queen was so pleased, she sent Downing a gold watch that became a treasured family heirloom.

This popularity, in turn, gave Downing the platform as an activist for New York’s free Black community, fighting alongside local civic organizations for economic equity — a legacy that was passed down to his eldest son, George Thomas Downing, who was also a hotelier, activist, and restaurateur.

After the Emancipation Proclamation, Black oyster harvesters looked to the fishing industry as means to financially support themselves and their families. At the time, oystering was one of the highest paid professions for Black men. By the early 1900s, many areas along the Eastern Seaboard were renowned for robust oyster harvests. The Department of Labor even noted in its yearly bulletin that Black oyster harvesters were thriving in oyster and fish-producing areas like Litwalton and Whealton.

During the Reconstruction era, Black oyster farmers in the South (the Carolinas, Georgia, Louisiana) often entered into sharecropping-variety agreements that kept Black Southerners impoverished and immobile. In response, many made their way North to form communities like Sandy Ground, an oyster harvesting sanctuary in Rossville, New York.

Promoting Sustainable Communities

Historically, oyster farming supported sustainability not only within the industry, but also within predominantly Black communities.

“The economic impact of the oyster farming process affects individuals and businesses on several levels,” said Kevin Dawson, associate professor of history at the University of California, Merced, and author of The Undercurrents of Power: Aquatic Culture in the African Diaspora. Dawson has dedicated his life’s work to examining aquatic culture amongst West Africans and Africans in America during the late 15th century through American Reconstruction.

“My current work in progress closely examines how enslaved African women used fishing techniques to sell all kinds of seafood, including oysters, at what would be known as modern-day farmer’s markets,” said Dawson.

“During the early and mid-1800s, most of what was being eaten in seaports was being produced by enslaved people during their free time. They were fishing, crabbing, harvesting oysters and selling it in port cities like Baltimore, Charleston, and New Orleans. Oysters, in addition to other types of seafood, were really crucial to those economies,” emphasized Dawson.

In his research, Dawson discovered that these women were often allowed to keep their profits. However, enslavers used this system to justify not giving the enslaved enough clothes to wear or quality food to eat.

“A universal complaint was that enslavers did not provide them with enough clothing and food … so women used profits from selling oysters to buy necessities like clothes, bedding, bathing, and hygienic products in addition to small livestock for meat and eggs,” explained Dawson.

Another such story is that of John and Tom Vreeland Jackson, two brothers who, in 1830, were freedmen in the Hudson River region whose oyster business funded the purchase of family land and served as a refuge for enslaved Africans escaping through the Underground Railroad.

Oyster harvesting continued to support generations of families by providing stable and steady work. For instance, Ira Samuel Wright of Wetipquin, Maryland, worked as an oyster farmer from the 1950s to the mid-70s. Oystering the Chesapeake Bay, just like his father had done before him, Wright earned a solid income for himself and his family.

Dawson continued, “Over time, oysters were not just used to feed people and produce cash crops for profit. Oyster farmers contributed to an ecosystem within Black neighborhoods by also using oysters as fertilizer in composting methods and by providing jobs for skilled workers and their families.”

Longtime oyster farmer and commercial crabber Ernest McIntosh Sr., who owns the family-operated oyster farm E.L. McIntosh and Son Oyster Company, has been harvesting wild oysters along Georgia’s coastline for more than 50 years.

In an interview with Jolvan Morris, a consultation biologist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Fisheries Oral History Archives, McIntosh described how the oyster industry supports the economies in the Southeast, particularly St. Augustine, Jacksonville, Savannah, Atlanta, and parts of the Carolinas. McIntosh Sr., who taught his son to harvest oysters as a pre-teen, used revenue from crabbing and oysters, as well as a SBA loan, to build a seafood packing and shipping house which provided jobs and income to other members of the community.

Although the crabbing portion of the business proved fruitful for McIntosh Sr., he explained that his brothers left due to shifts in the industry, government regulations, and increased pricing. “They all turned sour at it … and got out,” said McIntosh, whose business is now entirely focused on oyster farming.

A Vanishing Legacy

Around 1929, state governments replaced oyster harvesting with repletion seed programs, hoping to restore oyster beds that had been displaced by large kelp forests. However, decades after the programs were initiated, efforts were thwarted by fungal pandemics and natural predators.

In the 1970s, overharvesting, pollution, and gradual climate change continued the sharp decline in oyster farming, especially in Black communities. And while restoration practices have resulted in boosting previously low oyster populations, Black oyster communities have yet to fully recover, jeopardizing the history and traditions of culturally-nuanced oyster harvesting.

Today, oyster farming is still practiced by the descendants of generations of Black harvesters in coastal communities along the Chesapeake Bay such as Hobson Village, Virginia, where Mary Hill, a seventh-generation oyster harvester may be the only Black woman oyster farmer in the country. Local historians, societies, museums, preservationists, and oral storytellers in Louisiana parishes as well as other once-thriving historically Black oyster communities along the coasts are working to ensure the stories, recipes, and traditions of Black oyster farmers don’t get lost in shifting economic and political landscapes.

Accessibility and Education in Mind

“While it has steadily declined in African American coastal communities, accessibility and education can further support development in oyster farming,” said Jordan Lynch, aquaculturist and farm manager of the Key Allegro Oyster Farm in Rockport, Texas.

Lynch said “one of the biggest hurdles in advancement is visibility and access to capital for underrepresented and Black [oyster] farmers.”

There are, however, organizations like Minorities in Aquaculture which are increasing opportunities for anyone who wants to learn more about oyster farming or any careers in the aquaculture sector. While Minorities in Aquaculture is the currently the only minority workforce development organization in the industry, according to their official website, they are committed to “educating underrepresented demographics about the environmental aquaculture and a growing viable career pipeline.”

Lynch, who is originally from Iowa, knew that in order to get more career-focused information, he was going to need to get out of his hometown. Not only did he leave his construction career to pursue an education in aquaculture at Texas A&M in Galveston, he voluntarily interned with a local oyster farmer who showed him the ropes. “I also paid my way to a lot of national conferences, but I know that everyone can’t always afford to attend them.”

“In order to preserve the legacy, there should also be more education on the nuts and bolts of oyster farming,” said Lynch. “If new oyster farmers are just learning the ropes, they should definitely understand their access to landing and the history of the farm site. How far is the landing from how you’re going to get your oysters? Five miles versus 10 across the bay makes a huge difference. Also, what about the history of the site … how often does the bay close?” he continued. “There’s a ton of research that needs to be done.”

Diverse Storytelling Holds Another Key

“Oyster farming today is pretty much a face-to-face network … and the relationships you build with people in this industry are critical if you want to go far,” said Lynch.

After a delectable first experience eating raw oysters in Charleston, South Carolina, Kamille Harris and Jasmine Hardy highlighted their newfound love by starting an Instagram page, Black Girls & Oysters, where the couple showcase themselves eating and learning about all-things oysters.

“Not having prior knowledge of the intersection of Black history and oysters, I really did not think oysters were eaten widely by people in our communities. So, bridging that gap and helping our people to understand the history, is going to get more Black folks not only wanting to taste them, but potentially even work in oyster farming or seafood commerce,” said Hardy.

Dawson confirmed that, as storytelling evolves, new generations are sharing the stories of Black oyster farmers (past, present, and future) in unconventional ways to ensure visibility.

“Instead of just providing information through scholarly texts and museum exhibits, social media platforms can help historians get information to individuals in short, digestible chunks,” he said.

Jasmine Norton also envisions a future where accessible information can open more doors especially for Black oyster enthusiasts, chefs, scientists, historians, restauranteurs, harvesters, shuckers, dredgers, packagers, transporters, or anyone who wants to explore the oyster industry for its history or as a trade.

“One of my goals is to have my own brand of oysters that are sourced from Chincoteague, Virginia, the birthplace of Thomas Downing. It’s my way of honoring history … And I’m definitely not the only one fighting to keep our connection to oysters alive. Through storytelling, we can make sure our narratives — and our legacies — don’t disappear.“

At first, the wolf was intrigued by the strange, buzzing creature flying toward it. Dropping into a playful stance, it considered whether the drone overhead was something to play with or, at the very least, eat.

That was not the response that the USDA’s Wildlife Services “night watch” team, positioned nearby, was looking for. It was August of 2022 in southwestern Oregon’s Klamath Basin, and the group was testing whether small, remote-piloted drones might be effective at detecting and scaring wolves away from cattle.

It had been a tough period for conflict between wolves and livestock. Over the preceding three weeks, the notorious Rogue Pack had killed a cow just about every other night. “It was really bad,” said Dustin Ranglack, predator project leader for the National Wildlife Research Center. “And nobody’s happy when that is happening.”

As in most of the lower 48 states, gray wolves are federally listed as endangered in the western two-thirds of Oregon, which means that nonlethal tactics are the only legal option for ranchers hoping to prevent wolves from preying on their livestock. Since 2018, state and federal wildlife agencies had been conducting “night watches” in the area, patrolling hotspots of wolf activity on foot and in all-terrain vehicles, and using handheld thermal cameras to scan for predators entering cattle pastures. If detected, they’d deploy an assortment of tools to scare the wolves away, including cracker shells, noisemakers, and nonlethal ammunition.

The hands-on approach was relatively effective, but trees and uneven terrain presented a visibility challenge. The inspiration to try drones came from an unlikely source. “Some folks were out trying to find Bigfoot using drones with thermal cameras,” said Ranglack. “We thought, boy, that’s actually a good idea.” Drones might enable the night watch to detect wolves sooner. But personnel at Wildlife Services, which in recent years has directed more resources toward nonlethal approaches, wondered whether the drones themselves might be able to directly haze wolves away from livestock, reducing the agency’s need to intercept them in person.

That night in 2022, the drone’s pilot flew it away from the playful wolf and back to base, where a speaker was attached to the aerial unit’s setup. As the wolf began to approach a group of cattle, the drone flew to it again, this time with the pilot yelling at the wolf through the speaker overhead. Spooked, it ran off immediately.

Everything But the Kitchen Sink

Before gray wolves were protected under the Endangered Species Act in 1974, they were nearly exterminated through a government-sponsored campaign of trapping, poisoning, and shooting. Today, wolf populations are rebounding across the Western U.S., driven by natural repopulation, as well as reintroduction efforts that have seen wolves intentionally released in areas such as Yellowstone National Park and, most recently, Colorado’s rural Western Slope. It’s a major win for conservationists, but many livestock producers view it as an alarming turnaround, particularly if they find themselves on the receiving end of a persistent predation issue.

Seeking a solution, ranchers and wildlife agencies have tested and deployed a diverse arsenal of equipment and strategies, from motion-activated floodlights to noisy speakers to the occasional inflatable air dancer. “We’re seeing a lot of uptake in these practices with people who may not be excited about wolves on the landscape, but who recognize that they’re here to stay,” said Shawn Cantrell, vice president of species conservation and coexistence at the nonprofit Defenders of Wildlife, which promotes strategies for living alongside wolves through community outreach and advocacy.

“Some folks were out trying to find Bigfoot using drones with thermal cameras. We thought, boy, that’s actually a good idea.”

Cantrell has been working on issues around human-wolf interaction for over a decade. He said that the single most effective nonlethal tool is human presence. Range riding, a practice of patrolling and monitoring herds on horseback or ATV, seen as an effective approach, and new agency-funded range rider programs are popping up in states such as Colorado. Livestock guardian dogs are another low-tech solution. But both methods can be costly and require specialized training for dogs and humans alike.

Another highly effective tool is fladry, lines of brightly colored flags that are attached to a wire and strung around grazing land to form a visual barrier that is offputting to wolves. Multiple studies have demonstrated that fladry works, but only if used sparingly, for about six weeks at a time. “Wolves tend to be very inquisitive, and they’re also very smart,” said Cantrell. “After a while, they will get accustomed to any particular nonlethal tool, and at some point they’ll test it.”

Habituation is one angle that Ranglack’s team monitored in their experimentation with drones. So far, he said there’s been no evidence of wolves getting comfortable with them. In fact, the tool may be getting more effective. “That first wolf, when we approached it with the drone, wasn’t afraid of it at all,” he said. “Now, the wolves in this area have had exposure to the drone, and they will often already be moving away when we approach them with just the drone’s rotor noise. They’ve already come to associate the drone with people, and we’re not necessarily having to use the human voice, or recorded gunshots, or fireworks sounds, or whatever else.”

Speaking Their Language

Sara Nozkova has a vision for a future where new technologies aren’t limited to scaring animals away with loud noises and flashing lights. She’s the CEO of Flox, a Swedish company that’s working to combine artificial intelligence with wildlife science for a more holistic approach to deterrence.

This fall, Flox will begin selling its first product, the Edge unit, which is designed to attach to fence posts and repel wildlife using AI-powered image recognition and a proprietary set of bioacoustic deterrents. “It’s kind of our core technology, so I cannot say too much, but the idea is that we kind of speak the language that they understand,” said Nozkova. Flox works with wildlife researchers and biologists to learn and adapt from the animal responses it receives on the spot. “If we see that there isn’t the right reaction with one sound, we go directly to the next one, so the AI is learning the behaviors and how to trigger the right reaction.”

“It’s become a staple for wolf conflict prevention, especially in southwest Oregon.”

Nozkova said this approach mitigates the issue of habituation. “Based on the trials that we’ve been doing, not only do we not see any habituation, we actually see that we can teach animals to avoid different areas.” Predator deterrence is just one application of the technology: Flox has trialed the Edge device in airports, railways, and farms, and says it’s so far repelled 25,000 animals, including deer, elk, and wild boars.

Drones are the next frontier of Flox’s product development. “We’ve been experimenting with drones since 2021, because we believe that that’s the future,” said Nozkova. To fulfill customers’ needs, she said a drone would need to operate autonomously, patrolling around the clock — especially evenings and nights when animals are most active — and returning to a charging station as needed. “It’s something that’s definitely possible, but it’s quite complicated.” Autonomous drones are tightly controlled by the Federal Aviation Administration, and regulatory hurdles abound.

Nozkova says her company is continuing to test the concept while waiting for the next wave of drone technology to lower costs and enable further innovation. For now, multiple Edge units can be installed to form a virtual fenceline that approximates what a drone might be able to cover. “With drones, we will unlock the potential to cover even larger areas,” she said.

Peace of Mind

While autonomous drone patrols may be a long time coming, there are plenty of limitations to using drones to haze wolves today. Battery life allows only for a short window of time before drones need to recharge, and topographic elements such as tree cover or rocky areas can present a challenge. (Seen from an overhead thermal camera, a sun-warmed rock can look like a wolf.)

Cost is another major issue: Each drone used by Wildlife Services costs between $10,000 and $20,000, and flying them requires at least one trained pilot and one visual observer to keep eyes on the drone, ideally with a fully charged backup on hand. “The cost of this technology is not at a point where it is feasible for each individual producer to be able to go out and buy something like that,” said Ranglack.

“It’s going to take time for the technology and the price point to catch up. But it would give that producer peace of mind.“

Still, he is positive about the technology’s potential. After the night watch introduced drones in the Klamath Basin, livestock predations went from one every other night, to just two over 85 days. Though more experimentation is needed, “It’s become a staple for wolf conflict prevention, especially in southwest Oregon,” he said. Wildlife Services is now growing the program, training more pilots, acquiring more drones, and working with state agencies to test the approach in Colorado, Arizona, and Northern California.

Someday, Ranglack would like to see a future where every producer could buy an affordable drone that could be programmed to patrol an area that covers all of their livestock. At a minimum, he envisions a system where the drone could assess whether there’s a threat or not, and send out either an “all clear” or “threat detected” message with a location pin, allowing people to respond quickly.

“It’s going to take time for the technology and the price point to catch up,” he said. “But it would give that producer peace of mind of knowing that there is something out there watching over their herd or their flock while they sleep at night.”

Rolling hills covered in tall grass, short trees and shrubs, and wildflowers every color of the rainbow — it doesn’t get much more picturesque than Texas Hill Country in the spring. Late March is when the wildflowers are in full bloom, lining the highway alongside ranches, vineyards, BBQ halls, resort spas, and other tourist attractions.

This year, just before peak wildflower season, nearly 10,000 acres of Hill Country burned in a scorching wildfire — later named the Crabapple Fire for its origins on Lower Crabapple Road.

“It literally just took off and we could not catch it,” said Fredericksburg Fire Chief Lynn Bizzell, who spearheaded containment of the Crabapple Fire. He said in his nearly 50 years of fighting fires, this one stood out as especially overwhelming — calling the heat “incinerating,” and noting that this fire moved quickly, making it particularly hard for his crew to catch.

The vegetation across the land was a huge part of what made this fire high-speed and hot — including tall grass and cedar trees. Both of these are endemic to Texas Hill Country; however, grazing animals typically keep these two types of kindling in-check. With more people moving to Hill Country and managing their land without grazing animals or prescribed burns, kindling like this is becoming more plentiful — which means wildfire risk will continue to rise.

Unless — we fight fire with fire.

*

Tom Proch didn’t lose his home to the Crabapple Fire, but he did lose his guesthouse, woodworking shop, barns, shed, chicken coop, trailers, and around 40 acres of trees and timber. In terms of land management, Proch does his best to keep his recreational land clear of fire kindling — keeping in mind the cost associated with managing that much recreational land.

“Long story short, if you have the equipment, all it takes is time to manage the land,” Proch said. “But if you don’t have the equipment, it takes time and a bunch of money.”

And Proch is not alone. Many landowners in Hill Country now file for wildlife exemption for their non-agricultural land, a way of paying agriculture property taxes in return for performing conservation practices. Managing that land can pose a challenge when it comes to minimizing wildfire kindling.

“To me, a lot of the country now is undergrazed, and that’s why our fire danger has skyrocketed around here.”

“Because there’s portions of the land here under wildlife exemption that are not grazed, the cedar that grows in there has the fuel around it, the grass, to be very, very volatile,” said Brad Roeder, county extension agent. “To me, a lot of the country now is undergrazed, and that’s why our fire danger has skyrocketed around here.”

While it may seem simple (less kindling = less chance for a wildfire to spread), in practice this quickly gets into the weeds of land management — literally and figuratively.

*

Cedar was key to the Crabapple Fire burning hot, due to the high oil content of these trees and the tall grass growing around them on land that hadn’t been grazed. Under more humid conditions, sometimes cedar can actually work as a firebreak — due to their high leaf moisture potential.

When the fire broke out, the humidity was down to 9%, according to Fredericksburg Prescribed Burn Association (PBA) president Allen Ersch.

“At 20% humidity, if you have short grass burning you can spray it out with water, look back at it, and it’s burning again,” said Ersch. “Like a trick candle — you blow it out, and it comes back. At 9% humidity, you’re lucky to get it out the first time.”

Ersch has worked with fire in a productive way for Texas Hill Country for over 20 years, serving the community as a certified private prescribed burn manager, and teaching landowners how to use prescribed burns and brush pile burns to manage their land. He also uses prescribed burning to manage the nearly 600 acres of property he currently manages for himself and for others.

“At 20% humidity, if you have short grass burning you can spray it out with water, look back at it, and it’s burning again. At 9% humidity, you’re lucky to get it out the first time.”

Looking at the history of the land, Ersch pointed out that fire has always been a part of the story, but how people have interacted with and viewed fire has changed significantly.

Prior to European settlers moving in, Texas Hill Country was open land with frequent wildfires that would start from campfires and lightning strikes and would burn until they were stopped by natural breaks like creeks. However, German influence brought fences around property owned by different families to contain grazing animals like cattle and goats, and fires needed to be put out so they wouldn’t destroy those fences.

Overgrazing quickly became a large and consistent issue.

“Tall grass was wasted grass,” Roeder said. “The first picture of our ranch was from the drought of the 50s, and there is literally not a blade of grass anywhere in sight.”

When people started turning away from the land for their livelihood after the 1950s Texas Drought, the grass had time to recover — and so did the cedar, previously kept in check by goats.

*

In 1995, Texas enacted a wildlife management exemption from high property tax — this alternative to farm exemptions meant people could own large pieces of Texas land without paying high property taxes, and without having to graze animals or plant crops. As Ersch put it, many landowners opted not to have the “pleasant remains” left by cattle on their land under wildlife exemption. Put simply: Land without cattle is land without cattle manure, too.

Morgan Treadwell, professor and extension range specialist at Texas A&M University, said that both a fear of fire and of overgrazing has kept landowners from preventing wildfires — especially those who are managing land under wildlife exemption.

“They’re sort of in preservation mode, a little bit of let-nature-exist-in-a-vacuum type of thing,” she said. “But when you start talking about the natural processes that shape plant communities throughout the Edwards Plateau, Hill Country, the panhandle, all of that — they crave fire and grazing. They cannot survive without it.”

She explained that oftentimes landowners who move out to Hill Country from larger towns or cities don’t prepare their land for things like floods and fires, even though they are both real threats to this part of Texas. “It’s another example of humans becoming even more disconnected, and rather than living in sync with Mother Nature, they’re just fighting it,” she said.

When it comes to managing brush to prevent wildfires, there appears to be two options for wildlife exempt plots and rangeland alike — graze it or burn it.

Treadwell also made the point that fire is not only a native to Texas Hill Country, but it also plays a crucial role in maintaining soil health and plant biodiversity that conservationists and ranchers both depend on.

“If I can graze it, I can burn it, and then I can graze it again — it’s a really cool cycle that inevitably benefits [ranchers’] bottom line.”

“I think there’s lots of reasons why we should look to inject fire into every place that evolved with fire — after that reset, it’s incredible the amount of diversity that’s released on every trophic level,” said Treadwell.

Although many people who run cattle on their land have an incredible understanding of what it takes to keep their grass healthy, many really “put the brakes on” — as Treadwell put it — when it comes to fire. “Few producers really embody that synergistic process of the more you burn, the more grass you have, the more brush and trees you suppress, and the less they are choking your grasses out,” she said. “If I can graze it, I can burn it, and then I can graze it again — it’s a really cool cycle that inevitably benefits their bottom line.”

And she would know — her family is the fifth generation on their ranch just north of Hill Country, where they’ve been using a combination of prescribed fire and grazing to manage their land for decades.

So while the number of wildfires per year has steadily risen, in Texas and across the United States, a fear of fire might only fuel the ones that are out of our control.

Conservation of Texas grasslands may call for lighter grazing than in decades past, but swinging the pendulum in the opposite direction makes the land unmanaged — perfect kindling for an unmanageable wildfire when the conditions arise. Striking a balance between prescribed burning, grazing, and giving the land time to rest between management styles is what will likely move Texas ranching, conservation, and wildfire prevention forward more than any one of these alone.

“No one’s really gotten prescribed fire off the ground here. A lot of ranchers are afraid of it.” So said Jim Armedariz, a state rangeland specialist with the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) in New Mexico. He’s fixing to change that fearful attitude across his state — and to help producers understand not only how to introduce the practice to their land, but how to do it safely.

Land managers across the U.S. have suppressed fires for the better part of a century, creating situations that have increased fire’s destructive potential. When Armendariz talks to ranchers around New Mexico, he points out other devastating effects of that suppression: invasive eastern redcedar encroaching on central grasslands, Rocky Mountain juniper taking over the Great Basin and Front Range, creosote bush and mesquite gobbling the desert. This encroachment is displacing the nutritious grasses munched by some of the state’s 2 million cows, goats, and sheep and upping the risk of more destructive wildfires. But as he and other fire specialists shared with Offrange, there are ways for producers to have their fire and the safety of their operations, too.

Though Armendariz believes fire is as “natural to the land as wind and rain and snow and drought and all of the elements we deal with,” he understands why it stokes so much fear in people. In 2022, U.S. Forest Service lost control of two prescribed burns; they merged and eventually sizzled over 340,000 acres to become the biggest fire in New Mexico’s history. Nevertheless, Armendariz considers prescribed fire a potent way to ensure natural fire events are less potentially destructive, and to make land more productive for farmers and ranchers — by revitalizing native grasses and managing troublesome non-native plants. Preparation, however, is key.

It’s also important to note that in some habitats, burns can supplant natives in a process called type conversion. This means that it’s essential to talk with a fire professional like Armendariz to better understand the suitability of fire to your land and its plants. “Of all the tools that we have in our toolbox for managing woody species encroachment [fire is] probably the cheapest one,” Armendariz said — it costs a rancher less than $15 an acre to run a controlled burn, versus $80 an acre for herbicide sprayed by plane, or up to $400 an acre for mechanical removal.

Livestock producers often use prescribed fire to improve rangelands. But the practice has its upsides for farmers, too, who may “burn off their fields to get rid of debris and other residue as a regular part of their annual operations,” said Katie Low, statewide coordinator for the University of California Division of Agriculture and Natural Resources’ Fire Network. In some farming communities there’s also a tradition of irrigation ditch burns, which get rid of weeds and dead stuff to improve waterflow.

“No one’s really gotten prescribed fire off the ground here. A lot of ranchers are afraid of it.”

Fire safety starts with hardening the defensible spaces on your property. According to Lou Bean, a wildland fire fighter in Colorado, there are three defensible zones around a house or barn. Up to five feet from a structure is zone one, which can be hardened by cleaning debris from gutters, clearing away leaf litter, replacing flammable mulch with pebbles, and removing trees and shrubs (no matter how much you love them). Zone two, five to 30 feet from a structure, should have grasses mown short, no dead plants, and “ladder” fuels (branches and grasses that carry fire) trimmed away; give the same treatment to infrastructure like wells and propane tanks. Zone three, 30 to 100 feet from a structure, should more generally promote good forest health, Bean said. They also recommended storing firewood at least five feet from any structure. These efforts, they said, are “super, super critical and generally the easiest and cheapest to do.”

More thorough hardening can be done as finances allow, said Low. For example, removing debris from roofs and patching any holes; installing fire-resistant metal flashing when gutters are installed; staple-gunning 1/8” metal mesh over vent openings, which are usually covered with 1/4” mesh that keeps out critters but can let embers through. Armendariz recommends replacing wood fences with virtual fencing (though that’s not viable for all ranchers).

Documents available online can help you understand what’s actually involved in a burn; NRCS, Extension, and state ag departments may also provide information. Many states have prescribed fire councils, which typically offer their own basic training. This can be a great way to gain confidence and expertise, without which, said Bean, “It’s hard to know who to turn to to understand fire behavior.” Some California counties have an additional Livestock Agricultural PASS Program, which may provide some training to producers for when wildfires arrive.

If you are thinking of experimenting with prescribed fire, all three experts recommend building a relationship with your local fire department first. Prior knowledge of your setup can “really help them in a situation where they need to defend your property,” said Low. “But also they can advise on like, ‘Hey, you might want to put a fuel break on this ridge line or increase your defensible space around this thing here.’” (A fuel break is an area that gets cleared of vegetation or other flammable materials to lessen a fire’s ability to jump from one place to another.)

Next comes your burn plan. In it, you describe the area to be burned, your objectives, anticipated weather, the number of people on your crew, what equipment you’ll assemble; NRCS can help you do this right, as well as get it submitted to the right people. “The entire burn is not going to go according to the plan,” Armendariz said. “It’s just a tool so that you’ve thought everything through.”

“Weather is probably the biggest factor that you’ve got to really understand to carry out a prescribed burn.“

A standard burn trailer for prescribed fires, which some fire councils rent out, contains water sprayers that attach to an ATV or a person’s back; multiple radios so your crew can communicate; portable weather kits; drip torches; extra fuel; gas-powered pumps to pull water out of a pond or well; and hand tools for tossing dirt over an errant ember or flame. (Armendariz’s preferred smothering tool is a still-green juniper branch). Low adds well-fitted N95 masks and animal first aid to her list of must-haves; Bean recommends PPE-level leather gloves, all-cotton clothing, and eye protection.

Make sure you are knowledgeable about, and stay up-to-date on, any state and regional laws around burns. For example, said Low, California’s local Air Quality Management Districts have region-specific requirements for agricultural burns and prescribed burns; you’ll also need to contact them for permits.

Working to make your property a controllable environment is an essential next step. “First things first, you’ve got to have good fuel breaks all the way around,” Armendariz said. These can be manmade — existing roads whose abutting vegetation has been hand- or sheep-mowed — or natural, like rivers and streams. When well-maintained will prevent fire from spreading beyond where you intend it to go. Low recommended putting signs on all roads and water resources, so they’re easy to locate for anyone unfamiliar with your property.

Next up: getting a handle on the weather. “Weather is probably the biggest factor that you’ve got to really understand to carry out a prescribed burn; temperature, relative humidity, and wind direction are the three most important ones,” Armendariz said. Also be on the lookout for an inversion layer — that is, a layer of warm over cold air that can trap smoke beneath it; subjecting your neighbors to clouds of low-lying smoke is sure to sour them on your activities. “And don’t pull up your Google weather app; go the extra mile to access the [National Weather Service’s] Fire Weather Dashboard,” Bean advised, which shows a much wider array of useful data, such as dewpoint and the probability of thunder.

“You think everything’s under control and you walk away but that thing is not out until the last smoke is completely out.”

Armendariz relies on his local airport for valuable info. “There’s weather stations at most airports that have been collecting data for 50 years or more, and those are really good resources to know what to expect month to month,” he said. He consults historic weather data to determine the least-windy months. In New Mexico, that’s August and September, which have the added benefit of being followed by October’s wetter, cooler conditions that can prevent fires from smoldering on and on. It’s also important to pick a day with some humidity as very dry air can make it easier for fire to spread.

Pick your burn crew wisely, perhaps from among your neighbors, and be prepared to return the favor. “I think [a burn’s] much more manageable to do as a practice if you’re willing to do it with your community — like branding,” Bean said. And figuring out how to break your burnable area into smaller units allows you to stop when you need to, “if winds pick up or you feel uncertain. It’s easy to bite off more than you can chew,” said Armendariz.

Vigilance is especially critical after a fire. When somebody loses control of a prescribed burn, “It’s hardly ever when you’re doing the actual burn; it usually happens days after,” Armendariz said — although the danger can persist for months in a timber stand. “You think everything’s under control and you walk away but that thing is not out until the last smoke is completely out.” After a burn, plan to check the area twice a day, especially at the hottest time of afternoon between 2pm and 5pm.

Armendariz and Bean hope that more producers will learn to let go of their fear of using fire as a tool on their working lands. “Being afraid is not necessarily a good motivator to do this really important work on our landscape,” said Bean. “The attitude piece is huge.”

In the first few weeks after deadly wildfires swept through the Los Angeles area in January, Mia and Justin Nguyen weren’t sure what they could do to help.

The couple runs a gourmet mushroom farm in Long Beach, California, which started as a pandemic-era hobby and eventually grew into an operation supplying 1,000 pounds per week to dozens of restaurants and farmer’s markets. All those mushrooms produced thousands of pounds of substrate — wood chips containing mycelium, the part of the mushroom that grows underground and is left over after the edible parts are harvested.

People had been coming to pick up spent substrate “by the truckload,” Mia Nguyen said, to use for composting or as a soil amendment, since the Nguyens began giving it to their neighbors for free in 2021. But after the fires, they noticed more and more people making the trek from Altadena, a community which had experienced widespread destruction, about an hour’s drive north of Long Beach.

“We heard the same story, that the land is in major need of repair and that many people are using the power of ... spent substrate,” Mia Nguyen told Offrange.

That material was used to help restore the soil in private homes as well as public spaces like the Altadena Community Garden, which had been contaminated with toxic heavy metals, plastics, and compounds like PCBs. In doing so, mushroom growers and the volunteers who use and apply their substrate are providing real-world data on the effectiveness of using mushrooms to clean up pollution, helping researchers understand how it can be applied on a larger scale in the future.

Known as mycoremediation, this technique is growing more popular as people search for low-cost, low-tech solutions in the wake of worsening natural disasters, driven largely by climate change. When a fire sweeps through a neighborhood like Altadena, all the plastics, electronics, and building materials it consumes release their toxins into the air and surrounding soil.

“We heard the same story, that the land is in major need of repair and that many people are using the power of ... spent substrate.”

While government agencies like the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers conduct a basic cleanup, that often just means removing the top six inches of earth and debris, leaving residents to deal with any remaining pollutants before they can safely rebuild. Recognizing that many people weren’t receiving the funding needed to carry out a full remediation — which can cost upwards of $100,000 — experts like Danielle Stevenson took matters into their own hands.

Stevenson, a researcher and founder of the nonprofit Centre for Applied Ecological Remediation, established the SoCal Post Fire Bioremediation Coalition, which brings together three organizations that use mushrooms alongside plants and other living organisms to help clean up after the wildfires. So far they’re working to demonstrate their technique on one plot of land in Altadena, though they’re hoping to get funding to expand to other sites this fall.

“We were seeing that there were a lot of groups forming that were interested in this stuff, but didn’t have experience” in the field, Stevenson said. “We wanted to offer guidance and expertise and build a coalition around this type of work, knowing that there will probably be more fires [in the future].”

Though this is the first large-scale effort of its kind in Southern California, other teams of growers and mycologists have previously jumped into action after devastating wildfires in other parts of the state. Gourmet Mushrooms, Inc., a mushroom farm in Sonoma County, donated oyster mushroom substrate after the Tubbs Fire in 2017, which was used to cultivate mycelium in straw tubes called “wattles.”

The process works because mushrooms release enzymes that can break down pollutants into smaller pieces, which they eat and absorb into their own tissue.

These not only provide fungi with a base from which to start breaking down toxins, but also help stabilize the soil, which is particularly vulnerable to erosion from wind and rain following wildfires. An organization called CoRenewal, which is also part of the SoCal Post Fire Bioremediation Coalition, led similar efforts in the Santa Cruz area following the state’s worst-ever wildfire season in 2020, with help from local mushroom farms Far-West Fungi and Mazu Mushrooms.

And in remote Butte County, California, where the Camp Fire destroyed the town of Paradise in 2018, a mushroom grower whose entire farm burned down began using his mycological know-how to introduce residents to mycoremediation. Cheetah Tchudi founded the nonprofit Butte Remediation to apply the technique on the ground and help people who had been left behind by the state’s cleanup process. Although he warned that mycoremediation is not a “silver bullet” — for example, the mushrooms proved less effective against heavy metals than other toxins — Tchudi believes they can be helpful when combined with erosion control measures like wattles.

“We could potentially use fungi as a biological barrier — a stopgap for these contaminants slipping into the watershed where they’re so much harder to remove,” Tchudi told Offrange. “Their ability to break down hydrocarbons can potentially reduce the toxicity of the ash while we’re waiting for it to get cleaned up. It’s what I call an imperfect solution to an impossible problem.”

The process works because mushrooms release enzymes that can break down pollutants into smaller pieces, which they eat and absorb into their own tissue. Along with these species, known as “decomposer mushrooms,” Stevenson also uses mycorrhizal fungi, which live symbiotically with plants and help them absorb heavy metals such as lead and arsenic. She focuses on stimulating fungi already present in the soil along with introducing other kinds of mushrooms, such as oyster.

“It’s what I call an imperfect solution to an impossible problem.”

Working in other contaminated sites known as “brownfields,” Stevenson had previously figured out the best combinations of fungi and plants to use for soils specifically in the Los Angeles area — knowledge that proved useful after January’s fires. It’s particularly important to avoid using non-native species for mycoremediation, Stevenson said, because they can become invasive; not all types of mushrooms commonly grown for food can be used for post-fire cleanup for this reason. “You wouldn’t want to use yellow oyster or any of the tropical oysters,” Stevenson said.

Stevenson is now conducting more research in Altadena to understand which species can be the most useful for wildfire cleanup specifically, and how to work with them. But the SoCal Post Fire Remediation Coalition is also pushing for these methods to be applied in real time, offering workshops to train people in the technique. The group is also actively seeking volunteers to help out with planting and caring for the sites, or producers who can donate seeds, tools, or compost.

Cleanup in Altadena is proceeding slowly, with homeowners fighting for insurance payouts and federal agencies declining to help with soil testing. Though a still-developing field, bioremediation offers an immediate solution that’s four to eight times cheaper than traditional cleanup methods, according to Stevenson. And farmers, gardeners, or people with agricultural experience can be particularly well-suited for it.

“[Bioremediation] takes similar types of skills,” Stevenson said. “You’re farming, but it’s a special type of farming.”

In south-central Nebraska, Brandon Hunnicutt is trying to stave off an attack.

He’s heard the reports: sightings of white mold in the Northeast and in South Dakota. He knows the fuzzy fungus is coming for his soybeans. He just doesn’t know when.

Hunnicutt is a fifth-generation farmer, who runs an irrigated farming operation on land that’s been in his family for nearly 125 years. Working with his father and brother, they grow corn, popcorn, and soybeans. Rather than guessing when crops might get sick, Hunnicutt’s now letting the soybeans “speak” for themselves.

The translator, in this case, is InnerPlant, an agtech company in Davis, California. The startup engineered a soybean to emit a fluorescent signal within 48 hours of fungal infection and two weeks before visible symptoms would typically appear.

“If the plant itself can act as a sensor, that changes the game,” he said. “Usually, we’re behind the disease. By the time you see symptoms, yield’s already lost.”

The impact, of course, is bigger than any one farm. Fungal infections pose a major threat to crops worldwide, putting food supplies at risk. This is why scientists around the world are going straight to the source — the plant itself — to detect stress early. Researchers from several universities in India and Israel envision a tech-driven future where farmers beat blight using multi-omics research to reveal early warning signs, portable biosensors for quick field tests, and AI to break down complex imaging data.

“By continuously advancing and integrating detection technologies, researchers can make significant strides in mitigating the impact of these diseases on crop yields and safeguard them,” the authors wrote.

Still, size matters when it comes to adopting agtech, including early warning systems. A McKinsey study found that farms over 2,500 acres are 45 percent more likely to invest in agtech than smaller operations under 100 acres, mainly because they can spread out the costs. Even when input prices drop, tight margins mean any new made-for-growers technology has to save money or boost yields fast. Ideally both.

“Usually, we’re behind the disease. By the time you see symptoms, yield’s already lost.”

Add climate chaos to the equation, and the urgency ramps up. In hard-hit regions like Europe and Latin America, the survey notes, farmers are more willing to spend on agtech if it helps them deal with real threats. Now, researchers around the globe are answering the call, developing novel approaches to help farmers catch pathogens before disease takes hold.

“It really feels like researchers are starting to understand that plants are the ultimate storytellers of what’s happening in the field,” Hunnicutt said. “If we can figure out how to read that story, we can respond not just faster and more effectively, but in a way that’s more sustainable. With tech like this, it’s not just about spraying because it’s that time of year. It’s about knowing whether you actually need to. Otherwise, you’re throwing money away and doing more harm than good to the soil and the plant.“

“The Ultimate Storytellers”

Catching disease before it takes over a field is the golden fleece for farmers. Many still rely on sight alone to spot the blight, but by then, it’s usually too late. Losses can be devastating. For Hunnicutt, a pathogen can wipe out up to 50 percent of a crop, or $350 an acre. He says that even an 8 percent loss costs $50 an acre. As sustainable agriculture advocates push to cut fungicide use, early detection tools make targeted treatments possible. Basically, farmers can spray only when there’s an actual threat and not “just in case.”

In California, InnerPlant co-founder Shely Aronov said the team decided to target fungus first because it’s invisible, making it “the hardest stress.” Figuring out how to make a plant fluoresce was a multi-step process. By comparing healthy plants to sick ones, molecular biologists observed which plant genes switch on when stressed. Then they hooked those stress switches to a glowing protein and put it back into a healthy plant so it lights up when under attack.

Across the country, researchers at North Carolina State have zeroed in on volatile organic compounds (VOCs) to decode what plants are saying.

“Plants do not talk, but they do emit small molecules to communicate,” said Qingshan Wei, lead developer and associate professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering at North Carolina State University. “Sometimes, when the stress comes in, plants release those molecules as a warning to neighboring plants.”

The idea was simple: If Wei’s team could learn to read those VOCs, they’d get an early heads-up too. Rather than relying on bulky lab equipment to extract DNA, Wei developed a “Fitbit for plants.” Weighing just 1 to 2 grams and no bigger than a postage stamp, the sensor attaches directly to a leaf and detects VOCs emitted during the early stages of a pathogen attack.

Early lab tests on tomato plants showed promise detecting multiple pathogens earlier than usual tools, said Zach Hetzler, a postdoc at NC State and CEO of Verdia Diagnostics.

The team is now moving into pilot trials, ultimately aiming to deploy a distributed sensor network across a field or greenhouse. Though pricing is in the early stages, Hetzler said they’re aiming for about $30 per sensor. This is low for greenhouse growers, he added, especially given the potential to save about 50 percent more plants compared to relying only on visual cues.

“We are inspired by a lot of the existing systems in nature,” Wei said. “Some animals, like a mouse or dog, can sniff out diseases — some plant diseases, even some human diseases. The mechanism behind this is still not clear, and for us, that’s also quite a motivation. If natural living systems can perform so well, can we, as engineers, create something that does the same thing?”

Reading the Air

Across the pond in the UK, instead of targeting VOCs, researchers at the Natural History Museum and the Earlham Institute have their sights set on spores.

Matt Clark, lead researcher at the museum, developed a technology called AirSeq (pronounced “seek”), which captures spores using a vacuum-cleaner-like filter system. The particles are then flushed out, processed and run through a nanopore sequencer, a USB-stick sized device that can decode full genomes on the spot.

In greenhouse trials, he said, AirSeq detected fungal diseases in strawberries two weeks earlier than agronomists could. He envisions the tech evolving into a small device farmers place in their fields for real-time monitoring, combining spore readings with existing weather data to backtrack where the spores are coming from.

But something of this scale would require government backing and, of course, money. Previously, Clark received funding for biodefense applications from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), but that ended. To build the automated prototype, the team needs more financial support, he said, citing estimates in the low millions (USD).

Sequencing entire genomes gives deeper insights than a single-gene test, but requires more complexity. On the hardware side, the box needs to be either mobile (like a self-driving vehicle or drone) or large and bolted to something big, so it’s not left unattended for long periods or too hard to steal. The device also needs to be cheap enough for farmers to afford running it, but he believes it would help pay for itself by reducing pesticide use.

Ideally, the box would be inexpensive, initially around 10,000 GBP, he said. But scaling and a suitable service model could help bring the price way down. One idea is to create a monitoring system paid for by a mix of levies (small fees UK farmers and co-ops pay based on crop production) and local or national government money.

“As the data can inform all farmers in an area,” Clark said, “this is a way for all to benefit but keep the costs (per farm) low.”

Old Farm, New Tricks

Financing is always tricky, but farmers know that growing anything is about learning the right balance. Hunnicutt understands this, especially when it comes to irrigating soybeans when fungus is present. Too much water feeds the white mold. Too little makes the soybeans suffer, and yield drops. He knows a farmer who faced this exact dilemma last year.

Row spacing also adds to the complexity. Wider 30-inch rows improve airflow, which helps the canopy dry and slow mold growth. But as plants close in, moisture gets trapped, and mold thrives.

In both cases, catching stress two weeks earlier means treatments can be applied to prevent damage.

These challenges aren’t new. His father and grandfather dealt with them. But while the problems remain, the tools to counteract them keep advancing. Overall, he said, his father and brother support innovation, at least once he explains what the new technology can do.

“Usually the question is ‘Why?’ and I just say, ‘Why not?’” Hunnicutt said. “We’ll try it. If it doesn’t work, we’ll learn something anyway.”

One afternoon in May, the InnerPlant team planted a sentinel plot — designated plantings used as an early warning system — in his 160-acre field to signal a potential fungal outbreak. In August, despite the high humidity (where white mold usually thrives), nothing has shown up. No signal, no stress. Nothing.

“We haven’t seen any results,” Hunnicutt said. “I keep waiting to see if anything pops on ours. If it doesn’t show up, that doesn’t mean the technology doesn’t work. It just means we don’t have any disease … Maybe we just lucked out. I don’t know.”

Like many U.S. farmers right now, Paul Overby is feeling the Big Tariff Squeeze. For starters, the early August tariffs the Trump administration socked on an enormous swath of countries, including some input producers, raised fertilizer costs for the North Dakota commodity and specialty crop grower. A high Chinese tariff on canola from top producer Canada, affects U.S. farmers, too, whose prices are tied to those of our neighbor to the north; this leaves Overby with an as-yet untallied loss on this year’s harvest. And as of this writing, not a single soybean shipment had been booked from the West Coast to leading importer China, as that country retaliates for a U.S. tariff on all Chinese goods and Trump threatens to push it ever higher.

“We’re just struggling to deal with the normal fundamentals of the market — supply and demand — then there’s this whole uncertainty that’s created in the marketplace because of the craziness of tariff threats and then next week it’s different,” Overby said with an air of exasperation. “Just like the grocery store, once the prices go up, they don’t come down very fast,” he pointed out. Nevertheless, “We can’t do anything about it so most farmers are ignoring it for now, putting their heads down like, ‘Harvest is coming, I just gotta get the grain in the bin.’”

The U.S. harvested 4.36 billion bushels of soybeans last year, and more than half of that windfall shipped to China. Where the brunt of this year’s haul will go is — thanks to that essential trading partner’s decision to purchase zero American soybeans in retaliation for a 56.7 percent tariff on all Chinese goods — a matter of growing concern. And it’s happening just as U.S. farmers are bringing in their beans; the season for exports is September to February, with a slight overlap with when South American soybeans mature and hit the market, according to Mike Steenhoek, executive director of industry group the Soy Transportation Coalition, who grew up in an ag family.

Steenhoek compares the yanking of the Chinese market to a restaurateur who opens a sports bar next to a major league baseball stadium, where customers are almost guaranteed — only to have that team pick up and move to another city. “Someone can say, there are other customers out there; you can diversify, and we have been working very diligently to achieve that,” Steenhoek said. “But we’ve had this very mutually beneficial relationship with China for years and it’s served farmers well and been a source of major rural economic development.”

“We can’t do anything about it so most farmers are ignoring it for now, putting their heads down like, ‘Harvest is coming, I just gotta get the grain in the bin.’”

Suddenly needing to find an outlet for $13.2 billion worth of soybeans — the amount China purchased last year, compared to the $2.3 billion purchased by number two importer Mexico — is no easy lift. Not least, said Steenhoek, because China is the ideal soybean customer: a country with a large population; growing per-capita income to spend on food; an “insatiable demand for pork … and poultry” (hogs and chickens are the livestock fed the most soy meal); and a lot of home cooks who stock soy oil in their kitchens. “There isn’t another country that would have all those bullet points,” Steenhoek said. “That’s why it’s a real concern.” Not to mention, China has begun to invest in Brazilian soybeans, sending the clear message that “the United States is going to become [their] supplier of last resort,” Overby said.

As a result, the price for U.S. soybeans is now so low that grain elevators are sending letters to farmers, warning of the challenges to off-loading them. “At present, selling a soybean train is nearly impossible, and with the export market essentially at a standstill, we do not know when trading conditions will improve,” wrote grain cooperative CenDak to its members on August 18, in correspondence shared with Offrange. And the American Soybean Association, an industry trade organization, penned a letter to the White House on August 19, warning that “soybean farmers are standing on a financial precipice,” and urging the administration to prioritize their needs in upcoming negotiations.

What Overby called the “Trump tariff thing” was also an issue back in 2018, during his first presidential term. Crop prices had just plummeted and those tariffs “did not help anything at all,” Overby said. But biofuels, which can be made of corn, soy, and other grains, helped pull prices back up under Biden; exports mostly snapped back towards normal-ish, Steenhoek said.

“At present, selling a soybean train is nearly impossible, and with the export market essentially at a standstill, we do not know when trading conditions will improve.”

In a normal-ish export year, Midwestern soybeans get barged down the Mississippi, Ohio, and Illinois rivers to export facilities in New Orleans. Meanwhile, hundred-car-long trains shuttle soybeans from Western states to Pacific ports, and Pacific Northwest beans get barged down the Columbia River or through the Puget Sound. In Memphis, the main port for Arkansas growers, “There’s no [grain] barge traffic on the Mississippi River,” farmer Shawn Peebles told Offrange on August 19, recounting his first-hand view of the scene. “I mean, that’s scary. That is something I’ve never seen. I’m 54 and I have never seen it this bad. Would this put me out of business? No. Could we lose all our retirement? Yeah, yes.” (There has been some grain barge traffic elsewhere on the Mississippi but it’s down from last year at this time.)

Members of Overby’s wife’s book club had recently mused that grain elevators might not even purchase farmers’ soybeans this year — a rumor Overby’s co-op has since dispelled. “There will not be turning away of soybeans at elevators,” confirmed University of Illinois farm economy professor Gary Schnitke to Offrange in an email. “The question will be the price.” Not to mention how long the beans will have to sit around before it’s worthwhile to sell them.

That wait causes at least one serious ripple effect: “There’s going to be a lot of bushels that are going to need a home and then when you don’t have a green light for our major international customer, that’s going to put pressure on storage,” Steenhoek said. Dried soybeans can store for a couple of years, even in piles on the ground. But a soybean surplus from 2024 means some farmers have “missed the opportunity to pull the trigger” and sell off last year’s crop before this year’s harvest, Steenhoek said. Worst-case scenario: They’ll have to continue to pay for storage even as Brazilian soybeans start flooding the market in a few months, further limiting demand for the U.S. supply. Peebles responded to this possibility with resignation. “We’re approaching everything as business as usual, because you don’t have a choice, really,” he said.

Steenhoek said the landscape is not all doom and gloom, though. For starters, “Increased low prices will result in increased demand elsewhere, and we will continue to pick up [other] sales.” (He declined to say where.) A decrease in the value of the U.S. dollar will also help make exports more competitive, he predicted.

“I’m 54 and I have never seen it this bad. Would this put me out of business? No. Could we lose all our retirement? Yeah, yes.”

He and Overby are also both counting on a lift from the renewable fuels market, which can use any number of crops to make biofuel, including soybeans. “Delta Air Lines is buying every gallon they can get of it, because of the regulation in Europe requiring international flights … to have sustainable fuel,” Overby said. “Just like the farm crisis in the 2000s, which we solved by turning corn into an energy crop, that’s, in essence, what we’re probably going to do now — turn soybeans and some other minor crops into energy as a way of providing a support base for farmers.” Steenhoek said that the U.S. is currently limiting imports of renewable fuel feedstocks from other countries, “So that is certainly helping” soybean farmers, he said. Where soybean meal (as opposed to oil) can be sold, though, remains an open question, as does how the transportation industry will weather this swift change in supply chains. “It really wreaks havoc,” Steenhoek said.

The American Soybean Association has pleaded with the Trump administration to get China to remove their retaliatory tariffs and commit to a “significant” soybean purchase. There was no movement on that front in early September, although a Chinese ag consultant told Reuters that things could change come November, with the cost of U.S. soybeans “attractively priced” (read: low) and Brazilian beans priced high.

Still, Overby’s not overly optimistic about how things will pan out. “Those of us sitting in the middle with these smaller size operations are the ones that really get squeezed,” he said about his 1,300-crop-acre operation. “We’re too big to go get a bunch of off-farm income, and yet we’re too small, from a capital standpoint, to have a huge amount of resources to dip into to ride it through. That’s really the hidden farm crisis.”

“You’ll know you’ve found them when you feel the crunching under your feet,” Jason Jarvis said over his shoulder. I wasn’t sure I would feel anything through my thick-soled platform Crocs, but I played along. The salty water in southern Rhode Island wasn’t warm, but not as cold as I had braced for. By now it was up to our waists, mucky as we shuffled in the direction of the receding tide. A claustrophobic layer of fog made it impossible to know how far the pond actually stretched, but I could see a line of oyster cages bobbing gently, maybe a quarter-mile out, faintly distinguishable from the cloak of gray.

Several paces ahead, Jarvis stopped and angled the cage end of his long, steel clamming rake into the sand. I waded closer, anticipating a crunch. Nothing. But a couple more clumsy steps and suddenly the cushy sand gave way to something gravelly, coarse enough to feel through my bulky, rubbery soles. We’d found them.

The sand here was paved with slipper limpets, a variety of sea snail that grows so quickly and in such dense numbers that it earned the Latin name crepidula fornicata, or “the fornicators.” I had driven two hours from Boston early that morning to meet Jarvis — one of just a handful of fishers even bothering to harvest slipper snails — at the saltwater pond where he’s been gathering the overlooked creatures for the last two years. As climate change, warming seas, and habitat loss have made staple species more elusive — like wild clams, cod, seabass, and oysters — the snail population has stayed strong.

In parts of Europe, where invasive slippers have devastated local ecology, these snails are considered a delicacy. But in North America, where they’re native, the snails have a very different reputation. With the exception of some Indigenous communities, Americans have largely been untempted by sea snail snacks, and instead view them as undesirables and pests — especially professional clammers who have to fight with them to make their living.

While clams burrow deep in the sand, slippers grow on top of it in large stacks of up to a dozen. In places like Rhode Island, where slipper limpets remain an unregulated species with a very limited niche market, clammers are forced to dig through layers of lower-value snails to reach those commercial-friendly clams, typically throwing back the crepidula they dig up. They make the back-breaking work of clamming even more gruelling, whereas the snails themselves are easy pickings. Jarvis uses a small clamming rake because of the scale he’s harvesting, but for most people, no specialized equipment is needed; a garden rake would work, he said, or they’re easy enough to scoop up by hand. Yet somehow, this abundant protein source still feels like a well-kept secret.

That may soon change, thanks to a small but influential segment of the New England seafood strata. Jarvis has been pioneering their harvest and sale, supplying one of the region’s top restaurants — The Shipwright’s Daughter in Mystic, Connecticut — with a steady flow of sea snails. Executive chef David Standridge, 2024 recipient of the Best Chef: Northeast James Beard award, eagerly incorporated them into his menu, knowing they would “draw in the weirdos.” “People don’t post the lobster roll [online], they post the weird stuff,” he said, sitting across from me at an empty table in the downtime before the evening rush.

Limpet dishes like “sea-scargot” (a take on the classic French dish) quickly caught on with his fanbase, and his offerings have since expanded. While they have a distinctly saltier flavor than the average garden snail, these sea snails are comparable to other mollusks, Standridge said, good for pastas and fritters. Last year he experimented with preserving the snails in vinegar, and someday raw limpets might secure a spot on his raw bar. They can replace other shellfish like conch or cherrystone clams, the latter of which have become so expensive that he doesn’t even bother buying them anymore. He can get 100 pounds of limpets from Jarvis for $2.50 per pound, less than half of what he might pay for the same amount of clams.

A few years ago, slipper snails reportedly made waves in a handful of other fine dining rooms, including Dan Barber’s Blue Hill and Thomas Keller’s Per Se. And though limited, Jarvis occasionally has a few competitors on the sea snail market, including seafood retailers like Dune Brothers and American Mussel Harvesters, Inc.

At least in seafood restaurants, Standridge believes the only truly sustainable practice is to let fishermen dictate what’s on the menu — whether that’s sea snails, dogfish, mackerel, or any other locally abundant, attainable species. It’s up to the chef to translate that into something delicious. “It’s my job to make the unusual seem accessible. People come to a place like this where they can try something new,” he said. “If it’s good, they’ll eat it.”

But not everyone is so convinced. Jeffrey Levinton, professor of marine biology at SUNY Stony Brook, told Offrange that he has a hard time understanding the culinary appeal. “There’s so little meat relative to the shell,” he balked. “They’re not going to ever be a serious item in anybody’s cuisine. That’s the bottom line.”

Still, he acknowledged that these snails have remained radically abundant, while other — perhaps more appetizing — species have disappeared.

“In the 1970s, if you were in Shelter Island on the beaches, there would be three feet deep of scallop shells,” Levinton said. But today, because of habitat loss, climate change, and other factors, the bay scallop has practically disappeared from its native Long Island and Cape Cod. “Now it’s three feet deep of crepidula shells. We’ve got reefs of dead crepidula shells.”

Those shells are particularly recognizable because of the way they’re stacked on top of each other, which Levinton explained is always in the same pattern: an older female on the bottom and younger males on top. (Crepidula, he said, are hermaphroditic, meaning the oldest male will change its sex from male to female when the bottom female dies.) In general, these stacking snails are hardy creatures, with larvae that are “very resilient to all sorts of pollution” and ocean acidification, he explained. So it’s not like their population has suddenly exploded. It’s just that “everything else has declined in abundance.”

“We know they’ve always been abundant. But now wild oysters are gone, scallops are gone,” Levinton said. “As time goes by, other organisms disappear and crepidula survives.”

I asked Levinton what kind of an impact a hypothetical slipper limpet industry might have on the environment. Could we theoretically drive them to the brink of extinction, too? He laughed in my face — not only because he can’t imagine there being that kind of demand for the snails, but because they’re currently “so abundant, I find it hard to speculate without laughing.” But then again, he said, stone-faced, early European settlers used to write home about how the cod in Massachusetts was so prolific it was like you could “walk” on them. A few hundred years later and those cod are no longer here.

“There was a time when everything looked unimaginably abundant,” Levinton said, “so one must have a certain feeling that maybe anything could be exploited.”

We’re a long way off from disrupting the slipper snail population. And regardless, without a reliable way to process and package them, it’s hard to imagine sea snails in American fish markets and grocery stores, where they could be sold in mass quantities. One company in France developed its own proprietary processing method over a decade ago, but nothing similar has made its way to the States yet. Jarvis hopes to someday change that, and simultaneously raise the snails’ market value.

Unlike clams, oysters, scallops, and other marketable shellfish, there are currently no limits on where or how much an individual can harvest slipper snails. “But once the state of Rhode Island figures out somebody can make money from them they’re gonna regulate them and you’d have to have a shellfish license,” Jarvis said.

Until then, they’re fair game for anyone with access to the shore — which Jarvis predicts will only become more important as the economy keeps tumbling and our access to food grows more unstable and inequitable. Jarvis tells a story about New England during the world wars, when he says slipper snails were one of few protein sources for poor coastal dwellers. “When times were tough, people who didn’t have much knew about slipper snails,” he said. “It got a lot of people through tough times.”

It’s been a year dominated by “recession indicator” foods — foods the masses have learned to love that were otherwise quirky or out-of-bounds, like tinned fish, an industry that’s projected to hit $44.27 billion by 2030. Some might say slipper snails are more likely an apocalypse indicator — only entering the mainstream, as Levinton estimates, “100 years from now, when there’s not many of us left, scrounging along the shore.” But while the rest of us still teeter on the edge of full-blown dystopia, these are already pretty desperate times for our oceans and the people who make their living harvesting from them.

New England’s iconic shellfish — its clams, lobsters, oysters, and scallops — have become harder and harder to come by in the wild. But resilient slipper snails are here to stay. “The future is possible for slipper limpets,” Standridge said. “They’re the definition of sustainable and they take pressure off other species.”

In many coastal communities, there’s a very real fear that someday there will be nothing left to fish. Jarvis believes that these snails, though they’ve been “considered worthless forever,” may be the thing that keeps fishers in the water.

They got me in the water, anyhow — waist-deep in Winnapaug Pond with Jarvis, to be specific, swallowing a raw slipper snail that he’d just shucked from its knobby gray shell. The meat was briny and bright. It kind of shimmered in my mouth, the taste equivalent of how a sequin looks. He sent me home with a full bag of muddy snails. I cleaned and shucked them individually in my sink, after prying them from one another with surprising force. It felt kind of barbarous considering the miracles they undertake to keep their stacks alive and in one piece against tall odds. But for as tightly as they clung to each other, once they were separated, they practically slipped out of their shells with an easy sweep of a pocketknife.

With Standridge’s voice in my head, I prepared them the way I would normally do clams: in a lemon, butter, shallot sauce over bucatini. I made the mistake of overcooking them a bit, a little out of fear, so they lost some of their delicate flavor. But they were still sweet and perfectly chewy, just like all the more familiar shellfish I learned to love from an early age. If sea snails are an end-times food, at least I know I’ll be going out happy.

The West Texas oil and gas industry has a problem: It has too much water.

This isn’t clean water, though. It’s a byproduct of fracking, a form of oil and gas extraction where pressurized fluid is injected into the earth to crack open ancient fossil fuel deposits, which — along with oil and gas — often contain water.

In the Permian basin, an 86,000-square-mile geological formation spanning parts of Texas and New Mexico, about 6 million barrels of oil are pumped each day, creating upwards of 24 million barrels of wastewater.

The industry term for this wastewater is “produced water,” when the pressurized fluid from fracking mixes with the naturally forming water below-ground. For every one barrel of oil extracted there’s about four barrels of produced water, which contains high levels of salt, chemical additives, and metals like radium and arsenic.

Produced water is usually dealt with by injecting it back into the ground. But space to store this polluted water through deep well injection in the Permian Basin is running out. This has led some companies to experiment with other options, like treating the water and using it for agricultural uses.

While not yet ready for widespread use on farms, some oil and gas companies are optimistic it could soon be implemented — but produced water researchers and environmental advocates worry it’s being rushed without knowing the full impact on the land.

One of the state’s largest produced water pilot projects is currently being conducted by Texas Pacific Water Resources. They’re a subsidiary of Texas Pacific Land Corporation, the largest landowner in the Permian Basin, which makes money through royalty interests from oil and gas production.

Right now, Texas Pacific Water Resources is trying to determine how many toxic compounds Texas farmland could withstand if it were irrigated with produced water. To figure this out, in 2023 they started small greenhouse experiments with 12 different planter boxes growing native grasses and alfalfa. Each box contained different combinations of soil types from Reeves and Loving counties in West Texas; they were irrigated with varying qualities of produced water.

“We did start seeing some accumulations [of dissolved solids] in the soil, and we started noticing some decline in the crop quality by the end of the study as well,” said Adrianne Lopez, research and development manager at Texas Pacific Water Resources.

“What would be the impact on the soil and in the microbes, and also on the groundwater quality? That is ongoing research.”

This happened when the planter boxes were irrigated with water that had total dissolved solids (TDS) at 1,500 parts per million. TDS is the number of organic and inorganic materials like metals or salts that are dissolved in a certain amount of water.

The TDS of produced water from the Permian Basin is about 120,000 parts per million before it’s treated. The drinking water guidelines in the U.S. for the maximum level deemed safe to drink is 500 parts per million, according to the Safe Drinking Water Foundation. Texas Pacific Water Resources’ standard for their treated water is anything under 500 parts per million, according to Lopez.

“The desired TDS for us is below about 300 parts per million,” Lopez said. “And I’d say the upper limit of what we would accept coming out of the treatment is 500 parts [per million].”

To do this, they use reverse osmosis and thermal desalination systems to remove the salts from the water. It then goes through a second treatment process to get rid of more toxic compounds that can pass through desalination systems, like ammonia, boron, and benzine.

In 2024, Texas Pacific Water Resources took their experiment outdoors. Using about an eighth of an acre, they planted alfalfa and irrigated different sections of it with varying qualities of treated water.

“We know it is going to be expensive to treat this [wastewater]. After it’s all said and done, can it even be done economically?”

“Our goal was to find a crop that could uptake a lot of water since the whole purpose of beneficial reuse and desalination is to get rid of a lot of water that oil and gas is running out of space to dispose of,” Lopez said. Alfalfa proved to be the best crop for this because it can hold up in the tough West Texas climate.

Now, Texas Pacific Water Resources is building a 10,000-barrel-per-day water treatment facility that will expand on their alfalfa and native grass experiments. They’re testing to see how many chemicals could be in the water without harming the soil.

“We’re looking at if the treated produced water has those constituents [like ammonia] in the water, and if we apply it to the ground, what the degradation, absorption, fate, and transport of those constituents in the soil will be,” said Pei Xu, a civil engineering professor at New Mexico State University. Xu is the research director for the New Mexico Produced Water Research Consortium, which Texas Pacific Water Resources has been collaborating with to conduct their soil and crop research.

“What would be the impact on the soil and in the microbes, and also on the groundwater quality? That is ongoing research,” Xu said.

A High Price Tag

But even as these treatment facilities scale up, some are concerned it’s still not a cost-effective alternative to storing produced water underground. That’s according to Dan Mueller, a water resources engineer who worked for the Environmental Defense Fund for more than a decade on produced water management issues in the Permian Basin.

He’s worried that there hasn’t been enough pilot testing to predict the exact cost of treating potentially millions of barrels of produced water every day.

“We know it is going to be expensive to treat this [wastewater],” Mueller said. “So after it’s all said and done, can it even be done economically?” Yet Texas Pacific Water Resources isn’t too concerned about the price because they anticipate produced water treatment will be a growing interest in the Permian Basin as disposal space underground becomes scarce.

“Right now, with a 10,000-barrel a day pilot, we’re not necessarily going to see all of those economies of scale yet because it’s still so small,” Lopez said. “But as it gets higher into the 50,000-barrel a day treatment systems to the 100,000-or-more-barrel a day systems, those costs are going to drop quickly as those sites get bigger.”

Proximity Problems

But even if produced water gets cheaper to treat, figuring out how to even get it to farmers will be another hurdle.

There’s very little farmland in the Permian Basin because of how dry the region is, which means Texas Pacific Water Resources would have to find a way to transport the treated water to farmers 100 miles away — or incentivize them to move closer.

One way to do this could be to allow surface water discharge of treated produced water, Lopez said. Texas Pacific Water Resources is currently seeking a surface water discharge permit from the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) that would let them release treated water into the Pecos River Watershed in West Texas.

But the company has yet to get approval for this permit, which was submitted in February of 2024. They’re also waiting to hear back on a land application permit from the Railroad Commission of Texas, which would allow them to irrigate with produced water.

Recently passed Senate Bill 1145 could make that more challenging for them: The new legislation, which went into effect September 1, changes jurisdiction of land application permits for oil and gas operations from the Railroad Commission to the TCEQ. That means there could be different produced water standards Texas Pacific Water Resources will be required to meet.

Texas Pacific Water Resources has to find a way to transport the treated water to farmers 100 miles away — or incentivize them to move closer.

“We don’t know what their standards [for treated water] are going to look like,” Lopez said. “Once we get a permit from TCEQ, then we’ll have a better idea of how different the specs are going to be from surface water use to land application.”

Lopez is confident that their research has proved they can safely use treated water for a variety of purposes — including irrigation — but some environmental advocates say it’s being pushed too quickly.

“It feels like we’re rushing ahead of what we actually know,” said Evgenia Spears, water program coordinator for the Sierra Club’s Texas Lone Star chapter. They’re part of the Texas Produced Water Consortium that’s studying the economics and technology for treating produced water, and helps inform legislation like Senate Bill 1145.

While the Sierra Club supports the intent of that bill — which will allow the TCEQ to grant land application permits for produced water treatment projects — they don’t think it provides enough clarity on how those projects will be managed.

“The bill allows for the use of produced water in agriculture, but there is no clear system in place for the monitoring of environmental impacts associated with land application of produced water,” Spears said. “And there are no enforcement mechanisms in the language of the bill as it passed.”

The Sierra Club is pushing for clarity on these issues during the upcoming rulemaking that will dictate how SB 1145 is implemented.

“We want to make sure that there are standards that TCEQ has in place before we embark on agricultural reuses of produced water,” Spears said.

A fruit enthusiast doesn’t have to search far to find poetic celebrations of nectarines, bananas, apples, peaches, blackberries, watermelons, figs, oranges, or serviceberries. However, the various fine fruity qualities inherent to Lonicera caerulea — also known as haskap, blue honeysuckle, or honeyberry — have yet to inspire a single scribe to wax rhapsodic. Why? Maybe a better question is: Who’s ever heard of a honeyberry?

A small knot of farmers, university researchers, and extension folks in the West and Midwest have been working to boost both the name recognition and ubiquity of this berry that’s native Russia, Japan, and North America. It’s a heavy lift.

There’s no framework yet for standardizing production — best-tasting varieties, will they store, how much will they yield — to transform honeyberries into a commercial crop. There’s only one (retired) breeder in North America to support any new researchers interested in making necessary improvements. Berries picked before their Brix value (a measure of their sugar levels) has peaked at full sweetness can elicit an underwhelmed shrug from a first-time eater. And there’s also the matter of the cedar waxwings; migrating north in spring, they will greedily pick off every ripe berry and leave a grower with none. “I think you are underestimating how evil these birds really are,” one Minnesota farmer told another who’d just recounted the utter denuding of his shrubs on a university podcast.

In fact, it was this podcast that convinced its host, Steffen Mirsky, who’s also the emerging crops outreach program coordinator at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, to turn some attention to the oblong fruit. An earlier honeyberry episode got a relatively huge number of listens (1,255 versus the usual 300 or so), “which told us there was a lot of interest,” Mirsky said — possibly enough to make the challenges of getting a regional honeyberry supply chain up and running worth the effort.

As it happens, honeyberries have a unique set of attributes. For apple or grape growers who harvest in fall, June-ripening honeyberries can provide a revenue boost just as summer’s starting to hit. “They’re early flowering, but the flowers are cold hardy down to at least 20 degrees Fahrenheit,” Mirsky said. That means they can also support the first bumblebees to emerge when there’s no other food around for them, according to Madeline Wimmer, an extension educator at the University of Minnesota specializing in fruit, who’s been partnering with Mirsky to raise honeyberry awareness with events like farm field days.

Additionally — for the moment, anyway — honeyberries are only slightly vulnerable to spotted wing drosophila and powdery mildew (plus those waxwings); this means they don’t require much in the way of inputs, making them the rare fruit that can be handily slotted into an organic system. Although, said Zach Miller, superintendent of the Western Ag Research Center at Montana State University, “That is a honeymoon that will be over soon; it is an island right now that is relatively uninhabited by pests but as that island grows in size, there will be colonists.”

Unlike blueberries, which they resemble in color if not in shape, they do not require acidic soils to thrive — an additional appeal for farmers in the Midwest. And they’re good for value-add products like jams, ice creams, and wines; can be schlepped to the farmers market either fresh or frozen; and are ideal for a U-pick operation. Said Wimmer, “There’s a lot of directions they could go.”

For apple or grape growers who harvest in fall, June-ripening honeyberries can provide a revenue boost just as summer’s starting to hit.

This wasn’t always evident. Miller’s been running trials of honeyberries in the Intermountain West for the last decade to see, “Would farmers make money off this?” he wondered. Initially, “It wasn’t clear if there was any potential, because the first varieties that came onto the U.S. market, mainly from Russia in the early 2000s, were gross.” They were small and scant and had “kind of a quinine taste, to list their sins.”

They also bloomed way before any bees in the Montana springtime emerged onto the landscape. That honeyberry breeder, in Saskatchewan, along with a second, now-deceased one in Oregon, eventually produced a number of improved varieties, with names like Tundra and Borealis and Indigo Gem. They have big berries, good sweet-tart flavor, and steady ripening so a grower can pick them all at once — shaking the bush with a modified Sawzall works, as does a mechanical blueberry or raspberry harvester.

Since those early days, Mirsky, Miller, and several dozen farmers they’ve worked with on trials have figured out some of the fruits’ finicky particulars. Somewhere in the neighborhood of 1,000 plants, spaced 3 to 5 feet apart, fit on an acre, and these take three or four full years to reach maturity. Miller’s back of the envelope math indicates that “8,000 pounds per acre is where you’d want to be to make money,” although he admits this is a rough estimate, based on blueberries and grapes.

For fruit to set, they need fabric stretched beneath their roots to control weeds, as well as cross pollination with other varieties that have comparable flowering times, and if the varieties are too closely related they can’t cross-pollinate. So, for a primary crop of Aurora, say, a farmer needs to plant some bushes of mildly flavored Tundra or slightly bitter Honey Bee. Although, “Anyone who tells you that they know the perfect ratio between harvested varieties and pollenizers is lying and probably trying to sell you something,” Miller said. He’s trialed 16 varieties, some of which, like Indigo, grow low to the ground to make harvesting tricky (better for U-pick). Borealis hangs on to its fruit “so you tear the berries and they don’t store well,” said Miller (better for home gardeners).

After their first three years in the ground, the shrubs grow vigorously and amply — sometimes becoming as wide as they are tall and so laden with fruit that “they flop over,” said Miller. “It would be nice if they stood up a little bit more,” for harvesting purposes. In Wisconsin, Mirsky’s first trials are just hitting the two-year mark and he hasn’t yet assessed things like yield and mature plant size. But in Montana, Miller’s figured out that some varieties can yield 15 pounds of berries per shrub. They can also take a heavy pruning with hedge trimmers and even though this “hurts yields immediately, [plants] rebound after a year,” Miller said. Trellising is another possible fix he’s planning to test out.

Still, bridging the gap between farm and Jamba Juice remains the biggest hurdle in getting these fruits their due.

Perhaps most essential of all is netting to keep the birds out. For individual nets placed over each row, this means spacing plants 10 to 14 feet apart to accommodate the net posts. “Berry plants have been making berries for birds for millions of years; ignore that at your own peril,” said Miller.

Honeyberries can be stored for weeks in a cooler but since they’re soft, both shaking and mechanical picking can damage them, which makes U-pick a way to get them quickly into a consumer’s hands, for about $8 a bucket. “Then there are a few farmer’s market gardeners that have realized that if you have a rack of … honeyberries amongst your other vegetable offerings, you’ll have a much longer line,” said Miller. A frozen berry pack might retail for $10 at the farmer’s market.

Any berry’s nutrients lie mostly in its skin and a honeyberry has extra, due to the fact that it’s really two berries wrapped up in another, outer layer of skin. That means juice shops might be obvious outlets for reaching the sorts of wellness afficionados who embrace açai for its purported antioxidant properties. “For people who are into super fruits this is definitely something that hits home,” said Wimmer.

Still, bridging the gap between farm and Jamba Juice remains the biggest hurdle in getting these fruits their due. “Most people haven’t heard of them and have never put one in their mouth,” said Miller. “But if you can get it in front of them and have them taste it, it’s a pretty easy sell.”

In Colorado, thousands of cattle graze upon a salad bar of forage found across 7.8 million acres. It’s one of the many benefits of raising cattle there, where the Bureau of Land Management operates about 2,400 separate grazing allotments used by more than 1,000 ranching operations. Yet, where a plethora of cows once roamed with little worry, much has changed since wolves were returned to the state via a voter-approved reintroduction effort.

Proposal 114 passed in November 2020, making it the first time voters were able to influence state wildlife management strategy. Prior wolf restoration efforts historically followed federal protocol outlined by the Endangered Species Act. When the measure passed, Colorado Parks and Wildlife (CPW) had three years to meet the Dec. 31, 2023, deadline to reintroduce wolves into the Western Slope.

CPW released the first 10 wolves in mid-December of 2023, meeting their deadline. Since then, they’ve introduced 15 additional British Columbian wolves in Eagle and Pitkin counties, and have a goal of introducing 30 to 50 wolves over the next three to five years. Yet, as the reintroduction effort continues, reports of livestock depredation funnel back to both CPW and the Colorado Department of Agriculture (CDA). To date, wolves have killed 36 head of cattle, 15 sheep, one llama and one dog since the reintroduction process began, according to CPW.

“It was a huge change for us,” said Tim Ritschard, a fifth-generation cattle rancher in Grand County and president of the Middle Park Stockgrowers Association (MPSA), which represents producers in Grand and Summit counties where the first 10 wolves were released. “And none of us knew when it was actually happening.”

Enter the Range Riders

Range riders serve as on-the-ground livestock guardians in areas with high depredation. They can travel by foot, on horseback, in UTVs, or by truck, patrolling grazing areas to observe predator-livestock activity, using non-lethal methods — think noisemakers, scare devices, or guns loaded with rubber buckshot or bean bags — to keep wolves at bay. In fact, the use of range riders as predator control was included in the Colorado Wolf Restoration and Management Plan to help ranchers combat livestock depredation. Because Colorado wolves retain both federal and state protections through the Endangered Species Act, it’s illegal to kill them, making non-lethal hazing a necessary component of Colorado wolf management.

Range riders aren’t a new concept to Western communities: “As a producer, most of the time we do our own range riding,” said Ritschard. However, agency-funded ones aren’t the norm. In fact, only two other states have officially funded range rider programs: Washington and Arizona.

“As a producer, most of the time we do our own range riding.”

In 2024, Dustin Shiflett joined CDA as their non-lethal conflict reduction program manager. He has extensive experience in both the agriculture and conservation arenas, having spent 16 years at CPW before spending a year in CDA’s Conservation Division. His first task? Working with local producers, livestock associations, CPW, and other stakeholders to hire the first group of range riders to serve Western Colorado while also developing a statewide range rider training program.

Washington and Arizona’s programs were paramount in helping shape Colorado’s program. He also collaborated with the Western Landowners Alliance, which provides four different Producer Tool Kits for Wildlife-Livestock Conflict Reduction.

“Ultimately, the goal’s to try and get a range rider training program that’ll be considered a gold standard in the Western states and I think Colorado is there,” said Shiflett. “While a traditional range rider might have done livestock management, fence maintenance — general ranch work — the modern range rider deals with wildlife and livestock interaction, mitigation, data collection, predator and livestock movement, and monitoring.”

During the hiring process, Shiplett included the community as much as he could.

“Every step of the way, CDA has tried to involve the producer,” he said. “The approach is more of a what’s going to work best for them because we don’t really know, aside from some of us raising livestock ourselves, what’s going to work best on their landscapes.”

There are currently eight range riders in Colorado, though they have funding for 12, paid via CPW’s “Born to Be Wild” license plate fund.

“Ultimately the goal’s to try and get a range rider training program that’ll be considered a gold standard in the Western states.”

Only months into the program, the idea’s still new. Many producers are skeptical of what the new range riders will do — and why CPW’s involved. Most ranchers don’t interact with the agency on a regular basis, according to Ritschard, who was involved with the hiring process.

That’s where Max Morton, CPW’s wildlife damage specialist, comes in.

“At the beginning, my job consisted of just calling producers all day, every day,” said Morton. “I’d say, ‘Hey, we have some wolves on your allotment. Are you okay with having a range rider out there? We’re not going to mess with your livestock. Just going to kind of make sure the wolves are staying out of trouble.’”

For the past few months, Morton has worked to build relationships within the communities impacted by the new wolf presence, noting how grateful he is to be “allowed on their properties to try to make the best of what they would call a bad situation.”

“I’m really happy to see the collaboration and the togetherness even in times of such stress,” said Morton.

Ride, Ranger, Ride

Unlike the old-fashioned depictions of range riders in Western imagery and paintings, those filling the positions have modern technology in their toolkits, which makes managing hundreds of thousands of acres by only eight contracted range riders manageable. With GPS collars on nearly 100% of the state’s wolf population, range riders know where the wolves are at all times — and can keep tabs on traveling packs.

And CPW anticipates the population will naturally increase. In July 2025, the agency confirmed three new packs — the King Mountain Pack in Routt County, the One Ear Pack in Jackson County, and the Three Creeks Pack in Rio Blanco County — though the exact count isn’t yet known. Female gray wolves average four to six pups per litter; however, pup survival rates vary based on location, with survival rates for the first year between 50% and 60%, according to CPW. The average lifespan of a wolf living in the Rocky Mountains is only three to four years.

“We’re coming to the tail-end of the denning season,” said Morton, noting that wolf pups are typically born in late April, sticking to their dens until the pups are about eight weeks of age “That kind of heavily localized wolf presence has really allowed our range riders to establish perimeters and work pretty closely with the producers who are in the immediate vicinity of highly localized wolves.”

“We want to give producers some peace of mind that somebody’s out there monitoring their livestock from predation.”

While it doesn’t seem like a lot of riders, Morton added “given the biology of the wolves and the number that we have in the state, coupled with the technology that we have to our advantage, we’re making it work pretty well.”

To measure success of the program, CPW will be collecting data, including GPS coordinates at range rider locations to compare with wolf presence, location of carcasses, wolf tracks, scat, and hair to see if range riders do decrease depredation for local producers. The state will compensate producers for lost livestock, up to $15,000.

As for the length of the program, Shiflett said the on-the-ground program will likely run seasonally — April through October/November — due to Colorado weather patterns with additional range rider training occurring during the offseason.

“Hopefully, we’re being effective out there,” said Shiflett. “We want to give producers some peace of mind that somebody’s out there monitoring their livestock from predation.”

A scan of the horizon in Montana’s Big Hole Valley reveals plenty of examples of the land reclaiming what once belonged to it. Derelict jackleg fence. Log calving sheds with caving roofs. Rusting Chevrolets and spools of barbed wire. A giant compost pile of livestock carcasses, bones protruding from the mulch like seashells at low tide.

Then, every five miles or so, an old, spindly implement punctuates the scenery. It’s tall, maybe 30 feet, resembling a giant see-saw permanently out of balance. It’s not so much a stairway to heaven as it is a halted conveyor belt to nowhere; there’s no grain silo or corn crib nearby for a machine like this to fill up from above. Regardless, its efficacy in stacking giant piles of hay is clear from its construction. Grass grows tall around its base of rough-hewn lodgepoles, as if the earth might swallow it whole if it stayed put for another century.

This contraption is known as the beaverslide, patented in 1910 by Big Hole ranchers Herb Armitage and D.J. Stephens. The haystacking device consists of a wide, sliding fork at the base of a ramp and a cable pulley system rigged to the ramp’s underside. In practice, ranchers use a team of horses or a motorized vehicle with a winch to pull one of the cables perpendicular to the beaverslide, which in turn hoists the fork up the ramp, bringing a giant pile of hay up with it. (Ranchers rake cut hay onto the beaverslides with old buck rakes.) At the top of the ramp, the hay falls to the other side, forming three-story piles that can reach 25 tons in weight, depending on who you ask.

Details on the manufacturing and distribution of the beaverslide — named for its origins in Beaverhead County — are slim. The prevailing story is that ranchers often made their own, then made duplicates for neighboring ranches upon request, according to Big Hole rancher lore. Over the last few decades, the contraption has largely become a relic of a bygone era. But it’s not entirely obsolete, as some ranchers still use their old beaverslides today. With modern challenges like ballooning upgrade costs and the ever-present battle over a rancher’s right to repair their own equipment, the analog beaverslide makes more and more sense for those still using one with every passing hay season.

One such family, the Kirkpatricks, have been ranching north of Wisdom, Montana, for going on four generations. The fifth generation rides along in car seats strapped to the small tractors that push buck rakes around the large field, collecting cut and cured hay and plowing it onto the fork of the beaverslide — or the derrick, as the Kirkpatricks call it.

“I just prefer it. The hay keeps better, and I didn’t want to have to invest in newer, modern, high-price machinery,” Dennis Kirkpatrick says, sitting in the windbreak of a pickup truck during lunch. Mykal, his wife, leans next to him and chimes in.

“We could either invest in land, or we could invest in machinery. And, well, what good is the machinery without the land?”

Beaverslides come with their own limitations. Unlike balers that a single person in a tractor can operate on their own, stacking hay the old way requires a roster of help — something that’s increasingly hard to come by in ranching and agricultural communities across the West. At any given time, the Kirkpatricks might have three or more drivers pushing tractor-mounted buckrakes around the field, plus someone to operate the winch that hoists the fork. Today, that’s Hans Humbert, an extended family member and fourth-generation rancher who Dennis Kirkpatrick also refers to as their handyman.

“This guy right here could repair any piece of equipment we own,” Kirkpatrick says, jerking a thumb at Humbert. “Probably with the pliers on his belt.”

That’s more than could be said for much of the mechanized equipment in the Big Hole Valley. The Kirkpatricks recall memories of neighbors being stuck in the middle of winter with broken-down bale processors and hungry cows. The closest repair shop in Jackson, an unincorporated community of roughly 20 people, is 42 miles south. The next closest shops or available technicians might be 53 miles away in Butte or 73 miles away in Dillon.

Many big-name mechanized implements run on trademarked chip technology that requires a trip to an authorized dealership for servicing. Even ranchers like Humbert who otherwise possess ample repair knowledge don’t have access to the diagnostic equipment necessary to solve problems on the fly. This might sound like sacrilege for an industry that lives and dies with rural, self-sufficient communities, but a bill calling for a rancher’s right to repair their own equipment died in the 2025 Montana legislature.

Score another point for the beaverslide — especially the more modern one with its sturdy steel frame that the Kirkpatricks use.

“I’ve never seen a metal derrick break an arm,” Humbert says. “The wooden ones, if they break an arm, the rancher goes across the river and cuts a tree, brings the tree back, whittles it down to size, puts the new arm on, it might cost them three days. We’ve broken the basket a few times. They can get bent, so they don’t deliver the hay properly, but you just fix a new one on there. We’ve had to get new cables. The skids wear out, but that’s something you fix in the off-season. It’s an awfully simple piece of equipment.”

“My brother is 75, and I’m 70. We’ll continue to stack hay this way until we die.”

While beaverslides and their resulting piles stuck the Big Hole Valley with the nickname “Land of 10,000 Haystacks,” this simple machine didn’t stay relegated to its namesake Beaverhead County. Use of the “slide stacker,” as it’s also called, spread as far east as Nebraska. Dan and Shirley Carson of Purdum, Nebraska, last used a stacker in 2020, when neighbor Marvin Sierks refurbished his and asked if he could employ it on their ranch to put up some hay.

The stacker now works as a crucial decor item for the Carson Ranch’s annual bluegrass festival. But at the time, the Carsons recall it outperforming their baler on wet, muddy ground resulting from summer rainstorms. Dan Carson, now 79 and retired, feels a sentimental affinity for the stacker, and not just because he also prefers the quality of stacked hay.

“There’s nothing prettier than a crew working a stacker,” he says. “It’s a fun time. I like to see it.”

Back in the Big Hole, Frances Strodtman-Royer shares a similar affinity for the beaverslide she and her brother use on their late dad’s ranch south of Jackson.

“With the beaverslide, we don’t need a specialist to get it repaired. A metal derrick will last forever. All you have to do is replace the wooden slide. But the structure’s there. And if you find a crack and know how to weld, you can fix it.”

Their metal derrick was constructed at Shepherd’s Garage in Jackson, founded in 1945 and still serving the community today. Repairability is extremely important to Strodtman-Royer’s operation. She and her brother still use tractors that range in age from 45 to 75 years old. To hoist the hay basket, they even run a winch on a 1939 Army truck — the first four-wheel-drive vehicle in the Big Hole, they say.

“Sure, our equipment is old,” Strodtman-Royer says, “but if our tractors were computerized like some of today’s equipment, we’d have to take them to a dealership in Dillon, and it doesn’t behoove us to do that. We’d also be looking at a quarter-million to a half-million dollars to switch over, and that just isn’t economically feasible for us. And the prices keep going up.”

But there’s something else about the old equipment that Strodtman-Royer considers impossible to part with: the connection it maintains between herself and her father.

“The buckrake I run was my father’s first buckrake. He put it together. So when I drive it, I’m with my dad. I’m putting my feet on the pedals where his feet were. So nostalgia is a big part of it. My brother is 75, and I’m 70. We’ll continue to stack hay this way until we die.”

In late August of 2008, an Alaska farm harvested fresh peas while sandhill cranes strutted down the rows, gleaning leftover peas and foraging for insects. The birds were regular visitors from the Palmer Hay Flats wildlife refuge, about 10 miles away, where 20,000 cranes congregate each summer.

Unbeknownst to the farmer, these stately birds left droppings that infected the peas with campylobacter jejuni, a bacterial illness that infects about 2.4 million people each year. After this batch of peas hit the market, close to 100 people fell ill and five were hospitalized.

As alarming as it was, this situation in Alaska is the only documented domestic incident of foodborne illness conclusively linked to wild birds through lab testing. Yet birds are often associated with food poisoning outbreaks in produce, leading buyers to make stringent demands and farmers to destroy wild bird habitats.

Where It Began

Most experts agree that popular fears about foodborne pathogens in produce started with an infamous 2006 spinach E. coli outbreak which caused 104 hospitalizations and 3 deaths. This outbreak was a major hit for food buyers. They dealt with financial losses from recalls, lawsuits, and plummeting spinach sales.

Facing economic losses and increased public scrutiny, food companies felt the pressure to make food safer. This pressure led buyers to institute new food safety practices including the removal of wildlife habitat on and around farms. While the 2006 outbreak was ultimately linked to wild hogs and cattle, buyers remained concerned about birds and other unrelated wildlife. They passed these fears down to their suppliers.

“There’s been incredible pressure on growers to do everything that they can to keep wildlife out of the farming environment in California.”

Daniel Karp, associate professor of wildlife, fish, and conservation biology at University of California, Davis, said that, “Since [the initial outbreak], there’s been incredible pressure on growers to do everything that they can to keep wildlife out of the farming environment in California. And then that’s kind of spread to other places throughout the United States as well.”

Over the last couple of decades, farmers have poured copper sulfates in the water, put out snap-traps and anticoagulant rodenticides, removed hedgerows, and made every effort to convince buyers their produce will not be tainted by local fauna.

While some farmers may not agree with these practices, continued food safety concerns among farmers and buyers have kept them alive. A study of the Salinas Valley (where the majority of U.S. salad greens are grown during warmer months) found that “over a 5-year period following [the 2006 spinach outbreak] 13.3% of remaining riparian habitat was eliminated or degraded.”

Testing the Fears

During the 2024 summer growing season, a team of researchers from UC Davis spent hours following bluebirds, turkeys, California quail, and other wild birds around the campus farm and nearby Putah Creek, dutifully collecting fecal samples. Their goal? To measure E. coli survival in droppings on lettuce, soil, and plastic mulch to determine how birds and their poop can affect food safety on farms.

At the end of the study, the team surveyed droppings from nearly 10,000 birds across 29 lettuce farms on California’s Central Coast. The team found that E. coli survival rapidly declines in bird feces, particularly those smaller than a quarter from songbirds and other smaller specimens. While they noted that E. coli lives longer on lettuce than soil or plastic mulch, likely due to the moist microclimate of lettuce, about 90% of all surveyed droppings were on the soil.

Their findings showed that birds on farms pose a relatively small food safety risk. They estimate that if growers ignored small bird feces on the soil, California lettuce farms following a no-harvest buffer around feces would be able to decrease the affected area from 10.3 to 2.7 percent. It also means that farmers could preserve habitat and even erect nest boxes to attract small, insect-eating songbirds to help with pest control — without compromising food safety.

John McKeon, who has been working on farms in the Salinas Valley for the last 25 years, shared a similar outlook. He’s noticed that for wildlife, there’s “a very high risk assumption” but that often the incident rate is actually really low, especially with wild birds.

“Pathogenic E. coli and salmonella are vanishingly rare in wild, farmland birds. And we now know E. coli tends to die off quickly in most bird poop.”

McKeon is currently working as the director of organic integrity and compliance at Taylor Farms, a massive agricultural operation that partners with other farms to produce about one in three salads in North America. Recently, Taylor Farms found that one of their 10-acre fields of romaine lettuce had accumulated significant bird feces.

Current safety recommendations include a “no-harvest zone” around bird poop including any crop that has been directly contaminated or could be by soil splash. The exact size of the zone depends on the crop type, number of droppings, and the size of droppings but it’s often around a 3-foot radius. Based on these guidelines and their own safety protocols, Taylor took this field off the commercial list, and decided to use it to further study the risk posed by wild birds.

They sampled bird poops throughout the field and tested for common foodborne bacteria. McKeon said, “Our incident rate was super-low, like no detection to only a few.” Then they had a harvest crew come through and run the lettuce through a rig before testing again, to “see what kind of detection we saw on that rig in terms of transference or cross-contamination potential, and again, the incident rate was really low.”

Don’t Blame the Habitat

Losing 10 acres of lettuce to wild bird poop is a financial loss for any farm, but Karp’s team has found that attempting to remove wild bird habitat may unnecessarily amplify this issue. Their work supports these conclusions. “Pathogenic E. coli and salmonella are vanishingly rare in wild, farmland birds,” he said. “And we now know E. coli tends to die off quickly in most bird poop.”

One of the team’s previous projects surveyed 20 strawberry farms on California’s Central Coast, a region that produces 43% of the nation’s strawberries. They found that removal of neighboring wildlife habitat had a negative impact on the farm.

“Our results indicate that strawberry farmers are better off with natural habitat around their farms than without it,” said lead author Elissa Olimpi, a postdoctoral researcher in Karp’s lab. The team found that removing natural habitat can increase crop damage costs by 76 percent. Conversely, adding habitat can reduce costs by 23 percent.

Karp explained that removing nearby habitat changes the way birds interact with the landscape and affects the type of birds on the farm. With less habitat available, more birds visit the farm. Large monoculture plantings that lack wild spaces also encourage more of the larger invasive species rather than native, insect-eating songbirds that benefit farmers. While many advocate for the ag benefits of birds for your farm — pest control is frequently invoked — Karp said he wishes we could reframe the way we think about them. Even on an intensive farm with no habitat around, you will still have birds. He encourages farmers not to think of birds as good or bad: “It’s like, what are you doing and how does that affect the birds and how does that affect the outcomes you want?”

In a 2022 study, Karp’s team examined the types of birds visiting farms and the pathogens they carry. They found that pathogens were most often found in birds associated with cattle feedlots, not the songbirds eating pests in a produce field. Karp said, “Our data suggests that some of the pest-eating birds that can really benefit crop production may not be so risky from a food-safety perspective.”

Changing the Conversation

Organizations like the Wild Farm Alliance (WFA) are trying to help farmers seize that benefit while protecting birds. They teach farmers how to support beneficial birds on their farms as a form of retro pest control.

Federal and state programs that regulate food safety on farms also seem to side with wildlife.

The USDA recommends against the removal of avian and other wildlife habitat and has implemented several programs designed to support wildlife on farms, including the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP), Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP), and Working Lands for Wildlife (WLFW).

Today, the vast majority of leafy greens growers in the Salinas Valley, including Taylor Farms, are members of the California Leafy Green Products Handler Marketing Agreement (LGMA). This program is a voluntary certification program for farmers that was created by the farming community in response to the 2006 outbreak. While joining is optional, membership requires farmers to verify compliance with food safety practices — more than 90% of U.S. leafy greens come from LGMA members.

When I reached out to them, leadership at LGMA noted they are first and foremost a food safety organization. However, communications director April Ward said that they do support wildlife co-management, which is “all about balancing food safety risk and conservation efforts.”

“We could go to the buyers and be like, you know, this is not benefiting anyone. It’s likely not making things more food safe.“

Like the USDA, they don’t recommend bird habitat removal. Instead, they recommend steps like “preventive barriers and increased monitoring” in specific situations along riparian areas.

McKeon said that it again comes down to controlling the perceived risk versus the actual risk. He said, “You have customers that come out on a farm that may have never been on a farm and their sense of risk is different than yours.”

While farmers like McKeon may agree with Karp, the real challenge is getting buyers to the table. The team at UC Davis, along with other scientists and nonprofits, have done outreach events, testified before water control boards, and talked to farmers, but nothing will change if they can’t reach the buyers.

Karp hopes soon they can get farmers and academics together to form a coalition, “We could then go to the buyers and be like, you know, this is not benefiting anyone. It’s likely not making things more food safe. It’s costly from an environmental perspective.”

“If we don’t take an interest in AI, AI is going to take an interest in us,” says Marc Arnusch of Arnusch Farms in Colorado.

Make no mistake: Digital technology, and artificial intelligence specifically, has been a key part of farming for years. What has changed, however, is the immense interest and investment in ChatGPT and other generative AI, particularly large-language models (LLMs) and chatbots. As seemingly every sector and industry rolls the dice on LLMs, it has likewise become a common discussion topic among farmers, agriculture experts, and anyone else involved in the business of food.

While hype abounds and capital flows, it’s worth pausing for a moment and assessing what LLM applications are already being used in ag, and what is being developed and forecast. Advocates say its potential for improving agricultural efficiency and addressing localized vulnerabilities makes it a game changer for the sector, while critics argue that the propensity of misinformation alongside privacy and environmental concerns means that, at the very least, far more regulation is needed.

Building for Farmers

Researchers around the world are scrambling to develop cutting-edge chatbots and LLMs for farmers, making use of various datasets and following a diverse array of ethical guidelines. David Warren is senior director of integrated digital strategies for Oklahoma State University’s Agriculture Division, and the AI program leader for the Extension Foundation, an educational ag non-profit. For many years, the foundation managed a platform called “Ask An Expert,” essentially a human-powered search engine, as users could ask a question and, hours or days later, get a response from a real expert — often one residing in the user’s state. Warren and others realized that this dataset of around 400,000 questions and answers was “an ideal training set for AI,” Warren told Offrange.

The foundation, which works closely with the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), ultimately developed a chatbot after holding a series of workshops to determine what it should and shouldn’t be able to do. The intention was to offer actionable advice to focus, somewhat narrowly, on science- and fact-based outputs. ExtensionBot, as it was dubbed, launched in November 2022, and two weeks later, ChatGPT hit.

“If we don’t take an interest in AI, AI is going to take an interest in us.”

OpenAI’s model possessed the ability to pull directly from large swaths of the internet, all of which made a static, limited tool like ExtensionBot suddenly seem insufficient. “We ripped out ExtensionBot’s guts,” Warren said, “and replaced it with an open-source model.” OpenAI had changed the game, and even the foundation’s small, direct-purpose tool felt the need to respond.

The main concern, of course, is the model’s trustworthiness, especially when it comes to farmers, notoriously risk-averse when it comes to their bottom line. This is understandable, Warren said, but argues that unlike a giant model like ChatGPT, what his group can offer is something much more purposeful and specific. His LLM is trained only on verified agricultural data, unlike ChatGPT’s scraping of essentially the entire internet, which has led in part to “hallucinations” built on inaccurate or incomplete information.

By the end of 2025, Warren’s team plans to include all the data contained with the foundation’s many systems throughout the country, alongside USDA sources. But even then, Warren stressed, “We curate what goes in there, even from those sources. We have a different idea of what is trustworthy, which is research-based outputs.”

Potential Advantages

Some farmers are taking a distinctly nuanced approach to AI. Farmer Marc Arnusch says he uses LLMs like ChatGPT and Grok to “help disseminate contracts, understand business strategy, in landlord negotiations, and email composition.” He has also used an AI-assisted Farmers Business Network platform to inquire about potential strategies for wheat control, and to suggest crop protection products. Even so, Arnusch is well aware of the risks: “It’s a recommendation, not a marching order. The farmer still has to make the decision, and do some ground truthing to make sure it’s legitimate and accurate, and understand the risk. It would be no different to going to anyone else for advice: You still need to scrutinize it and make sure it’s the right decision for your operation.”

This reflects some of the first research that has emerged on LLMs in agriculture. A study published last fall concluded that “While LLMs can potentially enhance agricultural efficiency, drive innovation, and inform better policies, challenges like agricultural misinformation, collection of vast amounts of farmer data, and threats to agricultural jobs are important concerns.” Another study argued that specialized LLMs for agriculture would “provide better consulting, explanation, interpretation, and decision recommendations,” which would only work if “it is ensured that the data behind these models is location-dependent, rely on real observations, and is up-to-date” — which Warren and ExtensionBot are aiming to achieve.

“It’s a recommendation, not a marching order. The farmer still has to make the decision, and do some ground truthing to make sure it’s legitimate and accurate, and understand the risk.“

As Arnusch has spent more time with these tools, a more exacting approach has helped to clarify what they can and can’t do. “We need to be apprehensive and not embrace this technology with open arms,” he said. “It is something that we need to understand, not necessarily adopt. [We need to] understand how it’s going to change our competitiveness, our markets, our ability to make good decisions quickly.”

Jim Wally, a small-scale farmer and engineer in north Florida, has played around with ChatGPT and other tools. His assessment is that if you’re an absolute expert on a subject and you can recognize immediately whether an AI output is accurate or not, it “can be reasonable to use it as a shortcut, but I wouldn’t trust it for anything that you don’t have an incredibly good understanding of.”

Like most industries, it shouldn’t be surprising that there is a diversity of opinion among farmers about the usefulness of AI and LLMs, especially when looking ahead to the future. Arnusch said that, among the farmers he interacts with, “There’s a high adoption rate of these technologies,” especially among younger producers, but he acknowledges that his personal network may not represent U.S. agriculture at large.

Risks Abound

Wally notes that many farmers are trying AI for simple tasks like email composition. But when it comes to using chatbots for actual advice and problem-solving, he identifies three groups across the farmers he knows: the old-fashioneds who haven’t used it and aren’t certain it could help them; some that are excited about it and want to use it as much as possible, while understanding they can’t fully trust it; and, “the biggest group, it seems, is those that were interested in it, tried it out, it gave them some grievously incorrect or harmful answer, and never touched it again.” He places himself in that final category.

Warren understands these concerns, but argues that “LLMs can support broadening the reach of expert advice and making it more accessible.” For the foundation’s tool, they are avoiding the verbose answers familiar to ChatGPT users and focusing squarely on simplified, fact-based responses. It also collects no personal data, unlike the larger bots. Among other concerns, one study noted that “farmers might input increasing amounts of personal information into these chatbots, including agronomic ‘trade secrets,’ such as what they grow, how they grow it, and personal information such as age, gender, and income.” Several chatbots, including an early version of ChatGPT, have had this type of data leaked. That is surely cause for concern, but there are larger worries over how unclear it is about how this data is being used by these companies.

“If an LLM recommends a pesticide that ends up killing an entire crop, it’s hard to know who’s to blame.”

Even so, Warren admits the tool hasn’t been tested with actual farmers yet — funding for that comes next. In the meantime, while slower-paced and lower-resourced efforts struggle to take shape, the bigger players are enjoying extreme popularity. Wally, for his part, puts this growth — and its attendant dangers — in stark terms: “People will die,” he says. “It can tell you the arsenic concentration in your soil is fine, and it can kill a person.” Or, even on a non-lethal scale, “It can tell you that your calcium’s out of range and that you need to spend $10,000 on more calcium, and it’s simply not true, and there’s no way to know that besides doing the work that you’re trying to skip by using the model.”

Sarah Marquis, outreach strategist for the National Farmers Union in Canada, notes that “the farmer is not benefitting as much as the corporations are” from the imposition of AI technology on their practices. “These technologies can be helpful, but it’s the companies that have all the data, which they can make profitable use of.” While chatbots and other AI-enabled tools are still emergent for most farmers, LLMs in particular lack transparency, Marquis added, and what they advise “might seem objective and true, but [it] might not be, and the way they arrive at their answers is unclear. We encourage our members to be careful with tools like that.”

Moreover, agribusiness companies like Cargill and Bayer are seizing the opportunity to push AI tools specifically for farmers, and it becomes difficult to know their trustworthiness when their data is proprietary and kept from view. An October 2022 article in the academic journal Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems analyzed multiple research studies and determined farmers may be right to be concerned. “Generally, farmers have limited control of their farm data by agricultural technology providers (ATPs). This raises concerns about privacy of farm data ... farmers are usually not informed about the purpose of data collection from the farm, how their data is used, and whether their data is shared with third parties. Due to the lack of control and lack of transparency, farmers are unwilling to share their data with ATPs.”

Then there is the even more elusive issue of accountability. “If an LLM recommends a pesticide that ends up killing an entire crop, it’s hard to know who’s to blame,” Marquis said. “Is the algorithm going to be held accountable, is the corporation?” From the farmer union’s point of view, there are far more long-standing and significant issues to address, namely economic dignity for farmers and improvements in safety. “LLMs are not helping with any of those outcomes,” Marquis said.

“These technologies can be helpful, but it’s the companies that have all the data, which they can make profitable use of.”

Marquis also notes the rapidly growing investment in AI data centers and the heavy toll they take on the environment, and how many of these centers are being built on rural land — land that is, or could be, agricultural. Wally calls this “a bubble” for short-term gain, regardless of long-term consequences. Arnusch suggests that there are rural economic development opportunities to these centers but, at the same time, the loss of agricultural land is an obvious detriment. Either way, he says, “We simply have too many businesses boarded up, and we see a hollowing out of our rural towns” — ideally, the centers will help spur the development these areas need.

As AI tools and LLM chatbots continue their growth, whether via large tech corporations, research-based academic prototypes, or UN-funded global platforms, farmers across America and beyond are facing an uncertain future overtaken by technologies bearing a lot of hype and promise. As Wally points out, this reflects a “broader historical trend of Silicon Valley being really sure that they’re smarter than everyone else in the world and they’re going to solve a problem in an industry they know nothing about.”

Wally does think farmers remain open to anything that can help improve their business. At the same time, “I imagine that a lot of farmers are probably a little insulted by the idea that they need [AI] to tell them how to run their farm.”

Picture a tree seedling on the forest floor, tiny and fragile. In a shifting climate, these seedlings are supporting the future with their spindly branches — and that burden is growing.

As forest fires, insect outbreaks, and other climate-related pressures intensify in North American forests, the need for tree seedlings is rapidly increasing. Meanwhile, demand for seedlings for large-scale reforestation projects to absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere is also on the rise.

Yet all of this is being squeezed through a bottleneck: tree nurseries — whose capacity currently falls well short of the need. “Now that there’s this shift towards greater interest, we’re quickly realizing there’s just so few seedlings produced to sustain that,” said Tony D’Amato, professor in silviculture at the University of Vermont.

Now these nurseries are starting to seek ways to boost capacity, with both small-scale initiatives, and expansions of university and government facilities. But like all things to do with trees, such efforts take time. And time, in a changing forest, is in short supply.

Starting Small

Growing a tree starts small; first, seeds have to be collected from the wild. Those seeds are then germinated and grown in beds or containers for at least a year.

It’s a deceptively simple process, and the reasons for low nursery capacity vary. In places like the Northeast, commercially and ecologically valuable species generally grew back on their own — at least until recently — limiting demand for seedlings, said D’Amato.

In other places, state governments have divested from seedling production, and production declined due to decreased funding and demand in the 1990s and 2000s.

But in recent years, the need to increase seedling supply has become apparent. “Bigger fires, bigger insect outbreaks, more people excited about trying to add forest to areas that currently don’t have forest — all these things have really pushed for more planting,” said D’Amato. “When you get above any scale that’s beyond a hobby project, you’ve realized there’s just not a lot of seedlings being produced.”

That deficit can reach staggering numbers: For instance, to plant 15 percent of the forest lost in Canada’s devastating 2023, 2024 and 2025 (so far) wildfires, the Canadian Tree Nursery Association estimates it would take 6.8 billion seedlings.

Some institutions have started to leverage public funding to meet that demand.

States Step In

In 2019, New Mexico’s state forester invited Matthew Hurteau, a professor in the department of biology at the University of New Mexico, along with two other researchers, to a meeting to help draft the reforestation section of the state’s forest action plan. In that session, they realized there was no way to accomplish the state’s goals — there simply weren’t enough seedings. “And so basically it was the four of us trying to figure out how to make that happen,” said Hurteau.

The resulting plan is to build a nursery with state and federal funds that will ultimately produce 5 million seedlings a year, starting with 1 million seedlings annually by 2028 — an increase up from 200,000 a year with current capacity.

Hurteau said they’ve already started seed collection and aim to provide a genetically diverse supply for the most common species, as well as a stock of less common but culturally important trees. Sale of seedings will cover the expense of operating the facility, but public funding for capital costs is important, Hureteau said, as there hasn’t been much of a business case for seedling production in the region, which can make it challenging to source the right local seedlings (a problem stymying other projects restoring ecosystems with native plants). “Here in the Southwest, we don’t have a timber industry, right? It’s not like you’re planting tomorrow’s dimensional lumber. It’s really about restoring watershed function and stuff like that.”

Increasingly, the ecology of forests is being compromised by extreme weather; in many places, fires are destroying the seed-producing mature trees as well as the seeds in the soil, meaning areas are too severely burned to regenerate on any human time scale. This requires more seedlings, and to fill the gap, California’s department of forestry and fire protection is currently designing an expansion of California’s only state-run nursery and seed bank, to quadruple its production of Douglas fir, coast redwood, and other coniferous species.

Topher Byrd, statewide reforestation coordinator at Cal Fire, said even an increase to a million seedlings produced a year, up from 250,000 today, still falls well short of what’s required. “We are definitely still behind the curve in terms of meeting the overall need for reforestation,” said Byrd. “Even if we were able to increase our capacity to five million, that’s still such a small drop in the bucket.”

Lack of existing capacity isn’t the only issue. In some places, seedling production isn’t always well-suited to the forest conditions of the future — prompting small nurseries to step in.

Farmers Band Together

In Minnesota, a network of growers called the Farm & Forest Growers Cooperative is starting to produce hardwood seedlings, spurred by research from the University of Minnesota, Duluth. In some parts of North America, the changing climate favors hardwood trees. But even where seedling production has existed, nurseries have often focused on conifers favored for timber production. That’s left a gap in the supply of species that will make up future forests — a hole that small-scale growers are trying to fill.

One of the co-op’s growers, Stefan Meyer of 3 Oaks Forest Farm in Minnesota, said despite being an experienced farmer, growing trees is a different beast. Meyer is currently growing several species of oak and maple, as well as yellow birch — a species for which there’s a lot of demand, and few suppliers. But the co-op’s focus isn’t just species diversity; growers are producing seedlings from seeds collected across southern and central Minnesota, to ensure broad genetic diversity. Those seedlings are then planted in the northern part of the state, where research suggests their southern genetics will help them withstand a warming climate.

Meyer, who is also the co-op’s coordinator, said while there is a state nursery, the co-op is the only entity paying close attention to migrating tree genetics northward. And while the co-op is meant to help its several dozen members benefit economically, Meyer said most growers, himself included, are motivated by concern for the future.

“They’re already seeing drastic changes [in] the forest around them. And this is why … they’re like, ‘I need to be doing something. I need to be an active participant and somehow helping to solve this issue.’”

In April, the co-op was dealt a blow, with the loss of USDA funding, but Meyer said they’ve dug in their heels and aim to get to producing 500,000 seedlings annually in the next five years.

“When you get above any scale that’s beyond a hobby project, you’ve realized there’s just not a lot of seedlings being produced.”

Seedlings are also needed to plant the trees that bolster climate targets. In New York State, The Nature Conservancy has launched a nursery incubation program to increase nursery capacity for reforestation programs; to meet net zero targets (where greenhouse gas emissions are balanced by carbon removals), the state has a goal of planting 25 million trees by 2033, which will require millions of additional seedlings.

The program is meant to provide funds for nurseries to increase seed collection or purchase greenhouses and tractors. TNC restoration manager Mandy St. Hilaire said that making it clear there will be buyers for the seedings — as the Nature Conservancy does with the incubation program, by contracting with nurseries ahead of time — is essential; otherwise, nurseries are leery of the risk of growing trees for future demand. “Being able to better coordinate that demand signal and de-risk that capacity investment with nurseries is really key, in order for them to be able to respond to this call to action.”

In the meantime, scientists say being strategic with seedlings can help with supply issues. At the University of New Mexico, Matthew Hurteau has been building a model to help determine where planted seedlings are more likely to be successful.

While conducting field research to build the model, he noted survival of planted seedlings as low as 13 percent; increasingly, severely burned landscapes are too hot and dry for seedlings to survive (“it basically cooks the little buggers,” said Hurteau). That’s a lot of waste when seedlings are already in short supply, but using data to refine planting locations can help the limited supply go farther on the landscape, Hurteau said — and this could ultimately help foresters direct nursery capacity to where it’s most likely to have an impact.

Ultimately, none of this can happen overnight, and the need is urgent — but that’s the tension of living in an era of accelerating climate change. In the long-term, trees can help support a liveable future. Tree nurseries can plant the seed.

Ninety years ago in 1935, a cataclysmic wall of dust swept across the Great Plains. Known as Black Sunday, it wasn’t the beginning of the Dust Bowl era, but it was the moment it entered the public consciousness. Photographs of towering clouds swallowing towns stunned Americans, driving home what had already been years of creeping environmental catastrophe.

The Dust Bowl began in the early 1930s, as drought gripped the central United States. Unsustainable agricultural practices, particularly intensive tillage of fragile prairie soils that they thought would enhance its moisture retention, had caused massive erosion. Soaring commodity prices in the 1920s and new tractor technologies had caused farmers to expand operations to produce huge volumes on marginal land. As the drought deepened and topsoil blew away, millions of those acres became unproductive for decades. Entire communities were displaced, and the federal government responded with landmark legislation that changed United States agriculture for most of the last century.

Now, those protections could crumble under changing federal priorities.

Today, conservation practices have grown considerably, largely thanks to federal policies. Cover crops grow on at least 5% of total U.S. cropland (around 15 million acres). Acreage cultivated without any tillage is over 100 million acres, and the USDA estimates that reduced tillage now comprises the majority of cultivated cropland.

Still, the gulf between health and declining soils in U.S. farmland is deepening. Dust storms affecting roadways in 2025 killed eight people in Kansas and four in the Texas Panhandle. Climate change is making these cataclysmic events even more likely. According to the Union of Concerned Scientists, “Although erosion rates have slowed since the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) began estimating them in the 1980s, soil loss from the nation’s farms is still unsustainable. Every year, U.S. croplands lose at least twice as much soil to erosion as the Great Plains are estimated to have lost annually during the peak of the Dust Bowl.”

Without the right mix of federal policies, incentives, and networks, the progress that’s been made over the last 90 years could erode. The gains of the post-Dust Bowl era were the result of deliberate, layered investments including locally led conservation districts, federal technical assistance, and a broader shift in agricultural norms. The National Resource Conservation Service (NRCS) today is facing structural changes that could affect them all.

The First Response

The Soil Conservation Service (SCS) was formed in 1935 following dramatic congressional testimony from Hugh Hammond Bennett, calling for a federal response to the soil erosion crisis on the exact day that the dust from Black Sunday blanketed the sky above the U.S. Capitol.

Promptly, the Roosevelt administration formed the Soil Conservation Service and appointed Bennett head; this agency ultimately became the NRCS in the 1990s. This group provided direct cash payments per acre for conservation techniques, such as planting soil-conserving crops, contour plowing, cover cropping, and retiring highly erodible land.

One lesser-known element of the Dust Bowl policy response, beyond financial incentives and crop insurance programs, was the Soil Conservation and Domestic Allotment Act’s creation of conservation districts throughout the country. These locally led entities were rooted in peer-to-peer networks: farmers working with fellow farmers, supported by federal technicians. Demonstration plots on private land were dotted across the country, showcasing sustainable practices, serving as powerful tools of persuasion. A culture of conservation began to take hold, reinforced by neighbor-to-neighbor engagement. Today there are over 3000 conservation districts in the United States.

This layered approach, leveraging financial incentives from above and social cohesion from within, formed a durable model for promoting sustainable agriculture. Work wasn’t perfect, but it was advancing. For decades, SCDs served as hubs of innovation, advocacy, and practical support.

The Rise of Top-Down Incentives

Direct payments, through Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) payments, Environmental Quality Improvement Program (EQIP), Conservation Stewardship Program (CSP) have grown from the 1940s to the 2000s alongside crop insurance subsidies, forming a suite of financial tools to encourage environmental stewardship.

However, recent research suggests these top-down financial incentives alone face huge challenges. Aparna Howlader, professor of economics from Chatham University, analyzed every conservation district and demonstration plot in the decades following the Dust Bowl and found that while financial incentives for conservation practices were available nationwide, “empirical data analysis shows that areas with strong conservation districts had a consistently higher yield and profitability during the massive 1957 drought.”

According to Howlader, “Soil conservation strategies mostly work when neighboring farmers are working together.” In times of high commodity prices, the appeal of conservation payments weakens. Land that might otherwise be left fallow or cover cropped is instead kept in production. Additionally, tenant farmers, who often make land-use decisions but don’t receive direct payments through federal programs, may lack motivation to adopt conservation practices at all. Soil conservation districts and their networks of technical support appear to have offered a kind of insulation against the boom-bust dynamics of commodity agriculture.

Today’s Soil Policy Environment: Incentives Retained, Support Eroded

Funds for federal conservation incentives programs are stable now, but other policy shifts may be undermining their effectiveness. The GOP-backed One Big Beautiful Bill maintains EQIP, CRP, and CSP funds by rerouting funds earmarked for climate resilience from the Inflation Reduction Act. Simultaneously, technical support around those practice changes is dwindling.

According to Richa Patel, policy analyst for the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition, “The greatest challenge for soil health today is wavering federal support.” The White House has proposed eliminating the NRCS’s entire Conservation Technical Assistance (CTA) division, which now awaits congressional approval. Patel said, “CTA is a foundational component of supporting farmers in adopting conservation practices — and ultimately improving soil health and productivity — on their farm.”

This is in addition to the Department of Government Efficiency terminating the leases of 59 office leases for the Farm Service Agency/NRCS and approximately 12,000 NRCS staff dismissed in mass firings. Funding freezes at the beginning of the new administration either paused or ended tens of millions in support for conservation districts. The federal architecture of conservation is tilting heavily towards financial incentives as the scaffolding of peer networks and technical is eroding.

Conservation districts themselves and the technical support they represent are experiencing uneven funding shifts. In some states, like Texas, Minnesota, and Oregon, resources have kept generally stable or even increased. More, like those in Illinois, Indiana, and Arkansas have sharply reduced funding due to state or federal policy shifts. Others, like California, have funding in limbo from federal changes to the Inflation Reduction Act.

The National Association of Conservation Districts represents the nation’s conservation districts to Congress. According to their CEO, Jeremy Peters, “One of the things we’re concerned with is a generational loss of conservationists. If the resources for technical support aren’t available, then we may lose the opportunity with this next generation of farmers to demonstrate how important conservation agriculture is to their bottom line. Our research shows on average, farmers can realize a net increased return of $65 per acre, based on efficiencies that are gained through conservation measures.”

At the same time, today’s crop insurance programs provide little incentive for new conservation techniques, as the risk for lost harvests from soil erosion and climate change for large farms falls on the federal government rather than the farmers themselves.

The Farm Journal’s 2020 “State of Sustainable Ag” report surveyed 500 farmers and found more than half believe implementing conservation practices typically improves a farming operation’s profitability in the long run. “Row crop farmers tell us they are willing to do the work, but they do not feel that they can, or should, individually shoulder the burden of the agronomic and financial risk associated with adopting new practices.”

Targeted soil conservation incentives are just one piece of the puzzle, however. Patel said, “To help prevent future Dust Bowl-like conditions, not only are voluntary programs like CSP valuable for increasing the implementation of important soil health practices, but it’s important we don’t continue to subsidize unsustainable farming practices on lands that are unsuitable for farming. Ideally, basic soil health standards tailored to all farmland can become a future prerequisite to receive federal crop insurance and commodity subsidies.”

Looking Back, Looking Forward

The Dust Bowl catalyzed an extraordinary response of federal investment, local engagement, and cultural transformation. In the decades that followed, resilient networks took hold, centered around conservation districts to embed a conservation ethic into rural life. Today, that ethic persists, but the structures that supported it are under strain.

Ninety years on, the lessons of the Dust Bowl remain visible in the programs and policies that shape American agriculture. Financial incentives from the federal government remain strong, but the support structure around them to help the transition towards conservation practices are faltering. Future policies, and farmers’ decisions in their fields, will determine whether 90 years of response after the Dust Bowl is taking root or in the wind.

Jess Wilson stood on a picnic table bench and welcomed a crowd to the Southeast Tennessee Young Farmers’ (SETNYF) third annual Farm Olympics. These farmers and their families had gathered at a park about a 30-minute drive north of Chattanooga, Tennessee, for good-natured competition. Participants would test their professional skills including a plant identification quiz and a fencing contest (not the Olympic kind). In the latter, teams of two would need to take down temporary fencing, carry it to a different area, and set it back up. The fastest pair would win.

As the competitors stretched before the events, Wilson, SETNYF president, explained the organization and the plan for the afternoon. Wilson’s group is a chapter of the National Young Farmers Coalition, a 15-year-old organization advocating for young and minority farmers. Shifting from the practical to the existential, Wilson highlighted the obstacles facing aspiring farmers.

“It is nearly impossible to be a young farmer because it’s so expensive to enter into agriculture,” she said. “The biggest barrier is land access.”

One of the planned Olympic events was based on this issue: The Obstacles to Land Access Race. Competitors would have to climb over rows of temporary fencing, scramble under or over giant wooden spools, and run around barrels in their race to the finish line. In past years, signs were placed next to each obstacle indicating which challenge they represented, including high land prices, student loan debt, and housing. This race was obviously a light-hearted game, but plenty of participants had struggled through the real thing.

Every five years, the U.S. Department of Agriculture National Agricultural Statistics Service (USDA NASS) releases a Census of Agriculture. In its most recent census from 2022, it found that the average age of American producers, defined as participants in farm decisions, was 58.1 years old, a number that had been increasing over the past 20 years. NASS also found that young producers (under 35 years old) comprised only 8.8 percent of all producers in our nation. And about 80 percent of those young producers were considered beginning farmers as they had been farming for no more than a decade.

Ernie and Janet Mathes did not have farming experience when they decided to enter the profession a few years ago. The Atlanta residents, now aged 39 and 36 respectively, began to improve their diet. They started with a small garden and backyard chickens but eventually sold their Georgia home and traveled America in an RV searching for the perfect place for their own homestead. “And then we figured, if we got enough property, why not supply [others with] the same food that we want?” Ernie said. “There’s other people looking for it.”

The Matheses’ search for property mirrors that of so many other young farmers struggling to break into the industry. “The longer we’re looking, the harder it was getting to find things,” recalled Ernie. They couldn’t compete with developers buying farmland, and they also couldn’t get a loan to buy land on which they could build a house. Eventually, they were fortunate to find an overgrown former cattle farm in Georgia whose owner, a widow, could no longer care for it.

Most new farmers are on their own when it comes to finding land. According to American Farmland Trust (AFT), an organization working to preserve farmland, most farmers no longer inherit their farms from family. But “land is becoming so expensive that you can’t pencil out a profit,” said Charles Martinez, an agricultural economist and director of the University of Tennessee’s Center of Farm Management. “So if you can’t pencil out a profit from the get-go because of the price of land, then you probably shouldn’t enter that business.”

“It is nearly impossible to be a young farmer because it’s so expensive to enter into agriculture. The biggest barrier is land access.”

According to the USDA’s Economic Research Service (ERS), the value of American farm real estate, defined as land and the structures on it, has surged since the mid-20th century. After accounting for inflation, ERS reports that the average value of one acre of that real estate has risen from almost $750 in 1950 to $4,170 in 2024. The average value for one acre this year is $4,350 according to NASS. Although this growth has been flagging since 2021, the American Farm Bureau Federation notes that the 2025 value is a record and the fifth consecutive year of increase.

To explain farmland’s high price tag, Martinez points to basic economic principles. Low supply increases prices, which is amplified by increased demand for land which also increases price. Young farmers often can’t compete with wealthier established enterprises for this finite resource, such as other farmers buying land to consolidate into larger operations. If they’ve been working on others’ farms to gain experience, it’s unlikely they’ve earned much, and high interest rates can prevent them from obtaining loans. And “if you have student loan debt, forget it,” said Wilson.

While leasing land is an alternative to buying, it doesn’t provide as much stability since leases can be broken or not renewed. Even the park where the Farm Olympics was held demonstrates this instability. Once a working farm, Hamilton County purchased McDonald Farm a few years ago and uses some of it as a public park. (A farmer also leases hundreds of acres on this site to grow corn.) The property’s future is uncertain as some want to use it for industry instead; for now, a decision on its fate has been postponed.

The cost of land is not limited to its price tag, of course. If it doesn’t already have a house, purchasers must plan for housing costs. They must also consider the cost of any infrastructure such as fencing that they need to build. If they recently bought the land, they should also take their unfamiliarity with it into account.

In 2023, the Matheses opened Iron Root Pastures, 225 acres on which they raise chickens, cows, and pigs. Ernie Mathes recalls that when his family first moved onto their farm and had to build their own infrastructure, they had to learn their area’s weather patterns. For example, because they are in a valley, their farm is subject to strong winds from storms; initially, this wind damaged a couple of their chicken tractors, or mobile pens. If a young farmer buys land but can’t pay for these initial costs, their farming career might remain stalled.

“If you can’t pencil out a profit from the get-go because of the price of land, then you probably shouldn’t enter that business.”

Like the Matheses, beginning farmers must also compete with affluent buyers who plan to use the land for something other than agriculture, such as development companies intending to build neighborhoods. In 2020, the AFT issued a report on America’s farmland entitled “Farms Under Threat: The State of the States.” It found that 11 million agricultural acres were transitioned, or converted, to urban and residential land from 2001 to 2016. This is the same amount of land that our country needed in 2017 to grow vegetables, nuts, and fruit.

In the first episode of Offrange’s podcast The Only Thing That Lasts, Sarah Mock interviewed AFT leaders about these statistics and learned that the lost 11 million acres represented roughly one percent of U.S. agricultural land. While that doesn’t seem like much, the reason losing such a small percentage of land can affect farmers so intensely is location. “If you look at it from a sky eye view,” said Martinez, “it might not seem like there’s much of an issue, but if you zoom in in certain areas, then you have issues.”

Tennessee is one of those areas. The AFT’s 2020 report listed the 12 states whose farmland was most at risk. Tennessee initially ranked fourth but was moved two years later to third. Because of this report, the Tennessee Department of Agriculture asked Martinez to conduct his own study.

By using USDA data based on satellite imaging and parcel data, or property assessment records, from each of the state’s 95 counties, Martinez tracked changes in every parcel in Tennessee. He concluded that the amount of the state’s farmland converted each year from 2017 to 2024 is roughly double what the AFT calculated. From 1997 to 2017, about 1.5 million agricultural acres were converted. He estimates that by 2027, Tennessee’s total lost farmland will reach about 2 million acres.

Conversion can have many causes, and the factors that have led to conversion in Tennessee can also be found across the nation. These include an area’s development driven by population growth. For instance, Middle Tennessee, home to the state capital of Nashville, had the highest rate of conversion in the state. This was due to residential development. Other causes include difficulties such as lack of planning, in transferring land to new owners, and farmers selling back their land to repay loans. Depending on location, extreme weather and disease can also lead to conversion.

“The longer we’re looking, the harder it was getting to find things.”

Tennessee’s experience matches that of its region. When AFT identified the states with the most threatened land and also the fewest land policies, a group the organization considered most troubling, it came up with a list of 11 states. Nine of them, including Tennessee, were in the South. According to the AFT, this region is “clearly a hotspot for agricultural land conversion.” And once converted to non-agricultural uses, it’s almost certain this land will never again be farmed since fixtures like concrete would have to be removed and the soil will have changed.

Some factors explain this regional trend of threatened land. One consideration is size. One hundred acres converted in Tennessee will have more of an effect on agriculture than 100 acres converted in a more expansive state such as California. Also, other areas have more land use policies addressing agricultural threats than the South. Martinez agrees with the AFT that one reason other states have more of these policies is because they have had to address the effects of development for a longer period of time. He also notes that those areas, especially on the coast, have natural resources like the ocean that inspired more conservation policies which benefited their agricultural sectors.

Martinez expects the struggle for land access to continue. “It’s not as simple as, ‘This is the first time we’ve seen this.’ It’s always been around,” he said. “It’s just it comes in different forms, generation to generation.” Not even a future significant transfer of farmland due to aging owners — the AFT estimates more than 350 million acres — changes his prediction. Land access obstacles will still be present. And if those owners need to fund their retirements with the sale of their land, they will need the highest price they can get moving it beyond the reach of young farmers.

In the meantime, Ernie Mathes has advice for the next generation of farmers facing these challenges: Don’t get bogged down in research. “Make something small and just start,” he said. “See if you enjoy doing it before you either saddle yourself with debt or do something that’s overwhelming that wears you out.”

Courtney Hammond is surrounded by color. In the late afternoon sun, he stands on a dirt path that divides gently sloping hills draped in pale greens, soft pinks, and rich burgundies — wild blueberries in full bloom. Each shade represents one of hundreds of different plants with its own genotype, forming a vibrant field buzzing with pollinators. It doesn’t look much like a cultivated blueberry farm, or any other agricultural land, for that matter.

It’s late May in coastal Maine, and the plants are speckled with white blossoms that will become this year’s crop by mid-summer. Each one rises up to shin height and brushes against its neighbors to form a patchwork quilt that helps define the region’s landscape. When glaciers receded from Maine and Canada’s Maritime provinces some 10,000 years ago, the blueberries took root in the acidic, rocky, virgin soils they left behind. The perennial shrubs have been growing on this destitute land ever since.

To the people of Maine, the wild blueberry is something much more than a fruit. It’s a natural resource, a point of pride, a stubborn and resilient companion that has reflected Mainers back to themselves for generations.

But for small growers like Hammond, who has been walking and working the fields at Lynch Hill Farm since he was little, it’s become harder and harder to turn a profit as obstacles mount. Most blueberry fields are unirrigated, so drought can wreak havoc, and late frosts kill blooms before they become berries. Both are being exacerbated by climate change, according to Lily Calderwood, wild blueberry specialist at the University of Maine, whose research program supports the industry. In good years, the total crop surpasses 100 million pounds, most of it grown here in Washington County. In bad years, it’s less than half that.

The shifting blueberry market has complicated matters further, owing largely to the cultivated or high-bush blueberry, which can be grown in a range of climates. The wild or low-bush berry is smaller, sweeter, and more varied in flavor, thanks to all those genotypes, and it has twice the antioxidants that turned blueberries into a superfood in the late 1990s. But high-bush production more than doubled in the 2010s, flooding the freezer aisle — home to 99 percent of all wild blueberries — and making it harder for Maine’s growers to get a fair price. The U.S. supplies roughly one-quarter of what is now a million-ton global supply. Canada’s support for wild blueberry expansion, meanwhile, has added even more pressure on Maine’s growers.

Last year, growers made just 38 cents per pound — less than the 60 or 70 cents it costs to produce.

For Hammond, a past president of the Maine Farm Bureau and member of the advisory committee for the Wild Blueberry Commission of Maine, the headwinds have become nearly unbearable. He’s been picking blueberries since his father quit teaching to take over the family farm and started dragging his kids along for the harvest. Like many of Maine’s independent blueberry growers, most of whom have a connection to the industry that goes back generations, Hammond may as well have been born with a rake in his hand. Unlike so many others, he still uses one — picture a handheld dustpan with comb teeth — to harvest each August. But at 57, he’s worried about who will take over when he hangs it up. More than that, he’s worried about whether hundreds of other small-scale growers will be able to persist through the challenges they all face together.

In a place where wild blueberries are more culture than crop, Hammond’s weary outlook reflects a broader concern about the future of the fruit that has helped sustain the region’s rural communities for decades.

“I’m fighting to keep the industry alive because it’s a way of life down here,” Hammond says, “but it’s not like it was.”

When Hammond’s grandparents bought this field in Milbridge in the early 1950s, they joined a lineage that dated back thousands of years to the Wabanaki tribes, who first learned to burn the land after a blueberry harvest to restart the plants’ two-year growth cycle. The tribes ate the berries fresh or dried them in the sun to offer sustenance through winter, and used them as both medicine and as dye for woven baskets. When settlers arrived in the 17th Century, they too relied on blueberries as a valuable food source. During the Civil War, blueberries were shipped out to support the Union. By the late 19th century, canning made preservation possible and commercial expansion followed. Soon, nearly every town around here had a cannery and managing blueberries became a viable way to make a living. These days, though, it’s far from a sure thing.

The vast majority of the 500-odd Maine growers sell their crop to one of five processors, which sort, clean, and freeze the berries to be shipped around the country. Their parents and grandparents could earn an income doing it, but most are now sustained by other work. Adjusting for inflation, the price they receive per pound has fallen by half in the past two decades, according to Eric Venturini, executive director of the Wild Blueberry Commission. Last year, growers made just 38 cents per pound — less than the 60 or 70 cents it costs to produce. That imbalance has led some to cease managing the crop altogether, rather than pour in resources just to finish in the red. If it continues, Hammond anticipates a “massive exodus” of independent growers, some of whom have already begun turning their land into solar fields or gravel pits.

On a drive around Lynch Hill’s scattered properties, Hammond points out some blueberry land he leased until everything went upside-down. Since 2016, he says, he’s only made money once. Otherwise, he’s hoped to break even. In response, he’s let more than 50 of his 300 acres go. Unless someone else steps in, the land will soon be overgrown by other species. Within a decade, much of it will be filled in by birch, cherry, and pine trees. It will return to the successional forest it would have been without human intervention.

“We’re at a turning point,” Venturini said. “The industry is changing. The question is whether it can change fast enough to be the version of the industry that we hope it will be.”

Calderwood, the extension specialist, is among those focused on helping growers adapt to all that change. When she came to Maine after studying hops and grains at the University of Vermont, she had never seen the fields known as the barrens — thousands of rolling acres of blueberries studded with rocky outcroppings. At first, managing them looked like an awful lot of work for little reward. “Immediately, I was like, ‘Why are you doing this?’” she says. But after meeting the people committed to preserving the fruit and its place in Maine’s culture, she quickly understood.

“For a lot of people, it’s not about the economics,” she says. “It’s about their care for the land and managing it over time — being a steward of that property.”

At a late-afternoon workshop at the headquarters of wild blueberry processor W.R. Allen in Orland, an hour west of Milbridge on Route 1, Calderwood and her colleagues show a group of growers how to calibrate their boom sprayers to get the most out of their inputs. The conversation drifts toward the cold, wet weather that’s been hampering pollination. Beehives are trucked into the fields each spring to support the process — among growers’ most significant costs — but the bees haven’t been flying. It takes several visits for a blossom to become a berry, and the window for pollination isn’t open long, so any delay adds anxiety about this summer’s crop. The last thing a wild blueberry grower needs is more anxiety.

Just down the road at a research field, Calderwood is studying the potential of mulch to help alleviate some of the stress felt by both growers and their plants. Spot mulching has been known to encourage wild blueberries to expand into bare patches by growing their subterranean rhizomes. Now, Calderwood is exploring whether broader application can help retain soil moisture. Drought has become more common in recent years, nearly biannual for the past decade. If it hits at the wrong time, it can wipe out entire fields. The same is true of late frost. “We’ve had years when you couldn’t pick a blueberry to save your soul,” Hammond says.

Adding to the volatility, some blueberries, confused by changing weather patterns, have started blooming in the fall. The unseasonal flowers die in the winter, limiting a plant’s fruit production the following summer, according to Brogan Tooley, a senior agroecologist who leads climate-related research at Wyman’s, a 150-year-old processor that buys from growers and also manages around 10,000 of Maine’s 47,000 total acres of blueberries. (The company has expanded into a wider range of frozen fruits as well.) Tooley is collaborating with University of Maine researchers to better understand how shifting weather patterns are affecting blueberry production — and to develop solutions.

“We’ve had years when you couldn’t pick a blueberry to save your soul.”

“Even growers I work with who three or four years ago would’ve said climate change doesn’t exist, they see it,” she says. “It’s in their backyard and they’re dealing with it on a daily basis now.”

Research shows the barrens are warming faster than the rest of the state, and growers have no choice but to respond. For decades, harvest began in the first or second week of August and lasted about a month, but last year Wyman’s began on July 20, Tooley says. The snowpack that protects blueberries from the elements in winter is also decreasing, which could inhibit their development and cut down yields. For growers, it’s become increasingly difficult to rely on traditional knowledge.

“Mainers are set in their ways,” Tooley says. “For a long time this industry was very much doing things by the books and by the calendar and had locked into this method of farming and just existing. People are realizing that things do need to change.”

Part of that change will come through research, which industry members fund via a 1.5 percent tax that supports the Wild Blueberry Commission and the university’s extension efforts. Calderwood and her colleagues are searching for ways to ward off diseases, including mummy berry (a fungal disease that shrivels the fruit), blight, and leaf spot. Entomologists are helping growers defend against pests like spotted wing drosophila, a fruit fly with a saw-like tail that emerged as a new threat in recent years. And the university has also explored whether drones can help growers more efficiently target the numerous weeds that populate their fields.

Other projects aim to illuminate the berries’ positive impact on human health, secure exemption from the Food Safety Modernization Act to streamline harvests, or investigate how to maintain the quality and shelf life of fresh berries. This last idea holds real potential, Calderwood says, because it could bring significantly more value to the crop. Hammond makes more than $4 per pound for the fresh-packed berries he’s begun focusing on — 10 times last year’s price for frozen. But it requires a level of investment most growers can’t muster: He couldn’t afford the $110,000 optical sorter he uses to ensure his berries meet quality standards if he didn’t use money from his family’s fuel company to buy it.

At the Passamaquoddy Wild Blueberry Co., a Native American-owned business in Columbia Falls, Maine, general manager Darren Paul and product manager Holli Francis have found their own way to branch out from the standard wild blueberry model. With help from a U.S. Department of Agriculture value-added producer grant, the company now keeps 20 percent of the berries grown on its 2,000 acres of tribal trust land to sell wholesale or freeze-dried under its own brand, while the rest are sold to Wyman’s. That control over a portion of its own crop makes Passamaquoddy a rarity in the industry, helping it return around $3 million in profit over the past five years to support the Tribe, Francis says. The company’s unique status in the industry is fitting, considering that the Passamaquoddy are among the five tribes of the Wabanaki Confederacy and their connection to the blueberry extends back thousands of years.

The Tribe bought its blueberry fields in 1981, in large part to preserve work for its members, Paul says. The Passamaquoddy have a migratory history, moving from harvest to harvest throughout the region. Blueberry season used to bring thousands of members from the Tribe and its relatives across Maine and the Maritimes to hand-rake the crop. Now, as with most of the industry, mechanized harvesters have taken over much of the work. Still, the barrens are peppered with shacks that house workers each summer, where the fields have long taken on the spirit of a family reunion.

“It’s a tough business,” Paul says. “It’s weather-dependent and you’re not going to get a good crop every year.”

That reality is helping to drive the industry’s existential crisis, with so many growers questioning whether to keep giving themselves over to a crop that doesn’t always give back.

“It would be sad,” Francis says of the prospect of fields gone fallow. “Blueberries are Maine.”

A short drive from the first blueberries his grandparents bought, Hammond pulls up to a charred field that he burned last week, just as the Wabanaki once did to reset the blueberries for a prune year. Most farms have transitioned to flail mowing to restart the plant’s two-year cycle, running a tractor through their fields with blades sturdy enough to cut down the thick carpet of blueberries. But Hammond spent most of his adult life as a Maine forest ranger, so the traditional method comes naturally to him.

As his black boots crunch through the ashes, he ponders why he and his fellow growers stay loyal to their blueberries, despite everything they face. It’s in his nature to keep going, he says. “It’s what we do.” Next spring, these blueberries will return, just as they have for thousands of years, and Hammond will be back for more.

When you think of 4-H, do you picture images of prized calves, giant zucchinis, and delicious pies? This summer, one 4-H program is taking to the skies so that teens can learn about using drone technology in farming.

This program comes at a time when the U.S. agricultural drone market is experiencing rapid growth. According to one forecast by Grand View Research, the segment is expected to grow from $506 million in 2024 to more than $1.7 billion by 2030. Benefits include reduced water, pesticide, and fertilizer costs by targeting only those areas in fields where they are needed. One study in Brazil showed that using drones for spraying used just 10 liters per hectare, compared with 250 liters for tractor application.

Data from drones can also result in higher crop yields through early detection and intervention of issues that could affect plant growth. And drones make far more efficient use of farmworker time and effort, as the devices can conduct field inspections faster and in greater detail than a human can.

Flying a drone for commercial use requires a FAA Part 107 Remote Pilot Certificate, which is available to operators 16 years or older after completing a written test (which costs $175). This qualifies the user to operate a drone that weighs less than 55 pounds that is flown during daylight hours no higher than 400 feet above the ground while maintaining visual line of sight (VLOS) with the drone. (Enforcement has been sparse, with only 27 civil actions taken between October 2022 and June 2024, but fines can be up to $75,000 per violation.) Steven M. Worker, 4-H youth development advisor with UC Agriculture and Natural Resources, is “excited to have a draft curriculum and to be pilot testing it at our youth drone camps.” He expects that the program will help campers ultimately attain their 107 licenses.

The majority of ag drones are currently focused on monitoring operations, according to Sean Hogan, drone program coordinator with the University of California Division of Agriculture and Natural Resources. These include using spectral image analysis to identify pest infestations, irrigation needs, and areas requiring fertilizer. Other applications include monitoring livestock herds.

Regulations hinder some uses of unmanned aircraft in agriculture. For example, the VLOS requirement typically limits the operational distance to about 2,500 feet, depending on terrain and weather conditions. Some applications are permitted under specific waivers, such as clearance for a pilot to operate a swarm of up to three drones at a time which can greatly increase the area that can be covered. Waivers can also be obtained for drone spraying applications for pest control or fertilization, which might also include a waiver for nighttime operations when conditions might be more favorable.

Hogan looks toward a future when the use of ag drones will be expanded. “Removing the VLOS restrictions and even permitting the use of autonomous drones” would make drones far more useful, he said, especially for larger farms with a lot of acreage.

In the meantime, California 4-H is hosting a series of week-long camps this summer to teach teens how to fly drones and use them to gather data to improve farming practices.

The camp curriculum is based on a modified version of training courses for adults that have been held over the past nine years, according to Hogan.

“Flying the drone accounts for only about 7% of the total time” that it takes to complete a camp project.

The participants will learn to fly drones safely, as well as gather and process the data from those flights. As it turns out, flight time is just a small part of using drones in agriculture. “Flying the drone accounts for only about 7% of the total time” that it takes to complete a project, said Hogan. The participants will also learn to use GIS (Geographic Information System) mapping software in conjunction with the aerial images and other data gathered from their flights.

The California 4-H camps will give some teens a head start in this new field. According to Hogan, “A single drone operator can cover about 200 acres in a day. Agricultural drone pilot is an emerging career opportunity.” The camp experience covers a range of STEM components, which are essential for agricultural applications. Hogan points out that “there is a shortage of people who have all the required skill sets” for drone projects.

The camps are part of a broader program called AFA2, which stands for “Ag from Above for All.” This three-year program is designed to engage youth aged 13 to 18 in the food and agriculture industries, through hands-on experiences. It is funded by a $750,000 grant from the USDA’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA). The program appears to be working, based on the positive response to the drone camp opportunities.

Mekhai is one of the teens who has registered for one of this summer’s camp sessions. He already had some experience flying his brother’s drone. “I’m eager to learn more about how drones are used in agriculture,” he said. “As someone who is currently raising a dairy goat and a market pig through 4-H, I’m passionate about livestock and farming. I’m also interested in exploring how to combine my interests in agriculture, livestock, and technology.”

These three camps are just the first step. Worker said that, “The goal is to finalize and disseminate the curriculum to other state 4-H programs and other youth programs. We have funds to copy edit, graphic design, and disseminate the curriculum.” Drone camp: coming to a state near you.

If you drive past any popular bowfishing or spearfishing sites in Minnesota, you might see fish carcasses strewn on the sides of roads or near boat landings — sometimes by the dozen, and in heaping piles. This sort of wanton waste is not legal, but it’s not often punished either. People continue to do this, and continue to get away with it, because of a longstanding prejudice against the animals deemed “rough fish.”

Though it’s commonly used by anglers and various state agencies across the country, rough fish — also known as “trash fish” — has no one definition. Broadly, it’s a term applied to freshwater fish that implies a species is neither valuable nor worthwhile to catch or eat. But this term has garnered a lot of criticism, over the past few years especially, for being problematic on multiple levels.

For one, it’s a term that’s confusingly applied differently to different species across states. The longnose gar, for example, is considered a rough fish and a nuisance in Ohio, but a desirable food source in Louisiana. Some fish like catfish and sturgeon were once considered rough fish, but escaped that designation when they became popular. To make matters worse, it’s used to describe both pesky invasive fish and underappreciated native species alike, creating an unfair conflation between the two and a false sense that native fish are damaging to the environment and deserve to be killed.

Changing the Conversation

Over the past few years, especially as a greater cultural tide boosts our appreciation for native ecology, scientists and activists are increasingly calling for a move away from what many call the “rough fish paradigm.” The disregard people have for native fish species simply because of the rough fish label creates a cycle of neglect, where fish are ignored and therefore understudied, recklessly fished, and tossed, says Andrew Rypel, director of the Fisheries School at Auburn University in Alabama, and lead author of a seminal 2021 paper on the rough fish paradigm. But failing to adequately examine these fish means we don’t discover all the interesting and potentially important aspects of their biology and contributions to the environment.

The term’s usage in the U.S. is just as unscientific as its current usage. “When the Europeans came to North America, they wanted to have fishing opportunities that mirrored the opportunities that they left behind in the older world,” said Rypel. They stocked American waters with more prized European game fish, fish that were deemed better for food and sport compared to the native species that had long been treasured and eaten by Indigenous communities. These less desirable fish became known as rough in reference to the practice of “rough dressing,” where commercial fishers gut lesser fish but don’t bother to fillet them.

Rough fish became the fish for poor and marginalized people, said Olaf Nelson, an Illinois-based amateur historian of North American native fishes and co-founder of Native Fish for Tomorrow, a non-profit advocacy group. And an idea took hold that these rough, native fish were taking up too many resources and squeezing the prized, non-native game fish. This terminology quickly entered legal parlance. In Minnesota’s first Fish Commission in 1875, native rough fish were referred to as “the vermin of the waters,” said Tyler Winter, native fish advocate and another co-founder of Native Fish for Tomorrow. There became plans to cull their populations and relegate them only to certain lakes.

“People don’t eat the fish they used to.”

The consumption of rough fish continued well into the early 1900s, especially since it was a time when people relied more heavily on local resources. But since then, commercial fishing for rough fishing has declined. Terry Miller, a commercial fisherman who harvests rough fish at the intersection of North Dakota, South Dakota, and Minnesota, said that 30 years ago there were six other guys operating out of his town alone. Today, he’s the only one doing this work in his whole region.

“People don’t eat the fish they used to,” Miller said. He argues that, since you can find whatever fish you want at the supermarket, people have been “spoiled” for choice. The rough fish Miller catches — including smallmouth and bigmouth buffalo, redhorse, sucker, and bowfin — mostly get sent to Asian markets in cities like Chicago or New York City.

The rough fish paradigm also permeates the sport fishing world. Since rough fish are thought to be pests, and the term colloquially includes native and invasive fish species, people conflate native rough fish with invasives like carp, and mistakenly believe that killing and discarding any rough fish is good for the environment — hence the piles of tossed-out carcasses. Bowfishing and spearfishing, sports that have gained traction over the last few years, have made new targets out of some native fish species like bigmouth buffalo fish. Many places don’t even have limits in place for how many rough fish you can fish at a time, and no protected seasons. A concern, Winter said, given that we don’t have comprehensive research on the populations of rough fish species, or even the number of species we have.

Learning More

We also know “almost nothing about the life cycle of many of these species,” according to Rypel. Questions like where do they migrate; how long does it take them; how do they spawn; and do they spawn every year successfully, are all critical for our understanding of whether a species is thriving or in danger.

Scientists have started to fill these gaps in our knowledge in recent years, with some pretty striking findings. Specimens of the bigmouth buffalo fish have been found to live amazingly long lives — up to 127 years — and don’t seem to decline biologically with age. But while bigmouth buffalo fish populations seem to be relatively stable over the years, new research also shows that they’ve struggled in the past 50 years to produce successful young, warning of a potential imminent decline in their numbers. Research on other native fish like quillback suckers, bowfins, and redhorse suckers have found that they’re also longer-lived than people previously assumed.

Despite new findings, in some places rough fish are still “not even listed in state fishing regulations, which speaks to their greater neglect,” said Alec Lackmann, a fish researcher at the University of Minnesota, Duluth, who conducts research on the biology and aging of native fish. Ideally as more of this research comes in, government agencies will step up and put regulations in place specific to the species.

We know “almost nothing about the life cycle of many of these species.”

Taking these fish and their regulatory needs seriously are important, not just for the species themselves, but for the greater environment. “The bigmouth buffalo is a direct competitor to the invasive bighead and silver carp,” said Lackmann, and act as a bulwark against their continued spread. They also consume baby zebra mussels, another invasive species. Certain native mussel species also have symbiotic relationships with native fishes, attaching to those specific fishes’ gills, he adds.

Despite all these known benefits that native fish species provide to the environment, the rough fish label still “cuts off people’s basic curiosity” about these fish, said Winter. So what would it take to shed the moniker?

There are several different species that used to be deemed rough fish that now have some other protected status. Rypel calls these “rough fish escapees.” Paddlefish and alligator gar escaped and are now trophy species for anglers. Sturgeon gained public awareness after nearly becoming wiped out and are now protected. Catfish gained popularity through media exposure starting in the 1980s and became a more popular food source (though Indigenous communities have long eaten catfish). But each of these species basically required publicity campaigns that made them fashionable in the public eye — not necessarily a scalable strategy for every native fish.

Policy Reform

Only one state so far, Minnesota, has taken steps to tackle the rough fish problem on a policy level. In May 2024, the state passed legislation to replace the rough fish category with a “native rough fish” category that includes only native species. It may seem like a small change, but “it’s a huge accomplishment,” said Winter, who was involved in these renaming discussions. This change is a step toward Minnesota protecting native species before they’re even endangered. The state is currently working through how exactly they’ll regulate all the species in this new category, such as with new harvest limits.

A lot of people, however, think the change to “native rough fish” is not quite enough. Lackmann and Rypel would both have preferred they just be labeled “native fish,” since that’s what they are, and “rough” still carries that pejorative connotation. Even more ideal, Lackmann said, would be for species to be referred to and regulated by their own individual names.

Winter explained that “native fish” would’ve implied that all other fish are non-native, which is certainly not true. Other candidate names created similar confusions. In the end “native rough fish” was the least bad option they had, he says (and jokes that no one went for his suggestion of “really really good fish”).

Despite this win in Minnesota, other states have yet to catch up. And we’re still a long way from fully correcting the “trash fish” mentality.

“In an ideal possible future, there would be a mix of all these things — catch and release, catching and consuming, and maybe some commercial harvest in some places.”

Ideally each native species would be valued simply because they’re native and good for their ecosystems. But what the rough fish escapee precedents show is that people tend to care about fish they think are either cool to catch, or good to eat.

But the problem with jumping ahead and encouraging people to catch these native species for sport or food is that we first need more basic research on these fish, how they live, how many there are, and what they need to survive and reproduce, said Lackmann. Then, if it seems like populations are robust enough, the next step would be to work through what sort of tracking and reporting is required to regulate commercial fishing, to prevent populations from declining too much.

Funding for robust management of native fish also poses an obstacle, said Rypel. “The majority of funding for state agencies to manage fish populations comes from fishing license sales,” he said. When people come in and only fish for bass or walleye, that incentivizes agencies to prioritize those species. It’s a chicken and egg dilemma — funding for the management of rough fish species is lacking, but it’s also not ideal to just reclassify and advertise native species as game fish without regulations and management plans in place first.

“In an ideal possible future, there would be a mix of all these things — catch and release, catching and consuming, and maybe some commercial harvest in some places — as science determines is acceptable,” said Nelson. But it’s a long way to go to get there.

Bees swarmed beneath the tulip trees. The late-June morning was already scorching, as I sat on the fringe of the meadow’s chest-high greenery. The densely packed native grasses and shrubs looked random and chaotic, but to realize how methodically they’d been introduced and maintained, I only had to glance beyond the nearby trees. I could see the asphalt of a manicured suburban road, dormant street lamps, and small front yards. The foliage here was overwhelming by contrast. Danila Sergeyevich Sheveiko, who owns the property with his partner, Linda Schade, had told me that if the rains continued, the narrow paths would soon close into verdant tunnels.

When Sheveiko returned, he found me there, studying the frenetic bees. They surged around his half-dozen hives. Each shallow super box held about 80 pounds of honey. Briskly, he set to work, leading me down one of the paths crisscrossing the forested heart of the land. Some local native species he’d reintroduced were thriving too well, overwhelming more reticent characters. Crouching, Sheveiko began to painstakingly thin the plants. He brandished an offending stalk of Virginia knotweed in illustration. It had nearly strangled a clump of sedge. When he moved on, the beleaguered sedge was visible again, although the surrounding vegetation appeared completely undisturbed.

In addition to knotweed, sedge, and many other carefully curated native plants, Sheveiko and Schade raise more typical agricultural fare. They grow tomatoes, green beans, blackberries, strawberries, chard, sweet potatoes, oyster mushrooms, and much more. They sell some locally and donate the rest. More impressive than the sheer bounty, though, is the footprint. Sheveiko and Schade have cultivated this dizzying array on a mere 1.5-acre residential plot in Kensington Heights. In the middle of the Washington, D.C., suburb, surrounded by neat grassy yards, they’re doing something utterly different. Their land, called The Sanctuary, is one of only two urban farms in Montgomery County, Maryland, officially recognized under the state’s grant program.

Its initial growth was rooted in destruction. A decade ago, the neighborhood lost 15 acres of green space to development in just a few years. When the couple learned another lot was on the chopping block, they pooled their resources with those of friends and family to buy the property before it became another cul-de-sac.

At the time, the plot was hardly a paradise. Behind the house, shadowed by tulip trees, lay the ruins of a commercial azalea nursery. Heaps of scrap metal and old equipment rusted beneath poison ivy and strangling honeysuckle vines. But within the neglected land, they saw a deeper potential. Sheveiko, a Russian Ukrainian expatriate and IT contractor, grew up farming and studied ecology, as well as finance. He was also president of the neighborhood’s Civic Association and chaired the county’s Water Quality Advisory Group. Schade, meanwhile, has degrees in urban planning and environmental management from Cornell and the Yale School of Forestry.

I asked Sheveiko what had led him to attempt such an unexpected restoration. We’d been talking for hours, sitting in a jungle of goldenrod as the sun fell behind the trees and the first fireflies emerged. It was clearly a question many people had asked him over the years. “I suppose,” he said wryly, “I wanted to save the world.”

The scope of that ambition is manifest in the project they’ve undertaken. The Sanctuary isn’t simply an urban farm; in fact, its most audacious goals have little to do with harvest. It is a time machine. Season by season, one square foot of soil at a time, the couple and their friends are undoing a stark ecological transformation centuries in the making. Showing me around, Sheveiko gestured at the radiant flourishing of his land.

“If you go to any park in Montgomery County, there’s no native ground cover. The bushes, the shrubs, and the ground cover — it’s all just a smattering of invasive species.”

The original ecosystem was all but eradicated when European settlers in the 17th century cleared the land and put down roots, both metaphorical and literal. The isolated colonial forts and outposts depended on imported crop species. As they expanded into towns, then cities, they increased agricultural production and systematically displaced Indigenous communities, who had spent millennia shaping the ecosystem. In the process, the environment was drastically altered, with native flora and even fauna replaced by imported species, including crops and livestock.

Hundreds of years later, The Sanctuary is a lonely island in a sea of transplanted, often far less diverse environs. As Sheveiko put it, there is “no other place in Montgomery County like it.” They currently boast three hundred local ecotype native species, or LENS, evolved for their specific region. Many are overlooked “scrappy fighters,” like the prolific Virginia knotweed. He recited names as we strolled through the meadow, reaching out to caress leaves or stems. Ten species of native grass. Eleven species of sedge. Six of goldenrod. Twenty-eight from the Aster family. Hundreds of fungi; I came home with a paper bag full of oyster mushrooms, repeatedly assured that in 43 years of mushroom hunting, Sheveiko has never poisoned anyone.

The restoration demands an absurdly myopic vigilance. Sheveiko wages meticulous warfare against his “enemies,” tiny weeds like celandine (now vanquished from the property) and Japanese stiltgrass (still entrenched). He sometimes baffles neighbors and dog-walkers. What on earth is he doing, hand-weeding the little strip of grass that divides his sidewalk from the road? Why doesn’t he just use a lawnmower? He’ll explain that he isn’t just weeding, but rather removing the non-native grasses.

At first, Sheveiko says, most passersby think he’s crazy. But after answering their questions, if they’re still interested, “I bring them up here and I blow their mind. And they’re never the same again.”

Certainly, some of his neighbors have welcomed the renewal of the land. Vasna Nontanovan, a retired Georgetown biotechnologist, lives within sight of The Sanctuary’s magnolia-shrouded front yard. She recently organized a group visit with local members of Third Act, an environmental nonprofit for elder activists. Nontanovan said it’s inspiring “for people to see that it is possible to have a place to forest-bathe, a stone’s throw from a Costco parking lot.” She’s been learning more about local ecotypes, hoping to integrate them further into her own extensive pollinator garden.

Sourcing and even identifying local native species can be a significant challenge, as Sheveiko acknowledged. Although many nurseries mark plants that are native to the United States, he looks for a much more specific “chain of custody,” narrowing the origins of the seeds to his precise region. Otherwise, his emerging meadow would include subspecies adapted to wholly different environments, like the Midwest’s prairies. Only three nurseries in the area provide enough information for him; however, they have limited stock. To gather the rest of his plants, Sheveiko works with local botanists and experts to identify nearby natural areas of least disturbance — also called refugia — and gathers seeds directly from there. “It is a patchwork,” he admits. But slowly, the work has reshaped his land.

In her seminal essay collection, Braiding Sweetgrass, the Potawatomi botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer asks, “How, in our modern world, can we find our way to understand the earth as a gift again, to make our relations with the world sacred again?”

When I posed Kimmerer’s question to Sheveiko, he replied with a quotation from the agrarian essayist Wendell Berry: “There are no unsacred places; there are only sacred places and desecrated places.”

On a spiritual level, Sheveiko’s goal is reconsecration. In the middle of a landscape monopolized and manicured into submission, he and Schade are sinking their hands into the dirt and finding the grief buried there. Like Kimmerer, Sheveiko believes an understanding of human history is integral to ecological restoration. He has spent countless hours immersed in local archives, digging through contracts, newspapers, and historical photographs. He knows the story of his land, dating back to the first colonization — the surveyors, the settlers, the Native tribes they encountered and often clashed with. Without such details, the complex tragedies of our history too often remain untaught and unreckoned with. It’s another kind of time travel, inextricably linked to his botanical efforts. Within both domains, he’s fighting to pull up colonialism by the taproots.

Still, he views the effort as deeply congruent with American principles. By reviving native species, Sheveiko wrote to me after my visit, “We can rescue the American farmer from the corn-soy duopoly and move the livestock industry towards sustainability while restoring American rivers and creeks at the same time. Decolonization actually means a return to capitalism — the ability of the land and the farmers to accumulate capital again.”

Despite mainstream resistance and his own skepticism of institutions, Sheveiko remains determined to reach a wider community. They don’t have a website for The Sanctuary, but the couple encourages visits and offers volunteer opportunities. Education is key to the broader mission. As Sheveiko told me, “If we want to restore the ecological integrity of this land, we have to know what the land was like to begin with.” After a reflective pause, he added, “That’s a quote from Aldo Leopold, the founder of the Yale School of Forestry. A horribly, horribly racist, deplorable genius.”

As radical as Sheveiko’s approach is, the results are hard to argue with. Standing in the leafy embrace of The Sanctuary, you’re transported to another world. After the modern desert of the surrounding suburbs, it’s an oasis, jarringly alive. You can’t help but imagine what towns and cities could be if each of us applied the same holistic care to our own land, in lieu of pesticides and mowing regimens. Imagine the change to our food system if backyards became polyculture powerhouses, yielding dozens of affordable staple crops. Imagine the transformation if even a few more people took up sustainability and diversity as the sacred work of a lifetime.

Just this year at The Sanctuary, they’ve had the first salamanders return. Several varieties of vital mycorrhizal fungi are again permeating the soil. Praying mantises — non-native but indispensable in fighting spotted lanternflies — are arriving in force. Beech and holly trees are springing up in parallel, the latter resistant to the former’s toxins. Everything is still changing, evolving, reaching for balance.

As we sat in the meadow at dusk, our conversation wandering from Revolutionary War history to etymology to epigenetics, the flickering fireflies suddenly reached a critical mass. Their scattered sparks coalesced into a dazzling firestorm, an unspeakable multitude. Sheveiko and I stood, set our tea mugs aside, and waded into the murky gloam. Somewhere in the loose folds of time, centuries unraveled. The world blazed.

Eventually, Sheveiko broke the silence. “All this work. All this blood, sweat, and tears. But then you come out here, and it’s so beautiful.”

In the living darkness, there was nothing else to say.

Mara Kushelman visits her mosquitoes almost every day. “They have no idea the weekend is a thing,” she says with a laugh. For Kushelman, a Ph.D. candidate at the Yale School of Public Health, it’s a short walk to the Fikrig Lab, which specializes in arthropod-borne infectious diseases (think ticks, mites, fleas, mosquitoes, and other generally bothersome insects). The entryway to the tall building at 60 College St. is flanked by enormous epoxy sculptures of a mosquito and a bedbug. The real, live mosquitoes are all the way up on the sixth floor.

Kushelman’s research focuses on dengue fever, so she keeps white paper cups of mosquitoes in climate-controlled chambers for experiments. The males are easy to take care of — they’re happy to drink sugar water from a wet paper towel draped over their cup. But the females? They need blood. On the top shelf of the lab refrigerator is a clear 30ml bottle with a white cap, full of bright red liquid. This isn’t human blood: It’s defibrinated sheep’s blood, sourced from a blood ranch in California.

*

Modern science and healthcare require increasingly large quantities of blood (the global blood product market — human blood, to be specific — is projected to grow at 6.4% over the next five years, according to Grand View Research). The average American is already familiar with the need for blood, since hospitals have long relied on donations for procedures like transfusions and organ transplants. And considering healthcare is now the fastest-growing sector of the U.S. economy, this need is only expected to increase.

Yet some blood comes from unexpected places. A few years ago, New England horseshoe crabs were in the news for their role as (involuntary) donors of the bright blue blood used in vaccine production. But crabs aren’t the only non-humans donating blood. Mammal blood from familiar farm animals is used in everything from routine hospital lab tests to cutting-edge virology research. Sheep blood is the cheapest and most widely available, but goat blood, bovine blood, and rabbit blood are all commonly used, along with mouse, chicken, and more.

Of course, this all begs the question: Where is the best place to get vials of sheep blood? “I can’t say I thought too much about where blood came from,” said Kushelman, at least not until she had to order goat blood for a specialized procedure. She had heard rumors of labs that pay college students to donate their blood. But in the case of her mosquitoes, that would be both unnecessary and impractical. “Human blood is expensive, and you need it fresh,” she said wryly. Instead, the Fikrig Lab orders vials of sheep blood through a centralized spreadsheet from a company in California that specializes in animal blood products.

But does it really take a whole farm specializing in blood production to feed a few lab-grown mosquitoes? Instead, a logical place to look for animal blood might seem to be a slaughterhouse. After all, over 40 million tons of blood are generated by slaughterhouses in the U.S. every year (over 10,000 Olympic-sized swimming pools’ worth). As it turns out, though, about 70 percent of slaughterhouse blood in the U.S. is discarded. In fact, blood is the main source of pollution in the millions of gallons of slaughterhouse wastewater generated annually, most of which ends up in waterways, according to the Center for Biological Diversity.

“I can’t say I thought too much about where blood came from.”

Why do we waste so much blood? There are many reasons, but at its core it’s an infrastructure problem related to American food history. Long before the biomedical industry needed vials of blood for lab tests and experiments, blood consumption in American kitchens had already begun to decline. In the late nineteenth century, as the meatpacking industry industrialized, upper-class Americans started to avoid foods like blood sausages, which they associated with “backwards” Central and East European immigrants.

The modern slaughterhouses built to fill the growing demand for meat after World War II didn’t usually incorporate infrastructure to save blood in a safe and hygienic way, and by the 1970s animal blood had virtually disappeared from American kitchens. That same decade saw the introduction of new regulations to control animal byproducts more strictly (making it more expensive and complicated to preserve blood at the industrial level).

As time went by, regulations ossified, and there have been no substantive changes to the rules about saving livestock blood since 1974. In fact, the USDA only removed a burdensome requirement for defibrination (a procedure to prevent blood from clotting) four years ago. The final result: during the same decade (1970s) when the U.S. healthcare sector expanded dramatically, the slaughterhouse sector, which could have provided a key ingredient for that expansion, gave up on blood almost entirely.

So, ironically, our reluctance to eat blood — which means that there is more of it available than ever — may have made it less available for the biomedical industry in the long run. And there’s no easy way to fix the infrastructure problem. As Arun Kumar Gupta explained, there are “logistical barriers to safely recovering and processing blood as a clean ingredient, unless it was a planned part of the system from the start.” Gupta is assistant professor at the department of food processing at Sardar Vallabhai Patel University of Agriculture and Technology, and the the lead author of a scholarly review of slaughterhouse blood uses.

The fact that most Americans — unlike Brits, Spaniards, or Costa Ricans – no longer enjoy blood sausage, is only one of the issues. A more prosaic challenge is “the lack of infrastructure and dedicated collection systems in many slaughterhouses,” said Gupta. “Collecting blood in a hygienic, food- or pharma-grade manner requires closed-loop systems, trained personnel, and investment in storage and processing facilities — things that aren’t commonly integrated, especially in conventional or high-throughput operations.”

Even when the blood can be captured appropriately, large slaughterhouses can’t always provide information on what the animals have been eating, whether they’ve been on antibiotics, or offer traceability back to the farm. And if it’s not clean enough or fresh enough to eat, livestock blood certainly isn’t high enough quality for a hospital or lab.

*

This is where “blood farming” comes in, filling the gap in a lucrative market for high-quality blood, serum, and plasma. At operations like Quad Five Ranch in central Montana, farmers keep animals exclusively as live blood donors, and every vial is traceable back to the initial batch.

It’s an unusual type of farming, to say the least. Candy Mitchell, who handles customer service at Quad Five, is used to getting asked what exactly she does for work. “I actually get that question a lot,” she said. “I basically tell them it’s a donor animal blood and serum facility, and tell them that we bleed horses, sheep, goats, and cows.” None of the animals are killed in the process, just like with human blood donation drives. The sheep are bled 1 liter each in special chutes every 28 days (it takes seven minutes for the entire process), after which “they eat like kings,” explained Mitchell.

“Using live donor animals with complete traceability and controlled conditions — definitely represents the gold standard.”

There are special considerations for this type of operation. Some of the animals, like the cattle, are rotated out every couple of years. “Cows tend to hold a grudge, and they don’t like being bled,” laughed Mitchell. The draft horses (purchased at Amish auctions) and goats end up in a special paddock which the ranchers at Quad Five call the “retirement pasture.” Sheep can be rehomed to ranches in Utah once they get too big for the chutes, at which point they’re raised like any other meat animal.

“Quad Five’s approach — using live donor animals with complete traceability and controlled conditions — definitely represents the gold standard,” said Gupta, the slaughterhouse blood expert. There are only a few operations in the U.S. like it (and according to Quad Five, they’re the only ones who are traceable). Outside of Denver, the Colorado Serum Company, founded in 1924, keeps a smaller herd of over 200 horses, 85 Holstein steers, 150 sheep and 22 goats in a 22-acre facility. Larger operations, like California-based HemoStat, contract with regular livestock farmers to source their blood.

For even more specialized work, there are operations like CoCalico Biologicals in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. If an experiment requires pre-vaccinated blood (to test immunity, for example), researchers can purchase an individual animal for an experiment. Rabbits start at $415 each. Goats are pricier, at $1,379 per head.

The pricing is transparent, but there is an air of secrecy surrounding blood collection. “I can answer vaguely,” said Audrey S., the office manager at HemoStat Laboratories in a phone call (she declined to use her last name). At Quad Five, Mitchell was reluctant to share photographs for this article. “We try to steer away from sending pictures of the blood being drawn directly.” On their website, CoCalico Biologicals euphemistically mentions a “disposal charge” included in the overall price of their product. “You can only vaccinate an animal with one type of antigen,” explained Kushelman. Once a goat has been used for a specific experiment, it’s not much use for anything else. Not all farms have a “retirement pasture.”

“Cows tend to hold a grudge, and they don’t like being bled.”

And not all blood farms sound as pleasant as Quad Five. Last year, a routine USDA inspection at Alabama-based based Southern Biotech found multiple health and safety infractions, including injured goats and a wild raccoon in with the rabbits. A particularly controversial practice is the farming of pregnant mares for a serum used to artificially induce sows at hog farms to go into heat.

It’s no surprise, then, as Gupta points out, that “blood-based products still carry a certain stigma.” The idea of herds of sheep lining up to have their blood drained, even if it’s saving lives, still sounds like something out of a bad science fiction movie.

*

Back in the lab at Yale, I ask Kushelman how much blood she goes through. It turns out that the experiments only take about two milliliters a week. In other words, it would take nearly 10 years for her mosquitoes to drink 1 liter of blood — a sheep’s monthly donation at Quad Five.

Kushelman’s neighbors, though, use a lot more. They’re researchers at a nearby lab who study sleeping sickness, transmitted by the dreaded African Tsetse fly, which feeds on cows. She shows me a box of flies in a chest freezer. “They take a gigantic amount of blood,” she says. The bigger the experiment and the larger the insect, the more blood is needed. She tells me to Google “engorged Tsetse fly.” I do, and wish I hadn’t.

Farming blood is different from farming chicken or beef. A cow slaughtered today feeds someone a few days later. Farming blood is more indirect. A sheep blood agar plate could detect strep throat at a pediatrician’s office, or it might feed lab-grown mosquitoes for years, slowly helping develop a strategy to eradicate malaria.

One thing is for certain: blood is a growth industry.

Farmers tend to be stoic people. They gaze at the sky, parsing out if the rain will come as forecasted, or if drought will persist before they shrug and decide: It’s out of my hands. It’s a career defined by a certain type of faith, and groundedness in cycles. That’s why massive trends like Dubai chocolate can’t exactly be planned for.

At least that is the case with Marianne Schweers. She’s owner of Heart of the Desert, a pistachio farm and vineyard outside of Alamogordo, New Mexico, a dry and sandy town three hours south of Albuquerque en route to the Mexican border. Schweers and her husband George moved from rural Nebraska in 1969 so that he could serve at the Air Force base there.

They enjoyed the Southwest so much that they settled in after his tenure was up, but they were farmers back in Nebraska. When they looked around, they had no idea what crop could possibly grow in the desert, and if their farming could continue. The cracked dirt was a far cry from the Midwestern soil that can cultivate row crops like clockwork. In their research, the Schweers stumbled across the ancient history of one native desert crop in Persia: pistachios.

“The pistachio-growing regions there have almost the exact same growing environment as here,” Schweers said.

Today, Heart of the Desert has 105 acres of pistachios. They are vertically integrated, so they farm, harvest, process, and market their own crop. They employ eight farmworkers, with about 40 employees in total. It’s a small operation in the middle of a big trend: Dubai chocolate.

These luxurious sweets are typically thick chocolate bars stuffed with green pistachio cream that’s studded with phyllo dough for a slight crunch. They’re a TikTok craze, and they’re expensive — bars typically sell for about $20 apiece. The trend has also spurred a range of global offshoots, like Dubai chocolate donuts, ice cream, and other desserts. In April, The Guardian reported that the craze was causing an international shortage of pistachios, with prices increasing from $7.65 to $10.30 a pound over the course of one year.

With all of this buzz around Dubai chocolate, are smaller pistachio farmers like the Schweers winning?

Crop Basics

The pistachio yield of New Mexico and Arizona shakes out to about 2 percent of the American crop. California dominates 98 percent of the market. Stephen Vasquez, executive director of the California Pistachio Research Board, said that in California, pistachios have a similar footprint as almonds and walnuts. They don’t require as much water as either of those other nuts, though. Almonds have a shallow root system, he said, while pistachios have a deeper one that extends two to three feet underground, and allows for a more established tree to grow because it can take advantage of underground moisture.

The U.S. is currently the number one producer of pistachios in the world with 51 percent of the market, followed by Turkey and Iran. Vasquez said that American pistachio farming systems are more advanced than competitors that still harvest in traditional ways. In California for example, pistachio trees have been engineered to be more like a bush, which helps with shaking the nuts loose mechanically as opposed to hand-harvesting.

Pistachios are also a resilient crop. They can live without irrigation, but consistent watering yields higher production and quality. The split rate, which is the percentage of nuts that grow big enough to break open their shells, is low without adequate water.

The Role of Byproducts

For all of its international might, the American pistachio market has one blind spot: Manufacturing capabilities to produce pistachio creams and butters. Those are largely imported, and the real moneymakers in the Dubai chocolate craze. The American market largely did not foresee ramping up to cash in on it.

“We look like a bunch of idiots in the sense as we marketed how we normally market, and [Dubai chocolate] snuck up behind and clobbered up,” said John Hueller, president of A & P Ranch in Arizona.

Pistachio creams and butters aren’t made with high-quality split nuts, but with what’s called closed-shell sinkers and floaters. These are immature nuts that are typically considered a byproduct of the harvest process. With Dubai chocolate getting stocked at a break-neck pace, recently Hueller had to figure out how to transport a few million pounds of byproduct to a processor within two months.

“It’s beyond a sensation, and driving the market,” he said.

For what it’s worth, Schweers doesn’t see Dubai chocolate as really being the indicator of the pistachio’s success. She attributes that to the larger industry as a whole that marketed pistachios successfully to the general public around the world, including giants like Wonderful pistachios that you can find in small travel-ready packs in the gas station.

“All of the small farmers are benefiting from what the Pistachio Growers’ Association are doing,” she said.

Luck of the Draw

Hueller is a second-generation farmer. He started his career in agriculture at 14. He’s 63 now, and about to retire. His primary operation in Cochise County, Arizona, has 2,400 acres of pecans and 1,500 of pistachios. Cochise is in the desert, but quite high at 3,600 to 4,200 feet. It snows a bit in the wintertime, and gets a good amount of rain during monsoon season. That combination of factors creates something magical.

“Very few places in the world can raise pistachios,” he said. “You have to have a certain number of things happen.”

For one, pistachio trees need to be able to chill for 950 hours per year, or about a month and a half, because they don’t rely on bees for pollination. There are male and female trees, and they self-pollinate via the spring winds. Pollen grains released by the male trees end up on the female flowers. It’s a natural process that doesn’t require heavy intervention, and the chilling helps to prepare both for pollination.

The weather also needs to be dry enough to allow for the pollen to travel when it’s released. Pistachios are a nut with a small footprint in this world, and we’re lucky enough that there are lands in the U.S. that can cultivate them. Even with climate change on the horizon and rising and falling demand, Schweers doesn’t see the unique factors that make pistachios so successful changing anytime soon, even when the Dubai chocolate trend fades.

“[New Mexico] produces a really good crop,” she said. “Nuts grown in the Southwest in particular have a robust flavor. I certainly see the pistachio industry staying, and growing.”

Livestock come in all shapes and sizes, fulfilling an array of assigned roles in the agriculture industry. Whether they’re a bucking bronco or rodeo bull in the performance sector, a dairy cow in the milking parlor, or a young calf racing its mates across a grassy pasture, they all regularly face injury risks, a reality underscoring the need for mindful stewardship in managing their well-being.

Enter the traditional, Western medicine-based large animal veterinarian.

These professionals fill this caretaker role much like our own doctors: diagnosing, treating, and preventing diseases, while also providing preventative care for whole-body wellness. The vet’s roles range from administering vaccinations to performing surgeries, depending on the specific needs of the animal at hand.

Yet some practitioners have found that traditional Western techniques are not enough to meet the veterinarian’s version of the Hippocratic Oath, and are turning to complementary or integrative treatment therapy tools, including applied kinesiology, acupuncture, and chiropractic care, to fill in the gaps.

These DVMs claim that integrating non-Western care methods with traditional practices can offer a more comprehensive and holistic approach to managing health issues. Anchoring these philosophies is the belief that all animals are unique and their care requires a customized methodology. Integrative care practices can help provide a more complete picture of an animal’s well-being, addressing pain, mobility, musculoskeletal problems, and even neurological and digestive conditions with potentially fewer side effects than conventional medications or surgeries.

Applied Kinesiology Turns on the Power

Dr. Keith Wagner, a seasoned Missouri-based DVM practitioner, works with horses of all ages, levels, and dispositions, ranging from Olympic athletes to acreage pets. He began his practice as a traditional Western medicine-based veterinarian, but over the last 15 years, he’s transitioned roughly 80% of his methods to applied kinesiology, acupuncture, and chiropractic treatments.

“I just had to make a change,” Wagner explained. “It was in my nature to continually ask why things happened and why something worked or didn’t work. Because of all these questions running around my mind over the years, I began adding and tweaking small things, slowly changing the way I was approaching health issues and how I treated them.”

His diagnosis method of choice is applied kinesiology (AK), also known as muscle testing, a diagnostic process to assess and treat functional illnesses and neurological imbalances. AK is a supplementary approach to standard medical practices, evaluating muscle responses and aiming to identify underlying nervous system dysfunctions that may contribute to health issues.

“I examine and assess the electrical function of the individual by touch to test muscle strength,” said Wagner.

Using applied kinesiology, Wagner checks approximately 25 central pattern generators (CPGs), essentially making up the hard wiring of the nervous system. Each CPG has an indicator muscle that becomes weak when CPG dysfunction occurs. Injury or pathological changes in the body create this dysfunction.

“Because of all these questions running around my mind, I began adding and tweaking small things, slowly changing the way I was approaching health issues.”

“When the muscle weakens across a joint, stability is lost, causing laxity or play during movement, followed by inflammation,” Wagner said. “Once I identify the problem CPG, I can essentially turn it back on to help restore the joint’s stability.”

Typically, these inflammations and weaknesses are treated with injections into the affected joint.

While applied kinesiology is Wagner’s primary diagnostic tool, he typically follows up with chiropractic procedures or acupuncture.

“To address the ongoing cycle from youthful wellness to later disease in horses and humans, early treatments such as acupuncture, applied kinesiology, and chiropractic care have preventative benefits,” he said. “These methods focus on maintaining balance within the body and preventing minor issues before they become major health concerns. In contrast, traditional Western medicine becomes more beneficial during later stages, providing effective treatment at end-of-life.”

Wagner believes combining these approaches delivers more comprehensive life cycle health and disease care.

“We correct the mechanical functions, which in turn helps us not to go down the aging and disease path so quickly,” he said. “In a perfect world, using complementary care earlier in life and Western-based medicine later should be the goal. We can’t stop disease and death, but we can slow or restrict them.” 

Breaking Out the Modalities

Dr. Quinley Koch, owner of Elite Equine and Veterinary Services in Wichita, Kansas, offers acupuncture, chiropractic, traditional Chinese medicine, and physical therapy for horses, cattle, and rodeo bucking bulls. Traditionally trained in Western veterinary medicine, Koch eventually branched into “integrative” work, a term she’s passionate about; she considers the often-referenced “alternative’” a misused word.

“First, these types of modalities are not ‘alternative’ to anything,” Koch said. “With many procedures, for example, neutering, there’s no alternative. Alternative is not an accurate term for what I do. Integrative is much better as it allows different processes and philosophies to work together.”

She commonly works with other veterinarians who provide vaccinations, joint injections, colic treatments, and other mainstream protocols. Koch said most members of the animal health and performance sector, including owners and veterinarians, use at least some form of integrative medicine as they’ve witnessed its positive results firsthand.

“There’s ample room for both mainstream and integrative practitioners. It’s an amazing, symbiotic relationship, achieving superior results.”

“There’s ample room for both mainstream and integrative practitioners,” she said. “It’s an amazing, symbiotic relationship, achieving superior results. Group efforts are far better than singular endeavors.”

Koch focuses on muscles, the nervous system, bones, and tendons, but her processes include the entire body. “The beautiful thing about acupuncture and physical therapy is it’s a whole-body approach,” she said. “If I help balance the body better than the body balances itself, it’s successful without using medications.”

Like Wagner, Koch also believes the veterinary community is changing, becoming more accepting of integrative methods. She thinks the shift started with human medicine, then trickled down.

“A huge push has occurred for integrative strategies on the human side as more and more people have tired of doctors prescribing medications without finding root causes,” she said. “With chiropractic treatment, acupuncture, and Chinese medicine, we’re able to find and treat the root cause along with the symptoms. Human medical shortcomings have created this massive interest, which has pushed its way into the veterinary field as owners want to treat their animals the same way they want to be treated.”

Claiming the Well-Traveled Road

Typically a veterinarian is called to assess, diagnose, treat, and rehabilitate using traditional, mainstream medical practices. 

“When I’m faced with a new large animal patient, I start with a strong Western approach including a visual assessment, a thorough physical exam to make a diagnosis, radiographs, and lameness locators for travel issues, discussions of nutritional health, and sometimes a neurological exam,” said Kelsey Walker, assistant clinical professor at the Oklahoma State University College of Veterinary Medicine. “Treatments often consist of antibiotics for infectious diseases, pain medications, non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs), joint injections, plus surgery to insert pins and plates.”

Walker treats all types of livestock from rodeo bucking stock to sheep, goats, and pigs. “Our clinical management depends on where the underlying source of the problem is found,” she said. “These large animals are often aggressive, of course, but we complete our Western-based protocols, keep them in the hospital, and apply a lot of positive reinforcement through their rehabilitation process. It’s amazing when fire-breathing dragons [Ed. Note: not actual dragons] limp into the clinic, and a few weeks later, they’re begging for scratches as they proudly walk back into their normal lives.”

Walker believes mainstream medical research and trials create the underlying foundation of performance animal care, reinforcing diagnosis and treatment protocols, and installing qualified and certified caregivers.

“The biggest problem is that we’re years behind human medicine, but we’re expected to provide the gold standard with data we don’t have. Continuing research is so vital to keep progressing.”

She notes Chinese medicines and herbs can help but is concerned about unregulated products and withdrawal times. She’s also seen modalities being misused and causing injuries by those without the correct training. If practitioners are certified with appropriate training, they can hold a positive place. She even utilizes acupuncture in her own treatment regimen when she deems it necessary.

“We’re all striving for the same results, and every integrative practitioner I know is willing to work together with more mainstream Western medicine practitioners.”

“For emergency matters like broken legs and acute illnesses, in my opinion, it’s obvious traditional Western practices fit best,” said Walker. However, “Due to how the body responds to long-term pain management, for more chronic issues, other modalities might be more effective,” she admits.

Walker credits a new generation of veterinarians and the open-mindedness of the general population with a shift to more out-of-the-box diagnosis and treatment methods.

“We’re all striving for the same results, and every integrative practitioner I know is willing to work together with more mainstream Western medicine practitioners,” Koch said. “By using a well-balanced strategy mix, we can provide the best possible, whole-body care.”

All three DVMs admit that both human and animal health have a long way to go. “Roadblocks to performance animal care include the same issues as on the human side,” Walker said. “Much of it comes down to education and explaining what we’re doing and why we’re doing it. Clients are asking for these modalities. They should be able to coexist successfully with Western veterinary medicine. I think it’s the way of the future.”

200 miles off the coast of New Orleans, and 2,200 meters below the surface, there’s a dip in the ocean floor containing a brine that makes the surrounding seawater look positively sweet. Sipping from a Jurassic-era salt deposit — with 500,000 metric tons of salt dissolved into the water every year — the Orca basin brine pool is roughly eight times saltier than ocean water. Though it’s dense with microbes, the basin is devoid of oxygen and toxic to aquatic animals.

But the same traits that make it hostile to life have a company eyeing it as a tool for maintaining a livable climate.

In May, a company called Carboniferous applied for a research permit from the EPA to drop 20 metric tons of sugar cane bagasse — the fibrous material left after crushing stalks to get juice — into the Orca Basin, a process the company says could store carbon for hundreds of years.

“We couldn’t do this in the lab, and there’s insights we’re going to be able to actually get with this plan that are going to justify the effort and the risks,” said Morgan Reed Raven, chief science officer at Carboniferous and assistant professor of earth sciences at UC Santa Barbara. “We’re going to throw everything at this, and if the data really supports it, then it will have definitely been worth it.”

The Carboniferous field trial is just one of a growing number of projects that propose to use oxygen-free (or anoxic) parts of the ocean as disposal sites for agricultural waste, enabling the removal of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere — a removal the IPCC has said is essential to reaching net zero emissions.

Yet some scientists are raising concerns with the safety and effectiveness of these methods — not to mention their potential to distract from emissions reductions — while farmers ask if it’s the best use of the waste material. Either way, projects are moving forward — are we ready?

Sinking agricultural waste to the deep sea — or “Marine Anoxic Carbon Storage,” as the company Puro.Earth, which validates carbon removal methods, dubbed it back in April — rests on a simple premise.

As crops photosynthesize, they incorporate carbon into their tissues. After those crops are harvested and processed, whatever is left over is often burned or tilled back into the soil and decomposes, which sends that carbon back into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide.

By sinking that crop waste into anoxic environments instead, researchers hope that material would potentially resist breaking down for thousands of years, effectively storing the carbon long term.

“We talk about [climate change] as being existential. We should act that way.”

Raven said it’s a promising enough idea that when the co-founders of Carboniferous reached out for advice, she assumed work had already begun. “I said, well, it’s an obvious idea. There must be a dozen teams working on that. And they were like, ‘Would you believe there aren’t?’”

That led to work in the Orca basin — a site Raven said has many advantages.

The basin is clearly defined — it has edges, it’s relatively small (3.2 miles squared), and it’s all within the United States — making monitoring easier. But more importantly, it has no oxygen, meaning no animals to quickly break down organic material and release carbon dioxide (the microbes that do exist there break down organic matter very slowly). As a brine pool, it has the additional advantage of being salty; salt has been used to preserve food for thousands of years, Raven said, and in the Orca Basin, sediment cores have revealed perfectly preserved macroalgae — seaweed that would otherwise turn to slimy goo in days, even in anoxic parts of the ocean. “For it to come up looking pristine is truly remarkable.”

Permanent preservation isn’t typically the goal in waste disposal. But in this case, Carboniferous was happy to learn, in early research trials, that material such as kelp stayed intact after 200 days in the basin. “They’re almost brighter green than when we put them in the brine. It’s just sort of a jaw-dropping gut check just how effective the salt is at preserving stuff,” Raven said.

As a next step, Carboniferous is proposing a field trial that will involve sinking 20 bales of sugar cane bagasse from Louisiana; bagasse is a waste material that requires a lot of energy to manage, often by burning, Raven said. “And so that particular scenario simplifies a lot of the … issues that are going to become really important as we think about scale.”

In the field trial, bales of bagasse will be wrapped in burlap and rope, and sunk to the bottom; researchers plan to test ways to examine whether the material is breaking down, along with other monitoring.

“I said, well, it’s an obvious idea. There must be a dozen teams working on that. And they were like, ‘Would you believe there aren’t?’”

The Orca basin is just one of the anoxic sites being explored for storing crop waste; another, much larger basin is found in the Black Sea, the kidney bean-shaped inland sea bordered by Turkey, Russia, and Eastern Europe.

Many countries in the area are large agricultural producers, producing millions of metric tons of produce, as well as wood products.

A company called Rewind is moving forward with a plan to use this waste — particularly, woody leftovers after pruning fruit trees, and residuals from the timber industry — to sink biomass into the Black Sea, which is largely devoid of oxygen. That provides a huge capacity for carbon storage, said Rewind CEO Ram Amar.

Amar says the company tried various kinds of biomass, from lettuce and corn stover to wood, and concluded wood degraded the least. Rewind is currently working through the permitting process with Romania on a plan to sink 100 metric tonnes of biomass in 600 meters of water.

Amar said there’s an analog for the effectiveness of this method in the wood that can naturally be found in the Black Sea, where shipwrecks from antiquity look as pristine as the day they sank. “You can find wood that has been in these environments for a thousand years or more.”

Altogether, Amar said anoxic basins could provide half a billion metric tons of carbon dioxide removal — a process that he said scientists at a recent Rewind workshop concluded can’t happen quickly enough.

“30 of the world’s leading marine researchers are saying, ‘Why aren’t we moving much, much, much faster with this method, even at very large scales,” he said. “The scale relative to the Black Sea … is really, really, really small, and therefore the environmental risk is really non-existent.”

“These are ecologically really interesting and special areas; using it as a garbage dump doesn’t seem to make a lot of sense to me.”

Lisa Levin isn’t so sure.

Levin is a marine ecologist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, and co-author of a recent paper that touches on biomass sinking. She says at the research level, there likely isn’t any risk. But at a large scale, she worries that filling these unique environments with sugar cane byproducts or other agricultural waste will have negative impacts; she questions whether we know what we’re at risk of losing in these environments, which contain unexplored microbial diversity.

“These are ecologically really interesting and special areas; using it as a garbage dump doesn’t seem to make a lot of sense to me.”

Amar said Rewind has dedicated significant resources to understanding the impact, and has concluded the effects of storing biomass would be in line with the natural variability of that environment; in the Orca Basin, Raven said sinking biomass is unlikely to change the ecosystem, since it already has no oxygen (biomass sinking can otherwise deplete oxygen), though she said when thinking about other sites and possible expansions, “we move into much harder questions.”

Levin and other scientists prepared input on Carboniferous’ plan in the Orca Basin, the public comment period for which closed in mid-July; so far, she said her main conclusion is that the approach doesn’t have the capacity to turn down the temperature of the planet. “It’s not going to be able to accommodate enough carbon to affect climate change. So my feeling is this is probably about selling carbon credits and making money.”

For some farmers, there’s also the question of the best use for agricultural waste.

Luke Lasley grows five acres of rare heirloom sugar cane on a farm in southwest Florida, which they press for fresh juice and shelf-stable syrup.

Lasley said the resulting bagasse is highly useful. “It’s actually a resource for the farm if you know how to work with it.”

“Shipping it out into the ocean and trying to sink it down there seems like a crazy way to sequester carbon because there’s a lot of costs involved with getting it there.”

Mostly, Lasley uses the bagasse to make biochar, a carbon-rich material similar to charcoal, made by roasting bagasse at high heat without oxygen. He said this helps retain water and nutrients in sandy soil, in addition to sequestering carbon.

Biochar is useful enough that Lasley buys what he can’t make himself — given that bagasse makes good biochar, he said he found the thought of sinking it into the ocean “kind of a wild idea.”

“Shipping it out into the ocean and trying to sink it down there seems like a crazy way to sequester carbon because there’s a lot of costs involved with getting it there, when the farm that’s producing it basically needs it in biochar form.”

Ultimately, trade-offs are becoming a fact of life in a changing climate, and proponents of carbon removal say the hazards need to be considered against the cost of doing nothing to remove emissions; when it comes to sinking crop waste, scientists say the potential means we have to at least try.

“We talk about this as being existential,” said Raven. “We should act that way.”

The relationship between farmer Steve Hess and his landlord had broken down by the time the tractors disappeared in 2017. For a decade, Hess had tended blueberry, apple, cherry, and other fruit trees on his 5-acre organic farm, a small sliver of the owner’s 600 acres nestled along the Ohio River in north-central Kentucky. But the informal agreement ended with the death of the landlord. The surviving family members wanted to reclaim the land and sell it.

Then, two weeks later, all three of Hess’s tractors had vanished. “It was all gone, clean,” he said. A two-row planter, post hole digger, and a mower deck also disappeared. Only his 1939 Ford 9N model tractor, a relic of our post-WWII agricultural heyday, remained.

He informed the sheriff of Oldham County, Kentucky, of the theft, noting the impending eviction from his farm. The county sheriff took notes and said Hess would hear back when new information about his tractors when, or if, they surfaced.

For three years the sheriff’s office called to say there was no news about the tractors. Then they stopped calling.

Farmers like Hess have found themselves in possession of increasingly valuable assets: used farm equipment. It’s a straightforward example of supply-and-demand. “The supply of used equipment comes from buyers of new, or at least newer, models, for the most part,” said Kelsey Larson, assistant professor of agricultural economics and extension specialist at Montana State University.

But current high interest rates have been dissuading potential buyers of new equipment, whose prices have skyrocketed due to the nationwide steel shortage, supply chain disruptions, and tariffs on European and Asian-manufactured equipment.

“If a farmer has to buy, they’re going to buy used; if they can, they’re going to hold on to what they’ve got right now — and both of those factors are going to push the price [of used farm equipment] upward,” Larson said.

Add general economic uncertainty to the mix and a 23% shrinkage of the inventory of used compact and utility tractors in the last year, and it’s no wonder that each year, thousands of tractors get reported as stolen across the U.S. In 2023, six years after Hess’s experience, there were 1,221 reported thefts of special equipment including tractors each month, according to data collected by the National Insurance Crime Bureau and provided to Offrange. From 2022 to 2023, the total number of reported thefts jumped by 10%, from 13,287 to 14,646.

It’s common practice for farmers to leave keys in the tractor for the next ride or the next driver.

Mower, riding, or garden tractors were the top style of reported thefts in the category, under which all three of Hess’s tractors fit. He lost a 22-horsepower Yanmar; a 60-horsepower John Deere; and a 30-horsepower Kubota.

It’s remarkably easy to steal a small tractor, provided you have access to a flatbed truck or trailer. One could say that tractors are ripe for the picking: It’s common practice for farmers to leave keys in the tractor for the next ride or the next driver, said Jacob Landis, whose family farm is spread across 1,500 acres in Northern Illinois. Tractors are often left alone, out of sight from houses or buildings or surveillance cameras. Older models from the same manufacturer, Landis noted, also often share keys.

By grinding off the VIN, older tractors can simply disappear into the used farm equipment market. Older models are often not equipped with GPS, leaving law enforcement little to go off. Less-reputable auction houses can turn a blind eye to a tractor’s provenance, or the stolen goods can change hands in private sales.

Last October, California law enforcement announced that they had broken up a farm equipment theft ring alleged to have stolen equipment totalling $2.25 million. The case began when detectives tracked the signal from a brand new stolen backhoe to the back of a semitruck parked at a truck stop. There, the detectives found another backhoe and an excavator reported stolen from a different county. More than 10 suspects are alleged to have transported the stolen machinery from San Joaquin Valley, the agricultural heart of California, into Mexico.

Talking about a stolen tractor is taboo in the farming community, Hess said, likening it to divorce.

Stealing a tractor might be relatively easy, but recovery is not. Only half of the value of the stolen equipment — $1.3 million — in California was recovered in the recent bust. The average annual recovery rate of stolen special equipment is even lower, according to NICB data. In 2023, the recovery rate was 30%, down from the 34% recovery rate of 2022. Half of the recoveries in 2023 occurred within one week of the theft.

Even a 30% recovery rate seems high to Hess. He believes that his tractors didn’t go far, maybe just down the road to a nearby auction house. But despite his lived experience, talking about a stolen tractor is taboo in the farming community, Hess said, likening it to divorce. He’s silenced many bustling farmer meetings with the announcement that his tractors got stolen.

Later, he would be quietly approached by fellow farmers with stories of their own thefts or thefts they’ve heard of. “How come we’re talking about this in hushed tones outside the room?” Hess asked.

But farm insurance specialist Jeff Joseph located near Rochester, New York, has not heard of tractor thefts in his 25 years of selling insurance to farmers. ATVs, snowmobiles, chainsaws, tools — those are common thefts, Joseph said. But tractors? “It’s not like stealing a car where you can get in and drive it at 80 miles an hour someplace and hide it in your garage,” he said.

“It’s not like stealing a car where you can get in and drive it at 80 miles an hour someplace and hide it in your garage.”

Yet Joseph could see the reasons why tractors appeal to thieves. “I’m glad that it’s not a phenomenon that we see here in New York,” he said.

Companies offer tractor-specific GPS tracking devices as theft prevention. Posters to online farmer forums recommend Apple AirTags or common-sense solutions like locking tractors in barns overnight or adding more surveillance cameras to the property. In the more remote stretches of his farm in Northern Illinois, Landis will deter tractor theft by putting the gear in a position that prevents the tractor from turning on. A tractor aficionado could figure it out, Landis said, “but if somebody just crawls in there and don’t know what they’re doing, the struggle might be enough that they leave the tractor alone.”

Buyers, meanwhile, can assure themselves that they are not buying stolen property by requesting a full maintenance and inspection history.

In some ways, losing both tractors and land at the same time was a blessing for Hess. It forced a clean break with the farming life. “I didn’t have to go to an auction. I didn’t have the store equipment. I didn’t have to worry about the pieces that didn’t sell.”

Jesse Galbreath’s 1,100 acre, family-owned farm sits in Washington state’s Skagit Valley. His mornings are spent tending to spinach seed, Brussels sprouts, beets, and orchard grass for horse fodder. If all goes well, his short-stalked spinach crop, with a rosette of leaves that relies on a consistent water supply and minimal pesticides, will produce a gainful seed yield.

Galbreath is one of multiple growers in the Pacific Northwest who produce spinach seed — Washington state grows nearly 75% of the country’s supply. The seeds are produced by the flowering spinach crops, which are then sold to growers who grow the vegetative spinach that is harvested for its leaves.

However, four years ago, the 32-year-old was dismayed to find that a spinach cluster occupying nearly 12 acres was wilting — the leaves were browning, and soon the beautiful crop died a quick death. There was nothing he could do. This was due to fusarium wilt, a disease where a pathogen burrows into the soil and starves the crops of water and nutrients by blocking the vascular system. This causes them to turn yellow, wilt, and die before they start flowering, depriving growers like Galbreath of the necessary seeds to sell to ag companies.

Now, a team has discovered a central Asian spinach variety that has demonstrated resistance against the wilt, spurring hope for growers here in the U.S. In a new paper published in Scientific Reports, plant pathologist Lindsey du Toit and co-author Sanjaya Gyawali of Washington State University discuss their attempts to control the wilt-causing gene.

Spinach requires the crop to be exposed to longer lengths of the day, to get them to shift from a vegetative state to a flowering one that produces seeds. It is not heat-tolerant when it’s flowering. The authors point out that the only area in the U.S. that meets these climatic requirements is the maritime region west of the Cascade Mountains in the Pacific Northwest. Commercial growers like Galbreath are contracted by seed companies who provide the seeds necessary for growers to produce and harvest, which is then bought by the companies for an agreed-upon fee. The fee, he said, is based on a five-year average of yield.

The wilting problem, however, goes deeper — the infected soil cannot be used to grow spinach for at least a decade. “If fusarium gets into the field, the rule of thumb is that you cannot grow spinach for 15 years,” said Galbreath, adding that this then warrants a very long rotation period between crops. Without an adequate supply of spinach seed, you can’t plant enough vegetative spinach crops to meet consumer demand, added du Toit.

One of the reasons du Toit started this job was to help manage this disease more effectively so the spinach seed growers can rotate the crops on a more reasonable duration. “This disease has complicated our ability to produce enough spinach seed in the U.S.”

“If the grower has two parent lines they’re planting — one female and one male line — either one parent or both might be susceptible to the disease,” du Toit warned, attributing this to the lack of resistance amongst commercial spinach varieties. So every winter for 16 years, her program has been testing soil samples from the seed growers’ fields to identify the potential risk, something Galbreath is thankful for. Their testing of spinach parent lines for seed companies also help seed companies and growers ascertain the susceptibility of the parent lines.

“If fusarium gets into the field, the rule of thumb is that you cannot grow spinach for 15 years.”

“While fungicides help, they are not as effective,” said Gyawali, who has worked as a geneticist for over 20 years.

They have been accessing gene banks where different spinach lines — including those of its wild ancestors — are stored. They sourced seeds from 600 accessions from gene banks including those that belong to the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the Dutch, as well as samples from central Asian regions of Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Kyrgyzstan. They then assessed which of these were resistant, so the seed companies and breeders can hopefully incorporate the resistance gene(s) into their modern cultivars.

They say the next step is figuring out what gene causes this resistance among this variety. To test how they fare in the field, Gyawali has been testing the wild, resistant lines with fusarium strains in a greenhouse that mimics the growing conditions of central Asia. For now, the farmers cannot grow this variety directly, he said, adding that they need to transfer wilt resistance to the local spinach varieties being grown in the Northwest.

Gyawali said that growers in the regions were fervently looking for resistant varieties, which is how they secured government funding to carry out this research. Their research was funded by USDA, and the team has a second tranche of funding that will allow them to continue.

As the Trump administration continues gutting federal agencies and their research wings in a bid to trim public spending, teams like du Toit’s stand to be affected. Last August, USDA announced federal grants worth $82.3 million to enhance the competitiveness of specialty crops. But since late January, the agency has rescinded or cancelled grants that were supporting donations to food banks and climate-smart agricultural practices, leaving many farmers in the lurch.

The authors highlight the need for such studies that can potentially benefit thousands of growers in the region. “We know that companies are using the information we’re generating from this work, so our work is supporting the industry,” du Toit said.

Lance Lilibridge got the call less than 24 hours after a derecho — a widespread windstorm — decimated much of northern Iowa in August 2020. If the winds had reached just five miles further north, Lilibridge’s home and crops would have been flattened. He was cleaning up what remained of his neighbor’s house when the phone rang.

Iowa Corn Growers Association was on the line, passing on a request from none other than NASA. They wanted pictures of the damaged crops.

“What does NASA want with pictures of wind-blown corn?” Lilibridge recalls asking. Turns out they were tracking the crop damage by comparing photos from the ground to satellite images above. That was enough to win him over. Lilibridge took out his phone and started snapping.

Contrary to popular belief, NASA is not just in the business of stargazing and Mars missions. In addition to their satellites that keep tabs on the cosmos, the space agency mans an entire fleet of Earth-facing satellites. These orbiting instruments collect enormous amounts of data on water cycles, weather patterns, vegetation, nitrogen content, and much more. The data NASA can record from these satellites has become so specific that it can weigh in on farm-level decisions.

That’s the whole purpose of NASA Acres, a sub-agency of NASA designed to use satellite data to help U.S. farmers make sustainable decisions and be more profitable. And through their ambassador program called FIAT — Farmer Innovation Ambassador Team — NASA Acres is recruiting farmers like Lilibridge to weigh in on the problems that need solving and to spread the word: NASA can help. The space agency is leveraging 50 years of satellite and data science to help any farmers willing to join in.

“FIAT is designed to be this partnership,” said Alyssa Whitcraft, director of NASA Acres. We want to “bring the value of satellite data down to earth and take everything NASA can do and use it to help farmers positively impact profitability.”

NASA can offer farmers data on how vegetation is growing, water usage, the amount of nitrogen taken up into the canopy, yield changes over time, and the impact of different types of tillage, just to name a few. They’re already supplying data to critical agriculture services like the U.S. Drought Monitor. And soon, they hope to be able to offer data on disease detection. These insights could help farmers minimize fertilizer costs, choose more profitable planting windows, time harvest, stop disease spread, or weigh the costs of management changes.

But most importantly, how the data gets used and applied is entirely up to farmers, Whitcraft said. Farmers identify the challenges — NASA Acres supplies the information to help with a solution.

“Every single time we walk into a room, there’s a mixture of excitement, ‘Oh gosh, NASA is here,’ or skepticism, ‘Why is the federal government here?”

“We want to build this together,” said Ignacio Ciampitti, professor of agronomy at Purdue University and co-director of the FIAT program. “We don’t want to play the game of assuming what they need, we want them to tell us what they need to be more effective.”

And farmer partnership is essential to making practical use of NASA Acre’s agricultural data. While NASA satellites collect tons of information over time, that data holds very little meaning if it isn’t connected to data on the ground — like Lilibridge’s crop damage photos. For every tool NASA Acres builds, they use a farmer’s on-the-ground images and measurements as reference points for the data from above.

In the arid regions of western Kansas, for example, NASA has satellite estimates of water used on crops. To compare, farmers have moisture probes — which measure water depletion in the soil — in their cornfields. With data from a few moisture probes as their key, NASA Acres can then estimate the water availability and usage across the whole operation based on the satellite data. This helps farmers make better decisions on when and how long to irrigate, Ciampitti said.

Similarly, in Oregon and Idaho, cattle and sheep ranchers penning their livestock at night to protect from predators were concerned that the nightly confinement was wearing down the rangelands. They shared their penning schedule and locations with NASA Acres researcher and NASA DEVELOP science advisor Tony Vorster. Vorster paired rancher information with satellite data measuring the vegetation to see if night penning was costing the ranchers valuable grass. So far, the rangeland appears to be holding up to overnighting cattle. Ranchers can keep their animals and their feed supply.

And the great thing about satellite data, Whitcraft said, is once researchers and farmers work together to make the on-the-ground connection, NASA Acres has years and years of data to look back on. Not only could farmers see where their operation is today, but they can compare it to years passed or see it change over time. That kind of data is invaluable as farmers attempt to plan for the future.

Spreading the Word

NASA Acres has lots to offer farmers, but one of its biggest barriers is that farmers don’t know about it. Most people don’t think NASA and agriculture have any overlap — at least on Earth.

But that couldn’t be further from the truth, Whitcraft said. NASA has been using its space vantage point to help with agriculture since 1972. The difference now, is that the satellite data has gotten a lot better and there are more ways it can be useful, she said.

So, the second purpose of FIAT — on top of helping NASA collect and apply data to solve problems — is to help the space agency spread the word and build trust in farming communities.

Dwane Roth, a water conservation advocate and retired farmer in Western Kansas, tells everyone he can, “I work with NASA.” So far, he’s only gotten positive feedback. “Everybody loves NASA. American farmers are patriotic — NASA is the definition of patriotic,” he said. But most have no clue that the agency works with agriculture. ”That’s where the ambassador program comes in,” he said.

In Whitcraft’s experience, not everyone responds with the same enthusiasm. “Every single time we walk into a room, there’s a mixture of excitement, ‘Oh gosh, NASA is here,’ or skepticism, ‘Why is the federal government here?” she said.

NASA isn’t in the business of surveilling farmers, enforcing compliance, or making a profit off of farmer data.

In Iowa, Lilibridge has experienced the same thing. People always think his affiliation with NASA is cool and even want to get involved. “But when I say we have to share our data, they say, “Oh, I’m not sure. What do they want?’” he told Offrange.

“We want to show all the cool stuff we can do, but we also want [farmers] to know we are non-regulatory,” Whitcraft said. NASA isn’t in the business of surveilling farmers, enforcing compliance, or making a profit off of farmer data. Much of the FIAT ambassador’s role is to get that message across.

Farmers have a right to be wary. Big Ag players have been leveraging farmer data to maximize their own profits for years. “There’s so much industry mining our data and taking advantage of us that it makes farmers really reluctant,” Lilibridge said. But he is adamant that sharing data with NASA is different giving it away to a corporation.

That’s because, ultimately, the tools built by NASA Acres will be open — built with farmers and handed over to any farmer that needs them. When a Colorado farmer reached out to NASA Acres and their U.S. Geological Survey partners, asking if her drought-stricken winter wheat crop was worth harvesting, they sent her satellite data measuring vegetation density on the crop fields compared to previous years — hers, free to use, Whitcraft said. NASA Acres researchers also developed a tool to help farmers in Illinois optimize nitrogen input based on their region and prices, again — free to any farmer who needs it.

That’s why Lilibridge is all in. “There’s so much wrong in ag,” Lilibridge said, “but this is one spot where I think farmers can regain some control and benefit.”

On the hottest of July afternoons, as I wrestle my lawnmower through the soup-thick humidity and Amazonian undergrowth of a North Carolina summer, I wipe the stinging, salty sweat from my eyes and imagine that I am in hell.

Ancient Greek hell, specifically — I identify with Sisyphus. The lawnmower is my boulder, and the growing grass forever keeps me from pushing it to the summit of a tidy yard.

Elspeth Hay, food writer and creator of Massachusetts public radio program The Local Food Report, believes American agriculture is trapped in a similarly Sisyphean cycle of plowing and planting annual crops. In her just-released debut book Feed Us with Trees: Nuts and the Future of Food, she suggests that a better path may lie with perennial nut trees like oaks, hazelnuts, and hickories.

The country’s reliance on industrialized monoculture field crops like corn and soy, Hay argues, has led to environmental issues such as soil erosion and an unhealthy food culture, heavy on refined grains. Through exploring the agronomy, cultural history, and nutrition of nut crops, she proposes a different story of how people can partner with plants for a world of ecological abundance and human wellness.

The book plays out like a tale of religious conversion. Hay summarizes her original faith with the phrase “No Farms, No Food,” a simple dogma that she unspools into a creed of unspoken assumptions about humanity and its relationship with the Earth. Going back to the Biblical creation narrative, in which Adam and Eve are expelled from a naturally productive garden to earn their bread by toil, Hay believes people in the West have grown alienated from their environment.

“We seemed to be the only species without a habitat; the only species without wild, abundant foods; the only species destroying our home planet and the vibrant communities of life that cover it,” she writes. According to this mythos, humans can flourish only at the expense of other creatures, by converting ever-larger portions of the world to farmland and staving off nature’s encroachment each year to plant high-performing annuals.

Hay’s road-to-Damascus moment takes place on a trip to Northern California, where she meets the Indigenous activist and cultural biologist Ron Reed. In a travelogue rich with visual detail — I particularly enjoy Hay’s fine eye for the traces humanity leaves upon landscapes, from grapevines to graffiti — the author visits the ancestral home of Reed’s Karuk people along the Klamath River.

In the valley the Karuk believe to be the center of the universe, Reed explains how his culture traditionally lived off the land, by stewarding oak forests with intentional burns to encourage the production of acorns. Their mythology treats humans not as despoilers of nature, but as vital components, carefully using fire to support habitat both for themselves and for animals like salmon, deer, and elk. Through this Indigenous example, Hay becomes obsessed with the potential of perennial nuts as a superior replacement for annual grains.

“Listening to Reed was like walking into a world I had always hoped might exist but never really believed in. I had no reference points for humans as ecologically good; I’d never heard us described this way,” Hay recalls. “In Reed’s stories, we had a habitat. We had responsibilities toward other species. And we had an environmental niche.”

“I had no reference points for humans as ecologically good; I’d never heard us described this way.”

The essential arc here, of Indigenous lifeways offering a revolutionary perspective shift for modern civilization, reminds me of David Graeber and David Wengrow’s monumental The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity. That 2021 book, a New York Times bestseller, drew heavily on historical critiques by Native commenters about what they saw as the strange and harmful ways of European settlers. Hay cites the historians in her acknowledgements, and while her book is more narrowly focused than their sprawling tome, it’s no less ambitious in its aim to interrogate a founding assumption of Western culture.

Having sown this proverbial acorn of a narrative, Hay spends much of the text defending it from the obvious counterarguments while it grows into a mighty oak. She deftly addresses questions about nuts’ yield, management by fire, and culinary potential, tying each chapter of well-supported research together with a scenic vignette from her reporting trips.

As a resident of the Blue Ridge Mountains who’s previously reported on a nut collective in Asheville, I was especially taken by Hay’s descriptions of Appalachia. Through archival documents and lively interviews, she reconstructs the thriving nut-based economy that carried on in the mountains through the early 20th century, until a fungal blight wiped out the American chestnut.

That section and others emphasize how both Indigenous and historical Western cultures reliant on tree nuts have held different ideas about land, embracing ideas of the commons and shared foraging rights rather than considering every parcel its owner’s exclusive domain. In Appalachia, for example, residents had legal permission to gather nuts and feed animals in the woods beyond farmers’ fences.

It’s enough to make a man walk away from the lawnmower and plant an acorn.

“All the spending money [many mountaineers] had came from nuts they had gathered on other people’s land,” Hay writes. “This was a completely different picture than I’d understood before, a way of life based on a set of cultural agreements I’d never heard of or experienced.”

The U.S. would be better off, Feed Us with Trees claims, if it restored some of those agreements and the tree crops that go with them. Compared with annual grain fields, nut forests build soil fertility over time; they serve as habitat for many more species; and they invite more intimate connection between people and place.

And as humanity wrestles with the climate change it’s causing, argues Hay, nuts and their management offer a powerful new mythology for how to relate to the Earth. “We don’t just need to move away from No Farms, No Food; we need a story to move toward: a new collective mission, a freshly forged communal understanding of how we might do our jobs in this world where we are a keystone species,” she writes at the book’s conclusion.

It’s enough to make a man walk away from the lawnmower and plant an acorn.

For 15 years, the Ivanhoe Farmers Market has been bringing fresh produce to a neighborhood in Kansas City’s East Side, where full-service grocery stores are few and far between. Its 20-plus vendors — farms, bakeries, apothecaries, and artisans — offer healthy food and specialty products. And the market itself serves as a platform from which small-scale gardeners and purveyors like Alana Young-Henry can grow. Her Young Family Farm started as a backyard garden and has expanded to two acres since joining the market, bringing community members collard, mustard, and turnip greens. Despite its popularity, the market has only been able to operate once a month from June to September. Young-Henry says the issue is quite simple: lack of funding.

But last fall, a three-year, $165,000 grant from the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), was set to change that. With funding from the Farmers Market Promotion Program, Ivanhoe aimed to support new growers, extend its season, and add a second day each month focused on low-income young mothers and seniors using food subsidies. For Ivanhoe, and scores of similar markets approved for funding, the program was set to be a game-changer.

That plan changed on February 14, when Young-Henry, who oversees the market as executive director of Ivanhoe Neighborhood Council, received a letter from the USDA saying the grant had been terminated because it “no longer effectuates agency priorities regarding diversity, equity, and inclusion.”

For Young-Henry, the grant cancellation rescinded what had been an important recognition of the role urban agriculture plays in sustaining her community — and the financial support to expand that role. “It means less healthy food in people’s bellies,” she said. “It means less opportunities for small backyard gardeners to establish a farm business.”

As the Trump administration’s attempt to reshape the federal budget has shaken up the USDA and the farmers who rely on its support, the sudden shift in priorities has muddied the path forward for producers in urban environments. Brian Guse, director of the Office of Urban Agriculture and Innovative Production, an arm of the USDA that has invested over $85 million in building the capacity of urban farms since it opened in 2020, retired in April “with mixed emotions.” The office pulled its latest round of grant applications this spring, and its funding for the next fiscal year remains in limbo. So, too, does the future of the urban service centers established in 2023 to connect uarban farmers with resources that have long benefited their rural counterparts.

Just as urban agriculture was beginning to attract the attention of the federal government, farmers and advocates describe having the rug pulled out from under them.

“Everybody is a little shell-shocked,” said John Bixler, executive director of Pittsburgh’s Hilltop Urban Farm, which lost about $43,000 in Climate-Smart Commodities funding it planned to use for deer fencing to protect the land where it runs a farmer incubator program.

“It means less opportunities for small backyard gardeners to establish a farm business.”

Although the Office of Urban Agriculture was authorized in the 2018 Farm Bill, much of the support offered to urban farmers has come since the 2020 pandemic disrupted supply chains and revealed cracks in the food system. Amid the crisis, the rate of food insecurity rose from 11 to 15 percent and the population seeking food assistance increased by half. In those circumstances, local producers were in high demand. At farmer’s markets, vendors offering fruit, vegetables, meat, and dairy largely saw increased sales. And at many markets, the use of SNAP benefits grew. By delivering for their communities in a moment of great need, urban farmers say they galvanized support — and, in time, garnered the backing of the federal government.

“We helped sustain our city,” said Ebony Lunsford-Evans, who operates a diversified vegetable farm and fresh-food corner store in Pittsburgh. She had a $7,000 climate-smart grant canceled that would have allowed her to install a water line for her farm. “We were a big part of our neighborhood’s eating. We were all in dire need then, and we truly stepped up. That really gave a lot of us hope and momentum.”

That momentum contributed to the Biden administration opening 17 urban service centers and 10 urban county committees, joining a roster of more than 2,300 USDA service centers nationwide. They were designed to put urban farmers in touch with the Farm Service Agency and National Resources Conservation Service (NRCS), which offer funding and technical assistance to growers establishing and expanding their operations.

“If you grow up on a farm in the country, you’re always hearing about the local NRCS office. That’s part of your life,” Bixler said. “It’s totally foreign to urban growers, and this was a first step in switching that up and making them aware of what resources might be available.”

But a pall of uncertainty and a string of cancellations, both to individual grants and programs just beginning to make a difference for urban farmers, have left many feeling spurned. “It was heartbreaking,” Lunsford-Evans said.

As farmers deal with the ramifications of lost funding, urban agriculture advocates worry that the disinvestment will have long-term consequences. Some, including Pasa Sustainable Agriculture executive director Hannah Smith-Brubaker and Hannah Quigley, policy specialist at the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition, expect the government to pull its leases on the urban service centers. Some of the directors of those minimally staffed local offices have participated in the deferred resignation program, leaving their future murky. Meanwhile, the USDA removed from its website a call for its next round of urban agriculture grants, which help train new farmers and expand production capacity for gardens and farms that often support low-income and food-insecure communities.

“Finally, finally, finally, the USDA was paying attention to and providing resources to farmers who historically have not been served very well, if at all.”

Urban farmers have also been hampered by cuts to local food purchasing programs that helped farms sell to schools and food banks and had an outsize impact on small-scale growers who benefited from their sizable contracts. And cuts to food assistance threaten to impact urban farmers, whose community members often rely on SNAP to purchase from them.

“USDA has a solemn responsibility to be good stewards of the American people’s hard-earned taxpayer dollars and to ensure that every dollar spent goes to serve the people, not the bureaucracy,” an agency spokesperson told Offrange. “As part of this effort, Secretary [Brooke] Rollins is carefully reviewing funding, including for programs that support urban agriculture.”

For Smith-Brubaker, whose Pennsylvania-based organization helped 45 farmers in Pittsburgh and Philadelphia apply for about $100,000 in now-canceled climate-smart grants, the federal investment in urban agriculture was a recognition that the food system must include cities.

“Finally, finally, finally, the USDA was paying attention to and providing resources to farmers who historically have not been served very well, if at all,” she said. “We had such momentum going and it’s all gone now.”

The rejection of diversity, equity, and inclusion principles further complicates the present and future funding environment for urban agriculture. In many cases, grant applications that were required to consider those principles under the last administration are now being targeted for doing so. Take, for example, Rollins announcing the cancellation of a grant for an Oakland, California, nonprofit focused on establishing new farmers because it aimed “to educate queer, trans, and BIPOC urban farmers and consumers about food justice.”

“We aren’t going to be able to put our faith in the idea that the federal government is going to come save us, because that hasn’t really been true for most of us.”

“How stripped will your narrative have to be in order to be considered [moving forward]?” said Qiana Mickie, executive director of the New York City Mayor’s Office of Urban Agriculture and a member of the advisory committee for the USDA’s urban agriculture office. The impact of the shift in priorities, she said, will be disproportionately felt by urban farmers.

As the future of the USDA comes into focus, farmers and advocates say their resilience has been tested before and will serve them in this moment. For many urban farmers, even establishing land for growing can require removing thousands of pounds of rubble from a site, remediating soil, and facing an uphill battle to install basic necessities like water lines and fencing, often on shoestring budgets. The recent federal investment promised to lighten the load, but the restructuring of the USDA won’t stop progress, they say.

“Urban farmers have really been doing it without USDA’s help for decades,” Quigley said. “They won’t cease to exist. They’ll be more creative.”

Young-Henry, who is coming to terms with the lack of funding to expand the farmer’s market in Ivanhoe, said the experience has led her to redouble her commitment, she said, and she’s seen the same from other urban farmers who are putting their heads down and focusing on the mission of their work.

“That’s what will continue to give us hope,” Young-Henry said. “We aren’t going to be able to put our faith in the idea that the federal government is going to come save us, because that hasn’t really been true for most of us. And it doesn’t seem like it’s going to change anytime soon.”

If you’ve ever bought a bouquet of flowers, chances are the green fronds placed among the blooms came from Pierson, Florida. This sleepy town of 1,500, sprawled out along Highway 17 about halfway between Jacksonville and Orlando, bills itself as the “Fern Capital of the World,” and for good reason: The area around Pierson supplies 97 percent of the leatherleaf ferns in the U.S., the most popular variety for floral arrangements.

Ferns in Pierson are typically grown outdoors to take advantage of central Florida’s slightly acidic soil and warm, humid climate, but they also require artificial shade structures or large trees to protect them from the relentless sun. When Felipe Ferrão, a plant researcher at the University of Florida, first came to Pierson in 2023, he immediately thought that these shaded areas would be ideal for another kind of crop: coffee.

This year, Ferrão is planning on testing out this hypothesis by brewing his first batch of coffee from field-grown Florida beans, which he plans to harvest from a half-acre plot on a fern farm in Pierson. He hopes to demonstrate that Florida can nurture a homegrown coffee industry, providing a domestic supply of the crop at a time when climate change is devastating coffee plots in countries like Brazil and Kenya.

“We are the country that consumes the most coffee in the world,” Ferrão said. “If we think about the fact that by 2050, more than 60 percent of coffee production around the globe is going to decline, there is no way that this country won’t be affected.”

Florida is better known for its citrus industry, which once thrived in the state’s abundant sunshine but has declined by over 90 percent in the last two decades due to more extreme weather and the spread of citrus greening disease. When Ferrão started working at the University of Florida as a postdoc in 2017, his goal was to study how genomics and plant breeding could be used to develop new kinds of agricultural industries in the state, starting with blueberries. Ferrão comes from a long line of coffee farmers in Brazil, the world’s largest coffee producer, and he eventually began thinking about what it would take to grow the crop in Florida.

To find funding and institutional support for the project, Ferrão approached the University of Florida’s Tropical Research And Education Center, where since 1929 specialists have studied how to grow all kinds of tropical fruits, vegetables, and ornamental plants, from passionfruit and papayas to lychees and limes. They breed different varieties to develop ones that are most adapted to the climate and try to work out solutions for diseases and pest control issues, said Jonathan Crane, the center’s associate director.

“People have tried to grow coffee down here for many years and have not been successful,” Crane said. “They didn’t have the knowledge to grow it successfully, or they picked the wrong species or variety of coffee.”

Temperatures played a role, too. Coffee originates from the Ethiopian highlands and has been introduced to countries like Brazil, Vietnam, Costa Rica, Kenya, and Colombia, all located close to the equator between the Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn, an area known as the “coffee belt.” The climate here is mild and typically doesn’t swing into extremes, which is how coffee plants like it. Coffea arabica, the most popular variety, thrives in a temperature range between 64° and 70°F.

“People have tried to grow coffee down here for many years ... they didn’t have the knowledge to grow it successfully, or they picked the wrong species or variety of coffee.”

Though Florida is usually warm and sunny, because it lies north of the coffee belt it can occasionally experience freezing temperatures (leading to headlines about iguanas falling out of trees). When Florida growers last attempted to plant coffee in the 1940s, Crane said, it “got frozen out,” unable to tolerate temperatures in the 40s and 50s.

Florida’s changing climate, though, could mean it’s time to give coffee in the state another try. Average annual temperatures in the state have increased by 3.5° F since 1950. Although Florida still experiences winter cold snaps, the number of freezing events per year has sharply decreased, Crane said, allowing agricultural production to move northward. And it’s opening up the possibility of growing some crops, like coffee, that struggled to survive when temperatures were colder.

Ferrão is also experimenting with growing a different variety of coffee — Coffea canephora, also known as robusta — that’s more heat- and pest-resistant than the popular arabica. And aside from producing homegrown coffee, Ferrão’s research focuses on understanding the genetics of coffee plants in order to breed more resilient, flavorful, and high-yielding varieties — not just in Florida, but around the world.

“We can deliver new tools [to growers], discover new trends and answer important biological questions,” Ferrão said. “All this expertise can help breeders and other institutions to improve the sustainability of the coffee chain.”

The work in Pierson began two years ago, when Ferrão was contacted by Gineva Peterson, a Pierson resident whose family has been running a fernery there since the 1970s and who wanted to branch out into growing coffee but couldn’t afford the start-up costs. She offered her land in exchange for Ferrão’s plants and expertise, and since May of last year they’ve planted around 600 arabica and robusta seedlings, which they anticipate will produce enough beans to host a coffee tasting by the end of the year.

“The majority of people in the U.S. have not seen a coffee tree.” She thinks they’ll come to Florida “just to experience what a coffee tree looks like.”

Peterson’s eventual goal is to run a coffee shop supplied entirely by her home-grown beans. Though it would be a Florida first, coffee production has also taken root in southern California, where a cooperative of 65 small farmers called Frinj is growing on a commercial scale. Crane sees potential for family farms and small growers to similarly make a living selling specialty, “Florida coffee”-branded beans.

“It’s not like we’re going to become a major coffee production area for the world like Brazil or Vietnam,” Crane said. Instead, “there is a huge interest and potential for a niche, high-end, valuable coffee industry.”

He brought up the example of Kona coffee, which was introduced to Hawaii in 1829 and grows only on around 9,000 acres on the slopes of the Hualalai and Mauna Loa mountains. One of the most expensive coffees in the world, it averages around $20 per pound and can get up to $60 or more. Educated consumers who have developed specific tastes in coffee, Crane said, are willing to pay a premium for specialty brands; other income can come from agrotourism, where people visit coffee farms and see how it’s grown and roasted.

The coffee plants have had to adjust to Florida’s sandy soil, and those grown under shade structures needed to be protected from freezing. Eventually, Peterson hopes to transition away from shade structures entirely and instead plant coffee underneath groves of oak trees in an arrangement known as a “hammock,” which also naturally keeps them warm in the winter. Insurers have stopped covering shade structures in the last few years, Peterson said, claiming they were too vulnerable to destruction from hurricanes.

Though Peterson doesn’t see coffee replacing ferns entirely, she believes the additional crop can help diversify the agricultural industry in central Florida. She anticipates she’ll have enough beans to open her coffee shop within one to two years. And once she and the University of Florida researchers have finalized their coffee-growing technique, other growers in Florida can participate, too.

“The majority of people in the U.S. have not seen a coffee tree,” Peterson said. She thinks they’ll come to Florida “just to experience what a coffee tree looks like.”

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INTRODUCTION - The Environmental Trolley Problem / Conserving Land, But for Whom?

SM: You’ve probably heard one of the many versions of the Trolley Problem. My favorite goes like this: There is an uncontrolled trolley barreling down the tracks. Five people are in its path. You have the ability to flip a switch and divert the trolley onto an adjacent track where it will hit only one person. So do you flip the switch, or do you do nothing?

If you feel like there’s a straightforward answer to this question– you might want to share your logic with the environmental movement, because a question with very similar contours has been plaguing them for the better part of a century. The environmentalist version, of course, doesn’t involve an actual trolley, but it hinges on a similar set of questions– about the pre-existing nature of things, when, or whether, we have a responsibility to act, and if we do, whether our aim should be to minimize harm or to allow “nature to take its course” without interference.

Differing opinions here have led to one of the most enduring schisms in the environmental movement, the one between conservationists who believe that land, forests, soil, and water should be protected through careful management, and preservationists, who believe that America’s pristine wildernesses should never be managed, or even touched, by humans at all– and should be left forever wild. So whether to protect land for use or from it– this is environmentalism’s hypothetical trolley switch. And this ideological divergence is at the heart of many of the most heated disputes between environmentalists and farmers.

[MUSICAL INTERLUDE]

In the first part of this episode, which you’ll find earlier in our feed, we took a closer look at how American farmland has been fundamentally transformed by and for agriculture, and the lasting impacts those actions have on farmers, communities, and ecosystems.

Today, in Part Two, we’re taking a look at our still-evolving ideas about the opposite– conservation, preservation, and even regeneration. We’ll be complicating the idea that “farmers are the original environmentalists,” and that environmental protection is an unmitigated good.

We’ll also look ahead to the role farmland may be able to play in sequestering carbon and averting climate disaster in the future.

This is The Only Thing That Lasts. I’m Sarah Mock.

[MUSICAL INTERLUDE]

At the beginning of Part I, I spoke with the environmental historian Paul Sutter, about Providence Canyon, a state park in Georgia that’s home to Grand Canyon-like cliffs, which were caused, in part at least, by overzealous farming on fragile and misunderstood land in the 19th century. As you’ll recall– Providence Canyon is a gigantic erosion gully, the result of countless gallons of water falling onto unstable soil, and then carrying the dirt away downstream, gouging out cavities in the land hundreds of feet deep. The impact that these gullies had on farmland, farmers, and their communities were severe, and in the end tens of thousands of acres of deeply gullied land had to be abandoned.

But I’m going to bring Paul back now, because there is an epilogue to the Providence Canyon story that we haven’t talked about yet, one which takes place in the 1960s, decades after the canyon was formed, and provides a very real example of the land stewardship trolley problem.

But this afterward doesn’t start amongst the farmland and gullies of the Georgia Piedmont, it begins downstream, in a wild, riverine area East of Atlanta–

Paul Sutter:  This place called the Alcovy River Swamps that were seen as swamplands, wetlands in the new parlance, in need of protection. And the Soil Conservation Service, ironically, it’s the Soil Conservation Service, wanted to go into the Alcove River and straighten it out and drain it and have more of the land open to agriculture.

SM: This proposed project marked the beginning of a fierce debate about the destiny of the Alcovy Swamps. To drain or to preserve, that was the question.

This issue arose around the same time that Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring was published, in which she warned, for one, that if the widespread and indiscriminate use of pesticides like DDT continued, the indirect effect on bird populations would be devastating. Hence the book’s ominous title–future Springs without songbirds. Silent Spring sparked a national environmental awakening, one that raised the stakes of draining the Alcovy swamps from what was previously a simple land improvement project into a full blown controversy.

On the one side of the issue were these newly empowered preservationists, who were anxious to protect the Alcovy wetlands in all their natural, soggy glory, and so protect the ecosystem and habitats that the swamp represents for wildlife. On the other side were those who identified as conservationists, people who supported channelizing the river and removing the swamp, in particular to make it more amenable to landowners and farmers.

It’s worth reckoning with the fact that these swamp-drainers weren’t necessarily money-hungry capitalists or careless polluters– on the contrary, they also thought of themselves as environmentalists. But from their perspective, using and managing land is an element of environmental protection. This is a core disagreement between preservationists and conservationists, even today– what one group calls preservation the other calls abandonment. What one group calls management the other calls extraction and abuse.

Depending on which of these two groups makes you feel more at home, maybe the right thing to do here– the solution to this trolley problem, seems straightforward to you. Either believe that the needs of humans and wildlife can both be advanced through active human interference and management, or you believe, as many researchers and activists did at the time, that these swamps represent pristine wilderness, have inherent environmental value, and therefore must be preserved undisturbed.

But let me complicate the story a little further. What if I told you that these swamps were not as “natural” as they first appeared.

Paul Sutter: Almost certainly there were swamps there in the mid-20th Century because all that soil that had been washed off the Piedmont had to go somewhere, and it went down into the bottoms of these river valleys and created swampy conditions.

SM: That’s right. The Alcovy swamps were not naturally occurring. They were formed by the same massive agricultural erosion that created the likes of Providence Canyon. Now does the answer seem so obvious? In other words, is the right thing to do to preserve the swamps as they are now, because over the years they’ve become home to wildlife, provided recreational value, and are now lending valuable ecosystem services? Or is the right thing actually to drain the swamps and restore the pre-man made-erosion ecosystem?

The end of this story is already written– and the final result was a mixed bag. Part of the swamp complex, called Cornish Creek, was channelized, and other parts were protected as part of the Alcovy conservation area. But for Paul, exploring these exact kinds of dilemmas has been one of the big, and relatively recent, leaps forward in the study of environmental history.

Paul Sutter: Environmental historians go into places that appear to be pristine and natural and show us all of the ways in which those places were materially and culturally constructed. Wilderness areas, national parks, and a lot of the effort of environmental historians was to show us that these places had all kinds of histories that we had to recognize. And that in some ways the acts of preserving these landscapes erased. Those histories, not the least of them being Indigenous histories. So a lot of the work environmental historians were doing was troubling these ideas of pure nature.

[MUSICAL INTERLUDE]

SM: It seems to me that having access to all the information about the true nature of a place– including its full history– human and otherwise– is critical to ethically deciding whether to flip the hypothetical trolley switch, or to do nothing. And one of the most important lessons of both Providence Canyon and the Alcovy Swamps is that separating human influence from “pure nature” is often nearly impossible.

But then what does that mean from preservationists, whose goal is to protect wildspaces by preserving their original states? What if we don’t know the original state of a place? Or what if that original state has been altered fundamentally by human action? How far back in history must we look to find that true original state? How do we know when to stop looking back?

I’ve asked myself a lot of questions like this while working on this story, and I’ve landed on few satisfying answers. The good news, then, is that I’m not the one answering most of these questions– after all, I make podcasts, not environmental policy.

To me though, that’s the most fascinating thing about this environmental trolley problem.

That, unlike the original thought experiment, questions of environmental policy are not hypothetical– they get decided all the time, by local officials and legislatures, by courts and federal agencies. Maybe then the better question for us to ask– rather than whether we should flip the switch or not– is whose hand is actually on the switch? What is it they’re trying to either conserve or preserve, and who are they saving it for?

That question has been a central one for Levi Van Sant, a researcher at George Mason University, who’s focused, among other things, on the intersection of conservation and farmland consolidation.

By happenstance, he grew up in central Georgia, within an hour of Providence Canyon, and spent years working on farms after college. He dreamed for a while about starting his own farm, but found that it was nearly impossible to go from being a farm laborer to a farm owner– especially without significant startup capital. As he learned how common a challenge this is, he returned to university, eager to study the cause of land access issues informed by his own direct experiences.

Levi Van Sant: The long and short of it is if you want to be in the local, sustainable, organic market, then you oftentimes need to be relatively close to a city because that’s where most of your market is a lot of the times. And that means the land cost is significant, so that’s one of the things that was motivating my research.

SM: For most anyone in agriculture, the fact that many young and beginning farmers find it nearly impossible to buy, and sometimes even rent, farmland is well-known. The farmland access challenge is complex, but one of the key contributors is another common issue– farmland consolidation. Consolidation in agriculture was most famously pushed by Richard Nixon’s Secretary of Agriculture, Earl Butz, who proclaimed that farmers should “get big or get out,” and since then farmland consolidation has continued steadily,leading to fewer and fewer people holding a larger and larger share of total U.S. farmland.

It’s easy to point to mega-buyers like Bill Gates as prime culprits, but according to Levi’s research, the problem is more insidious than that, leading to radical inequalities on a much more local level. For example, in some of the Virginia counties that Levi studies, the top 1% of landowners own between 25 and 45% of all land in the county, while the vast majority of other rural residents own tiny tracts or, more likely, renting.

But what do questions of farmland access and consolidation have to do with the people that make decisions about conservation or preservation? It’s a question of following the money. Throughout the U.S., money and environmental policy converge in one particular place– a conservation tool known as a conservation easement.

A conservation easement is a voluntary legal agreement usually between a landowner and a non-profit or a land trust. Under a conservation easement, the private landowner agrees to forego some property rights, to receive a tax or other benefit. And the non-profit is responsible for making sure the landowner sticks to the agreement. Communities, states, and even the federal government justify this tax discount, ostensibly because conserving open space provides a public good– and so owners pay fewer taxes in exchange for this public benefit.

There are many different kinds of conservation easements– ones for historical preservation, ecological benefits, and even ones that support the continuity of production agriculture. These last two types have become especially popular in areas with strong development pressure, like directly around cities. That matters because that land is also highly desirable for young and beginning farmers.

And that’s the thing, because depending on which type of easement is instituted, conservation easements can be a way that farmland, or potential farmland, gets tied up and removed from the market, limiting supply and therefore access.

Levi Van Sant: I got interested in the tendency for conservation easements to be used by large landowners, to maintain their large land holdings as a tax write-off. And there are lots of examples of how this works.

SM: The mechanism here is pretty simple, but packs a big financial punch. See, property taxes can be a key barrier to maintaining large landholdings. For free market heads out there– this is a good thing. If landowners aren’t making enough money on their land to afford the taxes on it, then they’ll be motivated to sell. And farmland should become more available, which might even eventually push the price down. But– conservation easements, whether they allow ag production or not, release current landowners from this bind by cutting their tax bill.

An easement can be created for any number of acres, and are generally negotiated privately, each one custom tailored to the landowner’s desires. This means that a landowner can create an easement that maximizes their benefit, helps them hold on to as many acres as possible, and maybe even set them up, financially, for expansion.

Levi Van Sant: Basically, the more money that you have, the bigger of a benefit you get from getting a conservation easement. In terms of tax benefits, they are regressive. By design, not to mention the fact that you have to be a landowner to even get one, right? So immediately you’re taking out a huge portion of the population that has least access to land.

SM: In the case of conservation easements, this is the end of the money trail, and the answer to our question about who decides environmental policy on farmland, and for whose benefit. It’s the wealthiest landowners who are in the driver’s seat when it comes to conservation easements, the same group who already have the most access to farmland, and who derive the most direct benefit from the land itself- whether by working it or enjoying it.

The impact on local communities around conservation easements goes beyond the financial.

There are good questions to be asked about what benefit an “open space” provides when nearby residents aren’t allowed to access it because it’s private land. It’s nice to see woods and fields from the road I guess, and there is some amount of clean air and water benefit that might not otherwise be present, but the terrible paradox that many landless rural communities live in is to be surrounded by farm- and wildlands that they’re forbidden to physically enjoy, even though they help pay for them through tax credits.

The fact the easements first and foremost deliver benefit to landowners is essential to their voluntary function– but it also makes them an imperfect tool if the goal is to protect ecosystems and open space, ostensibly for the benefit of the public. And questions about the public benefit of conservation easements are increasingly being raised.

Levi Van Sant: Republican lawmakers in South Carolina were the ones who challenged the sort of conventions around conservation easements and said, ‘Hey, if we’re funding conservation, my constituents want to be able to deer hunt there. Right? If we’re funding the protection of lands, why can’t we provide public access?’

SM: There is a lot of interesting work being done to make conservation easements more beneficial to the public. Because conservation easements tend to be highly customizable to a landowners needs, it may be possible, given the right landowner and situation, to make them less regressive, more accessible to the local community, and a better tool for achieving conservation goals. Though this is not a comprehensive solution, it could be a step in the right direction.

But Levi is thinking even more expansively about how policies and tools that go beyond easements might help not only preserve wildlands, but also relieve the farmland access issue as well.

Levi Van Sant: We do have federal public land for ranching and forestry, right? We have BLM land. We have national forest land. We don’t have any federal public land for farming. That’s a strange thing to me. That is a different path to preserving agriculture than conservation easements, that would provide a lot of access to farmland for a lot of people. It’s possible anyway that this could be done. There’s no reason why we couldn’t have public farmland.

SM: While publicly owned farmland might not be in the cards in the near future, it’s promising to see creative solutions being imagined that might allow more young and beginning farmers access to farmland, and that might help all Americans gain access to more spaces, agricultural or wild, that are protected in their name, for their benefit, and most importantly, with their tax dollars.

And when it comes to the question of who benefits from conservation or preservation, how it is done, and who, in the end, gets to decide, the idea of public ownership of farmland would change that equation as well. Rather than leaving the question of how land is managed or preserved exclusively in the hands of a shrinking pool of top farmland owners, public ownership could democratize decision-making around farmland stewardship, putting more hands on the switch while clearing more people off the tracks.

[MUSICAL INTERLUDE]

The question of how to balance human needs with those of the ecosystems around us will likely continue to be a key source of friction between conservationists and preservationists.

But in recent years, a new solution has emerged, one that promises not a trolley problem, but a win-win for both humans and the environment. Does the idea of regenerative agriculture stop the farmland-wildland tradeoff trolley in its tracks?

That’s after the break.

[BREAK]

Intro: This podcast is made possible by Ambrook. Ambrook builds financial management software for farms, ranches, and businesses across the American supply chain. It’s an all-in-one platform that simplifies accounting, record-keeping, and payments workflows while empowering operators with visibility into the health of their business. Here’s Alex, a Product Operations Specialist at Ambrook, on helping customers find success:

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Outro: That was Alex, a team member at Ambrook and an operator herself, on how Ambrook supports customers. Tune in to the rest of the season to hear from other members of the Ambrook team on why they chose to join and what motivates them to build the financial layer powering American industry.

Now, back to the show.

[END BREAK]

Part 4: Filling in the Gullies

SM: I think it’s safe to say that regeneration is the Next Big Thing, not just in agriculture, but across the land management world. After all, what’s the point of flipping the switch between conserving or preserving a deeply damaged landscape. The wounds must first be healed.

And there is no shortage of wounds for agriculture or environmentalists to take on either. From soils depleted by hundreds of years of extractive cropping, to the wind scoured landscapes still recovering from the dust bowl, to fields ravaged by overzealous chemical applications or pastures turned to sacrifice zones through animal overpopulation. America is littered with current and former farmland that’s experienced substantial damage.

Agriculture is, of course, not the only culprit– logging, mining, development in general, and countless other industry have contributed to the harm. But no industry has had a larger footprint over the course of this nation’s history than farming, and few other industries have caused such a wide mix of problems.

So what’s this solution? I’d argue that there is no reliable or widely agreed on definition of regenerative agriculture, but I think it’s safe to say that, at least philosophically, the goal is regeneration– agricultural practices that enrich a landscape, making it healthier, more vibrant, and more complete. There is a huge range of practices and tools that are considered regenerative, depending on who you are, but for our purposes, I wanted to know what kind of regeneration might be possible on a landscape like the one that has been at the center of this two part episode.

My question was simple– does the regen ag world have an answer for repairing the dreaded gully?

A.T. Cole and his wife Lucinda do not live in Georgia, nor have they set their sites on repairing the hundred foot gorges of Providence Canyon. But they have been working diligently for the last 20 years to repair their slice of another deeply gullied landscape– the one that cuts through their Pitchfork Ranch in Southwestern New Mexico.

When the Coles got started, they had no experience with ranching, and just a little experience with restoration work. Otherwise, they’ll tell you that they didn’t really know what they were doing. At the time, they’d never heard the term cienega– which describes a body of water that would come to dominate two decades of their life.

A.T. Cole: A cienega is shallow, slow moving water, and they would run from the boundary of a mountain on one side to the other side. So they were huge. They were wide and shallow. There’s an old adage, you didn’t know you were in a cienega until you got your feet wet because they were so shallow.

SM: When the Coles arrived on the Pitchfork Ranch, however, the cienega was not shallow at all.

Overgrazing, the elimination of fire on the landscape, and many other factors had left the cienega incised or gullied, and rather than a wide body of shallow water that sprawls and supports a large habitat, the cienega had become a narrow, fast-moving creek, eight or 10 feet deep in places, which whisked away more and more precious water, nutrients, and soil every season.

Learning about this history, the Cole’s set out to restore the cienega. The first step was figuring out how to slow the water down. Their solution involved creating more than 250 earthen grade control structures, like weirs, all along the streambed. When the water hits these structures– it slows down, and both sediment and seeds sink to the bottom. This simultaneously starts to fill in the gully with soil, and plants the seeds, creating a virtuous cycle, as more plants slows the water even more, which means more sediment, more plants, and a shallower and shallower stream.

Building grade structures is one of the most straightforward and affordable ways to undo a gully. With enough obstacles in its path water will slowly do the work of building up its own creek bed, repairing the channel it gouged out and in the process, stretching life-giving moisture across the desert. Between two and five feet of gully has been filled in on the Pitchfork so far, and the Cole’s have done this work with a combination handmade, machined, and even natural structures. A single boulder, for example, has captured 1,037 tons of sediment over the last 20 years.

A.T. Cole: I think the Apache term for this country translated to horizontal yellow. And that’s because it was predominantly yellow grassland and it wasn’t incised like it is now. And so it was much more horizontal. And so horizontal yellow is what we’re going toward. And we think of it in terms of shallowing the landscape.

SM: Both gullies, and the artificial gully we discussed in part one– field tile are strategies for deepening the landscape, for moving land to change the way that water flows in the hopes of making it better for farming. The problem of course, in both cases, is that water that’s flowing over land is never just water. It carries soil and nutrients away with it. The Cole’s efforts on the Pitchfork Ranch are aimed at turning this interaction on its head. They want to hold every drop of water they possibly can in the land for as long as they can, and in doing so, helping the land reabsorb all the moisture, nutrients, and life that the water holds.

A.T. takes comfort in the fact that the work that he and Lucinda are doing on the ranch is not only increasing the local land’s resiliency in the face of climate issues, it’s also contributing, at least in a small way, to climate mitigation. After all, research has shown that wetlands, including cienegas, tend to be dense carbon sinks in the landscapes, capable of storing fifty times more carbon than, say, farm fields or even grasslands or forest.

They also provide important cool spaces in hot regions, and provide critical environments for many vulnerable species. And the Coles see the outcomes of this work all the time, with their own eyes.

A.T. Cole: It’s almost a false appearance sometimes. Sometimes it looks like Eden. This is the Sonoran Desert. But there are parts of it that look like Virginia in the spring. we’ve videoed a herd of 50 deer on this ranch, 50. It was huge. And, the elk have arrived. We didn’t have elk here when we first came here. Just yesterday we saw Four Fox in front of the headquarters here. And we’ve had a coati, a troop of kudamundi.

SM: In case you, like me, are not familiar with Southwestern mammals, a kudamundi or a coati is also called the mexican raccoon, though they have slimmer bodies and longer tails and snouts than their raccoon cousins. These critters are rare in the U.S., and they’re pretty severely threatened by habitat loss, especially related to urbanization, deforestation, and agriculture.

[MUSICAL INTERLUDE]

SM: I think it’s safe to say that the work being done on the Pitchfork Ranch is, in the truest sense, regenerating the ecosystem that once occupied its landscape. But the sharp-eared listener might have noticed that, though the Coles may be realizing the promise of restoration efforts, we haven’t talked about the “agriculture” half of the “regenerative agriculture” equation here.

Today, A.T. does raise cattle on the Pitchfork Ranch, but he has mixed feelings about it. Throughout his decades of doing restoration work, he’s not seen evidence that cattle are good collaborators in regeneration efforts, though he does think they have some kind of place on the landscape.

A.T. Cole: So our cattle are not here as a restoration tool. Our cattle are here because we want to have the agricultural tax benefit. And you’ve probably heard the term that the tax benefit is substantial. Well, I had no idea, but substantial means over 400 times. It’s shocking, but what’s going to happen to this land? You can build houses, you could have McMansions here, you could have subdivisions here, but what else can you do on this habitat? I can tell you that my spouse doesn’t agree with that. She thinks that there shouldn’t be any cows out here. And there are lots of people who think there shouldn’t be any cows, period.

[MUSICAL INTERLUDE]

SM: The Coles’ experience on the Pitchfork is just a single anecdote, and many others, across the U.S. and around the world, have presented evidence that appropriate grazing and cropping can help make nearby human and wild ecosystems more healthy and stable.

But when it comes to answering our question, about the role of regenerative agriculture in repairing gullied landscapes, I think the Coles’ experience is particularly apt. After all, the southwestern U.S. may well be a more severely gullied landscape than the Georgia Piedmont, and unlike in the Southeast; overgrazing cattle, overharvesting timber, and generally overtaxing the land has unquestionably led to the Southwest’s current state.

To me, the answer is clear– the Cole’s success thus far wasn’t won by bringing more cattle into their cienega, a place where cattle will tend to loaf, wallow, and generally cause more pollution and destruction. Instead these victories were won by intervening in a way that accentuated natural processes, which in turn attracted wild animals to participate in the work of restoration, rather than familiar barnyard critters. I think the experience on the Pitchfork suggests that activities that truly restore or regenerate are often separate from, or even opposite to, agriculture.

And there’s something sensible about that conclusion– after all, agriculture is inherently extractive. Our food, fiber, and fuel are taken from one set of landscapes to be consumed elsewhere. It is very hard to regenerate a landscape when you are systematically removing some of its constituents, often replacing them with new inputs extracted from some other landscape somewhere else. Nothing comes from nothing, not even when you’re doing regenerative agriculture.

In other words, it seems to me that regen ag is really to be just another type of conservationism, dressed up in a sort of hyper-preservationist costume. Perhaps the lesson here is that, if a solution seems too easy and too perfect, it just might be.

CONCLUSION

SM: If regenerative agriculture is just another flavor of conservationism, then we’re back at square one, trying to decide whether we should conserve the landscapes around us for our use, or whether our obligation is to protect wilderness from the most destructive species on earth, humans.

Given the current political environment, conservationists currently have the upper hand, though in truth both sides of the environmental world are being excluded as questions about environmental protection and resource conservation take a backseat to economic and political expediency.

Pressures are extreme today, but not necessarily unprecedented, as many national environmental organizations have, in recent decades, already tilted their priorities away from their most radical preservation goals and towards those that are more palatable to farmers, business, and wealthy funders writ large.

This is likely why preserving farmland and protecting ecosystems are often blended together in environmental messaging as if they are a single activity. Perhaps the intent of creating the false equivalency is to indicate that farmland is better for wild plants and animals than, say, a housing development. But given everything we’ve learned across these last two episodes, about the destructive and partially agrarian forces that shaped Providence Canyon, about the correlation between Iowa ag and the state’s environmental and public health crisis, about the unintended consequences of conservation easements, and even the unhelpfulness of cattle on the Pitchfork, I think the assumption that farmland is automatically better for wildland seems questionable at best.

But of course, advocating for less farmland– or even better managed farmland, is not without consequences. More management is more expensive– it could raise food prices, an injustice to the poor. On the other hand, less farmland overall might make the farmland that’s left even more expensive and inaccessible– even further out of reach for young and beginning farmers. So then is it better to commit to higher levels of environmental mismanagement in order to have more affordable food, or to further expand agriculture’s footprint in order to ease access, even if doing so might cause more environmental problems and public cost? Which is right? Which is wrong? I genuinely don’t know.

The reality is, there are no easy answers– on farmland or in environmental policy. Every action has an equal and opposite reaction. For every good deed, a punishment. It’s trade-offs– all the way down.

[MUSICAL INTERLUDE]

There are just a couple of episodes left in this series, but one of the most crucial topics to discuss is still ahead of us. In the last 40 years, or so, the fundamental transformation that farmland has undergone, was not primarily ecological or practical, not political or cultural.

No, I’d argue that the biggest thing that’s happened to farmland in the last half century is the land’s transition from the home place to a home run financial asset. Something more valuable than gold.

Howard Halderman: the blue chip nature of it is, it provides that consistent annual cash return, and historically speaking, a 4 5 percent appreciation. So the Corn Belt is going to generate a 2 to 3 percent return today cash yield and a 4 or 5 appreciation. It’s an all in 6, 7, 8 percent returning asset and it’s like widgets coming out of a factory in that regard.

SM: How farmland became a more reliable investment than Wall Street, and how your retirement accounts farms its value— but actually, next time, on The Only Thing That Lasts.

SIGN OFF

SM: Before we sign off, I talked through information from a number of sources and experts today, so if you want to dig into it yourself, check out the shownotes, or our website for links.

While you’re there, make sure you head over to ambrook.com SLASH offrange to stay up on the latest reporting from the Offrange team on agriculture, land, and environmental issues like the ones we talk about here on the show. After you subscribe to the podcast, don’t forget to sign up for the newsletter, and follow Offrange on socials for news about upcoming projects and stories. And we can’t wait to hear what you think! If you like what we’re doing, let us know, and don’t forget to share.

The Only Thing That Lasts is now an Offrange production. This podcast is written, produced, and mixed by me, Sarah Mock. Our editor is Jesse Hirsch, with support by Ali Aas and Bijan Stephen. Technical support by Dan Schlosser, and general support by Mackenzie Burnett and the whole team at Ambrook.

A final note, Ambrook Research, the media outlet that produced this podcast, is 100% editorially independent from Ambrook, the fintech company that funds it.

Mistakes were made. To that, everyone can agree.

In 2019, Steamboat Springs, Colorado, became host to the region’s first ever Steamboat Gravel (SBT GRVL), a gravel cycling race that involved 2,000 participants hitting the rural, dirt, and gravel roadways of Routt County in distances that can top 100 miles. While the cyclists enjoyed the event, local ranchers experienced what they say was a long list of difficulties.

It was the county fair weekend, for starters, and many ranchers struggled to get out of their driveways to participate in events. It was also haying season, when ranchers can’t afford to lose time on the surrounding county roads. There were complaints about strewn trash, cyclists using ranchland as bathrooms, and overall rude behavior from the participants. And then there were the spooked cattle, startled by large packs of cyclists whizzing by at high speeds. “Ours got to running, hit the fence and broke through,” said Trenia Sanford, owner of the v\Ranch-Semotan Ranch. “It took us more than two-and-a-half hours to get them back. Once they learned how to escape, they kept doing it.”

Mistakes were made. But in the ensuing years, the two disparate communities of cycling and ranching have worked together to hopefully find a peaceful co-existence. This year’s late June event will serve as a proving ground.

Working Toward a Solution

Gravel cycling — something of a hybrid between traditional road biking and mountain biking — is the second-fastest growing category of the sport, behind e-bikes. Cyclists are drawn to the opportunity to ride at high speed on quiet, bucolic roadways, far away from busy traffic full of distracted drivers. And, as the sport explodes, so too have events around the country. Colorado, with its beautiful vistas and plentiful dirt/gravel roadways, is a natural spot for race organizers to target. Cyclists have shown their willingness to travel from all areas of the country for a chance to ride there. They bring with them plenty of tourism dollars for local hotels, restaurants, and more, which surely does hold appeal, especially in town proper.

But there are limits, say the ranchers, and questions of who exactly benefits from the influx of dollars — not to mention the need to avoid overtourism and protect the agricultural heritage of Routt County. “There’s a reason everyone wants to experience the area,” said Nancy Mucklow, who along with husband CJ has leased land for their alfalfa, hay, grass, and cattle farming for decades. “It’s pristine and uncrowded. But we have a master plan that prioritizes agriculture over tourism, so we’re not set up for large crowds of people.”

Following the first year of SBT GRVL, the ranchers compared notes and took their case to the county commissioners. Amy Charity, founding partner and CEO of SBT GRVL, was all ears, and created a second listening session a few months later. “The primary issues were the fact that the date of the race coincided with the Routt County Fair, there was two-way cycling traffic on the roads, which caused delays, and that not all rural residents knew the dates and timing of the event,” she said.

“We have a master plan that prioritizes agriculture over tourism, so we’re not set up for large crowds of people.”

Each year, Charity and her organization have worked to improve the situation, even as it expanded over the past few years. In 2024, the key changes included moving courses to a more remote location in the county; eliminating two-way cycling traffic; altering the timing and course routes to avoid commuting delays; increasing sheriff and police presence, medical support and traffic control; adding a command center; attempting to visit every on-course residence to communicate event day impacts; increasing on-course signage; and educating participants on the local rules of the road and stewardship.

Going into this year’s SBT GRVL all those changes will continue, in addition to others. “We’re moving the date away from haying season and the county fair,” said Charity. The organizers have also split the event into two different days, the first featuring a leisurely “ride” and not a race, and the second serving as a circuit race that begins and ends in Hayden, a small town about 20 miles outside of Steamboat. The total number of cyclists will top out at 2,500, down from last year’s 3,000.

Amber Pougiales, executive director of the local Community Agricultural Alliance, says that the ranching community is optimistic. “The race director has done a lot to mitigate the various issues, and moving the date will be huge for the ag community,” she said.

For her part, Pougiales sees great need for cohesion. “The sport wouldn’t exist without the rural communities, and I think the ag community can gain from the relationship, too,” she explained. “An event like this is an opportunity to create respect and appreciation for the rural landscape and the work that goes on there.”

A Roadmap

Ranchers are no strangers to conflict, whether with the federal government, housing developers, or even allowing land access to hunters. In most cases, they’ve had to work with the other party to achieve a peaceful solution.

As SBT GRVL and Routt County work out the kinks, they may take a page from Gunnison County, its distant neighbor to the south. Home to the towns of Crested Butte and Gunnison, each with long histories of mountain biking and, lately, gravel cycling, there’s an established blueprint for ranching/cycling cohesion. “We’ve worked hard with the ranching community to develop good lines of communication,” said Tim Kugler, executive director of Gunnison Trails, a non-profit trail advocacy organization. “When we started Gunnison Trails, we were forward thinking and quick to offer help and let the ranchers know we didn’t want to mess with their operations.”

To that end, Gunnison Trails has educated cyclists about keeping gates closed when they encounter them, added cattle guards in appropriate places, and has chosen not to introduce new mountain bike races out of respect for rancher concern (the county will continue hosting its gravel race).

“The overall sentiment I hear is that we are on the brink of over loving the valley, and we should be mindful of the consequences of hosting large events.”

With the emergence of gravel cycling, the organization has ensured that cyclists wait until the local roads are dry and ridable in the spring before they take to their two-wheeled steeds. The town’s Gunni Grinder gravel race is now entering its fourth year, features three race distances up to 120 miles, and remains smaller than its Steamboat counterpart. “The gravel scene is young here, and as it stands, we don’t have any issues,” said Kugler. “We are sensitive to anything that can grow quickly and keep good communications open.”

Rancher Hannah Cranor-Kersting, director of Gunnison County’s extension office, pointed out that organized recreation like gravel races is relatively new when compared to agriculture. “Obviously there can be conflict, and issues will pop up,” she said. “But we’ve been able to work together so that both sides can be happy with the outcomes.”

Ultimately, each community is unique and will respond to its issues differently, whether from the ranching side or the cycling side. The 2025 race weekend in Steamboat Springs took place in late June, and Mucklow hasn’t heard much negative feedback. Steamboat Gravel’s 2026 permit request will go in front of the county commissioners for approval in late July, which will make or break its future.

Mucklow had this to say: “The overall sentiment I hear is that we are on the brink of over-loving the valley, and we should be mindful of the consequences of hosting large events in a valley that isn’t set up for hosting large numbers.”

Conversations about agricultural emissions often center on livestock or fertilizer. Transport is a quieter, but crucial contributor. From farm to grocery store to kitchen cupboard, there’s a sprawling network of trucks, trains, and ships working to bring your groceries to you. About 30% of the world’s GHG emissions come from land-based transport, predominantly of cargo. But, as it stands, very little of that transport is powered by electricity.

“You can’t wake up a person who is pretending to be sleeping.” said Rish Ghatikar.

The words by Ghatikar, who is a researcher and advisor to the transportation and energy industries, are momentarily puzzling — what does pretend-sleeping have to do with electric trucks? Ghatikar is a visiting professor at the University of Southern Denmark, an Open Charging Alliance Ambassador, and he consults for EV startups; he’s considered a global authority on electrifying the trucking industry.

Ghatikar uses sleeping as a metaphor to describe prevailing attitudes towards the health and environmental consequences of a fossil-fuel dominated transport industry. By pretending to sleep, he outlines how policy and industry may appear to sideline these consequences, and even miss out on economic opportunities.

In the United States, almost all food transport happens by truck; transportation accounts for one fifth of the carbon emissions of food production and consumption. Researchers are still trying to estimate the global health impact of these tailpipe emissions, but it’s significant. These emissions have high concentrations of particulate matter and harmful gases like carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxides, and sulfur dioxide, which are linked to respiratory issues or exacerbate existing ones like asthma; they can even lead to complications like heart problems.

“For me, a lot of electrification comes down to tailpipe emissions. They’re so, so harmful,” Ghatikar stressed.

On the upside, with the right infrastructure, investment, and policy alignment, he believes that electrifying agricultural transport could offer one of the fastest pathways to climate progress and human health improvements.

Decentralizing Power

Long hours, tight delivery windows, and razor-thin margins leave little room for error for long-haul truckers. Most agricultural transport happens by road, whether it be a cross-country, big-rig journey or short-haul trucks delivering from farm to distributor. Technically, any of these vehicles have potential to be electrified, but logistics vary with scale and distance. Many agricultural trucks operate in remote areas with limited infrastructure. Charging time, limited range, and sparse rural charging stations are real concerns that could disrupt already demanding schedules.

Ghatikar and his colleague Michael Barnard worked on a series of articles identifying logistical hurdles in decarbonizing the trucking industry. Barnard is the founder and chief strategist of The Future is Electric, an analytical firm.

One issue: Agriculture predominantly takes place in rural communities in the U.S. “That poses a different set of challenges for the availability of charging infrastructure. The Level 3 charging [DC fast charging for heavy-duty vehicles] requires robust electrical infrastructure for high-capacity charging needs,” said Ghatikar.

The problem is, the United States’ grid hasn’t been upgraded or modernized for the last three to four decades. Wires carrying electricity to truck stops and warehouses are often thin and overhead, prone to overloads and extreme weather events. The distribution grid is also not currently equipped to handle the additional load that fully electrified agricultural transport would demand.

EV infrastructure like national charging stations is vital, but a centralized system that’s wholly dependent on the outdated grid might not be the best approach. A solution? Micro-grids.

A grid has three parts: An energy source where electricity is generated, a point where energy can be used, and a battery, where energy needs to be stored. Batteries help balance supply and demand, reducing strain during peak use or adding a boost when power is scarce. A micro-grid can serve just a single house, or even scale up to powering a neighborhood. They assure power availability, especially in areas prone to outages or scarcity. Ghatikar and Barnard’s model suggests deploying these microgrids wherever trucks need power, from farm to processor to rest stop. Microgrids can also address EV’s carbon problem.

“Depending on the energy matrix used to provide the energy, there might be no statistical difference in carbon emissions between using an EV and using a traditional diesel-powered engine,” said Lourival Monaco, a research assistant professor at Purdue University and research manager at Purdue DIAL Ventures, investigating agricultural economics.

The key difference is where power comes from. For example, if an electric vehicle is powered by electricity generated from burning coal, the total emissions might be the same as a gas-powered car. The key difference is simply where those emissions occur — at the power plant instead of from the vehicle’s tailpipe. One possible solution: Solar arrays could provide a significant chunk of the power required for microgrids.

“The plummeting costs of solar panels, despite the 50% tariff on Chinese panels, means that commercial solar installations at depots and truck stops are less expensive and with a faster return on investment than ever,” wrote Ghatikar and Barnard in an article in CleanTechnica.

Solar for EVs, combined with microgrids, could be something of a win-win. Farmers get electricity at minimal to no cost, and transportation runs at minimal to no emissions.

Dan Porter, director of operations and head cheesemaker at FireFly Farms Inc. at Deep Creek (Maryland), said his operation has already instituted solar panels to offset electricity costs. Currently, it doesn’t power EVs — electric trucks “are just currently way more expensive than a normal truck to purchase” — but rather helps them meet day-to-day electricity needs.

“Our grid makes about 60% of our power usage I think, but less in winter and more in summer. The array was 50% funded by a grant. [Overall] I think it was a good investment,” said Porter.

Grants, however, raise the next question. Who exactly is paying for electric trucks? Who pays to install things like microgrids?

The Right Policies

The immediate concern is that increased costs might shift to farmers and trucking companies — those costs are significant.

“A new fully electric commercial truck that you can put a milk tank body on costs 3X what a conventional diesel costs. Conventional $100k, electric $300k. There is also no used market. There are infinite used diesel trucks for $60k, but no electric,” said Porter.

It should be noted: Not all electric trucks are expensive. Smaller delivery trucks that travel relatively fixed, short distances every day already beat out diesel trucks in terms of cost. But that’s not the industry norm.

“Transportation is a tool. Processors look at this tool as an ROI-based decision. They’re going to leverage whatever makes financial sense to do — unless they can charge a premium for low carbon [products], it’s unlikely they’re going to invest in a tool that reduces their ROI,” said Monaco.

There is some concern that this premium might end up being a bad business decision.

“If you ask consumers ‘Do you think we need to have more sustainable products in supermarkets,’ over 80% will say yes. If you ask ‘Would you be willing to pay additional?’ in our research, 40% say no and 60% say yes,” said Monaco.

If consumers aren’t in a position to compensate for this extra cost of electrifying trucks, and processors see their bottom line changing, the onus of sustainability falls on the state.

In an ideal world, the extra costs of supporting farmers and transport companies that want to switch to EVs, as well as the setting up of micro-grids, would come from state, federal and local programs — a number of which do exist. One example is the USDA Rural Economic Development Program, which can provide grants of up to $2 million dollars to fund EV charging stations. The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and Inflation Reduction Act also contained pro-EV and grid policies in the form of tax credits and discretionary grants. And many states have a dizzying array of funding, too. Virginia, for example, allocates grants specifically for EV provisions in rural communities. Washington state deployed $85 million in grants during 2024 to build thousands of chargers.

And it’s not just direct funding that can help. When asked about what policy changes might enable electrification, Daniel Sperling laughs for a good 10 seconds before responding. “There are more than I can count, probably,” he said.

Sperling is the founding director of the Institute of Transportation Studies at the University of California, Davis, and a leading international expert on the energy and environmental aspects of transportation. Sperling outlines a number of non-grant-based policy shifts that could be implemented. Equipment manufacturers can pass on costs to final purchasers. Manufacturer mandates to sell a minimum number of electric vehicles can reduce prices for purchasers. Scholarships can be given to train new EV mechanics and maintenance staff.

“With policy changes, it’s vital to articulate benefits and be clear about potential outcomes, and be clear about the potential challenges that must be overcome,” said Ghatikar.

A circular economy of EVs can also help reduce costs. Batteries remain the most expensive part of an EV. For a personal vehicle, a 25% loss in battery capacity typically signals the need for a replacement. Instead of replacement, electric batteries or EVs themselves can be resold to less strenuous sectors, or deployed on shorter routes, recouping some costs.

From incentives to lower prices to battery swapping to rebates, there are ways to electrify the industry — but is there a will?

California-based Challenge Dairy purchased two EVs for their regular delivery route, and reached out to Offrange for a potential profile. But as the current administration announced changes in electrification policy, they rescinded this offer.

Changes to policies and subsidies currently involve a major rollback of the previous administration’s pro-EV policies. An important Biden-era goal was a (non-binding) agreement for 50% of vehicle sales to be EVs by 2050. The Trump administration has issued an executive order to dismantle this goal. They have also frozen the $5 billion National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure (NEVI) Formula Program for building EV infrastructure earmarked under Biden. The Inflation Reduction Act also supported the expansion of the USDA’s $1 billion dollar support for rural farmers to access clean energy — the Trump administration froze this funding. All of these changes can be understood in the context of the administration’s executive order from January 2025, “to eliminate the ‘electric vehicle (EV) mandate’ and promote true consumer choice.” A lot has also changed with the passing of the “Big, Beautiful Bill” on July 4th.

Slow Steps Forward

In 2021 and 2023, the California Air and Resource Board proposed two ambitious plans to transition a significant proportion of medium and heavy duty vehicles to electric, eliminating fossil fuels. Some agricultural and trucking organizations expressed unease, and the state has since withdrawn the requirement for comprehensive fleet electrification.

The state also requested a waiver from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to implement these emission standards, but repealed this request earlier this year.

“Identifying priority areas — both geographies and sectors, is key to begin the transition to EVs,” said Ghatikar.

For geographies, the agricultural powerhouses of California, New York, the Midwest, and Great Lakes regions are key. A lot of transport happens within these regions, minimizing the range required for EVs, and thereby reducing costs.

Among ag sectors, dairy production looks particularly promising. Dairy transport is always refrigerated, and around 15% of global fossil fuel energy is used in refrigeration.

“An electric refrigeration unit drawing from the battery could be 85-90% efficient overall,” said Ram Vijayagopal, research engineer at Argonne National Laboratory.

Most farms are within a 125-mile radius of a dairy processing facility, and data demonstrates that refrigerated tankers usually drive less than 300 miles a day. Strict labor laws surrounding the number of hours truckers can drive means they spend a lot of time doing other activities like loading, unloading, and resting. Since processors typically organize transport, a charging station at just one pickup point could provide enough charge for a truck to easily complete a day of driving. Coordinating charging with milk transfer means truckers won’t even lose time.

Whether electrification starts with dairy or not, the steps to enabling decarbonization of agricultural transport are clear. Solar-powered microgrids for charging, policy interventions, and research to lower costs, and rolling them out slowly in the sectors and geographies that will benefit the most. The real question is, will we wake up? Or pretend to keep sleeping?

Correction: This article initially stated that 15% of global emissions came from refrigerated transport. That figure includes all forms of refrigeration, not just from the transportation industry.

I imagine that you eat garlic. Most people do. Garlic is everywhere, all the time. It appears seasonless. It stores for months. Widely beloved, but rarely considered closely. So you might not know that these days, almost all of the garlic you can buy — whether from among a pile of perfect silverskins in your grocery-store basket, or an ivory-and-pink Chesnok red from the farmer’s market — is a little clone of some other garlic. You might not know that, nine months after you break off a clove and bury it, it will have fractaled into a head of near-identical cloves. You may not know that this process is faster and more consistent than planting seeds, which, like apples or citrus or rhubarb, don’t grow true — an offspring might not resemble its parent in any useful way.

But none of this is the crazy thing. The crazy thing is not that garlic isn’t grown from seeds; it’s that, for the most part, it can’t be. Ever since people began cultivating garlic — six millennia ago by some estimates, 10 by others — it’s primarily been done through asexual reproduction. In all those thousands of years, scarcely a single plant was coaxed to produce one solitary seed.

And so it forgot how.

About 15 years ago, a Missouri farmer and former union painter named Mark Brown began trying to coax true seeds from his garlic — an attempt, essentially, to undo thousands of years of domestication. (As an aside: What’s typically called garlic seed is not actually a seed, but rather the clove planted to grow a bulb. A true seed, on the other hand, is the small black sphere produced when pollen meets stigma.) It took years for the plants to cough up just a few small dark orbs. Only about 8 percent of them germinated. “You build your history of true garlic seed on failure,” Brown told me this spring, frogs chirping in the background. “That’s your foundation.”

The seeds that did germinate emerged with novel combinations of traits. He described one early success: a garlic that was pleasantly spicy, stored well, and grew a gargantuan scape. He named it Vavilov, after the Soviet geneticist. It’s still one of his most popular varieties, out of more than 200 that he grows. Brown is part of an informal network of independent growers who are cultivating garlic from true seeds — referred to, among garlic people, as TGS — to increase its resilience and diversity, to develop distinctive calling-card varieties, and to simply see what’s possible.

“Ironically,” Ted Jordan Meredith writes in The Complete Book of Garlic, something of a Bible for garlic people, “it is largely people that are responsible for recovering and preserving what was nearly lost as a result of human intervention.” It was a seductive notion: to create something new by making it wilder.

–

In the spring, Avram Drucker invited me to his farm, Garlicana. It’s located in Tiller, Oregon, about an hour and a half from the California border — a community made famous when much of it was put up for sale in 2017. (Most garlic grown in the United States comes from the Pacific Northwest and northern California. That said, American output is dwarfed by that of China, which produces around 90 percent of the world’s garlic, much of it destined for garlic powder and other processed products.) Before Drucker moved here in 2008, the land was just a junkyard, filled with trash and rusted-out cars. It took a decade to level the fields and produce arable soil, which even now is primarily hard, rust-red clay.

I’d met Drucker the previous fall at a Portland festival devoted to chicories, of all things. He stood behind a long table upon which were a dozen or more baskets of garlic and shallots, varieties listed on placards in elaborately calligraphed type. Those he’d developed from true seeds bore eclectic names. Some were invented, nonsense palindromes, while others were pulled from folklore or Ursula Le Guin novels. “When you breed anything, whether it be garlic or anything else,” he told me, “you create stories.”

“Ironically it is largely people that are responsible for recovering and preserving what was nearly lost as a result of human intervention.”

The tattoos wrapping down his arms ended in a small inked illustration of a garlic bulb on one middle finger. Before he started farming, he was squatting in Seattle and Portland, immersed in justice projects with a punk-rock bent — delivering books to prisoners, working with Food Not Bombs. In the world of garlic breeding, Drucker’s name is well-known; while reporting this story, I lost track of the number of times that someone mentioned his work.

He led me across the field, down the rows between plants sprouting flaglike from the soil. He grows around 150 types, roughly half of them created out of true seeds. Some were tall, some were short. Some were stiff, some were floppy. They were all green, but one was of a slightly bluer green. The bright afternoon sun washed out their differences, but I flatter myself to think I could actually discern the finer distinctions between horticultural groups — among the glazed purple stripes, marbled purple stripes, Creoles, or rocamboles — let alone between one generation of a breed and the next. The bulbs grew invisibly underground. I could not see garlic the way Drucker sees garlic, but it struck me that that was why I’d come: to understand why he and others do this work. To pay the feverish, single-minded attention necessary to grow true garlic seed was, I thought, to notice the object of that attention remade.

He describes himself as a garlic obsessive, though he says, often, that he also believes obsession is arbitrary — just about anything can catch your eye. Still, for the growers I spoke with, garlic seemed to have an intrinsic allure, even if it wasn’t something they always described in material terms.

“Garlic is mysterious and magical.”

“I’m drawn to it in a way that I’m not drawn to others.”

“​​As soon as you start thinking deeply about it, then you just can’t not anymore.”

“I think it’s kind of a sexy plant. I don’t consider radishes sexy, or turnips sexy, even though I like both of them.”

In The Complete Book of Garlic, Meredith describes garlic as “a plant that is both mundane in its everyday uses and mystical in its resonance with us.”

“You know,” Drucker told me, “one of the things you’re selecting for is charisma.” 

At the end of one row of garlic, a cluster of small pink flags fluttered in the breeze. Each one marked a separate generation of a separate TGS offspring — none of them yet remarkable enough to earn their own names. It might take years for any of them to pay off. Perhaps none of them will. The work is minute, meticulous, and unfathomably slow. Drucker might start with a hundred seeds and, over years, whittle down to a single plant he thinks is worth propagating, whether due to qualities of the bulbs or of the leaf architecture; then, he’ll grow it from seed cloves for stability.

The garlic flower contains both flower buds and tiny cloves called bulbils, a strange mash-up of organs, as though you were to look down at your hands and find toes growing among your fingers. This means that when the garlic bolts, the true-seed grower must remove the bulbils to encourage the flowers to mature. “It’s a long-term nerdy project,” Drucker said, “that hardly anyone’s ever going to stick through.”

–

The study of garlic reproductive pathways is only a few decades old. In the 1950s, Soviet researchers managed to get seeds from garlic, and starting in the 1980s, a flurry of papers by American and Japanese scientists described garlic fertility and seed production, while they also conducted expeditions to central Asia to collect wild garlic accessions for study. (The USDA declined multiple requests I submitted to speak with the pioneering botanists Barbara Hellier and Philipp Simon, who have shared garlic accessions with several of the growers I interviewed.)

“To protect their financial investments, the private sector has largely kept its research and development secretive and proprietary.”

Outside of the lab, breeding garlic using true seeds is even younger. Dillon Haggerty, a Washington farmer who is growing his first season of seeds, said, “It’s not like it’s a common practice.” Ted Meredith echoed this, telling me that the biggest change he’d observed since he started writing about garlic was more awareness of TGS among small-scale growers.

Yet it could also prove critical to the future of garlic as a crop. A 2004 study showed that around 50 percent of garlic varieties grown under different names are genetically identical. Generations of cloning have reduced its diversity, making it vulnerable to disease and climate change. Haggerty and Mark Brown both said they know some farmers who can’t grow garlic due to a fungus in their soil. Seeds, on the other hand, fuse genetic material from both pollinator and pollinated, increasing the crop’s resilience by introducing new combinations of traits. Some true seed advocates note that this genetic diversity will also be an asset as the planet grows hotter and extreme weather events become more common.

Garlic is remarkably sensitive to its environment, the same breed displaying different traits in different climates. True garlic seed allows growers to develop cultivars that thrive on their particular corner of farmland. In the late ’90s, Joseph Lofthouse quit his job as an analytical chemist and moved home to Paradise, a small Utah town near the Idaho border where his family had farmed for generations. He tried to grow garlic, but commercially available varieties failed to thrive in his high mountain valley, some 5,000 feet above sea level. His true garlic seed cultivars, on the other hand, are specifically adapted to their environment.

Lofthouse calls himself a “good little Mormon boy” and signs his emails “Love, Joseph.” He wears caftans and kilts and often goes barefoot. Though he used to sell his garlic, these days, he focuses exclusively on his breeding project — identifying promising new plants based on how they grow and how they taste. “I select for seediness above all other traits,” he told me. In contrast with Drucker’s meticulous accounts of bulb size, clove count, scape weight, and the like, Lofthouse is more inclined to let nature run its course; he doesn’t record his plants’ parentage. He is also devoted to spreading the word about true seed. He wrote a book, Landrace Gardening, which has sold nearly 10,000 copies, and manages a Facebook group of nearly a thousand amateur TGS growers. He thought they were driven by a shared desire: to make something connected to their own specific land.

–

As we walked among the garlic rows, Drucker turned back to look at me: “This will be a digression, but it’s important,” he insisted. “It’s a fundamental difference between my model and the professional model, and where those clash. That’s something that, to me, is worth elaborating.”

As the study of garlic reproduction has grown more robust, large private businesses have used this research “for larger-scale breeding projects,” Meredith writes in The Complete Book of Garlic. “To protect their financial investments, the private sector has largely kept its research and development secretive and proprietary.” In a sense, independent growers are working in direct opposition to this black box, committed to sharing their findings and seeking a closer relationship to the land.

The point of this story, I thought, wasn’t about the seeds themselves.

In 2012, Drucker and Meredith, who had been collaborating for several years, published a guide to growing true garlic seed. Although large commercial growers and researchers were producing true seed, they explained, few small growers were participating in the process. “We can change that,” they wrote. They published, in part, in order to democratize access to TGS; according to Drucker, they had learned that at least one patent application on the process was pending. “It’s a fuck-you to intellectual property rights,” he told me. “Ideas should be free.”

At Gateway Garlic Farms, Mark Brown, too, cited seed patents as “something that … made me go balls-out” on TGS. “Agronomical benefits belong to the world,” he told me. Since 1930, the Plant Patent Act has made it possible to patent crops produced asexually — the typical pathway for garlic. In 2001, the Supreme Court ruled that seeds could be patented, too. As public breeders face a decline, perhaps principled independent growers will be the ones picking up the slack. New types of garlic can be a mark of distinction for these small farmers, making them stand out in the market. “The hybrids that we’ve created all seem to have been superheroes,” Brown said.

–

After we spoke for the first time, Drucker steered me toward Rina Kamenetsky Goldstein, a prominent garlic scientist who recently retired from the Volcani Institute, Israel’s national agricultural research center. Kamenetsky, who was raised in Kazakhstan, likes to say that she’s from the same place as garlic — Central Asia being one proposed center of origin. She had an exuberant vision for the future: Garlic seeds, she hoped, could become an efficient alternative to propagation by cloves. They kept well, remained disease-free, and were lighter, smaller, and easier to transport.

But when we spoke, she predicted, dejectedly, that it would take decades for true garlic seed to be employed widely in this way. After all, breeding was a long, slow process, and broad commercial applications would require an enormous financial investment. “With all my respect, it’s on the level of hobbies with individual growers,” Kamenetsky said. “I am very pessimistic,” she went on. “I am very disappointed. I did a lot of research — and, finally, it doesn’t work commercially.”

At first, I found her pessimism infectious. Was true seed a futile exercise? You had to get on your hands and knees and take a hatpin or a penknife to a flower. Some plants are fertile for only a couple of days, and if you miss that window, better luck next year. The seeds themselves didn’t yield consistent results. It seemed like an absurd practice. But I wondered whether a commercial future was the point that I was looking for — or, maybe, if it was the point of a different story.

The point of this story, I thought, wasn’t about the seeds themselves. It wasn’t even really about the new breeds, but instead about how independent growers make meaning from the work itself. So many of them were interested in making and maintaining new types of garlic for the pleasure of diversity itself. They were still participating in the age-old practice of domestication, but in the opposite direction: By encouraging their garlic to be a little wilder, they were also expanding its potential. Brown hoped to grow a garlic whose flowers didn’t produce bulbils at all — that could produce true seed without human intervention.

Still, you couldn’t silo commercial concerns entirely, nor could you sever the practical from the philosophical arguments for TGS. “You grow things for money, for business, for joy,” Dillon Haggerty told me, “and I’m an information freak, a knowledge freak.” That very tension between domestication and wildness demanded closer attention to the plant and the land from which it grew; many of these growers also harbored a shared interest in sustainable growing practices. In the end, these conclusions weren’t unique to garlic. Drucker recalled encouraging a shopper at the farmer’s market to buy delicata squashes from several different stalls. “I’m the guy at the market who’s not the friendliest of people, but I’m the one that is like, ‘Check this out,’” he said. “I want people to have that connection, because that is going to counter a sense of alienation.”

In December 2023, former Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland designated an old farm in the city of Socorro, Texas, as a National Historic Landmark (NHL). On a list chock full of historic churches, former homes of presidents, and examples of grand architecture, the 14-acre farm with its dilapidated adobe-brick outbuildings stood out. Nonetheless, the National Park System and Haaland agreed that the property merited inclusion on the government’s official list of sites deemed historically significant.

That’s because Socorro’s Rio Vista Farm was formerly the Rio Vista Bracero Reception Center, a processing center through which tens of thousands of Mexican migrant farmworkers entered the U.S. in the mid-20th century as part of a temporary labor program. The arriving Mexican workers were known as braceros from the Spanish word for arm, brazo, roughly translating to “one who swings his arms.”

“One of the most incredible aspects about this story is that often in the United States, we think about food, but we don’t think about how our food is grown or who is enduring that extreme labor to bring us that food,” said Sehila Mota Casper, executive director of Latinos in Heritage Conservation (LHC). “The story behind Rio Vista is so important because of its association with agriculture and farm laborers.”

Rio Vista Farm’s journey to national recognition began in 2015, when Casper identified the site while working at the National Trust for Historic Preservation. The organization soon partnered with the City of Socorro and began working to secure funding for architectural studies, historical research, and interpretation, as well as critical stabilization and preservation work on the farm’s crumbling buildings.

Through archival work and interviews with former braceros, researchers pieced together Rio Vista Farm’s past and its role in the Bracero Program. The program, which ran from 1941 to 1964, was designed to recruit skilled agricultural laborers from Mexico to mitigate labor shortages in the United States resulting from American farmworkers enlisting during World War II and, later, the Korean War. Shortages were magnified during World War II when the government incarcerated tens of thousands of Japanese Americans, many of whom were farmworkers.

The young men who applied for the Bracero Program at intake stations across Mexico made significant sacrifices in pursuit of economic opportunities in the U.S. Many hoped that higher wages across the border would allow them to provide for those they left behind. “These are not just farmworkers, these are fathers [and] husbands who left behind their wives, their children, and also their culture and language,” explained Casper.

Applicants underwent humiliating medical and psychological examinations and delousing with dangerous chemicals such as DDT, before being invited to make the trip northward through Mexico and across the border, often in cargo trains without seats, windows, or water stops along the way. Mel Escobar, a former LHC graduate student fellow who researched bracero migration, said many “expressed pride in their role, despite enduring hardships such as racial tensions, low wages, humiliation, and navigating an unfamiliar culture.”

In the 1950s and early 1960s, the barracks on Socorro’s Rio Vista Farm served as dormitories, offices, and a mess hall to house and process the more than 80,000 braceros who passed through each year. It was one of five long-term bracero reception centers in California, Arizona, and Texas. At these sites, workers signed short-term contracts and boarded buses to farms in 30 participating states, going on to pick fruit in Michigan or trim tomato plants in California. Over the lifespan of the Bracero Program, more than 4.6 million contracts were issued.

After the Bracero Program ended in 1964, many of Rio Vista Farm’s buildings fell into disrepair, and its former use slipped from popular memory. According to Victor Reta, historic preservation officer at the City of Socorro, for decades before its recent revival, Rio Vista Farm had been “a mystery, like people knew that it was there, but didn’t really know what the barracks were for or anything of that nature.”

When Casper and Reta set out to preserve the old farm, 13 of the site’s remaining 18 buildings were empty and unmaintained. One that had been built for the Bracero Program was at risk of imminent collapse. The others had been repurposed as a community center and administrative offices for the City of Socorro.

“We talked about what the big dream was with the buildings, and we talked through what the community needed,” said Casper. Early on, the team made plans to nominate the site for NHL status. “We always knew the history was so significant that it should be a National Historic Landmark,” she said.

Before Rio Vista Farm became an NHL in December 2023, the City of Socorro received grant funding from the Mellon Foundation to pursue another of the team’s early plans: establishing the nation’s first Bracero Museum and Cultural Center at the site. A project to rehabilitate and renovate one of the existing barracks for the museum is currently underway. Slated to open in 2026, the museum will feature an exhibition about the Bracero Program curated by historians from the University of Texas at El Paso.

While the museum has yet to open, other efforts to help the public connect with Rio Vista Farm have already launched, including an award-winning online exhibition about the Bracero Program created by LHC based on Escobar’s research. A ribbon-cutting in May 2024 to honor the site’s NHL designation and its being home to the nation’s first bilingual Spanish and English landmark plaque drew dozens of interested locals. “We’re seeing more and more visitation to the site as the story has become better known,” Reta said. “It’s been a really great project to connect people to their history.”

Casper said the task of honoring and educating the public about Rio Vista Farm’s past has begun to feel even more urgent since President Donald Trump took office again in January 2025. Trump has issued executive orders to change historical interpretation at National Park Service (NPS) sites in ways that obscure the contributions of working people and communities of color. Seemingly as part of these efforts, NPS removed Rio Vista Bracero Reception Center from its website earlier this year. “These actions send a chilling message about whose history is valued and whose can be thrown away,” wrote Casper in a press release.

The Trump Administration has also launched a crackdown on immigrants, sparking fear in farmworker communities nationwide. While the Bracero Program ended in 1964, the nation’s agricultural sector remains dependent on immigrant workers from Mexico. Almost two-thirds of crop workers interviewed as part of the Department of Labor’s National Agricultural Workers Survey in fiscal years 2021 and 2022 were born there. Another 6 percent were born elsewhere in Central America. Typically, 90 percent of those with H-2A visas, issued to foreign laborers to work agricultural jobs on a temporary basis, are from Mexico.

As Reta said, “The story that began at [Rio Vista Farm] and helped create America is still going on today.”

Editor’s note: The author of this piece writes for the National Trust for Historic Preservation’s Saving Places.

Horror fans are spoiled for choice when it comes to films about flesh-eating bugs. Giant irradiated ants with poison fangs threaten to extinct humankind in Them! Arachni-lobsters stagger out of The Mist to snap terrified Mainers in half while dog-size quasi-spiders (ok, not technically insects) lay eggs inside alive humans. Swarms of grasshoppers bloodily wing their way through men’s heads and torsos in Locusts: The 8th Plague.

For sheer dread, though, nothing beats a short film made by the U.S. Department of Agriculture in 1963, called Look Out for Screwworms. That’s because every brief, suspenseful scene in its two minute and 26 second run time is absolute fact: the scientists exposing screwworm larvae to “gamma rays from radioactive cobalt;” the clueless cows wandering fields where danger assuredly lurks; the rancher discovering maggots burrowed deep in the meat of his live sheep. Not seen but potentially more panic-inducing is the rare possibility of human death to what’s known as screwworm myiasis; a man in Costa Rica died from this last summer.

The New World screwworm (Cochliomyia hominivorax) is a devastating pest — a species of blowfly — that’s native to the Americas. It was mostly eradicated from the U.S. in 1966 then beaten thousands of miles back south over the course of the next 30 years. However, it has managed to jump the jungle-y barrier afforded by Panama’s Darién Gap (where sterilization techniques have long been implemented to keep it at bay), possibly due to reduced jungle cover and more grazing livestock in the area. It’s made its way northward — from Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Honduras and El Salvador, Belize and Guatemala, and into Mexico, wreaking havoc along the way on all manner of livestock (and one deeply unfortunate human).

The advance of the screwworm, which is currently about 600 miles from the Mexico/Texas border, is making U.S. ranchers exceedingly nervous. Will defenses launched by university researchers, inspectors at USDA’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS), border-scouting “tick rider” cowboys, and scientists at fly-sterilizing facilities actually hold? That’s the question on every Southern rancher’s mind.

If “they were to come back like they were, it would put 90% of the cattle people out of business,” cattleman Jim Kearney, who helped his father in the “nasty” fight against the screwworm the last time around, told the Texas Standard. Treating screwworm infection is always disgusting business — the maggots have to be removed before the wound is cleaned and sutured — but back in Kearney’s father’s day antiseptic pine tar oil and insecticide smears added their noxious scents to the already-putrid smell of decaying flesh.

Philip Kaufman is an entomologist at Texas A&M and helped compile a new screwworm fact sheet that’s being distributed to ranchers. He isn’t prone to screwworm pessimism. “We are concerned but we are not in a crisis,” he told Offrange. “People are getting trained up and we’re gonna tackle this and solve it again.”

Also working in mammals’ favor (mammals are the preferred hosts, although birds will do in a pinch) is the fact that screwworms aren’t great at being parasites. Unlike other types of blowflies, these metallic-blue members of family Calliphoridae lay their eggs in live animals. They’re attracted by the smell of blood, from the wound left from a lamb’s umbilical cord, for example; or from castrating, branding, dehorning, and ear-tagging cattle, sheep, and goats. Horse ears can be munched raw by ticks, and among wild deer, shedding velvet from antlers is a siren call to screwworm moms to come on over and lay their eggs — up to 300 at a time. These hatch out spined maggots that anchor themselves into flesh, then proceed to eat their way through it, sometimes deep into muscle. If it’s deep enough the host animal cannot survive.

If “they were to come back like they were, it would put 90% of the cattle people out of business,”

“Normally with parasites, it’s not good to kill the host but inherently, by its host dying, that helps keep its numbers low,” Kaufman said. “If it were phenomenally good at its job we’d be overwhelmed with them.” Fire ants are powerful screwworm predators but unsurprisingly, no one is talking about dispersing more fire ants to eat the screwworms — although Kaufman expects native ant populations will help with the problem.

Still, there is bad news. The last time screwworms infested the American South, the population of Texas white-tailed deer was in the 10s of thousands. That population has since ballooned into the millions, according to Kaufman — in part, probably, because of the absence of screwworms to curtail their numbers. With more potential hosts around, eradicating screwworms will require a lot more effort should the pests make it over our border.

There’s been talk of using ivermectin to control screwworms in both wild and managed animals. But listening to Kaufman rattle off its drawbacks highlights the complexity of the task at hand. For starters, “Screwworm is not on the label for ivermectin,” he said, and FDA would have to be petitioned to change that. “They’re talking about adding ivermectin to [livestock] feed but how much do you give them? You don’t want to overdose them. You don’t want to under-dose. How long do you feed? Do you do two weeks on, two weeks off? A bobcat, it’s not going to eat corn [or pellets] out of a feeder, how do you control for that? What’s the withdrawal period going to be? Right now, it’s a 56-day withdrawal period for cattle” when used as an injected or pour-on dewormer.

“So you can’t butcher your cattle for 56 days. If you’re feeding wildlife, what does that look like for hunting season?” Studies, Kaufman said, would require “a lot of money, and they have to be done on every species you’re going to expose.”

Hopefully, it won’t come to this. Imports across the border of cattle, horses, and bison were halted this past May (as of this writing they’re being phased back in) and APHIS is working out how best to inspect and treat animals at the border and elsewhere, and how to quarantine regions or whole states if necessary.

“Reporting is the number one thing people can do. If you ignore this, that fly population is just going to get bigger and bigger ... this is a community issue.”

Fly sterilization techniques — male flies get zapped with radiation then dropped by plane over screwworm hotspots to mate with females that produce zero offspring — emerged in the 1950s and are still used, to great effect, today. A sterile-fly facility in Panama is still producing 100 million sterile flies for release per week, both an old J-06 strain that’s still effective, and a new one called PANCR-24 that was bred from flies in current outbreak areas. The U.S. is also funding updates to a Mexican sterilization facility and building a new one at an Air Force facility in Mission, Texas; the former should be online by summer of 2026.

Meanwhile, putting eyes on animals both wild and managed is the number one way to control for screwworms. To that end, USDA’s tick riders, who patrol the Rio Grande on horseback looking for animals carrying fever ticks, will have screwworms added to their portfolio of pests. Kaufman said ranchers must be on high alert, too: Check trail cams for animals “acting oddly, get out your binoculars and have a look.”

Changing livestock management might eventually be in order — forgoing dehorning, for example. And most crucially, inspecting animals often and thoroughly, and reporting any infestation to a veterinarian, even if it means the ranch could be quarantined. “Reporting is the number one thing people can do,” said Kaufman. “If you ignore this, that fly population is just going to get bigger and bigger and cause more of a problem for everybody else. This is a community issue.”

A bumblebee prepares to leave its hive. But first, it passes through a dispenser and picks up a dusting of biofungicide, a pesticide made of mycelium, that it will soon pass on to every strawberry flower it visits.

The pest-control formula will then be transmitted from flower to flower by other bees and different pollinators who visit next, hopefully preventing the farm’s strawberries from developing the gray mold no one wants.

When the bee returns to its hive after a long day of work, it enters through a different, pesticide-free entrance than it exited, so that new pest-control dust would not be brought in to contaminate the whole hive. This isn’t an accident; it’s a precise design for a method called entomovectoring, a buzz-worthy biological control solution to the pests and plant diseases destroying between 20 and 40 percent of the global annual harvest.

“As long as the crop has flowers that are visited by pollinators … then the possibility is there,” said Peter Kevan, a British-Canadian entomologist and professor emeritus at the University of Guelph, who quite literally (co-)wrote the book on entomovectoring. The method takes advantage of the fact that bumblebees, honeybees, and other pollinators visit thousands of flowers each day, making them an unexpected delivery system for fungicides and insecticides made from biological agents.

“Pollinating insects by their very activity spread tiny [pollen grains] between plants, so why not [use] them to disseminate other tiny particles such as microbes, that can serve to suppress plant pests and pathogens?” reads the introduction to Kevan’s book. He is referring particularly to microbial pesticides, which consist of a microorganism such as a fungus, virus, or bacteria as the active ingredient — the chosen agents depend on the particular pest being treated.

Since he first began studying this method two decades ago, Kevan has tested its potential on a number of crops including strawberries and greenhouse tomatoes, finding success with over 58% increased yield in some cases. Other studies around the world have also shown that biocontrol agents spread by bees can manage fire blight in apples, fungal diseases in tomatoes, and even borers in coffee plants when paired with specific microbial agents known to combat these issues. The method is being picked up across North America, Australia, Brazil, and Europe, and is now being evaluated in India, too.

“It’s taken off on a number of crops,” Kevan said. “People are becoming more and more interested in growing things without so much dependence on harsh chemicals.”

Along with crop protection without spraying en masse resulting in spray drift or run-off, this method claims to offer enhanced pollination. Bees spread pollen along with the protective treatment, which in turn improves crop yield and quality, especially for organic farmers who shy away from adding additional fertilizers and pesticides. Entomovectoring can also reduce the need for broadcast spraying equipment since hives are individually inoculated.

“Why not [use bees] to disseminate other tiny particles, such as microbes, that can serve to suppress plant pests and pathogens?”

The pesticides used through this method must be selected carefully, both for their effectiveness against the pest at hand and for their safety for bees. As a result, pesticides made of bacteria, fungus, and antibiotics have been the most successful. “It may be a little more management intensive in as much as there has to be somebody to look after the bees,” said Kevan.

Because of this, some are skeptical of how feasible this method really is. In 2024, Leisure Farms in Northeastern Ontario tried using entomovectoring to reduce aphids, which had been causing barley yellow dwarf disease in their oat fields. The hope was also to leave aphids‘ natural enemies, ladybugs, untouched.

The study showed a significant reduction in the population of aphids, but the family farm was left uncertain that the bee husbandry trade-offs were worth it. The scientists in this study did not track the impact of the bees on the final crop yield, leading to an incomplete picture for a farm that needs to closely monitor its bottom line.

“Oats, wheat, barley, these are relatively low-value, high-volume crops. In other words, we have to produce it cheaply and productively, and if we’re managing bumblebees … that’s not productive,” said Ben Schapelhouman, agronomist for Leisure Farms. “I’m not all that interested in that, just because … even if it does work, it might be too expensive to carry out and not scalable,” pointing to the fact that there might only be specific use cases where it is actually profitable to raise and care for bees.

There are other limitations to bee vectoring. Sometimes, the pollinators can spread harmful pathogens to their hives, and other times they may not be able to fly through extremely hot or rainy weather. Chemical agents also often work faster than their microbial counterparts. In many places, there’s also a lack of existing support for growers who may want to implement and troubleshoot bee vectoring technology.

“We have to produce [crops] cheaply and productively, and if we’re managing bumblebees, that’s not productive.”

“Bee vectoring is not a silver bullet and, as such, should be used as part of a more holistic pest management program,” said Les Shipp, a former greenhouse entomologist with Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada in an earlier interview.

However, there are companies scaling bee vectoring successfully. One such company is BVT, currently in the process of getting permits to operate under regulations in the U.S., Canada, Mexico, and European markets. It already has customers trying out bee entomovectoring with a proprietary powder mainly made of fungus. It’s been used on sunflowers, fruit, and even canola, another high-volume crop, and promises yield increases of at least 30 percent.

“It’s our job as farmers to distinguish ourselves and be different, to do something bigger, better, or more efficient than the next guy, so it’s a competition out here,” said Winn Morgan, co-founder of Major League Blueberries farm in Nicholls, Georgia, in an interview with BVT in 2021, adding that bee vectoring helped his operation switch to organic. “This technology using bees as a vector … it changed the way we farm here.”

“If you have a normal rate of 50 percent pollination success we’re having more like 65, 68 percent on most of our varieties here, and it’s throwing out a bigger crop,” Morgan said.

There is still lots of work to be done to determine just how widespread entomovectoring could become in helping solve pest management and pollination challenges. But, ask one of its many staunch proponents — they’ll argue that involving pollinators in our food systems in this new way could help us rise to the challenge of meeting global food demand.

In a corral that skirts a weathered red barn, Emily Black approaches a chestnut brown horse, placing her hands against its shoulder, careful not to press too hard as she works with the animal to correct a joint that’s lost its full range of motion. It’s part of her typical day — and the horse is one of her regular patients — as an animal chiropractor who serves clients along US-131, from Kalamazoo to Traverse City, Michigan.

Black is part of a developing field of specialists — chiropractors certified to work on animals large and small. “Instead of treating just a six-inch square on a human, I’m able to treat both humans and all sorts of animals,” said Black, whose client list is about 75% animals and includes horses, cattle, alpacas, goats, and pigs. She also provides chiropractic services to humans on some of the farms she visits. “Vets recommend chiropractic adjustments for several reasons, such as pain relief, performance enhancement and overall wellness.”

Animal Chiropractors 101

Animal chiropractors have been around informally since the early 1900s. However, it wasn’t until the late 1980s that Michigan veterinarian Sharon Willoughby-Blake became interested in chiropractic care after seeing its effect on a canine patient, and a small group of colleagues founded the first school and established certification standards. In 1989, the American Veterinary Chiropractic Association (AVCA) opened as a central place for those interested in pursuing careers as animal chiropractors. Later, Willoughby-Blake also opened the Options for Animals College of Animal Chiropractic headquartered in Kansas, which provides the coursework needed to become a licensed animal chiropractor per the AVCA and International Veterinary Chiropractic Association (IVCA).

To date, there are 803 animal chiropractors licensed by AVCA and 714 by IVCA. A veterinarian or human chiropractic degree is required before becoming an animal chiropractor.

“It’s about 250 hours of education along with hands-on training with animals,” said Jess Stief, an animal chiropractor based in Illinois. Stief works with a variety of farm animals along with smaller animals like dogs and cats. “You sit for a board exam with either the AVCA or IVCA. Once you get your license, there’s continuing education and you re-license every couple of years — just to stay current.”

But What Does an Animal Chiropractor Do?

Just like humans, animals can develop issues with joint mobility, spine alignment, arthritis, muscle spasms, and more. While traditional veterinary medicine often turns to pharmaceutical solutions, an animal chiropractor focuses on correcting alignment and function with physical intervention.

“Imagine large working draft-type horses getting sore and experiencing dysfunction in their back end, dairy cows getting sore in their hips and stifles from their udders, show goats presenting with sore necks from training, and agility dogs with sore shoulders,” said Black.

Common ailments where a farmer or rancher would contact an animal chiropractor or request a referral from their vet include problems with an animal’s gait, posture, chronic pain, mobility issues, and behavior such as extreme stress or anxiety.

But it’s not like animal chiropractors are putting the cow or horse up on a drop table like a human chiropractor does. Stief, for example, uses a step stool or ladder, depending on the size of the animal she’s treating, in order to get to the right angle to adjust their spines, pelvis, or hips. Black often moves with each animal, say, applying pressure to a horse’s shoulders while it is walking.

Livestock vs Humans

Animal chiropractic adjustments are similar to human chiropractic adjustments. Once the chiropractor locates the problem area — usually one with decreased or restricted motion — they apply a “high-force, low-amplitude thrust” specific to that joint to regain normal movement. For Black and Stief, this equates to gentle pressure with ideally little to no pain during the adjustment.

Without any “conscious, verbal communication,” according to Stief, they must rely upon non-verbal cues, especially when it comes to farm animals. “Most of them are going to be flight animals, right? They’re prey animals so my work with a dog versus cattle in that regard, I have to take into account how they’re wired a little bit differently.”

And, of course, it depends on the type of animal. For example, a horse will be used to human contact through regular grooming and riding, while a dairy animal that’s had little human touch tends to be more skittish, providing a much smaller window in which it can receive care.

“Once in a while, if something is really sore, I’ll get a little ear flick here and there, or somebody will kind of cock a leg or bite a little, but really, there’s not a lot of that aggression at all,” said Black.

But Is There Proof?

Chiropractic care, in general, is often met with skepticism as some practices or therapies lack scientific-based evidence proving that they’re beneficial. Further, within the animal chiropractic field, some veterinarians argue that there’s no evidence that these sorts of adjustments actually improve animal health. And, if animals can’t talk, how do animal chiropractors know the adjustments are working? Observance of better mobility and motion, the appearance of reduced pain and discomfort, and improved gait and posture, according to Black.

Rachel Rice, co-owner of True North Equine LLC at Cold Spring Farm in Maple City, Michigan, said she can attest to the value of an animal chiropractor’s abilities to keep animals like the horses she trains healthy and happy.

“Horses are always just messing around,” said Rice. “They lay down and roll and throw their neck out of place. It doesn’t take much for them to mess themselves up.” Especially since many of the horses she works with also barrel race, Rice has Black out monthly to work on 12 to 15 horses — she said the results speak for themselves.

“We had this mare with some underdeveloped muscle,” said Rice. “The horse’s withers, which are like extensions of their vertebrae right above their shoulders, had sunk down below her shoulder.” Rice credits the horse’s recovery to regular chiropractic adjustment, specific exercises and the use of MagnaWave — an unverified type of therapy that claims to use electromagnetic pulses to stimulate cellular activity, improve circulation, and promote healing. “The mare now has correct position and her back’s lifted up, allowing her to compete at a much higher level than she was previously.”

Instead of thinking of it as an either/or situation, the work of animal chiropractors can complement traditional veterinary care.

“The overall medical field and people’s interest in alternatives that are noninvasive, that don’t require drugs — these types of approaches, I think, are just growing in popularity and understanding around a healthy animal,” said Stief.

“This isn’t a replacement for traditional veterinary medicine,” said Stief. “But I will say I think the veterinary field — just like human medicine has — is getting more open-minded and holistic in its approach. I’ve never had a veterinarian respond poorly to the work I do.

“An animal that feels better in their body is going to have lower cortisol levels, it’s going to feel better, it’s going to digest its food better and so what you’ll notice is an animal — whether it’s a farm animal or a horse — is that if it feels better, you’re going to see overall improvement in the quality of life, whether you’re measuring performance or digestion, you’re going to see changes as that body falls back into homeostasis and balance.”

Every gold rush needs its proverbial shovel salesmen, even when the wealth in question lies above the soil. The bonanza Eric Meltzer and Byron Boos hope to facilitate comes in the form of hairlike, half-inch, reddish-orange threads: the stigmas of a small purple flower that, when dried, become the most expensive spice in the world.

The two are partners in Pennsylvania Saffron, LLC, which operates a research farm about 50 miles northwest of Philadelphia in the small community of Barto. Although the company harvested over 83,000 saffron crocuses from its one-acre plot last year, founder Meltzer said farming the flowers is mostly a means to a greater end.

“Our goal isn’t to be saffron farmers, but to be a technology company that solves the problem of mechanizing it,” explained Meltzer, who came to the crop in 2022 after selling his stake in a prior business. “We’re trying to make it so small American farmers can make money growing saffron, doing it in a way that’s different from how it’s been done since the time of the Bible.”

Saffron’s high prices — a half-gram retails for $14, or nearly $12,700 per pound, through Pennsylvania Saffron’s website — have long been tied to its intensive production. Traditionally, to avoid damaging the delicate flowers, each crocus is picked and has its three stigmas removed by hand. It can take 150 flowers to yield one gram of finished spice.

While the colonial U.S. once enjoyed a domestic saffron industry (coincidentally anchored in Philadelphia and supplied by nearby Pennsylvania Dutch farmers, who exported the crop to Spanish colonies in the Caribbean), it dwindled away after British disruption to trade routes during the War of 1812. We currently meet its saffron demand through imports, over 54 tons in 2024, from places with lower labor costs.

(Iran produces about 90% of the world’s saffron, but much of it is reimported through Spain or other countries to circumvent U.S. sanctions. Afghanistan, India, and Greece are among the other leading growers.)

Boos, Pennsylvania Saffron’s chief operating officer, envisions American saffron producers finding a toehold in the domestic market through greater automation at every step. He’s been engineering a modified garlic planter to put crocus corms in the ground, a motorized harvesting platform to speed a worker’s progress through the field, and mechanical systems for separating the stigmas from the flowers.

“We’re basically developing a playbook for farmers, so if you want to grow saffron, this is where you start,” he said. “But because we haven’t grown it before, every one of the elements is unproven. It’s a little daunting.”

“Because we haven’t grown it before, every one of the elements is unproven. It’s a little daunting.”

Even without specialized equipment, a growing number of U.S. farmers have been staking their own claims on saffron’s golden vein. The crop’s domestic resurgence traces to 2015, when University of Vermont entomologist Margaret Skinner partnered with one of her postdoctoral researchers, Arash Ghalehgolabbehbahani, an Iranian who was curious if the crop could grow in his new home. To their surprise, the plant proved remarkably resilient and produced solid, high-quality yields.

Ghalehgolabbehbahani and Skinner went on to establish the North American Center for Saffron Research and Development at UVM and held their first saffron-growing workshop in 2017. The center now boasts over 800 members on its SaffronNet listserv, and its most recent workshop, held earlier this month, had over 100 registrants from 25 different states. Commercial saffron operations have popped up in Vermont, Texas, California, and Washington. Skinner says hobby growers are successfully raising the plant as far afield as Alaska.

She sees saffron as a particularly great fit for small-scale, diversified farms like those that proliferate in Vermont: Although harvesting takes a burst of hard work, she says, it’s squeezed into a couple of weeks in late fall, when most other crops are done for the year. And because the spice is dried, farmers can store it and make sales over time, potentially supplementing their income during leaner seasons.

Mechanization of the type Pennsylvania Saffron is pursuing could be helpful for those farmers, but bigger barriers to domestic saffron may lie downstream of growing the crop. Rebecca Brown, a researcher at the University of Rhode Island who’s experimented with saffron, said that drying the spice is technically considered food processing. State-level regulations that weren’t designed with saffron in mind can demand cumbersome compliance paperwork or require a sterilizing “kill step” that would destroy its delicate flavors.

Finding a market also remains a major challenge. U.S. growers can’t compete on cost with even the most expensive imported saffron; Antonio Sotos, who exports the coveted La Mancha variety from Spain, says he pays farmers the equivalent of about $2,500 per pound. Although the Trump administration has generally increased tariffs on saffron-exporting countries, those rates aren’t anywhere near enough to close the price gap with domestic saffron.

“Our goal isn’t to be saffron farmers, but to be a technology company that solves the problem of mechanizing it.”

Ethan Frisch, co-founder and co-CEO of online spice company Burlap & Barrel, said he’s explored adding U.S.-grown saffron to his lineup. But the selling point of domestic sourcing, he continues, isn’t enough to justify the much higher cost. He also wants to keep supporting the female Afghan farmers who currently supply his saffron, for whom agriculture is among the few income-generating activities permitted by the country’s Taliban-led government.

“Customers are reluctant to buy saffron in the first place,” Frisch said, with the notable exceptions of the Indian and Iranian diaspora, who value its subtle, floral, honey-like flavors in dishes like Persian rice and paella. “In my experience, most European-background Americans are not cooking with saffron on a regular basis, and trying to get them to has been a huge challenge.”

While some U.S. saffron growers have been able to market directly to customers, charging between $50 and $75 per gram — up to $34,000 per pound — volumes remain low. Other marketing possibilities include value-added products, like infused honeys and maple syrups, or the pharmaceutical industry, where saffron has been studied as a treatment for conditions like premenstrual syndrome, Alzheimer’s disease, and depression. (Traditional medical systems like Ayurveda have also claimed the spice to be a potent aphrodisiac.)

Meltzer with Pennsylvania Saffron agrees that the industry is at best embryonic. “We certainly don’t want to solicit people to pour all their money into pickaxes,” he said, returning to the gold rush analogy. “We don’t have a complete answer yet.”

But he and Boos are hopeful that the time will soon be right for American farmers to dig in. They point to the rise of foodie culture, a growing desire for local sourcing, and visual-driven social media that might reward saffron’s striking hues.

“People are using things that are unique and different,” Boos pointed out. “Well, saffron is the most unique and the most different.”

A new generation is currently emerging across the rangelands of northern California, and it’s a hungry one. Some new generations inspire hope for the future. This one, however, bears the stench of destruction — or, in some cases, onions.

“Some producers walk out in spring and summer and can smell the onions, because the grasshoppers are eating them so viciously,” said Modoc County natural resources advisor Laura Snell of her region in California’s far northeast. She works for the University of California Cooperative Extension. “You can smell the grasshoppers eating your vegetables. No one feels good about that.”

Snell first spoke with Offrange last fall, after a particularly devastating season for California and seven other nearby states. A press release from last summer said her county had been “invaded” by grasshoppers, a voracious critter that will consume practically anything growing out of the ground, and lots of it. Just 30 pounds of grasshoppers will eat the same amount of vegetation as one 600-pound cow. Modoc was listed among eight other northern California counties as some of the worst hit. And that was their fifth consecutive year facing a grasshopper infestation — now they’re closing in on a sixth.

It was also in the fall when the pods now hatching this generation of grasshoppers were laid. The most effective time to try to stop the spread of the pests is between then and the spring, when they gestate from crawling nymphs into adults that can fly 15 miles or more. But the bureaucratic pest management systems in place rarely operate on that timeline. And the farmers and ranchers of Modoc County are paying a steep price.

Snell has watched as what once was an issue only for rangelands, grasslands, and hay production now disrupts every realm of local agriculture. Last year, the county lost 30 percent of its crops to grasshopper damage alone, with some producers reporting closer to 70 percent crop loss. Also suffering is the local population of bees, which tend to spend summers up there in the mountains. But damage to early crops and flowers meant 2024 was the first year Snell and her team observed a major hit to honey producers. “You can see the effects at the now-sparse local farmers markets and food co-ops,” she said.

The pests themselves aren’t new to the region, but the rate and persistence of their spread is. For generations, grasshopper invasions were cyclical, with something like one bad grasshopper year for every five good years — and existing guidance on how to manage them reflects that. But even as the county enters its sixth straight season of grasshopper hell — with the insects falling, as one local farmer put it to The Los Angeles Times, “like hail” — local authorities say they are limited in their ability to fix it.

Though Snell and her colleagues have tried, the federal agency devoted to grasshopper management — USDA’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) — has proved difficult to recruit. Each year the county needs to request an environmental assessment that would clearly detail the scope of the problem and lay out a plan of action. But rarely is it completed and approved in time to have a meaningful effect on grasshopper containment.

“You can smell the grasshoppers eating your vegetables. No one feels good about that.”

Unlike its neighbors in states like Oregon, Arizona, and Nevada, California doesn’t have a standing abatement program in place that would allow it to address this issue at the necessary scale and with the necessary speed. Reporting from the LA Times last year states that “California discontinued its abatement program more than 50 years ago because the grasshoppers had stopped becoming an issue until their recent return.” Without it, the county is forced to file ad hoc requests, which are very hit-or-miss.

Modoc County’s agricultural commissioner Heather Kelly said that without an environmental assessment in place, the county’s pest monitoring efforts are insufficient. With help from APHIS, they could “immediately go into action and make the appropriate applications so it doesn’t get beyond that property and damage adjacent crops.”

Though nothing when it comes to grasshopper abatement appears to happen on a very immediate, or linear, scale.

In an email, APHIS’s National Policy Manager William Wesela wrote that in May 2024 his office did send grasshopper experts from APHIS Oregon down to survey for grasshoppers at the Lower Klamath National Wildlife Refuge, where “populations of potentially damaging grasshoppers” were identified. But the wildlife refuge doesn’t technically contain any rangeland, a congressionally mandated stipulation of APHIS’s jurisdiction. Consequently, APHIS was unable to assist with treatments, which typically involve the application of an insecticide like carbaryl, diflubenzuron, malathion, or chlorantraniliprole.

Later last summer, APHIS did some surveys of Modoc County’s portions of the Modoc National Forest, where they found a different species of grasshopper and therefore determined it “would not benefit the adjacent cropland” to treat it.

Just 30 pounds of grasshoppers will eat the same amount of vegetation as one 600-pound cow.

Wesela said APHIS is “considering an environmental assessment for Modoc County” on an ongoing basis, though it will be a challenge to pursue because “historically, APHIS has not seen grasshopper activity in this area of the country.” He added that grasshopper populations are surveyed annually in states where outbreaks are “common.” But in states like California, he said surveys may be needed “when outbreaks occur” — which, on the grasshopper’s timeline, is already too late. But after nearly six straight years of catastrophic invasion in northeast California, it’s hard to know what the agency considers “historic” or “common.”

As outdated as these abatement policies now seem, the science for monitoring and understanding these insects and their behaviors hasn’t quite kept up either. No one is comfortable saying definitively what has caused the extended outbreak, but the strongest hypothesis appears to be drought, made more extreme by climate change. When the soils are wetter, for example, a naturally occurring fungicide keeps the grasshopper populations at bay.

Without better, more proactive solutions coming from the top, pesticides and insecticides are filling the treatment gap for the average solution-starved producer.

Of course, some science indicates that synthetic pesticides ultimately worsen drought by disrupting the soil biome. That partially explains why the California Department of Pesticide Regulation (DPR) is currently rolling out a new phase of its Sustainable Pest Management strategy, meant to “increase the availability of sustainable pest management alternatives [...] to replace the highest risk pesticide uses by 2050,” according to an email from DPR deputy director Sapna Thottathil.

She continued: “As climate change introduces new and increasing pest pressures, current tools decline in efficacy, and scientific studies identify potential risks that require restrictions on high-risk pesticides,” DPR will work alongside state, federal, and local agencies to improve “pest prevention, management of invasive species and other pests, and ongoing work to promote healthy soils and climate-smart agriculture.”

“You can see the effects at the now-sparse local farmers markets and food co-ops.”

While this strategy may have an overall benefit in the long run, it’s left some producers fearful that they may lose access to the only tool that’s had even a remote impact on the grasshopper epidemic in the short term. As their desperation grows, they’re even turning to ChatGPT for answers — which means Snell spent last summer debunking a bunch of online myths.

“It was saying dust your plants with flour and then the grasshoppers will choke on the flour and die,” Snell said. “In good ChatGPT style it had cartoon pictures of grasshoppers choking on flour.”

But flour isn’t going to cut it. The only real solution lies in proactive land management — not reactive surveying, spraying, or the sprinkling of baking supplies. The leaders of Modoc County know this, but have had trouble finding partners with the resources and the will to help. Snell predicted her county was unlikely to get increased federal support for grasshoppers this fiscal year. And with the tumultuous start to the second Trump administration, federal funding may be even harder to come by. Wesela from APHIS said he preferred “not to speculate” on the matter, though shortly after his correspondence, massive cuts were made to the agency’s workforce.

The grasshopper management program is over 90 years old, which could be seen as an asset or a handicap. But without accounting for modern challenges, climate and environmental changes among them, it will continue to fail to protect vulnerable places like Modoc County. In the meantime, Snell and others like her will be forced to rely on 40-year-old science that claims grasshopper invasions will simply cycle through, run their course, and disappear.

“Some of our changes with climate, in terms of moisture and temperature — it’s not the same ag as it was 50 years ago,” she said. “That resource from the federal government that says, ‘It’s just gonna be cyclic, don’t worry,’ it’s not providing comfort to the producers because they’ve seen it on the ground here year after year.”

When Kāwika Lewis is teaching keiki (children) how to plant fruit and vegetables on his family farm north of Hilo, he often uses guidance from the Hawaiian moon calendar. Different lunar phases can signal whether that particular day is fortuitous for planting, cultivating, or pruning. Lewis tells his visitors that, if the crescent moon is facing upwards — like an upright bowl — then it’s fine to plant.

On the other hand, “We do not plant when the bowl is facing upside down, when it’s empty,” Lewis said. “That represents a bowl that cannot hold anything.”

For centuries, Native Hawaiians have let the moon steer their farming and fishing. Today, locals are leading the charge in keeping those traditions alive — and modern agriculture organizations like the Western Pacific Regional Fishery Management Council (WP Council) are embracing the benefits of ancient knowledge, too. These annual moon calendars have long been created to guide outdoorsmen and women in their endeavors, and proponents believe they can be utilized in communities outside Hawai‘i.

Agriculture producers on the islands say the lunar phases dictate the tides, fish spawning patterns, plant water content, and the amount of light available on a given day. That helps them determine what sea creatures to catch and which plants to cultivate. Some techniques have been analyzed by Western scientists, while others remain understudied. Regardless, many Kānaka Maoli (Native Hawaiians) put faith in these ancestral practices and are working to revitalize them today.

The moon’s gravitational pull on the tides and its effect on fishing are much discussed among sportsmen and women, with researcher Nur Aida Athirah Sulaiman concluding that lunar phases and tides impact sea life’s behavior. “The moon phenomenon indirectly affects the biological cycle of living species including fish,” she wrote in the International Journal of Academic Research in Business and Social Sciences.

On the other hand, the University of Illinois Extension’s College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences depicted the science behind the moon’s influence on plants as “difficult to find,” though it conceded that further studies need to take place on the topic. The school cited recent findings that lunar gravity “is so negligible it cannot have significant influence over plant processes,” but researchers also found unexpected ties, such as the moon’s potential impact on plants’ pollen production.

According to the Hawaiian lunar calendar, Hilo, or the new moon, signals good fishing, with low evening tides, according to The Kohala Center. It’s also an excellent day for cultivating every crop except mai‘a (banana). However, the four phases of the waxing moon won’t suffice for planting or fishing, with rough waters and high tides. During Muku, or the dark moon, banana stalks grow, and fishing — especially diving — is recommended.

Lewis has focused on circulating that knowledge since 2016 when he founded ʻĀina University, a nonprofit that promotes reconnecting with the ʻāina (land). Lewis has hosted more than 50,000 visitors at his farm and takes that opportunity to introduce them to the kaulana mahina (moon calendar). “It’s inside of my DNA,” said Lewis, referring to his Kanaka Maoli ancestry.

The moon phases are being shared at both the institutional and local levels. Honolulu-based television station KHON2 News broadcasts the Hawaiian lunar phases to viewers, and the WP Council produces free lunar fishing calendars for not only Hawai‘i, but also American Samoa and the Northern Mariana Islands.

“Each region has their own older fishing traditions and kind of gear and what kind of fish are there and how they catch them,” said education and outreach coordinator Amy Vandehey at the WP Council.

The WP Council is a congressionally-created regional fishery management council that’s involved in fisheries across those islands, with a focus on incorporating Indigenous perspectives from local communities. Before the council started distributing the lunar calendars, many fishermen followed the moon phases on their own, Vandehey said.

“Typically, people end up learning it from other people, whether it be from family or friends,” she added.

Now, the council produces between 1,000 to 2,000 large classroom versions and 500 to 1,500 small waterproof versions for boat use — “and they definitely go quickly,” Vandehey said.

Haunani Miyasato also designs an annual moon calendar in ʻŌlelo Hawaiʻi (Hawaiian language) and leads mahina (moon) workshops that teach schools, organizations, and community members about the moon from a Hawaiian perspective. Local gardeners, farmers, fishermen, surfers, paddlers, and medicine makers often attend. The former teacher decided to make her own calendar to help her four children learn the lunar phases, which fall on different Gregorian dates each year.

“Some moons, you plant things, and some moons, you harvest or prune.”

“Growing up, we always heard some moons are better for fishing and, some moons, you don’t go fishing on at all,” Miyasato said. “Some moons, you plant things, and some moons, you harvest or prune.”

She also teaches the reasoning behind why certain lunar phases are better suited for their respective activities. For example, if someone wants to gather ʻopihi, a shellfish found on the shoreline, then low tide would be ideal for the best access, and daytime would allow for the most light to do so. Therefore, a moon phase that correlates with low tide during the daytime makes the most sense.

The ʻŌiwi (Native) belief is that the theory can also be applied to plants, Miyasato explained, because nutrients are supposed to travel through the plant during different lunar cycles.

“The waters of the ocean are pulled by the moon,” she said. “The waters in our plants are also pulled by the moon, too, so it’s like there’s a tide in our plants.”

Other Indigenous cultures use similar systems of planting, Miyasato said. She likens the kaulana mahina to North America’s Old Farmer’s Almanac. First published in 1792, the almanac explains the significance of full moons and includes a moon phase calendar.

“It gives you some excuse as to what to blame it on if you don’t catch, too.”

Gil Kuali‘i is a Hilo lawai‘a (fisherman) and the Hawai‘i advisory panel vice chair at the WP Council. Kuali‘i says he and other Kānaka Maoli watermen plan their fishing expeditions based on the lunar phases because of their impact on the tides. The kaulana mahina can also correlate the spawning cycles of different species, Kuali‘i added.

The extra information promotes business productivity among fishermen, Kuali‘i said. “We’re really just scratching the surface on what this calendar can provide.”

Other Hawai‘i residents who aren’t of ʻŌiwi ancestry also use the lunar phases as a reference point.

Jeff Fay has owned Kona’s Humdinger Sportfishing, a family-run charter fishing business, since 1975. Originally from California, he now predominantly caters to tourists in Hawai‘i. Before they set off on his boat, Fay checks the lunar app on his phone, on top of other factors like the currents and the weather.

His business advises clients to fish on the full moon and the new moon — the best time to catch ‘ahi (tuna). The days near the full moon are also well-suited for blue marlin fishing. Fay explained that lunar phases affect when the fish feed and bite, and tidal changes mean increased activity.

On top of that, “It gives you some excuse as to what to blame it on if you don’t catch, too,” he joked.

Author’s note: Megan Ulu-Lani Boyanton identifies as Kanaka Maoli.

This past March, German chemical company Bayer announced (warned? threatened?) that it might stop making glyphosate, the herbicide in Roundup that the company acquired when it bought rival chemical company Monsanto back in 2018. After having paid $11 billion to settle 100,000 lawsuits from people claiming exposure to Roundup caused non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma and other cancers — and with over 65,000 cases still pending — Bayer is hitching the future of its glyphosate production in the U.S. to the whims of the Supreme Court, from which it seeks protection from further litigation.

A recent MAHA report barely mentioned glyphosate’s potential health risks; nevertheless, the report has troubled (outraged? disturbed?) American row crop groups, which means this controversy probably won’t fizzle out anytime soon. That got us wondering what Offrange’s readers made of the hullaballoo. More than 40 of you weighed in on the matter, expressing opinions that ranged from the pithy (“get rid of it”) to the significantly more nuanced. So here, using your thoughts and experiences as a springboard, we take a dive into the pros and cons of glyphosate; what the most recent science tells us about its human health impacts; and what Bayer’s announcement may or may not mean for the future of the most popular weed killer in the world.

First, as many of you pointed out, glyphosate is not going anywhere anytime soon. Since its patent expired in 2000 — and with it, Monsanto’s exclusive right to use it in products sold here — off-brand formulations for agricultural use, with names like Buccaneer and Killzall, have been widely available at the local farm supply. They’re often cheaper than Roundup, which is also still ubiquitous. “If you’ve got to buy 1,000 acres of product,” said Steve Haring, an agronomist with a new, small cider orchard in central Virginia, “the generic formulations are pretty good.”

What accounts for Bayer’s announcement, then? We asked Charles Benbrook, a pesticide expert and expert witness in litigation against the company. The liability for glyphosate, he explained, will always be Bayer’s — not the companies that make Buccaneer or Killzall — as the inheritor of the former primary manufacturer. To salvage their tanking stock price and protect their other assets, he expects they’ll sell off their production and formulation plants in Iowa and Louisiana, then place all remaining liability into a spin-off company infused with several billion dollars.

That would be used to settle future lawsuits till the funds are gone; the spin-off might then declare bankruptcy or otherwise make it difficult for plaintiffs to collect awarded payments. As Investigate Midwest reported last June, Bayer’s CEO doesn’t deny this possibility, saying he’ll “explore every reasonable option to protect the company and protect our mission from the litigation industry.” The announcement, then, might be seen as a provocation, meant to drum up support.

Offrange reader Haring considers himself a glyphosate “agnostic,” neither strictly pro nor con. He manages his orchard vegetation with a string mower because “baby trees are easy to kill” with herbicides, and he’s not concerned about weeds competing for water. “If I had an irrigation system, with weeds growing on or around the drip lines,” things might be different.

Brent Searle, an organic raspberry, tomato, garlic, and winter squash farmer in eastern Idaho, expressed a similar strain of “meh.” He uses OMRI-approved herbicides on his crops but glyphosate on his three acres of driveway. Organic chemicals, he said, “hit you with a six-times cost” that is “astronomical” for small-scale growers, “and honestly, they don’t work as well. But I see both sides. I know the benefit for farmers, but I’m not convinced that there isn’t a lingering impact on the environment” — in particular, for his honeybees.

“I see both sides. I know the benefit for farmers, but I’m not convinced that there isn’t a lingering impact on the environment.”

Rick Machado, who breeds seeds for experimental crops like sea beets in Bakersfield, California, once “trashed Roundup and the devil Monsanto”… until he got hit with bindweed. “All of a sudden I found myself in a position of needing” the herbicide, he said. “I used it, I kicked myself, but there was nothing I could do.”

Mihail Kennedy is production manager for B Bar, a regenerative organic ranch in central Montana. Where conventional neighbors “burn down the range” with herbicides to obliterate cattle-toxic larkspur, he sees this as “fighting 20 years of overgrazing and not understanding the system.” Weeds pop up in response to poor soil quality in order to “start the mineral cycle again and make nutrients more available to other plants,” he said. Glyphosate chelates those nutrients, binding with them to ensure they remain unavailable. At B Bar, Kennedy said, “Our whole philosophy is managing for life, not with death. We don’t kill any plants” on the range — with glyphosate or anything else. They deal with rangeland weeds by releasing cattle onto mountain pastures later, when larkspur’s not as palatable, and seeding in more diverse perennials.

Jim Smith, an organic farmer and former landscaper, witnessed a comparable dynamic in North Carolina with Japanese knotweed. When this much-reviled plant emerges to restore degraded soil, he said, people “spray it with Roundup and it comes right back” — helping create herbicide-resistant weeds and further trashing the soil. Globally, 56 species of weed are now resistant to glyphosate, driving up use of other, more toxic herbicides; where once GMO corn and soybean seeds were merely Roundup Ready, they’re now increasingly engineered to resist 2, 4-D, dicamba, and glufosinate, too.

The relevance of glyphosate to no-till was top-of-mind for Jeff Stoltzfus, a farm food safety educator at Penn State’s extension. The conservation plan for his own 45 acres connected to the Chesapeake Bay watershed, which is plagued by sediment issues, requires that he use no-till practices. “It’s been a huge soil saver. It’s a huge cost saver,” he said. And he doesn’t see a way to practice no-till without glyphosate. “There’s a couple of other things we could use” to control weeds — 2, 4-D, Gramoxone — “but I’m not sure what the gain would be. Those are not safer chemicals by any stretch of the imagination.” He sees the proliferation of Roundup as a big win for safety. “There’s no herbicide I’d rather use,” he said.

Other Offrange readers concurred. On his 17,000 row crop and hog acres in Henry, Tennessee, the use of glyphosate is 100 percent a given for Jimmy Tosh. It’s helped him control Johnson grass; he’s seen no evidence of weed-resistance on his land; and he believes claims that Roundup causes health issues are “ridiculous,” he said. “Most studies show it to be a safe and effective chemical.“

“There’s no herbicide I’d rather use.”

In a related vein, Mark Nussbaum used glyphosate when he grew Roundup Ready row crops in Girardeau, Missouri, 20 years ago; he uses it now on his 800 acres of hardwood trees. And he said he’ll continue to do so until “there becomes scientifically based, peer-reviewed evidence that glyphosate is harmful.”

Is it true that science hasn’t proven glyphosate has adverse effects on human health? There are a few relevant threads to pull here. As a number of you noted, the vast majority of legal claims against Bayer come from home users. And several others of you remarked that it was the surfactants in glyphosate-based herbicide (GBH) formulations that were responsible for human health concerns. Surfactants help the product to penetrate the weed; they also penetrate human skin.

As pesticide expert Benbrook explained, homeowners and landscapers tend to spray their yards with a handheld wand, with skin exposed. They feel no sickening effects as the product gets absorbed and enters their bloodstream — as opposed to, say, touching atrazine — leading them to believe it’s innocuous. Farmers, on the other hand, “are driving tractors and sprayers with glass and steel cabs [and] sophisticated air filtration systems ... The only time they’re exposed is when they get out of the machine to refill the tanks.”

Had Bayer labeled bottles intended for consumers with guidance to wear chemical-resistant gloves, that would have reduced exposures to what Benbrook called “this terrific herbicide.” In response to lawsuits, Bayer agreed to remove glyphosate from its lawn and garden products back in 2023 — although a 2024 review conducted by environmental group Friends of the Earth found that it remained in some formulations still available on store shelves.

“All of a sudden I found myself in a position of needing [Roundup]. I used it, I kicked myself, but there was nothing I could do.”

There are other health concerns surrounding commercial Roundup formulations, however. These, said Benbrook, pertain to spraying glyphosate as a desiccant on wheat, oats, and barley right before they’re harvested — a practice banned in the EU because it leaves residue on food crops intended for human consumption. Ninety percent of Americans pee glyphosate because of its use as a desiccant, said Benbrook.

And peer-reviewed, non-industry-backed science papers have indeed linked glyphosate to preterm delivery, low birth weight, late-term spontaneous abortions, and neurodevelopmental issues when mothers have been exposed to the chemical. The International Agency for Research on Cancer classified it as a probable human carcinogen in 2015 — a study that Jimmy Tosh, echoing the sentiments of farming groups and U.S. EPA, called “flawed” — but other peer-reviewed studies have since reached the same conclusion. Benbrook said what (partly) accounts for the difference is that EPA used largely industry-commissioned studies in its analysis; and it looked solely at dietary exposures to pure glyphosate, versus IARC’s additional considerations of dermal exposures and formulations.

Earlier this June, the results of a large, global peer-reviewed study, looking at both pure glyphosate as well as two formulations, were released. “[I]ncreased incidence of leukemia, and of skin, liver, thyroid, nervous system tumors were observed across all three treatment groups,” the paper concluded.

“It’s biochemistry and you’re going to get hurt if you’re not careful with it,” said Rick Machado.

This story was produced in collaboration with EGAB.

At the break of dawn in Kitale County, Kenya, Kenneth Kipchumba tightens his grip on a worn-out “jembe,” the Swahili word for hoe, and heads out to his five-acre farm. The soil is rich but the work is grueling, and with no access to affordable tractors or modern machinery, he spends countless hours under the sun, manually tilling rows for watermelons, maize, and millet.

Kipchumba is among the continent’s 65 percent of smallholder farmers for whom manual labor remains the norm, stalling agricultural productivity and threatening food security. Scarce and costly mechanization forces them to rely on sheer muscle and willpower, limiting yields and livelihoods.

“Tractors are almost nonexistent in the village, and when they do show up, they’re either too expensive or too few to meet everyone’s needs, forcing us to make tough choices,” Kipchumba said. “The planting season starts in April, but we had already started preparing the plots in December,” Kipchumba explained. “It’s time-consuming and less efficient. We get to [only till] the upper surface of the land, which could be easily uprooted, as sometimes strong winds come, and the soil is gone. Now you have to dig again.”

For much of the world, ag-tech has grown to encompass drones, robots, and other advanced technologies to ease crop cultivation. But for most farmers in Sub-Saharan Africa, even securing relatively old technology such as tractors remains a challenge. But while this greatly affects the productivity level of farmers in Sub-Saharan Africa, there are a handful of startups trying to change that. In the face of significant funding and ecosystem challenges, they have seen some successes.

Africa has just 1.3 tractors per square kilometer, a stark contrast to, say, Brazil’s 116 or India’s 128. According to Ohio-born Jehiel Oliver, CEO of Hello Tractor, a Kenya-based, John Deere-backed ag-tech company working to bridge the gap between farmers and mechanization, this shortfall is largely driven by “capital expenditure burdens, a lack of financing, and de-risking structures that continue to hold back mechanization across Africa.”

“In Sub-Saharan Africa, the liquidity isn’t there to address the investments needed for our farmers to be competitive globally, so innovation is needed — specifically, technology applied in an intelligent way to reduce the [capital expenditure] burden that farmers would bear to reach [high] productivity levels,” said Oliver, who was appointed to the President’s Advisory Council on Doing Business in Africa under the Obama Administration.

Oliver also explained that “while tractors are capital-intensive,” the company has expanded beyond the traditional ownership model where each farmer owns a tractor. Instead, they leverage technology to “spread the cost of a single tractor across many farmers,” making access more affordable and “significantly reducing the capital expenditure burden.” In practice, this may mean paying less but only getting a tractor on a part-time basis.

Hello Tractor and other firms like Nigeria’s Traxi and Ethiopia’s Lersha are part of a growing wave of startups shaping the future of Africa’s agricultural mechanization. These enterprises provide a range of services to farmers, from land preparation to harvesting.

“It truly takes an entire support ecosystem to ensure machinery reaches farmers and meets their agricultural needs.“

Hello Tractor, through its software technology and financing programs, operates an amortization scheme that helps farmers become tractor owners within their communities. These programs, according to Susan Njihia, innovation lead at Hello Tractor, have enabled the firm to build a functioning ecosystem of 4,500 tractors and combine harvesters, personally financing 198 of them.

This initiative has benefited farmers across Nigeria, Kenya, Uganda, and Rwanda, with plans to expand into Ethiopia. To date, Hello Tractor has mechanized 179,500 acres and serviced 199,800 smallholder farmers.

“We’ve gradually become one of the largest financiers of tractors on the African continent. It truly takes an entire support ecosystem to ensure machinery reaches farmers and meets their agricultural needs. Our Pay-As-You-Go tractor finance model offers credit to traditionally unbanked entrepreneurs at the base of the pyramid, enabling them to become tractor owners,” Oliver explained.

Njihia noted that, unlike other regions where large-scale mechanization depends on individual ownership and well-established infrastructure, Hello Tractor has adapted to the unique realities of African smallholder farming.

Farmers like 40-year-old Bala Chuseh from Pangri village in Taraba State, Nigeria, say they have benefited from Hello Tractor’s mechanization programs, successfully cultivating multiple crops last year’s season.

“I planted maize, guinea corn, and beniseed,” he said.

Jkusenga went on to explain that tractors are a “rare sight” in his community, leaving him with no choice but to hire 15 laborers to cultivate cabbage, lettuce, spinach, and other crops.

However, most smallholder farmers across Africa still lack access to such services. This includes Kipchumba, who has never heard of Hello Tractor — or any ag-tech companies, for that matter. His experience is shared by fellow Kenyan farmer Dennis Mutua Jkusenga.

Jkusenga went on to explain that tractors are a “rare sight” in his community, leaving him with no choice but to hire 15 laborers to cultivate cabbage, lettuce, spinach, and other crops on his 10-acre farm in Machakos County, Eastern Kenya.

“With a tractor, it takes about a day to till a plot, but with human labor, it takes much longer, even for your produce to be ready, because of the extra time spent using manual labor,” he said, adding that when farmers rely on human labor, there is always a risk of injury, which could become “very costly.”

The solutions to the challenges of access, according to Theo Chiyoka, CEO of Traxi Continental Limited and Vida Verde Limited in Nigeria and Uganda, are still evolving, as inaccessibility of machinery remain a significant issue.

At Traxi, they use a tractor-hiring model in several Nigerian states and collaborate with local associations to ensure smallholder farmers have access to mechanization.

“Our model is simple: We purchase and provide the machinery for hire. A farmer rents the machine and only pays for the work done and the time it’s used. Any idle time is our responsibility, so we must ensure the machine is used efficiently. The machine pays for itself through its work,” explained Chiyoka.

Recent USAID funding cuts have severely threatened farmers’ access to these services and slashed Vida Verde’s revenue by up to 40 percent.

He further explained that they had previously attempted to involve the government in addressing the issue, but acknowledged that “it’s a work in progress.”

Soil testing services are also a key component of Traxi and Vida Verde’s approach to mechanizing smallholder farmers in Nigeria and Uganda.

“[Soil testing] determines moisture levels and which crops we can grow. Traditionally, soil samples had to be sent to a laboratory, and it would take seven days to receive results,” Chiyoka said. “These results are often too technical and require a specialist to interpret and recommend action. Now, we can use mobile phones, portable testing scanners, satellites, and have the information relayed via WhatsApp.”

Nonetheless, recent USAID funding cuts have severely threatened farmers’ access to these services and slashed Vida Verde’s revenue by up to 40 percent, he noted.

A lot of work has come to a halt, Chiyoka explained. He had contracts with NGOs that were meant to provide soil-testing services to farmers in rural areas across Uganda, Nigeria, and Mozambique. With those agencies now closed, it has led to the shutdown of some mechanization operations for Vida Verde Limited and Traxi.

Chiyoka added that the funding cuts also suspended a job-creation plan targeting mechanization and other agro-allied services, which was projected to benefit 25,000 youths over 10 years.

Hello Tractor, like others in its category, lost a potential funding partner, due to cuts of up to 83 percent of USAID programs announced in March by the Trump administration.

“The challenges that these firms are facing with mechanization cannot be separated from the broader challenges of agricultural development in Africa.“

Most of these ag-tech firms, according to Oliver, continue to grapple with the same longstanding challenges that “have held back Africa’s agricultural sector for decades.”

Idris Badiru, a lecturer at the Department of Agricultural Extension and Rural Development, University of Ibadan, noted that while ag-tech operations supporting mechanization are “valuable,” solving agricultural problems requires “a collective effort from all stakeholders.”

“The challenges that these firms are facing with mechanization cannot be separated from the broader challenges of agricultural development in Africa. The key issues are finance, infrastructure, and knowledge management and transfer,” Badiru explained. “Small-scale farmers are not considered creditworthy. There is often no electricity to power some of these mechanization technologies. Technical know-how is still lacking, and we face major hurdles within the agricultural extension delivery system.”

Badiru criticized African governments and their agencies for failing to fulfill their obligation to farmers and leaving social entrepreneurs unsupported.

“In the case of credit facilities, we need to go beyond relying solely on the government. There is a need for angel investors and social entrepreneurs who are interested in the agricultural component but are not solely focused on profiting from farmers,” he said. “The governments must create a conducive environment so that these agribusinesses can deliver mechanization services to farmers at minimal cost, without negatively affecting consumers in the long run.”

Around 30 A.D., the Roman emperor Tiberius decided he wanted year-round access to his favorite food: long-fruited melons, also known as Armenian cucumbers. Near his palace on the island of Capri, the emperor’s gardeners constructed wheeled beds with wooden frames covered by sheets of transparent gypsum, which let in sunlight and kept the vegetables warm even during the winter. These structures, called specularia, were the world’s first greenhouses, buildings designed to regulate the temperature and humidity of the environment inside.

These days, greenhouses look a little different. In an airy, 8-acre facility in Texas, the roof is made of glass rather than gypsum, while fans, screens, and heating systems control the climate inside with precision. Leafy greens are grown in neat rows using a hydroponic system that replaces soil with a simple growth medium and delivers nutrients through water. When it’s time to harvest, a conveyor belt moves the lettuce underneath a mechanical blade and into the embrace of a robotic packing arm, which separates the greens into neat bags to be shipped to consumers.

This greenhouse is operated by BrightFarms, a company founded in 2011 which has since become a major player in the greenhouse-grown leafy green market. While vertical farms have struggled to break even, horizontal greenhouses like this one are booming, buoyed by advances in technology as well as energy and water savings that put them at an advantage. Aside from its Texas site, BrightFarms runs facilities in New Hampshire, Virginia, North Carolina, Georgia, and Illinois, boasting that it can deliver lettuce to two-thirds of U.S. consumers in as little as 24 hours after harvest.

As climate change makes traditional field-grown agriculture more risky and unpredictable, greenhouses like the ones used by BrightFarms are having a moment. According to the USDA’s Economic Research Service, the number of “controlled environment agriculture” operations, where plants are grown indoors under carefully monitored conditions, doubled from 2009 to 2019.

Both greenhouses and vertical farms fall under the umbrella of “controlled environment agriculture,” or CEA. But there’s a key difference: While vertical farms stack plants on top of each other and rely entirely on artificial light, greenhouses tend to spread out horizontally and utilize some sunlight, with additional lighting provided when necessary.

That arrangement makes vertical farms more suitable for growing crops in the middle of urban areas where space is limited, endearing them to tech companies and start-up investors who saw their potential to “disrupt” agriculture. The hype, though, by and large hasn’t paid off; a number of vertical farming companies have gone under in recent years, plagued by high energy costs and consumer indifference.

Greenhouse-grown lettuce ... is now seeing “explosive growth,” increasing five-fold in the past five years.

“Greenhouses have continued to grow because we now have exceptional control over the climate” inside them, said Abby Prior, BrightFarms’ chief commercial officer. At the same time, they have advantages over vertical farms because they still rely on sunlight as their primary energy source. “Sunlight is free. It’s how we’ve been able to scale this business and also build a business model that’s financially sustainable as well as a better solution for the planet.”

The first greenhouse in the U.S. was built in Boston in 1737, and by the 19th century, greenhouses were common around the Northeast, allowing farmers to sell fresh produce in the cities even during the off-season. Then, starting with the Great Depression, the value of greenhouse-grown vegetables trended steadily down, said Neil Mattson, director of the CEA program at Cornell University. The nationalization of the food system, with year-round produce being grown in California and Florida and shipped by refrigerated trucks across the country, made them less necessary.

But since the 1980s, that trend has reversed, with new greenhouse technology imported from the Netherlands — the world leader in CEA — driving down costs of production and encouraging the expansion of some greenhouse crops, particularly tomatoes. A majority of the fresh tomatoes Americans eat now come from greenhouses, Mattson said, and though greenhouse-farmed lettuce holds a much smaller share of the market, it’s now seeing “explosive growth,” increasing five-fold in the past five years.

There are a few reasons behind this shift, Mattson explained, starting with consumer preferences. The popularity of bagged salads has led to greater demand for fresh, varied, and flavorful lettuce at any time of the year; growing greens indoors near major urban centers rather than trucking it in from California allows them to stay on store shelves for longer, leading to a better experience for buyers as well as less waste for retailers.

Climate change, meanwhile, is wreaking havoc on traditional lettuce-growing regions like California’s Salinas Valley, with erratic weather patterns shifting between droughts and torrential rains. This has made harvesting more difficult, encouraged the spread of diseases, and led to worries about water use, as California grapples with high demand from its agricultural industry. And the Covid-19 pandemic caused supply chain disruptions that exposed the fragility of a centralized food system, pushing some suppliers to focus more on distributed, local production.

A majority of the fresh tomatoes Americans eat now come from greenhouses.

At the same time, greenhouses still face some challenges. In 2020, Mattson and his colleagues at Cornell published a study showing that in major urban areas, greenhouse-grown lettuce was still at least 50 percent more expensive than field-grown lettuce because of higher associated costs of electricity and labor. Companies like BrightFarms or Gotham Greens have to charge at a similar price point as organic produce, and rely on consumer willingness to pay more for lettuce that’s labeled “local” or “pesticide-free.”

Technological advances, though, could eventually bring these costs down as greenhouse production expands through economies of scale, Mattson said. Inside, greenhouses today don’t look like the simple constructions of yore; they’re integrating much of the technology typically associated with vertical farms.

Lamps made with light-emitting diodes, or LEDs, have become widespread in the last 10 years and use much less energy than older incandescent bulbs, bringing electricity costs down and allowing greenhouses to operate year-round. Climate control systems regulate the humidity and even the carbon dioxide levels in a greenhouse, maximizing crop yields. And automated systems, like those utilized by BrightFarms, use robots at all stages of the growing process, from seeding to harvest and packaging, reducing the need for human input at a time when farms are facing labor shortages.

“Greenhouse technology has gotten so sophisticated,” said Tom Stenzel, executive director of the Controlled Environment Agriculture Alliance, an industry group that was founded in 2019 to represent leafy greens growers and has since expanded to include all kinds of indoor crops. “It’s not the old plastic cover — you’re controlling everything.”

At the same time, developing these systems requires a huge up-front cost, which can be a barrier for growers trying to enter the industry. That’s why Stenzel’s organization is lobbying for government support for CEA — for example, by pushing for USDA programs to encompass indoor agriculture as well as outdoor. And more recently, Stenzel said, they’ve had to speak out against Trump’s tariffs, which would raise the cost of imports from countries like the Netherlands that supply greenhouse technology and make the business more expensive for growers.

In major urban areas, greenhouse-grown lettuce is still at least 50 percent more expensive than field-grown lettuce because of higher associated costs of electricity and labor.

So far, the greenhouse-grown lettuce market seems to be expanding alongside traditional field-grown lettuce, rather than replacing it. But Stenzel and Mattson don’t expect that to continue for long. Modern greenhouses require less water, less fertilizer, and little to no pesticides, putting them at a long-term cost advantage and aligning them with consumer preferences. And particularly in areas of the world with little water and abundant energy — the Middle East, for example — indoor agriculture is much more pragmatic than outdoor.

In the U.S., companies like BrightFarms are also expanding into new areas, focusing on building a network of regional greenhouse-grown salad “hubs” that bring their product closer to consumers. Freshness and quality, they believe, will give them an advantage over still-cheaper field-grown lettuce.

“There is value in being able to eat every single leaf in the container,” Prior said. “And in the product looking beautiful in your refrigerator even well past the sell-by date.”

On a foggy March day in Putney, Vermont, about 40 cheese professionals, wearing mostly plaid shirts and wool sweaters, gathered at a conference inside a renovated whitewashed barn framed with dark wooden beams. There was a homey smell of manure in the air, and soft light filtered in through the big windows. At the front of the room, a microbiologist was giving a 1.5-hour lecture about mold. Instead of yawning or looking out the window, most members of the audience were literally on the edge of their seats. Many knew each other already, but this was their first time meeting for an inaugural conference on the science and craft of raw milk cheese; the excitement in the air was palpable.

Public health agencies in the U.S. have warned Americans about the dangers of raw milk consumption since the 1920s, when pasteurization became widespread. Recently, concerns about the safety of milk have resurfaced in a big way with the spread of avian flu to dairy cows, cuts at the FDA, and a concurrent fascination with raw milk across broad swaths of popular culture. But what to do with raw milk cheese, the aged cousin of the controversial white liquid? The answer historically has been less clear.

The CDC recommends that pregnant women avoid raw milk cheeses, even those aged for over 60 days, such as Gouda, cheddar, or the king of raw-milk cheeses, Parmeggiano-Reggiano. Meanwhile, the FDA has repeatedly placed restrictions on raw milk cheeses imported from Europe, including effectively banning well-known favorites like Roquefort.

The U.S. is more cautious than most other countries. Less than a day’s drive north of Vermont, in the Canadian city of Montreal, customers at cheese shops like Bleu & Persillé can buy tiny rounds of wrinkly raw-milk cheeses imported from France that are only a few weeks old. But south of the border, since 1949, the importation or sale of young raw milk cheeses like Crottin, Brie, or Camembert has been illegal.

For government regulators, the higher counts of microbes in raw milk cheeses are cause for concern. But for participants at the conference in Vermont, raw milk cheeses like Parmesan have a proven safety record, and those microbes — and their unpredictability and mystery — are something to celebrate.

“We actually have no idea what molds are out there in the landscape,” said Benjamin Wolfe, associate professor of biology at Tufts University. Behind him, colorful graphs illustrated microbiomes he’d discovered on cheeses around the Northeast. “Molds are like the beavers of cheese,” he explained, “little fuzzy creatures” whose actions shape the landscape of the cheese rind. All cheesemakers know how important mold is for the final taste of their cheese. But Wolfe explained that we have no idea how much diversity is out there, diversity that can be lost with pasteurization. At his lab, “we’re trapping molds, we’re hunting molds,” and Wolfe’s graduate students are combing through the New England landscape for unidentified microbes. “Literally in my backyard we found a new species of penicillium we’re working on describing.”

This wilderness of mold microbiota, about which we know surprisingly little, is especially exciting to raw milk cheesemakers who — to put it bluntly — think pasteurized cheese is boring.

In fact, the co-hosts of the conference, Rachel Fritz Schaal and Peter Dixon at Parish Hill Creamery, not only want more raw milk cheese on American plates, but want cheesemakers to make it from scratch, using their own starter cultures. This method of using autochthonous (indigenous) cheese cultures is practiced widely around the world, from Italy (think Parmesan) to Colombia — but not in the U.S.

In fact, although in 2025 most consumers have heard of sourdough bread, natural wine, or wild-fermented beer, there are still fewer than ten producers of “wild” cheese in the U.S., according to Fritz Schaal. In a similar way to sourdough bread, cheese can be made by letting fresh raw milk sour into a sort of natural yogurt, and using that yogurt to inoculate a vat of milk, instead of freeze-dried imported microbes which are standard in the industry.

Dixon, Fritz Schaal, and Wolfe all argue that studying the microbiome of raw milk reveals an important element — terroir, or the influence of place on the final taste. “I have been known to argue at great length that pasteurized cheeses do not have terroir,” said Fritz Schaal. The reason is that pasteurization “flattens” the milk, turning it into a blank slate.

In addition to killing potentially harmful microbes, pasteurization gets rid of any local microorganisms that may have originated in the locale where the animals grazed. Most cheesemakers then add industrially produced powdered cultures to produce the flavor notes that they want in the cheese. These freeze-dried cultures come from as far away as Denmark, and the result, according to raw milk aficionados, is that a lot of pasteurized cheese basically tastes the same. According to Dixon, the goal with raw milk cheesemaking is to “drag the pasture into the cheese,” anchoring it to the creamery where it’s made.

Terroir for cheese takes a more circuitous path than with wine: soil to grass, grass to milk, and then milk to cheese. In studies performed by Wolfe’s lab at Tufts and the D’Amico Microbiology Lab at the University of Connecticut, fungal genetics has revealed that the microbes present in the air, on the wall, and on cheesemakers’ hands on the day the cheese was made showed up in the final product months later. Wild mold strains from the leaves and grass outside, and of course those from the animal producing the milk, also influence the cheese’s development. Even sea salt can introduce microbes captured from the ocean. The result — if done right — is a cheese that cannot be replicated anywhere else.

On the last day of the conference, participants tried three cheeses made as part of the Cornerstone Project, in which multiple cheesemakers in different states commit to make cheese according to the exact same recipe, but each using their own raw milk. Represented on the plate were Connecticut, Pennsylvania, and Vermont. The three cheeses were nothing alike. One was yellower than the other two. Another had stronger flavor, while a third tasted creamier. The recipe was the same, but each cheese reflected the evolution of local microbes over time.

Fritz Schaal argues that this kind of unique, regional, raw milk cheese could be the way to keep more small producers in business. “It is not enough to make cheese at a small scale. You have to make something exceptional, something that wows. Autochthonous starters are something only you can do.” She is careful to point out that only high-quality, tested, safe raw milk from a trusted source (in her case, a neighboring dairy) will produce the type of cheese she’s advocating for.

Not all raw milk, then, is created equal, certainly not when it comes to cheese. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., may not have convinced everyone that drinking raw milk is patriotic or American. But raw milk cheesemakers are sure that nothing could be more American than a raw, natural-rinded wheel of cheese, with a microbiotic signature that reads “Made in the U.S.A.”

Born under cloudy skies in soggy northern Portland, my family moved to the tiny northern town of Page, Arizona — in a land where thirst is a constant companion. Surrounded by the Navajo Nation, I grew up with kids whose families have a long history of adapting to the climate of northern Arizona’s high desert.

Best known for herding sheep, the Diné people mastered dry farming on the arid Colorado Plateau, drawing on generations of traditional ecological knowledge. They managed water with features like waffle gardens and berms, utilizing deep alluvial soils, and cultivated drought-tolerant crops, such as the “Three Sisters” — beans, corn, and squash. The sustainable system they developed relied on continuous seed saving and maintaining soil health with minimal disturbance.

It makes sense why their environment necessitated the Navajo’s year-round preparation for a brief planting season, adapting their food system to the arid climate of the Colorado Plateau.

Five years ago, I returned to the Pacific Northwest, where I now live with my sister on her 20-acre property in Western Washington. I was surprised to discover that growers in the Willamette Valley in Western Oregon, an area that receives around 35 to 60 inches of rain annually, were now on the lookout for more innovative ways to grow plants with less water. I couldn’t understand why farmers receiving that much annual rainfall needed to worry about water.

Wanting to understand why, and looking for resources that might help my sister and me conserve water ourselves, I reached out to Amy Garrett, director of operations at the Dry Farming Institute.

Amy’s involvement in dry farming began when she was working for the Small Farms Program at Oregon State University in 2011. She kept getting questions from new and beginning farmers facing unexpected water rights limitations and restricted access to irrigation. Traditional extension resources and conversations primarily focused on irrigated agriculture, which left water-poor growers somewhat up a creek without a paddle.

There is more to dry farming than simply turning off irrigation.

“I was having conversations with growers who had signed leases or were bequeathed land and were really just trying to figure out what they could grow after discovering they didn’t have water rights to the land, or it was a lot more expensive than they’d planned for,” Amy recalls. “It became clear after discussing soil type and drought-hardy crops that there was a significant knowledge gap regarding dry farming practices.”

For new farmers in Oregon, securing water rights presents significant challenges due to the state’s “first in time, first in right” water doctrine. This system prioritizes older water rights, meaning newer farms often face shortages, and water rights are not automatically transferred with land ownership. Many basins are already fully claimed or “over-appropriated,” making it difficult or impossible to obtain new permits, particularly in eastern and southern Oregon. This already complex situation is further exacerbated by the past two decades of persistent drought, which has strained water supplies and made existing rights even more precarious.

What Is Dry Farming, Actually?

There is more to dry farming than simply turning off irrigation. The methods shared by the Dry Farming Institute rely on carefully selecting sites with deep, water-retentive soil and enhancing these conditions through practices like adding organic matter and precise soil preparation. Key to its success is planting at optimal times when soil moisture is present, often with lower plant density to reduce competition for water. Farmers employ moisture conservation techniques such as dust mulching throughout the growing season, alongside selecting drought-tolerant crop varieties, to grow crops with minimal to no irrigation. This encourages plants to access and utilize deep soil moisture more effectively.

The general definition of “dry farming” from their downloadable Dry Farming Zine toggles between terminology, but ultimately, “Dry Farming is rainfed [read: not irrigated] crop production during a dry season in a region that experiences 20 inches or more of annual rainfall.” In the maritime Pacific Northwest, winter rains replenish soil moisture yearly, giving growers sufficient water to grow crops without traditional irrigation.

But even in a region with over 20 inches of annual rainfall, Oregon’s food systems still have a water problem. In 2015, a severe drought in the Pacific Northwest led to early water restrictions, forcing many farmers to reduce or halt irrigation, which resulted in crop failures. The crisis highlighted the region’s fragile water supply and the challenges faced by those with junior water rights.

“It became clear after discussing soil type and drought-hardy crops that there was a significant knowledge gap regarding dry farming practices.”

A chance encounter with an experienced dry farmer applying the practices he’d learned from Italian immigrants inspired Amy to bridge the knowledge gap between farmers with practical experiences and growers needing dry farming insight. In the midst of that severe drought, she staged a pivotal demonstration to showcase the potential of dry farming in the Willamette Valley. Despite challenging conditions, dry-farmed crops thrived without irrigation, leading to a paradigm shift among attendees.

Today, the core purpose of the Dry Farming Institute is outreach and education, aiming to empower growers to thrive with less water through various initiatives. They develop impact case studies, sharing innovative approaches from active practitioners, and host virtual water resilience workshops, which are great for getting ag professionals and farmers together to network and trade insights.

This year, the Institute is also developing a water resilience toolkit — a practical guide based on extensive research, offering actionable steps and resources for increased water resiliency. All these efforts aim to build capacity, confidence, and community within the farming sector in Oregon and Washington.

Should You Dry Farm?

If dry farming practices work so well in the Pacific Northwest, why wouldn’t farmers adopt them everywhere? While the strategies developed in Oregon can help reduce water use in other regions, their suitability depends on climate, soil, and local conditions. Plants don’t need to develop deep roots in areas with steady summer rainfall (say, a Midwestern state like Indiana). In contrast, in Oregon’s dry summers, crops must reach deeper for moisture, training them to be perfect candidates for dry farming.

Amy suggests that dry farming is particularly beneficial for farmers in drought-prone regions or those facing specific water restrictions; growers looking to improve resilience to extreme heat; and regions with seasonal or intermittent rainfall, where farmers can use soil assessment, variety trials, and soil moisture sensors to reduce irrigation reliance.

But before you reach out directly to DFI, consider that their overall process of knowledge-sharing and experimentation can be replicated anywhere. I asked Amy whether dry farming is viable for large-scale corporate farms or if it’s primarily suited for smaller operations.

“I would have to say that depends on how a farmer defines success,” Amy suggested. “Corporate farms prioritizing maximizing yield and profit often rely on and have more access to traditional irrigation, making it less appealing.” Small-scale farmers often turn to dry farming out of necessity, due to water shortages, high irrigation costs, or a lack of infrastructure.

“A major advantage of dry-farmed produce, we’re discovering, is extended shelf life.”

“It’s just not a yield-maximization strategy,” she continued, “but a major advantage of dry-farmed produce, we’re discovering, is extended shelf life.” Despite yielding smaller sizes and quantities than irrigated crops, she said dry-farmed produce tends to store much longer, reducing waste. This is particularly beneficial for farmers marketing their produce over extended periods, as irrigated produce can rot in storage, negating its initial higher yield.

Longer shelf life and exceptional flavor turned Mary Colombo of Wild Roots Farm onto dry farming. Located near the confluence of the Sandy and Columbia rivers, the farm supplies a CSA and local restaurants in the metro Portland area with dry-farmed produce such as potatoes, tomatoes, winter squash, corn, and tepary beans, a legume grown by Native people since pre-Columbian times.

“I became interested in dry farming because it seemed so counterintuitive to grow crops without irrigation, but the results we’ve had are impressive,” admits Mary, who took her passion for food, gardening, and a desire for more meaningful work to a deeper level through the help of a farming incubator program, which eventually led her to the Dry Farming Institute.

Her biggest takeaways of dry farming? “I’m amazed by the wide variety of crops that can be dry-farmed,” she said. “The Dry Farming Institute is continually expanding and exploring new crops that can thrive in our region without irrigation.”

“Corporate farms prioritizing maximizing yield and profit often rely on and have more access to traditional irrigation, making [dry farming] less appealing.”

Growers who may not have initially had to worry about water restrictions may need to reconsider water conservation in the near future. With funding from the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act helping farmers conserve Colorado River water, many are reconsidering their irrigation practices. If these financial incentives disappear, growers may face economic losses from reduced crop production, making alternative water-saving techniques like dry farming more appealing.

When I interviewed Amy in mid-February, she had just returned from a brief vacation to learn that a major grant, representing half of the Dry Farming Institute’s 2025 funding, had been frozen. This was likely due to its focus on “underserved producers” and “climate change” — phrases that are perceived as problematic by the current administration. On May 6, that funding was officially terminated. This cut creates substantial uncertainty for ongoing projects and additional hiring in 2025. It also makes relying on federal grants, the primary funding source for the past decade, unreliable.

While this is challenging, Amy acknowledges the opportunity to re-evaluate the organization’s priorities and potentially transform their approach to funding and programming. Like most people in the food and agricultural industries, they’re used to pivoting. Individual donors and the NoVo Foundation have already stepped in to help fill the gap.

“I’m trying to look at this setback as an opportunity to let go of some things that we don’t need to carry anymore,” said Amy. “A chance to transform the way we work as we continue to support growers in their efforts to produce food with less water.“

Fifteen of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s federally funded gene banks are common-sensical repositories, housing plants that thrive in the regions where they’re located: bananas in Puerto Rico, onions in Geneva, New York. But the 16th bank, the Western Regional Plant Introduction Center in Pullman, Washington, is weird no matter how you slice it. Like its brethren, its 14,000 seed and rootstock accessions, representing 1,300 species, are meant to safeguard agriculture’s genetic diversity and are available to breeders and commercial growers.

But Pullman’s are mainly plants that “didn’t fit into anybody’s else’s collection,” said curator Alex Cornwall. Its orphaned odds and ends include sugar and table beets; legumes like Lupini beans and lotus; cool season grasses; dye plants like madder root and bed straw; dandelions being investigated for their potential to make natural rubber; and culinary rhubarb — 47 varieties in all, with 10 more on the way, including some crop wild relatives.

Despite the fact that rhubarb’s pinkish/greenish stalks can reliably be found piled up on farmer’s market tables pretty much everywhere starting in April, it’s not much of a farm staple outside the Pacific Northwest — possibly because it flourishes in plenty of American home gardens. A handful of holdouts in Washington’s Puyallup Valley still grow rhubarb both in its field and forced form (more about that later). But in 2022, only 1,720 acres of rhubarb were farmed across the country; for comparison, the crops that bookend rhubarb in the Census of Agriculture totaled 20,400 acres that same year (radishes) and 79,400 acres (spinach).

You can intuit near-desperation in Cornwall’s voice as he discusses the professional disinterest in this vegetable that’s related to buckwheat and loves temperatures as cold as minus 50 degrees Fahrenheit: If professional growers “request rhubarb from me, I am 100 percent willing to send material to them” — for free, no less — “so that we can get more of these varieties out there,” he said. Takers in 2024: three, including a group from Canada that was discounted because they neglected to secure the necessary import permit. Consider this a rhubarb stan article as we consider: What would it take to get American farmers and eaters to embrace the Rheum?

***

Perhaps the answer can be found in northern England’s Yorkshire Triangle. This is the accidental birthplace of forced rhubarb, a winter crop that’s grown in total darkness after being transplanted from field to hothouse (or as became traditional in Yorkshire starting 200 years ago, a shed heated by the region’s abundant coal supply).

Legend has it that a gardener unwittingly kicked a bucket over a rhubarb plant, only to discover that it thrived in the murk. In a few short weeks it had used the energy stored in its roots to shoot up dramatically. Its normally pallid, super-sour stalks were colored a vivid pink and tasted sweet(er), with less of a stringy, tough chew; the stalks were capped with pale (toxic) leaves wrinkled like Napa cabbage. Even now, starting in January enthralled Brits flock to Yorkshire, where the delicacy is harvested by candlelight after a growing period so fast and intense — allegedly an inch per day, as it frantically seeks sunlight — the plant makes a high-pitched popping sound.

“There’s not a whole lot of research being conducted, and I think part of it is the perception that rhubarb is only seen as a dessert.”

Brian Anderson runs Knutson Farms in Sumner, Washington, which sells over a million pounds of Crimson red and Johnson red rhubarb a year; the farm started forcing rhubarb in the 1940s, to keep the crew busy over the winter. The plants can live for decades but working them is labor-intensive. To keep them healthy as they age, Cornwall said the plants actually need to be chopped up occasionally; some farms’ crews will run a tractor or a spader through a field of them — or chop them one by one with a shovel — so the centers of their crowns don’t rot. Like apples, rhubarb doesn’t breed true if it’s raised from seed, so chopping it up into pieces is also how you make more plants to propagate.

Only well-established field plants that are three or more years old are hardy enough to be forced as the days grow short and cold. As soon as they go dormant, in late December, “We dig them up, put them in tight rows in our completely dark hothouse. And they just grow,” said Anderson. Any plants that survive the intense effort of transferring all their energy into their shoots get moved back to the field come spring. “If we get 60 percent of that [winter] crop, we’re pretty happy,” Anderson said. He manages to sell everything he harvests, to local grocers as well as mail-order chefs and mixologists interested in turning out cobblers and cordials. But as he told Washington’s Capital Press, he doesn’t see much potential to grow his rhubarb business; any more and “we probably wouldn’t have a sale for it,” he said.

USDA’s Cornwall thinks part of the problem is rhubarb’s association with sweets. “There’s not a whole lot of research being conducted, and I think part of it is the perception that rhubarb is only seen as a dessert,” sweetened with sugar and other, less astringent, fruits. It wasn’t always, or everywhere, so.

The U.S. got its initial predilection for rhubarb from the U.K., where it didn’t start appearing in cookbooks until the early 19th century, when sugar became affordable to the masses. Before that, it was used medicinally, as a purgative to restore “the tone of the stomach,” according to a manual published by an 18th century British physician. Centuries earlier, as rhubarb traveled along the Silk Route from China and Tibet, whence it originated, it was heralded as a cure-all for spleen and liver ailments; inflamed kidneys; sciatica; asthma; dysentery; fever; and poisonous animal bites.

In the late 1800s, the USDA moved its rhubarb collection to a new gene bank in Palmer, Alaska, as a means to bolster the fresh food supply for people who’d settled in with the Klondike Gold Rush (they’d brought cold-loving rhubarb with them); starvation was a major concern. By then, eating the plant, which is rich in vitamin C, was also known to be a reliable way to stave off scurvy; the leaves are inedible, however, due to their high oxalic content. As a bonus, frigid winters and long summer days meant an Alaskan homesteader could raise a rhubarb the size of a shed. Today it’s recognized for its anti-bacterial, anti-inflammatory, digestion-promoting properties.

“My technicians sample rhubarb [varieties] growing in the field; they eat it like celery and they’ve become connoisseurs.”

What other important abilities might rhubarb possess? “We’re preserving these plants in the hopes that people are going to come looking for them,” Cornwall said wistfully. He and his team have even identified types that can withstand increasing heat from climate change. “We’ve got a farm down the Snake River where it gets well over 100 degrees during the summer and [several] accessions are thriving,” he said. Southwestern desert rhubarb? Anyone?

Fed up with waiting for his worthy collection to be discovered, Cornwall decided to take matters into his own hands. At the end of May 2025 he hosted a Rhubarb Rumble in the town of Pullman. Locals were asked to submit dishes, — especially non-desserts. Cornwall made chutney, although he’d been intrigued by tales of an Alaskan rhubarb competition to which someone contributed a rhubarb pizza. (Pork barbecue in tomato/rhubarb sauce was on the menu but the winner was a rhubarb panatela.)

In fact, outside the Anglo-Saxon tradition of pies and jams lies a whole swath of cuisines that use rhubarb as a savory ingredient. Tugum rawash is a rhubarb sauce topped with coddled eggs — a sort of Afghani version of Middle Eastern shakshuka. A Persian stew called Koresh Rivas tempers bitter rhubarb slices with lamb and spices. TikTok is replete with videos of gourmets munching on fresh rhubarb stalks either with a sprinkle of salt or au naturel.

“My technicians sample rhubarb [varieties] growing in the field; they eat it like celery and they’ve become connoisseurs,” Cornwall said. All he wants to know is what he can say or do to convince you to become a connoisseur, too.

Nearly every day, dog trainer Jamie Penrith meets with dog owners whose pets have threatened or harmed sheep. “People come to me because they are desperate,” he said. “Either their dog has attacked, or they can see that their dog would attack.”

He teaches these dogs to leave sheep alone, using perhaps the most maligned tool in the dog training industry — the electronic collar, or e-collar. Through adjustable electric pulses administered via a handheld remote, the predatory pets learn that livestock are off the menu.

While the tool has been banned or heavily restricted in several countries due to welfare concerns — including Germany, Norway, and Sweden — some trainers argue that e-collars can prevent dangers to both livestock and dogs. Sheep farmers are even pushing back on existing bans, citing concerns for their animals. As more governments consider prohibiting the collars, debate is heating up over whether predatory instincts can be controlled without them.

Shocking Dogs to Protect Sheep

In the English countryside, where publicly accessible footpaths cross grazing lands, canine-bovine conflict is common. By one estimate, about 15,000 sheep are attacked by dogs every year across the UK — a number that may be growing, according to insurance data.

From speaking with owners, Penrith knows many attacks go unreported. “I would say you could probably quadruple that, at minimum, in terms of the actual attacks that do take place.” And livestock are not the only animals at risk — legally, farmers may shoot a pet that harasses their herd.

The conflict is common in Dartmoor National Park, where dogwalkers roam the rolling terrain alongside farmers grazing sheep, cattle, and ponies. Last year, the park’s livestock officer, Karla McKechnie, responded to 109 incidents of dog attacks on livestock, an increase from previous years. “We have a huge problem with out-of-control dogs,” she said.

In Wales, which enacted a ban on training with the collars in 2010, sheep farmers have called for a reversal. They argue that insurance data shows their animals suffer a higher rate of dog attacks than other parts of the UK. Adding to farmers’ concerns, a 2024 survey found that while a majority of dog owners let their dogs run free in the countryside, less than half of owners say their dogs come when called.

“We have a huge problem with out-of-control dogs.”

Years ago, Sarah N. (last name withheld for privacy concerns) of Devon, England, realized the risk of letting her dogs roam without training. On a walk through the woods, two of her dogs, Lola the terrier mix, and Fred the vizsla-pointer cross, charged a sheep down a steep bank and into a river. Her husband had to climb down the cliff, wade in the water and lift the sheep — shaken but uninjured — back onto shore.

After the incident, she hired Penrith. He first taught the dogs that following a verbal command to come back allows them to avoid the sensation coming from the collar. In a later session, the trainer brought the dogs near sheep in a controlled setting, delivering a pulse when their predatory impulse was piqued. The dogs learned two things: You must come back when called, and livestock must be left alone.

Usually after about three or four zaps, “the sheep becomes a stimulus that the dog thinks ‘do not approach under any circumstances, because it’s bad news for me,’” said Penrith. This negative association is intended to stop sheep attacks even when the dog’s handler isn’t present, which accounts for a large proportion of documented attacks — for example, when a dog escapes a yard.

After the training, Lola and Fred could safely run through the woods without bothering sheep. “It just gives them freedom,” Sarah said. “E-collars are a really good thing, used humanely with a trainer. ” (This reporter observed a similar outcome with her own dog, who now reliably responds to “come” even around squirrels and deer).

Electric Science

Electric shocks have a long history in behavioral research. Zaps can be timed precisely and delivered at calibrated intensity.

In dogs, findings dating back to the 1980s suggest that well-timed remote collar shocks — as part of a bigger training program — can curb unwanted behaviors. Still, other research has linked punitive training to worsening behavior in pets. The trouble is, protocols are inconsistent between studies. Many findings are based on owner observations reported in surveys, which begs questions like: Are certain tools causing problems, or are owners more likely to reach for those tools for problematic dogs?

The science on e-collars and livestock predation is sparse. In a 2001 study, researchers shocked 13 dogs when they came within two meters of the sheep. Tested a year later, their interest in sheep had tanked — only one dog stepped close enough to receive a zap. Owners of those dogs reported no negative behavior effects following the training.

Anamarie Johnson, an animal behaviorist working with U.S. rescue organizations, says there isn’t enough data on the consequences of e-collar training — both regarding predation as well as the emotional impact on dogs. That’s one reason why she studied stopping chasing in dogs as part of her PhD research at Arizona State University.

“The sheep becomes a stimulus that the dog thinks ‘do not approach under any circumstances, because it’s bad news for me.’”

For her study, published last year in the journal Animals, she selected dogs that chased a plastic lure moving rapidly through a motor-powered course. Then, the dogs were split into positive training and e-collar groups. The goal: Teach the word “banana” to mean “stop chasing.” (She chose a novel word that the dogs likely had no history with, unlike “come” or “stop.”)

In short training sessions, the word was paired with either a shock when the dog reached the moving lure, or, in the positive approach, the trainer said “banana” and dropped the dog’s favorite treat into a bowl while the lure machine was turned off. After the initial training, the dogs were tested to see how they responded to the banana cue when presented with a moving lure. While the e-collar-trained dogs were successful — most avoided chasing entirely or stopped when they heard “banana” — the food-reward group ignored the signal and chased the flying plastic. In a video behavior analysis of the training sessions, Johnson noted the e-collar dogs yelped when shocked but found few other signs of stress, though she added that the study didn’t provide insight into long-term impacts.

While some trainers embraced the findings (and others angrily criticized them), Johnson, who advises animal rescues on non-aversive handling and training methods, still thinks the collars are a risky tool in the hands of everyday dog owners. That said, “I don’t think anyone should be using my non-aversive protocol to try to stop [chasing] either,” she added, since it failed to stop dogs from going after the moving lure. Both training protocols were “super slimmed down” she added, and not something for owners to replicate — most real-world training takes longer, and is more complex, than can be fit into a three-day experiment.

(With more time, many e-collar trainers faced with a prey-chasing pup would teach an alternative behavior, such as coming back when called, and apply the stimulation for non-compliance. On the flip side, positive trainers might focus on getting many successful repetitions of “come” — rewarding heavily — until the behavior becomes near-reflexive.)

Avoiding Fragile Birds

While several countries have banned e-collars, at least one uses them in an official capacity to protect wildlife. New Zealand’s department of conservation, in partnership with nonprofit Save the Kiwi, organizes e-collar training to discourage dogs from approaching the flightless and fragile birds. Kiwi birds not only lack the ability to fly, they lack sternums — a hard nose nudge from a curious canine can be enough to crush their organs, said Emma Craig, dog specialist at Save the Kiwi.

The program started with hunting dogs in the 90s. Hunters use dogs to track their target: feral pigs. But those canines can also be drawn in by the kiwi’s strong musky scent. So, conservationists and trainers developed a program to teach dogs that kiwis are off-limits. In an outdoor training field, dog owners pretend to take their companion on a normal walk in the woods, but when the canine sniffs toward the kiwi decoy — either a real, dead kiwi or an artificial one, with added fresh scat for extra stink — the trainer shocks the dog via an e-collar, aiming for the lowest level needed to create an avoidance response.

Now, thousands of hunting, farming, and pet dogs are trained in New Zealand every year. While it’s not a guarantee against kiwi predation, Craig hears many stories from hunters — their dogs will suddenly move in a wide arc around an area, cautiously avoiding kiwi scent. Such unofficial reports as well some research suggests it provides extra security for the sensitive species, which is seeing a rebound in its numbers in some parts of the country.

A Welfare Worry or a Seatbelt?

From the spotty data available, Johnson and positive-reinforcement trainers remain unconvinced the tool is necessary and worry of welfare impacts, especially if owners can order the equipment with a single click online and no instruction. But, after facing intense pushback online for her research, she doubts other researchers will take up the cause of studying the behavior outcomes of using the training aids. The unwillingness to consider gaps in scientific understanding, said Johnson, is “a problem within the industry.”

Meanwhile, concerns about welfare continue to fuel proposals to limit use of the tool. In the United States, New Jersey and San Francisco regulators have considered bans. But, in a polarized dog training industry that seems to echo our current political climate, it’s unclear if dog professionals will come together on any guidance or regulation.

While acknowledging no training is fail-safe, Penrith argues the extra reliability of an e-collar is akin to a seatbelt — another layer of security for dangerous situations. Back in Dartmoor, McKechnie says that while she recommends leashing up pets near livestock, sometimes that’s not enough — leashes can break or slip out of hands. For dogs that are highly motivated to go after animals, McKechnie supports electric collar training to save the lives of both sheep and dogs. “Those dogs need to be trained,” she said.

Avian flu has become a financial disaster for some flock owners, especially in the egg industry. Backyard chicken owners are wondering whether their birds will be next. The problem is that there is no “early warning” system available. The gold standard for testing requires a lab and can take days to deliver results. A new detection technology can produce results in minutes, however, and is designed to be installed on site, right in the flock housing buildings, to provide continuous monitoring.

The USDA deems the H5N1 strain to be a highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI), which has had a mortality rate approaching 100% for some outbreaks. To control the spread of the disease, nearly 170 million heads of poultry have been culled or otherwise affected since the first outbreak was identified in February 2022, according to the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) of the USDA. This includes both commercial and backyard flocks, and the disease has had a significant impact on commercial egg supplies and other aspects of the poultry industry.

Controlling avian flu is difficult, because the virus is present in wild bird populations and it can easily be spread to domestic poultry, including chickens and turkeys.

But as we learned from Covid-19, viruses don’t always stay in their lane. H5N1 has also infected cattle, primarily herds of dairy cows. Unlike the high mortality rate with poultry, the virus does not appear to kill cattle. The spread of HPAI has forced the isolation of sick cows, however, and restrictions have been placed on transporting infected animals across state lines. According to Mostafa Ghanem, assistant professor of veterinary medicine at the University of Maryland, bulk testing of raw milk has been helpful in identifying outbreaks in dairy herds.

The more concerning development has been the transmission from cattle to humans; as of March 2025, the CDC reports 70 human cases in the U.S. and the majority of those were due to transmission from infected cattle. (To date, there haven’t been any known cases of human-to-human transfer.)

The risk to the general public is deemed to be relatively low; the costs to the poultry and cattle industries remain significant, however. While many federal research grants have been stopped as part of recent cost-cutting measures, the USDA did announce a $1 billion program that covers biosecurity, financial relief for affected farmers, and vaccine research. And new testing procedures are at the forefront.

The fact remains that time is money when it comes to poultry infections. Traditional testing takes time, which limits how quickly flock owners can respond and start mitigation treatments. Faster results could reduce financial losses significantly.

Faster Testing for Flocks

Researchers at Washington University in St. Louis have developed a novel testing procedure that can identify infected poultry in five minutes or less. These results are nearly instantaneous compared with the current gold standard for testing.

At present, detection of H5N1 in poultry relies on real-time reverse transcriptase polymerase chain reaction (PCR) testing. This process requires that physical swabs are applied to the birds — living or dead — or to surfaces in the flock housing and then those samples must be delivered to an appropriate laboratory. There, the samples must be processed and prepared for testing. “The automated testing process itself takes about six hours,” according to Ghanem. “In general, results are available within 24 hours, though this can be cut in half in urgent situations.”

The PCR testing is also used to detect the virus in products including milk and meat.

Other testing procedures require drawing blood samples from individual birds, which is more difficult than simple swab samples. These alternatives rely primarily on blood samples. Once these samples have been collected and delivered to a lab for processing and testing, these tests can rapidly detect antibodies in animals that have been exposed to the virus. This means they can report on exposure, but not specifically about active infection. And these test can still take days before results are available.

Results Out of Thin Air

The Washington University technology takes a completely different approach. Instead of relying on physical samples from individual birds (or cattle), the system samples air from the exhaust vents from the animals’ housing. The researchers have described their results in a paper in ACS Sensors.

The air enters a wet cyclone sampler which captures aerosol materials and concentrates them in a fluid. A “wet cyclone” uses a design similar to dust extraction systems that drive air through a cone-shaped device. This spins the airflow, as in a cyclone, that forces particulates to the outer wall of the cone. In this case, the wall is coated with a carrier fluid — keeping it wet — which captures the viral and other airborne material. The carrier fluid rinses the wall, and every five minutes, a sample of the fluid is pumped to the processing unit which is about the size of a desktop printer. A biosensor then analyzes the sample and quickly indicates whether or not the target virus is present.

The biochemical sensor relies on a material that is specific for the H5N1 virus, made from materials that are commonly available and relatively low-cost. One advantage of this testing is that it is non-destructive. The sample is not affected by the testing, which means that it can be preserved for use with other testing procedures if needed.

In addition to the speed of testing, a big advantage is that it does not require any technical skill to operate. The system can alert workers of possible infection in real time, and the levels of the detected pathogen. While the fabrication of the sensor system requires precision, the materials involved are not expensive and the system could be mass produced at a reasonable cost. The basic fabrication process uses screen printing technology to create the sensor electrodes.

But just how accurate is the testing? According to the team’s own published results, the system’s results showed a 90% correlation with the standard PCR lab results.

Where Do We Go From Here?

At this point, the system has only been tested in the lab using controlled samples. The research team has consulted with Varro Life Sciences during the process of designing the system, which could help speed the development of a commercial product. But the system will require pilot testing in the field to make certain that they can duplicate the accuracy produced in the lab and that the device will hold up under continuous operation.

One feature of the design does provide an important advantage for commercial applications. The biosensor can be charged with DNA material from other viruses, such as Covid-19 or the new H7N9 strain of HPAI virus. The sensor can also be charged using material from bacterial antibodies. This enables the system to detect aerosols containing a target bacteria and thus provide early identification of infections. The researchers were even able to identify samples of E. coli bacteria antibodies with their sensors.

In fact, it would be possible to include multiple sensors in the processing device so that multiple viral and bacterial infections could be detected using a single system. This continuous and real-time monitoring could be helpful in tracking disease not just in poultry and livestock operations, but in human healthcare facilities and other settings where disease transmission is a concern.

A low-cost airborne disease detection system that does not require trained technicians could save significant health costs — not to mention lives — for both agriculture and humans. If this new system proves to be effective, it could have a huge impact.

My first pet was a goldfish named Sparkle. She was 25 cents at Petco, and the size of my pinky finger. My mother bought a tank and all of the accoutrements — pebbles, dark flakes of fish food, and a miniature net — for Sparkle and her inexpensive friends waiting in collection cups to enter their new home.

A couple hundred bucks and four days later, Sparkle was dead, floating on the turquoise skin of the tank’s surface. But another one of those specimens, a standard Comet goldfish, thrived for the next decade. When I went off to college, my father was in charge of caring for the nameless goldfish that was easily six inches wide and thick.

Now that I think about it, is he still out in the garage, swimming in that too-small tank? No one can be sure. It’s very likely that he passed away, but it’s also not unlikely that he was brought out to a beach on the Magothy River in a bucket and released by my dad to go live his best life.

But the impact of owners that want to be merciful and release their goldfish into a local water body is profound. The first consideration is size. A recently caught goldfish in France weighed more than 67 pounds. In 2023, goldfish caught in the Midwest were over a foot long. And, of course, there was Megalodon, a massive goldfish caught in March in Pennsylvania — and an instructive warning tale.

These goldfish grew that large for a reason: They’re adaptable, voracious eaters that breed like crazy. In recent years, their presence in the Great Lakes has caused researchers to reassess what part the creatures have to play in environmental decline. For example, Lake Ontario is known as one of the most degraded aquatic ecosystems in the bunch due to nearby industrial activity, but it’s also home to a colony of goldfish that spawn in a specific spot every year, and each one can live up to 25 years.

But what exactly makes goldfish so dangerous to local waterways? And are pet owners to blame?

The American Chameleon

Grant Lord, the owner of AboutGoldfish.com, is a walking encyclopedia on the namesake species. Within 30 seconds of a video call from New Zealand, I learned roughly 10 facts: There are over 100 varieties of goldfish, which are descendants of the Prussian carp, carassius gibelio, which is a part of the Cyprinidae family, which also includes the sleek, stylish koi fish.

It’s not uncommon for goldfish to live from 10 to 40 years, and for over 1,000 years, farmers in China selectively bred them, and started to see new, exciting colors emerge from the genetic pool. Before long, more varieties developed, which are dubbed fancies by goldfish insiders. They may have bloated cheeks, two tails, or elongated eyes, among other features.

Traders in boutique varieties can sell a fancy for $15 a pop. But goldfish as a whole are particularly unique, Lord says, because they quickly revert back to their ancestral aesthetic. “Their genes try to revert back,” said Lord. “That’s one of the reasons why you mainly see single-tail goldfish in waterways. A lot return to their orange color [from other varieties] because of birds of prey ... They’re very adaptable, and breed like rats.”

Jennifer Riddle, programs manager for the Invasive Species Action Network (ISAN), also spends a lot of her time thinking and talking about goldfish. ISAN is largely funded by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and though there have been announcements of all kinds of cuts in the federal government, they have not impacted ISAN. 

“The barrier to entry for ownership is low. At the county fair, each kid gets a free goldfish.”

“I think [I talk about goldfish a lot] because many of us have owned one at one point in life,” she said. “The barrier to entry for ownership is low. At the county fair, each kid gets a free goldfish.”

But in our communal hearts and minds, when we hear the word goldfish, we think of the cracker or the Comet, the ubiquitous goldfish that children receive in a little bag at the county fair. The variety was bred around 1880 in Washington, D.C., in a few local ponds. It’s the most common type of goldfish that gets released in waterways, and can survive in a staggering range of temperatures and conditions. Fancies cannot.

Comets have very little economic value, and are bred as beta fish to feed turtles and large tropical fish. They’re the variety that goes into a little tank at home for a quarter, but that doesn’t limit what they can become.

The Question of Size

Though reputable resources say that goldfish are confined by their tank size and cannot grow to be large without more space, as an expert on the species, Lord isn’t completely sold on the theory.

“I’m doing research on this as we speak because it’s sort of a myth,” he said. “There are examples of stupidly large goldfish in small aquariums, and in other cases, there’s no growth [in a big space] ... So take that [idea] with a grain of salt.”

He argues that a goldfish’s size has much more to do with the mineralization of the water. When water is soft, which is excellent for laundry, that’s really bad for goldfish. Likewise, in the U.K. and the U.S. where there is a higher prevalence of hard water that runs through limestone, that’s an optimal environment for goldfish.

Beyond that, a significant misconception is that large goldfish are an anomaly.

“The Prussian carp can grow to 450 millimeters,” said Lord. “That’s just under half a meter. Goldfish grow to be large, especially the common Comets.”

Riddle concurs. Goldfish are hardy creatures and can survive in waters as long as they don’t freeze and do not exceed around 100 degrees Fahrenheit, so the majority of North American waterways are suitable habitat for them. If a pet owner dumps the contents of their aquarium into a river, it is more than likely that other species may die, but the goldfish will survive.

“I think part of it is sort of a numbers game,” she said. “The fact that they’re so common and so many people have had them means that they’ll be released.”

The Role of Pet Owners

As a goldfish enthusiast, Lord says that goldfish most definitely have personalities. Some are fearful, others are relaxed. They live a long time, and get to know the people who feed them. Lord says that if a stranger comes and stands beside him while he’s feeding the goldfish, they’ll swim to be closer to him, and be apprehensive of the stranger.

“Their memory is not three seconds. They remember stuff for months … They are quite intelligent.”

Yet even for all of Lord’s affection for goldfish, he is a staunch critic of pet owners who release their goldfish into the wild to live beyond a tank or personal pond.

“They should be shot for the ecological damage they’ve done,” he said. The problem is their very adaptability: Goldfish are not malicious like pike or catfish, but they eat whatever happens to float into their mouths, including a whole host of local aquatic plants. Years ago, Lord says that someone released numerous goldfish and koi in local waterways in New Zealand and has been disastrous for conservation managers to control.

“They’re very hard to get rid of,” he said. When a conservation body goes in to eradicate a goldfish population, Riddle says that it usually requires mechanical removal to selectively catch and cull the fish. There are also some chemical treatments that will kill them along with other non-target species. The economic burden of removing wild goldfish can fall to a state Fish and Wildlife service, or on a municipality. It just depends on where the water body is. A lake is a confined waterway, so eradicating released goldfish is difficult, but not impossible. In rivers, it’s a different story. They can never be completely cleared. A conservatory entity can work for years to chip away at the goldfish population, but one starry-eyed pet owner with a pair of tiny goldfish in a bucket can plunge the aquatic equilibrium back downhill.

But Riddle has a sympathetic view towards pet owners. When she talks to them about this issue, they get it. The dots connect, and she can see that when they let their pet go in the wild, it’s coming from a good place. They are often at a loss of what to do, she says, when they have to rehome a pet. Too often, pet stores sell animals without providing owners with information on the long-term commitments that come with it, or what to do if the owner is in a position where they need to rehome their animal. People get rid of pets for all types of reasons, like housing, a death, or even the cost to feed and maintain a pet’s environment — especially in this economy.

“You care for your pet. You’re releasing it into the wild where it might live a long, happy life … The biggest gap [...] comes from those selling or distributing pets.” Thus, part of the work in the future may be educating pet owners post-winning a carnival goldfish, but also getting buy-in from pet traders to be honest with their customers about what to do if they ever need to say goodbye to their pet.

Verdant pastures and happy cows star in the commercials of Tillamook County Creamery Association — more commonly called Tillamook — but a recently revived lawsuit paints a different picture of the farmer-owned cooperative, nationally famous for its cheese and ice cream products.

While the company is headquartered in the idyllic coastal town of Tillamook, Oregon, the bulk of their products are made in the small town of Boardman, a majority Hispanic community located in an arid, north-central corner of the state. There, Tillamook runs an 85,000 square-foot factory that produces roughly 170 million pounds of cheese every year. More than 30,000 dairy cows are housed in concrete structures on the nearby Threemile Canyon Farms.

The lawsuit alleges that Tillamook misrepresents where their products come from in their “Dairy Done Right” and “Goodbye Big Food” marketing campaigns, distancing themselves from the realities of large-scale dairy production while charging a higher price.

“This case is on behalf of all of the folks who were paying a price premium for these allegedly small-scale-produced products when in fact they’re very mass-produced,” said Amanda Howell, an attorney at Animal Legal Defense Fund, one of the litigators in the case.

The case is one in a long line of class action lawsuits accusing dairy and other food companies of similar marketing deception.

In 2022, a lawsuit was filed against Organic Valley on behalf of a consumer who accused the company of misrepresenting the conditions its dairy cows are raised in. Another case, filed in 2019, accused the egg brand Nellie’s of cruelly treating its laying hens while purporting humane animal conditions on its egg packaging. Neither case has been settled by the courts.

Tillamook faces similar accusations.

“The advertising that I’ve seen from Tillamook is very focused on this old-time, pastoral idea of farmers who interact with each cow every day and they all have names and they’re munching grass on pasture on the coast,” said Amy van Saun, senior attorney at the Center for Food Safety. “But there’s no pasture involved in Threemile Canyon’s operation.”

“The advertising that I’ve seen from Tillamook is very focused on this old-time, pastoral idea of farmers who interact with each cow every day.”

Tillamook adamantly disagrees with the accusations lobbed at them about deceptive marketing.

In a press statement, the company said that it “is true that not all of our milk and products originate from Tillamook County, and we’ve never hidden that fact.” It also said that it believes the case is “an unmerited attack initiated by the Animal Legal Defense Fund, anti-dairy activists who advocate for people to cut all dairy products from their diets, which only hurts the farming families of Oregon who own our co-op.”

The litigators disagree.

Howell of Animal Legal Defense Fund said that Tillamook’s marketing hurts “actual small-scale family farms” who have to charge higher prices in order to stay in business. “[The smaller producers] charge a premium price because they have to, and [Tillamook] is just charging a premium price because they can,” she said.

Something in the Water

In Boardman — where Threemile Canyon Farms is located — and the nearby town of Irrigon, some well water users have recorded nitrate levels five times the amount deemed safe by the federal Environmental Protection Agency. Ingesting nitrate-polluted water can cause a whole slew of health problems, including stomach cancer in adults and blue baby syndrome in infants. Enough long-term exposure can be deadly.

“Out in this area, they’re seeing increased amounts of cancer,” van Saun said. “It’s notoriously hard to attribute exactly where those [cancer rates] come from, but it is known that high levels of nitrates cause these health problems.”

The state of Oregon established the Lower Umatilla Basin Groundwater Management Area in 1990 to mitigate the pollution, but progress has been slow. The nitrate pollution comes from many sources, including fertilizer, manure, septic systems, and wastewater, which makes staunching the pollution all the more difficult.

Some of the region’s most vocal advocates point to the region’s commercial farms, CAFOs, and local port authority as the primary polluters. A different class action lawsuit was filed in 2024 on behalf of five Boardman residents against Threemile Canyon Farms (Tillamook’s operation), Lamb Weston, Madison Ranches, Beef Northwest Feeders, and the Port of Morrow, accusing them of polluting the groundwater. No court decision has yet been made.

A Rocky Past and a Hazy Future

The lawsuit accusing Tillamook of marketing deception was originally filed on behalf of four Oregon consumers in 2019 by the Oregon-based law firm Sugerman Dahab and the California-based Animal Legal Defense Fund.

In 2020, a circuit court judge dismissed the case, saying that it didn’t qualify for class action status. This decision was affirmed in 2022 by the Oregon Court of Appeals, but in early April of 2025, the Oregon Supreme Court decided the case had merit and should be allowed to proceed.

“Their decision was not unexpected, especially given our understanding of the Unlawful Trade Practices Act and the expertise of our co-counsel who are long time consumer protection advocates in the state,” Howell said.

But the lawsuit’s future remains unclear: Now the lawsuit will proceed at square one in the state’s trial court, with no specific timeline for when a final verdict will be made on the six-year-old case.

The electric vehicle market has seen explosive growth over the past decade. In 2014, a mere 63,525 plug-in electric vehicles were sold in the U.S. By 2024, sales skyrocketed to 1.2 million. Yet the same trends haven’t hit the electric tractor market, which continues to lag far behind the rest of the sector.

A 2022 report from California nonprofit CALSTART suggested that only well-off farmers with strong convictions about climate change were likely to purchase electric agricultural equipment, given the higher up-front cost and the need to invest thousands in charging stations. The infrastructure needed to charge electric agricultural vehicles can cost up to $50,000, and the CALSTART report noted that electric tractors are about 20% more expensive than their diesel counterparts; savings incurred by using electricity instead of fuel can take time to pay off.

Other issues inhibiting electric tractor growth include concerns about soil health and a lack of available tax credits. Behemoth tractors are already weighty vehicles, and the heavy batteries required to run large machines would add significant weight — this poses the risk of damaging soil. And while financial incentives like the clean vehicle tax credit are available for on-road electric vehicles, not many incentives are available for farmers. No federal credit exists for electric tractors, and California is the only state that offers a voucher through its Clean Off-Road Equipment Voucher Incentive Project (CORE) program.

Monarch Tractor, an electric tractor startup in California, makes the only approved model for the CORE program. Their tractor sells for $90,000 and boasts autonomous driving features; CORE vouchers knock $55,000 off the sticker price. But despite the vouchers, and despite raising $133 million in July 2024, Monarch laid off 10% of its workforce last November.

Monarch’s struggles are reflective of the overall electric market: The U.S. electric tractor market was worth just $200 million at the beginning of 2025. By comparison, the overall U.S. tractor market was worth $23.7 billion at the same time.

While the electric tractor market at large hasn’t gone according to plan, some farmers have turned to custom electric solutions.

Ted Blomgren runs Windflower Farm, a 30-acre organic farm in New York’s Hudson Valley. When Blomgren attempted to convert his Allis Chalmers G tractor to electric in 2000, it was mostly a passion project to work on with his two sons, 8 and 5 at the time. But what was intended as a father-son bonding project turned into a years-long fascination with electric tractors.

The G tractor conversion wasn’t the ideal fit for Blomgren’s farm — he needed a tractor with a three-point hitch, and wanted to carry more tooling implements at a time — so he set out to design his own electric tractor from scratch. Blomgren took inspiration from an Italian-made Mazzatti tractor, and its ability to carry three tooling implements at a time, reducing the number of passes through his crops. His tractor build worked well; he’s now built three of them for his farm.

And while financial incentives like the clean vehicle tax credit are available for on-road electric vehicles, not many incentives are available for farmers.

Blomgren has toyed with the idea of taking his invention to production, but he wants to fine tune a few features first. ”We’re building so many pieces from scratch, it’s kind of a fun challenge. We built our own brake pedals and brake boxes,” he said.

Despite innovators like Blomgren, Steve Heckeroth thinks farmers can be slow to adopt new inventions. “Farmers are a pretty conservative bunch to begin with. They don’t like change, and there’s so much change happening now,” said Heckeroth, CEO of Renewables. Renewables is a startup building a two-wheeled electric tractor for small farms. The tractor is still in the prototype stages, but Heckeroth hopes to bring the tractor to production by partnering with an autonomous vehicle company.

Heckeroth’s former company, Solectrac, which he founded in 2012, produced larger four-wheeled electric tractors. Solectrac — along with its parent company, Ideanomics — filed for bankruptcy in 2024. Heckeroth believes that the strategy to sell Solectrac tractors through a network of diesel tractor dealerships was a big mistake.

Heckeroth claims the company “spent millions and millions on advertising to people who thought it was a communist plot. Even some of the dealers got death threats when they put the electric tractor on their lot.” Heckeroth added that Solectrac “moved too fast” in their attempts to expand, which ultimately doomed the company.

A salesman at Beeler Tractor in California told me he previously had one Solectrac tractor on his lot, but it took over a year to sell. At another Beeler tractor location in Yuba City, California, sales representative Casey Dihel told me that “a lot of people weren’t open to the idea of an electric tractor, mostly due to run time.” He added that most Solectrac tractors he sold went to hobby farmers — commercial farmers weren’t interested. Two Solectrac tractors remain on his lot, which he received prior to the company filing for bankruptcy.

“ Our pitch to farmers is seven to $12 an hour. For every hour you run a tractor, that’s the savings that you see just on diesel versus electric.”

A YouTuber who goes by Tractor Time with Tim posted several videos on the Solectrac tractor he purchased. He praised the power of the electric motor, but was disappointed in the battery, which drained after a mere two hours.

Short battery life has long been a recurring critique of electric vehicles — both tractors and automobiles — but Blomgren says his invention can run for about six hours. “ Six hours is kind of a sweet spot,” he said. ”Nobody wants to be out cultivating for too many more hours than that.”

In a 2023 Pew Research survey, researchers found that younger respondents were more likely to consider purchasing an electric vehicle. That said, only 24% of rural respondents were open to the idea, in comparison to 48% of their urban counterparts.

Tepid responses to electric tractors aren’t stopping other manufacturers from dipping their toes in the market, though. Tilmor — an Ohio based startup — is slated to release a small electric tractor in fall 2025, and John Deere plans to release several electric models in 2026.

And despite the challenges, many remain optimistic about the future for electric tractors, including Kofi Britwum, an agricultural economist at the University of Delaware. ”The market is really going to grow,” he said. ”As much as 29% within the next nine years or so, so there’s definitely some promise.”

Monarch thinks the best selling point for skeptical farmers will be cost reduction — after the initial investment. Monarch CEO Praveen Penmetsa noted that the operating costs per hour are much lower than diesel tractors. “ Farming is a very low-margin business,” he said. “ Our pitch to farmers is seven to $12 an hour. For every hour you run a tractor, that’s the savings that you see just on diesel versus electric.”

For Tony Eldridge, a fourth-generation produce farmer in Middle Tennessee, community service is a vital part of farm life. To help feed hungry neighbors, he and his wife donate extra crops to churches and local charities. “We’ve been blessed, and we’ve been able to bless others,” he said.

Eldridge recently found a new way to contribute: gleaning, the ancient practice of gathering unharvested or unused crops and providing them to those in need. Last year, he invited volunteers with the Society of St. Andrew (SOSA), a gleaning nonprofit, to pick strawberries on his farm. Because it was near the end of the season, there weren’t enough strawberries left in his field to justify the expense of another harvest. “But why leave it in the field to rot and go to waste, when it can benefit other individuals?” Eldridge said.

Actual data on how many crops are left on farms is sparse. Estimates are mostly based on extrapolations, surveying farmers, and a few research studies. Jeannie Hunter, regional director for the Tennessee SOSA office, discussed this lack of solid statistics with colleagues; she realized that gleaners are perfectly situated to collect this data since they’re already in the fields. Hunter and her partners received a government grant for her gleaners to conduct a measuring study on nine Middle Tennessee farms during the growing seasons of 2021 and 2022.

To measure the amount of food loss on these farms, Hunter and her volunteers used a methodology developed by Lisa. K. Johnson, an independent food and agriculture consultant and expert in on-farm food loss. “If we don’t know, there’s nothing we can do about it,” Johnson said. “But once you’ve measured something and you’ve seen it, you’ve identified it, it’s hard to forget about.”

The SOSA volunteers began by choosing three random sites in a field. They picked all of the produce in those sites and sorted it into three categories: marketable, edible but unmarketable, and inedible. They weighed each group and then used a formula to determine the amount of food left in the entire field. At the end of the study, they estimated that more than 30 million pounds of edible food could have been left in Tennessee fields in 2021 and 2022. Afterwards, SOSA conducted another measuring study with Johnson’s help, from fall 2022 to fall 2024 on 20 farms in South Carolina. They found that 10 to 20 percent of the harvested crop was left behind and was edible.

There are a lot of factors that contribute to on-farm food loss. Because harvesting and preparing produce for transport is the most expensive part of cultivation, according to Johnson, farmers risk spending more picking crops than they’ll earn from them. This can happen if there isn’t enough produce left in the field after an initial harvest or if a farmer can’t find a market for it due to changing consumer preferences or the crop’s quality. For instance, if cucumbers are edible but too long for jars, a farmer can’t sell them to a pickle company and will have to find another buyer that doesn’t care about length.

Also, farmers under contract to supply customers with a certain amount of produce might plant more than they need. This ensures they can fulfill their obligation but might mean some produce will remain unsold. While farmers could donate the leftover crops, the federal tax deduction offered to them for doing this work is often seen as requiring too much work for too little benefit. “People that work in this field know that it’s not a failure on the part of the farmer, it’s a failure on the part of the system,” said Johnson.

For instance, if cucumbers are edible but too long for jars, a farmer can’t sell them to a pickle company and will have to find another buyer.

Negative connotations in labels like “food waste” can make farmers reluctant to allow gleaning and measuring. They also may be concerned about liability, possible damage, schedule delays, or the use of gathered information. But there are solutions to these concerns, and farmers can benefit from gleaning and measuring, using information provided by gleaners to consider adjusting planting plans.

Hunter has seen firsthand how farmers benefit. One farmer’s pepper plants had produced so much they were sagging. He allowed SOSA volunteers to pick the top peppers in what he called a “maintenance glean.” The plants stayed healthy, and the rest of the peppers were still available for his customers. Hunter and her volunteers also gleaned at a blueberry farm; that farmer viewed their services as a form of organic pest control, encouraging them to harvest every berry so none would rot on the ground attracting pests.

Eldridge noted that gleaning can be a marketing tool, an opportunity to help establish a farm’s reputation as one that assists others. Sylvia Ganier agrees. She’s the owner of Green Door Gourmet, a farm and agritourism site in west Nashville and a participant in the Tennessee SOSA measuring study. Volunteers who have gleaned in her fields have returned to buy produce from the farm, and they tell restaurants they’re happy to see her farm’s produce on menus.

But while gleaning has many benefits, it cannot solve the issue of on-farm food loss by itself. Shawn Peterson is a former sixth-generation Utah produce and poultry farmer and current executive director of the Association of Gleaning Organizations (AGO). Every year, AGO advocates for public support of gleaning and works with about 200 gleaning organizations to help them grow. Peterson believes that AGO gleaners are rescuing less than one percent of the produce that is available. “I think that gleaning is much better at building community and raising awareness around food waste than ... at actually recovering food,” he said.

Negative connotations in labels like “food waste” can make farmers reluctant to allow gleaning and measuring.

Peterson knows the challenges faced by gleaning organizations. Most are small, and the work is seasonal. Since they’re only busy for a few months each year, employees leave, and the organization has to hire new staff — making fundraising difficult. For these groups to grow, they need to obtain transportation for food and staff, as well as cold storage. Also, farmers often don’t provide much notice, making it challenging to find available volunteers. And distribution is a particularly difficult obstacle because volunteers often have to visit multiple organizations to deliver all of the gleaned produce (each can usually only take a limited amount if they don’t have cold storage).

The AGO has recently launched a project that will help address these limitations and advance discussion on how everyone in the food supply chain can benefit from unharvested crops. After receiving a government grant, AGO began a nationwide on-farm food loss study that will continue SOSA’s work of measuring unharvested crops. “We want to see farmers better understand what’s actually in their field, so they can better sell it,” Peterson said. “We want to see funders understand what’s in that field, so we can better recover it and get it to those who can’t afford produce.”

Peterson believes this study is the first of its size. Any of the 200 organizations that collaborate with AGO can choose to participate. Johnson, program manager for the grant program, will assist, and participating groups will use her methodology as much as possible.

The AGO aims to publish its findings in the spring of 2027. No matter what the study reveals, Peterson knows the journey to more efficiently using crops left on farms will be complex.

“It’s not farmers having better access to secondary markets. It’s not farmers having looser buying standards. It’s not more gleaning,” he said. “It’s a combination of things to address this real opportunity, and that’s really what it is. It’s an opportunity.”

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INTRODUCTION — The More Things Change

Sarah Mock: They say that fences make good neighbors, and as part of a generation eager for “healthy boundaries,” it seems like that idea still resonates.

When it comes to farmland, fences often communicate something just as important. Fences are a signal that on the agricultural side of the boundary, there are rules. Beyond the fence, the devil may care, but within the bounds, the seeds will be planted in rows, straight and even, at the right time, and with the requisite care and attention. Water, nutrients, plants, animals, and the soil itself will be looked after here, carefully monitored and controlled. On farmland there is thrift and intention and above all, order.

The antithesis of farmland, that place beyond the fence, is complex, chaotic, and unruly nature. Plants, animals, fungi, and the elements mingle and separate according only to chance and the forces of the universe. Life ebbs and flows with the seasons and the years, by turns explosively abundant and anemic, rarely orderly and often unpredictable. Wildland knows no straight lines or firm boundaries. Nature oozes, infiltrates, and evolves. Natural spaces change, and change, and change again.

Change is not a word we tend to associate with farmland. We celebrate century farms, fields and acres that have been in production for the span of multiple human generations. Postage stamps of the earth that yield a harvest again and again and again. After all, we want to– maybe need to believe that farmland will last forever, as long as we take care of it.

But then there are places like Providence Canyon, a little state park in Southeastern Georgia, that challenges the idea that it’s even possible to create a boundary between farmland and nature.

Paul Sutter:  These canyons are probably 100,150 feet deep in places, hundreds of yards wide. And these were allegedly caused by poor farming practices in the 19th century. These canyons were effectively erosion gullies.

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SM: Farmland in America has a distinct mythology, as we’ve been talking about on this podcast for the last six episodes. But nature and American wilderness have mythologies too, and the place where the farmland and wildland stories collide has become one of the most controversial flashpoints in American politics, culture, and society.

Full disclosure: Agriculture and the environment is a big topic– too big for a single podcast episode, and potentially even a whole season. Given that, we’re focusing on two particular questions here, the first about the separation of farmland from natural systems, and the second about the impacts of human actions, and lack thereof, on the places and spaces we use. We’ll be covering these two topics in a two part episode. This is part I.

Today we’re going to poke around at the fence line between nature and farmland, looking more deeply at the shared histories of what are now farms and wild landscapes, and at the possibility that the boundary between these supposed “opposites” might be a lot more porous than we thought. We’re going to explore the relationships between managed and unmanaged landscapes, and better understand how natural systems shape farmland, and how farmland in turn shapes everything from national forests, grasslands, and monuments, to cancer rates in the Midwest and the annual dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico.

This is The Only Thing That Lasts. I’m Sarah Mock.

[MUSICAL INTERLUDE]

PART 1: What Washes Away

SM: Whatever else might be true about Georgia’s Providence Canyon, it is beautiful. It looks a bit like the Grand Canyon, if not for all the trees. It’s a vista of cliff walls, colored shades from burgundy and bright orange to a crisp eggshell. The undulations in the rock faces are mesmerizing, and the place has the impressive feel of a landscape carved over millions of years.

Today, Providence Canyon receives about 300,000 visitors a year who come to marvel at the picturesque views and enjoy the woods, the wilderness, and the great outdoors. These visitors can hike around the thousand-acre park and read the occasional signpost about the history of the area, and how these canyons were formed.

Paul Sutter, the environmental historian and professor at the University of Colorado-Boulder that you just heard from a few minutes ago, stumbled upon Providence Canyon almost by accident. And when he first realized how the place came to be, he was flabbergasted.

Paul Sutter: My first reaction was, how ironic that the remnants of environmental mismanagement had been preserved as a park for its scenic qualities. I was amazed to find that the locals wanted to protect them initially even as a national park. They thought they were spectacular enough to warrant that designation.

SM: Paul is referring here to the fact that, beautiful as Providence Canyon may be, it is not a work of nature, but a work of man. Or, maybe not a work– an accident?

The most straightforward version of how this landscape was formed goes like this. The gullies started to appear in the middle of the 19th century, not long after farmers first arrived in this part of Georgia, cutting down the trees and plowing up soil. In doing so, they destabilized the land, and when it rained ,the force of the water hitting and then running off the ground would slice into the Earth, often quite spectacularly, swallowing up hundreds of acres of land, cemeteries, and buildings in a single storm. Providence Church, from which the Canyon gets its name, had to be moved in the late 1850s, to save it from falling into the gully’s now gaping maw.

I think it would have been easy for Paulto learn this ecological history and then wash his hands of Providence Canyon. After all, it’s a familiar story– enterprising landowners barge into a place they know too little about, launch into their work with too little awareness for the local ecological realities, and their self-interested efficiency leads to needless destruction. It share’s important similarities with the story of the Dust Bowl and other manmade ecological disasters both modern and ancient.

But Paul was suspicious that in the case of Providence Canyon, that convenient narrative wasn’t the full story. This suspicion arose out of a local legend that suggested the origin of the gullies was a little more fantastical than you might think.

Paul Sutter: The most common story was that it was started by a dripping barn roof. Or a woman who would throw out her washing water in the same place every day or cattle, walking downhill in this region. But the more I learned about this landscape, the more I recognized that whether these were actually true or not, they could have been.

SM: The science here gets a little tricky, but it’s true– these gullies weren’t caused exclusively by the destabilizing action of farmers. It was also caused by the nature of the place itself.

See, this region sits atop the beach of an ancient ocean. The beach was covered in sand dunes that were hundreds of feet high. Over time, with the help of upstream erosion, the sand dunes were completely covered with clay. And this covering resulted in the rolling, tree-covered hills common in this part of the country. To explain what happens next, Paul compares the landscape to a dipped ice cream cone. The clay is the chocolate, a hard, seemingly stable shell, and those ancient sand dunes underneath are the ice cream.

For a while, the clay holds the sand in place, and it doesn’t seem like anything has changed, but when you break through the outer shell, as farmers did when they plowed deeper and deeper into the soil, things start to go sideways, literally.

Paul Sutter: They breached that clay layer, and then water would start percolating down into that unconsolidated sand. And then at a certain point the land would just slump and slide downhill.

SM: Once this sliding starts, it doesn’t stop until the soil runs out. And the impacts can be unimaginably massive. In Stewart County, Georgia alone, erosion gullies have effectively obliterated 70,000 acres of former farmland, nearly a quarter of the whole county. And this was despite efforts by Georgia farmers to halt the carnage.

Paul Sutter: At least a subset of Southern farmers, were quite attentive to these problems and did try to solve them with what we would today recognize as conservation practices, sometimes successfully, sometimes unsuccessfully. And again, ironically, sometimes those very practices ended up creating the worst gullies by diverting terrace ditches off level fields into sloping land that concentrated water flow that actually created gullying.

SM: After World War II, farmers in the region had much greater success in reducing erosion, in part by recognizing that it wasn’t the farming practices alone that were causing the devastation. It was the combination of geography, soil, and farming that was to blame. So the remedy in the 20th century then, was not some newfangled farming practice, but the much simpler solution of moving farming elsewhere, to more stable soils, and allowing land in this area to return to forest.

Another reason farming largely came to an end in this area was because the existing gullies were basically impossible to repair, both because the damage was so extreme, and because the land simply wasn’t suited to recovery. In that way, retiring the land from agricultural production altogether was the only option.

In many cases, arranging this land retirement wasn’t very difficult, because the land had been abandoned already, or was effectively worth so little that the government was able to buy it from impoverished farmers as both a poverty alleviation mechanism and an environmental protection measure.

Paul Sutter:  If you are to go through the South today and look at the conservation areas that exist, and here I’m mostly thinking about a suite of national forests that forest lands along the Piedmont, the former plantation belt in the South, a lot of state parks, refuges, a lot of these lands are lands that had been severely eroded.

SM: The fact that many of America’s most damaged agricultural lands have been reborn as conservation land is not just a phenomenon of the agricultural South. There are many national forests that sit atop former ranchland, many Dust Bowl-era wheat fields that are now part of protected national grasslands, and many state parks and recreation eras that had previous lives as unsuccessful farms.

In the rare cases where parks and protected areas do not have settler-agriculture roots, think the Grand Canyon, Yellowstone, or Glacier National Park, these places were often given over for conservation not for their natural beauty, but in large part because they lacked promise as productive agricultural spaces for settlers.

In fact, Paul explains, the whole concept of preserving scenic places is a relatively new one that came into fashion right around the turn of the 20th century. Prior to that, the Grand Canyon, for example, wasn’t necessarily admired as a wonder so much as it was begrudged as a desert badland, a waste of cliff faces that hid in its depths the only valuable thing about it– the Colorado River. A river that could and would lend itself to irrigation.

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SM: Life is a cyclical thing, and so is land. The story of Providence Canyon may, at first blush, be one of disaster and destruction, but Paul pressed me to look deeper– not to think of “the end of farming” as the end of the story.

Paul Sutter: As I’ve returned to Providence Canyon, the gullies are healing. And what’s really happening is as trees are growing up, they’re trapping more soil. It’s just harder to see Providence Canyon now. When you walk up to the edge, it’s in the middle of a forest. And I would really love the park to be able to tell this complicated environmental story.

SM: Part of the complicated story of Providence Canyon is that, despite our desire to make a sharp distinction between nature and agriculture– between the things we control and are responsible for and the things we don’t and aren’t, the reality is, that distinction is only in our minds. Providence Canyon provides undeniable evidence that human and natural processes can co-create spaces and places, and often entangle to create unexpected outcomes, and our desire to label those outcomes, to assign values like “good” and “bad” to certain actions and people,

Might be natural, but they’re not particularly helpful. Not least because the outcomes, these gullies, are hardly final. After all, Providence Canyon, like every square inch of land on Planet Earth, is still evolving.

Paul Sutter: One of the most fascinating parts of Providence Canyon, if you go for a hike there, you come back out of the canyon and you’re hiking through the forest, and there’s actually an old automobile junkyard there, and these old rusted chassis of automobiles from early- to mid-century have trees growing up through them. And I’ve come to think of that as a really powerful metaphor for the place as well. That there is a kind of lesson about environmental resilience. When we talk about the damage done, the destruction, I use a phrase like environmental disaster. What exactly was the disaster? In the simplest sense, there was a lot of land that might’ve been in agriculture that was destroyed for agriculture.

SM: I’ve been thinking about the last part a lot lately, because land that is “destroyed for agriculture” is, of course, not necessarily destroyed at all. Land is not a thing that is very easily made, but it is not easily unmade either. Land transforms, expands and contracts, sometimes with human help, and sometimes without it. Often these changes are deadly and wonderful, beautiful and devastating. And more importantly, as time passes, triumphs and disasters both fade away.

The forests have come back to Providence Canyon, a younger version of the very kind that American farmers would have cleared away 200 years ago. And time, and the land, goes on.

[MUSICAL INTERLUDE]

SM: Providence Canyon and the severest of the Southeastern gullies may seem, today, like a somewhat quaint environmental disaster of yore. The result of too little knowledge, science, and technology colliding with a hell of a lot of gumption. Surely not a mistake we’d ever find ourselves making again…

Today, we have plenty of knowledge and know-how, and no shortage of gumption either. What’s more, we have wealth– wealth we’ve used to fundamentally reshape American farmland, especially in the Midwest. This time, our efforts are no accident, and we’ve taken some precautions, and put in some guardrails to prevent against calamity, and yet, there is always a price to pay for farming, and making farming more efficient, and the bill is already coming due.

How, exactly, are we paying for is the installation of tens of millions of acres of plastic gullies, or the large-scale adoption of field tile in American crop farming.

That’s after the break.

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Intro:

This podcast is made possible by Ambrook. Ambrook builds financial management software for farms, ranches, and businesses across the American supply chain. It’s an all-in-one platform that simplifies accounting, record-keeping, and payments workflows while empowering operators with visibility into the health of their business. Here’s Tom, the engineering lead at Ambrook, on how the company keeps the people who make their software as close to farmers as possible.

[NEW AD]

Outro:

That was Tom and his team help turn empathy into great products at Ambrook. Tune in to the rest of the season to hear from other members of the Ambrook team on why they chose to join and what motivates them to build the financial layer powering American farms.

[END BREAK]

PART 2: Field Tile — The Plastic Gully

SM: To teach us what we need to know about field tile, meet Larry Weber. Larry grew up on a small family farm in Northeast Iowa.

Larry Weber: Had a four-crop rotation. We had 400 chickens. We fed out a couple thousand feeder pigs each year and we had a small dairy herd that pastured in an area that had a little creek that ran through it. And I was drawn to the creek as a child, as many people are. And I think that influenced me.

SM: Today, Larry is a professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of Iowa, and a founder of both the Iowa Flood Center and the Iowa Nutrient Research Center. Larry is still a self-professed “water guy”and he’s dedicated his life to understanding the interplay between soil, water, and the ecosystems they underpin.

And Larry’s been busy over the last two decades or so. It started in 2008, when Iowa experienced an unprecedented and devastating flood. It involved most of the rivers in Eastern Iowa, and lasted essentially the whole month of June. Tens of thousands of homes and businesses were damaged or destroyed, whole communities essentially washed away.

Not unexpectedly, there were a lot of questions in the wake of this disaster, and Larry’s Iowa Flood Center was funded by the state legislature to understand why these floods were so severe.

The most direct answer was simple– Iowa is experiencing more severe rain events though overall annual precipitation hasn’t changed very much. But more rain is coming in short periods of time, which is the recipe for flooding.

But another place where blame accumulated was with Iowa’s farmers. See, farmers have also been impacted by this changing precipitation regime and they’ve struck on a solution.

Larry Weber: Those episodic rains that make the soil very wet for a short period of time lead farmers to do land improvement activities. One of those primary activities is to install subsurface tile drainage pipes to take that excess soil moisture out of the water column, and to dry that land out or those soils out because, as they say, corn doesn’t like wet feet.

SM: To keep corn roots dry, Iowan farmers have gone to great lengths, installing more than 9 million acres of field tile in recent decades.

Tile is an odd name for these drainage systems, because it doesn’t involve any kind of flat, ceramic object. Field tile is a series of interconnected and evenly spaced pipes, which are buried in a grid pattern in farm fields to move water quickly out of the soil. To install them requires significant earth-moving, as field tile is usually buried at a depth of three to six feet.

It can be hard to imagine that installing these pipes on 9 million acres could be worth the expense, but it often is, not least because the pipes last for a long time, and the year on year yield improvement, especially in a field with good soils but that can be wet, is often substantial, and more than compensates for the marginal cost of installation.

In the flooding years since 2008, however, farmers started to get flack about the impact of field tile on downstream flood conditions. After all, the logic goes, water that use to sit on farm fields is now being flushed away into the river as soon as it falls. Doesn’t that make farmers at least somewhat responsible for high water levels downstream?

Despite that logic, Larry’s research indicates that field tile is probably not worsening flood conditions in Iowa, mainly because water has to penetrate the soil to get into the tile system, and when 18 inches fall in a day, as it did recently about 16 inches will run right off the surface, never getting into the soil at all, and all that water is what causes the flooding.

But that doesn’t mean that field tile is not causing problems. To the contrary, Larry is very concerned about the impact of field tile on communities, land, and water downstream. But it’s not the water itself that’s the problem. It’s what the water is carrying that we should be worried about. Namely, Larry is worried about ag nutrient runoff.

There are two major sources of ag nutrients in Iowa. The first is applied chemical fertilizers, mainly nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium mixes, N-P-K for short. The second is animal manure, most of it coming out of confined hog facilities. Both animal waste and organic sources of N, P, and K exist naturally in the landscape, and all these nutrients feed plants and help them grow. But plants can only use so much.

Larry Weber: As they are applied in excess or as they run off in excess into our streams, they become a pollutant. And so they’re a pollutant in our rivers and streams that can result in levels that exceed the maximum allowable levels for drinking water.

SM: Nitrate, a form of nitrogen, is probably the most common excess nutrient found in Iowa’s waters.The EPA sets the maximum allowable level of nitrates in drinking water at 10 parts per million, above which the risk of severe impacts like blue baby syndrome, which can lead to death in children under six months of age, rises substantially. In some rivers in Iowa, nitrate loads are regularly above this level.

In 2015, the issue led the Des Moines Water Works board to sue several counties in Iowa for their nitrate discharge levels. The lawsuit specifically claimed that tile drainage lines moved nitrate more quickly and efficiently from farm soils into rivers which then feed into the public drinking water system. The nutrient loads required the utility to spend more than half a million dollars on nitrate removal in a single season to make the water safe for consumption.

But contaminated drinking water is really just the tip of the iceberg of nutrient-related problems, in Iowa and beyond.

Larry Weber: Too many nutrients into the Gulf of Mexico, result in small algal blooms that happen, the algal die and then consume the oxygen and the water creates a dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico. That dead zone target is 5,000 square kilometers as the acceptable size. That’s been as high as well over three times that, if not larger once that dead zone is created, of course, and all the oxygen is taken out of the water, then the aquatic species, both the fish that swim through the area as well as the macroinvertebrates and other, benthic and beneath forms of aquatic life all die. And obviously that’s not good for the health of that system.

SM: Not least of the dead zone’s impacts are on Gulf fisheries, both recreational and commercial. But we don’t have to wait for the nutrients to get all the way to the Gulf to see impacts. Algal blooms are common in lakes, reservoirs, and other water bodies throughout Iowa and the midwest, not only leading to an appealing green film, but also leading to fish deaths. An even more unpleasant consequence is high bacteria loads, in particular cyanobacteria, which can not only lead to rashes, pink eye, and terrible stomach aches, it can also get into drinking water supplies, where it is particularly hard to remove. And when cyanobacteria blooms die, they emit airborne toxins that can be extremely harmful to our respiratory systems.

High nutrient loads fuel cyanobacteria growth, and have led to countless closures of public recreation areas from beaches to rivers to lakes. And these increasingly high nutrient loads, Larry says, are directly linked not only to agricultural production, but to the installation of field tile.

Larry Weber: Historically, that nitrogen would have had to travel a great distance laterally through this soil matrix to find its way back to the stream. Now we have a buried pipe that’s installed on a regular pattern, widespread across Iowa. And so that nitrogen absorbed to that water doesn’t have to travel many thousands of feet to get to a stream. It has to travel tens of feet to get to a tile.

SM: One result of this very efficient removal of water from farm fields is a big yield boost, a boon for the bottom lines of individual farms. But another is a devastating quantity of pollution flowing downstream, killing fish, growing algae, closing public spaces, and threatening public health as it goes.

A big part of Larry’s work is not just understanding the relationship between ag production and water quantity and quality in Iowa, it’s also working on solutions that lead to a more stable future for the state.

He and his team have supported the development and adoption of hundreds of practices and tools that have been rolled out on farms all over the region. Though he’s proud of this work, he also understands that the incentives are stacked against them. He points to a 6-year period in which his team rolled out 84 solutions in a single small watershed aimed at holding back heavy rainfall and improving nutrient retention. Over that same period, 8,400 miles of new tile drainage was installed in that same watershed.

[MUSICAL INTERLUDE]

SM: Our technologies have advanced, and today we’re not losing buildings and towns to gullies we don’t understand. But we’re still causing damage, to the environment and to ourselves, through our actions to reshape the landscape for ag production and the corresponding reactions of natural systems, which move in ways we’re notoriously bad at predicting to keep things in balance. After all, water carrying nutrients downstream is not a “flaw” of nature, it’s by definition how nature works. It’s how soils are built, how nutrients get cycled, how life evolves and expands.

To my mind, there’s at least two ways to think about what might come of field tile in the future.

We can think about it as the straightforward reality, where those with the will and the resources to install field tile benefit the most, and the cost of quickly drying out fields is paid downstream, on nearby properties that depend on well water, by city water drinkers and recreationalists, by distant communities and industries. And perhaps most of all, the cost is paid by wild plants, animals, and ecosystems all along the way.

Perhaps in the longer term, we can also think of it like Providence Canyon, where the combined force of farming and nature reshaped the land of Southeast Georgia, destroying it for agriculture, and in many ways changing it beyond our recognition.Similarly, the intersecting qualities of farming and nature are reshaping the rivers and waters of the Midwest, perhaps destroying them for human consumption and recreation, but I think it would be wrong to say that it’s destroying the Mississippi Basin writ large. It’s not. Plants, animals, and ecosystems will adapt and survive. Whether or not we humans will, that’s another question altogether.

Our agricultural ways, in many senses, are about control, but they also exist at the confluence of forces we don’t control. Legally, we can say things like, “I can do what I want on my own property.” But the reality is, the effects of farming on the land are not contained by fences or property lines, nor are the impacts of nature and wilderness excluded by them. Farmland is at the mercy of natural systems, just as wilderness is at the mercy of farmland. The two are not separate or separable.

[MUSICAL INTERLUDE]

But what does that mean for us, as we sit at this critical juncture both for the future of farmland and Nature, in America and beyond? I asked this question of Larry, a man, I’ll remind you, who is not an environmentalist by training. He’s an engineer, and an engineer raised on an Iowa farm. He’s not advocating for the end to agricultural production in the state, not by a long shot.

But he does spend a lot of his time talking to farm and non-farm stakeholders alike, trying to communicate what’s at stake if the state can’t figure out how to manage its water problems.

Larry Weber: If we want to continue to intensify agriculture and we do it in a way that’s unchecked, that will become one of our biggest weaknesses. And I think one example of that is the impact of those agricultural pollutants on public health, on the water that we drink, and the air that we breathe. The state of Iowa has seen in the recent cancer registry that we are the second highest rate of cancer incidents in the nation and the state with the largest increase in rate of cancer. In the country. And so at the current status, we will likely overtake the number one position. Most certainly there are many competing elements to that cancer incidence. But it would be hard not to look at the water that we drink and the air that we breathe.

SM: Protecting our land, air, and water has long been a priority of the environmental protection movements, and it still is today. But though the outcomes we want, and the destruction we’re trying to avoid, might seem obvious, there are, in fact, a lot of disagreements about how to actually achieve them. And at a moment when environmental regulations– especially on the federal level– are weakening how we solve those disagreements and decide to take action feels more high-stakes than ever.

So now that we’ve gotten a taste of how we’ve transformed the land for agriculture, we’re going to take a closer look at these movements that are trying to conserve, preserve, and even regenerate healthy landscapes instead, sometimes in collaboration with agriculture, and sometimes– as was also true with 20th century Georgians did– by choosing to abandon agriculture altogether.

We won’t spend much time on the glossy websites and polished talking points of the organizations you’re likely already familiar with, but instead will dig into the sticky and unsexy debates about the role of domestic animals in landscape restoration, our obligation to manage damaged ecosystems or leave them alone, and who really benefits from existing environmental actions.

Levi Van Sant: Republican lawmakers in South Carolina were the ones who challenged the sort of conventions around conservation easements and said, ‘Hey, if we’re funding conservation, my constituents want to be able to deer hunt there. Right? If we’re funding the protection of lands, why can’t we provide public access?’

SM: Who are we really protecting farmland for, and who’s making a killing on the public dime— next time, on The Only Thing That Lasts.

SIGN OFF

SM: Before we sign off, I talked through information from a number of sources and experts today, so if you want to dig into it yourself, check out the shownotes, or our website for links.

While you’re there, make sure you head over to ambrook.com SLASH research to stay up on the latest reporting from the Ambrook team on agriculture, land, and environmental issues like the ones we talk about here on the show. After you subscribe to the podcast, don’t forget to sign up for the newsletter, and follow @AmbrookAg on socials for news about upcoming projects and stories. And we can’t wait to hear what you think! If you like what we’re doing, let us know, and don’t forget to share.

The Only Thing That Lasts is an Ambrook Research production. This podcast is written, produced, and mixed by me, Sarah Mock. Our editor is Jesse Hirsch, with support by Ali Aas and Bijan Stephen. Technical support by Dan Schlosser, and general support by Mackenzie Burnett and the whole team at Ambrook.

A final note, Ambrook Research, the media outlet that produced this podcast, is 100% editorially independent from Ambrook, the fintech company that funds it.

This is an op-ed. It does not represent the perspectives of Ambrook or this publication.

More than one hundred feet beneath the ground in Springfield, Missouri, there are expansive, dimly lit limestone caves. These caves are not filled with either iridescent hanging stalactites nor emerging, rocky stalagmites. Instead, the football-field-sized caverns are stuffed to the brim with American made cheese: cheddar, Swiss, provolone, and even a room dedicated to Wisconsin curds. The original owner of these infamous cheese caves? The United States government.

For decades, it was official American policy to purchase and store massive amounts of cheese in Missouri, Wisconsin, and Kansas. In the intervening decades, a company called Springfield Underground has taken over operations. While the USDA itself no longer actively stockpiles cheese in the caves, their use for storing immense amounts of dairy products continues, a quiet testament to the persistent overproduction baked into federal dairy policy.

The story of how the government came to store millions of pounds of cheese underground begins with the Great Depression. As prices for agricultural products collapsed in the 1930s, dairy farmers across the country faced financial ruin. Despite their pleas, distributors refused to raise their prices, convinced Americans would not pay a premium for a pantry staple. Infuriated, farmers took to the streets, sabotaging milkmen on their delivery routes and pouring gallons of milk on the ground to make their point.

They won: Franklin Delano Roosevelt offered subsidies to farmers who agreed to reduce their production in order to raise milk prices. While FDR’s policies planted the seeds of federal agricultural intervention, they would pale in comparison to what came later.

Throughout World War II, the American government touted dairy production as a vital contribution to the national war effort. They shipped dried milk to soldiers overseas, and new research about milk’s ability to build muscle mass made it the ideal beverage for the nation’s virile self-image. “If you read the literature from the 1940s, there’s an almost religious feel to the discussions of dairies‘ powers,” said Andrew Novakovic, E.V. Baker Professor of Agricultural Economics Emeritus at Cornell University. (A glowing pamphlet from the era described cheese as ”a food no one should live without.“) Soon, this belief became law. In 1946, Congress signed the 1946 National School Lunch Act, which required every meal served in schools to include milk.

But milk presented a logistical challenge. It was easily perishable, costly to transport, and difficult to store. For many dairy farmers, the precarity of their product necessitated a consistent, stable consumer. To promote production, Congress passed the Agricultural Act of 1949, which included the Milk Price Support Program (MPSP). The program guaranteed a minimum price for milk and authorized the USDA to buy the surplus when prices dipped below the support level. With the government as a buyer of last resort, production among dairy farmers soared. With their newfound certainty, they raced to churn out as much milk and cheese as possible.

That trend intensified under President Jimmy Carter. A peanut farmer from Georgia with deep ties to rural America, Carter viewed price support as a lifeline for struggling farmers, many of whom were being crushed by inflation and rising input costs in the 1970s. While running for president, he promised to raise the price of support for vulnerable dairy farmers and when elected, followed through. The result was a dramatic oversupply of dairy. Since it spoils quickly, the U.S. government encouraged producers to transform their milk into cheese, and the USDA began stockpiling the surplus in warehouses across the country, including deep underground in Springfield, Missouri. At its peak, the government spent over $2 billion a year to store the excess, much of it entombed beneath the Midwest.

For many dairy farmers, the precarity of their product necessitated a consistent, stable consumer.

When Ronald Reagan took office in 1981 promising to slash federal spending, the cheese stockpile became a symbol of a bloated government. In an infamous press conference, Reagan’s Secretary of Agriculture, John R. Block, held up a five-pound brick of processed cheese and declared, “We’ve got 60 million of these that the government owns. It’s moldy, it’s deteriorating ... we can’t find a market for it, we can’t sell it, and we’re looking to give it away.” Some critics proposed dumping it in the ocean. Instead, amid rising hunger and a recession, the Reagan administration created a solution: Give it away. The USDA began distributing the surplus through food banks, churches, and welfare offices. This marked the beginning of what became known — often mockingly, sometimes gratefully — as “government cheese.” (Not to be confused with the new TV show of the same name.)

To many, the image of government cheese embodied the contradictions of federal policy. A symbol of waste born from overproduction and bureaucratic miscalculations yet also a lifeline for millions of food-insecure Americans. The dense, salty cheese was emblematic of the era’s social safety net: essential, flawed, and stigmatized. These contradictions were used to justify sweeping changes. Under Reagan, the federal government began scaling back and privatizing key food assistance programs, leading to a major reduction in SNAP. The public image of food aid shifted from a social right to a begrudging handout.

Today, the former government cheese caves are still operational, but the Department of Agriculture is no longer their primary tenant. The Springfield Underground complex has been transformed into a vast industrial logistics hub, with over 3 million square feet of temperature-controlled storage leased to corporations like Kraft Heinz, PepsiCo, and Nestlé. Some of the same companies that benefited from USDA dairy surplus purchases during the program’s heyday now rent space in the very caverns once used to house that surplus. These artificial caves maintain a steady 58 degrees year-round, making them ideal for storing perishable goods including cheese, which is still housed there, albeit now as private inventory.

“We’ve got 60 million of these [blocks of cheese] that the government owns. It’s moldy, it’s deteriorating ... we can’t find a market for it, we can’t sell it, and we’re looking to give it away.”

While the U.S. government no longer actively stockpiles cheese, the surplus problem hasn’t entirely disappeared. In 2022, the USDA reported that commercial inventories of American cheese topped 1.5 billion pounds, the highest level since the 1980s. Though most of that cheese is now stored above ground in refrigerated warehouses, the symbolism of the caves persists and is often invoked during debates over agricultural subsidies and food aid.

Dozens of viral TikTok videos continue to show the Springfield cheese caves with a mix of befuddlement and pride. “This is where our taxes go?!” writes one user; “God Bless America,” says another. Despite privatization, the caves remain a subterranean monument to the country’s ongoing struggle to balance food security, farm economics, and public perception. Government cheese, once a symbol of abundance and attempts to help small farmers, has continued to be a symbol of government dysfunction — a stigma that persists to this day.

In President Trump’s “one big beautiful bill,” which passed the U.S. House of Representatives last week, federal funding for SNAP would decrease by more than $267 billion over 10 years. The impact of that cut would be enormous: More than 40 million Americans rely on SNAP, including one in five families with children. Like in the 1980s, accusations of government waste have fueled calls to reduce the social safety net. Once again, dairy is at the center of the story — but this time, the industry could face a major loss.

According to Mother Jones, the dairy industry still receives nearly $1 billion a year in subsidies. Perhaps the largest, least visible subsidy flows through federal food programs like SNAP, WIC, and school lunches. A prime example: Every federally reimbursed school meal must still include a carton of milk regardless of whether or not students want it, need it, or can even digest it. Some students have even protested and won lawsuits over the fact that they need a doctor’s note to receive soy milk.

“Every dairy producer I work with is aware of this connection [with the federal government] and many are frustrated by it.”

This creates an enormous, federally subsidized market for dairy. In fact, recent bipartisan legislation proposed by the dairy lobby would expand this requirement to include whole and two percent milk, bringing more milk into American schools. “Dairy producers understand that they are deeply intertwined with federal food aid programs,“ said Novakovic. If the Republicans‘ proposed cuts go through, the benefits could profoundly impact their bottom line. ”Many dairy producers who supported [the President] are surprised to see the proposed cuts.“

Luis A. Ribera, professor and extension economist at Texas A&M, agrees. “Every dairy producer I work with is aware of this connection [with the federal government] and many are frustrated by it,” he said. Most would prefer open international markets as a release valve for their products, selling cheese in places like Canada and Europe, where import restrictions remain tight. Their goal isn’t to produce less dairy, despite the fact that fewer Americans are drinking milk than ever before. Activists argue that instead of subsidizing a fading industry, federal policy should pivot toward emerging, climate-conscious alternatives like almond, soy, and oat milks.

At a time when federal food aid is once again under attack and claims of government waste abound, it’s no surprise that the cheese caves have resurfaced in the public imagination as viral symbols of confusion and government excess. While today’s debates may feel new, the entanglement between the dairy industry and the American government is anything but. With dairy exports declining and domestic surpluses rising once more, it’s not unthinkable that the government could once again return to the caves or finally shut off the milk spigot once and for all.

Invasive annual grasses affect tens of millions of acres across the U.S. Their success comes down to unique biology and the ability to grow whenever and wherever the opportunity arises. Not only do they pose significant challenges for rangeland management, where they are a major contributing factor to the increasing frequency and intensity of wildfires, but these species have also made their way onto arable land, where they outcompete crops for essential resources such as water, nutrients, and light.

One crucial agricultural commodity, which contributes billions of dollars to the U.S. economy and is particularly affected by these troublesome grasses, is winter wheat. Similar life cycles and optimal conditions necessary for growth mean that in the fall, when the wheat is planted, these weeds are just starting to germinate. Thus they can compete with the crop throughout much or all of the growing season, causing significant problems for wheat producers.

Vipan Kumar, associate professor of weed science at Cornell University, has dedicated his career to researching weed ecology and biology, developing strategies to manage these tough-to-control grasses.

“These invasive annual grass species have an advantage over others because they can withstand harsh conditions — dry climate and cold temperatures — and can produce seeds and germinate in a short period of time. Wild oats, downy brome, Japanese brome, Italian ryegrass, and jointed goatgrass can all significantly impact winter wheat, and if the crop is infested heavily, the grass species can take over and reduce grain yield by up to 70 or 80 percent,” said Kumar.

The quick emergence and growth of annual grasses, and their ability to produce many seeds for the next generation have, for many years, meant wheat producers have struggled to control them — particularly in Western states such as Washington, Oregon, Montana, and Colorado.

“Sometimes the crop can be a complete failure, especially if these grasses are taking over and have a good seed bank. Yield, quality, and price can all be dramatically affected,” Kumar explained.

These grasses can also pose problems after harvest, when the percentage of weed seeds and other contaminants in the grain determines price and quality. They can not only devalue the crop so it gets classified as animal feed, but can even lead to an export being rejected.

Chemical Solutions

To help combat these troublesome species, herbicide-tolerant wheat varieties were developed, which have been bred to tolerate specific herbicides, allowing farmers to manage these weeds without harming the wheat crop. Clearfield wheat varieties were the first to come onto the market in 2001. Although extremely effective at first, years of repeated use of these herbicides has led to invasive grasses developing resistance.

The need for an alternative led to a collaboration between Colorado Wheat and Colorado State University, and the development of CoAXium herbicide-resistant wheat varieties, which first became commercially available to farmers in 2019. According to Brad Erker, executive director of Colorado Wheat, CoAXium is currently used on approximately two million acres of wheat production, out of about 25-30 million.

“Invasive annual grasses have been a problem for wheat producers in Colorado for decades — especially jointed goatgrass, brome species, and feral rye,” Erker explained. “In some areas, weeds are very accustomed to (and have become resistant to) Imazamox, the chemical used in the Clearfield system, because it’s been applied for so many years in a row. The CoAXium system is one additional tool that has come into the mix lately, and we market it around the Western United States,” said Erker.

It is only a matter of time before these weeds also develop resistance to the [newer] herbicides, so precautions are being taken to minimize risks.

However, it is only a matter of time before these weeds also develop resistance to the herbicides used with CoAXium, so precautions are being taken to minimize risks. Stewardship programs for both the Clearfield and CoAXium Wheat Production Systems are in place, which emphasize the need for specific rotation of crops and herbicide modes of action, and also stress the importance of not saving seed to replant. Farmers must sign and adhere to these conditions before purchasing seed.

According to Kumar, it is extremely important to fine-tune cultural and agronomic practices, such as cover crop and crop rotation usage, as part of an integrated approach to weed control. Annual grasses tend to accumulate if wheat is grown year after year in the same field, but a wheat-fallow rotation allows herbicide spraying during the fallow period, which can prove very effective at reducing the weed seed-bank. But the best way to disrupt the cycle of these winter annual grasses, while also helping to combat herbicide resistance, is a three- or four-year rotation of winter wheat with summer crops such as sorghum, soybean, and corn.

Southeastern Emergence

Annual ryegrass is a significant problem for wheat farmers in some parts of the Southeastern U.S. Although a valuable forage crop for cattle farmers, it can greatly reduce wheat yields and can be very challenging to control.

Austin Thrash, a wheat and soybean farmer based in the Arkansas River Valley, never had a problem with invasive annual grasses until five years ago, when machinery moved into the area from other parts of the country, helping to spread these unwanted species into a new area.

“It seemed like all of a sudden we had a problem, and it started it spread, especially on our acres that we don’t till a lot. The ryegrass really has been troublesome, especially over the last two or three years. For the last four or five years all the post-emergent herbicides we use don’t work any more, and the problem’s so bad that on some of our acres we’ve had to quit growing wheat,” he said.

Pre-emergent herbicide, applied soon after planting and ideally before the ryegrass emerges, is Thrash’s best option. Without this, he says the only way to kill it would be to till the land. He has been looking for new ways to manage this invasive annual grass, and one method seems to be working really well. Last year he planted wheat, let the ryegrass grow, then put cows into these fields. They grazed the ryegrass out until the middle of May, which helped prevent it from going to seed.

“The cows love it, and really do well on it! We’re increasing our cow numbers per acre now,“ Thrash said earlier this year, ”and are about to turn them out on it again. The wheat is now at a stage where it can handle the grazing, and traffic from the cows.”

Lessons From Down Under

But Thrash and other farmers around the U.S. will eventually need other methods to control these troublesome grasses. In Western Australia wheat producers are now experiencing multi-herbicide resistance, a huge issue. Because there are now no chemical control options available, this has brought about the use of several Harvest Weed Seed Control (HWSC) methods, which control the spread of herbicide-resistant weeds by reducing the amount of weed seed going back into the soil seed-bank.

One prominent method of HWSC involves attaching an impact mill to the back of the combine and as the crop is harvested weed seeds enter the mill and are destroyed. So, although they go back onto the field, they do not germinate.

Chaff lining is another method, and involves modifying the combine so the chaff, which contains all the weed seeds, is separated from the straw and funneled into narrow rows in the field. These chaff lines act as a mulch, preventing germination and emergence of the weed seed. They can also be used as animal feed.

More than a decade ago, Jason Norsworthy, a weed scientist at the University of Arkansas Division of Agriculture, travelled to Australia to see HWSC in action. Well aware of its benefits, Norsworthy and other scientists are currently testing these methods for suitability in U.S. agriculture. Australia has a very arid climate, and a much lower yield potential compared to the U.S., so although used with great success there, some minor mechanical problems need to be overcome before these are adopted here. The much larger amounts of biomass taken into the combine can affect airflow in the system, while high moisture content entering the seed mill can lead to serious clogging.

“Combating these grasses is not a one man job, a farmer cleaning every field and he’ll be alright. The problem will come back if your neighbor is not also doing that job.“

Norsworthy is also working with John Deere See and Spray technology, which uses cameras and machine learning to differentiate between crops and weeds, enabling precise herbicide application. HWSC is driven by herbicide resistance, and Norsworthy can see that the day is fast approaching when these weed control methods will also become essential here in the U.S.

“Australia has run out of chemical options and the U.S. is now getting very close to a similar situation,” he explained. “Growers will then be forced into these techniques. That’s a bad situation to be in. I wish growers were more proactive and would adopt them prior to not having the options. But unfortunately I’ve done this long enough now to know that as long as there’s an easy button, and as long as there’s something you can do chemically that is effective, there will be a lot of hesitation in trying to adopt something like [HWSC],” he said.

As the area dominated by invasive annual grasses continues to expand, helped by milder winters and more arid summers, they are already causing increased frequency and intensity of wildfires, affecting ecosystem health and biodiversity, and will soon also change the way we farm.

“Combating these grasses is not a one man job, a farmer cleaning every field and he’ll be alright,” explained Kumar. “The problem will come back if your neighbor is not also doing that job. Assistance is also needed from the government, researchers, and various other agencies. A community approach is needed, and everyone needs to be made aware of the problem.”

I pin the ewe against the wall, one arm around her chest and one around her rump. Her head is tied to a post and she thrashes against the restraint. She needs to stay still for her newly adopted lamb to get a good suckle. This mother bore only a single lamb of her own, leaving her extra milk to feed this one, the smallest of her sister’s triplets — if she accepts him.

I lean into the ewe with my chest, feet cramping and biceps burning. My 16-year-old daughter helps the little guy find the teat each time he loses it. After 15 minutes or so, he wanders off with a full belly and lays down for a nap. Walking home from the barn in the quiet of 3 a.m. with my girl, I am filled with gratitude. Tending the land and animals fills me with purpose and satisfaction, which peak with the pre-dawn magic of new life.

We weren’t expecting these lambs. In fact, it’ll be six weeks until our planned lambing window. However, last Halloween Eve, appropriately known in some areas as Mischief Night, our young ram had an “unsanctioned conjugal visit” — as my husband called it — with the ewes. Apparently it was a busy night, as we now have three ewes with lambs. As happens often with sheep, some birth more than they can feed and some have fewer. When this leaves lambs neglected or undernourished, my daughter and I step in to balance the families.

By restraining the potential adoptive mother every few hours around the clock to allow the new lamb to nurse, she is supposed to eventually accept him as hers, as her milk changes his smell to match her own. The ewe’s milk changes the baby as the baby becomes part of the mother, in a reciprocal dance central to the continuance of many species. A child can enter a parent’s heart deeply enough to remake us, whether human or ewe, whether born of our body or not.

For example, normally the ewes will run in terror from our herding dog. However, a mother with young lambs will often charge and ram the dog, overcoming fear to protect her babies. As a mother, I have been equally changed by the drive to give my children the best of myself and of the world. My heart has been broken down and rebuilt in the shape of the ones I am raising.

The little lamb we’re helping tonight belongs to my daughter. She and I each have our own sheep flock. While we manage them together, we each make our own decisions about selling, culling, and breeding. Managing the business aspect is a large part of why raising sheep appeals to her. At an age when a person’s desire for autonomy often outstrips society’s willingness to grant it, making real decisions about life, death, and substantial sums of money help meet that need. Sometimes she makes choices for her flock that I wouldn’t make for mine, such as keeping one that is tame but not robust. I provide information but she makes her own decisions, as she did when she was eight and we first started raising sheep.

One of the things I love about lambing time is the way it brings my daughter and me together. Like most teens, she has her own busy schedule and interests. While she does quite a bit of farm work, she generally prefers to do it on her own these days. I understand it’s time for her to reach for independence, and I’ve already gone through this stage with my son. Still, I miss the abundant time and easy companionship of chores when she was younger.

Lambing brings us together again. Whether we are going to the barn in the middle of the night to deal with a problem, sharing the work of caring for moms in stalls with newborn lambs, or sitting with a birthing ewe, it’s easier to be with each other during lambing season than any other. Some people believe sheep are unintelligent, but I find they have a gentle zen presence that helps me come home to myself. Maybe that helps us be with one another, too.

In my experience, becoming a parent means having one’s heart perforated — little dotted lines right down the middle, dividing the portion that will be torn away when that child moves off into life on their own. As the splitting of the parent’s heart begins in earnest during the teen years, every warm hug or shared laugh becomes precious and, in some cases, all too rare. As a mother and daughter working together to help connect this ewe with the lamb who needs her, our efforts to build bridges between them are also strengthening the bond between us. It’s a beautiful parallel that has always been present in this shared shepherding project, but has become clearer in recent years.

A couple of years ago, my daughter told me she liked lambing season more than Christmas: the miracle of new life and first steps, the surprises: Girls or boys? Spotted or solid? One, two, four? All are amazing, but for me, the best gift is time and joy shared with her. This year, she said that it’s not just witnessing births and new lambs, but also making the decisions and doing the caretaking that feels deeply fulfilling. This is an education and nourishment that far too few young people get to experience these days — an antidote to the unreality of video games and social media.

Caretaking the land and animals isn’t just good for youth. It’s a large dose of mental wellness for me every day, too. When I lived in the city or suburbs, I often found myself overcome with despair and a kind of purposeless drifting feeling brought on by the artificiality of the surroundings and my daily activities. Now that I use my heart, mind, and body to nourish people in my community, caring for the plants and animals that produce real food, I no longer suffer that way. Working for tangible benefits in all weather, bathed in the music of birds, frogs, and wind is how humans evolved. It’s also how I thrive.

After five days, the ewe accepts her adopted son. Watching them graze together on pasture, knowing that he would’ve starved without our help, is a joy that inspires me when other aspects of life are hard. The success shared with my daughter is a balm to my heart where it’s slowly tearing in two, just as it’s meant to.

Few recent novels give agriculture its due. In contrast, farming is at the core of 19th- and even 20th-century American fiction, with its heroes formed through westward expansion.

“I don’t see enough fiction about contemporary farming, so I wanted to try,” Louise Erdrich told me on a phone call.

Erdrich, who is of Ojibwe descent and a member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa, reimagines the contemporary farming plot for our era of climate change in her latest book, The Mighty Red. Across her expansive body of work, which now totals 32 books, she has ignored the narrative assumptions U.S. audiences place on Native people, and written with precision and sensitivity. She has won the Pulitzer Prize, National Book Award, and National Book Critics Circle Award, among others.

The Mighty Red takes place in a sugar beet farming town in North Dakota’s Red River Valley of the North during the 2008 financial crisis. Kismet Poe, the protagonist, is a young woman with Ojibwe ancestry about to graduate from high school. Following a confusing tragedy, Kismet finds herself stuck in a portent-clouded marriage to Gary Geist, the son of sugar beet farm owners. But as her consciousness about the land grows, so does her sense of agency, and her resolve to escape the marriage.

Human relationships and the environment twine, each reflecting the other’s condition. Erdrich explores the environmental consequences of industrial farming and the possibilities for action when our fate is uncertain.

As weighty as the subject matter is, this novel is a page-turner. After finishing it, I felt like I had read a book without parallel — it stayed with me, coloring my perspective, for weeks. 

The Red River runs north along the border of North Dakota and Minnesota into Canada. It is extremely toxic — a key site of danger in the novel — and floods often. Minnesotan geologist Jim Stark said floods in the flat Red River Valley differ from conventional ideas of river surges. “They’re very slow because of the topography, but they inundate a great deal of land,” he said.

The valley’s clay soil is some of the world’s most fertile, however. “I can dig down for two, three feet sometimes, and it’s still black soil,” said Steve Radel. Erdrich stayed at the Radel family’s holiday rental on their Minnesota family farm, Redpath Retreat, while writing the book. The region is responsible for nearly half of U.S. sugar beet production, and is home to the American Crystal Sugar co-op, the largest producer in the country.

“I grew up in the Red River Valley, so I suppose it would be fair to say that I have been researching this book a little at a time, for many years,” Erdrich said. She gathered stacks of documents and interviewed people from different phases of her life about farming.

“While in high school I visited and sometimes helped out friends who lived on farms, or worked in the sugar beet fields, but things have changed considerably,” she said. “I might have a better emotional understanding of why people farm than a practical understanding of how it is done. That did take a lot of research.”

“I don’t see enough fiction about contemporary farming, so I wanted to try.”

Phoebe Farris, a photographer, art critic, and professor emeritus of art and design at Purdue University who is of Powhatan-Pamunkey ancestry, has written about Erdrich. “For Indigenous people, it was always an issue, trying to protect the land and the environment. It wasn’t some kind of new age threat or something that got commodified. What she’s doing, what she’s talking about, we’ve always experienced and tried to live,” Farris said.

Crystal Frechette, Kismet’s mother, works the night haul for the Geists, sticking it out regardless of weather. Erdrich shows the physical labor involved with exactitude: She “worked until her biceps trembled and the back of her neck went numb.”

As Farris said, “Some people are harming the environment. It’s not by choice. It’s the only job we can get.” Environmental damage is not always a matter of agency, but rather of survival.

Meanwhile, Gary, who will inherit the Geist family farm, muses, “The fact was, they weren’t as rich as people thought.” Despite their high output, debt is the reality of running a farm. His mother, Winnie, continues to carry the hurt from the foreclosure of her childhood farm, which her father-in-law bought up.

Sarah Vogel, a North Dakotan advocate and former state Commissioner of Agriculture, is the author of The Farmer’s Lawyer, which discusses her experience representing 240,000 small family farms facing foreclosure during the Reagan administration and which Erdrich cites in her acknowledgements. “It was absolutely accurate, the way Louise Erdrich described what happened to her family’s farm,” Vogel said. As in the rest of the country, the number of farms in the sugar beet industry has decreased over time, while their size has increased.

[Sugar beet farming is] “a big cultural thing … it’s really helped a lot of farms through difficult times.”

Still, sugar beet farming is a fact of life in the Red River Valley. Kismet and other characters see a strange beauty in it. Looking out at the Geists’ farm, how “the baby beet plants, coddled in their chemical dust, stretched row after laser row into the shimmer of tomorrow’s heat,” she finds it “exquisite.”

Rob Sip, executive director of the Red River Watershed Management Board, said, “[Sugar beet farming is] a big cultural thing … it’s really helped a lot of farms through difficult times.” His grandmother told him stories of defoliating, digging, and loading sugar beets by hand from nearly a century ago. Sip has helped with the sugar beet harvest almost every year since 1990.

While The Mighty Red is set against the backdrop of the sugar beet industry, gardens are also at the novel’s heart. “There are also gardeners in the book — that’s farming too, personal farming,” Erdrich said.

At the moment she is most lost, Kismet creates a plot of her own. She discovers real soil, with “insect husks, fluffy particles, nutlike crumbs, infinitesimal threads,” while reading Madame Bovary. She resolves to do the opposite of whatever Emma would do, because Flaubert’s heroine poisoned herself and died. “The last thing Emma would have done was put her hands in the dirt and start a garden,” she says. This intention, held onto when everything else is unclear, becomes her guide. She plants cuttings from Crystal’s garden instead and chooses life. 

Her realizations crescendo once she visits her friend’s farmstead, which is rewilding sections of its land with native plants, and witnesses a vesper flight. The Radels have been working to make Redpath Retreat a similar oasis, with land put into the CRP (Conservation Resource Program) and RIM (Reinvest in Minnesota), a permanent easement.

Names carry significance in The Mighty Red — it is bold, and a little mischievous, to make your protagonist a gardener named after fate. Aside from Kismet, Crystal is named after American Crystal Sugar. Radel said, “I texted her [Erdrich]. I said, ‘Hey, has anyone else that’s read this book picked up on that little pun?… She goes, ‘Steve, Steve, nobody else.’”

As in the rest of the country, the number of farms in the sugar beet industry has decreased over time, while their size has increased.

Weeds are also more than their name. They symbolize resilience against elimination. Crystal compares her and Kismet’s father Martin’s families to the Lord’s ivy, “a weed ineradicable by human means.” As she eats the nutritious lambsquarters she has grown in her garden, she reflects on how this early American crop has been supplanted by the nonnutritious sugar beet.

“I was raised by parents who operated a large garden so I grew up working in the garden and weeding (and eating some weeds),” Erdrich said. “My grandparents on the Turtle Mountain reservation supported their children with a successful truck garden. My sisters, brothers, nieces, nephews — and as for me I am a slacker.“

She continued, “I am very bad at gardening. Last year my only successful crop was mint — because it is invasive.”

As Erdrich brings readers closer to the present day, she alludes to shifts such as drones and precision technology. These are not framed as at odds with regenerative agriculture: In a dream, Diz sees fields covered in amaranth via a drone.

What most closely links The Mighty Red with our current world is existential risk from climate change. At a book club meeting, the women read Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and debate how the world will end. Winnie points outside at the dirt rising from the sugar beet fields. She says that this is how the apocalypse will happen, because there is no food without soil. Kismet speaks up, saying that the novel is not about apocalypse, but about the love between a parent and child.

The novel acts as a closed circuit, creating balance from its own elements.

These two threads — love and apocalypse — lace through the novel. It maintains the hope that even if we approach the brink, and live amid varying forms of destruction, we can return.

The novel acts as a closed circuit, creating balance from its own elements. At the end, I wondered if Kismet’s world could have been opened slightly more, if returning to the beginning was best for her. But perhaps Kismet is right — what will get us through doom, if not love? The book is about what is to come, but also about what always has been.

From the essential literary ingredients of fate, environment, and love, The Mighty Red charts its own dynamic. While in conversation with the classic novels, it transmutes this literary inheritance to present us with something fresh and true.

“It’s big enough to hold what’s troubling you,” Steve Radel said, about the prairie. “Anything I’m concerned about here, it can be held.”

Perhaps it is big enough to hold our existential crises, both planetary and personal, as well.

When Eric Cates, owner of Cates Family Farm in Spring Green, Wisconsin, monitors his cows, he’s carefully eyeing them for one particular transgression: to ensure they don’t munch on any plastic garbage thrown from driver windows.

“I’ve seen bags of chips and plastic bags drifting into our farm,” said Cates, “and we can’t let them eat anything that they come up on. We don’t want that plastic in their system.”

New research has found that farmers might be up against a more difficult form of plastics to find that can hurt their yields: Microplastics are miniscule fragments of plastic products that have been detected almost everywhere on Earth, from Antarctic sea ice to human brains.

Most research on microplastics has focused on its potential relationship to human health but now more studies have found a relationship between these tiny plastic pieces and plant health.

A 2024 report discovered how this crisis has disrupted the photosynthesis process across a wide swath of crops, including soybean and corn. The study from Ninjaing University in Japan, published in National Academy of Sciences USA, noted how microplastics coverage reduces the photosynthesis of terrestrial plants by about 1 percent, and by about 7 percent in marine algae.

The study also found that with the current rates of worldwide plastic production and microplastics exposure, farmers may see a 4 to 13.5 percent yield loss per year in staple crops such as corn, rice, and wheat over the next 25 years.

The researchers added that a 13 percent decrease in “environmental microplastic levels could reduce photosynthesis losses by approximately 30 percent … and the study emphasizes the importance of incorporating plastic pollution mitigation strategies into broader sustainability and food security initiatives.”

“The impact of this study is very substantial,” said Richard Thompson, professor of marine biology at the University of Plymouth and who, in 2004, coined the term “microplastics.” He wasn’t involved in the recent research.

It is “almost impossible to remove [microplastics] from the environment, which is why it’s essential to reduce their use straight from the source.”

He added how microplastics are so nano-sized, it would be “almost impossible to remove them from the environment, which is why it’s essential to reduce their use straight from the source.”

Both Thompson and the Chinese study point to several pathways for microplastics to infiltrate crops: Heavy use of plastics in textiles and cosmetics leads to treatment plants pumping out sludge that is often used in farmland as a nutrient enrichment. Mulch films and fleeces to protect crops are largely made from plastic. And airborne microplastics can shuttle through the air from, say, car tires on nearby roads.

The latter pathway can be especially harmful to human health. A report from the Center for International Environmental Law noted that “microplastics often have large specific surface areas and are predominantly hydrophobic, meaning they repel water. These characteristics make airborne microplastics a ‘Trojan Horse’ capable of hiding and carrying harmful substances inside the animals or humans who inhale, absorb, and ingest them.”

Microplastics don’t just hurt a crop’s growth but also its flavor. A 2023 study from Agricultural University in India also found stunted growth in crops, such as tomatoes, peppered with microplastics. Study author Periasamy Dhevagi said these particles dwindled seed germination rates, particularly at higher concentrations. She added, “It was observed that a concentration-dependent negative [meaning, if the observed area was high in microplastics concentration] impacts the physiological, biochemical, growth, yield attributes and fruit quality of tomato.”

Most significantly, microplastics in the studied crops showed “metabolic disturbances that can impair growth and reduce resilience to environmental stresses,” Dhevagi said.

“The impact of this study is very substantial.”

Dhevagi urges for more research into an area of agricultural science she believes is sorely ignored. “The possibility of microplastics entering the food chain raises worries regarding food safety and human health,” she said. “Addressing this issue needs a collaborative effort among politicians, academics, and the agricultural community to establish sustainable practices and policies that reduce microplastic contamination in agroecosystems.”

Thompson, a specialist in microplastic pollution’s impact on marine life, is hopeful that UN negotiations between 180 countries “who realize how dangerous microplastics can be,” is close to securing a binding treaty, despite numerous meetings over the past five years.

Most recently in December 2024, a group of oil and gas producers led by Saudi Arabia, Iran, Russia, and other Gulf states, opposed capping plastic production outlined in the treaty, insisting the regulations should focus solely on plastics waste management.

With plastic production still rising — projected to nearly triple by 2060 — Thompson is anxious the spread of microplastics in both agricultural and marine ecosystems will gain too much momentum to be reversed. He also believes a particular scientific challenge has blunted the treaty’s progress.

“If there’s enough outrage out there about microplastics covering so much farmland, then yeah, I definitely think these ideas could gain traction.”

“Many countries still want evidence microplastics can be dangerous to human health, and studies have only been able to prove association, not causation, because we can’t do studies on human subjects,” Thompson said.

Still, he maintains, the microplastics found on plants could end up in the food we eat. “We already know this happens with other foods including fish, and questions are in what concentration and how harmful are they.”

Some farmers are not taking any chances with how microplastics may be ending up on their land. For now, Cates will still be taking a hands-on approach to keeping his family farm as plastic-free as possible. He’ll continue picking up Doritos bags and beer cans flung near his land, and he’ll also quickly trash the plastic binding wound around his hay bales.

He pauses thoughtfully when asked if he thinks these new studies on microplastics will move the policy needle in any way. Two beats. Then he replies, “If there’s enough outrage out there about microplastics covering so much farmland, then yeah, I definitely think these ideas could gain traction.”

Once upon a time, cow milk was a foul liquid, linked to fully one-quarter of all foodborne illnesses in the U.S. and in second place only to water for its ability to transmit disease. Epidemics of typhoid, tuberculosis, and scarlet fever were readily passed from milk to humans; additionally, an innocuous-looking glass of the stuff put a Gilded Age imbiber at risk of contracting salmonella, E. coli, campylobacteriosis, Staphylococcus aureus infection, yersiniosis, brucellosis, Q fever, and/or listeria. A century later, unpasteurized milk can still offer up a slew of historic hazards, as well as a new one — the H5N1 bird flu virus.

There’s one process that has so far reliably protected humans from getting sick from many of the pathogens that can fester in milk: pasteurization. It’s been standard practice since 1924, thanks to the efforts of the U.S. Public Health Service (the umbrella organization for the Department of Health and Human Services, which today oversees the Food and Drug Administration). Pasteurization is still keeping our milk supply safe as you read this — despite alarming headlines that appeared in the media at the end of this past April, like this one from the Greenville News: “FDA suspends dairy quality testing amid federal workforce cuts. Is it safe to drink milk?”

The short answer is yes — for now. But an ongoing erosion of trust in federal agencies meant to keep the public safe, as well as potential harmful consequences from kicking the safety can down the road in the middle of a massive bird flu epidemic, means there are reasons for concern.

The suspension of testing is happening at the FDA’s Moffett Center Proficiency Testing Laboratory in Chicago — mass layoffs mean there aren’t enough staffers to carry out the lab’s work. However, what this suspension practically means for milk safety got largely lost in the public freak-out. Way back when, the U.S. Public Health Service developed what’s known as the Pasteurized Milk Ordinance (PMO). This is a set of voluntary testing and other standards that counties and states could follow to ensure that the milk from their cows was safe to drink. The PMO exists to this day; it’s updated biennially and undergirds the milk testing that ensures a disease-free Grade A milk supply across the U.S.

“Program is currently paused but will resume once transferred to another FDA laboratory — an effort that is actively underway.“

After the Moffett news hit, the dairy industry rushed to assure Americans that there was no reason to forgo (pasteurized) milk: “Consumers can continue to trust that the dairy products they purchase at retail are safe to consume,” said a spokesperson for trade group International Dairy Foods Association in a statement. (IDFA declined to comment about the current milk-testing situation.) Consumer safety advocates largely agreed. But they’ve also cautioned that gaps in testing at Moffett — as well as an earlier announced suspension of testing for bird flu as that epidemic grows and morphs — could contribute to a less-safe food supply as waves of foodborne illnesses continue to crop up.

“I’m not sure there’s a direct threat to the food supply now” from milk, said Thomas Gremillion, director of food policy for the Consumer Federation of America, which is also part of a consortium called the Alliance for a Stronger FDA that seeks to keep the agency sufficiently funded. “Your milk is generally a pretty safe product if it’s pasteurized.” (Metal residues and pharmaceuticals are contaminants that heating can’t get rid of.) But the suspension of Moffett’s and bird flu testing are “part of a broader erosion of FDA’s capability to … detect outbreaks before they get big. It’s pretty scary,” he said.

Below, we take a look at what FDA downsizing actually does and does not mean for milk safety.

***

The 2023 update of the PMO is a 421-page behemoth that offers guidance to regulatory agencies — a state department of agriculture, for example — about keeping milk sanitary. This includes everything from how to construct and keep clean a milking barn; how to hygienically move milk from cow to hauling truck; how to sanitize equipment; how often facilities need to be inspected; and how frequently milk needs to be sampled from dairies and processing plants to make sure it meets various standards — usually once every three months.

Samples are sent for testing to a municipal or state lab. Washington’s lab, for example, tests over 3,500 samples a year, for aerobic and coliform bacteria, somatic (aka tissue) cells, antibiotics, and phosphatase (to check for proper pasteurization). Forty-six of 50 states have adopted these standards; states that haven’t adopted PMO standards have their own standards that are at least similar and in some cases might be higher. Some food retailers, like Costco, also do their own food safety audits. However, said Ilana Korchia, an attorney at foodborne illness law firm Marler Clark, the fact that not all state epidemiology labs are created equal is something to be uneasy about. “Without centralized federal oversight, there may be gaps,” she said.

The Moffett lab exists parallel to the PMO structure. Until April 2025 it conducted what’s called lab proficiency testing — basically, ensuring that 170 FDA-affiliated testing labs are capable of accurately and consistently identifying any contaminants sent to them in milk samples. This is the testing that’s been suspended. As an FDA spokesperson wrote in response to a comment request, the “Program is currently paused but will resume once transferred to another FDA laboratory — an effort that is actively underway. In the meantime, state and federal labs continue to analyze food samples, and FDA remains committed to working with states to protect the safety of the pasteurized milk supply.” Good news? Yes. With some caveats.

“It’s never good when you’re reducing instead of empowering these agencies, which were already understaffed.”

According to Gremillion, the suspension is effectively a gap in testing; this, he said, “undermines the federal government’s ability to surveil the food supply” and reduces our confidence that “public health authorities will be able to respond effectively if, say, the virus evolves to withstand pasteurization.” He said that under the Biden administration, there’d already been talk about closing the Moffett lab. It’s fine if FDA wants to consolidate lab functions or otherwise reorganize, “but they have gotten the cart before the horse here. I’m pretty sure the previous administration’s plans to close down the lab were not fire everyone and then figure out who can do the work somewhere else in the agency,” Gremillion said.

Korchia equates FDA’s role in keeping people safe to one essential leg in a three-legged stool, the other two being state and municipal oversight. “When someone falls ill, they get hospitalized. A [stool] sample returns positive for E. coli or [a blood sample for] salmonella or bird flu and if it’s a reportable disease in that state, the [hospital] reports that positive test result to the health department,” she explained. “Then it’s a coalition of state, county, and federal agencies that get involved and that do confirmatory testing and do trace back analysis. And it’s never good when you’re reducing instead of empowering these agencies, which were already understaffed.”

Gremillion concurs. “Some states have very robust public health and epidemiological surveillance infrastructure,” he said. “Minnesota has got state-of-the-art epi labs and they find more foodborne illness outbreaks — but they’re small. States like Alabama find fewer outbreaks — but they’re big. The takeaway is, if you don’t look for this stuff, you won’t find it.”

The Moffett lab is one piece of federal safety infrastructure that’s been cut. “It’s certainly not the only one,” Korchia said, pointing to the decimation of staff elsewhere at the FDA as well as at the Centers for Disease Control, which tracks outbreaks. She added, “I think this will continue to happen, and I don’t see it getting any better. Some people say, maybe this administration is cutting down these agencies in an effort to rebuild them, but we haven’t seen that yet.”

“The fact that new vectors of transmission are being identified now, when resources are being cut, is concerning.”

Gremillion points to another troubling outcome of the Moffett’s suspension: Its scientists were also working to “develop the capacity to test for H5N1, to ensure that we can respond if that becomes an important vector,” he said. In 2024, when bird flu re-emerged, the U.S. Department of Agriculture established the National Milk Testing Strategy (NMTS) to selectively monitor raw milk for the virus — which means there is “absolutely … a risk of further proliferation,” Korchia said. “Cattle that appear healthy can still harbor and transmit the virus asymptomatically.” FDA’s role was to sample dairy products — milk, cheese, and butter, for example — for any evidence that H5N1 had survived pasteurization (so far it hasn’t). This FDA testing has also been suspended.

Before the advent of avian influenza in the U.S., raw milk dairies had been expanding and regulations loosening. Bird flu, however, has been found in raw milk — a product that accounts for as much as 5 percent of the nation’s milk supply. New research indicates that raw cheese might also pose a bird flu infection risk. A new strain of bird flu has also evolved — B3.13, which has leaped from cows to cats, killing, sickening, or blinding a number of them. Said Korchia, “The fact that new vectors of transmission are being identified now, when resources are being cut, is concerning.”

Korchia noted that suspending milk testing is of a piece with a larger federal effort to abandon food safety measures; as of April 25, the administration walked back a proposal to test chicken for salmonella. “Each lab that gets shut down, each program that gets shut down, each federal employee that’s actively working on outbreak response and on testing and figuring out where the source of an outbreak is coming from that gets fired, is a step” towards “more chaos and less transparency,” she said.

“Have the first 10 days of the Trump administration done things that are causing foodborne illness out in the population?” asked Gremillion. “It’s really hard to know that, but moving forward, it seems like that’s going to be the ultimate effect.”

The first thing visitors see when they arrive at Finca La Zafra, an agroecological project in Gurabo, Puerto Rico, is the welcoming restaurant. Bartenders shake up cocktails to an upbeat soundtrack while servers weave through the space, balancing abundant plates. The scene is compelling enough, but the Finca’s most innovative offering is hiding in plain sight: Eco-Agricultores 100x100, its recently launched program that equips budding farmers with machinery, tools, seeds, compost, technical guidance, and, most importantly, a 100x100 plot of land to grow anything they can dream up, on the Finca premises.

Ask any Puerto Rican in the food or hospitality industry, and they’ll share an inconvenient truth: The island imports more than 80% of its food, and that includes produce. This reality has created significant challenges in the recent past; when Hurricane Maria disrupted the supply chain in 2017, the media got to review the anachronistic Jones Act, which complicates imports from the U.S and steeply affects the cost of goods. Every port strike or shift in policymaking is also a bitter reminder of how dependent the island is on the U.S. mainland.

But recently, educational projects, experimental farms, innovative restaurants, and hands-on programs like Eco-Agricultores 100x100 have been carving out a different narrative. Led by a young generation of farmers and entrepreneurs, these initiatives shine a spotlight on local, sustainable produce Puerto Ricans are excited to both grow and consume.

“We need farmers in PR. We need to grow our food and depend less on importation,” said Jan Diaz, president of Finca La Zafra. “It’s important for our communities to have access to fresh and healthy food and it’s important for individuals to figure out where to get this food.”

According to professor Angela M. Linares Ramírez from the Agro-Environmental Sciences Department at the University of Puerto Rico, local agriculture in PR faces a range of environmental, financial, and labor-related challenges. There are environmental hardships like soil degradation that’s driven by erosion, nutrient depletion, and salinization, and water scarcity caused by erratic rainfall patterns, prolonged droughts, and inefficient water management practices. Then, there’s the cost of inputs, and the scarcity of young farmers.

“Food imports, mainly from the Americas, are another challenge and competition for local farmers,” Linares Ramírez said. Then there’s the cost attached to agriculture — everything from fertilizers, pesticides, equipment, and electricity. Not to mention actual land ownership. “These costs place a heavy burden on local farmers, especially since many depend on imports for these inputs, driving up their prices,” she said.

At Finca la Zafra, Eco-Agricultores 100x100 tries to tackle some of these obstacles. At first, the Diaz family, who purchased the 30-acre parcel in 2019, didn’t see it as a major opportunity. Coming into the project with a background in hospitality — the family owns several restaurants on the island — “We just wanted a space to decompress from the fast-paced life and to harvest a few crops for our restaurants on a small scale,” Diaz said.

A nudge in the right direction, however, came from a course at El Josco Bravo, an agroecology project and training school that had been pioneering the discipline in Puerto Rico since 2004. “We started to understand the importance of agriculture here in PR and the impact it has in our daily life,” Diaz said. “We also knew how hard it was to find local products for our restaurants, let alone for an individual, and decided it was our responsibility to join the movement of Puerto Rican farmers.”

The family decided to launch an application process for several 100X100 plots in August, inviting people with or without experience to experiment and plant. As of now, six farmers are running agricultural projects at the Finca. “We are excited to see them thrive as we continue to understand how else we could help them grow,” Diaz said.

While the scope may sound small, Eco-Agricultores 100x100, as well as other projects scattered through the island, have a big task at hand — shifting the cultural mindset among the younger generation of Puerto Ricans to position farming as a respectable, promising, and viable career.

In addition to Finca la Zafra and Josco Bravo’s offerings, Carite 0.3 in Guayaba, Frutos del Guacabo in Manatí, and Finca Neo Jibario in Rio Grande operate similar models: working farms combined with agrotourism, featuring a restaurant or dinner series, educational tours or workshops, and, at times, lodging.

“We need farmers in PR. We need to grow our food and depend less on importation.”

These new initiatives tend to avoid pesticides and adopt permaculture and hydroponic practices. At Finca Neo Jibario, insects are kept at bay with the help of “teas” brewed from tobacco plants, and compost is used to enrich the soil. What started as a patio passion project in San Juan is now a 10-acre operation, growing kale, passionfruit, acerola, lettuce, eggplants, and more, depending on the season. “The land was used for sugarcane over 50 years ago, and it wasn’t impacted too much by chemicals and pesticides, which was perfect for us,” said Antonio Castro Barreto, general manager at Finca Neo Jibario .

A few years ago, Barreto pivoted from a career in personal training to join his brother, founder Francisco Castro, in his quest to revive local agriculture. He never looked back. “People are starting to care more about local, nutritious produce,” he said. Having “direct experiences with the farm,” according to Baretto, is also important. “With the tours, especially for children, and the private dinners, we try to establish that connection,” he said. “So people really see and feel the importance of local agriculture in Puerto Rico.”

While the learning curve can be steep — according to Linares Ramírez’s students are still hesitant to adopt farming as a career, and establishment commercial farms are equally apprehensive to tap into innovative, environmentally friendly methods — things are slowly changing.

“There are pockets of farmers interested in innovation, particularly those who see long-term sustainability and profitability potential through modern farming techniques,” said Linares Ramírez, who, three years ago, introduced a new course on sustainable agricultural management. Additionally, she said, there’s been “a growing interest in agroecology and regenerative farming practices, which focus on sustainability, biodiversity, and soil health.”

This shift, Linares Ramírez added, reflects broader global trends toward environmental consciousness. “Puerto Rico, with its fragile ecosystems, is especially well-suited for these practices,” she said.

The appetite for local produce is also growing on the consumer side. Finca Neo Jibario has been working with PRoduce, an island app offering subscription boxes and connecting shoppers with local growers and farmers; launched in 2020, the app received James Beard recognition a year later. On the app’s produce section, each product is labeled “local” or “imported,” with the former outweighing the latter.

More and more restaurants are also pledging allegiance to locally grown produce by sourcing it from local farms or growing it themselves. Aldeana, a farm-to-table restaurant and event space opened in 2024, is a good example of Puerto Rico’s new culinary wave — restaurants that promote farm-to-table and locality.

In addition to sourcing everything locally, the chefs also grow seasonal produce on site, from herbs like cilantro and recao — a popular Puerto Rican green used in stews and sauces, to avocados, guava, breadfruit, and edible flowers. “The more we can support local agriculture, the better,” said Aldeana chef and co-owner Raúl Correa. “It’s a fundamental part of both our business and personal philosophy.”

Correa views the restaurant as a part of a movement, emphasizing that sourcing locally is what sets these emerging restaurants apart. “A tomato is a tomato, but what makes the difference is the soil and climate,” he said. “When we travel, we want to taste the tomatoes from that region, and when you visit us, we want you to experience ours.”

This is a Perspective piece and does not represent the views of Ambrook or this publication.

A rumor swirled in the immediate aftermath of Trump’s victory: Joel Salatin had been picked to serve as an advisor to the incoming Secretary of Agriculture. It was speculated that he would be counseling Thomas Massie, a Republican congressman from Kentucky who lives on an off-grid regenerative farm in the hills of Appalachia.

Neither of these reports proved true. Brooke Rollins, a Republican politico with little farm policy experience, was selected as agriculture secretary. Neither Massie nor Salatin were in the picture that emerged.

Salatin, one of the most well-known figures in the eco-farming movement, is part of a right-leaning current in the otherwise prevailing liberal culture of the scene. A successful Virginia chicken farmer, he gained prominence through his innovative techniques in animal husbandry, showing that it could be done sustainably, humanely, and profitably. He popularized these methods — and his name — with books like You Can Farm and Pastured Poultry Profit$. Alongside these farming how-to titles were others like Everything I Want To Do Is Illegal, a critique of the over-bureaucratization of our food system (including what Salatin sees as the overreach of child labor protections on farms).

Michael Pollan catapulted Salatin beyond the world of pastured poultry enthusiasts when he featured him prominently in his 2006 bestseller The Omnivore’s Dilemma. He is introduced in the book as a “self-described Christian-conservative-libertarian-environmentalist-lunatic farmer” — a collection of attributes that didn’t seem to cause much of a stir at the time. Perhaps this was due to the relatively depoliticized culture of the mid-2000s. Maybe Salatin’s off-farm views were a bit less front and center back then. Either way, in the last decade or so as America’s partisan lines sharpened, some in the regenerative agriculture scene grew wary of Salatin’s politics. By Inauguration Day 2025, he was planted firmly in the MAGA camp.

I spoke with Salatin last month. I wanted to get a sense of where he saw things heading for agriculture under Trump. On November 6 of last year, a day after Trump won, he penned a blog entry titled Celebration. In it, his optimism seemed unbounded. He wrote about a potential future where we would “eliminate ALL federal intervention in the food system, in farming.” A libertarian’s dream.

So what does Salatin think is on the horizon for our food system? His chances at directly affecting farm policy may have been scuttled, but does he still have hope that the new administration might usher in a revolution in agriculture, with RFK Jr — the lodestar of MAHA — at the president’s ear?

Over the hour and a half we spoke — he was generous with his time — our conversation meandered off the farm and into a wide range of controversial subjects. I’ve included italicized links to provide clarity and corrections when necessary.

Can you evaluate what we’ve seen so far with the second Trump administration, specifically on agricultural issues?

My bottom line sense is that the food and farm sector is going to sabotage the health sector. So you got RFK Jr. over here at Health and Human Services. You got Brooke Rollins over here at USDA. My sense is that she’s a bit of a lightweight in this space. So the question is, how’s she gonna get pushed around?

Obviously, the bird flu is front and center and we’re still seeing the extermination policy, the stamp out policy for surviving birds. We’ve killed 166 million chickens and probably only a million of them were sick. The rest of them were not sick. It’s insanity to kill the survivors, but that’s what we’re doing

I’m on a 12-person task force to try to create an anti-USDA bird flu policy that RFK Jr. can use as a bargaining chip in his discussions with Brooke Rollins. And my two primary suggestions on that have been: Don’t kill the survivors and allow the chicken owner to determine the remedy. Right now there’s only one remedy, kill them all. But there are lots of other remedies. There’s hypochlorous, there’s some homeopathic stuff. And you can do nothing. Sometimes it runs its course.

(Read why experts largely support the “stamping-out” policy of culling all birds on affected farms.)

It’s clearly 99% affecting factory farms. There are some backyard flocks that have gotten bird flu, but there are some really filthy backyard flocks that have a dirt chicken yard, dirt run, and some very old chickens. They’re being kept until they’re geriatric, which makes them much more vulnerable to bird flu as they get old. I went on a bit of a tear with the homesteading community — “Look folks, when that chicken hits four years old, put it in the stew pot.”

You mentioned the task force that you’re sitting on. Is this an official government task force?

No, that’s kind of an ad hoc group. We’re working directly with RFK Jr and just trying to provide him an alternative view. I can tell you this, that every single medical doctor that was de-platformed and censored over questioning Anthony Fauci about our COVID policies is in favor of eliminating the extermination policy in bird flu.

I know that you’re skeptical of vaccination regimens for animals. Are you similarly skeptical of vaccines for humans?

We don’t vaccinate any of our animals at all. And in humans, in general, I’m no-vax — vaccinations have not actually cured anything. Sally Fallon at Weston A. Price says, typhus and cholera, dysentery, diphtheria, whooping cough, those were all due to lack of sanitation. She says the plumbers and electricians are what stopped all those.

(It is estimated that childhood vaccines alone have saved over 150 million lives.)

The longer I live, the more I doubt the conventional narrative, why did we enter World War I? Why did we enter World War II? Why do we get the Federal Reserve? Why do we have an Internal Revenue Service? Why do we have the food safety inspection service that Teddy Roosevelt [started]? I call him “Rooseveltski,” because he was a socialist.

Why do we have these things? The longer I live, the more I realize that the official narrative generally obfuscates the real story. I’m completely skeptical of whatever the official narrative is. A guy was telling me the other day, “You know what the difference is between conspiracy and uncovering the real story? About 12 months.”

It seems like the vaccine skepticism and health food concerns of MAHA might make some ground in the governing MAGA movement. It does not appear that any of the regenerative agriculture aspects of MAHA have made any headway. If this trajectory continues, do you feel like your support for Trump was a miscalculation?

I don’t see my support of MAHA a la Trump being a miscalculation. The other side would have been way, way, way worse. Sometimes you take the lesser of two evils … I don’t think that was the case here. I’m thrilled with DOGE. I’d like to see the federal government down to about a tenth of its size. I’d like to see the USDA eliminated, Health and Human Services eliminated, Department of Energy, Department of Health, Department of Housing and Urban Development, IRS … I would eliminate just about everything except the military and I would close all of our foreign bases and bring all our soldiers home. I’m a Ron Paul guy, okay? Let’s be Switzerland. Let’s hoe our own garden and let the world mind its own business and not try to meddle in everything.

But I think that your assessment of the regen ag aspect of MAHA is absolutely dead on. It’s going to be thwarted by the industrial ag sector surrounding Brooke Rollins.

It was reported in the last couple of weeks that the USDA has been taking steps to strengthen the industrial agricultural system in a number of ways like providing economic relief payments to commodity growers and increasing line speeds at meat processing plants.

It’s just more of the same. It just shows that, in agriculture, we definitely have not turned the corner. I’m not in favor of any relief payments to any farmer at all. I’m not in favor of crop insurance. All that stuff is market manipulative. I mean, it helps wheat, but doesn’t help amaranth. Any time that you have marketplace intervention on the part of the government, whether it’s regulatory or beneficial, or concessionary, you incentivize the markets into places, that in a free market, they wouldn’t go otherwise.

The new administration has frozen funds to USDA programs which are aimed at helping small scale regenerative farmers and their allies. For instance, Pasa — a major service provider to farmers in Pennsylvania and the region — has had to furlough 60 of their 70 employees. Does this concern you?

Not at all. Bring it on. Bring it on. I think the sooner we wean the entire ag sector off the government’s nipple, the better off we’re going to be. We complain about crop subsidies and corn and soybeans and ethanol, but as soon as we get a chance at that trough, we’re guilty of the same. Just shut it all down. Shut it all down and I think we can compete very well.

You’ve long described yourself as a “Christian libertarian environmentalist capitalist lunatic farmer.” Do you think that the current regime offers a decent home for this kind of politics to flourish?

I do. The question will be, can we get to him? When people ask me, “If you could be king for a day, what would you do?” I always disappoint them and tell them, I’m a one string banjo, I’m a one string guy. My one solution is a food emancipation proclamation. And yes, that is strong language. But right now, our food and farm sector is enslaved, it is shackled by a regulatory structure that keeps us from being able to engage as neighbors in food transactions. If two consenting adults want to get together voluntarily and exercise freedom of choice on the fuel for their microbiome, we should be able to do that, we should be able to engage in that transaction without a bureaucrat involved.

I can’t imagine a more Trumpian idea. Can you imagine him standing up? “Today, I’m issuing a food emancipation proclamation!” That’s so Trumpian. I’ve told everybody that I know that I can get to, “I want 30 minutes with Trump.” If I had 30 minutes with Trump, to present this idea, I think he’d be all over it. It would unleash hundreds of thousands of homesteaders and small farmers and culinary artisans to our neighborhoods, our communities, our locales, to create entrepreneurial options. The fact is, Americans, we love choice. We’ve got choice in the bedroom, choice in the bathroom, choice in the womb, but no choice in the kitchen. And it’s time to rectify that. What good does it do to have the freedom to pray, preach, and assemble and own a gun, if you can’t choose your body’s fuel to give you the energy to go, shoot, pray, preach, and assemble.

In 2020, your long standing relationship with Mother Earth News was terminated by the magazine due to “a significant ideological impasse over political and social issues.” Have you found that your ability to speak to a more liberal crowd has diminished over the years?

Yes, I would say so. It used to be that it was much easier, but today’s partisanship and bifurcation have made it far more difficult. I will tell you, that break was very painful for me, I mean, I grew up on Mother Earth News as a teen, a young fella.

Let me back up a little bit. We homeschooled our kids before homeschooling was popular, back in the early ‘80s when they sent truant officers to take your kids away because you were being a negligent parent. And at that time, the entire homeschooling movement was dominated by liberals. It was very much a hippie anti-establishment holdover. “I don’t want my kids praying in the school.”

Well, then the 10 Commandments came down off the public school classrooms. And that awakened the kind of faith-based conservative element in America to rise up and say, “Whoa, wait, we don’t like the way this is going.” And here’s my point. In 1980, if you met a homeschooler, chances are they were, they voted Democrat. They were for, you know, abortion, blah, blah, blah. Today, if you meet a homeschooler, 90% chance they’re a conservative Christian faith-based kind of person.

We’re seeing the same thing, I believe, in the homestead movement. So, you know, you had the hippy, beaded, bearded, braless back-to-the-land-movement of the 1970s that spawned Mother Earth News. And we saw it on our farm as we started getting some media attention and some fame. People would come to visit and goodness, 75% of our visitors were liberal Democrats, “Coexist” on the license tag and that sort of thing. And we loved them and we got along fine. We were glad to have them interested in compost and not chemicals. And, you know, acupuncture and chiropractic and all the quackery, medical quackery.

And so, when Mother Earth News was developing these homestead fairs and capitalizing on that post-hippie revival of self-reliance and do-it-yourself-ism, back in let’s say, 2010, they were the big kahuna. I mean, they owned the space.

Well then 2020 ... we’ll never forget that year, that was a cultural year from hell, in my view, on so many fronts. And so, when I got canceled, what happened was, those camps split up, Mother Earth News deteriorated rapidly and completely embraced liberal [politics]. It outed them, I think. And I still love them. I don’t have any animosity.

What I’m going to get to is that when they exited the space as the big gorilla, suddenly it opened up oxygen for conservative faith-based homestead outfits to step up to the plate. And today, there are, I don’t know, 20 at least of these conservative faith-based homestead conferences around the U.S., maybe even 30. Seems like I go to 90% of them. And, you know, they’re not afraid to open in prayer. They’re not afraid to have a presenting of the colors. They’re not afraid to sing the national anthem on opening day. It is a revival.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Witnesses to an evening’s murmuration of starlings have described the event as an “elegant,” “shape shifting,” “dazzling cloud.” A swarm of locusts hits different.

Those who have watched the approach of a ravenous horde — infamously referred to as a “plague” in the Bible — lean toward more dread-filled reactions, describing how massive undulations of the winged insects have blacked out the sun then “beat against the houses, swarm[ed] in at the windows” before “dropping to the ground like hail.” Capable of eating millions of pounds of plant matter in a single day, such swarms decimated crops, fouled water supplies, and destroyed livelihoods across the American West in the 1870s.

Yes, the Rocky Mountain locust of devastating yore is now extinct. But American agriculture in Western states remains vulnerable to several kinds of endemic grasshoppers. As Gregory Sword, entomology professor at Texas A&M, explained it, “All locusts are grasshoppers but not all grasshoppers are locusts”; and even without the swarming mechanism they can cause a lot of damage.

Last year saw devastating scourges hit California nut orchards and Colorado rangelands. Biologists are also anticipating a threat from a non-native, Central American locust (Schistocerca piceifrons) that’s edging ever closer to the South Texas border as climate change shifts the insects’ range. The threat’s not only that they’ll gobble valuable crops; it’s that they might interbreed with local non-swarming North American grasshoppers. “Maybe we’re going to be invaded by the genes for becoming a [swarming] locust,” said Sword. Yikes.

Aerial spraying of potent pesticides when swarms are already in progress is the usual treatment by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS); this can wipe out numerous beneficial species. But researchers studying what makes grasshoppers swarm believe this knowledge holds clues on how to more effectively fight the bugs’ insatiable chomping — or even stop it before it happens. “The holy grail” for controlling these insects, said Sword, “is to be able to predict their movements.”

There are over 10,000 species of grasshoppers across the globe. Only a few of them have the genetic capability to go from comparatively docile bugs to swarming locusts — called locust phase polyphenism, according to William Wesela, an agriculturist at APHIS. Non-locust-type grasshoppers can wreak havoc, too, as 2024’s influxes prove; there are about 20 species of these grasshoppers in the American West. Sometimes, though, definitions can get mushy.

“Like many things in biology, it’s complicated,” said Rick Overson, co-director of Arizona State University’s Global Locust Initiative Lab. “There are 19 poster-child locusts all nerdy grasshopper biologists will agree, those are the ones we’re safe calling locusts. There’s other grasshoppers that have locust-like tendencies. Then there’s locusts that nobody remembers being a locust several decades ago, and now they’re acting like a locust.” This certainly complicates things for anyone hoping to better control them.

“The holy grail [for controlling locusts] is to be able to predict their movements.”

Swarm-capable locusts exist everywhere except Western Europe, Antarctica, and the U.S. and Canada (for now). The most concerning species of them all, the desert locust (Schistocerca gregaria) has been devastating smallholder farms across Africa’s Sahel since time immemorial; they caused $2.5 billion worth of agricultural losses in a 2005 outbreak. Scientists expect in some cases, climate change will make future outbreaks much worse.

People used to believe swarming and non-swarming locusts were different species. We now know the same genome in a single species, turned off or on, can produce two very different creatures. As Sword explained, desert locusts, reared in isolation, are colored green or brown — colors of camouflage. They’re also “really slow and cryptic and shy — they’ll move away from other individuals. But when you crowd them, all that changes and they aggregate towards one another, and they become much more active, which leads, ultimately, to the swarming.”

According to Arianne Cease, director of ASU’s locust lab, plenty of rain leading to abundant plant growth can cause locusts to lay enough eggs to trigger group swarming dynamics. But locust and grasshopper outbreaks are also common during droughts, “potentially because their predators haven’t survived,” she said. Their ability to capitalize on both conditions “can exacerbate an already challenging situation for agriculture in the region that might have been navigating years of drought.” The consequences can also be enormous for beekeepers, according to Wesela at APHIS, who depend on rangeland flowers to sustain their hives.

Desert locusts raised crowded together become brightly, boldly colored and are more willing to eat a wide range of even toxic plants. “When there’s more competition for food, you can’t be as picky,” Sword said. The bugs are compelled to keep teeming forward en masse in order to find more food sources — and also avoid becoming prey to each other. That’s right, on top of everything else, swarming locusts are “raging cannibals,” said Sword. “If they don’t move, they risk getting consumed by other locusts.”

In a chamber of the ASU locust lab, it’s not a swarm but one solitary migratory locust (Locusta migratoria) that’s flying, legs casually stretched behind, into strong headwinds in a PVC wind tunnel. Attached by a tiny magnet glued on its back to a long metal screw, the miniscule aeronaut first ate a high-carb/low protein meal — mimicking the cotton, wheat, and prairie grasses it targets in the wild — so researchers can gain better understanding of its dietary preferences in advance of a day’s journey that might last hundreds of miles. “We’re trying to paint a picture of the nutritional physiology of these beasts” — basically, what they like to eat and when — “to better understand how they’re doing what they’re doing to make them so hard to manage,” said Overson.

Swarming locusts are “raging cannibals. If they don’t move, they risk getting consumed by other locusts.”

In another chamber down the hall, both gregarious, group-reared locusts, and solitary little ones that can’t see or smell each other, are awaiting an assortment of experiments. Some of these will test what the locusts will do in group marching situations; it turns out even juvenile locusts that haven’t yet developed functional wings have the propensity to “swarm” on the ground. They’ll be fed different diets, explained Sydney Millerwise, a doctoral student at the lab, then monitored as they make their way round and round a donut-shaped arena to see what, if anything, will compel them to break ranks. The marching phase of teeny-bopper locusts might prove the most fortuitous time to try to stop them in their tracks; they’re a lot slower when they’re small and can’t fly.

The next things to ascertain are whether the swarming proclivities of one locust species apply to other grasshopper species. Sword’s lab is part of a National Science Foundation grant to figure out just that; he’s hoping the grant will be renewed after this year. He’s also on the cusp of understanding what makes a swarm tick, neurobiologically speaking.

Sword is part of a team that recently figured out that it’s the sight of other locusts moving ahead of it — rather than the smell of them, or the perception of polarized light coming through its compound eyes — that keep a bug careening ever forward. With this sort of intel in hand, researchers might be able to develop more targeted biological controls so chemical use could be cut way back. “If we can keep them from being attracted to each other, even though there might be an outbreak going on, they would still stay as normal behaving grasshoppers,” said Sword. Wesela believes Sword’s and ASU’s work “could have valuable implications,” he wrote in an email, especially in informing “strategies for managing grasshopper outbreaks in rangelands.”

A technology called RNA Interference (RNAi), which targets the expression of certain genes, might work. Another control that shows promise is Metarhizium acridum, a fungus that penetrates a locust’s outer cuticle to inhibit its immune function. ASU’s Cease said it isn’t approved for use in the U.S. yet; it’s also slow-acting, to the annoyance of anyone who “wants locusts off their land as soon as possible,” she said. And the potential for it to have unexpected consequences on landscapes is something that needs to be considered.

For now, Sword is tempering technological innovation with old-fashioned physical labor, visiting the U.S.-Mexico border every month to look for signs that the Central American locusts have arrived at last. “I literally drive along the wall and collect grasshoppers,” he said. He’s also trying to get locals engaged in the search because the occasional, if determined, efforts of one man go only so far in grasshopper surveillance. “Somebody out there is going to find it,” he said.

In 2015, Pennsylvania hobby farmer Daniel Leiber showed up to a French fine dining restaurant in New York City with some cuts of lamb and pork, hoping to turn his livestock pastime into a business. If this meeting went well, it would be his first restaurant account. If it didn’t, he was going to need to find another way to make an income off of his growing farm. In the end, things took a turn he wasn’t expecting.

This is good, the executive chef told him. But do you think you could grow me some squab?

“I didn’t even know what squab was,” Leiber said. “He could see that on my face.”

The chef explained that squab are juvenile pigeons — and no, they weren’t the same as the ones perching on statues and buildings around the restaurant. Pigeons grown for food are commonly consumed in other parts of the world, such as China and France. It’s common, for example, to see deep-fried squab on Chinese New Year banquet menus, or roasted and served at Michelin-starred French restaurants. These pigeons, which are raised as livestock, harvested as juveniles, and called “squab,” are thought of as a delicacy. And, since this restaurant happened to serve high-end French food, the chef wanted them on the menu.

Fortunately, Leiber was up for the challenge, and quickly found out why the chef had made such a query of someone with no experience — squab farmers are few and far between in the U.S. He had to mostly teach himself the craft of “squabbing,” because the only help he could find nearby was someone who raised pigeons for show. He purchased a few King pigeons, built them a dovecote (pigeon house), and started working on creating his own custom feed. Within a few months of that first meeting, the New York City restaurant had Stardust Farm’s squab on the menu.

In January of this year, there were 869.3 million broiler-type chickens hatched in the U.S. Squab numbers are much harder to get ahold of, but the most reliable estimates are that we produce barely more than a million squab annually. In the U.S., squab is what Leiber calls “a lost delicacy.” But it wasn’t always so hard to find.

Not What You Think

Most people are familiar with city pigeons, but these urban-dwelling birds only represent a small facet of the wide variety out there.

“If you go on our website, you can see all kinds of different colors and varieties that don’t look anything like the [pigeons] you see out in the wild,” said Tim Heidrich, secretary of the National Pigeon Association.

Heidrich said there are hundreds of pigeon breeds, and they can generally be sorted into four categories. “Fancy” pigeons are raised for showing. Racing pigeons are raised for speed. Performance pigeons are trained to do tricks. And “utility” pigeons are used for squabbing.

Heidrich himself has been keeping fancy pigeons since he was a child in the 1960s and ‘70s, when he says it was much more common. Anecdotally, several other kids in the neighborhood kept backyard pigeons, inspiring him to get into the hobby. He started with two birds, whom he named Hank and Henrietta. Today, he maintains a dovecote with a couple hundred birds, including four breeds that he shows at competitions. But beyond show value, he also just really likes them.

“Chickens don’t interact with you as much as pigeons do,” Heidrich said. “The pigeons, they just seem to have much more personality to them.”

Culturally, pigeons have played many roles for humans. Like Heidrich, many people have kept them as backyard pets. They have been messengers, entertainers, and even took part in World War I, providing critical communications services by carrying messages. There’s a laboratory in Utah that studies pigeons for their impressive genetic variation. But raising pigeons as meat is one of the key ways humans have interacted with pigeons through time.

“Chickens don’t interact with you as much as pigeons do. The pigeons, they just seem to have much more personality to them.”

Squabbing as a practice has been around for thousands of years in many parts of the world such as Europe and North Africa. In England and France, there were thousands of dovecotes belonging to members of nobility in the 16th and 17th centuries. But the practice has faded over time, and while there’s a minor pigeon market in the U.S., it’s not that common.

“It never caught on in the U.S. that I know of, in any big way,” Heidrich said.

Bigger companies like Palmetto Pigeon Plant in South Carolina dominate a rather meager industry in the United States. Hanna Raskin of The Food Section reports that in the U.S. there are only 13 producers authorized to sell squab across state lines.

Most folks looking to buy squab in the U.S. must turn to online ordering or specialty meat markets. Paulina Market in Chicago is just such a place. They sell squab online and in their brick and mortar to retail customers. A spokesperson for the shop said they don’t sell much of it, though — it would be a big month to even sell 12 birds, they said. However, they added, sometimes that number doubles around the winter holidays.

The low numbers may be partially due to the fact that pigeons have gained a reputation as dirty birds — a misconception that both Leiber and Heidrich enthusiastically deny. For some Americans, the rugged urban ones have tainted their perceptions of this protein. But it may also be because the industrialization of animal agriculture requires the most meat for the least input, a demand that’s particularly difficult for pigeons to meet. As the quick-producing chicken took center stage as America’s most popular animal protein, squab has all but faded from view.

Raising Pigeons

It’s not that squab farms are impossible to scale up — Palmetto Pigeon Plant has tens of thousands of birds. But raising pigeons is a little different from poultry like chickens, explained Leiber.

“You could take a fertilized chicken egg, put it in an incubator, hatch that egg, and within three days, the baby chick is already eating grain on its own,” Leiber said. “With pigeons, you need the parents.”

A mother pigeon will lay only two eggs at a time, and the parents will take turns incubating those eggs. It takes just shy of 20 days to hatch these eggs, and then both parents will assume the responsibility of feeding their young.

The bird is meant to be tender, owing to the fact that they are butchered so young. Leiber harvests his at a month old, before they’ve left the nest.

“In a perfect world scenario, I’m pulling the squab right out of the nests so they’re not even flapping their wings yet. You can imagine how tender the meat is.”

“I’m pulling the squab right out of the nests so they’re not even flapping their wings yet. So you can imagine how tender the meat is.”

Covid-19 nearly ended Leiber’s career as a squab farmer. Before the pandemic hit, Leiber’s flock was about 1000 birds, or 500 pairs. When restaurants started closing down, he had to significantly cut down his flock. Leiber, who has a pigeon tattooed on his arm, took the culling hard.

“It was horrible,” he said. “It messed me up psychologically for a couple months.”

But now, he’s started building his flock back up and he’s pivoting his operation. Instead of searching for restaurant clients, he’s inviting people to stay at the farm and learn what he loves about pigeons firsthand.

“I’ve been trying my best to reintroduce people to squab,” he said. “I mean, people in my generation, they don’t know squab. I’m the only person where they would ever hear about squab from.”

Leiber, who also went to culinary school, now operates a farm stay bed and breakfast. People can come learn about squab farming, among other things, and then try pigeon for dinner — perhaps for the first time.

When Matt LeBel and his team went out collecting soil samples at the end of September in North Carolina, it was a different experience than usual. Hurricane Helene had just ravaged the southeastern states of the U.S., leaving farmers focused on providing support to communities that had been hit hardest. “We just went out and kind of did things in a way that felt like they could keep their focus on family and supporting the community,” said LeBel, chief of staff at Lithos Carbon.

The team needed to test whether the basalt they’d treated the soil with had actually stored carbon. Lithos sells carbon credits to companies looking to offset their emissions, and with deadlines for end-of-year accounting approaching, LeBel and his team had to act fast. Before the hurricane hit, however, there’d been a drought that had pushed the harvest back, making the fields inaccessible to vehicles, so they had to do the work on foot.

Lithos is one of many companies aiming to store carbon through a process known as enhanced rock weathering (ERW). In May last year, Lithos, alongside four of its competitors, was awarded $1.2 million dollars as a semi-finalist in the Department of Energy’s Purchase Prize, a competition to deliver carbon removal credits to the government. Yet some issue caution on claims of whether the practice can truly store carbon.

When basalt is added to fields and is exposed to water, it breaks down and reacts with carbon dioxide to form bicarbonate ions. These ions contain carbon and are washed away into rivers, lakes and eventually the ocean, where they remain. Lithos adds basalt to farmers‘ soils for free and finances their operations by selling carbon credits to polluters looking to offset their emissions.

“The trade-off is we allow them to put the product on our fields, and we sign off on any carbon credits that they can sell off of our farming,” said Tim Madeiros, a farmer in Newburg, Pennsylvania, who is working with Lithos. They first applied basalt to his fields in July 2023, with the resulting harvest of grass hay in May last year.

Madeiros came across Lithos via a Facebook advert while he was searching for a solution to his weed problems. His farm is organic so herbicides weren’t an option; he instead turned to Lithos and their basalt. Madeiros said that the weed control from ERW has been “very effective” and on top of that his yield increased by 40%.

A UK paper published in February 2024 found that ERW can store around 2.5 tons of carbon dioxide per hectare every year and improve crop yields by up to 15%. Another study a year later from the same author found that ERW deployed on agricultural land could sequester 0.16-0.30 gigatons of carbon dioxide every year by 2050. For context, the U.S. emitted 6.3 gigatons in 2022.

“Many studies … are not looking at the net impact of putting rocks on fields for the atmosphere, which is what we ultimately care about in our climate strategies.”

Despite the promising results presented by ERW studies, Freya Chay, program lead at non-profit Carbon Plan, recommends caution, stating that we’re still early in our understanding of the technology’s potential. “Many studies … are not looking at the net impact of putting rocks on fields for the atmosphere, which is what we ultimately care about in our climate strategies,” said Chay.

The study published in February 2024 calculated the carbon storage potential based on the amount of basalt that dissolved — which doesn’t automatically equate to carbon removed from the atmosphere.

Similarly, it’s difficult to generalize, said Chay. Each study has its own design — from the kind of rock used through to the type of soil or the local climate — so results from one situation don’t necessarily apply to others. Differences can arise from “one field to another.” That’s true across time, too: The study found a yearly carbon storage potential of 3.8 tons per hectare in the first year, which averaged out to 2.5 tons per year over a four-year period.

“We need more field trials to understand how general these kinds of responses are,” said David Beerling, professor of natural sciences at the University of Sheffield and lead author of the paper in question. He agrees with Chay that our understanding of the technology is still in the early stages, though he highlights that increases in yield seem to be a consistent result in field trials.

Another consideration is the carbon emitted in deploying the technology. One paper found that it is rock grinding, rather than mining, which has the largest environmental impact. Another found that particle sizes of less than 50 micrometers result in greater carbon sequestration through ERW.

Microsoft, British Airways and the Nigerian government all announced ERW partnerships in fall last year, showing there’s growing interest in the technology.

“I think there is an argument to be made that the commercial sector is running ahead of the science.”

Some have concerns that the business model of selling carbon credits to polluters isn’t doing much to actually address emissions and is instead a way for companies to greenwash. A paper published in November found that less than 16% of investigated carbon credits constituted real emissions reductions, though the paper in question didn’t look into any ERW projects.

“I think a lot of the credits that are used to make public claims to consumers are not backed up by science, and there’s a lot of evidence to support that concern,” said Chay.

Carbon markets are, however, a little more nuanced than that. “Buying credits to make claims that you have offset fossil fuels is very different than buying credits as basically a mechanism for supporting R&D,” she said. She adds that it’s important to take each credit on a case-by-case basis if you want to levy the criticism that it’s a way for companies to greenwash.

“I think there is an argument to be made that the commercial sector is running ahead of the science,” said Beerling. At the same time, he said there are some “very good” commercial companies, and he highlighted Lithos as being “rigorous” in their work.

“We actually go to every farm about every six months and [take a soil sample] approximately every two and a half acres,” said Mary Yap, co-founder of Lithos. The soil samples are then tested against a control field in order to better understand how much bicarbonate has formed.

Modeling is used to understand how the bicarbonate ions move through rivers and into the ocean, which Yap said was studied with academics and is publicly available for scrutiny. It’s possible that when the ions come into contact with acidic rivers — due to excess fertilizer runoff, for example — that carbon can be released again. When accommodating these kinds of issues in their accounting, Yap said they estimate conservatively.

She adds that Lithos currently uses super-fine basalt in their operations, which is a waste product of other mining processes and therefore no new mining or grinding is needed. “We screen all that for purity, for safety, making sure it’s good for our farmers, making sure it’s nutrient-rich,” she said.

Yap said companies like Microsoft and Google “are really trying to reduce their emissions while also buying down removals for the parts that are really hard to reduce.”

Responding to the idea that polluters might use carbon credits to greenwash, Yap said companies like Microsoft and Google “are really trying to reduce their emissions while also buying down removals for the parts that are really hard to reduce.”

Microsoft recently signed a deal with Lithos to permanently remove 11,400 metric tons of carbon from the atmosphere. The software company’s emissions have risen from 12.2 to 15.8 million metric tons of carbon equivalents between 2020 and 2023.

Chay said that on a structural level, “offsets have played a role of relieving structural political pressure on emission reductions,” and that “carbon removal is only useful if we do deep emission cuts.” Yap added that “there’s no way that we’re going to use carbon removal to remove 50 to 60 billion tons of emissions a year.”

For farmer Madeiros, however, the carbon credit side of things doesn’t really matter. He doesn’t believe humanity’s carbon footprint is impacting the Earth. “I would [work with Lithos] again, because simply, it doesn’t cost me anything to do it, and I’m benefiting from it,” he said.

After the post-hurricane collection, LeBel says he and his colleagues at Lithos feel that the kind of hard work they put in is going to be necessary to get the industry off the ground. “There will be more hurricanes, there will be more droughts, there will be more things that impact farmers,” he said. For now, however, things are back to normal: “We’re thankfully outside of that emergency period, we’re back into a world where [the sampling is] more planned, more scheduled, and we’re not as crunched.”

When Charlie Henriksen began working on Lake Michigan in the 1980s, fish and commercial fishermen were both abundant. But in the decades since, fisheries have shrunk, undercut by increasing regulations and invasive species.

Henriksen is still fishing — his primary catch is lake whitefish, which have proved remarkably resilient to changing conditions — but the fishery he started in 40 years ago is all but gone. “There’s little spots where there’s some fish, but nothing like it used to be, or should be.”

This trajectory isn’t helped by the way many North Americans consume fish. On its way to your plate, a fish leaves much of itself behind. First goes the head — roughly 20 per cent of the animal — then the guts, bones, blood, and skin, leaving a fillet that makes up less than half of the creature it started from.

For the fish, this is bad enough. But for the fishermen already operating on thin margins, throwing half of their catch away is also bad for their bottom line.

In the Great Lakes region, people are investigating whether there’s another way.

Henriksen is part of a group of Great Lakes fishermen, aquaculture producers, and processors exploring whether the solution lies in using 100 percent of the fish they catch for applications ranging from fertilizer to cosmetics and skin grafts. “Even if it added a couple dollars a pound to our base price, it would be a game changer … it would actually make what’s left of our industry profitable again.”

The initiative is part of a global movement that people hope can address the problem of fish waste — which the World Economic Forum estimates in the tens of billions of tons a year — while making fishing communities more resilient.

But in the Great Lakes, the effort is also contending with a shifting environment, ecologically and politically, and a supply chain that isn’t set up to use much of what comes out of the water.

Why Not Take All of Me

While Indigenous and traditional communities have long used the entirety of fish (as do cultures outside of the Western world) efforts are intensifying to do so in industrial fishing— starting with a nation that’s long been dependent on cod.

In the 1980s, Icelandic fisheries were put under a quota system to address concerns about overfishing; over the next decade, landings of Atlantic cod dropped from around 450,000 tons to less than half that amount. “What it meant is that all these businesses that had been built around volume as the business model really had to think, ‘Okay, now I can’t catch as much … so how do I maximize the value’,” said Alexandra Leeper, CEO of the Iceland Ocean Cluster, a network of Icelandic ocean companies.

Initially, the industry responded by adjusting filleting practices to waste less of the fish — but in time, focus shifted to cod’s other parts. The 100% Fish Project, an initiative of the Iceland Ocean Cluster, now helps as much as 95 percent of cod caught by Icelandic fishers find a purpose. This includes cosmetics, fish leather, pre-treatment sprays for colds, and skin grafts for burn victims.

As an island nation, there’s a longstanding recognition in Iceland that resources are limited, and that effort into catching fish can’t be wasted, said Leeper. Now, the 100% Fish Project is relearning those pathways. “We couldn’t just keep fishing endlessly — there’s a need to do things better now.”

Casting the Net Wide

The shift isn’t confined to Iceland.

On a trip to Europe, David Naftzger, executive director of the Great Lakes St. Lawrence Governors & Premiers (GSGP), which supports environmental protection and economic development in the Great Lakes Region, stumbled across the Iceland Ocean Cluster.

In Atlantic cod’s trajectory, Naftzger recognized a parallel story to that of lake whitefish, one of the Great Lakes’ most important species — and the 100% Fish Project prompted a revelation. “We realized we really just had a filet factory, and we were leaving a tremendous amount of unrealized value on the table,” he said.

In response, Naftzger’s organization launched their own project, called 100% Great Lakes Fish, in 2022. Projects to use the entirety of fish have also sprung up in Namibia, South Korea, and Alaska.

As a first step for the Great Lakes, participating fishermen and companies voluntarily pledge to stop sending fish waste to landfill, starting this year. “Putting valuable raw material … into that landfill really doesn’t make any sense,” said Naftzger. He said the GSGP has also done testing of the major fish species caught in the Lakes to determine what kinds of products they’re suitable for. “In the near term, we’ve identified opportunities to roughly triple the value that’s generated by each fish.”

Initially, this may be as simple as diverting fish waste to compost, but over time, could include uses such as fish meal, collagen, and leather.

Stakes Are High

One challenge in the Great Lakes is the fishery’s highly decentralized structure; unlike in Iceland, where processing happens in one location, fish in the Great Lakes is harvested and processed by small companies or individuals in communities on both sides of the Canada-U.S. border (a situation that also confounds efforts to develop tinned fish production in the Great Lakes).

This adds complexity at a time when Canada-U.S. trade relations are rocky, to say the least; in an average year, Charlie Henriksen might send 50 percent of his catch to Ontario for processing — 80 percent of which then comes back to the U.S. “This whole war with Canada and tariffs is just really draining to think about,” he said. “There’s been so much legwork to make [100% Great Lakes Fish] happen. It really just doesn’t need an extra roadblock.”

On top of that, traditionally, many Great Lakes harvesters have been in competition, Naftzger said, which makes collaborating to develop new products a tougher sell. Still, fishermen see promise in the idea.

“It’s just heartening that we’re trying to do something,” said Henriksen, whose son is his business partner. “We’re building a business for the future — that’s why I’m involved.”

Henriksen is skeptical that the increase in fish value that Iceland Ocean Cluster claims — from $12 to a potential value of $5,000 for a single cod — would be possible in the Great Lakes. But even a small increase in the price per pound could make the fishery viable, he said.

Already, Henriksen has been collaborating with a researcher to see if his scraps make viable aquaculture feed; he’s also worked with a company to make fish leather products, though “people didn’t get real excited about them.”

Rough Waters Ahead

There are other hurdles to overcome. Fisheries have been decimated by invasive species, and recovery from those impacts has been slow — even as funding for control measures is precarious.

And in the long term, invasive species — among other issues — could be exacerbated by climate change. The Great Lakes’ cold temperatures have held many invasives at bay, said Zachary Feiner, research scientist at University of Wisconsin-Madison. But Feiner’s research on invasive carp in Wisconsin rivers suggests that could change in future. “A little bit of warming all of a sudden makes those a great place for invasive species to be in.”

Meanwhile, declining ice cover on the Great Lakes is also affecting the survival of young fish of species like whitefish, which depend on ice to protect their eggs over the winter. “You’re seeing impacts of climate change very, very directly.”

Naftzger said shifting the industry to use more of each fish makes it more resilient to the shifts that come from a changing climate. “Anytime you’re dependent on a single product, you’re more vulnerable to some kind of a dislocation or a change.”

Dennis VanLandschoot is one of those hoping for that more stable footing.

His grandfather started VanLandschoot & Sons after emigrating from Belgium to Michigan in the early 20th century.

But environmental conditions, regulations, and persistent labour shortages make keeping the fishery going a tough proposition; earning revenue on the 50 per cent of the fish they’re currently throwing away would be “huge.”

VanLandschoot said this isn’t just about his family, or the commercial fishers on the Great Lakes. Ultimately, using more of what’s coming out of the water will also support healthier populations for what’s left in the water. “Really it starts from the back end,” said VanLandschoot. “What can we do for the fish?

Five Rivers Cattle Feeding LLC is the world’s largest cattle-feeding company, employing hundreds of workers in 13 feedlots scattered across six states. Veterinarians, managers, health staff, and barn employees support the health and welfare of nearly 865,000 cattle.

These employees identify and treat respiratory diseases, pneumonia, viral and bacterial infections, rumen disruptions, lameness, and a host of other health-related maladies, injuries, and defects. They insert rectal thermometers, inject antibiotics, deliver oral drenches, and complete minor and major medical procedures to care for the sick.

Alongside this, dozens of riders comb through countless pens, scanning for a nearly never-ending, committed-to-memory list of symptoms and clinical signs including every consistency and variation of bodily discharges and fluids, irregular sounds, surprising behaviors, awkward gaits, funky smells, and much more. All this is accomplished from the back of a horse, often in extreme heat or cold, gale force winds, sheeting rain, and/or howling blizzards.

Even when deemed successful in their roles, too many animals die; cattle are prey creatures and use every shred of willpower to hide sickness until they’re no longer able. No matter how experienced and knowledgeable, even the best pen riders are mere mortals. They cannot see what isn’t yet there to see.

Five Rivers personnel aren’t unique or unusual in their abilities, but an example of what occurs each day across the cattle feeding industry. Veterinarians assess and prescribe, barn staff probe and record, and pen checkers ride and inspect, each mirroring various industry approaches to animal health. Five Rivers, as the largest feedyard in the country, is representative of the industry’s tech-driven push toward predicting cattle diseases earlier and more efficiently.

Tech Languishing in the Shadows

Technology has created superior vaccines, more efficient antimicrobials, and improved treatment deliveries, but identifying cattle illness before clinical signs appear has remained an industry challenge.

A ride amongst the pens at Five Rivers confirms evidence of tech-based aspirations. Currently trialed and functioning hardware hums quietly beside unused, previously tested gadgets deemed ineffective or impractical. Sporadically mounted on alleyways, light posts, gates, and bunk rails, they cast a shadow of proof on the efforts made.

“Being in agriculture has a way of wearing us down, as much of what we play a role in is often out of our control.”

“Seeing this evidence, it’s obviously a work in progress,” said Five Rivers’ head veterinarian, Josh Szasz. “Being in agriculture has a way of wearing us down, as much of what we play a role in is often out of our control. Early disease detection technology is no different, but this ... doesn’t stop us from returning to the table when something new shows promise.”

Five Rivers focuses on early disease detection innovations. If these advancements could ever crest the figurative hilltop, the cowboys might be able to ride into previously uncharted territory, identifying sick animals for treatment days before clinical signs surface.

“Our motivation toward using these early disease detection tools is to deliver fewer antibiotics and to use them more judiciously. We want to do our part in curbing antimicrobial resistance too,” Szasz said. “These kinds of improvements are good things.”

Look at Those Handsome Muzzles

Of course, if technology startups wish to showcase their capabilities, the largest feedyard in the world is the ideal place to do it. To this end, Five Rivers Cattle Feeding hosts periodic competitions with many disease detection startups exhibiting their offerings to capture the feedlot’s attention.

MyAniML, a Kansas City-based animal health technology company, attended one of these competitions, propelling themselves onto the feedyard’s radar. Their technology uses motion sensor cameras to photograph faces and, more specifically, muzzles. Facial recognition identifies individuals, and AI breaks down video and picture data, assessing muzzle distinctions to predict the onset of illness.

“Each muzzle is like a fingerprint,” said Shekhar Gupta, MyAniML’s founder and CEO. “They go through tiny changes as health status fluctuates. By studying these minute differences in a muzzle’s ridges, we can predict health events 2 to 3 days before noticeable symptoms occur.”

Feedlot cattle generally live close together; disease transmission is a major concern. But Gupta believes facial recognition and muzzle analysis will help identify and isolate sick individuals earlier, saving money on treatment costs and reducing transmission risks.

Turn Up the Lights

Five Rivers has hosted several smart ear tag startups hoping to catch the operation’s attention with their unique product capabilities.

HerdDogg is a technology company that operates like a benign Big Brother, continuously watching over animal health from afar. Its Bluetooth-capable system uses accelerometers and sensor-equipped ear tags to detect minute temperature and movement changes even the most experienced handlers can miss. These smart tags collect data and upload it to the cloud, where algorithms correlate it to individual health status. Alerts of potential sickness or injury are delivered through text messages or emails.

“We’ve improved our health algorithms to be more customizable to each operation,” said HerdDogg CEO Andrew Uden. “Our system now allows users to remotely activate ultra-bright green LED lights on the smart ear tags of sick animals making it easy to identify them.”

Uden says their enhanced capabilities have cut false positives across the board without sacrificing detection of true positives. Their timing has also improved with shorter intervals between alerts and less time needed to ‘train’ the algorithms on new cattle or properties.

Currently, Five Rivers hasn’t committed to any smart ear tag startups, although they remain interested in their capabilities.

A Deep Breath to Assess

Isomark Health, a Wisconsin-based animal health company, has developed a non-invasive technology to monitor disease status by measuring and analyzing isotopic biomarkers in exhaled breath samples.

While they haven’t taken part in any of Five River’s events, they are currently attempting to advance their innovation further into beef markets.

Isomark’s patented breath analysis system provides sickness notifications one to two days before clinical signs appear. In ongoing, internal, dairy-based trials, the technology identified ketosis and milk production issues three to five days ahead of conventional methods. The company is currently enhancing its algorithms for infections and adding identifications for other metabolic diseases.

“Isomark is optimizing cattle management by observing health, metabolic status, and methane emissions,” said CEO and founder Fariba Assadi-Porter.

The company’s next goal is to place the device on more dairies and feedyards, screen more animals, and increase awareness while developing a smaller footprint for the next generation of their device.

Other Innovations

Many other start-ups have generated feedyard interest.

One biotechnology company developed a rapid farm-based blood test for immune health status. Smart rumen bolus devices claim to detect sickness up to 5 days before symptoms appear. Computer vision analyzes movements and behavior to identify illness, while internet-connected smart collars detect irregular patterns, including H5N1 avian influenza. Another start-up uses leg tags that monitor motion and gait for health issues. And out-of-the-box software programs are interpreting vocalizations to diagnose sickness.

It remains to be seen if any of these innovations will “pass go” on the way to Five River’s ground floor. For Dr. Szasz, this speed of commerce always represents the massive elephant in the room. It’s where he gauges promise.

“If our motivation to pursue innovations is sidelined by cost or speed of commerce not matching our reality, it tends to go away.”

“If we have to adapt our handling chutes or hire an extra person to run a device, it tips the scales,” he said. “We continue to show interest, but If our motivation to pursue innovations is sidelined by cost or speed of commerce not matching our reality, it tends to go away.”

“Early disease detection technologies are promising; they really are,” Szasz added. “[But] while this potential is getting closer, some truths still make us hesitant.”

He’s tested many innovations but continues to find most are still too expensive, don’t work well in the realities of production, have cumbersome hardware, exhibit connectivity issues, or are simply too far off to be a genuine option.

Yet Szasz continues to be hopeful. “I’ve got to stay optimistic something positive will come along or an upgrade to something currently out there will be the answer,” he said. “Maybe the next pitch we hear will move the ball down the field. If it’s a break-even proposition and the right thing to do, we’ll do it. Even if we lose a little money or efficiency, and it’s the right thing to do, we’ll do it. And especially if an animal welfare breach occurs if we don’t do it, it’s a no-brainer. I’m optimistic. We’re on a slow march but at least we’re still moving.”

Traci Malone has heard a lot of different worries about food over more than two decades as a registered dietician and licensed nutritionist in Asheville, North Carolina. But over the past five years or so, she says, a new fear has started taking hold of the people she serves, its spread turbocharged in the way only the viral internet can.

“I think it’s insane, this impact of social media influencers,” said Malone. “Clients come to me believing that the seed oils are the devil incarnate.”

When she first began to study nutrition, Malone explained, the term “seed oil” itself — now used in reference to industrially extracted, neutral-tasting cooking oils from plants like canola, soybean, and sunflower — wasn’t a mainstream phrase. Instead, dieticians called those products vegetable oils and, due to their higher levels of unsaturated fat, considered them a generally healthier alternative to animal-based fats like butter and lard. Although seed oils can break down into toxic byproducts when repeatedly heated and may contribute to inflammation in large amounts, Malone said, they’re not a problem when used in moderation for home cooking.

The term — and its attendant discourse — broke into popular consciousness around 2020, when “Carnivore MD” Dr. Paul Saladino appeared on the Joe Rogan Experience podcast to associate seed oils with a wide range of dietary woes. (It should be noted that Saladino was promoting his recently published book, The Carnivore Code.) Influencers on both sides of the culture, from left-leaning environmental advocates to right-wing skeptics of globalized farming, proceeded to pick up the theme. The nonprofit International Food Information Council, which is largely supported by big food and ag companies like General Mills and Cargill, found that 28 percent of American consumers said they actively avoided seed oils as of late 2024.

Those influencers have gained a powerful sympathizer in federal government through the confirmation of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as the U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services. Long a critic of the industrial food system, Kennedy sold merch emblazoned with “Make Frying Oil Tallow Again” as an independent presidential candidate; in October, he posted on X that Americans were “being unknowingly poisoned by heavily subsidized seed oils.”

Farmers who grow oilseed crops are now facing their own fear: Will Kennedy, whose role includes oversight of the federal Food and Drug Administration, strive to eliminate seed oils from America’s food supply?

At a February Senate hearing, American Soybean Association Chair Josh Gackle cited “increasing rhetoric perpetuating false claims about the detrimental health impacts of soybean oil and other seed oils, paired with threats of banning these products from domestic food use,” as major challenges. The ASA and other advocacy groups, including the National Oilseed Processors Association, Edible Oil Producers Association, and Corn Refiners Association, signed onto a March open letter urging Kennedy to follow “the robust science- and risk-based regulatory systems to which these products are already subject.” Over 60 Republican lawmakers, many from farming-heavy states like Iowa and Nebraska, sent a similar letter to Kennedy in April.

Vegetable oils are big business in the U.S., representing nearly $114 billion in annual value as of 2022 according to Purdue University’s Center for Global Trade Analysis. And although much of that value stems from exports or industrial and biofuel use, the domestic food market makes up a key part of the mix. A March study by World Agricultural Economic and Environmental Services, commissioned by the United Soybean Board, found that a domestic ban on seed oil in food would cut annual U.S. net farm income by $1.9 billion, or 1.6 percent.

“Clients come to me believing that the seed oils are the devil incarnate.”

“From a vegetable oil perspective, this is a much more disruptive shock than COVID,” said agricultural economist John Kruse, the study’s lead author. In the event of a ban, he projects that the U.S. would try fill its food oil needs mostly through imported palm oil (a product with its own controversies). Current domestic production of lard and tallow, seemingly Kennedy’s preferred alternatives, could substitute for only a few of the 59 pounds of seed oils Americans consume per capita each year.

Among those farmers concerned is Tim Mickelson, president of the U.S. Canola Association, who has grown the plant since 1997 on about 2,800 acres in Rolla, North Dakota. Canola is an excellent climatic fit for the state, which produces over 80 percent of the country’s harvest. He says it’s been an invaluable part of his own rotation, yielding a solid return while conditioning soils and breaking disease cycles between wheat crops.

Mickelson is also an avid social media user as @BisonAddict — honoring the mascot of his alma mater, North Dakota State University — with over 17,000 TikTok followers. There, he’s run headfirst into anti-seed oil rhetoric, and he’s been frustrated by what he sees as its irrational fearmongering.

“What surprises me the most is how many people will actually judge something not on scientific facts,” said Mickelson, pointing to research by Harvard University and other experts that backs vegetable oil as a healthy choice. “But anything that causes a consumer to make a different decision in the store and not buy canola oil affects the demand for the product.”

Mickelson personally believes a federal seed oil ban is unlikely and is more worried about the market impacts Kennedy’s rhetoric is already having. A number of businesses have publicized their switch away from seed oil, including salad chain Sweetgreen and fast-food icon Steak ‘n Shake. “Fries will be RFK’d!” wrote the latter, in an X post announcing its decision. (Kennedy subsequently praised Steak ’n Shake as he ate its fries with Fox News host Sean Hannity, and he later hosted the company for a pop-up at an HHS staff cafeteria.)

“From a vegetable oil perspective, this is a much more disruptive shock than COVID.”

But how the federal government might act remains uncertain. Kennedy declared that “nothing is going to be off limits” in his first address to HHS employees. In response to a request for comment on this story, a spokesperson for the FDA wrote that “it is critical to consolidate the scientific literature and gain a clearer understanding of the overall impact of ingredients within our U.S. food supply — so Americans know what is in their food.” Despite Kennedy’s promise of “radical transparency,” the department did not respond to further clarifying questions.

It’s also unclear if Kennedy will face opposition from other forces within the Trump administration. Kailee Tkacz Buller, the USDA’s new chief of staff, was previously president of the National Oilseed Processors Association and Edible Oil Producers Association. “Soybeans are a major crop in the United States, and USDA continues to support American agriculture and put farmers first,” wrote a USDA spokesperson, when asked about Kennedy’s stance.

All of this hubbub over seed oils, emphasized dietician Malone, is unlikely to make Americans much healthier, especially when seed oil opponents often don’t acknowledge the well-established link between saturated fats like beef tallow and heart disease.

“I do my best to help people move away from very black-and-white thinking about food and nutrition to somewhere in the middle, a little bit more gray,” Malone says. “We’re now frying all in beef tallow, and that seems like a very reactionary and extremely sharp direction to take.”

Sometime around 2015, Keper Connell had an epiphany while on vacation in Barcelona. He had long worked as a commercial fisherman, doing all kinds of fishing jobs throughout the seasons. “But most of that was just so I could keep catching bluefin tuna,” he said. He loved the challenge, heading out to the Gulf of Maine from his home in New Hampshire with just rod and reel. Those expeditions were, as he puts it, “entirely enjoyable.” But profitable? Not so much.

In Spain, though, Connell learned that bluefin tuna was a prized food fish — caught every summer the same way it had been for millennia, much of it packed in olive oil and tinned to enjoy year round. “I thought, ‘Wow, I’m catching these same fish. How come I can’t put this in the tin back home?’ It was in the back of my mind for many years,” Connell said. He continued catching tuna on slim margins — “not really making any money but knowing full well that, up the chain, they’re making plenty” on the wholesaler or restaurateur side — and eventually decided to do the value add himself. He founded Gulf of Maine Conservas in 2019.

It was a good time: Tinned fish was becoming a much-discussed food world darling, and the U.S. market would go on to grow steadily over the next several years. “Americans started to realize this is a healthy source of protein and all these other nutrients,” said Anna Hezel, author of the 2023 tinned fish cookbook Tin to Table, who first started noticing the trend bubbling up in the early 2010s.

American consumers also realized that the cheap, water-packed albacore they grew up with was not their only option. Cans of high-quality fish from Portugal and Spain, where tinned fish (or conservas) is a longstanding tradition, came back in suitcases as souvenirs and appeared in greater numbers on grocery shelves. Wine bar menus began filling with cockles, razor clams, and whole baby squid, packed in olive oil and sometimes flavored with ingredients like garlic or chile. At some point, tinned fish became a poster child of affordable luxury, declared online to be the new “hot girl food.”

Still, when it comes to traceable, carefully processed, beautifully packaged tinned fish, companies like Gulf of Maine Conservas are relatively rare. Other U.S. brands have sprung up, too — but look at the tin and you’re likely to see the fish inside was caught and processed in Europe as a private-label product, then shipped thousands of miles. As the global tinned-fish market continues to grow, expected by some estimates to nearly double in the next decade, there are a lot of reasons to start asking: Why don’t we make more of it here?

*

There are reasons to love tinned fish that aren’t just TikTok fodder. For one thing, it can be a highly sustainable seafood choice, often using smaller species that are wild-caught and less prone to overfishing. Preserving reduces waste and requires less energy for storage and transport. It also means that a seasonal catch can be sold year-round, creating new and more reliable markets for fishers. Especially amid global trade uncertainty — and the threat of a 20 percent blanket tariff on imports from the European Union — there might be an opening to keep some production local.

“I think a lot of American companies are asking the same question: We have fish here, we have canneries here, why can’t we do what they’re doing [in Europe]?” Hezel said. “One of the main reasons is probably just species availability.” Some fish emblematic of Iberian conservas are not so easy to come by on this side of the Atlantic. Our native anchovy, for example, is harvested mostly as bait fish, and the Pacific sardine fishery has been closed since 2015 due to overfishing.

Other conservas classics are available domestically, like mackerel, which Connell sources locally to complement the bluefin he mostly catches himself. But Gulf of Maine Conservas also offers tins of something slightly more unusual: smoked eel from the region’s American eel elver fishery, which are caught as juveniles and raised in a recirculating aquaculture system at American Unagi in Waldoboro, Maine.

“I think a lot of American companies are asking the same question: We have fish here, we have canneries here, why can’t we do what they’re doing [in Europe]?”

Connell is not alone in giving the conservas treatment to American fish that customers might not be used to seeing in tins (or eating at all). In Oregon, chef Sara Hauman’s Tiny Fish Co. makes Pacific Northwest conservas with species like sole, rockfish, or geoduck. Wildfish Cannery, a brand that grew out of a community salmon cannery in Alaska, gives some of its tinned salmon a Mediterranean twist and packs seafood like lingcod or Giant Pacific octopus in high-quality olive oil.

For Marissa Fellows, founder of Michigan-based Great Lakes Tinned Fish, the conservas trend has provided a new way to support fishers and culinary traditions in her home state. Fish is big business in the region — the industry is valued at about $7 billion — and is embedded in the culture of life on the water. Still, around 90 percent of seafood sold in Michigan is imported. As far as Fellows knows, hers is the only company of its kind that sources fish exclusively from the Great Lakes.

One of the most popular native species in the region is lake whitefish, which Fellows said is synonymous with summer: “People have family whitefish dip recipes that they eat at their cottages. It’s this super idyllic, quintessentially Midwestern thing.” Her tins of cold-smoked whitefish have found an audience among tinned fish skeptics and aficionados alike. “There’s a little bit of local pride that comes with that,” she added — “to show people what the Midwest and the Great Lakes are all about.”

Still, despite her best efforts, it was more or less impossible to keep the whole supply chain entirely regional: “There’s no fish cannery in the Midwest,” Fellows explained.

*

As basic as it is, one huge hurdle to domestic tinned fish production is a lack of infrastructure. There simply aren’t very many canneries. “In Spain and Portugal, a lot of the companies that still exist are canneries that were started by families a hundred years or more,” Hezel noted — but thanks to consolidation and changing consumer tastes, many coastal U.S. states don’t have an operating seafood cannery at all. And building one from scratch tends to be a prohibitively expensive proposition.

It wasn’t always this way, but the historical seafood processing model was not necessarily built with longevity in mind. “Just like lumberyards, [canneries are] built on a resource site,” Connell explained. Take Cannery Row, of Steinbeck fame: Northern California and the Central Coast were long centers for the sardine industry, but when the stock crashed in the mid-20th century, the canneries shuttered. Connell said the situation in Maine is similar; when herring stock collapsed in the 1970s, the canneries eventually moved, closed, or were bought up. In late 2024, the last remaining cannery in the state announced that it would be relocating to Delaware.

Though Connell catches or sources all of his seafood from the Gulf of Maine, he has found that the best option for canning is across the country in Coos Bay, Oregon. “The Pacific Northwest is really the only guiding light at this point,” he said. A group of canneries that popped up around the region’s Albacore fishery about 50 years ago is still going strong, serving many of the country’s domestic conservas brands.

In light of the tinned fish renaissance, some in that area are expanding. Western Washington’s iconic Taylor Shellfish, for example, got into the canning business recently, about a century after the Taylors first started farming oysters in South Puget Sound. Wes Taylor, a fifth-generation employee, explained that it started with a small deal between neighbors: The owners of a local oyster operation called Ekone were looking to retire and approached Taylor Shellfish to look after their business, including the small cannery and smokehouse they’d built by their tidelands on Willapa Bay.

Another sign of a potential groundswell: The East Coast recently saw the opening of its first new cannery in more than 80 years. Island Creek Oysters began operations at its new facility in the seafood capital of New Bedford, Massachusetts, in June 2024. One hope is that the cannery will provide a more consistent market for local shellfish farms; Island Creek buys from more than 100 of them for its tinned fish line, which also includes products from a co-packer in Spain.

“I’ve been met with a lot of sheer enthusiasm. Doors are opening left and right.”

Aside from the infrastructure challenges, some amount of consumer education and market-building is likely still ahead if U.S. conservas are to really thrive. This could include increasing awareness of local species, tying this style of seafood into the locavore movement, and emphasizing all the ways that tinned fish, already a sustainable choice, can be made even more so while celebrating seafood biodiversity. Fellows noted that chefs can be an asset in introducing these products to new audiences. “I’ve been met with a lot of sheer enthusiasm,” she said of her deepening ties in the Michigan restaurant industry. “Doors are opening left and right.”

But paying fairly, producing on a small scale, and keeping the supply chain close to home — that all adds up, and the pricing of brands like these can be another hurdle. Transparency about why these tins cost much more than the cents people might used to be paying for an inferior product is important. So is a certain degree of smart branding, which has helped companies like Fishwife — which mostly imports its fish but processes some of it at a cannery on the West Coast — achieve massive success. Hezel is confident that the “get what you pay for” mindset that conscious consumers bring to other foods can be leveraged to recast domestic conservas as something to be coveted: “I think there is opportunity for American companies to build products that have the same amount of cultural currency.”

In the end, Connell said, it’s a rising-tide situation — the more companies, canneries, and customers, the better. “Is this really a substantial industry? Can it be bolstered? I think it can. And the closer you get to the consumer’s mouth, the easier it is.” Connell also noted that objections to the price tag tend to arise only before someone has actually tasted the fish in the tin. “My only response is, ‘Please try it,’” he said, “and it’s quickly overcome.”

Every year in the United States, tax loopholes originally created to help struggling farmers are utilized by businesses and individuals with seemingly no agriculture connection.

In Florida, local governments lose millions in revenue every year to real estate developers who lease their land to cattle grazers to avoid higher property taxes in so-called “Rent-A-Cow” schemes. Earlier this year High County News found more than 3,000 homeowners in Montana were claiming farming-related tax benefits, in some cases without having to prove any agricultural activity at all.

Last year public documents showed that Trump National Golf Club in New Jersey was avoiding $257,000 in taxes every year by treating some of its acreage as farmland and keeping a herd of 12 goats.

But some tax experts believe they’ve found a long-abused farm tax shelter that could specifically benefit farmers. It’s called the monetized installment sale, and it’s available to anyone selling an agriculture product — but it also requires a sophisticated set of transactions, is heavily scrutinized by the IRS, and if not done carefully, could overwhelm generations of farmers in back taxes.

Following the Big Dogs

Tax attorney Michael Burwick is not a farmer or from a farm community. He works a couple of blocks from the New York Stock Exchange and has spent most of his career between Boston, New York, D.C., and South Florida.

But about two decades ago, Burwick noticed something curious: Large, publicly traded companies in the paper goods, packaging, building materials, and forest management sector were using a safe harbor in the farm tax code to sell billions of dollars in assets, seemingly tax-free.

Between 2004 and 2016, at least 10 companies including Boise Cascade, International Paper, Kimberly Clark, Plum Creek, and Greif, Inc. deferred billions in federal taxes — $3.4 billion to be exact — by using a complicated financial transaction known as the monetized installment sale.

Burwick “realized there was a legal way to help farmers with their biggest complaint — taxes.”

Monetized installment sales normally aren’t permitted by the IRS, which added them to its Dirty Dozen list of tax scams in 2023. But Burwick noticed there was an exception in the tax code for farmers — a little-known section called 453A — which the companies could exploit because the assets they were selling included timberland, which the IRS considers an agricultural asset.

When he saw how companies in the Fortune 500 were exploiting 453A, Burwick “realized there was a legal way to help farmers with their biggest complaint — taxes,” he said.

Tax Me Later

Burwick isn’t the only tax expert promoting monetized installment sales to farmers, but he’s one of a handful of people who have endeavoured to explain how they work in plain English, having addressed the topic in a series of columns for Bloomberg Tax.

Monetized installment sales can involve up to five parties — a seller, a buyer, a dealer, a lender, and an escrow agent — and a sophisticated set of transactions.

First, farmers can defer their income taxes for 30 years by agreeing to be paid in installments for their crop, cattle, or other agricultural product rather than a lump sum. Second, they can use those promised installments as collateral for a loan of 90% or more of the total sum. They essentially walk away with their entire earnings untaxed — for a time.

The first part of Burwick’s strategy, using installment payments, is not a new idea. They’re a widely used tax strategy in many industries for deferring capital gains tax — the tax incurred when you sell a high-value asset for more than it was purchased.

Rather than accept all the funds at once and pay a 30 to 50% capital gains tax on them, sellers opt to get the money in installments, said Garrett Griffin, tax attorney and CEO of Griffin Private X Investors, a firm that executes installment strategies.

“As a farmer, I can sell my grain — which is ordinary income — on the installment sale treatment. Nobody else in the U.S. can do that.”

In these cases, Griffin’s firm buys the asset with a promissory note and then sells it to the ultimate buyer. Griffin invests funds from the buyer and pays the seller in installments over 10, 15, or 30 years. The seller only owes capital gains taxes a little at a time.

“It’s a way to not avoid, but delay the payment of capital gains tax so it’s not happening all at once,” Burwick said. And it can make a big difference. Take a $1 million sale. If you pay taxes all at once, the best case scenario is that you’ll have $700,000 to invest and grow at about 6% interest. But with installment sales, the entire $1 million is collecting that 6% interest while it sits with the intermediary. In fact, most of Griffin’s customers request interest-only payments and use it as additional cash flow to fund retirement.

These are the installments Burwick wants farmers to use, but in 453A they get two key perks: In addition to deferring capital gains, they can use installments to defer their ordinary income tax, and they can use that agreement as collateral for a loan, allowing them to reap almost the total income amount at once and untaxed.

Cash in Hand

453A applies to anyone selling an agricultural product: farmers, ranchers, fishers, winegrowers, allowing them to defer their ordinary, April 15th income tax. Similar provisions have existed in the tax code since 1918 when the country’s economic base leaned more heavily towards agriculture, likely to reflect the fact that farmers don’t get paid regularly but in lump sums at harvest.

“As a farmer, I can sell my grain — which is ordinary income — on the installment sale treatment. Nobody else in the U.S. can do that,” said Griffin, who is also building a 453A service for farmer income taxes.

The even bigger caveat is that a farmer can take their installment sale agreement with a firm like Griffin’s to another lender and get a loan for 90 to 95% of the total income.

Take a grain farmer. If they sold $1 million in product last fall, they can opt to do an installment sale over 30 years, effectively deferring the taxes. But instead of getting the installments, they use their arrangement with the intermediary as collateral for a loan of $950,000.

A portion of that loan must be set aside to pay for future taxes. But with nearly their entire earnings in hand, farmers have way more control. They can buy land, invest in life insurance, and do meaningful wealth planning. They can pay tuition or take an anniversary trip. At least for 30 years.

With nearly their entire earnings in hand, farmers have way more control.

For the hobby farmer, the strategy really isn’t worth it, Griffin said. “But the guy selling half a million in inventory can certainly use this.”

“Only ag is allowed to monetize the installmentment sale contract, that is right in section 453A,” said Paul Neiffer, CPA, a tax principal and expert in agribusiness and income taxation.

Even within agriculture, there’s tons of red tape, said Michael Gustofson, principal at Farmers First Trust. Gustafson’s operation has been setting up monetized installment sales to help farmers defer capital gains tax for the last seven years. “From what our attorneys tell us, the sale of raw ag products can also use this approach,” he said, meaning farmers can use the monetized installment sale on income from yearly crop sales too.

But the IRS is still watching closely. The agency has cracked down on anyone trying to use the strategy outside of agriculture. And in 2023, it proposed new regulations for the ag businesses legally using monetized installment sales, too. The new regulations, which would require anyone using 453A to fill out a special tax form, haven’t been approved in the two years since. But they are a reason for farmers considering this approach to be cautious.

Griffin argues that transactions by companies like Boise Cascade and International Paper are proof that this approach is legal — albeit complicated. Farmers only need a way to execute the same strategy — year after year after year.

A Long Time for Things to Go Awry

A legal way for farmers to put off taxes and manage more of their own money seems like a no-brainer. But “it’s not a free lunch,” Neiffer warned. There are both risks and costs to this approach.

The deferred taxes eventually come knocking.

At year 30 — or whenever the loan is due — when the intermediary pays back the lender, the seller will be on the hook for the income taxes they deferred. This approach assumes the farmer is setting aside and investing an appropriate portion of their loan to pay off future taxes. That 10 to 20 percent set-aside for investment is significant, but less than the 30 to 50 percent many farmers give up when they pay income taxes normally.

But even then, there are risks. A lot can change in 30 years. Operations can be passed to the next generation, and financial details can get lost. If a farmer makes this deal in middle age, her heirs will likely be the ones left to foot the tax bill. If there’s not very clear communication and financial advice, the new generation could get saddled with bills they weren’t prepared for.

Farmers agreeing to this arrangement are also signing on to pay taxes in future conditions. Taxes deferred this year will be paid based on 2055 inflation and tax rates. “The risk is that no one knows what the tax rate will look like in 30 years,” Burwick said.

And even if the strategy works, Neiffer said it still comes with costs, usually in the form of interest. Farmers get yield interest from the intermediary. But they owe interest on their loan. The hope is that those two interest rates would cancel each other out, but usually the interest they owe outpaces the interest they earn, Neiffer said. Then there’s the fee — typically around half a percent — to conduct all the transactions.

The deferred taxes eventually come knocking.

And not every farmer needs to defer taxes. Many farmers carry enough operating costs to significantly minimize their taxable income, Gustafson said. In those cases, this strategy likely wouldn’t be worth it. He recommends farmers consult their CPA, the person who knows the operation best, when considering 453A for capital gains or income tax deferral.

Both Griffin and Burwick are still in the building phases. Griffin said he’s still looking for the right lender, a separate entity willing to offer the loan against the installment sale. But one of his clients, a feedlot owner selling $10 million in cattle twice a year, is an ideal candidate for monetized installment sales.

Burwick already has a few interested clients, but he will need more to get this offering to scale. Scale is the only way to lower the costs of these expensive and precise transactions so that they don’t eat into the farmer’s financial benefit, he said.

“This is perfectly legal, and nobody knows about them except for Fortune 500 companies,” Burwick said. “My goal is to work with individual farmers … to democratize the legal theory.”

Really, he’s just using the code the way it was intended.

Thanks to Nick Zarzycki for his help reporting and editing this piece.

About a decade ago, Ryan Prewitt, executive chef and partner of New Orleans restaurant Peche, found himself in a pickle. The seafood restaurant was about a year old, and the raw oyster bar and menu of Gulf seafood was a hit. But Peche was limited on space, and between trash, recycling, composting, and glass, garbage was constantly accumulating everywhere. One might be surprised to learn that the worst element amid all of the chaos of a seafood restaurant were ragged oyster shells. They were heavy, wet, and they stank. Amid all of the other refuse, collecting between 5,000 to 8,000 shells a week with nowhere for them to go but the garbage can wasn’t working.

Prewitt thought the solution was a no-brainer: Staff could pack shells back into the cardboard boxes they were delivered in and return them to the supplier, who could then dump them right back into the Gulf of Mexico. 

But he was very wrong. “We were told by members of the scientific community that [the oyster shells] could be infected with bacteria, and poison the water,” Prewitt said. By a twist of fate, at the same time Shell Oil was seeking to sponsor a trial oyster recycling program through the Coalition to Restore Coastal Louisiana (CRCL) that year, and Peche was approved and enrolled in the pilot program for free. They’ve participated ever since.

The aquaculture off of Louisiana’s coastline in the Gulf of Mexico has always been big business. Seventy percent of all oysters in the U.S. come from the Gulf Coast, and in 2018, Louisiana ranked third nationally for the highest seafood sales. The three main products that make up the bounty of state sales are farm-raised crawfish, catfish, and oysters, which alone generated $619 million in 2019.

But a consistent, acute threat to the seafood industry is coastal erosion and wetland loss. To New Orleanians, it is no secret that the longevity of the city is correlated to the existence of the outer barrier wetlands that slow storms and their cascading waves.

How do you make sure every oyster shell gets recycled, and not thrown in the trash?

“Recent figures are [that we’re losing] a football field [of wetlands] every 100 minutes,” said James Karst, communications director for CRCL. “In less than a century, 2,000 square miles of wetlands [have] disappeared. They’re no longer wetlands, [but] open water that’s about the size of Delaware.“

Thus, the Restaurant Recycling Program through CRCL that Peche started participating in came from multifaceted needs: If restaurants recycled their oyster shells and they were processed properly to prevent contamination, strategic oyster reefs could be installed to prevent land loss. Other benefits like water restoration and a greater oyster harvest for future generations are also invaluable. But a very simple, everyday occurrence can imperil this network of positive impact: How do you make sure every oyster shell gets recycled, and not thrown in the trash?

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Oyster recycling programs are not a new phenomena. Maryland and Virginia operate collection services to restore the Chesapeake Bay, along with other regional programs in Mississippi, Galveston, and Tampa. But besides New Orleans, only one other city was truly defined by the oyster, yet tangibly lost it over a century ago.

“Pre-colonization, oysters were a huge resource for the Indigenous population,” said Charlotte Boesch, senior shell recycling program manager with the Billion Oyster Project (BOP) in New York City, an oyster recycling program that creates oyster reefs in the New York harbor via recycled shells from city restaurants. “During colonization and industrialization, [we] overharvested and dredged shipping channels, [which] destroyed the habitat and polluted our harbor. Oysters became functionally extinct, and [we] stopped having oysters in New York City.”

Though most have heard of iconic dishes like Oysters Rockefeller, it’s hard to really understand what was lost with the de-facto extinction of oysters by the 1930s. Early European travelers to New York reported that oyster shells were nearly 10 inches to a foot in length. Nowadays, oysters are considered large when they’re over 3.5 inches. Though bigger doesn’t always equal better, it goes to show that the waterway’s abundance has drastically changed.

“New York used to be known as Oyster City because they were shipped across the country, [but] all oyster harvesting shut down until the 1970s when the Clean Water Act passed,” said Boesch. Prior to the passage of the regulation, industry was free to dump waste and sewage into the city’s harbor, and oysters simply couldn’t survive. The Clean Water Act banned the dumping of waste into the city’s waterways, and the water slowly but surely became cleaner, and more hospitable to aquaculture.

Early European travelers to New York reported that oyster shells were nearly 10 inches to a foot in length. Nowadays, oysters are considered large when they’re over 3.5 inches.

The Billion Oyster Project launched in 2014 with a slightly different mission than the CRCL: In Louisiana, oyster shell installations in the outer wetlands were expressly to prevent land loss. For BOP, the larger goal is a cleaner coastline due to the filtration capacities of oysters. There is no short-term goal to eat the oysters of New York harbor because of the city’s sewage system design. With heavy rains, sewage still overflows into the surrounding waterbody, which is what budding oysters eat.

“If we had a billion oysters in the harbor, we would be able to filter it every three days,” said Boesch. From there, New Yorkers could finally, after over a century, safely utilize their central coastline for safe recreation, boating, and economic activity. Though the harbor is cleaner than it has been for the past 100 years, there is still a stigma that it’s dirty. With enough oysters and cleansing power, that could change, even if no one eats them at all. The problem is collecting what oyster shells are out there amidst the notoriously high turnover, limited space, and financial constraints of the restaurant industry.

“That’s our biggest challenge with the program,” said Prewitt of Peche. “We’re a fairly large restaurant with 100+ employees and people constantly coming and going … The system, on one hand, is established with a method for getting the shell into the bin, and it works, but to say it works all the time would just not be true.

”At Peche, a large dump bin to collect shells is situated next to the dish station with a top layer that allows for ice to melt and water to flow through. The detritus from the raw bar includes ice, lemons, and shell in one wet mix. That concoction is hauled periodically to this dump bin, where the ice melts off and spent lemons and shells are left. A runner will pluck all of the shells up and transport them to their own storage area periodically for weekly pick-up by CRCL contractors.

But all of this happens in a pressure-cooker where cooks, servers, managers, and hosts are trying to make and serve food, and if new hires aren’t educated about why and how to separate out all of the restaurant’s waste, shells can easily get routed into the trash, even with the most noble intentions from leadership. High turnover in restaurants is common in New York, too, which means that Boesch has to think about a metric of her success as not just as the number of restaurants that sign up for shell recycling, but how many stay engaged and participate year-round.

“There’s not enough oyster shell in the world or Louisiana that we could armour our entire coast with oyster reefs, so it’s a very targeted method of slowing land loss.”

To keep in touch with rotating chefs, Boesch produces a monthly newsletter for all participating restaurants to keep oyster recycling top-of-mind. The team also visits restaurants a few weeks after onboarding for a 10-minute preshift talk with servers and hosts so that they can explain the program to diners. BOP has also dipped their toes into conducting restaurant staff briefings with the front and back of the house in Spanish to help the message resonate with bilingual restaurant workers.

“Staff turnover and staff engagement is incredibly challenging, and the only solution is a very dedicated chef that communicates it to new staff,” said Boesch.

But the tiny act of dropping a shell into a bin makes a difference. Since 2014, CRCL has constructed 8,000 linear feet of shoreline with over 15 million pounds of recycled shells from participating New Orleans and Baton Rouge restaurants. Five barrier reefs have been constructed in the wetlands, including a project that helped stabilize ancestral mounds for the Pointe-au-Chien Indian Tribe. In 2023, Governor John Bel Edwards signed bill HB255 into law, a tax credit of $1 for every 50 pounds of oyster shell recycled by restaurants. New York has a similar bill in assembly right now.

“There’s not enough oyster shell in the world or Louisiana that we could armour our entire coast with oyster reefs, so it’s a very targeted method of slowing land loss,” said Karst.

By way of running Peche and working with local seafood purveyors, Prewitt has traveled all across the country to meet fishing communities and learn how to make these human and ecological ecosystems more sustainable for generations to come. He said that right now, much is difficult in the Gulf aquaculture industry. The work is hard, and many young people don’t want to do it. Buying a fishing boat is expensive, and there aren’t enough pathways for fishermen to access low-cost loans and grants to launch their business. Yet even for land loss and struggles with storms that impact oysters harvests, Prewitt is optimistic about the future of oysters and how far Louisiana’s management of the crop has come in the past decade.

“Offshore oyster versus offshore fin fishing is a considerably cheaper way to get into the fishery business. The start-up costs are lower, and the effort is frankly lower … The permitting is straightforward, and the system is set up for them to exist,” he said. “That’s a tremendous help to get more people into that industry.”

The irony was not lost on Josh Pierce. In 2014, a couple of dozen geese had descended upon his office building in Elmhurst, Illinois — which happened to be the headquarters of Bird-X, one of the country’s biggest suppliers of bird-control products — and showed no intention of leaving.

Pierce, now sales manager for Bird-X, decided to test a solution his company had recently started offering: a handheld laser meant to startle unwanted birds. Like a latter-day Buck Rogers, he strolled out of the building with his blaster, sized up the quarry, and took aim.

“I shined that laser directly at the head of the alpha goose, and my goodness, did they disperse instantly,” Pierce recalled. “It really turned on a lot of light bulbs. If we can actively connect with bird flocks out in the field the way that I just did, we really might have something here.”

Livestock farmers across the U.S. have been reaching similar moments of laser-driven enlightenment. As poultry and dairy operations struggle with the ongoing spread of highly pathogenic avian influenza, they’ve sought to reduce the risk of their animals contracting the disease. Farmers know that wild birds such as geese, ducks, and seagulls spread bird flu along their migration routes, and lasers are becoming a go-to tactic for keeping them — and by extension, the virus — away from buildings or pastures.

Scientists have looked into lasers for bird control around airports since the 1970s, said Rebecca Brown, chair of plant sciences and entomology at the University of Rhode Island, but comparatively little work has examined their use in agricultural settings. She and her husband David Brown, a professor of computer science at the same university, published the first study of “laser scarecrows” for protecting cornfields in 2021. (They’d been asked to look into the technology as an alternative to gas-fired startle cannons, which regularly draw noise complaints.)

The theory of why lasers work is fairly straightforward. “Birds primarily rely on vision to interact with the world and sense threats, and their vision is much better than human vision,” Rebecca Brown explained. Green lasers in particular are close to the wavelengths that birds best perceive in motion, and the beams likely interact with the green chlorophyll in plants to produce disorienting effects only birds can see.

Although the research is limited, Brown continued, it’s promising. Her own study found that lasers could reduce bird damage on corn by up to 70 percent, while Dutch scientists determined in 2021 that lasers cut wild bird visits to a free-range egg farm by over 98 percent. In a survey published in 2024 by Cornell University, corn growers reported that lasers were by far the most effective method of bird control, outpacing options like scare eye balloons and wacky inflatable arm-flailing tube men.

A notable gap in the data, says Brown, concerns whether lasers routinely damage birds’ eyes. A 2021 masters thesis from Purdue University found that the beams could induce cataracts, corneal swelling, and other problems in the lab, but no peer-reviewed study has yet checked their impacts in the field.

“I shined that laser directly at the head of the alpha goose, and my goodness, did they disperse instantly.”

As the scientific understanding matures, many growers are pressing ahead with lasers based on their own experiences. Among them is Jake Vlaminck, general manager of turkey producer Fahlun Farms in Lake Lillian, Minnesota, about 100 miles west of Minneapolis.

The town’s namesake lake and other nearby bodies of water attract a lot of gulls, Vlaminck said, that proceed to roost on the roofs of his barns. He didn’t give them a lot of thought until 2022, when a bird flu outbreak forced him to cull tens of thousands of turkeys. Realizing that gulls or other wild birds might have introduced the flu, he started looking for countermeasures.

A neighboring farmer encouraged him to attend a demonstration of the Bird Control Group’s AVIX Autonomic, a robotically controlled system that costs about $15,000 to purchase and install. Its laser swivels on a base to target dozens of different points in constantly shifting patterns, keeping birds from growing accustomed to the beams.

Although Vlaminck remained a bit skeptical, he was willing to take a chance on anything that might avoid a repeat outbreak. He set up two units in early 2023, before the spring migration season, and over the following year his flocks remained untouched by flu.

“It really got me interested in saying, ‘This must be the answer here,’” said Vlaminck. He’s since bought two more lasers to cover even more of his farm, and as president of the Minnesota Turkey Growers Association, he’s become something of an evangelist to other farmers. Minnesota is now a hotspot for laser installations; poultry farmers have put in over 100 laser systems since 2023, some with support from a state program meant to prevent bird flu transmission.

Federal authorities, however, aren’t as enthusiastic. U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins announced a $1 billion strategy to combat bird flu in February, including $500 million in cost-share funding to help farmers beef up their biosecurity. But the USDA is unlikely to approve lasers as part of that plan.

Agriculture Brooke Rollins announced a $1 billion strategy to combat bird flu in February, but the USDA is unlikely to approve lasers as part of that plan.

“While we cannot speak to all possible recommendations that will be made or mitigations that will be considered for the cost-share program, we can say that lasers have not been proven to deter the types of wild birds most commonly found around poultry facilities,” wrote Tanya Espinosa, a spokesperson for the USDA’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service.

(Other segments of the federal government appear less worried about the disease. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration, overseen by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., recently paused efforts to increase bird flu testing. Kennedy has also suggested poultry farmers let the flu spread freely through their flocks, an idea experts say would be both inhumane and a likely economic disaster.)

Vlaminck argued that the USDA’s position ignores lasers’ demonstrated potential. He compared recent cases of bird flu in Minnesota poultry to those across the U.S. as a whole: The country saw 21.8 million cases in 2023 and 50.7 million in 2024, an increase of over 130 percent, while the state’s caseload rose just 14 percent over the same period. “I don’t know what better study you could have than to look right there and say, ‘What did Minnesota do differently?’” he said.

Even without federal backing, farmers are moving forward with the technology. Keith Gutshall is a 20-year veteran of the pest control industry and owner of The Fur Bandit in central Pennsylvania. He started installing lasers just two years ago, but he estimates they’ve already grown to about 40 percent of his business, with agricultural clients including major egg producer Hillandale Farms and multiple dairies.

Lasers aren’t a silver (or shiny green) bullet, emphasized Gutshall. They work by line-of-sight, so they can be a poor fit for facilities with complicated layouts, and growers may be constrained by nearby roads or airports where lasers pose a safety hazard. Top-of-the-line systems are expensive and require careful programming to perform at their full potential.

But for farmers who’ve lost entire flocks to bird flu, or find their stockpiles of feed pecked apart, Gutshall says the investment can be very worthwhile. He estimates that laser clients usually see their wild bird activity drop by 80 percent, with even further reductions when they add on other deterrents. And the entertainment value can’t be underestimated.

“People that I show it to are amazed, and after doing this two years, I’m still amazed,” said Gutshall. “It’s actually kind of fun to watch the birds take off when the laser gets close to them.”

When it gets hot outside, we humans turn on the air conditioning. Birds fly to cooler places. But trees stay put. Their migration occurs over generations. Each tree can only hope their seeds grow in more suitable land, higher up in elevation or further north where climates are cooler and wetter.

And, in general, young trees across the interior Western U.S. do occupy cooler climate areas than their adult predecessors. But not because seeds are successfully spreading to new areas.

Instead, forests are contracting away from the hotter, dryer areas that they used to occupy, according to a study published in Nature Climate Change in January.

This contraction without expansion means that trees may be well-served by a helping hand from us. “We probably need to actively plant at the higher elevation portions of their range, in these kind of cooler and wetter sites, where they would be successful—but are really seed-limited,” said Miranda Redmond, associate professor in forest science and climate change and University of California, Berkeley.

The Trees That Resist

Around 2016, Redmond set out to determine if the mismatch between young and old tree ranges—which has shown up in smaller scale studies—could be influenced by disruptions like wildfires, bark beetles or disease. She began this work when she was an assistant professor at Colorado State University.

Disturbances like a fire or an insect outbreak can give seedlings a chance to compete against the adult forest. But breaks in the canopy of adults allow light and heat to stream down onto vulnerable juvenile trees on the forest floor. The researchers wanted to know if disturbances limited tree regeneration because the hotter climate filtered down to the juvenile trees.

Redmond and her team tracked forests across eight states and over 25,000 plots of forest monitored by the USDA Forest Service. Fifteen tree species, including trembling aspen with its vibrant yellow leaves in the fall, and the towering grand fir, were counted every 10 years, with those numbers entered into a dataset called the Forest Inventory Analysis.

Dead trees, the cause of their death, the number and types of saplings: Redmond and her colleagues overlaid all this information in the FIA with climate data and known disturbances like wildfire, beetle outbreaks or severe wind.

Many species turned out to be stable across the landscape. Over half of the species stayed put, sprouting seedlings among their adult cousins.

Though several species’ seedlings sprouted in cooler and wetter areas after a disturbance, this movement of young trees was not as widespread as they’d thought, said Katie Nigro, who conducted the research as a doctoral student in Redmond’s lab at CSU. She is now a postdoctoral researcher working with the USDA Forest Service’s Rocky Mountain Research Station in Fort Collins.

To Nigro, this is good news. “It means we have time with trees, because they do live so long, and adults do tend to be really resilient to changes in the environment,” she said. “Especially when they’re not all killed by a wildfire or an insect outbreak, they’re hanging on in areas that maybe aren’t suitable for regeneration.”

The major change in tree distributions right now is due to losses in the hot and dry climate, Nigro said.

But it was difficult to make a broad conclusion about the impact of disturbances on range contractions. Patterns across an entire landscape “have to be really, really prevalent and really consistent,” to be meaningful, Nigro said. Instead, some disruptions in areas with certain species—wildfires and lodgepole pine, for instance—resulted in a significant shift while others did not, the study reported.

This is one limitation to working with FIA data, Redmond noted. It’s a robust dataset held in high regard by forest ecologists across the world, but the sites are essentially set up at random, which means that disruptions like wildfires might only happen in a small portion of the sites.

Other factors may obscure why a species does not appear to expand into new areas: It may get eaten before it can grow into a mature tree. Young trees are particularly tasty to certain browsing animals like elk and deer, said Simon Landhäusser, a forest ecologist and professor in renewable resources at the University of Alberta, Canada.

Aspen, for instance, is like “candy” to herbivores compared to pine trees, said Landhäusser, who was not involved in this study. Consistent browsing might obscure a species’s attempts at natural migration to a new area—especially in America’s southwestern states, which are full of elk and deer.

“They go to that candy store and eat it and let it regrow, and then eat it again. And they do that 30 times, and then the tree just gives up,” Simons says.

Lending Trees a Hand

Before industrialization, it’s thought that trees migrated around 20 to 40 kilometers per 100 years. In this century, trees would need to migrate an estimated 10 times that distance—or migrate roughly 10 times as fast—to keep pace with current climate change.

That is why trees are good candidates for assisted migration, Nigro said. It gives species “a little push” into cooler climates by planting warm-climate trees among more cool-adapted species.

This is considered the “low-hanging fruit” of forestry solutions to address climate change, said Greg O’Neill, climate change adaptation scientist for the provincial government ministry of forests in British Columbia (BC), Canada.

“It’s inexpensive, it’s very low risk—there’s precedent for it,” O’Neill said.

He should know. O’Neill has been running the assisted migration trial program in BC since 2009. Over the past 15 years, the anecdotal success of the trial shows “that what we call the realized niche of trees—where they are found—to be much smaller than their fundamental niche, where they can grow,” O’Neill said. “It dispels a lot of our anxiety when we go to do assisted migration.”

The trial led to a provincial rule requiring foresters to plant seedlings selected from a similar climate but two degrees warmer. This is called a climate-based seed transfer system and, beginning in 2023, all of the roughly 240 million seedlings planted in the public forests of BC are selected this way.

After years of analyzing how forests covering thousands of square miles react to climate change, Nigro is honing on just two sites in the Colorado State Forest.

“As much as we would love a conclusion to be true for the whole Western interior U.S., it’s still really important to do studies at the site level and really understand what’s going on,” Nigro said. “There are so many other factors that are influencing where and why trees are regenerating.”

She and her colleagues are preparing the sites outside Fort Collins, Colorado to join the Adaptive Silviculture for Climate Change project, which began assisted migration in forests of Eastern and Central U.S. and Canada in 2009. Nigro’s sites will be planted with five different species of pine, fir and spruce in the coming years—54,400 seedlings in all.

The project’s goal is similar to that of the BC-assisted migration project—to make forests more resilient to climate change. Though it will take years to complete the project, Nigro says she’s excited to see those trees get the critical nudge they need to establish themselves in areas where they can thrive.

It’s a sunny March afternoon and unseasonably warm in the High Peaks region of the Adirondacks. Farmer Adam Wilson is sipping tea at the wooden desk in his tiny house, and reading out loud from a book called Remembering Peasants: A Personal History of a Vanished World. A large window looks out across a soggy field and the bare vegetable garden to a grassy slope where a small herd of cows is sunning. It’s been three years since Wilson signed the deed to Sand River Community Farm – purchased in one lump sum of half a million dollars.

Farming isn’t the first thing that comes to mind when people think of the Adirondacks. Mountain wilderness, skiing and hiking, canoeing and camping, all draw millions of tourists to the area each year. But despite the harsh winters, up in the High Peaks region there’s a cluster of farms scattered across the mountain valleys and rocky alpine meadows. Right on the shore of Lake Champlain lies Essex Farm, one of the world’s only CSAs that feeds its members all year round, instead of only during certain seasons. Across Jay Mountain, tiny Sugar House Creamery milks twelve Jersey cows and makes award-winning cheese.

Yet local food remains beyond reach for many residents of Adirondack State Park. Those who spend time up in the North Country know there’s more to the Adirondacks than tourism: A hidden opioid epidemic accompanies an undercurrent of rural poverty in struggling towns and villages where logging and mining once paid the bills. Sand River is next to one of these towns – Keeseville – where lumber and iron processing in the 19th century made for a bustling hamlet, and local businesses produced everything from horseshoe nails to chairs.

Like many of America’s small industrial areas, circumstances changed over the course of the last century: lumber moved to the West coast, coal mines closed, factories went abroad. By the 1960s, the last big manufacturing operation in the area closed. In 2013, Keeseville residents voted – twice – to dissolve their village. One grocery store opened last December, but the owner admits that, since he’s been in Keeseville, three other stores have closed. For much of the last fifty years, this place – surrounded by some of the most fertile soils in the Adirondacks – has been a food desert. Some farmers have started taking food stamps or subsidizing CSA shares, but breaking down barriers to access remains a challenge.

The ‘Good Shake’

The farm Wilson runs is different from most others in the area. Nothing grown there is for sale at any of the regional markets. The farm isn’t on Google Maps; other than visiting its barebones website, the only way to find the location is a small wrought iron sign near the driveway that reads “Sand River Community Farm.”

Yet hundreds of people in the area have eaten food harvested from its soil. Just about anyone who stops by, whether on purpose or by stumbling upon it and getting curious, goes home with a frozen quart of soup. On the lid is a small sticker that reads: “This food is offered as a gift to anyone who is hungry for any reason.”

Sitting at the desk where he writes every morning, Wilson talks about his journey to Sand River Community Farm, which started around the time of the COVID-19 pandemic. Back then, he lived in Huntington, Vermont, and ran a bakery alongside a community farm. “I was footing all the bills with the bakery profit,” he says.

At the time, he’d read some books about the concept of a “gift economy” and was considering forming a nonprofit. The day before the pandemic was announced, he fell off his bed and broke his ribs. At that moment, lying on his back with no air in his lungs, he felt he’d reached a crossroads. He points at the corner of the desk, where a crack in the light wood reminds him of that day.

“I needed a good shake,” he smiles. “Now’s the time. Stop selling the bread. People are ready to consider things they wouldn’t have a week ago.” He decided he needed to commit to the idea he’d been ruminating on – that he needed to give everything away. So he opened a gift stand in Vermont in April, 2020: In those early days of the pandemic, neighbors in Huntington began exchanging gifts like sourdough bread and wine in a frenzy of exuberance.

Wilson’s stand was a rousing success, but there was no solid home base for the project. That is, until Ava, a member of the community, gave Wilson the most significant gift he’d ever received: half a million dollars from an inheritance to find the project a lasting place of its own. There was a farm for sale right across Lake Champlain. As Wilson explains, it was the last time that land would ever be sold.

“Now’s the time. People are ready to consider things they wouldn’t have a week ago.”

In his first months on what was to become Sand River, Wilson started to get to know his neighbors. Many were receptive to his ideas, especially some of the more seasoned farmers, who appreciated his emphasis on community and how he’d drop by with a package of ground beef from time to time. Younger folks showed up to volunteer on Sundays, and big crowds gathered for barn dances, singing, and community feasts all summer long.

The farm established itself as a local institution in less than two years, and Wilson incorporated the farm as a nonprofit. But he kept thinking about the neighbors who had never shown up – the ones hit hardest by life in a food desert. “How are we going to get the food to the people who need it most?” asks Wilson. “It’s been years trying to answer that question.”

So far, the answer seems to come in the form of grass-fed lamb and beef and incredible vegetables that would be the pride of any farmer’s market. He doesn’t want to sell this food. But he believes his idea is much more than charity – it’s about building what he calls a “modern commons,” a place where nothing would be bought and sold, where the food would always be a gift, and where both the harvest and work could be shared by all the members of the community.

The Neighbors’ Gift

Saturdays, Wilson and a few others head down to Keeseville and open an informal “gift stand” on the place where one of the now-demolished grocery stores used to be. Anyone who stops by is offered a bowl of soup from a big five-gallon pot.

On a winter day last December, about a dozen people gathered around a brightly burning fire. One was an Ivy league graduate. Another, a dancing instructor. There was a social worker who stopped by with her daughter. Wilson started a conversation with her, asking for advice on how to reach some of the more vulnerable residents of the town.

“The gift offers me a way to meet my neighbors where I’m not selling anything,” says Wilson.

Not everyone is convinced. Last fall, Wilson and his friend Sam, who works with unhoused people in Burlington, gave a talk at a local Grange. At the end of the talk, an audience member challenged the privilege of being in a position to be able to give food away, without worrying about making ends meet.

Wilson acknowledges the discomfort. “The question about luxury is very important,” he says. He believes that food can be a way to bridge class divides. Every gift, no matter how small, is also an opportunity for an exchange, which means an opportunity to build community.

Not all of his neighbors think it will work. But the dozens who give up their Sunday afternoons to garden, make soup, and prepare the food to share, are practicing a neighborliness that they hope will revive their rural community – and one day, establish it as the modern commons Wilson has been dreaming of.

Industry insiders are making a big bet on a rather unusual plant—a spindly, bright green succulent that thrives in saltwater. The wager? Ramping up its production could put a new superfood on grocery shelves, while helping address a soil crisis that’s decimating the livelihoods of farmers from Bangladesh to the U.S. eastern seaboard.

You may already be familiar with salicornia, also known by at least half a dozen other names, including pickleweed, sea beans, and sea asparagus. It belongs to a group of salt-tolerant plants called halophytes, which grow in saline marshes, swamps, seashores, and even semi-desert climates.

Recently, interest in halophytes has grown as scientists and environmentalists raise the alarm about increasing soil salinity. The salt content in soil has risen as a result of climate change-driven sea level rise and droughts, as well as human interventions, such as deforestation and seawater irrigation. It’s already affecting American farmers—more than 10,000 acres of farmland in Maryland and Virginia have been abandoned due to saltwater intrusion, while in California’s Central Valley, an estimated quarter of a million acres have gone out of production due to salt accumulation from saltwater irrigation, and another 1.5 million acres are designated salt-impaired.

Salicornia can be used to remediate soil in areas like these – it helps absorb run-off from fertilizers or urban waste before it reaches waterways. “The plants will pick up the salt out of the soil, and they can also be used to help pick up nutrients along the shoreline to help improve the coastal waters,” explained Megan Davis, research professor at the Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institute at Florida Atlantic University (FAU). Davis studies “sea vegetables,” including salicornia and other halophytes, and operates a marine Integrated Multi-Trophic Aquaculture (IMTA) system as director of FAU’s Queen Conch Lab. “The plants can actually utilize those nutrients and grow a crop,” she said.

That crop has yet to gain a foothold in the U.S. market. Still, scientists, environmentalists, and start-up founders in Asia, Europe, and North America are betting that salicornia has a bright future on restaurant menus and supermarket shelves. Similar products, including kelp, seaweed, and spirulina, have grown popular in the last decade. Last year, Innova Market Insights named ocean-derived ingredients, including things like fish oil and sea vegetables, a top consumer trend.

“There’s an amazing opportunity for farmers to get involved with working with the halophyte plants, salicornia being probably the most popular known species,” said Davis. Salicornia is an annual crop, but it can be harvested multiple times from a single planting and produces its own seeds. It can be grown in greenhouses year-round or outdoors and harvested in the spring. According to Davis, the plant is not prone to disease and has no known pests (most critters find its saltiness off-putting).

Salicornia tastes, as one might expect, like salt—with a hint of lemon and a pleasant crunch. Davis said she most enjoys the vegetable blanched as a side dish, pickled as a garnish, or chopped raw and tossed into a cold quinoa salad. Besides its approachable flavor profile, the plant is packed with vitamins, minerals, and antioxidants. It’s often labeled a superfood.

Salicornia tastes, as one might expect, like salt—with a hint of lemon and a pleasant crunch.

But while salicornia has potential as a foodstuff and is already growing popular in parts of Europe, it has yet to gain a foothold in U.S. supermarkets. Perhaps no one knows more about the challenges of selling salicornia to American consumers than Sam Norton, founder and former CEO of Heron Farms, a Charleston, South Carolina-based saltwater hydroponic farm start-up. Of marketing the product, which Heron Farms sold under the name sea beans, Norton said, “It’s not something like tomatoes where you can say, ‘Here’s the total addressable market and et cetera, et cetera.’ No one knows what the market is for such an obscure group of plants.”

Investors at Heron Farms appointed a new CEO in June 2023 and, according to Norton, began winding down operations and looking for a buyer for the company’s patent on a method of extracting salt from plants. Heron Farms did not respond to requests for comment, and its website appears to have expired as of March 2025.

Turning salicornia into a salt substitute is what Norton calls a “traditional MBA angle” to utilizing the crop. “People typically say, ‘Well, what’s the market for salt, and can we replace part of that market with a plant-based salt?’” Companies, including Texas Salt Co. and Green Salt, already offer salicornia-based salt substitutes in the U.S.

“But what we were doing is saying, ‘Let’s think of it as a new crop and not try to compete with commodities. Let’s just try to drum up some interest for it,’” explained Norton. That worked for a while. At its peak before the new CEO was appointed, Heron Farms was selling as many as 15,000 units of fresh salicornia per week across 40 states.

A real breakthrough, though, is going to require more than one punchy start-up. Norton believes the solution can be borrowed from the success of organic and non-GMO food labeling initiatives, which helped create sub-industries and carve out market shares for those groups of products. Recently, climate change-related food labels, which tell shoppers about the carbon footprints or recyclability of items in their carts, have also cropped up in supermarkets. These labels drive demand among a growing majority of consumers who want to make climate-conscious decisions.

Salicornia’s claim to fame among this same group of consumers could be that the crop can be grown using no fresh water in a world where fresh water is becoming increasingly scarce. “With halophytes, you can use seawater to grow basically a whole new industry that’s freshwater-free,” said Norton. “Not only are there all these products that could be developed from halophytes, but there’s also the question of how many consumer products can be grown without using any fresh water.”

The crop can be grown using no fresh water in a world where fresh water is becoming increasingly scarce.

Across the Atlantic, Europeans are already embracing salicornia. Dutch farmer Hubrecht Janse was the first on the continent to grow the crop, beginning in 2006. Later, he branched out into other sea vegetables on his outdoor sea marsh farm, Zeeuws Zilt, and helped develop a mechanical harvesting system to facilitate commercial production. In 2023, in eastern Germany, a regional produce company, Bördegarten, bought Salifaktur, the nation’s first salicornia start-up, and moved its production into the company’s greenhouses. Bördegarten harvested a whopping 400 kilograms, about 880 pounds, of salicornia per week from a 1,600-meter-square plot in its first year. It supplies hotels, catering businesses, supermarkets, and restaurants.

Davis said she believes American consumers will also develop an appetite for the salt-loving crop. “It’s just a matter of time and good marketing.”

On an episode of the BBC comic quiz show Would I Lie to You?, comedian Bob Mortimer was asked to describe the first time he discovered he could split an apple in half with his bare hands.

“I can’t remember the first time I did it,” he replied. “I can remember the feeling.” (Which, for the record, was “magnificent.”)

Similarly, I cannot remember the first time I watched a cow hoof trimming video on YouTube. But I recall the profound sense of fascination and wonder. Cows need their hooves trimmed? Why? Does it hurt? And what is “digital dermatitis?”

Months of bingewatching later, I now know that most dairy cows benefit from regular hoof trims for two main reasons: their diet and their time spent in barns. High-protein diets increase hoof growth, and barn floors prevent the natural shedding that occurs on natural surfaces like grass. (That’s one reason beef cattle don’t get their hooves trimmed.) It hurts as much as cutting our nails does — that is, not at all, unless we cut too close.

But I’m just one of millions of viewers on Facebook, YouTube, and TikTok who cannot get enough of cow hoof trimmers draining pus or blood-filled abscesses, removing detached hoof horn, and treating white line defect.

It’s the pimple popping of agriculture: a bit gross, but very engrossing. (Chances are someone you know shares this obsession. Ask them about it at your own risk, unless you have a couple hours to spare.)

In the world of cow hoof trimming, two internet stars stand out. Graeme Parker, who goes by The HoofGP, is based in southwest Scotland. Meanwhile Nate the Hoof Guy is Nate Ranallo, who lives in West Salem, Wisconsin, and has trimmed dairy cows’ hooves — and the occasional goat — for 23 years.

Parker and Ranallo are as different as chalk and cheese in their approaches to trimming and content creation. Parker favors the Dutch method, which trims each hoof to a standard length, while Ranallo uses the newer Kansas method, which focuses on each cow’s individual anatomy. Since Parker began his channel in 2019, he’s expanded to include videos about his family, his assistants, and even an autobiography called Bruised Sole. Ranallo takes a more minimalist approach with his one-man business and content, rarely showing his face and keeping his private life private. Which is ironic, since Ranallo was the only one of the two to respond to my request for an interview and a callout to their fan community.

Both trimmers sell merch, though Parker also sells a trimming course and his own lime-green adhesive. Between them, they have over 4.5 million followers on Facebook, 4 million on YouTube, and 2.4 million on TikTok.

“They show an aspect of American life that many of us never experience.“

What makes these videos so popular? A handful of media outlets have attempted to answer this question, including The New York Times — which cheekily but inaccurately called the preventative care a “cow pedicure.”

But none of them have actually asked the fans — until now.

“They show an aspect of American life that many of us never experience, and yet once presented with find ourselves very curious about,” wrote Benjamin Kieran in response to an informal, unscientific study I sent out to a group of Nate the Hoof Guy fans.

Or, to put it more bluntly as Rob Tooley from Havre, Montana, did, these videos are just “so damn interesting.”

Hooked on Hooves

The first rule of cow hoof trimming videos is that you don’t go looking for them; they come to you. For me, it was probably summoned by watching episodes of Dr. Lee Pimple Popper, whose videos of excavating icky things from someone else’s skin taps into people’s penchant for morbidly curious things like gory horror movies or picking scabs. Similarly, for hoof-trimming fan Jamie Showalter, it started with videos of ingrown hairs getting removed. “Skin, to me, has always been fascinating. Even the gross parts,” she said.

Clearly, we’re not alone. While the majority of hoof trims are routine maintenance, it’s videos like Ranallo’s “Cow’s Hoof BLOWS BUBBLES==INSTANT RELIEF” and Parker’s “NAIL REMOVED from BULL’S PAINFUL FOOT” that bring in the views: 66 and 17 million, respectively. “Oddly satisfying to watch — like removing a splinter,” commented @TheRealJohnux on Parker’s video. Though not even all fans will be able to stomach the waterfall of fluid in a HoofGP video where he drains an abscess on a cow’s side. “I have never gagged at one of your videos until today,” commented a user named @Haunted_Symphonics. Still, it has over 4 million views.

“One of the things that comes through in his videos is just how much he loves his work and loves those animals and wants them to be healthy.”

For other fans, the algorithm reflects a true subject matter curiosity. Joel Rifkin, a 61-year-old retired sheet metal worker and teacher living in the Bronx, found Ranallo’s videos through similar content posted by farriers, who trim and shoe horse hooves. So did Janeen Schultz, who lives in central Wisconsin and uses the videos to teach her 8- and 10-year-old sons about anatomy, vocabulary, biology, and even the mechanisms of the chute Ranallo uses to keep each cow and its hooves in place. “I’ll actually start pausing the video as Nate is uncovering the hoof” to quiz them on a potential diagnosis, she said.

On Ranallo’s platforms, viewership skews male. On Facebook, which has an older audience, it’s about 70% male to 30% female; YouTube is 60 to 40. TikTok, the youngest generation, is 50-50. But women dominate the comments section.

For all the different paths to Nate the Hoof Guy, his fans all seem to appreciate the care he takes with his craft and with the cows. “One of the things that comes through in his videos is just how much he loves his work and loves those animals and wants them to be healthy,” Showalter said.

Other fans agree. “I’m kind of jealous of the cows who receive such professional care!” Kai Spellman, a viewer with chronic health issues, wrote in response to my survey.

Such responses are what Ranallo hoped for when he filmed his first video in 2020. “I happened to see a post on Facebook where there was a cow getting a hoof trim, and it was depicted as torture,” he said, describing the misinformed and outraged comments as “atrocious.” While he wanted to combat misinformation, he had no clue it would take off as much as it did.

Ranallo became interested in cow hoof trimming while working on a dairy farm during college. He’d always wanted to have his own business, and both the repetitive nature and the relatively instant gratification of the work appealed to him. “Each cow is a mini job, so you can see your progress,” he said.

Both of these qualities also help explain why viewers love his videos. “There’s no surprises. There’s no sensationalism,” Schultz said.

Or, as Jean-Manuel Esnault in Nantes, France, put it, “He is an artist in his field.”

Parker’s road to the profession was grimmer. He grew up on a farm that his grandmother sold for millions after his father committed suicide — millions she pocketed and did not share with her grandchildren. Parker’s mother remarried a hoof trimmer, which is how Parker discovered it.

“He is an artist in his field.”

It’s easy to imagine a rivalry between Nate the Hoof Guy and The HoofGP fans, and there’s some truth to this. None of Ranallo’s fans would name names, but they hinted that they have watched other trimming videos and found them lacking.

From what I can tell, though, there’s plenty of room for two trimmers in this space, especially two as different in their trimming and marketing methods as Ranallo and Parker.

As Ranallo put it on a video in August 2020, “If you’ve been here before, but you’re a fan of The HoofGP and you’re afraid that if you subscribe to another hoof trimmer, it would be like cheating, don’t worry about it! I’ll never tell.”

To which The HoofGP cheekily replied in the comments, “I’ve always been [subscribed], but if you tell anyone I’ll deny all knowledge. ”

Rules Are Rules

Ranallo has his largest following on TikTok, where 2.4 million people are subscribed. One of those is Jennifer Greenlee, a doctoral student who enjoys the comments section almost as much as the content. “It’s one of the few communities where I genuinely see very, very few negative comments,” she said.

Instead, it’s defined by inside jokes such as “rules are rules.” The premise, Greenlee said, is that Ranallo’s voice is so soothing that people fall asleep as soon as they watch a post. The problem is that often it’s not bedtime. “It’s 11:45 a.m. but rules are rules,” a user named Sage commented on an upload.

Many survey responders find Ranallo’s videos, with their tight narrative arcs and folksy voiceovers, soothing and calming. “I watch at least one of his videos before sleeping,” wrote Ashutosh Jeevan Tilak, a 32 year-old podcaster from Jalgaon, India.

It’s “great ASMR,” wrote Sharon Baltusis, a cartographer from DeWitt, Michigan, who called his videos “euphonious.”

Showalter and Greenlee are such dedicated fans that they time their views to maximize Ranallo’s income. Greenlee switched from watching on TikTok to YouTube because the latter app pays more per view, and Showalter tries to watch each new upload within six hours of its appearance to help it gain traction. “I want to support the guy,” Showalter said.

Ranallo said that he makes six figures yearly from Facebook and YouTube and five figures from TikTok. Even so, he has no plans for fancy vacations or upgrading his house. The only large purchase has been a replacement chute that he plans to use until he retires. Otherwise, he keeps the money in the bank for retirement. “I know that it can disappear instantly,” he said. He has already seen a dip in income from some of the more explicit videos whose excess bovine fluids have run afoul of newer content guidelines. “They claim it doesn’t affect the reach, but it absolutely does,” he said.

Not only does he appreciate the opportunity to educate the public, but Ranallo also finds that making these videos has made him a better trimmer. “I’m my toughest critic,” he said.

Most importantly, it’s offered people a chance to understand agriculture better. “I didn’t even know this was a thing,” wrote Kristen Ritchie, a 59 year-old woman from Oklahoma City who grew up on a farm.

“He has actually created a place of comfort and understanding at the same time for a lot of people in a very busy, chaotic and hectic world,” Greenlee said. “He changes people’s minds every day.”

It’s now a distant memory, but black currants once had a strong foothold in American agriculture. The sweet, tart berries had been brought over from England in the 17th century as a crop for settlers to cultivate — a piece of home in unfamiliar lands. Shade-tolerant, cold-hardy, and bountiful, the bushes fit right in alongside numerous native cousins that had long been prized by Indigenous peoples for their medicinal properties. In time, they became a piquant part of the American diet, cooked into jams and sauces and eaten fresh by those who didn’t mind a bit of a pucker. By the turn of the 20th century, there were at least 7,400 U.S. acres in commercial production.

The black currant might have gone on to become an agricultural mainstay if not for another European import that arrived early in the new century. This one spelled doom. White pine blister rust, a parasitic fungus that uses the black currant and its genetic relatives to spread to nearby pine trees. This endangered the country’s critical timber industry, leading the federal government to wage an all-out assault on the otherwise innocent berry. In the process of protecting the pines, black currants were forbidden and then forgotten.

Today, though, a small community of growers are urging its revival, seeking to bring the berry back into the American consciousness — and into agroforestry systems, where it can thrive as a complementary crop.

“I don’t think this plant is a lost cause,” said Lily Hislop, who runs the only institutionally backed black currant breeding program in the Western Hemisphere at the Savanna Institute, a nonprofit focused on expanding agroforestry. “I don’t think this plant is going to stay stagnant forever.”

***

The demise of the black currant began in 1909, when a stand of white pines in Geneva, New York, began showing signs of sickness. The trees’ branches were swollen and dotted with yellow, elongated cankers, the work of Cronartium ribicola, or white pine blister rust, which had crossed the Atlantic on infected pine seedlings. The parasitic fungus requires two plants to complete its life cycle: pine trees and Ribes, a genus of shrubs whose most beloved member was the black currant. Spores from infected Ribes are carried on the wind to neighboring pines, which then become infected and send out distinct spores of their own in search of Ribes hosts to continue their spread. Although the fungus can cause leaf loss on Ribes, it’s relatively harmless; to white pines, however, it’s deadly.

Chestnut blight had ravaged the hardwood forests of America in the late 19th century, and another wave of devastation seemed imminent. With the health of the timber industry threatened, the federal government wasted no time. By 1912, the first domestic plant quarantine was put in place and the sale and cultivation of black currant and other Ribes plants — including red and white currants and gooseberries — was banned. A few years later, a blister rust control program was established, pouring $400,000 a year into containment and eradication.

Homeowners were asked to tear out their currants to stop the spread. Each summer, as soon as the plants leafed out enough to be easily identified, thousands of teachers and college students on break were hired to canvass forests, yanking Ribes up by their roots or dousing them with a deadly combination of salt and borax. At its peak, the eradication effort employed over 8,600 workers; it lasted until World War II. By 1959, the project had spanned more than 20 million acres at a cost just north of $100 million — roughly $1 billion in today’s dollars.

The Ribes restriction was lifted at the federal level in 1966, but by then the damage was done. Generations had passed with the black currant as an afterthought at best, or an enemy at worst. States were slow to end their bans, and roughly a dozen, mostly in the Northeast, maintain restrictions or outright prohibitions to this day. The black currant kept its prominent place in the European palate, where it’s favored for jams, cordials, juices, and fresh eating. But in the U.S., where its scale once rivaled the modern blackberry industry, it was all but buried.

The black current restriction was lifted at the federal level in 1966, but by then the damage was done.

Nearly 1,000 farms now grow black currants in the U.S., spanning about 500 acres, primarily in New York, Wisconsin, and the Pacific Northwest, according to Hislop. The small scale indicates the lack of a robust market; most farms sell direct to consumers or have “you-pick” operations. Most of the plants in the ground are cultivars that emerged from Canada, where, rather than outlawing Ribes, the government supported the development of currants resistant to blister rust.

The Canadian currants, bred primarily for disease resistance, tend to be “in-your-face funky” in a way that doesn’t suit the typical American palate, Hislop said, so their primary audience is European immigrants who grew up with the berries and want a taste of home. The most common varieties are Consort and Titania, but she’s working to release more appealing varieties based on the plant materials of a longtime breeder from British Columbia that might better connect with unacquainted Americans. Those cultivars are gaining popularity and regularly sell out. Given the fruit’s curious combination of flavors — blackberry, blueberry, and pine are among the base notes, said Hislop, but some varieties taste of raspberry, citrus, or grapes — she’s banking on its appeal.

“We don’t have access to complexity like that in our jam aisle,” she said.

If the black currant does catch on, it could occupy a compelling niche in the agricultural landscape. Because of its comfort with shade — an outgrowth of centuries spent in woodland habitats — it’s well suited as an understory crop. Hislop is also planning a research trial with colleagues at the University of Wisconsin to explore the currant’s potential in agrivoltaics. Grown alongside solar panels, she believes it could unite the push for renewable energy with the drive to keep farmland producing crops. Kevin Wolz, the Savanna Institute founder who now runs its for-profit spin-off, Canopy Farm Management, plans to plant 1,000 acres of currants over the next decade. They’ll be situated exclusively beneath chestnuts, where the bushes can maximize the value of land in agroforestry and accelerate cash flow for farmers waiting for their nuts to yield.

“It’s a very different approach to starting a new crop — to pair it with other things and put it in the most ecologically relevant context, rather than pushing forward with some new monoculture,” Wolz said.

He started putting currants in the ground on a farm in Sauk City, Wisconsin, last fall and will complete the first 100 acres this spring. He thinks Canopy can take on much of the risk inherent in reviving a forgotten crop that’s caught in a chicken-and-egg scenario, thanks to its complicated history: Growers are wary of planting a berry without a market, but re-establishing the black currant will require exposing it to consumers at a scale beyond what’s presently possible. As Hislop said, “We lost the throughline of people understanding and wanting the flavor and seeking it out.”