A Soil Fungus That Causes Lung Infections Is Spreading Across the U.S.
Nikki Main – November 21, 2022
The fungus histoplasma, which causes lung infections, was concentrated in the Midwest in the 1950s and 60s (top map), but now causes significant disease throughout much of the country (bottom).
An illness-causing fungus known as hisoplasma is in the soil of nearly all U.S. states, a new study suggests. The researchers behind the work say doctors may be relying on outdated risk maps and therefore missing diagnoses of the infections, which can sometimes be deadly.
According to the CDC, histoplasma, or histo, is found in the soil of central and eastern U.S. states, primarily in Ohio and the Mississippi River valleys. But that assumption is based on research from the 1950s and 1960s, says the team behind a new paper published in Clinical Infectious Diseases. When a person breathes in spores of the fungus, they can contract an infection called histoplasmosis.
“Every few weeks I get a call from a doctor in the Boston area – a different doctor every time – about a case they can’t solve,” said study author Andrej Spec, an associate professor of medicine at Washington University in St. Louis, in a press release. “They always start by saying, ‘We don’t have histo here, but it really kind of looks like histo.’ I say, ‘You guys call me all the time about this. You do have histo.’”
Lead author Patrick B. Mazi, a clinical fellow in infectious diseases also at Washington University in St. Louis, and his colleagues analyzed more than 45 million Medicare fee-for-service beneficiaries extending from 2007 through 2016. They looked at diagnoses across the country of three fungal diseases: histoplasmosis, coccidioidomycosis, and blastomycosis. Histo, the most common, was causing clinically relevant rates of illness in at least one county in 48 of 50 states, as well as Washington, D.C. The other two infections were each found in more than half of states.
“Fungal infections are much more common than people realize, and they’re spreading,” Spec said in the release. “The scientific community has underinvested in studying and developing treatments for fungal infections. I think that’s beginning to change, but slowly.” Climate change may be driving this spread as warming temperatures make more habitats suitable for the fungi.
While histo can be easily combatted in healthy adults, and many people who are exposed never develop symptoms, those who are immunocompromised as well as infants and people 55 years and older may develop more serious illness, including a cough, fever, chest, pain, body aches, and fatigue, according to the CDC. Symptoms appear within three to 17 days after exposure; most symptoms will go away within a month, but if it spreads from a person’s lungs, the illness can become severe and require months of treatment.
People can be exposed to histo and other fungal pathogens through activities that disrupt soil, like farming, landscaping, and construction. They can also be exposed inside caves and while working in basements and attics. Spec noted: “It’s important for the medical community to realize these fungi are essentially everywhere these days and that we need to take them seriously and include them in considering diagnoses.”
Large part of Ukranian corn crop may stay in fields over winter.
November 21, 2022
KYIV, Nov 20 (Reuters) – Significant areas of Ukraine’s corn crop may be left to overwinter in the fields due to difficulties with harvesting and fuel shortages, analyst APK-Inform said on Sunday.
Corn can potentially be harvested in winter or early spring, but previously only very small areas of the crop would be left to overwinter if farmers wanted to reduce grain moisture.
Ukraine is a major global corn grower and exporter and harvested almost 42 million tonnes in 2021. This year, analysts say, the harvest could total 27.5 million to 27.9 million tonnes.
APK-Inform said in a report that the prospect for a large part of the corn crop to stay in fields this winter was “becoming more and more possible” due to low domestic prices, difficulties with field work caused by the war and high fuel prices.
The Ukrainian agriculture ministry said on Friday only 50% of the area sown for corn had been harvested as of Nov. 17, or 12.3 million tonnes.
The government has said Ukraine could harvest between 50 million and 52 million tonnes of grain this year, down from a record 86 million tonnes in 2021, because of the loss of land to Russian forces and lower yields.
Farmers have already completed the 2022 wheat and barley harvests, threshing 19.4 million and 5.6 million tons respectively. (Reporting by Pavel Polityuk; Editing by Kirsten Donovan)
Farmland Values Hit Record Highs, Pricing Out Farmers
Linda Qiu – November 13, 2022
Farmland outside of Clark, S.D., on Oct. 26, 2022. (Tim Gruber/The New York Times)
Joel Gindo thought he could finally own and operate the farm of his dreams when a neighbor put up 160 acres of cropland for sale in Brookings County, South Dakota, two years ago. Five thousand or six thousand dollars an acre should do the trick, Gindo estimated.
But at auction, Gindo watched helplessly as the price continued to climb until it hit $11,000 an acre, double what he had budgeted for.
“I just couldn’t compete with how much people are paying, with people paying 10 grand,” he said. “And for someone like me who doesn’t have an inheritance somewhere sitting around, a lump sum of money sitting around, everything has to be financed.”
What is happening in South Dakota is playing out in farming communities across the nation as the value of farmland soars, hitting record highs this year and often pricing out small or beginning farmers. In the state, farmland values surged by 18.7% from 2021 to 2022, one of the highest increases in the country, according to the most recent figures from the Agriculture Department. Nationwide, values increased by 12.4% and reached $3,800 an acre, the highest on record since 1970, with cropland at $5,050 an acre and pastureland at $1,650 an acre.
A series of economic forces — high prices for commodity crops like corn, soybeans and wheat; a robust housing market; low interest rates until recently; and a slew of government subsidies — have converged to create a “perfect storm” for farmland values, said Jason Henderson, a dean at the College of Agriculture at Purdue University and a former official at the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, Missouri.
As a result, small farmers like Gindo are now going up against deep-pocketed investors, including private equity firms and real estate developers, prompting some experts to warn of far-reaching consequences for the farming sector.
Young farmers named finding affordable land for purchase the top challenge in 2022 in a September survey by the National Young Farmers Coalition, a nonprofit group.
Already, the supply of land is limited. About 40% of farmland in the United States is rented, most of it owned by landlords who are not actively involved in farming. And the amount of land available for purchase is extremely scant, with less than 1% of farmland sold on the open market annually.
The booming housing market, among a number of factors, has bolstered the value of farmland, particularly in areas close to growing city centers.
“What we have seen over the past year or two was, when housing starts to go up with new building construction, that puts pressure on farmland, especially on those urban fringes,” Henderson said. “And that leads to a cascading ripple effect into land values even farther and farther away.”
Government subsidies to farmers have also soared in recent years, amounting to nearly 39% of net farm income in 2020. On top of traditional programs like crop insurance payments, the Agriculture Department distributed $23 billion to farmers hurt by President Donald Trump’s trade war from 2018 to 2020 and $45.3 billion in pandemic-related assistance in 2020 and 2021. (The government’s contribution to farm income decreased to 20% in 2021 and is forecast to be about 8% in 2022.)
Those payments, or even the very promise of additional assistance, increase farmland values as they create a safety net and signal that agricultural land is a safe bet, research shows.
“There’s an expectation in the market that the government’s going to play a role when farm incomes drop, so that definitely affects investment behavior,” said Jennifer Ifft, a professor of agricultural economics at Kansas State University.
Eager investors are increasingly turning to farmland in the face of volatility in the stock and real estate markets. Bill Gates, the Microsoft co-founder and billionaire, is the biggest private farmland owner in the country and recently won approval to buy 2,100 acres in North Dakota for $13.5 million.
The number of private equity funds seeking to buy stakes in farmland has ticked higher, said Tim Koch, a vice president at an agricultural financial cooperative in the Midwest, Farm Credit Services of America. Pension funds also consider farmland a stable investment, Ifft said.
Farmers, too, have witnessed an influx of outside interest. Nathaniel Bankhead, who runs a farm and garden consulting business in Chattanooga, Tennessee, has banded with a group of other agricultural workers to save up to $500,000 to buy about 60 acres of land. For months, the collective has been repeatedly outbid by real estate developers, investors looking to diversify their portfolios and urban transplants with “delusional agrarian dreams,” he said.
“Places that I have looked at as potential farmland are being bought up in cash before I can even go through the process that a working-class person has to do to access land,” he said. “And the ironic thing is, those are my clients — like I get hired by them to do as a hobby what I’m trying to do as a livelihood. So it’s tough to watch.”
Bankhead characterized the current landscape as a form of “digital feudalism” for aspiring working farmers. Wealthy landowners drive up land prices, contract with agricultural designers like himself to enact their vision and then hire a caretaker to work the land — pricing out those very employees from becoming owners themselves.
“They kind of lock that person to this new flavor of serfdom where it’s, you might be decently paid, you’ve got access to it, but it will never be yours,” he said.
Unable to afford land in her native Florida, Tasha Trujillo recently moved her flower farm to South Carolina. Trujillo had grown cut flowers and kept bees on a parcel of her brother-in-law’s 5-acre plant nursery in Redland, a historically agricultural region in the Miami area, about 20 miles south of downtown.
When she sought to expand her farm and buy her own land, she quickly found that prices were out of reach, with real estate developers driving up land values and pushing out agriculture producers.
A 5-acre property in the Redlands now costs $500,000 to $700,000, Trujillo said. “So I essentially didn’t have a choice but to leave Miami and Florida as a whole.”
“Farming is a very stressful profession,” she added. “When you throw in land insecurity, it makes it 20 times worse. So there were many, many times where I thought, oh, my God, I’m not going to be able to do this. This isn’t feasible.”
As small and beginning farmers are shut out — the latest agricultural census said that the average age of farmers inched up to 57.5 — the prohibitively high land values may have ripple effects on the sector at large.
Brian Philpot, CEO of AgAmerica, an agricultural lending institution, said his firm’s average loan size had increased as farms consolidated, squeezing out family farms. This, he argued, could lead to a farm crisis.
“Do we have the skills and the next generation of people to farm it? And two, if the answer is going to be, we’re going to have passive owners own this land and lease it out, is that very sustainable?” he said.
Henderson also warned that current farmers may face increased financial risk as they seek to leverage their high farmland values, essentially betting the farm to expand it.
“They’ll buy more land, but they’ll use debt to do it,” he said. “They’ll stretch themselves out.”
Economists and lenders said farmland values appear to have plateaued in recent months, as the Federal Reserve raised interest rates and the cost of fertilizer and diesel soared. But with high commodity prices forecast for next year, some believe values will remain high.
A native of Tanzania who moved to South Dakota about a decade ago, Gindo bought 7 acres of land to raise livestock in 2019 and currently rents an additional 40 acres to grow corn and soybeans — all the while working full time as a comptroller to make ends meet.
For now, he has cooled off his search for a farm of his own even as he dreams of passing on that land to his son. The more immediate concern, he said, was whether his landlord would raise his rent. So far, the landlord has refrained because Gindo helps him out around the farm.
“He really doesn’t have to lend me his land,” Gindo said. “He can make double that with someone else.”
In Florida, Trujillo said, the owner of the land where her brother-in-law’s nursery sits has spoken of selling the plot while prices remain high, so he too has begun looking for his own property.
“That’s a big fear for a lot of these farmers and nursery owners who are renting land, because you just never know when the owner’s just going to say, ‘You know what, this year, I’m selling, and you’ve got to go,’” she said.
In Tennessee, Bankhead said he considered giving up on owning a farm “multiple times a day” as friends who have been longtime farmers leave the profession.
But so far, he remains committed to staying in the field and doing “the work of trying to keep land in families’ hands and showing there’s more to do with this land than to sell it to real estate developers,” he said. “But the pain of not having my own garden and not being able to have my animals where I live, it never stings any less.”
It’s an outrage that Saudis use Arizona’s water for free. I’ll work to stop it
Kris Mayes – November 4, 2022
Arizona should not be giving its water away to the Saudi Arabians, or anyone else for that matter. Yet, for the past seven years, the attorney general and governor have allowed a Saudi company to pump out more than $38 million worth of groundwater from La Paz County for free.
That’s right. Arizona is giving away its groundwater for nothing to one of the richest nations on Earth – and to the severe detriment of Arizonans.
It is an outrage and a scandal at a time when the Saudi government is deliberately raising the price of gasoline for U.S. citizens by cutting back OPEC oil supplies.
As attorney general, I will work to put an end to these sweetheart Saudi deals.
Below-market leases short Arizona schools
As first disclosed in The Arizona Republic last June, the State Land Department has leased state trust land to the Saudi-owned Fondomonte corporation for $25 per acre, so that the Saudi company could grow alfalfa and send it back to Saudi Arabia to feed that country’s cows.
More unbelievably, the state is allowing this company to pump groundwater for free. The $25/acre land lease is well below market rates, and the water being given away comes from the Butler Valley Basin and Vicksburg – areas that Arizona cities may very well need to rely on for their water needs in the near future.
To comply with the Gift Clause, a government expenditure must (1) serve a public purpose, and (2) the consideration the public has paid must not far exceed the value received.
As stated by the Arizona Supreme Court 38 years ago, the deal between the government and the private entity cannot be “so inequitable and unreasonable” that it amounts to providing a subsidy to the private party.
Giving away more than $38 million of groundwater for free is both inequitable and unreasonable. Agreeing to lease state land to a Saudi company for only one-sixth of the market price for similar land is probably inequitable and unreasonable as well. Pursuant to the Arizona Constitution, money that is generated from state trust land leases must go to benefit Arizona K-12 schools.
Wells are going dry, complaints unanswered
Ground water is used to irrigate an alfalfa field, April 7, 2022, at Fondomonte’s Butler Valley Ranch near Bouse.
Four months ago, the La Paz County supervisors filed a complaint with Attorney General Mark Brnovich concerning the below-market Fondomonte lease and the groundwater giveaway. To date, Brnovich has done nothing, not even respond to the county supervisors.
Moreover, several years ago, more than 500 La Paz County residents signed a petition that they hand-delivered to Gov. Doug Ducey’s advisers, voicing their outrage about the free groundwater giveaway.
Recently, I traveled to Vicksburg and met with La Paz County Supervisor Holly Irwin, who showed me the Fondomonte farm in that western Arizona community. Alfalfa fields stretch for miles, and commercial wells can be seen from the road gushing the state’s precious and irreplaceable water at thousands of gallons per minute.
Irwin also took me to a nearby Baptist church whose well has been dewatered. She told me that many of her constituents living around the Fondomonte farms have had their wells sucked dry by the Saudi-owned farms.
Records at the Department of Water Resources show that the Saudis are drilling deeper and deeper wells, which will likely cause residential wells to go dry.
During my first week as attorney general, I will request an auditor general’s audit of all industrial-scale leases of state trust land where water is being pumped to determine if the rates are below market and how much school funding has been lost as a result.
If such abuses have occurred, I will work to ensure that the companies are required to restore the proper funding to the state and our schools.
I will also proactively advise the Arizona State Land Department on an ongoing basis that leasing water at rates that are significantly below market rates could represent a violation of the state’s Gift Clause and that the leaseholders could face efforts to recover undercharges in the future.
Arizona’s water supplies have never been more threatened.
Lakes Mead and Powell are less than 150 feet from “dead pool” status and hydrologists believe they will hit dead pool sometime in 2023. It is time for Arizona’s leaders to act like they care about Arizona more than a country thousands of miles away that is trying to harm America.
I will do that as Arizona’s next attorney general.
Kris Mayes is the Democratic candidate for Arizona attorney general. She served two terms on the Arizona Corporation Commission.
Big agriculture warns farming must change or risk ‘destroying the planet’
Dominic Rushe – November 2, 2022
Photograph: Jeff McIntosh/AP
Food companies and governments must come together immediately to change the world’s agricultural practices or risk “destroying the planet”, according to the sponsors of a report by some of the largest food and farming businesses released on Thursday.
The report, from a taskforce within the Sustainable Markets Initiative (SMI), a network of global CEOs focused on climate issues established by King Charles III, is being released days before the start of the United Nation’s Cop27 climate summit in Egypt.
Many of the world’s largest food and agricultural businesses have championed sustainable agricultural practices in recent years. Regenerative farming practices, which prioritize cutting greenhouse gas emissions, soil health and water conservation, now cover 15% of croplands.- ADVERTISEMENT -https://s.yimg.com/rq/darla/4-10-1/html/r-sf-flx.html
But the pace of change has been “far too slow”, the report finds, and must triple by 2030 for the world to have any chance of keeping temperature rises under 1.5C, a level that if breached, scientists argue, will unleash even more devastating climate change on the planet.
The report is signed by Bayer, Mars, McCain Foods, McDonald’s, Mondēlez, Olam, PepsiCo, Waitrose and others. They represent a potent political and corporate force, affecting the food supply chain around the world. They are also, according to critics, some of those most responsible for climate mismanagement with one calling the report “smoke and mirrors” and unlikely to address the real crisis.
Food production is responsible for a third of all planet-heating gases emitted by human activity and a number of the signatories have been accused of environmental misdeeds and “greenwashing”. Activist Greta Thunberg is boycotting Cop this year having called the global summit a PR stunt “for leaders and people in power to get attention”.
“We are at a critical tipping point where something must be done,” said the taskforce chair and outgoing Mars CEO, Grant Reid. “The interconnection between human health and planetary health is more evident than ever before.” Big food companies and agriculture must play a big part in changing that, said Reid. “It won’t be easy but we have got to make it work,” he said.
Agriculture is the world’s largest industry. Pasture and cropland occupy around 50% of the planet’s habitable land and uses about 70% of fresh water supplies. The climate crisis is challenging the industry across the world but the group’s call for change comes as the industry – which employs 1 billion people – is facing supply chain issues in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic and soaring inflation. It also comes amid mounting skepticism about promises to change from companies that have contributed to climate change.
These current issues must not detract from the need for change, the report argues. “With the inflationary environment and widespread supply chain disruption, it would be easy to reduce our focus on the longer-term challenge of scaling regenerative farming. But we believe it’s vital we maintain a sense of urgency. We must take action now to avoid more acute crises in the future,” its authors write.
Sunny George Verghese, chief executive of Olam, one of the world’s largest suppliers of cocoa beans, coffee, cotton and rice, said: “We cannot continue to produce and consume food and feed and fiber in the way we are doing today unless we don’t mind destroying the planet.
“The only way out for us is how we transition to a more resilient food system that will allow us to meet the needs of a growing population without the resource intensity we have today.”
The report studied three food crops, potatoes, rice and wheat, and has made policy recommendations it will present at Cop27.
The taskforce’s members are working to make the short-term economic case for change more attractive to farmers. “It’s just not compelling enough for the average farmer,” said Reid. More widely the report argues industry and government must also work harder to address the knowledge gap and make sure farmers are following best practices. Third, all parties involved in the agriculture industry from farmers to food producers to government, banks and insurers need to align behind encouraging a shift to more sustainable practices.
“It involves change for all the players including the government, private, public companies and others. No one player can do this on their own, this has to be a collaboration of the willing. What needs to happen now is action and delivery,” said Reid.
Over the next six months, the group will assess how they can spread the taskforce’s work with the aim of establishing a common set of metrics for measuring environmental outcomes, establishing a credible system of payments for farmers for environmental outcomes, easing the cost of farmers transitioning to sustainable practices, ensuring government policy rewards farmers for greening their business and encouraging the sourcing of crops from particular areas converting to regenerative farming.
Devlin Kuyek, a researcher at Grain, a non-profit organization that works to support small farmers, said it was increasingly difficult for big agricultural and food companies to ignore climate change. “But I don’t think any of these companies – say a McDonald’s – has any commitment to curtail the sales of highly polluting products. I don’t think PepsiCo is going to say the world doesn’t need Pepsi.”
Kuyek pointed out that Yara, another signatory to the report, is the world’s largest supplier of nitrogen-based fertilizers, “which are responsible for one out of every 40 tonnes of greenhouse gas emitted annually”.
“It’s pretty disingenuous,” said Kuyek. “Small, local food systems still feed most of the people on the planet and the real threat is that the industrial system is expanding at the expense of the truly sustainable system. Corporations are creating a bit of smoke and mirrors here, suggesting they are part of the solution when inevitably they are part of the problem.”
Considering the controversial histories of some of the companies involved in the report, Verghese said he expected criticism and scrutiny. “All companies have to stand up to the scrutiny of being attacked if there is real greenwashing. There is no place to hide,” he said. “As far as Olam is concerned we are very clear on our targets, we have had the confidence to make these targets public. All of us have progressed along the sustainable journey. It is not that we have not made mistakes in the past but as we have become better at this we are willing to be subject to scrutiny.”
Both Reid and Verghese said the scale of the issues the world’s food supply is facing cannot be underplayed but that more governments and companies were becoming convinced of the need for urgent change. “I believe change can be made,” said Verghese. “I am optimistic. The fact that these kinds of coalitions are emerging is very positive. We are all otherwise very strong rivals and competitors. We hate each other’s guts, we don’t come together on anything unless there is a huge crisis. Everyone is recognizing there is a huge crisis. We need to come together.”
He was accused of stealing huge amounts of water over 23 years. Here’s why no one noticed
Dale Kasler, Ryan Sabalow – November 1, 2022
JOHN WALKER / jwalker@fresnobee.com
California’s water police struggle to track where water is flowing and whether someone is taking more than they’re supposed to.
A criminal case unfolding in the San Joaquin Valley underscores how the federal government seems to have similar problems.
Prosecutors say they uncovered a massive water theft that went on for 23 years without anyone noticing.
Earlier this year a federal grand jury indicted Dennis Falaschi, the former general manager of the Panoche Water District in the western San Joaquin Valley, on charges of conspiracy, theft of government property and filing false tax returns.
Falaschi’s alleged crime stemmed from the federal government’s operation of the Central Valley Project, the system of reservoirs and canals that dates to President Franklin Roosevelt’s administration.
According to prosecutors, Falaschi engineered a brazen scheme to steal $25 million worth of water from the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, operator of the Central Valley Project. More specifically, Falaschi stands accused of having his underlings siphon water from the Delta-Mendota Canal, the main conduit for delivering federal water to farms along the west side of the San Joaquin Valley and part of Silicon Valley.
He then billed Panoche customers for this stolen water and used the proceeds to pay “himself and other co-conspirators exorbitant salaries, fringe benefits and personal expense reimbursements,” the indictment says.
How Panoche Water District legal trouble started
Falaschi’s legal troubles began in 2017, when the state controller’s office released an audit showing that the financial controls at Panoche were too lax. Among other things, staffers were allowed to use district credit cards to buy Oakland A’s and Raiders season passes, and tickets to a Katy Perry concert.
A month later, Falaschi left Panoche. Then in 2018 the state attorney general’s office charged him and three other former district employees with embezzling $100,000 from Panoche and illegally burying toxic chemicals on district property. Prosecutors said Falaschi allegedly used the embezzled funds to buy a pair of slot machines and some kitchen appliances, among other things. That case is still pending.
The latest indictment covers a scheme that, according to prosecutors, began in 1992 and wasn’t discovered until April 2015 when a canal maintenance worker saw a whirlpool above the equipment that prosecutors say Falaschi had hidden in the canal to siphon off the water.
The theft lasted long enough to enable Falaschi to grab a total of 130,000 acre-feet of water — enough to fill about 13% of Folsom Lake, prosecutors said.
Last year district officials made a civil settlement over the missing water, agreeing to pay $7.5 million to the federal government and another $1 million to an umbrella agency, the San Luis & Delta-Mendota Water Authority, which buys water from the feds.
The indictment came months after the civil settlement. The grand jury says Falaschi had several of his employees install a valve mechanism in the canal — submerged below the water line — near the district’s headquarters in Firebaugh.
Falaschi, who now lives in Aptos, could receive up to 24 years in prison if convicted.
He has pleaded innocent to the criminal charges. In a statement, his Fresno lawyer Marc Days blasted the feds for prosecuting Falaschi “over a leak from the government’s rotted pipe which the government failed to repair,” and for relying on the statements of “unreliable and incompetent witnesses motivated by their own self-interest.”
Days said the amount of water the federal government accuses Falaschi of taking pales in comparison to some of the other leaks from the same canal.
He said area farm districts receive “massive amounts of unmetered water,” including one leak that Days alleges siphons off 200 cubic feet a second, an amount that in a year would surpass the water prosecutors allege Falaschi stole over those two decades. The federal government, Days claims, has known about the problems but fails to do anything to prevent them.
Mary Lee Knecht, a spokeswoman for the Bureau of Reclamation, declined comment because of the pending case.
Why missing water goes undetected
Falaschi’s successor at Panoche, Ara Azhderian, said it’s no secret that water goes missing throughout the Delta-Mendota system. Evaporation alone takes a significant toll, he said.
In fact, Azhderian said Falaschi’s alleged scheme likely went unnoticed for so long due to the sheer size of the Delta-Mendota Canal and the volume of water it delivers.
Two million acre-feet of water moves through the canal in a typical year, and the canal is nearly 117 miles long.
“When you think about the system and how long it is, how big it is,” he said, “… it was such a small amount in the scheme of things as to be undetectable.”
Others say the problems along the canal — whether through massive leaks or by alleged thefts — highlight just how difficult it is to keep tabs on the state’s most precious resource.
“We really don’t know where our water is going,” said Jeffrey Mount, a water expert at the Public Policy Institute of California. “Where it really breaks down for us now is in this ever-tightening water world where we’re having to deal with less. Major chunks of it, we don’t know where it goes and who’s using how much.”
How unhealthy is red meat? And how beneficial is it to eat vegetables? A new rating system could help you cut through the health guidelines
Aleksandr Aravkin, Associate Professor of Applied Mathematics, University of Washington, Jeffrey Stanaway, Assistant Professor of Global Health and Health Metrics Sciences, University of Washington, and Christian Razo, Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, University of Washington – October 21, 2022
The new rating system shows that eating the right amount of vegetables can lower your risk of heart disease by nearly 20%. Westend61/Getty Images
The Research Brief is a short take about interesting academic work.
The big idea
We developed a new method for assessing health risks that our research suggests should make it a lot easier for people to determine which health advice to follow – and which to ignore. The approach, recently published in the journal Nature Medicine, offers a straightforward way for both policymakers and the general public to assess the strength of evidence for a given health risk – like consuming red meat – and the corresponding outcome – ischemic heart disease – using a rating system of one to five stars.
The system we developed is based on several systematic reviews of studies regarding risk factors like smoking and health outcomes such as lung cancer. Well-established relationships between risks and outcomes score between three and five stars, whereas cases in which research evidence is lacking or contradictory garner one to two stars.
In our analysis, only eight of the 180 pairs that we analyzed received the top rating of five stars, indicating very strong evidence of association. The relationship between smoking and lung cancer, as well as the relationship between high systolic blood pressure – the higher of the two numbers in a blood pressure reading – and ischemic heart disease were among those eight five-star pairs.
This rating system enables consumers to easily identify how harmful or protective a behavior may be and how strong the evidence is for each risk-outcome pair. For instance, a consumer seeing a low star rating can use that knowledge to decide whether to shift a health habit or choice.
While the visualization tool provides a nuanced understanding of risk across the range of blood pressures, the five-star rating signals that the overall evidence is very strong. As a result, this means that clear guidelines can be given on the importance of controlling blood pressure.
Why it matters
Clear messages and evidence-based guidance regarding healthy behaviors are crucial. Yet health guidance is often contradictory and difficult to understand.
Currently, most epidemiological analyses make strong assumptions about relationships between risks and health outcomes, and study results often disagree as to the strength of risk-outcome relationships. It can be confusing for experts and nonexperts alike to parse through conflicting studies of varying strength of results and determine if a lifestyle change is needed.
This is where our method comes in: The star-based rating system can offer decision-makers and consumers alike much-needed context before headline-grabbing health guidance is dispensed and adopted.
For example, the average risk of ischemic heart disease with a blood pressure of 165 mmHG – or millimeters of mercury, the basic unit used for measuring pressure – is 4.5 times the risk of the disease with blood pressure of 100 mmHG; but this is just a single estimate. The relative risk of ischemic heart disease increases by more than four times across the blood pressure range, and there is inherent uncertainty in the estimate based on available data. The rating of five stars incorporates all of this information, and in this case means that relative risk of ischemic heart disease across the entire range of exposures increases by at least 85%.
On the other hand, take the example of red meat consumption. Consuming 100 grams of red meat per day – as opposed to none – results in a very modest (12%) increase in risk for ischemic heart disease. That’s why it scores a rating of just two stars, consistent with only a weak association.
People should be well aware of their levels of exposure to risks classified with three to five stars, such as systolic blood pressure. By monitoring and keeping one’s blood pressure as low as possible, a person can substantially reduce the risk of developing ischemic heart disease.
What’s next
Our hope is that decision-makers will be able to use our star rating system to create informed policy recommendations that will have the greatest benefits for human health. We also hope the public can use the ratings and the visualization tool as a way to more clearly understand the current level of knowledge for different pairs of health risks and outcomes.
Jeffrey Stanaway receives funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
Aleksandr Aravkin and Christian Razo do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
It may be impossible to completely avoid PFAS, but there are a few simple ways to reduce your exposure.
Eating at home, ditching nonstick pans and unnecessary carpets, and filtering your water can help.
Hazardous, long-lasting “forever chemicals” are all over the news lately, and they’re all over our day-to-day environments too.
Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS, is a class of thousands of man-made substances that are common in everyday objects, but research is making it increasingly clear that they may be harmful to human health. Peer-reviewed studies have linked them to some cancers, decreased fertility, thyroid disease, and developmental delays.
That’s bad news since PFAS last for decades without breaking down, earning them the “forever chemicals” nickname. Researchers have found them in drinking water and household dust across the planet, in the oceans, at both poles, and drifting through the atmosphere.
In a paper published last month, leading researchers at the University of Stockholm concluded that all the planet’s rainwater, and probably all of its soil, are contaminated with unsafe levels of PFAS. Ian Cousins, who spearheaded that research, fears it’s impossible to avoid the chemicals.
“I don’t bother,” Cousins told Insider, adding, “It’s almost mission impossible. You can’t really do it.”
Even if you can’t completely dodge PFAS, there are a few easy ways to reduce exposure in your daily life.
Eat at home, with minimal grease-resistant packaging
A family eats dinner at their home in Calumet Park, Illinois, on December 8, 2020.Shannon Stapleton/Reuters
PFAS were developed in the 1940s to resist heat, grease, stains, and water. That means they’ve ended up in a lot of food packaging. That includes pizza boxes, microwave popcorn bags, some wrappers, and grease-resistant paper.
Restaurants and fast-food chains may use such packaging more than grocery stores do. A 2019 study found that people had lower PFAS levels in their blood after eating at home, and higher levels after eating fast food or at restaurants.
Throw out scratched nonstick pans
Red onion slices cooking in a black pan.Erin McDowell/Insider
The coating used in nonstick cookware usually contains PFAS, and they can easily leach into your food at high heat and once the coating gets scratched.
The Washington Department of Ecology advises against heating nonstick cookware above 400 degrees Fahrenheit, and recommends throwing it out once the nonstick coating scratches. Cast-iron pans are a safe alternative.
Ditch your carpet and stain-resistant fabrics
Other household items like carpeting, water-resistant clothing, and stain-resistant treatments for fabrics can also contain PFAS. Researchers don’t think the chemicals can easily absorb into your body through your skin, but those fabrics shed fibers that can travel through the house as dust, eventually getting ingested or inhaled.
Vacuum, dust, and open the windows
A property manager opens the window of a vacant house in the town Kamakura outside Tokyo, on November 15, 2014.Thomas Peter/Reuters
PFAS accumulate in dust, which lingers in the air and allows humans to breathe the chemicals into their lungs. By dusting and vacuuming regularly, along with opening windows to allow for airflow and ventilation, you can keep dust levels low in your home and reduce the amount of PFAS you inhale.
Test and maybe treat your drinking water
You can test your water for PFAS through a laboratory certified by your state. If the water exceeds guidelines, you may want to consider doing something about it, especially if you have children.
A person fills a bottle with tap water.Catherine Falls Commercial/Getty Images
Even at very low levels, exposure to two of the most common PFAS — called PFOA and PFOS — has been linked to decreased vaccine response in children. That research prompted the US Environmental Protection Agency to revise its drinking-water guidelines, decreasing the safe levels of those substances by a factor of 17,000. In August, the agency issued a proposal to classify those two PFAS as hazardous substances.
A few types of water filters can diminish PFAS levels, though they may not completely remove the chemicals from the water. State environmental departments recommend filtration systems that use reverse osmosis for tap water. They also recommend filter systems that use granular activated carbon (aka charcoal), which can be installed on faucets house-wide or used in a tabletop pitcher, but a 2020 study found mixed results from those systems.
If you get your drinking water from a well, the EPA recommends testing it regularly and contacting your state environmental or health agency for certified labs and safety standards.
Check before you buy cosmetics
A woman applies makeup to her friend in Nashville, Tennessee, on December 20, 2013.Harrison McClary/Reuters
Last year, a group of researchers published the results of testing 231 cosmetic products in the US and Canada for PFAS. More than half the products contained indicators of the chemicals.
The Environmental Working Group (EWG) has a public, searchable database of cosmetics and personal-care products, highlighting ingredients with potential risks to human health, such as PFAS like Teflon. They also maintain a map where you can check if you live near a PFAS contamination site.
The Green Science Policy Institute also keeps a list of PFAS-free products, including a guide to cosmetics.
Ultimately, Cousins said, people don’t need to be “super worried” about low-level exposure, since there’s no strong evidence of major health impacts across the population. Still, reducing PFAS use in consumer products could keep the problem from getting worse in the future.
“I think we should use this to get a bit angry about what’s happened and try and make change, so that we don’t keep doing this,” Cousins said. “Maybe we have to use [PFAS] in some cases, but only when they’re absolutely essential. And then we should also try to innovate, to try and replace them in the longer term.”
In Arizona, worry about access to Colorado River water
Tony Davis – September 13, 2022
Utah State University master’s student Barrett Friesen steers a boat near Glen Canyon dam on Lake Powell on June 7, 2022, in Page, Ariz. In Arizona, water officials are concerned, though not panicking, about getting water in the future from the Colorado River as its levels decline and the federal government talks about the need for states in the Colorado River Basin to reduce use. (AP Photo/Brittany Peterson, File) The Colorado River flows at Horseshoe Bend in Glen Canyon National Recreation Area, Wednesday, June 8, 2022, in Page, Ariz. In Arizona, water officials are concerned, though not panicking, about getting water in the future from the Colorado River as its levels decline and the federal government talks about the need for states in the Colorado River Basin to reduce use. (AP Photo/Brittany Peterson, File) Water from the Colorado River diverted through the Central Arizona Project fills an irrigation canal, Aug. 18, 2022, in Maricopa, Ariz. In Arizona, water officials are concerned, though not panicking, about getting water in the future from the Colorado River as its levels decline and the federal government talks about the need for states in the Colorado River Basin to reduce use. (AP Photo/Matt York, File)New home construction encroaches dormant fields owned by Kelly Anderson, left, Aug. 18, 2022, in Maricopa, Ariz. Anderson grows specialty crops for the flower industry and leases land to alfalfa farmers whose crops feed cattle at nearby dairy farms. (AP Photo/Matt York, File)Boats move along Lake Powell along the Upper Colorado River Basin, June 9, 2021, in Wahweap, Ariz. In Arizona, water officials are concerned, though not panicking, about getting water in the future from the Colorado River as its levels decline and the federal government talks about the need for states in the Colorado River Basin to reduce use. (AP Photo/Ross D. Franklin, File) Tourists carry a kayak up a sandy hill Tuesday, June 7, 2022, in Page, Ariz. As Lake Powell levels drop, recreation is becoming tougher to access as boat ramps and marinas close. (AP Photo/Brittany Peterson, File)
TUCSON, Ariz. (AP) — Robbie Woodhouse’s grandfather began nearly a century of family farming along the Gila River near Yuma in the middle 1920s when he dug up a bunch of mesquite stumps on his land to make way for his barley, wheat, Bermuda seed, cotton and melon fields.
Farming never really took off at the Woodhouse homestead until 1954, when the federal government finished a 75-mile-long concrete canal to bring Colorado River water to what’s now known as the Wellton-Mohawk Irrigation and Drainage District, which covers about 58,500 acres along the Gila River east of the Colorado.
Today, Woodhouse presides over the governing board of a district with more than 120 individual growers, partnerships, trusts and other operating entities growing about 100 different crops, including seed crops as well as staples like wheat, cotton, lettuce and other produce. Wellton-Mohawk is one of six agricultural districts in the Yuma area that together grow 90% of the cauliflower, lettuce, broccoli and other winter vegetables sold in the U.S.
But now, the future of this district, of farming in the Yuma area in general and of Arizona’s second largest drinking water supply for urban residents are all mired in a sea of uncertainty. Due to a logjam in interstate negotiations for massive cuts in Colorado River water deliveries, farmers and urban users have no idea how much water use they’ll be ordered to cut, possibly starting next year.
All the Yuma area irrigation districts depend entirely on Colorado River water to nourish their crops. While groundwater does lie beneath many of the farm fields, its quality is uncertain or poor in many places.
“Obviously we’re very, very concerned,” said Woodhouse, whose 1,250 acres grow mostly produce, such as cauliflower, broccoli and lettuce. “Without the water, we don’t grow anything. But I wouldn’t say we are scared. We do feel an obligation to do our part.”
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EDITOR’S NOTE: This is part of a collaborative series on the Colorado River as the 100th anniversary of the historic Colorado River Compact approaches. The Associated Press, The Colorado Sun, The Albuquerque Journal, The Salt Lake Tribune, The Arizona Daily Star and The Nevada Independent are working together to explore the pressures on the river in 2022.
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Water officials of Arizona cities of Tucson, Goodyear and Scottsdale are also concerned and a little on edge although they’re not panicking. They are the most dependent of Arizona cities on river water delivered through the Central Arizona Project, a $4 billion, 336-mile-long canal system running from the river to the Phoenix and Tucson areas.
While all these cities have backup supplies, led by groundwater, to cushion them in the short- to medium-term in the event of river water cuts, their long-term picture is more uncertain because the CAP was extended into Arizona nearly 40 years ago precisely to get them off groundwater.
Arizona got about 36% of its total water supply from the river as recently as 2020. That share of river water feeding farms and cities has declined some since then, with the advent of a federally approved Drought Contingency Plan that will cut the state’s river water use by 21% starting in 2023. It’s expected to drop even further in the coming years but nobody knows how much right now.
The uncertainty was triggered first in June, when Reclamation Commissioner Camille Touton testified at a U.S. Senate Committee hearing that to stabilize the river’s declining reservoirs Lakes Mead and Powell, the basin states need to cut their water use by roughly up to 30% starting in 2023, and come up with a plan to do that by mid-August. If a plan doesn’t appear by then, she warned the federal government would impose its own, to “protect the system.”
But mid-August came and went with no agreement and no plan or timetable for a plan from the bureau. The bureau did say at an Aug. 16 news conference, however, that it was going to look closely at several measures such as modifying the Hoover and Glen Canyon dams so they can keep delivering water at lower elevations and counting evaporation of water from Lake Mead and the river against the Lower Basin’s total water supply, thereby reducing that supply by hundreds of thousands of acre-feet a year.
So now, Wellton Mohawk and the other irrigation districts are pushing a plan to cut one acre-foot of water used per acre annually, on 925,000 acres along the Lower Colorado River in Arizona and California. In return, they’re seeking $1,500 an acre-foot in compensation, or a total of $1.387 billion annually.
With that money, they’ll invest in water-efficient farming tools like drip irrigation, gradually switch to less thirsty crops from water-slurping alfalfa and weather economic losses from reduced water use, Woodhouse said.
“What we want to have happen is for each individual farmer to operate their farms in the matter that they want to operate and plant the crops that they feel they can maintain the fertility of their soils,” he said. “I’m sure it’s going to greatly change crop rotations and also change management practices of individual farmers, to exist on less water. It’s real important that those decisions be left to each individual farm.”
This proposal has been roundly criticized by urban water leaders, however. While saying farms must take the biggest water use curbs because they use 72% of Arizona’s water and close to 80% basin-wide, Central Arizona Project officials say the farmers’ price tag is unrealistically high and that whatever money is paid should be used strictly to modernize irrigation practices for the long term.
“Anytime anyone wants to sit down with us and talk about it, we’re more than willing to do so. But no one has been willing to discuss it,” countered Wade Noble, an attorney representing the Yuma-area irrigation districts. “Until we get to that point, our voluntary forbearance of a significant amount of the water we control will remain on the terms we put on the table. We’re not going to negotiate with ourselves.”
Where both Arizona farms and cities agree is that the other river basin states and the federal government haven’t moved fast enough to reduce water use.
“Reclamation has got to show some leadership and say this has got to be done and give us a guide map as to how the system is protected as the commissioner promised what it would be,” Noble said.
The CAP’s board president Terry Goddard and its previous president Lisa Atkins wrote a letter on Aug. 19 to Interior Secretary that made essentially the same point. To date, no written response from Interior has been forthcoming.
With no action forthcoming on a deal, some Arizona water users have pulled back on past commitments to leave water in Lake Mead to prop it up. The Tucson City Council, for instance, had pledged earlier this year to leave 30,000 acre-feet in the lake in 2022 and 2023 but has since backed off that pledge and voted to order its full allocation of 144,191 acre-feet for 2023 pending the negotiations’ outcome. The Gila River Indian Community withdrew an even larger commitment, to leave nearly 130,000 acre-feet in Mead next year. The CAP is holding onto 35,000 acre-feet it was going to leave in Mead and announced plans to remove another 18,000 acre-feet from the lake next year.
“Unfortunately, the community has been shocked and disappointed to see the complete lack of progress in reaching the kind of cooperative basin-wide plan necessary to save the Colorado River system,” said Gila River Indian Community Chairman Stephen Roe Lewis.
Until now, it’s left almost 600,000 other acre-feet of its CAP supply in Mead since 2016. In 2022 alone, CAP users and other Arizona Colorado River users left nearly 800,000 acre-feet in Mead, led by 512,000 acre-feet it legally had to leave there under the terms of the 2019 Drought Contingency Plan due to the lake’s falling levels. Arizona and California left another 268,000 acre-feet in the lake this year from what’s called the “500 Plus Plan,” which had sought a half-million acre-feet in voluntary contributions to the lake, but projections for next year show more water will be removed from the lake under that plan than will be left in it.
Many Arizona cities using river water are preparing for the inevitability they’ll have to use less. In Goodyear, in the Phoenix area’s West Valley, whose population is about 101,000, the city has recharged about half of its annual CAP supplies into the ground for several years. It’s also been recharging treated sewage effluent into the ground, and has stored a total of seven years’ supply of both sources. It anticipates no short-term problems in delivering water to customers, said Ray Diaz, Goodyear’s water resources and sustainability manager.
Colorado River shortfalls aren’t going to affect what the city does now but could in the future.
“What would happen if we were shorted and had to continue our approved development?” said Diaz. “It’s something we would have to look into and really assess what we could afford for the future — how much water we can provide.”
In Scottsdale in the Phoenix area’s East Valley, CAP supplies about 70% of the water for its 250,000 residents. Most is delivered directly to homes and businesses rather than recharged. If the city had to sustain a large cut in CAP supplies, it would have to rely much more heavily on groundwater, said Gretchen Baumgardner, the city’s water policy manager.
It has stored about 230,000 acre-feet of CAP water and treated sewage effluent in the ground — about 2.5 years worth of its current supply — but town officials don’t want to use it all at once, Baumgardner said. It also gets about 15% of its supply from Salt and Verde River surface supplies, delivered by the quasi-public utility the Salt River Project.
“There will be a larger portion of groundwater” used in the future, said Baumgardner, adding that city officials won’t know how much until they learn how drastic the cuts in CAP deliveries will be.
The city is also looking to extend its supply further. Its wastewater treatment plant in North Scottsdale operates a pilot project to treat a small amount of effluent to exceed state drinking water standards, a process called “direct potable reuse.” The city is working with the State Department of Environmental Quality to help set up new state regulations that would allow the plant to reuse its wastewater for drinking on a larger scale.
But when asked if a “Day Zero” could ever arrive in which Scottsdale failed to meet all residents’ demands for water, Baumgardner replied, “It’s just one of those uncertainties right now. That will really be hard to answer,” in part because of a pending effort by federal officials to overhaul its guidelines for operating its reservoirs — an effort that won’t be finished until 2026.
In Tucson, officials of the Tucson Water utility are more optimistic about their ability to survive major CAP cuts. The utility about 40 years ago signed up to take almost a third more CAP water than it needs today to serve the 735,610 customers living inside and outside city limits. That’s allowed it to store nearly five and a half years worth of CAP in large, recharge basins — water that can be pumped when needed during CAP shortages later. The utility also has access to a huge aquifer lying under a large expanse of former farmland northwest of the city that it bought and retired in the 1970s. It also is regularly recharging and storing underground large amounts of partially treated effluent that can be pumped later for drinking.
But there is one cautionary note. A recent Bureau of Reclamation study found that as the Southwest’s climate warms up, runoff of melting snows into rivers and washes surrounding the city is likely to decline, meaning less water will be replenishing its aquifer than in the past. That would increase the possibility that groundwater pumping in place of CAP water use could put increased pressure on the aquifer, triggering higher pumping costs and more likelihood of subsidence in which the ground collapses, possibly triggering fissures.
Ultimately, the story of CAP water in Arizona is a story about groundwater, added Kathryn Sorensen, a researcher for Arizona State University’s Kyl Center for Water Policy. When there’s less Colorado River water delivered to Arizona, the cities, farms and other users fall back on groundwater, she said.
“We are very blessed to have plentiful aquifers in central Arizona we can fall back on,” Sorensen said while noting they are fossil aquifers, meaning water entered them thousands of years ago and they are not easily replaced.
“If we pump them and are unable to replenish the pumping, the aquifers will pay the price,” she said.
David Segal and José Bautista – September 10, 2022
A variety of olive oils at a shop in the town of Úbeda, in Spain’s olive oil producing province of Jaén, Aug. 26, 2022. (Emilio Parra Doiztua/The New York Times)
EL MOLAR, Spain — The branch, plucked from one of thousands of trees in a densely packed olive grove in this village, has browning leaves and a few tiny, desiccated buds that are bunched near the end. To Agustín Bautista, the branch tells a story, and the story is about a harvest that is doomed.
Typically, those buds are green and healthy, and can produce 13,000 gallons of olive oil in a season. That is more than enough for Bautista, a 42-year-old with a booming voice and close-cropped red hair, to support his wife and two young kids. Starting in October, when olives are shaken from the trees and gathered in nets on the ground, he’ll be lucky to produce one-fifth of that amount.
“I’m going to lose money,” he said, in the resigned tone of a man squarely in the acceptance stage of grief. As he looked around the arid acres of his property, he summed up the reality facing Spain’s olive farmers: “No water, no future.”
Drought has ravaged dozens of crops throughout Europe: corn in Romania, rice in Italy, beans in Belgium, and beets and garlic in France. Among the hardest hit is the olive crop of Spain, which produces half of the world’s olive oil. Nearly half of Spain’s output comes from Jaén, a landlocked southern province of 5,200 square miles, about the size of Connecticut, that yields far more olive oil annually than all of Italy, according to the International Olive Council. It is often called the olive oil capital of the world.
Farmers and political leaders are now searching for answers to a pressing question: What happens to a one-crop economy when that crop is scorched by record-breaking temperatures?
This has never been much of a tourist destination, but those who come, mostly to see Moorish fortresses and Renaissance-style cathedrals, are treated to a landscape unlike any other. Sixty-seven million olive trees are planted on every hill and valley, alongside every highway and road, in every direction. It has been called the largest man-made forest.
Since the Romans began planting this forest centuries ago, olive trees have sustained thousands of farmers and itinerant workers here. The trees thrive in a Mediterranean climate and need a minimal amount of rain. But not this minimal. Europe is suffering through its worst drought in 500 years, says the European Drought Observatory, a service run by the European Commission’s Joint Research Center, and is experiencing heat waves so severe that the nearby city of Seville gave one of them a name — Zoe — the way hurricanes and tropical storms are named in the United States.
The morning that Bautista studied the withered olive tree branch, he was sweating in heat that was already headed above 100 degrees by 11 a.m. As he drove his Toyota pickup truck around the 5,000 trees that he cultivates in a grove beside this tiny village where he grew up, he was already ruing lost profits. He and other farmers expect that the olive crop of Jaén will be about 50% smaller than last year. Government estimates of lost income now stand at $1 billion.
“The situation is critical,” said Francisco Reyes Martínez, president of the Provincial Council of Jaén. “A lot of people here are going to struggle.”
The harvest is just the latest setback for the hundreds of villages that dot Jaén and have relied for decades on the olive crop. El Molar has one bar, one church, no restaurants and an official population tally of 237.
“I think the actual number is closer to 200,” said the village mayor, Misericordia Jareño. “Some people have died.”
There were 1,000 people here when she moved to El Molar as a girl of 10, back in 1963. The place did not have a single paved road, and homes lacked running drinking water. But it had a high school, its own cuisine — she urged a visitor to return for dinner and try her gachamiga, a dish of olive oil, garlic, salt, water and wheat flour — and a sense of community that has endured even as the place slowly emptied.
Many remaining residents are fourth- or fifth-generation farmers who can trace their holdings back more than 100 years. They have an attachment to the business that transcends facts and figures, tiptoes into romance and bursts with civic pride. Oil from here winds up in dozens of varieties sold around the world, many of which can be purchased online directly from local mills.
The landscape has inspired some of Spain’s greatest poets (Miguel Hernández, Antonio Machado), singers (Juanito Valderrama) and painters (Rafael Zabaleta). Now the groves are turning up on social media. One Jaén farmer who has 1.7 million followers on TikTok makes gargantuan sandwiches, all generously slathered with olive oil.
With a nudge from the local government, a nascent olive oil tourism industry, dubbed oleoturismo, is starting to grow. There are spas with olive oil treatments and specialty shops, like Panaderia Paniaceite, that sell dozens of varieties of olive oil. One almazara, as traditional mills are known, offers olive oil tastings like wine tastings at a vineyard. Visitors can also spend a day working and living as an olive farmer, meals included, for 27 euros (about $27).
“It was a surprise to us, the amount of interest there is in seeing how we produce olive oil,” said José Jiménez, co-owner of the mill, Oleícola San Francisco, in a village called Baeza. “We’ve already had 50,000 visitors from 78 countries.”
Tourism will never offset losses in the fields nor thwart a variety of tectonic shifts that go far beyond the weather. A harvest that once took tens of thousands of people, including a massive influx of seasonal migrant workers, now requires a fraction of manpower because so much of the work is now done by machines. Most notably, there is the vibradora, a hand-held, gasoline-powered device — it looks like a chain saw with a very long, thin snout — that shakes olives out of trees by clamping onto branches and rattling them.
A person armed with a vibradora can shake 1,500 kilograms (about 3,300 pounds) of olives to the ground in a day. Using the traditional slap-it-with-a-stick technique, the number is closer to 200 kilograms a day.
That is one reason El Molar has been shedding population; far fewer people are needed for the harvest. And those still toiling in the groves face higher costs, especially now that inflation is over 9% in the eurozone, raising the price of electricity, fuel, fertilizer and labor.
“The cost of producing olive oil is now two or three times as expensive as it was 10 years ago,” said Juan Carlos Hervás, a farmer and expert with the local branch of a farmers union. He laid out the math: A liter of extra-virgin olive oil, the highest grade, now fetches 3.90 euros, well above the 1.8 euros per liter that was the going rate before the pandemic. But the price of harvesting that liter has gone up by 2.40 euros.
“We’re losing money now,” Hervás said. “For the first time in many years we’re seeing a good price for olive oil, but our costs are going up and it hasn’t rained in three months.”
Without expensive irrigation systems to water trees, many are fruitless. During Bautista’s drive through the groves of El Molar, there was a clear dichotomy: Trees that were quenched from a nearby reservoir, using many miles of black tubing, looked healthy and green. Those that were not were brown and barren.
“Eight liters per hour, for eight hours, one night a week,” said Bautista, explaining how much each tree is watered. That water is expensive, and farmers here need to buy a share of a reservoir cooperative, created in 2001, to access it. Many decided long ago to save their money, betting that rain would do the job for free.
That bet has never looked more catastrophic, although the portents were evident 15 years ago. José Felguera, the secretary of Asolite, a nonprofit association of olive tree farmers, said that in the mid-aughts, he and colleagues met with climatologists from Galicia, Spain, to pose a question: Why was there less and less rain?
“We saw lot more airplanes flying overhead, so we thought it had something to do with planes,” said Felguera, sitting near a public swimming pool in Arquillos, the village where he lives. “The climate scientists said that the planes had nothing to do with it.”
Felguera, who grew up in Arquillos, remembers two or three snowfalls a year as a child and creeks that were frozen so solid during winter that a rock couldn’t break the ice. Now, winters are dry and short, which he says is even more damaging to olive trees than torrid summers.
“These are trees made for dry weather, and periods of drought have been around forever,” he said. “But now the droughts are stronger and longer.”
Subsidies from the European Union have been essential to the olive farmers in Jaén for years. Currently, the rate is roughly 690 euros a year per hectare, said Juan Vilar Hernández, an agricultural analyst and professor at the University of Jaén. Given that the average farmer owns 1.58 hectares — about 4 acres — the average subsidy is roughly 1,090 euros a year.
“If you removed subsidies, about 80% of the farmers in Jaén would lose money,” he said. The subsidy is set to decrease in coming years, which alarms many farmers. One long-term solution is for farms here to embrace “modern oliviculture,” which means packing more trees into the same physical footprint, and then using additional industrial equipment during the harvest.
For much of Jaén, however, that isn’t possible. Most of its groves are on sloping hills where expensive new machines like olive harvesters — essentially, massive $500,000 tractors that drive over 14-foot trees — can’t operate. Inevitably, Jaén is going to lag in productivity compared with groves in California, Chile, Australia and elsewhere, Hernández said. The province may always be synonymous with olive production, but in the future it will be a competition that the province can’t win.
“The average age of an olive farmer here is 60,” he said. “And their children are all moving to cities. So in 20 years, no one is going to live in these villages.”
Luis Planas, Spain’s agriculture minister, said in an interview that the country needed to adapt to new conditions. He outlined a number of steps the government has already taken to provide short-term relief, including tax breaks and an increase in employment benefits. The goal is to save and sustain more than an industry.
“If villages like El Molar disappear, Spain will lose a very important part of its identity,” he said. “If the olive grove disappears, that area will become a desert.”
One recent Friday evening, El Molar ignored the weather and the laws of market economies arrayed against it and gathered for its annual summer fiesta. It had the feel of a family reunion, and included more than a few Bautistas, including a reporter of this story, who is Agustín’s cousin. Not much happened before about 11 p.m., when a brass band with a drummer noisily marched up the main street, playing a kid’s song, “Soy una Taza.” Beer and tortillas were sold at a pop-up restaurant and bar while children caromed around a bouncy castle set up nearby.
Many gathered under white tents set up in the village square. A few recent college graduates were on hand and rhapsodized about growing up here.
“My childhood was beautiful,” said Mario Romero, who was celebrating his 25th birthday. “When I was young, my parents taught me how to work in the olive trees and how to love this way of life.”
He liked being in nature, repairing broken equipment and having a sense of self-sufficiency. But he studied to be a teacher, and there is no longer a school for children older than 11 in the village. Like a lot of his friends, he won’t settle in El Molar because it lacks any opportunities aside from olive farming. That said, it will always be a part of his life. His parents still own 600 olive trees, and he has no intention of selling even one when he inherits them.
“I’d like to buy more,” he said. He imagines having children someday, and even if they never want to farm for a living, he wants to teach them how it is done. “The way my parents taught me.”
About midnight, a DJ showed up and started playing dance music at a tinnitus-inducing volume. As if on cue, the wind picked up, napkins started swirling in the air and to everyone’s collective delight, it started to rain, lightly at first.
An elderly woman named María la de Ricardo walked by, smiling.
“It is not normal to have rain in August,” she said. “But I was praying for it, and God listened.”
By then, it started to pour and everyone scurried for cover to watch the deluge.
