Category: Politics and American Democracy

Mark Bittman’s warning: the true costs of our cheap food and the American diet

Mark Bittman’s warning: the true costs of our cheap food and the American diet

Oliver Milman in New York                        April 25, 2021

 

The global, industrialized food system faces increasing scrutiny for its environmental impact, given its voracious appetite for land is linked to mass deforestation, water pollution and a sizable chunk of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions.

The implied trade-off has been that advances in agriculture have greatly reduced hunger and driven societies out of poverty due to improved productivity and efficiencies. But Mark Bittman, the American food author and journalist, argues in his new book Animal, Vegetable, Junk that these supposed benefits are largely illusionary.

In a sweeping deconstruction of the history of food, spanning the past 10,000 years of organized agriculture, Bittman takes in everything from Mesopotamian irrigation to the Irish famine to the growth of McDonald’s to posit the rise of uniformity and convenience in food has mostly benefited large companies, fueled societal inequities and ravaged human health and the environment. Al Gore, the former US vice president, has called the book a “must-read for policymakers, activists and concerned citizens looking to better understand our food system and how to fix it”.

The Guardian spoke to Bittman about the book – his comments are edited for length and clarity.

Many people will know you for the cookbooks you’ve written. This is quite a departure, isn’t it?

I think it is the most important piece of work I’ve done. I guess the obituary writers decide that or something. I don’t know. But How to Cook Everything was really important to me and my career. And obviously, it’s done very well. But this was the book I wanted to write, I think, for the last 20 or even 30 years. I can’t imagine doing anything bigger or more important.

You say that the advent of organized agriculture could be one of the most disastrous things we ever did. Why is this?

Jared Diamond is, I think, the first guy to say the agricultural revolution is not all peaches and cream. The population 10,000 years ago was a fraction of what it is now. Agriculture has enabled billions of people to have been alive, and be alive, than would be possible without agriculture. So if you think that’s beneficial, that’s really great.

On the other hand, one could argue that the quality of life did not go up, but went down when agriculture became common. And you could certainly argue that agriculture is damaging to the environment, the public health and so on right now. But that is fixable. It’s changeable. So, I don’t think you could say agriculture, which just means growing food or growing stuff, is a bad thing. It’s just what do we make of it?

The book contains quite a harsh critique of how free market capitalism has caused great problems in our food systems.

Yes. We should qualify, so called free market capitalism, since it’s socialism for big corporations and dog-eat-dog for everybody else or whatever. Yeah, there’s a zillion examples in the book and elsewhere of capitalism and its impact on agriculture. You could certainly argue that agriculture, agriculture slavery and capitalism are all tied together. And that’s something that developed from the 15th to the 18th century.

The fallout includes famine, doesn’t it?

The Irish famine was the first well known one and I guess you could say the first politically caused famine as opposed to more environmentally caused famine. They’re all complicated, but the Irish potato famine can definitely be laid at the feet of the English who had converted most of Ireland’s peasant farmland into grazing lands for both animals, the meat of which was destined to be sent over the Irish Sea.

And then followed famines in Bengal and in West Africa. Of course, Stalin and Mao’s famines, it’s not all the UK’s fault. The famines of Stalin and Mao are very much politically induced. They were about a lack of food, but how they were treated was very much political. Stalin wanted to erase the peasants, Mao wanted to erase the landlords. And they were both successful to some extent. They used food as a weapon.

Corn and soybeans grow on a farm near Tipton, Iowa.
Corn and soybeans grow on a farm near Tipton, Iowa. Photograph: Scott Olson/Getty Images

 

So where did we go wrong with food?

There was a time that almost everyone farmed and grew food for themselves and their neighbors and or trade, local trade and so on. But at some point, surplus became more important than feeding people. Growing food, or growing crops in order to sell them and make money became more important than growing crops to feed people.

And that process accelerated since 1500, or whenever you want to say capitalism began. To the point where, in the States at least, 95% of crops are basically grown as cash crops. And the question is almost never ‘What is the land telling us we want to grow? What can we grow that will be most beneficial for our community? What can I grow that’s most nutritious that will damage the land as little as possible?’ Those are not questions that are being asked.

Growing food, or growing crops in order to sell them and make money became more important than growing crops to feed people

The questions that are being asked or the question that’s being asked is ‘How can I make the most money possible with this land?’ Sometimes that means just selling the land for development. But often, it means growing one crop at a time. And it’s a crop that’s either directly or indirectly subsidized, like corn or soybeans. And it’s a crop that mostly goes into junk food or animal feed, or even ethanol, which is obviously not food at all.

I really think the enclosure of the commons was a big deal. When the nobility started dictating to peasants what should be grown and how it should be sold and to whom it should be sold. And peasants began to run out of land to grow food for themselves and their families. That was one of the driving factors in the industrial revolution. And we’ve just seen that accelerate.

So if we fast forward to the current situation in the US, how has this history influenced what people eat today?

One of the most damning statistics is that close to 50% of the food that’s available is in the form of ultra processed food. So ultra processed food is what I call junk food. What many of us call junk food. And it means food that contains non-food ingredients; food that your grandmother, great grandmother, maybe at this point wouldn’t have recognized as food.

Food that you can’t cook yourself. Food that you don’t find in your own kitchen in the normal course of cooking and eating. A food that didn’t exist before the 20th century.

The counter-argument to this is often ‘There is so much choice now, why not just choose a healthier option,’ isn’t it?

It’s important to recognize that because ultra processed food is cheap and it’s fast and it’s widely available; people without time and without money, are more likely to buy that kind of food. But everybody eats junk food. And it also poisons the environment for everybody.

The answer is to increase the availability and affordability of real food. It’s not let’s make better personal choices, because they go back to that statistic. And that’s why I think it’s so important that you can only buy, you can only eat what there is. Since actually no one is growing food, we’re all on the market. And if the market is 50% junk food, that’s what people are eating.

This system of food has proved very successful in establishing itself, hasn’t it?

The American diet, which we have to take full responsibility for, is spreading worldwide. It’s spreading worldwide because it’s profitable for big food. It absolutely is engineered to taste good. It hits the pleasure centers in your brain and it stimulates dopamine and so on. If it’s not, strictly speaking, addictive in the way that caffeine or opiates are addictive, it’s very, very close.

The sun rises over chicken houses on a farm in Virginia.
The sun rises over chicken houses on a farm in Virginia. Photograph: Steve Helber/AP

 

What do we need to do differently?

We really have to change agriculture what we’re growing and make a real effort to grow real food. Transport real food, market real food. Have farmers who steward the land. All of those cliches.

But on the other hand, we have to make sure that people have the income or the ability to buy real food. We have a choice. We are subsidizing junk food. It may well be that as societies grow, as populations grow, as societies become more technologically inclined, that it may be that food agriculture just is an expensive enterprise. And needs to be supported by government. It needs to be subsidized.

But we do have a choice between whether we subsidize bad agriculture or subsidize good agriculture. Whether we subsidize the production of junk food or subsidize the production of fruits, vegetables, nuts and seeds.

The world is going to have a population close to 10 billion people by the mid-point of this century and those who support the intensification of monocultural farming say this will be the only way to feed this number of people. What is your response to that?

No one’s asking us to feed them. In many cases, people are just asking us to leave them alone. So that, in a way is a PR ploy for big ag: “We need to increase yield forever, so that we can feed the world.” But the world does not want us to feed them. The world wants us to stop stealing their land and stop poisoning them and so on. At least, that’s my perception of the world.

Cheap food has had a terrible impact on public health. As every country switches from a traditional diet to a more American diet, their rates of chronic disease go up. And yet we cannot get government to consider this a crisis

As for producing cheap food that Americans can afford, yeah, that’s a trade off. That’s an industrial revolution era trade off. Workers were paid, it was assumed that women’s labor was free. So you didn’t have to pay workers enough to worry about child care or cooking or any other domestic chores. And then if you made food cheap, you could pay them even less.

So that was a trade off of the early Industrial Revolution. But there’s a price for cheap food. And the price is not only environmental damage and heavy resource use. There are other prices as well. But the one I want to focus on just this moment is the public health costs.

And if you look at a chart of health care costs versus food costs, it’s perfect like this. As food costs go up, healthcare costs go down. And as food costs go down, health care costs go up. So cheap food, that’s a direct correlation. Cheap food has had a terrible impact on public health. As every country switches from a traditional diet to a more American diet, their rates of chronic disease go up. In every single instance. And yet we cannot get government to consider this a crisis.

So we are paying for the food one way or the other, sometimes with our health.

Yeah, exactly. The society is paying the costs. Just like every aspect of food that you want to examine carefully has hidden costs. Economists call them externalities. Hidden costs that aren’t included in the cost of the product. So, Walmart pays its workers badly, you get cheap stuff at Walmart, including food.

Related: One in four faced food insecurity in America’s year of hunger, investigation shows

And some huge percentage of those workers are on food stamps. You’re also paying for those. You’re subsidizing Walmart employment costs. It’s not just cash, we’re paying with our own health.

What does an alternative to this look like?

I’m not saying we have to go from industrial farming back to farming the way it was in the 1600s by any means. But I’m saying there are steps we can take to reduce the use of pesticides. To make life better for farmers, to improve the quality of soil. To remove antibiotics from the food supply. To teach our children what real food is and so on down the line.

I think some limits on marketing junk food to children, along with teaching children where food is from and what food is about is really important. Because if you’re going to allow marketers to target kids, they will convince them that Tony the Tiger is their friend and that Coke is the best beverage to drink. And that McDonald’s is the most fun place to eat.

If you’re going to let kids become convinced of that then you’re going to have generation after generation of adults who were saddled with food preferences that are dictated by big food. And we all know how difficult it is to change our food preferences. We all know that. Especially in the last year, everybody saw that: “I’m so scared of Covid. I’m so bored with being locked up. I’m going to order in pizza and have ice cream.” Or whatever their favorite childhood food is, we would all turn to that. I saw this in myself and everybody I talk to sees it in themselves.

So, we have to raise generations of healthy children if we want generations of healthy adults. But that means making good food available, affordable to everybody.

  • Animal, Vegetable, Junk by Mark Bittman is published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Why young people of color are leading the fight to save planet Earth

Why young people of color are leading the fight to save planet Earth

Beth Greenfield, Senior Editor                                
Youth activists on the frontlines of climate-change justice include, clockwise from top left: Kevin Patel, Amy Quichiz, Wanjiku

 

As we head into Earth Day 2021 — the 51st anniversary of the worldwide environmental movement, on April 22— one of the best ways to find motivation and inspiration in the fight to save our planet might be to look toward those who are leading the charge: a diverse array of youth activists who understand that the only way to see and advocate for climate-justice issues is through an intersectional lens.

That means “taking account the dimensions of gender, socioeconomic class and race that all ultimately influence how one relates to and experiences the effects of climate change,” explains Aalayna Green, 22, co-environmental education director for Black Girl Environmentalist, a “supportive community of Black girls, women and nonbinary environmentalists.” Understanding those dimensions, Green tells Yahoo Life, “ensures that any climate change activism isn’t going to be automatically catered to one type of person in society.”

Historically, the environmental movement has been a very white one — at least on its face, due in part to a “long-running perception that people of color don’t care about the environment, or don’t have the skills and academic backgrounds for these jobs,” environmentalist Dorceta Taylor, a Yale School for the Environment professor, said in a 2014 interview. That perception “has been debunked for just as long,” according to Taylor, whose landmark 2014 report “The State of Diversity in Environmental Institutions: Mainstream NGOs, Foundations, and Government Agencies,” and a more recent update, called for action on the issue. (See just a tiny sampling of pioneering BIPOC environmental activists in the interactive XR, below.)

Just this week, Taylor and a slew of other environmental experts and a diverse array of young activists came together for the fourth annual New Horizons in Conservation Conference, presented by Yale, to discuss the status of equity and inclusion within the field of conservation. “The media tends to focus attention on climate activism on young white activists in the U.S. and Europe,” Taylor tells Yahoo Life vie email, but the conference “demonstrates that young students of color are engaged in climate activism and are interested in being a part of the solution… Many speakers drove the point home that the climate movement, conservation, and the broader environmental movement cannot be successful if white leaders, policymakers, practitioners do not collaborate with communities and activists of color.”

The event has served to highlight the new force of activists, expanding the understanding of who is affected by climate change and who is actively fighting against it.

“I think BIPOC youth, and youth in general, are leading the movement now,” says James Munn, an environmental organizer since 1990 and now the national campaign director for Greenpeace, which just released a new report, “Fossil Fuel Racism,” elucidating how fossil fuels disproportionately harm Black, brown, indigenous and poor communities. “I don’t think that was necessarily true before,” Munn tells Yahoo Life, “although not because there weren’t Black or indigenous POC youth involved in local fights, but because there was a huge separation between mainstream organizations and the local efforts.”

He adds, “We live in a white supremacist society, and organizations mirror the society they’re in. Hopefully, now we’re mirroring the changes that are happening in society.” That would make sense, he says, when taking into account today’s biggest issues and who they most affect.

“When you look at the current existential crises for humanity, you have racial injustice, inequality — with some making billions throughout the pandemic while many are struggling to just have enough food — and climate change,” Munn says. “And we have BIPOC youth often at the intersection of all three…so they can speak to all of it in a way that others couldn’t speak to it in the past.” And just being young, he adds, is an asset for these activists. “They feel invincible, and you need that to go against Trump or Bezos or Chevron, Exxon, and go, ‘OK, they have a lot of power, but we’re going to outlast and outthink them. We can do it.'”

To mark Earth Day this year, Yahoo Life is amplifying those voices by profiling just a handful of the ever-growing force of bright young activists who are approaching climate justice from an intersectional perspective. In our series of profiles, you’ll meet Wanjiku “Wawa” Gatheru, founder of Black Girl Environmentalist; Kevin Patel, founder and executive director of One Up Action; Amy Quichiz, founder of Veggie Mijas; Nyaruout Nguany, co-founder of Maine Environmental Changemakers Network; Vic Barrett, a campaigner with Alliance for Climate Education; and Xiya Bastida, founder of Re-Earth.

“I think the youth movement is the most inclusive and diverse it has been,” Batista, 18, told Yahoo Life about Gen Z’s approach to climate-justice activism. “Re-Earth Initiative, for example, has activists in over 15 times zones, we translate our information to over six different languages. Our board includes people from almost every continent and we operate in a non-hierarchical way that actually listens to the whole body when it comes to what we’re going to do… In our own youth organizations, we’re modeling the world we want to see.”

Recycling in the U.S. Is Failing, But These 7 Cities Are Doing Things Right

EcoWatch – Recycling

Recycling in the U.S. Is Failing, But These 7 Cities Are Doing Things Right

Tiffany Duong                                    Apr. 21, 2021

Recycling in the U.S. Is Failing, But These 7 Cities Are Doing Things Right
Jacobs Stock Photography Ltd / DigitalVision / Getty Images.

 

The recycling industry in America is broken. With unsellable scrap materials and already-burgeoning landfills, many consider the entire industry confusing and complex, at best, and a lost cause, at worst. Nevertheless, some local governments are trying to address program shortfalls with various policies.

Over the last 20 years, as more and more scrap materials were diverted from landfills, recycling rates increased, RTS reported. Still, several factors have complicated and even stalled serious progress. First, the U.S. recycling program is less-than ideal. The single-stream system means that consumers put all recyclables (and anything else they hope can be recycled) into one bin. This has created “imperfect recycling habits” and general consumer confusion about what is and isn’t recyclable. It’s easier on the consumer, but the result has been a contamination rate of about one-fourth of U.S. recyclables, Columbia’s State of the Planet reported.

The mixed-stream of materials in residential bins is subsequently trucked to a waste management facility, where it is cleaned, separated and processed into saleable bales of plastic, aluminum, paper and cardboard. These are the actual products that recycling facilities sell to other countries or to companies for processing into eventual new products, a Miami recycling facility representative told EcoWatch. The more contamination that a batch of recyclables has, the harder and more expensive it is to clean. Higher contamination rates result in a lower price for the product. At some point, it becomes more economical to landfill contaminated batches of recyclables rather than clean them.

In 2018, China threw a wrench in the U.S.’s already-precarious system when it decided to stop accepting most recyclables from the rest of the world. The goods were often too contaminated for proper recycling and would end up in landfills, oceans or polluting the countryside. The U.S. had previously shipped over half of its plastics and paper recyclables to China, and loss of this market meant that recycling facilities had nowhere to sell the increasing amounts of recyclable trash being created daily.

Having been so reliant on the Chinese market and without a federal recycling program, this forced recycling facilities to give cities and municipalities two choices: pay more for recyclables to be processed or send them to the trash, The Atlantic and State of the Planet reported.

In the years since, some states and cities have tried to regulate and legislate their way towards a third option: waste management policies that could work.

Here are some of the innovative local recycling policies:

1. San Francisco

According to the EPA, the West Coast city diverts 80 percent of its waste from landfills – the highest rate of any major U.S. city. A city ordinance requires both residents and companies to separate their waste into three streams – blue for mixed recyclables, green for compostables (including food scraps, food soiled paper and yard waste) and black for trash intended for the landfill. The system helps to protect the integrity of recyclables and allows for the diversion of 80 percent of food waste into compost for local farmers and wineries.

San Francisco also enacted a variety of aggressive regulations to support its goal of zero waste by 2020, including bans on single-use plastic checkout bags and polystyrene to-go food containers, construction debris recovery requirements, mandatory recycling and composting at all events in the city, and a government-private industry partnership with the city’s waste removal company, Recology, to ensure that the latter will remain profitable while it gets the city to its zero waste goal, reported the EPA and Busted Cubicle.

2. Los Angeles

As of 2019, California’s other major city recycled almost 80 percent of its waste, Busted Cubicle reported. LA went from voting against recycling in the early 1960’s to having a goal of recycling 90 percent of waste by 2025 and 97 percent by 2030, RTS reported. Compelled by statewide goals for waste recovery and mandates for recycling, LA used related state grants to build up its recycling infrastructure and better public education surrounding recycling.

In a public-private partnership, the city collects curbside collection and transports it to private recycling facilities. Sub-programs include requiring restaurants to compost their scraps and giving companies tax breaks based on the amount they recycle, Busted Cubicle reported. The report estimated that the local recycling industry added $1.2 billion annually to LA’s economy.

3. Seattle

According to RTS and Busted Cubicle, forward-thinking Seattle adopted a mandatory food scrap recycling program in 2009, a zero-waste policy in 2010 and a mandatory commercial recycling program in 2013. In particular, the city hopes to eliminate landfilling and incineration of trash.

As of 2017, Seattle recycled 56.9 percent of its waste, with a goal to reach 72 percent by 2025. A three-year phase-in program for mandatory recycling allowed for better education of residents and creation of processes for effective enforcement, Busted Cubicle reported. Individuals are incentivized to reduce waste because, while recycling is collected for free, residents pay a per-bag fee for regular garbage, The New York Times reported. Individuals are further motivated to reduce waste because smaller trash cans incur a lower monthly rate for disposal. Penalties and even fines are levied against non-compliant residents. Private companies hired by the city to process trash are similarly “handsomely compensated” when they send less to landfills.

4. Boise

According to the city, 98 percent of Boise residents recycle, a credit to their extensive educational programs, Busted Cubicle reported. When China’s recycling ban disrupted the city’s recycling, Boise came back with an innovative recycling initiative for previously non-recyclable plastic films.

In partnership with Hefty® brand bags and Renewlogy, a company that converts plastics into diesel fuel, Boise encouraged residents to collect their plastic films in orange bags provided to them by the city, RTS reported. The lightweight plastics, which include grocery store bags, food packaging and even candy wrappers, are bagged and put into normal blue recycling bins for pickup. At local processing centers, they are sent to Renewlogy in Salt Lake City for conversion into a diesel fuel that has 75 percent lower carbon footprint than fossil fuels at one-third the cost, Busted Cubicle reported.

5. San Jose

Just south of San Francisco, the Bay Area hub committed to 75 percent waste diversion by 2013, zero waste by 2022 and zero landfill or incinerator waste diversion by 2040, Busted Cubicle reported. A three-way partnership for commercial waste management between the city and two private companies has been critical to San Jose’s success.

Republic collects recyclables and organics from more than 8,000 businesses in the city. It processes the former and sends the latter to Zero Waste Energy Development Company for processing into energy or compost, the news report said. Residential curbside recycling continues to improve through various sub-programs including street sweeping, curbside junk pickup and cleanup events.

6. Denver

Colorado’s capital city currently has a low diversion rate – 22 percent as of 2017 with a modest goal of 34 percent by 2020 – but it has an advantage in housing Alpine Waste & Recycling. This cutting-edge waste management company uses technology to simplify single-stream recycling even further. Rather than asking customers to correctly figure out what is recyclable, Alpine finds ways to increase what types of items can be recycled in Denver.

The company has paved the way in new processes to recycle materials that traditionally were confusing or impossible to recycle, including paper coffee cups, juice and milk cartons, styrofoam and large, rigid plastics, Busted Cubicle reported. Their new facility employs state-of-the-art technology to quickly process many tons of waste per hour.

7. New York City

As recently as January 2020, The New York Times reported on “7 Reasons Recycling Isn’t Working In New York City.” The metropolitan “lagged’ behind other major cities, only recycling around one-fifth of its trash, The Times reported. Reasons included lack of recycling and composting bins, political reluctance and fiscal challenges to implementing additional recycling policies and the local culture built around hyper-consumerism, Amazon deliveries and takeout food.

Despite these shortcomings, the big apple makes this list because of a new proposed bill hoping to force manufacturers to pick up the tab for recycling paper, plastic, glass and metal. The extended producer responsibility (E.P.R.) bill would compel manufacturers to pay for the end-waste their products produce, another New York Times article reported. This could incentivize companies to create more sustainable packaging and products to lower fees. The municipality could use collected fees to offset recycling expenses. Proponents could also write in an anti-price gouging provision to ensure manufacturers don’t pass the new costs onto consumers. The profits from such a program would be infused back into New York’s struggling recycling programs, with the goal of upgrading technology and even creating more jobs, The Times reported.

While ambitious and innovative, many of these local programs are still far from reaching their lofty goals. As they work to become sustainable and profitable, the global market for high-quality recycled materials is actually growing, State of the Planet reported.

For the U.S. to take advantage of this, domestic recycling processes must be reformed, the news report emphasized. Whether through better technology at facilities like in Denver and Boise, innovative public-private partnerships like in the three California cities or in precedent-setting legislation like in New York, cities must lead the way in order to modernize and save the U.S. domestic recycling industry.

Tiffany Duong is an avid ocean advocate. She holds degrees from UCLA and the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School and is an Al Gore Climate Reality Leader and student member of The Explorer’s Club.

She spent years as a renewable energy lawyer in L.A. before moving to the Amazon to conduct conservation fieldwork (and revamp her life). She eventually landed in the Florida Keys as a scientific scuba diver and field reporter and writes about the oceans, climate, and the environment from her slice of paradise.

Black neighborhoods in Kansas hard hit by property tax sales

Black neighborhoods in Kansas hard hit by property tax sales

Roxana Hegeman                            

 

Racial Injustice Tax Sales

The Black homeowners kept paying what they could toward the taxes while waiting to talk to a judge about a new payment agreement. Then she found out her house was up for auction online.

“We just felt like it was a scam, like they were trying to take our property and my husband said we felt like we were targeted, you know, because we are living in a predominantly Black neighborhood and they were doing everything they could to cause us to lose our house,” she said.

The Dotsons are among those in historically Black neighborhoods in Kansas City, Kansas, who risk losing their homes amid the pandemic as delinquent property tax sales resume under a practice critics decry as racist and government officials laud for revitalizing communities.

“It is a reverse redlining that is racist. And I don’t use that word a lot, but that is the only thing, I mean, it is classism and racism to socially and economically deprive people of color who live in a particular part or who have acquired a foothold in a particular part of Wyandotte County,” said state Sen. David Haley, a Black Democrat, who has tried to help some residents in his hometown keep their houses.

Officials with the Unified Government of Wyandotte County and Kansas City, Kansas, acknowledge delinquent parcels up for tax sale are predominantly in Black neighborhoods. The county — whose population of 165,000 is about 23% Black, 30% Latino and 40% white — typically has 2,200 properties for sale annually at its three tax auctions, far more than other large Kansas counties.

Wyandotte County says it auctions residential property as soon as the law allows — when taxes are three years behind. It says the goal is to put properties into “responsible hands” to improve the appearance of neighborhoods.

A lot of the properties don’t sell at auction, and the county then gets them through the Wyandotte County Land Bank, a public authority that now has about 3,500 properties — nearly all of them acquired through tax foreclosures.

Katherine Carttar, local director of economic development, said the county decided to be more proactive with delinquent property taxes about three years ago and to use the land bank more as a way to rebuild neighborhoods. At a virtual conference last year touting its successes, she showed slides featuring now-renovated homes and credited the program with raising property values and the county’s tax base.

Critics say Wyandotte County has a disproportionately high number of delinquent tax sales compared with the rest of the state, and that the effort deprives residents of hard-fought gains in communities that for generations have faced discrimination.

Wyandotte County, where 21% of residents live in poverty, has whole city blocks of foreclosed property for future redevelopment. Displaced property owners get no compensation, Haley noted.

Carttar says most properties in the land bank have been long abandoned. The upcoming online delinquent tax sale lists 43% of properties as vacant.

The practice comes against the national backdrop of a wealth gap between white and Black households. The “first rung of the wealth building ladder” is homeownership, said Chuck Collins, director of the Program on Inequality and the Common Good at the Institute for Policy Studies, a progressive research group.

Nearly 72% of white Americans owned their own homes in 2017, compared with just slightly more than 42% of Black families, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

“Here we are during a pandemic where the racial impact of the pandemic has not been equal. It has been disproportionately borne by Black and brown people and there is a huge risk of evictions and foreclosures coming out of the pandemic once the various moratoriums are lifted,” Collins said. “So it might be a time not to pursue aggressive tax sales.”

The two Black county commissioners who represent neighborhoods hard hit by the sales did not respond to interview requests from The Associated Press.

In the Dotsons’ case, Haley noticed that their house was on the auction list and alerted them. They went to pay the full $2,300 in delinquent taxes the day of the sale, but were told it was too late, Rozetta Dotson said.

They eventually got their home back — by paying back taxes plus legal fees for the attorney for the real estate company that had bought it. The total was $5,200.

Haley successfully warned another Black resident, Karen Pitchford-Knox, that the house where she’d grown up was on the auction block this January. When Pitchford-Knox’s mom died in 2016, she inherited the house as well as more than $5,000 in delinquent property taxes. She got behind on her payment plan after losing her job during the pandemic.

Pitchford-Knox had about two weeks to — as she put it — “beg, borrow and steal from Peter and Paul” the $1,000 for the taxes.

“I most definitely do feel they are targeting Black homes,” she said, noting she knew three other Black women whose homes were on auction lists. “I feel it is like Black female homeowners and Black seniors.”

‘All kinds of damage’: Blood samples show effects of wildfire smoke on human health

‘All kinds of damage’: Blood samples show effects of wildfire smoke on human health

Denise Chow, Steve Patterson and Bita Ryan       

 

When the San Francisco Bay Area experienced a record 30 consecutive days of worrisome air quality alerts in August and September, Mary Prunicki began taking blood samples from firefighters.

The sky had turned orange from nearby wildfires. Thousands of firefighters would spend months battling the blazes, which would eventually scorch more than 4 million acres and kill 31 people.

And the damage isn’t likely to have stopped there. Prunicki, director of air pollution and health research at Stanford University’s Sean N. Parker Center for Allergy and Asthma Research, is studying the blood samples to understand what wildfire smoke does to human health. It’s part of a growing body of work that illustrates how wildfire seasons made worse by climate change threaten not just immediate destruction but also long-term health.

Mary Prunicki labels a sample collected from a firefighter. (NBC News)
Mary Prunicki labels a sample collected from a firefighter. (NBC News).

 

She and other scientists are particularly concerned about a type of particulate matter in wildfire smoke known as PM2.5. These tiny airborne particles, about one-twentieth the width of a human hair, are especially dangerous because they can be breathed deeply into the lungs.

“The size of that particulate can, when you inhale it, go all the way to the base of your lungs and then cross over into your bloodstream,” Prunicki said. “Once it’s in the bloodstream, it can go to various organs and do all kinds of damage.”

Experts have said that in a warming world, devastating wildfires like the ones that tore across California, Oregon and Washington last year will be more common. Around the world, wildfire seasons have been starting earlier and lasting longer, becoming in some regions an almost year-round threat.

Blue Ridge Fire (Jae C. Hong / AP file)
Blue Ridge Fire (Jae C. Hong / AP file)

 

In addition to being more frequent, studies have shown that climate change is making the blazes more intense and destructive.

The results of Prunicki’s study are forthcoming, but a clearer picture is emerging of just how damaging wildfire smoke can be to humans, and scientists are sounding the alarm over a problem they say is only going to get worse with climate change.

“In the climate science community, we’ve been predicting these types of impacts for decades now,” said Tom Corringham, an environmental economist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego.

Corringham co-authored a study published last month in the journal Nature Communications that found that airborne particles in wildfire smoke can be several times more harmful to human respiratory health than other forms of air pollution, including car exhaust.

It’s not yet well understood why wildfire smoke is more harmful than other forms of ambient air pollution, although it is likely to have something to do with the chemical composition of what’s being burned, Prunicki said. Wildfires that engulf homes and other buildings, for instance, can be particularly dangerous because the chemicals in furniture, clothing and other everyday items are released. In some cases, the materials in firefighters’ protective gear can also release harmful particulate matter.

Tony Stefani, a retired San Francisco fire captain, knows the risks well. Stefani, who in 2006 founded the San Francisco Firefighters Cancer Prevention Foundation, was diagnosed with a rare form of kidney cancer. He recalled wondering whether his illness was somehow linked to his line of work.

Tony Stefani. (NBC News)
Tony Stefani. (NBC News)

 

“I knew there was definitely something wrong,” Stefani said. “And I thought there was a direct correlation between what I had and my exposures on the job.”

Many of his colleagues, Stefani said, accept that developing cancer is not a matter of if but when. Studies by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health have shown that firefighters are at higher risk of cancer and cancer-related deaths compared to the general population, but researchers want to know why — and how best to protect them.

Through his foundation, Stefani works to spread the word about early detection and prevention, but he’s also involved with scientific efforts such as Prunicki’s research to better understand how exactly wildfire smoke affects immune functioning and human health.

While firefighters are among the most vulnerable when it comes to smoke exposure, it’s not just those on the front lines battling blazes who are feeling the impacts of more frequent and intense wildfires.

Studies have observed increases in hospitalizations, particularly for respiratory conditions, during wildfire events. In their study, Corringham and his colleagues combed through 14 years of hospital admissions records in Southern California, analyzing them together with satellite data on wildfire smoke and wind.

The researchers discovered that an increase of PM2.5 pollution from wildfire smoke caused respiratory-related hospital admissions to increase by 1.3 percent to 10 percent. An increase in PM2.5 from other sources of air pollution, on the other hand, contributed to only a 1 percent rise in hospital admissions.

Their findings suggest air quality standards may need to take into account differences in toxicity between different forms of air pollution, said a co-author of the study, Rosana Aguilera, a postdoctoral researcher at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography.

“If there are different impacts of PM2.5 on health, depending on where this PM2.5 is coming from, then we should study that further and reflect that in standards and policies for air pollution,” she said.

A study published Wednesday in the journal JAMA Dermatology also found that wildfire smoke can exacerbate more than just respiratory conditions. Researchers at the University of California, San Francisco observed a rise in the number of patients visiting health clinics for eczema and other general skin concerns in November 2018, when the catastrophic Camp Fire raged in Northern California.

The scientists found that even short-term exposure to hazardous particulate matter in wildfire smoke can have consequences for skin health.

Mary Prunicki takes a skin sample from a firefighter to test for toxins. (NBC News)
Mary Prunicki takes a skin sample from a firefighter to test for toxins. (NBC News).

 

The studies of the health effects of wildfire smoke paint a concerning picture of a future in which climate change is expected to supercharge wildfire seasons.

That realization, Stefani said, makes his foundation’s collaboration with scientists all the more important, because science can help advocates push for safer working conditions and better public health measures.

“They’re the impetus for change,” Stefani said of the studies. “That is the reason that we know there’s a problem. When we have the scientific proof that something’s wrong and we have the numbers to show it, change can occur. And that’s really, really important.”

Struggling to Make a Profit, Fracking Investors are Searching for the Exit

DeSmog

Struggling to Make a Profit, Fracking Investors are Searching for the Exit

Banks and investors have given up on the U.S. fracking industry, which is bad news for current investors who waited too long to get out.
Justin Mikulka                         
 
Photos adapted by: Justin Mikulka

The outlook is increasingly bleak for oil and gas companies. The beginning of this year has seen the highest number of companies announce bankruptcy during the first quarter in five years. Eight oil and gas companies announced they were filing for bankruptcy during the first quarter of 2021.

Meanwhile, earlier this month The Financial Times noted that of 500 privately owned oil and gas companies in the U.S., 400 are losing money and unlikely to ever pay back their large debts. According to the Financial Times, the remaining companies are focused on a “last gasp” effort to look profitable to potential buyers in order to “secure a profitable exit.”

If they can’t secure a “profitable exit” that will help them pay back their debts, the most likely outcome is bankruptcy.

As Adam Waterous, head of the private equity group Waterous Energy Fund, told the Financial Times: “This business is broken. The industry is going through a multiyear process of wringing capital out of the sector, not bringing new capital in.”

Investors appear to be done with the fracking industry as they realize that the only people making money are the Wall Street banks and shale company executives. With investors losing interest in the fracking industry — and banks no longer interested in loaning money to fracking companies  —  there is a lack of new money available to prop up the struggling fracking business model.

The U.S. fracking boom has all the echoes of the U.S. housing and mortgage financing boom of the early 2000s — and this is bad news for the industry. It’s a trend that’s been lurking for years.

As DeSmog reported in 2018, quoting from The Big Short, a book about the lead up to the 2008 financial crisis: “All these subprime lending companies were growing so rapidly, and using such goofy accounting, that they could mask the fact that they had no real earnings, just illusory, accounting-driven, ones. They had the essential feature of a Ponzi scheme: To maintain the fiction that they were profitable enterprises, they needed more and more capital to create more and more subprime loans.”

Like the housing bubble, the fracking bubble continued despite huge losses because companies were able to borrow more money to keep producing oil — that they then sold for a loss.

As Michael Lewis, author of The Big Short, pointed out, to keep a Ponzi scheme going requires a constant influx of new money because there are no profits. When the new money sources dry up — the scheme collapses.

Shale Investors Looking for Greater Fools

An April article by Bloomberg reports that the business strategy for private shale company owners is to now “escape” the industry altogether.

These investor plans to escape the fracking business, however, require willing buyers — or as they are known in this part of the business cycle, “greater fools.” This is the idea that you can make money from overpriced assets because there will always be someone else, the fool, willing to buy it at an even higher, inflated price. However, if there are no willing buyers, these investors will find themselves “holding the bag” — essentially stuck with a worthless investment.

The fracking company owners looking to escape by selling their companies know the financial numbers better than anyone — that explains their urgency to get out. As the Financial Times noted, most of these companies have debts far greater than any future potential income, making bankruptcy a near certainty in the future.

Bankruptcy has been a popular approach for many big shale companies — like Chesapeake Energy and Whiting Petroleum — but the ability to emerge from bankruptcy requires banks agreeing to loan more money to the company. If that option is unlikely, the company’s assets will be sold off, which is another unattractive option at this point with 400 oil and gas companies finances and assets making them “unsaleable.”

This cycle of foolish buying and selling resulted in the housing crisis when there was no one to keep buying, and it appears to be happening now with the fracking industry. The housing crisis was preceded by the creation of a whole industry of “house flippers” who borrowed money to buy houses to then resell for a profit. And the same has been seen with fracking.

As DeSmog wrote in 2018 about fracking giant Chesapeake Energy, its business model involved flipping land leases for oil and gas production, more than actually producing oil and gas. This approach — where fracking management teams are in the business of flipping companies for big gains more than extracting fossil fuels — was widespread with shale companies and highly lucrative for executives.

The business of flipping assets requires that there always be a well-funded “greater fool” willing to pay for them. As the money is drying up for the fracking industry the scheme is being revealed and — like the 400 U.S. shale companies the Financial Times described as “unsaleable” — those left holding the bag now are likely to lose big.

The early days of the fracking boom saw some tremendous success stories with flipping fracking assets with one of the biggest being the sale of XTO’s natural gas assets to Exxon in 2009 for $41 billion. Eventually even Exxon’s CEO Rex Tillerson admitted the company “probably paid too much”; that deal is now viewed as one of the worst deals in the history of oil and gas, resulting in Exxon writing off at least $20 billion of the investment last year. However, it was a great price for the owners of XTO.

More recently, in February, Equinor decided to cut its losses with the U.S. shale industry and sold its Bakken assets for $900 million. That’s far less than what Equinor paid when it  first entered the Bakken in 2011 with an investment of $3.8 billion.

As these examples show, when everyone wants to escape a market, the usual outcome is very few do and those that do get out take huge losses.

The Return of Liar Loans

In January 2019, the Wall Street Journal reported that shale wells were not producing as much oil as the companies had promised investors. That article recounted a story from an oil industry conference where the idea that companies would properly estimate the potential future oil production brought a round of laughter from the conference attendees.

Why were fracking companies consistently overestimating the value of oil wells and reserves? “Because we own stock” was the answer from one conference attendee. This open admission that companies were lying about the value of their oil and gas assets to pump up their stock prices, combined with “lax corporate governance in the oil patch”, as a 2020 Reuters article describes, was a warning sign that the shale business was broken — and actively misleading investors.

One of the biggest problems behind the housing crisis were so-called liar loans. These were loans made to borrowers who lied about their income and assets to qualify as borrowers — even though the banks knew they were lying.

The same basic thing has happened with the fracking industry. In the oil business loans are based on a company’s reserves which refers to the amount of oil the company says they can produce from its assets. Banks lend against these assets in something known as reserve-based lending. What has happened in the fracking industry is that many companies may have been misleading about how much oil they can produce from their reserves.

Last year, DeSmog wrote about how reserve based lending for the fracking industry was a big problem. At the time, it was estimated that banks wrote off around $1 billion in reserve based loans for shale companies in 2019, exceeding their total losses for the past 30 years.

In December 2020, S&P Global wrote about the dim outlook for fracking companies and the banks that had loaned them money which included insights from Chris Holmgren, managing director for energy credit and risk management for Wells Fargo.

“The core reserve-based lending model began to break down. It became not successful in grasping the risks involved in shale development,” Holmgren said. “Lenders began to realize that they made decisions based on exaggerated potential.”

In the housing crisis they were liar loans. In the shale crisis they are “exaggerated potential” loans.

As expected, bankruptcies of shale companies are now on the rise in 2021 despite much higher oil prices. Just like many homeowners who borrowed money to buy houses they couldn’t afford based on their income, too many shale companies borrowed money to buy assets that will never produce enough income to pay back the money that was borrowed — even with higher oil prices.

In March, the CEO of Occidental Petroleum, Vicki Hollub, explained to attendees of leading oil industry conference CERAWeek that the economics of the shale industry were quite difficult when it came to producing profits.

“The profitability of shale,” she said, “is much more difficult than people ever realized.”

This fact is no longer a secret, which is why many fracking investors and banks are looking for a way to escape — but that escape seems unlikely.

Wells Fargo’s Holmgren described what could be the epitaph of the U.S. fracking revolution: “Banks are losing money and investors are stuck in investments they can’t get rid of.”

Justin Mikulka is a freelance writer and audio and video producer living in New York. Justin has a degree in Civil and Environmental Engineering from Cornell University.

Pesticides disrupt our hormones for generations

Pesticides disrupt our hormones for generations – even women whose grandmothers were exposed to the chemical have higher risks of obesity and breast cancer, scientists say

Julia Naftulin                      April 19, 2021
DDT spray toxic chemicals
An aerosol can, loaded with DDT, Dichloro-diphenyl-trichloroethane, is used here against flies. (AP Photo) AP

  • A new study found women whose grandmothers had DDT exposure are more likely to be obese and have early periods.
  • DDT was a widely used insecticide that’s been banned in the US since 1972.
  • Early onset periods are a risk factor for breast cancer and heart conditions.

There’s evidence that DDT, a pesticide previously used to kill insects like mosquitoes, is still wreaking havoc on human health four decades since the government banned it.

In 1972, Congress banned DDT, or dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane. Since then, evidence has emerged – first in wildlife and then in humans – that the pesticide left an enduring mark on health.

According to a study published April 14 in the journal Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers & Prevention, the granddaughters of people who were exposed to DDT while pregnant are more likely to be obese, have early-onset periods, breast cancer, high blood pressure, and diabetes.

To study the effects of DDT, researchers at UC Davis and the Public Health Institute in Oakland used archived blood samples from 15,000 women who were pregnant when DDT was still used. The researchers then worked with these women’s daughters and granddaughters, collecting their blood samples to see how DDT impacted them before they were born.

Researchers found that women in their 20s and 30s with grandmothers who were exposed to DDT are between two and three times more likely to be obese and two times more likely to have their periods start earlier than usual – around the age of 11.

Early-onset menstruation can lead to other health conditions later in life, like breast cancer, high blood pressure, and diabetes, according to the study authors.

“Even though we banned that stuff more than 40 years ago, people now walking the Earth – the granddaughters of those who were pregnant – were exposed,” Barbara Cohn told the LA Times. Cohn is director of the Public Health Institute’s Child Health and Development Studies, the institution that researched the 15,000 women who gave blood samples decades ago.

‘Forever chemicals’ are ruining reproductive abilities and overall health

This isn’t the first study to find chemicals’ lasting impact on human health.

An October 2007 study in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives found the daughters of pregnant women exposed to DDT were more likely to develop breast cancer. The researchers of the study also found children who had DDT exposure were five times more likely to develop breast cancer.

In addition to DDT, chemicals in plastics like water bottles are altering human reproductive abilities, Insider previously reported.

“It’s the full meaning of what a ‘forever chemical’ is – in some ways, that makes every chemical potentially ‘forever’ if it has the potential to do this,” Cohn told the LA Times.

Agriculture, human health and ecosystems at risk as Illinois’ climate is quickly changing, report shows

‘If you want a scary story:’ Agriculture, human health and ecosystems at risk as Illinois’ climate is quickly changing, report shows

Morgan Greene, Chicago Tribune                April 21, 2021

 

Illinois’ climate is swiftly changing,

In an extensive new report released Tuesday, the Nature Conservancy details how Illinois’ climate has transformed and looks forward to what more change might mean for the state’s agriculture, human health and already-stressed ecosystems.

“There’s a big message there that we need to be doing everything we can to prevent future climate change by mitigating our use of fossil fuels, particularly,” said Donald Wuebbles, a professor of atmospheric sciences at the University of Illinois, and one of the lead authors of the assessment. “For those things we can’t prevent, because there’s still going to be some change, we have to adapt to be resilient.”

Even after curbing carbon emissions to meet certain bench marks, the changes in Illinois by 2100 could be stark: average annual temperatures warming 4 to 9 degrees, a month of 95-degree or higher temperatures, 3 more inches of spring rain, more flooding, and compounding health risks from heat, waterborne pathogens and diseases carried by mosquitoes and ticks. Not to mention the mental strain of living through it all.

What’s happening in Illinois is part of the larger story of human activity driving a changing global climate. Last year tied for the warmest on record, according to NASA scientists. Since preindustrial times, concentrations of heat-trapping greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide have shot up, and the global average temperature has increased. The Paris Agreement aims to limit warming, preferably to 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit, a limit fast approaching.

Carbon emissions dropped during the pandemic, but carbon dioxide levels continued to climb.

“The climate of Illinois, like the rest of the country and the rest of the world, is changing and is changing rapidly,” Wuebbles said. “And that has serious repercussions on the people of Illinois.”

“If you want a scary story, that’s the story,” Wuebbles added. “And we need to be taking it seriously. We need to be doing something about it.”

Vulnerable communities

The health effects of climate change will depend on where you live; communities already disproportionately facing inequities, including low-income communities and communities of color, are likely to be harder hit, according to the report released Tuesday by more than 40 scientists and experts.

“The thing about climate change is that it really doesn’t leave anything untouched,” said Karen Petersen, climate change project manager at the Nature Conservancy. “It’s not just about temperature, or feeling hotter on a summer day, or having a rainier day. It’s about how those climate impacts, which we perceive as our daily weather, are going to impact how a farmer farms, or how someone deals with heat stress.”

In Illinois, increasing overall precipitation and heavier events are expected to intensify flooding.  Greater flooding risk may bring greater emotional stress, along with mold and waterborne disease. Additionally, dozens of Illinois health care facilities are located in flood plains, which may hinder access to care during floods.

According to a study referenced in the assessment that looked at flooding claims by county over a seven-year period, nearly all private insurance claims were in urban areas.

In Chicago, flooding has forced sludge into basements and unleashed swarms of sewer flies in nightmare scenarios. The burden is disproportionate, said Marcella Bondie Keenan, climate program director at the Center for Neighborhood Technology.

“You can see it on the ground in terms of neighborhoods that are being hit over and over again, places like Chatham for example,” Keenan said. “But also places like the Far Southeast Side.”

On the Southeast Side, it’s not just the basement backups, Keenan said, but also what’s being picked up along the way from industrial areas. And pollution concerns also connect to climate resiliency, Keenan said.

“Every time we make a decision around what to permit and how to develop, you’re either moving toward a climate safe future, or you’re moving further away from it,” Keenan said.

Climate change is likely to increase the total days with a dangerous heat index in Illinois and warmer weather can mean an increased risk of heat stroke. Cities including Chicago, blanketed in concrete and asphalt, also exhibit the “urban heat island effect” — warming more and staying warmer at night. If emissions rise, heat waves like the 1995 Chicago disaster that led to more than 700 deaths are expected to become more common.

Heat may also welcome some species north, including the yellow fever mosquito, which transmits dengue, and allow pests to bite for longer periods. Warmer winters may assist tick survival and mosquito population growth, leading to earlier and more circulation of West Nile virus.

Respiratory allergies and asthma attacks could be more frequently spurred by mold, pollution and pollen — which is likely to see an extended season. In Illinois, the assessment notes asthma is already high among African Americans, women and low-income communities.

“The normal that we understand now is going and is already shifting,” Petersen said. “It’s already happening.

‘A very resilient breed’

Jeff Kirwan, who serves on the board of directors for the Illinois Farm Bureau, farms corn and soybeans south of the Quad Cities in Mercer County.

Over the years, Kirwan said variability seems to have increased a bit, but it’s hard to assess. “We do seem to get more severe weather, more dynamic rainfalls, dryer spells,” Kirwan said. “The future, when you look into that crystal ball, it’s a whole bunch of uncertainty. … We don’t know. And so you just kind of adapt. And I think that’s what we’re good at, adapting to changes.”

The climate that Illinois farmers depend upon is changing, the assessment says, and farmers will be up against higher temperatures, increased soil evaporation, flash droughts — and stressed crops.

Illinois is among the top producers of soybeans and corn, which in part contribute to a more than $19 billion a year industry, according to the Illinois Department of Agriculture. The industry employs close to a million people, but farm operators have decreased to about 75,000 from 164,000 in 1959, while average farm sizes have more than doubled with technology developments, according to the Department of Agriculture.

It’s tough to predict how Illinois crops will react to a warming climate with much uncertainty ahead, the assessment notes, but even with a longer growing season, there are some challenges farmers might face.

Increased carbon dioxide levels may benefit soybean crops in the short term, but as drought and heat intensify, elevated levels may make things worse. Corn yields are likely to be reduced by 2050 and may be particularly vulnerable to warming nighttime temperatures. Some planting zones may shift north.

With increasing precipitation, a wet spring could delay planting. In 2019, among the wettest years on record , about 1.2 million acres of corn and soybeans went unplanted, the assessment notes. Wetter weather can also cause erosion, which can make soil less resilient to extreme weather.

Nuisances — weeds, pests and disease — may also become greater problems, requiring more applications of control measures, including pesticides.

These competing forces mean adapting will be necessary, but the assessment says farmers may be able to make up for some losses through technology advances and management tweaks.

Kirwan’s farm uses cover crops — which can assist in soil erosion — and other conservation measures. Adopting those practices was part of thinking about sustainability, water quality and nutrient management, Kirwan said.

“But also because it helps us preserve our asset and our legacy,” Kirwan said. “It’s not for everybody, and you’ll get differing opinions, but I think overall we try and do the things that are best for our operations and for our families.”

There have been discussions about climate in Illinois for years in the agricultural world, Kirwan said, and he’s still optimistic, especially as technology has developed.

“Farming, we are always dealing with challenges — weather challenges, insect challenges, governmental challenges,” Kirwan said. “Nothing’s ever going to stay the same, we know that.”

Weather disasters, and the existential threats climate change poses, can affect mental health, and the assessment notes farmers may be at an especially high risk as they face increasingly unpredictable and extreme weather.

To watch weather diminish a crop can take a mental toll, Kirwan said. “We don’t like to have to watch something that we put our hard-earned work into wither away.”

Still, Kirwan said, “Farmers are a very resilient breed — if we’ve made it this far.”

‘Things can warm up very quickly’

In Illinois, the average daily temperature has increased throughout most of the state in the last century by 1 to 2 degrees.

Nighttime minimum temperatures in some parts of the state have increased at three times the rate of daytime temperatures, leading to hot summer nights without relief, and also fewer freezing evenings in winter — the season that has seen the most warming. In some parts of the state, minimum winter temperatures have warmed by more than 3 degrees.

Daytime high temperatures have been kept at bay in part by increased precipitation, which increases soil moisture. Average annual precipitation has increased by 5% to as much as 20% in pockets of the state, and there are 40% more days with 2 inches of rain or more, while in recent decades extreme droughts have become more rare.

A warmer atmosphere holds more moisture, and heavier rains are likely to continue, especially in the north. But that balance may shift in coming decades, as temperatures increase and summer precipitation decreases.

“Once you dry out those soils, things can warm up very quickly,” said Jim Angel, a lead author of the report and a former state climatologist for more than three decades.

An exceptionally hot 1936 summer, with temperatures 4.5 degrees above a 30-year average, could become the norm.

And more extreme weather may become more likely — more exceptionally warm days, more intense rains and longer dry spells.

The assessment’s lower scenario model predicting the effects of climate change depends on a rapid retreat from fossil fuels and lower emissions overall, while in a higher scenario model, emissions continue to steeply rise.

Wuebbles, a former White House expert on climate science, said he thinks people can adapt to the lower end. “It’s the high scenario, or anything approaching the high scenario, that by the end of this century I think would be disastrous for humanity.”

The higher estimates for the state by the end of the century are difficult to imagine. In northern Illinois, for example, at the extreme end, the annual average temperature could increase from 49 degrees to as much as 63 degrees — a 14-degree jump.

“It’s not in the abstract,” Angel said. “We’re actually observing these changes taking place now and the projections are that not only are they going to continue, but in many cases become much more problematic moving on into the future.”

At a Tuesday morning news conference, Wuebbles said, “My big worry is getting to 2050 and having our grandchildren saying, what were they thinking back in 2020?”

Poverty soared to a pandemic high last month

Poverty soared to a pandemic high last month

Martha C. White                     

 

More than a year into the Covid-19 pandemic, it is becoming clear that the economic pain has not abated for many Americans — and is worsening for some.

 

Researchers at the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy and the University of Notre Dame Department of Economics are using monthly Census data to capture a nearly real-time snapshot of American poverty. Last month, even as the unemployment rate fell and more states relaxed restrictions on business operations, the poverty rate hit a pandemic high of 11.7 percent — a full percentage point greater than it was in early 2020.

For some of the most marginalized populations, the rate of poverty in March was even higher. Black poverty had retreated from the 23.3 percent high it touched last August but, at 21.2 percent, remained close to double that of the overall rate. Childhood poverty soared to a rate of 17.4 percent, and was high for less-educated people, as well, rising to 22.2 percent among those with only a high school education or less.

In both January and February of 2020, the poverty rate held steady at 10.7 percent — although even those metrics masked the challenges faced by some populations. Black poverty, for instance, was 20.7 percent in February 2020, compared to a rate of 8.9 percent for whites. The poverty rate for people without any college education was also elevated, at 19.6 percent in February 2020.

Experts say the monthly research illustrates just how instrumental Congressional fiscal aid such as the CARES Act and subsequent stimulus programs at keeping families out of poverty have been — and offers a glimpse of what could happen once those programs wind down if employment has not rebounded significantly.

“It’s astonishing that we’re seeing a high now. It does underscore how vulnerable so many people are that we still have not recovered enough that once the government aid starts tapering down… you can’t just cut off this aid overnight before the jobs come back,” said Andrew Stettner, senior fellow at the Century Foundation. “You’d hope by now things would have recovered,” he added.

Significantly, the researchers found that the poverty rate actually dropped in the early months of the pandemic, hitting a trough of 9.1 percent in May. James Sullivan, an economics professor and director of the Lab for Economic Opportunities at the University of Notre Dame and one of the research authors, said this was almost certainly a function of the combination of $1,200 stimulus payments that were distributed to most Americans, expanded unemployment benefits including benefits for gig and self-employed workers, and an extra $600 weekly benefit on top of existing state benefits.

“I feel like the most important takeaway from the work we’ve been doing since the start of the pandemic is the clear relationship between poverty and government relief efforts,” he said. “At the time, people were a little bit surprised, but then you look at the magnitude of the CARES Act, and it really makes sense that poverty would fall in the short run.”

The pandemic wreaked havoc on the finances of millions of households, but that pain was not spread evenly. Many people who were able to make the transition to working from home kept their jobs — although some did have their pay or hours reduced. But for people who worked in shuttered hotels, restaurants and malls, there were no alternatives.

“The economic impacts of the pandemic have been incredibly disparate,” Sullivan said. More recently, economists have noted the K-shaped recovery that has bifurcated Americans into haves and have-nots in the ensuing months.

The project’s authors note that while the unemployment rate has improved markedly since last April, weekly jobless claims filed still are being filed at a rate five times higher than before the pandemic. Sullivan suggested the April snapshot might show a brighter picture, though, since more families will have received financial assistance from the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan signed into law last month. “The latest relief package is going to provide significant additional resources to households, but we haven’t seen that in the data yet,” he said.

Stettner said those dollars would benefit the broader economy, not just the recipients. “Overall, the economy is doing very well, given the pandemic. That has a lot of do with the fact that we’ve supported people at the bottom. A lot of the consumer spending in our economy is by low- and middle-income workers. When they don’t have money, the economy suffers,” he said.

As a result, he added, it is important for policymakers to keep their foot on the gas and commit to fiscal support until the labor market recovery picks up steam. “In many sectors of the economy, it’s not going to open overnight,” Stettner said. “It’s going to take time for that activity to ramp back up.”

Can California’s Organic Vegetable Farmers Unlock the Secrets of No-Till Farming?

Civil Eats

Can California’s Organic Vegetable Farmers Unlock the Secrets of No-Till Farming?

Reducing tillage—which often relies on herbicides—has long been out of reach on organic farms. Now, a group of veteran growers are undertaking a soil health experiment with implications for California and beyond.

By Gosia Wozniacka                                  March 30, 2021

 

Transplanting melons in to high-residue beds on Full Belly Farm. (Photo courtesy of Full Belly Farm)Transplanting melons in to high-residue beds on Full Belly Farm. (Photo courtesy of Full Belly Farm)

Last summer, veteran organic farmer Scott Park was bewildered when he surveyed his vast tomato, corn, and sunflower fields. Before planting the crops on 350 acres he had radically cut down on tilling the soil, planted cover crops twice, and let goats graze the land. And he was sure he’d see excellent yields.

The undisturbed soil was loaded with earthworms, but the crops grew sluggishly and didn’t produce enough fruit. Park lost almost half of his yields—and over half a million dollars.

“We thought we were going to cut a fat hog,” said Park, whose farm lies 50 miles northwest of Sacramento in California’s Central Valley. “But the combination of no-till and grazing kicked me in the teeth.”

Though surprising, the result was part of a critical experiment that Park plans to replicate again—this time, on a smaller plot on his 1,700-acre farm: Because there’s more at stake than his own profit.

Park, who has been farming for 48 years and is well-known for his soil health practices, is one of a small group of innovative organic vegetable producers working with the University of California Cooperative Extension, Cal State Chico’s Center for Regenerative Agriculture and California State University, Fresno to decipher how to farm with little or no tillage—and without chemicals. Similar research is also taking place at U.C. Santa Cruz.

For the vast majority of organic growers, tilling the soil is a crucial tool. It helps control weeds (which are a much bigger challenge for farmers who don’t spray herbicides) and helps incorporate compost and other nutrients into soil. But that system may begin to change.

Organic no-till farmer Scott Park. (Photo credit: Chico State Center for Regenerative Agriculture)Scott Park. (Photo credit: Chico State Center for Regenerative Agriculture)

The so-called no-till farming system, which is said to boost soil health, sequester carbon, and bring myriad other benefits, is popular among commodity grain farmers in the Midwest and the Northeast—many of whom rely heavily on herbicides and increasingly use the term “regenerative” to describe what they do. But even among those farmers, most haven’t cut out tilling altogether, alternating no-till with tillage practices.

Switching to no-till on mechanized organic farms—and particularly in organic vegetable cropping systems—has long been considered the holy grail, and practically impossible to achieve, especially in the water-parched arid West, a region that dominates U.S. organic produce production.

Two growing seasons into the California experiment, Park and the other farmers have faced an array of challenges. Some have been economically painful, while others have led to promising results. And yet, if the farmers can get past the hurdles presenting themselves in these early years, their efforts could catalyze a massive shift to reduced tillage—and a new understanding of soil health—in the organic industry in California and nationwide. And because no-till is held up as a central tenent of regenerative agriculture, it could also be seen as a boon for farmers hoping to take part in the carbon markets the Biden administration has put forward in response to climate change.

“When soil transitions to a no-till system, yield reduction is usually a temporary thing,” said Cynthia Daley, a professor at Chico State who is involved in the project. “These farmers see the benefit of going into no-till, but they are trying to find a way to get there that doesn’t result in a negative economic impact in the long run. Their dedication is incredible.”

No-till could also create a carbon sponge to retain water in the soil and cut back on evaporation, a change extremely welcome in California, where water is scarce and droughts are common, said Paul Muller of Full Belly Farm, another farmer participating in the no-till experiment. The cooling effects on soil would also be crucial, Muller said, given that hot temperatures can negatively impact the soil’s microorganisms.

“We’re trying to figure out . . . whether there’s a better system without tillage where we can empower the microbial communities under those plants to supply them with what they need,” said Muller. “We’re at the beginning of that curve of knowledge and of understanding how these practices can capture more carbon and put more vitality into our farming system.”

No-Till Catches on with Organic Farmers

Intensive tillage on a large scale took off in the U.S. with the invention of the steel plow in the 1830s. But while it facilitated the conversion of prairie land and large-scale farming across the country, tillage also led to massive erosion, habitat loss, and the release of greenhouse gases. It culminated in the Dust Bowl of the 1930s, an agricultural crisis so severe that it caused some farmers to adopt conservation practices and the U.S. government to invest in teaching them how to take care of their soil through the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA)’s Soil Conservation service, which eventually became the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS). And while those efforts convinced some farmers to change their practices, most continued to intensively plow their fields multiple times each season.

No-till rose in popularity throughout several regions of the U.S. in the 1970s and today, its adoption is concentrated in the South, the Midwest, and the Great Plains. According to the 2017 U.S. Census of Agriculture, no-till was used on 37 percent of U.S. acres, and reduced tillage was practiced on an additional 35 percent. Since reducing tillage is part of a wider set of regenerative practices, some farmers are also planting more cover crops to regenerate their soil and prevent erosion. Cover crops use rose by 15 percent between 2012 and 2017, but they still only grow on about 4 percent of the nation’s total cropland.

On most farms, the phrase “no-till” is a misnomer, as many farmers use it to refer to a greatly reduced approach to tilling and not to the continuous lack of tillage. For this reason, teasing out the differences in approaches between regenerative and organic systems can be a challenge.

Some organic farmers have scoffed at the idea of no-till and regenerative agriculture systems that include herbicides. They argue that organic farming, which is built around the idea of soil health, can build up soil fertility or sequester carbon better than regenerative/no-till agriculture. Some research indicates this is true because the addition of manure and cover crops more than offset losses from tillage.

Other research shows that organic farms’ ability to store carbon at deeper soil levels exceeds that of conventional farms, even those using cover crops. Scientists are still learning to understand how soil works, so the jury is out on whether organic production that includes tilling but cares for the soil in other ways equals or outstrips no-till farming.

While science continues to evolve, a third of all organic farms nationwide self-define their operations as “no-till” or “minimal till”—but, as is the case for conventional growers, for most, these terms don’t mean that they have stopped tilling.

The “organic no-till” project at the Rodale Institute, is a good example. The Institute has been working since the 1990s on ways organic grain growers can disturb the soil less.

“On one hand, organic farmers claim to be improving soil health, but with the same breath they’re doing multiple tilling operations in a single season,” said Jeff Moyer, Rodale Institute’s executive director. “Tillage day isn’t a particularly good day if you’re an earthworm.”

Moyer, who spent 35 years as Rodale’s farm director and farm manager, began encouraging large organic grain growers to plant cover crops prior to their cash crops and to use the residue as mulch to suppress weeds. To facilitate the process on large farms, he re-designed the roller crimper as a tool to help organic corn and soybean farmers reduce tilling. Hitched to a tractor, the crimper flattens cover crops, breaking their stems and creating a dense mat of mulch. With the right tool, the farmer can then plant the cash crop directly into the newly rolled mulch.

A no-till roller-crimper. (Photo credit: Rodale Institute)A no-till roller-crimper. (Photo credit: Rodale Institute)

This system has allowed some organic farmers, mostly in the Midwest, to reduce their tillage—cutting it down to one deep-till pass per crop rotation. In the past, those farmers would make a primary tillage pass over their fields, followed by multiple secondary passes to disc, pack the soil, make a clean bed ready for planting, and then—once the crop is growing—to rotary hoe and cultivate multiple times to manage weeds.

“To the microbial life in the soil, it feels like tillage over and over again, and that’s what we’re trying to avoid,” Moyer said.

In addition to the tillage to establish the cover crop, Rodale’s system reduces multiple passes through the fields to just two, planting and harvesting, Moyer said. And farmers time the deep tillage for late summer, when the weather is dry and the earthworms and other soil life burrow deep in the soil in search of moisture. They also apply compost, manure, or other soil amendments, which—in addition to the benefits derived from the cover crop—reduce the negative impacts of deep tillage, he added.

The roller-crimper system has worked so well for organic grain corn and soybean that some conventional soybean growers are also using it to reduce their use of expensive herbicides, said Moyer, who is also the author of the newly published book, Roller/Crimper No-Till.

The approach has gone from total obscurity to adoption by organic farmers on millions of acres—mostly in corn and soybeans, but also on orchard and vineyard floors, Moyer said. Other institutions, including the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Washington State University, and Iowa State University, are also conducting research on reduced tillage in organic farming using the roller-crimper.

Organic Pioneers Form No-till Partnership

In California, organic vegetable growers have made multiple attempts at reducing tillage over the past decade, with little luck, said Tom Willey, an organic pioneer who retired three years ago from his 75-acre farm near Fresno. Willey, who farmed for nearly 40 years, is now helping other growers return to the effort.

A historical photo of Tom Willey in his farm field.Tom Willey holding soil from his farm.

“Our early attempts at no-till were so disappointing, we gave up,” Willey said.

Then, in 2018, three well-established organic farms, Scott Park’s farm Park Farming Organics, Full Belly Farm, and Pinnacle Organically Grown Produce joined forces with U.C. Extension, Cal State Chico, and Fresno State to launch on-farm trials focusing on various forms of reduced soil disturbance. Since then, with financial support from a USDA NRCS Conservation Innovation Grant (CIG), the farmers and researchers are trying out various approaches and equipment. While the farmers choose which practices to use, the universities are collecting soil and tissue samples and doing additional reduced till and cover crop experiments on the schools’ farms.

The partnership is especially significant in a state that has always been at the forefront of organics but has offered little to no research development or extension services to organic farmers.

The participating farmers have all grown cover crops, incorporated compost, and managed complex crop rotations for many decades; they have all also experimented with reducing tillage. Yet, in a sense, they have decided late in their careers to go back to farming school, putting aside prevalent, economically secure concepts of organic production to learn a more nuanced, complicated version of soil microbiology. It’s a significant risk, but one they hope will be worth it.

“It’s like looking at the world through a different lens . . . a more reverential one that says we don’t know a whole lot and we should stop screwing it up. And maybe it can teach us if we step back,” said Muller of Full Belly Farm.

The farmers and academics are part of a growing informal network that shares knowledge, swaps scientific papers and on-farm trial updates, organizes farm tours, and hosts a slew of soil health experts, including conventional no-till farmers.

“[There are] too few farmers left in this country to waste time being at war with each other,” Willey said. The hope is to eventually replicate a farmers’ network for organic vegetable producers that is akin to No-till On the Plains, which connects conventional growers from the Great Plains and Midwest regions.

Several hurdles to organic vegetable no-till have become immediately clear, said Jeffrey Mitchell, cooperative extension specialist at U.C. Davis and the lead on the CIG no-till project.

One of them is seed size. Unlike corn and soy, which will germinate well and emerge robustly in soil blanketed with thick cover crop residue, most vegetables seeds are very small and delicate. They don’t have the same ability to push out of mulch-covered soil and establish themselves. The lack of expensive no-till equipment in California is another challenge, said Mitchell, who over the past two decades has conducted reduced tillage studies in conventional farming systems. The farmers in the organic no-till project have “scrambled, borrowed, and modified” existing tools, he said.

California also has unique climate characteristics that make reducing soil disturbance more difficult. Unlike in the Midwest, there is no real winter or hard frost, which means year-round, hardier weeds. And for most of the year, California lacks the rainfall that Midwestern farmers depend on to add moisture and help integrate nutrients into the soil without tillage.

“For high-value vegetable organic farmers in California, the switch to reduced soil disturbance is high-cost and high-risk, so it’s been very challenging to break in with it in our state,” Mitchell said.

Using a ‘Cadillac System’ to Boost Soil Health

To Park, who grows processing tomatoes, dry beans, seed crops, wheat, rice, millet, quinoa, and corn, those risks are all too real.

February found him trying to understand what went wrong with the combination of grazing, double cover crops, and reduced tillage he’d deployed last year. He refers to it as his “Cadillac system,” because it’s a deluxe approach that uses multiple practices that are typically used piecemeal to support soil health.

Following a wheat crop, which Park chopped and used as mulch, he planted a multi-species summer cover crop. Once it matured, he brought in about 6,000 goats to graze it. He then spread compost and shallowly tilled it in 2–3 inches deep, planted a winter cover crop, mowed and lightly tilled the following spring, then planted tomatoes, corn, and sunflowers.

Park’s standard practices include eight soil disturbances (down from about 20 on a typical vegetable farm), but on the trial fields he has further reduced them to four light disturbances.

Park believes that combining multiple regenerative farming practices can improve the soil to a point where it can have a symbiotic relationship with the plants. Such soil can make more nitrogen available to the crops, while cutting down on pest and disease pressure. It also holds a lot more water.

“The idea is to flow with nature and not have to fight nature back,” he says. But this latest attempt at amping up his practices turned out to be a “complete disaster.”

The cover crops added plenty of biomass into the soil. And the fields had 70 percent of normal water and enough time to digest the residue, he said. But something—the decision to vastly reduce the number and depth of tillage passes, the grazing, or both—had “tied up” the nitrogen and starved the plants, he said. Park added granular organic fertilizer to 70 acres of the Cadillac fields, but it didn’t help.

Park is not the only farmer in the reduced-till trials who is seeing a yield drag, and knowing that provides motivation to continue the experiment. Thus far, all of the farmers who are part of the project have seen yield reductions ranging from 20 to 50 percent in most of their trial fields.

Given the weed control and yield issues, Park isn’t sure that organic growers in California will ever be able to cut out tillage completely

“There’s unbelievable interest in moving the dial and I’m 100 percent behind it,” said Park. “But every farm has its own personality and its own needs . . . These practices have to fit your crops.”

Cover Crop–Cash Crop Match-Making

Two-hundred miles south of Park’s farm, on California’s Central Coast, farmer Phil Foster was getting ready to plant carrots and lettuce in his reduced till trial fields. Foster, who co-owns Pinnacle Organically Grown Produce, has a much smaller farm than Park—300 acres split among two ranches—but grows 60 different organic fruits and vegetables in a carefully orchestrated year-round rotation.

During the on-farm trials, Foster and the other farmers have come to realize that cover crops are the key to sustaining a reduced or no-till practice. These crops, planted between cash crops, mainly for their benefit to the farming system, perform different functions: they may suppress weeds, fix nitrogen, or improve the soil microbial community. In recent years, research has pointed to the benefit of cover crop mixes—as opposed to a single species—because they mimic the natural ecosystem.

Farmer Phil Foster stands in his no-till organic field. (Photo credit: Chico State Center for Regenerative Agriculture)Farmer Phil Foster stands in his no-till organic field. (Photo credit: Chico State Center for Regenerative Agriculture)

Cover crops also must be chosen based on cash crops’ planting time and attuned to the crops’ nutritional, pest control, and water needs. And the various species should all have a similar maturation rate. Given all this, Foster say it will take time and a lot of experimentation to find that attunement with all his crops.

“We are continuing to learn the many nuances to cover species,” he said.

Foster has been farming organically for 30 years and keeps careful soil records. By cover cropping about half his acreage every year and incorporating the green manure and compost, he has been able to raise his soil organic matter by several percentage points. “I have seen how much more dynamic the soil is and how much easier it is to farm,” said Foster. “If you can attain a certain organic matter level, the soil takes care of the crops a lot better.”

But over the past decade, the organic matter on his farm plateaued, which lead him to consider reducing his tillage and a renewed focus on cover crops.

“We’re still disturbing the soil, but we’re bringing our soil disturbance from historical levels of 8 to 15 inches with discs and chisels, which we don’t run anymore, to 4 to 5 inches or even just a couple of inches,” Foster recently said during a presentation on the project at the EcoFarm Conference.

After joining the no-till trials, Foster upped his cover crop acreage by 20 percent. He also has increased the diversity of his cover crop mixes, with vetch and oats as the workhorses, and is now using “cocktails” of 5–10 species in different ratios that also include rye, field peas, safflower, sunflower, phacelia, mustard, flax, and tillage radish.

Like Foster, Full Belly Farm’s Muller is also expanding his mixes and now uses 10–12 different species. Muller is trying to make more use of cover crop grasses in his trial fields, including rye or sudangrass, which grow quicker than legumes such as vetch and provide a large amount of biomass. Grasses don’t decompose as rapidly, which has a down side in that they can tie up nitrogen and keep it from getting to the cash crops, but they also provide thick mulch that keeps weeds down for a longer window.

“We want to armor our soil as much as possible through the year,” Muller said. “That’s why we need to keep as much cover on the ground as possible at all times.”

For Park, whose tomatoes get planted in early spring, the options are slimmer. He has resorted to planting vetch in the fall, which matures quickly and can be terminated in March. While its residue supplies a quick boost of nitrogen to the tomatoes, it doesn’t suppress weeds, meaning that Park still has to till a few inches deep to get rid of them.

“Figuring this all out has been “a school of hard knocks,” he adds.

On Phil Foster’s farm, immaculate, uniform vegetables growing on the right side, compared with a high-residue set of beds on the left. (Photo courtesy of Jeffrey Mitchell, UC Davis Cooperative Extension.On Phil Foster’s farm, immaculate, uniform vegetables growing in tilled soil on the right side, compared with a high-residue set of beds on the left. (Photo courtesy of Jeffrey Mitchell, UC Davis Cooperative Extension)

By far the biggest challenge, Foster said, is figuring out when and how to kill—or terminate—the cover crops and to manage their residue on the planting beds before seeding. For instance, not all cover crops terminate well with the roller-crimper. In Foster’s no-till melon field, for example, the cover crop did not die when flattened with the machine and grew back, “meaning competition with the melons and lower yields,” Foster said.

Muller had a similar experience two years ago, when he tried a cover crop mix with oats. The oats didn’t die when flattened multiple times, and he finally brought in sheep to graze them down. It took three weeks to terminate the cover crop.

To deal with the problem, the farmers have mostly resorted to using a vertical tillage tool with undercutting knives or repeated mowing, although the fine clippings don’t keep weeds down for long.

Like Park, Foster isn’t quite ready to take his farm to zero till—mainly because planting the cash crops amidst the cover crops is still a work in progress. For now, he and the other farmers are using a strip tiller, which tills only a narrow, shallow strip for planting seeds in—a technique that’s still rare in California.

Does Plastic Hold the Keys to Vegetable No-till?

Foster and Willey, the retired Madera farmer, have been experimenting with cutting out all tillage on Foster’s trial fields via plasticuture and occultation, techniques often used by no-till gardeners and very small-scale farmers. They involve the use of plastic tarps and cardboard or other barriers to suppress weeds and retain moisture.

The plasticulture trial is the only experiment in the project thus far that has successfully addressed one of the major challenges for organic vegetable no-till in California: how to add fertility to the soil and prevent yield reductions.

Typically, organic producers incorporate compost and cover crop or crop residue into the soil through tillage. But with no-till, the residue and compost are left on top of the beds. Leaving plant “nutrition” on top isn’t a problem in rainier environments, Willey said, since the moisture turns the residue and compost into mush and brings it down to the plant roots. But that’s not the case in the arid West. And most California farms have switched to drip irrigation, which is buried in the soil and doesn’t help break down what’s on the top layer of soil.

The plasticulture and occultation trial fields have avoided this problem, Willey said, by mimicking or re-creating an artificial Midwest or Northeast climate through sprinkler or drip irrigation under the plastic “mulch.” The plastic helps retain moisture and keeps the soil warm. And the moisture, in turn, helps the decomposition of organic matter, which releases nutrients for plants to take in.

Last season, when Foster and Willey grew melons and watermelons this way, they saw high yields. It was a victory, though ironically Foster has worked for years to eliminate plastic from his fields and said he isn’t thrilled to use it on a large scale again.

Muller ran a similar experiment last year, also using a thin sheet of plastic on top of his beds. The eggplants he transplanted into the system had “great plant vigor, earlier set of fruit and better consistent yields,” he said.

Closing the Nitrogen Loop with No-Till

While most of the trials in the no-till project have seen less-than-stellar results so far, Muller takes the long view. He believes that with time, going to continuous no-till will be possible and advantageous to organic vegetable farmers.

“It’s going to take us time and we have to commit to reestablishing the soil microbiome and to providing a habitat for those organisms that fix nitrogen for the plants,” said Muller.

Muller, who was born and raised on a conventional farm, grew up seeing the impact of pesticides on both farmers and farmworkers. Like Foster’s operation, Muller’s 450-acre farm in the Capay Valley west of Sacramento grows over 80 varieties of vegetables, fruits, and nuts. And he has focused on natural practices to maximize the vitality of his farm and his soil, including cover cropping and applying compost. Now, he hopes cutting down on tillage can take the effort further.

Muller hasn’t tilled his trial field for nearly three years. He likes to walk through it examining the soil; he brings a shovel, but it’s easy to dig in with his hands.

Paul Muller standing in his cover-cropped field. (Photo courtesy of the Chico State Center for Regenerative Agriculture)Paul Muller standing in his cover-cropped field. (Photo courtesy of the Chico State Center for Regenerative Agriculture)

“There’s more earthworms, more vitality, more fungal activity, and much better water retention,” he said of the soil. The cover crops have also attracted beneficial insects like ladybugs and lacewings. “I’m not a scientist, but I can see the differences.”

Muller has been rethinking his views about soil fertility and “how farming practices determine the health of microbial communities, on which plants depend for nutrient acquisition, their diversity, who dominates and how both water and nutrient cycling are impacted.”

He and the other farmers are looking to emerging soil health research to understand the impacts of reduced or zero tilling on the living processes happening below ground. In recent years, scientists have come to understand that the soil’s fungi-to-bacteria population ratio is a good indicator of plant growth and nutrient uptake. Most tilled soil is higher in bacterial growth than fungi, which is damaged by tilling. But the ideal is to balance the two.

Higher inputs of nitrogen fertilizer have also been shown to cause lower fungi-to-bacteria ratios. In fact, studies show that adding any nitrogen inputs, including animal manure or other organic soil amendments, to soil can be detrimental to the mutually beneficial relationships mycorrhizal fungi form with plants.

“When you add nitrogen to the soil, you make the plants and bacteria lazy,” Muller sums it up.

The farmers in the trial have been influenced by the work of Australian soil scientist Christine Jones, who has found that the best way to mimic nature and ensure a robust microbial community is by having green plants grow in the soil year-round. Jones’ work has shown that cover crop mixes in a no-till system can create a self-sustaining closed loop in which bacteria and fungi will naturally do the work of fixing nitrogen and make it available to plants as long as enough carbon is available for them to digest. Such a system would decrease fertilizer greenhouse gas emissions as well as input, labor, and fuel costs.

“There’s emerging scientific evidence that diverse soil microbial communities can deliver never-imagined levels of nutrients to crops if our farming practices facilitate, rather than interfere with, their ability to do so,” Willey said.

Is Organic No-Till Farming Even Possible, or Worth It?

If these three California farmers do figure out how to eliminate tillage in their production systems, it’s not clear how long they can sustain such practices.

In experiments at the Rodale Institute, for instance, Moyer has seen that after five years without tillage “things start to break down.” There’s often a shift from annual weeds to perennial weeds, which are more challenging to control. In some areas, shrubs and trees start popping up in the fields. And groundhogs can become a problem.

“In the Northeast, our landscape wants to be hardwood forest . . . so the soil will try to revert back to that. In the Plains states, it wants to be grass prairie,” Moyer said. (In California, which has a Mediterranean climate, lack of rainfall limits forest growth, so this issue may bear less weight.)

“I don’t think we’ll be able to fight back the succession of species with mulch forever,” he added.

It may be, Moyer said, that agricultural soil that isn’t tilled needs an occasional reboot, much like a computer. For organic growers, “tillage is the reboot system,” Moyer said, “while for conventional farmers it’s increasing or changing the chemistry.” Organic farmers can quickly mitigate the damage from the occasional tillage by applying compost or animal manure and immediately planting a cover crop, he added

For the California farmers, who are planning to continue with the on-farm experiments beyond the four years of the CIG grant, the experiment is worthwhile. And they’re hoping other organic farmers will join the conversation. Ultimately, farmers need to figure out whether the overall benefits of reducing tillage outweigh the drawbacks in large-scale vegetable production systems. But the answers may not be far off.

“It’s one of the most exciting times I’ve had as a farmer,” said Muller. “The scientific body of knowledge is making wonderful leaps in our understanding of soil ecology. The hunches we had as organic growers . . . are now being borne out and understood.”

Gosia Wozniacka

Gosia Wozniacka is a senior reporter at Civil Eats. A multilingual journalist with more than fifteen years of experience, Gosia is currently based in Oregon. Wozniacka worked for five years as a staff reporter for The Associated Press in Fresno, California, and then in Portland, Oregon. She wrote extensively about agriculture, water, and other environmental issues, farmworkers and immigration policy. Email her at gosia (at) civileats.com and follow her on Twitter.