Read About The Tarbaby Story under the Category: About the Tarbaby Blog
May 22, 2019
The winds of change are blowing, and they’re bringing clean energy, prosperity, and good jobs to the U.S. (via The Years Project)
The winds of change are blowing, and they're bringing clean energy, prosperity, and good jobs to the U.S. (via The Years Project)
Posted by NowThis Politics on Wednesday, May 22, 2019
“Far too many have suffered the consequences of global warming in recent months, and the political response has so far been woefully inadequate—and the denial is just evil.” — Patagonia CEO Rose Marcario
Coal smoke and steam vapor pour out of the Bruce Mansfield Power Plant overlooking the Ohio River at dawn in Shippingport, Pennsylvania.Robert Nickelsberg / Getty Images file
In the latest bit of bad news for a planet beset by climate change, the concentration of carbon dioxide in Earth’s atmosphere has climbed to a level last seen more than 3 million years ago — before humans even appeared on the rocky ball we call home.
On Saturday, sensors at the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii indicated that concentrations of the greenhouse gas — a byproduct of the burning of fossil fuels — had reached 415 parts per million (ppm), meaning that for every 1 million molecules of gas in the atmosphere, 415 were of carbon dioxide.
Carbon dioxide traps heat from the sun, and higher levels are associated with higher global temperatures and other effects of climate change, such as rising seas and unusual weather patterns.
The level of CO2 in the atmosphere has risen an average of 2.5 ppm per year over the past decade, reaching 400 ppm in 2013 — and the level appears likely to go higher from here.
“We’re racing toward a state very different from the kind humans evolved in and that civilization developed in,” said Ralph Keeling, a geochemist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California.
The last time levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide were this high came during the Pliocene Epoch, which extended from about 5.3 million to 2.6 million years ago. During that period, average sea levels were about 50 feet higher than they are today and forests grew as far north as the Arctic, said Rob Jackson, a professor of earth system science at Stanford University. “Earth was a very different place,” he said. “You would hardly recognize the land surface, and my gosh, we don’t want to go there.”
But there is evidence to suggest the planet is headed in that direction. If the current trajectory continues, levels of CO2 could hit 500 ppm within 30 years, a number that could mean an increase in global temperatures of at least 2 degrees Celsius (about 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit).
“At the present pace, we could reach that well within a lot of people’s lifetimes,” Keeling said of the grim milestone ahead.
Levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere are commonly represented on a graph known as the Keeling Curve, named for Keeling’s father, Charles David Keeling, who began taking daily measurements of atmospheric carbon dioxide in 1958 from atop the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii. The curve shows a steep climb, owing to human-caused climate change.
As the planet inches toward 500 ppm, scientists are sounding the alarm over the potential for catastrophic changes to our environment. “None of these specific numbers are really thresholds in the sense that anything particular happens when we cross them,” Gavin Schmidt, a climatologist who directs NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York City, told NBC News MACH in an email. “But as we go through them, we are putting our foot on the accelerator of climate change, and impacts and damage will continue to rise.”
But it’s hard to say exactly what these changes will bring, or when. Some things, like the loss of vegetation and sea-ice coverage, will grow increasingly visible in the short term. Other things, like the melting of ice sheets in Antarctica and Greenland, occur more slowly. “But these impacts are going to persist for a very long time,” said Dana Royer, a professor of earth and environmental sciences at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut. “Once that happens, we can’t really reverse it.”
Even if moving to renewable energy and other measures help stanch the steady flow of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, our descendants will likely be saddled with the negative consequences of our artificially elevated levels of CO2.
“We’re not going to see the full consequences of 415 parts per million of carbon dioxide today,” Jackson said. “It’ll take a thousand years of people — 30 generations of people — to pay the price of what we’re doing today.”
From bleeding burgers to vegan shrimp, synbio food is backed by billions of dollars in funding, but questions remain about its safety and possible risks.
Impossible’s “bleeding” veggie burger, shrimp made of algae, and vegan cheeses that melt are all making their way into restaurants and on to supermarket shelves, offering consumers a new generation of plant-based proteins that look, act, and taste far more like the real thing than ever before.
What consumers may not realize, however, is that many of these new foods are made using synthetic biology, an emerging science that applies principles of genetic engineering to create life forms from scratch.
Originally used to produce medicines, biofuels, and super bacteria designed to eat oil spills, synthetic biology is increasingly being applied to the production of food and fiber—from vegan burgers to “spider silk,” feed for farmed fish, synthetic flavors, and animal-free egg whites. A California accelerator, IndieBio, is helping to churn out many of these new businesses. Synthetic biology applications span from simple gene editing combined with fermentation processes, to cellular meats that culture food products from animal cells in the lab, to gene drive applications intended to change an organism’s genetics in the environment, such as a mosquito’s ability to spread malaria. For purposes of this discussion, we focus on products and processes that rely on gene editing combined with fermentation.
Synthetic biologists identify the gene sequences that give food or fiber certain qualities, like the gooiness of cheese or the tensile strength of silk. Often, it’s a protein produced by plant or animal cells that imparts the desired quality. Once identified, the gene sequence for that protein is created chemically in a lab and inserted into yeast or bacteria cells. Then, much like brewing beer, a fermentation process turns the microbes into tiny factories that mass produce the desired protein—which is then used as a food ingredient or spun into fiber. The Impossible Burger, for example, contains an engineered heme, a protein originally derived from soy plant roots, that gives the burger its pseudo-meat flavor, color, and texture.
Most of the companies using synthetic biology are still in the startup phase and may fail to gain traction, just as the earlier applications of synthetic biology for biofuels failed to reach scale. But there are billions of dollars in funding behind these products, and plenty of desire for them to succeed. And while many synbio products promise to use fewer natural resources, similar to cellular “meat,” a general lack of public information and transparency from many companies about their processes and what their supply chains will entail when brought to scale leaves unanswered questions about the safety and ultimate environmental, economic, and social sustainability of these products.
In the interest of trying to track down answers to some of these questions, Civil Eats asked six companies using synthetic biology, as well as two industry associations—including Bolt Threads, Impossible Foods, Gingko Bioworks, and IndieBio—for comment; although many declined to comment, the answers we received—plus the many questions that remain unanswered—suggest how much we still need to know about the potential impacts of this food of the future.
Each synthetic biology process is unique, but take the example of bacteria-based fish feed produced by KnipBio, the first company of its kind to receive U.S. Food & Drug Administration (FDA) approval as GRAS (“generally recognized as safe”). KnipBio uses a microbe commonly found on leaves that naturally produce carotenoids, anti-oxidants that can be vital for fish health.
Through simple edits to the bacteria’s genetic makeup, KnipBio CEO Larry Feinberg says he can “turn up or turn down the valves to make things of interest,” like variations on the carotenoids. Next, he ferments the microorganisms in a tank, feeding them methanol—an alcohol derived from methane gas—or corn waste by-products to stimulate them to reproduce and make the carotenoids. The fermented bacteria are then pasteurized and dried, which Feinberg says kills them, and formulated into a flour that is milled into fish feed. It has taken KnipBio five years to refine this process.
Critics say that synthetic biology’s dangers lie in the potential release of gene-edited organisms into the wild, human health impacts, and disruption to agricultural communities, should engineered food or fiber displace natural products.
Rebecca Burgess, the founder of Fibershed, which last fall produced a report with ETC Group on the hazards of clothing made from genetically modified or synbio-derived materials, questions the efficacy of methods to keep gene-edited material from getting into the environment. “The concern is that they’re using base life forms that grow rapidly and transfer genes rapidly and they’re not considering the future of genetic pollution.”
Feinberg responded to this concern by saying that ensuring microbes are dead before release outside the lab is “microbiology 101,” like milk pasteurization. Nevertheless, “there should be, and will be, safety redundancy built into containment at an industrial biotech operation,” he adds. Furthermore, Feinberg says that research shows that modified bacteria tend to revert back to their “wild type” when they’re no longer housed in the optimized conditions created in the lab.
Piers Millet, vice president of safety and security at iGem, a non-profit organization that runs a global synthetic biology competition, agrees. “One of synthetic biology’s biggest challenges is getting the new traits to stick past a few generations [which typically last days or weeks]. In almost every case, the alterations you’re making make those organisms less suitable for natural environments.”
That challenge leaves Michael Tlusty, associate professor of sustainability and food solutions at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, “guardedly optimistic” that synthetic biology will have beneficial applications, like the creation of alternative fish feeds to reduce the pressure on forage fish. Tlusty also notes, “we’ve been editing bacteria for a long time, medically, such as for insulin.”
Bacterial engineering processes for medicine have been established for 40 years. We’ve also been editing bacteria to create the vegetable rennet in cheeses since 1990. In fact, 90 percent of U.S. cheese today is produced with what’s known as fermentation-produced chymosin, or FPC, a vegetable rennet.
There are no reports of health or environmental impacts from FPC to date, but neither does it appear that anyone has researched the question.
The main health concern with synthetic biology products is that they add new proteins to foods, and those new proteins may be allergenic, says Dana Perls, senior food and agriculture campaigner with Friends of the Earth. “We need to understand the short- and long-term impacts before these ingredients and products enter the market or the environment,” she says of products genetically engineered to replace animal products, and stresses the need for stronger regulations for all genetic engineering.
Most consumers wouldn’t know that the cheese they buy is produced using gene modification, because it isn’t labeled as GMO. The FDA ruled that because FPC was identical to the chymosin found in animal rennet, it didn’t require labeling.
GMO labeling laws in the U.S. don’t apply to products made using synthetic biology, which makes it tough for consumers to make informed choices. Most recently, the FDA announced that labeling isn’t required for ingredients made from GMO crops if no modified genetic material is detectable.
Cell-based meat, which is grown in a lab by multiplying entire stem cells taken from animal muscle, will be regulated by both the FDA and the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), though it’s not yet clear what that means in practice.
Synthetic biology is advancing so meteorically, regulatory schemes are hard pressed to keep up, Millet says, adding that, besides national laws, the industry follows World Health Organization biosafety guidance and other international regulations. But that guidance is updated every five years, so there can be a lag before the newest technology will be considered.
“The new wave of genetic engineering is slipping through very large loopholes,” says Perls. “People who are trying to purchase food or clothing that reflects their values are in the dark.”
As a disruptive technology, advocates fear that synthetic biology may also pose harm to the livelihoods of farmers, particularly in the developing world.
Oakland Institute’s Executive Director Anuradha Mittal is especially concerned that the rise of synthetic biology for products such as vanilla, coconut oil, and silk poses a threat to the livelihoods of smallholder and indigenous farmers if those engineered products replace their natural counterparts. Many of these farmers, like the Filipino coconut growers facing super typhoons year after year, are on the front lines of climate change, and Mittal notes that synbio alternatives could increase their vulnerability at a time when they need solid markets to help them adapt to climate change.
“These artificial solutions that are manufactured in petri dishes threaten smallholder farmers,” she told Civil Eats. “The devastation of women’s livelihoods in particular in India would be huge from these fancy silks.”
Fibershed’s Burgess worries that artisanal farmers and agroecologists could lose their sovereign rights if the synthetic biology world takes over fiber production and patents its processes.
Burgess’ concerns of farmer’s livelihoods being displaced are not unfounded, according to Todd Kuiken, senior research scholar at the Genetic Engineering & Society Center at North Carolina State University. “There are winners and losers. All of that needs to be evaluated and put on the table so people can make informed decisions,” says Kuiken, who previously led the Wilson Center’s Synthetic Biology Project. Companies need to conduct full life cycle assessments of their products, including both environmental and socio-economic impacts, he says. He knows of few companies that have done this, however.
Fermentation requires carbohydrates—think barley or wheat for beer brewing—and that raises a key sustainability concern: What feedstocks will be used, and how much?
U.S. synbio companies are largely using sugar from GMO corn, because of its abundant supply, according to Bolt Threads, a leading manufacturer of Spider Silk, on its website, adding, “It is widely believed that large-scale fermentation will be possible with non-food crops … in the future.”
Some companies like KnipBio, however, are choosing to work from day one with more sustainable feedstocks, like agricultural waste or methane gas. “Feedstocks that don’t compete with humans—that has to be part of the consideration. We have to make things more efficient,” says Feinberg.
FOE’s Perls worries that synbio companies could simply perpetuate “unsustainable, pesticide-intensive, industrial agriculture,” by requiring massive amounts of GMO corn or sugar cane.
“If we now have to scale monoculture 2,4-D corn to feed these fermentation tanks,” notes Fibershed’s Burgess, “what does that mean for the [U.S.] Midwest or the Cerrado in Brazil?”
Until recently, life cycle assessments that could answer the feedstock question were hard to come by. Recently, Impossible Burger became the first to release an environmental life cycle analysis of its burger. Peer-reviewed and produced by independent auditor Quantis, the assessment found that the Impossible Burger requires 87 percent less water, 96 percent less land, and produces 89 percent fewer greenhouse gas emissions than an equivalent beef burger.
The heme protein that’s synthetically produced is but one ingredient of the burger, which is made from plant-based proteins, fats, oils, and binders. Spider silks or other products that are principally made from proteins produced by synthetic biology will likely have a different footprint that may or may not be as environmentally beneficial.
And while Impossible Burger has taken initiative on environmental transparency, its life cycle analysis didn’t consider potential socio-economic impacts. That’s important, says Kuiken, because “say Impossible Burger takes over the world: You’d reduce the number of animal products; you need to understand all of [the] socio-economic interaction[s]” of a reduction in demand for products from farmers and ranchers and the resulting impacts on their livelihoods.
For those raising these questions, the lack of information and transparency on the part of most synbio companies fuels mistrust and prevents broader dialogue about the best solutions for the future of food, much like the lack of transparency on the part of cellular ag startups.
Garrett Broad’s 2017 essay in Civil Eats, “Why We Should Make Room for Debate about High-Tech Meat,” speaks to the dilemma. “I find myself with mixed feelings about the whole enterprise,” Broad wrote. “On one hand, I’m skeptical that these technological fixes will automatically lead us to some sort of agricultural utopia. But I’m also concerned that many who identify with the food movement might be missing out on the chance to shape the future of food because they’re turning their backs on food science altogether.”
iGEM’s Millet acknowledges there is some consumer distrust. “My feeling is that a lot of the leftover concerns about genetic modification has to do with the nature of power relationships, about very powerful companies controlling technology,” he says. “But that doesn’t mean we can’t have a different type of relationship.”
Dialogue with impacted communities is key, he says. Furthermore, Millet believes that synthetic biology can be used “to create a much fairer world, where people have more access to the tools they need to solve the problems challenging them, as opposed to mega-corporations selling the solution to them.” He cites an iGEM project in Sumbawa, Indonesia, where a poor community used synthetic biology to develop a genetic test to stop the pirating of its famous honey, a key revenue source for the island.
That vision of a fairer future is shared by others, like Oakland’s Counter Culture Labs, a “community supported microbiology maker space,” but not necessarily by the synbio companies remaining tight-lipped about their enterprises.
As in any industry, there are a range of players, with some more focused on sustainability than others. Whether synthetic biology can meet its promise by helping address some of agriculture’s biggest impacts and feeding the world—without causing harm—remains to be seen and will likely be project-dependent.
In the meantime, “people want real food, they want transparency, and nobody wants to be an experiment,” says Perls.
Shares of SunPower Corporation (NASDAQ: SPWR) jumped as much as 14.4% in trading Friday after the solar manufacturer reported first-quarter 2019 results. Shares gave back some of those gains midday, but at 12:15 p.m. EDT shares were still up 9.5% on the day.
Quarterly revenue was $348.2 million and net loss was $89.7 million, or $0.63 per share on a GAAP (generally accepted accounting principles) basis. On a non-GAAP basis, revenue was $411.6 million and the loss was $57.4 million, or $0.41 per share. Adjusted EBITDA was negative $23.8 million, down from a gain of $32.3 million a year ago.
Management also said it continues to expect 1.9 to 2.1 gigawatts of solar deployed with $1.9 to $2.0 billion of non-GAAP revenue for 2019. What investors likely gravitated to was management increasing the lower end of adjusted EBITDA guidance for 2019 from $80 million to $90 million, while keeping the $110 million top end of the range the same.
There weren’t any huge surprises in the quarter, but investors are likely relieved that operating conditions are expected to get better as the year goes on. The solar industry has been very competitive in the last few quarters, and price wars can lead to lower margins across the board. SunPower says it’s expecting margins to improve as new high-efficiency solar panels are rolled out and U.S. residential and commercial markets grow. That’s why there’s optimism today, and now the company needs to execute on rising expectations.
April 6, 2019
This desert farm is harvesting food using nothing but sunlight and seawater.
Harvesting food using sunlight and seawater
This desert farm is harvesting food using nothing but sunlight and seawater.
Posted by Mashable on Wednesday, April 3, 2019
April 24, 2019
Go, Sweden! (via World Economic Forum)
Go, Sweden! (via World Economic Forum)
Posted by Climate Reality on Tuesday, April 23, 2019
Most labels address how food is grown. The Agricultural Justice Project also focuses on how the people behind the food are treated.
By Lela Nargi, Farm Labor, Food Justice April 29, 2019
There’s an ever-growing preponderance of “eco-labels” in the food marketplace—203 in the U.S. alone, by one count. Inspired by an “increased demand for ‘green’ products,” according to a 2014 study in the Journal of Business Ethics, these labels alert consumers to everything from animal welfare to whether the food was grown without chemicals, GMOs, or harm to forests and birds. American consumers can seek out a fair trade label ensuring the well-being of banana and coffee growers and communities in Southeast Asia, South America, or Africa. But very few labels make such claims for food workers here in the United States.
One organization bucking this trend is the Agricultural Justice Project (AJP), a non-profit in Gainesville, Florida, that’s committed to the fair treatment of workers all along the food chain. AJP has been offering worker-justice-related certification and labeling since 2011, before the Equitable Food Initiative or Fair Trade USA (FTUSA) dipped their toes into the domestic arena, certifying their first farms here in 2014 and 2016 respectively.
Regardless of the size of a farm or other food-related business, AJP’s Food Justice Certification program requires that an employer offer workman’s comp, disability, unemployment coverage, social security, unpaid sick leave, maternity/paternity leave, “comprehensive requirements to ensure safe working conditions” even for migrant and seasonal workers, in addition to environmental standards—all with USDA Organic certification as its baseline.
Last November, AJP granted certification to its sixth business, Grafton, New York-based Soul Fire Farm, whose co-founder Leah Penniman recently received a Leadership Award from the James Beard Foundation for her commitment to tackling racism in the food system. AJP’s rigorous audit can be daunting, and its label is largely unknown to consumers. So, the decision to get certified was not a decision that Soul Fire’s founders took lightly. A firm belief in the concept, and a desire to see more farms engage in the process, convinced them to put in the time and effort.
“As thought leaders who are becoming more of a recognizable name, part of doing this certification was to say, ‘we believe in the values this represents,’ and to uplift the process,” says Soul Fire’s co-director, Larisa Jacobson.
Most of the Soul Fire Farm team. (Photo credit: Soul Fire Farm, courtesy of AJP)
Certainly, more farmers, food workers, and consumers are likely to now learn about AJP through Soul Fire’s connection to it. As a result, it’s possible more farms and food business will deem AJP certification a worthy pursuit, and more consumers will seek out its label. But the label is not AJP’s stand-alone goal. Much of the organization’s heavy lifting occurs behind the scenes, where it seeks to influence discussions about food worker rights in ways often less visible than its quiet (for the moment) third-party certification scheme.
Farm work ranks as one of the most exploitative and dangerous jobs of the 21st century, responsible in the U.S. for the second-highest number of deaths in 2017 (260) after truck driving. About 20,000 workers on American farms contract acute pesticide poisoning every year. Additionally, since many farm workers are migrants, they’re exempt from labor laws meant to protect against wage theft, poor living conditions, and poor treatment—including physical and sexual abuse—according to a report by fair-trade nonprofit Fair World Project. Similar dangers exist in restaurants, too, and in grocery stores.
Leah Cohen, AJP’s general coordinator, first cottoned to the cause at the root of the organization’s mission after driving a mobile dental clinic around migrant worker camps in Oregon. “I thought I was making a difference, but as I started to peel back the layers, I realized a dental van doesn’t do anything [about] the pesticide-drenched earth, holes in unheated [residential] shacks, living in fear of being separated from your family and deported, or wage theft,” she says. “Likewise, it’s not going to do anything for farmers who can’t make enough to cover the cost of production, regardless of whether they pay a working wage to their employees.”
These issues were top of mind for AJP’s five founders from the beginning. Elizabeth Henderson, who’s also a founding member of the Northeast Organic Farming Association (NOFA), currently sits on AJP’s board. She and her collaborators fought to write worker rights into the fabric of the USDA’s National Organic Program. When they failed, in 1999, they decided to write up their own standards. They intensively researched the issue and reached out to a wide swath of stakeholders in the early aughts, conducted pilot audits in 2006 and 2007, then officially began offering certification in 2011.
Still, the certification process—which Henderson calls “very much against the grain”—is not the main point. Rather, it’s the “bigger impacts on the consciousness of the organic movement” that is the true measure of what she and her partners set out to achieve.
For example, the new Regenerative Organic Certification (ROC), which is led by a coalition that includes the Rodale Institute, Dr. Bronner’s, and Patagonia and is currently in its pilot phase, did not originally include rights for farmers in its social fairness pillar. “Because of the advocacy of our AJP team members and allies, [ROC] added farmer rights standards,” says Cohen. Other examples of AJP’s influence are found in the evolution of Whole Foods Market’s Responsibly Grown program, Fair Trade USA’s standards, and Ben & Jerry’s Caring Dairy Program. “This work takes years of organizing, and sometimes results in official organizational transformation if we are patient and persistent,” Cohen says.
Another way change comes to pass is when farms and food businesses hire AJP to provide technical assistance to various aspects of their operations. Even though they might not make it all the way through to certification, according to Cohen, “they take bits and pieces and incorporate them to make improvements” to bringing their workers into the decision-making process, for example.
AJP receives grant money from ecologically conscious organizations such as Dr. Bronner’s and the Clif Bar Family Foundation (CBFF). (Editor’s note: Civil Eats has also received funding from CBFF.) “There are not that many groups out there trying to create market incentives for social change in the food system, and we felt that was worth investing in,” says CBFF director of programs for food systems and economics Allen Rosenfeld.
Would Clif Bar also consider adopting AJP’s label for its own products? “Our cross-functional sustainable sourcing team has met with AJP and we continue to evaluate their certification program, as well as others that could meet our social justice goals,” Clif Bar & Company communications manager Dean Mayer explained by email to Civil Eats. “We’re also exploring the development of our own proprietary programs for smallholder farmers.”
One way or the other, with or without formal adoption of its Food Justice Certification label, AJP seems to be managing to steer the conversation toward greater worker fairness.
Eco-labels pose something of a conundrum; the more of them turn up in the marketplace, the wider the so-called “credibility gap” grows, as consumers struggle to understand what the labels’ promises effectively mean (if anything).
As the Business Ethics study pointed out, “an eco-label may or may not involve an open- and consensus-based standard-setting process…may or may not be under government control…can be first-, second-, or third-party [certified], by verifiers who may or may not be accredited.” Additionally, since “labeling schemes are voluntary standards that are developed by private institutions … there is no commonly accepted legal standard” for them.
The confusion is compounded when it comes to social justice issues, says Magali Delmas, director of the UCLA Center for Corporate Environmental Performance and author of The Green Bundle: Pairing the Market with the Planet. “The question is, what is the tangible benefit, and how can we clearly convey [that] to the consumer? This is still a work in progress,” she says, “because it’s more difficult to measure and communicate social impact than it is environmental [benefit].”
But for consumers willing to do a little independent research, this is becoming easier. Consumer Reports rates food labels on its Greener Choices site. It calls AJP’s Food Justice Certification, conducted by third-party certified entities accredited in organics, “highly meaningful,” and confirms that its standards set a high bar.
Fair World Project (FWP) published a report called Justice in the Fields in 2016, specifically to evaluate seven farmworker justice certification labels—including AJP’s.
“Labor justice labels are important; just because something is grown organically or comes from a ‘local’ farm, that’s no guarantee that the people who grew it were treated well,” says FWP’s executive director, Dana Geffner. Her organization gave AJP a top rating because of what it calls the meaningful impact of its standards: “It’s one of the only certifications out there in the hired labor category looking to eliminate piece rate work”—paying per piece or per pound of produce picked rather than hourly—and “they also consider all the participants in the supply chain: farmers, workers, and retailers.”
Higher Level Organics in Viola, Wisconsin, became the seventh AJP-certified farm this month—the first hemp producer in the world to certify as fair trade. “It’s simply the right thing to do [a]s hemp production continues to rise…[and] an increase in agricultural labor [becomes] necessary,” founder Luke Zigovits said in a company press release.
Photo credit: Swanton Berry Farm (courtesy of AJP)
Swanton Berry Farm in Davenport, California has a union for its workers—a deeper commitment to the tenets of their AJP food justice certification. For Nancy Vail and husband Jered Lawson, co-owners of Pie Ranch in nearby Pescadero, AJP certification is deeply linked to their farm’s outreach to local youth and its partnership with the Amah Mutsun Tribal Band, whose ancestors once worked the surrounding land before “suffering the most outrageous trauma, genocide, and exploitation you can imagine” at the hands of white colonists, says Vail.
AJP certification doesn’t translate into a price premium for the food Pie Ranch grows, like an organic label does, and Vail says the pore-scouring process takes an enormous time and resource toll. But, she says, “We still feel committed to staying certified, to keep the conversation alive.”
For Brandon Kane, general manager of the GreenStar Food Co-op in Ithaca, New York (currently in the process of recertifying), “AJP was a natural extension of expressing our values—marketable proof that we are living up to our self-imposed expectations around a living wage [for our 225 employees] and supporting [over three dozen] farmers.”
After securing much-needed water rights, the co-op farm on the Tohono O’odham reservation is honoring thousands of years of the tribe’s farming history.
By Rudri Bhatt Patel, Indigenous Foodways April 25, 2019
In a quiet part of Tucson, Arizona, only a few miles southwest of the city center, the San Xavier Cooperative Farm honors the agricultural legacy of the Tohono O’odham, a Native American tribe that has farmed the land for over 4,000 years. Located on the ancestral village of Walk, the 860-acre operation, one of the few farms on an Indian reservation at last count, is a lush green oasis in the otherwise dry desert.
Julie Ramon-Pierson, president of the San Xavier Co-op board, grew up hearing stories about her grandparents and great-grandparents cooking traditional O’odham foods such as tepary beans, squash, and corn, and she remembers seeing her mother harvest and clean the native beans. She hopes the co-op will help resurrect narratives like the ones she was raised with.
“The primary goal of the co-op is to create economic development in the community, re-educate people about traditional foods so they can prepare them at home to adopt a healthier lifestyle, and preserve O’odham values, like respect of land, plants, animals, and elders,” she says.
The Tohono O’odham Nation spans 4,460 square miles in Southern Arizona and includes 28,000 enrolled tribal members. The land is divided into 11 districts, and the San Xavier District is home to about 2,300 members. Founded in the early 1970’s, the co-op leases farmland from the landowners, called allottees, and about 90 percent of its 25 to 28 employees are O’odham tribe members, according to Gabriel Vega, the co-op’s farm manager for 13 years.
The welcome sign outside the entrance reflects this agricultural history; it’s a shield painted with a traditional planting stick and feathers representing a blessing. In the center is a sprouting seed, considered “new life,” and the four parts represent seasons containing the cycle of the sun, rain, moon, and wildlife. (Photo by Rudri Patel)
While the co-op grows alfalfa as its primary money-maker, other parts of the property are home to orange, plum, and apple orchards; an assortment of vegetable crops; and native foods such as tepary, pima lima, black, and white beans, wild mesquite trees, and pima wheat.
In addition to growing and selling crops, the co-op hosts blessing and spiritual ceremonies and provides educational opportunities for the tribal community. In early March, for example, it hosted a cooking and culture workshop for women tribe members.
Jacelle Ramon-Sauberan, a doctoral student at the University of Arizona, is focusing her dissertation research on water and land rights, as well as the impact of the San Xavier Co-op. She sees the co-op’s impact as three-fold: “It keeps traditional ecological knowledge alive, assists with food sovereignty, and allows the community to know its history,” she says.
There is a real effort, says Ramon-Sauberan, to keep doors open and educate people. If a member of the O’odham community wants to learn how to cultivate a certain food, she says, the co-op creates a teaching space to achieve this goal. More importantly, this attitude helps foster a “communal spirit among the members” that extends beyond the organization.
Though the O’odham has built an agricultural history in the Sonoran Desert over the course of thousands of years—one that recently helped earn Tucson the honor of becoming the first U.S. city designated a UNESCO Creative City of Gastronomy—the tribe’s farming legacy has been threatened in recent decades by a conflict over the desert city’s limited water supply.
Traditionally, the O’odham people structured their fields to channel water into planting areas, using the Santa Cruz River as the main source. When Tucson began to develop, however, its water demands drained the aquifers from the area, and by 1950, Vega says, “much of the agriculture ceased.”
Farm manager Gabriel Vega has worked for San Xavier Co-op for 13 years. (Photo by Rudri Patel)
When the farm formed in 1971, it fought to reclaim tribal water rights and reintroduce farming practices that had been halted during the dry years. In 1975, the San Xavier District sued the City of Tucson over water rights. Ten years later, the Southern Arizona Water Rights Settlement Act granted an allotment of 56,000 acre-feet of water yearly from the Central Arizona Project—enough to sustain roughly 900 acres of land.
“Water to this community is a sacred element,” Vega says. “To have a running flow of water is fulfilling the prayers of the O’odham people.”
During the period when water supplies were nonexistent, the connection between the land and its people diminished, according to Vega. “Wells went dry, farming decreased, and it led to the decline of mesquite trees,” which in turn led to the loss of agriculture and tradition, and a rise in diet-related diseases like diabetes.
When water returned, it opened the door to reintroduce native foods, a healthier way of living, and a pathway to reconnect to the land. And that’s where San Xavier comes in.
Even with the busy undercurrent of activity, the farm is a tranquil space where a palpable sense of peace permeates the air. This isn’t accidental, according to Vega. “Many of the O’odham elders wanted this area to return to an agricultural community,” he says.
Although the water has returned to the area and re-enabled agriculture, healthy eating habits are slower to catch up. Vega says for many people the reality of day-to-day life on the reservation includes fast food.
To reverse this trend, San Xavier Co-op is preserving the “genetic resources” stored in seeds. Though the O’odham have 19 different varieties of corn, San Xavier has access to only two. Recently, the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) awarded the farm a grant to build a 2,400-square-foot cold storage facility to preserve its seeds.
“The plan is to go door-to-door in the community and see if families have corn seeds that were lost in the last few decades,” Vega says.
A large nursery houses several different varieties of seeds. (Photo by Rudri Patel)
Organizations like Native Seeds/SEARCH (NS/S) help preserve indigenous seeds and serve as a repository to protect cultural heritage. Although there isn’t an official partnership in place, Laura Neff, an associate at NS/S, says that San Xavier Co-op recently received two community seed grants from the organization. Additionally, San Xavier sells its products in the Native Seed/SEARCH retail store. With efforts like these, the O’odham people may be able to return to the foods their ancestors enjoyed.
Another focus at San Xavier is cultivating wild foods. In the past, the O’odham relied on the pods of mesquite trees to supply them with protein. Once the pods dry, the O’odham harvest, mill, and eventually turn them into flour. “Traditionally it was eaten with water, and these high nutrients provided energy,” Vega says.
San Xavier Co-op remains viable—and able to aggressively pursue growing native foods—“because it invests in alfalfa crops, its best-seller on the farm,” Ramon-Pierson says. But the focus on income doesn’t mean sacrificing what is good for the land, Vega emphasizes. The co-op is Certified Naturally Grown, he says, which means it grows everything without synthetic fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides, fungicides, or GMOs.
“This farming community has been here for several thousand years, and there is an intentional purpose to how the O’odham use the land,” says nursery coordinator Cie’na Schalaefli. Keeping it chemical-free helps the tribe maintain its traditional values.
Orchards line the property near the side of the farm. (Photo by Rudri Patel)
The co-op has also formed a partnership with the Compost Cats program through the University of Arizona, a student-run organization that collects food waste and scraps from local businesses, processes the material at the San Xavier Co-op, and sells it as compost to the community.
The co-op constantly looks for ways to diversify its offerings in order to stay afloat, Vega says. San Xavier has a blossoming partnership with both the food bank community and Tucson schools, says Ramon-Pierson, where it sells broccoli and melons. It also runs a catering business that blends seasonal indigenous O’odham foods with non-traditional items like tortillas and tamales.
Several other projects are in the works or already underway, Vega says. “Bridgestone, the tire company, recently contacted the co-op about the Gualye, a woody shrub which thrives in the desert Southwest,” he says. The interest is to produce rubber for tires. There’s also the possibility that pork production could begin on the property, he adds.
Even though the farm looks for numerous ways to be profitable, the O’odham Nation is the first priority. Workshops like the Wild Harvest teach community members how to harvest, process, and prepare traditional foods such as cholla buds from a cacti, also known as ciolim, mesquite, and prickly pear.
A colorful mural serves as a reminder of San Xavier’s ancestral roots. (Photo by Rudri Patel)
“Once they learn how to harvest, they can do this on their land at home, bring it back to the farm, and we pay them by the pound,” Vega says. This fosters economic resiliency and a way to reintroduce traditional foods to children and families.
The workshops also cover the basics of how to cook foods like tepary beans—which can easily boiled in water with chiles—and sends participants home armed with how to search for online recipes used in making traditional O’odham meals. A resurgence of traditional foods, according to Ramon-Sauberan at the University of Arizona, is working to reduce the rates of diabetes and other health issues among the O’odham people.
San Xavier Co-op’s multi-pronged approach to caring for its community, is merely a “continuation of what’s in their ancestral genes,” Vega says. “Not many spaces that allow you to pay your bills, take care of your elders, and adopt a healthy way of living.”
SPEAKER: It’s the 21st century. We know climate change is real. We know that one of the challenges we have is that pollution has been free, but we need to put a price on it.
DIMITRI LASCARIS: This is Dimitri Lascaris reporting for The Real News Network from Montreal, Canada. Earlier this week, officials from Environment and Climate Change Canada, a department of the Canadian federal government, presented the results of a study on warming in Canada. Their study concluded that Canada is warming at twice the rate of the rest of the world and that northern Canada is warming even more quickly, nearly three times the global rate. The officials also reported that three of the past five years have been the warmest on record in this country. Their study is the first of its kind. Entitled Canada’s Changing Climate Report, the study has been in the works for years and is the first of a series aimed at informing policy decisions and increasing public awareness and understanding of Canada’s changing climate. Now here to discuss this new study with us is Keith Stewart. Keith is a Senior Energy Strategist with Greenpeace Canada and part-time instructor at the University of Toronto. He has a Ph.D. in Political Science from York University and has worked as a climate policy researcher and advocate for 19 years. He joins us today from Toronto. Thanks for coming back on The Real News, Keith.
KEITH STEWART: Thanks for having me.
DIMITRI LASCARIS: So Keith, even with all of the warming that has occurred in this country since the beginning of the fossil fuels era, we Canadians continue to live in what is one of the world’s relatively colder climates. Why should Canadians be concerned about this report? How is the warming of the atmosphere and of the oceans affecting their lives in practical terms and what practical effects should Canadians anticipate as Canada continues to warm?
KEITH STEWART: It’s kind of a standard joke that oh, in Canada it would be nice if it was a little warmer. The problem is the rate of change. We haven’t historically– well, in the geological record climate has changed a lot over time– but we’re trying to pack change that usually take 50,000 to 100,000 years into 50 years. Because we’re burning fossil fuels and sort of increasing the greenhouse effect trapping heat, which it then causes a whole bunch of other changes. You might think oh, a little bit warmer that would be nice, but you’re also changing rainfall patterns. You’re going to have drought in some places. You are going to have more wildfires, the kinds we’ve seen in B.C. and Alberta the last couple of years where people literally couldn’t breathe. Walking outside in Vancouver was like breathing eight packs, smoking eight pack of cigarettes. In urban areas, one of the warnings in the report is we’re going to see even more flooding. In particular, the kind of flash flooding which in one incident here in Toronto back in 2013, we saw $960 million worth of damage in a couple of hours. We saw street cars under water. People had to be rescued from the GO train by boat. These kinds of severe impacts– the heat waves, the droughts, the wildfires, the flooding– these cause enormous damage to our economy, they cause enormous damage to our health, and we’re only seeing the thin edge of the wedge here.
When you look at this report, a big part of the message in the report is: what the future looks like depends a lot on what actions we take today. In their low emissions scenario, if Canada warmed about one point seven degrees, it would warm by another two degrees, that’s bad because it would have a whole bunch of negative impacts. The negative impacts by far outweigh the positives. In the high emissions scenario, the one we’re actually on the path to right now, they’re talking about warming by six degrees in Canada, on average even more than the far north, by the end of the century. That would make agriculture basically impossible in large chunks of the prairies. They say oh, you can just move further north. Well a lot of places in this country you move further north, they don’t have soil to be able to support agriculture. Here in Ontario, we have this thing called the Canadian Shield. It’s all granite. You can’t grow crops there. And similarly, forests which are suited for one climate system, can’t move themselves north 50, 100, 200 kilometers in the space of 20 years.
DIMITRI LASCARIS: This study was released on April 1st, Keith, which also happened to be the date on which a federal carbon tax of $20 a ton took effect in provinces that lack provincial pricing plans, including the provinces of New Brunswick, Ontario Manitoba, and Saskatchewan. The carbon tax, as I’m sure you know, is the centerpiece of the Trudeau government’s strategy for fighting climate change. In your view, is this carbon tax adequate both from the perspective of the amount of the tax and the breadth of its application? And if not, what kind of a carbon tax do you think we need in this country given the urgency of the situation?
KEITH STEWART: I think one of the problems we have in this country right now is action on climate change has been narrowed to carbon tax, no carbon tax. And really we need a whole, vast suite of efforts not just carbon taxes but also massive investments in things like public transit, so people can get to where they need to go without having to drive a car. We need to invest in better sewage/stormwater systems so that we’re not having these floodings. We need to invest in rapidly transitioning to renewable energy. A carbon tax is a key part of that. Raising the price of fossil fuels makes them less attractive relative to cleaner forms of energy. It also brings in some cash that can be done to build things like great public transit systems or, put up windmills and solar panels. So in the U.S. we are talking about this as a Green New Deal, kind of built on the New Deal that Roosevelt, that the Americans brought in to fight the Great Depression. That’s the kind of change we need. This carbon tax is a component of that and I think it’s kind of like the lowest possible measure, $20 dollars a ton kicking in this year. That’s 4.4 cents per liter of gasoline. When you look at the price of oil, the price of gasoline goes up and down. That’s not a huge change. That on its own is by no means enough. They’re also talking about increasing it $10 a year. Greenpeace would support that. We also think the money should be invested back in renewables, but that’s got to be just one piece of a much bigger package.
The big problem we have right now is no one is treating the climate crisis really like a crisis. We treat it more as kind of a messaging problem; we do a few things it will go away. Or, on one side of the political spectrum with the conservatives at the provincial level and federally who are fighting against even the small carbon tax that’s being proposed, they’re proposing we do nothing. That somehow if we ignore the problem, it will go away. One of my friends was asking me, “do you think this new report that just came is a wakeup call?” And was like well, there’s an old proverb that says “you can’t wake up a man who’s only pretending to be asleep” and that’s the problem with a lot of the politicians in this country and around the world. They’re pretending to be asleep on this issue, hoping they can get out of office and it will be someone else’s problem down the road.
DIMITRI LASCARIS: Now at the same time as the Trudeau government has raised alarms about the extent of warming in this country, federal and provincial governments continue to subsidize fossil fuels to the tune of about $3 billion a year. Also, as we’ve reported extensively on The Real News, the Trudeau government is spending billions of taxpayer dollars to buy its TransMountain tar sands pipeline. Keith, doesn’t this new study– I mean, what Justin Trudeau did on Monday was he held it up and said to the public and in particularly was addressing the conservatives and those who are opposed to the carbon tax, this shows that we have to impose a carbon tax. But doesn’t it also highlight the recklessness of the Trudeau government’s continued defense of the fossil fuels industry, its massive investments in the fossil fuels industry, this perpetuation of our dependence on fossil fuels?
KEITH STEWART: Absolutely. Subsidies in fossil fuels is basically like a negative carbon tax. You’re making them cheaper in order to get people to use more. Similarly, the federal government yesterday was denying that, in response, were denying that the purchasing the pipeline was a subsidy to fossil fuels. Well it is and I think the Trudeau government is trying to have it both ways. They say we’re going to do a carbon tax and we’re going to promote expansion of the oil industry. If you’re serious about climate change, that means getting off of fossil fuels as quickly as possible by mid-century, at the latest. Building a new tar sands pipeline that has to operate for 50 years to make the money back, makes no sense at this point if you’re seriously committed to achieving the Paris climate goals, to protecting the future of our economy, of our communities, of our ecosystems. So it’s not one step forward, one step back which is kind of what we’re seeing from the federal liberals. It’s got to be leaping forward and I think the big problem in Canada and also similarly in the U.S. and many other places is that entrenched power of the fossil fuel interests in Canada and particularly the oil lobby. In the US it’s also the coal lobby who are basically saying, don’t go too fast. Give us time to get our money out. The Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers has launched an election campaign in Alberta saying, we want to double the rate of growth of oil production in Alberta and here’s all things you have to do to help us do that which is kill regulations, get rid of carbon pricing, build new pipelines. That’s basically asking people to vote for climate destruction.
And I think this is going to be a big issue in the federal election here in the fall as we have the conservatives who are saying do nothing about climate change and give more subsidies to the oil industry. You have the liberals who are saying let’s do stuff on climate change but not touch oil production. So they are doing a coal phase out, they’re doing a bunch of other measures. But basically, oil is sacrosanct and what we really need is a push for this kind of a Green New Deal which actually, we can make our lives better. We can create great green jobs right across the country. We can deal with all sorts of problems in this country by the kind of investments that are necessary, putting people to work, solving the climate crisis.
DIMITRI LASCARIS: We’ve been speaking to Keith Stewart of Greenpeace Canada about an important and alarming new study showing that the rate of warming in Canada is far above the global average. Thank you very much for joining us today, Keith.
KEITH STEWART: Thanks so much for having me on.
DIMITRI LASCARIS: And this is Dimitri Lascaris reporting for The Real News Network.
