The sugar industry has contributed to the demise of the Everglades for decades, using the ecosystem as a giant septic tank and blocking the natural flow of water from Lake O. To save them, and all who call them home, we must reestablish the southern flow and get clean freshwater sent to the right place at the right time.
The sugar industry has contributed to the demise of the Everglades for decades, using the ecosystem as a giant septic tank and blocking the natural flow of water from Lake O. To save them, and all who call them home, we must reestablish the southern flow and get clean freshwater sent to the right place at the right time.
Here’s how much it costs to buy organics at Aldi, Trader Joe’s, Whole Foods and Walmart
Megan Leonhardt March 22, 2019
Source: Megan Leonhardt | CNBC
Almost half of Americans buy organic food at least some of the time, according to a recent poll by organic produce company Earthbound Farm. And millennials are particularly enthusiastic, with one in five saying they purchase organic products all the time, the poll finds.
But organic food can be a lot pricier than the conventional kind. Last year, shoppers paid roughly 7.5 percent more for organic items, according to Nielsen Research. For example, the company found, organic milk sells for $4.76 on average, almost double the average cost of regular milk at $2.59.
So which stores generally have the lowest prices for organic food? CNBC Make It worked with grocery price comparison app Basket to determine the average national cost of organics at Aldi, Trader Joe’s, Walmart and Whole Foods. We compared store brands wherever possible.
After crunching the numbers on 19 everyday grocery items — ranging from bananas and canned tomato sauce to white bread and peanut butter — Aldi came out ahead in more categories where all four retailers sold a similar product.
Aldi offered store-brand organic versions of 13 of the 19 items we sought, and its prices were competitive. Its whole frozen strawberries, for example, cost $.17 an ounce, significantly less than frozen strawberries at the other three stores.
Overall, those 13 organic products would set you back a total of $37 at Aldi, compared to $50 for comparable items from Whole Foods.
Why Aldi narrowly beats out the competition
Whether you’re shopping at your local grocery store or a big box store, you’re probably looking for value — good quality at a good price, says John Karolefski, grocery store analyst and editor of Grocery Stories. If you shop at Aldi, you know the grocery chain often delivers.
“Aldi, happily, has a lot of good quality, good-tasting products at good prices,” Karolefski tells CNBC Make It. “It’s one of the reasons they’ve been so successful in the U.S.”
“The best place you can buy organics, and they’re continuing to roll out even more, is probably Aldi,” agrees Phil Lempert, food industry analyst and editor of SupermarketGuru.
Part of the secret to the store’s low prices is that the vast majority of their products are private label, so you’re not paying for the marketing and advertising that many brands must use to attract customers.
It’s a strategy similar to the one used by fan-favorite Trader Joe’s, which also offers a lot of good prices on the organic products we compared. It’s worth noting that Aldi U.S. and Trader Joe’s are independently operated companies with distinct but once-related corporate parents. It could be said that Aldi and Trader Joe’s are “estranged cousins.”
“Aldi, happily, has a lot of good quality, good-tasting products at good prices.”-John Karolefski, editor of Grocery Stories
Aldi’s SimplyNature brand offers shoppers great value on organic products. Elsewhere, those “can be pricey, but you can get them for a good value at Aldi,” Karolefski says.
In addition to being organic, frugal shopping expert Lauren Greutman reports, the SimplyNature products do not contain over 125 ingredients that experts have deemed questionable, including artificial flavors, high fructose corn syrup, trans fatty acids, nitrates and propylene glycol.
Yet Aldi’s selection of organic products, while growing, remains somewhat limited. So if you’re shopping at this grocery chain, you may need to visit another store to get everything on your shopping list.
The worst agricultural downturn since the 1980’s is taking its toll on the emotional well-being of American farmers.
In Kentucky, Montana and Florida, operators at Farm Aid’s hotline have seen a doubling of contacts for everything from financial counseling to crisis assistance. In Wisconsin, Dale Meyer has started holding monthly forums in the basement of his Loganville church following the suicide of a fellow parishioner, a farmer who’d fallen on hard times. In Minnesota, rural counselor Ted Matthews says he’s getting more and more calls.
“Can you imagine doing your job and having your boss say ‘well you know things are bad this year, so not only are we not going to pay you, but you owe us’,” Matthews said by telephone. “That’s what’s happened with farmers.’’
Glutted grain markets have sparked a years-long price slump made worse by a trade war with top buyer China. As their revenues decline, farmers have piled on record debt — to the tune of $427 billion. The industry’s debt-to-income ratio is the highest since the mid 1980’s, when Willie Nelson, Neil Young and John Mellencamp organized the first Farm Aid concert.
So dire are conditions in farm country that Senator Joni Ernst, an Iowa Republican, and Senator Tammy Baldwin, a Wisconsin Democrat, pushed for mental-health provisions to be included in the 2018 Farm Bill. The legislation allocated $50 million over five years to address the shortfall of such services in rural areas.
Ernst said she spoke with a woman whose farmer husband died by suicide. While there’s been progress on a trade resolution, the ruckus “has been very, very hard on our farmers,” she said in a telephone interview. “We’ve had such a depressed farm economy.”
Few agricultural states have been hit harder than Baldwin’s Wisconsin, whose state license plates proclaim it as “America’s Dairyland.” Wisconsin lost almost 1,200 dairy farms between 2016 and 2018, government data show.
Smaller operators have been the most affected, she said by telephone. The mental-health provisions in the farm bill aren’t for a “free trip to the psychiatrist,” but rather about “community looking out for each other.”
There was a similar legislative effort in 2008 during the financial crisis, but the program was never funded because prices recovered, said Jennifer Fahy, communications director for Farm Aid, which advocated for the measures.
Two-thirds of the calls to Farm Aid’s hotline originated from growers who have been farming for a decade or more. They were evenly distributed among fruit and vegetable producers, livestock, grain and oilseed and dairy, the data show.
In 2018, the number of calls rose 109 percent to 1,034, increasing in the last five months of the year. In November, crisis assistance accounted for 78 percent of contacts to the hotline.
“The peak of the crisis was in 1986,” said Allen Featherstone, an agricultural economist at Kansas State University in Manhattan. “It is the worst since then by far.”
Mike Rosmann, another of the few mental health counselors in rural America, echoed the sentiments. A partially retired fourth-generation farmer, Rosmann rents out his Iowa property and maintains land under the conservation reserve program.
During the 1980’s farm crisis, the hotlines, counseling and other services that he participated in became the template for the provisions in the farm bill that Baldwin and Ernst advocated for, he said.
“The retaliatory tariffs by China have hurt soybean exports,” Rosmann said. “They’ve hurt our relations with other countries as well to a lesser extent, partly just because of the skepticism that surrounds the reliability of what the U.S. is doing.”
Still, farmers support Trump, in part due to his public support for corn-based ethanol, Rosmann said. Last week, the Environmental Protection Agency advanced a plan meant to expand the U.S. ethanol market, the first step in fulfilling a promise Trump made in Iowa last fall. About $8 billion in farmer aid has also taken some of the sting out of the trade war.
Some of that goodwill may be eroded by a 2020 budget proposal that would cut “overly generous” Department of Agriculture subsidies. The 35-day partial government shutdown earlier this year slowed implementation of the program.
Farmers have accrued so much debt because by nature they are optimistic, said Scott Marlow, senior policy specialist at the Rural Advancement Foundation International-USA in Pittsboro, North Carolina.
Their fierce independence and deep connection with the land can become an economic disadvantage, Marlow said. “They can be driven far further than most of us would be before they would call it quits, to the point of getting off-farm jobs to be able to continue farming, subsidizing the farming operation with off-farm income, driving themselves extremely hard.”
Sue Judd in Wisconsin set up a suicide prevention group for farmers and those in the rural community after her brother, a hobby farmer, killed himself, she said. Her group’s aim is to convince farmers that it’s all right to seek help and that they’re not alone.
Meyer, 71, who retired from law enforcement, was on the St. Peter’s Lutheran Church dart team with the parishioner who died by suicide. He says another parishioner who’s a farmer confided to him that he also struggled with stress. Meyer says that his aim with the groups is to “give them some hope if we can.” In the last meeting, 59 people showed up to share food, stories and hear financial advice and how to deal with stress compared with 45 in January.
Farmers’ spirits may lift if U.S. negotiators can broker a favorable deal with China soon. For now though, they’re having to cope with soybean prices of about $9 a bushel, almost half of what they were getting in the heyday of 2012. Chicago corn futures have followed a similar path to be trading at about $3.70 from a peak of $8.49 in 2012.
“If the corn price went up $3 a bushel and beans went up $5 my phone would ring a fourth as much as it is now,” Matthews said during a road trip. “Prices are really low and they’re waiting for what are they are going to do. Are they going to lift the tariffs? And so all of those things they’re constantly looking at.”
With assistance from Reg Gale and Cynthia Koons.
To contact the reporter on this story: Mario Parker in Chicago at mparker22@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story: James Attwood at jattwood3@bloomberg.net, Jeffrey Taylor
For more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com
Wisconsinite Abe Voelker says his family’s farm is yet another in a long line going out of business because of low prices, overproduction, the rise of CAFOs, and more.
By Abe Voelker, Business, Farming March 14, 2019
This essay originally appeared on Abe Voelker’s Blog, and is reprinted with permission.
This Christmas, like every other, I traveled to northern Wisconsin to stay with my parents on the dairy farm I grew up on. As usual I took the opportunity to help my dad and younger brother with barn chores and milk cows. The cows need to be milked twice a day, every day, roughly around 4 a.m. and 4 p.m. I didn’t help out every shift but I worked more than enough to once again be humbled about the life I left behind and recalibrate my nostalgia.
Early morning walk to the barn
Speaking of which, I never had the work ethic to be a farmer. Ever since I was little and playing video games on our NES, I was enamored by electronics. By the time our family got a personal computer and dial-up internet for Christmas in 1997, when I was 11, I was completely and hopelessly sucked in. There followed many evenings where my dad would come flying in to the house to yell at me for being late for chores when I lost track of time on “that damn computer.”
Thankfully for all involved, my younger brother Noah inherited my dad’s insane work ethic and love of farming and took up the farm’s reins (he also picked up my slack when we were younger—thanks Brother). He loves the work and excels at it.
I instead went to college and became a computer programmer, and haven’t lived in my hometown since.
I also have two older brothers; neither of them got the farming gene either. My eldest brother Jerry lives near Madison and also works in the software field. My second-eldest brother, John, lives near my folks and helps out quite often, but he also does other work and has other obligations, so most of the daily farming work falls on my youngest brother Noah and my dad, who is now into his 70’s.
Sadly this year, I found out that it will have been my final Christmas coming home and milking cows, because they’ll be selling off the cows over the coming spring and fall.
My dad and brother Noah getting ready to milk
The End of a Long Battle
This probably shouldn’t be a huge shock. Ever since I can remember there has always been a steady drumbeat of family farms going bust. Sometimes the tempo would increase, when milk and/or crop prices would hit new lows, but the drum has always beat on as the industry never seemed to turn a corner.
American milk is a global commodity, with commensurate pricing volatility due to fluctuations in global supply and demand, futures market speculators, and other factors. Source: USDA. 2018 dollar calculation made using CPI values.
Our family farm was subjected to the same ups and downs as every other farm but had always managed to weather every storm. I recall my dad saying how farming was a series of upturns and downturns in pretty much everything, and how it was important to save money from the good years so you can survive the bad years.
The cost of production has exceeded the value of production for dairy farms of my family’s size since the USDA began collecting these statistics in 2010. Source: USDA, “Milk cost of production by size of operation”
One of the bad times I can remember was in the mid-to-late ’90’s—I was in elementary school—when milk prices were so low that some farmers were dumping their milk down the drain in protest. At that time, my mom got involved in dairy activism and became a lead organizer of a group of area farmers who worked together to try to improve their lot and raise public awareness of their struggles.
In December 1995, they met with Wisconsin progressive legend Ed Garvey, a labor attorney who successfully helped form the NFL player’s union, to talk about forming a union for farmers.
The following year, after being rebuffed by a state representative for being a negligible percent of his constituency and told to come back when they had more support, they rallied farmers across the state to voluntarily close off their land to all recreational activity such as hunting, fishing, snowmobiling,4 and four-wheeling (snowmobile and ATV trails often cross farmers’ private land in Wisconsin).
They also blockaded a creamery cooperative’s weighing scales to protest the low prices.
In 1997, they founded an organization called Save Our Family Farms with the objective of getting farmers across the country to respond to a non-binding referendum on pricing mechanisms and supply management. I think the intent was to provide evidence of grassroots farmer support for Canadian-style controls on milk price and supply, which reduce volatility and the need for subsidies and have managed to maintain Canada’s family farms’ existence, which would give the American federal government ammo to institute similar policies.
Later, in 1998, they succeeded in establishing their union (technically a guild due to federal labor laws) as a branch of OPEIU, which in turn is affiliated with the AFL – CIO.
Unfortunately, while my mom and the other farmers had some success in raising awareness and garnering some attention from various government officials, their efforts didn’t have any discernible effect on policy or the milk price bottom line. Dairy farmers once again had to either hold on tight and ride it out, or go bust (and many did).
For our family at that time, the milk price situation combined with my dad needing knee surgery (from repeated stress of kneeling on concrete to milk cows) resulted in us having a dispersal sale and selling off most of the herd.
I remember it being an emotional day. After spending a week thoroughly cleaning up the barn and cattle, we set up a fenced-off show area outside the barn where on the day of the auction, the cattle were paraded out one-by-one to display to bidders and the auctioneer.
Milk prices being low also lowers the value of milking cows themselves, so we got less money than we had hoped for. To a kid it felt like vultures were paying a pittance to carry away a piece of my identity. By the end of the day, looking down the alleyway at mostly-empty cow stalls bedded with fresh sawdust, that anger turned to sadness and a sense of loss.
In time, my dad recovered from his surgery, my older brothers graduated from high school and moved out, and as my younger brother and I aged into our early teens, the herd was slowly built up to near-previous levels again.
‘Get Big or Get Out’
It seems hard to believe but at one point it was possible to make a decent living as a dairy farmer with a small herd (what’s now considered small, anyway). In 1981, my dad had a herd of 82 milking cows and he cracked the top 50 in all of northwest Wisconsin’s 22 counties for average milk production. This was in the heart of America’s dairyland by the way, to the point that federal milk pricing used to be based on how many miles away you were from here.
While not a scientific poll, it’s an interesting sample. If you look at the herd sizes listed you can see that they’re all what would now be considered small, with only two herds just barely over 100 head.
From what I can tell, the farming landscape changed dramatically in the 1970s when President Nixon promoted agribusiness lobbyist Earl “Rusty” Buty to USDA secretary. Butz had a reputation going back to at least the 1950’s for lobbying for dramatic modernizations to farming at the expense of small farms. “Adapt or die; resist and perish…Agriculture is now big business” he would say. By the 1970’s, before his USDA nomination, he was a director of three large agribusiness corporations.
Before Butz, farming practices were ruled by FDR New Deal-era controls on production, when memories of the Dust Bowl and destruction of the land through overproduction were still vivid. These production controls aimed to smooth out volatility by paying farmers to keep fields fallow in times of overproduction, and to release grain from storage in times of shortages. Farming production was geared toward American consumption, but even with the production controls there was always a surplus of grain to deal with.
Nixon brought Butz in with a mandate to get rid of the grain surpluses. Butz architected this by selling off the grain surpluses to the Soviets in “the largest grain deal so far as we [knew] in the history of the world” in 1972 for hundreds of millions of dollars.
Unfortunately, the deal didn’t come with an upper limit on how much grain the Soviets could buy (“because it did not occur to [them] that the Russians could ever buy too much”), and the Soviets bought up one – forth of the U.S. wheat harvest that year. The following year, American supermarket prices for bread and other goods shot up by 20%, of which some estimates attribute at least 15% of the rise directly on the export deal. Butz and the other deal-makers were dragged before a furious Congress to testify on what happened.
The grain shortages were a windfall for grain farmers, who were getting a higher price for their grain, but bad news for dairy farmers and other livestock farmers who fed their animals with grain.
To make up for the grain shortfall, Butz removed all production limits on grain and fervently encouraged farmers to go wild with production, to plant “from fencerow to fencerow” and “get big or get out.”.
The effects were quickly apparent, as before his USDA tenure was finished Butz became a pariah to everyone but the big farmers, as small farmers went bust under the continual tightening of the efficiency noose (Butz of course had no sympathy for these “inefficient” farms).
While not the whole story, Butz’s era was undoubtedly a major turning point in orienting our food economy towards consolidation and concentration of production in fewer and fewer hands.
Rise of the CAFOs
The consolidation of dairy and the continual shrinking of profit margins have led to drastic changes to the industry over the years. One change is that through selective breeding, improved nutrition, increased milking frequency, and other factors, the amount of milk that a single cow yields per year has more than doubled since the 1970’s:
Source: USDA Quick Stats
This has allowed overall milk production to increase, even while the total number of cows has shrank:
Source: USDA Quick Stats
While the overall number of cows have decreased a bit, the number of herds of cows, i.e. the number of farming operations, have decreased dramatically (and continues to do so—the latest count on the rate of change is two dairy farms per day closing):
Source: USDA Quick Stats
What this means is that the average number of cows on a given dairy operation has greatly risen, i.e., dairy farms have become much denser in terms of livestock. Looking at government statistics on dairy farm profitability, the reason this is happening (and the reason the trend will only continue) seems to be obvious—only farms with thousands of cows, that can use their size to cut costs, are able to operate in the black:
The only dairy farms that have been able to turn a profit (net value above zero) since the USDA began collecting statistics on dairy production in 2010 are the very largest. Source: USDA Milk Cost of Production Estimates by size of operation.
These changes have given rise to a whole new type of livestock farm: the Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation, or CAFO. CAFOs are defined by the EPA as “an AFO [Animal Feeding Operation] with more than 1000 animal units” (which for dairy, is 700 dairy cows, either milking or dry) or “any size AFO that discharges manure or wastewater into a natural or man-made ditch, stream or other waterway.”
Cows on a CAFO operation. Public domain image courtesy Danny Hart/PICRYL
In Wisconsin, the number of dairy CAFOs and the total number of cows on these operations continues to rise rapidly:
Source: Wisconsin DNR CAFO Permitees. (Note: These numbers only cover the latest CAFO permit issued to each operation. I have a FOIA request in progress with the WI DNR to get the historical permit data in order to improve this chart’s accuracy.)
The concentration of livestock on small plots of land and the large-scale industrialization of these farming operations have given rise to new negative externalities. CAFO livestock produce literal manure lagoons. There is so much manure produced that a huge pit must be dug, fitted with a liner, and the manure is dumped in, forming an artificial lake made of animal waste.
These manure lagoons are open-air, and the toxic fumes elevate rates of asthma in children living nearby. The liquid itself contains toxic chemicals, pathogens, and bacteria, and if it leaks out (say during heavy rainfall), is devastating to nearby communities as it contaminates the local water table, where people draw their well water from, and destroys local bodies of water where wildlife live and people recreate.
Due to the number of cows on these operations, high capacity wells that draw over 100,000 gallons of water per day are required in order to draw enough water for all the livestock. In rural Wisconsin, our natural water supply is beginning to be destroyed through a combination of manure and fertilizer spills contaminating our well water, and high capacity wells sucking out so much water that it’s disrupting the water table.
The agriculture sector, including CAFOs, is the leading contributor of pollutants to lakes, rivers, and reservoirs. It has been found that states with high concentrations of CAFOs experience on average 20 to 30 serious water quality problems per year as a result of manure management problems (EPA, 2001).
The report goes on to describe the long-term damage from even a single manure spill:
When groundwater is contaminated by pathogenic organisms, a serious threat to drinking water can occur. Pathogens survive longer in groundwater than surface water due to lower temperatures and protection from the sun.
…
Even if the contamination appears to be a single episode, viruses could become attached to sediment near groundwater and continue to leach slowly into groundwater. One pollution event by a CAFO could become a lingering source of viral contamination for groundwater (EPA, 2005).
…
Groundwater can still be at risk for contamination after a CAFO has closed and its lagoons are empty. When given increased air exposure, ammonia in soil transforms into nitrates. Nitrates are highly mobile in soil, and will reach groundwater quicker than ammonia. It can be dangerous to ignore contaminated soil.
…
If a CAFO has contaminated a water system, community members should be concerned about nitrates and nitrate poisoning. Elevated nitrates in drinking water can be especially harmful to infants, leading to blue baby syndrome and possible death.
For some real-world examples, in Wisconsin in 2017, a baby died from blue baby syndrome, a condition linked to high nitrates, in a community in Armenia, WI which had been experiencing a spike in private well nitrate levels after a 6,000-head dairy CAFO set up shop there. In the central sands region of Wisconsin, rivers such as the Little Plover, which was a notably good trout stream, have nearly dried up entirely from the substantial use of high capacity wells.
In Kewaunee County in northeast Wisconsin, more than one-third (!) of 320 wells tested were found to be unsafe to use due to unsafe levels of coliform bacteria or nitrates. In 2004, in that region, a six-month-old became violently ill after taking a bath in water poisoned by manure runoff. A state representative called the situation there a “public health crisis.”
A shower in rural Kewaunee County runs brown, contaminated by manure after a rainfall. Courtesy Erika and Rob Balza.
In 2014, in Juneau County, a man was forced to sell the home he had lived in for 20 years after a CAFO began repurposing water irrigation systems to spray manure, and the liquid soaked into the walls of his home (“It was an ammonia smell. It hurt so bad even to breathe,” he said).
An irrigation system is repurposed to spray manure on a Wisconsin field. Public domain image courtesy Wisconsin DNR
Besides environmental externalities, it’s also an open secret that these CAFOs heavily rely on undocumented immigrants for their day-to-day labor, particularly the parlor milking setups. In a recent news story, Congressman Devin Nunes’s family’s large dairy farm in Iowa got busted for such practices.
A dairy CAFO located in a tiny Wisconsin village pins an ad for workers written in Spanish to their Facebook page. There’s no ad in English. 🤔 That’s not a dig towards the immigrants—I married a Mexican woman and I love my inlaws and their culture dearly.
However, it’s important to remember that farms are in competition with each other for labor, land, and other resources. In this case, my brother and other family farms struggle and pay dearly to hire and retain legal workers at a high cost. Other farms, particularly the large ones, pay lower costs for illegal labor and externalize the costs of depressed wages onto everyone else, not unlike externalizing the costs of their pollution. It’s not a fair playing field to compete on.
Those are the federally-documented violations, anyway. My mom took some video of a leak about a month after the EPA-documented CWA violation which traveled down the hill into a creek that runs through my parents’ property, killing the wildlife there for God knows how long. This CAFO is now going through the process of installing a manure pipeline to move waste around to various fields—so far through private lands, but apparently they are also pursuing public right-of-ways.
It’s terrifying to consider how rapidly and how severely the water table and nearby wetlands could be damaged if this pipeline were to burst or leak, and how much manure could be pumped out below the topsoil before being detected.
So I spoke to the county’s conservation officer who had nothing but good things to say about the pipeline and how it will get tanker trucks off the roads, how a pipeline is safer for the environment, and how leaks would be stopped by shutoff valves. That may be true, but yet you can easily find news reports of manure pipeline leaks. When I asked my mom her thoughts, she told me there was allegedly a pipeline break already which sprayed manure across a neighbor’s yard and house, and showed me some pictures she took of the cleanup.
A skid steer cleans up an alleged manure spill at a neighbor’s house. Picture courtesy my mom.
For my brother Noah, who is taking over the farm, having the county’s biggest CAFO nearby unfortunately puts a competetive strain on his already-difficult situation. Because Wisconsin Pollutant Discharge Elimination System (WPDES) permit requirements require these CAFOs to own or rent enough land to spread manure on proportional to the amount of cows they have, this multi-million dollar corporation down the road is under land-pressure, and gobbles up all farming land in the area often before it’s even on the market. This makes it harder for my brother to find farmland to buy or rent nearby.
Failure of the Cooperatives
One last thing I’d like to touch on is the failure of the farmer cooperatives in this era.It’s probably well-known that there have been periods where farmers have went through tough times, and going back to at least the 1920’s, farmers have formed voluntary cooperatives (co-ops) to help one another out by pooling resources.
Check out this quaint 1940’s-era video for an explainer:
Unfortunately, the modern reality is that through repeated mergers, farming cooperatives have conglomerated into corporate behemoths. The co-op’s presence in a farming community today is as a local outpost that belongs to a sprawling empire.For example, in my family’s farm area the co-op conglomerate is Cenex, a.k.a. CHS Inc., which is a Fortune 100 company (!). And they’re not the only Fortune 100 farmer co-op either—there was once Farmland Industries, which imploded from the kind of financial stupidity that can only happen when you grow too large.
Anyway, for all the mergers and supposed efficiency gained by the local cooperative turning into a corporate dragon, my brother gets cheaper seeds by buying them from one dude starting up his own business out of the back of his truck, compared to the local co-op’s prices.
I’ve been told other services provided by the co-op suffer from massive inefficiencies as well—too many managers and idle workers at the headquarters, too many trucks show up concurrently at job sites leading to idle workers, inefficient truck routes, etc. The types of issues that crop up when there aren’t any farmers in the mix at the co-op any more—there’s no “skin in the game,” and no connection to the farmers being served.
The same kind of stuff happens with the cooperative creameries—the place where dairy farmers send their milk to be processed. You wouldn’t know there was a crisis going on looking at this creamery’s newsletter, with puff pieces about cheese curds showing up on the QVC channel, or about a director’s jetsetting trips to China and how impressed the locals were he could use chopsticks. Meanwhile member farmers (patrons) are getting the lowest milk checks from the creamery they’ve ever gotten. Yet somehow the board of this creamery had enough cash to allegedly buy another creamery to the tune of $6 million without bringing it up for a patron vote nor mentioning their intention at their annual meeting.
Farmers are generally scared to speak up about this kind of stuff for fear of getting dumped by their creamery and having nowhere to send their milk (because creameries serve limited geographic areas, a farmer may have very few—perhaps even just one—options for where to send their milk). With the overabundance of milk supply, the feeling is that creameries are on the lookout for ways to lower their supply burden by getting rid of patrons.7 Not being able to sell their milk is obviously a death knell for a dairy farmer.
Point being, farmer cooperatives were once local institutions bootstrapped by the farmers themselves, but now they too have fallen into the trap of corporate consolidation and become disconnected from the people they were meant to serve. Now, in hard times, these institutions have become a source of anxiety—at best an indifferent, inefficient use of resources, and at worst a potential hostile actor that could destroy you. Something unthinkable compared to their founding principles.
No Solution in Sight
What’s now happening in the final stages to the American family dairy farm has already happened to other food and livestock industries in this country. Notably poultry, as poultry farmers nowadays are more or less serfs to a handful of huge corporations.
Sunset harvest on the farm
For a time some thought it would be possible for small dairy farms to escape to a niche like organic, but even those farms are going bust as the large corporate farms have penetrated that market and flooded it with product (even if they probably aren’t following the already-lax USDA regulations).
I do think it may have been possible to save the family dairy farm at some point, probably through a supply management program similar to what Canada has. There are all sorts of arguments to be made for or against such a system but by all accounts Canadian farmers and consumers are generally happy with their setup up there. The 2014 Farm Bill would’ve been a good start; it included an oversupply management mechanism, but CAFO lobbyist groups like the Dairy Business Association pushed a last-minute amendment to remove it.
But at this point for America, the cow is out of the barn so to speak and it’s too late for our family dairy farmers. As dairy farms continue to close at record levels, the consolidation into large corporate farms will continue unabated.
For a taste of what the near future looks like, Wal-Mart already began bottling their own milk, shutting down over 100 dairy producers in the process. As for the distant future, I imagine it will look similar to the consolidation in other livestock industries, where a handful of mega corporations dictate production and the “farmers” are more like serfs, deeply in debt and entirely beholden to the corporation. I already mentioned poultry farming, but also look at hog farming: the largest hog producer in the country, Smithfield Foods, is now owned by a Chinese corporation, and which is responsible for staggering amounts of damage to rural American communities due to the concentrated waste it produces.
In the name of efficiency, profits will be concentrated in fewer and fewer hands while waste gets concentrated into more and more toxic forms to be dumped on rural communities.
Final Thoughts
Growing up on a dairy farm is a unique experience that I was fortunate to have. The farm was woven through all aspects of our family’s life, and the success of our family depended on everyone’s contribution to the farm. Family bonds were tempered by working with each other every day, and together overcoming the minor crises that arose (cows getting out, equipment breaking down, etc.). That’s why I used “death” in this article’s title; while it may seem melodramatic to some, that is what it feels like to me—like a piece of the family is dying.
Brother John coming back from spreading fertilizer, holding his daughter
You get a little taste of many things working on a farm, from agricultural, to construction (e.g., building and fixing up areas of the barn), to engineering (e.g., designing ad-hoc fixes to broken implements in the field), to mechanical and engine repair (e.g., fixing tractors and welding implements).
It saddens me that my brother Noah won’t be able to pass that legacy on to his daughter, and I can’t give my own kids a glimmer of it by having them work on the farm over the summers (and neither can my nieces or nephews).
It’s also a loss for Wisconsin’s culture—“America’s Dairyland”—that we aren’t going to have farm kids coming up any more, and our rural pastoral landscape that was dotted with barns, silos, and pastures with grazing cattle is being replaced by an industrial one with huge buildings, heavy machine traffic, and artificial lakes made of animal waste. Those of us who grew up in these rural areas and moved out but longed to return can’t even bear to do so any longer because the land has been blighted.
While the future is still uncertain for my kid brother Noah, I have no doubt he will succeed at whatever he puts his mind to. He’s got brains, talent, and a god-tier work ethic.
If there’s anything good to come of the situation, I am glad at least that he’ll be freed from the burden of having cows, which require one to be out in the barn every single day without end. It will also be a relief to my dad, who I mentioned earlier is now in his seventies and still has to work out in the barn every day because of the difficulty in hiring legal farmhands.
Whatever happens, these family bonds that were forged on the farm remain, and we will take care of each other.
Brother Noah getting in the skid steer
What You Can Do
As I said, I don’t think there’s anything on the horizon that would save family dairy farms, save for a supply management program suddenly appearing like a deus ex machina and solving the overproduction problem. I suggest lobbying your representatives for supporting such a measure in a future Farm Bill, and/or supporting family farm organizations who are fighting for that and other measures such as:
If you live in a rural or semi-rural area, it’s critical you pay attention to what’s going on in your local area. CAFOs will continue to grow and spread, and through organizations like the Dairy Business Association lobby for laws giving them freer ability to pollute the air, water, and land that we all need in order to survive. I suggest proactively lobbying your city or township to pass ordinances banning polluting activities in your area and restrictions that prevent CAFOs from operating in your area (otherwise you might end up on the defensive, which is nearly impossible to win). Some organizations that defend Wisconsin’s water you can support are:
Everyone, including cityfolk, must get educated on what is going on with our food economy, and the dangerous direction it has taken. I’m still getting educated myself so am open to suggestions, but the Food and Environment Reporting Network seems to do good work here.
Finally, I also recommend everyone, but especially rural folks support the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, as they work hard on several fronts (including another issue dear to my heart, improving broadband access) to empower local communities.
Addendum
This article is based solely on my own reflection and attempts to understand the systemic changes that affected my family’s dairy farm. Any mistakes I made are solely my own and do not reflect upon anyone else mentioned in the article.
I spent a lot of time writing this post but there are so many other issues that I wasn’t able to even get to. For example, the startling rate of farmers committing suicide (more than double that of veterans), which hit close to home when the man who visited our farm my entire life in his familiar white truck and sold my dad farm equipment killed himself (RIP Marty); to creamery cooperative mismanagement and ineffectiveness and the farmers doing battle with their own creameries, and the general failure of the Capper-Volstead Act; to the consolidation of the farm implement industry; to John Deere doing some shady things (here and here); to statistical changes of the price spread from farm to consumer (i.e., the amount of money farmers get from a gallon of milk or other dairy products compared to their retail cost); to digging into the nasty things CAFO lobbyists are doing; to rural communities fighting against CAFOs in their area; to Trump’s tariffs and a certain political anger people direct at farmers; and so many more I regret I wasn’t able to do justice to.
General Mills wants to regenerate 1 million acres of farmland over next decade
By Carrigan Miller,Staff writer, Minneapolis / St. Paul Business Journal
March 4, 2019
General Mills’ headquarters in Golden Valley
Golden Valley-based food company General Mills Inc. has announced that it wants to promote regenerative agriculture on 1 million acres of farmland by 2030.
It also announced a $650,000 grant to Kiss the Ground, a nonprofit that provides education and training on education on regenerative agriculture. That organization has a much more ambitious goal for soil health: it wants to increase the soil health of half a billion acres of land by 2050.
Regenerative agriculture refers to farming practices that increase the long-term health of ecosystems. While it does reduce carbon emissions, a major environmental priority, it also increases soil health and reduces water pollution in local watersheds.
This is part of a trend for the increasingly environmentally conscious food giant. It previously laid out a plan to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 28 percent from 2010 to 2025. It was almost halfway there in 2018, when it said its footprint was down 13 percent.
The General Mills portfolio already includes brands that emphasize sustainability. In 2014, they bought Annie’s, the Berkley, California-based organic food producer, whose product line includes ingredients produced by regenerative agriculture.
Competitors are also making inroads in sustainability. Kellogg’s, perhaps General Mills biggest competition, has environmental initiatives of its own. Last year, it set a goal of making 100 percent of its packaging either reusable, recyclable or compostable. It also intends to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 65 percent by 2050. They didn’t however, mention regenerative agriculture specifically.
The 28 percent reduction goal that General Mills has set is the same as the goal set by the United States Climate Alliance, a group of 20 states that that came together after the U.S. left the Paris Climate Agreement.
As Awareness Grows About Food’s Role In Climate Change, What Solutions Exist?
After a decade of work to connect food and climate, four experts say the link is being made, but much work remains to be done.
By Civil Eats, 10th Anniversary, Climate February 19, 2019
Over the past 10 years, we have seen a tidal shift in awareness about the dangers that climate change poses, and the fact that it’s only going to get much worse if we don’t quickly take dramatic action. In fact, data released just last week found that alarm over climate change in the U.S. has doubled in just the last five years.
Despite the growth in coverage, dialogue, and action to address climate change, food and agriculture remain far from the conversation. And yet we know that food and agriculture play a major role in the production of global greenhouse gas emissions—as much as 24 percent by some estimates. Take the recent interactive report from the New York Times highlighting the ways in which countries can dramatically reduce emissions; it gave less than one full sentence to food and agriculture.
Jon Foley, the executive director of Project Drawdown, a nonprofit organization focused on dramatic reductions of carbon in the atmosphere, has witness first-hand the momentum building. But he laments the wasted decades spent debating the existence of climate change.
“I wish we were having these conversations back in 1970 instead of 2018,” Foley said. “We’ve lost so much time.”
As part of Civil Eats’ 10th anniversary, we’re hosting a series of roundtables this year to look at the past, present, and future of the issues critical to the U.S. food system. Given the urgent need to act, and the strong swell of momentum behind policy solutions such as the Green New Deal, we begin this year with a focus on climate change.
The participants in this roundtable are: Renata Brillinger, Executive Director, California Climate and Agriculture Network (CalCAN); Rosie Burroughs, farmer and rancher, Burroughs Family Farms; Jon Foley, Executive Director, Project Drawdown; and Anna Lappé, author of Diet for a Hot Planetand director of the Food & Democracy program at the Panta Rhea Foundation. Civil Eats’ editor-in-chief, Naomi Starkman, and managing editor Matthew Wheeland facilitated the wide-ranging discussion. The conversation has been edited for clarity and brevity.
Looking back over the last decade of the food movement and the climate movement, has the divide gotten smaller? What would need to happen to bring these movements together? And can these two movements even coexist?
Anna Lappé.
Anna Lappé: When I look back to 2006, when the United Nations published “Livestock’s Long Shadow,” it was a wake-up call that got many of us thinking about the intersection between food and climate. At that time, there was a very strong climate movement that had been engaging people around the country and the world. And there was not much integration within the climate movement, or even much of a conversation around food or agriculture and agribusiness.
My sense of that was really confirmed when colleagues at Johns Hopkins did a study of climate coverage in the 16 biggest newspapers in the U.S., and only a tiny fraction—about 2.5 percent—even mentioned food and agriculture as a part of the problem or the solution, and a much smaller percentage talked about it as a substantial focus area.
I think it was a blind spot, not just for the climate movement, but for policymakers and for folks all across the spectrum. Many of the biggest environmental groups were campaigning around climate already, but certainly very few had integrated campaigns around agribusiness or food systems’ impact. Now, I feel like that story has totally changed. So many of the biggest climate organizations are really understanding that farmers and ranchers are on the frontlines of [climate] impact, but also the frontlines of the solutions.
Renata Brillinger: CalCAN formed 10 years ago, and I agree with Anna that [since then] the conversation has really widened from agriculture being mostly identified as the problem to it also being a solution. There’s also a more widespread appreciation of the very specific and unique contributions that properly managed farmland and ranch land can make to reduce emissions and store carbon.
Renata Brillinger.
I think, though, that talking about the food system or food movement is tricky. There’s quite a distance between consumers and urban dwellers and producers. Even if we were to bifurcate the so-called movement into those two categories, [consumers] and agriculturalists, it’s hard to generalize.
We’re lucky in California to have a context where we can talk about climate change—even in agricultural communities—without ears shutting. Nonetheless, farmers are not typically motivated to bring forward their climate solutions because of the benefits to the climate. That’s not the first thing on their list of priorities when they get up to go to work every day; they’re thinking about staying in business, the market pressures and price, input costs, natural resources, and weather. They’re not necessarily saying, “I’m going to go out and sequester some carbon this morning.” But the connections, all the co-benefits that we get by doing climate-friendly practices, those are what speak to farmers.
By way of a benchmark, California did its first Scoping Plan in 2008, which laid out the pathway to achieving the greenhouse gas emissions targets that the state had put into law (targets that have since been increased). At the time, only about half a page of that plan dealt with agriculture. Fast forward, and the 2014 update to the Scoping Plan included a much more substantial agriculture section, and a draft report was released in January 2019 focused solely on climate solutions on natural and working lands, including agriculture.
We just saw Governor Newsom propose the largest budget for the Healthy Soils Program, one of the state’s tools for reducing emissions in agriculture; and there are now more than $300 million worth of incentives for agriculture to deliver climate solutions [in the state], up from $0 four years ago.
Jon Foley.
Jon Foley: I would say that the two communities still have some work to do to really get together. A lot of progress has been made, but I fear not enough. The food and agriculture system altogether is about 24 percent, we think, of our total emissions of greenhouse gases, which is tied basically with electricity as the two largest emitters.
Within the food system, the three big parts are still deforestation, methane emissions from cattle and rice fields globally, and nitrous oxide from overusing fertilizers. Those numbers haven’t budged—if anything they might be going up again, especially as Brazil’s new leader seems to be going after what was a suspension of deforestation across the Amazon.
While food is slowly being recognized as a contributor to climate change, and also a solution, it’s nowhere near the magnitude of discussion or investment as electricity gets. Every time you hear about climate change, we’re going to talk about coal and renewables—but only maybe one in 10 times do you hear about food. Right now, 80 percent of the press, funding, investment, and attention is going to about 20 percent of the climate problem.
On the positive side, we’ve had a lot of discussions about reducing the problems of the food system. To me, the biggest levers are still things like slowing and ceasing deforestation, because not only does it prevent the source of carbon dioxide, it helps preserve the sinks of carbon that forests naturally are, as well as their benefits to biodiversity in watersheds and to the livelihoods of Indigenous communities.
I think food waste has gotten a lot of attention, too, which is nice since we waste 30 to 40 percent of all the food we grow. There’s also an active discussion around the role of meat, especially beef—the grass-fed vs. feedlot debate—whether this can flip from being a problem to being a potential solution.
Rosie and Ward Burroughs.
Rosie Burroughs: In terms of the farming connection, the encouraging part is that two years ago, I would have said that most of conventional farmers were not really concerned about climate change, nor were they interested in regenerative practices that sequester carbon. In the last two years, I’ve seen many younger farmers really embracing and trying new practices. For example, there’s a conventional farm next to ours—they’re young parents, and they’re looking at the future, but also the health for their children.
I’m encouraged that there are so many young farmers coming to our farm and saying, “I’m interested in doing some things better. I’d like to learn how to not use synthetic fertilizers.” Let’s get all farmers starting on regenerative practices, because once they learn the tools, they’re going to adopt them because they cost less.
What do you think it would take for the general public to start to understand that link between food and climate? Do you see signs that that it’s starting to happen?
Jon Foley: It’s not even just the broader public discussion, I think it’s [also] among policymakers and even so-called experts. Even people who have focused on climate change their entire lives tend to think only about CO2, forgetting methane, nitrous oxide, and other greenhouse gases that we emit. We tend to think only about energy, and we often forget things other than electricity. Even at the governor’s conference on climate solutions [in 2018] and at the IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] meetings, electricity gets much more discussion than it has impact on the atmosphere. Transportation probably gets the second biggest, and food usually doesn’t get a lot of attention until recently.
I find that there are a lot of myths; people often start talking about food miles. Well, it turns out if you run the numbers, food miles are really negligible when it comes to greenhouse gas emissions.
What I’m really excited about is highlighting solutions, like how we can protect forests and reduce food waste. How can we help shift to more sustainable kinds of diets that are also healthier for us? How can regenerative agriculture flip farms from being maybe a “problem” to being part of the solution? And especially the health of soils: Soil really does capture the imagination. It’s not hard for people to recognize healthy soil that’s teeming with life, versus soil that has been beat to hell with industrial farming for far too long. I think that might spur part of the conversation if we do it right.
Farms have a special place in Americans’ hearts—they’re part of our culture, our heritage, our ethos as a nation. This is a very positive opportunity for us to highlight the problems, look at the solutions to mitigate those problems, and also the opportunities for new farming. The time is now.
Anna Lappé: I really agree with what Jon is saying, but we have so much more progress to make. I have seen this real shift in how much people are talking about the food and climate connection. And yet we know from last year’s really alarming IPCC report that we have 12 years to radically shift systems worldwide; what is clear is that food and agriculture absolutely have to be part of that conversation. If you look at projections moving forward 10-20 years, unless we’re making some radical shifts, the impact on the food sector is going to really balloon.
I’m alarmed that we aren’t making more progress. We have to be looking squarely at corporate power, corporate influence on politics, and the fact that the immensely powerful fossil fuel companies really thwart a lot of progress. What we can see is that some of those very same companies are deeply involved with the food system. And unless we bring that conversation about challenging corporate power to the solutions we’re putting forth around food, I don’t think we’re going to see the progress we need. For instance, there’s been incredible campaigning around energy companies and we’re seeing some of those players move into fertilizer production. Koch Industries just put several billion dollars into fertilizer production plants in the South, for instance.
Rosie Burroughs: [We need to be talking] not only about food coming into the conversation, but nutrient-dense food—so food that’s healthy, food that’s medicine, food that’s going to keep the humans and all the animals on this planet thriving.
Where are you seeing traction on a policy level? Are there policies helping to shape and bring these two seemingly disparate movements together?
Renata Brillinger: It’s challenging to talk about the food system as a whole when it comes to policy because it’s an apples and oranges comparison. CalCAN only focuses on the farm production piece, and the estimates are that it’s roughly 8 percent of California’s emissions. That obviously doesn’t count all of the energy that goes into the inputs, especially nitrogen fertilizer, and it doesn’t count packaging, transportation, processing, and all that.
There are other efforts going on, for example to put some cap and trade funding into building compost facilities to deal with food waste, and the methane emissions that are associated with landfills. There are efforts to improve food processing facility energy efficiency, etc.
There are now four programs that all have what we would call natural solutions or biologically based solutions to reducing emissions on farms. One of them incentivizes farmers to reduce their energy and water use. Another incentivizes methane reduction in dairies, which is, as Jon said, a big source of potent greenhouse gas emissions. There’s a program to preserve farmland in perpetuity so that we can limit urban sprawl. Our transportation sector is our biggest problem in California; addressing it contributes to reducing future emissions from urban growth and sprawl. And the fourth program is the Healthy Soils Program.
California is unfortunately one of the only places in the world—maybe the only place in the world—where there’s a comprehensive suite of such programs. There are some other examples, but none that are quite so robust. It’s great that we’re blazing that trail, but it’s also obviously, completely insufficient if we need to get to bending our carbon emissions curve within 12 years. So, we’re both a beacon and obviously inadequate.
There are some other states that are moving forward with trying to put carbon-pricing mechanisms in place. Oregon, Washington keeps trying, New York—these are some places where then we can hopefully derive some revenue to direct toward [climate-smart] agriculture. And there are a number of other places where that’s impossible politically, but there are some organizations trying to figure out how to incentivize practices that deliver climate benefits on farms by calling it something other than climate protection—calling it “water-quality improvements” or “regulatory streamlining” or “erosion control.” “Healthy soil” is a becoming a proxy for a whole bunch of promising improvements in agriculture in various pockets around the country.
Anna Lappé: Outside our country there is actually a lot of movement to really scale up regenerative farming systems. I just had the opportunity to connect with a leader in an effort in the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh. It’s an inspiring, farmer-led movement to improve the livelihoods of farmers using practices that are also good for the climate. The kind of soil health efforts that build up carbon that also produce nutrient-dense food.
The project is called Zero Budget Natural Farming, and it’s about using on-farm nutrients to grow crops without relying on chemical fertilizers or pesticides, which is not good for the climate and not good for farmers—it pushes farmers into debt. They piloted it with about 100,000 farmers. And the government is planning to invest a huge amount of money across 6 million farmers over the next five years or more. When you have government investing, stepping up, and saying, “We want to have programs that benefit farmers at scale,” you can see incredible impact.
Going back to Jon’s earlier point about deforestation and agribusiness pressures on forests, I feel like this is where there could be some policy solutions, but we should also look at how can we put pressure on the finance sector not to underwrite the destruction of those vital forests. How can we put pressure on the insurance sector not to underwrite the agribusiness companies moving into those vital areas of the planet? And how can we also put pressure on the consumer-facing brands to make sure that nothing in their supply chains traces back to those vital forests? So yes, there’s a lot of really great policy solutions, but I also think we really need a whole host of strategies.
Jon Foley: We have four big tools to change the world: policy is one, but it’s also the flow of capital—where the money goes—and helping to highlight the risk of certain kinds of agriculture and the performance of other kinds. Where people invest and where they don’t is a really powerful thing. Also, changing the rules in technology and how people farm, showing that regenerative agriculture, organic, and other kinds of systems can actually be better—not just good for the environment, but just better overall for everybody. And of course the larger, behavioral side of things, like what we buy, our diets, our waste. So policy is not the only lever, and I worry that we’ve waited far too long for policymakers to get off the dime and they haven’t.
We’ve wasted 30 years waiting for the U.N. to save us—and it hasn’t done anything except produce a bunch of reports. It’s time to look elsewhere, which is why I get interested in cities and states. California’s doing some great work. Other places are, too. We’re seeing interesting intersections of business, civil society, NGOs, and even scientific organizations. The early success in Brazil in limiting deforestation, with activist groups going after big agribusiness and then agribusiness trying to reform and certify soybeans and beef from deforested regions—that was actually a pretty big success story. Hopefully it’s not being undermined now.
Ward Burroughs inspects compost on Burroughs Family Farms. (Photo courtesy of CalCAN)
On the global scale, there are some big leverage points: On deforestation—about half of historic deforestation in the last 20 years occurred in only two countries, Brazil and Indonesia. That’s where we ought to focus a lot of attention: on those two countries, and the soybean, beef, palm oil, and timber supply chains. That’s really where a lot of action is happening and only a handful of companies are involved in those, so it’s a good place to focus.
On fertilizer use, China, India, and the U.S. together represent about two-thirds of all the fertilizer use on the planet for three major commodities—rice, corn, and soybeans. And then if you look at methane emissions, again it’s China, India, and the U.S., mainly rice [paddies] and cattle. While it’s nice to grow organic arugula in our backyard, we have to look at these big systems, too, How do we reform them, how do we change them with that policy lever, with the changing-how-we-farm lever, and the how-markets-and-consumers-look-at-these-systems levers? We need to focus more on the big levers, because the planet doesn’t have time to wait. We have to significantly cut emissions and improve solutions in food—in a decade, basically. And there’s a lot of momentum, but we really need to look at getting big wins and where the possibilities are. That’s why I get excited about California as a leader.
Rosie, from your perspective, are some of these policies or incentive programs better at encouraging farmers to adopt regenerative and more sustainable practices than others?
Rosie Burroughs: Yes, but we still have a long way to go. Cover crops seems to be one thing that most farmers can just adapt to and implement. And there are some programs where farmers can get seed for free or at a reduced cost to start trying some of the cover crops, and of course they’re mostly highlighting the benefits to monarchs, bees and other pollinators.
Cover crops planted at Hundley Whaley Research Center as part of a multi-year study looking at how different tillage systems and seeding systems effect yields of soybeans and corn. (Photo by Bruce Burdick for CAFNR)
[It can be difficult to plant cover crops on a no-till farm], but cover crops is one of the first places that we can try to get more farmers to adapt, because it reduces the use of synthetic pesticides on the land and it improve soil biology. And once you start seeing and experiencing more life in your soil, you can see it above-ground, too; you’ll see more birds and beneficials.We [at Burroughs Family Farm] are an organic, seasonal, grass-based dairy using regenerative practices, and as Jon pointed out, there’s only a few big companies that are controlling all the buying power and distribution power, and we have had a terrible time trying to market our own product—everything from stores not wanting to have to add the paperwork for an independent distributor who sells farmer-direct to the store to the politics that are on the shelf. I knew of one farmer who wanted to get a new product on the shelf, and they were told it would cost $50,000 to buy a space. So the small farmer does not have a chance.
There is a crisis, particularly in the organic dairy business and there are several reasons for it, but people should know that Danone gave a one-year notice to many of their farmers across the nation. All but the majority of them have one year to find another home. Well, there isn’t another home to go to. There are just so few companies in that business so we have farmers going out of business left and right, and once we lose the farmers off the land, we’ve lost the resource of organic to be part of the [climate] solution. In my neighborhood, we’ve lost two organic dairies in 2018.
Given the state of the crisis, is there one thing that makes each of you hopeful in this moment?
Renata Brillinger: There is an explosion of science and willing practitioners like Rosie, who are way ahead of the curve. Rosie and her husband Ward joined us as advisers 10 years ago, but now they’ve got lots of amazing company in the farming community—people who are really curious. I’m blown away by the fact that young farmers are trying to get into this very hard business and are motivated in large part because they see it as having ecological benefits. That’s really hopeful.
There’s also been a big shift in the university world; not just science, but technical assistance providers, extensions, the Resource Conservation Districts, non-profit organizations, and there’s just an increasingly large coalition of those who are seeing this as an exciting growth area with lots of opportunity, co-benefits, and exciting, intellectual work to do. It’s like no other challenge we’ve faced as humans, and it’s bringing out the best in a lot of really smart people. It’s really popping, and it’s really hard, but I see a lot of curiosity and innovation.
Jon Foley: I think this discussion highlights some of the great momentum that’s building. The academic community, the NGO community—in food as well as in environment and climate change—are all beginning to recognize the opportunity here. And to me, the top-line issues—protecting rainforests, reducing food waste, and shifting diets—are beginning to get some traction.
I love what’s going on with different kinds of grazing techniques and stuff to maybe flip beef [production] from being a problem to a solution. On the whole, the planet’s beef and dairy systems are hugely responsible for a lot of our climate change problem because so much of it is not done well.
We do have to look simultaneously at shifting to better kinds of systems, but also just reducing demand for beef overall and making sure we don’t waste what we do grow. There are a lot of levers we can pull all at the same time: Less beef, no waste, and better [farming practices]. We’ve lost so much time because powerful people don’t want this change. And whether it’s the fossil fuel business or big agribusiness, that at the end of the day the impediments are gigantic and we have to just acknowledge that elephant in the room and find a way to move that as well.
Anna Lappé: My source of hope is always the energy I get from activism around the planet, from people really standing up to those powerful interests that Jon just named. I think if we are going to make the progress we need to make, that kind of speaking truth to power and standing up to really powerful corporate interests is going to be critical. What we’re seeing in the food industry is shape shifting—where you see a lot of the biggest, most powerful corporations that are really driving deforestation, non-regenerative practices in the beef industry, and fertilizer use—using a lot of public relations spin to try to make them look like they’re there on our side, so to speak.
For example, we just saw the merging of two of the biggest chemical corporations in the world, Dow and DuPont. They’ve now spun off their agricultural chemicals sector and rebranding themselves as Corteva, a name that comes from the combination of “heart” and “land,” and they’re trying to kind of present themselves as a benign force. We know the chemical industry is an essential part of a system that’s not sustainable for many reasons; it is not good for health and certainly not good for the climate. I get hope from the sense of the energy we’re seeing, energy around the Green New Deal, for instance, which will include areas of work around food and agriculture.
Rosie Burroughs: What gives me hope is believing that regenerative ag practices give us purpose and make us feel that what we’re doing is right. We wouldn’t farm any other way. It’s like what my husband says: “If we ever had to go back to conventional farming, we wouldn’t farm—because that’s a death sentence in terms of the soil, the animals, and food for humans.”
By Reconnecting With Soil, We Heal the Planet and Ourselves
Leah Penniman writes that Black people in the U.S have had a sacred relationship with soil that far surpasses enslavement and sharecropping.
By Leah Penniman, Food Justice, Young Farmers February 18, 2019
Participants of Soul Fire Farm’s training program transplant pepper seedlings. Photo by Neshima Vitale-Penniman.
Dijour Carter refused to get out of the van parked in the gravel driveway at Soul Fire Farm in Grafton, New York. The other teens in his program emerged skeptical, but Dijour lingered in the van with his hood up, headphones on, eyes averted.
There was no way he was going to get mud on his new Jordans and no way he would soil his hands with the dirty work of farming.
I didn’t blame him. Almost without exception, when I ask Black visitors to the farm what they first think of when they see the soil, they respond “slavery” or “plantation.” Our families fled the red clays of Georgia for good reason—the memories of chattel slavery, sharecropping, convict leasing, and lynching were bound up with our relationship to the earth. For many of our ancestors, freedom from terror and separation from the soil were synonymous.
While the adult mentors in Dijour’s summer program were fired up about this field trip to a Black-led farm focused on food justice, Dijour was not on board. I tried to convince him that although the land was the “scene of the crime,” as Chris Bolden Newsome put it, she was never the criminal.
But Dijour was unconvinced. It was only when he saw the group departing on a tour that his fear of being left alone in a forest full of bears overcame his fear of dirt. He joined us, removing his Jordans to protect them from the damp earth and allowing, at last, the soil to make direct contact with the soles of his bare feet.
Dijour, typically stoic and reserved, broke into tears during the closing circle at the end of that day. He explained that when he was very young, his grandmother had shown him how to garden and how gently to hold a handful of soil teeming with insects. She died years ago, and he had forgotten these lessons. When he removed his shoes on the tour and let the mud reach his feet, the memory of her and of the land literally traveled from the earth, through his soles, and to his heart. He said that it felt like he was “finally home.”
The truth is that for thousands of years Black people have had a sacred relationship with soil that far surpasses our 246 years of enslavement and 75 years of sharecropping in the United States.
For many, this period of land-based terror has devastated that connection. We have confused the subjugation our ancestors experienced on land with the land herself, naming her the oppressor and running toward paved streets without looking back. We do not stoop, sweat, harvest, or even get dirty because we imagine that would revert us to bondage.
Part of the work of healing our relationship with soil is unearthing and relearning the lessons of soil reverence from the past.
Teen participants take their shoes off to experience the mud on their feet. Photo by Neshima Vitale-Penniman.
We can trace Black people’s sacred relationship with soil back at least to the reign of Cleopatra in Egypt beginning in 51 BCE. Recognizing the earthworm’s contributions to the fertility of Egyptian soil, Cleopatra declared the animal sacred and decreed that no one, not even a farmer, was allowed to harm or remove an earthworm for fear of offending the deity of fertility. According to studies referenced by Jerry Minnich in The Earthworm Book in 1977, worms of the Nile River Valley were largely responsible for the extraordinary fertility of Egyptian soils.
In West Africa, the depth of highly fertile anthropogenic soils serves as a “meter stick” for the age of communities. Over the past 700-plus years, women in Ghana and Liberia have combined several types of waste—including ash and char from cooking, bones from meal preparation, by-products from processing handmade soaps, and harvest chaff—to create African Dark Earths.
According to a 2016 study in Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, this black gold has high concentrations of calcium and phosphorus, as well as 200 to 300 percent more organic carbon than soils typical to the region. Today, community elders measure the age of their towns by the depth of the black soil, since every farmer in every generation participated in its creation.
When the colonial governments in northern Namibia and southern Angola attempted to force Ovambo farmers off their land, they offered what they said were equivalent plots with better-quality soil. According to Emmanuel Kreike in Environmental Infrastructure in African History, the farmers refused to be displaced, countering that they had invested substantially in building their soils and doubted that the new areas would ever equal their existing farms in fertility. The Ovambo people knew that soil fertility was not an inherent quality but something that is nurtured over generations through mounding, ridging, and the application of manure, ashes, termite earth, cattle urine, and muck from wetlands.
This reverent connection between Black people and soil traveled with Black land stewards to the United States.
In the early 1900’s, George Washington Carver was a pioneer in regenerative farming and one of the first agricultural scientists in the United States to advocate for the use of leguminous cover crops, nutrient-rich mulching, and diversified horticulture. He wrote in The American Monthly Review of Reviews that the soil’s “deficiency in nitrogen can be met almost wholly by the proper rotation of crops, keeping the legumes, or pod-bearing plants, growing upon the soil as much as possible.”
He advised farmers to dedicate every spare moment to raking leaves, gathering rich earth from the woods, piling up muck from swamps, and hauling it to the land. Carver believed that “unkindness to anything means an injustice done to that thing,” a conviction that extended to both people and soil.
One of the projects of colonization, capitalism, and White supremacy has been to make us forget this sacred connection to soil. Only when that happened could we rationalize exploiting it for profit.
As European settlers displaced Indigenous people across North America in the 1800’s, they exposed vast expanses of land to the plow for the first time. It took only a few decades of intense tillage to drive around 50 percent of the original organic matter from the soil into the sky as carbon dioxide. The agricultural productivity of the Great Plains decreased 71 percent during the 28 years following that first European tillage. The initial rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide levels was due to the oxidation of soil organic matter through plowing.
The planet’s soils continue to be in trouble.
Each year we lose around 25 million acres of cropland to soil erosion. The loss is 10 to 40 times faster than the rate of soil formation, putting global food security at risk. Soil degradation alone is projected to decrease food production by 30 percent over the next 50 years. Further, when soils are laden with fertilizers and pesticides, the nutritional quality of the food they produce is lower than crops grown using methods that enrich the soil with compost, cover crops, and mulches.
Dance moves teach the process of weeding. Photo by Neshima Vitale-Penniman.
When the soil suffers, it’s not just our food supply that is at risk. The further the population gets from its connection to earth, the more likely we are to ignore and exploit those who work the soil. As Wendell Berry wrote in The Hidden Wound in 1970:
The white man, preoccupied with the abstractions of the economic exploitation and ownership of the land, necessarily has lived on the country as a destructive force, an ecological catastrophe, because he assigned the hand labor, and in that the possibility of intimate knowledge of the land, to a people he considered racially inferior; in thus debasing labor, he destroyed the possibility of meaningful contact with the earth. He was literally blinded by his presuppositions and prejudices. Because he did not know the land, it was inevitable that he would squander its natural bounty, deplete its richness, corrupt and pollute it, or destroy it altogether. The history of the white man’s use of the earth in America is a scandal.
In the United States today, nearly 85 percent of the people who work the land are Hispanic or Latino and do not enjoy the same labor protections under the law as other American workers in other sectors. Pesticide exposure, wage theft, uncompensated overtime, child labor, lack of collective bargaining, and sexual abuse are all too common experiences of farmworkers today.
Even in urban areas, our disconnect from soil has grave consequences.
As a toddler, my daughter, Neshima, loved to make mud pies in the playground and drop bean seeds into the furrows of community garden plots in Worcester, Massachusetts. I didn’t know that exposure to these urban soils would put my child at risk for permanent neurological damage.
At her 18-month pediatric visit, I learned that she was one of approximately 500,000 children with elevated blood lead levels in this country. She inhaled and ingested soil that had been contaminated with lead from old paint and gasoline emissions. I quickly became a safe-soils activist and tested hundreds of residential and public spaces across the city, encountering lead levels as high as 11,000 parts per million, well above the Environmental Protection Agency’s safe limit of 400 parts per million.
From the arsenic found at a school site in Maine to the heavy metals in the gardens of Portland, Oregon, and the brownfields at an affordable housing site in Minneapolis, our urban soils are showing the scars of our disconnection. Hailing from the Bronx, New York, a participant in one of our farm training programs shared, “The soil is toxic in my neighborhood. The only good thing I can say about it is that when there were drive-by shootings, I would get low to the ground and the smell of the earth meant I was safe.”
When soils suffer the most egregious abuse, they can no longer even provide stable ground beneath our feet.
In early 2018, wildfires tore through Santa Barbara County, California, burning up the soil organic matter and ravaging the vegetation that held the hillsides in place. Heavy rain followed the blaze, and the destabilized mud and boulders flowed downhill, leaving at least 21 dead and over 400 homes damaged or destroyed in their wake.
Both the wildfires and the erratic rainfall can be linked to anthropogenic climate change and our voracious appetite for fossil fuels. Coupled with that, the process of extracting those fossil fuels from the earth through coal mining and fracking further destabilizes the soil, resulting in sinkholes like the one in Chester County, Pennsylvania, connected to the Mariner East pipeline.
The soil stewards of generations past recognized that healthy soil is not only imperative for our food security—it is also foundational for our cultural and emotional well-being.
Western science is catching up, now understanding that exposure to the microbiome of a healthy soil offers benefits to mental health that rival antidepressants. After mice were treated with Mycobacterium vaccae, a friendly soil bacteria, their brains produced more of the mood-regulating hormone serotonin. Some scientists are now advocating that we play in the dirt to care for our psychological health.
We see the benefits of soil anecdotally on our farm with the youth and adult participants who come to learn Afro-Indigenous soil regeneration methods. While the curriculum focuses on such nerdy details as the correlation between earthworm count and soil organic matter, participants often reflect that the main thing they gain from their time with the dirt is “healing” and the strength to leave behind addictions, toxic relationships, poor diets, and demeaning work environments.
Our ancestors teach us that it’s not just soil bacteria that contribute to this healing process. Part of African cosmology is that the spirits of our ancestors persist in the earth and transmit messages of encouragement and guidance to us through contact with the soil.
Further, we believe the Earth herself is a living, conscious spirit imparting wisdom. When we regard a handful of woodland soil, rich in the mycelium that transmits sugars and messages between trees, we are made privy to the inner world of the forest super-organism and its secrets of sharing and interdependence.
Like Dijour, we are welcomed home to a profound web of belonging that extends beyond the boundaries of self and species.
One student on our farm reflected, “I leave this experience feeling grounded like a tree in a land and country that I previously did not feel welcomed in. Connection with soil was the awakening of my sovereignty.”
This article originally appeared in Yes! Magazine, and is reprinted with permission.
Early morning walk to the barn
I instead went to college and became a computer programmer, and haven’t lived in my hometown since.
My dad and brother Noah getting ready to milk
Unfortunately, while my mom and the other farmers had some success in raising awareness and garnering some attention from various government officials, their efforts didn’t have any discernible effect on policy or the milk price bottom line. Dairy farmers once again had to either hold on tight and ride it out, or go bust (and many did).
Cows on a CAFO operation. Public domain image courtesy Danny Hart/PICRYL
Teen participants take their shoes off to experience the mud on their feet. Photo by Neshima Vitale-Penniman.
Dance moves teach the process of weeding. Photo by Neshima Vitale-Penniman.(NRCS_Photo_Gallery).jpg){kind=link}
