Last year, when the perfect storm of warm, wet air first brought the bacteria to the farm, he tried removing infected branches and getting rid of cover crops, which were providing nitrogen that fed the disease. But to no avail—the disease had established itself in the trunks.

“It just devastated the orchard. We lost 80 percent of our trees in one season,” he recalls.

About half of the remaining 90 trees were a variety called Warren, which is immune to fire blight. For the rest, he decided to spray the tetracycline as a preventative measure, and is replanting the rest of the orchard with other varieties that are resistant to the disease.

It may shock you to discover that antibiotic use in organic apple and pear orchards is routine. In fact, tetracycline has been on the national list of synthetic production materials allowed in organic farming since the mid-’90s. Even so, antibiotic use in fruit production has largely gone unnoticed by the public, until now. With more focus on the larger issue of antibiotics in animal production—which accounts for nearly 80 percent of the antibiotics sold every year in the U.S.—a growing number of consumer advocates are sounding the alarm.

The growth in public awareness coincides with internal debate about the future of antibiotic use in organic orchards. Ahead of The National Organic Standards Board (NOSB) (the decision-making body behind the federal organic standards) meeting this week in Portland, Oregon, where members will discuss just how much longer farmers like Jones can continue routine use of antibiotics like tetracycline or streptomycin to control fire blight, several issues remain unresolved.

UPDATE: On April 12, 2013, ABC News announced that the National Organic Standards Board will not allow growers to use tetracycline past October, 21, 2014.

To read the rest of this story, please visit Take Part.

But it hasn’t always been this way. As one of the founders of the nonprofit People’s Grocery in West Oakland—the Bay Area’s most notorious food desert—he and his colleagues started out with more affordable, less ambitious projects, like a mobile food delivery service and a local community-supported agriculture (CSA) box. But it quickly became clear—as several grocery chains tried to enter the neighborhood and failed, and residents were left relying on corner stores or taking long trips by public transportation to other neighborhoods—that the area needed a reliable, independent grocery store.

“Residents said, ‘What you’ve brought to the neighborhood is great, but it’s far from a complete solution,’” Ahmadi recalls.

So, he left People’s Grocery, spent time in business school where he became an expert on community grocery stores, and then secured a possible matching loan from the California FreshWorks Fund for around a third of the funding. Ahmadi then hatched a plan to raise the remaining $1.2 million needed to start the People’s Community Market through what’s called a direct public offering. In other words, he’s inviting California residents to invest in fresh food — literally. For a mere $1,000, anyone in the state can become a shareholder.

As focused as Ahmadi is on getting this project funded—and he is, very—he’s also well aware that grocery stores are only one piece of the puzzle in a neighborhood where fresh food is hard to come by and 48 percent of residents are obese or overweight.

A rendering of the planned People’s Community Market in West Oakland, Calif.

“Education and access are two sides of the same coin,” says Ahmadi. “You can’t make healthy food available and just expect people to buy it. We’ve never thought that would work, we’ve never seen that work. And it’s not a very successful strategy to support people becoming more knowledgeable about their dietary choices without having a built environment that supports a change.”

That’s where the relationship between People’s Grocery and other community organizations come into it. Ahmadi envisions nutrition counselors on-site in the store offering advice, classes, and health screening. “We consider the education and health support service element to be core to the business model, not peripheral,” he says.

And that’s not the only way the People’s Community Market will differentiate from other, larger grocery stores. With a community advisory council (a group of neighborhood folks who will advise on things like planning, outreach, marketing, and recruitment), a commitment to hiring at least 50 percent West Oakland residents, and an eye toward community participation at every turn, Ahmadi hopes the market will succeed where bigger chains have failed.

While a cool grocery store will no doubt put the neighborhood at increased risk of gentrification, Ahmadi says, that fact simply can’t be a seen as a deterrent.

“Does that mean that out of your fear of [gentrification] you leave the community in the condition it’s in?” he asks. “That’s just not a very good a choice for us. Gentrification is a reality that goes far beyond what we’re doing here.”

Ahmadi also points to other examples of independent groceries in food deserts, such as Detroit’s Metro FoodLand, and the ways they have used community investment to stay viable in a market that’s less hospitable to chains like Trader Joe’s or Whole Foods. As Ahmadi tells it, Metro FoodLand owner James Hooks bought the store from Kroger when the chain decided to close all its Detroit stores.

“For the first few years after Hooks took over, the shrinkage [i.e. theft] and employee turnover were both really high,” says Ahmadi. (The average grocery store suffers from 3 to 5 percent shrinkage.) So Hooks started to do what only a small, independent grocer can—he got to know his workers and his customers. “He reformed his employee policies—to treat his workers better and give them more meaning. He also focused on relationship-building with the customers, and reformulated his products based on what they asked for … and as a result, he has dramatically reduced those numbers.” These differences—while the may seem small—have kept Metro FoodLand in business in a neighborhood where Kroger couldn’t survive.

“There’s a lot of research that shows that larger chain stores are not well suited for these types of demographics. They don’t have the ability to customize because they’re so centralized,” Ahmadi says. For instance, West Oakland shoppers aren’t likely to spend all their grocery money all at once, but they shop often, spending around $20 at a time. So Ahmadi plans to build a store that is smaller than the average supermarket, with less overhead and around 40 percent fewer items in stock.

“If I was an executive at a major chain, beholden to my shareholders, and needing to maintain large profit margins, I probably would say don’t open a store in West Oakland,” Ahmadi says.

Of course, if all goes well, the People’s Community Market will have shareholders, too—just a different kind.

“We’re trying to create an exciting proposition that offers a shift away from Wall Street. We hope our investors will also be proud allies and supporters who care about impacting our mission,” says Ahmadi.

Not that there isn’t money involved, of course. In fact, according to a study conducted by the People’s Community Market, around 70 percent of West Oakland residents’ grocery spending—or $58 million a year—is currently being spent out of the neighborhood. Ahmadi says he hopes to absorb around $10 million in gross sales, by serving, and employing, a significant portion of the community.

“We need a new kind of model for food deserts,” says Ahmadi. “I believe it can work—but it takes a lot more work.”

An earlier version of this story appeared on Grist.

If Proposition 37, California’s GMO labeling measure, gets voted down today, it will be unfortunate and frustrating for many. But it won’t happen for lack of a movement.

Last month, in a much-quoted New York Times Magazine article, Michael Pollan framed this state-level ballot initiative as an important test with national implications. If we can translate the growing consumer awareness about the value of organic and local food into a movement with real political will, he argued, then surely this ballot initiative was a reason to pull out the stops and push this burgeoning movement to its limit.

While Pollan didn’t exactly say that a loss for GMO labeling advocates in California would prove the opposite—that there is no movement afoot—I have no doubt that some heard it that way. Of course, whenever you set up rhetorical polarization for the sake of motivating a group, there is always the potential for weighty, motivation-killing loss on the other side of the coin.

But over the last few months we have seen grassroots forces standing up to big corporate dollars with a very clear goal (something we can’t say for the Occupy movement, despite its numbers). And that won’t be easy to dismiss—regardless of the final vote on Prop 37.

Pollan ostensibly asked: “What food movement?” And an impressive number of Californians—including nearly 1,300 chefs; 2,000 farms in California and several from out of the state; a growing list of scientists, including at least one geneticist; the state’s most high-profile farmers market; a well-respected senator; and a decent segment of Hollywood said: “This one!”

Meanwhile, the corporations funding the No on 37 campaign—mainly pesticide companies such as Monsanto and Dow and processed food and beverage makers like PepsiCo—have funneled $45 million, or five times what the Yes on 37 campaign has had to spend, into television ads and mailers. Their relentless message? That labeling would raise food prices and cause farmers to suffer. (Prop 37 opponents’ latest tactic is especially suspect: They’re distributing voting guides from faux-green and faux-Democrat groups that place a “no on 37” vote on a roster of otherwise progressive choices.)

In other words, the opponents have poured enough cash into the fight to turn even many educated, left-leaning, farmers-market-shopping voters against the ballot measure. So the real question is: Could any real grassroots movement (and no, the Tea Party doesn’t count) possibly beat those kinds of odds?

As of yesterday, most news outlets, including Reuters, were making it look unlikely, as the dollars spent have had a predictable, inverse relationship to polling numbers. From Reuters:

Four weeks ago, the labeling initiative was supported by more than two-thirds of Californians who said they intended to vote on Nov. 6, according to a poll from the California Business Roundtable and Pepperdine University’s School of Public Policy. On Tuesday, their latest poll showed support had plummeted to 39 percent, while opposition had surged to almost 51 percent.

Ouch.

In nothing else, the whole effort has put the issue on many more people’s radars than ever before. For instance, the graphic at right shows online social mentions for the key words “GMO” and  “Prop 37″ as recorded by the social media group Upwell from Aug. 1 to Nov. 1, 2012.

And it is possible that proponents of the bill—who have made an especially strong showing over social media channels thanks to efforts like tech investor Ali Partovi’s homemade video and its crowd-funded promotion on Facebook—will pull through with a last-minute victory. After all, polls aren’t always accurate, and there may be a portion of the electorate who will step behind the curtain, read the actual language of the bill, and think to themselves: “How could more transparency about the food we eat be a bad thing?”

If none of that happens and Monsanto takes the day, it won’t be because there’s not a bona fide movement gathering steam. On the contrary, I’d say the good food movement—awkward adolescent that it is—may have just had a taste of its first stiff drink.

Originally published on Grist.

Photo: Lynne Friedman

By now, you know that not all meat is created equal. That familiar fable about Old MacDonald and his happy barnyard menagerie is a far cry from the cruel reality of factory farms, where cows, pigs, and chickens are crammed together in giant warehouses, fattened on grain, and pumped full of antibiotics, then rolled out to the slaughterhouse to become the next Big Mac or box of McNuggets.

In regulatory lingo, these meat factories are called “concentrated animal feeding operations,” or CAFOs. (Pronounced “cay-fo.”) Here’s everything you ever wanted to know about them—and a few things you’d probably rather not know.

What makes a CAFO a CAFO?

Most in the industry consider all factory farms CAFOs, but the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has a very specific meaning. According to the EPA, an Animal Feeding Operation (AFO) is an operation that confines animals for over 45 days in a vegetation-free area. These animals are packed into warehouses and lots with slatted floors, not wandering around in the grass. Here’s the EPA’s website: “AFOs congregate animals, feed, manure and urine, dead animals, and production operations on a small land area. Feed is brought to the animals rather than the animals grazing or otherwise seeking feed in pastures, fields, or on rangeland.”

CAFOs are essentially big AFOs. The EPA breaks CAFOs down [PDF] into large, medium, or small varieties, depending on the number of animals involved, how wastewater and/or manure are managed, and whether the operation is “a significant contributor of pollutants.” Large CAFOs, which have at least 1,000 cows or 30,000 hens, are automatically subject to government oversight.

Here’s what one of those looks like:

How much of the meat we eat is CAFO-raised?

It’s hard to say exactly. Despite their growing presence in this country, CAFOs are invisible to most of us. If you live in an urban or suburban part of the country, most livestock—save the occasional decorative cow or sheep—is kept out of sight. But if you’ve driven through California on Interstate 5, you may have seen and smelled thegiant feedlot known as Cowschwitz. There are CAFOs in just about every state, but the Southeast and the Midwest—Iowa has an especially high number—are where you’ll find them in the highest concentration.

In case you missed it, it looks like this:

The exact number of CAFOs in this country is not easy to pin down. In its 2008 report, CAFOs Uncovered, the Union of Concerned Scientists wrote, “Although they comprise only about 5 percent of all U.S. animal operations, CAFOs now produce more than 50 percent of our food animals.” That was four years ago, and there is evidence that thenumber of CAFOs—especially in the Midwest—has gone up since then.

Isn’t it more efficient to raise meat like this?

It’s true that CAFOs crank out a whole lot of cheap meat in the short run, but there are long-term environmental costs associated with these operations that don’t show up on the price tag in the supermarket. Many CAFOs are located in arid areas, where large quantities of groundwater are required (like in the case of several large dairy producers in New Mexico). CAFOs also pollute the air and waterways with toxic feces and urine.

Ooh, did somebody say “toxic feces”?

According to the Union of Concerned Scientists, CAFOs produce about 65 percent of our country’s manure, or about 300 million tons per year—that’s double the amount of poo generated by all the people in the U.S.

Here’s what that looks like:

Some of that poo gets spread over farm fields, kinda like the old days, and some gets turned into energy through something called methane digestion. But a great deal of it ends up in holding areas, or lagoons, like the one pictured above. The result is often toxic fumes and high-nutrient (not in a good way) waste that leaks into streams and well water. The EPA reports that CAFO waste has polluted over 35,000 miles of river and groundwater in 17 states.

Why do CAFO owners use so many antibiotics?

The kind of extreme crowding that happens in CAFOs puts animals under a lot of stress. It can make some of them aggressive (you might be too, if you were locked in the mosh pit with a bunch of overweight metal heads), and it also makes many of them sick. CAFO owners use routine, sub-therapeutic doses of antibiotics to both prevent disease and make animals grow faster. In fact, a frightening80 percent of the antibiotics used in this country go to “treat” animals.

Overuse has also led to antibiotic-resistant bacteria in meat, and—perhaps even scarier—a growing concern that the antibiotics we give humans won’t work for long (Read a report from the Pew Commission on Industrial Farm Animal Production [PDF]).

Surely regulations make this stuff safe for people and the environment, right?

Only the largest CAFOs are subject to special federal government oversight. Beyond that, the rules vary state by state.

Of course, there are regulations governing farms—but most of them were designed for something that looks a little more like Old MacDonald’s place, and by calling themselves farms, many CAFOs have escaped the regulations associated with big factories. As Daniel Imhoff, editor of the 2010 CAFO Reader, said in a 2010 Civil Eats interview: “If the CAFO is legally considered a farm, or an agricultural enterprise, rather than an industry, then it is exempt from regulation of its airborne and land-borne waste. The industry has been fighting for many years to retain this agricultural status.”

But does this look like a farm to you?

[Ed's note: OK, this is a scene from a slaughterhouse, not the CAFO itself, but you get the idea.]

CAFO owners have done their damndest to keep their operations from public and government scrutiny. Their latest ploy is something called the “Farmer’s Privacy Act of 2012,” a bill, recently introduced in Congress, that would prevent the EPA from being able to fly over CAFOs.

What about the people who work at these factories?

Working conditions in CAFOs are among the worst around. Not only are wages low and hours long, but these facilities—which are full of dust, ammonia, and endotoxins (toxins released by bacteria)—are also very hard on workers’ respiratory systems. They are also rife with viruses that can pass from animals to humans.

How do I know if meat I buy in the grocery store is from a CAFO?

Easy—if you look really close …

You don’t see it? Ah, right. That’s because meat from animals raised in CAFOs looks a lot like any other—and it isn’t labeled. In fact, the onus remains on the relatively small percent of meat-producers who are trying to do something else—whether it’s use organic feed, raise their animals in smaller numbers, or keep them on pasture—to make their practices known through labels that are often perceived as something extra.

“I just want normal meat,” you may think to yourself, when faced with labels that declare things like “grass-fed,” “grass-finished,” and “pasture-raised.” Well, these days, we can all pretty much assume that “normal meat” = CAFO meat.

So, how do I avoid CAFO meat?

Here are a few suggestions to get you started:

* Find a farm in your area that raises animals on pasture (a farmers market is a great place to start the hunt).

* Be willing to spend a little more and eat a little less. You may also want to experiment with less-popular cuts, buy ground meat, and make your own stock from bones.

* Before ordering meat at a restaurant, ask if they know where it came from. If they don’t, it’s a safe bet it came from a CAFO.

Top photo: Pig by Shutterstock

Originally published on Grist

It happens like clockwork; every few months, a rant against local and/or organic food appears in one of the papers of record. The author is nearly always an educated man who uses the words “elite” and “elitist” at least 175 times while defending today’s corporate food system and implying directly or indirectly that changes to the status quo—which often inherently begin with those who can afford to make them—should be seen as suspect at best, and downright damaging at worst.

 Photo: at the farmers market, by Shutterstock

On the CIR website the video’s co-reporter Sarah Terry-Cobo explains how she and co-reporter/producer Carrie Ching arrived at this number with an environmental consulting firm called Route2 Sustainability. The annotation reads:

We looked at a range of ways beef is produced and came up with an average that is close to how a cow would be raised in Fresno, Calif.: about 1 pound of greenhouse gases per ounce of beef, or about 6½ pounds of greenhouse gases per quarter-pounder. We looked at studies that showed the health costs of treating overweight people and associated illnesses, such as high blood pressure, stroke and diabetes—that’s about 75 cents per burger. Then we looked at how much water it takes to produce a pound of beef—that’s about 50 cents per burger. We also looked at the price of a ton of carbon—that’s remarkably small for the U.S., less than one-hundredth of a penny. But in the European Union, because it has a functioning carbon market, the price would be about a nickel per burger. Daniel Lopez Dias, the lead economist on the calculations, notes that these figures are conservative and don’t include effects from air and water pollution, effects of low wages that slaughterhouse workers receive and the high risk of injury they face, or general effects of urban sprawl.

Rita has worked for the same Missouri-based pork processing company for 13 years. And yet she feels like she could lose her job at any time. If this 49-year-old mother of four is late for work by as little as five minutes, that’s one strike. If she takes more than her allotted seven minutes to race to the bathroom and back, that’s another strike. Three strikes is all it takes.

Rita (not her real name) cuts pork on a line she says has sped up considerably in recent years. The factory has reduced its staff, but demands the same amount of work from the employees that remain. She has to move fast, with a sharp knife, on her feet, for eight to 10 hours a day. “I’ve never seen so many people with heart problems,” she said of her co-workers over the phone recently. “I think it’s because of the stress. Where there used to be four of us, now there are two people. [The managers] say, ‘You all can do this.’”

In recent years, some workers have started talking about the conditions they face and trying to organize for better ones. Whenever this has happened, the company takes two approaches, Rita tells me. They start with a small raise (most meatpacking workers make a dollar or two more than minimum wage) to calm everyone down. If that doesn’t work, they’ll start firing people. Through all this, Rita has stayed on at the plant. “There are no other jobs,” she says.

Like farm work, meatpacking and other food processing work has become a last resort in this country. And while the harsh conditions Rita describes don’t apply to everyone working in her sector, they’re not atypical either.

But getting an industry-wide view of the type of challenges food workers face hasn’t been easy. That’s where a new report called  “The Hands that Feed Us,” which is  based on a comprehensive survey of over 600 workers from around the food industry (and nearly 50 employers), comes into the picture. Conducted by the Food Chain Workers Alliance, the survey puts Rita’s story in full context and shines a bright light on the often invisible people behind our food.

The Hands that Feed Us looks at five aspects of the food industry — food production, processing, distribution, retail, and service — and is filled with data and policy recommendations. Collectively, these five arenas sell over
 $1.8 trillion in goods and services annually, accounting for over 13 percent
 of the U.S. gross domestic product. And yet front-line workers in the food chain — the ones not in management or office positions — earn a median of $18,889 a year.

To put it another way, 20 million people — or one in five private sector workers — are working as we speak to make sure we get fed. And yet, as the report makes clear, they can’t always feed themselves or their families. It reads:

Ironically, food workers face higher levels of food insecurity, or the inability to afford to eat, than the rest of the U.S. workforce. In fact, food system workers use food stamps at double the rate of the rest of the U.S. workforce. They also reported working in environments with health and safety violations, long work hours with few breaks, and lack of access to health benefits.

At a time when many Americans are thinking critically about the environmental and ethical sustainability of their food, The Hands that Feed Us is a big step in a larger effort to integrate the discussion of the human element into the burgeoning food movement. And the coalition behind the report — a member organization made up of 14 groups ranging from the Coalition of Immokalee workers (two leaders of which were recently recognized by the Natural Resources Defense Council Growing Green Awards) to the Restaurant Opportunities Centers United — hopes it makes waves. Or, at the very least, gets people to widen the scope of what it means to “eat ethically.”

Joann Lo, executive director of the Food Chain Workers Alliance, is one of the core authors of the report (with Saru Jayaraman, director of the Food Labor Research Center at the University of California-Berkeley).

Lo is aware that it’s a jump for many eaters to go from thinking critically about where or how their food is produced to who produced, packed, prepared, and served it. But she points out that both problems stem from the same move toward consolidation and industrialization. The report doesn’t mince words either. It says:

Intense corporate conglomeration in every segment of the food chain has greatly diminished the quality and biodiversity of our food. In interviews, small and mid-size food enterprises reported that market consolidation has also created unsustainable competition for them. Corporate consolidation has also contributed to unsustainably low wages and benefits for food 
system workers, in both large corporations and small to mid-size businesses struggling to compete.

That through-line between ecosystem health and human health is the clincher, added Lo, in a recent phone conversation: “The industrialization of our food system has disconnected people from our environment — from how we treat the land and our animals.” And in the case of humans, she says, “that loss of respect for animals and nature is mirrored.”

Case in point: Lo describes an ad that someone from Unite Here, a member organization in the coalition that organizes food service workers, told her about recently.

“They found an ad from a staffing agency [in a magazine aimed at food service providers], and it literally had food service workers in a vending machine. It’s like workers in the food system are almost treated like objects — like we can use them up and toss them out.”

But what exactly will it take to convince eaters, many of whom are already fatigued by negotiating labels like organic, fair trade, grass-fed, and shade-grown? For starters, the Food Chain Workers alliance is partnering with the GOODMaker project to crowdsource an answer.

One of the simplest ideas is to shine a light on those employers who are doing right by their workers — such as, in the case of farm labor, the Agricultural Justice Project’s Food Justice Certified label. (Although many of the smaller business owners the report’s authors spoke to admitted that cutting labor costs had been a core strategy for staying in business as their industries faced consolidation.)

The report also points to the importance of sick days and health insurance as one way to highlight the connection between self-interest and public health. As Lo puts it, “the conditions for food workers impact food safety. Seventy-nine percent of food workers don’t have or don’t know if they have paid sick days. And we found that half of the workers reported they are going to work sick. Then they’re handling food — from the farm to the retail to the food service level.”

I’ve written about the issue of sick days, and healthy workers in general, and there is obviously much more that a healthy, empowered employee can/will want to do to keep our food system safe than a sick, overworked one. Case in point: I spoke with a 62-year-old woman named Angie recently who stocks groceries for Walmart. She told me that she regularly sees palettes of refrigerated and frozen foods sit in the warehouse for much longer than seems safe to her. But she works an understaffed night shift, where full-time workers have been slowly replaced by part-time and temporary employees, and there is rarely anyone to report such a concern to, or fix these problems when she does see them.

While this type of compartmentalization — wherein each worker knows his one small corner of the food chain well — might be efficient, it also keeps people from advancing professionally, or having the pleasure or opportunity to think and work on a system-wide level. (As I see it, the latter can’t be undersold as a key element in a thriving food system.)

Take as the opposite example a small farmer who grows and/or processes her own food and sells it directly to eaters through face-to-face relationships. This difference explains why so many people still work their tails off to produce food on a small-scale. It’s the opposite of a vending machine — in every way. It’s also the opposite of the way Rita, the meatpacking worker from earlier in the story, told me it feels to work for her employers. “I’m not just speaking for myself,” she told me. “They treat us like animals.”

Originally published on Grist

If you’ve noticed more carrot-crunching, more orange-peeling, and an abundance of leafy green salads lately, it’s probably not a coincidence. As The Washington Post reported last week, Americans eat more fresh foods than they did five years ago.

The WaPo story was based on a national phone survey conducted by the Kellogg Foundation, which found that the majority of Americans are trying to eat more fresh fruits, vegetables, and whole grains, are shopping at farmers markets at least on occasion, and say they know “a lot or a little about where their fresh fruits and vegetables come from.” These findings are interesting—and they speak to the success of a whole array of efforts to get more of us cooking, examining what we eat, and honing in on the place where healthy and truly delicious foods intersect.

Less visible in the media landscape is the fact that the Kellogg Foundation survey also suggests that all this healthy eating has Americans looking outside themselves.

For one, they’re considering the environment—64 percent say it’s “very important” that produce be grown in an “environmentally friendly way.” And the same number of people say it’s “very important” or “somewhat important” that produce be organic.

And nearly all—93 percent—of those surveyed say they think it’s at least “somewhat important” to “make sure all Americans have equal access to fresh fruits and vegetables.” And three-quarters of the respondents said they support the idea of a national program that would double Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, or “food stamps”) benefits at farmers markets. (Of course, this is more than an idea. As Grist reported recently, the U.S. Department of Agriculture is currently expanding the number of farmers markets around the nation that are equipped to accept EBT cards.)

Beyond these basic humanitarian instincts—and despite the apparent popularity of Tea Party politics—the survey also suggests that Americans look to our public institutions to play a part in ensuring healthy food access:

• 81 percent strongly or partly agree that Washington, D.C., needs to do more to increase access to locally produced fresh food in communities throughout the country.

• 86 percent strongly or partly agree that state and local officials should play a role in ensuring local fresh food is accessible to local residents.

• 89 percent strongly or partly agree that the community should play a role in ensuring local fresh food is accessible to local residents.

• 83 percent strongly or partly agree that Washington, D.C., should shift its support more toward smaller, local fruit and vegetable farmers and away from large farm businesses.

• 83 percent strongly or partly agree that Washington, D.C., should provide more incentives to encourage the creation of new businesses that sell, process, and distribute locally produced healthy food.

It may be too late for this data to influence the current Farm Bill process—which has taxpayers slated to support those “large farm businesses” with tens of billions in subsidies while offering a few million here and there for “smaller, local fruit and vegetable farmers.” And that’s the best-case scenario put forth by the Senate; the worst case (the House of Representatives’ version) would also involve tens of billions in cuts to SNAP—the very program that is proving crucial to fresh produce access.

Either way, it raises the question: Is this data a snapshot of a trend that has peaked and will now begin to reverse? Or are we seeing the early signs of a larger shift toward a saner, and—yes—a crunchier, leafier food system?

As I mentioned last week, we do still have some choice in the matter.

Photo: Chiot’s Run

Originally published on Grist

We hear a lot about recalls these days. But last night it wasn’t ground turkey, cantaloupes, or peanut butter that was taken off the market. It was one of the most hotly contested pesticides in recent memory: methyl iodide. As reported by the San Jose Mercury News, Arysta Lifescience, the makers of the fumigant, announced on Tuesday evening that they’d be suspending sales of the product (also known as Midas) in all U.S. markets.

In California, where methyl iodide was being slowly phased into use as a replacement for the ozone-depleting methyl bromide, farming communities have spent the year protesting. Several Central Coast counties even banned the chemical, which is used to sterilize the soil before strawberries and other high-dollar row crops are planted. Amy Yoder, head of Arysta LifeScience North American, was sufficiently vague when speaking to the San Jose Mercury News about the company’s withdrawal, and she said the company’s decision was based “on its economic viability in the U.S. marketplace.”

It may have also had something to do with the fact that California Gov. Jerry Brown has recently appointed Brian Leahy, a former organic farmer, as the head of the state’s Department of Pesticide Regulation. Or the fact that, just a month into the job, Leahy authorized a half-million dollar project to explore less toxic alternatives to fumigants. Adding to the strikes against Arysta, Pesticide Action Network (PAN) also announced yesterday a new round of evidence that a pesticide called Chloropicrin, which is used in conjunction with methyl iodide, had been found in the air in every site they tested near the farming operations conducted by Driscoll’s, the nation’s largest strawberry distributor. The press release read:

“This study illustrates how readily fumigants can move away from where they are applied at levels that can have serious health impacts on neighbors,” said Dr. Susan Kegley, consulting chemist for Pesticide Action Network. “Methyl iodide evaporates even more readily from soil than chloropicrin does, and used in conjunction, these two fumigants will pack a carcinogenic punch that no one should have to tolerate.”

It’s too early to know what Arysta’s decision will mean for California’s conventional strawberry farmers, who produce the popular fruit for around 80 percent of the nation, and are just this month beginning to harvest their first crops of the season. Although methyl bromide has been officially phased out of use, many farmers still have what is called a critical use exemption, meaning they can prove that “the specific use is critical because the lack of availability of methyl bromide for that use would result in a significant market disruption and there are no technically and economically feasible alternatives or substitutes available.”

In other words, the loophole is big enough to plant a field of strawberries in. And it may now be years before methyl bromide is truly, completely phased out. But, considering what a well-documented danger methyl iodide posed to farm communities, methyl bromide may be the lesser evil for the moment.  Not only is methyl iodide listed as a carcinogen on the state’s own Safe Drinking Water and Toxic Enforcement Act of 1986, but, according to PAN, it is also a source of thyroid toxicity, neurotoxicity, and reproductive toxicity.

Either way, we may soon see an end to the era of cheap, conventionally grown strawberries and the often wasteful behavior that comes with them, like this jaw-dropping 2010 video of a Florida strawberry farmer plowing under half his crop for the year because the market was flooded.

At the moment, however, I’m thinking of the high school I visited last fall in the midst of the Monterey County strawberry fields, where teachers and students were working furiously to have their concerns about the carcinogen heard by the outside world. Many of the kids in that area are the children and grandchildren of farmworkers, and I have no doubt they’ll have challenges ahead of all kinds. But for now, they have one less thing to worry about.

Photo: Sarah Cady

Originally published on Grist

Today, most of us see “local” as shorthand for fresh, delicious food that comes with a story attached—and that serves an alternative to consolidated, anonymous, commodity-based farming. But that hasn’t always been how the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) sees it.

USDA is known for creating, subsidizing, and promoting industrial agriculture. So the agency’s effort to dip its toes into the local food movement in 2009 with its Know Your Farmer Know Your Food program (KYF2) raised eyebrows and questions. Could USDA really help create a thriving bottom-up food system? Or would it spread the term local, and the ethos behind it, so thin as to make it meaningless?

Know Your Farmer, Know Your Food essentially re-packaged and highlighted government programs that support and promote the development of local farmers and ranchers. The funds it made available are a drop in the bucket (at a few hundred million dollars spread across 27 programs run by nine different agencies that support local food efforts in some way) when compared to the tens of billions the USDA puts toward the “big 5″ commodity crops—corn, soy, wheat, cotton and rice.

But that didn’t make it insignificant. In fact, as Know Your Farmer appeared in 2009, former Grist food editor Tom Philpott admitted to feeling cautiously optimistic about the effort. He wrote:

“…it’s remarkable and to my knowledge unprecedented that the USDA is making a major effort to publicize these programs and ensure that at least some federal money flows into emerging alternative food systems.”

This month, the USDA is making a very public effort to report its progress with the Know Your Farmer program after two and a half years. The agency has held several press events, including a live streaming conversation from the USDA headquarters last week, another from the White House on Monday (that included the first family’s head chef/resident looker, Sam Kass), and an ongoing attempt at a conversation via a hashtag on Twitter.

The agency has released what it calls the Compass, a series of documents, case studies, tools, and an interactive map designed to be a living representation of the KYF2 effort and its resources. The Compass includes anecdotes about scrappy, likable farmers, ranchers and other business owners who’ve used USDA dollars for things like food co-ops, small meat processors, hoop houses and artisan cheese operations. And most who take the time to dig in to the somewhat dry materials will likely be convinced that real work and concrete change is taking place—even if they’re ultimately dwarfed by the USDA’s agribusiness efforts.

But the USDA’s media blitz also raises a disturbing question, if we look closely: Does the agency see local food as any sort of alternative to industrial-scale (or “production”) agriculture? Or is it more of a garnish–say, a sprig of parsley—meant to make our nation’s heaping plate of corn and soy more appetizing?

This scene from last week’s live stream might shed some light on the answer:

Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack and Deputy Secretary Kathleen Merrigan are sitting together talking to an online audience flanked by the USDA seal and the American flag. Off to the side is a screen, where every few minutes a questions that’s been asked by an audience member via Twitter or email will pop up for the secretary and deputy to read out loud and answer.

After a promotional slideshow and several fairly benign questions about the KYF2 effort, an anonymous question appears on the screen (it’s at 17:55, for those of you following along at home). “How can local foods complement production agriculture?,” it reads.

Here’s what they have to say:

Vilsack: “This is a really important question. Because when KYF2 got launched, there was this belief that somehow it was separate from production agriculture.

We have always thought that it complements production agriculture. That it actually… increases the connection between consumers and people that are distant from the farm. The reality is that so many people who live in America today are generations removed from family members who farmed. So they may not have an appreciation for the challenges of farming… [see the video for his complete statement]

Merrigan: One person quoted in the Compass said…”Those of us doing the local/regional food work are ambassadors for American agriculture.” … That resonated with me because they’re putting that face on farming that I think is so important for all our constituents at USDA. [emphasis mine]

In other words, small producers working their behinds off on a local scale—who may get small loans but generally receive no subsidies, little to no crop insurance, and no lobbying power from organizations in Washington like the Farm Bureau—are valuable to the USDA because they make all farmers look much better by proxy.

Now, irony aside, why would USDA feel the need to dedicate so much time to making the point that stronger local economies should be in no way threatening  to Big Ag interests?

Well, some large producers have shown themselves to feel threatened by local food. Take this 2010 example, described by Don Carr of the Environmental Working Group, wherein an Iowa corn and soybean grower who is chairman of the Iowa Corn Promotion Board spoke up to criticize Merrigan’s early KYF2 efforts as “not the USDA that people in the Midwest are familiar with.”

There’s also the fact that a number of the services and funds KYF2 is highlighting were products of the 2008 Farm Bill. Since the Senate Agriculture committee is in the midst of holding hearings about the next Farm Bill, Merrigan and others behind Know Your Farmer probably feel they have a case to make.

The day after the Compass was announced, Republican senator Pat Roberts publicly criticized the KYF2 effort: it’s not “steeped in reality,” he said, since most food Americans consume isn’t grown locally.  In a story that ran on the industry site Agri-pulse, he was quoted saying that the initiative would be the subject of discussion at the Senate Ag Committee hearing. He continued:

“Would taxpayer dollars be better invested elsewhere, like research, pest and disease management that help the entire industry, rather than one particular farmers’ market.”

I’m guessing Merrigan and her staff understand the benefit of playing up local food’s “complementary” qualities in public, while doing work behind the scenes that could—even in small ways—begin shifting the power in American farming back towards small-scale producers and local infrastructure.

In fact, depending on how the 2012 Farm Bill shakes out, I have a hunch that the KYF2 effort will either be seen as a foundation on which the next several decades of system-changing local food work are built and strengthened, or a brief moment of possibility that very few of us truly understood while it lasted.

Originally published on Grist