Transitioning away from a system often characterized by carb-heavy, frozen and fried food can be a multi-year process, says Dreibelbis, and it starts with an in-depth assessment. “[Is the district] cooking anything at all? Are they buying everything prepackaged?” says Dreiblebis. “Do you have the equipment that you need to start cooking from scratch, even smallwares like cutting boards and knives? Some districts don’t even have that.”

From there, small changes add up to make a big difference: More than 28 million lunches are served every day in schools across the US, and for some students, that lunch is their most nutritious meal of the day. For schools with a breakfast program, evidence suggests that students who eat breakfast at school score higher on tests. But schools are up against many roadblocks, from staffing challenges to rising food costs.

Changing a school’s lunch program takes time, resources and commitment. Modern Farmer spoke with the four trendsetting schools to find out how they’ve made changes in their school lunches, what’s working and what the kids are saying about their new favorite foods. 

Students in the Clear Lake Community School District learn more about their vegetable of the month: corn. (Photography submitted by Julie Udelhofen)

Lowering the pressure 

“I was just reading that one in six kids have high blood pressure,” says Julie Udelhofen, food service director at Clear Lake Community School District in northern Iowa. “Sodium is an issue; so is sugar. We see it every day.” 

For Udelhofen, the health of the roughly 1,450 kids in her schools is a top priority, with sodium a particular issue. To combat the rise of sodium, Udelhofen has made two major changes. First, she’s moved away from pre-packaged and frozen foods as much as possible and brought in local fruits and vegetables, conducting taste-tests with her students. “We’ve done beets, kohlrabi, rutabaga and parsnips. We had all kinds of radishes, and about 10 different varieties of peppers, and the kids go down the line and pick their favorites,” says Udelhofen. The key, she says, is to introduce these foods in a low-pressure environment, making it a game of sorts. “It’s a lot of fun, because the kids are wholly invested in it. They will stop and taste things and talk to us.” 

Behind the scenes, Udelhofen and her team have drastically cut sodium levels by making their own spice blends, which have been a big hit with the kids. “That’s one of the best things we’ve done, especially in the middle school and high school.” They offer a garlic and herb blend, along with Greek and Italian seasonings that kids can add to their meals, without the heaping helping of sodium from traditional blends. 

At Sandy Valley School District, staff make up pre-packaged fruit and vegetable pouches for kids to grab and snack on. (Photography submitted by Tina Kindelberger)

Broccoli at breakfast

Most adults are probably not grabbing broccoli at breakfast, but somehow, Tina Kindelberger, food service supervisor at Sandy Valley Local School District in eastern Ohio, has turned the children in her schools into broccoli fiends. 

“It’s so cute when they do that,” says Kindelberger. “I see kids walking in here with packs of broccoli, and it’s 7:30 am.”

Kindelberger started her team’s transition to scratch cooking by first just making raw fruits and vegetables available to the kids at each meal. Rather than change everything they were cooking at once, they just added in a case in the cafeteria with packages of produce such as carrot sticks, tomatoes, snap peas, bananas, apples and yes, broccoli. “The kids seem to be excited when we bring out new things and try new things. I had plums out one day, and I couldn’t believe how many kids asked me what they were. They’d never seen a plum,” says Kindelberger. But they’re now primed to try these raw fruits and veggies, which also means they’re more willing to try the cooked options as the district moves to scratch cooking.

Kindelberger and her team feed about 700 students a day, from kindergarten to high school, and each age group has different tastes and preferences. For her, the first step to changing the menu was consulting with the kids. “I meet with [students] on a regular basis, and we get a lot of feedback,” she says. One request, from the older students, was a breakfast smoothie station. So, Kindelberger got a grant for a blender, and now there are fresh fruit smoothies. “The biggest thing is getting your kids involved, getting their opinions, because it does matter. They want to be heard.”

Carlee Johnson McIntosh has made many changes to her schools’ breakfast program, including adding a grab-and-go fruit station. (Photography submitted by Carlee Johnson McIntosh)

Spaghetti and moose balls

Local food looks a lot different in parts of Alaska than in much of the rest of the US. While many school districts are working with beef and potatoes, Carlee Johnson McIntosh, the food service director in the Petersburg School District in Southeast Alaska, has a freezer full of Sockeye salmon and moose meat. For her, working with local farmers sometimes means getting food delivered by boat from neighboring island farms. 

Her commitment to eating and preparing local foods started from a young age; Johnson McIntosh has allergies and was always looking for ways to alleviate and control her symptoms, so she became interested in what she was eating. Now that she supervises 450 students at her schools, she’s especially committed to ensuring they have high-quality and freshly prepared options. She’s spent the last decade advocating for changes at the school level, from altering when kids can eat breakfast to updating the kitchen facilities to allow for more scratch cooking. 

“Previously, the mealtimes were crammed together. The breakfast was before school and almost nobody showed up. Now, we’re after the bell,” and kids actually show up for breakfast, she says. She’s also had to push the district on purchasing more raw food and getting her staff certified to do more than just reheat frozen packages. “My first step was to talk to our health authority and see where our deficiencies are. Why is it that we are not adequately meeting a restaurant standard? We are feeding an at-risk population, so we should be held to the same standards [as other facilities].” 

That required some creativity on her part. While previous frozen options might be chicken nuggets, for Johnson McIntosh, local proteins are more likely to be moose, herring eggs or Sockeye salmon. So, that’s what they have. Now, the kids are chowing down on moose stroganoff or spaghetti and moose-balls, along with a daily salad bar. 

At RSU89, staff engage students in taste tests, to try out new recipes. And you even get a sticker for participating. (Photography submitted by Denise Tapley-Proctor)

One-bite policy

Not every new menu item is going to be a hit. Denise Tapley-Proctor, food service director at Regional School District 89 in Maine, knows that well. As she’s moved her team over to scratch cooking, there have been some fantastic wins and some less-than-stellar reviews. “We did a vegetable panini that the adults in the school system really liked and the high school kids were OK with. But the little kids were like, ‘no, don’t put vegetables in my grilled cheese.’ It was just a no go.” 

But that’s all part of the process, says Tapley-Proctor. One of the staff on her food service team introduced the “no thank you bite” policy when introducing a food of the month. You don’t have to eat the whole thing, but you have to take one bite to try it. Plus, you get a sticker if you do. 

The one-bite policy has been a great help to Tapley-Proctor and the team while they feed about 225 students a day. It’s allowed them to take a gradual approach with the changes, phasing in one new meal or even one new ingredient at a time. 

“Instead of bringing the box of instant potatoes, see how much longer it takes and how much better the flavor is [to make your own],” she says. “If we have leftover rolls from the day before that we didn’t serve the kids, if you cut them up and throw some spices on them, bake them in the oven, you have homemade croutons, and the kids are excited to put it on the top of their meal. It’s the little things that lead to the big thing.”

They’ve also started working with local farmers, teaching kids how plants grow. “We’ve learned that if the children have a stake in it somehow, like if they grow the food, they’re more apt to want to eat it,” she says. They’ve grown tomatoes in the school garden, then used the after-school program to make a salsa, which went on the menu the next day. “The kids were like, ‘this is our salsa,’” she says. 

Tapley-Proctor says it’s been a process for the staff as well. She’s helped them get training from the Chef Ann Foundation on kitchen skills and learning new recipes. But even with extra effort, she says the feedback from the kids is what makes it worth it. While serving a chicken pot pie, one of the students told them that it “made her belly happy.” Another boy was having a bad day, and then had some fresh watermelon with lunch. “This makes me think of summer and fireworks,” he said. “He had gone from a bad mental health day to a good mental health day because of the food.” 

A typical lunch tray at Sandy Valley School District. (Photography submitted by Tina Kindelberger)

Care about your cafeteria? Here’s how to get involved

The USDA will finalize proposed legislation around school lunches this month, with updates to its nutrition standards and exceptions for local and traditional foods. In the proposed changes, schools would have to reduce sodium levels, limit added sugars and would be allowed to use locally grown, raised or caught food that has been minimally processed in their menus. Updates will be phased in over the next five years, with the first changes coming to menus in the fall of 2024. 

If you have kids in school and are interested in helping bring about changes in your own district, everyone Modern Farmer spoke with recommended reaching out to the food service director at your school to find out what kinds of foods the school is working to introduce to kids and how. They’re the ones that feed your kids every day and can speak about their goals when it comes to nutrition. Some schools will even welcome parents to join their kids for a lunch period, to get a first-hand look at what’s on offer. 

You can also get involved at the state level, organizing around campaigns such as Healthy School Meals for All. For a list of what’s happening in your state, check out this map from the National Farm to School Network. 

And if you work in a school district, Dreibelbis advises that you make the switch to scratch cooking one step at a time. Take a cafeteria classic: boxed macaroni and cheese. You can change one element at a time, such as purchasing a pre-mixed cheese sauce but cooking your own pasta. Once that’s second nature, add one more element. “If you’re making something like a homemade cheese sauce, you’re using flour, butter, milk, cheese and salt. And right there alone, you’re going from what was probably 30 ingredients to five.”

The post On the Ground With the Schools Learning What It Takes To Improve Lunch Menus appeared first on Modern Farmer.

There’s no doubt that industrial animal agriculture carries a laundry list of sins; greenhouse gas emissions, biodiversity loss, deforestation, water pollution and labor rights abuses are just a few examples. But there’s also evidence that some regenerative grazing practices can enhance biodiversity, improve soil health and—possibly—sequester carbon. Not only that, but animal husbandry also has significant cultural value and eating animal products can have health benefits.

For some people, eschewing meat—or even all animal products—entirely is the only reasonable course of action. But for those who don’t want to go so far, “less” and “better” can seem like a pragmatic solution: There’s no need to cut out meat altogether; just cut down. Choose quality over quantity. Dig a little deeper, however, and things once again get very confusing. How much less is less? And how do we determine which meat is better?

Are chicken and pork the most climate-friendly options? Is it better for the planet to eat locally or organically? What’s the impact on my physical health of choosing one meat—or one meat alternative—over another? To be able to weigh up all these questions and accurately calculate which kind of meat and how much is “OK” for us to eat, the average consumer would need far more information, time and energy than anyone typically has at the grocery store. It can feel like we’re doomed to fail before we’ve even made a start.

Here’s the thing: There is no right answer when it comes to meat. And that’s OK. 

These questions and warring data points spurred us to make Less and Better?, our new podcast series from Farmerama Radio. Exasperated and concerned by the lack of nuance around this pressing issue, we wanted to try a different approach—one that attempts to illuminate the values and priorities that underlie even the most allegedly scientifically motivated positions.

For many people, the answer is simple: Just go vegan, or at least vegetarian. Studies show that diets without animal products have one-fourth the climate impact of meat-filled diets—from using less water and land and producing fewer carbon emissions. Rather than wrestling with the “best” meat to eat, many choose to forgo it altogether. 

But not everyone can do that. Meat holds cultural significance for many, and it can have nutritional benefits. There’s also a difference between heavily processed meat products and unprocessed meat, both in their effects on the body and the climate. So, for folks unable or unwilling to give up meat entirely, eating better-quality meat, and less of it, is the best approach. But even then, there are questions. The “right” answers to questions of how much less or what is better depend not only on a dizzying array of complex data but fundamentally hinge on which outcomes you believe are worth pursuing. Some argue that intensive factory farms produce fewer greenhouse gas emissions, in general, than extensive, pasture-fed systems. Others disagree strongly with this, but say, for the sake of argument, we accept this as true. At first, it seems simple: “Better” meat is factory-farmed meat. Now we just need to figure out how much “less” we should eat.

But what if we think the most important issues are biodiversity loss and ecosystem health? Or water pollution? Or workers’ rights? Or animal welfare? We address each of these issues in our series, and each of them points to a potentially different answer. On that last point, for example, animal welfare scientist Professor Françoise Wemelsfelder argues that recognizing farm animals as sentient beings “probably means that large industrial farming systems are not morally feasible.”

Wrestling with these concepts and questions is a valuable and valid exercise; it’s commendable to make decisions about your consumption and purchases that reflect your morals and values. But, like comparing apples with oranges, trying to find the perfect answer is an impossible task. It could even have negative mental health outcomes. Research in the field of consumer behavior has shown that we can experience negative emotions when trying to make choices that force us to make “emotionally laden trade-offs.” And, higher levels of eco-anxiety are reported among folks with more environmental awareness. 

What “less” and “better” means for you also depends on what interests, values and biases underlie your particular vision of what the world could, and should, look like. Efforts to boil less and better down to simplistic questions of CO2 emissions per livestock unit or the relative technical merits of soil carbon sequestration versus cellular agriculture ignore political questions. Questions such as who benefits? Who holds the power? Who has access to “better” meat? And what kind of future are we building?

Ultimately, we don’t think it’s possible to provide a simple, silver-bullet answer to the question of what constitutes “less” and “better” meat. But we also think that’s kind of the whole point. When it comes to less and better meat, we think the real question we need to ask is better for whom and for what?

Listen to the podcast series Less and Better? by Farmerama Radio here. 

The post Opinion: There’s No Right Way to Eat Meat appeared first on Modern Farmer.

Conservationist Eric Steen aims to change that. His Earth to Beer project is bringing together over 35 breweries from across the US to make a commitment to brewing a mindfully sourced and packaged beer in collaboration with local environmental nonprofits this Earth Day, “to pack as much sustainability as possible into each can.”

As the impacts of climate change intensify worldwide, there is a greater awareness that we need to make changes in our daily lives to help combat its effects. With this project, Steen is enabling breweries and drinkers to do this in an open-ended and collaborative fashion. “What I think is truly unique about Earth to Beer is that we don’t prescribe a specific way to approach the environmental question,” Steen explains. “We aren’t telling brewers to buy organic only, we’re saying that organic is one of many great options that also include local, regenerative agriculture, other certifications like Salmon-Safe, non-certified but responsibly grown, and more. This decentralized approach allows breweries to get creative in ways that make sense for them, their budgets, and their communities.” 

Ghostfish Brewing of Seattle is putting out an oyster stout and supporting the Puget Sound Restoration Fund as part of the Earth to Beer project. (Photo courtesy Ghostfish Brewing)

Steen aims to make the project as accessible as possible for breweries and drinkers, offering negotiated discounts with suppliers, information about ethical sourcing, and marketing and branding resources and custom artwork to help breweries attract interest from customers and retailers. Brewers can make any style of beer and use whichever sustainable resources they feel will suit their needs best. Recipes released already include Aslan Brewing’s classic Amber Ale, which uses all Salmon-Safe certified hops, and GearHouse Brewing’s Imperial Honey Wheat Ale brewed with Pennsylvania honey and aged in locally sourced whiskey barrels.

Earth to Beer features participants from Alaska to Texas to Hawaii, all of whom have committed to working with sustainable suppliers and partnering with a local environmental nonprofit. “We’ve asked breweries to reverse the role of what normally happens with a nonprofit — usually the nonprofit approaches the brewery and there’s a pretty hands-off way of giving donated beer for a cause. In Earth to Beer, breweries have to find a nonprofit they want to work with, do the outreach and invite them in” says Steen.

Oddwood Brewing in Austin TX has chosen to partner with the Colorado River Alliance for the project. “With good, clean water being absolutely crucial to the creation of good beer we, as a small community-oriented brewery, wanted to team up with those that are fighting to protect our water and communities,” says Oddwood’s events and operations manager Charlie Mikulich. Oddwood is also sourcing its malt from TexMalt, a locally based supplier that works with nearby farms to reduce the carbon footprint of malt supply. It is also sourcing from Yakima Chief Hops, a grower-owned family farm collective that uses green energy to power its facilities, a water reclamation program to keep local habitats safe, and created the Green Chief Program (a sustainability management program that promotes and develops guidelines for all their farms). 

Breweries are required to pay a small fee to join Earth to Beer and make a contribution to the nonprofit of their choice, depending on brewery size, ranging from $500-$1,000 minimum. They are also expected to begin open-ended collaborations, such as providing beer for events and offering free meeting spaces. For startups and minority-owned breweries, sponsor Arryved, which specializes in point-of-sale technology, has provided a stipend so cost doesn’t prohibit participation. “Building a better world through beer requires not only more sustainable ingredients and processes, but also more opportunities for people of color to participate and contribute to the creativity and problem solving we will need to get there,” says Aaron Gore, Director of Community and Partnerships at Arryved.

MadTree Brewing in Cincinnati, Ohio organizes staff volunteer days and donates one percent of all sales to local nonprofits. (Photo courtesy MadTree Brewing)

Another sponsor and collaborator is Canworks, the first US company to print directly onto aluminum cans, eliminating plastic waste and making them recyclable. “There is a challenge in consumer awareness. Most consumers don’t realize that many of the cans they recycle are covered in shrink sleeves and those cans are going straight to a landfill because of that,” says Canworks head of marketing Daniel Rigdon. That’s where Earth to Beer comes in. “Educating consumers so they can make informed decisions is the fastest way to effect change,” Rigdon explains.

Steen aims to spearhead wider industry change by creating a multi-layered, inclusive, educational and open-ended initiative. “Formalizing a campaign around Earth Day and institutionalizing it will go a long way to get breweries who aren’t thinking about their impact to start to care,” he says. This is also the goal for Tulsa OK’s Heirloom Rustic Ales, which is partnering with the Conservation Coalition of Oklahoma. “Our hope for this project is that other brewers (and growers) will see that consumers appreciate, and even gravitate towards, agriculturally holistic products,” says co-owner and brewer Jake Miller. 

For Steen, the key goal is to raise awareness about brewing and drinking intentionally. “If you’re not already intentional in the way that you source your ingredients, consider making one beer a year where you change things up. And each time you make this beer, get a little more intentional about it,” he says. His advice to consumers? “Ask breweries what they’re doing to support producers and suppliers who are environmental stewards, and go out of your way to support breweries that are intentional.”

Earth to Beer releases will be available around the country this April. Find the full list of participating breweries here.

The post Drinking, and Thinking About, More Sustainable Beer appeared first on Modern Farmer.

Food policy experts Sarah Hackney and Jamie Fanous have advice for those who feel overwhelmed or unsure about how to make a difference. Hackney is the coalition director at the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition (NSAC) in Washington, D.C., where she works with grassroots organizations to advocate for federal policy reform to advance the sustainability of agriculture, food systems, natural resources and rural communities. Fanous is the policy director at one of these organizations, a California-based nonprofit called Community Alliance with Family Farmers (CAFF). Together, Hackney and Fanous offer guidance on simple steps that we can all take to create positive change around us, in ways both big and small.

Join CSA programs and support food cooperatives 

Besides doing the research to elect officials who advocate on behalf of these priorities, the best thing we can do to support farmers year-round is to be just as conscientious about how we vote with our dollars. “Sign up for a CSA, go to the farmers market or co-op, purchase your produce from farmers directly. Go the extra mile to do that,” says Fanous. “If you’re going to a big box store, the produce is probably not from a small-scale farmer or a local farmer, so it’s really not supporting local economies. Joining a CSA program is a great way to build a relationship with your farmer and know where your food is coming from.”

Educate yourself and amplify your actions

For those looking to engage more deeply in food policy advocacy, Hackney and Fanous recommend tuning into social media platforms and newsletters from a mixture of national agricultural organizations, such as NSAC, and local ones, such as CAFF. 

“NSAC is one of the best places to get into the nerdy details of food and agriculture policy,” says Hackney. “We have a very active blog and a weekly e-newsletter where we highlight big food and ag policy news from D.C., along with free analysis you won’t find anywhere else.”

When it comes to understanding issues closer to home, Hackney says, “There are over 150 member organizations within NSAC, most of whom are state or regionally focused, and all of whom work in relationship with farmers and eaters in their communities. Almost all of them have active websites and social media accounts and some specifically have farmer- and consumer-led volunteer teams that help review and develop policy ideas both at the local and national level.” She recommends checking out the membership lists of a coalition such as NSAC or one of its peers, such as the HEAL Food Alliance, to see if there’s an active member organization in your state or region. 

Call Congress

Once you start following political and agricultural news, you may come across the occasional public request for citizens like yourself to contact local representatives in Congress to advocate for or against certain bills. 

“We share calls to action at key junctures in the policy process when there are opportunities for folks to make their voices heard directly with lawmakers,” says Hackney. “It’s absolutely possible for individual calls, emails and messages to make a difference: Lawmakers track and monitor who’s reaching out to them on issues that matter locally. When it comes to shifting food and farm policy toward more sustainable, equitable outcomes in our communities, we need those voices. We’re up against entrenched, well-resourced corporate interests and lobbying firms, and one of our best tools to push back is our willingness to speak up as voters, eaters and community leaders.”

“If organizations like CAFF or others ask—make the phone call. It makes a big difference,” says Fanous. “We very rarely ask people to make calls to their members, but when we do, it’s serious and we need that support. If you can’t make the call, repost the request on social media to give it more life.” 

Vote every chance you get

Besides the four-year presidential election cycle, there are congressional elections every two years, as well as annual state and local elections. Register with Vote.org to receive notifications about upcoming elections so that you never miss a chance to vote. 

“The coming 2024 election cycle may shape the fate and contents of the still-to-be-reauthorized farm bill,” says Hackney. The so-called “farm bill” should be passed by Congress every five years and pertains to much more than just farming. This package of legislation defines our food system, determining what we eat by how we use land, water and other natural resources. 

“Congress didn’t reauthorize the 2018 Farm Bill on time last year, instead opting to extend the old bill,” explains Hackney. “If Congress doesn’t complete the reauthorization process on the bill before the fall, that could shift farm bill passage timing into 2025, which means potentially new and different lawmakers sitting on the committees that draft the bill and new lawmakers in leadership positions to drive the process. While the farm bill is intended to represent the needs and issues of farmers and communities and families nationwide, the representatives and senators who sit on the House and Senate agriculture committees, who themselves only represent a slice of the country’s landscape and electorate, get to do the lion’s share of shaping that bill.”

If you’re not sure whether to vote yes or no for a particular bill, Hackney has advice: “If there’s a bill that focuses on an issue you care about, you can look up its authors and cosponsors—these are the lawmakers willing to go on the record with their support for a bill.” Keep an eye out for the names of politicians who are familiar to you and try to determine if their values align with yours, then use their judgment to guide your own. 

“For example, at NSAC, we’ve been organizing for several years around the Agriculture Resilience Act. It’s a bill that would address climate change by reshaping much of the US Department of Agriculture’s programming toward climate change action,” says Hackney. “It would increase resources and support for practices on farms that build diversity of crops and livestock, integrate perennial crops, keep the soil covered and integrate livestock into the landscape—all highly effective climate and agriculture solutions that can reduce emissions and build resiliency. Lawmakers who’ve endorsed this bill are essentially telling us: I support tackling the climate crisis by finding solutions through sustainable agriculture and food systems. You can find a bill’s cosponsors by using free, publicly available websites like congress.gov or govtrack.us.”

Diversify your approach 

“If we could fix our food and farm system by simply voting with our forks or making one quick call to Congress or growing our own food, we’d be there already,” says Hackney. “The truth is it takes action on multiple fronts—especially if we want to get to the root causes of the problems in our food and farm system. That means both doing what we can with our individual food choices—within our means and our communities—to support food and farm businesses operating on values of sustainability and equity and choosing to engage politically to improve food and farm policy.”

The post How to Be a Food Policy Advocate in Your Community  appeared first on Modern Farmer.

What if these food-insecure households—more than 13 percent of the county’s population—could access the abundant provision literally dropping from trees in their neighbors’ backyards?

“Food deserts—places like Phoenix, particularly—need to be more proactive about our own generation and capture of resources,” says Jérémy Chevallier, Phoenix resident and founder of Homegrown, a nonprofit organization dedicated to making local food more accessible to the surrounding community. Through a network of volunteers, farmers markets, food banks and grocery stores, Homegrown is channeling excess fruit from homeowners’ trees to food-insecure residents in and around Phoenix.

As a 31-year-old serial entrepreneur with a background in tech and marketing, Chevallier is an unlikely candidate to propose such an earthly solution. But unpredictable food availability during the 2020 COVID-19 lockdowns prompted him to consider how he could gain more control over his food supply.

“I recognized that many people were starting to pay attention to not only where their food was coming from but specifically getting it from as local of a source as possible… ideally their garden or their neighbor’s garden,” he says. “And I started wondering: How close is my neighborhood to operating as a self-sustaining village?”

It’s a critical question given the state of food access in Maricopa County, where Phoenix is located. The county contains 55 food deserts—areas in which residents have limited opportunities to purchase healthy, affordable food—and 43 are in Phoenix.

But despite the area’s issues with drought, the city has access to a canal system that provides a ready source of irrigation. Combined with copious sunlight and compostable waste, this system creates a “goldmine of opportunity” that Chevallier believes Homegrown can leverage to transform the area into a hub of local food production.

When properly maintained, fruit trees can maintain plentiful production for decades—production that exceeds the needs of a single household. And Chevallier quickly discovered that homeowners are more than happy to let someone take the surplus off their hands, especially when they know it’s being distributed to local residents in need.

His efforts are already paying off. During the 2023 citrus season, Homegrown’s core team of six harvested thousands of pounds of excess citrus, raised more than $5,000 for the nonprofit and sold more than $2,600 worth of fruit, juice and homemade marmalades at farmers markets. Wholesale orders from local grocers netted another $1,346.

Money from sales and donations goes directly back into the nonprofit to pay the team and purchase supplies and equipment. As its capacity expands, Homegrown will be able to deliver even more food to underserved residents in the Phoenix area. Currently, the nonprofit donates harvested citrus to partners such as Feed Phoenix, which serves 500 to 700 people every week through free community events, and the Arizona Food Bank Network, a system of food banks and pantries that feed more than 450,000 food-insecure residents across the state.

And fruit is just the beginning: Chevallier also has his eye on the Phoenix Valley’s bountiful pecan trees, olive trees and date palms. But despite the plentiful supply, he’s concerned the area isn’t ready to sustain itself solely on locally grown food—a goal he sees as essential to long-term food security.

The Homegrown team. Photo submitted.

Part of the problem lies in the city’s construction. Pavement and buildings create an urban heat island that raises local temperatures and contributes to drought conditions, making the area unsuitable for consistent food production.

Chevallier says permaculture can address the problem. Short for “permanent agriculture,” permaculture replaces traditional landscaping and gardens with “a diverse, integrated system that doesn’t look like rows of trees over here and crops over here,” he says. “It looks like a forest.” The greenery in these food forests mitigates the heat island effect and creates milder microclimates where food crops can flourish. By combining permaculture with food harvest and distribution, Chevallier hopes to usher in a future where neighborhoods can sustain themselves without the need for commercial food production.

To help the movement toward complete food security blossom in the Phoenix area, Chevallier launched Permascaping.com and started a “Grants for Gardeners” program. Interested hobby farmers and animal keepers can apply for resources to establish and support self-sustaining permaculture installations in their backyards.

“The reason Homegrown exists is to make homegrown food accessible to anybody who wants it,” says Chevallier. “[And] a lot of times, what’s holding people back from doing more [with gardening] is simply the resources.” He wants to use Homegrown’s grants to provide the money and space for local growers to feed themselves and their communities.

Chevallier recognizes that expanding his self-described “idealistic hippie vision” will take time, and Homegrown needs additional support to make it happen. He’s currently on the hunt for more distribution partners to help channel the “absurdly huge” fruit supply into the wider community. Fellow advocates of homegrown food can also make tax-deductible donations to fund the nonprofit’s efforts.

But ideally, Chevallier wants to connect with people with the resources and enthusiasm to bring Homegrown’s vision to life in communities nationwide. “What I would love to do is for Homegrown to … be a chapter-based organization,” he says. “If we can set an example of what’s possible in Phoenix, in one of one of the harder places to do this, then we know that we can inspire people and … expand that model.”

And he’s more than happy to share the processes he’s established over the last year to enable new chapters to take root and spread. “I want people to realize that this food is homegrown, that it didn’t come from a commercially managed and owned grove or orchard, but that it came from someone’s backyard,” he says. “That, to me, is the biggest impact we have the opportunity to make, to bring people together over that shared store of value.”

The post Meet the Arizona Nonprofit Working to Transform Urban Food Deserts appeared first on Modern Farmer.

 In the aftermath of the war, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was accepted by members of the United Nations (U.N.) at the Palais de Chaillot in Paris. Among the resolutions in the foundational text is Article 25. It reads, in part: “Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care.”

The right to food seems so basic; in 1948, it seemed unimaginable that we would be where we are today, with 828 million people living in hunger, according to the latest numbers from the World Health Organization. Most of those people—more than 85 percent—live in areas affected by conflict and war.

In 2015, the U.N. targeted 2030 as the year it would end hunger and food insecurity. In the past decade, we’ve seen catastrophic wars and food crises in South Sudan, Syria, Yemen, Haiti, Gaza, Ukraine and Somalia topping the list, with tens of millions of their citizens suffering almost unimaginable hardship, hunger and suffering. The populations in those conflict zones risk starvation, because access to food has been either coincidentally or intentionally cut off. 

While the U.N. unanimously passed a resolution condemning the use of food insecurity and starvation as a tactic of war in 2018, the resolution isn’t legally binding. The only way the millions of people in conflict zones are getting food that they don’t grow or find themselves is through the efforts of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and nonprofits, often staffed by volunteers who risk their lives to deliver food to people on the front lines.

The circumstances and details of delivery vary considerably. 

“Logistics for delivery of aid differ depending on many factors, from the location, geography and weather to the nature of the disaster, beneficiaries, time of year and level of conflict,” says Christine Quinn Antal, co-founder of the nonprofit Task Force Antal and a veteran with years of experience operating in conflict zones and managing crises. Task Force Antal focuses on providing food, evacuation support and humanitarian aid with a team of elite special operations veterans in conflict zones across the world. “Keeping supply chains safe and secure is always a major focus, so we can maintain confidence that the food and supplies we’re delivering make it to the intended location without any tampering.”

Photography provided by World Central Kitchen.

Delivering aid in Somalia

For decades, Somalia has been enduring conflict and extreme drought. While the country’s Civil War was sparked in 1991 when Siad Barre’s military junta was overthrown, it has since devolved to include multiple warring rebel groups. Currently, more than four million people there are acutely food insecure and 1.7 million children aged five and under are expected to suffer acute malnutrition this year, according to CARE International.

CARE works in 97 countries, in a mission to promote social justice and defeat poverty. Justus Liku, the Kenya-based senior director of Humanitarian Response and Impact, explains that delivering food aid is one measure CARE takes to assist those in need. 

“The drought in Somalia has killed tens of thousands of people and decimated crops and livestock that people depend on for their lives and livelihoods,” says Liku. CARE relies on food imported from nearby Kenya and Ethiopia and imports corn from Western Europe.

It also relies on imported nutritional supplements that malnourished children and parents need, as there is no supplement industry local to Somalia. “Getting food aid to people is very challenging in Somalia because there are so many conflicts, so crossing from one zone to another requires a great deal of planning and coordination.”

To conquer the logistics of delivering food by truck from one conflict zone to another within Somalia, CARE relies on a chain of local connections who meet each other near border crossings and deliver food from one truck to the other. 

“The drivers know each other, and remain in contact,” says Liku. “It is complicated, but [it’s] the best way we have found to get food to people across Somalia.” 

Thankfully, says Liku, mobile phone service is much more dependable in Somalia than in other countries in which CARE works, which enables delivery drivers to utilize GPS when necessary and communicate with each other and the people they’re trying to reach. 

Finding local on-the-ground contacts is key to the NGO Human Appeal’s approach in Somalia, as well as its other efforts in 27 countries, including Sudan, Pakistan, Yemen and Iraq. In 2023, Human Appeal delivered food and nutritional support to 773,426 people. Each delivery, by design, was different. 

“Local partners know the context and local challenges, and identify duly vetted local implementing partners,” says Owais Khan, deputy CEO of Human Appeal, a nonprofit organization working across the world to deliver aid and fight poverty and injustice. In an email, Khan told Modern Farmer that the group has an established model to assess the ability and capacity of local partners to help with food delivery projects. “The same applies to suppliers who need to be screened, have a solid track record and economically viable prices.”

Understanding each country’s needs, the demographics of the target group, the local diet and preferences and any other specific requirements such as religious or other food codes is essential, says Khan —and frequently, locals are the only ones who can truly decipher these often unwritten rules for outsiders. 

The U.N.’s Humanitarian Response Plan in Somalia is woefully underfunded, with about 9.8 percent of the $1.59 billion needed funded this year.

“There are so many countries and people in need,” says Liku “and not enough funding.”

Photography submitted by World Central Kitchen.

Delivering aid in Gaza 

Food security experts warn that the war between Israel and Hamas has caused a food crisis that threatens every single person living in Gaza. Currently, about half of the population—1.1 million people—are facing severe hunger and the possibility of famine, according to Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, an agency that monitors global hunger. Delivering food has been a dangerous endeavor recently, when at least 112 Palestinians were killed and hundreds more wounded amid an aid truck delivery in Gaza. 

World Central Kitchen (WCK), a nonprofit founded in 2010 by Chef José Andrés, has delivered more than 350 million meals around the world. WCK delivered food to Israelis after the October 7 attack that sparked the country’s war with Hamas and now is delivering food to Gaza. 

In early March, WCK began exploring routes into Gaza, eventually partnering with the NGO Open Arms in securing a maritime route through Cyprus. The mission has been dubbed Operation Safeena, which translates to Operation Boat or Vessel in Arabic. 

WCK has come under fire recently following allegations of sexual harassment within the top levels of the organization; however, that does not seem to have hampered its aid work. A spokesperson for World Central Kitchen said that WCK continues “to prepare about 300 tons of humanitarian food aid for a second sailing to Gaza from the Larnaca, Cyprus port.” 

WCK is focused on delivering culturally appropriate, shelf-stable foods, such as beans, carrots, canned tuna, chickpeas, canned corn, parboiled rice, flour, oil and salt. To date, WCK has delivered 39 million meals by land, sea and air to Palestinians. More than 1,500 trucks have been dispatched for on-the-ground deliveries across Gaza from WCK’s Cairo warehouses, and more than 60 community kitchens have been opened in Gaza. During the sacred month of Ramadan, WCK is delivering daily airdrops, the spokesperson said. 

Common Man volunteers delivering food and presents. Photography submitted by Common Man for Ukraine.

Delivering aid in Ukraine 

The war between Russia and Ukraine began in 2014 when the republic of Crimea was invaded by Russian troops in disguise. On February 24, 2022, Russia launched a full-scale invasion. Today, an estimated 3.7 million people are displaced in Ukraine, and 14.6 million people require humanitarian assistance, including food.

Children are especially vulnerable, says Susan Mathison, who co-founded Common Man for Ukraine in 2022 with Steve Rand, Lisa Mure and Alex Ray.

“When we visited Ukraine to see what we could do, we decided to focus on children, because we came to understand the enormity of what they were facing,” says Mathison. “Hundreds of thousands of children have been sent on trains from Eastern to Western Ukraine by their mothers who hope to keep them safe. Informal safehouses have sprung up to care for 2.5 million children.”

Two of the founding members of Common Man are members of the Plymouth Rotary Club in New Hampshire, and they used that connection to launch their mission.

“We knew we’d have to embed with local organizations on the ground if we wanted to succeed,” says Mathison. “So we called the Rotary presidents in Poland and Ukraine, and from there built an incredible network and system of delivery.”

Thus far, they have delivered more than three million meals to hungry children in more than 100 safehouses across Ukraine, using trucks driven by around 200 volunteers. They deliver locally produced traditional foods such as groat (similar to muesli or granola), canned meat and fresh produce grown by local producers, often to houses in the dead of night, and not necessarily with electricity. 

“Sometimes, I feel like we’re not doing enough,” says Mathison. “How are we really helping if we can only serve a fraction of the people in need? But I’ve been there to see the looks on the faces of the children when they receive the food, and that’s when I realize that what we are doing does matter, because every child matters.”

Hope for Ukraine, a non-profit launched in 2016 by Ukraine native Yuriy Boyechko, has raised more than $8.4 million since the full-scale invasion began and operates under a similar model.

“We realized that millions would need our help,” says Boyechko. “We began organizing food and field kitchens and figured out how to deliver meal kits that would feed families of four for (over a week).”

Currently, Hope for Ukraine is supplying 1,500 families with meal kits every week, with the help of co-partners on the ground and more than 100 volunteer groups, which deliver food to the most hard-hit regions in frontline towns. The non-perishable food they deliver is largely locally sourced, with the goal of boosting the economy, and providing the kinds of food locals are used to. 

“For a lot of people, this is their only lifeline,” says Boyechko. “Their infrastructure has been destroyed, and without this they will have no food. We are also operating five field kitchens with other pop-ups when possible and as needed.”

Currently, an estimated 10 percent of Ukraine’s humanitarian needs are being met, and Mathison says that donations have fallen off precipitously since the October 7 attack in Israel and the ensuing war there. 

“There are so many problems happening in the world, it’s easy to stay frozen,” says Mathison. “But if we could all just focus on one country, or one child, or one project, the world will be a better place. Pick something that will make your heart sing.”

Common Man for Ukraine founders. Photography submitted by Common Man.

Want to donate to an NGO or food charity? Here’s what you should consider: 

To ensure the safety of staff and success of the mission, always look at how the NGO interacts with and incorporates local groups into their work. 

“At the end of the day, any organization you support should be working with the actual citizens and organizations based there,” says Antal. “They are critical to know how to get in and get out, especially in armed conflicts.”

To ensure your funds are actually going to help, ensure that the charity is legally registered and abides by the rules and regulations of its governing body. Also important is that it submits an annual report of its expenses, so you can see exactly where the money is going. 

“A charity with a sustained track record of delivering aid to where it is needed most and regularly reporting its work to its donors is also key,” says Khan. “A professionally managed charity will always have internal policies and procedures that are applied across all internal functions to ensure proper governance and standards.”

In addition to the NGO’s featured above, here are vetted and widely respected organizations which you can feel safe donating money to:

The World Food Programme: Founded in 1963, it is the lead U.N. agency that responds to food emergencies and combats hunger worldwide. 

Oxfam America: A global organization founded in 1942 fighting to end poverty and injustice. 

Action Against Hunger: A global humanitarian organization that takes action against the causes and effects of hunger. 

The post How Does Food Get Delivered to Hungry People in Conflict Zones? appeared first on Modern Farmer.

When challenging its pork producer about its use of manure lagoons and the myriad health and environmental issues they pose, Ganzler knew that Bon Appétit’s end goal was not only to source more sustainable pork but to be able to communicate effectively with its customers about the issue—something that is quite difficult, since no one wants to talk about manure when they’re eating.

This tension is at the heart of Ganzler’s new book: How can companies practice authentic sustainability and work it effectively into their marketing strategy? In the book, Ganzler details Bon Appétit’s progress and missteps in navigating issues such as farmworker rights, pigs raised in gestation crates, chickens in cages, and more. The book, which comes out April 2, also includes interviews with other industry experts who talk about their experiences, including:  Rob Michalak, former global director of social mission for Ben & Jerry’s, who talks about integrating sustainability into operations and his experience with Milk with Dignity organizers; Gary Hirshberg, co-founder of Stonyfield Organic, who discusses picking your battles and taking stands on issues; and Lisa Dyson, CEO and co-founder of Air Protein, who talks about creating alternative protein and striving to be the number one meat company in the world.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Modern Farmer: In your book, you say that when a business does something right or makes progress toward a sustainability target, it should get credit for it. This can bolster the business, but you write that it can also create a ripple effect toward industry change. How so?

Maisie Ganzler: A great example of that was in 2005, when we at Bon Appétit made a commitment to cage-free eggs nationwide. We heard that the client at another corporation said to their food service provider, ‘We’d like cage-free eggs served here,’ and the food service provider said ‘Oh, we can’t do that. There’s not enough available, blah, blah, blah,’—all these excuses. And the client said, ‘Well, Bon Appétit does it for their locations. So, I’m sure you can do it here, too.’ That’s the ripple effect that I’m talking about—once a company has proven that something is possible, other companies now need to come to the table and do the same.

MF: Something you worked on passionately was sourcing pork from producers that don’t house pigs in gestational crates. You didn’t reach this goal overnight but through a series of milestones. You eventually accomplished this with pork producer Clemens Food Group, on which Modern Farmer reported here. To get there, you first had to hear big companies tell you no, it wasn’t possible. Why did you push on regardless? How were you confident you could achieve something that wasn’t being widely done at such a large scale?

MG: I pushed on for two main reasons. One was that it was simply the right thing to do. If you’ve seen a sow in a gestation crate, it’s heartbreaking. They can’t turn around, they can’t walk; it is very clear that something better could be done for that animal. So, that’s where we start, rooted in the idea that it’s the right thing to do for the animal. But as you’ve pointed out, we’re also a business and we want to get market credit. And we had made a public promise, and I was not going to go back on that. So, while I was transparent about the difficulties and about missing the deadline, I never wanted to say it can’t be done. Was I confident that it could be done? Not necessarily, but I don’t need confidence to keep pushing forward.

MF: You advise companies to own their challenges and obstacles to achieving their sustainability goals—something that can be tempting to hide. Why is it actually better to be transparent about these things?

MG: Being transparent is important because one, it will insulate you to some degree from greenwashing claims. If you are the person that’s stepping forward and saying here’s where we fell short, nobody can have that “gotcha” moment. The other thing is that it actually gets you more credit in the end. If you pretend that everything’s easy to do, why should anybody celebrate that you did it? If you’re transparent about how challenging it was, how many bumps there were in the road, how many times you failed and redoubled your efforts, how much more expensive it was, then all the more reason for customers or advocacy groups to laud your accomplishment when you finally do pull it off.

I don’t think that anybody on the consumer side, anybody reasonable, expects perfection from a company. But they do expect honesty. And I think that’s a reasonable expectation. One of the things that I talked to Gary Hirshberg about, the founder of Stonyfield, is he talked about people needing to make an emotional connection with the brand, especially if you’re asking them to spend more money on something. Just what I was talking about [with] gestation crates, and how they are so horrible for sows, that cuts to my heart, not necessarily to my head, because it is more efficient, it is more cost-effective, but my heart tells me something different. And a lot about building an authentic brand based upon sustainability is listening to your heart and being open with your heart.

If you’re not authentic in your desire to make real change, I think that people smell that. And you may actually have something backfire. Instead of [achieving] what you want, you may be in a worse position if you’re inauthentically making these promises.

Ganzler holds a piglet. (Photography provided by Maisie Ganzler)

MF:  You talk about how in Bon Appétit’s Farm to Fork program, you don’t require that producers be certified organic, but you do require that farms be owner-operated. As a farmer in St. Louis told you, if you’re a small farm, you can’t afford to scrap a whole field if you have a fungal outbreak, you need to be able to apply a fungicide. If you held firm to requiring organic certification, you’d end up putting the squeeze on some of your smaller producers. When setting a sustainability goal, how do you make sure that the parameters you choose can actually help you achieve your desired outcome?

MG: You have to first be really clear of what your desired outcome is. So, for the Bon Appétit Farm to Fork program, the desired outcome was to support farmers that were growing for taste—that was the initial impetus of the program: to get the best-tasting food. And to do that, we decided that we had to support small-scale farmers that were close to us that were able to grow for flavor, as opposed to grow for conformity or transportability or a whole host of other reasons. Be really clear about what your goal is. 

MF: Considering Bon Appétit’s size and reach, you encounter a lot of issues in our food system. You work with producers across a wide geography and advocates on a wide breadth of issues. From your perspective, what are the biggest issues in our food system right now? 

MG: From sitting in the chair of a food service company that’s a buyer, I think that the biggest issues really surround animal agriculture, how animals are treated and the impacts that the raising of those animals have on our environment. And there’s a lot of different things in play. And there’s a lot of strong opinions but also some conflicting information. So, I would say that there’s a whole host of issues around animal agriculture.

MF: For small farmers or food businesses that don’t have a marketing department, budget or training, do you have any advice for how they can still tell their story effectively?

MG: I think that the first thing is that they need to figure out what their story is and distill it down. If they have a package, what can they put on the package that quickly communicates the most salient points of their story, not the encyclopedic version of it, because no one’s going to take time to read that. Everybody’s got a website, so the same thing there, really figuring out what your headline is and succinctly communicating that to your customers. And making that headline something that does create an emotional connection with people. Not being afraid to take a stand, whether that is in the issues you take on, how you talk about them or where you talk about them. 

What I was trying to communicate in the book is the importance of both making meaningful change and getting market credit for it. And that’s where the title comes from—You Can’t Market Manure at Lunchtime. There was this real environmental change we were after, dealing with manure lagoons, but we also needed to be able to talk to customers about it. Because we are not advocacy groups, we are for-profit companies. But we have the power to do good in this world and capitalize on it. And there’s nothing shameful about that duality.

The post When Corporate Sustainability Goals Are Good for Business appeared first on Modern Farmer.

In a landfill, food and organic materials are dumped into the landfill, with more waste continually piled on top, creating compacted, oxygen-deprived areas where bacteria flourishes to break down the organic matter. The decomposition process generates methane, a greenhouse gas. According to the EPA, “municipal solid waste landfills are the third largest source of human-related methane emissions in the US.” 

Put another way: The majority of things we casually toss into the trash can be composted, with big benefits for the planet. 

Composting is a pretty basic concept, although there are several ways to go about it. Essentially, composting speeds up the decomposition process by adding organic matter to an oxygen-rich environment and then letting the bugs and fungi that break down matter do their thing. There are small, backyard-scale composting setups with worms (known as vermicomposting), large, industrial-sized bins that rotate the matter consistently to ensure the right airflow and all sizes in between. Whatever method you use, eventually, the end result is compost—a nutrient-rich soil that can be used as a soil amendment. 

Roughly 15 million American households have access to a food-waste compost program, with about 400 programs spread across 25 states. That’s about 12 percent of households across the country. If composting is a big win for cities—taking waste out of landfills, producing fertilizer and engaging citizens in the recycling process—why doesn’t everyone do it? Well, like most public works initiatives, it’s not that simple. 

To learn more about which municipalities offer composting across the US and Canada—and to add your city to our list—check out our compost map here. 

The curbside pickup truck from Washington’s pilot program. Photography submitted by the City of Washington, DC.

‘One size doesn’t fit all’

So, what does it take to implement a new composting program? In 2017, Washington, DC’s Department of Public Works put together a survey to assess the feasibility of a compost program for local residents. There are a lot of considerations; in this case, it found that the main obstacle was processing capacity. For a city of about 700,000 people, where does all of that waste actually go? 

The city just did not have the space to divert waste from the landfill at that time. However, in the intervening years, industrial composting programs in DC-adjacent Prince George’s County have increased, and other cities such as Boston have started composting—a development that Rachel Manning, a program analyst within Washington’s Department of Public Works, and her team have watched with interest. Finally, in August of 2023, seven years after its initial study, Washington launched its pilot compost program. 

The city now has about 10,000 households participating in the pilot program, with regular curbside pickup of compost, along with trash and recycling. Manning says the team sends out regular surveys to participants to see how things are going throughout the program, which is scheduled to last for a year. “Something that’s interesting to us is understanding that one size doesn’t fit all,” Manning says of the issues that have popped up from resident responses. “Maybe not everyone fills up a five-gallon bin, maybe some people want more than five gallons…so there’s a little bit of thinking about what are the right sizes of these containers? What type of [truck] fleets do we need to serve all these homes? Right now, it’s not the same size as our trash packer trucks, because we’re not servicing as many people. But also, food has a lot of moisture in it, so you need a particular vehicle for that. Also, [the Department of Public Works] has a goal to electrify all of their fleet. So, we need to think about electric vehicles, and what the capacity is there.” 

So far, Manning says the program has been a success. It has about a 70-percent adoption rate among participants and has diverted more than 400 tons of waste from the landfill. The city also brings the compost back to residents (if they ask for it) to use in their gardens, so there’s even more incentive for residents to compost. This summer, when the program is scheduled to come to an end, Manning and the team will evaluate moving forward with composting on an even larger scale. 

Photography submitted by they city of Kansas City, MO.

‘We’re willing to pivot’

“I’m going to tell you a secret,” says Melissa Kozakiewicz, assistant city engineer in Kansas City, Missouri. “I always start with pilots, and using the word ‘pilot,’ I can pivot and be flexible when things are working and when they’re not….but we aren’t going to take it away.” 

Kozakiewicz, who has previously built up a compost program in Jersey City, New Jersey, is now spearheading the compost pilot program in Kansas City. She’s hoping to replicate some of her previous successes, particularly in how she makes the program available to residents. “You have to be really deliberate and careful with how you introduce [a compost program]. You don’t want anybody to feel like you’re jamming something down their throat, because then they’re out,” says Kozakiewicz. Instead, she works at a pace with which the community is comfortable and integrates demonstrations at big public events, such as a Fourth of July parade. That way, residents get comfortable with composting as part of their public life and might be more inclined to continue doing it at home. 

[RELATED: Map: Who Composts?]

Kansas City also doesn’t currently offer a curbside pickup of compost. Instead, its model is a drop-off program. The city has five current drop-off locations, with 10 more to come around the city this year. Kozakiewicz says that helps prevent contamination of waste, because compost bins aren’t lying around next to trash or recycling containers. If residents make a trip to a special, designated location, it helps to reinforce what that location is for. It also helps ward against another common concern for cities: vermin and pests. “We have one of our drop-off spots inside of City Hall’s garage. It’s a publicly accessible space that anybody can use,” says Kozakiewicz, and the regular foot traffic allows for a lot of feedback if something’s amiss. “If you call me and say ‘Hey, I was at the City Hall garage, and it looks terrible,’ I can call somebody right this minute to go check it out.” (Data on adoption rates for composting are harder to find, but studies suggest that in the case of recycling programs, residents are more likely to participate when the programs offer curbside pickup.)

Both Kansas City and Washington, DC, are experimenting with programs at the municipal level and with just a portion of their residents so far. But can these programs scale up? Recent state-wide legislation is trying to answer that question. 

In Vermont, a state-wide food scrap ban went into effect in 2020. Residents separate their food scraps and either compost them in their own homes, drop them off at a designated station or sign up for curb-side pick-up. The law also prioritizes reducing food waste upstream, ensuring more food goes to food banks or is turned into animal feed. At the time of implementation, Josh Kelly, materials management section chief at the state’s department of environmental conservation, told Vermont Public that state legislators had been working on reducing waste since 2012. “We have had a state goal to have 50 percent of the waste that we produce separated and recycled, reused or composted. And that goal has never been met in all the years that it’s been in place.” In the year following the ban’s implementation, sales of backyard composters in Vermont more than doubled, and a survey last year found that 61 percent of Vermont residents felt a “moral obligation” to keep food out of landfills (although the state is still not meeting that 50-percent goal).

California is hoping to see some of that success, after it implemented state-wide legislation in January of 2022. The goal of the law, says Lance Klug, with CalRecycle’s office of public affairs, is to reduce the amount of organic waste in landfills by 75 percent and reroute 20 percent of fresh, unsold food to Californians in need, both by 2025. The law requires all cities and counties in the state to implement programs to collect organic waste and increase food recovery from sites such as grocery stores. So far, says Klug, the program is chugging along, although it’s run into issues ranging from COVID-related supply chain slowdowns to a slower adoption rate than hoped for. Roughly 75 percent of jurisdictions in California now have a composting program in place, and in 2022, about 200,000 tons of unsold food was recovered and redistributed to folks who needed it. However, as reported by the Associated Press, it’s unlikely the state will meet its 2025 goals. 

Photography submitted by they city of Kansas City, MO.

‘Education can’t be understated’

Not everyone has a state or even a city supporting them in the effort to compost. But for some folks, that doesn’t matter—they just do it anyway. 

For Bob Ferretti, that was no small feat. He’s the associate director of administrative services at Yale University, which at any given time has about 25,000 students, staff and faculty on the campus. That’s a lot of waste. 

About 15 years ago, Ferretti and his team began the process of figuring out how to facilitate a composting program on campus—made more difficult by the fact that, at the time, the city of New Haven, Connecticut, where Yale is located, did not have a program in place municipally. (Currently, there’s still no residential program for would-be composters in New Haven. However, the city does mandate that if you are a large business, produce enough compost and are located within 20 miles of a compost facility, then you are required to use it.) “There’s really no composting infrastructure within the state at an industrial scale,” says Ferretti. “There were small organic operations within local farms and things like that, but nothing that could handle the volume we were producing.” 

[RELATED: He Wanted to Start Up a Composting Operation. Outdated Zoning Laws Stood in the Way.]

At first, Ferretti recalls, Yale had to hire trucks to cart the compost daily from campus to a facility on the New York State border, which was a few hours round-trip. It wasn’t the best environmental solution, Ferretti says, for an effort aiming to curb greenhouse emissions. “We did meet with the city to try and come up with something even more local,” says Ferretti. “I don’t think there was a ton of real estate available for it.” Plus, says Ferretti, there were questions about who would own that kind of project. Would it be a municipally run program that only serves Yale? A private program for the university but that utilizes local government? Ultimately, Ferretti and his team found an industrial composter within the state, only about 30 minutes from campus, and partnered with it. 

There were some initial wins for the Yale project. As students who lived on campus mostly lived in residence halls and ate at large dining facilities, much of the waste was already centralized, making it less difficult to collect than in a spread-out city. But this was more than a decade ago, and Ferretti says they had needed to do a lot of education to get everyone on board. “We did a lot of waste stream audits for visual awareness, you know, where we dumped out bags of trash across campus and had people in Tyvek suits sorting through and showing people what’s in our waste stream so that they became aware of how much could be diverted,” says Ferretti. “We would have the students actively weigh plates after every meal, to see how much food was scraped into this bucket, so that they know how much was being composted.” There were still challenges with cross contamination, as silverware, latex gloves or other generic trash was easily dropped into the wrong container. “Education can’t be understated,” says Ferretti. 

There’s a lot to consider when starting up a new compost program. Even if your municipality offers curbside trash and recycling collection, adding compost to the mix isn’t as simple as buying a few more trucks and hiring some new workers. But with each new program that gets introduced, there are more examples of how to make composting work for cities, towns and even private entities of any size. 

In Kansas City, Kozakiewicz says the important thing to remember is not to wait for things to be perfect—you’ll be waiting a long time. “You’ve got to kind of push a little, using the resources that you have,” she says. “Nobody’s interested here in building a new landfill.” 

The post Composting Makes Sense. Why Don’t More Cities Do It? appeared first on Modern Farmer.

Ben Stanger has composted his whole life, starting with a backyard bin when he was a child. But when he wanted to expand his composting efforts and start a business, he had a hard time finding a municipality that would let him. 

Eventually, he was able to work with officials in Sun Prairie, Wisconsin, to update their bylaws so Stanger could start composting. Now, two years later, his business Green Box has grown by 28 times, and he’s looking to see how much further he can go. 

Stanger spoke with Modern Farmer about what it takes to start composting at this scale and how to advocate to rework restrictive legislation. 

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Photography submitted by Green Box.

Modern Farmer: First things first: Ben, how did this interest in composting start for you?

Ben Stanger: Growing up, my family was always very involved in growing food, gardening, canning stuff, whatever. As part of that, we composted as a way of doing natural waste diversion and creating quality soil to go back into the garden. It was something I was very used to and, as a young child, always took for granted. I realized, as I was older, “Oh, everybody doesn’t do this. Why don’t they all do this?” 

I moved to Chicago after college and, in 2017, I was working at a sustainable seafood company at a farmers market. And I saw a compost collection van driving around the neighborhood. And I just realized, “oh, wow, people are doing this, this is a real thing.” I contacted them, and I started working for them. I worked there for about two years. And in those two years, during the beginning of the pandemic, we grew really quickly. And I realized, “OK, this is a real way to kind of solve this issue.”

MF: So, that’s when you decided to iterate on the Chicago business, but in your hometown of Madison, Wisconsin?

BS: Yeah. In Chicago, [the business] didn’t actually compost ourselves. We were collecting organic waste, and then somebody else collected it from us. And that worked for the situation, but I kind of felt like it didn’t give us enough oversight over what we were doing. 

After moving back to Madison, I realized there wasn’t really any infrastructure to compost food scraps, even if I wanted to outsource it and just be a collector, like in Chicago. 

MF: On the surface, it seems like a compost program would be easy to implement if a city already has a trash or recycling pick-up. When you were searching for a place to start your business, what were the issues you came up against?

BS: The big thing is a lack of infrastructure; there’s nowhere to compost that amount of food waste. Food waste is hard to compost compared to other organic waste, like yard waste. It’s really nitrogen rich, it’s really putrescible. It’s really wet and often contaminated. And so you have to be able to handle all those things. And so it kind of requires a different approach than yard waste composting, which is pretty easy to manage. And so just making the investments, there are things that communities haven’t done. 

MF: In terms of infrastructure, many cities have landfills. What do you need for a large-scale composting program?

BS: Well, there’s no one right way to do this, everything is kind of iterative.

We opted for a rotating drum composter. Our goal was to just get our foot in the door in whatever municipality we ended up working in. And to do that, we wanted to make sure our process was as clean and efficient as possible so that we would allay any fears about possible rodents or pests or bad smells. So, we spent a lot of money to make sure that we didn’t run into any perception issues. Our main goal is to kind of make the perception of composting seem cool and achievable. 

Photography submitted by Green Box.

MF: In a place like Wisconsin, roughly a third of household waste is food waste. With that much organic waste, compost seems like an issue many jurisdictions would want to tackle. How many places did you go to before you found a home for Green Box?

BS: I was in my parents’ basement for about six months, just shopping around municipalities. Pretty much every place I emailed either didn’t have a commercial composting zoning classification, or if they did, they expressly prohibited food scrap composting. And pretty much every place, all their zoning codes were written in the ‘80s, when they were more concerned about pests for local landowners and homeowners. That was a big legislative hurdle. 

The other hurdle was real estate. The market is really hot right now, there are a lot of people moving here. And a lot of it is dedicated towards either residential or multi-use development, so it’s hard to find space for this sort of operation.

Finally, just being a new business owner in a business that’s not well established, it’s hard convincing people that what you are doing is worthwhile, if people hadn’t even heard of composting.

[RELATED: Map: Who Composts?]

MF: So, you had to contend with a bunch of bylaws written 40 or more years ago. 

BS: Yeah. And we did find a home in Sun Prairie. That’s a combination of timing, finding a good location and warehouse and the city being willing to work with us. What ended up happening was there was a zoning code to allow for commercial composting operations. Sun Prairie was very helpful and willing to work with us to update one of the classifications to compost food scraps.

MF: So, now, your coverage area extends outside of Sun Prairie, and you actually have customers throughout Madison as well. 

BS: We started off smaller and tried to be dense. We started just about two years ago, on Valentine’s Day, 2022. 

At first, we had 25 members that were composting 200 pounds a week. And because of that we had to be fairly tight, just to make sure that we weren’t losing money on pickups. But now that we have about 700 residential members, composting about seven tons a week, we can afford to go a little bit further afield. In fact, we’re planning a few expansions to even further surrounding smaller municipalities in this coming year. 

Photography submitted by Green Box.

MF: Is composting easier with more people, with larger pickups? Can you do things that backyard composters can’t? 

BS: So, in order to kill pathogens like E. coli and salmonella in compost, you need to achieve a temperature of 131 degrees [Fahrenheit] for a sustained 72 hours. That’s the baseline. Most backyard composting piles don’t hit that, so you don’t want to compost meat, bones or dairy in those smaller compost piles because of the risk of bacteria spreading. 

But for us, we can achieve those temperatures on an industrial scale, no problem. And because we are rotating and composting in a vessel indoors, we have no issues with pests. 

We need to make this easy for the average consumer to adopt. We’re happy to take diehard conservationists and environmentalists, that’s great. But we figured they were probably already composting. We need to try and cater to people who don’t have the time or the interest or just the knowledge. So, [we’re] trying to get as broad a base as possible.

[RELATED: Composting Makes Sense. Why Don’t More Cities Do It?]

MF: That’s an interesting goal, to go after the customers who might not be your immediate target audience. I know that, for many folks, efforts like composting can seem a little futile in the face of the massive changes that need to happen to help our planet. 

BS: Definitely. I’ll say it probably doesn’t matter that much if one individual composts. But if that one individual composting gets 10 more people to compost, eventually those 10 get 10 more, and then we get to the point where now there’s buy-in and capital investment in the infrastructure, so we can start working with whole municipalities…That’s a real impact. Part of this is changing perceptions, changing goals, changing understandings about how waste works. That’s the really powerful part.

Photography submitted by Green Box.

For more on what is takes for cities to start a compost program, check out our feature on municipal compost programs here. 

Ready to compost where you live? Here are some expert tips to get started. 

• Look for community compost groups. Many organizations, including community gardens or environmental clubs, hold seminars or introductory panels on how to start composting. Get up to speed on what’s offered in your area; in addition to learning the composting basics, you might be able to join a network that’s already established. You can also search for a local composter here, or use this EPA map to find opportunities to divert excess food near you. 

• Check in with your city’s waste management team. Does your city offer composting? If they do, is it easily accessible? Most city’s waste management departments are easily found on the city website. From there, they should lay out exactly what you can and can’t compost, your individual pickup times, or the drop-off locations nearest you. 

• Make your voice heard. If your city does not offer a compost program, let the waste management department know you want one! One of the biggest hurdles to starting a pilot program is ensuring that there are enough residents interested in composting in the first place. Make it clear that you want to participate in a program, which makes it much easier for city officials to greenlight one. There are also resources to help municipalities as they get started, including this template from the US Composting Council which helps cities look at land use ordinances and classifications. 
• Look at the zoning bylaws. As Ben found out, some municipal bylaws were written decades ago, and they may not be up to date with the best waste management strategies for cities. But when city officials see that there is interest from the public, they have more reason to look at updating those bylaws, or looking at new ways of waste diversion.

***

The post He Wanted to Start Up a Composting Operation. Outdated Zoning Laws Stood in the Way. appeared first on Modern Farmer.

For decades, Cairo—wedged between the Missouri and Kentucky border at the confluence of the Mississippi and Ohio rivers—has struggled to grow its local economy and population. One hundred years ago, Cairo boasted more than 15,000 citizens; today, its population has shrunk below 1,700. Median household income hovers just above $30,000, with about 24 percent of residents living in poverty—more than double the average in Illinois. Cairo doesn’t even have a gas station. Town residents have felt its lack of a grocery store more acutely, often having to cross state lines to get the most basic supplies.

But recently that trend has begun to change. Last summer, Rise Community Market opened its doors in Cairo, marking the first time in more than eight years town residents could go to a local grocery store. It was the result of more than two years of hard work and planning by community organizers, city officials and public service agencies. One reason behind their success: the grocery store’s model.

In 2021, Illinois Lieutenant Governor Juliana Stratton connected Cairo Mayor Thomas Simpson with a team at Western Illinois University about opening a community-owned cooperative grocery store right off Cairo’s main street. Sean Park is the program manager of the Value-Added Sustainable Development Center (VASDC), a unit of the Illinois Institute for Rural Affairs at Western Illinois University in Macomb. “That particular area had been beat down so much,” says Park, who has more than a decade of experience owning and operating an independent grocery store, as well as a background in rural development. Working with the Institute, Park has found unlikely success in rejuvenating small town businesses like grocery stores in a time when they face persistent distress.

Cairo’s situation may be unique, but it’s not unusual in losing its grocery store. Limited or no access to food tends to be thought of as an urban phenomenon, but it affects rural communities just as much. Seventy-six counties nationwide don’t have a single grocery store—and 34 of those counties are in the Midwest and Great Plains. According to a 2021 Illinois Department of Public Health report and the US Department of Agriculture’s Food Access Research Atlas, 3.3 million Illinois residents live in food deserts. (The USDA defines a rural food desert as any low-income community where the nearest grocery store is 10 or more miles away). To combat this growing reality, in August 2023, Gov. J.B. Pritzker (D) signed into law the Illinois Grocery Initiative, a first-of-its-kind $20 million program that will provide capital, technical assistance and a range of services to open or expand grocery stores in underserved and low-income neighborhoods across the state.

Even before Illinois’ new initiative, rural and small town communities in Illinois like Mount Pulaski, Farmer City and Carlinville have been working with VASDC, organizing their communities to pave the way for cooperatively owned, community-based grocers. Cooperative grocery stores were once perceived as the stuff of elite, granola-munching college towns and coastal enclaves. But today’s co-op advocates emphasize the power of cooperative ownership structures to provide local, democratic control of a community’s essential needs. While the economies of mass-scale production and logistics that sustain and supply traditional chain store or conglomerate grocers like Walmart and Dollar General are often deemed “efficient,” the Covid-19 pandemic revealed their underlying fragility and susceptibility to supply chain disruption.

It’s estimated that Walmart now sells just over a quarter of all groceries in the United States. In his forthcoming book Barons: Money, Power and the Corruption of America’s Food Industry, antitrust expert Austin Frerick writes that the gutting of New Deal-era price floor regulations has allowed companies like Walmart to amass a level of dominance not seen in US history. To do so, he writes, Walmart “demands that a supplier decrease the price or improve the quality of an item each year,” in addition to giving Walmart delivery priority.

In contrast, local, cooperative ownership helps guarantee that decision making about how a store is run and what it stocks are based on the community benefit. The items on the shelves of co-ops like Cairo’s Rise Community Market aren’t the stuff of Whole Foods, but these stores help bring needed items close to the community, like fresh produce and meat, which tend to be sourced from farmers and producers nearby. Robert Edwards, Rise Community Market’s store manager, says that local stores may not be able to match the extensive inventory and cost a little more than the Walmarts of the world, but “what you get for those few extra cents you spend is the ability to help those in your community” by ensuring that  goods are available “for those in your community who lack the ability to travel for them.”

Illinois Lieutenant Governor Juliana Stratton, center, cuts the ribbon at Rise Community Market’s opening ceremony.

Interest in bringing community-owned stores to rural America isn’t limited to Illinois. Across the country, communities are experimenting with new ways to address the disappearance of rural and small town grocery stores. The Institute for Self-Reliance has detailed examples of innovative models in Pennsylvania and North Dakota, including self-service grocers, rural grocery delivery and nonprofit grocers. Food cooperative programs are now active at state universities in Kansas, Nebraska, Wisconsin and elsewhere, and in recent years rural cooperative development centers have been active in almost all 50 states.

“Cooperative development is once again ascendant,” says Stacey Sutton, director of the Solidarity Economy Research, Policy and Law Project and associate professor in the Department of Urban Planning and Policy at the University of Illinois Chicago. “And it’s rising in areas that have not seen sufficient support in the past.”

Even though agricultural cooperatives, or farmers’ co-ops, have long been a cornerstone in rural communities, Sutton explains that there has been a significant gap in cooperative development for other types of collectively owned, democratically managed enterprises. Part of this is due to the influence of institutions like the USDA and land grant universities in rural communities, which have traditionally invested their resources in agricultural cooperatives, pooling resources around commodity crop and livestock production. “What’s missing is exactly what’s happening at Western Illinois, in terms of supporting other types of cooperatives, such as food cooperatives, which are essential in disinvested communities,” says Sutton.

One of the major challenges facing cooperative development in rural communities is access to technical services, or the process of providing specialized know-how and business acumen to help communities plan and build capacity for creating models of collective ownership. This is where the VASDC team comes in.

Unlike chain grocers or corporate juggernauts that take a one-size-fits-all approach, VASDC’s methods are more artisanal, tailored to the specific needs of developing a sustainable community-owned grocer. “The financial calculations of a full business plan require everything down to the floor plan,” Park says. “If we change the floor plan and some of the refrigeration section, it’s going to change your utility bill and the amount that you sell in each department. From there it’s going to change the profit margin in both those departments.”

Facing stiff competition discount stores like Walmart means that a cooperative’s success is totally dependent on community buy-in and organizing. For many communities, there’s an educational component to VASDC’s consulting. The kind of ongoing, sustainable collective action and community organizing required to keep a cooperative vibrant, coupled with learning and navigating the practice of democratic ownership, can be taxing and messy. Cooperatives often require more than just showing up to vote. It can take anywhere from six months to seven years to build a cooperative grocery, and it may not always work the first time.

Park says it can also be a hurdle to inform residents that cooperative grocers are open to non-members for shopping and that member-ownership is more about investing in a store’s sustainability than earning Costco-like membership privileges. On the flip side, member-owners who are unfamiliar with cooperative concepts sometimes expect Gordon Gecko-like returns on their investment. That’s just not possible in an industry where profits can be razor thin or in a cooperative where profits are typically reinvested in the store. Yet, Park says that for the communities he serves, the process is often worth it. “When you can guide them from concept to that opening day, that’s really rewarding.”

In the 12 years that Park has led VASDC, he has helped countless rural communities throughout Illinois and the Midwest develop community ownership models for grocery stores. Edwards, the manager of the Cairo co-op, credits Park’s successes to his previous work owning and managing a grocery store. “I find solace in knowing that he understands the hurdles of managerial responsibilities and the stress this can bring.” Park’s advice, he says, has been “invaluable in helping me navigate challenges,” and was vital to him in making a smooth transition into the manager role when he started in January 2023, six months before the opening. “Sean is unafraid of telling you when you’re making a mistake or that an idea is ridiculous,” Edwards says, “Knowing that you have a partner like that instills trust and that makes it easier to turn to him when you find yourself in doubt.”

This coming year will be the first of what Park describes as the “2.0” version of the center, with the addition of new staff members timed to address the expected interest generated by the Illinois Grocery Initiative. The additional staff will increase the center’s capacity to provide holistic solutions to tackle the challenges that affect grocers, small producers and growers, and rural communities across the state.

Given the demands on their time, the center’s staff is pragmatic. Kristin Terry, one of the center’s recent hires, who previously worked in economic development for Macomb, Illinois, says that if you’re within 10 or 15 miles of a Walmart or the new iteration of dollar stores that sell groceries, a community cooperative will not be viable, because too many people will still opt for the superstore. In this respect, it’s a Walmart economy, Terry says, and residents are stuck living in it.

While the speed with which Rise Community Market developed is a testament to Park’s work and the efforts of community organizers, the cooperative has faced some setbacks. A set of brand-new cooler cases malfunctioned and a walk-in cooler broke down overnight, leading to product loss and a decline in revenue. However, a USDA grant in combination with community backing and a GoFundMe campaign have helped address such setbacks.

“Fortunately, we have a community that believes in this project and wants to support the store regardless of the struggles we’ve faced,” Edwards says. As volunteer and community-owner support continue to grow, Edwards and the co-op members are optimistic that their store will be able to meet its fundraising and revenue goals. “The most important part of building a community-owned store is getting long-term community buy-in. It doesn’t end with the grand opening,” Edwards says. “You have to be committed to a long-term project.”

That appears to be true on the consulting side, as well. Recently, Park and the VASDC team held a meeting in a community that Park had visited a few years ago and had only found one person interested in the idea of building a cooperative grocer. This time, they found 10.

The post How Illinois Is Bringing Grocery Stores Back to Main Street appeared first on Modern Farmer.