Singer’s respect for soil inspired her to found Carbon Sponge, an interdisciplinary platform that honors this threatened resource by cultivating healthy soil to foster carbon sequestration. “Carbon sponge” is a term usually used to describe healthy soil that absorbs and retains water; Singer found it aptly described the subject and actions she wants to cultivate. 

Fighting climate change

Greenhouse gas emissions, which result from high levels of atmospheric carbon, are a critical cause of climate change. That systemic shift is responsible for weather patterns, such as periods of intense drought or rain, imperiling all aspects of life, particularly our food supply. Yet agriculture in the United States is responsible for about 10 percent of the country’s emissions and food production accounts for more than a quarter of global emissions, when factoring in the larger food system, including packaging and transportation. 

Carbon storage is an important tool in combating climate issues because sequestered carbon produces fewer emissions. It also improves soil’s fertility, its structure for conveying nutrients and capacity to retain water. Healthy soil is more productive and leads to better growing and farming outcomes.

Singer hopes to fight climate challenges and generate a societal shift in which decisions about land use practices, such as fracking, are thoughtfully made to support humans and other species that rely upon the ecosystem. Carbon Sponge, she says, is “part of our nature-based solution[s] to our man-made problems.”

An event with USDA scientists, organized by Carbon Sponge, at White Feather Farm in 2023. (Photo credit: Jess Giacobbe)

Anybody who is interested—urban, suburban or rural gardeners and farmers or any land stewards—can participate in Carbon Sponge. Singer has written a manual, “Carbon Sponge Guide: A Guide to Grow Carbon in Urban Soils (and Beyond),” available on the Carbon Sponge website. It explains how to assemble a toolkit of inexpensive, easy-to-purchase-and-use instruments to test metrics such as the fungal to bacterial ratio, which indicates soil’s ability to provide hospitable conditions for carbon storage. Chapters discuss how to monitor and teach children about soil and to design a carbon sponge. An educator at heart, Singer wants to offer tools to teach people to develop new ways of thinking.

Putting soil first

Centering soil in conversations is at the heart of Carbon Sponge. “First of all, asking, what does soil need? Which I think is an interesting question unto itself,” says Singer. “Then also, ‘what can we learn from soil?’” 

Farming methods over the past 50 years, such as growing monocultures and fertilizing depleted soil to prop up the system, are shortsighted, says Singer. She wants to invest in rather than impose on or extract from soil. “If you’re just looking at a yield and how much you get on the land, then you’re not understanding the complex systems that support the growth of that plant and future growth,” she says. 

Singer is notably not a scientist. She’s an award-winning professor of New Media at SUNY Purchase where she teaches Dark Ecology, a class closely aligned with her work in the ecological art space. It explores what it means to be human in the age of the Anthropocene, reading theorists, she says, who straddle art and science and think about how those disciplines can help people interrogate and rethink humans in relation to soil, microbes and the food we’re growing. Singer’s work, at the intersection of technology, art and social change, has been exhibited at MoMA/PS1 and is in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art. 

Fabio and Christine Ritmo of Nimble Roots Farm in Catskill, NY, a participating farm of Carbon Sponge Hub 2022-2024. (Photo credit: Brooke Singer)

After participating in collaborative art projects involving food waste, Singer wanted to learn more about soil. She also wanted to transform that waste into a rich resource. Those interests led her to co-found La Casita Verde, a community garden in South Williamsburg, Brooklyn. 

Singer had worked a lot with data collection, visualizing data in her art practice and generating data in various projects. Learning that the soil had to be tested for lead, a common contaminant in urban soil, prompted her to wonder what it was not being tested for and what would be useful to the soil. “What other kinds of data could we collect in the garden,” says Singer, “that kind of filled out the story about soil?” 

Group effort

Carbon Sponge, formed to explore regenerative agriculture in urban gardening, incorporates art, scientific research, data collection and agriculture. For its initial project in 2018, Singer, as designer in residence at the New York Hall of Science, assembled soil scientists, artists, agroecologists, urban gardeners, landscape designers, government agencies and corporate funders. The goal: to find out how carbon cycles in urban soils and if it was possible to grow soil organic carbon in urban soils in the same way that happens in native rural soils. “I was very interested in making an aesthetic and pleasing experiment so that people would be pulled in by it and want to be in this space and start to learn and ask questions with us,” says Singer. 

Urban soil is very different from rural soil, which is much less disturbed by humans. So, the experiment combined “technosol,” also known as human-engineered soil, a mix of sediment and compost, in different ratios. It demonstrated that soil organic carbon could be developed in urban soil.

The findings are important because the sediment, previously considered waste, can now be considered a resource, opening up new potential for use in ecosystem services and regenerative agriculture. A paper detailing results is currently under peer review. 

Singer’s integrative, collaborative approach and activist streak are influenced by her time at Carnegie Mellon University, where she earned her MFA. There she co-founded Preemptive Media, a collective of artists, computer scientists and roboticists who explored the then-new field of human and computer interaction. She enjoyed being part of a group that “included people who knew how to build projects both in the physical and technological sense and create projects that were bigger than one person,” she says, “and often with an eye towards inclusion, participation, transparency and building a better world with more of a democratic input.”

Carbon Sponge now also encompasses scientific research, Singer’s art practice, a farmer-to-farmer network called Carbon Sponge Hub (located since 2022 at White Feather Farm in Saugerties, New York, where Singer is the director of Farm Innovation), and a yearly soil fest there. 

Anne-Laure White, Carbon Sponge field tech, surveying the sorghum crop at Stoneberry Farm in Athens, NY, in 2023. (Photo credit: Brooke Singer)

Last year, 10 small area farms participated in the Hub, which includes professional lab testing to substantiate kit results. Planning for 2024 is underway, with intentions to scale up production from a hand-harvested-and-winnowed operation to a machine-driven one, to formally verify the kit, thanks to a USDA grant, and to explore culinary uses.

The Hub is also growing sorghum alone and in cover crop mixes for a scientific study to determine if sorghum can be called a “New York climate-smart plant.” The nutritious grain from Africa possesses numerous agronomic and sustainable properties that can help soil store carbon. It is drought resistant and produces a significant amount of plant biomass, which can be used by farmers to nurture the land. Notably, it efficiently photosynthesizes more “exudates” (“basically, liquid carbon,” explains Singer) into the soil through its vast root system, which helps microbes multiply, building soil health. Hub farm Zena Farmstead reported a 50-percent increase in microbial biomass in its experimental plot from its first to second year of participation. 

Looking ahead

Current generations may not see the benefits of this work; carbon sequestration can take many decades. But Singer is undeterred. “This provides one model,” she says. “We have to be on soil time, which is very different than human time. Both should be part of the solution.” 

Carbon Sponge is modeling new ways of thinking that are necessary for human survival. “We can’t get ourselves out of this problem in the same way we got into it, with extractive capitalists and profit-driven systems,” says Singer. “I’d like to think of this as a different way forward.”

***

You can find Singer’s manual, “Carbon Sponge Guide: A Guide to Grow Carbon in Urban Soils (and Beyond),” on the Carbon Sponge website. It explains how to assemble a toolkit of inexpensive, easy-to-purchase-and-use instruments to test metrics such as the fungal to bacterial ratio, which indicates soil’s ability to store carbon. 

The post Sequestering Carbon Is Not Just A Science But An Art, Too appeared first on Modern Farmer.

It turns out the miracle thread made from oil isn’t so recyclable. But it does break down, bit by bit: in the wash, on land, everywhere. Textiles are a major source of microplastics in the ocean, where they weave their way into the food chain, causing untold harms to marine life. Entire ecosystems are being altered by our clothes. 

Studies tell us we eat and drink its flecks, too, with unknown health impacts, and that the volume of plastic particles in the ocean is doubling about every six years. 

Our daily clothing choices are part of it all, but with polyester, rayon and acrylic so ubiquitous plastic even rains from the sky, choices are limited. Polyester, made from the same plastic as most water bottles, is woven into about half of the world’s clothing. Cheap and easy to make, it’s still the fastest-growing group of fibers used to manufacture garments. 

What’s the solution? Some see the answer to more sustainable fabrics in new materials that can readily decompose or be recycled; others say natural fibers and local supply chains are the way to go. But each approach depends on infrastructure that has yet to be fully realized. If the end game is simply more mass production and consumption, with the thought that all of this material will quickly degrade or find its way to recycling, our oceans and landfills of trash will only grow.

The high cost of fast fashion 

Fast fashion uses both synthetic and natural fibers, and the environmental trade-offs between the two are endless, from land and water use to chemical inputs. But when it comes to planet-heating emissions, fossil fuel-based synthetics—the main materials in use—are clear losers. Fashion contributes around 10 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, second only to big oil. And most of the carbon footprint of a garment is around producing its fibers. 

Another big factor is end of life. There is nowhere near enough fiber recycling infrastructure in the US, where 85 percent of used clothes and other textiles get sent to the landfill. In California, most clothing is disposed of through curbside solid waste collection—a straight route to the dump. At every level are gaps that prevent “textile circularity” especially when it comes to sorting out salvageable garments and sourcing recycling. And while natural fibers can biodegrade, it’s rarely that simple. Companies often blend natural with plastic fibers, adding dyes and finishes, and blends are particularly hard to recycle because the components require different processes.

In the US, 85 percent of used clothes and other textiles are sent to the landfill. (Photo: Shutterstock)

For companies, it isn’t profitable to develop large-scale reuse, repair and recycling with the high costs of transportation, labor and processing, along with decreasing quality of new products.

According to standards body Textile Exchange, only about 14 percent of polyester is made from recycled fibers. Companies are working on technology to make it easier—yet thousands of dangerous chemicals are used to make plastic goods and researchers are sounding the alarm about recycling them. 

In addition, most natural fibers are grown conventionally, which often means heavy use of pesticides, synthetic fertilizers and genetically modified or treated seeds. Cotton, the most used natural fiber, occupies 2.4 percent of the world’s farmland but uses 4.7 percent of the world’s pesticides and 10 percent of its insecticides. 

Enter next-gen synthetics. A slew of startups is out to replace both polyester and natural fibers with alternatives they say are better for the planet.

Emerging protein designers 

One emerging method used to create new fibers is with gene editing. It happens in a wink compared to the millions of years it took nature and selective breeding by humans to perfect, say, sheeps’ wool.

After modifying genes that give a desired quality to a natural fiber, scientists insert this DNA into yeast or bacteria cells. Next, fermentation turns the microbes into factories, churning out proteins that will be spun into fibers and given names such as Microsilk and Werewool.

As the companies see it, the process is more efficient than growing fibers naturally; traditional silk, for example, is biodegradable and long-lasting, but cultivation can use large amounts of water and pesticides. One of the most promising polyester and silk replacements is Tandem Repeat’s squid protein-based Squitex, which draws on AI to design a fiber with stretch, strength and thermal responsiveness, and it works with most current manufacturing equipment. The Philadelphia company, which plans to sell both fibers and garments, will release a limited collection this year.

Another is Spiber’s Brewed Protein, which can replace oil-based, silk and other animal fibers. The polymer can yield various end products depending on the twisting of yarns. By changing the protein content and yarn diameter, the company can tweak texture, weight and handfeel.

Spiber Inc’s Brewed Protein filament yarns have a silk-like sheen and texture. (Photo courtesy of Spiber Inc.)

That’s the easy part, experts say. The difficulty, and the stage most of these startups are now, is in scaling manufacturing. The manufacture of next-gen fibers requires giant fermentation vats and skilled workers. When it comes to spinning, according to Bloom Labs, costs can be two to three times higher than with oil-based yarns because the melt-spun machines used by the apparel industry don’t work with these fledgling fibers. 

But as the planet burns and plastic fibers boom, it’s getting harder for brands to ignore the need for sustainable fabrics. 

Nicole Rawling, CEO and co-founder of the think tank Material Innovation Initiative (MII), says they define “next-gen” as more than the gene-edited proteins. Those fibers can be plant-derived, mycelium, cultivated animal cells, microbe-derived, recycled materials and blends. “Next-gen materials must be animal-free, high-performance and have a smaller environmental footprint than their traditional counterparts,” she says. MII focuses on the goals of production, not the technologies used.

“We recommend focusing on the real problem: petrochemicals, not plastics,” says Rawling, noting that some plastics are bio-based and have less of an environmental impact. The claim is controversial, however, in terms of biodegradability and because plant-based plastics require crops such as corn and farmland that could have been used to grow food.

Spiber’s Brewed Protein materials are produced through a fermentation process that utilizes sugars and microbes. (Photo courtesy of Spiber Inc.)

Proteins aside, Circ, a recycling innovator, has developed a hydrothermal process that can separate polyester-cotton blends—the largest blend category globally—and recover both portions to make into like-new fibers for textiles. 

“Not long ago, it was nearly impossible to separate and re-use fibers from cotton/poly blends, thus millions of tons of discarded clothing and textiles were destined for landfill or incineration,” says Rawling.

One challenge is designing biodegradability into goods that won’t easily fall apart in use. A recent study from UC San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography tracked the ability of natural, synthetic and blended fabrics to decompose in the ocean. It found that natural and wood-based cellulose fabrics (Lyocell, Modal and Viscose) degraded within a month, while fabrics made of what was thought to be a biodegradable plastic (PLA) and the oil-based fibers in textile blends showed no decay after more than a year in the ocean.

Kintra Fibers has developed a bio-based polyester (56 percent corn-derived) it says greatly reduces greenhouse gas emissions compared to conventional polyester and can be produced with the same equipment. According to its website, the material decays in controlled composting conditions. 

Fiber growers

Last October, Sally Fox was thousands of miles from home, where the greens and golds of her cotton fields shimmered in the Central Valley sun. She was at a cotton-spinning mill in Japan to sell her fibers, because there are no such mills left in California, she said in an email. “I have one customer in the world.”

Fox has been selectively breeding cotton to produce her exquisitely colored yarns for 38 years, and she says the industry was once profitable enough that she could afford to lease her own gins, the machines that quickly separate cotton fibers from seeds.

That’s no longer the case. “The textile industry collapsed when the big brands went offshore and dumped the spinners and weavers in the US, Europe and Japan. And I lost all the mills I was selling to except this one,” she said.

Fiber farmers, already up against cheap polyester and the economy of fast fashion, now face another threat: the rise of mass-produced alternative synthetics in development.

Naturally colored cotton, bred by Sally Fox, growing at her Viriditas farm in California’s Capay Valley. (Photo courtesy of Sally Fox)

Rebecca Burgess, founder of Fibershed, a nonprofit that supports regenerative farming, points out that there is already a bounty of natural fiber available for textiles.

Two-thirds of the wool in California doesn’t even have a home and 900,000 pounds per year is textile grade, says Burgess. “We’re not even getting all the natural fibers that are part of food rotations.” 

The US is the third-largest global cotton producer. In 2018, more than 14 million of the 18 million bales it produced were exported. More than 200,000 acres of cotton is grown in the San Joaquin Valley—”enough to create at least seven pairs of jeans each year for every person in the state,” says Burgess.

If a strong local fiber economy existed, growers could find markets for all their fiber, she says. Instead, they face “huge deficits” in aggregation, distribution and manufacturing. If you start a spinning mill, for example, you also need a good wool scour line for a washing station and places to send wastewater.

Absent is large-scale felting, wool scouring, color-grown cotton gins, large-scale fine gauge spinning, industrial felt natural dye pigment production and more. 

Burgess sees the main problem with cheap fashion—one she thinks next-gen won’t solve—as massive overconsumption. At one end are people unboxing their huge hauls, “stoking people on TikTok to purchase just like them.” At the other is the Atacama Desert in Chile or Accra in Ghana, “where they receive something like 40 million garments per month,” most of which end up in open-air dumps.

Soil-to-soil fiber economies

Fibershed advocates for bringing home the once-thriving textile supply chain, which now exists as a geographically long series of links among growers and processors of fibers, weavers, knitters, dyers and finishers, product manufacturers and distributors. It envisions local systems where natural fibers are sustainably grown, processed, sewn into garments and ultimately composted. 

In Fibershed’s 168-producer network are regenerative farms and textile projects such as Chico Flax in the Sacramento Valley, which is working on bringing back the region’s flax textile industry. There are growers of dye plants, hemp, cotton and wool.

Wool production is often criticized for wreaking havoc on land, from overgrazing to scouring chemicals. The Center for Biological Diversity has called on brands to phase out or cut wool use in half by 2025. But Fibershed sees wool as a carbon sink. More than 55 wool producers have joined its Climate Beneficial Verification label program that supports farmers who are building healthy soil.

Wool is a renewable, biodegradable resource, but critics say the current scale of wool farming is environmentally unsustainable. (Photo: Shutterstock)

It’s not about small versus large-scale farming, says Burgess; small growers don’t always have enough land to use the rotational grazing that fosters plant biodiversity. “Some of the most regenerative, or grassland regenerating, grazing I’ve seen is on larger operations.”

To create vegetation shifts and poly cultures, ranchers try to mimic a wildland biome through multi-species grazing, “moving animals quickly through these systems, then having them return after land has had time to regenerate.”

Even cotton can be grown and processed within a scalable, restorative system, proponents say. Central Valley growers and researchers are incorporating carbon farming to help soil store carbon and water; abilities lost to decades of conventional practices. Less than one percent of cotton grown in the US is organic.

Cotton growing at Viriditas Farm, where rotational crops like heirloom Sonora wheat bolster root material and straw to build soil organic matter with each crop year. (Photo courtesy of Sally Fox)

Cleaning up cotton is something Sally Fox knows all about. “I was among those who started the whole organic cotton industry.” She grows her colorful “foxfibre” cotton using biodynamic practices, but for certification, she sticks with organic—it’s less challenging, but organic is the original regenerative certification, she says.

“It is absolutely the gold standard for sequestering carbon into soils—the goal of all regenerative farming practices.”

Unbox ‘like new’

Fox views sustainability in clothing as revolving around its longevity. Cotton spun correctly should last 20 to 60 years (except jeans). Linen spun correctly should last 100 to 1,000 years. Wool spun properly should last 80 to 300 years. “I am not kidding,” she emphasizes.

Her next criteria is ethical production, “with the work force between the raw material and final product not being enslaved or coerced or any of the rest of the shenanigans used to beat down the cost brands pay for products.” She prefers garments made in the US, Japan or the EU, because they have workplace standards. Elsewhere, she seeks GOTS and Oeko-Tex certifications. “GOTS actually inspects every facility.”

Last but not least, she mends holes, fixes seams. She even darns socks. It’s not exactly fast fashion, but just landing on a definition of sustainable “can make one’s head spin,” she says. And the first response is to give up, and basically give in to polyester—the wonder fabric that, today, isn’t so wrinkle-free after all.

With legislation that requires end-of-life solutions for products, consumers rethinking their choices and investment in both next-gen synthetics and local natural fiber economies, both visions can be part of a better clothing future. Here’s how you can help:

Buy less, and love what you do buy. Instead of buying loads of cheap clothing, instead think about investing in a few high-quality items that you love and know will last you a long time. Whether made of synthetic fibers or natural fibers such as wool, silk and linen, keep in mind the lifecycle of your clothing: what will happen to it when you’re finished with it?

Buy and sell used clothing. Gently worn or returned purchases are increasingly being offered on sites such as ThredUp, Poshmark, Relay Goods and Patagonia’s Worn Wear. (For example, Relay, which calls itself a zero waste marketplace, sells shoes and sports gear, buying their surplus inventory and returns from retailers and offering the most sought-after shoes at attractive markdowns). 

Learn to mend and repair. Sewing, darning and other forms of mending used to be common, and for good reason: they help you get the most out of your clothing, and they can be fun and creative, too. Inspiration is everywhere, if you know where to look—social media can be a good place to start, and books such as Visible Mending by Arounna Khounnoraj provide step-by-step instructions for how newbies can get started.

Support legislation designed to cut down on textile waste. Legislation introduced in California and New York would eventually require textile producers to provide end-of-life solutions for products. If you want to support those bills or ask for a similar one to be introduced in your state, contact your local legislators and let your voice be heard.

The post Are Next-Gen Synthetic Fibers the Future of Sustainable Textiles? appeared first on Modern Farmer.

These ingredients are endlessly diverse, including spent grains from beer production, ripe fruit that is too small for supermarket standards and cacao pulp from the process of making chocolate bars, but they share a similar origin story. In the past, these ingredients were lost somewhere in our food supply chain; now, pathways are being created to ensure they reach consumers. 

While other cited trends tend to center on a specific single ingredient or nutrient, the “upcycled” trend is unique in that it shifts the focus from personal to planetary health and longevity. “For the first time, the majority of the world is able to witness the real effects of climate change around them and they are looking for ways to help,” says Caroline Cotto, co-founder and chief operating officer at Renewal Mill, a California-based company that produces baking mixes with upcycled ingredients. “As more consumers look for sustainable foods in the marketplace, upcycled foods rise to meet that demand.”

“It’s this growing awareness that the take-make-waste systems that we’ve all participated in for the last 70 years are making people hungry and making the environment unlivable,” says Anna Hammond, founder and chief executive officer at Matriark Foods, a New York-based company that produces pasta sauces and vegetable broth with upcycled ingredients. “Solving for wasted food is one of the easiest things that almost everyone can participate in to mitigate climate change.” 

According to research from ReFED, a national nonprofit dedicated to ending food waste, 38 percent of food in the US was wasted in 2022. That’s 235 million tons of meals that went uneaten, despite the fact that one in eight Americans is food insecure. And it’s not just the food that goes to waste; that year, uneaten food accounted for 6.1 percent of greenhouse gas emissions and 22 percent of all freshwater use in the US.

[RELATED: The Staggering Scale of Food Waste, Explained]

“Food waste happens literally at every part of our global food supply chain,” says Cotto. “It happens when we leave unharvested food on fields due to cosmetic imperfections; it happens when we improperly store food during transport; it happens through byproduct production at food manufacturers; it happens when grocery stores overorder and throw out food they can’t sell or when restaurants make too much and can’t serve it all; and, in fact, the majority of the wastage still happens in our own homes.” 

Avoiding food waste in our kitchens is a crucial first step toward reducing our carbon emissions, water usage and overall impact on the environment.

“There are lots of things we can do to reduce food waste,” says Cotto. “Don’t over purchase. Make a list before you head to the grocery store. Eat leftovers or find ways to repurpose them into delicious new meals. If you’re headed out of town but still have stuff left in your fridge, find ways to gift to your neighbors and freeze everything you can for when you’re back. Compost whatever you cannot eat.” 

In addition to carefully and consciously eating all of the food that we buy, opting to purchase upcycled foods allows us to amplify our individual efforts by supporting climate-friendly producers that have an even greater environmental footprint. This is especially important for institutions, such as schools, hospitals and corporate offices, where the effect is even more powerful. 

In two reports on food waste in the United States published in December 2023, the Environmental Protection Agency highlighted upcycled foods as a key tool for addressing the climate crisis. 

Hammond came to this conclusion on her own several years prior, leading her to found Matriak Foods. There are “three questions that we always ask ourselves in everything we do,” says Hammond. “Does this mitigate food going to landfills and the negative environmental impacts of that? Is this good for small- and mid-scale farmers? Does this create greater access to healthy food for more people?” 

These questions are embodied in each of Matriark’s products, including its classic tomato basil pasta sauce. “We work with a roaster of tomatoes who [because of the way his machines work] was throwing out anywhere from 1.5 to 3 million pounds of tomatoes a year,” says Hammond. “We’ve developed a food-safe, compliant way to capture those perfectly ripe tomatoes and puree them into the base of our sauces.” Each carton of this sauce—which is packaged in Forest Stewardship Council-certified materials—diverts 0.4 pounds of food from a landfill and saves 50 gallons of water. 

Anna Hammond is founder and CEO at Matriark Foods, which upcycles ingredients for tomato sauces and broths. (Photo: Jessie YuChen/Matriark Foods)

Renewal Mill also partners with other food producers—in its case, the makers of plant-based milks, such as soy milk and oat milk. It collects the leftover pulp from this process, then dehydrates and mills it to be transformed into shelf-stable gluten-free flour. It sells this flour on its own and in vegan baking mixes for brownies, cakes and cookies. Since its founding in 2018, Renewal Mill has diverted more than 700,000 pounds of food waste and avoided more than one million pounds of carbon emissions. 

Both Matriark Foods and Renewal Mill belong to the Upcycled Food Association (UFA). “This organization’s first directive was to create a formal definition of upcycled food,” says Cotto, who serves as a board member at UFA. “The definition decided upon was: Upcycled foods use ingredients that otherwise would not have gone to human consumption, are procured and produced using verifiable supply chains and have a positive impact on the environment.” 

This definition serves as the foundation for the Upcycled Certified program, which has since certified nearly 500 products that span the spectrum from sweet to savory. In December 2023, an independent, third-party food verification company, Where Food Comes From, Inc., acquired the Upcycled Certified program, enhancing its perceived credibility and broadening its reach. 

Upcycled baking mixes from Renewal Mill. (Photo courtesy of Renewal Mill)

“You can shop for upcycled food across almost every aisle of the grocery store and for every meal,” says Cotto. “Look for the Upcycled Certified logo on packaging to help identify which products are reducing food waste.” 

Renewal Mill and Matriark Foods products can be bought online in individual packages or wholesale via their websites, where they also provide information on finding products in stores, including certain Whole Foods locations. To find more upcycled products and ingredients, shoppers can check out the UFA website’s list, which includes food and beverages, home and personal care products, and pet food options. 

Cotto points out that you can upcycle at home, too. “If you make your own beer or plant-based milks at home, don’t throw away the pulp. It can be repurposed into bread. Use fruit and vegetable pulp left over from juicing in muffins. Use the rinds of cheese to make rich and flavorful soup bases. The possibilities are endless!”

The post This is the Year to Eat More Upcycled Foods appeared first on Modern Farmer.

No person or plant can emerge unscathed, says Dr. Guillermo Murray-Tortarolo, a researcher at Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico. His work focuses on understanding the link between climate change and its impact on food production and human societies. As hotter and wetter conditions become more prevalent, so do the fungi, microbes and insects that thrive in those conditions. They can all increase a plant’s likelihood of disease. As well, changes in temperature make it harder for plants to photosynthesize, so crop yields are dropping. 

But while “climate change is affecting absolutely everything,” says Murray-Tortarolo, “some sectors are more impacted than others.” 

Dry and semi-arid ecosystems are seeing record biodiversity losses and challenges in the agricultural sector. 

“The large increments in precipitation variability and seasonality have reduced the certainty of planting times and expected yields, with some extreme examples occurring the last couple of years, like with the red jalapeño for sriracha and Canadian mustard,” he says. That’s right, folks; climate change is not just taking down staple crops, it’s coming for your most beloved condiments. 

Mustard yields are way down

The global mustard market is worth about $6.87 billion, and it is projected to increase by a compound annual growth rate of 5.8 percent through 2029. While mustard seed is native to Europe, World War II disrupted production there, and since then, Canada has become one of the world’s largest producers of yellow, oriental and brown mustard seeds. 

Last year, farmers in Canada planted close to 555,000 acres of mustard seed, producing 161,781 tons, primarily in Saskatchewan. But amid challenging weather conditions, yields have plummeted in recent years. In 2021, mustard yields hovered at 431 pounds an acre, down close to 57 percent from the usual 1,000 pounds per acre. 

That meant soaring prices and—quelle horreur—a distinct absence of mustard from supermarkets in France. “We lost almost everything during the harvest [of] 2021, but every year for the past 15 years has had extreme challenges,” says Élaine Bélanger, vice president of operations and co-owner of Maison Orphée, a Quebec City-based manufacturer of mustard, olive oils and other specialty products. “And because we are manufacturing organic mustard, we are a niche within a niche market. The costs were going way up in every direction, and even as we were able to source some mustard seeds from abroad, we didn’t want to change our recipe too much.”

A mustard field in Saint-Augustin-de-Desmaures, Quebec, Canada. (Photo: Anne Richard/Shutterstock)

The mustard Maison Orphée creates is a blend of yellow, brown and oriental seeds, and while Bélanger prioritizes sourcing from its network of growers in Canada, in bad years, it’s had to eat the costs of sourcing from Eastern Europe and beyond. 

“It’s very difficult for us as manufacturers, and for the growers we work with, to know what to invest in,” says Bélanger. “Because it’s not just an increase in temperature. It’s a change in several ways. If growers invest in a variety that is more adaptable to temperature, what about drought?”

With El Niño conditions this year, Murray-Tortarolo says we should all prepare for challenges. 

“This year, an El Niño is predicted, which may bring additional winter rainfall but also extreme conditions,” he says. “While it is too soon to know what to expect in the next planting season, extreme events are expected to be numerous.”

Hot sauce shortages 

Hot sauce shortages have also become increasingly the norm. 

The maker of the beloved sriracha, Huy Fong Foods, had to issue repeated statements to customers apologizing for the shortage of sauce, blaming poor harvests of chili peppers in California, New Mexico and Mexico for the ongoing dearth on supermarket shelves. (At certain points in the past few years, resellers have been offering the usual $5 bottles for up to $150 to desperate hot-heads.)

As it turns out, where we’re growing these peppers is part of the problem—and climate change is amplifying the issues. 

“Peppers first emerged in the rainforest,” says Dr. Danise Coon, a senior research specialist at New Mexico State University’s Agriculture Experiment Station. “And over 6,000 years ago, we domesticated them and eventually moved them to arid climates.”

Huy Fong Food sriracha hot sauce for sale in a Los Angeles supermarket. (Photo: calimedia/Shutterstock)

While we bred and adapted peppers for dry heat, it is now both hotter and drier in the regions in which they are cultivated.

“There are so many more extremes in recent years,” says Coon. “Last year was the hottest on record with 105 degrees or higher for 60 days during the growing season. In New Mexico, there’s a lot of debate going on about drip irrigation, which just adds to the challenges.”

The New Mexico red and green chili production was valued at around $46.2 million in 2022, but farmers also grow cayenne peppers and jalapeños there.

As the weather gets hotter and drier, and widespread irrigation appears less viable, researchers like Coon are working hard at coming up with solutions. “We are working on several projects aimed at combating climate change. We’re trying to breed chilis to produce higher yields under greater stress and drier conditions.”

Her colleague, Dennis Lozada, who specializes in plant genomics and molecular biology at New Mexico State University, says that examining the DNA sequence of individual chilis has been invaluable.

“We are looking at how we can even change things like root morphology to create higher adaptability,” says Lozada. 

They are working with an “endless” number of varieties, because there are thousands of wild species, which they can then cross-breed and hybridize. For Coon, it’s not just about saving hot sauce.

“In New Mexico, growing and eating chilis is a cultural thing,” says Coon. “It’s part of our heritage.”

Ketchup’s challenges 

Ketchup’s market size is gargantuan. Arguably, so are the challenges it is facing. The ketchup market was valued at around $31.9 billion in 2022, with an expected compound annual growth rate of 4.58 percent through 2028. 

Three years of searing temperatures in Australia, Spain and California—three of the world’s top tomato-producing areas—has led to a drop in tomato paste stocks, which not only goes into ketchup bases but is also key for pizza and marinara sauce. 

“Our market demands, compounded by climate change, have completely outpaced the ability of staple crops to evolve and adapt to a warmer climate,” says Dr. Amy Concilio, an associate professor of environmental science at St. Edward’s University in Austin, TX. 

California produces about 30 percent of the world’s tomatoes and 95 percent of the tomatoes used in canned goods in the US. Harvests were down 10 percent in 2022, according to the United States Department of Agriculture, and that trend is set to continue if things don’t change. 

This is where scientists come in. Artificial intelligence apps will be part of the solution, from helping improve weather models to reducing water consumption, says Concilio. 

And mega-companies such as Kraft Heinz (the world’s top manufacturer of ketchup) are pouring money into research and drastically reducing their environmental footprint as well. In 2022, its efforts allowed it to reduce water use by 8.7 percent overall and by 16.07 percent in high-risk watershed areas, according to its 2023 ESG Report. The company also sourced 75 percent of its tomatoes sustainably. 

The ketchup market is valued at around $31.9 billion. (Photo: Shutterstock)

But perhaps even more importantly, the company is investing in its own breeding program, dubbed HeinzSeed.

“At our core, Kraft Heinz is an agricultural company,” says Patrick Sheridan, vice president of global agriculture and sustainability at Kraft Heinz. The company is the largest purchaser of processing tomatoes in the world and it is serious about maintaining its edge amid a changing climate, says Sheridan.

“We’re aiming to purchase 100 percent sustainably sourced Heinz ketchup tomatoes by 2025,” he says. “One of the most significant challenges we face is water availability.”

Several years of below-average precipitation, coupled with decreased water availability in the regions in which the tomatoes are produced, with further declines anticipated, says Sheridan, has led the company to invest in improving irrigation technology and protocols and next-generation HeinzSeeds that are more heat, drought and disease tolerant.

For the foreseeable future, those who want to buy their condiments ready-made may have to face inflationary prices and shortages.

***

Hungry for a more eco-friendly and dependable alternative that is also kind to your wallet? You’ll never run out of sauces and spices if you grow the ingredients to flavor your foods yourself:

Grow mustard greens

Mustard greens are cooler-climate plants, and they tend to thrive in temperatures between 45 and 75 degrees Fahrenheit. You can grow them in raised beds outside or containers inside. Make sure they have access to six hours of direct sunlight. 

Take a plastic planting box with holes in the bottom and fill with prepared planting mix. Scatter mustard seeds over the soil, moisten lightly but don’t soak. Loose soil works best. Cover with cling wrap, and after two to three days, you’ll see seedlings. Remove the wrap, moisten the soil. After five or so days of growing, they’re ready to be harvested, or you can let them grow for up to three weeks. Use an organic vegetable fertilizer to feed these plants, following the directions on the label. Reseed the soil when you’re ready for another crop. 

Mustard greens are delicious on their own or sauteed in olive oil with salt and pepper. But if you’re eager to try your hand at making mustard itself, try this easy recipe from HGTV.

Grow serrano peppers

Serrano peppers need six to eight hours of sunlight every day, so make sure you place them near a south-facing window. (Alternatively, use artificial lights designed for gardening.) Also keep in mind that serranos are used to warm temperatures: 70 to 80 degrees Fahrenheit ideally. 

Take a plastic planting box with holes in the bottom and fill with prepared planting mix. Sow seeds about ¼ inch deep, and space them one to two feet apart. Loose soil is ideal. You want to keep soil moist but not wet. Use an organic vegetable fertilizer to feed these plants, following the directions on the label. Pepper plants self-pollinate, but you can shake them occasionally to help spur them on. 

Serrano chilis will spice up your life in a number of ways, but if you want to turn the chilis into hot sauce, try this basic recipe from the Food Network. 

Grow tomatoes 

Tomato plants need sun, and you may need some artificial gardening lights as an assist, especially in the winter. Seedlings need 18 to22 hours of light when growing indoors. Once they have color, they need less and can move to a window with plenty of light. Smaller tomatoes grow better inside. Keep in mind that tomatoes also love temperatures of 70 to 80 degrees Fahrenheit. 

Give your seedlings a boost by giving your seed-starting trays a little heat (the top of your fridge is a great spot). Once the seedlings are six inches tall, transfer them to a larger plastic planting container with potting mix. Keep the plants moist but not wet. Use an organic vegetable fertilizer to feed these plants, following the directions on the label. Tomato plants self-pollinate, but you can shake them occasionally to help spur them on. 

Tomatoes are great on salads, in sandwiches—even solo with salt and olive oil. But we’ve got your back if you want to use yours to make ketchup: This Food Network recipe is a good place to start.

The post Climate Change Is Coming for Your Favorite Condiments appeared first on Modern Farmer.

In 2023, Phoenix endured record-breaking heat that had residents coping with an entire month of daytime temperatures that never dropped below 110 degrees Fahrenheit, with the typical monsoon rains nowhere in sight. While other regions may not be quite so blistering, hotter temperatures and less rain in certain areas are likely to become more common as climate change, driven by the burning of fossil fuels, warms the planet. In Phoenix, where a harsh climate has always been more or less the norm, gardeners and farmers have been adapting for centuries, and they have wisdom to share. Their top tips? It all comes down to shade and soil. 

The native soil of Phoenix is often very clay-heavy, high in poor drainage and low in organic material. When it is exposed to the sun, it dries quickly and cracks, cooking anything below. This type of earth is fine for native food plants such as prickly pear cactus. But to grow more food, the soil needs to be both protected from the sun and built up with organic material for nutrients.

Phoenix’s clay soil is ideal for native plants such as the prickly pear cactus. (Photo: Shutterstock)

Rose Courtney is an urban gardener who has transformed her backyard into a food forest where she grows year-round. She even had a bumper crop during last year’s seemingly unending heat wave. In July, she was still growing vegetables such as carrots, kale and cucumbers, tending to her garden early in the morning, when the temperatures were in the 90s instead of the triple-digits.

“Invest time and energy in permanent [shade] structures,” she advises. “Without that, you’re not going to have a lot of success.”

Shade comes at two levels for desert gardeners—shade for the plants with shade cloth or trees and shade for the soil in the form of groundcover. At the Arizona Worm Farm, permanent shade structures, trees and wood chip mulch are all part of the soil-health strategy, too. In fact, owner Zach Brooks says that the mulch is potentially even more important than the shade—combined with high microbial activity, it keeps the soil moist and allows for a system of deep watering, less frequently. 

Permanent shade structures help protect crops from the hot Arizona sun. (Photo: Callie Radke Stevens)

“What happens three or four feet underground to 18 feet underground is more important than what happens above ground,” says Brooks. “So, keeping your soil covered that’s how we get away with watering as infrequently as we do and having good results for the time periods that we do.”

In the summer, the Arizona Worm Farm’s combination of shade (from both 50 percent shade cloth and trees), mulch and active soil keep the farm’s air temperature about 30 degrees cooler than the ambient temperature of the city. So, when it’s 110 degrees Fahrenheit at Sky Harbor Airport, where the city’s temperature readings are taken, it’s a balmy 80-85 degrees seven miles away at the farm. 

Brooks and his team grow food on the farm roughly from October to April, excepting the trees in the food forest, where at least one of the 118 trees is producing food year-round. This fall and winter growing season is common in the Valley of the Sun, where even cold snaps are short and relatively temperate. By planting in the fall and harvesting in the spring, growers can maximize cooler temps and wetter weather—and gardening days that are a little less sweltering. 

Zach Brooks of the Arizona Worm Farm shows off the work of composting worms. (Photo: Callie Radke Stevens)

Michael Chamberland is an assistant agent for the University of Arizona Cooperative Extension, a service of the University of Arizona. The extension provides resources for gardening all over the state. “What we’ve done here is taken advantage of the fact that our winter is cool and sunny and so we can grow things through the cool season,” says Chamberland. 

Chamberland also pointed out that it isn’t as simple as just swapping seasons. Seedlings are growing in temperatures that go from hot to cold instead of cold to hot, and the days are much shorter than a summer growing season. While you can grow almost anything in the desert with enough shade and water, it makes more sense to look for things that are better adapted to short days and low water use. 

Sierra Penn is the Indigenous Garden Educator for NATIVE HEALTH and runs a traditional garden on an urban lot in partnership with Keep Phoenix Beautiful. There, she plants in rows as well as using methods such as the Pueblo Zuni waffle beds and Akimel O’odham flood irrigation with water from Phoenix canals. 

Both techniques make it easier to water deeply and less frequently (another theme among the growers). In fact, many of those modern canals are built following the ancient canal systems dug by the Hohokam or Huhugam people thousands of years ago. Growing food in the Sonoran Desert is nothing new.

NATIVE HEALTH’s traditional garden incorporates Indigenous irrigation practices. (Photo courtesy of NATIVE HEALTH)

The garden is a teaching garden, and Penn runs workshops on everything from growing luffas to using grow bags to get started. Over the years, the garden has produced food such as brown tepary beans, Diné blue corn, Tohono O’odham melons and other traditional plants that grow well in the low-desert heat.

“I think it really helps them to kind of find that connection to ground themselves,” Penn says of the people who attend her workshops. “I think gardening is very grounding and just connecting us to our roots.”

Like most food growers, Phoenix farmers and gardeners have an extensive web of knowledge sharing within the region, too. Penn says that she didn’t have much experience when she started and has learned from Keep Phoenix Beautiful’s master gardener, who also knows about the traditional gardening methods, the garden employees and Native Seed/SEARCH, a southern Arizona nonprofit and heirloom seed source.

This knowledge web is particularly important in the urban, arid city because many gardening resources center on a longer growing cycle that has more lively soil and more water. 

“People get confused because they go on to these blogs and somebody in Minnesota is doing something spectacular, and it doesn’t work in Phoenix,” says Brooks. “If you follow Phoenix-based bloggers, then you get good advice.”

The traditional garden offers workshops and grows traditional plants such as Diné blue corn and Tohono O’odham melons. (Photo courtesy of NATIVE HEALTH)

The other gardeners agree. Penn has been diving deep into the gardening practices of Indigenous Arizona tribes, and Courtney looks for plants that grow well in similar climates. As the climate becomes less predictable, knowing how to successfully grow food in harsh environments will be vital. Just as these food growers have done, sharing knowledge will be equally as important. 

“I think my biggest tip would be to look at it as an experiment of trying something new, and if it fails, don’t be afraid to try again because you could create something bigger and better,” says Penn. 

Each of these desert gardeners shared failures, from pests to putting the wrong plant in the wrong soil. But they have also kept going, turning a suburban backyard, a cotton field and a misused urban lot into thriving food plots. As we rethink food systems, trying something new and creating something bigger and better might be just what we need.

The post Swapping Seasons, Casting Shade: How Farmers Are Growing Food in the Fearsome Phoenix Heat appeared first on Modern Farmer.

This breakneck pace is great news for the nation’s mission to transition to more clean energy generation, especially as precipitous cost curves make it increasingly affordable to decarbonize. But the reliance on utility-scale solar, which requires hundreds to even thousands of acres of land for panel installations, has sparked questions regarding the magnitude of land use requirements. In addition to concerns about impacts on food production and sensitive ecosystems, some critics argue that converting thousands of acres of agricultural land to utility-scale solar arrays would compromise the character of rural regions. 

Community solar, in contrast, operates at a small enough scale that it can occupy land within rural communities, such as commercial rooftops and brownfield sites, that might otherwise go unused—thus preserving the bucolic nature of agricultural regions. Plus, it enables households and business owners within rural areas, farmers and non-farmers alike, to benefit from renewable energy.

Community solar: the Goldilocks of renewables

Historically, would-be solar energy supporters have faced a binary between utility-scale solar, where large projects of typically five or more megawatts (MW) deliver electricity directly to a utility’s electric grid, and rooftop photovoltaics, where individual households or businesses generate up to one MW of solar energy through leased or purchased panels.

Between these two extremes sits community solar, a rapidly expanding midpoint promoted by recent legislation across many US states. Usually generating up to five MW of energy, community solar projects are small facilities, occupying up to 25 to 35 (and often more like five to 10) acres. Each megawatt powers the equivalent of 164 homes.

A solar project located at Gedney Landfill in White Plains, NY. (Photo credit: DSD Renewables)

Anyone living in the utility territory who pays an electric bill—from rural farms to urban apartments to businesses of all sizes, houses of worship and nonprofits—can subscribe to the community solar farm and receive a discount off their electricity bill, typically between five and 20 percent depending on the state.

 Instead of one solar array built on the rooftop of a single-family home, community solar provides an option for entire communities to share in the benefits of locally generated clean energy together. And unlike utility-scale solar, where ratepayers finance large solar projects via new line items on their utility bills but do not necessarily see the savings, community solar subscribers directly benefit from solar savings—similar to how a home-owned array benefits an individual household. In addition, a community solar subscription provides flexibility: no sign-up fees, no cancellation penalties and the ability for a subscription to follow the user’s utility account to a new home if they move. 

Perhaps the best thing about community solar is its effectiveness as a tangible option for people to participate in and take advantage of our country’s transition to renewable energy. More than a third of American households rent their homes, and for those who are homeowners, many lack the right sunny conditions on their property or simply can’t afford the long-term investment in solar panels. Community solar bridges the gap between utility scale and rooftop solar projects, keeping more money in people’s hands.

Solar panels atop the Shapham Place parking lot in White Plains, NY. (Photo credit: DSD Renewables)

The clean energy cover crop

Importantly for farmers and other rural residents, community solar helps rural areas meet their energy goals without an outsized impact on local landscapes. Community solar fits neatly into the nooks and crannies of a community and doesn’t require the large acreage of a utility-scale array installation. 

You can think of community solar as a multi-benefit “cover crop” for land that might otherwise go unused. Just as a farmer might grow alfalfa as a cover crop on a fallow field, communities can install solar on a school’s rooftop, a parking lot, a brownfield site too expensive to remediate or on agrivoltaic-compatible land such as cranberry bogs or sheep pastures. And just as alfalfa fixes nitrogen, builds soil, fights erosion and feeds livestock, community solar lowers energy costs, can make the local electric grid more reliable and brings money and jobs through labor and income, such as farmland leases, to the area.

With community solar, farmers save on their energy bills, property owners earn monthly rent for hosting panels, school children experience field trips to learn about solar generation and the municipality progresses towards its clean energy goals. Community solar is the third alternative that helps agricultural communities make efficient use of their land without sacrificing the farms or natural features that make the area special.

Photo credit: DSD Renewables

Sunlight isn’t red or blue, it’s ultraviolet

Growth in community solar ties into clean energy’s larger shift from politically divisive, abstract discussions about climate change to more nonpartisan, financial pragmatism. Recent meteorological events, such as the Canadian wildfire smoke, the Midwestern polar vortex and San Diego’s flooding, have spurred more conversations around the need to prepare for extreme weather, no matter what causes it. Given the energy transition’s potential to boost climate resilience, people are also discussing the role of renewables, such as solar and wind, within our nation’s generation stacks. This shift from political to financial perspectives makes clean energy a frequently purple endeavor, supported by the fact that both red and blue states are looking for ways to open or expand community solar as an option.

How does community solar fit farmers’ needs? Because of their large energy consumption at a more expensive residential rate, energy costs for farmers are often disproportionately higher in their operating expenses compared to other business types. Consequently, representatives from rural and agricultural areas are often community solar’s biggest supporters. Farmers looking to boost their resilience to extreme weather events by building a financial cushion can look to utility savings or solar leases as a significant benefit.

People interested in community solar can do a quick search online to see what kind of subscriptions are available in their area. As of December 2022, community solar projects are located in 43 states, plus Washington, D.C. To lease some of their land, people could contact community solar developers about opportunities to host solar projects. Other ways to take action include writing to elected officials to express support for the introduction or expansion of community solar programs, depending on the state’s current legislation, and spreading the word about community solar’s potential to neighbors and peers.

Whatever kind of community you find yourself in, community solar is or may soon be a neighbor—and a good neighbor, too.

Bruce Stewart is ⁠President and CEO of Perch Energy, a Boston-based company focused on accelerating access to community solar nationwide. Bruce has 30+ years of experience leading both energy and technology companies, serving as president of Direct Energy Home, co-president of Centrica US Holdings, and executive positions at GE Current and Constellation Energy. He is committed to Perch’s mission of making cleaner energy options more accessible for all.

The post Opinion: With Community Solar, It’s Not Renewable Energy vs. Rural Character appeared first on Modern Farmer.

Among those benefits, growing food in backyards, community gardens or urban farms can shrink the distance fruits and vegetables have to travel between producers and consumers – what’s known as the “food mile” problem. With transportation’s greenhouse gas emissions eliminated, it’s a small leap to assume that urban agriculture is a simple climate solution.

But is urban agriculture really as climate-friendly as many people think?

Our team of researchers partnered with individual gardeners, community garden volunteers and urban farm managers at 73 sites across five countries in North America and Europe to test this assumption.

We found that urban agriculture, while it has many community benefits, isn’t always better for the climate than conventional agriculture over the life cycle, even with transportation factored in. In fact, on average, the urban agriculture sites we studied were six times more carbon intensive per serving of fruit or vegetables than conventional farming.

However, we also found several practices that stood out for how effectively they can make fruits and vegetables grown in cities more climate-friendly.

Community gardens like Baltimore’s Plantation Park Heights Urban Farm provide a wide range of benefits to the community, including providing fresh produce in areas with few places to buy fresh fruits and vegetables and having a positive impact on young people’s lives. (Photo:  Keres/USDA/FPAC)

What makes urban ag more carbon-intensive?

Most research on urban agriculture has focused on a single type of urban farming, often high-tech projects, such as aquaponic tanks, rooftop greenhouses or vertical farms. Electricity consumption often means the food grown in these high-tech environments has a big carbon footprint.

We looked instead at the life cycle emissions of more common low-tech urban agriculture – the kind found in urban backyards, vacant lots and urban farms.

Our study, published Jan. 22, 2024, modeled carbon emissions from farming activities like watering and fertilizing crops and from building and maintaining the farms. Surprisingly, from a life cycle emissions perspective, the most common source at these sites turned out to be infrastructure. From raised beds to sheds and concrete pathways, this gardening infrastructure means more carbon emissions per serving of produce than the average wide-open fields on conventional farms.

Capturing rainwater from gutters to feed gardens can cut the need for fresh water supplies. Water pumping, treatment and transportation in pipes all require energy use. (Photo: Minnesota Pollution Control Agency)

However, among the 73 sites in cities including New York, London and Paris, 17 had lower emissions than conventional farms. By exploring what set these sites apart, we identified some best practices for shrinking the carbon footprint of urban food production.

1) Make use of recycled materials, including food waste and water

Using old building materials for constructing farm infrastructure, such as raised beds, can cut out the climate impacts of new lumber, cement and glass, among other materials. We found that upcycling building materials could cut a site’s emissions 50% or more.

On average, our sites used compost to replace 95% of synthetic nutrients. Using food waste as compost can avoid both the methane emissions from food scraps buried in landfills and the need for synthetic fertilizers made from fossil fuels. We found that careful compost management could cut greenhouse gas emissions by nearly 40%.

Capturing rainwater or using greywater from shower drains or sinks can reduce the need for pumping water, water treatment and water distribution. Yet we found that few sites used those techniques for most of their water.

2) Grow crops that are carbon-intensive when grown by conventional methods

Tomatoes are a great example of crops that can cut emissions when grown with low-tech urban agriculture. Commercially, they are often grown in large-scale greenhouses that can be particularly energy-intensive. Asparagus and other produce that must be transported by airplane because they spoil quickly are another example with a large carbon footprint.

By growing these crops instead of buying them in stores, low-tech urban growers can reduce their net carbon impact.

3) Keep urban gardens going long term

Cities are constantly changing, and community gardens can be vulnerable to development pressures. But if urban agriculture sites can remain in place for many years, they can avoid the need for new infrastructure and keep providing other benefits to their communities.

Taqwa Community Farm in the Bronx, New York, has provided space to grow fresh vegetables for the community for over three decades. The farm composts food waste to create its own natural fertilizer, reducing its costs and climate impact. (Photo: Preston Keres/USDA/FPAC)

Urban agriculture sites provide ecosystem services and social benefits, such as fresh produce, community building and education. Urban farms also create homes for bees and urban wildlife, while offering some protection from the urban heat island effect. The practice of growing food in cities is expected to continue expanding in the coming years, and many cities are looking to it as a key tool for climate adaptation and environmental justice. We believe that with careful site design and improved land use policy, urban farmers and gardeners can boost their benefit both to people nearby and the planet as a whole.

Jason Hawes is a Ph.D. Candidate in Resource Policy and Behavior at the University of Michigan; Benjamin Goldstein is Assistant Professor of Sustainable Systems at the University of Michigan, and Joshua Newell is Professor of Environment and Sustainability at the University of Michigan.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The post Urban Agriculture isn’t as Climate-Friendly as It Seems. These Best Practices Can Help. appeared first on Modern Farmer.

“We lost 10 percent of our saleable Christmas trees that year,” says Leanna Anderson, owner of Aldor Acres Family Farm in Langley, British Columbia and treasurer of the BC Christmas Tree Association. “The needles burnt from the heat, and we had to trim them back.” 

Photo courtesy of Aldor Acres Farm.

Across North America, heat waves and average increases in temperatures are affecting Christmas tree growers. Without a significant reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, average temperatures in Oregon, the largest producer of Christmas trees in the United States, will increase 8.2 degrees Fahrenheit by 2080. Warmer and drier conditions could alter the composition of Oregon’s forests and reduce productivity of evergreen species such as the Douglas fir, a popular Christmas tree choice.

But increasingly longer and hotter summers are already having a detrimental effect on Christmas trees. Evolved to go into dormancy as temperatures drop in the autumn, conifers develop a resin coating that keeps the needles intact and protects them from frost damage. But with longer summers, the trees are harvested while temperatures in November often remain above freezing. Thus, they aren’t getting that cold signal to develop their resin coat, which causes post-harvest needle loss—that pile of shedding needles under the decorated tree.

Dr. Gary Chastagner, a professor of plant pathology at Washington State University, has been studying Christmas trees for more than 40 years. His research has taken him to Turkey and the Republic of Georgia, where evergreen trees such as the Nordmann fir thrive in the area’s milder climate. Trials, which Chastagner has conducted, have shown that Eurasian trees can last up to three months in water as a cut tree and still retain its needles. 

He predicts that, in the future, trees that  thrive in these warmer regions will become popular consumer choices. “By identifying trees that don’t need cold acclimation for good needle retention, it will help mitigate problems of post-harvest needle retention, especially if we have warm falls,” he says.

Photography courtesy of Aldor Acres Farm.

Heat, though, is not the only issue affecting the beloved Christmas tree. 

Climate experts predict that, as the atmosphere continues to warm, its ability to hold moisture will increase. This will cause periods of heavier rain and waterlogged soil. For Christmas tree growers, this means phytophthora root rot, a species of spore-like fungal organisms that can lay dormant in soil or plant debris for years. During wet periods, the swimming spores germinate and become attracted to tree roots. Over time, they deprive the host of nutrients and water. Spread by rain, runoff water or even on footwear or farm equipment, once phytophthora is active in the soil, it’s almost impossible to eradicate.

At North Carolina State University, Justin Whitehall, an extension specialist in Christmas tree genetics, notes that there’s been a slow but steady increase in phytophthora in North Carolina. “Eleven percent of fields were infected in 2014. In the last few years, that number is closer to 16 and 17 percent,” he says. This is concerning for a state ranked as the second largest producer of Christmas trees in the US. 

 “Growers and consumers want high-quality trees, but in some places, North American trees cannot be grown because of phytophthora,” says Chastagner. “Eurasian firs, particularly the Nordmann, Trojan and Turkey firs, have shown some resistance to the disease.” Cones from mother trees have been brought back to Washington State, where seeds have been extracted and orchards planted to gauge the trees’ adaptability to the Pacific Northwest. 

The Momi fir from Japan has also proven to be resistant to phytophthora. “By working on a biochemical level trying to explore how the species resists the disease, we may be able, through genome editing or modification, get some of those traits into North American Christmas trees,” says Whitehall.  

Photography courtesy of Real Christmas Tree Board.

While researchers look at ways to adapt to an altering climate, growers are already making changes. 

 “When you have a crop that takes between eight  and 10 years to grow from seed to harvest, a lot can happen in that window,” says Marsha Gray, executive director of the Real Christmas Tree Board (RCTB), a non-profit organization supporting Christmas tree growers throughout North America. “When we are talking about weather issues, especially when it comes to getting seedlings established, growers are having a harder time,” she says. But they’re adapting. 

In the United States, there are 15,000 farms growing Christmas trees and more than 100,000 people are employed annually by growers and sellers. In an industry valued at more than  $2.5 billion, approximately 25 million to 30 million natural Christmas trees are sold annually. With so much at stake, growers have no choice but to adhere to changing conditions. 

In North Carolina, planting on slopes encourages better water drainage and helps combat phytophthora. In other places, such as Oregon, growers are looking at adding irrigation. Although common in other regions, the soil in the state has traditionally held enough moisture to keep trees from drying out. At Aldor Acres in British Columbia, Anderson touts irrigation as having been the farm’s saving grace during hotter summers. “It’s a fine line, though, between keeping the tree moist when it’s hot but not too wet that it encourages disease.”

The RCTB has invested more than  $250,000 in research to try and ensure the future is merry and bright for the trees. “That might seem like a lot,” says Gray, “but, for our industry, that’s more than has ever been invested. Over half of our research is in response to the changing weather.” 

The post Climate Change is Coming for Christmas Trees. Can They Be Saved? appeared first on Modern Farmer.

This first version was released in the early 1900s and refined multiple times. In 2012, the map received a massive overhaul backed by a novel climate modeling tool. And last week, the USDA unveiled its newest update, which underscores a warming trend perceived by many growers. 

“The 2023 map is about 2.5 degrees warmer than the 2012 map across the contiguous United States,” said Dr. Christopher Daly, a senior professor at the university and the founding director of Oregon State University’s Climate Group, which developed the map with the USDA. “This translated into about half of the country shifting to a warmer five-degree half zone, and half remaining in the same half zone. The central plains and Midwest generally warmed the most, with the southwestern US warming very little.”

A complex model

Daly helps the USDA generate the widely used plant hardiness map using a system known as the Parameter-elevation Regressions on Independent Slopes Model (PRISM). This knowledge-based system interpolates climate elements in complex landscapes using data such as temperature, precipitation and other climatic factors, generating a continuous grid of weather estimates on a monthly, yearly or event-based basis. 

“I’ve been interested in topography, mountains, valleys, rivers, coastlines and how they affect the environment around me,” says Daly. “I took what I knew and learned to do that and developed the first version of PRISM.” Before this model, he found no reliable digital tools that mapped the climate in these complex landscapes. Continuing his research at Oregon State, Daly began to look at rain shadows along the Cascade and Sierra Nevada mountain ranges. His research led to the birth of PRISM. 

“That was back in the early nineties,” says Daly. “It’s been improved and updated for the last 30 years and we’re still using it today.”

PRISM remains unique as it combines topographical data with expert knowledge of complex climate extremes and averages. The model is widely used and remains the highest-quality spatial climate data available. As the burning of fossil fuels such as gas and coal warms the planet, developing precise and accurate climate maps and data has become more important to growers and the economy.

One of the major changes in this year’s edition of the hardiness map is the zone boundaries. The USDA states that the new zones are generally about one-quarter-zone warmer than reported in 2012 throughout much of the United States. This is directly related to a more recent averaging period and warming. However, it is also attributed to additional data sources and improved interpolation. PRISM pulled data from 13,412 weather stations, almost 5,000 more than the 2012 data set. One thing that surprised Daly when the map was finalized and compared to the previous version was that it did not change as much as recent climatic warming would suggest. But, he said, “I think in the end we will see warming zones creep northward.”   

A community resource

Across the country, cooperative extensions exist for advice on anything plant-related. These local hubs empower farmers, ranchers and gardeners to meet challenges in growing plants. With a science-based approach, extensions are a great resource for local growers. This includes the volunteer-run master gardener program. Rachel McClure, coordinator of the Master Gardener Program at the University of Nevada, Reno, is just one example of the resources available to communities. 

“The USDA plant hardiness zone map gives us an idea of our average high and low temperatures,” says  McClure. She comes from a horticultural family and manages about 100 volunteer master gardeners across northern Nevada. “We have contact with thousands of community members every year and recommend this as a source to many people.”

The map is revised every 10 to 12 years by the USDA and reflects data from thousands of weather stations. Being a virtual map, it enables users to examine hardiness zones at a finer scale than before. “This is such a useful tool to home gardeners and everyone alike that it is interactive, and if you go to the web page, you can put in your state and get specific information,” says McClure. The interactivity includes a ZIP code zone finder, allowing users to zero in on their precise location.

“All our home gardeners and users of this map must know that it’s not absolute, it is a general guideline,” says McClure.  She adds that Mother Nature is tricky and has a sense of humor, often to the dismay of eager spring gardeners. She echoes Daly in stressing that there are microclimate differences among elevation changes, bodies of water and urban areas. Even across large properties, growers should learn to find cool pockets. As a general tool, though, the map is a wonderful source of knowledge for gardeners and the economy.

“We want to give gardeners, horticulturalists and others the best information that we can; there’s a lot of economics riding on these maps.”

“Horticulturalists use the zones also when they’re developing new plants; plant breeders use them a lot to determine which zones they would like to access in terms of markets and they look to our map to see what the cold tolerance would have to be for a plant to be able to survive in that zone,” says Daly. “We want to give gardeners, horticulturalists and others the best information that we can; there’s a lot of economics riding on these maps.” For growers, nurseries, plant breeders and even the USDA Risk Management Agency, the map provides a solid baseline of data and information.

PRISM’s data gets reviewed by a group of horticultural, botanical and climatological experts who then offer feedback and insight to Daly and his research team. From there, he builds the interactive digital map that represents a balance between year-to-year weather fluctuations and the differences between weather and climate, as far as plants are concerned. The same period of data, 1991 to 2020, is the same window that climatologists use to describe normalities in the climate, increasing the robustness of modeling.

“Climate is what you have in your wardrobe, and weather is what you wear today,” explains Daly. This distinction is important when studying the climate and weather. Climate looks at long-term trends to make predictions. PRISM succeeds at this very thing when running weather models. “Because the climate and the plant hardiness statistic is kind of like a weather statistic, it’s that coldest weather that occurred each year where the climate would be a long-term average over many days and years.”

For perennials, these averages are what matters. The finer scale provided by the new map will help growers better understand the data. “Generally speaking, the USDA hardiness zone map gives us a parameter to set,” says McClure. “And if we plan our gardening around those things, more often than not, it will help us be successful.”  

The post USDA’s Updated Plant Hardiness Map Shows Where Growing Zones Are Warming  appeared first on Modern Farmer.

“I stood a chance of losing my livestock,” Johnson wrote in a 1999 affidavit to receive part of a $2.3 billion federal settlement between Black farmers and the USDA.

Johnson, 81, who lives near Lexington, Mississippi, was among thousands deemed to not qualify for settlement money, his family said. 

Against all odds, their family farm has persisted, part of the just 1 percent of remaining Black-owned farms in the United States. In an age of mechanized and industrialized agriculture, they face many challenges in operating a sustainable cattle farm—and there’s federal assistance to help with that. 

But last month, Johnson’s children learned their application for federal conservation funding was turned down. They had sought up to $30,000 to dig a well and add cross fencing that would have allowed them to do rotational cattle grazing, which protects the soil from erosion.

“It was like ‘here again, another generation’,” said Charlene Gatson, 50, Johnson’s daughter. ”It was like history repeating itself.”

The Biden administration has called such USDA conservation programs a “linchpin” in the nation’s climate strategy, yet they remain vastly underfunded. 

Just three out of 10 landowner applications for the two main programs, the Environmental Quality and Incentives Program (EQIP) and the Conservation Stewardship Program (CSP), were approved between 2018 and 2022. The majority of landowners are told to try again without advice on how to improve their odds. 

Albert Johnson Jr. walks among the cattle on his family farm near Lexington, Mississippi, on Nov. 9, 2023. (Credit: Imani Khayyam for the Ag & Water Desk)

“These are farmers and landowners who want to do conservation on their farm. They want to do something we all seem to support—which is conserving natural resources,” said Jonathan Coppess, an associate professor and director of the Gardner Agriculture Policy Program at the University of Illinois. 

Farmers want to improve the environment. Hundreds of thousands of them are applying. “And then you don’t get funding for no other reason than that funding is not sufficient in the program. The level of frustration and anger is pretty real,” said Coppess. 

Although the Inflation Reduction Act provided $18 billion more for these in-demand conservation programs, some members of Congress want to claw back that money to pay for the 2023 Farm Bill. 

High demand, not enough money 

The flagship program of the USDA’s Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) is the program the Johnsons applied for—EQIP—which reimburses agricultural and forestry producers 50 percent to 90 percent of the cost for fixing specific conservation problems and delivering environmental benefits, such as improving water or air quality, enriching soil or protecting against drought.  

Between fiscal 2018 and fiscal 2022, the NRCS allocated $6.2 billion for EQIP, but that only covered 31 percent of the nearly 600,000 applications submitted during that five-year period, according to Investigate Midwest’s analysis of application and funding data the USDA provided The Gazette as part of a Freedom of Information Act request. 

The Conservation Stewardship Program, created in the 2008 Farm Bill, provides annual payments to producers willing to improve conservation over a five-year period. The NRCS awarded $2.1 billion from fiscal 2018 through fiscal 2022, which covered just 28 percent of applications nationwide. 

“EQIP and CSP are working lands programs so they are doing conservation on land that is continuing to produce crops,” Coppess said. 

Programs face criticism, but remain the main federally supported solution 

Modern agriculture takes a toll on soil and water. Programs like EQIP and CSP are intended to mitigate the damage. A 2020 NRCS report showed EQIP conservation from 2014-2018 increased soil and carbon retained in farm fields as well as provided wildlife habitat. 

“Practices funded through EQIP to address forest health and watershed protection on non-industrial private forest land also sequester carbon,” the report found.

The most popular requests for EQIP and CSP funds vary by state. In Iowa and Wisconsin, where corn and soybeans grow, cover crops were by far the most-funded EQIP practice from 2017 through 2020, according to an analysis from the Environmental Working Group. But in Mississippi, with a more diverse farming mix including poultry, livestock and cotton, the EQIP practices that got the most funding were for fencing, grade stabilization structures and irrigation. 

Some environmental groups have criticized EQIP for earmarking 50 percent of all funding for livestock practices, Coppess said. Although the U.S. has the world’s largest fed-cattle industry and livestock make up half or more of some states’ ag exports, what if your state isn’t big into pork or beef? Does that mean you get less money? There also are fears it will encourage more large-scale animal production, which can produce large amounts of waste that threatens water sources. 

The NRCS allocates money to each state for EQIP and CSP contracts. States then distribute the cash to counties or manage the funds at the state level. 

To decide how to spend the limited pot of money for conservation programming, local NRCS officials rank applications on a handful of factors, including how much the practice or activity costs, the magnitude of environmental benefits that could be achieved and how well the practice or activity proposed fits with “national priority resource concerns,” the NRCS reported. 

“The ranking process was developed to try to be fair to everyone,” said Scott Cagle, assistant state conservationist for partnerships with the Iowa NRCS. But there are winners and losers and some producers drop out if they don’t get funded right away, Cagle said. 

“We run into instances where producers signed up, the process takes too long sometimes and they give up,” he said. 

Outreach to Black landowners, others who are underserved

The Johnson family is raising cattle on about 15 of the 200 acres they own near Lexington, Mississippi. During long spells without rain, the grass dries up and the Johnsons have to buy hay. Then the pond dries up and they have to use a hose from the house to water the cows, Gatson said. 

Albert Johnson Sr. sits on a feed pail in the pasture of his family farm near Lexington, Mississippi, on Nov. 9, 2023. In October, he learned his children were denied funding through the federal Environmental Quality and Incentives Program because there isn’t enough money. (Credit: Imani Khayyam for the Ag & Water Desk)

If they got EQIP money, they would install cross fencing that would allow them to move cattle around, so plants can regrow between grazings and better protect the soil from erosion. A new well to provide reliable water would cost as much as $20,000. 

“We need funding just for the cows to survive,” Gatson said. 

The Mississippi NRCS suggested in a Oct. 6 denial letter that the Johnsons “defer” their EQIP application, which puts it back in the pile for the next funding cycle. But Gatson wants to know why their project didn’t rank higher so she can improve the application for next time. 

“Could you tell us why some were funded and some were not?” she asked. 

NRCS offices across the country have been trying to staff up to provide faster distribution of funds and more help for applicants. A workload analysis for Mississippi NRCS says they need another 55 to 60 employees to meet the need there. 

Mississippi conservation officials have been expanding outreach to small producers, including those who haven’t traditionally gotten funding.

“If you look at Mississippi, it has the highest percentage of Black landowners in the nation and that’s around 10 percent,” said James Cummins, executive director of Wildlife Mississippi, a nonprofit that works toward habitat restoration and conservation policy in the state. “We want to see a percentage (of new conservation money) going to help historically underserved producers to help them maintain their family’s land and improve their natural resources.” 

Mississippi, a state where agriculture is the No. 1 industry, submitted a whopping 10 percent of all EQIP and CSP applications from fiscal 2018 through fiscal 2022. But despite having the highest number of applications in both programs, only 14 percent of its CSP applications were approved, making it the state with the lowest approval rate relative to its application volume. In the case of EQIP, the state had an approval rate of just 21 percent.

Charlene Gatson, seen Nov. 9, 2023, on her family’s farm near Lexington, Mississippi, was frustrated when her family’s application to the federal Environmental Quality and Incentives Program was denied because the program doesn’t have enough money. (Credit: Imani Khayyam for the Ag & Water Desk)

Noemy Serrano is assistant policy director at Michael Fields Agricultural Institute who also works for Wisconsin Women in Conservation, which helps women farmers figure out conservation programs like NRCS. She said recently a farmer who’d received EQIP funding before was confused about whether she could apply again. 

“That speaks to the details,” Serrano said. “Even folks that have already applied and been funded through the program sometimes don’t fully understand how it works and how to move forward with it.” 

According to USDA data, Wisconsin funded 37 percent of EQIP applications and 35 percent of CSP applications received in fiscal year 2022. 

In a perfect world, the NRCS would work with each farmer to make their application more likely to be funded, advocates said.  

But because the NRCS staff are so busy, “instead of going out and adding different projects to these applications…they’re not adding that on, because it means more work,” said Sara George, who grows specialty crops near Pepin, Wisconsin. 

Cash infusion in jeopardy

Conservation advocates hope a federal cash infusion will reduce the backlog of unfunded projects. 

The Inflation Reduction Act, signed by President Joe Biden in August 2022, provides $8.45 billion more for EQIP and $3.25 billion more for CSP starting this year and building through fiscal 2026. This could potentially fund hundreds of thousands more applications. There’s another $300 million to quantify greenhouse gas sequestration. 

Herman Johnson carries feed to cattle on his family farm near Lexington, Mississippi, on Nov. 9, 2023. (Credit: Imani Khayyam for the Ag & Water Desk)

“We know nationwide that IRA funds will increase” in 2024, said Jamie Alderks, assistant state conservationist for financial assistance programs with the Illinois NRCS. “IRA funds will assist in meeting some of the unmet demand.”

But Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives want to repurpose that IRA conservation money to help pay for the Farm Bill, which expired in October without being renewed. House Agriculture Chairman Glenn Thompson suggested cutting $50 billion, mostly to climate change and public nutrition programs, to pay for other agriculture programs, such as crop insurance, The Hill reported. 

In an Oct. 23 letter published by Politico, 24 Democrats on the House Agriculture Committee pushed back against the idea: “Moving the IRA funds from conservation would be denying farmers the support they need and want.”

Brittney J. Miller of the Gazette contributed to this story, which is a product of the Mississippi River Basin Ag & Water Desk, an independent reporting network based at the University of Missouri in partnership with Report for America, with major funding from the Walton Family Foundation.

The post Conservation Programs Offer Solutions to Climate Threats, But Are Vastly Underfunded  appeared first on Modern Farmer.