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.

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.

A recent visit to the northern city of Montreal in February, when temperatures hovered around 10 degrees Fahrenheit, found restaurants and bars that still managed to serve locally grown and produced food and beverages. It drove home the point that, if they can make it work here—we can do it anywhere. 

Photography by Anne-Marie Pellerin – Tourisme Montréal

A long history 

Decades before cities began actively encouraging the growing and consumption of local food, Montreal was on it. In 1936, Montreal launched the first community garden initiative, alongside the Relief Gardens, and later, the Victory Gardens that sprang up as a result of the world wars. Community gardens continued to grow in popularity over the century, with new branches and chapters flourishing in the 1970s. That’s when the concept of “guerilla gardening” became popular in the city, as groups of Portuguese and Italian immigrants began gardening in unused spaces around the city. In 1973, the Victoria Community Garden was founded by the Jewish General Hospital and the Golden Age Foundation, which aimed to create a gardening space for residents over age 55. It’s now the second-largest garden on the island. 

Today, growing and consuming food feels like a cultural imperative.

“We have always valued culture and the arts, and to us, food and wine is part of that,” says Julie Martel, a longtime advocate for local produce and a project manager at the annual food-centric festival Montreal en Lumiere. “As we have all become increasingly aware of the impact of consuming food that is grown far away, Montreal’s institutions and its regular people have become more invested in supporting the local food movement.”

Today, there are 57 urban farming companies in Montreal, including the first urban rooftop greenhouse and the world’s largest urban farming project, Lufa Farms, at 300,000 square feet. 

A view inside one of Lufa Farms greenhouses. Photography submitted.

A culture of support

A proliferation of locally grown food won’t make an impact without a hungry and supportive culture. In Montreal specifically, and Quebec more broadly, that culture is specifically and purposefully fostered.

In 2020, Quebec Agriculture Minister André Lamontagne and Energy and Natural Resources Minister Jonatan Julien earmarked $100 million to double the size of the province’s greenhouse operations by 2025. Already, the province is 50 percent self-sufficient, providing its citizens with locally grown produce year round, with the goal of reaching 80-percent sufficiency. 

In Montreal, the government-funded convention center—the Palais des congrés de Montreal—is carbon neutral and has invested in several innovative food and ecological initiatives. The Urban Agriculture Lab, which has Canada’s first urban rooftop vineyard, extensive rooftop gardens and pollinating beehives, is housed there. 

But perhaps more importantly, the citizens, event planners and chefs of Montreal actively support these institutions.

“Did you know that spinach grown in the winter is sweeter?” asks Martel. “It’s because it is struggling, and that process releases a chemical that makes it taste sweeter. You discover that, and so much more, as a food lover in Montreal as we all get more creative growing and eating local food year-round.”

Martel treats her robust CSA—which grows its own produce and brings in dairy, poultry and meat from nearby farms in Quebec—like many of us do our grocery store, shopping online and ordering for the week. But she also uses her position of power to ensure that Montreal en Lumiere, a festival that draws in 500,000 visitors and includes events with 52 restaurants in the city, is hyper-local focused. 

“We bring in Michelin-starred chefs and iconic winemakers from across the world to create meals and pairings for the event,” says Martel. “But they are all using locally produced ingredients. When the festival began 25 years ago, it was all about Italian truffles and lemons. Now it’s about Montreal-raised fish, locally grown produce.”

Indeed, there are several now-iconic Montreal food and drinks companies that are regionally beloved but largely unknown outside of the city, simply because most of their goods are consumed by local gourmands.

Lufa Farms, the world’s first commercial rooftop greenhouse, was founded in 2009, employs more than 600 people and grows 50+ types of produce (including 10 varieties of tomatoes and three varieties of eggplant) across 300,000 square feet on four rooftops. That bounty totals 25,000 pounds a week and goes to 20,000 customers who are able to order customized food baskets. Lufa offers more than 400 pick-up points around the city, and the farm also delivers straight to customers’ doors. 

Several restaurants in Montreal proudly showcase their connection to Lufa Farms and another new local-famous innovator: Opercule. 

Founded in 2017, Opercule farms arctic char sustainably, consuming, it says, 100 to 200 times less water than classic open-circuit fish farms. (It is also powered by hydropower, which is ample in Quebec and much cleaner than alternatives such as coal). The fish are raised without antibiotics or hormones and delivered to the dozens of grocery stores and restaurants with which it works, just hours after being harvested via electric vehicles. Opercule produces around 25 tons of fish per year and harvests fish only once an order is placed.

Other, less obvious locally produced food and drinks businesses are also thriving. Take Distillerie de Montreal. 

Founded by fifth-generation distiller Lilian Wolfelsberger and lawyer and entrepreneur Stéphane Dion, the Distillerie produces about 300,000 bottles across more than two dozen different products, many of them using all local ingredients, says production manager Alexandre Arpin. “We buy mash from our local brewery that sources grain locally, and in a few years, we’ll be using our own grains, which we plan to source from our friends nearby.”

The vast majority of the production is purchased locally, although it does have a cult following in certain pockets of Europe. 

Distillerie also creates several spirits and liqueurs from locally farmed or foraged fruit, including La Pomme Blanche Marie-Jo (made with locally grown apples) and Sureau Elderberry (made with locally harvested elderflowers and berries). 

“We’ve ended up with some of our more interesting products because of things our forager Guy has brought us,” says Arpin. “I have at least 74 plants and mushrooms in some stage of distillation from things he’s brought us.”

Chef Maxime Lizotte. Photography submitted.

Looking ahead

Montreal rides its fame for bagels, poutine and smoked meat hard. But it is also increasingly seeking to honor the traditions and cuisines from the 120 ethnicities that live and thrive there, especially that of its First Nations people. 

In addition to supporting museum collections and festivals highlighting First Peoples’ culture, a First Nations Garden has been opened in the city’s Botanical Garden, and the city’s large-scale festivals are working to bring in and highlight the work of First Nations producer chefs. 

“We have so much to learn from the history and culture of the Indigenous people,” says Martel. “We decided to spotlight Indigenous cuisine at the festival this year, because we recognize how much Indigenous people have to offer in terms of knowledge of the edible plants and spices we still have to discover all around us.”

Maxime Lizotte, an Indigenous chef who worked at some of the country’s top kitchens, agrees. 

“During the pandemic, I decided it was time to focus on my Indigenous roots,” he explains. “I want to not only honor the traditions and lands of my ancestors of the Wolastoqiyik Wahsipekuk First Nation but also merge them with the cuisines that influenced me and made me fall in love with cooking and food.”

Much of the food that his ancestors cooked and ate was for survival, he explains. 

“The conditions were harsh,” he says. “A lot of our produce and meat was smoked or dried or both. It was an excellent way to preserve the food and sustain life, but maybe it’s not the way we want to eat today.” 

So, instead of serving up dried berries and simply smoked seal meat, he combines the best of both worlds. 

“I use Indigenous ingredients like seal and wild plants but also pork raised on my ancestral land,” he says. “To me, that’s more logical than serving deer flown in from New Zealand.”

Montreal’s spirit of using what you have on hand but prepared with inspiration from a wide swath of histories and cultures feels extraordinarily 22nd century. 

Hungry to find your own local, progressive, home-grown flavor? Check out the USDA’s CSA finder and LocalHarvest. Then write your local political representative and tell them to take a few pages out of our northern neighbor’s playbook and start funding local farming institutions.

The post If Montreal Can Feed Itself Year-Round, More Cities Can appeared first on Modern Farmer.

In 2014, a weekend gardening workshop taught by Will Allen of Growing Power changed everything. Her goal for the class was to learn how to improve her soil and figure out how to compost. “Why was my soil so bad that I couldn’t grow tomatoes correctly?” she wanted to know. 

Planting a tray of microgreens—nutrient-dense seedlings that are typically ready in three to seven weeks—and taking them home was also part of the curriculum. When her arugula tray successfully germinated, a seed was literally planted. She loved the quick results and cute miniature results. “I can do this,” she thought. So, she continued to grow them, eventually drafting a business plan, out of which Sweet Peas Urban Gardens was born. “I’m a microgreen farmer because of arugula,” she says. “The workshop turned out to be life-changing.”

She assumed chefs would be interested in microgreens’ nutrient density. She was (and still remains) surprised that they were more interested in the microgreens’ beautiful hues. “Do you have black microgreens?” they would ask. “What about blue?” 

Tami Purdue at the farmers market. Photography submitted.

Happy to have a local grower in Raleigh instead of flying microgreens in from California, many chefs she approached ended their contracts that day and hired her to grow them. Purdue adapted and experimented with germinating intriguing colorful varieties to chefs’ needs. Currently, Purdue grows around 55 varieties, including amaranth, red acre cabbage, red veined sorrel, pea shoots and cilantro flowers.

She began volunteering at the Well Fed Community Garden, where she learned more about gardening, local food systems and people making changes in the Raleigh food community. She also realized how much she didn’t know about agriculture terms. For example, she needed to learn the definition of specialty crops. “I thought it meant interesting stuff like ginger and turmeric and that microgreens were in it,” she says. What she found opened her eyes to how the system incentivizes commodity crops, which are more often grown to feed livestock, rather than to feed people. “The only [crops] that aren’t specialty are the commodity crops, which are sugar and wheat and corn and soy,” she says. “They are the ones that get the funding. It’s a screwed-up mess.”

A year after starting her microgreens business, she purchased a crop box, a modified and automated shipping container, and set it up in her backyard. One person running the shipping container five days a week for three to four hours a day produces three tons of microgreens annually, she says. 

When the pandemic hit, restaurant orders stopped and farmers markets shut down, but the changes brought a silver lining for Purdue. A business in Raleigh had previously been offering local and seasonal produce boxes, but it had pivoted to cater to customers’ desire for all types of produce year-round, sometimes importing it from other states and countries. The produce boxes were no longer representative of the local region, and Purdue saw an opportunity in the market: to provide a produce subscription box filled only with produce from local growers and offering microgreens, too. She started with 15-20 regular subscribers, and she now has more than 75. “Folks love the produce, and the added little microgreen pack in their boxes is the icing on the cake,” she says. 

She works seven days a week and laughs that she still works 80 hours a week, despite leaving her demanding former job. “[Farming] is what runs my life. It’s when I get up to when I go to bed,” she says. In addition to growing microgreens and coordinating subscription boxes, she also hosts workshops at Sweet Peas Urban Gardens on subjects such as how to grow microgreens or mushrooms, and she hosts local school visits and other events. Despite the workload, she’s all in on her second career. “It keeps me wanting to get up in the morning and do my part. I love it.” 

Part of Purdue’s passion is credited to her belief in the power of local and community-based food systems. “We can solve all of the things that are just so blatantly wrong,” she says. “Carbon footprint, food insecurity, clean food, so people aren’t sick— it’s just so in our face … It’s not rocket science to see the answer to it. [We need] more diversity in the food system and less mega food distributors.”

Purdue teaching kids how to grow shiitake mushrooms at Camden Street Community Gardens. Photography submitted.

Purdue is now in her sixties, but she’s not slowing down. She has big plans on the horizon for the next two or three years, including having the farm pay for itself and helping more farmers get paid through the produce subscription boxes. She recently received a grant from the USDA Office of Urban Agriculture and Innovation, which will help her hire a zoning expert to work with her municipality to change the rules so you can operate in your municipality. 

She says that if she can get involved in urban farming, anyone can. “I did it. I’m an old lady with no agriculture experience. You can do it, too.” 

The post Meet the Farmer Who Pivoted in Her Fifties From a Law Firm to a Microgreens Farm appeared first on Modern Farmer.

Graphic Journalist Nhatt Nichols takes us to West Virginia, where comparable changes to the SNAP program were made back in 2018, to explore the outlook for people facing food insecurity and the communities they call home.

This article first appeared on The Daily Yonder and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

The post How Will New Work Requirements for SNAP Benefits Affect Food Insecurity, Employment? appeared first on Modern Farmer.

Locals take precautions, staying off the boulders where bears can doze out of sight, carrying deterrents like bear spray or marine flares and reporting sightings on the town’s Facebook page. Every Halloween, emergency services band together to patrol the perimeter of town for bears so kids can safely go trick-or-treating.

But there’s a much more pressing threat to community health than a 1,000-pound polar bear ambling through the streets of Churchill, one that doesn’t get the attention it deserves: food insecurity. Churchill, home to 900 residents year round, is accessible only by train and air, meaning that the cost of fresh produce is often double that which people would pay in the capital city of Winnipeg, located over 600 miles south.

A mother and her yearling cubs testing the ice forming along the Hudson Bay. (Photo: Trina Moyles/Modern Farmer)

“In the dead of winter last year, the [grocery store] didn’t get their shipment in. So, there was nothing on the shelves,” says Jayden Chapman, sustainability coordinator at the Churchill Northern Studies Centre (CNSC), a non-profit organization that facilitates research and education initiatives in the North.

It was a reminder of the food security crisis in 2017 when a devastating flood event washed out the train tracks and cut off the flow of food and essential goods into the community. All essential goods had to be flown in,’ and, as a result, food prices skyrocketed and quality plummeted. 

“We’d get a shipment in and it would already be black and moldy. They’d still put it on the shelf because it was our only option,” says Chapman.

In the face of crisis, staff at the CNSC decided to innovate, and through a collaboration with Growcer Modular Food Solutions, they piloted one of the first vertical, hydroponic farm projects—housed in a 40-foot shipping container built to withstand the harsh winter conditions that can dip below -40 Fahrenheit—in northern Canada. The pilot project was a success and, as a result, the Rocket Greens initiative was born.

Today, Chapman and her colleagues produce between 250 and 400 units of fresh greens, which they deliver via a weekly subscription program to residents, restaurants and businesses. 

CNSC sustainability coordinator Jayden Chapman shows off a harvest of leafy greens. (Photo: Trina Moyles/Modern Farmer)

Katherine Branson, a sustainability technician at CNSC, manages the weekly production, planting seeds and transplanting seedlings after two weeks. Most plants take five to six weeks to grow to maturity, she says. Branson plants a variety of leafy greens and herbs—40 varieties in total—often opting for leafy kale, which tends to thrive. The plants are irrigated by a 1,200-liter tank, which circulates water continuously and is topped up every three weeks.

“I try to grow to full capacity every week, no matter how many people are buying because we like to donate the surplus,” explains Branson. “This is really important to us. We can’t really address food security and sovereignty if we’re just selling to the people who can afford it. We donate it so people who don’t have the means can access it.”

Another critical issue facing the town of Churchill is organic waste management, says Chapman, particularly related to scents attracting polar bears and increasing the risk of human-bear conflict. During the summer and fall months, as bears wait for the bay to freeze, they often follow their noses into town or to the garbage dump. Increasingly warming temperatures, due to climate change, is resulting in delayed freeze-up and bears spending more days on land.

A polar bear outside the CNSC is caught on trail camera, part of Dr. Doug Clark’s research on the frequency of bear visitation to human facilities. (Photo courtesy of Dr. Douglas Clark, University of Saskatchewan)

Dr. Doug Clark, a researcher at the University of Saskatchewan, uses trail cameras to study the relationship between the increasing number of days that bears spend on land and the frequency of visitation to human facilities, including the CNSC. In warmer years, like 2023, Clark is seeing a correlation between delayed sea ice and increased visitation of bears to human structures, including waste bins.

“This [research] tells us that we should focus our efforts on better managing waste and other attractants to prevent human-bear interactions,” says Clark. “And when they do occur to prevent escalation.”

This winter, Chapman and her colleagues are excited to launch a new initiative at the CNSC and pilot an in-vessel, outdoor composter to transform kitchen waste into compost. 

During the summer and fall months, when dozens of researchers and guests come to stay at the CNSC, the facility produces upwards of five gallons of organic waste a day. In the current system, the waste is stored behind the building, and although bears can’t get into it, the scent still attracts them, as documented by Clark’s research.

“This will help to reduce the smell of garbage around the Centre and the tension and risk of bumping into a polar bear,” says Chapman.

Waste management is a critical issue facing sub-arctic and arctic communities in Canada today, particularly related to attracting polar bears. (Photo: Trina Moyles/Modern Farmer)

The BIOvator, a stainless steel incinerator, breaks down organic and carbon materials, including a combination of kitchen waste and cardboard, or wood shavings, and converts the waste into nutrient-rich soil.

“We’re basically creating a product out of garbage,” says Chapman.

As part of the pilot project, the center will collect kitchen waste from the facility, staff’s kitchen waste from their own households and local restaurants in town. But Chapman hopes to expand their reach further into the community, which would, in turn, divert food waste from the landfill. The soil will be distributed to a community garden project in Churchill.

Chapman’s team’s efforts are part of a wider trend to implement improved waste management strategies in Churchill to reduce the number of bears wandering into town. For example, the town of Churchill is currently considering switching from an interior dump, which houses waste for several years before being shipped south to a landfill, to a thermal incinerator, which is a more environmentally safe method.

A yearling cub on the outskirts of town. (Photo: Trina Moyles/Modern Farmer)

With the looming threats of climate change, northern communities around the Hudson Bay will continue to face challenges with melting sea ice and the increased presence of polar bears in the community. But Churchill is leading the way as a model community in the Arctic for food security initiatives.

Other remote northern towns are following in Churchill’s footsteps. In 2018, Kuujjuaq, Nunavik, an Inuit community in northern Quebec, invested in a hydroponic farm in a shipping container. The following year, a vertical farm was established by a local grocery store in Yellowknife, Northwest Territories to supply people with fresh produce. The Gitmaxmak’ay Nisga’a Society, a non-profit First Nations organization based in Prince Rupert, British Columbia, invested in a similar model in 2020, and today feeds 1,600 members on a weekly basis.

“Over the years, we’ve spent a lot of time updating and troubleshooting the hydroponic farm,” says Branson. “But we’ve been producing healthy greens in Churchill for six years now.”

Jayden Chapman and Katherine Branson transfer fresh produce from the shipping container to the CNSC to organize into weekly subscription boxes. (Photo: Trina Moyles/Modern Farmer)

Since they started, the Rocket Greens initiative has sold more than 40,000 units of produce and the price of leafy greens (around $7 with government subsidies) has dropped to $4.

“It’s pretty amazing,” says Branson, as she places heads of lettuce into the weekly boxes.

Before she leaves the research station, she does as locals do in Churchill: looks both ways for bears. With none in sight, Branson steps out into the frigid sub-arctic temperatures to deliver fresh greens right onto people’s front doorsteps.

The post What It Takes to Feed the Community in the Polar Bear Capital of the World appeared first on Modern Farmer.

It can all get out of control very quickly without some organization and focus. Hence, the binder. 

Rice growing in one of the Lundberg Family Farms test greenhouses. Photography by author.

Rice is a critical global crop, responsible for about 20 percent of the calories people consume. Crucial to food security, we’ll have to both protect and invest in rice within our food system as the population grows.

Rice is also a crop that is highly susceptible to extreme weather, especially changes in water availability. Too little water, like farmers often deal with in California, is not good. It can take around 2,500 liters of water, through both rain and irrigation, to grow one kilogram of rice. So, breeding more efficient rice requiring less water is a big win for drought-prone areas. 

Conversely, too much water is also a bad thing when it comes to growing rice. While rice can grow well in a paddy, especially compared to other cereal grains, there is a limit to how much water the plant can bear and for how long. 

Lundberg grows more than 13,000 acres of certified organic rice, along with another 5,000 acres of conventional rice, and that all gets turned into dried goods such as rice cakes, chips, risotto and, of course, rice blends. When the company’s leadership wants a more vigorous Basmati variety or decides the short grain brown rice didn’t yield as much expected, they go to Bergmann and JJ Jiang, the nursery manager and plant breeder, with a goal. 

After testing the germplasm of new rice varieties in their greenhouse, Bergmann and Jiang plant a small batch in one of their test fields, taking notes throughout the season to build up their binder of statistics. Each field test is also a multi-year process, as they let the rice adapt to the growing conditions. Bergmann says they particularly focus on qualities such as weed competitiveness and drought tolerance. “We do look a lot at rice varieties that are going to have good root structures that give them resilience to dry up periods, so they can withstand those periods of time where we’re not putting water out to the field,” in an effort to make the rice resilient to a wide range of environmental conditions. 

“Breeding rice is a formidable task,” says Jiang. He calls the work “experimental design,” in that it’s not haphazard, but you do need to test out a lot of options before finding the one that works for you. “And there’s no standardized quality criteria (for rice.) It’s all up to us.” That means growers have to factor in multiple competing traits while also accounting for flavor, taste and consumer trends—not to mention changing environmental factors. 

Cross-breeding rice at Lundberg Family Farms. Photography by author.

Under water

Pamela Ronald, a professor of plant pathology at the University of California, Davis, has spent years working to develop rice with a high submergence tolerance. “Most rice varieties form well if they’re in standing water, but they’ll die if they’re completely submerged in water for three days,” says Ronald. This is a big concern for rice-growing regions in which flash flooding and tsunamis are occurring more regularly, such as Bangladesh, Vietnam and India. Ronald says it’s estimated that four million tons of rice—enough to feed 30 million people—is lost to flooding each year. This is a problem that is going to get worse in the future, as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicts that flooding will increase in both frequency and intensity going forward. 

In 1995, Ronald’s lab isolated a gene for submergence resistance that is now used by rice growers throughout India and Bangladesh, among other areas, with success. Her work has continued to help the crop in disease prevention, and in 2022, she was awarded the Wolf Prize in Agriculture for her contributions to humanity. “More than six million farmers are growing the [submergence-tolerant] rice, and they have a 60-percent yield advantage in some places in the world, such as eastern India,” says Ronald. “It’s benefitting the poorest farmers in the world.” 

When rice doesn’t get the right growing conditions, it’s also more susceptible to disease, such as phytopathogenic bacteria, which can significantly reduce yields. At the University of Missouri, Bing Yang, professor of plant science and technology, has used CRISPR to edit samples of the bacteria to determine which genes had the qualities that would infect rice crops, to help breed rice that is more disease resistant. “Bacteria usually have some weaponry or some factors which they employ to infect a host plant,” says Yang. Figuring out which genes those are, and then working backwards, can help determine which genomes in the host plant may need strengthening. “Farmers and breeders always want high-yield rice and, at the same time, try to breed a high-temperature tolerance or a high-salt tolerance. People are always turning to science to identify the beneficial genes which could give them an advantage.” 

An Arkansas rice field. Photography by Shutterstock.

Field work

Although California produces about half a million acres of rice a year, it’s only the second-highest rice producer in the country. The top honor goes to Arkansas, at nearly triple that output. In fact, Arkansas rice producers grow almost half of all rice in the country.

And while they don’t have the same complicated system of dealing with water as producers in California, they do have to contend with water and what’s naturally available all the same. Mark Isbell of Isbell Farms in central Arkansas is a fourth-generation rice farmer who’s watched the boom-and-bust cycle of rice growing get more erratic in recent years. “Two years ago, we had a massive flood that was fairly devastating to a good portion of the crop. And then last year was a pretty deep drought, which we were able to irrigate,” recalls Isbell. Isbell, and his father before him, have tinkered a bit with breeding in their rice crops, but most of their interventions have been more tactile. They have worked to adapt their 3,500 acres to make them more water efficient as the resource has become more scarce. 

First, they carefully precision-leveled their fields, to get them completely flat. An average rice field, says Isbell, will likely have a serpentine-style levee that holds water at different depths, which is needed for fields with slopes in different directions. With a flat field, “we more than have the amount of water that’s needed for [our rice] because you can so much more precisely flood the field without overusing water,” says Isbell. In that way, their rice may not be changing in the same way, but they are becoming more efficient, producing more bushels per acre on less water than 20 years ago. Isbell has, at one point, done the math down to the grain. “A high-water-use rice from another country is somewhere in the range of 14 cups of water to 400 grains of rice,”saysIsbell. “If you look at the mid-south, with average irrigation techniques, that’s maybe eight or nine [cups of water]. For the type of conservation practices we’ve implemented, we brought it down to about four or five cups of water [per 400 grains of rice].”

The view from a combine at Lundberg Family Farms. Photography by author.

The rice of the future

The benefits of healthy and efficient rice fields go beyond feeding the world. There are environmental benefits, with rice fields “acting as basically a sediment basin where the water is significantly clearer coming out of the fields than it was going in,” says Isbell. Producers will also often flood rice fields in the winter, which act as surrogate wetlands for migratory waterfowl. Lundberg farms estimates it has saved 30,000 ducklings in the last several decades of conservation efforts. 

All of this work and effort is making a difference. Farms and varieties are getting more efficient, producing more rice with fewer inputs and less water. Breeders are finding combinations of rice that are more drought tolerant or capable of withstanding torrential downpours. And scientists are finding ways to strengthen all of this from within the DNA itself. 

On the surface, all of this is good news for rice. But, there is a downside. Without a certain amount of variance within crops, they are more at risk of disease (take the Cavendish banana, for instance). Bergmann says it’s necessary to maintain a balance of crop diversity and predictive performance. “A farmer wants predictable performance; you want everything to mature at the same time. But from an ecosystem standpoint, variation is what gives a population strength,” he says. So, within their breeding schedule, they must account for time to let a variety “settle down,” taking years to go through successive generations of a bred variety to arrive at the right combination of variance and predictability. 

Ultimately, though, no rice variety will stay exactly the same forever, no matter how many resources growers pour into it. “Rice will change,” says Jiang. “No variety will last for life.” That means those farmers, growers, breeders and researchers will have to keep innovating to stay one step ahead of future challenges.

The post What Will Become of Rice? appeared first on Modern Farmer.

In 2001, executive director Kanekoa Shultz, a marine biologist and seaweed expert, helped rebuild the adjacent Paepae o Heʻeia fishpond. Originally constructed by Native Hawaiians hundreds of years before colonization, the effort resurrected a 1.3-mile rock-walled lagoon used for aquaculture. Yet, when heavy rains repeatedly choked the basin with sediment, Shultz realized that the pond was but one piece of a larger ecosystem in dire need of rehabilitation.

Six years later, Shultz went on to establish Kakoʻo ʻOʻiwi (the name roughly translates to “Helping Native Hawaiians”) on an untended, 405-acre parcel located directly across from the fishpond. Since then, he’s led the incremental effort to restore the fallowed land into loʻi kalo, the traditional Hawaiian irrigation system used to grow kalo, the Indigenous name for taro.

Enlisting a staff of 16 and an army of volunteers, the organization cultivates the crop in knee-deep water diverted from Heʻeia stream. In addition to supplying the community with fresh corms and spinach-like leaves high in calcium and fiber, an on-site kitchen churns out value-added products such as poi, or taro pounded into a starchy staple, and kulolo, a traditional pudding sweetened with coconut milk and raw sugar.

Kakoʻo Oʻiwi’s efforts, however, extend far beyond promoting Native farming traditions and nourishing the community. Its farming practices also help re-establish a vital ecological role: The irrigated ponds absorb floodwater and filter sediment flowing to the sea while the crops create wildlife habitat and curb invasive plant growth. As stewards of both island culture and terrain, “we’re restoring pono—restoring balance to the land,” says Shultz.

Shultz (right) leads volunteers in shredding taro. (Photo: Naoki Nitta)

Funded largely by private and community donors, it’s a tall order for the scrappy non-profit, which operates under a 38-year lease granted by the state in 2009. The focus on conservation, however, is imperative, he adds, for undoing decades of neglect and mitigating the challenges of a rapidly changing climate.

Heavy, angry water

As a primary food source, kalo holds a reverent place in Native Hawaiian culture, playing a prominent role in its origin story. Before the prevalence of large-scale, Western agriculture, “every valley that had a stream had a kalo plantation,” says Derek Kekaulike Mar, as he helps peel piles of raw taro tagged for a batch of kulolo. A childhood friend of Shultz’s, the frequent volunteer works for a subsidiary of the Hawaiian Native Corporation, a Native-run, nonprofit community impact organization and a Kakoʻo Oʻiwi donor.

Hawaiians traditionally divided land into ahupuaʻa, or self-sustaining units of agricultural production that stretch between the mountains and the ocean. Along with taro patches, the triangular swaths encompassed a range of terrain, from upland timber forests to rain-fed crop fields and orchards in the lowlands. And in many places, they extended to a fishpond—ancient Hawaiians built nearly 500 throughout the islands—with all the pieces connected by a stream.

Recent research has shown that this agricultural system, while only consuming six percent of land, allowed the islands to be self-sufficient in feeding an estimated pre-colonial population of 1.2 million. The study, which was conducted through Kamehameha Schools, a private school system dedicated to educating children with Hawaiian ancestry, concludes that the same methods could feed 86 percent of the state’s current population of 1.4 million—a striking finding for an archipelago that now imports nearly 90 percent of its food while exporting 80 percent of its crops.

Staff member and Farmer Specialist Nick Reppun steams loʻi. (Photo: Naoki Nitta)

Within each ahupuaʻa, a network of taro ponds functioned as surrogate wetlands, regulating the flux of water and removing contaminants flowing downstream. “So the health of the kalo is an indicator of health for the whole ecosystem,” Mar explains.

Colonization and the imposition of private land ownership created seismic shifts in both Native culture and the landscape. As large-scale sugarcane and pineapple plantations began flourishing in the mid-19th century, they consumed land by the tens of thousands of acres and siphoned water supplies, eventually drying up the majority of loʻi kalo throughout the islands. 

In the ahupuaʻa of Heʻeia, numerous taro fields had laid fallow since the 1940s, until Kakoʻo Oʻiwi began restoration. Those efforts, however, are integral to a greater system: They bridge the work of Papahana Kuaola, an educational non-profit that keeps upstream waters and forests free of debris and invasive, non-native flora, with the working fishpond located downstream.

Together, the triad works to maintain a clean water supply for the estuary while nourishing a range of Native crops. Besides kalo, both inland organizations cultivate ulu (breadfruit), sweet potatoes and bananas, while the ponds nurture herbivorous fish such as ‘ama’ama (striped mullet), awa (milkfish) and pualu (surgeonfish), as well as crab and shrimp.

Loʻi kalo at Kakoʻo ʻOʻiwi. (Photo: Naoki Nitta)

The traditional agricultural system also supports native fauna, including the endangered ‘alae ‘ula (Hawaiian moorhen). The red-beaked waterbird, whose population hovers around 1,000, nests in taro patches, making the loʻi kalo a crucial habitat.

Increasingly erratic weather patterns have also made taro farming central to maintaining the health of the ecosystem. The past eight years have brought “more rain bombs,” says Shultz. While rain falls with less frequency, each storm carries more volume, upping the potential for “heavy, angry water.”

Because flood pulses suffocate the estuary, the health of the fishpond and reef beyond is directly dependent on the filtration system, says Shultz. Moreover, kalo fields are remarkably effective at absorbing floodwater. “One acre can bank about a foot of water,” he says. “If you multiply that over a hundred acres—that’s over 30 million gallons of water [banked] per rain event.” Achieve that, and “now you’re actually starting to create some [meaningful] climate adaptation.”

Building a balanced system

Currently, the 50 acres of fields yield approximately 600 pounds of taro a week. Although Shultz’s goal is to triple production, scaling up has its challenges: Cultivation is a year-round, labor-intensive job that involves planting 1,000 bulbs weekly, in standing water, and harvesting an equal amount.

In addition to selling poi and kulolo, the farm is diversifying its revenue stream by incorporating non-traditional practices. “We’re taking care of the land that’s sustained us for thousands of years—in a contemporary system,” says Shultz. “It’s a balance,” much like him, he adds—a Native Hawaiian and a blend of other ethnicities. Along with a mushroom-growing facility in the works, he’s added high-value timber such as mahogany trees; 90 heads of sheep that mow down weeds and other invasive plants; and pigs that consume food and crop scraps such as tough and hairy taro peels. “We’ll be eating those buggers soon,” he says of the livestock. “We sell them, we trade them, we give them away.”

Despite these endeavors, the non-profit currently remains 90 percent dependent on grants. Still, “the biological returns far outpace our agricultural revenues,” says Shultz, and the investment in the land extends far beyond the reaches of the ahupuaʻa.

Between food sovereignty, climate resilience and reviving cultural practices, “you can put all kinds of labels” on these efforts, says Shultz. But, ultimately, they all support one goal: “It’s the ability for us to determine our own future.”

The post Meet the Taro Farmer Restoring an Ecosystem Through Native Hawaiian Practices appeared first on Modern Farmer.

COPs are historically where key climate decisions are made, such as the Kyoto Protocol, in which signing parties agreed to decrease greenhouse gas emissions, and the Paris Agreement, which committed parties to the goal of keeping warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius.

However, current world government actions are not enough to meet the climate goals set by the Paris Agreement, and even promises made at this year’s conference (and in years past) may not be enough to move the world closer to those goals. The climate conferences are not without their share of criticism. This year, the president of COP28, Sultan Al Jaber, has come under fire after claiming there wasn’t sufficient scientific evidence that a phase-out of fossil fuels could help lower global temperatures. Food production accounts for 26 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, and past COP conferences have been accused of greenwashing, in part by offering meat on the menu while talking about reducing global meat consumption. Critics have long accused COP conferences of being all about the talk, with little action. It remains to be seen what, if anything, will actually happen as a result of this year’s discussions. 

This year, at COP28 in Dubai, global food systems and agriculture were discussed more than ever before. Here are the key food and agriculture takeaways from this year’s conference, which wrapped up today.

Takeaway 1: Leaders linked climate and food systems with declaration

More than 130 countries signed the Declaration on Sustainable Agriculture, Resilient Food Systems and Climate Action, also known as the Emirates Declaration. That’s a mouthful, but the declaration appears to have weight behind it. More than $2.5 billion has been put aside for this declaration, including a $200-million fund from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation looking specifically at agricultural research. 

This declaration, first and foremost, emphasizes the importance of including agriculture and food systems solutions to meet climate goals. “We stress that any path to fully achieving the long-term goals of the Paris Agreement must include agriculture and food systems,” says the declaration.

Signees commit to taking action by 2025 to scale up and strengthen mechanisms for resilient food systems, with the goal of reducing environmental impacts and increasing security for those who work in the food system. Signees will review their progress next year, at COP29. Read the full text.

Takeaway 2: The FAO released a roadmap for sustainably feeding the growing population

During COP28, the UN’s Food and Agriculture Commission released a list of recommendations for what needs to change in the global food system to meet climate goals. The goal of this roadmap is to successfully feed the growing world population while staying aligned with emissions targets.

One of the recommendations in this roadmap was that meat consumption should shift to favor lower-impact animals that still meet nutritional needs. This is in reference to the emissions produced by animal agriculture, which are the food items that have the greatest environmental impact.

Meanwhile, companies and groups such as Tyson Foods, JBS and the North American Meat Institute attended COP28 to make the case that they have a place in the future of food.

Other recommendations include increased adoption of precision agriculture technologies and addressing obstacles to land tenure, with a special focus on women and Indigenous peoples. Read the full roadmap here, or click through this visualization here.

Takeaway 3: Countries made plans to tackle food waste, starting with the US

Announced first at COP28, the USDA has released a draft of the new National Strategy to Reduce US Food Loss and Waste. With an initial investment of $30 million, the strategy sets out four goals for the federal government. 

The goals include  the prevention of the loss of food where possible and preventing the waste of food. The other goals are to increase recycling rates for organic waste and, finally, to support policies that echo these aims. With roughly one third of available food going uneaten globally, a strategy centering food loss and solutions such as composting could make a big difference in the US.

“Food loss and waste poses a real challenge to agriculture, food and the climate. In order to tackle this problem, and in turn build a resilient food system and mitigate climate impacts, we must explore and implement innovative solutions,” said Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack in a release.

The policy is a joint effort between the USDA, FDA and EPA, and a 30-day public comment period is now open. You can add your comments on the policy here. 

Takeaway 4: Negotiators had trouble nailing down specifics

Sunday was Food, Agriculture and Water Day at COP28, and negotiators released a draft document, intended to help countries move towards sustainable agriculture and track progress. However, as reported by Indian media outlets, while the document references sustainable agriculture, it doesn’t pin down specific targets for goals related to food, water, health and agriculture. The document also points out that the funding required to adapt these systems “remains insufficient,” but it does not specify how much is actually needed. Other climate agreements have seen a softening in language as well, moving from a “phase out” of fossil fuels, to a “reduction.” 

Speaking at COP over the weekend, Vilsack even said that the final statement from the convention may not mention food or agriculture, as “there wasn’t enough time to negotiate a text.” Vilsack referenced disagreements between nations on how to measure progress of climate goals. 

Vilsack did highlight the US’s contributions to COP’s overall goals, including the investment of close to $20 billion to help agricultural producers reduce emissions and enhance carbon sequestration in their soil. 

Takeaway 5: New partnerships and coalitions emerged

This year’s COP has resulted in the emergence of several new initiatives that will be worth keeping an eye on. One was the International Soil Carbon Industry Alliance, formed among 28 organizations, which will focus on developing our understanding of soil carbon sequestration, a topic that has had an amorphous definition in the carbon credit market. 

Soil naturally stores carbon, making it a valuable resource for fighting climate change. However, the carbon credit market, which allows companies to offset their carbon footprint by purchasing carbon credits that, in theory, protect carbon sinks from being disturbed, lacks consistency and is therefore vulnerable to greenwashing. A better understanding of soil carbon sequestration can lead to best practices for land management and carbon storage. Read our breakdown of some of the obstacles the carbon credit market faces here.

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