At CAFOs, it is common to pool animal waste in one spot, called a manure lagoon. Anaerobic digestion creates a mixture of gases, which can be used for electricity or further processed into fuel for vehicles. The idea is to take advantage of these large quantities of waste to create something useful and reduce methane emissions, helping the climate along the way.

However, that’s not quite how it works out. In Lind, an overwhelming number of citizens showed up for a public hearing to discuss the change—the Wisconsin Examiner reported that there were so many attendees, they exceeded the capacity of the building and the meeting had to be canceled. Community organizers, under the group name Citizens Protecting Rural Wisconsin, argued that digesters aren’t the solution that they seem to be.

A new report by Friends of the Earth US and Socially Responsible Agriculture Project (SRAP) backs up that sentiment. The study suggests that methane digesters create incentives for the growth of industrial agriculture, further entrenching food systems that harm both people and the environment. These researchers, communities and advocates are working hard to resist the greenwashing of this technology—and sometimes they succeed. Vanguard Renewables, the company partnering with the dairy near Lind, officially withdrew its application to build in March. 

The report

Anaerobic digesters are not typically things that you would ever see on a small, pasture-based dairy or farm. Digesters require a lot of manure to work, meaning that they are more poised to be installed on CAFOs that typically have hundreds or thousands of animals. This suggests that supporting biogas production incentivizes the growth of the CAFO industry. 

“If we put money towards biogas, we’re essentially helping to subsidize and further entrench industrial livestock production,” says Chris Hunt, deputy director at SRAP and a contributor to this report, “and essentially the worst possible ways of managing waste, which is manure lagoons.”

This growth was documented in the report, finding that herd size at the studied CAFOs with digesters grew 3.7 percent year over year—24 times the growth rate of typical dairies in the states they studied. 

“Once you have a digester in place, there’s an incentive to create more biogas, because there’s now a market for biogas,” says Hunt. “The only way of doing that is to create more waste. So, there’s an incentive to add more animals to herd size.”

Greenwashing

The Global Methane Pledge was launched at COP26, aiming to reduce global methane emissions by 30 percent by 2030, using 2020 levels as a baseline. In 2021, the US released its own methane reduction plan. Expanding manure biogas production was listed as a key way to reduce methane emissions in the agriculture sector. Between 2010 and 2020, the USDA Rural Business Cooperative Service supported grants and loans totaling $117 million toward anaerobic digesters.

This plan aims to develop the industry further. Not only does it commit the USDA to launch additional work into biogas policies and research, but existing Farm Bill conservation programs such as the Conservation Stewardship Program (CSP) and the Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP) will provide resources in service of manure biogas production. 

In 2020, manure accounted for about 9 percent of the US’s methane emissions. The greater source of methane from animal agriculture is through enteric fermentation—created through the process of digestion. This accounted for about 27 percent of US methane emissions. Using anaerobic digesters to produce biogas can only address that 9 percent, and it does nothing to reduce the 27 percent inherent to ruminant agriculture—animals such as cows, buffalo, goats and sheep.

The gases produced by anaerobic digestion are being used for electricity and to power vehicles, but as the report and other advocacy organizations argue, this doesn’t make it a clean fuel.

“When you burn this fuel as an end use, it’s essentially the same as burning fossil fuels,” said Kat Ruane of Food & Water Watch during a recent webinar about biogas production in California. “It produces similar pollutants, it harms the environment in the same way and you’re still pumping gas into the atmosphere that we really don’t need to be there. So, clearly, this cannot be a solution to climate change.”

Anaerobic digesters. (Photo from Shutterstock)

Food & Water Watch did its own study on digesters in California feeding into the state’s Low Carbon Fuel Standard (LCFS) program. The leakage rates of these digesters could be as much as 15 percent. Food & Water Watch used satellite images of methane plumes overlaid with geographic information about where digesters in the LCFS program were located. They documented 16 dairy operations that emitted plumes, producing 59 plumes between March 2017 and July 2023. The emission rates of these plumes reached as high as 1,729 kilograms of methane per hour. A “super-emitter” in the imaging system is classified as just 10 kilograms of methane per hour.

“Another huge greenwashing problem with this technology is just the fact that it does not work,” said Ruane. “[It’s] an absolutely mind-boggling amount of pollution being produced under the guise of supposedly helping the climate.”

In addition to research, Food & Water Watch mobilizes people on issues related to food systems and factory farming. On its website, you can read about its various objectives and wins against industrialized farming as well as calls to action on these issues. Hunt of SRAP also encourages people directly dealing with the impact of factory farming on their community to reach out directly.

“If any of your readers are facing a factory farm, they should contact us,” says Hunt. “We provide free support to communities throughout the US to help them protect themselves from the damaging impacts of industrial livestock operations.” 

There’s no uniform approach for dealing with this issue, he says, as it depends a lot on regional factors, but SRAP provides resources such as the SRAP Help Hotline and SRAP Water Rangers Program, which offers free training on how to collect and analyze water samples, document pollution and report violations.

“There’s not really one universal secret. But this is what our organization does. So, I would encourage folks to reach out to us for help.” 

Digesters don’t erase factory farm concerns

Even if biogas production wiped out methane emissions completely, that’s still a narrow view of the factory farm problem, says Hunt.

“Biogas doesn’t solve the factory farm issue,” says Hunt. “Greenhouse gas emissions aren’t the only problems in factory farms. As someone who’s been working on this issue for 20 years, it’s actually one of the problems with factory farms that concerns me the least.”

He says that methane emissions are being misconstrued as the major problem caused by factory farms, and biogas has been used as the proxy for fixing all the problems explicitly with CAFOs. “But they don’t do that at all,” says Hunt.

Digesters don’t address worker or animal rights abuses at CAFOs, nor all of the environmental concerns. Moreover, many of the human health impacts are not mitigated by anaerobic digesters.

“When you have too many animals in one place, you’re going to have too much waste in one place, and that waste becomes a problem—that waste becomes a pollutant,” says Hunt. “So, these facilities pollute the air, pollute the water and threaten public health and spoil people’s drinking water. Adding digesters doesn’t actually fix that.”

Manure storage vessels. (Photo from Shutterstock)

As of 2020, there were more than 21,000 CAFOs in the US, and some are clustered geographically. In California’s San Joaquin Valley, for example, some people live next to as many as 25 CAFOs. 

The abundance of CAFOs in the San Joaquin Valley isn’t accidental, says Leslie Martinez, community engagement specialist at the Leadership Counsel for Justice and Accountability (LCJA). The San Joaquin Valley has several historically Black communities that are now largely Latino, and the abundance of polluters is evidence of environmental racism—hazardous materials or operations being located or dumped in communities of color. Moreover, many of these communities are unincorporated, and this can make it more difficult for residents to advocate for themselves.

“First and foremost, I think it’s really important that people understand the health impacts that come with so many large animals being confined in one area,” says Martinez.

These impacts include sleep apnea, asthma and other respiratory issues, as well as not being able to go outside because of the intensity of the smell or due to being swarmed by flies. CAFOs present a threat of nitrate pollution, which can cause a variety of illnesses including blue baby syndrome. Manure contamination can also lead to severe pathogen-related illnesses such as listeriosis and tetanus. The SRAP and Friends of the Earth report posits that while anaerobic digesters achieve temperatures that can kill some pathogens, the real solution is not to have such high concentrations of animals in the first place.

Martinez, who was born and raised in Tulare County in the San Joaquin Valley, works closely with other local organizers to do policy work against the LCFS rewarding CAFOs, such as trying to eliminate methane crediting. She encourages everyone to speak up on the impacts of dairies.

“Attend a workshop, speak up and be like, ‘As somebody who lives next to a dairy, as someone who lives next to a dairy with a digester, this is my reality of what I live with,’” says Martinez. “No one should be able to take away your right to clean air and clean drinking water and get away with it.”

On the LCJA website, you can read more about this work and find information for taking action. Small dairy farmers who’ve had success should share their stories, too, she says.

“Small farmers, rise up,” says Martinez. “There are success stories that I think need to be talked about. And I would love to hear what their solutions are to this epidemic of the CAFO industry.”

Dairy cows being milked. (Photo from Shutterstock)

A more sustainable future for dairy

As the SRAP and Friends of the Earth report states, “Only if one accepts the status quo model for industrial animal production as the baseline can it be argued that manure biogas has any benefits.” For Hunt, biogas production is not compatible with climate change solutions at all.

“I don’t think a sustainable future is compatible with the CAFO model,” he says. “You can spend millions of dollars and stick a digester on top of your lagoon, you can stunt the emissions a little bit that way. But you’re still left with all these other problems that are inherent in that model.”

“I don’t think a sustainable future is compatible with the CAFO model.”

Martinez encourages those who consume milk and dairy products to think critically about how these products get to your table. Collectively, she says, we need to think about what sustainability is and what we as consumers are willing to accept.

“Right now, people are saying that you having access to [these products] is more important than a young child being able to go outside and ride their bike or walk home from school,” says Martinez. “Because right now that’s kind of what the trade-off is.”

In her organizing, Martinez has been accused of being anti-dairy industry and anti-dairy farmer.

“But that is not true. I think that there is a place for dairies. And I think that that place for dairies is when you don’t have thousands of cows. It’s not sustainable,” she said in the Food & Water Watch webinar. “If we want to genuinely keep dairies around in California or in Wisconsin, wherever, they have to be truly sustainable. And that means making big changes.”

The post Biogas From Mega-Dairies Is a Problem, Not a Solution appeared first on Modern Farmer.

That’s how Bradley Aiken of Portland, OR began his response to our call for reader questions about where their food comes from. “My weekly visits to the local farmers’ markets still find an overabundance and reliance on plastic pint containers of berries, single-use plastic bags,and straws! I thought we were done with straws, really?”

Bradley’s lament probably feels familiar to most sustainability-minded consumers. Plastic is truly everywhere. Over just a few decades, it’s become an inescapable part of modern life, permeating nearly every aspect of our lives, from the food we eat (usually wrapped and bagged in plastic and often containing it) to the clothes we wear (60 percent of which are made from plastic) to the microplastics hiding just about everywhere, from clouds to human placentas to the Earth’s most remote corners.

“Plastic packaging is definitely a major source of plastic pollution, and it can seem totally overwhelming to folks when they go out to get food, especially since the great majority of our food is wrapped in plastic,” says Erica Cirino, communications manager for the advocacy group Plastic Pollution Coalition and author of Thicker Than Water: The Quest for Solutions to the Plastic Crisis. “It’s estimated that more than 40 percent of all plastic produced is single-use plastic packaging, which is an astounding amount.”

Hey plastic, don’t touch my cheese

Before the advent of plastic packaging, food was packed in a variety of materials, from natural substances such as gourds and leaves to, most recently, glass bottles and jars, metal cans and tins and paper products. Today, plastic encases a large and growing percentage of our food: A recent survey of Canadian grocery stores found that 71 percent of all produce was packaged in plastic and that baby food had the highest share of plastic packaging, at 76 percent.

There are a few reasons why so much of our food is packaged in plastic. Perhaps most importantly, it’s cheaper to manufacture and transport than alternatives. And as the world grapples with an urgent energy transition, fossil fuel companies jittery about the prospect of decreasing demand for oil are looking to plastics as their next major profit driver—and are on track to triple global plastic production by 2060.

Plastic also gives the impression of cleanliness and sterility, and it has long been thought to extend the shelf life of food, a notion that industry groups tend to emphasize but that recent studies have called into question. “It’s a seemingly hygienic coating for foods to be mass produced, shipped around the world and then end up in the supermarket and eventually in your refrigerator,” says Cirino. “It’s just a very disconnected way of interacting with our foods.” 

Worse, she points out, are the health risks of widespread exposure to plastics. Made up of polymers and a dizzying array of chemical additives such as stabilizers, plasticizers, flame retardants and pigments, plastic’s impacts on the human body represent an active area of research. It’s known that many chemicals in plastics, including phthalates and bisphenols, can transfer and leach harmful chemicals that can cause an array of health issues, such as hormone disruption, cancer, diabetes and reproductive disorders. Less well understood are the effects of microplastics, which we can ingest through food and inhale at a rate of about 16 tiny pieces per hour, according to one study. 

“It’s a shame that we’re putting it around our food because we’re exposing ourselves, almost inadvertently, to these toxins,” says Cirino. “All these plastics have different chemical risks associated with them. None of them are good.”

Out of sight, out of mind 

How did we get here? Quite conveniently, as it turns out. Before the advent of plastics in the 20th century, people produced a fraction of the waste they do today; materials were usually repaired, reused or repurposed. It wasn’t until the post-World War II boom that a culture of disposability began to take hold, as new plastics technology allowed cheap packaging to enter the mainstream, finding a market of consumers increasingly motivated by convenience. 

It took some getting used to; historian Susan Strasser recalls how, at first, many consumers washed and saved the tins from disposable TV dinners because they were so unaccustomed to throwing things away after a single use. And it was a transition explicitly driven by the industry. “The future of plastics is in the trash can,” declared Lloyd Stouffer, editor of Modern Packaging Inc., in 1956. By 1963, Stouffer was congratulating plastics industry representatives on their progress. “You are filling the trash cans, the rubbish dumps and the incinerators with literally billions of plastics bottles, plastics jugs, plastics tubes, blisters and skin packs, plastics bags and films and sheet packages—and now, even plastics cans,” he said. “The happy day has arrived when nobody any longer considers the plastics package too good to throw away.” 

Photo: Shutterstock

From the outset, industry groups pushed back against regulation and worked to redirect responsibility onto consumers, coining the term “litterbugs” and promoting recycling as the antidote to the rising tide of plastic waste. As a result, global plastic pollution, estimated at around 400 million tonnes per year, became everybody’s problem but theirs. 

“The whole idea of disposability is based on this idea that you can make something and not have to clear up after yourself,” says Oliver Franklin-Wallis, an investigative journalist and author of Wasteland: The Secret World of Waste and the Urgent Search for a Cleaner Future. “You go back to the very earliest days of the plastics industry and they have always treated waste as an externality. And when I say that, it means it’s a cost borne by other people … If you are a plastics company, we as the taxpayer, we as society, clean up for you, which means that you get privatized profits and socialized consequences.”

The narrative that puts recycling forward as the solution is a comforting one for consumers. But the reality is much more complicated. For certain plastics, namely PET (as in beverage bottles) and HDPE (as in milk cartons), “we have relatively good end-of-life solutions,” says Franklin-Wallis—although “they’re not always done very effectively, particularly in the [United] States.” But the plastic picture is brimming with films and wraps and other forms that aren’t recyclable under current circumstances, and in general, much less plastic is recycled than any of us would like to believe. (In 2021, the US had a plastic recycling rate of less than six percent, according to one report.)

Logan Harvey, senior general manager of Recology Sonoma Marin, gestures toward bales of plastic at a new recycling facility in Santa Rosa, CA. (Photo: Rose Garrett/Modern Farmer)

One culprit is a confusing labeling system that makes consumers think that things are recyclable when they’re not, leading to optimistic but misguided “wishcycling.” “The plastics industry has known for decades that [the labeling system] doesn’t work. It doesn’t help consumers. What it does is make consumers feel less guilty about buying things,” says Franklin-Wallis. “There’s lots of evidence to show that if you tell people that something is recyclable, they’ll feel less guilty in buying it and therefore they’ll buy more of it.” (Here’s a handy guide to those labels; only numbers 1 and 2 are widely recyclable.)

Less is more

Recycling correctly is one action consumers can take, but while it may feel good, it won’t solve the essential problem of too much plastic material clogging waterways, accumulating in soil and threatening human health. “People are recycling, and they are attempting to do what they were told was the right thing,” says Cirino. But, she says, increasing awareness of the inadequacy of recycling has begun to change people’s attitudes, leading them to seek out solutions such as reuse and refill.

Reusable takeout container systems have proliferated in recent years. Some areas have refill stores, where customers can bring their own bottles to stock up on bulk supplies such as dish soap and browse low-waste products such as metal straws and stainless steel bento boxes. But while consumer changes are an important part of the picture, individuals didn’t start the problem, and they won’t be able to fix it on their own. Effective regulation is key to stopping, as Modern Farmer reader Bradley put it, “plastic armageddon.”

“When you talk to people in the plastics industry, they will act as if consumers want this stuff. But actually consumers are never really given a choice,” says Franklin-Wallis. “If you give consumers the choice to choose more sustainable options, they almost always do that. They want to be able to recycle, they want [to] reuse, they don’t want to do things that are damaging for the planet. So, the challenge is forcing industry to [give people the option].”

Examples of effective legislation include bottle return schemes in countries such as Norway and Germany, which have 95- to 99-percent recycling rates for plastic bottles, and “extended producer responsibility” (EPR) laws, which shift some of the burden onto manufacturers, incentivizing things such as reducing packaging or investing in plastic recovery projects. “The solutions are out there and they’re scaled right now,” says Franklin-Wallis. “Quite often, the issue is either apathy or corporate opposition, and we need to kind of bust through both of those things.”

Throwaway culture is cheap, easy and convenient. Changing our consumer habits and challenging the interests of a powerful global industry is difficult. “There are no easy solutions,” says Franklin-Wallis. “There are only choices.” One choice that’s worth making, however small the impact? Buy less stuff—a lot less, if you’re able—and make do with what you already have. 

Click here to read our guide on how you can help reduce plastic waste, from things to do at home to how to support community and policy-level solutions.

***

Thanks to Bradley Aiken for submitting his question for our “Digging In” series. Got a question about where your food comes from? Let us know what you’d like us to investigate next by filling out this form.

The post Digging In: Food’s Big, Plastic Problem appeared first on Modern Farmer.

“Haw River watershed is beautiful,” says Emily Sutton, Haw Riverkeeper for the Haw River Assembly. “It’s really rocky. There’s some high bluffs and fun rapids to paddle and lots of hikes—it’s [a] very accessible river.”

The river is undeniably beautiful. But per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, commonly abbreviated as PFAS, are not visible to the naked eye. PFAS are chemicals that have been linked to debilitating health effects in high concentrations, and they are now so widespread that they are found in the blood of 97 percent of Americans.

This year, the EPA issued a proposed rule that public drinking water systems should not have more than four parts per trillion of two PFAS compounds, PFOS and PFOA. Back in 2019, Sutton and the Haw River Assembly detected 30,000 parts per trillion of total PFAS coming into the Haw from the city of Burlington—7,500 times the maximum concentration in the proposed new guidelines. For communities downstream that get their drinking water from the Haw, such as the town of Pittsboro, this invisible danger was a direct threat. The drinking water technically met all state quality standards, but only because there weren’t any for PFAS. The Haw River Assembly, the Southern Environmental Law Center and community members sprang into action.

A global pollution problem, communities such as those along the Haw River are having to deal with the reality of PFAS. While some states, such as Maine and New York, have passed laws beginning to regulate PFAS, federal oversight remains very light on these chemicals. Meanwhile, a new report from Food & Water Watch digs into why exactly these substances remain largely unregulated.

The Haw River. (Photography by Emily Sutton)

What are PFAS and when did they become a problem?

PFAS are chemicals that have been used commercially since the 1940s. They all contain a bond between the chemical elements carbon and fluorine, the strength of which keeps them from breaking down, giving them the nickname “forever chemicals.” Because these chemicals are so hardy, they bioaccumulate, meaning they grow in concentration over time. They are so widespread that they are found around the world. They are in Teflon pans, rain gear and mascara. They are in firefighting foam, electronics and hand sanitizer. They are in our blood.

The term PFAS refers to a class of chemicals that includes thousands of substances—as many as 14,000 or 15,000. “Part of the problem is that we can only test for about 70 of these 14,000,” said Kyla Bennett, director of Science Policy at Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER), in a recent Food & Water Watch webinar. “So, we don’t even know the chemical formulas of the vast number of these PFAS that are out there.”

PFAS are not naturally occurring—they have historically been made by a few key corporations, such as DuPont and 3M. 

The industry has known of the chemicals’ toxicity since very early in their use, said Natalie Balbuena, researcher for Food & Water Watch, in the webinar. The public didn’t know about PFAS until 1999, when a case was brought to the courts arguing that a farmer who lived near a DuPont plant noticed his cattle were dying.

“From there, all the information came out, and people started to really pay attention,” said Balbuena. Since then, high-profile cases have been brought against PFAS manufacturers, including one that resulted in a $671-million settlement in 2017 on behalf of West Virginians near the DuPont Washington Works plant, who were experiencing a myriad of health problems, from birth defects to cancer.

[RELATED: You’ve Already Been Exposed to Toxic PFAS. But You Can Take Steps to Minimize Future Exposure]

When it comes to agriculture, the cattle farmer near the DuPont plant was not a PFAS anomaly. A report from FoodPrint says that agricultural land across the country could be compromised. PFAS from contaminated water and topically applied biosolids, or “sludge,” can result in PFAS uptake for both animal agriculture and produce. This means that PFAS is also a growing concern for the food system—both for consumers and for farmworkers who work on contaminated land.

“‘Biosolids’ is just a euphemism for human sewage sludge,” said Bennett. Once wastewater passes through a treatment plant, the substance left over has commonly been applied to agricultural fields as fertilizer. “Turns out, the biosolids or the sewage sludge has a ton of PFAS in it, and farmers all across the country have been applying the sewage sludge to their farms and their fields.”

The resulting contamination has shut down farms across the country. Fortunately, there are some mechanisms for farm recovery. Even so, PFAS remains a concern at every level of the food system, from agriculture to cooking in the kitchen.

The public has now known about PFAS for more than 20 years, but it’s taken until this year for the EPA to propose drinking water standards. In 2023, the EPA proposed regulated maximum contaminant levels (MCLs) for a small handful of PFAS in public drinking water. This means public drinking water systems would be regularly tested for compliance. A decision on this proposed rule is expected soon.

“Is it enough?” said Bennett. “Absolutely not.”

In the Haw Rivershed

When Emily Sutton of the Haw River Assembly samples for PFAS in her watershed, she identifies potential sources of pollution on maps and how she can get to them without trespassing. 

“Oftentimes, that means we’re in boats paddling up the river to make sure that we can get as close to the pipe as possible,” says Sutton.

Wearing waders and gloves, Sutton will take sample jars over to the effluent pipe outfall and collect a sample directly from the source. She sends the samples to a lab and awaits the results.

In 2019, when the Haw River Assembly detected startlingly high levels of PFAS in an effluent pipe flowing into the Haw River, they immediately began alerting the public. The Haw River Assembly, along with the Southern Environmental Law Center, filed an intent to sue the city of Burlington. They also sent out mailers and calls to residents and held community meetings. They were able to negotiate a settlement with the city that targeted the industrial sources of PFAS, and got them to change their practices by phasing out PFAS elements or reducing their use.

“So, what used to be 30,000 parts per trillion coming from their wastewater effluent into the Haw is now consistently under 500,” says Sutton. “And it’s getting lower as that minimization plan is carried out.”

Haw Riverkeeper Emily Sutton samples water in the Haw Rivershed. (Photography by Liz McLaughlin)

Blocking legislation

Bennett said in the weinar that the EPA needs to define PFAS broadly, regulate them as a class and then ban all non-essential uses. 

“Unless you can define something, you can’t regulate it,” says Bennett. “We don’t need PFAS in our mascara. That’s a convenience, not a necessity.”

It’s not for lack of trying. In the new report for Food & Water Watch, Balbuena analyzes the attempts at regulation. Between 2021 and 2022, more than  70 bills that addressed PFAS were introduced to the US Congress. But the industry has so much influence, says Balbuena, that lobbying on behalf of PFAS has been very effective at keeping legislation at bay. Only four of the bills mentioning PFAS between 2019 and 2022 ever became law.

Lobbyists against PFAS regulation represent major PFAS manufacturers, oil and petroleum companies and the American Chemistry Council. For example, for eight current and historic major PFAS manufacturers between 2019 and 2022, lobbying reports totaling $55.7 million included content on PFAS and related bills, among other issues. 

These lobbyists target bills that would regulate PFAS, such as the PFAS Action Act, introduced in both 2019 and 2021. The report looked at eight PFAS manufacturers and noted that those companies employed 28 lobbyists to fight against the bill in 2019.

Additionally, Food & Water Watch found that in the US Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works—the same committee that failed to pass the PFAS Action Act—PFAS manufacturers contributed funds to the campaigns of two-thirds of the committee members. Committee members also received financial support from oil and gas companies and from the American Chemistry Council, all of which have an interest in PFAS remaining unregulated.

“There’s a lot of things here that tell us just how much influence the industry has with its money,” says Balbuena.

PFAS work on the ground

Across the country, communities are becoming more aware of PFAS and taking steps to address contamination. Several states, including Vermont and Michigan, have sued PFAS manufacturers. Many states have also passed their own regulations, in lieu of federal standards. River and waterkeepers across the country, as well as other advocacy groups, keep an eye on local communities, staying vigilant.

As it flows downstream, the Haw River eventually joins the Cape Fear River and carries on until it empties into the Atlantic Ocean near the southern tip of the state. The Cape Fear River basin supplies drinking water for nearly one million people. 

The Cape Fear River in Wilmington, NC. (Photo: Shutterstock)

In 2017, Wilmington’s StarNews broke the story about contamination from a PFAS called GenX in the Cape Fear River from the company Chemours.

“That was kind of the beginning of all of our knowledge-seeking on what GenX is, number one, and what PFAS is and what it means to us,” says Dana Sargent, executive director at Cape Fear River Watch.

Sargent has been heavily involved in PFAS work. Since there are no official regulations for PFAS in public drinking water systems in North Carolina, CFRW and the Southern Environmental Law Center sued Chemours and the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality. This resulted in a consent order among the three entities. Under the consent order, Chemours has to find standards for the more than 250 types of PFAS coming from its plant. It’s a long and slow process, but, she says, the impact is hugely important.

The best-case scenario, says Sargent, is a world where we no longer produce PFAS. But the amount of money the chemical industry makes off of PFAS prevents meaningful steps toward alternatives.

“We need to find a better way,” says Sargent. “We need to do better science, to stop putting PFAS out into the environment, because we know once it’s out there, it doesn’t go away.”

***

Read the full report: You can read Food & Water Watch’s full report here.

Watch to learn: If you want to learn more, the documentary “The Devil We Know,” about how PFAS contamination has rocked communities in West Virginia, is a good place to start. Then, watch “Dark Waters,” a film based on the true story of Robert Bilott, the lawyer who went up against chemical company DuPont.

Decrease your exposure: We solicited insights from those interviewed for this story about what people can do to decrease their risk of exposure to PFAS. Read some of their recommendations here.

The post Toxic PFAS are Everywhere, and Remain Largely Unregulated appeared first on Modern Farmer.

“When faced with that immensity of a problem, you’ve got to really focus on, ‘Well, what can I control?’” said Natalie Balbuena, researcher with Food & Water Watch, in a recent webinar. “There are a lot of key tools that I think begin with awareness.”

You can take steps to limit your PFAS exposure, even in your home. (Photography by Shutterstock)

Educate yourself and your community

Although it sounds simple, educating yourself about PFAS can lead to real change. Dana Sargent, executive director of Cape Fear River Watch, has been working with community members to test home wells for PFAS. These conversations can be devastating, she says, when people with sickness in their families find out that the water they’ve been drinking is contaminated. For a lot of people who learn about their exposure, the next step is telling other people they know.

“A lot of these folks that have come to know about this are sharing with their neighbors,” says Sargent. “And that is vitally important, because education is the first step towards policy change.”

[RELATED: Toxic PFAS are Everywhere, and Remain Largely Unregulated]

Case in point: There have been a lot of restrictions on who qualifies to get their well water tested in North Carolina. Sargent has been pushing for a pullback on these restrictions, and as more community members learned about the issue, they began contacting the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality (NCDEQ) as well to voice their concerns. 

Just this December, NCDEQ announced that it is pulling back restrictions, allowing thousands more people to get their well water tested—a big win, says Sargent.

“Action does effect change,” says Sargent. “We’ve got to beat it with a frickin’ heavy hammer in this town and in this state, but it does work.”

The documentary The Devil We Know is one good place to start. It provides a thorough look into the history of PFAS and how it affects human communities. 

Utilize your buying power, if possible

There’s no doubt about it—being able to be selective about where you spend money is an economic privilege. Systemic factors like this make certain communities disproportionately impacted by PFAS contamination. This is a justice issue, because non-contaminated products should not be accessible only to the wealthy.

“This is definitely an environmental justice issue,” says Balbuena of Food & Water Watch, “primarily because it really connects to a lot of the historical injustices when it comes to placing low-income communities of color next to certain chemical-producing, plastic-producing [and] fracking sites and just having them exposed to all these toxins and then being left with not only paying for the development of those things but also a lot of health effects.”

For those who are financially able, the Center for Environmental Health provides a list of PFAS-free products including textiles, foodware and more. Another accessible list that includes cosmetics, baby products and furniture is available here.

Voicing priorities to companies is also effective, even if you can’t use your dollars in a certain way. It can change company behavior.

“There are companies starting to respond and you can start to get some PFAS-free products,” said Kyla Bennett, director of science policy for Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER), in the Food & Water Watch webinar. Lowe’s took PFAS out of its indoor residential carpets. IKEA removed it from its processing. “I think those are some victories that we can take heart from.”

Limit plastics and other known dangers

Products containing PFAS won’t be labeled as such, and we do not yet have labeling requirements for products claiming to be free of PFAS. When it comes to products labeled PFAS-free, Bennett cautions that you have to be careful of greenwashing. Sometimes, one PFAS may be removed from a product just to be replaced with another. Look into the company’s verification process, if possible. 

Still, there are some things that you can assume contain PFAS. Bennett recommends avoiding #2 plastics as much as possible. This could be food containers, shampoo bottles and the like. Waterproof items, such as mascara and rain gear, can also be sources of exposure.

Another known danger is nonstick cookware. “Get rid of your Teflon pans,” says Sargent. “Obviously, if you get rid of it, you’re putting it into a landfill, it’s going to end up back in the system in some way. But like, don’t cook on that garbage.”

Know where your drinking water comes from

About 20 percent of exposure to PFAS comes through drinking water. One thing you can do, says Bennett, is look for certified filters to reduce PFAS loads in your home. Under the sink reverse osmosis is effective, but can be costly to the individual household. It also requires maintenance by the homeowner, which can make it difficult for renters.

“Reverse osmosis is very expensive,” says Emily Sutton, Haw Riverkeeper for the Haw River Assembly. “And that’s an environmental justice issue to say that only the wealthiest of us can have safe drinking water.” 

Knowing where your water comes from is important, says Sutton. Last year, in response to the PFAS contamination in the Haw River that was contaminating Pittsboro’s drinking water, the town installed a granular activated carbon filtration system. This effectively removes the majority of the PFAS from the town’s drinking water. 

The Haw Rivershed. (Photography by Emily Sutton)

Be vocal

The EPA recently withdrew its conditional consent for the chemical company Chemours to import waste containing PFAS to its North Carolina location, stating that the agency initially received inaccurate data from the company. Sargent believes the reversal is largely thanks to the fact that local residents have become such strong voices on this topic.

“We pushed back hard and they’re like, ‘We can’t do this to that community. They’re paying attention,’” says Sargent. “That’s huge.”

***

This guide accompanies our reported story about the history of PFAs, why regulators have been slow to act, and how one community successfully reduced the amount of these chemicals in their water. Read that story here.

The post You’ve Already Been Exposed to Toxic PFAS. But You Can Take Steps to Minimize Future Exposure. appeared first on Modern Farmer.

For the children in Greenville Central School District in upstate New York, the question is a no-brainer. Hands shoot up, and a chorus of eager voices cries: “Me!” “Me!” 

Duane Spaulding reaches into a cooler on the back of his maroon pickup truck, grabs a handful of whole chocolate milks and hands them out to the gaggle of preschoolers. “It should taste like a melted milkshake,” he tells them with a smile. 

It’s a rare treat for these youths. 

America’s public schools last served whole milk in 2012, two years after Congress passed the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act. The law strengthened nutrition standards for meals provided through the National School Lunch and Breakfast programs, with the goal of increasing fruit and vegetable consumption and reducing childhood obesity and diabetes. Whole milk and 2 percent, with their higher fat contents, were casualties of the stricter guidelines. 

But on this balmy day in late May, Spaulding, a former dairy farmer, and Ann Diefendorf, a sixth-generation dairy farmer from Seward, N.Y., are giving out whole milk on school grounds. 

The two are distributing fliers touting whole milk’s nutritional properties at Ag Day, an annual event sponsored by the district’s Future Farmers of America chapter. 

“We’d just like to get whole milk back in school as a choice,” Spaulding explains to the adults escorting children through Ag Day attractions. “So, if anyone can help, it’s a grassroots movement.” 

One woman nods, scanning the fliers. “I completely agree with that,” she says. 

This is the reaction Spaulding and Diefendorf want. The ban on whole milk in public schools is an ongoing source of discontent for dairy farmers and their allies in agriculture. They say whole milk is good for kids and that children will reject milk altogether and miss out on essential nutrients, such as calcium, potassium and vitamin D, if the only options are skim and low fat, which aren’t as tasty. 

“I don’t want these kids in school thinking that’s the milk we produce,” says Diefendorf, who owns 45 dairy cows. “We produce whole milk. That’s what goes out in the milk truck every other day. And for those who are so far removed from the farm community, they don’t know.” 

Spaulding, 64, and Diefendorf, 60, are involved with 97Milk, an all-volunteer organization seeking to reverse the ban on whole milk in public schools. Outreach and education are a core part of 97Milk’s mission, and the group’s name addresses one common misconception: the mistaken belief that whole milk is all or mostly fat. In reality, it’s only about 3.25 percent fat—“virtually 97 percent fat-free,” as the organization’s materials put it.   

Duane Spaulding distributes chocolate milk to students from Greenville Central School District in upstate New York. (Photo: Sara Foss)

The intensifying activism around milk comes at a time of angst and anxiety for dairy farmers, who have struggled to break even for years as costs have risen and prices have slumped. Adding to the stress is that Americans are drinking a lot less milk.

While not a new trend—consumption has been dropping since the mid-1940s—the decline accelerated faster during the 2010s than in each of the previous six decades. Between 2003-2004 and 2017-2018, children’s consumption of milk and milk drinks fell 26 percent, from 1.07 cup-equivalents per person per day to 0.79, according to a 2021 USDA research report. 

Data like this fuels concern that the dairy industry is losing ground with the youngest generation, the people who will become the customers of tomorrow. Also worrisome for farmers: The USDA is considering eliminating flavored milk in elementary and middle schools when it adopts new school nutrition guidelines for the 2024-2025 school year. 

97Milk got its start in late 2018 when Nelson Troutman, a retired dairy farmer from Richland, Pa., placed a wrapped hay bale with a message urging people to drink local whole milk at an intersection near his farm. 

Frustrated by a listening session with the Pennsylvania Milk Marketing Board—“they wine and dine the farmers, and then they go home and nothing happens”—Troutman decided to take matters into his own hands. “I said, ‘I’m going to start advertising that milk is 97 percent fat-free,’” he recalls. “I can paint that on a hay bale. It will look neat.’”

The bale did look neat. It went viral online and spurred media coverage. From there, organizing began, and hay bales began to proliferate. There are no formal records of how many bales have been painted or where they are, but Diefendorf estimates she has painted at least 50 in upstate New York. A 2022 article in Lancaster Farming reported that pro-whole signage had been spotted in at least seven other states, including Kansas and Ohio.  

“The kids in school get skim, and they hate it, and they throw it away,” says Troutman said. “Our big thing is: Where is the nutrition? It’s in the garbage can.” 

The resistance to reintroducing whole milk and 2 percent to public schools comes from health organizations that say skim and low-fat milk have the benefits of whole milk without the empty calories of the creamier beverage’s saturated fat. 

Samuel Hahn, a policy co-ordinator on the school foods team at the Center for Science in the Public Interest in Washington, D.C., says school meals have become much healthier under the nutrition standards enacted in 2010. He says there’s little evidence that kids prefer whole milk to skim and low and that the research suggests what children really want is chocolate milk. 

“What matters a lot more [to kids] is whether the milk is flavored as opposed to its fat content,” says Hahn. “As an organization, we’re not opposed to having flavored milk in school meals. We’re not opposed to milk at all. We just want to make sure it’s fat free or low fat, and if it is flavored, that it’s low in added sugars.” 

“What matters a lot more [to kids] is whether the milk is flavored as opposed to its fat content,” says Samuel Hahn, a policy co-ordinator at the Center for Science in the Public Interest. (Photo: Shutterstock)

While leading health organizations, such as CSPI and the American Academy of Pediatrics, recommend children switch to low-fat and skim milk at the age of two, there’s disagreement within the broader health community on the merits of that advice. 

“From a nutrition standpoint, whole milk is a great source of nutrients and really isn’t the problem with childhood obesity,” says Beth Chiodo, a registered dietitian who serves as public relations chair for the Pennsylvania Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics. 

Some studies “have shown that kids who drank whole milk were at a reduced risk of being overweight and less likely to be obese,” Chiodo continues. “A bigger driver of childhood obesity is high-fructose corn syrup, snack foods, processed food and fast food. These foods are calorie dense and aren’t providing any of the necessary nutrients kids need.”  

In its brief existence, 97Milk has gained some powerful political backers. 

Earlier this year, U.S Rep. Glenn “GT” Thompson, a Republican from Pennsylvania, and Rep. Kim Schrier, a Democrat from Washington, introduced the Whole Milk for Healthy Kids Act, which would allow unflavored and flavored whole milk to be offered in school cafeterias. This is the third time Thompson has introduced the bill, which has 100 co-sponsors from 37 states. In June, the House Education and Workforce Committee approved the bill in a 26-13 vote. The next step is to schedule a vote by the full House of Representatives.  

Similar bills have also been introduced in New York and Pennsylvania, where 97Milk is most active. 

“Banning whole and 2 percent milk was an ill-advised policy change,” says Rep. Chris Tague, a New York state assemblyman whose district includes Schoharie County, where Spaulding and Diefendorf live. “It has not served our young folks well, and it’s also hurt our dairy farms.” 

Tague, a former dairy farmer, is a co-sponsor of a bill that would put whole milk and 2 percent back in New York schools by allowing districts to serve milk produced by New York farms. Supporters contend that such milk has not entered interstate commerce and is outside federal jurisdiction. It’s unclear whether the bill, if passed, would survive a legal challenge. 

The Dietary Guidelines for Americans, published every five years by the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, recommends that those two years and older limit their intake of saturated fat to less than 10 percent of calories per day. If schools were permitted to serve whole or 2 percent milk, it would be difficult for them to menu these items regularly and still meet strict federal limits on calories and saturated fats. Thompson’s bill would increase the amount of saturated fat allowed in meals to account for the milk fat in whole milk. 

During Diefendorf’s visit to Greenville, she painted an 800-pound bale to donate to the district during breaks from greeting children and handing out milk. The slogan: “Look Up 97Milk.com. Support Dairy Farmers.” 

For Deifendorf and Spaulding, it will be a busy summer attending community events, fairs and other outdoor gatherings to share their message. The reception is overwhelmingly positive at  Greenville Central School District, where many children come from farming families.

“That is really good!” one boy yells after sampling the chocolate milk. 

“Of course,” says Spaulding. “We brought nothing but the best.”

The post Is Whole Milk Headed Back to School? appeared first on Modern Farmer.

Roman had recently entered the foster care system and found herself drifting away from things she once loved, such as spending time outside. She recalls thinking, “You seriously want me to be around bees? Definitely not.”

With no prior pollinator experience, Roman was apprehensive. “I knew they stung and to get away from them if they’re close to you.” But by her fifth week in the program, Roman had warmed up to the bees, finding them therapeutic. 

“The sound of the bees is really relaxing,” says Roman. “It’s calming.”

New students don’t get into a bee suit for weeks. First, they work on social and emotional skills. (Photo: Grey Kenna)

Started by clinical social worker Sarah Taylor in 2018, the Huneebee Project is a therapeutic job skills training program that has graduated 25 cohorts, including Roman, from the 15-week program over the past five years. It’s also installed roughly 30 honey bee colonies across seven sites in the greater New Haven area, planted pollinator-friendly garden plots and launched an online marketplace that sells honey made from the hives, candles and a curated selection of other artisan products.

Participants range in age from 15 to 23, and the project prioritizes enrolling children and young adults with past or present child protective and foster care involvement.  

Taylor had long dreamed of creating a nonprofit for youth who are aging out of the foster care system. But it wasn’t until she took time for herself that she realized the therapeutic potential of beekeeping. Burnt out and disheartened with the foster care and child protective services systems, Taylor started keeping her own bees while working and attending a fellowship program in New Haven. 

“After a day of work, the only place I wanted to be was with my bees,” says Taylor. “It became a meditative practice for me. They’re their own form of therapy.”

The Huneebee Project became Taylor’s opportunity to combine her love of beekeeping with her professional background. 

The students are responsible for about 30 hives, although they are working on expanding to 50 hives by the end of summer 2023 across seven official garden sites in New Haven neighborhoods where the youth live. They also now have community hive checks where locals can join in checking on and learning about bees. It’s one more place to create a network and sense of community for the teens and the bees.

“It was really important to have the gardens where youth live so they would be accessible and create spaces where they can have a sense of ownership,” says Taylor.  

Students are responsible for taking care of 30 bee hives throughout the greater New Haven area. (Photo: Grey Kenna)

Over the years, the programming has evolved as participating youth have given feedback. The program runs each summer and is purposefully small, with about six students taking part. The students must attend at least 75 percent of the workshops to graduate and are matched with a mentor who provides encouragement throughout the program and helps with practicalities such as transportation and breakfast.

“These are kids that are often not going to school or are struggling to get out of bed or are extremely socially anxious. The mentors encourage them, they help with transportation and even get them something to eat. The intensive individual attention is so important,” says Taylor.

Students don’t even get into a bee suit for the first weeks; instead, according to Taylor, they spend time forming relationships, understanding their feelings and their body’s responses to emotions, such as fear, and identifying what they need to regain a sense of control. 

“We have these 15-, 16-year-olds who are used to pretending to be tough, but it’s hard to pretend to be tough around the bees, and it allows for more authentic conversations around fear,” says Taylor. “When someone with a trauma history has that fear response activated but can regain a sense of control, I believe that is healing.”

Since starting the project, Taylor has watched students heal, graduate with professional skills they take with them to college or new jobs and blossom.

For Alex Guzman, who graduated from the program in 2019 and continues to work at the Huneebee Project as junior bee instructor while attending college, the experience helped teach her skills she continues to use today.

“I’ve learned how to socialize in a more professional setting, and I’ve also gathered a lot more patience,” says Guzman. “I have been handling my mental health, learning when to set a boundary or take a break when I need to and take a breather.”

After participating in the program, Maria Roman hopes to keep her own bees one day. (Photo: Grey Kenna)

They’re skills she’s learned from interacting with others in the program and the bees themselves. 

“You have to be really patient when you approach bees and to take your time,” says Guzman, “kind of like when you’re dealing with any living thing. Everything I’ve been doing with the bees has contributed to developing those [socialization and patience] skills.”

Students also learn practical office skills, such as using a printer or a coffee maker, that are easy to take for granted but intimidating if you’ve never used  them.

“I look at myself now and, sometimes, I feel like I’m ready to be a boss,” says Roman, who adds that she would someday like to have her own house with bees that she could take care of and eventually, if she has children, teach her kids about.

The post For These Teens, a Unique Beekeeping Program Teaches About Much More Than Honey appeared first on Modern Farmer.

The caterpillars do not just destroy trees. They can do damage to people as well, thanks to the minuscule white hairs that they shed, blowing in the wind or remaining after the caterpillars have departed. The rash can arrive after picking up branches or leaves with moth hairs in them or simply by being outside near an infested tree on a breezy day. The red welts of the rash itch and burn and, unlike poison ivy, the bumps can grow to the size of a dime. The itching and burning can last for more than a week. In some cases, the hairs of the caterpillars can cause respiratory distress, and if you have pre-existing respiratory issues, these can be extremely serious. For farm workers, foresters and anyone laboring outside in Maine, this is one of the hazards of the job.  

Brown tail moths first arrived in the US in the late 19th century by way of Cape Cod. For nearly twenty years, the population exploded across New England, Quebec and the Tri-State area. However, the introduction of a parasitoid fungus and aggressive applications of obsolete sprays such as arsenate of lead brought the population under control by the 1920s. Minor outbreaks would occur throughout the 20th century. The parasitoid fungus, entomopohaga aulica, thrived in the cool, wet New England weather, keeping the moth population under control until 2015, when an outbreak began along the Maine coast. This outbreak has stayed largely within the state, which has entomologist Tom Schmeelk, of the Maine Forest Service perplexed. “There hasn’t been a clear definitive answer for why it has not expanded back to its reach in the early 1900s.”

However, it is suspected that Maine’s increasingly warm and dry spring weather has played a role. The fungus that proved so effective at controlling the moths naturally in years past requires a cool, wet spring to thrive. The moth larvae thrive on warmer and drier conditions, and Maine has suffered moderate to severe droughts since 2015. With no natural agents to combat them, the brown tail moths have thrived.  

When Sarah Pike purchased Tops’l Farm in Waldoboro, ME, in 2015, she had  a vision of a glamping getaway and farm destination. What she didn’t know was that many of the beautiful apple trees lining the property’s walk to the Medomak River had already succumbed to brown tail moth infestation. “Losing many of the ancient apple trees on the farm within the first few months of our stewardship to the brown tail moth, felt like the property lost a really important part of its story.”

Pike began to combat the moths. She attempted spraying the apple trees and tall oaks that surrounded her farm, but the moths kept returning. Eventually, Pike began a regimen of daily nest clipping and caterpillar squishing. The most effective way to combat the moths is by clipping their nests out in late fall or early spring, when the caterpillars are dormant and the nests are most noticeable. Barrier bands around tree trunks can also prevent caterpillars from attacking a tree, as long as any existing nests are thoroughly removed.

A tree after brown tail moths devoured it. Photography courtesy of the author.

While brown tail moths are generalists, they do seem to prefer fruit trees and oak trees, putting a strain on Maine orchards. Bob Sewall is the steward of Sewall Organic Orchard, the oldest organic orchard in the state. Sewall has been tending his orchard for more than forty years. Brown tail moth caterpillars first began to appear in his trees four years ago, and he quickly found them to be more destructive and persistent than any pest he had faced before. Having never sprayed his trees, his first focus was to prune the larval clusters out.

“We took over 1,200 nests out,” Sewall says. “And we still didn’t get them all.  It was a losing battle; if you miss one nest, that can defoliate an entire tree.”  

Fortunately for Sewall and Pike, sprays are available that are effective against the moths. Sewall uses a combination of BT and Entrust organic insecticide, and he now sprays his orchard twice a year with this mix. But spraying is ineffective in a 65-foot-tall oak tree, and the moth population across the state continues to grow.

While some urban towns have organized volunteer efforts to clip out the moth nests on town property, the battle against brown tail moths has been left largely in the hands of individual landowners. In a state covered in majestic, old-growth trees that reach up to the sky, clipping and spraying both require a tree crane, which has greatly hampered individuals’ efforts to fight the outbreak. The Maine Forest Service suggests that if hiring a crane is cost prohibitive, a collection of neighbors might combine resources to have their area treated, but such co-operation does not always occur.  

While Maine scientists hope for a natural decrease in the moth’s population, they are also working on other mitigation methods, such as the release of the female sex pheromone, which confuses the males and disrupts the mating cycle. “This would be highly specific to the brown tail moth, so no non-target effects on beneficial insects,” says University of Maine Forest Entomologist Angela Mech. “It is eco-friendly and has the potential to be highly effective for a large area.”

While we wait for new mitigation methods or a return of the moth killing fungus, Mainers will continue to suffer from the brown tail moth rash. Long sleeves and limiting outdoor time can help reduce the risks of the rash developing, but for farmers who have to be outside every day and often work directly in moth-infested areas, topical ointments and sprays are available that specifically treat the brown tail moth rash and can provide relief.  

“We are still in an outbreak,” Mech says. “We will be itchy this summer.”

The post Brown Tail Moth Outbreak Makes Life Itchy for Maine Farmers appeared first on Modern Farmer.

Some have claimed that farmed salmon is naturally gray, suggesting they are malnourished, and consumers should avoid eating it for this reason.

These claims are utterly false and perpetuate a myth that can confuse or scare salmon consumers. The truth is that the color of salmon fillets is red due to naturally occurring molecules called carotenoids, such as astaxanthin. This is part of a natural diet of wild salmon, and is added to the food for farmed salmon.

Carotenoids are common in the natural world among different plants and animals. Salmon have it in their diet from eating algae, krill and other small crustaceans. Carotenoids are essential pigments produced by bacteria, fungi, algae and plants. Animals cannot make carotenoids on their own, so those found in animals are either directly accumulated from food or partly modified through their own metabolic reactions.

The color of salmon fillets is from the same pigment that we see in shrimp, lobsters and even flamingos.

The color of wild salmon’s flesh comes from naturally occurring carotenoids in their diet, which need to be added to the feed of farmed salmon. (Photo: Shutterstock)

Why are salmon red?

The red color of salmon flesh — their muscle tissue — is a unique trait in several types of salmon. It’s an evolved genetic trait that likely occurred as an evolutionary mutation and distinguishes salmon from other types of fish.

While the flesh color is a direct result of carotenoids in their diet, there is also a unique genetic component. The gene beta-carotene oxygenase 1 is responsible for carotenoid metabolism, and most likely explains flesh color variation in salmon.

Carotenoids, including astaxanthin, can be manufactured and added to the diet of farmed salmon. These can be produced synthetically on a commercial scale, or from natural sources, such as algae; the freshwater green microalgae, Haematococcus pluvialis, is a popular source. H. pluvialis is an excellent source of astaxanthin for farmed salmonids like rainbow trout.

More importantly, astaxanthin is a health-sustaining molecule that plays a critical role in fish health and survival, and has benefits for humans too.

Health benefits to fish

Astaxanthin is a potent antioxidant, meaning it prevents some types of cellular damage. Antioxidants have multiple health benefits for both fish and humans.

Astaxanthin’s antioxidant activity is 100 times higher than vitamin E, which is a popular antioxidant in human supplements. In fish, it has many important functions related to immunity and reproduction.

Research has shown that astaxanthin has a significant impact on reproductive performance in many different fish species, like egg production and quality, sperm quality, fertilization rate and survival of newly hatched larvae.

Salmon eggs are red or orange in color because of the accumulation of astaxanthin, which plays a beneficial role in protecting the eggs.

Salmon eggs in the Adams River, B.C.—the carotenoid astaxanthin gives the eggs their distinctive color. (Photo: Shutterstock)

New Canadian research is underway to investigate the role of dietary astaxanthin in inflammatory control and immunity in Atlantic salmon. Overall, studies have consistently found that dietary astaxanthin is an important nutritional factor in stimulating growth and maintaining health and survival of aquatic animals.

Health benefits to humans

In humans, astaxanthin’s antioxidant and anti-inflammatory effects have been shown to protect against stress-associated and inflammatory diseases. There are also potential effects on various diseases, including cardiovascular diseases, cancer, diabetes and obesity.

Additionally, pre-clinical trials predict that astaxanthin may regulate intestinal microbiome and glucose metabolism. People can get astaxanthin in their diet by eating salmon or other salmonids like trout as well as shrimp, crab, krill or supplements.

Astaxanthin in farmed fish feeds is not only for pigmentation, but is also a necessary nutrient for health and reproduction in fish. In turn, it increases the nutritional value of the fish fillets for consumers.

Stefanie Colombo is Canada Research Chair in Aquaculture Nutrition at Dalhousie University.

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

The post The Color of Farmed Salmon Comes from Adding an Antioxidant to Their Feed, with Benefits for Everyone appeared first on Modern Farmer.

The vaccine is intended to help honeybees—one species of pollinators at risk of extinction, facing habitat loss and other threats—fight back against American foulbrood, a destructive and deadly disease that can wipe out entire bee colonies. American foulbrood spreads through spores and kills bees when they’re still in a pupal stage, essentially eliminating the bee larvae, turning it dark brown and rotten.  

But this new vaccine works by cutting off the spores at the source. Rather than injecting the bees with miniscule syringes, the vaccine is fed to the bees and ultimately made into a sugar substance, irresistible to bees: royal jelly, like bee candy. Beekeepers would mix the vaccine into food fed to the worker bees, who then secrete royal jelly for their queen to feast on. Once the queen has ingested the vaccine, it will spread to her ovaries, where developing bee larvae will be exposed to the vaccine, and they will be born with immunity to the disease. 

The vaccine comes from a partnership between Dalan Animal Health and the University of Georgia’s College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences.  “People don’t understand how hard it is to keep bees alive,” said Keith Delaplane, professor of entomology and director of the UGA Bee Program, in a statement. “I can’t imagine a more frightening branch of agriculture to be in. It takes ceaseless attention.” 

Once it’s widely released, the vaccine could be a lifesaver—literally—for beekeepers, who presently have to rely on antibiotic treatments with limited success. Trevor Tauzer, owner of Tauzer Apiaries and a board member with the California State Beekeepers Association, said in a statement that such a vaccine would prevent other treatments, such as burning entire infected colonies, as well as all equipment used in their handling. “If we can prevent an infection in our hives, we can avoid costly treatments and focus our energy on other important elements of keeping our bees healthy.”

The vaccine currently has conditional approval for two years. Dalan plans to release the vaccine to a small number of commercial beekeepers over the 2023 season. From there, Delaplane hopes to move from bacterial diseases, such as American Foulbrood, to viral infections, which are tougher to vaccinate against. “It is trickier to create inherited immunity with viruses, yet viruses are front and center in all literature about bee health problems,” he said in a statement. “They have proven to be an intractable problem—my hope is that this partnership can lead to a viral vaccine.”

The post First Vaccine for Honey Bees Approved by USDA appeared first on Modern Farmer.

Bats have lived with coronaviruses for millennia. Details are still hazy about how one of these viruses evolved into SARS-CoV-2, which causes COVID in humans. Did it go directly from bats to humans or via another animal species? When? And why? If we can’t answer these questions for this now-infamous virus, we have little hope of preventing the next pandemic.

Some bat species are hosts for other viruses lethal to humans, from rabies to Nipah to Hendra. But their supercharged immune systems allow them to co-exist with these viruses without appearing sick.

So, what can we do to prevent these viruses emerging in the first place? We found one surprisingly simple answer in our new research on flying foxes in Australia: Protect and restore native bat habitat to boost natural protection.

When we destroy native forests, we force nectar-eating flying foxes into survival mode. They shift from primarily nomadic animals following eucalyptus flowering and forming large roosts to less mobile animals living in a large number of small roosts near agricultural land where they may come in contact with horses.

Hendra virus is carried by bats and can spill over to horses. It doesn’t often spread from horses to humans, but when it does, it’s extremely dangerous. Two-thirds of Hendra cases in horses have occurred in heavily cleared areas of northern New South Wales and southeast Queensland. That’s not a coincidence.

Now that we know how habitat destruction and spillover are linked, we can act. Protecting the eucalyptus species on which flying foxes rely will reduce the risk of the virus spreading to horses and then humans. The data we gathered also makes it possible to predict times of heightened Hendra virus risk—up to two years in advance.

Many Australians are fond of flying foxes. Our largest flying mammal is often seen framed against summer night skies in cities.

These nectar-loving bats play a vital ecosystem role in pollinating Australia’s native trees. (Pollination in Australia isn’t limited to bees—flies, moths, birds and bats do it as well). Over winter, they rely on nectar from a few tree species such as forest red gums (Eucalyptus tereticornis) found mostly in southeast Queensland and northeast NSW. Unfortunately, most of this habitat has been cleared for agriculture or towns.

Flying foxes are typically nomadic, flying vast distances across the landscape. When eucalypts burst into flower in specific areas, these bats will descend on the abundant food and congregate in lively roosts, often more than 100,000 strong.

But Australia is a harsh land. During the severe droughts brought by El Niño, eucalyptus trees may stop producing nectar. To survive, flying foxes must change their behavior. Gone are the large roosts. Instead, bats spread in many directions, seeking other food sources, such as introduced fruits. This response typically lasts only a few weeks. When eucalyptus flowering resumes, the bats come back to again feed in native forests.

But what happens if there are not enough forests to come back to?

Between 1996 and 2020, we found large winter roosts of nomadic bats in southeast Queensland became increasingly rare. Instead, flying foxes were forming small roosts in rural areas that they would normally have ignored and feeding on introduced plants such as privet, camphor laurel and citrus fruit. This has brought them into closer contact with horses.

In related research published last month, we found the smaller roosts forming in these rural areas also had higher detection rates of Hendra virus—especially in winters after a climate-driven nectar shortage.

Our models confirmed strong El Niño events caused nectar shortages for flying foxes, splintering their large nomadic populations into many small populations in urban and agricultural areas.

Importantly, the models showed a strong link between food shortages and clusters of Hendra virus spillovers from these new roosts in the following year.

This means that, by tracking drought conditions and food shortages for flying foxes, we can get crucial early warning of riskier times for Hendra virus—up to two years in advance.

Biosecurity, veterinary health and human health authorities could use this information to warn horse owners of the risk. Horse owners can then ensure their horses are protected with the vaccine.

Conservationists have long pointed out that human health depends on a healthy environment. This is a very clear example. We found Hendra virus never jumped from flying foxes to horses when there was abundant winter nectar.

Protecting and restoring bat habitat and replanting key tree species well away from horse paddocks will boost bat health—and keep us safer.

Flying foxes leave roosts in cities or rural areas when there are abundant flowering gums elsewhere. It doesn’t take too long—trees planted today could start drawing bats within a decade.

SARS-CoV-2 won’t be the last bat virus to jump species and upend the world. As experts plan ways to better respond to the next pandemic and work on human vaccines built on the equine Hendra vaccines, we can help, too.

How? By restoring and protecting the natural barriers that for so long kept us safe from bat-borne viruses. It is far better to prevent viruses from spilling over in the first place than to scramble to stop a possible pandemic once it’s begun.

Planting trees can help stop dangerous new viruses reaching us. It really is as simple as that.

Alison Peel has received funding from Australian Research Council, the US National Science Foundation and the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. She is a member of the Wildlife Health Australia Bat Health Focus Group and the Human Animal Spillover and Emerging Diseases Scanning working group.

Peggy Eby has received funding from the US National Science Foundation and the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

Raina Plowright has received funding from the US National Science Foundation, the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and the U.S. National Institute of Food and Agriculture.

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