This is especially true for Shannon Williams, a student at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, as she shops at her neighborhood Safeway on the west side of town. This is the closest option to South Cushman. Williams picks that store mainly for cost savings.

Across the street is a Fred Meyer grocery store. When asked what she thought of both supermarkets falling under one ownership, Williams was concerned. “It’s a bad idea. These are our two options, and Safeway is cheaper. If Fred Meyer owns both, I’m afraid they’ll control the prices.” 

The fate of food access in South Cushman turns on a proposed merger between Kroger, which owns Fred Meyer, and Albertsons, which owns Safeway. The Cincinnati- and Boise-based owners announced their $24.6-billion deal in October 2022, hoping to close by early 2024. Reaction to the proposed merger has been mixed, with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and some states threatening legal action to stop it. If successful, one company will have control over grocery prices for South Cushman. The same goes for neighborhoods like it across the country. Kroger would own 22 percent of the U.S. food retail market.

Over the past four decades, ownership over retail grocers in the U.S. has concentrated further and further. Four companies—Walmart, Kroger, Costco and Albertsons—own more than half of all grocery sales today. If Kroger goes ahead with its purchase of Albertsons, it would be just three companies that control the majority of all grocery sales in the country. 

Food deserts, too, are on an upward trend. The US Department of Agriculture (USDA) has defined urban food deserts as low-income areas where at least one third of the residents live at least one mile from a supermarket. A 2017 report shows that, since 2010, the number of food deserts in the country have increased, with estimates that almost 30 million Americans live in one. Further, 34 million Americans lack access to affordable, healthy food. Grocery corporations often say that consolidation can help counter those problems, but the evidence proves otherwise.

Photography by Shutterstock.

Less competition, higher prices

A spokesperson for Kroger tells Modern Farmer the merger “will mean long-term job security, higher wages, expanded benefits and a strong unionized workforce for associates. The merger will also mean lower prices and more choices for fresh food for customers and more investments in our communities. The alternative is lose-lose, undermining good union jobs and putting our communities at risk of higher prices, fewer options, shuttered stores, and more food deserts.”

It’s a common claim in the industry.

Yet, several studies, including the USDA’s own review, found that consolidating grocery stores results in higher prices in markets that have few options. In a letter sent to the Federal Trade Commission, the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) states, “there is no evidence the projected efficiencies” in the proposed Kroger-Albertsons merger will pass savings on to consumers. According to Sara John, a senior policy scientist at CSPI, this comports with basic economic principles. “When there is less competition, that leads to higher prices.”

This is especially concerning with food prices already at a historic high. Competition between a Fred Meyer on one side of the street and Safeway on the other generally helps consumers. If Kroger and Albertsons merge, a shopper might find their grocery bill changes, even if the stores’ names do not.

We’ve been here before

In a food desert, a significant portion of a neighborhood’s residents lack a supermarket within one mile. That distance cuts access to healthy foods, as low-income folks often lack reliable transportation, especially in difficult weather. The inconvenience alone forces shoppers to choose shelf-stable food, rather than fresh produce.

One study found that “the availability of supermarkets has been associated with more fruit and vegetable intake, more healthful diets and lower rates of obesity.” Kroger and Albertsons state that the merger will “expand access to fresh and affordable food.”

That’s true; supermarkets do provide access to a range of foods. Whether those options are available to low-income neighborhoods, however, depends on their price and store location.

Advocates, legislators and state attorneys general are worried about Kroger closing stores, especially any Albertsons close to an existing Kroger. The FTC, as well as state attorneys general, are currently reviewing the deal under their antitrust authority to ensure that mergers don’t harm consumers. To address those concerns, (as well as other fears of a monopoly), Kroger and Albertsons announced it will instead sell more than 400 of its stores to a third party, C&S Wholesale Grocers. 

To some experts, this is cold comfort. Lina Khan, the current head of the FTC, wrote a law review article in 2017 outlining how divesting stores has not solved monopoly concerns.

History gives us a stark example. When Albertsons purchased Safeway in 2017, the FTC signed off on the deal because Albertsons promised to sell stores to a small chain called Haggen. Haggen was ill equipped to take on so many locations, went bankrupt, closed stores and even sold some of them back to Albertsons. As a result, says Khan, “the level of consolidation resulting from this [2017] merger will be greater than what the government has planned and approved.”

The Kroger-Albertsons’ plan has similar issues. In 2017, selling to Haggen failed because it was unable to manage an increase to 164 from 18 stores. Today, selling to C&S will increase their stores to 413 from 160.

Sara John at CSPI is also worried about the disproportionate effect of closures on low-income neighborhoods. She predicts that grocers “will close their worst-performing stores, which has the biggest impact on low-income communities, on average.”

During another merger between Amazon and Whole Foods, there was speculation that Amazon’s capabilities make ordering online easier. However, many low-income folks, especially in Alaska and rural areas, lack reliable internet access to take advantage of delivery options.

Photography by Shutterstock.

Communities respond

Considering the potential harm to consumers, the FTC has an open investigation of the proposed deal. The commission can review mergers for anticompetitive practices, and if it finds problems, it can negotiate with the merging entities to avoid them. If all cannot agree, the FTC can attempt to stop the merger under federal laws that prohibit unfair business practices.

State attorneys general, such as those in Arizona and Washington, are also conducting their own investigations. Nevada has an open survey to take the pulse of consumers. The US Senate will be holding an antitrust panel this month. 

Other stakeholders are organizing to stop the merger. For example, a nationwide Stop the Merger coalition brings together consumer protection, privacy and labor advocates, to name a few. One member of the coalition, Katy Milani, is associate director for policy and advocacy at the Institute for Local Self-Reliance. She is calling on the FTC to enforce existing laws. “In the ’50s and ’60s, when the FTC enforced the antitrust laws on the books…independent grocery stores flourished,” Milani told Modern Farmer in an email. “We had a dynamic food ecosystem—we didn’t have food deserts.”

There are also more local efforts. In Alaska, an effort by the Alaska Public Interest Research Group (AKPIRG) led to the state’s Republican and Independent US senators, as well as its Democratic House representative, to urge the FTC to oppose the merger. Some (no less cold) communities, such as Chicago, are organizing to form publicly owned grocery stores.

Kroger states the merger will conclude in early 2024. To the shoppers outside Safeway in Fairbanks, consolidation often feels out of their hands. Still, movements to slow consolidation are gathering steam. To continue that movement, we have to recognize that consolidation does not, as the grocers claim, create oases.

This story has been updated to include a statement from Kroger. 

The post How Supermarket Mergers Affect Food Deserts appeared first on Modern Farmer.

“It’s really fun when schools buy those apples and the kids get to learn about it,” says Kate Wheeler, Farm to Fork specialist for the Utah State Board of Education.

Elliott apples end up in state school lunches thanks to farm-to-school programs, initiatives that have expanded in the last few decades as a way to support children’s nutrition and regional agriculture. And it’s not just in Utah. With schools back in session, many school districts will be putting food from local farms on kids’ lunch trays. Farm-to-school programs can manifest in many different ways, but one pathway that has been increasingly adopted in recent years is Local Food Purchasing Incentives (LFPIs).

LFPIs are state-led programs allowing schools or early care programs to receive financial reimbursement for buying food from local producers. Buying local can be cost-prohibitive, so these types of programs are on the rise after calls for institutional support through state policy. Between 2001 and 2019, eight states and Washington, D.C. established programs across the country. Since the onset of the pandemic, seven additional states have adopted LFPI programs. These initiatives aim to increase local food purchasing for school meals, while providing children with nutritious food, strengthening local economies and helping school districts overcome cost barriers to local food.

No two of these programs are identical. But a question they all have to answer is what does “local” food mean, anyway?

Bespoke programs for states

In New York, School Food Authorities (nonprofits in charge of cafeterias) that spend 30 percent of their lunch budget on in-state food get an extra $0.19 cents back for every reimbursable lunch. Maine’s Local Foods Fund reimburses school districts with a dollar for every $3 spent on select local food, with a $5,000 cap for the school year—$5,500 if schools participate in a local foods training. Maine’s program began in 2001, but it received bolstered funding in 2019 and has been expanding and adjusting since then. 

Some farm-to-school programs include farm education for students. (Photo: Shutterstock)

“It’s a constant evolution,” Robin Kerber, implementation manager for Full Plates Full Potential, an organization addressing food insecurity for children in Maine, said in a recent webinar hosted by the National Farm to School Network and Michigan State University’s Center for Regional Food Systems. “Every year, we’re reassessing what’s working, what’s not working, because we want it to work for everybody.”

This growing tide of LFPIs includes overlaps with other farm-to-school initiatives. One program distributes USDA funds to states to buy local food for schools. Additionally, some states are embracing a universal school meal model, wherein all kids eat for free at school, regardless of family income. Some of these include incentives for local food purchasing. This fall, students in Minnesota are experiencing the results of a universal meal policy for the first time.

“If there’s anything I can share, it’s that each incentive program is uniquely designed and administered,” says Cassandra Bull, policy consultant and host of the webinar series.

What is “local” food?

In practice, “local” is hard to define. Utah, for example, considers local to be anything Utah-grown. Wheeler says this approach isn’t without nuance. For example, schools can be reimbursed for Utah-made sour cream and cheese, but in the processing plants, milk from across state lines gets blended together to make these products. Utah counts these products as local as long as the product is made with 50 percent Utah-sourced milk. 

“The other piece that we’ve struggled with a little bit is, is local a value in and of itself?” says Wheeler. “Or do we want to be promoting specific types of values-based procurements where we’re looking at how the food is produced and how it’s grown and worker treatment and all of those other values that sometimes we associate with “local” but aren’t necessarily inherently part of just buying something that’s close to you.” 

But while big western states can equate “local” with “in-state,” things get trickier in the smaller states. New Hampshire is currently in the process of trying to pass a bill to support an LFPI. But only seven percent of New Hampshire is agricultural land, and many of the farms that it does have are dedicated to growing trees or hay. 

Three children having lunch. (Photo: Shutterstock)

Eight of New Hampshire’s 10 counties border other states or Canada, and Stacey Purslow, program coordinator for the New Hampshire Farm to School Program within the University of New Hampshire Sustainability Institute, says three of their school districts have students that live in one state and go to school in another. What this means is that the definition of “local” is going to be different than “from New Hampshire.”

“We don’t grow that much here, and we have cross-state school districts,” says Purslow. “So, we wanted to support New England agriculture as well.”

Conor Floyd, grant programs manager for Child Nutrition Programs in the Vermont Agency of Education, acknowledges that defining local food is not cut and dry.

“One really thorny issue for us in our process was, what counts as local?” says Floyd. Vermont uses a definition created by the state legislature. Beyond having a succinct definition, there’s also the matter of enforcement. “The question for me was, who’s checking to make sure that this is local or not?”

Tracking local purchases

In order to be compensated, schools need to keep track of local purchases. This can be tedious, but it can provide an accurate picture of local procurement in the state and show farmers what schools are buying.

In Utah, schools have a tracking spreadsheet to use throughout the year. If they don’t keep track along the way, it can result in confusion and difficulty when it comes time to submit, says Wheeler.

“Some of our folks who are buying local are also not submitting for reimbursement because they feel like it’s too much work,” says Wheeler.

Harvest New York, an organization that helps grow the farm and food economy in New York state, created a database to help School Food Authorities track down qualifying products and get the paperwork they need.

“We need to make sure that the products are actually from New York, but the paperwork can’t be so onerous that our school food authorities don’t want to participate in it,” says Cheryl Bilinksi, local food systems specialist and Farm to School lead at Harvest New York.

Cows in a field in Utah. (Photo: Shutterstock)

For Wheeler, the success stories keep her going. New this year, Utah have established cooperative contracts with seven ranchers across the state. Every school in the state can order and be reimbursed funds for local beef or bison.

“The ranchers are so excited, and the schools are so excited,” says Wheeler. “Just seeing something work makes you realize it can continue to work, and that’s definitely one of the things that keeps you going.”

The post States Want to Put More Local Food on School Lunch Trays. What Does That Mean, Exactly? appeared first on Modern Farmer.

Kraft, who runs a small chicken farm in Richland County, Montana, sent the money on the last day. And it might have worked out fine, as it has with other horses she has purchased after having only seen them online. But Nacho was coming to her via a vast network of greedy horse traders who prey on good-hearted people who want to give these equines a better life—and the sellers who oftentimes think they are sending their companions to loving new homes. 

A couple of days after they sent the money, Kraft and her husband were surprised to hear frantic banging on their door. The transporters who picked up Nacho told them the horse was in such bad shape when they got him that they rushed to Montana from the facility in Arkansas as fast as they could in fear the horse would go down in the trailer and not be able to get up. Nacho looked defeated, his head hanging low, old pressure sores on his bony hips, body propped against the side of the trailer to stay upright. “We were heartbroken and devastated,” says Kraft, who bought the horse for her daughters, who were 11 and 14 at the time. “The girls saw him come off and were bawling.”

They managed to get the horse out of the trailer. He quickly went down and didn’t get up for 12 hours. The family medicated him and checked to see if his legs could still move. Kraft’s farrier—a specialist in equine hoof care—came out a few days later. When he touched the sole of Nacho’s hoof with his rasp, it immediately bled. The soft tissue in his hoof was so inflamed, a condition known as laminitis or founder, that his coffin bone had rotated all the way down to the sole. An intense fight to save Nacho’s life began.

Fountain Hill claims to be “helping horses who are actually in immediate danger.” In fact, according to experts, Kraft is one of countless animal lovers before her to get sucked into a scam that not only doesn’t save horses from slaughter but actually pulls more horses into a cruel corner of the horse-trading world. These traders claim to offer animal lovers a chance to save horses from so-called “kill pens.” But they are endangering them throughout the entire process.

“Once they get into the auction/slaughter pipeline, so much of the callousness and cruelty starts there with no vet care and misrepresenting the horses to be rideable, healthy and young—anything to sell them,” says Wendy Thomson, the administrator of multiple social media pages to document and warn about kill pens. “Many times people have been sent horses straight out of the kill pens having strangles, salmonella and other diseases, basically on death’s door.”

After arriving at Crystal Kraft’s home, Nacho went down and didn’t get up for 12 hours. (Photo courtesy of Crystal Kraft)

The problem is so widespread that the American Horse Council released a statement on the scams: “These ‘bail-out’ or ‘ransom’ operations are run in conjunction with feedlot operators who buy animals at low market prices. These order brokers then post the animals on social media platforms with exaggerated price tags and an arbitrary deadline implying a day of shipment across an international border where the horses will be processed for human consumption.”

Slaughtering horses for their meat has essentially been banned in the United States since 2007 and some states have even banned the transportation of equines for slaughter. The number of horses getting shipped across the borders for slaughter has been dropping substantially over the past decade, from 148,848 in 2014 to 20,933 last year—a nearly 50-percent decrease from 2020. 

In the past month, two bills were reintroduced in the House and Senate that would stop these scams from happening. The Save America’s Forgotten Equines (SAFE) Act (S.2037/H.R.3475), which will be tacked onto the 2023 Farm Bill if successful, would permanently ban the slaughter of horses for human consumption in the United States and prohibit the export of horses for slaughter abroad.

Polls have found that 83 percent of Americans oppose the slaughter of US horses for human consumption. Yet, there are a number of equine industry organizations that are against the SAFE Act, including the American Quarter Horse Association, American Veterinary Medical Association, and the American Association of Equine Practitioners, which states that slaughter is a humane alternative to “a life of discomfort and pain, and possibly inadequate care or abandonment.”

The current system is not comfortable or painless. Investigations have found horses crammed together in trailers for more than 35 hours at a time with no food or water. And there’s no guaranteeing that the slaughter methods used are humane at all. “Half of these may be going to fairly decent export-approved abattoirs, but the other half are going to local abattoirs and being killed by punctilla, which is stabbing the horse in the back of the neck,” animal behavior expert Dr. Temple Grandin, a proponent of horse slaughter, told Horse Journals. 

To prevent this from happening, United Horse Coalition created an Equine Resource Database with a list of resources for horse owners in need, from castration services and veterinary grants to hay banks and euthanasia programs and clinics. “A lot of these horses are coming from situations where it has nothing to do with the horse and everything to do with the owner’s life circumstance, like losing a job or declining health,” says UHC director Ashley Harkins. “We want to head it off at the pass, so horses don’t end up at auction.”

It’s hard to know exactly where Nacho came from before arriving at Fountain Hill. A horse flipper could’ve found him for sale in a Craigslist ad saying something like, “Hoping to find forever home where he will be given the attention deserved.” He could have been sent to local auction by his previous owners, then listed for several hundred dollars more later that same day. Or he could have been passed around from auction to auction and dealer to dealer, each one earning their cut, as the laminae in his hoof became increasingly inflamed and broke down.

“The girls saw him come off and were bawling,” says Kraft, who bought Nacho for her daughters. (Photo courtesy of Crystal Kraft)

In many cases, the threat of imminent slaughter is a lie. 

Nacho shouldn’t have been eligible to transport to slaughter, according to USDA regulations, which require that the horse is able to bear wear on all four limbs and walk unassisted. Kraft’s vet and farrier told her that Nacho had been foundering at least a month before she got him and there was only a slim chance he would’ve been able to make it to the slaughterhouse standing up.

Jason Sexton, a horse dealer in Tennessee who does send horses to slaughter, says that most slaughter-bound horses are unrideable adults or far past their prime. He is disdainful of the dealers that inflate their prices and prey on buyers’ emotions with bail prices far higher than what a horse will fetch on the normal auction market. Around the time Nacho, who was calmly ridden in his sale video, was purchased for $2,500 last year, Sexton, who prices horses fairly, had advertised a beautiful but unbroke toffee-colored paint Quarterhorse for $850. 

“It’s a scam,” Sexton told me by phone. “Very few even have a deal to ship to plants.”

Unlike many of those fake so-called kill pens, Fountain Hill actually does have connections to slaughter plants. The page is moderated by Loren Austin Stanley, who is married to Boots Stanley. The Stanley family is one of the most prolific slaughter horse exporters in the country.

They also have a track record of abuse. Boots pled guilty to charges of aggravated animal cruelty in April 2018 after posting a video of himself and a friend slitting a dog’s throat, killing it on Snapchat, for which he received no jail time. In 2016, his father Greg and cousin Michael were charged with battery for hitting an animal rights activist in the face with a wood board. 

When Kraft found out who she had been dealing with, she was dismayed. She called the Stanleys seeking answers, but says she’s been ghosted for the past year.

For 22 days, the Kraft family cared for the horse that had been dumped at their door. They cut foam pads to cushion his feet every day. Kraft’s daughters spent their days showering him with affection, hoping that would give him the will to pull through. None of it was enough.

When they made the decision to euthanize Nacho and end his misery, Kraft was furious and heartbroken that her daughters were forced to watch the gentle animal they nursed suffer from the day they met him until the moment they put him down. “It’s not something I would wish on anyone,” she says. “I was so naive to the whole kill pen thing.”

The post Kill Pen Scammers are Preying on Horse Lovers appeared first on Modern Farmer.

The groups are referring to a policy rider in the Fiscal Year 2024 Agriculture Appropriations bill. The rider prevents the USDA from “promulgating, implementing, or enforcing” its proposed rules to strengthen the P&S Act.

The P&S Act is intended to level the playing field, promoting competition for farmers and ranchers. But it’s been notoriously undermined for decades, resulting in a handful of corporations running the vast majority of meat and poultry production, and using lobbyists to influence legislation. This consolidation of power and profit means that many meat producers are at the mercy of these conglomerates, which have come under scrutiny for price fixing in the past. During the height of COVID-19, amid supply chain breakdowns, beef and hog ranchers were struggling, while meat packers saw record profits. 

The Biden administration has released executive orders to look into the P&S Act and promote competition in the industry, and the executives of the “big four” meatpacking conglomerates have faced harsh criticism from opponents on both sides of the political aisle. The USDA has even proposed rules that would require poultry companies to be transparent about contract terms and increase protections against retaliation from major meatpacking corporations. 

However, the rider attached to the FY24 act would prevent the USDA from writing, preparing or publishing rules that could strengthen the P&S Act.  

In response, 102 groups have submitted an open letter to the House Committee on Appropriations, urging the removal of the rider. 

“This rider is an unacceptable attack on the ability of the Department of Agriculture to do its job: protecting American farmers and ranchers and ensuring fair and competitive markets,” the letter states. “Instead of carrying water for multinational meatpacking corporations, we urge the House Appropriations Committee to stand with American farmers and ranchers and reject any attempts to limit the Secretary’s authority under the Packers and Stockyards Act, or the USDA’s capacity to fully and effectively enforce it.”

Signatories of the letter include the Farm Action Fund, the National Farmers Union, National Center for Health Research, Center For Food Safety and Farm Aid, along with several state-run groups of independent cattle ranchers and farms. 

Along with the signatories, Farm Action’s chief strategy officer, Joe Maxwell, told media that the bill “is a blatant act to protect the world’s largest corporations at the expense of America’s farmers and ranchers.”

The bill passed the markup stage this week, with a 37-24 vote along party lines. However, either the House or the Senate could strike the wording from the bill during their individual votes.

The post Farm Groups Urge Legislators to Allow Changes to the Packers and Stockyards Act appeared first on Modern Farmer.

Previously, SNAP requirements stated that “able-bodied” adults 18-49 years old without dependents had to show they were enrolled in a job training program or worked for at least 80 hours a month in order to receive assistance. The legislation, signed into law by President Biden earlier this month, stretches that age range to 54 years old, although veterans, the homeless and young adults who were previously in foster care are exempted. The change is expected to be implemented gradually, according to the USDA. In October 2023, adults aged 50-52 will have to abide by the new rules. By the fall of 2024, adults up to 54 will have to adhere to new proof-of-work standards. 

Republicans who were involved in finalizing the debt ceiling legislation, notably House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, plugged the new work requirements as a win for welfare reform, by “putting people back to work.”

But advocates such as Gina Plata-Nino, deputy director for SNAP at the Food Research & Action Center, reject those assertions. She says there’s simply no evidence to indicate a proof-of-work requirement is an effective policy measure in growing the workforce. 

“This largely comes down to a misunderstanding of how difficult it is for low-income Americans to access these programs and, unfortunately, it’s going to be the cause of food insecurity rates spiking,” she says.  

Approximately one in 10 Americans experience food insecurity, but food banks and charities across the country have recently noted an uptick in demand. Last month in Boston, the line for the American Red Cross Food Pantry stretched the length of two football fields, exceeding some of the worst periods during the pandemic, while simultaneously reaching the second-highest monthly traffic since it opened 41 years ago. In April, more than half of the shelves were bare at the Atlanta Community Food Bank. And in central Ohio, Reuters reported that the number of households seeking food bank aid has increased by nearly half since last year. 

Photography by Ringo Chiu on Shutterstock

Plata-Nino points to a study from the American Economic Association, analyzing SNAP’s work-reporting requirement. It found that the reporting requirements do not “increase economic self-sufficiency.” The research also showed a 53-percent reduction in program participation. On the contrary, she notes that when SNAP benefits were issued during the pandemic, it reduced poverty by 9.6 percent and child poverty by 14 percent in states with emergency allotments.

Additional studies have shown that every $1 invested in SNAP benefits yields between $1.50 and $1.80 in economic activity during economic downturns.

The debt ceiling legislation falls on the heels of a Congressional decision to end pandemic-era emergency allotments to the SNAP program, which will impact more than 41 million Americans. Ed Bolen, director of SNAP state strategies at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, notes this earlier decision and says the additional changes to SNAP will likely push more marginalized groups farther into a state of poverty.

“It’s very unfortunate to see that in negotiations on what’s required for the government to keep its debt obligations and pay its bills, people think it’s worth taking away a program that provides basic food assistance to low-income folks,” he says. “The older you get, the more health challenges you experience and the harder it is to find a job.” 

The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities released estimates that some 750,000 adults aged 50-54 will lose food assistance as a result of increasing the age on the proof-of-work requirements. 

If individuals are unable to find work, and they are subsequently cut off from the program, it could exacerbate or create health challenges, says Bolen. This creates a dangerous cycle for already marginalized Americans. He adds that the new exemptions will be as much of a burden on eligible groups as they will be on the state agencies who will be tasked to fill out paperwork and provide documents to check all the boxes. 

Both Bolen and Plata-Nino believe the success of the exemption will largely depend on the resources of individual states, the training provided to caseworkers and how well the USDA co-ordinates and collaborates on the roll-out. 

Modern Farmer contacted the USDA to inquire about next steps and co-ordination plans with states to ensure eligible groups are supported in the exemption process. 

“The Fiscal Responsibility Act contains important exemptions from work requirement time limits for homeless individuals, veterans, and youth aging out of foster care, who often face significant barriers to employment that make it difficult to meet work requirements,” a USDA spokesperson wrote in an email. 

“We are working diligently to review the legislation, communicate with state agencies, work with our federal partners at the Departments of Housing and Urban Development, Veterans Affairs, and Health and Human Services, and issue guidance as expeditiously as possible to meet the parameters of the law.”

Despite the debt ceiling legislation being signed into law, there is a handful of Democrats who also oppose the SNAP changes and say they will continue to put up a fight. On June 7, House Democrats who sit on the Agriculture Committee also took a stand against the bill’s measures. 

Rep. David Scott, ranking member on the committee, told Modern Farmer he will “fight tooth and nail” to oppose any “legislative vehicle” that makes access to food more difficult. 

“We have the resources and farming capacity to feed every single American. We should take pride in SNAP and our ability to lift millions out of poverty by ensuring they have access to food until they’re able to stand on their own two feet,” Scott wrote in an email, where he noted that 43 percent of all SNAP participants are children. “Politicians who want to increase hunger in America should expect fierce resistance. I won’t stand for it.”

Although Scott did not elaborate on how he plans to rectify the recent SNAP changes, those who are part of advocacy and food policy circles say there’s an opportunity to do so in the 2023 Farm Bill. The Food Research & Action Centre has already proposed a slate of measures that includes expanding SNAP benefits for immigrants, people with disabilities and college students with lower incomes and eliminating three-month time limits on SNAP eligibility for certain working-age adults who cannot document sufficient hours of work, allowing benefits to be used at more food retailers. 

The Congressional Budget Office’s recent baseline projects that the next Farm Bill in the United States will cost US$1.51 trillion, making it the most expensive one in the country’s history, with 80 percent of the spending accounting for nutrition assistance. 

The post Changes to SNAP Benefits Spark Fear of Hunger Crisis appeared first on Modern Farmer.

“Back when we were young buckaroos, we would plow and disc and get a crop of weeds to come up [and then] knock them down,” Glenn said.

Frank and his younger brother John would hop on the tractor and start pulling their blue plow through the fields in February and March. Then they would go back with a tiller and turn over the topsoil before planting corn, soybeans, wheat and oats.

Today, the Glenns are still running their family farm in Columbia, Missouri, growing corn, soybeans and hay. But about 25 years ago they transitioned to a majority no-till operation, no longer digging up the first few inches of soil before planting. Their fields are now filled with big clumps of dirt and old roots from previous harvests. 

Matthew Backer spreads anhydrous ammonia onto a field on April 4 at Wise Bros Inc. in Kingdom City, Mo. (Photo: Kate Cassady/Columbia Missourian)

No-till farming helps decrease erosion and runoff. It’s one of several regenerative farming methods that help farmers’ fertilizer stay in fields and not run off into nearby waterways.

Rob Myers, director of the University of Missouri Center for Regenerative Agriculture, said less than half of Missouri farmers are using a regenerative method such as cover crops, no-till or integrating crops and livestock. Cost is one of the factors holding farmers back, Myers said. 

Farmers use fertilizer to build their soil’s fertility and help increase crop yields. But less than half of the nitrogen fertilizer applied is taken up by the crops. These excess nutrients wash into the Gulf of Mexico, creating a dead zone where fish and shrimp cannot live. But nutrient pollution is not just an environmental problem—it’s a business one.

[RELATED: Fertilizer Companies Cash in While Farmers and Communities Struggle]

Farmers are responsible for the cost of implementing alternative practices, and they bear the risk if it doesn’t work. Bruce Shryock, a corn, soybean and wheat farmer in Auxvasse, said farmers are stuck between science and the economy. 

“If you spend more and then don’t make any more, then you’re in trouble,” Shryock said.

Farmer finances on the line

A report from the University of Missouri found that net farm income in the state is projected to decrease by 14 percent this year, while the U.S. Department of Agriculture anticipates national farm income to fall by a fifth. Meanwhile, farmers’ input costs have increased 55 percent since 2020. 

Fertilizer accounts for about a third of these annual costs, and it now costs farmers nearly 73 percent more than it did in 2020. But farmers continue to buy it because it offers a good return on investment, said Ray Massey, a professor in MU’s College of Agriculture, Food and Natural Resources. 

“The economics said that you can make more money if you have higher yields,” Massey said. 

Farmers also must factor in other input costs like seed, pesticide, equipment and fuel. Crop revenue has increased but the prices for inputs have continued to rise, so their margins have stayed about the same, Frank Glenn said. 

 “It seems like they (the ag industry) don’t want farmers to make any money,” he said.

Frank Glenn operates a tractor while planting corn on April 11, 2023 at Glendale Farm and Stables in Columbia, Mo. The multiple screens monitor the mechanics of the tractor and where the corn has been planted. (Photo: Maya Bell/Columbia Missourian)

Some farmers coped with the price increases by cutting back on the amount of fertilizer they apply. Glenn said he and his brother went from applying 180 pounds an acre to 120 pounds last year. He said they were lucky crop prices were high or they might have not been able to survive the fertilizer price hike. 

“Jesus, it makes you wanna puke,” his brother John Glenn said. “It’s so expensive.“

Promoting intentional fertilizer use

Because fertilizer is expensive, farmers want to get the most bang for their buck, said Andrea Rice, director of research, education, and outreach at the Missouri Fertilizer Control Board. 

The agency enforces Missouri fertilizer laws, conducts nutrient research and helps farms implement alternative farming methods. 

Rice said high costs and current profit margins discourage farmers from applying more than the recommended amount, noting that farmers lose money if the fertilizer washes off their fields. 

Heavy rain or snow melt washes fertilizer into waterways, polluting water and creating toxic algae blooms in lakes and rivers. Ultimately, some of this pollution travels downstream to the Gulf of Mexico and creates a hypoxic area called the dead zone at the mouth of the Mississippi River where water oxygen levels plummet. Any wildlife in these areas must move or suffocate.

“The Gulf hypoxia situation—that’s not something that any farmer would want to cause,” Rice said. But she said the problem did not appear overnight and is going to take time to solve. 

Farmers have several ways of measuring how much fertilizer they need to apply to their fields. This includes soil testing and looking at past harvests to compare their yield to the amount of fertilizer they applied. 

The Glenns use a satellite to create a grid of their fields and take samples from each block on the grid. They can see how their soil structure varies and pinpoint the exact nutrients each block needs. 

Miscalculations such as applying too much fertilizer, applying it on frozen ground or overwatering fields will increase the runoff potential. 

Sarah Carden, a senior policy advocate at Farm Action, an advocacy group opposing corporate influence in agriculture, said the industry is set up to support conventional farming, which disincentivizes alternative practices. 

It’s easier for conventional farmers to qualify for crop insurance, Carden said, but it gets harder when a farmer wants to decrease the amount of fertilizer they use.

“It becomes a lot riskier for a farmer to participate in alternative forms of production,” Carden said. 

Making change happen

One method farmers can adopt to minimize the harmful effects of fertilizer is to plant cover crops, which help decrease erosion, hold moisture in the ground and reduce weeds. 

Integrating cover crops was a learning experience for Shryock, the farmer from Auxvasse. In his first year planting cover crops, a wet spring spurred his rye to grow to about eight feet tall. Getting that tall rye out of the field was a challenge, as it wrapped around his planter shaft and damaged the bearings on his equipment.

“I cussed it that first year,” he said. 

Shryock has since learned to kill rye when it’s about two feet tall. He saw the benefits of cover crops after that first year as it helped his soil and decreased runoff. 

Shryock also no-tills in addition to cover crops. These practices take more time, he said, but they’ve been worth it. He cut back on the amount of fuel he uses, but he still has to buy seed and pesticide and must spend time planting the cover crop. Shryock thinks more people would plant them if there was an incentive to help cover their costs. 

Frank Glenn plants corn in a minimum-till field on April 11, 2023 at Glendale Farm and Stables in Columbia, Mo. (Photo: Maya Bell/Columbia Missourian)

Rice said education can help increase the adoption of cover crops, though some farmers are used to doing things the way they and their families always have. 

She first advises new clients to do soil sampling. Then, she discusses the type of fertilizer they are using, the amount, application times and if they are using cover crops. 

“If we take those things and we do a little bit at a time and we keep encouraging and keep educating over time, there will be a big impact,” Rice said.

The MU Center for Regenerative Agriculture has recently been awarded two grants: $25 million to offer financial incentives for farmers to implement regenerative practices and $10 million to research how to improve varieties of cover crops. 

The grant will pay farmers to adopt grid sampling, cover crops and livestock grazing systems to decrease nitrogen runoff. It also will fund programs to help farmers learn about these methods and their benefits.

“It takes time to keep making changes and improvements in agriculture,” Myers said. “But I think we’re headed in the right direction with these practices.” 

This story is part of The Price of Plenty, a special project investigating fertilizer from the University of Florida College of Journalism and Communications and the University of Missouri School of Journalism, supported by the Pulitzer Center’s nationwide Connected Coastlines reporting initiative and distributed by the Mississippi River Basin Ag & Water Desk.

The post Facing High Fertilizer Costs, Farmers Still Struggle to Use Less appeared first on Modern Farmer.

Last year, he didn’t plant any. 

Dasher, 56, said it was because of elevated fertilizer prices. Like many farmers, Dasher is finding it hard to stay afloat. “The American public just doesn’t understand what kind of beating our group (of farmers) has been taking over the years,” he said.

Although fertilizer prices have fallen from their all-time high in March 2022, when they spiked up to 3.5 times higher than two years before, the commodity is likely to remain costly for some time, continuing to squeeze the food production system.

Meanwhile, the fertilizer industry has yielded record profits. Canada-based Nutrien Ltd., the world’s leading producer of potash fertilizer, saw profits increase 1575 percent between 2020 and 2022, to $7.7 billion. Florida-based Mosaic Co., one of the largest US producers of potash and phosphate fertilizer, netted $3.6 billion in 2022, a 438 percent increase from 2020. CF Industries, an Illinois-based fertilizer company, made $3.2 billion in 2022, a 955 percent increase from 2020.

The eye-popping figures have heightened concerns about consolidation in the fertilizer industry, even as the Biden Administration moves to boost domestic fertilizer production.

When asked for comment, Mosaic said in an email that the fertilizer business is cyclical and thus has volatility in prices. CF Industries did not respond to requests for comment. Nutrien did not provide a statement by press time. 

Global disruptions help drive up prices

There are a few clear reasons for the recent record fertilizer prices. The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 caused disruptions to the supply chain and labor shortages that hindered production of natural gas, a major ingredient in fertilizer. 

Then came a series of natural disasters, such as the February 2021 deep freeze in Texas, which froze natural gas wells and drove up demand for residential heating. In August that year, Hurricane Ida disturbed natural gas and fertilizer production in the Southeast.

Another factor was a reduction in exports from China, the world’s leading producer of phosphate, a chemical element that is a key component of fertilizer.

The war in Ukraine further tightened the market as Western countries sanctioned Russia, the world’s top fertilizer exporter. Disruptions in natural gas flow from Russia led to spikes in European natural gas prices and forced several European fertilizer plants to close or cut output.

Even low water levels on the Mississippi River contributed to price increases, as it limited the amount of fertilizer that could be shipped by barge.

“There were a myriad of reasons why we were seeing this big run up in fertilizer prices. It’s not just one thing. It was literally a whole menu of things that were seemingly going in the wrong direction if you were looking to obtain fertilizer,” said Chad Hart, an agricultural economist at Iowa State University.

Several of these factors are referenced in a study Hart co-authored that was hailed by The Fertilizer Institute for providing “the best analysis data will allow to date.” But some argue the study omits a large factor of the price increase: market power as a result of consolidation.

Allegations of market manipulation

Farm Action is a Missouri-based nonprofit organization that advocates for competitive food and agriculture systems across the United States. Co-founder Joe Maxwell believes consolidation in the fertilizer industry has led to market manipulation.

Since 1980, the number of fertilizer firms in the United States has fallen from 46 to 13. In 2019, just four corporations represented 75 percent of total domestic fertilizer production: CF Industries, Nutrien, Koch and Yara-USA, according to Farm Action. And just two companies supply 85 percent of the North American potash market: Nutrien and Mosaic, according to the Federal Trade Commission.

“These companies took advantage of their dominant position in a marketplace and increased commodity price to the farmers in an effort to price gouge and extract all the wealth that they could from that supply chain at the very roots: fertilizer,” Maxwell said.

[RELATED: Facing High Fertilizer Costs, Farmers Still Struggle to Use Less]

In 2021, the United States imposed tariffs on fertilizer imports from Morocco and Russia following petitions from Mosaic and CF Industries. Growers widely derided the move. A letter from the National Corn Growers Association to Mosaic accused the company of “irresponsible” practices that “manipulate the supply curve” and “dictate price to farmers.” 

Later that year, Farm Action wrote a letter to the Antitrust Division of the Department of Justice accusing the fertilizer industry of using its “monopoly power” to fix prices, requesting an investigation. Iowa Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley seconded that call, but no investigation has yet been announced. 

Mosaic said in an emailed response that since the tariffs took effect, foreign producers importing fertilizer into the North American market has increased, and by extension, made the market more competitive.

In a company Q&A, a Mosaic official, Andy Jung, said the tariffs are not the reason for the price increase and that the current market is not driven “merely by a ruling for fair trade.”

The effect of consolidation

President Joe Biden issued an executive order in 2021 promoting competition in the economy, including the agriculture sector and the fertilizer industry specifically. “Consolidation in the agricultural industry is making it too hard for small family farms to survive,” the order reads.

In response to the order, the US Department of Agriculture collected comments from agricultural producers on competition, access to fertilizer and supply chain concerns. From more than 1,600 responses, 72 percent described concerns about the power of fertilizer manufacturers and 62 percent described what they saw as unfair price-setting practices.

While the study from Iowa State University does acknowledge market consolidation, it dismisses it as a factor of price increase. Hart said he sees the consolidation, but can’t prove manipulation in such an unstable time.

“You just can’t separate out what’s happening and whether there is a competition problem in this market or not,” Hart said.

While many factors have made the ingredients for fertilizer more expensive, the increase in profits is disproportionate to the increase in production costs – basically, companies are making a lot more money than they’re spending. 

In 2022, Nutrien’s cost of goods sold increased by 24 percent compared to the year prior; however, its profits were up 142 percent from 2021. CF Industries saw its profit increase by 212 percent in 2022, while the cost of manufacturing and sales was only up 28 percent. For Mosaic, profits were up 120 percent in 2022, but cost of sales only increased by 46 percent.

Although corn farmers enjoyed the highest corn prices on record in September 2022, their profits were offset by increased fertilizer prices.

“These [fertilizer] corporations are well aware of their leverage and have used the cover of consecutive global crises to raise prices far beyond those demanded by necessity,” Farm Action said in a comment to the USDA.

Farming communities hit hardest

Small farmers, business owners and rural communities have struggled to pay bills amid these record costs and industry profits.

Gary Hamilton owns a small business in northeast Missouri called Frankford Farm Supply, where he sells fertilizer and farming equipment. He started the company about 30 years ago.

Hamilton’s store is down the road from one of many corporate-owned Nutrien stores scattered across rural America. Hamilton said that Nutrien’s prices are lower and he just can’t compete as a small family-owned business with less than 15 employees.

When fertilizer prices go up, Hamilton’s credit limit doesn’t. This means he may not be able to serve as many customers as he used to, and those customers have to turn to other stores. 

“Because of the high prices, I actually lose business. And when I lose business, then I have less money to pay for health insurance, fuel, salaries, wage increases, day-to-day things that businesses need to survive,” Hamilton said.

Fertilizer prices are expected to fall eventually, with lower demand from farmers helping to rebuild supply, experts say. But it will be hard to lessen dependence on fertilizer anytime soon. While farmers and small business-owners may complain about fertilizer prices, they will continue to pay for it, Hart said, because their business—and the food supply—depends on it.

This story is part of The Price of Plenty, a special project investigating fertilizer from the University of Florida College of Journalism and Communications and the University of Missouri School of Journalism, supported by the Pulitzer Center’s nationwide Connected Coastlines reporting initiative and distributed by the Mississippi River Basin Ag & Water Desk.

The post Fertilizer Companies Cash in While Farmers and Communities Struggle appeared first on Modern Farmer.

After a year of intense negotiations, the states along the Colorado River have reached a deal to solve one of the most complex water crises in US history. The solution to this byzantine conundrum is deceptive in its simplicity: pay farmers—who collectively use 80 percent of Colorado River deliveries—to give up their water.

Representatives from Arizona, Nevada, and California announced on Monday that they had agreed to reduce their states’ collective water usage by more than 3 million acre-feet over the next three years. That equals around a trillion gallons, or roughly 13 percent of the states’ total water usage. Under the terms of the deal, cities and irrigation districts in these so-called “Lower Basin” states will receive around $1.2 billion from the Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act, or IRA, in exchange for using less water. Most of the reductions are likely to come from farming operations.

Many had anticipated a more painful resolution to the crisis. Rather than taking mandatory cuts and losing out on billions of dollars from crop sales, irrigators in the southwest will get millions of dollars to reduce their water usage for just three years—and will cut their usage by less than half of what federal officials demanded last year.

This rosy outcome is only possible because of a wet winter that blanketed the river basin with snow and stabilized water levels in its two main reservoirs, Lake Powell and Lake Mead. Thanks to the ample runoff, the states could lower their target enough that the federal government could afford to compensate them for almost all of it.

This deal also resolves a key dispute between Arizona and California, the two largest water users on the river, which have clashed over how to respond to the water shortage. California has argued that Arizona should take the most cuts as the most junior user on the river, while Arizona argued that the cuts should be spread more evenly between all the states. The disagreement caused negotiations to drag out for months, and it’s only thanks to the payout from the federal government that they reached an accord.

These compensated cuts are larger than anything the river states have ever implemented before, but they are temporary, a Band-Aid for a crisis that is not going away any time soon. When the three-year agreement expires in 2026, the states will have to come back to the table again and address the elephant in the room: If water use is growing, and the river’s size is shrinking, some people are going to have to make do with less—not temporarily, but for good.

“This is a step in the right direction but a temporary solution,” said Dave White, a professor at Arizona State University who studies sustainability policy. “This deal does not address the long-term water sustainability challenges in the region.”

The basic blueprint of the deal is not new. Federal and state agencies in the Colorado River basin have tried to pay farmers to use less water before, but they have had difficulty scaling up these compensation measures. That’s in part because many farmers view the measures as an affront to their industry, even when they’re compensated. When a group of states in the river’s Upper Basin relaunched a dormant conservation program earlier this year, offering farmers money to leave their fields unplanted, just 88 water users across four states ended up participating.

The other issue is that conserving water is expensive. In order to convince farmers to plant fewer acres, officials need to give them more money per acre-foot of water than they would have made from selling crops on a given field. In California’s Imperial Valley, the “salad bowl” region that grows almost all the nation’s winter vegetables, irrigation officials have paid growers to invest in technology that makes their farms more efficient. But farmers in the valley have balked at the idea of taking money to leave their fields unplanted, especially as vegetable prices have remained high.

“Water is a valuable asset, and I think people are nervous about parting with it, because it kind of suggests that you don’t really need it after all,” said George Frisvold, an extension specialist at the University of Arizona who studies agricultural policy. “I think there’s real concern that this is voluntary now, but it could come back and bite you.”

The Biden administration has resolved those issues for the moment by offering a very generous price for conservation under the new deal. The compensation arrangement in the new deal works out to about $521 an acre-foot on average—three times the price in the Upper Basin pilot program and almost twice the conservation rate in the Imperial Valley’s program.

Frisvold says these payments will be hard to maintain over the long term.

“We have a bunch of IRA money to pay for this right now,” he told Grist. “But is this going to be an ongoing thing? It’s kind of up in the air.”

Until recently, these experimental conservation programs were just that—experiments. But over the past two years, as a once-in-a-millennium drought has all but emptied out the river’s two main reservoirs, the river states have scrambled to cut their water usage and stop draining the river. It is all but impossible to do that without using less water for agriculture.

The Biden administration kicked off the scramble last summer by delivering an ultimatum to the river states. While testifying before Congress in June, a senior official from the US Bureau of Reclamation ordered the states to cut their water consumption by between 2 and 4 million acre-feet, or as much as a third of the river’s normal annual flow. The administration threatened to impose unilateral water cuts if the states couldn’t reach a deal on their own.

The states tangled for months over who should shoulder the burden of reducing water usage. The so-called Upper Basin states of Colorado, Utah, Wyoming, and New Mexico pointed the finger at Arizona and California, which together consume the majority of the river’s water. Meanwhile, representatives from California insisted that legal precedent shields the Golden State from taking cuts and that Arizona should bear the pain. (It isn’t clear whether the other four states on the river’s Upper Basin will make any corresponding reductions.)

In the end it was a very wet winter rather than a diplomatic breakthrough that helped ease tension between the states. Thanks to historic snowpack in the Rocky Mountains, it’s likely that water levels at Lake Powell and Lake Mead will stabilize this summer, even if just for a few months. This plentiful runoff has made the worst-case outcomes for the river much less likely and has given the states some breathing room to negotiate smaller cuts.

The new target was just small enough to make voluntary conservation feasible with the money from the Inflation Reduction Act: In the final hours of the debate over the bill last year, Senator Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona negotiated a $4 billion tranche of funding for “drought response.” That money will anchor the deal for the next three years, but it’s unclear whether payments will continue after that.

The big question now is what happens at the end of 2026, when the conservation deal will expire and when states and tribes will gather to negotiate the river’s long-term future. At that point, the river’s water users will once again debate the big questions that this deal has allowed them to punt on: How much water use can a shrinking river support? Who should use less water to account for the river’s decline? How can the government make whole the tribal nations that still don’t have their water?

Even amid the relief surrounding Monday’s deal, some water officials were already looking ahead.

“This proposal protects the system in the short term so we can dedicate our energy and resources to a longer-term solution,” said Brenda Burman, the manager of the Central Arizona Project water authority, which delivers water to Phoenix and Tucson, in a press release. “There’s a lot to do and it’s time to focus.”

This article originally appeared in Grist. Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Learn more at Grist.org.

The post At Last, States Reach a Colorado River Deal: Pay Farmers Not to Farm appeared first on Modern Farmer.

Render of Indigo Commons courtesy of CultivateLAND

The pair ran that farm for three years as Houston built up around them. Eventually, the outskirts of the city were encroaching on their farm, and the pair ran into bureaucratic issues. They wanted to renovate restrooms for the growing farm team, but they weren’t able to get the right building approvals. If they wanted to improve the road on their property, they were looking at hundreds of thousands of dollars; they weren’t making that even with the success of their CSA. 

And then, Hurricane Harvey hit in 2017. While the nearby Brazos River didn’t flood, the guys lost everything. All of their crops. They took it as a sign to rethink their plans and how they were making use of the land. If developments were going up around them left and right, well, they could jump on that bandwagon, too. But they would do it as farmers first, part of the recent trend of farmers rethinking how best to use their land in the face of uncertain economic futures.

That’s when Indigo was born. 

“We’re urbanists at heart, as well as the farmers,” says Snodgrass. With that in mind, Snodgrass and Garrett planned out a new community, using their existing land as a base. The goal is to have 750 residential homes, commercial and public areas, even a lake—all centered around a 42-acre working farm. 

Render of Indigo Commons courtesy of CultivateLAND

After a few months of grading and readying the area, they broke ground at Indigo two weeks ago. This summer, the water and sewer lines will get installed, along with the critical infrastructure and paving. Then, in the fall, builders will start on the homes, with the grand opening currently scheduled for early 2024. 

Throughout the building process, the pair says the goal is to weave nature and agriculture into the fabric of the neighborhood from the ground up. For example, the lake is also the drainage facility of the community. “We’re investing more than you would into a typical drainage facility, in order to make a wildlife habitat for birds and fish,” says Snodgrass. Investing in the natural benefits of the lake in turn “make it a more engaging amenity for residents who want to go there, for birdwatching, and they can fish in the lake, they can ride in a kayak, instead of it just being a typical retention pond.” 

But it’s the 42-acre production farm that will anchor the community. Six acres will be devoted to vegetable production, with community plots and farmer’s markets. The other 36 acres will house livestock, both broiler chickens and hens, and traditional row crops, with some fun additions such as watermelon thrown in. If this sounds like a big undertaking, it is. But, for Garrett, it’s also exciting. “Farmers by nature are stubborn,” he says. “When we started our development journey, we were both stubborn. And we knew we were just going to have to do all of these things to accomplish our vision, to build the community that we’d be proud of.” 

Render of Indigo Commons courtesy of CultivateLAND

While not everyone who lives in the community will necessarily be connected to the farm, residents will have access to the community garden plots and the vegetables produced onsite through a farmer’s market. Snodgrass and Garrett hope that many of the farm’s workers would also choose to live in the community and that people want to participate in community gardening projects. 

That means, the guys say, that they want to make the units affordable within the growing Houston real-estate market and provide enough of a community and active neighborhood to entice people. They are looking at building vertically, committing to two- or three-story homes, rather than sprawling bungalows on huge lots. “Then you can condense everyone into a smaller space, and they can then walk to everything they need to get to. And we can reserve huge portions of the property for wildlife habitat and agriculture,” says Snodgrass. It’s a form of conservation development, where city planners start at the center (a main street or a community square) and build out from there, keeping in mind the facilities people will need as the neighborhood grows. 

But when they initially tried to explain their vision to financial planners, there was resistance. “Our biggest challenge every step of the way was financial people and city managers saying ‘well, where has this been done before?’ We think we can be that new model,” says Snodgrass. “We’re farmers. We’re focused on the biodiversity within our habitats, interplanting, crop rotations and all those things that really [impact] how soil systems work. And we want to get our soil into healthy cycles. We take the same approach when we look at development, and I think it is shocking to some people.” 

Still, Snodgrass says he and Garrett have worked hard to maintain their optimism and ethos throughout the project so far, and they will continue into the future. Instead, with this first agriculture-focused community as a model, they can tweak the formula and keep going. “Indigo will not be our last community.”

The post Building an Agri-hood: When the Development Revolves Around the Farm appeared first on Modern Farmer.

On busy weekends, crowds of locavores routinely swell to 15,000. “Customers come from all over,” says Gha Xiong, owner of Xiong Farm. He’s one of nearly 150 regional farmers, ranchers and food purveyors who set up Sunday shop in the sprawling parking lot, in clear view of the Prairie-style dome and spire designed by Frank Lloyd Wright.

For nearly two decades, Xiong and his wife, Kou Yang, have made the weekly, three-hour trek from their family farm outside of Fresno, where they grow a diverse range of Hmong and Asian produce such as bitter melon, bok choy and daikon. While business is normally brisk, an overly wet and drawn-out winter drowned their low-lying fields and delayed spring planting by nearly six weeks. Consequently, recent offerings have been slim. “People say, ‘You sold out so early today.’ No, [it’s just that] we don’t have enough to fill our tables,” he says, gesturing to the thinning pile of greens.

The Sunday Marin Farmers Market is the third largest in California. (Photo: Naoki Nitta/Modern Farmer)

For California farmers, relentless precipitation and a late spring are just the latest in a mounting list of challenges exacerbated by extreme climate, spiraling costs and increased environmental regulations. But the pressures exact a larger toll on independent producers like Xiong, many of whom lack the resources of the industrial giants that dominate the landscape. As a result, the state loses an average of four small-scale farms every day.

The recently proposed California Local Food Producers Bill (AB 1197) aims to stop the hemorrhaging by giving independently owned farms an official state designation and better support those who grow food for their communities. Although the bill isn’t directly tied to funding or other assistance, proponents say the legal definition would help target resources, state programs and future policies to help bolster the local food economy.

Small-scale producers play a vital role in supplying not just farmers markets but restaurants, community-supported agriculture (CSA) programs and food hubs, says Jamie Fanous, policy director at Community Alliance with Family Farmers (CAFF), a California-based, non-profit advocacy group and a major bill sponsor. “This is a path to designate who they are, so we can figure out how to protect those facing the highest pressures.”

A top-heavy landscape

The bill assigns values to “Local Food Producers,” defining them as independently owned farms in California that operate on less than 500 acres and sell more than 75 percent of products to their local community. (“Local,” however, remains a less-precise category, extending to the whole state.) The California Cattlemen’s Association, a non-profit trade group representing the state’s beef and dairy interests, has opposed the acreage limit, citing greater land needs for grazing cattle. In response, Assemblymember Gary Hart (D), who introduced the bill, is working to create a separate threshold to accommodate ranchers. “I am confident we will find the common ground to earn [their] support,” he told Modern Farmer in an email.

According to the 2017 Census of Agriculture, farms measuring less than 500 acres make up the backbone of U.S. agriculture, accounting for 85 percent of the overall landscape. Although that number inches up to 90 percent in California, two-thirds of its growers operate on less than 50 acres, helping to make the country’s biggest food producer also its most diverse.

Yet the largest five percent of properties make up more than half of the Golden State’s nearly 25 million acres of cropland, while 37 percent of fields and pastures are leased out by non-farmers. “So there’s a pretty significant power imbalance, where the majority of land is really owned by a few [parties],” says Fanous.

That shifts the foundations of California’s agricultural system away from individual and family growers to large companies and absentee landlords, many with weak ties to the local community. Often backed by speculative investment and run by farm management companies, she adds that these deep-pocketed operations are better equipped to weather the challenges of farming. 

California faces a particularly unique set of issues that heighten the impacts. Like the rest of the nation, the state contends with extreme weather and temperatures, pest infestations and decreased crop resilience. “But our farmers are constantly dealing with the whiplash of drought, wildfires and floods,” says Fanous. “It seems like every two to three months, there’s something new.”

Additionally, development pressure gobbles up 50,000 acres of cropland every year. And for independent growers, the majority of whom lease their fields, skyrocketing land prices continue to take a larger bite out of their profit margins; Xiong, the Fresno farmer, reports that the rent on his five-acre farm has nearly tripled in the last decade.

“And we only anticipate things to get worse as a result of the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act,” adds Fanous, referencing California’s strict limits on pumping groundwater. Enacted to replenish the state’s overtapped basins, research shows that the regulations could end up fallowing as much as 900,000 acres of farmland along the way.

Many small-scale growers—immigrants and historically underrepresented groups in particular—lack robust safety nets, says Fanous. Only eight percent of California farms receive public subsidies, few carry crop insurance and government aid is often laden with paperwork, bureaucracy and delayed payouts. That leaves them highly vulnerable to consolidation, which, she notes, has ramped up in recent years, further tipping the balance of power in favor of big industry.

Labels matter

“It often feels like we go from one [crowdfunding] to another, just so we can keep farmers in California,” says Andy Naja-Riese, chief executive director of the Agricultural Institute of Marin (AIM). The non-profit operates nine farmers markets throughout the San Francisco Bay Area, including its flagship at the Marin County Civic Center, drawing more than 350 farmers, food purveyors and artisans from 40 California counties. They also serve 47,000 shoppers who use CalFresh—California’s version of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP)—annually.

A recent survey reveals that this past winter’s storms hit AIM vendors hard: More than 75 percent missed market days, with a quarter experiencing property damage and 40 percent losing inventory. “The majority of producers rely on the markets and other local sales outlets to make their living,” says Naja-Riese. With many operating on razor-thin margins, “missed days and delayed sales have a huge impact on their business.”

Crop Swap LA operates three micro farms located in residential yards. (Photo courtesy Crop Swap LA)

In the past decade, California has seen nearly a fifth of its farmers markets and a third of its certified producers vanish. Giving local producers a legal designation is a key step in reversing the trend, says Fanous. “In order to protect a community, you need to first define [them], then map them to know where they are.”

The Farmer Equity Act, for instance, set the foundation for promoting equitable agricultural policies by identifying socially disadvantaged groups. Similarly, a local food producer designation allows effective inclusion or exclusion in measures such as water restrictions, grant and relief programs and technical resources, adds Fanous. “We could utilize this definition to exempt these producers from X, or prioritize for Y when it comes to, say, water or land issues.”

The label is every bit as relevant to urban growers and their communities, says Jamiah Hargins, executive director of Crop Swap LA, another bill supporter. The South Los Angeles-based CSA operates three micro farms located on slivers of residential yards. At just over one acre, Crop Swap LA grows a range of produce such as leafy greens, tomatoes and okra and distributes them weekly to 70 families within a tight, one-mile radius. The hyper-local system, says Hargins, ensures subscribers—many from underserved communities of color—with direct and reliable access to fresh, affordable and sustainably grown food.

Urban farms are an important investment in not just food security but community well-being and the local economy, says Hargins. “But in a city like LA, [real estate] is a money game,” he says, of the relentless threat that development poses to their existence. “So, hopefully, the bill will create a solid structure that helps us hold onto and guarantee our gains.”

While California grows most of the country’s produce, “the whole food system is set up to support industrial agriculture,” adds AIM’s Naja-Riese. “We can create better standards for what it means to feed your local community and put some meaning behind that.”

The post California’s ‘Local Food Producers’ Hope Proposed New Label Will Boost Support  appeared first on Modern Farmer.