Now ranchers around the country are trialing a new technology, virtual fencing, to manage animals and their land. A Norwegian company called Nofence is one of the first companies making this fence available to ranchers in the United States. There are several other systems also piloting their products, including Vence, eShepherd and Corral Technologies. 

Virtual fencing supplies ranchers with a collar solar or battery charged and uses a web-based app to remotely monitor and control where livestock graze. The rancher can use a smartphone, tablet or computer to draw paddock boundaries, and the collars are equipped with GPS to track the animals’ movements throughout the day. If an animal approaches the boundary, they receive an auditory warning that intensifies as they get closer. When the animal crosses the boundary, it receives an electric pulse that is less intense than that of an electric fence. 

The technology was designed to improve environmental and economic outcomes for livestock operations, while also reducing labor costs for ranchers and maintaining animal welfare. For those trialing virtual fencing products across the country, it’s achieved more. 

“I think it’s the future and there’s a ton of potential,” says Aaron Steele, founder and co-owner of mobile grazing company Goats on the Go. “To be able to do things like graze a small hilltop for four hours and not eliminate all of the vegetative cover, it opens up an opportunity we never had before.”

Environmental benefits

Regenerative grazing—or closely managing where and for how long animals forage—is a farming practice that can improve soil health and plant diversity. Ranchers think virtual fencing helps them be more efficient. Each new boundary drawn by a rancher moves livestock onto a fresh paddock, allowing grazed pastures time to recover as livestock feed in a new location. 

“We can move the goats an unlimited number of times a day if we want to,” says Adam Ledvina, owner of Iowa Kiko Goats and Blue Collar Goatscaping. “In a better world, you move your animals every day. And the more often you can move them, the better you are.”

For conservationists, it may also help a declining habitat. The United States has lost more than 50 million acres of grasslands in the last 10 years, and groups such as The Nature Conservancy and their partners are trialing virtual fences as a tool for conservation and grazing operations. 

Grasslands need stimuli from grazing to encourage plant growth and recycle nutrients into the soil, but the ecosystem also needs time to recover to decrease soil erosion. Virtual fencing enables land managers to be precise and adaptive in their livestock grazing activities so native plants thrive in pastures. 

“That’s one of the definite benefits to the soil, having animals on the land,” says Scott Haase, a farmer from Minnesota. “The livestock impact is what most fields have been lacking for the last 75 years.”

Megan Filbert, an adoption program manager at Nofence, uses the Nofence app with her herd of Kiko goats. The white icons represent each collared animal within the virtual boundary. (Photo credit: Robb Klassen)

Animal benefits 

Physical fences require ranchers to make frequent trips to their fields to check on their livestock and the stability of the fences. The mobile app connected to the virtual fence collars distributes real-time data on the rancher’s herd, providing information on animal health and location. The collar technology makes it so ranchers can see the current status of the animals anywhere and anytime—as long as there is an internet connection. 

“It could be the first thing you do in the morning and the last thing you do at night to make sure all the animals are doing their job and everyone is healthy,” says Ledvina. 

Virtual fencing also allows livestock to live more stress free with less human interaction. When animals are exposed to frequent stressors, it can cause an increased susceptibility to disease, decreased feed intake and reduced fertility.

In addition, the technology has even helped save animals’ lives by letting ranchers know when an animal stops moving or a signal is lost. 

“I have already saved animals from death because of the data being transmitted from the collars,” says Steele. “Farmers have a much better idea of the current well-being of their animals at any time of day than they’ve ever had before.” 

Steele recalls an incident that happened with another rancher participating in the Nofence pilot project with him. 

“He was just reviewing the data and found that one of his goats’ activity levels had declined,” says Steele. “He went and caught that goat, and sure enough, it had an injury. He only caught it in time to treat it because of the data.” 

Rancher benefits 

Virtual fencing has helped farmers monitor the status of their animals through a tap of an app, which current users of this technology says offers peace of mind. 

“If there’s a storm and a branch knocks down your fence, you wouldn’t know for a couple days, and this lets you know instantly,” says Ledvina. 

In the past, ranchers have struggled to keep livestock out of certain locations, such as bodies of water. Now, ranchers can create unique boundaries for their difficult terrain and even prevent animals from entering areas prone to flooding and wildfires. 

The fencing also eliminates hours of intensive labor. Building and maintaining physical fences requires a lot of work, including digging fence posts, replacing damaged fencing after storms and driving across pastureland to install more fencing. Ranchers report labor to be their largest expense, and virtual fencing can eliminate some of this labor. 

“I’ve got ponds and terrain to deal with, fallen trees in the wrong place, and all of those things add up,” says Daniel Faidley, operator of a cattle and goat farm in Iowa. “I don’t have piles of time.” 

Goats graze hard-to-fence terrain in Southern California. Ryan and Rianna Malherbe own this herd, and they utilize their goats for targeted grazing and wildfire mitigation. (Photo credit: Robb Klassen)

Room for improvement

Despite the suggested benefits the technology has brought to ranchers trialing virtual fencing, there are still some challenges in making it accessible to mass audiences. 

Some landowners claim virtual fencing is cheaper than investing in physical fencing, but the cost is still higher than they’d like. The individual cow collars by Nofence cost $329 each and $229 for goats or sheep, but that isn’t the rancher’s only expense. They also have to pay a monthly subscription fee that will vary depending on the size of their herd and other factors. Despite the costs, Ledvina says he believes the reduction of labor costs makes it less expensive and, therefore, worth the investment. 

The battery life of the collars is another potential concern. After their initial charge using electricity, some of these collars are charged using solar power, which means that the amount of sun they receive can affect the battery life. In the summer, animals like to seek refuge in the shade. And in the winter, there are fewer daylight hours. Steele says that, although the collars hold their charge for a long time, it can be difficult to get sunlight on these collars at all times. 

Another reason some ranchers are hesitant to try virtual fencing is a reluctance to rely too much on technology. 

“Some people like to think you’re just getting more into your phone, and I get it, I want to disconnect, too,” says Ledvina. “But I wake up every morning and I’m able to check my animals. I do it to check my livelihood.”

A look into the future

Many ranchers consider virtual fencing to be the next frontier. It’s made it easier for farmers to do things they haven’t been able to do before and gives them time to prioritize what they’ve been missing out on.

With the trial’s success, Nofence is currently considering how many collars will be available to the public for 2024, with a priority going to sheep and goat collars. Its cattle collars are expected to launch in 2025. eShepherd, produced by Gallagher Animal Management, will also be available to the public some time this year. 

For those still debating trying out virtual fencing technology, Haase says it’s worth taking a chance. 

“I think once it really takes off, people are going to do creative and surprising things with it,” says Haase. 

Jenny Melo Velasco and Kelly Wilson contributed reporting to this story.

Want to get in line for access to virtual fencing technologies? Farmers and interested readers can register interest or sign up on a waitlist to be the first to receive these collars. Here are links to the major companies on the market: 

• Nofence
• Vence
• Gallagher eShepard
• Corral Technologies

To learn more about The Nature Conservancy and partners’ projects to research how virtual fencing can help managers improve soil carbon storage, biodiversity and economic outcomes, you can read more about it here. 

The post Ranchers Embrace Virtual Fencing for Greener Pastures  appeared first on Modern Farmer.

For Audrey Speyer, founder of PuriFungi, seeing fungi blooming on cigarette butts is proof that they’re at work, doing what they do best: decomposing matter. Her Belgian start-up cultivates mycelium—the thread-like root structure of fungus—using the plastic- and toxin-laden stubs as fodder.

As digestive enzymes break down the hazardous mix, the mycelium grows into a lightweight, styrofoam-like material that gets molded into ashtrays. Distributed at music festivals and public events and in municipalities throughout Belgium, France and Luxembourg, the upcycled product, which looks like a hollowed-out wheel of camembert, brings the process full circle by reining in the world’s most discarded waste item.

Since the dawn of civilization, humans have harnessed the remarkable power of fungi—an entire kingdom of multicellular organisms that includes mold, mushrooms and truffles—to digest complex organic matter into simpler structures. Yeast feeds on sugars, for example, to produce alcohol, while certain mold strains churn out penicillin and other antibiotics. And mushrooms of all kinds sprout as they feast on crop waste, coffee grounds and horse manure.

More recently, mycologists have been unleashing fungi on common industrial and consumer waste. With a voracious appetite for environmental pollutants such as petroleum, plastics and chemicals, these natural bioreactors safely digest and transform toxins into mycelium. Along with ashtrays, the lightweight, durable and fire-resistant substrate can be molded and fabricated into an array of applications such as insulation panels, a leather alternative and even a biodegradable casket.

“Fungi are nature’s recyclers,” says Speyer. Cost-effective and low-impact, she and other mycoenthusiasts see huge potential for mushrooms to power a full-circle economy, creating a renewable material source while extinguishing common sources of toxic waste.

Mycelium breaks down the toxins in cigarette butts and grows into a styrofoam-like material that can be molded into different shapes. (Photos courtesy of PuriFungi)

No silver bullet

Mycoremediation—the practice of using fungi to clean up pollutants such as petroleum, chemicals and plastics—has long been studied as a promising solution to decontaminating oil spills, pesticide-laced soil and toxic wildfire ash. But, so far, efforts have been limited mostly to small-scale and trial applications.

“Contamination is not a straightforward problem,” says Kawina Robichaud, a mycologist at Biopterre, a Quebec-based research center specializing in bio-industrial innovation. Addressing site-specific variables—including the mix and concentration of contaminants, soil composition, climate and temperature—often requires a highly tailored approach to remediation, so “there’s no silver bullet,” she says.

One of Robichaud’s research projects explored the clean-up of a remote Yukon Territory site worthy of a Superfund designation: an abandoned waste oil dump built over an old copper mine. Besides foraging for fungi adapted to the subarctic environment, taming the stew of toxins required a larger bioremediation strategy, using local willows to concentrate inorganic contaminants such as heavy metals, as well as municipal compost, which added microbes and nutrients to help spur decomposition. (Inorganic compounds, by nature, don’t decompose but can be sequestered by organisms including mushrooms, plants and animals.)

The results were encouraging, says Robichaud, with test plots showing a 75-percent decrease in petroleum hydrocarbons. Yet, they also underscored the fact that, in nature, “fungi don’t work alone,” so site remediation tends to take “a community of organisms” to get the job done.

However, the ecosystem-based approach inherently comes with unknowns in consistency and timeline—factors that can make on-site applications a difficult business model, says Robichaud, especially in situations that call for quick and aggressive responses. “Nature takes time,” she adds. “That’s often not compatible with the world that we live in, where we want things fixed now.”

Still, the field holds clear advantages over conventional practices, which frequently involve chemical treatments and resource-intensive pumping, dredging and extraction. Using local resources to remediate waste, particularly in remote regions, also means “we’re not trucking raw materials hundreds of kilometers,” says Robichaud, “burning fuel to clean up fuel.”

For now, mycoremediation may be most effective when targeted on a singular waste source. Robichaud is currently studying the mycoremediation of retired railroad ties laced with creosote, a toxic compound used to make heavy lumber rot-resistant. The selective emphasis on one material allows for a controllable, predictable and scalable means of managing pollutants—an approach more amenable, she says, to garnering industry support.

Narrowing the scope

Because pollutant-laden waste is everywhere, narrow targets can still have huge impact, says PuriFungi’s Speyer. Take cigarette butts: With more than 4,000 contaminants, including 50 known carcinogens, “it’s a big cocktail of very bad things that spreads everywhere,” she says, noting that one stub can pollute 500 liters (132 gallons) of water. And the recent rise in smoking only heightens the need to find safe and effective ways to treat toxic waste that’s literally “under our feet.”

A designer by training, Speyer stumbled on fungi while searching for a sustainable and easy-to-cultivate material. In addition to being durable, fast-growing and adaptable to a range of applications, discovering that mycelium could render pollutants safe made it an attractive bio-based product, she says.

“Fungi are nature’s recyclers,” says PuriFungi’s Audrey Speyer. (Photo courtesy of PuriFungi)

Speyer and her crew cultivate fungi in a humidity- and temperature-controlled environment much like an indoor mushroom farm, inoculating a mix of cigarette butts and hemp with oyster mushroom spores. After the initial incubation period, they break up the substrate by hand and set the clumps into molds. Over the next few weeks, the mycelium grows as it eats away at organic pollutants and fruit mushrooms that concentrate heavy metals. As it fills into its prescribed shape, the fruits are plucked away; the final product is then heat pasteurized to completion.

Speckled with straw-like remnants of disintegrated butts, PuriFungi’s bloomy rind-covered ashtrays have steadily caught the eyes of municipal officials and event organizers looking to promote awareness—and develop outlets—for proper cigarette disposal. And as consumers learn about their provenance, it helps spur responsible behavior towards curbing litter, says Speyer.

With more reliable outcomes, waste-specific approaches to mycoremediation may make it an easier sell to industry. Robichaud’s lab recently partnered with Atelier du Partage, a Goodwill-like organization based outside of Quebec, to find an alternative to disposing the 66 percent of donated clothing that the non-profit is unable to sell—a staggering amount that totals nearly 30 tons every year. Using fungi to decompose the heaps of fabric keeps plastic fibers, fire retardants and other pollutants out of landfills and incinerators, says Robichaud. And as a bonus, the mycelium-treated threads, which retain some of their original colors, mold into shabby chic Christmas tree ornaments, making for a surprise hit among Atelier shoppers last holiday season.

With clothing and textiles responsible for 20 percent of global refuse, it’s an end-of-life solution that, at scale, could chart a new course for the high-volume waste stream.

Left: Native fungus isolated from creosote-treated wood. Right: Mycelium-treated threads molded into Christmas ornaments. (Photos courtesy of Biopterre)

The fungi-powered circular economy is also taking root in the construction industry, which produces nearly a third of the nation’s waste, contributing vast amounts of material produced from petrochemicals. Tech giant Meta has partnered with a mycoproduct company to upcycle demolished drywall from its Tennessee data center into new insulation and acoustic panels, and Lendlease, a military housing developer, is embarking on a similar venture using old asphalt shingles.

Despite the mushrooming waste problem generated by industry, the current push towards sustainable waste solutions is largely driven by external forces. But really, it’s “the [product] producers who have a responsibility to make it happen,” says Speyer. She sees the broader extension of Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) policies, which hold manufacturers responsible for collection, recycling and disposal of their products, as key to fueling regenerative waste management practices and supply chains.

Although EPR mandates have taken effect in an increasing range of countries and jurisdictions, including the European Union, Canadian provinces and a handful of US states, most focus on single-use plastics and packaging materials. Last year, the EU extended the obligation to tobacco manufacturers, although critics report that the regulations lack teeth.

Nevertheless, Speyer notes that a few cigarette companies have expressed interest in PuriFungi’s technology—although that’s posed a certain dilemma, she says, because “you don’t want to give them an excuse to keep producing more [of the same].” Ultimately, she’d like to see the development of a non-toxic, naturally biodegradable product.

While that might run counter to her current business model, “the [waste] problem is at such a massive scale,” says Speyer, that, at this point, there’s really no shortage of solutions.

The post Can Mushrooms Help Extinguish Toxic Waste? appeared first on Modern Farmer.

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

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

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

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

The high cost of fast fashion 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Emerging protein designers 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fiber growers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Soil-to-soil fiber economies

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Unbox ‘like new’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Livestock is responsible for anywhere from 11.1 percent to 19. 6 percent of greenhouse gas emissions, the majority of which come from cows raised for meat and milk products. Cows belch methane, a potent greenhouse gas that stays in our atmosphere for a much shorter time than carbon dioxide, about 12 years compared to thousands of years, but has much greater warming potential. One cow, for instance, burps about 220 pounds of methane in a year. As the planet warms, everyone from the IPCC to consumers to farmers and food producers is asking how to reduce those emissions—but what does that really mean? 

Photography submitted by Organic Valley.

“When you hear the term carbon neutral, that relates to industries that have carbon dioxide emissions,” says UC Davis professor and head of the agricultural research organization CLEAR Center at UC Davis Frank Mitloehner. “The cows are eating carbon-rich feed; they digest it, and when they digest it, they convert it to methane, and then they belch it out. So, what matters is that we manage methane and find ways to reduce it … Methane is only a problem if we don’t manage it and let it go into the atmosphere.” 

In other words, to reduce emissions from the agricultural sector, many companies and scientists believe the answer is to capture or reduce methane and nitrous oxide, the other significant greenhouse gas from the farming industry. Yet, measuring how much methane and nitrous oxide to reduce is a source of debate—in part because we don’t have a good understanding of these terms and labels. 

“One of the issues is the imprecise use of language many are interchanging between carbon-neutral and climate-neutral,” says Caspar Donnison, the author of a paper published in the journal Environmental Research Letters, on climate neutrality claims in the livestock sector. 

Donnison says that, in order to have alignment with the Paris Agreement (keeping global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius), there need to be significant methane reductions in the livestock sector, around 50 percent between 2020 and 2050. In contrast, the methane reductions proposed by some, such as studies he and his co-author scrutinized in their paper, are insufficient. Even with a proposed cut of 23 percent, livestock sectors would remain a source of very high emissions, sustaining a warming impact that is too high. 

“It is a misleading use of the term ‘climate-neutral’ that is used in these studies, since under their definition the sector would still be causing global warming,” says Donnison. To actually maintain neutrality, Donnison says, the sector has to reduce enough to offset all the greenhouse gasses and other emissions for which it is responsible. 

According to Donnison, there are large opportunities for the food sector to lower emissions, but they involve dietary shifts to plant-based foods, especially in areas with high meat consumption, and increased efficiencies in livestock production. 

Photography submitted by Organic Valley.

“About five years ago, I gave our sustainability director a goal for the farm to be carbon-neutral by the end of 2022 and expand that to the rest of the other farms that supply us by 2030,” says dairy farmer and president of Straus Family Creamery Albert Straus. The Straus family farm has been operating for more than 75 years, tucked along the coastline of Northern California. In 1994, Straus dairy farm became the first certified organic dairy farm west of the Mississippi River, and it was the first 100-percent certified organic creamery in the country.

The farm didn’t make its goal of carbon neutrality by 2022, but it is still working toward it. It has started testing a feed supplement with red seaweed, which has demonstrated a reduction in cow’s enteric methane emissions (which occur via cow burps) an average of 52 percent and as much as 90 percent, although there have been delays with availability recently. The Straus farm is one of a growing number of dairy companies, including Organic Valley and Neutral, which are trying to be climate-neutral and vying for sustainability motivated consumers in the process. But they each have different ways of going about it. 

Along with the seaweed supplements, Straus has implemented a few new pieces of tech, including a methane digester that captures methane emissions from on-farm manure that would otherwise be released into the atmosphere and converts it into electricity. They are also working with other farms that supply the creamery; in 2023, Straus launched an incentive program to incorporate the practices he experimented with and perfected on his farm, so the whole dairy creamery supply chain can be carbon-neutral by 2030.

“I think it is essential for us to create a positive environment where our farms … can address climate change, can address healthy organic food for the local populations and regional populations, and help revitalize rural communities as well,” says Straus.

Start-up Neutral, which launched in 2019 in Oregon and Washington before expanding nationally in 2021, uses carbon offsets. Carbon offsets (when a company or individual calculates its carbon footprint and then funds projects that offset climate change, such as tree planting) have become controversial over the past few years because they rely on hard-to-verify data and tend to put the burden of fighting climate change on projects occurring in the global south. Still, for Neutral, it was a way to be climate neutral from the start while working with its suppliers to reduce emissions on farms.

“Our goal is to use fewer offsets as we implement more of our carbon reduction projects,” says ​​Jake Schmitz, carbon reduction manager at Neutral Foods. “With a growing portfolio of emissions reduction projects, our goal is to cover as many reductions as possible through our own projects, resulting in a reduced use of offsets.”

To do that, Neutral is working with its farms to supplement cows’ feed with Agolin, an essential oil blend that the company says increases feed efficiency by more than four percent and reduces those burps by more than 8 percent. As Agolin helps farmers feed less, it should reduce N2O from crop production. It is also working to change the manure systems to separate solids and liquids, allowing farmers to distribute the manure more efficiently to cropland. 

Photography submitted by Organic Valley.

Organic Valley, a 1,600-farmer-owned cooperative, decided carbon offsets weren’t right for it.

“If we wanted to be carbon neutral tomorrow, we would have to buy carbon offsets because that’s how you get a lot done quickly,” says Nicole Rakobitsch, director of sustainability at Organic Valley. “Buying the carbon offsets from outside of your supply chain, though, means money goes to those projects that are not related to your commodity or the products that you’re making.”

On the facility side, Organic Valley has already pivoted to renewable electricity. Organic Valley, which has plans to be climate-neutral by 2050, decided to go with an approach called carbon insetting, which, according to Rakobitsch, means that, instead of purchasing offsets, it is using that money to invest in its suppliers and farmers.

Thanks in part to a USDA Climate-Smart Commodities grant, Organic Valley started a pilot program to provide technical assistance to farmers who want to implement a new practice, such as agroforestry, but don’t know where to start. Organic Valley pays its farmers annually per ton of carbon reduction to incentivize the farms. 

There are pros and cons to all of these reduction methods; the methane digesters that are part of Straus’s and Neutral’s work to be climate-neutral have been touted by the Biden administration as a critical part of methane reduction, but there are questions about how effective they really are. 

As the climate crisis intensifies, dairies who reduce their emissions are helpful, but only one part of an agricultural solution. As consumers look for more climate-friendly options, Donnison says to pay attention to the language companies use, to help avoid greenwashing. “It’s important to understand how companies are defining climate-neutral, and how they have calculated their emissions, as it can be misleading.”

The post Can Milk Be Climate-Neutral? appeared first on Modern Farmer.

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

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

Community solar: the Goldilocks of renewables

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The clean energy cover crop

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

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

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

Photo credit: DSD Renewables

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Effective January 1, 2024, intrastate trucks in California must be equipped with Electronic Logging Devices (ELDs), following in the steps of other states that have made similar mandates. Trucks making interstate deliveries have been required to be equipped with ELDs since 2017. 

ELDs are small devices, but the impact they’ve had on the trucking industry is monumental. Monitoring devices that track when the truck is in motion and for what duration, ELDs are largely intended to address road safety issues associated with drivers pushing themselves too far for too long. But some say ELDs are having the opposite effect and are a violation of trucker privacy and workflow.

“It just seems like the trucking industry is getting regulated out of existence,” wrote one trucker, Allen Boyd, in response to a request for comments on ELD regulation updates by the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) in 2022.

Why ELDs?

Long-haul trucking used to be a secure and respected career. Today, it’s a job with high turnover and a lack of security. Many headlines today talk about the future of trucking, which includes the possibility of autonomous fleets replacing human-driven ones at some point down the line. But the predicament in which truckers find themselves now actually goes back in time by several decades.

The Fair Labor Standards Act, which created a guaranteed minimum wage, passed in 1938. An exemption was included for truckers, so they could earn more and be more productive. But, in 1980, when the Motor Carrier Act was passed, truckers for the first time encountered Hours of Service rules, capping how many hours they were allowed to be on the job. While this is a pretty standard labor regulation, the fact that truckers still didn’t have a minimum wage created the issue as it stands today: Many truckers are paid by the mile, but they are limited in how many hours they can work. To earn a comfortable wage means there’s an implied and incentivized race against the clock. This, of course, is a dangerous combination on the open road.

ELDs are attached to the engine and can set very firm boundaries on how long the truck can be in operation and when it’s time for a mandated break. The FMCSA estimates that ELDs will lead to 1,844 fewer crashes and 26 prevented deaths every year.

The issue, says Karen Levy, PhD, associate professor in the Department of Information Science at Cornell University and author of Data Driven: Truckers, Technology, and the New Workplace Surveillance, is that ELDs don’t address what she believes is the actual root cause of fatigue-related crashes or unsafe driving.

According to Levy, these problems can be traced back to the standard pay structure for long-haul truckers, which is compensation for miles driven. There’s a common saying in the trucking industry, “If the wheels ain’t turning, you ain’t earning.” The issue with this is that there are tasks inherent to the job—getting gas, loading the truck, unloading the truck—that take place when the truck is stationary. As the saying implies, money isn’t earned during these periods, even if they take hours. This can incentivize driving longer without breaks than is safe. 

“One of the things that has really been striking to me is it can’t really be overstated how fundamentally dependent we are on this system that hardly works,” says Levy.

A truck dashboard with an ELD screen. (Photo: Shutterstock)

Not only do ELDs not solve the problem, says Levy, they could even make it worse. Firm constraints on driving time, while the pay structure remains based on distance traveled, means that drivers are implicitly encouraged to drive faster and more recklessly to maximize their mileage within the allotted time.

“We haven’t changed the economic structure of the industry or the rules,” says Levy. “All we changed is how they are monitored.”

It’s only been a few years since the 2017 mandate, but one study suggests that accident rates haven’t gotten better yet and might have even gotten worse.

One of the reasons for this, says Levy, is that it takes the flexibility out of the work. She gives a hypothetical:

Before, if you had 11 hours to get somewhere, and it takes you 11 hours and 10 minutes, it’s not a big deal. That’s just part of being on the road.

But, with an ELD, if you have 11 hours to get somewhere and taking a minute over would put you in violation, you might handle that drive differently.

“You’re probably going to drive much more recklessly, much faster, you’re not going to take the time to go get a cup of coffee if you feel like you need it,” says Levy. “You’re not going to stop and check on something that sounds weird on your truck.”

And, at the end of the allotted drive time, the trucker might not be anywhere near a place they can pull over to rest. If they drive further looking for a truck stop, they risk being in violation. In response to a request for comments on ELD regulation updates by the FMCSA in 2022, an anonymous trucker voiced their concern.

“In my honest opinion since ELD there has been more accidents because drivers are always being forced to race the clock so they can get loaded/unloaded and to [the] next pickup or safe spot to sleep for the night because they are out of hours.”

Another commenter agreed, saying that the ELDs make it harder for drivers to take breaks when they need them. And if they hit traffic, construction or unreliable road conditions, the driver loses miles and hours.

“We keep getting told that these laws, [these] rules are put in place to make it easier and safer for the driver. In doing so, it makes it harder.”

The road ahead

There’s a path forward, says Levy, but it’s got to go beyond just technology. “I don’t think there’s a tweak we could make to the ELD that would solve all the truckers’ problems,” says Levy. Safer roads probably require an approach that focuses more on trucker pay and labor rights. Trevor Ralphs, in a comment response to the FMCSA prompt, echoed Levy’s point about trucker pay structure.

“If you really want to make driving more safe for not only truck drivers but everyone else on the road, you would make it so that truck drivers are all paid hourly. This would make sure truck drivers are not in a rush to make the most money but instead they are taking things slow, steady and safe because you will be paid more for your time.”

Trucks at a truck stop in Missouri. (Photo: Shutterstock)

While the industry pay regulations haven’t changed, some companies have started shifting toward time-based pay in the ELD era. Nathaniel Hosea writes in response to the FMCSA prompt:

“I personally like ELDs as a company driver, it keeps everything organized and I get a[n] hourly pa[y] now. Before ELDs, I got paid CPM [cents per mile] and lost lots of money waiting time in stopped traffic and not being paid at warehouses. Finally, with ELDs and hourly pay, I don’t have to be pressured to speed and driving unsafe to deliver loads.” 

Hosea goes on to say that driving per mile should be a thing of the past. “There should be a law to end CPM [cents per mile] wage payments, traffic is too congested today to make any money on CPM.” 

We should remove the trucker exemption from the Fair Labor Standards Act, so that truckers can be paid more fairly, says Levy.

“I think, fundamentally, the problems in the industry are political and economic,” says Levy. “Truckers don’t have the political power to successfully argue for labor rights that would really make us all safer.”

More broadly, says Levy, there’s been a cultural shift from seeing truckers as the heroes of the highway to seeing them as on the fringes of society. But, at the end of the day, our country—and our food system—would not function without long-haul truckers and the work that they do. 

“Building dignity back into the job,” says Levy—not barring them from using business bathrooms or filming them constantly—“those are good places to start.”

***

Interested in learning more about this topic?

You can find Levy’s book here: https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691175300/data-driven

Truckers are paid a little differently than most other professions. A breakdown of why can be found in this article from FleetOwner. For a longer history of the trucking industry, check out this podcast called On the Move.

The post Driven Out appeared first on Modern Farmer.

Using farmland for solar panels, especially in the agriculture-heavy Midwest, is fraught with controversy. “There is concern that solar energy will prevent land from being used for farming,” says Matt O’Neal, professor of entomology and Henry A. Wallace Chair for Sustainable Agriculture at Iowa State University.

What if the two could co-exist?

A new study underway at Iowa State University seeks to answer that question.

“Solar panels don’t have to be disruptive. It doesn’t mean farming the land has to stop,” says O’Neal. “We want to look at possibilities and profitability.”

A multi-disciplinary team of ISU professors, graduate and undergraduate students is working with Alliant Energy through a public-private partnership to study the potential of agrivoltaics, the simultaneous use of areas of land for both solar panels and agriculture. The team includes horticulturalists, economists, environmentalists, sociologists, engineers and even entomologists.

The project is the first of its kind. “There has been research conducted, but not on a utility scale,” says Nick Peterson, Strategic Partnerships Manager with Alliant Energy, “and not in a public/private partnership with a land grant university.”

There has also been little research conducted in the Midwest, the heart of agriculture, where farmland is gold.

The solar farm

Alliant Energy completed construction on the 10-acre Alliant Energy Solar Farm on the ISU research farms near Ames, Iowa in the fall of 2023. Managed by the ISU College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, the research farms are used to study livestock production and the agriculture industry.

Alliant designed, built, owns and will operate and maintain the 3,300 solar panels and 16 inverters at an ultimate estimated cost of around $4 million.

The ISU team will plant fruits and vegetables beneath and among the panels to measure not only plant growth but the effect on energy production.

“One of the questions before the electrical engineers is the effect of the vegetation on the panels,” says Peterson. “Engineers know from previous study, particularly out of Colorado, that panels that are cooled can absorb more energy. What we’re studying now is how different types of panels and vegetation impact energy production.”

The solar array consists of two types of panels—fixed and single access tracker. 

Fixed panels are like those often found on rooftops. As the name implies, they stay in one fixed position. For scientific method purposes, the lowest edge of the panel sits at two heights, five feet or 2.5 feet. 

Tracker panels move with the sun. They are placed at five or eight feet. All panels are bi-facial, meaning they absorb sunlight on both sides.

Horticulturalists are growing raspberries, strawberries, summer squash, peppers and broccoli, along with control grasses. The first of the raspberries and the grass mix went in this fall. The remainder of the crops will be planted in the spring. 

Traditional Iowa crops such as corn and soybeans were avoided due to the need for large equipment and the small acreage. 

Issues such as harvest timing and growing season will be studied, as well as climatic impacts. O’Neal sees specific varieties eventually being developed for the environment.

The harvested crops will be sold to the university’s dining halls.

The crops, along with flowering perennials, were chosen with natural attraction of pollinators in mind, and the project will include beehives, with researchers studying how the bees develop and what kind of honey they produce. Other projects in various parts of the country have utilized sheep grazing in their agrivoltaics, but livestock was ruled out at ISU due to limited area and water availability.

“Bees are livestock, too,” says O’Neal.

More questions

While the bees, plants and energy production are under study, sociologists and economists will weigh in.

Sociologists will study public perception of agrivoltaics and solar power in general. Researchers will look at how such a project could affect a community and will track how information based on science leads to future community decisions.

“There are valid concerns about how land will be used in the future,” says O’Neal. “People are leery about ag land being used for recreation, urban development or energy production.” Wildlife conservation is a concern, including pollinators. Some see solar arrays as disruptive to agriculture, Iowa’s top industry. “This project will give the public a chance to see if various modifications to a solar farm make these sitings more palatable.”

“The bottom line is this is Iowa, and we should be growing things,” says Peterson. “For us to be good stewards of our customers, we need to be looking at how we can maximize land use.”

For Alliant Energy, the economics of power production are front and center. Peterson says 52 percent of Alliant’s energy comes from a mix of renewable sources such as wind and solar. The rest comes from natural gas and a few remaining coal plants set to retire by 2040.

A three-person economics team will study the cost and profitability of the solar farm. “Every step can be costly,” says Hongli Feng, assistant professor at the ISU Department of Economics, “from the land to the ground preparation, to the seeds and equipment and labor.” 

Based on the cost tracking, the team will create an enterprise budget tool for farmers and solar field developers.

The basic business model is based on reality. 

“The land lease agreement between ISU and Alliant Energy follows what landowners might experience if the energy company chooses a site on their land,” says O’Neal. “We want to look at what that relationship would be like.”

“Much of the existing research is regionally specific,” adds Feng. “We need to see how it applies to Iowa and the Midwest.”

The partnership

Alliant Energy has been active in research conducted by ISU’s Electric Power Resource Center for more than 60 years. According to EPRC director Anne Kimber, the center’s research focuses on integrating renewable energy into the existing structure that wasn’t designed for it.

In addition to the ongoing research, Iowa State University has a five-year strategic plan for operational sustainability, which includes goals for tripling the use of renewable energies and ultimately, carbon neutrality.

“ISU called Alliant to explore what sustainable energy production on the research farm might look like,” says Peterson. “ISU has added several new facilities to its research farm in recent years, including a feed mill and a turkey teaching and research facility. These projects give students the opportunity to learn agriculture and the agriculture industry firsthand, but they come with operating costs.”

The Alliant Energy Solar Farm will produce 1.375 MW of power at maximum capacity, enough to power the equivalent of around 200 homes. The renewable energy ISU receives will offset a portion of the university’s annual carbon emissions.

That alone is a pragmatic goal. But Ray Klein, director of partnerships at Iowa State University’s College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, saw more opportunity. He proposed leveraging the project for academic and ag industry research.

The result was a four-year, $1.8-million grant from the US Department of Energy, the largest grant awarded by the agency for such a project.

The research

Iowa State University is a land-grant teaching college, and the project includes surveys, seminars and field days to share findings with agriculture producers and the public through Iowa State University Extension and Outreach.

“When we first started this, ISU’s priority was that they be able to share what we learned,” says Peterson.

The information may be especially useful in the growing farm-to-table sector of ag production, where producers often operate on smaller tracts of land and sell locally, and food produced in agrivoltaics systems may more immediately go into local food systems impacting food availability.

“Local food systems are the next level of diversity in ag,” says Peterson. “This opens up a new avenue for farming that is coupled with renewable energy. I’m hoping we can develop the research base to show if agrivoltaics is viable, profitable and sustainable for this part of the world.”

“This is unbiased research,” adds Ajay Nair, an ISU professor of horticulture. “We will report what we find, and people can decide whether this is a system that is feasible or not.”

Kimber sees benefits beyond food and energy. “There are a lot of communities who are thinking about community solar arrays,” she says. “Imagine if the community also gets to have gardens associated with those arrays? You’re starting to build community around that. I think that’s worth working on.”

The post Crop and Energy Production Merge in Iowa Project appeared first on Modern Farmer.

Like many poultry farmers, Melnyk is worried about Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza (HPAI), or bird flu. The virus has been plaguing the industry since the 1960s, but the current H5N1 variant first came to prominence in the mid-1990s, when there were large outbreaks in southern China and Hong Kong. This current wave, which started last year, has spread to more than 80 countries. While there are ebbs and flows of disease transmission, the big outbreak that plagued producers in 2022 hasn’t shown signs of slowing yet. 

Anybody who comes into your yard is a risk, she says. “[The disease is] so small, it’s like a minute little piece of dust. So, you’re at risk all the time. Anything you do with poultry is truly just a risky kind of business,” says Melnyk. “You have to get really creative, and you have to be on the ball. For me, going directly to people’s houses is the safest way I can keep all sorts of things off my farm.” 

Rather than let customers come to her, and potentially infect the birds on her property, Melnyk is going to them, and then disinfecting when she gets back home. It’s part of a stringent biosecurity regime, which gets updated and tweaked as needed. “I have a zillion pairs of different rubber boots. I have rubber boots all over my yard, to use for different areas. My boot management is very good,” says Melnyk. She also uses vinegar and disinfectant as she moves between buildings, and she’s keeping her birds inside more, to ensure they stay away from wild fowl. 

Most of those wild birds, including Canada geese, should have left northern Alberta through September and October. But when Modern Farmer reached Melnyk in mid-November, the geese were still there. “This warm spell that we’re having is incredibly frightening, because it slowed down the migration of the geese,” says Melnyk. “We have grass turning green. Dandelions are coming up. I saw birds around that should have been gone four weeks ago.” With the wild birds sticking around, Melnyk is anxious and stressed, finding ways to get her energy out. 

“I actually have to run for a few miles every second day in order to function, just because I’m constantly afraid.” 

Egg production plant. Photography by Shutterstock.

The anxiety is understandable. There are currently 69 million birds affected with HPAI, in over 47 states, with infections striking commercial barns and backyard flocks alike. The biggest hit so far has been in Iowa, where a commercial egg-laying operation lost 1.6 million birds in late November. While that’s high, representatives from the USDA’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) say that we actually saw even more infections last year. “The overall number of birds affected was significantly higher in 2022 than it has been so far in 2023. In fact, we’ve seen 100 cases in commercial poultry facilities so far in 2023, versus 306 in commercial facilities in 2022—a decrease of more than 80 percent to the number of birds affected by the virus in 2023.” 

But, surprisingly, these aren’t distinct infection cycles of HPAI. This current wave of bird flu is actually the same wave we were fighting last year; there hasn’t been a full stop when the USDA can declare the outbreak over. 

“It’s kind of convenient for us, as morbid as that sounds, because we just keep the response going. We didn’t shut our office down or close the books, and then have to restart everything,” says Michael Cruson, communications director for the Minnesota Board of Animal Health. Minnesota, the turkey capital of the country, has seen more than  600,000 birds hit with HPAI in the past four months. 

The last distinct wave of HPAI was in 2014 through to 2015, though APHIS say it’s difficult to compare the two outbreaks. “More than 70 percent of cases during the 2014/2015 outbreak were due to farm-to-farm spread, versus fewer than 20 percent of the cases in this outbreak. The cases in the current outbreak are primarily being introduced directly from wild birds that are carrying the virus to domestic birds,” say representatives from APHIS in an email to Modern Farmer. As infected birds migrate, drinking from shared water sources or leaving stool or urine in shared areas, commercial birds get infected. It makes sense that there would be an upswing in the last month or so, as those birds finally start making their way south. 

“Hopefully, this is all leading to a downswing, where we can catch a break from this virus,” says Cruson. “It’s just taking a really long time to get to zero, where it’s gone.” 

A chicken getting tested with the be.well. Photography courtesy of Alveo Technologies.

Producers can test regularly for the virus, but the process can occasionally be delayed. The first test in an area, says Cruson, is often done by the state laboratory and then confirmed by the USDA. That means there can be a wait of a day or two, where the virus may be present in an operation, but state agencies aren’t able to take action without federal approval. That’s a fairly reactive model, says Shaun Holt, who is encouraging a transition to a more preventative process. 

Holt is the CEO of Alveo Technologies, a testing and diagnostics company that’s currently finalizing its initial testing of the Alveo Sense, a device that allows farmers and producers to do initial testing on site. “We want to take the testing out of the lab, where it’s centralized, and you need PhD scientists to run the instruments,” says Holt. Its  device, slightly smaller than a smartphone, is portable and rugged, so farmers can slip it in their pocket and bring it with them on their daily rounds. There are eight different testing wells, where producers can test samples collected from the trachea or cloaca. 

The device enables geolocation, and farmers can input data such as the exact coop number and flock to keep track of which viruses are showing up where and maintain a log for state or federal databases. In 2024, the company hopes to expand the testing phase to more commercial customers. The goal, says Holt, is to decentralize that testing model and allow farmers to see what’s happening in their flocks faster. 

The Alveo Sense device. Photography courtesy of Alveo Technologies.

Until then, the best thing producers can do is be strict with bio-security, says Dustan Clark,  poultry health veterinarian for the University of Arkansas. He recommends “putting up the birds in a pen that’s roofed over, even if it’s as simple as a plastic tarp on top, to help prevent contamination from wild bird droppings. If you’ve got a pond on your premises, make sure your birds don’t go near that pond, and don’t go near the pond yourself.” Be sure to clean and disinfect shoes before going into a coop, but the best thing to do is avoid areas such as parks, where wild birds congregate, he says. Above all, pay attention to your birds. Look at how much feed they’re eating, how much water they’re drinking, how many eggs they’re laying. If things look off, trust your instinct. “We call it ADR: Ain’t Doing Right,” says Clark. “And as a producer, you know when your birds just aren’t doing right.” 

As we go into the winter season, it stands to reason that cases will drop as wild bird migration wraps up, and Clark is hopeful that’s the case. “Are we going to be dealing with it in the spring? We just don’t know at this time. Almost anybody’s guess.” 

For Mandy Melnyk, spring migration is a long way off, but the health and safety of her birds is always on her mind. While she’s heard of the HPAI vaccine, it could be a while before that treatment is readily available to her. Instead, she is preparing to deal with an increased risk of bird flu going forward. “I think that climate change, and the migratory patterns of our birds changing, is a problem that nobody will fix, unless everybody pays attention.” 

The post Bird Flu is Spiking Again. Here’s What Producers and Industry Are Doing About It appeared first on Modern Farmer.

A new study out of the University of California, Irvine, published in the journal Nature Sustainability, shows that chemically synthesized dietary fats, or food fats made scientifically in a factory—not harvested from a field—could be a viable way to reduce environmental impacts in the agriculture sector. 

“We could drastically reduce some of the land that we’re using for things like oil crops, if we were making these in a factory and not using land at all,” says Steven Davis, PhD, Earth System scientist and lead author on the paper.

The amount of global agricultural land used for oil crops has nearly tripled in the last 60 years, making it one of the top three categories of agricultural products in terms of land use.

Palm oil, for example, is in many processed foods at American supermarkets. It has also come under fire because palm oil plantations in Asia, Latin America and West Africa have resulted in deforestation and negative impacts on human communities. Decreased land demands could lead to reforestation or preservation, which may benefit ecosystem biodiversity and reduce water use.

The amount of land used globally to grow oil crops has increased dramatically in the last several decades. (Graph by Our World in Data)

“If we targeted just a small amount of some of the very worst offending sources of these oils, palm oil plantations or soybeans that are grown on areas recently cleared in the Amazon, we can make very large reductions in some of the greenhouse gas emissions,” says Davis.

Fats could be synthesized at scale, says Davis. Using a source of carbon dioxide and hydrogen, the actual process of producing the fats could result in fewer emissions than traditional oil production. Still, he acknowledges that some consumers are wary of synthesized products—as the paper mentions, synthetic fibers have had significant environmental consequences; they are a source of plastic pollution through microfiber shedding, and the textiles themselves take a long time to break down. The impacts of this mean there’s a good reason to be cautious when approaching other forms of chemical synthesis, and more research is required. The sources of carbon would have to be fossil carbon, waste carbon (like municipal solid waste) or carbon captured from the air.

“I’m not someone who thinks we should stop agriculture altogether,” says Davis. “But I think it makes sense to prioritize the emissions related to that and the environmental impacts of that for the things that we really can’t do in other ways and that we really value the flavors of and the provenance of.”

Public acceptance of synthesized fats may be easier than other foods, since these fats are often present in processed foods and not always consumed as a standalone ingredient. Since farmed oil products and synthesized dietary fat are molecularly identical, it’s not something that would be distinguishable for consumers when eaten in this context.

“You don’t eat a Chips Ahoy! cookie and say, ‘man that palm oil in there was delicious,’” says Davis. “I don’t plan to stop buying apples, I think apples are a magical thing. But I don’t feel the same about palm oil that’s used in products that I buy.”

One important result of this shift would be a disruption in some of the agricultural communities that revolve around palm or other kinds of oil production. A change of this type would have to be carefully approached to ensure a just food transition, says Davis.

It doesn’t have to be all or nothing, he says. Not all vegetable oils need to go away.

“We’re not saying tomorrow you’re going to be eating like the Jetsons,” says Davis. “We are just talking about supplanting some of the most environmentally damaging sources of food with an alternative that hopefully wouldn’t make a meaningful difference to a lot of people in terms of their appreciation for foods that they eat.”

The post Do We Need to Farm Oil Crops? appeared first on Modern Farmer.

But things got complicated, and quickly. As schools went virtual, little Hudson had to start her kindergarten classes online. “It was impossible. She could not connect, even with the hotspot device, because we get terrible reception. Nothing worked,” Stroup recalls. By the third day of school, the girl was crying, worried that the rest of her classmates would learn to read while she was left behind. 

Stroup closed the laptop. She packed a lunch, took her granddaughter by the hand and walked down to the nearby creek. Together, the pair went through sets of picture books, until Hudson was able to sound out the words by herself. 

Unfortunately, most issues caused by Stroup’s slow internet connection are not so easily solved. Stroup and her husband farm about 200 acres near Bessemer City, NC. They raise beef cattle and plant wheat and soybeans. But they have been consistently stymied when it comes to internet access on their farm. The issue became even more apparent during COVID. With no reliable internet connection, the Stroups were stuck selling person to person, in a time when that sort of business was the most dangerous option. “It crippled us, especially then,” says Stroup. 

Even now, the lack of internet keeps the farm lagging behind. Most new farming equipment relies on an internet connection for GPS or other services. Even if the machine itself is not connected, you need the internet to fix it. “If you buy something new, they no longer give you a printed manual. As far as fixes and repairs and whatnot, you have to be able to download [a manual] off the internet.” So, Stroup is stuck with vehicles and equipment from the 1970s. “We can’t modernize,” she says. “We’re cut off.”

The Stroup farm is a classic example of those impacted by the middle mile effect. In an urban area, if an internet service provider (ISP) lays a mile of cable for broadband internet, it will be able to connect hundreds, if not thousands, of customers because the area is densely populated. In a rural area, that same mile of cable might connect a single family, so ISPs aren’t financially incentivized to run cable in those regions. What ends up happening is a lot of high-volume areas, surrounded by dead zones. 

In fact, Stroup says she was told by one ISP that it would not run cable connecting her farm with a new housing development being built at the edge of her property line unless the Stroups paid  for it themselves at a cost of more than $15,000. Stroup was shocked. “Are you crazy?” she thought. “Why am I paying for it?”

She sent a letter to her senator, who responded in 2021. He said there could be funding available for her through the Infrastructure Bill but that the decision of how and when to allocate those funds was down to the local level. He encouraged her to contact her governor. Stroup did. The governor’s response was to send her a fundraising letter. 

“You hear on the news that there’s new funding available and billions of dollars pumped in to specifically connect the middle mile,” says Stroup. “Where is that funding?” 

Lisa Stroup and her granddaughter. Photography by Lisa Stroup.

Mapping broadband’s dead zones

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) defines broadband as having download speeds of at least 25 megabits per second (MBPS) and upload speeds of at least three MBPS. The commission is in charge of keeping track of who is connected, what their speeds are and what needs to be done to get more Americans connected. It collects data, which gets compiled into the National Broadband Map. But the numbers on how many people are without broadband are anything but concrete. Some government figures put it at one in five US households, which would be 24 million households without access. The FCC’s 2020 report estimated that there were only 21 million individuals without access. But research from BroadbandNow, an independent firm, puts that number closer to 42 million Americans. 

The data is all over the place because the FCC’s mapping system is not verified. “They rely solely on information provided by ISPs,” says Sascha Meinrath, the Palmer Chair in telecommunications at Penn State University. “Every ISP is providing these hyperbolically rosy estimates of where they serve and the speeds that are available in those locations. And there’s no meaningful verification, much less any accountability.”

Meinrath says when you get down into the data, you find that the majority of people who aren’t connected to the internet are rural Americans and the poorest in the country. “Neither of those constituencies have a whole lot of wealth to squander,” he says. But that’s exactly what’s happening, as they often have to pay more for worse service. In the Cost of Connectivity report, researchers found that Americans pay more for internet services than most other countries in the global north, and the gap in service disproportionately affects people of color. 

Photography by Shutterstock.

Meinrath says a big part of the problem is that our ISPs don’t interoperate, meaning they don’t use each other’s equipment or infrastructure. And we’ve been here before. Picture an old black and white movie. There’s often a big boss, and they’ve got many different phones all sitting on their desk, each using a different telephone system. However, in 1934, the Communications Act passed with the mandate of universal service: the idea that everyone has the right to access communications services. The phone companies were forced to work together, and folks were able to have a single telephone for all of their needs. 

But now, says Meinrath, we’re right back where we started with ISPs. They don’t share infrastructure, which is why you’ll often see multiple cellular towers in the same area, because each provider uses their own. It’s expensive and goes against the proven success of a universal service mandate. 

So, what could the Farm Bill do about this? There are a few areas that we could start with, and Meinrath says the first one won’t cost the government a dime. “The Farm Bill could include a mandate that says anytime a provider reports to a federal agency that they provide service at an address, they must provide that service within 30 days or get fined $10,000 a day until they do,” says Meinrath. In other words, force the ISPs to show verification that they are doing what they claim. “You would spend nothing, and all of your maps would get super accurate, super quickly.” 

Beyond that, we could look to bring back the idea of common carriage. Up until 2005, we had common carriage in the US, just like the universal service with telephones. “If you had a telecommunications infrastructure, you had to carry the traffic of your competitors. For example, we all remember the dial-up modem days and all those CD-ROMs sent by AOL. The reason they could do that is because whoever your local phone provider was, they had to allow you to use their infrastructure,” says Meinrath. But the government got rid of common carriage in 2005, so ISPs started focusing on only the most profitable areas, leaving “nothing in other areas. And if you look, we have spent more on infrastructure than it would cost to provide universal service.” 

In the face of evidence and data, why have we set up a system that overbuilds in urban areas and nearly ignores rural spots? “The honest answer is because we’re idiots,” Meinrath says facetiously. “The opportunity cost to the country is an order of magnitude greater than the cost of just funding the build… It doesn’t make sense to the populace, not just rural, but the entire populace. And the only reason why we’ve done that is we have allowed ISPs to really dictate our policy, even when it is a vast detriment to society.”

Emily Haxby on her farm. Photography courtesy of Emily Haxby.

Struggling to connect

Emily Haxby, a fifth-generation farmer in Gage County, NE, has been vocal about what the lack of internet means for her and her neighbors. Or at least, she’s tried. 

“I was actually doing a Zoom call with the Farm Bureau, the state board, and we were talking about broadband and connecting people, and those 11,000 missing locations in our state. And I kept glitching out, because I didn’t have an internet hotspot.”

Haxby and her family farm corn and soybeans and raise cattle and goats. When folks outside of agriculture think about those tasks, they may not realize just how connected modern farmers need to be. But Haxby uses wifi-connected monitoring systems for her crops and animals, but needs to drive into town to upload her data. All of the pivots she irrigates with are monitored and connected to the internet. And without reliable broadband, things get pricey. “A lot of people are using cellular [data] because that’s all that’s available,” says Haxby.

While Haxby does have some internet service, the speeds are much slower than she needs. For instance, the camera that she keeps in the barn to watch over her animals isn’t the most reliable. “It’s very glitchy when I’m watching my critters. Have you ever seen a lagging goat walking around a barn? It’s really funny,” she says. On average, the speeds in Haxby’s area are about six MBPS to download and two MBPS to upload (far slower than the 25-three benchmark set by the FCC). Haxby says she’d like to install more cameras, especially in the calving season, but she can’t rely on them with her current connectivity. 

So, she tried to do something about it. She ran for supervisor in Gage County, and was elected on a platform that focused on internet access. She headed the Gage County Rural Broadband Project, with the aim of getting fiber internet out to at least 40 percent of the region. 

Now, after months of work, the project is moving forward with the ISP NextLink. Cables are going in the ground now and connecting more than 1,000 homes. “People are so excited to finally be connected with something more reliable. I get so many calls [asking] ‘when will it get to my place?’” says Haxby. The initial phase of the connection project will service about 40 percent of Gage County, but Haxby says that’s just not enough. Even with a goal of 99 percent of the state, that leaves out one percent of Nebraskans, or roughly 20,000 people. 

Haxby hopes these figures will finally compel ISPs to build out in rural areas. “I think for a long time providers have gotten complacent. There hasn’t been a push to get fiber to rural areas. I know there’s a cost barrier to that, but as a nation, we’re starting to see this is important,” she says. She hopes the Farm Bill comes with stipulations on its funding. “I hope the Farm Bill includes, at bare minimum, a requirement that any funding of broadband should be a minimum of 100/100 for speeds. We need to do what we can to make sure that the money that is being expended isn’t immediately outdated as we progress into the future.”

Broadband getting installed in Gage County. Photography by Emily Haxby.

Many legislators are promoting broadband. Georgia Senator Raphael Warnock and South Dakota Senator John Thune presented the bipartisan Promoting Precision Agriculture Act this spring, aiming to develop a national taskforce to determine connectivity standards for farm equipment. “Setting interconnectivity standards will help more agriculture devices, from a soil monitor in the ground to a drone overhead, talk to one another and transmit data efficiently, so that farmers can always have the latest information available to make decisions to improve efficiency, improve crop yields and lower costs,” a representative from Warnock’s office told Modern Farmer.

Senator Warnock, among other legislators, has also been vocal in pressuring the FCC to release broadband funding through the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund, and his representatives say he is working to include specific language relating to broadband internet and precision agriculture within the Farm Bill. 

At the state level, many government agencies are instituting grant policies to try and effectively distribute federal funding for broadband. In Minnesota, officials from Governor Tim Walz’s office say their data shows that roughly 180,000 households in rural areas are without broadband. So, they are distributing $100 million over the next two years through two programs: the Border to Border Broadband Development Grant and the Low Density Grant. The goal is to have all Minnesota homes and businesses connected to high speed internet by 2026. 

But that could be where the issues lie. It’s not that people aren’t invested in solving this problem. It’s that too many people in too many disparate agencies are working independently, says Emily Buckman, director of government affairs with the American Farm Bureau Federation. “We have been supportive of the ReConnect program, which has become the USDA premier broadband program over the last five years and the most funded,” says Buckman. “We also will be supportive of just streamlining the programs that are currently in place. There’s a rural broadband program over at USDA that’s pretty similar to ReConnect…There’s just so many programs out there that we would like to see as much streamlining as possible, so that it makes it easier for the providers to apply and get those networks deployed.”

Broadband has been a priority for the AFBF for years, says Buckman, but the conversation ramped up during COVID. It was then that the federation members recognized broadband access as a priority to push for within the Farm Bill. “Farmers and ranchers depend on broadband, just as they do highways, rails, waterways, to ship food and fuel across the country,” says Buckman. “We hear a lot about sustainability these days; our members are doing a lot more with less. And a lot of that is due to the technology advancements that have occurred over the last several decades. And many of those do require connection.”

Broadband getting installed in Gage County. Photography by Emily Haxby.

Disconnecting

Lisa Stroup in Gaston County is doubtful that she’ll ever see high-speed internet on her property. It’s doubly frustrating, as she watches the new housing development at the end of her property get fully wired. “The people who could make it happen don’t respond to you. Nobody is familiar with [the issue]. I’m like, OK, so what do I do with that? Who do you call?” 

Stoup eventually called her county office and was told they had no more funding to allocate to additional broadband, a fact that Justin Amos, the county manager’s chief of staff, confirmed. The county was able to participate in a grant program last year for the first time, partnering with the ISP Spectrum Southeast to leverage funds through the GREAT grant. Through that program, it connected 178 new locations in the county to high-speed internet. Amos also notes that the locations were picked by Spectrum, not the county.  

However, the funds for that grant are limited, and Amos says that while the county is looking at future funding opportunities, it does not have the funds right now. “We are happy to reach out to speak with Spectrum or another ISP partner to find out their broadband expansion plans. Unfortunately, for this resident and others in similar circumstances, the cost of providing high-speed broadband is expensive. For example, it can cost $50,000 per mile to expand broadband and that assumes perfect conditions,” says Amos. It’s not uncommon for some of that cost to fall to the residents in rural parts of North Carolina, he says, so Stroup isn’t alone in getting a sky-high quote from her ISP. 

It’s difficult to calculate what the lack of internet has cost Stroup. As the cost of fertilizer and seed continues to rise, just running the farm at a basic capacity is difficult. She can’t justify paying more for cellular data or hotspots. And driving into town to find internet service “cuts into your productivity and how much you can actually produce…Even though it’s looked at as a minor inconvenience to us, it has a major impact on the food supply,” says Stroup. So, she’s essentially given up the fight. 

Stroup says that, regardless of what legislation comes out or funding deployed in her area, she will be completely surprised if her farm is ever connected. “They’re not going to waste their money on us.” 

The post ‘We’re Cut Off’: Rural Farmers Are Desperate For Broadband Internet appeared first on Modern Farmer.