Transitioning away from a system often characterized by carb-heavy, frozen and fried food can be a multi-year process, says Dreibelbis, and it starts with an in-depth assessment. “[Is the district] cooking anything at all? Are they buying everything prepackaged?” says Dreiblebis. “Do you have the equipment that you need to start cooking from scratch, even smallwares like cutting boards and knives? Some districts don’t even have that.”

From there, small changes add up to make a big difference: More than 28 million lunches are served every day in schools across the US, and for some students, that lunch is their most nutritious meal of the day. For schools with a breakfast program, evidence suggests that students who eat breakfast at school score higher on tests. But schools are up against many roadblocks, from staffing challenges to rising food costs.

Changing a school’s lunch program takes time, resources and commitment. Modern Farmer spoke with the four trendsetting schools to find out how they’ve made changes in their school lunches, what’s working and what the kids are saying about their new favorite foods. 

Students in the Clear Lake Community School District learn more about their vegetable of the month: corn. (Photography submitted by Julie Udelhofen)

Lowering the pressure 

“I was just reading that one in six kids have high blood pressure,” says Julie Udelhofen, food service director at Clear Lake Community School District in northern Iowa. “Sodium is an issue; so is sugar. We see it every day.” 

For Udelhofen, the health of the roughly 1,450 kids in her schools is a top priority, with sodium a particular issue. To combat the rise of sodium, Udelhofen has made two major changes. First, she’s moved away from pre-packaged and frozen foods as much as possible and brought in local fruits and vegetables, conducting taste-tests with her students. “We’ve done beets, kohlrabi, rutabaga and parsnips. We had all kinds of radishes, and about 10 different varieties of peppers, and the kids go down the line and pick their favorites,” says Udelhofen. The key, she says, is to introduce these foods in a low-pressure environment, making it a game of sorts. “It’s a lot of fun, because the kids are wholly invested in it. They will stop and taste things and talk to us.” 

Behind the scenes, Udelhofen and her team have drastically cut sodium levels by making their own spice blends, which have been a big hit with the kids. “That’s one of the best things we’ve done, especially in the middle school and high school.” They offer a garlic and herb blend, along with Greek and Italian seasonings that kids can add to their meals, without the heaping helping of sodium from traditional blends. 

At Sandy Valley School District, staff make up pre-packaged fruit and vegetable pouches for kids to grab and snack on. (Photography submitted by Tina Kindelberger)

Broccoli at breakfast

Most adults are probably not grabbing broccoli at breakfast, but somehow, Tina Kindelberger, food service supervisor at Sandy Valley Local School District in eastern Ohio, has turned the children in her schools into broccoli fiends. 

“It’s so cute when they do that,” says Kindelberger. “I see kids walking in here with packs of broccoli, and it’s 7:30 am.”

Kindelberger started her team’s transition to scratch cooking by first just making raw fruits and vegetables available to the kids at each meal. Rather than change everything they were cooking at once, they just added in a case in the cafeteria with packages of produce such as carrot sticks, tomatoes, snap peas, bananas, apples and yes, broccoli. “The kids seem to be excited when we bring out new things and try new things. I had plums out one day, and I couldn’t believe how many kids asked me what they were. They’d never seen a plum,” says Kindelberger. But they’re now primed to try these raw fruits and veggies, which also means they’re more willing to try the cooked options as the district moves to scratch cooking.

Kindelberger and her team feed about 700 students a day, from kindergarten to high school, and each age group has different tastes and preferences. For her, the first step to changing the menu was consulting with the kids. “I meet with [students] on a regular basis, and we get a lot of feedback,” she says. One request, from the older students, was a breakfast smoothie station. So, Kindelberger got a grant for a blender, and now there are fresh fruit smoothies. “The biggest thing is getting your kids involved, getting their opinions, because it does matter. They want to be heard.”

Carlee Johnson McIntosh has made many changes to her schools’ breakfast program, including adding a grab-and-go fruit station. (Photography submitted by Carlee Johnson McIntosh)

Spaghetti and moose balls

Local food looks a lot different in parts of Alaska than in much of the rest of the US. While many school districts are working with beef and potatoes, Carlee Johnson McIntosh, the food service director in the Petersburg School District in Southeast Alaska, has a freezer full of Sockeye salmon and moose meat. For her, working with local farmers sometimes means getting food delivered by boat from neighboring island farms. 

Her commitment to eating and preparing local foods started from a young age; Johnson McIntosh has allergies and was always looking for ways to alleviate and control her symptoms, so she became interested in what she was eating. Now that she supervises 450 students at her schools, she’s especially committed to ensuring they have high-quality and freshly prepared options. She’s spent the last decade advocating for changes at the school level, from altering when kids can eat breakfast to updating the kitchen facilities to allow for more scratch cooking. 

“Previously, the mealtimes were crammed together. The breakfast was before school and almost nobody showed up. Now, we’re after the bell,” and kids actually show up for breakfast, she says. She’s also had to push the district on purchasing more raw food and getting her staff certified to do more than just reheat frozen packages. “My first step was to talk to our health authority and see where our deficiencies are. Why is it that we are not adequately meeting a restaurant standard? We are feeding an at-risk population, so we should be held to the same standards [as other facilities].” 

That required some creativity on her part. While previous frozen options might be chicken nuggets, for Johnson McIntosh, local proteins are more likely to be moose, herring eggs or Sockeye salmon. So, that’s what they have. Now, the kids are chowing down on moose stroganoff or spaghetti and moose-balls, along with a daily salad bar. 

At RSU89, staff engage students in taste tests, to try out new recipes. And you even get a sticker for participating. (Photography submitted by Denise Tapley-Proctor)

One-bite policy

Not every new menu item is going to be a hit. Denise Tapley-Proctor, food service director at Regional School District 89 in Maine, knows that well. As she’s moved her team over to scratch cooking, there have been some fantastic wins and some less-than-stellar reviews. “We did a vegetable panini that the adults in the school system really liked and the high school kids were OK with. But the little kids were like, ‘no, don’t put vegetables in my grilled cheese.’ It was just a no go.” 

But that’s all part of the process, says Tapley-Proctor. One of the staff on her food service team introduced the “no thank you bite” policy when introducing a food of the month. You don’t have to eat the whole thing, but you have to take one bite to try it. Plus, you get a sticker if you do. 

The one-bite policy has been a great help to Tapley-Proctor and the team while they feed about 225 students a day. It’s allowed them to take a gradual approach with the changes, phasing in one new meal or even one new ingredient at a time. 

“Instead of bringing the box of instant potatoes, see how much longer it takes and how much better the flavor is [to make your own],” she says. “If we have leftover rolls from the day before that we didn’t serve the kids, if you cut them up and throw some spices on them, bake them in the oven, you have homemade croutons, and the kids are excited to put it on the top of their meal. It’s the little things that lead to the big thing.”

They’ve also started working with local farmers, teaching kids how plants grow. “We’ve learned that if the children have a stake in it somehow, like if they grow the food, they’re more apt to want to eat it,” she says. They’ve grown tomatoes in the school garden, then used the after-school program to make a salsa, which went on the menu the next day. “The kids were like, ‘this is our salsa,’” she says. 

Tapley-Proctor says it’s been a process for the staff as well. She’s helped them get training from the Chef Ann Foundation on kitchen skills and learning new recipes. But even with extra effort, she says the feedback from the kids is what makes it worth it. While serving a chicken pot pie, one of the students told them that it “made her belly happy.” Another boy was having a bad day, and then had some fresh watermelon with lunch. “This makes me think of summer and fireworks,” he said. “He had gone from a bad mental health day to a good mental health day because of the food.” 

A typical lunch tray at Sandy Valley School District. (Photography submitted by Tina Kindelberger)

Care about your cafeteria? Here’s how to get involved

The USDA will finalize proposed legislation around school lunches this month, with updates to its nutrition standards and exceptions for local and traditional foods. In the proposed changes, schools would have to reduce sodium levels, limit added sugars and would be allowed to use locally grown, raised or caught food that has been minimally processed in their menus. Updates will be phased in over the next five years, with the first changes coming to menus in the fall of 2024. 

If you have kids in school and are interested in helping bring about changes in your own district, everyone Modern Farmer spoke with recommended reaching out to the food service director at your school to find out what kinds of foods the school is working to introduce to kids and how. They’re the ones that feed your kids every day and can speak about their goals when it comes to nutrition. Some schools will even welcome parents to join their kids for a lunch period, to get a first-hand look at what’s on offer. 

You can also get involved at the state level, organizing around campaigns such as Healthy School Meals for All. For a list of what’s happening in your state, check out this map from the National Farm to School Network. 

And if you work in a school district, Dreibelbis advises that you make the switch to scratch cooking one step at a time. Take a cafeteria classic: boxed macaroni and cheese. You can change one element at a time, such as purchasing a pre-mixed cheese sauce but cooking your own pasta. Once that’s second nature, add one more element. “If you’re making something like a homemade cheese sauce, you’re using flour, butter, milk, cheese and salt. And right there alone, you’re going from what was probably 30 ingredients to five.”

The post On the Ground With the Schools Learning What It Takes To Improve Lunch Menus appeared first on Modern Farmer.

In a landfill, food and organic materials are dumped into the landfill, with more waste continually piled on top, creating compacted, oxygen-deprived areas where bacteria flourishes to break down the organic matter. The decomposition process generates methane, a greenhouse gas. According to the EPA, “municipal solid waste landfills are the third largest source of human-related methane emissions in the US.” 

Put another way: The majority of things we casually toss into the trash can be composted, with big benefits for the planet. 

Composting is a pretty basic concept, although there are several ways to go about it. Essentially, composting speeds up the decomposition process by adding organic matter to an oxygen-rich environment and then letting the bugs and fungi that break down matter do their thing. There are small, backyard-scale composting setups with worms (known as vermicomposting), large, industrial-sized bins that rotate the matter consistently to ensure the right airflow and all sizes in between. Whatever method you use, eventually, the end result is compost—a nutrient-rich soil that can be used as a soil amendment. 

Roughly 15 million American households have access to a food-waste compost program, with about 400 programs spread across 25 states. That’s about 12 percent of households across the country. If composting is a big win for cities—taking waste out of landfills, producing fertilizer and engaging citizens in the recycling process—why doesn’t everyone do it? Well, like most public works initiatives, it’s not that simple. 

To learn more about which municipalities offer composting across the US and Canada—and to add your city to our list—check out our compost map here. 

The curbside pickup truck from Washington’s pilot program. Photography submitted by the City of Washington, DC.

‘One size doesn’t fit all’

So, what does it take to implement a new composting program? In 2017, Washington, DC’s Department of Public Works put together a survey to assess the feasibility of a compost program for local residents. There are a lot of considerations; in this case, it found that the main obstacle was processing capacity. For a city of about 700,000 people, where does all of that waste actually go? 

The city just did not have the space to divert waste from the landfill at that time. However, in the intervening years, industrial composting programs in DC-adjacent Prince George’s County have increased, and other cities such as Boston have started composting—a development that Rachel Manning, a program analyst within Washington’s Department of Public Works, and her team have watched with interest. Finally, in August of 2023, seven years after its initial study, Washington launched its pilot compost program. 

The city now has about 10,000 households participating in the pilot program, with regular curbside pickup of compost, along with trash and recycling. Manning says the team sends out regular surveys to participants to see how things are going throughout the program, which is scheduled to last for a year. “Something that’s interesting to us is understanding that one size doesn’t fit all,” Manning says of the issues that have popped up from resident responses. “Maybe not everyone fills up a five-gallon bin, maybe some people want more than five gallons…so there’s a little bit of thinking about what are the right sizes of these containers? What type of [truck] fleets do we need to serve all these homes? Right now, it’s not the same size as our trash packer trucks, because we’re not servicing as many people. But also, food has a lot of moisture in it, so you need a particular vehicle for that. Also, [the Department of Public Works] has a goal to electrify all of their fleet. So, we need to think about electric vehicles, and what the capacity is there.” 

So far, Manning says the program has been a success. It has about a 70-percent adoption rate among participants and has diverted more than 400 tons of waste from the landfill. The city also brings the compost back to residents (if they ask for it) to use in their gardens, so there’s even more incentive for residents to compost. This summer, when the program is scheduled to come to an end, Manning and the team will evaluate moving forward with composting on an even larger scale. 

Photography submitted by they city of Kansas City, MO.

‘We’re willing to pivot’

“I’m going to tell you a secret,” says Melissa Kozakiewicz, assistant city engineer in Kansas City, Missouri. “I always start with pilots, and using the word ‘pilot,’ I can pivot and be flexible when things are working and when they’re not….but we aren’t going to take it away.” 

Kozakiewicz, who has previously built up a compost program in Jersey City, New Jersey, is now spearheading the compost pilot program in Kansas City. She’s hoping to replicate some of her previous successes, particularly in how she makes the program available to residents. “You have to be really deliberate and careful with how you introduce [a compost program]. You don’t want anybody to feel like you’re jamming something down their throat, because then they’re out,” says Kozakiewicz. Instead, she works at a pace with which the community is comfortable and integrates demonstrations at big public events, such as a Fourth of July parade. That way, residents get comfortable with composting as part of their public life and might be more inclined to continue doing it at home. 

[RELATED: Map: Who Composts?]

Kansas City also doesn’t currently offer a curbside pickup of compost. Instead, its model is a drop-off program. The city has five current drop-off locations, with 10 more to come around the city this year. Kozakiewicz says that helps prevent contamination of waste, because compost bins aren’t lying around next to trash or recycling containers. If residents make a trip to a special, designated location, it helps to reinforce what that location is for. It also helps ward against another common concern for cities: vermin and pests. “We have one of our drop-off spots inside of City Hall’s garage. It’s a publicly accessible space that anybody can use,” says Kozakiewicz, and the regular foot traffic allows for a lot of feedback if something’s amiss. “If you call me and say ‘Hey, I was at the City Hall garage, and it looks terrible,’ I can call somebody right this minute to go check it out.” (Data on adoption rates for composting are harder to find, but studies suggest that in the case of recycling programs, residents are more likely to participate when the programs offer curbside pickup.)

Both Kansas City and Washington, DC, are experimenting with programs at the municipal level and with just a portion of their residents so far. But can these programs scale up? Recent state-wide legislation is trying to answer that question. 

In Vermont, a state-wide food scrap ban went into effect in 2020. Residents separate their food scraps and either compost them in their own homes, drop them off at a designated station or sign up for curb-side pick-up. The law also prioritizes reducing food waste upstream, ensuring more food goes to food banks or is turned into animal feed. At the time of implementation, Josh Kelly, materials management section chief at the state’s department of environmental conservation, told Vermont Public that state legislators had been working on reducing waste since 2012. “We have had a state goal to have 50 percent of the waste that we produce separated and recycled, reused or composted. And that goal has never been met in all the years that it’s been in place.” In the year following the ban’s implementation, sales of backyard composters in Vermont more than doubled, and a survey last year found that 61 percent of Vermont residents felt a “moral obligation” to keep food out of landfills (although the state is still not meeting that 50-percent goal).

California is hoping to see some of that success, after it implemented state-wide legislation in January of 2022. The goal of the law, says Lance Klug, with CalRecycle’s office of public affairs, is to reduce the amount of organic waste in landfills by 75 percent and reroute 20 percent of fresh, unsold food to Californians in need, both by 2025. The law requires all cities and counties in the state to implement programs to collect organic waste and increase food recovery from sites such as grocery stores. So far, says Klug, the program is chugging along, although it’s run into issues ranging from COVID-related supply chain slowdowns to a slower adoption rate than hoped for. Roughly 75 percent of jurisdictions in California now have a composting program in place, and in 2022, about 200,000 tons of unsold food was recovered and redistributed to folks who needed it. However, as reported by the Associated Press, it’s unlikely the state will meet its 2025 goals. 

Photography submitted by they city of Kansas City, MO.

‘Education can’t be understated’

Not everyone has a state or even a city supporting them in the effort to compost. But for some folks, that doesn’t matter—they just do it anyway. 

For Bob Ferretti, that was no small feat. He’s the associate director of administrative services at Yale University, which at any given time has about 25,000 students, staff and faculty on the campus. That’s a lot of waste. 

About 15 years ago, Ferretti and his team began the process of figuring out how to facilitate a composting program on campus—made more difficult by the fact that, at the time, the city of New Haven, Connecticut, where Yale is located, did not have a program in place municipally. (Currently, there’s still no residential program for would-be composters in New Haven. However, the city does mandate that if you are a large business, produce enough compost and are located within 20 miles of a compost facility, then you are required to use it.) “There’s really no composting infrastructure within the state at an industrial scale,” says Ferretti. “There were small organic operations within local farms and things like that, but nothing that could handle the volume we were producing.” 

[RELATED: He Wanted to Start Up a Composting Operation. Outdated Zoning Laws Stood in the Way.]

At first, Ferretti recalls, Yale had to hire trucks to cart the compost daily from campus to a facility on the New York State border, which was a few hours round-trip. It wasn’t the best environmental solution, Ferretti says, for an effort aiming to curb greenhouse emissions. “We did meet with the city to try and come up with something even more local,” says Ferretti. “I don’t think there was a ton of real estate available for it.” Plus, says Ferretti, there were questions about who would own that kind of project. Would it be a municipally run program that only serves Yale? A private program for the university but that utilizes local government? Ultimately, Ferretti and his team found an industrial composter within the state, only about 30 minutes from campus, and partnered with it. 

There were some initial wins for the Yale project. As students who lived on campus mostly lived in residence halls and ate at large dining facilities, much of the waste was already centralized, making it less difficult to collect than in a spread-out city. But this was more than a decade ago, and Ferretti says they had needed to do a lot of education to get everyone on board. “We did a lot of waste stream audits for visual awareness, you know, where we dumped out bags of trash across campus and had people in Tyvek suits sorting through and showing people what’s in our waste stream so that they became aware of how much could be diverted,” says Ferretti. “We would have the students actively weigh plates after every meal, to see how much food was scraped into this bucket, so that they know how much was being composted.” There were still challenges with cross contamination, as silverware, latex gloves or other generic trash was easily dropped into the wrong container. “Education can’t be understated,” says Ferretti. 

There’s a lot to consider when starting up a new compost program. Even if your municipality offers curbside trash and recycling collection, adding compost to the mix isn’t as simple as buying a few more trucks and hiring some new workers. But with each new program that gets introduced, there are more examples of how to make composting work for cities, towns and even private entities of any size. 

In Kansas City, Kozakiewicz says the important thing to remember is not to wait for things to be perfect—you’ll be waiting a long time. “You’ve got to kind of push a little, using the resources that you have,” she says. “Nobody’s interested here in building a new landfill.” 

The post Composting Makes Sense. Why Don’t More Cities Do It? appeared first on Modern Farmer.

Along the way, we found some interesting data: Roughly 83 percent of folks in Vancouver compost. New York City diverts more than eight million pounds of organic waste from landfills every year. Many cities, including Boston, San Jose, and San Antonio, provide compost back to residents for use in home gardens. Most importantly, in each of these cities, there is some sort of compost program accessible to residents.

If your city doesn't offer a compost program, you may be able to change that. Here are a few ways to get started:

• Look for community compost groups. Many organizations, including community gardens or environmental clubs, hold seminars or introductory panels on how to start composting. Get up to speed on what’s offered in your area; in addition to learning the composting basics, you might be able to join a network that’s already established. You can also search for a local composter here, or use this EPA map to find opportunities to divert excess food near you. 
• Make your voice heard. If your city does not offer a compost program, let the waste management department know you want one! One of the biggest hurdles to starting a pilot program is ensuring that there are enough residents interested in composting in the first place. Make it clear that you want to participate in a program, which makes it much easier for city officials to greenlight one. There are also resources to help municipalities as they get started, including this template from the US Composting Council which helps cities look at land use ordinances and classifications. 

• Look at the zoning bylaws. Many municipal bylaws were written decades ago, and they may not be up to date with the best waste management strategies for cities. But when city officials see that there is interest from the public, they have more reason to look at updating those bylaws, or looking at new ways of waste diversion. 

For more on how to get your city to start composting, read our Q&A with a composter here.

Want to add your city to our map? Fill out the form below, and let us know what composting is like where you live.

The post Map: Who Composts? appeared first on Modern Farmer.

Ben Stanger has composted his whole life, starting with a backyard bin when he was a child. But when he wanted to expand his composting efforts and start a business, he had a hard time finding a municipality that would let him. 

Eventually, he was able to work with officials in Sun Prairie, Wisconsin, to update their bylaws so Stanger could start composting. Now, two years later, his business Green Box has grown by 28 times, and he’s looking to see how much further he can go. 

Stanger spoke with Modern Farmer about what it takes to start composting at this scale and how to advocate to rework restrictive legislation. 

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Photography submitted by Green Box.

Modern Farmer: First things first: Ben, how did this interest in composting start for you?

Ben Stanger: Growing up, my family was always very involved in growing food, gardening, canning stuff, whatever. As part of that, we composted as a way of doing natural waste diversion and creating quality soil to go back into the garden. It was something I was very used to and, as a young child, always took for granted. I realized, as I was older, “Oh, everybody doesn’t do this. Why don’t they all do this?” 

I moved to Chicago after college and, in 2017, I was working at a sustainable seafood company at a farmers market. And I saw a compost collection van driving around the neighborhood. And I just realized, “oh, wow, people are doing this, this is a real thing.” I contacted them, and I started working for them. I worked there for about two years. And in those two years, during the beginning of the pandemic, we grew really quickly. And I realized, “OK, this is a real way to kind of solve this issue.”

MF: So, that’s when you decided to iterate on the Chicago business, but in your hometown of Madison, Wisconsin?

BS: Yeah. In Chicago, [the business] didn’t actually compost ourselves. We were collecting organic waste, and then somebody else collected it from us. And that worked for the situation, but I kind of felt like it didn’t give us enough oversight over what we were doing. 

After moving back to Madison, I realized there wasn’t really any infrastructure to compost food scraps, even if I wanted to outsource it and just be a collector, like in Chicago. 

MF: On the surface, it seems like a compost program would be easy to implement if a city already has a trash or recycling pick-up. When you were searching for a place to start your business, what were the issues you came up against?

BS: The big thing is a lack of infrastructure; there’s nowhere to compost that amount of food waste. Food waste is hard to compost compared to other organic waste, like yard waste. It’s really nitrogen rich, it’s really putrescible. It’s really wet and often contaminated. And so you have to be able to handle all those things. And so it kind of requires a different approach than yard waste composting, which is pretty easy to manage. And so just making the investments, there are things that communities haven’t done. 

MF: In terms of infrastructure, many cities have landfills. What do you need for a large-scale composting program?

BS: Well, there’s no one right way to do this, everything is kind of iterative.

We opted for a rotating drum composter. Our goal was to just get our foot in the door in whatever municipality we ended up working in. And to do that, we wanted to make sure our process was as clean and efficient as possible so that we would allay any fears about possible rodents or pests or bad smells. So, we spent a lot of money to make sure that we didn’t run into any perception issues. Our main goal is to kind of make the perception of composting seem cool and achievable. 

Photography submitted by Green Box.

MF: In a place like Wisconsin, roughly a third of household waste is food waste. With that much organic waste, compost seems like an issue many jurisdictions would want to tackle. How many places did you go to before you found a home for Green Box?

BS: I was in my parents’ basement for about six months, just shopping around municipalities. Pretty much every place I emailed either didn’t have a commercial composting zoning classification, or if they did, they expressly prohibited food scrap composting. And pretty much every place, all their zoning codes were written in the ‘80s, when they were more concerned about pests for local landowners and homeowners. That was a big legislative hurdle. 

The other hurdle was real estate. The market is really hot right now, there are a lot of people moving here. And a lot of it is dedicated towards either residential or multi-use development, so it’s hard to find space for this sort of operation.

Finally, just being a new business owner in a business that’s not well established, it’s hard convincing people that what you are doing is worthwhile, if people hadn’t even heard of composting.

[RELATED: Map: Who Composts?]

MF: So, you had to contend with a bunch of bylaws written 40 or more years ago. 

BS: Yeah. And we did find a home in Sun Prairie. That’s a combination of timing, finding a good location and warehouse and the city being willing to work with us. What ended up happening was there was a zoning code to allow for commercial composting operations. Sun Prairie was very helpful and willing to work with us to update one of the classifications to compost food scraps.

MF: So, now, your coverage area extends outside of Sun Prairie, and you actually have customers throughout Madison as well. 

BS: We started off smaller and tried to be dense. We started just about two years ago, on Valentine’s Day, 2022. 

At first, we had 25 members that were composting 200 pounds a week. And because of that we had to be fairly tight, just to make sure that we weren’t losing money on pickups. But now that we have about 700 residential members, composting about seven tons a week, we can afford to go a little bit further afield. In fact, we’re planning a few expansions to even further surrounding smaller municipalities in this coming year. 

Photography submitted by Green Box.

MF: Is composting easier with more people, with larger pickups? Can you do things that backyard composters can’t? 

BS: So, in order to kill pathogens like E. coli and salmonella in compost, you need to achieve a temperature of 131 degrees [Fahrenheit] for a sustained 72 hours. That’s the baseline. Most backyard composting piles don’t hit that, so you don’t want to compost meat, bones or dairy in those smaller compost piles because of the risk of bacteria spreading. 

But for us, we can achieve those temperatures on an industrial scale, no problem. And because we are rotating and composting in a vessel indoors, we have no issues with pests. 

We need to make this easy for the average consumer to adopt. We’re happy to take diehard conservationists and environmentalists, that’s great. But we figured they were probably already composting. We need to try and cater to people who don’t have the time or the interest or just the knowledge. So, [we’re] trying to get as broad a base as possible.

[RELATED: Composting Makes Sense. Why Don’t More Cities Do It?]

MF: That’s an interesting goal, to go after the customers who might not be your immediate target audience. I know that, for many folks, efforts like composting can seem a little futile in the face of the massive changes that need to happen to help our planet. 

BS: Definitely. I’ll say it probably doesn’t matter that much if one individual composts. But if that one individual composting gets 10 more people to compost, eventually those 10 get 10 more, and then we get to the point where now there’s buy-in and capital investment in the infrastructure, so we can start working with whole municipalities…That’s a real impact. Part of this is changing perceptions, changing goals, changing understandings about how waste works. That’s the really powerful part.

Photography submitted by Green Box.

For more on what is takes for cities to start a compost program, check out our feature on municipal compost programs here. 

Ready to compost where you live? Here are some expert tips to get started. 

• Look for community compost groups. Many organizations, including community gardens or environmental clubs, hold seminars or introductory panels on how to start composting. Get up to speed on what’s offered in your area; in addition to learning the composting basics, you might be able to join a network that’s already established. You can also search for a local composter here, or use this EPA map to find opportunities to divert excess food near you. 

• Check in with your city’s waste management team. Does your city offer composting? If they do, is it easily accessible? Most city’s waste management departments are easily found on the city website. From there, they should lay out exactly what you can and can’t compost, your individual pickup times, or the drop-off locations nearest you. 

• Make your voice heard. If your city does not offer a compost program, let the waste management department know you want one! One of the biggest hurdles to starting a pilot program is ensuring that there are enough residents interested in composting in the first place. Make it clear that you want to participate in a program, which makes it much easier for city officials to greenlight one. There are also resources to help municipalities as they get started, including this template from the US Composting Council which helps cities look at land use ordinances and classifications. 
• Look at the zoning bylaws. As Ben found out, some municipal bylaws were written decades ago, and they may not be up to date with the best waste management strategies for cities. But when city officials see that there is interest from the public, they have more reason to look at updating those bylaws, or looking at new ways of waste diversion.

***

The post He Wanted to Start Up a Composting Operation. Outdated Zoning Laws Stood in the Way. appeared first on Modern Farmer.

Chances are, yes, you could find strawberries at the store for sale. They’d be about the size of a golf ball, probably bright red and cost a lot of money. It’s likely not surprising that the strawberries your grandparents and great-grandparents were eating just a few generations ago were quite different. They were smaller, probably closer to the size of a quarter, a deeper red hue and they most likely weren’t around at the tail end of winter. 

Certainly, the change in availability is in part due to ease of imports and prevalence of greenhouses today. And some of the other changes are due to breeding and genetic engineering that creates berries that are hardier and more robust for that very shipping. 

But some of the changes, especially the ones we can’t readily see, are due to climate change. 

When it comes to how climate change is impacting our food, there are the short-, medium- and long-term impacts. In the short term, food security is a huge concern whenever an extreme weather event happens in an area. If there’s a fire or drought, crops can die off and yields go down. Floods or storms, along with rising temperatures, can lead to the perfect conditions for bacteria and fungi to thrive. 

In the medium term, though, things get more intense. Since the majority of plants evolved at a time when there was much more carbon dioxide in the air, they’re primed to hoard carbon from the air when it’s available. Greenhouse gases in our atmosphere mean there’s an excess of carbon dioxide now, which stimulates photosynthesis and growth in those plants while also changing their chemistry. While those plants are taking in more carbon dioxide, they’re still taking in the regular amounts of all the other nutrients they’re getting from the air and soil, such as nitrogen, phosphorus, magnesium and the rest. All of those other elements are staying the same, leaving us with a plant that has more carbon than before and an imbalance in its nutrition, impacting how our immune systems function.

And that leads to the long-term effect: what the plant leaves behind in the soil for the next harvest. As these new, nutritionally imbalanced plants decompose back into the soil, the composition of the soil itself changes. This is a long process, as it takes hundreds of years to make soil, but it’s already underway. The very earth in which we grow our food is less equipped for the job than it was last century. “It’s not just humans that are going to be affected, all life is going to be affected,” says Lewis Ziska, an associate professor in the environmental health sciences department at Columbia University.

There are other factors that can influence the dilution of a plant’s nutrients. Declines in nutrients can come from using certain fertilizers or through selective breeding where the goal is high yield. Importantly, nutrient declines are also difficult to measure. There are arguments that it’s not a side-by-side comparison to measure plants today against plants from the past, because the very measuring tools we use vary widely in terms of their sophistication and accuracy. But Ziska says there is research that shows that an increase in carbon dioxide will reduce protein and other macronutrient levels in plants, regardless of the level at which it started. 

“We [looked at wheat] and went back 150 years. We looked at the nitrogen, which is a proxy for protein, and saw that it’s been declining in a steady state,” says Ziska. “And the question, at least for bees and other pollinators, is, at what point does it stop?”

As Ziska notes, plants are far more than just a source of food. They’re a source of medicine and narcotics, all sorts of things that interact with human’s well-being, from alcohol to opium. And all of those things will be impacted by a rise in carbon dioxide levels. Take the birth control pill, which was derived from diosgenin, which is in yams. As the macronutrients in our yams change, so, too, could the medicine we make from them. And it’s not hitting all parts of the world equally. 

“In Bangladesh, where rice makes up 70 percent of your daily calories, what happens if rice changes?” asks Ziska. As rising carbon dioxide levels lower the nutritional profile of rice, “it’s going to have a much greater effect on a country that relies primarily on rice.” (You can read more about the future of rice in our recent feature here).

If climate-induced nutrient changes hit countries such as Bangladesh and Laos the hardest, countries such as the US, which gets more of its calories from corn rather than rice, may be spared the worst of it. Corn, Ziska says, has a different photosynthetic metabolism than other cereals, which means it can withstand higher levels of carbon much better than rice, wheat, barley, lettuce or potatoes. 

Along with corn, legumes are in a good position as well. “These are plants that have a very important symbiotic relationship with bacteria, where the bacteria will actually fix additional nitrogen. And when you give them more carbon dioxide, those carbs go to feed the bacteria, which, in turn, increase the amount of nitrogen that sticks,” explains Ziska. Researchers could look at gene editing or gene splicing to bring in elements from corn and legumes into other plants. They might find those helpful bacteria could also work well with another set of crops or there could be other lessons to learn from these plants that we can’t see yet. But as our atmosphere gets more carbon-rich, all is not lost. 

 “If there’s a silver lining in this, [corn and legumes] may be the answer to future food security—or at least future nutritional security.”

***

To learn more about how you can link your diet to climate action, check out this article from the United Nations. You can also look to incorporate more legumes into your diet, or ask your representative to make nutrition science a priority.

The post Your Food is Less Nutritious Than It Used to Be appeared first on Modern Farmer.

At the time, Corse was working off farm, while her parents transitioned their dairy into an organic operation. Corse, panicking, called her parents to find out that a fire had ripped through their barn. Luckily, they were able to move their animals out in time, but the recovery period was brutal. Corse’s parents settled their 100-head herd with a neighbor, driving the 20 miles each way twice a day, for months, to milk and care for the cows. Corse and her siblings had heart-wrenching discussions about if the barn was worth rebuilding, as her parents were getting close to retirement. But Corse didn’t want the farm to disappear. So, she rebuilt the barn and took over the operation, the sixth generation to run the Vermont dairy. 

As a dairy farmer, Corse has to prepare for fires, floods and all sorts of extreme weather disasters that can impact her animals and her business. She’s seen lightning strikes, 90-mile–per-hour wind storms and hurricane-level rain. “From a farmer’s perspective, there’s an incredible breadth of challenges that are coming because of extreme weather. And they’re incredibly unpredictable,” says Corse. “As you’re structuring your cropping and the livestock rotations, you’re having to actively adapt, sometimes daily, to deal with the weather conditions.” In order to deal with those challenges, Corse does have some contingency plans in place. She has a trailer that can fit some of her animals and enough pasture that she’s hopeful she’ll be able to find space for her cows. But the trauma of that fire stays with her, even now. “If that happened right now, I don’t know that I could continue,” says Corse. “I cannot overemphasize the strain from holding all of this stuff coming at you as a farmer.” 

Photography by Leitenberger Photography/Shutterstock

The impacts of extreme weather events and disasters on agriculture have been nearly unbelievable in some areas. Wildfires in California burned up more than 4.2 million acres in 2020 and, in 2017, damaged the wine grape harvest, resulting in an economic loss of roughly $75 million for the state. The 2021 heat dome that covered British Columbia saw temperatures rise as high as 121 degrees Fahrenheit, or nearly 50 degrees Celsius. The oppressive heat caused roads to buckle and more than 500 deaths across the region. Across farmland in the lower parts of the province, producers dealt with the deaths of thousands of animals, including more than 630,000 chickens, while 2,500 acres of blueberries wilted. Hurricanes in Florida have wrecked orange groves, causing losses of more than $247 million to the economy. 

As we reckon with the impacts of climate change, these extreme weather events will happen more frequently and with more intensity. Experts say we can expect to see more extreme cases of both flooding and drought, storms with higher winds and fires start and spread more rapidly. This has impacts on the health of soils and coastal waters, both of which are critical to the health and prosperity of our food supply. 

The stress and strain of an emergency evacuation can be a lot to think about head on. It’s painful to think about the potential losses of an emergency or how you might manage hundreds of animals in your rush out the door. But no matter your situation, the best thing you can do, says Ragan Adams, the veterinary specialist for the Colorado State University extension, is to make a plan and practice it, to get your livestock used to the motions. Animals, says Adams, are “aware of something changing in nature and around them. If they’re domestic pets, they’ll usually pick up from you if something’s wrong and begin to worry…There’s this saying in the world of animals that the slower you go, the faster you get things done. The slower you go, the less stressed you seem, the easier it is for the animals.” Also key in an emergency, says Adams, is a steady communication source that isn’t a cellphone (those towers can go down in a storm) and a reliable method of transportation that is gassed up and ready to go. Learn more about preparing for an emergency at the farm here.  

A 2011 paper from the USDA estimated that, at the time, the roughly 90 extreme weather-related disasters in the previous 30 years had resulted in more than $700 billion in normalized losses. “Droughts, floods, hurricanes, severe storms, heat waves, freezes and wildfires pose serious challenges for farmers and the agribusiness community,” writes author Raymond Motha. “Socio-economic costs of some of these natural disasters are far-reaching and long-lasting. The enduring changes in climate, water supply and soil moisture necessitate mitigation measures and adaptation strategies to cope with these changes in order to develop effective long-term risk management plans.”

Livestock producers and ranchers have a lot to deal with during a disaster, but crop farmers face a range of long-term impacts from weather events. Extreme precipitation, meaning heavy amounts of rain or snow falling in a short period of time, can cause crop damage and soil erosion. It can also lead to an increase in flooding, while runoff from all that water can add to pollutants in the streams and water supply. During droughts, soils can dry out, and heavy winds can strip or rearrange placements of that protective layer of topsoil. Building up that top layer of soil by cover cropping, or practicing no-till farming, can help protect the soil’s structure, but with more frequent wind and storm events, it’s getting harder to maintain that solid foundation.

Fire burns on the northwest side of Mount Shasta in Siskiyou County, California. Photography by Trevor Bexon/Shutterstock.

A colleague of Adams’s, Scott Cotton, has dealt with weather emergencies for close to 30 years. Now retired, he still consults with the Extension Disaster Education Network (EDEN), which developed after devastating floods in Mississippi and Missouri in 1993. The group now works with educators and citizens to prepare for emergencies and learn from them. 

One of the best things ag producers and farmers can do in advance of an emergency is work with the local agency in charge of disaster management, says Cotton. Whether that’s Emergency Medical Services, fire services or law enforcement, Cotton says their initial tendency in disasters is to shut down roads, limit access to areas and prioritize public safety. For a livestock producer who has poured his whole life and career into building his herd, he may not want to hear that he has to leave the animals behind. “That’s his life. It means everything. It’s his identity, his economic flow,” says Cotton. He’s seen those same producers, then, ignore directives from law enforcement and try to go around a blockade or cut a fence to move around it. Without proper communication with local agencies, those farmers can get stranded or stuck on a washed-out road or behind the fire line. Conversely, though, when producers and agencies make evacuation plans together ahead of time, it can make everything run smoother. “It takes the weight off of the emergency manager, because there is a team out there that knows what they’re doing,” says Cotton. “Nobody knows the landscape better than producers. So, when [EMS] needs a secondary access point in the area, and how to get around a blockage, producers know the way. If they’re in communication, it makes a difference.”

No matter how prepared you are, though, it takes a long time to recover after a disaster. There are four basic stages: preparation, mitigation (where teams work to reduce possible impacts), response and recovery. The weather event itself might have been a single day, but Cotton says the timeline of a disaster can run 10 to 12 years. 

Cotton recalls an historic blizzard in 2013, where nearly five feet of snow fell on much of South Dakota over three days. “We had 496 producers, across 200 miles. And it was sheep and cattle and horses, most of them.” Cotton and his local team started sending out emergency road crews to open up main arteries and get in touch with producers to find out where their livestock was and how many they’d lost. It took weeks to get to everyone, and then snow was so deep that it took excavators to clear paths to bury animals that didn’t make it through the storm. One producer, Cotton recalls, an 82-year-old rancher, lost the majority of his sheep and cattle. “We brought in a plow and dug a big trench, and then we piled all of his dead cattle up and rolled it into the trench with the snowplow….The trauma of his family standing here watching this, putting their entire life in a ditch, is really extreme.” That’s why Cotton says the first thing to think about once the disaster has cleared is counseling. There are psychological burdens that go along with weather disasters, especially for farmers and producers who can watch their livelihoods get wiped out in an instant. 

“We have producers who go out of business, not because they can’t refinance things, just because the emotional toll is so high from one or two events that they can’t handle it,” says Cotton. That’s what Corse was considering after the barn fire at her Vermont dairy in 2007. Ultimately, she decided to keep going, but she carries that trauma and stress with her every day now, and she sees it getting worse. “In a situation where, literally day to day, you’re having to adapt your entire plan as a farmer because the weather is changing that quickly…we’re not ready for this moment.”

The post When Natural Disasters Strike the Farm, the Effects Linger appeared first on Modern Farmer.

That’s why Ragan Adams, the veterinary specialist for the Colorado State University extension, recommends thinking through possible emergency scenarios before they occur, so you can have a full picture of what you might need. Different operations will have different priorities, and living on a flood plain versus a fault line will change your preparations accordingly. 

“If you have a dairy farm, there’s not many places you’re gonna move 1,000 cows and be able to milk them the next day,” says Adams. “So, people tend to put their emphasis on being able to shelter in place, be independent. In the beef industry, if you’ve got a cow-calf operation, oftentimes your benefit is land, so you move them to other pastures. Or in a hurry, if it comes up fast on you, you would cut fences and open gates and let them run for it.” 

While there are different strategies for individual operations, there are some principles to keep in mind when devising an emergency plan. 

Make a plan and practice it

It’s not enough to come up with an escape route or a plan in the abstract; you have to put it to the test. That means in the case of an evacuation, does your family know how to safely get off of the property and what to bring with them? There are resources, such as this Red Cross worksheet, that can help you work through every step of an evacuation. The Extension Disaster Education Network (EDEN) has resources for most every emergency you can encounter, from Tsunamis to swine fever. 

On a farm, think about everyone that might be on site. If you have employees or seasonal staff, emergency training with clear instructions is a must. Everyone should be aware of what to do in the event of an emergency and where to safely meet up afterwards. For a large staff, it’s a good idea to designate a team captain or leader who can be briefed on specific instructions and shepard folks along. 

And don’t forget about your animals. Get them used to being loaded into trailers, carriers or whatever mechanism you use to transport them. If you have the option to let them out to a further pasture, practice running out to the fencing or guardrails to ensure the livestock can safely move where they need to go. “If you have a trailer, but you haven’t put your horse in it in three years, when there’s all this excitement and everybody’s worried, those animals can get very worried. So, it’s important for their owners to practice getting them used to it,” says Adams. She recommends running through a drill yearly, to keep everyone up to speed. 

Have a buddy

What if you’re out of town when disaster strikes? Or if the emergency is too big to handle alone? Farmers tend to look out for one another, and this is no different. If there are several producers in your area, consider developing a phone tree or other communications plan if there is adverse weather in the forecast. 

And, says Adams, include your buddy in your planning session. “I know of a group in Colorado that has annual days in the spring, they’ll get a whole bunch of people together and practice loading their horses, so that everybody gets [comfortable],” says Adams.

Stay in contact

Make sure you have a reliable source of communication that is not a cellphone. Cell towers and service can easily go down in inclement weather, or signals may be jammed. Even landlines aren’t foolproof in certain situations. “The more reliant you are on one source of communication, the more you need backups,” says Adams. 

Adams suggests keeping a radio on hand, so you can get alerts and information as needed. She keeps a solar-powered ham radio on her property, which also allows her to radio out in case she needs assistance. Some municipalities or counties also have designated channels or feeds for emergency alerts. You can often sign up for alerts through your local emergency management office or private services like this one. Keep in mind, however, that you don’t want to solely rely on a cellphone or internet services. 

Keep your vehicle prepared

The final piece of the escape plan is ensuring that your vehicle is prepped and ready for transportation. That means ensuring that it’s gassed up and roadworthy. It could also mean keeping copies of printed maps handy in the vehicle—if those cell towers are down, GPS signals aren’t going to work well. 

Make sure that any attachments to the vehicle, such as trailers or flatbeds, are in good condition and easy to work with. Make sure that all tires are full and patched and that everyone knows how to operate any machinery they may have to work with. 

In the event that your area loses power, are you able to manually open fences, garages, gates and locks? Practice using these manual options, and make sure any electrified fences or gates have an override option in the event of power outage. Keep flashlights and other safety equipment in areas with easy access, so if lights go out, you’ll be able to see what you’re doing in the dark. 

The post How to Evacuate Your Animals in an Emergency appeared first on Modern Farmer.

Steward runs Red Angus cattle on about 1,000 acres of land over the Crow Reservation in Montana, right at the foot of the Bighorn Mountains. She and her husband started ranching in their late 20s, and they’ve been at it for more than 40 years now. “We started with a little ranch north of Gillette, Wyoming. We had nothing—no knowledge, no equipment. We had 65 cows and a book that told us how to pull a calf.” 

Photography submitted by Mickey Steward.

Over the decades, Steward has grown her operation and is now working her third ranch. She’s learned a few things over the years and likens the perfect balance of a grassland to “Goldilocks porridge.” Keeping the ground temperature steady, maintaining adequate soil moisture, moving the cattle at the right pace…it’s a lot to keep in mind. Steward works to keep track of everything by sectioning off her acres with electric fencing and moving her cattle in time with seasonal changes. In the spring, Steward moves her cattle out to pastures that have rested over the winter, but by the long heat of the summer, she’s wary of the ground getting too hot and baking, so she maintains a good litter cover while moving her cattle into shaded areas. “We try to bring back the climax vegetation, to encourage the vegetation to return to its most productive and stable state,” says Steward. It’s a difficult job to keep grasslands across the US in the best shape possible. In part, that’s because they keep disappearing. 

In 2021, roughly 1.6 million acres of grasslands across the Canadian and US Great Plains were plowed over. Since 2012, we’ve lost nearly 32 million acres, some to development, some to the expansion of farming. It’s not the fault of any one farmer, and Steward is quick to point out that ranchers couldn’t survive without farmers. But she does worry about the loss of ranchland. “The grasslands and rangelands are like the lungs of the body,” she says. “We have to have a balance. And we have to preserve those lungs, the grasslands and rangelands and open spaces.” 

Photography submitted by Mickey Steward.

It is tough for ranchers to stick with ranching, however, when large-scale farming can often prove more profitable for the same acreage—at least, initially. “A lot of the new land that’s getting plowed up is soil that isn’t necessarily going to sustain farming for the long term. It’s marginal soil,” says Alexis Bonogofsky, manager of the World Wildlife Fund’s Sustainable Ranching Initiative (SRI). A rancher herself, Bonogofsky raises ewes on about 100 acres outside of Billings, Montana, and works with ranchers, including Steward, to restore their grasslands and make it more profitable to stay in ranching long term. “Preventing that marginal soil from getting tilled up is a goal of ours. If we can make ranching a viable economic activity on that land, we’re helping to keep that grass.”

Keeping grasslands, and ensuring they are performing at their peak, has incredible benefits to wildlife habitat, water quality and carbon sequestration. “Healthy grasslands, with good grazing, can actually increase the amount of carbon that is sequestered in the soil. The northern Great Plains is one of four intact grassland ecosystems in the world,” says Bonogofsky. It can be hard for folks to see the importance of this ecosystem, she says, especially if they haven’t really seen a grassland up close. “The prairies is one of the most biodiverse ecosystems we have. I worry that people don’t understand the value of the prairie, and, therefore, might not be interested in protecting them…Grasslands can support grass-based economies and rural communities and wildlife all at the same time.” 

And one way to keep the grasslands healthy is, perhaps, a little counterintuitive: grazing. 

Grass is meant to be grazed; it’s how the roots get stronger and more secure and how the soil quality improves. But overgrazing, which tends to happen with too many animals on too small a parcel of land, has the opposite effect. Rather than strengthening the soil, overgrazing weakens root systems, resulting in patchy plant clusters and dismal topsoil. Steward worked with Bonogofsky and the SRI program to come up with a rotational program. 

Photography submitted by Mickey Steward.

They keep their herd on a relatively small paddock for a few days, then move them, but not by much. It’s a short shift over, but it allows the grasses that were just grazed enough time to recover. “You can’t run cattle and maintain a stable, diverse grasslands environment if you don’t control how long the grazing lasts, how hard the grazing is and how much physical impact the animals bring to the landscape,” says Steward. “You’re both mimicking the natural environment and encouraging it to be the best that it can be.”

When Steward first started with the SRI program, advisors came to the ranch and did a bunch of soil sampling. At the time, roughly 10 years ago, they found an average of three perennial grasses and plenty of bare ground. Now, a decade later, Steward says there’s an average of 12 native grasses, with a solid ground cover. “It’s about a 30-percent increase in productivity,” says Steward. 

The history of ranching, says Steward, is a fairly extractive one. “There was no real thought for balanced utilization. Now, we’ve gotten ourselves to the point where we need to regenerate the landscape,” she says. “We can make it the best it can be. And I firmly believe that livestock, because it’s a grassland that evolved with grazing animals, is the best way to do it.” 

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 Learn more about the WWF’s rangeland program, and the conditions which shaped the current state of Nebraska rangeland.

The post Meet the Ranchers Trying to Restore Grasslands appeared first on Modern Farmer.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Under water

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

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

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

An Arkansas rice field. Photography by Shutterstock.

Field work

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

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

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

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

The rice of the future

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

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

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

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

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

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.” 

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