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

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

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

The report

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

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

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

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

Greenwashing

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

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

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

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

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

Anaerobic digesters. (Photo from Shutterstock)

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

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

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

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

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

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

Digesters don’t erase factory farm concerns

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

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

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

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

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

Manure storage vessels. (Photo from Shutterstock)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dairy cows being milked. (Photo from Shutterstock)

A more sustainable future for dairy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

When challenging its pork producer about its use of manure lagoons and the myriad health and environmental issues they pose, Ganzler knew that Bon Appétit’s end goal was not only to source more sustainable pork but to be able to communicate effectively with its customers about the issue—something that is quite difficult, since no one wants to talk about manure when they’re eating.

This tension is at the heart of Ganzler’s new book: How can companies practice authentic sustainability and work it effectively into their marketing strategy? In the book, Ganzler details Bon Appétit’s progress and missteps in navigating issues such as farmworker rights, pigs raised in gestation crates, chickens in cages, and more. The book, which comes out April 2, also includes interviews with other industry experts who talk about their experiences, including:  Rob Michalak, former global director of social mission for Ben & Jerry’s, who talks about integrating sustainability into operations and his experience with Milk with Dignity organizers; Gary Hirshberg, co-founder of Stonyfield Organic, who discusses picking your battles and taking stands on issues; and Lisa Dyson, CEO and co-founder of Air Protein, who talks about creating alternative protein and striving to be the number one meat company in the world.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Modern Farmer: In your book, you say that when a business does something right or makes progress toward a sustainability target, it should get credit for it. This can bolster the business, but you write that it can also create a ripple effect toward industry change. How so?

Maisie Ganzler: A great example of that was in 2005, when we at Bon Appétit made a commitment to cage-free eggs nationwide. We heard that the client at another corporation said to their food service provider, ‘We’d like cage-free eggs served here,’ and the food service provider said ‘Oh, we can’t do that. There’s not enough available, blah, blah, blah,’—all these excuses. And the client said, ‘Well, Bon Appétit does it for their locations. So, I’m sure you can do it here, too.’ That’s the ripple effect that I’m talking about—once a company has proven that something is possible, other companies now need to come to the table and do the same.

MF: Something you worked on passionately was sourcing pork from producers that don’t house pigs in gestational crates. You didn’t reach this goal overnight but through a series of milestones. You eventually accomplished this with pork producer Clemens Food Group, on which Modern Farmer reported here. To get there, you first had to hear big companies tell you no, it wasn’t possible. Why did you push on regardless? How were you confident you could achieve something that wasn’t being widely done at such a large scale?

MG: I pushed on for two main reasons. One was that it was simply the right thing to do. If you’ve seen a sow in a gestation crate, it’s heartbreaking. They can’t turn around, they can’t walk; it is very clear that something better could be done for that animal. So, that’s where we start, rooted in the idea that it’s the right thing to do for the animal. But as you’ve pointed out, we’re also a business and we want to get market credit. And we had made a public promise, and I was not going to go back on that. So, while I was transparent about the difficulties and about missing the deadline, I never wanted to say it can’t be done. Was I confident that it could be done? Not necessarily, but I don’t need confidence to keep pushing forward.

MF: You advise companies to own their challenges and obstacles to achieving their sustainability goals—something that can be tempting to hide. Why is it actually better to be transparent about these things?

MG: Being transparent is important because one, it will insulate you to some degree from greenwashing claims. If you are the person that’s stepping forward and saying here’s where we fell short, nobody can have that “gotcha” moment. The other thing is that it actually gets you more credit in the end. If you pretend that everything’s easy to do, why should anybody celebrate that you did it? If you’re transparent about how challenging it was, how many bumps there were in the road, how many times you failed and redoubled your efforts, how much more expensive it was, then all the more reason for customers or advocacy groups to laud your accomplishment when you finally do pull it off.

I don’t think that anybody on the consumer side, anybody reasonable, expects perfection from a company. But they do expect honesty. And I think that’s a reasonable expectation. One of the things that I talked to Gary Hirshberg about, the founder of Stonyfield, is he talked about people needing to make an emotional connection with the brand, especially if you’re asking them to spend more money on something. Just what I was talking about [with] gestation crates, and how they are so horrible for sows, that cuts to my heart, not necessarily to my head, because it is more efficient, it is more cost-effective, but my heart tells me something different. And a lot about building an authentic brand based upon sustainability is listening to your heart and being open with your heart.

If you’re not authentic in your desire to make real change, I think that people smell that. And you may actually have something backfire. Instead of [achieving] what you want, you may be in a worse position if you’re inauthentically making these promises.

Ganzler holds a piglet. (Photography provided by Maisie Ganzler)

MF:  You talk about how in Bon Appétit’s Farm to Fork program, you don’t require that producers be certified organic, but you do require that farms be owner-operated. As a farmer in St. Louis told you, if you’re a small farm, you can’t afford to scrap a whole field if you have a fungal outbreak, you need to be able to apply a fungicide. If you held firm to requiring organic certification, you’d end up putting the squeeze on some of your smaller producers. When setting a sustainability goal, how do you make sure that the parameters you choose can actually help you achieve your desired outcome?

MG: You have to first be really clear of what your desired outcome is. So, for the Bon Appétit Farm to Fork program, the desired outcome was to support farmers that were growing for taste—that was the initial impetus of the program: to get the best-tasting food. And to do that, we decided that we had to support small-scale farmers that were close to us that were able to grow for flavor, as opposed to grow for conformity or transportability or a whole host of other reasons. Be really clear about what your goal is. 

MF: Considering Bon Appétit’s size and reach, you encounter a lot of issues in our food system. You work with producers across a wide geography and advocates on a wide breadth of issues. From your perspective, what are the biggest issues in our food system right now? 

MG: From sitting in the chair of a food service company that’s a buyer, I think that the biggest issues really surround animal agriculture, how animals are treated and the impacts that the raising of those animals have on our environment. And there’s a lot of different things in play. And there’s a lot of strong opinions but also some conflicting information. So, I would say that there’s a whole host of issues around animal agriculture.

MF: For small farmers or food businesses that don’t have a marketing department, budget or training, do you have any advice for how they can still tell their story effectively?

MG: I think that the first thing is that they need to figure out what their story is and distill it down. If they have a package, what can they put on the package that quickly communicates the most salient points of their story, not the encyclopedic version of it, because no one’s going to take time to read that. Everybody’s got a website, so the same thing there, really figuring out what your headline is and succinctly communicating that to your customers. And making that headline something that does create an emotional connection with people. Not being afraid to take a stand, whether that is in the issues you take on, how you talk about them or where you talk about them. 

What I was trying to communicate in the book is the importance of both making meaningful change and getting market credit for it. And that’s where the title comes from—You Can’t Market Manure at Lunchtime. There was this real environmental change we were after, dealing with manure lagoons, but we also needed to be able to talk to customers about it. Because we are not advocacy groups, we are for-profit companies. But we have the power to do good in this world and capitalize on it. And there’s nothing shameful about that duality.

The post When Corporate Sustainability Goals Are Good for Business appeared first on Modern Farmer.

On this particular afternoon, Cameron Rentsch is pedaling an e-bike through Missoula’s University District. Hitched to the back of the bike is a narrow trailer, holding three tall receptacles for collecting food scraps. They won’t all get filled today as this route is quick—only eight stops. Rentsch follows a map marked with the addresses and, at each house, picks up a small white bucket filled with organic waste—apple cores, coffee grounds, wilted roses—and dumps the bucket into one of the receptacles on the back of the trailer. 

Rentsch does this work for Soil Cycle, a compost-based nonprofit. Monday through Friday, Soil Cycle sends its cyclists out on the road, picking up food scraps from houses and businesses and taking them back to its facility. Not only do Soil Cycle’s staff pick up the food scraps, but a few times a year, its customers can pick up the end result: compost for their home gardens. What’s more, they do it all on bicycles, keeping the transportation sustainable. In 2023, Soil Cycle diverted more than 49,680 pounds of food scraps from the landfill. It’s a circular, closed-loop system. 

Meeting a need

When Caitlyn Lewis was in graduate school at the University of Montana, there was no municipal food waste collection system in Missoula. So, after graduation, she decided that’s where she wanted to focus her energy. As a result, she founded Soil Cycle.

“I was sick of throwing my veggies away when I was cooking, and I was adulting a little bit more and cooking with more fresh produce and thinking about my waste stream a little bit more than maybe I did when I was in high school. And there was nowhere to put it.”

Missoula is far from the only city to have a community compost program, but Soil Cycle stands out for its focus on sustainable transportation. There are a handful of other communities that also have bike-powered food scraps collection, such as BK Rot in New York City and Peels & Wheels in New Haven, Connecticut. Soil Cycle has gone through several different mission shifts since its founding, but the bicycle transport has remained one of the core values, says Lewis. 

“We figured we can meet as many issues in our city with one organization…soil health, food waste, carbon sequestration and sustainable transportation,” says Lewis. “It really is an example of how to do business in a different way.”

A few times a year, Soil Cycle is able to give the actual compost back to the customers.

“We’re creating this fertilizer that you can use on your houseplants and in your garden, and they can see firsthand how they’re making a difference,” says Elisabeth Davidson, executive director of Soil Cycle. “And I think that’s probably the biggest part in closing that loop. It’s people seeing the product that’s created by the food waste.”

Even a few years ago, the mindset around composting felt different in Missoula, says Lewis. When she started Soil Cycle, there were about 10 people who signed up right away. But others took some convincing.

“The rest were like, well, why do I need to compost? Why should I pay a service a fee to collect it? Why do you make compost?” says Lewis.

Left: Rentsch approaches the bike receptacles. Right: Aerial view of food scraps in the receptacle. (Photos by Lena Beck)

While limiting food waste is best for the environment, redirecting wasted food away from landfills is the next best option. Research from the EPA in 2023 found that 58 percent of landfill-produced methane came from wasted food. Methane is a greenhouse gas that contributes to climate change. Composting integrates oxygen into the equation, minimizing the methane produced when done correctly.

As more municipalities have created food scrap pick-ups and compost services, the directionality is often one-way. People let their food scraps be collected at the curb, says Davidson, and then their involvement ends. She hopes more people will start to wonder where those food scraps end up. 

“I wish folks just knew more about where their food was going after they threw it in the compost bin,” says Davidson. “It gets sent off and then [people are] like, ‘OK, I did my part.’ And that’s true, they did do their part. But looking throughout the system, you need to think down the line of OK, where’s my food waste going after this? How is it being processed? And how is it being distributed?”

Beyond Soil Cycle and Missoula, many cities have programs where you can purchase or get compost for free, making the process more full circle. In Bozeman, Montana, Happy Trash Can Compost collects food scraps and sells the finished compost back to the community. In Los Angeles, LA Compost provides several options for obtaining free compost, through farmers markets, co-ops or community hubs. Even some of the food scraps collected through the municipal program in Portland, Oregon are processed by Recology Organics, which will sell its compost products retail.

What’s next

A little before 4 pm, Rentsch finishes the route and pulls the e-bike to a stop in front of the gate surrounding Soil Cycle’s headquarters. Dropping off the food scraps and cleaning out the receptacles is the only thing left to do today.

“We can’t save every piece of fruit—organic materials are organic and they will decompose,” says Lewis. “But we should honor them and we should make the best-quality fertilizer we can.” 

Meanwhile, Lewis, who in recent years has also started a flower farm called Blue Mountain Flowers, has realized that there are some additional challenges to composting at the farm level—for example, an abundance of organic material can be hard to “turn,” a critical part of composting, if you don’t have heavy equipment. One of her goals for the coming year is to design a composting system that is easy to manage for farmers and is replicable across small farms.

“It’s a passion project of mine to create a composting system that can be replicated for small farmers,” she says. “And there’s ways to do it, without putting [in] a ton of time. You just have to be creative.”

Left: Rentsch bikes through Missoula picking up food scraps. Right: The bike parked at a customer’s house. (Photos by Lena Beck)

Since Soil Cycle is hyperlocal, there’s no competition with nearby municipalities. A company or initiative doing the same thing in the next town over is a collaborator, not a rival. 

“It doesn’t necessarily have to be bicycle-powered and identical to what we’re doing,” says Davidson. “But I’d say a lot of local communities are interested in creating some sort of composting service.”

And Soil Cycle’s connections stretch far beyond Montana, as more communities try to pick up the idea.

“I have a meeting with someone tomorrow, who I believe is from Ireland, [who says] ‘I want to do what you’re doing, here,’” says Davidson. “OK, let’s talk about it.”

The post Meet the Modern Composters on Wheels appeared first on Modern Farmer.

Surrounding the immaculate rows of kale that sold well in downtown Portland, some “weeds” would pop up in bunches. My boss told me to pick these plants, called lambsquarters, to make way for the kale, but said that I should feel free to take them home and eat them, as they were actually delicious. I did—there were a lot of nights that summer that I had steamed lambsquarters on top of herby rice and lentils or in a stir fry.

Why couldn’t we bring these into town to sell at the farmers market? It had nothing to do with the taste or nutritional value—lambsquarters are on par with the best of greens. But, simply put, there was no market for these “weeds.” They weren’t trendy like kale, nor did they have an old standby reputation like spinach. And so, even though they grew abundantly without being planted, most of them just went to the compost pile. 

Tama Matsuoka Wong’s new book, Into the Weeds, out March 12, resurfaced my memory of lambsquarters with a new curiosity. Not only does she mention them, she lists them as one of the top species to forage. Wong is a professional forager, finding, growing and collecting edible plants, many of which are considered weeds by the general population. She sources many of these plants from her own land—letting plants grow where they prefer instead of in orderly crop rows—and sells them to top restaurants in New York City, pulling them out of the “weed” category and onto dinner plates. After reading her book, which includes experiential knowledge, reflections, how-tos and a handful of recipes, I couldn’t wait to ask her more about her process.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Modern Farmer: There’s a term you use in your book that we should define. What is a “wild garden”?

Tama Matsuoka Wong: You might think that “wild” and “garden” are kind of contradictory to each other. But I mean, a garden in the larger sense of things is really anything that you can tend and enjoy—I think it’s something you relate to. So, a “wild garden” I view as something that is less created and controlled by you, and it has a lot more of its own initiative. I feel like it’s more dictated by the plants and their behavior. I’m not saying 100 percent, but it’s less of a cultivated garden, which is almost all created and planted by a person. 

Brassica rapa, also known as Field Mustard. (Photography by Ngoc Minh Ngo)

MF: You forage foods such as lemon balm, chickweed and nettle, and your buyers include some very nice restaurants in New York City. What is the significance of creating a market for something that many people perceive as a weed?

TMW: I want [the work that I do] to become part of the food system. And so, in that sense, an easy way to start with that is to start with restaurants. It’s a very interesting creative [research and development] effort to kind of take something that some people might not be familiar with and make it taste delicious, right? Chefs just love that. 

That being said, a lot of the plants that I am referring to are culturally significant. And in those countries, they are already culinary. And so, if I bring that to a chef who is from that place, they’re like, “oh my gosh.” To them, it’s just like home sweet home. That’s also what I think is great—people bring it as part of their culture. So, that’s what’s exciting about it. 

The big difference is to try and really have these weeds or these plants make [their] way into the actual food system so people become more familiar with it. But it’s also something that eventually is pretty easy, and I think that’s happening. I see it at farmers markets, for sure.

MF: Is there anything that Modern Farmer readers can do to help some of these plants make their way into the food system more consistently?

TMW: If you go to a farmers market, ask the farmer for some. I’m sure they’ll recognize them and they’ll be happy to sell them to you.

Left: Ajuga. Right: Dried herbs for tea. (Photography by Ngoc Minh Ngo)

MF: Many people “weed” their gardens. You practice something you call “editing.” What’s the difference and how does it relate to stewardship of the land?

TMW: Weeding, usually, you just go and get rid of everything, because [you] think it competes with the crop. Which maybe some weeds do, but a number of weeds actually don’t and they actually help the soil. Like purslane and chickweed—they’re very shallow-rooted, so they actually help to prevent erosion and keep moisture in the soil. I’ve talked to soil scientists, and I actually know some organic farmers, family farmers, and they’ve used chickweed as their cover crop. 

So, weeding, I think is [the] tearing, ripping out of anything that is not your crop. And editing is I’m making room for the weeds that I want. And I’m just editing out the ones that are less preferable. When I’ve talked to ethnobotanists, they said that that’s how peoples have worked with the land, is that they’ve edited out things for the preferred plants, always.

MF: In the book, you talk about your process, and instead of deciding ahead of time where to grow something, you often observe the natural habits of the plants in your space and take their lead. How do you balance that with the “business” of it all—needing to fill quotas for restaurants and the like?

TMW: I actually think it’s aligned. Because if a plant is growing where it wants to grow, it’s gonna thrive and multiply. If you’re trying to plant the plant where it doesn’t really want to grow—and believe me, you can try it over and over and over again—it’s just gonna sit there like a little sad, caged-up animal. And so, if you’re putting it in a place that breeds fecundity, as long as it’s not an invasive plant, then it’s going to thrive a lot of times. So, I think it’s aligned.

I do not plant invasive plants, because there’s so much of them that I don’t need to plant more. And actually, it would cause a lot of problems in my garden. But there are plenty of places that you can go and talk to conservation groups and others that will help you pick or let you pick invasive plants. 

Left: Open-lashed edging. Right: Honeysuckle. (Photography by Ngoc Minh Ngo)

MF: For Modern Farmer readers who are intrigued by the idea of foraging, what’s a good first step or takeaway?

TMW: One of my tips for gardeners or farmers or people that look askance at whatever this wild patch that they may have is to make it look intentional. The second thing is that I don’t think I can underscore how important it is to realize that every little patch of earth is unique. The urge to just come and get rid of everything that’s there without looking at it, and then plant everything in—what you’re doing is you’re taking something that’s actually a cloned or propagated thing, and you’re getting rid of the things that are really unique and special about whatever that little patch of earth that you’re attending has. 

If you don’t have access [to land], get to know your neighbors. If you know your neighbors, a lot of times, they’re not going to want the things that you’re going to want. The other thing is that there’s a lot of fallow land, and you need to make sure you’re working with the property manager, to make sure they haven’t sprayed or poisoned or there’s not a history of dumping or anything there. So, I’ve seen on the back of like church yards or temples or even areas of office space, there’s all this fallow, unused space. And you could go there and be like, can we have a garden, and then maybe have like a little bed, but then on the side, there’ll be weeds and you could forage those. 

If you really can’t even do that, then just have some big containers in your window, and put dirt in it and see what comes up. Because people have sent me things from their balcony steps in Harlem, and they’re like, “We planted a tomato plant that didn’t come up, but what is this?” and it was upland cress! It was really good.

You don’t have to have all this time, you don’t have to go to a national park. In different levels, you could start in many ways.

Left: Phlox. Right: Seed collecting. (Photography by Ngoc Minh Ngo)

Into the Weeds comes out March 12. For interested foragers, this book provides some guidance on identifying and preparing wild foods such as  lambsquarters, chickweed, sumac, purslane and juniper. 

If you begin foraging, it’s important to do so safely, sustainably and ethically. Here is a checklist to help you begin.

As Wong says, you don’t have to go far. This interactive map can help you find forageable items near you.

The post Making ‘Weeds’ Part of the Food System appeared first on Modern Farmer.

“We call ourselves an ‘experience farm,’” says Topaz. “But we could just as easily call ourselves an educational farm.” 

Topaz Farm grows vegetables, berries and more—but it also participates in something called agritourism, a broad term that includes activities and events that bring visitors to the farm. This relationship between the farm and the greater community has been critical to the farm’s survival over the past few years.

When Abeles and Topaz first acquired their land on Sauvie Island, it had been conventionally farmed for decades and had “virtually nothing good in the soil,” says Topaz. As they began to farm the land, they also endeavored to learn about regenerative techniques to foster healthier soil—supplementing with microbes, biochar and more. But these things don’t transform soil overnight, and in the meantime, it was difficult to make enough income through traditional farming alone. This was coupled with other mishaps that often befall small farms. The first year, deer ate two acres of strawberries while Topaz and Abeles were sleeping. This past year, squash bugs helped wipe out their pumpkin crop. Their forays into agritourism have kept the farm afloat.

“We think that for farmers to become sustainable financially and to remain in business and to keep farming, they have to have the flexibility to have diverse revenue sources,” says Abeles.

They aren’t the only ones who feel this way. When announcing the results from the 2022 Census of Agriculture this February, Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack said that many farmers rely on off-farm income to keep their production afloat, and he supports diversifying farmers’ income streams to keep farming economically feasible, although he didn’t mention agritourism specifically.

But despite many farms depending on extra revenue, which agritourism can provide, farmers such as Topaz and Abeles face challenges in navigating agritourism laws. According to Oregon’s legal code, farms can have “farm stands” as long as no more than 25 percent of the sales are attributable to “incidental items and fees from promotional activity.” This includes some but not all aspects of agritourism. But it doesn’t always make sense to Topaz and Abeles what fits into which category—it’s a problem, since there’s a hard cap on incidentals. For example, if they sell tickets to a farm dinner and prepare guests food made from the produce harvested on the farm, this can’t exceed 25 percent of their “farm stand” income. 

Left: At Topaz Farm, as with many agritourism farms, education is a key component. Right: A sign listing some agritourism activities visitors can participate in. (Photography by Topaz Farm)

Other issues emerged. They were told by a county official that if they host live music, it can’t be called a concert. But it is OK to call it a “harvest festival featuring a live music performance.” If a class of school children comes to the farm for an educational field trip and it’s raining (as it often does in northwest Oregon), Abeles and Topaz want to be able to utilize tents, but the county has flagged this as an issue as well, with the outcome yet to be decided.

“We used to say Mother Nature was the most challenging part of farming,” says Topaz. “We’ve replaced that with Multnomah County and the state being the most difficult thing that we deal with. And we’re not alone.”

The immense counterweight to all of these restrictions is that land use laws are in place for a reason: to protect the integrity of farmland. Across the country, millions of acres of farmland have been lost over the last 30 years, due to development and other forms of land conversion. What farmers, conservationists, lawmakers and residents of Oregon and the rest of the country are faced with is a delicate dilemma: How do you preserve the integrity of the country’s best farmland without sacrificing the livelihood of the farmer in the process? 

Agritourism on the farm

“Agritourism” is an umbrella term that encompasses so many different things. The National Agricultural Law Center defines agritourism as the “crossroads” of agriculture and tourism; it draws visitors to farms for educational, entertainment or recreational purposes, and it is intended to increase farm income. Examples vary widely; corn mazes, on-farm markets, farm stays and bed and breakfasts, U-pick opportunities, farm-to-table dinners, tours and classes are all examples of agritourism, and there are a lot more, too. 

This breadth is a double-edged sword. On one hand, there are a lot of different and customizable opportunities to bring in extra income on farms. But, at the same time, regulating all of these different activities as a monolith doesn’t make sense. As a result, the type of agritourism a farm can practice and how much of the business it can be isn’t consistent, not just state to state, but even county to county.

“There is not one nationally or internationally recognized definition,” says Audrey Comerford, an agritourism coordinator at Oregon State University Extension. “Which means it’s kind of an amoeba … [It] encompasses a lot of different things depending on the location.”

Comerford co-authored a new economic impact report on agritourism in Oregon’s Willamette Valley. Of the 18,679 farms in the Willamette Valley, about 4,000 of them may be engaged in some kind of agritourism. For these farms, agritourism can account for as much as 50 percent of their business. 

Comerford says Oregon’s land use laws seem to be stricter than those in other places in general. A national survey from the University of Vermont echoes this point, finding that farmers on the West Coast listed legal regulations as one of their biggest hurdles to agritourism. 

Live music featuring Gregory Alan Isakov at Topaz Farm. (Photography by Sara Wright)

The idea of gathering on farms is not new, says Lisa Chase, director of the Vermont Tourism Research Center at the University of Vermont and lead author of this survey. That’s something that’s been around as long as we’ve had agriculture. The more recent development is the profound disconnect between most people and the farms that feed them—direct on-farm jobs accounted for less than 2 percent of US employment in 2022. 

“What’s new is this disconnect with agriculture, for almost all of the US population, and that provides an opportunity for farms to help the non-farming public learn about food production, and [it] also provide some additional income for the farms,” says Chase.

In this way, agritourism provides an opportunity to increase the “agricultural literacy” of the public. But agritourism is a term that should be only reserved for working farms, says Chase. Unfortunately, that’s a tough thing to quantify.

“The fact that it’s a working farm needs to be included, and then it becomes a question of how do you measure that,” says Chase.

In Oregon, farmers such as Abeles and Topaz of Topaz Farm have to carefully navigate the rule that only 25 percent of their farm stand income can come from “incidental items” and “fees from promotional activity.” Another approach would be to use time spent or labor percentage instead of income, says Chase—something she’s seen in Italy. The benefit of this method is that these incidentals, such as farm stays or farm dinners, earn more over less time. This approach limits the amount of time spent devoted to agritourism, instead of capping the portion of income that is derived from it.

“It became problematic for farms who could make so much money from their overnight farm stays and not as much money from the food they were producing, even though it was a legitimate working farm,” says Chase.

A farm to table dinner at Topaz Farm. (Photography by Topaz Farm)

Even though this is a hard thing to try to quantify, getting it right is paramount. Chase says that, not too long ago, she had a phone call from a developer who was talking about starting an agricultural theme park and was curious about agritourism. Chase advised them that they shouldn’t use that word if they weren’t going to be running a working farm. 

“This is exactly what people are worried about,” says Chase. “As agritourism grows in popularity, it is a real concern. And the core of agritourism is that you’re a working farm. And I think that is what needs to be maintained in the regulations.”

‘Exclusive farm use’

Protecting farmland from losing its working farms is a key concern for Greg Holmes, Working Lands Program Director/Southern Oregon Advocate for 1000 Friends of Oregon, an organization that advocates for land-use planning.

Oregon passed Senate Bill 100 in 1973, creating the Department of Land Conservation and Development. This legislation and subsequent entity became the framework for land use protections in Oregon and, over the last 50 years, has protected much of Oregon’s fertile farmland (as well as forest land and conservation land) by labeling it as “exclusive farm use.”

While the state creates the regulations, it’s up to individual counties to zone the land. This can create some confusion, but the differentiation is essential. The land and the ecosystems it supports vary drastically throughout the state, from the damp, fertile Willamette Valley in the northwest corner of the state to the arid high desert of the eastern half of Oregon down to the piney shared border with California. Zoning all of these counties as though they are the same would come with its own problems. On top of this county-to-county variation, soil suitable for farmland is defined slightly differently for the west side of the Cascade Range versus the east side. 

“There [is] various room for interpretation and different counties apply the regulations, as they understand them, slightly differently,” says Holmes. “The result is that every county has something that fits the definition of exclusive farm use. And it’s protected and zoned for the purpose of protecting agriculture.”

Under Oregon’s legal code, if a farm on exclusive farm use land has a farmstand, income generated from the “incidental” items or “fee-based activity” sold there must be no more than 25 percent of the total farm stand revenue. Agritourism does not fall neatly into this split. For example, U-pick offerings don’t count toward the 25 percent, but tickets to a farm-to-table dinner do. The point is to prevent abuse of farmland—for example, selling things at a farmstand that don’t have anything to do with farming.

“The point of the limitation on the incidental sales is they want to make sure that it remains a farmstand and doesn’t have a store that happens to be located on agricultural land and is drawing people to it,” says Holmes.

A better definition of agritourism, says Holmes, would help draw a cleaner line between working farms making supplemental income and other types of businesses trying to use a farmscape as their setting. It has to address both the tourism aspect and the direct tie to working agriculture.

“The cleanest way to do this would be to start from the beginning,” says Holmes, to define what counts as acceptable agritourism and what should not take place on agricultural land. From there, the law can clarify the process of how to permit acceptable activities. “I don’t think you can ever get a list that’s all-encompassing, but we can do a lot better than what we’ve done now.”

Defining agritourism

Holmes isn’t the only one who has identified the need for a more concrete definition of agritourism. Suzi Spahr, executive director for NAFDMA, an organization that unites agritourism operators, says there’s significant diversity in what agritourism is. 

“You will have many local governments or state government officials who will think that they know what a particular farm will do and then will want to make regulations based on that style,” says Spahr. “But you’ll have a variety of different agritourism operations, and so a one-size-fits-all all very frequently does not fit the industry to its best.”

NAFDMA has created its own definition of agritourism: “Agritourism is an agricultural enterprise attracting visitors to a farm or ranch to experience a connection with agriculture production and/or processing through entertainment, education, and/or the purchase of farm products.”

“We are starting to use that as sort of the basis by which we ensure that the focus remains on agriculture as the main guiding force, the main purpose behind what’s occurring,” says Spahr. 

Sheep at Leaping Lamb Farm. (Photography by Nathan Fussell)

Scottie Jones of Leaping Lamb Farm in Alsea, Oregon practices a type of agritourism where guests can come stay on her farm. Jones found that having an overnight rental on her farm greatly increased the viability of her business. 

“It’s horrible to say this, but, you know, it takes the agritourism for me to be able to be a successful farmer,” she says.

She keeps the farm at the center of the farm stays—she loves the questions from guests that she gets to answer—what does a potato look like in the ground? What is a fertilized egg? Jones says it’s an opportunity for connection.

“We sell lamb—that’s our prime agricultural product that we sell,” says Jones. “But by adding the farm stay, immediately, we were starting to be able to pay for the tractor to break down, and we weren’t using our retirement to be farmers. So, I was wholly invested in what this could do for us; also what it could do for the people that came to visit.”

Jones is also the chair for North America at the Global Agritourism Network and the owner/operator of Farmstay, a network of small overnight rentals on farms across the country. It offers support and resources for farmers looking to diversify their business this way. Jones has also seen some of the abuses of this pathway—hotels or developers trying to create luxury agricultural stays on farmland.

The farm stay at Leaping Lamb Farm. (Photography by Leaping Lamb Farm)

“Farmstay is about working farms and ranches that offer lodging,” says Jones. “So, it’s about going onto a real farm. It’s not a fake farm, it’s not a beautiful piece of property; it’s a working farm.”

She sees these “fake farm” businesses as a detriment to trying to figure out how to proceed with legislation making agritourism easier on actual farms.

“I do understand the fear there,” says Jones. “I just need our regulators to know that there’s the rest of us. There’s the rest of us out there, just really trying to make a dollar and really wanting to make that connection and really wanting to provide a place for people to come to the country and learn something.”

***

Interested in figuring out if agritourism is right for your farm? Audrey Comerford co-teaches this online on-demand course for producers in Oregon. The OSU Extension Agricultural Tourism website can be found here, and you can sign up for its quarterly newsletter here. The Vermont Tourism Research Center has an extensive catalog of resources. Farmstay helps farmers looking to host guests figure out how to get started. And NAFDMA is a central resource hub for North American agritourism enterprises.

Want to learn more about land protections? Read more on the 1000 Friends of Oregon website. Here, you can learn more about Oregon’s land use planning system, read impact reports and brief yourself on important bills in Oregon’s 2024 legislative session.

The post The Business Behind the Farm Visit appeared first on Modern Farmer.

Becoming certified organic, however, is not an overnight process for farmers. Adopting approved organic practices is only part of it. For a food to become certified organic, the farmland must be proven to have not received any pesticides or unapproved substances for at least three years. 

For farmers who use more conventional methods but are interested in transitioning to organic, the process can take years. The investment of time is not without risk. During this transition period, yields can drop and farmers can still be years away from a return. Despite these obstacles, there are several reasons that farmers still pursue organic certification, such as environmental and health benefits.

We talked with Lindsay Haines, National Pest Management and Organic Systems specialist for the USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service, about what this transition looks like and what kind of government-backed support aspiring organic farmers can lean on.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Modern Farmer: Can you tell me what the process of transitioning to organic farming looks like for producers in terms of requirements?

Lindsay Haines: The basic requirement is to not have any what they consider prohibited substances applied to your ground for at least three years. So, that could mean you transition ground that hasn’t had anything on it for other reasons—it was just not used or in a conservation program or something. There weren’t any inputs, it wasn’t producing anything, so it can transition right away. 

Or in the more common circumstances, if people are farming conventionally and using some of the prohibited substances, they have to then stop using those substances and start doing other things—whether they plant a conservation cover for three years or actually start producing crops without those prohibited substances, but you have to document that you have done that for at least three years. So, it could be right away if you didn’t have a history, and you can prove it, or more typically three years, because you need that period of time to remove those prohibited substances.

Much of our conventional agriculture uses synthetic inputs. And they can have some very short-term impacts and long-term impacts. [In organic farming], we want to switch from that chemically based system to a biologically based system. And so, it does take a little time for the system to reset, so to speak.

Certified organic farms can’t use pesticides or other prohibited substances. (Photo from Shutterstock)

MF: During this transition period, what are some of the obstacles or hardships that producers can come up against?

LH: A very common problem with organic folks is weed management. The chemical products that many farmers use are very effective in terms of terminating weeds or plants that they don’t want in their system. If you’re doing things organically, there’s no similar, easy way to do it. It’s usually a combination of practices farmers have to use. They have to use lots of cover crops, and they have to have a more intense crop rotation and they may use some tillage. 

There [are] some infrastructure issues. You need some infrastructure first, before folks can know, ‘if I grow this, where am I going to sell it?’ So, some of the other initiatives across USDA are dealing with that. Bottlenecks with [organic] meat processors is a huge issue. There’s not enough certified meat processors, and then a lot of granaries that don’t have these segregated facilities. But it is getting better. 

MF: Organic certified foods may fetch premium prices. But as producers transition to organic farming, can there be a loss in yield or a financial burden that comes along with making this transition?

LH: There definitely is. We actually are offering what we consider “foregone income” for certain crops and certain regions of the country [to] compensate farmers that will see that sort of dip in yields as they transition. But once they get through the transition, I often hear farmers say it actually takes more like five years [to] get back to the yields that they might have had before. But they definitely do get back. 

Even though they may be getting premium prices, they still have different costs. I hate it when people just focus on the premium prices, because there’s so much behind that in terms of investing in the production and the values and the environmental benefits. So, it’s a big picture. It’s not just about the premium prices.

MF: The USDA offers some support to farmers going through this transition, through programs such as the Organic Transition Initiative. How does the initiative aim to help address some of these obstacles?

LH: A few years ago, the secretary said he wanted all the departments to investigate ways to help people transition. And so, we got a bunch of folks together in NRCS and thought how can we help folks, and we wanted to pursue this foregone income piece. And so, we did the deep economic dive and came up with some ideas for that. 

But we also wanted to help folks overcome the learning curve. Anyone in any business that wants to change how they do things has to learn a new way of doing things. And so, we want to really invest in farmers who want to invest their time to [research and try] these new ways of doing things organically. The thought behind it is to invest in folks, spending more time learning about these new ways of managing, attending workshops, getting mentors, working with other crop advisors or organic experts to find how they need to make every management decision differently throughout their growing season.

Certified organic farms must prove that the land has not received prohibited substances for at least three years. (Photo by Shutterstock)

MF: Part of the initiative is to bolster organic markets. Is there anything that farmers or non-farmers can do to also help support the growth of the organic market?

LH: I think the more people can ask questions [and] be informed, because labeling is just incredibly confusing to people. While the organic standard is not perfect—there’s fraud everywhere, right?—it does set the standard. So, you can go to a place and look at what the standards are, you can talk to your farmers. I just think it’s a great opportunity for people to come together, both farmers and consumers, to learn about our food and our environment.

MF:  Is there anything else you would like farmers or non-farmers to know either about this transition in general or about the Organic Transition Initiative?

LH: I just encourage people, if you’re not familiar with NRCS, [to] come to your local field office, get to know the folks, have folks out to your farm, learn from each other. Get to know your farmers, get to know how your food is produced. Most farmers welcome those sorts of interactions. And I think we’re all better for it, when we learn more about how our food is produced, and our allies with the agriculture industry, wherever people are on the spectrum. It’s very important for our food and also our environment.

***

For farmers: You can learn more about the Organic Transition Initiative here and apply by March 1 through your local USDA Service Center to receive help making this transition. 

For interested readers: To get a deeper understanding of the organic label, read our coverage here.

The post What Does it Take to Become an Organic Farmer? appeared first on Modern Farmer.

It happens everywhere in our food system. Tomatoes that don’t meet product specifications get left on the vine at farms. Byproducts of processed foods get tossed out on the manufacturing line. Ugly lemons get picked over at the supermarket. At home, we throw out the wilting spinach in our refrigerator that we bought when we had grand plans to cook, then ended up ordering takeout instead.

All of these things add up; food waste cost the US $428 billion in 2022. In addition to the monetary costs, wasted food could be going to those who need it—12.8 percent of American households were food insecure in 2022. Environmentally that same year, the US expended 6.1 percent of its greenhouse gas emissions on food that never gets eaten, as well as an estimated 16 percent of US cropland and 22 percent of its freshwater use.

The thing is, reducing wasted food is completely possible. A close look at where it happens in the food system, and how, reveals how interventions can make a difference in achieving our food waste goals.

Big goals for 2030

In 2015, the United Nations created a Sustainable Development Goal, or SDG, to halve food waste at the consumer and retail levels by 2030. The US joined in pursuit of this goal, thereby taking on the biggest food waste challenge in the world.

Now, in 2024, we have passed the halfway point to that deadline, but food waste is still a monumental problem in the US.

However, there have been some interesting fluctuations in this trend. The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent lockdown exposed weaknesses in our food system, but it also dramatically changed people’s eating habits, as well as their waste habits. Research indicates that the onset of the pandemic resulted in reductions in household food waste in many countries at first … “and then kind of a return to normal levels of waste thereafter,” says Brian Roe, leader of the Ohio State Food Waste Collaborative.

We don’t have definitive data as to why, but Roe offers a guess: In general, people were home more, going to the grocery store less frequently and not eating out at restaurants as much. As things began to re-open, food waste levels went back to “normal.”

Another interesting part of the food waste discussion at the national level is that municipal composting programs are becoming more common. However, compost doesn’t count toward the SDG food waste reduction goals. These measures will have to be achieved through upstream interventions. So, where in the food system can this happen?

On the farm: 16.8 percent of surplus food 

When it comes to fruits and vegetables, Dana Gunders, executive director of ReFED, says occasional overproduction can be attributed to fluctuating markets. Because of that, growers are always playing a guessing game about how much they will be able to sell and the price they will fetch versus the basic cost of harvest.

There’s also the question of aesthetics. “You also have products that are systematically left in the field because of their specs. They’re not meeting specs, for one reason or another. It could be size, shape, color, sweetness, but it also could be that they have two weeks of shelf life left instead of three.”

Labor or budget shortages can also result in food left on the vine—perhaps farms only find it possible to pay workers to go out in the field twice instead of three times and food gets left behind. Gleaning programs can address this.

But produce isn’t the only food that can be wasted on farms. Gunders says produce gets a lot of the focus, but that there are also wasted eggs, meat, dairy and commodity grains.

Tomatoes left on the plant. (Photo courtesy of Shutterstock)

In processing: 14.7 percent of surplus food

Manufacturing is decently efficient, says Gunders. But the byproducts of certain items can be a source of wasted food in the system. For example, if you’re making french fries, you may be tossing your potato peels, even though they are edible. 

The upcycled food movement has stepped in to try to figure out how to address some of these issues.

At grocery stores and restaurants: 20.2 percent of surplus food

A typical grocery store sells tens of thousands of different items, a fair few of which are not shelf-stable. Grocery stores must estimate how much of something they think they will sell, and they won’t always get it right. US grocery stores produce five million tons of food waste annually.

Seventy percent of the food wasted at restaurants happens in the front of the house, not in the kitchen. Often, this happens through big portions. Patrons can’t finish the food and it gets left on the plate.

A handful of states have passed legislation addressing surplus food at this level, either through organic waste bans, providing tax incentives to donate surplus food or liability protections for donated food, such as that which has passed its “best by” date. You can find more about what each state is up to using ReFED’s Policy Finder.

Uneaten food in a garbage receptacle. (Photo courtesy of Shutterstock)

At home: 48.2 percent of surplus food

The biggest share of food waste occurs at home. This makes the environmental impact even stronger—not only is the food wasted, but so much energy was used to get it from the farm, through the food system and into your kitchen. 

“It really boils down to the fact that we’re not very good at managing our food,” says Gunders. 

Fortunately, steps for reducing your home footprint are pretty accessible. A recent pilot study out of the University of Guelph found that at-home educational interventions can help reduce food waste. You can access the manual it used at home here. And for actionable tips for what you can do at home, read our how-to here.  

“I’m a big believer that we need to chip away at the consumer level because it is the source of the most. And by the time it gets to the consumer, it has embedded increasing amounts of energy and other resources. You’ve transported it a few more times, you’ve refrigerated it for longer, you burned more energy [and] created more emissions to get it to the consumer level,” says Roe.

Prevention vs. reaction

When it comes to food waste solutions, many fall on one end of the spectrum or the other: preventing food from being wasted in the first place versus getting use out of it once it has been wasted. Both sides are valuable.

Preventive strategies help cut down on the amount of money and energy used to create food that doesn’t get eaten. 

But disposing of wasted food the right way is also important. Landfills are the third greatest producers of human-driven methane in the US. An EPA study from 2023 found that an estimated 58 percent of the methane produced by landfills was due to food waste. Food, when tossed in the landfill, generates this greenhouse gas. The way to cut down on this is by redirecting food waste away from landfills. Compost, if managed properly through the integration of oxygen, will not create such high levels of methane. Check out our tips on compost best practices here.

“Getting a system in place throughout the country to really systematically get that food out of landfills, is now taking, I would say, more prominence as a good climate strategy,” says Gunders.

Learn more. Most of the data used in this article was sourced from ReFED, a leader in understanding food waste through data. Check out its homepage, Insights Engine and Policy Finder for more information.

The post The Staggering Scale of Food Waste, Explained appeared first on Modern Farmer.

With numbers like that, it’s clear that wasted food is a big issue, with an impact on the environment and food security. For problems this large, it’s easy to feel like individual action can’t make a difference. But in this instance, since we know that the largest share of wasted food happens at the household level, individual action being impactful isn’t just possible, it’s necessary.

“If we don’t take action as individuals, we will not be able to solve this problem,” says Dana Gunders, executive director of ReFED. “All the grocery store and restaurant work and supply chain work that’s happening out there will not solve this problem without people in their homes changing their food habits as well.”

After talking to some experts in the field, we put together a list of recommendations for cutting down on your food waste at home.

Buy less

While this isn’t particularly groundbreaking, it really is the key to reducing home waste. Don’t buy more than you can consume within a given time period. The thing is, many of us become guilty of this without even realizing it. 

There are a lot of different mindsets that can contribute to food waste at home, says Brian Roe, leader of the Ohio State Food Waste Collaborative. Some of these can be very well-intentioned, such as the provider mindset—overprovisioning so as to always have enough on hand for everyone. “Your love language translated into a waste language,” says Roe. “People are more focused on trying to be that good provider and don’t necessarily think about the waste as much.”

When that’s the case, keep a food diary. Every time you toss something out, mark it down. Look for patterns. Are you buying too many bananas? Are you cooking in portion sizes that leave you with leftovers you aren’t eating? Roe also recommends physically collecting the waste in one place. The visual of how much it is can motivate change. Noticing these patterns is the first step in breaking the cycle.

You can also keep track of how much you spend on food and compare it to how much is wasted. Many consumers are financially motivated, and they don’t want to waste money. However, that isn’t always enough of a mindset to reduce household food waste.

“The point of waste and the point of purchase are so far apart,” says Roe. “People aren’t reconciling their books the way a retailer or processor is.”

Store it right

Have you noticed that every time you buy spinach, it wilts before you can use it? Do your raspberries go bad within days? Storing these things properly makes a difference.

Secondly, proper storage can prevent things from getting lost in your refrigerator. Using clear storage containers so you can see what’s inside or marking the contents with labels and dates is a good way to keep what you’ve got at the front of your mind.

Harvest Public Media recently ran a piece about how canning is coming back into style. Canning used to be very popular at the household level, but it has largely fallen out of practice. While many people do this to preserve their garden’s harvest into the winter, you can also draw upon tried and true preservation techniques to avoid throwing away surplus food before it goes bad. Try canning, jarring or jamming.

Lastly, use your freezer to buy yourself extra time. “Freezers are a great way to put a pause button on your food,” says Gunders.

Safely canning or jarring vegetables is a good way to avoid wasting them. (Photo courtesy of Shutterstock)

Reevaluate ‘best by’ dates

We’ve all pulled a can of soup out of the cupboard only to see that its “best by” date has long since passed. But these dates are widely misinterpreted, says Gunders. Many actually refer to best quality, not to actual safety. 

“There is a small subset of products that can have some kind of increased risk associated with them,” says Gunders. “Deli meat is a great example. But we have no way as consumers to tell the difference at this moment because there [are] no actual legal definitions for the words they use next to the dates.”

There is now a push to create legal uniformity in the language you see on packaging so that it’s easier for you to tell what these dates actually mean. There is a voluntary language guide, which you can find here, but it is not universally adopted.

In the meantime, give things a sniff or taste, says Gunders. If it seems fine, it probably is. Of course, this doesn’t apply to everything. As a rule of thumb, Gunders says the exceptions are likely to be the foods that pregnant women are recommended to avoid.

[RELATED: The Staggering Scale of Food Waste, Explained]

Try weekly fridge clean-outs

It’s normal to accumulate extras in your fridge. Leftovers that you couldn’t quite finish or some surplus ingredient that you didn’t use all of, such as fresh herbs or half an onion. These are the items that are most likely to be tossed out unnecessarily. But you can reduce these occurrences with a designated day to use them up. Maybe you dress up leftovers with the extra ingredients you have lying around, or perhaps you cook all the extras into a stir-fry or soup. Being intentional about this can reduce the amount of food you toss.

“[Shop] your fridge before you go back to the store to really make sure you’re using stuff up,” says Gunders.

Compost as a last resort

We love compost. But, ideally, you are composting the parts of your food that can’t be used for something else. Roe says that research has suggested that, for some people, reducing food waste upstream and composting the scraps can be complementary attributes of a conscious consumer. But there’s also evidence to suggest that, sometimes, composting wasted food mitigates the guilt that people feel about letting it go bad. To address the food waste problem, compost should be the last resort, not a way to absolve yourself from wasting food.

A lot of things that often get tossed actually have viable uses in the kitchen—think, radish tops in your pesto or zesting your organic citrus rinds. For some clever tips on how to do this (plus many more), check out FoodPrint’s ABCs of Reducing Food Waste.

This graphic shows the optimal steps for reducing and handling wasted food. (Courtesy of the EPA)

Get the app

Thinking of creative ways to plan ahead during shopping trips or reuse ragtag ingredients may not be your strong suit. For those of us who might need help imagining what half a bell pepper and some shredded cheese might turn into, there are fortunately an abundance of phone apps that might help, such as Your Food – No Waste Inventory or KITCHENPAL: Pantry Inventory.

Roe recommends Hellmann’s campaign to decrease food waste, where you download the Fridge Night app and it helps you squeeze one more meal out of the stragglers in your fridge.

“You don’t have to be perfect at provisioning, you don’t have to be perfect at storing. But if you have the ability to make up for it at the end and the motivation to find the things in the fridge and put it together, then you are going to save money, get that one more meal a week out of your fridge [and] waste less,” says Roe. “And so, it kind of helps correct for other earlier errors in the chain.”

Learn more. Most of the data used in this article was sourced from ReFED, a leader in understanding food waste through data. Check out its homepage, Insights Engine and  Policy Finder for more information.

Let us know. We picked up these tips by talking to experts, but a lot of people have developed strategies from their own experience. Let us know in the comments about a creative way you reduce food waste.

The post A Bulk of Food Waste Happens at Home. Here’s How to Cut Your Footprint. appeared first on Modern Farmer.

Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan spoke first. He touched on the importance of having representation for urban agriculture within city government. “I felt like I was supportive of farming, but our bureaucracy wasn’t supportive,” he said in the announcement.

And then Rushdan moved in front of the microphone, to the sound of loud cheering.

By appointing Rushdan, Detroit joined a small handful of cities that are creating positions within city government for urban agriculture. Urban farming is known for connecting city dwellers with their food source, increasing food security and creating beautiful green spaces. Although urban agriculture has deep roots in many cities, these directors are giving city food spaces an institutional voice within the government, complementing the agency and advocacy that has long accompanied the practice.

“It really shows that community that they’re valuable to the city, because they have an advocate at that level,” Rushdan said later to Modern Farmer. 

Detroit, Michigan

Mayor Duggan’s proposed Land Value Tax Plan, on which Detroit may get to vote in 2024, would cut property taxes on structures such as houses while dramatically increasing the taxes for vacant lots. The idea is to reduce taxes for homeowners, without losing tax revenue for the city and simultaneously encouraging owners of vacant land to develop it. But the initial plans also created a problem: Urban farmers were caught in the middle, potentially facing big tax burdens if the plan was passed.

Urban farmers began meeting with Duggan to discuss the issue, leading to an exemption for urban farms under the proposed tax increases. Another byproduct of these meetings was the realization by the city that they needed the voices of urban farmers represented in government. Shortly after, Rushdan’s position was created.

In her speech at the ceremony, Rushdan made sure to acknowledge that while she’s the first in this position, she stands on the shoulders of giants in the Detroit agriculture scene. She referenced multiple local leaders who had helped build and expand urban agriculture in Detroit, such as Kathryn Underwood of the City Planning Commission and Malik Yakini of the Detroit Black Community Food Sovereignty Network.

“Even though this is a new iteration… I do see this as like a little bit of a continuation of that spirit,” said Rushdan later to Modern Farmer. “I think it’s important to always uplift that history.” 

Farming has a long history in Detroit, and many cities can say the same. In her position, Rushdan can help urban farmers navigate the challenges that remain—acquiring land is difficult, and finding land that has access to public water is an additional challenge. It can also be hard to compete with developers. In some cases, developers have bought up land where cultivation was taking place, and farmers lost decades of work.

“We really got aggressive over the last five years—we’re trying to figure out how to make people land secure,” says Rushdan.

But Detroit is in a unique position, because there’s a lot of vacant land. “It’s like re-imagining what a city could be with a lens of green space or the lens of sustainability,” says Rushdan.

Charlestown Sprouts Community Garden. (Photo by City of Boston)

Boston, Massachusetts

Shani Fletcher is the first director of GrowBoston, the city’s office of urban agriculture. In 2013, Boston adopted Article 89, which brought urban agriculture into the city zoning code. But there weren’t a lot of city programs to move urban farming initiatives forward. 

“We just saw this need for more kinds of programming and more kinds of investments beyond capital investments,” says Fletcher. In response, the mayor created GrowBoston, and Fletcher, whose career was driven by food justice, was appointed to the helm.

Part of Fletcher’s work at GrowBoston is to meet with other city departments that have an impact on urban agriculture—Public Health, Water and Sewer, Parks and Recreation and many more—which is part of why having a voice for urban agriculture in city government is so important. 

“Because of just the nature of urban agriculture, there’s so many departments that can have an impact on it, in a positive or negative way,” says Fletcher. “And so I think having an office and some staff who are actually focused on addressing the whole of urban agriculture and can kind of work with other departments to strategize is really a big benefit.”

The fact that urban agriculture is influenced by multiple departments is evidenced by the fact that in the cities that have an office for urban agriculture, it is housed in different departments. Boston’s is in Housing. DC’s is in Energy & Environment. Atlanta, City Planning. Philadelphia, Parks and Recreation.

As in Detroit, accessing land for urban agriculture and the upfront costs associated with making land suitable for farming is a significant obstacle in Boston. Fletcher says for people looking to begin urban agriculture in cities facing similar access issues, creatively engaging with others about how to use existing space is a good way to begin. This could be connecting with public officials or private landowners or rethinking what garden space can be.

“I really get excited thinking about growing food in weird places,” says Fletcher, such as vertically, on rooftops or in other creative spaces. “I like the idea of it just being kind of everywhere you go, there could be food growing, and that that’s being eaten, and that’s getting to people who need it.”

Eastie Farm greenhouse. (Photo by City of Boston)

Washington, DC and beyond

Kate Lee became the director of the Office of Urban Agriculture in Washington, DC in March 2020, but the need for her position arose several years earlier. In 2014, the District passed an environmental sustainability plan called Sustainable DC. One goal of this plan was to increase the amount of land under cultivation in the District by 20 acres. Urban agriculturists wanted to step to the plate, but they hit a common barrier—how to access land for this purpose? 

“The community advocated more and more vocally that we need a position embedded in this government, we need someone with know-how to run these programs to liaise between the government and the stakeholders,” says Lee.

In response, DC passed legislation in 2019 to create the Office of Urban Agriculture and Lee’s position.

DC is and has been gentrifying rapidly, and there’s a lot of value in supporting long-term residents of the District, says Lee. “The office is driven by community ownership, food sovereignty and self-determination … using our resources and our opportunity to advocate for self-determination.”

Although some of the cities with official urban agriculture positions might look far apart on a map, they don’t exist in silos. The directors have self-organized into a group that meets regularly and shares ideas and feedback with each other. The name of the group, of which Lee and Fletcher are co-chairs, is the Urban Agriculture Directors Network (part of the Urban Sustainability Directors Network), but you don’t actually have to be a director to join, as long as you’re a municipal government employee influencing urban agriculture in your area. Four years after its inception, this cohort now includes about 20 different municipalities. In the meetings, participants share best practices, support and coach each other and even celebrate victories, such as the creation of a new urban agriculture liaison in New Orleans.

“Our three cities [DC, Boston and Austin, Texas] wrote to the mayor of New Orleans [and] said, ‘Based on this position, please join this echelon of other cities leading in this work,’” says Lee. “And they did. New Orleans just funded an urban agriculture liaison position. And so that is the type of stuff that is really keeping me going.”

Edgewater Food Forest. (Photo by City of Boston)

Are you thinking about getting started in urban agriculture?: Look into local ordinances so that you can stay safe from accidentally breaking the law. Make connections with your neighbors and let them know what you’re doing. If your city doesn’t have an office of agriculture (yet), Rushdan says: “Find some advocates within the city. In a city that doesn’t have any office of agriculture that you can turn to, you [have] to find those advocates within the departments that believe in what you’re doing, so that they can figure out the internal systems.”

Fletcher echoes the sentiment of building connections with others who are engaged in urban agriculture. “I think there’s so much about urban agriculture that is about building community. And I think if someone’s interested in getting involved in urban agriculture, looking around your community and seeing who’s doing that already is a really good starting point.”

Are you a local government employee with some influence on urban agriculture in your area? Reach out to the Urban Agriculture Directors Network. The network meets regularly and is a good space for education and collaboration.

The post Urban Ag is Nothing New. Representing it in City Government is. appeared first on Modern Farmer.

According to Jaret Daniels, curator at the Florida Museum of Natural History, we no longer have the luxury of relying only on conservation lands to address biodiversity loss. Climate change, pollution, pesticides and habitat destruction are putting increasing pressure on pollinators, such as bees and butterflies. He says we need to look at nontraditional spaces as well, such as agricultural margins, utility corridors and roadsides. Although roads commonly fragment habitat for wildlife, pollinator programs, present in many states, flip the script and provide opportunities for conservation. 

Daniels is the lead of a new $155,000 grant from the Florida Department of Transportation that will plant 9,000 milkweed plants along Florida highways over the next three years to support monarch breeding habitat. Monarchs depend on diverse ecosystems, but they only lay their eggs on milkweed.

Monarchs are a “gateway bug” to improving habitat, says Daniels. Planting the roadsides for monarchs will also be good for insect pollinators in general. Beyond that, pollinators such as bees are key participants in agriculture, and we depend on them for our food. These roadside plantings aim to connect habitat, rather than fragment it. State Departments of Transportation (DOTs), often managing some of the most land in the state, are uniquely positioned to address this task.

“Even these fairly urbanized areas still harbor a lot of diversity,” says Daniels. “And if you connect those spaces, then it enhances it even more to provide connectivity between populations and movement.”

A milkweed plant grows along an FDOT roadway. (Photo by Jaret Daniels)

From beautification to conservation

Planting flowers along roadsides isn’t a new idea. Lady Bird Johnson’s beautification efforts in the 1960s spread beyond cities and to the highways, and many states have been planting flowers on roadways for years.

But some of these beautification efforts have taken up a second purpose—pollinator conservation. North Carolina began its Wildflower Program in 1985, and it now manages 1,500 acres of wildflowers along major North Carolina thoroughfares.

About 15 years ago, says Derek Smith, roadside management engineering supervisor for the North Carolina Department of Transportation (NCDOT), discussion of pollinators entered the picture when a North Carolina State University scientist, Danesha Seth Carley, started studying the effects these plantings were having on pollinators. NCSU research confirmed that these roadside plantings drew in a higher number of bees and greater bee diversity.

The efforts then became intentional. The NCDOT planted gardens for monarchs at highway rest areas, welcome centers and wetland mitigation sites. Two of these welcome centers are certified monarch waystations on MonarchWatch.org.

An adult monarch. (Photo by Jaret Daniels)

Besides milkweed, NCDOT also plants a mix of perennial, annual and native plants. “Monarchs will nectar on all kinds of plants,” says Smith.

The decision to plant perennials and natives means that the NCDOT doesn’t need to go back every year to re-establish the plot. Additionally, it’s worked with the North Carolina Department of Agriculture to support farmers who want to grow flowers on their farm margins in support of pollinators.

“Transportation departments are one of the largest landowners in various states,” says Smith. “Why not take advantage of it if we can, and create habitat.”

More than milkweed

The milkweed movement is commonly associated with a way to help the monarch butterfly. In recent years, it’s become a popular way to support the species—since milkweed is the only type of plant on which monarchs will lay their eggs. 

However, landscape designer and author Benjamin Vogt cautions against leaning too much on milkweed as the silver bullet for monarch conservation. Adult monarchs need a diversity of plants on which to nectar.

“A more diverse habitat planting fosters a thriving ecosystem, one in which countless other interactions are occurring, which not only benefit monarchs but all sorts of other butterfly and insect and bug species,” wrote Vogt to Modern Farmer in an email. “Gardening for monarchs means gardening for everyone else.”

[RELATED: Meet the Milkweed Man on a Quest to Help Monarch Butterflies]

Michael McClanahan of the Tennessee Department of Transportation is very familiar with the public’s love for milkweed. In 2023, the TDOT launched a program called Project Milkweed—free mail-order milkweed seeds for people to plant in their gardens to support monarchs. It ran out of seeds pretty quickly, restocked and ran out again. All in all, it received 130,903 individual orders, sending out a total of 799,601 packets of seeds. 

“I think we were shocked,” says McClanahan. “It’s really shown us that people want to do the right thing. And that people are really passionate about trying to preserve their space and create these waystations for migrating pollinators.”

A meadow planted by TDOT at a highway interchange. (Photo by TDOT)

In Tennessee’s planting program, though, it goes beyond milkweed. It started a few years ago when NCDOT wanted to “up [its] game,” says McClanahan. It didn’t start with planting but with other pollinator-friendly practices on the roadsides. TDOT started mowing less. It began deploying fewer herbicides and changing up their herbicide mixes. 

“That’s really kind of the genesis of our Pollinator Habitat Program is we started looking at our internal practices,” says McClanahan.

The program now boasts 11 sites, including welcome centers and state parks. Here, people can find diverse native plants, trees, bushes and grasses—such as partridge pea, false sunflower, frost aster and more.

For some of the roadside planting, McClanahan says sometimes people expect to see manicured,  blooming gardens. But many of their plantings are focused on native diversity and won’t always be in full color. Habitat restoration goes beyond pretty blooms and improves the ecosystem as a whole. 

“I think when you tell people that they’re native [plants], they’re more receptive to what’s out there.”

Use the space you have. Vogt doesn’t think you can necessarily “restore habitat” for pollinators in your backyard, but you can create a little island of resources. “Every plant matters,” says Vogt. “Every native plant matters more.” And if that island can connect to other islands, pollinators will be better off for it. “The more habitat we have in all shapes and form[s] the better,” says Vogt. He has published a few helpful books on this subject, including A New Garden Ethic: Cultivating Defiant Compassion for an Uncertain Future and Prairie Up.

Think local and make connections. “You can make simple steps in your own landscape to enhance and attract wildlife—plant native vegetation, reduce your lawn a little bit, diversify your landscape,” says Daniels. “And then as you’re going in and around your community, look at other spaces that have potential.” This could mean connecting with DOT officials, local government or even your homeowner’s association.

Use your resources if able. Smith says North Carolina’s Wildflower Program is not funded through tax dollars but through the purchase of personalized license plates. If you live in North Carolina, that’s a good way to support the continuance of the program. Other states have similar programs, such as Oregon, Colorado and Pennsylvania.  

Go beyond planting. Pollinators experience pressures from pollution, chemical pesticides/herbicides and climate change. Addressing these issues in your community through advocacy or policy is an important way to support pollinators. 

Learn more. There are many resources online for learning more about pollinator health and how to support them. Here are a few:

• Florida Wildflower Foundation.“They also have wildflower resolution templates on their website to work with local communities to try to increase planting along roadways or get areas designated as wildflower areas where mowing is reduced during spring bloom,” says Daniels.
• The Xerces Society. You can take part in nationwide movements for pollinators such as No Mow May.
• Tennessee DOT has a short series of educational videos online led by “Polli, the Bee from Tennessee.”
• Remember that there are some things that might seem helpful for pollinators but actually aren’t. Read about that here.

The post Pollinator Habitat is Falling to the Side of the Road—in a Good Way appeared first on Modern Farmer.