The local food system was not set up for emergencies. This realization was catalyzing for Julia Van Soelen Kim, a social scientist and food systems advisor for the University of California Cooperative Extension in Napa County, who saw the great abundance available yet no systems to get it to people in need.

“The event magnified and intensified the inequalities in food access and the abundance that our local food system could provide in emergencies,” Van Soelen Kim says.

In typical emergency response larger relief organizations—such as the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), Red Cross, Salvation Army, and state entities—take charge of large-scale feeding. They will use food that might be locally or regionally available from larger chains, but not food sourced directly from area farmers—and there’s no set way for these farmers to get their food to people in their communities.

What’s more, when outside organizations without the proper connections try to start moving food from farms to food banks, it often doesn’t work, Van Soelen Kim says. “They’re just picking up the food and don’t know how the farmer is going to get paid,” she says. While there is a role for these large-scale feeding organizations, she says, “we just want to make sure that they have access to local foods.”

To try to improve the system, Van Soelen Kim created the North Coast Emergency Food System Partnership to connect emergency management and local food-system professionals. The goal of the partnership is to enable the distribution of locally produced food in the wake of disaster. For both fields, this represents a novel collaboration.

A Landscape Vulnerable to Climate Change

While the region is popular with tourists thanks to its coastal location, wineries, and redwoods, the North Coast is very rural. Aside from the communities just outside the Bay Area, the median household income is well below the state average.

Alongside the ever-present threat of earthquakes, the region is especially vulnerable to the effects of climate change. Fires are a worry not just during the hot, dry summers, but year-round, and the coastal landscape is prone to landslides during heavy rains.

Nationwide, climate disasters are increasingly forcing communities to deal with large-scale emergencies, like the floods of Hurricane Helene, the wildfires that ripped through Los Angeles, and the floods in Central Texas after intense rainfall from Tropical Storm Barry. In such emergencies, food distribution is a major concern, and the model that the partnership is developing could serve as a solution across the country.

Suzanne Grady, program director at Petaluma Bounty, a food aid program and emergency food hub, says developing a resilient local food system prior to emergencies helps local food find its way to people after disaster.

“It just seems that we have been set up to rely too heavily upon groups and agencies that come in, potentially flood the area with resources that may or may not be needed, and then leave sometimes just as quickly,” Grady says. “It actually interferes with the local recovery efforts.”

While these relief organizations are necessary for disaster response writ large, she says, if there’s a resilient food system in place, the incoming groups could tap into that local system already in operation.

Transforming Regional Food Systems to Prepare for Disaster

The majority of the $1.5 million in funding for the project comes from the USDA’s Regional Food Systems Partnership Program, and the rest consists of local grants and matching funds from regional organizations and community foundations. As of this writing, the USDA funding has remained intact, despite the administration’s shift in priorities.

In mid-August, in fact, Van Soelen Kim received news that the program received a no-cost extension from the USDA, meaning that instead of having to scale back or end their activities, they have one more year to carry out their work using what’s remaining of their existing funding.

Van Soelen Kim and her colleagues are taking full advantage if the extension by focusing on three goals: building a “community of practice” among emergency management and daily food-operations professionals to collaborate on emergency feeding plans; establishing the technical assistance needed for food distribution systems to pivot after disaster; and shifting local government policy to incorporate local food distribution as central to emergency plans.

Van Soelen Kim has seen almost immediate results from the community of practice goal in particular. Partnership members meet by virtual calls quarterly and in person annually. While 250 people are on the member list, typically around 75 people participate in each meeting. Together, they discuss topics around local food systems and disaster response and build relationships with each other.

“This North Coast Regional Partnership has opened the doors for a lot of relationships and networking that is invaluable to the development of this local group,” says Robert Sataua, the emergency food response coordinator for Food for People, Humboldt County’s food bank. “It’s not something that’s a metric that you can put on paper, but I think the momentum is there.”

Most of Humbolt County, which is rural and rugged outside the port city of Eureka, is susceptible to disasters like fires and winter storms. Local producers raise and harvest livestock, dairy, a diverse array of crops, and oysters, yet a 2019 U.C. Davis report shows that one in five Humboldt County residents lives in a low-income area with limited access to food, especially fresh food. During emergencies, disparate relief organizations worked in a vacuum and most food came from outside Humboldt County.

Sataua, networking with colleagues in other organizations through the partnership, helped develop a multi-agency feeding plan to supplement regional and community disaster response. In Humboldt County, the new plan lays out strategies and guidance that will minimize duplication, coordinate resources, and deliver food and water efficiently.

With this plan, food systems and emergency management folks get on the same page before disaster strikes. Coordinated preparation helps farmers sell their food in a disaster and residents to more easily find out where and how to access it.

‘When Something Happens, We Know Who to Call’

The task force—which involved multiple parties including the Office of Emergency Services, the Department of Health and Human Services, two county food banks, and tribal communities—created a Multi-Agency Disaster Feeding Plan (MADFP), and now meets monthly to coordinate and discuss emergency feeding efforts and ways to strengthen resilience.

The plan is more than a document, Mahan says. “It’s a community-built roadmap for action. Developed by local organizations and government partners working side by side, it has strengthened relationships, clarified roles, and prepared us to respond quickly in a crisis.”

The relationships that members are developing are key, she says. “When something happens, we know who to call, and we know how to communicate with them—we’ve already built the relationship. So, we’re seeing a lot of strength in that soft infrastructure of relationship building.”

One example is the relationship between the DNATL Food Council and the school district’s nutrition services director, Julie Bjorkstrand.

That relationship showed its strength during the Smith River Complex Fire in August 2023, when the food bank, along with many homes in the area, lost power. The fairgrounds that was serving as a shelter had a hard time to keeping up with the demand.

“[Bjorkstrand] really stepped up,” says Mahan, refrigerating all the food from the food bank at the school district kitchen—and then going beyond. “She actually created a team that cooked and fed everybody at the shelter—[using] the school kitchens that she uses to serve 1,800 students breakfast and lunch every day.”

Bjorkstrand’s nimble response shows there’s room in a local food system to respond to disaster. The school district’s nutrition services team, which is actively involved in the task force, has now integrated lessons from the Smith River Fire Complex into the plan and laid out how the school district can help after another disaster.

Establishing Food Hubs and Bottom-Up Infrastructure

Humboldt County volunteer Jennifer Bell helps pack Harvest Boxes in 2020 for distribution during the pandemic. The boxes are a creation of the North Coast Growers’ Association food hub. (Photo credit: Megan Kenney)

Many Humboldt County business leaders revealed in surveys that they found building local and regional food systems to be a clunky process even in blue-sky times, says Megan Kenney, director of cooperative distribution for the county’s North Coast Growers’ Association (NCGA). In surveys distributed to local businesses, including local restaurants, food trucks, and food vendors, “everyone really wanted more local food,” Kenney says. “There just wasn’t an easy way to get it.”

The 100-member growers’ association supported the county’s farmers by coordinating farmers’ markets—but it didn’t distribute food. Now, thanks to participation in the North Coast Emergency Partnership, the group offers a food hub and a multi-farm CSA, too.

Kenney credits the connections and ideas she developed in the partnership for the development of the Harvest Hub in 2020. To make it easy for food buyers like restaurants and grocery stores to buy local food, the hub created an online marketplace that mimics a traditional distribution system.

Farmers drop off their local harvests at the cold storage facility in the NCGA warehouse, a key component of the food hub. From there, hub vehicles deliver the food to customers.

Currently, the hub provides food for 34 school sites, 11 restaurants, and nine community organizations that include two food banks, four tribes, and two community centers.

Though the hub serves the county year round, it has already proven essential after disasters. During the 2021 Monument Fire, NCGA put together no-cook boxes with produce and locally made soap for evacuees and people without power. Following a 6.4 magnitude earthquake in December 2022 and during subsequent winter storms, the hub collected donations from farmers for bulk food distributions.

And during the Smith River Complex fires in August 2023, its members sent food to Crescent City in Del Norte County, proving that the Partnership not only fosters cross-sectoral collaboration, but cross-county support as well. On-site at the hub’s warehouse, they’ve helped to coordinate emergency supply storage.

Additionally, to get around blocked roads after disaster, NCGA—with help from a USDA Resilient Food Systems Infrastructure (RFSI) grant and California Jobs First grants—is planning to establish “cooler nodes,” food drop-off sites with solar-powered coolers, in isolated communities.

During regular times, the nodes can keep food at safe temperatures until hub employees make the rounds for pickup and redistribution. After a disaster, they can serve as lifelines, providing a place for farmers to drop food to be integrated into an emergency feeding operation.

Farmers would still get paid through the same networks, but the recipients of the food would be food pantries or emergency providers like the Red Cross. They could use the same system and codes for the coolers to access food without having to have extra staff on hand.

Daniel Aldrich, director of the Resilience Studies Program and co-director of the Global Resilience Institute at Northeastern University, has found time and again in his research that connections among local people are important to building resilient communities.

“These bottom-up social infrastructure spaces [such as a food hub or community garden] give us the space where we can have agency,” Aldrich says. “The social connection, social capital, always tries to build these ideas of knowledge, of collective action.”

Bringing Local, State, and National Efforts Together

The event brought in 75 attendees from all the counties in the partnership, representing organizations including the Redwood Empire Food Bank, the Salvation Army, the American Red Cross, and the California Department of Social Services Disaster Services. It even brought in state and national representatives from large-scale food distribution and disaster response groups. The important factor wasn’t just that these organizations attended; it’s that their participation allowed for personal introductions.

“All the representatives from these large feeding entities . . . expressed, ‘If you need us, pick up the phone and call us,’” says Van Soelen Kim. “That kind of open-door approach was great to see because before, no one knew even where the front door was, and now they have an actual person to call.”

These connections matter, says Aldrich, of the Global Resilience Institute. “What it often comes down to, in the network that you formed, is how much information and collective action can you accomplish? If you’re alone, if you’re isolated, if you’re not engaged with other people, it’s much harder.”

Resilience, he emphasizes, is about human-to-human interaction, which the Partnership provides.

While the group has not replicated its work in other communities quite yet, organizers have started to disseminate information about the project at scholarly conferences and hope to begin training practitioners in other regions, Van Soelen Kim says.

With an upheaval in federal emergency assistance funding, Aldrich believes that communities need to step up for themselves. Traditionally, he says, we think about disaster response as having two pillars: government assistance provided by FEMA and the state, and insurance provided by the market.

“But the reality is what we see right now—both in California and with the ongoing mess in D.C.—is, it is really a triangle, not two pillars. The third part is community. What it often comes down to, in the network that you formed, is how much information and collective action can you accomplish?”

As the North Coast heads into the driest parts of the season and the Tubbs Fire’s eighth anniversary, Van Soelen Kim says the members of the North Coast Emergency Food System are increasingly appreciative of their group’s innovative approach.

“With time, we’ve found what we’re doing here on the North Coast is really special,” she says. “New people keep showing up to the conversation [and] we continue learning together about how layered and complex the emergency food system is. By collaborating in this way, we’re creating something unique that isn’t being done elsewhere.”

The post Disasters Block Local Food Access. One Groundbreaking Group Has a Solution. appeared first on Civil Eats.

https://civileats.com/2025/08/25/faster-lines-less-oversight-at-pork-and-poultry-plants/ https://civileats.com/2025/08/25/faster-lines-less-oversight-at-pork-and-poultry-plants/#respond Mon, 25 Aug 2025 08:01:40 +0000 https://civileats.com/?p=68152 Another head is already coming. For a year and seven months, Lopez performed procedures like this for 10 hours a day, five to six days a week. It’s what he was trained for as a consumer safety inspector at the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS). “I would have my […]

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A pig’s head arrives in front of Christopher Lopez. He knows the drill: cut into the area behind the ears, find two small lymph nodes, and incise them three or four times each. Check the nose and mouth for signs of disease—six to nine seconds to finish the inspection. Wash the gloves and sanitize the knives. One to two seconds to breathe.

Another head is already coming.

For a year and seven months, Lopez performed procedures like this for 10 hours a day, five to six days a week. It’s what he was trained for as a consumer safety inspector at the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS).

“You can’t look at five people and watch everything that they’re doing as well as pay attention to what you’re inspecting.”

“I would have my fingers start to lock up because I was gripping my knives too hard,” Lopez said. “Even though we kept ourselves at a high standard of being clean, I felt dirty, so I didn’t like to eat. It’s hard to stay hydrated, because if I had to take a drink, I had to take off my gloves, and I don’t have a lot of time to do that.”

At larger processing facilities, Lopez—who left his position in April—would help inspect thousands of animals a day for issues ranging from fecal matter to pathogens. The fast operation rates posed a challenge but were manageable, he said.

“I would say I had enough time,” Lopez said. “Did I have as much time as I wanted? No, absolutely not.”

Many swine and poultry plants across the U.S. are now increasing rates of processing and inspecting animals—or line speeds. The change is part of what government officials call a “modernized” inspection system, which also shifts carcass sorting duties from federal inspectors to company employees.

U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins makes her first official address to employees at the USDA Headquarters in Washington, D.C, on Feb. 14, 2025. Four weeks later, she announced plans to make faster line speeds permanent for pork and poultry. (Photo credit: Paul Sale, USDA, via Flickr)

In March, Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins announced plans to extend modernization waivers and to make faster line speeds a federal standard under President Trump’s second administration.

The move could permanently change the level of oversight FSIS inspectors have on the lines.

The USDA has said increasing line speeds will help companies meet growing demand without “excessive government interference,” according to a March release. Pork and poultry industry groups backed the announcement almost immediately, and one company official told Investigate Midwest that privatizing certain responsibilities allows for more in-house accountability during inspections.

Paula Soldner, national joint council chairperson of a FSIS inspectors’ union. (Photo courtesy of Paula Soldner)

However, critics of the change argue that federal inspectors play an essential role as independent watchdogs in privately run plants, and increasing line speeds with less federal oversight poses a significant risk to consumers, workers and animals.

“To put it simply, the plant will control every aspect of it with minimal oversight,” said Paula Soldner, national joint council chairperson of a FSIS inspectors’ union.

Shifts to modernization began in 1997 as FSIS permitted faster line speeds and fewer federal inspectors at a handful of swine and poultry slaughterhouses nationwide. In 2014, a new program began permitting poultry plants to modernize voluntarily, and an opt-in system for swine plants followed in 2019.

As of August, 168 poultry plants and 18 swine establishments have converted to modernized models. Waivers for two poultry facilities and four pork plants are currently pending.

At modernized poultry plants, line speed caps have risen from 140 to 175 birds per minute, and their swine counterparts face no line speed limits. All these establishments rely on their own employees to sort carcasses—the process of analyzing meat and trimming off defects—while government inspectors remain hands-off at the ends of the lines.

Though FSIS insists the modernized system keeps federal inspectors in charge, just with fewer physical responsibilities, The Washington Post reported in 2019 that inspection duties are shifting to private companies under modernization—if not on paper, then in practice.

At Wayne-Sanderson Farms, the nation’s third-largest poultry producer with over 26,000 employees, modernization efforts have led to a handoff of inspection responsibilities, according to Juan DeVillena, senior vice president of quality assurance and food safety. He confirmed company personnel have taken over initial inspection tasks and are now in charge of ensuring quality, while federal inspectors continue to oversee food safety.

“FSIS is food safety inspection, and they were getting into areas that did not belong to them,” DeVillena said. “What FSIS did is they just switched their focus to what they should have always done, which is food safety, and put the quality oversight back into our operations.”

In a statement to Investigate Midwest, a USDA spokesperson maintained that modernization is backed by “science and common sense.”

“These reforms allow for greater efficiency while strengthening U.S. food production, reducing costs for producers and consumers, and supporting a more resilient supply chain,” the government spokesperson wrote.

‘Some of Them Can Be Sneaky’: Inspectors Warn of Food Safety Risks

Christopher Lopez, former FSIS consumer safety inspector. (Photo courtesy of Christopher Lopez)

From August 2023 to last April, Lopez worked as an inspector on and off the processing lines at 16 pork, poultry, beef, or bison plants in three states. Multiple were modernized facilities, he said, including Pitman Farms, a Utah turkey establishment.

There, company personnel sorted the carcasses, and as a federal inspector, Lopez observed their actions and screened every bird at the end of the line.

There were benefits to this hands-off role, he said, like being able to “sit there and actually look at product and not have to focus on sharpening our knives.” That’s part of how FSIS framed the change in its modernization policy: By removing inspectors from hands-on duties, the agency said they could devote more time to evaluating carcasses online and completing offline verification tasks “that are more effective in ensuring food safety.”

“Extensive research has confirmed that modernized systems uphold the highest food safety standards,” the USDA spokesperson wrote to Investigate Midwest.

But under the poultry modernization program, only one federal inspector is stationed on each processing line, responsible for reviewing all carcasses sorted by plant employees. And problems arose for Lopez when the workers he oversaw consistently outnumbered him five to one.

“Yes, we’re there, and we have the potential to see everything that’s going on, but in reality, it doesn’t always work out that way,” Lopez said. “You can’t look at five people and watch everything that they’re doing as well as pay attention to what you’re inspecting.”

To Lopez, the success of a plant’s modernization depends on staffing levels. If line speeds increase, so should the number of plant workers and federal inspectors to maintain food safety standards, he said.

A USDA spokesperson did not address questions from Investigate Midwest about how the agency enforces federal staffing standards at traditional plants, and how these regulations differ at modernized plants.

Soldner, of the FSIS inspectors’ union, has visited several modernized slaughterhouses over the past few years. She said she noticed no glaring food safety concerns because all the facilities were “adequately staffed.”

But even sufficient staffing may not be enough. According to Lopez, FSIS requires its inspectors to undergo “intensive” training prior to certification, where food safety is highlighted as the top priority. At the modernized plants where Lopez worked, he said private employees tasked with carcass sorting went through similar training, though he believes it was not nearly as rigorous.

FSIS does not mandate any standardized training for company sorters. The agency instead encourages companies to conduct independent training based on federal guidelines for both pork and poultry, which are derived from FSIS inspector training protocols.

“When I came in in 1987, we regulated the industry. Now, industry regulates what FSIS inspectors have the ability to do.”

At Wayne-Sanderson Farms, DeVillena said privately hired sorters undergo annual recertifications using an internal training manual developed from federal guidelines. The training includes classroom lectures, on-the-job training, follow-up sessions, and continuous monitoring.

“I honestly don’t know the frequency in which the FSIS inspectors get trained, but I can tell you that for our group, it’s more strict because we own that process,” DeVillena said. “We gotta be able to defend it and validate it.”

But Wayne-Sanderson’s approach is not industry standard—or federally mandated. Critics say that flexibility is the problem. Without enforceable, uniform training requirements, each company can decide how thoroughly its workers are prepared to identify contamination and disease.

In public comments on the 2019 swine modernization policy, several advocacy groups urged FSIS to establish official training for company sorters. Even industry members requested that the agency improve existing training guidelines.

FSIS responded that its current guide was sufficient, and it would not be “prescribing specific sorter training or certification.” When Investigate Midwest asked why, the agency did not respond.

Adequate training only goes so far, Lopez said. In his experience, even if carcass sorters were well trained, their priorities as private personnel may have leaned toward keeping the lines moving.

“Some of them can be sneaky about what they do,” Lopez said. In instances where he flagged a carcass for contamination but didn’t immediately take control of it, he said employees would sometimes make the contamination “mysteriously disappear” or mix the carcass in with others. “They might do it in the name of efficiency, but not necessarily in the name of food safety,” he added.

In response to Lopez’s experiences at modernized plants, DeVillena said the structure of modernized inspection systems at Wayne-Sanderson Farms makes it “impossible” to hide defects.

“Even if we wanted to do that, which we don’t want to, there’s no way for us to do that,” DeVillena said.

Juan DeVillena, senior vice president of quality assurance and food safety for Wayne-Sanderson Farms. (Photo courtesy of Juan DeVillena)

DeVillena described two levels of FSIS oversight at his company: a carcass inspector stationed at the end of the line to catch external contamination like fecal matter, and a verification inspector who examines 10 carcasses in detail each hour, including internal checks, to make sure company employees do their jobs effectively. He emphasized that the latter inspector can open the carcasses, examine every surface, and is not directly supervising the sorters’ work—but still has full access to verify product safety.

However, other inspectors have described experiences similar to those of Lopez. In April 2020, Jill Mauer, a federal consumer safety inspector, filed a declaration as part of a 2019 lawsuit against the USDA over its swine modernization policy. In it, Mauer said she’d been working at a modernized pork plant in Austin, Minnesota, for 23 years prior.

“I have witnessed slaughterhouse employees attempt to sneak defective carcasses past me,” her declaration stated. Diseased animals and defects like “toenails, hair, and abscesses are routinely allowed for human consumption” at the facility, Mauer wrote.

Part of the problem, she said, was the short inspection time. At the modernized plant in Minnesota, “inspectors have about two seconds per pig to identify pathology and fecal contamination,” Mauer stated. Investigate Midwest reached out to her for comment, but she declined to speak on the record.

Soldner, who worked as a FSIS inspector for 32 years prior to her full-time role at the inspectors’ union, said this window wasn’t nearly enough time for federal inspectors to spot hazards—even if private employees had already reviewed the carcasses.

The shrinking role of inspectors on pork and poultry lines reflect a fundamental shift in oversight, she said.

“When I came in in 1987, we regulated the industry,” Soldner told Investigate Midwest. “Now, industry regulates what FSIS inspectors have the ability to do.”

Industry Groups Defend Modernization 

Pork and poultry industries claim faster line speeds do not make food any less safe. When the USDA announced its plans to formally increase line speeds in March, the National Chicken Council, a trade association representing U.S. chicken companies, voiced its support. In a March 17 release, the council cited a 2021 study concluding that faster line speeds do not predict higher salmonella contamination risk in young chicken processing plants.

In a statement to Investigate Midwest, Tom Super, the council’s senior vice president of public affairs, emphasized that modernization in poultry processing applies only to the speed of evisceration lines—the “highly automated” areas that involve organ removal, carcass cleaning, and inspection.

“Food safety outcomes are not determined by the speed of the evisceration line,” Super wrote. Instead, he said, they depend on maintaining strict protocols, using science-backed safety measures and ensuring consistent oversight.

“Line speed is not the variable that’s going to help protect workers. If we can talk about piece rate, that would be a much more productive conversation.”

Investigate Midwest reached out to several other modernized swine and poultry companies for comment about faster line speeds and the reorganization of federal inspectors. None responded to multiple requests for comment.

For years, industry groups have lobbied for faster line speeds, records show.

In 2017, the National Chicken Council petitioned the government to permit faster line speeds in young chicken slaughterhouses. Shortly after, multiple trade associations and corporations shared nearly identical letters of support.

In the letters, industry groups—including the Ohio Poultry Association, the Indiana State Poultry Association, Wayne-Sanderson Farms (then Wayne Farms), and House of Raeford Farms—celebrated the petition as a step forward in “promoting and enhancing FSIS inspection procedures” and “increasing industry efficiency.”

Industry members wrote that they believe modernization would maintain food safety, citing a 2017 federal report that found no increase in salmonella contamination at modernized poultry plants.

“The data also demonstrated that inspectors are performing four times more off-line food safety verification tasks” in modernized plants than in their traditional counterparts, the letters stated.

In one letter, House of Raeford Farms—one of the top poultry producers nationwide—highlighted the “competitive disadvantage” of line speed caps. Plants in other countries like Canada operate at higher line speeds, the company wrote, so eliminating domestic line speed limits would “put U.S. producers on more equal footing.”

FSIS ultimately denied the National Chicken Council’s petition in January 2018, but said it intended to allow faster line speeds at young chicken plants that follow certain criteria “in the near future.” A month later, the agency published that criteria, permitting certain facilities to increase line speeds.

Now, under Trump’s second administration, faster line speeds are on track to become the new federal standard for both pork and poultry.

For plants with high daily outputs, Lopez, the former FSIS inspector, said that faster lines and shifting federal oversight could lead to food safety risks. But he sees potential in modernized systems, he said, especially at facilities that maintain sufficient staff and don’t overwhelm them with thousands of animals a day.

“I think that some of the medium-sized establishments really could benefit from it,” Lopez said. “The large establishments just kind of take advantage of it.”

Is Speed or Staffing to Blame for Increased Worker Injury? 

Data shows that meatpacking and poultry companies are among the most dangerous industries in America.

Two government-commissioned studies published in January found that 81 percent of workers at evaluated poultry facilities and 46 percent of workers at evaluated swine plants were at high risk of musculoskeletal disorders (MSD) like carpal tunnel syndrome.

Many workers and advocates say faster line speeds increase risk of injury. Jose Oliva—campaigns director at HEAL Food Alliance, a coalition of food and farm system workers—called the change a “total travesty” for plant employees. Prior to HEAL, Oliva served as director of the Food Chain Workers Alliance, which represents hundreds of thousands of workers in the food system.

“The meat industry operates in secrecy, and USDA policies—like allowing company employees to replace federal inspectors—only deepen the opacity.”

“Even though you are wearing protective equipment, that does not give you 100 percent protection,” Oliva said. “If (workers are) injured or cut themselves, if the injury is not too deep, they just continue to work. The line just keeps moving.”

A policy brief from Johns Hopkins University supports this conclusion, according to Patti Truant Anderson, the brief’s author.

“What we found in our review of literature was that there’s strong evidence that line speeds are associated with higher worker perceptions of injury risk, so they feel like it’s more unsafe when they’re made to work at these higher line speeds,” said Anderson, who is policy director at the Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future. Her analysis also found that line speeds are associated with “lower worker well-being and higher injury risk from repetitive tasks,” she said.

Several reports by the U.S. Government Accountability Office, a federal watchdog agency, highlight these concerns. The assessments, published between 2005 and 2017, repeatedly note stakeholder concerns about worker safety with faster line speeds. When asked if GAO is investigating modernization in light of Rollins’ recent announcement, public affairs specialist Jasmine Berry Franklin told Investigate Midwest the agency has “nothing currently in the works.”

The National Chicken Council, however, points to results from the January study on poultry workers, which suggest no associations between evisceration line speeds and MSD risk. The identical study on swine workers found conflicting evidence: Faster evisceration lines were linked to an increase in MSD risk at one facility, and a decrease at another.

In the statement to Investigate Midwest, the USDA spokesperson cited the same studies, concluding “no direct link between line speeds and workplace injuries.” The agency’s March 17 announcement to formalize faster line speeds also halted any further collection of worker safety data from modernized plants, calling the information “redundant.”

According to Carisa Harris—principal investigator of both studies and director of the Northern California Center of Occupational and Environmental Health—evisceration line speeds aren’t the main determinant of worker safety.

Instead, she said, the critical metric is piece rate: The number of animal parts handled per minute by each individual worker. While evisceration line speeds measure the speed at which the lines move in one stage of processing, piece rate takes into account both line speeds and staffing levels to determine the individual workload of each employee throughout the entire process.

Both studies found a correlation between MSD risk and piece rate.

“There’s been so much attention on evisceration line speed, and our hope is that the conversation changes because that’s not the variable that’s going to help protect workers,” Harris said. “If we can talk about piece rate by area or by job, that would be a much more productive conversation to have.”

The two studies weren’t without limitations. One, as Harris called it, was “healthy worker survivor bias”—the tendency for results to reflect only workers healthy enough to continue on.

“Those who left employment due to work-related pain or the inability to keep up with the high pace of work were underrepresented,” the poultry report stated. The swine study echoed this limitation.

Debbie Berkowitz, who served as chief of staff at the Occupational Safety and Health Administration from 2009 to 2014, said she believes evaluated plants may have also added staff during the study period to reduce individual workloads while under observation.

“Because (the plants) knew they were being studied, they added workers to jobs, which meant that nobody was working harder and faster in the key jobs that they studied,” Berkowitz told Investigate Midwest.

The USDA spokesperson did not respond to a question about this phenomenon, but Harris acknowledged it was a concern—that plants may have temporarily improved working conditions during the study. However, she said her team regularly interviewed workers to assess whether the conditions they experienced during the studies matched their usual work environments. According to Harris, “very few” reported any differences.

Lori Stevermer, a Minnesota pork producer and immediate past president of the National Pork Producers Council, reiterated that “increased line speeds are not a leading factor in worker safety” in a statement to Investigate Midwest.

Super, of the National Chicken Council, said unsafe line speeds would be counterproductive for the industry itself.

“If line speeds are set too fast, then tasks will not be performed properly and the result will be a costly de-valuing of the final poultry products,” Super wrote in the statement. “No benefit exists for plant management to operate production lines at speeds that are unsafe, and will not permit all work to be performed at high levels of skill and competence.”

Where Efficiency Meets Animal Welfare 

Slaughterhouse operations are systematic. Animals undergo a step-by-step process that stuns, scalds, removes organs, washes, cuts, and chills in a highly efficient fashion.

However, protocol can go awry for a variety of reasons, ranging from worker error to machinery malfunction. And animal welfare advocates allege that it has, especially at modernized swine and poultry plants with increasing line speeds and shifting federal oversight.

Delcianna Winders, director of the Animal Law and Policy Institute at the Vermont Law and Graduate School. (Photo courtesy of Delcianna Winders)

Delcianna Winders, director of the Animal Law and Policy Institute at the Vermont Law and Graduate School, said that faster line speeds result in more inhumane practices.

“Animals who are not keeping pace with the line are handled violently by workers who are just trying to keep up,” Winders told Investigate Midwest. This involves “increased dragging of animals, hitting of animals, and excessive electroshocking” leading up to slaughter, she said.

Concerns like these helped fuel a 2019 lawsuit filed by Winders and a group of animal welfare organizations, challenging the USDA’s swine modernization program. The lawsuit alleged, among other claims, that increasing line speeds and shifting responsibility from federal inspectors to slaughterhouse employees jeopardize humane handling.

“Even downed pigs—animals too sick or injured to walk—were handled in this way, because, according to a supervisor, they ‘don’t have time’ to handle them more humanely,” the lawsuit stated.

As part of the court case, advocates and inspectors submitted a series of declarations about personal experiences with modernization. One testimony came from Mauer, the consumer safety inspector who raised food safety concerns about her modernized pork plant in Austin, Minnesota.

Mauer wrote that on multiple occasions, she noticed pig carcasses with water-filled lungs from the scald tank—a stage in the slaughter process where animals should be dead.

“While there are a few reasons why tank water in the lungs may occur, tank water in hogs’ lungs is an indication that pigs were possibly still breathing at the time they entered the scalding tank,” her declaration stated.

Improper execution at slaughterhouses isn’t a new complaint. In 2013, the Washington Post reported that nearly 1 million birds were boiled alive in U.S. poultry plants every year, based on USDA data. This was in part due to rapid line speeds, which can result in unsuccessful slaughter prior to scald tank immersion, the article found.

But Super, of the National Chicken Council, maintained that modernization only changes the speeds of post-mortem evisceration lines. Leading up to and during slaughter, Super said, chicken processors consider animal welfare “the top priority,” and they “strictly adhere” to federal guidelines for humane handling.

Advocates remain critical. Michael Windsor—senior corporate engagement director at The Humane League, a nonprofit working to end farmed animal abuse—told Investigate Midwest in a statement that faster line speeds in any stage of processing add pressure to the entire system.

“Any increase in line speeds—pre- or post-mortem—create a dangerous ripple effect that increases suffering for animals and hazards for workers,” Windsor stated.

He added that consumers likely have a “limited sense” of what goes on behind closed doors at modernized plants.

“When people think about food safety or animal welfare, they don’t necessarily picture the exhausted workers racing to keep pace with hundreds of birds per minute or the animals being improperly stunned and boiled alive,” Windsor wrote. “This lack of awareness isn’t accidental. The meat industry operates in secrecy, and USDA policies—like allowing company employees to replace federal inspectors—only deepen the opacity.”

Four years after the 2019 lawsuit, the judge dismissed the case and upheld the federal swine modernization program. In a December 2023 ruling, the court found that FSIS had adequately considered humane handling impacts, which was all the law required.

Winders said she believes courts generally defer to the judgment of administration agencies like the USDA.

“It’s very hard to prevail against an agency because everything is going to be interpreted in their favor,” she said.

Winders and her team stand firm on one claim, arguing modernization reduces federal oversight and endangers animal welfare. They’ve appealed the ruling, and an oral argument is approaching in the next few months. With formal laws on the horizon, Winders said issues surrounding modernization are only growing more critical — not just due to risks to animals, but also to workers and consumers.

“It’s hard to disentangle the animal welfare concerns and human safety concerns,” she told Investigate Midwest. “They’re really intertwined.”

This article originally appeared at Investigate Midwest, and is reprinted with permission. 

The post Faster Lines, Less Oversight at Pork and Poultry Plants appeared first on Civil Eats.

]]> https://civileats.com/2025/08/25/faster-lines-less-oversight-at-pork-and-poultry-plants/feed/ 0 https://civileats.com/2025/08/19/should-regenerative-farmers-pin-hopes-on-rfk-jr-s-maha/ https://civileats.com/2025/08/19/should-regenerative-farmers-pin-hopes-on-rfk-jr-s-maha/#respond Tue, 19 Aug 2025 08:01:18 +0000 https://civileats.com/?p=68145 This is the second in a series of articles examining the promises and policies of the MAHA movement. Read the first story here. In the process, his operation became a model for treating animals and the land well while building financial, community, and environmental resilience across America’s rural landscape. Along the way, he hasn’t shied […]

The post Should Regenerative Farmers Pin Hopes on RFK Jr.’s MAHA? appeared first on Civil Eats.

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This is the second in a series of articles examining the promises and policies of the MAHA movement. Read the first story here.

In the process, his operation became a model for treating animals and the land well while building financial, community, and environmental resilience across America’s rural landscape. Along the way, he hasn’t shied away from positioning his approach as a means to take back power from global meatpackers and end harms caused by industrial food production.

It’s the kind of farming—and thinking—that Robert F. Kennedy Jr., now the Secretary of Health and Human Services, has long celebrated as a health and environmental advocate.

So while Harris, who wears a tan cowboy hat and speaks with a soothing Southern drawl, says he’s generally “apolitical,” lately, he’s been engaging in D.C. discourse. That’s because he is “shocked and pleased at how much attention my kind of farming is getting.”

While Kennedy was still running his own campaign for president last year, his running mate, Nicole Shanahan, visited White Oak Pastures. A year later, with Kennedy a member of President Trump’s cabinet, Harris received an invitation to the White House for the release of the administration’s first Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Commission report.

“I’m not saying I was the only farmer there, but I was the only one there that looked like a farmer,” he said. On Instagram, White Oak Pastures posted a photo of Harris in his cowboy hat with his two daughters at the event, plus a photo of Trump and Kennedy. Comments on the photos were heated.

As everyone awaits the official release of the second MAHA Commission report, expected in early September, those remarks point to a divide that exists among farmers who typically agree on things like increasing organic matter, reducing pesticide use, and diversifying crops.

Like Harris, some farmers are thrilled to hear Kennedy using the word “regenerative” in the halls of power and calling out corporate influence on the food system, and are optimistic that real change is coming. Others question whether Kennedy will walk the walk, given his place in the Trump administration, which has been rolling back environmental protections, supporting increased taxpayer funding for chemical-dependent, commodity agriculture, and cutting support for the small, regenerative farms that the MAHA movement claims to support.

They also say the administration’s aggressive pushback on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives is hurting the young farmers who disproportionately run regenerative farms. The now-delayed (and recently leaked) second report from RFK’s MAHA Commission seems to confirm those concerns.

“We have had a major setback,” said Kate Mendenhall, an Iowa farmer who is also the director of the Organic Farmers Association, describing what organic and regenerative farmers have experienced since the Trump administration took over.

Mendenhall said many farmers fell behind this season because of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) funding freezes and are now reluctant to expand or invest in new practices. Many have also lost technical support due to program cancellations and staff reductions.

“I don’t think we can see the full impact now, but maybe next season we’ll see what comes forward or what we’re lacking this fall and winter,” she said. “I’m really delighted to see more conversation around helping people get access to more healthy food. We need that. And we also need to help farmers with the infrastructure steps they need to make it happen.”

Will Harris of White Oak Pastures.

A Resounding Message from MAHA

“Now all this MAHA talk makes me think that maybe, again, I might be an early innovator,” he said. “And I like that better.”

In other words, Kennedy’s attention feels like overdue recognition for some farmers who have been on the agricultural fringe for a long time.

While the Biden administration made some of the largest investments in history in paying farmers to implement conservation practices, rebuilding regional meat processing infrastructure, and shoring up the local supply chains that small, regenerative farms sell into, it also maintained the overall status quo and didn’t talk about transformation as loudly or as often as Kennedy does.

Harris said he heard talk of those investments but never saw impacts on the ground. What he remembers about the Climate-Smart Commodities Program, a signature initiative of Biden’s USDA, is not that it sent millions of dollars to small, regenerative farms through organizations like Pasa and Working Landscapes North Carolina, but that it directed huge sums of money to Tyson and other commodity ag giants.

Now, the thing that stands out to him about the current USDA is not that its actions seem to place the administration firmly on the side of Big Ag, but that Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins has repeatedly showcased her working relationship with Kennedy.

“I haven’t seen many programs implemented so far, but it’s still very early on,” Harris said. “I might get disappointed again, but the promise is better than it’s ever been in my lifetime.”

Steve Groff is similarly optimistic.

“The MAHA movement is a dream come true for me, because before I even heard the term, I was doing it,” said Groff, a third-generation farmer in southern Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, where he farms 200 acres with his son. “We need to eat less junk food and more healthy food, and I think every American agrees that there’s just too much chronic disease. Something’s going on here. We have an opportunity here that is just unbelievable.”

Groff plants hemp on most of his land; he used to process the crop into CBD oil but is now getting into fiber production for textiles and building materials. He also grows heirloom tomatoes, squash, and pumpkins that he sells to Whole Foods. His farm is certified regenerative by Regenified, which requires farmers to implement certain soil health practices but is not organic, since it does allow the use of pesticides and synthetic fertilizers.

To that end, his fields have been 100 percent no-till since 1996, and he regularly plants cover crops. Because of his attention to soil health and ecosystems, he said, he’s been able to reduce the amount of chemical herbicides and fertilizers he uses over time.

“It’s mimicking nature as much as we can to grow food,” he said. (No-till farming and using cover crops also often rely heavily on pesticides, especially glyphosate, which many in the MAHA movement are opposed to and Kennedy has been critical of in the past.)

Groff said he’s always been a conservative but that he didn’t always fully trust Trump. When Trump joined forces with Kennedy, however, that started to change.

As an example of how farmers might begin to shift to more regenerative practices, he offers the example of how farmers in Maryland and Pennsylvania in the 1980s were initially resistant to no-till farming and planting cover crops, but increasingly adopted both as awareness grew about how the practices could reduce pollution into the Chesapeake Bay.

“In my area right here, 70 percent of the land is no-till and cover crops. Now, they don’t do it for the Chesapeake Bay, they do it because it’s a better way to farm,” he said. “And the same practices that we started to do for the sake of the Bay now are the same practices to grow healthier food.”

USDA Cuts to Funding

At TendWell Farm in western North Carolina, farmer Steven Beltram grows leafy greens, tomatoes, peppers, and other vegetables across several hundred acres to sell to grocery stores and other commercial distributors.  Not only is the farm certified organic, it’s Real Organic Project certified, adding an extra layer of regenerative cred.

“We really focus on trying to build and restore and make the soil better year over year,” Beltram said.

Hit hard by Hurricane Helene last year, TendWell was grateful to be participating in a USDA initiative called the Local Food Purchase Assistance Cooperative Program that offered funding to move fresh produce from small farms directly into food banks.

The contract was for about $5,000 a week, a significant amount for a business of their size. It was especially beneficial, he said, because unlike with grocers who demand a certain amount of kale or lettuce regardless of how the crops turn out, TendWell could send the food banks surplus produce, thereby reducing waste.

“That was a good thing for us, and that was a good thing for our neighbors,” he said. “Giving out local produce to the community—I can’t see how anyone could be opposed to that.”

But in March, the USDA canceled $1 billion that had been allocated to the program and another similar program that connected small farms to schools, ending that source of income for TendWell. At the time, Rollins said repeatedly that she was ending it because it was a COVID-era program and states still had plenty of money left to spend.

At the same time, Rollins’ USDA has also cancelled 2025 funding for the Patrick Leahy Farm to School Program, ended the Regional Food Business Centers program, and revised the Climate-Smart Commodities Program in a way that meant many small, regenerative farms and the organizations that support them have borne the brunt of the impacts.

“It’s interesting to see that the USDA is cutting funding for programs like [Local Food Purchase Assistance] while they’re increasing payments for commodity crop production, and of course all that commodity crop production is based on the use of glyphosate,” Beltram said, referencing the $67 billion bump that commodity growers got in the recent One Big Beautiful Bill. “It really feels like a divided administration. The USDA is for the most part implementing practices that are the exact opposite of the goals of the MAHA movement.”

At the Organic Farmers Association, Mendenhall said she also sees staffing cuts at the Natural Resources Conservation Services (NRCS) as potentially undermining MAHA agricultural goals, since NRCS employees in local offices can act as guides for farmers looking to improve their grazing practices to produce grass-fed beef or to get the help they need to reduce chemical use.

“They’ve lost a lot of local technical expertise at NRCS in particular,” she said.

At the same time, cuts to other programs mean agriculture support organizations that provide similar help have also let staff go. “That type of technical assistance that farmers rely on when they’re scaling up or expanding markets has also been lost,” she said.

What Mendenhall would like to see in the MAHA policy recommendations is a reinvestment in helping farmers scale up organic production and enter new markets like school food, hospitals, and the institutional markets that open new doors to wholesale.

“That is the avenue forward, and that’s a great way to increase consumption of organic food, but farmers can’t just do it,” she said. “They need support in order to scale up, and then they’ll be able to continue to do it, but we have to invest in the supply chain issues that are creating a barrier for them to doing that on their own.”

USDA Ends Support for Young Regenerative Farmers

Customers at the farmers’ market have already reported they were losing benefits that allow them to buy more healthy food from local farms using their Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits, Nelson said. She’s also seen a lot of her farmer friends lose jobs with support organizations, including at Pasa and at the National Young Farmers Coalition (NYFC), where she is an associate field director.

“It’s so powerful to know that you can grow food and preserve a future, so that keeps me going all the time, but I do have worries,” she said. “I really want to have hope that the administration will show how they can support smaller farms. It has been interesting to watch freezes happen and unfreezes happen and nothing feels totally certain or set in stone. Every day is wildly different.”

Things have been particularly fraught for young farmers who don’t fit the stereotype of the brawny white male American farmer. In its latest survey, in 2022, NYFC received responses from more than 10,000 young farmers across the country.

“Through that data, we learned that there are way more farmers of color who are young and way more queer farmers that the USDA data doesn’t reflect,” Nelson said. Eighty-six percent of the young farmers surveyed classified their approach as regenerative farming.

Biden’s USDA encouraged organizations and farmers applying for grants to emphasize whether they were a part of or serving underserved groups, such as BIPOC, women, or LGBTQ farmers. Now, as the USDA goes through grant contracts rooting out DEI initiatives, those farmers and organizations are the ones seeing their grant contracts cancelled.

To push back on that issue, NYFC launched a social media campaign last month dubbed #WeAreAmericanFarmers, calling on USDA to honor its contracts, given Rollins’ repeated statements around supporting American farmers.

“This campaign is to underscore farmers who are immigrants, farmers who are not white, farmers who are queer are all American farmers as well,” Nelson said. “It’s a call for representation and to call out that kind of dangerous language around who gets access to USDA resources or not and who feels like they belong.”

Pesticides, Climate Change, and Ecosystems: MAHA vs. EPA and USDA

“We’re definitely experiencing a change in climate here, and it’s making it more challenging to farm, even aside from just a massive disaster that takes out all the infrastructure,” said TendWell Farm’s Beltram, who still hasn’t received disaster assistance after Hurricane Helene destroyed roads, tractors, box trucks, and more at multiple farm locations and left his team to spend the entire winter cleaning debris out of fields.

On the environmental side, the MAHA movement behind Kennedy has been more vocal about its desire to see more regulation of pesticides linked to health and environmental harm, especially glyphosate, atrazine, and neonicotinoids. Prior to his appointment, Kennedy railed against agricultural chemicals.

However, at a press conference during the recent Great American Farmers’ Market, in response to a question about whether the second MAHA report would include recommendations to restrict the use of some chemicals, he deferred to Rollins.

“There is no question that the use of crop protection tools remains one of the most important tools, if not the most important, to our farmers to thrive and to remain prosperous,” Rollins said, adding that Kennedy has met with 130 farmer and rancher groups. “I’ve also heard him say, ‘We can’t compromise our farmers and their ability to feed and fuel and clothe the world.’ I feel very confident that his and our commitment to make sure farmers are at the table remains paramount, and that the report will reflect that.” Asked to weigh in, Kennedy said he had nothing to add.

Recently, a legislative rider has also gained steam among Republicans in Congress that would help shield Bayer and other pesticide companies from lawsuits claiming their products cause health harms.

White Oak Pasture’s Harris has spoken out about this kind of “pesticide immunity” bill, a version of which passed this year in his state of Georgia. While he acknowledges some worry about the impacts of climate change, he’s especially concerned about the ecosystem collapse caused by pesticide use and other factors.

“I think one of the things we got wrong is this thing of killing the pest,” he said. “I believe that every creature—plant, animal, or microbe—that lives in and is indigenous to an ecosystem has a role in that ecosystem,” he said. “I think we’re not smart enough to know what it is [for every creature]. And the fact that we have driven and are driving so many species of plants and animals and microbes into extinction or near extinction is worrying to me.”

Does he think, then, that a successful MAHA policy plan for regenerative agriculture needs to address that fact? “Absolutely,” he said. Like many others, he’s waiting to see what happens next.

Politico just published a draft version of the MAHA Commission’s policy recommendations, which are currently being reviewed by the White House and could change significantly before being finalized.

The last section of the report is titled “Soil Health and Stewardship of the Land.”  But not one of the four bullet points in the section includes concrete policy steps or positions.

For now, it seems as though not even the MAHA Commission will provide clarity any time soon about the administration’s plans for regenerative farming.

“We don’t know what the program is yet,” Harris said. “Powerful people have been instructed to come up with a program, so that’s promising.”

The post Should Regenerative Farmers Pin Hopes on RFK Jr.’s MAHA? appeared first on Civil Eats.

“The health and the vibrancy of American farms is critical to the success of the MAHA movement,” Kennedy said during his opening remarks. “We have the best farmers in the world in our country. We have people who are developing innovative techniques for restoring the soil, for restoring the microbiome, for producing the healthiest food in the world, and one of the purposes of this meeting is to get that message out to the rest of America: that there’s hope.”

Elisa Lane is one of those innovators. Lane owns Two Boots Farm in Northern Maryland, where she tends to a 200-tree pawpaw orchard, grows vegetable seedlings for home gardeners in the spring, and harvests endless varieties of flowers that get arranged into farmers’ market and bridal bouquets. She does it all without pesticides or tilling, while building soil fertility with a variety of cover crops and compost.

But on a sweltering day a week before the roundtable, with a heat advisory in effect, one thing she was thinking about—for the first time—was crop insurance.

Over the last decade, she explained while hanging freshly harvested garlic in her barn, it’s been getting hotter. Her crew starts at 5 a.m. some days to get field work done before the unbearable heat sets in. Summers are drier. The weather varies more wildly. When storms hit, they seem more intense than in the past.

“They come on so fast and so quick. I just remember that happening in the last three years or so,” she said. “That causes power outages, which is something I’m so nervous about. If we have a cooler worth of stuff, it could all spoil.” The thing that scares her the most, though, is the prospect of losing entire crops, which is what happened recently on two nearby farms during hailstorms.

It’s not just hail. In recent years, Hurricane Helene damaged or destroyed crops on close to 5 million acres of North Carolina farmland. Farmers in Vermont lost vegetable crops worth millions of dollars to unprecedented flooding. In the West, some farms couldn’t plant crops due to historic drought conditions; others lost crops and livestock herds to wildfires.

While it’s difficult to attribute any single weather event to climate change, the evidence is clear that more frequent and intense extreme-weather events are making it increasingly challenging for farmers to grow healthy food regardless of their ability to innovate, complicating the MAHA movement’s goals.

The last report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) offered two big takeaways, said Rachel Bezner Kerr, the lead author of a chapter about climate impacts on food, fiber, and ecosystems. Overall agricultural productivity has been reduced from what it would have been with less or no global warming, and more robust evidence now shows extreme weather events are diminishing food security and nutrition.

“Going forward, unless we’re able to significantly reduce our greenhouse gas emissions, those impacts are going to be quite severe,” Kerr said.

However, in Washington, D.C., the Trump administration’s actions are likely to increase U.S. emissions. During the first week of his presidency, Trump signed executive orders withdrawing the U.S. from the Paris Climate Agreement, rolling back electric vehicle subsidies, and directing his agencies to increase the production of fossil fuels.

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has since proposed removing all limits on greenhouse gas emissions from power plants and overturning the finding that allows the agency to regulate greenhouse gas emissions.

Meanwhile, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) has canceled programs and contracts that pay farmers to use climate-friendly practices and has stripped the word “climate” from its vocabulary. Trump’s sweeping tax legislation, which Republicans in Congress named the “One Big Beautiful Bill,” also dismantles Biden-era climate actions and boosts the fossil-fuel industry.

Trump has promised that the administration is fully invested in Kennedy’s MAHA movement goals to reduce chronic disease by, among other actions, getting Americans to eat more fresh, healthy, whole foods.

But in response to questions from Civil Eats, White House spokesperson Kush Desai said the administration is not concerned by the fact that climate change is compromising the country’s ability to produce that food.

“When nearly 70 percent of American children’s caloric intake comes from ultra-processed foods—contributing to obesity, diabetes, and other chronic conditions—the Make America Healthy Again movement has more pressing short term priorities to address than vague climate change concerns about agricultural yields and nutrient density,” he said in an email.

As a result, it’s unlikely that the second MAHA report—which will be submitted to the White House this week and is aimed at helping Americans eat healthier—will include climate policy directives, even if experts say they should undoubtedly be included.

“If you’re thinking about the importance of things like fruits, vegetables, nuts, and seeds . . . very important foods that prevent diseases in our diet, then you need to think about, ‘How do we address climate change so that food production, both quality and quantity, remains stable?’” said Samuel Myers, the director of the Johns Hopkins Institute for Planetary Health. “That also will help with prices for Americans and protecting pollinator populations in the U.S. and abroad.”

Quantity and Quality of Food Impacted

At this point, the data from around the world is clear. “We can say decisively that productivity is lower than what it would be if there was no climate change,” said Kerr.

New research published in June identified yet another consequence of those reduced yields. As yields decline, farmers clear more land to grow food. As a result, more than 200 million acres of cropland in use today can be attributed to climate-change-driven yield loss. And as more land is cleared for farming, emissions increase, since forested land sequesters much more carbon.

“With a warming climate, we’re seeing a decrease in the productivity of our croplands around the world, and then as a result of that, in order to have the same amount of production, we are having to clear a lot more land, which then has an impact on the climate,” said Paul West, a senior scientist at Project Drawdown, who was an author on the paper. “So it ends up creating a vicious cycle.”

Myers’ research has also shown that the food that is being grown is not as healthy as it once was: Rising concentrations of CO2 in the atmosphere affect plant growth in a way that reduces the nutrient content of many important crops.

“We’ve found that crops grown at CO2 concentrations we expect to see by the middle of the century have reduced levels of things like iron and zinc and protein, which are super important from a health standpoint,” he said. “And then we find that potentially hundreds of millions of people get pushed into micronutrient deficiencies because of just the CO2 effect alone.”

In the U.S., that’s unlikely to happen, because our diets are more diverse compared to those of low-income countries that rely heavily on staple food crops. But Myers said climate change also threatens a wide range of foods that provide Americans with important nutrients. For example, the size and distribution of fisheries are changing, and it’s getting harder to raise livestock in certain places as heat and drought conditions increase.

Myers also worked on another study that found many scientific and policy reports underestimate how much food security is likely to be threatened in coming years because they often leave out other factors that intersect with climate change.

Over the last 10,000 years, he said, agriculture was optimized to conditions that were almost entirely stable. Now, everything about growing a crop—from temperature and water supply to pollination and pest pressure—is up in the air.

“We’re changing those biophysical conditions at the fastest rate in the history of our species,” he said. “It’s the climate that we’re changing, but it’s also biodiversity loss and pollution and changes in access to water. It’s not just climate change, it’s everything change.”

In addition to backtracking on a transition away from fossil fuels, President Trump’s EPA is rolling back numerous regulations intended to prevent pollution and safeguard biodiversity.

Forced by Climate to Cut Back on Healthy Crops

Ela is a fourth-generation farmer, and his produce, grown in soil that has more than double the organic matter compared to the local average, is sold at seven Colorado farmers’ markets.

Steve Ela packs apples at Ela Family Farms, where he’s recently taken trees out of production due to concerns about water availability. (Photo credit: Regan Choi)

However, his farm’s viability is entirely dependent on the annual snowpack, which melts into reservoirs that feed his irrigation systems. Several studies have documented declining snowpack in Colorado over the past several decades, caused by rising temperatures and declining precipitation.

There have always been drought cycles, Ela said, but in the past several years, there have been more of them. Last year, after not enough snowpack accumulated, the runoff season was short. When rain didn’t come, he had to start using the reservoir water about three months earlier than normal.

“That reservoir only holds so much water, and if you have to use it for a longer period of time, it’s just like a bank account,” he said. “You can stretch it out, but there’s only X amount there.”

This year, after another dry winter, they’ll run out of water for some of his apple trees in mid-August, with the harvest not happening until October. “If you stretch them, you beat them, you malnourish them, they just don’t come back the same,” he said. “There’s a lasting scar. It’s something that causes damage for multiple years.” After a historic fall freeze a few years ago, for example, his apple and pear trees looked okay, he said, but then he didn’t get a good crop on them for three years.

As a result of his water challenges, he’s started taking acres of trees out of production. It’s the only obvious solution he can see at the moment, he said: If there’s going to be less water available, he’s going to grow less fruit.

“The interaction between MAHA and climate change, it’s an awkward dance,” Ela said. As a dedicated environmentalist, he’s worried about the changing climate. But he also sees the value in the MAHA movement’s message, because “I think we could eat a lot healthier,” he said.

Can the Soil Save Us?

In fact, a 2022 survey by the Organic Farming Research Foundation found that 80 percent of farmers transitioning to organic practices cited “greater resilience to climate change” as a motivating factor.

Kennedy is a longtime critic of pesticide use and promoter of organic practices, and his MAHA movement includes many farmers and consumers who are pushing for more support for organic and regenerative agriculture. These two approaches to agriculture, which intersect and overlap in different ways depending on how they’re practiced, can build healthy soil and biodiversity on farms, creating systems that are both better for the climate and improve the nutrition of the food produced.

But so far, the administration’s actions have done more to hurt organic and regenerative farmers than help them. The USDA retooled the Partnerships for Climate-Smart Commodities Program in a way that led to thousands of farms around the country losing funding allocated to implement regenerative practices. Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins has also canceled more than a billion dollars in funding for local food programs that primarily benefit regenerative and organic farms.

Instead, Republicans’ One Big Beautiful Bill will send more dollars to conventional, commodity farms that rely on large-scale, chemical-intensive farming practices.

Some farmers are optimistic that the upcoming MAHA report will include policy recommendations related to soil health and regenerative agriculture. However, powerful agricultural lobby groups have been pushing back on that front, especially on any provisions regulating pesticide use, and ultimately Kennedy is not in charge of farm policy. Still, he hinted at his desire to push things in that direction.

“We need to give off-ramps to farmers so that they can transition to biodynamic agriculture, regenerative agriculture, and do it in a way that is going to maintain the vibrancy of their farms,” he said at the July roundtable. “We have a president now who is not only absolutely committed to the survival and prosperity of American farmers but is also looking around the corners, who is looking to the future.”

The trouble is, even if farm policy bucks the Big Ag headwinds and takes up the IPPC recommendations to shift to more regenerative, diversified systems, it won’t be enough to guarantee a future filled with healthy food if the administration continues to roll the clock back on overall emissions, Kerr said.

“I think it’s very hard to adapt if we are going over 1.5 [degrees Celsius of warming], and if we are ramping up our greenhouse gas emissions,” she said. “The adaptation strategies that we’ve identified are not adequate in the face of that kind of global warming.”

Elisa Lane, owner of Two Boots Farm, with the solar array that sits behind her fields on the edge of forested acres. Installation of the system was delayed to the USDA funding freeze. (Photo credit: Lisa Held)

At Two Boots Farm, Lane is doing her part on all fronts. In addition to building healthy soil and keeping a biodiverse forest intact on most of her acreage, she recently installed a solar array to shift the farm to renewable energy. The project was delayed significantly when the grant funding she had received from the USDA through a program that helps farmers install solar was frozen. It has since been unfrozen, and she’s now close to getting it up and running.

The system will save her around $500 per month in energy costs, she estimates, but she’s not sure if tax credits she was hoping for were eliminated in the One Big Beautiful Bill. Next on her list is crop insurance, which is difficult for small, diversified farms like hers to qualify and apply for.

In 2022, crop insurance subsidies cost taxpayers a record $19.3 billion, up from an average that stayed under $4 billion in the early aughts.

“The government will hopefully help in one way or another,” Lane said. “They have the ability to help on the front end with resiliency, or they’re going to be helping us on the back end, when everybody’s screwed financially because we’re losing crops.”

The post The MAHA Movement’s Climate Conundrum appeared first on Civil Eats.

Eventually she found Agroecology Commons, a small nonprofit farming collective based in nearby El Sobrante, where she signed up for Bay Area Farmer-to-Farmer Training (BAFFT), a nine-month program for beginning farmers. Swain is now an apprentice with Berkeley Basket, an urban backyard community-supported agriculture project, through a program that Agroecology Commons offered to BAFFT graduates.

“It’s given me a path that is so healthy,” Swain said. “This is what I want to do, and I didn’t know how I was going to do it.”

Agroecology Commons has helped aspiring farmers like Swain since its founding five years ago. But like many organizations, it must now do more with less.

It was among hundreds of programs whose grants have been canceled by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA).

“We’re hoping that we’re successful in fundraising and campaigning to offset some of the losses,” said Jeneba Kilgore, one of four Agroecology Commons co-directors. “[But] I don’t think we’ll completely recuperate everything that was lost as a result of the federal cuts.”

Thriving vs. Surviving

The group grows a range of produce, including cherry tomatoes, onions, and beans, on three acres of land tucked into the hillside of a suburban neighborhood. They raise goats and harvest honey. And they run a center dedicated to educating farmers and community members about farming and land stewardship.

In August 2022, the USDA announced plans to allocate up to $300 million in funding to projects that enable underserved producers to access land and technical support. The funding was made available under the Increasing Land, Capital, and Market Access Program (ILCMA), which aimed to help those producers move from “surviving to thriving.”

In June 2023, Agroecology Commons was among 50 recipients the USDA selected from across the country. It was awarded a $2.5 million grant to find, buy, and develop land for up to 10 “BIPOC, LGBTQIA, and landless farmers” in the Bay Area. The same year, the Commons was awarded a three-year, $397,000 grant through the Community Food Projects Competitive Grant Program—a small program designed to address food and nutrition security in marginalized communities—also through the USDA.

“The ILCMA grant was revolutionary,” said Kilgore, who, with a background in cooperative business, is the “numbers” person on the team. The first program of its kind in the area, Agroecology Commons “was really going to support so many people that have been historically removed from the land in really harmful ways, and support their future generations.”

Not long after the Trump administration took office, however, the USDA froze the grants—first the Community Food Projects grant, then the ILCMA grant—making the money inaccessible for months.

At last, Agroecology Commons received a termination notice for the Community Food Projects grant on March 7, but has yet to receive an official termination notice for the ILCMA grant. However, Kilgore said the grant has been removed from their Automated Standard Application for Payments (ASAP) portal—the portal used by federal agencies to disburse funds to recipient organizations. In addition, although the organization wasn’t named, the USDA publicized that a $2.5 million grant for a Bay Area ILCMA project was canceled in a June press release.

Since the beginning of this year, the USDA has terminated a number of grants that had been offered to food and farming organizations across the county, canceling billions of dollars in funding. Some programs—such as one that provided funding for governments to purchase local food, and another that supported small farms and food businesses around the country—have been completely canceled. Others, like the Farmers Market Promotion, Community Food Projects Competitive Grant, and the ILCMA program, have not been ended altogether but have had individual contracts canceled.

About 35 percent of the Commons’ work is funded by the state, foundations, individual donors, and earned income. But the remaining 65 percent of the work was made possible by these federal grants.

“It’s a seismic blow, but at least we know and can start the next steps,” Leah Atwood, another Agroecology Commons’ co-director, told Civil Eats in June.

Increasing Land Access

“There are a lot of young farmers that don’t have access to land or inherited wealth and are not going to be able to disrupt that 95 percent ownership reality by just trying to go at it by themselves,” Atwood said.

The majority of the ILCMA grant was going to be used to purchase land to establish a commons—a collaborative system where land is owned and managed collectively, rather than by sole owner—for BIPOC, queer, and landless farmers. The grant was also going to fund 60 percent of Agroecology Commons’ staffing capacity for the next three years.

The organization planned to purchase land in several counties across Northern California. They had already built a relationship with a real estate agent, Kilgore said, and had a list of sites that they were interested in purchasing, but before the team was able to move forward, the grant was frozen.

“When it came to the ILCMA grant, we were doing all the things that they said,” Kilgore said. “We’re supporting farmers; we’re supporting economic development; we’re supporting people to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps; we are giving people the opportunity to start their own business,” she said. “I wish they would just say that they don’t want to support people of color, and they just want to support white men,” she continued, “because that is what they’re implying.”

Training New Farmers

The program not only gives participants the chance to learn, experiment, and practice land stewardship under the guidance of experienced mentors, but also enables them to take online courses from global partners on a range of topics, including social movements in agrarian reform, agroecology, and food sovereignty.

Once they complete the curriculum, new farmers can apprentice at Bay Area farms. Of the 40 BAFFT graduates so far, 17 are currently working as apprentices on 12 different farms, according to Brooke Porter, a co-director of the Commons. To alleviate socioeconomic conditions that might prevent new farmers from being able to gain experience, the Commons makes a point of paying both the apprentices and their mentors.

Oftentimes, opportunities for young farmers to gain essential on-farm skills require them to provide free time and labor, which requires a certain level of privilege, Porter said. Agroecology Commons’ program challenges that status quo, giving disadvantaged farmers the boost they need to get started.

“This is an opportunity to really change the dichotomy of how people typically get to learn on-farm skills,” Porter said.

The Berkeley Basket CSA program is currently hosting two of the Commons’ apprentices—Swain and Cielo Flores, 31. Flores, whose family from El Salvador has a deep history in agriculture, said he signed up for the farmer training program because he was interested in learning how to start his own farming project and cooperative. The program and apprenticeship provided him a template for how he could approach his own project.

“I wouldn’t be doing this without their support,” Flores said. “Agroecology Commons is trying to support me in my vision to become a farmer, to become a land steward. This is deeper than what I do for my career. This is ancestral work for me.”

Moretta “Mo” Browne, who joined Berkeley Basket CSA in 2019 and now owns it, is grateful that Agroecology Commons pays both hosts and participants in the apprenticeship program.

“I already wanted to be a part of it, but the fact that they were able to compensate folks really feels like they understand how exploitative this work can be,” they said. Additionally, getting paid to be a mentor only sweetens the deal. “Being able to live out your dream of being a farmer shouldn’t come at the cost of having a roof over your head or putting food on the table,” they said.

In addition to the apprenticeship opportunity, the Commons offers its El Sobrante incubator farm as a space where BAFFT program graduates can start their own farm projects and continue gaining hands-on training. The 3-acre plot has shared infrastructure, a tool-lending library, and tractors, helping eliminate the structural barriers to successful farming.

Equity and Climate Efforts

“We knew a lot of our language has the DEI buzzwords that they’re looking for and the climate focus that they have been targeting, so [the termination] didn’t come out of thin air,” Atwood said.

Only about $32,000 of the grant remains. As a result, the organization has had to pause some projects, such as the creation of financial literacy and cooperative business-planning workbooks. It also cut back on the number of apprenticeship hours it can offer. Last year, Porter said, the Commons offered apprentices the option to do 250- or 500-hour apprenticeships, but this year, it could only offer the lesser of the two.
“It is a much different learning experience, obviously,” she said.

As for the ILCMA grant, it wasn’t until June that Agroecology Commons became aware that it too was likely designated for cuts. A USDA press release announcing the cuts cited a $2.5 million grant “for expanding equitable access to land, capital, and market opportunities for underserved producers in the Bay Area” as an example of one of the terminated programs.

“Putting American Farmers First means cutting the millions of dollars that are being wasted on woke DEI propaganda,” Rollins said in the press release. “Under President Trump’s leadership, I am putting an end to the waste, fraud, and abuse that has diverted resources from American farmers and restoring sanity and fiscal stewardship to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.”

When asked in an email for further details regarding the grant cancellations, the USDA press office declined to comment.

While Agroecology Commons has yet to receive an official termination letter for the ILCMA grant, Kilgore said it is hard to move forward when they don’t know what might happen next. The organization has had to pause progress on its land commons project and shift its plans to bring on four more full-time employees to only two part-time staff.

Because of the financial constraints that have resulted from the grant terminations, the Commons has had to cut another program, Farmer Wellness Days, which has provided more than 145 farmers with acupuncture, massages, or chiropractic work.

“Try to imagine building something and choreographing planning on quicksand,” Atwood said. “It’s so much of an energy drain trying to figure out how to accommodate that.”

Pressing Forward

The plaintiffs filed a motion for preliminary injunction on June 26, asking the court to stop the USDA’s behavior from continuing and for relief for the plaintiff grantees, according to FarmSTAND, a food-system-focused legal advocacy organization.

David Muraskin, managing director of litigation at FarmSTAND and one of the attorneys representing the case, said with the brief in support of the motion complete, the court can now issue an order. They hope a ruling will be made within a few weeks, he said, but it could also take months. And if the case moves to the appeals court, it could take a year at minimum.

While federal funding cuts have forced Agroecology Commons to scale down some of its initiatives, state funding has enabled the group to expand another one of its programs, which provides young farmers with financial resources to start their own farming operations.

The seed grant program—which addresses resource inequity among beginning farmers—has typically offered $1,000 to $5,000 grants to BAFFT graduates and the apprentice program’s hosts. This year, however, the organization will be able to offer eligible farmers up to $50,000 in seed grants after the California Department of Food and Agriculture (CDFA) awarded the program $784,000.

Prior to receiving the CDFA grant, 26 seed grants had been given out, totaling nearly $69,000, Porter said. This year $400,000 will be distributed to people in the Bay Area, who, like Lesley Swain, are pursuing their farming dreams.

Agroecology Commons may be able to help fewer new farmers, but they’re still offering a vital source of support, and they aren’t giving up.

“We’re not retracting any of our goals,” Atwood said. “We are continuing to be outspoken that we do believe that this type of work needs to center BIPOC, queer, and landless farmers.”

The post A Groundbreaking California Farming Collective Navigates the Loss of Federal Grants appeared first on Civil Eats.

https://civileats.com/2025/07/23/these-farm-and-food-projects-have-lost-their-epa-funding/ https://civileats.com/2025/07/23/these-farm-and-food-projects-have-lost-their-epa-funding/#comments Wed, 23 Jul 2025 08:00:56 +0000 https://civileats.com/?p=66230 As a result, hundreds of environmental justice grants were cancelled by the EPA. Among these were 21 projects designed to improve climate, farming, and food resilience in underserved communities across the United States. The organizations guiding these projects now face a significant loss of funding, ranging from $155,000 to $20 million each, according to federal […]

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On his first day in office, President Donald Trump signed an executive order to “unleash” U.S. energy. The order directed the head of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Lee Zeldin, to immediately pause previously approved disbursements of funds that were inconsistent with the president’s new energy priorities.

As a result, hundreds of environmental justice grants were cancelled by the EPA. Among these were 21 projects designed to improve climate, farming, and food resilience in underserved communities across the United States.

The organizations guiding these projects now face a significant loss of funding, ranging from $155,000 to $20 million each, according to federal documents obtained by Civil Eats through Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests.

After Trump’s executive order, some funds were immediately frozen, with organizations receiving little to no communication from the EPA as to why or for how long. Between late March and early May, the groups began receiving letters notifying them that their grants had been terminated.

To find the cancelled climate, farming, and food equity grants, Civil Eats examined a list of 400 environmental justice grants slated for termination, published by the U.S. Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, and cross-referenced the list with hundreds of grant descriptions made public by the EPA. Through FOIA requests, we verified that each of the 21 projects below had been terminated.

When asked why these equity grants had been cancelled, the EPA press office told Civil Eats in an email, “Maybe the Biden-Harris Administration shouldn’t have forced their radical agenda of wasteful DEI programs and ‘environmental justice’ preferencing on the EPA’s core mission. The Trump EPA will continue to work with states, tribes, and communities to support projects that advance the agency’s core mission of protecting human health and the environment.”

EPA’s Canceled Climate, Farming, and Food Equity Projects

Building Climate Resilient Communities in the Eastern Coachella Valley
Recipient: Pueblo Unido, CDC
State: California
Grant Program: Community Change Grant Program
Grant Amount: $18.8 million
Project Description: Pueblo Unido planned to use the funding to build four geothermal, solar-powered greenhouses in California’s Eastern Coachella Valley, supporting vertical hydroponic farming and offering training and jobs for “controlled environment agriculture” workers. Project plans included a nursery to propagate native tree seedlings for free distribution to the community.

Denver Urban Gardens Dig Deeper Initiative
Recipient: Denver Urban Gardens
State: Colorado
Grant Program: Environmental Justice Collaborative Problem-Solving Cooperative Agreement Program
Grant Amount: $500,000
Project Description: The Dig Deeper Initiative aimed to address environmental justice issues through planting community gardens and food forests in West Denver neighborhoods. The green spaces were meant to decrease the urban “heat island” effect, improve overall air quality, and increase residents’ access to fresh, healthy foods.

Drying Seaweed Using Waste Heat
Recipient: Prince William Sound Science Technology Institute
State: Alaska
Grant Program: Environmental Justice Collaborative Problem-Solving Cooperative Agreement Program
Grant Amount: $477,135
Project Description: This project planned to explore whether waste heat from a diesel power plant could be used efficiently to dry large quantities of seaweed. The goal was to eliminate processing roadblocks, grow the local mariculture industry, and increase food security.

Engaging Communities for a Resilient and Sustainable Waco and McLennan County
Recipient: Mission Waco, Mission World
State: Texas
Grant Program: Community Change Grant Program
Grant Amount: $18.9 million
Project Description: Mission Waco and its partners planned to divert food waste from landfills by expanding residential and commercial composting programs in McLennan County and its largest city, Waco. They also planned to create numerous internship, training, and professional development opportunities focused on food-waste diversion.

From Food Waste to Opportunity
Recipient: Rhode Island Food Policy Council
State: Rhode Island
Grant Program: Community Change Grant Program
Grant Amount: $18.7 million
Project Description: Rhode Island Food Policy Council planned to address food waste in Rhode Island through a multilevel approach. In collaboration with a coalition of organizations, the project intended to increase and improve composting infrastructure and support programs that would redirect edible food to nonprofits rather than landfills.

Growing Environmental Justice Through Community Food Forest Development
Recipient: United Charitable
State: Maine
Grant Program: Environmental Justice Collaborative Problem-Solving Cooperative Agreement Program
Grant Amount: $500,000
Project Description: Working with 11 partner organizations, United Charitable planned to develop eight food forests to increase climate resiliency and food security for Maine communities disproportionately impacted by environmental injustice. United Charitable planned to plant and distribute 1,870 fruit and nut trees in rural areas of the state, provide educational programs, and document food-forest projects so they might be implemented elsewhere.

Leech Lake Band of Ojibwe Tribal Resilience Hub
Recipient: Leech Lake Band of Ojibwe
State: Minnesota
Grant Program: Community Change Grant Program
Grant Amount: $20 million
Project Description: The Leech Lake Band of Ojibwe intended to use their funding to create a Tribal Resilience Hub that would have provided essential services during emergencies. They also planned to install rain gardens, plant community gardens, and invest in electric vehicles and transportation infrastructure.

Local Food Access and EJ Leadership Capacity Building Initiative
Recipient: Ecolibrium3
State: Minnesota
Grant Program: Environmental Justice Collaborative Problem-Solving Cooperative Agreement Program
Grant Amount: $500,000
Project Description: The Lincoln Park Local Foods Local Places Action Plan would have researched social determinants of health in Duluth’s Lincoln Park neighborhood. The project would also have created several different employment opportunities, including a neighborhood farmer-in-residence position to steward the expansion of urban agriculture education, support small grocery stores, expand land analysis and garden development, and explore using waste heat for food production.

Michigan Tribal and State Wild Rice Initiative
Recipient: Inter-Tribal Council of Michigan
State: Michigan
Grant Program: Environmental Justice Government-to-Government Program
Grant Amount: $3 million
Project Description: The Wild Rice Initiative would have used the funding to support the meaningful participation of Michigan’s federally recognized tribal governments in the Tribal-State Manoomin Stewardship Plan to protect wild rice.

Okanogan County Microgrid Community Resilience Hubs
Recipient: Okanogan County Community Action Council
State: Washington
Grant Program: Community Change Grant Program
Grant Amount: $20 million
Project Description: The Okanogan County Community Action Council was going to invest in two community resilience hubs. One would have served as an emergency shelter during extreme weather conditions and as a workforce training space, while the other would have turned an old Safeway building into a solar-powered food bank with gleaning programs, nutrition classes, and a market-style pantry. Although their grant didn’t appear on the Senate’s termination list, it was announced by the EPA in December—and then never materialized, according to the Council. According to information obtained from the EPA through a FOIA, the grant “was never awarded.”

Placemaking to Address Food Equity and Environmental Sustainability in Southeast Kansas
Recipient: Kansas Department of Health and Environment
State: Kansas
Grant Program: Environmental Justice Government-to-Government Program
Grant Amount: $1 million
Project Description: This project intended to use grant funding to promote food equity and environmental justice in Labette, Montgomery, and Cherokee counties through edible landscapes on main streets and raised-bed garden kits for families.

Por las Quebradas (For the Streams)
Recipient: El Departamento de la Comida
Territory: Puerto Rico
Grant Program: Community Change Grant Program
Grant Amount: $11.8 million
Project Description: The Por las Quebradas project aimed to create a climate resilience hub, restore waterways, and support community education and workforce development in the farming communities of San Salvador and Borinquen, Puerto Rico. The resilience hub would have established a plant and tree nursery, created community composting facilities, and expanded an existing program that purchased surplus produce from local farmers for a community kitchen.

Enhancing Community and Environmental Sustainability through the Dos Pueblos Institute’s Climate Action Strategy
Recipient: Santa Ynez Band of Mission Indians
State: California
Grant Program: Community Change Grant Program
Grant Amount: $20 million
Project Description: The Restoring Resilience project aimed to establish a resilience hub that would have served as an emergency shelter during wildfires and other disasters. In addition, it included plans to develop a regenerative farming operation and establish a composting facility to process organic waste.

Revitalizing Metlakatla’s Ecosystems for Future Generations
Recipient: Metlakatla Indian Community
State: Alaska
Grant Program: Community Change Grant Program
Grant Amount: $19.5 million
Project Description: Under this project, the Metlakatla Indian Community planned to advance regenerative practices on their homelands, including developing native seaweed farming, investing in municipal waste management, and electrifying kelp-farming boats.

Springfield Community Gardens 2040 Collaborative Farming Forward
Recipient: Springfield Community Gardens
State: Missouri
Grant Program: Environmental Justice Collaborative Problem-Solving Cooperative Agreement Program
Grant Amount: $500,000
Project Description: Springfield Community Gardens intended to mitigate climate and health risks by educating and empowering underserved urban and rural Greene County communities through sustainable, organic food production. The project aimed to expand a paid internship program that Springfield Community Gardens offers to community members.

The Resilient Glades Tree Campaign
Recipient: County of Palm Beach
State: Florida
Grant Program: Environmental Justice Government-to-Government Program
Grant Amount: $1 million
Project Description: The Resilient Glades Tree Campaign aimed to plant trees across public parks to increase shade, access to fresh food, and tree canopy coverage in Palm Beach, Florida. This included planting fruit-bearing trees as well as two urban orchards to boost community food resilience.

Transforming Communities from the Ground Up through Student Led Action
Recipient: Grades of Green
State: California
Grant Program: Environmental Justice Collaborative Problem-Solving Cooperative Agreement Program
Grant Amount: $500,000
Project Description: Grades of Green intended to help Inglewood Unified School District (IUSD) divert 75 percent of its organic waste from landfill and donate 20 percent of its leftover food. The project was already providing environmental and food education programs for students, had installed edible and pollinator gardens in the Inglewood community, and planned to improve access to green space in the district.

Uplifting the Wai’anae Community for Resilience and Vibrance
Recipient: Pacific International Center for High Technology Research
State: Hawaii
Grant Program: Community Change Grant Program
Grant Amount: $13.8 million
Project Description: The Uplifting Wai’anae project planned to install a microgrid of renewable energy at Pu’uhonua o Wai’anae Farm Village and to create job training and employment opportunities for residents. Using the microgrid, the project and its partners planned to build a containerized farm for sustainable production of native and food plant species that mitigate wildfire risk and storm impacts, while increasing food security.

Vallejo Food Rescue Project
Recipient: Food Bank of Contra Costa and Solano
State: California
Grant Program: Environmental Justice Collaborative Problem-Solving Cooperative Agreement Program
Grant Amount: $155,000
Project Description: The Vallejo Food Rescue Project would have diverted edible food from landfills to the food bank, improving access to food for low-income individuals while reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Meanwhile, the food bank was creating a toolkit with educational and promotional materials to support a replicable and collaborative local food rescue operation.

Wildfire Preparedness and Resiliency in Farmworker Communities
Recipient: Farmworker Justice Fund, Inc.
State: Washington
Grant Program: Environmental Justice Collaborative Problem-Solving Cooperative Agreement Program
Grant Amount: $500,000
Project Description: Farmworker Justice was helping improve wildfire emergency preparedness and disaster resiliency among farmworkers in Washington State. The project was creating a toolkit of resources, as well as SMS and text messaging systems, for more than 15,000 workers. The aim of the project was to create a model that could be scaled nationally.

Youth Development Project to Tackle Extreme Heat and Food Insecurity in Underserved Communities
Recipient: Dream in Green, Inc.
State: Florida
Grant Program: Environmental Justice Collaborative Problem-Solving Cooperative Agreement Program
Grant Amount: $150,000
Project Description: Dream in Green planned to educate and provide resources to underserved communities in Miami-Dade County experiencing extreme heat and food insecurity due to climate change. The project was also intended to help young people manage natural resources and learn about sustainable agricultural practices.

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]]> https://civileats.com/2025/07/23/these-farm-and-food-projects-have-lost-their-epa-funding/feed/ 1 https://civileats.com/2025/07/21/what-bees-can-teach-us-about-well-being-and-survival/ https://civileats.com/2025/07/21/what-bees-can-teach-us-about-well-being-and-survival/#comments Mon, 21 Jul 2025 08:00:48 +0000 https://civileats.com/?p=65748 A version of this article originally appeared in The Deep Dish, our members-only newsletter. Become a member today and get the next issue directly in your inbox. Michelle Cassandra Johnson and Amy Burtaine, co-authors of The Wisdom of the Hive, understand this about bees—and much, much more. Johnson began keeping bees at her home in North Carolina […]

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About 35 percent of the world’s food crops are dependent on pollinators, which means that we have them to thank for about one in every three bites of food that we eat. Whether or not you welcome the presence of bees at your picnic or party, there’s no denying our tables would be poorly set without them.

Michelle Cassandra Johnson and Amy Burtaine, co-authors of The Wisdom of the Hive, understand this about bees—and much, much more. Johnson began keeping bees at her home in North Carolina in 2019, prompted by a vivid dream about them at a time when her mother was gravely ill. Still half dreaming, she got online and ordered “everything that one needs to tend bees—the suit, the boxes, the bees, everything,” she says.

Soon afterward, she learned that in many cultures, bees are thought to help people through times of grief or uncertainty. “This is when I began to understand their mystical power,” she writes in the book. (Her mother eventually recovered.) “And when the shipment of bees arrived, I began to realize the very practical magic they embody.”

“What does it mean for us as humans to labor in a way that will support future generations, even if we won’t experience that ourselves? To me, that kind of laboring is a condition that needs to be in place for us to create justice.”

Burtaine started keeping bees a year later at her home off the coast of Washington state. Though she still does not feel like a master beekeeper, she’s had great teachers—millions of them. “I am always learning from the bees,” she says.

The two longtime friends, who both work as equity educators, experienced the joys and heartbreaks of beekeeping in their respective backyards—from the sweet taste of a hive’s first honey harvest to the silence of a colony lost to a bitter cold winter day.

Then, one day, Johnson called Burtaine and invited her to a shamanism workshop about the principles of the sacred feminine and bees. Burtaine recalls, “At the end of it, we turned to each other with so much excitement. It felt like everything that bees do is a metaphor for humans, which could be a lesson to us.”

That excitement sparked a creative collaboration that eventually took form as their new book, in which the authors invite us to reflect on the myriad complex relationships between humans, bees, and the planet we all share. They encourage us to reimagine the relationship between humans and bees as one defined not only by what the bees can provide us tangibly in the form of honey, but also by the life lessons they can offer if we really pay attention. And, as bee populations the world over have plummeted, resulting in resounding chants of “Save the bees!” Johnson and Burtaine ask instead: “What if the bees are here to save us?”

Civil Eats recently spoke with the authors about bees and what they can teach us about the attunement, caretaking, and interconnectedness that are vital to their survival—and, the authors believe, to ours.

What are some of the ways that we all live in relationship with bees, even if we don’t tend beehives?

Burtaine: Michelle and I did not write this book only for beekeepers. We wrote it as a love letter to bees and as a love letter to humanity. We see how bees treat one another and care for the hive as a superorganism in ways that we wish human beings modeled. Our mission with the book is to help people become students of bees, like we are. Even if you’re not a bee-tender, you’re a food eater—and there’s food injustice across the planet because of systems of oppression. We have things out of balance as humans because of our hierarchies, with us at the top, even though we couldn’t survive without pollinators.

There are also incredible statistics—something like two million flowers go into a pound of honey. It’s just one example of how bees work. Even if they won’t be able to benefit from or taste the fruits of their labor, bees are constantly laboring for future generations, and for us.

Johnson: I think we have forgotten who we are to each other and how to be in reciprocal relationship with the more-than-human world, which is making us suffer. Most of what we ingest is in some way touched by the honey bees, which should call us into a deeper relationship with them.

It makes me think about the life cycle of most bees, which is about six to eight weeks, with the exception of the queen. Throughout that cycle, they’re moving through different roles within the hive. Their final stage is being a forager, where they go out and gather resources, like pollen and nectar and water, for the hive. Often, they will not benefit from those resources directly, because they’re going to die soon.

So, a question we ask is: What does it mean for us as humans to labor in a way that will support future generations, even if we won’t experience that ourselves? To me, that kind of laboring is a condition that needs to be in place for us to create justice.

What are some of the surprising things you’ve learned about how bees interact with each other? What can they teach us about community?

Johnson: As a superorganism, bees do not think of themselves as individual bees—they think of themselves as an extension of the hive. Everything they do is for the hive. They also work with the ecosystem. They understand seasons and weather systems—they know if it’s going to storm well before we do. They work with the sun and light. They work with the things that are blossoming outside their hive. Bees have to understand all that to survive. What if we understood and were aligned in that way with the larger ecosystem?

Bees are also an indicator species—how well bees are doing is an indication of how well we are doing.

“We’re in a time of great uncertainty, and it’s scary. What if we were to—as the bees do—huddle together in the dark, instead of just figuring out ‘how do I survive?’ or ‘what do I need?’”

Burtaine: Bees attune to one another. Their vibration tells you how they are doing. When they are agitated, their vibration is higher. When they are calm, their vibration is lower. They work well together, whether under stress or not.

We as humans tend to fall apart under stress. We are not resonating with ourselves. We are not resonating with one another or doing what is best to help those right next to us. We are not tuning into the whole. We in the West are from a “save mine, get mine, hoard mine, figure out mine” culture that is antithetical to what the bees do. The bees could never do anything for individual gain.

How do you think bees should inform our response to the present moment, to what’s happening in politics and social systems?

Burtaine: So much of what bees do is in the dark [of their hive], but as human beings, we tend to fear the dark. It’s the land of our nightmares, myths, and legends; it’s full of monsters or the wild beasts that would eat us in the days before electricity.

There’s a beautiful writer, Francis Weller, who does a lot of grief work and talks about the period we’re in being “the long dark.” We’re in a time of great uncertainty, and it’s scary. What if we were to—as the bees do—huddle together in the dark, instead of just figuring out “how do I survive?” or “what do I need?” What if we embraced the unknown? What if we sit more kindly with ourselves and one another in the unknowing to create new visions, new ideas, new possibilities?

I think we’re at a time on the planet where we have to learn by doing. We cannot wait until we’re ready with things figured out. We’re not going to just get it right. We’re going to move messily through it together.

Johnson: One way we can learn to mirror the ways of the bee is to attune to our internal and external landscapes. People right now are dysregulated, distracted, and overwhelmed, so it’s very hard to show up moment after moment.

The bees tend to one another, and they tend to the hive. That laboring and care and attunement feel like skills and tools that people in our ancestral lineages understood, because they were more connected to natural rhythms and engaged in ceremony related to seasonal shifts. They were more closely aligned to agriculture in the sense of “what’s growing now?” not “what do I want to eat right now?”

It’s going to require us to understand that things are urgent, and also that a response to this urgency is us slowing down enough to understand what is happening. The bees model that all the time. They’re aware of everything that is happening within and outside the hive, and they’re communicating about it through their antennae, vibrations, and movements.

How can folks become more attuned to bees and begin to learn for themselves what bees have to teach us?

Johnson: A practical thing people can do is plant a pollinator garden or support a community garden. That practice of gardening with one another generates a sense of hive mind.

Burtaine: Honey tasting is a practice we suggest, as long as folks aren’t allergic. Sit with the incredible complexity that unfolds when you really taste it. There are stories in honey.

Johnson: There are hints of multiple plants and places [in honey]. It can be a beautiful meditative practice to both nourish your body and be really present to the complexity and sweetness of what the bees offer.

What are some things we can all do now to better care for the bees, ourselves, and those around us?

Burtaine: There are very practical things we can do. If you have the means, support local, organic farmers and beekeepers. Don’t use pesticides. Try humming—it’s a powerful nervous-system-settling practice that you can do by yourself. You can also put on a YouTube video to listen to the bees and hum along with them, or try a humming practice or attunement meditation.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

The post What Bees Can Teach Us About Survival and Well-being appeared first on Civil Eats.

]]> https://civileats.com/2025/07/21/what-bees-can-teach-us-about-well-being-and-survival/feed/ 1 https://civileats.com/2025/07/16/immigrant-farmworkers-win-housing-rights-in-vermont/ https://civileats.com/2025/07/16/immigrant-farmworkers-win-housing-rights-in-vermont/#respond Wed, 16 Jul 2025 08:00:59 +0000 https://civileats.com/?p=66098 Moreover, landlords cannot refuse an application if that number is not provided; they must accept any form of unexpired government-issued identification. They also cannot charge application fees for a residential dwelling. Republican Governor Phil Scott signed Senate Bill 127, the Vermont Rental Housing Improvement Program, on June 12, and the next day, Migrant Justice—the Vermont-based […]

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Under a freshly enacted Vermont bill on housing that bars discrimination on the basis of citizenship or immigration status, immigrant farmworkers no longer need to submit a social security number on rental applications.

Moreover, landlords cannot refuse an application if that number is not provided; they must accept any form of unexpired government-issued identification. They also cannot charge application fees for a residential dwelling.

Republican Governor Phil Scott signed Senate Bill 127, the Vermont Rental Housing Improvement Program, on June 12, and the next day, Migrant Justice—the Vermont-based organization that conceived the measure—took to the State House steps to celebrate.

“This is a really big deal for us, and maybe it wouldn’t seem like such a big deal for everybody if they haven’t been in that situation,” said a member of Migrant Justice who requested anonymity to protect her from reprisals.

The member said that in Vermont, opportunities for undocumented immigrant families to find housing are slim. While individuals who have been naturalized or received green cards are eligible for federally subsidized housing, undocumented individuals are not, which reduces housing opportunities for them. H-2A guest workers, typically single men employed under seasonal contracts, aren’t generally seeking housing, as their lodging is provided by their employers—often on the farm itself.

As a result, the member continued, many immigrants in Vermont struggle to find secure, safe living situations.

A moment from the immigrant housing law celebration at the Vermont State House in Montpelier. (Photo credit: Terry Allen)

“We’ve been seeing a lot of abuses,” Representative Leonora Dodge (D-Essex), who sponsored the bill, said. “A lot of young families are experiencing very dangerous situations, overcrowding, and instability. It’s a very tough housing market in Vermont, and people who were able and willing to pay rent, and could give good references, just weren’t even getting a foot in the door and were being rejected.”

A 2021 report published by the Vermont Housing Conservation Board found that 85 percent of farmworker housing in the state needed improvement, and that a lack of additional dwellings on farms had led to overcrowding.

Year-round migrant dairy workers make up the largest group of immigrant farmworkers in Vermont, and the majority—whether single workers or families—live on the farms where they work. Having an employer who doubles as a landlord puts immigrant workers “in a particularly precarious and vulnerable position, as they may be less likely to report discrimination, poor working, or poor housing conditions to government officials due to fear of deportation and are unable to access federal funds to support their housing needs,” according to the state’s 2024 Fair Housing Analysis.

“It’s a very tough housing market in Vermont, and people who were able and willing to pay rent, and could give good references, just weren’t even getting a foot in the door and were being rejected.”

“What that means for people in the farmworking community is that we’re obligated to stay on jobs where our rights aren’t being respected and we’re being abused, just because the farm is the only place where we’re able to get housing,” said the Migrant Justice member.

Migrant Justice, which has long advocated for the immigrant community, first approached the state legislature with their housing proposal in 2023; however, it didn’t gain traction. According to Vermont Public, landlords and bankers have been concerned that they couldn’t run credit and background checks without a Social Security number.

“To make a landlord have to take somebody—even if they’re not here legally—I think is a challenge and a big ask,” Angela Zaikowski, director of the Vermont Landlord Association, told lawmakers at a hearing in April.

In the same article, Christopher D’Elia, president of the Vermont Bankers Association, was quoted as saying, “the credit risk analysis becomes much more difficult and heightened,” when lending to undocumented immigrants. If “two weeks from now [they] may be deported, what’s the credit risk of being able to get repaid on that loan?” he added. “That is the reality we find ourselves in.”

Dodge spoke with landlord advocates who work nationally and learned that it’s possible to run credit and background checks with just a name, address, and birth date.

With this information, Dodge reintroduced the measure in the Vermont House of Representatives earlier this year as House Bill 169, using testimony from landlords, Migrant Justice members, attorneys, and bankers to negotiate the language.

The Vermont Housing Conservation Board found that 85 percent of farmworker housing in the state needed improvement, and that a lack of additional dwellings on farms had led to overcrowding.

Determined to see it pass, Migrant Justice built a coalition of more than a dozen state government agencies and community organizations in support of the bill, including Housing and Homelessness Alliance of Vermont, Vermont Human Rights Commission, and ACLU of Vermont.

“Migrant Justice was really the spirit. They spearheaded the effort,” Dodge said. “As the sponsor of the H.169 bill, my job was to lay the groundwork on the political and legislative side.”

The resulting measure was folded into S.127—an omnibus housing bill—which received bipartisan approval.

Now, with S.127 enacted, advocates say they hope the paperwork barriers that prevent immigrant farmworkers from accessing fair housing will be alleviated, giving them more autonomy to find better job opportunities and living conditions.

“We’re really happy to have this new law in place, because it means that workers aren’t tied any more to jobs where we’re being abused,” the Migrant Justice member said. “We’ll have the ability to find our own housing.”

Vermont is one of a handful of states to enact housing access protections for immigrants into law. California was the first, passing its amendment in 2015. Other states, including Washington, New York, Oregon, Colorado, Washington, D.C., and Illinois, have also implemented similar measures.

“I think that it’s so important that we pass legislation with the recognition that immigrant workers are people, and we have to address their whole experience and not just take advantage of them and exploit their labor,” Dodge said.

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]]> https://civileats.com/2025/07/16/immigrant-farmworkers-win-housing-rights-in-vermont/feed/ 0 https://civileats.com/2025/07/08/from-bees-to-beer-buckwheat-is-a-climate-solution-crop/ https://civileats.com/2025/07/08/from-bees-to-beer-buckwheat-is-a-climate-solution-crop/#comments Tue, 08 Jul 2025 08:00:50 +0000 https://civileats.com/?p=65717 “Bees love buckwheat,” says Keith Kisler, a farmer who co-owns Chimacum Valley Grainery, a mill, bakery, and brewery on Washington’s Olympic Peninsula. Kisler and his wife, Crystie, cultivate barley, quinoa, rye, spelt, and wheat on about 70 acres of organic farmland, but buckwheat has become one of his favorite crops. That’s because buckwheat—planted in late […]

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From a distance, fields of buckwheat may seem serene, with petite, fluffy white flowers and heart-shaped green leaves. But if you’re standing in one, you’ll hear the distinct buzzing of bees as they pollinate millions of flowers per acre.

“Bees love buckwheat,” says Keith Kisler, a farmer who co-owns Chimacum Valley Grainery, a mill, bakery, and brewery on Washington’s Olympic Peninsula. Kisler and his wife, Crystie, cultivate barley, quinoa, rye, spelt, and wheat on about 70 acres of organic farmland, but buckwheat has become one of his favorite crops.

Despite its name, buckwheat is not a type of wheat; it’s a gluten-free seed, rich in vitamins and minerals.

That’s because buckwheat—planted in late May and harvested in early October—is remarkably easy to grow. “In between, there’s really nothing done to that field,” Kisler says. “I don’t do any weed control, and we don’t water. It’s planted, it germinates, it grows, it flowers, it’s harvested.”

Buckwheat is also easy to mill into flour and adds a rich, earthy flavor to some of the Grainery’s products, like bread, beer, and pasta. By managing every step of the process, from cultivation to the finished product, Kisler has overcome buckwheat’s greatest challenge in the U.S.—a solid infrastructure that connects producers with consumers.

Buckwheat flour can be used in a range of recipes, including noodles, pictured here, as well as crêpes, blinis, and cookies. (Photo credit: Crystie Kisler, Chimacum Valley Grainery)

Buckwheat has a long bloom period, can build healthy soil, and is nutrient-dense, making it good not only for bees and farmers, but also planet and people. These multiple benefits are why Kisler and a team of scientists are working together to test new varieties of buckwheat and to build a local market for it.

Led by researchers at Washington State University (WSU) and supported by funding from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), they hope to increase organic production of this underutilized, low-input crop—one with the potential to address larger challenges like nutrition access and climate change.

A Versatile Seed

Despite its name, buckwheat is not a type of wheat. It is a seed rich in vitamins and minerals, including vitamins A, B, C, and E, as well as potassium and magnesium, which play an important role in a healthy human diet—and it is gluten free. The tough outer hulls are typically removed, and the hulled seeds, called groats, have a nutty taste and the al dente texture of farro. Buckwheat groats can also be milled into a flour for use in sweet and savory recipes, from brownies and cookies to breads and crackers.

Buckwheat originated in southwestern China, featuring in Asian cuisines for thousands of years before spreading to Eastern Europe, likely in the 15th century. Today, China is the world’s second largest producer of buckwheat after Russia. The grain arrived in North America during European colonization and was a favorite of Thomas Jefferson and George Washington, due to its capacity to suppress weeds.

Its culinary uses, however, have yet to be fully explored in the U.S., where it is still typically treated as an export item or cover crop. About 27,000 acres of buckwheat were grown here in 2017, the most recent year that data on buckwheat plantings were available.

Washington is the nation’s second top producer of buckwheat after North Dakota, with approximately 6,000 to 8,000 acres, according to Kevin Murphy, a WSU professor of international seed and cropping systems and the director of Breadlab, WSU’s grain research center. Almost all of the seed grown in the Northwest state is exported to Japan for making soba noodles.

Kisler’s buckwheat, grown on 12 acres that produce 16,000 to 18,000 pounds of seed annually, remains in his regional food system. His brother, on the other hand, grows between 200 and 300 acres of buckwheat in eastern Washington, entirely for export to Japan.

“There’s a need for different scales of operations,” Kisler says. “For somebody like my brother to grow several hundred acres of buckwheat and for small production at a local level.” 

Buckwheat flowers develop abundantly about 30 days after seeding. At right, an aerial view of a buckwheat field trial. (Photo courtesy of WSU)

Kisler has worked with Breadlab since 2008, and the buckwheat in his fields are varieties they developed together. For years before this collaboration, Kisler used buckwheat as a cover crop, and he saw how it enhanced his soil.

“It helps break disease cycles,” Kisler says. “It grows really quickly, so it out-competes the weeds in a field. It sends down a fairly deep tap root, which loosens compacted soils. It does well even in marginal soils. I don’t ever need to water it, even in a dry season. And it’s planted later, so from a production perspective, it spreads out planting and harvesting so all that work doesn’t need to happen all at once.”

Buckwheat’s agricultural benefits extend beyond the lifespan of the plant. “When I follow it with a grain crop, that grain crop does better in that section of the field where there was buckwheat the previous year than next door where there was no buckwheat planted,” Kisler says.  

The Pancake Project

In 2021, WSU researchers began collaborating with local producers to assess the regional market for buckwheat and millet and build consumer demand for these crops, supported by a $350,000 Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education Project (SARE) grant, funded by the USDA.

“I don’t do any weed control with buckwheat, and we don’t water. It’s planted, it germinates, it grows, it flowers, it’s harvested.”

They used the most promising buckwheat varieties from nearby farms to develop a pancake mix for Washington’s school lunch programs. Stephen Bramwell, Thurston County Extension director and WSU agriculture specialist, coordinated with nearly 300 school districts for their feedback. A critical factor, they found, was the ratio of buckwheat flour to whole wheat flour.

“After many rounds of taste tests at the Breadlab and schools, we’ve dialed it in to 50 percent buckwheat,” Bramwell says. “We tried to get it close to what people know, what wouldn’t be too different from other pancakes—fairly light, not too grainy, a little bit sweet.”

The pancakes’ appearance was particularly crucial. “The color—that’s a huge one for kids,” says Bramwell, noting that students prefer the lighter hue of pancakes made with refined wheat flour. “Buckwheat pancakes brown faster and can become really dark, so we’ve done trials to moderate the color.”

Buckwheat pancake-mix packets at the Thurston County Fair, created by WSU Extension. At the booth, kids could grind their own buckwheat flour for the packets using a hand-crank mill. The booth was extremely popular, with some kids returning two or three times to grind more buckwheat groats. (Photo credit: Stephen Bramwell)

To familiarize students with buckwheat, the team also organized hands-on lessons, including growing it in school gardens, harvesting and threshing it, using hand-crank mills to pulverize the seeds into flour, making pancakes, and taste testing batches made with different flour ratios.

“The best way to reach kids is not just when it shows up on the plate,” Bramwell says, “but when they’ve had a chance to get exposure to a new product by learning about it, as a plant, as a seed, and then as a food.”

‘More Bang for Your Buckwheat’

After the SARE grant ended in 2024, the WSU team received another USDA grant for a project they call More Bang for Your Buckwheat (MBYB). Their goal is to develop new buckwheat varieties based on traits that both farmers and consumers like and want. With these new varieties, the team plans to develop a diverse selection of “flavorful, affordable, and nutritious” buckwheat products and continue collaborations with 50 school districts in the region. 

“The name is sort of tongue-in-cheek,” explains Micaela Colley, WSU professor of participatory plant breeding. “Many farmers grow buckwheat knowing they won’t make any money off it, and they just till it in. We’re interested in all the values of buckwheat as a cover crop, but the idea is that you’re getting a food crop out of it, too.”

An array of foods made with buckwheat, including cookies and crackers, at the Buckwheat Festival. (Photo courtesy of WSU Breadlab)

Recent federal funding cuts devastated some WSU research programs, such as the Soil to Society grant, which included buckwheat as a key crop to consider for increasing food security. The four-year, $3.3 million MBYB grant is still being funded through USDA, but may be indirectly impacted by a $1 billion federal funding cut to the Local Food for Schools Cooperative Agreement Program, which affects 850,000 students in Washington and may limit the ability of some school districts to buy nutritious, locally produced foods—like WSU’s buckwheat pancake mix.

The MBYB team also includes experts from across the country, with several in New York—another top U.S. producer of buckwheat and buckwheat products. Cornell University and the Glynwood Center for Regional Food are key for research and forming relationships with both farmers and food producers to develop products such as BAM, a buckwheat-based milk alternative.

The MBYB grant will also help fund the third annual Buckwheat Festival on August 8 at the Breadlab, in Burlington, Washington. The small event, which attracted about 50 visitors last year, will offer an evening tasting of buckwheat foods and drinks for $25 or a full day of activities for $125, including a field tour with plant breeders and cooking demonstrations with chefs.

Since 2018, the Breadlab has collaborated with chef Bonnie Morales of the Eastern European restaurant Kachka, in Portland, Oregon, to develop recipes for the restaurant and pop-up events, including the Buckwheat Festival.

“She makes my favorite comfort food,” Colley says, referring to Morales’ golubtsi, a Ukrainian dish of cabbage rolls stuffed with buckwheat. The seed is used throughout Kachka’s menu, including for custard and blini.

The Buckwheat Festival offers tastings of buckwheat foods and drinks, field tours with plant breeders, and cooking demonstrations with chefs. (Photo courtesy of WSU Breadlab)

California chef Sonoko Sakai has also participated in the festival and will be there again this year. “She did a demo and made soba noodles by hand,” Colley recalls. “One thing that stuck in my mind that she shared is that in Japan, master soba chefs will include on the menu the date that buckwheat was harvested and what farm it came from.”

Ultimately, the goal is for buckwheat to be enjoyed year-round, not only on the day of the festival. For this to happen, there’s still much work to be done, especially in local and regional infrastructure.

“We’re really good at growing large amounts of grain and putting them in silos and then shipping them off somewhere far away,” Murphy says. “But if we want to eat locally and grow these grains at a smaller scale, there are a lot of gaps between the farmers and food companies and schools. How do we work together to bridge these gaps and make regional grain economies and value chains more efficient?”

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]]> https://civileats.com/2025/07/08/from-bees-to-beer-buckwheat-is-a-climate-solution-crop/feed/ 1 https://civileats.com/2025/07/07/farmworkers-heal-climate-scarred-land-with-native-seeds/ https://civileats.com/2025/07/07/farmworkers-heal-climate-scarred-land-with-native-seeds/#respond Mon, 07 Jul 2025 08:00:18 +0000 https://civileats.com/?p=65035 A version of this article originally appeared in The Deep Dish, our members-only newsletter. Become a member today and get the next issue directly in your inbox. Quiroz and Gómez are seed-cleaning specialists and field workers at Hedgerow Farms, a native seed farm near the Central Valley town of Winters. Hedgerow’s collectors gather seeds from native plants […]

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]]> A version of this article originally appeared in The Deep Dish, our members-only newsletter. Become a member today and get the next issue directly in your inbox.

Irma Quiroz pulled her bandana over her face, lowered her hat, and flicked a switch. A towering seed-cleaning machine roared to life, sending a cloud of dust and residue into the air. Quiroz shoveled native grass seeds into the machine as her husband, Juan Gómez, held out a palm to inspect the stream of cleaned seeds, looking for any that were empty or underdeveloped, as they cascaded out of the machine into white sacks. They were now ready for restoration sites across California.

Quiroz and Gómez are seed-cleaning specialists and field workers at Hedgerow Farms, a native seed farm near the Central Valley town of Winters. Hedgerow’s collectors gather seeds from native plants in the wild, and field workers grow them out at the 300-acre farm to produce more seeds. This spring, neat rows of mugwort, purple needlegrass, and California poppies sprouted in the midst of neighboring almond orchards, tomatoes, and alfalfa.

Government agencies, tribes, and other land managers use the seeds to revegetate fire-ravaged areas, transform abandoned farmland, reestablish wetlands, and repair other damaged or altered lands, creating environments that support local ecosystems and biodiversity.

“We’re doing something for the planet,” Quiroz said in Spanish.

Recreational areas have benefited too: Hedgerow Farms’ silverbush lupine grows in the Golden Gate National Recreation Area, and its native grasses can be found in the Yolo Bypass Wildlife Area outside Sacramento. The farm also supplies native seeds to seed packet retailers, helping sow drought-resistant plants and establish pollinator habitat in urban environments.

Some projects, such as the ongoing restoration of the Klamath River Basin in Oregon and California, involve billions of seeds—from various suppliers, including Hedgerow—spread across thousands of acres. “Native vegetation is the foundation of a healthy ecosystem,” the Yurok Tribe said in a social media post showing wildflowers blooming this spring in the scar of a former reservoir. After four dams were removed from the Klamath River, the tribe began revegetating the riverbanks last year, planting species such as milkweed—a key food source for monarch butterflies—that once flourished in the watershed.

A crew at Hedgerow Farms hoes a Lupinus bicolor field in Winters, California. (Photo credit: Joshua Scoggin/Hedgerow Farms).

Native Seeds to the Rescue

Research has shown that native plants play a powerful role in slowing climate change and restoring ecosystems. They create wildlife habitat, sequester carbon, limit dust and erosion by stabilizing soil, and deter future wildfires by preventing highly flammable invasive grasses from taking root.

“Having native seed ready and getting native plants back in the ground after these big fire events is critical,” said Justin Valliere, assistant professor of cooperative extension at the University of California, Davis, who studies native plant restoration.

Spanish clover, miniature lupine, and white yarrow are already growing at sites devastated this year by the Palisades and Eaton fires in Los Angeles. The seeds were supplied by Rancho De Las Flores, a native seed farm in Los Alamos, near Santa Barbara, which is owned by the same company as Hedgerow Farms. Las Flores and Hedgerow Farms coordinate production, each specializing in plants native to their regions.

“Having native seed ready and getting native plants back in the ground after these big fire events is critical.”

Hedgerow Farms has grown seeds for restoration projects on all fronts of the climate crisis. This spring, the farm’s collections experts left their homes before dawn to scout for irises and cinquefoils in the hilly pasture that runs along Gleason Beach, north of Bodega Bay on the Sonoma Coast, for a project restoring the first site in California where a highway was moved inland due to sea level rise.

Meanwhile, the farm has ramped up seed production for tarweed, phacelia, and saltbush, plants native to the San Joaquin Valley. As groundwater depletion threatens to dry up half a million acres of agriculture in the nation’s top-producing region, farmers and land managers have begun begun using native seeds to transition dairies and other farmland to desert scrub habitat.

“If fields are just abandoned, they can turn into sources of dust or weeds,” which can harm nearby farms and communities, Valliere said. The region, home to many of California’s farmworkers, already suffers from the worst air quality in the country.

A Shortage of Seeds

As the climate crisis accelerates the need for ecological restoration, native seeds are in high demand. In 2020, for example, California Governor Gavin Newsom announced a plan to conserve 30 percent of the state’s lands by 2030 to mitigate climate change and protect biodiversity by preserving nature. The plan includes land stewardship, which requires native seeds for measures such as rehabilitating wetlands to enhance wildlife habitat, and calls for accelerating restoration projects.

But only a handful of California farms—Hedgerow, its partner farm Las Flores, and a few others—grow native seed, and there isn’t enough inventory or production to support the state’s conservation goals, according to a 2023 report by the California Native Plant Society. The native seed shortage is “one of the main bottlenecks” delaying restoration work, Valliere said. “It’s a nationwide—even a global—problem,” he added.

During the past few years, catalyzed by the California Native Plant Society’s report, government agencies, land managers, and native seed producers formed working groups to improve coordination, discussing which native plant species might soon be in demand. “We’re trying to really listen and keep our finger on the pulse of where restoration is going,” said Julia Michaels, restoration ecologist and designer at Hedgerow Farms, adding that the company has scaled up its production in recent years.

Stewards of the Seeds

Hedgerow Farms is the longest operating native seed farm in California, and together with Las Flores, it is the largest. The farm’s biggest contracts, multi-year agreements that include seed collection and growing, are worth millions of dollars. For some species, Hedgerow Farms is the only supplier that can provide the quantity of seed—often delivered by the truckload—needed to reestablish huge swaths of native vegetation. All told, Hedgerow has enabled the restoration of hundreds of thousands of acres of California landscapes.

Michaels said the farm’s team of roughly a dozen farmworkers has been critical to that legacy. Their expertise in this unique field, she said, makes them some of the most important and irreplaceable people working to restore California’s ecosystems.

Founded in the 1980s by John Anderson, a local veterinary professor turned native plant guru, Hedgerow Farms has always hired farmworkers laboring in the surrounding fields and orchards for seasonal jobs. Some stayed on, developing expertise in the collection, growing, or processing of native seed.

“They’re the ones who hold all the knowledge,” Michaels said of long-serving employees who helped keep the farm running after Anderson’s death in 2020.

Not many people have applied farming techniques to native grasses and wildflowers, so Hedgerow Farms developed its own best practices, maximizing seed yields for 400 species through years of trial and error.

Like others at Hedgerow Farms, Alejandro García, one of the farm’s collections experts, grew up in an agricultural environment in Mexico, working with his family in corn fields in Michoacán. In California, García found work in orchards and vineyards, pruning and tending vines in Napa Valley before learning wildland seed collecting from some of the industry’s early leaders.

For the past two decades, García has scoured the state for native seeds. With permission from private landowners such as farmers and ranchers, or a permit to collect seeds on public land, he treks through marshes, grasslands, forests, and deserts.

“I learned to look at the flowers and see the differences,” García said in Spanish. He added that he can identify hundreds of species and subspecies, as well as their varying behavior, localized traits, and genetic diversity. He knows which seeds must be collected ripe and which can be gathered green and left to ripen off the plant.

With lupine, a native wildflower especially good at fixing nitrogen and restoring soil health after wildfires, “you can tell it’s ready when you see the veins” in the flower petals, García said.

Around 2010, he began teaching the intricacies of native seed collecting to Manolo Sánchez, who had been working in peach orchards near Yuba City. Both were hired as collections experts by Hedgerow Farms in 2017.

“They’re some of the best botanists in the state,” said Michaels, who has a doctorate in ecology and serves as vice president of scientific and public affairs at NativeSeed Group, which owns Hedgerow Farms and Las Flores. “What they do is really, really impressive.”

Hedgerow has enabled the restoration of hundreds of thousands of acres of California landscapes. The farm’s team of roughly a dozen farmworkers has been critical to that legacy.

Back at the farm, field workers grow out the wild seeds, turning handfuls into hundreds of pounds. Not many people have applied farming techniques to native grasses and wildflowers, so Hedgerow Farms has developed its own best practices, maximizing seed yields for 400 species through years of trial and error, said farm manager Jeff Quiter. When the crops are ready, a combine harvester moves through the fields, chopping up row upon row of wildflowers and separating out the seeds.

The seeds then go to the cleaning shed. Gómez, the seed-cleaning specialist, began working at Hedgerow Farms more than three decades ago after leaving Mexico to join his mother transplanting tomatoes near Winters. He modified equipment designed for corn and barley to clean grass and wildflower seeds, dialing the machine’s air flow up for one species, down for another. The process improves the seeds’ chances of germination, Gómez said in Spanish, and ultimately, the success of restoration projects. “You have to take it very seriously,” he added.

Quiroz, the farm’s other seed-cleaning specialist, initially preferred the exotic flowers she grew for garden centers while working at a nearby plant nursery. In comparison, she thought native plants “were ugly,” she said. But at Hedgerow Farms, where she has worked since 2021, Quiroz was soon preaching their virtues during farm tours, which are open to the public once a year. Unlike the flowers she had grown for sale at Lowe’s and Home Depot, which were bred to reproduce aesthetic qualities, native plants “are more resilient,” she said, having adapted to survive in their natural environment.

When Quiroz passes a cluster of lupine or poppies, and her children point out “her” flowers, she takes pride in her work—and the little ways she has changed the world around her. “If one can play a small part in a larger effort,” she said, “I think that’s beautiful.”

The post Farmworkers Heal Climate-Scarred Land With Native Seeds appeared first on Civil Eats.

]]> https://civileats.com/2025/07/07/farmworkers-heal-climate-scarred-land-with-native-seeds/feed/ 0 https://civileats.com/2025/07/02/trump-cuts-threaten-federal-bee-research/ https://civileats.com/2025/07/02/trump-cuts-threaten-federal-bee-research/#comments Wed, 02 Jul 2025 08:00:10 +0000 https://civileats.com/?p=65625 Through proposed layoffs and budget cuts, the administration has taken multiple actions that threaten an obscure division of the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS): the Ecosystems Mission Area, or EMA, which houses almost all federal biological research. Eliminating the division was prescribed by the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 agenda, despite the amount of research EMA provides. […]

The post Trump Cuts Threaten Federal Bee Research appeared first on Civil Eats.

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Public support for pollinators is nearly ubiquitous. Surveys show that 95 percent of Americans want to protect the bees, butterflies, and other creatures that are essential to ecosystem health and boost crop production, adding billions of dollars in value to U.S. agriculture—especially at a time when pollinator populations are declining. However, the Trump administration is pushing cuts that would make bee research and pollinator conservation slower, more expensive, and far less effective, experts warn.

Through proposed layoffs and budget cuts, the administration has taken multiple actions that threaten an obscure division of the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS): the Ecosystems Mission Area, or EMA, which houses almost all federal biological research.

Eliminating the division was prescribed by the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 agenda, despite the amount of research EMA provides. The 1,200 biologists and staff who work there document contamination in private and public wells, study the effects of wildfire and drought, and track wildlife disease outbreaks, including avian influenza.

They perform long-term monitoring of native and invasive species from avocets to zebra mussels—enabling management agencies to, for example, set sustainable waterfowl hunting limits, manage livestock predators, and keep waterways healthy. They also inventory, track, or study every known native bee species in the country, along with other pollinators.

Efforts to dismantle federal biological research show “a fundamental misunderstanding of what ecology is and does,” said Lori Ann Burd, environmental health director at the nonprofit Center for Biological Diversity. “I don’t believe Americans voted for the end of being able to gather native blueberries, or for the end of wildflower meadows.”

“I don’t believe Americans voted for the end of being able to gather native blueberries, or for the end of wildflower meadows.”

The White House claims that getting rid of EMA would eliminate duplicative programs and stop federal work on “social agendas” like climate change, while trimming about $300 million from USGS’ $1.6 billion budget. Though unspoken, historical records show the proposal also fits a much older, far-right vision of upholding private property rights by eroding the awareness and protection of imperiled species.

But biologists and conservationists nationwide say these cuts would actually dismantle irreplaceable, largely uncontroversial programs and drive out experts whose work is key not only to the government’s ability to manage natural resources, but also to a broad swath of work led by states and nonprofits.

In 2015, the Obama administration announced measures to protect bees, as beekeepers like Steve Corniffe (above), pictured at the time in Homestead, Florida, grappled with colony declines. (Photo: Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

Cutting Bee Research

Importantly, dismantling EMA would mean the elimination of the USGS Bee Lab—a tiny, two-person office in Maryland that is a linchpin for the study and protection of all U.S. native bees. “Every bee researcher, possibly every pollinator researcher in the U.S. has at some point worked with the USGS Bee Lab,” said Rosemary Malfi, the conservation policy director at the nonprofit Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation.

With a vast collection of high-resolution photographs, more than 700,000 specimens, and the unrivaled expertise of the lab’s director, biologist Sam Droege, the lab is the only U.S. entity with the resources to identify the nation’s more than 4,000 native bee species. Distinguishing different bees can be exceptionally difficult—but is essential for understanding their health, distribution, and needs.

This makes their work as important for preventing needless endangered-species petitions for bees that are simply hard to find, as it is for protecting the genuinely at-risk ones, Droege told Civil Eats. A federal biologist since 1978, Droege has risked his job to speak in defense of EMA.

“There’s a lot of inappropriately analyzed data out there saying there’s a bee apocalypse, that all bees are declining, but it’s more nuanced than that,” he said. “Wouldn’t you want someone to point that out that has scientific credibility? That’s what we do.”

In recent weeks, Droege has drummed up vocal support for the lab, and hundreds of biologists, volunteers, and partners have written to Congress on their behalf. “But in general, scientists—we’re just doing our job. We’re a little invisible,” he said.

Outside the Bee Lab are many other EMA scientists who could also be fired: Experts like Tabitha Graves, a Montana ecologist whose assessments of the Western bumblebee have become the framework for that species’ recovery in the Pacific Northwest or Wayne Thogmartin, a Wisconsin ecologist whose research on monarch butterflies has been internationally important for understanding their decline.

State agencies, federal resource managers, and nonprofits all rely on EMA’s centralized, consistent, and freely accessible data and guidance, which they say minimizes collective costs and effort.

States aren’t well-equipped to study creatures like bees, which don’t heed their borders, nor to ensure their work harmonizes with that of other states. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which manages protected species, isn’t funded to track all the other species—that’s EMA’s purview. Universities, though full of biologists exploring novel research questions, don’t usually do long-term monitoring. And there are few experts like Droege for any of these groups to hire if they need help.

So without the federal bee research division, “we cannot understand how pollinators are doing,” said Malfi at the Xerces Society—nor how to protect these creatures, without which North American ecosystems and crops (among them blueberries, tomatoes, and squash) would collapse.

Bees are essential to agriculture, including California’s almond industry (above). Researchers at Ecosystems Mission Area say they need to be monitored by the federal government, because pollinators migrate across state lines and international borders. (Getty Images)

An Office Under Multiple Threats

In recent weeks, EMA and its research has faced at least five existential threats: two from the Supreme Court and several from congressional budget processes. If any one of them succeeds, EMA could disappear before the end of the year. Most imminently, President Donald Trump has asked the Supreme Court to allow mass layoffs without congressional approval, seeking to fire more than 100,000 federal workers, including reportedly up to 80 percent of EMA staff.

These reduction-in-force (RIF) layoffs have been paused since May by a District Court injunction, which a federal appeals court has so far upheld. Trump’s emergency appeal to the highest court put it on their “shadow docket,” so although justices are now in recess until October, they could rule on it at any time.

Last week, the Supreme Court did rule on a seemingly unrelated case that nonetheless posed a sideways threat to EMA: Federal workers feared that when the court decided to limit nationwide injunctions, it would also undo the RIF injunction that has so far protected their jobs. To their relief, a footnote in the ruling likely blocked its application to this case.

Trump has also asked Congress to drastically cut EMA funding from USGS appropriations, proposing just $29 million for unspecified EMA programs in his 2026 budget request. But appropriations bills require 60 votes to clear the Senate, and tie individual legislators to unpopular cuts. In Trump’s first term, Congress rejected his attempts to gut science agencies, but amid this year’s funding fights, many biologists fear that legislators will not prioritize natural resources.

Trump has also asked Congress to drastically cut EMA funding from USGS appropriations, proposing just $29 million for unspecified EMA programs.

A second threat in Congress may not require any votes at all: In a recent House briefing, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum indicated the administration will send a budget rescission request to Congress later this summer, asking them to claw back a portion of the Interior Department’s 2025 budget, which still has not formally been allocated.

A rescission only needs a simple Senate majority—but if the request comes within 45 days of the fiscal year end (the window legislators have to take up a proposal), Congress could effectively cancel funding without ever needing to vote, since the paused money wouldn’t roll into the new fiscal year. The legally untested move, called a pocket rescission, would free individuals from blame—though it would almost certainly face lawsuits.

One other threat to federal biologists and other workers has so far been neutralized. In June, senators added a provision to Trump’s “Big, Beautiful Bill” that would have given his administration the power to downsize the federal workforce “without obstruction” from Congress or the courts.

If included in this budget reconciliation bill, it would have allowed the administration to implement RIF layoffs without approval from the Supreme Court. But the Senate parliamentarian has ruled that this and numerous other provisions violated Senate rules, so struck them from the bill.

While federal biologists have survived these attempts so far, they underscore the precarity bee research is facing. Many fear the division’s demise is imminent, especially if Congress doesn’t decide its fate through the appropriations process. So while conservation groups and supporters rally behind these scientists, Droege has been gauging other ways to preserve the lab’s collections, which form the foundation of all U.S. bee taxonomy.

The Smithsonian would probably take the lab’s hundreds of thousands of identified specimens, he said, but likely couldn’t provide the hands-on support the lab does. They also wouldn’t take the up to 200,000 specimens that haven’t yet been identified. As a last resort, Droege said, he’d move these to his own home and establish a private lab; at 66, he had no plans to retire, anyway.

“My motivation is not saving my job,” he said. “My motivation is the bees.” With continued study and science-based protection, he added, “it’s not that difficult to keep them around.”

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]]> https://civileats.com/2025/07/02/trump-cuts-threaten-federal-bee-research/feed/ 1 https://civileats.com/2025/06/30/can-this-baltimore-academy-continue-to-train-urban-farmers/ https://civileats.com/2025/06/30/can-this-baltimore-academy-continue-to-train-urban-farmers/#respond Mon, 30 Jun 2025 08:00:03 +0000 https://civileats.com/?p=65031 A version of this article originally appeared in The Deep Dish, our members-only newsletter. Become a member today and get the next issue directly in your inbox. This is the Black Butterfly Teaching Farm, run by the Farm Alliance of Baltimore (FAB), a membership organization of urban farmers, neighborhood growers, and those interested in learning more about […]

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]]> A version of this article originally appeared in The Deep Dish, our members-only newsletter. Become a member today and get the next issue directly in your inbox.

In southern Baltimore, not far from the sewage treatment plant of Wagner’s Point and massive coal mounds of Curtis Bay, lies a small farm of green grass, rustling trees, and rows of radishes, arugula, peppers, and more. On a cool afternoon in late May, groups of children and their parents pass by, cutting through a dirt path on their way to some other part of this historically industrial city. As they come and go, a small crew of farmers diligently tends to the crops and land.

This is the Black Butterfly Teaching Farm, run by the Farm Alliance of Baltimore (FAB), a membership organization of urban farmers, neighborhood growers, and those interested in learning more about both. The farm was designed to turn food-curious people into urban farmers, especially those who live or work in the “Black Butterfly”—the regions of the city to the east and west of the center, shaped like a pair of butterfly wings, where the city’s majority Black population lives.

“The folks that tore it apart have no intention of fixing it.”

These neighborhoods continue to grapple with a legacy of redlining, with impacts that persist today—from a scarcity of grocery stores to a lack of tree cover (and resulting “heat island” effect) to lower life expectancy in general, often due to environmental pollutants.

Urban farms, though, represent a tangible way for people to have “a sense of control and autonomy” over their health and environment, says Hannah Quigley, a policy specialist with the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition (NSAC). By enriching the environment and helping build a climate-resilient food system with economic potential, urban agriculture can unlock a form of empowerment for disadvantaged communities.

“It has real big community effects,” Quigley adds. “It’s not just helping one household in a lot of these settings. It’s helping hundreds of individuals in these neighborhood settings.”

Since 2021, the FAB has operated the Black Butterfly Urban Farmer Academy, which launched the teaching farm later that year and has graduated two groups of trainees. But this year, the program won’t be offered, as it takes a step back to finish several construction projects on the farm and to adjust to funding cuts by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA).

(Photo credit: Sam Delgado)

“I’m really looking forward to the full vision coming to fruition,” says Denzel Mitchell, FAB’s executive director and a former urban farmer himself, about the construction. He says they’re aiming to set up fencing, a greenhouse, an outdoor kitchen, a storage barn, and additional amenities for the community by the end of the year.

The Trump administration has cut many farming initiatives, including those addressing climate change and environmental injustice. That leaves programs like Black Butterfly—which aim to instill sustainable agriculture knowledge in residents who have long been blocked from land access—in limbo. Mitchell is skeptical that the funding challenges will be fixed any time soon.

“The folks that tore it apart,” he says, “have no intention of fixing it.”

Sustainable Farming in a Polluted Community

For years, the FAB had been having conversations about the need to offer people pathways to becoming urban farmers, says Mitchell, who drives an electric Ford truck to and from the farm. In 2017, the organization ran a feasibility study to understand exactly what the membership wanted. The response was “an opportunity to train,” Mitchell says. “That was the seed, if you will—no pun intended—of the training academy.”

There are other programs around Maryland that offer farm training. Mitchell himself trained with Future Harvest, which runs a year-long program for beginner farmers in the Chesapeake Bay region. But the city of Baltimore lacked an accessible, urban-scale training program.

People here needed something that was “a little bit beyond backyard growing,” and geared toward residents who wanted to develop a business, Mitchell says. “One of the things that we certainly understand as Black and Brown working-class folks is that you got to hustle. You got to have some little side gig.”

That entrepreneurial-environmental mindset has been a key part of the Black Butterfly Urban Farmer Academy’s framework. Its training is intended to help people feed their communities and grow potential businesses, while also learning how to sustainably steward the land.

Done properly, urban agriculture can reduce the carbon footprint of food and can help lower the heat island effect that many major cities face (while also benefiting the social, mental, and physical well-being of urban farmers and gardeners).

“The customers are really excited that we grow food in Baltimore City. They’re excited that these farms are right in their neighborhoods.”

Baltimore is no stranger to climate and environmental hazards, and this is especially true for communities living in the Black Butterfly. The teaching farm, whose nearly 7 acres of land were provided by the city’s Department of Planning, sits just a mile away from Curtis Bay, a neighborhood that has been plagued by pollution from coal dust. Black Baltimorians are also overwhelmingly worried about climate change and its harms, too.

As someone with decades of food and farming experience, Mitchell is well aware of how the changing climate has affected farming. At the same time, he expressed frustration that well-known “climate-smart” techniques, such as cover crops, are sometimes incentivized for industrial farms while smaller farms receive less support. These practices, Mitchell says, should be expected, rather than accepted.

Growing Urban Farmers

Past training programs of the Black Butterfly Urban Farmer Academy ran for nine months and began with in-person classes on foundational topics for a beginner farmer. Mitchell and other teachers guided participants through the basics, like crop selection, pest management, post-harvest handling, safety, marketing, and more.

After 12 weeks of classes, participants attended FAB’s field days, which connected them with local farms and food organizations to gain practical experience. Past field days included instruction on subjects like composting, beekeeping, and growing herbs. Students also gained hands-on experience from shifts at the teaching farm and other local farms.

Mitchell in the fields at Black Butterfly Teaching Farm. (Photo credit: Sam Delgado)

Past trainees were also each awarded a $2,000 stipend and equipped with books to further add to their understanding of the food system and farming strategies, including Farming While Black by Leah Penniman, The Market Gardener by Jean-Martin Fortier, and The Organic Farmer’s Business Handbook by Richard Wiswall.

Aria Eghbal was looking for a career change when she discovered the Black Butterfly Urban Farmer Academy. She was working as a medical assistant during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic and was feeling burnt out and frustrated by the healthcare system. She applied to the program and became one of 10 people accepted into the first training program—many of whom were also at a career crossroads, she says.

The training program marked the beginning of Eghbal’s career in the food system: as a farmer, as a cook, and, since last December, as FAB’s lead staffer at farmers’ markets. “The customers are really excited that we grow food in Baltimore City,” she says. “They’re excited that these farms are right in their neighborhoods.”

Becoming part of Baltimore’s urban farming community was one of the greatest benefits of the academy, she adds. “We really do care about each other and want to see each other thrive and succeed, through this process of growing food and flowers and processing honey and all the different things that we do.”

The Challenge Ahead

The Black Butterfly Urban Farmer Academy has seen nearly 20 people graduate from its program. But the USDA funding cuts, particularly to initiatives for diversity, equity, and inclusion, have also eliminated funding prospects. To operate services like the academy and an upcoming incubator program that Mitchell calls “the launching pad for the next generation of diversified family farmers,” he projects it will cost roughly $300,000. “Fundraising has been incredibly difficult this year,” he says.

Crops in the ground at the teaching farm. (Photo credit: Sam Delgado)

Added to the difficulty is a political environment where some organizations are hiding their missions. One funder recently asked Mitchell if he was “woke but cloaked”—whether, in other words, the FAB would be hiding language around equity from its website and other materials, to avoid targeting from the Trump administration. “How am I supposed to do that?” Mitchell asked, annoyed, recalling the conversation. “I’m a Black man. My politics are literally on my face.”

Despite all this, Mitchell still has plans for the land where the teaching farm is located, including a pavilion, a playground, and community and commercial orchards. “This was just us growing food and then trying to teach people how to do it,” Mitchell says. “And doing it in a way that is environmentally beneficial. So now, we got to figure out just how to do that on our own.”

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]]> https://civileats.com/2025/06/30/can-this-baltimore-academy-continue-to-train-urban-farmers/feed/ 0 https://civileats.com/2025/06/24/a-national-soil-judging-contest-prepares-college-students-to-steward-the-land/ https://civileats.com/2025/06/24/a-national-soil-judging-contest-prepares-college-students-to-steward-the-land/#comments Tue, 24 Jun 2025 08:00:48 +0000 https://civileats.com/?p=65364 Each year at the National Collegiate Soil Judging Contest, students gather to classify soils based on their color, texture, and structure. The team whose analyses most closely match those of professional soil scientists return to campus with a gleaming 3-foot trophy, the coveted Stanley Cup of soils. There is more than school pride at stake, […]

The post A National Soil-Judging Contest Prepares College Students to Steward the Land appeared first on Civil Eats.

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On an early spring morning in central Wisconsin, the hills were still and serene under a frosty grey sky. Then the fight songs began. More than 200 students from 27 colleges and universities across the U.S. had converged in Portage County for an unlikely competition. Their arena was not a court, a field, or a pool, but a pit dug five feet into the sandy red earth. Shouts of “Go Terps!” and “Hail Purdue!” erupted as the competitors fired themselves up to walk into the underbelly of the world.

Each year at the National Collegiate Soil Judging Contest, students gather to classify soils based on their color, texture, and structure. The team whose analyses most closely match those of professional soil scientists return to campus with a gleaming 3-foot trophy, the coveted Stanley Cup of soils.

There is more than school pride at stake, however. This competition teaches the next generation of soil scientists how to manage the soils used to grow our food and support our agricultural infrastructure. Their work helps farmers produce more nutritious crops, combat erosion, and capture and store carbon underground. As the Trump administration’s budget cuts put the field of soil science on shaky ground, students here remain committed to treating soil as the life-giving—and downright competition-worthy—resource that it is.

Students receive instructions ahead of soil-judging. The national competition has taken place every year since 1961, including one virtual contest during the COVID-19 pandemic. (Photo: Emma Loewe)

Prepping for the Contest

The first National Collegiate Soil Judging Contest was held in Lexington, Kentucky, in 1961 to give students more hands-on experience analyzing soils. It has occurred every year since, although in 2020, during the pandemic, it was virtual. Leading up to the contest, students learn about soil in the classrooms of their respective schools and practice analyzing it in pits around their campuses. Each fall, schools compete at regional competitions that roughly correspond to USDA Soil Survey Regions. The top schools from each region advance to the national competition in the spring, hosted by a different college each year. Teams and their coaches arrive at nationals a week early to familiarize themselves with that area’s unique soil.

“You can imagine how different the soil is in the middle of Utah than it might be in Maine or Florida,” John Galbraith, the longtime coach of Virginia Tech, 2024’s winning team, said in the lead-up to this year’s competition.

Teams can range in size from three students to more than 20. They compete both individually and as a group to most accurately describe the origin and characteristics of five “competition pits” over two days. These pits expose the top five to six “horizons,” or layers, of soil, telling a story of the land.

This year’s contest was held April 27 through May 2 this year. Hosting an outdoor event in spring in Wisconsin is always a gamble, since winter’s chill and precipitation tend to stick around well into April, and on Day One of the contest, Mother Nature dealt a losing hand.

It was 45 degrees and dumping rain as the students and their coaches gathered in the parking lot of a local nature reserve near this year’s host school, the University of Wisconsin Stevens Point (UWSP). From there, they were guided to the competition site, which had been kept a strict secret all week.

Once they arrived at the site, a wooded lakefront property called Lions Camp, students were forbidden from looking up anything about its soils online. “If your cell phone comes out, you will be disqualified,” Bryant Scharenbroch, an associate soil science professor at UWSP and the lead organizer of this year’s competition, bellowed over a loudspeaker. “No warnings!”

The poncho-clad students sloshed nervously towards the soil pits. Over the course of the morning, they would each spend an hour individually “judging” three pits. Judging requires filling in a scorecard with the color, texture, structure, and water retention abilities of each soil horizon, and using this to estimate the soil’s classification, how it formed, and how it can be best managed or utilized.

Students use a color book to determine the exact shade of each soil layer; a triangle to classify soil, based on its mix of clay, silt, and sand; a soil knife to get a feel for the texture of each horizon; and finally, a muffin tin to transport soil samples in and out of the pit. Their hands, though, are their most important tools. Throughout the day, students need to manually squeeze, squash, and smash the soil to get a sense of its composition, down to its exact percentage of clay versus sand.

At 10 a.m., the first timer went off, and the competitors descended into the soaked earth.

The national contest aims to give students hands-on experience evaluating soil. An affinity for soil is apparent in student apparel and tools as they compete. (Photos: Emma Loewe)

Digging Into Wisconsin’s Glacial Soils

The soil horizons in Portage County, Wisconsin, reveal a glacial history. The Laurentide ice sheet advanced and retreated over this region until roughly 11,000 years ago, depositing gravel, sand, and other sediment across the landscape along the way. The resulting soils are sandy and dotted with rocks and tend to have relatively low water retention, making them good candidates for irrigation systems.

Portage County’s glacial soils support an agricultural industry that produces $372 million worth of food (mostly vegetables like potatoes, sweet corn, and peas annually as of the 2022 census. The 951 farms in the county provide 74 percent of the state’s crop sales.

While more than 50 farms in Portage County top 1,000 acres, the typical farm size here is smaller—roughly 287 acres, or two-thirds the national average.

“We have a lot of very small-scale farming, an active farmers’ market, and a lot of local growers,” Scharenbroch said. “It’s something that’s really cool and unique about our area.”

To show students the range of farming styles in the region and how they impacted the soil, Scharenbroch took them to visit a handful of local producers during their practice week. There, students saw how farming practices like machine tilling caused soil layers to be tighter and less permeable, making it harder for water to penetrate. This left soil on the surface vulnerable to blowing away during winds and storms.

Farms that used techniques like compost application and cover cropping had deeper, darker-brown top layers that were better at absorbing moisture and less at risk of erosion. “One of the biggest things is to keep the soil covered,” said Joel Gebhard, a soil scientist for the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) who helped plan the contest. “If soil is bare, it’s going to get removed somehow.”

At Lions Camp, soggy students wrapped up their analyses of each pit. “Pit monitors”—mostly employees or alums of UWSP—collected their scorecards and walked them inside to a cafeteria where the coaches had gathered for grading. First, they needed to align on the correct answers for each scorecard. In a room full of soil science academics, this was more contentious than you might imagine. Every coach had their own opinion, and matters that may have seemed trivial (say, whether students need to place a dash through empty boxes, or leave them blank) were grounds for impassioned debate.

There was good reason for the pedantics. Because soil varies from state to state, region to region, and even mile to mile, and because there are over 20,000 ways to describe soils in the U.S., having an agreed-upon lexicon was essential. Once the coaches came to an consensus and reviewed (and re-reviewed) each student’s scorecards, the first day’s competition was complete. After hours in the dirt, students dumped their supplies into plastic buckets (some decorated with slogans, like “Loam is Home” and “Loess Lover”), piled into vans and headed back to their hotels to dry off and rest up for the second and final competition day.

Central Wisconsin provided ample soil types for judging as students competed. (Photos: Emma Loewe)

The Role of the Soil Scientist

The analysis these students perform provides practice for future careers in the soil sciences. “People who soil judge have such a big leg-up on anyone else entering soil jobs,” said Nathan Stremcha, a former UWSP soil judger who is now a soil scientist at the NRCS. “The skills directly transfer.”

The NRCS, an agency of the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), is one of the largest employers of soil scientists in the country, though soil scientists also work in the private sector for companies focused on bioremediation, construction, and agricultural research. Originally established in 1935 as the Soil Conservation Service, the agency was created to manage erosion and steward conservation during the Dust Bowl. Today, the NRCS manages the national Web Soil Survey, an essential database for farming, community planning, and beyond. “The database gets a hit at least every second,” Stremcha said.

Many students hope to go into a job at NRCS once they graduate—but now are unsure what will be available, given the recent federal funding cuts. Until recently, the agency was on a hiring spree. Many older employees were retiring, and it needed new soil scientists to help execute its climate-smart agriculture programs, which received $19.5 billion in funding over five years as part of the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA).

“Farmers trust us, but with that comes an obligation to make sure that you have well-trained employees who are going to be out there on the farms making the best scientific recommendations to make sure we get this conservation on the ground,” NRCS Chief Terry Cosby told the 2023 Trust In Food Symposium after unlocking the IRA funds, noting that the agency was struggling to find candidates qualified to advise farmers on soil conservation.

“They’re sending us even more jobs than we have students,” Scharenbroch said on a call back in October of 2024.

“People who soil judge have such a big leg-up on anyone else entering soil jobs. The skills directly transfer.”

The promise of the field changed, however, once the Trump administration took office this year. Since January, NRCS has reduced its staff by at least 2,400 employees, while a blanket freeze on hiring remains in place across the government. The USDA has erased information on federal loans and technical assistance for climate-smart agriculture from its website (although, after a lawsuit on behalf of farmers, it now plans to restore it) and cancelled many grants that had been made through the Partnerships for Climate-Smart Commodities program. In response to the USDA’s 2026 budget request, Congress is proposing $45 million in cuts to NRCS conservation operations. These moves have left farmers in limbo and federal soil science hiring at a standstill.

Coaches worry about what these cuts will mean for their students and the future of soil science at large. “My fear with having potentially fewer soil scientists around is that we’re going to have more environmental disasters and agricultural disasters that we’re not prepared to respond to appropriately,” said Jaclyn Fiola, an assistant professor of soil and environmental science at Delaware Valley University and coach of the school’s soil judging team, on a call with Civil Eats.

The job market may be fluctuating, but the next generation’s commitment to soils remains steadfast.

“Where people live, where agricultural and economic power is, how people form culture . . . It’s all based on the soil,” Sky Reinhart, a junior at the University of Idaho, said during competition weekend. “Once you learn to see the soil . . . It makes all the difference for everything.”

The Significance of Soil Surveys

Conducting a soil survey is often the first step in assigning value to a piece of land and designating its most effective and efficient use. Different types of soils are suitable for different crops, so these surveys can be instrumental for agricultural planning. Soil scientists can also work with farmers or ranchers to help them better manage soil health to reduce erosion, maximize water infiltration, and improve nutrient cycling, increasing yield.

Beyond the farm, the surveys provide information on which soils can best support infrastructure like septic systems and roads. Sometimes, they can even inform where to bury animals affected by disease outbreaks, like during the recent avian flu. Increasingly, they have important climate implications as well.

“A lot of our carbon sequestration models are based on numbers that were collected by soil surveyors,” Fiola said. “That’s a really important reason that we need these maps to be accurate.”

The climate applications of soil attract many of today’s students to the field. “Almost 50 percent of the students I interact with are coming into soil science because they want to make an impact on climate-change issues,” Scharenbroch said.

As a result, some regional and national contests now ask students to describe soil indicators like salinization from sea level rise, identify functioning wetlands, or calculate a soil’s carbon-storage potential.

Digging Deep, Despite an Uncertain Future

On Day Two of the contest, the unpredictable weather continued. Rain fell in fits and spurts over Scharenbroch’s home, which is near a glacial moraine and littered with unique deposits. (Rumor has it the Web Soil Survey played a role in his house hunting.) “These soils are really interesting,” Gebhard said, motioning to the two massive pits excavated in the front yard. “They’re messy because they’re right on this edge where glaciers went back and forth.”

During group judging day, each school analyzes pits together, aligning on a scorecard as a team. A few teams are assigned to a pit at a time, and they alternate between spending 10 minutes underground and 10 minutes above it.

Once the timer began at Scharenbroch’s, each team split off to stake their claim to a spot on the pit’s perimeter, setting up a tight circle to keep discussions out of earshot of the competition.

“Once you learn to see the soil . . . It makes all the difference for everything.”

“You texture, I color?,” Sean Cary, a sophomore at the University of Rhode Island, confirmed with his two teammates (the smallest team of the competition—fitting, they joked, as the smallest state). By splitting up tasks, the team could spend more time on each analysis and double-check each other’s work at the end. Rhode Island’s time in the pit was spent scanning the horizons closely, as if searching for a rare library book. Outside of it, they quietly deliberated on the soil’s properties and perhaps more importantly, its practical uses.

“Having the knowledge of what soils can do and how we can fix them and use them in the correct way is one of the main reasons I’m doing this,” said Cary, who is majoring in agriculture and food systems. “It’s not something that should be taken lightly, because the future of soil can affect the future of society.”

The pit monitors gave a two-minute warning to the final set of teams. Then, the contest students had spent months preparing for was over. Cary and his teammates dumped out their muffin tins, turned in their scorecards, and swished their hands in a water cup like used paintbrushes. When asked if they were happy that soil judging was over for the year, they said they’d miss it.

The winning team, from the University of Idaho, from left: Hannah Poland, Daniel Middelhoven, Tegan Macy, Sky Reinhardt, Coach Paul Tietz, Logan Mann, Jacob Flick, Coach MaryBeth Gavin. (Photo: Emma Loewe)

Crowning a Winner

All that was left was the awards ceremony. This would take place under a park pavilion in Steven’s Point later that afternoon, leaving students ample opportunity to get nervous about the results. Some distracted themselves by tossing a Frisbee around the pavilion’s perimeter; others sang old sea shanties as they waited. The trophy that every school was after sat up front: the Bidwell-Reisig, a two-handed behemoth nearly as old as the competition itself, named after its designers—a Kansas State soil professor and one of his students. Engraved with the winners of the past, the trophy’s 2025 spot lay blank in waiting.

At long last, Scharenbroch asked the group to gather round. Many students remained standing at the pavilion’s edge, too antsy to sit down.

First came the individual results: “In first place, with 852 points,” Scharenbroch announced to a rapt audience, “JosiLee Scott!”

The pindrop-quiet pavilion exploded in cheers. The West Virginia University senior walked stoically to accept her prize—a plaque and, naturally, some local cheese curds. She quickly ushered her coach up for a big bear hug and a photo as a well-earned smile spread across her face.

The grand prize, which went to the school with the highest combined group and individual scores, went to The University of Idaho—the Vandal’s first win in over 35 years of competing. Six Idaho students and their two coaches looked at each other in disbelief as they ambled up to accept the trophy. Some shed tears as they hoisted it high, the applause of their fellow soil enthusiasts filling the misty air.

The University of Delaware and The University of Maryland rounded out the top three schools, bringing the 2025 contest to a close. Some students were already planning for the next one. For others, this was the last competition of their scholastic careers. And what came next was as uncertain as the weather of a Wisconsin spring.

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