Gottenborg is working to create a habitat on his ranch that sustains the elk population. The ranch sits on the migratory path of the big animals, and every winter, hundreds of them travel through Eagle Rock looking for food as they move from higher to lower elevations. You could see their presence as a wildlife management success story or a nuisance, depending on how you look at them. Maybe a bit of both. 

“Elk can provide an indicator of how well habitats are functioning,” says Karie Decker, director of wildlife and habitat for the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation, which works to ensure the animals have the habitat they need to thrive. “They have a direct role on vegetation through herbivory and seed dispersal, create wallows and serve as prey and carrion for many other wildlife species.”

According to the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation, before Europeans settled in North America, more than 10 million elk were roaming around the US and parts of Canada, but due to overhunting and habitat loss, their numbers dwindled to 40,000 at the turn of the 20th century. 

That’s when conservationists and government agencies began efforts to restore elk populations through protected areas and regulated hunting. Today, Colorado is home to 280,000 elk, the biggest population in the world. Despite these efforts, maintaining that population is a challenge.

Every winter herds of elk come through Eagle Rock Ranch in search of food. (Photo courtesy of Eagle Rock Ranch)

Threats to the elk include everything from climate change to manufactured barriers that can stifle their daily and seasonal movements, land development, traffic, increased human recreational activity, fencing and conflicts with human activities.

“In Colorado, elk and many other species had a very challenging winter in 2022-2023, with a deep snowpack for an extended period, significantly reducing the population in northwest Colorado,” says Decker. “Other challenges to elk across various states include development and the loss of habitat, lack of or low-quality forage, drought, disease and social tolerance.”

Eagle Rock Ranch has been in operation, primarily as a cow-calf operation, for more than 150 years, but Gottenborg, who runs the ranch with his wife, Jean Gottenborg, daughter Erin Michalski and son-in-law Matt Michalski, is relatively new to Eagle Rock, acquiring the ranch about 12 years ago. The elk came with it.

“My predecessor fought them for years,” says Gottenborg. “He did probably everything a landowner could legally do to chase elk off the property, with mixed results. He had propane cannons and salt and pepper shells, and he would get into these big arguments with the Forest Service and CPW [Colorado Parks and Wildlife].”

The Gottenborgs are trying to create safe passage and habitat for the migrating elk. (Photo courtesy of Eagle Rock Ranch)

Elk are not small visitors. Males can weigh up to 700 pounds and stand five feet at the shoulder, females up to 500 pounds and 4-1/2 feet at the shoulder. 

“They are very large, determined eaters,” says Kara Van Hoose, Northeast Region public information officer for CPW. “They will devour hay and other grains left outside for domestic animals and livestock. Elk are known to be destructive in their pursuit of food, toppling over containers, ruining fences and other infrastructure and eating large swaths of crops.”

Still, the Gottenborgs decided to welcome the elk, hoping to make them a benefit to the ranch. Since buying the ranch, the Gottenborgs have been working to diversify their income with the goal of keeping themselves and other ranchers on the land and maintaining the open landscapes. They’ve dipped their toes into agritourism with curated experiences, including fly fishing, ranch tours and eco-tours, and they see the elk as another income stream.

Programs such as Elk Rent in Montana, from the nonprofit Property and Environment Research Center, and the USDA’s Migratory Big Game Initiative in Wyoming, Idaho and Montana pay landowners for providing elk habitat. While there isn’t a program set up yet to do the same in Colorado, the Gottenborgs are in talks with organizations that will pay for the elk to have forage access to their pastures in the winter.

During the winter months when the elk are migrating through the property, the Gottenborgs’ cattle are in Nebraska, so the Gottenborgs don’t need to worry about cows and elk competing for food. By the time the cows are back on the ranch, the elk have moved back up to higher ground. To make it easier for the elk to graze without the risk of getting caught in their fences, they’ve started making modifications to make it easier for them to move up and down the valley. 

“The hope here, too, is that my neighbors are watching me. That they’re following what we’re doing and we can expand the concept, so, eventually, there’s 10 or 12 miles of this valley opened up in terms of easier access,” says Gottenborg.

The Gottenborgs are attempting to diversify the ranch’s income with the elk, agritourism tours and more. (Photo courtesy of Eagle Rock Ranch)

Elk-friendly fencing that can be laid down flat on the ground to support seasonal wildlife passage is expensive. Still, the Gottenborgs believe there is enough interest in the forage access that they’ll be able to make more modifications. They’re not laying down all of the fences, but they can easily track the migration patterns of the elk in the snow, so they lay down specific fencing sections while keeping their gates open.

In 2023, the Gottenborgs also installed five large, shallow-pool structures that hold fresh water with pumps powered by solar panels. The drinkers, as the Gottenborgs call them, provide water in the higher elevation pastures during the warmer months and the shoulder seasons where natural water sources aren’t present and help to distribute wildlife across the landscape better. They’re hoping to install additional drinkers this year.

“The elk have been here a long time, and we’re trying to change our approach to make them an asset,” says Gottenborg.

The post Meet the Ranchers Working to Sustain the World’s Largest Elk Population appeared first on Modern Farmer.

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

Photography submitted by Organic Valley.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Photography submitted by Organic Valley.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Photography submitted by Organic Valley.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Roman had recently entered the foster care system and found herself drifting away from things she once loved, such as spending time outside. She recalls thinking, “You seriously want me to be around bees? Definitely not.”

With no prior pollinator experience, Roman was apprehensive. “I knew they stung and to get away from them if they’re close to you.” But by her fifth week in the program, Roman had warmed up to the bees, finding them therapeutic. 

“The sound of the bees is really relaxing,” says Roman. “It’s calming.”

New students don’t get into a bee suit for weeks. First, they work on social and emotional skills. (Photo: Grey Kenna)

Started by clinical social worker Sarah Taylor in 2018, the Huneebee Project is a therapeutic job skills training program that has graduated 25 cohorts, including Roman, from the 15-week program over the past five years. It’s also installed roughly 30 honey bee colonies across seven sites in the greater New Haven area, planted pollinator-friendly garden plots and launched an online marketplace that sells honey made from the hives, candles and a curated selection of other artisan products.

Participants range in age from 15 to 23, and the project prioritizes enrolling children and young adults with past or present child protective and foster care involvement.  

Taylor had long dreamed of creating a nonprofit for youth who are aging out of the foster care system. But it wasn’t until she took time for herself that she realized the therapeutic potential of beekeeping. Burnt out and disheartened with the foster care and child protective services systems, Taylor started keeping her own bees while working and attending a fellowship program in New Haven. 

“After a day of work, the only place I wanted to be was with my bees,” says Taylor. “It became a meditative practice for me. They’re their own form of therapy.”

The Huneebee Project became Taylor’s opportunity to combine her love of beekeeping with her professional background. 

The students are responsible for about 30 hives, although they are working on expanding to 50 hives by the end of summer 2023 across seven official garden sites in New Haven neighborhoods where the youth live. They also now have community hive checks where locals can join in checking on and learning about bees. It’s one more place to create a network and sense of community for the teens and the bees.

“It was really important to have the gardens where youth live so they would be accessible and create spaces where they can have a sense of ownership,” says Taylor.  

Students are responsible for taking care of 30 bee hives throughout the greater New Haven area. (Photo: Grey Kenna)

Over the years, the programming has evolved as participating youth have given feedback. The program runs each summer and is purposefully small, with about six students taking part. The students must attend at least 75 percent of the workshops to graduate and are matched with a mentor who provides encouragement throughout the program and helps with practicalities such as transportation and breakfast.

“These are kids that are often not going to school or are struggling to get out of bed or are extremely socially anxious. The mentors encourage them, they help with transportation and even get them something to eat. The intensive individual attention is so important,” says Taylor.

Students don’t even get into a bee suit for the first weeks; instead, according to Taylor, they spend time forming relationships, understanding their feelings and their body’s responses to emotions, such as fear, and identifying what they need to regain a sense of control. 

“We have these 15-, 16-year-olds who are used to pretending to be tough, but it’s hard to pretend to be tough around the bees, and it allows for more authentic conversations around fear,” says Taylor. “When someone with a trauma history has that fear response activated but can regain a sense of control, I believe that is healing.”

Since starting the project, Taylor has watched students heal, graduate with professional skills they take with them to college or new jobs and blossom.

For Alex Guzman, who graduated from the program in 2019 and continues to work at the Huneebee Project as junior bee instructor while attending college, the experience helped teach her skills she continues to use today.

“I’ve learned how to socialize in a more professional setting, and I’ve also gathered a lot more patience,” says Guzman. “I have been handling my mental health, learning when to set a boundary or take a break when I need to and take a breather.”

After participating in the program, Maria Roman hopes to keep her own bees one day. (Photo: Grey Kenna)

They’re skills she’s learned from interacting with others in the program and the bees themselves. 

“You have to be really patient when you approach bees and to take your time,” says Guzman, “kind of like when you’re dealing with any living thing. Everything I’ve been doing with the bees has contributed to developing those [socialization and patience] skills.”

Students also learn practical office skills, such as using a printer or a coffee maker, that are easy to take for granted but intimidating if you’ve never used  them.

“I look at myself now and, sometimes, I feel like I’m ready to be a boss,” says Roman, who adds that she would someday like to have her own house with bees that she could take care of and eventually, if she has children, teach her kids about.

The post For These Teens, a Unique Beekeeping Program Teaches About Much More Than Honey appeared first on Modern Farmer.

“It was a unique property and I didn’t really have a plan when I bought it, but I decided I didn’t want to build a house on it,” says Adams. “In thinking about what else I could do that was productive, I decided I’d take a shot at growing food.”

Adams quickly developed a plan to host farmers in residence, grow specialty crops for local brewers and host events on the small quarter-acre property he named New Brooklyn Farms. He connected with Prince George’s Soil Conservation District and eventually received USDA funding to build a greenhouse on the property.

That’s when he hit a roadblock. “I was trying to do things correctly and went to get a permit for the greenhouse and was told, ‘You can’t build a greenhouse, it’s not inline with the code, and you can’t operate a farm business, the property isn’t zoned for that,'” says Adams.

Urban farms, like New Brooklyn Farms, have sprouted up in vacant lots across the country since at least the 1990s, when urban farming started to go through a renaissance. In the decades since, many communities have reaped the benefits of having farms in traditionally residential areas—including increased access to fresh foods, carbon sequestration and even workforce training and community building—but many zoning laws haven’t kept up with the increased demand for urban farming. 

“Zoning initially was created to separate uses, to separate residential from agriculture, and it was all to promote public health and safety initially, but now I think people are beginning to see that it’s not really worked to further our communities,” says Lihlani Nelson, deputy director  at Center for Agriculture and Food Systems (CAFS) at Vermont Law and Graduate School, which helped to create the Healthy Food Policy Project.

Five years ago, CAFS, the Public Health Law Center (PHLC) and the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Health at the University of Connecticut came together to create a policy database to give local governments examples of policies that best work to increase access to healthy food. They quickly realized that zoning laws could have a significant impact on improving access to healthy food.

“People have been doing what we’re calling urban ag for a very long time,” says Nelson. “It’s not some brand new thing, but there has been such a growth in the movement around urban ag and there’s so many benefits that people understand in terms of health, environment and community, that it seems like a no-brainer to try to support it as much as possible through local policy, including zoning.”

Inside New Brooklyn Farms’s greenhouse. (Photo courtesy New Brookly Farms)

When Adams realized he couldn’t build his greenhouse, he started rallying local support.

 “I thought, ‘Wow I got this money to spend and I can’t build,”  says Adams.

He wrote to the mayor and the town council, worked to get support from different community organizations and eventually connected with a county council member that was pro-urban farming. For Adams and others who have worked to change zoning codes, gathering supporters has been the key to easing zoning restrictions.

In Kansas City, Missouri, a farmer from the former urban farm Bad Seed Farm got Cultivate KC involved early in their zoning fight.  The organization helps growers develop skills and access resources to start and maintain sustainable farm businesses.

“They were operating a CSA out of a backyard farm in a residential neighborhood and they started running into some issues with the city around running a business in a residential neighborhood,” says Ami Freeberg, Cultivate KC’s assistant director of strategy and partnerships.

In 2009 and 2010, Cultivate KC worked with the farmer and other community organizations on what ended up being an extensive process full of community meetings, meetings with city council members and members of the zoning department to come up with ordinances that eventually allowed for Bad Seed Farm and other urban farms to operate.

“It was a big step forward at the time because it made it possible and created a pathway for farm businesses to operate in residential areas, but there are still a lot of particulars around requiring special use permits, limiting onsite sales and specific restrictions around CSAs, separate from other types of urban agriculture,” says Freeberg.

In the 13 years since, the ordinance has made Cultivate KC’s work more straightforward in the sense that there are codes for them to point people towards, but the reception or the ordinance and urban farms in general has varied greatly by neighborhood and individual community member.

“There’s one neighborhood in particular that had a proliferation of urban farms after the ordinance passed,” says Brien Darby, executive director of Cultivate KC. “And even within that neighborhood, it depends on who you talk to, but some folks are all for it. They like it as an identity for the neighborhood. And some folks are like,  ‘We do not want any more green infrastructure going on in our neighborhood.’” 

Cultivate KC does expect that it will need to collaborate with the city to revisit the ordinance in the next few years. 

“There’s still a lot of gray areas in the language. We get questions every few months,” says Freeberg, adding that one of the initial things Cultivate KC worked on was putting together training for code enforcement, which they’d like to do again.

They also hope to work with officials in Wyandotte County, which oversees zoning for Kansas City, Kansas, on updating their codes to make urban agriculture more accessible.

It took Adams two years and a lot of campaigning to receive a special planning resolution to permit his  farm in Prince George’s County. The county also used it as an opportunity to expand zoning for urban farming.

Adams advises that others going through the process try to speak to as many people as possible within their zoning department. Getting in touch with politicians to get their support can be a worthwhile challenge, he says, noting that he leveraged community organizations to get in touch with politicians. “You have to put yourself out there, collect signatures    and use social [media] and the press to keep the eyes on and give people more reason to help you.”

The post For Urban Farmers, Community Organizing Can Be Key to Easing Zoning Constraints appeared first on Modern Farmer.

The Long Island-based nonprofit organization works to raise awareness of sustainable marine aquaculture through public oyster gardening and other sea farming activities. Oysters are one of the most environmentally friendly and sustainable protein sources. They help filter out pollutants in the water, keep the population of phytoplankton in check and create habitat for other marine life. South Fork Sea Farmers helps the waters off of Long Island reap all those benefits, while connecting people to a food source and teaching them about oyster farming.

“A single oyster filters 50 gallons of water a day,” says Jeff Ragovin, a board member with the South Fork Sea Farmers. “The oyster gardens are really amazing for the marine environment, providing habitat to shrimp, crabs, sea bass and black fish. While the oysters aren’t for sale, the people growing the oysters get to harvest them for their friends and family.”

Board member Jeff Ragovin. Photography courtesy of South Fork Sea Farmers.

Program participants pay a yearly fee of $200 for the equipment, and, in return, South Fork Sea Farmers asks for 200 oysters back from each plot, allowing it to continue seeding the public gardens. Participants can expect to grow up to 1,000 oysters, ready to eat, over the course of the season.

“It’s a super-sustainable, good-for-the-earth program,” says Ragovin.

Since it started, the program has grown to five harbors off the coast of Long Island. Last summer, with several partner organizations, it started a new reef in the waters off of Accabonac Harbor. South Fork Sea Farmers had students from East Hampton, NY schools sign up to help build the reefs, using bags of recycled oyster shells upon which spat will settle and grow. Those students will continue to monitor the reef’s progress as part of an educational project.

“We wanted to build a reef for years, but it took time to get the permit and do the shell collection,” says Ragovin. South Fork Sea Farmers purchased biodegradable bags from the Netherlands and filled them with used oyster shells collected from local restaurants to form the foundation of the new reef. 

After the shells were collected from restaurants, they had to cure for about six months before they were ready to be placed on the reef. While this reef is built from oyster shells, the waters off New York are also home to several artificial reefs built out of hard structures such as clean, recycled Tappan Zee Bridge material and jetty rock.  As those artificial reefs, the first of which was built in the 1940s, tend to collapse over time, the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, which builds and maintains those reefs, adds materials back to them every few years. The state hopes that, in addition to creating habitats for marine life, the reefs stimulate a productive aquatic ecosystem, increasing marine biodiversity as corals, mussels, snails, crabs and larger fish start to call them home. They also protect the shoreline from flooding and erosion and can decrease the energy of intense storms, and the Accabonac Harbor reef will provide space for more oyster gardening.

Photography courtesy of South Fork Sea Farmers.

South Fork Sea Farmers hopes that, in addition to building more oyster reefs locally, it can help inspire other municipalities and organizations to start their own public oyster gardens.

“We get people all over the country reaching out and asking how they can do something similar, so we’re working on putting together a guide of how to do it,” says Ragovin. “It’s been really a fun and exciting opportunity to see people in the local community be stewards of the environment.

The program has grown to an expected 150 families for the 2023 season, from an initial 15 pilot families, with many families including the original 15 coming back year after year.

If your local town isn’t quite ready for such a program or you don’t live along the coast, you can still witness some of South Fork Sea Farmers’ work when it live streams the oyster spawn next week. 

The post Meet The Modern Farmers Creating Public Oyster Gardens appeared first on Modern Farmer.

“In most places, including North Carolina, limited resources exist to restore habitats such as oyster reefs, and thus there was a need for an approach that integrated the best available data to direct restoration projects to the best locations, essentially asking the question, how do we maximize the bang for the restoration buck?” says Brandon Puckett, a research marine biologist with NOAA National Ocean Service.

In 2019, Puckett and a group of researchers from North Carolina State University launched a software mapping tool, designed to identify the best sites for re-establishing oyster reefs to ensure their ecological benefits. 

Oysters are so much more than just delicious protein sources; they’re climate-friendly environmental superheroes. Oysters sequester carbon, clean waterways by filtering pollutants such as microalgae and microscopic organisms in the water, control the amount of phytoplankton in the water, create habitat for other marine life and even help prevent coastal flooding and erosion.

“Most restoration suitability models are focused on where to restore to maximize population enhancement benefits, which is a common goal of restoration efforts,” says Puckett. “However, there are other objectives that restoration practitioners pursue—such as improving water quality or stabilizing shorelines.” Puckett says their mapping technology looks to find locations suitable for restoring populations and enhancing water quality.  

When they were developing the mapping or suitability tools, as Puckett calls them, researchers looked at similar mechanisms in use in the Chesapeake Bay and the Gulf of Mexico. They aimed to add on to existing technology after asking several partners what factors they thought were important. Their GIS-based device takes in a range of factors, including water salinity, dispersal of larval oysters and even distance from boat ramps.

In some ways, it’s similar to the interactive Connecticut Shellfish Restoration Story Map, a device developed by the state Department of Agriculture Bureau of Aquaculture, the state Department of Energy and Environmental Protection and The Pew Charitable Trusts, Connecticut Sea Grant launched in 2021 to aid shellfish restoration.

Full of photographs, the Connecticut map includes a physical GIS map and allows a user to zero in on an area by name or zip code to show multiple data layers of habitats, human uses, existing shellfish beds and other information such as areas where oysters may provide the most water quality benefits.

“We’d been interested in developing a plan for oyster bed restoration for the last five years,” says Tessa Getchis of Connecticut Sea Grant, UConn Extension. “But if we want to protect and grow them, we need to know what else is happening.” 

Much of the data from the Connecticut tool is still in the early stages, as it was developed during the early part of the pandemic, when large percentages of people in the shellfish industry were out of work. At that time, Connecticut Sea Grant secured funding, purchasing oysters from farmers who would have otherwise had no customers. They planted those oysters back into beds and closed off the areas to encourage repopulation.

“We can look at fishing activity or farms or where pipelines are, where docks were built and the water quality and temperature,” says Getchis. “We’re still building that research, but we’ve put it together in this portal and we’re working to sort through what is the best information, how can we make it more user friendly for people to develop restoration projects.”

The waters off the Connecticut coastline, according to Getchis, are home to some of the largest and most productive native oyster beds in the world, but due to the scale of such an undertaking, as well as the lack of funding, no one had surveyed them in more than 100 years. The state is also unique in that many of the protected beds are used as seeds for farming, with farmers given specific standards as to which oysters they can use. 

“We restored more than 2,000 acres. Some will serve the aquaculture industry, while some will remain closed,” says Getchis. That work is ongoing and, while not on as large of a scale, [CT Department of Agriculture’s Bureau of Aquaculture and partner agencies] are expanding the area for restoration.

The team is now looking into optimal shell density, doing restoration work in deeper waters where Connecticut has historically had oyster reefs and developing plans to continue monitoring the habitats.

In North Carolina, the state Division of Marine Fisheries is using mapping tools to plan multiple large-scale oyster restoration projects as part of the state’s oyster sanctuaries. 

“These projects are designed with maximizing oyster population enhancement as the primary goal,” says Puckett.

The tool can also be tweaked to help with other restoration needs. Puckett says there’s already interest in creating individualized tools from states along the Gulf of Mexico, where the tool might identify locations for ‘living’ shorelines or inform the best areas for aquaculture farming.

The post Can Interactive Mapping Tools Guide Shellfish Restoration? appeared first on Modern Farmer.

“Growing up, I spent a lot of time on the Sound. I’m a big water person and I’ve always been an environmentalist, so when I learned about the process of cultivating kelp, it didn’t take long for me to say ‘OK, I want to do this,’” says McGee, who has been farming kelp off the coast of Connecticut since 2019. 

It led McGee and fellow Connecticut seaweed farmer Suzie Flores to create the Sugar Kelp Cooperative. Officially established in 2022, the Sugar Kelp Cooperative consists of McGee, Flores and four other kelp farms in Connecticut and Rhode Island. Each farmer is a voting member of the cooperative, with an ownership stake, and they’re hoping to grow in 2023 to include farmers in Massachusetts and Maine. “Suzie and I kept talking about marketing and we kept coming up with ideas. We realized we needed to create an entity whose main goal is market generation. To do that, we needed to become a distributor and have year-round supply for it to be sustainable,” says McGee.

Jonathan McGee on the water. Photography by Sugar Kelp Cooperative.

In their first two years, Sugar Kelp created the popular New England Kelp Harvest Week, which takes place depending on the harvest season in mid to late April. The eventweek is a way for them to promote sales to restaurants, retail shops such as fish markets and food co-ops and breweries and distilleries, while introducing the general public to new ways to eat kelp.

“It’s really cool to see all the different applications for kelp,” says McGee, adding that he’s looking forward to seeing how a few of the bakeries they’re now selling use kelp. 

Overall, McGee says they’ve been happy with the results of New England Kelp Harvest Week, with every participating vendor telling them it was a net profit for their business.

But while they’re hoping to expand kelp week from primarily based in Connecticut to up the Rhode Island shoreline and down into New York in 2023, their biggest goal and challenge is creating year-round supply and demand.

“It’s the difference between being a special on someone’s menu and being a standard,” says McGee. 

The cooperative handles everything post-harvest, including  marketing, product development and sales efforts, to make sure that the kelp gets where it needs to go. They process the kelp to make it shelf stable for roughly a week, by drying it or blanching and freezing the fresh kelp. Right now, they dry out their kelp in a solar-powered seaweed processing facility. Seaweed farming is becoming increasingly popular for its potential to help mitigate climate change while supporting working waterfronts and providing people with healthy food. Kelp doesn’t require external inputs such as feed or fertilizer to grow, it doesn’t require fresh water or land, and it doesn’t produce methane emissions. But while seaweed farming is growing, getting permits to farm can be a long and arduous process. 

“Our regulations are quite robust and for good reason,” says McGee. “But it means there’s a good amount of oversight from the beginning when creating a site.

McGee had identified four potential sites for kelp farming before finally getting approval. And after a site is found and permitting given, kelp farmers still have to have their seaweed tested annually for food consumption, something that the cooperative helps the farmers do.

For farmers like McGee to keep growing it, they have to be able to sell it. While seaweed has long been farmed and consumed throughout the world, the industry is relatively young in the U.S., with farmers working to create a demand for their project.

Creating that year-round supply will also allow the Sugar Kelp Cooperative to invest in processing on a larger scale and  survive potential weather disruptions or crop failures.

Passionate that farmers should be able to make a living wage and that growing kelp should leave the local waterways and the planet better, the Sugar Kelp Cooperative is part of a growing trend of aquaculture farmers forming cooperatives to make it feasible for more farmers to regeneratively farm the ocean.

The post Meet The Modern Farmers Drumming Up Demand for Kelp appeared first on Modern Farmer.

Zlotkowski, who lives on Isleboro Island, off of Maine’s midcoast, spent her summer helping her mom Kimberly and sister Gaby sell oysters at the local farmers market. It was there that they  met another vendor selling homemade goat cheese. A quick taste and the family became obsessed with the cheese.

“I was like, ‘Mom, let’s get some goats so we can have some goat cheese,'” says Zlotkowski.  Understandably, her mom wasn’t entirely sold on the idea, but it happened that Kimberly was looking to clear some land. Zlotkowski saw her opening.

Goats eat a lot of vegetation that other livestock won’t touch, including invasive plants such as multiflora rose, sumac, barberry and more. They’re also able to access brushy areas that are inaccessible to some larger equipment, and they naturally fertilize while they work.  Zlotkowski dove into the research on goats, looking at everything from how to trim goat hooves to the vitamins and supplements they would need. She pitched the idea to her mother: Why not get some goats to clear the land, and they would also benefit from their milk and cheese? Kimberly got on board, and Grazy Goat Girls was born. 

Peaches the goat. Photography by @GrazyGoatGirls

Over the fall, Zlotkowski acquired five goats, and she has been getting the animals acclimated to their new environment. She has let the goats clear some of her mom’s land, inspecting their progress and timing, to help her handle inquiries from people throughout the region about clearing their properties in a safe and eco-friendly manner.

“We’ve had quite a few people email us and text us on Instagram wondering if [the goats] could come clear and when. Even people on other islands ask about having them come over,” says Zlotkowski.

While she builds up the landscaping business, Zlotkowski is also hoping to make goat cheese, her initial motivation for the project. Of the five goats now in their herd, they suspect one—they’ve named her Karen—is already pregnant. Zlotkowski hopes the upcoming pregnancy test reveals a positive result. “Karen would give birth at the end of January, and I’m hoping I’ll be able to milk her and try to make cheese.”

Even though there are only five goats, they’re a lot of work. Each day, depending on the weather, Zlotkowski will put the goats out in their pen, give them fresh water and hay and check to make sure they’re all happily adjusting. Two of the goats are still babies and need to be bottle-fed. The others need vitamins and other supplements, along with hoof trims and other grooming.

With two years left of high school, Zlotkowski is growing her burgeoning business slowly, balancing the goats with seeing her friends and attending basketball practice. She wants to see how big she can make Grazy Goat Girls before leaving for college. When she’s not there, Zlotkowski will have to find someone to care for her goats, before she can come back. “After college, I’m hoping I can come back and start a farm,” says Zlotkowski.

Although Zlotkowski has embraced her new herd, her mom has been slower to adjust to the goats. “When we first got them, she was like ‘these aren’t my goats, I don’t like them,’ but now she loves bottle feeding the babies and just loves them, but still doesn’t admit it,” says Zlotkowski.

Maybe her mom will even take over as caretaker when Zlotkowski is away at school. Until then, she’s happy to lead her herd through fields and pastures, keeping an eye on her goat-cheese-filled future. 

The post Meet the Maine Teenager-Turned-Landscaper Thanks to Grazing Goats appeared first on Modern Farmer.

When Joe Bouchard first planted buckwheat in the 1980s, he did it because he wanted to diversify. For nearly six generations, the farm had grown potatoes and grains such as oats, but as the price of potatoes declined in part due to overseas competition, the farm needed to create new income streams. That’s when it introduced Tartary buckwheat—at the time, a relatively unknown and unused product—to the fields.

“We had to do a lot of food shows to get the word out,” recalls Bouchard. “It was pretty difficult, but then again, everything you do is difficult.”

Despite its name, buckwheat doesn’t contain wheat; it’s not even a grain. Gluten-free, it’s considered a pseudocereal, which are seeds consumed as cereal grains (such as quinoa and amaranth) that don’t grow on grasses. It has a nutty, earthy flavor that, along with its gluten-free trait, makes it popular among bakers.

Buckwheat. Photo by Tinka Mach, Shutterstock.

Buckwheat originated in China and spread worldwide, becoming an essential ingredient for soba noodles, kasha, galettes and more. In the late 1800s, it was incredibly popular both for making flour and animal feed. But as the agricultural system industrialized, the pseudograin fell out of favor—that is, until now.

Today, there are two main types of buckwheat grown: the Tartary buckwheat that Bouchard Family Farms grows and common buckwheat. While both types are similar, Tartary is self-fertile and grows well in cold climates, while common buckwheat requires pollination to reproduce and prefers temperate climates. Tartary buckwheat is also more bitter than common buckwheat, and it is seeing a resurgence of use in crop rotation, which can help build soil health.

“Farmers love it as a short-season, quick-growing cover crop,” says Tom Molloy, an agronomist with the University of Maine Cooperative Extension. “It’s fairly fast growing and it’s competitive with weeds.”

Buckwheat also reportedly takes up phosphorus, a critical nutrient for plant growth, and then releases the nutrients off which later crops thrive. While phosphorus occurs naturally in the soil, farmers add it to the soil to increase soil health and yield, and like many agricultural inputs, it is becoming harder to obtain.

Karen and Steve Getz fell in love with buckwheat in San Jose, California’s Japantown, where soba noodles are made of ancient grain. Karen, who has a background as a baker and cheesemaker, and Steve, who worked for Organic Valley, wanted to create a product using buckwheat. Yet, it wasn’t until they met farmers cultivating Tartary buckwheat in Aroostook County that the pair decided to relocate to Maine to live out their dream of creating Maine Crisps, a line of buckwheat crisps.

“When I was up in Maine’s most Northern Country and I spotted the buckwheat growing, everything came together,” says Karen. “I could combine my love of baking and buckwheat to make something that would be safe for people with celiac disease or a gluten sensitivity to eat while supporting our local farm community.”

Despite its recent resurgence, buckwheat has yet to hit the mainstream. The Getzes get all of their buckwheat from the Bouchard Family Farms, in part because the farm is also able to mill the buckwheat in its certified gluten-free mill, but they believe in the crop’s potential.

“Buckwheat is a great crop because you get two crops out of it really—the buckwheat seed itself but also its flowers and, when it’s in bloom, before those flowers turn into a seed, [it’s where] you get buckwheat honey from,” says Karen.

Throughout Maine, Molloy is seeing steady growth of buckwheat as a cover crop plant, and the Cooperative Extension is encouraging some growers to try it out as a cereal. They’ve seen success with buckwheat cutting back on weeds and diseases when growers of other cereal crops plant it in rotation. The challenge that still exists is helping farmers determine when buckwheat is ready to harvest; unlike other crops that dry out before harvest, buckwheat should still be green when harvested.

“We hope it’s going to increase; we have to continue to market it,” says Bouchard, who, in addition to Maine Crisps, sells his buckwheat to supermarkets and other stores, as well as a good deal of direct-to-consumer shipping.

As the buckwheat resurgence gains momentum in Maine, farmers in other states are taking notice, with farmers in New York working on buckwheat with the Cornell Cooperative Extension and growers from Ohio to Missouri also experimenting with the crop.

The post Changing Tastes Fuel a Buckwheat Revival appeared first on Modern Farmer.

The natural barrier was such a success that he brought the design to community gardens in Roanoke, Virginia, where he works as an associate extension agent for Virginia Tech.  “I’ve found this fence design tremendously useful as a farmer as it not only reduces the maintenance involved with fencing but it also generates income and will last as long as the cacti,” says Jadrnicek.

A fencing system made of cactus.

In 2021, Wild Hope Farm, which has built up a bit of a following for its prickly pear—a group that includes everyone from local brewers and farmers’ market regulars—sold around $15,000 worth of fruit from the fence. It also sells the cactus pads for food and as potted plants.

“Protection for the vegetable field was the original thought, but [the plants have] served multiple purposes,” says Peanut Belk, head of business operations at Wild Hope Farm. “Not only does it produce flowers which attract pollinators, but the fruit we can harvest and sell to different brewers and cocktail vendors. It’s a crop that we don’t have to touch and yet can make a lot of money off of.”

Often treated as a weed, nopal or prickly pear cactus has great potential as a crop. It grows natively as far north as Connecticut and can be found as far south as Argentina. Super versatile, it’s used in various products, including beauty items such as soaps, shampoos and lipstick, as well as food and beverages. It’s a popular staple food in Mexico, where it’s treated as another vegetable, used in salads, salsas, sauteed with eggs or even to make an alternative French fry. A sustainability superhero, declared by the United Nations as a food of the future, cacti are drought resistant, can improve soil health and, because they reach maturity every six months, can be harvested faster than many other crops.

But nopales are not a mainstream crop—at least not yet. Farmers, researchers and companies across the US and Mexico are working to create a larger market for cacti.

Regina Trillo, founder of Nemi Snacks, and Hector Saldivar, creator of Tia Lupita, grew up eating cacti in Mexico. After moving to the United States, both decided to begin companies centered around the plant. Nemi Snacks makes flavored edible sticks with them, which can easily replace a craving for a bag of chips or pretzels, while Tia Lupita uses them as an alternative ingredient to make grain-free tortillas and tortilla chips to go along with its line of salsas.

Courtesy of Nemi Snacks.

“Cactus is very near and dear to us Mexicans. It’s part of our heritage, culture and diet,” says Saldivar, who started Tia Lupita to combine his love for health and wellness with the Mexican foods and flavors he grew up with in Mexico. “Nopales are represented in the Mexican flag as a key symbol that represents the foundation of Tenochtitlan, now Mexico City. Not only are nopales high in nutritional properties, they are the oldest food in the North American continent.”

Yet, the fruit is often intimidating, especially when sold with glochids, the hair-like spines found on cacti. Wild Hope Farm developed a technique to remove these spikes from the fruits, making them safe to handle with bare hands and increasing sales, but it still had to find people to buy them. “We did have to build up the market and educate people around what the cacti are and how good they are,” says Belk

Gerardo Martínez is focused on that education piece. “The cactus can be the food of the future,” says Martínez, director of intercultural engagement and inclusion at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. Since 2018, he has worked to grow the niche market and educate people about the benefits of nopal at the farmers market, thanks to a grant from Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education (SARE) program. 

“It’s got a great number of minerals and nutrients,” says Martínez, who plans to ramp up production in 2023 to regularly bring the cactus to farmers’ markets. 

Nopal can be more than just a source of food for people, though. At the University of Nevada, Reno, professor of biochemistry and molecular biology John Cushman found a lot to love about the plant during a soon-to-be-published study. “It’s cold tolerant, there are many uses for its fruit as food, the young pads can also be consumed for fresh vegetables, it can be used to feed animals and supplement up to 40 percent of cattle’s diet and 100 percent of sheep and goats’ diets,” says Cushman. “The idea is we could eventually replace some other crops.”

Cushman and his team are also looking at it as an alternative bioenergy. While that might still be a ways off, we’re starting to see more nopales grown stateside, offering many a taste of home—and for farmers, a taste of what could be their next cash crop.

The post Could Edible Cactus Be the Next Big Specialty Crop? appeared first on Modern Farmer.