There’s no doubt that industrial animal agriculture carries a laundry list of sins; greenhouse gas emissions, biodiversity loss, deforestation, water pollution and labor rights abuses are just a few examples. But there’s also evidence that some regenerative grazing practices can enhance biodiversity, improve soil health and—possibly—sequester carbon. Not only that, but animal husbandry also has significant cultural value and eating animal products can have health benefits.

For some people, eschewing meat—or even all animal products—entirely is the only reasonable course of action. But for those who don’t want to go so far, “less” and “better” can seem like a pragmatic solution: There’s no need to cut out meat altogether; just cut down. Choose quality over quantity. Dig a little deeper, however, and things once again get very confusing. How much less is less? And how do we determine which meat is better?

Are chicken and pork the most climate-friendly options? Is it better for the planet to eat locally or organically? What’s the impact on my physical health of choosing one meat—or one meat alternative—over another? To be able to weigh up all these questions and accurately calculate which kind of meat and how much is “OK” for us to eat, the average consumer would need far more information, time and energy than anyone typically has at the grocery store. It can feel like we’re doomed to fail before we’ve even made a start.

Here’s the thing: There is no right answer when it comes to meat. And that’s OK. 

These questions and warring data points spurred us to make Less and Better?, our new podcast series from Farmerama Radio. Exasperated and concerned by the lack of nuance around this pressing issue, we wanted to try a different approach—one that attempts to illuminate the values and priorities that underlie even the most allegedly scientifically motivated positions.

For many people, the answer is simple: Just go vegan, or at least vegetarian. Studies show that diets without animal products have one-fourth the climate impact of meat-filled diets—from using less water and land and producing fewer carbon emissions. Rather than wrestling with the “best” meat to eat, many choose to forgo it altogether. 

But not everyone can do that. Meat holds cultural significance for many, and it can have nutritional benefits. There’s also a difference between heavily processed meat products and unprocessed meat, both in their effects on the body and the climate. So, for folks unable or unwilling to give up meat entirely, eating better-quality meat, and less of it, is the best approach. But even then, there are questions. The “right” answers to questions of how much less or what is better depend not only on a dizzying array of complex data but fundamentally hinge on which outcomes you believe are worth pursuing. Some argue that intensive factory farms produce fewer greenhouse gas emissions, in general, than extensive, pasture-fed systems. Others disagree strongly with this, but say, for the sake of argument, we accept this as true. At first, it seems simple: “Better” meat is factory-farmed meat. Now we just need to figure out how much “less” we should eat.

But what if we think the most important issues are biodiversity loss and ecosystem health? Or water pollution? Or workers’ rights? Or animal welfare? We address each of these issues in our series, and each of them points to a potentially different answer. On that last point, for example, animal welfare scientist Professor Françoise Wemelsfelder argues that recognizing farm animals as sentient beings “probably means that large industrial farming systems are not morally feasible.”

Wrestling with these concepts and questions is a valuable and valid exercise; it’s commendable to make decisions about your consumption and purchases that reflect your morals and values. But, like comparing apples with oranges, trying to find the perfect answer is an impossible task. It could even have negative mental health outcomes. Research in the field of consumer behavior has shown that we can experience negative emotions when trying to make choices that force us to make “emotionally laden trade-offs.” And, higher levels of eco-anxiety are reported among folks with more environmental awareness. 

What “less” and “better” means for you also depends on what interests, values and biases underlie your particular vision of what the world could, and should, look like. Efforts to boil less and better down to simplistic questions of CO2 emissions per livestock unit or the relative technical merits of soil carbon sequestration versus cellular agriculture ignore political questions. Questions such as who benefits? Who holds the power? Who has access to “better” meat? And what kind of future are we building?

Ultimately, we don’t think it’s possible to provide a simple, silver-bullet answer to the question of what constitutes “less” and “better” meat. But we also think that’s kind of the whole point. When it comes to less and better meat, we think the real question we need to ask is better for whom and for what?

Listen to the podcast series Less and Better? by Farmerama Radio here. 

The post Opinion: There’s No Right Way to Eat Meat appeared first on Modern Farmer.

The researcher and passionate urban gardener in me couldn’t resist digging in deeper and working to illuminate a fuller “truth” around this recent result. Spoiler alert: Avoid carbon tunnel vision, as focusing on a single emissions metric misses the many other benefits that can get us out of the crisis we’re in. 

Back up a step: What is urban agriculture? Urban ag is any kind of food production space within a city, inclusive of commercial farms that grow and sell directly to consumers, non-profit farms that serve a broader mission, community gardens, school gardens and even vacant lots turned into thriving personal gardens or homesteads. 

Better yet, why do some researchers, farmers and activists prefer the term “urban agroecology?” From 2017 to 2019, my research team helped to define and elevate “urban agroecology” in the US as a better way of acknowledging the multifunctional benefits of urban green spaces. These farms and gardens are not “just” growing food, they are also building community, performing environmental services (think stormwater mitigation and reducing urban heat island effect), providing habitat for biodiversity and educating urban residents. It’s often one of the only ways kids and adults alike can interact with nature, see where their food comes from and witness the magic of a seed sprouting. Urban growing spaces are also often led by women and BIPOC farmers (more than 60 percent in my investigation of the East Bay in California’s Bay Area), serving as important grounds for empowerment, culturally relevant food production and healing of racialized patterns of agricultural work. 

Oxford Tract research farm at UC Berkeley. Photo submitted by Laney Siegner.

So, I had alarm bells going off when reading about this new study. The research from the University of Michigan-led study seems to show that fruit and vegetables grown in urban ag have a carbon footprint six times larger than that of “conventionally grown” food (meaning, on rural farmland). 

The choice to compare greenhouse gas intensity of soil-based urban agriculture systems with conventional farming systems brings up an inherently unfair comparison. When looking at conventional, large-scale farming systems, which are largely monocultures designed to maximize yield per acre via application of fossil-fuel based fertilizers, pesticides and other chemicals, we already have a large body of evidence that these are carbon-intensive production systems with a host of other detrimental environmental impacts (land, air and water pollution, soil degradation and erosion, habitat and biodiversity loss across billions of acres of “conventional farmland” globally). 

However, when you divide a large number (i.e., carbon emissions) by another large number (yield per acre), you get a small number of carbon emissions associated with each serving of lettuce, for example. When looking at urban community and school farms and gardens, we often see highly diversified plots that are more sparsely planted, with some weedy edges. They’re not exactly “yield-maximizing” practices on display. So, when you divide a relatively small number of carbon emissions, which the researchers in the study attributed to things such as garden infrastructure (raised beds, paved paths, tool sheds and others)—so, indirect emissions—and divide it by another very small number (yield per acre), you end up with a relatively larger number than your conventional allegory “lettuce serving.” The math here doesn’t point the finger towards the system that really needs changing in carbon and climate terms. 

This study disregards the far more pressing issue of the sheer quantity of emissions that come from conventional farming. Additionally, the conversations only circled back towards the end to include or acknowledge the many climate “benefits” of having spaces where city dwellers can connect with their food system and with nature in the city. These less quantifiable benefits are primary, not secondary; they are essential to bring into collective societal focus, rather than obscure behind a conclusion that sets up a feeling of confusion or uncertainty about whether urban ag is or is not a “climate solution.” Urban farms, especially when well managed and resourced with consistent staffing and city support, are critical pieces of the climate solutions puzzle. 

It brings me back to this unsettled feeling that the study is asking the wrong research question, if the conclusions and headlines point us towards some course of action around “fixing” urban farms so they can have a lower carbon footprint, while saying nothing about the carbon-intensive conventional farming system that urgently needs to change to address the overlapping climate and public health crisis. To quote one of the leaders of my urban ag research project, Dr. Timothy Bowles, a professor of Agroecology at U.C. Berkeley: 

“This is an issue with metrics… in this case, using efficiency as the metric (i.e., amount of food produced per unit of GHG emission). Efficiency metrics can be problematic for a number of reasons, and a number of studies have demonstrated more ‘efficient’ food production from conventional systems compared to various alternatives from a strictly GHG standpoint, largely due to higher yields, even if total emissions are high. In general, we need multifunctional perspectives for a more holistic systems comparison.” 

To be sure, we need conventional farming systems right now that create efficiency and economies of scale to grow and distribute large volumes of food to feed a growing population. There is no switching to diversified farming and regenerative agriculture overnight, just like there is no transition to purely solar and wind power for our electricity system without proper planning for this change. I’m not saying we can feed the entire city from the products of urban farms (although there have been researchers before me who modeled that this is theoretically possible, within a 50-mile radius, of a US midwestern city). What we need is for the conventional food system to change dramatically: to reduce reliance on fossil-fuel-based inputs, be more adaptive to climate extremes, adopt climate-friendly practices such as cover cropping and compost application, and in doing all this become a better source of healthy food. 

I’m also all for improving urban farms, increasing recycling of materials and waste streams in cities and resourcing them to be viable sites of food production, as the study authors point out as action items. I just find the impetus for doing so to be limited if we’re primarily talking about reducing the carbon footprint of these sites. Urban farms are capable of teaching the principles of photosynthesis, soil health and carbon sequestration even if they are not sequestering carbon in large quantities. And this knowledge is powerful. 

Where do we go from here as researchers, as eaters and producers of food? The food system of today is in crisis. It has prioritized cost and yield over all else. The result? It doesn’t work for farmers, it does not produce nutritious, healthy food for people and it is a disaster environmentally. However, the future of food can be diversified, abundant and rooted in soil health practices, fostering social equity and farmer well-being. I see that shift happening already on farms both urban and rural, big and small. It takes education, both farmer to farmer and farmer to consumer, as well as policy change to support the shifts already in motion. By reconnecting with food, with ecology, with living soil, we connect to climate solutions and help to reverse the damages of climate change.

Laney Siegner is founder and Co-director of Climate Farm School, with a Ph.D. from U.C. Berkeley Energy and Resources Group. 

The post Opinion: To Make a Real Impact on Climate Change, We Must Move Beyond the Carbon Footprint appeared first on Modern Farmer.

The farm bill is a critical bipartisan package of legislation that renews every five years, and it expired on September 30, 2023. To avert a government shutdown, the Senate passed an extension bill to keep the essential programs running through the end of September 2024. This tightrope omnibus bill funds the SNAP program, farmer subsidies and USDA loan programs and grants. Eaters and farmers alike depend on this bill to get food on the table.

As a farmer’s daughter and farm advocate, I know that the farm bill has one of the greatest impacts on what you eat, how that food was grown and the ability of beginning farmers to find land in the first place. Many of my friends are farmers and I’ve seen them struggle against countless barriers, especially when it comes to accessing or purchasing land. In a recent National Young Farmers Coalition survey, 59 percent of young farmers named finding affordable land to buy as “very or extremely challenging.” 

I’ve come to understand that despite where a farmer lives or what they grow, the lack of affordable land to farm is the number one reason farmers are leaving agriculture, the top challenge for current farmers and the primary barrier preventing aspiring farmers from getting started. The next farm bill can fix this.

Oregon agriculture is a part of my identity. I grow small-scale herbs, seeds and nursery starts in my backyard garden and work in the nonprofit agriculture world. My Land Advocacy Fellowship with the National Young Farmer Coalition empowered me to share my experience of growing up on the family farm with my senators and representatives offices on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C. 

Photo courtesy of Carly Boyer.

In June 2023, the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) announced the awardees of the $300-million Increasing Land, Capital, and Market Access Program, which included 50 community-based projects for underserved farmers, ranchers and forest landowners. Three projects were funded here in Oregon, led by the Black Oregon Land Trust, Indian Land Tenure Foundation program and Community Development Corporation of Oregon. This program resulted in federal dollars going out the door, directly benefiting community-led land access solutions. It was also a one-time funding opportunity that I believe should be made permanent. 

Following the creation of that one-time program, the bipartisan Increasing Land Access, Securities, and Opportunities Act (LASO) was introduced in both the House and the Senate. The LASO Act would expand on the promise of the Increasing Land, Capital, and Market Access Program. If enacted, this bill would authorize $100 million in annual funding for community-led land access solutions through the next farm bill. This would be a significant victory for young farmers, ranchers and everyone who has been fighting to win federal funding to address issues of equitable land access.

Flying to Washington, D.C with farmer Michelle Week of Good Rain Farm really impacted me. Hearing her experience of feeding more than 150 families in her Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) subscription yet still unable to afford to purchase farmland as an Indigenous woman in the Portland Metro area is alarming. 

Across the country, farmland is being lost to development at a rate of more than 2,000 acres per day. Over the next 20 years, nearly half of US farmland is expected to change hands. Additionally, Black farmers across the United States have lost 90 percent of their historic farmland due to systemic racism and discriminatory lending. Today, according to the most recently available statistics, 95 percent of farmers are white in the United States and 96 percent of land owners are white. For these reasons and more, I advocate for federal reparations in the form of land access through the LASO bill.

We all eat and, in order to eat, we all need farmers. I hope you’ll consider getting in contact with your members of Congress today and urge them to support farmers by asking them to include the Increasing Land Access, Security, and Opportunities Act (H.R.3955, S.2340) in the next farm bill. With the current farm bill temporarily extended, it’s a pivotal moment to uplift critical policy changes like the LASO Act and invest in the health and well-being of our communities, our food system and the future we all deserve.

Carly Boyer (she/they) is a fourth-generation land manager, stewarding 140 acres in Polk County, OR. She works for Oregon Climate and Agriculture Network, an agricultural non-profit focused on Soil health. She is a board member for Rogue Farm Corps, a beginning farmer program and a Land Advocacy Fellow with the National Young Farmers Coalition advocating for the One Million Acres for the Future Farm Bill campaign in Washington, D.C.

The post Opinion: Farmers Are Dropping Out Because They Can’t Access Land. Here’s How the Next Farm Bill Could Stop the Bleeding. appeared first on Modern Farmer.

French farmers, for instance, managed to persuade their nation’s leaders to ban food imports treated with the insecticide thiacloprid, dedicate €150 million (US$163 million) annually to support livestock producers and provide European-wide definitions for what constitutes lab-grown meat. German farmers also saw movement in their favor from their lawmakers on fuel subsidies. When protests reached Brussels—where the European Parliament was in session—European Union policy makers announced plans to cushion the blow from Ukraine grain imports and address bureaucratic red tape. 

Thus far, the protests offer some takeaways for American food and farm activists. 

Specifically, not only can public disruption trigger real change, but there is room to push back against the disastrous free trade policies that have wreaked havoc on farm economies on both sides of the Atlantic. Reducing tariffs and weakening price support policies to align with World Trade Organization (WTO) policy prescriptions, as well as those found in other free trade deals, such as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), has made food producers increasingly subject to price volatility. Such regional and international free trade policies took policy-making power away from national governments, transfering that power to unelected bureaucrats who thought food should be treated like any other commodity. 

US farmers and their allies should pay attention, think how to make protest part of our ongoing Farm Bill debate and take some power back when it comes to making policy.

In Europe, the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP)—similar to the Farm Bill in the United States—governs most facets of the continent’s agricultural system, including financial assistance, environmental policy and the regulation of exports and imports. Beginning in 1962 with France, Germany, Luxembourg, Belgium, Italy and the Netherlands, the arrangement has grown along with the European Union to cover all of the organization’s 27 member states.

CAP policies began to change in the 1990s to promote “efficiency.” Several policies were eliminated, including export subsidies, production quotas in dairy and price supports that were coupled to farmer income. While US President Ronald Reagan railed against “government cheese” to point out the assumed wasteful nature of US agricultural policy in the 1980s, in Europe, “wine lakes” and “butter mountains” were made into campaign slogans to cut public assistance for farmers. 

And cuts took place: From 1980 to 2021, the total EU budget dedicated to agriculture went to below 25 percent from more than 60 percent. 

The drop in production is coupled with declining rates of farmers themselves. In France, there were 389,000 farmers in 2020—almost 800,000 fewer than in 1980. Poland has lost 13% of its producers since 2010. Overall, throughout Europe from 2005 to 2020, the continent has seen 37 percent of its farms go out of business. During that same time, production has grown, as only farms of more than 200 hectares (approximately 400 acres) have increased in number. 

Matters are much the same in the US. According to the recently released 2022 Census of Agriculture, the largest four percent of US farms (2,000 or more acres) control 61 percent of all farmland. In 1987, that figure was 15 percent. Similarly, in 2015, 51 percent of the value of US farm production came from farms with at least $1 million in sales, compared to 31 percent in 1991. From 1997 to 2022, more than 340,000 farms, or 15 percent of operations, went out of business.

Protesting farmers with their tractors rally in front of the Greek parliament in Athens on Feb. 21, 2024. (Photo: Giannis Papanikos / Shutterstock)

In Europe, the ever-dwindling financial support for farmers is made contingent on meeting various environmental and labor standards. Put simply, for assistance, farmers must do more to receive less. Aiding, not curtailing ongoing consolidation, 20 percent of Europe’s farmers—particularly large-scale operators in terms of land and production—receive 80 percent of all payments. 

Adding insult to injury, EU authorities allowed the import of cheap Ukrainian grain to assist that country in its ongoing war with Russia. This, as supply chain disruptions from that conflict drove up the prices that European farmers pay for inputs such as gas and fertilizer. EU policymakers also are negotiating a contentious free trade deal with the South American regional trade bloc, Mercosul, which would invite agricultural export giants Argentina and Brazil to potentially undercut European producers. 

US farmers suffer in a similar policy environment as their European counterparts. The 1996 Farm Bill made periodic, ad hoc direct payments the primary way the US government provided financial assistance for producers. Gone, but years later reintroduced in a significantly weakened form, were non-recourse loans that assured farmers a decent income if market prices dipped below a certain threshold. With such loans, decent incomes can be guaranteed without forcing farmers to increase production potentially in environmentally harmful ways as governments purchase products off the market to stock reserves. 

To take on the harmful cuts that free trade policy promotion made a reality in the farm policy, US farmers and their allies could find inspiration from what is taking place in Europe, perhaps going to DC to make their voices heard. 

In fact, US farmers in the past did so. When free trade was in its infancy back in 1979, thousands of farmers drove their tractors to DC to demand policy changes to address rising foreclosures and increases in input costs. These actions inspired the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition (NSAC) to bring activists together in DC last year but mainly to make climate policy part of the Farm Bill. 

Now, with the Farm Bill debate continuing at least through September of this year, pricing policy reforms could take center stage. Some farm groups, such as the National Family Farm Coalition (NFFC) with its dozens of member organizations, have made pricing policy reform central to their Farm Bill platform. In demanding parity pricing, policy instruments such as non-recourse loans could be improved to assure farmers decent prices and dissuade them from increasing production to make ends meet. Addressing concentration is also part of the NFFC’s demands, with particular attention to an increased role for the government to finance land access programs and enforce antitrust laws.

Do such proposals challenge free trade? Yes, they do. And as European farmers have shown, protest can yield results. By adding some popular mobilization into the mix of our ongoing Farm Bill debate, maybe with the occasional rotten egg or manure load, farmers and their allies could push our lawmakers to make real changes for the benefit of our food and farm system. Let’s not just stand by as the people who grow our food endure yet more financial hardship.

Anthony Pahnke is the vice-president of the Family Farm Defenders and an associate professor of international relations at San Francisco State University; anthonypahnke@sfsu.edu. 

The post Opinion: European Farmers Are Standing Up to Free Trade—Will US Farmers? appeared first on Modern Farmer.

There were times during this voyage that it seemed humanity was driving down an alley toward a brick wall, fast. Catastrophe loomed everywhere I looked: in the dust bowls on the once-fertile plains of central Turkey, in the vanishing lakes of Mexico City, in the fetid cesspools outside the factory farms of North Carolina, in the disease-ravaged olive trees of Puglia, in the rapid wiping away of diverse food webs in every biome. The demographers’ scenario, where we’ll have to produce 50 percent more food by midcentury to feed a population of ten billion or face famine, sometimes seemed like the only possible outcome.

For the time being, our cunning plan seems to be to wait until the last second and hope an airbag will deploy to cushion us from the final impact. In modern times, there’s a long tradition of techno-optimists or cornucopians–science writer Charles C. Mann calls them “wizards”–telling us that technology will come to our rescue. In the 1930s, Winston Churchill predicted in the pages of a Canadian magazine that future famines would be averted by raising edible bacteria in underground cellars using artificial radiation. Others saw yeast factories and transcontinental algae pipelines nourishing the domed metropolises of the 21st century. 

According to the techno-optimists, hacking photosynthesis by genetically modifying rubisco, the enzyme found in all plants that turn sunlight and carbon dioxide into starches, proteins, and other nutrients will allow us to radically increase rice yields in Asia. Growing perennial grasses, rather than annuals like wheat, will permit us to mow the cereals we eat rather than cutting them down whole, thus keeping root systems intact and putting an end to soil degradation. Using robots to milk cows and drones for the precision irrigation of crops will save labor costs and conserve water. And growing meat in the lab, from cultured stem cells in bioreactors will eliminate the need for raising livestock, and all the environmental havoc that goes with it.

A closer look, though, shows that most of these techno fixes have serious downsides. Perennial wheat, marketed as Kernza, doesn’t have enough gluten to make bread or pasta; robot-milking systems don’t allow for pasture feeding, requiring cows to remain in barns year-round for the system to be profitable. Venture capitalists have poured $3 billion into the lab-grown meat industry, yet the resulting products have to be bulked up with plant protein, and are still far from palatable. As for Churchill’s plan to raise bacteria in caves, it’s back in the form of journalist George Monbiot’s plan for curing “agricultural sprawl” and feeding the billions: calories will once again be plucked out of the air, as Scandinavian labs use electricity and “precision fermentation” to transform bacteria into gray protein pancakes.

My response to the techno-optimists and wizards who tell us that we should all subsist on a diet of bacteria, yeast, cultured meat, or algae is: you go first. And by that I don’t mean take the first bite. (As an adventurous eater. I’ll try anything once.) I mean, show me that you can survive and thrive on that diet for five, ten, or 20 years. Then I might consider joining you.

I’ve noticed something about “scientifically improved” foods. To put it bluntly: nobody wants to eat that shit. The first approved transgenic vegetable, the slow-ripening rot-resistant Flavr Savr tomato, engineered with genes from a bacterial parasite, was a commercial flop, losing millions for the company that developed it. Golden rice, engineered to contain higher levels of beta-carotene, and the Arctic Apple, designed not to brown when cut, have also failed to attract farmers and consumers. 

It turns out that what people do want to eat when they’re given any kind of choice, and are able to afford it, is non-GM food. The market for organic food, which has more than doubled in a decade, accounted for $58 billion in sales in 2021 in the United States alone.

If we’re really serious about forestalling famine, we need to stop feeding so much grain to livestock, and save the wheat, corn, and rice we grow for human consumption. Edible insects are already being used to feed poultry and farmed fish, but they could also be included in the feed of cattle and pigs. The black soldier fly is an efficient, fast growing converter of organic waste into protein for animal feed. I interviewed Kieran Olivaraes Whitaker, the founder of the British company Entocycle, who has succeeded in raising millions of flies in a tiny rented space in the center of London. The entirely automated operation used the waste from breweries to feed the bugs; the black soldier flies can be used to boost the protein content in feed for cattle, poultry, pigs, and farmed fish. This approach makes a lot more sense to me than hoping humans will suddenly acquire a taste for bug-burgers. 

But raising insects for feed is a patch, not a solution. The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations has made it clear that for the time being, food producers pump out enough calories to feed everybody on Earth. It’s equally clear that the billions of inhabitants of the “Global South” aren’t the problem. It’s the people in the world’s rich nations, as well as the growing middle classes in Asia, Latin America, and Africa, who consume diets high in processed foods and grain-fed meat and dairy that keep us hurtling toward that brick wall. 

Puglia, in southern Italy, taught Grescoe about both olive trees and the ancient tradition of shepherding. Photo submitted.

In the final months of writing this book, I was lucky enough to spend a few weeks surrounded by wheat fields. I was staying in the foothills of the Jura Mountains, in the canton of Vaud, a part of Switzerland that prides itself on sustainable organic agriculture. Many of the farms were centuries old. The entire landscape seemed devoted to turning the richness of the soil into fantastically delicious foods. I witnessed the age-old transhumance, in which Simmental, Jersey, and Charolais cows were transported to summer pastures in alpine meadows more than 4,000 feet in altitude, where they fed on wild flowers and lush grass to produce the exquisite Gruyère, Tomme, and Vacherin cheeses sold in village fromageries. 

I’d arrived in mid-May, just as the reddish-orange poppies were blooming. On daily bike rides, I got to see the spring wheat planted in fields all around me mature from a lustrous green to a sharkskin amber. I recalled the criticism leveled against wheat: that it’s one of humanity’s most egregious examples of a monocrop. But in the Vaud, the fields were relatively small, a few dozen acres at most, and people were careful to plant fruit and nut-bearing trees alongside the edges. A local initiative had dotted jachères, richly diverse plots of native grasses and wildflowers that encouraged birds to nest and insects to gather pollen, in random spots among the wheat fields. 

Being in Switzerland was a reminder that agriculture need not be the problem. Done properly, it was the solution to our diversity and sustainability crisis. There was a world of other great practices out there, sometimes referred to as regenerative farming, biointensive agriculture, agroforestry, or permaculture, like the mixed mountain farming champion Sepp Holzer, an Austrian advocate of farming on marginal land.

Even if we aren’t in a position to grow our own food, there are straightforward ways we can all become responsible eaters. The  poet and essayist Wendell Berry laid out seven principles in his influential 1989 essay “The Pleasures of Eating.” Prepare your own food; learn where the food you buy comes from; deal directly, whenever possible, with local farmers, gardeners and orchardists. In self-defense, teach yourself about the economy and technology of food production and how industry adds to and alters food. Learn what is involved in the best farming, as well as in the life histories of food species. First and foremost, participate in food production, even if that means nothing more than growing herbs or tomatoes on a kitchen windowsill.

In Switzerland, I remembered the wheat fields I’ve known on the Canadian Prairies and the Great Plains, which can cover 30,000 acres, so vast that walking from one edge to the other can take three hours. Planted with dwarf hybrid varieties, sprayed with pesticides, and shocked dead with glyphosate for easier harvesting by combines, this was the kind of landscapes the critics of industrial agriculture decry: one devoid of diversity, dead except for the one plant species that happens to be valued by modern humans: wheat. It was a stark contrast to the Swiss countryside, where agriculture was practiced in a way that kept the soil healthy, and the land and air alive with animal, plant, and insect life.

If humans are defined as the species that adapts to new environments, we’ve fulfilled our destiny to the extent that we now find ourselves adapted to impoverished environments entirely of our own making. The monocultures of wheat, rice, corn, and soybeans that feed us depend for their success on the elimination of biodiversity. But diversity is what confers resiliency, and by simplifying natural habitats to serve the needs of industrial agriculture, we’ve left ourselves open to pandemics, supply-chain-disrupting wars, droughts, floods, and new crop and livestock diseases. Our determination to feed everyone on the planet cheaply has already resulted in malnourishment for the masses. If we don’t change our ways, it could soon lead to hunger for all.

Taras Grescoe is a Montreal-based journalist and author. He is the author of Straphanger, Bottomfeeder, and The Devil’s Picnic. He writes about the history of food on lostsupper.blog. 

The post Opinion: To Find the Future of Food, We Need to Look to the Past appeared first on Modern Farmer.

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

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

Community solar: the Goldilocks of renewables

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The clean energy cover crop

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

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

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

Photo credit: DSD Renewables

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Canada’s current agricultural production model is unsustainable and in desperate need of reform. A range of issues plague the current system, including corporate consolidation, farmland concentration in the hands of non-farmers and foreign buyers, pollution and animal welfare issues, as well as soil erosion and the poor treatment of migrant workers.

The loss of farmers in Canada is exacerbating these problems, with the farming population shrinking and aging significantly. In the last two decades alone, Canada has lost nearly 150,000 farmers with the current population standing at just 260,000. Of those remaining, only 8.5 per cent are under the age of 35 years.

This trend reveals that few young people from farming families are choosing to stay in farming, and those from non-farming backgrounds face obstacles like high costs and a lack of training.

While the farming population represents only a small percentage of the overall population, the impact of these issues extend far beyond the agricultural community. Current social crises, including biodiversity loss and food inaccessibility, affect everyone.

New report on agriculture

One of Canada’s leading agriculture research institutions, the Arrell Food Institute at the University of Guelph, released a report in April in collaboration with the Royal Bank of Canada and Boston Consulting Group with suggestions for transforming Canada’s agriculture sector.

The report advocates for a national policy strategy to help Canada become a global leader in productivity enhancing automation and in low carbon, sustainable food production.

The report has some highlights, like emphasizing the importance of improving immigrant opportunities in agriculture. It recommends providing permanent status to 24,000 farm workers and 30,000 farm operators over the next decade. This could improve opportunities for thousands of temporary foreign workers who are a crucial part of our food system.

However, the report falls short in a number of ways. It fails to address industry consolidation and doesn’t question the underlying assumption that large-scale commodity production for export is the only production system that matters.

Instead, it advocates for more capital-intensive automation and mechanization in line with the longstanding “bigger is better” agriculture policy of the past fifty years. Envisioning farming as hyper-specialized, where specializations only converge in a marketable product, misses critical aspects of farming knowledge.

Expensive technology costs continue to disproportionately benefit large agri-business corporations, with farmers receiving only marginal benefits for their investments, alongside a mountain of debt. The recommendations, as they stand, will only lead to further consolidation of power and land inequality.

Searching for solutions

Rather than focusing on automation and technology that may displace new farmers, agricultural innovation should be farmer-led, meaning research is aligned with real challenges experienced by farmers.

Farmer-researcher Eric Barnhorst, for example, conducted research on regenerating fallow fields with the Ecological Farmers Association of Ontario in 2022. He found that the cover crop method increased active carbon in the soil — a key indicator of soil health and regeneration potential.

Technology, if not carefully implemented, can make our systems more fragile, as seen with modern types of tillage that increase soil erosion. Instead, we should incentivize methods grounded in Indigenous stewardship customs that have maintained and improved soil health for centuries, like cover cropping, intercropping and mixed-use cropping.

There should be room for the promotion of agro-ecological and organic farming practices. This sort of production could make it possible for more diverse farmers to succeed, and for a greater variety of products distributed into local markets. Recent disruptions in the food supply chain have highlighted the importance of local food production.

Rather than treating agriculture fields as industrial factories, an alternative approach would involve encouraging more regenerative practices and cultivating a new generation of farmers integrated in their communities who know the land intimately.

Supporting young farmers

Moving forward, there is a pressing need for policies that promote sustainable farming practices, support the next generation of farmers, and address the systemic issues contributing to the current crisis in agriculture.

Without policies that address the growing barriers in Canadian farming, it will become more difficult for new farmers to thrive, no matter how much immigration, education or automation we invest in. New young farmers require mentorship, public investment in research and advisory services, financial security to invest and, critically, access to good farmland.

How these potential farmers will gain access to farmland with current land prices soaring past $25,000 per acre and restrictive policies that limit smaller-scale farms was left unaddressed by the recent agriculture report.

Rethinking urban growth boundary expansion to include small-scale farming, as well as making it possible to sever 50 acre farm lots in rural municipalities would be a good place to start. Creating more farmland trusts to protect and make productive farmland accessible to young farmers without debt and interest costs could also help long term.

Urban agriculture training sites and interdisciplinary approaches to studying food production are necessary for young people living in the city to become future farmers. Agriculture should be integrated into multiple fields of study, ranging from engineering to the social sciences, at all levels of education so children know farming is a viable career path from the get go.

We should strive for a food system that better serves our communities which includes leveraging all possible strengths within the Canadian agriculture context.

Richard Bloomfield is an Assistant Professor in Management and Organizational Studies at Huron University College, Western University. He is also a co-founder and board member of Urban Roots London, a non-profit urban farm.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Modern food systems are built on regulations born of the need to prevent deceptive practices like these. But modern food systems are still riddled with fraud. And yet, food fraud stories in the mainstream media consistently underestimate the breadth and scope of fraud in modern food supply chains. 

Most food fraud stories focus on premium foods such as maple syrup, wasabi, vanilla, caviar and truffles. But while these foods are at risk from food fraud, they make up only a tiny percentage of the foods we eat each day. 

Food fraud affects much more than high-cost foods such as honey and whiskey. It occurs in all parts of the food chain, including commodities such as grains and oils, animal feeds, fruit and bulk ingredients.  

What is food fraud?

When people use deceptive tactics to make extra profits from food, the result is food fraud. The deception can be perpetrated on an enormous scale, affecting hundreds of shipments of material across multiple years. Or it can be opportunistic, such as forging an organic declaration for a single delivery of oilseeds.

Food fraud can net millions of dollars for the perpetrator and costs the global food industry $40 billion per year. 

Food fraud in bulk

When fraud occurs in raw materials or inputs to the supply chain, huge quantities of food are affected, such as a massive fraud that occurred in organic grains used for animal feed. 

In 2019, a Missouri man was sentenced to more than 10 years in prison after being caught selling more than 10 million bushels of “fake” organic grain worth millions of dollars over a period of seven years. The man told customers he had grown the grain on his certified organic fields when it was non-organic grain that had been grown elsewhere. At other times, he sold grain from “organic” fields that had been sprayed with unauthorized chemicals and mixed non-organic grain into shipments of organic grain to increase profits. 

Most of the affected grain was purchased for animal feed for raising organic meat. Because the grain was not organic, the resulting meat was also not genuinely organic. In this way, the fraud was propagated along the supply chain, from grain trader to animal feed supplier to rancher to slaughterhouse to meat supplier and finally to millions of unsuspecting consumers. 

Cheaper bulk food ingredients are also affected by fraud. Thousands of tons of dried milk powder was adulterated in a massive fraud that led to illnesses in more than 300,000 infants who drank formula made from the milk powder. The fraud had been going on for years, undetected by authorities. 

The milk powder was adulterated with melamine, a poisonous chemical with a high nitrogen content, a whiteish color and a neutral taste. When added to milk powder or wheat gluten, it boosts the apparent protein content of the food in laboratory tests, thereby increasing the amount of money a seller can earn per pound. 

The same thing happened to ingredients used for pet foods. Wheat gluten was adulterated with melamine in 2006 and 2007, with at least 800 tons affected across dozens of shipments. The gluten was used as an ingredient by multiple pet food manufacturers in many brands of dog and cat food, killing an estimated 4,500 pets across the US. 

Different foods, different frauds

Food fraud affects every type of agricultural commodity, including fresh produce, edible oils and tree nuts. Fresh fruit might not seem like a lucrative target for food fraud, but it is vulnerable to counterfeiting, with exporters of some brands of fruit having to compete with unauthorized copies of their own products in importing countries. 

To combat this, Tasmanian cherry growers employ a range of overt and covert anti-counterfeit systems, including intricate, laser-cut carton stickers, custom-printed carton liners, watermarked carton bases and QR codes; while New Zealand kiwifruit growers have experimented with invisible “watermarks” that can be printed onto fruit skins with special food-grade chemicals.

Expensive oils and cheap oils are equally likely to be fraud-affected. Expensive oils such as hazelnut and coconut oil can be diluted with cheaper oils to increase profits for the seller. A recent survey of avocado oils found almost 60 percent did not meet purity criteria, with tests revealing they had been adulterated with sunflower and other oils. 

Cheap bulk oils such as palm oil can be fraud affected, too. Palm oils are considered to be environmentally unfriendly because their production can cause deforestation, so there is plenty of motivation for fraud perpetrators to make false claims about where and how they were grown or sourced. Soy and canola oils can be falsely claimed to be organic or non-GMO if they were made from GMO crops. This can even happen without the knowledge of the oil mill, which might have been deceived about the GMO status of incoming oilseeds. 

Tree nuts are popular targets for theft, because they keep for a long time and are difficult to trace when sold in bulk by thieves. A single trailer load of pistachios can be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, netting any thief a tidy profit when he sells them on to legitimate food traders. Food and beverage thefts are now the top cargo crime in the US, with strategic, organized thefts of food shipments increasing by 600 percent between 2022 and 2023. 

Food fraud is pervasive across all parts of the supply chain, from basic agricultural commodities to bulk ingredients used for manufactured foods and through to finished grocery items in every category. 

The Grocery Manufacturer’s Association estimates that at least 10 percent of all retail food has been affected by food fraud in some way by the time it gets into your shopping cart. The real proportion is probably even higher than 10 percent. 

We must stop thinking of food fraud as something that only affects high-priced luxury foods. It takes many forms and can appear in even the cheapest food ingredients and finished products.

What must be done?

Food fraud can only be tackled by the combined efforts of all parts of the food industry. Regulations and rules prohibit food traders and suppliers from selling fraud-affected foods, but laws are ineffective on their own. Enforcement against food fraud is low on food agencies’ priorities, which rightly focus on more pressing issues such as protecting consumers from foodborne illnesses. 

In 2023, the food industry still underestimates how prevalent food fraud is and how many different food types are affected. Purchasers of ingredients and commodities such as grains and oils still rely solely on certificates that can be forged, laboratory tests or that can be faked and letters of guarantee that are not worth the paper on which they are printed. 

All actors in the food supply chain, from growers and packing houses to oil mills, animal feed suppliers, food manufacturers, restaurants and retailers, must do a better job of holding their suppliers to account. That means doing more to check the authenticity of the food, commodities and ingredients they use, instead of relying on the word of the supplier. 

Consumers are, for the most part, at the mercy of the food industry, with no way of telling whether any item in their grocery cart is affected by fraud or not. That is why people in the food supply chain must become a little less trusting of their suppliers and a little more careful about checking for food fraud in the materials they purchase. With a little more effort and a little less blind faith, the industry can together keep everyone safe from food fraud.

Karen Constable is an international food fraud prevention expert, owner of Food Fraud Advisors consultancy and founder of The Rotten Apple, a weekly update on food fraud, food safety and sustainable supply chains for busy professionals.

This story is part of ‘Phonies, Fakes and Food Fraud’, a special Modern Farmer series. See the full series here.

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In 2018, voters in California decided they’d had enough and passed Proposition 12. That legislation stipulated that pork entering California’s markets must originate from animals whose mothers were given a minimum of 24 square feet of space, freeing hogs from gestation crates.

The law was meant to go into effect last year, but it was blocked by legal challenges from the National Pork Producers Council, which were eventually struck down by the Supreme Court this spring. Prop 12 will take effect December 31, 2023, and when it does, veterinarians like myself will be able to celebrate one small victory against this powerful industry. 

[RELATED: Supreme Court’s Ruling on Humane Treatment of Pigs Could Catalyze a Wave of New Animal Welfare Laws]

However, a new challenge to Prop 12 has emerged: The Ending Agricultural Trade Suppression (EATS) Act poses yet another barrier to our efforts to alleviate extensive animal suffering. This proposed legislation aims to invalidate more than 1,000 state-level laws and guidelines pertaining to both food safety and the protection of animals. Among the signatories of a letter supporting the EATS Act, penned for the U.S. Congressional leaders, is Nebraska Governor Dr. Jim Pillen, a hog producer and veterinarian, who is also part owner of a slaughterhouse. His signature highlights the way politicians can wield their power to protect their own interests over the interests of the general public. 

Veterinarians dedicated to the protection of farmed animals encounter multiple challenges as we strive to obey our oath to work for the “protection of animal health and welfare, the prevention and relief of animal suffering.” The reality of gestation crates is distressing: During one hour of observation, 92.6% of confined pigs exhibited signs of stress. These behaviors, marked by repetitive movements, serve as a mechanism to cope with being trapped in cages. One particularly pervasive stereotype is sham chewing, or repetitive chewing despite no food present in the mouth, which accounts for an astonishing 50-75 percent of the waking hours for these confined mother pigs. 

This lack of mobility gives rise to a multitude of physical ailments as well—constipation, rectal prolapse, muscle wasting and painful pressure sores. The plight of these animals is exacerbated by the conditions they’re forced to endure: sitting in their own excrement, leading to urinary tract infections.

The author examines a pig. (Photo courtesy of Crystal Heath)

The ramifications of gestation crates extend beyond animal welfare, threatening our own health. Confined sows have markedly elevated levels of stress hormones—adrenaline and noradrenaline—compared to their group-housed counterparts. This heightened stress not only renders these animals more vulnerable to infections but also exacerbates the virulence of pathogens such as salmonella, campylobacter and staphylococcus aureus. Tragically, this susceptibility affects their piglets, resulting in suppressed immune function compared to piglets born to group-housed mothers. Piglets often remain infected until they reach slaughter. These infections often go undetected, and when infected pigs are slaughtered and sold, this creates a public health threat. The piglets of group-housed sows have better resistance and resilience and are exposed to fewer pathogens than those of crated sows. 

Pork stands as the chief perpetrator of food-borne illnesses, with a staggering 787,000 annual cases in the United States alone. The economic toll is substantial, with salmonella infections linked to pork consumption resulting in a $1.9-billion annual cost to Americans. The prevalence of salmonella is pronounced among mother pigs, with 60 percent testing positive and 10 percent demonstrating resistance to multiple drugs. The consequences are manifold—it’s not just the health and welfare of the confined animals that is compromised; our own health is also put at risk. 

In a bid to combat the escalating incidence of disease, producers resort to antibiotics, worsening the crisis of multi-drug-resistant bacteria. Data from 2022, released by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, indicated that a staggering 89 percent of studied pork production facilities administered antibiotics and other antimicrobial drugs through feed with 27.1 percent of all antibiotics sold in the U.S. going to pork production. According to the World Health Organization, roughly 700,000 deaths annually can be connected to diseases that have become hard to combat due to antibiotic resistance. If this pattern continues, the number could surge to 10,000,000 by 2050.

Agriculture innovations and intensification have perpetuated the suffering of billions of farmed animals while simultaneously jeopardizing the health of our own species. As we look to the future, what will our relationship with other animals look like three decades from now? What health afflictions will plague us? The answers to these questions are contingent upon the policies we choose to enact today. The choices we make have ramifications for future generations, influencing not just the fate of farmed animals but our own species, too.

Dr. Crystal Heath is a veterinarian from Berkeley, CA, a graduate of UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine and co-founder of Our Honor, an organization that supports veterinarians and animal professionals in advocating for the best interests of others, no matter their species. She is also on the founding committee of Veterinarians Against Ventilation Shutdown. She is also one of the nearly 400 veterinarians who signed onto the veterinarians’ and animal welfare scientist’s amicus brief to the US Supreme Court (NPPC vs. Ross).

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Recent statistics on American agriculture reveal a decline of 200,000 farms between 2007 and 2022. Since 1935, we’ve seen a decrease of 4.8 million farms—to 2 million from 6.8 million. As agriculture has industrialized and become more capital-intensive, leading to dominance by wealthy, large-scale producers, much of the decline has come at the expense of small and midsized farmers.

This phenomenon isn’t just happening in the United States. New research published in Nature Sustainability projects that, if trends continue, the number of farms across the world will be sliced in half by the end of the 21st century as consolidation of land, wealth and power reshapes our farming and food landscape. 

The marginalization of smaller-scale farms has severe consequences. When farms are continually consolidated—when there is one 5,000-acre farm in a community, for example, instead of 50 100-acre farms—fewer people remain in rural areas. That decreased population leads to social and economic impacts, with ripple effects that harm small businesses, school systems and other community institutions. 

It’s even worse when the owners of large-scale farms don’t live in or meaningfully contribute to the community. Recognizing the value of farmland and the fact that, as a popular phrase goes, “they’re not making any more land,” investors are buying up agricultural acreage. These investors vary from agri-business “farmers” who manage operations from far-away offices to private equity firms. Their deep pockets price out new and underserved farmers looking to purchase land and root into a community. Data shows that land access is the biggest challenge faced by aspiring next-generation agrarians.

Small and midsized farmers are being forced out, with consequences for rural communities. (Photo: Brooks Lamb)

Environmental and agricultural impacts loom, too. Small farms tend to be more diversified than large-scale operations. That diversity supports healthier wildlife habitat, improved soil health and greater climate resiliency. These farms are essential for food security and local and regional food systems, where products grown in a community can stay in that community rather than being shipped across the country. While we’re all tired of talking about the COVID-19 pandemic, we should remember the importance of these smaller farms and local markets when the industrial food system couldn’t stock grocery store shelves.

If we dig deeper, another less obvious threat emerges from the consolidation of American agriculture: a growing disconnect with the land itself. Smaller-scale farmers often have an intimate awareness of their place. Their landscapes are small enough to know and close enough to touch, leading to an “eyes-to-acres” ratio, as conservationist Wes Jackson calls it, that enables attention and care. 

That “ratio” changes from place to place. After all, a “small farm” in my home state of Tennessee is different than a “small farm” in Kansas or Montana, Massachusetts or Maine. But the capacity for awareness and attunement remains. 

In Love for the Land: Lessons from Farmers Who Persist in Place, I explore these connections with the land, as well as the challenges that make maintaining connections difficult. In two Tennessee counties, which serve as microcosms of our current agricultural situation, I interviewed dozens of farmers and local leaders who shared the impacts of consolidation. “I hate it,” one person said, “but the farm program we’ve got today put the ‘little guy’ out of business. The little farmers can’t keep up with the big ones.” 

Brooks Lamb. (Photo courtesy of Regan Adolph)

It isn’t just consolidation threatening these small and midsized farmers. They also face pressure from real estate development. “Bedroom communities” are transforming once-rural places as people who work in nearby cities look to the hinterlands to build houses. Yet, because these new residents spend most of their waking hours in other places working, shopping and eating, they may not be invested in their new home areas. Ironically, their homes may be on large residential lots that qualify as “farms” given lax definitions.

Farmland conversion to subdivisions, strip malls and low-density housing is acutely affecting Tennessee, but it’s prevalent across the country. According to American Farmland Trust, Tennessee alone is expected to convert more than one million acres of agricultural land between 2016 and 2040, while the United States is on pace to compromise 18.4 million acres. Conversion will especially affect smaller farms.

Additional challenges await “underserved” populations, such as Black farmers. Those interviewed for the book describe facing racial injustices in the past and present on top of other agricultural and economic difficulties, which is consistent with the experiences of farmers of color across the United States.

Even in the face of consolidation, rural gentrification and systemic racism, some smaller-scale farmers persevere. Their sometimes-self-sacrificial stewardship is driven by love for the land, leading to what farmer-writer Wendell Berry describes as fidelity or devotion to place. When told to “get big or get out,” these farmers choose neither. In doing so, they show us the power and potential of people-place relationships.

We can all learn from these farmers’ examples. Whether we live on farms or in small towns, suburbs or big cities, we can connect with the earth where we are. That may be on a farm or it may be in a backyard, a community garden or an urban park. In various settings, we can work to cultivate affection and fidelity. Nurturing these virtues would lead to collective, empathetic care for our places, our neighbors and the planet.

Sunset over a farm in Marshall County, Tennessee. (Photo: Brooks Lamb)

Yet, we must do more than learn from these farmers. We also need to support them. 

We can leverage love for the land into strategies and policies that support right-sized farming, rural communities and the environment—which in turn helps us all. One such way to yield progress is through the creation of an Office of Small Farms within the United States Department of Agriculture. Too often, federal farm programs take a “one-size-fits-all” approach that simply doesn’t work for many farmers. With a federal office focused exclusively on assisting America’s small farms, we can help these essential people and places get the resources, technical assistance and information they need. 

Legislation to establish an Office of Small Farms has been widely endorsed by a diverse group of individuals and organizations. “Small farms are the heart and soul of our agricultural landscape, contributing to our economy, food security and the resilience of our local food supply chains. It’s time we do more to ensure that all farmers, regardless of the size of their farms, have equitable access to the support they need to flourish,” says Senator Cory Booker, a co-sponsor of the bill.

An Office of Small Farms won’t fix all the problems in our agricultural system. But it’s a much-needed start that should appeal to anyone who has the true needs of America’s rural communities and small family farmers at heart, regardless of political affiliation.

Statistics and on-the-ground evidence show that, in agriculture, size matters. Rather than stand back and watch consolidation continue, we can learn from the small and midsized farmers who persist, and we can work to ensure a future for farming that values attention and affection. 

Brooks Lamb is the author of Love for the Land: Lessons from Farmers Who Persist in Place (Yale Univ. Press, 2023). He also works as the land protection and access specialist at American Farmland Trust. Brooks grew up on a small family farm in rural Tennessee.

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