A recent article, by William R. Wootton, linked below, argues that too many American colleges, especially liberal arts institutions, which typically advocate for issues like sustainability, environmentalism, and social justice, often turn to large corporate agribusiness to handle their food service. In fact 50-60% of college food service is handled by large corporations and three – Aramark, Sodexo, and the Compass Group – dominate the market.

Colleges and universities have the ability to positively contribute to American agriculture by directly supporting local and regional producers. Not surprisingly, students and faculty at some institutions are working to do just that. First, they are pushing to develop independent, college operated food services, that primarily utilize locally-sourced food. Second, they’re demanding more agriculture-focused degree programs.

In terms of independent, locally sourced food service, a national, student-led organization called Real Food Challenge advocates for colleges and universities to source 20% of their food options locally by 2020. Thus far, they’ve gotten 9 colleges to commit to this effort and 31 others are in the process of making the commitment. This is an effort that can only benefit these educational institutions and the farmers and ranchers that are nearby.

The other piece of this puzzle is the lack of agricultural education at liberal arts colleges and universities, which is very surprising given the size of the agricultural industry in the United States. In fact, according to Mr. Wootton, only a handful of liberal arts colleges across the nation have degree programs devoted to or related to agriculture and food systems. Available agricultural programs will have to increase significantly to meet the USDA’s goal of 100,000 new farmers and ranchers.

Given academic institutions’ presence and influence in the United States, they have the opportunity to, in Mr. Wootton’s words, “harness the wealth of talent and energy that will be needed to build and fill the food basket for tomorrow’s world.”

Fire your food service and grow your own

By William R. Wootton, The Chronicle of Higher Education

American colleges, especially undergraduate liberal-arts institutions that profess a deep commitment to sustainability, environmentalism, and social justice—which, of course, they all do—cannot continue to turn a blind eye to the unsustainable and environmentally harmful practices of corporate agribusiness and its on-campus partners, college food services.

Instead, colleges can and should be playing a significant part in reshaping American agriculture, first by figuring out the exciting, complex, and potentially daunting process of developing an independent, college-operated food service, reliant upon locally and regionally sourced food, and firing their corporate food services. And second by building new, baccalaureate-level programs in agriculture.

Those two steps will allow colleges to get themselves out of an ethical pickle that’s been sitting in brine for a decade or more. In the same way that many colleges crow about their LEED-certified buildings, their low carbon footprints, the importance of their communities, and their commitments to everything green, sustainable, and just, they talk about their food. They show beautiful pictures of salads, fruits, and plated meals on their Web sites. They show gardens at harvest and chefs in white hats. The impression is that all this good stuff is somehow directly reflective of the institution itself; that it is part of the ethos and practice of the place.

It is anything but. Read more …

A recent report states that agricultural producers in the United States are capable of meeting the world’s growing need for food, as well as enhance natural resources, by 2050. But, the authors stress that changes must be made in our nation’s approach to land management.

The report, titled Developing a New Vision for United States Agriculture, Forestry, and Conservation is a product of the Solutions from the Land Initiative, funded by the Farm Foundation and The Nature Conservancy, which is a coalition of stakeholders who are examining sustainable solutions to climate change, food security, economic development, and biodiversity conservation.

Challenges listed in the report include:

• Loss of working lands, with 11 million acres of U.S. cropland, 12 million acres of pasture and rangeland and 16 million acres of forestland converted to development between 1982 and 2007.
• Conflicting policies and inadequate rewards for ecosystem services.
• Declining investments in research and innovation, and inadequate dissemination and use of existing research.
• The changing climate and potential negative impacts on livestock and crop production.
• Managing risk, market volatility, and multiple demands, as globalization and the growing link between energy prices and agricultural commodity prices lead to greater market volatility.

The authors stress the need for collaboration between farmers, ranchers, foresters, and conservation groups that will work toward several goals. They propose the following:

• Implement landscape-scale solutions and partnerships. This would involve setting regional objectives for land management and building coalitions of land managers, regulators, scientists, and civil society to develop policies that meet economic, social, and environmental objectives.
• Harmonize policy frameworks to eliminate conflicting regulations and redundant paperwork, while advancing the use of ecosystem service markets and sustainable supply chains.
• Reward stewardship of ecosystem services. The report says new markets for ecosystem services have the potential to substitute for conservation payments, but are rarely structured to adequately provide returns comparable to traditional production.
• Energize and coordinate research. A designated research council or overarching organization should set a research agenda that integrates agricultural, forest, and conservation goals. Research should be focused on real-life applications and decision makers, with improved methods for transforming research findings into on-the-ground results.
• Transform and modernize information networks. The authors say this requires moving away from a provider-centric information system, in which research results are communicated outward in the hopes of finding an audience, to a user-centric system where information is readily available to users when they want it. This would require better monitoring systems for regional-level systems such as air quality, water quality, and biodiversity, with new “meta-metrics” serving as broad indicators of sustainability.

We are most encouraged by the authors’ call for increased development of private-public partnerships. Meaningful change cannot be achieved without bringing all of the key stakeholders to the discussion table.  Also, the use of market-based incentives for ecosystem services has great potential.

From a natural resources conservation perspective, we have seen both of these approaches work effectively through Sand County Foundation’s Agricultural Incentives program and the Natural Resources Conservation Service’s (NRCS) Mississippi River Basin Healthy Watersheds Initiative. Both efforts involve private-public partnerships that pay incentives to farmers who implement practices to reduce nutrient runoff into waterways.

Download the full report

A vision for 2050

By John Maday, Dairy Herd Network

U.S. farmers and ranchers have the capability to meet the world’s growing need for food, fiber and energy by 2050 while protecting and improving environmental health, according to a new report. But achieving that vision will require a new, collaborative approach toward land management.

The report, titled “Developing a New Vision for United States Agriculture, Forestry, and Conservation,” comes from the Solutions from the Land initiative, which “brings together a broad range of stakeholders to explore the development of integrated sustainable solutions to the challenges of climate change, food security, economic development, and biodiversity conservation.” The initiative is funded by Farm Foundation and The Nature Conservancy.

The report lays out the challenges involved in sustainably increasing food production while using less land, water and other resources, and offers short- and long-term recommendations for overcoming those challenges. Read more … 

Beverly Bell and Tory Field recently wrote an interesting piece for the Huffington Post about the global food market and the impact it has on producers and consumers at the local level.

They write that food is a great unifier for the world’s citizens, but control of food production and distribution is increasingly being taken out of local hands and directed on the international level, detached from the populace.

However, Bell and Field argue that a movement for food sovereignty is underway. This is a movement that calls for the production, management, and distribution  of food, land, and agricultural systems to be placed back into the hands of citizens, giving them more of an opportunity to make the decision to consume locally produced food.

Another important element to this concept is the role of the producer. This movement wants farmers and ranchers, especially small-scale operations, to have the ability to produce products for local consumption under local control, rather than be affected by international market forces. For this to happen, though, activists in this movement are working at local, regional, national, and international levels to help ensure fair trade and economic systems, limiting imports to help protect local markets.

The major obstacle in this movement is the money and power that opposes it. Large landholders, corporations, many governments of industrialized countries, and organizations like the World Bank, International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the World Trade Organization (WTO) tend to prefer the status quo, meaning that this food sovereignty movement, although a great idea on paper, has quite a long way to go to become a reality.

Food sovereignty: Think globally, eat locally

By Beverly Bell & Tory Field, Huffington Post

The first group of protestors at Occupy Wall Street publically delivered 23 complaints, outlining the ways in which corporations control our daily lives. Number four asserted, “They have poisoned the food supply through negligence and undermined the farming system through monopolization.”

How we feed ourselves and each other is the backbone of how, historically, we have organized our communities and societies. The ways in which we arrange our agricultural systems make evident our larger worldviews. Food literally and figuratively connects us to each other, to our ancestors, to our cultures, and to the earth. Maybe all food should be acknowledged as soul food (with a low bow to Southern cooking) because it is, in fact, that deep.

A movement is afoot to put food, land, and agricultural systems back in the hands of citizens. One element has long been considered the overarching essential around the world, though it is only beginning to make an appearance in this U.S. This is food sovereignty, a combination of farming practices, marketing systems, and policy choices which together allow every people to make decisions about, produce, and consume its own local, healthy, and culturally appropriate food. Food sovereignty calls for the democratic participation of the population in shaping food and trade policies. It promotes the right of small growers to have control over their land and production, to grow for domestic consumption under local control. It also promotes ecological agriculture. Read more …

The United States has been experiencing an anti-meat movement as of late. Critics have deemed meat to be a contributor to obesity, illness, and negative environmental impacts.

However, as the article below points out, rarely do we hear about the meat producers across the nation who care deeply about their animals, products, and the effects their farming and ranching practices are having on the environment.

Documentarian Graham Meriweather has set out to help turn the tide through his documentary, American Meat, which examines the meat production industry from the perspective of organic and conventional farmers and ranchers.

Not only did Meriweather meet and interview several farmers and ranchers for the film, he’s also taken the film around the country to encourage dialogue about agriculture. Be sure to listen to the interview that’s at the end of the article.

There are at least two takeaways from this film that immediately come to mind.  First, maybe it’s not the meat industry that needs a restart, maybe it’s the way we communicate about it. Second, there are PLENTY of agricultural families across the United States who care deeply about and take immense pride in the quality of food they are putting on American tables. Many of these families have been recognized through the Leopold Conservation Award and National Cattlemen’s Beef Association’s Environmental Stewardship Award programs.

Stick a fork in it: The American meat industry is ripe for a restart 

By Leslie Chang, Grist

We’ve heard it 38,942,038,417 times* before: The system we use to produce meat in the U.S. is really eff-ed up. Feedlots = horror movies, all this carnivory is making us fat, and to make matters worse, meat consumption contributes to climate change. Right, all good arguments for eating less meat.

What we rarely hear is a fair, honest conversation with the actual farmers raising the animals that produce the meat that most of America consumes. That’s what Graham Meriwether wanted to do with his documentary, American Meat. The film explores meat production from the farmer’s perspective — and not just those who do it the free-range, organic, grass-fed way.

Meriwether initially set out to make a movie just about the alternative farms springing up across the country. He started off by talking to Joel Salatin of Polyface Farm, made famous by Michael Pollan’s book The Omnivore’s Dilemma. But when he started using stock footage of slaughterhouses, something didn’t feel right.

“I think the most important decision we made in the production of the film was not to put any hidden camera footage in the film,” Meriwether says, “because then that set us off on a journey where we got to talk to [conventional farmers], the people that, for the most part, feed most of our country.” Read more …

In a movement that’s being dubbed, “bean to bar,” some chocolatiers are joining the farm-to-table agricultural movement by being more transparent about how their products are sourced and made. According to the article, linked below, the chocolate industry has experienced a history of exploitation, so chocolatiers are hoping to turn this around by being more open about their processes and producing a more sustainable product.

Bean-To-Bar Chocolate Makers Dare To Bare How It’s Done

By Nancy Shute, NPR

If you’re looking to buy chocolate in San Francisco this Valentine’s Day, just follow your nose down Valencia Street. “A lot of people walk in [and say], ‘Oh, my gosh, the smell!” says Cameron Ring, co-owner of Dandelion Chocolate.

That lush chocolate scent is wafting from a new factory that’s smaller than many two-bedroom apartments. The floor plan may be modest, but the olfactory output is huge. And it’s not just the sweet perfume of freshly tempered chocolate. Just-ground cocoa beans exude an acidic tang that fades in a day or two, to be replaced by that classic chocolate aroma. The grassy, acrid smell of fermented cacao beans is even less alluring. They’re sequestered in a sealed room that vents outside.

“Chocolate is one food where everyone is familiar with it, but it has this untold story,” Ring says. As part of the growing bean-to-bar chocolate movement, he wants to tell that story. Thus the factory in a high-traffic area of downtown San Francisco, with a small store and cafe up front that lure customers in to see the whirring machines in the factory beyond.

Read more …

As the debate rages on over the use of genetically engineered (GE) crops, Greg Jaffe, a writer for “The Atlantic,” addresses some common myths about this phenomenon. His bottom line is that genetically modified foods have the potential to reduce hunger and improve the environment but several factors need to be taken into consideration before they can be deemed to have a significant positive impact on agriculture.

The myths he addresses in the article, which is linked below, are as follows:

Myth: “Frankenfoods” made with GE ingredients are harmful to eat.
Jaffe writes that no reliable evidence has emerged to indicate that eating GE foods has detrimental health effects.

Myth: FDA approves GE foods before we eat them.
According to Jaffe, the FDA does not approve foods or ingredients made from GE crops. The agency has, however, adopted a voluntary process where seed developers submit data showing that their product is “substantially equivalent” to non-GE seed and that using the product poses no new health risks.

Myth: Monsanto and other seed developers are the main beneficiaries of GE crops
Although it is true that seed developers make a profit off of these products, Jaffe contends that farmers benefit, as well, allowing them to significantly cut back on the use of expensive pesticides. In addition, Jaffe cites a University of Minnesota study in which it was found that non-GE crop farmers benefited from having neighbors who grow GE crops due to the decreased insect presence in the area.

Myth: GE crops are environmentally sustainable
Jaffe writes GE seeds might provide environmental benefits, but their long-term sustainability comes into question. He states that weeds and insects have the ability to adapt, citing that various weeds are showing tolerance to some of Monsanto’s best selling products.

Myth: Mandatory GE labeling would increase consumer choice
Some argue that labeling GE foods as such gives consumers the option of whether or not to purchase these products. Jaffe argues that this is unnecessary, however. Non-GE products have already begun labeling themselves. In addition, he writes that GE crops are becoming so prevalent that consumers should assume that any ingredient made from corn or soybeans, which is A LOT of them, likely has some GE component to it.

Myth: GE is the best way to increase farm productivity and reduce world hunger
Again, GE crops have the potential to have significant positive impacts, but Jaffe writes that other components are needed to make this happen. For instance, better irrigation equipment, post-harvest storage, and improved roads, especially in developing countries, are needed to truly make GE crops impactful on productivity and hunger reduction. Also, in general, GE crop farmers are often using these crops with farming practices that are unsustainable. So, several factors need to be improved, worldwide, before any claims can be made as to their positive effect  on agriculture and society.

What you need to know about genetically engineered food

By Greg Jaffe, The Atlantic

American farmers started growing genetically engineered (GE) crops (which are also commonly referred to as “GMOs”) in 1996, and now plant 165 million acres annually. Food manufacturers estimate that 70 percent of processed foods contain at least one ingredient made from GE crops. But along with such rapid adoption of a scary-sounding technology have come myths propagated by proponents and opponents. Here are some facts that sometimes get lost in the hype–and that will come as a surprise to people on both sides of the constant arguments.

Read more …

Alaskan Brewing Company, located in Juneau, has become the first brewery in the world to produce “beer-powered-beer”. The brewery recently installed a $1.8 million furnace that burns the spent grain from beer production, producing steam which powers the brewery’s new steam boiler. Alaskan estimates that this will reduce its fuel oil consumption by 60 to 70 percent.

Photo: Alaskan Brewing Company

Brewing company to produce ‘beer-powered-beer’

By Anita George, Paste

An Alaskan brewery found a creative and green way to dispose of its brewing waste and reduce the overall cost of powering its operations.

A recently installed $1.8 million furnace now burns the Alaskan Brewing Co.’s spent grain, (the waste left over after brewing beer) and converts it into steam, which is then used to power most of the brewery, according to The Associated Press.

Read more …

An Australian farm and retailer is using a unique approach to sell its products. Harris Farm Markets has teamed up with a marketing firm to develop an agriculturally-themed game that users can play through Facebook.

“The Crop,” launched today, encourages Facebook users to become involved in the “first fan-grown harvest.” Participants have the opportunity to select what crop is grown and take part in farming decisions as the crop is cultivated. The interesting, and, possibly brilliant, part of this approach is participants are then encouraged to visit their nearest Harris Farm Market store to purchase the fruits and/or vegetables they “helped” to produce.

Of course, Harris Farm Market is claiming that this is simply a way to educate consumers about where their food comes from. But, organizations do not hire marketing firms to fly under the radar. There’s a profit motive behind this, too.

If their goal is to educate AND make a profit, this has the potential to be a brilliant move. Food is a very personal thing for consumers. If they feel like they have a stake in how it’s produced and feel like they’re developing a relationship, and most importantly, trust with the producer, it’s likely that they will be a frequent customer. The question is whether or not this sort of trusting relationship can be built via social channels such as Facebook.

Harris Farm Markets takes facebook folk farming in new social media campaign via workshop

By Campaign Brief

Harris Farm Markets and Sydney-based creative agency Workshop Australia are inviting people to have their say in how fresh vegetables are grown via a new social media campaign that claims to be a world first.

Titled “The Crop”, the campaign launches today on Facebook and creates the first fan-grown harvest. “The Crop” is intended to help people understand the whole farm to store process, so they can choose the freshest fruit and vegetables available to them. People who join the Facebook page can help cultivate a real crop of vegetables and be involved in making choices from what crop is grown to actual farming decisions. The campaign will culminate with fans being able to go to their nominated Harris Farm Market store to collect the vegetables they’ve helped to grow.

Read more …

If you classify bacon as one of the world’s great treasures, I second that notion. Now, people who love their bacon … and ribs … and pork chops are  learning more about where their food comes from by taking butchering classes. Once restricted to the coasts, these classes are now offered at several locations in the Midwest.

Through these classes, students, mostly urban, from a range of professional backgrounds, are gaining an appreciation for the quality of products produced by America’s agricultural families.

Bacon, and how it came to be

By Ben Paynter, The New York Times

For Alex Swanstrom, an auditor at a financial firm, cutting into the dead pig wasn’t hard. It was what happened next that made him rethink whether whole-animal butchery was something he was ready to dive into.

Decked out in a black apron on a recent Sunday afternoon, Mr. Swanstrom, 27, slipped a six-inch boning knife into the carcass of a 275-pound Berkshire-Duroc hog that was splayed out in two large hemispheres on a table inside Local Pig, a butcher shop in this city’s industrial East Bottoms area. He was supposed to carve off the front shank, which requires separating the flesh and tendons around the lower shoulder to remove the limb. But even after dislocating a joint — it popped with the shrill squeak of compressed air escaping — the shoulder still hung together fibrously, causing Mr. Swanstrom to have to pull it over the side of the table for better leverage.

“Don’t force it,” said Alex Pope, one of the shop’s owners. “If you are in a spot that feels like it’s not going well, just move the knife around a little bit.”

When the limb detached, Mr. Swanstrom handed it over and took a swig of his beer.

“That was tougher than I thought,” he said.

Hands-on classes in butchering meat, created to give diners carnal familiarity with their food, emerged as a fad in the late 2000s, one confined largely to the coasts. That has since changed, with shops in places like Chicago and Milwaukee inviting students.

Mr. Pope, who opened his shop smack dab in the middle of the heartland a year ago, decided to offer hands-on classes after hearing about another shop that charged customers just to watch a demonstration.

“That’s ridiculous,” he said. “If you are going to learn to break down a pig, you should be able to actually do it.”

Read more …

Japan has finally listed a ban on U.S. beef imports that it put in place in 2003 in response to the “mad cow” scare. Japan was the largest importer of U.S. beef in 2003, so this is great news for American beef producers. However, as the article below points out, it is a silver lining in the midst of other hardships facing cattle ranchers. They must also contend with rising feed prices and a persistent drought that has diminished water supplies and harmed grazing lands.

However, America’s farmers and ranchers are resilient folks. We hope the lifting of this ban is the start of a string of good news for beef producers.

Photo credit: Kevin Kiley

A break for embattled ranchers

By Stephanie Strom and Hiroko Tabuchi, The New York Times

Reflecting diminishing fears over mad cow disease, Japan eased its decade-old restriction on imports of American beef on Monday, but industry experts said beef producers faced many more challenges to reverse a prolonged slump that has pared the nation’s herd to its lowest level in 60 years and sent prices soaring.

A Japanese government council that oversees food and drug safety cleared a change in import regulations that would permit imports of meat from American cattle 30 months old or younger, rather than the current 20 months.

The change is set to take effect on Friday for American beef processed after that date, and shipments could start arriving in Japan in mid-February, according to the Japanese Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries.

Japan, the world’s largest net importer of food, instituted the ban in 2003 after bovine spongiform encephalopathy, an illness more commonly known as mad cow disease, was found in a single cow in Washington State. Humans are thought to catch the disease’s fatal human variant, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, by eating meat, including the brain and spinal cord, from contaminated carcasses.

Japan eased the ban in 2006 but only for meat from cattle 20 months or younger. Japanese officials argued that the incidence of the disease was higher in older animals.

Read more …