The Business of Farming Against the Odds

Civil Eats | November 28, 2016

Kitchen Table Advisors meets with Fifth Crow Farm

Kitchen Table Advisors founder Anthony Chang (R) provides business guidance to Fifth Crow Farm in Pescadero, Calif. Photo credit: Jonathan Fong courtesy of Kitchen Table Advisors

As an immigrant farmworker in California who started her own organic farm in 2007, Bertha Magaña considered herself a success. Magaña Farms brought in stable income and generated enough revenue so that her husband was able to quit his job and join her.

But when the nine acres of land where she grew strawberries and a variety of vegetables went up for sale last summer, Magaña knew she might have to move—and she didn’t know where to turn. As a first-generation farm owner, she lacked connections to land and capital. And as a monolingual Spanish speaker, she couldn’t tap into many of the services offered to help farmers, since most are offered in English.

Enter Kitchen Table Advisors, a nonprofit organization providing business coaching and tools to farmers in Northern California who don’t have easy access to these resources. Along with the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and California FarmLink, Kitchen Table Advisors helped Magaña secure the loan she needs to buy the land.

“Before I started working with Kitchen Table Advisors, I was lost on how to manage the administrative parts of the farm,” Magaña said. “But now, I don’t have doubts and I feel better because of the support I have from them.”

Kitchen Table Advisors founder and executive director Anthony Chang said Magaña’s situation was an against-all-odds scenario.

“But our business advisor, David Mancera, was able to sit down with her and make sure it was a prudent move from a financial perspective,” Chang said.

After spending over a decade running small business support programs at Opportunity Fund and California FarmLink, Chang launched Kitchen Table Advisors in 2013. He was moved to act after discovering that many of the farmers at his local farmers’ market in Mountain View were barely getting by—and didn’t have anywhere to go for help.

“There are land trusts, farm incubators, and nonprofits that are dedicated to farmers’ markets,” Chang explained. “But business planning and financial management are the weaker parts of the ecosystem of support.”

After researching the economy of farming—an industry plagued by slim profit margins—he realized there was a need to support small farmers who were already growing their businesses, but faced challenges expanding further and establishing a sustainable income.

Eighty percent of the farmers who work with Kitchen Table Advisors are women, people of color, or immigrants.

“These folks face more barriers because of racism, sexism, or language in addition to all the other barriers faced by small farmers, and we help level the playing field,” Chang said. “While the USDA’s Farm Service Agency tries hard to help with its bilingual offices, the fact is there are fewer services available for non-English speakers.”

And even if there are services in different languages, being able to connect with someone who understands your background and experience is necessary to build the trust and relationships needed when borrowing tens of thousands of dollars, he said.

NewFamilyFarm_Oct2015_byJonathanFong-3693

Anthony Chang (L) sits down with New Family Farm in Sebastopol, Calif. as part of a regular business consultation. Photo credit: Jonathan Fong courtesy of Kitchen Table Advisors

That’s exactly how Mancera—a bilingual Salinas Valley native from a farmworker family with a strong background in business—made the difference for Magaña in her bid to purchase her farmland in Royal Oaks.

Although the cost per acre was steep, Mancera used his local knowledge of the area and nuanced understanding of the pressures on farmers in Central California to help assess whether buying the land made sense for Magaña in the long run.

And he trust that Mancera had developed with Magaña and her family was the other essential part of the equation.

“There was a part of the loan process where they might have backed out if they didn’t have anyone they trusted to explain it to them,” he said.

Instead of providing a business plan template, Chang and the group’s three business advisors (based in and around the Bay Area) work with clients over a three-year period to identify their needs, develop a plan of action, and assess how well the plan is working. Advisors meet with the farmers at least once a month.

In order to work with Kitchen Table Advisors, a farm or ranch must be certified organic. Qualifying ranches must raise their livestock on pasture. Chang adds that while it’s not a hard and fast rule, his organization is also looking for farmers that are at an inflection point in their business—either scraping by to make a living between $10,000 to 25,000 a year, or making more, but looking to gain long-term land stability by buying the land on which they’re farming.

During its first three years, Kitchen Table Advisors worked with 10 farms. The results were positive. On average, the farms’ net income increased by more 60 percent in three years. The group also increased their sales collectively by $1 million each year.

Farmers don’t pay for the group’s services. Instead, they work out an agreement with Kitchen Table Advisors that pays the group back by hosting farm tours and fundraising dinners, or through speaking at events aimed at both educating the public and building relationships with the partners and volunteers with whom Kitchen Table Advisors works.

Kitchen Table Advisors itself relies on funds from three main sources: Fifty percent of its budget comes from individual donations and 30 percent comes from tech companies (such as Adobe) and benefit corporations like Patagonia. The remaining 20 percent comes from large foundations and food businesses such as Bi-Rite Market, organic produce distributor Veritable Vegetable, and Delfina restaurant in San Francisco

“[Our supporters] share our values in terms of the food systems we want to see,” Chang said. “And they have a business interest in what we do, because we have a part in their supply chain.”

Now, as Kitchen Table Advisors expands its reach—in the past year it has taken on 15 more farmer clients and will start working with 14 more in January—it’s looking toward the future. The original 10 farms will continue to work with Kitchen Table, but will mainly focus on two large projects a year.

“We’re looking to collaborate more closely with food hubs, land trusts, and finance partners,” Chang said. “And as more U.S. farmers near retirement, we’ve just started talking about how we can help to support the next generation as land changes hands.”

As a “graduate” of Kitchen Table’s three-year program, Magaña may not be working as intensively with Mancera as before. But he will still play an essential role in her business—from helping her determine which crops to plant next season to serving as a translator with produce marketers and government agencies.

“When you are older like my husband and me, it’s much more challenging to have a stable job working for other people,” Magaña says. “But since we work for ourselves, we have more control over our work and our future. David helps me keep my business going.”

Will This Technology Make Fish Farming More Sustainable?

Civil Eats | July 6, 2016

Salmon farm. Photo credit: antonalfred courtesy of Creative Commons

Wild seafood is disappearing rapidly and many consumers have turned to farmed fish as a way to help reverse the trend. But finding a sustainable source of food for carnivorous fish such as salmon and tuna—which rank as the second and third most popular types of seafood in America—has been a persistent challenge for aquaculture producers.

Now, a group of scientists have developed a new form of fish feed that uses no agricultural land and requires very little water. It’s called FeedKind and it’s made from bacteria that eats methane and turns it into energy.

This approach is promising because for a long time fish farms merely fed these fish a diet consisting of wild “forage” fish and oil derived from wild fish. But it often took several pounds of wild fish to produce 1 pound of farmed fish, making it a loss for the oceans.

Then, in recent years, the aquaculture industry turned to feed based on corn, soy, and wheat, usually using dried distiller grains. While these solutions are often better for the oceans, they also rely heavily on agricultural land, much in the way other animal feed does. Similarly, they rely on the use of pesticides and synthetic nitrogen fertilizer, which contribute to “dead zones” in the ocean.

“We’re taking carbon from outside the food chain, which frees up more food for humans,” says Josh Silverman, the founder and chief products officer of Calysta, a biotech startup in Silicon Valley. “And we’re turning methane into a higher value product.”

Calysta says FeedKind could address sustainability problems plaguing aquaculture, which the Food and Agricultural Organization found is one of the fastest-growing agricultural industries worldwide.

After raking in $30 million of capital from investors in a third round of funding—including animal feed giant Cargill—since December, Calysta is readying a R&D plant in England that plans to manufacture FeedKind at pilot scale by the end of this year. It’s also hoping to get a North American commercial production facility online by 2018.

FeedKind is made by first dissolving methane in water with the bacteria (methanotrophs that are commonly found in the top layer of soil). The bacteria gobbles up the methane molecules. Then, after the mixture is fermented, the protein produced from this process is extruded and formed into pellets.

“[People] have known about this bacteria for years,” says Silverman, who has a Stanford PhD in biotechnology and comes from the biopharmaceutical industry. “But no one had thought about how to use them in industrial applications.”

The alternative fish feed was originally developed over a decade ago by Norferm, a Norwegian company that won approval to sell FeedKind in the European Union. After Calysta acquired the company in 2014, Silverman says he refined the fermenting process.

Norferm only tested the product in salmon. But Silverman claims that FeedKind could also be used to feed other carnivorous fish such as halibut, sea bass, sea bream, eel, and shrimp—perhaps even terrestrial livestock and pigs, he adds.

Jan Brekke, the CEO of Sogn Aqua, a sustainable halibut farm in Norway, says he has not tested FeedKind on his fish, but is encouraged by its potential.

“The whole idea of [not] using biomass from the sea to produce fishmeal will turn global fish farming in a total different direction,” he said in an email.

FeedKind is not an environmentally pristine product. For one thing, carbon dioxide is released into the atmosphere during the fermenting process. And Silverman says that Calysta plans to source the methane for FeedKind from natural gas extracted from the electricity grid rather than capturing it from the atmosphere. (Methane is a significant component of natural gas).

Still, Carbon Trust, a London-based consulting firm, found that producing FeedKind consumed 76 percent less water than growing the same amount of protein found in soybean meal and 98 percent less water than wheat gluten. (Calysta sponsored the research, but Carbon Trust maintains that its conclusions were developed independently and the study was peer reviewed.)

Sourcing methane from the grid rather than capturing the emissions produced from human activities (such as fossil fuel production, livestock farming and decomposing landfill waste) may seem like a huge missed opportunity, considering that the greenhouse gas is over 25 times more potent than carbon dioxide.

But because natural gas is so inexpensive, Silverman says there’s no significant infrastructure or market incentive in place for his company to capture methane at commercial scale.

Still, Jillian Fry, the director of the Public Health & Sustainable Aquaculture Project at Johns Hopkins University’s Center for a Livable Future, points out that the Carbon Trust study doesn’t take into account the large environmental impact associated with fracking, a process which is responsible for two-thirds of the natural gas produced in the U.S., according to the federal government.

“It’s a glaring gap,” she says. “Even if not 100 percent [of the natural gas and methane] comes from fracking, the water, land use, and the pollution need to be taken into account,” she says.

Silverman is hoping that commercializing FeedKind will help to stimulate further the unmet demand to convert methane into something more useful—and help to build the infrastructure Calysta needs to source methane more sustainably in the future.

Fry adds that because of the carbon dioxide that’s released and the methane sourcing, it’s difficult to say at this stage if FeedKind is something everyone should throw their support behind.

But she still thinks it has promise. “We need to strike a balance—we don’t want to kill all enthusiasm for a new product and say that there’s no progress unless it’s flawless,” she says. “It’s very exciting to hear about this kind of development.”

—

Note: This story was reprinted in GreenBiz on August 16, 2016.

A Local Grain Economy Comes to Life in California

Civil Eats | June 9, 2016

Bread made from local whole grains at Ponsford's Place Bakery

Whole grain loaves for sale at Ponsford’s Place Bakery in San Rafael, Calif.

When it comes to buying a local loaf of bread, most food conscious consumers find that supporting a small neighborhood bakery fits the criteria just fine.

But for longtime restaurateur Bob Klein, the owner of Oliveto in Oakland, California, that wasn’t enough. Klein, whose restaurant draws from Northern California’s bounty of vegetables, fish, and meat for its Italian-inspired meals, was troubled that he couldn’t find a local source of whole grain flour to make pasta.

“There’s no fully formed local grain economy in the U.S.,” Klein told Civil Eats after his company Community Grains hosted a conference that brought together farmers, plant breeders, millers, bakers, and researchers. (The first conference took place in 2014). “It takes lots of land and capital to be economically viable.”

Now Klein and his organization are making strides towards putting in place the missing components needed to advance that vision. What’s behind his quest to get locally grown and milled whole grains into the mainstream? Better nutrition, greater consumer availability, and higher prices for grain farmers, Klein says.

Last fall, Community Grains completed a feasibility study (funded by the U.S. Department of Agriculture) showing that bakers were willing to pay over 25 percent more for their organic heirloom wheat flour (grown and milled in California) than the going market price for standard organic wheat.

Most of the so-called whole wheat bread found in grocery stores and artisan bakeries today isn’t made with a very high percentage of whole grains, says Craig Ponsford, a champion artisan baker based in the Bay Area who transitioned to baking with 100 percent whole grains six years ago.

“That’s because the market is geared towards white flour,” he says. “It’s really difficult for the consumer to read ‘whole grain’ labels and understand [what they really mean].”

Because of the industrial food system’s appetite for white flour, grain processing facilities in America are almost exclusively comprised of machinery that strips down the whole grain to its starchy white endosperm as quickly as possible—which effectively gets rid of its more nutrient-dense bran and germ. (The air classifier mill that Community Grains uses at Bay State Milling to grind its flour keeps the bran and germ intact).

This means that farmers have no incentive to grow higher quality wheat, such as organic or heirloom varieties, Klein says.

And what about the few who were doing just that? “The price [the wheat] commanded was 15 to 20 percent less than what the crop was worth,” Klein says. “It’s the disparity between the industrial model and what people value.”

Educating the public about the value of whole grains, Ponsford and Klein agree, is their biggest task in starting to shift the U.S. supply, infrastructure, and market demand needed for local, whole grain economies to thrive. There are a few exceptions, such as Camas Country Mill near Eugene, Oregon, which grows, mills, and sells whole grain; Farmer Ground Flour, located in upstate New York, a collaborative enterprise where the grain is grown, milled and baked for locals to enjoy; and Wild Hive Farm Community Grain project, which operates a farm and mill in New York’s Hudson River Valley.

So in 2009, Klein formed Community Grains with the intention to make that economy a reality. Since then the organization has been producing the grain for its “identity preserved” flours, polenta, and pastas. Each batch is branded with both the name of the grain (such as Hard Amber Durum) used entirely to make the pasta, as well as the farm that grew it, such as Fully Belly Farm). It’s available in Whole Foods Markets specialty grocers across the U.S.

Back then, when Community Grains first approached farmers Fritz Durst (Tule Farms) and Full Belly Farm’s Paul Muller about growing whole grains for the identity preserved products, Klein says he had no problem getting them on board.

“[Farmers] know better than anyone how broken our commodity food system is,” Klein said. “So, I think we all started from the same place, and it had to be a completely alternative system to succeed.”

Other Northern California farms (including Healdsburg’s Front Porch Farm and Coke Farms in San Benito) grow for Community Grains as well.

But there was no large granary that could both clean and store their grain. And Klein soon discovered that this lack of infrastructure restricted the venture’s efficiency and profitability.

“Right now we have kernels of wheat that have been thoroughly cleaned and they’re sitting in a defunct winery facility,” he says. “But we’re concerned about bugs in the warm months, so are so moving it into a rented refrigerated storage facility. If we had our own [cleaning and storage facility], we wouldn’t have to pay for storing it, and moving it in and out.” But, he adds, that’s going to be an expensive addition.

To address this issue, Klein brought on Heather Crawford, a business-minded colleague with the background to determine just how Community Grains can build this infrastructure. The two have found that building a granary and getting it online in California could cost anywhere between $500,000 to $1 million. But with donations from a crowdfunding campaign, as well as help from several investors and banks, Klein says there’s a chance Community Grains could get the structure up and running by 2017.

And while Community Grains has yet to work out the exact details of the business model, Klein says that the goal is make sure it’s profitable and 50 percent owned by the grain farmers themselves.

In the meantime, Ponsford is continuing to experiment with these whole grains. For the last five years, he’s run Ponsford’s Place, his bakery in the North Bay, where he uses only uses 100 percent whole grains such as hard white whole wheat and spelt.

Ponsford’s Place Bakery in San Rafael, Calif. Photo credit: Kristine Wong

“I’m incredibly disciplined about not using white flour,” he said. “I’m trying to prove a point.”

On a recent Friday morning, his tiny (800 square foot) bakery was filled with customers buying bread and choosing from a display case full of fruit turnovers, cinnamon morning buns, cookies, and quiche.

But what the customers don’t see is the experimental side of the bakery, when Ponsford works during the wee hours of the night with whole grain flour dropped off by several of the same farmers that work with Community Grains as well as a few others. He tests them by making different types of dough and experiments with a variety of final products. “The whole point of this place is to develop skill sets around whole grains and find the best use of each grain,” he said. “Wheat is complicated.”

That’s in part because the type and quality of the soil impacts the quality of the wheat, which in turn can determine if it will be better suited to, say, a loaf of bread or a tortilla.

Ponsford says that he has also been putting pressure on other bakers to start using whole grains. And he thinks he’s having an impact.

“I see a slow shift happening,” he said. “Five years ago my peers weren’t interested. But now I’m seeing more and more bakers using whole grains all over the world.”

This story was reprinted on KQED’s Bay Area Bites blog on June 9, 2016. Lead photo of wheat by Community Grains.

New startup hopes to develop faster-growing crops

Modern Farmer | Nov. 10, 2015

BioConsortia Photo of plants being tested in various soils

Inside BioConsortia’s research facility, where plants are being tested in a variety of soils. (Photo credit: BioConsortia)

We talked with BioConsortia, an agricultural biotech company headquartered in Davis, Calif., that’s using a recently patented way to identify the specific combination of plant microbes to help improve crop yields in corn, wheat, and soybeans. It says that by 2017, it will be able to commercialize its first seed treatments containing the microbe combo that would enable a plant use less fertilizer yet get comparable yields.

The technology seems like what a plant breeder might do if collaborating with a microbiologist on speed.

One skeptic points out that it can be difficult to grow and mass produce such a group of microbes in the lab, so it’s not a done deal. Other companies—such as Novozymes and Monsanto—are also working with microbes. If it all pans out, it could change the face of agriculture as we know it by providing farmers with a natural alternative to genetically modified corn, soy, and wheat.

The process, dubbed Advanced Microbial Selection (AMS), inspired Khosla Ventures to invest millions in two rounds of BioConsortia’s R&D funding over the last four years. AMS scouts out each crop’s “dream team” of five to seven microbes, or microscopic organisms, that work together to boost a plant’s growth. (These microbes live both within the plant and in the soil.)

The technology seems like what a plant breeder might do if collaborating with a microbiologist on speed.

“It turns the traditional model—where microbiologists test microbes one by one—on its head,” says BioConsortia’s CEO Marcus Meadows-Smith. A serial biotech executive with a background in business and genetics, Meadows-Smith joined BioConsortia after a stint as the head of Bayer’s biological pest management division.

Here’s how the process (which was just patented last month) works, according to Meadows-Smith: First, scientists seek out the best-performing plants living in a variety of soil environments around the world, including ones stressed by drought, desert, cold, and wet conditions. Then they conduct DNA sequencing of the plants and the soils to determine what kinds of microbes are present.

Next, back in Bioconsortia’s California growth chambers, they root these plants in their original soils, then into normal and stressed soils. After observing which plants are thriving and which are faring poorly, they conduct another DNA sequencing round in the plants and the surrounding soils. The purpose is to identify all of the microbes hanging around. Some help to speed up growth by making nutrients more accessible, while others can defend against pathogens that might be present. (Think of the group as being there to help and protect—like a celebrity entourage of personal assistants and bodyguards.)

By looking closely at that entourage of microbes (collectively known as the plant’s microbiome), and comparing which specific microbes are present in the plants that are doing well with the ones those that are faring the worst, BioConsortia says it can nail down each crop’s “dream team” for each soil environment tested.

“We’re looking for that unique combination to keep the plants healthy—even with the ability to recover from drought and staving off the effects of a pathogen,” Meadows-Smith said. “The beneficial microbes have not been documented over the years, compared to the pathogens.”

To date, the company has performed experiments on corn, soybeans, and wheat. It’s in its second year of independent/third-party field trials that are testing the seed treatments (comprising the microbial “dream teams”) it has manufactured for these crops.

But even though Meadows-Smith says that the first year of field trials show that its approach increases yield by 6 percent (compared to an average of an <2 percent increase in yield for a genetically modified or hybrid approach) and a double-digit increase in stressed crops, he declined to show results or provide more details to Modern Farmer, citing confidentiality agreements.

Meadows-Smith says that the improved varieties include corn that produce greater yields, utilize fertilizer more efficiently, and are more drought tolerant, as well as wheat and soy that produce more. In the coming months, BioConsortia will start field tests for tomatoes and leafy vegetables.

“Using microorganisms is definitely the way of the future as it’s more environmentally sustainable [compared to using chemicals],” says Kari Dunfield, a professor of soil ecology at Ontario’s University of Guelph, who studies how agricultural practices affect microbial communities in soils. “The approach makes sense, as we know that microorganisms interact with each other and are synergistic.”

But the expert does express some reservations about BioConsortia’s process. “We know that it’s still really hard to grow those organisms in the lab, so that step will be tricky,” Dunfield says. “It’s one thing to know what organisms are there with the DNA, but when you have the DNA you don’t have enough to grow the organism, so that’s the rate-limiting mechanism.”

She also points out that since microbes are living organisms, they’re unpredictable—which adds a more complex aspect to production compared to working with chemicals. “When you’re selling a mixture [of microbes], you have to make sure they’re not outcompeting each other when you sell it to the farmer.”

A few years from now, Meadows-Smith wants to use Advanced Microbial Selection method to address food security for a growing world population.

But Meadows-Smith insists that BioConsortia’s approach could save millions of dollars. He says it takes $25 million to bring a microbial seed treatment to market, $60 million to do the same for a biopesticide (due to the global registration process), and $135 million for genetically modified trait (according to Peter W.B. Phillips, a professor of public policy at the University of Saskatchewan).

Advanced Microbial Selection can also speed up the research phase, Meadows-Smith claims, so products can get to market in about five years, compared to DuPont’s estimate of the 13 years it takes genetically modified crops to get to market.

“There is a long R&D phase [for GM crops], followed by field trials, field multiplication, and registration,” he said.

Meadows-Smith says that scientists first came up with the idea five years ago at BioDiscovery (BioConsortia’s subsidiary company in New Zealand) while conducting contract research for companies like Syngenta, Monsanto, and Bayer. “They had brainstorming sessions to find ways to improve the speed and efficiency of their discovery process,” Meadows-Smith said. “It was to this end that they had the breakthrough to think of this as a plant phenotype (or plant breeding question) and solution rather than a microbial question.”

He cites more dramatic numbers: The company screens 100,000 microbes in nine months, he says, while a conventional approach would take three to four years.

BioConsortia wants to sell the microbial seed treatments (which are applied directly to the seed) to distributors. If all goes well with the second year of field trials, Meadows-Smith says that a biofertilizer seed treatment—one that would need less fertilizer for comparable yields—will be commercialized by 2017.

But he doesn’t think the approach will necessarily replace other methods—such as genetic modification—across the board.

Currently, the company is focusing on the in the European and North American market. Next, Meadows-Smith says he wants to expand BioConsortia’s efforts to Latin America, Brazil and Argentina.

And a few years from now, he wants to use Advanced Microbial Selection method to address food security for a growing world population—something that’s projected to be a problem in the coming decades given stresses on the environment including drought, lack of arable land to grow sufficient amounts of food, environmental pollution, and climate change.

Meadows-Smith says that BioConsortia’s approach can develop crops that can create more harvestable yield, deposit more protein into wheat, or select for a microbiome that will improve the sugar content of plants.

“A few years from now we’d like to work on [applying this to] cassava, a staple carbohydrate for many parts of Africa,” he said.

Farms without wildlife don’t produce safer food

Civil Eats | Aug. 11, 2015

Lettuce crops. (Photo credit: Suzie’s Farm courtesy of Creative Commons)

Most leafy green lovers probably remember the moment when they became suspicious of spinach.

In 2006, an E. coli outbreak that killed three people and sickened about 200 more was traced to the cool-weather crop growing along California’s Central Coast. Despite the fact that federal and state investigators claimed it was not possible to determine exactly how the dangerous E. coli strain spread to the farm, cattle and wild pig manure were implicated as the sources of the bacteria.

The following year, the state’s farming industry pushed out the California Leafy Greens Marketing Agreement, a set of recommended practices based on previous guidelines issued by to U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to promote food safety on farms. Though voluntary, it covers over a dozen salad fixings (think spinach, arugula, kale, and several types of lettuce) and has since become widespread throughout the nation.

Simultaneously, many produce buyers began asking growers to clear areas near fields of any vegetation. As a result, the farm fields along the California coast changed radically after the outbreak, as farmers did away with wooded areas, medians, and hedgerows, and most farms became relatively sterile landscapes, aside from the crops.

Now a new study [PDF] is calling the efficacy of that practice into question.

“The bottom line is that removing habitat around farm fields is ineffective at making food safer from pathogens,” said Daniel Karp, a U.C. Berkeley postdoctoral researcher whose work is funded by The Nature Conservancy. “It has been shown in this region that there are a lot of benefits to surrounding vegetation as well, such as providing a home for pollinators, which are declining across the nation.”

The research—which was published yesterday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS)—used three sets of industry data from 2007 to 2013 and mapped the results of 236,000 tests for E. coli and Salmonella on leafy greens, irrigation water, and rodents on Central Coast farms.

Karp and his collaborators found that among 57 farms in Salinas, Monterey, San Benito, Santa Clara, and Santa Cruz counties—the source of three-quarters of the the country’s leafy greens—the overall frequency of disease-causing strains of E. coli increased in the six-year period. But it turned out the prevalence increased the most where surrounding wildlife vegetation had been cleared away.

In areas that had kept some natural vegetation intact—a fact the researchers verified using aerial imagery—the team also found that the overall presence of disease-causing strains of E. coli and Salmonella did not go up.

Karp says that by looking to California as an example, the study results could have implications for all of America’s 4.5 million acres of farmland where foods eaten raw are grown, and the wildlife habitat that surrounds this land.

“Federal legislation [enacted] in 2011 will give the FDA the ability to regulate farming practices,” he said, referring to the controversial Food Safety Modernization Act that has yet to be implemented. “While it doesn’t require farmers to remove habitat, my worry is that these practices will spread across the nation as buyers will put pressure on their growers and won’t buy from them unless they remove wildlife habitat.”

The Wild Farm Alliance, a nonprofit organization that advocates for the importance of protecting native species through sustainable agriculture has expressed concern about the dangers of removing wildlife habitat near leafy green crops all along.

Karp points to ways that conservation, agriculture, and livestock can flourish side by side, such as maintaining natural habitat (like trees) as a buffer between livestock and leafy green fields. The vegetation could filter runoff from grazed lands in the soil, he said.

“Or you could plant crops that need to be cooked, like artichokes, corn or wheat,” as buffer between livestock and leafy greens, Karp said.

Another option that could possibly work, he said, is to fence off waterways upstream from leafy green fields in order to prevent wildlife and cattle from defecating in the stream, which might eventually transport the feces downstream.

“We need to talk about how we can manage farming systems that both produce food and livestock and conserve nature at the same time,” Karp said. “We need to think creatively.”

Figure from study: Promising practices include (1) planting low-risk crops between leafy green vegetables and pathogen sources (e.g., grazeable lands); (2) buffering farm fields with noncrop vegetation to filter pathogens from runoff; (3) fencing upstream waterways from cattle and wildlife; (4) attracting livestock away from upstream waterways with water troughs, food supplements, and feed; (5) vaccinating cattle against foodborne pathogens; (6) creating secondary treatment wetlands near feedlots and high-intensity grazing operations; (7) reducing agrichemical applications to bolster bacteria that depredate and compete with E. coli; (8) exposing compost heaps to high temperatures through regular turning to enhance soil fertility without compromising food safety; and (9) maintaining diverse wildlife communities with fewer competent disease hosts.

New kind of agrihood in Northern California takes root

Civil Eats | July 28, 2015

On land that once housed a tomato cannery, a new type of farm is slowly taking root.

The barn at the Cannery, a new agrihood in Davis, Calif. (Photo credit: The New Home Company)

The farm is a flagship feature of The Cannery, a residential development in Davis, California, slated for public unveiling next month. And it’s on of a growing number of agrihoods, planned communities that eschew golf courses and build homes around farms instead.

It might surprise some, but The Cannery will be the first* of a new generation of agrihoods in Northern California, an area known for its local food and farm culture.

Well-established examples of the model, such as Serenbe on the outskirts of Atlanta and Prairie Crossing outside Chicago, have been around for 10 and 20 years respectively. But they’re relatively new to the Golden State. The Rancho Mission Viejo development in Orange County plans to launch a farm in 2016, and plans for an agrihood on University of California land outside San Jose were also recently announced.

The Cannery will be also be noteworthy addition to the agrihood list because it is the first agrihood located on former industrial land. In addition, the Cannery’s farm will be managed by a nonprofit organization focused on educating students and would-be farmers—another unusual element.

“Usually, agrihoods are taking over existing farmland, not reclaimed land,” says Mary Kimball, executive director of the Center for Land-Based Learning (CLBL), the nonprofit that’s gearing up to run the farm next year. The Center runs educational programs across California for students aspiring to agricultural and environmental careers.

Ed McMahon, a sustainable development expert at the Washington, D.C.-based Urban Land Institute currently tracks about 200 such projects nationwide (both complete and in development). He agrees that the model is unique.

The 100-acre development, located near the city’s downtown and the University of California-Davis campus, was the home of the Hunt-Wesson tomato processing plant (later taken over by ConAgra) from the early 1960s until 2000.

After several stalled efforts to build on the land by other developers, the city of Davis approved The New Home Company’s agrihood project in 2013. The project broke ground in May 2014. All 550 solar-outfitted homes in the development will be located within 300 feet of a park or trail connected to the city’s bicycle path network. The Cannery is also the city’s first master-planned community in 25 years, according to Kevin Carson, the New Home Company’s Northern California division president.

“We didn’t just want to put in a community garden,” he said. “We wanted to put real value back in farming, and [we wanted] people to get out of their houses to visit each other. We want the residents of Davis to bike here for a picnic and a tour of the farm.”

This fall, the New Home Company will deed the Cannery’s farmland to the city of Davis. In turn, the city will lease it to CLBL, which plans to make it one of several incubator farms managed by the organization’s graduates. Every few years, new farmers will rotate in and take over daily operations.

“It’s a model not just for California, but how these kinds of places can be reclaimed for innovative developments that have an urban farm,” Kimball said.

The farm, which occupies 7.4 acres of The Cannery, includes 210,000 square feet for growing crops, a barn, a farm house and a fruit orchard. The farmers will live offsite.

CLBL, which will receive $100,000 a year for three years from the New Home Company as seed money, plans to make it a working commercial farm specializing in organic vegetables. Kimball also expects that the farmers will establish a community supported agriculture (CSA) subscription service primarily for Cannery residents, and hold periodic tours or workshops for the community.

But residents shouldn’t expect the farm to be up and running shortly after they move in this fall, Kimball says. CLBL still needs to raise money for farm supplies and equipment—such as a tractor and drip irrigation tape, for example—and the incubator farmers have yet to be selected. The organization also plans to hire an employee who will serve as the farm’s community liaison.

And because the land was previously covered in concrete, Kimball says, the farmers will spend the first few years improving the soil. CLBL has trucked in a new layer of soil for starters. But the natural clay composition of the soil beneath will make it a challenging base for growing food.

“Environmental tests show that the soil isn’t contaminated,” Kimball said. “But for the first three to five years we’ll be doing a lot of reclamation and planting cover crops … we’ll also continue to add lots of manure to the soil to increase the organic matter.”

The New Home Company has planted pumpkins, tomatoes, and sunflowers on the lot for now, Carson said. And there’s also a 15-acre mixed use space at the Cannery that the New Home Company is currently marketing for lease. One possibility for the space, Kimball says, could be a public market of local artisan vendors similar to others that have sprouted around the country recently.

Agrihoods are a small part of the residential housing market—about 5 percent, McMahon estimates. But thanks to factors such as the popularity of farm-to-table dining and the rise of the grow/buy local movement, he says, the niche is growing by leaps and bounds.

The model is also attractive to builders, says McMahon. “You can create value at a low cost,” he said, adding that developers have found that onsite farms have had a greater impact on home sales than other amenities such as spas or swim clubs. “Ag is becoming a competitive differentiator in the development world.”

But the value of green space and the yearning for community, McMahon says, is also responsible for the strong pull towards agrihoods.

One example he pointed to was the Grow Community, a planned neighborhood on Bainbridge Island near Seattle. The developer was initially focused on creating “zero carbon” houses that produced as much energy as they consumed, but included a community garden as an afterthought.

The community garden ended up being the most important meeting place in the neighborhood. “This is where they hang out and talk with their neighbors,” he said. “It’s not just about growing crops. It’s about growing community.”

* A planned community called Village Homes brought gardens and edible landscaping to Davis residents in the 1970s, but it was not built around a working farm.

Middle photo: The first crops planted at the Cannery’s farmland. Photos and housing diagram courtesy of The New Home Company.

Are small farms in India the key to taking tea organic?

The Guardian US/UK | Feb. 5, 2015

Ramesh Babu’s EcoTeas organic tea plantation in Kotagiri, Tamil Nadu, India. Photo credit: Ramesh Babu/EcoTeas

When fourth-generation tea planter Ramesh Babu decided to leave his family’s plantation in the southeast Indian state of Tamil Nadu to start his own organic operation, people called him crazy.

“It was unheard of in our part of the country,” the 54-year-old said of his decision in 2006 to take on 10 acres surrounded by forest in the hill town of Kotagiri nearby. “Initially, when you stop using [chemical] fertilizer you have a big fall in your production, so that’s one major factor which keeps other tea growers from going organic.”

Though rewarding, establishing an organic tea plantation has been challenging, Babu admits. There weren’t any other organic tea planters nearby, so he had to learn everything from vegetable farmers before launching his EcoTeas estate. And because there aren’t many small tea factories in India, he had to design his own processing machinery – a costly undertaking that took seven years. Selling the tea leaves he and his family can’t process or hand-roll on their own was also tough, Babu says, as tea companies pay the same going rate for organic leaves as for conventionally produced leaves.

It’s a lonely road that has left the family-run operation in the red to this day, but it could be an important one. A Greenpeace India report – which has been challenged as “pseudo-scientific” by the tea industry – released in August found that more than 90 percent of the domestic packaged and produced tea contained pesticide residues (pdf).

Yet despite the roadblocks, organic tea production could be moving closer to the norm in a country that produces more tea than any other except China. In the past few months, the two largest tea companies in India – Tata Global Beverages and Hindustan Unilever, which together comprise over 50 percent of the domestic market – announced it would set up pilot studies with the government to test how their growers can phase out pesticide use.

In a statement, Hindustan Unilever said it plans to work with nonprofit agricultural advisor Cabi on the feasibility study and source all of its agricultural raw materials using sustainable crop practices by 2020. The company aims to launch the pilot in April, according to Greenpeace India campaigner Neha Saigal, but it’s not clear when Tata – the second largest tea company in the world (hit in recent years with reports that female workers had been trafficked into domestic slavery from a plantation in Assam) – plans to kick off its program, which also has a goal to achieve sustainable sourcing by 2020.

More details about the pilots aren’t clear, as the companies have remained tight-lipped. (Both declined to comment). But when the largest players in any industry take their first steps towards sustainability, it raises the question: could this pave the way for smaller producers to shift to organic cultivation too?

There’s a huge need to bring down barriers that make it harder for growers to go organic, according to Saigal, whose organization pushed for the pesticide-free commitment, and is now keeping an eye on the companies to implement the pilots. India’s regulations for pesticide use in tea aren’t straightforward or consistent from one jurisdiction to another, nor comprehensive, she says.

“Pesticide regulation in India is in shambles,” Saigal said. “What this shows is that you need a policy level change.”

“Growers aren’t aware of what they are using and what they aren’t using,” she added. “It’s the government’s job to make these small growers aware of what’s toxic and what’s not. It’s their job to create those support systems creating a knowledge base and having a system to transform that knowledge to use ecological alternatives.”

Greenpeace India is in talks with the Tea Board of India – the government-run body with the authority to crack down on these regulatory problems – about setting up a support system for small tea growers so they can move away from pesticides.

In September, the Tea Board (which did not respond to interview requests) issued the second version of its Plant Protection Code that listed the approximately three dozen pesticides approved for use in tea. Yet maximum residue levels had been set for just 10 of them, according to the document.

Government support is needed for organic tea production to thrive in India, Babu says.

“The government of India and the Tea Board have got to come up with a very supportive package for small tea growers,” he said. “This would mean giving subsidies to help small tea growers convert to organic.”

EcoTeas plantation, Kotagiri, Tamil Nadu, India

In direct opposition to the monoculture standard, Babu has not removed the trees that have taken root throughout his EcoTeas plantation. Photo credit: Ramesh Babu/EcoTeas

Babu has his own plan to jumpstart a new generation of organic tea growers in India. He expects his factory to be fully up and running in the next few months, which he believes will improve his financial position, since he’ll be able to produce up to 30 times more tea. Once that happens, he wants to teach other growers how convert to organic growing so he can process their leaves in his factory and start an organic growers association that could foster mutual support and push for higher payments for their leaves.

But Hope Lee, a business analyst who specializes in the hot beverages market for intelligence research firm Euromonitor International, says that small tea growers in India and other developing markets – such as Argentina, the Middle East, China and Kenya – face other challenges beyond their borders.

“They find it hard to export their product to developed markets because they don’t meet strict standards in developed countries,” she said. “Some companies in developing countries don’t have money to hire these expensive services [to test for pesticide levels] and they don’t see the short-term profit from it if they pay a lot of money for testing.”

But it also depends on how serious the national government is in promoting their tea exporting business and how they set their standards, she added.

“So this issue comes to the question [of] if Unilever or Tata have the resources to solve this problem,” Lee said. “Big companies like Twinings or Unilever or Tata – they can influence the government and they have the resources to train their suppliers and make their tea grow in a more sustainable way, but they need the cooperation of the local government,” she said.

Fair-trade and certification programs are used as additional strategies to move industries towards more sustainable practices. Yet Daan de Vries, the markets director at UTZ Certified, an Amsterdam-based organization, says that certification alone is not enough.

“In some places there’s value but it’s not the way to go to change markets,” he said. “Consistently, you’ll see no more than maybe 5% of people who would want to change their buying behavior based on sustainability claims or labels.”

Tea 2030 is an initiative that appears to be taking on a more comprehensive approach. Organized by UK-based nonprofit Forum for the Future, industry heavyweights like Unilever, Tata and Twinings have joined with the Ethical Tea Partnership, Fairtrade and Rainforest Alliance to identify challenges facing the tea industry, such as competition for land, climate change, natural resource constraints and living wage issues. (Starbucks also joined late last year).

A report released by the initiative last year lays out these challenges, along with principles for a sustainable value chain, which the alliance would like to see in action by 2030.

“Of course the individual companies are pursuing their own sustainability [initiatives], such as Unilever and Tata on pesticides,” said Ann-Marie Brouder, Tea 2030’s coordinator. “But there are some problems too big for individual companies to tackle…. We believe that if we’re going to make change, it needs to be owned by the tea sector.”

In the meantime, Babu continues to quietly push forward, all the while tending his tea plants and the trees he’s allowed to intersperse among the crop in direct opposition to the monoculture plantation standard.

“It’s something that cannot be approached in terms of a business,” he said. “It’s a change of the mindset.”

View the original story here.

Can tech startups change the way we eat?

The Guardian US/UK | October 31, 2013

Good Eggs offers a range of produce from local producers that can be ordered online.

These days, even the most casual observers can’t go long without hearing about yet another potentially disruptive business model hoping to redefine an industry.

But when that industry is food, it’s worth paying extra attention. Food, after all, affects everyone. And as the appetite for local food grows stronger than ever, a new crop of tech startups are moving to circumvent the industrial food system in favor of small, regional producers.

Innovative? Certainly. Disruptive? Maybe.

Founders from two promising examples, Good Eggs and Freight Farms, spoke at the Net Impact conference in Silicon Valley last week.

Farm-to-doorstep food, ordered online

Good Eggs, based in California, launched earlier this year after two years of research and testing to find unfilled needs in the food system. Co-founder Rob Spiro, an ex-Google employee, hung out with farmers, spent time on their ranches and tagged along on shoppers’ food-buying trips.

“There’s more demand than there is supply for local food … it’s very rare that you find a dynamic like that,” Spiro said at the Net Impact conference. The highly perishable nature of food, he added, causes the imbalance. Good Eggs’ solution is an online farmers’ market, complete with delivery. With more than 150 profiles of regional producers to pore through, San Francisco Bay Area residents can shop for food the way one might approach online dating.

First, find the type of product you’re interested in, whether it’s seasonal fruits and vegetables, dairy products, meats and seafood, baked goods or snacks. Then, see if the accompanying description and photos appeal to you. When you find something that meets your requirements, you can arrange to pick it up at a regional location or schedule a home delivery.

Good Eggs will aggregate orders from multiple vendors; delivery costs $3.99 per order. The idea is that shoppers have a better chance of finding what they want without having to visit multiple farmers’ markets while producers will only harvest what’s been ordered for the week, reducing food waste.

Aside from the Bay Area, Good Eggs is piloting test programs in Brooklyn, Los Angeles and New Orleans and plans to expand to hundreds of cities, Spiro said. He aims to take market share away from traditional grocers, including Walmart and Target, as well as from Amazon. “We would love to take them on,” he said.

But Good Eggs will have its work cut out to make sure it signs on enough producers to meet customer demand and vice versa. If it can’t meet most of shoppers’ grocery needs, they may not be willing to switch from bigger chains. The company also will need to keep a tight rein on quality control and – given the many different producers – make it easy for customers to choose between different products without being able to see, touch or smell them in advance.

In New Orleans, its fastest-growing market, the company already has signed on producers that weren’t previously selling at farmers’ markets, Spiro says. “We’ve got Vietnamese fishermen selling on the New Orleans [Good Eggs] market now that have not been hooked into the farmers’ markets or the local food scene,” he said.

Farm in a crate: year-round hydroponics

Two friends in Boston, Brad McNamara and Jon Friedman, were frustrated by the inefficiencies of growing plants in rooftop greenhouses. So they designed a hydroponics farm in a shipping crate that can be installed anywhere with electricity and water hookups.

That led to the founding of Freight Farms in 2010, then the raising of nearly $31,000 via Kickstarter for the company’s first unit in 2011.

The idea is a portable farm that users can use to grow local, fresh produce year round – instead of relying on food trucked or flown in from warmer climates. “Our main goal is to allow people to create small and medium-sized food businesses that can supply fresh and local foods to any environment,” McNamara, Freight Farms’ CEO, said at the Net Impact conference.

By doing that, the company hopes to ultimately change the way food is grown and distributed on a large scale. “The food system is linear, which creates inequality, access issues, price issues and spoilage,” McNamara said. “The system is ripe for disruption – and tech is a way to do that.”

Inside Freight Farms’ 40-foot-long shipping crates, users can grow their selection of more than 3,600 plants, including leafy greens, herbs and mushrooms. The system is climate-controlled, lit by LED lights and electronically monitored. Freight farmers can view the conditions in their farms via their smartphone and customize alerts, for instance, when the temperature or humidity exceeds a certain level.

The freight farms have the potential to be installed in a range of locations, such as underutilized land at schools or recreation centers, side lots or vacant lots. And, in order to use land more efficiently, the crates can be stacked four high and eight deep.

One developer in Massachusetts plans to install freight farms on three acres of an abandoned strip mall – farming a few crates himself and renting the rest to others – instead of putting in new stores. The system is designed to be accessible to those with little farming experience, McNamara claims. Inexperienced farmers have achieved crop yields of 60%, while experts have yielded 95%, he said. And the company also networks its farms so that users can support each other and share farming strategies and techniques.

Freight Farms has received a lot of interest from regional food distributors who haven’t been able to meet the demand for fresh local produce after the local growing season ends, McNamara said. “It’s cheaper for them to buy from a freight farm versus putting another truck on the road,” he added.

One distributor in Minnesota was so happy with the basil grown by a freight farmer that he offered $1.75 more per pound than the price he was initially willing to pay, he said.

With a price tag of $60,000 per shipping crate – and a threefold increase in price if the farm is solar-powered – McNamara acknowledges that a freight farm is not affordable for everyone.

In the past few weeks, though, he says he’s been exploring the ideas of regional food distributor sponsorship for crate farms in low-income communities. The distributor would pay for the farm with stipulations that a certain percentage of the vegetables would be grown for their inventory.

Freight Farms has also been tweaking its user instructions to make them more visual and to simplify the process. The hope is that this could make the farms more accessible to a broader swath of people, including those with little education or without strong English skills.

“We want to have these changes buttoned up by the middle of next year,” McNamara said.

View the original story here.

Native Americans Farm in Pescadero

by Kristine A. Wong

I produced, shot and edited this video along with a print article for Half Moon Bay Patch.

Native Americans Farm in Pescadero from kristine a. wong on Vimeo.

Last fall, a group of Native Americans from all over the country congregated in the Bay Area to participate in an annual swim from Alcatraz to San Francisco.

In the week leading up to the big event, the group headed out for practice swims at in the early morning and spent the afternoon visiting several sites in the Bay Area related to public health and wellness.

The program was sponsored by PATHSTAR, an organization focused on promoting sustainable health and wellness among Native Americans through hands-on education and experiential learning.

Founded by Nancy Iverson, a physician who worked on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota for many years, PATHSTAR encourages active lifestyle and healthy nutrition practices as strategies to prevent diabetes and other diseases in Indian country.

The group spent an October afternoon in Pescadero (south of Half Moon Bay) harvesting produce from Addwater Farm to sell at the Pescadero Farmer’s Market. The group then worked with Addwater Farms’ Brian Coltrin to prepare the produce for market sale.

Participants say they hope to pass on what they learned to community members back home, while Coltrin says he hopes to continue working with individuals at the Pine Ridge Reservation.

Coltrin was approached to participate in the program through Iverson, who is a regular customer of his at a farmer’s market in San Francisco.

Individuals who participated in the 2011 swim and PATHSTAR program are:

From Richmond, Calif.

Zolina Zizi (Cheyenne, Arkiara, Creek)

From Pine Ridge, S. Dak. (Lakota)

Terry Mills

Nakina Mills

Chrystal White Eyes

Jeffery Not Help Him

Martin White Hawk

Jolene Martin

From Ketchikan, Alaska (Ketchikan Indian Community)

Ruth E Pechay (Tlingit and Haida)

Anitamarie Pechay Seludo (Tlingit and Haida)

Bill Hardy, Ketchikan, Alaska

From Inchelium, WA (Colville Federated Tribes)

Shelli Martinez, Okanogan Band

Jerry Signor, Coville Federated Tribes

kristine wong | MULTIMEDIA + VIDEO JOURNALIST

reporting on energy, environment, food, green tech, culture, health

Tag Archives: farming