This “pinkhouse” at Caliber Biotherapeutics in Bryan, Texas, grows 2.2 million plants under the glow of blue and red LEDs. Photo: Courtesy of Caliber Therapeutics

Post by Michaeleen Doucleff, The Salt at NPR Food (5/21/13)

The idea of vertical farming is all the rage right now. Architects and engineers have come up with spectacular concepts for lofty buildings that could function as urban food centers of the future.

An artist’s rendering of what a planned vertical farm in Linkoping, Sweden, will look like.
Photo: Courtesy of Plantagon

“The idea of taking a skyscraper and turning it into a vertical farming complex is absolutely ridiculous from an energy perspective,” says horticulturist Cary Mitchell of Purdue University, who’s been working on ways to grow plants in space for more than 20 years.

The future of vertical farming, Mitchell thinks, lies not in city skyscrapers, but rather in large warehouses located in the suburbs, where real estate and electricity are cheaper.

And oh, yeah, instead of being traditional greenhouses lit by fluorescent lamps, he says these plant factories will probably be “pinkhouses,” glowing magenta from the mix of blue and red LEDs.

Light is a major problem with vertical farming. When you stack plants on top of each other, the ones at the top shade the ones at the bottom. The only way to get around it is to add artificial light — which is expensive both financially and environmentally.

Vertical farmers can lower the energy bill, Mitchell says, by giving plants only the wavelengths of light they need the most: the blue and red.

“Twenty years ago, research showed that you could grow lettuce in just red light,” Mitchell says. “If you add a little bit of blue, it grows better.”

Plant’s photosynthesis machinery is tuned to absorb red and blue light most efficiently. They have a handful of other pigments in their leaves that catch other wavelengths, but the red and blue wavelengths are the big ones, supplying the majority of the light needed to grow.

Cary Mitchell and Celina Gomez, of Purdue University, harvest tomatoes grown next to a tower of blue and red LEDs. Photo: Courtesy of Purdue Agricultural Communication photo/Tom Campbell

And there’s another advantage to using LEDs in greenhouses and vertical farming, Mitchell says: Because these lights are cooler, you can place them close to the plants — even stacked plants — and lose even less energy.

Recently, Mitchell and his graduate student designed a 9-foot-tall tower of lights and grew tomato plants right up against it. “As the plants get taller, we turn on the [light] panels higher up,” he explains. “It takes about two months before all the panels are on.”

The towers cut energy consumption by about 75 percent, Mitchell and his team reported earlier this year.

Right now, experiments are using these specialized LEDs to supplement natural light, not replace it.

But as LEDs get more and more efficient, could growers forgo the natural light altogether and grow crops completely in enclosed rooms, where they’re protected from temperature changes or damaging pests?

That’s exactly what Barry Holtz, at Caliber Biotherapeutics, is already doing.

His farms have never seen the light of day.

Plants at Caliber Biotherapeutics grow under blue and red LEDs, with wavelengths of light that match those that get absorbed by the photosynthetic machinery. Photo: Courtesy of Caliber Biotherapeutics

“A photon is a terrible thing to waste,” Holtz tells The Salt. “So we developed these lights to correctly match the photosynthesis needs of our plants. We get almost 20 percent faster growth rate and save a lot energy.”

Holtz is growing a tobacco-like plant to make new drugs and vaccines. The indoor pinkhouse gives him tight control over the expensive crops, so his team can stop diseases and contamination.

Holtz says this type of indoor gardening isn’t going to replace traditional farms anytime soon. It’s still relatively expensive for growing food. “We couldn’t compete with iceberg lettuce farmers,” he says, “but for certain specialty crops, the economics wouldn’t be so bad.”

And, he says, the pinkhouse is actually quite efficient when it comes to water and electricity. “We’ve done some calculations, and we lose less water in one day than a KFC restaurant uses, because we recycle all of it.”

Copyright 2013 NPR.

Archival photo of Alice Waters at the Ferry Plaza Farmers Market. Photo courtesy of CUESA

On May 18, CUESA will be celebrating the 20th Birthday Bash of the Ferry Plaza Farmers’ Market, with special events throughout the Saturday morning market.

For $20 a ticket ($10 for children 10 and under), market goers can create their own seasonal fruit shortcakes at stations “curated” with market ingredients prepared by four top local pastry chefs: William Werner of Craftsman & Wolves, Francis Ang of Fifth Floor, Jen Musty of Batter Bakery, and Luis Villavelazquez of Les Elements Patisserie. There will also be coffee, tea, and a juice and mimosa bar filled with fresh-squeezed juices, fresh fruit and vegetable purees (don’t miss the surprisingly refreshing fennel-frond puree), sparkling water and Champagne. The market’s founders will do a presentation at 11am.

Preview of the mimosa bar

The first regular weekly markets, held in front of the Ferry Building, happened in 1993. Do you remember 1993? I do. The scars of 1989′s 6.8 Loma Prieta quake still criss-crossed the city. A post-earthquake, post-financial crash, pre-tech boom recession meant jobs were scarce but rents were cheap. But change was coming, mostly notably along the waterfront. Since 1958, the Embaracadero Freeway had sliced across the northeastern edge of the city, throwing the piers from the Bay Bridge northwards into concrete-shadowed gloom. Ferries still left from the Ferry Building, but to get to them, you scuttled as fast as possible through the building’s dimly lit, grubby passages, no more inviting than a New York City subway tunnel. Then, in 1991, the earthquake-damaged freeway was finally removed, and the City realized it had a civic jewel–the greatly underutilized Ferry Building, suddenly revealed in all its Market Street-anchoring glory–on its hands. It would take another seven years before renovations would begin that would return the Ferry Building to a modernized, food-glorying version of its original 1898 self–but in the bare stretches of concrete out front (remember, those pretty, palm-dotted, skateboard-ready plazas are still at least a decade away), a culinary revolution was getting underway, one head of oak-leaf lettuce at a time.

Aerial view of an early Ferry Plaza Farmers’ Market across from the Ferry Building. Photo: Courtesy of CUESA

In 1992, a small group of San Franciscans including Sibella Kraus, then a forager and produce-finder for Alice Waters at Chez Panisse, writer, restaurant critic and Hayes Street Grill chef/owner Patricia Unterman, and local developer Tom Sargeant organized themselves into the San Francisco Public Market Collaborative, with the idea of reclaiming the waterfront for a public market that would connect farmers directly with chefs and home cooks–in fact, with any curious city eaters. After endless meetings with representatives from the City and the Port, they got grudging approval for a one-time-only open-air market in Ferry Plaza parking lot on Sept. 12, 1992. At the time, the Alemany Market, located near the freeways at the base of Bernal Heights, was the city’s only regular farmers’ market. If you were a chef, you relied on distributors and vendors from the wholesale produce market near Bayview. If you needed speciality items, you could swing through Chinatown, the Richmond, or the Mission, if you had time, but mostly, you talked to your delivery guys on the phone, and hoped they’d show up with something close to what you’d asked for.

The success of the one-day market took even the optimists of the collaborative by surprise. The group immediately began pressuring the city to give permission for a regular market, bringing farmers and urbanites together on a weekly basis. By 1993, there was already a few months of precedent: the Heart of the City Farmers’ Market had set up in Civic Center in early spring. Starting in May, the market slowly gained momentum, and word spread between interested cooks and farmers alike. Here was the place to come to get stuff fresh, straight from the ground. Farmers were learning, too, that these new customers were curious. They didn’t just want as many bunches for a dollar as they could get; they wanted to sniff and taste and know what it was they were seeing. By the time the summer was over, the farmers didn’t want to leave. They’d found a new outlet for their produce, one that required a lot of more hands-on time, but also could command a better price that wholesaling. And there were relationships forming, between up-at-3-am farmers from Watsonville and Guinda and city customers who were entranced at the idea of farm-fresh corn and just-picked melons showing up just down the hills from their Telegraph Hill doorsteps once a week. After yet more negotiating with the city, and the market became a year-round event.

Eatwell Farm stand in the early years–no crowds! Photo: Courtesy of Eatwell Farms

And from the beginning, the chefs came, too. In those first years, as I was learning my way around the city’s food scene as the weekly restaurant critic for the San Francisco Bay Guardian, every trip to the market was punctuated by running into a half-dozen other food writers, editors, cookbook authors, and chefs. It was a pretty small world, and for a few hours every Saturday morning, it really was a village. (Look, there’s Alice, sniffing the peaches!) The original core group of founders had reorganized into CUESA, the Center for Urban Education about Sustainable Agriculture–none of which were the food-world buzzwords that they are today. From the beginning, the market’s organizers had a larger vision: to educate minds as well as palates, and to change the way people, both home cooks and chefs, thought about the process of getting food to their tables. Meeting farmers every week, hearing how the weather or gas prices or labor issues were affecting their crops, seeing how their produce was shaped not season by season but week by week, was a living education for everyone shopping at the market. And farmers learned, too: about what they could sell, what flew off the table and what, like puntarelle, minaret-shaped romesco broccoli, padron peppers, or fuzzy-sheathed green almonds, needed a little more nudging to get piled into the chefs’ carts and make it onto menus across the city.

David Winsburg of Happy Quail Farms, who helped create the craze for padron peppers. Photo: Courtesy of CUESA

As the renovations of the waterfront and the Ferry Building got underway, the market moved to accommodate the construction, from various parking lots around the building, then north to another parking lot off Green Street near the Embarcadero. It remained for several years, then moved back, now to wrap around the Ferry Building, filling the back parking lot and wrapping around the building. I can still remember one blustery December 31, a vendor calling out, “Free rutabaga with every purchase!” and the delicious rutabaga-potato mash I made on New Year’s Day. Or the blissfully sunny February days, the market stalls glowing with sunshine-colored citrus, everyone outside eating oysters, when I’d come back to visit from self-imposed exile in gray, slushy, freezing New York City and wonder why I’d ever left. (Three years away from San Francisco was all I could stand.)

Autumn market sign. Photo: Courtesy of CUESA

There was a brief, unsuccessful attempt at a Sunday morning market; much more popular were the two lunchtime markets for downtown workers and weekday visitors on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Innovations at the market–from the Waste Wise initiative, which brought large-scale composting and recycling to the market, to the ban on plastic shopping bags, later adopted by the city as a whole, has made a small but significant change for the better in the way we shop and eat. Hundreds of schoolchildren come through the market every year, learning where their food comes from, and how it gets from dirt to plate.

Info Booth at Ferry Plaza Farmers Market. Photo: Courtesy of CUESA

Every day, says executive director David Stockdale, he talks with people from all over the world who are interested in learning from the market. Many of the vendors with brick-and-mortar shops inside the Ferry Building–Michael Recchiuti, Frog Hollow Farm, Prather Ranch, and soon Rancho Gordo and Humphrey Slocombe–started out as vendors in one of the three weekly markets. It’s become not just a market but an educational tool, a visitors’ destination, a fun place to go for breakfast or lunch, and a showcase for some of Northern and Central California’s best produce, week in and week out. Happy birthday, CUESA, and thank you for all you’ve done.

Do you have memories of the early days of the Ferry Plaza Farmers Market? Please share in the comments section, below.

The U.S. Capitol building. Photo: Jewel Samad/AFP/Getty Images

Post by Dan Charles, The Salt at NPR Food (5/16/13)

Two seemingly common-sense, bipartisan food reforms have gotten mugged on Capitol Hill in recent days. If you’re a loyal reader of The Salt, you’ve heard of them.

First, there’s the proposal — backed by an odd-couple alliance of egg producers and animal-welfare activists — to set minimum standards for the housing of egg-laying chickens. Second, the Obama administration wants to change the way the United States provides food aid to people in foreign countries, buying more of that food close to where it’s needed.

Neither proposal seems, at first glance, controversial. Changing the rules for food aid should save money, according to most independent analyses, allowing the program to feed more hungry people. Similar reforms, in fact, were proposed by President George W. Bush. The “egg bill,” meanwhile, is a remarkable instance of pragmatic compromise between bitter adversaries.

Any change, however, threatens somebody, and both of these proposals have run afoul of politically well-connected people.

In the case of food aid, the skeptics include American shippers and dock workers, who will get slightly less work if the U.S. sends cash to buy food abroad. They, in turn, have a powerful friend in Congress: Sen. Barbara Mikulski, proud native of the port city of Baltimore and chairwoman of the Senate Appropriations Committee. In an e-mail to NPR, Mikulski wrote that “we need to find a sensible center that will allow us to implement smart reforms without jeopardizing U.S. jobs, particularly those in the maritime industry.”

In part because of Mikulski’s resistance, advocates of reform are now trying a different route entirely — a free-standing bill that’s been introduced by Edward Royce, the Republican chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. Its prospects are uncertain.

The “egg bill,” meanwhile, has some influential supporters. Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack brings it up frequently as an exemplary compromise between large-scale agriculture and its critics. Debbie Stabenow, D-Mich., chairwoman of the Senate Agriculture Committee, actually tried to include it in her draft of the farm bill, which is up for renewal (again) this year.

Pork and beef producers, however, object in principle to the notion of federal regulation of farm animal housing — even though, in this case, the egg producers themselves are asking for federal regulations as a way to pre-empt state rules that are more troublesome.

When the agriculture committees of both House and Senate finished their versions of the farm bill this week, all mention of guaranteed living space for egg-laying hens had vanished.

In fact, the House committee adopted a provision that could make it more difficult for states to set such standards. This amendment, offered by Rep. Steve King, R-Iowa, would prohibit any effort by state governments to control the way that their food is produced by out-of-state farmers. The measure is aimed specifically at California’s Proposition 2, which is set to ban farmers in Iowa or Idaho from selling their eggs in California if those eggs come from chickens housed in traditional cages.

Copyright 2013 NPR.

Through the City Land Application of Biosolids Program in Geneva, Ill., the fertilizer supplement is provided to local farmers at no cost. Photo: City of Geneva/Flickr

Post by Eliza Barclay, The Salt at NPR Food (5/12/13)

Any gardener will tell you that compost is “black gold,” essential to cultivating vigorous, flavorful crops. But it always feels like there’s never enough, and its weight and bulk make it tough stuff to cart around.

I belong to a community garden in Washington, D.C., that can’t get its hands on enough compost. So you can imagine my delight when I learned that the U.S. Composting Council was connecting community gardeners with free material from local facilities through its Million Tomato Compost Campaign.

I signed us up last month, and was promptly contacted by Clara Mills, the environmental coordinator for Spotsylvania County in central Virginia. Mills volunteered to deliver a dump truck full of compost to our garden from her facility, an hour away. It sounded too good to be true. Then one of my fellow gardeners noticed the source of the Spotsylvania compost: biosolids, or human poop that’s been treated and transformed into organic fertilizer.

About 50 percent of the biosolids produced in the U.S. are returned to farmland through a process that is heavily regulated by the Environmental Protection Agency. Even so, some people – including the Sierra Club — remain skeptical of the use of this waste product in food production. They worry that heavy metals, pathogens or pharmaceuticals might survive the treatment process and contaminate crops. So what’s an urban gardener to do in light of mixed perceptions about whether it’s OK to use poop to grow your food?

I set out to investigate this, hoping that whatever I learned would help my garden decide whether to accept the donation or not.

First, remember that for thousands of years, before the invention of synthetic fertilizer in 1913, many farmers utilized their decomposed sewage, sometimes called “night soil,” to replenish the soil with nutrients lost in farming. The Chinese were especially adept at using human waste this way – one historical account notes that in 1908, a contractor paid the city of Shanghai $31,000 in gold for the privilege of collecting 78,000 tons of human waste and carting it off to spread on fields.

When growing urban areas required that sewage be piped outside of the city, the practice dropped off and attention turned to improving wastewater treatment to avoid polluting waterways. Raw waste is, of course, nasty stuff until all the dangerous bacteria have been killed off, either by heat or anaerobic digestion.

But the sludge was still piling up in landfills, so scientists began testing how to use it in agriculture safely; the waste was a free source of nutrients like nitrogen and phosphorus, afterall. And letting it sit in landfills or incinerating it created its own environmental issues. By the 1990s, the Environmental Protection Agency created strict standards with two tiers for biosolids still in use today. To sell Class A biosolids to farmers and gardeners, facilities have to ensure that there are no dangerous heavy metals or bacteria in the end product.

The ick factor, however, has not faded entirely. While plenty of large-scale farms like this one in Kansas City, Mo., use biosolids, they are not officially allowed in organic agriculture. Bowing to public input, the U.S. Department of Agriculture decided in 2000 to prohibit the use of sludge in the National Organic Program. This was in spite of the fact that “there is no current scientific evidence that use of sewage sludge in the production of foods presents unacceptable risks to the environment or human health,” USDA spokesman Samuel Jones tells The Salt.

A handful of activists have also sounded the alarm on the widespread use of biosolids in conventional agriculture. They allege, among other things, that the EPA-approved treatment of biosolids doesn’t address all the possible contaminants in the waste.

A National Academy of Sciences report in 2002 also stated that while there have been some anecdotal stories of adverse health effects from exposure to biosolids, there are no studies that prove a causal link. Still, the NAS said that since biosolids may contain substances like chemicals and pharmaceuticals, more epidemiological research was needed to explore possible health effects of using them to grow food. (Currently, the U.S. Geological Service is investigating exactly what happens to plants when biosolids are applied to soil.)

Still, some scientists argue that over the years, the biosolids industry has gotten much better at keeping contaminants out of the final product.

“We have systemically looked at all kinds of potential hazards,” says Ian Pepper, a professor and director of the Environmental Research Laboratory at the University of Arizona who has been studying biosolids for 30 years. “Invariably we’ve found that the risks are much lower than those suggested by environmental activists.”

And other proponents say that it’s hard to prove that biosolids are a significant source of contaminants.

“These compounds are ubiquitous in the environment – in the soil, water, within our bodies,” says Neil Zahradka, who overseas biosolids for the state of Virginia’s department of environmental quality. “So the question is: If it’s in the biosolids, then is that a problem? None of studies so far have been able to conclusively say that yes there’s an issue here.”

As for the pathogens, Zahradka contends that the composting process, one of a few different treatment methods (and the one used in Spotsylvania County, which offered compost to my garden), eliminates them.

Here’s how it works: Spotsylvania receives the raw sewage and mixes it with mulch. The carbon in the mulch speeds up the decomposition process, and generates heat. The material reaches 160 plus degrees for 21 days, says Mills. That’s enough to kill all harmful bacteria, she says. But the facility also tests the material regularly to be sure the pathogens and dangerous heavy metals are below detectable levels.

So will my garden be using these biosolids anytime soon? We’ll have to take a vote to decide. In the meantime, it’s interesting to see other urban gardeners getting on board with biosolids.

Copyright 2013 NPR.

A bee inspector checks on a frame of bees to assess the colony strength near Turlock, Calif., in February. More than 30 percent of America’s bee colonies died off over the winter. Photo: Gosia Wozniacka/AP

Listen to the Story on All Things Considered

Post by Dan Charles, The Salt at NPR Food (5/7/13)

According to a new survey of America’s beekeepers, almost a third of the country’s honeybee colonies did not make it through the winter.

That’s been the case, in fact, almost every year since the U.S. Department of Agriculture began this annual survey, six years ago.

Over the past six years, on average, 30 percent of all the honeybee colonies in the U.S. died off over the winter. The worst year was five years ago. Last year was the best: Just 22 percent of the colonies died.

“Last year gave us some hope,” says Jeffrey Pettis, research leader of the Agriculture Department’s Bee Research Laboratory in Beltsville, Md.

But this year, the death rate was up again: 31 percent.

Six years ago, beekeepers were talking a lot about “colony collapse disorder” — colonies that seemed pretty healthy, but suddenly collapsed. The bees appeared to have flown away, abandoning their hives.

Beekeepers aren’t seeing that so much anymore, Pettis says. They’re mostly seeing colonies that just dwindle. As the crowd of bees gets smaller, it gets weaker.

“They can’t generate heat very well in the spring to rear brood. They can’t generate heat to fly,” he says.

Farmers who grow crops like almonds, blueberries and apples rely on commercial beekeepers to make sure their crops get pollinated.

But the number of honeybees has now dwindled to the point where there may not be enough to pollinate those crops.

Pettis says that this year, farmers came closer than ever to a true pollination crisis. The only thing that saved part of the almond crop in California was some lovely weather at pollination time.

“We got incredibly good flight weather,” Pettis says. “So even those small colonies that can’t fly very well in cool weather, they were able to fly because of good weather.”

A bee collects nectar from a fruit tree in West Bath, Maine. The number of honeybees has now dwindled to the point where there may not be enough to pollinate some major U.S. crops. Photo: Pat Wellenbach/AP

“It’s just something that gets in your blood, so you don’t want to give up. [You say,] ‘OK, it’s 30 percent this year; I’ll do better next year.’ We’re very much optimists,” he says.

Beekeepers have a whole list of reasons for why so many colonies are dying. There’s a nasty parasite called the Varroa Mite, which they can’t get rid of. There are also bee-killing pesticides. And there are just fewer places in the country where a bee can find plenty of flowering plants that provide nectar and pollen.

That was especially true this past year. The same drought that left Midwestern corn fields parched and wilting also dried up wildflowers and starved the bees.

That was a natural disaster. But May Berenbaum, who chairs the Department of Entomology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, says that most of the changes in the landscape are the result of people’s decisions about what to do with their land.

“I just wish there were more incentives for people — not just farmers — to plant a more diversified landscape that provides nutritional resources for all kinds of pollinators,” she says. “Plant more flowers! And be a little more tolerant of the weeds in the garden.”

More controversial is the role of pesticides. Some beekeepers and environmentalists are calling for tighter restrictions on the use of one particular class of pesticides called neonicotinoids. Europe is about to ban some uses of these pesticides. But U.S. farmers and pesticide companies are opposed to any such move here, and the Environmental Protection Agency says it’s not yet convinced that this would help bees very much.

Copyright 2013 NPR.

Missouri farmer Gary Riedel says wet weather will put him about a month behind last year’s planting.
Photo: Abbie Fentress Swanson for NPR

Listen to the Story on Morning Edition

Post by Abbie Fentress Swanson, The Salt at NPR Food (4/24/13)

Last year’s drought wreaked havoc on farmers’ fields in much of the Midwest, cutting crop yields and forcing livestock producers to cull their herds. This spring, the rain that farmers needed so badly in 2012 has finally returned. But maybe too much, and at the wrong time.

It’s almost the end of April, which is prime time to plant corn. But farmers need a break in the rain so they can get this year’s crops in the ground and try to lock in good yields at harvest.

“There are other things that can limit yield, and planting date isn’t necessarily even the most important one,” says University of Missouri agronomist Brent Myers. “But it is something we have to consider. And we want to try to get that corn planted in that timely window of, say, after the first week of April to the first week in May.”

At his farm in Centralia, Mo., Gary Riedel, 69, in his green baseball cap and Western-style shirt, is just itching to plant corn on 1,000 acres of his 2,300-acre farm. He pulls open the lid from one of his planter’s hoppers and shows me the salmon-colored corn seed that’s all ready to go.

“Last year, I believe I started planting on the 28th of March, and this year, it may be the 28th of April, the way it’s beginning to look,” Riedel says. “It’s just that the later we get, the more we are subject to problems from pollination due to hot weather.”

Excessive heat and dryness can hurt corn pollination and stunt growth, leading to lower yields. So farmers try to plant early — especially with corn still getting about $6.50 a bushel. (As The Salt reported last year, corn farmers made serious money, even though yields were down.) The U.S. Department of Agriculture says by this time last year, 26 percent of the country’s corn crop was already planted. This year, farmers only have 4 percent of their corn in the ground.

We walk out to one of his misty fields, and Riedel points to the reason.

“See there, you can see a water puddle out in the field,” he says. “We’re going to have to wait till that dries up.”

But even when the puddle dries, it still might take a while to get corn into the ground. Planting in cold, wet soil can cause all kinds of problems for corn seedlings, including that they can’t take root or emerge above ground.

By this time last year, 26 percent of the country’s corn crop was already planted. A wet, cold spring means that only 4 percent is in the ground right now. Photo: Seth Perlman/AP

But even up until January, this moisture is what farmers had been hoping for. Last year’s drought led to a 13 percent drop in corn production, which in turn led to tight corn stocks and increased competition for corn between ethanol plants and livestock producers. The shortfall is also hurting corn exports, which are now at a 40-year low.

“A good production year would mean there would be less competition and would improve margins,” says Sterling Liddell, an agricultural economist with Rabo AgriFinance. “Especially in the cattle industry, which has suffered the most.”

Last year’s drought moved many farmers, including Gary Riedel, to increase the amount of crop insurance they carry. Peggy Smart, 77, also upped her coverage. Along with her family, she plants corn, soybeans and wheat on 6,000 acres of Missouri River bottomland in Tebbetts, Mo.

But nothing is planted yet. “We just don’t have enough sunshine,” she says.

Both Smart and Riedel are hoping to minimize the risks of bad weather by trying out drought- and flood-tolerant hybrid seeds this year. But first, they have to wait for the soil to dry out.

“It’s just crazy that one year is one way and one is another,” she says. “We don’t have to go to Las Vegas to gamble, because farming is the biggest gamble there is.”

Related Stories
• Meat Producers And, Ultimately, Consumers Hurt By Drought
• Secret Side Of The Drought: Many Corn Farmers Will Benefit
• Despite Crop Insurance, Drought Still Stings Farmers

Abbie Fentress Swanson reports from Missouri for Harvest Public Media, an agriculture-reporting project involving nine NPR member stations in the Midwest. For more stories about farm and food, check out Harvest Public Media.

Copyright 2013 NPR.

Luis Fernando Vasquez has been a coffee farmer in the central valley of Costa Rica his entire life. Photo: Dan Charles/NPR

Listen to the Story on Morning Edition

Post by Dan Charles, The Salt at NPR Food (4/24/13)

What does it take to find guilt-free coffee?

Much of our coffee comes from places where the environment is endangered and workers earn very little — sometimes, just a few dollars for a whole day’s work. Coffee farmers have helped cut down tropical forests, and most of them use pesticides.

It doesn’t take much effort, though, to find bags of coffee with labels that promise social and environmental improvements. Among the best-known are Fairtrade or Rain Forest Alliance Certified.

I went to Costa Rica to find out what those labels mean and how well they deliver on their promises.

I visited, for example, a hillside in the country’s central valley, near the town of San Ramon, where Luis Fernando Vasquez grows coffee.

Vasquez loves showing off his farm, which also produces bananas and honey. He’s lived here his whole life and learned to grow coffee from his father. But in the past few years, he says, he’s changed the way he farms.

Luis Fernando Vasquez’s coffee farm in Costa Rica. Vasquez says farmers have changed their methods in recent years. Where they once would cut down trees, he says, “now we are coming to understand that the tree plays a role” in a healthy coffee plant ecosystem. Photo: Dan Charles/NPR

“Before, a tree used to be an obstacle, and we’d just cut it down,” he says. “Now, we are coming to understand that the tree plays a role, and it can coexist with our commercial coffee plantation.”

Coffee plants that grow in the shade of trees produce fewer beans, but many people say those beans taste better. In addition, trees help reduce soil erosion and provide a home for wildlife.

Vasquez points at the ground, which is covered by a layer of dead, decaying leaves. “We used to pick all that up, bring it to one central point on the farm and then set it on fire,” he says. “But now I know that if I leave it there, it will actually help improve soil fertility.”

There also have been changes that I can’t see: He’s using fewer pesticides and recycling his trash.

Vasquez is enthusiastic about these changes, but they were not originally his idea.

They’re the result of a long chain of decisions reaching all to way back to American consumers contemplating their many coffee options in the local Stop & Shop.

Several people who are part of that chain are also with me here on the farm.

Fair Trade? Rainforest Alliance? What’s In A Coffee Certification
Learn More About the Different Coffee Certifications Below

Gurdian and his colleagues went to Vasquez and persuaded him to change his farming practices.

Why? “I think that the world is changing right now,” says Gurdian.

To be specific, one of ECOM’s big customers is changing. Nespresso, a coffee business owned by Nestle, has decided that it wants most of its coffee to carry a particular label: Rainforest Alliance Certified.

And Rainforest Alliance, the environmental group behind this label, has a whole set of rules for farmers, called the Sustainable Agriculture Standard.

ECOM took on the job of getting farmers onboard. “We said, ‘OK, it’s time to show the producers that sustainability is OK, and that we can offer lots of benefits, not only for them, the producers, but also for their farms,” says Gurdian.

There was also a small financial incentive. Now that Vasquez, the farmer, is Rainforest Alliance Certified, he gets about 15 cents more for each pound of coffee.

The number of farmers like him is growing. According to Rainforest Alliance, 4.5 percent of all coffee produced in 2012 came from Rainforest Alliance Certified farms. That’s a 45 percent increase over 2011.

There are other labels, of course: fair trade; organic; direct trade.

All of these labels promise slightly different things, and every promise involves some compromises.

For instance: Rainforest Alliance runs a relatively strict system, with independent auditors who inspect farms at random. If the auditors find prohibited pesticides, or workers earning less than the minimum wage, that farm can lose its certification. Sometimes, a whole group of neighboring farms also can be decertified.

You may be glad to know that the program has teeth. On the other hand, those rules shut out many of the smallest, poorest farmers.

Emilia Umaña, who also helps farmers get Rainforest Alliance certification, says the rules ask for things that are too expensive for many small farmers to buy — like special showers for workers to use after applying pesticides. “One of the biggest flaws in the system is that they use the same rule book, worldwide, for every type of producer in every company,” she says.

If you’re specifically interested in helping small farmers, maybe you should look for fair trade coffee. Its whole focus is small coffee producers. Traditionally, all fair trade coffee has come from cooperatives of small producers.

Christian Mora is the general manager of AFAORCA, a fair trade coffee cooperative in Costa Rica. Photo: Dan Charles/NPR

Christian Mora is general manager of one of these co-ops, called AFAORCA, in Costa Rica. It has just 24 members.

To get fair trade certification, he says, you have to show a fair trade organization that your cooperative keeps an honest set of books, that it operates democratically, and that it treats workers fairly.

“They come in and interview people who work in the coffee fields, and they make sure that salaries are fair, and that labor rights are respected, according to the law,” he says.

Once certified, the cooperative gets 20 cents extra for every pound of fair trade coffee that it sells. The cooperative then decides how to spend that “social premium.” It could pass the money on to its members, or do something else with it, such as improve a local school.

But there are compromises with fair trade, too. It doesn’t deal with environmental practices on the farms, and some buyers complain that fair trade coffee isn’t always good-quality coffee.

At the moment, in fact, the fair trade movement is going through a bitter split. One group, Fair Trade USA, wants to expand the label so it can include coffee from individual farmers — even big estates.

Mora isn’t happy about this expanded definition of fair trade. “It could be a problem, because the goal of the label gets lost, and it becomes more of a marketing tool for big businesses, and just makes it easier for them to sell their product,” he says.

This tension — between trying to be a real alternative to the mainstream and joining the mainstream — comes up all the time in these certification schemes.

The toughest environmental certification is probably one called Smithsonian Bird Friendly coffee. This coffee is grown organically, with no manufactured fertilizer or pesticides, in fields that also contain 10 different kinds of shade trees. Only a few farmers, though, are willing to grow coffee this way.

Angelina Zuñiga Godinez and Fanny Cordero Mora grow coffee for Coopetarrazu, one of Costa Rica’s largest coffee cooperatives. These bags of coffee are labeled with the towns where they are grow. Photo: Dan Charles/NPR

On the other end of the spectrum, Starbucks runs a really big program called C.A.F.E. Practices (Coffee and Farmer Equity Practices). Like Rainforest Alliance certification, this scheme includes both environmental and social standards, but the Starbucks audits aren’t really tests that a farmer can flunk. They’re more like counseling sessions. If farmers are doing something wrong, Starbucks will tell them how to improve, but it still buys their coffee.

Yet for all their differences and compromises, coffee producers in Costa Rica say these certification systems, collectively, have had a real impact.

Carlos Rivera Chavarria, general manager of one of the country’s largest cooperatives, Coopetarrazu, says certifications all helped farmers to hear what consumers wanted, much more directly than ever before.

These programs allowed his producers to “rediscover quality coffee,” he says.

Coopetarrazu sells coffee under the fair trade label. In addition, some of its farmers are Rainforest Alliance Certified, and the co-op sells a lot of coffee to Starbucks.

Now the co-op is experimenting with “direct trade.” It’s selling small lots of coffee from particular villages to roasters who can pass along the story of that coffee, and that village, to consumers who want to know even more about the sources of their coffee.

What’s In A Certification?

Organic

• Regulates growing methods, prohibiting GMO seeds and synthetic substances
• Forty countries carry organic coffee farms, with the first certified in 1967
• Averages a $0.255/lb increase in market price for coffee producers
• 298 million pounds organic coffee grown in 2010

Fair Trade International

• Seeks to increase welfare for small farmers and communities
• Guarantees a minimum market price plus 10- to 20-cent premium per pound
• Premium is paid to cooperatives to either distribute to farmers or use for community development projects
• 790 million pounds grown in 2010

Rainforest Alliance

• Emphasizes sustainability in social, environmental, economic and ethical areas
• Developed in early 1990s
• Recently gained the support of major buyers including McDonalds and Nespresso
• Expanded from 197 million pounds grown in 2007 to 827 million pounds in 2012

• Promotes biodiversity through the planting of trees for habitat and shade cover
• Requires organic certification and the use of specific trees
• Certification can lead to a 5- to 10-cent premium over organic coffee prices
• One of the smallest certification programs, with approximately 10.4 million pounds of coffee sold in 2011

Starbucks Coffee And Farmer Equity ‘CAFE’

• Verification criteria developed over past 14 years with Conservation International
• Evaluates workers’ rights, benefits, environmental protection and sustainability
• Starbucks aims for 100 percent-certified coffee supply by 2015
• In 2012, 90 percent of supply — approximately 491 million pounds — was from CAFE-verified farms

Copyright 2013 NPR.

Listen to the Story on Morning Edition

Post by Allison Aubrey, The Salt at NPR Food (4/23/13)

When we wanted to know how the growth of the specialty coffee movement is influencing the lives of farmers, we took a trip to the mountainous region of Huehuetenango in Guatemala.

Here, we met farmer Miguelina Villatoro, owner of Finca El Paternal. If you listen to my radio story, you’ll hear how she has salvaged a family farm by maximizing the quality of her beans and entering into a direct trade deal with Portland Roasting.

At a time when the global commodity price of coffee has sunk to about $1.40 a pound, Villatoro is getting $2.50 per pound for her coffee.

And this kind of premium is typical for farmers catering to the specialty market, who compete on quality. The premium she’s getting for her beans allows her to reinvest in the farm and improve conditions for her workers. One recent improvement: She has added water filters to boost the quality of workers’ drinking water. And the workers’ living quarters on the farm now have a stove with a chimney — small luxuries.

The relationship between Villatoro and Portland Roasting began with a dramatic landing by helicopter at her farm nearly 13 years ago. Mark Stell arranged the visit as part of a tour where he scoped out lots of farms. In the end, he was impressed with the quality of her coffee — which had just placed well at a tasting competition called Cup of Excellence.

“The quality is driving this [expansion of the specialty coffee],” says Edward Fischer, director of the Center for Latin American Studies at Vanderbilt University. And he says it’s having a positive effect on workers and small producers in Guatemala.

The volume of coffee that Guatemala exports has either dropped a little or stayed level since 2001, he says. “And yet the revenues from coffee have gone up,” says Fischer. This means that coffee producers are “earning more for the coffee they’re exporting.”

If you click on the slideshow above (the images shot by my colleague David Gilkey are beautiful), you’ll see the incredibly labor-intensive process of producing coffee. Who knew that coffee plants produce cherries, not beans? Or that they’ve got to be milled not once, but twice to produce the green coffee that’s ready for roasting?

So, next time you sip on a latte, remember: It’s not just the face of the barista behind those coffee beans.

Mark Stell of Portland Roasting samples coffee from his Guatemalan grower. Photo: David Gilkey/NPR

Knowing all the effort that goes into that cup “makes the whole experience of enjoying the coffee a little better,” says Teasdale.

The specialty coffee movement, often called Third Wave Coffee, is a fast-growing niche within the colossal coffee world.

And increasingly, in this third-wave world, roasters and cafes aren’t just selling us a good cup of coffee. They’re also selling us the story behind it.

Copyright 2013 NPR.

Cows wait to be milked at a California dairy farm. Photo: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

Post by Alastair Bland, The Salt at NPR Food (4/11/13)

For years, undercover videos documenting animal cruelty at farms and slaughterhouses have cast the nation’s meat and dairy farmers in a grim light.

In response, the livestock industry supported legislative efforts in multiple states designed to keep cameras from recording without permission in livestock plants. The Salt reported on these efforts, which activists call “ag gag” bills, last year.

But recently, the livestock industry seems to have taken a sharp turn in its legislative tactics.

Consider Assembly Bill 343 in California. Introduced in February, this bill would not prohibit a person from seeking employment at a slaughterhouse under false pretenses, which Iowa and several other states have outlawed. Nor would it forbid anyone from using a hidden camera while on the job, which Utah recently made illegal. All that AB 343 would do, in fact, is require that anyone who videotapes or records animal abuse turn over a copy of the evidence to police within 48 hours.

It sounds like the type of bill that animal welfare groups would welcome — but it isn’t. Rather, these groups have branded AB 343 as simply a new, and subtler, attempt to stifle undercover investigations of animal cruelty.

“The 48-hour time limit is a new twist to stop people from compiling information,” says Amanda Hitt of the Government Accountability Project, a Washington, D.C.-based group that helps investigate reports of animal abuses.

According to Hitt, in order to prove that a serious animal abuse problem is occurring, undercover investigators must gather lengthy documentation. “You can’t prove that animal abuse is systemic and recurring through one snapshot or video of an abused cow,” she says.

For this reason, says Matt Rice of the group Mercy for Animals, “the last thing we want to do is go to law enforcement at the first sign of animal abuses.”

But Justin Oldfield, of the California Cattlemen’s Association — AB 343′s sponsor — says the bill only intends to protect animals. Rather than allowing witnesses to keep quiet while they continue to film or photograph, Oldfield says, the bill mandates prompt reporting. He says that requirement will allow enforcement agencies to take swift action at the first indication of abused animals.

But not everyone trusts that authorities will respond to such reports of abuse in the absence of uninterrupted undercover investigations lasting weeks or months.

Taimie Bryant, a professor at UCLA School of Law who focuses on animal law, tells The Salt that public prosecutors tend to prioritize types of crimes other than those involving animal cruelty.

In the past, videos shot by the Humane Society of the United States and turned over to federal prosecutors have resulted in quick action and the filing of charges, The New York Times recently reported.

In the case mentioned by The Times, charges were filed before the undercover video was made public. But that’s uncommon in animal-related cases, according to Bryant. She says legal action usually only occurs if there is media coverage, public outrage and pressure to prosecute.

“Public response [to livestock abuse videos] and clamor are what usually moves these types of cases up the ladder of priorities and motivates prosecutors to take action,” she says.

Even in court, judges are often easy on defendants “if the evidence of animal abuse is thin,” Bryant says.

In 2009, Mercy for Animals publicly revealed seven weeks’ worth of footage recorded at the Willet Dairy in Locke, N.Y. The videos show employees cutting off cows’ horns and tails without using anesthesia. Bellowing calves are seen dragged by the legs away from their mothers. At least one worker was recorded digging his fingers into a struggling calf’s eye socket. Eventually, an employee named Phil Niles was fined several hundred dollars on a misdemeanor animal cruelty conviction.

The Cayuga County district attorney who handled the case, Jon Budelmann, tells The Salt that Niles’ conviction was based largely on footage that showed Niles hitting a cow on the head with a wrench. Other events and images recorded at the Willet Dairy might also appear cruel to some outsiders, he says. But those events did not provide grounds for criminal prosecution, because “they were considered normal within the industry,” Budelmann explains.

Occasionally, federal meat inspectors do speak up for animals — but their superiors don’t necessarily listen.

Take the case of USDA veterinarian and slaughterhouse inspector Dean Wyatt. In 2010, Wyatt testified before a House subcommittee that, on several occasions, he was either overruled or threatened with demotion or transfer after he told superiors about instances of extreme animal abuse he’d witnessed.

Wyatt said he’d seen employees butchering live animals at both Bushway Packing, a veal plant in Vermont, and at Seaboard Foods, a pig slaughterhouse in Oklahoma.

“He went up the chain of command reporting violations [at the Bushway veal slaughterhouse in Vermont], and they did nothing until the Humane Society [of the United States'] video came out,” says Hitt with the Government Accountability Project.

California’s AB 343 is scheduled to be heard by the state Assembly on April 17. Tennessee, Vermont and Nebraska are also now considering legislation that includes clauses with time limits on turning over recordings of animal abuse.

If these bills become law, they could eliminate the only source of oversight available at dairies and feedlots, warns Bryant at UCLA. She says that federal inspectors assigned to oversee animal welfare only work at slaughterhouses.

“But for dairies and feedlots,” she says, “these undercover videos are all we have.”

Copyright 2013 NPR.

Organic apples hang from trees at an orchard near Timberville, Va. Photo: Dean Fosdick/AP

Post by Maria Godoy, The Salt at NPR Food (4/10/13)

Apples and especially pears are vulnerable to a nasty bacterial infection called fire blight that, left unchecked, can spread quickly, killing fruit trees and sometimes devastating whole orchards.

“It’s basically like a gangrene of your limbs. It’s hard to stop” once it takes a hold, says Ken Johnson, a plant pathologist at Oregon State University.

It’s such a big threat that for decades, growers have seen two antibiotics, streptomycin and oxytetracycline, as vital weapons in the fight to control the disease – even on organic apples and pears.

But their use has raised questions about transparency in organic labeling, amid concerns about the overuse of antibiotics in food production.

“This isn’t what consumers expect out of organics,” says Urvashi Rangan, the director of consumer safety and sustainability at Consumer Reports. “Organic is supposed to be consistent in meaning,” she tells The Salt.

Here’s the back story.

When the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s national organic labeling standards went into effect in 2002, the two antibiotics were listed as synthetic materials approved for use in organic apple and pear production. Items on that list are revisited on a periodic basis. The notion behind the exemption for these two fruit crops was that, in-between reviews, growers would devise effective non-antibiotic-based methods for controlling fire blight.

But the antibiotic exemption is set to expire in October 2014. This week, the National Organic Standards Board is meeting in Portland, Ore., to decide on a petition from organic growers to extend that exemption one more time. Consumers Union, the policy arm of Consumer Reports, is among the groups who say the answer should be a resounding no.

Antibiotics have been used in American plant and livestock agriculture since the mid-20th century. About 80 percent of all antibiotics used in the U.S. go to livestock – not just to treat disease and prevent infections, but also, primarily, to help animals put on more weight.

That heavy usage has been widely blamed for promoting the spread of antibiotic-resistant bugs. And resistance can jump from bacteria that infect livestock to microbes that sicken people. The problem of drug resistance has led to widespread calls for reining in the use of antibiotics on farms, in order to preserve the medicines’ effectiveness in treating human disease.

But antibiotic use in plant agriculture is far more limited – just a little over one-tenth of 1 percent of total agricultural use, according to Virginia Stockwell, a plant pathologist at Oregon State University who studies fire blight management. Put another way, about 30 million pounds of antibiotics were used in livestock in 2011. By comparison, 36,000 pounds of antibiotics were sprayed on fruit trees – mostly on pears and apples, according to data from the USDA’s National Agricultural Statistics Service.

In the U.S., up to 16 percent of all apple acreage and up to 40 percent of all pear acreage gets sprayed with antibiotics each year, she says, citing data from NASS. That’s including all organic and conventionally grown fruit. Not every orchard gets sprayed every year.

“There have never been any cases where we’ve been able to link an antibiotic-resistant pathogen in humans to orchards,” says Stockwell, who recently conducted a review of the literature on the subject for the National Organic Safety Board.

Research suggests both of the antibiotics used on fruit crops are rendered inactive in soils, she says, minimizing concerns that residues that drift to the ground after spraying would be a problem. Any residue on fruit, she says, is miniscule.

Fire blight symptoms on pear leaves. Pears are particularly susceptible to the disease. Photo: Robert Burns/Texas AgriLife Extension Service/via flickr

“Everybody is committed to eliminating this use,” says David Granatstein, a sustainable agricultural specialist with Washington State University, who works with organic farmers in his state.

But before all organic growers can completely give up antibiotics, he says, they need to have effective alternatives for preventing the devastation of fire blight.

Aggressive pruning has helped reduce reliance on antibiotic spraying. So has the use of biological controls, like bacteria that compete with e.amylovora, the microbe that causes fire blight, for nutrients on blossoms. But it’s not enough.

Oregon State’s Ken Johnson is one of several researchers overseeing field trials of two promising antibiotic alternatives. “I’d say we’re fairly close,” Johnson tells The Salt.

He’s set to testify about these alternatives before the National Organic Standards Board on Wednesday. One option, called Blossom Protect, is a yeast-like fungus that blocks the fire blight bacteria from colonizing the blossom. It was registered for use with the Environmental Protection Agency late into last year’s growing season, so this will be the first year lots of farmers can try it.

The other alternative, a copper sulfate that can be applied during bloom times without harming the fruit, has yet to be registered with the agency. Both are highly promising, according to Johnson – but they need more testing. So 2014, he says, is still a bit too soon to say goodbye to antibiotics.

“Most people,” he says, “when their livelihoods depend on it, want to see a few years of positive data before they’re convinced that it is the right thing for them.”

Copyright 2013 NPR.