Across the country, farmers growing apples and other tree fruits are intensifying their efforts to mitigate the challenges posed by increasingly erratic weather patterns driven by climate change, from spring frosts to drought. Tactics include frost fans, misting and mulching. Plus, in some cases, growers are planting new trees that they believe will help them to prepare for a more resilient farming future. With these strategies, farmers hope to keep their precious fruits from being destroyed by the elements, protecting their livelihoods—and the quality of the fresh and local produce that consumers can enjoy.

Behrens, who is also president of the Michigan Cider Association, has recently embarked on a new challenge: taking over a tree fruit farm close to his cidery in the Grand Rapids area. The farm—which had previously been with one family since 1907—grows apples, peaches, pears, plums and cherries. There is also a market and bakery onsite. Being a cidery and a grower has some advantages: The fruit has a clear path to production even when packing houses are overrun, and using hail-damaged fruits is easier. 

But although residents of the snowy Mitten State might have enjoyed the warmer winter weather, farmers had other concerns. Behren’s orchard has been running about five weeks ahead of last year, in terms of the activity that the team has been seeing in the trees. For tree fruit farmers in the area, he says that late-season frost is the biggest single risk. “You increase your odds of that exponentially as you get into warmer winters and earlier springs.” 

A cold wave with a frost and freeze after bud break can mean no crop. Tree fruit in Michigan, including the apple crop, was severely impacted by late frosts in 2012. And in both 2020 and 2021, tart cherry production was slashed by more than half. This instability, combined with low prices for crops due to imports from Turkey, means a risk of losing a strong farming tradition in the nation’s top cherry state.

Long before fruits reach stores and customers, protecting a crop from a late cold snap can be a knife edge. “A three-degree difference for an hour or two can be the difference between a 10-percent crop loss and a 90-percent crop loss,” he says. Many orchards use frost fans to mitigate the issues of cold weather that comes too late in the year. But, in some cases, the weather gets so cold it doesn’t matter whether the farm has frost fans or not. Although some apple varieties can withstand cooler temperatures, when frost hits trees that are well into bloom, deploying mitigating measures can be a waste of energy for farmers. In these extreme cases, “it’s a whole bunch of money down the drain for nothing,” says Behrens.

Farmhaus Farms grows apples, peaches, pears, plums and cherries. (Photo credit: Alyssa McElheny)

Across the country, in the Pacific Northwest, spring frosts also pose risks for growers. At Finnriver Farm and Cidery on Washington’s Olympic Peninsula, operations director Andrew Byers has been using misting as a strategy to keep pear trees cool in the spring. The team has set up overhead misters with a thermostat when it reaches 40F or so during the day in February. “By evaporative cooling, we can keep the pear trees wet, and that keeps them a little bit cooler,” says Byers. This can “trick” the trees to avoid early blooming. “We can slow the buds despite a warm spell early on.” Naturally, this is an easier method to use with plenty of access to water. “It would be a difficult proposition in the Central Valley of California,” says Byers. 

Finnriver focuses on antique apple varieties from the UK, France and Spain, and he is working on breaking up the orchard’s monoculture. “When we feel vulnerable to the climactic changes that we’re seeing—like increased heat, less dormant period in the winter and erratic springs and erratic summers—the answer to me seems to be diversification,” says Byers. He explains that some of the diseases that live in soils and plant root tissue impact apples more so than other tree fruits. 

The team is planting other kinds of trees, including fruits with which the cidery already ferments, such as plums and elderberries. “Pollinator resilience is also a pretty big issue in this idea of erratic climate,” says Byers. This is another benefit of diversity, as plums bloom earlier than apples, whereas elderberries bloom later.

Byers has also ramped up efforts with mulch and compost additions in the orchard since the 2021 heat dome. “We just watched the trees sizzle,” he says. Now, he’s putting wood chips at the base of the trees. “That is creating this fungal network, as the wood chips break down,” he explains. Like a giant sponge, this helps to improve water resilience in the root zone of the trees. It’s a tactic that avid home gardeners can also employ, to help with conserving moisture and moderating soil temperature.

The farm has previously operated with a dwarf orchard, but Byers says that he is now four years into an initiative to plant larger trees, as part of a goal to look at longer-term climate resilience strategies. In a dwarf orchard, trees can be planted more densely, and they produce on a faster timeline than larger trees, with the first harvest ready just four years after planting. But these small trees only have around 20 years of productivity. The new semi-standard trees will require more space and take between seven and 10 years until the first crop is ready. But the change may be worth it: The larger and taller trees will remain productive for up to 100 years, and crucially, these larger trees will provide additional shade and have better water retention.

After looking at climate modeling provided by the Jamestown S’Klallam tribe, Byers decided that preparing for hotter, drier summers in the future should be a priority at the orchard. The new trees with deeper root systems will be an important part of that. With these measures, he is hoping to play his part in ensuring that fruit production continues in the face of climate threats. “We are standing on the shoulders of centuries of apple growing and trying to figure out the best fit pathway for the conditions that we have now.”

The post How are Tree Fruit Farmers Adapting to a Changing Climate? appeared first on Modern Farmer.

In 2023, Phoenix endured record-breaking heat that had residents coping with an entire month of daytime temperatures that never dropped below 110 degrees Fahrenheit, with the typical monsoon rains nowhere in sight. While other regions may not be quite so blistering, hotter temperatures and less rain in certain areas are likely to become more common as climate change, driven by the burning of fossil fuels, warms the planet. In Phoenix, where a harsh climate has always been more or less the norm, gardeners and farmers have been adapting for centuries, and they have wisdom to share. Their top tips? It all comes down to shade and soil. 

The native soil of Phoenix is often very clay-heavy, high in poor drainage and low in organic material. When it is exposed to the sun, it dries quickly and cracks, cooking anything below. This type of earth is fine for native food plants such as prickly pear cactus. But to grow more food, the soil needs to be both protected from the sun and built up with organic material for nutrients.

Phoenix’s clay soil is ideal for native plants such as the prickly pear cactus. (Photo: Shutterstock)

Rose Courtney is an urban gardener who has transformed her backyard into a food forest where she grows year-round. She even had a bumper crop during last year’s seemingly unending heat wave. In July, she was still growing vegetables such as carrots, kale and cucumbers, tending to her garden early in the morning, when the temperatures were in the 90s instead of the triple-digits.

“Invest time and energy in permanent [shade] structures,” she advises. “Without that, you’re not going to have a lot of success.”

Shade comes at two levels for desert gardeners—shade for the plants with shade cloth or trees and shade for the soil in the form of groundcover. At the Arizona Worm Farm, permanent shade structures, trees and wood chip mulch are all part of the soil-health strategy, too. In fact, owner Zach Brooks says that the mulch is potentially even more important than the shade—combined with high microbial activity, it keeps the soil moist and allows for a system of deep watering, less frequently. 

Permanent shade structures help protect crops from the hot Arizona sun. (Photo: Callie Radke Stevens)

“What happens three or four feet underground to 18 feet underground is more important than what happens above ground,” says Brooks. “So, keeping your soil covered that’s how we get away with watering as infrequently as we do and having good results for the time periods that we do.”

In the summer, the Arizona Worm Farm’s combination of shade (from both 50 percent shade cloth and trees), mulch and active soil keep the farm’s air temperature about 30 degrees cooler than the ambient temperature of the city. So, when it’s 110 degrees Fahrenheit at Sky Harbor Airport, where the city’s temperature readings are taken, it’s a balmy 80-85 degrees seven miles away at the farm. 

Brooks and his team grow food on the farm roughly from October to April, excepting the trees in the food forest, where at least one of the 118 trees is producing food year-round. This fall and winter growing season is common in the Valley of the Sun, where even cold snaps are short and relatively temperate. By planting in the fall and harvesting in the spring, growers can maximize cooler temps and wetter weather—and gardening days that are a little less sweltering. 

Zach Brooks of the Arizona Worm Farm shows off the work of composting worms. (Photo: Callie Radke Stevens)

Michael Chamberland is an assistant agent for the University of Arizona Cooperative Extension, a service of the University of Arizona. The extension provides resources for gardening all over the state. “What we’ve done here is taken advantage of the fact that our winter is cool and sunny and so we can grow things through the cool season,” says Chamberland. 

Chamberland also pointed out that it isn’t as simple as just swapping seasons. Seedlings are growing in temperatures that go from hot to cold instead of cold to hot, and the days are much shorter than a summer growing season. While you can grow almost anything in the desert with enough shade and water, it makes more sense to look for things that are better adapted to short days and low water use. 

Sierra Penn is the Indigenous Garden Educator for NATIVE HEALTH and runs a traditional garden on an urban lot in partnership with Keep Phoenix Beautiful. There, she plants in rows as well as using methods such as the Pueblo Zuni waffle beds and Akimel O’odham flood irrigation with water from Phoenix canals. 

Both techniques make it easier to water deeply and less frequently (another theme among the growers). In fact, many of those modern canals are built following the ancient canal systems dug by the Hohokam or Huhugam people thousands of years ago. Growing food in the Sonoran Desert is nothing new.

NATIVE HEALTH’s traditional garden incorporates Indigenous irrigation practices. (Photo courtesy of NATIVE HEALTH)

The garden is a teaching garden, and Penn runs workshops on everything from growing luffas to using grow bags to get started. Over the years, the garden has produced food such as brown tepary beans, Diné blue corn, Tohono O’odham melons and other traditional plants that grow well in the low-desert heat.

“I think it really helps them to kind of find that connection to ground themselves,” Penn says of the people who attend her workshops. “I think gardening is very grounding and just connecting us to our roots.”

Like most food growers, Phoenix farmers and gardeners have an extensive web of knowledge sharing within the region, too. Penn says that she didn’t have much experience when she started and has learned from Keep Phoenix Beautiful’s master gardener, who also knows about the traditional gardening methods, the garden employees and Native Seed/SEARCH, a southern Arizona nonprofit and heirloom seed source.

This knowledge web is particularly important in the urban, arid city because many gardening resources center on a longer growing cycle that has more lively soil and more water. 

“People get confused because they go on to these blogs and somebody in Minnesota is doing something spectacular, and it doesn’t work in Phoenix,” says Brooks. “If you follow Phoenix-based bloggers, then you get good advice.”

The traditional garden offers workshops and grows traditional plants such as Diné blue corn and Tohono O’odham melons. (Photo courtesy of NATIVE HEALTH)

The other gardeners agree. Penn has been diving deep into the gardening practices of Indigenous Arizona tribes, and Courtney looks for plants that grow well in similar climates. As the climate becomes less predictable, knowing how to successfully grow food in harsh environments will be vital. Just as these food growers have done, sharing knowledge will be equally as important. 

“I think my biggest tip would be to look at it as an experiment of trying something new, and if it fails, don’t be afraid to try again because you could create something bigger and better,” says Penn. 

Each of these desert gardeners shared failures, from pests to putting the wrong plant in the wrong soil. But they have also kept going, turning a suburban backyard, a cotton field and a misused urban lot into thriving food plots. As we rethink food systems, trying something new and creating something bigger and better might be just what we need.

The post Swapping Seasons, Casting Shade: How Farmers Are Growing Food in the Fearsome Phoenix Heat appeared first on Modern Farmer.

Kiawah River is an “agrihood”—a planned community with a working farm at its center. Residents may work or volunteer at the farm, or they may participate in a residents CSA program or visit their own farmer’s market. Kiawah River worked with established farms to begin its agrihood, building a community around preexisting farmland. Its farm partners include fourth-generation Freeman Farms and second-generation Rosebank Farms, along with several others.

Other agrihoods establish farms as central hubs when planning the community. Chickahominy Falls is located outside of Richmond, VA, in what is known as the French hay district, an area that has traditionally been farmland. The agrihood there is for residents 55 and over, and 10-acre Woodside Farms provides a gathering space, volunteer and working opportunities and a CSA.

Tiny Timbers is a small agrihood in St. Croix Falls, WI, a small city on the border near Minneapolis, MN. Its agrihood model uses tiny homes as the residences, with 11 families currently sharing the responsibilities of gardening and caring for the chickens, honey bees and orchards. The community was started by a husband-and-wife team, inspired by a passion for tiny homes and good food. They broke ground on their first houses in the spring of 2023, and they will complete their agrihood with 16 homes.

“Unlike many agrihoods that have a farmer on the edge of the development, ours is all resident operated,” says Melissa Jones, founder of Tiny Timbers. “So, they are personally getting their hands dirty.”

The Tiny Timbers agrihood model uses “tiny homes” as the residences. (Photo courtesy of Tiny Timbers)

Agrihoods are not a new phenomenon, but their presence has grown in the United States in recent years. According to a report by the Urban Land Institute, in 2018, there were more than 200 agrihoods in 28 states. The concept may seem similar to a commune, but agrihoods are not based around shared politics or religion but focus on fresh food and strong communities. Participation requirements on the farms vary. Many agrihoods offer volunteer opportunities on the farm for residents, but they do not require any participation in farming.

The Urban Land Institute considers agrihoods a valuable trend, helping to solve several issues within the US housing market. With 73 percent of Americans considering access to fresh and healthy food a priority, agrihood living puts residents in the middle of healthy food production. An agrihood’s investment in farmland can help save a family farm and keep more farmland in production. Revenue from the sales of agrihood properties can directly support farms when an agrihood is established, and even working farms near agrihoods that are not involved in the communities can see the value of their farmland rise when an agrihood is built nearby. Building a community around a farm will also save farmers shipping costs and reduce greenhouse gas emissions as produce no longer needs to be transported over long distances.

The agrihood model may harken back to communes or even colonial villages, but if you find yourself wondering “why now?”—the answer may be as simple as reliable access to great food.

“The people here are so kind and fun,” says Danna Berg, a resident of Kiawah River who moved to the agrihood from St. Petersburg, FL in 2021. “I had heard of an agrihood before, but I wasn’t really familiar with the concept. When I stepped foot on the property, I knew it was for me.”

Berg volunteers in the gardens and on the farm at Kiawah River. Every resident we spoke to indicated that the fresh produce was a huge part of the appeal of Kiawah River, from the honey and eggs to the fresh produce and goat’s milk. 

Kiawah River worked with established farms to begin its agrihood outside Charleston, South Carolina. (Photo courtesy of Kiawah River)

In some ways, agrihood living is an idealized version of farm life. At many agrihoods, you won’t have to shovel waste or dig in the dirt if you don’t want to, but you can still enjoy the benefits of local, organic produce grown right outside your door. Even when the residents are involved in the running of the farm, an agrihood can still present a more appealing option than beginning a farm on your own.

Those interested in growing their own food to any scale need to invest in farmland, and access to suitable and affordable farmland is the greatest barrier to young farmers getting started. In an agrihood, access to the land is guaranteed and does not come with the risks of beginning a new family farm.

“A lot of people want to live a healthier lifestyle and be involved with where their food comes from,” says Jones. “But farming can be a lonely, overwhelming task. So, having a community where people can learn from each other, tackle the areas of the agrihood they are skilled in, it helps everyone have a healthier, more fulfilling existence—and make friendships along the way.”

“The eggs are simply amazing,” says Lindsay Cobb. She and her husband Charlie moved to Kiawah River in 2021. When they moved, they had not heard of an agrihood, but they loved the idea of living near a farm and being part of the community events that Kiawah River hosts. 

“Access to the fresh vegetables is so unique,” Cobb adds. For farmers, access to fresh vegetables may be a given. But for many Americans, the opportunity to enjoy fresh produce is indeed unique. According to the Urban Land Institute report, 16 percent of Americans say that fresh food is not available in their communities.

The majority of agrihoods in the US today are marketed towards a more affluent demographic, with the average home price in an agrihood around $400,000. However, the model can be applied to lower-income housing and more urban developments. Agrihoods opening in Santa Clara, CA and Denver, CO are committed to offering affordable housing as part of their planned community. At Tiny Timbers, the tiny house model allows most residents to own their homes debt free.

Eleven families currently share the responsibilities of gardening and caring for chickens and honeybees at Tiny Timbers in St. Croix Falls, WI. (Photo courtesy of Tiny Timbers)

The farms around which agrihoods center face the same challenges as any other agricultural establishment. They can be adversely affected by weather, pests and predators, impacting their ability to supply the community. Some agrihood farms choose to focus on vegetable production to avoid the smells and noises of livestock, which can limit diversity of agrihood-produced goods. 

As they address housing needs in a local area, provide healthy food to residents and foster a connection between people and food production, agrihoods seem to offer solutions to numerous challenges. And while a healthy diet often brings residents to an agrihood, residents say that community is what makes them love agrihood living.

“The community here is top notch,” explains Barbara Viverito, who has lived at Kiawah River agrihood since August of 2020. “I have never seen a group of people so friendly.”

While they come in all shapes and sizes, the future of agrihoods may be with individuals like Melissa and Shane Jones at Tiny Timbers. Five years after purchasing a plot of land in 2017, they decided to do something more than just homestead for themselves.

“We have a tiny cabin that we love,” says Melissa Jones, “and my husband has a passion for homesteading—so why not combine those things and create a place where people can live lightly, often debt free, and have the ability to grow healthy, organic food? They can live a healthier lifestyle and be around people that have similar interests.”

The post Moving into the Agrihood appeared first on Modern Farmer.

A new study out of the University of California, Irvine, published in the journal Nature Sustainability, shows that chemically synthesized dietary fats, or food fats made scientifically in a factory—not harvested from a field—could be a viable way to reduce environmental impacts in the agriculture sector. 

“We could drastically reduce some of the land that we’re using for things like oil crops, if we were making these in a factory and not using land at all,” says Steven Davis, PhD, Earth System scientist and lead author on the paper.

The amount of global agricultural land used for oil crops has nearly tripled in the last 60 years, making it one of the top three categories of agricultural products in terms of land use.

Palm oil, for example, is in many processed foods at American supermarkets. It has also come under fire because palm oil plantations in Asia, Latin America and West Africa have resulted in deforestation and negative impacts on human communities. Decreased land demands could lead to reforestation or preservation, which may benefit ecosystem biodiversity and reduce water use.

The amount of land used globally to grow oil crops has increased dramatically in the last several decades. (Graph by Our World in Data)

“If we targeted just a small amount of some of the very worst offending sources of these oils, palm oil plantations or soybeans that are grown on areas recently cleared in the Amazon, we can make very large reductions in some of the greenhouse gas emissions,” says Davis.

Fats could be synthesized at scale, says Davis. Using a source of carbon dioxide and hydrogen, the actual process of producing the fats could result in fewer emissions than traditional oil production. Still, he acknowledges that some consumers are wary of synthesized products—as the paper mentions, synthetic fibers have had significant environmental consequences; they are a source of plastic pollution through microfiber shedding, and the textiles themselves take a long time to break down. The impacts of this mean there’s a good reason to be cautious when approaching other forms of chemical synthesis, and more research is required. The sources of carbon would have to be fossil carbon, waste carbon (like municipal solid waste) or carbon captured from the air.

“I’m not someone who thinks we should stop agriculture altogether,” says Davis. “But I think it makes sense to prioritize the emissions related to that and the environmental impacts of that for the things that we really can’t do in other ways and that we really value the flavors of and the provenance of.”

Public acceptance of synthesized fats may be easier than other foods, since these fats are often present in processed foods and not always consumed as a standalone ingredient. Since farmed oil products and synthesized dietary fat are molecularly identical, it’s not something that would be distinguishable for consumers when eaten in this context.

“You don’t eat a Chips Ahoy! cookie and say, ‘man that palm oil in there was delicious,’” says Davis. “I don’t plan to stop buying apples, I think apples are a magical thing. But I don’t feel the same about palm oil that’s used in products that I buy.”

One important result of this shift would be a disruption in some of the agricultural communities that revolve around palm or other kinds of oil production. A change of this type would have to be carefully approached to ensure a just food transition, says Davis.

It doesn’t have to be all or nothing, he says. Not all vegetable oils need to go away.

“We’re not saying tomorrow you’re going to be eating like the Jetsons,” says Davis. “We are just talking about supplanting some of the most environmentally damaging sources of food with an alternative that hopefully wouldn’t make a meaningful difference to a lot of people in terms of their appreciation for foods that they eat.”

The post Do We Need to Farm Oil Crops? appeared first on Modern Farmer.

It can take up to two hours to cook dry beans—and that’s not including the sometimes 12-hour presoak. That’s why scientists at the USDA’s Sugarbeet and Bean Research Unit are breeding dry beans that cook in a fraction of the time. Led by plant geneticist and dry bean expert Karen Cichy, they’re putting their hopes in two beans with which  most Americans aren’t familiar: the Mayocoba and Manteca, which are both quicker-cooking, and perhaps more importantly, yellow. 

Scientists at Cichy’s lab grew and cooked 295 bean varieties of different sizes and shades of yellow in 2018 and 2019. Called the Yellow Bean Collection (YBC), this assembly of beans was sourced from around the world, including Uganda, Colombia and Haiti. The goal? Identify which beans in the YBC cooked the fastest in Michigan and Nebraska, two major bean-producing regions of the US, and which genes in the DNA of those beans gave them their speedy cooking time. The team published its findings in 2022.

Dried bean plants. Photography by Jim Kelly.

Yellow dry beans are already popular in Latin America, the Caribbean and Africa. The popularity of dry yellow beans in other parts of the world could help persuade American farmers to grow a new crop that has potential, but not proven, demand in the US.

The Mayocoba, which originated in Peru, is popular in Mexico and is actually a recognized market class in the US. However, the bean isn’t popular nationwide, although folks in Michigan and the western US, as well as members of the Hispanic community, are probably familiar with and know it as the Peruano. Oval-shaped and plump, it’s often refried because of its creamy texture. 

However, traditional Mayocoba beans still require hours in the kitchen. Instructions from bean supplier Rancho Gordo state that cooking time for its Mayocoba can range from one to three hours, depending on how long the beans were soaking beforehand. The new Mayocoba variety will take around 20 minutes to cook (similar to the cooking time for rice) and be high-yielding, which will likely increase its appeal to farmers. As for the Mayocoba’s coat color, Cichy says the group is aiming for a “highlighter yellow.” It’s the shade that appeals to consumers in Mexico and was proven desirable enough in the US to grant a controversial 1999 patent (which was eventually canceled) that claimed monopoly rights over the bright yellow bean color. 

The Manteca originated in Chile. It’s a pale yellow and sometimes appears curved because of its hilum ring, the scar on its seed coat that marks where it was once connected to the plant. The bean isn’t a recognized market class in the US, but it’s popular among consumers in Chile for its easy digestibility and perceived low flatulence. 

Additionally, a 2018 study, which Cichy helped to author, found that some Manteca varieties are not only fast cooking but also high in iron bioavailability. This means that the iron in the bean is easily absorbed by our bodies. However, the Manteca is “not as pretty as the highlighter Mayocoba,” Cichy concedes—t least, not in bean form. But its appeal may lie in other uses. Because of its muted color, one plan is to mill the Manteca into a flour so it can be used as an ingredient. “When you make a flour, you don’t want the bean to be too colorful because sometimes those colors don’t look nice when they’re milled,” says Cichy. The pale yellow Manteca flour could be perfect for things such as  pasta. 

A bean flour could also increase consumption among Americans who don’t want or know how to cook dry beans, and a Manteca yellow bean pasta could provide three times the iron bioavailability of chickpea, wheat and gluten free pasta—all while cooking in only five minutes. This is according to the Sugarbeet and Bean Research Unit’s recent report, which also concluded that a single serving of Manteca rotini provides more fiber, calcium and iron compared to chickpea, whole wheat and gluten-free rotini.  

Scientists cooked the beans in a machine called a Mattson cooker. A rack of beans, like the one pictured above, is boiled in water. Above each bean is a pin, which pierces the bean once it’s softened. The time it takes for the bean to be pierced is its cooking time. Photography by Jason Wiesinger

According to previous studies, cooking time is probably a trait in yellow beans influenced mostly by genetics and less by the environment, and it can be passed down to future generations through breeding. By identifying associations between cooking time and a molecule called a single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP), which is a common source of genetic diversity, breeders can isolate genetic variations for the fast-cooking trait and use them to create marketable Mayocoba and Manteca beans. The YBC study identified a candidate gene for the fast-cooking trait.

When it comes to achieving the other desirable trait, a bright yellow coat color, scientists have to pay attention to a bean’s post-harvest darkening process. The YBC study found that a bean that doesn’t darken after harvest is also likely to have a fast cooking time. While the non-darkening trait doesn’t entirely account for variation in cooking time, it’s one influential factor. 

Achieving an attractive bean color isn’t a challenge reserved for just American plant geneticists. “Seasoned bean breeders all attest that it’s not easy to recover the attractive yellow color as you pursue productivity traits,” writes Clare Mukankusi in an email. Mukankusi is a bean breeder for the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT) in Uganda, which donated samples it’s collected from various African breeding programs to the YBC study. To East Africans, an attractive broth color after cooking is also important. “In Uganda and most of East Africa, a light brown (chocolate) thick broth is most preferred,” Mukankusi writes.  

Since the study’s publication, the lab has bred two Mayocoba and Manteca varieties that were evaluated in field trials and are now awaiting intellectual property protection and approval for release. If everything goes well, Cichy anticipates the two varieties will be commercially viable next summer. From there, it’ll be up to bean producers and sellers to market the beans to American consumers.  

The lab is also working on another study that explores the role of fiber in cooking time. “We found that yellow beans, especially the fast-cooking ones, have less insoluble dietary fiber,” Cichy shares from the study that’s yet to be published. “It’s only about six percent less if we compare them to yellow beans that take longer to cook. But we think that less fiber is what makes them cook faster.”

Data shows that legume consumption in the US is rising on average, from 8 pounds per person, per year in 2014, to over 11 pounds per person, per year, in 2017. That still falls just shy of the recommended 1.5 cups of beans, peas and lentils per week (or around 13 pounds per year) for a 2,000-calorie diet, as set by the Dietary Guidelines for Americans. 

“I am not saying that people must only eat beans. Certainly not. But beans can have a bigger presence in people’s diets,” writes the YBC study’s lead author Rie Sadohara in an email. She hopes that one day yellow beans will be considered their own category in the USDA’s bean consumption statistics, rather than grouped together with other minor beans. “Seeing beans grown and used at the levels of wheat or potatoes in the US would be great.” 

The post Will Yellow Beans Become the Next Superfood? appeared first on Modern Farmer.

Genetically modified crops (GMO) are also cross-bred, but instead of pollen, foreign DNA is introduced into the plant’s genome to create a new crop with desired characteristics such as sweeter-tasting fruit or longer-lasting color.  

But genome-edited (GE) breeding falls somewhere in the middle, depending on how you look at it. Ian Affleck is vice president of biotechnology for CropLife Canada, a trade association representing developers and distributors of plant science innovations and plant biotechnology. He describes GE crops as naturally derived, because you’re not introducing anything new into the genome. “The GE process is like tweaking a Word document. Instead of importing data, you are simply copying and pasting within the original document, using the material that has already been written.”    

In this metaphor, the seed, or document, had no bugs or glitches before moving things around internally, so, it shouldn’t  have any after the treatment, as nothing new has been added.The process, better known by some as CRISPR, is highly controversial among proponents of organic growing. 

Allison Squires is an organic farmer and president of  Canadian Organic Growers. “It’s still not natural. The seed has been synthetically altered.” Now, regulations from the Canadian government this spring have put Squires in what she sees as a precarious situation. 

CRISPR editing of seeds. Photography by Shutterstock.

In May, the Canadian federal government introduced new guidelines that removed public disclosure requirements and reduced health and safety assessments on some GE seeds. In the new wording of the regulation, two types of plants fall under an automatic assessment from the Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA). All seeds that introduce DNA from another species (meaning all GMO seeds) trigger an automatic assessment from CFIA. Plus, plants that possess “new traits and have the potential to negatively impact the environment” require assessment. Some GE seeds may fall under that second umbrella, and others will not. 

The bulk of Squire’s grain is exported to the European Union (EU), where any plant that has had its DNA altered in any way that doesn’t occur naturally is classed as a GMO. This includes GE-derived products. “It’s a huge market,” she says. Every load Squires sends overseas is genetically tested two or three times by EU customs, and agricultural officials have to make sure it’s not been in any way genetically manipulated, before being allowed into commercial circulation. “It’s a stringent process,” she says. “If my grain is deemed to be synthetically altered, I not only will lose the income from the shipment but will not be able to sell to the EU for several years until I can prove myself again.” 

The issue, for Squires and other growers like her, is that GE seeds can be released in the Canadian market without any additional testing—and growers are not obligated to disclose that the seeds have been gene edited.

When Squires buys seed from a distributor, they sign an affidavit assuring her that what she buys hasn’t been genetically altered. In Canada, under the Canadian Organic Standards, farmers are required to disclose if they use gene-edited seed or feed for livestock. If they do, even by mistake, they lose their organic certification. However, it is possible that because GE seeds won’t be identified as genetically altered within Canada that neither she nor the seed distributor will know if she is being sold GE seed.  

Proponents of gene-edited products point to Seeds Canada as the answer to everyone’s woes. The advocacy group has developed the Canadian Variety Transparency Database as a way for growers such as  Squires to keep track of GE seeds as they enter the marketplace.

Alison Squires at her farm, Upland Organics. Photography courtesy of Upland Organics.

Lucy Sharratt is a coordinator for the Canadian Biotechnology Action Network (CBAN) and works with farmer associations and environmental and social justice groups opposed to the synthetic engineering of food. She isn’t convinced the database will be effective when it comes to GE seed. “It’s entirely voluntary; seed companies can choose to register their seeds or not. There’s no tracking of who has or hasn’t [registered] and no enforcement. ”

Sharratt also points out that this lack of disclosure could translate to the consumer. In most Canadian grocery stores, organic and non-organic produce is clearly labeled. However, if GE seed is not required to be disclosed, it only follows that what is grown from that seed won’t be either. Consumers are already leery of this, according to a 2022 public opinion poll conducted by CBAN. A majority of Canadians (54 percent) are concerned about the safety of genetically altered foods and opposed by nearly two to one to letting companies conduct their own safety assessments, rather than the federally regulated Health Canada.

In the United States, there’s also opposition to government policy surrounding GE products. In 2020, the Plant Protection Act removed requirements regarding public disclosure and safety assessments on GE seed.

The Organic Trade Association (OTA) represents 10,000 organic businesses across 50 states and, as in Canada, continues to advocate for the organic food system to remain true to its intent by keeping modern biotechnology out—including GE seed. 

Currently, there are only a handful of GE vegetables and a soybean variety available commercially in the US. “In Canada, a few vegetable seeds could enter the marketplace in time for the 2024 growing season, with grain following a couple of years later,” Affleck predicts. 

And despite media reports that the Canadian decision was influenced by biotech companies such as CropLife lobbying the government, there is currently no review process of the legislation scheduled. Affleck maintains the decision “was based on reviews by Health Canada and the Canadian Food Inspection Agency, and all available science.”

This is not reassuring to Squires, who, in a September press release from Canadian Organic Growers, writes that “mandatory transparency of GE seeds is one of the most significant issues organic farmers are facing today. Without it, the integrity of organic production in Canada is severely threatened.”

Personally,  all Squires wants, she says, is for GE seeds to be identified and to be able to protect her family’s livelihood. “I don’t care if folk use GE seed, I just want to know, so I have a choice not to.” 

A previous version of this article incorrectly stated that all GE seeds were exempt from assessment under Canadian regulations. In fact, some GE seeds may require additional scrutiny from CFIA. We’ve updated the story to reflect this change. We regret the error.

The post How Should Gene-Edited Seeds be Regulated? appeared first on Modern Farmer.

Van Eenennaam, a professor of animal biotechnology, implanted embryos this spring in a herd of cattle, which carry the SRY gene. The fetuses—all female—will develop male characteristics, growing beefier and faster than females without the gene, something that would benefit cattle producers, says Van Eenennaam, who runs the Animal Genomics and Biotechnology Laboratory at UC Davis. 

The embryos were created from the semen of a bull named Cosmo. The SRY gene he passed on wasn’t developed through classic selective breeding, however, but a technology seemingly appropriated from science fiction—CRISPR/Ca9. The technology accelerates trait development by facilitating the precise deletion, insertion or modification of genes. It can also “turn off” or inactivate genes that make animals susceptible to some diseases, says Van Eenennaam. By inserting the SRY gene into chromosome 17 when Cosmo was an early-stage embryo, the gene became something he now passes on to all offspring, no matter the sex. 

Alison Van Eenennaam with Cosmo. (Photo courtesy UC Davis)

The technology received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2020, igniting a flurry of research as scientists explored its potential to change plant and animal DNA. With a growing global population of eight billion and the demand for animal protein soaring, new technologies are needed to make agriculture more efficient while reducing its enormous environmental impact. CRISPR promises a genetic revolution, with advocates hopeful that it can address disease prevention, food security and a reduction of methane, the greenhouse gas spewed by ruminants that is 25 times more potent than carbon dioxide at trapping atmospheric heat.

The only limit to CRISPR’s abilities, it seems, could be scientists’ imaginations.

Editing out disease

There is a deadly virus that causes porcine reproductive and respiratory syndrome (PRRS), which afflicts pigs worldwide, reducing growth in young swine and causing late-term abortions and stillborn piglets in sows. The disease costs the American pork industry more than $650 million a year; in Europe, €1.5 billion is lost annually to the virus.

The global biotechnology company, Genus PIC, has used CRISPR to remove a portion of the gene that causes PRRS. “A PRRS outbreak can wipe out an operation,” says Elena Rice, chief science officer at Genus. When pig farmers hear about CRISPR providing a “solution to the disease,” says Rice, “their first words are: ‘Give it to me tomorrow.’ I need it, I want it.’” 

Elena Rice is chief science officer at Genus, a biotech company developing disease immunity via CRISPR. (Photo courtesy Genus)

Genus has produced four generations of pigs with immunity to PRRS, showing “the stability of the gene being inherited,” says Mark Cigan, Genus’s trait development director. Now, Genus has a population of animals with CRISPR-created immunity. The goal for companies like Genus is to breed these animals and allow their enhanced genes to spread into the wider pig population. This has yet to happen, however, as the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) hasn’t approved animals with this CRISPR edit.

Rice says that Genus has been working closely with the FDA for years and “hopes to obtain approval in 2024 for CRISPR-edited animals with PRRS immunity.” Regulatory approval is critical, says Rice, as other countries look to the FDA to “guide their decision-making on gene editing.” 

The FDA is cautious, however, about CRISPR gene edits in animals, something it labels intentional genomic alteration, or IGA.

Adam Moyer, acting director, division of animal bioengineering and cellular therapies at the FDA’s Center for Veterinary Medicine (CVM), says that IGA analysis includes determining whether it causes “unintended alterations, like mutations.” One example, says Moyer, was pigs where two genes were removed via CRISPR, making them immune to PRRS as well as the transmissible gastroenteritis virus. The pigs were not only resistant to the viruses but showed “increased iron content in the muscles, indicating that the composition of the food derived from such animals would’ve been unexpectedly altered,” says Moyer. This, he says, is an example of “unintended implications that could impact animal or food safety.” 

Cigan says Genus has done extensive studies on the pigs that have undergone CRISPR editing to prevent PRRS viral infection and cleared them of any unexpected genetic or meat composition changes. “The pigs look great,” he says. 

The FDA, despite its prudence, is enthusiastic about CRISPR’s “great promise,” says Moyer. It granted food use authorization this year for the five pigs involved in a CRISPR project from Washington State University that produced data showing no harm would come from consuming gene-edited swine. To celebrate, WSU hosted a barbecue with sausages made from the pigs.

Jon Oatley and research team on the campus of WSU in 2020. (Photo courtesy Washington State University)

What makes CRISPR notable is that the genetic changes it creates are inherited by offspring, just like traits that are developed through selective breeding. CRISPER edits make a “significant change in one generation,” says Dr. Jon Oatley, a reproductive biologist who is undertaking CRISPR research at Washington State University School of Molecular Biosciences. This contrasts with “selective breeding, [which] takes five to 10 generations to make an incremental change,” says Oatley.

The five swine possessing a CRISPR edit were created at WSU as part of a project called “surrogate sires,” says Oatley. He used CRISPR to remove the NANOS2 fertility gene in the pig embryos, which caused the males to be born sterile. The young swine’s testes were then injected with sperm-producing stem cells from “high-value” pigs, turning these unremarkable animals into elite breeder males. This process gives breeders around the world “access to genetics that they would never have been able to get access to before… creating hundreds of males that all produce sperm from the elite male,” says Oatley. The final tally to obtain approval from the FDA for the CRISPR-edited pigs was $200,000. This included two years of feed and labour costs and extensive data collection, including expensive molecular analysis, says Oatley. “We needed to show that there [weren’t] any changes in their DNA due to CRISPR that we didn’t expect.”

Gas be gone

CRISPR technology may prove most useful when it comes to a more widespread issue: mitigating the methane-infused burps and farts caused by ruminant gut microbes that contribute to atmospheric heating. In the US, livestock produce about one-third of all methane, says Ermias Kebreab, director of the World Food Center at UC Davis.  

Kebreab and UC Davis associate professor Matthias Hess are part of a new initiative aiming to reduce greenhouse emissions by engineering the microbiome in cows and other ruminants. The research will analyze the microbes in bovine digestive systems, “[identifying] microbes and genes we want to target for editing,” says Hess. He isn’t looking for the complete elimination of methane, since it is “metabolically very important for an animal.” A reduction of 60 to 70 percent would be a huge accomplishment,” he says.

Ermias Kebreab and Matthias Hess stand together in the cow dairy facilities on April 10, 2023. They won the TED Audacious award with UC Berkeley and UCSF for their work with dairy cows. (Photo courtesy UC Davis)

Neither Hess nor Kebreab are certain at this early juncture whether a change to the microbiome will be inherited by offspring. However, mothers normally pass down their microbiome to their calves, and Kabreab anticipates that this will happen with CRISPR-edited microbes. 

The biggest challenge to obtaining buy-in for CRISPR may come not from regulatory agencies such as the FDA but from ordinary farmers and consumers. Bioethical issues have been raised about CRISPR gene editing in animals, with most of the concern centered around unintended effects on meat quality, as well as animal welfare. Older farmers have been the most vocal, says Oatley. Some have accused him of “playing God” and admonished him to “stop trying to do things nature didn’t intend.” Younger farmers “just love it. They’re asking me, ‘when is it going to be available for me to use?’” 

Cigan adds that the final word may ultimately fall to consumers, who must collectively be convinced of the safety of the technology once CRISPR-edited products are approved for the marketplace.

The post The Future is CRISPR appeared first on Modern Farmer.

Patterson grew up on the Tuscarora Nation Reservation just south of Lake Ontario near Niagara Falls. The painting reminded him of his elders teaching him to harvest black walnuts and hickories.

“I think, for me, it wasn’t about the tree, it was about a way of life,” said Patterson, who today is in his 40s, with silver-flecked dark hair and kids of his own. He sounded wistful.

The American chestnut tree, or číhtkęr in Tuscarora, once grew across what is currently the eastern United States, from Mississippi to Georgia, and into southeastern Canada. The beloved and ecologically important species was harvested by Indigenous peoples for millennia and once numbered in the billions, providing food and habitat to countless birds, insects, and mammals of eastern forests, before being wiped out by rampant logging and a deadly fungal blight brought on by European colonization.

Now, a transgenic version of the American chestnut that can withstand the blight is on the cusp of being deregulated by the US government. (Transgenic organisms contain DNA from other species.) When that happens, people will be able to grow the blight-resistant trees without restriction. For years, controversy has swirled around the ethics of using novel biotechnology for species conservation. But Patterson, who previously directed the Tuscarora Environment Program and today is the assistant director of the Center for Native Peoples and the Environment at the State University of New York’s College of Environmental Science and Forestry in Syracuse, has a different question: What good is bringing back a species without also restoring its traditional relationships with the Indigenous peoples who helped it flourish?

That deep history is not always clear from conservation narratives about the blight-resistant chestnut. For the past four decades, the driving force behind the chestnut’s restoration has been The American Chestnut Foundation, a nonprofit with more than 5,000 active members in 16 chapters. Before turning to genetic engineering, the foundation tried unsuccessfully to breed a hybrid chestnut that looked and grew like an American chestnut but had genes from species native to Asia that gave it blight resistance. “Our vision is a robust eastern forest restored to its splendor,” reads The American Chestnut Foundation’s homepage, against a background of glowing green chestnut leaflets. “Our mission is to return the iconic American chestnut to its native range.”

But the Foundation website’s history of the tree begins during colonial times, suggesting a romantic notion of a precolonial wilderness that ignores the intensive agroforestry that Indigenous peoples practiced. By engineering vanished species to survive harms brought on by colonization without addressing those harms, people avoid having to make hard decisions about how most of us live on the landscape today.

The nuts of the American chestnut are small, sweet, and nutritious. (Photo: Shutterstock)

Bill Powell began working on chestnut genetics when he was a 28-year-old graduate student in Utah, which is actually outside the tree’s natural range. Now in his late 60s, with silvery hair, glasses, and an infectious curiosity about the relationship between tree and pathogen, he’s a leading chestnut restoration expert.

When I met Powell in 2022, he fretted that the chestnut restoration process was taking too long. “Unfortunately, I see retirement on the horizon,” he told me. “But not anytime soon, because I have to get this done.” At the time, Powell was a colleague of Patterson’s, working for the same university and directing the American Chestnut Research and Restoration Project. Since then, as the blight-resistant tree has wound its way through the deregulatory labyrinth of federal agencies including the Environmental Protection Agency, Food and Drug Administration, and Department of Agriculture, Powell has had to step down, recently sharing his diagnosis of terminal colon cancer publicly.

When we spoke, Powell stressed that after the blight-resistant chestnut is deregulated, no Indigenous nations will have to grow the transgenic trees on their lands if they choose not to. But he acknowledged that this does not reassure those who think of Indigenous land not in colonial terms, meaning within reservation boundaries, but instead in terms of treaty rights or cultural practices on historic tribal lands. Indigenous nations, including members of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy such as the Tuscarora Nation, have long argued that even when they ceded land to colonial governments, they did not cede their rights to access and care for plants and animals on those lands.

The nuts of the American chestnut are small, sweet, and nutritious. They were an important part of the varied diet that sustained Patterson’s ancestors for millennia; in return, people cared for groves of the trees across thousands of miles. When the United States pushed Indigenous peoples throughout the chestnut’s range off their lands, and the American chestnut became functionally extinct, an ancient reciprocal relationship vanished, too.

“We were instructed to pick those nuts,” Patterson said. “And when we don’t pick them, the plant goes away.”

The American chestnut could reach 100 feet tall during its heyday. (Photo: Shutterstock)

With craggy bark and shaggy branches of feathery leaves, the American chestnut could reach 100 feet tall during its heyday. Its trunk could be 13 feet wide. The trees huddled along the Gulf Coast for some 8,000 years during the most recent ice age, sheltering in the relatively warm stretch from Florida to the Mississippi River, because mountain peaks even in the southernmost part of the Appalachians were too cold for chestnut trees to grow. Then, as the snow receded northward 20,000 ago, the trees slowly migrated from their coastal refuges. They worked their way up the Appalachian Mountains — helped by Indigenous peoples, whom they helped in turn.

The trees dropped an avalanche of chestnuts to the forest floor each year. According to historian Donald Edward Davis, people burned low fires that dried the nuts and killed off chestnut weevils. By suppressing other plants, fires helped the chestnut trees spread, and the nuts became staples of Indigenous diets — a reliable source of nutrition that people stored in earthen silos or pounded into flour for chestnut bread and other foods. The human-tended groves also fed animals such as elk, deer, bison, bears, passenger pigeons, panthers, wolves, and foxes. Chestnut logjams in streams created deep, clear pockets of water where fish could thrive. Several species of invertebrates relied on chestnut trees for habitat; after the trees died out, five species of moths went extinct.

European settlers forced Indigenous peoples along the chestnut’s range from much of their homelands, severing access to plants and animals they’d long interacted with. Meanwhile, settlers cut down chestnuts for many reasons — to clear space for towns and farms; to build fence posts, telegraph poles, and railroads; or just to gather the nuts more easily.

Nevertheless, the chestnut survived for centuries. Enslaved people gathered chestnuts to supplement meager meals and to sell. White Appalachian communities came to rely on chestnuts as free feed for their hogs and other livestock, and as a cash crop.

Then, in the late 1800s, horticulturalists imported trees carrying the fungal blight Cryphonectria parasitica to the United States. The blight spread by wind and splashing rain; it also hitched rides on insects and birds. Once it landed on the bark of a new tree, it dug in through weak spots — old burn injuries, insect wounds, or scars left from woodcutting — and dissolved the tree’s living tissue with oxalic acid, creating angry orange streaks and open cankers on trunks. The trees would die back to their roots, resprout, and die back again, like botanical zombies. The blight killed at an astonishing pace. All told, a tree whose ancestors evolved millions of years ago died out in less than 50 years.

In turn, the chestnut lost the people whose practices helped it thrive. Patterson told me that some Indigenous nations even lost their word for the chestnut tree, because chestnuts disappeared at the same time that the US government took Indigenous children, including at least one of Patterson’s own relatives, and placed them in boarding schools. In part, this was another strategy for coercing tribes to give up territory. Many children didn’t survive the schools, which were often run by Christian organizations. Those who did were forced to give up their languages, religious beliefs, and traditions. But chestnuts still inhabit Indigenous creation stories and religious calendars, and Patterson believes that a reciprocal relationship can be reestablished between Indigenous nations and the tree. He’s just not convinced that releasing the transgenic chestnut will restore those connections.

The Tuscarora Nation, of which Patterson is an enrolled citizen, is one of six Indigenous nations that today comprise the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, also known as the Iroquois Confederacy. The Haudenosaunee creation story, Patterson said, is “a cycle of loss, grieving, and recovery all the time, just like ecological succession.” By creating a genetically engineered chestnut, Patterson argues, scientists are avoiding the part of the cycle where people grieve and learn from their mistakes.

On the timescale of Haudenosaunee history, the losses still feel new. “It’s been 100 years — but that’s not long,” Patterson observed. Then he reconsidered. “That’s long for research scientists, or a plant technology innovator. It’s too long.”

To Patterson, what’s not being restored — treaty rights to access and care for plants and animals on the landscape — is telling.

“If you want to restore this, like, ‘primordial’ forest, don’t you also want to restore our relationship with that forest?” he asked. “Like — what’s your relationship to a transgenic chestnut?”

An undated archival photo shows a grove of blighted American chestnut trees in Page County, Virginia. (Photo: Library of Congress)

By the time Patterson first saw Ernest Smith’s artwork in the early 1980s, the Tuscarora Nation was going through a cultural renaissance. Patterson’s mother made her children speak Tuscarora at home to keep the language alive. His relatives participated in political acts such as the occupation of Wounded Knee by Indigenous people from across the US, in part to demand that the federal government uphold treaty obligations to the Lakota people. Murals on the walls of Patterson’s state-run elementary school showed Tuscarora people hunting, fishing, trapping, and gathering, even as non-Indigenous people contested those traditional activities outside of reservation lands, from the local to the national level.

Over time, Patterson was taught that the Haudenosaunee Confederacy never ceded its “reserved rights,” or rights that are not explicitly mentioned in treaties or court cases. Today, the Confederacy maintains that it still holds rights to care for and access the species growing on its ancestral homelands and in ancestral waterways — even in territory ceded to settlers. But both the state of New York and the federal government have chipped away at those reserved rights through court cases, and often won. In this legal context, harvesting chestnuts, like the family in Smith’s painting, is not only a cultural practice; it’s an exercise of tribal sovereignty.

Patterson works to rebuild tribal access to many plants and animals that are culturally important for Haudenosaunee peoples. Because those plants and animals often live outside of reservation lands, his work can be difficult. New York State maintains that, except on reservation lands, Indigenous peoples have the same rights as non-Indigenous peoples, and have to follow the same regulations regarding when, where, and how much they hunt, fish, or gather, such as hunting seasons or fishing licenses — regulations the Tuscarora have been fighting in court for decades. So to Patterson, the question of whether to grow transgenic trees isn’t really the most urgent one. He’s more concerned about upholding a way of life that restores traditional ecological relationships.

“Aside from the whole issue of being transgenic, this is just about access and care of place,” he told me. In New York’s state lands, he added, there are almost no provisions for gathering medicines, collecting food, or growing food in traditional territories. Yet that reciprocity helped chestnuts spread and thrive across thousands of miles and thousands of years.

The Haudenosaunee Confederacy began making treaties with white settlers more than 400 years ago. The two-row wampum belt, made of rows of white beads run through with two rows of purple beads, documents a 1613 agreement between the Haudenosaunee and Dutch settlers to live in parallel, not interfering with each other’s ways of life. In 1794, during George Washington’s presidency, the Haudenosaunee and the United States signed the Treaty of Canandaigua, affirming the Confederacy’s sovereignty on its territory. In the Nonintercourse Act, a series of statutes passed in the late 1700s and early 1800s, Congress also barred states from purchasing lands from Indigenous nations without federal approval. When states’ land purchases are approved, Indigenous nations don’t lose any other rights on those lands, such as hunting, fishing, or gathering, unless the treaty specifically cedes those rights, explained Monte Mills, who directs the Native American Law Center at the University of Washington.

Nonetheless, states including New York still try to assert control over tribes or tribal resources, and in many cases, succeed. In one 2005 case, Patterson himself was the defendant, charged by the state of New York for ice fishing without properly labeling his gear. Patterson brought a copy of the Treaty of Canandiagua to court, explaining to the judge that as a member of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, he had the right to fish in the state park, formerly Seneca territory, without regulation by the state of New York. Patterson lost that case.

The Supreme Court of the United States has also limited Haudenosaunee reserved rights, though from a different angle. In City of Sherrill v. Oneida Indian Nation of New York, decided just a few months before Patterson’s case, the Supreme Court ruled that although the Oneida Nation, which is part of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, never gave up certain rights on its ancestral land, it had essentially waited too long to exercise them.

This particular case centered around whether tribes had to pay local and state taxes on ancestral land that they bought back on the real estate market. In the majority opinion, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg wrote that both Indian law and the need to treat people equally “preclude the Tribe from rekindling embers of sovereignty that long ago grew cold.” According to Mills, the Supreme Court essentially said that Oneida had let too much time pass to assert its sovereign rights, and therefore had lost them.

“It’s one of the worst decisions from foundational Indian law court,” Mills said. Although the case was about property taxes, Mills said that it could be a precedent for preventing Indigenous nations from exercising reserved rights. “The state would probably point to Sherrill and say, ‘No, you can’t have those rights, because you haven’t asserted them for so long,’” he added.

But Mills also pointed out that sometimes, tribes and states have been able to work together to come up with mutually beneficial ways for tribes to exercise their reserved rights. If states are interested in recognizing tribal sovereignty, he said, there are models out there for how to do it.

For its part, the state of New York has been working recently to improve its relations with Indigenous nations. In 2022, the state and the federal government agreed to return more than 1,000 acres to the Onondaga Nation. That same year, Governor Kathy Hochul’s administration created an Office of Indian Nation Affairs in the Department of Environmental Conservation, the same department that 20 years previously ticketed Patterson and fought him in court over reserved fishing rights. Peter Reuben, who is enrolled in the Tonawanda Seneca Nation, is currently serving as the first director of the new office.

To Reuben, the creation of his position by the department “really shows that they are serious about us,” he said. Reuben is working to create a productive and respectful consultation process between the region’s Indigenous nations and the state of New York on environmental issues, and to hash out agreements over hunting, fishing, and treaty rights.

“If it’s in the state’s interest — which it seems like it would be — to have more support and additional resources for natural resource management, then why not work with tribal folks to support a program where they’re able to continue to do what they said they’ve been doing all along?” Mills said. “It’s probably going to lead to a better end result anyway.”

Chestnuts were a reliable source of nutrition for Indigenous people. (Photo: Shutterstock)

For now, while transgenic American chestnut trees are still highly regulated, one of the best places to see one is at the Lafayette Road Experimental Field Station on the southern outskirts of Syracuse. Powell met me there on a sunny July morning two summers ago.

On fields that glowed bean-pod green in the upstate humidity, thousands of chestnut trees grew in varying stages of reproduction, healing, and death. White paper bags festooned the taller trees, their flowers covered to manage fertilization.

The transgenic chestnuts contain wheat DNA that lets the tree create an enzyme that fights off Cryphonectria parasitica, the fungal blight. The blight cankers on these trees don’t grow big enough to girdle them.

Rows of strappy transgenic saplings, some as tall as Powell, waited in holding plots fenced to keep out hungry deer. “We’re planting them on very close spacing, and we can only hold them for about three years, and then they get root-bound,” Powell said. As the permitting process drags on, time is running out to replant these young trees.

I asked Powell why he thought restoring the chestnut was important. Chestnuts produced a stable crop of nuts for wildlife, because they flowered late enough in the year that they escaped flower-killing frosts, he said. “It was just an important part of our ecosystem, and for our heritage, too,” he added. “The railroads that were made in the East used ties that were made out of chestnuts because they were rot resistant. And people used to say, chestnuts used to follow you from cradle to grave, because the wood was used in everything from cradles to coffins.”

Although he’s retired, Powell is working to create a research center that would develop transgenic versions of other native species going extinct from blights, insects, and other introduced pests. He imagined growing transgenic versions of everything from elms, killed off by Dutch elm disease and the elm yellows pathogen, to ash trees, which are currently being devoured by iridescent green beetles called emerald ash borers.

People who hope to use technology to resurrect extinct species, whether the American chestnut or even the woolly mammoth, are sometimes considered ecomodernists. According to Jason Delborne, who studies biotechnology and environmental policy at North Carolina State University (where I previously worked, in the English department), “There are people who are environmentalists at their core, but sick of losing, and interested in the promise of technology to solve the ecological and environmental problems we are facing.” Part of that interest, he said, comes from a sense of responsibility to “fix what you broke.”

Indeed, Jamie Van Clief, the southern regional science coordinator for The American Chestnut Foundation, explained to me that she got interested in working for the organization because her field, environmental science, was depressing.

“There’s a lot of disaster, there’s a lot of dismay, and to have this foundation with such a positive and impactful mission just attracted me immensely,” she said. “To be able to work towards something when it kind of feels hopeless sometimes — and to be part of restoration on the scale that we’re doing — is incredible.”

As Powell and I gazed at a diseased, non-engineered chestnut sapling, its yellowing leaves hanging limp in the sun, I reflected that eastern forests weren’t exactly flush with any other giant trees. Almost all old growth has fallen to human endeavors. Conservation efforts also have to take into consideration climate change, which may shift suitable chestnut habitat north into Canada — and shift plant diseases’ habitats as well. Root rot, or Phytophthora cinnamomi, is another introduced pathogen. It only infects chestnuts in the South right now, because root rot dies during winter freezes. The American Chestnut Foundation estimates root rot will spread to New England in the next 50 years as the region warms. Plus, there are few places available for a new chestnut forest to grow, except perhaps forest remediation sites such as old Appalachian coal mines. The fact is, releasing blight-resistant chestnuts into the wild won’t guarantee them a landscape where they can survive.

Because biotechnology alone can’t restore the American chestnut to the numbers that its supporters are envisioning, Powell anticipates relying on citizen scientists. After deregulation, he imagines The American Chestnut Foundation sending transgenic pollen to interested people, who could pollinate the flowers of wild mother trees growing nearby. They could plant the nuts the trees grow or pass them on to other chestnut fans.

The health and ecological risks of introducing the transgenic chestnut into the wild are likely to be low, according to Delborne; its signature wheat gene is commonly found in many major food crops. But at heart, Delborne argues, the debate isn’t just about chestnuts. “It’s also about a category of technology that could find its way into the world,” he said.

Even if the chestnut recovery doesn’t work out, the approval of the engineered chestnut for unregulated growth could open the door to a new era of biotechnology in US forestry — such as a pest-resistant poplar tree, which kills forest insects by expressing genes from the bacterium Bacillus thuringiensis, and already grows commercially in other countries.

The debate about blight-resistant chestnuts isn’t really about trees or even genetic engineering; it’s about who gets to make decisions on the land. Conservation is framed in European cultures as an objective goal, but it’s a worldview that other people may not share, explained Katie Barnhill-Dilling, a North Carolina State University social scientist who researches environmental decision-making. “Some of the people I’ve talked to from the Haudenosaunee Environmental Task Force would contest that humans are here to accept the gifts as they are now,” she said.

Some Indigenous nations in the chestnut’s historic range, such as the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, or EBCI, are considering growing genetically engineered chestnuts on their reservation lands after the trees are deregulated. To EBCI Secretary of Agriculture and Natural Resources Joey Owle, restoring the American chestnut is another way for the tribe to exercise its sovereign rights, more than a century after the tree’s disappearance.

“It’s one project of many projects that we work on to enhance our sovereignty as a tribe, to work to establish a culturally significant resource that provided a bountiful harvest for our ancestors and wildlife,” he said. “It’s just cool to be part of it.” Based on feedback from EBCI committee members, Owle said that planting transgenic trees, while an option, is the “last option that we would like to pursue” to restore the species. For now, the EBCI is scouting out wild chestnuts that survived the blight, and planting hybrid trees on its land in partnership with The American Chestnut Foundation.

Photo: Shutterstock

On a crisp fall day a couple of years ago, Patterson and Powell arranged for around 15 people to gather chestnuts in upstate New York. The grove grew on a hilly slope on state land that used to be an agricultural field. “It was just a beautiful little spot,” Patterson recalled. The 12 or so American chestnuts were young; Patterson estimated they were perhaps 20 years old and no more than 25 feet tall.

The group, a mix of Haudenosaunee Confederacy members and non-Indigenous scientists, toted assorted equipment to gather the prickly nuts: ladders, homemade pickers, plastic buckets, sturdy leather shoes, and gloves. But first, they stood in a circle in the grove and discussed the future of the American chestnuts. According to Patterson, things quickly became adversarial.

Powell and Patterson had long been collegial: Patterson first tasted an American chestnut after he microwaved some that Powell handed him in the campus building where they both had offices. Meanwhile, Powell’s students learned from Patterson about the parallel expulsion of Indigenous peoples from their lands and the disappearance of chestnut trees.

Powell has constantly reached out to tribes for input and to understand their perspectives, Patterson said. And unlike other biotechnology researchers, Powell has focused on technology for environmental restoration, not for personal profit. “I admire the idea that this is about technology for restoration — whatever that is,” Patterson added.

But their relationships with plants remain fundamentally different. For example, Powell has talked about keeping the price of the transgenic chestnuts low, just to raise enough money to cover the costs of getting them out to people. In contrast, when I asked Patterson why he never bought or sold seeds from traditional food plants for his home garden, he sounded incredulous. “That’s like selling people,” he said. “That’s life. … Why would you sell somebody?”

That fall day, Patterson began worrying that if the restoration succeeds and transgenic chestnuts grow across the land, releasing pollen into the wind, people won’t be able to tell transgenic trees apart from non-transgenic trees. Scientists in the group assured everyone that in the future, people would be able to tell the trees apart through genetic testing.

“It was this privileged standpoint, which is, ‘Well, technology will figure it out for us.’ But it’s not as if I’m going to hand that technology to my son or nephews or my grandsons before they go off to gather,” Patterson said. “It just seemed like it was so simple to them.” He wondered why the non-Indigenous scientists and conservationists had been able to plant this grove on state land in the first place, when his nation was largely prevented from accessing or caring for plants there.

The group got tense. “The conversation turned to fear, and to moral opposition,” Patterson recalled. Patterson realized this standoff wasn’t the right frame of mind for the trip. “Well,” he exclaimed, “let’s go pick some nuts!”

As he collected chestnuts, Patterson couldn’t help but think of Ernest Smith’s painting. “It was a fulfillment of that scene,” he told me. Patterson reflected on his ancestors, wondering how they’d gathered the prickly nuts without his contemporary tools. He felt that by collecting chestnuts, he was doing what he was supposed to do. He hoped that in the future, he’d be able to find more wild chestnuts and organize more gathering trips, taking care to bring Haudenosaunee kids along. But he could see that the masting trees were struggling with the blight and weren’t going to survive much longer. Some of the young trees were already more than half dead, leaves brown and wilted.

He and his wife, who also attended the trip, were struck by a realization: If the federal government deregulated the blight-resistant trees, letting their pollen float freely through the air, this trip might be one of the last times they could gather wild American chestnuts with certainty.

This story was originally published by Grist. Sign up for Grist’s weekly newsletter here. Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Learn more at Grist.org.

The post The American Chestnut Tree is Coming Back. Who is It For? appeared first on Modern Farmer.

Yet that tension between the global appetite for chicken and the conditions of mass poultry farming is also an opportunity for problem solvers at the forefront of one of the more audacious—and controversial—developments in the food industry.

The lab at Good Meat. Photography by Good Meat.

Tetrick is the co-founder and CEO of Eat Just, which operates Good Meat, one of two companies approved by the USDA in June to begin selling cultivated, or lab-grown, chicken in the United States. The big idea: Create chicken meat in a controlled setting, with no harm to animals and a drastic reduction of the issues associated with problematic factory farming practices.

“We think that if you look at the last 50 years, the more traditional American farmer-rancher has been pretty decimated by large industrial operations,” says Tetrick. “So, our focus is how does cultivating meat ultimately replace a large-scale production of animal protein?”

But not everyone agrees that cultivated meat should replace traditionally produced animal protein. Among its critics is the World Farmers’ Organisation (WFO), representing more than 1.2 billion farmers globally, and which in July released a statement taking “a resolute stand” against lab-grown food. In the release, the WFO claimed cultivated livestock products “are supported by marketing campaigns that enhance the myth of greater sustainability compared to agriculture” and asserted that “there is no reliable evidence to compare cell-based food to farmer-produced one.”

“For us, food comes from the work of farmers, and we don’t think that these companies developing these products will stop just to be two or three percent of the market,” says Paolo Di Stefano, facilitator of the WFO’s Value Chain Working Group. “The idea that one day agriculture—natural agriculture, land-based agriculture—could be replaced by artificial food is quite difficult for us to accept.”

Farmers have every right to be concerned, whether it’s about the authenticity of cultivated meats or their own livelihoods. Automation and the uber-expansion of factory farming have increasingly limited the ability of others to compete in the marketplace. Many skeptics view lab-grown meat as a kind of Frankenstein-ing of food—an “unnatural” practice.

Photography by Good Meat.

Although proponents argue that a shift to lab-grown practices can dramatically lower greenhouse gasses, as well as reduce both land and water usage, some detractors claim that cultured meat may actually be worse for the environment than the real thing. What we know is that the cultured meat industry remains in its infancy, so research about complex long-term environmental ramifications is still limited. Lab-grown meat producers know that part of their industry’s value proposition hinges on improved environmental outcomes and more sustainable resource management.

Tetrick says his company has no interest in squeezing out small-scale poultry farming operations that favor sustainable and humane methods. He believes there will always be a market for animal-harvested meat done right. Rosanna Bauman, whose family runs Bauman’s Mobile Meat Market in Garnett, KS, seems to fall into the category of small-scale, “thoughtful” farmers that Tetrick describes. Bauman’s raises its chickens on pasture, with non-GMO grains, and its beef, pork and lamb on grass. They also hand-butcher their products and sell them direct-to-consumer at farmer’s markets and pop-ups. Bauman says she has heard “a lot of skepticism” from her customers about cultivated meat.

“Specifically, they weren’t sure that they wanted to be eating cultured meat and whatever it may or may not consist of,” says Bauman. “They were concerned about how it was presented to consumers … about how it was labeled or could be labeled.”

A chicken pot pie with lab-grown chicken. Photography by Good Meat.

Justin Kolbeck, co-founder and CEO of Wildtype—a company that makes lab-grown salmon—agrees with that sentiment. “I think the onus is on [companies like] us to communicate transparently, to have conversations like this, to talk about how the technology works,” says Kolbeck. “And, of course, our food products are just as susceptible to things like salmonella and listeria, that are sort of human-born and environmentally born. So, we need to have a very careful eye on food safety, just like any other conventional food company.”

In fact, Kolbeck says Wildtype, per an FDA request, conducted a DNA alignment test using the four nucleotides of Coho salmon samples, to test how similar the lab-grown salmon was to a freshly caught fish. “Lined them up, one by one, and just showed that it’s the exact same DNA that we found in conventional Coho salmon.” A person with a seafood allergy, says Kolbeck, would react to Wildtype’s product exactly as they would to the fish plucked from a stream.

Tetrick describes Good Meat’s chicken as the genuine article, even though it starts with a cell biopsy in a stainless steel vessel rather than an egg in a coop. “You feed the cell the same way that a farmer would feed a chicken,” says Tetrick. “Amino acids, vitamins and minerals. This is creating the conditions for the cell to grow in the same way that an animal’s body would create the conditions for cells to grow.”

Although some farmers follow more ethical animal welfare practices than others, cultivated meat—which removes slaughter from the production process, a key step—is indisputably more humane. Compared to traditional farming, the sustainability of lab-grown foods and the natural resources required to create cultivated meat is still in dispute—but is also constantly evolving as techniques are improved. Tetrick also notes that the controlled environment in which lab-grown chicken is created prevents diseases and other risks to consumers.

As for the overarching issue—is it natural?—Tetrick reorients the question: “Let’s just talk about that word: natural. I would ask, ‘Do you think chicken that is produced in the United States—99 percent of it—do you look at that as natural?’” Tetrick references chickens raised in jam-packed, sunlight-free structures, pumped with antibiotics and bred for maximum meat-bearing over the shortest time frame possible. There is a reason that chickens and eggs produced by factory farms today look and taste differently than products found on the market 50 years ago.

Cultivated meat advocates say lab-grown chicken offers the possibility of large-scale production with fewer required resources, less suffering and more control over the final product. But even its biggest champions admit that it won’t happen overnight.

“It is real chicken,” says Tetrick. “It’s just made in a way that doesn’t require the live animal to be a part of the production process. And because it doesn’t require the live animal to be a part of the production process, we think, ultimately, that we can make a lot more of that less expensively. Now, that’s a long journey to get there.”

That extended timeframe is both a boon and a worry for traditional farmers. “We don’t know today what the impact will be, because it’s not going so fast—the development of these alternatives—because of the cost of production,” says the WFO’s Di Stefano. 

Chef Jose Andres cooks with lab-grown chicken. Photography by Good Meat.

Yet one sticking point remains: the ick factor. Some eaters may never have the stomach for lab-grown meat. At the end of the day, will enough consumers bite?

Some already are. Cultivated chicken hit the market in Singapore more than two years ago, and this month, in Washington, D.C., it lands on the menu at chef José Andrés’ China Chilcano. Supplies are limited, and the price tag (a reported $70 per person) is sure to turn away some eaters. But cultivated meat producers are already receiving heavy investment from venture capitalists (and, notably, factory farms themselves), and it may be only a matter of time before lab growers unlock the components for scaling up production.

“At some point, are we using too much of the earth just for the animals we eat?” says Tetrick. “Longer term, that’s how you can make billions of pounds at the lowest possible cost in a way that just doesn’t require so many resources—so many hundreds of millions of acres of land and trillions of gallons of water. That’s where we see this going.”

The post It’s Alive! The Debate Over Lab-Grown Chicken appeared first on Modern Farmer.

Germinating seeds and growing food on the red planet is difficult, particularly when it comes to Martian soil. The soil on Mars contains a high level of perchlorate salts, which are toxic for plants. 

To simulate Martian perchlorate levels, a team of researchers from the University of Arkansas gathered soil from the Mojave Desert, where the desert earth is similar to that on Mars. The area was developed by NASA and its Jet Propulsion Laboratory in 2007 as the Mojave Mars simulant (MMS). Researchers mainly use the area for soil sampling, but they’ve also test-driven rovers and practiced using sampling equipment in icy conditions. 

The research team grew three varieties of rice, including one strain of wild rice and two strains with gene-edited lines. The goal was to produce rice better suited to drought, salty conditions and a lack of natural sugars. All three rice strains were grown in three mediums: soil from the MMS, a regular potting soil mixture and a combination of the two. The plants were able to grow in the all-MMS soil, but they didn’t thrive. Instead, the combined potting mixture provided the best results. Researchers found that a 75-percent MMS soil to 25-percent potting soil mixture created improved plants. They also discovered that plants could still take root with one gram of perchlorate per kilogram of soil, but three grams per kg was the upper limit—past that, nothing would grow. 

The team presented its findings at the 54th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference last month. Its next steps will be to experiment with other Martian soil simulants and other rice varieties that tolerate high salt concentrations. The team will also work to determine how much perchlorate can leach into the plant from the soil. 

It’s not just potential Martian settlers that could benefit from this experiment. There are several regions on this planet that are covered with high-salinity soil, such as parts of the Australian desert. 

But perchlorate salts is just one issue facing would-be Martian farmers. Martian soil is lighter and looser than soils on Earth, meaning they would drain water faster than our soil. It’s also missing many nutrients on which we rely to grow crops, such as nitrogen. Plus, Mars has about a third of Earth’s gravity, which could be disorienting for plants that rely on gravity to root into the ground. 

However, we may be closer than we think to providing astronauts with a semi-varied diet. In recent studies, wheat, mustard and tomatoes have all performed well in simulated conditions. Those on the mission to Mars may not be able to order a pizza, but they might just be able to make one themselves.

The post How to Grow Rice on Mars appeared first on Modern Farmer.