For farmers: You’re not alone.

Connect with other farmers:

Craig Watts stands in front of the mushrooms he grows. (Photo credit: Transfarmation / Mercy For Animals)

Craig Watts of Socially Responsible Agriculture Project says: “First and foremost, reach out to me directly and let me hear what is happening and see if there is something as it is a case-by-case process.”
Connect with Craig, or learn more about SRAP, here.

Tyler Whitley. (Photo credit: Transfarmation / Mercy For Animals)

Tyler Whitley of The Transfarmation Project says: “Just know that there are possibilities, even if they’re tough, and spend your time looking into those. Reach out to some organizations. It doesn’t have to be just us—there are a lot of organizations that are out there; their purpose is to help farmers outside of a ‘Big Ag’ system. Quality of life is what a lot of the farmers bring up to us. And if you’re unhappy with your quality of life, the best thing that I can say is to look into making a change. I think that’s something that resonates with all readers, not just farmers. Change is possible, even if it’s tough. But you can definitely do it.”
Learn more about the possibilities available to you with The Transfarmation Project.

Explore information resources:

Tanner Faaborg. (Photo credit: Transfarmation / Mercy For Animals)

Tanner Faaborg of 1100 Farm says: “I think they should at least just have an open mind. Have an open mind and do a little bit of research to see what’s out there because people are farming differently. There are some really interesting things happening right now. And then just start to write it down. You don’t need to do everything all at once. You don’t need to make a decision overnight. But I think I would recommend them to just start making a plan. And then just continue to look for resources like Transfarmation or talk to the USDA…There are a lot of resources out there that will help you at least get started. It doesn’t have to be a massive project. You could start out with one small change.”
The Faaborgs went from hog farming to selling value-added mushroom products. See how they reimagined their farm. 

Angela De Freitas. (Photo from Animal Outlook)

Angela de Freitas of Animal Outlook says: “I think knowledge is power. And I know that with a couple of the farmers that we’ve worked with, the first thing they did, which is eventually what led them to us, is they simply went online and started reading, because it helped them to understand that it wasn’t them. They were able to see that there are plenty of other nightmare stories out there of things that have happened to farmers, particularly in these contract situations. Start calling organizations—call Tyler, call me, call whoever you find, because there are resources out there to help and there are organizations out there to help. And there is no need to have to try and figure it out yourself because, at this point, there are a couple of us out there who have done it and had successes.”
Contact Angela at Animal Outlook.

Paula and Dale Boles. (Photo credit: Transfarmation / Mercy For Animals)

Paula Boles of JB Farms and Grace Chapel Greenhouses says: “The first thing that I would advise them to do is just do research. There are so many places that you can reach out [to] and talk to other people. And just see what options are out there. Even writing down ideas or visions, missions, whatever you think that aren’t possible—write them down anyway. And, sometimes, it’s almost like, once you write it down, it almost becomes a real thing. And then you can start looking at other ways to get there.”
Read about how contract farming affects mental health, from Paula’s perspective.

Contact your representatives:

Kara Shannon. (Photo from ASPCA)

Kara Shannon of the ASPCA says: “One of the first things that [farmers] should do is to talk to their representatives, both in their state legislature and in Congress, and just tell their story, because this is not the story that those lawmakers are hearing, especially in Congress. [They hear] from Big Ag that these contracts and these growers, they’re building strong rural economies and creating jobs and feeding the world, etc. And they are not often hearing from people who have these stories of getting into contract farming because they wanted to be their own bosses and keep the family farm and maintain this way of life and then find themselves in something so far from what they thought. So, I think sharing those stories [is] really important, because that is what is going to get those policymakers motivated to make changes to fund programs to help get those farmers out of it, to improve the accountability for these big producers that are getting the farmers in these incredibly unfair contracts.”
Support farm system reform here.

For interested consumers: You can help.

Ask questions:

The ASPCA has a guide for buyers called “Shop with Your Heart.” It helps consumers navigate grocery store aisles and determine whether the language or certifications on animal product packaging is legitimate or greenwashing. They also have a list of questions you can ask producers if you have the opportunity, such as at the farmers market. Often, smaller producers will qualify for legitimate certifications, but actually becoming certified is a financial obstacle, so it’s helpful to know what to ask them if you have the chance to speak to them directly. 

The ASPCA’s Kara Shannon shares a question she likes that implies transparency: “My go-to would be, ‘Hey, do you allow people to come out to the farm? Do you allow visits?’ And if the answer is yes, that’s kind of all you need to know.”

Become a farmer ally:

Additionally, Angela de Freitas of Animal Outlook says: “Something that’s really important to us organizationally is that farmers are our allies and that we don’t engage in shaming farmers or making them feel bad for what they have done or chose to do. And we recognize that farmers are part of the solution. That is, I think, a really important way to think about this—supporting the farmer to get out, celebrating the farmer getting out, offering the farmer options to get out, as opposed to trying to create change through shaming.”

We love to connect with our Modern Farmer community. If you have a farm and are considering transitioning to a more sustainable model, we would love to hear from you. Comment below or send us a note at lena@modfarmer.com.

The post Advice and Resources for Getting Out of Factory Farming appeared first on Modern Farmer.

But soon, other expenses started getting tacked on. Tyson required a new computer system to control the temperature in the barns. This was another $70,000. Their propane bill averaged around $25,000 per year. Not making the updates wasn’t really an option—no matter how much time and money you invested to be a farmer for the company, they could cut your contract at any time.

And the income wasn’t quite what they expected. Companies like Tyson pay their farmers in what’s called a tournament system. There’s a base pay, but whoever raises the best flock and has the best “feed conversion”—the biggest birds for the least feed— makes the most money, and payment decreases the further you go down the ladder. This essentially pits all the regional farmers against each other. 

Challenging company representatives, even on small things, resulted in retribution. Paula Boles says sometimes they’d intentionally bring you a “bad flock,” keeping your yields low and locking you into the bottom rung of the tournament system.

“If you complain too much, they just start sending you bad flocks of chickens,” she says. 

The Boles’ situation with Tyson was far from unique. While contract farming, or “factory farming,” has been exposed in the media for being exploitative of animals, the farmers who sign contracts with companies like Tyson, Perdue or other big players in animal agriculture also find themselves backed into a financial corner. But, over the last several years, there has been a wave of efforts to find ways to support farmers transitioning out of factory farming. The Boles, who raised their last flock for Tyson about nine years ago, are proof that getting out is possible.

“Now to have come through it, it’s been a long process,” says Boles. “It hasn’t been easy, but we’ve lived to tell about it, so to speak.”

Creating pathways

Tyler Whitley is the director of transfarmation for The Transfarmation Project, an initiative of Mercy for Animals. He has helped work with 12 farms to get them out of the industrial system—a system, he says, that is designed to exploit them.

 “The way that the current structure of factory farming is designed is that…the steps that carry with it the most risk and the most debt and the most liability are transitioned to the farmers,” he says. “And so what you have is you have farmers building these extremely expensive facilities at the very specific direction [and] design of the company that they’re working for. But they don’t own the animals.” 

The Transfarmation Project was founded by Leah Garcés. Whitley says that Garcés realized that ending factory farming would necessitate support systems for the farmers.

“She thought that if we’re going to be able to end factory farming, it’s not just about creating a different system that runs parallel, like you might see a lot of organizations doing when they talk about agroecology or regenerative farming [and] things of that nature,” says Whitley. “But you have to actually create transition paths for farmers to exit out of factory farming.”

And these pathways can be difficult to find and establish. Debt is one of the biggest hurdles to transitioning out of contract farming, says Whitley. And it’s not simply that the farmers have debt but a specific type of debt that requires lender authorization before farmers can make a change. 

Two of the other big challenges relate to the question: If not contract farming, then what? If you’re choosing to grow a different crop, a big obstacle is the learning curve—all forms of farming require specialized knowledge that makes changing lanes difficult. The other hurdle is marketing. When you have a contract, you don’t need to market your product, because you only have one buyer. This is also part of what makes factory farming inherently risky for the farmer.

“They don’t market the animals directly, so they have one customer,” says Whitley. “If you’re a business that has only one customer, you have a very high amount of risk for your business if you should lose that customer.”

When transitioning out of factory farming, farmers can try to use what they already have for a new purpose. This former chicken barn is now a greenhouse. (Photography credit to Transfarmation / Mercy For Animals)

Before The Transfarmation Project can help farmers find specific buyers for new crops, it needs to have a pretty good idea of what would feasibly bring in an income for the farmer. For this, it  turns to Highland Economics for market analyses. Highland Economics has composed reports on a handful of specialty crops of The Transfarmation Project’s choosing, such as hemp, edible flowers, strawberries and microgreens.

The assessments are twofold—it looks at the regional market drivers for a crop, including what types of investments are being made in the sector and important trends—and it also considers what the projected costs and returns of growing that crop are in an indoor setting. Looking at the data that emerges in these analyses, such as consumer demand and the debt service coverage ratio (the ability of a producer to pay their debts with the income they earn) helps farmers decide if a certain crop is right for them.

Travis Greenwalt of Highland Economics also encourages producers to do their own research. “I think this is a great preliminary or a starting point for starting that conversation,” says Greenwalt. “But the specific costs and specific returns are going to be all dependent on the location and the producer.”

‘Steady treadmill of debt’

Garcés started The Transfarmation Project after meeting Craig Watts, a then-poultry farmer for Perdue who let her come to his farm and film inside his chicken barns. This view into what factory farming was really like made national headlines. Watts found himself as a whistleblower after feeling deeply disturbed by the disconnect between how this scale of poultry farming was portrayed versus the reality of the situation. But when he was starting out, his goal was to get back to farming on his family’s land, and contracting with Perdue seemed like the way to do it.

“It just sounded like a good deal,” says Watts. “You build the houses, they supply the birds, they supply all the technical advice. It’s a steady cash income. Supposedly, you could have positive cash flow the first year in business, which was unheard of.”

Craig Watts. (Photography credit to Transfarmation / Mercy For Animals)

But Perdue exercised control over how Watts farmed. It could move the goalposts as it desired, requesting upgrades to his equipment for which he had to pay.

“They’re always coming back to you when you get your houses close to being paid for to make these additions or renovations,” says Watts. “There’s always this new thing, ‘it’s gonna save the industry and you have to have it, but we’re not going to make you get it but we’re not gonna bring you any more birds until you do it.’ It’s kind of making it mandatory without actually saying ‘mandatory.’” 

Instead of making good money, Watts found himself on a “steady treadmill of debt.”

Additionally, the way that the birds were being treated was misrepresented to the public, which eventually tipped Watts over the edge.

“I guess everybody has their breaking point,” says Watts. “And I had mine sitting in a motel room in Brookings, South Dakota.”

A commercial had come on the television for the company. As Watts watched the commercial, he saw Jim Perdue driving down the road and then stepping into a chicken barn. Inside the barn were big, beautiful, clean birds, walking around on floors covered in pine shavings.

The reality that Watts had witnessed day in and day out for 20 years was quite different: chickens packed into small spaces, often injured or physically unable to stand or walk, panting due to overheating and sitting on a cake of fecal matter.

“I had a contract with Perdue Farms, but at the end of the day, the customer was my boss,” says Watts. “And I just felt like they needed to know.”

And that was how he ended up letting Garcés inside his barns to film. The resulting video made national news in 2014.  

Craig Watts and Leah Garcés inside a former chicken barn. (Photography credit to Transfarmation / Mercy For Animals)

Now, Watts works with the Socially Responsible Agriculture Project (SRAP), heading up its Contract Grower Transition Program. At the same time, he is learning how to effectively grow mushrooms on his farm in the old poultry barns. Growing mushrooms requires a very different set of skills, and as he learns best practices, he helps other farmers find a place to land.

Most people who come to SRAP are in crisis mitigation mode; they just had their contracts cut, many are strapped with debt and they’re trying to figure out how to proceed without losing their land and their livelihoods. Every farm is different, so there is not one uniform approach. But SRAP provides guidance through the financial and legal obstacles.

“We are an air traffic controller, so to speak,” he says. “We are looking for that pilot to help them land as soft as possible.”

It’s not without loss, Watts cautions. Changing the way you farm or remaining in farming after a contract is cut isn’t always possible. “People still lose their farms,” says Watts. “There’s no magic wand here. We flip rocks until we can’t flip anymore.”

For Watts, the bigger changes have to be systemic.

“We hear about how the food system is broken,” says Watts. “The consolidation has given farmers less options to sell to and less options to buy from. But the reality is, the food system is working as it was designed to work. It’s working perfectly. What has got to happen is there has to be a major shift in policy.”

Ripple effect

The video Garcés made with Watts made waves in the media, but it also resonated deeply with other farmers who were in the same position and had felt completely isolated. In December 2014, the video made its way to Paula and Dale Boles.

That day, the Boles came home from a difficult day at their barns with a bad flock.

“We went back to the house and watched that, and just sat there in tears,” says Paula Boles. “Because we knew when we saw that, that we weren’t the dumb hillbillies like Tyson had told us that we were. We knew that there was somebody else out there. And everything that [Watts] said in that video was the life that we were living.”

They looked at their calendar and decided that May 2015 would be their last flock. Boles wrote a letter to Tyson requesting to terminate their contract, and four weeks later, they received notice that their cancellation had been accepted.

“Even driving to the post office to pick it up, I was a nervous wreck,” says Boles.

Farms contracting with Tyson have a sign on their property that says “Tyson” and the name of the farm. About a week after their cancellation was confirmed, someone from Tyson drove out to the farm and picked up their sign.

“We were just standing there, we thought, wow—we invested $400,000, we almost lost everything that we have, and all they had invested in us was a $20 sign.”

To learn about what the Boles did next to create a second life for their farm and hear about more organizations that offer support to producers transitioning out of factory farming, read part two.

The post They Once Worked in Factory Farming. Not Anymore. appeared first on Modern Farmer.

“The path they were on, they wouldn’t be able to do that,” says Faaborg. “And that’s when Wendell Murphy started moving into Iowa.”

Murphy Family Farms (later bought by Smithfield Foods) helped out with the loan needed to get started. The idea was that after about 10 years, it would be completely paid off.

“It sounded like a pretty good deal,” says Faaborg. “And it turned out a little differently.”

To maintain their contract, the company required the Faaborgs to take on additional expenses, such as upgrades to their barns. 

The Faaborgs farmed hogs for 30 years. When Tanner Faaborg came back to the farm as an adult, the family began thinking about ways to transition out of hog farming. 

“We started to see all these family farms just disappearing,” he says. “And then it became this kind of existential thought process for us on, you know, what is the future of this farm?”

This question would end up guiding the Faaborgs’ transition out of hog farming and into a business model that Faaborg hopes will sustain his family and their community for years to come. For farmers like Faaborg and Paula and Dale Boles, whom you met in part one, this transition has proven to be difficult but not impossible.

“It doesn’t have to be a massive project,” says Faaborg. “You could start out with one small change.”

Tanner Faaborg. (Photography credit to Transfarmation / Mercy For Animals)

Risk tolerance

While many contract farmers find themselves in parallel positions—burdened with debt and lacking independence in making decisions on their farm—the path out of factory farming looks a little different for everyone. Animal Outlook, an organization that helps farmers transition out of contract farming, has a general blueprint it uses to help farms transition, but the actual steps vary, because each farmer has different circumstances. According to Angela de Freitas, director of farm transitions for Animal Outlook, these are conditions such as varying amounts of debt, regional positioning, knowledge of how to do other things, whether or not there is off-farm income, what kind of regional collaborators or partners exist and a farmer’s risk tolerance for trying something new. Animal Outlook works with poultry farmers who have had their contracts cut, which can happen at any time.

“They find themselves in a bit of a crisis, because it’s unexpected,” says De Freitas. “It’s not as if they have notice, they don’t have notice—it’s just like from one day to the next they don’t have a job, basically. Yet, they still have a tremendous debt load.”

One of the first things that some of the farmers she’s worked with have done is to start accumulating knowledge by going online and reading about others in similar positions. This early step helps them to realize that it’s not just them, says De Freitas. From there, farmers can begin reaching out to organizations such as Animal Outlook for support.

Animal Outlook is an animal advocacy organization, but De Freitas says any alternative to factory farming also has to be financially viable for producers. It’s important, she says, to see farmers as allies in building a different food system.

“We also approach it with the absolute understanding that if it doesn’t work for the farmer, if the transition cannot be financially successful and offer them a good quality of life, then it doesn’t work.”

The future of the farm

Finding others who share your vision for something different is an important early step. When Faaborg wanted to start changing the way his family farmed, he was met with some skepticism and felt overwhelmed with the process, he says, until he linked up with The Transfarmation Project. Tyler Whitley and the team there brought not only the can-do optimism for a big change like this but also came equipped with some of the technical knowledge and resources.

The Faaborgs began a pilot project to grow mushrooms, all while working with an outside team to retrofit the hog barn and convert it into a growing space. After eight months of learning the ropes, they now make and sell value-added products, such as tinctures and coffee blends. Finding the market for a new product was one of the most difficult parts, says Faaborg. But their website is now live for pre-orders under the name 1100 Farm. The “1100” is a nod to the fact that company barns were called “Murphy 1100 buildings,” in reference to the number of hogs that were housed in each barn. Faaborg included it in the name as a reminder of where they’ve been.

“It will always be a reminder of the change that’s possible and the change that happened on this farm,” says Faaborg.

The Faaborgs’ former hog barns. (Photography credit to Transfarmation / Mercy For Animals)

Faaborg has also applied for funding from multiple USDA programs supporting projects geared toward things such as energy efficiency and oxbow wetland restoration. Faaborg’s goal is to showcase that it is possible to convert hog barns to do a different kind of farming, and in doing so create jobs and revitalize the local rural economy. A couple of years into this process, Faaborg now has an answer for the existential question he and his parents were asking at the beginning of the transition—what will be the future of this farm?

“I think this will be a family farm and stay in the family for generations to come. I think this will be a public space where people can come and tour the facilities,” he says. “I want people to be able to come out in the country and be in nature and actually see where their food comes from.”

The role of policy

One of the biggest obstacles that Kara Shannon, director of farm animal welfare policy for the ASPCA, has observed for farmers wanting to transition out of industrial animal agriculture and into specialty crops or something more humane is the lack of funding and resources available to overcome financial hurdles.

“The resources just aren’t there, which I think is particularly jarring for farmers who entered into the industrial model,” says Shannon, “because agricultural lenders are incredibly quick to give out enormous loans for farmers who want to build a CAFO [concentrated animal feeding operation]. And [they’re] not nearly as happy to loan to them for these types of projects.”

But that doesn’t mean there isn’t a way forward.

State and federal policy have a big role to play, says Shannon. At the federal level, the Farm Bill is a big piece of legislation that pours a lot of money into US agriculture, and, unfortunately, says Shannon, a lot of conservation funding through the Farm Bill goes to CAFOs.

“I think federal and state policy play a really huge role in shaping our farm system, which is evidenced by the decades of regulatory and policy choices that have gotten us to where we currently are with this consolidated industrial system,” says Shannon. “We really need policy now to support farmers who are trying to build both more humane but also more resilient regional food systems.”

Federal legislation moves slowly, but Shannon has observed that more and more states seem to be providing farmers with grants to diversify their operations. And it can make a big difference—Shannon points to Vermont, which recently launched a grant program for small farm diversification and transitions. An added bonus of this program is that, unlike some other grants such as the Value-Added Producer Grant Program, it doesn’t require matching funds from the producer, something that can be hard to pull off if you’re saddled with debt from contract farming.

“Vermont’s a big dairy state and a lot of the dairies are struggling,” says Shannon. “So, there’s been a lot of focus on helping them, and this grant program was one of the first major steps towards doing that.”

The ASPCA also helps fund some grants for farmers looking to make their operations more humane. Paula and Dale Boles, former Tyson poultry farmers, received one of these ASPCA-funded grants during their transition.

Thanks in part to Dale’s experience in construction, the Boles were able to adapt their poultry barns into greenhouses. During the transition, they have both held off-farm jobs, but at JB Farms, they grow things such as microgreens and vegetables. It’s important for farmers to experiment with different crops or ideas, says Paula Boles, to figure out what works for them. She has leaned into growing flowers under the name Grace Chapel Greenhouses. Two years ago, the Boles were able to pay off the lingering debt from their years in poultry farming.

Left: Paula Boles. Right: The Boles’ former chicken barn was converted into a greenhouse. (Photography credit to Transfarmation / Mercy For Animals)

“I walked into Carolina Farm Credit and handed them a check for $5,000 and paid off the loan from the business that we exited seven years prior,” says Boles. “But we live to tell about it.”

And their farm has found some new life as a community-centered space. They frequently have people coming out to the farm to visit or volunteer. The connection to the community has been rewarding for Boles—it’s the complete opposite of the Tyson tournament system, which pitted her farm against other farmers. Her goal is to one day be able to work in the greenhouse full-time. 

“I have a vision, I have a long-term goal, something that I think will sustain us, something that will keep me healthy and keep me active,” says Boles. “You know, the whole thing that I thought was going to kill me I think is now going to sustain me.”

Catch the first part of this series here to read about what drove the Boles family to make their farming transition.  

The post Exiting the Factory Farm appeared first on Modern Farmer.

At CAFOs, it is common to pool animal waste in one spot, called a manure lagoon. Anaerobic digestion creates a mixture of gases, which can be used for electricity or further processed into fuel for vehicles. The idea is to take advantage of these large quantities of waste to create something useful and reduce methane emissions, helping the climate along the way.

However, that’s not quite how it works out. In Lind, an overwhelming number of citizens showed up for a public hearing to discuss the change—the Wisconsin Examiner reported that there were so many attendees, they exceeded the capacity of the building and the meeting had to be canceled. Community organizers, under the group name Citizens Protecting Rural Wisconsin, argued that digesters aren’t the solution that they seem to be.

A new report by Friends of the Earth US and Socially Responsible Agriculture Project (SRAP) backs up that sentiment. The study suggests that methane digesters create incentives for the growth of industrial agriculture, further entrenching food systems that harm both people and the environment. These researchers, communities and advocates are working hard to resist the greenwashing of this technology—and sometimes they succeed. Vanguard Renewables, the company partnering with the dairy near Lind, officially withdrew its application to build in March. 

The report

Anaerobic digesters are not typically things that you would ever see on a small, pasture-based dairy or farm. Digesters require a lot of manure to work, meaning that they are more poised to be installed on CAFOs that typically have hundreds or thousands of animals. This suggests that supporting biogas production incentivizes the growth of the CAFO industry. 

“If we put money towards biogas, we’re essentially helping to subsidize and further entrench industrial livestock production,” says Chris Hunt, deputy director at SRAP and a contributor to this report, “and essentially the worst possible ways of managing waste, which is manure lagoons.”

This growth was documented in the report, finding that herd size at the studied CAFOs with digesters grew 3.7 percent year over year—24 times the growth rate of typical dairies in the states they studied. 

“Once you have a digester in place, there’s an incentive to create more biogas, because there’s now a market for biogas,” says Hunt. “The only way of doing that is to create more waste. So, there’s an incentive to add more animals to herd size.”

Greenwashing

The Global Methane Pledge was launched at COP26, aiming to reduce global methane emissions by 30 percent by 2030, using 2020 levels as a baseline. In 2021, the US released its own methane reduction plan. Expanding manure biogas production was listed as a key way to reduce methane emissions in the agriculture sector. Between 2010 and 2020, the USDA Rural Business Cooperative Service supported grants and loans totaling $117 million toward anaerobic digesters.

This plan aims to develop the industry further. Not only does it commit the USDA to launch additional work into biogas policies and research, but existing Farm Bill conservation programs such as the Conservation Stewardship Program (CSP) and the Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP) will provide resources in service of manure biogas production. 

In 2020, manure accounted for about 9 percent of the US’s methane emissions. The greater source of methane from animal agriculture is through enteric fermentation—created through the process of digestion. This accounted for about 27 percent of US methane emissions. Using anaerobic digesters to produce biogas can only address that 9 percent, and it does nothing to reduce the 27 percent inherent to ruminant agriculture—animals such as cows, buffalo, goats and sheep.

The gases produced by anaerobic digestion are being used for electricity and to power vehicles, but as the report and other advocacy organizations argue, this doesn’t make it a clean fuel.

“When you burn this fuel as an end use, it’s essentially the same as burning fossil fuels,” said Kat Ruane of Food & Water Watch during a recent webinar about biogas production in California. “It produces similar pollutants, it harms the environment in the same way and you’re still pumping gas into the atmosphere that we really don’t need to be there. So, clearly, this cannot be a solution to climate change.”

Anaerobic digesters. (Photo from Shutterstock)

Food & Water Watch did its own study on digesters in California feeding into the state’s Low Carbon Fuel Standard (LCFS) program. The leakage rates of these digesters could be as much as 15 percent. Food & Water Watch used satellite images of methane plumes overlaid with geographic information about where digesters in the LCFS program were located. They documented 16 dairy operations that emitted plumes, producing 59 plumes between March 2017 and July 2023. The emission rates of these plumes reached as high as 1,729 kilograms of methane per hour. A “super-emitter” in the imaging system is classified as just 10 kilograms of methane per hour.

“Another huge greenwashing problem with this technology is just the fact that it does not work,” said Ruane. “[It’s] an absolutely mind-boggling amount of pollution being produced under the guise of supposedly helping the climate.”

In addition to research, Food & Water Watch mobilizes people on issues related to food systems and factory farming. On its website, you can read about its various objectives and wins against industrialized farming as well as calls to action on these issues. Hunt of SRAP also encourages people directly dealing with the impact of factory farming on their community to reach out directly.

“If any of your readers are facing a factory farm, they should contact us,” says Hunt. “We provide free support to communities throughout the US to help them protect themselves from the damaging impacts of industrial livestock operations.” 

There’s no uniform approach for dealing with this issue, he says, as it depends a lot on regional factors, but SRAP provides resources such as the SRAP Help Hotline and SRAP Water Rangers Program, which offers free training on how to collect and analyze water samples, document pollution and report violations.

“There’s not really one universal secret. But this is what our organization does. So, I would encourage folks to reach out to us for help.” 

Digesters don’t erase factory farm concerns

Even if biogas production wiped out methane emissions completely, that’s still a narrow view of the factory farm problem, says Hunt.

“Biogas doesn’t solve the factory farm issue,” says Hunt. “Greenhouse gas emissions aren’t the only problems in factory farms. As someone who’s been working on this issue for 20 years, it’s actually one of the problems with factory farms that concerns me the least.”

He says that methane emissions are being misconstrued as the major problem caused by factory farms, and biogas has been used as the proxy for fixing all the problems explicitly with CAFOs. “But they don’t do that at all,” says Hunt.

Digesters don’t address worker or animal rights abuses at CAFOs, nor all of the environmental concerns. Moreover, many of the human health impacts are not mitigated by anaerobic digesters.

“When you have too many animals in one place, you’re going to have too much waste in one place, and that waste becomes a problem—that waste becomes a pollutant,” says Hunt. “So, these facilities pollute the air, pollute the water and threaten public health and spoil people’s drinking water. Adding digesters doesn’t actually fix that.”

Manure storage vessels. (Photo from Shutterstock)

As of 2020, there were more than 21,000 CAFOs in the US, and some are clustered geographically. In California’s San Joaquin Valley, for example, some people live next to as many as 25 CAFOs. 

The abundance of CAFOs in the San Joaquin Valley isn’t accidental, says Leslie Martinez, community engagement specialist at the Leadership Counsel for Justice and Accountability (LCJA). The San Joaquin Valley has several historically Black communities that are now largely Latino, and the abundance of polluters is evidence of environmental racism—hazardous materials or operations being located or dumped in communities of color. Moreover, many of these communities are unincorporated, and this can make it more difficult for residents to advocate for themselves.

“First and foremost, I think it’s really important that people understand the health impacts that come with so many large animals being confined in one area,” says Martinez.

These impacts include sleep apnea, asthma and other respiratory issues, as well as not being able to go outside because of the intensity of the smell or due to being swarmed by flies. CAFOs present a threat of nitrate pollution, which can cause a variety of illnesses including blue baby syndrome. Manure contamination can also lead to severe pathogen-related illnesses such as listeriosis and tetanus. The SRAP and Friends of the Earth report posits that while anaerobic digesters achieve temperatures that can kill some pathogens, the real solution is not to have such high concentrations of animals in the first place.

Martinez, who was born and raised in Tulare County in the San Joaquin Valley, works closely with other local organizers to do policy work against the LCFS rewarding CAFOs, such as trying to eliminate methane crediting. She encourages everyone to speak up on the impacts of dairies.

“Attend a workshop, speak up and be like, ‘As somebody who lives next to a dairy, as someone who lives next to a dairy with a digester, this is my reality of what I live with,’” says Martinez. “No one should be able to take away your right to clean air and clean drinking water and get away with it.”

On the LCJA website, you can read more about this work and find information for taking action. Small dairy farmers who’ve had success should share their stories, too, she says.

“Small farmers, rise up,” says Martinez. “There are success stories that I think need to be talked about. And I would love to hear what their solutions are to this epidemic of the CAFO industry.”

Dairy cows being milked. (Photo from Shutterstock)

A more sustainable future for dairy

As the SRAP and Friends of the Earth report states, “Only if one accepts the status quo model for industrial animal production as the baseline can it be argued that manure biogas has any benefits.” For Hunt, biogas production is not compatible with climate change solutions at all.

“I don’t think a sustainable future is compatible with the CAFO model,” he says. “You can spend millions of dollars and stick a digester on top of your lagoon, you can stunt the emissions a little bit that way. But you’re still left with all these other problems that are inherent in that model.”

“I don’t think a sustainable future is compatible with the CAFO model.”

Martinez encourages those who consume milk and dairy products to think critically about how these products get to your table. Collectively, she says, we need to think about what sustainability is and what we as consumers are willing to accept.

“Right now, people are saying that you having access to [these products] is more important than a young child being able to go outside and ride their bike or walk home from school,” says Martinez. “Because right now that’s kind of what the trade-off is.”

In her organizing, Martinez has been accused of being anti-dairy industry and anti-dairy farmer.

“But that is not true. I think that there is a place for dairies. And I think that that place for dairies is when you don’t have thousands of cows. It’s not sustainable,” she said in the Food & Water Watch webinar. “If we want to genuinely keep dairies around in California or in Wisconsin, wherever, they have to be truly sustainable. And that means making big changes.”

The post Biogas From Mega-Dairies Is a Problem, Not a Solution appeared first on Modern Farmer.

His new ebook, First Generation Farming, lays out his vision: building co-ops for first-generation farmers that hold resources in common and control a shared supply chain. His first such effort collapsed under the weight of interpersonal conflict four months after its formation in 2021, but he’s now building a cooperative structure in which his and two other farms supply livestock and eggs to a new entity, Blackbird Farms, a commonly held processor and sales distributor. Eventually, he says, Blackbird will buy the individual farm assets and fold those into a holding company. – Jacqui Shine

This interview was edited and condensed. 

JS: I wanted to hear about your book. You say the message is “how to start farming without ruining your life.”

CN: More or less, yes. 

JS: You’ve been writing about this for a long time. Is your sense of “how to do it without ruining your life” different than it was five years ago?

CN: Five years ago, I would have been able to give some general advice about, like, what products to take, what breeds to raise, more technical stuff like that. But what’s happened over time, as I’ve been able to get a better understanding of how food systems work, especially at scale—how the big boys operate—it became clear to me that if people are going to start farming and stay farming, there needs to be a fundamentally different platform for getting people onto the land. It’s way too risky. This [system] where people are going after grants or trying to do these policy things that make it easier for [first-generation farmers] to get themselves onto a plot of land, get themselves trained, start growing stuff and then trying somehow to market it—it’s just way too risky. And there’s too much attrition for it to ever create enough success to challenge conventional agriculture. 

We need to look to more of what conventional agriculture and conventional farmers have done to challenge some of the abuses that they’ve dealt with, which basically comes down to cooperatives, but a cooperative [model] more geared towards first-generation farmers that takes away a lot of the risk, that [is] really well resourced, that [has] land available for people to use and markets for people to sell into. So, you just take out all of this individual risk that goes into it. My book is about how to build those cooperatives and trying to deconstruct and dismantle a lot of the myth-making that’s led us down this path of thinking that small farms are the answer, which they just aren’t.

JS: There’s an existing set of practices for agricultural cooperatives. Is what you’re describing different?

CN: The only difference between what they’re doing and what we’re doing is that we’re trying to build a co-op that can build new farmers. We’re not trying to create a coordinated network of existing farms. We’re trying to bring in people who don’t have land and who aren’t farming right now, and we’re trying to bring them on to a commons. 

JS: It’s using the co-op model as a way to help first-generation startup farmers get into it, because it’s saner and more economically resilient. 

CN: The engineer in me doesn’t like to build things new if there’s something that exists that works, and co-ops work. Whenever you have an issue where there’s an abusive relationship between agribusiness and agriculture, co-ops tend to do—not a perfect job but a fairly good job of making sure the farmers are taken care of while also producing at the scale where the stuff they do is affordable. So, the only twist we’re trying is saying, “OK, how can we leverage the co-op model so that we can get new people into this and do it under regenerative ethics?”

Photo courtesy of Sylvanaqua Farms.

JS: Originally, you referred to yourself as a permaculture farmer. Have you abandoned that term? 

CN: I think a lot of my attraction to “permaculture” was just because of a void of information about how conventional systems work. They’re not as bad as people say they are. And the ones that are bad are bad for utterly fixable reasons and in utterly fixable ways. When it came to permaculture, small farming, it wasn’t like I had this religious devotion to any of these things. But if I see something that makes more sense and if I’m going to learn things about how conventional farming works, how agribusiness works and I’m going, “this just makes an awful lot of sense,” I want to change my mind.

JS: You don’t use small farming world terms such as “permaculture,” but you do still like “food sovereignty.”

CN: The “why” of me getting into agriculture has never changed. This has always been about making sure that people can determine how they are fed and that the systems that feed them are sustainable and durable and workable. “Food sovereignty” is one of those things that’s loosely defined enough to be able to choose your own adventure in terms of how you get there.

JS: What people want is for there to be room in the small farming system for Black and Indigenous farmers. And you say that system doesn’t work.

CN: Yeah, it’s like don’t run off the cliff. You see white [startup farmers] run off a cliff, you see three or four of them pull hang gliders out there and somehow float to safety, but most of them crash, and you never hear the stories of the crashes. The worst thing in the world for me would be for marginalized people who have something special to bring to the table [to run off the cliff]. Black folks, Indigenous folks, they have something we all need. And if we don’t get it, we’re screwed. I don’t want to see our people just follow these other folks off this cliff, because the consequences for us, number one, are worse. I know plenty of white folks got into farming, fucked up, kind of hit bottom, but they’re able to get up. Black folks, Native folks have a much harder time getting up when we crash. The consequences are harder, we fall on sharper rocks.

JS: What is that thing we need?

CN: It’s that outsider perspective. These are people who are not privileged, who are going to come to farming with the idea of, “I need to feed my people back where I came from where nobody has shit.” It’s a completely different perspective and brings a completely different sense of urgency to it. When that post went viral? My DMs were impossible, just full of colored folks: “I want to start my farm,” “help me start my farm, what do I do?” and it’s like, I see [where] you’re getting this idea from, and we may have to stop it right now before we lose a whole friggin’ generation of people who could do a hell of a lot of good if their energy was just directed 10 degrees to the left.

The post Chris Newman Wants to Help You Start Farming—Without Ruining Your Life appeared first on Modern Farmer.

“We call ourselves an ‘experience farm,’” says Topaz. “But we could just as easily call ourselves an educational farm.” 

Topaz Farm grows vegetables, berries and more—but it also participates in something called agritourism, a broad term that includes activities and events that bring visitors to the farm. This relationship between the farm and the greater community has been critical to the farm’s survival over the past few years.

When Abeles and Topaz first acquired their land on Sauvie Island, it had been conventionally farmed for decades and had “virtually nothing good in the soil,” says Topaz. As they began to farm the land, they also endeavored to learn about regenerative techniques to foster healthier soil—supplementing with microbes, biochar and more. But these things don’t transform soil overnight, and in the meantime, it was difficult to make enough income through traditional farming alone. This was coupled with other mishaps that often befall small farms. The first year, deer ate two acres of strawberries while Topaz and Abeles were sleeping. This past year, squash bugs helped wipe out their pumpkin crop. Their forays into agritourism have kept the farm afloat.

“We think that for farmers to become sustainable financially and to remain in business and to keep farming, they have to have the flexibility to have diverse revenue sources,” says Abeles.

They aren’t the only ones who feel this way. When announcing the results from the 2022 Census of Agriculture this February, Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack said that many farmers rely on off-farm income to keep their production afloat, and he supports diversifying farmers’ income streams to keep farming economically feasible, although he didn’t mention agritourism specifically.

But despite many farms depending on extra revenue, which agritourism can provide, farmers such as Topaz and Abeles face challenges in navigating agritourism laws. According to Oregon’s legal code, farms can have “farm stands” as long as no more than 25 percent of the sales are attributable to “incidental items and fees from promotional activity.” This includes some but not all aspects of agritourism. But it doesn’t always make sense to Topaz and Abeles what fits into which category—it’s a problem, since there’s a hard cap on incidentals. For example, if they sell tickets to a farm dinner and prepare guests food made from the produce harvested on the farm, this can’t exceed 25 percent of their “farm stand” income. 

Left: At Topaz Farm, as with many agritourism farms, education is a key component. Right: A sign listing some agritourism activities visitors can participate in. (Photography by Topaz Farm)

Other issues emerged. They were told by a county official that if they host live music, it can’t be called a concert. But it is OK to call it a “harvest festival featuring a live music performance.” If a class of school children comes to the farm for an educational field trip and it’s raining (as it often does in northwest Oregon), Abeles and Topaz want to be able to utilize tents, but the county has flagged this as an issue as well, with the outcome yet to be decided.

“We used to say Mother Nature was the most challenging part of farming,” says Topaz. “We’ve replaced that with Multnomah County and the state being the most difficult thing that we deal with. And we’re not alone.”

The immense counterweight to all of these restrictions is that land use laws are in place for a reason: to protect the integrity of farmland. Across the country, millions of acres of farmland have been lost over the last 30 years, due to development and other forms of land conversion. What farmers, conservationists, lawmakers and residents of Oregon and the rest of the country are faced with is a delicate dilemma: How do you preserve the integrity of the country’s best farmland without sacrificing the livelihood of the farmer in the process? 

Agritourism on the farm

“Agritourism” is an umbrella term that encompasses so many different things. The National Agricultural Law Center defines agritourism as the “crossroads” of agriculture and tourism; it draws visitors to farms for educational, entertainment or recreational purposes, and it is intended to increase farm income. Examples vary widely; corn mazes, on-farm markets, farm stays and bed and breakfasts, U-pick opportunities, farm-to-table dinners, tours and classes are all examples of agritourism, and there are a lot more, too. 

This breadth is a double-edged sword. On one hand, there are a lot of different and customizable opportunities to bring in extra income on farms. But, at the same time, regulating all of these different activities as a monolith doesn’t make sense. As a result, the type of agritourism a farm can practice and how much of the business it can be isn’t consistent, not just state to state, but even county to county.

“There is not one nationally or internationally recognized definition,” says Audrey Comerford, an agritourism coordinator at Oregon State University Extension. “Which means it’s kind of an amoeba … [It] encompasses a lot of different things depending on the location.”

Comerford co-authored a new economic impact report on agritourism in Oregon’s Willamette Valley. Of the 18,679 farms in the Willamette Valley, about 4,000 of them may be engaged in some kind of agritourism. For these farms, agritourism can account for as much as 50 percent of their business. 

Comerford says Oregon’s land use laws seem to be stricter than those in other places in general. A national survey from the University of Vermont echoes this point, finding that farmers on the West Coast listed legal regulations as one of their biggest hurdles to agritourism. 

Live music featuring Gregory Alan Isakov at Topaz Farm. (Photography by Sara Wright)

The idea of gathering on farms is not new, says Lisa Chase, director of the Vermont Tourism Research Center at the University of Vermont and lead author of this survey. That’s something that’s been around as long as we’ve had agriculture. The more recent development is the profound disconnect between most people and the farms that feed them—direct on-farm jobs accounted for less than 2 percent of US employment in 2022. 

“What’s new is this disconnect with agriculture, for almost all of the US population, and that provides an opportunity for farms to help the non-farming public learn about food production, and [it] also provide some additional income for the farms,” says Chase.

In this way, agritourism provides an opportunity to increase the “agricultural literacy” of the public. But agritourism is a term that should be only reserved for working farms, says Chase. Unfortunately, that’s a tough thing to quantify.

“The fact that it’s a working farm needs to be included, and then it becomes a question of how do you measure that,” says Chase.

In Oregon, farmers such as Abeles and Topaz of Topaz Farm have to carefully navigate the rule that only 25 percent of their farm stand income can come from “incidental items” and “fees from promotional activity.” Another approach would be to use time spent or labor percentage instead of income, says Chase—something she’s seen in Italy. The benefit of this method is that these incidentals, such as farm stays or farm dinners, earn more over less time. This approach limits the amount of time spent devoted to agritourism, instead of capping the portion of income that is derived from it.

“It became problematic for farms who could make so much money from their overnight farm stays and not as much money from the food they were producing, even though it was a legitimate working farm,” says Chase.

A farm to table dinner at Topaz Farm. (Photography by Topaz Farm)

Even though this is a hard thing to try to quantify, getting it right is paramount. Chase says that, not too long ago, she had a phone call from a developer who was talking about starting an agricultural theme park and was curious about agritourism. Chase advised them that they shouldn’t use that word if they weren’t going to be running a working farm. 

“This is exactly what people are worried about,” says Chase. “As agritourism grows in popularity, it is a real concern. And the core of agritourism is that you’re a working farm. And I think that is what needs to be maintained in the regulations.”

‘Exclusive farm use’

Protecting farmland from losing its working farms is a key concern for Greg Holmes, Working Lands Program Director/Southern Oregon Advocate for 1000 Friends of Oregon, an organization that advocates for land-use planning.

Oregon passed Senate Bill 100 in 1973, creating the Department of Land Conservation and Development. This legislation and subsequent entity became the framework for land use protections in Oregon and, over the last 50 years, has protected much of Oregon’s fertile farmland (as well as forest land and conservation land) by labeling it as “exclusive farm use.”

While the state creates the regulations, it’s up to individual counties to zone the land. This can create some confusion, but the differentiation is essential. The land and the ecosystems it supports vary drastically throughout the state, from the damp, fertile Willamette Valley in the northwest corner of the state to the arid high desert of the eastern half of Oregon down to the piney shared border with California. Zoning all of these counties as though they are the same would come with its own problems. On top of this county-to-county variation, soil suitable for farmland is defined slightly differently for the west side of the Cascade Range versus the east side. 

“There [is] various room for interpretation and different counties apply the regulations, as they understand them, slightly differently,” says Holmes. “The result is that every county has something that fits the definition of exclusive farm use. And it’s protected and zoned for the purpose of protecting agriculture.”

Under Oregon’s legal code, if a farm on exclusive farm use land has a farmstand, income generated from the “incidental” items or “fee-based activity” sold there must be no more than 25 percent of the total farm stand revenue. Agritourism does not fall neatly into this split. For example, U-pick offerings don’t count toward the 25 percent, but tickets to a farm-to-table dinner do. The point is to prevent abuse of farmland—for example, selling things at a farmstand that don’t have anything to do with farming.

“The point of the limitation on the incidental sales is they want to make sure that it remains a farmstand and doesn’t have a store that happens to be located on agricultural land and is drawing people to it,” says Holmes.

A better definition of agritourism, says Holmes, would help draw a cleaner line between working farms making supplemental income and other types of businesses trying to use a farmscape as their setting. It has to address both the tourism aspect and the direct tie to working agriculture.

“The cleanest way to do this would be to start from the beginning,” says Holmes, to define what counts as acceptable agritourism and what should not take place on agricultural land. From there, the law can clarify the process of how to permit acceptable activities. “I don’t think you can ever get a list that’s all-encompassing, but we can do a lot better than what we’ve done now.”

Defining agritourism

Holmes isn’t the only one who has identified the need for a more concrete definition of agritourism. Suzi Spahr, executive director for NAFDMA, an organization that unites agritourism operators, says there’s significant diversity in what agritourism is. 

“You will have many local governments or state government officials who will think that they know what a particular farm will do and then will want to make regulations based on that style,” says Spahr. “But you’ll have a variety of different agritourism operations, and so a one-size-fits-all all very frequently does not fit the industry to its best.”

NAFDMA has created its own definition of agritourism: “Agritourism is an agricultural enterprise attracting visitors to a farm or ranch to experience a connection with agriculture production and/or processing through entertainment, education, and/or the purchase of farm products.”

“We are starting to use that as sort of the basis by which we ensure that the focus remains on agriculture as the main guiding force, the main purpose behind what’s occurring,” says Spahr. 

Sheep at Leaping Lamb Farm. (Photography by Nathan Fussell)

Scottie Jones of Leaping Lamb Farm in Alsea, Oregon practices a type of agritourism where guests can come stay on her farm. Jones found that having an overnight rental on her farm greatly increased the viability of her business. 

“It’s horrible to say this, but, you know, it takes the agritourism for me to be able to be a successful farmer,” she says.

She keeps the farm at the center of the farm stays—she loves the questions from guests that she gets to answer—what does a potato look like in the ground? What is a fertilized egg? Jones says it’s an opportunity for connection.

“We sell lamb—that’s our prime agricultural product that we sell,” says Jones. “But by adding the farm stay, immediately, we were starting to be able to pay for the tractor to break down, and we weren’t using our retirement to be farmers. So, I was wholly invested in what this could do for us; also what it could do for the people that came to visit.”

Jones is also the chair for North America at the Global Agritourism Network and the owner/operator of Farmstay, a network of small overnight rentals on farms across the country. It offers support and resources for farmers looking to diversify their business this way. Jones has also seen some of the abuses of this pathway—hotels or developers trying to create luxury agricultural stays on farmland.

The farm stay at Leaping Lamb Farm. (Photography by Leaping Lamb Farm)

“Farmstay is about working farms and ranches that offer lodging,” says Jones. “So, it’s about going onto a real farm. It’s not a fake farm, it’s not a beautiful piece of property; it’s a working farm.”

She sees these “fake farm” businesses as a detriment to trying to figure out how to proceed with legislation making agritourism easier on actual farms.

“I do understand the fear there,” says Jones. “I just need our regulators to know that there’s the rest of us. There’s the rest of us out there, just really trying to make a dollar and really wanting to make that connection and really wanting to provide a place for people to come to the country and learn something.”

***

Interested in figuring out if agritourism is right for your farm? Audrey Comerford co-teaches this online on-demand course for producers in Oregon. The OSU Extension Agricultural Tourism website can be found here, and you can sign up for its quarterly newsletter here. The Vermont Tourism Research Center has an extensive catalog of resources. Farmstay helps farmers looking to host guests figure out how to get started. And NAFDMA is a central resource hub for North American agritourism enterprises.

Want to learn more about land protections? Read more on the 1000 Friends of Oregon website. Here, you can learn more about Oregon’s land use planning system, read impact reports and brief yourself on important bills in Oregon’s 2024 legislative session.

The post The Business Behind the Farm Visit appeared first on Modern Farmer.

The number of farms themselves has also declined from 2017 to 2022, down roughly 142,000 to 1.9 million farms. The last time the country saw numbers this small was 1850. However, the size of the average farm has increased, up five percent. 

Farmland now makes up roughly 39 percent of the country, and it has been dropping for decades. Presenting this data Tuesday afternoon, Vilsack says the trend is worrying. The survey, he says, is “a wakeup call” that is “asking us the critical question of whether we as a country are OK with losing that many farms.” Vilsack also notes that the majority of American farmers currently rely on a second off-farm income to supplement their farming income. Vilsack supports diversifying farmers’ income streams to create a “different model” of farming and help prevent the loss of more farmland. “I sincerely hope that we take this information very seriously,” says Vilsak. “It need not be that every five years we report fewer farms and less farmland. It doesn’t have to be.”

The census collects and details all sorts of information about American agriculture, in order to paint a picture of the industry as a whole. Here are three of our top takeaways from the data. 

Income is going up

Farms and ranches produced $543 billion worth of agricultural products in 2022, up from $389 billion in 2017. As well, the average farm income has gone up, weighing in at $79,790. A little less than half of farms (43 percent) reported positive net cash income in 2022. 

Those numbers could be a sign of the overall inflation in food prices and general cost of living increases since 2017. It could also be a reflection of the overall consolidation of farms—fewer farms, especially smaller farms, mean larger operations are left with less competition. The data shows that there was an increase in farms that had three or more producers between 2017 and 2022 and a decrease in the number of farms with one or two producers.

There are more new farmers, but not necessarily young ones

The average age of the American farmer rose to 58.1 years old in 2022, up 0.6 years from 2017. This is in line with a longer-term trend of an increased average farming age. But as the average farmer gets older, this census also recorded that nearly one-third of all producers are “new” or “beginning”—meaning they’ve been in the business for 10 years or less.

However, newer doesn’t mean younger. The average age of a new farmer was 47.1 years old. This could be in part due to the financial access barriers of getting into farming without a secondary income or fiscal stability. 

You can read more about how young farmers are pushing for access to farmland here. 

More farms have internet access

The 2022 census reports that 79 percent of farms now have internet access, which is up from 75 percent in 2017. Access to the web is important for farmers to stay competitive and be able to use modern, up-to-date equipment. This is especially true as precision agriculture technology continues to find its place on farms. The 2018 Farm Bill included investments into rural broadband, and the current version of the bill is set to expire in September of 2024.

To read more about the fight to get internet access to more rural areas of the country, check out our feature “We’re Cut Off.”

The post Three Takeaways from the USDA Census of Agriculture appeared first on Modern Farmer.

Effective January 1, 2024, intrastate trucks in California must be equipped with Electronic Logging Devices (ELDs), following in the steps of other states that have made similar mandates. Trucks making interstate deliveries have been required to be equipped with ELDs since 2017. 

ELDs are small devices, but the impact they’ve had on the trucking industry is monumental. Monitoring devices that track when the truck is in motion and for what duration, ELDs are largely intended to address road safety issues associated with drivers pushing themselves too far for too long. But some say ELDs are having the opposite effect and are a violation of trucker privacy and workflow.

“It just seems like the trucking industry is getting regulated out of existence,” wrote one trucker, Allen Boyd, in response to a request for comments on ELD regulation updates by the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) in 2022.

Why ELDs?

Long-haul trucking used to be a secure and respected career. Today, it’s a job with high turnover and a lack of security. Many headlines today talk about the future of trucking, which includes the possibility of autonomous fleets replacing human-driven ones at some point down the line. But the predicament in which truckers find themselves now actually goes back in time by several decades.

The Fair Labor Standards Act, which created a guaranteed minimum wage, passed in 1938. An exemption was included for truckers, so they could earn more and be more productive. But, in 1980, when the Motor Carrier Act was passed, truckers for the first time encountered Hours of Service rules, capping how many hours they were allowed to be on the job. While this is a pretty standard labor regulation, the fact that truckers still didn’t have a minimum wage created the issue as it stands today: Many truckers are paid by the mile, but they are limited in how many hours they can work. To earn a comfortable wage means there’s an implied and incentivized race against the clock. This, of course, is a dangerous combination on the open road.

ELDs are attached to the engine and can set very firm boundaries on how long the truck can be in operation and when it’s time for a mandated break. The FMCSA estimates that ELDs will lead to 1,844 fewer crashes and 26 prevented deaths every year.

The issue, says Karen Levy, PhD, associate professor in the Department of Information Science at Cornell University and author of Data Driven: Truckers, Technology, and the New Workplace Surveillance, is that ELDs don’t address what she believes is the actual root cause of fatigue-related crashes or unsafe driving.

According to Levy, these problems can be traced back to the standard pay structure for long-haul truckers, which is compensation for miles driven. There’s a common saying in the trucking industry, “If the wheels ain’t turning, you ain’t earning.” The issue with this is that there are tasks inherent to the job—getting gas, loading the truck, unloading the truck—that take place when the truck is stationary. As the saying implies, money isn’t earned during these periods, even if they take hours. This can incentivize driving longer without breaks than is safe. 

“One of the things that has really been striking to me is it can’t really be overstated how fundamentally dependent we are on this system that hardly works,” says Levy.

A truck dashboard with an ELD screen. (Photo: Shutterstock)

Not only do ELDs not solve the problem, says Levy, they could even make it worse. Firm constraints on driving time, while the pay structure remains based on distance traveled, means that drivers are implicitly encouraged to drive faster and more recklessly to maximize their mileage within the allotted time.

“We haven’t changed the economic structure of the industry or the rules,” says Levy. “All we changed is how they are monitored.”

It’s only been a few years since the 2017 mandate, but one study suggests that accident rates haven’t gotten better yet and might have even gotten worse.

One of the reasons for this, says Levy, is that it takes the flexibility out of the work. She gives a hypothetical:

Before, if you had 11 hours to get somewhere, and it takes you 11 hours and 10 minutes, it’s not a big deal. That’s just part of being on the road.

But, with an ELD, if you have 11 hours to get somewhere and taking a minute over would put you in violation, you might handle that drive differently.

“You’re probably going to drive much more recklessly, much faster, you’re not going to take the time to go get a cup of coffee if you feel like you need it,” says Levy. “You’re not going to stop and check on something that sounds weird on your truck.”

And, at the end of the allotted drive time, the trucker might not be anywhere near a place they can pull over to rest. If they drive further looking for a truck stop, they risk being in violation. In response to a request for comments on ELD regulation updates by the FMCSA in 2022, an anonymous trucker voiced their concern.

“In my honest opinion since ELD there has been more accidents because drivers are always being forced to race the clock so they can get loaded/unloaded and to [the] next pickup or safe spot to sleep for the night because they are out of hours.”

Another commenter agreed, saying that the ELDs make it harder for drivers to take breaks when they need them. And if they hit traffic, construction or unreliable road conditions, the driver loses miles and hours.

“We keep getting told that these laws, [these] rules are put in place to make it easier and safer for the driver. In doing so, it makes it harder.”

The road ahead

There’s a path forward, says Levy, but it’s got to go beyond just technology. “I don’t think there’s a tweak we could make to the ELD that would solve all the truckers’ problems,” says Levy. Safer roads probably require an approach that focuses more on trucker pay and labor rights. Trevor Ralphs, in a comment response to the FMCSA prompt, echoed Levy’s point about trucker pay structure.

“If you really want to make driving more safe for not only truck drivers but everyone else on the road, you would make it so that truck drivers are all paid hourly. This would make sure truck drivers are not in a rush to make the most money but instead they are taking things slow, steady and safe because you will be paid more for your time.”

Trucks at a truck stop in Missouri. (Photo: Shutterstock)

While the industry pay regulations haven’t changed, some companies have started shifting toward time-based pay in the ELD era. Nathaniel Hosea writes in response to the FMCSA prompt:

“I personally like ELDs as a company driver, it keeps everything organized and I get a[n] hourly pa[y] now. Before ELDs, I got paid CPM [cents per mile] and lost lots of money waiting time in stopped traffic and not being paid at warehouses. Finally, with ELDs and hourly pay, I don’t have to be pressured to speed and driving unsafe to deliver loads.” 

Hosea goes on to say that driving per mile should be a thing of the past. “There should be a law to end CPM [cents per mile] wage payments, traffic is too congested today to make any money on CPM.” 

We should remove the trucker exemption from the Fair Labor Standards Act, so that truckers can be paid more fairly, says Levy.

“I think, fundamentally, the problems in the industry are political and economic,” says Levy. “Truckers don’t have the political power to successfully argue for labor rights that would really make us all safer.”

More broadly, says Levy, there’s been a cultural shift from seeing truckers as the heroes of the highway to seeing them as on the fringes of society. But, at the end of the day, our country—and our food system—would not function without long-haul truckers and the work that they do. 

“Building dignity back into the job,” says Levy—not barring them from using business bathrooms or filming them constantly—“those are good places to start.”

***

Interested in learning more about this topic?

You can find Levy’s book here: https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691175300/data-driven

Truckers are paid a little differently than most other professions. A breakdown of why can be found in this article from FleetOwner. For a longer history of the trucking industry, check out this podcast called On the Move.

The post Driven Out appeared first on Modern Farmer.

“They see us as workers that they can exploit, pay a lesser wage to, that they can replace with machines. But we are the people in the first line of this food chain, and we have to be recognized and respected as such,” says Jiménez.

In 2016, Jiménez started Alianza Agricola, an undocumented farmworker-led advocacy organization fighting for farmworker rights in western New York. In 2019, the group helped in the fight to pass the Farm Laborers Fair Labor Practices Act (FLFLPA), a law that grants various labor rights such as collective bargaining, day of rest and overtime pay to farmworkers in the state of New York. It was a huge win, but it’s just the beginning of what’s needed.

Jiménez is not alone in his experience. An estimated 21.5 million people work to grow, harvest, process, pack, transport and sell the food that feeds Americans. Many of them put their well-being at risk to do so. Although undocumented workers face an extra set of challenges, millions of food and farmworkers, regardless of immigration status, are exposed to unsafe working conditions and paid low wages. 

According to the Institute of Health, farmworkers are 35 times more likely to die of heat exposure. They are at risk for injury and illness from heavy machinery or pesticide exposure and in recent years have been disproportionately exposed to wildfire smoke and COVID-19. The vast majority of food and farmworkers are paid low wages, are ineligible for paid sick leave and are not entitled to overtime pay. Advocates say this year’s Farm Bill, a package of legislation passed every five years, presents an opportunity for some of these conditions to change, or at least improve.

The Farm Bill covers programs ranging from crop insurance to conservation incentives to nutrition assistance and more. It is incredibly influential, yet since its inception in 1933, the Farm Bill has failed to include protections for food and farmworkers. Labor rights are technically outside of the United States Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) jurisdiction and covered by the Department of Labor, but their exclusion still reflects how our food system treats its workers, explains Sophie Ackoff, the Farm Bill campaign director at the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS). 

“Our tax dollars, our programs, are focused on the success of farmers and agribusinesses. And those 21.5 million workers who are doing the bulk of not only the work but the danger of producing food for our country are not in any way protected by the USDA,” says Ackoff.

Jose Oliva, the campaigns director at the HEAL Food Alliance, says the exclusion of workers from the Farm Bill isn’t accidental but rather the result of an exploitative history of agricultural workers—the majority of whom were African American—when the first Farm Bill was written. The bill was written to support farm owners, not workers. Over time, this has turned into support for large agribusinesses, Oliva explains.

“It is essentially a way for the government to ensure that the average farmer is not the recipient of most of the benefits that are built into the farm bill,” he says.

UCS, HEAL Food Alliance and Alianza Agricola, along with other farmworker-led groups, have been advocating for various bills to be included in the upcoming Farm Bill, which was supposed to be renewed in September 2023 but was recently extended to the end of 2024.

Protecting America’s Meatpacking Worker Act

Data from the Occupational Health and Safety Administration has revealed that the meatpacking industry is one of the most dangerous jobs in the food system, recording a disproportionately high number of severe employee injuries. Oliva describes working conditions in the meatpacking industry as horrendous. “These are places where folks are and during the pandemic were forced to work even while everyone else was able to work from home or not work at all,” he says.

Nearly eight percent of all early COVID-19 cases and four percent of early COVID-19 deaths were connected to meatpacking plants. At the same time, the profit margins of the meatpacking industry have grown 300 percent since the start of the pandemic. This bill, introduced by Sen. Cory Booker and Rep. Ro Khanna, would ensure safer line-processing speeds and stricter standards to protect meat and poultry workers from injury. 

Supporting our Farm and Food System Workforce and The Voice for Farm Workers Act 

Introduced by Sen. Alex Padilla, the Supporting our Farm and Food System Workforce and the Voice for Farm Workers Act would give food and farmworkers a dedicated voice within the USDA and strengthen their role and collaboration in decision-making processes. Despite being essential workers, Jiménez says agricultural workers are rarely heard by those in power. He hopes that is starting to change.

“I think it’s time the government put their eyes on who we are and what we’re doing,” says Jiménez.

Protect America’s Children from Toxic Pesticides Act

The United States uses more than a billion pounds of pesticides annually, a third of which are currently banned in the European Union. Each year, pesticide exposure harms as many as 20,000 farmworkers, causing them to suffer more chemical-related injuries and illnesses than any other workforce nationwide. Extreme heat also makes pesticides evaporate faster, a major concern as temperatures continue to rise due to climate change, Ackoff explains. The Protect America’s Children from Toxic Pesticides Act would ban the use of more than 100 toxic pesticides proven to harm both farmworkers and the environment.

Agricultural Worker Justice Act

Agricultural workers are some of the lowest paid workers in the country. In 2020, they earned on average $14.62 per hour, but in many states, the average pay is less than that. For undocumented workers, who make up approximately 50 percent of the farm labor workforce, the pay is even more precarious.

The Agricultural Worker Justice Act, introduced by Sen. Peter Welsch and Rep. Greg Caesar, would ensure that the USDA only purchases food from companies that pay their employees a living wage and would give the federal government tools to regulate and enforce safer working conditions for food and farmworkers.

Across the country, 80 percent of voters support better protections for food and farmworkers. There is immense opportunity to better support the backbone of our $1.053-trillion industry food and agricultural sector, says Ackoff. This year’s Farm Bill is funding-neutral, meaning no additional funding will be added, which could be challenging for the programs mentioned to get adequate funding. But Ackoff is hopeful the one-year extension will give more time to advocate for these changes to be made. Looking beyond 2024, advocates and farmworkers alike continue to fight for long-term change in the food system and to pass bills such as the Fairness for Farm Workers Act, which would update the nation’s 85-year labor laws to ensure farmworkers are paid fairer wages and overtime pay. 

“That would be the most transformative,” says Ackoff.

For Jiménez, the fight for fair working conditions and respect goes beyond himself. Despite the risk, he says he will not stop advocating for what farmworkers—especially undocumented workers—deserve. He wants a better future for his children, one where their worth isn’t undermined by their employer.

“I think that we’re invisible still. And more than anything, we want respect and recognition,” says Jimenez.

The post Farmworker-Led Groups Push For Next Farm Bill to Include Worker Rights and Protections appeared first on Modern Farmer.

Suffering from severe post-traumatic stress, Archipley was ready to retire after his four-year enlistment. “You don’t come back without damage from that,” says Karen. Yet checking out of the armed forces, the couple came to find, was a shockingly abrupt procedure with scant support. At that time, the Department of Defense’s (DoD) Transition Assistance Program, which was developed in 1991 to smooth the shift from active duty to civilian life, extended just four days. “It was harsh,” she says. They were left to navigate a lot on their own, including finding doctors familiar with combat-related conditions while trying to secure appointments at the Veterans Administration—on top of figuring out Archipley’s next career step.

Fortunately, the couple had invested in a 2.5-acre farm in Escondido, near Camp Pendleton, in between tours. “Farming turned out to be really healing,” says Karen, allowing her husband to decompress outdoors through physically demanding but rewarding challenges. After ending his service in 2006, Archipley and his wife established Archi’s Acres, an organic hydroponic farm that supplies basil and other specialty crops to local restaurants and stores.

Inside the Archi’s Acres greenhouse. (Photo courtesy AiSA)

With the successful launch of the business and a renewed sense of purpose, the couple looked to extend their reach. In 2007, they established the Veteran’s Sustainable Agriculture Training program, since renamed as Archi’s Institute for Sustainable Agriculture (AiSA), an agricultural training program designed to transition active and former armed force members into growers. Like a boot camp of sorts, the six-week intensive program immerses students in all aspects of sustainable farming and entrepreneurship and ushers them into viable, agriculture-based careers.

Along the way, it’s also become a platform—one that the Archipleys have leveraged to advocate for stronger government support in transitioning troops out of uniform.

A mission-driven attitude

In recent years, the unemployment rate among veterans has dipped dramatically, generally falling below the national rate. But, according to a study commissioned by the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD), historically, vets under the age of 24 have faced higher rates, which hit 29 percent in 2011. The gap closes quickly, however, with age and time out of uniform, the report suggests, and with proper education and training, former service members are quick to overcome skill deficits.

“[Those] leaving the military need a new purpose,” says Jeanette Lombardo, executive director of Farmer Veteran Coalition. The non-profit organization supports veterans in their transition to agricultural careers and provides tuition grants to several training programs, including AiSA. The armed forces instill “grit and a mission-driven attitude,” she says, so the challenging nature of farming—the weather, pests and disease, the market—is often a good fit. 

Service members also tend to be well versed in technology, Lombardo notes, making skills such as piloting drones readily transferable to the climate-smart and precision ag sectors. And disabled veterans are just as capable, she adds, particularly in marketing, logistics, distribution and compliance. “It’s a huge talent pool.”

Colin Archipley (far left) and Karen Archipley (far right) with a recent crop of students. (Photo courtesy AiSA)

The armed force’s emphasis on leadership training also helps stoke an entrepreneurial spirit. With a full military career under their belt, “many vets want to be their own boss,” says Tony Lattner, AiSA’s director of education and a retired Marine, “or [move on to] some type of supervisory role.” He notes that of the 600 or so program graduates, more than two-thirds either own their own farm or business or manage an operation.

Along with teaching agronomics, soil health and sustainable farming practices, AiSA places a big emphasis on developing an agriculture-related enterprise. Over six weeks, the curriculum covers the full seed-to-market process including access to financing, food safety and building a business plan around a farming operation. The program, which is also open to civilians, moved completely online in 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic to better accommodate service members spread throughout the world. (Local students still have the option of additional, on-site training.)

The class culminates in a final exam and a Shark Tank-style pitch to a jury of food professionals, industry leaders and investors. In addition to farming, graduates have gone on to launch successful ventures such as a chain of empanada stores in San Diego and a custom meat-processing facility serving small-scale ranchers in Lancaster, Kentucky.

The fast pace translates to three hours of classes twice a week and around five hours of daily reading and assignments. “It’s like a full-time job,” says Arlet Galindo, a current student. A human resources specialist in the Air Force, she’d been stationed in Turkey for her final assignment and has been juggling her studies while settling into life back home in Los Angeles. But organization, structure and time management come with the territory, she says. “That’s the military mentality—you just have to get it done. Failure is not an option,” she adds with a laugh.

The AiSA program places a big emphasis on developing an agriculture-related enterprise. (Photo courtesy AiSA)

Galindo is one of a number of students in the 15-person class attending the course through SkillBridge, a DoD career transition program. Established in 2011, it allows service members to acquire civilian work experience through training, internships and apprenticeships during the final 180 days of their enlistment. Although the positions are unpaid, troops are relieved of their military duties and receive pay and benefits throughout the transition period.

The scaffolding is essential to post-service success, says Karen Archipley. Before SkillBridge, troops were being pushed out of the military with little civilian experience and a lot of vulnerability. “People often took any job they could get because they had families to support or medical needs to cover,” she says, recalling an early AiSA graduate who attended the class while homeless. In 2013, in a plea to bolster career transition support for veterans, the Archipleys presented his story and other similar cases to then-OSD director Frank DiGiovanni—leading the White House to later recognize their efforts.

A new call to service

In 2016, AiSA became a college credit program through Cal Poly Extended Extension, a move that allowed service members to tap their GI Bill benefits for tuition. But as of last year, a new partnership with the University of Minnesota Crookston gives program graduates a fully accredited agricultural certificate—a credential that equates to a year’s worth of working experience when applying for the USDA’s Farm Service Agency’s (FSA) Beginning Farmer loan.

Along with helping students leverage their military background to access capital, the program also emphasizes market viability. As a course requirement, students submit a comprehensive business plan at the end of the term—one that can be handed over to a loan officer or used to attract investors. “The whole idea is that their [venture] is sustainable, both financially and resource-wise,” says Lattner, the educational director. “If you have to get a second job to run the farm, it defeats the purpose.”

Tony Lattner points out student projects. (Photo: Naoki Nitta)

Samantha Stephens, a recent AiSA graduate winding down a decade-long career in the Marines, was startled to find out what it would take to run her husband’s family ranch in Georgia. While the mother of two—with a third on the way—will concentrate on parenting for the next few years, the couple’s long-term plan is to expand the two-acre llama, goat and sheep farm to include cows, chickens and a greenhouse. Understanding the breadth of compliance, taxes and regulations “opened my eyes to how much we’ll need to produce to justify doing the business,” she says.

Still, students see their service background as an apt segue to farming. There are obvious parallels in decision-making and prioritization, says Grant Taute. The current student and Osprey pilot is hanging up his wings after 20 years in the Marine Corps to become an avocado and specialty crop farmer outside of San Diego. Despite a very different professional pace, he says, the process is similar. “Whether it’s water, time or money, you constantly have to decide, ‘how am I going to best expend this resource?’”

And, ultimately, many service members see farming as yet another calling. Erick Raymundo-Vidrio, an aircraft technician retiring from a seven-year career in the Air Force, is planning to start a container farm. By bolstering food security for his community, he says, “I still feel like I’m answering a call to serve. Just at a smaller scale.”

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