The latter statement is inspired by the words of the farmer and writer, Wendell Berry – specifically, his essay “The Pleasures of Eating,” published in 1989, in which he famously wrote that “eating is an agricultural act.” In the following decades, the farm-to-table movement has championed and codified this understanding of our food systems through numerous certifications that aim to help us make more sustainable choices. While many of us have gotten into the habit of seeking out certain symbols and words on food products, we have been slower to adopt this approach to beverages – especially alcoholic ones. 

“There are few reasons that it’s taken longer for sustainability practice and culture to reach the spirits industry,” explains Shanna Farrell, author of A Good Drink: In Pursuit of Sustainable Spirits. “The first is that you (often) can’t visit farms that grow the crops that become spirits.” 

While this is not the case for wine – an industry bolstered by enotourism [travel for the purpose of exploring wine regions], with visitors being encouraged to see the grapes up-close – many kinds of alcohol are subject to a strange separation from consumers. These products are, in fact, deeply rooted in a sense of place that is so much more complex than tidy rows of vineyards, hops, or grains convey at first glance. For this reason, the little labels on bottles of booze can go a long way in facilitating choices that are healthier for us and the planet – if we take the time to read and understand them. 

Some broad-reaching sustainability certifications are by now familiar – most notably the United States Department of Agriculture Organic seal, which was developed following the Organic Foods Production Act of 1990 (on the heels of Berry’s famous essay). Other, newer terms are somewhat intuitive, such as “Fish-Friendly” or the more specific “Salmon-Safe,” while still others, like “Carbon Neutral” or “B Corp,” require further study. In deciding which terminology to trust, it’s important to consider how and by whom these certifications are regulated. Ecolabels can be verified by governing bodies at the international, federal, or state level, as well as by independent organizations. 

The first step to sipping more sustainably is simply to acknowledge our drinks as agricultural products. From there, we can begin to consider how the cultivation, transformation, and transportation of their ingredients impacts our land, water, and air, as well as all of the life forms inhabiting these ecosystems.  

The wine industry is leading the way when it comes to creating a new correlation between alcohol and aquatic creatures with a more positive connotation than the phrase “to drink like a fish.” Ram’s Gate Winery in Sonoma, California is one of more than 2,000 farms that have joined the Fish-Friendly Farming Environmental Certification Program, which is regulated by a non-profit organization, the California Land Stewardship Institute. Caine Thompson, the winery’s head of sustainability, explains that in order to become certified, “The farmer must show that they are implementing practices that both restore fish and wildlife habitats and improve water quality.” 

Outside the Golden State, the Salmon-Safe Certification is another great way to verify that farmers are working in harmony with their local waterways. At Soter Vineyards in Oregon’s Willamette Valley, Salmon-Safe Certified is just one of the many ecolabels that the farm has earned over the years, along with Organic, Biodynamic, B Corporation, and LIVE (Low Input Viticulture and Enology). Soter Vineyards is also Bee-Friendly – according to accreditation by the non-profit Pollinator Partnership – highlighting their holistic approach to caring for creatures that live underwater and up in the air. 

Soter Vineyards’ viticulturist, Emily Rozga, explains that one of the shared key practices across these various certifications is “habitat maintenance.” This includes leaving some vegetation along the wetlands undisturbed to help regulate water temperatures and planting wildflower meadows for native pollinators, especially milkweed for migrating Monarch butterflies.  

Some certifications are narrowly focused on certain species, while others aim to be all-encompassing. In 2023, Anytime Spritz launched Farmhouse Gin and Farmhouse Vodka as the world’s first and only Regenerative Organic Certified spirits. Taylor Lanzet, co-founder of the “farm-to-can” cocktail company, explains that they don’t prioritize any one species over another. One of their partners in Hudson, New York, Breathe Deep Farm, started enacting regenerative organic practices in their fields of wheat and other grains, and is now “home to 122 rare and uncommon plant species, 83 bird species, and 40 butterfly and dragonfly species.” 

Winged creatures of all sizes play an important role in a balanced, biodiverse ecosystem and, for some crops, can be crucial for cultivation. Perhaps the most striking example of this is seen in the production of tequila. The popular Mexican spirit is made from the agave plant, which depends on bats for pollination. You may notice the term “Bat-Friendly” on some sustainable tequila brands, but you should also keep an eye out for the letters “ARA,” which stand for Agave Responsable Ambiental (Environmentally Responsible Agave). 

Mijenta is one of the few brands to gain this certification from the Tequila Regulatory Council and the Government of the State of Jalisco, Mexico. Elise Som, co-founder and director of sustainability at Mijenta, explains that they chose to pursue ARA certification to demonstrate that their agave is “grown on land that did not suffer deforestation.” Mijenta’s other certifications, including B Corporation by B Lab and Carbon Neutral by ClimatePartner attest to their “focus on community support and forest protection, as well as development of clean energy solutions.” 

Some sustainability labels in the beverage industry concentrate their attention on the maintenance of crop fields as healthy habitats, while others highlight the preservation of wild landscapes. Marla Hoban, co-founder of the Portland, Oregon-based non-alcoholic beer company Roaming Nobles explains that their brand name pays “homage to the noble animals that roam our state and all its beautiful natural spaces.” This connection is celebrated on their beer cans by the appearance of a tree symbol announcing their partnership with the Forest Park Conservancy, which cares for one of the United State’s largest urban parks – a vital habitat for hundreds of species, ranging from black bears to banana slugs, hoary bats, bobcats, and mountain beavers.

Your personal bar cart may seem far removed from forests and farmlands, but they are inextricably linked. It’s time we take an ecosystems approach to how we drink. Before you pour, carve out an extra few minutes to assess the labels at your local wine shop, call up your preferred brewer, or get friendly with your bartender. By mindfully choosing our beverages based on sustainability certifications, we can have a positive impact that extends well beyond happy hour. 

The post What Do Fish, Butterflies, and Bats Have to Do With Booze? appeared first on Modern Farmer.

But over the past 25 years, peer-reviewed scientific studies show that biodynamic farming enhances soil quality and biodiversity. It also produces more nutritious produce and wine that tastes better. 

With that in mind, the era of downplaying the merits of biodynamic farming is officially over. Today, biodynamic farmers on the cutting edge are taking the philosophy and science that has served them so well on their farms and applying it to their business practices.

Biodynamic farming 101

Still not sure what we mean when we say biodynamic farming? You’re not alone. Biodynamics is based on the work of philosopher and scientist Dr. Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925). It is, at its simplest level, a method of chemical-free organic farming that entails the observation of lunar phases, planetary cycles and requires the use of locally sourced materials for fertilization and soil conditioning.

Practitioners see the farm as a closed, biodiverse ecosystem that requires internal inputs—which can come from the manure of ruminants raised on the farm, or from teas made from plants grown and animal products present on the farm—to nourish and feed itself. 

There are two primary forms of biodynamic certification, through Demeter-USA and Demeter International. It is estimated that there are around 6,000 certified biodynamic farms in operation across the world, and many more who farm biodynamically without certification. (The cost of getting certified varies depending on the farm’s size, but is generally at least a few thousand dollars, and requires adherence to a complex set of rules and standards). 

Now, a new crop of producers are taking these same concepts and applying them to their businesses as a whole. Is the certified biodynamic coffee you’re drinking truly biodynamic if the coffee pods were dried on a conventionally produced table? These are the kind of questions the truly hardcore are asking.

Deeply considering every element that touches products

Gérard Bertrand, who owns and operates 16 certified biodynamic wine estates in Languedoc and Roussillon, France, has been infusing business decisions with biodynamic ideas for decades. 

At the Minervois winery Clos d’Ora, the layout was designed so that sunlight hits a precise place in the barrel cellar during each solstice. And at Languedoc’s Clos du Temple, architect Francois Fontes designed the space to link sky and earth. Glass panels bring sunshine into the winery through the ceiling, while a mashrabiya (a latticework window that is characteristic of Islamic architecture) cools the heat the sun brings and casts patterns of light and shadow. 

“The sun, the star that anchors our system and shines bright for much of the year in this region, shapes our construction projects,” Bertrand explains. 

At his wine resort Chateau L’Hospitalet, Bertrand created a The Moon Room devoted to biodynamically rooted tastings. 

“Its light fixtures mimic celestial bodies, their glow, colors, and rhythms attuned to the dishes and wines served,” Bertrand explains. “Short narratives weave through the meal, inviting guests to sense the rhythms that guide our biodynamic work. This is more than a meal—it is a multisensory journey, an education, and a fresh way of looking at the heavens.”

Robert Eden, co-owner and winemaker at Chateau Maris, also built his winery in Languedoc based on the biodynamic approach. 

“Our cellar and winery is constructed from hemp bricks and wood to create a plant-based space that can receive external energies,” Eden explains. “Built this way, our winery’s operation is not impaired, and the energy is not repelled by artificial metals and other materials.”

The placement and construction of the building was also considered with the movement of groundwater and alignment to prevailing winds. 

Other vintners, like Count Michael Goess-Enzenberg, owner of Weingut Manincor in Alto Adige, Italy, embraces a holistic approach to biodynamic farming and business-building.

“We get everything possible from organic or biodynamic sources,” Goess-Enzenberg says. “Oak for our barriques, which we use to age our wines, comes from our own forest. Straw and manure for our compost comes from local farms in our neighborhood, which we mix with remains from grapes after they’ve been pressed.”

The quartz used for the biodynamic preparation 501 (a spray used to promote grape strength and health) is sourced from their local mountains. Goess-Enzenberg likens biodynamics to a broad lifestyle that requires wholesale commitment. 

“It brings our lives into balance,” he says. 

At Cullen Wines in Margaret River, Australia, winemaker and managing director Vanya Cullen has created a biodynamic bubble around her entire operation. In addition to farming her vineyards biodynamically, Cullen has a biodynamic produce garden that feeds the on-site restaurant.

Cullen also sources barrels sourced on fruit or flower days, according to the biodynamic calendar. (In the biodynamic farming calendar commonly followed by practitioners, fruit days occur when the moon is in a fire sign—Aries, Leo or Sagittarius; flower days occur when the moon is in an air sign—Gemini, Libra or Aquarius; root days occur when the moon is in the earth sign—Capricorn, Taurus or Virgo; leaf days occur when the moon is in a water sign—Caner, Scorpio or Pisces). 

“We were amazed at the difference between wine made in barrels harvested on fruit and flower days,” Cullen says. “Wine aged in barrels harvested on fruit days are bigger and more expressive. Flower day barrels impart minerality and structure. Overall, we find that wines made with biodynamic barrels as a whole taste more complete.”

Cullen has worked with her coopers to hone the barrel program even further, prioritizing wood harvested on a new moon descending. 

Applying holistic biodynamic ideas to staff management

Beth Hoinacki, owner and operator of Goodfoot Farm in Oregon’s Willamette Valley says that her work for the International Organic Inspectors Association made her realize that biodynamic operations often unconsciously extended their practices well beyond the farming itself. She became determined to conscientiously do so on her own vegetable and fruit farm. 

“I inspected organic and biodynamic farms, and I was always struck by the staff at biodynamic farms,” Hoinacki says. “From the people who are there working in the fields every day to the owners, there was clearly this beautiful dedication to what was happening, and the story they were telling about the universe and our interconnection through the food they were growing.”

There is something about the practice of growing food biodynamically by the rhythm of the planets, moon, sun and stars that seems to engage the minds and hearts of the people involved, Hoinacki notes. 

“I intuitively knew that traditional labor structures on farms were not healthy, so when I began hiring people, I began doing so through the lens of biodynamics with the goal of expressing the character of the farm as it exists,” she says. 

Instead of the traditional power and management structure of owner and employee, she gives her employees the power to collectively agree on hours, start times and breaks. Her decision rooted power on the farm, without allowing inputs from the outside world. 

“It is a system that feeds itself,” Hoinacki notes. “I work with them on the farm because I find working the land rewarding, so we get to make decisions together. Our team members love the system.”

On the other hand… 

Inevitably, there are many who are less than convinced of the merits of biodynamically minded business decisions. 

Wendy Parr, a wine scientist and oenologist at Lincoln University in New Zealand was among the researchers who wrote “Expectation or Sensorial Reality? An Empirical Investigation of the Biodynamic Calendar for Wine Drinkers,” published in the peer-reviewed Public Library of Science mega journal PLOS ONE. In the study, 19 wine pros were asked to taste 12 different Pinot Noirs on fruit and root days. Bottom line: they found the day made no difference.

“To date, there is no clear evidence that the calendar affects tasting,” Parr says. “We know from neuroscientists’ work that no two people ever experience a wine in precisely the same way because there are a myriad of neuro-physical and psychological variables that could be involved.”

Parr adds that there is “anecdotal evidence” that wines can show changes across fruit or root days. 

“I’ve met winemakers in Europe and New Zealand who wouldn’t rack off wine on a root or leaf day,” she says. “It is not for me to say what others should believe or practise. I will add that we did one study only. In the absence of further research, the issue remains unclear.”

The jury appears to be out on whether or not tasting on a fruit or root day will drastically alter your assessment of a wine. But even a few decades ago, the notion that biodynamic farming could improve soil health was unproven and widely ridiculed. 

Tasting special wines, planning farm and winery constructions and basing staff decisions on a biodynamic calendar and philosophy may seem slightly out there—but if it helps vintners and farmers create better products and teams, who are we to argue? 

The post Biodynamic Farms Are One Thing. What About Biodynamic Businesses? appeared first on Modern Farmer.

The following passages are excerpted from Bad Naturalist, and have been lightly edited for length. 

Wherever people go, they reshape the land, and on this mountain it’s no different. Two hundred years ago, many of these hillsides were timbered for orchards. Around forty years ago, most of the orchards were replaced with cattle pasture. In the past decade, farmers stopped grazing cattle on the mountain. Haying eventually stopped, and mowing stopped, too. For a while now the land has been subject to its own rules; once people stopped managing it, it began to reshape itself. An old pasture filled in with blackberry. The forest encroached on the meadow, pioneer poplar, locust, and sassafras saplings taking the lead. A hayfield filled with hardy natives—and with weeds. Invasive shrubs climbed up and over a hillside, relentlessly expanding their range. Rather than a typical farm, the mountaintop looks unkempt, uninhabited, overgrown. The tendency might be to leave such a place alone—if humans stop interfering, nature will do what nature does, and take over. The land didn’t need me; it would rewild itself—right? Not exactly. Once a place has been disturbed by humans, the only way to repair it is to keep disturbing it, but in the right way. The tricky part is figuring out what that means.

****

In the Southeast, grasslands have declined by 90 percent. In Virginia, where this stunning, scraggly mountaintop is located, the Piedmont prairie, the native grassland community that once dominated the region east of the Blue Ridge mountains, is considered extinct; only small remnants hidden in tiny pockets around the state survive. With those numbers in mind, you can begin to understand why conservation of privately owned forests and grasslands is critical.

Back in 1962, even before MacArthur and Wilson had published The Theory of Island Biogeography, an independent researcher named Frank Preston declared that “it is not possible to preserve in a state or national park a complete replica on a small scale of the fauna and flora of a much larger area.” Parks alone can’t begin to help us ward off the worst effects of climate change, human development, the influx of invasive species, and other pressures that endanger biodiversity. Even if we put all the public lands together—all the national, state, and local parks and nature preserves—without the participation of private landowners, our parks would end up becoming species museums showcasing a handful of plants and animals, those lucky enough to survive the isolation.

Standing on the mountain, with all those acres of rolling hills unfolding in front of me, my goal to plant a small patch of meadow seemed timid. This land was big—I should think bigger! What if I could return this mountaintop to its natural glory? It would serve as a living example of how to restore native meadows! Pollinators would come from all around! I pictured sheep grazing on one of the hillsides. Just a handful of sheep. I’d make sheep-milk cheese. (I can’t eat dairy. I was clearly losing my mind.) I’d put up a fence to protect the sheep from the coyotes and bobcats and bears. Better make that an electric fence. Already I was taming the wilderness.

Even as I dreamed up a Percy-Shelleyesque vision of myself communing with nature, skipping through meadows, bluebirds winging around my head, I was hit with second thoughts. I had the nagging sense that I might be glossing over a few important factors (besides poison ivy and rattlesnakes). Like, at this stage in my life, and considering my various physical limitations, did I really want to take on such a big, ambitious project with an open-ended timeline and a learning curve as steep as one of those hills?

I understood, in theory, that caring for land was a major commitment— I would soon understand it even better in practice. To complicate matters, not only was there no house to live in up here, not even a shed for storing tools, there was no power, and no working well. This land would require time, sweat, single-mindedness: your basic obsession. In other words, exactly my jam.

So I chose to try to restore these two hundred acres, to attempt to transform ailing fields into native meadows, and a barren forest floor into a teeming native understory. Even though, outside of the knowledge I’d gleaned from books like Wilding and “weed warrior” expeditions with my kids along the Potomac River, I had no real idea what would be involved in doing this work on a vast mountaintop, or what the end point of such a project would look like—much less whether a true end point was possible.

If this course of action seems hopeful, foolish, and delusional, that’s the wheel around which my feelings about it cycle, sometimes in a single day. My frustrating limitations aside, what I do have going for me is a tendency to become preoccupied with a topic, studying it and talking about it nonstop (much to the irritation of my family). At various points in my life, I’d done this with mangrove trees, gray whales, carpenter bees, rats, sea urchins, carpet beetles, lizards, and flying squirrels. The mountain was not only a subject, but a place I could dive into and lose myself, a source of fascinating and unlimited information to fill my brain and give me a sense of purpose. And unlike most of the places that inspired those other fixations, the mountain wasn’t a place I would only visit—it would actually be my home. I’d literally live with the outcome, the success or failure of my endeavors. I didn’t know yet how that would feel or how it would influence my decisions.

My belief that I can revitalize this place has an almost magical quality to it, as if, as the land grows healthier, I’ll grow stronger, too. This may be magical thinking, but it’s also an exercise in hope. Standing on top of the mountain, contemplating the idea of somehow bringing change to this formidable landscape, is a dizzying experience. Whatever happens, like the wildflower seeds that stick to my trousers, the land grabs hold of me, and it won’t let go.

Taken from Bad Naturalist© Copyright 2025 by Paula Whyman. Published by Timber Press, Portland, OR. Used by permission of the publisher. All rights reserved.

The post In Bad Naturalist, an Author Settles on a Mountain Top and Tries to Farm appeared first on Modern Farmer.

The situation was worse than she realized: Prairie dogs are among the most maligned and persecuted animal species in the Western U.S. So maligned, in fact, that a 2020 survey in northern Montana found that well over half the area’s landowners believed prairie dogs should not live on public land.

To make matters even grimmer, this particular prairie dog had fleas. And those fleas could have been carrying the bacteria that causes plague — the Black Death. “It’s not great,” commented researcher Jesse Boulerice as he adjusted his gentle grip around her midsection.

The rodent responded by biting into Boulerice’s leather glove, hanging on with her two front teeth while researchers swiped a black streak of Clairol’s Nice’n Easy hair dye down her back.

Prairie dogs are among the most maligned and persecuted animal species in the Western U.S.

Though black-tailed prairie dogs have a long-standing reputation as pests, their ingenious tunnel systems and industrious prairie pruning make them one of the West’s primary ecosystem engineers. Some researchers call them the “chicken nuggets of the prairie”; if a prairie species eats meat, it almost certainly eats prairie dogs. Without prairie dogs, black-footed ferrets would never survive outside zoos and breeding facilities, and we would have far fewer mountain plovers, burrowing owls, swift foxes, and ferruginous hawks.

Before 1800, an estimated 5 billion prairie dogs lived from Canada to Mexico, covering the West with underground apartment complexes that shifted over the centuries like sand dunes. The Lakota, Dakota and other Indigenous peoples of the prairie shaped and depended on the ecosystems prairie dogs created. Some relied on prairie dogs for nourishment during thin times, or used them as a ceremonial food.

But European settlers were remarkably effective at shooting and poisoning prairie dogs and plowing up their burrows. Today, the five prairie dog species occupy just 2% of their historic range, and some occupy even less. 

Prairie dogs still survive in many of their historic territories: Black-tailed prairie dogs, known for their especially large, dense colonies, persist in isolated pockets of the prairie east of the Rocky Mountains from Canada to Mexico. White-tailed prairie dogs live in parts of Montana, Wyoming, Utah and Colorado. Gunnison’s prairie dogs eke out an existence in southern Colorado, and Utah prairie dogs live in, well, Utah. Mexican prairie dogs still hang on in small slices of northern Mexico. But many of these populations are too small to serve their ecosystems as they once did.

Within this familiar story of colonization and species decline, however, are more hopeful stories of creativity and adaptation: Researchers are using pedometer-like devices to map prairie dogs’ underground tunnels, remote-controlled badgers to understand prairie dog alarm calls and Kitchen-Aid mixers to craft solutions to deadly disease. After decades of restoration work by tribal wildlife managers, prairie dogs, black-footed ferrets, swift foxes and bison are once again roaming the Fort Belknap Indian Reservation in north-central Montana, one of the few places in the world where all four species coexist. Some private landowners, meanwhile, are finding ways to tolerate the rodents. Together, these researchers, managers and landowners are striving to conserve the West’s remaining prairie dogs and the prairie that depends on them.

ONCE THE COLLARED prairie dog was returned to her Tru Catch wire cage to await release, Boulerice reached into the next trap in line.

Boulerice is part of a team from the Smithsonian’s National Zoo and Conservation Biology Institute that is collaring and tracking prairie dogs at American Prairie — formerly the American Prairie Reserve — in central Montana. Each collar measures the animal’s acceleration and angle; by triangulating with locations picked up by sensors posted on poles throughout the colony, researchers can determine where and how far the prairie dogs travel both above and below ground. The Clairol dye patterns provide one more way to tell who’s who in a colony of look-alikes.

Though other researchers have studied prairie dogs’ aboveground lives, no one really knows what they do underground. Satellite imagery can be used to track Arctic terns over Alaska or grizzly bears deep in the wilderness, but it can’t penetrate the Earth. Decades ago, researchers laboriously excavated a white-tailed prairie dog burrow in southern Montana, revealing features like “sleeping quarters,” hibernacula, and a “maternity area” — but such work is invasive and yields little data on the animals’ movements.

At American Prairie in September, the Smithsonian team was joined by researchers from Swansea University in Wales who had developed the tracking collars Boulerice used. The collars were originally designed to study penguins underwater, an environment similarly resistant to conventional satellite tracking.

Prairie dogs aren’t the only occupants of prairie dog burrows. The mazes of tunnels and rooms also provide shelter for black-footed ferrets, swift foxes and untold numbers of insects. Burrowing owls shimmy their puffball bodies into the tunnels, where they raise their chicks on the plentiful bugs. Prairie rattlesnakes, tiger salamanders, horned lizards and badgers use them, too. And as climate extremes become more common aboveground, these burrows may become even more important.

“By creating tunnels, they’re also creating a thermal refuge,” said Hila Shamon, the director of the Smithsonian’s Great Plains Science Program and principal investigator of the colony-mapping project. “The prairie can be so hot in the summer or brutally, brutally cold in the winter. You don’t have any shade or place to hide from the cold … and conditions in the tunnel systems are consistent.”

Prairie dogs spend much of the day and all night in their burrows, living in family coteries composed of one male, three or four females and the year’s young. Their tunnel systems, which can extend across an area larger than  a football field, are like bustling apartment complexes where every family has its separate unit. Residents periodically pop out of doors to grab food, gossip about the neighbors and scan for danger.

“In the prairie,” Shamon said, “there’s a whole world that’s happening beneath the ground that we can’t see. But it exists, and it’s very deep, and it’s important.”

Aboveground, the effect of prairie dogs on the landscape is more obvious. “Prairie dogs create an entirely novel habitat type,” said Andy Boyce, a Smithsonian research ecologist. “They graze intensely. They increase the forbs and flowering plants, and they clip woody vegetation. They will eat and nibble on a new woody plant until it tips over and dies.”

“In the prairie, there’s a whole world that’s happening beneath the ground that we can’t see, but it exists, and it’s very deep, and it’s important.”

The landscape created by prairie dogs may look barren, but the reality is more nuanced. A healthy prairie isn’t an uninterrupted sea of grass; it’s  made up of grass and shrubs, wetlands and wildflowers and even large patches of bare dirt that allow prairie dogs — and other species — to spot approaching predators.

Bison like to wallow in the dirt exposed by prairie dogs, and graze on the nutritious grass and plants that resprout after a prairie dog pruning. Mountain plovers and thick-billed longspurs frequently nest on the grazed surface of prairie dog towns. (Both birds have declined along with prairie dogs; the mountain plover has been proposed for protection under the Endangered Species Act.)

Prairie dog colonies may also provide other species with a home-alarm system. “You have 1,000 little pairs of eyeballs constantly searching for predators all around you and then vocalizing loudly when they see them,” Boyce said. To test this hypothesis, Boyce’s Ph.D. student Andrew Dreelin attached a taxidermied badger to a remote-controlled car and drove it near long-billed curlew nests in Montana prairie dog colonies. He then measured how nesting curlews responded to the badger with and without a warning from the prairie dogs.

Results are pending, said Dreelin, but he’s certain that “we’ve only just started to scratch the surface on the multifaceted ways that prairie dogs could shape the lives of birds on the prairie.”

IN EARLY OCTOBER, about 500 miles south of American Prairie, Colten Salyer also donned thick leather gloves to protect himself from an angry mammal’s teeth. Then he opened a cat carrier filled with paper shavings and a member of a species once considered extinct.

The young black-footed ferret inside bared its long white canines. Bred at the National Black-Footed Ferret Conservation Center in northern Colorado, she was one of 20 about to be reintroduced to southcentral Wyoming’s Shirley Basin.

The black-footed ferret is North America’s only native ferret and one of only three ferret species in the world. And if there’s one thing black-footed ferrets need, it’s prairie dogs. They eat them almost exclusively, and they use their tunnels to live, hunt and reproduce, slipping in and out of burrows as they move like water across the landscape.

In 1980, black-footed ferrets were declared extinct, most likely extinguished by disease, development and endless prairie dog poisoning campaigns. But in 1981, a northern Wyoming ranch dog proudly presented his owners with his most recent treasure: a dead ferret. A local taxidermist confirmed that it was, in fact, a black-footed ferret, a member of a tiny remnant population.

The newly discovered ferrets lived in the wild until 1985, when biologists discovered that disease had killed all but 18. At that point, they scooped up the remaining ferrets and took them to captive breeding facilities. Only seven successfully reproduced, but those seven now have more than 11,000 descendants. In 2020, researchers used DNA from a wild-caught ferret with no surviving offspring to produce the first cloned ferret. Since then, they have created two more cloned individuals, and this past November, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service announced that one had given birth to healthy kits.

Captive-bred ferrets have now been released across the West. But to survive long-term, they need prairie dog colonies. And prairie dogs aren’t popular with their human neighbors.

Because they eat the same grass cows do. And they make holes.

“I was running to rope a yearling once, and I stood up in the saddle and was about to open my hand — and all of a sudden the horse’s front end disappeared,” said Salyer, a ranch manager in Shirley Basin who volunteered to help with the releases. His horse had sunk a hoof into a prairie dog hole, a misstep that sent Salyer tumbling to the ground.

Both Salyer and his horse were fine, and he shrugged after telling the story.But most ranchers have, or have heard, similar stories, many of which end with a valued horse breaking a leg. There’s no way to know how frequently horses injure themselves in burrows, but the stories spread as fast as a prairie fire.

What’s certain is that prairie dogs eat grass. Quite a bit of grass: A single prairie dog can devour up to 2 pounds of green grass and non-woody plants every week, according to Montana State University. For ranchers who use that vegetation to feed their cows, prairie dogs look like competition. Researchers, however, say the effects of prairie dogs on livestock forage are mixed. Black-tailed prairie dogs’ propensity to clip and mow, for instance, results in plants with higher fat and protein and lower fiber. “Across years, enhanced forage quality may help to offset reductions in forage quantity for agricultural producers,” a study published in 2019 by Rangeland Ecology and Management reported.

This uncertainty has led to some bureaucratic contradictions. The Wyoming Department of Agriculture labels prairie dogs as pest species and offers training in properly using pesticides to kill them; at the same time, the Wyoming Game and Fish Department lists the black-tailed prairie dog as a species of greatest conservation need.

Until the 1990s, said Randy Matchett, a Fish and Wildlife Service biologist in central Montana, prairie dogs were so despised in places like Phillips County, Montana, that the Bureau of Land Management produced maps of their colonies designed for sport shooters. Attitudes haven’t changed much: In 2020, 27 years after an initial survey of attitudes toward black-tailed prairie dogs and black-footed ferrets in Montana, researchers found that feelings about them had barely budged.

Matchett said that when he tells his Montana neighbors that only 2% of prairie dogs remain, a common attitude is: “What the hell’s the holdup getting rid of that last 2%?”

Chamois Andersen, a Defenders of Wildlife senior field representative, has spent decades working with landowners in prairie dog-rich places, and she’s persuaded some to allow researchers to survey their land for black-footed ferrets in exchange for funds for noxious weed removal. She speculates that younger generations of ranchers are more open to prairie dog conservation and to partnerships with public agencies and wildlife groups.

Matchett is less optimistic. Even the U.S. Forest Service and National Park Service, which together manage one of the largest black-footed ferret colonies in the world in South Dakota’s Conata Basin, poison some prairie dogs on federal land to prevent the population from moving onto private property.

Not all prairie dogs are equally reviled. White-tailed prairie dogs like those in Shirley Basin live at lower densities and tend to clip plants farther up the stems, making them less obvious to the casual observer. Landowners, as a result, are often more tolerant of them than their black-tailed cousins, said Andrew Gygli, a small-carnivore biologist for Wyoming Game and Fish.

Bob Heward, whose family started ranching in Shirley Basin more than a century ago, understands that a disliked species can also be useful.

He invites recreational shooters to target prairie dogs on his land, but he won’t use poison to kill the rodents because he knows they provide food for other species. Prairie dogs are a “nuisance,” he said, but they’re also as inevitable as the wind: “We’ve learned to live with them. They’ve been here longer than I have.”

Randy Matchett said that when he tells his Montana neighbors that only 2% of prairie dogs remain, a common attitude is: “What the hell’s the holdup getting rid of that last 2%?”

THE MALE SWIFT FOX at the end of the trap line was chunky, at least by swift fox standards: Though he weighed only about 5 pounds, his belly was round beneath his fluffy fur. His black eyes carefully followed Smithsonian researcher Hila Shamon as she loaded him into the backseat of her four-door pickup, covering the trap with a blanket as she prepared to transport him from this ranch north of Laramie, Wyoming, to a new home on the Fort Belknap Indian Reservation in Montana.

Unlike black-footed ferrets, swift foxes can survive without prairie dogs, but when prairie dogs are scarce they suffer from the loss of food, Shamon said, and are deprived of the shelter they find in prairie dog burrows. So they, too, declined as prairie dogs were exterminated and prairie habitat was converted into cropland. By the early 1900s, they had disappeared from Canada, Montana, North Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas and Oklahoma.

But swift foxes still live in parts of the West — and in some places, their populations are being restored. For the last five years, Shamon and her team have trapped swift foxes in Wyoming and Colorado and trucked them to Fort Belknap. This rectangle of grassland, buttes and prairie breaks near the Canadian border is home to the Nakoda (Assiniboine) and A’aninin (Gros Ventre), both Great Plains peoples. Today, it is one of the only places in the world where prairie dogs, swift foxes, black-footed ferrets and bison co-exist.

Montana State Sen. Mike Fox (Gros Ventre), D, who served as Fort Belknap’s director of Fish and Wildlife from 1991 to 2001, oversaw early efforts to restore buffalo, swift foxes and black-footed ferrets to the reservation. The goal was to “create a steady, healthy population of native animals that were driven to extinction because of the different uses of the land,” he said. “Like when they started poisoning the prairie dogs off in the ’30s and ’40s and wiped out the ferrets that were native here, and the same with the swift fox. We want to make as complete an ecosystem as we can, along with the buffalo.”

The tribes worked with the Fish and Wildlife Service to reintroduce black-footed ferrets, and, with researchers at the Smithsonian, World Wildlife Fund and other organizations, to bring back the swift fox. The collaborators spent two years planning the swift fox capture and translocation, Shamon said, considering factors like habitat quality, community attitudes and the overall risk to a re-established population.

Swift foxes had already been reintroduced in parts of Alberta and Saskatchewan and on the Blackfeet and Fort Peck reservations. The reintroduction at Fort Belknap continued the tribes’ restoration efforts and added a possible point of connectivity for other populations.

Tribal members living on and near the Fort Belknap Reservation have largely supported the reintroduction of native prairie species, especially after prairie dog numbers were diminished by an outbreak of disease in the late ’90s, Fox said. Now that the population is recovering and has started to clear larger areas of grass, however, some tribal members who raise cattle have begun expressing frustration to the tribal council.

“Wildlife and cattle will graze prairie dog colonies because of the new growth coming back throughout the year,” said Fox. “It makes it look even worse because it’s attractive to wildlife and domestic cattle, and they do their part. When it starts looking like a moonscape is when we get people noticing the most.”

He tells people that the little grass-eating rodents are necessary, and notes that the “moonscapes” aren’t as widespread as they may seem. But like non-Native ranchers across the West, some tribal members equate abundant prairie dogs with fewer cows. Fox doesn’t believe the council will allow widespread prairie dog poisoning on tribal lands — especially since the reservation now hosts black-footed ferrets — but he does worry that opposition could intensify.

Bronc Speak Thunder (Assiniboine), director of the Fort Belknap Buffalo Program, has also heard people complain about prairie dogs, though he added that “people complain about a lot of stuff.”

The tribes aren’t actively restoring prairie dogs, he said; they’re simply refraining from poisoning and shooting them. He sees that prairie dogs benefit tribal land by creating more habitat for ground-nesting birds and serving as food for swift foxes, coyotes, hawks and eagles. They also encourage the growth of nutritious grass for bison. “Like life, it’s a big circle, and that’s where it fits,” he said. “They’re part of the ecosystem that exists, and if you take something out, it throws everything off.”

WHEN I MET Randy Matchett, the Fish and Wildlife Service biologist, he sported a cowboy hat and graying horseshoe mustache and carried a handful of Smurf-blue flea-control pellets, each slightly smaller than a marble. The pellets, which Matchett produced in his workshop at the Charles M. Russell National Wildlife Refuge headquarters in Lewistown, Montana, are his latest attempt to protect prairie dogs from a fatal disease.

The pellets contain Fipronil, an insecticide used in treatments likeFrontline to keep fleas and ticks away from household pets, and are flavored with peanut butter and molasses to increase their chances of ending up in prairie dog bellies. Matchett dyes them blue because research shows prairie dogs are attracted to the color, and because the dye stains their feces, making it easy to estimate how many animals have consumed the pellets. Once ingested, Matchett hopes, his “FipBits” will kill the fleas that land on and bite prairie dogs, including the fleas carrying the bacteria that causes plague.

Yes, that plague. The bacte-ria Yersinia pestis causes bubonic plague, which became known as the Black Death after it killed at least 25 million Europeans during the 14th century.

In 1900, the disease arrived in North America via San Francisco, carried by rats stowed away on ships. During the following decades, the development of antibiotics controlled the disease in humans, but plague continued to spread among rodent species, affecting black-footed ferrets, rabbits and squirrels. First detected in prairie dogs in 1936, it devastated populations already hit hard by the conversion of the prairie to agriculture — and it remains a major threat to prairie dogs.

“Once colonies have plague, they can disappear in two weeks,” said Shamon. “There will be thousands of acres chirping with thousands or tens of thousands of animals and in two weeks, you will go map it, and they’re gone.”

A plague vaccine does exist, and is used to protect highly endangered species like black-footed ferrets. But it’s simply not possible to jab every prairie dog in the West. Matchett, who as a Fish and Wildlife biologist is responsible for conserving endangered species, got involved in plague prevention in the early 1990s, initially dusting prairie dog colonies for fleas. In 2013, he began testing oral vaccines in Montana colonies, working in parallel with researchers in seven other states. The first-generation vaccines were red, peanut-butter flavored cubes with a biomarker that tinted prairie dog whiskers pink. Matchett and his colleagues in Colorado also developed vaccine pellets that they mass-produced using a Lithuanian carp bait-making machine. Matchett helped craft a pellet shooter that could be bolted to the front of a four-wheeler.

Prairie dogs are “part of the ecosystem that exists, and if you take something out, it throws everything off.”

With the new vaccines primed to launch, Matchett felt hopeful. The World Wildlife Fund, which helped fund some of the work, felt hopeful, too. But in 2018, after years of trials with thousands of prairie dogs, he and other researchers concluded that even when a colony was given oral vaccinations, the number of prairie dogs that survived a plague outbreak was too small to support a black-footed ferret population. 

So Matchett pivoted. If he couldn’t inoculate prairie dogs against plague, maybe he could kill the fleas that carried the bacteria. What if he could persuade prairie dogs to eat Fipronil?

He made a new set of pellets with the same bait machine, this time using his wife’s grandmother’s Kitchen-Aid mixer to blend various types of flour, vital wheat gluten, peanut butter, molasses and other food-grade ingredients with a soupçon of flea killer. Early results have been promising: While adult fleas aren’t affected until they bite a prairie dog that’s ingested a pellet, not every flea needs to be killed; studies have shown that in general, fleas don’t trigger plague outbreaks until they reach a critical mass. And flea larvae appear to die when they crawl into or consume treated prairie dog poop, suggesting that the pellets could tamp down flea reproduction as well as kill the adult insects.

FipBits aren’t the only way to reduce the toll plague takes on prairie dogs, but Matchett believes they’re the most likely to work. In his office, perched on stacks of files, are the remnants of another of his many assaults on the problem: dozens of vials of alcohol, each containing bits of prairie dog ears. In 2007 and 2008, Matchett and his colleagues collected the snippets from prairie dogs that had survived plague outbreaks, hoping genetic analysis would explain their fortitude. The material has yet to be analyzed owing to a “combination of lack of funding, interest, time and capability,” Matchett said, but he hopes new funding will allow him and his collaborators to return to the project.

Despite the setbacks, Matchett believes researchers can find a way to control plague in prairie dogs. Human intolerance, as he sees it, is a more stubborn problem. Places like Fort Belknap and the Conata Basin of South Dakota — where prairie dogs are, at least for now, allowed to flourish — remain few and far between.

DRIVE SOUTH from Fort Belknap down Highway 191, head east on a straight gravel road, and you’ll find one more place where prairie dogs are left in peace.

American Prairie began in 2001 as an effort to protect and restore Montana’s grasslands. The nonprofit now manages more than 527,000 acres of private land and federal and state leases. Its ultimate goal is to connect 3.2 million acres of prairie, providing habitat for an array of species from bison to mountain plovers to black-footed ferrets. To the casual observer, American Prairie’s lands may already look like intact prairie, though ecologists like Daniel Kinka can’t help noticing the nonnative crested wheatgrass and the hundreds of miles of fencing.

“This is kind of like the Field of Dreams model: If you build it, they will come,” said Kinka, American Prairie’s director of rewilding. “A better habitat houses more wildlife, and the wildlife that are here are perfectly capable of restoring themselves.”

American Prairie prohibits the poisoning and shooting of prairie dogs on its land, and it regularly hosts research projects such as the Smithsonian’s burrow mapping — which may help explain how plague spreads within colonies — and Matchett’s tests of plague-mitigation tools. Prairie dogs, said Kinka, are the “unsung heroes of a prairie ecosystem,” important to all the other species American Prairie is trying to foster. And as researchers have found, the woody plants that prairie dogs chew down to clear their line of sight tend to be replaced by nutritious grasses and wildflowers, suggesting that even cattle may benefit from their presence.

The possibility that prairie dogs could be good for cattle, or at least not as bad as generally believed, is met with skepticism by American Prairie’s neighbors, many of whom see the nonprofit as a threat to ranching. Signs posted along highways in Phillips County, Montana, read “Save the American Cowboy. Stop American Prairie Reserve.” For now, Kinka isn’t trying to convince anyone to like or even appreciate prairie dogs, aiming instead for tolerance.

The black-tailed prairie dog complex studied by the Smithsonian team at American Prairie is a noisy place, filled with the barks and trills of hundreds of creatures. As I stood beside researcher Jesse Boulerice, listening, it was easy to imagine that the rodents were doing just fine. But they’re not. Will they ever be allowed to exist in numbers like this throughout their historic range?

Boulerice surveyed the surface of the colony, which was covered with dried plant nubs and bare mounds of dirt, and said he wasn’t sure.

Then he released a collared prairie dog who wagged her chubby butt in the air as she scurried into a nearby hole. She promptly popped back up, chirping out a message we’ll never understand. Perhaps she was warning her colony-mates to watch out for those marshmallows and carrots; they hide a nasty trap.

Or maybe she was scolding us — telling us exactly what she thought of our species before she disappeared into her burrow, leaving us to decide the future of hers.

This story is part of High Country News’ Conservation Beyond Boundaries project, which is supported by the BAND Foundation.

This article first appeared on High Country News and is republished here under a Creative Commons license. We welcome reader letters. Email High Country News at editor@hcn.org or submit a letter to the editor. See our letters to the editor policy.

The post Why the West Needs Prairie Dogs appeared first on Modern Farmer.

However, over the years, it’s become clear that malathion isn’t always safe for use, and, even if no humans are negatively impacted by it on a case-by-case basis, it’s much more likely to negatively impact unintended critters or plants, some of which might be endangered. Malathion remains on the market in the US (the United Kingdom withdrew malathion for sale in 2002 due to safety concerns), but some organizations are pushing back, citing the pesticide’s murky history and evidence that malathion isn’t as safe as you might want to believe.

On September 9, 2024, the Center for Biological Diversity, an organization dedicated to protecting endangered species from human impact, sued the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) for “failing to adequately protect more than 1,500 species of wildlife and plants from the insecticide malathion—in violation of the Endangered Species Act.” This came after years of back-and-forth on malathion’s safety. 

In 2017, scientists within the USFWS found that a single exposure to malathion “could be catastrophic” and that repeated use of the insecticide could eliminate entire populations of endangered species in particular areas. However, their findings went nowhere after that scientific determination was reversed by then-Secretary of the Interior David Bernhardt, which delayed the finalization of the biological opinion by five years. 

Fast forward to 2022, and the USFWS changed its tone: This time, it finalized its biological opinion on malathion and concluded that the pesticide does not pose an extinction risk to a single protected species of wildlife or plant in the United States. There’s very little to explain why such a drastic difference in findings would occur over such a short timespan. 

Lori Ann Burd, environmental health director for the Center for Biological Diversity (CBD), says that, despite the shift from the USFWS, the CBD remains steadfast that malathion is harmful. “Malathion belongs to an old class of pesticides called organophosphates. Organophosphates are potent neurotoxins associated with a suite of risks to human health, including death,” says Burd. “Farmworkers suffer disproportionate exposure to pesticides, including malathion. But others can also suffer substantial exposures, including people who spray malathion for landscaping, golf courses and mosquito control; people who live in areas where malathion is frequently used for mosquito control, and workers in factories where malathion is produced.” 

A glance back in time through malathion incident reports finds concerning stories from the 1980s and ’90s. In California, malathion was the third most common cause of pesticide-related illness from 1981 to 1985, especially among applicators exposed during indoor application, usually due to inhalation of fumes. Malathion is second on the list of active ingredients thought to be responsible for the largest number of acute occupational pesticide-related illnesses, using 1999 data. One incident report recounts the time a young girl ran across a lawn five hours after the application of malathion; she was left with blisters on her feet for months afterwards. Another incident from 1995 finds that a worker installing a door was exposed to malathion sprayed by the property owner; he was hospitalized for days with dysarthria, nausea, and vomiting. 

In fairness, malathion is generally safe enough for humans—usually. Malathion is of low toxicity to humans, but absorption or ingestion into the human body metabolizes malathion into malaoxon, which is substantially more dangerous. Symptoms of malaoxon toxicity can onset within minutes to hours after exposure, and can result in minor concerns such as allergic reactions or skin rashes to nervous system impacts, seizures, loss of consciousness, and even death. Even low levels of exposure can lead to these effects.  The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) recommends that workers not be exposed to more than 10 mg/m³ of malathion for a 10-hour workday, 40 hours per workweek. NIOSH also recommends that a level of 250 mg/m³ of malathion in the air be considered as immediately dangerous to life and health.

How can one stay protected from potential malathion toxicity? It’s important to use protective equipment when applying malathion, including gloves, rubber boots, a mask covering the nose and mouth, and eyewear. Even when wearing gloves, it’s important to thoroughly wash your hands afterwards. Windows should stay closed to prevent vapors from entering your house. Similarly, remember that anything you spray has the potential to cause harm; remove pet bowls, children’s toys, or anything else that might unknowingly harbor malathion. However, it’s important to consider others when choosing your pesticide; if you are unable to limit the exposure of others, such as neighborhood kids or dogwalkers, you may want to reconsider using a pesticide believed by many, and evidenced by many incident reports, to cause serious harm.

Malathion is, like most other insecticides, indiscriminate in who it kills; that means that endangered species that come in contact with it are likely to die. These species include the Karner blue butterfly, rusty-patched bumble bee, Indiana bat, northern long-eared bat, American burying beetle, lesser prairie-chicken, and many plant species. Bat species may actually be at an increased risk, as they may feed on mosquitoes sprayed with malathion before they succumb. Similarly, feral cats, or outdoor cats and dogs, might interact with objects sprayed by malathion, or eat insects or small animals that are contaminated. 

The government’s reply to the lawsuit is due by the end of January, and the incoming Trump administration could be a factor in how it proceeds. “The election could certainly lead to changes in how the government chooses to defend itself in the case, but we still feel confident in the strength of our claims,” says Burd. 

“The Fish and Wildlife Service submitted to the pesticide industry’s demands and hung more than 1,500 endangered species out to dry by failing to rein in malathion use in their habitats,” said Burd in a release regarding the CBD lawsuit. “Today, these animals and plants continue to be harmed by one of the worst neurotoxic pesticides on the market, which can be sprayed in the last few homes of some of our most imperiled species. That includes nearly every endangered butterfly, beetle and dragonfly we have. We just can’t let this go on.” 

The post Why One Group is Suing the Government Over Malathion, a Dangerous Pesticide appeared first on Modern Farmer.

Twice a growing season, a big yellow truck with the license plate “P4FARMS” pulls into Jesse Kayan’s farm in Brattleboro, Vermont, loaded with a thousand gallons of pasteurized human urine sloshing around in IBC totes.

For more than 10 years, Kayan has been applying human urine to his hayfields through a partnership with the Brattleboro-based Rich Earth Institute, a non-profit engaging in research, education and technological innovation to advance the use of human waste as a resource. In August, Rich Earth released a Farmer Guide to Fertilizing with Urine, available for free on their website. The guide compiles a wealth of information and best practices based on working with farm partners like Kayan and a growing body of scientific research from around the world.

“Our hay yields have gone way up as a result [of the urine],” said Kayan. “We have really hungry land and sandy soil. It’s brought it up to a new level and provided some resiliency in the soil health.”

Kayan, whose business relies on the organic vegetables he grows for his farmstand and CSA, said he’d be happy to use urine on other crops if the practice was more widely accepted by consumers.

“I personally, if it were my garden, I would not think twice about it,“ he said. ”I really don’t think there’s actually any food safety concerns. It’s a matter of perception.”

Kayan is one of nine Vermont farmers who’ve participated in Rich Earth’s field studies, funded by USDA Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education (SARE). In addition to hay, Rich Earth has conducted trials on sweet corn, hemp, figs, nursery trees, and cut flowers. The multi-year trials found that crops fertilized with human urine performed better than untreated control plots.

Kayan and other farm partners also observed higher yields and/or more robust growth and color in the urine-treated plots relative to those treated with conventional synthetic fertilizer; however, the trials found no statistically significant difference in total yields or relative feed value. That said, some international studies have shown improved yields and growth in certain urine-fertilized crops, such as cabbage, maize, and cucumber.

This is no surprise to Arthur Davis, who oversees farm partnerships for Rich Earth. He said human urine has a nutrient profile similar to many commercial fertilizers, with high levels of nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium, as well as micronutrients like magnesium, sulfur, and calcium.

But the potential benefits of fertilizing with human urine reach far beyond the fields of Vermont. Most commercially available fertilizers rely on synthetic nitrogen produced through the Haber-Bosch process, which accounts for 1.4% of carbon dioxide emissions, and 1% of total global energy consumption, according to the journal Nature Catalyst.

Most of this energy comes from natural gas, which means that the price of fertilizer is closely tied to the price of natural gas, a cost that is passed down to farmers and consumers. But the carbon footprint of conventional fertilizer doesn’t stop there. Mining of phosphate and potash are depleting natural reserves. The Global Phosphorus Research Initiative predicts a shortage of rock phosphate within the next 40 years.

“Our hay yields have gone way up as a result [of the urine].”

Diverting urine from the wastewater stream for use as fertilizer would also address the two largest contributors of nutrient pollution in the U.S., agriculture and human waste, which are responsible for toxic algae blooms, aquatic dead zones, and a wide range of human health conditions. It could also reduce nitrous oxide emission by keeping urine out of uncovered waste lagoons, where it festers with methane-breeding solid waste. Not only that, but urine-diverting toilets — available through Rich Earth — require little or no water to flush, which by their estimates could save up to 900 billion gallons of water per year in the U.S. Some of this water can be recycled for use in irrigation.

Initially, there were concerns about trace levels of pharmaceuticals in urine, but a recently concluded study by Rich Earth in partnership University of Michigan, the University at Buffalo, and the Hampton Roads Sanitation District in Virginia, detected no significant buildup in crop tissues. Davis said they are now also testing for PFAS; so far their samples have tested negative or extremely low.

If human urine is a safe, cost-effective and environmentally sustainable alternative to conventional fertilizers, why hasn’t it already been adopted on a larger scale?

One fundamental challenge of fertilizing with human urine is ammonia volatilization, which can cause the nitrogen in urea to evaporate quickly during storage and application. To prevent this, urine is applied as close to the ground as possible, and incorporated into the soil immediately.

Davis has worked with farm partners to develop application methods that are both practical and effective. For Kayan’s hay fields, Rich Earth uses a custom-built, 500-gallon trailer tank attached to a 30-foot boom suspended about three feet above the ground. The urine drizzles out evenly through small holes spaced every six inches.

“It’s incredibly easy,” said Kayan. “It requires basically just one person on the farm and some sort of form of locomotion.” In his case, this means a team of Suffolk Punch draft horses, but the same apparatus can be hitched to a tractor. “It’s real fast and easy, you can fertilize a lot of land real real quick with it.”

“When you’re filling the bulk tanks to go out and spray it’s really really powerful, but when I’m applying it I don’t really smell it that much.”

John Janiszyn, who runs a multigenerational farm stand in Walpole, New Hampshire, has been using urine on sweet corn for several years, and this year is testing it on his pumpkins.

Davis helped him modify his tractor so that he could cultivate his fields and apply urine in one pass. The urine flows from a tank attached to the three point hitch down through a hose onto the ground, where it is immediately buried by his cultivator. For his pumpkins, they applied the urine under a layer of plastic mulch, trapping the nutrients in the ground.

For Janiszyn, one drawback of using urine is that it is highly diluted. “You need a lot of it to do an acre,” he said. “So you sidedress or whatever and then have to go back and refill and keep going.”

It takes about 1000 gallons of urine just to fertilize one acre of hay. Currently, Rich Earth is nowhere close to being able to meet that kind of demand.

Rich Earth sources its urine from about 250 donors in the Brattleboro area, the first and largest ever community-scale urine nutrient reclamation project in the United States. At their central treatment and storage facility, the urine — about 12,000 gallon a year — is sanitized using a computer-controlled pasteurizer.

“I think it’s a little bit of a chicken and the egg,” said Davis. “It requires farmers to really feel like it’s worth investing in new equipment. They want to feel like they have steady access to the material in the first place, which then requires, on the backend, systems in place for collection and treatment.”

In Vermont, Rich Earth has been working with lawmakers for over a decade to clear regulatory pathways, and are now beginning the process in Massachusetts and New York.

“It’s purely the optics that I would worry about, and I really think that that’s just a matter of time [until it becomes normalized].”

“We’re probably the most kind of far along group in this country in terms of having a whole ecosystem of collection, treatment, transport, application, all under one regulated program,” said Davis.

Rich Earth offers assistance to organizations across the U.S. to obtain approval for farm-scale urine application, including the Land Institute of Kansas, which launched its own urine reclamation project in 2023.

But the greatest obstacle to making peecycling mainstream may not be logistic or regulatory at all. It goes back to what Kayan said about public perception.

“It’s purely the optics that I would worry about, and I really think that that’s just a matter of time [until it becomes normalized].”

“I don’t really want to be the first one,” he added.

Janiszyn and his wife Teresa found out about Rich Earth when they participated in one of their focus groups examining public attitudes toward urine reclamation.

“It was funny how having us in that focus group sort of changed people,” he said. “We said we use cow manure and stuff and this [urine] doesn’t sound like it would be an issue. And I remember one guy was like, yeah, well, hearing from these guys, you know, I guess it’s not that bad.”

Janiszyn said that after his experience in the focus group he wasn’t too concerned about customer response. “I realized that if I’m positive about it people will just come along with it. You have to have some control over the narrative.”

The post Can Human Urine Fertilize Our Crops? appeared first on Modern Farmer.

Rufino Vargas walked along the border of his greenhouse, on the westside of Detroit this summer, collecting chili peppers.

He stooped to point out a red one whose seeds he had ordered from Peru. Another, the chilaca, is from Guerrero, the Mexican state where he was raised. Some are especially spicy, others have an extra helping of healthy amino acids. He knows them all — all 60-plus varieties — by sight and taste.

“Four of these and one tomato — that’s a recipe for a very good salsa,” he says, pointing to a knee-high plant heavy with dark-green chilis.

Ortega Urban Farms, which Vargas built from scratch over two decades on a pair of vacant lots, is a labor of love rooted in his rural childhood, where agricultural techniques were part of the family lore.

Agriculture “is what keeps me alive, it’s my passion,” he said, speaking in Spanish.

Like some other gardeners throughout Detroit, Vargas credits his good health, at 59, to the farm — to the healthy food it gave him, and the emotional and physical benefits of working the land.

Still, this fall’s harvest may be his last in Detroit. Vargas plans to move to the west side of Michigan after the farm was hit with thousands of dollars in blight tickets from the City of Detroit. A friend has property near Lake Michigan where Vargas could farm and run a restaurant.

City officials told Outlier Media they’re willing to work with Vargas to help him continue growing food in Detroit, but that he needs to improve the condition of the property before they can cancel the blight tickets.

Growing healthier

When Vargas tells the story of his journey to the U.S. and his life here, he divides it into two parts: before and after he began growing food on Julian Street in Detroit’s Midwest neighborhood.

In Mexico, he’d found a government job, tracking and fighting agricultural pests, but violence in his hometown pushed him to attempt the difficult migration north in 1988. He ended up in Florida, where he worked in the restaurant industry for 15 years.

Cooking, for Vargas, is a passion linked with his love of growing food. He liked the restaurant industry. Still, the stressful lifestyle and unhealthy foods he was eating back then took a toll.

In 1999, a doctor told him he was prediabetic, which Vargas attributed to a combination of stress and poor diet. Hispanic adults of any race in the U.S. are 60% more likely than non-Hispanic white adults to be diagnosed with diabetes.

He began taking medicine to help, but he still struggled to get his blood sugar into a healthy range. A turning point came after he moved to Detroit and noticed a vacant lot across the street from his house and decided to sow some seeds.

Pretty soon, he was growing healthy food for himself and his family.

“I eat a lot of vegetables,” he said. “If I had to buy vegetables at the store, believe me, I wouldn’t buy them. A pound of heirloom tomatoes costs $8. I wouldn’t pay that. It’s a lot for me.”

As his diet improved and he spent more time working outside, he watched his health steadily improve as well.

“My blood sugar lowered a lot,” he said. “I will always have diabetes, but it is controlled. I use medication. I don’t exercise because I don’t have time, but I get a lot of movement from being active at the farm. It lowers my stress.”

Vargas’ experience is echoed in gardens across the city.

Diabetes relief was just one of a long list of physical and mental benefits reported by 28 gardeners who spoke with researchers for a 2022 study conducted by Michigan State University, Wayne State University, and the nonprofit Keep Growing Detroit.

Living off the land

Now, about 15 years after planting those first seeds, Ortega Urban Farms produces more vegetables than just a single family can eat. Selling what he grows has increasingly become a part of Vargas’ livelihood.

With assistance from Keep Growing Detroit, he’s expanded his operation and built a greenhouse. When the weather is warm enough, he spends Saturday mornings at Eastern Market, where he has a dedicated following among cooks looking for more than the usual variety of jalapeño or habanero peppers.

“These are peppers you can’t get at the store,” he said. When customers request rare varieties, he’s happy to set them aside.

Vargas also works part time for the Detroit Public Schools Community District’s Office of School Nutrition, helping students tend the garden at the Charles R. Drew Transition Center, which supports students ages 18-26 with special needs.

A connection to home and family

Vargas is eager to share his agricultural know-how, whether with Detroit students, visitors to his garden, farmers around the city, customers or anyone else. More than a livelihood or even a way to maintain good health, he views his knowledge of agriculture as a cultural inheritance, one that is in danger of dying out.

Growing his peppers links him to where he grew up and to the people who passed their knowledge on to him — his mother, who taught him how to select, dry and store seeds for the next season, and his uncles who showed him how to plant seeds, harvest, and work outdoors on their farm in Mexico.

Many of the vegetables he sells remind him of home. Farming also allows him to grow crops simply because they are meaningful. Like cempasúchil, or marigolds, flowers whose bright color and distinctive smell are an iconic part of the late October and early November Day of the Dead celebrations, when many Mexicans honor their ancestors.

Vargas says his deep connection to the plants he grows leaves him with feelings of pride and calm. This, too, helps his health, and it helps explain why he often goes straight from his day job to maintaining the greenhouse, and why he’s eager to expand his operation onto a neighboring vacant lot.

“This is where I kill my stress,” he said this summer, gesturing to the farm.

Fast forward a few months, and Vargas is hoping he can find the same peace on the other side of the state.

In September, the City of Detroit hit him with thousands of dollars in blight tickets for offenses including overgrown weeds, “unsafe conditions,” and storage of solid waste. City officials told Outlier they are willing to cancel the tickets if he fixes the problems by Oct. 31.

“Associate Director of Urban Agriculture Patrice Brown is taking the lead in helping Mr. Vargas work through these issues, toward a goal of him being able to continue his urban farming work in compliance with city codes and other related requirements,” city spokesperson John Roach said in an email.

He added that Vargas technically doesn’t own the property. Vargas acknowledged that he hasn’t been willing to pay the necessary tax bill to take over the property from the Detroit Land Bank Authority.

Instead, Vargas said he plans to accept an offer from an acquaintance to take over a much larger property in Covert Township, about 30 minutes north of Benton Harbor, with the possibility of buying it after a few years. Just a few miles from Lake Michigan, the property includes mature apple and peach trees and a restaurant that is fully equipped but inactive.

“I’ve been doing this for 15 years, and now (the city is) giving me a hard time?” he said.

The post From Rare Peppers to Blight Tickets, This Detroit Garden Shows the Promise and Challenge of Urban Gardening appeared first on Modern Farmer.

At 46 years old, Heidi Penix was diagnosed with breast cancer.

A Michigan native, she had just moved back from Texas to start a new job after losing hers due to the pandemic. But things were looking up: She also purchased her first home, in Detroit’s University District.

Penix wasn’t a farmer by any means, but she had been a believer in the food sovereignty movement. Her new home came with a yard left in disrepair after years of vacancy, so she contacted Keep Growing Detroit, an organization dedicated to food sovereignty, to buy seeds to start a garden.

On the same day, Penix was scheduled to pick up her seeds, she had a doctor’s appointment. That’s when she received the diagnosis.

“It’s always, now, so associated with cancer for me,” Penix said about that seed pickup after leaving the doctor. On the drive, she recalled saying, “We got to get the crops!” and “This is a really important thing. We just got to get it.”

Penix, now 48, has had a double mastectomy, but recently learned she has stage IV cancer with a metastatic bone lesion. Though the physical battle is grueling, she remembers how tending to the garden became a mental and emotional lifeline during her first treatment phase. Growing something in her backyard, however small, gave Penix a sense of purpose and a reason to keep going on the toughest days, she said.

‘When I couldn’t do anything else, I had this garden’

Penix’s garden is a canvas of organized chaos. It began with distinct sections: vegetables on one side, wildflowers on the other, and plastic fork prongs poking up to keep squirrels from walking on the plants.

Over time, nature had its way. Flowers like zinnias and black-eyed Susans, once intentionally planted in one section, began to spread. The marigolds, cosmos and calendula were now joined by goldenrod and poppies, creating a vibrant yet untamed space.

But Penix hadn’t always pictured herself as a gardener.

“I remember when I put the first seeds in the ground, I thought, ‘Well, this is pointless. Nothing’s going to happen,’” Penix said, laughing. “Then I remember when the first little seedlings came up, just feeling like I had done magic. I was like, ‘This is the coolest thing I’ve ever seen.’”

At first, Penix said, managing her garden was challenging, especially with the unpredictability of her treatment schedule. Urban gardening isn’t just about growing food: It also offers physical benefits, particularly for people recovering from chronic illnesses like cancer. Research has shown that light physical activity, such as gardening, can help patients stay mobile and in good spirits during recovery. A study of Detroit’s urban gardeners published in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health found that gardeners reported improved moods, reduced stress and better management of chronic conditions.

The diagnosis hit Penix hard. She didn’t have a family history of the disease. Sometimes, the garden was the only activity she had the energy for. Weeding, watering or simply being in the yard became a form of therapy.

“I was sick, and I was really depressed, and things kind of fell apart for me. And then I had this yard,” Penix said. “It’s the place I just wanted to spend the most time. It’s been this ongoing frustration: Plan the garden. Get really excited. Then it’s like, ‘Well, I have to have another surgery (and) can’t use my arms right after I planted. And then everything kind of falls apart. … And then when I was really mad, I could pull weeds. So it was a good outlet.”

A new outlook on food

Penix now researches injury and violence prevention in a public health master’s program at Johns Hopkins University. She’s knowledgeable in the field now, but initially, she knew little about the impact of healthy food on overall well-being.

Her cancer journey showed her the importance of what people consume and how environments shape health. Penix started focusing on addressing issues at the root, rather than only treating symptoms with medication.

“I learned how important green space is to every part of the human health experience,” Penix said. “I think about how important having the green spaces is to people. And being connected to the earth and being able to have control of the food systems and being able to use land to be able to grow healthy food I think is a really important thing.”

Penix grows tomatoes, cucumbers, lettuce, eggplants and beans to use in her meals. (Though, her husband says, she sometimes goes overboard with certain produce). Growing produce helped increase her fruit and vegetable intake to improve her diet. Research shows produce begins to lose its nutrients as soon as it is harvested, making fresh food the best choice.

Penix said urban farming also helped her learn more about what goes into in our food, like pesticides and other agents she considers to be harmful, although some experts maintain these chemicals are safe.

Kate Bauer, an associate professor of nutritional sciences at the University of Michigan, emphasized that any pesticide residue on food is safe for eating and that there isn’t much research that says pesticide-free or “organic” foods offer more nutritional benefits than nonorganic food.

“Food is pretty healthy, even if it doesn’t look perfect,” Bauer said, noting to never eat food that looks expired or rotten. “It is definitely more important to use your money to get as much fresh produce as you can that your family can handle and eat and (to have) a variety.”

As the flowers in her garden faded with the arrival of fall, Penix said she felt both a sense of sadness and peace. Her approach to urban gardening has become a metaphor for life: It’s about letting things bloom, grow and fall when the time comes.

“It’s a constant process of learning what it takes to keep things alive,” Penix said, adding that the garden “is an ecosystem that I’m not in charge of. It needs tending, it needs to be kept refreshed. … It’s sad to see all my goldenrods just fade because those are so pretty.

“It’s that hard time to let things kind of be without kind of aggressively pruning, trying to make things pretty. Just let it fade. I’m trying to be good with that.”

The post Gardening Heals: Detroiter’s Cancer Treatment Eased by her Work With Soil appeared first on Modern Farmer.

That lonely tree stood apart from the rest of the orchard—its companions had long since died—as a sentinel from a bygone era. It was the orchard’s only remaining Liveland Raspberry, which is not in fact a berry, but a variety of apple—named after its country of origin, a former Soviet province. If you’ve never heard of it, that’s because the Liveland Raspberry is one of more than 10,000 varieties of heirloom apple grown in the United States.

A mystique surrounds heirloom apples. Some people drive across state lines to seek out rare varieties; others dedicate their lives to preserving them. Their price reflects the mystique: At my local food co-op, the heirlooms are twice as expensive as the other apples. The word “heirloom” basically means “old,” but it’s taken on some broader, ethereal meaning to many people: novelty, obscurity, nostalgia, and maybe even superiority. For some people, heirlooms can ascend to become the object of a grail quest: the dream that we can bring the past back to life.

The irony in all this is that many heirloom apples aren’t actually that good. Take that lonely Liveland Raspberry: There was a reason the orchard was down to a single tree and more hadn’t been planted. Eaten out of hand, the Liveland’s texture is tough and its flavor is uninspiring. It’s better for cooking, but it’s still not as good as other apples in our August lineup. So, the Livelands generally withered in the cooler until some day in October, when we’d find them buried under a pile of crates and dump them all into the cider press. This was an annual tradition as consistent as the appearance of the phantom ladder. In this case, “heirloom” served as code for “relegated to history’s compost bin.”

Is there a way to peer through the ephemeral mist, to understand not only whether heirlooms are worth the hype, but what heirloom diehards are truly searching for?

I spoke with some growers who have devoted their lives to heirlooms to see if they could break the spell and help me understand the true value of an heirloom.

“I think an heirloom has to have a little bit more going for it” than just its age, says Dan Bussey, author of The Illustrated History of Apples in the United States and Canada, which catalogs and describes 16,350 varieties in seven volumes. “It needs to be something that had a life someplace—that was popular, people liked it. It has to have some value other than just being old.”

Interestingly, the value of an old apple can actually be its newness. I once sold apples to a couple who were looking for heirlooms. I offered them samples of such ancient varieties as Golden Russet, Wealthy, and Tolman Sweet, before they tried a Melba and fell in love. I tried to explain that Melbas, the product of a Canadian breeding program, were not technically heirlooms, but they had none of it. They had tasted mana and wanted five pounds, thank you very much.

That couple was using “heirloom” in a way that many people do, which is to mean “obscure.” So, there’s no small irony that one of the world’s most well-known apples, the McIntosh, easily meets any definition of an heirloom, having been discovered as a seedling by John McIntosh on his Ontario farm in 1811.

Many people know the McIntosh as a soft, mealy apple, and they despise it. Yet, there’s a small club of us for whom the Mac represents the archetypal apple. Imagine scouring a tree for an apple that’s hung on long enough to turn bright crimson, so ripe that it falls off right into your hand; biting into its crisp, snappy flesh, the juice’s tartness cutting through the last heat of summer, its incomparably rich flavor transporting you, if only for a moment, into reverie.

But blink, and you could miss that moment. The problem with the McIntosh, like many heirlooms, is that it doesn’t store particularly well. Within as little as a week or two after picking, a Mac may begin to lose its perfect crunch. And considering that the average apple on a supermarket shelf has been in storage for eight months, by the time your average apple-eater encounters a McIntosh, September’s sweet-sour snap has given way to the mealy mush of May. Today’s apples need to function in a system of international commerce, and they need to look presentable 12 months and 12,000 miles from their time and place of origin.

The McIntosh has other traits that bedevil its growers—Macs bruise easily, are especially susceptible to the fungal disease Apple Scab, and tend to fall off the tree before they’re fully ripe. Modern apple breeding programs have worked to eliminate these nuisances.

When the needs of the grower and grocer eclipse those of the eater, then your supermarket apple boasts a bright, shiny skin that cloaks blandness and fatigue, and sends apple enthusiasts looking elsewhere.

However, if this sentiment becomes overblown, then heirlooms can become code for “snobbishly superior.” In this case, the apple’s worth is predicated on its rarity, which makes ubiquitous apples, like the McIntosh, inherently worthless.

I asked the orchardists I interviewed whether there were apple varieties that weren’t good enough to deserve preservation. C.J. Walke, who manages the Maine Heritage Orchard, believes that’s the wrong question to ask. Instead, it’s important to look at the function of heirlooms in a robust local food system and regional economy. “If we go back 100-plus years, a lot of these varieties were grown on the farm or on the homestead, and they served a purpose for that family’s needs,” says Walke. Some were sold, but many were consumed right there by the family, eaten fresh or preserved as applesauce, cider, or vinegar. Heirloom varieties are so numerous because each fits a niche for every particular farm family, in terms of flavor, function, seasonality, and cold tolerance.

When I asked the orchardists why customers come to them looking for heirlooms, the reason that came up again and again was nostalgia.

“Their grandma had this tree, or their parents had this tree, and they haven’t seen it in 40 years,” says Jamie Hanson, the orchard manager at Seed Savers Exchange. “And so, for them, it’s a very personal experience.”

The richness of those memories drives the orchardists’ passion for their work.

“What moves me is how many generations of people loved these varieties,” says Erin Robinson, Orchardist at Scott Farm, in Dummerston, Vermont. “I am a link in that chain. I feel like it’s my duty to preserve them.”

Indeed, there’s something about apples that makes us look towards the past. Heirlooms hold the promise that there was once a richness that has been lost in the glossy monotones of the supermarket, and a diversity that met each individual’s particular need.

What excites Dan Bussey about heirlooms is their specificity, that a person can find something that fits their exact tastes. “I like everything to be a democratic process, where we all get a chance to try something, and if we love it, we should share it,” he says. “We should make it available to anybody. And if we like growing old varieties, great. If we love growing new varieties, wonderful. It’s what you like. That’s the important thing.”

The post Ode to an Heirloom appeared first on Modern Farmer.

Scientists have declared that we are in the midst of the earth’s sixth mass extinction, this one driven by human activities such as unsustainable uses of land, water and energy, and climate change. All of the other mass extinctions were natural phenomena, and the last one was 65.5 million years ago.

While there is plenty of blame to share among us humans, it would be foolish to ignore the role of agriculture in the demise of so many animal and plant species across the globe. Close to 40 percent of the planet’s land and 70 percent of its freshwater is used by agriculture.

But in recent decades, farmers, ranchers, and preservationists are individually, and in some cases collectively, working together to save rare and endangered animal species by using their products to feed, nourish, educate and clothe people. It’s counterintuitive perhaps to work—and in some cases, eat—animals as a way of saving them. But this strategy is not just ensuring the long-term health of species, it is creating opportunities to preserve traditional culture, farm greener, prepare for more extreme weather and eat healthier.

Famille Joly

The Loire’s Famille Joly has long held legendary status among wine lovers, largely for the quality of its biodynamic wines, and its leader Nicolas Joly’s unerring commitment to the authentic expression of the estate’s La Coulée de Serrant wines and vineyards.

This devotion goes much deeper than “just” committing to creating wines with minimal intervention in the vineyards and cellar.

“Winemaking should not be surgery,” says Joly. “Everything should happen in the vineyard. … When you feel the music come to you when you taste the wine, you know that the work you did in the vineyard is coming through.”

That work is meticulous, complex, and strategic. It even includes the specific type of manure Joly selects to fertilize his vineyards. In a bid to be totally true to his terroir—a French winemaking concept that aims to impart a combination of natural factors including soil, climate and sunlight to the glass—he’s working with a herd of indigenous cattle to “produce” compost.

“We brought in a herd of 10 Nantaise cows and a bull for their compost,” he explains. “But we also decided to use them because they are endangered. These cows are an essential part of our region’s landscape and history.”

These cows are an essential part of our region’s landscape and history.

And because they are indigenous to the region, their manure, arguably, will deliver more authentic terroir.

The Bovine Nantaise Are Docile, Flexible

The Nantaise are originally from the Loire and southern Brittany, and they have largely lived in coastal areas, according to the Slow Food Foundation for Biodiversity. This medium-sized breed (between 1,325 pounds for a female and 1,875 pounds for a male) is typically used for milk and meat, and is suited for humid and poor conditions. The Nantaise can thrive in regions where other breeds struggle, and they are notably docile. There are only around 900 cattle still in existence in all of France, and their presence in other countries is thought to be nonexistent.

Colonial Williamsburg

Colonial Williamsburg has been preserving rare breeds of cattle, horses, oxen, sheep and fowl since 1986. The focus, Colonial Williamsburg’s livestock husbander Darin Durham explains, is central to Colonial Williamsburg’s overarching mission of showing people what 18th-century colonial British American life looked like. The program defines “rare” as having fewer than 1,000 animals registered annually in North America.

“But the rare breeds program also preserves genetic material that will otherwise be gone forever,” says Durham. “Many of the breeds we work with are more suitable for self-sustaining regenerative agriculture in a variety of climates. They may be slower growers, but they often have great grass conversion or can tolerate extreme weather better.”

While farms across the world used to include a multitude of animal breeds, many of which were indigenous to the region, in recent decades, certain breeds selected for desirable characteristics such as high milk production or fast growth now dominate the landscape.

The composition of America’s cattle is 72 percent either straight or high-percentage British, with 17 percent primarily British crossbred, according to a recent survey conducted by Beef Magazine. That leaves just 11 percent of Continental or other breeds. (Of that 72 percent, 73 percent are Angus cattle, 15 percent are Red Angus and nine percent are Hereford).

Poultry populations are similarly uniform, with the Food and Agriculture Organization warning that up to 50 percent of poultry breeds are at risk of extinction.

“You never know what’s going to happen,” says Durham. “Many of the animals we work with are suitable for niche agricultural purposes, but you also never know when we might need that genetic material for science.”

There’s also the increasing prevalence of diseases that are entering our food supply. Just recently, the FDA noted that one in five retail milk samples tested positive for fragments of bird flu. Having a diverse genetic pool to draw from makes extinction-level disease spread less risky, researchers say.

The Rare Breeds program has about 150 animals on-site at one time, with many being either rented out to other farmers who want to breed them, or sold to buyers who plan to utilize the animals on their farm.

Nankin Bantam Chickens Are Foundational, Broody Breeds

The Nankin is believed to be one of the oldest bantam chickens in existence, and is foundational to most other bantam breeds. Durham notes that, in addition to being stunning farm eye-candy with copper-colored bodies and green and black tail feathers, they are docile and gentle, which makes them easy to care for. They are also broody, which makes them useful for hatching the eggs of pheasants and quails at larger operations.

American Milking Devons Make Great Cheese and Milk, Work the Land

American Milking Devons were the “trucks and tractors” of American farms before the advent of the internal combustion engine. In addition to being strong, and willing to work the land, Durham says that these cows offer milk with unusually high butterfat content, which makes them favorites among cheesemakers. They also provide quality meat and fatten up on grass well without supplements.

The Leicester Longwool Sheep Is a Triple Trophy

Animals that can be utilized for meat, milk and wool are rare, but the Leicester Longwool Sheep delivers, says Durham. The sheep are docile, easy to feed, are happy to graze on grass with good meat conversion and offer up to 10 inches of beautiful, ringleted wool.

Vermont Wagyu

“When I tried my first Wagyu burger in Montana, my reaction was the same as everyone else’s: ‘Wow,’” recalls Dr. Sheila Patinkin, a University of Chicago-trained pediatrician-turned-Vermont Wagyu founder.

Patinkin grew up around cows her whole life, and she found the opportunity to grow the market for Wagyu beef in the US on the 350-acre farm she purchased in 2006 irresistible—not that it was easy or straightforward.

“It was not possible to buy Wagyu cattle in the US at that point, so, instead, I purchased 20 embryos and had them implanted in Angus surrogates,” she says. “We ended up with 10 males and [10] females, which is pretty good.”

Growth of the market—and the cattle—was slow. It takes about three years for Wagyu to be ready for market, more than a year longer than Angus. And Patinkin had to pound the pavement to get any buyers.

But then she hooked Michael Anthony, executive chef at the Michelin-starred Gramercy Tavern in New York. By the time COVID hit, Patinkin had scaled up to 70 animals. What could have been a business-ending crash turned into an opportunity, thanks to her four children who shared her nascent e-commerce site with their email lists.

“It was amazing,” says Patinkin. “We actually ran out of inventory because word began to spread on the quality of what we had, and people were getting so interested in home cooking and high-quality food when everyone was stuck at home.”

Today, she typically has around 150 heads at any one time and e-commerce has turned into a mainstay of her business.

In the US, the presence of Wagyu cattle also contributes some much-needed diversity to the ranks of cows in the US. Until 1976, there were no Wagyu cattle in the country, and today, 100-percent Wagyu cattle still only account for 0.029 percent of the country’s 89.9 million cattle.

But Patinkin thinks that the Wagyu farmers, under current US labeling rules, are unable to leverage and fully recognize the rarity of the product they’re selling. As a rancher herself and as the president of the American Wagyu Association, she is spearheading a Wagyu transparency labeling initiative.

“We need to do a better job of identifying our heritage on labels,” says Patinkin. “There’s a lot of half-Wagyu beef out there that is selling at a discount, and doesn’t taste like my 100-percent Wagyu. It confuses the market. Why would a consumer spend double for mine if they don’t know it’s more authentic? And if they taste the other and think it’s 100-percent Wagyu, they won’t understand why it’s not as good as they’ve been told.”

Patinkin hopes that she and the roughly 1,700 other members of the American Wagyu Association will soon have a label that clarifies what they are selling, along the lines of certified Angus labels.

Wagyu Cattle Are Docile, Calve Easily, and Command Much More in the Market

The term refers to four breeds of cattle that hail from Japan, two of which (Japanese Black and Japanese Red) are available in the US. The first appearance of American Wagyu commercially became available in the 1990s amid a bid to produce super-premium beef. Wagyu beef also has a more heart- and cholesterol-friendly balance of fats than other beef products. In addition to offering superior flavor, nutrition and texture that make the product highly desirable and commands up to 50 percent more than comparable beef counterparts, Wagyu are docile, have good grass conversion, tolerate extreme weather better than other common domestic cattle breeds and calve easily, says Patinkin.

Currently, more than 44,000 species are threatened with extinction, according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature. Perhaps if we placed commercial value on more of these species, we would all value them more, and preserve them for the generations to come.

The post How Using Endangered Animals Might Actually Save Them appeared first on Modern Farmer.