Scorching temperatures in the Brazilian state of Pará have now made that routine unsafe. The heat has “been really intense” this year, said Pinto da Costa in Portuguese. It feels as if the “sun has gotten stronger,” so much so that it’s led her to shift her working hours from daytime to the dead of night.

Abandoning the practice that defined most of her days, she now sets off to the river in the pitch dark to chase what fish are also awake before dawn. It’s taken a toll on her catch, and her life. But it’s the only way she can continue her work in the face of increasingly dangerous temperatures.

“A lot of our fishing communities have shifted to fishing in the nighttime,” said Pinto da Costa, who advocates nationally for fisherfolk communities like hers through the Movimento de Pescadores e Pescadoras Artesanais do Brasil, or the Movement of Artisanal Fishermen and Fisherwomen of Brazil.

Moving from daytime to overnight work is often presented as the most practical solution for agricultural laborers struggling with rising temperatures as a result of climate change. But it is no longer simply a proposal: This shift is already underway among many of the communities that catch, grow, and harvest the world’s food supply, from Brazil to India to the United States. Studies show the most common means of adapting to rising temperatures in most crop-growing regions has been to start working when it’s still dark out, or even to shift to a fully overnight schedule.

“The obvious piece of advice that you’ll see given is, ‘Work at night. Give workers head torches,’ and so on,” said Zia Mehrabi, a food security and climate researcher at the University of Colorado, Boulder. “But the reality is, that can lead to other rights violations, other negative impacts.”

That’s been the case for Pinto da Costa and her fishing community in Brazil. Nighttime work has been an additional hardship for a community already struggling with the impacts of climate change. The region has experienced decades of severe drought conditions, causing fish to die off and physically isolating people as waterways dried up.

Research shows that regularly working during the night is physically and mentally disruptive and can lead to long-term health complications. Nighttime fishing is also threatening social and communal routines among the fisherfolk. A daytime sleep schedule can curb quality time spent with loved ones, as well as limit when wares can be sold or traded in local markets.

It’s also impacting their ability to support themselves and their families through a generations-old trade. “We’ve actually been working more hours with less food, with less production,” said Pinto da Costa, noting that working at night has made their work less efficient and led them to find less fish. “This is across all regions of Brazil,” she added.

The impact of a shift to nighttime hours is an understudied piece of the puzzle of how climate change and rising temperatures threaten the world’s food supply and its workforce. But for many experts, and those on the front lines, one thing is clear: Overnight work is far from a straightforward solution.

“It’s a very scary time for us,” said Pinto da Costa.

Outdoor workers, with their typical midday hours and limited access to shade, face some of the most perilous health risks during periods of extreme heat. A forthcoming analysis — previewed exclusively by Grist — found that, on average, the amount of time considered unsafe to work outside during a typical 9-to-5 workday will increase 8 percent by 2050, assuming greenhouse gas emissions stay on their current trajectory.

Led by Naia Ormaza Zulueta, a Ph.D. student at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and Mehrabi, the analysis measures the number of extreme heat days by geographic region, and then breaks down daily and hourly temperatures by the estimated amount of population exposed. The research reveals that an estimated 21 percent of the global population already faces dangerous levels of heat stress during typical workday hours for more than a third of the year. By 2050, without cuts to planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions (known as the “business-as-usual” scenario), that portion will jump to 39 percent.

“The number of days that people will experience a violation of their rights to a safe climate is going to substantially increase, but then also the number of possible working hours in a season, and productivity, is going to be substantially reduced,” said Mehrabi. “It’s a massive lose-lose situation.”

Their analysis finds that outdoor agricultural workers will encounter the largest health-related risks, with laborers in some areas being hit harder than others.

India, in particular, is projected to be one of the countries whose workforce will be most exposed to heat stress under the business-as-usual climate scenario. There are roughly 260 million agricultural workers in India. By 2050, 94 percent of the country’s population could face more than 100 days in a year when at least one daytime working hour exceeds a wet-bulb temperature of 28 degrees Celsius, or 82.4 degrees Fahrenheit — a conservative threshold of what is considered safe for acclimatized workers experiencing moderate rates of work. (Unacclimatized workers, or those unaccustomed to working in such environments, will face greater levels of heat risk at the same temperature and amount of work.)

In Brazil, another of the world’s top agricultural suppliers, heat risk is not as dire, but still poses a substantial risk for outdoor workers, including Pinto da Costa’s community of fisherfolk. By 2050, roughly 41 percent of the country’s population could experience more than 100 days a year when wet-bulb temperatures exceed the recommended threshold for at least one hour a day, according to the Boulder team’s analysis.

Mary Jo Dudley, the director of Cornell University’s Farmworker Program and the chair of the U.S. National Advisory Council of Migrant Health, said that the analysis is significant for what it reveals about the human health consequences of extreme heat, particularly as it relates to the world’s agricultural laborers. She’s seeing more and more outdoor agricultural workers in the U.S. adopt overnight schedules, which is only adding to the burdens and inequities the wider workforce already suffers from. This is poised to get worse. Zulueta and Mehrabi found that 35 percent of the total U.S. population will experience more than 100 days of wet-bulb temperatures exceeding 28 degrees C, or 82.4 degrees F, for at least one hour a day every year by 2050.

“This transition to a nighttime schedule pushes an extremely vulnerable population into more difficult work conditions that have significant mental and physical health impacts,” said Dudley.

Rebuking the human body’s circadian rhythms — that 24-hour internal clock that regulates when you sleep and wake — ramps up a person’s risk of health complications, such as cardiovascular disease and types of cancer, and diminishes their body’s ability to handle injury and stress. Working untraditional hours also can reduce a person’s ability to socialize or participate in cultural, communal activities, which are associated with positive impacts on brain and body health.

Women are particularly vulnerable to the social and economic impacts of transitioning to nighttime schedules. Despite making up nearly 45 percent of artisanal fishers in Brazil, women receive lower pay than their male counterparts. That means that when harvests decline with nighttime fishing, their margins are even smaller.

In the Brazilian state of Bahia, tens of thousands of women fishers work to collect shellfish en masse, while in Maranhão, women fisherfolk herd shrimp to the shore using small nets. Clam harvesting in Brazil’s northeast is also dominated by women. Because these jobs traditionally happened during the day and close to home, they allowed women to balance cultural or gendered family roles, including managing the household and being the caregiver to children. Shifting to evening hours to avoid extreme heat “poses a fundamental challenge,” said Mehrabi. “When you talk about changing working hours, you talk about disrupting families.”

Overnight work comes with other risks too. In many areas of Brazil, nighttime work is “either impossible” or “very complicated” because there are procedures and regulations as to when fisherfolk in different regions can fish, said Pinto da Costa. Nighttime fishing is regulated in some parts of Brazil — measures that have been shown to disproportionately impact artisanal fishers.

Even so, says Pinto da Costa, many are braving the risks “just to reduce the amount of exposure to the sun.”

“Honestly, when I saw that this was accepted in the literature, that people were giving this advice of changing their working shifts to the night, I was shocked,” said Zulueta, the author of the Boulder study, citing a paper published earlier this year where overnight work is recommended as an adaptation tool to reduce agricultural productivity losses to heat exposure. Under a policy of “avoiding unsafe working hours,” shifting those hours to the nighttime “is not a universally applicable solution,” she said.

Growing up a pastoralist in Ahmedabad, India, Bhavana Rabari has spent much of her life helping tend to her family’s herd of buffalo. Although she now spends her days advocating for pastoralists across the Indian state of Gujarat, the routine of her childhood is still ingrained in her: Wake up, feed and milk the herd, and then tend to the fields that surround their home.

But extreme heat threatens to change that, as well as the preservation of her community. When temperatures soar past 90 degrees F in Ahmedabad — now a regular occurrence — Rabari worries about her mom, who hand-collects feed for their buffalo to graze on. Other pastoralists are nomadic, walking at least 10 miles a day herding cattle from region to region in the hunt for pastureland.

“If we lose our livestock, we lose our culture, our dignity,” said Rabari. “If we continue our occupations, then we are dignified. We live with the dignity of our work.”

But rapidly rising temperatures are making it hard to hold on to that dignity of work. “The heat affects every life, every thing,” said Rabari.

Working overnight is a tactic Rabari has heard of other agricultural workers trying. But the idea of tending to the herd in the dark isn’t something she sees as safe or accessible for either her family or other pastoralists in her community. It’s less efficient and more dangerous to work outdoors with animals in the dark, and it would require them to overhaul daily lives and traditions.

“We are not working at night,” said Rabari. But what the family is already doing is waking up at 5 a.m. to beat the heat, collecting milk from their buffalo and preparing products to sell in the market during the dusky hours of the morning.

Rabari’s family and other pastoralists across Gujarat are increasingly in an untenable position. Hotter temperatures have already caused pastureland to wither, meaning animals are grazing less and producing less milk. More unsafe working hours means lost work time on top of that, which, in turn, changes how much income pastoralist families are able to take home.

The result has been not adaptation, but an exodus. Most pastoralists Rabari knows, particularly younger generations, are leaving the trade, seeking employment instead as drivers or cleaners in Ahmedabad. Rabari, who organizes for women pastoralists through the Maldhari Mahila Sangathan, or the Pastoral Women Alliance, says women are most often the ones left behind to tend to the herds.

They “have to take care of their children, they have to take care of the food, and they have to take care of the water,” she said. “They face the heat, they face the floods, or the excess rain.”

Halfway across the world, April Hemmes is facing off against unrelenting bouts of heat amid verdant fields of soybeans and corn in Hampton, north-central Iowa. A fourth-generation small Midwestern farmer, Hemmes works more than 900 acres entirely on her own — year in and year out.

The Midwest is the largest agricultural area in the United States, as well as one of the leading agricultural producers in the world. It’s also an area that has been battered by human-caused climate change. In fact, scientists just recently declared an end to the drought that had devastated the region for a whopping 203 weeks. The conditions impacted crop yields, livestock, the transportation of goods, and the larger supply chain.

Hemmes has the luxury of not having to face the same degree of heat stress that Rabari and Pinto da Costa are confronting elsewhere in the world, per the Boulder analysis. When compared to India and Brazil, the U.S. is on the lowest end of the worker health impact scale for extreme heat. And yet, heat is also already the deadliest extreme weather event in the U.S., responsible for more deaths every year than hurricanes, floods, and tornadoes combined.

A few years back, while building a fence on her farmland, Hemmes suffered her first bout of on-the-job heat exhaustion. Suddenly, her heart started to race and her body felt as if it began to boil from within, forcing her to abandon her task and head indoors, away from the menacing heat. It was a wake-up call: Ever since, she’s been hyper-cautious with how she feels when tending to her fields.

This past summer, the heat index repeatedly soared past 100 degrees in Hemmes’ corner of Iowa. She found herself needing to be extra careful, not only pacing herself while working and taking more frequent breaks, but also making sure to get the bulk of the day’s work done in the morning. She even began starting her day in the fields an hour or so earlier to avoid searing temperatures compounding with brutal humidity throughout the afternoon.

“This [farm] has been in my family for over 125 years,” she said. “I do everything from banking to planting to spraying, everything. So it’s all on me, and it’s my family farm. I’m very proud of that.” In 1993, her dad and grandfather both retired, and she took over operations. She’s been more or less “a one-woman show” since. Keeping her farm well-managed is a responsibility she doesn’t take lightly. “You do what’s best for the soil. Because that’s the inheritance of future generations,” she said.

When Hemmes looks at how to prepare for a future with hotter working conditions, she knows one thing: Nighttime work is out of the question.

Not only are summertime mosquitoes in Iowa “terrible after dark,” but Hemmes says some of the chemicals she uses are regulated, restricting her from spraying them during the nighttime. In addition, she would need to get lights installed throughout the fields to alleviate the risk of injury when she uses equipment, and she would be even more fearful of that equipment breaking down.

“It would take more energy to work at night,” said Hemmes. “I think it would be far more dangerous … to work after the daylight was gone.”

Like Pinto da Costa and Rabari, Hemmes is involved in advocacy for her community. With the United Soybean Board, Hemmes advocates for women in agriculture. With more resources at her disposal than Pinto da Costa and Rabari, Hemmes is focused on how to ensure solo-farming operations like hers have access to the technology they need to overcome heat spells — and never have to seriously consider an overnight harvest schedule.

On her own farm, she’s invested in “expensive” autonomous agriculture technology that allows her to take breaks when she needs to from the blistering sun. And she would like to see more precision technology and autonomous agriculture tools readily applied and accessible for farmers. She currently uses a tractor with an automatic steering system that improves planting and plowing efficiency and requires much less work, which she credits as one of the pivotal reasons she’s able to successfully manage her hundreds of acres of fields on her own.

She also hopes to see farmers tapping into their inherent flexibility. “What farmers are is adaptable,” she said. “I don’t have an orchard on my farm, but if I did, and I saw this thing [climate change] coming, you know, maybe you look at tearing the trees out and starting to plant what I can in those fields. Maybe the Corn Belt will move up to North Dakota. Who knows, if this keeps progressing?”

In Gujarat, Rabari and the Maldhari Mahila Sangathan are working to secure better representation for pastoralists in policymakers’ decisions about land use. The hope is for these communities to inform policies that would allow pastoralists job security and financial safety nets as climbing temperatures make it difficult to work and turn a profit.

Women pastoralists in particular are entirely left out of these policy spaces, said Rabari, which isn’t just an issue of exclusion but means their unique ecological knowledge is lost, too. “We have a traditional knowledge of which grass is good for our animals, which grass they need to eat so we get the most meals, how [they] can be used for medical treatment,” she said.

Pinto da Costa and the Movimento de Pescadores e Pescadoras Artesanais do Brasil are also advocating for monetary relief from the Brazilian government to offset the losses her fisherfolk community has faced from climate change and shifting work hours. In addition, she is looking for technical support to improve fisherfolk’s resources and equipment.

“I have maintained my energy and motivation to continue to fight for our rights,” said Pinto da Costa.

For all, it’s a race against time. Eventually, even working at night may not be enough to keep outdoor agricultural work viable. The Boulder researchers found that an overnight working schedule will not significantly alleviate dangerous heat stress exposure risk in key agricultural regions of the world — particularly across India. After all, heat waves don’t only happen during the day, but also take place at night, with overnight minimum temperatures rising even more rapidly than daytime highs.

Zachary Zobel, a scientist at the Woodwell Climate Research Center who has separately researched the impact of overnight work adaptations on global agricultural productivity levels, said the Boulder team’s analysis has a “novel” result, and lines up with what his team has found.

“Warming past 2 degrees C, which we will experience over the next 30 years, would mean that even overnight shifts wouldn’t recover productivity,” said Zobel.

“How do you solve a problem like that?” Mehrabi said. “The reality is that the workers most at risk are the people contributing least to the climate change problem. That’s not to say that we can’t have better policies around hydration, shading, health. But it’s just kind of trying to put a BandAid on a problem. It doesn’t actually deal with the problem at its root cause, which comes down to this trajectory of fossil fuel consumption and emissions.”

This article originally appeared in Grist.

Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Learn more at Grist.org

The post The Night Shift appeared first on Modern Farmer.

Chekeita Strong stood up in front of a crowd in New Orleans last April, introduced herself, and began giving instructions. There were about 70 people in the space, a wooden deck inside of New Orleans City Park. And the 17-year-old needed them all—the other teenagers, the adults, anyone who would listen—to pitch in.  

“If you have one of these flyers, go post it in your community or your local neighborhood, your local coffee shop, library, etcetera,” she says, “and continue sharing the petition, continue signing the petition.” 

Everyone was there that night for what at the time seemed, at least to outsiders, like a quixotic goal: putting the brakes on a major public works project that threatened the future of a place they loved. Strong, then 17, was by day a senior at Warren Easton High School. But she was also a crew member at Grow Dat Youth Farm, an organization that teaches young people like herself leadership skills while they learn about sustainable agriculture. 

Grow Dat is a seven-acre urban farm with 13 full-time adult staff, and a rotating crew of teenagers who work there after school. Founded in 2011, the group has provided more than 600 jobs for youth in New Orleans and taught nearly 19,000 students about sustainable agriculture during field trips. 

For the entirety of its existence, Grow Dat has maintained a campus at City Park, the city’s largest park.

That night, in Grow Dat’s longtime home, Strong and the team with which she worked at the farm, the Open Oranges, were taking on another role: participants in a community organizing campaign. 

Strong and the other teenage staff at the farm had been preparing for this work for the past couple of months. Role-playing with each other, they had worked on their public speaking skills and practiced answering media questions—all since they learned that Grow Dat might soon be displaced from the park to make way for a new road.   

Grow Dat has transformed its bit of land into a sustainability oasis. The farm’s adult and youth staff grow and harvest a variety of produce—satsumas, kale, carrots, okra, cherry tomatoes and basil—from the fields, fruit trees, and a memorial garden. They sell some of it to the public and donate some to local charities, eating the rest themselves at the campus. The structure of the eco-campus, as Grow Dat staff refer to the buildings next to the fields, is made up primarily of repurposed shipping containers. 

From the right angle, the Grow Dat site almost appears secluded. A bayou, used by locals to kayak, and a small forest buffer the north and west sides of the campus. Thickets of cypress and willow trees separate clusters of fields from each other. But it’s only a few minutes walk away from some of City Park’s most well-known amenities—such as the New Orleans Museum of Art—and the busy roads and densely populated neighborhoods that surround the park.

“Our location is ideal because it is in the center of the park, the heart of the park. It is a completely open, public space. So, there are no fences at Grow Dat. The public can pass through and see our programming in action and admire our fields,” says Callie Rubbins-Breen, co-executive director of Grow Dat.

“We’re situated right along the lagoon and have spent years fostering that ecosystem and maintaining it and stewarding it. I think, for the urban youth of New Orleans, coming to a space that feels both slightly manicured and agricultural but also very natural is both soothing and educational and inspiring for people.”

But they don’t own the land. Grow Dat is a tenant of City Park, which is publicly owned but managed by a private nonprofit called the City Park Conservancy. 

Late last year, Grow Dat staff learned that park management might force them to relocate. Soon, a coalition of supporters—made up of teenagers, parents, activists, lawyers and educators—organized to fight. Their plan: Stir up broader community support for the farm and against its eviction.

Some had experience with redevelopment battles against powerful interests, but, for most of them, especially the teens, this was their first experience with this kind of effort. And they were up against a sophisticated, well-funded group: the City Park Conservancy, a multimillion-dollar nonprofit hired by the park’s appointed governing board in 2022 to run the park. 

Earlier this year, the conservancy was finalizing a major redevelopment plan for City Park. Ot had hired Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates Inc.—a design firm that had worked on the Brooklyn Bridge Park in New York City, the George W. Bush Presidential Center and public spaces at Harvard and Princeton—in a $2.8million contract to create a plan for the redevelopment. 

Just weeks before Grow Dat supporters met that April night, the City Park Conservancy—which for months had hinted, not subtly, that a road might have to run through the farm’s campus—finally confirmed it. Park officials said they wouldn’t renew Grow Dat’s lease when it expired. 

It appeared that was it for the farm, at least in City Park. The conservancy wanted a road and couldn’t be forced to sign a new lease. This was an unwinnable fight for Grow Dat.

But it won. 

Farm staff circulated petitions, planned public meetings and worked the media, generating thousands of words of local media coverage. People with no direct connection to the farm began showing up to City Park governing board meetings, urging the conservancy to back off the farm. 

In August, the park announced that it had rethought its plan. Grow Dat would be able to stay. 

“I think, sometimes, when people grapple with something that they don’t feel like they have much impact in changing, people flounder, and feel despair,” says Rubbins-Breen. “But this, I think, really did galvanize people.”

A master plan and an existential threat

In late 2023 and through much of this year, however, the fate of Grow Dat has hung in the balance. 

Last year, City Park’s leadership began the master planning process—to “shape the next 100 years of the park,” as Cara Lambright, then-CEO of the City Park Conservancy, put it when the project launched. 

A key goal of the master plan project, which she says could take up to 20 years and $200 million to complete, was to create greater access to and circulation throughout the park. So, they proposed building a road through the middle of the park—a “promenade,” they called it—that would connect its north and south sides.

Staff and supporters of the farm say they first heard about the planned road in December 2023 during a public meeting the park held on its master plan. City Park Conservancy staff showed mockups of what the new park might look like after the redevelopment. Grow Dat wasn’t on any of them. 

“In our understanding, the road and Grow Dat don’t exist together. It’s an either or,” Rubbins-Breen said in March. City Park officials confirmed that they were planning to force the farm to relocate around the same time.

It was an existential threat for the farm, which contributes tens of thousands of pounds of produce to New Orleans’ food system each year, and its youth program. Even if it was to find a new location in the park or the city, it would take years to get back to the capacity that it spent more than a decade building at its present location.

And it was a blow to the youths who staffed and visited the farm, who had come to think of it as a refuge. The park has become a hub for racial and economic diversity and LGBTQIA+ inclusion in the city. 

“It was always about racial justice. It was also always about spaces for youth leadership,” says Nikki Thanos, a founding member of Friends of Grow Dat, a group that formed to advocate for keeping the farm in its present space. “And I think at the heart of it, it was always a fight about public participation and what democracy means in public spaces.”

Friends of Grow Dat

Over the 13 years that Grow Dat has been in existence, the farm has racked up supporters and goodwill throughout New Orleans through its commitment to education and sustainable agriculture.

Hundreds of young people have graduated from its youth leadership programs, which teaches communication and organizational skills. It has a community-supported agriculture, or CSA, program through which many more residents have become acquainted with the farm’s ability to grow and harvest a myriad of chemical-free, fresh produce.

Grow Dat’s campus is a gathering space that frequently hosts community events, such as tours of the farm for school field trips, public dinners and workshops where people can learn about the history of the land on which the farm sits  in City Park. They learn how it’s on land called Bulbancha by Indigenous people from the region, how it used to be a plantation and then, once it became a park, how it was white-only until 1958.

While the maps Grow Dat staff and supporters were shown in December appeared to show that the park would not be around much longer, City Park Conservancy officials were tight-lipped at first about their plans. 

Thanos says a loosely organized group of supporters started putting the pieces together about the park’s position on the farm in the months between its December meeting and another one planned for late March. A few weeks before the March meeting, City Park officials confirmed to Verite News that relocating the farm in favor of a road was a possibility.

“I think the early wave of emotions was like dismay, anger, confusion, disappointment “[and] a little bit of hope that maybe something could be salvaged,” says Thanos.

At the same time, there were similar emotions being felt by youth participants and full-time staff at Grow Dat. They wanted to advocate for Grow Dat—and eventually would—but the youth had to manage school, family, and extracurricular activities. And full-time staff had to deal with running the farm. 

That’s where Friends of Grow Dat came in. Thanos and several other supporters of the farm formed the community organization in March to help advocate for the survival of the farm. They wanted to help give voice to Grow Dat using their skills from a variety of professions to advocate for the farm and connections with powerful people in the city to build important alliances for the cause.

“I think part of the vision for Friends of Grow Dat was to create some technical and capacity support, both on the mechanics of grassroots organizing but also a place to leverage some of the institutional relationships that people had outside of the Grow Dat arena,” says Thanos.

Two days before the March City Park Conservancy meeting, members of Friends of Grow Dat held a virtual planning meeting over Zoom. There were a few dozen people in attendance. Attendees split off into breakout rooms to discuss different aspects of City Park’s master plan, including the road.

People also shared their reasons for supporting the farm, including one mother of an alum of the program who said it was pivotal in her daughter’s development by helping mature as a person through the relationships she formed with her peers. Founding members of Friends of Grow Dat advertised T-shirts that people could buy to help support their efforts and encouraged attendees to show up to the meeting. They weren’t the only ones—the farm sent out emails and posted social media encouraging people to go to the upcoming master plan meeting.

The master plan meeting was held at Dillard University on March 21. The meeting was supposed to be about water management projects in the new master plan. 

But the focal point of the meeting quickly became about the road through Grow Dat. Hundreds of Grow Dat supporters—many of whom wore “Friends of Grow Dat” shirts displaying drawings of different types of produce—gathered around an enlarged map of the park and needled park leadership with questions and complaints about the proposed road.

This was the type of moment that the youth at Grow Dat had been training for during their role-play and public speaking sessions.

Local TV, radio and newspapers showed up to the meeting. Grow Dat supporters were there, prepared to answer press questions. 

After much repeated chants and demands calling for City Park Conservancy CEO Cara Lambright to come out and speak with supporters, she did, answering questions and responding to concerns people had about the future of Grow Dat. She said the plan was a work in progress. She said the road would improve access to the park for people with disabilities. She said the park leadership liked the idea of having sustainable agriculture as part of the park, but supporters weren’t satisfied. They wanted a public forum exclusively about Grow Dat and, after cajoling from supporters, she agreed to have a public forum about the road and Grow Dat at a later date.

“It felt really empowering,” says Reid Lomax, who was a youth staffer in the program at the time. They remembered talking to some of the park’s leadership at that meeting, including Lambright, surrounded by supporters.

“I had my friends holding my back. My dad was right behind me. I had my co-workers around me. I had these adult supervisors around me that I trust and love very much,” says Lomax. “It was just like, ‘OMG, everyone’s here for Grow Dat.’”

The meeting was an inflection point in the fight to save the farm. Once on their backfoot, wondering how they could get the park to change its plans, youth participants, staff and supporters of the farm were now emboldened.

“It actually felt really good to realize, ‘Oh, we’re not fighting this battle alone’,” says Kendricka Kelly, another youth who was working at the farm then. 

 ‘It was a little nerve-wracking at first’

Lomax, 18, started working at Grow Dat when they were 15. During their first two years in the program, they learned how to tend to crops, work with people from other backgrounds and lead groups of people.

“It felt like they were trying to take away my home a bit,” Lomax says of the plan to displace the farm. “Honestly, I was very frustrated. But that just turned into, like, OK, let’s figure out what I can do about this.”

That was the attitude of many of the youth who worked at Grow Dat at the time. Kelly, who also worked at the farm for three years, was heartbroken by the development. But rather than wait and see what would happen, she wanted to be part of the effort to save the farm. 

“It was either we can try to go about this the smart way or make them upset and lose the farm,” she says.

Lomax and Kelly were part of an internal organizing effort at Grow Dat that was happening in parallel to the one happening with Friends of Grow Dat. The two of them and dozens of other youth who worked at the farm would spend parts of their shifts at the farm role-playing conversations with strangers or press interviews practicing their oratory skills in case they had to give public comment at Conservancy meetings and memorizing  statistics about the impact of Grow Dat on New Orleans, such as how many teens had come through the program (more than 600) or how many pounds of produce they harvest each year (50,000).

In April, youth at the farm began hosting public meetings of their own where they invited members of the public to envision a more community-driven plan for the park’s future. During those meetings, young people who worked at the farm served as emcees and docents, gave presentations and facilitated discussions.

Some of what they did, such as guiding conversations, they learned as participants in the farm’s leadership program anyway, but other things, such as speaking to the press, were completely new to them.

“It was a little nerve-wracking at first, I think because we were all a little uncertain of what could happen,” says Lomax. But through looking to their supervisors for guidance and working with their peers, they became more comfortable with the organizing effort.

“It felt a lot less stressful working with people who were in the same position as me because we were all learning,” they say, so it was just like “we gotta make sure that [Grow Dat] stays here. We gotta figure out what to do.”

Don’t stop fighting

About a week after the March planning meeting, City Park officials responded to emails from supporters of Grow Dat, who were lobbying the park to keep the farm in its place, saying they wouldn’t renew the farm’s lease after it expired in 2027. In the meantime, though, they’d started meeting with the farm’s leadership to discuss the proposed road. 

Everything from the park helping the farm relocate to keeping the farm in its place was discussed, according to statements made by leadership of City Park and Grow Dat. But officials from the City Park Conservancy indicated that there were no changes to the plan to build the road. 

Soon after, though, the park’s leadership began to reverse course. In April, the City Park Conservancy announced a pause to its master planning process in order to get more community input. Lambright mentioned the public uproar over Grow Dat as one of the reasons for the pause.

About two months later, Lambright resigned as CEO of the park to take a job in Houston at Hermann Park. “Since I’m no longer with the Conservancy, it doesn’t feel appropriate for me to give a response on this,” she wrote in an email to Verite News. “I’m very pleased that everything seems to be going in the right direction with the two organizations.” The forum Lambright agreed to back in March never happened.

Talks continued, although neither side was speaking publicly about the state of negotiations. Then, in mid-August, City Park and Grow Dat announced that they had reached a deal to keep the farm in its current location for up to 10 years.

“Now, we know that we have a place to be able to continue our programming and working with the youth who are the future of our city,” Julie Gable, co-executive director of Grow Dat, said at the City Park Improvement Association board meeting in August where the deal was approved.

Verite News reached out to current City Park leadership and members of the boards of the City Park Improvement Association and City Park Conservancy for comment on Grow Dat’s organizing efforts. City Park leadership said they didn’t have comment on the matter and board members either didn’t have time to comment or didn’t respond to requests for comment. 

Some of the goals of the farm’s youth leadership program are to help them develop critical thinking skills, envision a just and sustainable world and work with others across differences to make change.

“At Grow Dat, we encourage young folks to analyze the state of our world today and advocate for a better future, advocate for a future they want to live in,” says Rubbins-Breen. “And so, involving them and learning alongside them, that felt very important to us. That is a foundation of our programming that we talk about and try to live every day that we’re here.”

Lomax and Kelly both say that Grow Dat was already a formative experience for them prior to participating in the organizing effort that saved the farm. But going through that struggle taught them both different lessons. Lomax says they learned about how easy it can be sometimes to get people to rally behind a simple mission, especially when people are already passionate about it.

Kelly says she learned to fight, no matter the odds.

“I feel like what I learned the most is if you want something, you have to fight for it, no matter how impossible it seems,” she says. “Even if it may look like it’s over with, don’t stop fighting until you know it’s over.”

The post The Community Organizing Effort That Helped Save an Urban Farm in New Orleans appeared first on Modern Farmer.

“I was surprised and dismayed to find that climate change was barely mentioned except for the usual nostrums that pass for addressing the environment: water, recycling, reusing, and the like. I don’t think that food disruption is just a vague possibility, I think it is inevitable, and that communities should be preparing for it.” 

Food security, at its core is, access to affordable, nutritious, culturally appropriate foods. It involves a high degree of choice—the freedom to pick between different options. Food insecurity is when that choice and that access are taken away. Moreover, food insecurity disproportionately affects traditionally underserved communities.

And the reader who wrote to us is correct: Climate change, and the more frequent and fierce natural disasters associated with climate change, are proven to increase food insecurity. It can disrupt access to food, or exacerbate existing inequalities. In June and July, Hurricane Beryl caused power outages for hundreds of thousands of people in Texas, resulting in widespread food spoilage. Months after the 2023 firestorm in Maui, thousands of people were still living in emergency shelter accommodations, relying on Red Cross meals and lacking the ability to cook their own food. In California, 2023’s catastrophic atmospheric rivers endangered the jobs of farmworkers, who already face high levels of food insecurity due to low wages and other factors. 

And right now, communities in the American Southeast are dealing with the repercussions of Hurricane Helene. 

There are a lot of independent organizations that address this intersection head-on. But how can people like our reader encourage their local governments to follow suit? Across the country, communities are addressing this question in different ways. 

Palm Springs, CA

Four hundred and fifty miles away from Sierra Vista, California’s Palm Springs is a city of a similar size, with around 45,000 people. Heat and drought are top concerns in this desert town. Palm Springs has a Sustainability Plan, meant to inform future planning in the city, that directly mentions food security along with renewable energy, water conservation, and more. While Palm Springs has a reputation as a vacation destination, the income disparities in the Coachella Valley are some of the highest in the state. Christian Wheeler, climate and sustainability specialist for the city of Palm Springs, says that there is food insecurity in Palm Springs. 

“Already in the city, we have a road and, below the road, there’s a lot of grocery stores, but above it, there’s not really any grocery stores,” says Wheeler. “So, [the city] already knew that there was inequitable access to food in general, and then climate change is not going to help that.”

Food deserts—areas without access to affordable and nutritious food—demonstrate that there doesn’t need to be a specific weather event for climate change to impact food security. Having to travel further to the grocery store can quickly become unsafe in extreme heat if you don’t have access to a car. And in Palm Springs, where temperatures regularly reach above 100 degrees Fahrenheit, heat exposure is a big concern.

Palm Springs doesn’t grow or produce its own food. One of the things the city is looking into is how to incentivize more local food growth through zoning. 

“We are currently in the process of updating our zoning code,” says Wheeler. “You can incentivize this through landscaping requirements…dedicated to edible food, herbs and different things like that. You can also zone for urban agriculture, because in some cities, it’s a little bit hard with the zoning—it’s not really made for someone to do farming in the middle of the city.”

This is replicable in other places, says Wheeler. Most cities have some kind of landscape requirements; it’s just about gearing them toward food production. Updating those existing requirements with edible food requisites could be one way to get more food closer to home.

They are also expanding their community gardens. Being a smaller city, one of the challenges is just getting the word out.

“Since we’re a smaller city, we don’t necessarily have community organizations that are focused on urban agriculture, so we kind of have to do our own outreach,” says Wheeler.

Phoenix, AZ

Phoenix is in the same state as Sierra Vista, but it is a major metropolitan area. When writing its Food Action Plan, published in early 2020 with the goal of making healthy food available for all, it made a GIS map of food deserts. This made it easy to show council members vulnerabilities in their districts.

“As we start to roll out programs, we really start to look at food desert areas,” says Rosanne Albright, environmental programs manager for the City of Phoenix.

Phoenix has a climate action plan that uses items from its food action plan. In Phoenix, climate threats include heat and strain on water. Around a third of the city gets its water from the Colorado River, a dwindling water source.

The food security part of this plan aims to increase local food production—on rural farms, city farms, backyard gardens and community gardens.

“We also knew that our local farmers really are some of the best in the country, because they know how to farm given our extreme heat and our water situation. So, that alone let us know that if we could increase that we’re not only going to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, but we’re going to be able to provide more food, healthier food, all of those things all at once.”

Another facet of this plan focuses on the distribution side—getting local food into the local market. This is challenging because farmers can’t sell their products locally if those pathways are not already established.

“That distribution can go to it staying here, rather than getting exported elsewhere and reduce the need for us to import food here,” says Albright.

Many of Phoenix’s food programming got put on the spot immediately. Right after the plan was approved in early 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic began. As cities began receiving disaster funding, many struggled to know how to use it most effectively. Phoenix began plugging it into the food programs it had just developed. 

“We were able to go beyond just providing funding to food banks, [and] really creating this network,” says Albright.

The network proved to be very useful, because it allowed people in the food system to have a direct government ear to let officials know when something was impeding the path to a more resilient local food system. Producers that wanted to try innovative things to bolster local food production such as vertical farming, growing in storage containers and more were hitting permitting roadblocks. It was through this network that they learned about critical gaps in zoning code. In the next year, they’re hoping to have some of these zoning amendments addressed.

“Our zoning codes did not have all the current definitions of agriculture,” says Albright. “They don’t consider solar panels. There’s lots of things that we didn’t even know about. And now we do because we have that pipeline directly to those farmers. So, that network, we’ve learned, is really important.”

Ashland, OR

Ashland, a city near the border of Oregon and California, has seen the linkage between climate change and food security play out in recent memory. In 2020, the Almeda fire burned more than 3,000 acres, forcing evacuations from the surrounding area and destroying more than 2,500 homes.

Published in 2017, the Ashland Climate & Energy Action Plan lacks measurable food security goals, says Bryan Sohl, who served on the committee that wrote the plan. But after the fires occurred, food security conversations have changed in Ashland and the surrounding areas.

Rogue Food Unites, a nonprofit organization, was formed during the fires. Although it began responding to the direct need for immediate relief, it has expanded its programming to include things that can increase local food security, such as a mobile free farmers market, where insecure families can access fresh food, and creating freeze-dried ready-to-eat meals for disaster preparedness.

When the Almeda fire happened, Stu O’Neill’s house became a drop site for donations. In the years since, he’s joined Rogue Food Unites as chief financial officer. The connections the group has formed locally—with farmers, restaurants, and food-insecure individuals—poise Rogue Food Unites to best serve the community in future crises.

“And yet, we know, because of climate change and how things are happening in our communities, and the impacts of climate change for us, it’s kind of a matter of when, not if, and we hope to be strong and ready and have our community stronger and more ready to respond the next time something bad happens,” says O’Neill. “We really do feel that the resilience of being able to respond to future disasters comes from having a strong local food system.”

Now, Rogue Food Unites is working on creating a replicable blueprint of its work, so that others can put it into action in their communities.

“We’ve been talking to a number of different communities around Oregon who are interested in replicating our market model in their community,” says O’Neill. “We’re really interested in seeing more communities adopt this sort of food insecurity initiative.”

As for folks who want their city’s plan to reflect the relationship between food security and climate change more explicitly, bringing food security to the attention of officials is helpful.

“Coming up in the mid [to] late fall, we’ll be doing our annual work plan for our committee,” says Sohl. “And I think one thing to bring back to my committee is like, hey, what are we doing about food security?”

In Your Community

While there are many great independent organizations doing work around food security and climate change, you can also encourage your local government representatives to address the issue. Many city government meetings are open to the public, either in person or on Zoom, and will accept written or spoken public comments. Based on the perspectives in this article, here are some questions to bring with you for a starting point:

-What is our city doing to plan for climate change-induced food insecurity?

-Does the zoning in our city encourage local food production? Or does it actively inhibit it? How?

-Who is doing food security work in our area? 

-Where are the food deserts located in our community? How is our city working to address these accessibility issues?

How is your community planning for climate-induced or exacerbated food insecurity? Let us know in the comments.

The post City Planning for Food Security in the Face of Climate Change appeared first on Modern Farmer.

“I remember the heat of the sun and the intense exhaustion during my first years in the tomato and watermelon fields,” he recalls. Over more than a decade, Salucio harvested watermelon and tomatoes across Florida, Georgia, Missouri and Maryland, working up to 12 hours each day. “Struggling with dehydration, I would get hit with terrible cramps in my feet, my legs, my fingers. They would get hard as rocks, and I could not walk, carry my bucket or lift a watermelon well. But I had to just endure and keep working. I remember, in my first weeks as a young farmworker in the tomato fields, one supervisor saw me struggling with a foot cramp and just said, “Well, you’ll just have to drag it.” 

Salucio is one of many farmworkers who struggled with the wide-reaching effects of heat stress. And now, farmworkers are bracing for an even hotter future. 

Heat is the most deadly extreme weather condition in the US. Six hundred people die from heat each year. US.m farmworkers are a shocking 35 times more likely to die from heat than other workers. Since 1992, more than 1,000 farmworkers have died and at least 100,000 have been injured from heat. Between 40 percent and 84 percent of agricultural workers experience heat-related illness at work. 

Extreme heat and humidity impede the body’s ability to cool down, setting off catastrophic and irreversible organ failure, heart attack or kidney failure. Those who work outdoors without adequate hydration can develop chronic kidney disease, among other health issues.

Farmworkers’ growing vulnerability to heat stress cannot be blamed on climate alone. There are social and political causes, stemming from the way agricultural work is performed, organized and regulated. These include: the intensity and length of the working day; piece-rate payment systems; lack of consistent access to clean drinking water, shade and bathrooms; a poor work safety climate; and excessive clothing. 

As such, immediate actions must be taken to protect workers from needless suffering and death. 

The federal government has begun to address the crisis, but the OSHA rule-making process is slow. President Biden ordered OSHA to develop a heat standard in 2021. In April 2024, a draft was discussed, but stakeholder and public feedback still must be sought before the rule can be finalized. This could very well drag on, since even mitigating preventable heat-related illnesses and deaths has become politicized.

In the meantime, heat stress protections fall under OSHA’s general duty clause, which ensures the workplace is “free from hazards that are causing or likely to cause death or serious physical harm,” including extreme heat. Additionally, OSHA implemented a spot inspection program for workplaces with significant heat hazards, and it has increased efforts to inspect farms hiring H2A guest workers. 

However, these small protections aren’t enough. 

Concerningly, OSHA cannot enforce its standards on farms with 10 or fewer employees, due to a 1976 appropriations rider exempting them from red tape. Only a small handful of states, which can run their own OSHA plans, have standards for heat exposure. 

Farmworkers cannot wait years for the right to safe working conditions. Action must be taken by civil society and the private sector. The Fair Food Program (FFP), a farmworker-led, market-based solution to agricultural workplace injustices—recently cited as an emerging “gold standard” in social responsibility in a 10-year, longitudinal study of the leading certification programs—provides a solution. 

The FFP has developed comprehensive standards and protocols for heat stress prevention and response, protections the Washington Post called “America’s strongest workplace heat rules” earlier this year. Under the plan, workers receive mandatory cool-down rest breaks every two hours; are provided unrestricted access to clean water with electrolytes and shade; are monitored more frequently for heat stress, especially during the acclimatization period to heat; are trained on the signs of heat illness; and if showing signs of heat stress, they can stop working—without fear of repercussions—if they feel unwell.

Now implemented in 10 states, the FFP has begun expanding to communities in South Africa and Chile. The number of US states participating is also set to double this summer, with the USDA’s recognition of the program. 

The Fair Food Program works with the Fair Food Standards Council, an independent third party that audits participating farms for compliance with a suite of labor justice standards developed by farmworkers themselves and runs a 24/7 worker complaint hotline. In the 12 years since its launch, the FFP has successfully addressed some of the most intractable labor justice problems in agriculture, such as gender-based violence and forced labor, which have been all but eradicated from FFP farms. 

Although more than a dozen major food companies—including such well-known brands as Walmart, McDonald’s and Whole Foods—currently participate in the program, more must join to expand the program’s benefits. The workers behind the program remain undaunted in their determination to expand its life-saving protections. In the words of one anonymous worker, speaking to a Fair Food Standards Council auditor in 2018: 

“Before, I would be working under the sun, working hard, and I would want to stop for water. The boss would stop me, and I would say, I need water. He would say, there’s the ditch over there, it’s got some water. There were no water bottles. We were exhausted, we needed water. There were no toilets. Before, if you spoke out, you would be fired…  But now that we are united, we have strength. We are taking steps forward, and we cannot go back. We are building a road forward, and we will never go back.”  

Kathleen Sexsmith is an assistant professor of rural sociology at the Penn State College of Agricultural Sciences. Greg Asbed is the co-founder of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers.

The post Farmworkers Cannot Wait for OSHA to Adequately Protect Them From Heat. The Fair Food Program Provides a Solution appeared first on Modern Farmer.

It was mid-February, and in Oaxaca City, Mexico, temperatures were just starting to climb into the 80s. Spring is the hot season here, and in addition to weathering the heat, my partner and I were also in the midst of a move from the home we’d rented near the city center for two years to a little house out in the countryside.

Our spacious spot in the city had served us well, but we had become increasingly worried about the one main issue we had faced there: the severe water shortage experienced by many of Oaxaca City’s approximately 300,000 inhabitants. For several months every dry season, we and our neighbors received municipal water only once every 42 days—a situation that has become the new normal over the past few years. When this water is sent through the city’s aging system of pipes and arrives in private households, Oaxaca dwellers store the water in giant rooftop water tanks called tinacos—or, even better, in large underground cisterns—in order to have continual access to water throughout the month. But even though my partner and I rented a house with a large 10,000-liter-capacity cistern—and although we took daily measures to curb our water consumption—more frequently than not, our cistern routinely ran dry before the next water delivery, leaving us without water for days at a time: Hello, washcloth “showers” using bottled water purchased from the corner store.

When we looked for a new house to rent outside the densely populated city center, we reviewed listings located in areas known to have more regular water delivery. We found a new space, but with just two days left to clean the large house from top to bottom in order to recoup our security deposit, we woke to bone-dry taps. We hurriedly contacted several pipa companies— water trucks that extract the liquid from private wells and deliver between 3,500 and 10,000 liters at a time; most of them, completely at capacity shuttling water around the municipality, never responded. Those who did quoted us outrageous prices and couldn’t even deliver until several days later. So, our final hours in our city home saw us toting heavy 20-liter plastic bottles of water up our hot asphalt street, in order to be able to wash the windows and mop the floors before moving out.

Day Zero is coming

Even those far from Oaxaca City have likely heard about Mexico’s headline-making droughts and Mexico City’s dire lack of municipal water. That enormous megatropolis—home to an estimated 22 million people—is possibly facing a “Day Zero”—or complete loss of water—as early as this month. A one-two punch of a combination of climate change and rapid urban growth is quickly draining the aquifer underneath North America’s largest city, according to Scientific American, and the problem is far from unique to either Mexico City or Oaxaca City, with historic water scarcity affecting 30 of 32 of the country’s states or almost 131 million people. 

To get a sense of the situation here in Oaxaca City—and, by extension, the entire state, home to approximately four million inhabitants—I spoke with Juan José Consejo Dueñas, director of INSO, the Instituto de la Naturaleza y la Sociedad de Oaxaca (Oaxacan Institute of Nature and Society). Established in 1991, the civil association supports communities across Oaxaca in projects focusing on environmental conservation and, since 2003, Aguaxaca has been the association’s main project. The goal is to secure consistent sources of clean water through the restoration of potable water networks, installation of absorption wells and rainwater collection systems.

“Water doesn’t really need an explanation,” says Consejo as we sit around a large table in his office scattered with informational handouts and books published by INSO. “It’s essential for life: not just biological life—we are all basically water—but also at an ecological level. There is no ecological system that doesn’t require water, and it’s essential for any social system.” 

It’s not a shortage, it’s a loss

So, how did Oaxaca’s water situation get to where it is today? First of all, Consejo is quick to correct my usage of the term “shortage.” “There is no water shortage,” he says, explaining that the local climate is characterized by a dry season of little to no rainfall (typically November through April) and a wet season of abundant rainfall (typically May through October). “We can’t speak of scarcity when what we really have is an excess— a destructive excess—of water for many months.”

During the rainy season, says Consejo, an average of 88 cubic meters of rain falls every second during a heavy rainstorm, enough to fill 88 1,000 litre tinacos. The real problem, says Consejo, is the difference, over time, in the way this rainfall is absorbed by the earth and filters down into the underground water table. In a functioning “hydrosocial” water cycle, about a quarter of each rainfall should be absorbed back into the earth. But in Oaxaca, where rapid urban development has led to a huge increase in paved roads and unchecked deforestation and where a robust mining industry has altered the physical landscape, water infiltration has been severely reduced, to about 15 percent. 

“It’s an enormously destructive process, drastically altering the soil and requiring an enormous quantity of water,” says Consejo of the open-pit mining industry in Oaxaca, particularly the mining of gold and silver. Since 2003, residents of the Oaxacan community of Capulálpam de Méndez have railed against the government-approved mining of minerals there by the corporation La Natividad, claiming that the activities have drained 13 of the area’s aquifers as their clean water has been diverted towards mining operations. Earlier this month, widespread protests by citizens shut down access to the rural town, and local participation in the national presidential election on June 2 could not proceed. 

In an analysis of land coverage, INSO found that, in 2005, about 50 square kilometers of Oaxaca’s urban center were paved, in comparison to 1980, when about 10 square kilometers were paved, with other coverings including agriculture, forest and pastures. All that pavement causes rainwater to just run off, instead of sinking into the ground, and prevents it from settling into natural pools and man-made dams. 

“We lower absorption, we raise runoff, we lower evaporation, and then what do we do with any clean water we have left? We pollute it,” says Consejo, referring to the practice of mixing pure water with human waste, as well as all the chemical runoff present in the soil.

Searching for solutions

SOAPA, Sistema Operador de los Servicios de Agua Potable y Alcantarillado (Drinking Water and Sewage Services), is the state governmental agency responsible for the distribution of municipal water to city residents. While the agency did not respond to requests for an interview, I was able to speak with Elsa Ortíz Rodríguez, secretary of the city’s department of Environment and Climate Change. She says the municipal system of underground pipes that deliver the water distributed by SOAPA is extremely old, built more than 40 years ago—and rapidly and haphazardly expanded since then. “In some spots, the pipes are fractured and leak water underground,” says Ortiz. “With old pipes, you also have to think about rust, which can also reduce the final amount of water that’s delivered.”

In order to address the water scarcity issue, Ortiz’s department finances a variety of projects focusing primarily on reforestation within the city limits. However, she admits that the usual impediments have limited the impact of these projects over the 2.5-year course of her administration, which will turn over in another six months: a lack of funding and a lack of coordination among city, state and national governments.

As Juan José Consejo Dueñas explains, governments tend to propose complicated and expensive engineering projects to “solve” the water problem. In the case of Mexico City, the “solution” has been Cutzamala, a sprawling system that directs water to the metropolis from the river of the same name, located 100 kilometers away. Oaxaca’s government has proposed something similar: a grand engineering project to extract water from the Paso Ancho dam in the Mixteca region, located 100 kilometers south of the city. 

Because the Cutzamala system relies on a vast network of dams to store the water—and dams are subject to increased evaporation due to rising temperatures—it’s not the most efficient system. “We have the Mexico City model, which is exactly what we shouldn’t be doing,” says Consejo.

Instead, Consejo says, the solution to the water problems faced by the region lies in redefining our relationship to water. One of INSO’s primary projects is a restored nature area in the community of San Andrés Huayápam, called El Pedregal. An operating permaculture center, El Pedregal features dry toilets, rainwater collection systems, humidity-preserving trenches,\ and other responsible water use projects. Generally, Oaxacan sentiment places little faith in the ability or desire of the government to suitably respond to the complex water issue, making grassroots initiatives such as El Pedregal all the more important. 

In my new home—located, incidentally, a stone’s throw from El Pedregal in the community of Huayápam—we receive municipal water at least once a week, sometimes twice. The area, at a higher elevation than the city, has been known throughout history for possessing clean water; its name, in the indigenous language Nahuatl, translates to “on the ocean,” referring to its large bodies of water. Even here, however, the water situation is by no means stable, with recent photos showing two of the area’s largest man-made dams at some of their lowest historical levels. 

Our move has alleviated most of the water issues we face, but moving is simply not an option for many families, nor would doing so solve the problem impacting millions around the country. This feeling of hopelessness has led to numerous protests around Oaxaca, with citizens demanding that SOAPA send more water. In mid-March, residents of the Monte Albán neighborhood close to Oaxaca’s world-famous restored pyramid site took to their streets to denounce more than 40 days without municipal water. Residents of the Figueroa neighborhood, near SOAPA’s downtown headquarters, followed suit a week later, making it clear that as long as widespread water mismanagement persists in this area, so too, will social unrest.

The post Mexican Cities and States Could Run Out of Water. What’s the Solution? appeared first on Modern Farmer.

Era mediados de febrero y, en la Ciudad de Oaxaca, México, las temperaturas comenzaban a subir a los 80 grados Fahrenheit. La primavera es la temporada de calor aquí, y además de soportar el calor, mi pareja y yo estábamos en medio de una mudanza desde la casa que habíamos alquilado cerca del centro de la ciudad durante dos años, a una pequeña casa en el campo.

Nuestro espacioso lugar en la ciudad nos había servido bien, pero nos preocupaba cada vez más el principal problema que habíamos enfrentado allí: la grave escasez de agua que experimentan muchos de los aproximadamente 300,000 habitantes de la Ciudad de Oaxaca. Durante varios meses, en cada temporada seca, nosotros y nuestros vecinos recibíamos agua municipal solo una vez cada 42 días, una situación que se ha convertido en la nueva normalidad en los últimos años. Cuando esta agua se envía a través del envejecido sistema de tuberías de la ciudad y llega a los hogares privados, los habitantes de Oaxaca almacenan el agua en grandes tanques de agua en los techos llamados tinacos, o mejor aún, en grandes cisternas subterráneas, para tener acceso continuo al agua durante todo el mes. Pero, aunque mi pareja y yo rentábamos una casa con una gran cisterna de 10,000 litros de capacidad y tomábamos medidas diarias para reducir nuestro consumo de agua, con más frecuencia de lo que quisiéramos, nuestra cisterna se quedaba vacía antes de la siguiente entrega de agua, dejándonos sin agua durante días: Hola, “duchas” con toallitas usando agua embotellada comprada en la tienda de la esquina.

Cuando buscábamos una nueva casa para rentar fuera del densamente poblado centro de la ciudad, revisábamos listados ubicados en zonas conocidas por tener una entrega de agua más regular. Encontramos un nuevo lugar, pero con solo dos días restantes para limpiar la gran casa desde arriba hasta abajo para poder recuperar nuestro depósito, despertamos con los grifos completamente secos. Nos apresuramos a contactar a varias compañías de pipas, camiones de agua que extraen el líquido de pozos privados y entregan entre 3,500 y 10,000 litros a la vez; la mayoría de ellas, completamente ocupadas transportando agua por el municipio, nunca respondieron. Las que lo hicieron nos cotizaron precios escandalosamente elevados y ni siquiera podían entregar hasta varios días después. Así que nuestras últimas horas en la casa de la ciudad nos vieron cargando pesadas garrafones de 20 litros por nuestra calurosa calle de asfalto, para poder lavar las ventanas y trapear los pisos antes de mudarnos.

Se Acerca el “Día Cero”

Hasta los que viven lejos de la Ciudad de Oaxaca a lo mejor han escuchado de las sequías en México que aparecen en los titulares y de la grave falta de agua municipal en la Ciudad de México. Esa enorme megápolis, hogar de un estimado de 22 millones de personas, posiblemente enfrente un “Día Cero,” o una pérdida total de agua, tan pronto como este mes. Una combinación de cambio climático y rápido crecimiento urbano está drenando rápidamente el acuífero debajo de la ciudad más grande de América del Norte, según Scientific American, y el problema toca a muchos lugares más que la Ciudad de México o la Ciudad de Oaxaca, con una escasez de agua histórica que afecta a 30 de los 32 estados del país, o casi 131 millones de personas.

Para tener una idea de la situación aquí en la Ciudad de Oaxaca, y por extensión, en todo el estado, hogar de aproximadamente 4 millones de habitantes, hablé con Juan José Consejo Dueñas, el director del INSO, el Instituto de la Naturaleza y la Sociedad de Oaxaca. Establecida en 1991, esta asociación civil apoya a las comunidades de todo Oaxaca en proyectos enfocados en la conservación ambiental y, desde 2003, Aguaxaca ha sido el proyecto principal de la asociación. El objetivo es asegurar fuentes consistentes de agua limpia mediante la restauración de redes de agua potable, la instalación de pozos de absorción y sistemas de recolección de agua de lluvia.

“El agua casi que no se necesita explicar,” dice Consejo mientras nos sentamos alrededor de una gran mesa en su oficina, llena de folletos informativos y libros publicados por el INSO. “Es esencial para la vida: no solo para la vida biológica—somos básicamente agua—sino para el nivel ecológico. No hay ningún sistema ecológico que no requiere el agua, y es esencial para el sistema social.”

No es una escasez, es una pérdida

Entonces, ¿cómo surgió la situación actual del agua en Oaxaca? Antes que todo, Consejo rápidamente corrige mi uso del término “escasez.” “No hay escasez de agua,” dice, explicando que el clima local se caracteriza por una temporada seca con poca o nada de lluvia (típicamente de noviembre a abril) y una temporada húmeda con lluvias abundantes (típicamente de mayo a octubre). “No podemos hablar de escasez cuando en realidad lo que tenemos es un exceso—sobre todo un exceso destructivo—de agua en muchos meses.”

Durante la temporada de lluvias, explica Consejo, caen en promedio 88 metros cúbicos de lluvia por segundo durante una tormenta fuerte, lo suficiente para rellenar 88 tinacos de 1,000 litros cada uno. El verdadero problema, destaca Consejo, es la diferencia, a lo largo del tiempo, en la forma en que esta lluvia es absorbida por la tierra y se filtra hasta el acuífero subterráneo. En un ciclo “hidrosocial” funcional, aproximadamente una cuarta parte de cada lluvia debería infiltrarse en el suelo. Pero en Oaxaca, donde el rápido desarrollo urbano ha llevado a un gran aumento de calles pavimentadas y a una deforestación desenfrenada, y donde una robusta industria minera ha alterado el paisaje físico, la infiltración de agua se ha reducido severamente, a aproximadamente un 15 por ciento.

“Es un proceso enormemente destructivo porque implica un cambio muy drástico del uso de suelo y se requiere una enorme cantidad de agua,” dice Consejo, refiriéndose a la industria minera a cielo abierto en Oaxaca, particularmente la minería de oro y plata. Desde 2003, los residentes de la comunidad oaxaqueña de Capulálpam de Méndez han manifestado contra la minería de minerales aprobada por el gobierno de allí, llevada a cabo por la corporación La Natividad, alegando que las actividades han drenado 13 de los acuíferos de la zona, ya que su agua limpia ha sido desviada hacia las operaciones mineras. A principios de este mes, protestas generalizadas por parte de los ciudadanos cerraron el acceso al pueblo rural, y la participación local en la elección presidencial nacional del 2 de junio no pudo proceder.

En un análisis de la cobertura del suelo, INSO determinó que, en 2005, aproximadamente 50 kilómetros cuadrados del centro urbano de Oaxaca estaban pavimentados, en comparación con 1980, cuando unos 10 kilómetros cuadrados estaban pavimentados, con otras coberturas que incluían agricultura, bosques y pastizales. Todo ese pavimento hace que el agua de lluvia simplemente escurra, en lugar de infiltrarse en el suelo, y evita que se acumule en pozas naturales y presas hechas por el hombre.

Disminuimos infiltración, aumentamos escurrimiento, disminuimos evapotranspiración, y el cuarto es que las fuentes superficiales y también las del subsuelo las estamos contaminando,” comenta Consejo, refiriéndose a la práctica de mezclar agua pura con desechos humanos, así como a todos los productos químicos presentes en el suelo.

Buscando soluciones

SOAPA, Sistema Operador de los Servicios de Agua Potable y Alcantarillado, es la agencia gubernamental estatal responsable de la distribución de agua municipal a los residentes de la ciudad. Aunque la agencia no respondió a mi solicitud de entrevista, pude hablar con Elsa Ortíz Rodríguez, Secretaria de Medio Ambiente y Cambio Climático de la ciudad. Ella explica que el sistema municipal de tuberías subterráneas que distribuyen el agua de SOAPA es extremadamente antiguo, construido hace más de 40 años, y expandido rápidamente y desordenadamente desde entonces. 

“En algunos lugares la tubería ya está vieja y está fracturada,” dice Ortíz. “E incluso cuando estás hablando de tubería vieja, estás hablando de oxidaciones que pueden de alguna forma aminorar la calidad del agua.”

Para abordar el problema de la escasez de agua, el departamento de Ortíz financia una variedad de proyectos centrados principalmente en la reforestación dentro de la ciudad. Sin embargo, admite que los impedimentos habituales han limitado el impacto de estos proyectos durante los 2.5 años de su administración, que terminará en seis meses: la falta de financiación y la falta de coordinación entre el gobierno metropolitano, estatal y nacional.

Como explica Juan José Consejo Dueñas, los gobiernos tienden a proponer proyectos de ingeniería complicados y costosos para “resolver” el problema del agua. En el caso de la Ciudad de México, la “solución” ha sido Cutzamala, un extenso sistema que dirige agua a la metrópolis desde el río del mismo nombre, ubicado a 100 kilómetros de distancia. El gobierno de Oaxaca ha propuesto algo parecido: un gran proyecto de ingeniería para extraer agua de la presa Paso Ancho en la región de la Mixteca, ubicada a 100 kilómetros al sur de la ciudad.

Debido a que el sistema Cutzamala depende de una vasta red de presas para almacenar el agua, y porque las presas están sujetas a una mayor evaporación debido al aumento de las temperaturas, no es el sistema más eficiente. “Ya tenemos el modelo de la Ciudad de México de lo que no se debe hacer, osea aquí podríamos haberlo hecho mejor en vez de pensar, ‘ay, ¿como lo hicieron allá?’” comenta Consejo.

En cambio, Consejo cree que la solución a los problemas de agua que enfrenta la región radica en redefinir nuestra relación con el agua. Uno de los proyectos principales del INSO es un área natural restaurada en la comunidad de San Andrés Huayápam, llamado El Pedregal. Un centro de permacultura funcional, El Pedregal cuenta con baños secos, sistemas de recolección de agua de lluvia, zanjas de infiltración y otros proyectos de uso responsable del agua. En general, el sentimiento oaxaqueño no confía mucho en la capacidad o el deseo del gobierno para responder adecuadamente al complejo problema del agua, lo que hace que iniciativas de base como El Pedregal sean aún más importantes.

En mi nuevo hogar—ubicado, por cierto, a un paso del Pedregal en la comunidad de Huayápam—recibimos agua municipal al menos una vez a la semana, hasta dos veces. La zona, a una elevación más alta que la ciudad, ha sido conocida a lo largo de la historia por poseer agua limpia abundante; su nombre, en la lengua indígena náhuatl, se traduce como “sobre el mar”, refiriéndose a sus grandes cuerpos de agua. Sin embargo, incluso aquí, la situación del agua no es estable, con fotos recientes mostrando que dos de las presas artificiales más grandes de la zona están en niveles históricamente bajos.

Nuestra mudanza ha aliviado la mayoría de los problemas de agua que enfrentamos, pero mudarse simplemente no es una opción para muchas familias, ni resolvería el problema que afecta a millones en todo el país. Este sentimiento de desesperanza ha llevado a numerosas protestas en Oaxaca, con ciudadanos exigiendo que el SOAPA envíe más agua. A mediados de marzo, residentes de la colonia de Monte Albán, cerca del famoso sitio de pirámides restauradas de Oaxaca, salieron a las calles para denunciar más de 40 días sin agua municipal. Los residentes de la colonia Figueroa, cerca de la sede central del SOAPA en el centro, hicieron igual una semana después, subrayando que mientras persista la mala gestión del agua en esta zona, también persistirá la agitación social.

The post Ciudades y estados mexicanos podrían quedarse sin agua. ¿Cuál es la solución? appeared first on Modern Farmer.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Singer’s respect for soil inspired her to found Carbon Sponge, an interdisciplinary platform that honors this threatened resource by cultivating healthy soil to foster carbon sequestration. “Carbon sponge” is a term usually used to describe healthy soil that absorbs and retains water; Singer found it aptly described the subject and actions she wants to cultivate. 

Fighting climate change

Greenhouse gas emissions, which result from high levels of atmospheric carbon, are a critical cause of climate change. That systemic shift is responsible for weather patterns, such as periods of intense drought or rain, imperiling all aspects of life, particularly our food supply. Yet agriculture in the United States is responsible for about 10 percent of the country’s emissions and food production accounts for more than a quarter of global emissions, when factoring in the larger food system, including packaging and transportation. 

Carbon storage is an important tool in combating climate issues because sequestered carbon produces fewer emissions. It also improves soil’s fertility, its structure for conveying nutrients and capacity to retain water. Healthy soil is more productive and leads to better growing and farming outcomes.

Singer hopes to fight climate challenges and generate a societal shift in which decisions about land use practices, such as fracking, are thoughtfully made to support humans and other species that rely upon the ecosystem. Carbon Sponge, she says, is “part of our nature-based solution[s] to our man-made problems.”

Anybody who is interested—urban, suburban or rural gardeners and farmers or any land stewards—can participate in Carbon Sponge. Singer has written a manual, “Carbon Sponge Guide: A Guide to Grow Carbon in Urban Soils (and Beyond),” available on the Carbon Sponge website. It explains how to assemble a toolkit of inexpensive, easy-to-purchase-and-use instruments to test metrics such as the fungal to bacterial ratio, which indicates soil’s ability to provide hospitable conditions for carbon storage. Chapters discuss how to monitor and teach children about soil and to design a carbon sponge. An educator at heart, Singer wants to offer tools to teach people to develop new ways of thinking.

Putting soil first

Centering soil in conversations is at the heart of Carbon Sponge. “First of all, asking, what does soil need? Which I think is an interesting question unto itself,” says Singer. “Then also, ‘what can we learn from soil?’” 

Farming methods over the past 50 years, such as growing monocultures and fertilizing depleted soil to prop up the system, are shortsighted, says Singer. She wants to invest in rather than impose on or extract from soil. “If you’re just looking at a yield and how much you get on the land, then you’re not understanding the complex systems that support the growth of that plant and future growth,” she says. 

Singer is notably not a scientist. She’s an award-winning professor of New Media at SUNY Purchase where she teaches Dark Ecology, a class closely aligned with her work in the ecological art space. It explores what it means to be human in the age of the Anthropocene, reading theorists, she says, who straddle art and science and think about how those disciplines can help people interrogate and rethink humans in relation to soil, microbes and the food we’re growing. Singer’s work, at the intersection of technology, art and social change, has been exhibited at MoMA/PS1 and is in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art. 

After participating in collaborative art projects involving food waste, Singer wanted to learn more about soil. She also wanted to transform that waste into a rich resource. Those interests led her to co-found La Casita Verde, a community garden in South Williamsburg, Brooklyn. 

Singer had worked a lot with data collection, visualizing data in her art practice and generating data in various projects. Learning that the soil had to be tested for lead, a common contaminant in urban soil, prompted her to wonder what it was not being tested for and what would be useful to the soil. “What other kinds of data could we collect in the garden,” says Singer, “that kind of filled out the story about soil?” 

Group effort

Carbon Sponge, formed to explore regenerative agriculture in urban gardening, incorporates art, scientific research, data collection and agriculture. For its initial project in 2018, Singer, as designer in residence at the New York Hall of Science, assembled soil scientists, artists, agroecologists, urban gardeners, landscape designers, government agencies and corporate funders. The goal: to find out how carbon cycles in urban soils and if it was possible to grow soil organic carbon in urban soils in the same way that happens in native rural soils. “I was very interested in making an aesthetic and pleasing experiment so that people would be pulled in by it and want to be in this space and start to learn and ask questions with us,” says Singer. 

Urban soil is very different from rural soil, which is much less disturbed by humans. So, the experiment combined “technosol,” also known as human-engineered soil, a mix of sediment and compost, in different ratios. It demonstrated that soil organic carbon could be developed in urban soil.

The findings are important because the sediment, previously considered waste, can now be considered a resource, opening up new potential for use in ecosystem services and regenerative agriculture. A paper detailing results is currently under peer review. 

Singer’s integrative, collaborative approach and activist streak are influenced by her time at Carnegie Mellon University, where she earned her MFA. There she co-founded Preemptive Media, a collective of artists, computer scientists and roboticists who explored the then-new field of human and computer interaction. She enjoyed being part of a group that “included people who knew how to build projects both in the physical and technological sense and create projects that were bigger than one person,” she says, “and often with an eye towards inclusion, participation, transparency and building a better world with more of a democratic input.”

Carbon Sponge now also encompasses scientific research, Singer’s art practice, a farmer-to-farmer network called Carbon Sponge Hub (located since 2022 at White Feather Farm in Saugerties, New York, where Singer is the director of Farm Innovation), and a yearly soil fest there. 

Last year, 10 small area farms participated in the Hub, which includes professional lab testing to substantiate kit results. Planning for 2024 is underway, with intentions to scale up production from a hand-harvested-and-winnowed operation to a machine-driven one, to formally verify the kit, thanks to a USDA grant, and to explore culinary uses.

The Hub is also growing sorghum alone and in cover crop mixes for a scientific study to determine if sorghum can be called a “New York climate-smart plant.” The nutritious grain from Africa possesses numerous agronomic and sustainable properties that can help soil store carbon. It is drought resistant and produces a significant amount of plant biomass, which can be used by farmers to nurture the land. Notably, it efficiently photosynthesizes more “exudates” (“basically, liquid carbon,” explains Singer) into the soil through its vast root system, which helps microbes multiply, building soil health. Hub farm Zena Farmstead reported a 50-percent increase in microbial biomass in its experimental plot from its first to second year of participation. 

Looking ahead

Current generations may not see the benefits of this work; carbon sequestration can take many decades. But Singer is undeterred. “This provides one model,” she says. “We have to be on soil time, which is very different than human time. Both should be part of the solution.” 

Carbon Sponge is modeling new ways of thinking that are necessary for human survival. “We can’t get ourselves out of this problem in the same way we got into it, with extractive capitalists and profit-driven systems,” says Singer. “I’d like to think of this as a different way forward.”

***

You can find Singer’s manual, “Carbon Sponge Guide: A Guide to Grow Carbon in Urban Soils (and Beyond),” on the Carbon Sponge website. It explains how to assemble a toolkit of inexpensive, easy-to-purchase-and-use instruments to test metrics such as the fungal to bacterial ratio, which indicates soil’s ability to store carbon. 

The post Sequestering Carbon Is Not Just A Science But An Art, Too appeared first on Modern Farmer.

The researcher and passionate urban gardener in me couldn’t resist digging in deeper and working to illuminate a fuller “truth” around this recent result. Spoiler alert: Avoid carbon tunnel vision, as focusing on a single emissions metric misses the many other benefits that can get us out of the crisis we’re in. 

Back up a step: What is urban agriculture? Urban ag is any kind of food production space within a city, inclusive of commercial farms that grow and sell directly to consumers, non-profit farms that serve a broader mission, community gardens, school gardens and even vacant lots turned into thriving personal gardens or homesteads. 

Better yet, why do some researchers, farmers and activists prefer the term “urban agroecology?” From 2017 to 2019, my research team helped to define and elevate “urban agroecology” in the US as a better way of acknowledging the multifunctional benefits of urban green spaces. These farms and gardens are not “just” growing food, they are also building community, performing environmental services (think stormwater mitigation and reducing urban heat island effect), providing habitat for biodiversity and educating urban residents. It’s often one of the only ways kids and adults alike can interact with nature, see where their food comes from and witness the magic of a seed sprouting. Urban growing spaces are also often led by women and BIPOC farmers (more than 60 percent in my investigation of the East Bay in California’s Bay Area), serving as important grounds for empowerment, culturally relevant food production and healing of racialized patterns of agricultural work. 

So, I had alarm bells going off when reading about this new study. The research from the University of Michigan-led study seems to show that fruit and vegetables grown in urban ag have a carbon footprint six times larger than that of “conventionally grown” food (meaning, on rural farmland). 

The choice to compare greenhouse gas intensity of soil-based urban agriculture systems with conventional farming systems brings up an inherently unfair comparison. When looking at conventional, large-scale farming systems, which are largely monocultures designed to maximize yield per acre via application of fossil-fuel based fertilizers, pesticides and other chemicals, we already have a large body of evidence that these are carbon-intensive production systems with a host of other detrimental environmental impacts (land, air and water pollution, soil degradation and erosion, habitat and biodiversity loss across billions of acres of “conventional farmland” globally). 

However, when you divide a large number (i.e., carbon emissions) by another large number (yield per acre), you get a small number of carbon emissions associated with each serving of lettuce, for example. When looking at urban community and school farms and gardens, we often see highly diversified plots that are more sparsely planted, with some weedy edges. They’re not exactly “yield-maximizing” practices on display. So, when you divide a relatively small number of carbon emissions, which the researchers in the study attributed to things such as garden infrastructure (raised beds, paved paths, tool sheds and others)—so, indirect emissions—and divide it by another very small number (yield per acre), you end up with a relatively larger number than your conventional allegory “lettuce serving.” The math here doesn’t point the finger towards the system that really needs changing in carbon and climate terms. 

This study disregards the far more pressing issue of the sheer quantity of emissions that come from conventional farming. Additionally, the conversations only circled back towards the end to include or acknowledge the many climate “benefits” of having spaces where city dwellers can connect with their food system and with nature in the city. These less quantifiable benefits are primary, not secondary; they are essential to bring into collective societal focus, rather than obscure behind a conclusion that sets up a feeling of confusion or uncertainty about whether urban ag is or is not a “climate solution.” Urban farms, especially when well managed and resourced with consistent staffing and city support, are critical pieces of the climate solutions puzzle. 

It brings me back to this unsettled feeling that the study is asking the wrong research question, if the conclusions and headlines point us towards some course of action around “fixing” urban farms so they can have a lower carbon footprint, while saying nothing about the carbon-intensive conventional farming system that urgently needs to change to address the overlapping climate and public health crisis. To quote one of the leaders of my urban ag research project, Dr. Timothy Bowles, a professor of Agroecology at U.C. Berkeley: 

“This is an issue with metrics… in this case, using efficiency as the metric (i.e., amount of food produced per unit of GHG emission). Efficiency metrics can be problematic for a number of reasons, and a number of studies have demonstrated more ‘efficient’ food production from conventional systems compared to various alternatives from a strictly GHG standpoint, largely due to higher yields, even if total emissions are high. In general, we need multifunctional perspectives for a more holistic systems comparison.” 

To be sure, we need conventional farming systems right now that create efficiency and economies of scale to grow and distribute large volumes of food to feed a growing population. There is no switching to diversified farming and regenerative agriculture overnight, just like there is no transition to purely solar and wind power for our electricity system without proper planning for this change. I’m not saying we can feed the entire city from the products of urban farms (although there have been researchers before me who modeled that this is theoretically possible, within a 50-mile radius, of a US midwestern city). What we need is for the conventional food system to change dramatically: to reduce reliance on fossil-fuel-based inputs, be more adaptive to climate extremes, adopt climate-friendly practices such as cover cropping and compost application, and in doing all this become a better source of healthy food. 

I’m also all for improving urban farms, increasing recycling of materials and waste streams in cities and resourcing them to be viable sites of food production, as the study authors point out as action items. I just find the impetus for doing so to be limited if we’re primarily talking about reducing the carbon footprint of these sites. Urban farms are capable of teaching the principles of photosynthesis, soil health and carbon sequestration even if they are not sequestering carbon in large quantities. And this knowledge is powerful. 

Where do we go from here as researchers, as eaters and producers of food? The food system of today is in crisis. It has prioritized cost and yield over all else. The result? It doesn’t work for farmers, it does not produce nutritious, healthy food for people and it is a disaster environmentally. However, the future of food can be diversified, abundant and rooted in soil health practices, fostering social equity and farmer well-being. I see that shift happening already on farms both urban and rural, big and small. It takes education, both farmer to farmer and farmer to consumer, as well as policy change to support the shifts already in motion. By reconnecting with food, with ecology, with living soil, we connect to climate solutions and help to reverse the damages of climate change.

Laney Siegner is founder and Co-director of Climate Farm School, with a Ph.D. from U.C. Berkeley Energy and Resources Group. 

The post Opinion: To Make a Real Impact on Climate Change, We Must Move Beyond the Carbon Footprint appeared first on Modern Farmer.

No person or plant can emerge unscathed, says Dr. Guillermo Murray-Tortarolo, a researcher at Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico. His work focuses on understanding the link between climate change and its impact on food production and human societies. As hotter and wetter conditions become more prevalent, so do the fungi, microbes and insects that thrive in those conditions. They can all increase a plant’s likelihood of disease. As well, changes in temperature make it harder for plants to photosynthesize, so crop yields are dropping. 

But while “climate change is affecting absolutely everything,” says Murray-Tortarolo, “some sectors are more impacted than others.” 

Dry and semi-arid ecosystems are seeing record biodiversity losses and challenges in the agricultural sector. 

“The large increments in precipitation variability and seasonality have reduced the certainty of planting times and expected yields, with some extreme examples occurring the last couple of years, like with the red jalapeño for sriracha and Canadian mustard,” he says. That’s right, folks; climate change is not just taking down staple crops, it’s coming for your most beloved condiments. 

Mustard yields are way down

The global mustard market is worth about $6.87 billion, and it is projected to increase by a compound annual growth rate of 5.8 percent through 2029. While mustard seed is native to Europe, World War II disrupted production there, and since then, Canada has become one of the world’s largest producers of yellow, oriental and brown mustard seeds. 

Last year, farmers in Canada planted close to 555,000 acres of mustard seed, producing 161,781 tons, primarily in Saskatchewan. But amid challenging weather conditions, yields have plummeted in recent years. In 2021, mustard yields hovered at 431 pounds an acre, down close to 57 percent from the usual 1,000 pounds per acre. 

That meant soaring prices and—quelle horreur—a distinct absence of mustard from supermarkets in France. “We lost almost everything during the harvest [of] 2021, but every year for the past 15 years has had extreme challenges,” says Élaine Bélanger, vice president of operations and co-owner of Maison Orphée, a Quebec City-based manufacturer of mustard, olive oils and other specialty products. “And because we are manufacturing organic mustard, we are a niche within a niche market. The costs were going way up in every direction, and even as we were able to source some mustard seeds from abroad, we didn’t want to change our recipe too much.”

The mustard Maison Orphée creates is a blend of yellow, brown and oriental seeds, and while Bélanger prioritizes sourcing from its network of growers in Canada, in bad years, it’s had to eat the costs of sourcing from Eastern Europe and beyond. 

“It’s very difficult for us as manufacturers, and for the growers we work with, to know what to invest in,” says Bélanger. “Because it’s not just an increase in temperature. It’s a change in several ways. If growers invest in a variety that is more adaptable to temperature, what about drought?”

With El Niño conditions this year, Murray-Tortarolo says we should all prepare for challenges. 

“This year, an El Niño is predicted, which may bring additional winter rainfall but also extreme conditions,” he says. “While it is too soon to know what to expect in the next planting season, extreme events are expected to be numerous.”

Hot sauce shortages 

Hot sauce shortages have also become increasingly the norm. 

The maker of the beloved sriracha, Huy Fong Foods, had to issue repeated statements to customers apologizing for the shortage of sauce, blaming poor harvests of chili peppers in California, New Mexico and Mexico for the ongoing dearth on supermarket shelves. (At certain points in the past few years, resellers have been offering the usual $5 bottles for up to $150 to desperate hot-heads.)

As it turns out, where we’re growing these peppers is part of the problem—and climate change is amplifying the issues. 

“Peppers first emerged in the rainforest,” says Dr. Danise Coon, a senior research specialist at New Mexico State University’s Agriculture Experiment Station. “And over 6,000 years ago, we domesticated them and eventually moved them to arid climates.”

While we bred and adapted peppers for dry heat, it is now both hotter and drier in the regions in which they are cultivated.

“There are so many more extremes in recent years,” says Coon. “Last year was the hottest on record with 105 degrees or higher for 60 days during the growing season. In New Mexico, there’s a lot of debate going on about drip irrigation, which just adds to the challenges.”

The New Mexico red and green chili production was valued at around $46.2 million in 2022, but farmers also grow cayenne peppers and jalapeños there.

As the weather gets hotter and drier, and widespread irrigation appears less viable, researchers like Coon are working hard at coming up with solutions. “We are working on several projects aimed at combating climate change. We’re trying to breed chilis to produce higher yields under greater stress and drier conditions.”

Her colleague, Dennis Lozada, who specializes in plant genomics and molecular biology at New Mexico State University, says that examining the DNA sequence of individual chilis has been invaluable.

“We are looking at how we can even change things like root morphology to create higher adaptability,” says Lozada. 

They are working with an “endless” number of varieties, because there are thousands of wild species, which they can then cross-breed and hybridize. For Coon, it’s not just about saving hot sauce.

“In New Mexico, growing and eating chilis is a cultural thing,” says Coon. “It’s part of our heritage.”

Ketchup’s challenges 

Ketchup’s market size is gargantuan. Arguably, so are the challenges it is facing. The ketchup market was valued at around $31.9 billion in 2022, with an expected compound annual growth rate of 4.58 percent through 2028. 

Three years of searing temperatures in Australia, Spain and California—three of the world’s top tomato-producing areas—has led to a drop in tomato paste stocks, which not only goes into ketchup bases but is also key for pizza and marinara sauce. 

“Our market demands, compounded by climate change, have completely outpaced the ability of staple crops to evolve and adapt to a warmer climate,” says Dr. Amy Concilio, an associate professor of environmental science at St. Edward’s University in Austin, TX. 

California produces about 30 percent of the world’s tomatoes and 95 percent of the tomatoes used in canned goods in the US. Harvests were down 10 percent in 2022, according to the United States Department of Agriculture, and that trend is set to continue if things don’t change. 

This is where scientists come in. Artificial intelligence apps will be part of the solution, from helping improve weather models to reducing water consumption, says Concilio. 

And mega-companies such as Kraft Heinz (the world’s top manufacturer of ketchup) are pouring money into research and drastically reducing their environmental footprint as well. In 2022, its efforts allowed it to reduce water use by 8.7 percent overall and by 16.07 percent in high-risk watershed areas, according to its 2023 ESG Report. The company also sourced 75 percent of its tomatoes sustainably. 

But perhaps even more importantly, the company is investing in its own breeding program, dubbed HeinzSeed.

“At our core, Kraft Heinz is an agricultural company,” says Patrick Sheridan, vice president of global agriculture and sustainability at Kraft Heinz. The company is the largest purchaser of processing tomatoes in the world and it is serious about maintaining its edge amid a changing climate, says Sheridan.

“We’re aiming to purchase 100 percent sustainably sourced Heinz ketchup tomatoes by 2025,” he says. “One of the most significant challenges we face is water availability.”

Several years of below-average precipitation, coupled with decreased water availability in the regions in which the tomatoes are produced, with further declines anticipated, says Sheridan, has led the company to invest in improving irrigation technology and protocols and next-generation HeinzSeeds that are more heat, drought and disease tolerant.

For the foreseeable future, those who want to buy their condiments ready-made may have to face inflationary prices and shortages.

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Hungry for a more eco-friendly and dependable alternative that is also kind to your wallet? You’ll never run out of sauces and spices if you grow the ingredients to flavor your foods yourself:

Grow mustard greens

Mustard greens are cooler-climate plants, and they tend to thrive in temperatures between 45 and 75 degrees Fahrenheit. You can grow them in raised beds outside or containers inside. Make sure they have access to six hours of direct sunlight. 

Take a plastic planting box with holes in the bottom and fill with prepared planting mix. Scatter mustard seeds over the soil, moisten lightly but don’t soak. Loose soil works best. Cover with cling wrap, and after two to three days, you’ll see seedlings. Remove the wrap, moisten the soil. After five or so days of growing, they’re ready to be harvested, or you can let them grow for up to three weeks. Use an organic vegetable fertilizer to feed these plants, following the directions on the label. Reseed the soil when you’re ready for another crop. 

Mustard greens are delicious on their own or sauteed in olive oil with salt and pepper. But if you’re eager to try your hand at making mustard itself, try this easy recipe from HGTV.

Grow serrano peppers

Serrano peppers need six to eight hours of sunlight every day, so make sure you place them near a south-facing window. (Alternatively, use artificial lights designed for gardening.) Also keep in mind that serranos are used to warm temperatures: 70 to 80 degrees Fahrenheit ideally. 

Take a plastic planting box with holes in the bottom and fill with prepared planting mix. Sow seeds about ¼ inch deep, and space them one to two feet apart. Loose soil is ideal. You want to keep soil moist but not wet. Use an organic vegetable fertilizer to feed these plants, following the directions on the label. Pepper plants self-pollinate, but you can shake them occasionally to help spur them on. 

Serrano chilis will spice up your life in a number of ways, but if you want to turn the chilis into hot sauce, try this basic recipe from the Food Network. 

Grow tomatoes 

Tomato plants need sun, and you may need some artificial gardening lights as an assist, especially in the winter. Seedlings need 18 to22 hours of light when growing indoors. Once they have color, they need less and can move to a window with plenty of light. Smaller tomatoes grow better inside. Keep in mind that tomatoes also love temperatures of 70 to 80 degrees Fahrenheit. 

Give your seedlings a boost by giving your seed-starting trays a little heat (the top of your fridge is a great spot). Once the seedlings are six inches tall, transfer them to a larger plastic planting container with potting mix. Keep the plants moist but not wet. Use an organic vegetable fertilizer to feed these plants, following the directions on the label. Tomato plants self-pollinate, but you can shake them occasionally to help spur them on. 

Tomatoes are great on salads, in sandwiches—even solo with salt and olive oil. But we’ve got your back if you want to use yours to make ketchup: This Food Network recipe is a good place to start.

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