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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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That trail of tiny footprints, indiscernible to the naked eye, is remarkably effective at protecting the tree from pathogens and pests. That makes ants, in the eyes of Ida Cecilie Jensen, a legion of unlikely warriors — one humans should consider enlisting in the fight to grow food in a warming world. “Ants are a Swiss Army knife,” said Jensen, a biologist who studies the symbiotic relationship between ants and agriculture at Aarhus University in Denmark. “Kind of like a multitool for farmers.”

With an estimated 20 quadrillion ants on Earth at any given time, the bugs are found just about everywhere on the planet. They are also among the species that humans, which they outnumber at least 2.5 million to one, have most in common with. Ants have extraordinary collective intelligence, their colonies weaving robust community networks and dividing labor. The social insects even wage war with one another and build complex agricultural systems.

Ants also have “so many of the same problems and challenges that we have,” Jensen said. “Luckily for us, they already found a lot of great solutions.”

One such challenge is how to grow food while confronting climate-wrought consequences — such as an influx of spreading plant pathogens caused by warming.

Plant diseases cost the global economy hundreds of billions of dollars every year, with between 20 to 40 percent of global crop production lost to crop diseases and pests. Climate change is ramping up outbreak risks by morphing how pathogens evolve, facilitating the emergence of new strains, and making crops more susceptible to infection. Most farmers and growers increasingly rely on chemical pesticides to combat these emerging issues, but the widespread use of such substances has created problems of its own. Synthetic pesticides can be harmful to humans and animals, and lose their efficacy as pathogens build up resistance to them. The production and use of synthetic pesticides also contribute to climate change, as some are derived from planet-warming fossil fuels.

Instead of chemicals, an army of ants may march right in. Though most people view the small insects as little more than a nuisance, colonies of them are being deployed in orchards across a handful of countries to stave off the spread of crippling infestation and disease.

In a body of recently published and forthcoming research, Jensen examined the antimicrobial effects of wood ants, a European field ant known for building dome-shaped nests in fields and open woodlands, and weaver ants, which live in ball-shaped nests within tropical tree canopies across Asia, Africa, and Australia. Her team looked at how the microbes influenced apple brown rot and apple scab in two orchards in Denmark — one commercial and one experimental — and found that wood ants effectively reduce apple scab, which can cause serious yield losses, by an average of 61 percent. The scientists also found that the number of disease-free apples more than doubled compared to when ants weren’t wielded as an alternative biological pesticide. For another experiment in Senegal, they collected weaver ants from mango orchards to investigate the bacterial communities associated with ants, discovering that they also leave microbial footprints that may inhibit fungal diseases such as mango anthracnose, which can lead to extensive yield losses.

Past studies have found that for crops from cocoa to citrus, ants could replace insecticides in a multitude of climates and locations, reducing incidences of pear scab in pear trees, coffee leaf rust in coffee shrubs, and leaf fungal attacks in oak seedlings. Weaver ant nests used as an alternative pesticide in mango, cashew, and citrus trees have all been shown to lower pest damage and produce yields on par with several chemical pesticide treatments. For more than a millennia, the species was embraced as a natural insecticide in countries like China but never quite made its way into the agricultural mainstream in North America or Europe. The method would eventually be replaced by the dawn of synthetic solutions. Still, despite that legacy, exactly how ants take on disease has remained a scientific mystery.

The answer, Jensen said, lies in how ants function. All species of the arthropod possess a body that is essentially hostile for bacteria because they produce formic acid, which they use to constantly disinfect themselves. Ants are also perpetually hungry little things that will feast on the spores of plant pathogens, among other things, and their secretion of formic acid and highly territorial nature tends to deter a medley of other insects that could be transmitting diseases or making lunch of some farmers’ crops. Ultimately, their greatest trick is what Jensen’s newest research reveals: Ants also inherently have antimicrobial bacteria and fungi on their bodies and feet, which can reduce plant diseases in afflicted crops, with these microorganisms deposited as the critters walk. When the bugs are cultivated in fruit orchards, they march all over trees, their feet coating the plants in microbial organisms that can curb emerging pathogens.

Understanding why they have this effect makes it easier to promote and implement native species of ants as biological agents in fields and farms, which Jensen advocates for. She’s not only researching how to do this as a doctoral candidate, but also founded AgroAnt in 2022, a company that leases colonies to cull plant pathogens and pests to farmers in Denmark — much like beekeepers lease hives. Her research team is now looking into boosting populations of existing ant colonies already living in orchards, rather than introducing new ones. Building rope bridges between trees to help ants better get around, and increasing the number of sugary extracts left in strategic locations to feed them, can create ant population booms, which Jensen sees as a simple and inexpensive way for farmers to ward off costly bouts of crop disease.

Others are not convinced this would be any more useful or cost-effective than existing biopesticides like canola oil and baking soda, or pest management chemicals derived from natural sources.

Kerik Cox, who researches plant pathology at Cornell University, said that many of the microbes derived from the ants in the study have already been studied, and optimized for formulation and efficacy in agricultural systems. “Many are highly effective and there are numerous commercial products available for farmers to use,” said Cox, adding that he doesn’t see “anything in this study that would be better than the existing biopesticide tools, which are registered by the [U.S. Environmental Protection Agency].”

Jensen acknowledges there is always a risk when introducing any species — ants new to an area could push out other beneficial species, for example, or attract aphids, those small green plant-damaging insects that ants share a symbiotic relationship with. Still, she is adamant that as long as the species is native to the area and agricultural system they’re being introduced to and then properly managed, the possible benefits outweigh the pitfalls.

On a practical note, the money-saving argument of ants pitted against synthetic products also carries a big draw; particularly given that conventional pesticides, in addition to their organic, chemical-free counterparts, have become more expensive in recent years across Europe and the U.S. Those product prices tend to climb when extreme weather shocks disrupt production, a likelihood as climate change makes disasters more frequent and severe.

Conversely, Jensen said farmers can simply leave sugar-water solutions, cat food, or chicken bones, among any number of kitchen scraps, in fruit orchards where beneficial, pathogen-combating ants are typically already present — such as weaver ants in mango orchards. If the species already dwell there, this could increase their numbers and efficiency. The technique, however, should be approached with caution depending on location, to minimize the risk of attracting potentially harmful members of the ant family.

“I don’t believe in one solution that could fit everything, but I definitely think that ants and other biological control agents are going to be a huge part of the [climate] puzzle in the future,” she said.

This article originally appeared in Grist at https://grist.org/food-and-agriculture/a-secret-weapon-in-agricultures-climate-fight-ants/.

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

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Each year, about one in six Americans falls ill to foodborne illnesses, and oversight agencies have routinely found that the U.S. food safety system — a shared responsibility of the FDA, the U.S. Department of Agriculture and several others — falls short.

In 2017, the Government Accountability Office called for a unified strategy to address food safety, as no less than eight different federal departments had a hand in fortifying the nation’s food. And in 2018, the GAO criticized the USDA for not doing enough to keep foodborne pathogens out of the nation’s meat supply.

In 2021, ProPublica found that the USDA knew of an ongoing salmonella outbreak but had allowed contaminated meat to continue to be sold.

Generally, the USDA inspects meat and poultry, and it sometimes has inspectors stationed inside large meat processing plants. The FDA inspects fruits, vegetables, dairy products and processed foods — about 80% of the food supply. It also inspects food overseas that will be imported to the U.S.

“Given the large number of food facilities and the agency’s limited resources, meeting the existing inspection mandates has been challenging for the agency,” the FDA told the GAO. However, the “FDA is excited for the work underway” at the agency to address food safety.

In October 2024, the FDA announced it was implementing a near agency-wide reorganization that it said would help it better oversee the nation’s food supply.

The reorganization was prompted, in part, by the FDA’s delayed response to a whistleblower complaint about infant formula produced at an Abbott Nutrition factory. Despite receiving the complaint, the agency took no action for 15 months, during which time several infants fell ill after consuming the contaminated formula.

In its announcement, the FDA said it was “focused on transforming the agency to be more efficient, nimble and ready for the future.”

COVID-19 inhibited inspections

The FDA is required to inspect about 75,000 food facilities in the U.S. each year, according to the GAO’s report, published Jan. 8. However, between 2018 and 2023, the latest year data is available, it failed to perform the number of inspections mandated by the 2011 Food Safety Modernization Act.

One reason the FDA fell behind was the COVID-19 pandemic. It affected the agency’s ability to conduct in-person inspections (as it did for other agencies, such as the Occupational Safety and Health Administration).

The year of the pandemic, the FDA only inspected 7% of facilities identified as “high-risk” for foodborne illnesses, according to the GAO. The number increased to about half the following years.

Still, the pandemic created a significant backlog, which the agency is still dealing with, the GAO said.

“While it is unclear when FDA will be able to clear the backlog of past due inspections created during the pandemic, FDA officials told us they are taking steps to address it,” the watchdog said in its report.

Inspection gaps, staffing challenges

Another challenge is the lack of experienced inspectors. As of 2024, the agency had 432 inspectors, which the GAO said was 90% its full capacity.

As of mid-2024, a quarter of FDA food inspectors were eligible for retirement, and more will be eligible by summer 2025. (The GAO report does not say how many retired.) The FDA is hiring new staff, but “the hiring rate has not outpaced losses,” the GAO reported.

When a foodborne illness outbreak does occur, FDA inspectors must focus their attention on the outbreak. But that adds to the backlog of regular inspections, the GAO said: Prioritizing outbreaks “directly affects” the agency’s ability to conduct inspections that might prevent outbreaks.

Adding to the workforce issue is that it takes about two years to train a new food inspector.

The FDA said it had stepped up efforts to recruit qualified inspectors, including offering student loan reimbursements.

“While these actions represent positive steps,” the GAO said, “FDA continues to face long-standing and significant workforce capacity challenges.”

The USDA has also struggled to hire and retain food safety inspectors. Even before the pandemic — when meat processing plants were known COVID-19 hotspots — agency employees reported feeling burned out with heavy workloads, Investigate Midwest reported in 2019.

For instance, due to low staffing, one USDA food inspector, at eight months pregnant, was working double shifts.

Too few overseas inspections

The FDA is required to perform about 19,000 food safety inspections overseas each year, as the U.S. imports many foods consumers want year-round, such as bananas. It also did not meet this threshold, averaging just 5% of the required figure between 2018 and 2023.

The FDA told the GAO that the required number of foreign inspections was unrealistic. As of mid-2024, just 20 employees were dedicated to foreign inspections.

In 2015, the GAO recommended the FDA determine a reasonable target for foreign inspections. Responding to this latest GAO report, the FDA said it would not do so.

“FDA officials told us in August 2024 — nearly 10 years after we made our recommendation — that they do not intend to take any further action to address it,” the GAO said. “We maintain that identifying an appropriate annual target for conducting foreign inspections and using it to assess FDA’s performance in safeguarding imported food is important.”

This article first appeared on Investigate Midwest and is republished here under a Creative Commons license. Investigate Midwest is an independent, nonprofit newsroom. Their mission is to serve the public interest by exposing dangerous and costly practices of influential agricultural corporations and institutions through in-depth and data-driven investigative journalism. Visit them online at www.investigatemidwest.org

The post As Foodborne Illnesses Sicken Tens of Millions Each Year, FDA Falls Behind on Mandated Inspections appeared first on Modern Farmer.

When Michael Kotutwa Johnson goes out to the acreage behind his stone house to harvest his corn, his fields look vastly different from the endless rows of corn you see in much of rural North America. Bundled in groups of five or six, his corn stalks shoot out of the sandy desert in bunches, resembling bushels rather than tightly spaced rows. “We don’t do your typical 14-inch spaced rows,” he says.

Instead, Kotutwa Johnson, an enrolled member of the Hopi tribe, practices the Hopi tradition he learned from his grandfather on the Little Colorado River Plateau near Kykotsmovi Village in northeastern Arizona, a 90-minute drive from Flagstaff: “In spring, we plant eight to 10 corn kernels and beans per hole, further apart, so the clusters all stand together against the elements and preserve the soil moisture.” For instance, high winds often blow sand across the barren plateau. “This year was a pretty hot and dry year, but still, some of the crops I raised did pretty well,” he says with a satisfied smile. “It’s a good year for squash, melons and beans. I’ll be able to propagate these.”

Dry farming has been a Hopi tradition for several millennia. Kotutwa Johnson might build some protection for his crops with desert brush or cans to shield them from the wind, but his plants thrive without any fertilizer, pesticides, herbicides, mulch or irrigation. This is all the more impressive since his area usually gets less than 10 inches of rain per year.

In the era of climate change, the practice of dry farming is met with growing interest from scientists and researchers as farmers grapple with droughts and unpredictable weather patterns. For instance, the Dry Farming Institute in Oregon lists a dozen farms it partners with, growing anything from tomatoes to zucchini. However, Oregon has wet winters, with an annual rainfall of over 30 inches, whereas on the plateau in Arizona, Johnson’s crops get less than a third of that. Farmers in Mexico, the Middle East, Argentina, Southern Russia and Ukraine all have experimented with dry farming, relying on natural rainfall, though conditions and practices vary in each region.

For Kotutwa Johnson, it’s a matter of faith and experience. Between April and June, he checks the soil moisture to determine which crops to plant and how deep. He uses the traditional wooden Hopi planting stick like his ancestors, because preserving the top soil by not tilling is part of the practice. “We don’t need moisture meters or anything like that,” he explains. “We plant everything deep, for instance, the corn goes 18 inches deep, depending on where the seeds will find moisture,” relying on the humidity from the melted winter snow and annual monsoon rains in June.

His harvest looks unique, too. “We know 24 varieties of indigenous corn,” he says, showing off kernels in indigo blue, purple red, snow white, and yellow. His various kinds of lima and pinto beans shimmer in white, brown, merlot red and mustard yellow. Studies have shown that indigenous maize is more nutritious, richer in protein and minerals than conventional corn, and he hopes to confirm similar results with his own crops in his role as professor at the School of Natural Resources and the Environment at the University of Arizona, and as a core faculty member with the fledgling Indigenous Resilience Center, which focuses on researching resilient solutions for Indigenous water, food and energy independence. He earned a PhD in natural resources, focusing on Indigenous agricultural resilience, not least to “have a seat at the table and level the playing field, so mainstream stakeholders can really hear me,” he says. “I’m not here to be the token Native; I’m here to help.” For instance, he attended COP 28, the 2023 United Nations climate change conference in Dubai, to share his knowledge about “the reciprocal relationship with our environment.”

“I’m not here to be the token Native; I’m here to help.”

Kotutwa Johnson was born in Germany because his dad was in the military, but he spent the summers with his grandfather planting corn, squash, beans and melons the Indigenous way in the same fields he’s farming now, where he eventually built an off-grid stone house with his own hands. “As a kid, I hated farming because it’s hard work,” he admits with disarming honesty, followed by a quick laugh. “But later I saw the wisdom in it. We’ve done this for well over 2,000 or 3,000 years. I’m a 250th-generation Hopi farmer.”

Unlike many other Indigenous tribes, the Hopi weren’t driven off their land by European settlers. “We’re very fortunate that we were never relocated,” Kotutwa Johnson says. “We chose this land, and we’ve learned to adapt to our harsh environment. The culture is tied into our agricultural system, and that’s what makes it so resilient.”

However, the Hopi tribe doesn’t own the land. Legally, the United States holds the title to the 1.5 million acres of reservation the Hopi occupy in Northwestern Arizona, a fraction of their original territory. Kotutwa Johnson estimates that only 15 percent of his community still farms, down from 85 percent in the 1930s, and some Hopi quote the lack of land ownership as an obstacle.

Like on many reservations, the Hopi live in a food desert, where tribal members have to drive one or two hours to find a major supermarket in Flagstaff or Winslow. High rates of diabetes and obesity are a consequence of lacking easy access to fresh produce. “If you’re born here you have a 50 percent chance of getting diabetes,” Kotutwa Johnson says. “To me, this is the original harm: the disruption of our traditional foods. By bringing back the food, you also bring back the culture.”

Traditionally, Hopi women are the seed keepers, and the art of dry farming starts with the right seeds. “These seeds adapted to having no irrigation, and so they are very valuable,” Kotutwa Johnson says. He is fiercely protective of the seeds he propagates and only exchanges them with other tribal members within the community.

In that spirit, he was overjoyed to receive 800-year-old corn ears from a man who recently found them in a cave in Glen Canyon. Kotutwa Johnson planted the corn, and about a fifth actually sprouted. He raves about the little white corn ears he was able to harvest: “It’s so amazing we got to bring these seeds home. It was like opening up an early Christmas present.”

From a traditional perspective, “we were given things to survive,” he says. “In our faith, we believe the first three worlds were destroyed, and when we came up to this world, we were given a planting stick, some seeds and water by a caretaker who was here before us.”

He doesn’t believe that climate change can be stopped. “But we can adapt to it, and our seeds can adapt.” This is a crucial tenet of Hopi farming: Instead of manipulating the environment, they raise crops and cultivate seeds that adjust to their surroundings. His crops grow deep roots that stretch much farther down into the ground than conventional plants.

“Our faith tells us that we need to plant every single year no matter what we see,” even in drought years, he explains. “Some years, we might not plant much, but we still plant regardless because those plants are like us, they need to adapt.”

Dry farming is “not very economically efficient,” he admits. “Everything is driven towards convenience nowadays. We’re not trying to make a big buck out here; we’re here to maintain our culture and practice things we’ve always done to be able to survive.”

Kotutwa Johnson does not sell his produce. He keeps a percentage of the seeds to propagate and gives the rest to relatives and his community or trades it for other produce.

But his vision far surpasses his nine acres. He wants to pass on his dry farming methods to the next generation, just as he learned them from his grandfather, and he often invites youth to participate in farming workshops and communal planting. That’s why he recently started the Fred Aptvi Foundation, named after his grandfather, to focus on establishing a seed bank and a Hopi youth agricultural program that incorporates the Hopi language. Aptvi means “one who plants besides another,” Kotutwa Johnson explains. “It’s about revitalizing what’s there, not reinventing it.”

The post Growing Corn in the Desert, No Irrigation Required appeared first on Modern Farmer.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Growing healthier

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Vargas’ experience is echoed in gardens across the city.

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

Living off the land

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

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

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

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

A connection to home and family

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A new outlook on food

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Driving down Monterey Street on Detroit’s westside, there are more abandoned and vacant houses than occupied ones. Sidewalks are overgrown with grass, and stretches of land as long as football fields separate the homes that remain.

About midway down the block, between Wildemere and Lawton streets, is Fennigan’s Farms. You can’t miss it from the tall towers of bright yellow sunflowers waving in the wind. As you walk up, there’s a table with tomatoes and a sign that reads “Free Produce.”

Amanda Brezzell is the co-founder and creative director at Fennigan’s Farms. Brezzell said the farm and design firm’s mission is to be a resource to the community, helping Detroiters achieve food sovereignty by providing fresh, accessible food, some at no cost.

According to a report sponsored by the Michigan Association of United Ways, about 69 percent of Detroit households surveyed find it difficult to afford the basic cost of living, including food. This is compounded by the fact that 39,000 Detroit households spend more than half of their income on housing alone, and that many find other necessities, such as utilities, auto insurance and child care, unaffordable.

“I just know what kind of help that would be for me, if somebody was giving me some of my groceries for free before I even had to get to the grocery store,” Brezzell said. “Even if it’s just a pint of tomatoes, that would have cost you way more. That’s three more dollars in your pocket or five more dollars in your pocket, or shoot, eight more dollars in your pocket.”

Brezzell said they believe urban farming is important for their neighbors’ health and well-being, and hopes Fennigan’s Farms becomes a community hub to accomplish just that.

A community-first approach

At its core, Fennigan’s Farms is an “agricultural design” studio. The team develops pop-up farmers markets, garden beds and community gardens to increase green spaces around Detroit. Fennigan’s also grows flowers to sell at local events.

The design work and floral sales are how Brezzell can offer free produce, which they say is important to giving their community locally sourced food options, eliminating barriers to access.

“Being aware of community needs is paramount to what we do,” Brezzell said. “We wanted to break down that immediate barrier to accessing food. I can’t drive you to the store, but if you’re walking past, I can give you something. … Food was never meant to be a commodity.”

The U.S. Department of Agriculture considers an urban area a food desert if its poverty rate is at least 20% and if one-third of residents live more than one mile from a major supermarket or grocery store. By that definition, about 10% of Detroit is considered a food desert.

But the key consideration is access to fresh and healthy food, which remains a problem in the city, especially for Black residents, Brezzell and Bauer said. A poor diet and an inadequate nutrient intake can lead to several health problems, such as obesity, diabetes and cardiovascular disease.

“It’s about our food system taking advantage of certain communities,” said Kate Bauer, an associate professor of nutritional sciences at the University of Michigan. “This is not about a lack of education. Urban farming allows local people — individuals — to take back that ability to control their health, their bodies and what goes on in their neighborhoods.”

Fennigan’s Farms aims to be more than a local grocery store. Brezzell wants it to become a community hub, a place for residents to gather, share knowledge and engage in discussions about sustainable practices.

When planning crops, Brezzell said it’s important to consider the needs of the community and consult them about what they want to eat.

“Sometimes people are like, ‘Wow, you grow a lot of tomatoes,’ or, ‘You’ve got a lot of herbs,’ or whatever. Yes, because people in the neighborhood want tomatoes. They want potatoes, they want squash, corn, beans, et cetera. So we’re making sure to grow those things and not have to throw them away because people aren’t eating them.”

Creating a food-sovereign Detroit

Between 2017 and 2022, the city lost 10 full-line grocery stores, leaving 64, at that time. The addition of Black-owned stores like the Detroit People’s Food Co-op, Neighborhood Grocery and Linwood Fresh Market has helped to address the issue, but considering some suburbs like Livonia have more major grocery stores than residents say they need, Detroit still has progress to make.

“Looking at particularly African American or Black communities, I think it’s incredibly important (to) think about the overlapping and interfacing systems of injustice and structural racism that are impacting these communities,” said James Buszkiewicz, a research investigator at University of Michigan who has studied social determinants of health. “It trickles all the way down to this kind of (food access) … and access to opportunities that can impact food access.”

Urban farming offers a community-based solution to this problem, but Black urban farmers often encounter financial barriers to acquiring land or accessing water to grow food. Brezzell said they had to spend between $5,000 and $10,000 to get water for the farm.

“Food was never meant to be a commodity.”

Amanda Brezzell, co-founder of Fennigan’s Farms

The City of Detroit has initiatives to increase access through land-based projects like urban farming, but Brezzell said the support is still inadequate. They want policies that make sustainable farming simpler at the city, state and federal levels.

“It’s an economic opportunity,” Brezzell said. “It’s not just that I can’t buy the land. It’s not just the water. It’s about the fact that I need access to continue to do the things that I want to do for my community. But if it’s been commodified and turned into an economic opportunity that I’m not allowed to benefit from, then that’s just another form of displacement, right?”

An appreciation for locally grown produce

Recent research shows that living near community-based agriculture initiatives can have a positive impact on a person’s health.

Bauer’s research for the project Feeding MI Families shows that lower-income families have limited food options. Urban farming increases those options, cultivates a deeper connection to local food sources, promotes healthier eating habits and invokes a greater appreciation for local agriculture.

“Our health is really due thanks to farmers and all the people in the food system who can get healthy food to us,” Bauer said. “That’s why (there’s) all the efforts to get farms in schools and child care centers, to get kids exposed to fresh flavors. There’s a strong belief that knowing where your food comes from and knowing the process of growing the food … is going to shift your mindset to be more appreciative and open and thoughtful about the way you eat.”

Brezzell said the joy they experience cultivating land with their family and the conversations Brezzell gets to have with their neighbors gets them out of bed every day.

They hope the farm remains a resource for Detroiters, as a community hub for emergencies, a place to find fresh produce or just somewhere for residents to get together and talk about growing.

“I’m not sitting here thinking like, ‘We’re feeding people,’ or ‘I’m keeping people alive.’ I’m coming from the space of, you come by, you see free produce, and it sparks something in you,” Brezzell said of their mission.

“The community doesn’t need your … pity. Nobody needs your help from that mindset. People need access to resources so they can best take care of themselves with full autonomy. So offer your support.”

This article first appeared on Outlier Media and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

Healing Soil: Detroit Urban Farms is produced by Outlier Media in partnership with Planet Detroit, with support from the Michigan Health Endowment Fund. 

The post From Sunflowers to Squash: One Detroit Farmer’s Push for Food Sovereignty appeared first on Modern Farmer.

Helene and Milton, the two massive hurricanes that just swept into the country — killing hundreds of people, and leaving both devastation and rumblings of political upheaval in seven states — amounted to their own October surprise. Not that the storms led to some irredeemable gaffe or unveiled some salacious scandal. The surprise, really, may be that not even the hurricanes have pushed concerns about climate change more toward the center of the presidential campaign.

With early voting already underway and two weeks before Election Day, when voters will decide between Vice President Kamala Harris, who has called climate change an “existential threat,” and former President Donald Trump, who has called climate change a “hoax,” Grist’s editorial staff presents a climate-focused voter’s guide — a package of analyses and predictions about what the next four years may bring from the White House, depending on who wins.

The next administration will be decisive for the country’s progress on critical climate goals. By 2030, just a year after the next president would leave office, the U.S. has committed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 50 to 52 percent below 2005 levels, and expects to supply up to 13 million electric vehicles annually. A little further down the line, though no less critical, the country’s climate goals include reaching 100 percent carbon-free electricity by 2035 and achieving a net-zero emissions economy by 2050.

As you gear up to vote, here are 15 ways that Harris’ and Trump’s climate- and environment-related policies could affect your life — along with some information to help inform your vote.

Your energy mix

Over the last year or so, utility companies across the country have woken up to a new reality: After two decades of flat growth, electricity demand is about to spike, due to the combined pressures of new data centers, cryptocurrency mining, a manufacturing boom, and the electrification of buildings and transportation.

While the next president will not directly decide how the states supply power to their new and varied customers, he or she will oversee the massive system of incentives, subsidies, and loans by which the federal government influences how much utilities meet electricity demand by burning fossil fuels — the crucial question for the climate.

Trump’s answer to that question can perhaps be summed up in the three-word catchphrase he’s deployed on the campaign trail: “Drill, baby, drill.” He is an avowed friend of the fossil fuel industry, from whom he reportedly demanded $1 billion in campaign funds at a fundraising dinner last spring, promising in exchange to gut environmental regulations.

Vice President Harris is not exactly running on a platform of decarbonization, either. In an effort to win swing votes in the shale-boom heartland of Pennsylvania, she has reversed course on her past opposition to fracking, and she has proudly touted the record levels of oil and gas production seen under the current administration. Despite the risk of nuclear waste, the Biden administration has also championed nuclear power as a carbon-free solution and sought to incentivize the construction of new reactors through subsidies and loans. Although Harris says her administration would not be a continuation of Biden’s, it’s reasonable to expect continuity with Biden’s overall approach of leaning more heavily on incentives for low-emissions energy than restrictions on fossil fuels to further a climate agenda.

Your home improvements

In 2022, the Biden administration handed the American people a great big carrot to incentivize them to decarbonize: the Inflation Reduction Act, or IRA. It provides thousands of dollars in the form of rebates and tax credits for a consumer to get an EV and electrify their home with solar panels, a heat pump, and an induction stove. (Though the funding available for renters is slim, it is also out there.) In 2023, 3.4 million Americans got $8.4 billion in tax credits for home energy improvements thanks to the IRA.

If elected, Trump has pledged to rescind the remaining funding, which would require the support of Congress. By contrast, Harris has praised the law (which, as vice president, she famously cast the tie-breaking vote to pass) and would almost certainly veto any attempts by Congress to repeal it. As a presidential candidate, she has not said whether she would expand the law, though many expect she would focus on more efficient implementation.

But while repealing the IRA might slow the steady pace of American households decarbonizing, it can’t stop what’s already in motion. “There are fundamental forces here at work,” said Gernot Wagner, a climate economist at Columbia Business School. “At the end of the day, there’s very little that Trump can do to stand in the way.”

For one, the feds provide guidance to states on how to distribute the money made available through the IRA. More climate-ambitious states are already layering on their own monetary incentives to decarbonize. So even if that IRA money disappeared, states could pick up the slack.

And two, even before the IRA passed, market forces were setting clean energy on a path to replace fossil fuels. The price of solar power dropped by 90 percent between 2010 and 2020. And like any technology, electric appliances will only get cheaper and better. It might take longer without further support from the federal government, but the American home of tomorrow is, inevitably, fully electric — no matter the next administration.

 

Matt Simon, Senior staff writer focusing on climate solutions

Your home insurance premiums

Whether they know it or not, many Americans are already confronting the costs of a warming world in their monthly bills: In recent years, home insurance premiums have risen in almost every state, as insurance companies face the fallout of larger and more damaging hurricanes, wildfires, and hailstorms. In some states, like Florida and California, many prominent companies have fled the market altogether. While some Democrats have proposed legislation that would create a federal backstop for these failing insurance markets — with the goal of ensuring that coverage remains available for most homeowners — these proposals have yet to make much headway in a divided Congress. For the moment, it’s state governments, rather than the president or any other national politicians, that have real jurisdiction over homeowner’s insurance prices.

Near the end of the presidential debate in September, when both candidates were asked about what they’d do to “fight climate change,” Harris began her response by referring to “anyone who lives in a state who has experienced these extreme weather occurrences, who now is either being denied home insurance or is being jacked up” as a way to counter Trump’s denials of climate change.

Traditional homeowner policies don’t include flood insurance, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency runs a flood insurance program that serves 5 million homeowners in the U.S., mostly along the East Coast. Homeowners in the most flood-prone areas are required to buy this policy, but uptake has been lagging in some particularly vulnerable inland communities — including those that were recently devastated by Hurricane Helene. Project 2025, which many experts believe will serve as the blueprint to a second Trump term (though his campaign disavows any connection to it), imagines FEMA winding down the program altogether, throwing flood coverage to the private market. This would likely make it cheaper to live in risky areas — but it would leave homeowners without financial support after floods, all but ensuring only the rich could rebuild.

 

Jake Bittle, Staff writer focusing on climate impacts and adaptation

Your transportation

The appetite for infrastructure spending is so bipartisan that the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, signed in 2021, has become more widely known as the bipartisan infrastructure law. But don’t be fooled. A wide gulf separates how Harris and Trump approach transportation, with potentially profound climate implications.

Harris hasn’t offered many specifics, but she has committed to advancing the rollout out of the Biden administration’s infrastructure agenda. That includes traditional efforts like building roads and bridges, mixed with Democratic priorities including union labor and an eye toward climate-resilience. The infrastructure law and the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act include billions in spending to promote the adoption of electric vehicles, produce them domestically, and add 500,000 charging stations by 2030. They also include greener transportation efforts aimed at, among other things, electrifying buses, enhancing passenger rail, and expanding mass transit. That said, Harris has not called for the eventual elimination of internal combustion vehicles despite such plans in 12 states.

Trump has also been sparse on details about transportation — his website doesn’t address the issue except to decry Chinese ownership. During his first term and 2020 campaign, he championed (though never produced) a $1 trillion infrastructure plan. It focused on building “gleaming” roads, highways, and bridges, and reducing the environmental review and government oversight of such projects. He has favored flipping the federal-first funding model to shift much of the cost onto states, municipalities, and the private sector. Ultimately, Trump seems to have little interest in a transition to low-carbon transportation — the 2024 official Republican platform calls for rolling back EV mandates — and he remains a vocal supporter of fossil fuel production.

 

Tik Root, Senior staff writer focusing on the clean energy transition

Your health

Rising global temperatures and worsening extreme weather are changing the distribution and prevalence of tick- and mosquito-borne diseases, fungal pathogens, and water-borne bacteria across the U.S. State and local health departments rely heavily on data and recommendations on these climate-fueled illnesses from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, or CDC — an agency whose director is appointed by the president and can be influenced by the White House.

In his first term, Trump tried to divorce many federal agencies’ research functions from their rulemaking capacities, and there are concerns that, if he wins again in November, Trump would continue that effort. Project 2025, a sweeping blueprint developed by right-wing conservative groups with the aim of influencing a second Trump term, proposes separating the CDC’s disease surveillance efforts from its policy recommendation work, meaning the agency would be able to track the effects of climate change on human health, like the spreading of infectious diseases, but it wouldn’t be able to tell states how to manage them or inform the public about how to stay safe from them.

Harris is expected to leave the CDC intact, but she hasn’t given many signals on how she’d approach climate and health initiatives. Her campaign website says she aims to protect public health, but provides no further clarification or policy position on that subject, or specifically climate change’s influence on it. Over the past four years, the Biden administration has made strides in protecting Americans from extreme heat, the leading cause of weather-related deaths in the U.S. It proposed new heat protections for indoor and outdoor workers, and it made more than $1 billion in grant funding available to nonprofits, tribes, cities, and states for cooling initiatives such as planting trees in urban areas, which reduce the risk of heat illness. It’s reasonable to expect that a future Harris administration would continue Biden’s work in this area. Harris cast the tie-breaking vote on the IRA, which includes emissions-cutting policies that will lead to less global warming in the long term, benefiting human health not just in the U.S. but worldwide.

But there’s more to be done. Biden established the Office of Climate Change and Health Equity in the first year of his term, but it still hasn’t been funded by Congress. Harris has not said whether she will push for more funding for that office.

Zoya Teirstein, Staff writer covering politics and the intersection between climate change and health

Your food prices

Inflation has cooled significantly since 2022, but high prices — especially high food prices — remain a concern for many Americans. Both candidates have promised to tackle the issue; Harris went so far as to propose a federal price-gouging ban to lower the cost of groceries. Such a ban could help smaller producers and suppliers, but economists fear it could also lead to further supply shortages and reduced product quality. Meanwhile, Trump has said he will tax imported goods to lower food prices, though analysts have pointed out that the tax would likely do the opposite. Trump-era tariff fights during the U.S.-China trade war led to farmers losing billions of dollars in exports, which the federal government had to make up for with subsidies.

Trump’s immigration agenda could also affect food prices. If reelected, the former president has said he will expel millions of undocumented immigrants, many of whom work for low pay on farms and in other parts of the food sector, playing a vital role in food harvesting and processing. Their mass deportation and the resulting labor shortage could drive up prices at the grocery store. Meanwhile, Harris promises to uphold and strengthen the H-2A visa system — the national program that enables agricultural producers to hire foreign-born workers for seasonal work.

In the short term, it must be emphasized that neither candidate’s economic plans will have much of an effect on the ways extreme weather and climate disasters are already driving up the cost of groceries. Severe droughts are one of the factors that have destabilized the global crop market in recent years, translating to higher U.S. grocery store prices. Warming has led to reduced agricultural productivity and diminished crop yields, while major disasters throttle the supply chain. Even a forecast of extreme weather can send food prices higher. These climate trends are likely to continue over the next four years, no matter who becomes president.

But the winner of the 2024 election can determine how badly climate change batters the food supply in the long run — primarily by controlling greenhouse gas emissions.

Ayurella Horn-Muller, Staff writer focusing on the impact of climate change on food and agriculture

Your drinking water

“I want absolutely immaculate, clean water,” Trump said in June during the first presidential debate this election season. But if a second Trump presidency is anything like the first, there is good reason to worry about the protection of public drinking water.

During his first term in office, the Trump administration repealed the Clean Water Rule, a critical part of the Clean Water Act that limited the amount of pollutants companies could discharge near streams, wetlands, and other sources of water used for public consumption. “It was ready to protect the drinking water of 117 million Americans and then, within a few months of being in office, Donald Trump and [former EPA administrator] Scott Pruitt threw it into the trash bin to appease their polluter allies,” former Sierra Club Executive Director Michael Brune said in a press release.

While in office, Trump also secured a conservative majority on the Supreme Court, which last year tipped the court in favor of a decision to vastly limit the Environmental Protection Agency’s power to regulate pollution in certain wetlands, forcing the agency to weaken its own clean water rules.

A Harris administration would likely carry forward the work of several Biden EPA measures to safeguard the public’s drinking water from toxic heavy metals and other contaminants. For example, in April, the EPA passed the nation’s first-ever national drinking water standard to protect an estimated 100 million people from a category of synthetic chemicals known as PFAS, or “forever chemicals,” which have been linked to cancer, high blood pressure, and immune system deficiencies. Enforcing the new standard will require the agency to examine test results from thousands of water systems across the country and follow up to ensure their compliance — an effort that will take place during the next White House administration.

“As president,” Harris’ website says, “she will unite Americans to tackle the climate crisis as she builds on this historic work, advances environmental justice, protects public lands and public health, increases resilience to climate disasters, lowers household energy costs, creates millions of new jobs, and continues to hold polluters accountable to secure clean air and water for all.” Project 2025, the policy plan drawn up by former Trump staffers to guide a second Trump administration’s policies, indicates that a future Trump administration would eliminate safeguards like the PFAS rule that place limits on industrial emissions and discharges.

Just this month, the EPA issued a groundbreaking rule requiring water utilities to replace virtually every lead pipe in the country within 10 years. With funds from Biden’s bipartisan infrastructure law, the agency will also invest $2.6 billion for drinking water upgrades and lead pipe replacements. Harris has previously spoken out about the dangers of lead pipes, stating at a press conference in 2022 that lead exposure is “an issue that we as a nation should commit to ending.”

The success of these and other measures will rely on a well-staffed EPA enforcement division, which may end up being one of the most insidious stakes of this election for environmental policies. Budget cuts and staff departures during the first Trump administration gutted the EPA’s enforcement capacity — a problem that the agency has spent the past four years trying to mend. Project 2025 “would essentially eviscerate the EPA,” said Stan Meiburg, who served as acting deputy administrator for the EPA from 2014 to 2017.

 

Lylla Younes, Senior staff writer covering chemical pollution, regulation, and frontline communities

Your clean air

President Biden’s clean air policy has been characterized by a spate of new rules to curb toxic air pollution from a variety of facilities, including petroleum coke ovens, synthetic manufacturing facilities, and steel mills. While environmental advocates have decried some of these regulations as insufficiently protective, certain provisions — such as mandatory air monitoring — were hailed as milestones in the history of the agency’s air pollution policy. Former EPA staffer and air pollution expert Scott Throwe told Grist that a Harris- and Democratic-led EPA would continue to build on the work of the past four years by  enforcing these new rules, which will require federal oversight of state environmental agencies’ inspection protocols and monitoring data.

Project 2025 proposes a major reorganization of the EPA, which would include the reduction of full-time staff positions and the elimination of departments deemed “superfluous.” It also promotes the rollback of a range of air quality regulations, from ambient air standards for toxic pollutants to greenhouse gas emissions from coal-fired power plants.

What’s more, a growing body of research has found that poor air quality is often concentrated in communities of color, which are disproportionately close to fossil fuel infrastructure. Conservative state governments havepushedback against the Biden EPA’s efforts to address “environmental justice” through agency channels and in court — efforts that will likely enjoy more executive support under a second Trump administration.

Your public lands

Under the Antiquities Act of 1906, a national monument can be created by presidential decree. The act can be a useful tool to protect important landscapes from industries like oil, gas, and even green energy enterprises. Tribal nations have asked numerous presidents to use this executive power to protect tribal homelands that might fall within federal jurisdiction. During his first term, Trump argued that the act also gives the president the implicit power to dissolve a national monument.

In 2017, Trump drastically shrunk two Obama-era designations, Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante in Utah, in what amounted to the biggest slash of federal land protections in the history of the United States. At the time, Trump said that “bureaucrats in Washington” should not control what happens to land in Utah. While giving back local control was Trump’s stated rationale, tribes in the area, like the Diné, Ute, Hopi, and Zuni, had been working for years to protect the two iconic and culturally significant sites. Meanwhile, his decision opened up the land for oil and gas development. While not all tribal nations are opposed to oil and gas production, tribal environmental advocates are worried that a second Trump term will erode federal environmental regulations and commitments to progress in the fight against climate change.

Since 2021, the Biden administration has put more than 42 million acres of land into conservation by creating and expanding national monuments. This includes the Baaj Nwaavjo I’tah Kukveni, a new monument spanning a million acres near the Grand Canyon — the kind of protection that tribal activists for years had worked to prevent industrial uranium mining. And just this month, Biden announced the creation of the Chumash Heritage National Marine Sanctuary — a 4,500-square-mile national marine sanctuary to be “managed with tribal, Indigenous community involvement.”

But Harris might not continue that legacy. While she has remained silent about what she would do to protect lands, she has been vocal about continuing the U.S.’s oil and gas production as well as a push for more mining to help with the green transition — like copper from Oak Flat in Arizona and lithium from Thacker Pass in Nevada — both important places to tribal communities in the area. Tribes have been subjected to the adverse effects of the energy crisis before — namely dams that destroyed swaths of homelands and nuclear energy that increased cancer rates of Southwest tribal members — and without specific protections, it’s easy to see green energy as a changing of the guard instead of a game changer.

Taylar Dawn Stagner, Indigenous affairs reporting fellow

Your next climate disaster

Congress controls how much money the Federal Emergency Management Agency receives for relief efforts after catastrophic events like hurricanes Helene and Milton, but the president holds significant sway over who receives money and when. A second Trump administration would likely curtail some of the climate-focused resiliency projects FEMA has pursued in recent years, such as cutting back money for infrastructure that would be more resilient against hazards like sea level rises, fires, and earthquakes. Republican firebrands, like Representative Scott Perry from Pennsylvania, have decried these projects as wasteful and unnecessary.

Under the Stafford Act, which governs federal disaster response, the president has the power to disburse relief to specific parts of the country after any “major disaster” — hurricanes, big floods, fires. In September, Trump suggested that he might make disaster aid contingent on political support if he returns to office, promising to withhold wildfire support from California unless state officials give more irrigation water to Central Valley farmers. Harris has not given an explicit indication of how she would fund climate-resiliency or disaster-response programs, though she has boosted FEMA’s recovery efforts following Helene and Milton.

 

Jake Bittle, Staff writer focusing on climate impacts and adaptation

Your understanding of climate change

The United States has long been a leader in research essential to understanding — and responding to — a warming world. The government plays a key role in advancing climate science and providing timely meteorological data to the public. Neither Trump nor Harris address this in their platform, but history yields clues to what their presidency might mean for this vital work.

Trump has consistently dismissed climate change as a “hoax” and downplayed scientific consensus that it is anthropogenic, or driven by human activities. As president, he gutted funding for research, appointed climate skeptics and industry insiders, and eliminated  scientific advisory committees from several federal agencies. Thousands of government scientists quit in response. (In fact, still reeling from Trump’s attacks, new union contracts protect scientific integrity to combat such meddling.) His administration censored scientific data on government websites and tried to undermine the findings of the National Climate Assessment, the government’s scientific report on the risks and impacts of climate change. If reelected, Trump would almost certainly adopt a similar strategy, deprioritizing climate science and potentially even restructuring or eliminating federal agencies that advance it.

Harris has long supported climate action; she co-sponsored the Green New Deal as a senator and, as vice president, cast the deciding vote to pass the Inflation Reduction Act, which bolstered funding for agencies that oversee climate research. As part of its “whole of government” approach to the crisis, the Biden administration created the National Climate Task Force, with the EPA, NASA, and others to ensure science informs policy. Although Harris hasn’t said much about climate change as a candidate, climate organizations generally support her campaign and believe her administration will build on the progress made so far.

 

Sachi Kitajima Mulkey, Climate news reporting fellow

Your electric bill

A lot goes into calculating the energy rates you see on your monthly electric bill — construction and maintenance of power plants, fuel costs, and much more. It’s pretty tough to draw a direct line from the president to your bill, so if you’re worried about your energy costs, you’d do well to read up on your local public utility commission, municipal electric authority, or electric membership cooperative board.

What the president can do, though, is appoint people to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, or FERC — the board of up to five individuals who regulate the transmission of utilities across the entire country. As the U.S. continues to shift away from fossil fuels, a fundamental problem stands in the way: The country’s aging and fragmented grid lacks the capacity to move all of the electricity being generated from renewable sources. In May, FERC, which currently has a Democratic majority, approved a rule to try to solve that issue; it voted to require that regional utilities identify opportunities for upgrading the capacities of existing transmission infrastructure and that regional grid operators forecast their transmission needs 20 years into the future. These steps will be essential for utility companies to take advantage of the subsidies offered in the IRA and bipartisan infrastructure law.

The rule is facing legal challenges, which like much else in U.S. courts, appear to be political. So even if Harris wins November’s election, and maintains a commission that prioritizes the transition away from fossil fuels, the oil and gas industry and the politicians who support it will not acquiesce easily. If Trump wins, he’d have the chance to appoint a new FERC chair from among the current commissioners and to appoint a new commissioner in 2026, when the current chair’s term ends. (Or possibly sooner.) Although FERC’s actions tend to be more insulated from changes in the White House because commissioners serve five-year terms, a commission led by new Trump appointees would most likely deprioritize initiatives that would upgrade the grid to support clean energy adoption. Trump’s appointees supported fossil fuel interests on several fronts during his previous term, for instance by counteracting state subsidies to favor coal and gas plants.

Izzy Ross, Regional reporter, Great Lakes

Your trash

Some 33 billion pounds of plastic waste enter the marine environment globally every year, and the problem is expected to worsen as the fossil fuel and petrochemical industries ramp up plastic production.

Perhaps the most important step the next president could take to curb plastic pollution is to push Congress to ratify and implement the United Nations’ global plastics treaty, which is scheduled to be finalized by the end of this year. The Biden administration recently announced its support for a version of the treaty that limits plastic production, and, though Harris hasn’t made any public comment about it, experts expect that her administration would support it as well. Meanwhile, a former Trump White House official told Politico this April that Trump — who famously withdrew the U.S. from the Paris Agreement in his first term — would take a “hard-nosed look” at any outcome of the plastics negotiations and be “skeptical that the agreement reached was the best agreement that could have been reached.”

The Biden administration has also taken some positive steps to address plastic pollution domestically, including a ban on the federal procurement of single-use plastics. Experts expect that progress to continue under a Harris administration. In 2011, as California’s attorney general, Harris sued plastic bottle companies over misleading claims that their products were recyclable. As a U.S. senator, she co-sponsored a Democratic bill to phase out unnecessary single-use plastic products.

Trump, meanwhile, does not have a strong track record on plastic. Although he signed a 2019 law to remove and prevent ocean litter, he has taken personal credit for the construction of new plastic manufacturing facilities and derided the idea of banning single-use plastic straws. And Trump’s “drill, baby, drill” agenda could increase the extraction of fossil fuels used to make plastics.

Your votes

After decades of failed attempts to tackle the climate crisis, Congress finally passed major legislation two years ago with the Inflation Reduction Act. Not a single Republican voted for it.

Elections aren’t just important for getting the legislative power needed to enact climate policies — they’re also important for implementing them. The IRA and the bipartisan infrastructure law, another key climate-related law, are entering crucial phases for their implementation, particularly the doling out of billions of dollars for clean energy, environmental justice, and climate resiliency. Trump, having vowed to rescind unspent IRA funds if elected, seems poised to hamper the law’s rollout, slowing efforts to get the country using more clean energy.

But it’s a mistake to imagine that only federal elections matter when it comes to climate change. Eliminating greenhouse gases from energy, buildings, transportation, and food systems requires legislation at every level. In Arizona and Montana, for example, voters this year will elect utility commissioners, the powerful, yet largely ignored officials who play a crucial role in whether — and how quickly — the country moves away from fossil fuels. State legislators can also open the door to efforts to get 100 percent clean electricity, as happened in Michigan and Minnesota after the 2022 election. Even in a state like Washington with Democratic Governor Jay Inslee, who once campaigned for the White House on a climate change platform, votes matter — climate action is literally on the ballot in November, when voters could choose to kill the state’s landmark price on carbon pollution.

Depending on what happens with the presidential and congressional races, state and local action might be the best hope for furthering climate policy anyway.

Your global outlook

During his first term, Trump pulled the U.S. out of the Paris Agreement, a global commitment to reduce the burning of fossil fuels in an effort to curb the worst impacts of climate change. “I was elected to represent the citizens of Pittsburgh, not Paris,” he said from the Rose Garden of the White House in 2017. Trump didn’t entirely abandon global climate discussions; his administration continued to attend global climate conferences, where it endorsed events on fossil fuels.

The Biden administration rejoined the Paris Agreement and pledged billions of dollars to combat climate change both domestically and abroad, but a second Trump administration would likely undo this progress. Trump says that he would pull out of the Paris Agreement again, and reportedly would also consider withdrawing the U.S. from the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, a 1992 treaty that’s the basis for modern global climate talks. Harris is expected, at least, to continue Biden’s policies. Speaking from COP28 in Dubai last year, an annual United Nations climate gathering, she celebrated America’s progress in tackling the climate crisis and petitioned for much more to be done. “In order to keep our critical 1.5 degree-Celsius goal within reach,” she said, “we must have the ambition to meet this moment, to accelerate our ongoing work, increase our investments, and lead with courage and conviction.”

But both the Trump and Biden administrations achieved record oil and gas production during their time in office, and Harris opposes a ban on fracking. In order to make a dent in the climate crisis, whoever becomes president would have to reject that status quo and put serious money behind global promises to mitigate climate change. Otherwise, climate change-related losses will just continue to mount — already, they are expected to cost $580 billion globally by 2030.

The post The Climate Stakes of the Harris-Trump Election appeared first on Modern Farmer.

In the spring of 2014, I found myself sitting across from a man who was by every definition my enemy. His name was Craig Watts and he was a chicken factory farmer, raising chickens for slaughter. My career is devoted to protecting farmed animals and ending factory farming. Until that point, I’d spent my whole life working against everything Craig Watts stood for. Now I was sitting in his living room.

As I sat there, a thousand questions were swirling in my mind. I’d been trying for years to get footage from inside a chicken factory farm at a time in our country when seeing inside a chicken farm was—and still is—nearly impossible. I’d failed every previous attempt.

That day, I’d driven from my home in Atlanta to Craig’s home in rural North Carolina. Before I left, I gave my husband the address and told him, “If I don’t come back, look for me rotting away in the chicken litter.” I was convinced I was heading into an ambush, not knowing my life would soon be changed forever.

Prior to our meeting, Craig Watts had been raising chickens for twenty-two years in factory farms for Perdue, the fourth-largest chicken company in the United States. When Craig was a young adult, he had searched for a way to stay on the land that had been passed down in his family for five generations, in one of the poorest counties in North Carolina. There were very few jobs in the area, so when Perdue came to town and offered him a contract to raise chickens, it sounded like a dream come true. He took out a $200,000 loan from the bank to build the chicken houses while Perdue agreed to pay him for each flock he raised. With that money, he planned to pay off the loan, as you would a mortgage.

But soon the chickens started to get sick—it was a factory farm, after all. Twenty-five thousand chickens were stuffed wall-to-wall in darkened warehouses, living on their own feces, breathing air thick with toxic ammonia. Many of the sick chickens died, and you don’t get paid for dead chickens. Craig started to struggle to pay off his loan. His paychecks got smaller, but the bills kept coming. Soon he wanted out, but he’d been trapped. Now he was all but an indentured servant, and if he stopped, he’d risk losing everything.

By the time he and I met, Craig had reached a breaking point. His payments seemed never-ending, and so did the illness, death, and despair of the chickens. He was ready for a change. Through late afternoon conversations, and much soul-searching, I realized that I had overlooked an ally. I learned that chicken factory farmers wanted to see factory farming change about as much as animal rights activists did. We had been over-looking each other all these years.

Throughout the summer of 2014, I came back many times with my filmmaker partner Raegan Hodge to learn from Craig. I walked those warehouses as Craig explained the problems, as he picked up the chickens who had died or had to be killed because they had messed-up legs, trouble breathing, difficulty walking. All of these horrors, all of our conversations, were captured on film.

In the winter of 2014, after months of filming and learning to trust each other, Craig and I did something neither of us expected to do. We decided to release the footage together. This was a huge risk. He feared losing his income, his land, and having his neighbors hate him. But he did it anyway. The New York Times broke the story. Within twenty-four hours, a million people had seen our video about the horrors of chicken factory farming. Our story went viral. Suddenly, we had a megaphone. Our unlikely alliance put the truth about factory farming on a global platform.

Too often we become so entrenched in our values, in our fight, that we don’t stop to consider what we might have in common with the so-called opposition. We jump straight to the differences. And it is often the tyranny of small differences that holds progress hostage. Craig was the very first chicken factory farmer I ever connected with, but there would be many more.

In the United States, we still hold close an image of a quaint, independent family farm. But what actually exists is industrial animal agriculture, a system that does more harm than good. If you cross the country, no matter what state you are in, you’ll find a similar story. There is a person in a poor rural county who is searching for a way to stay on the land that had been passed down in their family for generations, searching for a way to make their living off the land and live out their version of the American dream, one in tune with nature and set to the soundtrack of crickets, cicadas, warblers, and chickadees. With few jobs around, the chicken industry’s offer sounds like a dream come true. This farmer often ends up just like Craig.

Meeting Craig would change my trajectory as an activist. We’d become close friends, collaborators, and conspirators in the decade that followed, working to dismantle factory farming piece by piece. We’d see that we’d been fooled. As Craig said: “We were red ants and black ants trapped in a jar. And then someone would shake the jar and we’d start fighting each other. But we’d never stop to question—who’s shaking the jar?” And I’d ask, “Why are we trapped in this jar?” The years ahead, we’d look to smash the jar and remove the shaker’s power. We’d look to reform our food system away from industrial animal agriculture and remove the power of Big Animal Agriculture—the great monopolies with strongholds over our political and economic systems.

When it comes to the meat, dairy, and eggs we eat, the price at the grocery store or restaurant is never a fair reflection of the true cost. In factory farming, risks and liability are mostly externalized by the industry, and most often to the most vulnerable among us. This damage, this harm, is borne by many—from the workers to the animals to the farmers. The industry makes extraordinary profits off this harm by externalizing risk and liability. Externalities are the root of the business model, and they’ve driven the spectacular success, power, and wealth of this industry. But because these costs are hidden from those who purchase the products, consumers don’t affirmatively consent to the harm caused by eating animals and their products.

The workforce in slaughterhouses, the communities living around factory farming, and, in recent years, refugee communities who’ve been brought in as the next generation of farming communities are some of the most affected. These vulnerable communities lack political and social capital, and they have few choices and little ability to fight against the harm that factory farming imposes upon them. 

In slaughterhouses, some immigrant workers have documentation and some don’t, but regardless of their situation, if they complain they take risks. When people die on the job, the federal agencies don’t respond 85 percent of the time, according to Civil Eats. Agricultural work is some of the most dangerous work in the country, ranking third among all occupations in fatal injuries together with forestry, fishing, and hunting. According to Civil Eats, animal confinement workers are subject to long-term lung and acute respiratory injuries from their work environments and are exposed to asphyxiating gases from manure.

Black communities in the South, many of whom are descendants of enslaved people, are also disproportionately affected by factory farms. Maps of North Carolina clearly show higher clusters of factory farms surrounding historically Black and low-income rural communities. Studies indicate that in some communities in North Carolina, for example, there are ten times more concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) in low-income and Black and Brown neighborhoods than in higher-income, whiter areas. This is a clear example of environmental racism, a form of institutional racism where environmental hazards and harms are disproportionately distributed in and around communities of color. Where once these communities enjoyed the land that meant so much to their families’ freedom and history, that enjoyment is now ruined. Now they are surrounded by hog and chicken farms, unable to even leave their homes without suffering the smells, flies, and even spray from the farm’s waste.

As the pool of people willing to take on the perils of working in factory farms and slaughterhouses diminishes, the industry has begun to recruit a new, unsuspecting crop of factory farmers: refugees fleeing persecution in war-torn countries. From Burma to Cambodia to Laos, families looking for opportunity and escape come to the US and take on factory farming, only to find themselves trapped and unexpectedly in danger again.

Though farmers, workers, and animals have been suffering for decades, the system responsible for their collective oppression was thrust into the public eye during the pandemic. The attention it received was unprecedented, as was the desire for change.

Transfarmation

During this time of great loss and uncertainty, the people closest to factory farming—farmers, slaughterhouse workers, and communities living next to factory farms—who had already begun to build a new way, accelerated their efforts. They were tired of feeling vulnerable to the fragility and oppression of factory farming.

In late 2019, Mercy For Animals, the organization I lead, launched a new project. We called it the “Transfarmation Project,” and it aimed to be a platform where we could support farmers wanting to make the transition from animal agriculture to plants. It built on the work Craig and I started all those years earlier. But it ended up being so much more. In the years that followed, I would continue my curious journey through rural America, meeting farmers and together rolling up our sleeves to set out a road map for a new rural economy—everything from hemp to mushrooms to lettuce and whatever other innovations we could dream up.

This book is about more than individual farmers going through a career transition. It is about how we transition away entirely from factory farming. Many times, when people are tackling systemic challenges, they write about either the problem or the solution. But a gulf is left in the middle—the complexity of how. This book peers deeply into that gulf, at the transitional moment, and shows how it might be done, through the experience of those who are already doing it. It is told in three parts from the perspective of those closest to factory farming: farmers, the animals, and vulnerable communities working in or near factory farms or slaughterhouses.

This book is about smashing the jar and changing the common narrative that this food and farming system is serving us well. It is about rebuilding our food systems so that we are not trapped in a container, controlled by a monopoly causing us harm. Instead, we are in a collaborative, community-built network that honors all animals and nature, unlocks our highest potential, and empowers everyone to thrive.

The post Transfarmation: The Movement to Free Us From Factory Farming appeared first on Modern Farmer.