Civil Eats

Trump Budget Request Cuts Nearly $5 Billion From USDA

Rebekah Alvey — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 20:27:46 +0000

April 3, 2026 – The White House has proposed a 19 percent cut in the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) budget for the upcoming fiscal year, with an increase in spending for the agency’s reorganization efforts.

President Donald Trump sent his fiscal year 2027 budget request to Congress on Friday. In theory, the request will serve as the basis for Congressional appropriations. But during last year’s process, Congress broke with the White House in several areas, including agriculture conservation funding.

Friday’s request calls USDA a “bloated” bureaucracy with programs that are “irrelevant to supporting an America First agricultural policy.” In total, it requests $20.8 billion in discretionary budget authority for 2027, a $4.9 billion decrease from the 2026 congressionally enacted levels.

The biggest investment in the USDA included in the request is $50 million for the agency’s reorganization plan. A key part of the plan involves moving USDA employees out of Washington, D.C., to regional hubs across the country. While the administration argues this will better reach rural communities and farmers, much of the feedback to the plan has focused on concerns it will result in further staffing cuts.

Many of the programs suggested for cuts were also included in last year’s budget request. The latest proposal suggests cutting $240 million from the McGovern-Dole Food for Education Program, a foreign aid program. Under the State Department section of the budget request, it asks for $1.2 billion in cuts to Food for Peace, another foreign food aid program.

Members of Congress from farm country have fought to preserve funding for these programs, which provide a market for excess commodities.

The budget request also includes $510 million in cuts to the National Institute of Food and Agriculture Formula Grants, $82 million from the Rural Business Service, and $659 million from Community Facilities Grant Earmarks.

The White House budget asks Congress to cut funding for the Agricultural Marketing Service (AMS) by $61 million, which houses the National Organic Program and other initiatives to boost markets for commodities and specialty crops.

The request says the agriculture industry can support its own marketing “without deepening the Federal deficit” and suggests the industry use check-off programs, or commodity-specific marketing and research programs, rather than taxpayer dollars.

The budget request also includes investments in Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) priorities. Under the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), the White House asks for $19 million to expand access to nutrition services at “Health Centers” through healthy food and nutrition education. It also includes $57 million to remove “unsafe chemicals” in the food supply, among other investments in the Food and Drug Administration’s regulatory capability.

Under the request, the Environmental Protection Agency would lose $4.6 billion from last year’s level, a 52 percent decrease. (Link to this post.)

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EPA and HHS Announce New Efforts to Target Microplastics

Lisa Held — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 16:34:12 +0000

April 3, 2026 – Leaders of federal agencies on Thursday announced two actions they say are aimed at protecting Americans from the potential dangers of microplastics.

Microplastics are widespread in water and in farm soils, where they can alter soil biology and be taken up by plants. They have been found in fruits and vegetables, seafood, honey, beer, and other foods. The food system is also a source of contamination: Farms use plastic that can shed the particles, and food and beverage companies are a leading source of plastic pollution.

The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has now launched a $144 million research program—called STOMP: Systematic Targeting Of Microplastics—which will be run out of its Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H).

“Americans deserve clear answers about how microplastics in their bodies affect their health, HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said in a press release. “Through ARPA-H’s STOMP program, we will measure microplastic exposure, identify sources of risk, and develop targeted solutions to reduce it.”

Scientists and public health advocates have been calling for more research into microplastics and human health, since the science is new and the compounds are already ubiquitous in human bodies.

Meanwhile, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) added microplastics to a draft of the Contaminant Candidate List 6 (CCL), EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin announced. That would put microplastics on a list of contaminants that are not currently regulated in drinking water.

Judith Enck, the president of Beyond Plastics, called the move an “important first step.” “I applaud this decision by the EPA and urge the agency to move rapidly to not only regulate microplastics in drinking water but to also prevent microplastics from entering our water supplies,” she said in a statement.

But other experts say the listing is unlikely to lead to regulations. In March, the EPA decided not to set regulations for nine chemicals already on the list, including the insecticides tribufos and ethoprop, which are part of a highly toxic class of pesticides called organophosphates.

And over the past year, the agency has repeatedly asserted its commitment to deregulation, rolling back rules that limited other pollutants in water, including forever chemicals, waste from meatpacking plants, and mercury emissions from coal-fired power plants. (Link to this post.)

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USDA Pauses Rural Energy Grants Amid Anti-Renewables Push

Rebekah Alvey — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 20:23:18 +0000

April 2, 2026 – The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) has paused processing applications for a popular rural energy program, further delaying funds to farmers as high energy costs vex rural communities.

On Tuesday, the USDA’s Rural Business Cooperative Service released a stakeholder announcement that it will pause Rural Energy for America Program (REAP) awards until it updates regulations. The rule is being rewritten to comply with an executive order targeting wind and solar energy subsidies, which President Donald Trump signed in July 2025.

REAP has been a popular and largely bipartisan program that helps farmers lower energy costs. It provides grants and loans to farmers and small businesses in rural communities to install energy-efficient technologies, including solar and wind.

Since its creation more than 20 years ago, REAP has allowed for investments in over 22,000 renewable energy projects, according to a 2023 report by the Environmental Law and Policy Center (ELPC)—representing more than $10 billion in private investment in rural economies.

The pause in REAP processing comes as farmers and businesses struggle with rising energy costs, Matt Ohloff, an ELPC policy advocate, said in a statement.

“Failing to implement this program is only creating more hardship and uncertainty for farmers and rural small businesses,” he said.

Once the regulations are updated, the USDA intends to issue a new notice for funding opportunities, for which farmers must reapply. Until then, any applications are now on pause, the agency said.

There is no immediate timeline for updating the regulations, a USDA spokesperson said in an email.

“Bringing regulations in line with the Trump Administration’s priorities to end market-distorting subsidies for unreliable, foreign controlled energy sources is a top priority for the USDA,” the spokesperson said.

The agency did not respond to a question about how the executive order may alter projects or technologies used in REAP. The executive order mentions ending subsidies for solar energy, but it’s unclear how the new regulations could limit REAP grants for solar installations or other technologies.

The administration has taken other efforts to limit solar energy developments on farmland through REAP. The USDA paused REAP funding in 2025 and only partially reopened the program, after instituting other program limits. But it has not returned to the level of operations prior to 2025, according to the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition.

Representative Chellie Pingree (D-Maine), who sits on the House Agriculture Appropriations Subcommittee, told Civil Eats that the number of applications awaiting processing is unknown. Farmers go through a lot of work to apply for these grants, given the amount of data and information needed to show compliance, so forcing farmers to reapply already is “cruelty,” she said.

“This is just one more blow to especially small- to medium-sized farmers, who are having a tough time making a living right now,” Pingree said. “You’ve got the increased cost of diesel fuel, fertilizer, tariffs on their equipment. The least USDA could be doing is helping them out, not harming their businesses.”

The appropriations process will begin soon, allowing lawmakers to question USDA leadership about this move, she added. (Link to this post.)

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USDA Payments for Organic Farmers Delayed

Lisa Held — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 20:28:21 +0000

April 1, 2026 – The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) has yet to initiate the 2025 application and payment process for funds authorized by Congress to help farmers afford organic certification.

Three months into 2026, the agency has not indicated when those funds might be made available. Due to rising costs of both certification and other farm necessities, it will likely result in fewer farmers pursuing certification, said Kate Mendenhall, executive director of the Organic Farmers Association.

“It’s the small farms where it really makes a financial impact,” said Mendenhall, who is an Iowa livestock farmer. “I would anticipate that farms might hold off on certifying for a few years, and we’ll probably lose some smaller farms.”

Data from the Organic Trade Association (OTA) shows an increase in organic food sales, up to more than $70 billion in 2025. But that increase is primarily from imported food. Other data points to a decrease between 2021 and 2023 in the number of U.S. acres certified organic, with many existing organic farms going out of business or dropping certification.

The USDA’s cost-share program—which pays for up to 75 percent of fees up to $750 per scope–is a very small chunk of money per farm, but advocates say it’s meaningful.

“It is clear that, despite the popularity of organic agriculture in New York State, organic producers need continued support to meet increasing consumer demand,” Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (D-New York) said in a March 19 letter to Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins. “As farmers across the country struggle with rising costs and lower margins, every dollar is critical.”

In her letter, Gillibrand called on the USDA to release both 2025 and 2026 organic cost-share funds. The USDA did not respond to Civil Eats’ requests for more information and comment.

The funds were initially delayed because the program was not included in earlier extensions of the farm bill, said Tom Chapman, co-CEO of OTA, but Congress remedied that in the One Big Beautiful Bill, passed in July.

In several meetings since, Chapman said, staff at the Farm Services Agency (FSA), the office that administers the program, have said the funding will be released but that the priority is currently on larger payments—specifically from the $13 million Farmer Bridge Assistance Program, which is primarily for commodity crop farmers.

Former USDA officials say FSA has long struggled with its workload, especially when new programs are introduced. In 2025, the agency lost more than 1,200 employees.

Mendenhall said there may also be gaps in communication: In the fall, she submitted organic cost-share paperwork to her local FSA office. A few weeks later, the worker in her local office told her she hadn’t realized the office had not received authorization to submit the applications.

Chapman said he’s confident that FSA is working on it and he doesn’t get the sense that the agency is deprioritizing organic farmers, but “we would love to see the FSA, working at full staff capacity, able to act on these programs with gusto so they support our sector,” he said.

In the meantime, Mendenhall is worried about the ripple effects: She just found out that because fewer organic farmers have been going to her meat processor, the processor dropped its certification, meaning she won’t be able to label her meat as USDA Certified Organic if she sticks with them. “It has greater implications across the supply chain when stuff like this happens,” she said. (Link to this post.)

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A Mobile Clinic Delivers Critical Care for Texas Shrimpers

Elizabeth Myong — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 08:00:27 +0000

Photographs by Joseph Bui

• Texas is a major producer of shrimp in the U.S., thanks in large part to Vietnamese immigrant fishermen.
• Fishing—and shrimping in particular—is very dangerous work, with a fatality rate 40 times the national average. The Trump administration has deregulated the industry and cut safety funding, creating an even more dangerous environment.
•Meanwhile, this community has long lacked access to medical care.
• The Docside Clinic, which started in 2021 and operates monthly, provides primary medical care, food, clothing, and social and legal services at no charge.
• Clinic practitioners are planning to expand to other locations in Texas, Louisiana, and Puerto Rico.

It’s a cool February morning in Galveston, Texas. Seagulls circle overhead, and dozens of docked shrimping boats bob in the water. Next to a wooden pier, nurse Martha Díaz crouches down to examine open sores on a shrimper’s heel.

He carefully rolls the cuff of his jeans to his knee and raises his foot so she can see it more clearly. Through a medical student translating her English to Vietnamese, Díaz asks about the cluster of yellow and pinkish-red sores and his history of diabetes as she wipes his foot with gauze and a cleansing solution.

The shrimper is one of a handful of men who’ve come out for UTHealth Houston School of Public Health’s Docside Clinic, monthly pop-up events where local commercial shrimp fishermen—many of them Vietnamese immigrants—can get primary medical care, food, clothing, and social and legal services at no charge. The clinics connect shrimpers to care they would not be able to otherwise access, given many are uninsured, unhoused, and have limited English proficiency and varying immigration statuses.

Traumatic work-related injuries make commercial fishing one of the most dangerous occupations in the U.S.

“It felt like it was a population that was quite literally invisible,” said Shannon Guillot-Wright, an associate professor in the department of environmental and occupational health sciences at the school. She launched the clinics in 2021 with a one-off event to research how to reduce “slips, trips and falls,” but after the shrimpers revealed deeper health disparities, the clinics turned into a monthly commitment.

“When we went out there, everyone basically was like, ‘You’ve got the wrong story,’” Guillot-Wright said. “Many of them would talk about, ‘I haven’t had access to a physician in 10 years. I don’t have access to food; I don’t have access to housing.’” Guillot-Wright changed her approach from specifically focusing on traumatic injuries to seeing them as part of a much bigger picture, one that centered on the fishermen’s basic needs.

Now, patrons gather for a few hours each month under a pop-up canopy to seek care—for everything from work-related injuries to chronic conditions like diabetes and hypertension—from a nurse, two community health workers, a volunteer lawyer, a handful of medical and MPH students, and researcher Guillot-Wright.

Shannon Guillot-Wright, an associate professor in environmental and occupational health sciences at UTHealth Houston. Guillot-Wright launched the Docside Clinics in 2020. (Photo credit: Joseph Bui)

Traumatic work-related injuries make commercial fishing one of the most dangerous occupations in the U.S., with a fatality rate over 40 times the national average, according to the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH). Out in the open water, fishermen labor for long hours in all kinds of weather as they handle heavy equipment and pull in catches on wet surfaces, which can lead to falls overboard, slips, and severe injuries from machinery. On the docks, fishermen can fall or be struck by fishing gear at boatyards.

Shrimping has proven to be particularly dangerous. Compared with other commercial fishing fleets in the Gulf of Mexico, the shrimping fleet experienced the highest number of fatalities—about half the region’s total—from 2010 to 2014, according to a NIOSH report.

Despite this, the Trump administration has been working to deregulate commercial fishing and cut safety funding and resources for fishermen, creating an even more dangerous work environment—and making the work of the clinic even more vital. Additionally, healthcare costs are skyrocketing; Affordable Care Act (ACA) marketplace premiums are expected to more than double on average this year after Congress failed to extend the ACA’s enhanced premium tax credit.

Amidst this increased instability and need, the Docside Clinic is trying to fill the gap for fishermen who often risk their lives to put food on tables across the U.S. The clinic continues to care for its patrons while also figuring out how to ensure its long-term financial stability and expand the model to fishing communities elsewhere in the country.

The clinic pops up on the docks once a month. (Photo credit: Joseph Bui)

Establishing Care for a Marginalized Community

Since the 1950s, Texas has had one of the top-producing shrimping industries in the country, with catches of white, brown, and pink shrimp. However, in recent years, the industry has steeply declined due to a drop in prices spurred by imported shrimp, high gas prices, and other disruptions, including the COVID-19 pandemic.

Vietnamese fishermen arrived in Texas following the Vietnam War, in the 1970s and 80s, when many people fled Vietnam as refugees. They settled in Galveston and the Texas Gulf Coast, where they could use their fishing skills in a coastal environment similar to that of their home country. Many came with their families, establishing close-knit communities of Vietnamese immigrants here.

They faced intense discrimination from white fishermen, however. In 1981, after the Ku Klux Klan intimidated and harassed them by holding rallies, burning a boat, and hanging an effigy of a Vietnamese fisherman, the Vietnamese Fishermen’s Association successfully filed a lawsuit against the hate group that stopped their intimidation and dismantled their paramilitary militia.

Today, many of the shrimpers are Vietnamese men in their 60s accustomed to the grueling labor of shrimping. They are used to being at sea for four to six weeks at a time, trawling the water with thick green shrimping nets and hauling in 75-pound loads of shrimp—and only sporadically returning to shore.

Before the shrimpers had access to the clinic, many avoided seeking medical care. Guillot-Wright said her research revealed most deckhands reported that they hadn’t seen a primary healthcare provider for years—even decades—due to many barriers, such as the length of time they spent at sea, their tendency to lose important documents in the water or from boat accidents, and financial and language barriers.

A shrimper drags his nets down the dock, flanked by shrimp boats. (Photo credit: Joseph Bui)

To cope with aches and pains, fishermen are also especially prone to self-medicating with alcohol, cigarettes, and substances. Across the fishing industry, substance abuse—including a surge in opioid addiction—is a widely known issue that is intertwined with the high rate of fatal injuries.

One shrimper, who has been in the industry for 40 years, has become accustomed to hearing about and experiencing accidents. He describes his work with a dismissive wave: “No, no—it’s easy.” Yet the broken pinky finger of his leathery, tanned left hand juts out at a 90-degree angle from an accident years ago. While he initially went to the hospital, he missed followup appointments, so his finger didn’t heal properly. He also recalls slipping on the deck and hurting his ribcage, which he didn’t seek medical care for.

Still, he’s used to hearing about far worse. Offhandedly, he mentions a fatal accident that once happened on a nearby boat, when a cable came loose and hit a fisherman. “Somebody there, he [died] in the boat,” he said, pointing into the distance.

That’s why the Docside Clinic is so vital: It makes it easier for fishermen to address injuries and health issues they would otherwise be prone to brush off. “This is definitely a good opportunity to make sure that we’re trying to meet people where they are,” said Díaz, who’s worked at the clinics for over four years.

Kait Guild is the assistant director of Harvard Medical School’s Mobile Health Map, a network of mobile health clinics focused on health equity. She said the flexibility of mobile health can help rebuild trust with people the traditional healthcare system hasn’t been able to reach. “It’s providing care in accessible spaces, places where underserved and marginalized community members and patients of all backgrounds feel safe,” she said.

Sisters CucHuyen “Cecile” Roberts (left) and CucHoa Trieu, community health workers and translators at the clinic. (Photo credit: Joseph Bui)

Respecting Culture, Building Trust

The February clinic fell within Tết, the Vietnamese Lunar New Year, and the clinicians celebrated with a special themed clinic. While the fishermen take turns consulting with nurse Díaz, shrimpers lounge on camping chairs, chatting in Vietnamese as they munch on chả giò, fried eggrolls. Many hold lì xì, red envelopes stuffed with lucky $2 bills, given to them by the clinic team.

Though the dock is an unconventional spot for a health clinic, it’s where the fishermen feel most at home. Their presence permeates the space, from a note written in Vietnamese taped to a door window to a white marble Buddhist statue looking out on the water.

Given the long history of discrimination they have experienced, many of Galveston’s Vietnamese fishermen are wary of strangers, including reporters, and building trust can be complicated.

CucHuyen “Cecile” Roberts and her sister Cuc Hoa Trieu, who migrated from Vietnam to the U.S. in 1986, have worked for more than 20 years as community health workers and translators in Houston, which has the third-largest Vietnamese population in the U.S. The sisters have been pivotal in building trust with the shrimpers since the clinics launched over four years ago.

Their shared heritage with the shrimpers helps them understand the cultural stigma other health workers might miss, like the fishermen’s difficulty asking for help. “That’s culture because it’s embarrassing, it’s shameful, to say you need something. Like, ‘Oh you can’t take care of yourself,’ ” Roberts explains.

At just 4 feet 11 inches, Roberts is a ball of energy, with a magnetism that has helped her become one of the fishermen’s closest confidantes. During the February clinic, she boisterously greets a shrimper while waving him over to come closer. “I hug them. I don’t care if they’re dirty or stinky or whatever,” she said. Gesturing to images on her phone, she said, “You see we take pictures [with them] and stuff like that. Make them very welcome. Make them happy.”

Roberts said she knows how to speak with the fishermen because it’s like talking to people back home in Vietnam. “I know how to make them feel comfortable, because I’m like one of them,” she said.

While it took her and Trieu years to gain their trust, the fishermen now tell them nearly everything—and they reciprocate by picking up the phone and offering help at a moment’s notice. During a previous year’s winter freeze, for instance, Roberts helped the fishermen get blankets after they called in the middle of the night to say they were cold. “They trust us now because they know that we’re here to help them, not to hurt them,” she said.

In the last year or so, they’ve even been able to convince a few of the shrimpers to accept care at a traditional hospital. Roberts sees it as a stride forward: “These guys, they don’t go to the hospital—even [if their] skull splits open, they won’t go!”

Last year, the team noticed over many months that a fisherman in his 60s was in declining health, sweating during cold weather and experiencing high blood pressure. The Docside Clinic, along with its partners, helped the fisherman access medication and housing.

A small grant program at the free health clinic St. Vincent’s Hope Clinic, which covers the cost of Uber rides to and from the hospital, has made it even more possible for fishermen without cars to seek care if the Docside Clinic team notices they’re at risk.

At the February clinic, Díaz advises a fisherman whose blood pressure is abnormally high to get checked out at the hospital. Around 6:30 p.m., hours after the clinic ended, the sisters hop on a call to translate for the fisherman as he tries to arrange an Uber ride.

For Guillot-Wright, it’s been rewarding to see the fishermen access followup care or testing because of their familiarity with the clinics. “That continuity of care exists in a totally different way than it would have if we hadn’t just come out to the docks, plopped down our Academy chairs, and just started meeting people where they are,” she said.

A shrimper rests for a moment on the docks. (Photo credit: Joseph Bui)

The Quest for Long-Term Sustainability

Currently, about half of the clinic’s funding comes from NIOSH, which has faced policy whiplash over the last year. In April 2025, the Trump administration made extensive budget and staffing cuts to the federal agency only for all the fired employees to be reinstated earlier this year after public outcry.

While there was some back and forth with NIOSH, Guillot-Wright said, so far they’ve been able to keep their funding for the Docside Clinic. Still, she’s looking to grow their funding sources to ensure the viability of the Galveston location, as well as maintain a second Texas location in Port Arthur and expand to Louisiana and Puerto Rico.

“We’ve started to diversify and work with foundations, state funding, and think about other sustainable ways that we can keep the work going,” she said.

One way Guillot-Wright has tried to sustain the clinics is by partnering with local nonprofits, as evidenced by a table of free supplies available to the fishermen: cans of sliced pears and tomatoes from the local food bank, packets of Tylenol and Ibuprofen, portable ice packs, hygiene kits—even some mini Old Spice deodorants from the local Seafarers Center.

The clinic has also partnered with lawyer Bill Rankin, who’s provided the fishermen with free legal services for the last two years. One shrimper, through a Vietnamese translator, spoke with Rankin at the February clinic about how to apply for a new green card after losing his.

The card is vital for the fisherman to remain safely in the U.S., and he needs it to return home to Vietnam, which he hasn’t done since leaving in 1977. As he talks about visiting the graves of his parents and grandmother and reuniting with his younger sister, his eyes moisten slightly and his face flushes a soft red. “I [want to] come back to my country,” he said in English.

“We don’t always do the work of thinking about where our food comes from, and I think doing that work as consumers goes a really long way.”

Because of the transient nature of the shrimpers’ lives, Rankin explains documents often go missing, falling overboard or getting lost as shrimpers move from place to place. “They’re here legally generally,” he said of the fishermen, “but they might have, in the course of their employment, lost a particular kind of documentation that they need to get a copy of, or they’re looking to take the next step from being a legal resident to a citizen.”

Given the current political climate in the U.S. and surge of deportations, Rankin worries for the shrimpers. Even for immigrants who are legal residents applying for citizenship or passports, he said “the risk level has increased.”

Ultimately, Guillot-Wright said she sees the clinics as an effort to care for the people who feed us but are often forgotten. “We don’t always do the work of thinking about where our food comes from,” she said, “and I think doing that work as consumers goes a really long way.”

At the clinic, nurse Martha Díaz carefully finishes wrapping the fisherman’s foot to cover his sores. “It may be better to clean your whole entire foot, not just the wound, every day because bacteria can get stuck on your skin,” she explains.

After an interpreter translates Díaz’s instructions, the fisherman nods in understanding—he can clean his foot daily. He rests his newly bandaged foot on the concrete floor as Díaz pulls off her latex gloves and starts to gather the supplies he’ll need when miles out at sea. Perhaps next month, he’ll be back.

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Trump Administration Tells Hospitals to Align With New Nutrition Guidelines

Rebekah Alvey — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 19:10:53 +0000

March 31, 2026 — The Trump administration is pushing hospitals to align patient meals with the latest Dietary Guidelines by phasing out ultra-processed food and high-sugar foods in favor of fruits, vegetables, and minimally processed proteins.

On Monday, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) sent a memo to hospitals requesting they adjust meals with the updated Dietary Guidelines for Americans (DGA).

The memo urges hospitals to limit ultra-processed foods, sugar-sweetened beverages, refined grains, processed meats, and foods high in added sugars, sodium, and artificial additives.

Instead, hospital meals should prioritize minimally processed protein, vegetables, fruits, legumes, healthy fats, and whole grains. Some of the recommended meals include grilled salmon with quinoa and roasted vegetables or steel-cut oats with berries and nuts.

This is one of the first concrete steps the administration has taken to implement the updated DGAs, a key priority of the food wing of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement. The administration is in the rulemaking process to update nutrition standards for school meals to align with the guidelines, as well.

Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and CMS Administrator Mehmet Oz announced the memo at a roundtable in Florida. The event was hosted by America First Policy Institute, a conservative think tank co-founded by Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins. The officials also celebrated a commitment from Nicklaus Children’s Hospital to include more farm-to-hospital purchasing and boosting local procurement.

The CMS memo, technically called a Quality and Safety Special Alert, reminds hospitals that they must comply with federal conditions to receive reimbursement for Medicare. This includes ensuring patient meals are nutritious in accordance with recognized dietary practices.

Hospitals are largely reliant on federal Medicare and Medicaid dollars. The memo states hospitals must comply with the Conditions of Participation, but does not discuss any enforcement mechanisms for this change.

Over the past decade, groups like the Food Is Medicine Coalition have pushed for changes to hospital food, and many large healthcare systems have worked to improve the quality of the meals they serve.

Ahead of the changes to school meals, school nutrition experts have warned it would cost more to move away from ultra-processed foods and more scratch cooking. It’s not yet clear the potential cost impacts on hospitals, but rural hospitals already on the economic brink are also grappling with the impacts of other healthcare policy changes. (Link to this post).

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In Southeast San Diego, a Model for Creating Community Wealth Through Food

Sheila Pell — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 08:00:26 +0000

Every Wednesday morning, a refrigerated solar-powered truck arrives at the Mt. Hope Community Garden in Southeast San Diego. The driver hops out and lifts an awning on the side of the truck, revealing shelves that will soon be filled with leafy greens, beets, eggs, avocados, honey, and even specialty fruits like kumquats.

Since 2022, this truck, the People’s Produce Mobile Farmers Market, has sold affordable fresh fruits and vegetables to local residents, helping many stretch their Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits. With its rotating weekday schedule of stops, the truck can serve a wide swath of neighborhoods in need.

“The first time I entered Mt. Hope community garden was due to food insecurity,” says resident Lucia Davis, who heard about it from a family member. Now she shops at the produce truck weekly. She has also joined a neighborhood growers’ network that donates food raised in backyards to the truck and to the Golden Groceries program, a CSA subscription. The community garden, produce truck, grower’s collective, and CSA all stem from the same place: a multifaceted nonprofit called Project New Village.

The organization has been working to reshape the local foodscape since launching its community garden in 2011 on land initially leased from the city.

“In the neighborhoods of southeastern San Diego, there are many fast-food and junk-food establishments, but very few healthy food outlets,” says Project New Village co-founder Diane Moss.

The organization, funded mainly through private donations, has been working to reshape the local foodscape since launching its community garden in 2011 on land initially leased from the city. In its mission to improve the health and well-being of the residents of Southeast San Diego, Project New Village has evolved into a full-fledged food justice organization. It’s also part of an emerging model called Equitable Food Oriented Development (EFOD), which uses food as an engine to build community wealth.

Now, plans are underway to expand this project with a $10 million food hub called The Village, which would provide the kind of permanent food and wellness infrastructure the neighborhood has never had. The two-story development will integrate the existing community garden and also include a fresh‑food marketplace, prepared‑food vendor stalls, a commercial kitchen, and a community gathering space. Project New Village hopes to start construction later this year and open the food hub in 2027.

“[This is] real community ownership of a physical space and economic resource that contributes to long‑term wealth and resilience at the neighborhood level,” Moss says.

The People’s Produce Mobile Farmers Market sells locally grown produce at the Vision Culture Foundation farmers’ market in National City, near San Diego. (Photo credit: Vito Di Stefano)

From Garden to Food Hub

Twelve African American–led organizations, including SD Black Psychologists Association and Jackie Robinson YMCA, founded Project New Village in 1994 as a response to neighborhood concerns like youth violence and family fragmentation. By 2008, their social‑justice lens expanded to food access and health.

“At that time there were no farmers’ markets, farmstands, or community gardens [in Southeast San Diego],” Moss says.

Outdated zoning made urban gardening difficult in Southeast San Diego, despite plentiful vacant lots and interest from the community. In 2011, Project New Village secured approval to start the Mt. Hope Community Garden on a third of an acre, leased from the city. Its 40 beds flourished, becoming an inspiration for civic change: In 2012, San Diego’s Development Services Department instituted urban agriculture reforms to make small-scale farming more feasible, relaxing rules for raising livestock, starting and operating community gardens, and selling produce grown on-site.

The mobile market “is beginning to address food apartheid to promote health equity.”

However, those reforms didn’t protect the garden when its lease ended in 2019, and the city put its land up for sale to align with evolving state laws to address the housing crisis. The Mt. Hope parcel was legally classified as surplus property, not a community asset, which the reforms would have safeguarded. The group managed to secure a loan from the nonprofit Conservation Fund in the nick of time, and outbid developers.

Owning the garden brought stability and fueled new initiatives. The group purchased the produce truck with state and private funds. U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) grants supported farmers’ market promotion, and a 2023 Alliance Healthcare Foundation grant contributed $2 million toward building a market—a cornerstone of the planned food hub.

In 2024, San Diego State University researchers who evaluated how these efforts were impacting food security noted that the produce truck “is beginning to address food apartheid to promote health equity.”

An Underserved Community

Project New Village’s work is increasingly urgent. Food insecurity affects 26 percent of San Diego County residents, comparable to pandemic levels. In Southeast San Diego, where Project New Village operates, the numbers are higher because the poverty rate is up to three times the county average. This area also has the county’s highest enrollment for CalFresh, California’s version of SNAP.

Many people in this majority Black and Latinx area live more than a mile from a supermarket, and most small stores lack fresh produce and healthy food. But don’t call Southeast San Diego a food desert. The term “food apartheid” more precisely captures what’s missing: land ownership and capital.

San Diego County has the nation’s highest concentration of farms, with more than 5,000 operations, 69 percent of which are small—between 1 and 9 acres—and located mostly in the unincorporated inland and northern parts of the county. It is a top producer of nursery products, floriculture, and avocados.

Things look much different in Southeast San Diego. In the early 20th century, racially restrictive covenants concentrated non‑white residents in Southeast San Diego, and redlining denied them federal mortgage loans to buy land and build wealth. Many families once farmed small plots, but as suburbs grew and land values rose, the foodscape hollowed out, a casualty of development.

Now, federal cuts under the 2025 One Big Beautiful Bill have deepened nutrition insecurity, slashing programs like SNAP, which had contributed most of the food aid in San Diego (for every meal provided by the Feeding America charitable network, SNAP supplied nine). The cuts total roughly $300 million per year for San Diego nonprofits and safety‑net programs, putting 100,000 San Diegans at risk of losing food assistance.

To help offset the cuts, private funders led by the San Diego Foundation awarded more than $2.5 million to programs that provide resources such as medically tailored meals and weekend food kits. Project New Village was able to use $250,000 of this aid for operating its mobile farmers’ market. The nonprofit is otherwise less dependent on federal dollars, powering through with a mix of philanthropic funders, state and city grants, and community‑based donors.

A rendering of The Village, a $10 million project that will integrate the Mt. Hope Community Garden and include a fresh‑food marketplace, prepared‑food vendor stalls, a commercial kitchen, and a community gathering space. (Credit: MW Steele Group)

The EFOD Model

The Mt. Hope Community Garden, mobile farmers’ market, backyard growers’ network, and future food hub form what Project New Village calls the Good Food District.

The nonprofit is building this community‑owned economic engine through Equitable Food Oriented Development, which focuses on reparative wealth building rather than maximizing investor profit.

The EFOD strategy was formalized in 2019 by a collaborative of nonprofits across the country that had spent decades working to give their communities a say in their food systems, with support from DAISA, an equity-focused consulting firm, and the Kresge Foundation. To date, the collaborative has funded more than 40 BIPOC‑led food and agriculture projects, including the Detroit Food Commons, a national model for community‑owned retail, and El Depa, in Puerto Rico, which advances seed sovereignty and agroecology.

San Diego has few community‑wealth models, according to the San Diego Food System Alliance (SDFSA), a sustainable food nonprofit and Project New Village partner. There are too many barriers, including zoning limits, redevelopment pressure, and sky-high land costs. Cheaper lots often lack water, accessibility, and other features that would make them suitable EFOD candidates.

“Land is the foundation,” says Sona Desai, SDFSA co‑executive director. The organization is developing the county’s first agricultural land trust to help underserved growers secure land.

Project New Village applied for and received an EFOD designation in 2021 and remains the only EFOD organization in San Diego. Membership is highly selective. While designation doesn’t guarantee funding, it opens access to capital designed for community‑owned, non‑extractive food‑system work and strengthens eligibility for other public and private dollars. EFOD is backed by philanthropic, affordable-lending, and community‑investment partners, which still includes the Kresge Foundation.

With a public market, commercial kitchen, healthy food vendors, and event space, The Village will bring the kind of amenities to Southeast San Diego that many communities take for granted.

“The Village project brings food dignity to a community lacking in neighborhood healthy food choices,” says Ami Young, a resident who shops at the produce truck and prioritizes local and organic food.

Most pre‑development milestones for The Village are complete, and the team is awaiting city approval of construction permits. EFOD funds supported early consulting work; now a capital campaign is underway to secure the remaining $4 million for construction and operations. Meanwhile, the garden, where it all began, along with the mobile farmers’ market truck and backyard growers’ network, will continue its important work.

When you ask Moss about the challenge of overcoming the funding gap, her answer is calm. Project New Village plans to pursue public and private grants and equity loans, Moss explains, while further cultivating its donor base.

“If needed, we can approach the construction in phases, and the timeline would need to be adjusted,” she says. “Ours has been a journey of small miracles, and we can see the finish line.”

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Trump Administration Boosts Biofuels in Effort to Ease Farmer Woes

Rebekah Alvey — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 17:24:39 +0000

March 30, 2026 – Amid farm economy struggles and rising gas prices, President Donald Trump announced on Friday the release of an updated biofuel policy and temporary boosts to ethanol sales.

Speaking at a White House event celebrating farmers, Trump announced a final rule raising the minimum amount of renewable fuels that must be blended into the U.S. fuel supply. Biofuels like ethanol, biodiesel, and renewable diesel are largely made with corn and soybean oil, meaning this rule could boost demand for those crops.

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) finalized the rule under the Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS). The final rule sets Renewable Volume Obligations (RVO) significantly higher than the previous amount, released under the Biden administration, and slightly higher than previously proposed levels.

Biodiesel and renewable diesel production and use is expected to increase by 60 percent with the latest RVOs in comparison to the previous limits, according to the EPA. Under the rule, fuel made with foreign feedstocks or foreign-made fuel will have less compliance value than domestic fuels starting in 2028.

In a press release, Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins said the volumes are expected to create a $3 billion to $4 billion increase in net farm income.

“At a time of significant economic pressure across agriculture, policies that strengthen domestic demand are more important than ever,” Rob Larew, president of the National Farmers Union, said in a statement. “Expanded biofuel volumes translate directly into stronger markets for our corn and soybean growers, helping support farm income and rural communities.”

Recently, the administration also announced an emergency fuel waiver allowing the sale of E15 gasoline, which is fuel blended with 15 percent ethanol, from May 1 to May 20. While commodity groups and members of Congress have pushed for more E15 sales for years, the waiver is largely aimed at preventing dramatic price hikes at the gas pump amid the war in Iran.

While proponents of E15 welcomed the waiver, they also pushed for more certainty through permanent year-round E15 sales.

“Hardworking people in this country are struggling with Trump’s cost of living crisis—from health care to groceries to energy bills to child care—and it is time that Congress put up or shut up by putting legislation for permanent year-round E15 to a vote of the full House,” Representative Angie Craig (D-Minnesota) said in a statement.

Craig is the top-ranking Democrat on the House Agriculture Committee. During the recent markup of the House farm bill, Democrats pushed to include a provision granting year-round E15 in the package, but Republicans voted down the amendment, arguing it was not under the committee’s jurisdiction.

Both actions are also the latest steps as the administration works to appeal to its agricultural base ahead of midterm elections and as farmers continue to struggle with high input costs and low prices for commodities. On top of these trends, changing trade policy has presented additional challenges for farmers.

Now farm groups are warning lawmakers and the administration of even more pressures due to the war in Iran, including its impact on fertilizer and fuel prices.

During the White House event, Trump also touted the Farmer Bridge Assistance (FBA) program, which provides $12 billion to farmers, with the bulk going to commodity producers. He also said the administration would request additional farm assistance in the next funding bill.

On top of these announcements, the White House released a website showcasing the administration’s actions related to agriculture. These include tax policy changes under the Republicans’ One Big Beautiful Bill. (Link to this post.).

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How a Tiny Farm County Fought a Data Center Complex and Won

Ben Seal — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 08:00:51 +0000

A version of this article originally appeared in The Deep Dish, our members-only newsletter. Become a member today and get the next issue directly in your inbox.

On a bright day in early February, farmers Mark Shultz and Mike Leighow drove along the ruler-straight roads of Montour County in north-central Pennsylvania. From Shultz’s new Chevy Silverado, they gazed at the snow-covered farmland with a sense of nostalgia. These fields were at the heart of a proposal to rezone more than 800 agricultural acres to make way for a data center that residents had been fighting for months. Shultz and Leighow were just two out of hundreds of opponents.

Shultz slowed the truck as they passed the area where residents expected the data center would go, just a short distance from Talen Energy’s Washingtonville natural-gas power plant.

The company aimed to partner with Amazon Web Services for a data center buildout that would kick farmers off the land they leased from Talen and further reduce the county’s dwindling farmland. Even though the rezoning hadn’t yet been approved, workers dotted the open fields, surveying them for the anticipated development.

As tech companies and developers seek to power the artificial intelligence boom by building data centers anywhere they can, farmland is increasingly in high demand. The surge is sparking backlash in places like Montour County, where the loss of farmland, spiking property values, and a suite of environmental concerns threaten to destabilize agricultural communities.

As tech companies and developers seek to power the artificial intelligence boom by building data centers anywhere they can, farmland is increasingly in high demand.

Talen had already recently sold a nuclear-powered data center to Amazon in Berwick, about 20 miles from the proposed site in Montour County, and Amazon was expanding that complex to 960 megawatts—equivalent to the annual energy consumption of nearly one-fifth of all Pennsylvania households. This was the fate Shultz, Leighow, and their neighbors feared for their community.

But just a few days later, Montour county commissioners unanimously rejected the rezoning request. Sam Burleigh, a co-founder of Concerned Citizens of Montour County, a community action group formed to fight the proposal, called it a “David and Goliath” moment.

As data centers proliferate, the response in Montour County shows what it might take to stem the tide. Commissioner Rebecca Dressler cited “extraordinary public engagement” in voting against Talen’s request, which she said failed to demonstrate a clear public benefit.

“Public participation matters,” she said, “and it has mattered here.”

An Ideal Base for Data Centers

Pennsylvania is already home to more than 50 data centers of various sizes, and at least 50 more have been proposed. Ginny Marcille-Kerslake, a senior organizer with Food & Water Watch who supported the community’s resistance in Montour County, says the state has become a hotbed because of its abundant power, water, and land—the three essentials for data center development.

Pennsylvania is the country’s third-highest producer of energy, needed in enormous quantities to power data centers. It offers the largest network of waterways in the contiguous United States, necessary for cooling down the thousands of computers inside data centers. And it boasts millions of acres of relatively flat and open agricultural land that is ideal for development, if it can be secured.

The state’s Democratic governor, Josh Shapiro, a presumed 2028 presidential candidate, has also welcomed the influx, promoting Amazon’s proposed $20 billion investment in the state by signing into law a tax break on purchases of key data center equipment.

Residents attend a Montour County Planning Commission meeting in November 2025, at which the data center proposal was discussed. (Photo credit: Sam Burleigh)

Farmers Face Disruption

For farmers in Montour County and beyond, the data-center boom threatens to shrink farmland and reduce the productivity of what remains.

Multiple sources, including Shultz and Leighow, say that if Talen had succeeded in its bid, it would have removed from agriculture additional neighboring land that it purchased contingent on getting its own land rezoned. Already, Montour County—at 132 square miles, the state’s geographically smallest county—has watched its farmland steadily disappear, losing 22 percent of its land and 28 percent of its farms between 2017 and 2022 alone. The rezoning would have exacerbated that trend.

Andy Bater, a Pennsylvania Farm Bureau board member, says the disappearance of farmland can lead to “a vicious cycle” of increased prices that push out current farmers and keep away new entrants. “That’s the dilemma that I think about all the time,” he says.

The disappearance of farmland can lead to “a vicious cycle” of increased prices that push out current farmers and keep away new entrants.

What’s more, nearby farmers would be forced to reckon with operating alongside a data center. Shultz has already gotten a taste of the risks, due to transmission lines that run to and from the Talen plant in Washingtonville, cleaving his 500 acres of corn, soy, and hay. The energy company tramples his crops to access the lines, and he worries about the effects of stray voltage. Talen has been “an unfriendly neighbor” for years, he says; residents still lament the destruction of Strawberry Ridge, a farming village that was razed to make way for the power plant decades ago.

Data centers have prompted a litany of community environmental complaints, including for their massive draw on local water supplies—a particular concern in Montour County, where the vast majority of residents and farms rely on wells.

“If we can’t get water, we can’t survive,” says Leighow, who grows 105 acres of corn and soy in Montour County on land first purchased by his grandfather in 1901.

The round-the-clock noise and light that data centers produce can also stress animals and inhibit dairy production. Their incredible need for electricity risks disruptions to the grid that Shultz and Leighow worry would affect their own needs, and it drives up electricity bills in the community overall.

The Community Stands Up

By the time Montour County residents learned about the rezoning bid last summer, many feared it was already too late. They heard about Talen’s plans not from the company, but through word of mouth as neighbors began receiving offers to buy their land at six to seven times the market rate. Residents formed the Concerned Citizens group. Through right-to-know requests, they discovered that a data center complex was the ultimate goal of the rezoning bid and quickly rallied behind an effort to quash it.

“I don’t want to be treated like a mushroom, kept in the dark and fed bullshit,” Leighow says.

In the months before the county commissioners’ vote, residents showed up by the hundreds to town halls and a public hearing on the request, carrying signs and wearing red T-shirts imploring “Say No!” to industrial rezoning. More people signed a petition against the proposal than voted in the 2024 election.

Residents were motivated to fight after witnessing what had befallen neighboring Berwick, where the community learned about the construction of the data center too late to do anything about it. “[It] lit a fire for us, seeing how they got railroaded,” Burleigh says.

The fight in Montour County is “a shining example of what a community can do and how to do it,” Marcille-Kerslake says.

The battle may not be over yet. Talen did not respond to requests for comment but has reportedly indicated it intends to continue pursuing a path forward in Montour County. People in surrounding communities are now being approached for land that could serve as an alternative location, Marcille-Kerslake says.

‘We Spoke With One Voice’

For Marcille-Kerslake, the vote in Montour County offers a reminder that opposition to data centers is most powerful at the local level. Food & Water Watch encourages municipalities across Pennsylvania to pass zoning ordinances to prevent development before it gets off the ground, particularly in agricultural areas where data centers are incompatible with farmers’ needs.

“These communities know firsthand that what they have is worth protecting. They cherish that land. They cherish their agricultural lifestyle and community, and what they are producing is the very thing that we depend on,” she says. “What this victory shows them is that it is possible to keep protecting it even when faced with these extremely wealthy and powerful corporations. They really just need to work together and use their voices at the local level.”

Burleigh has heard from communities across the country facing their own data center proposals, including groups from Texas, Oklahoma, California, and Maine, among others. Montour County’s rejected rezoning, he says, “gives a breath of hope to all the municipalities that are battling this.”

Shultz wants others to learn from what his community has accomplished. “Don’t lay down and let them roll over you,” he says.

Leighow adds: “We stood up as a community and were clear about our values. And we spoke with one voice.”

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USDA Cancels Land Access Program for Young Farmers

Lisa Held — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 16:07:59 +0000

March 25, 2026 – The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) has ended a Biden-era program designed to give the next generation of farmers a leg up, terminating $300 million in contracts.

Created with Inflation Reduction Act and American Rescue Plan funding, the Increasing Land, Capital, and Market Access (ILCMA) Program was championed by the National Young Farmers Coalition (NYFC), which has repeatedly found in national surveys that access to land and capital are two of the biggest barriers young farmers face.

In June 2023, the USDA awarded 50 organizations—including tribes, farmer associations, and universities—five-year contracts for projects dedicated to addressing those challenges. 49 of those contracts have now been terminated as of March 26, according to letters sent to the organizations.

Politico first reported the cancellations Tuesday.

“In Iowa, we’ve seen firsthand how the ILCMA program helps bridge the gap for beginning farmers who are ready to step into land ownership but face steep financial barriers,” Breanna Horsey, executive director of Sustainable Iowa Land Trust, said in a NYFC press release Wednesday. “Terminating these projects undermines the progress communities have made to keep farmland in production and in the hands of the next generation. At a time when land costs are at record highs, pulling support from locally‑led solutions is not just harmful to farmers, it’s harmful to the resilience of our rural communities.”

As directed by Congress, projects were specifically vetted and selected based on whether they would benefit farmers and ranchers who had been historically underserved or shut out of USDA programs. As a result, many of those projects aimed to help Black, Indigenous, women, and immigrant farmers.

That put the program in the crosshairs of the Trump administration, as it sought to eliminate diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) efforts. In the termination letters sent to contract holders this week, Steven Peterson, the associate administrator of the Farm Service Agency, said the awards don’t align with the agency’s goals and priorities. The programs represent “discriminatory preferences” and “wasteful spending that did little to further lawful agricultural land purchases,” he wrote.

In the NYFC release, JohnElla Holmes, CEO and president of the Kansas Black Farmers Association, said her group had six farmers waiting for down payment assistance to purchase small farms.

In response to Civil Eats’ questions, a USDA spokesperson sent a list of seven expenditures it considered inappropriate, ranging from $10,000 to $130,000.

“Under the guise of increasing land access for producers, the ILA program included no minimum requirement for direct producer support. Instead, the program permitted the abuse of federal funds, including expenditures on the purchasing of a barbeque smoker, construction of a gazebo, massages, and for one awardee, a $20,000 budget for ink pens alone,” the spokesperson said. “To no surprise, a peek behind the curtain of this Biden-era program revealed the egregious misuse of taxpayer dollars to the tune of nearly $300 million dollars.”

The $300 million, which would have been distributed over five years, is a sliver of U.S. agricultural spending. USDA economists predict that direct government payments to farms will total $44.3 billion in 2026. The vast majority of that spending is paid to large, established, commodity farms, with no limits on how money can be spent.

Organizations have the opportunity to appeal the terminations within 30 days, and some might also choose to take legal action.

One contract recipient, Agroecology Commons, is already part of a suit that alleges the USDA cannot cancel contracts that were binding agreements based on qualifications authorized by Congress. Sources told Civil Eats that organization was the one that did not receive a termination letter.

“This is a total slap in the face for farmers and will not withstand legal scrutiny,” House Agriculture Committee Ranking Member Angie Craig (D-Minnesota) said in a statement Tuesday. “The American people deserve better.” (Link to this post.)

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‘Native Foods Have Sustained People for Generations’

Jack Strong — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 08:00:51 +0000

My name is Jack Strong, and I’m a member of the Confederated Tribes of Siletz Indians. I’m the executive chef of The Allison Inn and Spa in Newberg, Oregon, and I’m a partner with the Siletz Valley culinary program at the school that I went to as a kid.

Students in the course cook from-scratch meals for the entire school (K through 12), located just outside the Siletz Reservation, in central Oregon. They also run a food truck, which is named YA-TR’EE-YAN (“a gathering of people around food” or “feast” in Dee-ni) and offers free meals to students and tribal members during the summer. They serve some recipes from my cookbook, too, with Native ingredients like venison, elk, salmon, and sablefish.

I’ve heard Native foods described as the first cuisine of the Americas and the last to be discovered. All these different Asian and European cultures are represented in the U.S., but until recently people wouldn’t even say there is a Native cuisine. Coming up, I didn’t have any Native chefs to look up. Telling that story, at the restaurant and to my students, has been something I’ve really tried to do.

I was raised on the Siletz reservation in central Oregon by my grandmother and grandfather. I enjoyed growing up in a small town. It felt safe; you knew everyone; there was no traffic. There was the forest where you could run around a little bit, and the river for fishing, and this place called the play shed, where I played basketball. You got to experience different sports because there weren’t a lot of kids—they needed everybody to make a team.

One of Strong’s signature dishes at JORY: Pan-roasted Skuna Bay King salmon with a salmon skin chip, set on sunchoke purée and quinoa and topped with cranberry relish and radish microgreens. (Photo credit: Kari Rowe)

My grandma would tell me stories about the history of our family and tribe. There was a time when we were a recognized tribe. Then, from the 1950s to the 1960s, the U.S. government eliminated federal status for tribes. We lost all federal recognition, access to land, resources, benefits. We call that the “termination” period.

What we have now in Siletz is a mere fraction of what our original land was. We moved here from our ancestral homelands, which are primarily from Southern Oregon into Northern California.

Termination was a tough time for our tribe, but they continued to fight to be recognized as a sovereign nation again and have land to create a home that would be ours for generations. Many tribal leaders made trips to Washington, D.C., to speak in front of Congress on our behalf, including my grandfather, who was on our tribal council as well as being a war veteran. In 1977, we regained federal status.

I was fortunate because as I grew up, the tribe started do more culturally important activities that we hadn’t done during termination. Our community started what we call “culture camp” that we still do every year over a weekend. They were teaching the youth things like basketry making and preparing eels to eat. My grandma would tell stories about teaching herself everything—like her amazing beadwork —and was a big part of making sure I went to that camp to learn about our culture.

“Friends and family knew there was always some kind of meal happening at the Strong house.”

My grandfather passed away when I was ten, but growing up, my grandmother was working and he was retired, so I originally started cooking for him. It was basic stuff that I learned from my grandmother—who cooked everything from scratch for us—and I learned I had a love for being in the kitchen.

I got into fishing as a young teenager. The Siletz River runs through the town and reservation, then it joins the ocean in the Siletz Bay. Growing up, I’d see salmon and steelhead trout spawning in the river.

My family was connected with seafood. My uncle was known for his smoked salmon—he would barter with smoked salmon like currency. He’d dig for clams and mussels, too. My other relatives worked in seafood processing. They would bring my grandma salmon heads. She would boil them and eat all the parts—the eyeballs, the cheeks. Later, in my first job out of culinary school, I did a lot of seafood butchery, and we would break down all of our salmon, and I’d bring the heads to her as gifts.

I’ve been asked quite a bit throughout my career about my grandma’s cooking. Her time was so much about survival. It was being taken from your homelands and away from your native foods. Growing up toward the end of that in the ‘80s, we were still on commodity foods—the flour and fats and sugars that were given to us. One of my first early times helping her in the kitchen was making noodles from scratch for chicken noodle soup.

Friends and family knew there was always some kind of meal happening at the Strong house. It was never just us eating by ourselves—it was always people coming over. I had this connection that food equates to taking care of other people, it gives you a sense of home and community.

My Culinary Influences

My first job was in high school at a fish-and-chips place in Newport, along the coast, 20 minutes away. It was a husband and wife who owned it, and they were mentors for me. He would go down to the boats on the bay front and get fresh fish, bring it back, and teach us how to fillet it.

I learned to appreciate fresh products and also the basics of hospitality, like cleanliness and multitasking, and how to interact with guests and the importance of being a strong player to support the team.

Afterwards, I enrolled in a two-year hands-on culinary program at Lane Community College in Eugene, and then at a local restaurant. That chef asked me to do a dish that might speak more to my culture.

I thought of fry bread, which was such a big part of our culture, but also came out of survival. My chef was Jewish, so I made a play off of lox and bagel with fry bread and cold-smoked cured salmon lox. That was probably the first-ever dish highlighting some part of my culture. That’s when I started to do what I do now every day.

After eight years at the restaurant, I started to get itchy. I wanted to try something else. I got an offer from the Phonecian Resort, near Phoenix, that had over 1,200 employees—more staff than people who lived in the town I came from. Arizona was the opposite of Oregon. Here, it’s beautiful and green and wet. There, it was dry and sunny every day. It was completely different from what I was used to. It was overwhelming, but I grew quickly there because I was like a sponge, absorbing everything.

I learned about the foods from the other beautiful tribes around there—the Navajo, Hopi, Gila River, Tohono O’odham. They’re all so different, and they’re all based off of place. Southwest foods include so many different chiles, beans, and corn—all Native foods. It was just so clear to see how these foods have sustained people for generations.

Students at the Siletz Valley School culinary program butchering local albacore tuna. (Photo credit: Rachelle Hacmac)

My Local Foods

After many years of working in Arizona—including at the Sheraton Grand at Wild Horse Pass, on the Gila River Reservation, and KAI, which is influenced by the food of the Akimel O’odham and Piipaash peoples—I ultimately came back to the Northwest to be close to family. Now, at The Allison in Newberg, I get to highlight Native foods in the kitchen and garden. I really love that—it’s my culture and home, and it’s nice to be able to share all the great things that come from here.

My role as a chef is about taking care of others, nourishing people. I’ve always felt like my part in this ecosystem is to support the farmers, the fishermen—to put money back into community.

If you’re getting any kind of tribal foods or just even local foods, usually they’re not really set up with infrastructure, so it takes extra effort on your part. At JORY, the fine-dining restaurant at The Allison, we use a lot of local.

“I’ve always felt like my part in this ecosystem is to support the farmers, the fishermen—to put money back into community.”

We have local fishermen through Northwest Fresh Seafood, which is a cute little fish shop right in Newberg. Our meats all come from Northwest Premier Meats nearby in Tualatin—her name’s Tina, and she takes care of us. Our cheese is from Briar Rose Creamery, 15 minutes away. Bread comes from our baker, Tim, at Carlton Bakery. We get our mushrooms and huckleberries and black and white Oregon truffles from Misty Mountain. We have a guy down at Oregon Royal Sturgeon, which is in the Fort Klamath area, and their fish is so fresh. For special events I might get something specific, like the Ozette potatoes from the Makah tribe up in Neah Bay, Washington, which I get through a gentleman who works for the Northwest Native Chamber.

Our produce is from local farms or our 1.5-acre garden, and last year we grew some Ozettes too. Anna, our master gardener, is so cooperative and passionate about what she does. We recently planted miner’s lettuce out there, which is a Native food. I do this dish called The Allison Garden, with a “soil” out of dark rye bread and vegetables stuck in that soil, with greens on the side. I use the miner’s lettuce as part of this dish.

Reconnecting With Native Traditions

Growing up, our Siletz language, Dee-ni, wasn’t taught in school. Now they have an online dictionary and programs in the elementary schools, so younger generations have access to our language. I learned what I know when I moved back to the reservation as an adult, going to once-a-month classes and coming home to put sticky notes on objects in the house. I mostly use our language around food—for things like lhuk (salmon), gus (potato), or ch’aa-ghee-she’ (egg)—especially on menus, because it relates to me that way.

When I was young, as far as I’m aware, the tribe wasn’t really foraging for traditional foods like huckleberries, and camas was only for ceremonies. Now every year I go picking huckleberries on tribal lands, and they’re one of my favorite foods. We serve them often at The Allison. You can go savory or sweet with huckleberries, and I’ve worked with the pastry chef, Shelly Toombs, to develop a huckleberry semifreddo.

My Work With Native Youth

In 2024, I got a message from Patrick Clarke, the director of the Siletz Valley School culinary program, which started the previous year. He said, “You should come out to the school and meet the kids sometime.”

I invited the class out to The Allison for a field trip tour of the garden and kitchen, followed by lunch and a Q&A. The class of about 20 students got to learn about cooking and other aspects of hospitality, including marketing, housekeeping, HR, accounting, admin—all these different jobs you can have under one roof at a place like The Allison. They asked me questions about my path and my advice for them. I feel like my path into the culinary world is very approachable, very driven by taking care of others and just pushing yourself to be the best you can.

It could have been just the one tour, but Patrick and I kept talking. Next, the school hosted me. They made lunch and gave a tour of the school and their food truck. The kids used the recipe out of my cookbook for fry bread, and I hopped in the food truck to make it with them.

Since then, a lot of what I do with the culinary program is giving them opportunities to learn and connect with other Native chefs—like at the Native American Heritage Month event we hosted at The Allison last November. The students helped with everything, from prep days to shucking oysters that night.

“I do whatever I can to give them experiences. The more experiences they have, the bigger and better picture they’ll see.”

I try to give them a path toward a good career in the kitchen, about being happy in what you do. But I’m also very transparent about the difficulties. You’re going to work holidays and your birthday, and you’re going to be taking care of others on their special days. It can be long days of physical work.

Siletz is a small town with no stoplights, a thousand people, and really no business besides a mini-mart gas station—unless you work for the tribe, and those jobs are limited. So it’s really all about exposure to new things. That’s half the battle—getting out of Siletz a bit and seeing what’s in the world. I do whatever I can to give them experiences, like going up into Portland and being part of the governor’s conference [in April 2025], feeding lawmakers and representing the tribe. The more experiences they have, the bigger and better picture they’ll see.

Last month, there was an event called the Blue Foods Forum in Portland, all focused on foods from the ocean. The kids cooked Oregon albacore and supported the chefs, including helping with a plating for a demonstration I led with tribal-caught salmon from Iliamna Fish Co.

Through the Oregon Albacore Commission, they also got to go out on a boat—which I know for some kids was their first time. They received a donation of whole albacore tuna that they learned to butcher. As part of the lesson, they took the fish heads and other parts of the skeletons and buried them to help create a natural fertilizer, as part of this full-circle journey so that nothing goes to waste and everything stays in the ecosystem.

It was like one of the times, as a kid, that I came back home with trout for my grandma. I didn’t clean the fish at the river, and she reprimanded me. She was happy I had caught trout, but she was like, ‘You need to gut those at the river. You need to wash the inside of their flesh with the water. All of what you cleaned out is going to be eaten by the crawdads and all the other life that’s in the river, and that’s part of the process.’ With the students learning how to break down albacore after the boat trip—that was their teaching moment of how everything is connected.

It’s really impressive to see how far some of the students have come. The program gives them direction; it pushes them to see what they can do, and it benefits the school and the community. I try to do whatever I can to support the students. For the past two years at JORY, we’ve had a special dish on the menu that highlights traditional Siletz foods, with some of the proceeds going towards the culinary school program.

I really connect with the youth in Siletz. As someone who came from that school, I understand what those kids are going through, what their opportunities are. For me, it’s personal—I can say: “I’ve sat where you’re sitting.”

As told to Civil Eats and lightly edited.

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In an Ohio Apple Grove, Researchers Race to Save Rare Varieties

Ben Seal — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 08:00:09 +0000

In the fall of 2004, Diane Miller, a tree-fruit specialist, began a two-part expedition on a Fulbright to Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, in Central Asia, the birthplace of the apple. Her quest: to bring back seeds from the region’s wild apple trees that could infuse domestic breeding programs with biodiversity.

The American apple industry is concentrated almost entirely on a handful of varieties. Just 15 apples account for roughly 90 percent of the market. In contrast, Central Asia’s thousands of wild apple varieties offered untold diversity from trees that had borne fruit across centuries of cultivation.

On the second half of the expedition in 2005, Miller, accompanied by her teenage daughter, Amy, journeyed through dramatic Kyrgyz landscapes. The pair traversed alpine passes and arid valleys on the way to a mountainous area in the west that was blanketed by apple and walnut forests. They were awed by the breathtaking abundance.

There was something else, too: The steep, wooded slopes and sandstone bluffs, surrounded by a wash of dense greenery, reminded them of their home in Appalachian Ohio.

“If I squinted a little bit, I could have thought I was at home,” said Amy Miller, now a fruit grower and plant pathologist. “That was our first indicator that these trees might be well adapted to our region.”

“It can be the foundation to a future of apple growing that ensures clean water and biodiversity and the health of farmworkers.”

The Millers returned to Ohio with hundreds of seeds from trees whose longevity suggested they might carry disease resistance—a trait that could be bred into American varieties, potentially reducing domestic reliance on chemical sprays.

In spring 2007, they planted seedlings in a research plot at Dawes Arboretum, a 2,000-acre preserve in an agricultural community east of Columbus, Ohio. The seedlings became part of a much larger collection, spanning roughly 6,000 trees and 15 acres, including controlled crosses of domestic varieties and selections from previous U.S. Department of Agriculture collection trips to Kazakhstan.

At Dawes, the Kyrgyz apples thrived. For nearly two decades they’ve lived there, some 800 trees growing into a unique repository of wild apple genetics that many breeders and growers now view as critical for the future of the domestic apple industry. Apple growers face a host of challenges, including global competition, climate change, rising costs, and many more.

“It can be the foundation to a future of apple growing that ensures clean water and biodiversity . . . and the health of farmworkers,” said Eliza Greenman, a germplasm specialist at the agroforestry nonprofit Savanna Institute. “It’s a foundation to unlocking apple flavors, too—to extending the boundaries of what we think apples can taste like.”

That future, however, is now uncertain. In mid-December 2025, Dawes’ executive director, Stephanie Crockatt, sent Miller a letter asking for the trees to be removed by the end of March.

“We have made the decision to adjust our research priorities and land management strategies,” the letter stated.

The directive left only enough time for “triage,” Greenman said. More than 100 plant breeders, researchers, fruit growers, agroforesters, and nonprofits signed a letter, written by Greenman, that pleaded for an extension so the collection “can be used, studied, and evaluated for years to come.”

Dawes pushed its deadline out a year to March 2027. Even with the extension, Greenman said, the decision risks dismantling an unrivaled resource for apple breeders that could take decades to reassemble.

Diane Miller surveys the wild Kyrgyz apple collection at Dawes Arboretum in Newark, Ohio. (Photo credit: Amy Miller)

Resilience Through Diversity

Diane Miller’s work is organized around a simple idea, she said: “genetic diversity for environmental resilience.” Through her work at Ohio State, the Midwest Apple Improvement Association, and the Midwest Apple Foundation, she’s long championed plant breeding that can increase disease resistance and reduce reliance on fungicides and insecticides.

Domestic apples are susceptible to pests like the codling moth and diseases like apple scab, a fungus that blemishes the fruit’s skin, and fireblight, a destructive bacteria that can rapidly kill trees. Because of these vulnerabilities, apples are sprayed with pesticides intensively, often weekly.

The domestic apple industry has veered toward a high-risk, high-reward model, Greenman said, accepting the added frustration and increased costs—in both sprays and systems—of working with delicate but delicious apples like Honeycrisp because the price they fetch can be three times that of sturdier alternatives.

In Kyrgyzstan, where the Millers gathered their genetic material, apples have been cultivated for centuries but never domesticated in isolation like American apples. In that wild setting, the trees remain largely unbothered by pests and disease. For the Millers, that made them invaluable for breeding programs that could cross their hardy traits with the intense sweetness and trademark crunch consumers crave from the Honeycrisp and numerous varieties it’s inspired.

“The future of the apple industry needs more disease resistance built in,” Greenman said, “or else breeding will be replaced by creating chemicals.”

“The future of the apple industry needs more disease resistance built in or else breeding will be replaced by creating chemicals.”

With American apple growers concentrated on a small range of varieties, “there’s a real risk of a genetic bottleneck,” said Matthew Moser Miller, an Ohio orchardist and cider maker who is familiar with the Dawes collection (and who is unrelated to Diane and Amy Miller).

A limited genetic pool can weaken disease resistance, making trees more vulnerable over time, he said. The Kyrgyz trees at the arboretum offer a safeguard—an immense variety of flavors and the promise of greater crop resilience.

As the seedlings grew into a forest of mature, 20-foot-tall trees, Diane Miller selected the best candidates for breeding, propagating them by grafting cuttings, called scionwood, onto rootstock and letting them grow. To cross two varieties, she applied pollen from the flowers of one to the flowers of the other.

Miller worked at this for years, promoting desirable qualities through generations of breeding while maintaining a library of traits breeders could use into the future. The Kyrgyz trees “have inherent vigor that is lacking in domestic apples,” she said. They also boast unusually high quantities of phenols, the chemical compounds that give fruits their antioxidant and anti-inflammatory power.

But plant breeding is a long-term process that will be interrupted by the forced exit from the arboretum. Moving the entire collection would be impossible, and moving just a selection wouldn’t capture its diversity. Miller will spend the next year collecting scionwood to propagate clones from the planting, but she will lose mature trees whose age is an integral part of understanding their potential.

“It takes time to sort and sift all that out,” Miller said. “They don’t just jump out and say, ‘I’ve got multi-gene disease resistance. Take me.’”

An apple tree bred with wild Kyrgyz genetics from the Dawes Arboretum collection. With its disease resistance and large fruit, it’s a prime candidate for breeding with existing commercial varieties to produce a crisp, delicious, yet resilient apple. (Photo credit: Diane Miller)

Rebuilding a Repository

Despite the protests of the apple breeding community, Crockatt, who took over as Dawes’ executive director in November 2024, says genetic research and crop production no longer align with the arboretum’s priorities.

Although Dawes hosts other research collections, including for maple, buckeye, and witch hazel, those are governed by formal research agreements outlining responsibilities and expectations. The Kyrgyz apple collection hasn’t met those guidelines, Crockatt said.

“It really is a situation where we have been a host, not a partner,” Crockatt said.

The relationship between Dawes and the nonprofit Midwest Apple Foundation, whose members have tended and monitored the entire 15-acre collection since its planting, developed out of a handshake agreement between leaders who are no longer at their respective institutions, Amy Miller said.

The foundation tried to formalize an agreement with Dawes in 2024, while the arboretum was under interim leadership; its intention was to rehabilitate the full planting, replacing trees whose evaluation was completed with new seedlings to observe. With a funding plan in place and apparent support from Dawes, the Millers were optimistic about their proposal. But the next time they heard from the arboretum was the December letter, sparking frustration and a rush to find a new home for the plant material.

“The new leadership team didn’t show any interest in actually learning what we have there,” Amy Miller said. “They didn’t reach out with any questions or to get any background information on what is even going on there. They just suddenly said, ‘Pack your stuff and get out.’”

According to Crockatt, research had been concluded on one plot when she arrived and left unattended at another, allowing invasive species to proliferate and threaten nearby collections. The arboretum’s decision was “based on alignment to our nonprofit mission,” she said.

With no other recourse, the Millers are hoping to replicate through grafting the seedling orchard they first planted in 2007, perhaps with duplicates in multiple locations to ensure longevity. They have yet to identify suitable host sites.

In late February, Diane and Amy Miller visited Dawes, along with Matt Thomas, a conservation biologist and Amy’s partner, to collect scionwood from 120 trees to begin rebuilding the repository. They will have two more opportunities to do so—in late summer, when they can gather budwood, and again during the trees’ dormancy next winter.

The group won’t be able to salvage everything, and what they do collect will no longer be growing on its own roots, which diminishes their ability to fully evaluate a tree’s potential, Diane Miller said.

Once the Millers have rescued what they can from the collection next spring, Crockatt said the trees will all be taken to local zoos to be browsed on by animals.

“It’s not like they’re going to be destroyed and forgotten,” Crockatt said. “They will serve a purpose.”

For apple breeders and growers, though, the trees’ highest purpose would be to remain in the ground at Dawes, where they can continue to serve as a vast library of genetic material whose potential can be explored over time.

“While we have it, we should protect it and try to preserve it, lest we shortsightedly allow it to be lost,” Matthew Miller said. “At that point, it may be difficult, if not impossible, to recover those lost genetics.”

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Nearly 150 USDA County Offices Have No Conservation Staff, New Data Shows

Lisa Held — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 19:12:46 +0000

March 23, 2026 – According to a new analysis, 144 U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) county offices lost all of their conservation staff in 2025, prompting questions around who will assist farmers looking to enroll in popular programs that boost farm resilience and improve the environment.

The analysis, shared first with Civil Eats, was conducted by Prospect Partners this month and is based on updated data released by the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) in early March.

OPM shared data in January that showed the USDA’s Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) lost nearly a quarter of its staff since President Donald Trump took office, but the latest data shows for the first time how much staffing has been lost at the county level.

Most NRCS staff work outside of Washington, D.C., in local offices, where they act as the agency’s “boots on the ground.” They visit farms and work closely with farmers to identify appropriate programs and practices and help with complicated paperwork.

The data shows that in 2025, a little more than half of about 2,400 total counties experienced overall net losses in NRCS staff. In addition, 139 counties no longer had any staff in three roles key to on-farm conservation work—soil conservation, soil conservation technicians, and general natural resources management—by the end of last year. Of counties that had staff at the start of 2025 dedicated to rangeland management—critical in the Western United States—one in four no longer have anyone in that role.

Bernie Kluger, a former USDA official who completed the analysis at Prospect Partners, said the lack of staff could impact the agency’s ability to launch new programs, such as the NRCS Regenerative Agriculture Pilot, which was announced in December.

“Given the launch of the new MAHA [Make America Healthy Again] program focused on regenerative agriculture, this [staffing issue] becomes mission critical to the agenda of the White House,” he said. “You can’t give regenerative agriculture advice for Idaho with somebody on the phone from Florida.”

The lack of staff will likely disproportionately impact small farms with the fewest resources, Kluger said, since those farmers often need more help accessing programs.

The USDA did not respond to a request for comment on this new data and its implications.

At the launch of a new network called American Farmers for Conservation on Capitol Hill last week, multiple farmers from states around the country said they had been encountering NRCS staff shortages at local offices.

John Painter, an organic dairy farmer from Tioga County, Pennsylvania, said that in the past, NRCS staff had been tremendously helpful to him, especially in utilizing conservation programs to improve his grazing and water systems. Now, he said, employees in his local office are tasked with covering three counties at once.

In a meeting with House Agriculture Committee Chairman G.T. Thompson (R-Pennsylvania), Painter said he and other farmers brought up the issue. “G.T. said absolutely he was concerned, and he would talk to the administration about it,” he said. Thompson’s office did not respond to a request for comment. (Link to this post.)

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A Hidden Crop for Corporate Tech: Farm Data

Elsa Wenzel — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 08:00:02 +0000

A version of this article originally appeared in The Deep Dish, our members-only newsletter. Become a member today and get the next issue directly in your inbox.

Andrew Nelson is a self-described “tech-forward” farmer near Garfield, a tiny town in eastern Washington close to the Idaho border. He uses popular precision agriculture services, paired with artificial intelligence, to produce wheat, canola, lentils, garbanzos, and green peas across 7,500 acres.

Precision farming technologies gather data from a variety of points, such as GPS coordinates from tractors, seeding rates from planters, pesticide volumes from sprayers, moisture readings from soil probes, and yield estimates from combines.

The services—from Bayer, Deere, Corteva, Trimble, and others in the ag-tech sector—increasingly use artificial intelligence to detect patterns, weaving together farmers’ data with other feeds, like satellite images and weather station readings. Farmers can open dashboards on their smartphones or computers to see overviews of conditions and trends, along with suggestions about practices to tweak.

“Giving some of that information to the person that I’m having to buy a three-quarter of a million-dollar machine from just doesn’t sit quite right.”

Nelson takes advantage of many of these capabilities, feeding his spraying data to Bayer Climate FieldView to receive recommendations on chemical applications. He allows John Deere Operations Center to collect data from his tractors and combines to provide him insights on equipment performance and efficiency.

But the fifth-generation grower doesn’t share all his field-level data with the services. “I’ve read the terms and conditions,” says Nelson. “But giving some of that information to the person that I’m having to buy a three-quarter of a million-dollar machine from just doesn’t sit quite right.”

Ads for these AI-powered services promise to “empower” farmers to “harness” their data and “make better decisions,” boosting yields and unearthing efficiencies. In the U.S., uptake is relatively high, with 27 percent of farms or ranches using the tools, according to the U.S. Government Accountability Office. And market analysts project double-digit growth for these tools, expecting them to reach as high as $27 billion by 2030 worldwide. Aiding the growth are multiple tailwinds, including incentives bundled in the latest draft of the U.S. farm bill.

With the industry poised to expand exponentially over the next few years, small-scale farmers and sustainability advocates worry that big companies will leverage their data to sell more products and services, corner markets, or even threaten their livelihoods.

‘Small’ Data in Big Hands

While 70 percent of precision ag-tech users globally are large operators, smaller farms are slower to buy in.

California almond grower Rebekka Siemens has resisted sales pitches for expensive “smart” irrigation systems. “On the one hand, it’s attractive that the reporting can be integrated or exported for reporting purposes easily,” says Siemens. “On the other hand, it could harm you . . . . It feels exposing, the lack of privacy. We don’t know who’s doing what with it.”

There may be little value in “small” data from more modest plots of land, but corporations see aggregated pools of information as a gold mine. And training AI systems on the capture of feeds from thousands of farms raises questions of who should hold the intellectual-property rights.

“It’s essentially like we’re being charged to use the service and then the company is making even more money off of us by selling our data,” Siemens says.

Most ag-tech services insist that they are granting farmers ownership of their data. “Farmers own their own data—full stop,” said Brian Leake, a spokesperson for Bayer, pointing out that the Climate FieldView technology has been certified by the auditing nonprofit Ag Data Transparent since 2021. “They can choose to share their data with others and request that their individual farm data is deleted.”

Watchdog groups warn, however, that legalese within click-to-sign contracts favors the businesses. Surprises can lurk within a 10,000-word software license agreement, they say. And a contract that prevents a tech company from selling data to a third party may nevertheless grant a business partner broad rights to exploit and share anonymized pools of data.

A gray zone exists regarding who controls the bits and bytes, which the ag-tech providers store with the likes of Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud.

Advocates also raise red flags about the perceived marriage between Big Tech, which profits from people’s data, and the Big Ag companies blamed for industrializing agriculture and squeezing out family farms.

The fears are manifold. What if the main purpose of collecting all this data isn’t to help farmers, but to sell more products? Where does data go if a startup folds? What if a bad foreign actor uses intelligence to disrupt the food system? Could government use evidence of fertilizer use today to punish a farm later for nitrogen pollution? What if the data lands with hedge funds or investors who manipulate commodity markets or drive down land prices to further concentrate land ownership?

Elizabeth Vaughan, senior manager of the Small-Farm Tech Hub at the Community Alliance with Family Farmers, worries that AI might further concentrate power outside farmers’ hands.

“Is Amazon going to be our food producer 50 years from now, or Microsoft—or are we still going to have small farmers that provide for their local communities, grow culturally relevant crops, and have resilient community food systems?” she asks.

Related suspicions led Bayer to drop a planned partnership with startup Tillable, often described as an “AirBnb for farmland,” in February 2020, four months after it was announced. When Tillable sent unsolicited cash rental offers to farm owners, farmers accused it of crafting its bids using data about farm yields gleaned from Bayer’s Climate FieldView. Bayer, however, said it did not establish any backend data-sharing with the startup.

(Infographic courtesy of IPES-FOOD)

Protections and Alternatives

Federal regulations have not caught up with the rapidly developing AI and machine-learning tools that harvest masses of data. Tech companies have lobbied against bills they say would hamper innovation. And members of Congress overwhelmingly agreed to remove a proposal from the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, passed in July 2025, which would have barred states from making new laws regulating AI for up to a decade.

However, state lawmakers are acting.

In Nebraska, the Agriculture Data Privacy Act (LB525) is the first bill anywhere claiming privacy rights for business data, according to attorney Reed Freeman, a partner with ArentFox Schiff who specializes in data privacy and security. The latest version, watered down since it debuted in 2025, would bar third-party companies from monetizing farm data without the farmer’s permission.

If the bill becomes law, it could have broad business implications beyond agriculture, according to Freeman. “This is saying there’s value in non-personal data, and . . . the guy who generated it is the guy who should wrest the value out of it,” he says.

Meanwhile, a handful of coders, farmers, and educators are looking to enable small-scale farmers to benefit from data-driven insights without having to surrender their information to big tech companies.

“It’s important for you to control this data, but there’s no value in it if you just put it on a hard drive on your desk and never do anything with it,” says Ben Craker, who grows corn, soybeans, wheat, and hay in central Wisconsin. Craker serves as president of the Ag Data Coalition, a nonprofit that allows farmers to retain, share, or restrict access to their farm data while choosing to enable universities to use it for research purposes.

Other digital tools are emerging that sidestep the corporate giants. For instance, farmers and researchers at the University of British Columbia created open-source LiteFarm software to help farmers with crop planning and tracking tasks.

And Washington grower Nelson is working on a low-cost service, Ag Answers, which would use AI-based text chats to help farmers gain insights from their fields, fill out USDA forms, and suggest when equipment may be overdue for maintenance.

Beyond the Data

Advocates of sustainable farming practices want more for farmers than just retaining data sovereignty, however. They feel that most ag-tech tools do not adequately serve small-scale, diversified farms and are concerned that high-tech services prioritize maximizing yields of monoculture crops over soil health and climate resilience.

They also doubt the ag-tech claim that precision agriculture is environmentally beneficial—a way to decrease the use of fossil-fuel-heavy pesticides and fertilizers—a point bolstered by a new HEAL Food Alliance report that shows that the use of fertilizers and pesticides have actually climbed alongside the rise of precision agriculture.

In addition to making farmers dependent on proprietary corporate offerings with questionable data protections, digital technologies remove farmers from the land, says soil scientist Jessica Chiartas, who serves as board president for RegenScore, a tool that collects data on regenerative farming practices. “The best way to manage your farm is to be out there on the ground, looking, smelling,” she says.

Nettie Wiebe, a professor, farmer, and longtime farm activist in Saskatchewan, contributed to a February report by the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems (IPES) that challenged the “false promise” of digital agriculture. Industrial agriculture is concerned mostly with mechanical innovation, she says, and is “premised on a view that the natural world is just made up of many, many, many data points.”

She holds a different view: “Those of us who farm in a small-scale way, we know that actually it’s [about] the interrelationship between various organic elements that make up the natural world.”

The post A Hidden Crop for Corporate Tech: Farm Data appeared first on Civil Eats.

Fertilizer Companies Face Congressional Scrutiny Over Potential Price Fixing

Lisa Held — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 17:06:14 +0000

March 18, 2026 – As the war in Iran drives fertilizer prices higher, lawmakers and federal agencies are turning their attention toward powerful companies and potential price fixing.

In a bipartisan effort to address farmers’ economic woes, Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-South Dakota) and Senator Amy Klobuchar (D-Minnesota) introduced a bill Thursday that would provide farmers with more detailed information on fertilizer pricing, while Klobuchar also joined with Senator Roger Marshall (R-Kansas) to introduce a bill to expand domestic fertilizer production.

Senator Josh Hawley (R-Missouri) sent a letter to the five largest fertilizer companies asking them to answer detailed questions related to price gouging and asked the Department of Justice (DOJ) to start a formal investigation into their practices.

That letter followed a Bloomberg report earlier this month, in which unnamed sources claimed the DOJ is already probing whether companies have colluded to raise fertilizer prices. In response to a Civil Eats inquiry asking for confirmation of that investigation, a DOJ spokesperson said in an email that the agency could not comment on the status of a pending criminal investigation.

“The Department of Justice stands ready to investigate and prosecute any company that exploits opportunities by engaging in collusive schemes that artificially increase prices and harm American consumers, farmers, and businesses,” they said.

The activity in D.C. comes amid increased concerns from farmers and farm groups over rising operating costs.

On Thursday, more than 50 of the country’s largest farm groups sent a letter to President Donald Trump asking for additional economic assistance for farmers. Recent spikes in fertilizer and fuel prices due to the closure of the Strait of Hormuz are “further straining a farm economy that already had its back against the wall,” they said.

And earlier this week, an Iowa farmer filed a class action lawsuit against the largest fertilizer companies alleging that during pandemic-era price spikes in 2021 and 2022, companies coordinated to restrain competition and keep prices high. “Prices soared far beyond historical norms and remained elevated even after defendants’ claimed justifications—such as global supply disruptions and increased input costs—had subsided,” according to a press release from the law firm representing the farmer.

In response to requests for comment on the allegations, two of the six companies named, Yara and Nutrien, cited their commitments to lawful and ethical business practices. (Link to this post.)

The post Fertilizer Companies Face Congressional Scrutiny Over Potential Price Fixing appeared first on Civil Eats.

Congress Responds to César Chavez Sexual Abuse Allegations

Rebekah Alvey — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 21:59:06 +0000

March 19, 2026 — Members of Congress and state officials are working to distance celebrations, streets, and buildings from renowned farmworker union leader César Chavez, following extensive allegations of sexual abuse.

Chavez co-founded the United Farm Workers (UFW) in 1962 and died in 1993 at the age of 66. His work as a union leader and civil rights activist is remembered through César Chavez Day on March 31, and in the names of countless streets, government buildings, and more.

On Wednesday, a New York Times investigation reported that Chavez had allegedly groomed and sexually abused underage girls. The report details Chavez’s pattern of sexual abuse of women in the labor movement, including Dolores Huerta, who founded UFW alongside Chavez.

“I have kept this secret long enough. My silence ends here,” Huerta wrote in a statement published after the investigation, detailing her own experiences with Chavez. “I have never identified myself as a victim, but I now understand that I am a survivor—of violence, of sexual abuse, of domineering men who saw me, and other women, as property, or things to control.”

Civil Eats has not independently verified the Times allegations. The investigation included interviews with those allegedly assaulted by Chavez, along with documents of union records, emails, and more.

The UFW has said it will not participate in celebrations of its co-founder planned for later this month due to the allegations, which they called “shocking” and “indefensible.”

Members of Congress are grappling with the allegations and how to support farmworkers while separating Chavez from the movement’s legacy.

The Congressional Hispanic Caucus said in a statement Wednesday that it is committed to renaming streets, post offices, vessels, and holidays that commemorate Chavez, to “instead honor our community and the farmworkers whose struggle defined the movement.”

“Confronting painful truths and ensuring accountability is essential to honoring the very values the greater farm worker movement stands for—values rooted in dignity and justice for all,” Senator Alex Padilla (D-California) said in a statement.

In the wake of the report, cities and states have cancelled, postponed, or renamed celebrations planned for later this month, at a time when U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement is continuing to target immigrant farmworkers.

In California, the first state to recognize César Chavez Day as a state holiday, lawmakers are considering renaming the celebration. The City of Los Angeles has moved to rename the day to “Farm Workers Day.” (Link to this post.)

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USDA Proposes Delaying Poultry Industry Rule

Lisa Held — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 15:31:03 +0000

March 19, 2026 – The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) yesterday proposed delaying a set of regulations that were set to change how chicken companies pay contract farmers and how they communicate with farmers around required infrastructure investments.

The rule was the third in a series finalized under former President Joe Biden to enforce the more than 100-year-old Packers and Stockyards Act, a law intended to ensure farmers are protected from potential meatpacker abuses.

The new rule prohibits companies from reducing pay to farmers based on rankings that compare them to others—a practice that has been common within the industry’s “tournament system.” It also requires companies to provide more-detailed paperwork about capital investments that farmers are required to make. In the past, many farmers have struggled with expensive, unexpected barn upgrades that companies require.

The rule was set to go into effect in July. The USDA is now proposing a year-and-a-half delay, until December 2027, “to allow for thorough consideration of estimated costs and the policy and legal issues associated with the final rule,” according to the regulatory filing.

In the explanation of its delay, the agency said Congress had encouraged the USDA to delay the rule and that there is uncertainty around whether the benefits outweigh the costs.

However, in a press statement, National Farmers Union (NFU) president Rob Larew said the rule had established guardrails for the tournament system, offering farmers more transparency and certainty.

“Growers have long raised concerns about the unfairness of tournament pricing and the amount and quality of information provided to them by poultry companies,” Larew said. “NFU is eager to see implementation of this long-overdue rule. Delaying it is a disservice to family farmers who deserve a fairer system.”

The USDA is taking comments on the delay of the rule until April 17. (Link to this post.)

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Should Every State Have Its Own Farm Bill?

Lisa Held — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 08:00:00 +0000

When Christa Barfield started farming in a 24-square-foot greenhouse in her Philadelphia backyard in 2020, she had no experience or training. She just knew she wanted to grow healthy vegetables and sell them locally, and she knew she wouldn’t use chemical pesticides.

Early on, she connected with staff at the Rodale Institute, the country’s most influential center for in-field organic agriculture research, based in Kutztown, Pennsylvania, 75 miles northwest of Philadelphia. With their help, she figured out next steps and acquired new skills, like large-scale soil testing. Today her business, FarmerJawn, includes 123 acres of diversified vegetable production, farm stores, and a growing Community Supported Agriculture membership, and she’s set to apply for both USDA Organic and Regenerative Organic certification in 2026.

“This is our year right here,” said Barfield, who is now a board member for both Rodale and the Pennsylvania Farmers Union.

Christa Barfield. (Photo courtesy of FarmerJawn)

The free consulting Barfield received through Rodale is one example of a program paid for by the Pennsylvania Farm Bill, the first state-level omnibus bill dedicated to investments in agriculture.

Signed into law by then-Governor Tom Wolf in 2019, the bill supports local farming and nutrition. It provides farm-to-school grants, business development for farms looking to produce higher-value products, and farm workforce development. It has been continually funded with bipartisan support—and it could serve as a model for other states as the federal farm bill remains stalled, two and a half years behind schedule.

Because of the holdup in Congress, federal investment in farm programs beyond standard commodity payments and crop insurance has become less reliable. Under the Trump administration, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) has also proven willing to cancel contracts with farmers enrolled in programs funded by the federal bill.

Pennsylvania’s farm bill, meanwhile, is building stronger agricultural economies and communities, the kind of work a federal farm bill was designed for.

“I would say that real change in agriculture happens at a local and state level. We shouldn’t stand around and wait for federal policies,” said Jeff Tkach, Rodale’s CEO. “It has truly been a bipartisan effort [in Pennsylvania] and that has been unwavering.”

Several other states are considering similar packages or are investing in agriculture one small bill at a time. Whether states play a bigger role in farm policy in the coming years will depend on many factors, but many food and farm advocates see the Pennsylvania Farm Bill as a valuable guide.

Why a Farm Bill Works for Pennsylvania

Pennsylvania has a unique farm landscape, a result of its diversity in both topography and population. It has a large industrial poultry industry and plenty of commodity grain. But it also has large, well-established local food economies, with many small farms selling directly to residents, explained Hannah Smith-Brubaker, the executive director of Pasa Sustainable Agriculture.

It also ranks No. 3 for the number of farmland acres certified organic and has the highest number of farmers under 35 in the nation.

“I think that there has long been an understanding in Pennsylvania that federal ag policy touches such a narrow number of farmers and encompasses such a narrow vision of what agriculture looks like,” said Lindsey Shapiro, a vegetable farmer who is also Pasa’s federal policy organizer. “Pennsylvania has been trying really hard to create policies that broaden the reach of ag policy and include producers that have traditionally been ignored or left out.”

Many in the state attribute a good portion of that focus to the state’s secretary of Agriculture, Russell Redding, who has had the job for 13 (non-contiguous) years under three different governors. At Pasa’s annual conference in February, as Redding walked on stage, the hundreds of farmers in the room erupted in ecstatic applause, hoots, and hollers.

Pennsylvania Secretary of Agriculture Russell Redding attends Pasa Sustainable Agriculture’s annual conference in February. (Photo courtesy of Pasa)

The farm bill came out of a process he and Wolf first started, Redding told Civil Eats, to define and quantify Pennsylvania agriculture. One of the big takeaways from that project was that “diversity is our strength,” he said. “And it’s every dimension of diversity, so that’s the urban and rural, it’s the Amish and the English, it’s the forest products, it’s the apple orchards, it’s the animals, et cetera.” Redding thought many aspects of that diverse production, like farms in urban areas, were not adequately represented in federal programs and that the state should do more to support them.

Redding is also who Tkach, at Rodale, spoke to first about how Pennsylvania could lead the way in organic production. In 2018, Tkach said he shared with the secretary his vision for translating Rodale’s 45 years of research into practical assistance.

“Up until that point, we had no mechanism to take the science off our farm and translate it onto other farms,” he said.

Redding was especially interested, Tkach said, in helping the state’s ailing dairy industry survive; organic milk fetches premium prices. When the first Pennsylvania farm bill passed in 2019, an organic transition program was one of its six pillars.

Rodale received a $250,000 grant through that program to provide free on-farm consulting—including agronomic advice and help with paperwork and market access—to any farm in the state that wanted to transition land to organic.

The program has been funded annually ever since and has successfully helped more than 60 farms transition 10,000 acres, Tkach said. It helps a range of farms, from direct-to-market vegetable farmers like Barfield to multi-generational commodity grain operations. Rodale has also helped processing facilities obtain organic certification.

More significantly, the organization used the organic transition program to launch the same consultancy across the country. They now have 32 consultants working with more than 1,000 farm clients nationwide.

“I travel around the country with my work, since Rodale has campuses now in Iowa, Georgia, Washington state, and California, and I’ll tell you that there are leaders in those states that are very jealous of what we’ve created here in Pennsylvania,” Tkach said. “California, I think, is taking a very close look at what we’ve done, and they’re starting to follow suit.”

“I travel around the country with my work, and I’ll tell you that there are leaders in those states that are very jealous of what we’ve created here in Pennsylvania.”

In addition to organic investment, Smith-Brubaker said many of Pasa’s member farmers have applied for the state’s Farm Vitality Grants, which can be used to venture into creating value-added products (like making jam from the fruit they grow) and succession planning. Redding said those grants were foundational to the Pennsylvania Farm Bill, especially because the state has a lot of farmland that is preserved under easements but that is in transition, with many retiring farmers figuring out who they might pass the land to and new farmers looking for land.

Others benefit from Urban Agriculture Infrastructure Grants; Barfield landed one to help her open a “corner store” in Philadelphia’s Kensington neighborhood, to sell fresh produce and other healthy products in a neighborhood with few nutritious options.

“In federal programs, there aren’t a lot of opportunities for infrastructure purchases on a farm,” Smith-Brubaker said. “The fact that the Pennsylvania Farm Bill includes funds not only for infrastructure, but infrastructure that’s specific to the unique challenges of farming in an urban setting, that’s really unique and exciting.”

The state farm bill also funds farm-to-school and other projects, and Redding said its success spurred additional programs that aren’t technically part of the farm bill but build on the same goals, like Agriculture Innovation Grants, introduced in 2025.

Shapiro at Pasa said that she’s encouraged by the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture’s (PDA) engagement with Pasa’s farmers around how the bill might change to meet the state’s evolving needs.

“Theoretically, we need a new federal farm bill every five years,” she said. “Maybe we need a new state version as well.”

Should Other States Follow?

By Redding’s count, 16 states have reached out to him to read the Pennsylvania Farm Bill as a model. Connecticut passed its version of a farm bill in July 2025, and Maryland is considering putting together a larger package of investments in agriculture. “There’s nothing inside of the farm bill that’s not transferable to every other part of this country,” he said.

One big bill with several components is rare at the state level, but other states are filling agricultural gaps they see with individual legislative fixes. Minnesota legislators, for example, created their own version of a canceled federal program that paid for food banks to buy from small farms nearby.

While many states can’t create their own farm bills because they don’t allow “omnibus” bills, legislators can pass multiple bills at the same time in a sort of package format, said Kendra Kimbirauskas, senior director of Food, Agriculture and Rural Economies at the State Innovation Exchange.

Kimbirauskas, who works with state legislators on progressive food and farm policies, said there might also be reason lawmakers want to avoid passing larger farm bills.

Bigger bills can come with some of the same controversial “riders” that happen at the federal level, since it’s easier for lawmakers to slip things in.

“Most of them are operating with huge budget shortfalls and now they’re having to make up for all of these other things like housing and Medicare and SNAP.”

For example, last year, North Carolina lawmakers tucked a provision that would have given pesticide companies immunity from lawsuits claiming their products caused health harms into their version of a state farm bill, the North Carolina Farm Act of 2025. The bill didn’t pass, but at the state level, industry groups might wield more power, since it’s a smaller playing field, Kimbirauskas said.

The biggest challenge for states looking to spur agriculture innovation, though, is finding the funds.

“Most of them are operating with huge budget shortfalls and now they’re having to make up for all of these other things like housing and Medicare and SNAP,” she said, referring to recent changes made by the federal government. “There’s the aspiration of what folks really do want to do and then overlaying that is the reality of what can be done.”

Still, she said, state legislators are leaning into farm fixes that don’t require a lot of funding, like state-level right-to-repair laws, and there are other examples of state-level agriculture investments picking up speed.

In Minnesota, the state legislature created a farm-to-school program in 2019 to enable more schools to buy produce and meats from nearby farms. It started with $500,000 in funding the first year. Last year, despite a tighter budget, lawmakers working across the aisle increased the funding to nearly $2.5 million.

“At the end of the day, what farmers and what communities need is a farm system where we can have good food in our communities and get a fair price for that, and farm-to-school is just a win-win-win across the board,” said Sean Carroll, the policy director at the Land Stewardship Project, which has advocated for the Minnesota legislation. “It is not controversial in the state. It’s bipartisan.”

Notably, Carroll said, there’s also no powerful group that lobbies against farm-to-school funding.

During a tumultuous year for their state, Minnesota lawmakers also created the first state grant program specifically designed to replace funding that the Trump administration cancelled last year, helping food banks buy fresh food from local farms. The Farm to Food Security Grant Program is funded at $700,000 annually for two years, and the state’s agriculture department put out its first request for applications in mid-February.

Just across Pennsylvania’s state line, Maryland Governor Wes Moore’s administration passed the Chesapeake Bay Legacy Act, which created the state’s first guidelines around regenerative agriculture and gave regenerative practices a boost.

That came despite a challenging budget outlook, Maryland Secretary of Agriculture Kevin Atticks said. “The state leases a lot of land to farmers, and going forward, the farming practices [on that land] must be deemed regenerative under this definition.”

The bill also codified a program that the Maryland Department of Agriculture is launching, called Leaders in Environmentally Engaged Farming (LEEF), a sustainability certification that rewards farmers for practices that sequester carbon and contribute to healthier ecosystems.

Now, Atticks said, he is making big plans for when the state’s budget issues began to ease, which will likely include a legislative package of investments in local food and farms.

Because of the way Maryland’s legislative process works, a typical farm bill isn’t possible. “As an example, if we wanted to do something about farmers growing food and also mandate that school lunches had to incorporate local food,” he explained, “those are in two completely different sections of law, and so that would need to be two bills—one to deal with the eating and one to deal with the growing.”

Still, some ideas from Pennsylvania will likely make their way into the legislation. “We’ve had meetings with Secretary Redding’s team about their farm bill,” Atticks said. “Ours will notably look different than any other state’s, but we do have plans to continue highlighting agriculture in the state, because it’s going to be critical in the next couple of years.”

In fact, some D.C. insiders think that there may never be a typical farm bill at the national level again, given last year’s fracturing of the coalitions that used to help move the legislation. If Congress does manage to get the process back on track, it’s going to take a while.

In Redding’s mind, states should start to think about their own laws as the central tool for agricultural policies, with complementary federal laws—not the other way around.

“You can’t do what we do without [federal farm bills], but the narrative is not about what Congress is going to do. The narrative has become, ‘What is Pennsylvania going to do?” he said. “That’s an important change, and I think it has actually allowed us to talk about our own definition of agriculture and recognize that we’ve got organic producers and urban producers and folks doing amazing things in communities that have never been acknowledged before.”

Plus, there’s the simple fact of getting around D.C.’s deep divide. Far from being a fight for funding, in Pennsylvania, across party lines, Redding said the farm bill “has been the most predictable and supported element of the budget for the last nine years.”

The post Should Every State Have Its Own Farm Bill? appeared first on Civil Eats.

Op-ed: The Food Justice Movement Has Nothing in Common With MAHA

Dara Cooper — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 08:00:57 +0000

Dara Cooper is the co-founder and senior advisor for the National Black Food and Justice Alliance, HEAL Food Alliance, and LIFE Resource Collaborative. Contributors include: Cicely Garrett (NBFJA), Dr. Jas Jackson (NBFJA), Navina Khanna (HEAL Food Alliance), Jose Oliva (HEAL, Food Chain Workers Alliance), Shantell Bingham (Liberated Investments in Food and Farm Ecosystem), Dr. Monica White (NBFJA Blackademics), LaDonna Redmond, and Malik Yakini (NBFJA Co-founder).

Civil Eats recently published an op-ed by Nicholas Freudenberg and Marion Nestle asking, “Can Food Justice and MAHA Find Common Ground?”

The answer? No. Absolutely not.

Aside from the disrespectful, paternalistic undertones of white academics telling frontline communities of color what we “need to be doing,” the questions, assumptions, and even the focus could not be further from what is necessary in this political moment.

First, the regression around racial justice and equity is astounding. Anyone who would remotely consider themselves an ally of communities of color would understand the basics around mutual respect.

Part of respect is recognizing the leadership and insights of your counterpart—understanding they have strategies, vision, and an agenda. At best, the op-ed could have been delivered as questions to the food justice movement as opposed to what reads as a series of condescending directives.

Second, the read of the food justice movement is wildly ahistorical. Is it willful ignorance to invoke the 1960s and completely miss the focus on organizing, power-building, anti-violence, and liberation that grounds our movement?

Launched in the 1960s, the Black Panther Party’s Free Breakfast Program is often (rightfully) credited with contributing to the origins of the food justice movement, and yet was also described as the greatest threat to the FBI’s effort to destroy the Black Panther Party, according to FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover.

We know the FBI’s Counter Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO) waged an entire war on our people and our movements, including the Black Panther Party, American Indian Movement, Young Lords, and so many more. The U.S. continues to wage war and violence, thus destabilizing economies, inciting civil wars, and advancing U.S. corporate interests while wiping out entire Indigenous food systems all around the world today.

In the midst of the war on our communities, however, we fight back. We choose to defend ourselves; we strategize, innovate, restore, and lead cultural work as we build new systems instead of begging to be accepted into a conversation with a so-called “health” arm of a racist, xenophobic, sexist regime.

In the middle of ICE raids, bombings, coups, threats, and economic attacks waged against our communities and communities in Palestine, Iran, Venezuela, Cuba, Colombia, Mexico, Sudan, Haiti, and so many more sovereign nations around the world, choosing to focus on winning favor among supporters and agents of this regime misses the mark of this moment so deeply.

So no, the food justice movement has not “long focused on reforming the food system and improving diets.” While not a monolith, the organizations as named in the op-ed leading the food justice movement have always focused on justice and have been crystal clear about the violence against our communities via COINTELPRO, food and nutritional violence, housing, policing, mass incarceration, settler colonialism, land displacement, and labor exploitation.

We understand these issues are a byproduct of racial capitalism, and thus our focus has always been on fighting for and modeling a much more just economy. There is no reforming a system that is rotten to its core. And while we understand health as an integral part of liberation, we know full well it goes far beyond simple “diets.”

Which leads to our third issue: Corporate power and extractive racial capitalism is what got us here. We know that in continuing to build collective power, socialist and cooperative economics are our real priorities. And while we engage in work to transform policies such as the farm bill and fight back against the attacks on SNAP, the authors of the recent op-ed hurl directives at POC-led food justice organizations, but never once indict the so-called “movement” that runs the Department of Health and Human Services, an arm of the regime running the White House.

We understand clearly that corporate consolidation is an issue and that the subsidies for Big Ag need to be shifted to local POC- and ally-run food economies, that workers need to be protected and should actually own the means of production, and that regulation of corporations is needed to protect our food.

We are not convinced by the empty rhetoric, superficial lip service, and shallow policy shifts of the MAHA madness. In fact, we reject the whole concept and premise of “making America healthy AGAIN,” as if health can happen without radical changes, cultural practices, food traditions, and community care. More than anything, we reject the idea that this America has ever been healthy for our communities.

We suggest the authors hurl their concerns towards the lack of decency amongst MAGA and MAHA followers, and instead of attempting to direct us, direct them to truly stand up to this administration—and defect. To even call into question whether these two “movements”—as if they weren’t camps that are diametrically opposed—can come together under one big, unfocused, watered-down, compromised, raggedy tent is insulting.

We reject any obfuscation around racism and any attempts at neutrality in the face of clear attacks and threats to our freedom aims. Not only has this administration rolled back any semblance of progress around racial equity, it has deemed any mention of race illegal and unleashed a rollout of unabashed attacks on our communities and universities.

Meanwhile, their courts claim race as a legitimate profiling indicator for ICE raids. And while we understand that these are different departments and players, to treat MAHA as separate from MAGA is absurd. There is a clear line in the sand right now and a right and a wrong side of history. Which side will you choose?

Furthermore, we see the splinters among MAGA but we are not pawns or chess pieces to be manipulated. Do not attempt to divide and conquer us. We suggest you do your own work to further whatever split you would like to see between MAHA and MAGA.

You’re welcome to join us–with focus and actual mutual respect.

The post Op-ed: The Food Justice Movement Has Nothing in Common With MAHA appeared first on Civil Eats.

Op-ed: The AI ‘Revolution’ Is a False Promise for Food Systems

Anthony Pahnke — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 08:00:33 +0000

A version of this article originally appeared in The Deep Dish, our members-only newsletter. Become a member today and get the next issue directly in your inbox.

Big tech’s influence on the current federal administration is undeniable. During his first term, President Donald Trump issued an executive order to promote AI research and development. Shortly after taking office last January, he issued another order to investigate and remove any barriers to AI adoption. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA), which Trump signed into law in July 2025, authorizes more than $1 billion in federal funding for AI projects.

The intrusion of AI has spread to our food systems. In agriculture, an AI revolution is being widely promoted by those who stand to benefit: transnational corporations, banks, big NGOs, and governing bodies. Even though there are only 20 autonomous tractors in the U.S. as of 2025, John Deere has plans to go fully driverless by 2030. In seafood, Big Tech is also helping drive the push to expand offshore fish farming. This Blue Revolution—fashioned after the Green Revolution that industrialized agriculture in the 1950s and 1960s—describes the dramatic growth of farmed seafood since the 2000s.

Proponents claim this shift will make production more efficient and help feed the world. But as with previous food “revolutions,” we must investigate these claims.

Farmers today are being told that AI will future-proof their operations, boosting yields and streamlining their work. But in practice, many are signing away their data rights via complex “click-to-agree” contracts, feeding data into platforms they do not control. The tech firms behind these tools then sell the data to seed suppliers, animal and fish feed conglomerates, and pharmaceutical companies, which in turn sell their products right back to the farmers.

“Farmers today are being told that AI will future-proof their operations, but in practice, many are signing away their rights.”

TidalX AI, launched by Google’s parent company, Alphabet, is among the main groups lobbying the U.S. government to, for the first time, open federal waters to large-scale fish farming. The use of underwater cameras and AI underpins efforts to move operations farther offshore, even though doing so can increase risks and reduce the chances of spotting problems early. Last year, researchers reported more frequent and larger mass die-offs on salmon farms, partly due to reliance on technologies that attempt to “optimize” production in riskier environments.

While industrial aquaculture is often promoted as a source of new jobs, both aquaculture and agriculture face the likelihood that AI will replace workers with drones, automated feeders, and ground sensors to determine how much pesticide to apply, when, and where. The “fully autonomous farm” is coming into focus. This foreshadowing, along with continuing mass arrests of farm workers, begs the question: Will robots feed us when workers are deported?

To investigate whether AI will help feed people, we can look to previous tech shifts. It’s true that some tools have increased yields. Feed-measuring and herd-monitoring tools have boosted output per cow on dairy farms. New pesticides and precision methods have raised yields gradually and persistently for decades for soy and corn.

But higher yields have not guaranteed better access to nutritious food. The Green Revolution, for instance, made many farmers in the Global South dependent on synthetic chemicals that produce food of declining nutritional quality while contaminating ecosystems and posing dangers to human health. Moreover, traditional small-scale producers operating without AI have, by some estimates, managed to feed as much as 70 percent of our global population—even though they operate on as little as 25 percent of the world’s land.

“To investigate whether AI will help feed people, we can look to previous tech shifts. It’s true that some tools have increased yields, but higher yields have not guaranteed better access to nutritious food.”

The HEAL Food Alliance, a multi-sector, multi-racial coalition working to transform food systems, recently released a report on “precision” tech and AI tools in food systems. The report identifies a clear pattern: Corporations market these technologies as serving the public good, including as a climate solution. In reality, they consolidate corporate power and shift environmental costs onto communities and ecosystems. This diverts resources away from the farmer- and fisher-led solutions that keep ecosystems intact, support local economies, and strengthen food sovereignty. Food systems dominated by a handful of corporations are inherently vulnerable and unsustainable. Moreover, the data centers that power AI gobble up farmland and water, making it even harder for younger people to get into the profession.

We know that, as countries grow wealthier, the demand for meat and seafood rises. So the question remains: Will ramping up production in both agriculture and aquaculture improve food security—or simply expand the supply for premium markets and exports?

Here at home, as high-tech food production has increased, our food system has become more, not less, dependent on global trade. The U.S. imports about half of our fruit and one third of our vegetables. Seafood shows this dynamic even more clearly: American fishermen land more than enough wild seafood to meet domestic demand, but much of it is exported, while lower-quality imports are brought back.

This system does not feed people here or support the livelihoods of our food producers. It feeds global commodity markets, allowing corporations to move food wherever it fetches the highest return. The vulnerabilities of our globalized food system have surfaced repeatedly, including during the early stages of COVID-19, when farmers plowed their crops under and fishermen had no market for their catch. Just this year, retaliatory tariffs in Trump’s trade wars have further exposed our dependence on unstable global markets.

We know there are better solutions for feeding people, namely investing in local fisheries, small farms, and food systems at home that provide high-quality food while honoring ecological responsibility, fair pricing, and equitable access.

In this spirit, and challenging the various ag provisions in the OBBBA, more than 500 farmer and consumer groups have called for the “skinny farm bill” to include initiatives to restore SNAP funding, improve credit and land access, and make markets more competitive. As Congress revisits the farm bill, lawmakers should renew funding for Farm to School and Local Agriculture Market Programs, which directly support the food producers in our communities.

Similarly, Congress should reintroduce the Domestic Seafood Production Act (DSPA), which would improve working waterfront infrastructure, local processing, and training initiatives for seafood workers. Last year, a subset of DSPA, known as the Keep Finfish Free Act (KFFA), was introduced. Passing KFFA would bar federal agencies from authorizing large-scale finfish farms offshore without an act of Congress.

We need to keep a vigilant eye on each wave of tech change, asking whether it will actually feed people who grow and catch our food. Technology isn’t the enemy—until it’s monopolized and weaponized by corporations. Without guardrails, AI risks accelerating the extraction and exploitation already decimating our food systems.

The post Op-ed: The AI ‘Revolution’ Is a False Promise for Food Systems appeared first on Civil Eats.