These lands are part of the 80 percent of Alaska that sits in a zone containing permafrost—ground that remains at or below 32 degrees Fahrenheit for two or more consecutive years. The thawing of this layer can trigger a process called subsidence, a physical sinking of the land ranging from a few inches to more than three feet deep. In addition to damaging buildings and infrastructure, subsidence impacts soil fertility and waterflows, and releases ancient stores of carbon into the atmosphere, heating it and exacerbating the thawing.

With the Arctic warming two to four times faster than the global average, permafrost thaw is becoming increasingly prevalent—and is expected to accelerate. Increasing temperatures and precipitation, as well as wildfires, drive the thawing; so does clearing land for agriculture, which removes protective and insulating vegetation.

Because the frozen layer lies beneath the “active layer” of soil that thaws annually and can be used to grow crops, farmers don’t necessarily know if their land contains permafrost until they see the signs of its degradation: mysterious crop loss, damaged farming equipment, or ground that sinks gradually over time.

Permafrost Grown, based in Fairbanks, equips local farmers with tools that make it easier to manage permafrost land. The five-year, $3 million project, launched in 2022 and funded by the National Science Foundation’s Navigating the New Arctic Initiative, is a collaboration between researchers and producers that studies how certain agricultural practices impact permafrost degradation.

The findings of the project, now in its final year, could prove important for people outside the 49th state, too. Climate change could make farming at warmer, lower-latitude regions more difficult and push agriculture further north in the coming decades. Because its thawing drives climate change, permafrost also has important climate implications on a global scale.

We connected with Melissa Ward Jones, a permafrost geomorphologist and the principal investigator of the Permafrost Grown project, and Glenna Gannon, a sustainable food systems researcher and the project’s co-investigator, to learn more about the permafrost-agriculture intersection and its relevance to farming and food production in Alaska and beyond.

What are some of the ways you’ve seen permafrost thaw negatively impact farms in your region?

Glenna Gannon: Some of the earliest questions folks were asking us were about obvious subsidence—areas where the ground has depressions. That could look like anything from the ground sinking to tractors getting stuck and not being able to work the land in that particular area. There’s one peony producer we work with who abandoned their farm field [due to subsidence].

Melissa Ward Jones: There can be a lot of stress and uncertainty when parts of your land are continuously sinking and you don’t know what is causing it, exactly, but you know it’s related to permafrost. The sinking can kill crops, inhibit you from planting the crops you want to plant, and damage farm equipment and fencing.

Subsidence can also impact soil fertility. And groundwater cannot flow through frozen soil, so as it thaws, it also changes groundwater flow patterns.

Are there any protections in place for farmers whose land subsides due to permafrost thaw? 

GG: Currently, there’s nothing at the state or federal level, or private agricultural crop insurance, that covers permafrost. Traditional agricultural insurance is designed for “probabilistic” events like hailstorms and drought.

Let’s dig into Permafrost Grown’s model of a diverse research team collaborating with farmers to conceptualize and implement studies. Why was taking this approach important to you?

MWJ: Permafrost Grown focuses on such a big topic that it needed a range of experts from a range of research disciplines as well as collaborator farms that represent a range of cultivation activities and permafrost types.

I think everyone’s background and expertise strengthens the overall project. Glenna was a great fit with her expertise of agriculture and food system sciences and her network of farms. Permafrost science is a broad discipline, and the co-investigators expanded our permafrost expertise: Dr. Mikhail Kanevskiy is an expert in cryostratigraphy, the analysis of permafrost cores. Dr. Benjamin Jones is leading the permafrost drilling, remote sensing, and drone-mapping work. And Dr. Tobias Schwoerer is a natural resource economist who provides expertise in economics and people’s perceptions of risk and decision-making strategies.

How do you choose which types of farms to work with?

GG: We started the project with a smallish cohort of farmers who we already knew were experiencing some challenges associated with permafrost on their farms. As we developed the project, we identified a few more. And then, by year two of the project, there were a couple of farmers who were saying, “I heard about your work. I’d love to be involved,” or “I’ve got this crazy thing going on. Could you guys help?”

We tried to be mindful of folks who had different types of agricultural operations—vegetable crops, grains, or hay, or animal production—as well as the types of permafrost or symptoms of agriculture-permafrost interactions, so that we had a gamut to look at and collect data from.

We currently have 10 collaborating farms in Alaska; nine are in the Greater Fairbanks Region of the Tanana Valley.

You have a number of studies underway, on subjects like how compost and different types of mulches impact land that has permafrost. How do you collaborate with farmers to design and implement this research? 

MWJ: Throughout the year, we maintain constant communication. We share an annual survey that asks how their year went and [includes] questions that help us plan for upcoming trials or data collection. We [also] have workshops where we discuss as a group.

GG: We’re also doing farm visits. What’s a bit more unique about this work is that since we live in the same community [as the farmers], we’re not just meeting in an office building once a year. We’re visiting these people at their homes. Melissa’s daughter plays with some of these folks’ kids. We see these individuals in our community. So there is definitely a very local perspective and feeling to this project.

Despite the challenges of things like permafrost and living in the subarctic region, a lot of the farmers have a built-in purpose for doing this work and an attitude of resilience, which is really profoundly positive to work with.

What is an example of a specific permafrost-agriculture interaction you’re researching?

MWJ: With our Great Mulch Study, we’re looking at the thermal impact of 11 different mulch types, including straw, paper, and soy-based plastic products, as well as a few synthetic mulches like infrared-transmitting (ITR) plastic mulch.

We’re interested in seeing if some are better suited to potentially mitigate permafrost thaw and identify others that could accelerate permafrost thaw.

GG: And we’re evaluating these different mulches for their intended agricultural use too—looking at weed suppression, moisture retention, and soil warming.

MWJ: [Mulch] is one of the topics of our projects that farmers want to talk to us about the most. Even if you’re not looking at it from a permafrost perspective, it’s still beneficial for agriculture in Alaska more generally to have this kind of data, because this research has just not been done at high latitudes. We’re the only ones to our knowledge who are doing it at this scale.

What does this data collection look like in practice? 

GG: Melissa and I have a full replicated trial with all treatments at the Agriculture and Forestry Experiment Station in Fairbanks. Some of our partner farms are replicating some of the specific mulch treatments [on their fields]. So that might be one or two of the mulch types with one or two crop types.

No farmer is going to give up a huge portion of their field to set up an experiment when they’re trying to make a living. So we work with folks as best as we can to say, “What’s meaningful to you and not going to disrupt your personal economy?”

Based on your research so far, what strategies can help farmers successfully manage permafrost thaw? Which ones seem to have the opposite impact? 

MWJ: For mulches, some early findings show that, from a ground-temperature perspective, “wave selective mulches” like IRT often produce the highest maximum temperatures during the summer. These are also the mulches that produce the highest-yielding plots.

Straw, as expected, has the greatest insulating effect year after year, keeping soil temperatures cool during the summer. In the shoulder seasons, spring and fall, it has the inverse effect of keeping the soil warmer, delaying soil freezing, and preventing soil freezing at deeper depths.

Another thing we have been looking at for the project is compost piles. We have shown that large, active compost piles can cause permafrost degradation year-round, including in the wintertime. Understanding sources of ground heating, but also potential strategies that encourage ground cooling, are important considerations if you are cultivating on permafrost-affected soils.

While we are characterizing a lot of these processes through our work, our project is not necessarily generating or recommending mitigation strategies. Rather, we are providing data and knowledge to support on-farm decision making.

Why is it important to protect permafrost from thaw in the first place? And why is that something that we need to be mindful of in Arctic conditions?

MWJ: It depends on your values. If the permafrost is carbon-rich [and] you want to try to minimize carbon release, that’s one reason [to keep it stable]. If you have ice-rich permafrost, if you keep it stable, you’re not going to get subsidence and have to deal with all those problems.

But then there are also some people who are just like, “I just want to thaw it all and warm up the soil so I don’t have to deal with it.” We’re not saying one is approach is better than the other.

Most of the time, permafrost is presented as a resource that should be protected in every situation due to its climate impacts. Can you talk more about why is this not always the case in the context of the farmers you work with?

MWJ: The upper layer of soil, even though [it’s] unfrozen, can still be below the temperature range needed to successfully grow desired crops . . . So one reason could be to warm the soil for crop growth.

Another is, if you have a permafrost type that only has ice lenses [sheets of ice] near the surface, you could thaw your permafrost to melt all the ice, so all the subsidence that will occur happens. Then you can continue cultivating once the land dries, and future subsidence will no longer be an issue.

I’d also like to point out that permafrost is not necessarily “bad” [for farmers]. There can be positives too. We have heard from farms that some of their most productive lands were in areas that historically had ice-rich permafrost. These areas were self-watering, with the ground ice acting as the moisture source, and were good for many decades until subsidence began to occur.

Also, when permafrost degrades, thaw ponds appear and these can be used as water sources for irrigation. We work with at least one collaborating farm that does this. Notably, other cultures use various stages of permafrost degradation for agriculture. In the Sakha Republic, formerly Yakutia, the Sakha people have used alaas meadows, created by degrading ice-rich permafrost, for animal husbandry and hay production for centuries.

How will the findings from this project be shared and disseminated? I’d imagine you want to get the word out to other farmers in the state, but are there plans to bring in additional stakeholders like government officials or those who make land-use decisions? 

MWJ: Our goal is to provide data in a way that farmers can use to make decisions. There are three to four co-op extension publications that will be published after the end of the project, the Great Mulch Study being an example.

We also do a lot of outreach and presentations at various conferences and workshops. There’s a lot of interest from other farmers around the state, but also [from] Division of Agriculture officials.

GG: Our hope, as Alaska continues to have a priority set for increasing agricultural production, is that we are generating information that is also useful to decision makers—whether those be policymakers or folks thinking about farmland conservation—on the types of permafrost-agriculture interactions that are important to take into consideration.

To what extent is it possible to grow Alaska’s agriculture industry without further disrupting its permafrost? 

GG: One of my personal takeaways from this project is that we should be thinking very carefully about preserving and maintaining the parts of Alaska that have already been cleared or developed for agricultural production and saving those areas from things like urban development.

There are few, if any, guaranteed ways to determine whether permafrost is present prior to development—especially at the scale of acres—that aren’t cost-prohibitively expensive or not feasible due to remote site access. Any new land-clearing for agricultural development in regions with higher permafrost prevalence is subject to a “hope-for-the-best-and-wait-to-see-what-happens” scenario over the years to decades post-clearing.

This makes investment in developing new agricultural land a risky bet for farmers and helps make the case for why established, “permafrost stable” farmland in Alaska is a valuable asset we should be prioritizing for food production, not development.

This is not to say we can’t develop new farms and ag land in Alaska—it just comes with risks that are unlike anywhere else in the nation, with no support systems in place for producers if it doesn’t work out.

What lessons in place-based, climate-adaptive agriculture can the rest of the country learn from Alaska? Why should people across the world know about what’s happening in the state? 

GG: There are climate projections modeling that the future of food production will be shifting northward, into boreal regions with discontinuous permafrost.

Understanding [permafrost] interactions now helps us think about what a northward shift might look like practically and what type of land would actually be suitable for production. I think people have a tendency to go, “Look at all that undeveloped land up there that can all be used for X, Y, Z.” Part of our intent is to understand [underlying permafrost] at a time when there isn’t as much external pressure to develop agriculture in Alaska.

That’s one piece. And this project shows how collaborative research can be performed with farmers. That model could be applied to a lot of different research questions regarding external pressures on agriculture. One example I’m thinking of, because it’s another area I work in, is the conflict between infrastructure development for energy and agriculture. There’s an imposing need for the land to be used one way, but we still need to produce food. So how do we work together?

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

The post Alaska’s Thawing Permafrost Could Shape the Future of Farming appeared first on Civil Eats.

In those early days in America, it was Cambodian food Uy most longed for—the soups, curries, and rice dishes that married fresh and fermented, striking the perfect balance of sweet, sour, salty, and umami. At one point, he traveled all the way to Long Beach, California, home of the country’s largest Cambodian population, in search of connection and familiar flavors.

Among the foods Uy missed most, salted crab, or kdam prai, held a special place. Before he moved from a village in Kampot province, in southwestern Cambodia, to Phnom Penh, the capital, he often went into the nearby rice fields with his family, where small brown crabs burrowed into the wet mud of the paddies. After harvesting—which kept the crabs from damaging the crop—they cleaned and soaked them for two days in fish sauce, sugar, and garlic.

His family’s salted crab, chopped up with the shells still on, starred as an unmistakable ingredient in papaya salad, more for the distinct flavor it imparted than the meager meat it offered. Marinated in lime, Thai basil, chili peppers, and more garlic, it was also served as a side dish alongside rice. Salted crab was everywhere in Cambodia. In the U.S., even a frozen import was hard to find; fresh was unthinkable.

“It’s the small things you miss, especially when you don’t have access,” Uy says.

A decade later, Uy is bringing kdam prai to Maine. He’s now the food and farm program manager at Khmer Maine, a nonprofit serving Portland’s 2,000-plus Cambodian residents through cultural exchange, community building, and civic engagement. And he’s marrying his past and present by developing a salted crab product featuring an invasive species from the Gulf of Maine, protecting the state’s marine ecosystem while feeding his community.

If You Can’t Beat Them, Eat Them

All this is happening as the Gulf of Maine warms faster than 99 percent of the world’s oceans, creating increasingly hospitable conditions for the green crab to proliferate. In this ecological crisis, Uy and his colleagues saw opportunity.

With help from a U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) Business Builder grant, Khmer Maine is preparing to launch its own kdam prai, made from locally harvested green crabs. The project has also connected Maine’s Cambodian community with GreenCrab.org, a nonprofit leading a regional effort to mitigate the crabs’ environmental impact by turning them into a food source.

Gobbling up green crabs is part of a broader movement that has also put lionfish, feral pigs, kudzu, and Asian carp on dinner plates and restaurant menus to stanch the spread of invasive species. Joe Roman, a conservation biologist who developed the concept of invasivorism 25 years ago, describes it as “a form of biological control” with the human appetite as the agent of change.

For Marpheen Chann, who founded Khmer Maine in 2018 to unite his community, salted crab offers a way to share a meaningful message while helping to address the green crab problem.

“We are showing how immigrants impact our communities and contribute to culture, economy, and ecology,” Chann says.

Invasive and Delicious

“They hold a reminder of home,” Chann says of green crabs. “Some of the grandmothers, the way they look at these crabs, there’s a light in their eyes. They recognize the shape and size of the crab and exactly what it can be used for.”

Although feedback from the giveaway suggested the Cambodian community wasn’t a suitable wholesale market for fresh crabs, Chann saw potential in a value-added product—especially one that could make the crabs available through Maine’s long winters, when they hide until spring. Khmer Maine received the USDA grant in 2025, securing around $78,000 to create a salted crab product that could address that need. Last fall, Chann and Uy started developing their recipe with support and guidance from some of the community’s elders.

Sokhuon Ou was eager to help. After nearly a decade away from home, she still misses the salted crab she used to eat with her siblings.

“They are the most delicious food,” she says through an interpreter.

During two test batches made at Fork Food Lab, a Portland commercial kitchen and business incubator, a half-dozen elders, including Ou, helped Chann and Uy with the hard work of preparing salted crab, scrubbing sinks full of feisty crabs to douse in the brine. They shared stories and memories in their native Khmer language to pass the time. As soon as Uy opened a bucket of the finished product for packaging, the elders began clamoring for a taste, he says. Then they packaged 500 pounds of crab into vacuum-sealed bags and went home with some samples.

Ou was happy to be surrounded by the pungent aroma from the garlicky fish-sauce brine. She’ll be even happier to have fresh, local kdam prai this summer. The first crabs of the season are only just beginning to emerge, but once the harvest arrives, Chann plans to salt them and give away samples at Seafest, a celebration of Southeast Asian cultures on May 2 in Westbrook, Maine.

As soon as Khmer Maine can secure crabs and build up its supply of kdam prai, it will begin selling flash-frozen quart containers directly to the community from its offices near Portland Harbor and at local events, rather than wholesale. If all goes well, the salted crab may hit the shelves of Portland’s Cambodian grocers. Any revenue will support the organization and its other initiatives, including growing popular herbs like Thai basil for the community.

There will be opportunity to expand if Khmer Maine chooses: Parks has a long list of chefs in the region who have requested samples. And the country’s second-largest Cambodian community resides an hour and a half away in Lowell, Massachusetts, offering another market with an appetite for salted crab.

The Making of a New Market

As a member of his town’s shellfish committee, he’s led the effort to protect clam harvesters by trapping green crabs, which can eat up to 40 clams a day. Based on unscientific surveys, Stanton says, the trapping seems to be making a difference, with crab populations dwindling in coves they’ve harvested most. Stanton is struck by the Cambodian community’s enthusiasm for using green crabs as a food source and eager to support the development of a consistent market for the species.

“If anybody can crack the code, all the clammers will start catching them,” Stanton says.

The development of a culinary market for green crabs could alleviate some of the threat to coastal economies dependent on lobsters, clams, mussels, and oysters. As the Gulf of Maine warms, ocean acidification is complicating shell formation and lobsters are migrating north for cooler climes. In that sense, green crabs represent a new type of abundance, Parks says.

“We’re losing access to so many species,” she says. “We finally have something we can fish and fish and fish, and it’s going to be there in the future.”

Chann and Uy take pride in what they and their collaborators are doing with green crabs, responding to the impact of ecological crisis and showing that their small community can help guide the future of green crab foodways. More than anything, though, they take satisfaction in knowing that they’re providing Portland’s Cambodian community with a taste of home.

“It would bring a big moment of joy if you could access the food that you had eaten when you were young,” Uy says. With green crab season fast approaching, he’s ready to do just that.

The post Maine’s Cambodian Community Aims to Keep Invasive Green Crabs at Bay appeared first on Civil Eats.

“Born here, raised here, processed here,” the rodeo stars state matter of factly, explaining a revised label plan for some U.S. products.

The heavily produced video was intended to raise awareness for the revamped “Product of the USA” label for meat, poultry, and egg products. That label, finalized under the Biden administration in 2024, closed a loophole that could boost competitiveness for smaller meatpackers and ranchers and was celebrated for providing more transparency to consumers.

The calls to close the loophole largely come from smaller ranchers who struggle to compete with cheaper beef from large, consolidated meatpackers. But the initiative is also facing criticism that it does not go far enough, along with a push for the return of mandatory labeling.

‘Product of the USA’ Origins

Previously, the label could be used on beef raised and slaughtered in a foreign country, as long as it was packaged or minimally processed domestically.

Rollins told reporters that the Biden administration never put any marketing behind the policy. She is now in talks with “big food companies” to push them to buy beef from American ranchers, she said. “The goal is to be able at the end of the day to wholly subsist and to rely on American ranchers, American born, raised, harvested, processed beef.”

U.S. cattle herds hit a 75-year low in 2026, according to USDA reports, contributing to high beef prices for consumers and increased pressure on domestic cattle ranchers.

As the industry works to improve domestic herds and markets, Rollins said, consumers should know where their food is coming from.

The labeling, which is currently voluntary under the USDA rule, is most likely to benefit smaller meatpackers that are local or regional, said Bill Bullard, CEO of R-CALF, a group that supports independent cattle producers.

Four of the largest meatpackers control over 80 percent of the U.S. market, but they largely import their beef, he said. The labeling allows the smaller packers that represent the remaining 20 percent to differentiate themselves.

These packers hope the new label will correct consumer misconceptions about food origins. For example, Bullard said, consumers erroneously think that beef with a USDA inspection sticker is also produced domestically. That label simply notes that the product was deemed safe by USDA inspectors, but does not mean anything about where it was produced.

“The more the ‘Product of the USA’ label is used in the marketplace, consumers will be better informed and will better understand that there’s a difference between an origin label and a food safety inspection label,” Bullard said.

The label could have an outsized effect on the domestic organic beef market as well, said Alicia LaPorte, communications director at Niman Ranch, a network of farms focused on humane and sustainable practices.

About 95 percent of organic beef is imported, but consumers may be unaware of that, she said, and organic shoppers tend to have more room in their budget to pay for more expensive domestic products.

Consumer research from grocery and meat industry groups also demonstrates that organic shoppers prefer domestic products.

“It could make a meaningful difference for domestic ranchers having that [labeling] more upfront, because I do think it could really shift what shoppers choose to buy,” LaPorte said.

Calls for Mandatory Label

The World Trade Organization has meanwhile ruled that U.S. labeling for beef and pork violated trade obligations by discriminating against cattle and hogs imported from Canada and Mexico. The rulings allowed Canada and Mexico to impose retaliatory tariffs against U.S. exports and prompted lawmakers to remove the requirement for these products.

R-CALF’s stance is that the WTO “overreached” in its ruling and that the COOL law applied to domestic and imported products the same.

“We are not concerned that mandatory country of origin labeling in any way violates our trade agreements or trade standards,” Bullard said. “The fact that virtually every product in America is subject to a mandatory country of origin label suggests to us that the ruling by the WTO was purely political.”

Bullard said R-CALF is encouraging Congress to revive the COOL law for beef products in the upcoming farm bill.

During a recent announcement about domestic beef, Rollins said she is a “big supporter” of COOL, which she said promotes transparency, but action on COOL is ultimately in the hands of Congress.

“For me, it’s black and white,” she said. “Everyone in America should know where their food is coming from.”

The post Will ‘Product of the USA’ Give Cattle Ranchers a Boost? appeared first on Civil Eats.

My first concrete lessons in food inequity came from eleven- and twelve-year-olds. When I finished my undergraduate degree, I moved to Atlanta to teach at Coretta Scott King Young Women’s Leadership Academy, a predominantly Black single-gender public school that was founded the year I joined the teaching staff. Most of our students came from neighborhoods that had some of the highest poverty and crime rates in the city.

They also experienced some of the highest rates of food insecurity, and had the least access to fresh, healthy food—a trend that persists, according to a 2023 study conducted by Megan Winkler and her colleagues at Emory University’s Rollins School of Public Health.

On one occasion, I took a few students to a grocery store and then served them dinner at my home. While we sat at the dining room table together, they changed the whole trajectory of my life by simply pointing out that the food they had access to in their neighborhood was significantly inferior to what I had in my neighborhood less than five miles away.

Those students asked a number of questions: Why does your neighborhood have the nice grocery stores? Why do you have so many more kinds of fruits and vegetables than we do? They also had critiques: It’s like they don’t care if we have options? and How are we supposed to eat healthy if everything around us is unhealthy? Gathered around a table on a random school night, we mused about what it means to be healthy, to feel confident and nourished, to feel included in society.

Their questions became my questions, and their critiques were guideposts for my own curiosity when I returned to graduate school to study anthropology. I became obsessed with learning how cities work, and how macro-level forces shape the everyday realities of people like my students and their families.

I took an internship at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Disparities Solutions to understand the relationship between residential segregation and health outcomes, and I sought mentorship from sociologists who were experts in urban design and inequities. I learned that my students’ observations were not an anomaly.

Predominantly Black urban neighborhoods in the U.S., regardless of income, have fewer food resources than their white counterparts. As I’d learn, this lack of provisioning has major impacts on long-term health. Sometimes referred to as obesogenic environments, neighborhoods with less access to fresh produce and grocery stores, or that lack sidewalks and green space, are risk factors for obesity, diabetes, and hypertension.

When people have easier access to fast-food chains and liquor stores than grocery stores or farmers’ markets, that impacts the decisions people make about what they’ll eat.

For example, my middle school students in Atlanta could walk to a corner store with burglar bars on the window or a fast-food restaurant in the same amount of time it would take me to reach my choice of four grocery stores. Relatedly, many of their parents worked long hours and weekends, making time a factor in how and when they shopped for groceries. In contrast, while I was in graduate school, I supported myself by babysitting for wealthy families in the Washington, D.C. area.

After school, there was one place that these kids always wanted to go: McDonald’s. There was one place that parents almost always said it was okay for me to take them: McDonald’s. These kids, mostly wealthy and mostly white, were never the poster children of the childhood obesity epidemic. They weren’t the imagined victims of the fast-food industry. They, unlike the students I taught in Atlanta, were just kids with choices.

What I learned from these experiences was that there wasn’t anything inherently different about the kind of choices kids would make if given the opportunity. The main difference was the range of choices they had. For my students, that landscape was limited. The experiences of my students directly challenged the myth that poor people and people of color are more inclined toward unhealthy foods.

Instead, the structures that shaped their world—the facts that healthy grocery stores were further away, their parents often worked overtime at low-wage jobs, and fast food was the least expensive option—funneled them toward foods that weren’t the healthiest options.

To convey that these problems are structural and not caused by individual choices, activists and scholars use the term “food apartheid,” which they define as the system of racialized inequality in food access. The idea of food apartheid forces us to zoom out and consider how many systems are deliberately built to work against certain consumers based on race and geography.

Karen Washington, longtime food justice activist and cofounder of Black Urban Growers (BUGs), plainly stated that food apartheid “looks at the whole system, along with race, geography, faith, and economics. You say ‘food apartheid’ and you get to the root cause of some of the problems around the food system. It brings in hunger and poverty. It brings us to the more important question: What are some of the social inequities that you see, and what are you doing to erase some of the injustices?”

This question is at the heart of the food justice movement, a movement that aims to expose inequalities that shape our food world and to work toward equity.

Food justice has received a lot of attention and support over the past 25 years, though its origins are arguably much older. Some point to the Black Panther Party’s Free Breakfast for Children program and Fannie Lou Hamer’s Freedom Farms Collective in Sunflower County, Mississippi, in the 1960s as early experiments that formed a foundation for the food justice movement.

In Food Justice, the first full-length book about the subject, published in 2010, Robert Gottlieb, cofounder of the Urban and Environmental Policy Institute at Occidental College, and Anupama Joshi, cofounder of the National Farm to School Network, characterized food justice as “ensuring that the benefits and risks of where, what, and how food is grown and produced, transported and distributed, and accessed and eaten are shared fairly.”

Inherent in their definition is a sense of shared fate—a counter to a version of food consumption that overemphasizes individual choice. Gottlieb and Joshi helped us understand that a justice orientation toward food requires us to shift the benefits and risks such that the blessings and burdens are more equitably shared. Many organizations and researchers have built on this approach, with most diagnosing the problems in the food system as stemming from the prioritization of profits over people’s wellbeing while also providing direct aid and access to impacted communities.

For over 15 years, I’ve witnessed this work in real time. In D.C., the Green Scheme established gardens at housing projects so that residents could build self-sufficiency. When money was low, one of the residents would pick whatever was left in the garden to make a huge pot of soup to share with others. In Atlanta, a group of Black farmers founded the Southwest Atlanta Growers Cooperative (SWAG), to provide more produce in southwest Atlanta.

All over the country, I’ve encountered individuals and organizations who haven’t waited for food environments to change on their own. Instead, they’ve set out to change things themselves.

What was once a grassroots movement rooted in principles that emphasized growing community control over food systems is now firmly mainstream, with thousands of organizations across the country. Mainstream means more people listening, more people paying attention to the problem, more opportunities to address the inequalities we so desperately want to eradicate.

But there’s also a risk for cooptation, with the most radical components of the movement being sidelined either because of pragmatism (prioritizing the work that can get funded) or discomfort. For the early architects, food was always political and thus, so too was food justice—a direct affront to unfair systems.

But as the movement has grown, what is considered justice in regard to food is increasingly nebulous. Sometimes, the urgency of providing healthy food eclipses the equally important need to build new infrastructures such that one day, food inequalities will no longer exist. That is a huge, daunting task that won’t happen overnight. But we can’t lose sight of it even as we meet the needs of communities who require immediate support.

There’s also a risk that those who are creating visions for what they believe food justice is do so without relationships with or input from the communities they want to serve. This disconnect might prioritize “healthy food” while wholly missing the mark on the reality that justice is a collaborative effort that must include vision and leadership from the communities being served.

As food justice has firmly taken its place in the mainstream, “food” and “justice” aren’t always in alignment. In fact, sometimes they’re at odds. Radical dreams also cost a lot of money and require a lot of effort. But what if the challenges we face are invitations to redefine where and how we seek value?

In almost every class I teach, I tell students that part of what we’re experiencing in an unjust food system is a crisis of scale. Our current, corporatized food system prioritizes increasing size and reach, consolidation, monopolization, and standardization not only across the country but across the world. The industrialized food system has grown too big and requires inequality to sustain itself.

The challenge with scaling up is that the bigger the scale at which something operates, the harder it is to infuse it with values that everyday people espouse and the harder it is to make it accountable for the lives it touches. On the other side of the equation, the further away something is from people’s bodies and lived experiences, the harder it is for them to imagine that they can have any impact on it.

The produce in our grocery basket is often grown across the world, picked by people we’ll never meet in places we’ll never go, and the problems of hunger and access seem unimaginably vast. Even if we wanted to change those systems, where would we start?

Thinking at a large scale can feel overwhelming. Luckily for us, that isn’t the only register at which we can find inspiration or practice our values. Our everyday lives present unlimited opportunities to construct justice and liberation in our food system and otherwise. No matter the size of the action, the point is that liberation doesn’t just happen.

We have to work toward it in everything we do. If nothing else, that is what I hope you learn from the people and gatherings in this book. The values we practice and the rituals we build in our everyday lives hold keys to how to transform our food system. People like my grandmother understood the power of togetherness. We must take the lessons they offer us more seriously.

***

The answers aren’t neat or easy, but I think we’re closer to them than we think. One of the core arguments of this book is that everyday ways people get together to meet the physical and social needs of others comprise a masterclass for how to hone the values that are less quantifiable. Who better to learn from than the experts themselves—everyday people who put nourishment into practice as a way of life.

It is imperative that we put nourishment at the center of food justice movements. We can take inspiration from organizations like the National Black Food and Justice Alliance (NBFJA), which is leading some of the most exciting, expansive work right now, ranging from offering direct support to Black farmers to establishing centers for the study and practice of Afroecology at historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs). Each year, they celebrate this work with an annual gathering, an event that nourishes everyone to continue the arduous work of building better infrastructures.

We must also take inspiration from everyday people like those featured in this book. It is a loving calling in, an invitation for us to reconsider what we are fighting for, how we’re fighting for those things, and how those people’s knowledge and ways of being are embedded in our visions for the future. I’m not saying our food justice movements have failed. I’m saying we’re at an impasse, and we’ve got to look beyond the echo chambers that currently define what is important and what is at stake.

I turn toward Black gatherings to reframe our understanding of what is possible in the food world, by looking at what is already happening when Black people gather around food. It is an attempt to write about a belief I hold deeply, a belief that has held me deeply: there is no inherent deficit in Black people. In fact, if we look closely enough, if we are curious enough, much of the magic and creativity that happens when Black people gather can be transformative not only for us but for the entire world.

Gather starts from the premise that death, destruction, and denial are not the only ways to index Black life. By looking at the spaces where Black people gather, we can also witness the beauty of Black aliveness—in all its goodness, contradictions, love, and capaciousness.

Visit Blackgathering.net to listen to the interviews recorded for Gather and to see photos and videos of the gatherings featured in the book. 

The post Excerpt: ‘Gather: Black Food, Nourishment, and the Art of Togetherness’ appeared first on Civil Eats.

Michael Strickland is no stranger to such unearthings. A microbial ecologist, he often goes into the field to collect soil samples, or cores, to study in the lab. Usually, he’s probing to a depth of about a foot. This dig will go 10 times deeper.

As the press nears the 8-foot mark, the soil layer, which is likely near 10,000 years old, is heavily compacted and does not budge. Watching nearby, Strickland catches his breath as the machine grinds to a halt. “I’m thinking, ‘Is it going to happen? Are we going to get this core out of here?’” he says. The work slows to a creep, but with some coaxing, the land opens up centimeter by labored centimeter.

Over the course of three weeks, the process continues until finally, six soil-filled cylinders are ready to be capped, strapped onto a truck, and driven to their new home: The University of Idaho’s Deep Soil Ecotron, where Strickland is the director.

This new research facility, opened in May 2025, provides a rare chance to study deep soils—largely uncharted domains that are at once remnants of the past and potential harbingers of the future for agriculture and climate science.

Why Study Deep Soils?

Scientists have paid less attention to deep soils for another reason: They’re relatively stable. Deep soils start roughly 30 centimeters (about a foot) below the surface and are lower in oxygen than topsoil, limiting their microbial turnover, gas exchange, and plant activity. Topsoils, which are constantly shifting in response to environmental conditions, offer a more dynamic field of study.

In the last few years, however, emerging research has suggested that the hidden realms of deep soils are worth exploring. Deep soils, for example, could play an important role in climate change mitigation by storing carbon deep underground. While carbon sequestered in topsoil—once hailed as a solution to the climate crisis—is anything but permanent, carbon at deeper depths appears to be more stable and protected. Beyond their carbon-sequestering capacity, the way that deep soils cycle and store other compounds, like nitrogen and water, could prove relevant to farmers looking to maximize yields.

Deep soil also seems to be teeming with novel bacteria that don’t exist anywhere else, and could be just as rich in microbial life as surface soil. The intact soil cores collected here will give Strickland and his team a glimpse into what types of organisms have adapted to these dark, dense, low-oxygen environments, and how they impact the wider ecosystem.

“The interaction between roots, minerals, and microbes going beyond the topsoil is really fascinating and can help us better understand the soil, our climate, and how changing conditions above ground are driving dynamics below ground,” says Ashley Keiser, a DSE science advisor and soil ecologist at UMass Amherst.

Deep soil has been compared to outer space and the depths of the ocean: a “dark forest” that is mysterious and relatively unchartered. The new Idaho facility offers a look into an otherwise unseen world—and the possibilities that come with it.

A New Type of Laboratory

A soil pit at Sandpoint Organic Agriculture Center after a Deep Soil Ecotron excavation exposes the levels of deep soil. (Photo credit: Michael Strickland)

Since the first ecotron facility opened at Imperial College London in the early 1990s, about a dozen others have been built, mostly in Europe. Many of these facilities research how climate changes affect the functioning of different ecosystems, from heathlands to freshwater ponds.

Idaho’s Deep Soil Ecotron (DSE) is the first in the world dedicated to deep soils. The DSE, mostly funded by a $18.95 million grant from the U.S. National Science Foundation, houses 24 of the gigantic columns. Six are filled; the remainder will house soil from Idaho and beyond.

These “ecounits” are notable not only for their size and depth, but also for their scientific controls. They are equipped with heat exchangers for adjusting soil temperature and ceramic suction cups for modifying water content. Scientists can also tinker with the light, humidity, and greenhouse gas (methane, carbon dioxide, and nitrous oxide) concentrations at the surface of each unit. “We can essentially mimic almost any climate conditions, barring extreme cold,” says Strickland. At the top of each soil column rests a “grow chamber” where researchers can interact with the topsoil, growing crops or applying soil amendments depending on what they’re studying.

Sensors are installed throughout each column to deliver continuous information about how the soil is responding to the changes happening below and above the surface.

All six of the filled columns contain soil from the Sandpoint site. Three have intact soil cores that were extracted with the hydraulic press and represent natural, untouched soil environments. The other three have “disturbed” soils that were filled manually and exposed to oxygen, likely affecting their structure and function. These different sample types are now undergoing data collection and proof-of-concept work before the facility opens up to the broader scientific community in the next six to 12 months.

Deep Soil’s Potential for Farmers

At the Deep Soil Ecotron, a soil cylinder equipped with sensors that monitor soil conditions like temperature and moisture content. (Photo credit: Michael Strickland)

Once he learned about the DSE through his role on a university advisory board, he started digging into ways it could help him prepare for and respond to unpredictable weather events like drought so they wouldn’t hurt his yields and margins as much.

“This [facility] can allow us to simulate different climatic events—from a really wet year to a drought year—not only in the top at the grow chamber, where the crop is, but throughout that soil profile,” Blair says. “Once we know what the moisture levels are 2 feet, 3 feet, 10 feet down, we as farmers may be able to better manage our crops based upon those findings.”

Beyond providing information on deep soil moisture, Stickland and DSE co-director Zachary Kayler say the facility could help predict how soils will respond to temperature extremes like heat waves, which can be simulated in each column.

Using the data constantly collected from the ecotron sensors, the DSE team may even be able to develop hyperrealistic computer models of each soil system, which Kayler refers to as “digital twins,” and run tests on these ahead of forecasted weather events to predict how soils might be affected in real life.

Data from the DSE could help farmers better manage soil nutrients to maximize yield—and reduce fertilizer costs, too, Strickland says. Nitrate, for example, is a highly mobile compound that can easily move through the soil profile and become stored in deeper layers. “Rather than applying more nitrogen, you might be able to [one day] mine the deeper nitrogen pools within ecosystems,” he says.

The facility could also assist farmers in pest detection and management. Since each soil unit is contained, researchers will be able to introduce pests without worrying about contaminating nearby environments. This would allow them to run experiments that would be difficult in the field and potentially identify early signs of a pest problem so farmers can stop infestations before they begin. The units could also serve as a testing ground for new agricultural products like GMO crops and microbial inoculants—soil amendments made with bacteria—to help ensure they work as intended before being released into the field.

Earlier this month, Kayler hosted a conference with local growers, producers, and farm industry affiliates to unveil the new facility, discuss how it could best meet their needs, and get the word out about its potential.

“Until the University of Idaho started this project, I had no clue what an ecotron was,” says Blair. “I think it’s a hidden secret that needs more publicity in agriculture circles.”

Digging Deeper on Carbon

Soil organic carbon, formed by decaying plant and animal material, gets pulled deeper underground through precipitation, root transfer, animal activity, and certain microbial processes. The deeper the soil organic carbon (SOC), the less likely it is to be released into the environment due to a variety of factors, including reduced microbial disruption. But research suggests that it can still be unearthed under certain conditions.

“Some of this deeper soil carbon is more stable, but we don’t necessarily know what could change that,” says Gabrielle Feber, a third-year Ph.D. candidate at the University of Idaho who is part of a DSE student research team.

The DSE could help demystify deep soil carbon cycling and storage in a few ways. First, it allows researchers to manipulate different environmental conditions like temperature and precipitation to get a better idea of how deep soils might retain or release carbon as climate conditions change. Researchers will also be able to manipulate the surface of each ecotron column and could study how different land management practices, like planting perennials, impact the carbon activity of deeper soils below. Findings from the facility could help inform future strategies to keep stored carbon deep underground and out of the atmosphere as climate conditions change.

This information will be just as relevant to farmers, who rely on soil organic carbon as an essential nutrient for crop growth, as it will be to environmental scientists, who cite uncertainties about soil carbon storage as one of the main barriers to accurate climate modeling.

“Deeper soils have the potential to be our ally or foe when it comes to mitigating climate change, depending on whether they can be managed to actively sequester SOC or whether global changes increase the decomposition of deep SOC, causing it to be respired to the atmosphere as CO2,” according to a 2023 paper in the Annual Review of Ecology, Evolution, and Systematics.

Now that major construction on the DSE facility is complete, funding must be secured to keep it up and running. This will likely come from a mix of federal funding, grants, and scientific partners who pay to conduct their research there.

The ultimate vision is to fill the remaining columns with soils from around the country and potentially the world—a sprawling tapestry of the Earth and an arena for diverse science.

“This is not a University of Idaho-only facility,” says Strickland. “It’s something anyone who has ideas can come in and potentially utilize.”

The post Deep Soils Could Hold Keys to Climate Resilience appeared first on Civil Eats.

https://civileats.com/2026/04/13/more-than-just-their-work-a-farmworker-advocate-on-those-who-feed-us/ https://civileats.com/2026/04/13/more-than-just-their-work-a-farmworker-advocate-on-those-who-feed-us/#respond Mon, 13 Apr 2026 08:00:13 +0000 https://civileats.com/?p=72519 In 2022, she received a James Beard Leadership Award for a project she launched there, “The Humans Who Feed Us,” a series of first-person stories about food-system workers. In February, she won the Elevate Prize for her work to end gender-based violence and promote gender equity. Ramírez’s multigenerational, migrant farmworker family inspired her life’s work. […]

The post ‘More Than Just Their Work’: A Farmworker Advocate on Those Who Feed Us appeared first on Civil Eats.

]]>

Mónica Ramírez has dedicated most of her life to broadening public understanding of who migrant women are and how often they are overlooked. A civil rights attorney, Ramírez is the founder and president of Justice for Migrant Women.

In 2022, she received a James Beard Leadership Award for a project she launched there, “The Humans Who Feed Us,” a series of first-person stories about food-system workers. In February, she won the Elevate Prize for her work to end gender-based violence and promote gender equity.

Ramírez’s multigenerational, migrant farmworker family inspired her life’s work. She often points to how her family’s story changed when farmers offered them a chance to stay in the rural Ohio town where she was born. That stability helped her parents move into work outside the industry and enabled Ramírez to attend school without having to do field labor herself, like her parents, grandparents, and uncles.

“Just being able to break that migrant cycle made a big difference in terms of my life choices,” she says.

Ramírez believes the most effective way to bring people together is not through confrontation, but by building common ground.

At 14, she began writing for her local newspaper about issues affecting farmworkers and Latinos in her hometown. After college at Loyola University of Chicago, she earned a J.D. at the Ohio State University’s Moritz College of Law and a master’s in public administration from the Harvard Kennedy School.

Having grown up in a place where people get to know one another in school hallways, church pews, and grocery store aisles, Ramírez believes the most effective way to bring people together in today’s rural America is not through confrontation, but by building common ground.

Civil Eats spoke to Ramírez about how her work has evolved, the importance of humanizing food system workers, and the challenges facing farmworker activism today.

What was the narrative you wanted to shift by launching “The Humans Who Feed Us”? 

I didn’t want to highlight the problems the farmworker community or immigrants face. I wanted to focus on their dreams, because that’s something that everyday people can relate to. My hope was that in creating the project that way, by having these portraits where you can see the individual and read some of their dreams on the cards alongside the portraits, the public would be able to connect with these individuals beyond their work, as people, and be able to say, “I share that dream.”

As you were learning their stories, what themes kept coming up? 

Whether they’re fleeing violence or poverty, there was this idea that if they could come to the United States, it would be better. There’s a lot of gratitude. People are very grateful for the opportunities they’ve been given.

But there’s also this underlying theme that they want people to see them. They hear what people are saying about immigrants, and they want their neighbors to know that what they’re doing is for the good of many. They want to be seen and they want to be valued. A lot of them live in invisibility. They’re people who are going to work every day, doing work that literally sustains us. Whether they’re working in a grocery store, at a restaurant, a food truck, or far off in the fields, it’s like society has made them invisible.

What would you want the public to understand about the farmworkers and other communities behind our food? 

That they are critical to our everyday lives. And that they’re more than just their work. These are whole people. They contribute in many ways.

Also, if you’re only focusing on their work, you fail to see all the other things that [as human beings] they need support with.  It’s important for people to understand [their] struggle right now. There are so many rights that farmworkers and others who are employed in the food supply chain don’t have.  Waiters and waitresses still have tipped wages. Members of the farmworker community still don’t have the right to overtime or the right to unionize under federal labor law.

We need consumers to see themselves as partners in this work. They need to be invested in improving the conditions. It’s been almost 90 years since the farmworker community and other food workers were denied the basic rights of other working people under the Fair Labor Standards Act. At the highest level of government, the decision has been made not to improve their rights over all these decades. We have to understand that as consumers and be partners in making the change. It’s not going to change if everyday people don’t get involved.

Mónica Ramírez at the Raizado Festival in Aspen, Colorado, in August 2025. Founded by Ramírez in 2020, the festival is a project of Justice for Migrant Women and celebrates Latine culture, leadership, and community. (Photo courtesy of Justice for Migrant Women)

How do you create common ground when having this discussion with someone who thinks differently? How does doing this advocacy work in rural America differ from in cities? 

It really resonates when I talk about what it means to be a good neighbor. It doesn’t matter what your political affiliation is; that kind of language brings people together. We always look for words and ways where we can find common ground and bring people together, trying to connect human to human. That has been at the heart of what’s been successful in our work.

When you’re in a big city, it’s easier to find like-minded people. There’s just more people, and there’s a certain level of anonymity. Here in small-town Ohio, people I see at church or in the grocery store are people who we interact with every day. That’s a big difference between rural America and big cities, because we are not anonymous; people very much know who we are. That makes us a little bit more careful and thoughtful about what we say and do—and makes it a little bit easier to bring people of different political views together. We have had those kinds of bonds for years.

A challenge we have is that we are very isolated. We have to be creative in how we reach people because of the isolation and the information gaps that exist here. But the opportunity is that we have these close, longstanding relationships.

You’ve spent years advocating for migrant women and farmworkers. How has your work evolved? 

I think it’s come full circle. I started as a 14-year-old activist telling the stories of my community, and today, many years into my career, I still tell the stories of my community. There is urgency around that because one of the biggest struggles we have is the dehumanization of farmworkers. When you dehumanize a person, it makes it easier to exploit them because you no longer see them as deserving respect or fairness.

What has always been urgent for my work has been addressing the issue of sexual violence. It’s a major problem in the farmworker community. Because of the recent news related to César Chávez, that issue is front and center again. It should have always been front and center, but now it’s reemerged in the public eye. That is a longstanding problem, and there have not been sufficient supports needed to address sexual violence in the farmworker community.

What was your first thought when you learned about the allegations against César Chávez?

My very first reaction was confusion. I just could not have ever imagined that César Chávez would have caused that harm. It took me a little while to try to understand it. I felt shocked and hurt and sad. Mostly, I felt sad for the survivors. When I read about Dolores [Huerta] experiencing sexual violence, I had no idea. I’ve known Dolores for many years and just felt heartbroken. Like in grief, I’ve been through waves of emotions.

When you have a situation of sexual violence, there’s a ripple effect of harm. There’s no way to completely heal that harm, certainly not immediately. From the perspective of someone who’s focused on this work my entire career, what does this process need to look like? What does it mean for what I believed my whole life about the foundation of this movement?

Has this changed how you see leadership and the movement?

One person is not a movement. There are millions of people that have been part of the farmworker movement from all around the world. It has been farmworker community members who have been the heart and the center. Why do we have people that we put in a kind of hero status? People need people to look up to, but there is a danger when you have a singular hero and not his full story.

You can have a visionary [leader], but there are many people that implement that vision. This is an opportunity to say to ourselves: Are we living up to the standards that we are setting? If we’re not, what can we do to change that? How do we make sure that the movements we’re part of, and lead, are spaces with opportunity for many people to rise to the top in leadership?

What gives you hope for the future? 

The people we have the honor to serve give me so much hope. With all the odds stacked against them, the rhetoric about immigrants, the negative things that are happening that directly impact their lives, they just keep moving forward, with the single goal of making things better for their families. My hope is that people in society start to understand how much power and vision they have. They know what they need, what needs to change, and we should listen to them and never undermine their power.

The post ‘More Than Just Their Work’: A Farmworker Advocate on Those Who Feed Us appeared first on Civil Eats.

]]> https://civileats.com/2026/04/13/more-than-just-their-work-a-farmworker-advocate-on-those-who-feed-us/feed/ 0 https://civileats.com/2026/04/09/usda-finalizes-rollback-of-environmental-permitting-regulations/ https://civileats.com/2026/04/09/usda-finalizes-rollback-of-environmental-permitting-regulations/#respond Thu, 09 Apr 2026 17:48:57 +0000 https://civileats.com/?p=72508 April 9, 2026 – The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) this week finalized a rule that will overhaul how the agency implements a key environmental law. The new rule will significantly pare back environmental impact requirements, eliminate opportunities for public comment, and remove climate change and environmental justice considerations. It represents a major change in […]

The post USDA Finalizes Rollback of Environmental Permitting Regulations appeared first on Civil Eats.

]]> April 9, 2026 – The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) this week finalized a rule that will overhaul how the agency implements a key environmental law.

The new rule will significantly pare back environmental impact requirements, eliminate opportunities for public comment, and remove climate change and environmental justice considerations.

It represents a major change in the way the USDA implements the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), which was signed into law in 1970 and requires the government to identify and assess the environmental impacts of any “major federal actions significantly affecting the quality of the human environment.”

At the USDA, NEPA compliance can mean environmental assessments of grazing infrastructure on public lands or of plans to eradicate crop pests or to manage wildlife impacts on farms and livestock.

Last spring, the Trump administration rescinded NEPA regulations that applied across the government and directed agencies to make additional changes.

In a press release, Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins said the USDA’s approach will reduce the volume of NEPA regulations by 66 percent and will lead to faster, more efficient reviews. “Those savings benefit the American people, and quicker reviews mean the loans, critical infrastructure, and forest health projects our farmers, ranchers, and rural communities depend on can move forward sooner,” she said.

But representatives of environmental groups including the Sierra Club and the Center for Biological Diversity, who have a lawsuit in process against the USDA opposing the rule change, said the final rule could shut the public out of important decisions.

“It really takes away our right to know what’s going on on our public lands,” said Wendy Park, a senior attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity, who said she is also concerned about the USDA’s “vast” expansion of “categorical exclusions”—instances in which environmental assessments are not required. “There will definitely be more rubber stamping of projects,” she said.

In comments on an earlier proposed version of the rule, Earthjustice attorneys argued the removal of climate change and environmental justice considerations is not consistent with the law.

House Democrats on the Natural Resources Committee also objected to the proposed changes in a letter sent to Rollins last August. “Public comment is not a barrier to efficiency; it is how government agencies gain a full understanding of the environmental, cultural, and social consequences that their decisions will have on the public they serve,” they wrote.

In the letter, they argued insufficient staffing and funding, not NEPA regulations themselves, were responsible for issues with efficiency. “Enhancing permitting office budgets, increasing staffing levels, and investing in workforce training would significantly improve the efficiency and timeliness of NEPA reviews, while preserving the rigor and public accountability the law requires,” they said. (Link to this post.)

The post USDA Finalizes Rollback of Environmental Permitting Regulations appeared first on Civil Eats.

]]> https://civileats.com/2026/04/09/usda-finalizes-rollback-of-environmental-permitting-regulations/feed/ 0 https://civileats.com/2026/04/08/food-companies-backslide-on-promises-to-reduce-pesticides/ https://civileats.com/2026/04/08/food-companies-backslide-on-promises-to-reduce-pesticides/#respond Wed, 08 Apr 2026 08:00:59 +0000 https://civileats.com/?p=72490 More than six years later, the webpage that outlined that plan redirects visitors to a page on regenerative agriculture, where the word “pesticide” does not appear. “They are no longer aligning their regenerative agriculture program with pesticide reduction at all, which is obviously concerning, because what the soil science points to is that regenerative without […]

The post Food Companies Backslide on Promises to Reduce Pesticides appeared first on Civil Eats.

]]>

Article Summary

• In an annual report, As You Sow awarded lower scores to 10 out of 17 major food companies on their approach to mitigating pesticide risks.
• Companies are making little progress in reducing the volume of pesticides used in the U.S. food system, despite the increase in public awareness.
• An increase in consumer pressure could push companies to improve; many companies that scored poorly in the report are also seeing their stock prices decrease.

More than six years later, the webpage that outlined that plan redirects visitors to a page on regenerative agriculture, where the word “pesticide” does not appear.

“They are no longer aligning their regenerative agriculture program with pesticide reduction at all, which is obviously concerning, because what the soil science points to is that regenerative without significant pesticide reduction is not regenerating soil health,” said Cailin Dendas, the senior coordinator of As You Sow’s Environmental Health Program.

Dendas is the author of a new report that found General Mills is not alone: It’s one of several food companies moving away from earlier promises to reduce pesticide use.

The annual report ranks the country’s biggest food companies on their commitments to disclosing pesticide use and reducing it in their supply chains. This year, report authors awarded lower scores to 10 out of 17 companies, concluding that “the food industry is not stagnating on pesticide risk—it is actively reversing progress it had already made.”

The report lands at a time when evidence on the health and environmental risks of many common pesticides is rapidly mounting, with Americans increasingly concerned about those risks.

In the past month alone, Iowa researchers put out a report concluding that in their state “the impact of pesticide use on cancer incidence may be similar to that of smoking.” Food & Water Watch published a map showing that rates of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma are elevated in Midwest counties where glyphosate use is highest. And a new study from researchers in Peru published in Nature found that the risk of developing cancer in areas where pesticide exposure was more likely was 150 percent higher on average.

Following a Seattle symposium at the end of March to review glyphosate research, leading experts from around the world declared that the evidence is now strong enough to definitively say the use of world’s most ubiquitous weedkiller is causing widespread health harms. In the midst of it all, the Center for Food Safety and Center for Biological Diversity released two analyses showing that even for pesticides that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has determined may cause cancer, the agency almost never includes a warning.

Attributing long-term health harms to pesticide exposure is notoriously complicated, because it’s impossible to isolate exposure to any one chemical from other environmental exposures and risk factors. And the EPA maintains that its processes ensure the pesticides it approves are safe when used as directed.

Nevertheless, Dendas said all of this makes the As You Sow report’s findings on companies moving away from goals to reduce pesticides even more important. “It feels like a time where companies really need to step up, and we’re seeing them turn their backs.”

‘Pesticides in the Pantry’

For the annual “Pesticides in the Pantry” report, Dendas explained, her teams spend a few months digging into publicly available documents, such as Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) reports. They compile preliminary scores for 17 companies across 27 metrics, including whether the company has stated goals to reduce pesticide use, whether it collects and monitors data from its suppliers, and whether it publicly discloses any of that data on pesticide use. Then, they send what they’ve found to the companies and give them an opportunity to respond before updating and finalizing the scores.

This year, fewer companies than usual—about half—responded, Dendas said.

The best possible score is 27, though most companies are far from that. From 2023 to 2026, the average score fell from 4.5 to just 3. Four companies’ scores improved in that span, but 10 saw their scores fall. And while in 2023 only one company got no points at all, five were awarded zero points this year. (Nestlé scored the highest—with just 10 points, up from 6 in 2023—based on practices including publicly disclosing pesticide data and requiring some farms to reduce pesticide drift.)

General Mills, known for iconic brands including Cheerios, Bisquick, and Annie’s organic, fell the furthest. Having scored 10 points in 2023, the company received zero points this year. In other words, it has no publicly stated goals to reduce pesticide use, no collection of pesticide use data, and no specific policies to protect farmworkers from exposure, among other shortcomings in the report’s rankings.

“They were, for many years, publicly disclosing the pesticide reduction of their supply chain achieved through their organic brands and have since even taken that down,” Dendas said. Similarly, ADM, one of the world’s largest buyers and processors of commodity crops like corn and soybeans, declined by 6 points in the report’s ranking after eliminating a goal it had previously set to “reduce the usage of chemical pesticides in our key agricultural supply chains by 2030.”

Neither company responded to Civil Eats’ requests for interviews related to the As You Sow report.

Experts note that little progress has been made in reducing the volume of risky pesticides used across the U.S. farm landscape, despite the increase in public awareness.

In commodity crops, for example, Bill Freese, science director at the Center for Food Safety, said herbicide use has been increasing, especially because the now long-term, widespread use of herbicides has led many weeds to develop resistance. That means farmers may now have to apply several chemicals to kill all their weeds.

At the end of March, the Environmental Working Group (EWG) released its annual Shopper’s Guide to Pesticides in Produce, which includes the Dirty Dozen list of the most commonly contaminated fruits and vegetables.

The 2026 report found 75 percent of conventional produce samples tested positive for pesticide residue.

Every year, critics of the report point to the fact that the levels that EWG finds are generally far below what the EPA considers dangerous. The most recent USDA testing, for example, found that while the majority of its produce samples contained residues, 99 percent of those were at levels below EPA’s limits for health risks.

Regardless of the risk implications, EWG’s data points to trends in use: That 75 percent number, like most of the measurements the researchers compiled, was very similar to what they’ve been finding for years, said EWG’s science analyst, Varun Subramaniam.

“The bottom line is a lot of the stats and the findings that we put out remain pretty consistent,” he said. “A reason for that is the main driver of changes is regulation, and unfortunately regulations at the national scale for pesticides are pretty few and far between.”

Will More Attention to Health Risks Spur Companies to Change?

Meanwhile, deregulation remains a key priority of the Trump administration, especially at the EPA. Trump’s EPA moved more staff into the pesticide office to speed up approvals of new chemicals. In some cases, new chemicals may be safer than the ones they’re replacing, but public health groups are already suing the agency over the 2025 approval of the insecticide isocycloseram, claiming the EPA did not factor in human health risks to organs, including the liver and testicles.

Getting the EPA or any part of the federal government to regulate pesticide use and push the industry toward reductions is unlikely without a mandate from Congress.

“Very few companies will actually do the right thing without regulations because their job is to make money for their stockholders,” said Danielle Fugere, As You Sow’s president and chief counsel. “I really do believe that we need much stronger regulations, but where there is no regulation, investors can also work to say, ‘Hey, we want to have strong, long-term companies that are resilient.’”

Fugere and others said increasing consumer attention to the issue means companies that fail to act could lose customers and, therefore, profits. At the end of the “Pesticides in the Pantry” report, for example, the researchers show that many of the companies that scored poorly on their metrics were also seeing significant decreases in stock prices.

It’s not possible to draw a direct correlation between the two issues, but Dendas said the decline is in contrast to increases in stock prices for some companies that focus on organics. “Sprouts is one of those that over the last five years experienced a 416 percent increase in their stock price,” she said.

Freese, at the Center for Food Safety, said companies should be concerned about the increasing numbers of Gen Z and health-focused shoppers, who care deeply about avoiding pesticides.

According to EWG, about 2.8 million people viewed its Shopper’s Guide last year.

“Using [the guide] as evidence for lobbying, for advocating for changes in regulation is super important,” Subramaniam said. But in the meantime, he added, “We believe that consumers have a right to know what’s on their food.”

The post Food Companies Backslide on Promises to Reduce Pesticides appeared first on Civil Eats.

https://civileats.com/2026/04/07/op-ed-usda-canceled-300-million-in-contracts-to-support-first-generation-farmers-im-one-of-them/ https://civileats.com/2026/04/07/op-ed-usda-canceled-300-million-in-contracts-to-support-first-generation-farmers-im-one-of-them/#comments Tue, 07 Apr 2026 08:00:08 +0000 https://civileats.com/?p=72470 The funding came through the Increasing Land, Capital, and Market Access Program (ILCM), the result of years of advocacy. It was the federal government’s most ambitious effort to address the compounding barriers that young, underserved, and first-generation producers face in starting and sustaining a farm. In March, the USDA ended those projects, terminating the ILCMA […]

The post Op-ed: USDA Canceled $300 Million in Contracts for First-Generation Farmers. What a Waste. appeared first on Civil Eats.

]]>

In 2023, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) awarded $300 million to 50 community-based, locally led projects in an effort to support small farmers.

The funding came through the Increasing Land, Capital, and Market Access Program (ILCM), the result of years of advocacy. It was the federal government’s most ambitious effort to address the compounding barriers that young, underserved, and first-generation producers face in starting and sustaining a farm.

In March, the USDA ended those projects, terminating the ILCMA contracts and effectively abandoning the next generation of farmers.

I have spent nearly a decade fighting for that generation, while trying to realize my own farm dreams. I’m the manager of the Land, Capital, and Market Access Network, so the USDA’s decision to end the contracts hits me twice: as an advocate and as a farmer.

I own and operate Maple Urban Farm in Saint Paul, Minnesota, producing eggs, vegetables, fruits, and herbs to feed my family and my neighbors. I’m a homeowner, the owner and operator of two successful businesses, and a graduate of a farm business management course. I have the skills, drive, and commitment to grow my urban farm into a robust, profitable operation.

“The USDA’s decision to end the contracts hits me twice: as an advocate and as a farmer.”

Despite all of the advantages I have, I don’t have the capital to purchase farmland. Across the country, including here in Minnesota, that barrier is nearly insurmountable without help. And I am far from alone.

It provided grants and low-interest loans for farmland down payments, on-farm infrastructure, and agricultural equipment; farm business management training and technical assistance; programming to build relationships between retiring landowners and new farmers seeking access to land; and more.

The program served farmers and ranchers facing the steepest barriers: Black, brown, Indigenous, immigrant, refugee, LGBTQ+, limited-resource, women, and veteran producers. People without inheritable land or generational wealth.

The need was overwhelming. According to the National Young Farmers Coalition, applications submitted in 2022 totaled over $2.5 billion in requested funding—more than eight times what was awarded, proving how real and widespread the crisis is.

On March 23, the USDA sent termination notices to 49 of 50 ILCMA projects, with just two business days’ notice. Termination letters cited a lack of progress, “DEI preferences,” and accusations of waste, though without evidence.

The termination letters omitted how USDA leadership, under the Trump administration, spent over a year systematically undermining the program. They froze funding for nearly four months in 2025. Even after funds were unfrozen, USDA Farm Service Agency (FSA) program officers were unable to respond to awardees’ inquiries for several months, stating that they were awaiting further guidance from leadership. And most impactfully, USDA stalled providing required pre-approvals for awardees to move forward with planned land acquisitions, micro-grants to producers, low-interest loans, and other core project activities.

“The termination letters omitted how USDA leadership, under the Trump administration, spent over a year systematically undermining the program.”

Over the past year, I witnessed this play out first-hand as I have provided grant management, advocacy, communications support, and guidance to a cohort of most of the program’s awardees across the country. Awardees didn’t fail to make progress. The USDA prevented them from making progress, then cited the absence of progress as grounds for termination.

In termination letters, USDA called the projects wasteful, but the waste here was theirs. As a brand new program, the USDA Farm Service Agency (FSA) staff—funded by taxpayer dollars—took a couple of years to properly design, fund, and launch the ILCMA program. Awardees also spent years building partnerships, hiring staff, and laying the groundwork—work that will now go unrealized.

Moreover, a leaked internal USDA memo revealed that staff were given a list of banned words, including “Black,” “Indigenous,” “underserved,” and “equity,” that would flag a grant for cancellation. But labeling it a DEI issue masks how widespread the consequences are.

Consequences Across Communities

According to the USDA’s 2022 Census of Agriculture, the average age of U.S. farmers is just over 58. Over a third of all farmland in the U.S. is estimated to change hands in the next two decades, according to American Farmland Trust. The average farm costs close to $2 million—just for the land. Land access is already the number one reason young people are leaving agriculture, according to the 2022 National Young Farmers Survey, and Black and Indigenous farmers in particular have been systematically locked out of land ownership for generations.

ILCMA was the only federal program specifically designed to meaningfully address these challenges.

“The terminations don’t just cut off individual grants, they sever relationships built over years between farmers, landowners, lenders, and the community organizations that made those connections possible.”

Terminating it now, in the midst of record farmland costs, a gutted USDA workforce, and an extremely fragile farm economy without a single meaningful alternative plan isn’t fiscal responsibility. It is abandonment. The consequences ripple across our communities and economies: farmland consolidating into fewer and fewer hands, a farming workforce aging out with few people able to replace it, and communities losing access to local food. The consequences are already being felt by real farmers and real communities across all 40 states and territories where ILCMA projects operated.

“We have six farmers who were waiting for down payment assistance to purchase small farms, and now that opportunity may never come to fruition,” said JohnElla Holmes, who is the CEO and president of the Kansas Black Farmers Association and an ILCMA awardee who received a termination letter. “We come from a legacy of resilience forged through hardship—generations who endured injustice and yet still built, cultivated, and contributed so much to this country. Still, we find ourselves fighting for access to the very opportunities that others are encouraged to pursue freely.”

Her words belong to farmers in nearly every state where these projects operated. The terminations don’t just cut off individual grants, they sever relationships built over years between farmers, landowners, lenders, and the community organizations that made those connections possible.

Projects held up their end of the bargain. They built the partnerships, hired the staff, laid the groundwork. The federal government signed the contracts. Taxpayer dollars were already invested. Cancelling mid-project doesn’t save money, it wastes everything that came before and puts our entire future in jeopardy.

Congress has the power to act, and the responsibility to do so. Members of Congress, regardless of party or geography, should step up by exercising their full oversight authority and demand that USDA honor its signed contracts.

Congress should pass the Honor Farmer Contracts Act, which would require USDA to honor all signed agreements and prohibit the agency from unlawfully terminating contracts. They should also pass the bipartisan New Producer Economic Security Act, which would codify a pilot version of the ILCMA program and protect this work going forward.

We are still here, farming, dreaming, and fighting for young, underserved, and first-generation producers. But we’re running out of time.

The post Op-ed: USDA Canceled $300 Million in Contracts for First-Generation Farmers. What a Waste. appeared first on Civil Eats.

]]> https://civileats.com/2026/04/07/op-ed-usda-canceled-300-million-in-contracts-to-support-first-generation-farmers-im-one-of-them/feed/ 1 https://civileats.com/2026/04/06/for-aquaculture-will-ai-be-a-net-positive/ https://civileats.com/2026/04/06/for-aquaculture-will-ai-be-a-net-positive/#respond Mon, 06 Apr 2026 08:00:04 +0000 https://civileats.com/?p=72090 Some AI models try to predict disease outbreaks or track when nets need repairing. Some are also programmed to act without human input—for example, administering laser energy to kill sea lice, a major problem in the salmon industry. Most, however, focus on improving feed efficiencies, since feed averages 60 percent of a fish farm’s costs. […]

The post Will AI Be a Net Positive For Aquaculture? appeared first on Civil Eats.

]]>

Finfish aquaculture, particularly in the oceans, faces a slew of challenges, including disease outbreaks, high mortality rates, water pollution, fish escapes, and feed problems. AI systems are being introduced to tackle these issues, particularly in the U.S., but the solutions are newly emerging and not yet widely adopted.

Some AI models try to predict disease outbreaks or track when nets need repairing. Some are also programmed to act without human input—for example, administering laser energy to kill sea lice, a major problem in the salmon industry. Most, however, focus on improving feed efficiencies, since feed averages 60 percent of a fish farm’s costs.

The models often combine computer vision, which gives cameras the ability to detect and analyze images just as a human would, with machine learning, which enables machines to learn from data and improve over time without further programming.

More than 90 companies are developing AI tools for aquaculture, with the majority headquartered in Norway or the United States, according to new research by ReThink Priorities, a think and do tank. Seventy-six percent of the innovations focus on finfish, especially high-value species like salmon but also trout and tilapia. Most systems are used by large industrial fish farms. That is changing, though, as AI companies develop business models to accommodate smaller-scale operators.

The jury is still out, however, on whether AI applications can help the industry address its most pressing problems. And there are concerns, as in other sectors being transformed by AI, about data quality and privacy, high costs, and the impacts on labor.

A fish farm off the coast of Iceland. (Photo credit: Ed Wingate, Unsplash)

Where Is AI Deployed in Aquaculture?

Thus far, AI adoption worldwide is concentrated among a small number of large companies. Eric Enno Tamm, CEO and co-founder of British Columbia–based seafood software company ThisFish, estimated that in 2024, the seafood industry invested more than $610 million on AI-related initiatives—and that 10 of the world’s largest aquaculture companies had made 86 percent of those investments.

Many of these companies are in Chile or Norway. The latter is the epicenter for this type of AI innovation, with its super-size farms and their data-rich environment attracting AI entrepreneurs.

In the U.S., which has less than 1 percent of the world’s aquaculture, a small number of companies are using AI. Cooke Aquaculture, which produces at least 13,000 metric tons of salmon annually in Maine’s coastal waters, and Atlantic Sapphire, a land-based system in southern Florida that produced 5,096 metric tons of salmon last year, for instance, use AI systems to monitor their stock and optimize feed. Blue Ocean Mariculture, a smaller Hawaiian farm raising kanpachi (Seriola rivoliana), is experimenting with AI to measure fish weight, inventory, and behavior.

Blue Ocean Mariculture also collaborates with the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) on a project using computer vision to monitor and evaluate the behavior of endangered Hawaiian monk seals frequenting the farm. After a baseline study showed where the seals were pulling fish from the pens, the company made equipment changes. This included smaller mesh sizes, a new nursery pen designed for juveniles, and a “mortality trap” with a slide and one-way door that collects and seals off dead fish from predators, Tyler Korte, Blue Ocean’s vice president of marine operations, told Civil Eats.

AI-assisted vision technology captures data points for biomass measurement at a salmon farm. (Photo courtesy of ReelData)

AI Tools for Feeding Fish

Most of the current AI innovation in aquaculture focuses on efficiencies in feeding. Unlike land farmers, fish farmers cannot see their animals to monitor their appetite levels or health status. They estimate how much feed to give thousands to millions of animals by netting out and manually weighing a few hundred fish from each pen or tank every month and working up an average, which they then apply to their total stock.

“There’s a lot of error that goes in with that sampling bias,” said Mathew Zimola, founder of ReelData, an AI company. He added, “Farmers don’t want to touch their fish, because it stresses them out.”

ReelData uses hardware and software systems that enable land-based aquaculture farmers to monitor their fish biomass and automate feeding, without having to scoop them from the water. Its systems deploy underwater cameras equipped with computer vision—a gamechanger for monitoring fish populations on farms and in the wild—to measure and analyze fish in a tank as they swim past.

“Farmers don’t want to touch their fish, because it stresses them out.”

AI tools for optimizing feed are also gaining traction in the shrimp industry, said Dominique Bureau, professor of Animal Nutrition and Aquaculture at the University of Guelph in Canada. These systems use an AI-enabled, underwater microphone, developed by AQ1, that listens for the clicking sound that shrimp make when they bite. Using machine learning, these tools can predict when the animals need to be fed.

“What we’re seeing, based on data, is a lot of overfeeding,” Bureau said. Excess food, he explained, nourishes potentially pathogenic bacteria in the water that produce toxins harmful to shrimp. “Basically you kill your crop.” Automatic feeders coupled with AI microphones are “a great improvement,” he said.

The U.S. produces a fraction of the world’s farmed shrimp. Most farms are very small, though some may use AI tools for measuring shrimp weight and length, such as those developed by Tomota, said Brian Vinci, director of the nonprofit Conservation Fund’s Freshwater Institute.

Imperfect Solutions

AI applications for aquaculture suffer from broader challenges inherent in these technologies: costliness, data quality, availability, privacy issues, and unproven effectiveness. Job loss is also a concern, though it’s too early to tell what impact these emerging systems may have on labor.

Industry insiders agree that few fish farms have robust enough data-management systems for deploying cost-effective AI tools. Uneven data quality can contribute to glitches.

“One of the problems with AI is, it sometimes gives you unpredictable results that can mess up your system,” said Rakesh Ranjan, a research scientist at the Freshwater Institute, who develops AI tools for land-based aquaculture. “There should be a human in the loop who can check and then do the final action.”

Data privacy is also a concern as fish farmers hand over sensitive business and technical data to AI companies, which sometimes anonymize and share their data with feed and pharmaceutical companies and other suppliers to help them hone their products. Regulations are needed to protect data privacy, and farmers need to be clear when they sign agreements with AI companies about how and where their data will be used, Rajan said.

“We’d love to see more peer-reviewed data, as opposed to self-reported data from the companies themselves.”

The costs can be a barrier for many farmers. AI’s high price tags have favored adoption by the biggest players. The AI hydrophone, for example, costs tens of thousands of dollars per pond, Bureau said. However, AI companies are now offering aquaculture tools for a monthly service fee, making them more accessible to a wider range of operations. ReelData’s biomass and feed programs cost a couple thousand dollars a month, Zimola said. “Any farm that’s producing at least 300 metric tons of fish a year can get value from our system.” AI-equipped cameras, which can cost a million dollars to buy, can also now be rented.

And performance claims aren’t yet backed by independent data. ReelData’s feed program increases the growth rate for fish by an average of 10 percent, “turning a 1,000-metric-ton farm into a 1,100 metric-ton-farm,” Zimola said. The program reduces the feed conversion ratio (the amount of feed going into a system versus the amount of food produced) by about 10 percent. Though he’s confident in those numbers, Zimola said, he “isn’t there yet” with publishing the data.

In fact, no independent studies yet exist to evaluate how these emerging AI systems are improving feed operations, fish health, or water quality. “We’d love to see more peer-reviewed data, as opposed to self-reported data from the companies themselves,” said Sophie Williamson, senior researcher in animal welfare at ReThink Priorities.

A Double-Edged Sword?

While AI-enabled tools may solve some industry challenges, they could also lead to larger farms—and the impacts that come with them. “Detecting earlier disease, improving water quality, reducing overfeeding are all positive things for animals,” said Williamson. But there’s a flip side, she said: “We would expect farms may want to stock more aquatic animals.”

Williamson is particularly concerned that farms may increase stocking densities if AI helps them reduce or better monitor disease, and that could have other animal welfare impacts.

Alternatively, as companies increase efficiencies and reduce costs, they may expand the size of their farms. That is likely true, according to Tony Chen, founder of Manolin Aqua, an AI service that uses machine learning to predict fish health. “When you talk to farmers, they all want to make more money [and] bring more fish to the market, but . . . the piece that created uncertainty in their businesses is fish health.”

The MARA Act, which supports deep-ocean aquaculture research, is moving through Congress. If it passes, the legislation could lead to larger fish farms in U.S. waters, and potentially a wider adoption of AI systems within the industry.

For Vinci, AI tools might help clean up some of the salmon industry’s problems. “I do think we’ll see improvements in things like identifying fish behaviors that show stress, or showing ulcers on fish or lice on fish, and having ways to quickly address that before it gets out of control,” he said.

The post Will AI Be a Net Positive For Aquaculture? appeared first on Civil Eats.

]]> https://civileats.com/2026/04/06/for-aquaculture-will-ai-be-a-net-positive/feed/ 0 https://civileats.com/2026/04/03/trump-budget-request-cuts-nearly-5-billion-from-usda/ https://civileats.com/2026/04/03/trump-budget-request-cuts-nearly-5-billion-from-usda/#respond Fri, 03 Apr 2026 20:27:46 +0000 https://civileats.com/?p=72454 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 […]

The post Trump Budget Request Cuts Nearly $5 Billion From USDA appeared first on Civil Eats.

]]> 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.)

The post Trump Budget Request Cuts Nearly $5 Billion From USDA appeared first on Civil Eats.

]]> https://civileats.com/2026/04/03/trump-budget-request-cuts-nearly-5-billion-from-usda/feed/ 0 https://civileats.com/2026/04/03/epa-and-hhs-announce-new-efforts-to-target-microplastics/ https://civileats.com/2026/04/03/epa-and-hhs-announce-new-efforts-to-target-microplastics/#comments Fri, 03 Apr 2026 16:34:12 +0000 https://civileats.com/?p=72434 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, […]

The post EPA and HHS Announce New Efforts to Target Microplastics appeared first on Civil Eats.

]]> 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.)

The post EPA and HHS Announce New Efforts to Target Microplastics appeared first on Civil Eats.

]]> https://civileats.com/2026/04/03/epa-and-hhs-announce-new-efforts-to-target-microplastics/feed/ 1 https://civileats.com/2026/04/02/usda-pauses-rural-energy-grants-amid-anti-renewables-push/ https://civileats.com/2026/04/02/usda-pauses-rural-energy-grants-amid-anti-renewables-push/#respond Thu, 02 Apr 2026 20:23:18 +0000 https://civileats.com/?p=72419 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 […]

The post USDA Pauses Rural Energy Grants Amid Anti-Renewables Push appeared first on Civil Eats.

]]> 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.)

The post USDA Pauses Rural Energy Grants Amid Anti-Renewables Push appeared first on Civil Eats.

]]> https://civileats.com/2026/04/02/usda-pauses-rural-energy-grants-amid-anti-renewables-push/feed/ 0 https://civileats.com/2026/04/01/usda-payments-for-organic-farmers-delayed/ https://civileats.com/2026/04/01/usda-payments-for-organic-farmers-delayed/#respond Wed, 01 Apr 2026 20:28:21 +0000 https://civileats.com/?p=72409 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 […]

The post USDA Payments for Organic Farmers Delayed appeared first on Civil Eats.

]]> 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.)

The post USDA Payments for Organic Farmers Delayed appeared first on Civil Eats.

]]> https://civileats.com/2026/04/01/usda-payments-for-organic-farmers-delayed/feed/ 0