Reducing Food Waste Takes More Than Finishing Your Plate

In southeast Costa Rica near the Panamanian border, there’s a group of farmers growing bananas and cocoa without pesticides. Two indigenous groups work communally owned land in the buffer zone surrounding La Amistad National Park. Their cooperative is called the Talamanca Small Farmers Association.

But Talamanca’s growers face the same discouraging problem year after year: They work in a rural area. Some farmers transport their bananas for an hour by boat, and then another three hours by truck, to a processing plant owned by a Chiquita subsidiary. Often, the bananas have to wait for the truck, and they rot. It rains a lot there — the roads frequently flood in the wet season — and sometimes the farmers lose whole truckloads of bananas waiting for the waters to recede. The estimated losses are 40 percent of the crop, said Stephanie Daniels of the Sustainable Food Lab, which has been working with Talamanca to solve the problem of spoilage.

Between 30 and 40 percent of the food grown around the world is lost: spoiled, wasted, or eaten by vermin. Saving even a portion of that could make a huge difference for poor farmers and the environment. Combine a reduction in food waste with increases in farm yields and better livelihoods for the poorest, and we’d have a realistic scenario in which we could improve overall human health and happiness without expanding our agricultural footprint.

As the example of Talamanca illustrates, solving the waste problem can make more food available to eaters while enriching the farmers. (Feeding the world is really a problem of enriching the poor, as grist has written about here. If you want to catch up on the theory and background, here’s the full series.)

The banana fields of Talamanca by: Stephanie Daniels

As Daniels explained it, solving the waste problem is an important step forward to the larger goal of plugging small farmers into the world market. There are people all around the world who want what these Costa Rican farmers grow and are willing to pay a premium for it. Stonyfield Farms buys their bananas to mix with yogurt. People in Switzerland eat their unusual fruits. Basically, there’s a lot of wealth that wants to go to rural Costa Rica in exchange for the stuff that’s already growing there — but instead, a lot of that stuff is rotting on the ground.

And so Talamanca is working on a solution. With money from the government, from Stonyfield, and from the Danone Ecosystem Fund, it’s investigating building a small-scale processor: A machine to peel the bananas, squish them, and aseptically seal them into shelf-stable bags. Today, the farmers depend on Chiquita’s machinery; if they had the food processing technology, they would make a lot more money — and have a lot more control over their destiny.

Around The World

The farmers of Costa Rica aren’t alone. This year the Rockefeller Foundation and the Global Knowledge Initiative produced an in-depth report on food waste in Africa, which showcased dozens of Talamanca-like stories. When farmers simply have airtight bags for their beans, cowpeas, and corn, the lack of oxygen kills insects inside, resulting in millions of dollars in savings. Farmers are using cassava graters and solar driers to process crops that rot easily. They are tapping into the world market with cellphones.

This is a systems-based report, looking at the entire network of farmers, buyers, agricultural educators, and technological capacity. As I read it, it became clear that reducing food waste is not necessarily an end unto itself, but something that comes naturally if you are trying to help poor farmers sell their food and earn a living wage.

North America

Food waste, however, looks very different depending where on Earth you stand. In poorer countries, the bulk of food waste is due to lack of technology and the inability of farmers to sell their goods. In the richer countries, food waste is all about culture.

World Resources Institute

“It truly is wasted in this country,” said Dana Gunders of the NRDC, the author of this landmark report. “If we took someone out of Cambodia — or their consumer expectations for food — and combined that with the U.S. technology for preserving food, realistically we could cut a lot of our food waste.”

People often come to Gunders to ask if they should go ahead and eat moldy bread. But she said that sort of thing is a tiny part of the problem.

“It is about eating carrot tops, in a way — but it’s really about having 4,000 sandwiches left over at a conference. It’s about plowing under an entire field because the market shifted.” And it’s about throwing away tons of produce because it doesn’t fit the exacting standards of size and aesthetics that we’ve come to expect and enshrined in our regulations.

Cutting post-harvest waste can be a huge boon to small farmers. But in this country, where a large share of the waste occurs at the consumer level, the impact is a little less clear. Perhaps having more food around would mean fewer farms; that could be good for the environment or bad, depending on what replaced them.

But Gunders thinks that food waste won’t decrease so fast that it dramatically outstrips the rising demand. If we are able to cut waste in this country, that would probably mean that more food produced in the U.S. might be exported as animal feed, as rising affluence increases the demand for meat. Or the land might increase biofuel production. Neither of these outcomes gets environmentalists too excited, but both would reduce the pressure to expand farmland in more sensitive areas.

The Takeaway

If we continue business as usual, we’re going to need a lot more food by 2050. This is what food futurists have been calling “the food gap.” The World Resources Institute has suggested that a reasonable goal might be cutting our current food waste in half. Just doing that would take care of a fifth of the food gap.

When we talk about food waste in richer countries, we are mostly talking about consumer waste — reducing that is important for cutting the food gap. But when we talk about food waste in poorer countries we are talking about losses (the yellow and red bars on the graph above) that take money out of farmers’ pockets. And there, the potential in reducing waste is even greater: By enriching small farmers, it would reduce poverty — which is the ultimate goal, and the root cause of hunger.

[part of the Hungry, Hungry Humans series on grist]

The Post-GMO Economy

One mainstream farmer is returning to conventional seed — and he’s not alone

As an invulnerable tween, Chris Huegerich, the child of a prosperous farming family, wiped out on his motorcycle in tiny Breda, Iowa. Forty years on, folks still call Huegerich “Crash.” And though he eventually went down a conventional path (married, divorced) and bought out his parents’ farm, Huegerich has recently reverted to his daredevil ways — at least when it comes to choosing what kind of corn to plant.

It’s late November, and Huegerich’s 2,800 acres in central Iowa have been neatly shorn to sepia-and-umber stubble. His enormous combines and cultivators have been precision parked — wheel nut to headlight — inside his equipment sheds. But in Huegerich’s office, between the fields and the sheds, chaos reigns. A dozen dog-eared seed catalogs litter a table, along with marked-up spreadsheets and soil maps. For farmers choosing next year’s crop, this is decision time.

Huegerich, in his combine. He has no ideological problem with GMOs but has been experimenting with conventional seeds for financial reasons

Buying seeds used to be a fairly simple matter. Farmers picked four or five varieties offered by a regional dealer, and that was that. But in the mid-1990s, biotech companies started producing seeds genetically modified with traits from other organisms. One trait made soybeans resistant to the herbicide glyphosate; another, using a protein from the soil bacterium Bt, helped corn fend off the insects rootworm and European corn borer.

Huegerich’s father eagerly embraced the new genetically modified (GMO) seeds. They cost more, but he could save money on herbicides and pesticides. His yields and profits went up, helped in part by good weather and favorable market conditions. But as revenue rose and the years passed, trouble was looming.

“Five years ago the traits worked,” says the strongly built Huegerich, who followed in his father’s footsteps and planted GMO seeds. “I didn’t have corn rootworm because of the Bt gene, and I used less pesticide. Now, the worms are adjusting, and the weeds are resistant. Mother Nature adapts.”

Staring at a future of lower corn prices and higher inputs, Huegerich decided to experiment. Two years ago, he planted 320 acres of conventional corn and 1,700 with GMO corn. To his delight, the conventional fields yielded 15 to 30 more bushels per acre than the GMO fields, with a profit margin of up to $100 more per acre. And so in 2013, he upped the ante, ordering six varieties of conventional seeds for close to 750 acres and GMOs for his remaining acres.

Attachments for a skid loader sit stacked near the silos at Huegerich’s home base. After harvest, Huegerich has a busy winter planning for next year’s crop.

Hugerich Isn’t the only farmer retreating from GMO seeds. In pockets across the nation, commodity growers are becoming fed up with traits that don’t work like they used to. Not only are the seeds expensive (GMO corn can cost $150 more per bag than conventional corn), they’re also driving farmers to buy and apply more chemicals. During the growing season, Huegerich sprays both his conventional and his GMO corn twice with herbicides and twice with pesticides, despite the GMO’s theoretical resistance to rootworm. “It gives me peace of mind,” Huegerich says. Between 2001 and 2010, the consumer advocacy group Food & Water Watch reports, total on-farm herbicide use increased 26 percent as weed resistance grew. Today, 61.2 million acres of cropland, including many of Huegerich’s, are plagued by glyphosate-resistant weeds.

Just as plants and animals adapt to environmental pressures, retailers respond to consumer pressure. This past March, Whole Foods announced that by 2018 it would label all its foods containing genetically engineered ingredients. In June, Target announced it would debut a line of foods, called Simply Balanced, that would be free of genetically modified ingredients by the end of 2014. And by late summer, more than 20 states were considering genetic modification label laws.

While consumer demand will ultimately propel more non-GMO grain into the market, more proximate factors can also influence what kinds of seeds farmers plant. For example, geography. Does the grower live close to the river systems that send the vast majority of the nation’s conventional grain to GMO-averse markets in Japan, South Korea and the EU? Wyatt Muse, a merchandiser for Clarkson Grain, which buys conventional and organic corn and soybeans, pays farmers a premium — up to $2 extra per bushel over the base commodity price of soybeans, $1 for corn — to not only grow the crop but also preserve its identity. (That is, keep it separate from genetically modified grain all the way from planting through harvest, storage and transportation.)

Huegerich doesn’t live near a dry mill that would pay him a premium for conventional corn, or a river that can move his product out into the world. But he does live within trucking distance of Blair, Nebraska, where a Cargill-owned plant converts his crop into plastic for customers who want a bio-based product but can’t get behind GMO corn. “I get a fifty-cent-per-bushel premium,” Huegerich says.

Aaron Bloom doesn’t farm near an outlet that pays a premium, but he still comes out ahead with conventional corn. A crop consultant, Bloom has been experimenting with non-GMO varieties for five years on land he works around Cherokee, Iowa. “We get the same or better yields, and we save money up front,” he says. And yet when he first suggests conventional seeds to clients, he sometimes gets pushback. “Guys think that you have to get out the cultivator” — which pierces the soil between rows of crops — “and kill your weeds by hand. No! You’re going out there with the planter anyway, just add your insecticide and your conventional herbicides.” Last year, not one of the roughly 30 farmers to whom Bloom sold non-GMO seeds had a bad harvest — despite unprecedented drought. “And I’ve got another 20 trying this year.”

Still, winning converts to conventional corn can be an uphill slog. Post-harvest, farmers face a barrage of TV and print ads touting the latest seed technology. There’s a subtler psychology at work, too. Farmers have close relationships with their seed dealers, who often live nearby and keep them company at local baseball games, PTA meetings or church. “You can’t break up with them,” Bloom says, noting that seed dealers work on commission. DuPont Pioneer, for example, offers him a non-GMO corn for $180 a bag, while Wyffels Hybrids sold the same for $115 a bag last year.

Why does Pioneer charge so much? Because it doesn’t want lower-priced conventional seed to lure customers away from GMOs. Bloom says a company dealer confessed: “We don’t want our farmers to buy it.”

From left: Rotary hoes neatly stacked in Huegerich’s shop; The corn combine shows some attitude.

Into this breach, smaller companies that specialize in non-GMO seed have leapt. West Des Moines–based eMerge Genetics has averaged 30 percent growth in each of the last five years. Sales at Spectrum Seed Solutions, based in Linden, Indiana, have doubled every year of the four it’s been in business. Its president, Scott Odle, believes that non-GMO corn could be 20 percent of the market in five years. After surveying 10 smaller companies focusing on conventional seed in the grain belt earlier this year, Ken Roseboro, editor of The Organic & Non-GMO Report, reported that each saw an increase in demand. “And I think it’s going to continue,” he says.

But are there more acres of conventional corn being planted, or are small seed companies simply filling a niche that larger companies have relinquished? It’s difficult to say. Jeffrey Neu, a Monsanto spokesperson, says, “While we offer some conventional hybrids, we continue to see the greatest demand for ‘traited’ products. We typically do not provide percentage or sales information.” Daniel Jones, a business manager at DuPont Pioneer, says sales of his company’s conventional seeds have “trended up,” but he declines to say by how much. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, 88 percent of the corn planted in the nation in 2011 and 2012 was genetically modified; in 2013, the percentage rose to 90. Because the total acreage of corn is so huge — 97 million acres — it obscures the acreage planted by farmers like Huegerich and Bloom. “The growth is regional and local,” Wyatt Muse of Clarkson Grain says, “so it won’t show up in the national data.”

Aaron Bloom, a farmer and business consultant at Huegerich’s farm;

The big seed companies are carefully watching state legislatures, spending tens of millions of dollars to defeat proposed labeling laws and fielding calls from food companies concerned with how such laws could impact production agriculture. “If such laws create a demand at the farmer level, we’ll have to respond,” Pioneer’s Jones says, cautiously. “But we won’t lead the charge.” Chuck Hill, specialty products manager at AgriGold Hybrids, which sells both GMOs and hybrids, sounds a similarly wary note: “Whole Foods’ decision to label was not an earthshaker,” he insists. “The company was already serving that clientele. Now, if Walmart decided to label GM food, that would be a major chit.”

And yet this parallel seed economy is churning. The Non-GMO Project, which offers third-party verification and labeling for non-GMO products, has been inundated with requests from food purveyors for information about enrolling their products, and consumer spending on non-GMO-verified products rose from $1.3 billion to $3.1 billion between 2011 and 2013. Companies that make non-GMO feed for animals, says Caroline Kinsman, communications manager for the Non-GMO Project, are experiencing “incredible demand.”

From left: A sign in the town of Breda, Iowa; Non-GMO corn shows its stuff at one of Huegerich’s farms

Sales at Hiland Naturals, which makes conventional and organic feeds for livestock, have more than doubled since it received Non-GMO Project verification last year. Most of Hiland’s customers are small farmers who sell eggs or meat at farmers markets and natural grocery stores. But many sell birds to Whole Foods and to institutions like colleges. Some of Hiland’s growth, owner Dan Masters says, comes from people wanting to know what they’re eating, some is from pending labeling laws and some is from “people who are tired of big corporations and big agriculture.”

As farmers across the grain belt were contemplating what they’d plant next spring, Masters was in talks with one of the nation’s largest animal feed producers to formulate a non-GMO-verified product. Should the deal come to fruition, it would more than double his company’s size and trigger the opening of several more mills.

“We need to get more farmers on board with conventional seed now,” Aaron Bloom says, anticipating the market’s growth. “We need to be innovative and grow toward the demand of the consumer.”

The article was produced in collaboration with the Food & Environment Reporting Network, an independent, non-profit news organization producing investigative reporting on food, agriculture and environmental health.

[via modern farmer]

Farmstand [App]: Discover and Share The Best of Your Local Farmers’ Market

Are you into eating locally grown food? Then you’ll enjoy Farmstand, an iPhone app built to grow and foster your local farmers and food.

Farmstand makes it easy to discover and share the best of your local farmers’ market. The iphone app lets you share photos, post deals; and by doing so, support local farmers. But they will soon take the experience beyond just the iphone as they are working hard on adding a web component featuring farmer profiles and restaurants that serve locally grown food.

Yay for locally grown food!  

Activity

Quickly find your closest market and see what’s happening at farmers’ markets around you.

Find a Market

Looking for fresh food in your area? Find a market wherever you are.

Market Information

Easy access to hours of operation, directions, and photos from other market goers.

Post Updates

See something awesome at the market? Share it with the Farmstand community and help promote your local market.

Learn more about their purpose or download the free iPhone app.

[via: SwissMiss]

National Farmworker Awareness Week highlights a dirty labor plight

This week it’s time to pay some respect to the folks who actually do most of that farming work.

The vast majority of our stateside fruits and vegetables are handpicked by more than 3 million migrant and seasonal farmworkers. Without those farmworkers, we’d be very hungry. But as a whole those workers are treated badly: They’re underpaid, underinsured, and undereducated. About half of them are undocumented, and only about a third are U.S. citizens. These workers bear the brunt of our food system with their bodies, but only California requires that they get water and bathroom breaks. On average, one farmworker dies on the job every day in the U.S., and laborers can be as young as 12 — legally.

 

Data from reports by the National Center for Farmworker Health, Center for Progressive Reform, and the Kresge Foundation.

[via: Grist]

The Soybean: GMO vs. Organic [infographic]

[source]

2012 Food and Farm Bill

Last week, Washington D.C. became the food capital of the country as the Senate debated the 2012 Food and Farm Bill, culminating in the passage of the Agriculture Reform, Food and Jobs Act of 2012. If you're asking yourself "What does this mean for me?" you're not the only one.

What it means is that our country is one step closer to the approval of the single biggest piece of legislation that governs what we grow and eat. It is a 5-year, $969 billion bill that touches every single person's life in America. Every farmer, parent, cook, eater, student, and activist is impacted by the policies addressed by this bill that only comes around once every five years. Now that the Senate has passed their version, it is up to the House of Representatives to pass their own before the bill can officially become law.

Now that you've got a little bit better idea of what it is, you may now be asking yourself, is the Senate Bill a good thing or a bad thing? The answer to that question depends on what your priorities are. Earlier this year, our friends at Slow Food USA wrote a letter to the leaders of both the Senate and House Agriculture committees outlining their priorities for the upcoming Food and Farm Bill.

The three biggest points from Slow Foods' letter were:

1. A health focused food system, an end to hunger and access to healthy food.
2. A level 'plowing' field for family farmers and vibrant regional farm and food economies.
3. Good environmental stewardship

With these requests in mind, Slow Food has broken down the top 5 wins and bottom 3 losses following the Senate's voting on a bill involving over 300 amendment requests.

Wins: 

1. The Senate passed and amendment sponsored by Senate Sherrod Brown (D-OH) that provides critical funding for rural jobs and new farming opportunities. This means, among other things, that a young person who wants to start a new farm, but lacks access to the kind of credit that would allow them to do so could now qualify for funding through the Rural Micro-entrepreneur Assistance Program.

2. The Senate passed an amendment sponsored by Senator Saxby Chambliss (R-GA) that makes sure that farms receiving subsidized crop insurance will be required to follow basic conservation guidelines. This means that if a large conventional farm in Ohio receives insurance payments to cover against their losses for the year, they will need to follow the same conservation laws that were previously applied to farms receiving direct subsidies.

3. The Senate passed an amendment sponsored by Senator Jeff Merkley (D-OR) which makes it much easier for organic farmers to gain access to crop insurance. Right now, if an organic farmer in wishes to receive crop insurance, they will have to pay a much higher premium than their conventional farming neighbor, despite being reimbursed at the same rate. This would change that and set the reimbursements to more appropriate levels.

4. The Senate rejected amendments by Senators Rand Paul (R-KY) and Jeff Sessions (R-AL) that would have further weakened the already weakened SNAP program. These amendments would have made it harder for states to provide food assistance to their most vulnerable citizens.

5. The Senate Agriculture committee's bill puts an end to costly, direct subsidy programs that do nothing to support healthy farming practices. Currently, if you own farm land in New Mexico that qualifies for a direct subsidy, you will receive payments from the government even if you don't plant a single crop. This bill would end that practice.

Losses:

1. The Senate did not consider an amendment sponsored by Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA) that would have made it unlawful for meat packers to own or feed livestock intended for slaughter. The current practice among meat packers is to slaughter their own livestock when prices are too high and buy from farmers when prices are low. This amendment would have created a fair marketplace for family farms raising livestock, not disproportionately favoring large slaughterhouses.

2. The Senate rejected an amendment by Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) that would have re-directed some crop insurance funding to eliminate the cuts to the SNAP program. Without this amendment, an estimated 500,000 households across the country will lose $90 per month in SNAP benefits.

3. The Senate did not consider an amendment by Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) that would have enabled schools to purchase from local and regional producers. This amendment would have allowed school districts to continue participating in the Department of Defense Fresh Program while making their own fresh produce purchases.

Leading up to the official casting of votes, Senate Agriculture Ranking member, Senator Pat Roberts described the bill by saying, "Is it the best possible bill? No. It is the best bill possible."