Even after all that quarantine hobby honing, gardening can still be an uphill battle for those lacking a green thumb—but a little help from robotic friends apparently goes a long way. Recently, UC Berkeley unveiled AlphaGarden, a high-tech, AI-assisted plant ecosystem reportedly capable of cultivating a polycultural garden at least as well as its human counterparts. And in one particular, consequential metric, AlphaGarden actually excelled.

As detailed by IEEE Spectrum over the weekend, UC Berkeley’s gardening plot combined a commercial robotic gantry farming setup with AlphaGardenSim, an AI program developed in-house by utilizing a high-resolution camera alongside soil moisture sensors. Additionally, the developers included automated drip irrigation, pruning, and even seed planting. AlphaGarden (unfortunately) doesn’t feature a fleet of cute, tiny farm bots scuttling around its produce; instead, the system resembles a small crane installation capable of moving above and tending to the garden bed.

[Related: How to keep your houseplants from dying this summer.]

As an added challenge, AlphaGarden was a polyculture creation, meaning it contained a variety of crops like turnips, arugula, lettuce, cilantro, kale, and other plants. Polyculture gardens reflect nature much more accurately, and benefit from better soil health, pest resilience, and fewer fertilization requirements. At the same time, they are often much more labor-intensive given the myriad plant needs, growth rates, and other such issues when compared to a monoculture yield.

To test out AlphaGarden’s capabilities compared with humans, researchers simply built two plots and planted the same seeds in both of them. Over the next 60 days, AlphaGarden was largely left to its own literal and figurative devices, while professional horticulturalists did the same. Afterwards, UC Berkeley repeated the same growth cycle, but this time allowed AlphaGarden to give its slower-growing plants an earlier start.

According to researchers, the results from the two cycles  “suggest that the automated AlphaGarden performs comparably to professional horticulturalists in terms of coverage and diversity.” While that might not be too surprising given all the recent, impressive AI advancements, there was one aspect that AlphaGarden unequivocally outperformed its human farmer controls—over the two test periods, the robotic system reduced water consumption by as much as a whopping 44 percent. As IEEE Spectrum explained, that translates to several hundred liters less after the two month period.

[Related: Quick and dirty tips to make sure your plants love the soil they’re in.]

Although researchers claim “AlphaGarden has thus passed the Turing Test for gardening,” referencing the much-debated marker for robotic intelligence and sentience, there are a few caveats here. For one, these commercial gantry systems remain cost prohibitive for most people (the cheapest one looks to be about $3,000), and more research is needed to further optimize its artificial light sources and water usage. There’s also the question of scalability and customization, as different gardens have different shapes, sizes, and needs.

Still, in an era of increasingly dire water worries, it’s nice to see developers creating novel ways to reduce water consumption for one of the planet’s thirstiest industries.

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When it comes to the critical process of pollination, butterflies and especially bees are typically the most lauded participants. These pollinators fly from flower to flower to feed and fertilize plants by spreading pollen around. But, these fluttery creatures are far from the only species that help flowers reproduce and bloom. It turns out that some of nature’s most unsung and diverse pollinators are a type of long-snouted beetles called weevils.

[Related: Build a garden that’ll have pollinators buzzin’.]

A study published May 25 in the journal Peer Community in Ecology wiggles into the world of weevils, including some who spend their entire lifecycle in tandem with a specific plant they help pollinate. 

“Even people who work on pollination don’t usually consider weevils as one of the main pollinators, and people who work on weevils don’t usually consider pollination as something relevant to the group,” study co-author and assistant curator of insects at the Field Museum in Chicago said in a statement. “There are lots of important things that people are missing because of preconceptions.”

The quarter-of-an-inch long  weevils can be considered pests, especially when found munching on pasta and flour in pantries. Weevils used to find their way into the biscuits on Nineteenth Century ships that even highly ranked officers ate, as depicted in the 2003 seafaring film Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World. They can be so destructive that from 1829 to 1920, boll weevils completely disrupted the cotton economy in the South as they fed on cotton buds. 

Despite this less than stellar reputation, the insects are still beneficial to many of the world’s plant species. 

Scientists have identified roughly 400,000 species of beetles, making them one of the largest groups of animals in the world. Among this already big bunch of bugs, weevils are the largest group. “There are 60,000 species of weevils that we know about, which is about the same as the number of all vertebrate animals put together,” said de Medeiros.

The authors looked at 600 species of weevil, reviewing hundreds of previously published data on how weevils and plants interact to get a better sense of their role as prime pollinators. It focused on brood-site pollinators—insects that use the same plants that they pollinate as the breeding sites for their larvae. It is similar to the relationship between Monarch butterflies and milkweed, which is the only plant that Monarch caterpillars can eat. 

“It is a special kind of pollination interaction because it is usually associated with high specialization: because the insects spend their whole life cycle in the plant, they often only pollinate that plant,” said de Medeiros.  And because the plants have very reliable pollinators, they mostly use those pollinators.” 

[Related: This lawn-mowing robot can save part of your yard for pollinators.]

Unlike Monarchs, brood-site pollinators take the relationship with the plant a step further. They rely on only one plant partner as a source for both food and egg laying, unlike adult Monarchs who will eat the nectar of many different types of flowers. 

“This kind of pollination interaction is generally thought to be rare or unusual,” said de Medeiros. “In this study, we show that there are hundreds of weevil species and plants for which this has been documented already, and many, many more yet to be discovered.”

The relationship like the one between weevils and their plants means that they both need each other to flourish. Some industries, like palm oil,  have already hurt forests, therefore disturbing the animal species that rely on them. 

“Oil palm, which is used to make peanut butter and Nutella, was not a viable industry until someone figured out that the weevils found with them were their pollinators. And because people had an incorrect preconception that weevils were not pollinators, it took much, much longer than it could have taken,” said de Medeiros.

Misconceptions about weevils were one of this team’s motivations for the study. The team hopes that by summarizing what is known about the pollinators, more scientists and the general public appreciate the role of weevils as pollinators, particularly in the tropics. 

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One large part of managing egg-laying hens is a process called sexing, or determining the sex of a baby chick after it hatches. A study published May 22 in the journal PLOS ONE finds that fertilized chicken eggs can be sexed by “sniffing” the volatile chemicals that are emitted through the chicken’s shell.

About a day after hatching, chicks are sorted by sex. Male chicks are killed almost  immediately, a process that kills an estimated 6.5 billion male chicks per year. Sexing is largely used due to both economics and biology—male chickens are of little use to the egg and meat industry since they do not lay eggs and do not fatten up quickly enough to be sold as meat. The practice costs egg producers about $500 million annually, but some European countries including Germany and France have already banned culling of male chicks or plan to phase it out. 

[Release: 6 things to know before deciding to raise backyard chickens.]

If hatcheries could identify the sex of an egg earlier in incubation, billions of male eggs could be humanely killed before the chick can feel pain, as well as reducing waste and environmental impact. The technology that is already on the market for this process called in-ovo sexing depends on either imaging through the shell or sampling the shell through a tiny hole. 

In this new study from researchers at the University of California, Davis and a startup company at the university called Sensit Ventures Inc., it is possible to sniff out the egg’s volatile organic chemicals and determine the egg’s sex. 

The team first had to find out if the chemicals released by male and female embryos give off reliably detectable differences. At study co-author Cristina Davis’s lab at the UC Davis Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, the team developed sensing chip technology that can collect and analyze organic chemicals in the air.  

They adapted suction cups that are already used for industrial handling of eggs to “sniff” air from the eggs without actually opening them up. Gas chromatography and mass spectrometry analyzed the air samples and the sex of the eggs was confirmed by DNA analysis at the UC Davis Department of Animal Science. 

[Related: Which Came First, The Chicken Or The Egg?]

“We found that there are volatile chemicals from the egg, a scent that you can capture and sort statistically,” study co-author and CEO of Sensit Ventures Tom Turpen said in a statement. 

According to the study, this air-sniffing technique was able to identify male and female embryos at eight days of incubation with 80 percent accuracy, based on two minutes of air sampling. Using this rapid suction-cup sampling method could also be carried out in rows that test multiple eggs at the same time 

“We think that the hardware platform invented at UC Davis could be integrated into hatcheries,” Turpen said.

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An estimated 30 tons of highly volatile ammonium nitrate disappeared from a railcar traveling last month between Wyoming and the Mojave Desert in California. Frequently used as a fertilizer, the compound is also infamous for its role in the deadly 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, as well as a massive 2020 explosion in Beirut, Lebanon, that killed over 200 people. In this instance, however, multiple reports indicate Union Pacific railway officials believe the cargo accidentally leaked out of “the bottom gate on the railcar” during its two-week journey across the western US.

According to The New York Times, a Union Pacific spokesperson explained that the fertilizer—transported in pellet form within a covered hopper car akin to coal shipments—is designed for ground application and quick soil absorption, and “should pose no risk to public health or the environment.” The shipment belonged to an explosives manufacturer, Dyno Nobel, whose representatives also told the Times they do not currently suspect “criminal or malicious activity” behind the disappearance. Union Pacific is reportedly in the “early stages” of its investigation, while the Federal Railroad Administration and the California Public Utilities Commission are also conducting their own reviews of the incident.

[Related: Toxic train derailment in East Palestine, OH highlights issues facing America’s railways.]

“The railcar was sealed when it left the Cheyenne facility, and the seals were still intact when it arrived in Saltdale. The initial assessment is that a leak through the bottom gate on the railcar may have developed in transit,” a Dyno Nobel spokesperson said in a statement.

Although ammonium nitrate is relatively harmless on its own, its addition to a fuel source combined with heat and pressure make for an extremely powerful explosion. This can often prove useful—as is the case with a compound called ANFO (ammonium nitrate/fuel oil), which miners use to clear large rock formations. However, ammonium nitrate is also a go-to chemical for illegal homemade explosives and bombs. As California radio outlet KQED explains, Congress passed a law in 2007 on the regulation and transfer of ammonium nitrate to prevent its misuse by bad actors. In 2011, the Department of Homeland Security proposed additional regulations, but never formally adopted them.

News of the rail incident comes only a few months after a Norfolk Southern freight train derailed in East Palestine, Ohio, resulting in a temporary, mandatory evacuation order for thousands of residents. The release of toxic chemicals such as vinyl chloride gas and a carcinogen called ethylhexyl acrylate resulted in numerous reports of physical and respiratory issues such as headaches, coughing, and acute bronchitis.

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The most irrigated crop in the US isn’t a particularly tasty one. Nationwide, lawn grass takes up a total area bigger than the size of Georgia, and requires more than 300 gallons of watering per household a day. “These turf grasses have really short roots, so they require nearly a constant input of water,” says Becky Barak, a conservation scientist at the Chicago Botanic Garden and leader of the Rethinking Lawns Project.

The traditional American lawn, which often holds non-native species from Africa, Asia, and Europe, can be great for kids and dogs to run around on. But there are tons of native plantings that decrease water and pesticide use, reduce time and energy spent on mowing, absorb stormwater, and provide real habitat for wildlife. Not to mention, they make an incredible backdrop in the process. “Some native grasses can be mowed to look more like traditional turf grasses,” Barak says. “But then there are others that are beautiful and can add so much visual appeal and a totally different look.”

[Related: What to consider before ripping out your lawn]

When it comes to choosing types of grass, there are thousands of choices. “They can be all different colors of the rainbow,” Barak says. That might sound overwhelming, but don’t worry—you can narrow down the list by browsing local native nurseries and regional university guides. (Remember to check the soil type in your yard and find plants that match.) Once you have some options that work for your space, no matter how tiny, you’ll be well on your way to creating the native landscape of your dreams. Here are nine beloved varieties to get you started.

Short grasses

Buffalo grass (Bouteloua dactyloides)

• Native range: Central US
• Height: 3 to 10 inches
• Light: full sun
• Water use: low to medium

If you’re looking for a native grass that still keeps the lawn feel, look no further than buffalo grass. Named after the American bison that once grazed all over the Great Plains, this drought-tolerant turf grass is a popular choice for lawns for its sod-forming abilities. You can mow it infrequently or never if you prefer the slightly taller look. Although buffalo grass can survive without irrigation, it may lose some of its color in periods of drought and dormancy. Mix the seeds with other low-growing options for sustained greenery, or consider using a buffalo grass cultivar that’s bred for more consistent color.

Curly mesquite grass (Hilaria belangeri)

• Native range: Southwestern US
• Height: 4 to 12 inches
• Light: full sun
• Water use: low

Another popular turf grass for drought tolerance, this species is the perfect choice for desert and desert-like environments. It’s considered to be one of the best lawn options out of native grasses in the US, though its range is limited to Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas. Curly mesquite grass can grow in a variety of well-drained soils but works best in clay loam.

Pennsylvania sedge (Carex pensylvanica)

• Native range: Eastern and Midwestern US
• Height: 6 to 12 inches
• Light: part to full shade
• Water use: low to medium

Although Pennsylvania sedge isn’t technically a grass, its grass-like appearance makes it a great choice for homeowners looking to make their yard more native without losing the lush carpeted look. The plant offers good ground cover, spreads well, and deters deer from grazing. In the fall, this delicate, windswept-looking sedge turns from vibrant green to tan.

Medium grasses

Purple lovegrass (Eragrostis spectabilis)

• Native range: along the East Coast from Maine to Florida, west to Arizona
• Height: 8 to 18 inches
• Light: full sun
• Water use: low

Purple lovegrass, one of Barak’s favorites, adds the perfect pop of color to your lawn. The heat-tolerant plant really starts to shine in August, when it forms an inflorescence of purple-red flowers that seemingly float on the grass like a cloud of color. Though it can be damaged by heavy foot traffic, the grass stays relatively short, only needs to be mowed a few times throughout the year, and is deer-resistant.

[Related: This lawn-mowing robot can save part of your yard for pollinators]

“Hatchita” blue grama (Bouteloua gracilis)

• Native range: Western and Central US
• Height: 8 to 20 inches
• Light: full sun
• Water use: low to medium

Along with buffalo grass and curly mesquite grass, this type of grass completes the trifecta of popular native turf choices in the US, but is even more drought tolerant than the other two members of the big three. It’s also both cold and heat tolerant, can grow in most soils except overly wet ones, and hosts different kinds of skipper butterflies during their breeding season. In the summer, the plant displays an inflorescence of purple flowers; in fall, it turns beautiful hues like orange and red. For fuller coverage, consider combining blue grama with buffalo grass and various native wildflowers in your yard.

Muhly grass (Muhlenbergia capillaris)

• Native range: Southeastern US and the East Coast
• Height: 2 to 3 feet
• Light: full sun
• Water use: low to medium

Planting muhly grass is like setting off living fireworks on your lawn. Each fall, it blooms with feathery pink inflorescences In winter, the grass fades into a rich tan. Beyond that, it retains a gorgeous dark-green color. The plant is easy to grow and germinate and is highly deer resistant.

Prairie dropseed (Sporobolus heterolepis)

• Native range: Great Plains
• Height: 2 to 3 feet
• Light: full sun
• Water use: low to medium

Another one of Barak’s favorites, prairie dropseed’s flowing green clumps make it the perfect accent or border grass—but that’s not the only fun part. When it begins to pop around June, the grass produces small pink and brown flowers that smell like coriander, licorice, or popcorn. It maintains its shape outside of the warmer seasons, even when blanketed by snow. This slow-growing type of grass is also a great choice if you’re looking to make your yard more pollinator-friendly, as they provide nesting materials for native bees.

Tall grasses

Little bluestem (Schizachyrium scoparium)

• Native range: everywhere in the US except the West Coast
• Height: 2 to 7 feet
• Light: full sun
• Water use: low to medium

Despite its name, this drought-resistant grass is rather tall, making it a great choice to add dimension to a yard or garden. Little bluestem also boasts, you guessed it, a beautiful blue hue in summer before turning copper in the fall. Loved by homeowners (including Barak) and animals alike, this grass attracts birds and butterflies and provides nesting materials for native bees. On the flip side, you might catch a few deer visiting your new bluestem buffet.

[Related: How to build a butterfly watering area]

Switchgrass (Panicum virgatum)

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On a clear morning in April, after milking his seven cows, Tim Sauder looked over the pasture where he had just turned the animals out to graze. Like many dairy farms, Sauder’s fields swayed with a variety of greenery: chicory, alfalfa and clover. But they were also full of something typically missing on an agricultural landscape — trees. Thousands of them.

Between 2019 and 2021, Sauder planted 3,500 trees at Fiddle Creek Dairy, a 55-acre family farm in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, where he and his wife raise cows to produce yogurt, cheese and beef. Today, young willow, hickory, poplar, pecan and persimmon trees stud the pastures, and on a crisp spring morning, rows of honey and black locusts, bur and cow oaks, were beginning to leaf out, casting shadows on the long grass below.

Sauder said planting trees has always been a priority; before he filled his pastures with them, the farm was home to a small fruit orchard as well as riparian buffers — trees planted along the creek to prevent erosion and safeguard water quality. But the trees that his cattle now graze beneath represent a fundamental shift in his operation.

The Sauders are betting the farm, as it were, on silvopasture, the ancient practice of raising animals and growing trees and pasture on the same piece of land (silva is forest in Latin). In a silvopasture setup, farmers carefully manage each element to benefit the other—relying on manure to fertilize trees, for example, or fallen fruit to feed the livestock—resulting in a system that’s greater than the sum of its parts. 

It’s an old idea that’s gaining modern traction. Last year, the USDA awarded the Nature Conservancy and multiple partner organizations a $64 million grant to advance agroforestry — the umbrella term for agricultural practices that incorporate trees — by providing technical and financial assistance to farmers looking to make the switch. This year’s Farm Bill could mean another infusion of funding as well as the expansion of existing agroforestry programs to more explicitly include silvopasture. 

“The USDA is doing a lot, but a lot more could be done,” said Jabob Grace, communications project manager with the Savanna Institute, a nonprofit that promotes agroforestry practices. His organization is advocating that the 2023 Farm Bill increase appropriations for the National Agroforestry Center, the only government agency dedicated to the practice, from $5 million to $25 million (Grace said the Center has been chronically underfunded, never receiving more than $2 million annually). They’re also pushing for the establishment of regional agroforestry centers, the development of a USDA technical assistance program in agroforestry, and more grant money dedicated to helping farmers like Sauder establish a silvopasture system. 

In Sauder’s pastures, “each tree has multiple benefits,” he explained. Mulberry leaves have more protein than alfalfa, and the seed pods that fall off the honey locust every autumn are packed with sugar; those trees were chosen to supplement the animals’ diet. Sauder chose other tree species with leafy canopies to protect his herd’s health. “Come August, there will be shade here when the cows need it.”

Providing shade may seem like a matter of comfort, but it can actually be one of life and death. Last summer, thousands of cattle died in Kansas, after the area was racked by historic heat and humidity. As the climate heats up, researchers think mortality events like the one in Kansas will become more common. But even when cattle survive brutally hot summers, the impact of heat stress can wreak havoc on a farm’s bottom line.

Grace said the farmers he works with are worried about what hotter temperatures mean for their livelihoods. 

“When we talk to our producers about silvopasture, the first thing they’re interested in is shade,” Grace said. “They’re noticing the hotter temperatures. Their cattle are uncomfortable, they’re not putting on weight. Cash is almost directly flowing out of that farmer’s pocket when they have overheated cattle.”

A lot of cash, in fact. A 2022 study from Cornell University predicted that losses of cattle herds due to heat stress will total $15 to $40 billion a year by the end of the century. To avoid these losses, the authors note that “tree–livestock systems can be highly effective in reducing heat stress.” And Farm Bill funding could help more farmers get started.

Shade is one way silvopasture cuts down on costs, but there are others. Some poultry farmers use the method to shield their flocks from birds of prey. Vineyards and Christmas tree farms are increasingly turning to grazing animals to mow and control weeds.

But a silvopasture system can do more than simply save farmers money; it can help them diversify what they grow. Perhaps one of the oldest — and most profitable — examples of silvopasture is the dehesa system of southern Spain, where Ibérico pigs wander among towering oak trees, feasting on acorns and fertilizing the soil, resulting in some of the world’s most expensive ham and a cash crop of cork.

While livestock health and revenue are compelling reasons for farmers to practice silvopasture, perhaps the method’s most convincing advantage is its potential as a climate solution. 

Project Drawdown, a nonprofit that analyzes climate solutions, ranks silvopasture as the 11th most effective strategy for combating climate change — well ahead of solar panels, recycling and electric cars — finding that pastures with trees sequester five to 10 times as much carbon as similarly sized but treeless pastures.

The perennial roots of a silvopasture system can also help stabilize the soil, preventing erosion as well as the flooding that’s becoming more common with heavier rains. Additionally, a well-managed silvopasture operation can reduce wildfire loads — thanks to carefully spaced and pruned trees as well as grazing animals that control the shrubby understory — and increase biodiversity.

What’s more, when livestock get to eat the forage that’s right in front of them, the gas-guzzling farming equipment and trucks typically used to get food to feedlots can stay in park. “Cutting back on harvesting and transporting means a significant reduction in greenhouse gasses,” Grace explained.

According to Grace, large swaths of the American Midwest used to be covered by a natural silvopasture of sorts, an oak savanna ecosystem where grazing animals like bison dined on prairie beneath fruit and nut trees. Many Indigenous cultures embraced and benefited from this form of land management, until European settlers got to work deforesting the region, eventually building farms that worked more like factories. 

This emphasis on efficiency led to widespread monoculture and annual cropping systems where, Grace said, “for a good chunk of the year, not much is happening.” 

Today, only about 1.5% of farmers in the U.S. (approximately 31,000) practice any form of agroforestry, including silvopasture, a 2017 USDA survey revealed. But as summers get hotter and climate predictions more dire, interest in the practice is booming. Matthew Smith, research program lead at the USDA’s National Agroforestry Center, said “the demand for silvopasture knowledge and information is higher than anyone can provide.” 

That’s because silvopasture is more complicated than turning livestock loose in the woods; it requires choosing the right trees and forage for the local climate and constantly moving livestock from one place to another. 

“If folks are interested in silvopasture, they really should have expertise in rotational grazing beforehand…which is hard to learn,” Smith said. “Things can go wrong quickly when all your crops are in the same place.” Livestock left in one spot too long can damage trees, for example, and plants grown too close together can outcompete each other for light and nutrients. 

There are other challenges. For one thing, silvopasture systems require a large area of land and more hours of labor — at least at first — to maintain. Additionally, it takes trees many years to grow and begin to provide meaningful benefits. But, by far, the greatest obstacle for most farmers who want to practice silvopasture is the high price of purchasing, planting and maintaining trees. 

The vast majority of silvopasture operations rely on grants and cost-sharing programs from organizations like the Natural Resources Conservation Service and the USDA, programs  that advocates like Grace say badly need the boost in funding and staff that this year’s Farm Bill could provide. Grace said that the handful of existing agroforestry programs, such as the Conservation Reserve Program and the Environmental Quality Incentives Program, are vague in their wording and need to be tweaked to more explicitly fund silvopasture projects and provide additional cost-sharing opportunities to farmers. 

Savanna Institute ally and climate NGO Carbon 180 is recommending that the 2023 Farm Bill increase federal cost share to 75% for agroforestry practices to help defray upfront costs and ensure farmers can access high-quality, regionally appropriate trees and shrubs. 

In the meantime, funding remains a “major barrier to farmers hoping to pursue silvopasture,” said Austin Unruh, owner of Trees for Graziers, who helped Tim Sauder secure money from the Pennsylvania office of the NRCS. Unruh, whose business has helped about 25 farms implement silvopasture in the last three years, said helping farmers pay for them “has been frustrating. It’s a different source of funding each time, different hoops to jump through.”

For Sauder, the financial assistance from the state was paramount. He said that without it, the trees in his pasture simply wouldn’t be there, “at least not for the next 20 years or so.” 

He admits that the new system has been a lot of work upfront, but that he expects it to pay off in the form of healthier pasture, soil and cows — and hopefully his land’s ability to support more of them. 

And yet, it’s working in tandem with nature that inspires Sauder the most. Running his farm with the health of the ecosystem top of mind, he said, is like making up for the mistakes of his ancestors, Mennonite immigrants who displaced Indigenous people and bent the land to their will. 

“I’m reimagining what would have happened if they had arrived here and said instead, ‘What’s the best way to live in this place?’”

This article is copublished with Ambrook Research as part of a series that looks at ways the 2023 Farm Bill can help address the climate crisis. Nexus Media News is an editorially independent, nonprofit news service covering climate change. Follow us @NexusMediaNews.

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Over the last four decades, global water use has increased by about 1 percent per year. This rise is driven by many factors, including population growth, changing consumption patterns, and socioeconomic development. By 2050, the United Nations Water estimates urban water demand to increase by 80 percent. As freshwater needs continue to rise in cities, the sustainable management of urban water supply becomes even more critical.

In the past two decades, over 80 metropolitan cities around the world have experienced water shortages and extreme drought. Such urban water crises are expected to occur more frequently in the near future, therefore it’s crucial to understand how they unfold, who is vulnerable to them, and how they can be addressed.

Why urban water crises occur today

Many factors contribute to the development of today’s water crises, including changing land cover and use, urban infrastructure maintenance, and climate change, says Adriana Zuniga-Teran, neighborhood design and environmental sciences expert and assistant professor of geography, development, and environment at the University of Arizona.

For instance, impervious surfaces like concrete and asphalt often replace natural porous land cover as cities grow, resulting in less precipitation infiltration, which can affect the whole hydrological cycle. In addition, cities, farms, mines, and industrial land use all consume a lot of water compared to natural landscapes. Furthermore, rich and poor countries alike face issues with aging water infrastructure, which requires a massive amount of resources to upgrade. Lastly, climate change factors in because extreme weather events can make water more polluted, scarce, and/or unpredictable.

[Related: Groundwater is an incredible resource. It’s time to treat it like one.]

In general, Zuniga-Teran says the reasons for urban water crises are, to an extent, caused by “a consequence of uncontrolled urban growth and the unsustainable use of water resources.”

Population growth is not enough to indicate water demand, because certain individuals and social groups use a lot of water (and other resources) while other groups don’t. What’s at play is the current political-economic system that makes it possible for some individuals to over consume water while others don’t even have access to it, says Elisa Savelli, a research fellow at the Uppsala University Department of Earth Sciences in Sweden.

Socioeconomic inequalities can drive water crises

According to a recent Nature Sustainability study on the metropolitan area of Cape Town, stark socioeconomic inequalities play a major role in the production of water crises. The authors built a model to account for unequal water consumption across different social groups, which allowed them to retrace who over consume water and who doesn’t. They found that privileged households with better access and financial resources are able to consume more water to use however they want to.

“We found that whilst constituting only 13 percent of the urban population, the elite consumed more than half of the city’s water, and for non-basic needs such as gardening or swimming pools,” says Savelli, who was lead author of the Nature study.

Not only did wealthier households consume more public water sources, but they also had access to private sources that aren’t controlled by municipalities, like boreholes. In comparison, informal dwellers and lower-income households constitute over 60 percent of the city population but consume only about 27 percent of the city’s water. 

“Socioeconomic inequalities can drive water shortages and crises as much as, if not more than, population growth or climate change,” says Savelli. The current political-economic system triggers the unsustainable exploitation of water sources with the objective of accumulating profit and capital, without accounting for water as a common resource, she adds.

Wealthy people generally have the infrastructure to make water available to them, so it’s easier for them to consume it. They also have larger properties to maintain, larger dwelling units, pools, and more, says Stephanie Pincetl, director of the California Center for Sustainable Communities at UCLA.

“In places like the Southwest, we need to aggressively change outdoor landscapes,” says Pincetl. In California, landscape irrigation accounts for about 50 percent of annual residential water consumption. Overall, federal and local governments have a responsibility to manage urban water supplies sustainably and equitably.

Various strategies to manage urban water supply sustainably

To ensure more sustainable management of urban water supply, Pincetl suggests establishing tiered water rates where rates are higher with more consumption. Water use budgets per household are already in some places across the country, like Orange County, California. Those who stay within their monthly water budget get a lower rate per centum cubic feet (CCF) compared to those who go over it.

A 2021 Water Economics and Policy study looked into the county’s application of tiered rates and found that water was saved for the two agencies that converted to a budget-based rate structure at multiple levels of consumption. However, Zuniga-Teran says water demand policies that aim to control human behavior might not be enough to influence the behavior of wealthy residents. After all, they may not mind paying a lot more for water.

Municipalities can also acquire water rights by buying farmlands to change the water use from agricultural to municipal, says Zuniga-Teran. Back in the 1970s, Tucson, Arizona purchased over 20,000 acres of farmland in Avra Valley to acquire water rights and preserve groundwater. Investing in education and communication programs to help individuals learn how they can contribute to sustainable water management is also important, she adds. A 2022 Sustainability study in Mexico aimed to implement an environmental education program on water conservation in 10-year-old students. The authors found that such environmental programs can improve water use and conservation.

[Related: A new climate report finally highlights the importance of our decisions.]

A major part of sustainable resource utilization is water reuse for both potable and non-potable purposes. For instance, Zuniga-Teran says households can collect greywater—excess runoff water from showers or washing machines—and harvest rainwater to use for car washing or toilet flushing. Cities could also reuse reclaimed water, or treated municipal wastewater, and send it to a drinking water treatment plant to be directed into the drinking water distribution system. Meanwhile, stormwater, or surface water from heavy rain or snow, may be used to irrigate landscapes and replenish local aquifers while reducing flooding, she adds. All these alternative water sources could be treated and used for a variety of purposes.

“Instead of building another dam or promoting water technologies, policies should seek to alter privileged lifestyles, limit water use for amenities, and redistribute income and water resources more equally,” says Savelli. “The construction of additional infrastructure would not address the root cause of water overconsumption, and in turn, this and other technocratic solutions would protract current water crises into the future.”

When it comes to sustainable urban water management, cities should prioritize low-income, marginalized communities that still experience legacies of redlining and disinvestment and are likely to suffer the impacts of climate change the most, says Zuniga-Teran. Therefore, funding engagement efforts is critical as well. “Equity has to be at the forefront of all water-related efforts,” she adds. “To address inequities, community engagement is needed to make sure all voices are heard and that programs and policies are designed to address their particular needs.”

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Buzzwords like autonomy, artificial intelligence, electrification, and carbon fiber are common in the automotive industry, and it’s no surprise that they are hot topics: Manufacturers are racing to gain an advantage over competitors while balancing cost and demand. What might surprise you, however, is just how much 180-year-old agriculture equipment giant John Deere uses these same technologies. The difference is that they’re using them on 15-ton farm vehicles.

A couple of years ago, John Deere’s chief technology officer Jahmy Hindman told The Verge that the company now employs more software engineers than mechanical engineers. You don’t have to dig much deeper to find that John Deere is plowing forward toward technology and autonomy in a way that may feel anachronistic to those outside the business.  

“It’s easy to underestimate the amount of technology in the industries we serve, agriculture in particular,” Hindman told PopSci. “Modern farms are very different from the farms of 10 years ago, 20 years ago, and 30 years ago. There are farms that are readily adopting technology that makes agriculture more efficient, more sustainable, and more profitable for growers. And they’re using high-end technology: computer vision, machine learning, [Global Navigation Satellite System] guidance, automation, and autonomy.”

PopSci took an inside look at the company’s high-tech side at its inaugural 2023 John Deere Technology Summit last month. Here’s how it’s all unfolding.

Where it started—and where it’s going

John Deere, the OG founder behind the agricultural equipment giant, started as a blacksmith. When Deere, who was born in 1804, moved from his native Vermont to Illinois, he heard complaints from farmer clients about the commonly used cast-iron plows of the day. Sticky soil clung to the iron plows, resulting in a substantial loss in efficiency every time a farmer had to stop and scrape the equipment clean, which could be every few feet.

Deere was inspired to innovate, and grabbed a broken saw blade to create the first commercially successful, “self-scouring” steel plow in 1837. The shiny, polished surface of the steel worked beautifully to cut through the dirt much more quickly, with fewer interruptions, and Deere pivoted to a new business. Over 180 years later, the company continues to find new ways to improve the farming process.

It all starts with data, and the agriculture community harnesses and extrapolates a lot of it. Far beyond almanacs, notebooks, and intellectual property passed down from generation to generation, data used by the larger farms drives every decision a farm makes. And when it comes to profitability, every data point can mean the difference between earnings and loss. John Deere, along with competitors like Caterpillar and Mahindra, are in the business of helping farms collect and analyze data with software tied to its farm equipment. 

[Related: John Deere finally agrees to let farmers fix their own equipment, but there’s a catch]

With the uptake of technology, farming communities in the US—and around the world, for that matter—are finding ways to make their products more efficient. John Deere has promised to deliver 20 or more electric and hybrid-electric construction equipment models by 2026. On top of that, the company is working to improve upon the autonomous software it uses to drive its massive vehicles, with the goal of ensuring that every one of the 10 trillion corn and soybean seeds can be planted, cared for, and harvested autonomously by 2030.

Farming goes electric

In February, John Deere launched its first all-electric zero-turn lawn mower. (That means it can rotate in place without requiring a wide circle.) Far from the noisy, often difficult-to-start mowers of your youth, the Z370R Electric ZTrak won’t wake the neighbors at 7:00 a.m. The electric mower features a USB-C charging port and an integrated, sealed battery that allows for mowing even in wet and rainy conditions.

On a larger scale, John Deere is pursuing all-electric equipment and has set ambitious emissions reduction targets. As such, the company has vowed to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by 50 percent by 2030 from a 2021 baseline. To grow its EV business more quickly, it will benefit from its early-2022 purchase of Kreisel Electric, an Austrian company specializing in immersion-cooled battery technology. Krieisel’s batteries are built with a modular design, which makes it ideal for different sizes of farm equipment. It also promises extended battery life, efficiency in cold and hot climates, and mechanical stability.

Even with a brand-new battery division, however, John Deere is not bullishly pushing into EV and autonomous territory. It still offers lower-tech options for farmers who aren’t ready to go down that path. After all, farm equipment can last for many years and tossing new technology into an uninterested or unwilling operation is not the best route to adoption. Instead, the company actively seeks out farmers willing to try out new products and software to see how it works in the real world. (To be clear, the farms pay for the use of the machines and John Deere offers support.)

“If it doesn’t deliver value to the farm, it’s not really useful to the farmer,” Hindman says.

See and Spray, launched last year, is a product that John Deere acquired from Blue River Technology. The software uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to recognize and distinguish crop plants from weeds. It’s programmed to “read” the field and only spray the unwanted plants, which saves farmers money by avoiding wasted product. See and Spray uses an auto-leveling carbon fiber boom and dual nozzles that can deliver two different chemicals in a single pass.

Another new technology, ExactShot, reduces the amount of starter fertilizer needed during planting by more than 60 percent, the company says. This product uses a combination of sensors and robotics to spritz each seed as it’s planted versus spraying the whole row; once again, that saves farmers an immense amount of money and supplies.

Right to Repair brings victory

Just one machine designed for farmland can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. Historically, if equipment were to break down, farmers had to call in the issue and wait for a technician directly from John Deere or an authorized repair shop for a repair. Many farms are located far away from city centers, which means a quick fix isn’t in the cards. That could be frustrating for a farmer at any time, particularly in the middle of a hectic planting or harvest season. 

At the beginning of this year, John Deere and the American Farm Bureau Federation signed a memorandum of understanding stating that farmers and independent repair shops can gain access to John Deere’s software, manuals, and other information needed to service their equipment. This issue has been a point of contention for farmers, and a new law in Colorado establishes the right to repair in that state, starting January 1 of next year. 

However, that comes with a set of risks, according to John Deere. The company says its equipment “doesn’t fit in your pocket like a cell phone or come with a handful of components; our combines can weigh more than 15 tons and are manufactured with over 18,500 parts.”

In a statement to DTN, a representative from John Deere said, “[The company] supports a customer’s decision to repair their own products, utilize an independent repair service or have repairs completed by an authorized dealer. John Deere additionally provides manuals, parts and diagnostic tools to facilitate maintenance and repairs. We feel strongly that the legislation in Colorado is unnecessary and will carry unintended consequences that negatively impact our customers.”

The company warns that modifying the software of heavy machinery could “override safety controls and put people at risk” and creates risks related to safe operation of the machine, plus emissions compliance, data security, and more. There’s a tricky balance that both benefits farmers who want control over their investments and potentially puts those same farmers—or anyone in the path of the machinery—in peril if the software is altered in a way that causes a failure of some kind. Of course, that’s true for any piece of machinery, even a car. 

[Related: John Deere tractors are getting the jailbreak treatment from hackers]

Farming machinery has come a long way from that first saw blade plow John Deere built in 1837. Today, with machine learning, the equipment can detect buildup and adjust the depth on its own without stopping the process. Even in autonomous mode, a tractor can measure wheel slip and speed, torque and tire pressure, and that helps farmers do more in less time. 

In the life cycle of farming, technology will make a big difference for reducing waste and emissions and offering better quality of life. Watching the equipment in action on John Deere’s demo farm in Texas, it’s clear that there’s more bits and bytes on those machines than anyone might imagine.

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The West just had a very wet winter. The snowpack at the top of the Rocky Mountains, which feed the Colorado River, a crucial water source for seven states and Mexico, has been replenished. The Great Salt Lake has risen a little more than three feet. Currently, the US Drought Monitor shows that almost all of California is out of a severe drought.

Now, spring temperatures are causing the snowpack on the Sierra Nevadas to melt and trickle down to California’s waterways. After enforcing steep cuts in some counties in 2021 and 2022, the state just granted more river water to millions of residents and agriculture. For farms in particular, this means they may not have to rely as heavily on groundwater, which is being rapidly depleted in some parts of the state.

[Related: This phantom lake in California is back with a vengeance]

But scientists warn this one strange winter should be taken as that: extraordinary. To fully rid the West of its long-term megadrought, which research shows has been exacerbated by climate change, there would need to be several rainy and snowy winters in a row, says Wei Zhang, a climate scientist and assistant professor at Utah State University.

Zhang calculated how abnormal California’s precipitation was from December 2022 to February 2023 using data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and found it was about 52 percent higher than average. “It’s an extreme event—it happens every few decades,” he notes.

“This wet winter definitely is great news for the Colorado River because of the snowpack. That snow runoff from the mountains will drain into the Colorado River and increase the stream flow,” Zhang explains. “But that cannot solve the water problem in the Colorado River—that demand is still much larger than the supply.”

The Colorado River has been overused for decades. And thanks to the megadrought, which has caused increased evaporation and decreased snowfall, it’s also shrinking. The federal government plans to adopt a final decision this summer about how to best manage the parched river—and which states will lose acre-feet of water from the plan. 

Zhang is also digging into why this past winter was so wet in Western states. He says it’s unlikely it was caused by climate change, which would cause precipitation to fall more as rain than snow. He thinks it’s more likely tied to shifts in jet streams, or the upper level wind flows that drive the movement of winter storms. These new patterns could potentially be tied to changes in climate, but either way, scientists need more evidence before they can make a definitive conclusion about the reason behind all the snow this winter.

“This extreme event could be caused by some random [atmospheric] processes in the climate system, or it could also be forced by some sea surface temperature anomalies, or because of the background changes in the [Earth’s] climate,” Zhang says. “But it’s very difficult to build that causal relationship between one extreme winter or one extreme event and climate change.”

[Related: Farmers accidentally created a flood-resistant ‘machine’ across Bangladesh]

Simon Wang, another climate scientist and professor at Utah State University, thinks that while climate change can contribute to the overall warming of the planet and increases in precipitation, it doesn’t regulate year-to-year patterns. 

Like Zhang, he’s cautious about how much impact one season can have. “Drought is a long-term problem that requires sustained water management and conservation efforts, as well as proactive measures to adapt to increasing aridification due to increased evaporation,” he writes in an email to PopSci. “While this wet winter has helped to alleviate some immediate concerns, it is not a solution to the diminishing water supply.”

Both Wang and Zhang emphasize that California and the rest of the West’s water woes have not yet waned. “Many people may think that we don’t have a water problem anymore. I don’t think that’s true,” Zhang says. “All the models are projecting a dryer and hotter western US [in the next decades]. I don’t think this event will overturn that trend.”

Correction (May 2, 2023): The article previous incorrectly stated that the Sierra Nevada snowpack feeds the Colorado River. It should be the Rocky Mountains.

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It’s hard to imagine life without the nightshade family. It includes the likes of tomatoes, potatoes, peppers, and eggplants—some of the essential ingredients for a healthy diet–and delicious recipes. But, it turns out one of these tasty flowering plants has a longer history in North America than scientists previously believed. 

According to a March paper in the journal New Phytologist, the chili pepper may have been growing roots in present-day Colorado at least 50 million years ago—quite a bit earlier than scientists originally believed.  Previously, the chili pepper’s origin was placed 15 million years ago in South America. The newest theory emerged when a postdoc and an undergraduate student at University of Colorado-Boulder discovered a fossil of a plant that uncannily resembles the chili pepper, notably through its spiky ends on a fruiting stem called the calyx. 

“The world has maybe 300,000 plant species. The only plants with that kind of calyx is this group of 80 or 90 species,” Stacey Smith, senior author of the paper and associate professor of evolutionary biology at CU Boulder, said in a press release.

[Related: 5 heirloom foods that farmers want to bring back from obscurity.]

The well-preserved specimen was revealed in the Green River Formation, a site chock full of Eocene fossils and discoveries. But, it ended up not being as rare as the authors thought at first—two more similar chili pepper deposits from Green River were hidden in the CU Boulder collections and another at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science. These fossils were uncovered in the 1990s, but it certainly isn’t unheard of for discoveries to lay in wait until the right scientists come along. 

The Green River Formation is a marvel for capturing the Eocene, which lasted from around 34 to 56 million years ago and marked the beginning of the era of mammals. During this epoch, the amount of carbon in the atmosphere was around double that of today, paving the way for palm trees to grow in Alaska and a lack of ice driving sea levels 500 feet higher than they are currently. 

So what could’ve happened that caused the gap between when chili peppers were evolving in Colorado and when they appeared in South America during the Miocene? The authors theorize that modern birds, which have been able to fly long distances for some 60 million years, could’ve carried seeds and plants in their poop or stuck to their bodies. 

Through birds, chili peppers would’ve made their way to South America. Since the latest discovery puts the evolution of chili peppers back to the days of Gondwana, transoceanic travel may have been unnecessary. Birds could simply fly across shorter watery distances or via a chain of volcanic islands, the scientists wrote in the new paper. 

[Related: Oldest evidence of digested plants in a roughly 575-million-year-old creature’s gut.]

Nevertheless, this discovery puts the oldest chili peppers in a place that no longer has many native nightshades or any chili peppers at all. “These chili peppers, a species that we thought arose in an evolutionary blink of an eye, have been around for a super long time,” Smith added. “We’re still coming to grips with this new timeline.”

So next time you break out a meal of Colorado-style chili, that bowl of goodness might have even more local roots that anyone realized.

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This article was originally published on Undark.

Approximately 300 miles south of New Zealand, the Auckland Islands lie in a belt of winds known as the Roaring Forties. In the late 19th century, sailing ships departing Australasia would catch a ride back to Europe by plunging deep into the Southern Ocean to ride the westerlies home.

But these seas were poorly charted, and weather conditions frequently horrendous.

Sometimes, navigators miscalculated the islands’ position and, too late, found their vessels thrown upon the islands’ rocky ramparts. Ships were torn to pieces and survivors cast ashore on one of the most remote and inhospitable places on the planet. These castaways soon found out they were not alone.

The main land mass in the Auckland archipelago, Auckland Island, was — and still is — home to pigs, initially introduced in the first half of the 19th century by European hunters and explorers, as well as a group of Indigenous New Zealanders fleeing conflict.

The pigs have no natural predators, and over time, they have wrought destruction upon Auckland Island’s flora and fauna. Government conservationists now want them gone — but there’s a twist: These once domesticated farm animals have evolved into ultra-resilient, disease-free pigs that have caught the eye of scientists who study xenotransplantation, a type of medical procedure in which cells, tissues, or organs from one species are transferred into another species.

Last year, for the first time, surgeons transplanted pig hearts and pig kidneys into humans. Such procedures have not yet been tested in clinical trials, and they are not approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration or regulatory agencies in New Zealand. But researchers say that xenotransplantation could eventually prove effective at treating a range of conditions and may alleviate the huge global need for donor organs. The Auckland Island pigs, with their unique genetics, may be especially well-suited for this purpose.

Some of the hardy quadrupeds are now housed in a research facility on the New Zealand mainland. Meanwhile, conservation authorities are preparing a massive effort to eradicate those left in the wild.

The first European ship to reach the Auckland Islands (known as Maukahuka or Motu Maha in the Māori language) was the whaler Ocean, in 1806. The ship’s captain returned the following year to drop off a team of seal hunters. During this visit, pigs were first released as a food source. Subsequent introductions continued, and in the late 1800s, with the tales of shipwreck and survival piling up, the New Zealand and Australian governments got involved, releasing additional pigs for the castaways.

The pigs, which were of mostly European and Asian origin, had to learn to live with the persistent cold, rain, and wind — far from ideal conditions for animals bred for sheltered barnyards. But because pigs produce up to two litters each year, they can adapt relatively quickly, said Michael Willis, of the Rare Breeds Conservation Society of New Zealand. Soon, Auckland Island’s pigs formed one unique strain.

In the winter, they survived by eating the island’s endemic plants and scavenging carrion. In the summer, their fortunes changed, and they gorged on plump albatross chicks and protein-filled penguin eggs. Twenty-five species of seabird breed on the Auckland Islands, but after two centuries of pig predation, their numbers have fallen. New Zealand conservationists are increasingly wary of the porcine prowlers.

The archipelago is “an immensely special place,” said Stephen Horn, a project manager at New Zealand’s Department of Conservation. It’s the biggest remaining stronghold of the yellow-eyed penguin, the world’s rarest penguin species, and the Gibson’s wandering albatross, which breeds there exclusively. (Currently, said Horn, seabirds on Auckland Island nest only on the precipitous edges of the land, where even the most tenacious pig won’t venture.)

The pigs have also taken a toll on the spectacular flowering plants known as megaherbs, which are now “almost non-existent” on Auckland Island, Horn said. “They’re absent until you get to the extremely steep cliff areas. Then you can see patches of green that are out of reach” of the pigs.

Horn believes there are between 700 and 1,500 pigs on the island, with the population fluctuating widely. Survival to breeding age, he said, is low. Those that do make it have to be tough and adaptable. “On one hand, super admirable,” he said, “the way they’re able to adapt and survive in those conditions.” And on the other hand, incredibly damaging. “They use the coastline pretty heavily,” he said. “They’ll eat anything that turns up, scavenging things like dead whales and seals or even krill and squid.”

Mindful of the Department of Conservation’s long-held wish to eradicate the pigs, the Rare Breeds Conservation Society sent a team to retrieve some in 1999. Using dogs, they managed to catch 17. “Hunger appeared to be the pigs’ constant companion,” wrote team member Peter Jackson for New Zealand Geographic. “The suckling sows had only two or three teats producing milk, which told how few piglets survived.”

The team loaded the pigs on a boat and brought them back to the southern New Zealand town of Invercargill. There, the animals were put into a quarantine facility, intended to protect the country’s domestic pig herd from potential diseases.

Keeping the pigs in quarantine required money the Society didn’t have, so they prevailed upon Invercargill’s then-mayor, Tim Shadbolt, a colorful former left-wing activist, who dipped into his contingency fund for the approximately 2,300 in today’s New Zealand dollars, or $1,400, needed to feed them.

During the first year of quarantine, the pig population ballooned. “They dined on porridge and swedes and they became raging sexual beasts, producing larger litters than they did on the Auckland Islands,” Shadbolt recalled in a 2008 article in the Otago Daily Times. The pig’s food bill increased tenfold — an expenditure that whipped up a political storm in Invercargill, with councilors and constituents railing against what they characterized as a scandalous waste of public money. Shadbolt was unceremoniously stripped of his contingency fund.

The mayor, though, would be vindicated. These pigs from a previous century soon found an unlikely home in the futuristic world of xenotransplantation.

Globally, the demand for transplant organs is overwhelming. Every year, thousands of people die waiting for a new heart, liver, kidney, or lung that never arrives. In the United States alone, around 17 people on the organ waiting list die every day. For decades, xenotransplantation has been seen as a possibility to bridge this shortfall.

Since the 1960s, surgeons have transplanted chimpanzee and baboon parts into a small number of humans with life-threatening conditions, but these efforts have had little success. The biggest challenge is getting the human body’s immune system to accept the new organ.

The use of non-human primates for biomedical research is controversial, so over time, researchers looked to pigs. “Their organs, their tissues, and their physiology are sufficiently close to humans,” said Paul Tan, founder and CEO of New Zealand xenotransplantation research company NZeno. “Their cells function in a manner that is very close to humans. So their blood sugar levels and our blood sugar levels are pretty close.”

In the late 1980s, New Zealand pediatrician Bob Elliott and colleague David Collinson started a company called Diatranz to investigate whether pig islet cells could be used to treat Type-1 diabetes. For Collinson, the quest was personal. His son suffered from the disease.

Islet cells are found in the pancreas and produce insulin, but in Type-1 diabetes patients, are destroyed by the immune system. Trial transplants of human islet cells had met with mixed results, and in any case, with millions of Type-1 diabetes sufferers globally, there were nowhere near enough human donors to meet demand.

Diatranz aimed to surgically implant pig islet cells, encapsulated in a seaweed-derived polymer that shielded them from the human immune system, into the pancreases of diabetes patients. In the 1990s, though, the work stalled amid fears of disease.

Xenotransplantation, of both cells or organs, carries the risk of bacterial or viral infections crossing from the donor animal into humans. Pigs are not as closely related to humans as apes and baboons, a circumstance that makes transplanted pig parts less likely to spread disease to humans. Still, the risk persists.

While common diseases might be eliminated with medicines, a more serious risk was thought to come from viruses that essentially gatecrash the genetic material of the host animal. These are called retroviruses; they include HIV as well as viruses that cause certain cancers.

Some retroviruses, called endogenous retroviruses, have, in the deep past, even insinuated themselves into the DNA of sperm and egg cells — they are therefore part of the animal’s genetic makeup, replicated in every cell in the body and passed down through generations. There is currently no medication to eliminate retroviruses.

The concern was that pig tissues could secrete infectious particles of a porcine endogenous retrovirus, or PERV, which could then infect human cells to create a new, transmissible human disease. In the worst-case scenario, it was feared, such an event could trigger a global pandemic.

In the late 1990s, a London-based research team confirmed that, in a laboratory setting at least, PERVs could infect human cells.

The discovery, for a time, “killed xenotransplantation,” said Björn Petersen, a xenotransplantation researcher with the Friedrich Loeffler Institute, the German government’s animal-disease research center. “Pharmaceutical companies withdrew their money from the research.”

Around the world, the hunt was on for pigs that were as disease-free as possible.

In 1998, Diatranz partner Olga Garkavenko turned on her radio and got wind of Invercargill’s new arrivals. She decided to investigate.

The company obtained tissue samples from the quarantined pigs for analysis. The islands’ harsh conditions, it seemed, had been tough on disease.

“They remained isolated and therefore they remained free of a lot of common infections that you have in pigs,” said Tan. “The pigs that were weak were probably wiped out. Only the fittest survived.”

The pigs also have an unusually low number of retrovirus copies in their genome. Petersen noted that the population is also completely free of a type of PERV called PERV-C, which may pose the biggest risk to human transplant recipients. This was possible “because they were isolated for a long time and they never had contact with other pigs.”

Joachim Denner, a xenotransplantation researcher from the Free University of Berlin, said the Auckland Island pigs had another major advantage over other pig breeds — their small stature. At around 90 pounds in weight, he said, “they are the right size for transplantation.” A domestic pig weighs 300 to 700 pounds, and its organs, he added, are too large.

In 2004, Elliott, Tan, and others set up a company called Living Cell Technologies, or LCT, which absorbed Diatranz and took over the pigs’ care, building an expensive facility near Invercargill to keep them in medical-grade isolation while they were selectively bred for xenotransplantation.

The animals housed in quarantine were suddenly reputed to be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars each, much to then-Mayor Shadbolt’s barely-concealed glee.

The project brought jobs and millions of dollars of investment to Invercargill. “It has all come to fruition,” Shadbolt said in the 2008 Otago Daily Times article. “I rub it into those people who didn’t support me at every opportunity.”

By the 2010s, concerns around PERVs were lessening, as multiple clinical trials of cell transplants suggested not only that pig cells could be effective in treating diabetes, but also that PERVs weren’t passing to humans. New gene-editing technology also meant that retrovirus genes could be rendered non-functional before an animal was born.

With these advancements, the race to successfully implant pig organs in humans has gathered pace. Groups around the world now breed pigs for this purpose. It’s big business — a recent report estimated the global xenotransplantation market could be worth $24.5 billion by 2029.

In January 2022, a University of Maryland group, using a pig organ from the U.S. company Revivicor, conducted the first successful transplant of a pig heart into a living patient. The patient survived for two months. While the cause of his death is still being examined, evidence of a disease called porcine cytomegalovirus was found during the autopsy. The pig used in the transplant, said Tan, would have been rigorously screened for the virus, which, he added, shows the importance of breeding pigs that are genuinely free from such diseases.

Paul Tan now runs NZeno, which has taken over the breeding and keeping of the Auckland Island pigs. LCT, meanwhile, has switched its focus to Parkinson’s disease and recently began clinical trials of a treatment that involves inserting capsules containing pig brain cells into the human brain to repair nerve damage.

NZeno supplies pig cells to LCT and is also trying to establish itself as a major player in the organ game. “We like to think that our strain of pigs, derived from the Auckland Islands, further developed at Nzeno, would be the ideal pig strain for human organ xenotransplantation,” said Tan. Their cells, he noted, have already been used in humans for years, and have a very good track record of safety. The small number of retrovirus copies in the pigs’ genomes, he said, also require less gene editing compared to other breeds.

NZeno recently provided its pig cells to a team at Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich, which aims to have a genetically-modified pig ready for a pig-human heart transplant by 2025. NZeno is also working with another xenotransplantation group in China that aims to develop kidneys for transplant.

Petersen agreed that there is a solid rationale for minimizing gene editing. “The more genetic modifications you do,” he said, “the more side effects you can maybe expect.” But, he added, there may be cases in which it doesn’t make sense to prioritize the minimization of gene editing. For example, “if you want to have a universal donor” — an animal that can supply a variety of suitable organs or cells for human transplant — “then you need to have a pig with more genetic modifications right from the beginning.”

Denner said the Auckland Island pigs, which he describes as the most disease-free pigs in the world, may yet prove their true worth. But he cautioned against viewing them — or any pig — as a silver bullet. “All these studies have limitations,” he said. “The real effect of PERVs on humans, we will see when we perform the first transplants of organs.”

For now, wild Auckland Island pigs continue to run free in their storm-battered home, but the clock is ticking. Over the last five years, New Zealand’s Department of Conservation has been preparing for eradication.

Stephen Horn leads the team charged with this enormous task. Previous work attached GPS trackers to pigs, trying to learn their movements, and Horn’s team has trialed various methods of killing them. The plan is to wipe out the pigs using a combination of traps, poisoning, and hunters shooting from helicopters and on foot.

“The approach is really high intensity, as quickly as possible,” said Horn, “and try to keep the population as naive as possible.

“You need a suite of tools,” he continued, “because pigs are smart. Not every pig is going to be vulnerable to the same technique.”

Compounding the difficulty is the island’s size and isolation. It is several days’ dangerous sail from the mainland and, aside from a few uninhabitable hut shelters, the islands have no infrastructure to support human life. Once ashore, movement through the dense undergrowth and shoulder-high grasses is extraordinarily difficult.

“It’s rugged, remote, and massive,” said Horn. “It’s pretty overwhelming when you’re looking at it through a lens of animal pest control.”

Not everyone is thrilled at the prospect of the pigs’ demise. The animals are “very much part of our heritage,” said Willis of the Rare Breeds Conservation Society. The organization argues more effort should be made to preserve at least some of them. Perhaps the pigs could be fenced off, so as not to disrupt the entire island, said Willis. Or some could be relocated to another island, where they might not pose as much of a problem. As far as he is aware, however, these options are not being considered.

Paul Tan said he would also jump at the chance to retrieve more pigs.

The Department of Conservation, said Horn, has fielded inquiries about recovering pigs, but the logistics of retrieving them from the Auckland Islands, as well as the enormous costs involved in quarantine, are major hurdles to overcome.

Horn said that while staff are actively discussing options for retrieving pigs, their focus is eradication. With a plan in place, the department just needs to secure enough funding to make it happen, he said, “to undo some of the damage that was done by people, on what is an extremely fragile, but important place.”

Bill Morris is a documentary filmmaker, wildlife cameraman, and science journalist based in Dunedin, New Zealand. He is a regular contributor to New Zealand Geographic magazine and his work has also appeared on the BBC and Animal Planet.

This article was originally published on Undark. Read the original article.

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Soil is one of the most crucial, if not underrated, elements of daily life—it’s essential for growing the food and resources we rely on, combats drought, protects against flooding, and can sequester carbon dioxide for years to come. But, the dirt beneath our feet is constantly under threat due to rising temperatures and biodiversity loss thanks to climate change. And despite how simple we may think soil is, it’s pretty hard to know what’s really going on deep in the ground from the surface.

Scientists in Italy, however, think they may have a robotic solution—a seed-inspired robot. Scientists at the Bioinspired Soft Robotics (BSR) Lab, a part of the Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia (IIT-Italian Institute of Technology) in Genoa, have developed the first 4D printed seed-inspired soft robot, which they claim can help act as sensors for monitoring pollutants, CO2 levels, temperature and humidity in soil. They published their findings earlier this year in Advanced Science. The research is part of the EU-funded I-Seed project aimed at making robots that can detect environmental changes in air and soil. 

What they’ve got here is an artificial seed inspired by the structure of a South African geranium, or the Pelargonium appendiculatum. The seeds of the tuberous, hairy-leafed plant have the ability to change shape in response to how humid their environment is. When the time comes for the seeds to leave the plant, they detach and can move independently to “penetrate” soil fractures, according to the study. This almost looks like crawling and burning action, which is due its helical shape changing according to changes in the environment. In a way. The curly seeds can find a home for themselves simply by expanding and shrinking due to changes in water content of the air.

[Related: This heat-seeking robot looks and moves like a vine.]

The team at IIT-BSR mimicked these seeds by combining 3D printing and electrospinning, using materials that also absorb and expand when exposed to humidity. Using fused deposition modeling, the authors printed a substrate layer of polycaprolactone, a biodegradable thermoplastic polyester activated using oxygen plasma to increase water-attracting abilities. Next, they added electrospun hygroscopic fibers made of a polyethylene oxide shell and a cellulose nanocrystal core. 

When tested in a soil sample, the robot was able to shimmy about, adapt its shape to cracks, and burrow into holes in the ground much like the natural seed. Not to mention, it was capable of lifting about 100 times its own weight. First author Luca Cecchini, a PhD student at IIT, said in a statement that the biodegradable and energy-autonomous robots could be used as “wireless, battery-free tools for surface soil exploration and monitoring.”

“With this latest research,” Barbara Mazzolai, associate director for robotics of the IIT and coordinator of the I-Seed Project, said in the statement, “we have further proved that it is possible to create innovative solutions that not only have the objective of monitoring the well-being of our planet, but that do so without altering it.”

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In the past couple of years, dozens of states that have decided to legalize recreational marijuana. Cannabis, including medicinal and recreational, is legal in more states than illegal now, which means more state-regulated grow operations are popping up around the country. 

Researchers across the country, including at the University of California Berkeley’s Cannabis Research Center, are interested in examining how cannabis cultivation impacts the sustainability, land, and the environment. Ariani Wartenberg, a postdoctoral fellow at UC Berkeley, is an author of a 2021 article that reviewed all studies that have looked at the environmental impacts of cannabis. “I was surprised, actually, at how few I found. I expected there would be more,” Wartenberg says of the studies they were able to include in the review paper. 

[Related: Can you overdose on weed?]

The reasons that the impact of cannabis cultivation on the environment hasn’t been studied much is likely twofold, Wartenberg says. Looking into federally illegal substances is tricky, even when it comes to things like their impacts on mental health. The stigma against these substances means that empirical studies of the environmental impact of cannabis didn’t become mainstream until about a decade ago. 

Studying cannabis is important because it isn’t lumped in with traditional agriculture as far as regulations go, says Van Butsic, study author and Cannabis Research Center co-director. “One of the reasons why we do research on cannabis is because it has a sort of unique and separate social and cultural history than other agricultural crops,” he says. 

While the environmental impact of cannabis cultivation is a new area of research, early studies show that sustainability needs to be an important consideration of cannabis cultivation. Research from Colorado State University shows that one serving of THC has a much higher greenhouse gas footprint than a serving of beer, wine, or cigarettes. One of the biggest reasons for this disparity—energy-intensive indoor growing.

In Wartenberg’s review paper, the researchers identified six major areas to look at to assess the sustainability of cannabis: air pollution, pesticide use, water use, energy use, land cover change, and water pollution. 

Some of these impact areas, the researchers say, apply to any sort of crops, such as water use and land use. But because cannabis is easy to grow almost anywhere, it is often grown indoors. Eighty percent of Colorado’s one million pounds of cannabis grown annually comes from indoor farming. When farmers grow plants without natural sunlight, they can expect more of a strain on energy use than outdoor or mixed-light methods.

One primary concern with indoor growing is energy use for lighting and air circulation. A 2021 study shows that indoor cannabis cultivation is on its way to becoming a significant greenhouse gas producer in the US. Colorado’s weed industry accounts for 1.3 percent of the state’s total greenhouse gas production. That’s about the same emissions from coal mining in the state, according to the study authors. The same study found greenhouse gas emissions from cannabis cultivation vary based on the region of the US, with the highest amount coming from cannabis grown in the Mountain West, Midwest, Alaska, and Hawaii. Meanwhile, southern California and coastal regions make for less demanding growth regions thanks to mild climates. 

Other studies have shown that growing cannabis can also impact air quality. Cannabis plants, like all plants, emit gasses called biogenic volatile organic compounds, or BVOCs. A 2019 study in Colorado measured how much BVOCs are produced by cannabis cultivated indoors. These gases are a precursor to ozone formation, and further research showed that in Colorado, indoor cannabis cultivation could increase ozone pollution. Ground-level ozone is a pollutant that causes coughing and airway inflammation, so more research is needed to determine if indoor cannabis cultivation poses unique air quality risks. 

[Related: Cannabis might help curb chronic pain, reducing the need for opioids]

Quantifying the overall environmental impact of cannabis cultivation is difficult because of illegal or trespass farming done without state permits. It is difficult to quantify how many illegal farms there are in any state. Still, in northern California, Butsic says, it is a lot. “In northern California, where we’ve done the finest grain research and the most research, over two-thirds of the farms are not permitted,” he says.

An illegal grow operation isn’t necessarily bad for the environment, Butsic says. Many growers have been operating for decades and simply don’t have the money to spend on the permitting process. But on the other hand, an illegal grow operation doesn’t undergo the same testing for pesticides as a permitted site in California. How rigorously states measure pesticides in legal medicinal or recreational cannabis varies a lot from state to state and is far from consistent. There are instances where dangerous rodenticides have been found in animals near trespass cultivation sites. There also isn’t much research about how pesticides applied to cannabis may impact human health because those chemicals could directly impact the lungs when smoked. 

The group at Berkeley and other nonprofits such as the Cannabis Certification Council are trying to bring sustainability and environmental impacts to the forefront when they talk with policymakers. The Cannabis Certification Council has a #Whatsinmyweed campaign that urges consumers to care more about how their cannabis is produced and distributed. The group also provides a list of existing third-party environmental certifications consumers can look out for. 

But with cannabis regulations left to individual states, and a large number of illegal grow operations, the energy, pesticide and water use of grow operations as a whole will likely remain nebulous—at least for now.

This story has been updated. It was originally published on May 6, 2021.

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Today is a very special holiday where a skunky smell permeates the air. If you’re celebrating 4/20, Popular Science has the perfect lineup of dope science stories to make you everyone’s favorite bud. Don’t puff puff pass on this one!

Essential cannabis accessories

First things first, everyone needs some cannabis supplies before lighting up. But with so many twists on glassware and other options, how do you decide? From vaporizers to grinders to pen batteries, PopSci’s roundup of essential cannabis accessories will walk you through the choices.

A step-by-step guide to rolling a joint

Rolling a joint can’t be that hard, right? Wrong. Thankfully, in honor of 4/20, our DIY step-by-step guide will explain both the art and the science of rolling a joint, with advice straight from some of New York City’s expert budtenders. It’s the perfect refresher for veterans and crash course for newbies, complete with photos, detailed instructions, and material recommendations.

Can CBD help you chill? Here’s what we know so far.

CBD, THC’s sister molecule, has been working its way into various products as part of a budding industry. CBD is legal in more US states than cannabis, and can be added to almost any product as long as it has less than 0.3 percent THC. It’s a great alternative for those looking for stress relief, or don’t want the psychoactive effects of cannabis itself. Still have some questions about CBD? It’s not a panacea, but it may be worth trying out.

Is growing weed sustainable? The answer is complicated.

Using cannabis products to ease climate anxiety might be a Catch-22. Researchers say it’s hard to measure the environmental impact of today’s celebrated plant: Grow operations across the US take up a lot of water, land, and energy. Here’s what we know about the sustainability of cannabis.

Can you overdose on weed?

All substances have their risks, what about weed? Well, thankfully its not possible to overdose in the traditional sense, but overdoing it does pose some safety threats. Before you celebrate 4/20, listen to this Ask Us Anything podcast on the side effects of weed to gain some insights on responsible consumption.

The tasty chemicals flavoring the edible cannabis boom

Cannabis may have a distinctive smell, but a little-known aspect to users and non-users alike is that each strain has a special chemical composition. Like wine with its various aromas (such as floral, fruity, or earthy) different strains of cannabis possess a signature scent and taste. What makes them unique? Terpenes, or “terps,” are aromatic compounds found in many herbs and flowers. There are hundreds of known kinds that yield diverse flavors and effects. PopSci reported a comprehensive overview on the science of terpenes, ending with a list of the most buyable varieties.

Is marijuana a performance-enhancing drug? The best evidence says no.

Unfortunately for many athletes, cannabis use still falls on the list of prohibited substances. These regulations are in place to prevent the use of performance-enhancing drugs and ensure fair competition, but does cannabis really belong on the same list as steroids? Learn why the scientific reasoning behind cannabis regulations in sports might be lacking.

Cannabis gets its high-inducing power from ancient viruses

The next time a friend thanks a higher power for cannabis, remind them to appreciate viruses for their genetic contributions. (At the very least, it was a joint effort.) The psychoactive and medicinal effects of cannabis probably evolved from ancient viruses Mapping the genome of the plant posed a challenge to researchers as an illicit substance, but as it slowly became legal in different states over the past two decades, they dove deep into its background. What better time than 4/20 to learn the evolutionary history of cannabis.

Why German scientists got cows stoned

Nobody wants animals to get high on our supply, but these German scientists did it on purpose with cows. Not to laugh at the animals’ “pronounced tongue play,” as researchers described: They wanted to test if leftover organic matter from the hemp industry could be fed to livestock, reducing waste and curbing methane emissions from regular hay and soy. The German study led to some especially silly bovine behavior and THC-spiked milk.

Does CBD show up on a drug test?

Using cannabis products might lead to a positive drug test that could cost you a job or other opportunities. For those that want the stress-reducing effects of cannabis, but have to keep off the grass, consider quality products with this CBD drug test and product guide.

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PLANTS ARE CRUCIAL to human survival, even when there’s no sunlight. But dealing with darkness is second nature for someone with a green thumb like Howard Levine, chief scientist for NASA’s International Space Station (ISS) Research Office. Nurturing leaves outside Earth’s atmosphere is not only important for cycling nutrients and water during future space voyages, but also helps alleviate the cooped-up feeling astronauts experience. “On the ISS, you’re up there for six months at a time. People often say it’s like being in the bathroom with six of your best friends,” says Levine, who has been growing plants in orbit for decades.  

Space might be an extreme example, but cramped, dark dwellings exist on the ground too. Keeping your houseplants alive in windowless rooms, in shadowy corners, or during short winter days can be a challenge. Luckily, there are strategies to help your flora stay lush and verdant, even when their sunny source of energy is limited. 

Mini indoor greenhouses

Darkness usually means a dip in natural heat. Colder temperatures slow our bodies down, and that’s true for plants too. The chemical reactions that control their growth decelerate and sometimes stop.  

In Iceland, horticulturist James McDaniel uses geothermal heat in his greenhouses to protect his plants from the wintry cold. Each of the structures has holes beneath that stretch deep to a pocket of steaming-hot water, he explains. “You can funnel that [steam] into the pipes through the greenhouse and use natural ventilation to keep the temperature a set range.” 

But you don’t need volcanic energy to run a mini indoor greenhouse, which can be as simple as a repurposed IKEA cabinet. A heater can add warmth, although you might want to pair it with a humidifier to keep from drying your houseplants out. For individual plants, glass dome cloches can trap heat from limited sunlight and also enclose water vapors, which protect plants from the crisp air conditioner in the summer and the prickly heater in the winter. 

Grow lights

Plant grow lights provide an easy and accessible energy boost in dim or pitch-black spaces. These specialized beams sport different features, colors, and prices. LEDs, for instance, are the cheapest and most energy-efficient option, using about a third of the electricity of old sodium lightbulbs.

While most devices stick to a warm white spectrum, plants respond differently to various illuminating hues. In Levine’s experiments on Earth, red light worked well for the slender flowering plants Arabidopsis. But in the ISS’s weightless environment, they stretched into funny shapes until he started adding blue lights. He eventually found a middle ground and doused the plants in green light at the request of astronauts who missed the familiar color.  

Bright surfaces

If electricity is a limiting factor, you can try to reflect light with mirrors or aluminum foil. Even brightening up your space with white decor, like a light-colored tablecloth, will cast a little glow onto your plants. While it’s not comparable to using a grow lamp or the sun (reflections don’t deliver as much energy), it could offer plants an extra boost. 

The makeup of your indoor garden will dictate how much brightness you need to add, Levine explains. Some flora, including lettuce and tomatoes, need more light than those like Arabidopsis; new seedlings need less light than fully grown plants. As you choose your seeds and seedlings, research their native ranges to learn how much sunshine they’d naturally get.

Plants are ultimately adaptable. They can stretch their stems toward available light sources or produce extra chlorophyll, the pigment that absorbs whatever luminescence is available. “Even though they may not be getting all the light that they would like for optimum growth, they’ll still grow,” says Levine. With only a little extra help, you and your plants can conquer the darkness. 

Read more PopSci+ stories.

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In the United States, there are over 6,500 rural and urban areas where residents have limited access to stores that sell affordable, nutritious food. Living in these places, sometimes dubbed “food deserts”, can lead to poor diet and associated health risks. However, unlike deserts, the lack of access to healthy food in communities does not occur naturally. They developed over time as a result of racially discriminatory policies and systematic disinvestment.

Given the increase in food insecurity in urban areas, some cities have begun experiments with edible landscapes to address food insecurity. By working together to grow a “food forest,” community members can increase their access to local food sources.

Food forests, or edible forest gardens, are a type of agroforestry system that “mimic the structure and function of a natural forest ecosystem, but are designed to produce food, medicine, fiber, and other products for human use,” says Mikaela Schmitt-Harsh, an associate professor at James Madison University whose research focuses on the social-ecological dynamics of urban forests. 

[Related: How to eat sustainably without sacrificing your favorite foods.]

The first public food forest in the US—the Dr. George Washington Carver Edible Park in North Carolina—opened in 1997. As of 2018, there are more than 70 food forests in public spaces across the country.

Schmitt-Harsh says different layers of vegetation—like trees, shrubs, herbs, and ground covers—all work together to “create a sustainable and diverse food production system.” For example, a food forest could be composed of tall trees like chestnut or walnut as the canopy layer and apple or persimmon trees as the sub-canopy layer. Beneath them can lie currant bushes like elderberry or spicebush, along with edible herbs and mushrooms. Ground cover, medical roots, and climbing plants are also included. “You can swap out any of these selections for your favorite nut trees, fruit crops, and herbs to make your own system,” says Schmitt-Harsh.

Food forests may be grown on private properties, vacant lots, parks, or other open spaces in otherwise urban environments. This helps residents by forming a food production system within the community. The forests, which are typically at least 1/8 of an acre, can be critical in areas where local, fresh foods are inaccessible or unaffordable, says Sheila K. Schueller, ecosystem science and management lecturer at the University of Michigan.

Schueller says food forests don’t just give people access to fresh and nutritious fruits, nuts, and produce, but also empower neighborhoods by increasing food security and sovereignty and the sense of community. Moreover, connecting people with the source of their food may raise awareness about “the benefits of sustainable forms of agriculture and the value of local in-season foods over distantly-sourced or unsustainably-grown foods,” she adds.

Climate change mitigation and adaptation

The ecologically diverse system of food forests benefits the environment in so many ways, says Schueller. For instance, the structural complexity of the different layers can attract perching and nesting birds, while the variety of blooms expands the habitat of pollinators. Deeper root systems also improve water retention. Lastly, the vegetation provides shade and improves temperature regulation, which is ideal in hot cities or arid climates. All of these improve resilience in the face of changing climates and extreme weather events, says Schueller.

[Related: Paleo and keto diets aren’t great for you or the planet, study says.]

Food forests also help mitigate climate change by sequestering carbon from the atmosphere.

Since they have trees, shrubs, and perennial plants, Schueller says food forests can store more carbon in their biomass and the soil compared to other food systems or land use such as annually tilled crops or lawns.

“This increased vertical layering of plants means that more carbon is sequestered per area, and especially the woody vegetation stores more carbon long term,” she adds. “Food forests are not annually tilled like most crops and have deep root systems, so they can store a lot of carbon in the soil and below-ground vegetation.”

Having an abundance of locally-sourced foods in the community minimizes greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions as well, particularly those caused by transportation across the food chain. A 2021 Nature Food study previously estimated that food transportation contributed around 4.8 percent of the GHG emissions of the global food system, but newer research suggests it accounts for about 19 percent instead. In general, Schmitt-Harsh says food forests can reduce the food miles traveled, or the distance from where the food was grown to where it’s eaten.

The interest and advocacy for food forests have grown alongside other local food movements, like farmers’ markets and community-supported agriculture (CSA) programs. They are all experiencing an upward trend in urban and suburban landscapes as communities explore ways to bring food production closer to home, says Schmitt-Harsh. 

A 2017 Public Health Nutrition study on low-income adults’ perceptions of farmers’ markets and CSA programs found that residents of urban, affordable housing communities are motivated to eat healthily, but they cannot afford them. Accepting benefits like the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) would increase their access to healthy foods and reduce health risks.

“Some of the most successful community food forests are those that embrace a grassroots approach and engage multiple stakeholders in promoting community building and food literacy,” says Schmitt-Harsh. 
If you want to grow a food forest in your area, try getting in touch with potential stakeholders like local governments, community-based groups, academic institutions, and non-profit organizations that can mobilize community members to participate in civic activities. Who knows, there might be an organization near you already.

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One of the perks of living in a semi-rural area is the availability of fresh eggs. At least four people I know have hens roaming their yards, so my wife and I get all the eggs we can use, and then some. They end up in a wooden egg holder that sits right out on the counter.

That’s right, freshly-laid eggs don’t have to be refrigerated and can be kept at room temperature for weeks. Indeed, in many places around the world, eggs typically aren’t refrigerated at all. In the US, though, both the Federal Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommend always refrigerating eggs. However, that’s not directly because of the eggs themselves—it’s to prevent bacterial illnesses, specifically salmonella.

Freshly laid eggs have a natural defense against bacteria: a protective protein coating called the cuticle, or “bloom,” says Jacob R. Tuell, assistant professor of animal science and food science at Northwest Missouri State University. The bloom seals up those pores, preventing bacteria from sneaking inside. Research has shown that the cuticle is effective at keeping salmonella at bay for about three to four days after laying, he explains. After that, its effectiveness begins to deteriorate. In the US, commercially produced eggs are washed to eliminate any possible salmonella, but that washing process also removes the protective bloom. This, in turn, speeds up the spoiling process and necessitates refrigeration. Elsewhere, eggs often aren’t washed before being sold, so the bloom remains in place, sealing out any bacteria. In short: if you bought your eggs at a store, are unsure how fresh they are, or don’t know if they’ve been washed, put them in the fridge.

However, flocks raised in US backyards don’t have the same washing requirements, Trager says. “If you keep the coop clean and have good bedding, there’s really no reason to refrigerate or wash the eggs.” As long as the bloom remains intact, eggs can last for weeks at room temperature without spoiling, he explains.

And of course, there’s no reason you can’t store fresh eggs in the refrigerator if that makes you more comfortable, washed or unwashed. Once they go in, though, they have to stay there. However, Trager cautions against storing washed eggs on a wooden tray. Wood is too porous to be properly sterilized and may transfer contaminants through the pores of the bloom-less eggs, he explains. So if you’re planning to make this wooden egg tray, only use it for fresh, unwashed eggs.

Warning: DIY projects can be dangerous, even for the most experienced makers. Before proceeding with this or any other project on our site, ensure you have all necessary safety gear and know how to use it properly. At minimum, that may include safety glasses, a face mask, and/or ear protection. If you’re using power tools, you must know how to use them safely and correctly. If you do not, or are otherwise uncomfortable with anything described here, don’t attempt this project.

How to build a wooden egg holder

Stats

• Time: 1 to 2 hours
• Material cost: $5 to $20
• Difficulty: easy

Materials

• A 2-foot-long, 1-by-4-inch board (any kind of wood you like)
• Wood glue
• (Optional) ¼-inch dowel

Tools

• Miter saw
• Table saw
• Jointer
• Planer
• Speed square
• Tape measure
• Orbital sander
• Sanding discs (120-, 150-, and 220-grit)
• Drill press (or drill)
• Clamps
• ⅛-inch drill bit
• 1 ¼-inch Forstner bit
• (Optional) router
• (Optional) chamfer router bit
• (Optional) ¼-inch drill bit
• (Optional) chisel

Instructions

1. Mill your lumber to size. This is one of those projects where having flat, square boards will make your life easier. We have a comprehensive guide to milling lumber, but it’s a straightforward process. Start by cutting the pieces of the egg holder to rough length on your miter saw: one board of 13 inches and two of about 5 inches each. Then run them over your jointer to flatten one face, and again to flatten and square one edge. 

Next, take them to your planer to flatten the remaining face, and trim them down to final width and length on your table saw. When you’re done, you should have three boards, all between ½ and ¾ inches thick: 

• 1 (12½-by-4-inch) board
• 2 (5–by-4-inch) boards

If you purchased pre-milled, square wood, you may be able to skip this step. But double-check that everything actually is flat and square.

2. Measure and mark the egg hole locations on the longest board. Before measuring the centers of the 12 holes on this board, use a square to draw a line across what will be the top of your egg holder, parallel to the end of the board and a quarter-inch in. This represents the depth of the dado where this piece of wood will sit inside the two shorter boards—we’ll worry about cutting that slot in Step 6. The distance between those two lines should be exactly 12 inches.  

Using your square and a tape measure or ruler, draw lines 1 inch, 3 inches, and 5 inches from those dado lines, moving toward the center of the board. Then make two marks on each of these new lines, 1 inch in from the long edges of the board. Those 12 intersections are where the centers of the egg holes belong.

3. Drill pilot holes in the board. Anytime you use a Forstner bit to drill all the way through a board, start with some pilot holes. Forstner bits are known to blow out or chip wood as they exit, so the best practice is to drill halfway through from the top, then turn the board over and drill the rest from the bottom to prevent tear-out. The easiest way to line those two cuts up is with a pilot hole.

If you have a drill press, drill the 12 small holes with that, using a ⅛-inch bit, or whatever size in that range you have. If you use a hand drill, make sure it’s straight up and down. You can use a speed square as a visual reference, or you can make a quick drill guide to keep the hole perpendicular to the face. If the drill bit wanders or leans, the two Forstner holes may not line up properly, and you’ll have to do a lot of sanding to fix it. No one wants to do any more sanding than they need to.

4. Drill the full holes. Change the ⅛-inch bit out for the 1 ¼-inch Forstner bit. Again, a drill press is best for this cut, but a handheld drill can do the job if you’re careful and use a jig for alignment. Center the bit in a pilot hole, and start to drill. Stop when you get just past halfway. Drill all the holes halfway through on one face of the board, then flip it over and drill from the other side.

5. (Optional) Chamfer the edges of the holes. To help the eggs sit better and reduce the chances that they’ll crack on sharp edges, chamfer the top edges of each hole. The easiest way to do this is with a router and a chamfering bit. I used a router table to make this cut, but if you don’t have access to one, you can use a palm router. Make sure to clamp your board securely to the work bench if you do. 

• Note: If you don’t chamfer the hole edges, at least thoroughly round them over with sandpaper.

6. Cut dado slots into the legs. There are many ways to cut dado slots. My preferred method, and the one accessible to most people, is on the table saw with a crosscut sled. If you have a flat-cut table saw blade, like one that comes with a dado stack, use that, but it’s fine if you just have a normal blade. You can use a full dado stack to make this cut faster, but I wasn’t comfortable using mine on such a small board so I made multiple passes with a single blade.

[Related: How to refinish a scratched wooden cutting board]

Mark a line ¾ of an inch from the bottom of the leg, then make another line above it so the distance between the two is the thickness of the tray board. Set the height of your blade to a quarter-inch, and start removing the material between those lines by making one cut on your crosscut sled. Keep moving the leg over about ⅛-inch to make additional cuts. Repeat this as many times as you need to in order for the tray to fit in the slot. 

If you use a standard blade for this, you’ll probably wind up with little wedges on the bottom of the slot. Trim those flat with a chisel.

7. (Optional) Cut curves on the corners of the legs. This is purely for aesthetics, but I love the way it looks. Draw a small arc at each corner of every leg board. You can use any cylindrical object to trace these—I used a spray paint bottle cap. Then remove the wood outside of that arc. I cut mine first with a band saw, then rounded it over with a sander, but a jig saw or coping saw will work as well. You can even just jump right to the sander, though that will take a bit longer.

8. (Optional) Add dowels for stacking. If you’re planning to make more than one tray, you may want to consider stacking them. Of course, you can place one on top of the other, but there’s always the risk that it will slide off and splatter your eggs. To give it some support, drill a ¼-inch hole in the top and bottom centers of the legs. Insert a dowel in the top of the bottom tray legs, and then you can slide the top tray onto that dowel, locking it into place. Round over the ends of the dowels with 120-grit sandpaper to make them easier to slide in and out. 

9. Sand everything to 220-grit. You’ve heard me say it before—sanding is the difference between a good product and a great product. Sand all of the pieces with an orbital sander, working through the grits—start with 120 and finish with 220. The hard part of this build is sanding the holes and chamfers, if you made them. You can use your fingers to get inside everything, or you can use a piece of sandpaper wrapped around a dowel. Of course, if you have a spindle sander, use that and save your fingers.

• Pro tip: If you use a dowel, you can open the chuck of your power drill all the way, stick the dowel in, and tighten it up. Then you can wrap the dowel in sandpaper and use the drill to spin it quickly inside the holes.

Before you finish sanding, slightly round over all sharp edges with 220-grit sandpaper to keep them from splintering or breaking later. 

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This article originally appeared in Grist.

Beyond the fields of berries, grass seed, and wheat at Jacque Duyck Jones’s farm in Oregon, she can see distant plumes of exhaust spewing from factories in Hillsboro, just outside Portland. Years ago, Jones and her family didn’t worry much about industry creeping closer to their land. A 50-year-old state law that restricts urban growth, rare in the United States, kept smokestacks and strip malls away.

But a national push to make semiconductors — the microchips that help power modern electronics, from dishwashers to electric vehicles — has prompted Oregon lawmakers to lift some of those restrictions. Keen to tap into $52 billion that Congress earmarked last year in the CHIPS and Science Act, Oregon legislators last week passed a bipartisan bill aimed at enticing chip manufacturers to set up shop in the state, in part by allowing them to convert some of the country’s richest farmland into factories. The bill gives Governor Tina Kotek, a Democrat, authority through the end of next year to extend urban development boundaries, a process currently subject to appeals that can be drawn out for years. 

“That’s like granting divine power,” said Ben Williams, president of Friends of French Prairie, a rural land advocacy group. Under the bill, the governor can select two rural sites of more than 500 acres and six smaller ones for development related to the semiconductor industry. That revision to the state’s rigid land-use system has drawn pushback from farmers and conservation organizations. They say the legislation endangers farms, soil health, and carbon sequestration efforts. One potential site for a factory would pave over rural land within a mile of the Duyck family’s land.

“I am worried,” Jones said. “When [the CHIPS Act] was passed at the federal level, here in Oregon we never imagined it would result in basically a choice. I would have never imagined it to have been a threat to farmland in Oregon,” she added, noting that she doesn’t oppose the industry, only building factories on agricultural lands.

With bipartisan support, President Joe Biden signed the CHIPS Act last year intending to jumpstart semiconductor manufacturing in the United States, where 37 percent of the world’s chips were made in 1990, compared to only 12 percent in 2020, according to the Semiconductor Industry Association. Politicians from across the political spectrum lauded the CHIPS Act as a job creator and a way to shore up the semiconductor supply chain during a global shortage. 

Semiconductors are in microwaves and smartphones, but they are also essential for renewable energy technology. They’re key to solar panels, wind energy systems, heat pumps, microgrids, electric vehicles, and more. In a report published last year, the U.S. Department of Energy called semiconductors “a cornerstone technology of the overall decarbonization strategy” and said a lower-carbon future requires “explosive growth” of both conventional and more advanced chips. 

In Oregon, cashing in on the federal bill won’t necessarily mean bolstering a domestic supply of wind turbines or solar panels, which are mostly manufactured in China. In large part, the chips made in the state, which is already a hub for the industry, are used in computers and high-tech products like electronic gaming and artificial intelligence, according to Arief Budiman, director of the Oregon Renewable Energy Center. 

Supporters of the Oregon bill say capturing the CHIPS Act windfall could create tens of thousands of jobs and more than $1.5 billion in local and state tax revenue. 

“Imagine electric and autonomous vehicles, biotech, clean tech, and others doing research and advanced manufacturing here,” the Oregon Semiconductor Competitiveness Task Force said in a report last August. “In short, acting now could spark a boom that lasts another 30 years.” 

To stay attractive to industry giants like Intel, which already has an Oregon campus but recently chose to build a $20 billion mega-factory in Ohio (to the dismay of Oregon’s elected officials), the state needs to make more industrial land available, the task force said. It described “no development ready sites of the size needed to attract a major semiconductor investment, or to support larger size suppliers.”

Rural land-use advocates largely reject that argument. One group — 1,000 Friends of Oregon — has listed several existing industrially zoned sites that could be used for chip factories. The Oregon Farm Bureau, which opposes the land-use provisions in the state bill, also argues there’s already enough available land within urban growth areas to build new factories, said Lauren Poor, the bureau’s vice president of government and legal affairs. “We’re not opposed to the chips bill, generally speaking,” Poor said. But “once we develop these sites, we can’t get that soil back.”

Wet winters and dry, warm summers help the state’s growers produce some 200 crops, ranging from hops to hay. Oregon dominates other states in blackberry, crimson clover, and rhubarb production, and almost all of the country’s hazelnuts are grown there. “We owe that to the diversity of our climate and our soils, which is one of the reasons we’re very protective of our very unique land-use system,” Poor added. 

The state’s land-use restrictions are rooted in the country’s first law establishing urban growth boundaries, which former Governor Tom McCall, a Republican, signed in 1973. The law, aimed at limiting urban sprawl, allows cities to expand only with approval from a state commission. A decision to move boundaries can be appealed multiple times at both the county and state levels, Williams said. Under the new bill, challenges to the governor’s chip-factory designations will be considered only by the state supreme court.

“It’s very detrimental to expand outside the urban growth boundaries,” said Jones, the farmer. She worries building chip factories on farmland could increase nearby property values, making arable land harder for farmers to buy or rent, and could supplant not only rows of crops but essential farm infrastructure like seed-cleaning sites. 

Aside from tweaking Oregon’s special land-use laws, state legislators are considering a bill that would fund nature-based climate solutions, like storing carbon in agricultural soil. Poor said the two bills seem to run counter to each other. “What do you want from us? Do you want us to sequester your carbon, or do you want to pave over our farmlands?”

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

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Water is quickly flooding back into California’s Tulare Lake Basin, engulfing towns and farms, submerging roads, and reviving a so-called phantom lake. Tulare was once the largest freshwater lake west of the Mississippi until settlers diverted its source rivers, forcing it to vanish by the mid-20th century. Now, it seems Tulare Lake is back with a vengeance. 

According to a 2007 study for the US Environmental Protection Agency, Tulare Lake was once a permanent feature of the San Joaquin Valley. It covered an estimated 790 square miles, creating a biodiverse wetlands ecosystem that encompassed approximately 10 percent of California. In the late 1800s, settlers began diverting Tulare’s tributaries for agricultural purposes, incrementally drying the lake and exposing nutrient-rich soil. 

[Related: Rain, storms, and mudslides batter California]

Now, the lake-turned-farmland is one of the most important agricultural regions in the state, worth an estimated $2 billion dollars in dairy products and crops like grapes, cotton, corn, alfalfa, almonds, and pistachios. While an influx of water is a relief to many in California, easing a years-long drought and refilling reservoirs, it spells disaster for regions like the Tulare Basin. Residents are already seeing vast amounts of water threaten their livelihoods—and it’s only just beginning. If current conditions keep up, says UCLA climate scientist Daniel Swain,this may be the worst flood for the Lake Tulare Basin yet.

What is a phantom lake?

A phantom lake is a seasonal body of water, typically reviving during periods of intense precipitation. These lakes are usually not very deep, as far as lakes go: Prior to water diversion, Tulare was estimated to be about 37 feet deep. Shallow lakes dry up much faster than deeper ones, owing to their larger surface area to volume ratio, allowing the sun to heat up and evaporate the water quickly. The California Central Valley’s hot, arid climate makes its phantom lakes especially ephemeral. 

Owens Lake, 220 miles north of Los Angeles, is another ghost that has recently resurrected. The construction of Los Angeles’ aqueduct depleted the freshwater body by diverting its tributary in 1913, but the lake is now rapidly refilling for the first time in 110 years. 

Tulare Lake has a similar backstory. It comprises a natural watershed for the Sierra Nevada mountain range, which feeds meltwater through multiple rivers and into the basin. Today, levees and dams prevent water from entering the basin by diverting or blocking these rivers. Though, as evidenced by the recent storms, those systems can only do so much to prevent flooding in the face of an extreme influx of water.

Why is Tulare Lake flooding again?

Atmospheric rivers—long, narrow plumes of atmospheric moisture—are to blame for the region’s recent storms. They originate in the tropics, where warm air can take up much more water than in colder climates. Climate change is raising temperatures and the atmosphere’s capacity for holding water, amplifying storms in California and many parts of the world. 

Despite the already significant flooding, most of the water that will enter the Tulare Basin hasn’t done so yet, Swain explains. Plenty of snow can still melt and flow down from the Sierra Nevada mountain range.

Flood risk will likely rise across California following an uptick in extreme precipitation events, but the Tulare Lake area is the most vulnerable. With its low elevations and proximity to the Sierra Nevadas, “[the basin] is the place where we very strongly anticipate that flood risk will increase the most in a warming climate,” Swain says.

With global heating driving up temperatures and the amount of water vapor in the atmosphere, rain has begun to replace snow at high elevations and snowmelt has accelerated earlier in the year. Swain also points out that a much more severe flood could occur in a future scenario with slightly warmer temperatures, but the same amount of precipitation. Rain and snow create the flood, but rising temperatures intensify it.

Where is all the water coming from?

The Sierra Nevada mountain range lies east of the San Joaquin Valley. Each spring, as temperatures warm, the snowpack accumulated over the winter begins to melt. As it does so, gravity pulls meltwater down from the mountains and into the lowest regions of the valley—namely, the Tulare Lake Basin./p>

This year, the Sierra Nevada snowpack is three times larger than normal and still growing. As of April 4, 2023, the estimated snowpack for the southern Sierras is 302-percent above average.

“All of that water is eventually going to have to enter the San Joaquin watershed, and a lot of it’s going to pass through the Tulare Lake Basin,” Swain says. “That’s going to present some serious challenges—I mean bigger challenges than we’re currently seeing.”

In the coming weeks, the Tulare Lake Basin and larger San Joaquin Valley will, unfortunately, experience deeper and more widespread flooding.

“There’s just that much water up in the mountains, it can’t go anywhere else, right?” Swain adds. “… In the end, the water always wins.”

How long with the Tulare Lake flood last?

Tulare Lake is an isolated, shallow body of water. It has no tributaries or outlets, so whatever water enters the basin sits there until it evaporates. An impermeable layer of clay underneath the former lake prevents most water from exiting through the ground.

[Related: What is a flash flood?]

The lake has occasionally been revived in the past. In the last big flood event in 1982 and 1983, the second wettest period in recorded history in the area, the lake did not fully disappear until 1985, per the Fresno Bee. The amount of water that has already accumulated in this year’s flood could take months or even years to evaporate—and there’s still a lot of snow waiting to melt in the wings. As of April 5, current precipitation levels in the Tulare Lake Basin rival its wettest years on record, 1968 and 1969.

What are the solutions to the flooding?

Restoring natural floodplains, adding levee setbacks and recharge basins, and “essentially giving water more room to roam in places where we’ve pre-designated it so it doesn’t cause too many problems” are among the list of solutions for the Tulare Lake region and its residents, Swain says.

But implementing land use changes is easier said than done. The San Joaquin valley has a long history of water wars, and no single entity has the authority to make these changes. Private landowners are responsible for many of these decisions, leading to extralegal activity and political conflict.

“This is a very difficult problem legally, practically, and ethically, and I don’t think there are any obvious solutions,” Swain notes. “Even though there are some obvious land use changes that would help the broader problem, getting there and implementing them in an equitable way is far from a straightforward thing to do.”

It’s already too late to do anything this spring besides survive the influx of water and try to control the damage. The challenge now lies in long-term planning for future floods. Moving forward, local conversations about these decisions should be held, including Indigenous groups like the Yokut people who were forcibly removed from the area in the 1800s.

“We’re really in a tough spot where these are big problems that have been known for a long time,” Swain says. In the coming months, he expects water will inundate some places that are now dry. Not only that, but adding water to farmland that has been treated with fertilizers, pesticides, and other chemicals may mobilize contaminants. Farms with animal agriculture produce lots of fecal waste, threatening microbial contamination. Tulare County has already issued a health warning regarding floodwater contamination.

“It’s going to be a long spring for some in the San Joaquin Valley and the Tulare Basin, in particular,” Swain says.

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This article was originally featured on Field & Stream.

In January, Field & Stream reported on a startling population explosion of invasive pigs in Canada’s Praire Pothole Provinces. According to Dr. Ryan Brook, the leader of the University of Saskatchewan Canadian Wild Pig Research Project, the swine are blends between wild and domestic pigs prompting him to call them “super pigs.” After escaping or being released from enclosures, the pigs have managed to thrive despite the cold climate—and are threatening to invade the northern U.S.

Related: Colombia Struggles to Control Exploding Population of Over 100 Invasive Hippos

Dr. Brook recently spoke at length with Field & Stream about his research and the vast array of worrying consequences the feral hog proliferation could have. But sometimes you just have to see it to believe it. These charts from the Canadian Wild Pig Research Project illustrate the shocking invasion happening up north right now.

A Nation-Wide Incident Map

Canada’s invasive pig problem is relatively recent, unlike the one in the southeast U.S. Before 1995, there were hardly any occurrences of feral pigs. That all changed when the market for farmed boars dropped out in the early 2000s. This short video shows a contagion of red indicating wild pig sightings quickly spreading throughout Canada in the last 30 years.

A More Detailed Map

Pinpointing populations of invasive pigs is paramount to mitigating their spread. That’s why Dr. Brook and his team recently put together a detailed map of wild pig occurrences in Canada. “[The] reality is still that outside of the Prairie Provinces of Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba, there are no meaningful opportunities to hunt wild pigs, which is not allowed in Ontario and Quebec,” wrote the Canadian Wild Pig Research Project in a Facebook post. “There are a little over 54,000 points here—more than half in Saskatchewan.”

City Pigs?

Dr. Brook is currently tracking a population explosion of “super pigs” in close proximity to Edmonton. Could feral pigs invade the city itself? Hopefully not. But there has already been one occurrence within city limits, and another right on the outskirts. “Please tell me that we won’t have wild pigs in Canadian cities,” wrote Dr. Brook in a Tweet.

Super Pigs Caught on Camera

Dr. Brook and his team rely on a network of trail cameras and reports from citizens to track the spread of wild hogs in Canada. This has helped them get an idea of where they like to be—and it’s no surprise that they often gravitate to farms. “If you are looking for wild pigs these days, remember that corn is king,” wrote the Canadian Wild Pig Research Project in a Facebook post.” If there is any standing corn crop in areas that have wild pigs, then that’s a good first place to look. The amount of standing corn left for winter cattle grazing has increased in many areas and pigs really like it. Corn provides great hiding cover and food value.”

The Final Word on Canadian Super Pigs

These graphics all illustrate an unfortunate reality: Invasive pigs have successfully managed to establish populations in Canada, particularly in Manitoba and Saskatchewan. And they’re there to stay. According to Dr. Brook, total eradication is no longer possible—but preventing the spread of Canadian super pigs is still important. People in Canada and the northern U.S. should report any sightings of feral pigs to their local conservation officers and to the Squeal on Pigs program.

The post This is how bad a ‘super pig’ problem can really get appeared first on Popular Science.

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The waste honeybees discard in their hives could hold valuable insight into the public health of our cities. In a study published this week in the journal Environmental Microbiome, scientists shared a new method for collecting microbial information from the environment using honeybee debris. Identifying germs in a city gives researchers a snapshot of the diversity of a city’s microbiome, which could lead to better health outcomes. The technique might also help in surveilling illness-causing bacteria and viruses among bees and humans. 

While we can’t see microorganisms, they play a critical behind-the-scenes role in shaping our survival. For example, microbes in the human gut support digestion, help keep our immune system healthy, and are the first line of defense from “bad” bacteria that cause food poisoning and other infections. Typically, the more diverse a person microbiome, the greater their health and well-being. One way to increase said variety is interacting with outside surroundings.

[Related: A link to depression might be in your gut bacteria]

“A lot of [microbes] are beneficial to human health,” says lead study author Elizabeth Hénaff, an assistant professor at the center for urban science and progress at New York University. “The goal of this study is understanding the whole breadth of diversity of microbiomes and the ones we’re interacting with in urban environments.” 

Hénaff and her colleagues knew they wanted to create microbial maps of different cities to get a better sense of  the diversity in each area. However, they weren’t sure what was the best way to move forward. One idea was swabbing noses, but it would be impractical to swab everyone in a broad and diverse area. The urban microbiomes might also differ from block to block, requiring extensive swabbing. Another option was wastewater surveillance, but the researchers wanted to look at everything urbanites came into contact with—not just what they digested. Then came the aha moment: they could study bee hives.

Because honeybees constantly interact with the environment when they forage for nectar, and they often carry back some bacteria, fungi, and other microorganisms from their travels  when they return to the hive. “As bees are foraging, they’re traversing all of these microbial clouds related to other aspects of the built environment,” explains Hénaff. “They’ve traversed the microbial cloud of a pond, a body of water, and groups of human beings if they happen to be in the same park where they’re going.”

The scientists used a technique called metagenomic sequencing to study all the genes found in a single environmental sample. This allowed them to match genes to different microbial species related to hive health and, in turn, learn the health status of the bees. But first they had to figure out what sample should be collected from the hive.  

In a pilot project in Brooklyn, New York, the scientists worked with local beekeepers. They took swab samples of honey, propolis (a resin-like material used to cover the inside of hives), debris, and bee carcasses—anything that could provide the most information on microorganisms.

Subsequently, they discovered that the microbes found in honey and propolis were similar across hives. “Bees are really good at controlling the microbial environment of their own beehives,” adds Hénaff. The only material that differed from hive to hive was the debris left at the bottom of the hive, and this became the source they collected in the next set of experiments.

To profile urban microbiomes, the team took samples of debris from 17 tended hives from four cities across the world: Sydney and Melbourne in Australia, Tokyo, and Venice. The DNA extracted from the bee debris contained material from different sources, including plants, mammals, insects, bacteria, and fungi in the area. 

Each city carried a unique microbial profile that gave a snapshot of how life is like there. The single Venice hive used in the study was filled with wood-rotting fungi. Hénaff says the findings makes sense since most buildings are built on submerged wood pilings. In Australia, the two Melbourne hives had large amounts of eucalyptus DNA, while Sydney’s revealed high levels of a bacterium called Gordonia polyisoprenivorans, that breaks down rubber. Tokyo’s dozen hives displayed genetic hints of lotus and wild soybean—a common plant found in Eastern Asia. There were also high levels of a soy sauce fermenting yeast called Zygosaccharomyces rouxii. 

“Most interesting to me was that [the results] didn’t feel like a disjoint metric from all the other things we know about these cities and their culture, but it actually felt like a puzzle piece we didn’t know existed that fit into our general understanding of these cities,” says Hénaff.

The debris were also helpful in identifying microbes involved in bee health. The team found three honeybee crop microbial species—Lactobacillus kunkeii, Saccharibacter sp. AM169, and Frishella perrara—along with five species related to the insects’ gut health. Three honeybee pathogens were also identified across cities. 

Next, the study identified the human pathogens bees could pick up when venturing outside. The researchers focused on the hive information collected in Tokyo because it had more hives than the other cities, and so had more data for DNA sequencing. They detected two bacteria: one that could cause bacillary dysentery and another involved in cat scratch fever. They then took the pathogen behind cat scratch fever, Rickettsia felis, and reconstructed the genome. Doing so allowed them to not only confirm the species was in the city, but that it had the bacteria-associated molecules to allow it to spread disease. 

[Related: 5 ways to keep bees buzzing that don’t require a hive]

Profiling the microbiome of different cities may be an additional tool for detecting potentially harmful pathogens in humans, says Hénaff. It could also open up new ways of surveying airborne pathogens—a growing interest since the recent arrival of SARS-CoV-2.

Jay Evans, a research entomologist at the US Department of Agriculture who was not involved in the study, says the new approach is “fine” and can help in identifying at least the microorganisms found in urban floral environments. However, he expressed reservations about overvaluing some results. Evans notes that one of the species genome-mapping algorithms used in the study is known to be “a bit greedy,” matching the best microorganism available at the moment. This suggests some genetic matchups to bacteria may not actually be the right fit, and that further tests would be needed to confirm their presence. Because bees can pick up non-living hitchhikers like pesticides, Evans also says it would be nice for the researchers to contrast these biological results with pesticide-specific studies and how that affects hive microbiomes.

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People often adjust their diets to keep themselves healthy—but what about changing what we eat for the health of the planet? It appears that some popular meal plans, such as ketogenic and Paleolithic diets, aren’t very good for Earth or for your wellness, according to a recent study in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition  looked into the environmental impact and nutrition quality of food commodities.

Our food choices can have major consequences: What we eat contributes about a third of all greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions globally, when accounting for agriculture and land use, supply chain, and our dietary habits. Given food’s huge impact on climate change, it’s important that dietary patterns become more sustainable. This begins with identifying the food choices that are environmentally friendly, which is exactly what the study sought to find out.

“Given that many people are experimenting with different diets, it’s helpful to have a sense of the differences in their impacts,” says Diego Rose, study author and director of nutrition at Tulane University. “What individuals choose to eat sends signals to producers about what to produce, so individual behaviors can affect what gets produced and thus the impacts from our overall food production.”

Going vegan benefits the environment

The new research assessed the carbon footprint and quality of six popular diets, namely: vegan, vegetarian, pescatarian, Paleolithic, ketogenic, and omnivore (which, basically, is the diet of everyone else). Vegans, as defined by the study, ate very little meat and dairy: less than 0.5 ounces of the former and less than 0.25 cups of the latter each day. Meanwhile, vegetarians ate less than 0.5 ounces of meat, poultry, and seafood combined; a pescatarian diet was similar to a vegetarian one, but included seafood.

[Related: How to eat sustainably without sacrificing your favorite foods.]

Those who consumed meat but ate less than 0.5 ounces of grains and legumes per day, and less than 0.25 cups of dairy, followed the Paleo diet. People who have a keto diet eat less than 50 grams of net carbohydrates. The authors allowed minimal amounts of some typically excluded foods to account for any minor deviations or accidental consumption of ingredients that the respondent might not have known.

The findings showed that Paleo and keto are among the highest in carbon emissions and lowest in nutrition quality. The researchers estimated these diets produce about 2.6 and almost 3 kilograms of carbon dioxide for every 1,000 calories consumed, respectively. Meanwhile, a vegan diet was the best for the environment, which generates about 0.7 kg of carbon dioxide for the same number of calories. The amount of dietary GHG emissions significantly decreased when meats are replaced with plant proteins.

A vegetarian diet produces the second lowest emissions at 1.16 kilograms of carbon dioxide for every 1,000 calories consumed, the study authors found. Pescatarian and omnivore diets fared in the middle, generating about 1.66 and 2.23 kilograms of carbon dioxide for the same number of calories, respectively.

The scientists reviewed the diets of more than 16,000 adults, collected by the National Center for Health Statistics’ nationally representative National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey. Rose and his co-authors’ also created their own database of environmental impacts of food commodities, which they linked to the national dataset to calculate the impact of each food item consumed. This allowed the authors to compute an average carbon footprint for each diet type.

[Related: Why seaweed farming could be the next big thing in sustainability.]

The study shows, in line with previous research, that eating less animal-based food is best for the planet. Consumers have the greatest influence in reducing carbon emissions from the food system by shifting their diets to lower carbon-intensive foods, says Gregory A. Keoleian, director of the Center for Sustainable Systems at the University of Michigan who was not involved in the study. For example, a change away from meat altogether could reduce food-related emissions by up to 73 percent. Additionally, if global food production shifted to plant-based diets by 2050, there could also be sequestration of 366 to 603 gigatons of carbon dioxide from native vegetation regrowth in areas currently occupied by animal agriculture.

“All animal-based foods combined—red meat, poultry, fish or seafood, eggs, dairy, and animal-based fats—represent 82 percent of the baseline diet carbon footprint,” says Keoleian. “Plant-based proteins such as legumes, soy products, and nuts and seeds will dramatically reduce impacts.”

Considering foods’ environmental impact

As of 2018, about 5 percent of Americans are vegetarian, and only 2 percent have a vegan diet. “Taste and price, along with cultural and social backgrounds, are more important for most consumers’ decision-making about food, [rather] than health or the environment,” says Rose.

To encourage consumers to shift to environmentally friendly diets, he says policymakers could start by educating the public about the environmental impacts of food, either through dietary recommendations or food labels. One recent study found that around 16 percent of a nationally representative sample might be receptive to changing their diet to follow environmentally sustainable guidelines.

[Related: Eating seafood can be more sustainable and healthy than red meat.]

The Agriculture Department’s Dietary Guidelines for Americans 2020-2025 that provides recommendations on what to consume to support good health, reduce the risk of chronic disease, and meet nutrient needs may play a role. Keoleian says these guidelines can be expanded to include information about the environmental impact of diets, which is relevant because climate change influences human health, too. Reducing diet-related emissions by making better food choices may lead to improved health, mostly by helping reduce air pollution. 

Applying a carbon tax that raises the price of carbon-intensive foods may encourage consumers to opt for lower-impact foods, says Keoleian. But if this were to happen, programs that assist lower-income households—like the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP)—would be critical since the access and affordability of nutritious food is “particularly problematic,” he adds.

They could also enact programs that subsidize greener food production, promote more sustainable versions of livestock, and offer alternatives to animal-based foods, says Rose. Furthermore, restaurants can place more sustainable foods higher up on the menu and develop new recipes with less meat but more flavor,  he adds.

To make it easier for consumers to shift to environmentally sustainable diets, a whole-of-society approach is needed, Rose says—one that includes policymakers, restaurants, food producers, and eaters, too.

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I AM STANDING in the basement of 1550 Mission Street in San Francisco—a new high-rise in the city’s prime real estate location—listening to the steady hum of human grime being filtered. Above me, residents on 38 floors are showering and brushing their teeth as part of their morning routine. In front of me, a maze of pipes and tubes feeds their discarded water into a membrane bioreactor the size of a backyard hot tub. Inside, the membranes and oxygen bubbles purify the H₂O and channel it back into the building instead of into sewage pipes, clean enough for flushing toilets and urinals. “We’re able to reuse about 95 percent of it,” says Aaron Tartakovsky, co-founder and CEO of Epic Cleantec, the company that designed the technology. His father, Igor, the other co-founder and the chief engineer, chimes in with a twinkle in his eye and a proud smile. “It’s kinda cool how it works.”

The really cool stuff, however, is stationed in the nearby New Market, or NEMA, building where Aaron and Igor piloted their poop-recycling operation. Unlike the 1550 Mission setup, which recovers only grey water—from everything but toilets and kitchen sinks—NEMA’s does the dirty work. Here, a silvery machine resembling a giant food processor the size of a small fridge collects people’s waste, intercepting the sewage outflow. When the machine runs, the sludge splats onto its rotating mesh belt. The liquids trickle through, but the feces stay on. A wrangler squeezes out more water, producing palm-size glops of dung that plop into a bin. 

When the pilot program was in operation in 2019 and 2020, Aaron or his coworkers would replace that 55-gallon bin weekly and drive it to the company’s nearby poo-processing facility, Epic Hub, located in a former car dealership. There, the excrement was chucked into another apparatus that thoroughly mixed it with a disinfecting chemical blend, killing pathogens. The sterilized gunk was composted into soil, which Aaron and Igor used to turn an industrial patch of land outside Epic Hub into a blooming garden. “We call it ‘Soil by San Franciscans for San Franciscans,’” Aaron says. “We’re talking to the city about using it in parks.” I share every bit of his excitement. As someone who grew up on a small farm in the former Soviet Union that my grandfather fertilized with the contents of our septic system, I believe our so-called “humanure” should nourish our crops.  

The US produced 5,823,000 dry metric tons of biosolids—the end product of wastewater treatment plants—in 2018. In terms of its chemistry, the stuff is like your average dirt, albeit with a smell. In an ideal world, biosolids—potent fertilizers high in nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium—would be returned to vegetable and dairy farms to replenish the nutrients we’ve extracted or grow the trees we cut. Scientists call this concept circular ecology, which is key to sustainable living in the 21st century. Yet at the moment, only half of our biosolids come back to farmlands. The other half rots in landfills, releasing greenhouse gases—or, worse, is shoved into incinerators that spit smoke into the air. The reasons for these wasteful approaches span from financial to logistical to the general yuck factor. New equipment for turning sludge into pathogen-free fertilizer that meets EPA standards can be expensive. If a big metropolitan area generates a few thousand metric tons of biosolids a week and doesn’t have enough farmland nearby to absorb it, the city will have to truck it away using fossil fuels. Finally, people just don’t love wastewater facilities, which they see as epitomes of filth. 

That mindset began to change in 2011, first among tech creators and then the larger public, when the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation issued the Reinvent the Toilet Challenge, asking experts to recover valuable resources from toilet outputs, including clean water and nutrients. Originally intended to solve sanitation challenges in poorer countries, it propelled new ideas for sewage treatment in general. California’s historic drought was another big catalyst. “In 2014, our elected officials asked, ‘Why are we still using fresh water to flush toilets in San Francisco? And why can’t we reuse it?’” Aaron says. “So we really focused on solving that problem.”  

The city wanted to encourage water reuse, particularly in big new buildings, says Paula Kehoe, director of water resources at the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission, an agency that services 2.7 million people in the San Francisco Bay Area. “We started thinking about the on-site water treatment systems as more of resource recovery facilities,” Kehoe says. 

In a time when we embrace locally grown food, it makes sense to process the remnants locally as well. The centralized treatment plants that most city municipalities rely on might have worked well in the 20th century, but many have now aged to the point where they’re no longer sustainable or economical. The typical wastewater pipe lasts 50 to 100 years; the average US one is about 45 years old, with some being more than a century old, which creates the risk of sewage spills and contamination. According to a 2019 estimate from the Report Card of America’s Infrastructure, the nation’s utilities spent more than $3 billion to replace about 4,700 miles of pipelines—only a tiny fraction of the country’s total 1,300,000-mile network. A 2017 report estimates that by 2042, 56 million more people will be using these centralized treatment systems, and some $271 billion will be needed to sustain them annually. 

On-site filtration and treatment could be a crucial alternative. “There are certainly advantages with a centralized wastewater system, as you get specialized knowledge and technical expertise in one place in case something goes wrong,” says Bill Brower, senior biosolids engineer at Brown and Caldwell, an environmental engineering and construction firm. Yet in the era of climate change and increasing droughts, purifying the precious H₂O at the source has real benefits too. “I think there’s certainly a place for doing more decentralized treatment,” Brower says. But before we start shutting down the sewage lines, we need to figure out where to put the “number two.”

From soviet refugee to poop entrepreneur

Growing up in 1960s Odessa, Ukraine, then a part of the USSR, Igor Tartakovsky aimed to be a rocket scientist. “I wanted to build planes and spaceships—that was my childhood dream,” he says. Yet for a Jewish kid, it was a difficult path. The anti-Semitism in the Soviet empire was palpable: Igor graduated from high school with highest honors, but was turned down from his town’s engineering schools. He didn’t give up easily and was eventually accepted to study aeronautics at Electromechanical College in Novosibirsk, a snowbound Siberian city. He traded Odessa’s mild climate for endless winter in a heartbeat. 

When he applied for a summer job in engineering the next year, he filled out 15 forms, submitted more than a dozen photos of himself, and was still rejected. He let go of his aerospace dream and pivoted to studying refrigeration and air conditioning.  

The career switch didn’t help. Again, Igor graduated at the top of his class, and again, he was turned down for the jobs he applied for. He got a gig at a floating fishing factory boat that sailed in the frozen Far East for six months at a time. Besides refrigerating seafood, his engineering prowess came in handy for building a contraption to distill moonshine from fermented apple juice—a feat his crewmates loved, but Igor didn’t. He felt he was wasting his life. It was clear that he didn’t have a future in the Soviet Union, so his family decided to leave. 

The only way to emigrate from the KGB state at the time was to receive an invitation to “reunite with the family” from a relative living abroad. Any correspondence asking for such a favor could be intercepted by the government. So Igor’s kin penned a so-called “underwear letter.” They wrote their names and dates of birth down on the stretched-out waistband of a pair of boxers; when the rubber shrank down, the text wasn’t visible. A person leaving the country took their underwear missive with him, and after a year, the coveted invite came through. The KGB officer working on Igor’s case called him “an idiot” because he “clearly had bright prospects in this country,” and gave him 45 days to leave. Igor obliged. His parents and sister followed. 

In San Francisco, Igor met his future wife, got a job, and had children. Later he launched his own company, designing air-conditioning systems for apartment and office buildings in the city. He never thought he’d end up making “humanure.”

Humans vs. manure

Throughout most of human history, our relationship with our waste has been thorny. We can’t stop producing it, but we can’t live with it. The undigested nutrients in our feces—proteins, lipids, sugars—breed intestinal worms and the deadly bacteria that cause scourges like dysentery, gastroenteritis, and typhoid. To avoid spreading disease, we must distance ourselves from our metabolic output as quickly and efficiently as possible. 

The industrial Western sewage systems of the past 150 years perfected this process. As cities grew, so did their centralized sewage operations. The first wastewater treatment plants in America were developed in the 1850s. Today, more than 16,000 of them chug out sludge 24/7, processing what comes down municipal, home, and office pipes. Combined, the US has enough such tubing to wrap around our planet 52 times. Or reach to the moon and back almost thrice. About 62.5 billion gallons of wastewater flow through these lines daily. 

To my grandfather, none of this made economic or environmental sense, especially the part about tossing dung along with trash. “You have to feed the earth the way you feed people,” he used to say as he filled up his compost pits with the brown goo from our septic tank every fall. He then closed them up and let Mother Nature do her job. When he dug them up again three years later, the pits would be full of fluffy black dirt so nutrient-rich that our plants managed to bear fruit despite the short, cold, and rainy Russian summers. 

Spending billions on purifying wastewater to release into rivers and streams, only to pump it back into water mains and clean it again for human consumption, doesn’t make sense either. “In 2015 it became a mandatory requirement for any new building in San Francisco over 250,000 square feet to install an on-site water treatment system for their toilet and irrigation needs,” says Kehoe. “And in 2021 it became a requirement for any new building over 100,000 square feet.”

For Igor and Aaron, his third and youngest son, who studied political science but ended up following in his father’s engineering footsteps, the move was a serendipitous one. They’d just gotten their toes wet in sewage and were pumped to dive in. 

An epic origin story

In 2013, a client asked Igor to find a building-wide sewage recycling system for their space in the Bay Area. He couldn’t find a single model on the market. Some months later, at a tech conference, Igor watched someone sterilize dog poop by whipping it in a food processor with potassium permanganate. He knew the chemical from his childhood: Called margantsovka, it was a common disinfectant. When his aquarium fish would start getting sick, he would add a few drops, he recalls. “The bacteria would die, and the fish would swim in a rosy water for a little while because potassium permanganate is also a colorant.” The compound (chemical formula KMnO₄) causes an oxidizing reaction that kills microorganisms, including the pathogenic ones that commonly afflict humans. “It’s been widely used to wash wounds or disinfect a glass that someone drank from,” says Govind Rao, professor of biochemical engineering at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. “It’s a very powerful oxidant, but it works best when pathogen loads are low.” Disinfecting typical sewage would require tons of KMnO₄, but the Tartakovskys found a workaround—just do it at the source. Most people don’t carry large amounts of dangerous pathogens in their intestines (otherwise they’d be very sick), so what they flush isn’t usually festering with germs. It is after sludge floats through the miles of pipes for days that it becomes colonized with all sorts of bugs that naturally dwell there, growing and multiplying. “When sewage swirls down the pipes for days and weeks, its pathogen load is huge,” Aaron explains. “But if you get it right after someone flushed the toilet, the pathogen load is much lower.”

Igor and Aaron started by whipping their family dogs’ droppings in a food processor, too. For better sterilization, they added other chemicals, coming up with their company’s proprietary microbe-busting mix. Now they needed to scale up, so they convinced an Italian company that built industrial-size mixers to let them try their neutralizing method on septic sludge at a wastewater treatment plant near Florence. In March 2015, they flew in for a test. As they experimented with the settings on a machine the size of a backyard grill, the reaction released too much heat. The mixer’s top blew off, painting the ceiling with sanitized yet still stinky slime—a historic incident Aaron caught on video. But that taught the father and son the parameters for an industrial processor. Once back home, they formed Epic Cleantec, a water recycling solution company, and focused on building their own mixer. 

They hired an engineering company in Minnesota to build one. Testing it in the Land of 10,000 Lakes proved messy too. Aaron was filling up a bucket of fecal goo when the pressurized slush hit the bottom so hard, it splashed him from head to toe. “I almost lost my lunch that day,” he recalls. Later, the muck partially froze in the frigid Midwestern winter, rattling around the mixer. They never considered giving up. “I learned early on that failure was not an option,” Igor says. Aaron draws his inspiration from his family history. “My grandparents were Holocaust survivors,” he says. “Considering what they went through, I can deal with sewage.”

The Minnesota exercise gave them exact mixer dimensions—length, diameter, blade size. But the final version was built by a company in Los Angeles. Driving down to give it a whirl, Aaron called every kennel in the area to ask for dog poop. Most laughed and thought it was a prank, but five dished some out. More came from the SPCA, which became Epic’s first official poop supplier. 

Igor and Aaron were also working on assembling the apparatus that managed the sewage flow, which would put sludge through the rotating mesh belt and then a wrangler to compact it into the palm-size glops that would be fed into the disinfecting mixer. Stringing the mesh belt and wrangler together was reasonably straightforward, but the father and son needed large quantities of sewage to test the process from end to end. In 2017, Epic began buying sludge from Stanford University’s Codiga Resource Recovery Center, which had a miniature sewage station, to continue calibrating their system. “It cost 40 cents per pound,” recalls Sebastien Tilmans, Codiga’s executive director.

When even that stream proved insignificant, Epic began chugging sludge by the truckload—literally. By then, Epic Hub was located in a former car dealership, so the sewage trucks that were emptying some of the Bay Area septic systems would roll in to dish out their cargo. “We would stretch a hose from the truck into our system and let it run, end to end,” Aaron says. “Some of these trucks carried sewage from a Facebook cafeteria bathroom,” he explains. “Some of our soil is Facebook-made.”

Once they tested the mixer-processor in their Epic Hub, the Tartakovskys approached the owners of NEMA (whom Igor knew) about testing it in real life. Building engineer Derwin Narvaez’s first reaction was one of sheer disgust. “You’re going to do what?” he remembers asking. Seeing the tech in action won him over. “The end product is just black dirt!”

Standing next to the custom mixer, which resembles a giant meat grinder, Aaron demonstrates how that black dirt was produced during the pilot. The glops of excrement picked up from the sludge squeezer in the NEMA basement were shaken in from the collecting bin—and the machine would chew through them with Epic’s disinfecting blends for about 20 minutes. Then Aaron would put the freshly made earth through a battery of tests, checking for pathogens and heavy metals, before letting it dry outside near the Epic Hub garden. “I always wondered what people in nearby skyscrapers thought we were doing,” he says. “But no one complained,” given there was no stink.

He scrapes some of the dirt residue from the mixer’s innards and offers it to me. After some hesitation, I hold the powdery black substance in my hand and give it a timid sniff. It looks and smells just like the garden dirt from my grandfather’s pits. But while his backyard-farm approach worked on a small scale, Epic’s might change how we process sewage in entire high-rises, which is crucial, because two out of every three people worldwide will likely be living in urban areas by 2050. 

Other companies are redesigning our relationship with excrement in their own unique ways. A group of pee-cyclers in Vermont founded Rich Earth Institute, a nonprofit that gathers urine from residents in containers and distributes it to farmers, but for many that manual process is a downside. Israel-based startup HomeBiogas pioneered a toilet that helps produce fertilizer and methane, the latter to be used for cooking fuel—a self-sustaining approach that works for private homes and small buildings, but not high-rises. South African company LiquidGold Africa developed a way to extract fertilizing compounds from urine, which can be collected en masse from plumbing in buildings, but it doesn’t yet recycle solids. In Portland, Oregon, a large apartment complex, Hassalo on Eighth, built an entire outdoor wastewater treatment facility, but that requires a lot of surrounding space. Australia-based company Aquacell operates several building-level water recycling systems in the Bay Area; according to Kehoe, a few more are in the works, but Aquacell doesn’t dig into the solids business. By comparison, Epic’s end-to-end tech is particularly well suited for offices and dwellings in densely populated cities, the number of which will keep growing. “This firm seems to have a solid, innovative technology,” says William Toffey, sustainability strategist at BlueTech Research, a company that specializes in water solutions. “The 1550 residence in San Francisco is its shiniest example.”

Will more skyscrapers join in? Narvaez, who is now an ardent supporter, thinks so. “Rather than rationing water, buildings should adopt this approach,” he says. “To me, it’s the future of all new buildings. The buildings will save a lot, and so will society. It’s a win-win situation.” 

In the coming years, Epic’s next-generation OneWater system will be installed in four other buildings in San Diego and San Jose, where it will function as a full-blown mini-treatment plant. The mesh belt processor will squeeze water out of the sludge. The membrane bioreactor will clean it and put it back in circulation. And the mixer will turn the gunk into garden topsoil, eventually feeding the cities’ parks, the Tartakovskys hope. “We’ll use the same motto,” Aaron says. “‘The soil by San Diegans for San Diegans.’ And so on.”

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This article was originally featured on High Country News.

Those who visit the Gila Wilderness in southern New Mexico these days have to grapple with a number of perils: rattlesnakes, extreme heat, bears, rugged terrain and, of course, raging bulls. Between 50 and 150 cattle are parading across the landscape, chomping native plants down to the nub, trampling riparian areas to dust, eroding landscapes, damaging habitat and oozing vast clouds of methane. Oh, and, according to the U.S. Forest Service, they’re also playing bullfighter with unsuspecting hikers.

This kind of behavior is, naturally, unacceptable to  the Gila National Forest, which manages the land in question. So, last summer, officials hired contract wranglers to round up the rambunctious cattle and evict them from the forest. After both contractors and cows were injured in the process, officials decided to take a more lethal tack, and, in February, sent out  helicopter-borne shooters to “attempt to eradicate them from the area,” as the agency’s decision put it.

It may be the most consequential action the federal government has taken in at least two decades to mitigate the impacts of overgrazing on public lands. It might even look like the start of real grazing policy reform, something conservationists have been pushing for since the 1970s. But there’s a catch: The only reason the Forest Service did something this time is that the bovines in question are feral — descendants of cattle abandoned by a belly-up livestock operator in the 1970s. Think of them as the bovine version of “orphaned” oil and gas wells, similarly sullying land and water and continuously belching methane.

The Forest Service’s justification for its lethal response, in a nutshell is: “Feral cattle are an invasive species that damage native habitats with their grazing behaviors.” That’s all fine and good, but you could take the “feral” off the front of that sentence and it would still be equally true. And yet the 1.5 million or so additional “authorized” cattle that are trampling the public lands are getting off scot-free. Same goes for Cliven Bundy, whose own semi-feral cattle have been illegally grazing public lands in Nevada for about 40 years, and there is still no plan to remove them. 

The Biden administration promised new grazing rules this spring, but early indications suggest we can expect another big nothing-burger. Several weeks ago, the administration announced this year’s grazing fees, although it hardly needed to go through the trouble, since for the 27th year in the last four decades, the fee once again amounts to just $1.35 per animal unit month — the minimum allowed by law. That’s all it takes to authorize a half-ton cow and her calf to gobble up 600 to 800 pounds of the public’s forage per month, destroy cryptobiotic soil and disgorge more climate-warming methane. Hell, you can’t get a cup of coffee for $1.35 these days!

8.09 million
Number of animal unit months (AUMs) for cattle authorized by the Bureau of Land Management for Western states in 2021. This does not include non-cattle livestock or cattle grazing on Forest Service lands. 

233 pounds per year 
Amount of methane emitted by a single cow-calf pair.

$6.10; $4.85; $20.10
Minimum fee per AUM for grazing on Utah state land; New Mexico state land; and non-irrigated private land (estimated average), respectively. 

The Bureau of Land Management says it uses market forces and other considerations to determine its grazing fees. Yet even though the market for cattle has changed substantially over the last 40 years, grazing fees haven’t budged. In 2000, for example, the price for a pound of live cattle was $0.70; today it’s $1.65. And yet in both years the grazing fee was the same. One might argue that low fees are necessary to keep cheeseburgers from becoming a luxury item. But since only about 5% of America’s 29 million beef cows graze public lands, the fee would have little impact on your tab at Blake’s Lotaburger, New Mexico’s favorite fast food beef joint. While in some ways it’s far better to have cows out on the range than confined to a feedlot, open-range cattle are a lot harder on the climate.

That’s the conclusion of a study published last year, which found that public-range cows not only emit methane (via enteric fermentation) and nitrous oxide (in manure), like all cattle do, they also wreck native plants and soils enough to shift the landscape from serving as a carbon sink to becoming a source of greenhouse gases. And they emit more methane because the energy content of public-land forage tends to be lower than the alfalfa or grain fed to pastured and feedlot cattle. “The forage from public lands, especially when high in exotic grasses,” the authors wrote, “is about the worst diet to feed cattle from a greenhouse gas perspective.” 

Low fees are only one of the places the feds have dropped the ball on grazing. The data shows that the BLM fails to meet its own standards for rangeland health. Agency-managed national monuments — including Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante national monuments in Utah and Canyon of the Ancients in Colorado — not only grandfathered in existing grazing, but allow for new leases, even when cow hooves are likely to damage cultural sites.

$12.77 million
Revenues to the BLM from grazing fees (for all livestock categories) in 2021.

$105.9 million
Amount budgeted to the Department of Interior for rangeland management in 2020, meaning the taxpayers are subsidizing grazing operations to the tune of $93 million per year. 

$2.5 billion
Total amount of livestock subsidies paid by the federal government to ranchers and farmers in the 11 Western states between 1995 and 2020. 

Congress has also failed to pass legislation making voluntary grazing permit retirements permanent. That would allow conservation groups to buy out a willing livestock operator’s permit, knowing that it would stay retired, something that seems like a win-win, though it is still adamantly opposed by the Sagebrush Rebel crowd. As things stand, retired permits can be put back into action 10 years down the road, which, you know, sort of defeats the purpose.

Admittedly, it’s hard to make meaningful reforms in this realm. To do so means pushing back against the mythology of cowboy culture and the outsized political influence livestock operators wield. Even the plan to shoot the feral cattle in the Gila ran up against this: The New Mexico Cattle Growers’ Association tried to stop the shoot, claiming it was animal cruelty. (A judge rejected the bid.) It’s an odd stance, given that the livestock industry advocates shooting wolves and other predators, ridding the public lands of wild horses, and, of course, ultimately eating its cows.

But then again, (almost) no one is suggesting that the feds start shooting “authorized” cattle. They’re just asking for a few common-sense reforms and maybe a grazing fee a little more in line with the cost of a cheeseburger. It shouldn’t be so difficult.

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For gardeners, rabbits are a common cause of headaches, as they munch on a laundry list of vegetation, from berries and vegetables to perennials and woody plants. Aquaculturists like oyster farmers have the same problem, except not from fuzzy mammals. Marine rays are the main culprit, especially given that more than 80 percent of marine aquaculture consists of some of the rays’ favorite things to “crunch” on: bivalve mollusks.

[Related: Listen to the soothing sounds of a snacking stingray.]

When culturing hard clams (Mercenaria mercenaria), the bivalves must be placed at the bottom of a marine environment where they then grow to a sellable size. Clammers use mesh netting, plastic, or wire covers to protect their clam lease, similar to using a wire fence to try to keep rabbits out of a vegetable garden. However, the effectiveness of using these methods for highly mobile marine predators like rays hadn’t fully been tested until very recently. 

In a study published March 7 in the journal Aquaculture Environment Interactions, a team from Florida Atlantic University’s (FAU) Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institute and the Mote Marine Laboratory studied how the whitespotted eagle ray (Aetobatus narinari) interacted with clams enclosed in anti-predator materials. These rays are a formidable opponent with strong jaws, crushing fused teeth, and nimble pectoral fins. 

In a large outdoor tank, the team used aerial and underwater videos to assess the rays’ responses to various anti-predator materials. One plot of clams were placed inside polyester mesh bags that also had a latex net coating, another under a high density polyethylene (HDPE) netting, and a third under chicken wire cover netting. The control plot of clams were unprotected. 

After the completion of each trial, the team noted the number of crunched clams and how frequently the rays visited the various randomized patches. While the undersea hunters were capable of consuming clams through bags, the anti-predator treatments reduced clam mortality four- to tenfold compared to control plots where the clams were unprotected. The double-layered treatments (bags with cover netting) had the lowest clam mortality.

“Based on our findings, many of the current anti-predator grow-out strategies used in the hard clam shellfish aquaculture industry appear capable of reducing predation by large predators like whitespotted eagle rays,” said study co-author Matt Ajemian, director of the Fisheries Ecology and Conservation Lab at FAU, in a statement. “In par­ticular, bag treatments with cover nettings achieved the highest clam survival rates, although it is important to note that this did not appear to completely deter rays from interacting with the gear.”

[Related: Tiger sharks helped scientists map a vast underwater meadow in the Bahamas.]

The observations suggest that the rays appear to be capable of interacting with the aquaculture gear for longer periods of time, which potentially diverts them from other natural feeding habitats such as sand and mud flats.

“These habitat associations could expose these sensitive animals to other risks, although we are just beginning to understand them and admittedly have a lot more to learn,” said co-author Brianna Cahill, a research technician at Stony Brook University, in a statement. “Contrary to what we expected, rays did not prefer control plots (mimicking natural conditions) over treatment plots with anti-predator gear. This suggests a real possibility that these rays are interacting with shellfish aquaculture gear in the wild, as suggested by our clamming industry partners.”

The researchers also observed the rays interact with the treatments on the deterrents, including using their lower dental plate to dig through the sediment at the bottom of the tank to access the clams in the unprotected control plots and to move the gear.  

More testing could reveal whether chicken wire, a common deterrent in Florida, is actually beneficial. Earlier studies suggest that the electric field of the metal could be detected by rays and sharks and might overstimulate them, protecting the farmed shellfish. 

“Given the frequency of interactions we observed with chicken wire in our experiment, we question whether chicken wire is a deterrent, an attractant, or neutral, as it may not have a powerful enough signal to influ­ence the rays,” said Ajemian. “Still, we have more questions than we started with, and look forward to investigating this further with other species and deterrent types.”

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If you’ve ever been to a fancy tequila bar, you may have hear of an alcoholic drink distilled from agave called mezcal. The smoky-tasting dram is surging in popularity around the world— it’s estimated that the global sales for the beverage will jump from $338 million in 2022 to $2115 million by 2031. Around 70 percent of all mezcal is distilled in the southwestern state of Oaxaca, Mexico. One thing that separates mezcal from the other bottles of hard liquor on the shelf are the worms commonly found inside them. 

[Related: City lights could trigger a baby boom for some moths and butterflies.]

There are some theories as to why the worm is there, especially since they appear to be a relatively recent addition to the drink that dates back to the 17th century. Indigenous Mexicans have been adding larvae to food for ages, but one theory posits that Jacobo Lozano Páez, a distiller who found that adding the creature changed the taste of the agave and began adding it to his spirits in 1940. Some other popular theories center around the belief that the larva brings good luck to the person who finds it in a glass, and a study from 2013 found that adding larvae to is mostly driven by the belief that the larva are healthy and are aphrodisiacs.

In a small study published March 8 in the journal PeerJ Life & Environment, a team of researchers from the United States, Canada, and Switzerland looked to identify what species of larva are found in  bottles of mezcal. They wanted to see if drinkers were consuming the larvae of the aptly nicknamed tequila giant skipper butterfly (Aegiale hesperiaris), the moth Comadia redtenbacheri, a weevil, or a completely unidentified insect species. 

The results were somewhat surprising. All of the larvae in the specimens obtained from 21 commercially available mezcals purchased between 2018 and 2022 were from the moth C. redtenbacheri, despite about 63 species of larvae being widely consumed in Mexico. 

The team used DNA analysis of larvae to determine their identity. Additionally, all of the larvae appeared very similar on the surface, with prolegs and a distinct head capsule. They also variety from pinkish red to white in color.

[Related: Five burning questions about tequila, answered.]

In response to a declining number of larvae available to add to mezcal, the team in this study believes that new cultivation methods for larvae in captivity are needed. researchers have begun to develop methods to cultivate these larvae in captivity, but that can be a challenge. 

“There is still very little known about how best to rear mezcal larvae and additional scientific research is needed to understand how captive insect breeding can become a central part of the agricultural industry in Mexico,” the team writes in the study. 

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A robot for measuring the angles of corn stalk leaves may sound like a ridiculously niche invention, but it’s a device with potentially major benefits for farmers. As detailed in a paper recently published in the Journal of Field Robotics, researchers from Iowa State University and North Carolina State University have designed an autonomous wheeled device narrow enough to move between corn rows spaced a standard 30 inches apart. As the robot traverses a field, its four tiers of dual cameras take an array of photos to allow a stereoscopic view for 3D plant modeling via a separate software program. 

[Related: John Deere finally agrees to let farmers fix their own equipment, but there’s a catch.]

When it comes to corn, the curves and angles are important, as far as the leaves are concerned. In relation to the stalk itself, the crop’s leaves ideally will angle upwards at the top before bending more horizontally as they progress lower, thus allowing optimal sunlight harvesting for photosynthesis. Unfortunately, measuring this attribute—important to optimizing future crop generations—is a painstakingly slow and rudimentary chore for farmers, who often resort to hand measurements via basic protractors. 

Enter onto the field AngleNet, the name given to the two part robot-software system.

In a press statement on Tuesday, Lirong Xiang, the paper’s first author, as well as assistant professor of biological and agricultural engineering at North Carolina State University, explained that, “For plant breeders, it’s important to know not only what the leaf angle is, but how far those leaves are above the ground. This gives them the information they need to assess the leaf angle distribution for each row of plants. This, in turn, can help them identify genetic lines that have desirable traits—or undesirable traits.”

[Related: Jailbreaking has sprouted for John Deere tractors.]

Researchers also found that AngleNet measured corn stalk leaves’ angles within 5 degrees of those measured by hand, or “well within the accepted margin of error for purposes of plant breeding,” Xiang said.

It may not seem like it at first thought, but the agricultural industry is often home to extremely advanced automation technologies—albeit not without their own controversies and concerns. Moving forward, however, researchers hope to further optimize AngleNet’s algorithms for even more precise measurements, as well as work alongside other crop scientists to utilize the technology. By deploying the system in the real world, the team also hopes to speed plant breeding research to eventually improve farmers’ future crop yields.

Correction 3/8/23: An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated that the University of Iowa participated in this research. We regret the error.

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YOU’RE WALKING through a forest. The soil is soft beneath your feet, and the sun is shining brightly through the dark green treetops. To your left, you see rotten logs with dense clusters of oyster mushrooms. On your right, a thick bundle of chanterelles sprouts from the leaf-littered floor. Farther off the beaten path are stout-looking porcinis, frequently with a colony of poisonous fly agarics nearby, and, maybe, a bunch of magic blue gyms—those might ruin your nature walk, though. 

The mushroom kingdom holds many shapes and secrets beyond those of the little white buttons and baby bellas found at the grocery store. Ethical foraging is one of the easiest and most valuable ways to incorporate an array of mushrooms into your life; to get started, you can join a mycology group or contact a local guide to learn how to harvest edible fungi safely and sustainably. 

But there are more creative ways to incorporate the power of mushrooms into your days. Fungi are a versatile and adaptable group, which is why they offer a range of benefits to a variety of people. They’re a multifaceted food source, providing fiber, protein, and other nutrients. They can be used to create dyes, build structures, or breed new strains of mushrooms. In essence, they’re really cool, and they’re inspiring biologists, artists, and engineers to develop practices that can make the world prosper. Here’s a mini-tour of what the flourishing field of mushrooming has to offer.

Shopping for mushrooms 

Head to the supplement aisle in any health food store, and you’re bound to find shelf space dedicated to the medicinal wonder of mushrooms. Research on fruit flies and mice shows that cordyceps, popular among consumers (and apocalyptic TV shows), has anti-cancer properties and possibly anti-aging effects, too. Reishi and turkey tail are coveted for their potential immune-stimulating effects, while lion’s mane may help soften dementia, according to a small pilot study.  

Most of these benefits have been investigated on animals or in test tubes, making it challenging to draw conclusions on human health. If you’re looking for guaranteed results, it’s better to grab fresh, whole mushrooms from the produce section than spend all your money on pills and potions. 

“Eating food is always safer and less expensive than using its supplemental form,” says Lori Chong, a registered dietitian at the Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center. With fungi, you should know which edible varieties are good to cook with. Reishi and turkey tail are not commonly used for culinary purposes because their tough texture and bitter taste make them unpalatable. On the other hand, lion’s mane, shiitake, enoki, and maitake make fine ingredients for a meal, each with its distinct flavors and properties. 

A steady intake of mushrooms can work wonders for our bodies. Eating 18 grams daily could reduce someone’s cancer risk by 45 percent, according to a scientific review of 17 observational studies. Using mushrooms to lessen meat consumption can also help reduce the risk of heart disease by lowering saturated fat in a diet—you can do this by mixing chewy stems and caps with ground meat. And they’re one of a few sources of ergothioneine, an amino acid with anti-inflammatory effects, according to several international medical papers. 

Getting them into your diet isn’t too difficult, says Chong. “Mushrooms make a great addition to any combination of stir-fried vegetables,” she explains. “They are easy to prep and quick to cook. Consider sautéing a package of mushrooms and keeping them in the refrigerator to add to an omelet, spaghetti sauce, sandwich, or salad.” 

Oh, and don’t eat them raw: Farmed mushrooms may contain agaritine, a toxic compound destroyed by heat during the cooking process. Research has found that certain store-bought varieties have less agaritine than freshly picked ones, but questions remain.

When shopping for whole mushrooms, make sure they’re firm to the touch, smooth, and dry on the surface. You don’t want any that look dried out, feel slimy, have big spots of discoloration, or show wet spots. Once you get home, store them in the fridge in a loose bag or a glass container with the lid cracked to prevent moisture buildup and fast spoilage.   

Dyeing with mushrooms 

Though they’re certainly delicious, there’s much more you can do with mushrooms than eat them, including making pigments for fabric dyes, ink, and all varieties of paint. In fact, the vastness of the fungus kingdom covers every color of the rainbow, says Julie Beeler, a naturalist, teacher, and artist. “Mushrooms contain a variety of different chemical compounds that create colors ranging from red to yellow to blue and colors in between,” says Beeler. “These pigments can be found throughout the mushroom, but for certain species like Cortinarius semisanguineus [the surprise webcap], the color is concentrated in the caps. For Hydnellum caeruleum [the blue and orange hydnellum], the color is throughout the mushroom. And for Hypomyces lactifluorum [the lobster mushroom], it is only the parasitized outer layer.”

Beeler created the website Mushroom Color Atlas as an educational resource for people who want to use mushrooms to make hues. She walks beginners through the process of extracting dyes from 28 fungal varieties that are common in the wild, and she intends to add another 13 in the coming months. Those few dozen specimens can produce more than 800 colors, she notes.

While the practice is growing in popularity, it has centuries of history. Fungi, particularly lichens—complex organisms created by a symbiotic relationship between a fungus and an alga—have been used in cultural practices across North America, North Africa, Asia, and Europe. Prior to the Industrial Revolution, all pigments were processed naturally. Since then, pretty much every dyed item we encounter has been colored using synthetic dyes. “Mushrooms allow you to get back to natural practices that are more regenerative and sustainable for the environment and the planet as a whole,” says Beeler. 

To stain fabrics, she explains, you need a pot, similar to one for making tea. Beeler suggests cutting the fungi into smaller pieces and steeping them for about an hour in hot, but not boiling, water. (A temperature of about 160 degrees Fahrenheit will prevent the compounds from degrading.) When the color of the water has changed, you can dip natural fibers in to dye them. 

The look of your final product will depend on the mushrooms you use and your material. Wool tends to absorb more vibrant, bolder shades from the organisms than other textiles. Cotton, the world’s most widely used fiber, is surprisingly more complicated because it’s cellulose-based and requires a lengthier mordanting process to fix the chemicals to the threads. “You’ll need to be a lot more advanced to get really great colors on cotton,” says Beeler, “but you can get some incredible colors with wool.” 

If you’re not getting the look you want, you can alter the pH of the dye bath depending on what the mushroom you’re working with responds to best. Certain species prefer more acidic environments, so you can add vinegar to produce an orange tinge. Or for greater alkalinity, add a sprinkle of sodium carbonate to get a vibrant blue or green. The hues might fade over time with repeated washing or exposure to sunlight, unless you use a mordant like alum to bind them to the fibers.

The best part is that you can find your main materials almost anywhere: while moving dead limbs around your yard, during a walk through the park, or perched upon a strip of grass in a parking lot after a good rain. Some will look like the mushrooms you get from the grocery store, with the expected gills underneath; others will have more novel structures. Boletes, such as the spring king, have a spongy cap and produce a range of beautiful earth tones. Some false gill mushrooms deliver a spectrum of blues, greens, and yellows, depending on which you grab. Tooth fungi have fanglike spines and often produce blues or greens. Another excellent clue to the dyeing potential of a mushroom is whether it’s colorful inside and out. The lobster mushroom, for example, makes a variety of pinks and reds, true to its name. 

“I just love that as I’m walking in different environments, every step I’m taking, I’m thinking about that fungal underground in the soil and the mycelium, this web of connections creating a rainbow beneath my feet,” Beeler says. 

Building on mushrooms

Creating structures with mycelium—the network of fungal filaments that allows mushrooms to grow aboveground—is an exercise in simulating the layers in natural ecosystems. The practice is a chance to think of the presence of trash as an opportunity to create something new. “In the living world, there isn’t really such a thing as waste,” says Merlin Sheldrake, the author of Entangled Life, a bestselling book on mycology. Scraps are always used to create something else, like a scavenger breaking down a carcass. “Are there ways that we can learn from those cyclical processes to behave more like other living organisms do?” Sheldrake continues. “Or will we continue just to produce stuff and then put it in landfills?” 

Building with fungi is a relatively new field that’s in a state of expansion. Mycelium can be used to create packaging, clothing, and even buildings; researchers are working on making the materials more robust and streamlining production. BioHAB, an architectural project in Namibia, for instance, is salvaging the remains of cleared encroacher bush, an indigenous species that drastically reduces usable land and resources, to create a substrate for farming mushrooms. The waste from cultivating the fungi is then compacted into eco-friendly bricks. The end product is strong, flexible, insulative, and soundproof, and can be used to reinforce structures in local villages, BioHAB’s website states. 

Similarly, NASA is looking into mycelium-based construction materials for astronaut dwellings on the moon and Mars. These composites are light and transportable, protect better against radiation, could self-replicate in their new environments for an endless resource, and, at the end of their life spans, can be turned into fertilizer.

Working with mushroom structures encourages builders to think about the whole cycle of production. “If you’re growing composite material using mycelium and hemp, for example, then you think about where the hemp is coming from,” Sheldrake explains. “Then you start thinking about the fact that you are harnessing a waste stream from another industry to produce the feedstock to grow the fungus.” 

Accessing mycotecture at the consumer level is a bit more complicated, but more opportunities are sprouting up. If you want to wear your mushrooms, luxury fashion houses like Stella McCartney, Balenciaga, and Hermès are experimenting with mycelium leather. In 2021 Hermès introduced a bag in partnership with MycoWorks, a company that develops leatherlike materials in a variety of colors from reishi. 

Pivoting to mushrooms could, in part, help buffer the effect industrialization has on the planet. Manufacturing is a major cause of environmental degradation, pollution, carbon emissions, and waste. Mushroom-sourced components can offer a break from petrochemicals and plastics if they can be produced sustainably enough and brought to scale. But the field, which is still in its infancy, has a ways to go before it can make an earnest contribution to the use of sustainable goods. 

“These fungal materials are exciting when you step back and look at how all these different industries go together and the possibilities that exist between them,” says Sheldrake. “Unless we rethink the way that we build and produce, then we are going to be in even bigger trouble than we already are.” 

Growing your own mushrooms

When Tavis Lynch started raising mushrooms in the early 1990s, he approached it as a hobby before expanding into more complicated projects, eventually becoming a professional mycologist and commercial cultivator. He currently grows 20 indoor and outdoor mushroom varieties employing genetic pairing—creating new strains of mushrooms by mating spores from two existing varieties. 

Lynch has made a fruitful career out of something people can do at home. A DIY venture doesn’t have to be complicated. “There are a lot of different ways to grow mushrooms,” Lynch explains. “We can grow them on wheat or oat straw. We can grow them on natural logs. We can grow them on compost. We can even grow them on blended substrates that we create, typically an enriched sawdust or coffee grounds.” 

Most varieties of mushrooms bred at home are used for cooking or medicine. But the first thing to assess is the resources available where you live. Coffee grounds, compost, or sawdust will be the best substrates for anyone living in a major metropolitan area where green space is limited or tightly regulated. For those budding hobbyists, going the kitchen counter route with a tabletop kit, rearing specimens in a basement, or even hanging them somewhere in your shower will be your best bet. (Choosing a shaded, humid spot is the most important element.)

Once you’ve figured out the logistics, including what type of mushroom you want to farm, Lynch suggests finding a spawn supplier—a step that, like growing the fungi, won’t be too hard. “They’re popping up left and right every day because the trend toward home cultivation of mushrooms is massive right now,” he says. Companies such as Tavis’s Mushrooms, North Spore, Field & Forest Products, Earth Angel Mushrooms, and Mushroom Queens offer online ordering and quick shipping across the US.

I ordered a pink oyster mushroom kit online from Forest Origins. Starting the growth process was as simple as Lynch had said it would be: All I had to do was cut into the substrate bag, disturb some of the top layer with a fork, dampen it, and place it on my counter to get indirect sunlight. Then, twice a day, I came by and spritzed it with a water bottle. I started seeing fruiting bodies develop about a week into this daily ritual. Sadly, I accidentally sprayed it with bleach while cleaning and had to order another kit. 

Bleaching aside, checking on my baby mushrooms felt as good as tending to my other plants. Ensuring they had enough sun and moisture gave me a few minutes of grounding amid chaotic days. It was a reminder that nearly everything provided to us by this Earth is beautiful and useful.

“Getting out, working with your hands, having a distraction from your digital devices and from the noise of others and the city—that’s the real medicine,” says Lynch. “I’m looking out my window right now at my mushroom farm, and I wish I was out there working on it.” 

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The field of agrivoltaics, in which land is used for both farming and solar power generation, has some basic logistical issues. Namely, it has been difficult to build structures that can both efficiently generate solar power while not blocking the sunlight needed for crops to actually grow. A team of researchers at UCLA recently discovered a novel solution to the issue that relies on organic materials. The process even outperforms conventional glass-roof greenhouses installed with traditional solar panel arrays.

[Related: Why your community’s next solar panel project should be above a parking lot.]

The team detailed their findings on Monday in Nature Sustainability, describing how integrating a layer of a naturally occurring chemical known as L-gluthathion can extend semi-transparent solar cells’ lifespans while also improving their efficiency. Yang Yang, a materials scientist at UCLA’s Samueli School of Engineering, explained that organic materials could be a major tool within agrivoltaics, because they selectivity absorb certain spectrums of light. Historically, however, they have been too unstable to widely deploy in the solar energy industry.

Inorganic solar cells’ organic counterparts often degrade extremely quickly as sunlight causes them to lose electrons through oxidation. By adding a thin layer of carbon-based L-gluthathion, the previously short-lived cells could maintain upwards of 80 percent efficacy after 1,000 usage hours—a major step up from the less than 20 percent efficacy over the same time period sans L-gluthathion.

[Related: Solar energy company wants to bolt panels directly into the ground.]

To test the new solar cells, Yang’s team compared the yields of two dollhouse-sized greenhouses growing broccoli, mung beans, and wheat. The transparent glass roof of one greenhouse was fitted with a number of traditional inorganic solar panels, while the other’s ceiling was entirely composed of the semitransparent organic panel arrays. To researchers’ surprise, the semitransparent greenhouse actually resulted in higher crop yields than its traditional counterpart. The team believes this could be thanks to the L-gluthathion layer blocking both ultraviolet and infrared rays—UV light often can damage plants, while infrared can heat greenhouses too much and cause crops to require more water.

Yang’s team hopes to eventually scale production of the new organic solar cells for widespread industrial usages. 

New, efficient, partially organic designs, along with proposed projects like more parking lot canopies and cheaper home applications, could help insure solar power as one of nations’ key tools in transitioning to green, sustainable energy grids.

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From the 15th to the 12th Century BCE, Greece’s Mycenaean civilization played a major role in developing classical Greek culture. The two major cities, Mycenae and Tiryns, are even featured in Homer’s epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey. These stories have influenced literature and art in Europe for more than 3,000 years, but scientists are still finding new clues to how these people lived. 

A large debris deposit in the remains of Mycenae that dates back to the Late Bronze Age (about 1200 to 1150 BCE) is helping a team of researchers from the University of North Florida, the University of California, Berkeley, an archaeology research firm SEARCH, Inc better understand the history of animal resources in the ancient city. Their most recent findings, published March 1 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE, describe animal remains inside a well within Petsas House–a household in Mycenae that also had a ceramics workshop that local artisans used.

[Related: Horned helmets came from Bronze Age artists, not Vikings.]

From well preserved agricultural records and architecture like the entrance to the Mycenae citadel called the Lion Gate, researchers believe that animals provided an important source of both sustenance and also symbolism. However, more research is needed to fully understand the role that animals played.

In the study, excavations into Petsas’ well recovered multiple animal remains among stone, metal, and ceramic material. The most common remains were from sheep, goats, pigs, cattle, and dogs. The team believes that most of this material was likely thrown into the well from other parts of the house after a destructive earthquake, and additional evidence showed that the animals were used as food. 

The team found that the dog remains were more intact than the farm animals and were deposited into the well at a different time. They believe that this is tentative evidence that the canines may have been treated differently in death than the other animals like pigs or sheep. 

[Related: Ancient poop proves that humans have always loved beer and cheese.]

“This study presents new insights about ancient animals recovered from the renowned archaeological site of Mycenae in Greece—a major political center in the Late Bronze Age, famous for references in Homer’s Iliad,” the authors wrote in a statement. “Research at Petsas House, a domestic building in Mycenae’s settlement used in large part as a ceramics workshop, revealed how the remains of meaty meals and pet dogs were cleaned and disposed of in a house well following a major destructive earthquake. Study of the archaeologically recovered bones, teeth, and shells from the well yielded a more nuanced picture of the diverse and resilient dietary strategies of residents than previously available at Mycenae.”

More deep dives into this well and the rest of the archeological site will potentially reveal patterns of how this civilization stored food, traded food and other goods, and how they responded to natural disasters. 

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These days, it seems like you can make milk out of anything. But should companies be able to call the liquid made from oats, coconuts and soy beans “milk”? The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has released draft guidance on how food and beverage companies should label and identify plant-based milk products marketed as milk alternatives. 

The draft guidance proposes that companies can continue to use the word milk to market these dairy alternatives, but they also should include a statement that explains how the product compares nutritionally with dairy milk. One possibility is that culture alt-milk labels state that the product “contains lower amounts of vitamin D and calcium than milk” or “contains less protein than milk.”

[Related: Magnetic microrobots could zap the bacteria out of your cold glass of milk.]

The FDA writes that consumers “understand that plant-based milk alternatives do not contain milk.” The draft cites a survey of consumer comments gathered by the agency where roughly 75 percent of participants reported knowing that the products were not made with dairy. Focus group research also indicated that calling these products “milk” is “strongly rooted in consumers’ vocabulary.”

“Getting enough of the nutrients in milk and fortified soy beverages is especially important to help children grow and develop, and parents and caregivers should know that many plant-based alternatives do not have the same nutrients as milk,” said Susan T. Mayne, director of the FDA’s Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition, in a statement. “Food labels are an important way to help support consumer behavior, so we encourage the use of the voluntary nutritional statements to better help customers make informed decisions.”

The Good Food Institute, which advocates for plant-based products, objected to the extra labeling writing “the guidance misguidedly admonishes companies to make a direct comparison” with cow’s milk, even though key nutrients are already required to be listed. Meanwhile, chief executive of animal-free meat company BetterMeat Paul Shapiro praised the move on Twitter. 

In response, Sen. James E. Risch (R-Idaho) and Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D-Wis.) issued a joint statement saying that the “misguided rule will hurt America’s dairy farmers and our rural communities.” Idaho and Wisconsin, both states with large dairy industries with a vested interest in selling cow’s milk, have been pushing for better labeling of alternative milk products. In 2017, Baldwin introduced the DAIRY PRIDE Act which would require the FDA to enforce the federal definition of milk as the “lacteal secretion … obtained by the complete milking of one or more healthy cows.” The bill has yet to pass, despite being reintroduced in 2021.

According to the FDA, 1 in 3 households in the United States reported purchasing alternative milk products in 2016, and sales of plant-based milk products rose from $1.5 billion to $2.4 billion from 2016 to 2020. 

Consumption of cow milk has decreased by nearly half in the past 50 years, according to the Department of Agriculture. As non dairy milks have surged in popularity, the cattle milk industry has been challenging the right of the plant based milk industry to call their projects milk. 

The FDA oversees “standards of identity”, legally binding definitions of products so that consumers know what they are getting when they purchase something. Another example is how some cheeses, like Kraft Singles, are labeled “cheese product” depending on pasteurization and production processes. 

In 2018, the FDA began a strategy to update these standards “in light of marketing trends and the latest nutritional science,” but milk has already had a complicated history with standards of identity. The FDA previously said that milk can generally be described as “the lacteal secretion, practically free from colostrum, obtained by the complete milking of one or more healthy cows.” 

The dairy industry has raised concerns for two decades regarding the FDA’s policing the definition of milk amidst the rise of plant based dairy milk alternatives. Dairy producers have argued that plant-based milk companies are playing “fast and loose using standardized dairy terms,” arguing that this language use is inaccurate since the plant-based alternatives don’t have the same taste or nutritional profile as dairy milk. 

[Related: The almond milk craze could be bad news for bees.]

In response to the new draft guidelines, Jim Mulhern, head of the National Milk Producers Federation, told The Washington Post that the proposal is a “step toward labeling integrity” that acknowledges the “utter lack of nutritional standards prevalent in plant-based beverages.” He criticized the suggested guidance on terminology, emphasizing that “dairy terms are for true dairy products, not plant-based impostors.”

The debate is likely to continue as some nutritional studies are challenging dairy milk’s superiority over plant-based alternatives. A 2020 review by The New England Journal of Medicine on how milk and human health found that dairy milk did not prevent bone fractures, a common reason for suggesting milk as a healthy beverage. The study found higher rates of hip fractures in countries that consumed the highest amounts of milk and calcium.

“In reality, some plant milks are likely to be superior to cow milk,”  Walter Willett, a professor of epidemiology and nutrition at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and author of the study told CNN. He added that soy milk has more healthy essential fatty acids than cow’s milk and that eating soy phytoestrogens in adolescence may reduce the risk of breast cancer.

The FDA is currently accepting comments on the new draft guidance and, in a statement, FDA Commissioner Robert Carliff said, “The draft recommendations issued today should lead to providing consumers with clear labeling to give them the information they need to make informed nutrition and purchasing decisions on the products they buy for themselves and their families.”

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How well do you know your pets? Pet Psychic takes some of the musings you’ve had about your BFFs (beast friends forever) and connects them to hard research and results from modern science.

YOUNG MALE COWS, not unlike many teenagers, can be a handful. They like to test boundaries; they challenge the other members of their herd, looking to establish themselves within its hierarchy. And so when Sammy, a six-year-old cow at Peace Ridge Sanctuary, hit adolescence, he confronted Theo, the herd’s patriarch.

Theo is a big animal, standing seven feet tall at his shoulders and weighing a muscular ton, but a gentle one. He’s something like a kindly uncle, taking calves under his wing, quick with a soothing lick and nurturing by disposition. He’s not a fighter—and Sammy was already larger than he, and aggressive to boot.

“He didn’t know what to do,” recalls Daniella Tessier, the sanctuary’s founder and operations manager. “That was probably a little scary to him.” Then Clementine, the herd’s matriarch, noticed what was happening. “She went over to the younger steer, pushed him out of the way, and challenged him. And the minute she did that, it was like a lightbulb went off. Sammy stopped—and that was the end of that.” Theo and Sammy have been friendly ever since.

There are more than 300 rescue animals at Peace Ridge, which is located on a windswept hilltop in rural Brooks, Maine: donkeys and goats, sheep and geese, rabbits and pigs. But their 50 cows have an extra-special place in Tessier’s heart. She’s known bovines ever since she was a toddler on her grandfather’s farm, and has come to appreciate them in ways few people have a chance to. Not only has Tessier spent a great deal of time with them—she’s been able to study them outside the confines of farms, in rare sanctuary settings where animals are less stressed and able to express social behaviors that would otherwise be stunted.

“When you get to interact with groups who are able to stay intact, you can see right away that they have such complex relationships,” says Tessier. “And there is so much expression of affection and nurturance and genuine care.”

There’s a hierarchy at Peace Ridge, but it’s not determined solely by physical dominance. Presiding over it is Clementine, who is far from the biggest cow of the bunch, or the strongest, and who doesn’t even have horns. She is, however, the oldest, and seems to have earned the regard of her peers by dint of life experience and her dedication to maintaining good relations between herd members.

“Clementine is always looking around to make sure everyone’s OK,” says Tessier. Theo does this too, but when tensions start to rise, it’s Clementine who steps in. “She’s an active peacekeeper,” Tessier says. “She’s just going to get in there and say, ‘Don’t go over that line.‘ And everyone listens to her, though she’s an older, smaller cow. It keeps things in balance.”

I volunteer at Peace Ridge, although with the goats, not the cows. To be honest, the cows have always made me a bit nervous. They’re such massive creatures, and, like many folks, I don’t have much familiarity with them. When Tessier told me about Clementine and the herd’s organization, I was surprised.

It wasn’t that I considered cows stupid—an old stereotype so ingrained that it’s actually a subdefinition of the word—but their social complexities didn’t ever come to my mind. “Most people’s perception of them is as plodding herd animals with little individual personality and very simple social relationships or preferences,” wrote ethologist Lori Marino of the Kimmela Center for Animal Advocacy in a review of cow cognition. That about summed my assumptions up—until I heard Clementine’s story.

A skeptical reader, however, might be inclined to dismiss Tessier’s observations as anecdotal. So what does science have to say?

There’s a fair bit of research on cow cognition and relationships. One especially delightful study from the University of Cambridge, which measured their reactions while learning to open a gate, described how finding a solution produced a Eureka!-style moment of excitement. It should come as no surprise that cows prefer the company of some individuals more than others. But it may be more surprising to learn just how important licking is to them, reducing tension and helping individuals bond, like grooming in primates.

As for social organization, biologists have long described hierarchies in the few feral herds that exist across the world, providing a glimpse into how cows would live in a natural setting. Those groups are matriarchal and led by elder females, just as Tessier has observed. Hierarchies have also been observed in farmed cows, but there are no records in either feral or farmed cows of the sort of peacekeeping behaviors Tessier describes.

“There is not much work on this,” says Cédric Sueur, an ethologist at the University of Strasbourg who has studied group dynamics in European bison—in whom he documented female leadership and collective decision-making—and their farmed cow relatives. Still, says Sueur, “I do not exclude that [such behaviors] exist.” It might simply be that researchers haven’t looked for them or, as Tessier believes, that groups of cattle are too unstable and unnatural for their innate sociality to flourish.

Whether cows are raised for beef or milk, and whether they’re kept on small farms or large-scale operations, turnover within herds is far greater than at Peace Ridge or in the wild. Collectives don’t remain intact for years. “When a farmer changes out their stock, they’re interrupting whatever social hierarchy was allowed to happen,” says Tessier. “It might be that every six months to a year, members are taken away. That breaks up relationships you might have been able to observe.”

Christian Nawroth, an ethologist at the Research Institute for Farm Animal Biology in Germany, calls this “a very important point” and agrees that captivity in production settings “decreases the possibility of expressing social behavior.” He also points to research on reconciliation and conflict resolution in domestic pigs and in goats. “Settling disputes is probably something we could observe in cows,” Nawroth says.

The next question would be whether that reflects care for the well-being of other cows and even a conscious attempt at maintaining a herd’s good vibes. Tessier is certain that this is so, although an alternative explanation, says Nawroth, is that dominant individuals “want to have it quiet in the pen” and decrease the risk of injury to four-legged bystanders. 

Perhaps research on stable herds at sanctuaries will someday resolve that question. Indeed, the new research program at Farm Sanctuary in New York was launched with the belief that more can be learned—not just about cows, but about all farmed animal species—at sanctuaries than in dairy stalls and livestock pens. In the meantime, Clementine will be watching over her herd, keeping the peace, as her own caretakers understand.

We hope you enjoyed Brandon Keim’s column, Pet Psychic. Check back on PopSci+ in April for the next article.

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Despite a series of devastating rain storms during December 2022 and January 2023, large portions of the western United States are still experiencing drought conditions. The US is just one of multiple countries facing abnormally dry conditions that are being exacerbated by human-made global warming. 

[Related: The nation’s largest water supplier declares a ‘drought emergency’ ahead of 2023.]

The eastern Horn of Africa (Somalia, Ethiopia, and Kenya) is forecast to face a sixth consecutive poor rainy season this spring which is intensifying the worst drought the region has seen in 40 years. (There are typically two rainy seasons per year: March to May and October to December.)

The drought is primarily due to a combination of warmer temperatures changing the climate and a weather phenomenon called La Niña. La Niña can temporarily reconfigure weather patterns around the globe and bring more rainfall to places such as Indonesia and Australia while reducing rain in eastern Africa.

In August 2022, a rare third consecutive La Niña was forecast by the United Nations’ World Meteorological Organization (WMO). “The worsening drought in the Horn of Africa and southern South America bears the hallmarks of La Niña, as does the above average rainfall in South-East Asia and Australasia. The new La Niña Update unfortunately confirms regional climate projections that the devastating drought in the Horn of Africa will worsen and affect millions of people,” said WMO Secretary-General Petteri Taalas in a statement. 

A separate WMO report from November 2022 showed that the La Niña conditions are persisting. 

The drought has triggered widespread food insecurity, with Somalia on the brink of famine. Over 1.3 million people in Somalia have been forced to leave their farms and seek food elsewhere.  In Kenya, meteorologists pointed to climate change’s involvement in the crisis.

“It is time we started including climate change as a factor in our development plans. The current drought which we warned about some years ago has wider ramifications on the social economic conditions of the region including peace, security, and political stability,” Evans Mukolwe, former director of the Kenyan and UN weather agencies, told The Associated Press.

[Related: La Niña is likely back for another unpredictable winter.]

Countries in South America are also facing similar La Niña driven dryness. Since 2019, the central region of the continent has seen drought conditions. Neighboring Uruguay declared an agricultural emergency in October 2022 and the drought has also hit Argentina’s soy, corn, and wheat crops. The country is the world’s top exporter of both soy oil and meal and third for corn and the dry conditions have led to sharp cuts in harvest forecasts. 2022 was Central Argentina’s driest year since 1960. 

Scientists from the World Weather Attribution (WWA) conducted a rapid report on the drought, concluding that climate change is not directly reducing the rainfall here, but the high temperatures are likely worsening the already dry conditions. Last week, Argentina and surrounding countries saw a heat wave which quickly evaporated some of the precipitation that had fallen during January and earlier this month. 

“Higher temperatures in the region in late 2022, which have been attributed to climate change, decreased water availability in the models,” the WWA wrote in their report. “Climate change probably reduced water availability over this period, increasing agricultural drought, although the study could not quantify this effect.”
WWA uses observations and climate models to see if climate change factors are present in extreme weather and compare what is happening now with what has happened in the past.

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It’s no secret that agriculture is a huge source of climate-change inducing greenhouse gasses. From methane in beef production to synthetic fertilizers, there’s a lot of work to be done in making our food systems climate-friendly.

Manure and synthetic fertilizers emit the equivalent of 2.6 gigatonnes of carbon annually—enough to fill 26,000 aircraft carriers by weight. That’s more than global shipping and aviation combined.  

[Related: Compost can help protect us from food poisoning.]

Organic fertilizers include manure, compost, or bone meal and are derived from animal or plant sources.  Synthetic fertilizers, which often contain only a few nutrients lost from the soil, instead go through a manufacturing process, even if many come from naturally occurring mineral deposits.

But how much is produced, hasn’t really been quantified. 

“Incredibly, we don’t actually know how many chemicals we produce globally, where they end up, where and how they accumulate, how many emissions they produce, and how much waste they generate,” said André Cabrera Serrenho, an environmental engineer from Cambridge’s Department of Engineering, in a statement.

While it’s necessary to reduce the amount of carbon emitted from fertilizers, it has to be done so in a way that doesn’t jeopardize global food security. Previous studies have estimated that 48 percent of the global population consumes crops that are grown using synthetic fertilizers and that the world’s population is projected to reach 9.8 billion by 2050.

For the first time, researchers have calculated and quantified the full life cycle of fertilizers, and their findings published February 9 in the journal Nature Food found that carbon emissions from fertilizers could be reduced by as much as 80 percent by 2050. 

Serrenho, an author of the study, and co-author Yunhu Gao undertook a project to accurately measure the complete impact of these fertilizers on the carbon cycle. 

“In order to reduce emissions, it’s important for us to identify and prioritize any interventions we can make to make fertilizers less harmful to the environment,” said Serrenho. “But if we’re going to do that, we first need to have a clear picture of the whole lifecycle of these products. It sounds obvious, but we actually know very little about these things.”

The team looked at data from 2019 and mapped out the global flows of manure and synthetic fertilizers and their emissions throughout their life cycles across nine regions of the world. They found that two thirds of emissions for fertilizers occurred while they were being used and not during production. 

“It was surprising that this was the major source of emissions,” said Serrenho. “But only after quantifying all emissions, at every point of the life cycle, can we then start looking at different mitigation methods to reduce emissions without a loss of productivity.”

[Related: Wastewater could be the secret to eco-friendly fertilizer.]

The authors found that the most effective mitigation tactic at the production stage would be for the industry to decarbonize the heating and hydrogen creation from the process. The fertilizers could also be mixed with nitrification inhibitors, chemicals which prevent bacteria from forming nitrous oxide. The downside is that these chemicals are likely to increase the cost of fertilizers.

“If we’re going to make fertilizers more expensive, then there needs to be some sort of financial incentive to farmers and to fertilizer companies,” said Serrenho. “Farming is an incredibly tough business as it is, and farmers aren’t currently rewarded for producing lower emissions.”

Reducing the amount of fertilizer used across the board would be the most effective way of reducing the emissions associated with them. Some of the methods the study evaluated include using water electrolysis during fertilizer production that can keep methane from forming and using nitrogen inhibitors in the fertilizer when it is in the field.  

[Related: Potty-trained cows could seriously help the planet.]

“We’re incredibly inefficient in our use of fertilizers,” said Serrenho. “We’re using far more than we need, which is economically inefficient and that’s down to farming practices. If we used fertilizer more efficiently, we would need substantially less fertilizer, which would reduce emissions without affecting crop productivity.”

While Serrenho said there are “no perfect solutions,” research like this will be critical in rethinking how food is produced and the economic incentives that work best to implement change.

“Our work gives us a good idea of what’s technically possible, what’s big, and where interventions would be meaningful,” said Serrenho. “It’s important that we aim interventions at what matters the most, in order to make fast and meaningful progress in reducing emissions.”

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The British staple beans on toast is in for a makeover. A group of researchers plan to slip faba beans inside white bread to make it more nutritious and sustainable. The product, which they’ve dubbed “beans in toast,” could hit UK shelves in the next few years if a company decides to manufacture it. 

About 96 percent of the British public eat bread, and of those, 90 percent choose white bread, according to Kantar Group, a data analytics company. Putting faba beans, also commonly called fava beans and broad beans, where the recipe calls for soy could provide Britons with a source of easily digested protein, fiber and iron, which are often low in UK diets. “We’ve chosen faba beans because they’re very particularly nutrient-rich,” says Julie Lovegrove, the leading researcher of the project and a professor of human nutrition at the University of Reading in England. She says that only 11 percent of the UK population consumes the recommended fiber intake of 30 grams a day. 

According to Lovegrove, early testing of the faba bean product resembles normal white bread. “It tastes very similar; it looks very similar,” she says. “It’s slightly darker in color, and doesn’t rise slightly as much as the white bread. But we are at the beginning of this project, so those are the challenges that we’re going to overcome. We want to make it as identical to the commercial white bread as we can.”

The researchers say that faba beans, native to northern Africa and southwestern Asia, can be grown sustainably and at low cost in the UK. “For the UK, the most sustainable plant-based protein source is the one that requires the least input for the maximum output [of protein yield],” Donal O’Sullivan, a crop science professor at the University of Reading and another one of the researchers, wrote in an email to PopSci. “It is faba bean that has the most favorable footprint.” 

[Related: To save water, Arizona farmers are growing guayule for sustainable tires]

White bread is typically made using 1 to 3 percent soya flour, grown from soybeans, which is used to whiten the bread, according to Yael Vodovotz, a food scientist and professor at the Ohio State University. Researchers would replace the soya flour and 25 percent of the wheat with faba bean flour, which they say could reduce carbon dioxide emissions from the production process by 11 percent compared to a wheat-only loaf. 

The project is an exercise in sustainable local food growth, which Lovegrove says the UK government has encouraged through funding. Most of the country’s soybeans are imported across oceans, and a sizable portion of the supply comes from the US. In fact, soybeans make up the second largest cash crop in the states behind corn, with farmers sending $27 billion worth of the commodity abroad in 2021. The bean’s prominence has led the crop to become the subject of trade politics, with China, the biggest US soy importer, instituting tit-for-tat tariffs in 2018.

US soybean production has a relatively low carbon footprint and most are grown using just precipitation, according to Jeremy Ross, a soybean agronomist and professor at the University of Arkansas. “Less than 10 percent of the total US acreage of soybean is irrigated. So a majority of the soybean acres in the US are dependent on rainfall during the growing season,” he wrote in an email to PopSci. 

[Related: Which veggie oil is most sustainable?]

But soybeans aren’t native to the UK and don’t grow well there. Faba beans, on the other hand, sprout nicely in the country. “We’re using homegrown pulses,” or dried legumes, Lovegrove says. (Only about 55 percent of food that Britons eat are grown in the country—the rest are imported.) “There’s a big drive to increase the growth of food within the UK to reduce miles traveled of the foods themselves,” she explains.

The group of researchers won £2 million in government funding to develop their beans in toast product. The project is led by a large coalition: 25 researchers from the University of Reading will work with retailers, farmers, and policymakers. There are several steps to get it started. First, the researchers will grow the faba beans and produce the flour for the substitute. Then, they will test their product and survey consumers for their opinions on it. Finally, they will model the impact of increasing dried-legume consumption on human and environmental health.

The post A new ingredient could revolutionize white bread appeared first on Popular Science.

Articles may contain affiliate links which enable us to share in the revenue of any purchases made.

This article was originally featured on Hakai Magazine, an online publication about science and society in coastal ecosystems. Read more stories like this at hakaimagazine.com.

From the shore, you have to squint to see them—the 50 or so objects that look like large black duffel bags floating in several rows near the surface of Napeague Bay in East Hampton, New York. And if it’s dark, or the wind churns up waves, you might not spot them at all. To get a better look from the beach, you really need binoculars, which is what Adam Younes uses when he wants to do a visual check of these bobbling floats marking his oyster farm. But on most days, he putters his small boat 805 meters offshore to the site, easily navigating the nine-meter channels between the rows, to check on the cages suspended just below the water’s surface. Within each cage, hundreds of oysters fatten up until their salty, soft inner bodies are big enough to be served at seaside restaurants and galas and probably aboard the yachts that occasionally sail by.

In 2016, Younes picked this four-hectare plot, about half the size of a baseball field, because it was a 10-minute drive from his house. He named his oyster farm Promised Land, a biblical reference to a peaceful resting place. The area’s shores and marshes and quietly swaying woods have always felt like heaven to him.

Yet, the name didn’t live up to reality. Younes soon found out that some people didn’t want the oysters there, including members of the coveted Devon Yacht Club who often convene in a one-story cedar-shingled building roughly half a kilometer away on the shores of Napeague Bay. Between 2018 and 2021, members from Devon and other yacht clubs, along with area residents, aired their grievances about aquaculture and oyster farms like Younes’s during a series of long, and what at times felt like deadlocked, public meetings. The meetings were part of a 10-year review of the aquaculture lease program by Suffolk County, which East Hampton is a part of. Locals, particularly those who were boaters, accused oyster farmers of obstructing access to nature with their floating gear. “We’re going to pave paradise and turn it into a parking lot,” one resident said, paraphrasing a popular antidevelopment song to make a point about floating farm gear.

Younes never imagined that his farm, his promised land, would unleash so much disapproval. More than a year later, the memories of the review continue to haunt him. “Talking about this still makes me sick and angry,” he says, with a heavy sigh. “It was an emotional fight.”

Oyster farmers across the United States and parts of Canada are being confronted by a growing population of coastal residents who are upset about where farms are going up. Along the US East Coast, as well as in other prime oyster-growing regions such as Washington State and British Columbia, tempers have flared. Coastal homeowners are making passionate speeches at local meetings and enlisting lawyers, as Devon Yacht Club did, to help appeal farm leases they deem are too close to where they live and play. “It’s probably as contentious as it’s ever been,” says Ben Stagg, who, until the end of 2022 was chief of shellfish management at the Virginia Marine Resources Commission, an agency that manages that state’s oyster leases. At one point in 2022, Stagg had about 260 lease applications to look through, and of those, 30 percent were being protested by locals, a rate that he says has generally tripled in recent years.

The disputes come just as North American interest in oysters is growing. Oysters are increasingly recognized as a sustainable seafood, and they capture their own food from the water column, benefiting the ecosystem. An oyster is like nature’s Brita pitcher: it can filter about 189 liters of water per day, removing excess nitrogen and phosphorus. As climate change progresses, oyster aquaculture could also help mitigate some of the issues coastal communities are facing, suggests Nick Ray, a biogeochemist at Cornell University in New York who does research in aquaculture. The oyster’s filtering abilities reduce pollution, and cages full of oysters serve as a living coastal buffer against storm surges and erosion, he says.

After struggling early in the pandemic, some farmers in the United States described the summer of 2021 as “bonkers” as they worked overtime to deliver oysters to customers who were craving the salty bivalves after a long period of COVID-19-induced restaurant closures. Chuck Westfall, an oyster farmer and executive of the Long Island Oyster Growers Association, says that demand was so high people kept buying even after all the premium oysters were sold, gladly snatching up those he would consider a little subpar because they hadn’t had the time to grow. Farmers are saying 2022 was another good year, though demand cooled a bit.

Unsurprisingly, potential newcomers to the industry seem to be taking note. In some areas, like Maine and North Carolina, applications for oyster farms are on the rise. In most states, farmers essentially rent water space for a set amount of time. Stagg approves leases as big as 101 hectares, roughly one-third the size of Central Park in New York City. In Suffolk County, Younes and other farmers can lease four hectares for 10 years. Many states have interactive maps that show the available space, sites the state has vetted and deemed appropriate for aquaculture (although in some places, the auditing occurred long before nearby residential development took off). A farmer submits an application for a particular site and a review process follows—resource managers like Stagg consider factors such as the farm’s size, water depth, and other nearby activity before approving the application. In some states, local residents must be notified of the proposal, and there’s a public comment period where they can chime in. But not every state allows input, and even where there are opportunities for public comment, residents often argue they are not properly informed about a prospective farm’s size, location, or methods.

Friction in the oyster world seems to stem from differing beliefs about what the water should primarily be used for: work or leisure? Is it for kayaking and boating or for producing food? Is it meant to be devoid of “eyesores” so people can look onto a smooth, glassy surface from their decks or yachts? Some people would say all of the above, that it’s all possible, but areas where those demands overlap are where the conflicts tend to erupt. In uberwealthy East Hampton, members of the Devon Yacht Club and other residents argued that Younes’s floating cages were a hazard to navigation. Curt Schade, one of the club’s former board members, says the area is heavily used for recreational boating, especially in the summer when the club runs a youth sailing program. In public review hearings, club members also made sure to mention Devon’s historical ties: they had been sailing those waters for more than 100 years. “If the cages had been on the bottom, there really would have been very little conflict,” Schade says, referring to another aquaculture method where oyster cages are anchored to the sea or bay floor, rather than floated near the surface.

Younes points out that his cages are near the surface only between June and October, which helps him get higher yields since there is more food for the oysters to feast on near the surface and he’s better able to monitor the shells and address any problems; after that, he drops the cages to the seafloor. Unfortunately, the months the cages are on the surface are also peak sailing season.

If you travel north from East Hampton across Long Island Sound, you’ll land on the southern shores of Rhode Island. Here, the landscapes feel nearly identical to East Hampton: cedar-shingled homes near smooth beaches framed by swaying beach grass. The community issues echo across the sound, too—here, the waters have also become a source of tension between some residents and oyster farmers. The sleepy town of Tiverton, tucked into the southeastern corner of the state, may not have the same concentration of monied residents as East Hampton, but people are just as adamant about protesting certain oyster farms. In the summer of 2021, dozens of yellow signs began showing up on manicured lawns in Tiverton, urging residents to Act Now!!! The signs were put up by community members who oppose a proposed oyster farm. Unlike Younes’s farm, which is accessible only via boat, the roughly half-hectare farm on the Tiverton site could be reached by wading into the relatively shallow waters of the Sakonnet River. Brothers John and Patrick Bowen, the two farmers behind the proposed site, were attracted by the alternative to running a boat to a location farther offshore and also noted the site wasn’t great for swimming or kayaking.

But some residents think the farm’s placement is actually its flaw and have differing ideas about the area’s use. “It’s a public access point with free parking, used by many to fish, kayak, and swim,” says Kenneth Mendez, a Tiverton resident. He equates the operation’s location to putting an organic farm in the middle of a public baseball field. “I think most people would say, No, we’re not okay with that,” he says. “There are other areas to farm. And this area is valued and has social good and impact for all those who use it.”

In both coastal communities, residents voice concerns that oyster farms would be privatizing and profiting from space that has always been public.

Farmers think these space concerns are overblown. “Kayakers and small boats would be able to easily navigate through our lease area,” the Bowen brothers explain by email. “Our proposal will not prevent anyone from fishing. All proposed gear will be subtidal, not visible above the waterline (except four mandatory corner marker buoys).”

Because his site is 805 meters offshore, Younes believes boats have more than enough room to go around the farm. “And they do it every day. Sometimes they even go through my site,” he says. When he submitted his public comment letter during the review process, he attached several photos. They showed bluebird skies, small waves cresting on the bay, and a smattering of sailboats, all appearing to navigate the waters around this operation with ease. At least in those still images, the farm and boats seem to coexist peacefully, all enjoying a promised land.

Other industry supporters point out that boating comes with the inherent responsibility of paying attention and navigating around objects, be it other boats or oyster farms. “If you are a recreational boater, you should be aware of hazards—there are many,” says Karen Rivara, president of the East Coast Shellfish Growers Association and an oyster farmer in Southold, New York. “Other boaters are the biggest danger, not gear.”

On the briny, unsettled surface, these disagreements can sometimes look like a class rift—a clash between the working class and coastal elites, between people who make their living in the water and those whose work has afforded them the opportunity to purchase properties, like second homes, on the water. In the past few years, there’s been an influx of people and money into many coastal towns. By some estimates, the population of Southampton, a wealthy area of New York that’s part of the Hamptons, nearly doubled in 2020 as affluent New Yorkers fled the newly circulating coronavirus. (Home prices in some areas doubled from 2020 to 2021; the median sale price in July 2022 was US $2.5-million, with several homes selling for $30-million or more.) A similar pattern unfolded in coastal communities in Rhode Island, North Carolina’s Outer Banks, and Maine.

As new residents pour in, the population shift could be ushering in people who might not have an appreciation for, or connection to, coastal economies. Although oysters have been harvested for centuries in the wild, aquaculture in its current form, with gear and floats, is comparatively new. Many people haven’t had the time to get used to it, let alone romanticize it like they do other types of marine industries. “If you go to Maine, there are far more lobster buoys per acre than there are oyster cages in Narragansett Bay,” says Jules Opton-Himmel, owner of Walrus and Carpenter Oysters in Narragansett, Rhode Island. People paint pictures of the colorful buoys or travel to see them, thinking they’re quaint, he says. Lobster harvesting is “part of the culture there, and people accept it and like it. But there’s not that cultural history [with oyster farming] here.”

Still, it’s important not to generalize—research shows that wealth is actually not a strong predictor of aquaculture support. A 2015 study from Vancouver Island University in British Columbia found that factors like affluence or even living near the water or knowing someone who works in the aquaculture industry aren’t good indicators of a person’s attitude toward oyster farming. Instead, attitudes seem to vary by community, says study coauthor Grant Murray, now a marine social scientist at Duke University in North Carolina. “And we don’t really know why that is … it could be due to local culture or networks of people who talk to each other and convince one another that it’s good or bad.”

The tensions between residents and farmers bring up a larger question: If the water is a public good, whose needs and wants will ultimately prevail? And who gets to decide that? In Virginia and other states, resource managers like Stagg make the call. If a lease is protested, Stagg would try to work with both parties to come up with a compromise, becoming less like a government official and more like a marriage counselor. Typically, after some back and forth between farmers and residents, he was able to scooch leases a few meters over. It doesn’t sound like a lot, but it’s often enough to appease both parties. But not every alternate location will work. To the general public, water may look like water pretty much anywhere you go. But factors such as depth, currents, temperature, and sediment composition can vary even within just a few meters and can impact the success of an oyster-growing site.

Stagg also admits that finding common ground between residents and farmers is getting harder. “I’ve been doing this a long time, and I think I am pretty good at trying to negotiate these [leases]. But it’s getting really difficult because people really dig in pretty, pretty hard,” he says. “People don’t have unfettered access to the water like they did in the past. And they don’t like that.” He started to turn down lease applications in areas he thought would be contentious.

If resource managers like Stagg can’t help opposing groups find a compromise, cases usually move on to the local city council or courts, where they can get stuck as appeals and counter-appeals are volleyed between parties. The process becomes costly, time consuming, and emotionally taxing. When community members objected to one of Opton-Himmel’s leases in Rhode Island, he tried to resolve things the traditional way: by going to local meetings to explain his business plan. But his neighbors remained unsatisfied, and they hired an attorney. So he did, too. Yet neither group would budge.

One day, Opton-Himmel received an email from the Young Farmer Network with an ad for a mediation service; he called the number and set up an appointment. A few months later, on a July afternoon, Opton-Himmel and seven community members met with a mediator at the public library. He remembers the initial mood as tense: “Nobody shook hands, and this was before the pandemic.” But a few hours later, the tenor changed as each side got to know the other. Opton-Himmel learned that these residents had been saving for decades to retire on the water, and the view they were getting with his floating cages in the distance wasn’t the empty bay they had been daydreaming about. “And they said [to me], ‘Oh, well, we just thought you were a greedy capitalist doing an illegal thing that you knew you could get away with,’” he says. (There was a misunderstanding about how many cages he could use.) After several meetings, they reached a compromise: Opton-Himmel agreed to move his farm to another site, but he could expand and have eight times more cages. He still had to get all the necessary government approvals, but residents agreed to not protest his lease. “The mediation was the key to finding a solution,” he says. “Otherwise, we would probably still be fighting to this day.”

On Long Island, oyster farmers aren’t sure they have anything more to give. “I don’t see much room for compromise because we’ve already given up quite a bit,” says Younes. After the 10-year review process, Younes was able to keep his farm in place, but the county took away nearly 5,200 hectares of potential aquaculture cultivation zone. “Those are economic opportunities and aquaculture opportunities for the future of Suffolk County that are gone,” he says, adding that he’s heard that the exhausting review process has deterred others from setting up new farms.

States have been looking for ways to get ahead of the conflict. Instead of leasing out smaller parcels of water in increasingly developed areas, some states, like North Carolina, are considering designating aquaculture zones in more remote areas—say, 50 or 100 hectares of water subdivided into several farms. While this idea could mitigate conflicts between neighbors, Murray says that there are risks to lumping everyone together. Storms and water-quality issues, for example, could destroy entire oyster yields. And there’s no guarantee that those remote shorelines won’t eventually become desired by people looking for their own slice of coastal paradise, the next promised land. In Tiverton, Mendez, an opponent of the current location of the Bowen farm, supports something relatively more modest: that oyster farms be placed at least 305 meters from the shore. Similar efforts have been successful in places like New Zealand, which requires a much more significant five-kilometer buffer between the coast and aquaculture farms. (Of course, this solution means that farmers are burning more fuel to get to their sites.) But even that cushion may not appease dissenters: in Suffolk County, Younes and other farmers are already required to be at least 305 meters offshore, and that regulation clearly hasn’t been enough to dodge conflict.

As coastal communities continue to squeeze in more people, more yachts, and more recreation, states might have to revisit current aquaculture programs to see what’s viable now. Farmers and residents may find that compromise is easier when they channel the creatures they’re fighting over. Not by hardening their shells, but instead by softening their stances about what can and can’t be done on the water so that they see each other as neighbors who can coexist, rather than opponents. Oysters can be an important protein for the future and a buffer against some climate change impacts only if society can balance competing interests.

This article first appeared in Hakai Magazine and is republished here with permission.

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Plastics produced from plants are often considered less environmentally damaging than plastics made from petrochemicals. But scientists are warning that we should be careful making such assumptions.

A new literature review examining the results of around 20 scientific papers has found that bio-based plastics, most of which are made from cornstarch, can be just as toxic as their conventional cousins when dumped in coastal environments. The review also shows that plastics marked as biodegradable often fail to break down in these environments.

The paper highlights the lack of research into the environmental toxicity of bioplastics. The authors write that, for now at least, regulations on bioplastics need to be as tight as those for petroleum-based polymers.

Bioplastic production has boomed in recent years on the back of concerns around plastic waste and the carbon footprint of plastic production. According to European Bioplastics, an industry association, 2.4 million tonnes of bioplastics was made globally in 2021—a number expected to triple to around 7.5 million tonnes by 2026. This represents less than two percent of global plastic production.

The term bioplastics is quite broad. It covers both bio-based plastics, which are made from plants or other non–fossil fuel organic matter rather than petroleum, and biodegradable plastics, whether bio-based or made from fossil fuels.

Bioplastics also aren’t necessarily different from conventional plastics, says Martin Wagner, an environmental toxicologist at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology who was not involved in the review but whose work was included in the analysis. While some bioplastics are new chemical compounds, others are chemically identical to conventional plastics, just produced from carbon derived from plants rather than fossil fuels.

While acknowledging that there is not a lot of data available, and that much of it focuses on the same few bioplastics (such as polylactic acid and polyhydroxyalkanoates, which are mainly produced from starch from plants such as maize, sugar cane, and soybean), the review’s authors suggest that the toxic effects of bioplastics on marine and estuarine life can be of a similar magnitude as those from conventional plastics.

For instance, some of the studies included in the review show that both conventional plastics and bio-based plastics can affect how well mussels attach to rocks. They can also affect the activity of enzymes in the mussels’ digestive systems and gills, and provoke an immune response and kick-start detoxification mechanisms.

However, bioplastics also come with their own unique problems. Bio-based plastics, the review shows, can affect the marine environment in different ways than conventional plastic. For instance, two studies showed that plastic bags derived from cornstarch decrease the level of dissolved oxygen in marine substrates. The cornstarch plastic also causes the seafloor substrate to heat up. The authors of one paper suggest that the bioplastic had a sealing effect on the sediment.

The failure of plastics certified as biodegradable or compostable to break down under marine conditions is not particularly surprising. Degradable bioplastics are designed to break down and convert at least 90 percent of their material into carbon dioxide under specific composting, industrial, and laboratory conditions, not on the beach or the seafloor. But the reviewed studies found that in realistic marine conditions, degradation rates vary hugely depending on the thickness and type of bioplastic. While some items completely degraded or disintegrated in a few months, others could take years to completely degrade.

Wagner says the attitude that some people hold that everything that is biological is better is problematic and based on wishful thinking. “I think the underlying assumption that just because it is bio-based or biodegradable that makes it safer needs to be challenged because there is just no logical reasoning why that should be,” he explains.

Elena Fabbri, an expert in plastic toxicity at the University of Bologna in Italy who also wasn’t involved in the review, agrees: “It’s not correct to say that bioplastics are necessarily safer.”

Bioplastic development has focused on renewable feedstocks and sustainability, Wagner claims, but neglected the products’ sometimes unique safety issues. He says his work on bioplastics, such as starch-based and bamboo-based plastics, has shown that they contain toxic chemicals comparable to those in petroleum-based plastics. These toxic compounds could be either additives used to improve the functional performance of plastic, or substances added unintentionally, such as byproducts created during manufacturing, he explains.

Fabbri echoes Wagner, highlighting that many bioplastics contain thousands of additives. She adds that a large part of the problem is that manufacturers do not have to list the additives they use. This makes it challenging for researchers to identify these chemicals, she adds, as they do not know what they are looking for.

While Fabbri believes bioplastics are a good innovation, she says we need to be certain they are safe and sustainable—and this includes the products of their degradation.

“If you produce bioplastic as a safer plastic, you should also ensure that everything coming out from those plastics—the microplastics, the fragments, and the leaching compounds—are safer as well,” Fabbri explains.

This article first appeared in Hakai Magazine and is republished here with permission.

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Seaweed is way more than just a slimy plant that feels gross to swim through. It can truly do it all. It’s one of the most abundant plants on the planet, a dietary staple for millions around the world, soaks up carbon, could be used to replace plastics, and is even a more eco-friendly cow feed (more seaweed means less methane in cow farts, according to some research). 

More seaweed farming is also a potentially major part of the solution for global food insecurity. A study published January 26 in the journal Nature Sustainability is shedding new light on just how much.

[Related: Why seaweed is a natural fit for replacing certain plastics.]

“Our study found that expanding seaweed farming could help reduce demand for terrestrial crops and reduce global agricultural greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) by up to 2.6 billion tonnes of CO2-equivalent per year,” Scott Spillias, a PhD candidate from the University of Queensland in Australia (UQ) and co-author of the study, said in a statement. “Seaweed has great commercial and environmental potential as a nutritious food and a building block for commercial products including animal feed, plastics, fibers, diesel and ethanol.”

The team used the Global Biosphere Management Model, which assesses competition for land use between agriculture, bioenergy, and forestry, to map out the potential of farming more of the 34 commercially important seaweed species. It also estimated the potential environmental benefits on a range of scenarios based on water and fertilizer use, GHG emissions, changes in land use, and projected changes in species presence by 2050.

“In one scenario where we substituted 10 percent of human diets globally with seaweed products, the development of 110 million hectares of land for farming could be prevented,” said Spillias. “We also identified millions of available hectares of ocean within global exclusive economic zones (EEZs), where farming could be developed.”

EEZs are areas of the sea where a sovereign state has special rights regarding the exploration and use of the marine resources in the area. At up to 114 million hectares suitable to farm seaweed, the largest suitable ocean was the Indonesian EEZ, according to the study. The Australian EEZ also holds potential and is home to at least 22 commercially viable seaweed species and about 75 million hectares of suitable ocean.

According to Spillias, many of the native species of seaweed living in Australian waters haven’t been studied from a commercial production perspective.

“The way I like to look at this is to think about ancestral versions of everyday crops – like corn and wheat – which were uninspiring, weedy things,” Spillias said. “Through thousands of years of breeding we have developed the staple crops that underpin modern societies and seaweed could very well hold similar potential in the future.”

[Related: Putting cows on a seaweed diet helps curb their methane burps.]

Some of the main concerns with expanding seaweed farming include the ropes and other gear used in aquaculture that potentially lead to entanglement of some marine mammals, the risk of certain species turning invasive, and ensuring that enough sunlight continues to reach below the surface.

The team points out that expanding seaweed production would need to be carried out with care, to avoid bringing some of the problems from the land into the ocean. 

“Our study points out what could be done to address some of the mounting problems of global sustainability facing us,”said co-author Eve McDonald-Madden, a research fellow at QU’s School of Earth and Environmental Sciences, in a statement. “But it can’t be implemented without exercising extreme caution.” 

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After years of unfulfilled promises, presidential pressure, and jailbreaking workarounds, it appears John Deere is finally opening up its high-tech farming equipment to farmers’ right to repair—with a major caveat. Per a joint announcement released Sunday alongside the American Farm Bureau Federation (AFBF), the machinery maker has entered into a memorandum of understanding (MOA) that opens up its software, documentation, and tools to farmers and third-party repair providers. 

As The Wall Street Journal notes, however, the long sought-after concession can be withdrawn at any point following the introduction of state or federal right to repair legislation. The MOA between Deere and the farmer advocacy group includes a stipulation that allows both parties to terminate the agreement in the event that either state or federal right to repair laws go into effect.

[Related: John Deere tractors are getting the jailbreak treatment from hackers.]

According to AFBF President Zippy Duvall, the new MOA “ensures that our farmers can repair their equipment and have access to the diagnostic tools and product guides so that they can find the problems and find solutions for them,” while setting up the opportunity “to really work with John Deere on a personal basis.”

Deere’s new agreement with the AFBF also appears to offer a potential alternative to federal and state regulators opening up wider markets via right to repair laws by offering a template for other consumer groups and businesses. Although the consumer rights’ campaign is long associated with items like smartphones, laptops, and tablets, owners of countless products—including industrial agricultural harvesters—have also argued for their ability to access the software and tools needed for customization and everyday issues. Meanwhile, companies such as Deere have countered these claims citing concerns over safety and hacking, such as 2021’s ransomware attack on JBS Meat.

[Related: Microsoft is making it easier for customers to repair devices. Will other companies follow?]

Part of the deal, however, requires that the ABFB promises it will begin encouraging “state Farm Bureau organizations to recognize” their memorandum with Deere while also “refrain[ing] from introducing, promoting, or supporting federal or state ‘Right to Repair’ legislation.” The AFBF also states it intends to pursue similar agreements with other manufacturers.

As part of the MOA, the AFBF and Deere will meet “at least semiannually” to review potential updates to the agreement, address various operational concerns, and review any changes across the country’s right to repair legislation landscape.

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This story was originally published by Grist. You can subscribe to its weekly newsletter here.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has proposed new standards for how much of the nation’s fuel supply should come from renewable sources. 

The proposal, released last month, calls for an increase in the mandatory requirements set forth by the federal Renewable Fuel Standard, or RFS. The program, created in 2005, dictates how much renewable fuels — products like corn-based ethanol, manure-based biogas, and wood pellets — are used to reduce the use of petroleum-based transportation fuel, heating oil, or jet fuel and cut greenhouse gas emissions. 

The new requirements have sparked a heated debate between industry leaders, who say the recent proposal will help stabilize the market in the coming years, and green groups, which argue that the favored fuels come at steep environmental costs. 

Below is a Grist guide to this growing debate, breaking down exactly what these fuels are, how they’re created, and how they would change under the EPA’s new proposal:

The fuels

Renewable fuel is an umbrella term for the bio-based fuels mandated by the EPA to be mixed into the nation’s fuel supply. The category includes fuel produced from planted crops, planted trees, animal waste and byproducts, and wood debris from non-ecological sensitive areas and not from federal forestland. Under the RFS, renewable fuels are supposed to replace fossil fuels and are used for transportation and heating across the country, and are supposed to emit 20 percent fewer greenhouse gasses than the energy they replace.

Under the new EPA proposal, renewable fuels would increase by roughly 9 percent by the end of 2025 — an increase of nearly 2 billion gallons. The new EPA proposal will set a target of almost 21 billion gallons of renewable fuels in 2023, which includes over 15 billion gallons of corn ethanol. By 2025, the EPA hopes to have over 22 billion gallons of different renewable fuel sources powering the nation. 

Advanced biofuel, a type of renewable fuel, includes fuel created from crop waste, animal waste, food waste, and yard waste. This also includes biogas, a natural gas produced from the methane created by animal and human waste. Advanced biofuel can also include fuels created from sugars and starches, apart from ethanol. 

In its newest proposal, the EPA suggests a roughly 14 percent increase in the use of these fuels from 2023 to 2024 and a 12 percent increase the year after that. The EPA wants roughly 6 billion gallons of advanced biofuel in the marketplace by this year.

Nestled inside of the advanced biofuel category is biomass-based diesel, a fuel source created from vegetable oils and animal fats. This fuel can also be created from oils, waste, and sludge created in municipal wastewater treatment plants. Under the new EPA proposal, the agency is suggesting a 2 percent year-over-year increase in these fuels by the end of 2025, which equals a final amount of nearly three billion gallons.

Cellulosic biofuel, another type of renewable fuel, is a liquid fuel created by “crops, trees, forest residues, and agricultural residues not specifically grown for food, including from barley grain, grapeseed, rice bran, rice hulls, rice straw, soybean matter,” as well as sugarcane byproducts, according to the 2005 law.

“In the interim period, there’s going to be a need for lower carbon, renewable liquid fuels”

Geoff Cooper, president and CEO of the Renewable Fuel Association

The EPA’s recent proposal aims for nearly double the amount of the use of these fuels by 2024. Then a 50 percent increase the year after, equivalent to 2 billion gallons. 

The new RFS proposal also hopes to create a more standardized pathway for renewable fuels to be used in powering electric vehicles, with more and more drivers turning to EVs in recent years. 

“We are pretty pleased with what the EPA proposed for 2023 through 2025,” Geoff Cooper, president and CEO of the Renewable Fuel Association, an industry group whose members primarily include ethanol producers, but also represent biogas and biomass producers, told Grist. 

Cooper said that the EPA and the Biden administration recognize that alternative fuels are a growing and needed sector while the country tries to move away from fossil fuels. Setting standards for the next three years will help the biofuels industry grow, said Cooper, who predicted more ethanol, biomass, or biogas producers will emerge in the coming years. 

“I think the administration recognizes that you’re not going to electrify everything overnight,” Cooper said, “and in the interim period, there’s going to be a need for lower-carbon, renewable liquid fuels.”

The controversy

While renewable fuel standards have gained a stamp of approval from industry producers and the federal government, environmental groups see increased investment in ethanol, biomass, and biogas as doubling down on dirty fuel. 

“It’s not encouraging because it continues on the false premise that biofuels, in general, are a helpful pathway to meeting our climate goals,” Brett Hartl, government affairs director for the nonprofit environmental group Center for Biological Diversity. 

Hartl argues that investing in increased corn production to fuel ethanol will continue harmful agricultural practices that erode soil and dump massive amounts of pesticides on corn crops, which causes increased water pollution and toxic dead zones across the country and the Gulf of Mexico. The United States is the world’s largest producer of corn, with 40 percent of the corn produced used for ethanol. 

A study released earlier this year from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that when demand for corn goes up, caused by an increase in blending requirements from the RFS, prices increase as well, which causes farmers to add more fertilizer products, created by fossil fuels, to crops. The EPA’s own internal research has also shown greenhouse gas emissions over the next three years will grow with the increase in blending requirements from the federal mandate.

The Center for Biological Diversity has been critical of the EPA’s past support of renewable fuel without a calculation of the total environmental impacts of how the fuel is produced and is currently in legal battles with the federal agency. They’re not alone in their critiques. 

Tarah Heinzen, legal director for Food & Water Watch, a nonprofit environmental watchdog group, said in a statement that an increase in both industrial corn production and biogas, a fuel created from animal and food waste, are not part of a clean energy future. 

“Relying on dirty fuels like factory farm gas and ethanol to clean up our transportation sector will only dig a deeper hole,” Heinzen said. “The EPA should recognize this by reducing, not increasing, the volume requirements for these dirty sources of energy in the Renewable Fuel Standard.” 

Alternative fuels, like biogas and biomass (a fuel created from trees and wood pulp), have gained steam thanks to the ethanol boom of the renewable fuel category. The biogas industry is set to boom thanks to tax incentives created by the Inflation Reduction Act. 

Biomass is a growing industry in the South, with wood pellet mills popping up in recent years. Scientists from across the globe have decried the industry’s suggestion that burning trees for electricity is carbon neutral, with 650 scientists signing a recent letter to denounce the industry’s claims.

The world’s largest producer of wood pellet biomass energy has come under fire from a whistleblower who said the company uses whole trees to create electricity, despite the company’s claims of sustainably harvesting only tree limbs to produce energy. Wood pellet facilities have faced opposition from local governments and federal legislators, with community members in Springfield, Massachusetts successfully blocking a permit for a new biomass facility in November. 

Despite concerns from environmental groups, the forecasted demands of the EPA show that the nation is pushing for more of these fuels in the coming years. This past spring, a bipartisan group of Midwestern governors asked the EPA for a permanent waiver to sell higher blends of ethanol year-round, despite summer-time smog created by the higher blend of renewable fuel.

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The cost of putting food on the table keeps going up in the United States, especially for vegetables. According to the US Labor Department’s most recent producer price index data, vegetable prices saw a 38 percent jump in November from October’s prices. The cost of veggies is more than 80 percent higher compared to November 2021 prices.

Climate change has played a prominent role in the shortages, according to scientists. The western United States is in the grips of a historic 23 year-long mega drought that has drastically lowered water levels in the Colorado River, which is shrinking. According to NOAA, as of October 2022, there have been more than a dozen weather or climate disaster events that have resulted $1 billion in losses in each instance.

[Related: The numbers show just how devastatingly dry the Western US is right now.]

According to reporting from Bloomberg, the state of Arizona produces 90 percent of the country’s leafy greens annually from November through March, and this year’s crop production was hit hard by the drought. Arizona will also lose one-fifth of its share of water from the Colorado River next year.

California is the US’ top agricultural producer and has lost about $3 billion due to the drought. “There’s just not enough water to grow everything that we normally grow,” Don Cameron, president of the State Board of Food and Agriculture, told the Times of San Diego.

Climate change was front and center at this year’s Colorado River Water Users Association conference, which is normally a largely academic three-day event. “The Colorado River system is in a very dire condition,” declared Dan Bunk, a U.S. Bureau of Reclamation water manager. “Flows during the past 23-year period are the lowest in the past 120 years and (among) the lowest in more than 1,200 years,” Bunk told the webinar audience.

According to Bunk, two of the largest reservoirs on the Colorado River are at historically low levels. Lake Mead, located behind the Hoover Dam on the Nevada-Arizona state line is at 28 percent capacity, compared to 100 percent in mid-1999. Lake Powell, which is formed by the Glen Canyon Dam on the Arizona-Utah border was last full in June 1980, and is at 25 percent capacity today.

Stormy weather has also affected this year’s crop yields. In Florida, the devastating Hurricane Ian and late-season Hurricane Nicole cost the state almost $2 billion.

“Every year the farmers who feed our nation get smarter and more resilient, but it’s increasingly stressful to adapt to the extreme variability they face,” Erica Kistner-Thomas from US Department of Agriculture’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture, told USA Today. “One year they’ll have the best year ever and then the next year they’ll be hit with a major flooding event or drought.”

[Related: Rain storms have gotten more intense across most of the US.]

Additionally, University of Wisconsin, Madison agriculture and applied economics professor Paul Mitchell told USA Today, “crops are more resilient to dry weather than they were 20 years ago.” He added that as these extreme events devastating crops happen more and more frequently, the crops won’t be able to adapt quickly enough.

“US agricultural productivity is rising, but it’s not becoming more resilient to extremes,” Mitchell said. “When bad years start to line up, are we doing things to prepare for the unusual as it becomes more usual?”

Some ways to help save money as produce and grocery prices continue to rise are to stock up on staple items (flour, canned goods, sugar, etc.) in bulk if possible, always go to the grocery store with a list and ideas of what’s on the menu for the week, comparing prices via a supermarket’s website or app, and trying to alter your menu and use expensive items like meat more sparingly.

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If you are an avocado toast or guacamole enthusiast, there’s a good chance to tasty green goodness you’re eating was grown in Mexico. In 2019, the United States imported $28 billion worth of agricultural products from Mexico, with fresh fruit and vegetables leading the pack.

It turns out that Mexican agricultural dominance goes back centuries, long before Spanish colonization began in 1519. Before the arrival of the Spanish, the agricultural system in the Basin of Mexico, a 3,700 square mile highlands plateau in central Mexico, fed a huge population for the time. Mexico City (called Tenochtitlan) was home to as many as 3 million people, compared with 50,000 in Seville, Spain’s largest urban center.

A study published today in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) details how the Mexica, or Aztecs, were able to achieve such an accurate agricultural calendar.

[Related: Scientists still are figuring out how to age the ancient footprints in White Sands National Park.]

An accurate calendar was crucial to growing the food that fed so many people in a region with a dry spring and summer monsoons. Farmers needed advanced understanding of when these seasonal variations in the weather would arrive, since planting crops too early or too late could have been disastrous. They also needed a calendar that could adjust to leap year.

Colonial chroniclers documented the use of a calendar, but this new research shows that the Mexica used the mountains of the Basin as a solar observatory, and kept track of the sunrise against the peaks of the Sierra Nevada mountains. 

“We concluded they must have stood at a single spot, looking eastwards from one day to another, to tell the time of year by watching the rising sun,” Exequiel Ezcurra, the study’s lead author and an ecology professor from the University of California, Riverside, said in a statement.

To find the spot, the team analyzed Mexica manuscripts, particularly the ones that referred to Mount Tlaloc. The mountain at the east of the Basin had a temple at its summit. Using astronomical computer models, the team confirmed that a long causeway-like structure at the temple aligns with the rising sun on February 24. Depending upon which calendar (Gregorian or Julian) is used as a comparision, February 23 or 24 is the first day of the Aztec new year.

“Our hypothesis is that they used the whole Valley of Mexico. Their working instrument was the Basin itself. When the sun rose at a landmark point behind the Sierras, they knew it was time to start planting,” added Ezcurra.

When viewed from a fixed point on Earth, the sun doesn’t follow the same trajectory every day. During the winter, the sun runs south of the celestial equator and rises toward the southeast. As the longer days of summer approach, the sunrise moves northeast due to the Earth’s tilt. This process is called solar declination. 

This study is potentially the first to demonstrate how the Mexica were able to keep time using this principle with the sun, and the mountains as guiding landmarks. Learning about these Aztec methods offers a lesson about the importance of using a variety of techniques to solve questions about the natural world.

[Related: Severe droughts are bringing archaeological wonders and historic horrors to the surface.]

“The Aztecs were just as good or better as the Europeans at keeping time, using their own methods,” said Ezcurra.

The observatory could also have a modern function today. Historical images show that the forest is slowly climbing up Mount Tlaloc, possibly due to an increase in average temperatures at lower elevation. 

“In the 1940s the tree line was way below the summit. Now there are trees growing in the summit itself,” Ezcurra said. “What was an observatory for the ancients could also be an observatory for the 21st century, to understand global climate changes.”

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Nitrogen fertilizers play a significant role in global crop production. About half of the human population is supported by food grown with fertilizers. Although the planet’s atmosphere comprises approximately 78 percent nitrogen, it doesn’t come in a reactive form that plants can utilize. It wasn’t until 1908 that chemists developed a technique to convert nitrogen from the atmosphere into a state of synthetic nitrogen that plants could use.

This technique, called the Haber-Bosch process, is how nitrogen is captured from the air and reacted with hydrogen to produce ammonia, an effective fertilizer that plants can absorb from the soil. This process is the standard industrial procedure for making ammonia today, but it accounts for about 1.4 percent of global carbon dioxide emissions.

“The hydrogen in ammonia is sourced from fossil fuels, such as natural gas, and nitrogen is sourced from air,” says Saurajyoti Kar, a postdoctoral researcher at the Argonne National Laboratory. “Using fossil fuel as a raw material and source of energy for the conversion process increases the energy and environmental penalty of producing the nitrogen-rich fertilizer using [the] conventional production process.”

[Related: Pee makes for great fertilizer. But is it safe?]

The global ammonia market is predicted to reach $82.40 billion in 2026. Given how energy-intensive the Haber-Bosch process is, producers must take greener approaches to fulfill the increasing demand for fertilizers. In a recent Science of The Total Environment study, researchers evaluated the process of removing ammonia from wastewater and converting it into fertilizer, which can be a more sustainable alternative.

Municipal wastewater generally contains a high concentration of nitrogen and phosphorus, says Kar, who was involved in the study. At treatment facilities, the wastewater is treated to reduce this concentration and avoid issues—like eutrophication, which can lead to algae overgrowth— when it is discharged to surface water bodies, he adds.

By capturing nitrogen from wastewater, producers may avoid the energy-intensive production of ammonia. In addition, it reuses nitrogen that is already fixed in the atmosphere. “One of the ways of capturing the nitrogen at wastewater treatment facilities is by air-stripping,” says Kar. “At a certain process temperature, excess ammonia from wastewater stream transfers from liquid to gaseous phase, which can further react with acids to form stable nitrogen-rich fertilizers.”

The authors conducted a life-cycle analysis and found that air-stripping ammonia from wastewater treatment plants to make nitrogen-rich fertilizer produces six times fewer GHG emissions than the Haber-Bosch process. Air-stripping technology produces between 0.2 to 0.5 kilograms of carbon dioxide equivalent per kilogram of ammonium sulfate, which is significantly lower than 2.5 kilograms of carbon dioxide equivalent per kilogram of ammonium sulfate from the Haber-Bosch process. Using renewable energy sources for the air-stripping process may reduce emissions even further.

[Related: Bees can sense a flower’s electric field—unless fertilizer messes with the buzz.]

“Using air-stripping-based nitrogen fertilizer can reduce the greenhouse gas emissions burden from agriculture and contribute towards decarbonization goals for agriculture,” says Kar. The agriculture sector made up 11 percent of the country’s GHG emissions in 2020, including applying fertilizers.

Aside from environmental benefits, wastewater treatment facilities may also have economic upsides. Should they establish the infrastructure for an air-stripping system, the capital cost and operation costs can be surpassed by the revenue generated from selling the recovered ammonia, says Kar.

Overall, the study demonstrates that there is a more sustainable alternative to the energy-intensive nitrogen production process. Though air-stripping may produce fertilizer on a smaller scale than the standard Haber-Bosch process, recovering and reusing any amount of nitrogen still helps minimize GHG emissions and prevent pollutants from reaching water sources.

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The International Space Station is generally a pretty busy place, and this week sounds like no exception. Arriving this week aboard SpaceX’s 26th commercial resupply mission (CRM) is a host of supplies for upcoming experiments, including microbes capable of devouring plastic, developing shelf stable yogurt-like concoctions, and a crop of space tomatoes.

[Related: The ISS’s latest arrivals: a 3D printer, seeds, and ovarian cow cells.]

First up is Pseudomonas putida, the plastic-craving microorganism. Organized by SeedLabs in a collaboration with MIT Media Lab Space Exploration Initiative, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, Weill Cornell Medicine, and Harvard Medical School, the upcoming experiments will test out the microbes’ capabilities in space, potentially providing important advancements for both pollution reduction on Earth as well as uses for astronauts during future lunar and Martian explorations. As Fast Company explained earlier today, Pseudomonas putida is not only capable of breaking down PET, an extremely common plastic often used in bottling and packaging, but also turning those broken down compounds into β-ketoadipic acid, “a nylon monomer that can be made into fabric or used in existing manufacturing processes.”

Researchers are hopeful that the microbes’ development in a zero-gravity, high UV radiation-environment might actually strengthen the organisms, which would be a boon both for future space missions as well as humans’ attempts to rein in pollution here on Earth. “Studying how the bacteria fare in space also generally helps glean more information about the microbes’ biological makeup, and if they could withstand changing environmental conditions on Earth,” Fast Company adds.

Pseudomonas putida isn’t the only microscopic arrivals aboard the ISS this week. As Tech Crunch notes, astronauts are receiving additional microbes as part of “the second phase of an attempt to create a shelf-stable pre-yogurt mix that, when hydrated, results in the bacteria naturally producing a target nutrient” like glucose and other complex molecules for medications. Gaining a better understanding of how these processes develop in space could also help future explorations’ achieve greater self-sufficiency in producing meals and necessary drugs.

[Related: NASA astronaut Victor J. Glover on the cosmic ‘relay race’ of the new lunar missions.]

Speaking of meals: ISS denizens have a batch of cosmic tomatoes to enjoy. These “Red Dwarf” miniature tomatoes are part ongoing experiments aimed at growing healthy food in micro- and zero-gravity environments using only artificial lighting. While recent work focused on leafy greens like spinach, the Veg-05 project is concerned with larger products like the red fruit—yes, fruit, remember? After a 104-day growth period from seed to finished food, astronauts will reportedly get a chance to conduct their own taste test. No word on whether space-bound bacon and lettuce will be available on the ISS by then, unfortunately.

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Figuring out what to feed a seemingly ever-growing herd of US livestock is tricky. Industrial hemp, however, has grown to a value of $824 million in 2021 and creates some 24,000 tons of leftover organic matter, according to the New York Times. 

The hemp plant is the same species as a cannabis plant, except it contains 0.3 percent or lower tetrahydrocannabinol or THC. New industries making products using the less-potent varieties of THC and tough fabric or plastic alternative materials from the plants fibers have popped up since the 2018 US Farm Bill allowed its production once again. And some scientists have stared to wonder if it could be useable cow feed. 

Well, it depends on if farmers want their cows to get a little stoned.

A new study out this week in Nature Food shows how when cows get their regular feed swapped with hemp, they start to act a little silly, not unlike humans who have recently imbibed with cannabis. Compared to their peers who ate regular corn and hay feed, the hemp cows were more relaxed, yawning and salivating more often, and got into some “pronounced tongue play,” the authors write. Their eyes even got red and droopy, according to the paper. 

[Related: Potty-trained cows could seriously help the planet.]

The main reason for the paper, however, wasn’t to just see cows acting goofy. Currently, you cannot feed livestock the leftovers from hemp in the US. The stoned cow experiment took place in Germany largely to figure out if a hemp-fed cow led to a THC-filled milk. 

In this case, the milk produced actually did have too much THC to be considered safe according to guidelines set by the European Food Safety Authority. “Shortly after starting to feed the industrial hemp, health-significant amounts of delta nine THC and other cannabinoids were detectable in the milk,” according to a release. “When consuming milk and milk products with a delta nine THC content of this magnitude, the acute reference dose (ARfD) of 0.001 milligrams of THC per kilogram of body weight can be significantly exceeded in humans.”

However, the course is easily reversed—milk THC levels drop pretty soon after letting the cows sober up, and especially silly behavior stops within two days.

While having THC-tinged milk consumed by humans probably won’t be on the shelf anytime soon, feeding livestock hemp at a certain level may actually make them more relaxed and live happier, healthier lives, according to other research. This means that scientific research on stoned cows will likely be a somewhat frequent occurrence in the coming years. 

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This article originally appeared in Nexus Media News and was made possible by a grant from the Open Society Foundations.

For most of the Shinnecock Nation’s history, the waters off the eastern end of Long Island were a place of abundance. Expert fishermen, whalers and farmers, the Shinnecock people lived for centuries off the clams, striped bass, flounder, bluefish and fruit native to the area.  

Today, the area is best known as a playground for the rich, where mansions sell for tens of millions of dollars. The Shinnecock community no longer lives off the water as it once did — rapid development, pollution and warming waters have led to losses in fish, shellfish and plants that were once central to the Shinnecock diet and culture. 

That’s why Tela Troge, an attorney and member of the federally recognized tribe, started planting kelp.  

Kelp is a large, fast-growing brown seaweed that sequesters carbon and harmful pollutants. It’s also full of nutrients and is used in foods, pharmaceuticals and fertilizers—making it a big business. 

The global commercial seaweed market is valued at around $15 billion and is projected to reach $25 billion by 2028. In the United States, the kelp market is expected to quadruple by 2035, according to the Island Institute.

For the estimated 800 residents of the Shinnecock Reservation, where Troge said some families live on just $6,000 a year, kelp farming could be an economic lifeline. On one side of Shinnecock Hills, “you have billionaire’s row where some of the wealthiest people in America have homes,” Troge said. “Then, on the other side, you have Shinnecock territory, where 60 percent of us are living in complete poverty.” 

In 2019, Troge, an attorney who has represented the Shinnecock Nation in federal land rights cases, was looking for a way to create jobs and clean up Shinnecock Bay. That’s when GreenWave, a nonprofit that promotes regenerative ocean farming, approached the community about starting a kelp hatchery.

Troge and five other women from her community formed the Shinnecock Kelp Farm, the first Indigenous-run farm of its kind on the East Coast.

Greenwave’s model “so closely matched our skills, our expertise, our traditional ecological knowledge,” Troge said. The Shinnecock practiced regenerative ocean farming long before the term existed; they farmed scallops, mollusks, oysters and clams—all natural water purifiers—together with seaweed. 

This system of kelp removing nitrogen near the surface while shellfish do the same down below creates powerful water filtration, said Charles Yarish, an emeritus marine evolutionary biologist at the University of Connecticut. It’s an ancient model. “If you go into Chinese literature, even to ancient Egypt, you will see examples of those cultures having integrated aquaculture,” he said.

Kelp feeds off excess carbon dioxide, nitrogen and phosphorus. The last two are pollutants responsible for harmful algal blooms that have killed off plants and animals in Shinnecock Bay, said Christopher Gobler, a marine scientist at Stony Brook University on Long Island. Kelp blades are lined with cells containing sulfated polysaccharides, essentially chains of sugar molecules that give kelp its slimy texture. These polysaccharides bind with nitrogen and phosphorus, pulling both out of the water and dissolving the nitrogen into a compound called nitrate. The dissolved nitrogen is what makes kelp a potent natural fertilizer.

These kelp forests promote biodiversity, lessen ocean acidification and remove dissolved carbon dioxide from the water. One meta-analysis by researchers at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration found that, on average, these farms remove 575 pounds of nitrogen per acre. (Projections based on another study, from Stony Brook University, put that figure at 200 pounds of nitrogen per acre.) Seaweed aquaculture could absorb nearly 240 million tons by 2050, equal to the annual emissions from more than 50 million fossil fuel–powered cars, according to a 2021 study published in Nature.

Compared to land-based crops, kelp requires very few resources—just spores, sea, and sunlight—and far less labor and harvesting equipment, said Halley Froehlich, a marine biologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara. But, Froehlich added, kelp’s real superpower is that it grows quickly—faster than almost any other plant on the planet.

In December of 2021, Troge and her business partners started planting 20 spools of kelp off the shore of St. Joseph Villa, a retreat space just across the bay from the reservation. The villa, which offers easy access to the water, had once belonged to the Shinnecock nation. Today, it is run by a Catholic ministry known for its environmental and social justice work.

Troge and her fellow farmers ran the business out of a cabin donated by the ministry and encountered their share of challenges. It took longer than they had expected to find the right species of kelp—one that they deemed hearty enough for the hatchery. 

“We got out later than we had hoped, as December is quite late,” said Danielle Hopson-Begun, who co-founded the Shinnecock Kelp Farm. Sugar kelp is normally planted in the mid-fall, in time for a January growth spurt. 

Then they suffered outbreaks of slip gut—a type of algae that grows on sugar kelp and suffocates it. 

But by the spring of 2022, the Shinnecock women harvested 100 pounds of kelp, most of which they dried and sold as organic fertilizer. They donated their excess spores back to GreenWave, which distributed the excess to other growers. This was a small harvest compared to established kelp farms. Gobler, the marine scientist, estimated that a one-acre ocean farm could generate 70,000 pounds of kelp.

This year, the farmers plan to expand from 20 spools of kelp to 200. They are expecting a significantly larger yield and are exploring different uses for the crop, like food and cosmetics. They’re also talking with other hatcheries about exchanging spools of kelp in order to experiment with different species of seaweed. The farm is already cleaning up the area, Hopson-Begun said; since operations began she said the water appears clearer and more birds fly overhead.

As Troge and her colleagues plan ahead, they’re also looking to bring on additional staff to help manage the harvests. They plan to hire from within the Shinnecock community. “I’m just really excited about building up to the point to offer people living-wage jobs,” Troge says.

—

This article was made possible by a grant from the Open Society Foundations. Nexus Media News is an editorially independent, nonprofit news service covering climate change. Follow us @NexusMediaNews.

Iris M. Crawford is a climate journalist and the Climate Justice Sr. Editor at Nonprofit Quarterly. 

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While dams are an engineering marvel, generating energy for millions of people around the world, some of them come with negative environmental side effects, from causing more inbreeding in animals by separating their populations to harming the flow of sediment in rivers that deprives wetlands of resources.

In the Pacific Northwest, the Snake River is the mighty Columbia River’s largest tributary, and home to four controversial dams known as the Lower Snake River dams. For decades, environmentalists have been calling for their removal due in large part for the effects on the region’s salmon population. While the dams include ladders and other fish passages, they still have made it difficult for the fish to make it to the Pacific Ocean. Three of the river’s salmon species are endangered or threatened, while the area’s orca whale population is running out of salmon to eat. A 2022 report from NOAA said that rebuilding the area’s salmon population will require large-scale actions, including breaching the dams.

While every dam and related water basin is different, some existing dams could be part of a more sustainable future when water from their reservoirs is used in irrigation for farming, according to a study published today in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). The study investigates how much water storage would be needed to maximize crop irrigation without depleting water stocks or encroaching on nature, and how many people this watering technique could feed. They found that dammed reservoirs could be used to store more than 50 percent of the water needed for such irrigation.

[Related: Dams are hurting this enigmatic Australian species.]

The researchers analyzed the natural hydrological cycle (or water cycle) to see how much freshwater in both surface and groundwater bodies is created and renewed by this natural process, and how it compares to the water needs of current farmland. Through their analysis, they estimated that harnessing the full potential of storage-fed irrigation could help grow enough food to feed about 1.15 billion people around the world

The authors also found that if all of the 3,700 potential dam sites that have previously been mapped out to generate hydroelectricity throughout the globe were built and partially used for crop irrigation, they could supply enough water storage to irrigate crops for about 641 million people.

While dams have potential, the authors caution against relying on them as a major sustainable solution, due to their socio-environmental consequences. In some circumstances, dams have fragmented rivers and displaced people. They also cost more, have high levels of water evaporation, and cause ecological consequences.

“Amongst all supply and demand side options to increase food and water security, building more dams should be the last resort,” the researchers said in a joint statement.

Additionally, the authors emphasize that even if large reservoirs are built, they still would make up only a single part of the solution. They recommend serious evaluation of alternatives instead of building new dams.

According to the researchers, some alternative solutions for more environmentally sound water storage for irrigation are using small dams to harvest water, recharging groundwater systems with water from winter storms or snow melt in the spring, and better management of soil moisture on fields. The team highlights that better irrigation techniques or crops more aligned with water availability can reduce the demand for stored water.

“There is an urgent need to explore alternative water storage solutions, but we have to acknowledge that many dams are already in place,” said study lead author Rafael Schmitt, a research engineer with the Stanford Natural Capital Project, in a statement. “Our research illuminates their crucial role in ensuring food security in the future.”

Better water storage techniques using dam reservoirs would help build a more sustainable agricultural future. Farming practices in many parts of the world pollute and deplete water resources, can damage natural landscapes, and generate about one-third of global greenhouse gas emissions. Roughly two-thirds of cropland around the world depends on rainfall, and in times of drought the deficit is made up via non-sustainable water resources such as non-renewable groundwater or impeding environmental flows.

[Related: How AI could help bring a sustainable reckoning to hydropower.]

“Nutritional security is a core challenge for sustainable human development,” said study senior author Gretchen Daily, co-founder and faculty director of the Stanford Natural Capital Project, in a statement. “Our study highlights the urgent need and opportunity for nature-positive investments into irrigation and water management to reduce harmful impacts of agriculture while supporting other vital benefits of farmland and freshwater ecosystems.”

Eric Edwards, an assistant professor at North Carolina State University’s Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics who was not involved in the study told PopSci that this paper is tackling an important food production issue, “Focusing on irrigation is a key question as a changing climate will make patterns of precipitation more variable, which could affect the security of the world’s food supply.”

However, Edwards cautions that this study is not a benefit-cost analysis and that water problems are local, so more broad and global solutions are not as effective. “Individual dam projects could still cause large ecological problems or be excessively costly relative to the monetary benefits they provide,” he said. “Dams and the related irrigation water distribution infrastructure are very expensive. Often, such projects are not justified based on their improvements in agricultural production and are instead best explained as governmental subsidies to agricultural interests.”

According to Edwards, this paper can also help other researchers and policymakers conduct further study on how to better use the water basin.

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Most farmers in Pinal County, Arizona knew the water cuts were coming eventually. 

The Colorado River, a major source of water for crops, had been running at lower and lower levels, thanks to a 27-year drought intensified by climate change. And the seven US states and Mexico, that rely on the river, are promised more water than is available, causing chronic overuse of the existing supply.

When the government declared an official “shortage” on the river last year, an unprecedented step, it triggered major water cuts in the central Arizona county. And those cuts have caused some farmers in Pinal County to look for more water-efficient crops, including Will Thelander, a third generation farmer in Arizona, who is testing a crop called guayule. 

Guayule, a desert-adapted shrub pronounced “wy-oo-lee,” could be used for several products, most notably as a natural rubber for tires. And it requires only about half the water of cotton, alfalfa, and corn—the more water-intensive crops Thelander typically grows.

“What makes the plant so great for someone like me is it uses a lot less water than traditional crops,” he says.

Supporters tout its many environmental benefits. Native to the Chihuahuan Desert, it requires less water than many other crops, for one. And after it’s established, it doesn’t require any insecticides or tilling, limiting use of the chemicals and supporting carbon storage.

Guayule has caught the attention of industries that are also looking for more sustainable materials. For instance, research on the crop has been supported by tire manufacturers, most notably a multinational company Bridgestone, which hopes to expand and diversify its natural rubber supply chain.

A boon for the environment

Farmers and water managers typically measure water using acre-feet, which is the amount of water required to cover one acre of land, one foot deep. One acre-foot is about 325,851 gallons. 

Guayule requires about 2.5 acre-feet of water over 12 months. That’s about two times less water than other crops Thelander grows, like corn, which requires 4.5 acre-feet over four months. What’s more, his alfalfa, a plant usually turned into animal feed, uses 6 acre-feet over about eight months, while the big yields of cotton he grows, typically requires 5 to 5.5 acre-feet over five months. 

What gives guayule a leg up over these other thirsty crops is its high drought tolerance.  

“Guayule is a wonderful alternative, because it’s not a crop that will die if you fail to water it a couple of days late, or even a couple of weeks late, or in some cases a couple of months late,” Peter Ellsworth says, a professor of entomology and integrated pest management specialist at the University of Arizona. “So it makes it uniquely adapted to our production region.”

[Related: Artificial intelligence could help farmers water only the thirsty plants]

For the past two decades, Ellsworth has worked on behalf of agricultural industries, including with guayule.  He explains that guayule also provides other environmental co-benefits. For instance, lygus bugs ostensibly don’t hurt guayule—instead, preferring to infest cotton. Because of this, Ellsworth has discussed landscape arrangements that place guayule close to cotton, to act as a kind of protective barrier that soaks up the lygus bugs and reduce pressure, and insecticide use, on the cotton crop. While guayule is vulnerable to other insect damage and weed competition in its early growing stages,established plants grow much more resilient to pests and won’t require additional spraying. 

The plant also acts as a nursery, attracting and potentially supplying important pollinators and  natural enemies of pests, such as predatory insects and parasitoids, to the rest of the agriculture system, Ellsworth says.

Guayule is a perennial crop, meaning it’s harvested once every two years. And it doesn’t require any replanting once it’s already been established, which reduces the number of tractors needed and the amount of carbon pulled out of the soil. The low maintenance makes it ideal for farmers—particularly those in arid, drought-stricken areas of the southwest. The farmers working with the crop right now are almost exclusively in Pinal County, where Colorado River water cuts were the most severe, and just south in Pima County.

“You’re not out there disturbing the ground, except for once every two years, when you’re coming through with some harvest equipment to chop it off and bring it in,” Thelander says.

Sustainability and stability for farmers

Since 2019, Thelander has been collaborating with Bridgestone, a Japanese company that’s one of the largest tire manufacturers in the world, is sponsoring most of the research for guayule in Pinal County. The company has made a recent push to expand and diversify its renewable resources—and guayule has several appealing qualities over other sources. Most of their natural rubber right now comes from hevea rubber trees in southeast Asia, which seem to be vulnerable because of changing farmer interest, world conflict, and other factors, Ellsworth says. And, he explains, although it would require more intense processing than hevea trees, developing a tire manufacturing process out of guayule would help mitigate the reliance on a less reliable rubber source.

As one of the test farmers, Thelander is currently growing 84 acres of guayule, but he says the company hopes to ramp up production of the crop to 300 acres by next year, 2,000 acres by 2024, and eventually have 25,000 acres in production by 2027.

[Related: Researchers are using tomato peels and eggshells to make tires]

However, just because guayule is a more water-efficient crop, it doesn’t necessarily mean farmers will use less water in general. Total water use will depend on how many acres of guayule and other crops are grown and how much groundwater is available to farmers. Production of guayule is still relatively small and farmers tend to be skeptical, Ellsworth says.

“Growers are, much like scientists, they’re skeptics, and they always want to see proven technologies,” he says. “So there’s always some barriers to getting them to adopt something entirely different because there’s risk associated with that.”

But ultimately, the lower water requirement may allow growers to put more of their acres to use, instead of fallowing them, which is what Ellsworth says is happening now.

During a recent meeting at the Bridgestone facility in Eloy, Arizona, Thelander noted the presence of local growers in attendance. He says there’s been a growing interest in guayule among fellow farmers. 

“Farmers are definitely interested. And they’re getting contracts put together,” Thelander says. “You have a billion dollar company like Bridgestone behind something. And they’re guaranteeing prices. It can provide stability for a farmer.”

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Bees are well-versed in the unspoken language of flowers. These buzzing pollinators are in tune with many features of flowering plants—the shape of the bulbs, the diversity of colors, and their alluring scents—which bees rely on to tell whether a reward of nectar and pollen is near. But bees can also detect signals that go beyond sight and smell. The tiny hairs covering their bodies, for instance, are ultra-sensitive to electric fields that help bees identify flowers. These electric fields can influence how bees forage—or, if those fields are artificially changed, even disrupt that behavior.

Today in the journal PNAS Nexus, biologists found that synthetic spray fertilizers can temporarily alter electric cues of flowers, a shift that causes bumblebees to land less frequently on plants. The team also tested a type of neonicotinoid pesticide—known to be toxic and detrimental to honeybee health—called imidacloprid, and detected changes to the electric field around flowers. Interestingly, the chemicals did not seem to impact vision and smell cues, hinting that this lesser-known signal is playing a greater role in communication. 

“Everything has an electric field,” says Ellard Hunting, lead study author and sensory biophysicist at the University of Bristol. “If you are really small, small weak electric fields become very profound, especially if you have lots of hairs, like bees and insects.” 

[Related: A swarm of honeybees can have the same electrical charge as a storm cloud]

Biologists are just beginning to understand how important electric signals are in the world of floral cues. To distinguish between more and less resource-rich flowers within a species, bees, for instance, can recognize specific visual patterns on petals, like spots on the surface, and remember them for future visits. Shape of the bloom also matters—larger, more open flowers might be an easier landing pad for less agile beetles, while narrow tube-shaped bulbs are hotspots for butterflies with long mouthparts that can reach nectar. Changes in humidity around a flower have also been found to influence hawkmoths, as newly opened flowers typically have higher humidity levels.   

An electrical cue, though, is “a pretty recent thing that we found out about,” says Carla Essenberg, a biologist studying pollination ecology at Bates College in Maine who was not involved in the study. A 2016 study found that foraging bumblebees change a flower’s electric field for about 1 to 2 minutes. The study authors suggested that even this short change might be detectable by other passerby bees, informing them the flower was recently visited—and has less nectar and pollen to offer. 

A flower’s natural electric field is largely created by its bioelectric potential—the flow of charge produced by or occurring within living organisms.  But electric fields are a dynamic phenomenon, explains Hunting. “Flowers typically have a negative potential and bees have a positive potential,” Hunting says. “Once bees approach, they can sense a field.” The wind, a bee’s landing, or other interactions will trigger immediate changes in a flower’s bioelectric potential and its surrounding field. Knowing this, Hunting had the idea to investigate any electric field changes caused by chemical applications, and if they deterred bee visits. 

He first started out with pesticides because of the well-studied impacts they can have on insects. “But then I figured, fertilizer also has a charge, and they are also applied and it is way more relevant on a larger-scale,” he says. These chemical mixtures used in agriculture and gardens often contain various levels of nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium. “Everyone uses [fertilizers], and they’re claimed to be non-toxic.”  

First, to assess bumblebee foraging behavior, Hunting and his colleagues set up an experiment in a rural field site at the University of Bristol campus using two potted lavender plants. They sprayed a commercially available fertilizer mixture on one of the potted plants while spraying the other with demineralized water. Then, the team watched as bumblebees bypassed the fertilizer-covered lavender. Sprays that contained the pesticide or fertilizer changed the bioelectric potential of the flower for up to 25 minutes—much longer than shifts caused by wind or a bee landing. 

[Related: Arachnids may sense electrical fields to gain a true spidey sense]

But to confirm that the bees were avoiding the fertilizer because of a change in electric field—and not because of the chemical compounds or other factors—the researchers needed to recreate the electric shift in the flower, without actually spraying. In his soccer-pitch-sized backyard, a natural area free of other sources of electricity, Hunting manipulated the bioelectrical potential of lavender plants in order to mimic the change. He placed the stems in water, wired them with electrodes, and streamed a current with a DC powerbank battery. This created an electric field around the plant in the same way as the fertilizer. 

He observed that while the bees approached the electrically manipulated flowers, they did not land on them. They also approached the flowers significantly less than the control flowers, Hunting says. “This shows that the electrics alone already elicit avoidance behavior.”

Hunting suggests that the plant’s defense mechanism might be at the root of the electrical change. “What actually happens if you apply chemicals to plant cells, it triggers a chemical stress response in the plant, similar to a wounding response,” he explains. The plant sends metabolites—which have ionic charge—to start to fix the tissue. This flux of ions generates an electric current, which the bees detect. 

The researchers also noted that the chemicals didn’t seem to impact vision or smell, and that, interestingly, the plants sprayed with pesticide and fertilizers seemed to experience a shift in electric field again after it rained. This could indicate that the effect persists beyond just one spray. The new findings could have implications for casual gardeners and major agricultural industries, the researchers note. 

“Ideally, you would apply fertilizer to the soil [instead of spraying directly on the plant],” Hunting says. But that would require more labor than the approach used by many in US agriculture, in which airplanes spray massive fields. 

[Related: Build a garden that’ll have pollinators buzzin’]

Essenberg says that luckily the electric field changes are relatively short lived, making it a bit easier for farmers to find workarounds. For instance, they could spray agricultural chemicals during the middle of the day, when pollinators forage less frequently because many flowers open in the morning and typically run out of pollen by then. 

The toxicity of chemical sprays is probably a bigger influence “at the population level” on bee decline, Essenberg says. But this study offers a new idea: that change in electric potential might need to be taken into account for effectively spraying plants. “It raises questions about what other kinds of things might influence that potential,” she adds, such as contaminants in the air or pollution that falls with the rain.

Essenberg says it would be helpful to look at the impacts of electric field changes in more realistic foraging settings over longer periods of time. Hunting agrees. “Whether the phenomenon is really relevant in the long run, it might be, but we need to uncover more about this new mechanism.” 

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This article was originally featured on Hakai Magazine, an online publication about science and society in coastal ecosystems. Read more stories like this at hakaimagazine.com.

Fifteen-year-old Brianna K. (known as Kū) loves listening to her family tell stories about the wildlife they grew up with along the shores of west Maui, Hawaiʻi. The stories describe diverse, vital ecosystems. They tell of things that have been lost.

“Older generations will talk about different seaweeds or different fishes that they used to see in places that I swim in now. And when I go out there with my dad or my parents or my cousins, you don’t see too much of it,” Kū says.

In just the past few years, Kū has watched her father’s farm produce fewer crops. Fishermen are bringing in smaller hauls, too, and her family’s household patches of kalo—a Hawaiian staple crop—are shrinking. In school, Kū says, she learned that these are the signs of climate change and how it’s affecting her community.

Now Kū, alongside 13 other young people, is suing the Hawaiian government for its failure to protect her constitutional right to a clean and healthful environment. Their lawsuit, filed in June and supported by the US nonprofits Our Children’s Trust and Earthjustice, is challenging the state’s Department of Transportation for operating a transportation system that the youth claim prioritizes fossil fuel–powered cars over mass transit and other environmentally friendly alternatives, contributing to greenhouse gas pollution. Their goal is to force the department to fully decarbonize by 2045.

Over the past two years alone, nearly 500 climate change–related lawsuits have been brought to courts around the world, according to a report by the London School of Economics’ Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment.

But where most of these lawsuits pitch climate change as a problem that has yet to unfold—either by challenging government carbon targets and policies, or by accusing fossil fuel companies and other high-polluting industries of spreading misinformation or cutting their emissions too slowly—Kū and her co-plaintiffs’ lawsuit is just one of many recent legal challenges that is taking a new approach to try to force governments to reckon with climate change.

In addition to arguing that Hawaiʻi’s carbon emissions are affecting Kū and her co-plaintiffs’ right to future livelihoods and culture, they are suing over the harm that has already been done.

To Kim Bouwer, a legal expert focused on climate and energy at Durham University in England, the case follows in the spirit of one of the first lawsuits to explicitly link climate change to contemporary damage.

In 2008, the residents of Kivalina, an Alaska Native village on the edge of the Chukchi Sea, sued ExxonMobil and other fossil fuel companies for the damage the community had already felt from climate change–induced flooding and coastal erosion. The Kivalina residents documented very clearly the impacts the community had felt, says Bouwer. “The problem there,” she adds, “was the courts didn’t want to hear them.”

The Kivalina lawsuit was dismissed. The judge overseeing the case, US district judge Saundra Brown Armstrong, wrote in her decision that regulating greenhouse gas emissions is a political, rather than a legal, issue. As such, she wrote, it had to be resolved by the US Congress. A last-ditch attempt to take the case to the US Supreme Court also failed.

Over the past 14 years, however, judges, at least in some jurisdictions, seem more willing to accept that people who are suffering the worst impacts of climate change have the right to make those arguments in front of a court.

Something else important has changed since those in Kivalina filed their lawsuit in 2008; scientists have vastly improved their ability to directly link real-world events to climate change.

A report by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), published in February, for instance, pulls no punches in its conclusion that climate change has unequivocally disrupted human and natural systems. It says anthropogenic warming has already caused substantial damage to ecosystems, water security, food production, and peoples’ health and well-being. Climate change is already disrupting cities, settlements, and infrastructure—especially in low-lying small-island developing states and atolls, which are particularly vulnerable to sea level rise.

While broad, extensive reports like the IPCC’s have helped build a scientific basis for explaining climate change’s effects, they’re not always enough to satisfy a court that a specific change in a particular place, or a specific extreme event like a storm, heatwave, or flood, was caused directly by global warming.

That’s where the fast-moving field of attribution science comes in.

Scientists, like those involved in the World Weather Attribution initiative, are now adept at cutting through the noise to show the extent to which climate change has made a particular extreme weather event more likely or more potent. Some recent examples, among many, show how climate change increased the chance of devastating bushfires in Australia in 2019 and 2020 by at least 30 percent. It exacerbated heavy rainfall in South Africa in April 2022, making the devastating flooding that killed hundreds of people and displaced tens of thousands heavier and more likely. And global warming amplified a long-running heatwave in India and Pakistan that killed dozens and ravaged crops.

“We know so much more now about the science,” says Bouwer. “It is now possible to have sufficiently persuasive scientific evidence that both links the behaviors of corporates or national governments to climate change and, to some extent, can attribute specific events or specific impacts to climate change.” When it comes to winning a lawsuit, Bouwer says, that’s what you need to succeed.

Against this backdrop, litigants like Kū are moving ahead.

While the lawsuit against Hawai‘i’s Department of Transportation was filed just a few months ago, roughly 7,500 kilometers to the southwest, Torres Strait Islanders are fighting a similar fight—though theirs is much further along.

Situated between the northern tip of Queensland, Australia, and Papua New Guinea, the Torres Strait Islands are mostly populated by Torres Strait Islander peoples with their own distinct cultures, languages, and identities. The islands are extremely low-lying and are some of the most vulnerable places in the world to climate change. Data from the Torres Strait Regional Authority shows that sea level around the islands is rising by six millimeters each year—twice the global average.

For years, Torres Strait Islanders have mobilized against climate change, including a three-year effort to take Australia to the United Nations to accuse it of breaching the Torres Strait Islanders’ fundamental rights to culture and life by failing to adequately cut national carbon emissions. In September, the UN Human Rights Committee agreed with them and said they should be compensated.

Two Torres Strait Islander people are taking a different route. Much like Kū in Hawaiʻi, Guy Paul Kabai and Pabai Pabai sued the Australian government. They argue that Australia breached its legal obligations to prevent the loss of their communities to climate change. According to their lawyers, Kabai and Pabai’s case is unusual in being brought by people suffering from the impacts of climate change against their own state—a state which is one of the world’s big per capita carbon dioxide emitters.

In their filing, Kabai and Pabai outline the range of harms Torres Strait Islander peoples are already experiencing: higher average temperatures, more frequent and severe heatwaves, coastal erosion, and more potent storm surges. Even cemeteries are at risk. The documents describe how, on land, salt water has contaminated freshwater ecosystems. In the ocean, warming and acidification have led to visible coral bleaching and are disrupting the marine food web.

Kabai and Pabai do not hesitate to describe climate change as an existential threat to their communities. “Our ancestors have lived on these islands for more than 65,000 years,” says Kabai in a press release. “If you take away our homelands, we don’t know who we are. We have a cultural responsibility to make sure that doesn’t happen and to protect [our] country and our communities, culture, and spirituality from climate change.”

In yet another case, in Indonesia, four residents of Pulau Pari are hewing closer to the playbook laid out by the residents of Kivalina in 2008.

Pulau Pari, an island a few dozen kilometers northwest of Jakarta, has already seen flooding and extensive damage to houses, streets, and businesses. But rather than taking action against the Indonesian government, the residents of Pulau Pari are suing Holcim, a Swiss company that manufactures cement, concrete, and other building materials.

The islanders argue that because Holcim is one of the 50 biggest carbon dioxide emitters in the world it bears a proportionate responsibility for the resulting climate change. They want the company to slash its carbon emissions to limit future harm, and are asking for compensation and money to build new flood defenses.

Whether the courts will rule in favor of Kū and the other Hawaiian youth, Kabai and Pabai, the residents of Palau Pari, or any of the plaintiffs in other similar cases remains to be seen. But unlike the residents of Kivalina, who tried and failed to secure a judgment in 2008, many of the cases underway now are standing on a stronger legal footing.

The Hawaiian claimants, in particular, are optimistic. Leinā‘ala Ley, a senior associate attorney at Earthjustice and co-counsel in the lawsuit, says the basics of climate science are well established in Hawaiian politics and law. The state’s supreme court has already concluded that climate change “harms present and future generations” and that Hawai‘i is “vulnerable to the ecological damage caused by an unhealthy climate system.”

Ley adds that many harms are readily visible on the island, from drought conditions to roads crumbling into the sea. “We don’t have to look to the future here. We can just look unfortunately to the present to see the kind of havoc that climate change is wreaking.”

For Nikki Reisch, director of the climate and energy program at the Switzerland-based Center for International Environmental Law, the growth in lawsuits like these reflects the deep geographical and social injustices of climate change.

“It’s no surprise that many of these cases are being brought by islanders or island populations, because they’re among the most vulnerable … to the truly existential threat that climate change poses,” she says. “As the devastation caused by climate change becomes increasingly apparent, it will only become easier to connect the dots between polluting activity and the failure to reduce and regulate it—and ever harder to deny responsibility for the consequences of that action.”

And it’s only appropriate, Reisch adds, that the lawsuits are being brought against the high-emitting wealthy countries and biggest polluters “that are responsible for the lion’s share of the planet-warming emissions to date.”

Back in Maui, Kū has a keen sense of what is at stake. “It would be cool to see the same thing that my grandpa got to see when he was growing up, or be able to work in my family’s land up in the valley and be able to restore a bunch of other kalo patches up there.”

Kū is no stranger to going to court, having already testified in local lawsuits about water resources. But if the lawsuit ever gets to that stage, she is excited about the idea of making a stand on climate change. “Hopefully, it would make a huge impact on not just my island or our community, but like the whole entire state. It would be amazing.”

The post Some climate activists aren’t suing over the future—they are taking aim at the present appeared first on Popular Science.

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This article was originally featured on Hakai Magazine, an online publication about science and society in coastal ecosystems. Read more stories like this at hakaimagazine.com.

On a snowy January morning in 2022, I walk into Duo, an exclusive little restaurant in the heart of the southern Italian town of Lecce, carrying a polystyrene box filled with two frozen plate-sized jellyfish. Antonella Leone, a senior researcher at the Italian National Research Council’s Institute of Sciences of Food Production, is with me holding an authorization letter for chef Fabiano Viva to legally handle the sea creatures. Viva awaits us at the restaurant’s entrance, greets us with a hearty handshake, and takes the cooler. Within minutes, his assistant is defrosting the jellyfish under the tap. Viva laces up his white apron, fills a pot with water, and ignites the stove.

Leone is part of a small group of scientists who have been studying Mediterranean jellyfish for the past 12 years. For the last seven, they have involved chefs, testing ways to get the general public interested in eating the marine invertebrate.

“The idea of eating a jellyfish never crossed our minds, because we would only see one every once in a while,” Leone explains. But as several species of local and alien jellyfish became increasingly abundant—such as in 2014 when a jellyfish bloom saw 400 tonnes of the barrel jellyfish per square kilometer carpeting the massive Gulf of Taranto—Leone wondered what they could do with them.

But convincing Italians to eat jellyfish is like enticing them to try pineapple on pizza––not a simple task. Southern Italians eat octopus, sea urchin, and other sea creatures, but jellyfish are largely ignored. Selling jellyfish for human consumption is prohibited in the European Union, as regulators still do not consider the sea creature a safe, marketable food due to historical lack of interest in them as a food source, which is why Leone arrived at Duo with a permission letter in hand.

Safety concerns around jellyfish don’t seem to be a problem in China, where jellyfish have been on the menu for almost two millennia. (A favorite is an appetizer of chilled jellyfish seasoned with dark vinegar, sugar, soy sauce, chicken stock powder, and sesame oil.) Today, 19 countries harvest up to one million tonnes of the gelatinous sea dweller, contributing to a global industry worth around US $160-million.

Paired with forward-looking chefs like Viva, Leone and her team began researching ways to make jellyfish tasty and safe for Mediterranean menus in 2015. As ocean fish stocks continue to deplete at alarming rates, and jellyfish seem to be thriving, more and more people are asking if eating jellyfish will effectively mitigate the jellyfish problem, and if they will become a sustainable and safe source of food. But can jellyfish become a food of the future, not just for adventurous diners eating at upscale restaurants, but for all?

Jellyfish are in a broad group of aquatic animals that marine biologists refer to as “gelatinous macrozooplankton.” There are some 4,000 known species worldwide, probably others unknown. They can be as small as a cereal flake, like the highly venomous Irukandji box jellyfish mainly found off the coast of Australia, or have tentacles up to 36 meters long, like the enormous lion’s mane jellyfish. Jellyfish are an important part of marine ecosystems and serve as meals to 124 fish species and 34 other animals, such as the leatherback sea turtle.

But all is not well in the jellyfish world. Since the turn of this century, scientists have witnessed a worrying increase in jellyfish populations in various parts of the world. According to Lucas Brotz, a researcher who has long studied jellyfish at the Institute for the Oceans and Fisheries at the University of British Columbia, it’s not easy to understand the reasons behind the phenomenon.

“Not all jellyfish are increasing in all places, but we do see a sort of sustained major increase in many areas around the world,” says Brotz. And there are myriad reasons that could be driving this change, among them alien jellyfish species being introduced into new areas and range expansion as climate change and warming waters favor some species over others.

Like other marine invertebrates, jellyfish will reproduce in great numbers when conditions are right. Nutrient pollution and warming waters in some parts of the world have resulted in higher-than-normal jellyfish blooms and situations that can have negative repercussions on infrastructure, tourism, and more. Video by the Hakai Institute

The jellyfish increase is being felt particularly hard in places like the Mediterranean Sea and along the coast of Japan. Hordes of jellyfish have destroyed fish farms, clogged power plants, capsized fishing boats as they weighed down nets, and upended tourism by making waters unsafe for swimming. And their presence can impact creatures they share the sea with, too.

“Imagine [something the size of] the biggest oil tanker in the world, traveling along the Mediterranean coasts to Israel, consuming all the plankton,” says Stefano Piraino, Leone’s husband and a marine biologist and jellyfish expert at the University of Salento in Lecce, as he explains how massive blooms of jellyfish can hog all the plankton that other planktivores need.

Seeing the new availability of jellyfish in the Mediterranean, Piraino joined Leone in her quest to find possible culinary uses of jellyfish.

Back at Duo, Viva slips on latex gloves and carefully lifts the Rhizostoma pulmo jellyfish from below the running tap. They’re still a bit frozen, quite unlike the dried jellyfish used in Eastern cuisine, which must be rehydrated before use. Viva slips the jellies into a pot of boiling water and starts to stir.

When Leone started studying how jellyfish could be used for food or food ingredients—and how they could be preserved for later use—she stumbled upon one main problem. The primary method to preserve jellyfish, as perfected in Asia, was to dehydrate them using the chemical compound alum. But alum is considered toxic for human consumption and its use doesn’t meet the European Food Safety Authority’s standards. So Leone and her colleagues set out to devise a new and nontoxic way to desiccate edible jellyfish.

Her team overcame the drying challenge by using calcium salts instead of alum and went on to experiment with dried, fresh, and frozen jellies, turning them into mousse, meringue, seasonings, and thickeners.

The magic of turning gelatinous macrozooplankton into food and food products happens in Leone’s lab at the Institute of Sciences of Food Production, where she and her team of seven run their experiments. A long steel testing table with two shelves of transparent jars and scales at its center separates the expansive room. Inside an industrial fridge rest racks of test tubes containing jellyfish extracts to study.

But it is one thing to do research in a lab, and another to convince Italians to consider replacing fish with jellyfish in a soup. According to a 2020 study led by Luisa Torri, a professor of food science and technology at the University of Gastronomic Sciences of Pollenzo, there might be some hope for acceptance. The study surveyed 1,445 people on their attitude toward the idea of consuming jellyfish, taking into consideration traits such as age, behavioral habits, and mouthfeel, and showed that young, well-traveled people with higher education levels and sensitivity to the environment are the ones more likely to eat jellyfish.

I fit that category, so when Viva invites me to take a whiff of the white foam now bubbling rapidly on the stove, I try to keep an open mind.

I close my eyes and breathe deeply. “It smells like oysters,” I tell him.

“You need to disconnect your brain from what you know,” says Viva. “You need to detach yourself from the food in your memory.”

Is the key to accepting an unusual food making new food memories? If that’s the case, we’ll need to find a way to get jellyfish from the sea to dinner tables.

As well as helping to deal with future seas full of jellyfish, fishing for these creatures has been touted as a way to help small-scale European fishers, who are struggling with low fish stocks.

“A source of income? That would be great!” says Rocco Cazzato, a sixth-generation small-scale fisher from Tricase Porto, at the idea of fishing jellyfish. “But I would never eat them, not even if it’s the last thing left in the world to eat.”

Cazzato recounts the pain of pulling on his fishing nets crowded with jellyfish that he could not sell, and he says that if jellyfish were in demand locally like the commonly consumed scorpionfish, those jellyfish in the net would help small fishers like him make ends meet.

Although Leone is working to fill the information void, knowing which jellyfish are edible and safe for consumption is still a question few researchers are tasked with answering. According to Brotz, while many different jellyfish types are increasing worldwide, only a handful of them are preferred for human consumption. And just because they seem to be more abundant, it doesn’t mean that fishing them will be a panacea. The title of a 2016 paper Brotz coauthored says it all: “We should not assume that fishing jellyfish will solve our jellyfish problem.”

The paper advises caution: jellyfish are understudied, and the effects of removing them from the ecosystem, even when they are in excess, are unknown and potentially negative. Some jellyfish, for instance, act as nurseries for juvenile fish, and jellyfish can be both predator and prey in food chains.

Silvestro Greco, research director at the Anton Dohrn Zoological Station, echoes the concern that fishing isn’t necessarily the way to combat jellyfish blooms. He fears that once industrial jellyfish extraction begins, quick depletion might have unexpected consequences on local marine environments. In the early 2000s, for instance, a portion of the fishing fleet in the Gulf of California, Mexico, diverted its efforts to harvesting jellyfish. Fishers and processing plant workers quickly profited from the new market, but overfished the resource, leading to the rapid depletion of jellyfish.

Still, some fishers are poised to launch if a fishery opens—there is already Asian interest in fishing jellyfish in the Mediterranean. But even with interest from fishers, if there’s no market, then there’s no point.

According to Leone, the enterprise of getting jellyfish to the masses needs an entrepreneur willing to invest the several thousand euros needed to request that the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) accepts jellyfish as edible food for sale, allowing them to be legally sold in fish markets and restaurants.

Leone believes that, with her team, she’s gathered the scientific research to support such an application to EFSA and that some entrepreneurs have shown interest. It’s only a matter of time before some species of jellyfish make the list of approved European foods, she says, and she’s keen to broker the divide between fishers, markets, and chefs.

Creating this market could help artisanal fishers, the ones most affected by jellyfish blooms, Leone says. “They come back with nets full of jellyfish and three fish inside. If jellyfish would become accepted edible food, they could sell it as sea products like others.”

Leone first targeted curious chefs—ones without preconceptions, eager to accept a challenge—in 2015, and they became important team members. Leone and her team are part of the EU-funded GoJelly project that looked into innovative uses for jellyfish—including in fertilizers, cosmetics, and nutraceuticals, and for snaring microplastics. Membership means that Leone can regularly bring Viva and other chefs jellyfish to experiment with in their kitchens and find ways to make the sea creature appetizing. Over the years, Viva has tried the jellyfish pickled and dehydrated like chips, and as an ingredient in soups and pasta sauces.

The most significant difficulty that Pasquale Palamaro, chef of the Michelin-star restaurant Indaco on the island of Ischia, encountered was the drop in weight as the jellyfish was cooked.

Jellyfish are 95 percent water and a small percentage of proteins, so when the animal dies, it loses much of the water. To avoid this loss, Palamaro believes they have to be consumed fresh within a few hours of harvest or stored safely frozen or preserved with the calcium salt technique that Leone developed.

Palamaro boils the Pelagia jellyfish from the Mediterranean for one minute, marinates it in citruses for an hour, and then seasons it with pumpkin seed oil before serving it with quinoa. Gennaro Esposito, chef of the Michelin-star restaurant Torre del Saracino in Vico Equense, prefers to pair the jellyfish with marinated cucumbers, chili kefir, and lettuce paste. Leone has collected the more successful recipes of these chefs and others in the freely available European Jellyfish Cookbook.

But not all chefs are convinced of the jellyfish’s culinary potential. In 2017, Greco, a marine biologist but also a food scientist and an avid cook, fried 50 kilograms of Pelagia jellyfish at the Slow Fish conference in Genova, Italy, to create awareness about the rapid rise in jellyfish numbers in the Mediterranean.

“It was a success,” Greco says, “but because they were fried. Everything fried is good.”

He believes jellyfish don’t have an interesting texture and don’t make a compelling case for culinary indulgence. All in all, he doesn’t believe that jellyfish will be quickly adopted by cuisines that traditionally never used them.

But according to Leone, jellyfish today are in the same situation as tomatoes in the 16th century. Tomatoes, now a key ingredient in traditional Mediterranean cuisine, were unknown before being brought over from the Americas around the 1550s. At first, they were thought to be toxic and unhealthy. Still, possibly thanks to forward-looking cooks, or simply because of necessity, tomatoes began appearing on pizzas and in parmigiana and pasta sauce, ultimately becoming part of the Mediterranean diet.

Whether or not jellyfish take a similar trajectory and become accepted in Western markets is hard to say, but many of our favored seafoods are declining or have already collapsed explains Brotz. “We may get to a point where there is no other seafood available.”

Back in the kitchen at Duo, Viva has turned one of the two jellyfish into a soup, adding tomato sauce, olive oil, a garlic clove, and a pinch of parsley. He offers me a serving.

I spot the turgid tentacles and part of the cap floating in the orange liquid, and my stomach turns. The first spoonful of broth goes down quickly. It tastes like a delicious––and fishy––tomato soup. Then I search for a piece of the jellyfish. I hesitate. I slurp it up.

It feels like a gulp of the sea itself as the flavor of the jellyfish unfurls in my mouth with the strength of a tsunami. The texture reminds me of calamari or a piece of fat from a cooked steak. As I chew, trying to repress the impulsive disgust, I think of cooked tripe. I swallow.

I look at Viva and say, honestly: “It tastes like the sea!” He smiles, agreeing.

As I take a few more polite spoonfuls, the words of Esposito, the chef of Torre del Saracino, come to mind. He’d pointed out that jellyfish carry a stigma of fear, but that the instinct to avoid them can be unlearned. Through cuisine, “we transform a fear and a dread into a taste, which is better,” he said.

I reflect that my hesitancy might be a result of cultural heritage—this food is as unfamiliar to me as a tomato was to my ancestors over 500 years ago—as Viva prepares the other jellyfish. He coats it with flour and deep-fries it in vegetable oil.

This time, it is crunchy and crispy—like a French fry. And, of course, it tastes great.

This article first appeared in Hakai Magazine, and is republished here with permission.

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Rooftop gardens are a great way to make urban communities more sustainable, economical, and enjoyable for residents. That said, there’s a reason they aren’t as ubiquitous as many would expect—because of issues such as increased solar radiation and higher wind speeds, the conditions generally aren’t as favorable for plants as they are at ground level. Thanks to recent breakthrough developments, however, rooftop yields could dramatically increase thanks to some ingenious rerouting of buildings’ typical carbon dioxide emissions.

According to a paper published last week in Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems, researchers constructed a new ventilation system reliant on a Boston University building’s normal carbon exhaust system to act as fertilizer for both spinach and corn crops. Meanwhile, control plants grown nearby employed their own fan system to ensure airflow sans building emissions. The resulting yields were noticeable, to say the least.

[Related: The complete guide to building a rooftop garden.]

“Spinach grown next to the exhaust vents had four times the biomass of spinach grown next to a control fan,” explains the paper’s announcement, adding that, “even when high winds decreased the size advantage, the plants were still twice as large as the controls.” Interestingly, even though the corn was predicted to benefit less from the extra CO2 than spinach (whose photosynthesis pathways are more influenced by CO2 levels), its yield was still two-to-three times larger than the control crops.

CO2 exhaust occurs both naturally and artificially in buildings, including sources like humans’ everyday exhalations and HVAC systems. To maintain healthy air quality—less than 1000 parts per million (ppm)—the toxic gas is usually released into the outside air via those same HVAC systems and ventilation. The research team’s reroute funnels some of what would otherwise become wasted and generally harmful emissions towards the rooftop gardens, where it can then be absorbed by plant life.

“We are hoping this could lead to the further development of this system and eventual implementation in rooftop gardens and farms,” said research lead Sarabeth Buckley in the announcement. “If that happens, then hopefully more rooftop farms will be installed. They could provide a multitude of environmental and social benefits such as energy savings for the building, carbon drawdown, climate mitigation, urban heat reduction, local food production, community building opportunities, and aesthetic and mental health benefits.”

A few hurdles remain before city residents can expect to see similar systems on their own roofs, including optimizing air application design and addressing adverse wind speeds. Still, the breakthrough system’s benefits are already stark enough that they provide a promising lead for creative solutions to improving urban sustainability programs. And in any case, we all could probably benefit from a bit more spinach in our diets, anyway.

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The world’s first insect vaccine is here, and it could help with stopping a fatal bacterial disease in honeybees. A study published on October 17 in the journal Frontiers in Veterinary Science found honeybees born from vaccinated queens were more resistant to American Foulbrood (AFB) infection than hives with unvaccinated queens. Not only would the vaccine help in improving colony health, but it might increase commercial beekeeping to make products, such as honey and medical wax.

Several factors have contributed to declining honeybee populations—higher temperatures from climate change, pesticides, and drought to name a few. “Bee health is a multifaceted problem and many factors play into the survival or perishing of a beehive,” says Dalial Freitak, associate professor at the University of Graz in Austria and senior author of the study. “As in any organism, diseases can cause havoc, especially if other stressors are at play.” The current vaccine tackles AFB, a devastating disease that’s caused early outbreaks in US beehives since the early 1900s. 

AFB is caused by the spores of the larva of the bacteria Paenibacillus. Young honeybees ingest the spores in their foods and in one to two days, the spores take root in their gut, sprouting out rod structures. Like an aggressive cancer tumor, the rods quickly multiply before invading the blood and body tissues and killing the young insect larva from the inside. By the time they die, new spores have formed to infect the bees that come in to clean up the honeycomb cells where the deceased laid. Beekeepers may also accidentally spread the disease by exposing contaminated honey or equipment to other bees. Freitak estimates at least 50 percent of beehives globally have AFB. While cultivators may not see any noticeable symptoms of the disease at first, it can feel like a ticking “time bomb” with an outbreak potentially happening at any moment, she says.

The recent study tests the safety and effectiveness of an oral breeder vaccine—an immunization that’s passed down from parents—to increase resistance against Paenibacillus larva. The oral vaccine is mixed into a new queen’s food which she ingests before being introduced into the hive. Once digested, the vaccine contents are transferred into the fat body, the storage organ in insects. Vitellogenin, or the yolk proteins that provide nutrients for growing embryos, bind to pieces of the vaccine and deliver it to eggs in the ovaries. “A little piece of vaccine into the ovaries stimulates an immune response and it’s where you need it the most,” says Annette Kleiser, the CEO of biotech company Dalan Animal Health that created the vaccine. “A lot of these diseases are when the larvae get infected in the first few days when they hatch.”

[Related: Do we still need to save the bees?]

In the current study, two queen honeybees were vaccinated with either the vaccine or the placebo before entering their hive and laying eggs. After the eggs hatched, the two hives were brought to the lab (to avoid infecting other colonies in the wild) and exposed to AFB spores for several days. The team found that vaccinating the queen decreased the risk of AFB by 30 to 50 percent. What’s more, the vaccine did not impact the health of bee colonies. The study authors saw no difference in hive losses between the placebo and vaccinated groups before spore exposure.

“They have shown a proof-of-concept,” says Ramesh Sagili, a professor of apiculture at Oregon State University who was not affiliated with the study. He notes, however, the study took place in an isolated, lab-controlled setting and the challenge with this type of technology is the lack of success when tested in the field. One suggestion is to conduct large-scale field studies, expanding from two honeybee hives to thousands split between vaccine and placebo groups. Other questions Sagili would like answered in future research is how the vaccine fares against different AFB strains and how long immunity lasts in the long-run.

“I’m convinced they have something promising here, but only if they do some large-scale field studies with the beekeeping industry,” adds Sagili. If successful, he says this could open doors to the production of vaccines for other viral diseases plaguing honeybees.

Still, finding solutions to assist honeybees with illness is important: “A declining honeybee population has made it difficult to pollinate enough food for everyone to eat,” explains Kleiser.

Honeybees pollinate one-third of food in the US. Beyond honey, they are essential for the production of apples, broccolis, melons, and even your favorite cup of java. But as much service honeybees provide, humanity has provided them a disservice in keeping them safe and alive. Beekeepers estimated a 45.5 percent loss in honeybee colonies from April 2020 to April 2021, which is largely associated with human activity. According to the United Nations, if bees continue to disappear, we may see permanent disruptions in our food supply chain and the disappearance of fruits, vegetables, and other crops heavily dependent on pollination.

[Related: Temperature tells honey bees what time it is]

There are other options currently on the table to mitigate the spread of AFB. Once beekeepers notice the first signs of disease, they can burn the honey, tools, and other equipment in contact with the hive. Additionally, they could quarantine the hive to prevent infected bees from swarming nearby colonies. However, both options aren’t ideal because they slow down honey production and affect the food supply chain. “You have a withdrawal period where you have to wait and that costs money to beekeepers,” says Kleiser. “The flowers won’t wait so if you miss the season you miss your entire yield.” 

Another option is antibiotics. Sagili explains that antibiotics are effective against AFB, and beekeepers have been using antibiotics to manage the spread of spores. Because of its availability, he says it doesn’t rise to the level of other challenges that honeybees presently face. That said, there is always a risk of antibiotic resistance that could lower honeybees’ protection against the bacterium. “Beekeepers have options, but it would be nice to have a vaccine for [AFB] so they have one less problem to deal with,” Sagili says.

Right now, the vaccine is pending conditional license by the US Department of Agriculture Center of Veterinary Biologics. Kleiser emphasizes the vaccine would not only benefit bees, but the larger ecosystem as well. “It’s a survival issue,” she says. “We have to understand the critical importance of these animals.”

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Right now, there are 68 carbon pricing initiatives implemented around the world, according to the World Bank. Carbon pricing schemes apply a financial cost to greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions to try and shift the burden of environmental impact to those responsible for it and who are in a position to reduce it. The goal is to bring down GHG emissions by taxing the carbon content of fossil fuels and creating a supply and demand for emissions allowances.

However, New Zealand is taking carbon pricing to a whole new ballpark—the ranch.

Last week, the New Zealand government announced its plans to impose a farm-level levy on farmers for their livestock’s emissions—the first of its kind around the globe—to meet climate targets. Taxing animal agriculture, which contributes about 14.5 to 16.5 percent to global GHG emissions, can be important in transitioning to a low-emissions future. 

Although the levy is far from being implemented, it’s essential to explore how feasible it is to impose and how it would affect farmers, animals, and food. 

Reduce emissions from animal agriculture to meet climate goals

Methane, nitrous oxide, and carbon dioxide are responsible for more than half of New Zealand’s gross emissions. Livestock supply chains generally emit these through four pathways: enteric fermentation or the digestive process of ruminants that produce methane as a byproduct, feed production, manure management, and energy consumption.

Livestock burps, urine, and manure are significant methane and nitrous oxide sources. These two greenhouse gasses are about 25 and 300 times more potent than carbon dioxide at warming the atmosphere. Feed production is also a big factor because the expansion of feed crops and pastures into natural areas emits carbon dioxide. At the same time, the use of manure and nitrogen fertilizers results in nitrous oxide emissions.

The goal is to set this farm-level pricing system in motion by 2025 to incentivize farmers to minimize their emissions. The revenue will be invested back into the agriculture sector by funding research and technology that may reduce emissions further.

[Related: Putting cows on a seaweed diet helps curb their methane burps.]

“[Livestock emissions] are currently not priced in the market, and when we buy beef, the climate impacts and environmental costs to society are not reflected in the price,” says Greg Keoleian, director of the Center for Sustainable Systems at the University of Michigan’s School for Environment and Sustainability. “The proposed tax on livestock in New Zealand is a mechanism to internalize that cost and avoid the further expenditures related to climate change impacts.”

There are various emissions reduction strategies that farmers can adopt across the livestock supply chain. For instance, increasing reproductive efficiency (like by reducing the interval between parities) may be beneficial because a more efficient animal retains more dietary nitrogen protein. Therefore there will be less nitrogen in their urine and manure. Improved fertility in dairy cattle can reduce methane emissions by 10 to 24 percent and nitrous oxide by 9 to 17 percent.

That said, enhancing productivity or efficiency must be carefully measured and controlled because it may harm animal health and welfare. More reproductive pressure can increase the metabolic demands associated with pregnancy, potentially resulting in a higher risk of metabolic diseases like clinical hypocalcemia and ketosis, reduced immune function, and reduced subsequent fertility.

Changing livestock’s diet—like adding fatty acids, seaweed, or maize and barley—may also reduce emissions from enteric fermentation. Regularly scraping manure and transporting it to an outside storage facility for pigs and cattle production systems can reduce methane and nitrous oxide emissions by 55 and 41 percent, respectively.

“This program is positioning the agriculture industry in New Zealand to become leaders in reducing methane and carbon dioxide emissions from livestock production,” says Keoleian. “Certifications and labeling could be used to differentiate their farm products in the marketplace for green consumers willing to pay more for lower carbon footprint meat.”

Levy on farmers might not necessarily be the magic bullet to reducing emissions

Although the levy proposal aims to reduce GHG emissions, it isn’t as straightforward as it seems. 

“There is no doubt the food system in general and ruminant production in particular needs to reduce its carbon footprint,” says Ermias Kebreab, director of the UC Davis World Food Center. “However, the burden needs to be shared by society and not just farmers that are already operating on small margins.”

Sam McIvor and Andrew Morrison, CEO, and Chairman of Beef + Lamb New Zealand, respectively, emailed farmers last week and said, “we will not accept a system that disproportionately puts our farmers and communities at risk.” The Federated Farmers of New Zealand also expressed disappointment with the government’s proposal.

There is potential for emission leakage if livestock production is displaced to areas with little regulation, says Kebreab. Emission leakage refers to the increase in emissions of a region with weaker environmental regulations due to another region’s strengthening of its environmental policies because the production just relocated to unregulated jurisdictions.

[Related: The inconvenient truth about Burger King’s ‘reduced methane’ Whopper.]

In addition, the policy might encourage some farmers towards less carbon-intensive livestock, such as pigs instead of beef cattle, which can pose a problem from an international perspective regarding beef supply, says Keoleian. “Setting the policy is complex because of how it could impact small versus large producers, trade implications, and how consumers respond, which ultimately drives production and livestock emissions,” he adds.

Regarding regulation, Kebreab prefers the ‘carrot’ over the ‘stick’ approach, which means rewarding positive behavior instead of having the threat of punishment. And research shows this might be a better strategy for newer policies. According to a 2019 Scientific Reports study, positive incentives or rewards are necessary to foster cooperation in collective action for the public good—like international climate change mitigation—while negative incentives like sanctions are more effective for maintaining cooperation after it has been initiated.

Kebreab believes it is a bit too early to implement such a levy on farmers today and suggests setting the goal low and ramping it up later as more technologies and emission reduction strategies become available or adopted by farmers.

For now, the proposal is currently going through a consultation process to get feedback and work through the transition assistance, levy setting, and sequestration. This farm-level emissions pricing system will likely take a while and a bit of refining before being implemented.

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There’s a phrase that rings loudly in the heads of Popular Science editors any time we bring together a new Brilliant 10 class: “They’ve only just begun.” Our annual list of early-career scientists and engineers is as much a celebration of what our honorees have already accomplished as it is a forecast for what they’ll do next. To find the brightest innovators of today, we embarked on a nationwide search, vetting hundreds of researchers across a range of institutions and disciplines. The collective work of this year’s class sets the stage for a healthier, safer, more efficient, and more equitable future—one that’s already taking shape today. 

• Kandis Leslie Abdul-Aziz: Turning food waste into filters
• Sangeetha Reddy: Harnessing the power of immunotherapy for breast cancer
• Mohammad Hajiesmaili: Decarbonizing the internet
• Rachael Bay: Predicting how wildlife will adapt to climate change
• John Blazeck: Building an immune system from scratch
• Daniella Mendoza DellaGiustina: Spying our future in near-asteroid flybys
• Samitha Samaranayake: Making transit sustainable and equitable
• Chantell Evans: Finding the roots of neurodegenerative disease
• Aaron Streets: Mapping every human cell
• Daniel Larremore: Crunching the numbers to get ahead of outbreaks

Turning food waste into filters

After earning a bachelor’s in chemistry in 2007, Kandis Leslie Abdul-Aziz took a position at an oil refinery along the Schuykill River in South Philadelphia. Part of her job was to analyze refined petroleum products, like acetone and phenol, that other industrial manufacturers might buy. She was also tasked with testing the refinery’s wastewater—which, she couldn’t help but notice, flowed out right next to a residential neighborhood. “Literally, if you looked out past the plant,” she says, “you could see houses close by.”

That was more than a decade before an explosive fire forced the refinery to close and spurred an unprecedented cleanup effort. But the experience got Abdul-Aziz thinking about the life cycle of chemical byproducts and their potential impacts on human health. She went back to school for a PhD in chemistry, and her lab at the University of California, Riverside, now focuses on giving problematic waste streams—from plastic trash to greenhouse gases—a second life.

To start, Abdul-Aziz decided to investigate whether she could convert corn stover into something with economic value. The stalks, leaves, tassels, and husks left over from harvest add up to America’s most copious agricultural waste product. Much of it is left to rot on the ground, releasing methane and other greenhouse gases. A small percentage does get salvaged and converted into biofuels, but the payoff usually isn’t worth the effort.

Abdul-Aziz and her colleagues set out to test multiple processes for turning the refuse into activated carbon, the charcoal-like substance that’s used as a filter everywhere from smokestacks to your home Brita pitcher. Her analysis, published in 2021, looks at the activated carbon produced by various methods—from charring stover in an industrial furnace to dousing it in caustic substances—and the molecular properties that affect which contaminants it can soak up. The ultimate aim: Tell her what kind of chemicals you want to clean up, and she’ll create a carbon filter that can do the trick.

Abdul-Aziz has since applied to patent her customizable process, and is looking into other sources of detritus and use cases. Wastewater treatment companies have expressed interest, she says, in using her tools on environmental toxins such as PFAS—the stubborn, hormone-disrupting “forever chemicals” ubiquitous in household products and prone to contaminating drinking water. At the same time, she has also demonstrated that she can derive activated carbon from citrus peels, and is now investigating whether she can do the same with plastic trash.

She’s also exploring an even bigger swing. Earlier this year, the National Science Foundation awarded her half a million dollars to develop absorbent materials to capture carbon dioxide emissions and help convert them back into useful materials such as polymers and fuels. Abdul-Aziz wants to identify practical recycling processes that don’t require overhauling existing infrastructure. “For us it’s about trying to develop realistic solutions for these sustainability problems so they can actually be implemented,” she explains. It’s these small steps that she believes will move us toward a truly circular economy—one where materials can be reused many times. And with any luck, her innovations will help buffer the worst impacts of the very petrochemicals that inspired her quest.—Mara Grunbaum

Harnessing the power of immunotherapy for breast cancer

In recent decades, immunotherapy has been a game-changer in cancer treatment. Drugs that augment the body’s natural immune response against malignant tumors have dramatically improved survival rates for patients with diseases like lymphoma, lung cancer, and metastatic melanoma. But the method has been far less successful in breast cancers—particularly the most aggressive ones. Sangeetha Reddy, a physician-scientist at The University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, is trying to change that. “We could do better,” she says.  

Reddy works with patients with triple-negative breast cancers, so-called because the malignancies don’t have any of the three markers scientists have historically targeted with anti-cancer drugs. Even with aggressive chemotherapy and surgery, the prognosis for these patients—who account for about 15 percent of breast cancer diagnoses worldwide—is relatively poor. Immunotherapies, in particular, often fail because breast cancers tend to hobble the body’s dendritic cells, the roving molecular spies that sweep up pieces of suspicious material and carry them back to immune system headquarters to introduce as the new enemy. When the body doesn’t know what it’s supposed to be attacking, boosting its power is of little use.

Reddy is therefore trying to figure out how to restore dendritic cell function. As a physician-scientist, she uses a relatively new approach that she describes as “bedside to bench and back.” She treats patients in her clinic, conducts in vitro and mouse experiments in her lab, and designs and manages her own clinical trials. This physician-scientist method enables a positive feedback loop: Reddy can analyze tumors excised from her own patients to assess whether treatments are working. Then she can test out new drugs on those same cancer cells. When she identifies a promising tactic, she can design clinical trials to test things like safety, dosage, and timing. At every step, she can find something in what she learns to incorporate back into her research or her patients’ care.

This cyclical strategy has led Reddy to the combination of three drugs that she’s currently testing against triple-negative breast cancer: Flt3-ligand, a protein that stimulates the proliferation of dendritic cells; a chemical that helps activate these cells and others; and anthracycline, a standard chemotherapy agent. In mice, this triad kept breast cancer tumors at least 50% smaller than chemotherapy alone. “A couple of our mice, we actually cured them,” says Reddy. A Phase-1 clinical trial investigating the safety and efficacy of the regimen in people began enrolling patients earlier this year.

Though it can take years to work out all the kinks in a new cancer treatment and clear the hurdles on the way to FDA approval, Reddy’s multi-pronged strategy should streamline this process as much as possible. Doing so will allow her to enable a transformation she’s been eyeing since she started to specialize in cancer treatment more than eight years ago. As a fellow at the MD Anderson Cancer Center, Reddy worked with melanoma patients in clinical trials of immunotherapy, which gave her a firsthand look at the treatment’s emerging potential. “We were taking patients who would have passed away within months and giving them ten years,” she says. “Just that hope that we can get there with [triple-negative breast cancer] led me to this path.”—M.G.

Decarbonizing the internet

The internet as we know it is inextricable from the cloud—the ethereal space through which all e-mails, Zooms, and Instagram posts pass. As many of us well-know, however, this nebulous concept is anchored to the Earth by sprawling warehouses that crunch and store data in remote places. Their energy demands are enormous and increasing exponentially: One model predicts they will use up to 13 percent of the world’s power by 2030 compared to just 3 percent in 2010. Gains in computing efficiency have helped matters, says University of Massachusetts Amherst assistant professor of informatics and computer science Mohammad Hajiesmaili, but those improvements do little to reduce the centers’ impact on the environment.

“If the power supply is coming from fuel sources, it’s not carbon optimized,” explains Hajiesmaili. But renewable power is sporadic, given its reliance on sun and wind, and geographically constrained, since it’s only harvested in certain places. This is the puzzle Hajiesmaili is working to solve: How can data centers run on carbon-free energy 24/7?

The answer involves designing systems that organize their energy use around a zero-carbon goal. Several approaches are in the works. The simplest uses schemes that schedule computing tasks to coincide with the availability of renewable energy. But that fix can’t work on its own given the unpredictability of bright sunlight and gusts of wind—and the fact that the cloud doesn’t sleep. Another strategy is “geographical load balancing,” which involves moving tasks from one data center to another based on local access to clean power. It, also, has drawbacks: Transferring data from one place to another still requires energy, Hajiesmaili notes, and, “if you’re not careful, this overhead might be substantial.”

An ideal solution, and the focal point of much of his work these days, involves equipping data centers with batteries that store renewable energy as a reserve to tap, say, at night. “Whenever the carbon intensity of the grid is high,” he says, “you can just discharge from the battery instead of consuming local high-carbon energy sources.” Even though batteries that are big enough, or cheap enough, to fully power data centers don’t exist yet, Hajiesmaili is already developing algorithms to control when future devices will charge and discharge—using carbon optimization as their guiding principle. This “carbon-aware” battery use is just one of many ways in which Hajiesmaili thinks cloud design should be overhauled; ultimately, the entire system must shift to put carbon use front and center. 

Most big technology companies have pledged to become carbon-neutral—or negative, in Microsoft’s case—in the coming decades. Historically, they have pursued those goals by buying controversial offset credits, but interest in carbon-intelligent computing is mounting. Google, for one, already uses geographical load balancing and is continuing to fine-tune it with Hajiesmaili’s input, and cloud-computer company VMWare has its own carbon-cutting projects in the works. In his view, though, the emerging field of computational decarbonization has applications far beyond the internet. All aspects of society—agriculture, transportation, housing—could someday optimize their usage through the same approach. “It’s just the beginning,” he says. “It’s going to be huge.”—Yasmin Tayag

Predicting how wildlife will adapt to climate change

Evolutionary biologists typically think about changes that took place in the past, and on the scale of thousands and millions of years. Meanwhile, conservation biologists tend to focus on the needs of present wildlife populations. In a warming world, where more than 10,000 species already face increased risk of extinction, those disciplines leave a crucial gap. We don’t know which animals will be able to adjust, how quickly they can do it, and how people can best support them.

Answers to these questions are often based on crude generalizations rather than solid data. Rachael Bay, an evolutionary biologist at the University of California, Davis, has developed an approach that could help make specific predictions about how at-risk species might evolve over the coming decades. “Injecting evolution into conservation questions is really quite novel,” she says.

The central premise of Bay’s work addresses a common blind spot. Conjectures about how climate change will affect a particular creature often assume that all of them will respond similarly to their changing habitat. In fact, she points out, it’s exactly the variation between individuals that determines if and how a species will be able to survive.

Take the reef-building corals she looked at for her PhD research: Thought to be one of the organisms most vulnerable to extinction as a result of warming oceans, some already live in hotter waters than others. Bay identified genes associated with heat tolerance in the coral Acropora hyacinthus and measured the prevalence of that DNA in populations in cooler waters; from there, she was able to model how natural selection would change the gene pool under various climate-change scenarios. Her findings, published in 2017 in Science Advances, made a splash. The data indicated that the cooler-water corals can, in fact, adapt to warming if global carbon emissions start declining by 2050; if they don’t, or keep accelerating as they have been, the outlook becomes grim.

Bay has continued her work on corals and other marine organisms, but she has also applied her method to terrestrial animals. In 2017, work she conducted with UCLA colleague Kristen Ruegg bolstered the case for keeping a Southwestern subspecies of the willow flycatcher on the US endangered list. Though the species as a whole is abundant, with a breeding range that spans most of the US and southwestern Canada, the subgroup that occupies southern California, Arizona, and New Mexico has struggled with habitat loss. The scientists demonstrated not only that the desert-dwelling birds were genetically distinct enough to merit their own listing, but also that individuals in that population have unique genes that are likely associated with their ability to survive temperatures that regularly top 100°F. Protecting this small subgroup—less than one-tenth of a percent of the total population—could help the entire species persist.

That kind of specific, forward-looking decision is exactly what Bay hopes to enable for other wildlife facing an uncertain future. Other recent work has focused on how yellow warblers, Anna’s hummingbirds, and a coastal Pacific snail called the owl limpet might shift their ranges in response to climate change. “The pie-in-the-sky goal is to make evolutionary predictions that can be used in management,” she says.—M.G.

Building an immune system from scratch

When a new pathogen invades, the immune system unleashes a suite of antibodies into the bloodstream—the bodily equivalent of throwing spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks. While most of those proteins will do an okay job of neutralizing the trespasser, a valuable few will zero in with deadly accuracy. The faster scientists can identify and replicate those killers, the better we’ll get at beating disease. Case in point: Antibody therapy helped many at-risk patients sick with COVID-19. The big challenge in studying the body’s natural response, however, is that in order to do so, people have to get sick.

John Blazeck, of Georgia Tech’s School of Chemical and Biomedical Engineering, is developing a workaround. Instead of using the human body as a “bioreactor” for antibodies, he wants to use microbes. That way, the repertoire that fires off in response to a pathogen can be studied in, say, a flask or a chip. The dream of a “synthetic immune system” has kicked around biotech circles for the last two decades, but Blazeck’s work is ushering it into reality. “We can have a million different microbes, making a million different antibodies that would mimic what a person would be doing,” he says.

His career began in synthetic biology, a field that involves sticking genes into microbes to make them do new things. Specifically, he tried to get them to pump out biofuels. His interest in advancing health, however, led him to use his expertise to fight disease in 2013, when he injected microbes with the human genes known to produce antibodies. Recreating the immune system in this way is a colossal undertaking. “The catch is that the process has been optimized for millions of years, so it’s very hard to make it happen,” he explains.

Nevertheless, his team has made foundational progress that could underpin the future of this research. Recently, they figured out how to efficiently mutate antibody DNA after it’s been inserted into microbes, which will help them select antibodies that bind more tightly to a given pathogen. The process is meant to mimic how the immune system uses its B cells—the body’s antibody factories—to self-select the proteins that generate the strongest defenses.

Building a synthetic immune system is only half of what Blazeck is doing to supercharge immunity. The rest builds on his postdoctoral research on engineering a means to thwart cancer cells’ defenses. Tumors secrete molecules that shut down immune cells trying to get in their way. Blazeck—with his former advisor George Georgiou, of the University of Texas, Austin—found an enzyme that can render those molecules harmless, allowing the immune system to do its thing. Ikena Oncology, a company specializing in precision cancer treatment licensed the enzyme, one of the first of its kind, in 2015. Both aspects of Blazeck’s work are at the forefront of burgeoning new fields, and he’s been heartened by the early response. “I hope that people continue to appreciate the value of trying to engineer immunity, and how it can contribute to understanding how to fight disease—and also directly fight disease,” he says.—Y.T.

Spying our future in near-asteroid flybys

The whole world will be watching when a 1,000-foot-wide asteroid called Apophis swoops by Earth in mid-April 2029. But Daniella Mendoza DellaGiustina, a planetary scientist at the University of Arizona, will be looking more closely than anyone else. Her gaze will be trained on what the space rock reveals about our past—and what it means for our future. “It’s going to captivate the world,” she says. In 2022, NASA named her principal investigator of the OSIRIS-APEX mission, which will send the OSIRIS-ReX spacecraft that sampled the asteroid Bennu in 2020 chasing after Apophis.

DellaGiustina wasn’t always interested in space, but as a “cerebral young person” gazing into the famously clear skies of the desert Southwest, she had a lot of big questions: Why are we here? How did we get here? A community college class in astronomy piqued her interest. Then, a university course on meteorites led to an undergraduate research position with Dante Lauretta, who later became the principal investigator of OSIRIS-ReX. DellaGiustina knew “very early on” that the research environment was right for her: “You’re actively pushing the boundary of human knowledge.” A master’s degree in computational physics led her to field work on the ice sheets of Alaska, which resemble those on other planets. Eventually, she returned to the University of Arizona, where completed a PhD in geosciences (seismology) while working on image processing for OSIRIS-ReX.

A belief that asteroids hold answers to the big questions of her youth drives her to understand them from the inside out. “They really represent the leftovers of solar system formation,” she says. “It’s kind of like finding an ancient relic.” So-called carbonaceous asteroids like Ryugu and Europa—rich in volatile substances, including ice—may explain how water and the amino acids that jumpstarted life once made their way to Earth. They may also offer a glimpse of the future: “Near-Earth asteroids, especially, hold tremendous potential for resource utilization,” DellaGiustina says, “but one might also take us out someday.”

Apophis is not considered dangerous, but it will swing by at roughly one-tenth the distance between Earth and the Moon. “If we ever have an incoming threat to our own planet, we need to understand ‘what’s the structure of this thing?’ so that we can properly mitigate against it,” she says. With DellaGiustina at the helm, the OSIRIS-APEX project will use this once-in-7,500-years chance to study how close encounters with planets can change an asteroid. Earth’s tidal pull, for example, is expected to “squeeze” Apophis—a tug DellaGiustina hopes to measure via a seismometer dropped on the surface.

Lauretta, who has worked with DellaGiustina since she was an undergraduate, jumped at the chance to nominate her to lead the next phase of the OSIRIS mission. She had always been keen on designing experiments—Lauretta seriously considered her proposal to equip OSIRIS-ReX with a dosimeter to measure the radiation risk for future asteroid-hopping astronauts. Her “decisive leadership is rare and critical for a program of this size,” he adds. On the off chance that an errant space rock ever threatens Earth, it’ll be a comfort to know she’s at work behind the scenes.—Y.T.

Making transit sustainable and equitable

Picture this: It’s Tuesday morning, and you’re planning to ride the train to work. Walking to the station takes 25 minutes, so you hop on the local bus. Today, though, the bus is delayed, and doesn’t reach the station in time to catch the train. You wait for the next one. You’re late for work.

If your boss is a stickler and you rely on public transit, a missed connection can be make or break. These are the kinds of problems that Samitha Samaranayake, a computer-scientist-turned-civil-engineer at Cornell University, has made it his mission to solve. He designs algorithms to help varied modes of mass transit work more seamlessly together—and help city planners make changes that benefit those who need them most.

Before Cornell, Samaranayake spent several years studying app-based ridesharing, including the potential of on-demand autonomous car fleets. In 2017, he co-authored an influential paper showing that companies like Uber and Lyft could reduce their contribution to urban congestion if cars were dispatched and shared efficiently. But he quickly became disillusioned with entirely car-centric solutions. “It’s convenient for people who can afford it,” he says, but when it comes to moving city-dwellers efficiently and accessibly, mass transit can’t be beat.

So Samaranayake began investigating how new technology can best be incorporated into city transit systems—and possibly solve some of their most-common pitfalls. Take the “last mile problem:” the challenge of transporting people from transit hubs in dense urban areas to the less-centralized places that they need to go—like their homes in far-out neighborhoods. If these connections aren’t quick and reliable, people may not use them. And if people aren’t using a neighborhood bus line or other last-mile service, says Samaranayake, a transit agency might cut it rather than run more buses, making the problem worse.

That’s where the technology developed by ride-sharing companies becomes useful, says Samaranayake. In recent years, he’s designed algorithms to integrate real-time data from public transit with the software used to dispatch on-demand vehicles. This could let transit authorities send cars to pick up groups of people, then deliver them to a commuter hub in time to make their connections.

This approach is known as “microtransit,” and after pandemic-related delays, a test project with King County Metro in Seattle launched earlier this year. It uses app-based rideshare vans to shuttle shift workers and others who live in the outskirts of the city to and from the regional rail line. Although it’s too early to measure success, Samaranayake has seen enthusiastic uptake from some commuters without many good alternatives.

That points toward his other goal: finding better ways to quantify how equitably transit resources are apportioned, so that city planners can ultimately design new systems that reach more people more efficiently. This social-justice element helps motivate Samaranayake to keep working on mass transit, even though funding has typically been more abundant for flashier technology like self-driving cars.

That could be changing: In recent years, Samaranayake and his collaborators have received nearly $5 million from the US Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation to pursue their vision. “Transit is not ‘cool’ from a research perspective,” Samaranayake admits. “But it’s the only path forward to a transportation system that is environmentally sustainable and equitable, in my view.”—M.G.

Finding the roots of neurodegenerative disease

Anyone who’s taken high school biology knows that mitochondria are the powerhouses of cells. While it’s true that these organelles are responsible for converting sugars into energy, they also have many less-appreciated jobs, including generating heat, storing and transporting calcium, and regulating cell growth and death. In recent decades, researchers have linked the breakdown of these functions to the development of certain cancers and heart disease.

When it comes to diseases like dementia, Parkinson’s, and ALS, however, Duke University cell biologist Chantell Evans thinks it’s time to look specifically at neurons. “Mitochondria are implicated in almost every neurodegenerative disease,” says Evans. By unraveling how neurons deal with malfunctioning mitochondria, her work could open up possibilities for treating many currently incurable conditions.

Evans’ work focuses on understanding a process called mitophagy—how cells deal with dead or malfunctioning mitochondria—in neurons. There are plenty of reasons to believe brain cells might manage their organelles in unique ways: For one, they don’t divide and replenish themselves, which means the 80 billion or so we’re issued at birth have to last a lifetime. Neurons are also extremely stretched out (the longest ones run from the bottom of the backbone to the tip of each big toe) which means each nucleus has to monitor and maintain its roughly two million mitochondria over a great distance.

Before Evans launched her investigation in 2016, research on epithelial cells—those that line the surface of the body and its organs—had identified two proteins, PINK1 and Parkin, that seem to be mutated in patients with Parkinson’s disease. But, confusingly, disabling those proteins in mice in the lab didn’t lead to the mouse equivalent of Parkinson’s. To Evans, that suggested that the story of neural mitophagy must be more complicated.

To find out how, she went back to basics. Her lab watched rodent brain cells in a dish as they processed dysfunctional mitochondria. Evans gradually cranked up the stress they experienced by removing essential nutrients from their growth medium. This, she argues, is more akin to what happens in an aging human body than the typical process, which uses potent chemicals to damage mitochondria.

Results she published in 2020 in the journal eLife found that disposing of damaged mitochondria takes significantly longer in neurons than it does in epithelial cells. “We think, because [this slowness] is specific to neurons, that it may put neurons in a more vulnerable state,” she explains. Evans has also helped identify additional proteins that are involved in the best-known repair pathway—and determined that that action takes place in the soma, or main body, of a neuron but not in its threadlike extensions, known as axons. That, she says, could mean there’s a separate pathway that’s maintaining the mitochondria in the axon. Now, she wants to identify and understand that one too.

Thoroughly documenting these mechanics will take time, but Evans says charting the system could lead to precious medicine. “If we understand what goes wrong,” she says, “We might be able to diagnose people earlier… and be more targeted in trying to develop better treatment options.”—M.G.

Mapping every human cell

It took the Human Genome Project a decade to lay out our complete genetic code. Since then, advances in sequencing technology have vastly sped up the pace by which geneticists can parse As, Gs, Ts, and Cs, which has allowed biologists to think even bigger—by going smaller. Instead of spelling out all of a person’s DNA, they want to create a Human Cell Atlas that characterizes the genetic material of every single cell in the body. Doing so will create “a reference map of what a healthy human looks like,” explains bioengineer Aaron Streets.

Understanding what makes individual cells unique requires insight into the epigenome—the suite of chemical instructions that tell the body how to make many kinds of cells out of the same string of DNA. “This is where the notion of the epigenome comes into play,” says Streets, who runs a lab at the University of California, Berkeley. All cells may be reading from the same book, but each one’s epigenome highlights the most relevant passages—essentially how and which genes are expressed. Streets is inventing the tools scientists need to zero in on those specifics.

Reading the epigenome is important, says Streets, because, in addition to showing why healthy cells act the way they do, it can also reveal why an individual one goes haywire and causes illness—cancer, for example. Once the markers of a rogue actor are known, he explains, researchers can develop therapeutics that address the question: “How can we engineer the epigenome of cells to fix the disease?”

Characterizing cells is highly interdisciplinary work, which Streets is perfectly suited for. He majored in art and physics but “just wasn’t good at” biology organismal studies. It wasn’t until graduate school, where he worked with a physicist-turned-bioengineer, that he realized how much insights gleaned from math, physics, and engineering could benefit the study of living things.

As a start, this year Streets and his colleagues published a protocol in the journal Nature Methods for reading particularly mysterious parts of the genome. The tool identifies sections within hard-to-read DNA regions that bind proteins—and thus have epigenomic significance—by bookending the strings with chemical markers called methyl groups. To James Eberwine, a pharmacology professor at the University of Pennsylvania and a pioneer of single-cell biology, “it is going to be very useful” for building a cell atlas.

Now, Streets’s lab is building new software to piece together the millions of sequences that comprise a single cell’s genome. And, because mapping every single anatomical cell will require a fair bit of teamwork, the programs they create are shared freely with other scientists who can use the tools to make their own discoveries. “If you look at really huge leaps in progress in our understanding of how the human body works,” says Streets, “they correlate really strongly with advances in technology.”—Y.T.

Crunching the numbers to get ahead of outbreaks

Like everyone in early 2020, Daniel Larremore wondered whether this virus making its way around the globe was going to be a big deal. Would he have to cancel the exciting academic workshop he had planned for March? What about his ongoing research on the immune-evading genes of malaria parasites?

As the answers became clear, so did his next big task: predicting the trajectory of the disease so that scientists and policymakers could get ahead of it. “You have a background in infectious diseases and mathematical modeling,” thought the University of Colorado Boulder computer scientist. “If you’re not going to make a contribution when there’s a global pandemic, when are you going to step up?” He put his work on the epidemiology of malaria on hold as he emailed colleagues studying the emerging outbreak to ask how his lab could help. “I sent that mid-March,” he says, “and didn’t stop working until early to mid-2021.”

Before coming to Boulder, Larremore had been a postdoctoral candidate at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, where he was first immersed in the world of infectious disease—how it was transmitted, how it evaded immunity, and how to model its spread. It prepared him well for the first wave of COVID-19 research questions, which were all about working around the shortcomings of antibody tests. At the time, they were the only tools available for counting infections, but their sensitivity and specificity varied widely. A paper he co-authored in those early months described how to estimate infection rate, a key metric in justifying public health measures like mask mandates and social distancing.

As the pandemic wore on, Larremore and his collaborators continued to think forward: “What’s the question we’re going to be asking six months from now that we’ll wish we had the answer to right away?” The research they conducted now underpins much of American COVID policy: Their modeling found that speed, not accuracy, in testing was more important for curbing viral spread; that the success of immunity passports depended on the prevalence and infectiousness of the virus; and that elderly and medically vulnerable people should be prioritized for vaccination. “Dan did a huge amount of work across a number of different disciplines, and I think the contributions he’s made have really been remarkable,” says Yonatan Grad, an associate professor at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health who frequently collaborates with Larremore.

While his work on COVID-19 winds down, Larremore is already helping develop a general theory of disease mitigation involving at-home testing. Through modeling, he’s hoping to find out how much testing might slow the spread of different infectious diseases—and how that changes with disease or the variant. He’s excited about leveraging the jump in public science literacy induced by COVID-19: “If you tell people to self-collect a nasal swab, they’ll do a great job at it,” he says. He imagines a world where the public can reliably self-diagnose common illnesses like flu, and take the appropriate steps (wearing a mask, opening windows) to protect others. “That just seems really empowering,” says Larremore. “And, potentially, a cool future.” —Y.T.

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Following this summer’s devastating floods in the United States, European Union, and a “monsoon on steroids” that left one-third of Pakistan under water, it is becoming increasingly clear that rising floodwaters are a dangerous part of our future with continued climate change. The collateral damage doesn’t go away when the flood waters recede. There is emotional trauma and post traumatic stress disorder, expensive material loss, and a study published today in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) is taking a closer look at the affects of all this excess water on food insecurity.

The authors examined more than a dozen countries across western, eastern, and southern Africa and found that flooding can affect food security for over 5.6 million people across the continent.

[Related: How climate change fed Pakistan’s devastating floods.]

“Our findings show that floods can impact food security both immediately and in the months after the flood event,” Connor Reed, a former New York University Center for Data Science graduate student and lead author on the study, said in a press release. “In many flood events we assessed, there were substantial damages to infrastructure, croplands, and livestock, which compromised food production and access, as well as water resources and sanitation also critical to food security.”

Between 2009-2020, the researchers studied how key flood characteristics, including location, duration, and extent, influence the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) scale. This is a food insecurity metric used by USAID’s Famine Early Warning System. It measures the severity of food insecurity using a five-point scale, ranging from minimal food security (IPC 1) up to famine (IPC 5). Approximately 12 percent of those who experienced food insecurity were affected by flooding’s devastating impacts over the 2009 to 2020 timeframe included in the study.

However, there were some beneficial impacts that remedied food insecurity, depending on the time period and regional scale. 

“Our results suggest that floods can have opposing effects on food security at different spatial scales, particularly at time periods after they occur,” study co-author Weston Anderson, a research scientist at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center and the University of Maryland’s Earth System Science Interdisciplinary Center, said in a press release. “In a given year, excess precipitation may immediately lead to floods that destroy crops in a localized area while also being associated with beneficial growing conditions that boost crop production on the country-scale.”

However, the team cautions that any positive impacts from flooding are not guaranteed to be felt by all. These beneficial findings instead make a case for improved data collection on flood and food security to better aid both climate adaptation planning and disaster response.  

[Related: Why we’re going to see a rapid rise in sunny day floods.]

“What we highlight in particular is that flooding has important but complicated impacts on food security at different times and spatial scales,” Sonali Shukla McDermid, an associate professor in NYU’s Department of Environmental Studies, said in a press release. “This is however largely understudied globally, and therefore not well understood. Improving knowledge of where, when, and to what extent floods affect food security is crucial, especially for decision-makers across flood-prone rural areas that contribute to regional and global food supplies.”

The study also found that food security is affected in highly localized and varying ways, instead of more uniformly across countries. The team says this is evidence that the relationship between flooding and food security is not due to dynamics that vary by individual country, such as, changes in food prices, but instead to, “context-specific impacts on food production.” This kind of impact includes, subsistence crop loss, destruction of infrastructure creating difficulty in accessing food, and sanitation deficiencies that lead to water-borne illness.

“Understanding flood impacts on food security is of growing importance for the humanitarian community,” co-author Andrew Kruczkiewicz of the International Research Institute for Climate and Society at Columbia University said in a press release. “With the outputs of this study, the humanitarian community is in a better position to decide what actions, including anticipatory, preparedness and response, to prioritize—or deprioritize—in the areas we studied.”

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Can the people of the world be fed without ruining the planet in the process? Among the many scientists, organizations, companies, and farmers working on this problem is Microsoft. Yesterday, the tech giant open-sourced what they call the toolkit for the farm of the future. It’s a set of algorithms designed to increase food yield while decreasing cost and environmental impact.

“​​The soils are not getting any richer,” says Ranveer Chandra, who founded Microsoft’s agriculture research division in 2014. “The water levels are receding; then there’s climate change. How do you get the world to grow more nutritious food in a sustainable way? One of the most promising approaches is that of data-driven agriculture.”

Agriculture is the fifth-greatest greenhouse gas emitter in the world, responsible for over 11 percent of annual emissions. Yet, it is integral to the survival of humanity and is in peril from climate change-related extreme weather events, like drought.

[Related: Why the road to robotic farming is uncertain]

Inspired by this predicament, Microsoft Research started their agricultural research division eight years ago, with the goal of creating “farmer-augmenting” technologies like the newly released FarmVibes.AI. Inside FarmVibes.AI is a package of algorithms intended to help agriculturalists like Washington-based farmer and software engineer Andrew Nelson increase accuracy when it comes to planning, planting, harvesting, and distributing their crops. The Microsoft Research team has been testing out Project FarmVibes on Nelson’s 7,500 acre farm since 2017, where he saved 35 percent on one herbicide alone this spring. With the help of Microsoft and his background in computer science, Nelson flew drones and put sensors in the ground while running Project FarmVibes’ algorithms. Together, these tools let him create maps to strategically spray herbicides and understand ideal seed depths for planting. Now, some of these same algorithms are becoming open-sourced, meaning anyone can download them, redistribute them, and edit them for their own use.

Fertile ground

FarmVibes.AI is only the first of Project FarmVibes’ several software releases planned with the goal of increasing precision and productivity in farming. This first release includes four main components in the FarmVibes.AI suite. One component, Async Fusion, uses in-ground sensors along with drone and satellite images to create maps of nutrient and moisture distribution across a select patch of land, giving farmers information on where fertilizer and seeds should be placed, thereby reducing overfertilization and waste. 

Then there’s SpaceEye, another now open-source FarmVibes.AI program announced by Microsoft in December 2021, which can digitally remove clouds from satellite images and enable farmers to detect where weeds are growing so they can apply herbicide more precisely. “SpaceEye takes radar imagery, and the signals go through clouds,” Chandra says, revealing the previously obscured land underneath. “Then we use another AI scheme we developed called partial observation GANs, and we start predicting what image is below the clouds,” Chandra adds. 

Another FarmVibes.AI tool, DeepMC, brings hyper-localized climate predictions to farmers by gathering information on temperature, pressure, humidity, radiation, precipitation, wind, and more from a distributed sensor network and forecast data from local stations. These micro-climate predictions allow farmers to customize what they plant and when to the conditions specific to their farm. 

“For some of our chemicals, if you apply them and there’s a freeze, you lose 40 percent of your yield,” says Nelson. ”The problem is, our weather forecasts are very general for the area, and we have rolling hills. Sometimes between the top and bottom of the hill, there can be a 10 to 20-degree difference, so having the localized DeepMC down at the crop level makes a big difference.” 

Carbon capture

As for sustainability, FarmVibes.AI has a “what if” analytics tool that estimates the impacts of farming on carbon sequestration. As plants, including Nelson’s crops, photosynthesize, they absorb carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas from the air. These plants then store this carbon in their own biomass, thus contributing to atmospheric carbon removal. Soil is made from decayed plants, making it the largest terrestrial carbon sink in the world. If farmers choose to take precautions through methods like conservation tillage and minimally disrupt their soil, they can help promote prime conditions for sequestration. Through the “what if” tool, farmers can learn how the conditions on their farm combined with farming methods can best allow them to store carbon. This may generate an additional source of income for farmers in carbon credits, earning farmers up to 30 dollars per acre per year at popular startup Indigo Ag.

But of course, plants aren’t the largest producers of greenhouse gasses in agriculture; it’s animals—more specifically, cows. Although Microsoft hasn’t done as much testing with animals, Chandra says these tools can be repurposed to gauge emissions from livestock. “Similar to how Andrew flies a drone to measure crop stress, we flew drones over cows in pasture. You could see how they were moving, how they were pooping,” Chandra says.

Although the tech isn’t intended to be directly used by farmers yet, unless you happen to be a software engineer like Nelson, the fact that it is now open-source does provide an avenue for Microsoft’s partners, like Land O’ Lakes and the USDA, to build products with these algorithms and release them to farmers, Chandra said.

[Related: Can industrial farming be a force for good?]

The release of FarmVibes.AI comes shortly after John Deere announced plans to bring new autonomous tractors to market. John Deere has said it will build a fully autonomous farming system by 2030. This development is in line with where Microsoft is headed with its agriculture projects. “We have partners that work in the autonomous tractor space,” Chandra says. “We would expect our precision agriculture tools to be able to feed into tractors. I think the challenge is how do you do that at an even more micro scale? And that’s some of what we’re looking at.”

Ultimately, FarmVibes’ success lies in its ability to aggregate existing tools that have previously worked separately from one another or were difficult to overlay, Nelson says. Now, Nelson is able to create a map in 18 minutes of where he should spray his field. Previously, that would have taken days. “It’s definitely stepping stones,” he says.

Correction on Oct. 7: This article has been updated to clarify that it was Microsoft’s agricultural division that began in 2014, and not Project FarmVibes. Additionally, it has been updated to clarify that Nelson is now able to map his field in 18 minutes, not spray them in that amount of time.

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The Greek name for cacao translates to “food from the gods.” So who wouldn’t want to try this purest form of chocolate? According to new archaeological research, everyone in the ancient Maya community of El Pilar probably did. 

“To be a Maya, you had to have cacao,” says Anabel Ford, director of the Mesoamerican Research Center at University of California, Santa Barbara.

In a study published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences today, Ford and her team examined 54 vessels for residue of cacao biomarkers, seeking to close the gap on research about non-upper class Maya cacao consumption. 

Out of the dozens of vases, bowls, jars, and plates, 56 percent were found to have cacao seed residue. The artifacts were dug up from Central America and date back to 600 to 900 CE. The vast majority were recovered from residential units in and around El Pilar’s monuments rather than royal spaces. Earlier analyses of highly decorative ceremonial vessels led to notions that seed consumption was primarily limited to elite classes, which this new research refutes.

Although Theobroma cacao, the cacao tree, was domesticated as early as 5,400 years ago in South America, it was an incredibly decisive crop for the Maya of modern-day Belize and Guatemala. “It doesn’t surprise me at all to hear of a site where they’re finding cacao in commoner contexts as well as elite contexts,” says Cameron McNeil, a specialist in archaeobotany at the City University of New York. “Cacao was the only stimulant that was available to people in Mesoamerica. I think that’s why it became important across such a wide area.”

By looking at methylxanthines, the class that includes stimulants like caffeine in coffee and theobromine in chocolate, the researchers analyzed traces of compounds in Late Classic Maya pottery. But one chemical in particular, theophylline, proved to be crucial in identifying cacao remnants. While Theobroma cacao does contain caffeine and theobromine, “it is unique in Mesoamerica for theophylline,” the authors of the study write.

[Related: Climate change is coming for Indonesia’s cocoa farms]

Previously, chemical analyses of decorated vessels primarily revealed consumption patterns by Maya elites. Yet, the majority of Maya weren’t elites—they were farmers who had access to crops like Theobroma cacao. “The first question I would ask is, ‘who was growing the damn things?’ Not the elite, I am sure of it,” says Ford.

Royal or not, Ford says ritual consumption of cacao would have been important to the Maya of El Pilar for its sanctity and kick of caffeine. Cacao was also highly valued because of its difficulty to grow—so much so that it is believed to have been used as currency, and even traded for human beings, McNeil explains. But by no means does this indicate that it was reserved for the ultra-wealthy. Although McNeil says royalty would have had more consistent access to cacao because of its monetary status, non-elites would still use the stimulant in their everyday lives and rituals when they could get it. This, in part, mirrors our use of the plant today.

“Rituals can be sumptuous or not. It’s like the difference between Queen Elizabeth’s funeral and my father’s,” says Ford. Just as eating chocolate and drinking coffee are daily rituals for many now, cacao consumption may have gone far beyond extravagant ceremonial purposes.

[Related: How much chocolate would you have to eat for it to kill you?]

The results of this study help dispel inaccurate beliefs about class-based enjoyment of cacao in Mesoamerica that, according to McNeil, were in part perpetuated by Spanish colonizers. “They’re not writing about what the common farmer is doing and eating,” she says. Instead, they focused on practices of royalty, accounts that have since been passed down, repeated, and assumed by many to be the whole truth. 

For Ford, having evidence of working-class cacao consumption isn’t just exciting archaeological news: She also hopes it sends a message that Maya farmers, cooks, and community members are just as important to learn from as royalty. “Everyone likes to focus on the fancy things, but if you want to know about society, you need to learn about social history. There’s a lot more to understanding a landscape of ancient history and ancient Maya than these big dead kings and queens,” she says. “People should know when they’re making an assumption … otherwise it becomes writ.”

Correction (September 28, 2022): The origins of the word Theobroma are Greek, not Latin, as previously stated.

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Humans have consumed meat all throughout history, but more recently, meat consumption has exploded. Global meat production reached about 375 million tons in 2018, more than triple the amount that the world produced fifty years ago. 

The production of animal-based foods carry heavy environmental impacts, using approximately 2422 cubic gigameters of water yearly. They also account for about 57 percent of all greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from food production—almost twice the emissions from plant-based foods—not to mention that livestock grazing takes up about 26 percent of the Earth’s ice-free land.

Given its impact on climate change, many argue that it’s time to reduce red meat consumption and explore viable alternatives. For some meat lovers, seafood may be the ideal swap.

Seafood is a relatively low climate impact source of highly nutritious food. The authors of a new Nature study analyzed the GHG emissions associated with the production of various seafood like whitefish and crustaceans as well as their respective nutrient densities. They found that reducing the consumption of red meat and replacing it with certain seafood species may improve nutrition and reduce GHG emissions at the same time.

[Related: Eating sustainably may mean skipping the lobster for now.]

Seafood contains nutrients that other foods don’t have, or only in very low levels, such as iodine, vitamin D, and omega-3 fatty acids, says Friederike Ziegler, study author and senior scientist at the RISE Research Institutes of Sweden. In terms of nutrition and greenhouse gas emissions, those that performed best or had the lowest emissions per nutrient density were small pelagic species (like anchovies, mackerels, and herrings), bivalves like mussels and oysters, and salmonids, she adds.

Based on the study, large pelagics like yellowfin tuna also had high nutrient density scores, but they produced more emissions than small pelagics, bivalves, and salmonids. Meanwhile, most whitefish species—like the Atlantic cod—had fewer GHG emissions per edible product than large pelagics, but they weren’t as nutritious.

“Diet shift is a key strategy to reduce greenhouse gas emissions,” says Greg Keoleian, director of the Center for Sustainable Systems at the University of Michigan’s School for Environment and Sustainability who was not involved in the study. Shifting from beef to different seafood may lead to a large reduction in emissions, but sustainability is hardly ever that simple. 

A primary concern for switching from turf to surf is the sustainable production of each seafood species. This depends on various factors such as the source and production method as well as the feed for aquaculture, he adds.

In 1974, about 10 percent of fish stocks were being fished at biologically unsustainable levels, meaning they were being caught at a rate faster than the fish can recover its population. Since then, this percentage has tripled—rising to 31 percent in 2013 and 34 percent in 2020. Overfishing, the main driver of ocean wildlife population decline, can cause the loss of breeders, disruption of natural communities, and a massive depletion of many species, thereby harming ocean biodiversity.

“Many small pelagic fish stocks are currently overfished and they play a vital role in aquatic ecosystems,” says Keoleian. “These fish are also heavily fished for fishmeal used in aquaculture.  Many salmon stocks are also overfished and bivalves populations are declining due to climate change, so sustainability of production from increased demand could be a concern.”

There is potential to increase production and total consumption of small pelagic species by making use of underexploited species. Additionally, utilizing other species that typically end up in fishmeal and fish oil in aquafeeds could be beneficial, says Ray Hilborn, professor at the University of Washington School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences.

Salmon, on the other hand, is pretty much fully exploited. “Any hopes for increased hatchery production are dubious because there appears to be competition for food in the North Pacific ocean, so more hatcheries would not likely increase total production,” says Hilborn.

Policymakers play a major role in shaping sustainable seafood production. They affect the food system from different angles, ranging from dietary advice that influences people’s eating habits to fishing regulations or aquaculture licensing procedures that shape the sustainability and volume of production in fisheries and aquaculture, says Ziegler.

For example, the Keep Finfish Free Act of 2019 aimed to prohibit the issuance of permits to conduct finfish aquaculture in the US Exclusive Economic Zone, unless specifically authorized by Congress. The health and integrity of Alaska’s wild fish stock must be protected and properly managed, otherwise, industrial aquaculture operations may threaten the ecosystem with non-native and genetically modified fish species, according to Alaska Rep. Don Young who filed the legislation.

[Related: How to eat sustainably without sacrificing your favorite foods.]

To increase seafood production without causing further environmental harm, all wild stocks must be managed sustainably, which means fishing within their biological limits and protecting the ecosystem they depend on, says Ziegler. This maximizes the harvest from capture fisheries.

Ensuring that the harvested fish biomass is used for food and not wasted along the supply chain would also make a difference. A lot of fish processing trimmings are used in feeds, even though it is fully possible to utilize more of these side streams to produce nutritious food or food ingredients, she adds.

Meanwhile, designating marine protection areas (MPA) can be effective in restoring ecosystems, says Keoleian. Labels informing consumers of sustainable seafood production may also influence consumers’ consumption, he adds. For instance, the Marine Stewardship Council certification is a way to show that a particular fishery meets established standards and best practices for sustainable fishing.

Overall, if you want to reduce your carbon footprint and eat red meat less frequently, try incorporating more sustainably-sourced seafood into your diet. Not only will you be helping the planet, but you’ll also benefit from having a more varied diet.

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To control unpredictable water and stop floods, you might build a dam. To build a dam, you generally need hills and dales—geographic features to hold water in a reservoir. Which is why dams don’t fare well in Bangladesh, most of which is a flat floodplain that’s just a few feet above sea level.

Instead, in a happy accident, millions of Bangladeshi farmers have managed to create a flood control system of their very own, taking advantage of the region’s wet-and-dry seasonal climate. As farmers pump water from the ground in the dry season, they free up space for water to flood in during the wet season, hydrogeologists found. 

Researchers published the system they’d uncovered in the journal Science on September 15. And authorities could use the findings to make farming more sustainable, writes Aditi Mukherji, a researcher in Delhi for the International Water Management Institute who wasn’t involved in the paper, in a companion article in Science.

“No one really intended this to happen, because farmers didn’t have the knowledge when they started pumping,” says Mohammad Shamsudduha, a geoscientist at University College London in the UK and one of the paper’s authors.

[Related: What is a flash flood?]

Most of Bangladesh lies in the largest river delta on the planet, where the Rivers Ganges and Brahmaputra fan out into the Bay of Bengal. It’s an expanse of lush floodplains and emerald forests, blanketing some of the most fertile soil in the world. Indeed, that soil supports a population density nearly thrice that of New Jersey, the densest US state.

Like much of South Asia, Bangladesh’s climate revolves around the yearly monsoon. The monsoon rains support local animal and plant life and are vital to agriculture, too. But a heavy monsoon can cause devastating floods, as residents of northern Bangladesh experienced in June.

Yet Bangladesh’s warm climate means that farmers can grow crops, especially rice, in the dry season. To do so, farmers often irrigate their fields with water they draw up from the ground. Many small-scale farmers started doing so in the 1990s, when the Bangladeshi government loosened restrictions on importing diesel-powered pumps and made them more affordable. 

The authors of the new study wanted to examine whether pumping was depriving the ground of its water. That’s generally not very good, resulting in strained water supplies and the ground literally sinking (just ask Jakarta). They examined data from 465 government-controlled stations that monitor Bangladesh’s irrigation efforts across the country.

[Related: How climate change fed Pakistan’s devastating floods]

The situation was not so simple: In many parts of the country, groundwater wasn’t depleting at all.

It’s thanks to how rivers craft the delta. The Ganges and the Brahmaputra carry a wealth of silt and sediment from as far away as the Himalayas. As they fan out through the delta, they deposit those fine particles into the surrounding land. These sediments help make the delta’s soil as fertile as it is. 

This accumulation also results in loads of little pores in the ground. When the heavy rains come, instead of running off into the ocean or adding to runaway flooding, all that water can soak into the ground, where farmers can use it.

Where a dam’s reservoir is more like a bucket, Bangladesh is more like a sponge. During the dry season, farmers dry out the sponge. That gives it more room to absorb more water in the monsoon. And so forth, in an—ideally—self-sustaining cycle. Researchers call it the Bengal Water Machine. 

“The operation of the [Bengal Water Machine] was suspected by a small number of hydrogeologists within our research network but essentially unknown prior to this paper,” says Richard Taylor, a hydrogeologist at University College London in the UK, and another of the paper’s authors.

“If there was no pumping, then this would not have happened,” says Kazi Matin Uddin Ahmed, a hydrogeologist at the University of Dhaka in Bangladesh, and another of the paper’s authors. 

Storing water underground instead of a dam has a few advantages, Ahmed adds. The subsurface liquid is at less risk of evaporating into useless vapor. It doesn’t rewrite the region’s geography, and farmers can draw water from their own land, rather than relying on water shuttled in through irrigation channels.

The researchers believe that other “water machines” might fill fertile deltas elsewhere in the tropics with similar wet-and-dry climates. Southeast Asia might host a few, at the mouths of the Red River, the Mekong, and the Irrawaddy.

But an ominous question looms over the Bengal Water Machine: What happens as climate change reshapes the delta? Most crucially, a warming climate might intensify monsoons and change where they deliver their rains. “This is something we need to look into,” says Shamsudduha.

The Bengal Water Machine faces several other immediate challenges. In 2019, in response to overpumping concerns, the Bangladeshi government reintroduced restrictions on which farmers get to install a pump, which could make groundwater pumping more inaccessible. Additionally, many farmers use dirty diesel-powered pumps. (The government’s now encouraging farmers to switch to solar power.)

Also, keeping the Bengal Water Machine ship-shape means not using too much groundwater. Unfortunately, that’s already happening. Bangladesh’s west generally gets less rainfall than its east, and the results reflect that. The researchers noticed groundwater depletion in the west that wasn’t happening out east.

“There is a limit,” says Ahmed. “There has to be close monitoring of the system.”

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Tapping into green energy such as hydropower, wind, and solar energy is more important now than ever. But, these three powerhouses are not the only “renewable” energy sources on the scene. Compared to hydro, wind, and solar, biomass had the largest percentage share of total US energy consumption in 2021. 

Biomass refers to renewable organic materials from plants and animals, which include wood and wood processing wastes, agricultural crops, and animal manure, among others. Natural biomass resources can help fulfill energy demand, and unlike other renewable energy sources, they can also be converted directly into biofuels for transportation use.

In 2021, the United States produced about 17.5 billion gallons of biofuels. While this fuel source isn’t without controversy, the global biofuel demand is expected to increase by 28 percent by 2026. However, biomass feedstocks are not immune to the impacts of climate change. 

Climate change poses a direct threat to biomass sources

To have biomass, ultimately, we need plants to grow. In a sense, biomass supply and availability ultimately depend on the climate. 

“Increasingly dryer and hotter weather conditions pose a threat to successful cultivation, and ultimately, the yield of agro-derived biomass feedstocks,” says Victor Ujor, assistant professor of food science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “With a near-global drop in rainfall, plant growth and yield will fall dramatically, if this trend continues.”

Aside from having fewer agricultural residues for use as biomass, lower crop yields can also lead to more and more non-agricultural land being converted to use for food crops. This could lead to a reduction in non-agricultural biomass and increased use of fertilizers, says James Clark, professor of chemistry at the University of York in England.

Wildfires are also happening more frequently, becoming bigger and more intense, and spreading further thanks to climate change. These raging fires can eliminate forest-derived plant biomass, most of which takes longer to grow, says Ujor. 

[Related: Biofuels are having a government-funding moment.]

Overall, worsening climate change threatens the availability of biomass, affecting not only the supply of biofuels, but also the capacity of a negative emission technology called bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS). Negative emission technologies refer to those that remove and sequester carbon dioxide from the air.

BECCS extracts bioenergy from biomass via combustion or processing, which may release emissions because plants absorb carbon from the atmosphere as they grow. However, these emissions are captured and stored through geologic sequestration, the method of securing carbon dioxide in underground geologic formations to prevent its release into the atmosphere. As of 2019, five facilities around the world were using BECCS technologies and capturing about 165,000 tons of carbon dioxide per year.

According to a new Nature study, the capacity of BECCS may decrease in the future due to the effects of climate change on crop yields and biomass feedstocks. Therefore, it must be utilized sooner rather than later, the authors argue.

If global mitigation strategies alongside large-scale BECCS are employed in 2040, global warming may reach 2.5 degrees Celsius in 2050 and 2.7 degree Celsius in 2100, says Clark, who was involved in the study.

Only by starting to use this strategy at a much larger scale by 2030 will we meet the Paris goal of limiting global warming to no more than 2 degrees Celsius by 2100, he adds. The study emphasizes that there is an urgency to use BECCS in the near future to mitigate climate change and avoid serious food crises, unless other negative emission technologies become available to compensate for its reduced capacity.

Bioenergy use still poses environmental risks—even when paired with carbon capture 

If BECCS can help blunt the release of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, what’s preventing its large-scale deployment today?

The cost may be the single most important factor, says Ujor, and we still need massive investments in research to develop cost-effective BECCS strategies. Estimates show that it may cost up to $200 per ton of CO2 sequestered. This is costly compared to another negative emission technology called direct air capture with Carbon Storage (DACCS), which can cost as low as about $94 to $232 per ton of CO2 from the atmosphere.

“The cost of trapping, storing and compressing CO2 is enormous,” says Ujor. “At present, the economics does not yet add up positively to warrant scale up at the level that we direly need the technology to work.”

Also, the energy sources of BECCS operations are, for the most part, fossil-based, so it could be counterproductive to put more CO2 in the air in an effort to trap and store CO2, he adds. Shifting energy sources away from fossil fuels may be necessary first.

Technical barriers also exist, specifically, the safe storage of carbon dioxide. The security of a storage site is crucial because the leak of highly concentrated carbon dioxide would be dangerous for public safety, the ecosystem of the site, and the Earth’s climate. Extensive studies need to be conducted to determine how well and how safely CO2 can be stored without harming the environment, says Ujor. 

[Related: Tech to capture and reuse carbon is on the rise. But can it help the world reach its climate goals?]

However, BECCS remains controversial because of concerns about the sustainable scalability of the technology. According to Nathanael Greene from the Natural Resources Defense Council, the amount of land, water, and nutrients needed to produce enough biomass may threaten biodiversity, water supply, and nutrient balances. 

Based on integrated assessment models, a massive deployment of BECCS in an effort to limit the temperature increase to 1.5 degrees Celsius may require about 25 to 80 percent of current global cropland. Meanwhile, growing biomass crops for BECCS to meet the Paris goal of 2 degrees Celsius might require more than double the amount of water currently used worldwide in irrigation for food production. 

Given its potential impact on resources and biodiversity, the scale of BECCS deployment must remain within certain conditions where it is beneficial. For instance, the amount of carbon removed from the atmosphere through BECCS may be offset if there is a significant land-use change to meet a 1.5 degrees Celsius climate change target.

When it comes to bioenergy crops, there’s also the risk of taking arable land away from growing food. “If food is used to power cars or generate electricity or heat homes, either it must be snatched from human mouths, or ecosystems must be snatched from the planet’s surface, as arable lands expand to accommodate the extra demand,” says Guardian columnist George Monbiot.

Ujor says this may be mitigated by targeting reclaimed surface-mined lands for growing bioenergy crops, as well as continuing to develop strategies and plants that can do more with less. “We need to develop agro technologies that allow us to grow more with less,” he adds. “Breeding and engineering crops that generate greater yield whilst using less water and fertilizer—both for bioenergy and food crops—are particularly important to this quest.”

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The idea for Promesa was born one afternoon in May 2017 when Mikael Jakobsson and Aziria Rodríguez Arce were playing a round of Puerto Rico, a highly rated, award-winning board game. The premise is that players act as colonial governors and slave owners on the US territory and island, and win points by running plantations, constructing buildings, and shipping goods to Spain. Jakobsson says Puerto Rico came from a 1990’s board game “renaissance” in Europe that popularized themes of exploration, expansion, exploitation, and extermination in the industry.

“It’s playing oppression. It’s like history fan fiction with all these games… You find an island and it’s yours” says Jakobsson, a lecturer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and research coordinator at the university’s Game Lab. “It’s a pretty shitty theme for a board game.” 

To break the all-too-popular pattern, over the past two years, Jakobsson has been working with Puerto Rican graphic artist Rosa Colón Guerra to create Promesa, a new board game that more accurately reflects the reality of Puerto Rico’s history and people. The game is based on the real-life PROMESA act, which was established by the US government in 2016 in response to the island’s debt crisis, putting American lawmakers in charge of the country’s finances. To win, you must settle Puerto Rico’s bills and build up the country’s infrastructure, education, and social services.

[Related: Climate-related food shortages are driving more Puerto Ricans to farming]

With its unconventional premise and solutions-geared gameplay, Promesa stands out from other options already on the market. For one, it’s set in the present to familiarize players with the challenges Puerto Ricans are facing today. “When a game is set in the distant past, I think it’s to not upset anyone … We don’t have to worry about human suffering,” Jakobsson says. “But we need to see that Puerto Rico is still an actual territory.”

To see exactly how this reframing changes a board-game-playing experience, I played a round of Promesa in late August. I’m no board game expert, but I am competitive—and I wanted to see what Jakobsson’s idea of winning looked like. 

Navigating catastrophe

The artwork on Promesa is some of the most detailed and vibrant I’ve seen. Colón Guerra, currently a resident at MIT’s Visiting Artists program, traveled all over her home country to capture important local landscapes and ensure that the visuals reflected the people there. Somehow, she squeezed the 3,500-square-mile island down to a roughly 4-foot-square board. Lagoons, castles, and sea animals dot the edges as a waterfall and ruins hold court at the center. A dock, on the southwest corner, is painted like the Puerto Rican flag. If you recognize some of the landmarks, Jakobsson says this is by design: they wanted the depiction of Puerto Rico to feel familiar to those who know the island.

I’m sitting in the Game Lab in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with fellow MIT students, Grace and Iris, for a trial run of Promesa. A pile of crystalline black gems is balanced precariously on a blue “raft’”: These gems represent the country’s debt, while the raft symbolizes the blue tarps that still cover many houses on the island after Hurricane Maria. Our mission is to work together to slowly push the raft off the island without spilling any gems—or else more obstacles will hinder us. Throughout the game, we must invest in education, social services, and infrastructure by adding gems from each of these categories (colored bright green, blue, and yellow) to the pile of debt gems on the raft. This reflects the cost of investing in these areas, and adds to the difficulty of moving the raft. At the same time, paying into education or infrastructure, for example, allows us to take certain actions, like get rid of debt gems or push the raft farther off the island, that help us reach the final goal. 

“You three are now the lawmakers in charge of handling Puerto Rico’s debt crisis,” Jakobsson says to open the game. “Congratulations.”

We laugh nervously. “This game seems like it might be hard to win,” Grace says with a slight smile as she tips the gems onto the raft to launch us into more than a hundred years of colonial exploitation and economic burden. A few of the pieces fall off, and we exchange looks as Jakobsson places two red setback gems on the “catastrophe” scale. Once we hit five, disaster strikes. (The nature of the event isn’t specified, but Jakobsson alludes to some of the recent hurricanes and earthquakes that have damaged the island.) After the third catastrophe, the game is immediately over.

A few rounds later, we reach our first catastrophe and have to give up five of our hard-earned education and infrastructure gems. Without those, we’re not allowed to push the raft off the island anymore—we have to spend more on education and infrastructure and incur extra debt before Puerto Rico can progress. 

“You’ve still got time,” Jakobsson says, when we let out slightly distressed groans. “But not a lot.”

Win and lose together

From the start, Jakobsen says his idea was to show that the island’s debt can’t fully be paid off. 

But it took several years of research for him and Arce, an MIT graduate student and consultant on the project, to reflect that nuance in the aims, rules, and construct of a board game. In the summer of 2018, Jakobsson received a grant from the university to travel to Puerto Rico, where they worked with scholars and colleagues to learn what residents were most concerned about, and how those core issues might effectively be designed into a game. After weeks of interviews and analysis, the team settled on the topic of the debt crisis. 

Promesa went through many iterations, starting off with a card game structure and then changing formats completely. Eventually, the makers settled on the throughline of getting rid of the country’s debt on a raft, based on the images of the blue tarps they saw after Hurricane Maria. They wanted to send the raft floating, metaphorically, back to Washington, D.C. to “leave the debt where it belonged.” With that part established, the rest of the game came together more quickly. 

Ultimately, the structure of the game differs from any that require players to best others to win. It’s a collaborative, cooperative game—you win and lose together. 

“A lot of games are built around mechanics that perpetuate certain ideas of Western progress. It’s like, ‘might makes right.’ It’s not about ethics—it’s about having a powerful army,  corporation, or whatever it is that makes you a winner,” Jakobsson says. “So we try to challenge some of those ideas.” 

Tabletop lessons

So why spend so much energy on conveying history through a board game that’s supposed to be fun? Wouldn’t this kind of effort be more meaningful in a book or documentary? Board games are a powerful medium, Jakobsson says, because we can engage with them in personal spaces where it can be hard for other political messages to reach. Even if players don’t become experts on Puerto Rico’s colonial past, portraying a different kind of history is important on its own. 

“I think there is something about playing out an issue versus just reading or hearing about it that can grip you a little deeper, and maybe can be a little more memorable,” Jakobsson explains. 

He adds that he doesn’t think that Euro-games, with their fixation on conquest, are designed to be intentionally harmful. After all, they can be fun to play. But they still have an impact on players’ views and actions in the real world. Games and other media, Jakobsson says, are cultural artifacts that shape our understanding of the people and places around us. “They are reflections of the society or the culture in which we create them. And culture, to some extent, reflects the games we play. So I think there’s a lot of learning going on in games.

[Related: Two-player games that won’t turn you and your friend into enemies]

At the moment, the team is printing a limited run of Promesa. They’ve faced challenges in production and distribution due to the pandemic and slowed-down supply chains, but in the future, they hope to crowdfund resources to support wider access to the game. 

Jakobsson hopes that Promesa can nudge game designers in a different direction of storytelling and cultural engagement. Even though the board game industry is surging, explicitly anti-colonialist games like Promesa are still rare. More games that buck traditional trends of “exploration, expansion, exploitation, and extermination” will lead to more interesting directions, he says. 

“The idea that games are just for fun and nothing else—that is already starting to be a little less common among younger players,” Jakobsson points out. Many of his students at MIT look for games that have more complex and mature themes about social issues. In his experience, “there’s nothing outlandish about a board game about a political debt crisis.”

Earlier this summer, Ravensburger, the parent company that owns the original Puerto Rico, announced that they would release another game this fall: Puerto Rico 1897. This new version, which marks the year the country achieved autonomy from Spain, moves away from colonial themes: The goal is now to be the most prosperous farmer on the island. But there is still no acknowledgement of the US takeover in 1898. 

Journey’s end

It’s the last move: Grace, Iris, and I have one chance to push the raft off the island. We draw our last gems (not red, thankfully), and add them to the perilously high stack. The edges of the silicon blue square resist the neoprene material of the board and, for some reason, my fingers are shaking. I hold my breath while pushing, and it seems to pay off—we successfully get the raft into the deep-blue waters of the Atlantic. 

Jakobsson warned us it would be a tough journey, but after several rounds of luck, collaboration, and, notably, delicate pushing, we managed to resolve Puerto Rico’s debt crisis. After celebrating our win, Iris and Grace admit they hadn’t known about the PROMESA Act before playing. Iris says that, during each of her moves, she kept imagining what investing in infrastructure, education, and social services on the island might actually be like. 

“Well,” Jakobsson says, “at least we did that.”

Correction (September 10, 2022): Mikael Jakobsson’s last name was misspelled in some references. They have now been corrected.

The post You’ll need to solve Puerto Rico’s debt crisis to win this new board game appeared first on Popular Science.

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In the early 1970s, petroleum products ruled the ink production market. Back then, the supply of vegetable oils was too limited to use for ink products. However, the rising prices of petroleum in the late 1970s compelled the Newspaper Association of America (NAA) to find a possible cheaper alternative. They tested various vegetable oil formulations before coming up with the idea to use soybean oil, which had its first successful practical printing run in 1987 in The Gazette from Iowa.

Although the majority of US newspaper printers still use petroleum-based ink today, there is now consumer pressure to move in the direction of more environmentally friendly options. One of which is soy-based ink. Here’s why the growable ink is considered greener than its petroleum-based counterpart. 

Soybean oil is renewable and emits less volatile compounds

When it comes to determining the sustainability of a product, it often all comes down to where the core resources come from. Traditional ink is based on finite petroleum-based resources, while soy-based ink is made from soybean oil, which, as a plant product, is naturally renewable, says Shelie Miller, Jonathan W. Bulkley Collegiate Professor in Sustainable Systems at the University of Michigan. 

Like most bio-based products—goods that are wholly or mostly derived from biological materials—the carbon footprint of soy ink is lower compared to that made with petroleum, she adds. That’s because plants absorb and store carbon during their growth, thereby removing carbon from the atmosphere.

[Related: Where does your paper come from? The good and the bad news.]

This product is then refined and mixed with environmentally friendly, natural resins and waxes to make the final product, says Wendy Brannen, Senior Director of Marketing & Communications at the American Soybean Association (ASA). 

Aside from being renewable and having a low carbon footprint, petroleum-based inks produce more volatile organic compounds (VOCs) while they dry. “VOCs are the chemical compounds that evaporate off the paper surface and often create a noticeable chemical smell that can contribute to air quality impacts and can be harmful to human health,” says Miller. A 1994 EPA document found that soy inks had over 80 percent less volatile components compared to petroleum-based inks.

VOCs affect human and environmental health by irritating the eyes, nose, and throat, and producing ozone pollution. Some of the VOCs emitted by petroleum-based inks include benzene, toluene, and xylene, says Brannen. They also contain alkanes, measurable amounts of metals, and hydrocarbons. “For inks, reduced VOCs will likely have the greatest benefit by reducing workplace exposures rather than benefits to customers,” says Miller.

Brannen adds that soy ink is biodegradable and more easily removed from paper, which makes recycling easier as well because waste paper needs to be deinked first before it can be reprocessed into new paper products.

However, bio-based products have environmental trade-offs, too. “Soybeans are usually grown in monocultures that consume large amounts of energy and [use] pesticides that reduce biodiversity,” says Miller. Using crops for purposes other than feeding the hungry—like making biofuel—also raises moral and ethical dilemmas. According to a 2022 report from the independent think tank Green Alliance, about 3.5 million people could be fed every year if the United Kingdom stopped using crop-based biofuels.

According to a 1995 manual from the Iowa Waste Reduction Center, soy ink is about 2 to 5 percent more expensive than petroleum-based inks. This price difference is likely a factor against the major industry shift to greener ink, although more recent data comparing the cost of the two is needed. As demand for natural materials increases, the use of genetically modified feedstocks (in soy ink’s case, soybean) will also become more likely.

Printing with soy ink may be visually beneficial

Soy ink is slower to dry than other inks and not ideal for glossy magazines, but it still has some advantages. For instance, it spreads about 15 percent further than petroleum inks, which means printers may need less ink to print on the same amount of paper, potentially helping reduce ink use and cleanup costs as a result. 

In addition, “soy ink produces brighter and more vibrant colors than petroleum-based ink,” says Brannen. Because soybean oil is clearer than petroleum-derived oils, less pigment is necessary to produce the desired print density. “Because of the more intense colors, less ink may be needed to print materials, thereby lowering costs,” she adds. “Also, [color] soy ink is better at resisting rub off on the reader’s hands.”

The authors of a 2018 study published in the Journal of Applied Biomaterials & Functional Materials compared the printing quality of inks made of vegetable oils and petroleum-derived mineral oils. They concluded that both inks show similar printing performances in terms of printing quality, therefore ink choice should be based on human and environmental health impacts and ease of recycling and printing, among other reasons. The study recommended that inks from petroleum-derived mineral oils should then be replaced by vegetable oil-based inks.

[Related: You may need to read dozens of books each year to offset that new e-reader.]

More than 90 percent of US daily newspapers are printed with color soy ink today. But overall, only about 33 percent of the country’s newspaper printers use soy ink at all. Aside from newspapers, other products like children’s books and booklets in K-pop albums are sometimes printed with soy ink as well.

If a product has the “Printed with Soy Ink” certification mark, that means it met or exceeded the soy ink standards of the ASA, which regulates the use of the SoySeal. Brannen hopes that the merits of soy ink, such as its environmental benefits and ease of use for printers and end users, will encourage more vendors to use it. While the mass of ink on a single package or sheet of paper can be negligible, small environmental impacts add up, especially when associated with a product like ink that is everywhere, says Miller. 

That said, we shouldn’t focus on improving the sustainability of products and packaging materials without also addressing the environmental issues associated with overconsumption. Simple actions like buying secondhand books or refraining from mass purchasing albums can go a long way, especially if a lot of people do it. 

“If we reduce the amount of things that we consume,” Miller adds, “we also eliminate the need for packaging and all of packaging’s impacts—including the ink.”

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When it comes to “jailbreaking” products, people may usually envision hacking smartphones and tablets to skirt tech companies’ limitations on unlicensed modifications. In reality, however, the logic (and subsequent workarounds) are applicable to pretty much any technology reliant on modern electronic systems, and farm equipment is no exception. These days, John Deere’s equipment can be as advanced as any smart device, and is usually controlled via touchscreen computers and frequent software updates. All that proprietary tech has led the iconic company to institute some pretty impressive restrictions on farmers’ personal augmentations.

As Wired and elsewhere recently reported, a hacker known as Sick Codes presenting at this past weekend’s Def Con hacking convention in Las Vegas showcased their newfound ability to control multiple John Deere tractors via vehicles’ onboard touch screens. After months of experimentation on Deere circuit boards, Sick Codes figured out a way to essentially trick the computers during a “reboot check” to fool them into starting up as if being accessed by a certified dealership’s technicians. From there, they were able to access approximately 1.5 GB of log data usually utilized in system diagnostics, as well as a potential route towards even deep computer access.

[Related: Microsoft is making it easier for customers to repair devices. Will other companies follow?]

Aside from highlighting the importance of individual consumers’ being able to troubleshoot vital machinery’s computers themselves, Sick Codes’ breakthroughs also illustrated the vulnerabilities that could be exploited by bad actors via chaining to other attacks. It’s extremely important to balance farmers’ right to access these systems, alongside industry-wide security to prevent agricultural instability and crises. Last year, for example, a ransomware attack on JBS Meat briefly disrupted the company’s productivity. While the overall consequences were limited, that won’t necessarily be the case for future hacks.

Despite this, Sick Codes explained they understand it is also important for farmers’ to have computer access for products like John Deere tractors.

“Farmers prefer the older equipment simply because they want reliability. They don’t want stuff to go wrong at the most important part of the year,” Sick Codes told Wired, adding, “So that’s what we should all want, too. We want farmers to be able to repair their stuff for when things go wrong, and now that means being able to repair or make decisions about the software in their tractors.”

The post John Deere tractors are getting the jailbreak treatment from hackers appeared first on Popular Science.

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This article was originally featured on Undark.

On the southern edge of Mexico City, on a patch of land surrounded by water, a farmer and a scientist recently inspected rows of small cubes of mud that had sprouted seedlings. They were crouching on a chinampa, an island that appears to float in Lake Xochimilco, part of a complex ecosystem where the Aztec Empire once flourished.

The farmer, Dionisio Eslava, expects a good harvest of the mix of crops he planted this year. On this spring day in May of last year, he showed the agricultural scientist, Carlos Sumano, the sowing cubes he created with mud he scooped up from the bottom of canals, a Mesoamerican farming technique called chapín. “They’re just about ready for transplanting,” said Eslava, carefully pulling a single cube from the ground and, after a closer look, returning it to its place with other chili pepper plants.

Eslava and Sumano are working together to preserve the region’s chinampas, remnants of the branch and reed rafts that Mesoamerican farmers covered in nutrient-rich lake mud to grow fruits, vegetables, and flowers. They are part of a conservation partnership that is tapping Indigenous agricultural knowledge and scientific expertise to prevent the demise of Xochimilco, an ecosystem of more than 6,000 acres of protected wetlands that provides multiple environmental benefits, including food production, groundwater recharge, and carbon sequestration.

The traditional farmers, known as chinamperos, and scientists from the National Autonomous University of Mexico, also known by its Spanish acronym UNAM, are seeking to encourage sustainable and pesticide-free ancient farming to restore areas degraded by rampant development, pollution, and over-exploitation of groundwater. Though they haven’t always seen eye to eye over the years, the farmers and scientists agree that a healthier ecosystem will not only ensure continued food production but also the survival of the remarkable salamander called the axolotl, which is on the brink of extinction.

So far, the project involves some 30 farmers, including Eslava, who rely on ancient agricultural methods that include extracting a mix of rich soil and decaying vegetation from the marshy lakebed to grow crops. Among other things, they are digging narrow canals adjacent to chinampas to act as a refuge for the critically endangered axolotl and other threatened species. Rustic filters made from aquatic plants are placed in the canals to absorb contaminants and increase water transparency.

Chinamperos maintain the canals, irrigate crops with cleaner water from restored waterways, and replace pesticides with organic fertilizers. Scientists evaluate species development and changes in water quality. They collect samples of water and soil to test in the laboratory for the presence of bacteria, heavy metals, and other pollutants. When the canals are free of contaminants and have reduced salinity, the water quality is better prepared to sustain the axolotl and other native species. Sumano and his colleagues also hold workshops on organic fertilizers and water and soil quality.

The farmers, meanwhile, provide the project with a wealth of knowledge that has been passed down from generation to generation, Sumano maintains. “We’re working with people who know how to get results on their chinampas,” he said. “It’s not like the institution is here to tell them what needs to be done.”

Eslava views the exchange of knowledge as a boon for one of the last vestiges of a centuries-old lake culture facing major threats to its survival. For years, he has worked on his own and with other chinamperos to clean up garbage from the shallow waterways he has navigated in wooden canoes since he was a youngster. “We contribute what our ancestors taught us about the richness of the chinampas,” he said. “Scientists bring resources, they monitor the quality of the water and the nutrients in the soil.”

Still, some farmers remain wary of scientists because over the decades researchers from various institutions have studied Xochimilco in isolation, neglecting to tap the deep local understanding of chinamperos. “They didn’t want to hear what we had to say, just like the authorities didn’t want to hear what we had to say, because we are farmers,” Eslava said.

When he accepted Sumano’s invitation to join the project in 2020, Eslava was already relying on traditional farming methods without pesticides. But he hoped that scientific expertise and resources could help expand Xochimilco’s sustainable agriculture and improve habitat for the axolotl, or ajolote, and other native species like the freshwater crayfish acocil and the minnow-sized charal.

Eslava said he believes more farmers, as well as more people in the region, are coming to realize the importance of preserving Xochimilco (pronounced so-chee-meel-koh) and its biodiversity. “If we all do our part,” he added, “we can leave something much better here for future generations.”

Despite the environmental pressures, the ecosystem remains a striking green space on the southern shore of Lake Xochimilco. Though it’s technically part of a metropolitan area of 21 million people, it retains a tranquil atmosphere. Rows of its most emblematic tree—the ahuejote, or willow—border chinampas in showy formation, its intertwined roots anchoring the plots. Xochimilco’s name in the Nahuatl language, “field of flowers,” is reflected in a landscape bursting with flowers like purple bougainvilleas and yellow floripondios, or angel trumpets, and rich with birds like white pelicans and egrets.

Xochimilco, which UNESCO recognized as a World Heritage site in 1987, was once part of a vast network of lakes and canals that stretched through the Valley of Mexico, where various Nahuatl-speaking Indigenous communities thrived long before Spanish colonizers arrived in the 16th century. The Spanish eventually drained the waterways as a new city replaced the conquered Aztec capital of Tenochtitlán, and urbanization over the centuries has further degraded the chinampas, despite multiple efforts to protect the area.

As the deterioration has worsened, concern has grown over the fate of the axolotl, which has profound cultural significance in Mexico as a symbol of the country’s pre-Hispanic history. A grinning image of the creature in the waters of Xochimilco graces Mexico’s new 50-peso bill.

Luis Zambrano, a biologist at UNAM who oversees the chinampas project with the farmers, arrived in Xochimilco in the early 2000s to research the axolotl, or Ambystoma mexicanum. Researchers have long studied the small salamander’s extraordinary regenerative abilities in hopes of uncovering biological secrets that could one day help renew human tissue. The axolotl, which retains its juvenile characteristics throughout its life cycle, can grow new limbs and other missing organs.

When Zambrano began to study the animal, with its unusual flat head and crown-like gills, it was under siege in the canals where it had lived for centuries. Poor water quality and invasive carp and tilapia introduced in the 1970s and ‘80s to promote fishing devour axoltl eggs and feed on the insects, small fish, and crustaceans crucial for the salamander’s survival.

Wild axolotl sightings are rare, but Zambrano says a survey of the population is pending. The last count conducted by the university, in 2014, estimated the presence of axolotls at 36 per square kilometer, or about .386 square miles. A survey conducted by the Autonomous Metropolitan University (UAM) in 1998 put that number at 6,000 per square kilometer.

Zambrano’s initial research has gradually expanded to include exploring the mutually beneficial union of salamander and chinampa. In 2017, his team received about 7 million pesos, or more than $370,000, for the project. The federal funding, made available for UNESCO designated sites, kicked the project into high gear. In later years, Zambrano said, the funds decreased to 5 million pesos—including a portion provided by the local government.

The waterways of Mexico are the only natural habitat of the axolotl—“water monster” in Nahuatl—although the amphibian is abundant in captivity and a popular pet in various corners of the world. But Zambrano says that differences between wild and captive-bred creatures are considerable because captive axolotls experience losses in physiological and behavioral capabilities.

While Zambrano’s original idea was for surviving axolotls to wiggle on their own into the restored canals or refuges, researchers are also looking into the possibility of introducing captive-bred creatures to these spaces themselves. Before that can be done, however, Zambrano said they need more information about the salamanders’ genetics and reproductive capabilities, among other things. It’s known that farmers sometimes release axolotls into canals after raising them in aquariums, but the researchers say this is generally frowned upon due to environmental regulations.

If the axolotl goes extinct in the wild, it would be a tremendous loss to Mexico and the world, he said. “It’s not only one of the most researched species in terms of genetics, but it’s an animal that’s closely connected to our Mexican culture.”

In Aztec mythology, the creature is the last incarnation of Xólotl, the god of fire, who transformed himself several times after refusing to die in sacrifice for the launch of a fifth cycle of creation. It’s a story passed down among generations, and Eslava knows it well. “When Xólotl was discovered, he was condemned to stay a salamander forever, and was told that when his body of water was no longer useful, he and the human race would disappear,” he explained.

The ancient tale seems particularly relevant nowadays, Eslava maintains: “We are experiencing enormous pollution worldwide and many species are becoming extinct. Here in Xochimilco, we are putting a lot of pressure on the axolotl area and the water that’s so important to us.”

On another spring day, Eslava paddled in the shallow waters of Xochimilco toward the chinampa where he grows his crops. Although he was away for years when he worked for the government and when he retired, he returned to his childhood home some years ago to find another Xochimilco. Houses had replaced vegetables in chinampas; plastic bags of trash piled high in the waterways; and treated water flowed in canals once awash with natural spring water.

As Mexico City’s population has grown, intensive water pumping has depleted much of the underground sources that used to feed the maze of canals. They now get treated wastewater from nearby plants, which has contributed to the decay of waterways and chinampas. “Things were different when I was growing up,” Eslava said. “It was cleaner, there was no plastic at all. The scent of flowers was intense in the morning, and there were still many beautiful chinampas and canals.”

Many farmers have abandoned their chinampas, either because they’re not interested in farming or because they can’t make a living at it. Some rent out their plots and, instead of growing crops, tenants build houses or turn them into soccer fields or other unauthorized sites.

Meanwhile, crowds of visitors roam the waters of Xochimilco in colorful, flat-bottomed boats called trajineras, injecting money into the local economy but also straining the ecosystem.

Eslava was already involved in clean-up projects and restoration efforts with other Xochimilco residents when Carlos Sumano came calling in 2020. He relished the idea of the project because the university’s sponsorship would help provide funding and resources to assist chinamperos to reactivate dormant chinampa agriculture.

“All the fertilizer we need is down there in the water,” he said. “All the vegetation that disintegrates there is a very rich material, it’s what our ancestors used. That’s why chinampa farming was so rich. There was an enormous diversity of crops and everything was done using traditional methods like mud and native seeds.”

Those traditions had gradually succumbed to new agricultural practices that were ushered in starting in the 1940s with the promise of greater yields. “The ‘green revolution’ was this vision of increasing agricultural productivity as fast as possible, as best as possible, and that’s when the use of pesticides and fertilizers started to grow,’” Zambrano said. “But the quality of the water is reduced a lot when you put in pesticides and fertilizers, because they kill everything, including the axolotl.”

Narciso Alvarado is another chinampero who has stopped using pesticides and is participating in the project. He spends most of his days tending to such crops as cauliflower, onions, and radishes in his chinampa. The idea of being able to sell his crops at a fair price with validation from the university, while helping to restore the ecosystem, appealed to him. “I’ve been farming for a long time, and I want to keep doing it here, in Xochimilco,” he said in a recent interview. “I don’t want chinampas to disappear.”

Neither does Eslava, who spends much of his time improving plots. He and Sumano recently brought six very young axolotls bred in aquariums to a narrow, restored canal. The minuscule creatures, which resembled tadpoles, wiggled out of a bucket and into the water. Sumano explained that the axolotls were placed there to be monitored for a few days, after which Eslava took them back out.

Zambrano believes the project has already started to reap benefits, like healthy species in some canals and growing interest in reactivating abandoned chinampas, though he notes that ambitious restoration projects such as this one take time and effort. But “reactivating chinampas, restoring Xochimilco, implies improvement of biodiversity, improvement of the city’s water management, improvement of microhabitat changes,” he said. “It implies more resiliency in terms of climate change and conservation of an iconic species like the axolotl, as well as a significant increase in local food production.”

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At the end of the last Ice Age, 11,700 years ago, only babies would have been able to digest lactose, one of the key sugars in milk. Being able to do so into adulthood is a new development in our evolution. It’s especially common in people of European, South Asian, Middle Eastern, and West African descent, and evolved so quickly that it’s the textbook example of human adaptations to agriculture.

But according to new research published this week in the journal Nature, ancient humans in Europe drank lactose, even without being able to digest it. Only when famine and disease turned lactose into a liability did adults hang onto lactase, the key enzyme that breaks down the sugar.

“What we’ve shown is the received wisdom is erroneous,” says study co-author Richard Evershed, an archaeological and paleo-chemist at the University of Bristol. The textbook story is that the lucky few milk-drinkers got some kind of advantage from the beverage—maybe it let them grow faster, or gave them extra vitamin D in dark Northern latitudes—that led to the proliferation of lactase-processing genes.

The speed with which Europeans picked up lactose tolerance means that people without it must have been at an extreme disadvantage. “You’ve got to kill somebody to have [that kind of] selection, to put it bluntly,” Evershed says. 

The new story of milk-drinking unfolds through three lines of evidence. The first is a map of nearly 13,000 ancient pottery fragments collected from Portugal to Turkey to Finland. Although the contents of the pots were long dried up, animal fats leave distinctive residues—which allows researchers, 9,000 years later, to tell if they held milk.

[Related: How to make oat milk—with science]

Those ancient films show that milk drinking is essentially as old as farming, and spread into Europe as early as 6,500 BCE, 3,000 years before the rise of lactase in adults, or lactase persistence.

So how did farmers who couldn’t process lactose end up drinking milk? It turns out that the health effects of lactose intolerance are often blown out of proportion, George Davey Smith, an epidemiologist at the University of Bristol, and another author, says. Bloating, gas, and other purported signs of lactose intolerance are less common than people think. And while undigested lactose can cause diarrhea, so can coffee, prunes, and plenty of other enjoyable foods.

Using the 500,000-person genetic database UK Biobank, the researchers found that well over 90 percent of people who can’t process lactose still drink cow’s milk. It turns out that lactose tolerance just isn’t a big factor in determining your ability to stomach cow juice. “One of my co-authors only did a lactose test when she was part of the project,” says Evershed. “She found she was lactose intolerant, and she’d been drinking milk. She had no hint of it.” Some who don’t naturally produce lactase can still digest it with the help of an adapted gut biome. Others produce the enzyme to digest the sugar, but are allergic to another part of milk.

“It became clear that people could happily drink milk,” enzyme or no, says Davey Smith.

But if milk goes down so easily, that leaves another mystery: Why would ancient Europeans so quickly have developed lactose tolerance, if they didn’t need it?

The key is in understanding what happens when times get bad. In a person who can’t process milk sugar, the excess sits in a little wad in the colon. “The undigested lactose sort of sucks water out,” Davey Smith says, sometimes causing diarrhea. That’s not always a problem—but when a person is malnourished, or sick with an intestinal disease, the lactose poops can make them sicker.

On a population level, during disease outbreaks or famines, milk could turn from a source of calories into a kind of poison. And, based on the genes of ancient European bones, it was the ability to resist that poisoning that drove lactose tolerance across the continent.

[Related: Heat stress might curdle the dairy industry]

By lining up the map of ancient milk-vessels, the presence of the enzyme in ancient genes, and the frequency of ancient skeletons, the researchers found that people who drank milk faced no evolutionary pressure to digest lactose. “This pulls the rug out from under the feet of just about every theory for why that natural selection was there,” says Mark Thomas, a study co-author and expert in human evolution at University College London. “Milk use doesn’t explain anything.”

Instead, bumps in lactase persistence were best explained by evolutionary pressure during population crashes. “Those drops in population almost certainly indicate famines,” says Thomas. And famines would have had a two-fold effect. When food was scarce, ancient farmers would have eaten up all their low-lactose yogurts and cheeses first. Once crops fail, “they’re going to be left only with fresh milk,” Thomas says. Couple high-lactose foods with severe malnourishment, and diarrhea is no longer inconvenient—it’s fatal. 

Dense populations, measured via the distribution of skeletal remains, also explained some of the pressure towards lactase persistence. This, the researchers believe, happened as children—still young, but too old to produce lactase—were increasingly exposed to the threat of lactose diarrhea and intestinal infectious diseases that thrived in close quarters. The combination of those forces largely explain how, by the beginning of the Iron Age, roughly 3,000 years ago, lactase persistence had become so common.

That timeline also contradicts a theory that the adoption of agriculture, roughly 10,000 years ago, left humans sicker and malnourished, Davey Smith says. “It doesn’t fit in with the chronology… which says agriculture is the worst mistake humans ever made—that’s what I thought we’d find. It turns out it was 5,000 years later.”

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Plant parenthood was something thousands have embraced over the past couple of years as a way to connect with nature even while stuck indoors. Tending to leafy friends also functioned as a way for people to relieve stress and anxiety and get the peace of mind they need.

If you happen to be one of the newly-minted plant parents with a newfound love for greens, you may want to take it up a notch and expand your knowledge on all things flora. For starters, you can expand the plant library you have in your head by identifying as many plants as you can. The NatureID app can help, thanks to its ability to recognize thousands of plant species in a snap. You can grab a lifetime subscription on sale for over 60 percent off.

Out of all the nearly 400,000 plant species out there in the world, NatureID can identify over 14,000 of them. It uses artificial intelligence to recognize a plant, and all you have to do is take a picture using your device.

But aside from merely naming plants you see at the park, NatureID also helps you become a better plant parent by assisting with plant care. It can diagnose plant states, identify diseases, and offer specific care advice to make them thrive. It lets you discover how much water, light, and fertilizer a plant needs to stay healthy, and if it so happens that your plant is sick, the app gives you a clear picture of how severe the problem is and how to accelerate recovery.

It can even help you with plants that you don’t own yet. The app can identify certain traits to make sure you’re buying the best plants for your needs, like low light, air purification, pet safe, fly trappers, and more.

NatureID has over 8 million downloads to date, boasting a rating of 4.6 out of 5 stars on the App Store. It has helped millions of plant lovers gain access to virtual botanists to enhance their respective plant care routines. You can even use it as a journal and get timely reminders, track care recommendations, and set watering, misting, feeding, and rotating schedules.

A lifetime subscription to NatureID normally retails for $59, but you can grab it on sale for only $19.99.

Prices subject to change.

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Minimizing the risk of living on an unlivable planet requires significantly reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions through various means, like shifting to renewable energy and electrifying sectors that rely on fossil fuels. In countries like Finland and Sweden, taxes play a key climate role, especially when it comes to policies that charge a fee based on the carbon content of fossil fuels.

However, emissions caused by agriculture must be addressed, too. “The food we eat is the biggest cause of biodiversity loss in the world and the second biggest source of greenhouse gasses, so it’s very difficult to address those problems without considering the food system,” says Ian Bateman, co-director of the Land, Environment, Economics and Policy Institute (LEEP) at the University of Exeter.

Is there a way to take the idea of carbon taxing to the grocery aisle? New research suggests that tax policies could minimize GHG emissions and improve dietary quality at the same time. But they may have a disproportionate impact on low-income communities if implemented inefficiently.

Carbon and health tax policies may improve human and environmental health

According to a new Nature Food study, a combined carbon and health tax policy on food products would significantly impact consumers’ purchasing decisions. These taxes would apply to carbon-intensive foods like beef or unhealthy foods like alcohol and sugary drinks. A healthier and more environment-friendly grocery run can reduce GHG emissions and improve the quality of diets at the same time.

The authors considered two approaches to address biodiversity loss and increasing GHG emissions: providing information about food products’ carbon and health impacts and imposing taxes based on their carbon and health impacts.

[Related: Why is it so expensive to eat sustainably?]

The authors, including Exeter’s Bateman, conducted a survey by replicating an online supermarket to determine how information about carbon or health impacts, taxation, and combined information and tax affected consumers’ purchasing decisions. Almost 6,000 participants reported their usual food and beverage purchases for the baseline scenario. 

Afterward, they were presented with the same list of products but with additional product information or new prices, depending on the hypothetical policy instrument. They faced one of three scenarios: carbon information and tax policies, health information and tax policies, or an unexplained tax followed by carbon and health information. After product info was added or prices changed due to the chosen policy instrument, participants were allowed to revise their food purchase choices if they wanted to. Looking at shopping lists before and after policy interventions permitted the authors to see the effect of different policies on food purchase behavior and, subsequently, on GHG emissions and dietary quality.

Both measures—providing carbon or health information and adding carbon or health taxes—helped move consumption towards healthier or lower-emissions foods, says Bateman. “Taxes were more effective than information, but the biggest effect is when both are used together,” he adds.

Additional taxes may have a disproportionate impact

The concern about carbon and health taxes is the potential disproportionate burden on low-income communities. The poor might be unable to afford even a slight price increase on commodities like food or fuel, leaving them even more vulnerable. 

It’s important to ask whether different demographic groups spend the same proportion of household incomes on specific food products. If not, carbon and health taxes may have a different impact on high- and low-income communities, says Aseem Prakash, professor of political science at the University of Washington, Seattle and founding director of the UW Center for Environmental Politics. Health taxes (also called sin taxes) on food, alcohol, tobacco, and soft drinks generally take a greater share of income from the poor than from the wealthy.

[Related: Which veggie oil is most sustainable? It’s complicated.]

Revenue recycling, or using the tax revenue for a designated purpose that will benefit society, can help mitigate the regressive effects of carbon taxes, says Prakash. For instance, tax revenues could fund public transit, social safety net programs, and public school education.

“The money raised by the taxes should be used to reduce other taxes on the poor—such as income tax—until you reach the point where the income [tax] of the poor is fully compensated for the price rises,” says Bateman. “There will still be an incentive to buy lower tax foods so they are still effective in changing purchasing, but the tax redistribution means the poor can now afford to buy more high health, low carbon foods.”

Bateman adds that these tax policies must be revenue neutral to avoid a disproportionate impact on low-income communities, who are most likely to be affected by climate change and health problems. Revenue neutral means that the government’s overall tax revenue does not change. Instead, the gains from taxing high-emission and unhealthy food products are utilized and returned to the public. 

Taxes on food alone will not change the food system entirely. However, they can be part of a broader range of policy measures, such as cutting subsidies for producing unhealthy and high-emission foods and boosting investments toward producing healthy and environmentally friendly foods, says Bateman. After all, taxing certain foods only helps if good alternatives are available. 

“There are several other tools that can be used as well, including information campaigns,” says Prakash. “If we want individuals to drive less, we must give them low-carbon options to meet their transportation needs. Thus, taxes could shape behaviors more effectively if individuals have other options with similar costs and convenience.”

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The journey to completely slaughter-free meat products has been a long one. There’s mounting evidence that producing animal products is a huge bane on the planet. For those carnivores who love to bite into a beef burger or a tasty chicken nugget but can’t bear to contribute to the often controversial ways that meat is produced, there are plenty of alternatives options. Substitutes like tofu patties don’t always seem to perfectly scratch that itch for meat-lovers. 

One solution that many scientists and the food industry have studied is developing lab-grown meat—that’s where actual animal cells are taken from an animal and are grown independently in a lab setting. So, real chicken cells would be in those nuggets, but no actual chicken has to die in order to get your savory snack. And these lab-grown foods have already been made—California start-up Eat Just’s no-kill chicken meat was approved for sale in Singapore in 2020, and Hong Kong-based Avant Meats developed lab-grown edible fish maw.   

But, the holy grail of lab-curated meats scientists are reaching/aiming for is beef. Beef is infamous for its carbon footprint, as well as its difficulty to be recreated as cultured cells. In 2013, a Dutch scientist pioneered the first lab-grown beef burger, but the catch is the animal-saving meal sold for around $330,000. Unlike birds and fish, it just so happens that mammalian cells are significantly trickier and more expensive to handle.

“This is a challenge because, as you know, mammalian cell culture is super expensive,” says Kasia Gora, synthetic biologist and co-founder of cell-cultured meat company SCiFi Foods. Currently, biopharma companies are the primarily large-scale lab developers of mammalian cells, explains Gora. This cell line research has been important in early stage pharmaceutical development, but the processes are expensive. “It works and it’s fantastic if you can charge $1,000,000 a gram for your product,” Gora says. “But food has to be cheap.”

[Related: How to enjoy fake meat in a way that actually helps the planet.]

However, Gora and the team behind SCiFi Foods, previously called Artemys Foods, have made a breakthrough—cow cells that can reduce the cost of cell-cultured beef by 1000 times. The trick, according to Gora, is a combination of single-cell suspension and CRISPR gene editing. 

Typically when growing cultured cells, they need to stick on to something to start growing. “Most animal cells prefer to grow attached to a solid surface, which mimics the conditions they would find themselves in within an animal body,” says Liz Specht, vice president of science and technology at the Good Food Institute, a nonprofit focused on alternative protein acceleration. “But when growing cells at large scale, being limited to surface-adherent cells presents a challenge because you need a lot of surface area, think of how thinly cells grow on the surface of a cell culture dish, to make a lot of meat.”

To combat this, typically companies will use tiny beads for the cells to glom on to, but as the cell masses accumulate this can become bulky and bump or damage other growing cell beads, Specht adds. Her team has found that a more effective approach is growing in single-cell suspension, or when cells just grow floating around on their own like yeast in a brewery vessel. Without the beads or any surface at all, costs go down and efficiency goes up. 

Gora and her team have made impressive strides with a single-cell suspension approach that’s resulted in beef that’s not too far from the real thing. Using CRISPR Cas9, the scientists can reduce functions of certain genes or replace them with other wildtype genes to convince them that they are “happy growing in single cell suspension,” says Gora. The team can then pop these cells into bioreactors, which are vessels made for growing organisms under controlled conditions, making scaling up is pretty straightforward, she adds. 

There is a big difference between SCiFi’s product and the super-expensive Dutch lab burger, though—these cells are going to be used as an ingredient in mostly plant-based burgers instead of making up the whole thing. So instead of building up the scaffolding of a fully lab-beef burger from scratch, Gora says using the structure of a veggie burger will bring the best of both worlds.

“Fundamentally, the strategy solves the cost problem with cultivated meat, and it has the benefit of solving the taste problem of plant-based meat,” she says. The company forecasts that a pilot run of their burgers should be priced around $10 per burger. But it will still likely be a handful of years before the average grocery shopper can try one, especially since the FDA has yet to approve a product like this to sell for consumption. 

As with most developments in alternatives to meats, there are legitimate concerns with the future of cultured cell meat. The Counter published an in-depth report on some of the major questions that still stand with these kinds of products—such as the likelihood that these projects could be reliably scaled up, the problem with potentially harmful viruses infecting living cells in a culture, or the feasibility of producing certain cells without collecting fetal bovine serum from slaughtered cows. Some scientists argue that there could be more climate change impacts from lab-cultured meat than traditional methods. 

Scientists have also expressed concern that cultured meat doesn’t necessarily change or shift our thinking on the current unsustainable food system in place today. “But if cellular agriculture is going to improve on the system it is displacing, then the critics are right: it needs to grow in a way that doesn’t externalize the real costs of production on to workers, consumers, and the environment,” write researchers at Duke University and Johns Hopkins University, in an article for the Guardian. 

While many components of the research and production process still need to be refined, the era of lab-grown or cell-cultured meat is fast approaching.

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The world is in a fertilizer shortage. The dilemma is linked to the war in Ukraine, which affects the export of ingredients like potash and phosphate. The fertilizer price has increased by around 30 percent since the year began, heightening the cost of food. Rising fertilizer costs are also threatening to cause food shortages in developing countries. 

Farmers need to fertilize crops to keep food supplies at adequate levels. New research shows our own waste could be an efficient tool for accomplishing this—specifically human urine.

Researchers from the National Institute of Agricultural Research of Niger recently published research on using urine as a fertilizer for pearl millet crops, a grain commonly grown in the region. Urine contains phosphorus, potassium, and nitrogen, which are widely used for growing crops. The scientists treated the urine and tried using it as fertilizer over three years and found it increased yields by roughly 30 percent.

The scientists treated the urine by simply storing it at just above 70 degrees Fahrenheit for two to three months. The pH of the urine increases over time as urea, a nitrogenous compound, hydrolyzes to ammonia, which sanitizes the urine. It can then be used as a fertilizer.

The thought of pee on plants may conjure up images of dead grass where dogs have relieved themselves, but that’s because of the salt content in the urine hitting the living parts of a plant. Treavor Boyer, an associate professor of sustainable engineering at Arizona State University who was not involved in the previously mentioned study, tells Popular Science. It’s about how you use the urine. 

“Salt on leaves and stems does burn the plant. That’s the biggest challenge. The urine has salts in it,” Boyer says. “If you’re applying liquid urine with the salts in it, you want to not necessarily spray it on the plants but apply it to the ground so it gets to the roots. If there’s enough irrigation in place, that will wash away the salts because they’re pretty mobile in the soil. They don’t stick around. And then the nutrients stick around in the soil.”

[Related: Diverse microbes are key to healthy soil. Climate change is threatening that.]

Nancy Love, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of Michigan who was also not involved in the study, tells Popular Science that using urine as a fertilizer appears to be relatively safe when adequately treated. She says any viruses and bacteria in the urine, like E. coli, that might be worrisome aren’t a problem for humans following the treatment process. In her lab, they actually pasteurize the urine using heat to treat the urine instead of simply storing it.

One problem, Love says, is the “ick factor.” People don’t like the idea of eating food that was grown using a urine-based fertilizer. People may not understand that it’s being treated and isn’t going to make them sick. Love says it’s simply a messaging problem, but urine can also be used to fertilize crops that aren’t going to become food for humans as well. 

“It could be used for fertilizing food for animals that then become food or in other places where you’re fertilizing non-food crops,” Love says. 

Historically, urine has been used as a fertilizer for thousands of years in parts of Africa and Asia. Today, urine-as-fertilizer is seeing a bit of a resurgence. Pilot projects are popping up across the US, Europe, and Africa. Many are interested in replacing chemical fertilizers because the production of synthetic nitrogen found in these fertilizers contributes to greenhouse gas emissions, which is not an issue with urine. 

These projects are small, but Boyer says we could increase the scale if we had more waterless urinals that can capture and divert urine without dilution. 

“In the US, we have waterless urinals, but they’re really only used for water conservation. They’re not really used as part of a urine collection system,” Boyer says. “We need to have plumbing fixtures in place that can allow us to collect urine separately from the rest of the wastewater. That urine would have to be stored in a building, likely, and then used on site in a small manner or there needs to be a logistic system in place to gather that urine and use it in a beneficial way that starts to become economical.”

Love says it’s not likely that urine-based fertilizer will take the world by storm any time soon, and it’s also not likely we’ll start replacing every urinal with one that could help accomplish these goals. Still, pee-collecting urinals could become more commonplace in new and remodeled buildings.

“What we don’t want to do is rebuild our infrastructure with 1950s, 60s, or 70s technological thinking about water systems,” Love says. “What we want to do is advance technology and advance government policy.”

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Many potential effects of climate change on humans, wildlife, and plants are relatively well-understood. Higher temperatures and extreme weather events can lead to food insecurity, loss of habitats, and the decline or extinction of species of living things. However, it’s also important to discuss how climate change can affect microorganisms or the tiny living things found everywhere on the planet that the naked eye can’t see.

Microorganisms are the earliest known life forms on Earth. They play a critical role in ecological processes like the decomposition of organic matter, nutrient recycling, soil aggregation, and even the control of pathogens. Their abundance and diversity help maintain a stable and healthy global ecosystem. However, if microbial diversity were to change, the ability of other organisms to respond to climate change may be affected, too.

A study published in Nature Microbiology this month reported that long-term global warming reduces microbial biodiversity in grassland soil. The authors conducted a seven-year experiment to observe the changes of microbial communities in response to climate changes such as warming, altered precipitation, and annual biomass removal. They found that the richness of bacteria, fungi, and protists decreased.

Microbial diversity is essential in maintaining soil health and quality and carrying out the soil’s function as a living system that sustains biological productivity and supports plant and animal health. Unfortunately, the loss of microbial diversity is associated with loss of function. This bodes poorly for humans because it translates to the decreased ability to grow crops, increased environmental damage, and reduced ability to fight off pathogenic microbes and plants, says Martin J. Blaser, Henry Rutgers Chair of the Human Microbiome at Rutgers University, who was not involved in the study.

To support food production for a growing human population, farmers need healthy soils. Climate change—through reduced microbial diversity—may not only affect our ability to grow food but also result in certain foods having lower nutritional value, says Blaser. That’s because microbial diversity is necessary to promote nutrient uptake and make it easier for plants to get essential soil minerals and micronutrients.

[Related: Bacteria wars are raging in soil, and it’s keeping ecosystems healthy.]

More than two billion people worldwide already suffer from micronutrient deficiencies, leading to various health conditions like cardiovascular diseases, congenital disabilities, and mental health problems. For instance, many children in China are deficient in iron and zinc, which can derive from the deficiencies of these elements in soils and foods. In 2007, about 40 percent of the total land area in China was deficient in iron and zinc.

“Human well-being is directly tied to microbes,” says Jay T. Lennon, a professor in the Department of Biology at Indiana University who was not involved in the study. “Of course, our health is intimately affected by the trillions of microbes that live on and within us. But, in nature, they also provide essential services, in terms of degrading contaminants, purifying water, and ensuring the fertility of soil needed to feed a growing planet.”

One vital role of microbes is in reducing contaminant concentrations in crops, which is crucial because pathogen contamination of fresh produce poses a pressing threat to human health. For instance, eating contaminated vegetables grown in soils amended with non-composted animal manure may allow pathogens like Salmonella and E. coli to enter the human body. Moreover, certain plant defenses don’t operate as effectively when temperatures get too high, which makes them more susceptible to pathogens. Overall, soil microbial diversity helps suppress disease-causing soil organisms due to the complex interactions that occur belowground and potentially inhibit pathogens’ development or persistence.

“Scientists are concerned about how climate change will affect the distribution of diseases like cholera, but also the emergence of new pathogens,” says Lennon. “Plant and animal hosts form complex relationships with microbial symbionts. It’s currently unclear how climate change will alter these relationships and what the consequences will be.”

Ultimately, it’s crucial to protect biological diversity—the variety of all life on Earth—to maintain the stability of the global ecosystem. Biodiversity loss is driven by climate change, but this decline in biodiversity can also accelerate climate change, which makes it a positive feedback loop. For instance, the instability of ecosystems due to biodiversity loss weakens the Earth’s ability to regulate greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) and prevent extreme weather events, which, in turn, alters the structure of many ecosystems and makes species more vulnerable.

Since you can’t see microbes, it can be harder to protect them. Some studies show that the degree of understanding of microbial ecosystems and their services must increase to the same level of knowledge with plants and animals before they are taken seriously in conservation initiatives and policies. Still, protecting flora and fauna remains vital because as certain plants and animals become extinct, the microbes associated with them may also disappear. 

“To some degree, [the] conservation of plants and animals will also help to maintain their associated microbiota,” says Lennon. “For example, a recent paper discusses how ‘acoustic restoration’—that is, working towards the re-establishment of natural soundscapes—helps with the conservation efforts including the maintenance of ecosystems.” 

Blaser says the loss of microbial diversity may also be driven by the use of fertilizers, pesticides, and monoculture practices. Specific solutions, like reducing chemical pesticide use and crop diversification, will likely reduce the negative impact on microbial diversity. Battling climate change requires all sorts of focuses, and biodiversity loss must be tackled—including the living things we rely on that may hardly ever cross our minds.

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This article originally appeared in Nexus Media News. It is part of Covering Climate Now’s ‘Food & Water’ joint coverage week and was made possible by a grant from the Open Society Foundations.

Maritza del Rosario López Cortés comes from a long line of farmers in central Puerto Rico. But it was only after Hurricane Maria devastated the island in 2017, leaving many residents in her hometown of Villalba without electricity or access to food, that she fully appreciated the importance of local growers.

“It took so long for food to get here,” López Cortés said. “There was no fresh food for what felt like ages.” She and her family relied on shelf-stable MREs to supplement their meals—packaged ready-to-eat meals distributed by FEMA—for weeks, she said. She remembers the relief she felt when she discovered plantains and root vegetables that were still good to eat in fields near her home during that time.

The experience showed how vulnerable the island’s food systems are and led the 37-year-old cosmetologist and mother of two to revive her family’s farm. She took the helm at Hacienda López Cortés in 2020, now a 6-person operation, which grows staple crops like calabaza (squash), coffee and plantains. She keeps an active social media presence, posting photos of her harvest and employees to Facebook, and sells most of her products to local restaurants and supermarkets. She was excited to discuss some of the traditional farming practices she employs, which include using bulls to plow the fields. 

“I ask people all the time, if the supermarkets close, if the stores close, what would you eat—do you know where it’s coming from?” López Cortés said. “Seeing how much people need access to fresh food motivates me every day.” 

In the five years since Hurricane Maria, Puerto Rico has seen a resurgence in small-scale farming and projects that educate locals about where their food comes from. Many, like López Cortés’, have learned to rely heavily on regenerative growing practices, like crop rotation and using shading plants. 

The US territory is vulnerable to a number of natural disasters, including intense tropical storms and drought. Hurricane seasons, made longer and more intense by climate change, have left behind a fragile electric grid that causes regular power outages, disrupting  daily life, work and education for Puerto Ricans. More than 80 percent of Puerto Rico’s food is imported, so when a major storm hits, it can delay shipments from the mainland. Residents are left with half-empty shelves at the store. 

Rising costs of living on the island combined with higher food prices worldwide will only make it more difficult for Puerto Rican families to prepare for future natural disasters, said Luis Alexis Rodríguez-Cruz, a food systems researcher at the USDA’s Caribbean Climate Hub. A 2020 report from George Washington University found that about 40 percent of Puerto Rican families reported being food insecure in recent years. Survey participants revealed that they often ran out of money for food and that they went hungry. Food prices in Puerto Rico are about 18 percent higher than they would be on the mainland, according to the island’s Institute of Statistics. 

Supporting local farmers can improve food security across the island, Rodríguez-Cruz said. What’s more, devastating events like Hurricane Maria present opportunities for farmers to build more resilient systems, according to a study he co-authored last year. Rodríguez-Cruz and his fellow researchers found that farmers “who faced a total loss adopted the most adaptation practices.” (The study also found that farmers with higher education levels were more likely to adopt adaptation practices.) 

Rodríguez-Cruz said he has noticed a growing interest in local agriculture and supporting Puerto Rican farms. “[You hear it] on the radio and the TV. There’s more conversation around food production, agriculture. And I think that’s definitely what happened with Maria. [The storm] catalyzed much of that,” he said. 

He pointed to operations like El Josco Bravo, an organic teaching farm about 20 miles west of San Juan, which has churned out a new generation of organic farmers. 

Puerto Rican TikToker and independent journalist Bianca Graulau posted a video about El Josco Bravo’s educational program a few months ago. She reported that the program had resources for about 150 participants, but received many hundred more applications. (Representatives from El Josco Bravo could not be reached for comment.)

Though nongovernmental programs have stepped up to provide technical education and support, Rodríguez-Cruz said the local and federal government could do more to help small farmers with administrative and bureaucratic challenges that come along with running a farm, Rodríguez-Cruz said. That might include streamlining paperwork and helping new farmers navigate guidelines and regulations, he said. 

Supporting local food systems can improve public health outcomes during and after natural disasters, said Ruth Santiago, a Puerto Rican lawyer and activist. “After Hurricane Maria, FEMA brought in food and it was horrible—very highly processed with high sugar content,” she said. “They gave my mother a bag of Skittles. My mother’s diabetic.” (Around 16 percent of adults on the island have diabetes, compared to 10 percent of adults on the mainland.)

Santiago, who advocates for rooftop solar electricity with a group called Queremos Sol, said local farming, like renewable energy, could make the island more climate-resilient. “We really need to think about alternate ways of having food security and sovereignty here in order not just to be resilient, but also to cut down on medical expenses, which are very high here.” 

The island’s ongoing power outages exacerbate food insecurity by making it difficult to refrigerate perishables. In April, a fire at a power plant shut off power for more than one million customers in Puerto Rico. San Juan residents protested outside of the island’s power authority’s offices, with some placing bags of spoiled food to show authorities what the outages had cost them.

López Cortés has found meaning in her new calling as a farmer, but it’s also helped her household’s bottom line. “I don’t do those huge $500 to $600 grocery hauls anymore,” she said. “I buy some meat, fish and rice, but my roots and vegetables come from my field. I don’t buy canned or frozen food as often anymore.” 

As Puerto Rico heads into another hurricane season, she said she feels better prepared than she was for Maria. “If another big hurricane comes, I think I’ll be able to put food on the table for my family,” she said. “Not just my nuclear family, but my extended family—my brothers, my uncles, too.” 

She paused.

“My goal is that my produce ends up on the plate of other Villalba residents. Once everyone here has a full belly, I hope [my food] ends up reaching the rest of Puerto Rico,” López Cortés said.

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Hundreds of scientific papers have been published about the threats of pesticide use. Still the movement to get away from them has been challenging. Global use of the chemicals nearly doubled between the years of 1990 and 2018, increasing from 2.3 to 4.1 million tonnes, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the UN. 

However, there is a bit of hope in the European Union at least. Just this week, the group of nations proposed binding targets to reduce risky pesticides by 50 percent by 2030. On top of this, they put forth an all-out ban in areas like public parks, gardens, playgrounds, public paths, and ecologically sensitive spots. 

“We need to reduce the use of chemical pesticides to protect our soil, air and food, and ultimately the health of our citizens,” European Commissioner for Health and Food Safety Stella Kyriakides said in a release. “For the first time, we will ban the use of pesticides in public gardens and playgrounds, ensuring that we are all far less exposed in our daily lives.”

Farmers will be financially compensated for any losses  by the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) during the transition for five years. This is especially important as many farms have been built for a pesticide-heavy agricultural system. Though ultimately the plan would offer relief: Prices for synthetic fertilizers have soared over the past year, placing direct financial burdens on farmers who depend on the chemicals for high yields of crops. 

“Since the ‘green revolution,’ countries around the world have relied heavily on pesticides to increase agricultural production,” says Laurie Beyranevand, Director of the Center for Agriculture and Food Systems at Vermont Law School. “In many ways, our food system and the ways we produce our food rely very heavily on the use of pesticides—meaning farmers may need training and support for different pest management systems.”

This week’s proposal is a part of the larger Farm to Fork strategy, which is a post-COVID reassessment of the EU’s food system focused on changing production, processing and distribution, consumption, and food waste in order to have a sustainable system and mitigate climate change impacts. Farm to Fork itself is part of an even larger goal called the European Green Deal which aims to neutralize greenhouse gas emissions and decouple the economy from resource use. 

The milestone proposal could become law as soon as 2023, along with the first biodiversity legislation to be passed in the EU since 1992, when the Habitats Directive came into force which ensured protection of endangered flora and fauna, as well as 200 different types of unique environmental habitats. 

Still, not everyone is on board with the plan. French President Emmanuel Macron has been especially vocal about concerns relating to food security, emphasizing a need for “agricultural independence” over sustainability in the light of the food crises associated with the Russian invasion of Ukraine. 

These worries, however, aren’t necessarily based in reality. “While many suggest that the food system will suffer dire consequences if farmers are limited in their ability to use pesticides, that represents a false narrative,” Beyranevand says. 

There are ways to farm sustainably and continue to feed the world, adds Kathleen Merrigan, the executive director of the Swette Center for Sustainable Food Systems at Arizona State University. Integrated Pest Management (IPM), for example, includes a range of  techniques like setting thresholds for pest populations before taking any steps to control them, monitoring and identifying specific organisms, implementing tools like crop rotations, and selecting pest-resistant plants. Controlling pests through highly targeted chemicals or trapping and weeding are a last resort before getting into the more serious stuff. 

Other  methods, like amping up female leadership in farming, could be an answer, adds Merrigan. A 2011 FAO study found that having women farmers with the same access to resources could increase yields by 20-30 percent. Getting food waste in order is also crucial, as about one third of global food supply is wasted every year.

“My point here is that we have enough food to feed the world now, and we’ve got over 800 million people who are hungry,” she says. “So when people say, ‘oh, can’t change the way we produce food because we can’t afford to have hungry people.’ Well, we have hungry people now.”

It’s important to note that this proposal doesn’t flat-out ban  pesticides. They are still an “important tool” for pest control, notes Leslie Hickle, CEO of insect monitoring technology company FarmSense. Deploying them will likely get even more complicated as the planet changes, biodiversity continues to struggle, and the environment degrades. But with technology and strategies focused on both protecting the environment and the food supply, more sustainable agricultural systems are possible, she continues. 

Continued public education and pressure will help push those goals forward. “It wasn’t until public outrage fueled by Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, California oil spills and the Cuyahoga River Fire triggered the formation of the EPA,” Hickle says. “We are at a similar inflection point with the EU Commission’s position on reducing pesticide use.” 

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Higher average temperatures and more frequent heat waves are likely to occur due to climate change. This week, about 20 percent of people in the United States are estimated to experience temperatures greater than 100 degrees Fahrenheit. Meanwhile, the recent heatwaves in India and Pakistan have resulted in at least 90 deaths and a 10 to 35 percent reduction in crop yields in some regions.

As a result of rising global temperatures, the heat stress of livestock, which arises from combinations of air temperature, humidity, solar radiation, and wind speed could increase. This added stress makes it difficult for animals like cows and pigs to control their own body temperature. If livestock is unable to dissipate heat effectively, their body temperature increases, which can reduce their productivity, thereby affecting the food supply.

Of the predominant livestock industries in the US, the dairy industry is estimated to be the most vulnerable to economic losses from heat stress, says Amanda Stone, assistant professor and extension dairy specialist at Mississippi State University. Dairy’s risk is significantly higher than beef cattle, the next most vulnerable industry. To keep the $827 billion global dairy industry up and running as the planet gets warmer, it’s crucial to understand the extent of climate change’s impact on cattle production and to mitigate its effects.

Increasing global temperatures will affect cattle production

Heat stress does not only affect the behavior and welfare of cattle, but also reduces their feed intake, productivity, and animal fertility, says Philip Thornton, principal scientist at the International Livestock Research Institute and flagship leader in the CGIAR Research Program on Climate Change, Agriculture, and Food Security. 

“Animals eat less and increase their respiration, so more energy is expended on trying to keep cool, with less energy available for meat and milk production,” he added. Moreover, it increases their susceptibility to diseases, and in cases of extreme heat stress, their mortality as well. Quite recently, extreme heat killed thousands of cattle in Kansas, one of the largest cattle producers in the country.

According to a study published in The Lancet Planetary Health in March, the impact of climate-change-related heat stress on dairy and beef cattle production may lead to global production losses of meat and milk amounting to about $40 billion per year by the end of the century for a high greenhouse gas (GHG) emission scenario. Even in the best-case scenario where emissions are low, producers could be looking at a loss of around $15 million.

[Related: Potty-trained cows could seriously help the planet.]

To compute these losses, the authors predicted changes in feed intake by the animal in response to hot, humid weather in various GHG emission scenarios. They converted these changes in feed intake to changes in milk and meat production, and then valued them using 2005 prices, says Thornton, who is one of the authors of the study.

Based on the study, the losses in tropical regions are estimated to be higher than those in temperate regions, for both high and low emission scenarios. “Some parts of the northern temperate areas of the globe may see increased production as cold spells decline,” says Thornton. “In other words, more of the energy in the feed eaten by animals can go towards meat and milk production, rather than keeping the animal warm.”

The impacts of heat stress on cattle can affect the food security and diet diversity of both livestock producers and consumers. Producers may experience income reduction, loss of assets, and decreased resilience of their livelihoods, while consumers may face higher prices for meat and milk, says Thornton.

Food supply depends on products coming from farms, so anytime there is a disruption in these systems, the entire food supply chain suffers, says Stone. “We may see a shift in where these farms are in relation to our consumers—for example, ‘local’ may be a farm 100 miles away instead of 10—and there will be fewer farms with more cows supplying all our needs,” she adds. Therefore, it’s crucial to mitigate the impacts of increasing heat stress on cattle production.

Farmers may adopt various adaptation interventions 

However, there are plenty of adaptation methods that farmers can try to keep their cows cool even in record-breaking heat. 

Cows can’t sweat as humans do, so in confinement operations where cows live inside a barn, fans and sprinklers can be used to create an evaporative cooling system, says Stone. There are also sensor technologies that monitor cow behavior as well as physiological and production changes, which can adjust barn temperatures based on what is happening with the cows, she adds.

For outdoor production systems, a wide range of feed additives such as betaine or chromium may alleviate heat stress to an extent due to their antioxidant capacity. Livestock grazing systems coupled with trees can also be effective in shading animals during hot and humid spells, says Thornton. In parts of Africa, some farmers are switching species altogether: from cattle to more heat-resilient goats or even camels, he adds.

“In the longer term, there are prospects for breeding animals with greater heat stress tolerance, also perhaps through cross-breeding programs,” says Thornton. “Such approaches may be quite costly and take several years to come to fruition, however.”

Policymakers will have to support the cattle industry

To keep dairy producers in business with the rising costs of production and decreased production as a result of increasing heat load, producers need to receive more money per unit of milk produced, says Stone. 

“Policies that control the volatility of the milk market are of utmost importance to dairy farmers,” she adds. “We continue to improve our efficiencies to produce more milk with [fewer] cows, land, and resources, but there has been little reward for these improvements in a producers’ bottom line. The continued expectation that farmers can continue to do more and more with less and less has to have a breaking point and I believe we may be reaching it.”

[Related: Almost everything you know about cheese is wrong.]

As the world continues to get hotter, heat stress becomes an increasingly challenging issue both for livestock and the humans working outdoors. Some places will be too hot for animals to thrive, especially in lower-income countries. Moving livestock production to more conducive environments within countries may be an option, although this will be heavily dependent on the nation’s markets, economics, and social and cultural considerations, says Thornton.

However, all measures to address the effects of heat stress must be coupled with a significant decrease in emissions to mitigate climate change and further global warming. “In the long run,” says Thornton, “the most effective way to address the challenge is to redouble our collective efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions as quickly and as comprehensively as possible.”

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We depend on our grocery stores to provide access to produce and food products from all around the world, any time of the year. And while we’ve come to expect avocados on the East Coast in the middle of winter, these culinary delights come with a price for the planet. 

New research out yesterday in Nature Food shows that food miles, or the distance between the place where food is grown to your plate, has a much higher carbon footprint than previously estimated. The carbon cost is actually around 19 percent of all food-related transportation emissions. 

Taking the entirety of the food supply chain into account, global food miles add up to around 3 gigatons of carbon dioxide equivalent emissions, which stands around 3.5 to 7.5 times higher than previous estimates. All of that amounts to about half of direct emissions from road vehicles, the study authors write. This is a significant deviation from previous estimates that put food transportation at under 5 percent of emissions of the global food system.

Unsurprisingly, these results are especially relevant for wealthy countries with especially well-stocked grocery stores. The authors looked at food miles in 74 different countries, incorporating 37 economic sectors like livestock or vegetables, transport distances, and the weight of the commodities. While the largest countries in the world, China, India, and the US, make up most of these food emissions, smaller wealthy nations tend to have a bigger impact per person. For example, combine the US, France, Germany, and Japan, and the numbers crunch to around 12 percent of the world’s population, but nearly half of the emissions associated with food transport. 

“Prior to our study, most of the attention in sustainable food research has been on the high emissions associated with animal-derived foods, compared with plants,” David Raubenheimer, coauthor and nutritional ecologist at the University of Sydney said in a release.  It’s true that meat and animal products do rack up a considerable carbon footprint: Research from 2018 shows how 20 percent of Americans are responsible for half of the country’s food emissions. Other studies suggest that most of us are eating too much protein in our diets—the overconsumption also likely contributing to emissions. However, this new study actually shows that eating fruits and vegetables is a noteworthy dilemma. Fresh produce Is especially a major player when it’s out of season and shipped from far away. 

Transportation associated with fruits and vegetables added up to around 36 percent of the total food-miles emissions (or over 1 billion tons of carbon dioxide equivalent), nearly doubling the amount of greenhouse gas emissions from their production. Meat production, on the other hand, emits around 3 billion tons of carbon dioxide equivalent, but transportation costs a little over 100 million tons. The higher emissions for fruits and vegetables is largely due to carbon-intensive refrigeration to keep produce looking as ripe and plump as possible. 

[Related: Here’s the actual impact of cutting down on red meat]

On top of the surprisingly high environmental cost of fruits and vegetables in general, over half of the emissions came from moving food around inside of countries, with less contributed from international transport. Essentially, your indulgent French cookies or Korean ramen shipped to your neighborhood store aren’t just what’s driving up emissions—even getting a “US grown” banana could rack up some serious environmental mileage.

The answer to this problem, however, is quite simple—learn about and purchase foods in season where you live.

“One example is the habit of consumers in affluent countries demanding unseasonal foods year-round, which need to be transported from elsewhere,” Manfred Lanzen, another author and professor of sustainability research at the University of Sydney, said in the release. “Eating local seasonal alternatives, as we have throughout most of the history of our species, will help provide a healthy planet for future generations.”

This may initially seem like a nuisance when you’ve got a hankering for mango or pineapple while living in a cold region, but there are lots of tools out there that can help you determine when your favorites are in season and where they are coming from. For example, the nonprofit Grace Communications Foundation shows that in Georgia, now is the time to dive into cantaloupe, peaches, and zucchini; on the other side of the country in Oregon it’s time for rhubarb, endives, and apples.

If the whole population of the planet ate locally, emissions would drop by around a third of a gigatonne. For foods that must be transported, shifting to cleaner vehicles and natural refrigerants could help lessen the blow.

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From We Are What We Eat: A Slow Food Manifesto by Alice Waters, published by Penguin Press, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © 2021 by Alice Waters. 

In the very early days of Chez Panisse, I knew the importance of the flavor and freshness of our ingredients, but seasonality wasn’t uppermost in my mind. The truth was, seasonality was an invisible force that we were grappling with every day, but we weren’t fully committed to understanding what it meant.

The shift to seasonal cooking at Chez Panisse came with our connection to the farmer Bob Cannard, and the aliveness of the food that came into the restaurant from his farm. Part of this was because of Bob’s semi-coastal Sonoma microclimate; part was because he knew precisely which vegetables and fruits he could grow successfully at different times of the year. He would send us vegetables we didn’t even know were in season. Finding something in the winter like Bob’s carrots or chicories—which were so beautiful and flavorful—was an edible education. His ingredients made us realize that there were new and different flavors to be found, whatever season we were in.

Dump mediocrity; embrace ripeness

Ripeness is the key to seasonality. There’s a subtlety to ripeness, and it takes discernment to know when something is ripe: the right amount of give to an avocado, the color of the shoulders of the Blenheim apricot, the scent of a passion fruit. You must look carefully, evaluate the flavors, and figure out the essence. Discernment is not the same thing as judgment; it’s not merely “this is good”; “this is bad.” To understand ripeness, you have to learn through trial and error—you have to taste and taste again.

As recently as 60 years ago, preserving was a skill that most families had. When you know how to cook and preserve foods, you can employ these ingredients in myriad ways. Freezing can also be used to capture a moment, as with stocks or fruit that can be made into smoothies and ice creams later in the year. Preserving food helps us all be less food insecure. And while I am completely devoted to seasonality and the primacy of localness, I do recognize the benefits of Carlo Petrini’s idea of “virtuous globalization”: buying coffee, tea, spices, chocolate, and other nonperishable goods from people in other countries who are using best farming and labor practices.

Living in the season is empowering—and there can be enough local food, even in the months when there are fewer fresh ingredients available. It’s possible to prepare yourself. You need to have cool places to store sweet potatoes and apples and nuts. You need to have the forethought to capture and preserve the bounty of the harvest when it’s at its peak.

Eating in season also challenges you to be inventive. I find I take much more care with ingredients when I’m eating seasonally. I’m more economical, too: I might candy the orange rinds instead of throwing them away, and I might make a broth using the green tops of vegetables and onion skins. I’m not as inclined to let things go to waste, because I know this is the one moment of the year to have that beautiful spring pea, or that September fig. I cherish it.

Be patient

Patience is obviously part of seasonality, too. Every year, we can’t wait for the arrival of our California king salmon. But we do wait. And when it’s finally in season, we have it on the menu all the time, and it is sublime. Most important, cooking like this helps us to remember that we can’t expect the salmon season to be what it has always been. The local salmon’s availability is different every year, because of global warming, overfishing, and natural environmental shifts. Two years ago, the local salmon was available for only six short weeks. We have to go with nature’s ups and downs. And when we do, we become more attuned to the bigger picture of what’s happening to our ecosystem, and we want to take care of it.

Because it is terribly important that we accept change. Everything is different all the time—when we want the world around us to always be the same, we are swimming upstream. Seasonality helps guide us and propels us to embrace change rather than dread it. When you accept the seasons, you feel the ephemeral nature of each moment and understand how fleeting and precious life is.

Alice Waters is a chef and the founder/owner of Chez Panisse in Berkeley, California (est. 1971). She has won numerous awards, including the National Humanities Medal, the French Legion of Honor Medal, the Cavaliere of the Italian Republic, and three James Beard Awards. As vice president of Slow Food International and founder of the Edible Schoolyard Project, she has helped bring organic seasonal food awareness to people of all ages all over the world.

Buy We Are What We Eat: A Slow Food Manifesto here, now available in paperback.

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Plucking ripe tomatoes, cucumbers, and heads of lettuce all year long in your apartment sounds like a dream to both a couch potato and a houseplant hobbyist. Thanks to hydroponic cultivation, this is possible, even without playing hours of Stardew Valley or Terrarium.

Hydroponic cultivation, a method of growing crops in nutrient-rich water instead of soil, isn’t a passing fad. According to one recent market estimate, the commercial-scale industry was valued at $9.5 billion in 2020 and could double by 2028. 

And an increasing number of do-it-yourself hydroponic kits—ranging from bare-bones basic to sleek, minimalistic models—are available for purchase. And they seem to have gained popularity with consumers during the first year of the pandemic; AeroGrow, which makes the AeroGarden-branded hydroponic sets, saw revenue increase 107 percent from the third quarter of 2020 from a year earlier.

But is the amount of electricity and water needed to nurture and harvest that produce without soil in your kitchen sustainable compared to traditional or commercial cultivation? For some veggies, the answer is probably not.

Certain crops fundamentally are better suited for at-home hydroponic cultivation than others—meaning you shouldn’t have to put in months or years worth of resources before you see the fruits of your labor.

Often the first thing that people ask Angelo Kelvakis, the research and development director and master horticulturist at hydroponic gardening company Rise Gardens, is whether they can grow an avocado tree in their home.

“[Avocado trees] take years to cultivate, they’re huge, and they use tons of water and other resources, tons of light,” he explains. “When you get into the realm of fruits, you’re already in murky water.” 

He says that produce almost entirely made up of water, like berries, naturally needs a lot of water during their growing period. But the larger issue is that fruiting plants need space and attention, so commercial-scale operations have a better chance of success because they have more physical space, plant-specific cultivation systems, and enough workers to keep up with the growth.

[Related: Build a DIY garden you can bring on the road.]

For example, kale is another crop that can be hard to grow in an at-home hydroponic setting, Kelvakis says, because edible varieties can grow up to three feet tall and several feet wide in a soil field. But growing smaller dwarf varieties of these crops with manageable root structures can counteract this concern.

“Issues arise when people want to grow non-dwarf varieties,” he explains. “These plants will quickly outgrow any indoor system and can cause issues with plumbing, growing into lights, and leaf litter scattered around your unit.” And, of course, any plant that typically grows in the dirt, like carrots or turnips, isn’t a great option for a soil-free cultivation environment.

But for the most part, experts say, crops like tomatoes, most smaller leafy greens, and certain types of herbs cultivated at home in hydroponic settings use less water than field-grown crops.

“Greenhouse-grown produce can be 10 to 15 times more efficient compared to [produce] grown in field conditions in terms of water use efficiency,” says Murat Kacira, the director of the University of Arizona’s Controlled Environment Agriculture Center. “For instance, it may take about a gallon or less than a gallon of water for a head of lettuce to be grown in a [commercial or at-home] greenhouse system, compared to 10 to 15 gallons of water per head of lettuce grown [in a field.].” 

Hydroponically grown tomatoes also appear to be more adept and efficient with their water intake than tomatoes grown in soil, according to a study published last year in Scientia Horticulturae. Tomato plants grown in hydroponic systems experienced less evaporation from their leaves. The authors write that the hydroponic crops more efficiently consumed water than plants grown in soil yet grew roughly the same amount and quality of fruit.

But what about the electricity usage necessary to keep your grow lights shining or your water circulation pumps churning? Start with using the most obvious source of energy: the sun. Hydroponics industry experts note that hydroponic set-ups don’t necessarily require grow lights and could still utilize natural sunlight; microgreens, for example, can grow with just the ambient light in your home.

“You can’t beat the sun; the sun is the best thing ever, because that’s how all plants [evolved],” says Kelvakis. But plants with long photoperiods—an extended sunlight exposure requirement—or that require more intense sunlight than your area enjoys will require additional lights to meet their needs.

However, air conditioning is another consideration for the electricity gobbled up by indoor hydroponic crop cultivation. Even commercial growers “haven’t really cracked the code” yet on the energy costs, says Jacob Pechenik, co-founder of at-home hydroponic system company Lettuce Grow. 

“You’re powering all the lights, but then you also have this hot space you need to cool, so you have to get air flow and circulation and that’s when the power requirements become very high,” Pechenik adds.

But with an indoor home hydroponic system, if you have an AC unit that works great for your personal needs, you probably won’t need any additional cooling power, says Kelvakis. 

Other environmental factors also have to be weighed against the significantly higher energy needs for indoor cultivation, says Deane Falcone, chief scientific officer at Crop One, a vertical farming company.

He explained that the increasingly extreme weather conditions, like extended heat waves or major rainstorms and inundations, associated with climate change don’t directly impact indoor crop cultivation as it does on traditionally grown crops.

“That kind of uncertainty and variability in the weather [with outdoor growing] has to be balanced with the reliability that we get from indoor growth, including in your own home,” says Falcone. “So you’re probably not going to be providing all the sustenance for your family from your indoor growth system, but you’ll always have something of decent quality.”

[Related: Vertical farms are finally branching out.]

Growing crops indoors eliminates a plant’s exposure to pests, diseases, or polluted soil. That makes outdoor crop cultivation overall less efficient.

This kind of exposure affects both the edibility and the attractiveness of the produce—an essential factor to consider when looking to minimize food waste, Falcone added. For example, he explains that low-to-no bacterial concentrations on lettuce leaves grown indoors mean “adding two to three weeks to the shelf life, so you’re probably going to [have time to] finish consuming it.”

“The crops that are grown in [hydroponic] greenhouse systems or in a vertical [hydroponic] farming system, right now, are produced under optimized conditions,” says Kacira. “The yield outcome, as well as the quality attributes are maximized meeting the expectations of the consumers in terms of the size, the color, the texture, the flavor, the nutritional content, everything.”

However, Kacira says while the electricity usage per plant might be similar between a home and commercial set-ups, “what you can achieve with the produce coming from a commercial setting may be slightly different in terms of the yield and quality attributes.” A home grower’s experience and attentiveness will also play a factor. So if you’re determined to set up an indoor hydroponic garden, it’s time to really commit to utilizing your green thumb.  

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This article was originally featured on The Conversation.

Figuring out how to feed people in space is a major part of a larger effort to demonstrate the viability of long-term human habitation of extraterrestrial environments. On May 12, 2022, a team of scientists announced that they had successfully grown plants using lunar soil gathered during the Apollo moon missions. But this is not the first time that scientists have attempted to grow plants in soils that typically do not support life.

I am a historian of Antarctic science. How to grow plants and food in the far southern reaches of Earth has been an active area of research for more than 120 years. These efforts have helped further understanding of the many challenges of agriculture in extreme environments and eventually led to limited, but successful, plant cultivation in Antarctica. And especially after the 1960s, scientists began to explicitly look at this research as a steppingstone to human habitation in space.

Growing plants in Antarctica

The earliest efforts to grow plants in Antarctica were primarily focused on providing nutrition to explorers.

In 1902, British physician and botanist Reginald Koettlitz was the first person to grow food in Antarctic soils. He collected some soil from McMurdo Sound and used it to grow mustard and cress in boxes under a skylight aboard the expedition’s ship. The crop was immediately beneficial to the expedition. Koettlitz produced enough that during an outbreak of scurvy, the entire crew ate the greens to help stave off their symptoms. This early experiment demonstrated that Antarctic soil could be productive, and also pointed to the nutritional advantages of fresh food during polar expeditions.

Early attempts to grow plants directly in Antarctic landscapes were less successful. In 1904, Scottish botanist Robert Rudmose-Brown mailed seeds from 22 cold-tolerant Arctic plants to the small, frigid Laurie Island to see if they would grow. All of the seeds failed to sprout, which Rudmose-Brown attributed to both the environmental conditions and the absence of a biologist to help usher their growth.

There have been many more attempts to introduce nonnative plants to the Antarctic landscape, but generally they didn’t survive for long. While the soil itself could support some plant life, the harsh environment was not friendly to plant cultivation.

Modern techniques and emotional benefits

By the 1940s, many nations had begun setting up long-term research stations in Antarctica. Since it was impossible to grow plants outside, some people living at these stations took it upon themselves to build greenhouses to provide both food and emotional well-being. But they soon realized that Antarctic soil was of too poor quality for most crops beyond mustard and cress, and it typically lost its fertility after a year or two. Starting in the 1960s, people began switching to the soilless method of hydroponics, a system in which you grow plants with their roots immersed in chemically enhanced water under a combination of artificial and natural light.

By using hydroponic techniques in greenhouses, plant production facilities weren’t using the Antarctic environment to grow crops at all. Instead, people were creating artificial conditions.

By 2015 there were at least 43 different facilities on Antarctica where researchers had grown plants at some time or another. While these facilities have been useful for scientific experiments, many Antarctic residents appreciated being able to eat fresh vegetables in the winter and considered these facilities enormous boons for their psychological well-being. As one researcher put it, they are “warm, bright and full of green life – an environment one misses during the Antarctic winter.”

Antarctica as an analog for space

As permanent human occupation of Antarctica grew through the middle of the 20th century, humanity also began its push into space – and specifically, to the Moon. Starting in the 1960s, scientists working for organizations like NASA began thinking of the hostile, extreme and alien Antarctic as a convenient analog for space exploration, where nations could test space technologies and protocols, including plant production. That interest continued through the end of the 20th century, but it wasn’t until the 2000s that space became a primary goal of some Antarctic agricultural research.

In 2004, the National Science Foundation and the University of Arizona’s Controlled Environment Agriculture Center collaborated to build the South Pole Food Growth Chamber. The project was designed to test the idea of controlled-environment agriculture – a means of maximizing plant growth while minimizing resource use. According to its architects, the facility closely mimicked the conditions of a Moon base and provided “an analogue on Earth for some of the issues that will arise when food production is moved to space habitations.” This facility continues to provide the South Pole Station with supplementary food.

Since building the South Pole Food Growth Chamber, the University of Arizona has collaborated with NASA to build a similar Prototype Lunar Greenhouse.

Growing plants in space

As people began spending longer times in space toward the end of the 20th century, astronauts began putting to use the lessons from a century of growing plants in Antarctica.

In 2014, NASA astronauts installed the Vegetable Production System aboard the International Space Station to study plant growth in microgravity. The next year, they harvested a small crop of lettuce, some of which they then ate with balsamic vinegar. Just as Antarctic scientists had argued for many years, NASA asserted that the nutritional and psychological value of fresh produce is “a solution to the challenge of long-duration missions into deep space.”

Antarctic research plays an important role for space to this day. In 2018, Germany launched a project in Antarctica called EDEN ISS that focused on plant cultivation technologies and their applications in space in a semi-closed system. The plants grow in air, as misters spray chemically enhanced water on their roots. In the first year, EDEN ISS was able to produce enough fresh vegetables to comprise one-third of the diet for a six-person crew.

Just as in Antarctic history, the question of how to grow plants is central to any discussion of possible human settlements on the Moon or Mars. People eventually abandoned efforts to cultivate the harsh Antarctic landscape for food production and turned to artificial technologies and environments to do so. But after over a century of practice and using the most modern techniques, the food grown in Antarctica has never been able to support many people for very long. Before sending people to the Moon or Mars, it might be wise to first prove that a settlement can survive on its own amid the frozen southern plains of Earth.

Daniella McCahey is an Assistant Professor of History at Texas Tech University.

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The scarcity of palm oil has been circulating in headlines for the past couple of weeks. On April 28, Indonesia, traditionally the largest exporter of palm oil in the world, banned exports of the widely used cooking oil to address shortages. This followed the country’s ban on coal exports, which was enforced in January to keep up supplies for local power plants, subsequently leading to a giant jump in coal prices from $148 at the end of 2021 to $223 by January 25. 

While the coal ban was lifted at the beginning of February, the decisions to stop exporting both goods as a solution to alleviate shortages had been deemed questionable by experts. “Did the problems go away? No,” Bhima Yudhistira Adhinegara, the director of Jakarta-based Center of Economic and Law Studies told CNN Indonesia. “Instead, it was protested by overseas potential buyers. These kinds of policies need to be stopped.”

Hundreds of farmers in Indonesia have protested as palm fruit prices dropped dramatically, while rival palm oil provider Malaysia has used the opportunity to scoop up market share. But this new battle is only one chapter in this cooking oil’s blemished history. Since the 16th century, palm oil has been deeply attached to the trans-Atlantic slave trade, colonialism, and environmental destruction.

Wringing oil from fruit

Palm oil is made from squeezing the fruit, or its stone, of the palm tree Elaeis guineensis. Because the oil remains semi-solid and spreadable at room temperature, it has a long shelf-life. It has now found its way into around 50 percent of America’s packaged food products—including ice cream, instant noodles, and other snacks. 

[Related: Our love of palm oil is destroying forests. Here’s how to use less of it.]

Beauty products like soap, shampoo, and lipstick also use the oil, which cleanses and hydrates skin, and doesn’t melt easily.

The story of palm oil

Shipping and trading palm oil started in the 1500s, but the invention of palm-oil-based margarine caused demand to explode by the 1900s. To mass-produce palm oil, trees were grown on plantations, where working conditions were often abusive, coercive, and even violent—conditions that have persisted into the modern era. 

After World War II, Indonesia and Malaysia became independent from Britain, and relied heavily on the export of palm oil. Then in the 1960s, palm oil faced competition in the form of tallow and lard derived typically from pigs. In the decades that followed, demand waned as health concerns about saturated fats became abundant, writes Jonathan E. Robins, an associate professor of global history at Michigan Technological University, in a post for the Conversation. But by the 1990s, Robins notes that movements to eliminate trans fat, which are naturally found in the guts of ruminant animals, opened the door back up for palm oil as a “cheap and effective substitute” for artificial trans fats. Between 1995 and 2015, palm oil production quadrupled—85 percent of which came from Malaysia and Indonesia.   

Palm oil is wrought with environmental issues as well as ethical ones. Converting tropical forests to palm oil plantations has caused an abundance of problems, according to the World Wildlife Fund, which include removing habitats for endangered species, increased air pollution from forest burning, pollution of water with pesticides and fertilizers, increased soil erosion, and loss of critical carbon sinks. 

Citing these ecological harms, the European Union set goals to phase out palm oil biofuel use by 2030. Some companies have removed palm oil from their products. But the change doesn’t always stick: The UK-based food store chain Iceland had stopped using palm oil, only to resume recently because the Ukraine crisis was so disruptive to supply chains. 

But some groups, including the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), have argued boycotts could lead to even more damage. According to a 2018 IUCN report, although palm oil farming endangers biodiversity and creatures like orangutans, gibbons, and tigers, swapping out plantations for rapeseed, soy, or sunflower may cause even more biodiversity loss and deforestation.

[Related: Which veggie oil is most sustainable? It’s complicated.]

“When you consider the disastrous impacts of palm oil on biodiversity from a global perspective, there are no simple solutions,” IUCN Director General Inger Andersen said in a release in 2018. “Half of the world’s population uses palm oil in food, and if we ban or boycott it, other, more land-hungry oils will likely take its place. Palm oil is here to stay, and we urgently need concerted action to make palm oil production more sustainable, ensuring that all parties–governments, producers and the supply chain–honor their sustainability commitments.”

What Indonesia’s ban really means

Despite palm oil’s sustainability concerns, the ban really doesn’t have much to do with the planet—instead, rising demand and oil shortages spiked prices outside the acceptable price range for Indonesian consumers. Unlike many Americans and other Westerners who may only consume oil as an ingredient in a product, for Indonesians the oil is crucial for everyday cooking, be it feeding a family or running a business.

The ban has hurt local farmers even more. “The effect of the export ban on small scale farmers has been enormous because many of them do not have other sources of income,” Mansuetus Darto, head of the Indonesian Oil Palm Farmers’ Union, West Java, told Al Jazeera. The ban compounds economic disruptions that began with COVID-19, Darto said. “So many farmers have struggled, especially in the last two years. They had hoped things were starting to improve after the pandemic, but if there are local or global political problems, it will affect them too.”

There isn’t an easy answer to fix palm oil production. Cutting off exports from a particular country, be it this oil or fossil fuels, doesn’t make these complex problems disappear. It often leaves those hurting in an even more precarious situation.

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Farms make up about 40 percent of all US land. In many counties, particularly those that run down the middle of the country, more than 70 percent of the terrain is used for agriculture.

This means the way farmers manage their land, crops, and livestock can play a key role in helping the country hit its conservation and climate goals. The pastures, orchards, and fields they tend often overlap with wildlife habitat and hold carbon-storage potential. But current government programs that encourage farmers to adopt sustainable, climate-smart practices need more funding. In particular, two conservation programs are receiving more interest than they’re able to invest in.

This is where the Farm Bill could make a major difference. In 2018, the national legislation package sent $867 million dollars to a wide range of services like food stamps, crop insurance, and natural resource conservation. With the next update planned for 2023, Congress is starting to break down the success of current programs and determine how much money to dedicate to them for the next few years. Some legislators and stakeholders are calling for a boost in overall Farm Bill funding so it can sustain an increased focus on climate and conservation.

“Farmers have been seeing the effects of climate change for a long time, and are sometimes the first to tell you that the weather’s getting worse and more unpredictable,” says Michael Happ, program associate for climate and rural communities at the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy (IATP). “Our funding needs to reflect that.”

[Related: The future of American conservation lies in restoration, not just protection]

Agricultural management is crucial to climate mitigation. The Environmental Protection Agency estimates that farming accounted for 11 percent of America’s greenhouse gas emissions in 2020. Conservation programs under the Farm Bill support practices like planting cover crops and switching to no-till tractors to preserve land health, sequester carbon, and encourage farmers to make their livelihoods more resilient to the changing climate.

The Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP) and the Conservation Stewardship Program (CSP) are two initiatives under the Farm Bill that have been extremely popular in recent years. EQIP provides financial and technical assistance to farmers who want to adopt more sustainable practices to help conserve natural resources. CSP assists farmers in their existing conservation efforts, such as improving grazing conditions, increasing crop resiliency, or developing wildlife habitat.

The problem is the programs need millions more dollars to meet demand. Happ’s research in 2021 found that the US Department of Agriculture awarded contracts to only 42 percent of CSP applicants and 31 percent of EQIP applicants between 2010 and 2020. During this time frame, CSP denied more than 146,000 contracts and EQIP turned down more than 946,000, in part because of a lack of funds.

“There are thousands of farmers across the country who are being closed out [of these programs],” Happ says. “There’s just not enough money to fund all of these contracts.”

In fiscal year 2022, the US budget dedicated about $759 million to technical assistance for farming conservation programs. But IATP and other stakeholders are calling for an increase to at least $1.1 billion—almost double the current budget. Whether the 2023 Farm Bill will contribute to filling this gap is still unclear.

Patrick Westhoff, director of the Food and Agricultural Policy Research Institute at the University of Missouri, says it’s hard to predict what funding will look like for the next iteration of the Farm Bill. The decision will depend on a multitude of factors, including the state of the general economy, the health of the farming economy, and the make-up of next year’s Congress.

In the debate preceding the 2018 Farm Bill, some Republican legislators pushed for the gutting of CSP and for its subsidies to be folded into EQIP. This would have shaved off nearly $5 billion from conservation funding over a decade, according to the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition. What’s more, Westhoff notes that it would have left a potential incentive for farmers to backslide on sustainable practices. While CSP assists those who have used techniques like no-till farming and sustainable grazing for a long time, EQIP rewards farmers for switching to eco-friendly practices. If the first program is rolled into the second, existing applicants might be tempted to double dip.

“This has been very much part and parcel to the climate debate as well: Do we only have carbon trading schemes that pay people for changing what they’ve been doing to ways that reduce emissions and sequester carbon, or do we reward people who have been doing things all along that have had those effects?” Westhoff says.

Happ also notes that, despite all of its benefits to soil health and biodiversity, EQIP supports industrial practices, like drainage techniques and waste management, that sometimes actively harm the environment. This means that EQIP’s already limited funding is “being misdirected to large, polluting operations, while thousands of farmers are being turned away from contracts that could help them pay for conservation improvements and help their bottom lines,” Happ wrote in an IATP report in April.

[Related: ‘This plan is a lie’: Biogas on hog farms could do more harm than good]

Another Farm Bill benefit that has been struggling is the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP), which pays landowners an annual fee if they agree to let environmentally sensitive land lay fallow for at least a decade. But with contracts expiring in 2022, landowners decided to take 1.7 million acres out of the program to put back into use for crop production. This year’s sign-ups also totaled to the smallest amount of land added to the reserve since it’s creation in 1985. 

Westhoff says a combination of higher crop prices in the market and lower rental payments through the program has led CRP to become less attractive to landowners. The return to farming takes away the ability of these lands to improve water and soil health and provide more wildlife habitat. It also puts a dent in the amount of American acres that are able to store carbon in the long-term, which ultimately limits progress on the country’s climate goals.

The good news is, conservation programs like EQIP, CSP, and CRP already provide tools and strategies to combat climate change—they just need a few tweaks and lots of new funds, Happ says. The 2023 Farm Bill is a chance to bring sustainable agriculture to the fore, without leaving the people it was built for behind.

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Global food production is a major driver of deforestation and biodiversity loss. All of the food system activities—including crop production, livestock and fish farming, processing and supply chain, and land use—account for about 37 percent of total greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. More than half of these emissions come from the production of animal-based food and livestock feed.

Producing ruminant meat, or meat from cattle, sheep, goat, and buffalo, remains an overwhelmingly GHG-intensive process. To reduce the consumption of ruminant meat and minimize the environmental impact of food production, it’s necessary to explore various meat alternatives. People can opt for plant-based substitutes that mimic meat products using plant materials like soy or peas. There’s also the option of lab-grown meat, which comes from the cultivation of a small sample of animal cells. Both would produce significantly fewer GHG emissions and use less water than conventional meat. 

However, there is another meat alternative that should be on consumers’ radars: fermentation-derived microbial protein.

Viability of microbial protein as a meat alternative

Microbial protein refers to protein derived from microorganisms such as fungi, bacteria, or algae. To turn the proteins into a meat alternative, the organism needs to be cultivated in bioreactors—a type of fermentation vessel—using sugar as feedstock.

“Once the target organism is successfully grown, the so-called biomass is harvested,” says Lutz Grossmann, assistant professor in the Department of Food Science at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. “This biomass can then be converted into different kinds of foods, or the proteins can be extracted and used as a food ingredient.”

In producing meat alternatives, the microbial protein may have an advantage over animal or plant protein because it is not dependent on climate or season, which means land shortage, droughts, or floods wouldn’t restrict its production. 

[Related: How to enjoy fake meat in a way that actually helps the planet.]

“The advantage of using such organisms as a food source is that we can cultivate them under controlled conditions in areas where the cultivation does not compete with agricultural land,” says Grossmann. “Also, growing these microorganisms usually does not require pesticides and they have a high protein content.”

The first full-scale production and commercialization of microbial protein occurred in the 1970s with the animal feed product Pruteen. The fairly underdeveloped state of fermentation technology, high cost of microbial protein production, and competition with cheaper alternatives initially hampered the breakthrough of microbial protein products, but it is slowly regaining momentum over the recent years.

A common example you may find in your grocery store today is Quorn, which uses mycoprotein derived from the fungus Fusarium venenatum to make meat substitutes that are intended to taste and feel like animal meat, such as burger patties or meatballs. Meanwhile, Nature’s Fynd uses protein from Fusarium strain flavolapis, a fungus discovered in the geothermal hot springs in Yellowstone National Park.

Replacing beef with microbial protein benefits the environment

According to a recent study published in Nature, annual deforestation may be cut in half if 20 percent of per-capita ruminant meat consumption was substituted with microbial protein by 2050. This substitution would offset future increases in global pasture area, which can also cut related CO2 emissions in half, says Florian Humpenöder, study author and senior scientist at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research.

“The production of ruminant meat requires large areas for cattle grazing or growing its feed on cropland, which causes deforestation, biodiversity loss, and CO2 emissions,” he adds. “Today, almost 80 percent of global agricultural land including cropland and pasture is used for feeding livestock.”

Although the production of microbial protein has considerably lower land use and GHG emissions compared to that of ruminant meat, its energy consumption is almost equal to that of beef production. The entire process of microbial meat production—which includes electricity generation, microbial cultivation, bioreactor stirring and cooling, and the eventual downstream processing of biomass and proteins—requires energy. Microbial protein may contribute fewer GHG emissions if the cultivation process is designed with sustainability in mind, says Grossmann.

If our food systems were to increase the production of microbial protein or other biotechnology-enabled alternatives (due to consumer acceptance, for instance), it’s necessary for electricity generation to be decarbonized on a large scale, says Humpenöder. Renewable energy sources should be considered in producing microbial protein. Otherwise, the reduced land-related GHG emissions from the substitution with microbial protein may be jeopardized by the increase in energy-related GHG emissions, he added.

Meat alternatives can be tasty and healthy

Although an increasing number of people are willing to try meat alternatives and incorporate them into their diets, there’s still a lack of product diversity, says Grossmann.

A 2021 survey from the International Food Information Council found that 65 percent of Americans consumed plant-based meat alternatives in the previous year. However, many remain reluctant to try them because they might not taste as good as animal meat. Some people have dietary concerns as well, and they don’t believe that plant alternatives may be better for their health.

In reality, microbial protein is protein-rich, and it also contains all the essential amino acids that humans need to obtain from nutrition, says Humpenöder.

[Related: Our meat habit is causing pollution issues—by way of our poops.]

“[Meat alternatives] can also be a more healthy choice because they can be formulated with more healthy ingredients, such as fibers, less saturated fats, and less salt,” says Grossmann. “They can also be fortified with important vitamins and minerals. We will see more and more of such products coming on the market in the future that will also have an even better taste.” 

Meat alternatives need to provide the same sensory experience as animal meat in terms of the look, texture, smell, and flavor to encourage consumers to make the switch to more sustainable options. Researchers from a 2022 Applied Economic Perspectives and Policy study conducted a blind tasting experiment and found that 100 percent real beef is still the most preferred option compared to the blended burger with 70 percent beef and 30 percent mushroom or burgers made with alternative protein. 

“There is a hurdle for many consumers to try new foods,” says Grossmann, “but once the products are more established, people encounter and try it more often, [and] they can become a staple food of our everyday life.”

The post This fermented meat alternative could help halve global deforestation rates appeared first on Popular Science.

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This article was originally featured on Undark.

ACROSS MIDWESTERN FARMS, if Girish Chowdhary has his way, farmers will someday release beagle-sized robots into their fields like a pack of hounds flushing pheasant. The robots, he says, will scurry in the cool shade beneath a wide diversity of plants, pulling weeds, planting cover crops, diagnosing plant infections, and gathering data to help farmers optimize their farms.

Chowdhary, a researcher at the University of Illinois, works surrounded by corn, one of the most productive monocultures in the world. In the United States, the corn industry was valued at $82.6 billion in 2021, but it—like almost every other segment of the agricultural economy—faces daunting problems, including changing weather patterns, environmental degradation, severe labor shortages, and the rising cost of key supplies, or inputs: herbicides, pesticides, and seed.

Agribusiness as a whole is betting that the world has reached the tipping point where desperate need caused by a growing population, the economic realities of conventional farming, and advancing technology converge to require something called precision agriculture, which aims to minimize inputs and the costs and environmental problems that go with them.

No segment of agriculture is without its passionate advocates of robotics and artificial intelligence as solutions to, basically, all the problems facing farmers today. The extent of their visions ranges from technology that overlays existing farm practices to a comprehensive rethinking of agriculture that eliminates tractors, soil, sunlight, weather, and even being outdoors as factors in farm life.

But the promises of precision agriculture still haven’t been met: Because most of the promised systems aren’t on the market, few final prices have been set and there’s precious little real-world data proving whether they work.

“The marketing around precision agriculture, that it’s going to have a huge impact, we don’t have the data for that yet,” says Emily Duncan, a researcher in the Department of Geography, Environment and Geomatics at the University of Guelph in Canada. “Going back to the idea that we want to reduce the use of inputs, precision agriculture doesn’t necessarily say we’re going to be using less overall.”

Even so, Chowdhary, who is co-founder and chief technical officer of Earthsense, Inc., the company that makes those beagle-sized robots, is hopeful that the adoption of his robots will propel farmers well past precision agriculture, to think about the business of farming in a whole new way. Right now, he says, most farmers focus on yield, defining success as growing more on the same amount of land. The result: horizon-to-horizon, industrial monocultures saturated with chemicals and tended by massive and increasingly expensive machinery. With the help of his robots, Chowdhary foresees a future, instead, of smaller farms living more in harmony with nature, growing a diversity of higher value crops with fewer chemicals.

“The biggest thing we can do is make it easier for farmers to focus on profit, and not just on yield,” Chowdhary wrote in an email to Undark. “Management tools that help reduce fertilizer and herbicide costs while improving the quality of land and keeping yield up will help farmers realize more profit through fundamentally more sustainable techniques.”

Chowdhary’s robots may help farmers cut costs by, among other things, pulling weeds that compete with corn. For centuries, farmers tamed weeds with hoes and plows. World War II gave rise to the modern chemical industry, and the herbicides it produced made farmers perceive weeds as a non-issue, leaving the ground beneath crops like corn unnaturally bare and vastly increasing the yield per acre, revolutionizing the farm economy.

Nature is persistent, however, and inevitably weeds evolved that resist herbicides. To compensate, suppliers blend powerful and increasingly expensive herbicidal cocktails and genetically modify seed to be chemically resistant. That agricultural arms race traps farmers in a cycle of rising costs, threatens precious water resources, and only works until, as Iowa farmer Earl Slinker puts it, “you go out and spray it one year and it doesn’t do anything.” The result is a smaller harvest, according to Slinker, which in the low-profit-margin business of farming can mean disaster.

The question that underlies all the theorizing is both economic and cultural: Are farmers going to buy in?

“The challenge is demonstrating the benefits to farmers and making these things easy to adopt,” says Madhu Khanna, who studies technology adoption at the University of Illinois Department of Agriculture and Consumer Economics. “For most of these technologies, the benefits are uncertain.”

IN AGRICULTURE, the conventional wisdom is that the outcome of the race to the farm of the future will be determined by clear-eyed economic decision-making. If robotics and artificial intelligence make business sense, the market will develop. “Farmers and growers are very smart about that,” says Baskar Ganapathysubramanian of Iowa State University’s Artificial Intelligence Institute for Resilient Agriculture. “From hardware and software perspective, if there’s a clear value proposition,” he adds, “they’re going to choose it.”

The growth numbers suggest farmers are open to the potential benefits of advanced technology. Overall, farmers spent almost $25 billion on tractors and other farm equipment in 2020. While Covid-19 slowed the adoption of robotics, farms worldwide are expected to incorporate the technology into their operations faster than the industrial market—increases of 19.3 percent and 12.3 percent, respectively, over five years. The global research firm MarketsandMarkets estimates that spending on robots will go from nearly $5 billion in 2021 to almost $12 billion in 2026. One result of that optimism, according to CropLife, a U.S. agribusiness publication, is that the third quarter of 2021 saw more venture capital investment in agriculture technology startups than ever: more than $4 billion.

“So few people have experience with farming,” says Joe Anderson, an agricultural historian and professor at Mount Royal University in Calgary. “They assume there’s more stasis than there has been. There are lots of innovations. There have been lots of changes.”

The tractors dragging huge implements across fertile fields feature technology that has outpaced even the most advanced automobiles. Many are steered by GPS, following paths mapped out over years of planting and harvest, rendering the farmer in the air-conditioned, video-equipped cab not much more than a passenger.

“You put your first pass and the next ones will follow right along,” says Slinker, who farms 500 acres outside Grundy Center, Iowa. “I just put on a little Keith Jarrett and sit back and travel across the field.”

In the autumn, harvesting machinery guides itself along those same tracks, sensing and recording the productivity of every square foot of field. That data can be used to calculate how much of which hybrid seed should be planted next year, determine how heavily it should be fertilized to reach its fullest potential, and identify small patches of ground that aren’t productive enough to be profitably planted.

“When I stop and think about an autonomous tractor, that seems like a really big leap,” Sarah Schinkel, who leads John Deere’s technology stack innovation group, said at the National Farm Machinery Show in February, “but when I stop and think about it and how much automation is already a part of our equipment, maybe it’s not that big of a leap.”

Deere is doing a limited release of its first fully autonomous tractor this year, with greater availability in 2023 and beyond. In contrast to the small-robot vision of researchers like Chowdhary, it’s a remake of the company’s popular Model 8R tractor, which weighs 14 tons. It fits neatly into the existing agribusiness model, but even with that adoption advantage no one expects a fast transition. Farm equipment has an amazingly long lifespan, at least compared to consumer products like cars. Modern tractors routinely operate for 4,000 hours, and a well-maintained model can last 10,000—or approximately 25 years.

“Even though you may think you’d be interested in getting some new robotic equipment,” says Scott Swinton, a distinguished professor in Michigan State University’s Department of Agriculture, Food, and Resource Economics, “a lot depends on where you are in the depreciation and use cycles for the equipment you have. So we see a lot slower adoption than you do in genetics or chemicals.”

And there is another thing: Critics note that robotics, even if widely adopted, won’t address some of the underlying inadequacies of conventional agriculture.

“When we think about this global challenge of feeding everyone our current system is not set up to do that,” says Duncan. “The fix isn’t to throw more tech at it. It’s to question the system.”

The Midwestern corn-and-soybeans row-crop sector is just a fraction of all of agriculture, which in the U.S. was valued at over $205 billion in 2020. Much of that is what farmers refer to as horticultural crops—fruit, vegetables, and other produce.

“The important distinction is between field crops that are highly mechanized like corn and horticultural crops that require special treatment,” says Swinton. “They are higher value and can tolerate higher investments in equipment. It’s equipment that does weeding in vegetable crops, some robotic harvesting of, say, asparagus or broccoli, some robotic pickers of tree fruits. These are all in areas where you need somewhat skilled labor, and labor can be hard to get.”

The problem is, the planting and harvesting of horticultural crops that is handled so easily by people flummoxes robots. George Kantor, a research professor in Carnegie Mellon’s Robotics Institute, says it will be necessary to change farms to suit robots. Consider, he suggests, the unremarkable act of picking an apple. What a human laborer can accomplish almost without a thought is nearly impossible for a machine. Locating each piece of fruit, gauging its ripeness, and reaching through a tangle of leaves and branches to gently pluck it from the tree—it’s easier, he says, to train the tree than it is to train the robot. In the case of apples, that means sculpting the orchard into what he calls “fruiting walls”.

“Their tree canopy is trained to be essentially a two-dimensional object,” Kantor says. “It’s a wall with a bunch of apples hanging off of it. We don’t have anything that can harvest your grandfather’s apple tree, that can reach inside the canopy and pick an apple. But these fruiting walls, it’s a much easier problem.”

WHERE THE AGRICULTURAL labor shortage is most intense, robotics are gaining ground the fastest. Robert Hagevoort, an extension dairy specialist and professor at New Mexico State University, says the nature of dairy farming makes its labor crisis among the worst in agriculture’s sectors. Cows need to be milked twice a day, he says, every day, creating a lifestyle that is a tough sell to young people choosing a career. The labor shortage is contributing to the decrease in the number of dairy farms.

“In some places,” he says, “some of those producers with land they bought by the acre for agriculture end up selling it by the square foot for real estate development.”

Robotics have offered a lifeline to some dairy farmers. But contrary to the idealized vision of smaller, more local, family farms, robotics have nudged dairy toward larger operations.

“If you went into farming because you wanted to do your own thing and be by yourself like my father did,” says Christopher Wolf, professor of agricultural economics at Cornell University, “that’s not the job anymore. It’s a different skill set. You’re going to be part of a management team.”

Wolf grew up in Wisconsin at a time when 150 cows was a large herd, but still manageable by a single large family. Adding robots to dairy farming creates the same potential economies of scale that have industrialized row crops like corn and soybeans. A single robotic milker can care for over 60 cows, and the second milker is cheaper than the first, and the third cheaper than the second. In advanced milking parlors dozens of milkers can be linked together and managed by only a few technicians working predictable eight-hour shifts and having barely any contact with the cows.

“If you’re set up that way you can also take a vacation,” says Wolf. “I knew dairy farmers growing up who hadn’t taken a vacation in 20 years.”

At the farthest reaches of robotic farming are the developers who are completely abandoning almost every aspect of traditional farming. Iron Ox, a California start-up that just received a $53 million infusion of capital from Bill Gates’ Breakthrough Energy Ventures fund, grows high-value fresh produce in completely controlled, indoor environments.

“Most approaches to automating parts of agriculture are one robot that does one operation,” says Brandon Alexander, CEO of the company. “The reason that hasn’t succeeded is at the end of the day plants are complex things. If you’re really going to automate it, you have to design the entire process from the ground-up for automation.”

That will likely happen first in an agricultural sector with few traditions to change, a very small installed technical base to replace, and a high rate of potential return—which is a pretty apt description of the embryonic cannabis industry. Legal cannabis is already the U.S.’s fifth most valuable crop, and producers are adopting new technology in ways traditional farmers are not.

“There’s not a strong bias looking backwards at how the crop is produced,” says Kantor. “The other thing of course is we talk about high value crops. Grapes are high value crops, leafy greens are high value crops, but cannabis is in a whole other league. It’s going to drive a lot of interesting technologies.”

ASTUDY BY THE University of Illinois estimates that the cost of seed, fertilizer, herbicides, and other farming inputs for corn and soybean production are going to rise over 30 percent between 2020 and the 2022 planting season. The study predicts per acre return—roughly the equivalent of gross profit—for corn will drop from $378 to $61 per acre in 2022.

“From a farmer’s perspective they know they need help,” says Alexander. “The average grower recognizes that something pretty drastic needs to change if we’re going to feed a growing population.”

But according to Terry Griffin, a cropping systems economist at Kansas State University, economists too often assume farmers will behave like businesses, when they often behave more like consumers. “Different people measure value differently,” Griffin says. “Some farm management goes to having the greatest net return. Some might want the newest equipment or the best environmental metrics. For every individual it’s a different value proposition.”

Khanna cites another factor that is often forgotten: consumer perceptions. If consumers start to demand, for example, more crops produced without today’s heavy application of chemicals, it could drive adoption of robotics.

“We underestimate consumers,” she says, in reference to the role they can play in creating this market. “As there is more demand for sustainably produced agricultural products, there will be a greater shift toward documenting what farmers are doing. Policies will do that too, but a lot of the change is going to be driven by consumer and market pressures.”

“I don’t think there will be one model of agriculture in the future, but there is a push to move away from the industrial model of farming,” says Hermione Dace, a policy analyst at the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change in London. “Traditional farming will still exist, but there will be less of it. Robotics will help traditional farmers apply inputs more precisely and reduce the environmental impact of farming as well as saving cost.”

Nidhi Kalra, a senior information scientist at the Rand Corporation, a public policy think tank, says the current moment in agriculture recalls the Gartner Hype Cycle, a formulation of the adoption of new technology “which is basically that new tech comes in, dreams are vastly overinflated, those technologies crash and people say it’s garbage, and then you come out of the valley and the tech starts doing useful things in the world.”

If she’s right, today’s excited anticipation of agriculture’s robotic utopia-to-come will inevitably give way to disillusionment as seemingly world-changing ideas amount to very little.

Kantor believes there have already been three or four robotic waves. In the 1950s, Walt Disney created Tomorrowland, the first really vivid demonstration of what very human robots might one day do. It generated a lot of excitement, but what came out of that period were industrial robots, bolted to factory floors and accomplishing a single rote task. Roughly every decade since then there’s been some new technology that opened wider possibilities. He cites the personal computer, ATMs, and shopping kiosks.

“Now we’re in a self-driving car wave and agriculture wave, and it’s going to recede,” he says. “I like to think of it as tides, waves washing up on the beach, and there’s a lot of excitement and then the waves recede, and one or two things are left behind and are useful.”

It ultimately will come down to what farmers choose. On his farm in Iowa, Slinker thinks of himself as pretty typical. He’s not on the cutting edge of technology, but he adopts what makes sense to him and what he has seen work for farmers he knows. But he will keep some things, too, even when it’s not completely rational.

And so, along with the modern equipment he uses to operate his farm, he holds onto an old tractor that belonged to his father. That tractor may not be part of the billion-dollar calculations being made on his behalf by people who spend more time in research labs and conference rooms than they do on the farm, but it should be. It’s handy for hauling small loads without putting hours on his bigger, more expensive tractors. And it reminds Slinker, he says, of why he got into farming in the first place, and that’s something he’d like to preserve.

The post Why the road to robotic farming is uncertain appeared first on Popular Science.

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This story originally appeared in the Taste issue of Popular Science. Current subscribers can access the whole digital edition here, or click here for a new subscription.

Bored by the uniform tastes born of modern industrialized farming, food historians, small-farm growers, and curious gourmands are resurrecting forgotten eats—once-famous crops ready for a second act. Their efforts represent a clarion call to embrace bites with flavors as rich as their backstories. Here are a few long-gone bites making delicious comebacks.

Cocke’s Prolific white dent corn

Cocke’s Prolific white dent corn scarcely resembles the sweet yellow cobs that line produce aisles and markets. The grain gets its name from the shape of its kernels: shrunken, with a dimple at the top. The taste, according to culinary historian David S. Shields, is singular. “Very good,” he says, with a “flinty wholesomeness”—especially when used to whip up grits or spoonbread. “So light, so buttery, so quick to disappear.”

Its story begins in the 1820s when John Hartwell Cocke—a brigadier general of the Virginia militia during the War of 1812—crossed a round-kerneled white flint corn with Virginia white gourdseed corn. Flint matured in less than three months, but was too starchy for easy milling; gourdseed ground up better, but took a long time to ripen and bore just one ear per stalk. A single shoot of the general’s Frankenstein could produce as many as five ears—a whole lot in those times. The horse-racing set also loved it, since its high sugar content gave animals a kick.

“It was a national corn at the end of the 19th century,” says Shields, who heads up the Carolina Gold Rice Foundation, a nonprofit working to preserve heirloom foods. During the 1900s, though, Cocke’s Prolific was crowded out by inexpensive yellow dent corn, whose makeup was better suited for mass production of products like syrup—it also made for excellent livestock feed. Thanks to its versatility and hardiness, It’s now the most widely cultivated variety of the grain across the globe.

A single family in rural South Carolina—named the Farmers, if you can believe it—kept Cocke’s Prolific alive as a memorial to a beloved patriarch, who had grown it since the 1930s but died unexpectedly in 1945. In 2017, Shields got wind after a friend of the Farmers began selling kernels on Craigslist. Once Shields’ foundation broke the news of the long-gone corn, people across the US started requesting seeds. Now, Shields says, “it’s being grown from Maine to Arizona.”

[Related: “Indigenous farmers are ‘rematriating’ centuries-old seeds to plant a movement”]

Beaver Dam pepper

Common rainbow bells sweeten as they ripen, but Beaver Dam peppers get a total flavor overhaul with age: Young green ones are a bit acidic, but they eventually turn red and grow bold, with a taste both sweet and spicy. Chopped and boiled down with vinegar, sugar, and pectin, the veggie adds a unique kick to homemade hot pepper jelly. Folks also like it in salsa.

“It [has] a subtle, zesty heat. It’s the best of a sweet pepper with some elements of spice to it,” says John Hendrickson, a local farmer who grows the variety.

The veggie originally came to the town of Beaver Dam, Wisconsin, two years before the outbreak of the First World War, when Joe Hussli left the Austro-Hungarian Empire carrying several seeds. While it was never commercially cultivated, the pepper was passed down through the Hussli family and others. Like many other heirloom bites, though, it fell out of favor as hardy hybridized vegetables filled grocery stores in the middle of the 20th century.

Still, Beaver Dam’s prized pepper lived on thanks to groups like the Seed Savers Exchange, an organization that conserves heirloom foods. Hendrickson bought seeds from them more than a decade ago and tapped Hussli’s grandson for growing advice. For example, he learned that the stalks stretch unusually tall, so he cultivates them in pairs that hold one another up. Hungry Cheeseheads were ready: “They have such a huge following among people who like them,” he says.

So beloved is the food that in 2014, Diana Ogle—a Wisconsin transplant fascinated by the town’s namesake vegetable—launched the Beaver Dam Pepper Festival. It features local businesses, artisans, and, of course, the famed produce itself. Hendrickson plays a critical role: He’s the only farmer there who sells the hamlet’s signature crop. “I am the ‘pepper guy,’” he says.

Manoomin (wild rice)

More than a millennium ago, Indigenous tribes migrated to the region we now know as Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Michigan, inspired by a prophecy to journey to a place where food grows on the water. There they found wild rice, which isn’t rice at all, but rather the slim, black grain of a tall grass that grows well in calm waters with muddy bottoms. The tribes called it manoomin in Ojibwa, the language of the Chippewa.

“It was one of the staple foods that my community relied on, especially through hard winters,” says Roger LaBine, a member of the Lac Vieux Desert Band of Lake Superior Chippewa Indians. Harvested in late summer, manoomin is rich in protein, fiber, B vitamins, and zinc.

By the early 1900s, after centuries of colonization, wild rice beds were largely lost. Logging’s effects were particularly acute: Dams constructed to raise water levels and make it easier to float fallen trees downriver drowned the rice, which grows best along shallow banks. “The whole surface of rivers would be covered with logs. Any river rice that would grow was wiped out,” says Barb Barton, an aquatic resource specialist in the Michigan Department of Transportation and author of Manoomin: The Story of Wild Rice in Michigan.

Barton and LaBine are working to bring it back. Over the last few decades, their efforts have helped identify prime growing beds, organize harvesting workshops, and educate local populations on how activities like boating, swimming, and mining can disturb the plant. There are now 14 wild rice beds in Lac Vieux Desert Band ancestral territory, according to LaBine, with more to come across the region—allowing more people to experience manoomin’s earthy, nutty flavor. Barton eats hers with blueberries, cinnamon, and honey for breakfast. “It’s fantastic,” she says, “and it’s very versatile in terms of things you can make with it.”

[Related: “Why is it so expensive to eat sustainably?”]

American chestnut

Lest one forget the silky voice of Nat King Cole, chestnuts are delicious. Even unroasted with no open fire in sight, the American variety are a treat, full of fiber and vitamin C, with a rich, sweet flavor thanks to their fat content—higher than the chestnuts from some East Asian countries.

Roughly 120 years ago, forests from the Mississippi River to the Atlantic Ocean produced reliable bounties of the snacks. Yet today, much larger varieties from China and Japan are the norm. This difference in size proved to be the downfall of the American chestnut. “That’s how we got into this mess in the first place,” says Hill Craddock, president of the Tennessee chapter of the American Chestnut Foundation.

Americans in the 1800s wanted big nuts, and Cryphonectria parasitica, a blight-causing fungus, likely hitched a ride on nursery stock of Japanese trees as early as 1876. The pathogen produces oxalate, an acid that attacks plants lacking the enzyme to neutralize it. Over the next 60 years, disease destroyed some 3 billion trees.

According to Craddock, who teaches biology, mycology, and dendrology at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, many scholars consider the American chestnut functionally extinct. The blight doesn’t kill roots, so trunks can sprout back. But these plants—around 400 million of which still survive—are shrubby, and the sickness attacks when they grow. They don’t flower often enough to propagate, if they bloom at all.

Schemes to beat back the blight are well underway. A collaborative team at the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry at Syracuse is editing lab-grown tree embryos with a gene from wheat that helps fight the fungus, and members of the American Chestnut Foundation are crossbreeding local and Chinese species. Hybrid stalks planted over the last decade across Virginia, North Carolina, and Tennessee are already producing thousands of chestnuts. The ultimate goal, Craddock says, is to restore the forest ecology of the Eastern US by adding millions of the engineered trees—and making their fruit plentiful to the animals, and humans, who once enjoyed it.

Sierra Beauty apple

There were once close to 17,000 apple varieties in North America, many of which traveled west on wagon trains (and actual trains) in the 1800s and early 1900s. Settlers carried cuttings and saplings that produced fruit they liked; when they reached wherever it was they were headed, they grafted trimmings onto existing trees or planted anew. Many of the fruits died out when encampments failed. In other cases, the westward bound simply did not bother to plant. Today, fewer than 5,000 of those original, heirloom apple breeds exist, and the ones still around are difficult to find.

Such was the story of the Sierra Beauty, a crisp pomme with buttery notes and an aroma strangely reminiscent of pineapples. The fruit itself is indigenous to California, was discovered around 1870 (some speculate near its namesake foothills), and eventually traveled north to become a mainstay of the Oregon Nursery Company. The firm closed due to financial troubles just before the Great Depression, leaving its signature apple to the history books.

It wasn’t until the 1970s that a group of heirloom enthusiasts “rediscovered” it at a small orchard near Mendocino, California. Turns out, proprietor George Studebaker had picked up a single tree on a wagon ride around the Sierra Nevada foothills in 1906.

Today, the Gowan family tends hundreds of rows of Sierra Beauty trees, which are sold at the farm and wholesale. Co-proprietor Sharon Gowan says the fruit’s firm flesh and sharp taste make it ideal for baking. And it’s particularly good for anyone interested in making hard ciders, which is how the orchard sells most of its Sierra Beauties today: squeezed, fermented, bottled, and chilled.

[Related: “Rerouting billions in agriculture subsidies could boost global food security”]

The post 5 heirloom foods that farmers want to bring back from obscurity appeared first on Popular Science.

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We depend on our rivers for a lot—drinking water, agriculture, biodiversity. But climate change, in combination with consequences of how natural resources are managed, can have a big impact on how well rivers can do their jobs. And according to a new report from the conservation nonprofit American Rivers, some of the US’s most fabled waterways  are in dire need of support.

The annual list of the 10 most endangered rivers, which supply millions of people across the country, came out on Monday, and includes the Snake River, Mobile River, Maine’s Atlantic Salmon River, and Coosa River. But the biggest and most at risk is the Colorado River, which provides water to at least seven states across the Southwest as well as northern Mexico. 

“The climate crisis is really a water crisis, and ground zero for that crisis is the Colorado River Basin,” ​​Matt Rice, American Rivers’ director of the Colorado Basin Program, told CNN. “We are being pushed in realtime to live with the river we have, to adapt to a hotter, drier reality in the Colorado River.”​​ 

The 1,450 mile-long Colorado brings water to millions of people across major cities like Denver, Salt Lake City, Santa Fe, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, San Diego, Phoenix, and Tijuana, as well as nine national parks that house more than a dozen endangered species. The river also feeds into two important reservoirs, Lake Powell and Lake Mead, which are experiencing historically low water levels and may never recover. 

But right now, there simply isn’t enough water in the river to meet everyone’s needs. According to the report, management was built on the assumption that there was a significantly larger amount of water in the Colorado and its basins than there actually was. This discrepancy might have come from some misleading data in the early 20th century, the Washington Post reported.

[Related: 40 million Americans depend on two reservoirs that just hit record lows.]

However, another related report from American Rivers and other environmental groups, including National Audubon Society, Environmental Defense Fund, and The Nature Conservancy, also outlines a handful of strategies to rebuild resilience in the incredibly important water source. The suggestions include anything from forest management to building naturally distributing aquifer storage in the forms of meadows and floodplains to even covering reservoirs and canals with shade balls and solar panels to slow down evaporation rates.

“As we face another summer of drought and fire, we are already seeing what our future could look like if we continue with business-as-usual,” said Nancy Smith, Conservation Director at The Nature Conservancy’s Colorado River Program in a press release. “The scale and pace of climate-related changes in the Colorado River Basin pose an increasing risk to the reliability of our water supplies—and we do not have time to waste.”

For the other rivers on the list, threats range from coal ash to industrial agricultural pollution to dams. The second-most endangered waterway, the Snake River,  is struggling due to dams that have prevented young salmon populations from migrating to the Pacific Ocean.

The Snake River, which runs through Idaho, Oregon, and Washington, once produced 2 to 6 million salmon and steelhead trout every year, feeding a healthy trophic web and trade economy. Northwest Tribal Nations have relied on the salmon populations for centuries longer. But after the creation of four federal dams between 1955 and 1975, the fish have been pushed to the brink of extinction, the report states. 

All this goes to show how varied the problems facing American water sources are—and that we are at a crossroads where we have to choose to reinvigorate and protect these landscapes, or risk losing them forever.

The post From pollution to dams: here’s what is plaguing America’s 10 most endangered rivers appeared first on Popular Science.

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In California’s San Joaquin Valley, the land around the Tulare Basin has unique dips and rises. The culprit of these strange divots isn’t the earthquakes that plague the West Coast. They are from the human-made wells used to unearth the area’s groundwater—the water held in the area’s soil.

The San Joaquin Valley is one of the most agriculturally productive regions in the US, providing nearly half the nation’s food. The Tulare Basin, a historic watershed in the Central Valley Aquifer system, collects most of its water from the snowmelt runoff from nearby mountains, with some also imported from other aqueducts and canals. The entire aquifer system provides drinking water for about 6.5 million residents. But between California’s recurrent droughts, water shortages, and the increased risk of wildfires, humans have been pushing underground water resources to their limit. 

In fact, we’ve pumped so much from the Tulare aquifer that California’s groundwater is in danger of running out. While local efforts have long worked to tackle Tulare Basin’s diminishing water, government agencies are stepping in with creative solutions. Recently a team of NASA hydrologists offered a new vantage point to monitor and inform underground water management: orbiting satellites. The study was published on March 9 in the journal Scientific Reports.

Underground water basins typically occupy the space between soil and rock particles, and can be used to support the local water bank supply in case of droughts. This groundwater is a kind of “savings account” that we depend on for all sorts of urban and agricultural needs, says Kyra Kim, second author of the study and water resources researcher at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
“Because the [Tulare Basin] supports such a flourishing agricultural business, one downside of that is it requires a lot of water to sustain,” she says.

[Related: We’re barreling towards another Dust Bowl]

As these agricultural practices and other human activities have drained the land system to excess, the top layers of earth have gradually sunk. This problem, called subsidence, can happen due to the subsurface movement of the planet’s natural resources like salt, oil, or in this case, water. While subsidence isn’t necessarily a surprise, scientists in the community and at NASA have been alarmed by how much faster land in the Central Valley has been sinking during periods of drought. It’s caused the Tulare Basin to sink at a rate of about a foot a year.

Subsidence can also cause structural damage to Earth’s surface, including the things we build on top of it. “We’re damaging civil infrastructure like roads, bridges, pipes, and we’re seeing the surface sink as high as a foot a year,” says Kim, adding that “you’re sometimes permanently losing that storage space for water, so it’s almost as if you’re decreasing the overall limit for your savings account.”

Subsidence can also cause structural damage to Earth’s surface, including the things we build on top of it. “We’re damaging civil infrastructure like roads, bridges, pipes, and we’re seeing the surface sink as high as a foot a year,” says Kim, adding that “you’re sometimes permanently losing that storage space for water, so it’s almost as if you’re decreasing the overall limit for your savings account.”

Groundwater levels can be restored after a wet, rainy season, explains Thomas Meixner, a professor of hydrology at the University of Arizona. He likens the earth to a sponge that constricts when people “squeeze” water out, and plumps up when water is absorbed. However, communities and industries are “pulling water out faster than it’s being recharged or replenished,” Meixner says. 

Scientists also do not have a clear baseline of water reserves, Meixner says, which adds even another obstacle in measuring how much of the precious resource is being used over time. “Getting more precise estimates of what the actual change of volume of groundwater is can really assist us with better managing these groundwater basins,” he says.

NASA has previously used satellite data to help the Central Valley evaluate water levels and the impact of over pumping groundwater. Now Kim’s team is offering new insight. They created a model to investigate month-to-month variations in two of the sinking layers of soil in the Tulare Basin. They drew upon water loss data from two satellites, the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (Grace) and Grace Follow-On. They also combined it with data on ground level changes from an ESA Sentinel-1, a constellation of two satellites that can perform continuous radar mapping of the Earth’s surface height. 

[Related: Artificial intelligence could help farmers water only the thirsty plants]

“The relationship between groundwater depletion and land subsidence is not going to be linear in time and space,” Kim says. That means that these dips and rises don’t always line up with their expected causes. According to the study, while a heavy rainfall would refill the aquifers water levels, instead of making the land rise, it would sometimes make it sink instead. 

These short-term changes can help the scientists make sense of what local communities and farmers need to do to better ration water resources on a timescale that is more realistic to local and legislative management, she explains. 

Satellites traditionally have an easier time monitoring and viewing winding rivers and lakes than changes in water underground. But the Grace satellites use gravity to measure how much water mass there is under the Earth’s surface. The team’s findings showed that these topographical changes are attributed to volume changes in the aquifers, not by events like heavy rainfall that can affect water levels. 

In the next steps of the research, Kim wants to combine this new data with the NASA-ISRO SAR mission (Nisar) to create a better model of natural resources in other areas in California, and possibly, around the globe. Planned to launch in 2023, Nisar is a joint effort between NASA and the Indian Space Research Organization—an international partnership that will help widen the scope of environmental data. The three-year long mission will measure Earth’s changing ecosystems and ice masses, and provide scientists with detailed information on natural hazards, rising sea levels, and groundwater. 

“Overall, the culture around water is changing,” says Kim. “We’re really seeing a shift towards more hands-on management with water, which is a really positive change.”

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This article was originally featured on High Country News.

Phoebe Parker-Shames is, as far as she knows, the first Ph.D. ecology student to concentrate solely on cannabis. Since she arrived at UC Berkeley six years ago, she’s been collecting data on wildlife and the cannabis industry in southern Oregon, where she’s from, focusing on the farms that operate in the shadow of federal prohibition. The plant’s legal status has long made it difficult for researchers to assess the impact of cannabis farming’s impacts, and Parker-Shames is the first to gather data on how the industry’s patterns and practices impact area wildlife.

In March, she published a landscape study of cannabis farms in Josephine County, Oregon. The first study to take a serious look at the growing industry’s extent, it revealed that, at a conservative estimate, cannabis is produced on 6% of all private parcels. Parker-Shames believes her mapping work and ecology research will not only help cannabis farmers, but also their communities, which are grappling with the industry’s trade-offs. “For the first time, an opportunity is emerging for communities to openly discuss what cannabis means to them, their local economies, and the environment,” she writes in her recent report, from increased water demands to impacts on local wildlife. But the industry remains an opaque one, and conclusive answers to key questions are hard to come by.

Recently, High Country News spoke with Parker-Shames about the role of science in policymaking, and what might best help Western communities that are navigating a “green rush” for the first time. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

High Country News: The cannabis industry has been under a prohibition for generations. In some counties in the West, growing permitted cannabis is legal, in others, it’s not. What has your research experience been like under prohibition?

Phoebe Parker-Shames: There were logistical questions like, “Am I even going to be able to do this work at all?” Then there were more of the impediments to day-to-day research—and obstacles to the type of research that I wanted to conduct—because of it being an illicit substance at the federal level. Most students, when they are stepping in to study an industry or system, they have decades of research and previous studies to build off. I have none of that for cannabis. That makes it really hard, and part of why I’m limited in the sort of conclusions that I can draw as a scientist. I must make the baselines myself.

HCN: Given climate change and the aridification of the West, many of our readers associate illicit cannabis with increasing demands on scarce water and possible environmental harm. What makes it tricky to draw such conclusions about the industry? 

PPS: The very first thing I must point out is there is no one standard cannabis farm. That makes researching the impacts of cannabis extremely difficult. I don’t think I appreciated just how hard that would be until I started, but you’ve got huge variations in size. Everything from four plants all the way up to thousands: That’s an impossible range to make any sort of ecological conclusions about general impacts. Then you have things like differences in practice. Some people are using hoop houses, some people are growing in native soil, and most people are growing in bags. The use of fencing is pervasive, but also inconsistent in how permeable the fences are to local wildlife. Some people are using intensive irrigation systems, while some people aren’t. Some build in vegetation that could otherwise be wildlife habitat, clearing it and forming their farm there. Some people are coming into places that have already been set for agriculture. It goes on.

It’s an incredibly difficult question to answer. It can range from being perfectly compatible with local flora and fauna, all the way to being extremely detrimental to air, water, wildlife and people. I have been focusing my work on how we keep it at “most sustainable” and get people away from the large-scale industrial, super-high input with lots of disturbance.

HCN: What are you and other scientists still unable to study?

PPS: I would love to study the so-called “cartel” farms on public lands. We only have access to researchers who are partnering with law enforcement, and go and study them after a bust. Surveys and questions to farmers don’t end up reaching that community either. I think it matters because they’re in this vacuum of actual research. We don’t know how many there are, we don’t know what their most common farming practices are, and we don’t know how they feel about this topic or where they’re getting their information on how to cultivate.

Because of that, they become the boogeyman. Everybody else says this is the scariest, worst form of cannabis. Probably, but I don’t know; they only get studied after they’ve already been busted, which is not the same as studying an active farm. It’s also not feasible to do an interview with someone as they’re being arrested. That’s a whole population of farmers that I would love to know more about. 

HCN: You write that your research is a tool to inform communities in making decisions about how and where cannabis is grown. What kinds of trade-offs do communities face? 

PPS: For a long time, a lot of rural communities have depended on cannabis for their livelihoods, and at this point it is really embedded. So you’ve got some fundamental trade-offs, especially in a place like Josephine County, Oregon, where the cannabis industry is essential for the functioning of the county. It’s deeply intwined into the economic system.

If you are uncomfortable with seeing the economic or the ecological impacts of this industry, or if your gut reaction is, “I don’t like what’s happening with this industry, and I wish it would go away,” then you have to recognize that there are economic trade-offs. I went into this work specifically because I care about these communities. I would prefer us to think about the ways in which we cultivate, rather than whether or not we cultivate. If you wanted to enforce every single person who is cultivating illegally, that proportion of the entire population of the county, we would live in a police state. You can’t regulate something that is illegal.

HCN: Western cannabis farmers are becoming more visible, and so are the impacts of an increasingly industrialized model of cannabis farming. Many readers are feeling this “green rush” for the first time. Can you highlight strategies for how communities, their governments and farmers can effectively mitigate negative ecosystem impacts?

PPS: One of the critical steps is to increase dialogue between policymakers and regulators and the people impacted. Too often, when we think about who our community is and who gets input on these regulations, we exclude some cannabis farmers because they’re operating in an illegal space.

In my mapping work—a conservative estimate from 2016—we found that was that cannabis was grown on 6% of all private land parcels. That is a huge proportion of the land owned in the entire county. Even now, most of them are probably not legal. If you want to make recommendations for how people cultivate—if you want to encourage them to use those most sustainable practices, or at least the least harmful ones—you’re going to hit roadblocks if they’re growing illegally. So really, a more effective way to change this is to get them into the legal market, and then make policies about how you want them to grow and where you want them to grow—but not “don’t grow.”

I have been studying cannabis and ecological outcomes in Josephine County for the last five years. There is no easy, fast way to know who is doing the most harmful impacts. I am confident that law enforcement doesn’t have access to that information either.

HCN: As a scientist studying cannabis agriculture and ecology, what is the one question that’s most on your mind right now?

PPS: We know that the policy landscape is a bit of a mess. But where do we go from here? I have these recommendations about policymakers engaging with farmers and having community discussions where we think about trade-offs, but I don’t know how to get people to sit down and do that.

The post An ecologist explains why cannabis farms are so hard to study appeared first on Popular Science.

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Analysis paralysis—being so overwhelmed by options you can’t pick a path—has new meaning thanks to climate change. Making the “right” choice has never been more complicated, but we’re here to help. This is Impact, a new sustainability series from PopSci.

Do you love the planet, but also love a big, juicy steak? You’re certainly not alone. But, if you’re looking for ways to cut down on your personal climate change impacts, countless studies and reports point toward making your diet less carnivorous. Even the most recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report shows that reworking our agriculture systems and adopting more sustainable diets could provide as much as 20 to 30 percent of the emissions reductions needed to keep the climate below 1.5 or 2°C above pre-industrial levels. 

If you’re not ready to go cold turkey on your favorite meaty dishes, however, there are plenty of things you can do to smoothly move toward a more veggie-heavy and planet-friendly diet. 

Rethink how much protein you really need

Depending on who you are, and what your day-to-day life looks like, you may need more protein than someone else. On average, people need about 0.8 grams of protein per kilogram of their body weight per day, says Amy Kimberlain, registered nutritionist, certified diabetes care and education specialist, and media spokesperson for the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics.

In a diet of 2,000 calories per day, that would mean your daily protein intake should make up around 200 to 700 calories per day, with a higher intake for middle-aged and older people and people who regularly exercise. For the typical 180-pound American, that’d be about 65 grams of protein. But according to the Mayo Clinic, anything above 2 grams of protein per kilogram of bodyweight would likely be excessive. And a lot of folks consume an excessive level—most adults hit around 100 daily grams of protein according to one 2017 report (and too much protein in your diet can mean icky side effects like bad breath and diarrhea). 

[Related: Is red meat healthy?]

The caloric and protein levels of course vary depending on what your favorite foods are—a Burger King burger packs around 13.6 grams of protein, whereas a serving of canned black beans comes in around 8.87 grams of protein, according to the USDA. It might take some math and label-reading, but knowing how much protein you need to be healthy could make the decision to swap a chicken leg for a side salad a tiny bit easier. 

Sneak in vegetables (literally) to your favorite hearty dishes

Adding in “healthy” substitutes often comes in the form of making pizza crusts out of cauliflower or using greek yogurt instead of sour cream in your favorite recipes. But beyond just health purposes, doing some sneaky swaps can be good for the planet as well.

“I think of chili as a great example,” says Kimberlain. “It’s always debated—beans in the chili or not, right? But jokes aside, by throwing beans in, it helps extend the chili.” With all the other ingredients added in, you might not even end up using as much meat. That principle–substituting or using a little less meat–works for “any dish you’re preparing,” she says.

Other ways to sneak vegetables into meat-heavy dishes could be throwing mushrooms into your burger patties, hiding peppers and carrots in marinara sauce, or sliding in shredded zucchini into your next spaghetti and meatball night. 

[Related: How to eat sustainably without sacrificing your favorite foods.]

The same thing can go for dairy—looking into cooking with alternative milks or even vegan cheese is a great starting point, and might be imperceptible to even the hungriest dairy lovers. If the concept of dairy-free milks, cheeses, and yogurts give you the willies, you can always test a half-dairy, half-substitute option and see how it goes. 

Start with a couple meatless nights a week

Trying out a meatless meal once every week is another great option for improving your health, helping the planet, and getting a little creative in the kitchen. Luckily, there are loads of recipes to get you started on a greener diet—even if it starts out as only a few dishes or meals a week or month. 

But, Kimberlain adds, it’s important to double-check the ingredients before you dive into meat alternatives. If you’ve got a hankering for a bean burger, make sure if you’re buying the patties that list beans as the actual main ingredient—not a side thought. Just because a product is vegan or plant-based doesn’t necessarily make it a perfectly healthy and environmentally sustainable food. 

Every gradual movement to a veggie-filled diet matters. If you meet yourself, and your loved ones, where they are and view it as an adventure, it might not be as hard as you’d think to lighten up on meaty meals. 

The post Stealthy ways to make your diet more plant-based appeared first on Popular Science.

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Analysis paralysis—being so overwhelmed by options you can’t pick a path—has new meaning thanks to climate change. Making the “right” choice has never been more complicated, but we’re here to help. This is Impact, a new sustainability series from PopSci.

America’s love for hamburgers has a pretty hefty cost on the environment. But to get a hamburger in your hands, you probably won’t have to look far, and it’ll only put you out a few dollars.

Conventional agriculture has set itself up to be a massively efficient system for getting food in the bellies of Americans—particularly when it comes to processed food, grains, and meat. Processed food makes up more than half of Americans’ calories each year, including butter, cheese, and canned beans. Meanwhile, billions of government dollars are put into subsidizing dairy and meat farming and the soy, rice, wheat, and corn crops that often end up in processed foods. 

All of that comes at a massive societal cost. Food production contributes about a third of total global carbon emissions, mainly via converting forests and wetlands to farms and ranges. Chemical-heavy monocrop farming, which the US exported across the world during the green revolution, has undermined global insect populations and destroyed marine ecosystems.

There’s no one definition of sustainable food. Instead, there are a range of alternatives that would improve on industrial farming in different ways: cut down on the footprint of beef, reduce pesticide inputs, keep money in farming communities, and make fresh food cheaper and more available. But when it comes to those alternatives, the financial story is very different because of deep seated infrastructure and socioeconomic factors.

But smaller farms and food sellers still exist, many of them directly challenging the logic of the existing food system with organic, local, or regenerative practices. The big question now—why is it so hard to make a sustainable food system affordable for everyone?

Beef is intensive to produce. Here’s how it’s gotten so affordable. 

At the center of the fast-food menu is beef. And the ubiquity of the protein is a marvel—cows are hungry, thirsty, expensive animals to raise. Although cattle and land conversion emissions are substantial, the meat remains affordable to consumers because of centralization in meatpacking and a feedlot system that uses subsidized crops to quickly raise animals. 

Even though cows emit methane no matter what, they can be part of an agricultural system that enhances soil fertility and biodiversity. Sustainable meat growers and conventional cattle ranches generally start the same way: with a small herd of steer-eating grass. In 2017, the USDA estimated that the average herd of cattle in the US was around 45, while only 10 percent of ranches have more than 100 animals.

Kate Estrade, co-owner of Local Cooling Farms, a 60-acre, regenerative mixed-crop outfit in Bogalusa, Louisiana, is a small-farm example. Local Cooling’s animals eat through “intensive rotational grazing,” moving from small pasture to small pasture.

Proponents argue that rotational grazing better approximates the ecological role of wild grazers, like bison, which would constantly move to avoid predators while cutting down costs for feed and medicine. Also, chickens, goats, and pigs are in the mix, eating shrubs, bugs, and parasites. One 2020 study in Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems of cattle, sheep, goats, and poultry found that its carbon footprint was 66 percent lower than that of a conventional meat producer. That finding is specific to intensively managed herds—studies of “continuously grazed” grass-finished beef have found mixed results. 

[Related: America’s obsession with meat, explained.]

But a key difference between Local Cooling and a more conventional beef farm is how the cattle end their lives. While most American cows live on relatively small farms, they spend three to six months at feedlots, where they’re “finished” on corn. Price floors for corn, which the government has supported with more than $100 billion since 1995, encourage farmers to produce more and more grain, keeping its prices low, which trickles down into beef.

Intensively-managed meat doesn’t require many inputs, but the tradeoff comes in terms of time and space. “Grass-finished beef is just gonna have to eat grass for a lot longer to put on the same amount of weight and fat,” says Estrade. The animals are generally slaughtered between ages two and three, while feedlot-finished steers can end life at a year or two. The Frontiers paper also found that the intensively managed farm required more space per animal. That makes sense—industrial farms keep pigs and chickens jowl to jowl.

The extra land and time are substantial contributors to the cost of meat. But in many ways, the price of food doesn’t matter if you can’t access it.

Getting sustainable and healthy food to local populations is a challenge on its own. 

Fast food isn’t necessarily the most budget-friendly option. Sarah Elton, director of the Food Health Ecosystems Lab at Ryerson University, says that “if you’re going to cook from scratch, you could purchase ingredients involving some fruits and vegetables for probably the same price [as a combo meal].”

“I think that’s really the crux of the issue,” she says. “Why is it so easy to buy fast food, expensive or inexpensive?”

Cooking at home requires a fully equipped kitchen, the confidence to cook, and time. Someone working two jobs and commuting by public transit might not have the time to cook at home, or pick up fresh food from a grocery store if there’s even one nearby.

Once termed a “food desert,” this scenario is a place without any fresh food within a half-mile, and it affects at least six percent of America’s population. The concept fails to capture how people eat without grocery stores, relying on pre-made meals at local fast-food restaurants or corner stores. Nevertheless, communities awash in fast food—half of all US counties, by one measure—are a product of car-dependent infrastructure, disinvestment in urban neighborhoods, and federal policy that encouraged the development of fast-food franchises. 

[Related: COVID-19 is exposing the food deserts around Native American reservations.]

But smaller corner stores can also be hubs for fresh foods. Over the last 20 years, a program with the Food Trust, a Philadelphia-based nonprofit, has worked with corner stores to stock more fresh food and make money. The initiative began in low-income zip codes in Philadelphia but has since expanded to the West Coast and Camden, New Jersey. In Camden, the Trust helped store owners form an association to jointly buy from distributors or even hire lawyers for training on Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) eligibility—which requires a store to stock certain staple or fresh foods.

Kelvin Marciano Garcia Diaz, the owner of Medina Supermarket in Camden, is a member of the Associación de Empresarios Unidos. He says that speaking to PopSci with a translator this year is “like a roller coaster. Prices are going up and up and up, and they don’t see when they’re going to come down.”

Currently, Garcia shops at retailers like Costco because he doesn’t buy in significant enough quantities to access wholesale rates. When the price for a crate of eggs went up to $20 in the past week, he hasn’t necessarily been able to raise prices to match while keeping customers. “If [the association] buys in bulk, they can lower the price of not only the shelf-stable items like canned beans, but also lettuce, plantains,” and staples like eggs and milk.

But that points to one of the key factors keeping the price of conventional food down: Big retailers like Walmart and Costco buy in such enormous quantities that they have power over prices that neighborhood stores don’t. 

The missing piece—connecting farms to people 

A farm that can count on large sales can keep costs lower, as can a restaurant chain that never has to worry about meat running out during a drought. 

Many sustainable alternatives are smaller-scale, which comes with advantages and disadvantages. Estrade says that many farmers who intensively manage beef also tend to butcher and sell directly to their consumers, giving them more control over prices. (Intensively rotated cows are consistently more profitable for farms.) But industrial outlets, which centralize butchering and distribution, get a price advantage just by sheer scale. Six meatpacking companies own two-thirds of American slaughterhouse capacity, and a large packing plant can process thousands of cows a day. Butchering costs totalled somewhere upwards of $2 a pound of saleable pork for Estrade recently.

Farms of all kinds have turned to cooperative distribution arrangements to balance scale and autonomy. A distributor, which manages buying crops, storing them, and transporting them to retailers, can let many small farms act more like a big operation in business terms, coordinating marketing and sales, centralizing storage and deliveries, and even helping with long-term crop planning. Still, in agricultural terms, farms can focus on the details.

[Related: How to eat sustainably without sacrificing your favorite foods.]

For example, a few years ago, Sun Produce Co-Operative, a vegetable distributor in the Phoenix area, supplied five local school districts with food as a pilot program. “On their own, a farm couldn’t have produced enough carrots to feed 25,000 children for a few months,” says Cindy Gentry, the co-op’s president. “But working together we were able to plant and harvest enough. It’s the same for anybody that is going to require volume”—like a supermarket or cafeteria.

Stiil, most of Sun Produce’s customers come through more traditional local food channels, like farm share boxes. More opportunities have appeared, like a $4.2 million two-year federal program to get local food into even more Arizona schools. But these require intense planning. “It is terrifying to imagine the production planning needed, the infrastructure, delivery, warehouse, keeping things cold,” Gentry adds. “What will happen if the farms all gear up for it, and then the money goes away?”

The federal government has been central to the growth of industrial food. It has the power to do the same for other types of farming. During the pandemic, the USDA purchased billions in produce for hunger relief, and provided small loans and grants to independent meat processors. Then, the country might see a less destructive, more equitable food system where food costs reflect its environmental cost.

Disclosure: the author is a customer of Kate Estrade from Local Cooling.

The post Why is it so expensive to eat sustainably? appeared first on Popular Science.

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This article was originally featured on Southerly, in partnership with Scalawag. 

Sherri White-Williamson lives about three miles from a pork processing plant in Clinton, N.C. On a good day, the air smells fresh, tainted by a minor whiff of rotten egg and sewage. On a bad day, the odor from the plant is so strong, she has to keep her windows closed. 

The smell wafts into a local elementary school, nearby restaurants, churches, and the county history museum. Those who live and work in the area say they have to keep fans, candles, and air fresheners running at all hours to make the air tolerable. The problem is even worse for people living down the road in rural Sampson County, near large hog farms, where they must endure more potent odors and pollution coming from the lagoons filled with waste, and the systems that spray waste onto fields as fertilizer.

North Carolina is the second largest producer of pork in the country, and Sampson, Duplin, and Bladen counties house more than 40 percent of the state’s hog farms. According to census data, between a quarter to a third of the population in all three of these counties are Black; around a quarter of Duplin and Sampson residents are Latinx. About 42 percent of residents in neighboring Robeson County—the fourth largest hog producing county—are Native American. 

At farms using this system, hog waste— feces, urine, blood, and pus—drips through slats in the floors and into open pit lagoons, where it is mixed with water. The wastewater often sits uncovered, emitting noxious odors and gasses including methane, or is pumped out and sprayed as fertilizer on crop fields. There are approximately 4,000 lagoons in North Carolina, and the sludge—unusable waste left after the liquid has been sprayed—has almost filled many of these lagoons to capacity, experts say.

These are often in “communities that are low-income and minority,” White-Williamson said. 

The pollution from concentrated animal feeding operations disproportionately impacts rural Black, Latinx, and Indigenous communities in North Carolina, including the Haliwa Saponi, Coharie, and Lumbee tribal nations. Studies have shown they’re more likely to live within three miles of large swine operations. A 2021 report also found that in Duplin County, 89 premature deaths per year can be attributed to emissions from hog operations.

Instead of replacing the current waste management system with cleaner and safer processes, as Smithfield has done in states like Missouri, the hog industry and energy utilities have invested hundreds of millions of dollars in a different, more profitable waste management system: Biogas. Biological natural gas, often called renewable natural gas, is the result of a refining process in which anaerobic digesters—sealed, oxygen-free tanks designed to break down organic waste—collect methane from hog waste and convert it into natural gas for electricity. 

There are some immediate benefits to the process. By covering open pit lagoons, the systems reduce direct methane emissions and odors. But residents, researchers, and farmers say that this rapidly growing industry is mostly a distraction that doesn’t actually address North Carolina’s growing hog waste problem. 

White-Williamson has been fighting the hog industry’s waste management practices in Sampson County for decades. A year ago, she launched the Environmental Justice Community Action Network, a network of residents and organizations that educate and organize around hog farming and other local environmental hazards. She said widespread adoption of biogas systems will further cement the hog industry’s poor waste management practices in low-income communities of color. Others say it could actually increase water pollution in certain areas. Small-scale farmers are concerned that this newest strategy allows an industry where they see little of the profit to make more money, without actually alleviating their waste problems.

Still, the industry is expanding quickly: Smithfield Foods, a massive corporation that is the largest pork producer in the state, reports that in the next eight years, 90 percent of its hog farms will feed into biogas pipelines. After experimenting with smaller projects, Smithfield partnered with Dominion Energy to invest over $500 million in a major biogas project—one that will mean building large facilities and pipelines in rural eastern North Carolina.  

How biogas works

“This biogas plan is a lie,” said Larry Baldwin, Crystal Coast Waterkeeper of the International Waterkeeper Alliance, during an October 2021 public comment meeting held by the Department of Environmental Quality’s (DEQ) Environmental Justice and Equity Advisory Board. “This directed biogas plan, to me, is one of the more disgusting plans the industry has come up with in recent years. This is nothing but a Band-Aid that’s being applied to [the] lagoon-spray field system to perpetuate its use.”

A booming industry

With tens of billions of gallons of manure produced by hogs per year, waste is a massive problem. Biogas is becoming an increasingly popular way to address it: Last November, President Joe Biden’s administration pointed to biogas operations as a key way to reduce methane emissions in agriculture. 

Powerful institutions in North Carolina, including Duke University and Duke Energy, have been exploring the viability of biogas production since 2010, three years after the state mandated 12.5 percent of energy must come from renewable sources starting in 2021. This same law stated that by 2025, 0.2 percent of this renewable energy must come from swine waste-to-energy sources. That’s enough to power a little less than 122,000 North Carolina homes each year. 

Smithfield’s major project, Align Renewable Natural Gas (RNG), would install anaerobic digesters on farms in Virginia, Utah, and North Carolina, connecting them via pipeline systems to processing plants for “cleaning” and conversion of waste gasses into usable methane. From there, the gas is moved through existing natural gas infrastructure.

The North Carolina section, called the Grady Road project, would comprise more than 30 miles of pipelines—the exact location of which Smithfield has not shared—that connect 19 hog farms in Duplin and Sampson Counties to a natural gas processing plant at the intersection of Highway 24 and I-40, between Warsaw and Turkey. 

Smithfield says the Align project is expected to capture about 85,000 tons of methane each year and will produce enough energy to power 700,000 homes over 20 years. 

“The Align RNG initiative provides new income potential to North Carolina family farmers by turning one of their biggest costs—hog manure—into a new revenue source,” Kraig Westerbeek, senior director of Smithfield Renewables and hog production environmental affairs, wrote in an email. “In addition to directly benefiting local farmers, these projects benefit the surrounding community by creating jobs, bolstering local tax bases, and driving greater economic development.”

However, the Grady Road Project would only create 2.5 permanent jobs, and any jobs associated with building the digesters or pipelines are temporary, according to NC Policy Watch. Smithfield has stated local farmers will be compensated through long-term contracts. But participating farmers must pay for their own digester systems, which can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. The four farms that currently have permits for the project are corporate farms rather than small family operations; experts and residents believe given the tentative location of the pipelines, the rest will be large operations as well. The project was slated to be complete early this year; Smithfield did not respond to requests for comment about an updated timeline. 

“This project will not expand hog farming, but it will make it more sustainable,” Westerbeek said. The company maintains that the project will lead to cleaner air for communities around the farms. 

Duke Energy, which has multiple biogas projects in the works, touts similar benefits. “Historically you’ve had these lagoons that were uncovered that the methane was escaping straight to the environment,” said Duke Energy spokesperson Randy Wheeless. “But once you cover those lagoons and are capturing the methane, you’re also eliminating that smell as well. And I think environmentally that’s a positive.” 

Residents say the industry is hiding behind promises of reduced emissions and bad odors, because biogas systems don’t incentivize companies to stop industrial hog farming or find a less intrusive waste management system. Some worry biogas will create more demand for hog farming, since it is marketed as a “renewable” energy source. 

At a public listening session in October 2021, Duplin County NAACP president Robert O. Moore said that Smithfield promised 20 years ago to install cleaner technology to deal with hog waste. (The company researched other “environmentally superior” technologies but never implemented them.)

“The corporation has refused to implement any technology to clean up the water, citing the cost of doing so was too expensive,” Moore said. “Yet the cost of this biogas project rivals the costs that would have been to implement cleaner and safer technology to ensure the safety of those living near these operations.” 

Still, the technology is gaining traction, with support from North Carolina’s Democratic governor, Roy Cooper. Last year Cooper signed the 2021 North Carolina Farm Act into law; state regulators will create a “one-size-fits-all” general permit for biogas that would fast-track the permitting process for any farm in the state looking to add an anaerobic digester to their lagoons.

“Other than the four permits that have already been issued, every other facility connected to this Grady Road Project is going to be authorized under this general permit that’s being developed right now,” said Will Hendrick, environmental justice policy deputy director for NC Conservation Network, at a March community meeting in Sampson County. “So too will the next biogas project in the next community. And the next one after that.” 

Another form of environmental injustice

Living near a hog farm operation is linked to higher rates of kidney disease, certain cancers, asthma, and anemia. The misted feces from spray fields contain pathogens, antibiotics, and nitrates that can lead to antibiotic resistance and weaken the immune system, increasing likelihood of death from kidney failure, tuberculosis and other respiratory diseases. 

Since many rural residents get their water from wells, there’s a constant fear of hog waste seeping into groundwater, high concentrations of which can lead to ammonia poisoning as well as premature infant mortality or blue baby syndrome. 

Jeff Anstead, a citizen of the Haliwa Saponi Tribe, whose members mostly live in Warren and Halifax Counties, said odors from a nearby hog farm are affecting Indigenous cultural practices, too. After visiting the Coharie tribe in Sampson County for their annual pow wow, Anstead said that “when the sun went down and dew started to fall, the hog farm was located directly behind them … [the smell] was almost unbearable.”

Twenty-five years ago, because of reports of pollution from hog waste, the state put a moratorium on building new concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) and expanding existing ones. In 2007, the state passed legislation that permanently banned the construction or expansion of lagoon and sprayfield systems, requiring any new or expanding farms to meet five strict environmental standards for waste management. Operations built before the moratorium were not required to do so . And biogas does not address these revised environmental standards.

The problem is likely to get worse. As the climate changes, extreme rainfall and storms are becoming more intense and frequent in North Carolina. When a lagoon leaks or breaches during a heavy rainfall event—which happened during Hurricane Matthew in 2016 and Hurricane Florence in 2018—waste can travel into nearby waterways, causing ecological damage and fish kills due to excess nutrients in the waste, including phosphorus.

Communities trying to hold the agriculture industry accountable for pollution from hog waste lagoons and spray fields have had major victories in recent years. Duplin County residents won their 2018 lawsuit against Smithfield for offensive odors, pollution, and noise that made living nearby unbearable. But the Farm Act of 2018 made it nearly impossible for residents near hog operations to sue the swine industry in the future. 

Residents say developers aren’t being transparent about the Grady Road biogas project, the permitting process, and the locations of participating farms. A year ago, North Carolina’s Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) approved water quality permit modifications that allows four of the 19 farms on the Grady Road Project to set up their anaerobic digestion systems. In September, The Southern Environmental Law Center (SELC) on behalf of the Duplin County NAACP and the NC Poor People’s Campaign, filed a complaint with the EPA claiming DEQ violated the Civil Rights Act by ignoring the disproportionate impacts of hog farms and biogas facilities on communities of color. 

Early this year, a judge ruled in Smithfield’s favor, upholding the permits after EJCAN, Cape Fear River Watch, and SELC challenged the four existing permits. However, the EPA agreed to investigate whether state regulators discriminated against communities of color when they approved those permits. 

Researchers and organizers are concerned biogas operations could cause even more pollution. While covering lagoons is better than leaving them uncovered in terms of methane emissions, doing so can cause the amount of toxic ammonia in lagoon wastewater to increase, according to co-director of the Duke Environmental Law and Policy Clinic, Ryke Longest. In an open waste lagoon, ammonia escapes into the atmosphere. With a covered lagoon, ammonia is trapped and the amount in liquid waste increases by up to 3.5 times.

“I haven’t seen them show any studies or any evidence to prove that what they say is true about the reduction of pollution that they assert is going on here,” Longest said. 

The biogas processing plant may also shift some of the air pollution and emissions to other nearby communities. In documents submitted to state air quality regulators in 2020, Smithfield predicted the Grady Road central gas processing plant will produce more than 60 tons of carbon emissions per year.

“It’s very disturbing, because biogas is not a clean renewable energy by any means,” said Donna Chavis, senior climate campaigner with Friends of the Earth and citizen of the Lumbee Tribe. 

Big ag takes the profits

Tom Butler and his brother started their hog farm in Lillington, N.C., in 1995, after inheriting 200 acres of land from their parents. Five years later, they found out the odor from their two open pit waste lagoons and the feces-filled mists they used to fertilize their fields were disrupting neighbors’ lives. 

Going forward, they wanted to ensure Butler Farms did as little environmental harm as possible. “We made a vow between ourselves that we would try to do something to have an impact [on the industry],” Butler said. 

The brothers started by inviting family, neighbors, and EPA representatives to an open meeting—both to apologize, and to assure them that a solution to the waste and odor problems was on its way. Ten years and hundreds of thousands of dollars later, Butler Farms installed an anaerobic digestion system in hopes of reducing its methane emissions, runoff, and odor. The system generates energy that he sells back to local energy providers.

Since the advent of CAFOs and their impact on pricing because of their ability to quickly produce pork in bulk, hog farming is no longer a profitable profession for small farmers like Butler. Often, they make just enough to keep their operation functioning and to pay their bank statement every few weeks. Butler said when he first started, he was $600,000 in debt. He said he has not made a dent in it—most of his money goes back into the farm or to the integrators— companies like Prestage Farms, who Butler contracts with—to buy more hogs, food, and supplies. The little additional money he makes selling biogas energy back to his local electric cooperative goes right back into the farm as well.

“Our [hog farm] contract was written so that we would never make any profit at all. Most growers are like me, they’re in debt,” said Butler. “And they do not want to say anything to make the integrator mad, because the integrator could cut their contract.” 

Integrators own almost every part of the system except for the waste, which farmers must deal with. After over 25 years of raising hogs, Butler Farms has accumulated about 12 million gallons of sludge; they produce about 10,000 gallons of waste per day. The industry has done nothing to help him address the waste overflow, and he says that biogas attempts to put a Band-Aid on what will be a massive sludge containment issue in the state.

“We do not know what their motives are,” Butler said. “They don’t share any information with us. They don’t share any goals. But we know that they’re going to do whatever costs the least.”

Nine years after setting up his own waste-to-energy system, Butler—who is now 80 years old and runs the operation with his son—is concerned with Smithfield’s recent biogas investment, saying it greenwashes the issue of hog waste management in the state by falsely claiming to be environmentally safer. 

“It’s just a way for [the industry] to kind of pan the gold out of your water, and then they leave you with the waste,” Butler said. “I love what I do. I love my industry. But I don’t think we’re doing enough for the environmental part. And they know that but they will not admit it. They don’t care anything about their growers. They care about profit.”

Cameron Oglesby is an environmental justice storyteller, freelance journalist, and public policy graduate student based in Durham, N.C.

This story was supported by the Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture at Columbia University, and is part of their POWER project.

The post ‘This plan is a lie’: Biogas on hog farms could do more harm than good appeared first on Popular Science.

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California and the rest of the American West are facing the worst drought in over 1,200 years. This drought is devastating the agricultural industry and creating conditions that lead to massive wildfires. According to the IPCC, climate change makes it likely that droughts will only continue to get worse. To maintain an adequate supply of fresh water, the region needs to develop technological solutions to dwindling water levels.

Fortunately, a decent chunk of California is on the coast, meaning one solution to the drought is utilizing desalination technologies to turn seawater into fresh water. However, large desalination plants take years to become operational and are expensive to operate (nearly $3,000 per acre-foot of seawater). Additionally, many places experiencing drought in the West, such as Arizona and New Mexico, are not on the coast.

But desalination isn’t just an option for freshening up seawater, says Brent Haddad, a professor of environmental studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. “[Desalination] can improve not just brackish groundwater but also agricultural groundwater that’s been harmed by chemicals and even some industrial wastes,” Haddad says.

[Related: 40 million Americans depend on two reservoirs that just hit record lows.]

Brackish groundwater is salty water that’s found hundreds of feet underground, and it is naturally occurring. It can be found throughout the United States. There’s roughly 800 times more brackish groundwater in the U.S. than the groundwater we currently pull from wells.

The main method used in desalination is called reverse osmosis. High levels of pressure are used to push the water through membranes that capture the salt and other minerals while allowing the water to pass through. 

Despite desalination’s potential, Haddad says the building up of plants has been slow. California currently has 12 seawater desalination plants. But, he thinks it’s going to be necessary to build more to deal with the drought. “There are other options, but in some cases, desalination will turn out to be the best option,” Haddad says. “We really need to keep every option open to deal with these challenges.”

One researcher, Peter Fiske, may have the solution. Fiske is the director of the National Alliance for Water Innovation (NAWI) and Water-Energy Resilience Research Institute (WERRI) at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California. He says that it can take many years to get a desalination plant built due to permitting issues, and moving so much water across long distances can add up financially. He thinks we should be thinking about a more distributed plan—meaning more, smaller desalination plants.

“One of the things we’re going to find is there are a lot of little water sources. We’re going to need smaller scale desalination,” Fiske says. “We’re going to need it to be very compact and, in a way, rather than making a large treatment plant, we’re going to need lots of little treatment packages.”

Fiske says that the groundwater and other water sources aren’t as salty as seawater, so they’re less difficult to desalinate. He says we could have small water “washing machines” all over the West that would be easy to permit, quick to build, and wouldn’t have to move water out of the area they operate in. Most desalination plants run on fossil fuels, but in recent years nuclear has appeared as an alternative power source. Fisk is researching how future small desalination machines could run on solar power (a group of Chinese and American scientists previously figured out how to power a small desalination plant using passive solar power in 2020).

“There’s lots of dirty water around that we could reuse over and over again. Brackish groundwater is extensive throughout the state of California,” Fiske says.

[Related: Groundwater is an incredible resource. It’s time to treat it like one.]

Not only is this process more affordable than current desalination plants, but it could actually become lucrative, Fiske adds. Elements like lithium, a resource needed in batteries for cell phones and electric vehicles, can be found in much of this groundwater, which could be extracted and then sold. The USGS claims lithium can be found in drinking water sources throughout the country, especially places in the West that rely on aquifers like the High Plains and Rio Grande. 

Technological improvements in reverse osmosis techniques could also drive costs down, he says. “The reverse osmosis membranes that we make today are so much better than the membranes that existed 20 years ago,” Fiske says. “They’re just getting better and better. Each increment of performance improvement in these membranes lowers the cost, lowers the energy and makes the water easier to make.”

One day, Fiske adds, individual farms and others who need better access to fresh water may be able to produce their own desalinated water from a mini plant, creating much more sustainable access to local water sources. As climate change rages on, ideas that allow communities to thrive on their own—be it in the middle of the country or on the coast—may help keep more places habitable.

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Vegetable oils generally refer to any oil derived from a plant—be it seeds, nuts, cereal grains, or fruits. Some of these oils, such as canola and olive, are used for cooking and salad dressings, others, like soybean or sunflower, may be added to soap or perfume formulations. Because of its versatility and application in many industries, the global demand for vegetable oil is increasing. The estimated market for vegetable oil reached approximately 219 million tons in 2020, which is expected to reach about 285 million tons by 2026.

Palm oil, the most efficient vegetable oil crop to grow, is currently the most widely consumed vegetable oil in the world. However, the conversion of a Southeast Asian peat swamp forest to a palm oil plantation is responsible for about 0.44 to 0.74 percent of global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Given the environmental impact of vegetable oil production, there is a pressing need for more sustainable growing solutions.

Rapeseed oil production emits the least amount of greenhouse gasses

A 2022 study published in Science of The Total Environment assessed the extent and variation of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions across the entire production chain of vegetable oils, including favorites like palm, soybean, rapeseed (also known as canola), and sunflower oil. The authors looked at the impact of various production systems, from the clearing of vegetation and use of agricultural practices to the processing of fruits and seeds to make refined oil.

They found that the median GHG emissions of rapeseed, sunflower, and palm oil are all lower than the global median across all oil crop systems, which was 3.81 kilograms of carbon dioxide equivalent per kilogram of refined oil.

“If we look at the average production system for each oil type, rapeseed oil production seems to result in the least GHG emissions per liter, closely followed by sunflower oil,” says Thomas Alcock, study author and postdoctoral researcher at the Technical University of Munich. “However, there is huge variation in the possible emissions from each oil type.”

[Related: The secret to curbing farm emissions is buried in the Stone Age.]

According to the study, rapeseed oil produces about 2.49 kilograms of carbon dioxide equivalent per kilogram of refined oil. This is significantly lower than soybean oil, which results in the highest emissions at 4.25 kilograms of carbon dioxide equivalent per kilogram of refined oil. This isn’t the first time researchers have found similar results—a 2015 study published in the Journal of Cleaner Production that assessed the GHG emissions of the same four vegetable oils plus peanut oil also found rapeseed oil to be the least carbon-intensive option. 

Identifying the factors that affect the quantity of GHG emissions the most is important in finding ways to improve sustainability, says Alcock. For instance, using large amounts of synthetic nitrogen fertilizer can increase emissions because producing them is energy-intensive. These fertilizers also release nitrous oxide, a GHG that is about 300 times more potent than carbon dioxide.

The authors compared the different production systems and regions for each oil type as well. They found that rapeseed production with conventional tillage systems in Canada produced more than twice as many emissions than no-till systems due to the differences in the amount of carbon that is stored in the soils.

“Whilst vegetable oils might not seem like one of the biggest food groups, they can in fact be found everywhere,” says Alcock. “Production of the crops that produce vegetable oil also takes up around 20 percent of arable land worldwide, so vegetable oil production is definitely a big contributor to global GHG emissions, as well as other sustainability issues such as biodiversity loss.” With food production being responsible for more than 25 percent of global GHG emissions, improving the sustainability of different production systems for each type of crop is crucial.

How to improve the sustainability of vegetable oil production

Greenhouse gasses aren’t the only thing that defines sustainability. For example, it’s important not to leave out land use and water consumption in terms of vegetable oil production. Rapeseed oil may be the best performing in terms of GHG emissions, but sunflower oil has the least impact when it comes to water consumption. 

Palm oil is associated with a low land footprint, and farmers can churn out higher amounts of oil over small areas of land because of its high yield. Farmers can produce 89 million tons of palm oil from 47 million hectares of arable land, compared to a combined yield of 92 million tons of soybean and rapeseed oil from over 402 million acres.

“Growing oil crops on areas of low carbon storage potential—such as on land where forests cannot grow but crops are still productive—can result in vegetable oil with a lower carbon footprint,” says Alcock. “If we can produce more of a certain oil crop in a given area of land without massively increasing inputs, the GHG emissions per bottle will be proportionately lower.”

[Related: How I Converted My Mercedes-Benz To Run On Veggie Oil.]

Favoring production on land with low carbon storage potential, while simultaneously reforesting agricultural areas that have storage potential when vegetation is regenerated, may help offset emissions, according to Alcock. Although this is challenging, it can go a long way in improving the sustainability not just of vegetable oils, but other crops as well, he adds. 

When it comes to palm oil, one of the biggest sources of GHG emissions is the wastewater produced during the oil pressing stages called palm oil mill effluent (POME), which releases huge amounts of methane, says Alcock. Every ton of palm fruit that is milled produces about 0.87 cubic meters of POME. Capturing and using it as a source of energy using biogas capture technologies, like covered lagoon systems or contact reactors, can drastically reduce the carbon footprint of palm oil production. However, most palm oil processing mills have yet to adopt this technology.

For other crop types, improving sustainability could mean reducing the amount of synthetic nitrogen applied to crops as much as possible, which is generally the biggest source of GHG emissions on farms, he adds. This can be done by choosing crop cultivated varieties that are more efficient with their nitrogen use and including nitrogen-fixing plants, like legumes, in crop rotations, which provide nitrogen to the soil more naturally. 

“As for who can implement these changes,” says Alcock. “That is the million-dollar question. At the moment, there is very little incentive for vegetable oil producers to do much to reduce their GHG emissions. Government incentives and investment in technologies to reduce emissions from processing steps would certainly help.”

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This story originally featured on Saveur.

When Malcolm Evans was nine years old, he noticed a commotion across the street as he exited the doors of his apartment building in Chicago’s Cabrini-Green neighborhood. An assortment of people, none of whom he had ever seen before, were congregating in a deserted lot—the site where the classic 1996 film Hoop Dreams had been filmed, but which the city had since all but abandoned. 

For the next few days—which turned into weeks, then months—Evans watched quietly, off to the side, as local urban agriculturists Erika Allen and her father Will Allen cleared the land, laid out a plastic barrier, carried in truckloads of funky compost, and began building what he would eventually realize was a farm. When Erika, now a food justice activist, noticed a young Malcolm on the corner of that lot, she could see the apprehension in his eyes; newcomers to the neighborhood rarely stuck around. “I knew what was going on,” she said. “I told him, ‘Watch, I’ll be back. Just watch.’” 

Over the next few years Evans looked on as the farm began to flourish, noticing how patches of compost gave way to ripened tomatoes, and how the soil provided an ecosystem for worms and various insects. The project leaders, Erika and Will Allen, recognizing Evans’s curiosity, would answer his questions readily, instructing him on how to carefully harvest the crops during the growing season and encouraging him to take some of the vegetables home. It was a place where he felt appreciated; cultivating life, learning about hoop houses, and connecting with a network of farmers and volunteers who would become close mentors and friends. Besides, the farm was always open. 

Growing up, Evans was often looking for an escape—a place away from home, a place to breathe. Usually, that meant downtown Chicago, but that was a whiter part of town where people would look at him funny, clench their purses, or cross the street. It was clear, he used to think to himself, that he didn’t fit in. 

Now, 20 years later, Evans has a place to breathe. He is the farm manager of the Urban Growers Collective, a nonprofit organization co-founded by Erika in 2017 (Will went on to win a MacArthur Genius Grant for his work on urban farming and sustainable food production) that operates eight farms on 11 acres of land across Chicago’s South Side, including the lot in Cabrini-Green. 

“The garden was my safe zone, and we make and create these safe zones because that’s what folks need,” says Evans. Over time, he developed a relationship with the land—to weeding and tending the soil—which grew into a profound passion. When he suffered a gunshot wound to the head at the age 19, it was farming that got him through it by providing him an outlet during a turbulent time. His lineage, which traces back to parts of Mississippi before the Great Migration, instilled in him a persistent, lifelong calling to better understand the intricacies of farming. Something about the way he felt seeing that plot across the street all those years ago, growing food and feeding the neighborhood, ignited an innate curiosity.  

The Urban Growers Collective is rooted in two simple rules: show up, and stay consistent. The organization is part of a growing nationwide farming movement in which individuals are banding together to revitalize abandoned landscapes to address food insecurity, urban blight, and cataclysmic governmental failures. 

Nearly four in 10 Black and Hispanic households with children are struggling to feed their families during the coronavirus pandemic, according to research by economists at Northwestern University. Thirty-nine percent of families are experiencing food insecurity, the highest rate seen in over a decade. This, many activists argue, is the byproduct of food apartheid, systematic and discriminatory policies that impede a community’s ability to access food. 

“Give us opportunity, give us land, and give us resources,” says New York City-based community organizer and food justice activist Karen Washington. “I don’t want a handout, I want a hand-in.” Washington is the co-founder of Black Urban Growers (BUGS), an organization that builds community among Black farmers and gardeners. 

“When COVID was starting, the first thing that the city wanted to do was close the gardens,” says Washington, explaining that New York City was scrambling for ways to save money amid growing budgetary concerns. But for Washington and other members of her Bronx community, that was a shortsighted perspective. “You’re asking us to close the gardens in communities that are being impacted and harmed by COVID the most, [when] people are standing in line trying to get fresh produce? Hell no.” 

In response, Washington and 18 other residents formed the Bronx Community Garden Farm Hub, which devised ways to maintain these lifelines, regenerate revenue, and keep people fed despite the uncertainty of the moment. This included sharing tips on harvesting best practices, distributing seeds among farmers in the area, and donating produce to those in need. 

“The idea that you’re going to scoop up a farm that is supposed to be in service to the community is a reflection of how we think about Black people,” says Erika Allen, who is now Board President of the Chicago Food Policy Action Council, which advocates for policies that advance food justice and food sovereignty in Chicago. 

In 2011, Tony Hillary founded Harlem Grown, an independent non-profit organization that supports a dozen urban agriculture facilities across Harlem in New York City—including soil-based farms, hydroponic greenhouses, and school gardens. The organization celebrated its 10-year anniversary late last year. In reflecting on how the program has grown over the past decade, Hillary comes back to the food and, just as importantly, the people who have grown it.

“The savior complex permeates the nonprofit space. You parachute in and you lift out, and the community sees it coming a mile away. They’re not going to buy into it,” he says. Instead, “we use food as a vehicle of change.” It was during the 2008 financial crisis that Hillary made his way up to 135th Street and Lenox Avenue one afternoon and found himself in front of a school building. Soon after, he stumbled upon an abandoned lot across the street and went to work. 

“I showed up 10 years ago, and haven’t left yet. I’m there six, seven days a week, even in the snow, in the winter.” It’s hard work. And because the movement often gets romanticized, the visceral labor that is farm work, that is cleaning polluted lots, weeding, composting and harvesting is often forgotten. But Hillary recognized quickly the importance of showing up and showing out, day-in and day-out. The community responded in kind. 

“We have a Chinese grandmother who lives in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. It takes her two hours one way to come to our farm. She doesn’t speak English. She translates with an iPad. She comes in every Wednesday and Saturday and teaches our kids how to make vegetable dumplings by hand, and how to pickle. She comes in and tells us every week, this is the garden where love grows,” says Hillary. “The fruits and vegetables are a metaphor. We do grow tons of food, we plant tons of food, but we grow people, and that’s the biggest crop we have and it’s the most long-lasting crop.” 

To date, Harlem Grown has donated more than 6,000 pounds of produce back to the community, and at the start of the pandemic the organization provided more than 35,000 dinners to homeless shelters across Harlem in a program they called Harlem Helping Harlem.

In the fight for food sovereignty, which is at the heart of many food justice movements working to battle food apartheid, we’re reminded of what is possible when people come together to better their community and believe in their land. 

“We’re working in concert to figure out how we can shift the landscape and change what is possible for our people,” says Naima Penniman, Director of Education at Soul Fire Farm and co-founder of WildSeed, a Black and brown-led farm. An intimate relationship with the land, Penniman explains, fosters and lays bare a larger Black ecological tradition. 

“Resistance has literally been braided through our story here,” says Penniman. “Throughout our history as Black people on Turtle Island, on these lands—despite the overtly racist structures that were set up there—[there] has been creative resistance to organized labors and collectivized land and kinship commons. Before our ancestors got here, they had the foresight to gather up the seeds that they had been saving in their communities for generations and braid them into their hair.” With these conserved seeds, communities were able to grow foods like egusi melon, okra, and black eyed peas from the African coast that became a part of the American horticultural tradition. 

Soul Fire Farm in Petersburg, New York, is an Afro-Indigenous-centered community farm that reaches over 160,000 people each year. Alongside a yearly harvest, it leads an assortment of food justice workshops, supports urban farms in neighboring cities, and educates residents on upcoming public policy initiatives. Soul Fire has provided both food and physical refuge for communities of color across the nation. It is, as Penniman calls it, “a green oasis amidst precarity.” 

“When I walk onto the farm in the summer, you get this deep breath of fresh air when everything is blooming,” says Justina Thompson, Food Education manager at Urban Creators which supports the Life Do Grow urban farm in Philadelphia. “We have a butterfly bush with these really bright and vibrant purple flowers. The butterflies flock to it in the summer. They’re everywhere. Our bird feeders are full so when you walk into the barn you see all of these birds fly as soon as you make your presence known. And it’s like, wow—there is so much life here.” 

With the day-to-day hardships and systemic inequities that continue to disproportionately impact low-income Black and Brown residents, gardens have become an oasis in so many communities. This sense of refuge, perhaps, is what beckoned to Malcolm Evans all those years ago. “We’ve had people who’ve just laid down on the soil to rest,” says Erika Allen of visitors who stop by the farm in Cabrini-Green. “To grieve for all the lives lost.” There is something in the gardens that keeps people committed to the land—and to the resistance the land can embody. 

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When the International Panel on Climate Change published its last dismal forecast in 2014, it focused on the risks in years to come. Now that future is already here. A new 3,675 page-long report released by the IPCC today gives a detailed look at how the world has already destabilized—and how it will continue to do so until drastic action is taken.

“Today’s IPCC report is an atlas of human suffering and a damning indictment of failed climate leadership,” United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said in a statement. “With fact upon fact, this report reveals how people and the planet are getting clobbered by climate change.”

Currently, average global temperatures stand at about 1.09 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. The Paris Agreement, which was signed by 174 countries and the European Union, aims to keep that rise under 1.5 degrees Celsius. At this level, climate change will still have a strong impact on the planet, but not nearly as much as an increase of 2 or 3 degrees. There is some debate on if the world can hit that goal with its current trajectory, and what must be done to stay below the 1.5-degree cap.

[Related: You can’t escape climate change by moving to New Zealand.]

The report, authored by 270 researchers spanning nearly 70 nations, describes how climate change is coming on harder and faster than anyone predicted. Additionally, it advises governments and communities to expand their adaptation strategies to protect increasingly vulnerable landscapes.

Weather extremes have led to increasingly dire scenarios for people across the globe. Between 2010 and 2020, 15 times more people have died from floods, storms, and droughts in the most vulnerable regions of the world, including parts of Africa, South Asia and Central and South America, compared to lower-risk areas. Warmer temperatures are also causing diseases like Lyme, West Nile, and malaria to spread.

Nature is feeling the hurt too, with massive die-outs in various species of trees and corals and all-out extinctions of animals like the golden toad and Bramble Cay melomys. According to the report, around 14 percent of all species are facing a “very high rate of extinction” at the most optimistic heating forecast of 1.5 degrees Celsius. That percentage will at least double if the temperature increases to 3 degrees. 

The report further breaks down climate change impacts for every single continent and region. North and South America, for example, will face increasing heat spells, more extreme tropical cyclones, and strong declines in snow cover, glaciers, and permafrost. The entire African continent is already seeing weather anomalies and is likely to experience increasing heat waves both on land and in marine environments throughout the 21st century. Severe coastal flooding due to sea level rise is another consequence. 

Additionally, the report dives into the risks for small islands in the Caribbean Sea, Pacific Ocean and Western Indian Ocean, which stand to lose the most as the world veers into climate extremes. These places could still be habitable with 1.5 degrees Celsius warming, according to Adelle Thomas, an adaptation researcher at the University of the Bahamas and co-author on the report. But the effects are irreversible in some aspects.

“The science is quite clear that adaptation cannot prevent all losses and damages. There are just some negative impacts of climate change that we are not able to prevent,” Thomas said at a press conference Sunday.  

[Related: What the final COP26 agreement really means.]

Currently, millions of humans are exposed to food and water insecurity. Half of the world already faces water shortages for at least one month out of the year—and depending on the amount of temperature rise, somewhere between 8 to 80 million people will suffer from hunger, mostly in Sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia and Central America. The report even shows that the rate of food growth is slowing because of climate change: A 1.5-degree-Celsius increase would put about 8 percent of the world’s farmland out of use. 

“The picture is stark for food systems,” co-author Rachel Bezner Kerr, a professor of global development at Cornell University, said at Sunday’s conference. “No one is left unaffected by climate change.”

The report ends on an eerie note: “Any further delay in concerted anticipatory global action on adaptation and mitigation will miss a brief and rapidly closing window of opportunity to secure a liveable and sustainable future for all.” But its overall message to people is to start preparing for climate change now, and expect more dramatic shifts in less than a lifetime. 

“Climate impacts are more intense and more frequent than we thought possible at this stage,” Ani Dasgupta, president and CEO of the World Resources Institute, said in a release. “Still, we continue to burn fossil fuels, cut down trees, eat carbon-intensive foods, and emissions continue to rise.”

The report blasts current climate adaptation strategies as reactive and short sighted. These measures might work now, it notes, but have the potential to cause more harm than good. Sea walls are a common example: They often protect cities from one-off flooding events, but in the long term, hurt natural ecosystems and put people at risk when the infrastructure eventually breaks down. 

Instead, the authors say solutions should revolve around “climate resilient development,” which includes a more holistic view of increasing ecological stewardship, education, and inclusion. Band-Aids will no longer make the cut, IPCC Working Group II Co-Chair Debra Roberts said in a release: Society, governments, and the private sector must come together to combine justice and equity with future adaptation developments. 

“Yes, things are bad,” co-author Helen Adams of King’s College London told the Associated Press. “but the future depends on us, not the climate.”

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As many amateur gardeners can attest, some plant’s abilities to regrow parts of themselves is rather astounding. Cutting off a piece of a stem and placing it in a cup of water can result in a whole new veggie. But at the microbiological level, botanists have found that in response to these cuts, plants pick between two responses: regeneration and defense. A new study published in Developmental Cell explores whether flora could be nudged toward regeneration rather than defense to help boost quick growth.

When a plant is hurt in some way, it has many ways of fixing or protecting itself using the chemicals in its body. But as the study’s authors point out, this response usually see-saws between the two. For example, an individual plant could either regrow its broken limb or guard itself by producing toxins that ward off animals. 

To tease apart whether these two reactions happen in sequence or whether defense always comes before regeneration, the researchers attempted to manipulate plant biology to swing in one direction. By tampering with chemical responses, they tried to draw out the amount of time that Arabidopsis thaliana and maize would focuse on regeneration.

[Related: The bizarre botany that makes corn a fruit, a grain, and also (kind of) a vegetable]

According to Kenneth Birnbaum, a professor of biology at New York University and one of the authors of the study, the work began with a few central questions. How does a plant know it’s injured? And what early steps connect an injury toward regeneration? To tackle these queries, him team focused on the plant’s DNA itself to see how it was changing in the first few hours after sustaining injury. 

By focusing on dicots, a plant variety with two stems like Arabidopsis, and monocots, which have one stem like maize, the biologists were able to provide results for the two main plant types. The researchers started with Arabidopsis, or thale cress, which is a solid regenerator and a popular lab tool for microbiologists (it was the first plant to ever have its entire genome sequenced). It also has thin, transparent, spaced-out roots that make for easier analysis, says Lieven De Veylder, a professor of plant biotechnology at the Ghent University in Belgium who was not involved with the study.

Birnbaum found that the plants’ glutamate receptor-like proteins began to ramp up their defense mechanism, almost as if they were getting ready for battle, he says. These molecules, which are analogous to the glutamate receptors found in the human brain, sense amino acids for metabolism and other purposes. They also power a plant’s defense system when it’s wounded.

The glutamate receptor-like proteins in plants work by flooding calcium into the cells, which tells the little workhorses to act quickly when their defense has been breached by pathogens like bacteria or fungi. While the researchers initially thought that calcium was signaling the cells to start regeneration, they found that the cells were actually being told to increase defense.

Birnabaum says that they previously assumed that both responses were inextricably linked to each other. But by manipulating the receptors in this study, they found that the plants can actually separate their reactions. 

To test this, the authors activated the receptors through two different processes. One method involved using a genetically manipulated receptor that José Feijó at the University of Maryland has been working on. The researchers compared the injury response of ordinary plants to samples that had four of their glutamate receptor-like protein genes modified to suppress their reaction. As a result, the “quadruple mutant” plant demonstrated an increase in regeneration. 

But working with genetic mutations comes with a slew of unknowns, says Birnbaum. So to confirm their findings, the team used a chemical treatment adapted from human neurobiological research to inhibit the plant receptors’ responses. 

Birnbaum found that by chemically stopping the receptors from sending out calcium, they were able to reduce the defense response and increase the regeneration response for a short time. Across both Arabidopsis and maize, regeneration time doubled. The success of regeneration was measured by tests like the ability to regrow roots or a stem-cell structure called a callus.

But the biggest test was to see if the inhibition of the receptors would work on both the monocots and the dicots. “To our surprise, in a lot of ways, they worked equally well in both of the divisions,” says Birnbaum. For him, this means that the defense signaling works in the same way across plant varieties. 

“It’s kind of seeing something that’s conserved between, say humans and birds,” he notes.

Theoretically, the ability to increase regeneration could be used to boost the resiliency of essential crops against climate change. Since a large percent of crops such as corn or sugar are already genetically modified, this would just be another way to alter them to make them hardier, says Birnbaum. 

[Related: Is it okay to eat GMOs? Scientists say ‘yes.’]

The trouble is that some of the most important crops like maize and sorghum are comparatively pretty bad at regeneration. Boosting the amount of regeneration time for those plants would allow them to get better at it in the event that they face more damage.

De Veylder notes that there are many possible reasons, including differences in cell composition, that could make maize harder to regenerate. In a comparison to trees, he says that there are many species that can’t regenerate after sustaining wounds. If that were to change though, people would potentially reap many benefits: increased biodiversity, heftier harvests, less food insecurity, and even more efficient carbon capture. 

But De Veylder also cautions against jumping the gun, especially in terms of extrapolating these findings to other types of crops. “Most people are just trying to understand the components that you need for innovation,” he says. “I think it’s still early days. People first want to have the toolbox before they go into the crops.”

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IT’S EARLY JULY, and Jessika Greendeer moseys along a row of head-high Mandan Bride corn, carefully weeding between the stalks while their tassels poke skyward. All around her, dozens of plant varieties grasp the earth with their roots—sunflowers track the daylight, beans and chilis hang on their vines. Greendeer, a member of the Ho-Chunk Nation from Wisconsin, manages this 30-acre farm and Indigenous seed bank for the nonprofit Dream of Wild Health in Hugo, Minnesota, a town about 18 miles northeast of Minneapolis-St. Paul. Many of her charges have survived over generations, making them heirlooms of sorts.

Greendeer belongs to a constellation of seed keepers and farmers from tribal communities who are cultivating traditional crops to return them to their original caretakers. Many age-old plant varieties were lost or nearly wiped out when their Indigenous stewards were forced from their homelands by settlers and troops who broke or coerced treaties, made outright land-grabs, engaged in unrestrained genocidal warfare, and enforced racist federal policies. By the end of the 19th century, anthropologists, scientists, and entrepreneurs began collecting Native American cultural belongings—especially seeds—driven by the assumption that the tribes would be annihilated. “We all deserve to be reconnected with our foods,” Greendeer says.

That sentiment encompasses more than a desire to right past injustices. One in four Native Americans suffers from food insecurity, compared to 1 in 8 Americans overall, according to a 2017 study in the Journal of Hunger & Environmental Nutrition. Nearly all reservations are food deserts, reports the nonprofit First Nations Development Institute. These inequities helped give rise to a movement for food sovereignty—the term for systems that enable people, as opposed to corporations—to propel the sustainable production and distribution of provisions. Advocates are trying to revive ancestral culinary and farming practices and open access to traditional foods. In particular, Indigenous archivists, farmers, and scholars are unearthing long-lost “seed relatives” in federal, private, and museum collections and reuniting them with their tribal communities like long-lost kin. The effort is known as rematriation, or the restoration of sacred resources, like plants, land, and water, to their original Indigenous stewards. The term honors Mother Earth as a life-giving force. “Seeds are tribal ancestors too,” Greendeer says. “And they need returning.”

Academic institutions and museums are often unwilling or too administratively rigid to share, much less return, whole collections of cultural objects. Yet a few, like the University of Michigan (UM), have begun partnering with Indigenous communities and organizations to do just that. And while tribes have welcomed these moves, they’ve mostly drawn the line at employing techniques like genetic analysis that might identify ancient crop varieties. In the past, the agricultural industry and research institutions have used such information for ownership patents. Instead, careful methods like hand pollination will suffice to keep the integrity of each inherited crop while tribes revive their traditional plant knowledge.

At Dream of Wild Health, founded in 1998, Greendeer leads a dedicated seed regeneration team of two employees and two interns tasked with increasing heirloom stockpiles. She joined the nonprofit after completing a veteran’s program in organic farming following a decade in the US Army. Dream of Wild Health also runs an array of youth education efforts, seed-keeping and growing workshops, and organic produce-sharing programs. It also leans on partnerships with local groups like the Indigenous Food Lab, a culinary school and community kitchen focused on researching traditional ingredients and designing nutritious Native cuisine.

“A seed’s whole purpose in life is to sacrifice itself to grow one more time,” Greendeer says as she paces the garden. They need to return home to hear their languages again, to see their people again. By the end of the growing season, at least three beloved varieties of corn, squash, and beans will have their homecoming.

FOR CENTURIES, tribes in the upper Great Lakes area and across North America developed a palate of colors and tastes, famously breeding spin-offs of staple crops acquired and traded along routes reaching as far as present-day Colombia and Peru. This diversity helped define the unique relationships between different Native cultures and their foods, which were passed from generation to generation like heirlooms. In a push for westward expansion from the 1800s to the 1920s, the US Cavalry, Army, and militias applied their might to destroy crops, native plants, and other food sources like deer and buffalo. Dispossession of territory and of cultural objects went hand in hand; by the 1900s, anthropologists and scientists sought to preserve a visual record of Indigenous culture for museums and academic study. In the ensuing decades, the same entities ignored or resisted Native Americans seeking to regain their cultural property.

Today, at least hundreds and likely thousands of types of heirloom foods sit in restricted collections and private seed bank freezers. Oscar Will’s is one such example: The American farmer and entrepreneur built a profitable company in 1882 with corn gathered from the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara tribes in the upper Missouri River plains. In the 1940s, geographer and anthropologist George Carter amassed a hoard of Indigenous goods farmed in the Southwest, which he later donated to the University of California, Berkeley. And the US Department of Agriculture houses a seed bank with more than 10,000 plant varieties for researchers and producers and increasingly does oblige tribal requests.

[Related: Want to better understand the biodiversity of a forest? Ask the locals.]

The United States took a step toward redress in 1990, when President George H.W. Bush signed the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, commonly called NAGPRA. The legislation recognized that Indigenous skeletal remains and cultural artifacts are distributed across the country in federal agencies and museums, with access predominantly limited to white academics. While the legislation doesn’t mention seeds, NAGPRA established a process by which tribes can apply for the return of items significant to their heritage and identity, termed “objects of cultural patrimony.” “The bill before us is not about the validity of museums or the value of scientific inquiry,” Hawaii Senator Daniel Inouye said at the time. “Rather, it is about human rights.” However, whether institutions complied remained an ongoing issue.

SOMETIMES THE CROPS at Dream of Wild Health need precise and personal attention to ensure they will be laden with seeds by fall. In the squash patch, for example, Greendeer—who graduated from the Rodale Institute’s Organic Farming Certificate Program in Pennsylvania in 2016—might carefully and methodically float from flower to flower, assuming the role of a bumblebee and hand-pollinating to prevent cross-fertilization. Each plant produces male and female flowers, and they need to mingle to produce fruit. So Greendeer plays the matchmaker. She reaches down and gently plucks a mature golden male blossom and carries it to a neighbor. After peeling back the male petals to uncover a pollen-dusted part, she brushes it across the female’s orange ovary with a painterly stroke. Then she folds closed five-pointed petals and seals them with a clothespin. On to the next.

Except for Greendeer’s manipulation, each squash flower, regardless of gender, must be kept closed to ensure no pollen from nearby farms blows in and cross-fertilizes the crop. The heirloom corn similarly requires special attention. Greendeer hand-pollinates it by brushing one stalk’s tassels against a neighboring female’s silk, then draping a bag over the fertilized plant to ward off any unwanted invaders.

The squash, corn, beans, and other plants that Greendeer tends are the direct result of generations of careful crop selection and breeding by several ancestral Indigenous communities. Some came from partners like the nonprofit Seed Savers Exchange (SSE) in Iowa or the USDA’s Germplasm Resources Information Network, which maintains a repository of more than half a million samples from 15,000 species of flora. Others were shared by families who managed to safeguard them at home. “It’s one of the few things that they can hold in their hand and say their ancestors were holding the same thing,” Greendeer says.

She respectfully declines to identify the crops’ specific varieties to protect the recipient tribal nations and their seeds, citing past scientific and corporate exploitation—like genetic patenting. She first encountered resistance to the technology in 2017 when she embarked on a growing project on former Ho-Chunk land with Claire Luby, a postdoc researcher in plant breeding and seed systems at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Initially, the duo considered mapping the genomes of each plant, hoping the DNA would reveal advantages that may have helped the ancient corn adapt to the northern climate. They theorized that genetic patterns might suggest whether any varieties were the foundations for some of the present-day corn grown across the Midwest. Or maybe that a cluster of crops from the Great Lakes region are distantly related to Southwestern ones. But it wasn’t meant to be.

They shelved the study after Greendeer consulted local Native American communities, who weren’t comfortable with their researching and sharing the corn’s genetics by way of a published study. Genetic patenting of heirloom crops is a major concern for many Indigenous growers. For years the White Earth Land Recovery Project in Minnesota has fought the agricultural giant Monsanto for exploiting varieties of its corn and the University of Minnesota over the patenting and genetic engineering of wild rice, a crop sacred to the Anishinaabe tribes. Instead of doing the analysis, Greendeer and Luby recorded visual observations of each type of corn as it grew as reference points to pass along to Native growers once the seeds were returned.

Today, much of Greendeer’s work focuses on regeneration for rematriation—increasing the supply of certain vegetables, fruits, and legumes to return the seeds home. This year in May, for instance, she planted 200 total Mandan kernels that she received from the SSE, which boasts a collection of about 20,000 varieties, including historic North American ones. She will harvest the multicolored ears to collect more kernels, lay them out to dry in the sun, then store them for the winter.

The farm’s partnership with the SSE began in 2020 in hopes of identifying, growing, and rematriating desirable seeds from the nonprofit’s stock each season. Greendeer and two other Native farmers were invited to review the exchange’s inventory. She estimates it has hundreds, maybe thousands, of long-dormant Native American varieties.

This expanding effort to share and rematriate ancestral crops has birthed a new consciousness among Indigenous and non-Indigenous seed banks. Their collaborative practices—all aimed at reproducing resilient ancestral food systems—have also begun to make inroads with museums and universities.

THE SHELVES of the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley, hold a small vial of 13 beans. Of unknown variety, they were carried from northern Oklahoma to Santa Clara Pueblo in New Mexico by representatives of the Delaware Tribe of Indians. In the early 1940s, anthropologist George Carter, who was studying the origins of agriculture in the Southwest, “removed” them, and he eventually included them in the collection he donated to the university.

In December 2020, the Delaware Tribe approached UC Berkeley with a NAGPRA claim to rematriate the beans—marking the first time the law has been used for this purpose. When the Berkeley NAGPRA committee and the Delaware Tribe met, tribal representatives made the case that food, including the seeds that grow it, is part of any people’s cultural history, which makes the ancestral germs eligible to be returned under NAGPRA’s definition of an “object of cultural patrimony.” “To me, it’s pretty clear-cut,” says Tom Torma, the university’s liaison with the tribe, supporting that claim.

The campus’s NAGPRA Advisory Committee agreed, recommending the school hand over the beans. The tribe plans to put them to rest with a ceremonial burial after Berkeley releases the vial in spring of 2022. For now, the beans patiently wait.

[Related: Can we untangle ecology from its baked-in colonial biases?]

Today, Berkeley is reckoning with its colonial past. But as recently as June 2020, a California state audit report found that the university had returned only 20 percent of its Indigenous objects and ancestral remains since the federal act kicked in.

“Each museum gets to define things as they see it,” says Torma. Institutions can interpret NAGPRA as restrictively or as broadly as they want. This might change soon. The US Department of the Interior—headed for the first time by a Native American, Deb Haaland of the Pueblo of Laguna—announced in July 2021 that it would seek to reform regulations to expedite pending tribal requests under the policy.

Because Berkeley’s NAGPRA committee was receptive to the Delawares’ claim, Professor Elizabeth Hoover—who is of Mi’kmaq and Mohawk descent and studies, among other things, food sovereignty—hopes to share the museum’s ethnobotanical list with tribes. She is among the seed keepers, scientists, and scholars trying to change museum culture to include consultation and collaboration with Indigenous communities. This rematriation coalition of sorts has returned treasures from UM, the Field Museum in Chicago, and the Science Museum of Minnesota in St. Paul. However, Hoover notes, “It’s a lot easier to get something into a museum than it is to get something out.”

“We move at the rate of trust,” says David Michener, curator of the botanical gardens and arboretum at UM, which in the past four years has grown and rematriated plants within its collection in partnership with local Native communities. UM maintains the third-largest ethnobotanical seed collection in North America—essentially a stockpile of Indigenous crops and foods. If tribes knew the sheer size of the cache, Michener says, “Every sovereign nation is going to want to know what seeds are there, and if they are alive.”

In 2018, he joined a pilot project with Shiloh Maples of the Little River Band of Ottawa Indians and the Indigenous Seed Keepers Network, an heirloom-growers’ advocacy group, to rematriate seeds from the university’s collection to the Anishinaabe people.

Recently, Veronica Pasfield, a NAGPRA officer for the Bay Mills Indian Community in Michigan, began combing through a copy of UM’s sweeping inventory, looking for those that might belong to her tribe. Pasfield is somewhat new to seed rematriation but has worked for 15 years to return other cultural possessions to Indigenous groups. In fact, UM hired her as a NAGPRA coordinator in 2010, when the school still held 1,600 Native American remains in its museum of anthropology. Today, half of them have been returned; work to return the culturally unidentified is underway.

“Sometimes the most egregious offenders of failing to observe the rights of Indigenous people are researching universities,” Pasfield says. “They attract faculty and graduate students and massive grant money to do research on our bodies, our objects, our seeds.”

THE GROWING SEASON ends with a harvest, when at least some of the bounty of traditional science and farming is finally tasted. In 2019, the first year Dream of Wild Health had a dedicated seed regeneration team, Jessika Greendeer stepped into the heirloom garden and plucked a squash for a potluck. Her mentee was finishing her apprenticeship that day, and Greendeer wanted to mark the occasion with a special send-off. She asked the chef who prepares meals for Dream of Wild Health’s youth education programs to bake the vegetable.

Normally Greendeer dries and preserves seeds to be stored away to plant next season. Squash is an exception in that its meat is also harvested so that it doesn’t go to waste. And while Greendeer usually seasons it, this heirloom variety’s flavor was almost spiritually nourishing, whether baked, pureed, or roasted. “It was perfect straight out of the oven,” she says.

The following year, as the coronavirus inflamed food insecurity, disrupted supply chains, and swallowed up jobs, Dream of Wild Health and the Indigenous Food Lab in Minneapolis prepped and delivered more than 80,000 meals for nine tribal nations around the state. The food also fed the Minnesota Indian Women’s Resource Center and residents in homeless encampments in the city, many of whom are Indigenous. Their work, among Indigenous sovereignty groups’, was recognized by a new US Department of Agriculture initiative this past fall.

Instead of using “colonial ingredients” like wheat flour, refined sugar, and dairy, the Lab’s Oglala Lakota culinary director and chef, Sean Sherman, prioritized sourcing produce from Indigenous growers to cook an array of culturally relevant foods. All his dishes were designed to support Indigenous dietary needs: sweet potato, carrot, and maple soup; smoked turkey with native grain mix; bison and hominy stew; bison tamales with black beans; and fried wild rice with, oh yes, bison-cranberry meatballs.

Two growing seasons have now passed amid the pandemic. It’s late September, and Greendeer stands at the edge of the modest but immensely rich garden. Soil-regenerating cover crops of radishes, peas, and oats blanket the field. As winter approaches, she thinks about the oncoming responsibility of passing along bundles of heirloom seeds she’s safeguarded for months. Rematriation, she knows, is an exercise in trusting one’s own abilities, then letting long-lost ancestors go to be nurtured by their tribes. Their fates will be out of her hands, the way it was meant to be.

Since she joined the rematriation movement, Greendeer has remained conflicted about the role museums played in colonization. Yet without their collections or non–Native American seed banks, what chance would there be to connect tribes to their cultural foods? She talked with her elders about these feelings, and something they said gave her much comfort. “You have to remember that there was a time when we weren’t in a place to take care of them in a good way. That some seeds said, ‘Yes, I will go.’ And so they waited for a time to be returned.”

This story originally ran in the Winter 2021 Taste issue of PopSci. Read more PopSci+ stories.

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Growing a garden in space isn’t easy—but for astronauts, having a green thumb isn’t just a talent, it’s nearly a requirement. 

Plants have had a short but lively history of being grown on the International Space Station. As astronauts move towards long-term independence from Earth, it’s even more imperative that they be able to meet their own nutritional needs in orbit.

“The small-scale projects performed on the space station today focus on conducting primary research associated with crop growth and performance,” says NASA in an emailed statement. “They serve as a stepping stone to the development of fully functional operational crop production systems that will accompany astronauts in the future.” 

Current efforts at large-scale space crop production, however, face expensive and logistical challenges and technological gaps. A new paper, published Friday in Frontiers in Astronomy and Space Sciences, champions the need for new advances in automation, robotics, and even machine learning to get around some of these barriers. 

Because pre-packaged food degrades over time, and any resources from Earth to potential lunar or Martian settlements may take too long to be delivered, it’s more feasible to invest resources into keeping flight crews healthy in real-time. 

“It’s just so expensive and so hard to constantly provide food and oxygen and all the things that you need to keep people alive,” Simon Gilroy, professor of botany at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who was not involved with the research. Space is a “weird” place for biology to exist in, says Gilroy, and that’s one of the reasons it’s a great opportunity to study plants and humans’ evolutionary record. 

But in some measure, NASA’s deep interest in astrobotany, or the study of how plants interact with a space environment, also stems from lessons gleaned from piratical history. Centuries ago, when adventurous explorers journeyed long distances across the sea many would die from scurvy, or a severe lack of vitamin C. 

This crucial vitamin, which can be naturally found in oranges, is a key nutrient in staying healthy. And, though modern purveyors of the universe could take their daily vitamins instead of going through all the trouble to grow their hard-won lettuce, plants provide powerful psychological as well as nutritious benefits. 

The Frontiers article also states that by using a technique called hyperspectral imaging—a method that can capture and process a large amount of information from across the electromagnetic spectrum (not just red, green, and blue light)—scientists could develop a precise plant health monitoring system. This system would collect data to help ensure food safety by autonomously monitoring plant health, as well as alerting astronauts to early plant diseases, drought, or microbial infections. 

A prototype of this system is already in development at the Kennedy Space Center, where it is also being used to create a database of plant images astronauts can refer to when determining plant stressors. 

[Related: Watering space plants is hard, but NASA has a plan]

NASA hopes that in the future, these and similar systems will be used to help train AI algorithms that can be used on the ISS, and Gateway, an outpost that will orbit the moon as part of NASA’s Artemis space program. But according to the agency, “more work needs to be done before we can be confident that the crews we send to Mars will have a healthy and fully functional food system to accompany them on their journey.”

Along with the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), NASA is also currently investigating the use of microgreens—small, nutrient-dense plants that can be easily grown and eaten without the need for extended crew involvement. Numerous space crop research projects are also underway, including the Vegetable Production System (Veggie), a garden on the ISS that astronauts use to study microgravity’s effect on plants. 

Another, the Advanced Plant Habitat (APH), is a fully automated growth chamber used to harvest and conduct real-time research on plant crops. Because of these and similar projects, NASA has become a pioneer in space crop research and solutions.   

One latest example is Ohalo III, a prototype crop production rig in production at the Kennedy Space Center. This rig will serve as a test platform for new plant growth technologies, and test advanced concepts for water delivery. The rig will also let astronauts pick and eat a variety of “salad-type crops,” which scientists hope will reduce “menu fatigue.”

The Ohalo III project, which began in 2019, will eventually be deployed on the Mars Transit Vehicle, where it will help guide early lunar and Mars surface production systems. 

That said, humans are still years away from seeing large-scale space crops become a reality, Gilroy says. But the next few decades’ worth of space crop projects are about laying the groundwork for future generations to thrive. 

“We’re still in that sort of discovery, tinkering phase, where we’re making progress towards finding the solutions,” says Gilroy. “We’re like the explorers who’ve just stepped on to their boats and are just sailing across the oceans to find out what’s going on.”

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Snickers, M&Ms, Twix bars. These candies might be found in kitchen cupboards, but their prime ingredients come from much farther away. In fact, Mars Wrigley, the largest chocolate producer in the world, gets most of its cocoa, or 400,000 tons annually, from Côte D’IVoire, Ghana, and Indonesia. 

As the third biggest cocoa powerhouse in the world, Indonesia’s farmers have a lot to lose as climate change threatens the $80-million export industry. As rainfall patterns shift and temperatures climb, land ripe for cocoa cultivation will fall by 9 percent by 2050. Deforestation across the country is also making the fruit trees more susceptible to pest infestation. But while climate adaptation measures are being put in place to protect smallholder farmers (those who harvest on under five acres of land), not everyone is convinced that these measures are working. 

In a recently published article in Annals of American Association of Geographers, Sean Kennedy, a professor of regional and urban planning at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, looked at how climate adaptation is both helping and hindering the lives of cocoa farmers. He specifically focused on the measures implemented by corporations like Mars. 

Smallholder farmers, who tend to nearly 4 millions acres of land across Indonesia and account for 95 percent of its cocoa production, often face the brunt of climate change-induced threats that affect their yield and profit. To secure its own production, Mars has put various measures in place to help these growers adapt. But as Kennedy found, the company’s measures come at the cost of the farmers’ mobility.

[Related: Indonesia’s capital is sinking, but climate change isn’t the only culprit]

One of the prevailing narratives with climate is that enabling people to stay in place is the best way to help them adapt. But this discounts a history of migration in farming communities, says Kennedy.

Migration has long been used as a climate adaptation technique because it allows farmers to decide when and where they will plant, cultivate, and process crops to avoid risk. It’s not just about farming either—mobility becomes a question of supplemental livelihoods too. Looking past the individual farmer to their families, different members of a household might seek temporary off-farm employment in nearby cities as a way to reduce financial risk. But that can only be achieved through the freedom of movement.

In the broader scheme of climate adaptation, however, the idea of staying in place no matter how the wind changes sometimes goes hand-in-hand with resilience, Kennedy says. 

“It’s often linked to adaptation and the idea that resilience comes through increased ability to withstand shocks and to not have to change what you’re doing,” he explains. “But in the case of Mars, that narrative of staying in place enables them to continue producing the supply of cocoa in the face of these worsening climate shocks.”

Because Mars has adopted its own system to standardize the quality of cocoa it uses, Kennedy argues that they create financial dependency for the farmers. The standards require the growers to use costly fertilizers and pesticides. In the worst case, this can cause the farmer to fall into debt or lose their land as collateral. Mars did not respond to PopSci for comment on its practices.

Kennedy does point out that the company doesn’t explicitly call these procedures climate adaptation, but at the very least, they’re portrayed as measures designed to benefit smallholders. Overseas, Mars runs a chain of production where the corporation doesn’t have to take on any of the risk of owning the farms, but still maintains significant influence. These are just some ways it ensures its supply of cocoa remains untouched. 

While Mars may not call this climate adaptation, Kennedy notes that the safeguarding measures are intended to defend cocoa yields from labor shortages or crop disease. These hazards are increasingly being shaped by climate change. In his research, Kennedy gleaned the perspectives of Indonesian farmers who are growingly more vulnerable to climate change. Ultimately, these strategies put in place by Mars to boost productivity also limit the cocoa growers’ ability to use alternative adaptation strategies.

“At the end of the day, they’re restricting the livelihood options that these individuals have,” Kennedy says. So rather than being able to pursue off-farm employment or being able to produce other crops that may be more economically beneficial for them, the [company is] narrowing those opportunities to just cocoa production.”

Samuel Dupre, a survey statistician with the U.S. Census Bureau’s International Program, learned from his own experiences in running microfinancing operations for women in Ghana that, “if you want conservation interventions to work, you have to make it work with people’s livelihoods, and not in a way where you’re taking away their ability to feed their family.”

According to Dupre, who was not involved with Kennedy’s study, Mars’s climate finance strategy amounts to taking away individual farms’ agency. “Smallholder farmers’ ability to persist generally rests in their ability to have these wide livelihood portfolios,” he says. Creating a variety of income streams through migration is a big source of security for these households. As Mars seeks to lock people in place and control what they can or can’t do with their crops and their land, they threaten to take away the protection of diversification. 

But for Dupre, there’s no equitable answer when it comes to big corporations and climate financing. “They’re answerable to their stakeholders, and if they’re acting to their mandate, they’re going to maximize production and income while minimizing risk,” he says. From that point, it becomes a matter of figuring out who’s going to bear the burden of risk—whether it’s corporations like Mars, farmers, or governments. While Dupre thinks that some of Mars’s actions such as its farmer field-training program could benefit local growers, ultimately the decisions about change need to be made by the people on the ground.

“For us in the Global North, we’re not the ones who should be making those decisions in the first place,” Dupre says. “A more equitable solution should give people the resources to make their own decisions on their farms.”

[Related: Climate change makes it deadlier to cross the US-Mexico border]

In his research on small coffee farms in Guatemala, which is currently under review for publication, Dupre found that access to different sources of information from the internet or radio was essential for growers to make these decisions. Understanding what dangers are in store for their farms, how other areas they might migrate to have been affected by climate change, and what action they can take locally all go a long way for resilience. Non-predatory loans were another must-have.

“Access to equitable finance is huge. A massive farm or a massive corporation getting access to finance to deal with [climate] situations is easy, but it’s expensive to be poor,” Dupre says. “The less resources you have, the less diversity of options you have, the easier it is to be taken advantage of and have someone else push that risk off on you.” 

For Kennedy, part of the problem is a framing issue. By only seeing these farms as cocoa farms, they’re forced into limited options. “When you focus just on the commodity as your adaptation approach, everything revolves around cocoa and maintaining cocoa production without thinking about it from an individual livelihood point of view,” he says. 

Shifting to an approach that prioritizes livelihoods, multiple household incomes, and food security from different crops offers a more sustainable solution. But until companies do that, Indonesian farmers and chocolate buyers around the world will have to contend with the risks that climate change poses on their beloved ingredients.

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This story originally featured on Saveur.

Beekeeping heritage permeates Slovenian culture. In the small Central European country, approximately one in 200 people keep and tend to bee colonies. Locals share a deep respect for the winged insects as indispensable pollinators in the food system, and honey appears often in traditional Slovenian delicacies. Beekeeping tradition runs so deep that in the Slovenian language, saying one’s “ax fell into the honey” is a proverb used to describe a sudden stroke of good luck. 

“If you want to have a tomato, you must have a bumblebee,” says Maruška Markovčič, who works in the Slovenian capital of Ljubljana’s Department for Environmental Protection. As pollinators, bees enable crops to flourish and are thus critical for agricultural production.

Slovenia has long held a high regard for these insects. In the 18th century, Maria Theresa, then empress of the Habsburg Empire, launched the world’s earliest beekeeping school in Vienna and named Anton Janša as the instructor. “He was the first beekeeping teacher in the whole world, and he was a Slovenian,” explains Blaž Ambrožič, who looks after more than 100 colonies and sells bee products on his family farm in Bled. 

Centuries later, bees are dying at alarming rates around the globe, due to factors like pesticide use, disease, and climate change. But in Slovenia, the beekeeping tradition continues to thrive, fueled by the country’s respect for nature and commitment to sustainability and conservation. In 2016, the European Commission awarded Ljubljana the title of European Green Capital. Domestically, the Slovenia Tourist Board certifies destinations and businesses that exemplify sustainable practices by giving them a Slovenia Green Label. This attitude of eco-consciousness extends directly to the care of bees.”If something bad happens in the environment, beekeepers immediately see the mistakes because bees will be dying,” explains Peter Kozmus, who heads the breeding program for the 8,000-member strong Slovenian Beekeepers’ Association and also led the initiative for the United Nations to declare May 20 as World Bee Day. Bees’ sensitivity to environmental pollutants and disturbances, Kozmus explains, makes the insects important bio-indicators—and their caretakers critical stewards. “If bees are doing well in the city, this is very good proof that the city is healthy,” he says. In 2011, Slovenia became one of the first European Union countries to ban the use of neonicotinoid pesticides after beekeepers suspected the pesticides were killing their bees. To further protect its native Carniolan honey bees—which Slovenians revere for their industrious and gentle nature—the country does not allow the import of other bee species.

When bees return to their hives after pollinating plants, the nectar they bring back is very fluid. “They need to dry it with their wings,” explains Nika Jere, who works with her beekeeper father in the family’s meadery business Jere in the countryside of Ljubljana. “If you have mass production and big hives, they cannot really dry it well, so the honey is usually pretty liquid.” Slovenian honey, on the other hand, is thicker and more firm—”like the taste and the minerals are concentrated, because the water has been removed by the bees,” says Nika. “That’s why the taste is really intense.”

Today, honey is still a regular fixture on Slovenian breakfast tables and a primary sweetener in desserts. It’s a sweetener in traditional foods like potica, leavened pastries often rolled with walnut filling, as well as medenjaki, ginger-scented honey biscuits. At Jere, Nika’s father Gregor looks after 300 beehives, producing raw honey and using it to make both regular and sparkling mead, an alcoholic beverage made by fermenting honey with water.

In 2007, the Slovenian Beekeepers’ Association launched a breakfast campaign to reemphasize the nutritional and environmental value of native bee products. Beekeepers visited their nearby schools bearing honey for schoolchildren to enjoy for breakfast. “While these children in kindergarten were eating honey, the beekeepers explained to them why bees are so important, why it’s important for us to eat bee products—because they are very healthy,” says Kozmus. Eventually, the initiative expanded to include other locally produced foods like bread and milk. The Traditional Slovenian Breakfast is now an annual event held on the third Friday of each November. 

“When my children were small, getting a spoon of honey was like, for them, a lollipop,” says chef Ana Roš, who was voted the World’s Best Female Chef in 2017 by The World’s 50 Best Restaurants. “For me, it’s completely natural that at home I have a few different types of honey, but I don’t have sugar.” At Hiša Franko, Roš’ restaurant in Soča Valley, the menu springs entirely from local ingredients that reflect the diversity of the Slovenian landscape. The country’s varied topography, she explains, produces many distinct flavors of honey. Chestnut honey, for example, is dark-hued and tends to carry bitter and smoky notes, while the light-colored linden honey has a woody, minty aroma. These variations wouldn’t be possible without Slovenia’s attention to preserving a pristine and biodiverse environment. “It’s a direct result of the beauty and the quality of the nature,” says Roš. “Whatever the bee is going to collect, this is how the honey is going to look. There is no cheating in that. It’s a direct production.” At Hiša Franko, Roš regularly features bee products in innovative creations like bee pollen ice cream with hydro honey, and fondue made from beeswax and local cheeses. 

Named the European Region of Gastronomy 2021, Slovenia is increasingly becoming a global food destination for its culinary philosophy that supports local growers and makes the most of its diverse topography. Food-minded tourists can experience the wide range of bee products not only at dining establishments, but also at the apiaries themselves. In a growing apitourism trend, many professional beekeepers across the country have opened their doors to visitors, introducing them to the unparalleled taste of Slovenian honey and offering a glimpse into the pollinators’ important care. Some apiaries allow visitors to don beekeeping gear and learn how to extract honey from a hive, while others even provide apitherapy experiences. “They arrange the apiaries so that you can relax in there, you can listen to the bees, you can lie on top of the beehives so that you can feel the buzzing of the bees,” explains Markovčič.

Intertwining beekeeping with tourism is one way the country continues to champion bee conservation and educate people around the world about sustainable beekeeping practices. “If we are really disturbing one point of the chain, the whole [environmental] system can collapse,” says Markovčič. “We are responsible for the environment of the bumblebees. They cannot plant wildflowers for themselves.” 

Every third spoonful of food consumed in the world depends directly on the pollinating efforts of bees, which means we have bees to thank for much of what we eat. Slovenia has been returning the favor all along. 

“Here in Slovenia, bees are like pets,” says Ambrožič. “Save the bees, and we will save ourselves.”

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This post has been updated to include additional context and background for several studies and sources cited. It originally published on January 13, 2022.

In July, chemical-manufacturing giant Bayer announced that home gardeners would no longer be able to buy products containing glyphosate, the active ingredient in the world’s most actively used weed-killer Roundup. It was the culmination of tens of thousands of lawsuits filed against Bayer and Roundup’s previous owner, Monsanto, for their alleged role in causing a form of cancer called non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. So far, plaintiffs have been awarded hundreds of millions of dollars in settlements. In August, Bayer filed a petition to have the US Supreme Court review one of those cases.

The decision to remove glyphosate from the home-gardening market wasn’t an admission of culpability, and farmers will still use glyphosate-containing products. Bayer maintains that glyphosate is safe and doesn’t cause cancer. The most recent report from 2016 by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) supports Bayer’s view. The authors of the report concluded that glyphosate was an unlikely carcinogen and poses no known meaningful risks to human health.  These findings have been backed up by regulatory agencies across the globe, including the EU’s Assessment Group on Glyphosate (AGG), European Food Safety Authority (EFSA), European Chemicals Agency (ECHA), German BfR, Australian, Korean, Canadian, New Zealand,  Japanese regulatory authorities, and the Joint FAO/WHO Meeting on Pesticide Residues (JMPR). Still, authorities like WHO’s International Agency for Research on Cancer list glyphosate as a probable human carcinogen.

At the same time, scientists and economists raise doubts about the safety of Roundup and similar products—and the rigor of the research that’s gone into reports by Bayer and the EPA.

How Roundup became ubiquitous

When Monsanto first marketed Roundup in 1974, the company sold it as a breakthrough tool for agriculture: an herbicide that was safe for the environment and for humans. Unlike the pesticide DDT, which was banned by the EPA in 1972, Monsanto asserted that glyphosate wouldn’t linger in the environment or in human bodies. Studies suggest that within soil, glyphosate’s half-life, or the amount of time it takes for half of a particular application to break down, is between seven and 60 days. It leaves behind a chemical byproduct, AMPA, but neither glyphosate nor AMPA tend to accumulate in human cells. Instead, they’re excreted in urine and feces. 

[Related: Pesticides might be worse for bees than we thought.]

There’s also the mechanism by which glyphosate kills weeds: it inhibits the shikimate pathway, a system plant cells use to produce energy, by inhibiting an enzyme that helps them synthesize amino acids from carbohydrates. In essence, glyphosate starves plants. Human cells don’t have this same pathway to energy production. This detail sets glyphosate apart from other chemicals that cause genetic mutations and cancer, which tend to target pathways that also exist in human cells, says Jia Chen, a professor of environmental and public health at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. “For that purpose, you would consider it quite harmless,” Chen says. 

While human cells don’t use the shikimate pathway, bacteria do. It’s possible that glyphosate’s apparent risk to human health is due in part to the chemical’s effect on the good bacteria in our guts. This community of good bacteria don’t just help us digest our food; they’re also vital players in our immune system. 

Studies on rats and bacteria cultured in labs suggest that glyphosate inhibits the composition of gut bacteria, possibly limiting their ability to modulate our immune systems. (However, we can’t know for sure based on these studies whether the same effects occur inside the human body.) Theoretically, glyphosate doesn’t have to stick around in our cells to have these effects; the chemical just needs to pass through. Imbalances in the microbiome create room for pathogenic bacteria, which could trigger inflammation. Researchers reason that both inflammation and immune-disruption are associated with increased cancer risk, according to a 2018 review published in the journal Carcinogenesis.

However, Bayer points out that when the European Food Safety Authority reviewed claims that glyphosate harms human gut microbiota, they found no evidence to support that assertion.

On top of that, research suggests that even at very low concentrations, glyphosate mimics human hormones, potentially triggering or speeding up the growth of tumors.

Nearly half a century after its introduction to agriculture the chemical is ubiquitous in the environment. “Glyphosate is, by far, the most heavily used and most profitable herbicide ever discovered,” says Charles Benbrook, an agricultural economist at the Heartland Health Research Alliance and a compensated expert witness in the ongoing Roundup litigation. As of 2014, 825,000 tons of the herbicide were used each year worldwide, according to an article published in the journal Environmental Health. 

Scientists have found glyphosate everywhere from tree roots to honeybee hives. In a study of 94 pregnant women who weren’t directly exposed to herbicides at work, Chen and a team of international scientists found traces of glyphosate in the urine of 95 percent of participants. “You can even detect it in surface water and rain,” Chen says, “Glyphosate is basically everywhere.”

The trouble with studying Roundup

Scientists have linked glyphosate and glyphosate-containing products to a number of conditions, from miscarriages to cancer. But you can’t randomly expose people to a potential toxin and compare them to an unexposed group, the way you would conduct clinical trials for a drug—doing so would be unethical for the former and pretty much impossible for the latter, given this compound’s ubiquitousness—so examining the effects of glyphosate in humans remains a challenge, Chen says. Scientists tend to study the effects of the chemical on human cells or other animals in the lab, or to retrospectively ask people about their exposure to glyphosate to find potential health correlations. Still, exposing lab mice to toxins won’t give you a clear image of what happens to humans, and people may bump into multiple potentially toxic substances throughout their lives that could damage their health. In other words, neither method is perfect.

In 2016, the EPA concluded that glyphosate was “not likely to be carcinogenic to humans.” 

[Related: Pesticides can hurt agricultural communities—so why do farmers fight back against bans?]

Scientists, regulators, and the popular press have all focused overwhelmingly on the link between glyphosate and cancer. “But from my point of view, I’m more interested in the non-cancerous outcomes. Because health is not just equal to cancer,” Chen says. This year, Chen’s pilot study on pregnant women, published in the journal Environmental Pollution, linked higher urinary concentrations of glyphosate to shorter pregnancies. All of the pregnant people in the study gave birth to full-term babies—in other words, gestation lasted 37 weeks or longer—but shorter pregnancies, especially those shorter than 37 weeks, are associated with complications in newborns, from breathing to gastrointestinal problems. The babies born to people who had more glyphosate in their urine also had greater distance between their anus and genitalia, which is associated with higher levels of male sex hormones. That finding suggested to Chen that glyphosate might interfere with the endocrine system—alarming, but not conclusive. Again, Bayer points out that no regulatory authority has ever found evidence that glyphosate acts as an endocrine disruptor.

Data on non-cancer outcomes isn’t the only information we lack, says Leland Glenna, a sociologist at Pennsylvania State University. Herbicide manufacturers aren’t required to share the inactive ingredients in their products, so scientists don’t really know what Roundup contains, aside from glyphosate. That makes it difficult to study. 

The data isn’t just incomplete. Glenna, who researches the role of science and technology in agricultural policy-making, believes much of it is unreliable. Much of the epidemiological data we do have comes directly from scientists employed by the companies producing herbicides—a potential conflict of interests. In that EPA report on glyphosate, 39 percent of the studies reviewed were produced by industry-funded scientists, according to an analysis published in Environmental Sciences Europe. 

“There’s a clear distinction between public science and private science,” Glenna says. That same analysis found that out of the 36 studies on pure glyphosate that were included in the EPA report, just two percent published by industry scientists found an association between glyphosate and cancer versus 67 percent of those published in peer-reviewed journals. But even that number may be unreliable. 

[Related: The main ingredient in RoundUp doesn’t just kill plants. It harms beetles, too.]

During the 2018 court case Johnson v Monsanto, evidence presented included leaked internal emails in which Monsanto employees discussed ghostwriting studies to support the claim that glyphosate is safe for human health.  This included discrediting the International Agency for Research of Cancer’s report that “glyphosate was a probable human carcinogen,” according to a 2021 review co-authored by Glenna and published in the journal Research Policy.

Still, scientists don’t have conclusive evidence that Roundup causes health problems. According to Chen, science has a long way to go before reaching any conclusion on the effects or Roundup—or lack thereof. She and other scientists are calling for more independent research, the release of information on inactive ingredients in these products, and a greater focus on complete herbicide formulations rather than just glyphosate. 

For now, Heartland Health Research Alliance’s Benbrook doesn’t advise consumers to renounce Roundup entirely. Instead, he says to take proper precautions: wear protective clothing when using the herbicide, take a shower immediately after any potential exposure, and avoid the product if you’re immunocompromised in any way. 

“There is some alarming evidence there, but nothing is concrete,” Chen says. “That’s why we need more research.” 

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After the E.coli outbreak in spinach in 2006, farms in California’s Salinas Valley had to take action to address food safety. The wave of concern around wildlife contaminating produce resulted in 13 percent of wetlands and river-side habitats being razed over the next few years. And it wasn’t a one-time event: In response to food-borne diseases, habitats are often removed to prevent animals from coming in contact with crops. But according to a team of entomologists and environmental scientists from across the US, the safety of our fruits and veggies doesn’t need to come at the cost of biodiversity. 

Building on previous research, a study published recently in Ecological Applications illustrates the scale of risk associated with birds and pathogens in produce. It also proposes how some farms can deter harmful wildlife interactions—and welcome beneficial ones.

The researchers traced a path to find out how likely it is that birds carry bacteria, which species are most likely to do so, and how frequently they’re able to transmit people-sickening diseases.

In a meta-analysis of the existing data on birds and pathogens, Olivia Smith, a postdoctoral researcher at Michigan State University, found that nearly all past studies were conducted on the West Coast of the US where a majority of domestic produce is grown. In addition, they tended to focus on smaller organic farms that were varied in their production. Like Smith’s previous research, the studies focused on three bacteria that commonly cause food poisoning: E.coli, salmonella, and campylobacter. 

[Related: Compost can help protect us from food poisoning]

To properly establish risk, the authors first looked at whether the birds were actually carrying these contaminants. In their aggregated data from 1,565 studies, they found only 0.22 percent of birds carried E. coli and 0.46 carried salmonella. Conversely, around 8 percent carried campylobacter, which also happens to be the only example of an outbreak that has conclusively been traced to wild birds: a flock of migratory cranes in pea fields in Alaska.

To follow these pathogens back to the responsible bird species, Smith used a previous set of results where researchers collected 1,215 fecal samples from farms across Washington, Oregon, and California and identified them through DNA testing. Out of the 106 species present, nearly 40 percent of all the fecal matter was traced back to 35 kinds of birds. White-crowned, song, and house sparrows were three of the most frequent suspects when it came to the discovered poop deposits. 

Working with Smith’s previous studies and lab data collected by Daniel Karp, an assistant professor in the department of wildlife, fishing, and conservation biology at UC Davis and an author of the paper, the team also used data from 87 farms to see if the birds carrying the pathogens were visiting and interacting with the fruits and vegetables and transferring their bacteria. They then compiled survey data by observing the number of birds in and around the fields and whether they were touching the crops in some way.

For the most part, the total number of contacts observed per species positively correlated to the number of feces that could be traced back to that bird. But while the survey helped identify which feathered visitors were actively shedding their pathogens onto the crops, there were some cases where the abundance of a particular species didn’t match the frequency of its poops. With barn swallows, for example, the correlation was inverted.

“A swallow is flying above the farm field a lot and is dipping down and sometimes interacting with the produce, but it’s not really landing at all,” Karp explains. “We would say that it interacts with the produce a lot, because we see it there a lot. But those birds don’t really poop on the wing much.”

This means that though they are spotted often, the swallows are probably contaminating the crop much less than they are around it. At the same time, they’re eating pests that are harmful to the crops along the way. In comparison, the three types of sparrows were both present in the field and defecating a lot. 

“For the sparrow, this is a bird that even given its relatively high abundance in these fields, it poops even more often,” says Karp. 

The authors also concluded that the amount of pathogen that a bird species can carry could be determined by the risk of exposure. Species like Canada geese and brown-headed cowbirds that tend to dwell on the ground and around feedlots for livestock are more likely to come into contact with feces that carry E. coli and other bacteria. They might then pick up the those microbes and transport them to produce farms as they move and forage throughout the day.

Meanwhile, insect-eating birds like the yellow warbler that prefer being higher up in the canopies tend to have lower exposure. Smith has found that these species are less likely to carry disease because their natural habitats are relatively cleaner than the ground down below. This could be compounded by the fact that insects aren’t relatively as dirty as the grain that cattle and poultry are contaminating on ground.

Identifying key traits in bird species that serve as vectors for these harmful pathogens makes it easier to utilize safer food-handling techniques without affecting biodiversity and sustainability efforts.

“The exposure trait about livestock tells us something about how these birds are getting the pathogens, but also the kinds of birds that you would expect to be worried about,” says Karp. On the flip side, the diet indicator could suggest that certain avian species are actually beneficial for plants and farms. 

For Karp, this information is useful in creating more targeted schemes to evaluate which birds are harmful and whether their presence should be managed on specific farms. Deterrents such as screamers, sound cannons, or even falconry could be used to shoo away pathogen-carrying species. 

“This kind of targeted management gets us toward a more win-win situation, where we’re sort of benefiting conservation, and then getting some of those pests benefits, but then not worrying too much about the food safety risks,” Karp says. 

[Related: How to clean your bird feeders and baths for salmonella]

Sadhana Ravishankar, professor of food safety at the University of Arizona, stresses that while understanding who the predominant carriers of disease are, being able to deter them is another story. “Farmers can probably take precautionary measures, but nature is so vast. How effective can these controls be?” she says.

Other than scale, a lack of established controls is another food safety issue. “A lot of research needs to be done before you can come up with scientifically sound metrics,” Ravishankar says. Without these guidelines, farmers have an even tougher job of regulating what is or isn’t safe for consumption. 

Karp, however, plans to continue to refine his analysis by focusing on looking at how long a pathogen  lingers once it’s reached the crops. “Does it actually survive in the food?” he says. “Is it there for a couple of hours? Or is it there for weeks, in which case you’d be more worried about it when harvest time comes?”

From a bird lover’s perspective, his co-author Smith is interested in managing agricultural systems in a way that’s good both for people and biodiversity. She hopes to figure out which birds are risky so that US farms can be more sustainable and safe for a kid snacking on an apple and the swallows swooping through the sky.

The post These bird species are most likely to contaminate our fruits and veggies appeared first on Popular Science.

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