Hannah Wallace

Climate-friendly wine: Four tips for sustainable drinking

If you’re concerned about the climate crisis and you drink wine, there are some things you need to know. Curl up with a glass and read our guide.

I wrote this article for Imagine 5, a new Europe-based storytelling platform inspiring you to live a planet-friendly life. 

 

It’s bleakest January, snow covering the sidewalks, and you see a watermelon in the grocery store. You don’t have to be a sustainability expert to see there’s an issue here: we know that produce shipped from far away has a higher footprint than local, seasonal food.

But what about wine? After all, the wine section of any store is a veritable tour of the planet. Can it be kind to the planet at the same time?

“Growing grapes and making wine is probably one of the lowest impact agriculture crops in the world,” says wine climatologist Greg Jones, Ph.D., who recently became the CEO of Abacela, his family’s winery in Southern Oregon. But “the fact that wine is shipped all over the world is just as bad as the watermelon being in a store in New York City in January.”

Working out the real impact of the wine you drink – all the way from the grapes to the bottle to the truck that brought it to your local store – requires paying a little attention. Lucky for you, there’s a lot more “sustainable” wine now than ever—and data from International Wine & Spirits Research shows that consumers are willing to pay more for it. So, refill your glass. Here’s our guide.

1. Buy locally-made wines

When it comes to food, most climate warriors know that, as well as avoiding the foods with the biggest climate impact, like most beef and dairy, it helps to buy food that is grown locally and in season. If your food comes from a nearby farm or ranch, you’re reducing the “food miles” that it takes to get it from its source to your dinner plate.

But while we’ve learned to value local food, that’s not how we tend to look at wine. “We’re in a system that’s selling geography,” says Greg Jones of Abacela. “Wines should be bought locally just like everything else should be.” 

If you live in a state like Oregon, California, Washington – or even New York, Texas, or Virginia – that has a wine industry, you’re in luck. Buy directly from local winemakers or from shops that feature them. If you don’t, try to find wines that are from your region. 

But here comes an important caveat. Most wine from overseas is transported by ship, so it’s less carbon intensive than if it were flown. “Far more important are the road miles—a bottle of wine transported by road across the U.S. will have the highest footprint, no matter where it was originally shipped from,” says Mike Berners-Lee in his book The Carbon Footprint of Everything.

2. Buy wines without chemical inputs 

Pesticides and herbicides used in agriculture seep into our waterways, contaminating ecosystems and building up in creatures, some of which we eventually consume. They’re also dangerous to the workers who farm the vineyards. In the U.S., there are at least three different farming certifications that eschew chemical inputs and commercial fertilizers.

“Anything with a ‘cide’ appended to it [herbicide, pesticide, fungicide] is intended to kill things,” says Eric Lemelson, owner of Lemelson Vineyards, one of the first Oregon vineyards to be certified organic. “And we are a biological life form, so I don’t want my crew spraying something that I wouldn’t want to spray myself. Period. End of story.” Lemelson’s vineyards were certified organic in 2004.

“Organic grapes don’t automatically mean organic wine”

A wine made with organic grapes (certified by a third-party organization that works with the United States Department of Agriculture), means that most synthetic pesticides, herbicides or any chemical fertilizers are forbidden in the vineyard. Organic grapes don’t automatically mean organic wine: to get a wine certified organic, a winemaker must go a step further, not using any sulfites during bottling. (Sulfites, also known as sulfur dioxide, are a chemical compound that preserve freshness and prevent oxidation.) 

The United States also has over 80 biodynamic vineyards, certified by an organization called Demeter. These eschew synthetic pesticides and fertilizers, and also stick to a further set of guidelines. Biodynamic wineries must integrate livestock and compost on their vineyards, to increase the fertility of the soil, plant cover crops, and use approved natural methods to look after soil and plant health.

Like with the ‘organic’ label, biodynamic grapes don’t automatically mean biodynamic wine. To call your wine biodynamic you also need to use no imported yeasts, no pasteurization, no plastic containers as storage vessels, and a limited amount of sulfite for bottling, among other strictures.

If you’re a wine drinker, you’ve probably noticed the term natural wine on restaurant menus and at wine shops lately. While there’s no universal definition or set of requirements for natural wine, the ethos is simple: sourcing organically-grown fruit and using minimal intervention in the cellar. Most mass-produced wine is made with additives, ranging from added sugar and dry powdered fish bladder (for fining purposes) to something called Mega Purple (a grape concentrate used to “plump up” the color of a pale red wine and add a jammy flavor). And because there are no labeling requirements in the United States, these don’t need to be disclosed on the bottle. Natural winemakers eschew such additives, even relying on native yeasts instead of commercial yeasts. Occasionally natural wines have a cloudy appearance or a funky flavor, but in the best hands it yields a fantastic terroir-focused vintage.

And finally there are regenerative wineries. The Regenerative Organic Alliance, formed in 2017, has certified 19 regenerative wineries both in the U.S. and abroad. Like organic and biodynamic viticulture, regenerative has a ban on synthetic pesticides, herbicides and chemical fertilizers. But it also includes measures to minimize disturbances to the soil, and to ensure animal welfare and social justice.

They even do a worker audit to ensure that people are being paid fairly, that there’s a pathway for filing grievances without fear of retribution, and that there’s no child labor. Some of the U.S. wineries to receive certification are Grgich Hills Estates in Napa Valley, Tablas Creek in Paso Robles, California and Ambar Estate and Troon Vineyards, both in Oregon. 

There are also plenty of wineries that farm regeneratively, without tilling (which releases carbon into the atmosphere) or using synthetic pesticides, but that don’t go to the expense of getting certified, so talk to your winemaker or wine shop owner.

3. Buy wine from vineyards that don’t irrigate

Grapevines, like all plants, require a certain amount of water to flourish. Traditionally, in the Old World wine regions of France, Italy, Germany, and Spain, supplementing with irrigation was — and still is — a no-no. In fact, in France, your appellation d’origine contrôlée (AOC) — the industry’s stamp of terroir — is revoked if you irrigate. In Italy, recent droughts have forced officials to relax the rules, but the philosophy is that adding unnatural quantities of water meddles with a wine’s unique expression of place.

In the United States there is no such rule, and watering means bigger yields and bigger profits, so vineyards here tend to be irrigated — even in regions like Oregon’s Willamette Valley, which gets an average of 35-63 inches (89-160cm) of rain per year.

“What people who irrigate don’t really want to talk about is that they get their vines in production quicker and they get a bigger crop by irrigating,” says John Paul, founder and owner of Cameron Winery in the Willamette Valley’s famed Dundee Hills. “That immediately alerts you that that fruit probably isn’t so great.

Paul and Russ Raney at Evesham Wood co-founded Oregon’s Deep Roots Coalition back in 2004. Today, the coalition is a group of 45 Oregon and California winemakers who pledge not to irrigate their vineyards, except in the first three years of establishing new vines. (If the winemaker doesn’t own a vineyard, they pledge to source grapes only from non-irrigated vineyards.) The Deep Roots Coalition can therefore include wineries like Brick House and Johan that own their own vineyards as well as urban wineries such as Love & Squalor and Teutonic. You can find member wines in top wine shops.

Climate concerns were a motivating factor in founding Deep Roots — and a recent investigation by the New York Times showing that aquifers are being depleted nationwide, especially in Oregon, makes judicious use of water even more urgent. 

But there’s another reason to buy wines made from dry-farmed grapes. Both Paul and Raney (who died in 2022) believe that dry farming yields more complex-tasting wines — in part because the vine roots go deep into the soil to seek out moisture, minerals, and microbiota. Irrigating not only prevents the true expression of terroir, Paul believes, it results in fruit that contains more sugar, which translates to higher-alcohol wines. (Not necessarily a good thing if you’re looking for a complex, terroir-driven wine.)

Dry farming is also a sensible approach if you want to be resilient in the face of climate change. Since non-irrigated vines sink deeper into the soil in search of moisture, they tend to do better in dry, drought-like conditions than vines that rely on artificial irrigation. 

“You know, when the water’s gone, the game’s up,” says Paul.

4. Pick sustainable packaging

According to a 2014 study commissioned by the Wine Institute in California, glass bottles account for 29% of wine’s carbon footprint — the single biggest factor. As a result, there’s been a lot of buzz around boxed wine lately. There are indeed environmental virtues to “bag-in-box” wines. For one: It is lighter than glass and therefore takes less fuel to transport. That said, each cardboard box is lined with an aseptic bag that contains three different types of plastic. Just like most potato chip bags, this wine bag has a foil-based liner and is therefore not recyclable. 

Traditionally, wine has come in glass bottles, which are infinitely recyclable. That said, not every state has a robust recycling program like Oregon does. And making new glass is energy-intensive. 

A new reusable wine bottle company called Revino is hoping to make wine more sustainable. Keenan O’Hern and co-founder Adam Rack have created a bottle that can be cleaned and reused up to 50 times. This not only reduces waste, it provides a local and affordable source of glass bottles, and obviates the need for ordering new glass bottles from, say, China. The bottles, which will be made by O-I Glass at one of two west coast plants, will also be slightly lighter than the average 500 gram wine bottle.

“Light-weighting is an exceptional step towards sustainability—it’s what everyone should be doing and practicing. But what if you could lightweight and also have a reusable bottle?” asks O’Hern. “What if you could do both those things and have the most sustainable solution on the shelf because you’re reusing it?” 

So far, 60 Oregon wineries have signed on including Bethel Heights, Cameron, and Et Fille. Revino’s bottles are already in use; Revino will start collecting bottles from winery tasting rooms this summer, delivering them to their wash facility for a thorough cleaning. Then Revino vans will re-deliver the bottles to member wineries, and so on. Wineries will receive a 10-cent credit for each bottle returned through Revino’s pick-up route.

One Canadian life cycle assessment, written by Julian Cleary and published in the Journal of Cleaner Production, found that a reusable glass wine bottle had 83% less emissions than the lightweight single-use glass wine bottle. A report by the Belgian nonprofit Reloop, based on 32 research articles, found that bag-in-box wines were responsible for less carbon emissions when the wine was transported over long distances (500 km, or 311 miles) but at 100km (61 miles), the two were matched – and that’s before you even start to consider the non recyclable waste from those bags. 

If all this talk of packaging, plastic, and transport takes you away from the romance we all associate with wine, never fear. With a reusable wine bottle, you’ll still be able to deftly uncork the bottle and pour it into your loved one’s glass. Just save the corks: there are plenty of ways to re-use or recycle them.

Could You Transform Your Yard into a Flourishing Wildlife Haven?

Through Backyard Habitat Certification, individuals strive to make even the smallest outdoor spaces more biodiverse. Those changes add up. 

I wrote this article for Reasons to be Cheerful in late April, 2024.

 

Four years ago, Melody Murray started noticing these cute signs in her Portland, Oregon neighborhood of Sullivan’s Gulch. Posted in residents’ front yards, the signs read: “Certified Backyard Habitat” with a drawing of a black, red and white spotted towhee sitting on a leafy branch. 

“I didn’t know what they were for,” says the Ohio native who moved to Oregon in 1994. Her curiosity piqued, she went online and quickly found out: The Backyard Habitat Certification began as a joint project of Columbia Land Trust and Portland Audubon (now called the Bird Alliance of Oregon) to encourage urban residents to garden without pesticides, plant native plants and remove invasive species. All of these practices support a flourishing community of native birds, insects and other wildlife. 

Trillium in Melody Murray’s yard. Courtesy of Melody Murray

When Murray lucked into a one-acre property in the Cully neighborhood in 2021, she joined the Facebook group “Friends of Backyard Habitats,” where she lurked for a while until she felt ready to sign up. Because she and her partner had already cleared away invasive plants like ivy and vinca (periwinkles) — and planted an array of native trees, shrubs and plants — they got certified at the “Silver” level as soon as the Backyard Habitat technician could come for a site visit.  

“It was super easy for me because I had already made an effort to remove the ‘bad guys,’” says Murray, who was already a skilled gardener. “There were other bad guys. But I had enough native stuff that it tipped the balance.”

Since the Backyard Habitat program launched in 2009, 14,000 properties have enrolled in the Portland metro area. (It covers Clackamas, Clark, Multnomah and Washington counties.) The program began as a pilot project in the Southwest hills neighborhood as a way to get neighbors to keep their ivy and blackberry plants from crawling over fences. The habitat signs were a helpful incentive from the start, along with certification, resources and discounts. It worked so well, says Peterson, that the city of Portland wanted to take it city-wide. That’s when Portland Audubon came in as a partner.

After Melody Murray and her partner cleared away invasive plants and planted an array of native trees, shrubs and plants, they got certified at the “Silver” level. Credit: Backyard Habitat Certification Program

 The program, which costs no more than $45 to join, is relatively straightforward. (There’s a sliding scale so that people who can’t afford $45 can pay less. There’s also an option to pay more than $45 to pay it forward.) Once a resident fills out an enrollment form and pays the fee, a habitat technician will come to their house for a site visit. They’ll look closely at the resident’s yards — contrary to the name, the certification covers not just a person’s backyard but front and side yards, as well — and give pro tips on creating habitat for wildlife, managing stormwater, decreasing pesticide use and removing nuisance weeds. They also recommend ways to increase the percentage of “naturescaped areas.” Naturescaping is a gardening practice which emulates nature, so the idea is to select plants that are native, in this case, to the Willamette Valley ecoregion. These plants have adapted to the local climate and are naturally resistant to pests and diseases. They also provide food and shelter to support the entire life cycles of pollinators and birds they have evolved with. As a bonus — and a win for lazy gardeners — they require less maintenance and help manage stormwater. The Backyard Habitat program also asks that each participant have at least three native canopy layers present. (Canopy layers are composed of tall shrubs, small shrubs, and groundcover.) 

Getting rid of nuisance weeds is important because they smother and kill native plants, which local wildlife depend on. One of the most commonly found in gardens in the Portland area is ivy (all cultivars). Though it can look beautiful — who doesn’t like an ivy-draped railing? — it can damage trees and shrubs (which it can completely engulf, eventually killing them), increase erosion and degrade habitat. The one habitat they’re good for is rodents, which love to hide in the ivy.  A good native alternative to ivy is oxalis (a.k.a. redwood sorrel), an edible perennial that flowers, or wild strawberry (though it requires full sun to fruit). 

All these changes and additions can be intimidating at first. Patrice Ball first applied for certification in 2015. She had just been widowed and she wanted to honor her late husband, who had been a gardener. But after the site visit she felt overwhelmed by all the requirements. She didn’t tackle the invasive plants and eventually sold that house and moved to a smaller one that fit her needs better. 

Patrice Ball was pleasantly surprised to learn that her non-native hibiscus tree was not a
deal-breaker for certification. Courtesy of Patrice Ball

At the new property, she began gardening in earnest, with more attention to natives. “I thought, ‘Maybe someday I’ll apply for that,’” she says. One day, she was visiting a friend who had Backyard Habitat Certification and saw a banana tree in her yard. “I said, ‘Now wait a minute. That’s not native,’” she recalls. The friend informed her that certification doesn’t require you to have all native plants, just a certain percentage of your plantable yard. For Silver, that’s just five percent. (Gold is 15 percent and Platinum — much harder to reach — is 50 percent.) In 2022, when a technician came to do a site visit, Ball was pleasantly surprised to hear that she only had to do a few more things. 

“When she left, I thought, OK, I have a shot at this!” That fall and the spring of 2023, Ball added the things the technician suggested. In the summer another technician came out to do the second inspection. “I was a little nervous,” Ball recalls. “I thought I’d get the lowest of the three rankings. At the end of the visit, he was like, ‘Congratulations: you got the Gold certification!’” 

Ball had lived in Belize and for nostalgia’s sake she had also planted a hibiscus tree (not native to the Pacific Northwest). Hers was in full bloom at the time of the second site visit, and the technician asked if she could pose in front of it for the official photo, which he’d then put up on the Backyard Habitat social media. “I said, ‘But it’s not native!’ And he said, ‘That’s OK!’” recalls Ball. “Mainly he was like, ‘You’ve done a really good job, you have a water feature, there’s no lights to confuse the birds at night, you have really happy birds.’”  

A flicker nesting in Melody’s yard. Courtesy of Melody Murray

At the initial assessment, the technician provides a folder full of materials including a native plants brochure, a native plant tracking sheet and coupons for discounts at local nurseries. When they send their site report, the technician also includes a bunch of resources including a link to the Portland Plant List, which is a great way to find native plants and identify nuisance plants, and a link to the Friends of Backyard Habitats Facebook group. 

It was a fun project for Murray, who may sign up for Backyard Habitat’s Open Garden tour (where others can tour your garden). “I have a ton of vine maple. I’ve got a couple if native roses. Every variety of Oregon grape you can imagine, Kinnikinnick, a lot of manzanita,” she says. “I’ve also got camas, penstemon, and Oregon white oak.” As if she couldn’t contain her excitement, Murray went on: “I’ve got huckleberry, native blueberries, native blackberries — not the Himalayan ones. Native rhododendrons, serviceberry. Cascara. A whole bunch of different kinds of ferns — every kind of fern you could imagine.” 

Having a flourishing yard is just one reward. The other? “My birds and insects have really ticked upwards in a big way!”  

The Movement To 'Make America Rake Again'

The roar of leaf blowers has long been ubiquitous in fall. But as more US cities ban the gas-powered devices, that’s starting to change. 

I wrote this piece for Reasons to be Cheerful in January.  

Ten years ago, when Michael Hall retired as dean of students at the Pacific Northwest College of Art and began to spend more time at home, he noticed an ear-splitting noise — something he’d never been around during the day to hear. “The neighbor’s contractor was rattling my windows and assaulting my ears!” he says. One day, he went out and met the contractor at the curb and said, “Can you dial back on the leaf blower? There’s only 10 feet between our houses and it’s really a nuisance.” The contractor responded, “If you kept better care of that side of your house, I wouldn’t have to do that.”  

That launched Hall on a mission that he’s still leading to this day. “At first I started out as Don Quixote out there, tilting at windmills,” says Hall, who describes himself as an old Berkeley hippie. Today he’s not only a co-chair of Quiet Clean PDX, a grassroots organization that’s pushing to ban the use of gas-powered leaf blowers city-wide, but part of a growing national movement. More than 100 US cities have banned gas-powered leaf blowers and over 45 different organizations across the country are part of the Quiet Clean Alliance, from Quiet Clean Philly to Quiet Clean Seattle.  

Michael Hall. Courtesy of Quiet Clean PDX

Not only do gas-powered leaf blowers create extreme noise pollution — the most powerful can produce sounds of up to 100 decibels of low-frequency noise, around the same as a Boeing 737 taking off — they are also an environmental menace and a threat to human health. Most have what’s called a “two-stroke engine,” an outmoded design that burns a mix of gas and oil (for lubrication). It’s been shown that because this type of equipment doesn’t have catalytic converters, only two-thirds of the gas and oil mix is burned as fuel. The rest is emitted as toxic fumes of nitrogen oxides and volatile organic compounds (VOCs), two of the main ingredients in ground-level ozone, which both trigger asthma attacks and contribute to premature death. In fact, according to the California Air Resources Board, a single operator using a gas leaf blower for one hour generates the same smog-forming emissions as one car driving 1,100 miles. These small devices also leak formaldehyde and benzene, both of which are known carcinogens. And the people who are most impacted by these toxic fumes? The lawn care workers who use them, many of whom are from lower socio-economic backgrounds. After that, children, the elderly and anyone who is ill are the most impacted — and unlike landscapers, they aren’t wearing protective gear. 

Finally, these relatively small devices also emit tons (literally) of carbon dioxide, the leading cause of global warming. According to the latest data from the EPA, fossil fuel-powered lawn equipment (including not just leaf blowers but trimmers, mowers, weedwackers, etc.) emits 30 million tons of carbon dioxide in the US each year — more than the amount of greenhouse gases that Los Angeles produced in 2021. 

Oregon's Not-to-miss Willamette Valley Wine Scene

I wrote about the new guard of young and diverse winemakers in the Willamette Valley for Bloomberg Pursuits. 

Here's a tease:

I’m in McMinnville (population: 34,000), in the heart of Oregon wine country, sharing pizza with the Mayor. As we chat about how she got into politics, she greets every person who walks past our table at Mac Market by name. 42-year old Remy Drabkin is not your typical mayor of a small agricultural town. First, she’s queer. Second, she’s been a winemaker since 2006, known for her Italian-style reds including an estate Lagrein. When Drabkin was young, her mom cooked at Nick’s Italian Café, where all the winemakers hung out. She’d have Thanksgiving with the Lett family (of Eyrie). 4th of July was at the Adelsheims. At the tender age of 14, she worked harvest at Ponzi, where idolized the Ponzi daughters. That’s when she cemented her aspirations to be a winemaker. Today, at her 29-acre property in the Dundee Hills, she has 7 acres planted and sources fruit from other vineyards.

Back then, in the mid-90s, Oregon wine pioneers like the Letts and the Ponzis knew what the rest of the world is waking up to now. The soil and climate of Oregon’s Willamette Valley—the elements that make up terroir—yields grapes that make some of the finest wines in the world. These families and others who arrived decades earlier are still making incredible wines. But Oregon’s wine industry has grown dramatically over the past fifty years—today, there are over 700 wineries in the Willamette Valley, the 150-mile long area that runs from Portland to Eugene. And over the past 15 years a new crop of winemakers—many from different cultural and racial backgrounds—have entered the scene. From a Black former sommelier from Per Se to a Japanese immigrant who started her career in Germany, these and others are injecting a new energy into the Valley. They’re also attracting a younger, more diverse audience to the region.

“I’m aware that just by showing up, I challenge the status quo,” says André Hueston Mack, winemaker at Maison Noir. “There are not a lot of people like me who do what I do.” Mack, like many of the newer faces of Oregon wine I spoke to for this story, does not own land. But he has forged connections with vineyard owners and buys fruit from them, cheekily calling the resulting bottlings OPP (Other People’s Pinot).

Continue reading here.   Or see here for a PDF version of the final story. Download 14 Best Wineries Hotels and Restaurants in Oregon’s Willamette Valley - Bloomberg 

 

Doing What Comes Naturally

At Hiyu Wine Farm in Hood River, Oregon, a commitment to permaculture yields wild and complex field blends and a well-set winemaker's table. 

My piece on Hiyu is in the April issue of Food & Wine, with absolutely stunning photographs by Eva Kolenko. 

 

The farmhouse and hilly vineyards at Hiyu Wine Farm in Hood River, Oregon. 
PHOTO: EVA KOLENKO

The first time I met winemaker Nate Ready, he was pouring his wines at Pairings wine bar in Portland, Oregon. With his long salt-and-pepper beard and intense yet humble manner, Ready reminded me of a cross between Rasputin and a young Dumbledore — if Dumbledore were a wizard of wine. I’d tasted natural wines before (that is, wines made from organic grapes using native yeast and minimal intervention), but these, from Hiyu Wine Farm in the Columbia River Gorge, were remarkable. One was a field blend of red varietals, another was a pét-nat, and yet another was an orange wine that had had skin contact for 100 days. They had one thing in common: They all tasted alive.

“You taste his wines, and they are unlike anything on the West Coast,” says Brian McClintic, founder and owner of Viticole, a wine club that creates custom blends with organic producers here and abroad. “You can’t really compare them to anything; they’re so distinctive.”

Whereas some winemakers see a division between winemaking and farming, for Ready, the two are inseparable. When you visit Hiyu, high above the Hood River, you get the impression right away that Ready and his co-founder, China Tresemer, work using the principles of biodynamic farming. Plump pigs joyfully stampede down the slope of the vineyard, and ducks, speckled guinea fowl, and Dexter cows keep the grasses down and fertilize the vines. Their guiding philosophy, however, is permaculture, an even more holistic way of farming that uses a diversity of plants and animals to create resiliency. The farm, a former pear orchard with a view of Mount Hood, evokes an English smallholding farm. McClintic, with a nod to J.R.R. Tolkien, calls it “Shire-y.”

Tresemer and Ready grow 112 varietals of grapes on the property. (Most vineyards grow only a handful.) And most of Hiyu’s vineyard is planted with field blends. An Old World practice of planting varieties together in the same plot and then co-fermenting the grapes together to make a wine, field blends are rare in U.S. viticulture today. But this wasn’t always the case. Pre-Prohibition, Ready says, most vineyards were planted this way. After drinking wine from old California vineyards that were planted with field blends and also seeing Marcel Deiss in Alsace successfully convert his sites from monovarietals to field blends, Ready was convinced it made sense here. He and his winemaking team also forage other fruits from the property and co-ferment them with grapes to make beverages that blur the distinction between cider and wine. One, called Espina, used a wine base that Tresemer made in 2017 with Pinot Gris grapes from vines that had been trained so they climbed up the trunks of fruit trees. She co-fermented the grapes with the fruits that grew in the hedgerows beneath: pears, elderberries, blackberries, plums, and rose hips. The second component of Espina was a wine made in 2018 — pears fermented on the skins of Gewürztraminer and barrel-aged for two years. Finally, whole blackberries and plums were added to a vat of fermenting pears, and the fruit was macerated on the skins for two weeks before pressing. In 2020, Hiyu’s two farm fellows, Kathline Chery and Yakira Batres, blended these three components together to make the resulting wine. The Hiyu team made a second version of Espina last spring.

To experience Hiyu to its fullest, you need to visit the farm, as I did, for a tour of the 30-acre property and a wine-tavern lunch. Ready or Tresemer will lead you through the farm — from the “forest garden” to the pear orchard, which provides fruit for an eau-de-vie and various other concoctions like Espina. You’ll wander the vineyards, which are populated by the aforementioned speckled guinea fowl, Dexter cows, and pigs — the latter a cross, I learned, between Kunekune and American Guinea Hogs.

Ready’s field blends, like Corvus and Falcon Box, are wild and complex. But even his more affordable Smockshop Band wines are creatively ambitious and delicious. The Smockshop Band Columbia Valley Red is a blend of more than 50 varieties from four different vineyards, and it was fermented in a myriad of ways, with most of the grapes in barrels for three to five years. It’s a multidimensional wine that has the fruit-forwardness of a Pinot yet a deeper, spicier, more tannic side as well. And it’s a mere $44 a bottle; not inexpensive, but given the labor involved in making it, a bargain.

A springtime glass at Hiyu Wine Farm. EVA KOLENKO

Such wines must be enjoyed with food. The meal my friend and I had — snap peas with pancetta over maltagliati pasta with porcini; luscious pork belly and black garlic; and lettuces with charred garlic scapes and a green goddess dressing — was unfussy and delicious. In-house chef Jason Barwikowski has been with Hiyu since the very beginning, and he’s as inventive in the kitchen as Ready is in the vineyard and cellar. Almost all of the ingredients for his dishes come from the farm. Periodically, Ready came outside to pour us another taste of wine in our elegant handblown Zalto glasses. Before dessert, he arrived with a plate of Adarre cheese with a lush persimmon from the very tree Tresemer had pointed out earlier. As we tucked into our last course, a financier with apple butter, a crew of big jolly pigs ran down the vineyard’s slope. We raised our glasses to the pigs, who, like us, were living life to its fullest here at Hiyu.

The Snack Bag of the Future Won’t Be Made from Plastic

Companies from Frito-Lay to Kettle Chips are experimenting with corn starch, calcium carbonate and other materials that eschew plastic but preserve taste.

I wrote this story for Bloomberg Green. 

Florencio Cuétara is the kind of person who crosses the street to tell people to pick up their litter. One day, Cuétara, an avid diver, was swimming in the Mediterranean when he came across a plastic cookie bag. “This bag hits me in the face as I’m swimming. And I’m cursing whoever put it in there, as if it’s somebody else’s fault,” Cuétara says. “Then I realized that the bag was one of my bags — with my last name on it.” 

Cuétara’s family business is Switzerland-based snack company Cuétara Foods, which makes 25 brands of cookies, biscuits and crackers sold all over the world. For Florencio, who was CEO for the Americas at the time, that moment was a turning point. “I was like, ‘I want to blame everybody else for this,” he says. “But I’m not an innocent party here. I’m part of the problem.’” 

Most bags for potato chips and other crispy snacks are made with three layers of polymer materials: a moisture barrier on the inside (usually biaxially oriented polypropylene), low-density polyethylene in the middle and an outer layer of thermoplastic resin. From an environmental standpoint, polymers — like all plastics — have two marks against them: They’re made from petroleum, and they’ll never decompose.

 

Today, according to the UN Environment Programme, humans produce about 400 million tons of plastic waste every year. Half of that is single-use plastic, like potato chip bags, that ends up in landfills or in waterways, where it breaks down into microplastics that are consumed by aquatic life, and eventually by people. At the behest of consumers and under the shadow of potential regulation, snack companies big and small are now looking for a way to break that cycle with alternative packaging materials. The only question is who will succeed. 

The great repackaging

Florencio Cuétara swam into his cookie bag in 2015, setting off a four-year quest to find a different packaging material that didn’t rely on fossil fuels. In 2019, Cuétara and Dr. Russ Petrie, an orthopedic surgeon in California, founded Okeanos, which uses calcium carbonate to create bags for snacks, rice, coffee and salt, as well as wraps for flowers. 

Calcium carbonate (CaCO3), a mineral naturally found in stone or rocks, has been used as a filler in packaging before, but only in small percentages. Cuétara and Petrie developed a technology they called “Made from Stone” that is up to 70% calcium carbonate; the rest is made of resin. The company’s bags are both flexible and light — they float on water — and the technology is now used by manufacturers in 15 countries including Brazil, India, Canada, the Philippines and the US. “We were called crazy a number of times,” Cuétara says. 

A flower wrap using Made from Stone packaging.

Courtesy of Okeanos

For Sean Mason and Mark Green, co-founders of British crisps company Two Farmers, it took five years to find a packaging material that would both biodegrade and keep their chips crunchy. “Obviously the single-use plastic that’s in crisp packets is blighting the landscape and the seas,” Mason says. 

Mason also saw a need for consistency. Two Farmers sources all of its potatoes from Green’s farm in Herefordshire, where cover-cropping (planting a crop like clovers or alfalfa after the cash crop) is used to nourish the soil. The farm also has an anaerobic digester that converts farm waste into bio-methane — which in turn produces more than enough electricity to run the entire operation. “Our difference was sustainable farming, so we thought we should see that through to the crisp bag,” Mason says.  

When it came to identifying an alternative material, though, Mason and Green were stumped. First, they considered cardboard boxes. “We suddenly realized that we would still have to put a plastic bag inside to keep it fresh,” Mason says. “So we were effectively just over-packaging; packaging for packaging’s sake.” Next they looked at tins — “too expensive and probably too much waste for a small 40-gram packet.” Finally, at a packaging trade show they came across eucalyptus cellulose films in their raw state, and started talking to the producers about their potential for crisps bags. 

What on Earth?

The duo found a laminator, which helped them figure out how to add plant-based glues and inks for printing. After producing the film, they sent it off to TŪV Austria — a third-party certifier that verifies whether packaging is compostable — to have it tested for compostability and eco-toxicity. Following some trial and error, their material passed muster, and in 2019 Two Farmers officially launched its gourmet potato chips in 100% compostable packaging made from eucalyptus cellulose. Mason, who credits David Attenborough’s Blue Planet II with helping put single-use plastics on Brits’ radar, says his company’s bags take 30 to 36 weeks to decompose in home composting systems, or 11 weeks in an industrial composter. 

The eucalyptus film is much more expensive than plastic — over 10 times the cost, to be exact — and each packet retails for £1.20 ($1.40). But quality hasn’t been an issue: Last year, Two Farmers’ Woodland Mushroom & Wild Garlic and Herefordshire Sausage & Mustard flavors won the Great British Food award in the Savoury Snacks category. 

Big Chip

There are thousands of companies making snacks all over the world, but any progress on plastic packaging will have to involve a few big ones. In the world of US potato chips, for example, Frito-Lay, a division of PepsiCo Inc., has a whopping 60% of the market share, according to data analytics firm IRI Worldwide.  

Frito-Lay North America began its own foray into alternative packaging over a decade ago, with the 2009 debut of a 100% compostable bag for SunChips. Made from 90% polylactic acid, the bag was notoriously noisy when opened or handled — up to 95 decibels, by some accounts — and Frito-Lay discontinued it in 2010. 

Frito-Lay has made quieter headway since, and the company has a goal of making all of its packaging 100% recyclable, compostable, biodegradable or re-usable by 2025. In 2021, it debuted a bag made of 85% polylactic acid — typically composed of corn starch — for two of its Off the Eaten Path veggie chips. (The rest is made of aluminum coatings, inks and adhesives.) 

The Off the Eaten Path bag is industrially compostable, which means it can be put into city compost systems. The bags can also be sent back via a free shipping label to New Jersey-based TerraCycle, which partners with Frito-Lay on the venture. (Though questions have been raised about the effectiveness of TerraCycle’s plastics recycling program, which involves third-party facilities.)

“We’re going through a test and learn phase [with Off the Eaten Path] as we work towards our ultimate goal of designing 100% of our packaging to be either recyclable, compostable, biodegradable or re-usable,” says David Allen, vice president and chief sustainability officer for Pepsi-Co Foods North America. 

Also in the US, Salem, Oregon-based Kettle Foods Inc., which makes the popular Kettle Chips brand, will debut a Made from Stone bag this spring, starting with its sea salt flavor. 

The Off the Eaten Path bag can be put into a city compost system.

Off the Eaten Path

Looming regulations

Companies that aren’t moving towards plastic-free packaging yet may be forced to in the future, as regulators start to step in. Last year, the European Union proposed new rules that would require companies selling products in EU countries to make their packaging easier to reuse, recycle or compost. The rules would also limit unnecessary empty space in packaging, part of an overall goal to to reduce packaging waste by 5% by 2030, compared to 2018 levels. If effective, the EU could set a standard for other nations to follow.

But the hurdles remain enormous, and snack bags are just one piece of a much bigger problem. Most developing countries don’t have recycling or composting facilities, and in the nations that do, those systems are often broken or dysfunctional. The Environmental Protection Agency estimates a US plastic recycling rate of just below 9%, while Beyond Plastics, a project out of Bennington College, pegs it at an even bleaker 5% to 6%. In the EU, almost 38% of plastic was recycled in 2020, and regulations imposed in 2021 halted the sale of the 10 most common plastics to wash up on European beaches, including bottle caps and straws. But addressing plastic packaging writ large will require changes at every part of its life cycle: from raw materials to duration of use to the nature of disposal. “Even with recycling, you increase emissions,” says Cuétara at Okeanos. “And remember: You can only recycle a number of times.” 

Those hurdles are part of why Cuétara says Made from Stone bags are catching on: Packaging manufacturers can keep using their existing equipment, and calcium carbonate is naturally abundant with relatively stable pricing. 

“If somebody came to my potato chip company and said, ‘I want you to change everything and get rid of your suppliers and it’s going to cost you more,’ the answer would be, ‘Thank you, but we have no interest,’” he says. “I have to tell you, there’s been almost no calls of, ‘We don’t want to do it.’ It’s an impossible thing to say no to.’”  

 

 

7 Green Tech Startups With the Innovations—and the Funding—to Help Save the Planet

From growing kelp forests to making packaging out of mushrooms, these companies are reducing greenhouse gas emissions from every angle. 

I wrote this round-up for Inc.'s Carbon Neutral package, in the May/June 2022 issue. 

Entrepreneurs coast to coast are coming up with innovative technologies showing not only that we can live without carbon-based energy, but also that we can thrive without it. From a Maine startup that's growing kelp forests (which can sequester gigatons of CO2 for centuries) to an electric vehicle company in Eugene, Oregon, that's making affordable electric cars with flair, these green tech startups show that our carbon-free future actually looks pretty cool. Wave energy? Batteries to store renewable energy that are more environmentally friendly than lithium? Biodegradable mushroom-based packaging? These aren't merely futuristic notions. They're happening now, and they've got the funding to prove it.

 

A Running Tide kelp microforest.

 

 Courtesy of Running Tide

 

 

 

An Acrimoto FUV.Courtesy of Acrimoto

Arcimoto

Tech: Builds right-size EVs for less than $20,000
Founder: Mark Frohnmayer
Home base: Eugene, Oregon

Not everyone needs--or wants--a Tesla. Arcimoto is on a mission to democratize electric vehicles. The startup, founded in 2007, makes a series of right-size EVs that are ideal for urban eco-drivers. The Fun Utility Vehicle (FUV), for example, is an open-air (yet covered) car with three wheels. Doors optional. It's ultra efficient and--unlike so many EVs--actually affordable. The company is growing, having just moved into a new 250,000-square-foot plant, a fivefold increase over its former digs. Next off the line will be a series of specialty vehicles, including the Rapid Responder, outfitted with sirens and lights for emergency services, and the Cameo, designed to create a smooth camera vehicle for the film and influencer industries.

Running Tide

Tech: Grows kelp to capture carbon
Founder: Marty Odlin
Home base: Portland, Maine

Like trees, kelp naturally fixes carbon dioxide from the atmosphere--only kelp does it exponentially faster than land-rooted trees and plants. So founder Marty Odlin decided to build a business selling carbon credits around this fact. Running Tide scientists amplify the process by growing the seaweed on wood buoys layered with ground-up seashells that sit on the ocean surface, allowing the plants to capture carbon via photosynthesis. The buoys themselves are made of carbon-rich wood, and when they get waterlogged over the course of several months they sink to the bottom of the ocean--carbon, kelp, and all--where they will sit for centuries. The potential is enormous: Some suggest kelp farms like these, if scaled in our oceans, could collectively sequester over 270 gigatons of carbon. Shopify, Stripe, which just launched a new $925 million carbon removal initiative, and Frontier (along with Alphabet, Meta, and McKinsey) were early purchasers of Running Tide's carbon credits. Chris Sacca's Lowercase Capital is also an investor. The first deployment of algae is happening in late summer 2022, off the coast of Iceland.

Rye Development's Swan Lake Energy Storage Project

Tech: Uses hydropower to store renewable energy
CEO: Paul Jacob
Home base: Boston

Renewable energy sources like wind and solar are critical to our carbon-free future, but since it's not always windy and/or sunny, they require storage mechanisms to green the grid. When it opens in 2026, the Swan Lake energy storage project, based in Klamath County, Oregon, will be the first pumped storage hydropower project built in the U.S. in 30 years. The system uses excess renewable electricity from the grid to pump water to an elevated reservoir, where it sits as stored energy until it's needed. During peak demand, the water is released, spinning turbines that generate electricity. Swan Lake, which is being built by Boston-based Rye Development, will generate 400 megawatts of clean electricity, vastly increasing the storage capacity for the grid's wind and solar electricity.

ESS Energy Warehouse battery system.Courtesy of ESS

Energy Storage Systems

Tech: Builds a better battery
Founders: Julia Song and Craig Evans
Home base: Wilsonville, Oregon

 

These husband-and-wife founders started in their garage in 2011, cooking up so-called "flow" batteries, which store more energy and cost less per kilowatt-hour than lithium-ion cells. That's because they're made of environmentally benign materials: iron, salt, and water. A bonus: Iron batteries have a longer lifespan than lithium batteries--they can operate for 25 years or more with daily use versus lithium ion's 8 to 10 years. This kind of long-duration battery storage, which has been installed at San Diego Gas & Electric and other locations, will be crucial to reliably power a grid that relies on intermittent renewable resources like wind and solar.

 

AquaHarmonics

Tech: Tunes buoys to the waves to generate power
Founders: Alex Hagmuller and Max Ginsburg
Home base: West Linn, Oregon

Solar and wind energy will be essential for a carbon-neutral future, but the amount of time they produce energy is low. Solar produces energy just 25 percent of the time and wind produces energy 35 percent of the time. Wave energy, by contrast, has the potential to produce energy 60 percent of the time, and AquaHarmonics' founders believe they can increase that capacity to at least 80 percent. They will do this by using many smaller devices rather than a single large device as most other wave energy startups have done. Not only are small devices cheaper and easier to deploy, they can also generate more consistent power because they move out of phase with one another. For a variety of reasons, they can also survive storm conditions better than most bigger devices can, and continue to generate similar amounts of power. AquaHarmonics is designing cylindrical buoys with a mooring line that reels in and out with the waves. Depending on where they're deployed, the average capacity is 300 to 600 kilowatts, about the same as a big wind turbine. In 2017, the startup won the $1.5 million Wave Energy Prize and has since received $4.4 million in grants from the Department of Energy. It will soon deploy a device in Hawaii at a Navy Wave energy test site to demonstrate that the technology works. Grid-connected testing should follow in 2023.

 

Harvested air mycelium (left) and a faux leather jacket made from mycelium.Courtesy of Ecovative

Ecovative

Tech: Makes biodegradable packaging from mushrooms
Founders: Eben Bayer and Gavin McIntyre
Home base: Green Island, New York

Polystyrene foam, otherwise known as Styrofoam, is made from petroleum. But what if you could use a plant-based version that you could also break up into bits and throw in your garden, knowing it would become soil in a matter of months? That's the solution pioneered by Ecovative, with its 100 percent natural and biodegradable packaging material made from mushroom mycelium, the root structure of fungi. The company uses a patented growth chamber to guide mycelium into enormous sheets, and then forms it into everything from wine shippers to packaging for beauty brands like Ulta Beauty Retailing. Next up? Projects for the fashion industry including shoe insoles and mycelium leathers. The company, which has licensees in many countries, is ramping up production, with plans to open a 20,000-square-foot facility on the East Coast in August 2022.

Products made with Perfect Day animal-free milk protein.Courtesy of Perfect Day

Perfect Day

Tech: Makes faux milk that's nearly identical to the stuff from cows
Founders: Ryan Pandya and Perumal Gandhi
Home base: Berkeley, California

Methane is 28 times more potent at trapping heat than CO2, and a single dairy cow generates about 220 pounds of the greenhouse gas per year. The founders of Perfect Day engineered a way around the climate-warming impacts of the 10 million-cow strong dairy industry in the lab. By introducing the genetic code for whey protein into a fungus, Trichoderma reesei, they get a whey protein that is molecularly identical to the whey protein in cow's milk. As such, it mimics the creamy mouthfeel of dairy, making it a viable substitute. The protein is already used in a handful of popular ice-cream brands including Midwest ice cream manufacturer Graeter's and the Keto-friendly line Nick's. The company also partners with General Mills on a cream cheese and Betterland and Starbucks on an alt milk that the coffee giant is still trying to name.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Spectacular Comeback of the American Farmers Market

Once ubiquitous, farmers markets nearly vanished in the mid 20th century — until an array of forces converged to bring about their modern-day renaissance.

Fennel, beets, and parsley, at the PSU Farmers' Market; Brussels sprouts on the vine 

Visit the main Portland Farmers Market on any given Saturday morning and you’ll see tables spilling over with rainbow chard, beets, leeks and all kinds of lettuce. You’ll see vendors selling homemade salsa and tortilla chips, and cheesemakers plying their brie. It’s a scene that’s become part of America’s urban fabric. Today, there are over 8,140 farmers markets around the country.

But it wasn’t always this way.

 America’s interest in fresh, local food was well underway by the time Michael Pollan’s influential The Omnivore’s Dilemma became a bestseller in 2006 and Michelle Obama started a kitchen garden at the White House. But just a few decades prior, the beloved farmers’ market was all but extinct in the US. Its near death — and spectacular comeback — shows how social movements, economic shifts and government policy can converge to resurrect a food system that’s healthier for people, the planet and cities themselves.

To continue reading, go to Reasons to be Cheerful. 

 

How San Francisco Cracked the Urban Composting Code

California’s environmental achievements are something to behold. The state ranks first in the U.S. for growth in solar power generation and battery storage. It’s the national leader in cumulative electric vehicle sales and public EV charging stations. And it’s one of a growing number of states that aim to run entirely on carbon-free energy in the coming decades – a goal it briefly met, for about 15 minutes, on April 30.

Now, California is once again setting the pace on a critically important (if somewhat less glamorous) climate imperative: urban composting.

On January 1, a law went into effect making it mandatory for every city and county in California to provide residents a means to separate and recycle their organic waste. The impacts could be enormous – according to climate experts, composting is one of the simplest low-tech measures humans can take to reverse climate change. Allowing food waste to decompose in landfills creates methane, a greenhouse gas dozens of times more potent than carbon dioxide. And landfills are the third-largest source of methane in the U.S. Composting has other benefits as well, from sequestering carbon and helping farmers create drought-resistant crops to creating long-term revenue streams for city governments.  

Yet few big American cities have successful city-wide composting programs, particularly on the East Coast. How does a city fully integrate composting into its sanitation stream? Perhaps nowhere offers as clear a path forward as San Francisco, the first big U.S. city to offer composting to all of its residents. Twenty-six years later, its system remains the gold standard.

Building a system scrap by scrap

In 1990, when curbside recycling was still new to many communities, San Francisco was already recycling over 25 percent of its trash. Nevertheless, the city’s Department of the Environment was concerned about all the garbage still being sent to faraway landfills, so it authorized a “waste characterization” study in 1996 in which engineers looked at exactly what was being sent to the dump. What they found was shocking: 33 percent of it was organic material that could have been composted.

“It was a combination of food scraps, sticks and leaves,” says Robert Reed, public relations manager at Recology, a resource recovery company that partners with the city. “We have 5,000 restaurants here, so we’re generating a lot of food scraps.”

All those scraps add up to a heap of emissions, plus the associated costs of disposal. “When you put materials in a landfill, you eventually fill that landfill and you have to build another landfill. And now you have to ship to greater distances,” says Reed.

So, at the city’s request, Recology, which has collected San Francisco’s refuse since 1921, launched a compost pilot program. It started at the San Francisco Wholesale Produce Market and on residential routes in the Richmond District. Soon after, it expanded to include some large convention hotels. By 2000, it had gone citywide. 

Nine years later, when cities like Seattle were just beginning their voluntary residential composting programs, San Francisco made composting and recycling mandatory for all residents and businesses. 

Mandatory participation scaled things up dramatically. Recology began offering free composting pails, bin labels, signs, multilingual trainings and toolkits for commercial buildings. It also meant occasional fines from the city for non-compliance. All of it was part of the city’s ambitious plan to be “Zero Waste” by 2020.

Today, San Francisco’s pioneering program is world renowned. Over 135 countries have sent delegations to study the city’s compost and recycling systems first hand. The city collects more than 500 tons of compostable materials from its ubiquitous green bins every day, according to Reed, helping to divert some 80 percent of the city’s waste from landfills. All these organic scraps are turned into high-quality compost in just 60 days at a Blossom Valley Organics facility east of the city, and then sold to local farms, vineyards and orchards.

The curbside composting and recycling bins used in San Francisco. Credit: Recology

The revenue from these sales helps offset the cost of the program. “If something goes into the landfill, there’s no sale!” laughs Reed. The system also creates jobs. According to a study by the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, composting sustains four times the number of jobs as landfill or incineration disposal operations. In Maryland, a 2013 study found that composting operations provided more total jobs than the state’s three trash incinerators combined. 

And of course, all that compost enriches the region’s soil with nutrients, minerals and microbes, helping farmers grow healthy crops with fewer commercial fertilizers. Compost also acts as a natural sponge – Pennsylvania’s Rodale Institute found that farms can grow up to 40 percent more food in times of drought when they use compost and follow other organic practices. In the West, where drought is common, this is a boon to both commercial farmers and backyard gardeners. Compost can even mitigate the threat of wildfire by retaining moisture from rain and irrigation. 

All of which begs the question: With the many obvious benefits and few apparent downsides, why, 26 years after San Francisco started composting, haven’t other major cities like New York, Boston, or Chicago followed suit?

New York’s composting conundrum

Not long ago, New York City briefly had its own in-home composting program. In 2015, then New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio introduced a Zero Waste initiative similar to San Francisco’s. Composting was its cornerstone. Pandemic-related budget cuts forced the city to suspend the service in May 2020. But even before that, the program was anemic, only diverting 43,000 tons of food scraps in 2017 – just five percent of the city’s total food waste. 

A New York City curbside composting bin in 2017 before the program was discontinued. Credit: Wikipedia

Theories abound as to what went wrong. One big one has to do with a lack of public outreach. Even the chairman of the city council’s sanitation committee admitted that no one in his own building knew how the system worked. “In my building, we received the brown bins, and some fliers,” he told the New York Times. “I guarantee I’m the only person in my building who knows how to use them.” 

Simply convincing residents to change their long-standing garbage habits was another hurdle. Former NYC Sanitation Commissioner Kathryn Garcia told the Times, “The biggest challenge is asking New Yorkers to do something different.” She related a story about how, when the department was handing out brown bins one man didn’t want one. “But we were handing out compost at the same time, and he definitely wanted the compost. We said, ‘We really need your banana peels in order to make this in the future.’” The man took one of the bins, illustrating the importance of education and outreach.

New York re-launched its composting program in August 2021 in neighborhoods where interest was most concentrated, according to Vincent Gragnani, press secretary at the city’s Department of Sanitation. Soon, there will be 100 bins at schools across the city that can be accessed with a smartphone app or a key card. “Within the next two years, every public school in the city will be separating their organic waste for collection,” Gragnani told RTBC. New Sanitation Commissioner Jessica S. Tisch is in the process of reviewing what has and has not worked with the city’s program in the past, but is not ready to share this publicly.

Can California strike ‘black gold’?

Now, inspired by San Francisco’s trailblazing composting success, California is set to enact statewide composting for all. (Only a small handful of states mandate statewide composting). The goal of the law is to reduce the landfilling of compostable materials by 75 percent by 2025, thereby reducing methane emissions on a massive scale. CalRecycle, the department that oversees the state’s recycling and waste reduction programs, estimates about half of the state’s communities had food and yard waste collection programs at the start of 2022.

“We all have the same goal: to send as little as possible to the landfill,” says Reed. Credit: Sacramento State

There are several things the remaining cities and counties around California can do to emulate San Francisco’s success. One is to stay on message. In 2000, when Recology made green bins available to every resident in San Francisco, the response was mixed. “Some people said, ‘Come and take it back.’ Other people embraced it right away,” recalls Reed. “We were doing a lot of outreach and education in promoting the program and why we think it’s important for people to participate.” 

For instance, San Franciscans speak over 100 different languages, so Recology opted to put photographs on the green bins (in addition to a few words in English, Spanish, and Chinese), showing what can and can’t be composted. The company also produces a customer newsletter that comes with its bills, filled with articles about the benefits of composting and recycling. In addition, Reed, a former reporter, worked closely with journalists to get stories published early on about restaurants embracing composting and vineyards relying on compost from the city. 

But according to Reed, the key to composting success is getting kids on board. “The best way to get adults to compost is to get composting programs running in schools,” he says. Recology donates compost to school gardens, which makes a big impression on children. “Those kids go home and say, ‘Why don’t we compost at home?’ The very next day the dad has a pail on the kitchen counter, and they’re rolling.” 

Prior to the pandemic, classrooms would visit the Recology Environmental Learning Center and even take tours of the composting and recycling plants. During Covid, Recology’s programming for students has shifted online. The company leads virtual field trips via Zoom and has produced educational videos and games about composting and recycling for kids from pre-K to high school. There’s even a “Better at the Bin” coloring book.

Finally, Reed says regular and frequent communication with the city is key to the composting program’s success. Every week, Recology staff members meet with a team from the Department of the Environment. “We all have the same goal: to send as little as possible to the landfill,” Reed says. At these meetings, they compare the tonnage that the city is sending to compost versus sending to the landfill, brainstorm ways of getting more residents to compost, and discuss messaging. 

One conundrum recently tackled in these meetings was how to encourage more participation in apartment buildings, which have lower rates of composting and recycling, and where 65 percent of San Franciscans live. Their solution: recruit volunteers at these buildings to distribute Recology’s monthly newsletter, as well as encourage composting in neighborly ways, like with composting contests or quizzes. “These are very creative people!” says Reed. “They keep composting part of the conversation.” There are now advocates in 100 buildings around the city.  

One of these is Madeleine Trembley, who lives at the Gateway Complex in the city’s Financial District. A year ago, Trembley, who refers to compost reverently as black gold, started a newsletter for her 1,255-unit building called Trash Talk. “The newsletter immediately got a lot of peoples’ attention,” Trembley says. “It was educational, practical. We give tips that people can implement easily, understand easily.” As a result of her newsletter and the topics it covered, more young residents have gotten involved in the Board — and one of them is even making video tutorials about composting to share with residents. “It just makes no sense to create more methane gas to stow it away in the landfill. And I think a lot of people realize that.” 

 

I'll Be There

For Bon Appetit's May issue, I wrote about a new continuing education program for Latinx vineyard workers in Oregon's Willamette Valley.  Currently, the article isn't up on the Bon Appetit website, but here's a PDF: Download Ahivoypiece

 

California’s Floodplains Are Coming Back, and So Are Their Salmon

Farmers and ecologists are partnering to restore the state’s natural flooding patterns, allowing native fish to thrive.

I wrote this story for Reasons to be Cheerful. 

Until just a couple of centuries ago, inland California was a lush tapestry of wetlands and floodplains that nourished a thriving ecosystem of fish. But as the state — and its vast agriculture industry — has grown, its waterways have been modified drastically. Rivers have been drained, fields dried out, levees and dams constructed. These engineering feats, coupled with extreme drought, have decimated natural habitats. Today, a shocking 83 percent of native fish species in the state are in decline.

Chinook salmon is one of these. “Winter runs used to have returns in the hundreds of thousands. Now a good year would be 10,000 fish,” says Andrew L. Rypel, a professor of fish ecology at UC Davis where he co-directs the Center for Watershed Sciences. Today, two of California’s three recognized Chinook salmon runs are listed under the U.S. Endangered Species Act. “We have had years that have just been in the hundreds. It’s a species on the precipice of extinction.”

Now, Rypel and his colleagues are helping the Chinook rebound by working with California rice farmers to recreate the natural floodplains in which the fish used to thrive.

“One of the critical parameters that salmon managers are interested in is out-migration survival. Do they make it to the ocean? And how many?” Credit: Center for Watershed Sciences

The so-called “salmon-rice project” began a decade ago, when a motley group of scientists, rice farmers and conservationists joined together to answer a simple question: if they were to flood rice fields with water from the Sacramento River — effectively mimicking the region’s original ecological rhythms — would juvenile salmon take to the fields and grow? 

First, they conducted some basic experiments to see whether salmon even lived in floodplains. Turns out, they did. The Nigiri Project – which began in the early 2000s, is still ongoing and involves some of the same people working on Rypel’s project — set out to determine whether salmon can survive on rice fields. In Asian countries, freshwater fish are often raised on flooded rice paddies, but it wasn’t known if salmon in particular were suited to that environment.

“The answer was that they not only survive, they grow extremely well,” Rypel says. “The fish were feeding on lush zooplankton that develop off the decomposed rice straws.” Rice straw is a rich source of carbon, and Rypel says that the density of zooplankton (normally microscopic) that develops in these winter-flooded rice plains is so high that you can actually see them with the naked eye, swimming around. 

“It turns out that this kind of food is like an awesome steak for the growing salmon,” he says. UC Davis scientists found that these juvenile salmon survived at high rates in the flooded rice fields — 50 to 80 percent over the course of a month. “That’s excellent for baby fish,” Rypel says. They also grew two to five times faster than they grow in the Sacramento River.

With these data points in hand, Rypel and his colleagues teamed up with the California Rice Commission and California Trout in 2018 and began studying the viability of raising juvenile salmon in small experimental fields. The work was funded, in part, by the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS), a wing of the United States Department of Agriculture that pays farmers and ranchers to do conservation work. 

The researchers found that juvenile salmon grew two to five times faster on the rice fields than they grow in the Sacramento River. Credit: Center for Watershed Sciences

In 2021 the California Rice Commission and the UC Davis scientists got an additional $550,000 grant from NRCS to continue and expand upon their work. (The California Rice Commission and its partners are matching this grant.) Though this is the first year scientists are trying this out on production-scale rice farms, preliminary data is encouraging. For instance, in years like the past one, when the rice fields around the Sacramento River don’t flood naturally, farmers flood their fields with water from the adjacent canals and then scientists stock them with hatchery fish. They then track the fishes’ growth, survival and movements. Data so far indicates that these fish survive at a rate four to five times higher than lab-raised fish. 

In the coming months, they’ll continue to track these hatchery salmon with tiny acoustic transmitters as they make their way out to sea. “One of the critical parameters that salmon managers are interested in is out-migration survival,” Rypel says. “That is: do they make it to the ocean? And how many?” The plan is to track 600 of the salmon to see if they make it to the Golden Gate Bridge and conduct a side-by-side comparison with lab-reared fish of out-migration survival.

 

Rypel says it boils down to two words: Big and early. “Being a baby salmon kind of sucks!” he laughs. “It’s really hard. Most of the fish die. You are dodging predators, you have to migrate a super-long distance. You need fat reserves.” Giving the salmon a head start while they’re still very young can have huge knock-on effects. “We think that by rearing them on these rice fields, we can get fish very big, very quick. If the fish can become smolts [juvenile salmon] earlier in the winter, they can ride the flows better and have better survivorship.”

Raising fish in rice paddies is nothing new. Rice farmers from China, Thailand, India and Northern Vietnam have been doing it for centuries – according to some evidence, for as long as 2,000 years. 

According to Rypel, the unusual collaboration between farmers and ecologists is “a good example of how farms can work together with conservation scientists to make a difference.” Credit: Center for Watershed Science

But the project in California is actually more directly inspired by a series of bird conservation efforts dating back to the late 1980s and early ’90s. At the time, Pacific flyway birds — ducks, snow geese, egrets and all the other migratory birds that over-summer up in Alaska or Canada, and over-winter in the Central Valley — were in decline. For decades, rice farmers in the area regularly burned their leftover rice straw after the fall harvest. “People who lived in the area at that time will remember when the skies were black with smoke,” Rypel says. The air quality was poor, and carbon was being released into the atmosphere, as well.

Residents frustrated by poor air quality campaigned to stop this practice, and in 1991 a state law banned it. “Some smart people got together at that time and figured out that if you re-flooded the rice fields, you could naturally decompose the rice straw,” Rypel says. “At the same time, you could potentially provide habitat for the migratory birds that were on the Pacific flyway.” The NRCS began a program where they paid rice farmers to flood their fields instead of burn them, which was a win for the locals, a win for the birds and a win for the farmers, as it gave them a new revenue stream.

“I’m not a bird ecologist, but I work with a lot of bird scientists who have worked on this, and it’s probably one of the big conservation success stories in our country’s history,” Rypel says.

It was that program’s success that got fish ecologists scratching their heads. “Hey, if you can do this for birds, why can’t you do that for fish?” Rypel recounts. “We’ve got 83 percent of species declining in California. We know salmon use the floodplains. Is there a way to do this with fish?” 

The answer appears to be a resounding yes. There are roughly 500,000 acres of rice under cultivation in the Sacramento Valley. “That’s a lot of habitat that’s potentially on the table there,” notes Rypel. He and his colleagues at UC Davis hope to replicate the model on more farms in years to come. “It’s a good example of how farms can work together with conservation scientists to make a difference.”

The Next Chapter for Farm to School: Milling Whole Grains in the Cafeteria

A new pilot project in California is purchasing a mill for a school cafeteria, marking the next step in years-long effort to bring local, whole grains to schools around the country.   This was published on Sept. 10, 2021 in Civil Eats.  

 

Nan Kohler founded the milling company Grist & Toll in Pasadena, California in 2013 and her freshly milled flours have been a hit with bakers, chefs, and locavores ever since. But her abiding wish is to sell California-grown, freshly milled whole grain flour, which is nutritionally superior to refined flour, to the public schools in the area.

“If I could sell to anybody, I would sell to the school lunch programs,” Kohler says. “Then we start those little healthy bodies young, and we change those palates to look forward to delicious whole grain foods. And set them up for healthier lifestyle and eating habits going forward.”

The problem is that schools typically can’t afford Kohler’s flour. This fall, however, she is midwifing a project that will get whole grains into two California school districts. Along with the California Wheat Commission, she was recently awarded a $144,000 California Department of Food and Agriculture (CDFA) grant that will enable Shandon Elementary in San Luis Obispo County to be the first public school in the U.S. to make its own flour using a stone mill on site. The grant, which is funded through March 2023, will cover the cost of the mill and two pasta extruders as well as the training for cafeteria staff to use both.

Elementary students processing whole wheat pasta with the wheat they harvested that season from their school’s wheat garden.

Two additional grants for $20,000—one awarded to Shandon Joint Unified School District and the other to nearby San Miguel Joint Union School District, both along California’s central coast—will buy enough whole grains from local farmers to provide both districts with freshly milled flour for nearly two years. Claudia Carter, executive director at the California Wheat Commission, says the Wheat2School project will provide students in these two districts with nutrient-dense, whole grain foods.

Over the past 20 years, the farm-to-school movement has prioritized getting locally grown fruits and vegetables onto cafeteria trays. The “grain-to-school” movement, though, is just starting to gain steam. The Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act (HHFKA), passed in 2010, improved nutrition standards nationally, requiring grain-based foods served in public schools to be made with at least 50 percent whole grains. It also provided $5 million annually in funding for farm-to-school projects across the country.

“Over the past 5 to 7 years, we’ve seen a real increase in folks doing farm-to-school that haven’t been just fruits and vegetables,” says Anna Mullen, the communications director at the National Farm to School Network. “We’ve seen an expansion of the idea—to wheat, grains, fish, protein, bison.” Mullen credits the HHFKA for codifying support for farm-to-school projects, and spurring innovation—including projects like the one at Shandon.

Ahead-of-the-curve school districts have been sourcing local wheat for years. Two in Oregon—Portland Public Schools and Bend-La Pine Schools—have been baking with flour from Camas Country Mill in the Willamette Valley for instance. In Georgia, Burke County Public Schools has been sourcing whole wheat flour, whole grain grits, and corn meal from Freeman’s Mill in Statesboro for 7 years.

And other districts are beginning to embrace the idea as well: Two years ago, the Chicago-based company Gourmet Gorilla began sourcing wheat from Midwestern farmers to make oat bars, muffins, and pizza with 51 percent whole grain for schools in Illinois, Wisconsin, and Louisiana. And in upstate New York, a dozen public schools began working with pasta manufacturer Sfoglini and Birkett Mills to serve students a 51 percent whole wheat fusilli and macaroni.

However, the Shandon project is one of the first that will exceed the National School Lunch Program’s requirement. For at least the next two years, all the bread, pizza, tortillas, and even pasta will be made with 100 percent whole wheat.

‘The Best Tortilla I’ve Have Ever Had’

Claudia Carter, who is working on a Ph.D. in nutrition at North Dakota State University, is passionate about the Wheat2School project for several reasons.

 

Chuck Buckingham, lead volunteer, using his wheat thresher to harvest at Whitehead Elementary in Woodland.

The majority of the students at Shandon and San Miguel are farmworkers’ kids, and most are Latinx. “My food service manager [at Shandon] told me, ‘For some of these kids, [school breakfast and lunch] are the only two meals they eat throughout the day,’” Carter says. “So I have to feed them the best I can. How can I be serving them a Pop-Tart, canned fruit, and fruit juice? If you add that together it’s 65 grams of sugar—and that’s just their breakfast!”

That list describes the actual menu at the Woodland Unified School District just outside Sacramento, where Carter launched a previous wheat-to-school project. And it’s a far cry from that kids have less than 25 grams (six teaspoons) of sugar a day.

“For some of these kids, [school breakfast and lunch] are the only two meals they eat throughout the day—so I have to feed them the best I can.”

Breakfasts like this, Carter says, can not only lead to childhood diabetes, they also lead to sugar spikes (and crashes) that undermine sustained learning. She points out that whole grains, on the other hand, contain not only more fiber than white flour, they contain Vitamin E, an antioxidant that is important for vision and a properly developing nervous system. (The Dietary Guidelines for Americans has called these both “shortfall nutrients” since they are so under-consumed by the U.S. population.) Whole grains also are rich in B vitamins and protein, both of which are important for brain health. And though some whole grain recipes—like whole-wheat muffins—contain added sugar, the levels tend to be lower than the processed food included in most school breakfasts.

Some nutrition professionals pointed to the high percentage of whole grain foods that went to waste in the first few years after the HHKA, but Carter believes that you can influence kids’ palates by feeding them high-quality whole grains early on.

The 100 percent whole wheat cinnamon rolls prepared for Shandon and San Miguel schools.

In Ecuador, where she grew up, bread and tortillas made with whole grain are a rarity. It was her husband, who hails from South Dakota, who converted her to eating them. “As a result, our kids have been eating whole wheat stuff since they were little,” Carter says. “I buy all the stuff Nan produces at Grist & Toll, and I make pancakes, bread, and cakes.”

Carter is also on the board of a nonprofit called Yolo Farm-to-Fork, which funds edible school garden programs throughout Yolo County in California. A few years ago, in an effort to introduce other kids to these delicious, nutritious baked goods, she helped launch Yolo’s wheat-to-school project at another elementary school in the county. The students grew wheat—and, in a single day, harvested it and milled it themselves.

“That same day we had stations for pasta-making, tortilla-making, and bread-baking,” Carter says. “Keep in mind that 80 percent of these kids are Mexican-American. They grew up eating white tortillas, like me. And every single kid had a huge smile on their face when eating their tortilla warm. I heard, unanimously, ‘This is the best tortilla I have ever had.’”

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This experience was the inspiration for the Wheat2School project at Shandon. Carter will be collecting data for her doctoral research, proving, she hopes, that kids actually do want to eat 100 percent whole grain products. She also plans to compare the nutritional content of the fresh bread with what Shandon has served in the past.

Baking Demos and Milling Lessons

This month, Grist & Toll’s Kohler will visit Shandon to train cafeteria staff and the California Wheat Commission’s intern Isaac Lopez on the mill. The staff—including Shandon’s food service manager Gelene Coehlo, a home baker herself—has expressed excitement about the project.

Lopez, a student at Cal Poly, will be on site once a week to help with trouble-shooting. Eventually, Carter hopes to train high school students to use the mill as well.

Over the summer, the California Wheat Commission hosted baking demos and tested recipes to find the tastiest and healthiest recipes for kids. Kohler is sharing some new recipes for muffins and no-knead pizza; they’re also making some surprising discoveries, including a way to decrease the sugar content in their roll recipe from 20 percent to 15 percent.

From left: Claudia Carter and Nan Kohler at Shandon Elementary school.

“The beauty of working with 100 percent whole Sonora wheat is that it comes with an internal sweetness,” Carter notes. Though the National School Lunch Program has no limit on sugar, she and Coehlo are glad to reduce it where they can.

As part of the grant, Carter and her intern will also be developing lesson plans on the history of wheat grown in California, agricultural science, and the superior nutrition of whole grains. “Right now, we’re putting together a lesson plan on the Missions in San Miguel that grew Sonora wheat specifically,” she says. Students will also have the opportunity to grow and harvest wheat in a test garden.

Supporting local farmers is key to Carter and Kohler’s vision for the project, and to that end, they’ve arranged for three of the California farmers who supply grains for the pilot project to speak in classrooms this fall.

“We want to show children their faces and say, ‘OK, you are eating their bread,’” says Carter. “A lot of pointing back to how your food is made, why this is so important.”

The Cost of Local Wheat

Since infrastructure is one of the tricky issues with wheat-to-school projects—schools need to find a local miller to work with, or have a mill on site—some people are studying how to make the process smoother and less costly. Last year, researchers at the Center for Integrated Agriculture Systems at the University of Wisconsin-Madison College of Agriculture & Life Sciences and the Artisan Grain Collaborative in Madison received a $516,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Farmers’ Market Promotion Program to expand the value chain for Midwest grain growers in institutions over the next three years.

“I think that creating those local businesses that make products from a local grains is probably gonna be the sweet spot,” says Vanessa Herald, a senior farm to institution outreach specialist at UW-Madison.

Umi Organic in Portland is one such company. In 2019, Portland Public Schools began purchasing the company’s 50 percent whole-grain, organic yakisoba noodles. Umi’s owner Lola Milholland says that providing additional funding for grain-to-school projects like hers is critical to their success.

“Our product does cost more money,” she says. “It’s Oregon-milled grain, Oregon-produced noodles.” (Milholland sources Durum and Edison wheat flour from Camas Country Mill in Eugene.)

Oregon’s legislature has been funding farm-to-school projects since 2007, when it budgeted for a permanent, full-time farm-to-school manager position. In July, the legislature re-upped the Oregon Farm-to-School Grant Program, setting aside $10.2 million in funding for schools to purchase and serve Oregon-grown foods. These funds, in part, will go to buy more Umi Organic noodles; the Portland Public School district just increased its noodle order from 2,000 pounds every six weeks to 3,600 per month.

In Chicago, Gourmet Gorilla maintains a cost-conscious focus, since their customers are school districts that don’t necessarily have grants. Co-founder and CEO Danielle Hrzic says they lower costs by including some conventional ingredients alongside organic ones.

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“There are some concessions you have to make,” says Hrzic. “Breads were really tough. We want clean and whole grain, and it gets expensive in a lot of cases. So that’s where we started making our own grain products that met all the nutritional requirements.”

Their internal brand, Grow Good Foods, includes GROWnola, muffins, pizza, and oat bars—all made from local grains including sorghum. The company works with Janie’s Mill in Illinois and Meadowlark Organics in Wisconsin.

The Future of Wheat2School

Back at Shandon Unified, Kohler sees a future for the Wheat2School project even when the CDFA grants expire in 2023. “We need to set it up so it can thrive on its own and be sustainable,” Kohler says. “We’ll be facilitating the connections with the farmers who are committed to a certain price point for the grain.”

Although the California Wheat Commission’s grant covers all the start-up costs—the stone mill and two pasta extruder machines, as well as staff training—the main challenge once the other two grants run out will be getting quantities of wheat at a price that can work for both the district and the farmers. “I don’t think we’ll have any trouble doing that,” Kohler says, optimistically.

“We know all about school budget deficits and challenges—but we also know what’s possible with a lot of creative thinking and community-building.”

Organic whole wheat flour costs three times as much as processed white flour, which can go for as little as 27¢ a pound. Shandon and San Miguel are paying an average of 55¢ a pound to buy unmilled wheat directly from the farmers, according to Carter.

“We know all about school budget deficits and challenges,” Kohler says. “But we also know what’s possible with a lot of creative thinking and community-building.”

When she and Carter first met with the Shandon kitchen staff this summer, they were already brainstorming about how the mill might open up fundraising opportunities like pizza parties and bake sales. Furthermore, Kohler expects more organic growers to join the Wheat2School project—she was inundated with wildly supportive messages from farmers after announcing the project on Instagram this summer. Some of these farmers grow at higher volume and may be able to achieve a lower price—one that schools can afford on their own in the future.

As Kohler said in her Instagram post, “You think it can’t be done? Too complicated? No one is interested? Kids won’t eat whole grains? Watch us, we’re about to blow the lid off all that.”

From a Prison Garden Sprouts Real Growth

I wrote this story for Reasons to be Cheerful.

 

Amid rows of snap peas and summer squash, incarcerated gardeners cultivate job skills, inner peace and fresh produce for the cafeteria.

On her most recent stay at Coffee Creek Correctional Facility in Wilsonville, Oregon, 45-year-old Adria White knew that she needed more than a drug treatment program. She was up for release soon, and while that program, which she’d participated in twice before, included useful tools like mindfulness training and behavioral therapy, it did little to prepare her for getting a job on the outside.  

“You learn coping skills,” says White, who became dependent on methamphetamines at around age 30. “But when you get out and you’re poor and struggling, that doesn’t solve your life problems.”

So when her cellmate told her about Lettuce Grow, a sustainable gardening program that takes place at 16 Oregon prisons and juvenile detention centers, she signed up, hoping the skills she’d gain would help her land a job at a nursery or start a community garden in her hometown. 

Though she had zero prior gardening experience, White, it turns out, has a green thumb. Soon she was digging her hands into the small garden plot on the medium security side of the prison, planting mainly flowers and herbs. “I spent a lot of hours out there — as many as I was allowed. I fell in love with my plants. There’s a bond,” she says. Dahlias became her favorite flower. “They are fast and they are so eye-catching!” She also loved the aroma of the herbs — particularly lavender and sage — and shared them with others. “Women started rubbing lavender on their Covid masks,” she laughs. 

One of the privileges of the gardening program is that participants are permitted to go outside when the yard isn’t officially open.

“I was like, ‘This is cool. I can go outside and no one is out there!’” she says. Over time, her gardening work became more than just a chance for some limited freedom from confinement. It grew into a full-fledged passion. 

White was scheduled to take the next sustainable gardening class in September, right after she’d moved to minimum security, but the entire prison was evacuated due to wildfires. When prisoners and staff returned to the facility, a Covid outbreak resulted in a lockdown that barred all visitors including the Lettuce Grow staff and volunteers. “As a precaution we had provided the class with the text books and class materials, just in case we got shut out,” says Lettuce Grow director Rima Green. White, undeterred, worked her way through the class materials on her own. “That’s no mean feat,” emphasizes Green. The curriculum, from Oregon State University’s Extension Service, is a college-level class.

Green and staff were finally allowed back into Coffee Creek in March, and got to know White as they gardened with her, side by side. Green was so impressed by White’s skills and determination that she hired White, who was released in May, to be a part-time employee at Lettuce Grow, which is a program of the Portland-based nonprofit Growing Gardens. In her new job, White is doing office work such as correspondence, surveys and coordination with volunteers. Other graduates of the Lettuce Grow program have gone on to find jobs at Portland Nursery, a family-run garden center with two locations, and other horticultural-related businesses in Oregon. 

Adria White in the garden she planted at her sister’s house after being released from prison. Photo courtesy Adria White

Lettuce Grow was founded by attorney and master gardener Sarah Van Roo in 2009 with 15 incarcerated people in two Oregon prisons. Van Roo’s original intent was to improve the nutritional quality of the meals served to residents, some of whom she’d befriended while teaching yoga at Coffee Creek. 

In 2015, Lettuce Grow merged with Growing Gardens, which promotes food security by building gardens at schools and in residents’ backyards. Today, 11 years later, Lettuce Grow serves 200 incarcerated people in Oregon each year, providing them with valuable job skills and a respite from the drudgery of prison life. Those enrolled in the program are able to take classes like the Oregon Food Bank’s Seed to Supper class, Oregon State University’s Sustainable Gardening class and an advanced Greenhouse Management class.

Because participants cultivate a vegetable garden on site, Lettuce Grow also gives prisoners access to healthy, delicious food, like fresh-from-the-garden tomatoes, spinach, snap peas, kale, lettuce, summer squash and broccoli. In 2020, even amid the pandemic, the State Corrections system grew 365,536 pounds of food. Some 97 percent of that went into the institutions’ kitchens. (The rest was delivered to food banks across the state.) This total does not include the produce grown in federal prisons in Oregon like the one in Sheridan, where residents harvested 100,000 pounds of food in 2020, all of which was consumed at the prison cafeteria. But the program’s most impressive data may be that which shows participants have just a four percent recidivism rate — the national average at state correctional systems, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, is 68 percent within three years.

White was hired as a prison gardener when she moved to the minimum security facility within Coffee Creek. When she got there in September, the garden had seen better days due to staffing shortages and one uncooperative correction officer. “It had been neglected, with the quarantine and the fires,” she says. “And the voles!” Despite being a menace to the garden, the voles became popular with the gardeners, who gave them names and treated them like pets. Meanwhile, White spent so much time weeding that at night she dreamt she was pulling weeds. She was paid $50 per month for four 40-hour weeks — a very small sum, but one that is fairly typical for what incarcerated folks earn.

There’s a lot of creativity at Coffee Creek’s minimum security garden. One woman has designed a “Three Sisters” garden of corn, beans and squash. Another used flowers to recreate the album cover of Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon. White grew flowers and herbs, and with other gardeners harvested vegetables and fruits for Coffee Creek’s cafeteria. That was probably the most rewarding part of the job, White says.

Adria White’s grandson sampling the garden’s berries. Photo courtesy Adria White

“When we got the fruits and vegetables on the trays, every single woman was grateful. You could hear every woman talk about it. They would tell us thank you,” she says. “I also had people come up to me throughout the day while I was working and say how much the garden means to them — how seeing the flowers, having a place to sit down and see something natural instead of cement and barbed wire were good for the soul.”

Coffee Creek currently has about 800 residents, all of whom are women. At the cafeteria, the lines were always longer in summer, when the women knew that the garden’s abundance would show up on their trays. The tomatoes were the most popular item.

“In prison, they don’t ever serve tomatoes,” says White. “Some people — especially if they were lifers — when they got fresh organic tomatoes on their tray, it was an overwhelming sensory experience. There is a lot of emotion in eating a fresh tomato when you haven’t in ten years.” 

For White, the garden had the added bonus of soothing her anxiety.

“I’m kind of reclusive. Being social is challenging for me,” she says. “I thought, ‘I’ll never be able to get a job, I’m so weird in public.’”

But gardening, of course, is a solitary pursuit, and White says getting better at it gave her confidence and made her realize that she can do something to make money. The first thing she did after being released this May, she says, was plant a garden at her daughter’s house.

“Every time I get anxious, I go into the garden,” she says. “The transition from prison life can be really tough. For me, to have something positive — something new to keep my mind busy until I have my perspective back — that has been huge.”

Unsurprisingly, the pandemic had a big impact on the program. None of Lettuce Grow’s 32 volunteers statewide were able to visit the facilities for months, and a number of the sustainable gardening and greenhouse management classes were cancelled. At some sites, classes were conducted by members of the prison staff or even by incarcerated tutors themselves. At facilities like Coffee Creek — which had a number of lockdowns — there were no classes. Everything White learned while in minimum security was from getting her hands dirty and from gleaning tips from fellow gardeners, or from Green and Mirabai Collins from Lettuce Grow, who were finally allowed in in March

But with vaccination rates increasing in Oregon prisons — at press time the prison vaccination rate was 71 percent, higher than the statewide rate — some facilities are starting to pilot face-to-face visitations, and Green is hopeful that volunteers will soon be allowed back in. 

For White, learning how to garden has been nothing short of transformational. She’s already found another gardening project to sink her hands into — she recently stumbled upon a community garden near her daughter’s house that was overgrown and neglected. When she called the number for the volunteer organizer, the fellow who answered said he’d moved to California. Would she like to take it over? White accepted the task, and is now eager to get in there and start weeding. She envisions a zen garden with lots of flowers. “I want it to be a healing space,” she says. “It creates a healing energy instead of stress.” 

Canndor: the world's first cannabis herbarium

 

Two California women—Eleanor Kuntz and Kerin Law—have created the world's first archive of preserved cannabis specimens.  I wrote about their project, Canndor, for Broccoli, the magazine for cannabis lovers. 

Here's a short snippet of the article:  

When botanists or naturalists need to identify a particular plant, they head to the local herbarium to cross-check existing identified specimens of the plant.  Think of a herbarium as a library, only instead of books, it contains dried and labeled plant specimens. In the United States alone, there are hundreds of herbariums—from the Missouri Botanical Garden’s herbarium (one of the world’s most famous, with nearly 7 million specimens) to the one at Harvard University. Worldwide, there are more than 3,000 herbariums. 

But until recently, there hasn’t been a single herbarium dedicated to cannabis.

When plant geneticists Eleanor Kuntz and Kerin Law launched their botanical identification company LeafWorks in 2016, they quickly realized the need for one. 

At LeafWorks, Kuntz and Law do DNA sequencing tests for the natural products industry, which helps ensure accurate labeling and combats fraud. Herbal companies such as Traditional Medicinals will send small samples of herb particulate to LeafWorks be sure that it is what their suppliers say it is.

“If we’re going to do a test on ashwagandha or gingko, we’ll go to an herbarium and get vetted samples that occur throughout the plant range,” says Kuntz, who studied with renowned American herbalist Rosemary Gladstar. Through their connections at the Missouri Botanical Garden and Kew Gardens in England (where Kuntz interned for a summer), the two scientists are able to access fingernail-sized pieces of dried plant matter so they can sequence its DNA.  (In some cases, herbariums have their own DNA banks, in which case they can share the plant’s sequence with LeafWorks.) Kuntz and Law then uses those samples as a baseline for future tests on that species of plant.

To continue reading, get your copy of issue #10 on newsstands now or download a PDF of my article here:

Download 42-45_HERBARIUM (1)

The Casino That Farms Its Own Food

I wrote this piece for Reasons to be Cheerful in November.

A stone’s throw from the blackjack tables, bison are grazing, beehives are buzzing, crops are growing — and nature is winning.

 

On the surface, Oklahoma’s Downstream Casino Resort looks like any other: lines of brightly lit slot machines snake past entrances to steakhouses and sports bars, while cocktail waitresses shuttle trays to craps and blackjack tables. A takeaway cafe serves gourmet coffee, and an all-you-can-eat buffet is stacked with prime rib on Saturday nights.  

But beneath this familiar facade is a very different kind of system — one that applies traditional Indigenous food and farming principles to modern hotel operations. The Quapaw tribe, which runs the Downstream Casino Resort, operates seven greenhouses and two sprawling gardens that provide the hotel with 20 varieties of vegetables and herbs. The tribe also has an apiary with 80 beehives, as well as a craft brewery and a coffee roaster that supplies the hotel and casino. The Quapaw is also the only tribe in the United States with its own USDA-certified meat packing and processing plant, where it processes bison and cattle that it raises on open pastures, selling the bulk of it to the casino’s five restaurants. (The rest is provided to the two tribal-run daycares, the Quapaw Farmers Market, the Quapaw Mercantile and a few other tribally-run shops.) 

Cattle grazing on pastureland behind the Downstream Casino Resort. Photo courtesy Downstream Casino Resort

With all these businesses — plus a construction firm — the Quapaw Nation is one of the largest employers in this part of Oklahoma, employing 2,000 tribal and non-tribal workers, while paying above-average wages and offering a full benefits package to all full-time employees. It’s a business model that preserves cultural heritage while providing a profit. 

Lucus Setterfield, director of food and beverage at Downstream, says 50 percent of the food served at the resort’s Red Oak Steakhouse comes from the Quapaw land. Even the mint in the restaurant’s mojitos is grown in the greenhouses.  

“The Quapaw are one of the most innovative tribes in the country when it comes to food sovereignty,” says Maria Givens, the communications director of the Native American Agricultural Fund (NAAF). 

Innovative as it may be, the Quapaw are essentially resurrecting a way of life — living off the land that sustained them before they were driven off of it by American settlers. Colonization — and the policies that created Indian reservations — deprived them of their traditional foodways of foraging, fishing and hunting and disrupted their long-established patterns of intense physical activity. Public health experts believe that these are two of the reasons Indigenous people have some of the highest rates of diabetes in the U.S. According to the CDC, Native American adults are three times more likely to be diagnosed with diabetes than white adults, and 1.6 times more likely to be obese. 

With seven greenhouses and two gardens, the Quapaw gardeners harvest about 6,000 pounds of food per year. Each morning, the resort’s chefs stop by and place their orders. Photo courtesy Downstream Casino Resort

By retrofitting a modern resort with a system of locally sourced, sustainably raised food, the Quapaw are reclaiming their food sovereignty and, at the same time, benefitting every guest who visits their resort, whether those guests know it or not.

Bringing bison back

It all started in 2010 when then tribe chairman John Berrey, a fifth-generation cattle rancher, had a vision to reintroduce bison to this part of Oklahoma. The bison is the state mammal, but it’s also a traditional food for the Quapaw people, who lived in Northeastern Arkansas and then western Missouri before eventually moving to Oklahoma.

That year, the tribe was given eight bison from Yellowstone National Park via the InterTribal Buffalo Council. Now, ten years later, the tribe has a bison herd of close to 200 as well as a herd of 385 Black Angus cattle. (The bison have been breeding, but the tribe has also gotten additional bison from other national parks.) Both are pastured on fields of native grasses and the ones that are headed for slaughter are finished on grains and mushrooms. The tribe processes only five to 15 bison per year and doesn’t slaughter until they’ve sold out of every type of meat: steaks, ground bison, chuck roast and bison jerky. “We use the whole animal,” explains Quapaw Nation grants coordinator Shelby Crum — even the hides, which a Quapaw artist decorates with tribal paintings and sells at the farmers’ market. 

The 25,000-square-foot meatpacking plant, which opened in 2017, was designed to conform to renowned animal scientist Dr. Temple Grandin’s blueprint for humane animal handling. The Quapaw built the processing plant adjacent to the feeding facility to avoid the need for transport, which makes animals nervous. It also uses Grandin’s designs for curved chutes with high walls, which minimizes stressors, and the holding pens include extra crowd gates and bright colors. In addition to processing its own animals, the plant processes 50 to 60 head of cattle per week for nearby ranchers from Oklahoma and Missouri. 

A worker processes honey from one of the resort’s 80 beehives. Photo courtesy Downstream Casino Resort

The meat is broken apart into different cuts, smoked, flavored and packaged right there at the facility, which also has freezers and coolers for storage. Most is sold at a discounted price at tribally-owned retail outlets like the Quapaw Mercantile, the farmers’ market, the Quapaw C-Store and the Downstream Q-Store. “The whole goal is to make it affordable,” Crum says. That said, anyone from any state can order the meat via the Quapaw Cattle Company’s online store. 

One Big Table

I wrote this story about one of my favorite Oregon wineries, Big Table Farm, for Food & Wine's October 2020 issue.

With the wildfires still raging in Oregon right now, we here at Food & Wine debated whether it was really the right time to run a story (which appears in our October print issue) about a happy communal dinner in the middle of Oregon wine country. So we reached out to Clare Carver, who owns and runs Big Table Farm together with her husband Brian, for her take on the matter. She told us, “You know, in my community right now, I think people are really tired, but we’re all looking for joy, and this is a joyful story. Thankfully the fires close to us have gotten under control quickly, so the resources and amazing people who were fighting them have headed over to the other side of the state. It’s still a terribly sad situation there, and things still feel off the rails here—even a few days ago I still had 10 evacuated animals at my farm—but we’re back to bringing in our crops.

“For me, this story is a great reminder of who we are in Oregon, and what we’ll look forward to when the smoke clears, literally. I feel that when you share a story or a picture or a bottle of wine, you inspire and create connection. This story was captured before this current moment in Oregon. Personally, I’m glad F&W is choosing to share it now, to help bring people hope and to spark joy.

“Taking care of our crew and sharing the food we raise and grow all year to nourish us through harvest is one of my greatest joys. So I hope these recipes and photos help bring you joy and hope, too. Although the table looks different this year, caring for people and giving them love and joy through food and wine is still as strong as ever. And together we are all stronger. So cheers from me to everyone reading this.”

It’s an October evening at Big Table Farm in Gaston, Oregon, and the conversation is raucous around the long dinner table.

As Clare Carver, farmer, artist, and currently host of this party, passes a bowl of sage-flecked potatoes to her husband, winemaker Brian Marcy, she recounts how the couple first met sea salt entrepreneur Ben Jacobsen, who sits at the far end of the table. It was nearly a decade ago, she says, while filming an episode of a show called Man Fire Food. The title alone makes everyone snort with laughter. Cellar hands Ben Luker, who is Australian and very tall, and Mark Kulpins, a Midwesterner who used to work in finance, cheerfully debate who will get to drink more of the exceptional Pinot Noir and Chardonnay that Carver and Marcy have laid out—and who will be tonight’s designated driver. (The two live in the same nearby town.) And Lily Gray, a North Carolina native who formerly worked for Marcy as a part-time cellar assistant, tells how she first discovered Big Table Farm: by selling Marcy’s wine at a shop in Raleigh. “I sent out 50 cover letters to wineries, and Brian was the first one to write me back,” she says. She came to Oregon with a backpack and $300 in her pocket.

Continue reading on Food & Wine.  

Deepa Iyer Is Farming for Social Justice

This story appeared on Civil Eats on Sept. 18th. 

In Ghana, when a person passes a farmer in the field, they call out, “Ayekoo,” which loosely means “I see you” or “I acknowledge you farming the land.” In response, the farmer says, “Aye,” to thank the passerby for the acknowledgement.

When naming their new farm in rural Washington, Deepa Iyer, the daughter of Indian immigrants, and her partner Victor Anagli, who grew up in the Volta region of Ghana, wanted to honor this call and response tradition, so they christened their 21-acre property Ayeko. Located in the town of Enumclaw, Washington—40 miles southeast of Seattle—Ayeko is covered with fruit trees and raspberry and blueberry bushes and bisected by a creek.

“It’s magical,” says Iyer, who grew up in New Jersey.

 

The couple—who between them have two children and one full-time, off-farm job—are currently growing organic vegetables on one acre and have started a U-Pick for the berries. But in the future, they hope to invite other farmers and families who are Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) to join them.

“We want to share this land with other people,” Iyer says. “Our vision is village-style, everyone growing food—a life where kids can run out the door and don’t have to make an appointment to have a play date.”

As of today, however, Iyer and her family and community—along with others across Washington state and along the entire West Coast—are largely sequestered indoors as a result of the wildfires that are burning around the state and region. “We are concerned because there are fires very close to here . . . we are surrounded by dry grass and anything could happen,” Iyer told Civil Eats in an email. “Crops are looking affected by smoke; nothing has been lost to fire, but it feels like the season is over in many ways.”

A group of people work in the fields at Ayeko Farm. (Photo by Sharon Chang, courtesy of Ayeko Farm)

Before the fires, Iyer found out she’d been chosen as one of 12 recipients of the Castanea Fellowship, a two-year program that helps support a racially just food system. The fellowship comes with a $40,000 grant and a connection to a network of experienced farmers who get together for six “learning immersion journeys.”

Farzana Serang, executive director at the Castanea Fellowship, says Iyer is a valuable part of the cohort. “What’s incredible about Deepa,” Serang says, “is she’s been farming for 20 years, making culturally relevant food more accessible, and still considers herself new to the work.”

Discovering a Love of Farming

Iyer fell in love with farming the year after college, when she took a six-month soul-searching trip to India. While there, she visited botanical sanctuaries and worked on intentional farming projects. When she returned home, she found an internship with a watershed organization, Stony Brook-Millstone (now the Watershed Institute), which also had an organic farm.

It was there that she discovered environmental education. She would take school children to the pond and collect water samples that were full of tadpoles and dragonfly nymphs. “I didn’t even know that this type of work existed,” Iyer says. “You can be out in nature with kids as they discover their love of nature?!”

She also got hooked on organic farming. “I would stand on the truck and the guys would come in with the harvest and throw pumpkins at me,” says Iyer, who describes herself as “a tomboy to the death.” She caught all the pumpkins.

Now, at 42, Iyer still relishes manual labor. “Bending over and pulling weeds all day? I love that!” she says.

Iyer also spent a year as a teacher-in-residence at Slide Ranch, an educational farm on the coast north of San Francisco that connects children to nature. That experience put Iyer more firmly on the path of food systems education and led her to launch an urban farm collective in Oakland called (SOL), which she ran for six years before heading to Michigan State University to study the intersection of social justice and the ecological impact of our food and farming systems.

Anagli, who she met in Michigan, comes from a long line of farmers in Ghana. One of the first questions he asked her was, “How do you want to change the world?”  

“I’d never been asked that before,” Iyer says.

Eventually, the couple moved to Oakland with their young son and began the hunt for a plot of fertile land.

Twenty-One Acres in Enumclaw

They started searching for land with some friends, but everything they found within a two-hour drive from Oakland was out of their price range. Iyer, who has family in Seattle, shifted the search to Washington and in early 2018, she found the property in Enumclaw.

Sunflowers in the fields at Ayeko Farm. (Photo by Sharon Chang, courtesy of Ayeko Farm)

Iyer also landed a full-time job at the International Rescue Committee in Tukwila, where she heads up a community agriculture and food security program with refugees from Burma, Bhutan, and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Through this, she runs four community gardens in South King County, as well as two market garden production sites, and she co-runs the Tukwila Village Farmers Market.

At Ayeko, the couple farms using organic methods—like composting and minimal tillage—though they’re not certified organic. They grow the usual suspects—beets, carrots, kale, lettuce, spinach, Swiss chard, and tomatoes—as well as foods that have roots in Iyer’s family food traditions, such as bottle gourds, which are light-green, smooth-skinned and so neutral tasting they’re “almost bland,” says Iyer. They’re also growing amaranth greens, or callaloo, as well as long beans, fenugreek leaves, and peanuts.

This kind of “cultural rescue” is very important to Iyer, who earned her master’s degree studying the food and farming practices of elder women in the Himalayas. “If we lose a vegetable type or variety, then we lose all the things that go with it—words, celebrations, colors, stories—so much richness,” Iyer says.

Not long ago, Iyer invited a group of her mom’s friends to Ayeko and one Indian-American woman in her 70s saw the long beans in the fields and grew animated. “All these conversations started happening about these recipes,” says Iyer. “‘Oh, my grandma used to make those!’ she said. Those are my dream-come-true moments.”

Because theirs is such a bare-bones operation—the crew is just Iyer and Anagli, and Iyer maintains a full-time off-farm job—they don’t yet have a booth at the farmers’ market or even a community supported agriculture (CSA) program.

So for now, their method of selling produce is very casual: they send e-mails to their community inviting them to come to the farm and get it or to access it at one of a few drop-off points in and around Seattle. They also started a U-Pick earlier this summer for their 400 raspberry bushes and hope to add blueberries soon. They have a number of fruit and nut trees as well, but those aren’t producing fruit yet.

Navigating Racism with a Dream of Bringing People Together

The Castanea Fellowship has been a boon, she says—both financially and emotionally. The grant will help with basic support operations like fixing the well and purchasing supplies and equipment, like a tractor. Iyer also hopes it will help launch some of their more ambitious projects, like creating an outdoor school for BIPOC kids or a co-op venture with other farmers.

Additionally, the Fellowship’s learning immersion journeys, which, for the foreseeable future, are all being conducted on Zoom, have been incredible, says Iyer. “It’s been super inspiring,” she says. “These are people who have been through so much and doing so much amazing work.”

The 2020 Castanea fellows, who include farmers, chefs, community organizers, and more, have been a source of inspiration for Iyer. Some, for instance “have been able to take [challenging life] experiences and build themselves into strong, positive people with a deep critique of our system and strong analysis of systemic racism and how it manifests in the food system.”

And although the work of running a farm in rural Washington has been deeply satisfying, living in a rural area as people of color has its challenges. “There are very, very few Black folks out here,” Iyer says. When they moved to Enumclaw, she jokes, Anagli and their kids doubled the town’s Black population. “All Lives Matter” signage abounds.

Two months after moving to the farm, Anagli was walking home from the bus stop when a white woman harassed him and threatened to call 911 because she didn’t think he lived there. The family also had their house robbed on the same day. “We went into a deep state of fear, and I just started feeling guilt, regret, and doubt,” Iyer says.

And yet, she holds out hope for reconciliation and healing within their community. “I keep thinking we can build community anywhere. If somebody is racist, it doesn’t mean they’re a bad person. We’re in a society that’s committed to systemic racism—it’s everywhere.”

Iyer is hopeful that the land and the food it brings forth can draw folks together. Before pandemic-times, the couple hosted the first of what they’d hoped would become an annual cooking and capoeira event called Grounded in Freedom. Though they cancelled the event this summer, they hope it’s safe to host it again next summer. In the meantime, Iyer hopes to connect with the Muckleshoot Tribe, which has a reservation nearby. “There’s a lot of opportunity to build community,” she says.

Lately, Iyer’s vision of subdividing the property and inviting other families to live there in a cooperative farming village is also much on her mind. She imagines there would be a shared meal once a week. Except for the indigenous folks, Iyer says, “The reality is that everyone’s grandma or great grandma is from somewhere else—we can all share those stories of our grandmother’s recipes.”

A New Generation of Black Farmers Is Cultivating Self-Determination

By going back to the land, Black farmers are resuming a journey toward “food sovereignty” that began centuries ago.

I wrote this piece for Reasons to be Cheerful on August 21st, 2020.  

When Malcolm Shabazz Hoover and Mirabai Collins broke ground on the Black Futures Farm in January, it was the first time either of them had farmed on their own. On their one-acre plot in Portland’s Brentwood-Darlington neighborhood, the couple — with the help of a few interns — grows everything from purple king pole beans and heirloom tomatoes (trellised on string so they’ll climb upwards) to delicata and patty-pan squash, corn, okra, cabbages and zucchinis. 

“So many zucchinis. It might as well be a zucchini farm!” Mirabai laughs. They sell their produce via a small CSA program and several BIPOC farmers’ markets around town. 

Hoover and Collins are part of a new generation of Black farmers returning to the land to exercise their right to Black food sovereignty. Formally defined in 2007 at the Nyéléni Forum for Food Sovereignty in Mali, food sovereignty is the right of people to determine their own food and agricultural systems, and have healthy and culturally appropriate food produced through ecologically sound and sustainable methods. People who have food sovereignty reject the notion that food is a commodity, and support local farmers and food providers instead of large agri-businesses. Charlie Smith, co-director of the Portland-based Black Food Sovereignty Coalition, puts it more succinctly: “Food sovereignty is people, place and economic opportunities.” 

Mirabai Collins and Malcolm Shabazz Hoover on their wedding day.

Hoover, 50, found his way to farming almost by accident. A U.S. Navy veteran, he worked in city government and as a school teacher in Oakland before taking a job at the Oregon Food Bank in 2017. Adjacent to the Food Bank was a farm named Unity Farm run by Art Shavers and Shantae Johnson. During his breaks, Hoover would walk over and chat with them, and help them weed when they asked him to. “Bro, we love talking to you, but this is hard work,” Hoover remembers Shavers saying. “If you’re going to be out here, you need to help.”

Though both his parents had grown up on farms, it wasn’t until these afternoons spent digging in the soil with his friends that Hoover realized how therapeutic gardening could be. He was hooked. 

Hoover also works at Impact NW, a homelessness nonprofit with offices across the street from a 13-acre farm. “I felt a real connection to the land and asked what it would take for us to occupy it,” says Hoover. With the help of the Black Food Sovereignty Coalition, who provided advice and infrastructure, Collins and Hoover took over stewardship of one of the 13 acres, and Black Futures Farm was born.

 

The couple did have some farming experience. Hoover, who took Oregon State University’s Master Gardener program, helped run a VA pilot program to teach veterans to be farmers. Collins had interned on several organic farms and worked on cannabis farms in Humboldt County, California. She also teaches horticulture classes in prisons for a nonprofit called Growing Gardens. Though their CSA is small by most standards — only 17 families are enrolled this year — all are Black or have Black children, and one third of these members pay with SNAP assistance (food stamps). It’s important to both Hoover and Collins that their CSA benefit those most in need. Hoover’s dad was a Black Panther and his parents were involved in the Black Arts Movement. For him, farming is personal and political. 

“I love growing food. It’s incredibly healing to me,” he says. “It’s been said that if you can’t feed the people, you can’t lead the people. So in these times, we are creating something for what’s next, for Black people.”

Cultivating farmers

Black Futures Farm belongs to the Black Food Sovereignty Coalition (BFSC). Founded in 2018, it builds on a decade of work by local Black farmers, food justice activists and community organizers. It serves as a hub for Black and brown communities, helping them confront the systemic barriers that make food, place and economic opportunities inaccessible. 

BFSC provides technical and professional assistance to farms and food businesses and helps them incubate their ideas, says co-director Eddie Hill. But Hill and his team at BFSC are also looking to make systemic changes. “If we’re looking at the larger food system and best practices, it’s not just: ‘Hey, if you get Black people to start farms, that will solve the problem,’” says Hill. “No, you have to have them participating in all parts of the food system: manufacturing, composting, packaging, branding, transportation.”

Black farmers and food purveyors need concrete support for basic business and logistical challenges: storage, distribution and financing; Good Agricultural Practices (GAP) certification; and Hazard Analysis Critical Control Points (HACCP) training, an internationally recognized method of identifying and managing food safety-related risk. “These systems don’t exist in our community right now,” says Hill. 

In addition to helping Black-run farms with lease agreements and food safety protocols, the BFSC works with Mudbone Grown to organize an annual “Back to the Root” conference for Black growers, producers, educators, advocates and ranchers. It also runs programs like Grandma’s Hands, where Black grandmothers in Portland share family recipes and food traditions, cook together and, these days, take turns hosting a monthly community dinner on Zoom. The program, funded by the Oregon Department of Agriculture, allows the grandmas to buy all their produce for the monthly community meal from Black- or brown-run farms. BFSC is also in negotiations for a centrally located food processing facility in Portland, where Black and brown farmers and food entrepreneurs can process vegetables and make and package products like salsa, juices, and bone broth for local grocery store chains.

The roots of sovereignty

Black farmers were once far more prevalent in America than they are today. Following Emancipation, even after the “40 Acres and a Mule” promise was overturned by Andrew Johnson in 1865, formerly enslaved Blacks were able to own land — and many did. By 1920, according to the 1930 Census of Agriculture, there were roughly one million Black farmers in the U.S., comprising 14 percent of all the farmers in the nation.

Black farmworkers till a 575-acre plot of land owned by Dave Lewis, an African-American farm owner in Alabama, in 1940.

Today, there are just 48,700 Black farmers in the United States, making up roughly 1.4 percent of the country’s 3.4 million farmers. There are many reasons for this decline, but as Vann R. Newkirk II recently wrote in the Atlantic, much of the land was wrested away from Black farmers by White people via legal, coercive and sometimes violent means. “A war waged by deed of title has dispossessed 98 percent of Black agricultural landowners in America,” according to Newkirk. 

Perhaps surprisingly, much of that was taken away during the height of the Civil Rights Movement. Black farmers lost around six million acres of land between 1950 and 1969, according to Joe Brooks, the former president of the Emergency Land Fund. “That’s a staggering amount of land loss during the heart of the Civil Rights period, when African Americans were struggling for social and political and economic rights,” says Savi Horne, founder and executive director of the Land Loss Prevention Project in North Carolina.  

There have been some attempts at land reparations, most notably a lawsuit against the USDA in 1997 that awarded a $2 billion settlement to thousands of Black farmers and their families. Horne and others who are actively helping Black farmers keep their land say that this lawsuit did not go far enough. Tens of thousands who lost their land and, along with it, their food sovereignty, have still never been compensated for it.

An encouraging sign is more localized efforts at helping Black farmers like Collins and Hoover reclaim food sovereignty in their communities. Many organizations and farms came together to help Black Futures Farm operate with almost no overhead in its first year. The property — which came with 18 fruit trees including apples, figs and cherries — is being leased to the couple at a low cost by Portland Parks and Recreation. The starts and seeds were donated by MudBone Grown, Red Barn Farms, Side Yard Farms, Portland State University, the OSU Master Gardeners and Territorial Seed, among others. The couple also has subsidized water bills this year.

“A lot of people gathered around the idea of letting go of what had long been a White-held space, and handing it over to the stewardship of Black people,” Collins says. “The farm has become what it is because people worked hard and believed in what it could be. We had no money or resources starting out, so all of what you see there is the result of people pulling together — or, essentially, what real community looks like.”  

Next season, they’ll have to buy their own seeds and starts and pay more rent. “It’ll be more organized for that reason,” Collins says. “We’ll have a crop plan, we’ll order the things we want to grow. This season was very much a space, really hard work, and community. And probably some lunacy. And definitely some arguments.”

“Yeah. We’re going to have an argument today,” Hoover teases.

“We are,” Collins agrees, both of them laughing.

The couple were married two months ago — on the farm, dressed in overalls. They often finish each other’s sentences. 

They seem ideal partners in other ways, too. Both are passionate about growing their own food and feeding Portland’s Black community. Once they are more established and have a stronger foundation (and once the pandemic is over), they plan to bring more Black and brown folks onto the farm for education, community-building, art, training, certification and other pathways to food sovereignty. Just last week, Vanessa Chambers from Grandma’s Hands came to Black Futures Farm with two of her granddaughters to pick produce and be filmed for a segment to promote Oregon-grown foods in public schools. The farm has even had interest from an investor: Tampa Bay Buccaneers football player Ndamukong Suh, who attended Portland’s Grant High School and whose mom lives in the city.  

An urban farm with a CSA in the Pacific Northwest is nothing unique, Collins points out. “But a Black-centered, Black-run horticultural space that is wide open to the imaginings, hard work and possibilities of Black people, is — and I think that is more what Black Futures is about.”

Wine Country’s Farmworkers Are Staying Healthy Against All Odds

Populated by seasonal laborers, Oregon’s Willamette Valley could have been devastated by the coronavirus. Instead, it’s become a model for how to keep workers safe. 

I wrote this story on Salud! for Reasons to be Cheerful. 

Santiago Garza Martinez, now 47, was a young man when he started working for Anne Amie Vineyards in Oregon’s Willamette Valley in 1999. He began as an equipment operator, and today, 21 years later, he’s the field manager, overseeing a crew of 38 vineyard workers, all but eight of whom are seasonal employees. They weed, plant vines, and pick Pinot Noir grapes for Anne Amie’s acclaimed bottles. And like many seasonal farmworkers, their access to health care is precarious at best.

“The majority of the farmworkers in my crew don’t have primary care physicians,” Garza Martinez says. Even if they did, paying for the care would be a challenge for many of them. There are 2.5 to 3 million farmworkers in the United States, and many lack access to health insurance, according to Silvia Partida, CEO of the Texas-based National Center for Farmworker Health. 

Since May 7, ¡Salud! has screened 400 farmworkers for Covid-19.

So when America’s first coronavirus cases were reported in January in Seattle, just four hours north of the vineyard, the need to protect the Anne Amie workers was immediately apparent. That’s where ¡Salud! came in. Founded in 1991 by two physicians who loved wine, ¡Salud! is a nonprofit health care service that runs mobile clinics in Oregon vineyards. It is supported by the state’s wine industry, which throws an annual fall gala where winemakers auction off special cases and experiences. (There’s also an online summertime auction — this year’s takes place this week July 14-16.) Last year’s two auctions brought in $1 million. Over the past 29 years, ¡Salud! has raised over $17.2 million. 

“¡Salud! is basically my crew’s primary care for wellness checks, referrals, follow-ups for any conditions they might discover in their health screenings,” says Garza Martinez. 

Over the past several months, it has also become a lifeline amid a national health crisis. Since May 7, ¡Salud! has screened 400 farmworkers for Covid-19, with roughly four percent testing positive. (Only two have been hospitalized thus far and both are recovering at home.) Leda Garside, chief nurse at ¡Salud!, estimates that roughly 70 percent of the vineyard workers she sees do not have any other healthcare.

A health care worker waits by the ¡Salud! van.

Garza Martinez himself, even though he has been on Anne Amie’s health insurance plan since 2008, has relied on ¡Salud! over the years for everything from basic physicals to vaccines. Recently, he’s availed himself of a flu vaccine, a tetanus shot and a Covid-19 nasal swab test, which he says was like having a pipe cleaner shoved up his nose until it hit the back of his tongue. “I cried!” he says, laughing at it now. (He tested negative.)

¡Salud! was excellent at educating farmworkers about Covid-19, says Garza Martinez. Not only did it send Spanish-language email and text updates from the CDC and the Oregon Health Authority on the importance of social distancing and wearing masks, it provided masks to farmworkers starting at the end of February.

In the beginning, when masks were in short supply, Garside sent out an information sheet from the CDC on how to make cloth masks. But before long, Garside’s friend, a retired nurse named Maria Michalczyk, launched the Pandemic Volunteer Mask Makers of Oregon, a group of over 500 volunteers from across the state who sewed masks for vineyard workers, donating a bunch to ¡Salud! In late April, when Governor Kate Brown received a donation of N-95 masks from China’s Fujian Province, ¡Salud! alerted field managers at all the wineries, and Garza Martinez retrieved boxes of them for his crew at Anne Amie.

“¡Salud! is really the soul of the Willamette Valley,” says Cooper Mountain Vineyard co-owner Barbara Gross, whose parents were founding members of the organization.

Leda Garside, chief nurse at ¡Salud!, estimates that roughly 70 percent of the vineyard workers she sees do not have any other healthcare.

Gross was impressed by how early ¡Salud! began testing for Covid-19 — in late March and early April, a time when many states were still struggling to implement comprehensive testing infrastructure. “I think my crew had access to testing before you, as a regular consumer, had access,” she says. “Leda and her crew proactively got out there and tested. That was 100 percent ¡Salud!”

“It’s really hard work”

Farmworkers regularly do back-breaking labor, often in harsh weather conditions. They’re out in the fields every day, picking berries, kale, asparagus and citrus — or pruning, thinning, training vines and weeding. When the Covid-19 crisis hit in mid-March, it disproportionately impacted Latinos, who comprise 72 percent of farmworkers in the U.S.

“It’s really hard work,” says Garside. “You’re exposed to the elements: cold, wind, rain — you name it.” Luckily, because most Willamette Valley vineyards farm organically or biodynamically, pesticide exposure is not a big factor. But laboring in the fields for years on end can cause health issues that accumulate over time. “And we do have workers who are in their seventies and eighties!” Garside says. A network of 174 federally funded community health centers across the country serves farmworkers, but these clinics only reach one million farmworkers and their family members, says Partida, from the National Center for Farmworker Health, leaving a big gap.

¡Salud! aims to fill that gap — at least in Oregon’s vineyards — providing healthcare to vineyard workers year-round. Spring through fall is the organization’s busiest season.

Before the pandemic, many medical procedures were conducted in the ¡Salud! van. Now, more often, they happen in the field.

“This time of year, we’re out in the vineyards every week, three to four times a week,” Garside says.

Garside, who has been working for ¡Salud! for 23 years, is its beating heart. Raptor Ridge Winery proprietor Annie Shull fondly calls her “the good witch of the Valley.” 

Garside and her team of bilingual nurses roll into vineyards in a retrofitted Sprinter Van that contains a reception area and a full examination room. Before the pandemic, they would see a patient in the van, where they’d do blood pressure checks, basic bloodwork, vision exams and vaccinations. But now, due to strict Covid protocols, the nurses set up outdoor service stations separated by dividers to maintain privacy. (They can still do basic tests and health education in the vineyard, but for other medical tests, they’re steering farmworkers to their clinic at OHSU Hillsboro Medical Center.) 

In 2019, over 900 farmworkers received wellness exams via ¡Salud! and over 500 received flu shots. Some 68 workers received free vision exams via a partnership with Oregon Health Sciences University’s Casey Eye Institute and Pacific School of Optometry. And 114 received dental services through ¡Salud!’s partnership with local dental hygiene science programs, Medical Teams International and community health centers. Until recently, most of this dental work was done in the ¡Salud! van, but that’s also on hold during the pandemic. 

Several farmworkers have tested positive for diabetes or pre-diabetes and with diet and lifestyle changes recommended by ¡Salud! nurses, have been able to manage and even reverse the condition.

Since diabetes is so prevalent in the migrant seasonal farmworker community, a blood sugar test is always done as part of routine bloodwork. Results are immediate, which allows ¡Salud! nurses to give advice on how to make diet and lifestyle changes, even if the patient is just pre-diabetic. If blood sugar levels are very high, they make an immediate referral to a primary care doctor. Garza Martinez says several of his crew have tested positive for diabetes or pre-diabetes and with diet and lifestyle changes recommended by ¡Salud! nurses, have been able to manage and even reverse the condition.

The day I spoke to Garside, she had seen 25 farmworkers on the picturesque grounds of Stoller Family Estate in Dayton. She made a dental referral for a worker whose bridge work, done in his native Guatemala a decade ago, had broken. “So he is walking around with these little stubs from four teeth and it’s super uncomfortable,” Garside says. 

“There’s a lot of conscientiousness about the land and how to maintain it and treat it well. It’s the same philosophy with health care.”

She called a local community health clinic that could squeeze him in the following day. (¡Salud! provides a dental grant if the patient cannot afford even the lower price that the health clinic charges.) Another patient had extremely high blood pressure and Garside was able to connect with his primary care doctor, who ordered a prescription he could pick up the next day. 

“We are a safety net service,” Garside says. She is grateful to the Oregon winemaking community for coming up with the idea of delivering these vital healthcare services 29 years ago. “There’s a lot of conscientiousness about the land and how to maintain it and treat it well. It’s the same philosophy with health care,” she says. “We are very fortunate that the industry has proven itself — how to take care of the land and do something for the seasonal agricultural workers.”

 

Portland's Food Hub Keeps Local Food Stocked During COVID-19

When our convoluted national supply chains broke down during COVID-19 and meatpacking facilities shuttered due to outbreaks, The Redd on Salmon was able to pivot, helping Portlanders weather the pandemic with ample supplies of local food and locally-made hand sanitizer.  I wrote about this unique food hub's myriad projects for Reasons to be Cheerful. 

It’s Friday afternoon, and people on bikes and in cars are pulling up to an enormous red-brick warehouse in Portland’s Central Eastside to pick up their “Greater Good” boxes. Packed with local food, the $50 boxes are organized by local grocery chain New Seasons and wholesaler Organically Grown Co. A similar pick-up parade occurs on Wednesdays, when people cart away “Dock Boxes” of fish, shrimp and crab from popular Oregon Coast seafood restaurant Local Ocean. And on Monday evenings, Farm Punk, a farm in nearby Gresham, drops off its 50 community-supported agriculture (CSA) shares here, to be delivered the next day to eaters’ front porches via electric-assist trikes. 

This is the “new normal” at the Redd on Salmon, an enterprise that’s optimizing Portland’s local food system and helping farmers, ranchers and fisherfolk adapt to a post-Covid reality. Even in the before times, the Redd on Salmon served as a solution to the infrastructure dilemma for small and mid-size farmers, who face all kinds of logistical challenges as they try to get food to consumers. Without the production volume to justify large-scale storage and transport systems, small farmers often spend a full day on the road each week, burning precious time and money driving to restaurants and supermarkets, dropping off their wares one at a time. They also need to market and often sell their own goods — skills many farmers don’t know the first thing about. 

With logistical and marketing support from the Redd, small food producers can scale up and eventually serve institutional outlets like schools, hospitals, grocery stores and corporate offices. Credit: The Redd

The Redd solves all these problems in one fell swoop, acting as a distribution hub, an affordable storage space and a shared industrial kitchen. Ecotrust, the environmental think tank behind the Redd, also hosts a business accelerator, helping small farmers to scale up. Currently, the Redd supports more than 150 small to mid-size food-related businesses. From 2018 to 2019, the facility’s core tenants saw a 45 percent increase in job creation and a 12 percent increase in jobs at or above the living wage. 

Medium-sizing small farms

The Covid-19 pandemic has exposed the failures of the industrial food system. Grocery stores have run short of pasta, canned beans, flour, yeast and meat. Farmers, unable to sell to school cafeterias and chain restaurants, are dumping their milk and plowing under their onions. When 20 gargantuan meat processing plants were shuttered by coronavirus outbreaks, farmers were left with no choice but to euthanize hundreds of thousands of pigs and millions of chickens. 

As Michael Pollan noted in his recent piece in the New York Review of Books, our industrial food chain is broken, but local food systems, like the one championed and supported by the Redd on Salmon, are proving to be more resilient. “The advantages of local food systems have never been more obvious, and their rapid growth during the past two decades has at least partly insulated many communities from the shocks to the broader food economy,” Pollan writes.

 

The Redd on Salmon is an integral part of this system. It is what is known as a food hub, a centrally located space that facilitates the aggregation, storage, processing, distribution and/or marketing of regionally produced food products. Not only does the block-long space provide farmers a 2,000-square-foot cold storage facility (half freezer, half refrigeration), it has offices and “dry storage” space so local companies like Ground Up PDX (nut butters) and Hoss Sauce (hot sauce) can stash boxes and product at a central location closer to their customers. 

The Redd solves the transport conundrum, too, with its main tenant, B-Line. A short-haul service with a fleet of electric-assist trikes, B-Line executes “last-mile” delivery without spewing carbon dioxide or jamming up the roads at delivery sites. Trike drivers load up their insulated trailers with up to 600 pounds of product and drop off food at restaurants, grocery stores and corporate cafeterias like AirBnB and Google. (B-Line also has one truck for deliveries that are further than three miles away. Founder and CEO Franklin Jones is saving up for an electric one.)  

By providing an all-in-one distribution hub to farmers who could never afford one on their own, the Redd was conceived as a way to support what food systems experts call “the agriculture of the middle.” Ag of the middle producers are larger than those who sell via local farmers’ markets or CSAs, but smaller than those supplying globalized commodity markets. With logistical and marketing support from the Redd, these producers can scale up and eventually serve institutional outlets like schools, hospitals, grocery stores and corporate offices.

A short-haul service with a fleet of electric-assist trikes, B-Line executes “last-mile” delivery without spewing carbon dioxide or jamming up the roads at delivery sites. Credit: The Redd

And lest you think this is a quirky boutique solution unique to Portlandia, know that there are over 350 food hubs around the country—from Durham, North Carolina to Traverse City, Michigan. A traditional food hub offers aggregation, marketing and often distribution for agricultural products. It might also serve as an incubator for micro-businesses. But the Redd takes it a step further, offering shared kitchens, a co-working space and even (across the street in the Redd East) an 8,000-square-foot event space with a state-of-the-art kitchen. Jim Barham, an agricultural economist at the USDA, calls the Redd a food hub on steroids.

Founded by Ecotrust, which has long been a champion of ag of the middle producers, the Redd runs a two-year Ag of the Middle Accelerator Program that helps smaller-scale farmers, ranchers and fisherfolk learn the basics of marketing, accounting, taxation and business structure — as well as helping them apply for USDA value-added producer grants. As part of their orientation, participants in the accelerator tour the Redd’s facilities; graduates often end up using the space in some way. Over 70 producers have either graduated from the accelerator program or are in it right now. The current cohort of 17 businesses increased their sales by $1.5 million, collectively, after one year in the program. 

Keeping it local

Pre-pandemic, 30 to 40 percent of B-Line’s deliveries were to restaurants, corporate cafeterias or downtown businesses like Office Depot. Now that most of those are closed, the company has had to pivot, doing more frequent deliveries to New Seasons’ 18 area grocery stores, as well as serving as a physical hub for new direct-to-consumer services like the DockBox and Greater Good boxes. 

“When the pandemic hit, there was a flurry of ‘panic buying,’” says B-Line founder and CEO Franklin Jones. As it did at many supermarket chains, demand skyrocketed at New Seasons, causing a backlog with mainline distributors like KeHE, UNFI and Supervalu. As a result, says director of brand development at New Seasons Chris Tjersland, these distributors limited the amount of product that could be shipped to each store, leaving them with empty shelves. 

But because B-Line has pre-existing relationships with local farmers and producers, Jones was able to funnel products straight from these vendors through the Redd and into the aisles at New Seasons. Working with B-Line also allowed Tjersland and Jones to work directly with the producers of New Seasons’s private label line at a moment when traditional distribution channels were breaking down. While industrial farms were dumping perfectly good fruit and milk, B-Line was storing and delivering thousands of cases of Shepherd’s Grain flour, 800 cases of Rallenti Pasta and over 400 cases of Scenic Fruit frozen berries. Tjersland even worked with local companies Brew Dr Kombucha and Straightaway Cocktails to make New Seasons hand sanitizer, which was stored at the Redd and delivered via B-Line. 

The pandemic prompted other positive developments at the Redd. Redd Campus Manager Emma Sharer was tasked with how to optimize the Redd East event space, normally booked with weddings, natural wine fairs and food-focused conferences. In late March, she was doing an ab workout on the waterfront when she ran into Jacobsen Valentine, founder of Feed the Mass, an affordable cooking school that teaches people how to make healthy meals from scratch.

For the past month, a handful of volunteers have been cooking two meals a week at the Redd’s kitchen; each meal can feed 200 people. Credit: The Redd

The two struck up a conversation. “He was like, ‘My nonprofit is really struggling and I have this idea: how can we make meals for people who are missing access to them? Who are forced to buy fast food or packaged food?” 

They cooked up a collaborative plan. Ecotrust would donate its Redd East kitchen to Valentine two days a week, and he would cook meals for unhoused and food insecure folks around town.  

The FED Project was born. For the past month, Valentine and a handful of volunteers have been cooking two meals a week at the Redd’s kitchen; each meal can feed 200 people. The meals are packed up individually and delivered to folks around town who need them. 

Ecotrust gave Valentine a small food budget and stipend. Plus, Sharer scored a huge food donation from Airbnb when the company’s Portland offices, including its cafeteria, closed in March. Since the company had been sourcing via the Redd, much of the food was high-quality and local. “There was cheese, sour cream, Camas Country flour, a lot of spices, chicken from Marion Acres, pork products from Campfire Farm, confit garlic, frozen berries,” says Airbnb’s food program manager Abby Fammartino, who estimates that the donation was worth $10,000 in total. Jacobsen and his crew made mac and cheese the first week and channa masala the next. 

Sharer and Valentine hope that this particular project will live on even after the pandemic is over. “If we were to get more funding, could some of that go towards paying BIPOC (Black, Indigenous and People of Color) farmers to purchase more product, supportive of the sourcing side of farming?” asks Sharer. “That’s our next step.”

One thing is clear: the Redd campus — and its robust local food community — helped keep flour and hand sanitizer on New Seasons shelves while mainline distributors couldn’t keep up with the spike in demand. 

“What it [the pandemic] made me realize is that the supply chain infrastructure is broken,” Tjersland from New Seasons says. Jones, who hasn’t had to lay off anyone at B-Line as a result of his increased business with New Seasons, agrees. “The whole pandemic really shone a spotlight on how resilient the local supply chain could be.” 

 

 

 

MilkRun Revives the Milkman Model for Farm Fresh Produce

 

I wrote this feature about Portland-based startup MilkRun for Businessweek's food issue. 

 

Julia Niiro on her farm in Canby, Oregon [CELESTE NOCHE FOR Bloomberg] 

When Julia Niiro founded MilkRun in Portland, Ore., in 2018, she wanted to combat two enduring challenges to local food systems: inefficient distribution and low farmer pay. Addressing these issues was necessary for smaller producers to disrupt an industry that’s “really, really good at processing cheap food and selling uniform waxed apples at the same place we go to buy our toilet paper,” as she put it in an impassioned 2019 TEDx Talk. But it’s much less successful at delivering the sustainably raised, flavorful food grown on nearby farms.

In America, efficiency and scale have superseded taste, nutrition, and the livelihood of the farmer who grows, raises, or otherwise produces our food. Producers get only 8¢ out of every dollar spent by consumers, on average.MilkRun’s mission is straightforward: “I want to make it as easy to buy from our local farmers as it is to book a stay in someone’s house or call a ride.”

The case for buying locally produced food is stronger than ever. When the Covid-19 pandemic began to shut down Oregon and the rest of the country in mid-March, it both sped up the trend toward online grocery shopping and highlighted the shortcomings of the industrial food system. In just a few weeks, farmers, unable to sell to restaurants, school districts, and coffee shops, were dumping milk and plowing under onions. Not long after, 20 U.S. meat-processing plants were shuttered because of coronavirus outbreaks, leaving farmers to euthanize tens of thousands of pigs and chickens. By contrast, the small, nonindustrial supply chains of family-run ranches, dairies, mills, and produce farms were able to keep up with increased demand.

 

Continue reading on BusinessWeek's site. 

 

The New Wave of Oregon Chardonnay

I wrote this in May for British wine magazine Club Oenologique.

Back in early February, before the coronavirus pandemic had shuttered restaurants, bars and cafes everywhere, I met two Oregon winemakers for a lively lunch at Gabriel Rucker’s bustling Canard in Portland, Oregon.

“This is our waving-of-the-flag wine,” said winemaker Josh Bergström as he poured me a splash of his 2016 Sigrid, a restrained, acid-forward Chardonnay which sells for around $110 a bottle. Bergström, who has been making Chardonnay for 22 years, was joined by his wife Caroline and friend and colleague Ken Pahlow, winemaker at Walter Scott Wines in Oregon’s Eola-Amity Hills (pictured above).

Oregon is renowned for its Pinot Noir. Burgundian winemakers have been snapping up vineyards here since 1987, when Domaine Drouhin — the first Burgundy house to make wine outside of France — bought land in the Dundee Hills.

But lately, the buzz has been all about Chardonnay. The Oregon Chardonnay Celebration began in 2012 with 50 attendees. This February, 56 Oregon winemakers poured for over 500 attendees. While New World Chardonnays have a reputation (often unjustified) for being over-oaked and unctuous, the best of Oregon’s have a natural acidity, lower alcohol and an enormous textural expression.

The Willamette Valley, cooled by Pacific breezes coming through the Coastal Range, has a similar cool climate to Burgundy. Summer days are long, with ample sunshine, and nights are cool. Oregon Chardonnays can have the same brightness and minerality as the best white Burgundies and in order to achieve this, Bergström and Pahlow have to pick grapes early. Earlier, in some cases, than others would like.

“For us, a lot of times, we’re picking Chardonnay at the same time a lot of the sparkling guys are picking for their wines,” Bergström says. Winemakers can have heated arguments with growers. Bergström recalls one conversation in which a grower told him it would be “irresponsible” to pick when he wanted to. Finally they agreed: the grower would pick the fruit but Bergström would have to truck it out himself. This conversation — and others like it — pushed Bergström to move to the estate model.

Pahlow, who learned the perks of picking early while working harvest with Dominique Lafon (both in Burgundy and in the Willamette Valley), sources all of his own fruit. Luckily, most of his growers agree with his harvest dates for Chardonnay. He’s also sourcing from vineyards that practice sélection massale, a viticultural technique that replaces dying vines by grafting cuttings from old vines, thereby creating more clonal diversity (and hence uneven ripening) in the vineyard. “When you walk through the vineyard you think, ‘That’s not really ripe. That’s close.’ But when you pull it all together—Oh my god!” says Pahlow. “Like a symphony, you have all these different things contributing to the final voice.”

Josh and Caroline Bergström

The Bergström vineyard

Bergström and Pahlow namecheck roughly a dozen Oregon winemakers who fall into the “natural acidity camp”. In this coterie are such renowned producers as Bethel Heights, Brick House (founded by former CBS foreign correspondent Doug Tunnell), Crowley, Goodfellow, Lingua Franca (where Lafon is consulting winemaker) and Evening Land. Others, like the Drouhins, Brian O’Donnell at Belle Pente, and Brian Marcy at Big Table Farm, pick a little later, and so have some of that riper quality, though they still lead with natural acidity. “The styles diverge, but what [these Chardonnays] all have, regardless of when the winemakers picked, is this tension. This notion of tension and brightness that is indisputably Willamette Valley,” Bergström says.

Oregon’s success with Chardonnay can be traced back to the late 1980s, when pioneering winemaker David Adelsheim — who had studied at the Lycée Viticole in Burgundy — and a few forward-thinking colleagues travelled to Burgundy and asked the ministry of agriculture for Dijon clones. Amazingly, the French said yes. “We didn’t make a hearty Burgundy and we didn’t make a Chablis, so we posed no competition to France,” Bergström says. That’s when the Chardonnay scene in Oregon picked up steam.

All of a sudden, you could ripen Chardonnay alongside Pinot Noir and you were getting these classic aromas and flavors, Bergström says. Winemakers interested in classic expressions of Chardonnay started planting the Dijon clone and forming small groups to talk about techniques in the cellar and growing practices. These conversations have been going on for 30 years.

Ken Pahlow and Walter Scott Wines general manager Erica Landon

Pahlow in the vineyard

Today, with the realisation that Oregon Chardonnay can be as excellent and ageworthy as its Pinot Noir, Pinot Gris is being ripped out and replaced. “There is an unprecedented commitment to Chardonnay in this valley,” Pahlow says. “You’ve never seen more vineyards planting Chardonnay and placing it in the best spots, which in the past would have been reserved for Pinot Noir.”

This thrills both winemakers, who see themselves as Chardonnay champions—at least for their style of Chardonnay. “For the first time, [we’re seeing that] white wine in Oregon can be a world class wine, and can sell for the same price as Pinot Noir,” Bergström says.

Since the pandemic hit Oregon in mid-March, both wineries have had to pivot to online sales only, cancelling all tasting room visits and launch parties. “We are hanging in there, thanks to the fact that our wine warehouses and UPS and FedEX are considered essential businesses, and most Americans have been stuck at home for the past two months and are cooking more and drinking wine,” wrote Bergstrom via e-mail. That said, he’s had to get “much, much leaner” as a business. Pahlow, whose business was already fairly lean (he employs just three people), says everyone on his crew has had to take pay cuts. That said, direct-to-consumer sales have been solid. “We’ve been blown away by the support. We feel very lucky,” he says.

This ‘Carbon-Negative’ Burger Is Fighting Climate Change

I wrote this story for Reasons to be Cheerful, David Byrne's new online magazine. 

As fake meat floods the market, some fast-food joints are insisting that their ultra-sustainably raised beef is better for the planet.

Burgerville's No. 6 Burger uses regeneratively farmed grass-fed beef, wheat from farmers who plant cover crops and practice low-till agriculture, and cheese from a creamery in Southern Oregon that gets it milk from small, family-run farms.

 

Everyone from Miley Cyrus to Trevor Noah is raving about the Impossible Burger, the vegan beef with the trademark “bleed” that debuted in 2016. It’s one of a handful of plant-based meats that have surged in popularity on claims that they can “drastically reduce humanity’s destructive impact on the global environment,” as Impossible Foods CEO Pat Brown has put it.

But what if there’s another, earth-friendlier option? What if a juice-dripping burger from an actual cow could be better for the planet than vegan-but-you’d-never-know-it imitation meat? A few burger chains are tacitly suggesting as much, offering real beef burgers that, by some measures, are more sustainable, and show how farming, done correctly, can be good for the earth.

Carbon-negative beef

Burgerville, a 60-year-old fast-food chain in the Pacific Northwest, launched the No. 6 Burger in September, so named for the sixth element in the periodic table, carbon. The No. 6 is a lesson in regenerative agriculture, a holistic land management practice that reverses climate change by rebuilding soil’s organic matter and restoring its biodiversity. 

The 100-percent grass-fed beef burger is from Carman Ranch, which practices rotational grazing on pasture, sequestering carbon back into the soil. (More on that later.) The brioche bun is baked at Grand Central Bakery from wheat grown on two Northwest farms (Small’s Family Farm and Camas Country Mill) that practice minimum tillage, which prevents erosion and carbon loss. And the aged cheddar melted atop is from Face Rock Creamery, which works with small-scale dairies within 15 miles of its facility. Every one of these enterprises is based in Oregon or Washington. The burger is currently sold at nine of Burgerville’s 41 locations. (It was slated to roll out at 16 additional locations in March, but then the coronavirus pandemic hit.) 

“Soil health is the core principle of what we do,” says Cory Carman, the 40-year-old owner of Carman Ranch. The pasture at Carman Ranch is rich with deeply rooted perennial grasses and nutrient-dense cover crops like winter pea, oats, sunflowers and a brassica mix—all plants that feed soil microbes as well as the cattle, eliminating the need for trucking in carbon-reliant feed like corn. The cattle are rotated on pasture and cycle the nutrients through their bodies, nourishing the soil with their manure, which in turn feeds the next cover crop. After they graze, that area is left fallow for as long as a year so it can regenerate. Crucially, the grasses and cover crops that the cattle munch on also pull carbon from the atmosphere and store it in the soil. 

Though Carman doesn’t have funding to test how deep a carbon sink her grazeland is, other ranches that practice regenerative grazing have. White Oak Pastures, a Bluffton, Georgia-based farm, recently had an outside firm conduct a “Life Cycle Assessment” of its rotationally grazed beef. The results show that the operation produces a net total of negative-3.5 kilograms of carbon emissions for every kilogram of beef produced. In other words, the cattle of White Oak Pastures have a net-negative impact on the environment—the very process by which they’re raised reduces climate change.

A partnership, rare and well done

Back in 2017, before the No. 6 Burger was on their menu, a few Burgerville executives visited Carman on her family’s ranch in Wallowa County, Oregon. The company wanted to put its money where its values were—fostering a more resilient regional supply chain. But the executives were wary, in part, because of the premium price that Carman Ranch beef commands. 

Cory Carman on her ranch in Wallowa, Oregon. Credit: Steven Jackson / Flickr

Carman convinced them that supporting her ranch would help bring the operation to scale, allowing her to lower her prices —a virtuous cycle of its own. “I told them, ‘Listen, if you want us to scale up so we can become one of your suppliers eventually, you can’t just sit around!’” she recalls. The Burgerville execs agreed, and committed to making the ranch’s grass-fed beef about seven percent of the beef in all their burgers.

The partnership worked. Burgerville’s commitment to buying a steady weekly volume allowed Carman to scale up, doubling the ranch’s production from 20 head of cattle a week to 40. Today, the Carman Ranch beef Burgerville buys goes first to the No. 6 Burger, and if anything is leftover, they’ll use it in the grind for the regular burgers. (The chain uses Country Natural Beef, which is grass-fed and corn finished, for its other burgers.) And even though the coronavirus pandemic shuttered all Burgerville restaurants to dine-in customers (38 remain open for drive-through or delivery business), they’ve stuck by their weekly order from Carman Ranch. 

Despite its $8 price tag — several dollars more than Burgerville’s $5.39 Northwest Cheeseburger — the No. 6 has been a hit. “I thought there was going to be all this pushback on pricing, but there wasn’t,” says Michelle Battista, the chain’s senior vice president for brand and marketing. From September to April 5, Burgerville sold nearly 50,000 No. 6 Burgers, nearly 14 percent of the company’s quarter-pounder burger sales. 

Impossible in nature

The No. 6 Burger is a story of long-game sustainability, in which shared risk and commitment lead to scaled-up carbon-negative farming.

The Impossible Burger’s story is different. A Silicon Valley food-tech triumph, its genetically engineered soy-based “heme” compound (the part that makes it “bleed”) has won over even un-woke fast food chains like Burger King and White Castle. But as critics like Anna Lappé, author of Diet for a Hot Planet, have pointed out, the company’s reliance on genetically modified soy is problematic in ways that have nothing to do with animal rights. 

GM soy is genetically engineered so that it can be sprayed with Bayer-Monsanto’s glyphosate-based herbicide Roundup. Not only has glyphosate use been linked to the decline in honeybee and monarch butterfly populations, it has been classified by the World Health Organization as a probable carcinogen. The company’s reliance on a monoculture crop — genetically modified soy — also perpetuates one of the worst aspects of the industrial food system. Growing one crop year in and year out degrades the soil and contributes to erosion — because there are no cover crops to keep the soil in place — and also requires chemical fertilizers and other fossil fuels to harvest and transport. According to the World Food LCA Database, soybeans have a footprint of two kilograms of carbon for every kilogram of beans produced.  

Rachel Konrad, the chief communications officer at Impossible Foods, says that the company routinely scans for pesticides and herbicides and that there is no glyphosate in the Impossible Burger (though she did not deny that glyphosate is used on GM soy crops). She also disputed that relying on soy would perpetuate a monocultural food system, saying, “Animal agriculture is the No. 1 reason we’ve developed dangerous, biodiversity-killing monocultures… For what it’s worth, if you want to avoid soy for some reason, then you must eliminate animal products from your diet since livestock consumes the vast majority of all soy.” This is entirely true of the cheap feedlot beef raised in America, which is what most fast-food chains depend on. However, it is not true of ranches, like Carman’s, that practice regenerative agriculture, since their cattle is grazed on only pasture; they never eat soy or corn.  

There is also the question of whether heme, made from fermenting a genetically engineered yeast, is safe to eat. Konrad cites conclusions from the U.S. FDA and third-party food safety scientists “that the heme in the Impossible Burger is totally safe to eat.” But organizations like the Center for Food Safety and Moms Across America argue that we don’t really know, since this is the first time humans have ever consumed this unique lab-made form of heme. 

But the biggest impact of these products may be how quickly they have shifted focus away from more sustainable methods of farming and toward tech-based solutions instead. Before fake meat made a splash, at least one fast-food chain had just begun committing to more sustainably raised beef. In 2015, Carl’s Jr. introduced an antibiotic-free burger sourced from free range, grass-fed cattle. It’s no longer on the menu — now the chain sells the Beyond Burger instead. 

While some regional chains like Elevation and Bareburger have continued to source grass-fed beef from smaller family-run farms, most are still sourcing their beef from confined animal feeding lots, which are devastating for the environment, horrific for the animals and not great for human health. (Cows evolved to eat grass, not corn, which tends to make them sick). This, at least, is something that Impossible CEO Brown and proponents of regenerative agriculture agree on: our addiction to cheap feedlot beef is harming the planet. 

Burgerville’s business has been crucial to Carman Ranch’s growth. But more important than revenue, the chain has given Cory Carman — and the other farmers behind the No. 6 burger — a chance to share her mission with the wider world. “We want to get the message out: Why should you pay a premium for grass-fed beef? Why is our species dependent on the health of the soil?” She, like other practitioners of regenerative agriculture, is concerned that lab-based meat perpetuates monocultures. “The integration of animals, in some way, is critical to all ecological systems,” she says.  

The benefits of regenerative agriculture are complex, but once customers are educated, says Battista, they’re on board. “As a marketplace, we got people to grass fed,” she says. “We got people to see the difference between grass-fed and conventional feedlot beef. And people are like, ‘Yeah, I get it!’ And they connect the dots back to their own health and wellness.” 

 

The Oregon County that Stopped Big Water

I wrote this story on March 2nd for Reasons to be Cheerful, David Byrne's new publication. 

As Washington State moves to ban companies from selling its spring water, the story of Hood River County shows how even a small place can stop the extraction of its most precious resource.

Two weeks ago, Washington State took a major step toward shutting off the tap for companies that want to haul away its spring water and sell it around the world. The state senate passed a bill that would prohibit companies like Crystal Geyser and Nestlé from extracting, bottling and selling water from spring-fed sources. If enacted, it would be the first state law in the nation to declare that “any use of water for the commercial production of bottled water is deemed to be detrimental to the public welfare and the public interest.” 

Governor Jay Inslee hasn’t taken a position on the bill, but observers say he will likely support it, setting a precedent for other states like Maine and Michigan that have pushed back against water bottling operations in recent years.

Washington’s law would be the toughest restriction on water bottling operations in the U.S. so far — but it wouldn’t be the first. Across the Columbia River from the state’s southern border, Hood River County, Oregon, won an improbable victory against a Nestlé bottling operation in 2016, setting the stage for efforts like the one in Washington today. Hood River County’s fight against Nestlé took a decade, but in the end it stopped the company from opening up a facility in the small town of Cascade Locks and banned commercial water bottling in the county entirely. The lessons of that fight offer a roadmap for similar efforts elsewhere.  

An extractive industry

Despite the snowy mountain peaks and sparkling waterfalls that adorn their labels, nearly two-thirds of all bottled water sold in the U.S. come from municipal tap water. Not only is this water no safer or purer than water from the faucet (tap water is actually tested more frequently) it is 2,000 times more expensive. In addition, the bottled water industry creates millions of single-use plastic bottles that will never be recycled. In 2016, four billion pounds of PET (polyethylene terephthalate) plastic was used for bottled water production. 

But it’s bottled water from spring-fed sources that can have biggest ecological impacts. “Bottling spring water can be disastrous to the water table because the company sucks a large amount from a small source,” says Julia DeGraw, who was the senior Northwest organizer at Food & Water Watch during the decade when Nestlé was trying to open a bottling facility in Cascade Locks.

DeGraw says that communities in Mecosta County, Michigan have seen their wells run dry, their springs stop flowing and their fish die off because of Nestlé’s aggressive water pumping operations. A spokesperson from Nestlé Waters North America does not directly deny this, but points to data from Michigan’s Department of Environment, Great Lakes and Energy showing that the state’s nearly 40 bottled water companies account for less than .01 percent of water used in the state.  

A fish ladder at Cascade Locks on the Columbia River. Credit: J. Stephen Conn / Flickr

Hood River County’s fight against Nestlé began back in 2008, when the multinational company approached Cascade Locks with plans to open a $50 million bottling plant that would have extracted more than 100 million gallons of water a year from Oxbow Springs, which feeds a salmon hatchery.  

DeGraw remembers those early days clearly. “We were the lead organization… really early on when we were trying to build a coalition,” she says. That coalition ended up being big, a fact that was key to the effort’s success. It included not just environmental groups like Food & Water Watch and the local Sierra Club chapter, but also public sector unions, Native American tribes, activist nuns, pro-bono lawyers, ultra runners, a hunger striker and ordinary people turned activists. 

Also critical was the fact that although the effort was grassroots, it was also well-resourced. Food & Water Watch put money behind the campaign, hiring DeGraw to be the local organizer and helping to pay for the county ballot measure. And in 2012 the Crag Law Center donated its services, filing two protests challenging the Oregon Water Resources Department’s (OWRD) approval of Nestlé’s water exchange permit. 

The broad reach and resources of the coalition, which named itself Keep Nestlé Out of the Gorge (KNOG), allowed it to confront the company’s U.S. water division, which has a pattern, the organizers say. They claim it seeks out economically distressed towns like Cascade Locks, which was once a boom town when the timber industry was thriving. In 2010, the town had a median income of just $42,917 and an unemployment rate of 15.5 percent, according to data from the U.S. Census. 

“When the mill closed down, it really had a profound effect on the economy,” says Aurora del Val, a retired English teacher who got involved in the campaign to keep Nestlé out. “Cascade Locks is a town that has the profile that I think a lot of these water companies are looking for. And they’re saying all the right things. The Nestlé guy would shake hands with all the business people and gave money to the food bank. He made all these promises. There is a real standard way that they operate in a small town.” Nestlé’s spokesperson confirmed that the company makes significant economic contributions in areas where they operate. “We support many community organizations, locally and nationally, through donations of water, food, supplies, and money,” he wrote via email. 

In Cascade Locks, Nestlé promised jobs and economic prosperity while playing down potential environmental consequences, and local officials took it at face value, del Val says. 

“It’s kind of like the tobacco industry saying ‘Don’t worry, it doesn’t give you cancer!’” she continues. “The water plant might’ve provided a few jobs locally, but in terms of — for the larger economy — it would’ve put the water supply at risk.”

Resistance coalesces

Concerned about the negative repercussions — depleting groundwater that farmers and residents depend upon, siphoning off the cold creek water that’s essential for fish habitat — del Val started to talk to her neighbors, many of whom were also concerned. In the spring of 2015, she helped found a group called the Local Water Alliance, eventually becoming the group’s campaign director. Even though she calls herself a “reluctant activist,” del Val went door-to-door and talked to Democrats, Independents and Republicans alike. 

In Cascade Locks, she and others were able to persuade long-time residents and independents Kathy and Bob Tittle, who own the Chevron station in town, as well as Joseph Shelley and Lynn Pruitt — a Libertarian and Republican, respectively — who felt so strongly about the campaign that they allowed their photos on the Local Water Alliance’s materials. In Odell, in the heart of orchard country, Butch Gehrig, a registered Republican, endorsed the Alliance’s campaign, too. “Water matters, and it doesn’t matter which political affiliation you are,” she says. 

The Bridge of the Gods spanning the Columbia River between Cascade Locks, Oregon and Washington State. Credit: C. Hanchey / Flickr

The Yakama Nation opposed the bottling plant at around the same time. Chairman JoDe Goudy spoke on the steps of the Oregon Capitol saying that the Yakama Nation would sue the state of Oregon if Nestlé was authorized to bottle water from Oxbow Springs. The Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs and Umatilla and Nez Perce tribes also sent Governor Kate Brown letters opposing the bottling facility and critiquing the process. 

“Our natural resources are important and we can’t be extracting them,” says Carina Miller, who was a member of the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs’ tribal council at the time. Miller says that tribal treaty rights were disregarded when the Nestlé deal was set into motion, and was troubled that this wasn’t what motivated Governor Kate Brown’s late-in-the-game decision to oppose the deal. On the other hand, Miller says, the fact that area environmentalists and conservative white farmers alike recognized that tribal people needed to be at the table was huge. “To go and have shared values — just that there was an acknowledgement that tribes should be included. That was a win.” 

Even though Nestlé spent $105,000 to oppose the Hood River County Water Protection Measure — more than double what backers of the measure raised — it passed in May 2016 by nearly 70 percent. “It was democracy in action,” del Val says. “The power of the vote was pretty inspiring. Even though this is a real dark time, people do really make a difference.” 

Even so, perhaps because Governor Brown hadn’t taken action, Nestlé, Cascade Locks and the ODFW continued to pursue a water rights swap, in violation of the voter-approved measure. (At question was whether a county government has the authority to tell a city government what it can and can’t do with its resources.) After a new round of emails and phone calls from local residents and a damning story from a local news affiliate, Brown finally told ODFW to halt its water exchange in October of 2017, putting the kibosh on the Nestlé facility for good. 

Today, business is booming in Cascade Locks, according to del Val. A Basque cidery called Son of Man recently opened, sharing space with two natural winemakers. Thunder Island Brewing just broke ground on a 10,000-square-foot facility on the main street. And Renewal Workshop, a startup that takes discarded apparel that would normally go into the landfill and transforms it into new products or upcycled material, opened in 2016. “Those are the kinds of companies that are opening here,” says del Val. “They’re green and sustainable… and they’re hiring!” 

Now Hood River County is passing on the lessons it learned from its epic battle. DeGraw and del Val have recently shared tactics and strategies with resident-turned-activists in Randle, Washington, who have been fighting a similar effort by Crystal Geyser. “You don’t have to reinvent the wheel,” says del Val. “Not everyone involved is a career activist. We’re just ordinary people who care.”

Flower Power

The American cannabis boom goes far beyond the vast ranks of stoners who can finally roll their joints legally. Hannah Wallace looks at one grower focusing on terroir and nuance in the pursuit of weed that isn't about getting you high

                                          Nathan (left) and Aaron Howard (right) at East Fork Cultivars in Southern Oregon 

 

When he was a baby, Wesley Howard was diagnosed with neurofibromatosis, a genetic disorder with no known cure. Nine years later, doctors detected scoliosis, a spine-deforming symptom of the disease. At 20, Wesley had his first seizure. ‘It was random neurological mayhem,’ recalls his brother, Nathan. ‘A lot of pain, epilepsy, sleep problems.’ 

Though anti-seizure medications helped, they had negative side effects. Eventually, Nathan and his other brother, Aaron, came to realize that a long-stigmatized plant with which Wesley already had a lifelong relationship, might be a more stable alternative—cannabis. The drug not only gave Wesley relief from the pain, it allowed him to eat and sleep. But this was in 2004, when the only cannabis cultivars Aaron could get his hands on—illegally—were high in a compound known as tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), which is intoxicating. And while he loved the relief and escape afforded by the THC high, Wesley didn’t necessarily want to be intoxicated all the time. 

Around 2009, Aaron began hearing about a non-intoxicating compound found in cannabis, cannabidiol (CBD). Known for its anti-seizure and pain-reducing effects, CBD also mitigates the sometimes negative effects of THC, such as anxiety and paranoia. The two are the most important naturally occurring cannabinoids found in plants of the Cannabis genus. And while they have an almost identical chemical structure, a slight difference in the arrangement of atoms is crucial: THC is intoxicating, getting you high; CBD is not, but has proven medicinal properties. 

But very few cannabis cultivars that were available in 2009 contained enough CBD to be medically effective. ‘At the time, you couldn’t find people who had CBD in their lexicon,’ says Nathan, whose position was complicated by the fact that he was then chief of staff for Oregon state senator Mark Hass. During the long period when cannabis was illegal in the US, most breeders bred for one main trait: high THC. Nathan likens high-THC strains of cannabis to home-produced moonshine during Prohibition’s ban on alcohol. ‘Their main goal is intoxication,’ he says. 

‘Everyone I talked to prior to the 2014 Farm Bill was like, “Weed that doesn’t get you high? One: that doesn’t exist. And two: no one is going to want that.” But the Howard brothers were determined not to listen to the naysayers. Instead, Nathan, 29, and his brother, Aaron, 33, set out to do something different: produce craft cannabis that is high in CBD with lower levels of THC than most consumers have come to expect.

Oregon has an increasing reputation for producing some of the best Pinot Noir in the world. But what few wine lovers know is that it is also recognised for producing top-shelf weed. Even before the state legalised recreational cannabis in 2015, breeders and growers flocked to Oregon for its climate (both political and agricultural). In the four years since, these folks have, for the most part, emerged from the shadows of Prohibition. Right now, there are so many recreational cannabis growers in the state – 1,141 at the last count, according to the Oregon Liquor Control Commission – that the market is flooded with high-quality craft cannabis. (Cannabis is still illegal federally in the United States and interstate commerce of cannabis – even from one ‘legal’ state to another – is currently prohibited.) Taking a cue from the wine industry, many of these cannabis growers are practising organic agriculture and marketing their unique cultivars with vivid tasting notes. ‘The familiar rich, vanilla, berry nose, and puffy pistillate development have been carefully nurtured,’ reads a description of Blue Dream from an indoor grower in Portland.

But as more and more ‘cannabis naive’ people explore the plant – whether for the aches and pains of ageing, serious medical conditions, or just for the pleasure of a few hours’ intoxication – it’s clear that less THC and more CBD makes for an easier transition. For those who are accustomed to sipping a glass or two of wine in the evening, nibbling on a half-square of a CBD-dominant chocolate bar could be just the thing. 

Continue reading at Club Oenologique. 

 

The Next Wave of Sustainability in Wine

By now, the wine-drinking public is familiar with sustainability descriptors like organic, biodynamic, and even natural. They’ve been to LEED-certified wineries, and they may even have heard about a more holistic certification, called B Corps, which takes into account the way a business treats its employees, its environment, and its community. But a new wave of winemakers is working with ultra-sustainable practices—some of which are so groundbreaking they don’t even have a certification yet. SevenFifty Daily spoke with winemakers who are setting the bar with green building and agroecological farming practices to learn why they’re worth pursuing—and how they can help create a more sustainable future.

A “Living Building” Tasting Room

A few years ago, when Cowhorn winemaker Bill Steele was planning a new tasting room at his Jacksonville, Oregon, winery, he had a game-changing conversation with Stephen Aiguier, the founder and president of Green Hammer. Steele and his wife, Barbara, knew they wanted a green building. Aiguier listened as Steele talked about his aversion to chemicals in the field and in the cellar.

“We wanted a building that was consistent with our biodynamic farming philosophy,” says Steele, whose winery is located in the Applegate Valley AVA. “And Stephen said, ‘It sounds like you’re describing the Living Building Challenge.’” Once Aiguier started explaining it, the Steeles were all in.

 

The most rigorous standard for green buildings in the world, the Living Building Challenge (LBC) was formulated by the Seattle-based International Living Future Institute (ILFI) in 2006. It’s designed around seven performance areas, referred to as petals. Unlike other certifiers of green buildings, the ILFI won’t certify a building until a full year after it’s completed. That’s because some of the building’s petals—namely, energy and water—require 12 months of continuous occupancy before they can be shown to work in accordance with the challenge. The Energy Petal requires that the building produce 10 percent more energy than it consumes; the Water Petal requires (among other things) that 100 percent of the project’s water needs be supplied by captured precipitation or other natural closed-loop water systems.

There’s a reason it’s called a challenge.

For Green Hammer and the Steeles, it was the Materials Petal that posed the biggest challenge—it requires the architect to reject materials that contain any one of more than 800 chemicals on the International Living Future Institute’s Red List. Since there are no reporting standards for the building industry, this means the architect of an LBC project has to call each manufacturer to ask if its products contain any of the Red List chemicals. Aiguier spent more than a thousand hours on the phone with companies, asking questions about their products’ components and microcomponents. When making these calls, he says, “you sound like a crazy hippie. A lot of people essentially hang up.”

Barb and Bill Steele of Cowhorn. Photo by Clair Thorington.

But the Green Hammer team persisted. Fortunately, the ILFI has a product database of nontoxic building materials (made without Red List chemicals) called Declare. High-profile companies—Etsy and Google, for example—have publicly signed on to using Declare products in their buildings. As a result, materials vendors are starting to reformulate their products and be more transparent about what’s in them.  

In May 2018, Cowhorn’s tasting room became the first winery tasting room in the world to be named a Certified Living Building. And it’s not that other wineries haven’t tried. Sokol Blosser, which had already achieved a U.S. Green Building Council LEED certification for its barrel cellar in 2002, aimed for LBC with its new tasting room but was unable to achieve certification.  

Continue reading at SevenFifty Daily. 

 

Embracing Smoke Taint as an Expression of Terroir

This story appeared on SevenFifty Daily on July 25.  

The 2017 Eagle Creek fire is seared into Oregon winemaker Michael Garofola’s memory. Since February 2017 he had been working with a 0.61 acre block of Dolcetto for his Cutter Cascadia label in the von Flowtow vineyard on the west side of Hood River, and the fruit was just beginning to ripen. On September 18, the fire was raging. Hood River was on Stage 2 evacuation notice—locals might get a call at any moment to drop everything, grab their family members and pets, and get out. In the meantime, Garofola—who leases this block and farms it solo—was thinning fruit and taking samples.

“You’re out there with a bandana over your face in the vineyards,” he says. “The sky is orange. It’s just like what you imagine the last skies over Vesuvius looked like. It’s dark. It’s eerie.” That particular day, Garofola didn’t get the call. “I did my work for the day, packed up, and drove back to Portland.”

During the fire, which started on September 2 and wasn’t fully controlled until November 30, the grapes were going through véraison—the onset of ripening, when the berries change color. “If the fire had happened a month before, it wouldn’t have been a problem,” explains Garofola. “But post-véraison [the grapes] are ripening, losing acidity, but their skins are becoming more porous.” The porousness makes it easier for the skins to soak up the smoke. Phenolic glycosides contained in the smoke, such as guaiacol and eugenol, which are initially bound with sugar, break apart and become volatile during fermentation.

the Dolcetto vineyard during the fires [Credit: Michael Garofola of Cutter Cascadia] 

 

A Smoky Vintage

Most winemakers and critics abhor the taste of so-called smoke taint, using descriptors like “burnt,” “medicinal,” or “wet ashtray” to describe it. But instead of letting the grapes sit on the vine—as some neighboring growers did—or selling them off to the bulk market (a common practice at bigger wineries when smoke taint is detected), Garofola decided to go ahead and make a rosé and a red under his Cutter Cascadia label. Earlier this month, he released 30 cases of his rosé, called Strawberry Mullet, to Portland area shops including E&R Wine Shop, Division Wines, and Pairings Portland. He’ll bottle his red in late July.

“This is the climate of the vintage, without a doubt,” says Garofola, who is also the sommelier at Beast in Portland. “It’s not something I want to happen every year, obviously, but at the same time, I did with it what I felt was the best for the wine.” That is, he manipulated the wine as little as possible. After forest fires, some winemakers use carbon filtering, reverse osmosis, or manufactured yeast strains to mitigate or mask smoke taint, but not Garofola.

Making wine without such processes or additives was “the most authentic thing for me to do,” he says. “I’m not apologizing for the smoke. I’m not the one who started the goddamn fire! I’m just leaning into it.” Garofola says the smokiness of the rosé, which had almost no skin contact, is muted. The red—which obviously will have had more skin contact by the time he bottles it at the end of June—is a little riskier. Right now, the wine conjures a vivid sense memory for Garofola. “It reminds me of a tobacco shop my old man used to take me to in Indiana,” he says. “It smells exactly like black cherry tobacco.”

Hiyu Wine Farm winemaker Nate Ready is also unapologetic about his smoky 2017 vintage. He grows over 100 varieties at his main vineyard, five miles south of Hood River—this was the site that was most affected by the fires. In fact, Ready believes there’s a delicacy to these wines that comes from the fire, which delayed ripening and—because of the cover of smoke—created lower-alcohol grapes with a finer thread of acidity.

“The wildfires are totally part of the terroir,” says Ready. “That’s what’s so cool about wines—they reflect the culture and the ecosystem. And living in the West, we should get used to it. This is going to be part of the flavor of living in the West.”  

Ready dislikes the term smoke taint because it labels a smoky character as a flaw. The smoky nature of his 2017 wines has made him more attuned to élevage, the progression of wines as they ferment in barrels. “You’re looking to take the wine to a place where these things express themselves in the cellar and evolve to a place where—Oh!—it’s more stable and compelling,” says Ready. “For sure, it’ll still change in bottle, but in ways that are more subtle.” As a result, he will probably hold the 2017 wines in barrel longer than usual. (Nothing has been bottled yet.)

Ready plans to talk openly about the forest fire’s effect on the grapes at tastings and in his newsletter. “I would just say, ‘There was a fire in 2017 and you can taste it in the wine. You can taste it structurally,’” says Ready, whose wines—he makes rosé, white, and red—are bottled under his Hiyu and Smockshop Band labels.

A Rauchwein for Aging

Barnaby Tuttle at Teutonic Wine Company in Portland is a little more brazen. Last year he committed to buying Riesling grapes from Laszlo Regos at Pear Blossom Vineyard in the Columbia Gorge. Needless to say, he didn’t anticipate a devastating wildfire—or that the grapes would come back from the lab with an exceptionally high sensory threshold level of guaiacol. Knowing that the chemical guaiacol was concentrated in the skins, Tuttle pressed the wine—whole cluster—as fast as he could. “And then I thought, ‘Hey, let’s have some fun. Let’s make a deliberately smoked wine!’” Tuttle recalls.

Tuttle explains that he and his crew crushed the fruit, did pigéage, or punch-down, and gave the wine four days on the skins. The result, which he bottled in April and calls Rauchwein (“smoke wine” in German), has an ever-so-subtle smoky scent. “I can feel it texturally on the palate,” says Tuttle, who has made enough Riesling to know what the mouthfeel should be. “And then, in the finish, there’s a kick that makes me think of mezcal.”

But the Rauchwein may become smokier over time. Teutonic’s tech notes for the wine say it’s meant to age “a long time.” Knowing that the smoky phenols may become more prominent as the wine ages, I ask if that concerns him. “I hope the taint grows in bottle,” he says. “I suppose there is a point [at which] the taint could be overwhelming, but it would have to grow exponentially for it to be a distraction. Maybe there is a risk to making interesting wines?”

After the winemakers grapple with the effects of the smoke and fire, however, it’s up to the retailers to sell the wines. Some retailers are talking up the smoked character of the 2017 vintage; others, not so much. Jeffrey Weissler, owner of Pairings Portland, has been pouring Garofola’s Strawberry Mullet for guests and is almost sold out. “People like it,” he says. “It’s an interesting, delicious, funky wine.” But he doesn’t push the forest fire angle. “It’s a sore spot for a lot of winemakers,” he says.

But Brent Braun, the sommelier at Portland’s OK Omens and Castagna, does talk to guests about the two smoky rosés he has on the by-the-glass menu at OK Omens. One is Strawberry Mullet and the other, a Dolcetto rosé made by winemaker Darryl Joannides of Viola Wine Cellars in Portland. “People love them. Especially the Strawberry Mullet because it’s so intensely smoky,” he says. “It’s so obvious. It’s fun!” Viola’s Dolcetto, on the other hand, is “lightly smoked,” says Braun. “It hits the classic notes. It’s a pretty light, refreshing patio rosé.”

Michael Wheeler of PDX Wine distributes Teutonic’s wines to restaurants and wine shops across Oregon and, when he’s doing a tasting, likes to talk about the smoky smells and flavors that resulted from the forest fires. “Or as I like to call it, terroir from the sky,” Wheeler says. “Taking what nature gave and making a true, full terroir wine—land and air. A pure wine of nature and the vintage.”

 

Preserving Oregon's Wine Legacy—One Interview at a Time

I did a Q&A with the director of Linfield College’s pioneering Oregon Wine History Archive for SevenFifty Daily. 

In SevenFifty Daily's Unsung Heroes series, we profile behind-the-scenes professionals in the drinks industry who are essential to making businesses function but who don’t normally get the spotlight.

Archivist Rich Schmidt (right), behind the camera. 

In 2011, Linfield College in McMinnville, Oregon, established the Oregon Wine History Archive, an ambitious project to chronicle and preserve all aspects of the Oregon wine industry. Since then, Linfield—which has also hosted the International Pinot Noir Celebration (IPNC) every summer since 1987—has become a significant hub of wine education. In March of this year, after a $6 million gift from Grace and Ken Evenstad of Domaine Serene in the Dundee Hills, it became the first liberal arts school in the country to offer an interdisciplinary bachelor’s degree in wine studies.

The archive, located in a climate-controlled room at the Linfield library, houses everything from old photos and receipts to wine country guidebooks from the early ‘80s and land-use planning maps. “It’s a sweet space for a college of our size,” says Rich Schmidt, the director of archives. The archive’s online component is growing too. It currently contains over 200 oral histories—video interviews with winemakers, viticulturists, and others immersed in the state’s wine industry. SevenFifty Daily asked Schmidt about the genesis of the project, why Eric Asimov made the cut, and which oral histories will always stick with him.

Continue reading here. 

 

The Secret Ingredient for America's Most Loved Sea Salt? A Failed Tech Startup

 

 

 

I wrote about Ben Jacobsen and his Oregon-harvested artisanal sea salt for Inc.'s May issue. 

 

Netarts Bay, a protected estuary on the Oregon Coast, is an ideal spot to harvest salt.                [Photo: Carlos Chavarría]

While attending business school in Copenhagen in 2004, Ben Jacobsen fell in love with Maldon sea salt, the flaky finishing salt prized by chefs. Returning to the United States--landing in Portland, Oregon--he was shocked to find that no one here was harvesting anything like that high-end sea salt.

After his mobile-app-discovery startup went belly-up, Jacobsen began lugging 275-gallon wine totes of seawater from Netarts Bay back to his home in Portland, where he re-created the laborious (and messy) process of evaporating the water to make salt. "I destroyed cookware and pots and pans and made a mess in the oven and everything else," Jacobsen says. "It was definitely a learning experience." Today, his category-defining American flaky sea salt is the favored salt of celebrity chefs.

The process of salt-making is now much more efficient at Jacobsen's 6,000-square-foot production facility on the Oregon coast, where the company has built custom equipment. Jacobsen's 42-person crew harvests 18,000 pounds of salt per month, which is then sent to the warehouse in Portland's Central Eastside to be packaged and shipped out to Williams Sonoma, Whole Foods, and thousands of other retailers across the country. "Like the people who went to California 240 years ago and wondered if it was possible to grow grapes and make wine there," says Jacobsen, "we're the first in our category to make great salt in the U.S. mainstream."

Continue reading on Inc.'s website. 

Honey, Do: the Mead Revolution

I wrote about mead for the April issue of Food & Wine.  

I'd always thought of mead, the ancient alcoholic beverage made from fermented honey, as a cough syrup–like draught from Chaucer’s time. But a recent tasting organized by Chrissie Manion Zaerpoor, author of The Art of Mead Tasting & Food Pairing, changed my mind: I sipped meads that ranged from a dry sparkler that reminded me of a refreshing rosé, to a marionberry variety aged with chile peppers. Turns out, mead has as much range and variety as wine—and just like its grape-based sibling, it has terroir as well. And there’s never been a better moment to try mead. There were only about 30 meaderies in the U.S. two decades ago, and today, there are over 500. Want to taste the trend? Start with a visit to one of these great craft mead taprooms.

Charm City Meadworks
Baltimore, MD 

James Boicourt and Andrew Geffken founded Charm City Meadworks in 2014 and have just opened a new facility with 10 meads on tap. Outside the tasting room, their still meads—evocative of wine—come in 500 ml bottles; the carbonated ones come in 12-ounce cans. (Distribution is currently limited to the D.C./ Maryland/ Northern Virginia area.) Favorites include basil lemongrass, sweet blossom, and the seasonal mango comapeño, which packs some heat.  

Nectar Creek
Philomath, OR 
 

 

Brothers Nick and Phil Lorenz make 15 session-style meads (carbonated and less than 10 percent ABV), the most popular of which is “Sting”—made of freshly juiced ginger and white clover honey. (It won a gold medal at the Mazer Cup.) They’re also experimenting with sour meads (fermented with Brettanomyces and lactobacillus) and braggots (mead fermented with malted grains). If you can’t get to their Philomath tasting room, rest assured: their meads are distributed to 10 states including California, Georgia, and Texas. 

Sap House Meadery
Center Ossipee, NH

Ash Fischbein has his high school English teacher to thank for his mead career: he read about the beverage in Beowulf. “Back then, it was more about, ‘How can I get my friends drunk?’” laughs Fischbein. Now, Fischbein and his cousin Matt own Sap House Meadery, where their stand-out melomels — mead fermented with fruit — win awards at the Mazer Cup International mead competition. At their new mead pub, lined with rough-sawn pine, you can taste mead cocktails, mead- mosas, and (on Friday nights) pair dry semi-sweet mead with oysters.  

Wild Blossom 
Meadery
Chicago, IL

Greg Fischer was six when he began beekeeping, so it’s hardly surprising that he became a mead-maker, opening Illinois’ first meadery 17 years ago. At Wild Blossom Meadery’s posh tasting room, you can try bourbon-cask aged meads like Sweet Desire, a blueberry mead, and a Barolo-style red, Pyment, that’s co-fermented with grape skins. 

Becoming a Master of Roussanne

Maggie Harrison on her unconventional path to becoming a winemaker and her dedication to a difficult grape. (This story was originally published on SevenFifty Daily on Jan. 19, 2018.) 

As soon as you taste one of Maggie Harrison’s wines—whether it’s an earthy Pinot Noir, a marvelously complex Chardonnay, or her lush, floral Roussanne—you understand why she has such a loyal following. What you taste in the glass comes from the unconventional ways in which this winemaker picks and ferments her fruit, particularly the Roussanne, a Rhône variety that’s notorious for ripening unevenly. For more than a decade, Harrison has been pulling the very best expressions out of a handful of varieties and making exquisite, nuanced wines at Antica Terra in Oregon’s Willamette Valley.

Maggie Harrison with Sean O’Connor (left) and chef Timothy Wastell (right)

 

The Epiphany

Harrison’s unlikely journey to becoming a winemaker started on an island off the coast of Kenya. With a degree in international relations and conflict resolution from Syracuse University in New York State, Harrison landed a job at the Carter Center in Atlanta but deferred acceptance so she could travel. After a year spent backpacking around Europe, another year in South America, and yet another year in Africa, she was less and less sure about pursuing a career in conflict resolution.

“One evening, on an island off the coast of Kenya, I was having a beer and a complete nervous breakdown,” Harrison says. “A fellow traveler from Mozambique was unlucky enough to have pulled up a seat next to me. I spent most of the evening explaining to him that I was feeling adrift. Finally, this guy put down his beer, exasperatedly, and looked me in the eye. ‘You’ve just spent half an hour telling me everything that’s impossible,’ he said, ‘everything you don’t want to do.’”

“Then he asked, ‘What is it that you want to do?’” Harrison considered the question for a moment and said she thought she’d like to learn how to make wine. The traveler asked if there were any grapes in her country and she said there were.

After leaving Africa, Harrison headed for a winery in California. It wasn’t just any winery but Sine Qua Non in Ventura County—the cult winery owned by Manfred and Elaine Krankl.

The Oregon Trail

After working eight vintages with the Krankls—a period she calls the most formative of her life—Harrison was asked by one of their dear friends to be the winemaker at a new venture in Oregon’s Eola-Amity Hills. She demurred.

“I had just begun Lillian—my own tiny Syrah project in California,” Harrison recalls, “and my first vintage was still resting in the barrel. I was afraid that if I took on another project, I would be stretching myself too thin.”

The owners of the new vineyard—Scott Adelson, John Mavredakis, and Michael Kramer—none of whom had winemaking or vineyard experience, were persistent. Ultimately, though, they accepted Harrison’s firm “No, thank you.” But they did ask her for a favor: Would she mind taking a look at the vineyard and giving them some pointers on how to farm it? Harrison flew up to Oregon on a rainy spring day.

Her arrival was not auspicious. One of the partners picked her up at the airport and drove her southwest to the Eola-Amity Hills. The weather was gray and bleak, and the endless suburban strip malls along 99W only made things seem bleaker. When she finally arrived at the vineyard, in the countryside northwest of Salem, a sign in barely legible script read “No Trespassing.” “The r was backwards,” Harrison recalls, “as if it had been written by an ax murderer.”

But once she set foot in the vineyard, Harrison fell in love with the property.  

“To our left were wetlands and views of the ryegrass growing beyond. To our right, on a steep hillside, was a forest of gnarled, moss-covered oaks. When we reached the top of the hill, the first thing I noticed was the light,” Harrison says. “The clouds fractured over the vineyard and allowed the sun to ray through… I could see the vineyard—a sea of yellow leaves and stunted shoots. The vines were at the beginning of their growth cycle, but they were already beginning to defoliate. The site was so beautiful, the potential so clear—but the suffering was equally clear.” Harrison had only been there a minute before she ducked behind one of the oaks, called her then-boyfriend (now husband), and said, simply, “We’re moving to Oregon.”  

Luckily, he agreed.

Harrison finished her last vintage of Sine Qua Non in 2005, and in 2006 she became an owner—with Adelson, Mavredakis, and Kramer—of the 40-acre property in the Eola-Amity Hills. At the time, only six acres were under vine. But since then, she’s planted another 13, bringing the vineyard to just under 20 acres. It’s here that Harrison grows Pinot Noir and Chardonnay grapes and bottles them under the Antica Terra label.

Reckoning with Roussanne

But Lillian, Harrison’s California project, lives on. Each fall, she flies south to California and picks Syrah, Roussanne (which she started sourcing in 2011), and (in the past) Cabernet Sauvignon. The clusters, carefully stacked in vented plastic totes, are sent to Oregon by refrigerated truck to be sorted and fermented at the Antica Terra facility in Dundee. The resulting wines are bottled under the Lillian label, named after Harrison’s maternal grandmother.

Harrison has a particular passion for Roussanne, the only white wine she makes under the Lillian label. If you ask her how she produces it, she grows animated, eager to share the unique methods she’s devised to get the most out of this tricky variety.  

Lillian and Antica Terra bottles at Harrison's Eola-Amity Hill Vineyard (the Roussanne is at left) 

“There is not a tremendous amount of Roussanne grown in this country, because of its somewhat annoying habits,” Harrison says. “The growers struggle with it because it ripens incredibly late, and the winemakers struggle because it ripens incredibly unevenly.” (Jon Bonné, in his book The New California Wine, reports that fewer than 400 acres of Roussanne are planted statewide.)

“Roussanne is the least uniform grape variety I’ve ever seen,” says Harrison. “A single vine will have clusters that are green, yellow, gold, amber, rusted, and botrytis. Nothing is ripe at the same time.”  That’s a major frustration for most vineyardists, but it became a creative challenge for Harrison. Her work-around is to pick when 80 to 85 percent of the fruit is perfectly ripe and then collate by color.

“Roussanne becomes really russet when it’s ripe—deeply amber and a little bit scaly,” says Harrison. She and her vineyard team bring the whole block in at once and then separate it by color at the sorting table. First they sort by clusters—one box for the greenest, then gold, then amber—as well as a box for the fruit with the highest percentage of botrytis. The grapes on the richest end of the spectrum are sorted one by one. Harrison handles each of these boxes differently.

The grapes on the lightest end—the greenest ones with the highest acid—she handles like Chardonnay. “I’ll give them 10 to 18 hours in the press,” she says, “and then [send them] directly into barrel.” The yellowish grapes, she’ll macerate on the skins for six hours and then take them to the press. Deeply golden grapes she might let macerate on the skins for as many as 20 hours to extract maximum aromatics, flavor compounds, and textures. Says Harrison, “We’re trying to eke out what’s there.”

Finally come the richest grapes. “The challenge here,” says Harrison, “is really how you’re going to access the aromas you know are there—in the gentlest way possible.” Instead of walking on the fruit with rubber boots (the way winemakers may do when making a dessert wine like Sauternes), she macerates and ferments the fruit on the skins for three to five days, gently washing the skins with the juice twice a day until the aromatics crack open and the flavors become really clear. Each of these Roussanne wine groups is fermented in barrel, separately, for a year. “Then we take samples and take them to the blending table,” says Harrison. “That’s where we find the ratio that comes together to form the most compelling whole.” The result is a highly aromatic, floral wine with a lush texture and an almost oily quality.

A few years ago, Harrison was at a dinner party at a winemaker’s house in California. She says the winemaker exclaimed, “We hate Roussanne!”

The reason it’s a turnoff for some, she surmises, is that it’s a low-acid grape. “If you try to retain the acid that exists, you lose out on the dripping honey beeswax characteristic,” she says. “But if you forgo that, you lose all the acid.”

In her inimitable way, Harrison has figured out a method for working with the fruit and pulling the best aromas, flavors, and textures from it to create the finest expression of a Roussanne.

 

A New Documentary about Poet-Farmer Wendell Berry

Over a decade ago, while filmmaker Laura Dunn was making her first feature documentary, “The Unforeseen,” farmer and poet Wendell Berry graciously invited her into his Henry County, Kentucky home so she could record him reading the poem from which the movie’s title originates. Like many, Dunn was moved by Berry’s presence, and she’s been working to bring his worldview to a wider audience ever since.

Earlier this year, she released “Look and See,” an unconventional documentary about Berry’s life. In the film, Berry himself is elusive, never actually appearing on camera in the present day. Instead, the film is filled with still images of Berry on his farm in the early years, television footage from the 1970s of him opining about changes to agriculture, and his resonant voice floating over gorgeously shot images of Kentucky farmland.

Wendell Berry at his multipaned window, which he wrote about in the Window Poems.

Dunn knew early on that Berry would not agree to be filmed. But rather than abandon the project entirely, she took this as a creative challenge. As a result, “Look and See” offers a view of the world from Berry’s eyes instead. Over the course of the film, you meet Berry’s daughter, Mary; his wife, Tanya; and numerous Kentucky farmers whose struggle to stay on the land in the face of consolidation is the subject of much of Berry’s work.

The film also captures Berry’s debate with Earl Butz, the now famous U.S. secretary of agriculture under Nixon and Ford, and a major proponent of industrialization of agriculture. In his rebuttal, Berry pays homage to the “traditional farmer” who “first fed himself off his farm and then fed other people; who farmed with his family, and passed the land on to people who knew it and had the best reason to take care of it. That farmer stood at the convergence of traditional values. Our values. Independence, thrift, stewardship, private property, political liberty, family, marriage, parenthood, neighborhood. Values that declined as that farmer is replaced by technologies whose only standard is profit.”

“Look and See,” which has been screened in communities across the country through TUGG (a theatrical booking site for indie films), debuted on Netflix in October. Civil Eats spoke to Dunn about telling the story of Berry’s life, her unconventional filmmaking methods, and why she sees Berry’s novels as the heart of his oeuvre.

When did you first read Wendell Berry’s writing and what imprinted itself upon you?

I read The Unsettling of America in high school. My mom is a [corn] geneticist—and very much an environmentalist, an agricultural person. Because of that, I was interested in these ideas. And then I read more of his stuff in college; he was a writer I really loved. But when I was working on my first feature, “The Unforeseen,” [executive producer] Terrence Malik wanted me to find some voices to include in the film … So I delved deeply into his work—mostly his poetry. And then I reread The Unsettling. And I really fell in love with his poetry and his work again.

And why did you decide to make this film, so many years later?

When we toured “The Unforeseen,” I was really surprised by how few people knew who Wendell Berry was. I feel like more people should be familiar with Berry’s work.

Can you talk about what it was like to make a film about Berry without including him in it? And I take it that wasn’t your choice?

It was the constraint he put on me. He is really anti-screen: no computers, T.V., or movies. He thinks it contributes to the decline of literacy and the deterioration of imagination. And I knew that, so I knew this would be a challenge.

He didn’t want to be filmed—it makes him feel so inauthentic. So, in those early conversations, I said to him, “I understand. I actually think that’s very insightful information about you. If we could just do audio interviews, that would be interesting. I want you to point me to what we should see.” So I accepted that constraint. And it was his wife Tanya who would say, “This is who you should talk to.”

Can you say anything about the black-and-white still photos at the heart of the film?

James Baker Hall, one of Wendell’s dearest friends, passed away in 2009. He was a writer and professor at the University of Kentucky, and he took all these gorgeous black-and-white photos. His widow had boxes and boxes of never-before-seen negatives and when we found them, I thought, “There’s a film here that we could piece together.” It’s sort of impressionist-style.

Who are the farmers you interview throughout, and why do you choose not to name them in the course of the film?

Everyone in the film is a friend or a neighbor of Berry’s. Sometimes I watch the film and think, “Maybe I should have named them.” Form is something I’m constantly experimenting with. There are standard things you’re supposed to do in a documentary. I had it with their names for a long time. Then I thought, “It becomes so literal-minded.” I want people to feel something. We live in such an information age. I don’t want more data. I want something that’s going to transport me to a place. I’m making the film I want to see.

Can you speak about the beautiful wood engravings that start each chapter of the film?

Wesley Bates has illustrated a lot of Wendell’s books. [Co-director/producer] Jef Sewell, my husband, did the visual design. I wanted it to be chapters like in a book. So he said, “We have to find Wesley Bates.” He’s an amazing, vibrant artist in his 60s, who lives in Toronto. They’d have conversations over the phone and then he’d sketch something and then we’d give him feedback.

Throughout the film, we hear Berry reading his poems. How did you choose which poems to include?

It was really tough. “The Window Poem” was something I had read many years ago and that was really in mind when we started the film. It’s about the tension between the grit of our world and the patterns. My approach was to go to Henry County and do a portrait of this place. We’d go and I’d spend a few weeks, find what stories were compelling. We’d shoot all the footage and then you edit it and you find narratives—poems to frame things. This illustrates this idea, or that idea.

I was familiar with his essays and poetry, but I didn’t know that he also wrote novels. Can you say a little about them?

I honestly think his novels are the heart of his work. Basically, every single novel is told through the eyes of a different character in a small town in Kentucky. The more you read, the more complete a picture you get.

Berry is hard to categorize, and you get at that in the film where his wife Tanya says, “Some people would think he’s a novelist and some think he’s an essayist and some think he’s a poet…” How do you see him?

I see him as an artist. I think his nonfiction writing is infused with poetics all over the place. He sees segmentation or categorization as a function of the industrial mind. He very much believes in interdisciplinary thought. So I think he’s deliberately defying … category. He doesn’t want to be limited.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. “Look and See” is available on Netflix; the trailer is below.

 

 

Race and Food are Intertwined. Here’s How We Can Do Better.

This piece ran on CivilEats.com on Oct. 20th. 

 

The food system, like every other sphere of life in America, has been shaped by structural racism and racial injustice. Civil Eats has chronicled some of the many efforts to expose and address the ways that structures in the food system actively work to silence, marginalize and take advantage of people of color.

 

Ricardo Salvador, senior scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists and director of its Food and Environment Program, has spent a lifetime writing and talking about what an equitable food system might look like. On a recent, unseasonably sunny October evening at The Redd on Salmon in Portland, Oregon, he offered 800 food system innovators a reminder about the size and scope of institutional racism in our current food system, underlined the urgency of food justice work, and offered concrete actions we can all take to create positive change.

“We live in a very unjust, inequitable society,” began Salvador. “And the brunt of the inequity is felt through the food system.” Salvador detailed how we got here through the dark history of colonization—from the genocide of the myriad Native American tribes, whose land we stole, to the African citizens who were abducted and enslaved by the English and then the Americans.

“From the standpoint of an economist, the way you generate wealth is that you have access to at least one of the factors of production: land, labor, rent,” Salvador said. From the 1830s until the 1880s, he noted, we drove the original inhabitants of this continent off their land, quite literally depriving them of their food as well as their food culture.

“If you want to find some of the most immiserated human beings on the planet—not just in the United States—you would go to the concentration camps that we call the reservations,” Salvador said. “Here is where you will find people whose land was taken from them, and therefore their foodways, their ways of accessing the natural resources upon which they based their entire cultures and they way that they nourished themselves.”

Similarly, the Africans who were taken from their homeland and brought to the U.S. by the slave trade were driven against their will from their land and were forced to be the unpaid labor to allow white Americans to profit. “What those people were enslaved to do was actually to drive the beginning of what today we call Big Ag,” Salvador said.

Tragically, slavery has not disappeared. To this day, exploited farm labor is what keeps the cost of food so cheap in this country. “Farm labor is the most essential, the most important part of our food system, and the most undervalued,” Salvador said.

“We spend as little as 6 to 12 percent of our disposable income on food. That is usually quoted as something that we should be very proud of. But it should be a national shame,” he said. “It’s as if the workers involved in the food industry and nature that is required to produce the food were costs to be minimized…We need to find a way in which we actually value all of those resources—the land and the people that are involved.”

One of the long-simmering questions facing those striving for better food for all is how to go beyond voting with your fork? Is it possible to create a new food system that does not rely on exploitation?

Salvador made a case for profound system shifts like reparations, loan forgiveness programs, and immigration reform. He urged people to work independently and collectively to support these goals and the great food-system reform work that’s already afoot in our communities around this country. Among his suggestions:

• Support Reparations to the descendants of enslaved peoples. One place to start is to urge your members of Congress to support Rep. John Conyers’ (D–MI) bill, HR 40: Commission to Study Reparation Proposals for African Americans Act.

• Reverse Black land loss through loan forgiveness initiatives that right historical systematic discrimination

• Support immigration and labor reforms that value labor and provide for dignified livelihood. For example, the Coalition of Immokalee Workers’ Fair Food Program, and realistic transition initiatives such as the proposed “Blue Card” program.

• Get your elected officials to support U.S. Representative Chellie Pingree’s Local Food and Regional Market Supply FARMS bill, which will create local jobs, boost midsize farms’ sales, and increase access to healthy food.

• Get your elected officials to read and support Oregon senator Earl Blumenauer’s roadmap for an alternative Farm Bill “Growing Opportunities.”

• Get your local school district to sign onto the Good Food Purchasing program, a metric-based framework that encourages institutions to direct their buying power toward local economies, environmental sustainability, a valued workforce, animal welfare, and nutrition. (L.A. Unified School District, San Francisco Unified, Oakland Unified, and Chicago Public Schools have all already signed on.)

• Join the Health, Environment, Agriculture, and Labor (HEAL) Alliance, a coalition of organizations that are working on food justice, health, and sustainability in our food system.

In closing his presentation at the Redd, Salvador came back to his original question.

“Do we know enough to create a food system that does not rely on exploitation?” he asked. “Yes, we know enough to produce our food without exploiting nature, and we definitely know enough to produce our food without exploiting people…. Let me just put a very sharp point on it for you: The question is not really: ‘Do we know enough to be better?’ The question is: ‘Will we?’”

 

 

 

Building Portland’s Local Food Economy at the Redd

When Cattail Creek Lamb owner John Neumeister was younger, he would devote one day per week to making the 110-mile drive from his ranch near Junction City, Oregon to Portland, where the bulk of his customers were located.

“I’d leave the farm, drive 100 miles to the processor, pack the order myself, do the invoices by hand in the truck, and then go make 20-25 deliveries at restaurants around Portland,” said Neumeister, who will turn 70 next month. He would crash at a friend’s house in Portland, then do more deliveries the next day, on the way back home.

These 15-hour-days took their toll, but they also didn’t allow Neumeister, who has been raising pastured lamb since he took over his family’s flock in high school, any time to drum up new business or work on long-term sales strategy. And if he got a last-minute order from a Portland restaurant who suddenly ran out of lamb mid-week there was little he could do about it.

“If a chef called me on Thursday, I might say ‘You know, I can see if UPS can deliver it,’” Neumeister said. Which meant trying—sometimes in vain—to stalk his local UPS driver, whose delivery route he knew by heart. If he couldn’t locate the UPS truck, Neumeister was out of luck.

“And then the restaurant would end up buying from one of my competitors.”

                                                     A B-Line trike rider leaves the Redd with a refrigerated                     box full of food for Portland area restaurants

Now, thanks to the Redd on Salmon, a Portland food hub created by the environmental nonprofit Ecotrust, Neumeister not only has freezer storage space for up to 3,600 pounds of lamb in Central Eastside Portland, he’s got a stall for staging orders, an office space, and built-in distribution via B-Line trikes to Portland area restaurants.

Best of all, there’s no need to chase down UPS drivers. When a restaurant needs a special order of pastured lamb, as happened earlier this month with chef Joshua McFadden’s Tusk, all Neumeister needs to do is call B-line, who also does fulfillment for Cattail Creek.

Continue reading at CivilEats.com. 

 

Janaki Jagannath: Championing Farmworker Justice in the Central Valley

This story appeared on Civil Eats on August 2nd. 

 

In the late spring of 2014, Janaki Jagannath and her colleagues had left a community meeting and were standing in the dusty basketball court inside Cantua Elementary School in Cantua Creek, California. Nestled deep in the west side of the San Joaquin Valley, Cantua Creek is one of the poorest communities in the state—located in one of its most lucrative agricultural regions.

The residents of Cantua Creek had just been hit with three-fold water rate hikes, which would mean paying close to $300 a month for water the local health department had found to be contaminated with high levels of disinfection byproducts, leaving it undrinkable. And residents had just been told that their water would be shut off if they couldn’t pay the new rates. Jagannath, who was then working for California Rural Legal Assistance (CRLA), was outraged.

“In California, water is the epitome of privilege,” Jagannath explained by  e-mail. “At no point in this state’s history have rural residents—the people who do the work of growing, picking, and packing our agricultural commodities—had a say in where clean water should be directed. The odds have been stacked against small, local vegetable producers—and moreover against the health and safety of farmworkers—for the majority of California history.”

Standing around the local basketball court with colleagues from other farmworker advocacy organizations and environmental justice nonprofits, Jagannath realized an urgent need for these groups to come together strategically if they were to succeed in fighting the myriad injustices facing low-income farmworkers in the San Joaquin Valley.

She got her wish. A year later, at just 26, Jagannath was hired to be the first coordinator of the San Joaquin Valley Sustainable Agriculture Coalition, which she soon renamed the Community Alliance for Agroecology (CAFA). Now 28, Jagannath is known as a powerful advocate for farmworker rights, environmental justice, and political organizing in California’s San Joaquin Valley.

CAFA is a coalition of six environmental justice nonprofits—the Center on Race, Poverty, and the Environment; Californians for Pesticide Reform; Community Water Center; Cultiva la Salud; El Quinto Sol de America; and the Leadership Council for Justice & Accountability—all working to advance agricultural and natural resource policies in the San Joaquin Valley that heal the ecological system and build political power in rural communities.

“Jagannath took the Alliance to a different level,” said Caroline Farrell, executive director at the Center on Race, Poverty, and the Environment, and one of the Alliance’s founders. “Her focus became ‘How do we work with small farmers of color in the valley? How do we build a good agricultural system from the ground up?’”

For two years at California Rural Legal Assistance (CRLA), Jagannath had worked one-on-one with farmworkers who had experienced pesticide exposure, harassment in the fields, and wage theft. She also worked on some larger environmental justice cases—like the episode in Cantua Creek—that were focused on communities’ access to fresh water.

In Cantua Creek, Jagannath worked alongside residents to secure subsidy funding from the state to defray their water bills, and arranged for state-funded bottled water to be delivered to each home (which is still happening to this day). Situations like the ones at Cantua Creek are symptoms of a larger illness, of course. Members of CAFA get farmworkers involved in building environmental justice solutions. For example, CAFA is currently advocating for legislation known as the Farmer Equity Act (AB 1348), which would give socially disadvantaged farmers and ranchers increased access to environmental stewardship funds.

Formative Experiences in Farming

Jagannath’s parents emigrated to the U.S. in the 1980s from South India, settling in Mobile, Alabama, where Jagannath was born. Her dad worked at paper mills in the South, and Jagannath’s childhood was punctuated by moves from one rural mill town to another. Her parents divorced when she was five, and eventually her mom moved to Southern California, where she raised Jagannath and her brother.

I fell in love with agriculture there,” Jagannath said. “I grew up wanting to farm.”

Jagannath may have been destined for a career in farming—after all, Janaki is the Hindu goddess of agriculture. “Overall, she is a central character in Hindu faith representing the ecological cycles of the planet upon which agriculture, and all of life on earth, depend,” said Jagannath. But during college at the University of California, Davis, Jagannath spent her summers working at Chino Nojo, a diversified fruit and vegetable farm in Rancho Santa Fe, California. She harvested crops—from carrots to strawberries—alongside the field crew and also worked at the farm’s vegetable shop.

She remembers picking the season’s finest heirloom tomatoes and then slicing them for Alice Waters at the back of the shed so she could taste them before loading up crates for Chez Panisse. She also recalls picking golden raspberries in late summer for Wolfgang Puck, who would drive all the way to the farm from Spago in Los Angeles.“

Working at Chino Nojo opened her eyes to the need for more farms like it—those that provide long-term, stable work for farmworkers, and employers who see farming as a dignified occupation.

“I learned a lot of what I know about farming from one farmworker there, Rene Herrera, who has worked there for most of his life, and his father before him,” Jagannath said. “Those kinds of jobs are rare as a farmworker—because farms like the Chino family’s are equally rare and precious places.”

At UC Davis, Jagannath “got politicized,” she said. She discovered the vocabulary with which to explain the environmental downside of her dad’s jobs working at paper mills throughout the South—and learned about the concept of environmental justice.

By the time she graduated in 2011—with a B.S. in International Agricultural Development—Jagannath had worked with faculty to build the University’s Sustainable Agriculture and Food Systems degree, which is considered a paradigm-shifting step for agricultural education in California. She went on to get a certificate in ecological horticulture from UC Santa Cruz’s Center for Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems.

Fighting for Policy and System Change

At the Community Alliance for Agroecology, there are three main areas of work: policy advocacy (as with the Farmer Equity Act, or trying to establish a drinking water fund for rural residents paid for by Big Ag polluters), local agroecology organizing (such as holding farmer-to-farmer exchanges on agroecology and market enhancement), and building political power for systems change (they host trainings in the areas of food systems history, campaign planning, communications, policy advocacy and organizing). Right now, the organization’s biggest policy push is on the Farmer Equity Act, though the group has also been actively trying to get the state to channel some of the subsidies it grants to large dairies with methane digesters to “alternative manure-management strategies” like pasture-based dairies.

 Promoting soil health is another major area of the Alliance’s focus. “Janaki knows all this information about soil health,” said Genoveva Islas, Program Director at Cultiva La Salud. “It really does help to highlight our connection back to the earth, and why it’s so important to preserve it.”

In addition to composting and manure management, CAFA is championing a practice known as orchard recycling. “Rather than growing an almond tree for 25 years and pulling it out and burning it in field, you take that material and blend it back into the soil,” explained Janaki. “We’re essentially trying to close the loop.”

But probably the most exciting part of CAFA’s work right now—especially in the Trump era—lies in developing a so-called “organizer academy” led by two United Farm Workers-trained organizers that will teach community members and farmworkers about food-systems history, campaign planning, communications, policy advocacy, and organizing. “The curriculum is taught in a way that’s evocative of the 1960s and 70s organizing strategies that were successful in winning some of the major battles for equity for farmworkers,” said Jagannath. So far, the pilot project has been for CAFA staff only, but Janaki envisions trainings for farmworkers in the near future.

“We can’t just advocate for reform and regulation,” Jagannath said. “Instead, we’re working on how to build political power amongst farmworker communities, to ensure our local and state elections have representation for communities of color who have been paying taxes but not receiving any of the benefits.”

Update: Jagannath will be attending UC Davis law school in the fall to study Environmental Law with a focus on agriculture and land use. CAFA is currently seeking a new coordinator.

 

 

 

Rwandan Coffee, from Crop to Cup

When Agnes Nyinawumuntu began her career as a coffee farmer two decades ago, she picked coffee “cherries" indiscriminately and with little care for quality. Back then, because she was selling her cherries to a middleman for a pittance — 250 Rwandan francs (about 30 U.S. cents) for 2 pounds of unwashed cherries — she had no incentive to select only the ripe, scarlet-colored cherries that create the best coffee.

                                               Agnes Nyinawumuntu at a Let's Talk Coffee event (photo: Relationship Coffee Institute) 

Today, after three years of training in agronomy, cupping and roasting by the nonprofit Relationship Coffee Institute, Nyinawumuntu is paid nearly $2 a pound for her beans, and she is also the past president of the Twongere Umusaruro Cooperative in eastern Rwanda. She has become a respected figure in Rwanda’s coffee industry who is regularly asked to train other Rwandan coffee-growers in best agricultural practices. The money she has earned has lifted her family out of poverty — she was able to upgrade their earthen dwelling to a stucco house and purchase mattresses for herself and her husband and for each of their five children, as well as purchasing livestock and an additional plot of land for farming.

Over the last four years, the Relationship Coffee Institute has enrolled more than 14,000 female coffee farmers in Rwanda in its training, teaching them how to improve coffee quality throughout the growing and processing of the beans. The Relationship Coffee Institute (RCI) is a unique collaboration between a B Corp-certified coffee importer, Sustainable Harvest, and the nonprofit Bloomberg Philanthropies.

Improving economic opportunities for farmers like Nyinawumuntu is RCI’s reason for existing.  

Continue reading my feature for B Magazine, the publication of B Lab, on the nonprofit's web site. 

Farmers Who (Still) Support Trump

In late February, I read an Op-Ed by Nicholas Kristof called "Trump Voters are Not the Enemy" that really resonated for me. Like everyone I know, I'd been struggling to understand how 62 million Americans could vote for someone who treats women so abysmally, stoops to racial slurs, and ridicules everyone from disabled people to Miss Universe. I realized there were other reasons Trump appealed to folks, of course, but I assumed that voting for him meant you also endorsed his worse traits.  

Todd Nash, in a photo taken by Brown Cannon III for 1859 Magazine 

 

Since agriculture is one of my beats, I went in search of farmers from my (and Kristof's) home state of Oregon. What I discovered is that Trump supporters have complicated feelings about him—even more so now that the new budget proposal makes such drastic cuts to the agriculture programs that really help farmers (some of the very people who helped elect him). But these farmers still hope he will deliver when it comes to getting rid of regulations.  I think my favorite quote came from rancher Todd Nash, the Commissioner of Wallowa County out in Eastern Oregon, when I asked him if he had any reservations about Trump. 

“His personality! His flippant comments! It was really tough for me to vote for somebody that was not respectful in a lot of ways,” said Nash. “During the campaign, every time he would say something that was so offensive, I kept saying, ‘Doggone it! Don’t make it so hard for me to vote for you!’” he recalled. 

Read the whole four-part series, which was published in Oregon Business Magazine earlier this week. 

I'm on the Four Top, Katherine Cole's new OPB podcast

A few weeks ago, wine writer Katherine Cole invited me to be a panelist on her new podcast, the Four Top. On the podcast, which just won a James Beard media award, Katherine and three other food-world insiders (usually members of the media) talk about hot-button topics in the food and beverage culture. For this episode, Peter Platt of Andina restaurant, OPB reporter Roxy de La Torre, and I discussed Sanctuary Restaurants, undocumented immigrants in the restaurant industry, and Peruvian cuisine. Have a listen here, and subscribe to the Four Top on iTunes! 

 

Listen to "Ep. 18: Sanctuary Restaurants | Undocumented Labor In Food | Peruvian Cuisine" on Spreaker.

Cabo's New Wave

I've been traveling to Cabo for years with my mom and step-dad and every time we go, it seems, there are more restaurants touting their locally-grown, organic produce. Not only that, there are now at least three organic farms in the arroyo outside of San Jose that have restaurants.  I write about these on-farm restaurants for the May issue of Food & Wine.  (Available with a digital or print subscription here.) 

Here's a tease:  

It’s dusk and I’m sitting with my husband on a lush 16-acre organic farm, sipping a glass of cabernet when I notice that the tree brushing up against my arm is festooned with pomegranates. It’s only 5:30PM but already the open-air bar to my right is spilling over with glamorously-dressed Californians and Canadians nursing carrot margaritas and watermelon-mint-basil juleps served in Mason jars and a band on a stage made of hay bales is belting out Amy Winehouse’s Back to Black. Rows of arugula, beets, carrots, collards, and mizuna line the field behind us, foreshadowing the unforgettable meal we’re about to consume.

I’m not in my agriculturally-rich home state of Oregon. I’m at Flora Farms in San José del Cabo, Mexico. When I first started coming to Los Cabos 18 years ago, it was impossible to find organic produce anywhere, let alone on restaurant menus. The Cape of Baja, home to both Cabo San Lucas and San José del Cabo, is arid and desert-like—I’d assumed it was inhospitable for farming. 

Little did I know that in 1996, Gloria and Patrick Greene, expats from California, had quietly started growing organic vegetables on an estuary hidden behind the colonial town of San José. Back then, there was no marina and few people lived in the rural villages of Animas Bajas and La Choya; certainly no tourists drove out there. In fact, when it rained, the arroyo would flood, making these two villages—and the Greene’s yurt and farm—inaccessible. “When the arroyo used to run every summer, we’d be cut off for two to three days,” says Greene, laughing. (This was before the San José Marina—or the bridge to it—was built.)

Today, as we tour the farm with chef Guillermo Tellez, I marvel at how the whole Flora Farm enterprise has expanded since I first visited in 2012. The old growth mango grove, a magical spot for weddings and other events, now has its very own kitchen and a brand-new open-air rotisserie for grilling chickens. (Beets, wrapped in tinfoil, are roasted in the embers and served in a fabulous salad at dinner.) Owners of one of 10 culinary cottages— luxury straw bale homes—have access to a beautiful lap pool and hot tub, as well as unlimited organic vegetables and herbs. There’s even an on-site microbrewery, two clothing boutiques, and a brand-new spa and yoga center, complete with a barber shop and juice bar. “We are like our own little village,” says Tellez, whose hoop earrings and pointy salt-and-pepper goatee lend him a pirate-like vibe.

Wine glass in hand, I follow Tellez as he leads us past a wedding—the guests are mingling over cocktails in the mango grove—into his tiny meat cellar, where various cuts of heritage pigs dangle from strings. He’s justifiably proud of the kitchen’s ambitious charcuterie program, which yields dry-cured coppa, sopressata, and culatello (leg cut cured in a pig’s bladder). The cellar will soon double in size, he tells us, and a cheese cave is in the works. Right now, the staff milks six cows and makes their own butter, ricotta, and burrata. (The cave will allow Tellez to make cotija and other aged cheeses.) 

Gloria’s motivation to start farming twenty years ago was simple: she had opened an organic restaurant in San José, and needed a ready supply of pesticide-free produce. The 10-acre plot of land that she and Patrick owned came with a mango orchard and a well. Though the soil wasn’t ideal for farming, the Greenes built it up with compost and cover-cropping. Within a few years, their flavor-packed vegetables were turning heads. Chef Charlie Trotter requested tomatoes and herbs for his restaurant at the One & Only Palmilla. Eventually, Trotter gave Gloria a wish list of heirloom varieties to grow: Black Krim and German pink tomatoes, Broad Windsor favas, nero di Toscana kale. Soon other area chefs were placing their orders.

Gloria had been hosting a farmers market and cooking classes on her property for years. In 2009, she began working with a local rancher to raise Spanish hogs, chickens, goats, and rabbits on a nearby ranch. She and Patrick opened Flora’s Field Kitchen the following year. The marina bridge, built that same year, made the journey to the farm easier, but it was still circuitous, via a steep, pothole-pocked dirt road. Nonetheless, guests arrived in droves. Even the likes of Thomas Keller and George Clooney were showing up for dinner. Today, the restaurant is so busy—they do breakfast, lunch, and dinner—that chef Tellez reserves all the farm’s produce, herbs, eggs, and meat for its own meal service, farm store, private events, and two markets.

Just-picked winter root vegetables for sale at Flora Farms

 

Flora’s Field Kitchen seems to have started a trend. A few miles to the west, chef-farmer Enrique Silva has been farming organically at Los Tamarindos since 2002, and opened an on-farm restaurant in 2011. And last year, Cameron Watt and Stuart McPherson, expats from Vancouver, B.C. snapped up a 25-acre site between Los Tamarindos and Flora Farms. But the farm-to-table ethos has also caught on throughout Los Cabos. All the best resort restaurants along the corridor—from brand-new Comal at Chileno Bay Resort to the restaurants at the One & Only Palmilla—source their produce from local farms and ranches. And every Saturday morning, San José’s boisterous Mercado Orgánico attracts locals and travelers who come for its farm-fresh eggs and produce, live music, yoga classes, and tasty Mexican fare like Tlacoyos and tamales. 

 

 

the beet salad at Flora Farms  

Why Grass-fed Dairy is Better for You

This explainer-style piece on grass-fed dairy was published in Organic Life last month but with all my travels this winter, I forgot to post it. ;-) 

        Petting a cow at Jon Bansen's pasture-based dairy in Monmouth

Most milk and beef sold in America today comes from cows that have been fed corn. It cheaply fattens the animals up, but because cows’ multi-compartmented stomachs can’t properly digest corn, it also makes them more susceptible to E. coli, a pathogenic bacteria that can spread to humans. The solution? The food cows were meant to survive on: grass. 

Not only are grass-fed cows healthier, but their meat and milk are more nutritious than their cornfed counterparts. Grass-fed meat and dairy contain gobs more beta-carotene and omega-3 fatty acids, which may prevent dementia as well as heart disease. They’re also high in conjugated lineoleic acid (CLA), a healthy omega-6 that’s been shown to lessen symptoms of inflammatory disorders such as allergies and asthma. In well-managed grass-fed operations—where cows are regularly moved to fresh pasture—there’s an environmental boon, too. Their manure replenishes the soil, improving the quality of the forage growth, which in turn reduces erosion and water pollution.

As word of these benefits has gotten out, demand for grass-fed products has skyrocketed. That’s led to some shady advertising. All cattle are grass-fed until they get to the feedlot, and any producer can put the words “grass-fed” on their product. (The USDA’s woefully understaffed Food Safety and Inspection Service theoretically regulates grass-fed beef claims, but doesn’t have the resources to audit ranches, so it’s all on the honor system.) Luckily, there are a few reliable and strict grass-fed certifications out there.

Continue reading here. 

 

Harnessing the Generosity of Farmers

This story originally appeared on Civil Eats on August 18th. 

                                                                                 Claw, who is from Burma, fries up veggies for a pad thai 

 

It’s 10:00 a.m. on a Thursday morning in late July, and 15 families are lined up outside SnowCap Community Charities in the Rockwood neighborhood of Portland, Oregon. Many have been waiting for over an hour in hopes that they’ll get first dibs at this food pantry, which is the largest in the state, serving over 9,000 people a month. The old model was that food pantries gave clients a pre-packed box of food. But SnowCap, like an increasing number of food pantries across the U.S., allows clients to “shop” or choose for themselves what they want to eat. There are limitations on some items, and generally speaking, the earlier they arrive, the better the pickings.

Another reason clients arrive early is SnowCap’s impressive assortment of seasonal produce from local farms. Amongst the offerings on display today are enormous green zucchinis, pattypan squash, purple turnips, greenbeans, lettuce, mushrooms, onions, and cherries from a farm in the Columbia River Gorge. There are also huge bags of frozen diced carrots, with or without corn.

A willowy 33-year-old woman named Erin takes a five-pound clamshell container of luscious-looking cherries and tells me she has been a regular at SnowCap for a year. “I cook a lot,” she says. “I make an ‘end of the week soup’ using up whatever is left in the fridge.” She especially loves the squash, radishes, and tomatoes, when they’re available. What will she do with the cherries? “Eat them immediately!”

Mona, a thirty-something woman from Egypt, has loaded her cart with apples, cherries, and purple turnips. She spurns the zucchini and the summer squash—“I don’t like these!” she says, wrinkling her nose—but loads up on purple turnips, which she likes to pickle. “My children love them!” she says. Claw, a Burmese woman wearing dangly silver earrings and a sequined T-shirt, says she likes to fry up vegetables with onions and chiles and make a Pad Thai.

The bulk of the fresh produce at SnowCap comes from Farmers Ending Hunger, a group of 100-plus farmers across the state who donate a portion of their crops. “Growers get the idea of feeding hungry people,” says executive director John Burt. “They get that and they step up.” 

Like other organizations that have been popping up around the country—from Farm to Food Pantry in Washington state to Michigan Agricultural Surplus Program—Farmers Ending Hunger aims to recover the imperfect or “ugly” produce for which farmers can’t get top dollar. However, instead of purchasing produce, Farmers Ending Hunger asks farmers to make a donation. The organization was founded in 2006 by agricultural engineer and president of IRZ Consulting, Fred Ziari, when he learned that Oregon was one of the hungriest states in America. (Ten years later, it still clocks in at Number 10 in the USDA’s ranking of least food-secure states.)

At the time, Ziari, who lives in the farm belt on the eastern side of Oregon, began having conversations with nearby farmers and ranchers, asking them if they’d donate some of their crops to the hungry. What started with 173,000 pounds of frozen peas from a handful of growers has blossomed into an organization that donated 4.2 million pounds of farm-fresh food to the Oregon Food Bank last year. Two million pounds were potatoes and 1 million was onions, but the remainder was comprised of a huge variety of fresh fruits, vegetables, local wheat, and even hamburger meat from an eastern Oregon ranch.

Erin, 33, loves fresh cherries and plans to eat these immediately

Growers range in size from a philanthropist in Hood River who has a two-acre pear orchard to Orchard View Cherries (the source of the cherries at SnowCap), which grows fruit on 2,400 acres in and around The Dalles.

This was the first year that Orchard View Cherries, a 4th generation family-owned orchard, gave to Farmers Ending Hunger. Thanks to a new high-tech Italian sorting machine called Unitec Cherry Vision 2 (yes, it photographs each individual cherry!), the cherries are efficiently sorted into two channels. Perfect, unblemished are sent abroad to Japan or Dubai or to U.S. chains like Whole Foods and Safeway. Those that are slightly misshaped or off-color either go to the Oregon Cherry Growers for processing (into a brine or Maraschino cherries) and s Farmers Ending Hunger.

“When you’re selling to the retail buyer, they want the cherries to look pretty well perfect,” explains owner Ken Bailey. “The machine can determine what is too soft to put into the pack for retail.” So even though the cherries destined for Farmers Ending Hunger look flawless to most mortals, they’ll only remain that way for a few days.

In many states, farmers find it cheaper to leave fruit in the field rather than pay for labor and transport costs. In Oregon, according to Burt, the vast majority of farms giving to Farmers Ending Hunger give produce that would otherwise be sold for good money.

“We try to generate stuff right out of harvest,” says Burt. “It comes right out of the line—no different than what you buy in the store.” So farms are, in effect, donating product as well as labor. But Farmers Ending Hunger makes it easy for farmers to say “yes,” because they often provide transport (via the Oregon Food Bank or OFB), packaging, and sometimes even volunteer labor.

During harvest, an OFB truck arrives at Orchard View Cherry once a week, delivering the cherries to the central warehouse in NE Portland within two hours. There, OFB volunteers pack the cherries into plastic clamshells (purchased by Farmers Ending Hunger), stack them into cardboard totes which are then sent out to a network of 21 regional food banks throughout the state. (From there, they may be delivered to smaller school or church pantries in each community.)

“Without these materials, it would have been very difficult to deliver the product to the regional food banks and agencies in a client-friendly pack size, without damaging the cherries,” explains Katie Pearmine, the Strategic Sourcing Manager at the Oregon Food Bank. “Food banks don’t typically have budget for this type of material, so this is actually what made it work.” The whole delivery process takes about 24 hours, from farm to food bank. The same routine happens with other perishable crops across the state.

All-told, Orchard View Cherry donated 85,000 pounds of hand-picked fruit to Farmers Ending Hunger this summer. But Bailey wouldn’t have done it without the urging of executive director John Burt. “We get so wrapped up in our harvest and activities,” says Bailey. In addition to buying the plastic clamshell containers, Farmers Ending Hunger makes it easy for farmers by filling out the paperwork and (via its relationship with the OFB) handling distribution. The farm also gets an Oregon state tax credit of 15 percent of the value of the fruit donated. (Labor costs are not factored into tax credit.) Farmers who donate can also get a federal deduction on their taxes.

Pearmine at Oregon Food Bank, who is also a former Farmers Ending Hunger board member, emphasizes that getting fresh produce to food insecure Oregonians—while not easy or cheap—has everything to do with the strategic partnership between farmers and processors, Farmers Ending Hunger, and the Oregon Food Bank.

“You ask a farmer to donate and they are like, ‘I don’t have access to cash.’ And then you say, ‘Where do you have excess in your food stream?’ or ‘What can you do that can help people in poverty the most?’ Those are the questions that John Burt asks farmers.”

 

Photos of SnowCap Community Charities food bank clients by Lindsay Trapnell/The Oregon Food Bank. 

Portland's First Food Hub brings the Farm to a Bigger Table

I've been wanting to write about Ecotrust's the Redd on Salmon ever since VP of Food and Farming Amanda Oborne explained the concept to me. I finally got my wish: my short article on the Redd appears in the September issue of Fast Company magazine.  

 

Here's a longer version of the story: 

The local food movement has reached a plateau. According to the latest census, Americans spend a mere $1.3 billion on local food via farmers markets and CSAs. (That’s a fraction the trillions we spend in the industrial food system). Though many midsized farmers and ranchers long to expand their reach, most don’t have the infrastructure, time, or staff to do so.

Environmental think tank Ecotrust in Portland, Oregon, may have the answer. After years of research on what the so-called “agriculture of the middle” needs to scale up, Ecotrust’s in-house food systems expert Amanda Oborne has helped spawn a new project. Called the Redd on Salmon Street, the two-building $23 million campus is part high-end food hall, part “food hub”—a central warehouse where farmers, ranchers, and other food producers can stash their product until it’s ready to be distributed. And because this is Portland, the food is not distributed via CO2-spewing trucks. Instead, a company called B-line employs cyclists to deliver product via a fleet of electric-assist trikes with refrigerated trailers that carry up to 700 pounds. The Redd (the term for the spawning ground of salmon) is poised to grow Oregon’s regional food economy from boutique to badass. 

Food hubs are nothing new. In fact, there are roughly 350 food hubs across the U.S., according to the Wallace Center’s National Good Food Network. But the Redd is unique.

Most food hubs are run like nonprofits. The Redd is a for-profit business with equity investors. It has anchor tenants like the FoodCorps national headquarters, retail space (ground will break on the Redd “east” building in the fall), and production kitchens for value-added food businesses. These businesses, which pay market-rate rents, subsidize the less sexy behind-the-scenes storage and operations, which is run by B-line. Think of it as a mash-up of a real estate development, food hall, and traditional food hub.

At press time, B-line had already signed on 30 clients including Betsy’s Best Bars (vegan energy bars), Camas Country Mill (flour), Carman Ranch (grass-fed beef), OlyKraut (gourmet sauerkraut), Organically Grown Co. (produce), and Starvation Alley Farms (organic cranberries and juice). Here’s how it works: a company delivers its product to the Redd and stores it either in dry or cold storage. B-line riders repack products into a trailer and bike it around town from AirBnB’s corporate cafeteria to local grocery stores like New Seasons, and on to downtown restaurants like Higgins and Cafe Bijou. (The trikes have a 2.5 mile delivery radius.)   

It’s hard to overstate how excited ranchers and fisherman are about the Redd’s 2,000 square feet of cold storage—half freezer space, half refrigeration. Oborne calls it “the beating heart of the entire campus.”

“It used to be that all the little guys would pull up at New Seasons in their Subarus or pick-ups, clogging up the dock doors,” says Oborne. “Now they bring their stuff to the Redd and it gets repacked for store-specific delivery.” Vendors love this because they don’t waste time making deliveries; New Seasons loves it because trikes can bike right into the packing area. 

There’s nothing wrong with shopping at farmers markets, of course, but Oborne sees them as a point on the local food economy’s trajectory. “Farmers markets helped us wake up,” Oborne says. “Projects like the Redd will help us grow up.”

 

 

 

 

Change is Brewing: A Florida University helps revive Haiti's once-robust coffee trade

 

A version of this story is in the summer issue of Modern Farmer. 

Believe it or not, Haiti was once the largest coffee producer in the world. By the late 18th century, this small Caribbean nation was exporting half of the world’s supply of coffee. But over the intervening 200 years, political instability and an extreme lack of infrastructure made it hard for the country to compete in the global coffee market. During the U.S. embargo in the mid-‘90s, most coffee farmers, struggling to survive, began burning their trees to make charcoal—Haitians' only form of fuel—or ripping them out to plant staples like corn and beans.

A decade ago, a delegation from St. Thomas University in Miami Gardens, Florida, visited Port-de-Paix, in the Northwest department of Haiti. This small Catholic university has had a 36-year-long relationship with the Port-de-Paix diocese, and it has a long-term commitment to economic development in the region.

“It’s the poorest region of the poorest country in the Western hemisphere,” says Anthony Vinciguerra, director of the university’s Center of Community Engagement. It also happens to be one of Haiti’s oldest coffee growing regions, with heirloom Arabica coffee trees scattered about.

When Vinciguerra asked local church and community leaders how the university could support development in Port-de-Paix, the answer was clear: Farmers wanted help reviving their coffee industry.

 

“We didn't know beans about coffee!’” recalls Vinciguerra. But St. Thomas has a large population of Haitian students—many of whom study business, trade, and marketing. After an initial investment of $10,000 from a private donor, Vinciguerra  launched a student-run project that allowed students to get hands-on experience with commodity import marketing, sales, and direct trade.

The Cafèière et Cacouyere du Nord Ouest (COCANO) cooperative was born. Since then, over 200 students from disciplines ranging from international business to plant biology have worked on the project. “We even have science students who are trying to eradicate the coffee bean bore beetle with organic treatments and traps,” Vinciguerra says. Giving students these key jobs obviates the need for a coffee broker, which ensures more money for the farmers.

Crucial to the project’s success was finding roasters who could bring COCANO coffee to the global specialty coffee market. The Italian roaster Pascucci Torrefazione was the first to sign on, followed by Miami’s Panther Coffee. 

Panther owner Joel Pollock, a former roaster from Stumptown, remembers his first cupping of COCANO coffee vividly.

“We tasted defects from many angles,” he says. “There were drying problems, uncontrolled fermentation, mold problems, storage problems.”

But after showing farmers how to install drying racks (to get coffee up off the ground), and emphasizing the importance of processing coffee on the same day it’s picked, he’s seen vast improvements. The 2015 harvest, he says, was the best yet. “It’s got this sweet, chocolatey flavor with some acidity and some red fruit,” says Pollock. “It was miles ahead of the first cup I tasted.”

Before COCANO, farmers in Port-de-Paix had been earning a measly $0.60 per pound. But now, they get $3, $3.25, or $3.50 a pound, depending on the quality of their beans. (Pollock employs the “Direct Trade” model, which rewards farmers for quality by paying them well above the Fair Trade price of $2.20 a pound.)

Pulling farmers out of poverty via high-end specialty coffee is a compelling story, but Pollock, whose next cafe is opening in Miami’s Little Haiti, thinks the quality of the coffee should speak for itself. “You have all these people marketing Haitian coffee by tugging at people’s heartstrings,” he says. “We don’t want to make you feel bad about the plight of Haiti. We’re trying to make it so that if we go away, these people are still making killer coffee.”

Move Over, Kale: Dulse Is The Superfood Of The Future

I wrote about dulse, a crimson sea vegetable that's got the umami of bacon and the nutritional punch of kale, for the February issue of Fast Company. No, dulse is not new. It's been a culinary staple in Ireland, Scotland, Wales, and New Brunswick for centuries. But this particular strain, which is being grown in tanks on the Oregon Coast, grows super fast.

Will farmed dulse be a sustainable new crop for Oregon? After tasting it at Imperial, I sure hope so. 

Fried dulse is served with aioli at Imperial

Wine without Water: the Case for Dry-Farming Grapes

At a recent dinner celebrating “dry-farmed” Oregon wines at Portland’s Southeast Wine Collective, diners listened intently as winemaker Russ Raney explained why he and John Paul decided to form the Deep Roots Coalition.

Evan Roberts from Crowley Wines, Brian O'Donnell from Belle Pente, Katie and Tom Monroe from Southeast Wine Collective, and Russ Raney, founder of Evesham Wood

“Back in the late ‘90s, we were astonished by the number of vineyards that were going into the Willamette Valley with irrigation,” said Raney, who is the founding winemaker at revered Oregon winery Evesham Wood. The Willamette Valley, which gets 42 inches of rainfall a year, seemed like one place that you shouldn’t need to irrigate—or so believed Raney, who had worked on vineyards in Germany, where irrigation is frowned upon. John Paul of Cameron Winery in the nearby Dundee Hills adamantly agreed. Not only was the duo passionate about conserving water, they aspired to make complex, place-driven wines. In 2004, they formed a small collective of winemakers who spurn irrigation, relying on natural rainfall alone. They called it the Deep Roots Coalition, in honor of the way non-irrigated vines’ roots sink deep into the soil in search of moisture.

My story on the merits of dry-farming vineyards—both for the planet and the palate—appears in the winter issue of Modern Farmer.

Oregon's Rabble-Rousing Winemaker: John Paul

I got to interview one of my favorite Oregon winemakers for Portland Monthly's Long Story Short column.

Cameron Winery's John Paul, a longtime advocate of dry farming, isn’t worried about this summer’s heat waves.

 

John Paul was finishing his postdoc in chemistry at UC Berkeley when he found himself drawn more to the wineries of Napa than to the lab. By 1984 he and his wife, Teri, had purchased a vineyard site in the Dundee Hills, and Cameron Winery was born. Since then, Paul has become one of the most revered winemakers in Oregon—his complex pinots, chardonnays, and Giuliano (a Friulian blend) enjoy a cult following. Still, Paul produces no more than 5,000 cases a year, 80 percent of which stay in Oregon. (He and his 14-year-old dog, Jackson Pollock, make the Portland deliveries themselves.) An outspoken critic of both irrigated vineyards and herbicides, Paul is also the founder of the Deep Roots Coalition, an organization that advocates for “dry-farmed” wines.

The pivotal moment came when I was assistant winemaker at Carneros Creek in Napa and I was sent to a tasting of Domaine Romanée-Conti wines: 1976 vintage. I still remember sitting down with these big Burgundy glasses, which I’d never experienced before, and just being completely blown away by the wine. And getting up from that tasting and going, “This is the wine I want to make.” I’d never had a wine like that before, because it was too expensive for me!

When we first put in the vineyard, the deer were wiping out the vines, so we installed an electric fence. I had planted the vineyard to be like a grand cru vineyard in Burgundy—I planted 20 different clones of pinot noir in a two-acre parcel. My wife came up with the name: Clos Electrique. It literally means “electric fence.”

To irrigate is to take away a critical component of the terroir. Our established vineyards are doing fine this summer because the vines are old and they have really deep roots—they send their roots deep in search for water and minerals and bring forth each year a wine that says, “This is Oregon fruit. It could be from no other region of the world.”

Russ Raney and I founded the Deep Roots Coalition in 2004. A lot of the talking heads in the industry were extolling the virtues of irrigation. We knew that it was wrong, and if you irrigated in France, for example, you would lose your appellation. So we formed the DRC, and now two dozen wineries are members. I think we’re starting to influence the conversation in a big way. I don’t think people understand: Vineyards use a huge amount of water. But I also don’t think they understand what irrigation physiologically does to the grapes. It’s why California wines have 15–16 percent alcohol. They wouldn’t be [so alcoholic] if they were dry-farmed.

Don Oman, founder of Pastaworks, turned me on to Italian wines. And then he got me to go to Italy with him several times. I fell in love with the wines of Friuli. I started growing Friulano at Clos Electrique when somebody showed up at the winery with a bunch of cuttings in the back of his pickup truck and said, “I bet you would like these.” The new Giuliano is totally amazing. It’s exactly what I want to be making: 40 percent Friulano. It’s got this grapefruit-rind thing in the mouth.

Dijon clones are planted up and down the Willamette Valley for both pinot noir and chardonnay. I think that’s a huge mistake. They just don’t make very good wine! They’re bred for production, not for quality. Obviously people who have Dijon clones would argue all day with me that that’s not true. But in my opinion, Dijon clones make inferior wines in most cases, on the same soil type, than the clones that were here before them: Pommard and Wädenswil.

My kids are now 28 and 33. Julian, at 28, has become a complete wine geek. He designs my labels, and he loves to talk with me about how I’m making the wine. But I don’t think he has any aspirations to make wine—although recently he asked if he could come up and work harvest. You know what? You just never know.

Clean Weed: Inside an Organic Marijuana Farm

{This story was published on Civil Eats on July 27th.}

Sofresh Farms, in Canby, Oregon, is not what I expect. When I finally find it, on an out-of-the-way gravel road, I’m struck by how ordinary this rural neighborhood is. There’s a produce farm on one side; a man raising Longhorn cattle on the other. Magnificent Mount Hood dominates the skyline. Other than the 8-foot-high wooden fence surrounding the property, there’s nothing to tip me off that this is a cannabis farm. 

Further complicating my notion of a typical pot farm, I’m met at the gate by a tow-headed three-year-old boy wearing silver wings. 

“Do you know where Tyson is?” I ask, mentioning the grower by name. The boy looks at me skeptically until I introduce myself.

“What’s your name?” I ask.

“Theo,” he says.

After texting Tyson again, I ask Theo if he might be able to help me locate him. He opens the gate, offers me his tiny hand, and leads me down a flagstone path to a greenhouse.

Tyson Haworth, a freckled 36-year-old farmer emerges from the greenhouse, wearing sunglasses and a worn Sofresh T-shirt. “I see you’ve met my son,” Haworth says, chuckling. As he shows me where to park, Haworth says he loves farming cannabis right where he lives.

“My kids will never know that pot was illegal,” he says.

Tyson Haworth at Sofresh Farms

Like many who have been growing for the medical marijuana market in Oregon, Haworth is over-the-moon that the state legalized recreational use of the drug last fall. He’s on a mission to destigmatize cannabis. “Marijuana was used for millennia,” he tells me, noting that the Chinese have long prescribed the plant for medicinal purposes. “And it was in the U.S. Pharmacopeia until 1942!” But he’s also on a mission to prove to other cannabis growers that you can successfully grow pot using agroecological farming methods.

“I’ve got little kids! I don’t want toxic chemicals around,” says Haworth, who intersperses his rapid-fire facts about cannabis farming with quotes from organic pioneer Elliot Coleman and organic soil guru Jeff Lowenfells. Though Haworth’s farm will never be USDA-certified organic (that is, until marijuana is legalized at the federal level), it is verified by Clean Green Certified, one of the only third-party certifiers to hold cannabis farmers to national and international organic standards.

The Making of an Eco-Label

If you smoke a joint, you’re not just inhaling THC and other cannabinoids. You’re also likely breathing in dangerous neurotoxins and cancer-causing chemicals.

Now that recreational marijuana is legal in four states—Alaska, Colorado, Oregon, and Washington—a dirty little secret about the pot industry has surfaced. Pot growers—especially those who cultivate plants indoors—rely heavily on pesticides.

A host of pests and other plagues can devastate cannabis crops: spider mites, root aphids, mosaic virus, and downy mildew are just a handful. Many cannabis farmers tend to turn to insecticides and other chemicals as a quick fix.

“Growers use everything from myclobutanil [a fungicide sold under the brand name Eagle 20] to synthetic pyrethroids,” says Chris Van Hook, founder of Clean Green Certified. The latter include Avid (abamectin) to control spider mites, and bifenthrin, which has been classified by the EPA as a possible human carcinogen. Growers also use chlorpyrifos and malathion, both organophosphates known for damaging the human nervous system.

“Whether it’s medical or adult recreational use, you need to be concerned with the manner in which it’s grown, because you’re ingesting it,” cautions Van Hook. The way it’s ingested matters too; preliminary studies show that marijuana concentrates like oil and hash contain much higher pesticide residue levels than buds.

Pesticides aren’t the only problem, either. A new paper in the journal Bioscience documents the environmental havoc wreaked by illegal marijuana farming in California. In an interview with Yale 360, the paper’s author talks about the way these farms “siphon off scarce water resources, poison wildlife, erode fragile soils, and overload waters with nutrients.”

Van Hook founded Clean Green Certified a decade ago. A U.S. Department of Agriculture-accredited organic certifier as well as a lawyer, Van Hook has worked in agriculture and aquaculture his whole life. In 2003, Van Hook was approached by a grower who wanted him to certify her cannabis as USDA organic. Van Hook explained that he couldn’t do that with a crop that is still illegal at the federal level, but the grower argued that there was a need for third-party certification. Van Hook discovered he could use U.S. and international organic standards to certify cannabis as long as he and certified growers don’t use the word “organic” or “USDA organic” to describe their product. Clean Green was born.

Before growers can become Clean Green certified, they must fill out an application with details about water use and energy use; soil erosion prevention; and how they plan to combat pests, weeds, and diseases. Clean Green inspects each farm annually, reviewing the farm’s inputs—from fertilizers and potting soils to sprays. Finally, the company tests the soil for 75 compounds at a federally licensed agricultural lab. (As Noelle Crombie at the Oregonian recently reported, unlicensed labs tend to have inconsistent practices and can produce inaccurate results.)

To be Clean Green certified, you must also have a carbon reduction plan in place, whether that means buying renewable energy and using more efficient lighting or locating your dispensary close to your grow operation to cut down on transportation-related emissions.

“People in educated urban areas need to bring the same attention to the cannabis industry that they bring to their food and to their shade-grown, bird-friendly organic coffee. And they need to do it this year!” Van Hook says, a note of impatience creeping into his voice.

It seems some already are. To date, Van Hook has certified nearly 100 growers, processors, and handlers and says he’s seen an uptick in applications since Oregon legalized marijuana. Tyson Haworth at Sofresh Farms is one of them.

The greenhouse at Sofresh Farms

 

From Fish Oil to Beneficial Bugs: Taking it to the Next Level

Haworth came to cannabis farming via organic agriculture. He worked for the produce distribution company Organically Grown Co. for 13 years before starting an indoor tomato farm. But it wasn’t until his wife Michelle had her second back surgery that the couple started to grow marijuana. Michelle was hesitant to take the opiates her doctor prescribed because she feared addiction. Smoking pot gave her immediate relief from the incessant pain. Eventually, realizing he could earn much more growing medical marijuana than he could growing off-season tomatoes, Haworth started Sofresh in 2012. There was no question that he’d farm cannabis using organic practices.

This summer, Haworth is growing outdoors for the first time. The plants will grow to be nine feet wide and twelve feet tall. Although Haworth still cultivates some plants indoors, he doesn’t think it’s the future—especially now that pot is legal in Oregon.

“It’s harder to control pests indoors,” says Haworth. “You have to play mother nature. And she’s very good at her job.”

Soil health is of critical importance to Haworth. First, he puts down a layer of straw, then a layer of soil mixed with biochar, a soil amendment akin to what you’d find in an old growth forest. Then he adds a layer of compost or worm castings and then a final layer of straw. Finally, the soil and the plants are inoculated with mycorrhizae, which creates an intelligent food highway underneath the roots.

Sofresh is also one of the only cannabis farms in the U.S. that practices no-till agriculture. In its small 600 square-foot grow room (formerly a horse barn), I’m surprised to see wooden planks between the rows of impressively flowering Nuken, Black Betty, and Sweet Tooth—the strain that won the Amsterdam Cannabis Cup in 2001. Tattooed workers balance on the planks as they thin the canopy, so as not to disturb the soil.

“It’s important that there’s no compaction,” explains Haworth as he shows me around. “Lack of moisture and compaction are what kill the soil.” After harvest, the workers cut the plants and leave the stem to decay into the soil. Where other farmers apply myclobutanil, Haworth keeps mildew and mold at bay with fans and a large dehumidifier, and keeps the plants thinned for better air flow.

Haworth and his staff also spray the cannabis leaves with a compost-and-roasted-eggshell-tea, which is high in calcium, explains farm manager Missy LaGuardia. Calcium deficiencies can make cannabis plants more susceptible to pests. LaGuardia keeps the plant moist by spraying a mixture of aloe and fish oil on the leaves. “It mimics a really healthy mid-summer rain,” says LaGuardia, who usually sprays it at night.

LaGuardia says they populate the farm with ladybugs as soon as they see signs of aphids. Outdoors, natural predators like tree frogs and mice do their share of work, though LaGuardia admits they also eat the beneficial bugs.

The ladybugs released indoors are smart: Unless there’s a sustained source of food, they’ll escape. So LaGuardia keeps what she calls a “ladybug altar” in one corner of the greenhouse—a decomposing cannabis plant rife with aphids. She points out little orange clusters. “These are ladybug eggs!” she says, smiling triumphantly. I gasp, wondering if a conventional pot farmer would ever take such a risk. “Aren’t you worried this will lead to an aphid outbreak?” She shrugs her shoulders. “You’ve got to leave a little for nature.”

 

Photo of Tyson Haworth by Michael McDermott. Photo of marijuana plants courtesy of SoFresh.

Flour Power

If you know me, you know I'm obsessed with craft bakeries, particularly my local one in Portland: Tabor Bread. The baker at Tabor makes a sprouted grain and seed loaf with red fife flour grown in the Willamette Valley that's got a nutty flavor with caramel notes and a hint of sour. It's perfect as toast, slathered with butter, but also makes an excellent sandwich bread.

I wrote a short piece in this month's Hemispheres magazine about the trend of bakers sourcing heirloom grains and milling them in-house with stone mills (which preserves both the nutrition and the flavor of the grain.)

behind the scenes at Portland's Tabor Bread

Bucking the gluten-free trend, heirloom grains and real bread make a comeback

A gluten-free craze has taken the nation by storm. But there’s also been an equally strong—though less publicized—pro-grain movement. Across the country, craft bakers have shown a renewed interest in heirloom wheat and rye varieties, each of which boasts a unique flavor profile that speaks to its rich history and local agricultural influences. Think of it as grain terroir.

Many of the wheats currently seeing a resurgence were once grown abundantly in America but fell out of favor in the late 1800s with the advent of roller mills, which efficiently remove the bran and the germ to make white flour. The problem? The germ tastes great. “The germ is not only where the nutrients and fatty acids are, it’s the flavor center,” says David Bauer, owner and baker at Farm & Sparrow Bakery in Asheville, North Carolina. He grinds his heirloom grains with a stone mill to preserve both the bran and the germ.

Bauer first came across Wren’s Abruzzi rye—an Italian cultivar that came to U.S. shores through Charleston during the colonial era—in a Virginia field, where it was being used (unceremoniously) to suppress weeds. “He was cover-cropping his fields with it!” Bauer says of the land’s farmer, sounding scandalized. Softer than the German rye typically grown in the U.S., this variety boasts a rich umami flavor, which Bauer describes as “bright and spicy.” It’s become a favorite in his seeded rye breads at Farm & Sparrow, and he uses it in his rye-cacao shortbread at All Souls Pizza, the Asheville pizzeria he co-owns with a local chef.

Red Fife, another ancient grain, came from Ukraine to Canada via a Scottish immigrant in the mid-1800s and is now making a comeback in Oregon’s Willamette Valley, where farmer Tom Hunton at Camas Country Mill is growing it to the delight of area bakers and bread lovers. Herbaceous and nutty, with caramel notes, Red Fife has become a hit at Portland’s Tabor Bread, where it’s used in toothsome loaves like the popular sprouted grain and seed. “It’s really mild and slightly sweet,” says baker Brad Holderfield. “It doesn’t have a bitter quality the way a lot of red wheat does.”

Josey Baker's California Heirloom loaf, made with Sonora wheat grown by "badass farmer" Sally Fox

At San Francisco’s The Mill, the aptly named Josey Baker has developed an obsession for einkorn (German for “single grain”), a grassy, nutty variety that ranks as the world’s oldest wheat cultivar; farmers were probably growing it more than 10,000 years ago. Those original farmers seem to have been onto something: Not only is the variety more nutritious than modern wheats (it’s higher in protein and beta-carotene), but einkorn also contains—for people who care about such things—less gluten. “It’s like you took a loaf of adolescent Wonder Bread and let it mature into a fully developed and nuanced version of itself,” Baker says. Although The Mill’s einkorn bread is made of only water, salt, sourdough starter and whole-grain flour, it comes out of the oven smelling like honey. “It’s my favorite bread we’re making now.”

 

The Power of Selection: Plant Breeder Frank Morton

I got to write about superstar organic plant breeder Frank Morton for Communal Table, a new literary and food publication created by the talented Adrian Hale. Here's a teaser, below, but you can read the whole article here. 

Frank Morton with Lane Selman, agricultural researcher at Oregon State University, brandishing a mix of Stocky Red Roasters, Joelene's Rustic Italian, Little Bells, and Gatherer's Gold [Photo by Shawn Linehan] 

When I moved to Portland four years ago and began frequenting the farmers’ market, it didn’t take me long to become obsessed with Gathering Together Farm’s vegetables. The farm’s stand drew me in with its bounty and its kaleidoscope of color: crisp peppers in green, red, yellow, and purple; fragrant bundles of fresh basil; and singular specimens that I’d never seen before, like watermelon radish and delicata “zeppelin” squash. But it was the lettuce—hulking heads of it, bursting with uncommon vigor—and several types of kale (not just lacinato but White Russian and a frilly magenta-stemmed kale called Red Ursa) that stopped me in my tracks and caused me to exclaim out loud to complete strangers.

Before I ever tasted a nibble of lettuce, I knew Gathering Together Farm was special. What I didn’t know until recently was why some of the farm’s most popular vegetables are unique and uniquely tasty.

The wild salad mix, the kale, and the delicata can all be traced directly to one maverick plant breeder named Frank Morton. Little known to the general public, Morton is a rock star in plant breeding circles. A seed saver who grows heirloom plants that are at risk of extinction, Morton is also an organic plant breeder who creates never-before-seen varieties that have improved yield and disease resistance as well as culinary attributes such as texture, color, and enhanced flavor. He’s also an indefatigable activist who sued the USDA in 2008 for failure to require an environmental impact assessment before Roundup Ready sugar beets were introduced in the Willamette Valley.

Plant breeders have been overlooked in the local food movement, but they shouldn’t be. Without them, we wouldn’t have any heirloom tomatoes to delight over at our farmers’ markets or improved varieties like Frank Morton’s addictive Stocky Red Roaster sweet peppers. “Breeders are architects . . . the people writing the original recipes,” says chef Dan Barber in The Third Plate. The type of breeding that makes headlines these days is genetic engineering, a technology introduced in the 1980s that involves splicing DNA from one plant or animal into an entirely different plant. (“Golden rice,” for instance, is endowed with a gene from corn and a gene from a soil bacterium.) But what Frank Morton practices is old-fashioned Mendelian crossbreeding, which humans have used for thousands of years. He crosses a plant that has a trait he likes—say, Merlot lettuce, which is resistant to downy mildew—with another plant he also likes—say, Reine d’ Glaces lettuce, which has dark-green lacy leaves and is crispy and sweet—then saves the seeds from this union and plants those the following season.

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Beyond Organic? Alternatives to USDA-certified Organic

{This story was published on Civil Eats earlier today.}

Last fall, after wondering for years about whether I should buy produce from farmers who claim that they are “organic, but not certified,” I dug into some big questions about certification. That process led me to explore many other seemingly respectable food labels that—while much less popular than organic—seemed to offer a similar, if slightly different level of transparency between eaters and farmers.

Organizations like Certified Naturally Grown and Food Alliance have in-depth certification processes, setting them apart from meaningless, uncertified marketing terms like “natural.” And while there are also a number of strong animal welfare labels (think Certified Humane or Animal Welfare Aproved) as well as the increasingly ubiquitous Non-GMO Verified label, I decided to investigate two that are used for produce. Here’s what I found.

Certified Naturally Grown

Back in 2002, when the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) launched its National Organic Program (NOP), sustainably minded farmers around the U.S. rejoiced. But a handful of farmers from New York’s Hudson Valley were less enthusiastic. Though they were committed to organic practices, they weren’t convinced that the USDA program was an ideal fit—especially considering the cost and paperwork involved.

So they formed a grassroots nonprofit called Certified Naturally Grown (CNG), with its own set of standards and a certification process to go with them. “They felt organic [certification] was better suited to larger operations and wholesale channels where there wasn’t that connection between the farmer and the eater,” explains Alice Varon, Executive Director of CNG.

The CNG standards are based on the organic standards; they don’t allow synthetic pesticides, herbicides, or GMO seeds, and they require crop rotation and soil amendments. But the program is broader in its scope. Since 2010, it has covered not only produce farmers and livestock producers, but beekeepers as well. (The USDA does have organic standards for apiculture in the works, but they aren’t scheduled to hit the market until 2016.) CNG is also in the process of developing standards for aquaponics and mushroom cultivation.

CNG involves much less paperwork than the USDA organic program—at a more reasonable cost. That’s in part because the organization employs a peer-review inspection process: Each annual on-farm inspection is done by another CNG farmer. For free. In fact, all certified farms must inspect at least one other farm.

“A lot of farmers are drawn to our peer-review inspection process,” says Varon. “They feel a great deal of ownership in it. And it gives them a chance to connect with one another.”

They’re also drawn to the lower certification cost. While USDA organic certification can be prohibitive for small-scale operations (as much as $1,000 a year, depending on the size), CNG has a sliding scale that starts at $100 per year. CNG also has a scholarship fund for beginning farmers or those who have suffered unusual difficulties such as extreme weather or physical injury.

Farmer Rick Reddaway, who has a “petite” vegetable farm in Orient, Oregon, grew weary of telling his farmers’ markets customers, “No, I’m not certified organic, but I do grow everything without pesticides or herbicides.” Wanting some accountability, he chose CNG both for its lower cost and because it doesn’t require conventionally farmed land go through a three-year transition period before it can get be certified.

The CNG application asks farmers if any prohibited pesticides or herbicides have been used on their fields over the past three years. If the answer is yes, CNG will allow a farmer to have “CNG transitional status” as she transitions her farm from conventional to organic. Reddaway was able to get full CNG certification because the East Multnomah Soil & Water Conservation District, which owns his land, told him it had been fallow for three years.

“I’m in an incubator program on land that I’ll soon have to leave, so it just didn’t make sense for me to do USDA organic certification,” says Reddaway.

Farmer Rashid Nuri, who runs an urban farm in Atlanta, Georgia called Truly Living Well, says USDA organic standards were much too onerous for him. “I have multiple farm sites and 10 years ago, each site had to have its own documents to be certified organic,” says Nuri. Though this rule has since changed, Nuri is a loyal member of CNG.

To make certification as transparent to consumers as possible, the grower’s complete application is posted on the CNG website, as is the last date of inspection and the name of the certifying farmer. “We take comfort in the fact that our website is completely up-to-date,” says Varon. When she gets the occasional call from a consumer saying that a farmer using the CNG logo isn’t up on the CNG site, Varon sends the farmer a letter.

So why would one choose CNG produce over organic? Since CNG is tailored to direct-market farmers, the CNG label typically means your produce is coming from a local farm. Though some organic produce comes from local farms as well, much of the organic produce you find at Whole Foods or Walmart has been shipped from great distances. Organic, in other words, does not always mean small, community-supported farms. CNG produce may also be less expensive than certified organic, though it depends on where the farmer is located and the scale of her operation.

On the down side for farmers, Certified Naturally Grown doesn’t have anywhere near the name recognition of the certified organic label, nor is it as ubiquitous. But since 2002, membership has been steadily climbing, mostly via word-of-mouth. CNG has 740 certified farms and apiaries in the U.S. The highest concentration of CNG-certified farms is in the Southeast, with a preponderance of them in Georgia.

Varon thinks that’s because organic never developed a strong foothold in the Southeast. “There wasn’t this sense that organic is the only game in town,” says Varon. “And certainly, in the South, you have a resistance to government-run programs!”

Food Alliance

While the organic standards are seen as relatively stringent by many, they are notoriously lacking when it comes to labor and and animal welfare standards. And some farmers believe they could have a wider environmental scope as well. That’s where the Food Alliance label comes in.

When Karl Kupers and Fred Fleming began selling Shepherd’s Grain flour in 2003, they went with Food Alliance because its standards went “beyond organic.”

“What appealed to us was Food Alliance’s broader and deeper look at agriculture and food in general,” says Shepard’s Grain General Manager Mike Moran. Like organic growers, Food Alliance-certified farmers cannot grow genetically modified seeds or use high-toxicity pesticides, and they must also practice integrated pest management, an ecosystem-based approach.

But in addition, Food Alliance farmers must practice soil and water conservation, wildlife habitat and biodiversity conservation, and prove that they’re offering safe and fair working conditions for employees. That last part means having a grievance procedure, a nondiscrimination policy, and offering benefits like health insurance and bonuses, among other things.

In addition to crops, Food Alliance has standards for livestock operations, shellfish farms, nurseries and greenhouses, and even food handling operations. “This appealed to us because you can certify that everybody who touches your product is aligned to the same philosophy,” says Moran. So, not only do all 38 farmer-owners at Shepherd’s Grain have to be certified, but the Old Centennial Mill in Spokane, Washington, owned by ADM, has to be certified as well.

Food Alliance was founded in 1998—four years before any national organic standards existed. The organization doesn’t forbid the use of all synthetic pesticides and herbicides, but it does ban all chemicals that the World Health Organization classifies as “extremely hazardous” and “highly hazardous.” This means that chemicals like glyphosate and diuron (both classified by the WHO as only “slightly hazardous”) are permitted. However, executive director Matthew Buck says the organization’s focus on Integrated Pest Management is meant to reduce if not eliminate the need for chemical applications.

“Our strategy is to first prevent the problem so no treatments are necessary,” says Buck. “Use of chemical treatment is absolutely your last resort—if you’re going to lose the crop and your livelihood.”

Some farmers prefer this because it gives them wiggle-room if they can’t use IPM to suppress a pest that’s decimating their crop. FA also allows farmers some leeway on chemical fertilizer applications (unlike organic), but the hope is that using cover-cropping, on-site composting, and integrating livestock into crop production will prod farmers to use much less commercial fertilizers.

Food Alliance’s inspection is not as affordable as CNG’s, but that’s because Food Alliance works with a third-party auditor, International Certification Services. The inspection fee ranges from $600-$1,100 for three years, which works out to around $200-$350 per year. (There is also an annual licensing fee, based on a percentage of gross sales, that’s paid directly to Food Alliance.)

For farmers, there are trade-offs. Buck likes to use the example of an organic wheat grower, who creates a risk of erosion every time he or she tills the ground. (Most organic wheat farmers rely on tillage to prevent weed growth.) A Food Alliance-certified wheat grower, on the other hand, can “direct-seed” with minute amounts of chemical fertilizer and they don’t need to take as many passes through the fields. Not only are they conserving oil, they’re building organic soil matter and sequestering carbon. “I think there are many benefits to organic agriculture and it represents an improvement over ‘conventional,’ but I don’t think organic is the paragon of sustainable agriculture,” says Buck.

Margaret Reeves, Ph.D., senior scientist at the Pesticide Action Network, supports organic because of the integrity of the label. But she understands the appeal of Food Alliance. “I have visited some of the big organic farms, that for all intents and purposes look pretty darn conventional, except they don’t use the disallowed products,” says Reeves. “Food Alliance goes beyond that by offering the environmental stewardship parts that organic does not.” Reeves has also been involved in the creation of a new business-to-business certification process called the Equitable Food Initiative, which is aimed at protecting farmworkers from pesticide exposure and abusive working conditions.

So what’s a conscientious consumer to do? Luckily, it’s not usually a choice between one sustainable label and the other. Usually—whether you’re at the farmers’ market, food co-op or the grocery store—you’re deciding between a conventional apple and and an organic apple or a conventional apple and a CNG apple.“There really are complimentary efforts out there,” says Reeves. “It comes down to what’s available.”

Find a list of Food Alliance-certified producers here and a Certified Naturally Grown-certified producers here.