In California, a Race to Save the World’s Largest Trees From Megafires

When the Washburn Fire burned through part of Yosemite’s iconic Mariposa Grove in July, photos of its famed giant sequoias steeped in smoke and surrounded by automated sprinklers to shelter them from the flames shocked viewers around the globe. 

Less than a year earlier, similar photos showed the trunk of the sequoia known as General Sherman, the world’s largest tree, wrapped in a tinfoil-like material to repel the flames of the KNP Complex Fire. Yet, while those efforts helped save the celebrity trees from the infernos, the annihilation elsewhere in California’s Sierra Nevada mountains is difficult to grasp: The U.S. Forest Service estimates that, in 2020 and 2021 alone, wildfires killed 13 percent to 19 percent of the world’s giant sequoias. 

“Those are crisis numbers,” said Tim Borden, the sequoia restoration and stewardship manager at Save the Redwoods League, an advocacy nonprofit stewarding several sequoia groves that have been deeply impacted by high-severity fires. “The lights are flashing red.”

While climate is one driver of the growing size and intensity of the megafires decimating the world’s largest trees, it’s only part of the picture.

“Part of this is caused by how our forests have changed because of management decisions that were well intentioned at the time, but not really fully known,” Borden said.

Read more on Inside Climate News.

What Will the Rise of Giant Indoor Farms Mean for Appalachian Kentucky?

Nancy Hatfield was working the night shift as an assistant manager at a 24-hour Shell gas station in Flemingsburg, Kentucky, when she learned that the new indoor farm—just 20 minutes away in Morehead—was hiring.

Hatfield, who is 27 and has two young daughters, says before her eldest started school, the late hours weren’t so bad. Her husband would take care of the kids at night, and she would spend the day with them before heading back to her job at 5 p.m.

“It was great,” she told me. “Then Madeline started school, and I was like, ‘If I’m at work all night and she’s at school all day, I’m never going to see her.’ And that didn’t sit well with me, so I went on the hunt for a different job.”

Now, Hatfield spends evenings with her family and days helping take meticulous care of hundreds of thousands of tomato plants in a glass-roofed greenhouse the size of 50 football fields. She started working for AppHarvest—a company she says many in the community had their eyes on—shortly after it went into production in March 2021, right before the first harvest of hydroponic tomatoes.

Appharvest’s Morehead, Kentucky, facility.

Hatfield is one of around 500 AppHarvest employees from Morehead and other nearby towns in this region of Appalachian Kentucky, a small army of plant tenders called “crop care specialists” who show up every day in brightly colored T-shirts. The jobs—which start at $13 an hour and provide health insurance and productivity bonuses—have been popular in a region where the average household income is 40 percent less than the national average, and living-wage jobs have been scarce in recent years.

For Hatfield, it was a step up. “There hadn’t been anything similar in the Morehead area,” she told me. “A lot of people either work in fast food, education, or in the medical industry. So, this gives people an option in the agriculture field, without having a degree.”

Hatfield is also missing a hand, so her job options have been limited. And yet, when we spoke, she described with enthusiasm the way she one-handedly removes suckers from the tomato plants—which can grow as tall as 40 feet under a combination of natural light, LEDs, and high-pressure sodium lights—to ensure that the plants’ energy goes into creating trusses, or clusters of tomatoes. Hatfield hopes it leads to more opportunities with the company. But for now, she says, she likes caring for the plants much better than overseeing a convenience store.

The other AppHarvest workers I met at the Morehead facility—a sleek, 3 million-square-foot building made up of several conjoined Dutch-style greenhouses surrounded by picturesque rolling hills—echoed Hatfield’s experiences. And it’s not hard to see why the whole operation has inspired a combination of awe and optimism for both residents and visitors.

Inside the temperate greenhouse, long rows of plants—720,000 in total growing in small cakes of substrate—flank a center walkway, and the light, when it filters through the glass roof, is refracted, diffusing and softening the shadows. A 44 million-gallon retention pond lies alongside the far end of the building, collecting rainwater and cycling it through to the plants and back out again in a closed loop.

And while it’s one of a handful of high-tech indoor farming operations that have garnered glowing media attention and massive venture capital investments in recent years, the majority of the others have built locations in urban areas first and then begun to add more rural, less coastal locations. Take Aerofarms’ indoor warehouse operation in Danville, Virginia (population 42,000), or Bright Farms’ greenhouse in Wilmington, Ohio (population 12,000), for example.

AppHarvest, on the other hand, has been rooted to rural Kentucky from the start. CEO and founder Jonathan Webb grew up in the state and returned a few years ago after working in renewable energy development in New York and Washington, D.C., including a stint with the Department of Defense. He says he turned to the burgeoning world of indoor agriculture as a solution to climate change and an alternative to conventional farming, or what he calls “dirty agriculture.” Read More.

Op-Ed: We Are What We Eat — and We Must Make Food Decisions With the Climate Crisis in Mind

The following piece ran in nearly every Edible publication across North America in Fall 2021.

If we had been told, a decade ago, that so many climate-fueled disasters would hit the food system so soon, would we have believed it?

If someone had described the catastrophic flooding of the Missouri river that submerged a million acres of corn and soybeans in 2019 (followed a year later by winds in the same region that were so destructive they flattened corn silos), crops in Texas freezing in April, winemakers having to throw away entire vintages because they tasted of wildfire smoke, shellfish in British Columbia being literally cooked alive in the ocean and ranchers throughout the West being forced to sell off tens of thousands of cattle so they wouldn’t starve due to drought—would we have listened?

Would we have done more to prepare?

I can’t help but think back to a lecture I sat in on in 2008 on the future of food and climate change by a pair of Ivy League economists.

I had seen An Inconvenient Truth and was serious about local food. And I had a hunch that reducing my “food miles” wouldn’t cut it. 

The economists talked about the potential boon to crop yields, due to “increased photosynthesis” and “CO2 fertilization,” but added that warming temperature and rising evaporation would balance one another out, at least in our lifetimes.

Some places would get too wet, and some would be too dry, they warned. And, as if to reassure us, they said that other parts of the world—developing nations with little infrastructure and large numbers of subsistence farmers—would face the worst of the problem.

And those of us in North America? We’d be fine until at least the end of the century.

Then someone turned the lights back on, the economists thanked the audience, and everyone went home.

Read more.

As Coffee Rust Reaches Hawaii, Farmers Prepare for a Devastating Blow

Suzanne Shriner remembers the moment she heard the news that coffee leaf rust had been spotted on the island of Maui, just around 100 miles from her farm on the Kona Coast of the island of Hawaii. It was a Friday afternoon in October—seven months into the pandemic—and Hawaii had just re-opened to tourists.

“I got the text and my stomach dropped,” recalls Shriner, who farms with her extended family and serves as president of the Kona Coffee Farmers Association. Like most of her peers, Shriner had been trying to mentally prepare for the moment for a long time. “We’d hoped we would have a few more years,” she says. “But when I learned it was here, I knew we had a massive challenge ahead of us.”

Coffee leaf rust, or Hemileia vastatrix, was first identified in Sri Lanka in the 1860s and has made its way through most of the world’s coffee-growing nations since then. The fungus, which thrives in warm, wet conditions and travels on the wind, debilitates and destroys coffee trees. It’s also one of the biggest factors most scientists point to when they say that climate change is coming for your morning cup of coffee. Read more.

The Fight to Keep Farmers’ Markets Open During Coronavirus

At the downtown Berkeley Farmers’ Market last Saturday, shoppers showed up in droves, despite the cold, rainy weather. There were no samples, no musicians, and most vendors were wearing gloves. Many sold everything they had, which is unusual for March, when the fruit is scant and many of the farms bring the same arrays of greens, root vegetables, and onions.

“It’s a good thing we’re busy, since this could be the last market for a while,” a Riverdog Farm cashier told a customer draped in rain gear.

The Downtown Berkeley Farmers’ Market. (Photo CC-licensed by Franco Folini)

And his fear was not unwarranted. Just the day before, the city of Seattle—where the spread of coronavirus began earlier and is further along than in most other parts of the U.S.—had announced that all farmers’ markets would close for at least a month. Seattle suspended all large gatherings and the markets have been lumped together with parades and public parties.

Read more on Civil Eats.

Automated Harvest is Coming. What Will it Mean for Farmworkers and Rural Communities?

It’s a misty morning near Salinas, California and the advanced.farm TX harvester—a lightweight, driverless tractor covered in canvas—is picking strawberries. Like a dot-matrix printer moving along a page, the harvester’s robotic hands move back and forth along the beds, scanning for signs of red. When it identifies a ripe berry, it dives down, gently plucks it from the plant, and places it in a crate.

At the same time, a crew of about two dozen farmworkers is also harvesting strawberries just a few hundred feet away, on an adjacent farm. As an energetic song blasts from a parked vehicle, the men and women stoop to pick berries straight into plastic clamshells that they tile, side-by-side, into cardboard trays. Once their trays are full, the workers take them back to one of several sorting tables spread out along the access road (to allow for social distancing). It’s clear by the speed at which they’re walking—and in some cases even running—to drop off each box that these men and women are getting paid by the piece.

I’ve trudged through the muddy, irrigated fields to watch both forms of harvest with Kyle Cobb, advanced.farm’s youthful, clean-cut CEO. The company was the first to mechanically harvest strawberries for commercial sales last year, and had raised just under $10 million by June 2020, including a $7.5 million Series A round in 2019. After building a robot that cleaned solar panels, Cobb and his team dove into agriculture, where they hope to put an end to the notoriously grueling, repetitive work of harvesting strawberries.

If things go as planned, and advanced.farm is able to scale up over the next several years, Cobb says, “You’d see the same crew, but instead of it being this big, you’d see about half the size . . . and they wouldn’t be doing the traditional picking like this. They’d be doing a combination of sorting and packing in a very comfortable ergonomic set up.”

Read more on Civil Eats.

Potentially deadly valley fever is hitting California farmworkers hard, worrying researchers

LAMONT, Calif. — Victor Gutierrez contracted valley fever, an illness caused by a soil-borne fungus, and he thinks he got it in the summer of 2011 when he worked in the nectarine orchards of California’s dry, dusty Central Valley.

“The wind was really strong, and we were almost falling off our ladders,” Gutierrez said. “The dust would rise up in the fields and we would get lost in [it].”

Read more on NBC News or see the video here.

Costco’s 100 Million Chickens Will Change the Face of Nebraska

Can a single company reshape a landscape? That’s the question at play in Nebraska, where Costco, one of America’s most powerful companies, has the potential to impact residents, farmers, and the environment in complex and unprecedented ways.

At the center of the move is the company’s $4.99 rotisserie chicken. In 2014, Costco reported selling 78 million of these processed, four-pound birds a year. In order to guarantee a steady supply and maintain the price, Costco fixed its eye on Nebraska as the best place to start raising and processing its own supply of chickens, and “break free of the monopoly” held by companies such as Tyson and Pilgrim’s Pride, much like it did for sausage and hotdogs with its Kirkland plant in Tracy, California.

In June, the company broke ground on a giant new poultry processing facility in Fremont, about an hour west of Omaha. The plant will process more than 2 million chickens a week, or more than 100 million birds a year, and provide as much as 43 percent of Costco’s rotisserie chickens, as well as around one third of the raw birds it sells.

Read more on Civil Eats.

Carbon Farming Works. Can It Scale up in Time to Make a Difference?

The knowledge and tools to sequester carbon on farmland have blossomed rapidly in California; now farmers and ranchers just need funding to make it happen. Read more on Civil Eats.

No-Till Farmers’ Push for Healthy Soils Ignites a Movement in the Plains

Jimmy Emmons isn’t the kind of farmer you might expect to talk for over an hour about rebuilding an ecosystem. And yet, on a recent Wednesday in January, before a group of around 800 farmers, that’s exactly what he did.

After walking onstage at the Hyatt in Wichita, Kansas to upbeat country music and stage lights reminiscent of a Garth Brooks concert, Emmons declared himself a recovering tillage addict. Then he got down to business detailing the way he and his wife Ginger have re-built the soil on their 2,000-acre, third-generation Oklahoma farm. Read more on Civil Eats.