Filmmaker Diana Rodgers and the Better Meat Movement

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Author: Rocco Pallin | Published: December 16, 2017

Diana Rodgers is a dietitian, author, and sustainability advocate living on a working farm near Boston, Massachusetts. Through her Sustainable Dish website, blog, and podcasts, Rodgers aims to emphasize the importance of sustainable food systems and nutritional, healthy lifestyles. She presents recipes, nutrition and sustainable lifestyle tips, and interviews with various players throughout the food system. She also highlights the importance of understanding where food comes from when consumers make their food choices.

Rodgers believes in the nutritional and environmental benefits of well-managed, grass-fed cattle. In her new film Kale vs. Cow: The Case for Better Meat, she questions whether a healthy, sustainable, and conscientious food system can exist without animals.

Food Tank had the chance to talk to Diana Rodgers about her upcoming film, her efforts as a champion for better meat, and her thoughts on what consumers can do.

Food Tank (FT): How did you first become involved in the movement for better meat?

Diana Rodgers (DR): I live on a working organic farm outside of Boston with my husband and two kids, and I have a busy nutrition practice, blog, and podcast. I’ve always been interested in food and farming.

I worked on an organic farm during summers while I was an art student, and I’ve always spent a lot of time in the kitchen. In my mid-20s, I was diagnosed with Celiac disease. Going gluten-free solved many of the digestive problems I had been living with since a child, but it wasn’t until I reduced my dependence on processed foods that I really regained my health.

In my mid-30s, after a career in food marketing, I decided to become a dietitian. There was a strong vegetarian undercurrent among my professors, and I knew there was a need for an advocate for ‘better meat.’ Not all meat is factory-farmed, treated inhumanely, and cancerous, yet we never learned about sustainability issues during the coursework to become a Registered Dietitian. I’m passionate about humane handling and I’m on the board of Animal Welfare Approved. Red meat is quite a nutrient-dense food, and well-managed cattle are one of our best chances at reversing climate change.

FT: What inspired you to make your upcoming film Kale vs. Cow?

DR: There’s a big difference between factory-farmed meat and well-raised meat, yet you would never know this from some of the recent anti-meat documentaries out there. The media has really attacked cows as a major cause of climate change and human disease, and many people feel that it’s unethical to eat them. I’ve seen some pretty outrageous health claims in recent documentaries, such as that meat causes diabetes and that sugar is just fine. Anyone with some basic understanding of science and human metabolism can tell you this is just false information.

I think it’s time to defend meat and debunk these illogical arguments. I decided to move forward with my own film project to explain that meat is not necessarily as bad as many like to think. I understand sustainable food production and human nutrition, plus, I have a background in multimedia production; this project was a natural fit!

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Soil Acidification Is an Awaking Giant Close to Home

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Author: Joel Huesby | Published: December 17, 2017

The Dec. 12 front-page article, “Region’s farmers seek answer for soil acidification,” describes what may well be the most far-reaching threat to conventional crop production: soil acidification. The repeated application of relatively inexpensive nitrogen fertilizers over the past 70 years or so has indeed increased crop productivity, but it has also come at a great hidden cost.

The threat of soil acidity is like an unseen sleeping giant who is only now being awakened. Soon enough, it will be very difficult, if not impossible, to undo what was done.

Even moderate soil acidification is hideous because it prevents crop roots from growing properly and taking up nutrients. The very practice that gave abundance now takes life away. Few things in nature come free. It turns out that particularly ammonic-based nitrogen fertilizers are both plant food and soil poison.

You wouldn’t want to take a whiff, but the nose knows. If soil acidification is not abated or reversed, food insecurity — on a local as well as global scale — will surely follow, and like the giant, it’s already awakening here close to home. This should get your attention.

Soils in the foothills of the Blue Mountains of Walla Walla and Columbia counties, the Palouse, and the Idaho Panhandle regions indicate acidity is widespread and becoming more severe, much with a soil pH well below 6. Peas and lentils get into trouble below 5.6 and wheat below 5.2. But some pH samples are in the mid 4s — nearly 1,000 times more acidic.

Our remarkable soils have had the ability to buffer, that is, to mask or hide, the harmful effects for a time. Like the giant, his rumblings went largely unnoticed and then… there he is.

Amendment or correction won’t be easy. In the soil on a chemical level, lime must be mixed with several feet of top soil, not just applied to the surface, in order for the reaction to occur.

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Video: ‘Salvation Is In Soil’ TEDxDirigo by Florence Reed

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Climate change got you down? We understand. Why not lift yourself up with this brand new TEDx talk from our Founder and Director of Strategic Growth, Florence Reed?

Upon arriving in Panama as a Peace Corps Volunteer, Florence Reed was committed to creating necessary and large scale change in the world. What she learned was that the answers to some of the world’s largest problems are often at the feet of the people on the ground – in this case the world’s small scale farmers.

In this talk recorded live at TEDxDirigo in Portland, Maine, Florence shares her lessons learned and the opportunities that still lie ahead.

If you’re as inspired by this talk as we are, we encourage you to write a comment on Youtube and share the video with your networks. Thank you for helping our work reach as many people as possible.

Where Corn Is King, the Stirrings of a Renaissance in Small Grains

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Breaking with the industrial model of growing corn and soybeans, a growing number of Iowa farmers are putting oats, rye, and other small grains into their crop rotation, a switch that is regenerating soils, cleaning up waters, and providing benefits to family farms.

Author: Twilight Greenaway | Published: November 28, 2017

To the untrained eye, Jeremy Gustafson’s 1,600-acre farm looks like all the others spread out across Iowa. Gazing at his conventional corn and soybean fields during a visit in June, I was hard-pressed to say where his neighbor’s tightly planted row crops ended and Gustafson’s began.

But what distinguished this vast farm in Boone, Iowa, was a thin, 16-acre strip of oats Gustafson had planted in a loop around the barn. At the time, the chest-high oats were at the “milk stage.” When Gustafson squeezed the grains embedded in the feathery grass between his thumb and forefinger, they released a tiny dollop of white liquid, a sign that they would be ready to harvest in about a month.

Oats and other “small grains” like rye and triticale stand out in Iowa — the nation’s number one producer of corn, a crop that covered more than 90 million U.S. acresin 2016 and was worth more than $51 billion. As is the case all over the Corn Belt, most Iowa corn is planted in rotation with another ubiquitous crop: soybeans. That Gustafson is willing to plant something other than corn and soy in Iowa makes him an outlier.

“I’m doing this for the soil,” says Gustafson, 40, and that’s a bigger deal than it may sound.

The majority of conventional farmers leave their soil barren for nearly half the year, exposing it to erosion in a state where some townships see as many as 64 tons of soil per acre run into waterways each year. Along with that soil come the remnants of fertilizer applications, in the form of nitrates and phosphorus, which foul drinking water, choke out aquatic life, and spur toxic algae blooms. Des Moines Water Works, the state’s largest water utility, spends an estimated $1.2 million per year to remove nitrates from drinking water to meet U.S. Environmental Protection Agency safety levels.

To begin to counter that tide, Gustafson and a growing number of farmers are working to keep small grains and other plants in the soil year-round. Many say they decided to take this approach after meeting Sarah Carlson, a 38-year-old, no-nonsense agronomist from rural Illinois, who has spent the last decade alternately challenging and supporting hundreds of farmers from a small office in Ames, Iowa, with her colleagues at Practical Farmers of Iowa (PFI). Their goal is to help producers diversify, improve their soil, and maintain autonomy within a landscape dominated by a handful of powerful agribusinesses. 

KEEP READING ON YALE ENVIRONMENT 360

Reclaiming Appalachia: A Push to Bring Back Native Forests to Coal Country

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Previous efforts to restore former coal mine sites in Appalachia have left behind vast swaths of unproductive land. Now, a group of nonprofits and scientists are working to restore native trees to the region — even if it means starting the reclamation process from scratch.

Author: Elizabeth McGowan | Published: December 14, 2017

Near the top of Cheat Mountain in West Virginia, bulldozer operator Bill Moore gazes down a steep slope littered with toppled conifers. Tangled roots and angled boulders protrude from the slate-colored soil, and the earth is crisscrossed with deep gouges.

“Anywhere else I’ve ever worked,” Moore says, “if I did what I did here, I’d be fired.”

Moore is working for Green Forests Work, a small nonprofit, as part of a project to rehabilitate a rare red spruce-dominant forest on 2,000 acres that were mined for coal in the 1970s and 1980s. The mine became part of the Monongahela National Forest in 1989 when the U.S. Forest Service purchased more than 40,000 contiguous acres known as the Mower Tract.

Moore and other bulldozer operators hired by the nonprofit first knock down non-native Norway spruce and undesirable red pine. Then they score the heavily compacted dirt with three-foot-long steel blades; openings formed by this “deep ripping” allow newly planted native saplings, shrubs, and flowering plants to take root and thrive. The downed trees are left in place to curb erosion, build soil, and provide brushy habitat for birds and mammals.    

“Ripping so deep might seem extreme, but it’s the only way to give these native trees a chance,” says Chris Barton, co-founder of Green Forests Work and a professor at the University of Kentucky who specializes in forest hydrology and watershed management. “What’s on top of this mine site isn’t soil. It’s the spoil created when rock was blown up to expose the coal seam, and it’s really compacted.”

Such aggressive bulldozing is part of a new and evolving approach to healing forests destroyed by decades of surface coal mining in Appalachia, from Alabama to Pennsylvania. These lands were supposed to have been reclaimed in recent decades under the 1977 federal Surface Mine Control and Reclamation Act. But scientists and conservationists say that many of those reclamation efforts were failed or half-hearted efforts that did little more than throw dirt, mining debris, grass, and non-native trees over scarred lands.

Now, Green Forests Work and other groups are attempting ecological do-overs with the aim of restoring native forests on large swaths of previously reclaimed public and private lands throughout Appalachia. The deep-ripping technique developed by Barton, with support from a team of other scientists, involves uprooting the non-native trees and grasses planted by coal companies and starting the entire land restoration process from scratch.

At 2,000 acres, Cheat Mountain is Green Forests Work’s largest undertaking since it began operating as a nonprofit in 2013. Barton has partnered with public and private funders to coordinate the planting of more than 2 million trees on 3,300-plus acres in Appalachia. Other former mining sites that it is tackling include a 130-acre plot within the Flight 93 National Memorial near Shanksville, Pa., the former mine site where one of the four hijacked planes crashed on Sept. 11, 2001; a 110-acre site near Fishtrap Lake in Pike County, Ky.; and a 86-acre area within the Egypt Valley Wildlife Area in eastern Ohio. These and other planned restoration sites are part of an estimated 1 million acres that the federal Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement (OSMRE) has designated as legacy coal mine sites.

KEEP READING ON YALE ENVIRONMENT 360

Changing Consumers Ignite Food Revolution

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It’s transforming Minnesota’s food companies and economy.

Author: Kristen Leigh Painter | Published: December 17, 2017

Elke Richards drives two hours to Maple Grove every month to shop at Whole Foods and Trader Joe’s, both of which offer more organic groceries or minimally processed food than she can find near her home in Alexandria. In the summer, she goes to farmers markets for locally grown produce. For meat, she visits a local family farm that raises sheep and cattle using environmentally friendly land management practices.

Richards, a 34-year-old mother of two young children, first took interest in how and where food is grown more than a decade ago, when she was in college.

“I started looking at the footprints of how we get food to our plate in America,” she said. “It is really discouraging.”

Today, Richards is convinced that making healthier food choices for her own family is essential.

Millions of consumers around the world are making similar choices — to buy and eat food that is more pure and produced in ways less harmful to the environment. Those decisions in the grocery aisle are transforming the agricultural economy of Minnesota and the Midwest.

Farmers are under pressure from consumers and food companies to adopt new techniques that take less of a toll on the environment, and to take better care of animals they raise. Sales of grocery shelf staples such as Wheaties, Betty Crocker cake mixes and some packaged meat products are flat or in decline, forcing food industry giants such as Minnesota’s Cargill, General Mills and Hormel to rethink the kinds of products they sell.

Figuring this out “is the challenge of our time for the food and agriculture industries,” said David MacLennan, chief executive of Minnetonka-based Cargill. “You need a lot of other companies and governments and … local farmers to come along with you.”

Much of the food industry has rallied around the idea of “sustainability,” which in the most precise definition refers to the ability of a food system to last over time. But the word has become a broad banner for issues like animal welfare, soil management, fair farm wages or climate change.

In 2015, nearly three quarters of consumers said they sometimes or usually had such concerns in mind at the grocery store, according to the food research firm the Hartman Group. Sales of organic food, the most recognizable segment, have doubled in the past decade to about $47 billion in 2016, according to the Organic Trade Association. While organic represents only 5 percent of total U.S. food sales, it is growing much more rapidly than overall food sales.

With sales of the packaged food staples that dominate American grocery aisles stagnant or sinking, the food industry has no choice but to adapt. Doing so will require re-engineering complex production chains developed over decades to provide massive amounts of food at the lowest possible price.

“Big food companies that dominate the food world are really having to move faster,” said Kent Solberg of the Sustainable Farming Association of Minnesota. “But the billion dollar question is if it can be fast enough and big enough of a change that the consumer will be responsive to it.”

Many of the changes start with how individual farmers treat the earth itself.

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Fast-Fashion’s Environmentally Destructive Habits

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Author: Sophie Linden | Published: December 7, 2017

Style has its hazards. From credit card debt to painfully high heels, many trends have proven the idea that fashion comes at a cost. Each decade of outfits has a concerning global impact. Now, a recent study from the Ellen Macarthur Foundation illuminates the incomprehensible toll fashion takes on the climate.

Done in collaboration with animal-welfare advocate and high-end clothing designer Stella McCartney, the Macarthur study tracks the environmental devastations incurred through the production of next season’s wares.

The study calls this fashion’s tendency to “take-make-and-dispose,” also known as fast fashion. It’s an obsession with new style wherein unworn clothing is quickly turned over, and a garbage truck’s worth of fashion is thrown away every second of the year. If the industry keeps up like this, by 2050, textiles and garments will account for a quarter of the world’s carbon budget.

It’s also estimated that half a million tons of plastic microfibers are leaked into earth’s oceans each year, as synthetic materials are laundered and microparticles of plastic eventually travel into the ocean. This is the equivalent of 50 billion plastic water bottles, contributing to a health crisis for sea animals, which are ingesting plastics as if they were plankton.  

In order to remedy the heavy-handed consequences of fast fashion, the foundation has offered a four-part approach: asking stakeholders to phase out the use of hazardous materials, improve the recycling of old fabrics, use renewable resources in manufacturing, and increase the quality of goods it sells.

The authors envision creating a “new textile economy,” though it is worth noting that some corporate entities are already changing their business practices with climate change in mind.

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New Healthy Soil Guide Gives Cooks a Better Recipe for Climate Change

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This restaurant duo wants to spread the gospel that healthy soil on farms and ranches can play a major role in slowing global warming.

Author: Diana Donlon | Published: December 5, 2017

December 5 marks the United Nations’ World Soil Day, which recognizes the crucial role soil plays in human health, food production, and climate change mitigation. To mark the occasion, Diana Donlon, director of the Center for Food Safety (CFS)’s Soil Solutions program, spoke with Anthony Myint and Karen Leibowitz, owners of The Perennial Restaurant in San Francisco. The team is launching a Healthy Soil Guide for chefs and home cooks about they can play in promoting healthy soils and climate solutions. CFS has also released a short film today called “Chefs for Soil,” which includes Myint and Leibowitz discussing their climate-friendly restaurant; that film is embedded below.

You’re a couple of city-dwelling restaurateurs with businesses in San Francisco and Manhattan—how did you find out about the connection between healthy soil and a stable climate?

Karen Leibowitz: We’d been working together in the restaurant business for a few years, starting with Mission Chinese Food and Commonwealth, both in San Francisco, when we had a daughter and started to think more concretely about the future with a capital F. That’s when we realized what a big impact the food system has on climate. We committed to the idea of making a sustainable restaurant, and when a friend of ours suggested we visit a rancher in Marin County—John Wick [of the Marin Carbon Project], who pretty much blew our minds.

Anthony Myint: John talked a mile a minute and offered us a reason to feel hopeful for the first time in our lives about reversing climate change. He explained the importance of perennial plants, particularly grasses, to “drawing down” carbon dioxide and return it to the soil, and we got so excited. We were still on our way home from Wick’s ranch when we decided to name our latest restaurant The Perennial.

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Healthy Soils Program: Diversity of Farms Awarded, Cover Crops and Compost Most Popular Practices

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Author: Brian Shobe | Published: December 13, 2017

The California Department of Food and Agriculture (CDFA) announced its first round of grants for the Healthy Soils Program last week. In our first blogpost about the awards, we shared a summary of the awards by project type (incentives versus demonstration) and a breakdown of the awards by county. In this blogpost, we share a preliminary analysis of the distribution of the awards based on land use type and the practices projects plan to adopt.

This preliminary analysis is based on our interpretations[i] of the one-paragraph project descriptions provided by applicants, which you can read here:

Incentives Projects

The 64 incentives projects are fairly well distributed across the major agricultural land use categories in California, with a quarter of the awards going to orchards, a quarter to annual cropland, and 13-14% each to vineyards, grazing/range lands, and mixed land use operations. Nine percent of project descriptions were too vague to determine their land use.

We were excited to learn that nearly three out of four projects awarded will be adopting more than one practice; furthermore, nearly one in four projects will be adopting four or more practices! Numerous studies have demonstrated that combining Healthy Soils practices has a synergistic effect on soil health and GHG emissions.

Cover cropping is by far the most popular practice with more than half (39) of the projects planning to adopt it. Compost applications to perennial crops (21) and annual crops (18), mulching (14), and hedgerow planting (16) are also quite popular, with more than a quarter of projects including those practices. The “herbaceous cover practices” (e.g. contour buffer strips, field border, filter strip, etc.) seemed to be the least popular, with at best a handful of projects planning to adopt those practices. However, it is important to remember that in order to be eligible for any of the “herbaceous or woody cover practices,” an applicant had to adopt or maintain an existing “soil management practice.” This likely prevented some farmers and ranchers who were interested solely in the “herbaceous or woody practices” from applying.

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Local Food Video Series: Diverse Approaches to Common Challenges

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Author: Caroline Kamm | Published: December 2017

In the summer of 2017, I set out on a road trip from Monterrey, Mexico, to Toronto, Canada, filming a documentary series on North American local food initiatives. During this 4,800-kilometer (3,000-mile) journey, my co-creator and I had the privilege of meeting dozens of farmers, small-business owners, community organizers, and food advocates who shared an inspiring and diverse vision for the future of North American food.

Beginning in November 2017, each of their stories will be presented as a component of a 10-part series entitled The Food Less Traveled.

There is far from a consensus on what counts as local. The U.S. Department of Agriculture uses several definitions of “local food,” including geographic distance traveled and specific types of market arrangements. Many of the organizations in this series work expressly on shortening the distance between producer and consumer, while others are engaged in work beyond a single community or region. When exploring the concept of a local food system, this series highlights organizations at the neighborhood and community level, as well as larger initiatives that have a significant local impact.

Each of these organizations approaches food from an entirely unique perspective. Even so, a number of common themes emerged between their work, and it is these core themes that the series will explore further. This is perhaps one of the most inspiring things about food and agriculture: the capacity of creative people to devise a number of solutions to the food system’s biggest challenges.

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