Think of your favorite fruits and you might think of the warm climates they tend to thrive in. Florida oranges, Texas grapefruit, California strawberries — and grapes, figs, pears, and apricots. But here’s the funny thing: Most fruit trees have to chill. Literally. Unless they’re tropical, trees have what are called “chilling requirements”: They need winter temperatures to drop to within a certain range — usually just above freezing — and remain there for a set period of time.

This allows the buds to go into dormancy and tolerate harsh winter weather, and to reset themselves for the fruit production cycle to start again when spring comes around.

But what happens when they don’t go dormant because it doesn’t get cold enough outside? As you may or may not have noticed, perhaps depending on your age — winters are getting warmer. If trees don’t get sufficient chilling, they don’t fruit. And as some researchers see it, the future of the planet’s fruit and nut production is in peril. In fact, lack of chill time has already spelled trouble for U.S. farmers growing tree crops, including pistachios, walnuts, and cherries.

Insufficient cold makes for confused trees, says Eike Luedeling, a climate change scientist who has published studies on chilling requirements and fruit trees.

“You have the buds breaking irregularly and over a long time, so it’s kind of staggered — much longer than it should be — and ultimately, it results in having a bad fruit set,” he says.

Which crops will be affected, as weather patterns continue to change? For starters, Luedeling listed: apples, pears, cherries, walnuts and other tree nuts, pomegranates, and olives. But where exactly the list ends is hard to predict.

It’s also hard to say precisely how irregular winters disrupt a tree’s blooming cycle, explains Greg Lang, a horticulture professor at Michigan State University. “There are various stages: The flowers cannot open, or the flowers can open but the pollen doesn’t germinate well, or the pollen can germinate well but the ovules don’t get fertilized strongly,” he says. But the end result is the same: “All of those are going to lead to no fruit.”

Chilling is not a matter of simply accumulating enough hours under a certain temperature; the sequence is crucial. Even if a tree has lived through most of the cold hours it requires in a given year, an unexpected warm day in the middle of February could disrupt the cycle.

“That’s where climate change comes into play … temperatures are fluctuating to a much greater degree. We have warmer days [at] unusual times,” says Lang. And that, he adds, could lead to “some negating of the chilling effect.”

Scientists around the world are researching the connection between climate change and agriculture, with a strong focus on adaptation strategies for big commodity crops like corn and wheat. But there’s little comparable research being done to adapt fruit production to changing climate patterns and conditions. And this has Luedeling concerned. Corn and wheat are “very well-researched,” he says, “but for trees, we’re barely beginning to understand how they work, and they’re much more complicated organisms.”

The answer, in part, might be breeding trees that can grow under changing climatic conditions — something that’s not being done on a wide scale at this point.

“If we make the right decisions, then we won’t have a problem at all,” Luedeling says. “The challenge is looking ahead far enough to put the right trees in place now that can produce under climate conditions 20 years in the future,” he says.

It’s important to keep in mind that trees take years to produce, and live for much longer than many food crops.

“If you grow a cereal and it doesn’t work, then next year you just grow a different cereal,” he says, but “if you’ve put trees in place, you’ve made an enormous investment that will have to pay off over 20 or 30 years. If you make the wrong decisions, that can be an enormous economic problem.”

And the unfortunate alternative to planting more resilient trees? Chemicals. Some fruit growers could turn — or are already turning — to substances designed to break dormancy when a tree doesn’t do so on its own. What that means for environmental runoff and water contamination — and for organic agriculture — is an entirely unanswered question.

So scientists like Luedeling and Lang would like to see research going into breeding fruit trees, and they’d like to see it soon.

“It’s not something [farmers] can do,” says Lang. “Scientists who devote their lives to breeding and understanding the genes … they’re the ones who are likely to make the significant advances.” And it’s a long process even for them, he says: “10 years is the most glowing possible possibility; 15 to 20 years is more normal.”

Farm owners and farmworkers may not always see eye to eye, but there’s one thing on which they do — strongly — agree: We need change to our approach to immigration.

After years of ignoring the issue, Washington, D.C., has started to pay attention and may just be ready to act. President Obama has named immigration reform a top priority for his second term, House Speaker John Boehner feels “confident” that Republicans will agree to a comprehensive immigration bill, and if Obama’s expectations are met, we may see a proposal come out of Capitol Hill soon after his Jan. 20 inauguration.

Farmworkers, exempt from some of the nation’s most basic labor laws, like minimum wage and overtime pay, work in one of the most hazardous occupations in the country. They face risks from strenuous physical labor, often for long hours in extremely hot climates; pesticide exposure; and their work often involves dangerous equipment, often without proper training or safety measures.

Those are standard complaints, but because most farmworkers are undocumented — estimates range from about 50 percent to more than 80 percent in the U.S. — or in some cases employed through a guest worker program that doesn’t get much government oversight [PDF], they are doubly vulnerable. Without immigration status, they have little or no leverage to speak out or fight against inhumane working conditions, and often lack any avenue for doing so.

Farmers, meanwhile, want reform because the current system for agricultural employment is failing them. As the anti-immigration climate has intensified over the last few years —  with programs like E-Verify, an internet-based system that lets employers do a background check on their employees — farmers have felt threatened because undocumented workers are a population they depend on. The result is tangible; more and more farmers are complaining about a lack of workers.

“One thing that I’ve been told consistently by growers this year was that if you needed 30 people, you had 25. If you needed five crews, you had four,” said Bryan Little of the California Farm Bureau Federation. “The result of that is you wind up losing productivity.”

That affects farmers’ profits, but the long-term implications have some concerned about larger, national issues like food security. In a recent California Farm Bureau survey, “Sixty-one percent of the nearly 800 growers surveyed said they were shorthanded by a little or a lot this year.”

“I talk to growers who are saying, ‘We are triaging. We don’t have enough workers to harvest all five fields that are ripe this week. We picked out the two or three that are going to bring the most profit and we ditched the others,’” said Frank Gasperini, president of the National Council of Agricultural Employers (NCAE). He added that more and more farmers are choosing to grow crops based on what they can get the labor for, and U.S. food production is suffering as a result. “Food costs will continue to go up, but more importantly, it means that we will continue to see food production acres going to other countries.”

Little agreed, saying he’s seeing a “notable” percentage of agriculture move to Mexico, where “you’re starting to see significant investment in the kind of infrastructure that’s necessary to support things like growing peppers and lettuce and strawberries.”

So what kind of changes do farmers and farm workers want to see? And what changes are we likely to see in whatever immigration reform package comes out of D.C. in the coming year?

Just about everyone agrees that effective, comprehensive immigration reform can’t just change the system going forward; it has to address the immigration status of undocumented workers already in the country. So the real question is: What status will those workers be given?

Farmworkers and their advocates want to see workers given permanent legal status. This would give farmworkers more rights, as well as more dignity by recognizing their place in the U.S. and the role they play in our economy and our food system. Some industry groups, however, are pushing for solutions like the American Farm Bureau Federation’s proposed an “ag card” program, or a temporary work visa.

Such measures would provide a stopgap for farmers looking for more workers in the short term, but they are not much different than the  guest worker programs that already exist and are riddled with problems — from inefficiency to worker abuse.

“We vigorously oppose those kinds of guest worker programs,” said Bruce Goldstein, president of the advocacy group Farmworker Justice.

In the coming months, he predicts “a public policy battle over whether this country will go down the path of becoming a nation of guest workers or will retain its history into the future as a nation of immigrants.”

Plus, advocates say the ag card program wouldn’t solve the fundamental problems faced by migrant farmworkers.

“The biggest issue with employer-based programs is that [workers] don’t have guaranteed rights,” says Lalo Zavala, chief executive officer of MAFO, a partnership of farmworker organizations nationwide. Zavala points to the fact that many workers are bussed to remote locations, where they become completely reliant on their employers for basic needs like food, water, and housing, and an internal economy that uses tokens rather than dollars.

While that doesn’t have to mean a raw deal for the worker, reality has shown that’s often exactly what it means. Under an ag card-type program, it’s very possible that workers would be vulnerable to neglect, price gauging, and unsanitary conditions.

Beyond the immigration status of current workers, the discussion of how to reform immigration policies to improve agriculture gets pretty sticky. Farmworkers and advocacy groups want to see basic protections for workers, while many large farms and employers are less interested in providing those protections.

Opponents of tightening labor laws for agricultural workers argue, among other things, that raising wages and providing overtime or workers’ compensation to farmworkers will be costly.

But, Goldstein points out, “In most of the states where there’s a lot of farmworkers, like California and Washington state, there is workers’ compensation coverage and they are very successful agribusiness states. There’s no excuse for other states to deprive farmworkers of wages and medical care when they are injured on the job.”

Overall, what Farmworker Justice and other groups want to see is, as Goldstein put it, “modernization of labor relations in agriculture and an end to the discrimination of labor laws against farmworkers based on their occupation.”

How government officials will address these issues when they work on immigration reform is still a huge question mark. As the Farm Bureau’s Kristi Boswell says, “There’s a lot of rumors and people talking about reform … but at the end of the day, it’s what the whole package is going to look like and what can actually pass politically. And I think we’re a long way from figuring that out.”

Less than a year into her studies at Northeastern University, Cristina Suazo couldn’t believe what she was hearing dining hall employees say about the conditions they were working in every day.

One woman talked about the sexual harassment — a manager would come up from behind and grope her, Suazo recalls hearing, then walk away and go about the rest of his workday. “And she couldn’t do anything about it because this was her manager,” she remembers hearing.

As Suazo started to hear more stories of workers feeling disrespected or violated, or like their jobs were on the line for no good reason, she joined other students in a campaign, part of Real Food, Real Jobs, a national effort by Unite Here, to unionize dining hall workers. The goal was to convince Chartwell’s, a subsidiary of the multinational Compass Group and the company that operates the university’s dining services, to recognize the union and to negotiate a contract formalizing certain rights for the cafeteria employees. (Spoiler alert: They won recognition and are currently negotiating a contract.)

Kyle Schafer, a coordinator with Unite Here, said that union recognition is the most important step because then workers have a legal right to collective bargaining. Over the last two years, the Unite Here dining hall campaign has won union recognition or a contract for workers on 12 university campuses, including Georgetown University, Chicago State University, and Harvard Law. While each contract differs from campus to campus, they all bring to the table more affordable healthcare, mandated annual raises, and contract stipulations to maximize full-time work.

Not all students on a campus get involved in the campaign: Among Northeastern’s 15,000-plus undergraduates, for example, people like Suazo make up a tiny minority. Her motivation is particularly enlightened, and formed in part because of her religious beliefs. “They’re the ones serving the students in and out every day,” says Suazo. “I think it’s my responsibility as a consumer to know what’s behind my nourishment.”

Students like Suazo are part of a number of younger people who are drawing a connection between the healthy and organic food movements on campuses and the way food workers from around the food chain are being treated. Take the Student Farmworker Alliance, which has been pivotal in helping Florida tomato workers fight for humane working conditions, or the Real Food Challenge, a nationwide college-level effort that defines “real food” as coming from a system that “fundamentally respects human dignity.” More and more, it looks like Generation Y might just be more inclined to see people’s fundamental rights as a core aspect of sustainability. To further bring home this connection, The Real Food, Real Jobs Campaign just released a report called Our Common Ground: Food Workers, Sustainable Food Advocates, and Institutions of Higher Education, underscoring why sustainable food and better working conditions are good for students and workers alike. As a cook at Wesleyan University says in the report, “We’re on the front line of campus food. If it were bad or unsafe, we would be the most likely ones to know it.”

At Northeastern, it was up to the employees to do a lot of the initial legwork in getting the campaign started on campus, but students felt they played an important role. After all, they are the customers: the source of the food service company’s revenue.

“The students are the ones fueling this whole chain,” says Suazo. “I don’t think the administration would take the workers seriously, or make it a priority, without pressure from [us].”

University dining halls make up a huge market for the food service industry: $20 billion in annual revenues, which is more than what Taco Bell, Burger King, and Applebee’s combined rake in, according to Unite Here. Also important is the fact that most dining halls have succumbed to the trend of consolidation: Three large companies — Aramark, Sodexo, and Compass Group — now operate a majority of the campus dining hall services in the U.S. that are outsourced to private companies.

Tarshea Smith, a cashier at Georgetown University, felt the effects of that consolidation firsthand. She said she had no problems until Aramark took over. “People were really afraid, really working in fear. And we never experienced that before,” she said. “People were coming in, it was like — OK, who got fired this week?”

For Smith, the change was particularly rough because she has a health condition that occasionally sends her for emergency doctor visits, and her bosses used to understand that. But when she called in from the hospital to her boss under Aramark, she came back to work to find she had been written up.

She was frustrated, but hadn’t realized some of her colleagues felt the same way, and she had no intentions of putting up a fight. Then students approached her to ask how the new management was treating her; they were also talking with her colleagues, and eventually shared those stories and helped workers realize the problem was bigger than any one person. “We didn’t know what to do until the students reached out to us,” she said.

Now that they’ve won union recognition and a contract, she says, things are different. “I feel more respected,” she said. “We have job security — and at least we have 40 hours a week. At first, we had 37 or 35 or whatever they wanted to cut it to. Now they can’t do that anymore. If you’re a full-time worker, you need full-time hours.”

It’s about better pay and lower healthcare costs, but it’s also about something far more fundamental: respect. Smith feels so much more comfortable in her job now that she’s hoping to help others win the same battle. As a volunteer organizer, she makes house visits and talks to workers on other campuses about issues they face, to see if union organizing will help them, too.

“They helped me, now I have to help someone else,” she says. “I know what it’s like to work in fear. You’re not getting paid enough, but you have to work — you’re working two or three jobs to survive.”

Because school dining employees are often literally at the front lines of what is being served, they can also stand up for healthy, higher-quality food, at a time when many cafeterias are cutting corners. For instance, Smith recalls seeing food labeled as organic that didn’t come from a truly certified organic source, and she hopes to one day see “whistleblowing language” in cafeteria contracts to call out such practices.

The goal, she says, is that “we can have sustainable jobs, and students can have sustainable food.”

For all our environmental woes, the U.S. is making progress in one exciting area: The word “compost” is becoming a household term, while more and more cities are starting to implement wide-scale composting programs. And this shift is good for more than just our landfills. We Americans are pretty wasteful when it comes to food — it’s the single largest type of municipal solid waste that ends up in landfills — and throwing it out with the trash leads to methane emissions, a greenhouse gas that makes carbon dioxide look harmless.

But as composting becomes more popular, so do the companies trying to capitalize on the uptick: The number of packaging products marketed as compostable — or with claims that people might equate with compostable, such as “biodegradable” or “plant-based” — has exploded.

Like the natural foods market, where highly processed snacks with genetically modified ingredients can be called “natural,” all the eco-marketing for food packaging is causing some confusion. There are cups made from corn, plates made from sugarcane, biodegradable dog poop bags — but “bioplastics,” as these are generally known, are not always truly compostable. Confused yet?

Here’s the tricky part: “Bio” often simply means the material will biodegrade in a short time frame compared with conventional plastic — or break into lots of teeny tiny pieces of plastic. At the same time, some products are plant-based, but not compostable.

“You can have oil-based plastics that are compostable and plant-based plastics that are not compostable,” says Michele Young, organics manager for the city of San Jose. “Compostability and degradability are not based on the feedstock. It’s literally based on the chemical signature, the way the plastics are put together.”

California has started to legislate the claims that brands can put on their packaging products, so a package has to meet certain standards if it’s going to say “compostable” or “biodegradable” on it. But that’s relatively recent; and it’s rare. Nationally, there’s nothing legally wrong with a company printing those terms on its products even if they don’t actually break down at compost facilities. In general, though, the term “compostable” does tend to hold the most credibility; “biodegradable,” in the eyes of Dan Matsch, compost manager for recycling and zero-waste organization Eco-Cycle, is often more a greenwashing tactic than anything else.

Don’t panic, it’s … plastic?

What about things like coffee cups and to-go food containers? They look both recyclable and compostable, don’t they? Well, it turns out those items only hold food and drinks because they’re lined with plastic. Does that super-thin layer of plastic keep them from being compostable? It depends who you ask.

Some cities, like San Francisco, collect plastic-coated packaging with their compost.

“We did that after seeing how the plastic separated and got screened off, and there was no visible plastic left in the compost,” says Jack Macy, the city’s commercial zero-waste coordinator. “We saw a benefit of being able to compost the paper fiber, instead of just land-filling that stuff.”

Plus, it’s easier for encouraging residents to compost if they can take the milk carton they’re already going to throw away, and use it to store their compost.

But others are concerned that the plastic ultimately ends up contaminating the environment, in such small fragments that they are nearly invisible on the surface.

Now, the amount of plastic we’re talking about is relatively small — as Macy says, plastic-coated paper cartons tend to be about 80 to 95 percent compostable. But places like Eco-Cycle have spent time analyzing our compost-filled future, and they’re concerned that if we don’t put proper policies in place now, there’s going to be a lot of plastic in our soil later.

Eco-Cycle conducted a study [PDF] with Maine-based Woods End Laboratories that found the plastic coating breaks down into tiny plastic fragments — “microplastics” — which don’t actually disappear. Instead, they contaminate the finished compost as well as the soil where that compost is used, where worms and insects will ingest it. And, as some research has shown, those fragments also ultimately get washed out with the rain and feed into rivers, lakes, and oceans, where they impact marine ecosystems. (It’s not entirely unlike the microplastic that gets released while you put your fleece jacket in the washing machine.)

Woods End founder Will Brinton calls the danger of microplastics in the ocean “a major international calamity.” And he says runoff from plastic-contaminated soil has the potential to exacerbate that problem if more communities begin composting on a municipal level and accept plastic-coated products. That’s why Matsch from Eco-Cycle thinks it’s so important to confront the issue now, before it’s too late. “If we don’t get in front of this plastic problem, it’s going to bite us later on when we find that we’re putting significant plastics into the environment,” he says.

Cedar Grove, a compost manufacturer in Washington, doesn’t accept plastic-coated products, although it used to. They stopped, said Vice President Jerry Bartlett, after noticing that even though things like milk cartons were 75 or 80 percent cardboard, “the plastic wouldn’t break down, so the composting process could never get to the cardboard. So we ended up having big pieces of plastic.”

But Macy says San Francisco hasn’t had a problem with plastic contamination. There’s no easy, universal rule to follow, in part because different compost facilities use different processes, and some have more trouble with plastics — and even with bioplastics — than others. That’s one of the (many) challenges facing an industry that has a whole lot of growing to do before the ins and outs of compost are something the average person is going to care about even a little bit. And if you’re a home composter, you likely care very much — but most of this will not apply to you because compostable plastics are designed to break down at temperatures much higher than backyard compost heaps will ever reach. So don’t even bother with them.

Sorting it all out

When compostable plastics don’t end up in a compost bin, there’s really nothing green about them. In fact, when they end up in landfills, the compostable packaging just ends up contributing to methane emissions.

And because so many compostable plastics are made to look like real plastic, there’s another layer of confusion: When clear compostable cups end up in the recycling bin, they can actually contaminate the plastic recycling process.

If the recycling facility is able to identify the compostable items, they can screen them out, but that means extra steps (and, probably, extra labor costs). “People feel like they’re doing the right thing and then if it ends up in a landfill anyway, you haven’t really gained anything,” says Young.

She describes composting today as similar to the early days of recycling, before the proper infrastructure and public education efforts were established. And for now, the bottom line is to find out what your local composting facility does and does not accept.

“Recycling was very, very confusing in the beginning, and there was a big outcry. People didn’t know what to buy, or what to do with it,” recalls Young. But now, she adds, “people have figured that out to a large degree. Food waste and compostable plastics represent the next generation of: where can it go, how do I sort it?

Nelida Martinez worked as a farm laborer for big conventional farms in California for almost 20 years. But after her son, Danny, was diagnosed with leukemia, she says, “I never wanted to work around chemicals again.”

Martinez started selling vegetables from her community garden to help pay for her son’s treatment (he has since recovered), and then got hooked up with Viva Farms, a farm incubator program in Washington state’s Skagit Valley that helped her access land she could farm as if it were her own. Now, Martinez has a three-acre plot there, leases another two acres elsewhere, and sells more than 70 types of organic vegetables at a farmers market, where she also makes fresh tortillas and sells Oaxacan-style tacos.

Martinez wants to expand her business, but access to credit or capital isn’t easy to get if you’re not established. That’s exactly why she was chosen to participate in a new microloan program designed to help small and beginning farmers. Martinez is one of the first two bootstrappers to receive funding from the Farmer Reserve Fund, a project launched jointly by Viva Farms, Slow Money NW, and a local credit union. She has received $2,000 to use primarily for buying seeds and vegetable boxes. “The loan allows me to have more cash throughout the season while I wait to harvest my crops,” she says.

This program is an early example of something that could catch on around the country and make a difference not only for participating farmers and their families, but also for our nation’s food system. In the recent past, microloans have often been used to help start or expand businesses in developing countries, but the concept is now taking off in the U.S. The U.S. Department of Agriculture even proposed a microloan program for small farmers this spring. Between that, the Farmer Reserve Fund, and other programs that have sprouted up like it, this could be the next step for microloans, and a promising future for beginning farmers in the U.S.

Once a farm gets to be a certain size, farmers have a relatively easy time accessing credit. “There are more government programs and [grants] for you once you’re on a more solid footing,” says Ethan Schaffer, Viva Farms’ director of business and organizational development. And, even when they’re just starting out, hipster farmers tend to have access to family loans and low-interest credit cards. But many young farmers — particularly Latino farmers — don’t have those options. So, says Japhet Koteen, the Farmer Reserve Fund’s project manager, they usually resort to high-interest credit. “Then they’re trying to run a business with a 20 percent interest credit card,” he says, which is not the best idea.

That’s why Viva Farms screens and selects Farmer Reserve Fund applicants, Koteen explains. They know the local farming community best and can help farmers access loans based on more than just their credit history.

“The amount of information that banks ask for with a regular loan is pretty small when it comes down to it,” says Schaffer. “We have a huge amount of information, probably more than a typical bank would have for a loan. That’s kind of the secret sauce of the whole thing.”  

In other words, the personal and professional relationships are key. Viva Farms works with farmers to develop business plans and requires on-farm education, with a focus on financial literacy. Then the course instructors for those programs will recommend a dollar amount for the loan to the bank.

The Fund makes loans of between $1,000 and $10,000 — amounts too small for most financial institutions to bother with — for farmers with between two and 10 acres of land.

“We found that that’s where the largest gap is at the moment: that earlier stage, for smaller amounts of money,” says Schaffer.

Koteen expects the program to expand to other parts of Washington within the next couple of months, and he thinks it’s replicable far beyond that, as well. “There are other entities like Viva Farms who know there’s a need and have existing relationships with these farmers,” he says.

Santiago Lozano, a strawberry farmer who was chosen alongside Martinez in the first round of loans, is excited about having $5,000 to spend on strengthening his business. For one, he can now pay his workers before the harvest is sold — something he wasn’t able to do last year.

Plus, Lozano says: “The loan makes it a lot easier to deal with emergencies, like when I lost my strawberry crop this spring from all the rain. Now I have enough to make it to the next harvest.”

It also helps him aim high and dream big.

“Someday I want to buy my own farmland. I like being able to hire my family and friends and give them all jobs,” he says. “I wouldn’t work so hard if I wasn’t working for my own dream. It’s beautiful really. It’s important to have a dream and then make it happen.”

At any given moment, Collin Faunce can see exactly how much energy he’s using in his house. When he turns on the dishwasher, his consumption spikes on the colorful head-up display on his computer monitor. If he and his wife, Erica, set the air conditioning just a few degrees higher, they can watch the dollars spared tick upwards in real time. They don’t have to wait for the monthly bill to understand their savings, and when a gadget siphons away precious energy, the Faunces can immediately identify the culprit.

“After about a week or two [of using the program], I could figure out which appliances were using how much energy and kind of plan accordingly after that,” said Faunce.

Welcome to our gamified future: where energy efficiency competes with Foursquare and Angry Birds for your attention. Winning brings badges and high scores, but it also translates into money saved for the consumer and a smarter grid for everyone.

The Faunces got the display last year when they entered a program hosted by San Diego Gas & Electric (SDG&E) to encourage people to cut down on energy consumption. The utility partnered with Boulder, Colo.-based startup Simple Energy to motivate residents by making a competitive game out of it, complete with prizes.

“You could tell what position you were in relative to everyone else — you could determine if you were going to catch them and pass them,” said Faunce.

Simple Energy develops websites and apps that allow consumers to track their energy usage in real time and compete with each other (or themselves) to reduce it. The contest the Faunces won, Biggest Energy Saver, was actually a pilot program in San Diego that proved social gaming applications can help consumers earn an average energy savings of 20 percent — up to 50 percent for top users.

#Winning (at energy efficiency). (Photo by Michele Ficara Manganelli.)

But the energy and cost savings didn’t end when the competition did. “People thought we were going to revert back, but we’re actually saving more and more as time goes on,” Faunce said.

Here’s an oversimplified description of how it works: Simple Energy gets consumer usage data from electric utilities and funnels that through its servers into the mobile and desktop programs it designs. All you need is a computer or smartphone: Once you sign up, your online account or mobile phone app can tell you how much energy you’ve used in the last hour, day, month, etc.

“You don’t actually have to do anything — other than save energy,” said Simple Energy co-founder and CEO Yoav Lurie. “Even if you never come back, you’re still playing.”

If your friends join, you can monitor how you’ve performed against them, too. If you’re using less energy, you’ll score more points and beat them out. As a reward, you can earn badges (a la Foursquare) for reaching certain benchmarks or demonstrating feats of energy-saving skill: How often can you halve your energy use? For how many days in a row?

Lurie thinks the concept is a no-brainer. He points to people struggling to stay healthy: We all know what health-positive habits are good for us, but does everyone get enough exercise and eat right all the time? Both research and anecdotal evidence back up the idea that competition — be it a points system to control your eating habits or finding a workout buddy — make long-term health goals easier to attain. It’s the same with energy efficiency: A lot of people think it’s a good idea to save more energy, it’s just inconvenient or a hassle to do so.

“We’ve always relied on gamification,” Lurie said. “Now it’s just getting more complicated.”

Lurie says utilities nationwide are eager to work with Simple Energy: Some have state-mandated efficiency goals to meet, while others hope to combat energy-use spikes that imperil the stability of the grid, leading to brownouts and blackouts that neither customers nor utilities want to suffer through. So it’s in the utilities’ interest to figure out how they can effectively encourage customers to reduce their energy use and try especially hard to cut back on high-demand days (common in the current nationwide inferno we call “summer 2012″).

Eyes on the prize: Some utilities reward ultra-efficient consumers with iPads or cash grants for nearby schools. Click to embiggen.

Some utilities already promote efficiency directly to customers in messages printed on monthly bills, but those aren’t exactly game-changing tactics. Behavioral change requires an effective communication to an engaged audience, and let’s face it: Nobody wants to spend more time talking with their utility than they have to.

“Most utilities don’t have a mechanism for telling customers to lower their A/C,” said Lurie. “Who follows their utility on Twitter?”

This summer, SDG&E enlisted Simple Energy to run the San Diego Energy Challenge: Residents can compete in reducing their energy use to win prizes like gift cards and tablet computers. But the biggest winner will be local schools: When residents sign up for the contest (which is jointly funded by SDG&E and the U.S. Department of Energy) they choose a middle school to earn points for. In the end, the three middle schools with the greatest savings will split a $30,000 cash grant.

Erin Coller, SDG&E communications manager, said while the company runs its own programs promoting efficiency, Simple Energy’s approach is good at getting people actually excited about it.

“It’s not something that’s really top of mind on a regular basis,” she said. The networking and gaming platforms really “increase the level of enthusiasm that people have about their energy use.”

Simple Energy (which also has a program with beleaguered Pepco in the D.C. area) is not the only company using social networking and gamification to promote energy efficiency.

This spring, Opower launched a Facebook app to let friends compare their energy use. Both companies are integrating Green Button data, an industry-led initiative (albeit at the request of the White House) launched in March to increase consumers’ access to data about their own energy use. Using it involves clicking an actual “green button” on utilities’ websites.

Green buttons are hardly riveting, but other energy efficiency startups are employing more distinctive and even whimsical approaches. Leafully, the Grand Prize winner in the DOE’s Apps for Energy challenge, translates energy consumption into carbon impact units anyone can relate to: number of trees purifying the air or number of farting cows in a month, for example. The idea is to make it easy for anyone, regardless of age or maturity level, to understand and have fun with energy consumption.

Gamification is quite the buzzword these days, so is this all a passing fad? It’s possible. But for Simple Energy and potentially Opower, gamification seems like the easiest way to get people to do something they already want to do (use less energy) using tools they’re already excited about (Games. Virtual badges. Facebook!). Nothing more, nothing less.

Simple Energy, now 18 months old, thinks they’ll get it to a point where people in different cities, and under different utilities, can engage and compete with each other. (Right now, you can only compete against others who share your service area.) There are a few obstacles between here and there: How do you create an even playing field across different climate zones, or how will you handicap players with access to abundant hydropower?

Still, cross-country competitions could come sooner rather than later. Lurie said they’ve already spoken with hundreds of utilities who are waiting to see how their current partnerships turn out. “The need is great,” he says.

Coller said it’s too soon to tell if SDG&E will continue or expand their program after this summer, but she made it clear that Simple Energy is a valuable part of the efficiency equation.

And if other users react like the Faunces have, there’s no doubt it can have an impact on individual habits. Faunce doesn’t see his grandparents enrolling in a Simple Energy program, but for people open to new technology, he thinks it’s an easy sell.

“People are competitive and we’re competitive — it’s kind of what helped us win,” he said. And victory brings much more than bragging rights: Since starting the program, the Faunces have saved nearly $2,000 a year on energy costs. With results like that, it’s not hard to imagine everyone wanting to play.

Terry’s new book Plastic Free: How I Kicked the Plastic Habit and How You Can Too is published without plastic, all the way down to the glue. (If you’re going to shop for it online, check out her website first to learn about buying from a place that has committed to shipping it without plastic.) We talked with Terry recently about plastic-free living, why the proposed alternatives to bisphenol A (BPA) might be worse, and the connection between cutting out plastic and building a local economy.

Q. Why did you write this book? Whom are you trying to reach?

A. While I was writing, I was thinking: What would have helped me when I didn’t know anything? I tried to make this a book for people who are just starting [to cut out plastic], or who are already on their way.

I’ve been working on going plastic-free for five years. I did it slowly. I really recommend that people take it step by step, and then it won’t take so much time. Because a lot of the time and effort is just developing a new habit. Once you have the habit, you don’t have to think about it. For example, I never leave the house without a reusable bag anymore — and I don’t have a car, so it’s not a matter of leaving a bag in the car. It’s not hard, it was just learning to remember to do that in the beginning.

Q. Have you calculated how much money you save with your new habits, like buying food in bulk?

A. I went from eating Stouffer’s mac-n-cheese in a microwavable plastic tray to eating food from the bulk bins, so it’s kind of hard for me to compare. But to me, now, what I put in my body is more important than having lots of stuff. So I’ve shifted my spending.

Q. Where are the places you’ve been most surprised to find plastic?

A. I still think that the most surprising thing I ever discovered is that chewing gum is made out of plastic. And that there’s plastic in a lot of pills — especially time-release pills and capsules.

So it’s the plastics that are meant to be ingested that surprise me. And you have to be careful. People say to me, “It’s okay because I chew Glee Gum, and Glee is made with natural chicle.” And that’s true, it’s made from natural chicle — mixed with plastic. I discovered a plastic-free chewing gum this year that’s made by an English company, Peppersmith.

Q. BPA gets a lot of attention. What else should we be aware of, when it comes to human health?

A. There are thousands of additives that could be added to any particular plastic product; they affect the strength, flexibility, color, and even sometimes add antimicrobial and flame-retardant properties. When you see the number in the triangle at the bottom of a container, that tells you what the basic polymer is. Those basic plastic molecules are strung together, but the additives aren’t really attached, and when the plastic is subjected to stress, like heat or light or age, those additives can leach out. Plastics manufacturers are not required to disclose any of the ingredients in their formulations, so we don’t know what chemicals have been added.

In one experiment in Canada some researchers were using plastic polypropylene test tubes — #5 plastic, which is considered to be food-safe. Their experiment had nothing to do with plastic, they just happened to be using plastic test tubes, and their results kept getting contaminated. What they found was that additives in the tubes were leaching into the chemicals they were actually testing. They were shocked about this because they thought #5 plastic was nonreactive — everyone thought that. A lot of food containers are made out of #5 plastic and the FDA labels them as food-safe.

The point is that if we don’t know what chemicals have been added, there’s no way for us to know what could be leaching out and whether it’s safe or not.

The alternatives to BPA being developed — we really don’t know if those alternatives are any safer than BPA itself. They haven’t really been tested either. PVC, which is full of pthalates, is one “alternative” to BPA. And there’s some suggestion that bisphenol S (BPS), a BPA alternative, might have even more estrogenic activity. I don’t know if that will turn out to be true, but these alternatives need to be tested more.

We just have to be careful. We have to ask questions: What are you using instead of BPA? Campbell’s has said they’re going to phase out BPA from their cans, but they won’t say what they’re going to line them with instead. So Healthy Child Healthy World has a campaign going to get Campbell’s to reveal what the alternative will be.

Q. In your book, you highlight a few companies that keep sustainability at the core of their business model, rather than just, say, promote reusable bags. But they’re all small, local businesses. Is that a coincidence, or do you think there’s a way for those models to be scaled up?

A. The Texas-based company in.gredients wants to get the plastic out of the entire supply chain, and they say the only way to do that is to keep it local. They have their local vendors picking up their empty container as they’re delivering food in a new container. You can’t do that in a scaled-up business.

Plastic enables the food system to be monstrous. If we reduce our food miles, we don’t need as much plastic. It boils down to that. If you increase your food miles, then you have to find more ways to preserve the food because it has to last longer.

We have a company [in the Bay Area] that sells yogurt in returnable mason jars and ceramic containers. You pay a deposit and get it back when you return the container. That only works locally. A company like Stonyfield Farm, which is national, can’t do something like that, or they haven’t figured out a way to make it work.

And the problem with yogurt is that most is packaged in plastic while it’s hot. They pour the hot milk into the plastic container, put the bacteria in and seal it up, and the yogurt [culture] is basically formed in the plastic container. And we know that plastic leaches more when it’s subjected to high heat. There’s a company here, Straus, that sells yogurt in plastic containers, but their yogurt is vat-set. They don’t put the yogurt into the cups until it’s cooled down, specifically because of the leaching plastic. But that can’t really be scaled up — the reason companies fill the containers hot is they can do it so much faster.

Q. Do you have a favorite tip or recipe that you’ve discovered in your plastic-free life?

A. The one thing that I enjoy the most is homemade chocolate syrup. It takes the place of Hershey’s syrup in the squeeze bottle. It tastes way better, it’s super easy to make, and it’s all from sugar and cocoa powder from the bulk bin, salt from a box or bulk bin, water from the tap, and vanilla from a glass jar. The glass bottle has a little plastic cap on it, but that’s the only plastic involved. The recipe is in the book.

Q. You’ve figured out how to make a lot of things from scratch. Does that take up a lot of time?

A. I don’t do all of them on a regular basis, though I have done them to see if they work. There are things I just do without, but I wanted to present them as options in the book. Like if you want to have mayonnaise on a regular basis, it’s easy to make. If I cared about mayonnaise as much as I care about chocolate syrup, then I would make it!

I actually don’t spend a ton of time being Suzie Homemaker, but I do spend a lot of time researching and experimenting. It’s my passion — and it’s my way of giving back to the world because I share all the information I discover.

Q. If you weren’t so busy with book touring and promotion right now, what would you be doing?

A. What I would love to work on is a campaign to get Trader Joe’s to stop packaging their produce in so much plastic. They’re worse than any other grocery store I’ve seen, and Trader Joe’s caters to a clientele that cares about the environment. So to wrap all their produce in plastic is just hypocritical. That was why I went after Brita, too, because Brita was advertising itself as an environmentally friendly alternative to bottled water. And yet, even though there actually was a way to recycle the filters [in Europe], they weren’t doing it in the U.S. I guess hypocrisy just really bugs the crap out of me.

Climate change may be wreaking havoc on ecosystems and food supplies around the world, but there are also some things it’s really great for — like weeds.

According to research published last month in the journal PLoS ONE, weeds love carbon dioxide. Or, more precisely, they’re learning to love CO2 because they can adapt quickly to most conditions. Crops grown for food, on the other hand, don’t adapt because they’re designed not to — you want things like rice or wheat to have the same reliable taste, right? That’s why farmers take great care when they’re choosing the kinds of seeds they want to grow.

Now, thanks to climate change, that consistency is also a huge risk. The study in PLoS ONE, conducted by some forward-thinking researchers at the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), found that as CO2 levels rise, weeds fare better than their domesticated crop counterparts. That’s because the weeds adapted. But that’s not all: It turns out exposure to CO2 also makes them behave a little like zombies. In other words their weed-like qualities were also contagious (via gene transfer), and the actual crops began behaving more like weeds.

There’s already concern about genetic contamination from GMO food crops to weeds. Now there’s evidence that weeds could compromise food crops. (And we’re not even talking about “superweeds,” which are pretty scary in their own right because of their rapid growth and resistance to herbicides.)

The science

The USDA researchers grew two types of rice side by side — a wild, weedy variety (known colloquially as “red rice” for the color of the grains) and a cultivated variety called Clearfield 161, which is chemically altered (but not genetically modified) to be herbicide-resistant. As they raised carbon dioxide levels at the test site, the researchers found that the weedy rice did better, but not because it grew faster — what it did was transfer genes into the cultivated crop, making the Clearfield rice “essentially a weed,” said Lewis Ziska, a USDA plant physiologist who co-led the study. The weedy, wild rice isn’t what most people consider “wild rice.” Ziska says people could eat it if they had to, but most of us wouldn’t want to. And rice from the plants that were genetic cross between the weedy and crop rice tended to be more fragile (with the hulls cracking easily) with a lower nutrient content.

“That’s sort of the science fiction aspect of this,” Ziska told Science News. The article says he “likens the scenario to Invasion of the Body Snatchers” when he says, “Whatever [seed] the good plant produces is now going to be bad seed.”

The research also has some eye-opening implications for our entire food supply: Ziska said he expects that what happened to rice will happen to other crops, if and when CO2 levels rise. Many cultivated crops have weed counterparts that are almost identical genetically. They also often look very much alike — making them hard for a farmer to fight.

In other words, the crops we rely on for sustenance could be dominated by bigger and more aggressive weeds as climate change worsens. And that’s leaving aside any issues with genetic modification and changes in water levels or temperature, all of which have been linked with falling crop yields or the rise of superweeds.

What is it about weeds that makes them seem so indomitable?

“You are selecting for weeds in particular because what weeds do is they come up quickly. They generate a lot of seed; they have very quick growth cycles,” said the scientist. “They’re constantly growing and producing new DNA. And over time, that DNA is going to be selected for. What we think has happened is that that DNA is being selected for by the change in CO2.”

When in the zombie apocolypse …

The news isn’t necessarily all bad. The upside, says Ziska, is that if these wild rice relatives are behaving like weeds because of natural selection, then the possibility exists to use traditional breeding methods to find ways to give productive crops weed-like qualities that make them more resilient.

“The weeds are doing what weeds have always done, and that is adapt very quickly to a very sudden change in circumstance — and maybe that’s our role model. Maybe that’s the thing that we should look at as a strategy for being able to very quickly adapt in agriculture to what’s happening to the globe as a whole,” says Ziska.

That’s the focus of some follow-up research the scientist has been involved in. He believes that allowing cultivated crops to adapt to changing conditions — as the weeds are doing — could be an easy, cheap way to manage the increasing pressures on the global food supply. Not that emulating weeds would be a magic-bullet solution; but it could be a part of a larger approach to dealing with both climate change and an explosive demand for food as the world population climbs ever higher.

And because it relies on principles borrowed from nature — rather than trying to defy nature, as much of biotechnology does — the potential for success seems that much greater.

“Can we do what nature’s been doing for the last 50 years, and can we do it in an accelerated way so that we can begin to take advantage of this additional resource in terms of making more seed yield?” Ziska asks, optimistically. “This is particularly imperative at a time when there is so much pressure being put on the global food supply.”

The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) oversees the National Organic Standards, but there are independent organizations (accredited by the agency) who make sure that farms, food producers, and handlers are sticking to those standards by avoiding toxic pesticides, genetically engineered seeds, synthetic fertilizers, etc.

If the merger goes through, as it is likely to, CCOF Tilth will be the biggest game in town with nearly 4,000 farmers, ranchers, and processors under its charge. The organization will also develop a new label to accompany the name change.

“Oregon Tilth’s and CCOF’s origins date back to the 1970s amidst growing interest in the benefits of organic farming,” said Chris Schreiner, Oregon Tilth’s executive director, in a statement. “We both have deep roots in the organic movement.”

The boards of directors of both groups have approved the move, which is expected to be formalized in October.

Cathy Calfo, executive director of CCOF, will also serve as the executive director for CCOF Tilth. She said the merger will allow for greater efficiency in the certification process, as well as an expansion of research, advocacy, and educational work.

Perhaps above all, Calfo expects the merger to bring a financial boost directly to farmers. Many of the organizations’ members are small- to medium-sized farms, and the costs of organic certification can be a real strain. Calfo said that when the unified certification organization spreads those costs over a larger number of farmers, each farmer should face smaller fees.

“What we’re hoping to see out of this is a stabilization of certification costs,” she said.

On a website dedicated to the merger, CCOF Tilth says some members will also see reductions in paperwork and faster inspections.

But not everyone is without criticism. Mark Kastel of The Cornucopia Institute, the organization that often acts as a watchdog to the organic industry (and was behind the recent kerfuffle about GMO ingredients in Kashi cereal), is keeping a close eye on the merger.

“Certification has become a multimillion-dollar industry, and there will be certainly implications to this major merger in the organic industry,” said Kastel. “We like to say that ‘competition is the friend of the farmer.’ We will now have two giant organizations dominating farmer and processor certification,” he added.

Nonetheless, the organization’s leaders tout the benefits of the merger as good for a growing industry.

As Calfo puts it: “We’re two organizations with a common history that want to join forces to grow the organic movement together.”

Even as temperatures climb above 90 degrees F, many of the state’s 400,000 farmworkers don’t have access to shade; or the water station is too far from where they are picking a crop, and they have to put off getting a drink. And since farmworkers are so frequently paid on a piece-rate basis rather than hourly, there’s strong incentive to put off that drink, if available at all, for as long as possible.

It’s not that there aren’t laws requiring water and shade (there are), but if you’re a worker on a California farm, you’re not likely to see labor inspectors patrolling the fields, making sure all the rules are being followed and workers are safe, let alone comfortable.

Farmworker advocates have been pushing on the issue for years — public attention to farmworkers and heat safety spiked in 2008, when Maria Isabel Vasquez Jimenez, 17 years old and two months pregnant, died from heat exhaustion she developed while working in California’s grape vineyards.

Two years earlier, her employer had received citations for exposing workers to heatstroke and not training them on heat safety, and a fine had been issued. But it was never collected, and the California Occupational Safety and Health Administration (Cal/OSHA) did no follow-up inspections of the company.

Now, nearly four years later, little has changed about the conditions that led to her death, nor the poorly enforced laws that enable those conditions.

Which is where the Farm Worker Safety Act of 2012 enters the picture. The law would hold growers and labor contractors jointly liable if workers are not provided adequate shade and water. What happened to Maria Jimenez was an extreme case; death from heat illness is relatively rare. But the legislation is as much about improving the quality of life for workers as it is about preventing unnecessary deaths.

Farmworkers are not only vulnerable to dehydration and heatstroke, but also to other health problems like urinary and kidney infections, according to the National Center for Farmworker Health. And if a worker happens to have diabetes, or another chronic illness, it can compound the risks that come with heat exhaustion generally.

Some crops are better than others. “When people are working, picking cherries or picking apricots or pears,” said Luis Magaña, director of the Organization of Farm Workers of California, “at least they have shade provided by the trees. And they have a chance to rest under the trees.”

But crops that grow in low-lying rows — asparagus, tomatoes, and grapes, for example — leave workers entirely dependent on shade their employers provide. (And it may not matter if the asparagus you’re eating is organic or not.)

Of course, if there’s no drinking water available, the situation is ultimately the same — shade or no shade. It doesn’t take a medical professional to know that prolonged physical exertion in extreme heat without proper hydration is asking for trouble.

Existing regulations allow farmworkers to file a complaint with Cal/OSHA if they are not provided adequate water or shade, and require the agency to send an inspector out within three days. But with about 200 labor inspectors to cover the state’s estimated 35,000 farms, Cal/OSHA does not often meet that requirement, according to farm labor advocates.

“Last year alone, UFW filed 75 complaints. In over two-thirds of those cases, Cal/OSHA didn’t send someone at all, let alone within three days,” said Giev Kashkooli, strategic campaigns director for United Farm Workers (UFW). Cal/OSHA would not confirm or deny the number of complaints filed.

Magaña said that generally, inspections at California farms did increase for about a year after Maria Jimenez’s death, because there was so much public attention on the issue. “But now, without the same publicity,” he said, “Cal/OSHA is not regularly visiting these places. Sometimes, but not very regularly.”

He added that when inspectors do show up, a farmer or contractor can often see them coming, and can use that time to prepare. He also said that because the inspections are so sporadic, employers can say the workers will be moving to another field soon, and shade will be provided there. “They can manipulate the situation very easily,” he said.

When inspectors do find situations to write up, it rarely amounts to much. “Fines are routinely marked down and often never collected,” Kashkooli said, adding that there’s no recourse for workers when Cal/OSHA does not come through for them.

UFW says that, using statistics from Cal/OSHA, at least a third of the farms they inspect are out of compliance with the heat illness regulation. “This means using conservative numbers for the number of farmworkers in the state, at least 140,000 farmworkers do not have basic things like shade or water every day they go to work,” said Kashkooli, adding that the law would “deliver fair consequences for the employers who choose to put farmworker lives at risk by not providing water and shade.”

The Farm Worker Safety Act would also establish a private right of action so that farmworkers can take their employers to court if Cal/OSHA does not sufficiently respond to their complaints — meaning workers could sidestep Cal/OSHA, which right now is their last resort for making sure the laws are enforced. Under the proposed legislation, a worker can take a problem up directly with his employer, rather than wait for Cal/OSHA to act, or more likely, according to UFW, to not act.

Since there’s effectively no punishment for breaking the rules the way they stand now, there’s no incentive for following them.

What this all adds up to for the workers who produce so much of our food is a pretty bleak situation: Aside from the health risks, there are the psychological effects that come both with heat stress and with being treated so poorly on a daily basis.

There are some advocates who think better enforcement of existing laws, in the form of more inspections, is what’s necessary — not new legislation. Gail Wadsworth, executive director of the California Institute for Rural Studies, is one of them.

“Farmers are well aware of what they’re required to do, and the majority of farmers are meeting those regulations. But there’s always going to be outliers,” she says. “Enforcement, I think, is a better solution if the state legislature could be motivated somehow to increase funding to Cal/OSHA for inspections and follow-up.”

Wadsworth is skeptical, but not opposed to the proposed law. She’d like to see it effectively improve conditions for farmworkers, but she also believes those conditions are emblematic of a much larger problem: the fact that farmworkers have little power under the law and in our society generally. That they are treated so often “as tools rather than as people,” she says.

“This is a complaint we hear consistently: ‘We’re looked at as being just another tool in the field.’”

As some advocates see it, the Farm Worker Safety Act, if successful, might begin to change that.