One of the biggest water polluters in our country is the factory farm. In 2008, a Government Accountability Office report panned the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) for failing to know where most of these farms were located, let alone if they were releasing their manure into rivers, lakes, and streams.

So in early 2011, the EPA announced a rule asking such farms, known as Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations or CAFOs, to submit basic information, like their address and how many animals they have, to the agency. On Friday, July 20, EPA quietly announced it was withdrawing that rule, planning instead to try to collect the data from the existing records held by states, even though it has tried that before, with poor results.

In trying to understand why the EPA would back off such a seemingly innocuous yet important data collection project, I imagined myself inside a meeting of EPA clean water officials as they made the decision to withdraw the rule.

Setting: A 10-top table in a soulless gray-hued conference room, Federal Triangle, Washington, D.C.

Official One (storms into room, slams hand on table): I wish those House Republicans would all go on a schmoozy farm tour and fall into a manure lagoon! I can’t believe they accused us of flying spy drones over American farms.

Official Two (looking worn): Well, we are flying planes over factory farms in Nebraska and Iowa.

Official One: That’s because we can’t enforce the Clean Water Act without aerial inspections. Ever since the National Pork Producers Council sued us, the only way we can know if factory farms are polluting the water is if they tell us by applying for a discharge permit –

Official Two: Not likely.

Official One: Or if we check up on them with flyovers, where we can see manure flowing into waterways.

Official Two: Well, our work will get a little easier when we at least know how many factory farms there are, how many animals they have, where they are located, and how they manage their manure. I mean, how can we regulate the biggest source of water pollution in the country if we don’t even know where they are?

Official One: Yeah, I’m glad we’re going to release that rule requiring CAFOs to report those details to us soon. We’ve been working at getting better intel on them for over a decade!

Enter Official Three.

Official Three (looking dejected): Hi guys.

Officials One and Two: Hey.

Official Three: So … you know how it’s an election year, and those Nebraska senators just gave us a bunch of shit for the aerial flights over CAFOs? That’s not playing too well in the farm belt.

Official One: Yeah?

Official Three: Yeah. And all the big agricultural lobby groups, like the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association and the National Pork Producers Council, are saying that us collecting data on them is going to open up large farms to agriterrorism. I know that’s bullshit, but in rural America, this data collection effort just looks like more government meddling.

Official One: But these guys are in an industrial occupation! Their cows, pigs, and chickens produce three times as much poop as all Americans every year. And we don’t even know where it’s going! Not knowing where they’re located or what they are doing with their waste is like not knowing where sewage treatment plants are located, and if they are following the correct protocol for managing waste.

Official Three: Well, it’s just going to have to wait. We’re going to withdraw our rule requiring CAFOs to report basic data.

Official Two: People who care about clean water are going to be pissed.

Official Three: Well, we are going to try and work with the states to gather that information from them.

Official One: Hah! Remember when the Government Accountability Office said all the data we gathered from states about their CAFOs was inaccurate and unreliable? And aren’t we about to release a report showing that Iowa, which has the most pig factory farms in the nation, isn’t enforcing the Clean Water Act on those farms?

Official Three: I know, but it’s really the only option right now. So deal with it. We’re going to work with the Association of Clean Water Administrators to get the data on CAFOs from states, and maybe this time around it will be a little better.

It’s not like anyone gives a damn about clean water when they’re about to run out of unemployment insurance anyway. If you don’t like it, move to the Netherlands. They regulated their dairy CAFOs so strict that half of them moved over here.

Official Two: Okay. So let me get this straight. We’re withdrawing our proposal to collect information about addresses, contact details, animal numbers, and manure management on 20,000 of the nation’s most polluting farms, even though we have a legal agreement with three major environmental groups saying we will do this?

Official Three: Yes. But maybe we’ll release the withdrawal notice late on a Friday, after everyone’s left the office.

Well, it’s 4 o’clock. Want to hit up Harry’s? I’m buying.

Conservation is an important part of federal farm funding — the laws that shape what, where, and how we grow our food. And yet, if the negotiations around the 2012 Farm Bill go as predicted, funding for conservation is in grave danger.

Why does conservation on farms matter? Well, for starters, most large-scale agriculture is a disruptive endeavor. It requires farmers to plow under native flora and replace it with giant monocultures of annual crops, and then coddle those crops by irrigating them and applying fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides — all ecologically damaging technologies.

There are ways to farm better, to wash away less soil and use fewer dangerous chemicals. But farming with a lighter footprint often costs more than it brings in, and until around the last decade, federal policy has done little to inspire conservation. Instead, farm subsidies encourage farmers to plant crops fencerow to fencerow with little regard to environmental impacts.

In 2002, though, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) began a program aimed a shifting the balance towards conservation. The shift continued after the 2008 Farm Bill, and the new program — the Conservation Stewardship Program (CSP), which pays farmers to implement measures that reduce erosion and chemical drift, minimize fertilizer runoff, and improve habitat for native pollinators — has grown every year.  It’s now the most widespread conservation program in the country.

Farmers enrolled in CSP make seemingly small changes that can have a big impact over time. They may purchase new spray nozzles to reduce the amount of chemicals that drift into the air or water. Or they might plant borders around their fields to make homes for pollinators, implement no-till farming (which reduces soil erosion), or regularly test plants to finely calibrate their fertilizer usage. Ranchers and forest managers can also get into the conservation stewardship game, by agreeing to use techniques like rotating livestock so they don’t overgraze or planting buffers along riparian areas to enhance stream habitat.

None of this might sound radical, but the thing is — until recently — the most popular federal conservation program was one with the opposite strategy. The Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) paid farmers to stop doing their jobs — to take land out of production. While CRP has earned accolades from wildlife preservation groups and halted much soil erosion, its impacts were necessarily limited to the marginal land that farmers could spare, and it had no effect on lands under production.

The CSPfocus on working lands is a relatively new twist, supported by both sustainable agriculture advocates and production-oriented farmers. “(It) rewards farmers for doing the right thing rather than just pursuing the highest return possible from government farm programs,” said Ferd Hoefner, policy director for the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition, a group that works to push sustainable agriculture incentives in U.S. farm policy.

And CSP has proven popular since widespread enrollment options were offered, after the 2008 Farm Bill. It surpassed the reserve program this year, at 37 million acres.

Corn growing on wheat residue in a conservation plot.Photo: International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center“There was record turnout for the first signup … and it’s been really successful.” says Brad Redlin, director of conservation programs for the Izaak Walton League of America. Redlin likes the program because it doesn’t discriminate based on size and it lets farmers enroll regardless of whether they’re growing strawberries or soybeans.

Each state gets an allocation of acres under the program, and sets conservation priorities, like reducing erosion or improving water quality. Then, farmers compete for who can promise the most environmental benefits [PDF] on their land. The highest-ranking farms win CSP contracts, until the acreage cap for the state is reached. (The Natural Resources Conservation Service, the USDA agency that administers the program, grades the applications.)Five percent of those acres are also set aside for beginning farmers and ranchers, and another 5 percent for socially disadvantaged or limited resource applicants.

Once a farmer wins a contract, he or she is paid yearly on a per-acre basis for a five-year term. Payouts must average $18 per acre. Cropland rates run around $24 per acre, and rangeland around $4.

Carl Mattson, a Montana pea and wheat farmer, enrolled his 4,000 acres in 2004, when the program kicked off following the 2002 Farm Bill. He has implemented a number of conservation practices, including no-till and pesticide reduction. Mattson said his enrollment began during a 10-year drought when crops were doing poorly. During those lean years, he said, the income from CSP was a “very high” percentage of his total farm revenue.

“CSP allowed us to continue to maintain what we were doing conservation-wise and even allowed us to explore additional activities,” he says. Investing in these practices can mean buying pricey new equipment or sustaining less productive fields while they learn a new system, he adds. The payments help make surviving the transition possible.

In 2008, the USDA made some important changes to the program, some good, like expanding its scope, and others that both Mattson and Hoefner criticize. Now, instead of paying farmers who are already conservation-minded, the application process weights its scoring in favor of farmers adopting new practices.

“The old mantra for the early (2002) program was ‘reward the best and motivate the rest,’” says Mattson. But under the new system, farmers already practicing conservation have less of a chance to win contracts.

“That, unfortunately, has had the effect of keeping the best conservation farmers out of the program,” says Hoefner.

While some might see why the government wouldn’t want to pay farmers for something they’re already doing, Mattson says the program works better that way. When the program began, farmers like him, who were already practicing no-till, won contracts because of their early adoption. But after that, many farmers in his county who did not win contracts switched to no-till, in hopes that they’d win a contract. “You got over 50 percent of the farmers to change their practices without one single federal dollar, just because they wanted to be in line for the next go-round,” he says.

Now those farmers will not win contracts — unless they can promise to add still more new conservation practices. And that’s something Mattson and Hoefner would like to see changed in the next Farm Bill.

Right now, though, many conservation advocates are just hoping their programs don’t suffer major cuts. Paying for stewardship isn’t cheap — the government spends about $600 million on the program yearly.

As the congressional super committee is working to squeeze dollars from the overall national budget, as much as $23 billion could get cut from agriculture funding (in fact, some beleive the entire 2012 Farm Bill is being crafted quickly, behind closed doors). The National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition is working to inform their base about the danger of such cuts. And while CSP is popular among the agriculture community, it doesn’t yet enjoy the broad support held by the Conservation Reserve Program, which is by no means safe from cuts, either, but has the backing of a large group of hunters, fishermen, and others who benefit from wildlife habitat.

If the stewardship program shrinks in size, fewer acres will be farmed carefully. Or, conversely, we’ll lose more soil from our farmlands and we’ll see an increase in pesticides and fertilizer use.

Since switching to no-till, farmer Mattson has seen significant ecological improvements on his farm. His ponds no longer fill with soil from erosion. He uses less fertilizer, because his soil is healthier (and full of earthworms), and less fuel, because he doesn’t need to till as much.The Conservation Stewardship Program is working — for him, for farmers on 4 percent of the nation’s cropland, and for the air, water, and land it aims to protect.

“It’s an expensive program.” Mattson says, but, he adds, “if conservation is what the American public wants, this is a premier program to do it.”

All cattle, no hats.Photo: Rob Crow

Word spreads that I want to hear their stories. We all know they’re harassed by many demons: Land, feed, and fuel costs have all soared. Newly health-conscious consumers disdain red meat; environmentalists regularly sue over grazing practices. Retail giants like Walmart grab an increasing share of any profits. The price a rancher gets for beef, adjusted for inflation, dropped from $1.97 to 93 cents per pound between 1980 and 2009.

Today, though, the ranchers are focused on a different villain, and one after another, they pull me aside to tell different versions of the same tale. They talk about the meatpackers’ power — how it’s become nearly impossible to make a living as a small operator, because the meatpackers no longer buy much from small operators. It’s harder and harder to get a fair price for cattle, they say, and the meatpackers that slaughter and process the beef conspire to make it so.

Bill Bullard, president of the Montana-based Ranchers-Cattlemen Action Legal Fund (R-CALF), mounts the podium like a preacher and rallies the crowd. “Our cattle industry is shrinking,” Bullard booms. “Folks, these are signs of an unhealthy industry. An industry in severe crisis.” He’s one of many who raise the specter of the nation’s chicken and hog industries, in which once-independent farmers are now treated more like meatpackers’ employees.

Close to 2,000 people show up at the next day’s workshop, held at nearby Colorado State University and sponsored by the U.S. departments of Agriculture and Justice. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack fields questions about the meatpackers and cites a grim statistic: The number of U.S. cattle producers has plummeted from 1.6 million in 1980 to 950,000 today. Vilsack doesn’t directly blame the meatpackers, but says, “We can’t continue these trends, because if we do, we’re going to end up with a handful of farmers, a handful of packers, a handful of processors, a handful of grocery stores, and at that point, the consumers will suffer as well.”

It’s a chord that twangs mournfully throughout U.S. agriculture, as a traditional rural way of life appears to take its last, sad, shuddery breaths. But the ranchers haven’t given up hope. In fact, many speakers thank the Obama administration for showing more guts than previous administrations — Democrat or Republican — and finally standing up to the meatpacking industry.

The rise of the meatpackers began in the 1880s — an era, in the words of the Federal Trade Commission, “when the modern American meat industry was in its infancy.” Back then, John Rockefeller was building the Standard Oil empire as other powerful men became railroad and steel barons. The “Big Five” meatpacking companies controlled 45 percent of the domestic cattle market by the early 1890s. Every Tuesday at 2 p.m., their representatives met in downtown Chicago to decide how many cattle each would bring to the marketplace. This illegal act of collusion — which kept meat prices high by limiting supply — was known as the Veeder Pool, because the meatpackers’ attorney, Henry Veeder, kept records for the meetings and later testified about them in Congress. The Veeder Pool and similar dodgy arrangements put the squeeze on ranchers, whose cattle decreased in quality and value as the packers held them back from the market.

The big meatpackers were mostly able to evade enforcement of the 1890 federal Sherman Antitrust Act. Whenever the pressure got too strong, the companies would play legal hide-and-seek, merging or dissolving to avoid prosecution. Even when trust-busting President Teddy Roosevelt took office, the companies retained their power. Upton Sinclair, a leading muckraker, described the power of the “Beef Trust” in his classic 1906 novel, The Jungle:

It was the incarnation of blind and insensate Greed. It was a monster devouring with a thousand mouths, trampling with a thousand hoofs … it was the spirit of Capitalism made flesh … it wiped out thousands of businesses every year, it drove men to madness and suicide. It had forced the price of cattle so low as to destroy the stock-raising industry … it had ruined butchers who refused to carry its products. It divided the country into districts, and fixed the price of meat in all of them …

Spurred by that book and cattlemen’s complaints, in 1918 the FTC found “evidence of two generations of combined effort on the part of the American meat packers, particularly the Armour, Swift, and Morris families, to control an ever increasing part of the food of the American people.” The meatpackers were “skilled in concealing” their collusion and maintained “the appearance of competition,” the FTC said.

Congress tried to crack down with the 1921 Packers and Stockyards Act, which forbade packers from engaging in “unjust, unfair, or discriminatory practices” against livestock sellers. At the time the law was passed, “it was viewed as providing the most complete oversight of any sector of the economy,” says Neil Harl, an Iowa State University economist and lawyer who has studied it extensively. Yet the meatpackers’ grip simply tightened, as they used “intense political pressure” to ward off the Agriculture Department regulators, says Harl. “Whether it was a Republican administration or a Democratic administration, there was not a lot of effort … to implement the full measure.”

While there have been fluctuations — meatpacker concentration hit a low point in 1977 — mergers in the ’80s began a tidal wave of consolidation that leaves meatpackers with nearly double the power they wielded 120 years ago. Four giant companies — Tyson, Cargill, Brazil-based JBS, and National Beef — now control about 80 percent of the U.S. beef market.

More than 200 ag groups and a bipartisan bunch of senators from cattle and hog states — Jon Tester (D-Mont.), Tim Johnson (D-S.D.), Tom Harkin (D-Iowa), and Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) — persuaded Congress to crack down again in 2008. Language inserted in the Farm Bill directed the Department of Agriculture to devise new rules that establish more clearly when the Packers and Stockyards Act is being violated. The USDA’s Grain Inspection, Packers, and Stockyard Administration (GIPSA, pronounced “jipsa”) proposed rules last June, and the feds are evaluating more than 60,000 public comments. Prominent Obama administration officials focused on the issue include Secretary Vilsack, Attorney General Eric Holder, and the head of GIPSA, J. Dudley Butler. He’s a farmer and lawyer from Mississippi, who was a founding member of the reform-minded nonprofit Organization for Competitive Markets and an R-CALF member. Butler keeps a low profile, but when he was appointed in May 2009, he said he was coming to Washington, D.C., “to enforce the Packers and Stockyards Act.”

Photo: Mark Kjerland & super.heavy via flickrTalk with healthy-food advocates in urban centers across the country, and frequently, you’ll hear the same story. It goes something like this:

Once upon a time, this city was full of grocery stores. Then came urban renewal/an economic downturn/a mass exodus of the wealthy and, one by one, the groceries closed up and moved to the outskirts of the city. Since then, there have been Safeways/Krogers/Publix that have set up shop here and there, but they all end up leaving. Now we have 100 liquor stores for 25,000 people in this part of town, and the closest these stores come to selling fruit is the Arbor Mists in the drink cooler.

Thus, the United States has ended up with so-called “food deserts,” low-income enclaves that lack easy access to grocery stores selling healthy food and fresh produce.

It’s not only the biggest cities that have lost their grocery stores. While it’s hard to find a good grocer in parts of Atlanta and New York City, fresh veggies can be equally difficult to come by in places like Durham, N.C.; Tucson, Ariz.; and Nashville, Tenn. 

According to Miriam Liebovitz of Community Food Advocates, a Nashville organization working to increase access to healthy food, carless residents of South Nashville must frequently take multiple buses and spend hours in transit to the nearest supermarket. “We’re working on getting policy incentives, tax and building incentives, to try and get grocery stores into Nashville neighborhoods,” she says.

Marketing justice

The work done by organizations like Community Food Advocates falls under the phrase du jour “food justice,” a term that’s all about equity, says Oran Hesterman, an agronomist and food systems expert who now heads up Detroit’s Fair Food Network. Those working for food justice believe people should have equitable access to healthy food, equitable opportunities to produce such food, and equitable chances to find living-wage jobs in the food and agriculture system.

Hesterman, like others in the food-justice field, see problems like skyrocketing obesity rates and diabetes as symptoms of a broken food system in need of extensive rebuilding. Their research shows that “the symptoms of that broken system show up in our low-income communities quicker and more harshly,” he says.

Alison Alkon, a sociologist at California’s University of the Pacific who studies the food-justice movement, likens it to the fight for environmental justice that sprung to life in the 1970s, when low-income communities and communities of color realized they were being hit with a double environmental whammy — extra exposure to toxic operations on the one side, and lower access to environmental amenities like parks and clean air on the other.

These residents also say they want what most people already have easy access to — a full-service grocery store in their neighborhood that would offer a wide range of products for one-stop shopping.

But like environmental justice issues, the causes and impacts of lack of access to food frequently have multiple historic causes, ranging from structural racism to poor urban planning.  

“Planners did not actively try to make neighborhoods underserved … but by certain planning decisions, the end result was the same,” says Samina Raja, a planner at the University at Buffalo.

Due to a push from activists and local communities, planners are starting to include food access in how they manage city planning, but there’s a ways to go, says Raja. “Not having paid attention to food for several decades, we’re in a pretty dire situation in terms of disparities and justice.”

As the country’s obesity epidemic looms large and Michelle Obama continues to push healthy food initiatives, numerous cities have started to think about how lack of access to healthy food can affect the health of their residents, and thus reduce the amount of money they spend on healthcare for diet-related problems.

“Ultimately, it’s the best preventative medicine we have — eating healthy,” suggests Hesterman, pointing to efforts like Pennsylvania’s Fresh Food Financing Initiative, which provides incentives for grocery stores to open in underserved, low-income areas, as a model cities around the country are looking to follow.

Declaration of independents

Building grocery stores in an underserved area is one concrete step toward making access to food more equitable, but it’s neither a simple task nor a straightforward solution.

As with many young social movements, there is tension between what the activists — who often come from outside the impacted communities — seek, and what those experiencing the problem view as the cure.

Activists often push to create (frequently small) independent grocery stores, cooperatively- and community-owned, or to get fresh produce in existing corner stores through programs such as Healthy in a Hurry in Louisville, Ky., and the Healthy Bodegas Initiative in New York City.

Research and focus groups completed by Hesterman’s Fair Food Network, the Oakland research group PolicyLink, and academics like sociologist Alkon, however, show that many residents of low-income neighborhoods do not yet use the alternative venues offered by food justice groups. These residents also say they want what most people already have easy access to — a full-service grocery store in their neighborhood that would offer a wide range of products for one-stop shopping.

West Oakland, Calif., is one of the few communities to have successfully created a small-scale cooperative grocery stores. Thus far, it’s received a positive response from the community, says James Berk, one of seven worker-owners at Mandela Foods Cooperative. The marketplace, located across the street from a major public transportation hub, stocks fresh and organic produce and offers classes on cooking and nutrition.

This video from PolicyLink celebrates Mandela’s first year in operation:

As you can see, Mandela looks very different from a standard grocery store, with bulk bins selling organic beans, grains, and dry goods taking up prime real estate in the space. At 2,500 square feet, it’s about the size of a corner store, although it takes a strong stance against selling liquor.

“The closest thing that we come to alcoholic beverages is kombucha [a fermented tea],” says Berk.

Giant cranes guard the waterfront on the port city of Oakland, California’s western flank, brashly broadcasting the city’s industrial past and present to all who fly in, drive by, or walk through one of the Bay Area’s grittiest urban locales.

Yet in the same West Oakland neighborhoods that boast industrial diesel pollution from the bustling port and shockingly high poverty rates, urban food activism has flourished.

City Slicker Farms in West Oakland has a sliding-scale farmers market, a backyard-garden program, and sells vegetable starts as well.

“We’re trying to grow as much food as possible for the community,” said City Slicker Executive Director Barbara Finnin.

Started in 2001, City Slicker Farms is one of the oldest food and farming organizations in Oakland. Founded by activist Willow Rosenthal, the group, along with the food justice nonprofit People’s Grocery, has become an incubator and hub for agtivists who want to make fresh, healthy food available to all Oaklanders, especially those low-income communities and communities of color who typically have reduced access to quality produce at affordable prices.

Nonprofits like City Slicker and People’s Grocery have been around for nearly a decade. The city of Oakland is nationally known in sustainable foodie circles as a locus for activism on urban farming and food justice. But the city’s grassroots food and agriculture movement faces a challenge in scaling up that will require significant investment and public sector support.

In January 2006, when Jerry Brown was mayor, the Oakland City Council commissioned a study to examine what it would take to produce 30 percent of the city’s food locally. Two University of California, Berkeley doctoral students completed the work and recommended that Oakland create a Food Policy Council to advise the city on how it could meet that goal.

One mayor and nearly four years later, the Oakland Food Policy Council has a structure and regular meetings, but progress on policy change is slow, and with budget cuts roiling the city, forcing it to take unprecedented measures like laying off 10 percent of its police force, it’s unclear if Oakland will have the foresight, or the dollars, to prioritize citywide changes in food policy.

Unlike in Seattle or San Francisco just minutes across the Bay, say, which have aggressively moved to prioritize food security and encourage urban agriculture efforts (see “Smart cities are (un)paving the way for urban farmers and locavores“), Oakland’s have flourished through benign neglect.

In some ways, the absence of policy has been an encouragement to urban food production, says Novella Carpenter, West Oakland urban farmer and Farm City author (see Grist’s interview). Carpenter says Oakland’s lack of regulation against raising animals encouraged her to raise a variety of livestock, from honeybees to hogs.

“A lot of cities, for instance, have laws against even having chickens,” she points out. But Oakland has no such law, and hasn’t made it a priority to enforce the few livestock regulations it does have.

“There’s no officer that’s patrolling looking for roosters or male goats [both illegal],” she added. “As long as your neighbors are cool with you having pigs it’s fine.”

Sometimes the neighbors aren’t just “cool with” pigs, they even let you harvest their backyard fruit. That’s the premise behind Forage Oakland, an art project/food bartering network that lets those seeking fruit connect with those who have too much. The project’s goal is not just to keep excess fruit from going to waste, but also to strengthen neighborhood ties by getting neighbors who otherwise wouldn’t interact to connect via fruit.

Projects like Forage Oakland seem to spring up all over Oakland’s funky, fertile activist soil. There’s Planting Justice and Phat Beets Produce (see spotlights below), and Oakland Food Connection, a group that builds school gardens and works with communities and youth to grow food in East Oakland.

A number of these new groups are run by people who first connected with food justice in Oakland via People’s Grocery, an organization that has helped redefine food justice by vigorously educating those who work with it about the systemic causes behind lack of access to fresh and healthy food in low-income communities.

Jason Harvey, the executive director of Oakland Food Connection, which expands the food justice movement into Oakland’s eastern neighborhoods, said the time he spent working as a farmers market manager at People’s Grocery educated him on the disparity between income levels and access to healthy food in Oakland.

In East Oakland, for instance, there is only one grocery store (and 32 liquor stores) for a population of over 30,000, whereas in Oakland’s wealthier Piedmont and Montclair neighborhoods, with a similar number of people, have four supermarkets and half the number of liquor stores.

Five years into his term at Oakland Food Connection, Harvey now talks about combining policy change with the grassroots activist movement he’s long been a part of. Harvey expressed some frustration with the failure of Oakland politicians to imagine alternative futures for the city that might involve, say, cooperative, community-owned grocery stores.

Overall, though, he’s optimistic.

“There’s a number of people right now who are working on trying to create some citywide food justice strategies. I’m one of those people, sitting at the table right now with the executive directors of People’s Grocery and City Slicker Farms,” Harvey said.

Whether Harvey and his cohorts’ strategies to bring systemic change to Oakland’s food system will work remains to be seen. In the meantime, Oakland urban farmers and food justice fighters will keep on growing food, raising livestock, bartering fruit, holding garden work parties and produce exchanges — creatively working to feed themselves and others good, clean, and just food.

Project spotlights

In just one day, nine Planting Justice volunteers spread 2,000 square feet of cardboard and 18 cubic yards of compost and mulch, and planted dozens of veggies, herbs, flowers, fruit trees, and shrubs to create this front-yard mini-farm in Richmond, Calif.

Planting Justice
North Oakland

Permaculture teacher Gavin Raders and community activist Haleh Zandi decided to turn their successful garden installation business into a permaculture-focused food justice nonprofit. Planting Justice uses its for-profit permaculture installation program — called Transform Your Yard — to fund its mission of bringing healthy food to low-income Oakland residents. For every four gardens Raders and Zandi install with their business, they can install one for free in a low-income household. They also run a community garden in a large North Oakland apartment complex, teach free classes on growing plants and permaculture on their rooftop garden, and support an “edible forest” community garden effort in East Oakland.

The Biofuel Oasis offers veggie oil and urban-farming classes and supplies.

Biofuel Oasis
Berkeley-Oakland border

Created by Novella Carpenter and her farmer friends in May 2009,  the Biofuel Oasis is much more than a renewable energy pit stop — it’s an urban farm store and hub where aspiring farmers can learn how to raise food in the city.

The affordable classes and equipment it offers include recycling gray water for irrigation, raising and butchering rabbits, keeping bees and goats, and preserving the fruits of his or her labor. You can get your organic chicken feed and beekeeping equipment there, too.

The Healthy Hearts Youth Market Garden in North Oakland grows greens, tomatoes, basil, squash, and other seasonal vegetables.

Phat Beets Produce
North Oakland

Executive Director Max Cadji, who also works for People’s Grocery, started this youth-focused food justice nonprofit with a guerilla produce farmers market selling affordable foods in an Oakland park in 2007. Phat Beets now hosts two farmers markets where producers sell their goods at affordable prices to North Oakland residents. It recently collaborated with the Oakland’s Children’s Hospital and Research Center, where the farmers markets are hosted, to start an obesity prevention garden in a small North Oakland neighborhood. And beginning in June, Phat Beets is operating the Healthy Hearts Youth Market Garden, along with community members of the Dover neighborhood and park, and the patients of the Healthy Hearts Clinic at Children’s Hospital.

California dairy farmer Joey Rocha. Photo: Stephanie OgburnTurlock, Calif. — Joey Rocha tends 2,800 cows at his Central Valley dairy. That may sound like a large herd, but in California, Rocha is a mid-sized dairy producer.

Taken together, California’s dairy cows produce more than 100,000 tons of manure every day. Rocha and his fellow dairy farmers put all those cow pies to good use — as fertilizer for the fields that grow the corn that feeds their herds. It’s a perfect closed-loop system, except for one big problem: nitrogen.

Manure is nitrogen rich, which makes it a great fertilizer. But by applying every last bit of ma­nure to their fields, California dairy farmers — and non-dairy farmers as well — are dosing their crops with more nitrogen than the plants can absorb. The excess nitrogen is causing serious air and water pollution problems and may even be threatening the health of the soil.

There are ways around this problem: dairy producers and farmers could dial back on the manure and synthetic fertilizers they apply. But there’s not a lot of incentive to do this.

“[Fertilizers] are, in fact, relatively cheap and very good insurance,” says Allen Dusault, program director at Sustainable Conservation, a California group that works with farmers to develop economically-feasible approaches to environmental practices. “If you’re a farmer that is applying adequate amounts and then some, it’s good insurance to make sure you get your yields.”

Perverse incentives

Yields are the driving force of modern agriculture. Whether a farmer is growing corn to feed his dairy cows or someone else’s, he gets paid by the ton. If he can apply a little extra of something that is cheap or free (fertilizer or manure) in order to ensure a high yield, that’s a no-brainer.

 Although most agronomists will tell you that farmers over apply nitrogen and can get the same yields without adding as much fertilizer and manure as they do, few farmers are willing to take that risk for an environmental benefit that doesn’t impact them.

Thus, nitrogen pollution from farms is really a kind of market failure: individual farmers have little or no incentive to act in a way that protects the groundwater beneath them. But the public does have an interest in clean water; and public action will likely be required to change the incentive structure.

Reducing risk

Allen Dusault, program director at Sustainable Conservation, a California group that works with farmers to develop economically-feasible approaches to improving environmental practices, has thought a lot about the N problem. What’s needed, he says, “is a way to insure the financial viability of crop production methods without creating such a surplus of nitrogen that you have runoff.” 

That’s where risk-reduction programs such as the Best Management Practices (BMP) Challenge come in. The BMP Challenge, a unique program available in 18 major farming states, allows farmers to try environmentally-beneficial management techniques by offering to pay them for any costs they might incur in the process.

The program, originally started by American Farmland Trust and now run by a company called AgFlex, is focused mostly in areas where nitrogen runoff is causing big problems: the Chesapeake Bay, Mississippi River watershed, the Great Lakes Region, and now California dairies.

Farmers who enroll in California’s BMP Challenge agree to apply less manure to their corn, and to try and target that application at times when the corn will actually absorb most of the nitrogen in the manure. If farmers’ yields dip, the program compensates them for their loss. If their yields increase or hold steady, farmers pocket the savings from reduced fertilizer use and higher yields.

Rocha was one of the five dairy farmers that Dusault and Sustainable Conservation first approached in 2009 about taking the BMP Challenge. “We don’t look for these new programs,” says Rocha, whose environmental consultant turned him on to the program. “But when stuff comes our way, we do take a listen to it.”

Next year Sustainable Conservation hopes to enroll about 20 dairy producers in the San Joaquin Valley, according to senior project manager Ladi Asgill. The program is appealing, says Asgill, because it “offers an opportunity for dairies to experiment and work out the kinks in implementing a new practice, where we offer risk coverage, basically.”

Speaking of risk, Rocha did have slightly lower yields this year. But he also learned a lot about how to time his irrigations and apply manure more efficiently. With a few years practice, Rocha believes he could get to the point where he sees “the same [yields] with less [manure].”

Limiting risk is a key component in getting farmers to try new practices that have favorable environmental results, says Ferd Hoefner, policy director for the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition[4], a D.C.-based policy group.

“There really is a barrier to adoption of practices, even practices that on average are great net-return kinds of practices for farmers,” Hoefner says. “They fear there will be some kind of cost of production.”

The BMP Challenge gets farmers over the financial hurdle. For Rocha, it was a “no-fear” option.

“There’s nothing unattractive about it,” he says.

Taking it national

Of course, paying farmers to try new practices can get expensive. Farm conditions vary and the program has to pony up to pay for yield reductions. Ideally, says policy analyst Hoefner, the program might work well as a kind of national insurance policy for farmers willing to try something new.

In Hoefner’s view, modest programs like the BMP Challenge could have a lot of short-term impact. But when it comes to creating truly sustainable agriculture systems, Hoefner says his organization would like to see more support for widespread systemic changes in how dairy farms, and other farming systems, operate. Such changes would include returning to traditional pasture-based grazing systems, and exchanging concentrated animal feeding operations such as Rocha’s for smaller livestock production approaches that integrate animals into farming systems with techniques such as rotational grazing.

The HDTV Challenge

Rocha didn’t get his usual yields last year, but he’s game to try the BMP Challenge or some other similar program again.

“If it’s out there next year, if there’s another program to be had, we’ll take a good hard look at it again,” he says. “If we wind up with … [a] little less nitrogen, that’s better for us, better for the ground.”

In the long run, what matters most is the effect that Rocha’s experiment has on his dairy farming neighbors. If they see him getting more yield with less manure, they may start doing what he’s doing — and if that happens, the practice of smart nitrogen use could snowball.

Sustainable Conservation’s Dusault calls programs like BMP Challenge “showcasing,” and likens Rocha to the early adopters who bought the first HDTVs. (25 percent of American households had high definition televisions in 2007; 50 percent had them in 2009.)

Manure management isn’t as much fun as watching Peyton Manning launch a Hail Mary in hi-def, though, and if California dairies follow the same trend as California farmers who failed to adopt conservation tillage, Dusault’s HDTV penetration model may not apply.

The truth is it’s too early to tell how effective the BMP Challenge for California’s dairies will be. What is clear is that unless government steps in to share some risk or change financial incentives, farmers across the country will likely continue overdosing their fields with nitrogen — to the detriment of our ecosystems and our health.

The amount of food a farmer could grow was once limited by his or her ability to supplement soil nitrogen, either by planting cover crops, applying manure, or moving on to a new, more fertile field. Then, about 100 years ago, a technical innovation enabled us to produce a cheap synthetic form of nitrogen, and voila! Agriculture’s nitrogen limitation problem was solved.  The age of industrial nitrogen fertilizers had begun.

The breakthrough, by German chemists Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch (rhymes with posh), made it possible to grow many, many, many more crops per acre. For the last 50 years, farmers around the world have used synthetic nitrogen fertilizers to boost their crop yields and drive the 20^th century’s rapid agricultural intensification.

But in their fervor to increase yields, farmers often dose their crops with more nitrogen than the plants can absorb. The excess is now causing serious air and water pollution and threatening human health. Ironically, all that fertilizer may even be ruining the very soil it was meant to enrich.

Nitrogen, it seems, has a dark side, and it has created serious problems that we are only now beginning to reckon with.

Nitrogen kills a bay

To see nitrogen’s ill effects up close head to the mid-Atlantic coast and visit the Chesapeake Bay, the nation’s largest estuary. Once the site of a highly productive fishery and renowned for its oysters, crabs, and clams, today the bay is most famous for its ecological ruin.

On Dec. 9, 2008, the Environmental Protection Agency’s restoration program for the Chesapeake Bay marked its 25th anniversary. Other than the passing of the years, there wasn’t much to celebrate. The Chesapeake Bay Program’s goal is rehabilitation of the vastly polluted estuary, yet its 2008 “Bay Barometer” assessment found that “despite small successes in certain parts of the ecosystem and specific geographic areas, the overall health of the Chesapeake Bay did not improve in 2008.” (The fight to save the Chesapeake continues; in 2009, President Obama ordered the federal EPA to lead the ongoing cleanup efforts, but groups involved are still arguing over the details.)

A significant portion of the Chesapeake Bay pollution comes from agricultural operations whose nutrient-rich runoff — in the form of excess nitrogen and phosphorus — fills the Bay’s waters, leading to algal blooms, fish kills, habitat degradation, and bacteria proliferations that endanger human health.

The nitrogen runoff comes from the synthetic fertilizer applied to farm fields, as well as the manure generated from the intensive chicken farming on the east bay. Of course, the nitrogen in that chicken manure — some 650 million pounds per year, according to The New York Times – can largely be traced to synthetic nitrogen; the chickens are merely recycling the synthetic fertilizer that was originally applied to feed crops.

This type of reactive nutrient pollution is now so common that the dead zones, acidified lakes, and major habitat degradation it can cause are occurring with greater frequency, not just in the Chesapeake Bay, but in other parts of the United States and around the world.

Bombs away: Synthetic nitrogen comes of age

Nitrogen is ubiquitous. It makes up 78 percent of the earth’s atmosphere. But atmospheric nitrogen is inert. It exists in a stable, gaseous form (N2), which plants cannot use. Unless nitrogen is made available to plants, either by nitrogen-fixing bacteria in the soil or by the application of fertilizer, crops won’t grow as productively.

The German chemists Haber and Bosch found a way around this availability problem. Originally conceived as a way to make explosives for war, their technique turned inert nitrogen gas into highly reactive ammonia (NH3), a form of nitrogen that can be applied to soil and absorbed by plants. With their discovery, nitrogen ceased to be a limiting factor in agriculture.

The widespread use of synthetic fertilizer took off after World War II when innovations allowed nitrogen fertilizer to be produced inexpensively and on a grand scale. When Norman Borlaug, a leader of the Green Revolution, and other plant breeders began developing and exporting dwarf, high-yielding, fertilizer-loving varieties of corn and wheat, the new chemical fertilizer addiction went global. In 1960, farmers in developed and developing countries applied about 10 million metric tons of nitrogen fertilizer to their fields. In 2005, they applied 100 million metric tons.

This order of magnitude increase coincided with the Green Revolution. Indeed, nitrogen fertilizer is largely responsible for the phenomenal crop yield increases of the past 45 years. Without the additional food production fueled by nitrogen fertilizer, researchers estimate that two billion fewer people would be alive today.

Shifting shapes, getting around

Modern agriculture — and, consequently, present-day human society — depends on the widespread availability of cheap nitrogen fertilizer, the ingredient that makes our high-yielding food system possible. But the industrialization of this synthetic nitrogen fertilizer has come with costs.

The high temperatures and very high pressures needed to transform N2 to NH3 are energy intensive. About one percent of the world’s annual energy consumption is used to produce ammonia, most of which becomes nitrogen fertilizer. That’s about 80 million metric tons (or roughly one percent) of annual global CO2 emissions — a significant carbon footprint.

Nearly half that fertilizer is used to grow feed for livestock. Herds then return the nitrogen to the landscape, where it contributes to several different kinds of pollution — the second cost of synthetic nitrogen.

Synthetic fertilizer is made with reactive nitrogen — that’s what makes the fertilizer easy for plants to use. As it turns out, though, reactive nitrogen doesn’t always stay where you put it. Farmers may apply this synthetic fertilizer to their cornfields, but the nitrogen in it will happily engage with the soil carbon, oxygen, and water in its environment. This is the essential problem with reactive nitrogen — its ability to morph and move around, often to unhealthy ends (see illustration).

Estimates vary on just how much nitrogen escapes from fields and remains reactive and potentially harmful, but it’s not unreasonable to assume that plants absorb 30 to 50 percent of the nitrogen in the soil. So if a farmer applies 125 pounds of nitrogen fertilizer to an acre of corn, 30-50 percent of it will end up in the corn; as much as 70 percent — or 87 pounds per acre — could end up somewhere else.

‘N’ stands for ‘Needs to improve’

There is an obvious way around this nitrogen problem: use less fertilizer more efficiently. But there’s not much incentive to cut back.

Farmers get paid by the ton, which makes yields the driving force of modern agriculture. Most agronomists agree that farmers can get the same yields without applying as much fertilizer and manure as they now do. But few farmers are willing to take that chance. Many farmers use fertilizer as a form of insurance; better to apply a little too much and get high yields than apply too little and risk yield (and profit) declines.

The challenge then is to find a way to provide plants with enough nutrients to maintain high yields while also minimizing nitrogen leakages. This may sound straightforward, but it’s tough to find mainstream farmers who are using nitrogen efficiently and safely. There simply aren’t incentives to do so. Fertilizer is cheap, and polluters don’t pay.

The situation might change if nitrous oxide becomes regulated under climate legislation. But in the climate bills currently making their way through Congress, agricultural emissions are explicitly exempted from any cap. Even if ag-related nitrous oxide emissions did get capped, policies would have to address efficiency directly. Otherwise, a climate-focused policy risks encouraging farmers to adopt practices that simply force the reactive nitrogen in another direction — into ground and surface water, for example.

Farmers don’t over-apply nitrogen on purpose. Nor do they want to contribute to estuary pollution and dead zones. But for 40 years, we’ve invested in a type of agriculture that rewards high yields over all other considerations.

U.S. grain farmers operate under pressure to generate volume, and have little or no incentive to conserve synthetic nitrogen along the way. Under the Farm Bill, commodity farmers get subsidies based on how many bushels they churn out, not how efficiently they use nitrogen. Even when fertilizer prices spiked in 2008, synthetic nitrogen remained a remarkably cheap resource — and corn farmers had every economic reason to lay it on liberally.

In their 2009 paper in the Annual Review of Environment and Resources, researchers G. Philip Robertson from the University of Michigan and Peter M. Vitousek from Stanford noted that the cost of applying a little additional nitrogen to a cornfield is more than paid for by the marginal gains in yield. In other words, corn is really cheap — but nitrogen is even cheaper.

Scientists now know that this arrangement can’t last forever — agricultural intensification has come with enormous costs. They also know there are other ways to manage crops and reward farmers. The Rodale Institute’s research on high yield production using cover crops to build soil organic matter and biologically fix nitrogen provides one example of a potential alternative to current practices. But the incentive structure around farming must change.

No longer can farm-support policy blindly push maximum yield. Farmers should be rewarded at least as much for conserving nitrogen and building the organic matter in soil. Rodale’s research suggests that those goals can be achieved without sacrificing much in the way of long-term yield.

Twenty-five years ago, the Commonwealths of Pennsylvania and Virginia, the state of Maryland, and the District of Columbia formally agreed to cooperate with the United States Environmental Protection Agency, in order “to fully address the extent, complexity, and sources of pollutants entering the [Chesapeake] Bay.” As it turns out, the Bay and other nitrogen-threatened ecosystems need more than cooperation to get healthy. They need the kind of political will that will take nitrogen efficiency and impacts seriously — and force actual changes to agricultural practices. And endangered ecosystems need for those changes to happen soon. We don’t have another quarter century to spare.

Cows on pasture: potential solution, or menace to society?

To James E. McWilliams, author of the new book Just Food: Where Locavores Get It Wrong and How We Can Truly Eat Responsibly, just food is certainly much more than food produced and purchased locally, and his book wags a contrarian finger at the “locavores” who believe purchasing food grown close to home somehow makes it more just, fair, or better for society and the planet.

“The locavore approach to reforming our broken food system has serious limits-limits that our exuberant acceptance of eating local has obscured,” McWilliams writes. In their application of a simplistic valuing methodology (judging food purely by how far away from one’s plate it originated), he claims, these 100-mile dieters could potentially do more harm than good, if they succeeded in their apparent mission to force the entire world’s eaters to choose food grown within a short drive of their kitchen table.

The problem with this argument is its irrelevance. The few truly orthodox locavores who presumably exist (do you know even one?) aren’t close to persuading the world to eat the way they do. To devote an entire book to debunking the impulse to eat closer to home doesn’t address the points raised by food and farm activists. At their most relevant, today’s alternative eaters illuminate the systemic problems created by industrialized food provisioning: negative impacts on the global climate as well as significant deterioration in water quality, soil quality, local economies, worker justice, and human health.

McWilliams reduces the message of the food movement to a simple prescription–eat local–and proceeds to debunk it. Yet it’s hard to believe any thoughtful person could imagine that eating locally would address this multitude of issues. One imagines, rather, that consumers, when faced with a system they don’t support, are voting with their dollars for the only alternatives they can find-local food at the farmers market and organic products at the store. What McWilliams seems to miss is that these purchasing choices don’t make people fundamentalist locavores or organic purists. The locavores I know don’t view shopping consciously as a solution; they view it as a protest.

The author often categorizes proponents of alternative food systems–first locavores, then organic advocates, then those who object to genetically modified crops–as wild-eyed extremists in need of some firm schooling on “a golden mean of producing food.” McWilliams’ vision of this agricultural golden mean promotes lifecycle assessments over food miles, and judicious pesticide use over organics. He preaches the potential of genetically modified cassava to feed starving Africans, dismisses grass-fed beef because it can’t be scaled up to meet current demand, and advocates a drastic increase in freshwater aquaculture to meet demands for animal protein.

Again and again, one gets the uncomfortable feeling that McWilliams creates fanatical straw men in order to make his own presentation of facts seem like a rational alternative. “The problems that I have with organic agriculture have less to do with how it is currently practiced than with the inflated claim that it’s the only alternative to today’s wasteful conventional production,” he writes. But do any serious proponents seeking more sustainable alternatives to conventional agriculture claim this?

As he continues on his mission to disabuse the ecological faithful of their trust in growing organically, McWilliams uses the fact that sometimes organic growers use toxic natural compounds to knock organic off what he perceives to be its high horse of purity, and then cites the work of Bruce Ames, a controversial Berkeley scientist, to support the view that many modern pesticides don’t hold the same risks as their older counterparts. Despite devoting pages to each of these points, they do little to move McWilliams towards his chapter’s supposed conclusion: that organic should fall within a “continuum of farming systems.” A discussion of the pros and cons of organic and conventional production, and a studied evaluation of other farming systems along such a continuum, would have been a good start.

McWilliams’ defense of modern pesticides leads him to a contradiction. If pesticides aren’t so bad, one wonders why the author’s measured support for GMO crops hinges in part with the argument that they allow for a reduction in pesticide use. Or do they? “To be sure, there are many studies that show the exact opposite-that is, that GM crops have done nothing to reduce pesticide use,” McWilliams writes.

Paying little heed to such inconvenient tangles in this chapter or others, McWilliams hurtles forward down the path of measured (the man loves his middle ground) support for GM crops. In his rush to the middle, though, the author misses some important facets of the GM debate. For example, he glosses over evidence that GM technology hasn’t managed to boost yields, much industry hype to the contrary; and he ignores the vested interest in today’s crop of herbicide-tolerant genetically modified seeds: namely, that the companies that sell seeds with herbicide resistance also peddle the herbicides that must accompany their product.

This blithe obliviousness to the profit-seeking motives of the GM seed industry allows McWillams to argue for development of GM technology for “subsistence oriented” crops so they might thrive in dry or salty soils. This argument falls short on economic and theoretical grounds. While Monsanto can make billions of dollars per year selling Roundup Ready corn and soy (and Roundup) to industrial-scale farmers, there’s little cash to be made selling, say, drought-tolerant cassava to African smallholders. So what entity is going to develop such seeds? McWilliams’ answer: the Gates Foundation. But while the aims of the foundation are admirable, there’s plenty of evidence that Gates, like McWilliams, doesn’t really understand hunger in Africa.

Gates and McWilliams, in promoting biotechnology as the solution to Africa’s food troubles, take a shortsighted view of hunger, seeing it only through the lens of yield shortages and disregarding the ample historical evidence that hunger in developing countries has at least as much to do with world trade, democratic failures, poverty, and conflict as they do with the lack of a salt-tolerant sorghum seed.

McWilliams: courageously manning the middle of the road. The most sensible recommendation McWilliams makes is that if we want to lesson agriculture’s impact on natural systems, we need to eat less meat. In forming this argument, he relies heavily on a 2006 report from the Food and Agriculture Organization, almost to the point where one felt reading the report and getting data firsthand might have been a better use of time. McWilliams’ also hypes the importance of life-cycle analyses (LCAs) in pointing out inefficiencies in the food system. LCAs are good tools, but they hardly represent the sort of radical approach that’s “off the public radar screen,” as the author claims, ignored by locavores the world over as they persist in stubbornly clinging to food miles as their shortcut solution for determining a food’s ecological footprint.

McWilliams’ stated goal in writing Just Food was to lay a blueprint for “how we can truly eat responsibly.” He’s right in pointing out that eating locally and organically alone won’t result in the creation of a just food system, and that there’s much work left to do if the aim is sustainability in food provisioning. Yet his book fails to outline any sort of considered analysis of what a “truly” responsible food system might look like. Instead, the author wastes time promoting himself as the arbiter of rational thinking about the food system, an antidote to those rabid locavores and organic purists crowding the aisles of Whole Foods and farmers markets who vainly believe they’ve found the solution to our food systems’ problems.

One imagines McWilliams, a historian at Texas State University, might have written a book more in tune with his academic training, perhaps an examination of the rise of the varied movements of local eating, organic growing, fair trade, and healthy food access. He could have combined this historical survey with an analysis of what these movements mean in the greater context of our increasingly globalizing food system, and concluded with how they might be woven together into a forward-thinking approach that moves us toward the “just food” he claims to care so much about. Instead, we’re left with a treatise that focuses more on taking Alice Waters and Slow Food advocates down a peg than on putting forth innovative solutions to the problems within our food system. While this might be the author’s idea of fun, it’s ultimately a childish way to make a point, and a disappointing strategy on which to hinge a book.

We’ve all heard that eating locally is one way to reduce your environmental impact. But what about donating locally? In the urban wilds of New York City, a new non-profit is betting that locally based, small-scale giving can have a big eco-impact.

Ioby, whose name stands for “in our back yards,” connects people working on neighborhood-level projects with community members who can physically and financially support them. At ioby.org, launched this month by co-founders Erin Barnes, Cassie Flynn, and Brandon Whitney, individuals or groups post project descriptions and budgets, and interested donors contribute to the project of their choice. Here’s their introductory video:

Within its first 10 days of existence, ioby successfully facilitated the funding of the first three of its 40 listed projects: a Boy Scout proposed and executed an environmental awareness fair, a community garden got a compost education class off the ground, and another grassroots group undertook a park cleanup and revegetation project in Queens. It’s all part of an effort, says Barnes, to get people connected to their surroundings and invested in the future.

The concept that powers the organization’s work is known as microfinance. As a philanthropy model, it’s not new, but in recent years it’s gained momentum online, with popular sites focusing on education and international development projects. Ioby is the first microfinance site to focus on funding local environmental projects.

Fueled by their successes so far, ioby’s founders — who met at the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies and have called New York City home since graduating in 2007 — hope to expand the model to other communities around the country, though they acknowledge that it will take a lot more work than they first realized. They recently got together to answer a few questions about where the idea came from, who’s using ioby.org, and how it works.

Organizers of “It’s My Park!” day asked ioby followers to help them raise awareness.ioby.orgQ. Do you think ioby’s small-scale model is the future of environmental activism?

A. Barnes: A lot of environmental work comes from national campaigns, and all of those efforts are really important. But I think one of the things that we miss is the groups themselves in the neighborhoods, recognizing their own environmental problems, proposing their own solutions. Ioby helps small, community-based groups like neighborhood associations and block associations. It gives them a website, it gives them a storefront, it gives them a cash register, a place where they can talk about these issues to the general public.
I actually think that this is a pretty powerful tool for grassroots organizing. You can reach a lot of people – that’s what social networking does. You engage them by telling them the stories about projects that are happening in their own neighborhoods. You ask them for $20 or three hours on a Saturday afternoon. And I think at that point you have a dedicated lifelong member who wants to make sure that half a block of green space is protected into the future.
Flynn: The people that go onto ioby.org, they get to see what’s going on in their neighborhood and they get to choose a project that is meaningful to them.
Whitney: Ioby really is about local places and helping people either rediscover or discover for the first time that the environment isn’t something that’s abstract or far away, and that it’s mostly about what’s right around you.

Q. How do people get projects on ioby?

A. Whitney: You go to ioby.org. It’s very easy to find the application there. You create a login first, and it’s a pretty short series of questions. It’s not a very onerous process, we don’t think. We take about two weeks to review [the project] and make sure it meets all of our criteria, and then we get back to you with our answer and we post it. We have worked with groups to make an initial idea that didn’t completely meet our criteria, or had a huge budget, into something better suited for our site.

To help residents explore the undiscovered trails of northern Manhattan, Hike the Heights sought funds and volunteers.ioby.orgQ. What kind of projects are you most excited about?

A. Barnes: There’s so many. The Rockaway Waterfront Alliance is a good one. It’s a rainwater harvest system that they want to install, and that’s actually just $345. It’s about storm water management, reducing non-point source pollution from flooding. The All People’s Garden on the Lower East Side needs $2,000 to remove some serious concrete debris. There’s a CUNY-Baruch honors student who is proposing to build a green roof on his school’s building. Groups are composting at McCarren Park in Brooklyn, gardening in abandoned lots, boating in the East River, and hiking through Northern Manhattan. There’s just so many projects on the site I can’t keep track of them.

Q. Who’s using ioby so far?

A. Barnes: The project groups that are using ioby are really various. Some of them are 501(c)3s, some of them are not. One group is Columbia University’s public health department, and another is Sustainable South Bronx, and one is a school teacher in Washington Heights. There’s a lot of community gardens, and there are some that just focus on one neighborhood, like Trees Not Trash Bushwick.

Q. How do you ensure a funded project gets completed?

A. Barnes: Our project groups do the fundraising [at ioby.org] and then, as the project is underway, they post updates. They post photos and they talk about when volunteers come out and plant some trees and clean up some debris … At the end, when the project is completed, they submit a report and write about lessons learned, or what they would have done differently, or advice to other groups, and they put that on the website [where it's available to the public].

Q. How did you come up with the idea for ioby?

A. Barnes: We copied already successful models and applied it to the idea of doing local environmental work. A lot of the other wonderful, fantastic, online micro-philanthropies that are hugely, wildly successful are about someone really far away giving money to something that they’re really far away from. We were thinking that with the environment being something that people have a personal connection to, if we encourage people to donate to something locally then they’re investing in the future of their own neighborhoods.

Q. Do you have plans to expand ioby to other cities?

A. Whitney: The short answer is yes. Although we’ve found over the past year that it takes an incredible amount of work to build the capacity to engage with the hundreds of groups that we’ve talked to thus far just in one city. And so it’s going to be a process of expanding city by city, and sort of picking some key places first.

Q. Do you really think small, local environmental projects can make a difference when we face such vast environmental problems?

One teacher is seeking support so students can test soil and water quality.ioby.orgA. Barnes: You’re talking about New York City. You’re talking about a city with the carbon footprint of Ireland. You’re talking about this massive place where if all these people make a small individual effort it can make a huge, huge impact. All you have to do is get one eighth of all of New York City residents to help plant a tree each and then you have a million trees.
Flynn: I think one of the things that ioby really believes in is that a lot of small actions can lead to big change. We hear a lot about these huge environmental problems. “An Inconvenient Truth” came out, and a lot of people learned there’s this big problem going on out there. Now that we have this information, what’s the next step? People want to know how to get involved. And these are people that don’t come necessarily from an environmental background. They want to learn more, and they want to get involved, and they can go to ioby and they can do these smaller projects that do add up to big change.

Q. It sounds as if you’re equating environmentalism with community building.

A. Flynn: Ioby tries to tap into this idea that environmentalism can be what you care about. A lot of people, especially in New York, are very connected to their space. We’re very proud of our borough … And I think ioby is providing this space where you see all the great things that are going on around you in a place that you really care about.
Barnes: I think that environmentalism has always been about the things that are immediately around you. It’s the streets and sidewalks we walk on every single day, it’s the subway we take to work, and it’s that poor little tree that’s barely able to sprout out of the sidewalk. It’s hotdog stands and soccer fields. That’s our environment. If you clean it up, and you put your blood and sweat into that, and you plant some trees, you are going to become a steward of that for the rest of your life. This is about transformational environmentalism, where we become environmentalists for life.

Editor’s note: Stephanie Paige Ogburn attended graduate school at the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies along with the three founders of ioby.org. She is not involved in ioby.org in any way other than writing about it as a new model of environmental activism.

Photo courtesy of M J M, via Flickr

“Who is at the table?” asked Anim Steel, Director of National Programs for The Food Project, a Boston-based organization that works to engage youth in sustainable agriculture. Steel’s rhetorical question referred to a growing conversation among members of the sustainable food movement about helping the movement grow and include all people, not just those who can afford organic food.

This conversation’s incredibly important. It could also be awkward and uncomfortable, as it broaches the historically difficult topics of structural racism and environmental justice. “Nutritional redlining” was one of the phrases uttered in a  conference speech by Erika Allen, who works with her father Will Allen doing the awe-inspiring work of Milwaukee-based food and farm organization Growing Power. Erika Allen’s speech also addressed the thorny topic of how food movement members can create healthy food systems in tandem with low-income communities, as opposed to imposing these food systems from the outside, without community buy-in and input. Of course, this issue isn’t limited to food systems building; low-income communities and communities of color have long suffered disproportionately negative impacts from externally-imposed urban planning and economic development decisions.

All of this talk of white privilege and power in the food system may sound like a circular return to past debates of environmental justice and the problems of an overly-white environmental movement, but in fact, the willingness of a relatively nascent coalition of good food and farming activists to listen and participate in a difficult conversation on race and privilege points to the movement’s growing power and maturity.

Everyone eats. Unhealthy food, grown in unsustainable ways, negatively impacts all the world’s people, and disproportionately impacts poor communities and communities of color. As minority populations in the U.S. grow in voice and number, and the alternative food movement’s willingness and ability to provide a welcome “place at the table” to all eaters, is not only logistically necessary, but morally imperative.