As a host to the larvae of the endangered Fender’s Blue Butterfly, Kincaid’s lupine was declared a threatened species under the federal Endangered Species Act in 2000. Only found in small areas of prairie grassland west of the Cascade Mountains, Mallonee Farms is the northernmost epicenter for the lupine in the US. 

Kincaid’s Lupine (Photo courtesy of Washington Natural Heritage Program)

All across North America, endangered plant species and wildlife are struggling to survive on agricultural land. The United Nations Environment Programme has pegged the global food system and its encroachment on wildlife habitats, along with its use of fertilizers, pesticides and other chemicals, as directly threatening 86 percent of species at risk of extinction worldwide. In the United States, more than 50 percent of threatened or endangered species are vital pollinators such as the Fender’s Blue Butterfly. Without pollinators to fertilize berry crops, orchards or field crops such as squash, all of us eaters are also endangered. But, it’s not always easy for growers to identify those species at risk on their properties.

Until its discovery in 2004 by an eagleeyed employee of Washington State’s Department of Natural Resources cycling past one of the farm’s pastures, Maynard Mallonee had no idea the lupine on the family property was endangered.

NatureServe is a US-based not-for-profit organization that acts as a clearinghouse for biodiversity data. Through remote sensing such as wildlife cameras, collaring of wildlife, satellite imagery, drones, geographic information systems (GIS) and on-the-ground eyewitness observations, analysts can predict where wildlife and plant species at risk might be on agricultural land. 

Compiled into maps, the information is used by government agencies such as state departments of natural heritage, fish and wildlife services, conservation organizations and individuals across North America to tailor responses that support at-risk species. These might include, as in the case of the Mallonee Farm, adopting rotational grazing practices or, in other instances, altering haying schedules. But nothing is full-proof and the surveying of private land is, after all, voluntary. 

“We can’t survey everywhere,” says Regan Smyth, vice-president of conservation and science for NatureServe, “which makes a lot of things hard to know.” 

A still image of the NatureServe Explorer Pro interactive map that allows users to explore documented at-risk species by area and by species. The dark red hexagons represent an area with greater than 2,000 species and lightest hexagons representing an area with less than 25 species. (Image courtesy of NatureServe)

She also admits that when it comes time to do on-the-ground surveys to verify the predictive data, growers can get a little ornery about sharing information. They worry about the inconveniences it might cause to production. After the lupine was discovered on the Mallonee family farm, the Department of Fish and Wildlife told Maynard Mallonee to come up with a rotational grazing plan for his cattle that protected the lupine.

“It’s big government telling you what to do,” says Mallonee, “and if you don’t do what they want, they can make life difficult.” 

For the most part, Smythe says people managing land care about it and want to do the right thing. “Once people understand working lands need to be part of the picture of how we keep a diversity of life on the planet, then those who might in other circumstances not want people traipsing around their property become collaborators with Natural Heritage programs,” she says.

In Utah, the Wildlands Network uses mapping data to predict the migration corridors of wildlife. Hunter Warren is engagement coordinator for the organization and concurs with Smythe that there can be a mixed reaction from landowners when they learn that a migrating herd of mule deer, for example, will be stomping through their property. But once they learn that any adjustments needed to support the wildlife, such as replacing barbed wire fencing with fencing that won’t snag and harm an animal, will be paid for by the organization, they become more receptive.

Migrating herds of deer or elk, for example, can, through their grazing and trampling of the ground, break down organic matter into the soil, releasing nutrients that benefit crop production. Plants such as Kincaid’s lupine through their root systems create pathways in the soil that allows for enhanced water filtration and carbon sequester. 

Bryan Gilvesy is CEO of the Alternative Land Use Services Program (ALUS), a non-profit organization working to help fund grower’s initiatives in six Canadian provinces and in Iowa that protect species at risk. He relates how in Southern Ontario a farmer discovered his hay field was home to 250 bobolinks, a bird assessed as being of special concern in Canada by the Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada and listed under the Species at Risk Act. A ground nesting bird, the bobolink prefers grasslands and prairies to lay its eggs. As more land is converted for agricultural use, the bobolink’s traditional nesting areas have become endangered. Combine or tractor harvesting destroys eggs and can even result in the deaths of birds. ALUS worked with the farmer to alter the haying schedule so that the fledgling bobolinks had time to grow. 

“The farmer got a more mature hay crop and was rewarded financially,” says Gilvesy.

A report by The American Farmland Trust has concluded that managed agricultural land can support both food production and wildlife. It advocates for a broader approach to mapping biodiversity on agricultural land and enlisting the help of farmers and ranchers to do it with policies that embrace the USDA’s legacy of voluntary, incentive-based and locally led conservation. 

On the Mallonee farm, the latest mapping shows a 33-percent increase in the lupine’s population. And although the farm’s grazing plan is having to be constantly updated and re-filed with the Department of Fish and Wildlife to accommodate the spread, Mallonee is happy he took the time and effort to protect the plant. 

 “In the beginning, maybe I might not have,” he says. But, without question, Mallonee is happy he did. The benefits of taking action to protect the lupine have been worth it. “The dairy farm is better managed through the rotational grazing methods we’ve developed,” he says.

The post A Win for Growers Who Protect Biodiversity on Agricultural Land appeared first on Modern Farmer.

A new study out of the University of California, Irvine, published in the journal Nature Sustainability, shows that chemically synthesized dietary fats, or food fats made scientifically in a factory—not harvested from a field—could be a viable way to reduce environmental impacts in the agriculture sector. 

“We could drastically reduce some of the land that we’re using for things like oil crops, if we were making these in a factory and not using land at all,” says Steven Davis, PhD, Earth System scientist and lead author on the paper.

The amount of global agricultural land used for oil crops has nearly tripled in the last 60 years, making it one of the top three categories of agricultural products in terms of land use.

Palm oil, for example, is in many processed foods at American supermarkets. It has also come under fire because palm oil plantations in Asia, Latin America and West Africa have resulted in deforestation and negative impacts on human communities. Decreased land demands could lead to reforestation or preservation, which may benefit ecosystem biodiversity and reduce water use.

The amount of land used globally to grow oil crops has increased dramatically in the last several decades. (Graph by Our World in Data)

“If we targeted just a small amount of some of the very worst offending sources of these oils, palm oil plantations or soybeans that are grown on areas recently cleared in the Amazon, we can make very large reductions in some of the greenhouse gas emissions,” says Davis.

Fats could be synthesized at scale, says Davis. Using a source of carbon dioxide and hydrogen, the actual process of producing the fats could result in fewer emissions than traditional oil production. Still, he acknowledges that some consumers are wary of synthesized products—as the paper mentions, synthetic fibers have had significant environmental consequences; they are a source of plastic pollution through microfiber shedding, and the textiles themselves take a long time to break down. The impacts of this mean there’s a good reason to be cautious when approaching other forms of chemical synthesis, and more research is required. The sources of carbon would have to be fossil carbon, waste carbon (like municipal solid waste) or carbon captured from the air.

“I’m not someone who thinks we should stop agriculture altogether,” says Davis. “But I think it makes sense to prioritize the emissions related to that and the environmental impacts of that for the things that we really can’t do in other ways and that we really value the flavors of and the provenance of.”

Public acceptance of synthesized fats may be easier than other foods, since these fats are often present in processed foods and not always consumed as a standalone ingredient. Since farmed oil products and synthesized dietary fat are molecularly identical, it’s not something that would be distinguishable for consumers when eaten in this context.

“You don’t eat a Chips Ahoy! cookie and say, ‘man that palm oil in there was delicious,’” says Davis. “I don’t plan to stop buying apples, I think apples are a magical thing. But I don’t feel the same about palm oil that’s used in products that I buy.”

One important result of this shift would be a disruption in some of the agricultural communities that revolve around palm or other kinds of oil production. A change of this type would have to be carefully approached to ensure a just food transition, says Davis.

It doesn’t have to be all or nothing, he says. Not all vegetable oils need to go away.

“We’re not saying tomorrow you’re going to be eating like the Jetsons,” says Davis. “We are just talking about supplanting some of the most environmentally damaging sources of food with an alternative that hopefully wouldn’t make a meaningful difference to a lot of people in terms of their appreciation for foods that they eat.”

The post Do We Need to Farm Oil Crops? appeared first on Modern Farmer.

Patterson grew up on the Tuscarora Nation Reservation just south of Lake Ontario near Niagara Falls. The painting reminded him of his elders teaching him to harvest black walnuts and hickories.

“I think, for me, it wasn’t about the tree, it was about a way of life,” said Patterson, who today is in his 40s, with silver-flecked dark hair and kids of his own. He sounded wistful.

The American chestnut tree, or číhtkęr in Tuscarora, once grew across what is currently the eastern United States, from Mississippi to Georgia, and into southeastern Canada. The beloved and ecologically important species was harvested by Indigenous peoples for millennia and once numbered in the billions, providing food and habitat to countless birds, insects, and mammals of eastern forests, before being wiped out by rampant logging and a deadly fungal blight brought on by European colonization.

Now, a transgenic version of the American chestnut that can withstand the blight is on the cusp of being deregulated by the US government. (Transgenic organisms contain DNA from other species.) When that happens, people will be able to grow the blight-resistant trees without restriction. For years, controversy has swirled around the ethics of using novel biotechnology for species conservation. But Patterson, who previously directed the Tuscarora Environment Program and today is the assistant director of the Center for Native Peoples and the Environment at the State University of New York’s College of Environmental Science and Forestry in Syracuse, has a different question: What good is bringing back a species without also restoring its traditional relationships with the Indigenous peoples who helped it flourish?

That deep history is not always clear from conservation narratives about the blight-resistant chestnut. For the past four decades, the driving force behind the chestnut’s restoration has been The American Chestnut Foundation, a nonprofit with more than 5,000 active members in 16 chapters. Before turning to genetic engineering, the foundation tried unsuccessfully to breed a hybrid chestnut that looked and grew like an American chestnut but had genes from species native to Asia that gave it blight resistance. “Our vision is a robust eastern forest restored to its splendor,” reads The American Chestnut Foundation’s homepage, against a background of glowing green chestnut leaflets. “Our mission is to return the iconic American chestnut to its native range.”

But the Foundation website’s history of the tree begins during colonial times, suggesting a romantic notion of a precolonial wilderness that ignores the intensive agroforestry that Indigenous peoples practiced. By engineering vanished species to survive harms brought on by colonization without addressing those harms, people avoid having to make hard decisions about how most of us live on the landscape today.

The nuts of the American chestnut are small, sweet, and nutritious. (Photo: Shutterstock)

Bill Powell began working on chestnut genetics when he was a 28-year-old graduate student in Utah, which is actually outside the tree’s natural range. Now in his late 60s, with silvery hair, glasses, and an infectious curiosity about the relationship between tree and pathogen, he’s a leading chestnut restoration expert.

When I met Powell in 2022, he fretted that the chestnut restoration process was taking too long. “Unfortunately, I see retirement on the horizon,” he told me. “But not anytime soon, because I have to get this done.” At the time, Powell was a colleague of Patterson’s, working for the same university and directing the American Chestnut Research and Restoration Project. Since then, as the blight-resistant tree has wound its way through the deregulatory labyrinth of federal agencies including the Environmental Protection Agency, Food and Drug Administration, and Department of Agriculture, Powell has had to step down, recently sharing his diagnosis of terminal colon cancer publicly.

When we spoke, Powell stressed that after the blight-resistant chestnut is deregulated, no Indigenous nations will have to grow the transgenic trees on their lands if they choose not to. But he acknowledged that this does not reassure those who think of Indigenous land not in colonial terms, meaning within reservation boundaries, but instead in terms of treaty rights or cultural practices on historic tribal lands. Indigenous nations, including members of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy such as the Tuscarora Nation, have long argued that even when they ceded land to colonial governments, they did not cede their rights to access and care for plants and animals on those lands.

The nuts of the American chestnut are small, sweet, and nutritious. They were an important part of the varied diet that sustained Patterson’s ancestors for millennia; in return, people cared for groves of the trees across thousands of miles. When the United States pushed Indigenous peoples throughout the chestnut’s range off their lands, and the American chestnut became functionally extinct, an ancient reciprocal relationship vanished, too.

“We were instructed to pick those nuts,” Patterson said. “And when we don’t pick them, the plant goes away.”

The American chestnut could reach 100 feet tall during its heyday. (Photo: Shutterstock)

With craggy bark and shaggy branches of feathery leaves, the American chestnut could reach 100 feet tall during its heyday. Its trunk could be 13 feet wide. The trees huddled along the Gulf Coast for some 8,000 years during the most recent ice age, sheltering in the relatively warm stretch from Florida to the Mississippi River, because mountain peaks even in the southernmost part of the Appalachians were too cold for chestnut trees to grow. Then, as the snow receded northward 20,000 ago, the trees slowly migrated from their coastal refuges. They worked their way up the Appalachian Mountains — helped by Indigenous peoples, whom they helped in turn.

The trees dropped an avalanche of chestnuts to the forest floor each year. According to historian Donald Edward Davis, people burned low fires that dried the nuts and killed off chestnut weevils. By suppressing other plants, fires helped the chestnut trees spread, and the nuts became staples of Indigenous diets — a reliable source of nutrition that people stored in earthen silos or pounded into flour for chestnut bread and other foods. The human-tended groves also fed animals such as elk, deer, bison, bears, passenger pigeons, panthers, wolves, and foxes. Chestnut logjams in streams created deep, clear pockets of water where fish could thrive. Several species of invertebrates relied on chestnut trees for habitat; after the trees died out, five species of moths went extinct.

European settlers forced Indigenous peoples along the chestnut’s range from much of their homelands, severing access to plants and animals they’d long interacted with. Meanwhile, settlers cut down chestnuts for many reasons — to clear space for towns and farms; to build fence posts, telegraph poles, and railroads; or just to gather the nuts more easily.

Nevertheless, the chestnut survived for centuries. Enslaved people gathered chestnuts to supplement meager meals and to sell. White Appalachian communities came to rely on chestnuts as free feed for their hogs and other livestock, and as a cash crop.

Then, in the late 1800s, horticulturalists imported trees carrying the fungal blight Cryphonectria parasitica to the United States. The blight spread by wind and splashing rain; it also hitched rides on insects and birds. Once it landed on the bark of a new tree, it dug in through weak spots — old burn injuries, insect wounds, or scars left from woodcutting — and dissolved the tree’s living tissue with oxalic acid, creating angry orange streaks and open cankers on trunks. The trees would die back to their roots, resprout, and die back again, like botanical zombies. The blight killed at an astonishing pace. All told, a tree whose ancestors evolved millions of years ago died out in less than 50 years.

In turn, the chestnut lost the people whose practices helped it thrive. Patterson told me that some Indigenous nations even lost their word for the chestnut tree, because chestnuts disappeared at the same time that the US government took Indigenous children, including at least one of Patterson’s own relatives, and placed them in boarding schools. In part, this was another strategy for coercing tribes to give up territory. Many children didn’t survive the schools, which were often run by Christian organizations. Those who did were forced to give up their languages, religious beliefs, and traditions. But chestnuts still inhabit Indigenous creation stories and religious calendars, and Patterson believes that a reciprocal relationship can be reestablished between Indigenous nations and the tree. He’s just not convinced that releasing the transgenic chestnut will restore those connections.

The Tuscarora Nation, of which Patterson is an enrolled citizen, is one of six Indigenous nations that today comprise the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, also known as the Iroquois Confederacy. The Haudenosaunee creation story, Patterson said, is “a cycle of loss, grieving, and recovery all the time, just like ecological succession.” By creating a genetically engineered chestnut, Patterson argues, scientists are avoiding the part of the cycle where people grieve and learn from their mistakes.

On the timescale of Haudenosaunee history, the losses still feel new. “It’s been 100 years — but that’s not long,” Patterson observed. Then he reconsidered. “That’s long for research scientists, or a plant technology innovator. It’s too long.”

To Patterson, what’s not being restored — treaty rights to access and care for plants and animals on the landscape — is telling.

“If you want to restore this, like, ‘primordial’ forest, don’t you also want to restore our relationship with that forest?” he asked. “Like — what’s your relationship to a transgenic chestnut?”

An undated archival photo shows a grove of blighted American chestnut trees in Page County, Virginia. (Photo: Library of Congress)

By the time Patterson first saw Ernest Smith’s artwork in the early 1980s, the Tuscarora Nation was going through a cultural renaissance. Patterson’s mother made her children speak Tuscarora at home to keep the language alive. His relatives participated in political acts such as the occupation of Wounded Knee by Indigenous people from across the US, in part to demand that the federal government uphold treaty obligations to the Lakota people. Murals on the walls of Patterson’s state-run elementary school showed Tuscarora people hunting, fishing, trapping, and gathering, even as non-Indigenous people contested those traditional activities outside of reservation lands, from the local to the national level.

Over time, Patterson was taught that the Haudenosaunee Confederacy never ceded its “reserved rights,” or rights that are not explicitly mentioned in treaties or court cases. Today, the Confederacy maintains that it still holds rights to care for and access the species growing on its ancestral homelands and in ancestral waterways — even in territory ceded to settlers. But both the state of New York and the federal government have chipped away at those reserved rights through court cases, and often won. In this legal context, harvesting chestnuts, like the family in Smith’s painting, is not only a cultural practice; it’s an exercise of tribal sovereignty.

Patterson works to rebuild tribal access to many plants and animals that are culturally important for Haudenosaunee peoples. Because those plants and animals often live outside of reservation lands, his work can be difficult. New York State maintains that, except on reservation lands, Indigenous peoples have the same rights as non-Indigenous peoples, and have to follow the same regulations regarding when, where, and how much they hunt, fish, or gather, such as hunting seasons or fishing licenses — regulations the Tuscarora have been fighting in court for decades. So to Patterson, the question of whether to grow transgenic trees isn’t really the most urgent one. He’s more concerned about upholding a way of life that restores traditional ecological relationships.

“Aside from the whole issue of being transgenic, this is just about access and care of place,” he told me. In New York’s state lands, he added, there are almost no provisions for gathering medicines, collecting food, or growing food in traditional territories. Yet that reciprocity helped chestnuts spread and thrive across thousands of miles and thousands of years.

The Haudenosaunee Confederacy began making treaties with white settlers more than 400 years ago. The two-row wampum belt, made of rows of white beads run through with two rows of purple beads, documents a 1613 agreement between the Haudenosaunee and Dutch settlers to live in parallel, not interfering with each other’s ways of life. In 1794, during George Washington’s presidency, the Haudenosaunee and the United States signed the Treaty of Canandaigua, affirming the Confederacy’s sovereignty on its territory. In the Nonintercourse Act, a series of statutes passed in the late 1700s and early 1800s, Congress also barred states from purchasing lands from Indigenous nations without federal approval. When states’ land purchases are approved, Indigenous nations don’t lose any other rights on those lands, such as hunting, fishing, or gathering, unless the treaty specifically cedes those rights, explained Monte Mills, who directs the Native American Law Center at the University of Washington.

Nonetheless, states including New York still try to assert control over tribes or tribal resources, and in many cases, succeed. In one 2005 case, Patterson himself was the defendant, charged by the state of New York for ice fishing without properly labeling his gear. Patterson brought a copy of the Treaty of Canandiagua to court, explaining to the judge that as a member of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, he had the right to fish in the state park, formerly Seneca territory, without regulation by the state of New York. Patterson lost that case.

The Supreme Court of the United States has also limited Haudenosaunee reserved rights, though from a different angle. In City of Sherrill v. Oneida Indian Nation of New York, decided just a few months before Patterson’s case, the Supreme Court ruled that although the Oneida Nation, which is part of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, never gave up certain rights on its ancestral land, it had essentially waited too long to exercise them.

This particular case centered around whether tribes had to pay local and state taxes on ancestral land that they bought back on the real estate market. In the majority opinion, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg wrote that both Indian law and the need to treat people equally “preclude the Tribe from rekindling embers of sovereignty that long ago grew cold.” According to Mills, the Supreme Court essentially said that Oneida had let too much time pass to assert its sovereign rights, and therefore had lost them.

“It’s one of the worst decisions from foundational Indian law court,” Mills said. Although the case was about property taxes, Mills said that it could be a precedent for preventing Indigenous nations from exercising reserved rights. “The state would probably point to Sherrill and say, ‘No, you can’t have those rights, because you haven’t asserted them for so long,’” he added.

But Mills also pointed out that sometimes, tribes and states have been able to work together to come up with mutually beneficial ways for tribes to exercise their reserved rights. If states are interested in recognizing tribal sovereignty, he said, there are models out there for how to do it.

For its part, the state of New York has been working recently to improve its relations with Indigenous nations. In 2022, the state and the federal government agreed to return more than 1,000 acres to the Onondaga Nation. That same year, Governor Kathy Hochul’s administration created an Office of Indian Nation Affairs in the Department of Environmental Conservation, the same department that 20 years previously ticketed Patterson and fought him in court over reserved fishing rights. Peter Reuben, who is enrolled in the Tonawanda Seneca Nation, is currently serving as the first director of the new office.

To Reuben, the creation of his position by the department “really shows that they are serious about us,” he said. Reuben is working to create a productive and respectful consultation process between the region’s Indigenous nations and the state of New York on environmental issues, and to hash out agreements over hunting, fishing, and treaty rights.

“If it’s in the state’s interest — which it seems like it would be — to have more support and additional resources for natural resource management, then why not work with tribal folks to support a program where they’re able to continue to do what they said they’ve been doing all along?” Mills said. “It’s probably going to lead to a better end result anyway.”

Chestnuts were a reliable source of nutrition for Indigenous people. (Photo: Shutterstock)

For now, while transgenic American chestnut trees are still highly regulated, one of the best places to see one is at the Lafayette Road Experimental Field Station on the southern outskirts of Syracuse. Powell met me there on a sunny July morning two summers ago.

On fields that glowed bean-pod green in the upstate humidity, thousands of chestnut trees grew in varying stages of reproduction, healing, and death. White paper bags festooned the taller trees, their flowers covered to manage fertilization.

The transgenic chestnuts contain wheat DNA that lets the tree create an enzyme that fights off Cryphonectria parasitica, the fungal blight. The blight cankers on these trees don’t grow big enough to girdle them.

Rows of strappy transgenic saplings, some as tall as Powell, waited in holding plots fenced to keep out hungry deer. “We’re planting them on very close spacing, and we can only hold them for about three years, and then they get root-bound,” Powell said. As the permitting process drags on, time is running out to replant these young trees.

I asked Powell why he thought restoring the chestnut was important. Chestnuts produced a stable crop of nuts for wildlife, because they flowered late enough in the year that they escaped flower-killing frosts, he said. “It was just an important part of our ecosystem, and for our heritage, too,” he added. “The railroads that were made in the East used ties that were made out of chestnuts because they were rot resistant. And people used to say, chestnuts used to follow you from cradle to grave, because the wood was used in everything from cradles to coffins.”

Although he’s retired, Powell is working to create a research center that would develop transgenic versions of other native species going extinct from blights, insects, and other introduced pests. He imagined growing transgenic versions of everything from elms, killed off by Dutch elm disease and the elm yellows pathogen, to ash trees, which are currently being devoured by iridescent green beetles called emerald ash borers.

People who hope to use technology to resurrect extinct species, whether the American chestnut or even the woolly mammoth, are sometimes considered ecomodernists. According to Jason Delborne, who studies biotechnology and environmental policy at North Carolina State University (where I previously worked, in the English department), “There are people who are environmentalists at their core, but sick of losing, and interested in the promise of technology to solve the ecological and environmental problems we are facing.” Part of that interest, he said, comes from a sense of responsibility to “fix what you broke.”

Indeed, Jamie Van Clief, the southern regional science coordinator for The American Chestnut Foundation, explained to me that she got interested in working for the organization because her field, environmental science, was depressing.

“There’s a lot of disaster, there’s a lot of dismay, and to have this foundation with such a positive and impactful mission just attracted me immensely,” she said. “To be able to work towards something when it kind of feels hopeless sometimes — and to be part of restoration on the scale that we’re doing — is incredible.”

As Powell and I gazed at a diseased, non-engineered chestnut sapling, its yellowing leaves hanging limp in the sun, I reflected that eastern forests weren’t exactly flush with any other giant trees. Almost all old growth has fallen to human endeavors. Conservation efforts also have to take into consideration climate change, which may shift suitable chestnut habitat north into Canada — and shift plant diseases’ habitats as well. Root rot, or Phytophthora cinnamomi, is another introduced pathogen. It only infects chestnuts in the South right now, because root rot dies during winter freezes. The American Chestnut Foundation estimates root rot will spread to New England in the next 50 years as the region warms. Plus, there are few places available for a new chestnut forest to grow, except perhaps forest remediation sites such as old Appalachian coal mines. The fact is, releasing blight-resistant chestnuts into the wild won’t guarantee them a landscape where they can survive.

Because biotechnology alone can’t restore the American chestnut to the numbers that its supporters are envisioning, Powell anticipates relying on citizen scientists. After deregulation, he imagines The American Chestnut Foundation sending transgenic pollen to interested people, who could pollinate the flowers of wild mother trees growing nearby. They could plant the nuts the trees grow or pass them on to other chestnut fans.

The health and ecological risks of introducing the transgenic chestnut into the wild are likely to be low, according to Delborne; its signature wheat gene is commonly found in many major food crops. But at heart, Delborne argues, the debate isn’t just about chestnuts. “It’s also about a category of technology that could find its way into the world,” he said.

Even if the chestnut recovery doesn’t work out, the approval of the engineered chestnut for unregulated growth could open the door to a new era of biotechnology in US forestry — such as a pest-resistant poplar tree, which kills forest insects by expressing genes from the bacterium Bacillus thuringiensis, and already grows commercially in other countries.

The debate about blight-resistant chestnuts isn’t really about trees or even genetic engineering; it’s about who gets to make decisions on the land. Conservation is framed in European cultures as an objective goal, but it’s a worldview that other people may not share, explained Katie Barnhill-Dilling, a North Carolina State University social scientist who researches environmental decision-making. “Some of the people I’ve talked to from the Haudenosaunee Environmental Task Force would contest that humans are here to accept the gifts as they are now,” she said.

Some Indigenous nations in the chestnut’s historic range, such as the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, or EBCI, are considering growing genetically engineered chestnuts on their reservation lands after the trees are deregulated. To EBCI Secretary of Agriculture and Natural Resources Joey Owle, restoring the American chestnut is another way for the tribe to exercise its sovereign rights, more than a century after the tree’s disappearance.

“It’s one project of many projects that we work on to enhance our sovereignty as a tribe, to work to establish a culturally significant resource that provided a bountiful harvest for our ancestors and wildlife,” he said. “It’s just cool to be part of it.” Based on feedback from EBCI committee members, Owle said that planting transgenic trees, while an option, is the “last option that we would like to pursue” to restore the species. For now, the EBCI is scouting out wild chestnuts that survived the blight, and planting hybrid trees on its land in partnership with The American Chestnut Foundation.

Photo: Shutterstock

On a crisp fall day a couple of years ago, Patterson and Powell arranged for around 15 people to gather chestnuts in upstate New York. The grove grew on a hilly slope on state land that used to be an agricultural field. “It was just a beautiful little spot,” Patterson recalled. The 12 or so American chestnuts were young; Patterson estimated they were perhaps 20 years old and no more than 25 feet tall.

The group, a mix of Haudenosaunee Confederacy members and non-Indigenous scientists, toted assorted equipment to gather the prickly nuts: ladders, homemade pickers, plastic buckets, sturdy leather shoes, and gloves. But first, they stood in a circle in the grove and discussed the future of the American chestnuts. According to Patterson, things quickly became adversarial.

Powell and Patterson had long been collegial: Patterson first tasted an American chestnut after he microwaved some that Powell handed him in the campus building where they both had offices. Meanwhile, Powell’s students learned from Patterson about the parallel expulsion of Indigenous peoples from their lands and the disappearance of chestnut trees.

Powell has constantly reached out to tribes for input and to understand their perspectives, Patterson said. And unlike other biotechnology researchers, Powell has focused on technology for environmental restoration, not for personal profit. “I admire the idea that this is about technology for restoration — whatever that is,” Patterson added.

But their relationships with plants remain fundamentally different. For example, Powell has talked about keeping the price of the transgenic chestnuts low, just to raise enough money to cover the costs of getting them out to people. In contrast, when I asked Patterson why he never bought or sold seeds from traditional food plants for his home garden, he sounded incredulous. “That’s like selling people,” he said. “That’s life. … Why would you sell somebody?”

That fall day, Patterson began worrying that if the restoration succeeds and transgenic chestnuts grow across the land, releasing pollen into the wind, people won’t be able to tell transgenic trees apart from non-transgenic trees. Scientists in the group assured everyone that in the future, people would be able to tell the trees apart through genetic testing.

“It was this privileged standpoint, which is, ‘Well, technology will figure it out for us.’ But it’s not as if I’m going to hand that technology to my son or nephews or my grandsons before they go off to gather,” Patterson said. “It just seemed like it was so simple to them.” He wondered why the non-Indigenous scientists and conservationists had been able to plant this grove on state land in the first place, when his nation was largely prevented from accessing or caring for plants there.

The group got tense. “The conversation turned to fear, and to moral opposition,” Patterson recalled. Patterson realized this standoff wasn’t the right frame of mind for the trip. “Well,” he exclaimed, “let’s go pick some nuts!”

As he collected chestnuts, Patterson couldn’t help but think of Ernest Smith’s painting. “It was a fulfillment of that scene,” he told me. Patterson reflected on his ancestors, wondering how they’d gathered the prickly nuts without his contemporary tools. He felt that by collecting chestnuts, he was doing what he was supposed to do. He hoped that in the future, he’d be able to find more wild chestnuts and organize more gathering trips, taking care to bring Haudenosaunee kids along. But he could see that the masting trees were struggling with the blight and weren’t going to survive much longer. Some of the young trees were already more than half dead, leaves brown and wilted.

He and his wife, who also attended the trip, were struck by a realization: If the federal government deregulated the blight-resistant trees, letting their pollen float freely through the air, this trip might be one of the last times they could gather wild American chestnuts with certainty.

This story was originally published by Grist. Sign up for Grist’s weekly newsletter here. Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Learn more at Grist.org.

The post The American Chestnut Tree is Coming Back. Who is It For? appeared first on Modern Farmer.

It was the winter of 2014 and Andres, like many other hazelnut growers in the Fraser Valley region of British Columbia, was destroying the last of his hazelnut trees lost to Eastern Filbert Blight. Burning is the best way to remove infected trees, according to guidelines from B.C.’s Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Fisheries. Still, it was an emotional experience for Andres. “Getting rid of the old trees…it took a lot of tears.” 

Peter Andres burned his hazelnut trees at his former farm in Agassiz, BC. Photography courtesy of Peter Andres.

Eastern Filbert Blight, a fungal disease spread by windblown spores that ultimately destroys infected trees, had spread from the east to west coast of North America in the late 1960s, initially into Washington and Oregon, then eventually into BC. The blight was first detected in BC in 2002;  immediately, it was a race against the clock to slow its spread. Andres, then president of the BC Hazelnut Growers Association, worked with a team of growers to map impacted farms, trying to predict which would be hit next. They monitored orchards for symptoms and cut down infected trees. But as the fungus kills trees from the inside out for at least a year before they show symptoms, it was a losing battle. 

The goal then shifted to securing a supply of blight-resistant trees for replanting. By the time the fungus reached BC, Oregon State University had already been breeding blight-resistant varieties for more than three decades in an effort to save Oregon’s official state nut. A quarantine was put in place by the Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA) in 1975 to try to keep the disease out of BC. But the quarantine also prevented the import of these new blight-resistant trees from coming into the country. It took several years, but Andres and other growers were finally given the green light to bring tree tissue culture across the border in sterile test tubes. Using this culture, trees were cloned in a lab and raised by Nature Tech Nursery until ready to plant. Andres’ orchard was among the first in BC to trial the new varieties in 2011. 

Rows of blight-resistant trees on Andres’s farm. Photography by Peter Andres.

Despite these efforts, the blight decimated the BC hazelnut industry. Hazelnut production declined from more than one million pounds pre-blight to around 25,000 pounds by 2017, a loss of nearly 98 percent. Andres recalls walking politicians through ravaged hazelnut orchards, making a case for government financial support to help keep the industry alive. “It’s about food security,” he explained at the time. As Andres notes, hazelnuts are the only nut grown commercially in BC, which produces approximately 90 percent Canada’s hazelnuts.  

After six years, the BC hazelnut industry is finally in a period of renewal. After an initial push to attract new growers and expand the number of acres planted, and with support through the BC Hazelnut Renewal Program launched in 2018, hazelnut production is steadily increasing. The new varieties from Oregon have proven not only blight resistant but also higher yielding. “We’ve got nuts rolling off the fields,” says Zachary Fleming, president of the BC Hazelnut Growers Association. In 2021, BC produced more than 70,000 pounds of hazelnuts on around 350 acres. He’s hopeful that BC will be able to meet, if not surpass, pre-blight production levels within a decade. 

The BC hazelnut industry is not a significant player in global production, nor does it wish to be. According to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, Turkey is the largest supplier of hazelnuts, accounting for 62 percent of global production in 2020, followed by Italy and the United States. In North America, most hazelnuts are produced in Oregon’s Willamette Valley, with some production in Washington and BC. Oregon accounts for around 5 percent of the global production with nearly 100,000 acres planted (68,000 bearing acres in 2022). In comparison, BC hopes to reach 1,000 acres. 

Photography by Peter Andres.

Ferrero Group, which makes Nutella, Ferrero Rocher and Kinder Surprise, buys around a quarter of the hazelnuts grown globally and has been looking at Canada to diversify its suppliers. While the BC Hazelnut Growers Association is open to the idea of supplying to Ferrero in the future, its focus for now is the local market. As Fleming explains, “There is enough global supply, so we aren’t looking to be a huge exporter. We want to produce BC products for BC.” 

Fleming estimates that there are now around 100 growers in BC, and most of them are new. “There are a few [industry] pioneers out there who have replanted, perhaps less than five,” says Fleming. “It’s been a complete restart… so there’s a generational knowledge gap.” This knowledge gap is compounded by having to work with new varieties, which Fleming says might as well be entirely different species. “The first field I helped plant was five years ago, and we’ve made five years of mistakes.” 

In addition to replanting, the lack of processing capacity was another hurdle faced by the BC hazelnut industry. With the supply of hazelnuts having dried up, the two former processing facilities in the Fraser Valley were forced to shut down. The call was answered by the Hooge family of Fraser Valley Hazelnuts Ltd. The property purchased by the family to expand its poultry production happened to be the site of a former processing facility. “All the growers that had replanted came to us and said ‘hey, can you start it up again?”recalls Kevin Hooge. “The whole future of the industry seemed to hinge on that decision.” So, the family dusted off the old equipment and got to work, gradually expanding its operation into a full processing facility that now services the entire BC hazelnut industry. Since opening in 2016, the plant has played a vital role in helping new and existing farmers get their hazelnuts to local customers. 

Peter Andres at his local farmer’s market. Photography courtesy of Peter Andres.

After clearing his fields, Andres needed a fresh start. In 2016, he purchased a new farm where he planted blight-resistant trees. Eager to pass on his nearly four decades of knowledge to the next generation of growers, Andres helped form the Hazelnut Growers Collective. Today, Andres can be found at the Vancouver Farmers Market selling hazelnuts under the banner of the Hazelnut Growers Collective. He first sold hazelnuts at the market out of the back of his pickup truck on a busy Thanksgiving weekend in 1997. After the blight hit his farm, Peter thought he would have to say goodbye to his market customers forever. Through the collective, growers co-ordinate their market attendance, prices and packaging. This means that their customers have a reliable supply, while allowing the growers greater flexibility. 

The renewal of the BC hazelnut industry has required persevering farmers, enterprising processors, teams of researchers, cross-border collaborations and government support. Andres reflects on the last 15 tumultuous years “People always ask me, ‘Aren’t you sad that all your trees died?’ I’m sad, but in a way, I’m not sorry. Instead of us old fogies with the old farms and old varieties, we now have new ones. The industry got reinvigorated.”  

The post Bringing Hazelnuts Back from the Brink appeared first on Modern Farmer.

Render of Indigo Commons courtesy of CultivateLAND

The pair ran that farm for three years as Houston built up around them. Eventually, the outskirts of the city were encroaching on their farm, and the pair ran into bureaucratic issues. They wanted to renovate restrooms for the growing farm team, but they weren’t able to get the right building approvals. If they wanted to improve the road on their property, they were looking at hundreds of thousands of dollars; they weren’t making that even with the success of their CSA. 

And then, Hurricane Harvey hit in 2017. While the nearby Brazos River didn’t flood, the guys lost everything. All of their crops. They took it as a sign to rethink their plans and how they were making use of the land. If developments were going up around them left and right, well, they could jump on that bandwagon, too. But they would do it as farmers first, part of the recent trend of farmers rethinking how best to use their land in the face of uncertain economic futures.

That’s when Indigo was born. 

“We’re urbanists at heart, as well as the farmers,” says Snodgrass. With that in mind, Snodgrass and Garrett planned out a new community, using their existing land as a base. The goal is to have 750 residential homes, commercial and public areas, even a lake—all centered around a 42-acre working farm. 

Render of Indigo Commons courtesy of CultivateLAND

After a few months of grading and readying the area, they broke ground at Indigo two weeks ago. This summer, the water and sewer lines will get installed, along with the critical infrastructure and paving. Then, in the fall, builders will start on the homes, with the grand opening currently scheduled for early 2024. 

Throughout the building process, the pair says the goal is to weave nature and agriculture into the fabric of the neighborhood from the ground up. For example, the lake is also the drainage facility of the community. “We’re investing more than you would into a typical drainage facility, in order to make a wildlife habitat for birds and fish,” says Snodgrass. Investing in the natural benefits of the lake in turn “make it a more engaging amenity for residents who want to go there, for birdwatching, and they can fish in the lake, they can ride in a kayak, instead of it just being a typical retention pond.” 

But it’s the 42-acre production farm that will anchor the community. Six acres will be devoted to vegetable production, with community plots and farmer’s markets. The other 36 acres will house livestock, both broiler chickens and hens, and traditional row crops, with some fun additions such as watermelon thrown in. If this sounds like a big undertaking, it is. But, for Garrett, it’s also exciting. “Farmers by nature are stubborn,” he says. “When we started our development journey, we were both stubborn. And we knew we were just going to have to do all of these things to accomplish our vision, to build the community that we’d be proud of.” 

Render of Indigo Commons courtesy of CultivateLAND

While not everyone who lives in the community will necessarily be connected to the farm, residents will have access to the community garden plots and the vegetables produced onsite through a farmer’s market. Snodgrass and Garrett hope that many of the farm’s workers would also choose to live in the community and that people want to participate in community gardening projects. 

That means, the guys say, that they want to make the units affordable within the growing Houston real-estate market and provide enough of a community and active neighborhood to entice people. They are looking at building vertically, committing to two- or three-story homes, rather than sprawling bungalows on huge lots. “Then you can condense everyone into a smaller space, and they can then walk to everything they need to get to. And we can reserve huge portions of the property for wildlife habitat and agriculture,” says Snodgrass. It’s a form of conservation development, where city planners start at the center (a main street or a community square) and build out from there, keeping in mind the facilities people will need as the neighborhood grows. 

But when they initially tried to explain their vision to financial planners, there was resistance. “Our biggest challenge every step of the way was financial people and city managers saying ‘well, where has this been done before?’ We think we can be that new model,” says Snodgrass. “We’re farmers. We’re focused on the biodiversity within our habitats, interplanting, crop rotations and all those things that really [impact] how soil systems work. And we want to get our soil into healthy cycles. We take the same approach when we look at development, and I think it is shocking to some people.” 

Still, Snodgrass says he and Garrett have worked hard to maintain their optimism and ethos throughout the project so far, and they will continue into the future. Instead, with this first agriculture-focused community as a model, they can tweak the formula and keep going. “Indigo will not be our last community.”

The post Building an Agri-hood: When the Development Revolves Around the Farm appeared first on Modern Farmer.

Residents packed town hall meetings to tell elected officials not to put the facility in their backyards.

“Almost all of the feedback was negative,” says Greene County Commissioner Brandon Huddleson. Among the many objections was the project’s proposed location. “It was on 1,500 acres of prime farmland.” 

Greene County has some of the best soil in the state for crop production, and residents didn’t want to see fertile fields disappear into a solar farm. Huddleson stressed that officials in Greene County aren’t opposed to solar energy, but they wished that solar developers could find a better location.

The Ohio Power Siting Board rejected the project in the face of overwhelming community opposition. While the siting board, which approves energy projects, has approved 65,000 acres of solar development and has another 27,000 acres in development, the alternative power source faces fierce opposition in corners of the state blanketed with pastures and crop fields.

Last year, the siting board rejected two other solar arrays based in part on worries over farmland, says siting board spokesperson Matt Butler. 

“When you’re losing that farmland, there’s certainly a lot of pushback,” says Peggy Hall, an associate professor and field specialist in agricultural and resource law at the Ohio State University, who tracks cases involving rural solar energy.

Ohio is hardly alone.

As utility companies and state governments across the United States look to decarbonize power grids, the struggle against catastrophic climate change is coming face-to-face with the defense of agriculture.

With land prices already spiking in states such as Ohio, farmers worry that competition with deep-pocketed utility companies will drive up land values and price them out of their most lucrative fields.

Photography by Shutterstock.

Competition for prime land

In a 2022 report, the American Farmland Trust estimated that solar development will take up around 2.5 million acres in the United States by 2040. Of those acres, 83% will be farmland and roughly half will be the most valuable farmland. 

It’s a small number compared to the nation’s nearly 893 million acres of farmland, and studies have generally found that solar projects in rural areas barely move land prices. But as more lucrative cropland is swallowed up by solar and wind developers, farmers worry their best assets are disappearing.

“Whenever you reduce the land base, you’re increasing competition for that land,” says Hall. “When you start getting some of these numbers thrown in that landowners are receiving for these projects [solar developers pay between $250 and $1,000 per acre per year], you start worrying about what kind of impact that is going to have on land values.”

Prime farmland is often an ideal space for solar arrays, say experts. Farmers and solar developers both need land that’s relatively flat, and the most valuable fields also tend to sit close to the transmission lines to which solar arrays need to connect.

Farmland “has been cleared of rocks and trees already,” says Francis Pullaro, executive director of Renew Northeast, an advocacy group that works with environmentalists and renewable energy developers. “And if farmland is close to a substation, that lowers the cost of the project by shortening the distance between the project and where it has to interconnect” with the power grid.

Growers—most of whom lease at least a portion of their land—say they don’t have the resources to outbid wealthy solar developers. Illinois farmer Jim Reed says he hesitated when approached about a solar array on his Piatt County farm.

“Piatt County has some of the best farm ground in the whole world,” he says. “It was the top-ranked county in the entire nation and soybean yield with the best soils anywhere, so it would be a shame to cover up that dirt with something that takes away from the food production.”

On the other side of the equation, solar development can keep farmers in business.

“The ability to site renewables on farmland can be a really important source of additional income that can be relied upon during drought years or when commodity prices are down,” says Gregory Wetstone, CEO of the American Council for Renewable Energy.

And with time running out to avert the worst impacts of climate change, scientists and environmentalists say that solar arrays need to go somewhere. 

Buckeye state opposition

Last year, Ohio had around 13.5 million acres of farmland, a dip of 100,000 acres from the year before, according to the USDA.

While only 92,000 acres (less than one percent) are dedicated to solar development in Ohio, the loss of significant acreage can be devastating to individual communities, says Hall. “If you start taking away thousands of acres out of agricultural production, you are affecting the rural economy.”

And solar is just one of many developments encroaching on agriculture, says Dale Arnold, director of energy, utility and local government policy for the Ohio Farm Bureau. Developers have for years built housing, industrial facilities and commercial properties on former cropland. However, solar grabs headlines and attention because it takes up hundreds or thousands of acres at once, as opposed to a housing project that is built one house at a time.

“You need to look at all four corners of the box,” says Arnold.

The three solar developments rejected by the siting board targeted rural communities with sparse populations and roads abutted by corn and soybean fields on both sides.

Public interest is among the criteria the siting board must consider before approval; the three projects could not meet that standard with unanimous opposition from local governments, says Butler.

Rural communities opposed to solar got an assist from Ohio’s General Assembly in 2021, when the legislature approved a bill that gave townships the right to summarily reject renewable energy projects.

Republicans in the overwhelmingly conservative state legislature cited the need to return more control to local governments, but they never granted townships the right to reject oil and gas development.

Resistance to rural solar cuts across ideological lines. Oregon, a predominantly blue state, passed a law in 2019 restricting solar development on prime farmland.

However, support for farmers who lease their land to solar developers also knows no political party.

In conservative heartland states such as Iowa, property rights have generally won out over skepticism toward renewable energy.

“The policy we have right now reflects back to the landowners,” says Denny Friest, president of the Iowa Corn Growers Association and a corn and soybean farmer. “They have the right to do what they want [with their property].”

Photography by Shutterstock

Seeking middle ground

In the face of opposition, clean energy advocates seek paths that satisfy farmers, developers and environmentalists.

Rather than restricting solar projects on prime farmland, the state of Connecticut requires its siting board to give extra consideration to proposals on valuable cropland. State legislators see the law as a compromise that allows for renewable energy development but accounts for agricultural concerns.

“I think there is a happy medium to be found and I hope this is it,” says Connecticut state representative Joe Gresko.

However, not everyone is happy with the law, which makes the process more expensive for solar developers and doesn’t similarly restrict other forms of electricity, says Pullaro, with Renew Northeast. 

As solar proliferates, farmers have found ways to coexist with solar developers, grazing cattle or growing specialty crops that require less sunshine underneath raised panels. “We really need to highlight that you can have renewable development without giving up the opportunity to farm a ranch simultaneously,” says Wetsone.

Solar panels on barns and unusable soil is another possible middle ground.

Keith Bishop, owner and CEO of Bishop’s Orchards near Guilford, Connecticut, has two solar arrays on his farm, one on a ground mount and another on the roof of one of his buildings.

The ground-mounted solar takes out around an acre of ground, although it was on a hillside with a granite wedge, so it did not impact the orchard’s production. But Bishop cautioned that he could only install so much solar before impacting his crop yields. “I would like to put in more, but we’re limited over where we can do it.”

Resistance in some parts of the country may naturally wane as solar arrays become more common and farmers gain interest in the projects. “I tell farmers ‘you need to be involved in those discussions,’” says Arnold. “Because if you’re not at the table, you will be part of the menu.”

The post Solar Projects on Farmland Meet Community Opposition in the Midwest appeared first on Modern Farmer.

Beyond the fields of berries, grass seed, and wheat at Jacque Duyck Jones’s farm in Oregon, she can see distant plumes of exhaust spewing from factories in Hillsboro, just outside Portland. Years ago, Jones and her family didn’t worry much about industry creeping closer to their land. A 50-year-old state law that restricts urban growth, rare in the United States, kept smokestacks and strip malls away.

But a national push to make semiconductors — the microchips that help power modern electronics, from dishwashers to electric vehicles — has prompted Oregon lawmakers to lift some of those restrictions. Keen to tap into $52 billion that Congress earmarked last year in the CHIPS and Science Act, Oregon legislators last week passed a bipartisan bill aimed at enticing chip manufacturers to set up shop in the state, in part by allowing them to convert some of the country’s richest farmland into factories. The bill gives Governor Tina Kotek, a Democrat, authority through the end of next year to extend urban development boundaries, a process currently subject to appeals that can be drawn out for years.

“That’s like granting divine power,” said Ben Williams, president of Friends of French Prairie, a rural land advocacy group. Under the bill, the governor can select two rural sites of more than 500 acres and six smaller ones for development related to the semiconductor industry. That revision to the state’s rigid land-use system has drawn pushback from farmers and conservation organizations. They say the legislation endangers farms, soil health, and carbon sequestration efforts. One potential site for a factory would pave over rural land within a mile of the Duyck family’s land.

“I am worried,” Jones said. “When [the CHIPS Act] was passed at the federal level, here in Oregon we never imagined it would result in basically a choice. I would have never imagined it to have been a threat to farmland in Oregon,” she added, noting that she doesn’t oppose the industry, only building factories on agricultural lands.

With bipartisan support, President Joe Biden signed the CHIPS Act last year intending to jumpstart semiconductor manufacturing in the United States, where 37 percent of the world’s chips were made in 1990, compared to only 12 percent in 2020, according to the Semiconductor Industry Association. Politicians from across the political spectrum lauded the CHIPS Act as a job creator and a way to shore up the semiconductor supply chain during a global shortage.

Semiconductors are in microwaves and smartphones, but they are also essential for renewable energy technology. They’re key to solar panels, wind energy systems, heat pumps, microgrids, electric vehicles, and more. In a report published last year, the U.S. Department of Energy called semiconductors “a cornerstone technology of the overall decarbonization strategy” and said a lower-carbon future requires “explosive growth” of both conventional and more advanced chips.

In Oregon, cashing in on the federal bill won’t necessarily mean bolstering a domestic supply of wind turbines or solar panels, which are mostly manufactured in China. In large part, the chips made in the state, which is already a hub for the industry, are used in computers and high-tech products like electronic gaming and artificial intelligence, according to Arief Budiman, director of the Oregon Renewable Energy Center.

Supporters of the Oregon bill say capturing the CHIPS Act windfall could create tens of thousands of jobs and more than $1.5 billion in local and state tax revenue.

“Imagine electric and autonomous vehicles, biotech, clean tech, and others doing research and advanced manufacturing here,” the Oregon Semiconductor Competitiveness Task Force said in a report last August. “In short, acting now could spark a boom that lasts another 30 years.”

To stay attractive to industry giants like Intel, which already has an Oregon campus but recently chose to build a $20 billion mega-factory in Ohio (to the dismay of Oregon’s elected officials), the state needs to make more industrial land available, the task force said. It described “no development ready sites of the size needed to attract a major semiconductor investment, or to support larger size suppliers.”

Rural land-use advocates largely reject that argument. One group — 1,000 Friends of Oregon — has listed several existing industrially zoned sites that could be used for chip factories. The Oregon Farm Bureau, which opposes the land-use provisions in the state bill, also argues there’s already enough available land within urban growth areas to build new factories, said Lauren Poor, the bureau’s vice president of government and legal affairs. “We’re not opposed to the chips bill, generally speaking,” Poor said. But “once we develop these sites, we can’t get that soil back.”

Wet winters and dry, warm summers help the state’s growers produce some 200 crops, ranging from hops to hay. Oregon dominates other states in blackberry, crimson clover, and rhubarb production, and almost all of the country’s hazelnuts are grown there. “We owe that to the diversity of our climate and our soils, which is one of the reasons we’re very protective of our very unique land-use system,” Poor added.

The state’s land-use restrictions are rooted in the country’s first law establishing urban growth boundaries, which former Governor Tom McCall, a Republican, signed in 1973. The law, aimed at limiting urban sprawl, allows cities to expand only with approval from a state commission. A decision to move boundaries can be appealed multiple times at both the county and state levels, Williams said. Under the new bill, challenges to the governor’s chip-factory designations will be considered only by the state supreme court.

“It’s very detrimental to expand outside the urban growth boundaries,” said Jones, the farmer. She worries building chip factories on farmland could increase nearby property values, making arable land harder for farmers to buy or rent, and could supplant not only rows of crops but essential farm infrastructure like seed-cleaning sites.

Aside from tweaking Oregon’s special land-use laws, state legislators are considering a bill that would fund nature-based climate solutions, like storing carbon in agricultural soil. Poor said the two bills seem to run counter to each other. “What do you want from us? Do you want us to sequester your carbon, or do you want to pave over our farmlands?”

This article originally appeared in Grist. Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Learn more at Grist.org.

The post In Oregon, a Microchip Gold Rush Could Pave Over Long-Protected Farmland appeared first on Modern Farmer.

The 2017 census was released on Thursday—it takes a little while to aggregate all the data, hence the delay—and it contains both good and bad news, though if we’re being honest, there’s more bad than good. One major difference this year is how the census defines who works on a farm; previously there could be only one principal operator of a farm, while this survey allows for multiples. That’s good for accuracy, though it might skew some numbers when compared to previous years.

The total number of farms is down 3.2 percent from the 2012 census, as is the total amount of land dedicated to farms and ranches. Yet the average size of farmland is up, meaning that the few farms that do exist are bigger—either expanding, or the smaller farms just haven’t been able to survive.

Of the over two million farms in the United States, just over 105,000 of them combine for 75 percent of sales, which goes along with the idea that consolidation is creating fewer, more powerful, larger farms.

Average income is down two percent; the average yearly income of an American farmer is now $43,053, which is below the average of American workers in general. The average age of the American farmer remains concerningly high, increasing by 1.2 years to 57.5.

The number of female farmers is up significantly, from about 970,000 in 2012 to 1.23 million in 2017. But this is one of those figures that could be skewed by the new rules: before, when a family farm was required to name a single principal operator, it’s possible that a man was chosen by default. Now, women might be more likely to be added as a farmer—but these aren’t necessarily new female farmers.

There is some good news. The number of farms using renewable energy has more than doubled. Internet access—more rare than you might think in rural areas—is up, too, from 69.6 percent to 75.4 percent. The number of organic farms increased from about 14,000 to about 18,000, but the amount of sales in organic produce has more than doubled. And small farms are increasing in number, along with the massive farms—it’s the middle size that’s being boxed out. (That one might not be good news, exactly.)

You can check out the full census here.

The post Fewer Farms, Smaller Farms, and Lower Incomes: The Agriculture Census Is Out appeared first on Modern Farmer.

Alarmed by this trend, environmentalists back in the 1970s developed the idea to pay retiring farmers to preserve their land in a natural state rather than sell out to real estate developers. Since then, thousands of nonprofit “land trusts” have sprung up to support the cause, 29 states now have funding programs to support them, and the federal government has offered a hefty tax break to landowners who sign a “conservation easement,” which is legalese for a document that prevents a parcel from being paved over, in perpetuity, no matter who buys it.

For the most part, the movement has been a success. So far, it’s kept more than 56 million acres out of developers’ hands over the past four decades. But some in agricultural circles are concerned that conservation land is also being kept out of the hands of future farmers since traditional conservation easements don’t require the land to be productively farmed, only preserved.

Holly Rippon-Butler, land access program director for the National Young Farmers Coalition (NYFC), a group working to make farmland more affordable and break down other barriers that face aspiring agriculturalists, says land trust properties may be off-limits to developers. However, they are becoming increasingly desirable among deep-pocketed individuals who are looking to establish hobby farms and equestrian estates, which are fair game under most conservation easements. “City folks who want to buy farmland for its idyllic qualities but not necessarily food production for market are a worrisome new piece of the larger land access issue,” she says.

Vermont and Massachusetts have taken steps to counter that trend by making state funds available to land trusts looking to incubate actual farmers rather than, as the saying goes, “gentleman farmers” — the nascent raison d’être of the land trust movement, says Rippon-Butler. The NYFC intends to champion the concept nationally, starting in New York, where the demand for land from those who can afford second homes has driven rural real estate values up to $8,000 to $10,000 per acre and pushed monthly mortgage payments out of reach for anyone on a farming income. Earlier this year, the group helped craft the Working Farm Protection Act, legislation sponsored by New York assembly member Didi Barrett that will allocate state funding specifically for conservation easements that not only preserve the land but also require it to be farmed sustainably. The bill was signed into law by New York governor Andrew Cuomo in August.

The NYFC has embarked on a nationwide tour to push for similar funding programs in other states and to mentor local land trust groups that are looking to help young farmers access land, with or without government funding. In northwest Ohio, the NYFC is working with a 20-year-old land trust known as the Black Swamp Conservancy, which obtained funding from Toledo Community Foundation last year to start purchasing properties and making them available for rent at below-market rates to new farmers, who will eventually have the option to buy. “This is the new wave,” says Chris Collier, conservation manager for the Black Swamp Conservancy. “There’s a younger generation looking to get back to the farm, and we want to make it easier for them.”

In Iowa, the NYFC has worked with the three-year-old Sustainable Iowa Land Trust (SILT), whose farming-based conservation easements drop the market value of the land by 45 percent. “The more you restrict how land can be used, the more you lower its value and, voilà, it becomes affordable,” explains Suzan Erem, executive director for SILT. “It’s a rather elegant solution to the problem.”

Erem emphasizes that this is no quick fix: In three years, SILT has acquired five properties, which is “breakneck speed for a land trust,” she says. Brokering a single conservation easement can be a years-long endeavor, so it will be a while before the architects of the land trust movement, version 2.0, can point to more than a scattering of concrete results. The good news is that, because of the very nature of conservation easements, the results are permanent. “We have a very long timeline in this movement,” says Erem. “We’re not thinking in terms of quarterly reports or seven-year profit margins; we’re thinking in terms of seven generations.”

The post Forty Acres of Farm Land in America is Lost to Development Every Hour appeared first on Modern Farmer.