S2 Ep016 What We Urgently Need to Know About Climate & Nutrition in the 2023 Farm Bill: with Elizabeth Henderson, Author, Farmer, and Activist, Pt2

Jul 31

Elizabeth Henderson, author and organic farmer for more than 30 years, joins us to speak more about the climate crisis and the 2023 Farm Bill, and how U.S. agricultural policy and spending must join other economic sectors in reducing greenhouse gas emissions and supporting urgent climate goals. She explains:

How New York used money for ecological conservation on increasing methane production and biogas to feed into the natural gas pipeline;
Examples of the ecological conservation practices that help mitigate climate change while also protecting farmland productivity;
The link between skewed U.S. agricultural pricing, agricultural overproduction, and the heat island effect on large farms;
The programs and organizations that need your support in working for sustainable policy on climate, nutrition, food security, and land access policy.

“And farms that need a lot of labor and very little of that labor is now produced by local people. Most of the people working on those great big farms are migrant farm workers. Many of them undocumented. And they're exposed to the ammonia, to the dust, to the terrible environmental conditions that exist on those farms.” -Elizabeth Henderson

Transcript

Season 2, Episode 16 (Part 2) : What We Urgently Need to Know About Climate & Nutrition in the 2023 Farm Bill: with Elizabeth Henderson, Author, Farmer, and Activist

Elizabeth Henderson, Guest:

The very biggest livestock farms, both beef and dairies, produce a tremendous amount of manure. So from being a solution- a great fertilizer- it becomes a problem. What are you going to do with it? So they put it in great big pits- but then the manure pits emit a lot of methane as well as other pollutants into the air. So what's the solution? Well, you put a cap on it, and then you can capture the methane by adding an anaerobic digester, which takes the methane, separates it out, and you can use that as an energy source.

So funding that should be going for conservation for growing more cover crops and making soil healthier is being invested in these biggest farms, encouraging them, actually, to get bigger, to have more cows. Not because we need more milk, but because they can use more manure in their anaerobic digester system, and channel the methane from those digesters into pipelines that can be connected in with the so-called natural gas pipelines.

[Rhythmic sounds of electric train pulling into station]

[Subway chimes arpeggio played on mandolin]

Cevan Castle, Host:

This is Towards a Kinder Public, a podcast about steps that we can all take to achieve a kinder public space, that better meets our interconnected needs. I’m Cevan Castle, and along with Annie Chen, we are Kinderpublic.

My guest for this episode is Elizabeth Henderson, an author, organic farmer for over 30 years, and the creator of the first New York Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) farm west of Albany. She co-chairs the Policy Committee of the Northeast Organic Farming Association’s (NOFA) Interstate Council, and represents the NOFA Interstate Council on the Board of the Agricultural Justice Project. She is a member of the Rochester Food Policy Council, among many other organic farming and justice leadership positions.

This is the second part of our conversation. The first part can be found one week back on your podcast player, or accessed with both audio and a full transcript on our website, kinderpublic.com.

Today Elizabeth will explain more of what we need to know about the opportunities for significant action in the 2023 Farm Bill. She talks about where we are currently going wrong, from both a nutrition and climate perspective, and what we should be doing instead.

And she addresses the most important fact of all - that ecologically responsible, sustainable farms can produce enough food to feed everyone.

As this episode went into editing, a large portion of the state of Vermont has just experienced tragic flooding from a severe weather event. It’s important to realize that industrial agriculture has no solution for resilience during extreme weather conditions and events like this one. Organic and sustainable farming methods, in contrast, have many solutions that have been researched and proven for many decades, and farmers using these systems just need access to funding - through some of the existing Farm Bill programs that we discuss today- and public support.

Our food security depends on the network of farmers that can innovate, change, and adapt methods, and that already have a strong and cooperative communication network in place.

Look on social media for the organizations that Elizabeth shares during this conversation, or find them linked in our episode notes and blog post. Please take one further step - it’s crucial to do it soon - and let your community know, and legislators know, which piece of this information on farming, climate, and nutrition resonated with you. You can even share this podcast episode, or just links to the organizations mentioned.

It’s truly, truly my pleasure to share part two of my conversation with Elizabeth Henderson.

[Subway chimes arpeggio played on mandolin]

Cevan, opening interview:

We've touched on all of these really wonderful topics and I'm so excited to include these details. They're so important.

Elizabeth Henderson:

Well, we haven't really talked about the Farm Bill.

Cevan:

Right!

Elizabeth Henderson:

Which is what we started on. So, policy issues.

Cevan Castle:

If there's anything else you'd like to add, we can do that. Otherwise we can, we can move on to one of the next questions.

Elizabeth Henderson:

Yeah. There is something I wanna add, and that is that in New York State, we have spent a disproportionate amount of the money that goes to mitigating climate change in agriculture by spending it on the biggest farms building anaerobic digesters.

Cevan Castle:

What are anaerobic digesters?

Elizabeth Henderson:

Well, the very biggest livestock farms, both beef and dairies, produce a tremendous amount of manure. So from being a solution, a great fertilizer, it becomes a problem. What are you going to do with it? So they put it in great big pits - and the cooperative extension and the universities have encouraged them to do this - to create manure pits, but then the manure pits emit a lot of methane as well as other pollutants into the air. So what's the solution? Well, you put a cap on it and then you can capture the methane by adding an anaerobic digester, which takes the methane, separates it out, and you can use that as an energy source.

So funding that should be going for conservation for growing more cover crops and making soil healthier is being invested in these biggest farms, encouraging them actually to get bigger, to have more cows. Not because we need more milk, but because they can use more manure in their anaerobic digester system and channel the methane from those digesters into pipelines that can be connected in with the so-called natural gas pipelines.

Cevan Castle:

Mm-hmm. <affirmative>. So they're aggregating cows to feed into the natural gas use.

Elizabeth Henderson:

Yes. Right.

Cevan Castle:

So they're harnessing <laugh> animals to perpetuate this reliance on gas. That's incredible.

Elizabeth Henderson:

Right. So that brings us around to measures in the farm bill. It's tremendously important to increase the amount of money that's spent on conservation, but to target conservation for the measures that are listed as practices in the Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP) and the Conservation Stewardship Program (CSP).

Practices like growing more trees, keeping the trees growing longer, planting trees in pasture, doing silvopasture. Planting cover crops, paying for cover crop seed for farms, doing soil testing so that farmers become really aware of how they can improve their soil and what may be missing. Those are really important conservation measures, but some of the funding from those programs goes to manure pits, caps on them, and methane digesters, and those are false solutions.

So conservation money should not go for that.

Cevan Castle:

I have two questions. First I'd like to just clarify in the, uh, digesters then, beyond extending the use of gas and using dairy animals and beef animals to generate a fuel like that, what are the environmental impacts of the digesters?

Elizabeth Henderson:

Well, there's usually methane that escapes, they're very leaky systems. And then, you know, if you back up and look at the whole system, a livestock growing system where the animals are on pasture, if they eat grass, they produce less methane altogether.

And the grass itself, if managed properly, is building carbon in the soil instead of row crops, which tear it up and reduce the carbon. So encouraging livestock farmers to use alternative manure systems where they separate the liquid from the solids, and compost the solids are much healthier for the planet and for surrounding communities.

Cevan Castle:

And that's not what's happening on these massive farms.

Elizabeth Henderson:

That's right.

Cevan Castle:

What would be more of the condition that we would find the animals in there. They're not on pasture.

Elizabeth Henderson:

That's right. They're kept in great pig barns or feedlots, and if cows are on pasture, they're healthier, they help build the soil, they can be very beneficial in terms of mitigating climate change.

Cevan Castle:

So I can drive not too far from where I am right now and see, uh, larger dairy, they're not massive, but they're, you know, you can definitely see that in some of these locations where the cows are very concentrated, there is no grass in the small amount of area that they have outside of the barn, it's really, uh, reduced to a, a trampled dusty muddy surface. And when it rains, it's muck everywhere. And when it's <laugh> hot, it's just dusty and dry and,

Elizabeth Henderson:

And farms that need a lot of labor and very little of that labor is now produced by local people. Most of the people working on those great big farms are migrant farm workers. Many of them undocumented. And they're exposed to the ammonia, to the dust, to the terrible environmental conditions that exist on those farms.

Cevan Castle:

Excessive heat in an area like that with no trees, no grass, you know, it's just, uh, it's a, um, it's a heat island. Just like if you were in a mall parking lot <laugh>.

Elizabeth Henderson:

Right. That's right. And by contrast, if you raise animals in pastures that have trees planted in them, they're shade, there's healthier soil, and the animals themselves burp less. <laugh>

Cevan Castle:

They burp less. Is that what you said?

Elizabeth Henderson:

They burp less?

Cevan Castle:

Yes. Okay. Just wanted to make sure. <laugh>

Elizabeth Henderson:

They're eating less soy and corn, they're eating more of the grasses, which they're designed as ruminants to digest.

Cevan Castle:

Right. Right. And so the, the, uh, soy and corn that they're eating, that is a difficult thing for them to digest, which causes more of the problematic gasses from the animal. Right,

Elizabeth Henderson:

Right. And then you have all of the chemicals that went into the production of those monocrop, corn and soy

Cevan Castle:

In the animal. Right. The whatever that corn and soy was treated with is then in the animal,

Elizabeth Henderson:

Of course. Right.

Cevan Castle:

And those are the mono crops that you were talking about, the things that are exactly, yeah. Intensively produced in large machinery scaled operations. Yeah.

Elizabeth Henderson:

So it's a whole system that is supported by federal, um, agricultural policy by the farm bill. Those farms get most of the crop insurance, um, subsidies. So the government pays a large part of the crop insurance cost and guarantees the companies that provide the crop insurance, something like 13 to 15% profit on the crop selling the crop insurance.

So I don't know the single farm, smaller scale farm, that's making a return on investment of 13 to 15% guaranteed by anybody.

Cevan Castle:

<affirmative> Mm-hmm. <affirmative>. So that's an interesting thing to sit with. The government is guaranteeing the large scale farms that are using unhealthy farming practices. Actually, I would even say, and I, I think that I've heard you say this before, like this is not a farming practice. This is an industrial practice. It's being labeled under agriculture, but if farming is a highly skilled occupation, which involves very detailed knowledge of many interconnected biological systems, <laugh> and planetary systems, you know, and what they're doing on these large scale operations is harnessing industrial production and chemical use and basically forcing the plants to grow through these synthetic fertilizers and feeding the animals foods that are not ideal for their digestive processes.

Elizabeth Henderson:

Right. So it's a whole system that is destructive and not sustainable. So when people say, well, can all these small farms feed the world? Well, most of the world is fed by small farms.

Cevan Castle:

Oh, wait, what?? <laugh>

Elizabeth Henderson:

And if we stopped supporting the industrial system and instead used the resources to enable more people to run small farms that are locally controlled, we would have more healthy food and the planet would benefit by having less, less climate destruction going on.

Cevan Castle:

Well, this is another one that you hear quite a lot… <loud voices in background> I apologize for my children in the background, “This isn't scalable. Organic farming isn't scalable. It will never feed everyone. We export so much food, we have to have this volume.”

So can you say a little more about this belief, and is it true. If it's not true, explain more about why it isn't true.

Elizabeth Henderson:

Well, scaling up means farms getting bigger and bigger instead of scaling up, you can scale out by having more small farms. When I started doing CSA and it was successful and popular people said, well, why don't you get bigger? And I said, I don't wanna get bigger. I’m the size… Our farm, the size I want it to be. So I taught the other farm organic farmers in my neighborhood how to do CSA. And so in the area of Rochester, there are 30 farms doing it. So that is scaling out and that is how it would be possible to have many more farms producing in a healthy way.

Cevan Castle:

When my daughter and I were participating in the small and lovely farmer's market in Albany, one of the people who we saw a couple times at our little booth asked me how many acres we had. <laugh> Your point just now makes me think of that comment and how it's not about acreage, and it can't be about acreage because there's land use policy…

Elizabeth Henderson:

Exactly.

Cevan Castle:

Can you talk about access, equitable access to that land to make those small farms?

Elizabeth Henderson:

Well, that's one of our really big problems. And when the National Young Farmers Coalition polled young farmers all over the country, and when the Black farmers talk about their situation, land is really hard to get because it's very, very expensive. So we need alternative ways of providing access to farmers through land trust, which is how I got my hands on land to use, the members of my CSA contributed money to the Genesee Land Trust, which purchased a farm from the people I had been leasing from when the farmer died. The land trust then leased the land back to my farm so that we could use it. And that farm is now preserved in perpetuity for people to do organic farming on. That could be replicated over and over again, all over the place. And there are projects like Agrarian Trust and the Northeast Black Farmers Land Trust that are doing this, and that should be supported.

Cevan Castle:

Is there anything or more that we should touch on in terms of farming methods, weasley language, inappropriate subsidies to large farms? <laugh> Or should we move on to the last questions here?

Elizabeth Henderson:

Well, reasoning language, when I, when I talked about that, I was referring to carbon markets where some of the big companies, General Mills, Tyson, and others, are claiming that they will have millions of acres in regenerative agriculture where they are paying farmers so much per ton of carbon per acre. And that is supposedly regenerative agriculture.

But if you read the fine print on those contracts, the farmers only actually get payment for increased carbon if the carbon increases. And there are many things that can keep it from increasing very fast, like drought conditions, or a flood, and then the farmers have to pay it back to the companies that are supposedly paying them for a ton of carbon.

So these carbon markets are a really false solution that appear to be providing offsets that enable the big businesses to continue business as usual, that really aren't, solving the climate problem at all.

So now we can go on to your last question.

Cevan Castle:

Sure. I'd like to talk about what issues we should be watching carefully with regard to the 2023 Farm Bill, and what areas will make the most impact for highly skilled farmers.

Elizabeth Henderson:

Well, there is an excellent package of marker bills for the farm bill called the Agricultural Resilience Act that was put forth by Congresswoman Pingree in Maine. And that would greatly increase the amount of money that goes into conservation and building soil. It would increase the funding that's going into enabling small scale farms to purchase land. And it would reduce the amount of money that is going into some of the things that we've talked about, support for crop insurance for the biggest farms, and, you know, insurance businesses.

So, supporting conservation programs, avoiding the false solutions of carbon markets and offsets, enabling programs that help Black and Indigenous farmers to access more farming resources, and increasing the amount of money that goes into the nutrition programs.

People who - just horribly low incomes - depend on SNAP or EBT, these are the nutrition program payments, and the right-wingers are constantly trying to reduce the amount of money that families get. People should be guaranteed enough healthy food to live on through SNAP and through WIC. And there's a really excellent nutrition program called GusNIP - the Gus Schumacher Nutrition Improvement Program - which pays doctors to prescribe healthy food and then covers the cost of that food for lower income people. Or it's done in a number of different ways, but that idea could be multiplied all over the country.

Cevan:

That's amazing.

Elizabeth Henderson:

And I just wanted to say, that it's important for people to understand that these bigger farms have gotten bigger and bigger because the federal government departed from the system of parity pricing with supply management, which is what brought farming out of the Dust Bowl and the depression. Parity pricing meant that farmers got prices in the market from the manufacturers or marketers who were buying from them, from the retailers, prices that were adequate to cover the cost of production.

And in many cases, reduced the amount that they produced - that’s supply management. They cut the acreage, and put some of the acres in cover crops and permanent pasture, if the land was fragile, um, shouldn't be farmed at all, so that there was less grown. So with the departure from parity, particularly with the 1996 Farm Bill, there is no parity left in US foreign policy.

Farmers grow more in order to cover their costs. The margin per acre is very slim, so they grow more and more and more. They overproduce. That's wonderful for Tyson and Perdue, because they get cheap feed for their ever increasing flocks of chickens or hog farms, and then more crop is exported, and sold abroad at prices that undercut the prices that farmers need, so they grow less of their own food in those countries. And then more of the corn and soy is turned into ethanol, so it's burned up.

Cevan:

So we're exporting this system as well. <laugh>

Elizabeth Henderson:

Right. So we're growing biofuels that are supposedly more climate friendly than fossil fuel natural gas, whereas there's not actually that much evidence that ethanol produces fewer emissions. And when you take into consideration the entire system of the way those crops are grown, the chemical fertilizers, herbicides, et cetera, the shipping, we're not saving on emissions by growing crops that way or using ethanol.

Cevan:

And I just saw an opinion column where they were talking about the surface temperature of the soil in a region like that, where they're growing a large tract of a crop, it was like 165 degrees that they measured, which is extremely dangerous, once again, bringing us back to the incredible heat effects of farming without trees. We don't want to expose and expose and expose for sun. We actually want to create a measured system that manages sun exposure as well as soil nutrition, and water management, right? I'm sure I'm missing things, but these things are all interconnected. And when we strip the soil and we just blast it with sun, and then chemicals, we’re actually creating a massive problem.

Elizabeth Henderson:

Exactly. Well said. <laugh>

Cevan:

Thank you. <laugh>

Elizabeth Henderson:

So the farm programs that increase conservation…

Cevan:

Yes.

Elizabeth Henderson:

…And that increase nutrition are the ones that people should support. And they’re organizations like, in the Northeast states, the Northeast Organic Farming Association (NOFA) in all the Northeast states, or MOFGA, the Maine Organic Farmers and Gardeners Association.

On a national level, there's the National Family Farm Coalition, which has put forward a really excellent piece of marker bill on dairy, that would provide milk from family farms, that would provide parity pricing for milk while controlling the amount of milk that's produced. Supply management.

And organizations like Food and Water Watch, that are doing a really good job on this, Earthjustice. We're all supporting and working together, trying to get a Farm Bill that will be transformative instead of more of the same old, same old, that is killing the planet.

And any opportunity to support the Federation of Southern Co-Ops, and the Northeast Farmers of Color Land Trust, and the Black Farmers Networks and the Young Farmers Coalition, those are the organizations that people should support.

Cevan:

This fills me with all kinds of happiness. Thank you for sharing all of your expertise today.

Elizabeth Henderson:

So nice to meet you.

Cevan Castle:

Nice to meet you, too!

[Sounds of frogs calling from a marsh on a rainy summer evening]

Cevan:

Links to more information about our guest and the topics mentioned, as well as a full transcript of the conversation, are available on the podcast section of our website, kinderpublic.com.

To share information about issues in public space, and spaces that are doing things right, email podcast@kinderpublic.com.

If you have enjoyed an episode of Towards a Kinder Public, we would love your help in sharing the episode with others - that can be one action that we all take in support of good farm legislation and land access justice. Please leave us a rating and a review, it helps us make our topics more visible, and we really appreciate your support.

You can find us on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter! We are @kinderpublic.

I’m Cevan Castle, my guest has been Elizabeth Henderson. Join us next week for more on the 2023 Farm Bill from Chicago, and more specific actions we can all take to support healthy legislation. Working together is the way forward. Have a very good week!

[Frog sounds continue and then fade out]

Mentioned in this episode:

Peacework Farm

Northeast Organic Farming Association (NOFA)

Agricultural Justice Project

Rochester Food Policy Council

Climate Reality Project

Community Supported Agriculture (CSA)

The U.S. Farm Bill

Glyphosate

Regenerative Agriculture

Agrarian Land Trust