agriculture

In the Southwest, solar panels can help both photovoltaics and crops

agriculture, Science, solar panels, syndication / Mike M. / July 11, 2025

Cultivation in a harsh climate

Solar arrays can shade crops from sun while moisture cools the panels to increase their productivity.

Volunteers with the National Renewable Energy Laboratory work at Jack’s Solar Garden in Longmont, Colorado. Credit: Bryan Bechtold/NREL

This article originally appeared on Inside Climate News, a nonprofit, non-partisan news organization that covers climate, energy, and the environment. Sign up for their newsletter here.

“We were getting basil leaves the size of your palm,” University of Arizona researcher Greg Barron-Gafford said, describing some of the benefits he and his team have seen farming under solar panels in the Tucson desert.

For 12 years, Barron-Gafford has been investigating agrivoltaics, the integration of solar arrays into working farmland. This practice involves growing crops or other vegetation, such as pollinator-friendly plants, under solar panels, and sometimes grazing livestock in this greenery. Though a relatively new concept, at least 604 agrivoltaic sites have popped up across the United States, according to OpenEI.

Researchers like Barron-Gafford think that, in addition to generating carbon-free electricity, agrivoltaics could offer a ray of hope for agriculture in an increasingly hotter and drier Southwest, as the shade created by these systems has been found to decrease irrigation needs and eliminate heat stress on crops. Plus, the cooling effects of growing plants under solar arrays can actually make the panels work better.

But challenges remain, including some farmers’ attitudes about the practice and funding difficulties.

Overcoming a climate conundrum

While renewable electricity from sources like solar panels is one of the most frequently touted energy solutions to help reduce the carbon pollution that’s driving climate change, the warming climate itself is making it harder for solar arrays to do their job, Barron-Gafford said. An optimal functioning temperature for panels is around 75° Fahrenheit, he explained. Beyond that, any temperature increase reduces the photovoltaic cells’ efficiency.

“You can quickly see how this solution for our changing climate of switching to more renewable energy is itself sensitive to the changing climate,” he said.

This problem is especially pertinent in the Southwest, where historically hot temperatures are steadily increasing. Tucson, for instance, saw a record-breaking 112 days of triple-digit heat in 2024, according to National Weather Service Data, and the US Environmental Protection Agency reports that every part of the Southwest experienced higher average temperatures between 2000 and 2023 compared to the long-term average from 1895 to 2023.

However, planting vegetation under solar panels—as opposed to the more traditional method of siting solar arrays on somewhat barren land—can help cool them. In one set of experiments, Barron-Gafford’s team found that planting cilantro, tomatoes and peppers under solar arrays reduced the panels’ surface temperature by around 18 degrees Fahrenheit. That’s because plants release moisture into the air during their respiration process, in which they exchange oxygen for carbon dioxide.

“This invisible power of water coming out of plants was actually cooling down the solar panels,” Barron-Gafford said.

Throwing shade

While Barron-Gafford said some laughed him off when he first proposed the idea of growing crops in the shade of solar panels, this added sun shield can actually help them grow better, especially in the Southwest, where many backyard gardeners already employ shade cloths to protect their gardens from the blazing heat.

“Many people don’t understand that in Colorado and much of the West, most plants get far too much sunlight,” said Byron Kominek, owner/manager of Jack’s Solar Garden in Boulder County, Colorado, which began implementing agrivoltaics in 2020. “Having some shade is a benefit to them.”

Jack’s Solar Garden has integrated 3,276 solar panels over about four acres of farmland, growing crops like greens and tomatoes. Meg Caley with Sprout City Farms, a nonprofit that helps with farming duties at Jack’s Solar Garden, said they’ve been able to produce Swiss chard “the size of your torso.”

“The greens just get huge,” she said. “You have to chop them up to fit them in your refrigerator.”

She added that the shade seems to improve the flavor of the vegetables and prevents them from bolting, when plants prematurely produce flowers and seeds, diverting energy away from leaf or root growth.

“Plants when they’re stressed out can have more of a bitter flavor,” she explained. “So the arugula that we grow is not as bitter or spicy. It’s sweeter. The spinach is sweeter too.”

Barron-Gafford and his team are seeing the same thing in Arizona, where they grow a variety of produce like beans, artichokes, potatoes, kale, and basil.

“We’ve grown 30-plus different types of things across different wet winters and dry winters and exceptionally hot summers, dry summers, average or close to average summers,” he said of the solar-shaded crops. “And across everything we’ve done, we’ve seen equal or greater production down here in the Southwest, the dry land environments, where it really benefits to get some shade.”

As in Colorado, some of those crops are growing to epic proportions.

“We’ve made bok choy the size of a toddler,” Barron-Gafford said.

All that shade provides another important benefit in a drought-stricken Southwest—lower water requirements for crops. Because less direct sunlight is hitting the ground, it decreases the evaporation rate, which means water stays in the soil longer after irrigation. Barron-Gafford and his team have been running experiments for the last seven or so years to see how this plays out with different crops in an agrivoltaic setting.

“What is the evaporation rate under something that’s big and bushy like a bean or potato plant versus something thinner above ground, like a carrot?” is one of the questions Barron-Gafford said they have tried to answer. “For the most part, I would say that we are able to cut back our irrigation by more than half.”

They are partnering with Jack’s Solar Farm on water research in Colorado and have so far found similar results there.

This shade has another benefit in a warming world—respite for farmworkers. Heat-related illnesses are a growing concern for people who work outside, and one recent study predicted climate change will quadruple U.S. outdoor workers’ exposure to extreme heat conditions by 2065.

But with solar arrays in the fields, “if you really carefully plan out your day, you can work in the shade,” a factor that can help increase worker safety on hot days, Caley said.

The AgriSolar Clearinghouse performed skin temperature readings under solar panels and full sun at a number of sites across the United States, finding a skin temperature decrease of 15.3° in Boulder and 20.8° in Phoenix.

“I don’t know what the future holds”

Despite the benefits of agrivoltaics, the up-front cost of purchasing a solar array remains a barrier to farmers.

“Once people see the potential of agrivoltaics, you run into the next challenge, which is how do you fund someone getting into this on their site?” Barron-Gafford said. “And depending on the amount of capital or access to capital that a farmer has, you’re going to get a wildly different answer.”

While expenses are dependent on the size of the installation, a 25-kilowatt system would require an upfront cost of around $67,750, according to AgriSolar Clearinghouse. For comparison, the median size of a residential solar array in 2018 was around 6 kW, the organization stated, which would cost around $16,260 to install.

Kominek said the total initial cost of implementing a 1.2 megawatt capacity agrivoltaics setup on his farm in Colorado was around $2 million, but that the investment has paid off. In addition to the revenue he earns from farming, all of the energy produced by the arrays is sold to clients in the community through a local utility company, earning the farm money.

The Rural Energy for America program has been one resource for farmers interested in agrivoltaics, offering loans and grants to help install solar. However, it’s unclear how this program will move forward amid current federal spending cuts.

Meanwhile, some of the federal grant programs that Barron-Gafford has relied on have suddenly come to a halt, he said, putting his research in danger. But, as federal support dries up, some states are charging on with their own funding opportunities to develop farm field solar projects. For instance, Colorado’s Agrivoltaics Research and Demonstration Grant offers money for demonstrations of agrivoltaics, research projects, and outreach campaigns.

There are other challenges as well. Caley, for instance, said farming around solar panels is akin to working in an “obstacle course.” She and her team, who mostly work manually, have found ways to work around them by being aware of their surroundings so that they don’t accidentally collide with the panels or strike them with their tools. This job is also made easier since Kominek invested between $80,000 and $100,000 to elevate his farm’s panels, which better allows animals, taller crops and farming equipment to operate beneath.

Still, a 2025 University of Arizona study that interviewed farmers and government officials in Pinal County, Arizona, found that a number of them questioned agrivoltaics’ compatibility with large-scale agriculture.

“I think it’s a great idea, but the only thing … it wouldn’t be cost-efficient … everything now with labor and cost of everything, fuel, tractors, it almost has to be super big … to do as much with as least amount of people as possible,” one farmer stated.

Many farmers are also leery of solar, worrying that agrivoltaics could take working farmland out of use, affect their current operations or deteriorate soils.

Those fears have been amplified by larger utility-scale initiatives, like Ohio’s planned Oak Run Solar Project, an 800 megawatt project that will include 300 megawatts of battery storage, 4,000 acres of crops and 1,000 grazing sheep in what will be the country’s largest agrivoltaics endeavor to date. Opponents of the project worry about its visual impacts and the potential loss of farmland.

An American Farmland Trust survey found that Colorado farmers would prefer that utility-scale solar projects be sited on less productive or underutilized farmland rather than on highly productive or actively farmed land. They also expressed concern for the potential negative impact that solar projects could have on farm productivity and the health of the land, including soil quality.

Some farmers also worry that the solar panels could leach metals into the ground, contaminating their crops, Barron-Gafford said. But while agrivoltaic systems are put together in a way that makes that highly unlikely, there’s no reason not to add soil sampling studies into the work they’re doing to reassure farmers, he added.

And agrivoltaics advocates say that the practice could actually improve soil health by reducing erosion, increasing the amount of organic matter and enhancing soil biology with cooler, moister conditions.

“I wish more people spent time listening to the folks on the ground and the folks experiencing these transitions,” Barron-Gafford added. “Because you understand more that way in terms of what their motivations or concerns actually are.”

“We don’t have to choose”

While Caley understands farmers’ concerns, she sees agrivoltaics as a way for them to keep agricultural land in production while also benefiting from solar electricity.

“The tension in a lot of communities seems to be that people don’t want to see agricultural land taken out of production in order to bring a solar farm in,” she said. “The idea here is that we don’t have to choose. We can have both.”

Kominek encourages people to envision what our landscapes and climate will look like in the next 20 to 30 years, adding that in his part of Colorado, it only stands to get hotter and drier, making agrivoltaics a smart solution for farming and clean energy production.

“Communities around the world need to figure out what changes they need to make now to help people adapt to what our climates and landscapes will be in the future,” he said. “Agrivoltaics is a climate adaptation tool that will benefit any community where such systems are built as the decades pass.”

In the Southwest, solar panels can help both photovoltaics and crops Read More »

Federal funding freeze endangers climate-friendly agriculture progress

agriculture, climate change, Science, syndication, Trump, USDA / Kelly Newman / April 4, 2025

For decades, environmental and farm groups pushed Congress, the USDA and farmers to adopt new conservation programs, but progress came in incremental steps. With each Farm Bill, some lawmakers threaten to whittle down conservation programs, but they have essentially managed to survive and even expand.

The country’s largest farm lobby, the American Farm Bureau Federation, had long denied the realities of climate change, fighting against climate action and adopting official policy positions that question the scientific consensus that climate change is human-caused. Its members—the bulk of American farmers—largely adhered to the same mindset.

But as the realities of climate change have started to hit American farmers on the ground in the form of more extreme weather, and as funding opportunities have expanded through conservation and climate-focused programs, that mindset has started to shift.

“They were concerned about what climate policy meant for their operations,” Bonnie said. “They felt judged. But we said: Let’s partner up.”

The Trump administration’s rollbacks and freezes threaten to stall or undo that progress, advocacy groups and former USDA employees say.

“We created this enormous infrastructure. We’ve solved huge problems,” Bonnie added, “and they’re undermining all of it.”

“It took so long,” Stillerman said. “The idea that climate change was happening and that farmers could be part of the solution, and could build more resilient farming and food systems against that threat—the IRA really put dollars behind that. All of that is at risk now.”

Burk says he plans to continue with conservation and carbon-storing practices on his Michigan farm, even without conservation dollars from the USDA.

But, he says, many of his neighboring farmers likely will stop conservation measures without the certainty of government support.

“So many people are struggling, just trying to figure out how to pay their bills, to get the fuel to run their tractors, to plant,” he said. “The last thing they want to be doing is sitting down with someone from NRCS who says, ‘If I do these things, maybe I’ll get paid in a year.’ That’s not going to happen.”

This story originally appeared on Inside Climate News.

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Trump admin. fires USDA staff working on bird flu, immediately backpedals

agriculture, bird flu, dairy, H5N1, health, outbreak, poultry, Science, USDA / DJ Henderson / February 20, 2025

Over the weekend, the Trump administration fired several frontline responders to the ongoing H5N1 bird flu outbreak—then quickly backpedaled, rescinding those terminations and attempting to reinstate the critical staff.

The termination letters went out to employees at the US Department of Agriculture, one of the agencies leading the federal response to the outbreak that continues to plague US dairy farms and ravage poultry operations, affecting over 160 million birds and sending egg prices soaring. As the virus continues to spread, infectious disease experts fear it could evolve to spread among humans and cause more severe disease. So far, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has documented 68 cases in humans, one of which was fatal.

Prior to Trump taking office, health experts had criticized the country’s response to H5N1 for lack of transparency at times, sluggishness, inadequate testing, and its inability to halt transmission among dairy farms, which was once considered containable. To date, 972 herds across 17 states have been infected since last March, including 36 herds in the last 30 days.

In a statement to Ars Technica, a USDA spokesperson said that the agency views the response to the outbreak of H5N1—a highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI)—as a priority. As such, the agency had protected some positions from staff cuts by granting exemptions, which went to veterinarians, animal health technicians, and others. But not all were exempted, and some were fired.

“Although several positions supporting HPAI were notified of their terminations over the weekend, we are working to swiftly rectify the situation and rescind those letters,” the spokesperson said.

The USDA did not respond to Ars Technica’s questions regarding how many employees working on the outbreak were fired, how many of those terminations were rescinded, or how many employees have been reinstated since the weekend.

The cuts are part of a larger, brutal effort by the Trump administration to slash federal agencies, and the cuts have imperiled other critical government and public services. In recent days, several agencies, including the National Institutes of Health, the CDC, the National Science Foundation, and the Department of Energy, among others, have been gutted. At CDC, cuts devastated the agency’s premier disease detectives program—the Epidemic Intelligence Service—members of which are critical to responding to outbreaks and other health emergencies.

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Ants learned to farm fungi during a mass extinction

agriculture, ants, Biology, evolution, fungi, Science / Shannon Garcia / October 3, 2024

Timing is everything

Tracing the lineages of agricultural ants to their most recent common ancestor revealed that the ancestor probably lived through the end-Cretaceous mass extinction—the one that killed off the dinosaurs. The researchers argue that the two were almost certainly related. Current models suggest that there was so much dust in the atmosphere after the impact that set off the mass extinction that photosynthesis shut down for nearly two years, meaning minimal plant life. By contrast, the huge amount of dead material would allow fungi to flourish. So, it’s not surprising that ants started to adapt to use what was available to them.

That explains the huge cluster of species that cooperate with fungi. However, most of the species that engage in organized farming don’t appear until roughly 35 million years after the mass extinction, at the end of the Eocene (that’s about 33 million years before the present period). The researchers suggest that the climate changes that accompanied the transition to the Oligocene included a drying out of the tropical Americas, where the fungus-farming ants had evolved. This would cut down on the availability of fungi in the wild, potentially selecting for the ability of species that could propagate fungal species on their own.

This also corresponds to the origins of the yeast strains used by farming ants, as well as the most specialized agricultural fungal species. But it doesn’t account for the origin of coral fungus farmers, which seems to have occurred roughly 10 million years later.

The work gives us a much clearer picture of the origin of agriculture in ants and some reasonable hypotheses regarding the selective pressures that might have led to its evolution. In the long term, however, the biggest advance here may be the resources generated during this study. Ultimately, we’d like to understand the genetic basis for the changes in the ants’ behavior, as well as how the fungi have adapted to better provide for their farmers. To do that, we’ll need to compare the genomes of agricultural species with their free-living relatives. The DNA gathered for this study will ultimately be needed to pursue those questions.

Science, 2024. DOI: 10.1126/science.adn7179 (About DOIs).

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Cleaning up cow burps to combat global warming

agriculture, cows, methane, Science / DJ Henderson / June 20, 2024

In the urgent quest for a more sustainable global food system, livestock are a mixed blessing. On the one hand, by converting fibrous plants that people can’t eat into protein-rich meat and milk, grazing animals like cows and sheep are an important source of human food. And for many of the world’s poorest, raising a cow or two—or a few sheep or goats—can be a key source of wealth.

But those benefits come with an immense environmental cost. A study in 2013 showed that globally, livestock account for about 14.5 percent of greenhouse gas emissions, more than all the world’s cars and trucks combined. And about 40 percent of livestock’s global warming potential comes in the form of methane, a potent greenhouse gas formed as they digest their fibrous diet.

That dilemma is driving an intense research effort to reduce methane emissions from grazers. Existing approaches, including improved animal husbandry practices and recently developed feed additives, can help, but not at the scale needed to make a significant global impact. So scientists are investigating other potential solutions, such as breeding low-methane livestock and tinkering with the microbes that produce the methane in grazing animals’ stomachs. While much more research is needed before those approaches come to fruition, they could be relatively easy to implement widely and could eventually have a considerable impact.

The good news—and an important reason to prioritize the effort—is that methane is a relatively short-lived greenhouse gas. Whereas the carbon dioxide emitted today will linger in the atmosphere for more than a century, today’s methane will wash out in little more than a decade. So tackling methane emissions now can lower greenhouse gas levels and thus help slow climate change almost immediately.

“Reducing methane in the next 20 years is about the only thing we have to keep global warming in check,” says Claudia Arndt, a dairy nutritionist working on methane emissions at the International Livestock Research Institute in Nairobi, Kenya.

The methane dilemma

The big challenge in lowering methane is that the gas is a natural byproduct of what makes grazing animals uniquely valuable: their partnership with a host of microbes. These microbes live within the rumen, the largest of the animals’ four stomachs, where they break down the fibrous food into smaller molecules that the animals can absorb for nutrition. In the process, they generate large amounts of hydrogen gas, which is converted into methane by another group of microbes called methanogens.

Enlarge / The microbes that digest fiber—and those that produce methane—live mostly in the rumen, the first and largest of a cow’s four stomachs.

Knowable Magazine

Most of this methane, often referred to as enteric methane, is belched or exhaled out by the animals into the atmosphere—just one cow belches out around 220 pounds of methane gas per year, for example. (Contrary to popular belief, very little methane is expelled in the form of farts. Piles of manure that accumulate in feedlots and dairy barns account for about a quarter of US livestock methane, but aerating the piles or capturing the methane for biogas can prevent those emissions; the isolated cow plops from pastured grazing animals generate little methane.)

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Nitrogen-using bacteria can cut farms’ greenhouse gas emissions

agriculture, bacteria, Biology, climate change, fertilizer, nitrogen, Science / DJ Henderson / June 1, 2024

Keeping crops from the greenhouse —

Nitrogen fertilizers get converted to nitrous oxide, a potent greenhouse gas.

Diana Gitig – Jun 1, 2024 11: 00 am UTC

A tractor amidst many rows of small plants, with brown hills in the background.

Fritz Haber: good guy or bad guy? He won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1918 for his part in developing the Haber-Bosch process, a method for generating ammonia using the nitrogen gas in air. The technique freed agriculture from the constraint of needing to source guano or manure for nitrogen fertilizer and is widely credited for saving millions from starvation. About half of the world’s current food supply relies on fertilizers made using it, and about half of the nitrogen atoms in our bodies can be traced back to it.

But it also allowed farmers to use this newly abundant synthetic nitrogen fertilizer with abandon. This has accentuated agriculture’s role as a significant contributor to global warming because the emissions that result from these fertilizers is a greenhouse gas—one that has a warming potential almost 300 times greater than that of carbon dioxide and remains in the atmosphere for 100 years. Microbes in soil convert nitrogen fertilizer into nitrous oxide, and the more nitrogen fertilizer they have to work with, the more nitrous oxide they make.

Agriculture also leaks plenty of the excess nitrogen into waterways in the form of nitrate, generating algal blooms that create low-oxygen ‘dead zones’ where no marine life can live.

One way to reduce nitrogen emissions from farms would be to simply use fertilizer more efficiently. But—as we’ve seen with fossil fuels (and antibiotics and plastics)—when humans have a miraculous substance on our hands, we just can’t seem to use it at levels that minimize its impact. We instead seem compelled to throw around as much of the stuff as we can. But even if we were to start using less fertilizer now, we are past time to choose a single technique to curb greenhouse gas emissions; we need to put them all into action.

Denitrifying bacteria reduces levels of nitrous oxide in soil by converting it to the molecular form of nitrogen found in air. They use it as an oxidizer for respiration under conditions with low or no oxygen. So adding these nitrogen-respiring bacteria to soil could help decrease nitrous oxide emissions.

Modifying the microbiome of soil is just as hard as modifying the microbiome in our bodies. So instead of trying to promote the growth of any denitrifying bacteria that might happen to already be in soil, researchers decided to grow them externally and then add them in. Their source was partially treated sewage, called digestate, that was destined as organic fertilizer anyway. Keeping the digestate in oxygen-free conditions enriched their levels of one strain of nitrogen-respiring bacteria.

The researchers homed in on this particular strain because it has the enzyme needed to break down nitrous oxide, but not the enzymes used to make it from other nitrogen compounds. And although it is not the fastest, most efficient strain at nitrogen respiration, it won because it is the most tenacious: It grows to high concentrations even when oxygen is present, and it works well in soil.

When this digestate was mixed into soil, fertilizer-induced emissions were reduced by 50–95 percent, depending on the pH and organic carbon content of the soils. The effect lasted over the entire growing season. The presence of the added nitrogen-respiring bacteria did not seem to affect the indigenous microbiota already present in the soil, and the added bacteria did not carry genes for antibiotic resistance or pathogenicity, which is obviously essential if they are to be used in farming. What hasn’t been tested yet, however, is whether the presence of these bacteria influence the growth of crops.

Using mathematical modeling of future emissions, the researchers concluded that adding these bacteria to soil could reduce nitrous oxide emissions by 60 percent, and if they are added to all liquid manure systems in Europe, Europe could reduce its anthropogenic nitrous oxide emissions by 3 to 4 percent.

Nature, 2024. DOI: 10.1038/s41586-024-07464-3

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Some states are now trying to ban lab-grown meat

agriculture, climate change, lab-grown meat, Policy, Science, syndication / DJ Henderson / March 12, 2024

A franken-burger and a side of fries —

Spurious “war on ranching” cited as reason for legislation.

Wyatt Myskow and Lee Hedgepeth, Inside Climate News – Mar 12, 2024 1: 30 pm UTC

tanks for growing cell-cultivated chicken — Enlarge / Cell-cultivated chicken is made in the pictured tanks at the Eat Just office on July 27, 2023, in Alameda, Calif.

Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

Months in jail and thousands of dollars in fines and legal fees—those are the consequences Alabamians and Arizonans could soon face for selling cell-cultured meat products that could cut into the profits of ranchers, farmers, and meatpackers in each state.

State legislators from Florida to Arizona are seeking to ban meat grown from animal cells in labs, citing a “war on our ranching” and a need to protect the agriculture industry from efforts to reduce the consumption of animal protein, thereby reducing the high volume of climate-warming methane emissions the sector emits.

Agriculture accounts for about 11 percent of the country’s greenhouse gas emissions, according to federal data, with livestock such as cattle making up a quarter of those emissions, predominantly from their burps, which release methane—a potent greenhouse gas that’s roughly 80 times more effective at warming the atmosphere than carbon dioxide over 20 years. Globally, agriculture accounts for about 37 percent of methane emissions.

For years, climate activists have been calling for more scrutiny and regulation of emissions from the agricultural sector and for nations to reduce their consumption of meat and dairy products due to their climate impacts. Last year, over 150 countries pledged to voluntarily cut emissions from food and agriculture at the United Nations’ annual climate summit.

But the industry has avoided increased regulation and pushed back against efforts to decrease the consumption of meat, with help from local and state governments across the US.

Bills in Alabama, Arizona, Florida, and Tennessee are just the latest legislation passed in statehouses across the US that have targeted cell-cultured meat, which is produced by taking a sample of an animal’s muscle cells and growing them into edible products in a lab. Sixteen states—Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Texas, and Wyoming—have passed laws addressing the use of the word “meat” in such products’ packaging, according to the National Agricultural Law Center at the University of Arkansas, with some prohibiting cell-cultured, plant-based, or insect-based food products from being labeled as meat.

“Cell-cultured meat products are so new that there’s not really a framework for how state and federal labeling will work together,” said Rusty Rumley, a senior staff attorney with the National Agricultural Law Center, resulting in no standardized requirements for how to label the products, though legislation has been proposed that could change that.

At the federal level, Rep. Mark Alford (R-Mo.) introduced the Fair and Accurate Ingredient Representation on Labels Act of 2024, which would authorize the United States Department of Agriculture to regulate imitation meat products and restrict their sale if they are not properly labeled, and US Sens. Jon Tester (D-Mont.) and Mike Rounds (R-S.D.) introduced a bill to ban schools from serving cell-cultured meat.

But while plant-based meat substitutes are widespread, cell-cultivated meats are not widely available, with none currently being sold in stores. Just last summer, federal agencies gave their first-ever approvals to two companies making cell-cultivated poultry products, which are appearing on restaurant menus. The meat substitutes have garnered the support of some significant investors, including billionaire Bill Gates, who has been the subject of attacks from supporters of some of the state legislation proposed.

“Let me start off by explaining why I drafted this bill,” said Rep. David Marshall, an Arizona Republican who proposed legislation to ban cell-cultured meat from being sold or produced in the state, during a hearing on the bill. “It’s because of organizations like the FDA and the World Economic Forum, also Bill Gates and others, who have openly declared war on our ranching.”

In Alabama, fear of “franken-meat” competition spurs legislation

In Alabama, an effort to ban lab-grown meat is winding its way through the State House in Montgomery.

There, state senators have already passed a bill that would make it a misdemeanor, punishable by up to three months in jail and a $500 fine, to sell, manufacture, or distribute what the proposed legislation labels “cultivated food products.” An earlier version of the bill called lab-grown protein “meat,” but it was quickly revised by lawmakers. The bill passed out of committee and through the Senate without opposition from any of its members.

Now, the bill is headed toward a vote in the Alabama House of Representatives, where the body’s health committee recently held a public hearing on the issue. Rep. Danny Crawford, who is carrying the bill in the body, told fellow lawmakers during that hearing that he’s concerned about two issues: health risks and competition for Alabama farmers.

“Lab-grown meat or whatever you want to call it—we’re not sure of all of the long-term problems with that,” he said. “And it does compete with our farming industry.”

Crawford said that legislators had heard from NASA, which expressed concern about the bill’s impact on programs to develop alternative proteins for astronauts. An amendment to the bill will address that problem, Crawford said, allowing an exemption for research purposes.

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Urban agriculture’s carbon footprint can be worse than that of large farms

agriculture, farming, plants, recycling, Science, Sustainability, urban farming / Mike M. / January 23, 2024

Greening your greens —

Saving on the emissions associated with shipping doesn’t guarantee a lower footprint.

John Timmer – Jan 23, 2024 7: 14 pm UTC

Lots of plants in the foreground, and dense urban buildings in the background

A few years back, the Internet was abuzz with the idea of vertical farms running down the sides of urban towers, with the idea that growing crops where they’re actually consumed could eliminate the carbon emissions involved with shipping plant products long distances. But lifecycle analysis of those systems, which require a lot of infrastructure and energy, suggest they’d have a hard time doing better than more traditional agriculture.

But those systems represent only a small fraction of urban agriculture as it’s practiced. Most urban farming is a mix of local cooperative gardens and small-scale farms located within cities. And a lot less is known about the carbon footprint of this sort of farming. Now, a large international collaboration has worked with a number of these farms to get a handle on their emissions in order to compare those to large-scale agriculture.

The results suggest it’s possible that urban farming can have a lower impact. But it requires choosing the right crops and a long-term commitment to sustainability.

Tracking crops

Figuring out the carbon footprint of urban farms is a challenge, because it involves tracking all the inputs, from infrastructure to fertilizers, as well as the productivity of the farm. A lot of the urban farms, however, are nonprofits, cooperatives, and/or staffed primarily by volunteers, so detailed reporting can be a challenge. To get around this, the researchers worked with a lot of individual farms in France, Germany, Poland, the UK, and US in order to get accurate accounts of materials and practices.

Data from large-scale agriculture for comparison is widely available, and it includes factors like transport of the products to consumers. The researchers used data from the same countries as the urban farms.

On average, the results aren’t good for urban agriculture. An average serving from an urban farm was associated with 0.42 kg of carbon dioxide equivalents. By contrast, traditional produce resulted in emissions of about 0.07 kg per serving—six times less.

But that average obscures a lot of nuance. Of the 73 urban farms studied, 17 outperformed traditional agriculture by this measure. And, if the single highest-emitting farm was excluded from the analysis, the median of the urban farms ended up right around that 0.7 kg per serving.

All of this suggests the details of urban farming practices make a big difference. One thing that matters is the crop. Tomatoes tend to be fairly resource-intensive to grow and need to be shipped quickly in order to be consumed while ripe. Here, urban farms came in at 0.17 kg of carbon per serving, while conventional farming emits 0.27 kg/serving.

Difference-makers

One clear thing was that the intentions of those running the farms didn’t matter much. Organizations that had a mission of reducing environmental impact, or had taken steps like installing solar panels, were no better off at keeping their emissions low.

The researchers note two practical reasons for the differences they saw. One is infrastructure, which is the single largest source of carbon emissions at small sites. These include things like buildings, raised beds, and compost handling. The best sites the researchers saw did a lot of upcycling of things like construction waste into structures like the surrounds for raised beds.

Infrastructure in urban sites is also a challenge because of the often intense pressure on land, which can mean gardens have to relocate. This can shorten the lifetime of infrastructure and increase its environmental impact.

Another major factor was the use of urban waste streams for the consumables involved with farming. Composting from urban waste essentially eliminated fertilizer use (it was only 5 percent of the rate of conventional farming). Here, practices matter a great deal, as some composting techniques allow the material to become oxygen-free, which results in the anaerobic production of methane. Rainwater use also made a difference; in one case, the carbon impact of water treatment and distribution accounted for over two-thirds of an urban farm’s emissions.

These suggest that careful planning could make urban farms effective at avoiding some of the carbon emissions of conventional agriculture. This would involve figuring out best practices for infrastructure and consumables, as well as targeting crops that can have high carbon emissions when grown on conventional farms.

But any negatives are softened by a couple of additional considerations. One is that even the worst-performing produce seen in this analysis is far better in terms of carbon emissions than eating meat. The researchers also point out that many of the cooperative gardens provide a lot of social functions—things like after-school programs or informal classes—that can be difficult to put an emissions price on. Maximizing these could definitely boost the societal value of the operations, even if it doesn’t have a clear impact on the environment.

Nature Cities, 2019. DOI: 10.1038/s44284-023-00023-3 (About DOIs).

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A locally grown solution for period poverty

agave, agriculture, materials science, Science, Sustainability / Shannon Garcia / December 9, 2023

Absorbant agave —

A Kenyan tinkerer and Stanford engineer team up to make maxi pads from agave fibers.

Diana Gitig – Dec 9, 2023 1: 08 pm UTC

Image of rows of succulents with long spiky leaves and large flower stalks. — Enlarge / Sisal is an invasive species that is also grown agriculturally.

Women and girls across much of the developing world lack access to menstrual products. This means that for at least a week or so every month, many girls don’t go to school, so they fall behind educationally and often never catch up economically.

Many conventional menstrual products have traditionally been made of hydrogels made from toxic petrochemicals, so there has been a push to make them out of biomaterials. But this usually means cellulose from wood, which is in high demand for other purposes and isn’t readily available in many parts of the globe. So Alex Odundo found a way to solve both of these problems: making maxi pads out of sisal, a drought-tolerant agave plant that grows readily in semi-arid climates like his native Kenya.

Putting an invasive species to work

Sisal is an invasive plant in rural Kenya, where it is often planted as livestock fencing and feedstock. It doesn’t require fertilizer, and its leaves can be harvested all year long over a five- to seven-year span. Odundo and his partners in Manu Prakash’s lab at Stanford University developed a process to generate soft, absorbent material from the sisal leaves. It relies on treatment with dilute peroxyformic acid (1 percent) to increase its porosity, followed by washing in sodium hydroxide (4 percent) and then spinning in a tabletop blender to enhance porosity and make it softer.

They tested their fibers with a mixture of water mixed with glycerol—to make it thicker, like blood—and found that it is as absorbent as the cotton used in commercially available maxi pads. It was also as absorbent as wood pulp and more absorbent than fibers prepared from other biomaterials, including hemp and flax. Moreover, their process is less energy-intensive than conventional processing procedures, which are typically performed at higher temperatures and pressures.

In a cradle-to-gate carbon footprint life cycle analysis, including sisal cultivation, harvesting, manufacturing, and transportation, sisal cellulose microfiber production fared roughly the same as production of cellulose microfiber from wood and much better than that from cotton in terms of both carbon footprint and water consumption, possibly because cotton requires so much upstream fertilizer. Much of the footprint comes from transportation, highlighting how useful it can be to make products like this in the same communities that need them.

Science for the greater good

This is not Odundo’s first foray into utilizing sisal; at Olex Techno Enterprises in Kisumu, Kenya, he has been making machines to turn sisal leaves into rope for over 10 years. This benefits local farmers since sisal rope and even sisal fibers sell for ten times as much as sisal leaves. In addition to making maxi pads, Odundo also built a stove that burns sawdust, rice husks, and other biodegradable waste products.

By reducing wood stoves, he is reducing deforestation and improving the health of the women who breathe in the smoke of the cookfires. Adoption of such stoves have been a goal of environmentalists for years, and although a number of prototypes have been developed by mostly male engineers in developed countries, they have not been widely used because they are not that practical or appealing to the mostly female cooks in developing countries—the people who actually need to cook with them, yet were not consulted in their design.

Manu Prakash’s lab’s website proclaims that “we are dedicated toward inventing and distributing ‘frugal science’ tools to democratize access to science.” Partnering with Alex Odundo to manufacture menstrual products in the low-income rural communities that most need them seems like the apotheosis of that goal.

Communications Engineering, 2023. DOI: 10.1038/s44172-023-00130-y

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