By Jessica Kutz for The People Sentinel.
Broadcast version by Mark Richardson for South Carolina News Service reporting for the Solutions Journalism Network-Public News Service Collaboration

It’s high noon on an overwhelmingly hot summer day in Allendale County, and the air conditioning is blasting inside Rachael Sharp’s truck. Looking out at her farm through the windshield, Sharp opens up one of many agriculture related apps on her iPhone. With the push of a button, her irrigation systems nearly half a mile away tremble to life, spraying water onto a vast field of soybeans.

That’s the future imagined by precision agriculture, an umbrella term for the new agricultural technologies transforming farming; artificial intelligence (AI), satellite imagery, cloud computing, remote irrigation, drones and self-driving tractors are becoming the future of agriculture. With billions of dollars of private and public investment behind it and the hope of it helping agriculture mitigate and adapt to the global climate crisis, precision agriculture makes bold promises. 

Locally, some farmers have described the rollout of precision agriculture as a welcome opportunity, while others experienced it as overbearing. But on Rachael Sharp’s family farm, precision agriculture is a mixed bag.

“We’re saving on input costs because we don’t put as much water, nutrients or fertilizers out and there’s not as much left in the environment at the end of the day,” Sharp said, her iPhone open to the Climate FieldView app, which shows her satellite-generated graphics of which parts of her farm need water. “But it spits out so much information that sometimes it feels overwhelming.”

Precision agriculture technology is being marketed aggressively to local farmers — at trade shows, in emails, and over phone calls — with the main promises being the ability to cut costs, get higher crop yields and optimize their farming techniques.


“We went to [a trade show] last year and I bet we saw 35 different people offering precision ag tools and products,” Sharp said. The previous year, Sharp said, only several people were selling precision agriculture products. “It was crazy overwhelming.”

For local farmers on shoestring budgets, these promises are enticing, as recent crises have forced American farmers to grapple with higher input costs on fertilizer, seeds and fuel, as well as unstable markets to sell their harvest. In 2022, American farmers dealt with a 50% rise in the cost of fertilizer after its main ingredient, natural gas, spiked in cost when Russia invaded Ukraine. As climate change worsens, increasing temperatures are forcing farmers to make decisions regarding what seeds to plant and when to plant them.

“We’re looking at planting a soybean [seed] that doesn’t take as long of a growing season,” said Rachael Sharp, noting her concern for what future temperature changes could mean for her farm. “We’ve adjusted to planting it earlier and getting it out of the field earlier because you’re not gonna have as much [growing] time. Our winters these past two years have been so mild, so the oats don’t have the fertilization they need.”

At a time of destabilization for local growers, precision agriculture’s tools offer a way to navigate the instability. Through the use of nodes, soil probes, sensors, drones and satellite imagery, precision agriculture collects data regarding soil chemistry, seed usage, crop damage, weather patterns and other variables. Then, using cloud computing, algorithms, and machine learning, these data are then analyzed to show farmers which areas of a field need the most, or the least, attention.

“In a sense, it’s like micromanaging a field,” said Michael Plumblee, Assistant Professor of Agronomy at Clemson University, who has been involved in the local rollout of precision agriculture. “Rather than treating everything across the field as the same, we identify different management zones within the field.”

Precision agriculture digitizes almost every step of the farming process, from tilling and sowing to irrigation and fertilization to pest control and harvesting.

“There’s enough precision agriculture technology now to make better actions with the limited resources we have, [since] we don’t have infinite water, infinite fertilizer, and infinite labor,” said Vicente Ossa, the marketing manager for WiseConn, a precision agriculture company that sold its automated irrigation system DropControl at a July trade show in Barnwell.

The global market for precision agriculture is expected to grow from $8.5 billion in 2023 to $14.9 billion by the end of 2028, according to a market research report by BCC Research. North America, the report says, has the highest market share in precision agriculture globally.

As climate change creates increasingly unpredictable growing seasons, warmer winters and threatens crop yields in the southeast, data analysis will become an important part of helping farmers make better decisions, according to Kevin Royal, the precision agriculture specialist at the Edisto Research and Education Center in Blackville.

“Farmers place their bets on what variety to plant based on what they think the weather’s gonna be like this year from the field conditions and from historic data, but that’s where the AI comes in,” Royal said. “Based on historic patterns and projected temperature changes, it gives you recommendations.”

Using data gathered from a field, artificial intelligence can be used to help farmers adapt to climate change and reduce a field’s emissions. For instance, targeted use of nitrogen fertilizer cuts down on excessive use; nitrogen fertilizer creates nitrous oxide, a greenhouse gas 300 times more powerful at warming the atmosphere than carbon dioxide. 

Algorithms and machine learning are increasingly being used in farming operations as agriculture increasingly becomes an industry of data; by 2021, 87% of farms were using some form of AI. However, artificial intelligence itself is a growing emissions source, as the energy-hungry data centers that power artificial intelligence will consume twice as much energy in 2026 as they did in 2022, according to the International Energy Agency.

The technological innovations of precision agriculture will play a key role in adopting the practices that keep agriculture on track to meet emissions reductions targets, according to a World Resources Institute report. Precision agriculture is being used to track and reduce energy usage, particularly from groundwater irrigation, which farmers are increasingly relying on as rainfall patterns become less predictable. By using less water in irrigation, Sharp has cut down on energy consumption; irrigation pumping accounts for 16% of all greenhouse gas emissions from energy use in agriculture, forestry and fisheries in the United States.

“In South Carolina, we spend a lot of money irrigating,” Jose Payero, an irrigation specialist at Clemson University who has developed an app that allows farmers to insert field data and energy variables. Payero led a demonstration on irrigation energy consumption at a farm field day in Blackville on September 12. “You can calculate what the cost is per acre, and the total cost for your farm, depending on your energy source,” he told a crowd of farmers.

Precision agriculture is also helping farmers confront local ecological issues. As previously reported by The People-Sentinel, booming populations of wild deer and pigs in the region have caused widespread damage to local farms, pushing local farmers into the red.

“Now they can actually figure out what percentage of that field has been damaged by wild pigs and how that may increase over time,” said John Mayer, a research scientist at the Savannah River National Laboratory, who has studied wild pig populations for decades. “That’s one of the major ways precision agriculture [is] able to help with the wild pig populations.”

In Rachael Sharp’s fields, wild deer have been a persistent issue, but satellite mapping now shows how parts of the field are more damaged by deer than others. “It sees things that the human eye wouldn’t see until probably much later, which has been helpful because by that point in time it’s too late.”

Although Rachael is joining farmers in adopting precision agriculture technology, other farmers, such as her 76-year-old father Don Sharp, are cautious. Despite the purported benefits of precision agriculture, its technologies are expensive to adopt, and Don Sharp shares the concerns of many local farmers about growing corporate control over small farms.

“I think in another 30 years small family farms will be out of business and corporations will own [their land],” said Don Sharp, who has been farming the same land since he was a teenager in the 1960s. At that time, there were roughly 3.5 million farms in America; now, there are 1.89 million farms in America.

Just getting precision agriculture into rural areas faces numerous challenges. Its technologies require high bandwidth speeds for uploading and downloading data collected from farms, creating a major barrier for local farmers; as with many rural communities across the United States, rural counties like Barnwell, Allendale and Bamberg counties have inequitable access to broadband.

“We need to double the food supply for the world in the next 50 years, but we’re basically out of agricultural land, so broadband will be essential for precision agriculture,” said Christopher Ali, a professor of telecommunications at PennState.

But the lack of broadband in rural areas is beginning to change. In November 2021, President Joe Biden signed the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, which contains $42 billion in funding for a nationwide buildout of broadband infrastructure, called the Broadband Equity Access and Deployment Program.

“Last fall, we just got high speed internet through the infrastructure grants [and] we are so thankful for it,” said Richard Rentz, a farmer from rural Bamberg County. “It has been a game changer in a lot of ways.”

The deployment of broadband infrastructure on Rentz’s farm has allowed him to begin precision agriculture practices like variable rate seeding, which involves using data to plant seeds in areas of a field that have higher productivity.

“[Precision agriculture] has been saving us on everything,” Rentz said. “When you start varying lime and varying fertilizer, the payback is pretty quick, and even with variable rate seeding, the payback is relatively quick. … Certainly it saves on everything.”

For Tony and Steve Douglas, two brothers who farm in nearby Aiken County, lack of internet access has created numerous problems. While using automated steering on their tractor, which is connected online via cell phone tower, connection will frequently drop.

“You know how a signal is,” Tony Douglas said. “You be down in the bottom [of a field] and the cell service drops to your tractor and it messes up your rows. Then you gotta drive around and try to find a signal. It was really frustrating.”

Internet and broadband accessibility will be one of the biggest barriers for implementing precision agriculture, according to Royal.

“As we’re becoming more dependent on moving that data from the field to the cloud, wireless broadband is a big issue,” said Royal, who serves on a working group at the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) that encourages the adoption of precision agriculture. “Broadband can help or hinder your adoption of precision ag. In some places it’s great and in some places, it’s really tough.”

Farmers in America and in rural counties like Allendale are also getting older; the average age of an American farmer is 58.1 years old, and roughly 58% of farmers in Allendale are over 65, according to USDA statistics. Older legacy farmers like Don Sharp are less familiar with technology, and fear being left further behind; even 37-year-old Rachael struggles to understand the new technology hitting the market.

“A lot of people that are coming into farming now, they don’t know anything but using tech to make decisions,” Rachael said. “Fear shouldn’t be the reason farmers are adopting these technologies but it feels like it is.”

But learning gaps and an aversion to new technology is something that precision agriculture companies are beginning to adjust to. Development of new innovations in precision agriculture will only be as good as farmers’ ability to utilize them, Ossa said, so working with farmers to improve technological literacy will be a key step in moving forward.

“We had a client who was very old and not close to technology at all and didn’t have a smartphone,” Ossa said. “We were able to simplify it in a way that an everyday guy can use. He understood the value that we are bringing and got a phone.”

But as coordination between precision agriculture systems improves and artificial intelligence learns more about farms, the need for humans to make decisions about agriculture will continue to fall, according to Royal.

“With machine learning, you’ll eventually have a local bot or a service you subscribe to that’ll take years worth of data and help you build a more dynamic map of where your good yields can be or where your poor yields are projected to be,” Royal said.

Despite its acclaimed benefits, the Sharps have noticed that precision agriculture systems frequently fail to understand characteristics about their land that they have accumulated through decades of farming.

“They definitely overpromise and underdeliver,” Sharp said. “They tell you all these wonderful things it's going to do for you and that can be true, but we’re already trying to raise crops and a lot of farmers don't have time to sit down and learn. I think the Silicon Valley people think everybody knows as much as they know.”

For now, Don Sharp still keeps an inventory on pen and paper. Although he is not against utilizing precision agriculture, he worries of a future where the farming lifestyle continues to be pushed out of both agriculture and society.

“I always say that he who plants a seed beneath the soil and waits for it to grow believes in God,” Don Sharp said. “You don’t really have that type of farmer anymore. They’re a dying breed.”


Jessica Kutz wrote this article for The People Sentinel.


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Consumers are unhappy with increasing food prices and blame inflation. In reality, natural disasters have a direct link to grocery costs, with no end in sight.

Climate change affects Illinois farms, especially drought. The weather extremes lower their livestock's productivity, raising the price of dairy and meat products.

Michael Stromberg, spokesperson for Trace One, a food and beverage regulatory compliance company, said the effects of floods, hurricanes, drought and extreme heat have a nationwide and global impact.

"The price of oranges and the price of orange juice have both steadily increased in recent years due to declining production in Florida caused by large hurricanes," Stromberg outlined. "Grain prices are through the roof in critical agriculture regions like the Midwest. It starts with drought. It affects a huge portion of agriculture in that region that has an aftereffect at the grocery store in terms of your grocery prices."

Illinois ranked 10th in the Trace One study of all 50 states where natural disasters have the biggest impact on the nation's food supply. Losses were mostly due to drought in Henry, Sangamon, Lee, Logan, Bureau and Mason counties.

Stromberg argued innovation is needed to solve these dilemmas. One solution is to develop and
distribute climate-resilient crops capable of withstanding extreme droughts and floods. Other strategies are to implement effective water resource management systems and invest in flood control measures alongside restoring natural buffers. Wetlands and watersheds will act as sponges to help mitigate the dangers of excessive rainfall. He added more answers can take on a scientific tone.

"Farmers can use newer precision agriculture technologies like IOT sensors, drones, advanced analytics that can allow farmers to better monitor weather patterns, things like soil health and their water usage, which can optimize resources better," Stromberg explained.

He urged the public to vote for policies prioritizing renewable energy, water conservation and sustainable agriculture to drive "incremental improvement," and for the public to reduce their food waste. Another Trace One study found Illinoisans lost slightly more than $1,900 per household, or $766 per person from food waste last year.


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By Seth Millstein for Sentient.
Broadcast version by Freda Ross for Texas News Service reporting for the Sentient-Public News Service Collaboration

Another day, another E. coli outbreak. In the last half of 2024 alone, E. coli has been found in ground beef, carrots, onions, walnuts and cheese, causing at least 186 illnesses, one death and several recalls. Why is E. coli popping up left and right — and what do these outbreaks have to do with factory farms?

The answers to these questions, respectively, are “we don’t know” and “a lot.” Harmful E. coli is produced primarily in the guts of ruminant animals, such as cows, sheep, goats and deer, and as a result, it’s often found in beef. It can easily infect other foods as well — but even when it does, beef production and cattle farms are often still the ultimate source of the contamination.

This can play out in several ways, but it’s important to note at the outset that there’s still a lot we don’t know about E. coli transmission. Often, researchers can’t identify with certainty the original source of contamination, and can only speculate on the path it took to reach whatever food it ultimately infected. The bacteria itself also changes and adapts over time, complicating these post-outbreak analyses even further.

“With many of the outbreaks, [investigators] cannot find the source of the infection,” Alfredo Torres, professor of microbiology and immunology at the University of Texas Medical Branch, tells Sentient. “There are all sorts of contaminations that we have no idea where they’re coming from.”

What Is E. Coli?

E. coli, or Escherichia coli, comes in many different varieties. The majority of them are harmless, and some serve important purposes in the human body, but there are six subvarieties of E. coli bacteria — often referred to as “The Big Six” — that can cause illness in humans.

In the United States, most E. coli outbreaks are caused by the strain O157:H7. This strain belongs to a group of E. coli subtypes called Shiga-toxin producing E. coli, or STEC. As the name implies, the STEC varieties of E. coli produce a toxin called Shiga, and when we talk of humans becoming sick with E. coli, it’s usually the Shiga toxin that’s responsible for causing the actual illness.

While there’s a lot that scientists still don’t understand about STEC, it’s believed that the bacteria’s initial development must take place in the intestinal tract of certain non-human animals, namely cows and other ruminants. From there, it can spread to humans in a number of ways, but to the best of scientists’ current understanding, it can’t develop in the first place without a ruminant’s gut.

Humans contract harmful E. coli strains by eating contaminated food and or water, interacting with infected animals or people, or coming into contact with feces with E. coli in it. It can be highly contagious; in 1993, a sixteen month-old boy died from E. coli after coming into contact with the stool of a classmate who had the disease.

Although this was an example of human-to-human transmission of the bacteria, it still began with a cow: The classmate’s mother worked at Jack In The Box, the source of the outbreak.

E. coli can produce a variety of symptoms. When it infects the large intestine, it can result in diarrhea, vomiting, nausea, stomach cramps and loss of appetite; when the bacteria is in the urinary tract, it causes pain during urination, cloudy urine and abdominal or pelvic pain.

Although most people who become sick from E. coli recover within a week or so, some patients develop serious and life-threatening conditions, such as haemolytic uraemic syndrome (HUS) and sepsis. Studies on the mortality rate of E. coli infections have come to a wide range of conclusions, from eight percent on the low end to 35 percent on the high end.

Where Does E. Coli Come From?

E. coli lives in many places, but the “Big Six” subtypes that sicken humans are all found primarily in the bodies of cattle, Torres tells Sentient.

“The bacteria can actually grow in the rectal anal junction of these animals without causing any disease, or any symptoms, or anything,” Torres says. “So when [the cows defecate], the fecal matter is contaminated with this organism, and anything that gets in contact with the manure, or water contaminated with the fecal matter, can get contaminated with the bacteria.”

Historically, E. coli outbreaks in the United States came from tainted beef, Torres says. The O157:H7 strain was first discovered in 1982, when 47 people contracted it after eating contaminated burgers from McDonald’s. The 1992 E. coli outbreak, which killed four people and sickened over 500, also originated from beef patties, this time from Jack In The Box.

The Jack In The Box outbreak received significant media attention and became something of a national scandal. In response, the USDA subsequently implemented a number of regulations to prevent beef from being contaminated with E. coli, and fast food restaurants implemented operational changes, such as separating beef patties with tongs instead of bare hands, in an attempt to accomplish the same.

These changes did reduce the frequency of beef-originated E. coli outbreaks, Torres says, but they didn’t put an end to the outbreaks entirely. The harmful strains of E. coli may originate in a cow’s gut, but they can survive in other environments as well. And thanks to this resilience, E. coli has the ability to infect plenty of foods other than meat.

How Factory Farms Cause E. Coli Outbreaks

Given E. coli’s affinity for cow intestines, it’s no surprise that cattle farms and slaughterhouses are often the source of E. coli outbreaks. Typically, this happens when E. coli in the cow’s gut cross-contaminates the rest of his or her body during the slaughtering process, and ends up in the resulting beef.

But because E. coli is found in manure as well as the body, anything that comes into contact with manure is also liable to be infected. This includes water — and unfortunately, it’s not uncommon for manure from cattle farms to make its way into nearby waterways. (The disease can also spread via human waste in waterways, but only if the human in question had already contracted E. coli).

There’s good reason to believe that this leakage, or runoff, contributes to the spread of E. coli. A 2023 study found that water samples taken from sources within a mile of factory farms had higher concentrations of E. coli than those located more than five miles away from said farms.

This year, an FDA study found that waterways contained a higher prevalence of STEC stains of E. coli in particular when they passed by factory farms. This occurred even when there was no apparent runoff from the farms to the water, leading researchers to speculate that the bacteria latched on to dust from the farms and traveled to the water via the air.

Complicating matters further is the fact that E. coli can also live in the leaves of certain vegetables. This was evident in 2006, when tainted spinach caused a massive nationwide E. coli outbreak that killed three people, sickened over 200, and depressed spinach sales for over a year.

The Spinach Outbreak: a Case Study in Uncertainty

The spinach incident is a good illustration of how E. coli outbreaks occur — and of why even vegetable-based outbreaks can often be traced back to meat production.

“That was the first time we learned that somehow, the bacteria is able to survive in leaves of spinach,” Torres tells Sentient. “If you use a microscope and you look inside of a leaf, there’s an area called the stroma, and you can actually find the bacteria attached to that area.”

The fact that E. coli can survive within the biological structure of spinach itself, as opposed to simply living in water on the surface of spinach, means that washing contaminated spinach isn’t sufficient to rid it of the bacteria.

Subsequent investigations of the 2006 outbreak found that the contaminated spinach originated from a single grower in California, and investigators were even able to trace it back to a specific ranch in San Benito County. That ranch was located next to a cattle farm, and manure and river water from the cattle farm was later found to have the same strain of E. coli that contaminated the spinach.

But incredibly, despite all of these findings, investigators weren’t able to determine precisely how the spinach became infected in the first place. They speculated that tainted river water could have made its way into the well that irrigated the spinach fields, or alternatively, that a wayward cow or pig might have inadvertently transferred the bacteria from the cattle farm to the spinach.

Nevertheless, a spokesperson for the California Department of Health said at the time that “we’ll never be able to make a definitive link” between the cattle farm and the spinach ranch.

The whole episode encapsulates an unfortunate truth about E. coli outbreaks: we often don’t get a full picture of how exactly they unfolded. We know that the disease originates in the stomachs of cows and a few other species, but the path it takes to infect humans is often impossible to fully understand.

Take the recent McDonald’s outbreak. Contaminated onions are believed to be the culprit here — but how did they get contaminated in the first place?

The short answer is that we don’t know. In an interview with Sentient earlier in the year, public health expert Sarah Sorscher said that the onions were “probably being processed in an environment with ground beef or some other high-risk food” that already had E. coli. Torres, meanwhile, suggests that they may have been contaminated via tainted water.

But these are merely guesses — educated guesses, to be sure, but guesses nonetheless. As of this writing, the precise manner in which the onions and carrots became contaminated with E. coli is unknown, and it’s entirely possible that it will never be known. Such is the nature of E. coli outbreaks.

But one thing is for sure: eventually, it always comes back to poop. And factory farms present the perfect opportunity for this poop to make its way into drinking water. Manure from these farms is typically stored in enormous outdoor lagoons, which can — and do — easily leak into nearby waterways.

How Can We Prevent E. Coli Outbreaks?

The federal government has taken a number of steps to lessen the risk of E. coli outbreaks. The Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) of the USDA tests random samples of raw beef for E. coli before they’re sent to restaurants or retailers, and conducts regular inspections of produce farms.

But the government can’t test every piece of spinach or beef before it’s sent out into the world. The ambiguous and confusing nature of E. coli spread means that ultimately, it’s on individual farms to implement and follow best practices that can help stem the prevalence of outbreaks.

Some of these practices are mandated by the government, while others have been developed and voluntarily adopted by producers. Since 1996, the FDA has required meat and poultry producers to implement an inspection system called HACCP, or Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points, to catch potential contaminations before sending their product to distributors.

But these kinds of rules are only effective if agricultural producers abide by them, and sometimes they don’t. The processor of the tainted spinach behind the 2006 outbreak, for instance, hadn’t been following its own water-inspection policies in the month that the tainted spinach was processed, a subsequent investigation found.

The FDA can warn, fine and even shutter facilities that ignore food safety practices. But much of the time, this only happens after there’s been an outbreak. In 2017, the FDA shut down Dixie Dew Products after discovering numerous food safety violations at its production facility — but only after the company’s soy nut butter gave E. coli to 29 people, nine of whom developed kidney failure as a result.

The Bottom Line

E. coli is something of a moving target. The ways in which it infects food still aren’t fully understood, and the government has at times been slow in implementing policies to reduce the frequency of outbreaks (the FDA only rolled out comprehensive safety rules for produce in 2016, for example). The fact that the bacteria keeps popping up in new foods creates yet another challenge.

One thing is clear, however: Industrial animal agriculture, and cattle farms in particular, are central to the spread of E. coli. While operational and regulatory steps can be taken to reduce the risk, E. coli’s prevalence on cattle farms is an unavoidable and intrinsic consequence of how the cow’s digestive system works. As long as we’re farming cattle for food, we’re going to be dealing with E. coli.


Seth Millstein wrote this article for Sentient.


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Consumers are unhappy with increasing food prices and blame inflation. In reality, natural disasters have a direct link to grocery costs, and no end is in sight.

Indiana farms are affected by climate change including hot, dry summers and excessive rain.

The weather extremes lower the productivity of their livestock which raises the price of dairy and meat products.

Trace One is a software and regulatory compliance company for the food and beverage industry.

Spokesperson Mike Stromberg said the effects of floods, hurricanes, drought, and extreme heat have a nationwide and global impact.

"The price of oranges and the price of orange juice have both steadily increased in recent years, due to declining production in Florida caused by large hurricanes," said Stromberg. "Grain prices are through the roof in critical agriculture regions like the Midwest. It starts with drought. It affects a huge portion of agriculture in that region, that has an after effect at the grocery store - in terms of your grocery prices."

Indiana ranked 24th in the Trace One study of all 52 states where natural disasters have the biggest impact on the nation's food supply.

Losses were mostly due to riverine flooding, or excessive water flow - in Clay, Dubois, Knox, Morgan, and Vigo counties.

Stromberg said innovation is needed to solve these dilemmas. One solution is to develop and distribute climate-resilient crops that can withstand extreme droughts and floods.

Other strategies are to implement effective water resource management systems and invest in flood-control measures alongside restoring natural buffers.

Wetlands and watersheds will act as sponges to help mitigate the dangers of excessive rainfall. More answers, he added, can take on a scientific tone.

"Also, farmers can use newer precision agriculture technologies," said Stromberg, "like IOT sensors, drones, advanced analytics that can allow farmers to better monitor weather patterns - things like soil health and their water usage, which can optimize resources better."

He advocated for the public to vote for policies that prioritize renewable energy, water conservation and sustainable agriculture to drive "incremental improvement" and for the public to reduce their food waste.

The study found that Hoosiers lost slightly more than $2,000 per household, or $826 per person, from food waste last year.




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