By Ashley Stimpson of Nexus Media News for Sentient.
Broadcast version by Suzanne Potter for California News Service reporting for the Sentient/Just and Climate-Friendly Food System-Public News Service Collaboration
In early 2020, a group of Saudi farmers led Vanessa Melino into the desert. Then a plant physiologist at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, Melino was looking for hardy crops that could thrive in harsh conditions — in the Saudi desert, where the over-extraction of groundwater for irrigation has resulted in markedly high levels of salt in the soil.
After driving for hours, the group arrived at salt lakes in the desert, “like glistening white pans you can see from a distance.”
Spindly green shoots of wild salicornia emerged from the water, flourishing despite “salt literally built up in crystals on the surface of the soil,” she said. “These plants are remarkable.”
Salicornia –also known as samphire, sea beans, sea asparagus, glasswort, and pickleweed –is a halophyte, a group of salt-loving species that blossom in conditions that would be fatal to other plants. Recently, scientific interest in salicornia has spiked, thanks to concern over increasing soil salinity—the result of rising seas, prolonged drought, and human activities like deforestation and seawater irrigation.
Saudi Arabia is hardly alone in its salty dilemma. By some estimates, more than half of the globe’s arable land could become too salty to farm by the year 2050. A recent study from NASA predicts that saltwater will taint 77 percent of the coastal aquifers – groundwater systems that deliver freshwater inland – by 2100. These conditions will be a death sentence for many conventional crops, which aren’t bred to handle high levels of salinity.
What will farmers grow in the salty fields of the future? Melino thinks it might be salicornia.
Cultures around the world have utilized salicornia for centuries to produce glass and soap, while countries from France to Turkey to Korea have long regarded the plant as a culinary delicacy. Salicornia proliferates in coastal deltas, mangrove swamps, and salt marshes, growing in small, short bushes. Recognizable by its bright green and knobby stalks—which boast a satisfying crunch ideal for stir-fries, salads, or even pickles—salicornia is high in fiber; its seeds can be used to produce an oil that’s rich in protein and fatty acids.
That’s why Melino, now a lecturer at the University of Newcastle in Australia, is working to transform the plant—which grows wild around the world—into a domesticated crop.
While it took our ancestors thousands of years to domesticate wheat and corn, “we don’t have that kind of time,” said Melino. To speed up the process, she and her international research team have gathered the hardiest specimens they could find from all over the world and are now breeding them in nurseries in Saudi Arabia and Egypt.
Domesticating salicornia would be a huge step forward in getting the plant into the hands of farmers who are struggling to adapt to rising seas and salty soils, said Yanik Nyberg, founder and CEO of Seawater Solutions, a Scottish organization that restores degraded coastland around the world and helps communities adopt climate-friendly farming practices.
In Vietnam’s Mekong Delta, where 18 million people depend on rice production for their livelihoods and saltwater intrusion is predicted to soon cause up to $3 billion in crop losses a year, Seawater Solutions is teaching farmers to grow salicornia and develop a market for the crop.
Nha Be Nhut, a farm outside Ho Chi Minh City, for instance, once grew lemongrass, watermelon, and squash using pumped groundwater, a method that can hasten saltwater intrusion. Today, its owners are running trials growing salicornia, irrigating the plants with brackish water from nearby canals, and selling it to high-end restaurants in the city, where chefs incorporate it into dishes like salicornia-marinated gazpacho and salicornia pakora.
In eastern Ghana, the organization is working with villagers in the low-lying Volta Delta to restore mangrove forests that have been cut down or overfished, and sow salicornia in the adjacent lagoons. For now, the plant will be used as fish food in aquaculture projects, said Nyberg.
These projects are largely in trial stages, with profit and scalability still a question mark. But a challenge, according to Nyberg, is sourcing reliable seeds.
“Right now, we’re selecting plants from the wild, ones that perform well, and we dish those out,” Nyberg said. “Usually, only about 50 percent survive; it’s definitely quantity over quality.”
“These are pretty wild plants, so germination is erratic,” said Arjen de Vos, whose Netherlands-based organization, The Salt Doctors, develops climate-resilient agricultural systems in salt-affected parts of the world.“Getting their hands on good seeds is difficult for farmers.”
There are other obstacles standing in the way of the broad adoption of salicornia as a food crop, de Vos said. For one thing, little research has been done on pests or diseases that might affect the plants. Another larger issue is developing a market for the crop. “If there’s no market for it, no farmer will grow it.”
Efforts are underway to introduce consumers to salicornia. In the United Arab Emirates, the nonprofits World Wildlife Foundation and International Center for Biosaline Agriculture brought together the country’s top chefs to familiarize them with the food and ways to use it in their menus.Salicornia startups have popped up in Portugal and Poland, and in Ireland, a popular Dublin restaurant features the salty vegetable on the menu.
For now, de Vos said most farmers are taking stopgap steps to adapt to increasing salinity, such as installing drainage systems and breeding conventional vegetables to be more salt-tolerant.
But he worries even those strategies may not be sustainable in the long term.
“Rainy seasons are becoming shorter. People are tapping deeper and deeper, where the groundwater is saltier. The world is running out of fresh water,” he said. “We may not be there yet, but salicornia will be very needed.”
Melino, who’s not involved in de Vos’ or Nyberg’s projects, said there’s something of a “consortium” of people around the world working to make salicornia a viable crop for a warmer, saltier future. “It’s a little bit of a competitive space,” she said, with some scientists, like her, working on domestication and others working on “promoting a culinary relationship” with the plant: “The two can and should happen alongside each other.”
The scientist is hopeful that as research continues, salicornia’s trajectory will look something like quinoa’s, another salt-tolerant crop. The Andean grain prized by Indigenous cultures was neglected for centuries before being “rediscovered” in the last half of the 20th century and heavily promoted by the United Nations. In 1980, eight countries grew quinoa; today that number is close to 100.By 2034, the grain you couldn’t find on grocery store shelves a decade ago, is projected to hit $2.78 billion in global sales.
With enough investment and interest, Melino believes salicornia might one day be as popular — and that saltwater, instead of being a foe to the world’s food supply, might be its friend.
Ashley Stimpson of Nexus Media News wrote this article for Sentient. If you have a climate solution story you'd like to share, you can do that through Project Drawdown's Global Solutions Diary.
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A new study says agriculture co-ops are a strong economic force in states like South Dakota - but their future is murky, because of federal tax cuts set to expire.
Farm cooperatives have been around for more than a century, allowing smaller farmers to pool together resources to buy supplies and market their products.
South Dakota State University Ness School of Management and Economics Associate Professor Matthew Elliott helped lead research into co-op profits in North and South Dakota and Minnesota.
Even though corporations and industrial farms have a growing presence in agriculture, he said co-ops have staying power.
"There is consolidation going on to achieve efficiencies, but generally we see cooperatives still maintaining a good business volume in these industries," said Elliott, "and that's been pretty consistent, steady, for a long time."
He said co-ops benefit from the tax cut law enacted during the first Trump administration by allowing income from member sales to be taxed at lower rates.
The study says in 2022, that newer deduction helped generate $255 million in economic activity in South Dakota farming towns.
Republicans in Congress want to extend the broader tax cuts. But skeptics say that would require drastic spending cuts, which would harm rural communities and eat away at farmers' profits.
When focusing solely on the co-op tax deduction, Elliot said it's likely a more effective tool in this part of the country.
"It can be a struggle to get investment interested in our region," said Elliott. "It's one of those ways the dollars we do generate, we can keep here and keep multiplying and growing our economy."
He said those are extra dollars farmers can use to boost worker pay or buy equipment from local dealers at a time when small towns struggle with population loss.
If the deduction expires, observers say these farmers will have higher tax bills.
Overall, the planned extension of the Trump tax cuts has renewed debate about whether they mostly benefit wealthier Americans, and leave middle- and low-income workers behind.
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By Seth Millstein for Sentient.
Broadcast version by Alex Gonzalez for Arizona News Connection reporting for the Sentient-Public News Service Collaboration
We’re in the fifth year of a worldwide avian flu outbreak, and there seems to be no end in sight. The standard containment measures haven’t been working, and as a result, egg prices are at record highs, and over a hundred million chickens are dead. But a closer look shows how egg farming helps facilitate the virus’s spread — and how the government’s attempts to stop the bird flu outbreak have fallen short.
“This is historic. We never had anything this big, geographically or species-wise,” Maurice Pitesky, an associate professor and expert in poultry disease modeling at the UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine, tells Sentient. “This is way beyond [farmers’] skill set.”
The government has stepped in and attempted to end the outbreak through various means, but none have worked. And this is in part because egg farming itself, on a foundational level, is highly conducive to the spread of dangerous pathogens like avian flu.
Egg Farming At a Glance
As of 2022, the latest year for which data is available, there were a little over 168,000 farms in the U.S. that produced poultry products, in whole or in part.
Livestock chickens are generally divided into two categories: broilers, who are raised and slaughtered for meat, and layers, who are raised to lay eggs. At any given point, there are around 389 million layer hens at poultry farms across the U.S., and they produce about 109 billion eggs every year.
In the U.S. alone, farmers slaughter around 9.5 billion chickens every year, including both broilers and layers.
Bird Flu At a Glance
Avian influenza, also known as avian flu or bird flu, is nothing new. It was first discovered in the late 1800s, and there have been a number of high-profile outbreaks since then. In fact, a number of high-profile outbreaks happened in 2014.
But the most recent bird flu outbreak has proven much more resilient and deadly than those in the past. It began in 2020, and while previous outbreaks have died off after a few months to a year, this current one is now in its fifth year and showing no signs of letting up. It’s also been spreading to non-avian species, including pigs and cows, as well as people. Backyard chickens and small farms are also far from immune from the virus.
How Egg Farming Facilitates the Spread of Avian Flu
The current strain of avian flu is believed to have originated in wild birds, not animal farms. But there are a number of things about animal farms, and chicken farms specifically, that make them especially susceptible to spreading the disease.
To begin with, the living conditions on poultry farms are almost tailor-made to facilitate the spread of disease. This is especially the case when the chickens are confined in close spaces, as they are on factory farms, but it’s also just an intrinsic fact about chicken husbandry itself. Chickens are highly social creatures who interact regularly with one another, and disease spreads rapidly through flocks even when the animals have a healthy amount of space.
That said, practices common to factory farms make the situation much worse, and not solely because the chickens in them are typically crammed together in tight spaces. The poultry industry has selectively bred chickens in order to maximize egg output, but selective breeding leads to a low level of genetic diversity within flocks. This, in turn, might make the flocks more susceptible to diseases, according to a 2008 study.
The sheer size of factory farms is another exacerbating factor for avian flu: If one chicken gets the disease, everyone else in the flock is also at risk, and when the flock in question has tens of thousands of chickens in it, that’s a whole lot of potentially exposed birds. On smaller farms and backyard farms that follow different practices, the risk is still there. It’s just mostly owing to spread from wild birds rather than these other factors.
One reason this recent outbreak has worried epidemiologists so much is its ability to spread to non-bird species. This aspect, too, is potentially related to chicken farms: Dairy cows are sometimes fed “poultry litter” — a euphemistic name for the mixture of chicken manure, feed, feathers and other organic garbage from poultry farms — and it’s been speculated that this practice may be responsible for spreading the virus to dairy cows, who in turn have been spreading it to people, mostly farm workers.
What Has the Government Done?
The federal government authorizes chicken farmers to slaughter their entire flock if even one case of avian flu is detected, and farmers who do this are compensated by the USDA for their losses. These are called indemnity payments, and the USDA has doled out over $1 billion of them so far.
But although the government pays farmers to kill their flocks after detecting H5N1, it has not, until very recently, required farms to implement biosecurity measures in order to receive those payments. For the bulk of the outbreak, farms that experienced outbreaks were required to submit biosecurity plans, but the USDA did not engage its oversight powers to ensure that these plans were actually being implemented. And in December, a USDA report found that the bailouts were inadvertently incentivizing farms not to strengthen their biosecurity measures.
This may be why, according to the USDA, a total of 67 egg farms have been infected with H5N1 more than once, even after culling their flocks and receiving bailout money from the government.
It also may be why the USDA updated its biosecurity policies this year, and is now requiring H5N1-infected farms to pass a visual audit in order to receive any future indemnity payments.
Most of these biosecurity measures concern the structures and policies at the egg farms themselves. But Pitesky says that they should also account for what’s going on near the farms, given that wild waterfowl are one of the main ways the virus spreads to poultry farms in the first place.
“There’s this whole concept of what I call ‘outward facing biosecurity,’ and I don’t think we really do any of that at this point,” Pitesky says. “And that’s really focused on what’s going on within about a four kilometer diameter of your facility.”
The closest to what Pitesky is describing, at least on the governmental level, is the Biden administration’s Wildlife Biosecurity Assessments program, a pilot program in which the USDA sends staff to infected farms to survey the surrounding areas for potential security holes.
The Trump administration recently announced an expansion of this program, but crucially, it only involves a one-time survey of each farm. What’s really needed, according to Pitesky, is ongoing monitoring and surveillance of the surrounding areas, as that’s the only way to account for constantly changing environmental conditions in the wild.
“The thing that we all have to realize is that the farm doesn’t change location, but the habitat around the farm changes,” Pitesky says. “Until we really understand what’s going on outside the facility, we’re just going to be reactive. We’re going to see which places get affected, and then we’re going to respond. But then a year later, it’s going to be something 50 kilometers to the west or east that gets hit.”
Egg Prices
According to the CDC, H5N1 has affected over 166 million birds in the U.S. since 2022. Needless to say, this has dramatically reduced the national egg supply, which in turn has caused egg prices to skyrocket — at least, according to the egg industry. While that’s been a very unwelcome development for consumers, many egg farmers have been enjoying record profits during the outbreak regardless, in part due to these higher prices.
“If you’re lucky enough to not have been hit by bird flu, then your costs haven’t changed very much, and the price of eggs is double,” Aaron Smith, Gordon Rausser Distinguished Chair and Professor of Agricultural and Resource Economics at the University of California, Berkeley, tells Sentient. “So you’re making some pretty big profits right there.”
However, some have also accused egg producers of price-gouging to take advantage of the bird flu outbreak, and a coalition of farmers has demanded that the FTC investigate this possibility.
It’s also been suggested that general inflation has played a role in the high egg prices we’re seeing now, but Smith believes this isn’t the case.
“The worst inflation was in 2022-2023,” Smith says. “Pretty much everything in the economy went up by 20-25 percent. Egg prices are, what, approximately double what they were, so it’s mostly the flu” [driving up prices].”
The Bottom Line
There’s one very cheap step the government hasn’t taken to try and stop the spread of bird flu: Advising people to eat fewer eggs. Americans tend to not be so fond of the idea of being told what to eat, but it is our enormous appetite for eggs that egg farms are as ubiquitous as they are, and without that level of consumption, bird flu would be a fraction of the problem it is now.
The uncomfortable truth is as long as animal agriculture exists on both an expansive and industrial scale, we’ll be dealing with zoonotic diseases and their fallout. In this case, that fallout is over 150 million dead chickens and an increasingly expensive breakfast.
Seth Millstein wrote this article for Sentient.
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Nebraska farm leaders are asking the Trump administration and the European Union to deescalate a trade war developing over tariffs.
The National Farmers Union and the EU ag group Coldiretti have sent a joint letter to President Donald Trump and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen - telling them farmers on both sides of the Atlantic are vulnerable to tariffs, which would reduce markets for their crops.
While there is talk of tariffs on lots of imported products, Nebraska Farmers Union President John Hansen said it's America's Midwest farmers who are most vulnerable in the tit-for-tat trade war.
"Ag's nose bleeds first," said Hansen. "It bleeds worst and in a lot of cases, it bleeds longest."
The EU has responded to Trump's proposed tariffs on farm products with retaliatory tariffs of its own.
Trump has also proposed tariffs on Mexico and Canada, until those countries do more to stop the flow of drugs and immigrants the administration says are coming into the U.S. illegally.
As one of the top exporting states in the country, Hansen said tariffs could be especially bad for Nebraska farmers.
"Whether it's our soybeans or our pork," said Hansen, "we have a lot of commodities that we grow in great efficiency and great productivity in our state that obviously need export markets."
The Trump administration is scheduled to announce its latest intentions on tariffs April 2.
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