Meet the Native American Farmer Promoting Northern New Mexico’s Indigenous Foodways
A cooking class at The Feasting Place provides a small glimpse into pueblo life.
School lunch is more than just a meal for students to fuel them for the day. It’s an opportunity for students to discover new foods, learn about their community and take a personal role in their own health.
As inflation and the scale-back of pandemic-era boosts to SNAP and other government food programs threaten access to healthy food, school lunches matter more than ever.
Modern Farmer talked to school staff in Texas and Alabama about why food–and the funding for food–is so important for communities and students. Here are four reasons why you should care about school food:
Food is a learning tool
Children spend most of their day and year at school. It’s also where many children consume most of their daily nutrition. Whether it’s a lunch from home or a lunch from the cafeteria, school is where students learn about why the food they eat is so important.
Teaching students about nutrition is linked to better long-term health outcomes and better performance in the classroom, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Health class is required in American schools in 46 states and is often the first place children are exposed to information about how what they eat affects their long-term health. The school lunchroom is just one place where health education can leap from the textbook to the real world.
The number of schools providing nutrition education fell from 84.6 percent to 74.1 percent from 2000 to 2014. Not providing nutrition education is linked to lower academic performance at school.
“We want to give these kids good food because it’s important to fuel their day. They can’t focus in the classroom if they’re hungry or if they’ve been working hard in football practice and not eating,” says Lisa Quinn, director of nutrition at Deshler High School.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends schools include nutrition education throughout the school day from school gardens and farm-to-school lunches in addition to in-classroom learning.
Food is a community resilience tool for students and for farmers
Putting local food on school lunch plates is good for farmers and for students.
A school’s big purchases can support the local economy, turning money that previously had been funneled to producers far away, into fuel for the nearby community. That gives schools an opportunity to vote with their dollar, spending money where they want to see the economy grow. In that way, schools can use their budgets to support the public good.
Programs the National Farm to School Network can connect local agriculture to school classrooms, giving students an opportunity to learn about agriculture in their communities and giving farmers local business opportunities.
Including locallysourced food (and education about where it came from) can also make students more likely to eat their greens, according to research from Saint Louis University.
Food insecurity is a national threat
The ability to obtain healthy food is getting harder and harder for American families. In 2024, 47.4 million Americans, including 13.8 million children, live in food-insecure households, according to data from the USDA’s Household Food Security report published in September. The data shows an increase of 3.2 million people compared to 2022 and a 13.5 million increase since 2021.
Researchers with the Food Research & Action Center (FRAC) cited inflation and the rollback of COVID-19 pandemic relief programs that had provided temporary boosts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) as factors that contributed to the increase in food insecurity.
Shoring up these programs, FRAC believes, will help to quell the threat food insecurity poses.
“We have the tools needed to end hunger. It’s time to wield them and finally make hunger in America a thing of the past,” says Crystal FitzSimons, interim president of FRAC.
The now-expired bonus funding for SNAP gave schools the resources to provide free meals to students at no charge. This gap in funding highlights the important role schools play in providing essential nutrition to American children.
“SNAP is our nation’s first line of defense against hunger, but the benefit levels are too low. The 2021 adjustment to the Thrifty Food Plan, which is used to determine SNAP benefits, was an important step in increasing benefit levels, providing more resources to participants to purchase the food they need. Yet, despite an increase in food insecurity nationwide, rather than invest more in SNAP, several lawmakers seek to cut nearly $30 billion in SNAP benefits over 10 years,” said officials with the Food Research & Action Center in a press release on the 2024 report.
How you can take action for better school food
Support efforts such as the Healthy School Meals for All initiative and the Good Food Purchasing Program
If you want to learn more about organized efforts to make school food healthier and more accessible to all families, visit the Healthy School Meals for All, Good Food Purchasing Program and CDC Healthy Schools websites.
The Good Food Purchasing Program has an action planning toolkit you can use to gauge how you can make an impact on your local food system and how to take action.
To really dig into the organizations taking this issue seriously, check out the list of 1,400 organizations that signed this July 2024 letter asking Congress to protect SNAP. Find which organizations are in your area and get involved with their efforts.
Contact your local representative
Call your local lawmaker and ask them to support efforts to improve nutrition education and connect local agriculture with the school lunchroom.
Support local agriculture through SNAP
Instead of buying food at the grocery store, consider visiting a local farmer’s market. If you receive SNAP benefits, you may be able to double your food-buying power through the Double Up Food Bucks program. The program matches every SNAP dollar spent at farmer’s markets, doubling your purchasing power at the local farmer’s market.
Spending SNAP benefits with farmer’s markets tells government funders that Americans want more access to locallygrown food.
When Marissa Bell started working for the Lake Travis Independent School District in Austin, Texas in 2020, she didn’t know the food supply chain was about to be turned on its head.
As the dietitian and marketing coordinator for Lake Travis ISD, Bell is responsible for ensuring students have medically and culturally appropriate foods to eat from the school cafeteria. This means ensuring meals are safe for students with allergies and dietary restrictions, as well as appropriate for students with religious and cultural restrictions on certain foods.
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While many of the pandemic supply issues have been resolved, there are still hiccups in the food chain. Lisa Quinn, director of child nutrition at Deshler High School in Tuscumbia, Alabama, says many schools are still dealing with this problem.
“I may order wheat bread, but they ship us white bread or no bread at all,” she says. “That forces us to either change our menu or go to a local grocery store with a purchase order to get what we need to meet those government nutrition guidelines.”
To deal with these ongoing challenges, Bell’s school district decided to join a local nonprofit called the Sustainable Food Center and the Good Food Purchasing Program, which allows smaller schools to join together, pooling their resources and purchasing power.
Bell says the school’s big purchases can support the local economy, turning money that previously had been funneled to producers far away from Texas into fuel for the nearby community.
“We’re spending lots and lots of money as a school district on food compared to a family that goes to the store. Schools have the opportunity to really use their big budgets for public good.”
While the benefits of buying local help school staff do their jobs better, there are also benefits for students. These benefits go far beyond putting calories in kids’ stomachs.
“School food is a huge lever for change, because almost everyone goes to school. Our most vulnerable populations are funneled through the school district at some point, and it’s an opportunity to capture those students and make sure that they have the same access to healthy and good food that everyone else has access to. It’s really a foundation of health equity,” says Bell.
She remembers an encounter with a student at the grocery store after one of the school’s regular fresh fruit and vegetable tasting days in the lunchroom. One of the vegetables offered for students to try was sugar snap peas.
“I heard these little footsteps running up to me, and one little girl just jumped right in front of me, and she said, ‘I saw you today, and we were tasting fruits and vegetables and guess what? I’m here to buy sugar snap peas,” says Bell, describing a student interaction at the grocery store. “That was probably the most enlightening moment I’ve had in this role thus far. These kids, they go home and they bring it to their families, and it changes family dynamics. That’s the potential of this.”
While changing school food at Lake Travis has been beneficial for both students and the school, Bell says there’s a long way to go to making school lunch more sustainable and more nutritious.
The regulatory barriers in place keep schools from being able to simply buy food from local farmers. For Lake Travis, this means buying food in collaboration with other local school districts. This way, schools can get bulk discounts on foods and ensure that the food they are buying meets regulatory standards. However, this method of purchasing limits the school’s options.
“Larger school districts can specify things like a geographic preference, or somewhere within a certain mile radius, or they can ask for organic options. In our situation, if we’re the only school district asking for that option, and among 100 other school districts, that product is not going to make it on the bid,” says Bell.
Looking forward, Bell says the school will continue to interact with community farmers about becoming school food suppliers and working with organizations such as the Good Food Purchasing program to meet those regulations.
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“We find that a lot of the local vendors also support these other values in the Good Food Purchasing program. And it’s easier to justify the local purchase because it’s an initiative of the government,” she says. “Until the system of purchasing changes, or until our regulations allow us to prioritize local purchases, it’ll be programs like Good Food Purchasing that’ll be really what helps us get it on the menu, but we still have a long, a long way to go.”
Quinn hopes to receive more funding to buy and prepare delicious homemade, healthy meals for students. She says she hopes Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s promise to “get processed food out of school lunch immediately” will lead to more funding for food and more employees in school lunchrooms.
This school year, Quinn has challenged her staff to pitch one new homemade meal every week and to create a plan for how to prepare it for school lunch.
“I have them tell me one meal every week, and then we decide who will be in charge of the meal,” says Quinn. “They tell me the ingredients they need to prepare it and I make sure those ingredients get purchased.”
Our food systems in North American can be complicated. While there is plenty of food, many people struggle with access to enough food, and farmers may have difficulties reaching local communities interested in their products.
Over 2024, we covered many people working to address these systemic issues. This collection is a look back over the year, at some of the most popular stories of people tackling these food system problems head on.
From local farmers planting native crops, to cyclists increasing food security in their neighborhood, to mycologists cutting down on ocean plastics using mushrooms, here are some of our most impactful changemakers of the year.
In this series
Meet the Native American Farmer Promoting Northern New Mexico’s Indigenous Foodways
A cooking class at The Feasting Place provides a small glimpse into pueblo life.
On the Ground With Local Governments Prioritizing Urban Ag
More and more cities are creating positions in local government for directors of urban agriculture.
Spotlight On the Modern Composters on Wheels
Soil Cycle picks up food waste on bikes and turns it into compost for its customers.
Meet the Woman Who Launched a Local Training Program to Save Native Bees
Andrea Montoya created an advocacy program of community members to plant native species across the city, re-wilding urban spaces into critical habitat.
Meet the Midwestern Farmer Restoring the Land by Growing Native Plants
“There's all kinds of environmental nightmares going on right now, and we need to do an ecological rehabilitation of this planet in a hurry.”
Young People Need to Find Farming. 4-H is the Answer
The average age of farmers in the US is close to 60, and young farmers have trouble finding a way into the field. Programs like 4-H are the best option.
Meet the Mycologist Stopping Ocean Plastics, One Mushroom Buoy at a Time
A surprisingly buoyant material, mycelium can help aquafarmers and fishermen end their dependency on plastic gear.
Meet the Modern Farmer Cracking Cold Storage in the Coldest Places
An Alaska farmer demystifies affordable cold storage in his new book.
On the Ground With Philadelphia Neighborhoods Transforming Vacant Lots into Flourishing Gardens
A quarter of Philadelphia's population lives below the poverty line and many face food insecurity. There are also thousands of abandoned lots across the city. Community gardens and farms help provide a solution but some are being threatened by rising development.
Spotlight On the Cyclists Feeding Their Community
Austin Bicycle Meals delivers food, water, survival supplies, and popsicles by the coolerful to those in need.
On the Ground With Food Banks Decolonizing Food
When food charities offer culturally relevant foods they not only supply sustenance but build trust.
Spotlight On the Students Growing Kalo in Hawai’i
This plant has deep roots in Hawai’i. By cultivating and tending to the kalo, students are learning more than just farming techniques. They are connecting with their culture.
Every morning, for years, Josana Pinto da Costa would venture out onto the waterways lining Óbidos, Brazil, in a small fishing boat. She would glide over the murky, churning currents of the Amazon River Basin, her flat nets bringing in writhing hauls as the sun ascended into the cerulean skies above.
Scorching temperatures in the Brazilian state of Pará have now made that routine unsafe. The heat has “been really intense” this year, said Pinto da Costa in Portuguese. It feels as if the “sun has gotten stronger,” so much so that it’s led her to shift her working hours from daytime to the dead of night.
Abandoning the practice that defined most of her days, she now sets off to the river in the pitch dark to chase what fish are also awake before dawn. It’s taken a toll on her catch, and her life. But it’s the only way she can continue her work in the face of increasingly dangerous temperatures.
“A lot of our fishing communities have shifted to fishing in the nighttime,” said Pinto da Costa, who advocates nationally for fisherfolk communities like hers through the Movimento de Pescadores e Pescadoras Artesanais do Brasil, or the Movement of Artisanal Fishermen and Fisherwomen of Brazil.
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Moving from daytime to overnight work is often presented as the most practical solution for agricultural laborers struggling with rising temperatures as a result of climate change. But it is no longer simply a proposal: This shift is already underway among many of the communities that catch, grow, and harvest the world’s food supply, from Brazil to India to the United States. Studies show the most common means of adapting to rising temperatures in most crop-growing regions has been to start working when it’s still dark out, or even to shift to a fully overnight schedule.
“The obvious piece of advice that you’ll see given is, ‘Work at night. Give workers head torches,’ and so on,” said Zia Mehrabi, a food security and climate researcher at the University of Colorado, Boulder. “But the reality is, that can lead to other rights violations, other negative impacts.”
That’s been the case for Pinto da Costa and her fishing community in Brazil. Nighttime work has been an additional hardship for a community already struggling with the impacts of climate change. The region has experienced decades of severe drought conditions, causing fish to die off and physically isolating people as waterways dried up.
Research shows that regularly working during the night is physically and mentally disruptive and can lead to long-term health complications. Nighttime fishing is also threatening social and communal routines among the fisherfolk. A daytime sleep schedule can curb quality time spent with loved ones, as well as limit when wares can be sold or traded in local markets.
It’s also impacting their ability to support themselves and their families through a generations-old trade. “We’ve actually been working more hours with less food, with less production,” said Pinto da Costa, noting that working at night has made their work less efficient and led them to find less fish. “This is across all regions of Brazil,” she added.
The impact of a shift to nighttime hours is an understudied piece of the puzzle of how climate change and rising temperatures threaten the world’s food supply and its workforce. But for many experts, and those on the front lines, one thing is clear: Overnight work is far from a straightforward solution.
“It’s a very scary time for us,” said Pinto da Costa.
Outdoor workers, with their typical midday hours and limited access to shade, face some of the most perilous health risks during periods of extreme heat. A forthcoming analysis — previewed exclusively by Grist — found that, on average, the amount of time considered unsafe to work outside during a typical 9-to-5 workday will increase 8 percent by 2050, assuming greenhouse gas emissions stay on their current trajectory.
Led by Naia Ormaza Zulueta, a Ph.D. student at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and Mehrabi, the analysis measures the number of extreme heat days by geographic region, and then breaks down daily and hourly temperatures by the estimated amount of population exposed. The research reveals that an estimated 21 percent of the global population already faces dangerous levels of heat stress during typical workday hours for more than a third of the year. By 2050, without cuts to planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions (known as the “business-as-usual” scenario), that portion will jump to 39 percent.
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“The number of days that people will experience a violation of their rights to a safe climate is going to substantially increase, but then also the number of possible working hours in a season, and productivity, is going to be substantially reduced,” said Mehrabi. “It’s a massive lose-lose situation.”
Their analysis finds that outdoor agricultural workers will encounter the largest health-related risks, with laborers in some areas being hit harder than others.
India, in particular, is projected to be one of the countries whose workforce will be most exposed to heat stress under the business-as-usual climate scenario. There are roughly 260 million agricultural workers in India. By 2050, 94 percent of the country’s population could face more than 100 days in a year when at least one daytime working hour exceeds a wet-bulb temperature of 28 degrees Celsius, or 82.4 degrees Fahrenheit — a conservative threshold of what is considered safe for acclimatized workers experiencing moderate rates of work. (Unacclimatized workers, or those unaccustomed to working in such environments, will face greater levels of heat risk at the same temperature and amount of work.)
In Brazil, another of the world’s top agricultural suppliers, heat risk is not as dire, but still poses a substantial risk for outdoor workers, including Pinto da Costa’s community of fisherfolk. By 2050, roughly 41 percent of the country’s population could experience more than 100 days a year when wet-bulb temperatures exceed the recommended threshold for at least one hour a day, according to the Boulder team’s analysis.
Mary Jo Dudley, the director of Cornell University’s Farmworker Program and the chair of the U.S. National Advisory Council of Migrant Health, said that the analysis is significant for what it reveals about the human health consequences of extreme heat, particularly as it relates to the world’s agricultural laborers. She’s seeing more and more outdoor agricultural workers in the U.S. adopt overnight schedules, which is only adding to the burdens and inequities the wider workforce already suffers from. This is poised to get worse. Zulueta and Mehrabi found that 35 percent of the total U.S. population will experience more than 100 days of wet-bulb temperatures exceeding 28 degrees C, or 82.4 degrees F, for at least one hour a day every year by 2050.
“This transition to a nighttime schedule pushes an extremely vulnerable population into more difficult work conditions that have significant mental and physical health impacts,” said Dudley.
Rebuking the human body’s circadian rhythms — that 24-hour internal clock that regulates when you sleep and wake — ramps up a person’s risk of health complications, such as cardiovascular disease and types of cancer, and diminishes their body’s ability to handle injury and stress. Working untraditional hours also can reduce a person’s ability to socialize or participate in cultural, communal activities, which are associated with positive impacts on brain and body health.
Women are particularly vulnerable to the social and economic impacts of transitioning to nighttime schedules. Despite making up nearly 45 percent of artisanal fishers in Brazil, women receive lower pay than their male counterparts. That means that when harvests decline with nighttime fishing, their margins are even smaller.
In the Brazilian state of Bahia, tens of thousands of women fishers work to collect shellfish en masse, while in Maranhão, women fisherfolk herd shrimp to the shore using small nets. Clam harvesting in Brazil’s northeast is also dominated by women. Because these jobs traditionally happened during the day and close to home, they allowed women to balance cultural or gendered family roles, including managing the household and being the caregiver to children. Shifting to evening hours to avoid extreme heat “poses a fundamental challenge,” said Mehrabi. “When you talk about changing working hours, you talk about disrupting families.”
Overnight work comes with other risks too. In many areas of Brazil, nighttime work is “either impossible” or “very complicated” because there are procedures and regulations as to when fisherfolk in different regions can fish, said Pinto da Costa. Nighttime fishing is regulated in some parts of Brazil — measures that have been shown to disproportionately impact artisanal fishers.
Even so, says Pinto da Costa, many are braving the risks “just to reduce the amount of exposure to the sun.”
“Honestly, when I saw that this was accepted in the literature, that people were giving this advice of changing their working shifts to the night, I was shocked,” said Zulueta, the author of the Boulder study, citing a paper published earlier this year where overnight work is recommended as an adaptation tool to reduce agricultural productivity losses to heat exposure. Under a policy of “avoiding unsafe working hours,” shifting those hours to the nighttime “is not a universally applicable solution,” she said.
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Growing up a pastoralist in Ahmedabad, India, Bhavana Rabari has spent much of her life helping tend to her family’s herd of buffalo. Although she now spends her days advocating for pastoralists across the Indian state of Gujarat, the routine of her childhood is still ingrained in her: Wake up, feed and milk the herd, and then tend to the fields that surround their home.
But extreme heat threatens to change that, as well as the preservation of her community. When temperatures soar past 90 degrees F in Ahmedabad — now a regular occurrence — Rabari worries about her mom, who hand-collects feed for their buffalo to graze on. Other pastoralists are nomadic, walking at least 10 miles a day herding cattle from region to region in the hunt for pastureland.
“If we lose our livestock, we lose our culture, our dignity,” said Rabari. “If we continue our occupations, then we are dignified. We live with the dignity of our work.”
But rapidly rising temperatures are making it hard to hold on to that dignity of work. “The heat affects every life, every thing,” said Rabari.
Working overnight is a tactic Rabari has heard of other agricultural workers trying. But the idea of tending to the herd in the dark isn’t something she sees as safe or accessible for either her family or other pastoralists in her community. It’s less efficient and more dangerous to work outdoors with animals in the dark, and it would require them to overhaul daily lives and traditions.
“We are not working at night,” said Rabari. But what the family is already doing is waking up at 5 a.m. to beat the heat, collecting milk from their buffalo and preparing products to sell in the market during the dusky hours of the morning.
Rabari’s family and other pastoralists across Gujarat are increasingly in an untenable position. Hotter temperatures have already caused pastureland to wither, meaning animals are grazing less and producing less milk. More unsafe working hours means lost work time on top of that, which, in turn, changes how much income pastoralist families are able to take home.
The result has been not adaptation, but an exodus. Most pastoralists Rabari knows, particularly younger generations, are leaving the trade, seeking employment instead as drivers or cleaners in Ahmedabad. Rabari, who organizes for women pastoralists through the Maldhari Mahila Sangathan, or the Pastoral Women Alliance, says women are most often the ones left behind to tend to the herds.
They “have to take care of their children, they have to take care of the food, and they have to take care of the water,” she said. “They face the heat, they face the floods, or the excess rain.”
Halfway across the world, April Hemmes is facing off against unrelenting bouts of heat amid verdant fields of soybeans and corn in Hampton, north-central Iowa. A fourth-generation small Midwestern farmer, Hemmes works more than 900 acres entirely on her own — year in and year out.
The Midwest is the largest agricultural area in the United States, as well as one of the leading agricultural producers in the world. It’s also an area that has been battered by human-caused climate change. In fact, scientists just recently declared an end to the drought that had devastated the region for a whopping 203 weeks. The conditions impacted crop yields, livestock, the transportation of goods, and the larger supply chain.
Hemmes has the luxury of not having to face the same degree of heat stress that Rabari and Pinto da Costa are confronting elsewhere in the world, per the Boulder analysis. When compared to India and Brazil, the U.S. is on the lowest end of the worker health impact scale for extreme heat. And yet, heat is also already the deadliest extreme weather event in the U.S., responsible for more deaths every year than hurricanes, floods, and tornadoes combined.
A few years back, while building a fence on her farmland, Hemmes suffered her first bout of on-the-job heat exhaustion. Suddenly, her heart started to race and her body felt as if it began to boil from within, forcing her to abandon her task and head indoors, away from the menacing heat. It was a wake-up call: Ever since, she’s been hyper-cautious with how she feels when tending to her fields.
This past summer, the heat index repeatedly soared past 100 degrees in Hemmes’ corner of Iowa. She found herself needing to be extra careful, not only pacing herself while working and taking more frequent breaks, but also making sure to get the bulk of the day’s work done in the morning. She even began starting her day in the fields an hour or so earlier to avoid searing temperatures compounding with brutal humidity throughout the afternoon.
“This [farm] has been in my family for over 125 years,” she said. “I do everything from banking to planting to spraying, everything. So it’s all on me, and it’s my family farm. I’m very proud of that.” In 1993, her dad and grandfather both retired, and she took over operations. She’s been more or less “a one-woman show” since. Keeping her farm well-managed is a responsibility she doesn’t take lightly. “You do what’s best for the soil. Because that’s the inheritance of future generations,” she said.
When Hemmes looks at how to prepare for a future with hotter working conditions, she knows one thing: Nighttime work is out of the question.
Not only are summertime mosquitoes in Iowa “terrible after dark,” but Hemmes says some of the chemicals she uses are regulated, restricting her from spraying them during the nighttime. In addition, she would need to get lights installed throughout the fields to alleviate the risk of injury when she uses equipment, and she would be even more fearful of that equipment breaking down.
“It would take more energy to work at night,” said Hemmes. “I think it would be far more dangerous … to work after the daylight was gone.”
Like Pinto da Costa and Rabari, Hemmes is involved in advocacy for her community. With the United Soybean Board, Hemmes advocates for women in agriculture. With more resources at her disposal than Pinto da Costa and Rabari, Hemmes is focused on how to ensure solo-farming operations like hers have access to the technology they need to overcome heat spells — and never have to seriously consider an overnight harvest schedule.
On her own farm, she’s invested in “expensive” autonomous agriculture technology that allows her to take breaks when she needs to from the blistering sun. And she would like to see more precision technology and autonomous agriculture tools readily applied and accessible for farmers. She currently uses a tractor with an automatic steering system that improves planting and plowing efficiency and requires much less work, which she credits as one of the pivotal reasons she’s able to successfully manage her hundreds of acres of fields on her own.
She also hopes to see farmers tapping into their inherent flexibility. “What farmers are is adaptable,” she said. “I don’t have an orchard on my farm, but if I did, and I saw this thing [climate change] coming, you know, maybe you look at tearing the trees out and starting to plant what I can in those fields. Maybe the Corn Belt will move up to North Dakota. Who knows, if this keeps progressing?”
In Gujarat, Rabari and the Maldhari Mahila Sangathan are working to secure better representation for pastoralists in policymakers’ decisions about land use. The hope is for these communities to inform policies that would allow pastoralists job security and financial safety nets as climbing temperatures make it difficult to work and turn a profit.
Women pastoralists in particular are entirely left out of these policy spaces, said Rabari, which isn’t just an issue of exclusion but means their unique ecological knowledge is lost, too. “We have a traditional knowledge of which grass is good for our animals, which grass they need to eat so we get the most meals, how [they] can be used for medical treatment,” she said.
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Pinto da Costa and the Movimento de Pescadores e Pescadoras Artesanais do Brasil are also advocating for monetary relief from the Brazilian government to offset the losses her fisherfolk community has faced from climate change and shifting work hours. In addition, she is looking for technical support to improve fisherfolk’s resources and equipment.
“I have maintained my energy and motivation to continue to fight for our rights,” said Pinto da Costa.
For all, it’s a race against time. Eventually, even working at night may not be enough to keep outdoor agricultural work viable. The Boulder researchers found that an overnight working schedule will not significantly alleviate dangerous heat stress exposure risk in key agricultural regions of the world — particularly across India. After all, heat waves don’t only happen during the day, but also take place at night, with overnight minimum temperatures rising even more rapidly than daytime highs.
Zachary Zobel, a scientist at the Woodwell Climate Research Center who has separately researched the impact of overnight work adaptations on global agricultural productivity levels, said the Boulder team’s analysis has a “novel” result, and lines up with what his team has found.
“Warming past 2 degrees C, which we will experience over the next 30 years, would mean that even overnight shifts wouldn’t recover productivity,” said Zobel.
“How do you solve a problem like that?” Mehrabi said. “The reality is that the workers most at risk are the people contributing least to the climate change problem. That’s not to say that we can’t have better policies around hydration, shading, health. But it’s just kind of trying to put a BandAid on a problem. It doesn’t actually deal with the problem at its root cause, which comes down to this trajectory of fossil fuel consumption and emissions.”
This article originally appeared in Grist.
Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Learn more at Grist.org
On a Friday morning in late September, the students in Naʻau ʻŌiwi gathered in Māhukona on the North Kohala Coast of Hawai’i Island to build beehive boxes.
The apiary they are building will produce honey for their secret recipe plans for the statewide Kalo Challenge, which is the culmination of their nine-month program that centers the ancestral practice of cultivating the Hawaiian staple crop kalo (taro), and serves as a competition where they do presentations on their cultural education, as well as present innovative recipes for competition.
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Naʻau ʻŌiwi, which means “native gut,” is in its third year at Kohala High School, as part of the Hawai’i Department of Education’s Alternative Learning Programs, which partners with 33 schools across the islands and trades the conventional classroom for ʻāina (land)-based cultural education, where students can earn the same credits for graduation.
The students of Naʻau ʻŌiwi like to call this AlterNATIVE Learning and follow the ‘ōlelo no’eau, or Hawai’ian proverb “A’ohe pau ka ‘ike ka hālau ho’okahi,” meaning not all knowledge is taught in one school.
Three years ago, the program started with only two students; now there are 12. They spend each day at a different farm, ranch, or cultural learning program area throughout rural Kohala with various organizations. At each location, they have plots with different varieties of kalo.
The first year, they won with kalo pizza. Last year, they presented them with “kalo-min”—which was a creative take on saimin—a side dish of hō’i’o (fiddle-head fern) salad, and deep-fried panko-breaded kulolo, a kalo-based dessert, that was accompanied by coconut ice cream and a haupia drizzle.
Even more impressive is that through their partnership with Hawai’i Land Trust, they harvested a kiawe tree log at Mãhukona and made stunning trays on which to serve the food, and chopsticks for the judge’s utensils.
In Māhukona, they built beehives under the tutelage of instructors from Ho’ōla Honey, a Native Hawai’ian-owned beekeeping business and rescue. There, their partner organization is Hawai’i Land Trust (HILT), which recently acquired the coastal lands to protect and conserve the area, that much like the rest of Hawai’i, has deep cultural significance to many generational families, and is also a historic training area for traditional Hawai’ian navigators who traveled by wa’a, or canoe.
According to Keone Emiliano, the land steward and educator for Māhukona with HILT, when the students aren’t building beehive boxes, they have been planting native plants, like the kukui nut tree, along with tending their kalo patch.
“It’s not just about what they tell us to do [with planting], it’s learning about the place, about its history, the people that used to be there, what they did, the way they lived and what they used it for, the tools and canoes, and cultivating the land,” says Alex Faisca, who is in his second year with Naʻau ʻŌiwi.
Faisca adds that his parents say he is very lucky that he and the other students have this program, because they never had anything like it growing up.
In fact, when their lead teacher Aoloa Patao was growing up, the only thing he learned about being Native Hawai’ian was what he saw in the Adam Sandler film 50 First Dates, and he wouldn’t learn more until college. He then had to learn on his own afterwards.
Many were in this boat. Due to colonial influences in the late 1800s, Hawai’ian cultural education in public schools was suppressed for many years, until the cultural renaissance of the 1970s, when there was more demand for the reinstitution of this kind of education in schools and colleges. Despite the state’s constitution being amended to mandate it, instruction was limited; however, more initiatives started happening over the years, particularly after the establishment of the Office of Hawai’ian Education in 2015 alongside the development of the Nā Hopena A’o framework.
Nā Hopena A’o is a department-wide framework to help guide the public education system based on Hawaiian values, culture, history, and language, as well as aiming to develop skills and behaviors that honor the qualities and values of the indigenous language and culture of Hawaiʻi.
Patao is happy to be part of remedying that issue for the students. “It makes me feel good about their potential and the future of our community, and that they are in a better position to know who they are and not have to try to figure it out on their own,” says Patao.
Other partner organizations are the voyaging nonprofit Nā Kālai Wa`a—where the students learn to connect the relationships between traditional sailing and kalo—LT Ranch, which prioritizes cultural learning for Native Hawai’ian youth, and ‘Iole Hawai’i, a new Indigenous learning lab on 2,400 acres, that combines ancient wisdom and modern technology for sustainability solutions.
“All this stuff, it helps in life. It’s not about what you are doing, but how you are doing it, with patience, perseverance, and problem-solving skills.”
“All this stuff, it helps in life. It’s not about what you are doing, but how you are doing it, with patience, perseverance, and problem-solving skills,” says fellow senior Daylan Kaitoku, adding that it’s almost like a college setting, because he gets to learn about weather stations, pH testers and soil testers. “And on top of that, there’s a cultural aspect to it,” he says.
Each year, the students have also created an educational component for the area’s elementary kids.
In the first year, the first two students had never heard the origin story of kalo until they were juniors in high school, so to make sure the younger generation didn’t have to go as long as they did to connect to it, they made a children’s book about the backstory, which is the Native Hawai’ian mo`olelo (story) of Hāloa, which involves the birth of the Hawai’ian people and the connection Hawai’ians have to kalo, not just as a food source but as an ancestor.
They passed the book on to the elementary school children, with the Department of Education backing them by printing 200 copies. The following year, the students developed a card game called Go Kalo, inspired by the classic game Go Fish, featuring all 22 parts of the kalo plant.
“It was a good idea, because instead of just matching the cards [like in Go Fish], you can learn,” says student Ihilani Leong, who did a lot of the design. Each card tells what part it is, its location on the plant, and what it looks like.
Much like the plans for this year’s Kalo Challenge, what they are doing for the youth is still being formulated. However, out of all the things they are doing with the program, Kaitoku hopes “that the seed that’s planted grows into wisdom, knowledge, and hope for the next generation.”
Farming has come a long way in the last few years.
We know, from the last census of agriculture, that farm life is changing. The number of farms is dropping, while the size of the average farm is going up. That means fewer farmers are working more land.
In order to be efficient, farmers have to turn to technology. Whether that means electric tractors or drone sprayers, to save manpower on the fields, or installing solar panels or virtual fencing to make the most out of the acreage they have, farmers are getting creative.
Here we’ve collected some of our most popular stories exploring the biggest tech in use on farms today.
In this series
Ranchers Embrace Virtual Fencing for Greener Pastures
Virtual fencing is being introduced to ranchers across the United States. Here's how it’s affected their livestock operations.
Welcome to the Next Generation of Agricultural Drones
The newest crop of drones promises farmers greater sustainability and autonomy, while drawing interested newcomers into the field.
Facial Recognition Technology Could Improve Livestock Health
Researchers from the US to Australia are adapting artificial intelligence to help monitor animal well-being and treatment.
Electric Tractors are Rolling Out in the Field. Here’s What That Could Mean for Farmers.
E-tractors could radically change the agricultural landscape by scaling sustainability and increasing efficiency.
New Solar Panels Allow Farmers to See the Light
Researchers harness sunlight to harvest energy and food together, utilizing the full spectrum of light to improve outputs.
Farming At Your Fingertips: How Technology is Changing Agriculture Work
There’s an app for everything, from analyzing sales data to automating lighting and temperatures. Is this the future of farming?
At This Farm, Data Is the Most Important Crop
In Ottawa, a government-supported nonprofit is researching solutions to address current—and future—problems for farmers.
Researchers are learning just what’s possible using the gene-editing technology CRISPR, which advocates say can prevent disease, improve food security and reduce methane emissions.
How High-Pressure Processing Is Helping Remote Farmers Bring Fresher Foods to Market
A cold preservation method is pumping more value into crops by capturing ripeness and extending shelf life.
Will Laser-Weeding Robots Change Farming?
The latest tech innovation to land in the fields.
Watching Grass Grow … From Space
Knowing when your fields are an optimal length for grazing is crucial for grassland farmers or ranchers. Satellites may be the best way to get that information.
This story originally appeared at Ambrook Research.
Twice a growing season, a big yellow truck with the license plate “P4FARMS” pulls into Jesse Kayan’s farm in Brattleboro, Vermont, loaded with a thousand gallons of pasteurized human urine sloshing around in IBC totes.
For more than 10 years, Kayan has been applying human urine to his hayfields through a partnership with the Brattleboro-based Rich Earth Institute, a non-profit engaging in research, education and technological innovation to advance the use of human waste as a resource. In August, Rich Earth released a Farmer Guide to Fertilizing with Urine, available for free on their website. The guide compiles a wealth of information and best practices based on working with farm partners like Kayan and a growing body of scientific research from around the world.
“Our hay yields have gone way up as a result [of the urine],” said Kayan. “We have really hungry land and sandy soil. It’s brought it up to a new level and provided some resiliency in the soil health.”
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Kayan, whose business relies on the organic vegetables he grows for his farmstand and CSA, said he’d be happy to use urine on other crops if the practice was more widely accepted by consumers.
“I personally, if it were my garden, I would not think twice about it,“ he said. ”I really don’t think there’s actually any food safety concerns. It’s a matter of perception.”
Kayan is one of nine Vermont farmers who’ve participated in Rich Earth’s field studies, funded by USDA Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education (SARE). In addition to hay, Rich Earth has conducted trials on sweet corn, hemp, figs, nursery trees, and cut flowers. The multi-year trials found that crops fertilized with human urine performed better than untreated control plots.
Kayan and other farm partners also observed higher yields and/or more robust growth and color in the urine-treated plots relative to those treated with conventional synthetic fertilizer; however, the trials found no statistically significant difference in total yields or relative feed value. That said, some international studies have shown improved yields and growth in certain urine-fertilized crops, such as cabbage, maize, and cucumber.
This is no surprise to Arthur Davis, who oversees farm partnerships for Rich Earth. He said human urine has a nutrient profile similar to many commercial fertilizers, with high levels of nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium, as well as micronutrients like magnesium, sulfur, and calcium.
But the potential benefits of fertilizing with human urine reach far beyond the fields of Vermont. Most commercially available fertilizers rely on synthetic nitrogen produced through the Haber-Bosch process, which accounts for 1.4% of carbon dioxide emissions, and 1% of total global energy consumption, according to the journal Nature Catalyst.
Most of this energy comes from natural gas, which means that the price of fertilizer is closely tied to the price of natural gas, a cost that is passed down to farmers and consumers. But the carbon footprint of conventional fertilizer doesn’t stop there. Mining of phosphate and potash are depleting natural reserves. The Global Phosphorus Research Initiative predicts a shortage of rock phosphate within the next 40 years.
“Our hay yields have gone way up as a result [of the urine].”
Diverting urine from the wastewater stream for use as fertilizer would also address the two largest contributors of nutrient pollution in the U.S., agriculture and human waste, which are responsible for toxic algae blooms, aquatic dead zones, and a wide range of human health conditions. It could also reduce nitrous oxide emission by keeping urine out of uncovered waste lagoons, where it festers with methane-breeding solid waste. Not only that, but urine-diverting toilets — available through Rich Earth — require little or no water to flush, which by their estimates could save up to 900 billion gallons of water per year in the U.S. Some of this water can be recycled for use in irrigation.
Initially, there were concerns about trace levels of pharmaceuticals in urine, but a recently concluded study by Rich Earth in partnership University of Michigan, the University at Buffalo, and the Hampton Roads Sanitation District in Virginia, detected no significant buildup in crop tissues. Davis said they are now also testing for PFAS; so far their samples have tested negative or extremely low.
If human urine is a safe, cost-effective and environmentally sustainable alternative to conventional fertilizers, why hasn’t it already been adopted on a larger scale?
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One fundamental challenge of fertilizing with human urine is ammonia volatilization, which can cause the nitrogen in urea to evaporate quickly during storage and application. To prevent this, urine is applied as close to the ground as possible, and incorporated into the soil immediately.
Davis has worked with farm partners to develop application methods that are both practical and effective. For Kayan’s hay fields, Rich Earth uses a custom-built, 500-gallon trailer tank attached to a 30-foot boom suspended about three feet above the ground. The urine drizzles out evenly through small holes spaced every six inches.
“It’s incredibly easy,” said Kayan. “It requires basically just one person on the farm and some sort of form of locomotion.” In his case, this means a team of Suffolk Punch draft horses, but the same apparatus can be hitched to a tractor. “It’s real fast and easy, you can fertilize a lot of land real real quick with it.”
“When you’re filling the bulk tanks to go out and spray it’s really really powerful, but when I’m applying it I don’t really smell it that much.”
John Janiszyn, who runs a multigenerational farm stand in Walpole, New Hampshire, has been using urine on sweet corn for several years, and this year is testing it on his pumpkins.
Davis helped him modify his tractor so that he could cultivate his fields and apply urine in one pass. The urine flows from a tank attached to the three point hitch down through a hose onto the ground, where it is immediately buried by his cultivator. For his pumpkins, they applied the urine under a layer of plastic mulch, trapping the nutrients in the ground.
For Janiszyn, one drawback of using urine is that it is highly diluted. “You need a lot of it to do an acre,” he said. “So you sidedress or whatever and then have to go back and refill and keep going.”
It takes about 1000 gallons of urine just to fertilize one acre of hay. Currently, Rich Earth is nowhere close to being able to meet that kind of demand.
Rich Earth sources its urine from about 250 donors in the Brattleboro area, the first and largest ever community-scale urine nutrient reclamation project in the United States. At their central treatment and storage facility, the urine — about 12,000 gallon a year — is sanitized using a computer-controlled pasteurizer.
“I think it’s a little bit of a chicken and the egg,” said Davis. “It requires farmers to really feel like it’s worth investing in new equipment. They want to feel like they have steady access to the material in the first place, which then requires, on the backend, systems in place for collection and treatment.”
In Vermont, Rich Earth has been working with lawmakers for over a decade to clear regulatory pathways, and are now beginning the process in Massachusetts and New York.
“It’s purely the optics that I would worry about, and I really think that that’s just a matter of time [until it becomes normalized].”
“We’re probably the most kind of far along group in this country in terms of having a whole ecosystem of collection, treatment, transport, application, all under one regulated program,” said Davis.
Rich Earth offers assistance to organizations across the U.S. to obtain approval for farm-scale urine application, including the Land Institute of Kansas, which launched its own urine reclamation project in 2023.
But the greatest obstacle to making peecycling mainstream may not be logistic or regulatory at all. It goes back to what Kayan said about public perception.
“It’s purely the optics that I would worry about, and I really think that that’s just a matter of time [until it becomes normalized].”
“I don’t really want to be the first one,” he added.
Janiszyn and his wife Teresa found out about Rich Earth when they participated in one of their focus groups examining public attitudes toward urine reclamation.
“It was funny how having us in that focus group sort of changed people,” he said. “We said we use cow manure and stuff and this [urine] doesn’t sound like it would be an issue. And I remember one guy was like, yeah, well, hearing from these guys, you know, I guess it’s not that bad.”
Janiszyn said that after his experience in the focus group he wasn’t too concerned about customer response. “I realized that if I’m positive about it people will just come along with it. You have to have some control over the narrative.”
When Aimee Thompson graduates from Washington State University Veterinary College in May 2025, she will not be heading to a bustling city or a thriving suburban clinic like many of her peers. Instead, she will return to her roots in rural Nevada. For Thompson, this is not just a career path but a calling deeply rooted in her heritage.
“I’ve always had a deep attachment to veterinary medicine. My family has a cattle ranch, and I am sixth generation. I was raised around animals,” says Thompson.
She is one of a dwindling number of veterinarians choosing to enter rural animal practice. Between three and four percent of new veterinary graduates pursue careers focusing on livestock or food systems. In 2022, more than 500 counties in the US were facing severe shortages of food animal veterinarians, some with no vet service at all.
Thompson’s hometown of Tonopah, Nevada is part of a 23,000-square-mile area she says the USDA has identified as a veterinary desert. The only time vets came to the Thompson ranch was for preventative care.
In regions like these where agriculture is the backbone of the economy, the absence of veterinarians can spell disaster. Thompson remembers having to trailer their horses to a vet. “If the veterinarian 1.5 hours away couldn’t treat the issue [typically colic],” she says, “we were not in a position to seek advanced care [colic surgery] due to it being another four- to fivehour drive. Typically, it would end in euthanasia,” she says.
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Let your state representitive know you support the Rural Veterinary Workforce Act.
Fewer vets on the ground means fewer eyes to catch early signs of disease in livestock. Early detection is critical in preventing disease outbreaks, such as the 2015 bird flu that killed 50 million turkeys and chickens in Midwest states. It also heightens the danger of zoonotic diseases, which can pass from animals to humans. There is a danger that as these shortages continue, preventative care—which includes deworming and livestock vaccinations—will not happen. The ripple effect of inadequate veterinary care in rural communities, according to a report commissioned by the Farm Journal Foundation, has the potential to affect an estimated 3.7 million livestock-related positions.
“We are worried about our capacity to identify as well as respond to diseases, whether that is endemic disease and/or foreign animal diseases,” says Dr. Rosslyn Biggs, DVM, and director of continuing education and beef cattle extension specialist at Oklahoma State University (OSU) College of Veterinary Medicine.
One of the driving forces behind rural vet shortages is that starting salaries are not always compatible with vets who work in urban centers. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, veterinarians in rural areas earn between $61,470 and $73,540 a year—roughly half of what they could make in a city.
“Salaries in the rural, large, mixed or food animal space,” says Biggs, “have been historically lower than those in urban or other segments of veterinary medicine.” This difference makes it difficult for newly graduating vets. In 2023, for example, 83 percent of veterinarians graduated with an average student debt of $185,000.
The Veterinary Medicine Loan Repayment Program (VMLRP) through the USDA Food and Agriculture Institute (NIFA) is designed to help more food animal and public health veterinarians relocate to those rural areas facing veterinary shortages. The program will pay off up to $75,000 of each veterinarian’s student loans if they practice in an area designated as being short of vets for a minimum of three years. Since the program’s inception in 2010, it has helped more than 795 veterinarians.
Need, however, has outstripped VMLRP’s ability to respond. The bipartisan Rural Veterinary Workforce Act could change this. The legislation would end the federal taxation the USDA is currently required to pay on behalf of the award recipient. This could potentially free 39 percent of the allocated money for the VMLRP, creating significant funds for new recipients. This bill was introduced into Congress on June 23, 2023.
But will it be enough to stem the tide? More than just monetary considerations—the life of a rural vet isn’t easy. “It’s hard work. It is long hours,” says Biggs.
When Thompson graduates, she will begin a contract with a veterinary clinic in Elko, Nevada.
“Part of my contract is that I get to do outreach to areas that don’t have veterinary care,” she says. Twice a month, she will travel long distances to remote communities and provide vet services. This can, for many vets, be isolating and another reason they are deterred from entering into rural practice. Thompson credits her upbringing with making her prepared for these challenges.
“I grew up learning how to navigate without resources, coming from that background has prepared me the most,” she says.
According to the American Veterinary Medicine Association (AVMA), 45 percent of vets practicing in rural areas are more likely to leave if they come from an urban background. Those that choose to return to urban practice say lack of time off and family concerns played a factor in their decisions.
A shortage of vets in rural areas also means a lack of mentorship for graduating vets. In essence, no one guides young vets through the practicalities of rural veterinary life.
This is something Thompson herself identifies as important. “Eventually, I would like to set up in a rural area,” she says, “but I definitely need that mentorship coming out of school.”
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At OSU, things are slightly better than at other veterinary colleges. In 2023, 25 percent of OSU grads entered large or mixed animal practice, while the national average historically fluctuates between 10 and 15 percent. It is something upon which the college is hoping to build. Currently developing a Center for Rural Veterinary Medicine, the goal, among other things, is to provide that much-needed early guidance. The current vision for the program includes a service component in underserved/rural regions as well as outreach programs to mentor youth to help them prepare for and develop an interest in food medicine veterinary practice. The Integrated Beef Cattle Program for Veterinarians has already proven to be invaluable as part of the larger vision for the center. “Twenty vet students with interest in beef cattle practice are paired alongside 20 veterinarians who have some experience in beef animal medicine,” says Biggs.
Another solution, according to Thompson, is to create more opportunities for youth to be exposed to livestock, and have ranchers, farmers and vets come to speak to school-age children. “When I was in school,” she says, “we had an agriculture day in which we’d go out with the local 4H club and they had animals and would teach us handling and proper care. We got to interact with the animals, particularly livestock, and got a little more comfortable with that.”
Eighty percent of those interested in rural veterinary care have had a significant history of livestock exposure, says Thompson.
Still, Biggs acknowledges that being a rural vet is not easy. For one, you are going to get dirty. “But,” she says, “being in rural communities and serving farmers and ranchers—there is no better work.”
Mary Oxendine grew up in Robeson County, NC, among the Lumbee people. As a child of multigenerational farmers, she grew up picking peas and butterbeans, working with her grandmother making sausages, and plucking chickens.
As an adult, she worked her way up in the local government’s food security program. But when her father passed, she found herself reconnecting with farmers in the fields.
“I was looking for what made me feel grounded and what made me feel like I belonged. And, I just started growing things. I got a community plot at Hawk’s Nest Healing Gardens… and really felt like I was reconnecting with myself and with the land and with my ancestors,” says Oxendine. “For me, it’s really about having a deep relationship with the plants and with the rest of nature, caring for them like you would actual family—gently picking up their branches. There’s a deep relationship and reciprocity, because I care for them and then they care for me.”
Oxendine says this interconnectedness colors her every choice and step and that it is inherently an Indigenous mindset.
“If we spray an insecticide, yes, maybe it kills that one insect, but it also could potentially impact other pollinators that will decrease my yield,” says Oxendine. “It’s impacting birds and the ecosystem and affecting the water and drinkability of water for humans, but also the water toxins that are impacting fish and other wildlife in the water. To me, the best way to impact climate is before you do something, think deeply and ask what are the real impacts of that act.”
Historic violent storms, destructive floods, rising sea levels and melting polar ice caps dominate our lives and headlines. But, are we past the point of no return, or can we still have a positive impact on the planet and life on it?
Climate scientists and US leaders believe so, although the window is narrow.
But how can we change course, and who has the answers? Oxendine believes Native farmers deserve a word.
Native environmental views can fight climate change
Despite measures taken since, human activity and the El Nino phenomenon continued to accelerate global warming to the point of experiencing the hottest years on record in 2023 and 2024. One wonders, with cutting-edge scientific advances, national and international mitigations, and an increasingly common understanding of climate change, why does the problem persist so tenaciously?
Beth Roach is a member of the Nottoway Indians of Virginia. She is also the co-founder and owner of Alliance of Native Seedkeepers, Bertie County Seeds retail shop, and Quitsna Conniot ancestral gardens with Justin “Fix” Račhakwáhstha Cain, who is Tuscarora (Skaroreh Katenuaka).
They both have extensive lived experience as land stewards, as well as deep multi-generational connections to agriculture and forestry stewardship.
“We study our local environment intensely [all day, every day] and notice both subtle and dramatic changes,” says Roach. “From these observations, we adapt our practices. We anticipate changes in our growing zones and educate others. We advocate for climate adaptation planning through Indigenous frameworks.”
They were able to ascertain early that the hardiness zone where they live was shifting due to climate change, and are already taking preventative steps to nurture seeds and plants that would be endangered. As important as modern-day scientific methods and data are, they also have a unique take on understanding our woodlands ecosystem by learning from the past.
“We utilize traditional place names and translate them in order to understand how our ancestors saw the water and land,” says Roach. “Additionally, we use these translations to assess changes in our ecosystem and climate.”
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Roach and her colleagues believe that Native people know the story of the land, and have the connections through lived experience, oral histories passed down, blood memory and documented history to understand where it has been, what their ancestors observed, and what it needs to thrive into the future.
And the land responds in kind to mindful stewardship. For example, simple but measured clearing of invasive plants, such as cultural burning, yields surprising results when Earth is allowed to finally breathe. Native plants spring up once again from the freed soil. Loving fertilized with the ash of its stewards, the forest is cleansed of excessive pests and invasives safely for established growth to flourish.
However, industrial carbon dioxide, PFAS, chlorines, bromides, CFCs and plastics harm air quality and increase temperatures, accumulate in rain and waterways or deplete protective ozone layers and cause contamination long after their release. Not only is the story of the land unknown, unwanted, and dishonored by apathetic corporate self-serving, it is actively quashed by intimidation, violence and legislative manipulation. And the land responds to this as well.
A climate-conscious approach must first honor the land, its people, and its story.
Creating programs for and with Native people
One of the programs created to put Native voices first in the discussion of climate change is First Nations Development Institute’s Stewarding Native Lands program. It has offices in Nevada and New Mexico, and serves tribes as well as Native nonprofits across the nation and it has five program areas. The stewardship program overlaps with food sovereignty and cultural programs because they are so intertwined culturally.
The stewardship program has four initiatives, and one that specifically addresses climate. Mary Adelzadeh, senior program officer with the institute, has much to say regarding increasing the capacity of Native land stewardship models. She also stresses operating from a mindset and position of strength—as overcomers—not victims.
“Because when you think about this climate challenge, it is rooted in the fact that Native people and their knowledge was contained onto reservation systems, and in order to really have a transformative change in climate, we really need to invest in the adaptive capacity of these Native communities, to be able to scale it out.”
The Stewarding Native Lands program works toward supporting co-management and co-stewardship of federal lands. These are sovereign-to-sovereign agreements, where tribes could enter into these arrangements with federal entities such as the Bureau of Land Management, the Forest Service, and National Park Service.
Their focus is land access, establishing and bolstering the workforce, and the nuts and bolts of what it would take to scale Native land stewardship. The traditional Western conservation frameworks weren’t designed for and are not really accessible to tribes. Her approach is that new conservation, finance, opportunities that are directly accessible to tribes should be decided upon.
Along the lines of investment, Amir Kirkwood, CEO of Justice Climate Fund, spoke about their works with programs empowering such endeavors. One is the Clean Communities Investment Accelerator (CCIA) program, part of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund (GGRF) program.
“That program was really designed to have community lenders—could be banks, CDFIs, could be other funds—that did not have existing climate or greenhouse gas reduction programs in place, to basically fund their ability to build a program at their individual organization for the benefit of the communities,” he says.
The fund was awarded $940 million on August 16. The idea is that by working with those banks at the community level, they can help them to not only deploy capital in greenhouse gas reductions but raise outside capital to compliment federal funding, and utilize that as wrap-around funding for initiatives with additional community benefits—such as job creation, supporting local businesses, or contributing to better health outcomes in those communities.
“So, that’s where community banks have always been a valuable asset locally, is that they have that comprehensive focus on the communities. And so, this is exciting because it’s able to add to what they already do, with some of the work around climate finance as well,” says Kirkwood.
Reclaiming land
Some independent projects are already having groundbreaking impact in their communities as well as restorative climate implications. One such initiative is Makoce Ikikcupi, a Reparative Justice project on Dakota land in Minisota Makoce (Minnesota). Ahán Heȟáka Sápa (Luke Black Elk, Thitȟuŋwaŋ Lakota) works with the program as a farm director. It’s a Dakota-run organization out of Minnesota, and the name actually means “Land Reclamation.”
Currently, they have purchased three separate pieces of land situated throughout Minnesota, and Ahán Heȟáka Sápa is the farm director for their second village site, Hohwoju Otunwe (Village of Vibrant Growth). It is located near Mountain Lake, Minnesota, which is a small town in southern Minnesota. There are a couple of different groups, or what’s modernly called tribes. But they all fall under what they call the Očhéthi Šakówiŋ, which means the Seven Councils Fires.
“One of the things that Indigenous people really lack is access to land. My tribe has control of two million acres on the books, but really we only have about a million acres accessible to our people. And even then, we have been taught by the capitalist education system that we should be sort of fearful in going outside and picking natural plants or you know, even so much as growing your own food,” says Ahán Heȟáka Sápa.
They consider themselves to be free Oceti people, and aren’t funded by any tribal organization or tribal entity, to avoid a precedent of Native people buying land back with their own money.
“We don’t want to set a precedent for our children to have to find their own funding and use their own money to do this, because it’s really still ours, this land that we’re around. All of Minnesota was once Dakota territory and we really feel strongly about coming back to this area,” says Ahán Heȟáka Sápa.
Chana J. White is a mother, grandmother, farmer, and Master Beekeeper. She works with Whitaker Small Farm Group and Eastern North Carolina Farmer Collaborative, and also owns and operates Native Brand Honey. One challenge faced even in Indigenous circles is disenfranchisement from cultural and foodways; however, White speaks of the benefits of access to oral histories and elder wisdom, which she can pass on to next generations of agriculturalists and climate keepers.
“Thankfully, we have some old heads still around that let us know and have taught us when to plant root crops, above the ground crops, when to seed, and when to pull weeds. We even watch certain animals because they know when rain is coming. I believe it’s important to listen and pay attention,” she says.
Can we imagine a society that honors the Earth instead of exploiting it?
This will only happen as Native voices are sought for solutionary committees and legislative decisions in every locale, compensated for their contributions, and renewed to their ancestral homelands for restorative land stewardship and ownership.
Beth Roach can see it also. “Ensuring Native engagement and leadership of our water, land, and seeds ensures protection of each for many more generations to come. Inspired by the traditional wisdom of seven-generational thinking, we envision a future where our children and theirs can thrive in harmony with the Earth, cradling their culture and justice in equal measure,” she says.
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