A3. Agroecology

O‘ahu is building its first comprehensive plan focused on food systems. It is the local government’s first attempt at formalizing its role in identifying and addressing food and agriculture issues on the Hawaiian island.

The five-year Oʻahu Food Systems Plan—led by the City and County of Honolulu’s Office of Climate Change, Sustainability and Resiliency (CCSR)—outlines 10 broad strategies for the island’s government agencies. Following the release of the draft plan in May, CCSR received hundreds of comments during its public comment phase, ranging from calls for more accountability mechanisms to clarification on the plan’s integration of Hawaiian values. The office now works to incorporate suggestions and get a final draft adopted by the Honolulu City Council by the end of the year, according to CCSR’s Food Systems Fellow Kaitlyn Judd. 

The plan’s strategies primarily focus on reducing food insecurity, promoting food sovereignty, and ensuring the long-term resilience of Oʻahu’s natural resources and small food producers.  One of CCSR’s first priorities is the creation of a working group across numerous Oʻahu public agencies, which would help the government avoid redundant or conflicting programs as well as compile resources, knowledge, and funding.  

“A key goal is building the capacity needed to effectively coordinate and implement these actions,” Judd tells Food Tank. “The collaborative process used to develop the draft plan has already helped to establish connections between departments and provide a solid foundation for this ongoing coordination.” 

The draft plan contains around 70 actions for local government, each of which belongs to one of the 10 strategies. Many proposals build on existing government and nonprofit work to address gaps in the island’s food system. 

One action under the strategy to “enhance market opportunities and value chain coordination for local food,” for example, would expand the O‘ahu Good Food Program, which aims to support local business by making it easier for institutions to buy food from O‘ahu’s small and medium-sized producers at scale. In Hawaiʻi, where around 90 percent of food is imported, according to the University of Hawaiʻi at Hilo, local institutional purchasing offers a unique opportunity to boost the state’s economy and build food system resilience.

Every year, food producers brace for the impacts of seasonal Kona low storms, which can cause massive structural damage and financial losses. Farmers in Hawaiʻi also pay higher labor costs than those on the U.S. mainland due to the smaller scale of their agriculture operations and struggle to compete with lower prices from producers in states like California, according to Albie Miles—a sustainable food systems professor at the University of Hawaiʻi at West O‘ahu and the Director of its Transforming Hawaiʻi’s Food System Together initiative.    

“You start to combine these things—high rates of household food insecurity, low rates of emergency and commercial food storage, critical points of vulnerability on the south shore of O‘ahu,” Miles tells Food Tank. “If any of that is disturbed as a result of a hurricane, for example, then the structural bottleneck—the port of Honolulu—is disrupted, and that interferes with our ability to import and distribute food across the entire state.”

Other non-governmental organizations, including the Hawai‘i Good Food Alliance (HGFA), are partnering directly with CCSR to carry out the plan’s action items. Around one in three households in Hawaiʻi experience food insecurity—nearly triple the national average, per the Hawaiʻi Food Bank’s most recent data. As part of its strategy on food security, CCSR is leveraging services provided by the HGFA to reduce administrative and logistical barriers that might prevent farmers markets and other food hubs from accepting federal food assistance benefits.

Another action item in the strategy details how local government will continue to explore subway stations as “visible demonstrations of sustainable food practices,” like hosting food distribution events and growing culturally significant plants. In its strategy focused on food-producing gardens, the plan also identifies public housing as a crucial site for community gardening, and suggests that Honolulu pursue public and private funding for growing spaces. Proposals like these identify elements of the built environment as potential places for food systems change.

If adopted by Honolulu City Council, the Oʻahu Food Systems Plan will likely become the island’s primary outline for addressing a range of agriculture and food issues over the next five years. Though its action items would remain as guidance, not requirements, Judd says the plan can serve as a long-term framework and path toward idea-sharing across disciplines and sectors.

“Unless there are planning processes like the Oʻahu Food Systems Plan or other state and regional food system planning initiatives to implement policy recommendations, all this research that happens in higher education just sits there and it’s never implemented into actionable strategies,” Miles says.

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Photo courtesy of the City and County of Honolulu’s Office of Climate Change, Sustainability and Resiliency

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Walk into any of the world’s great seed banks, and you will find one of humanity’s quietest triumphs.

Within carefully monitored facilities are millions of seeds, protected as a vital safeguard against war, climate change, disease, and loss. Governments, scientists, farmers, nonprofits, Indigenous communities, and others have spent decades building an extraordinary safety net for our food system.

This work is essential. But it is not enough.

Every time I stand in one of these collections, I find myself asking a singular question. It’s not, “Have we saved enough seeds?” Instead, it’s, “Who will carry these seeds forward?”

For decades, much of the conversation about agricultural biodiversity has centered on preservation. How many varieties have been collected? How many are safely stored? How many have been documented, cataloged, and protected?

These are important questions. But seeds have never saved themselves.

Every variety that still exists today survived because someone, somewhere, decided it was worth growing for one more season. Perhaps it produced through a drought. Perhaps it thrived in a mountain valley where little else would. Perhaps it made the best sauce, the sweetest pie, or the meal that brought a family together every August.

Long before there were professional plant breeders and modern gene banks, Indigenous peoples, and generations of farmers, gardeners, cooks, neighbors, and grandparents were making careful seed-saving choices year after year.

They selected the plants that performed well, tasted good, or held meaning for their communities. They saved those seeds and passed them on.

We often call these varieties “heirlooms,” a word that can make them sound like antiques. But heirlooms are not objects preserved behind glass. They are the result of continuous observation, adaptation, and innovation by dedicated people.

Every year someone selected the best of them. Every year someone decided they were worth saving again. That is not nostalgia. It is one of the longest-running experiments in human history.

Today, we rightly celebrate new agricultural technologies and advances in plant breeding. They can also help farmers respond to changing climates, emerging pests, disease, and shifting production needs.

But somewhere along the way, we began to assume that newer automatically means better.

Better for whom?

Better for shipping across a continent? Better for mechanical harvest? Better for shelf life? Sometimes the answer is yes. But what about flavor? What about local adaptation developed over generations by people who knew their land intimately? What about the bean a community continued to grow because nothing else matched its taste or cultural significance?

Those choices contain knowledge. And that knowledge ought to help guide the future of agriculture alongside the latest scientific breakthroughs.

Preserving this knowledge has always been a shared responsibility. Indigenous communities, farmers, gardeners, seed libraries, nonprofit organizations, public gene banks, and universities all serve as bridges between generations. They carry forward genetic material along with the stories, practices, relationships, and ways of understanding the land connected to it.

Much of this work happens quietly and with modest resources, even though it sits at the intersection of some of the defining challenges of our time: food security, climate resilience, biodiversity, and cultural survival.

We have invested in preserving seeds. We must also invest just as deliberately in the people who will keep them alive and useful.

It means creating opportunities for young farmers and gardeners to learn how to select, save, and share seeds. It means making collections more accessible to the communities and growers who can put them to use. And it means supporting the next generation of plant breeders and gene bank professionals.

It also means recognizing that chefs, seed companies, educators, and eaters have roles to play. When people choose diverse crops, ask where their food comes from, grow unfamiliar varieties, or support organizations maintaining public collections, they help create a future for those seeds.

Agricultural biodiversity is not something we simply store. It is something we participate in.

A seed may remain alive in a freezer for a century, but its fullest value is realized when someone plants it. When someone tastes it. When someone observes how it responds to a changing environment. When someone decides, among all the other options available, “This one is worth saving and growing again.”

That decision, repeated, is how diversity has always moved through history.

The most compelling question before us today is not whether we can preserve the biological diversity we have inherited. It is whether we can inspire enough people to see themselves as part of its future.

Every generation receives this extraordinary inheritance. No generation can claim it as its achievement alone. We borrow it from those who came before us, add our own chapter, and pass it along.

The future of crop diversity will not be decided by freezers, databases, or scientific breakthroughs alone. It will be decided by people—by what we choose to grow, eat, share, study, support, and save.

Who will carry the diversity forward?

The answer must be all of us.

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Each week, Food Tank is rounding up a few news stories that inspire excitement, infuriation, or curiosity.

U.N. Conference on Drought and Desertification Begins

The 17th session of the Conference of the Parties to the U.N. Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) kicked off this week, where decision makers are gathering in Mongolia to tackle drought and land degradation. 

WWF calls drought, which dries soils and makes farming more uncertain, “one of the clearest ways people feel climate change.” Today, land degradation and drought are estimated to cost the global economy nearly US$900 billion every year, affecting up to 40 per cent of the world’s land and 3.2 billion people, according to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization. 

During the conference, governments, investors, businesses, scientists, and civil society organizations will discuss solutions to restore lands. 

A major focus at this year’s Conference is to allocate the US$12 billion that was pledged by countries and institutions under the Riyadh Global Drought Resilience Partnership two years ago at COP16. The funds are intended to help 74 countries stricken by drought and land degradation. Although there’s still a long way to go to secure the finance needed—an estimated $2.6 trillion by 2030 according to the UNCCD—to restore the world’s lands, it’s a welcome step in the right direction. 

Yasmine Fouad, Executive Secretary of the UNCCD, also reports that more than 70 countries submitted their drought management plans, which now need to be converted into projects for implementation.

NGOs Mobilize to Help Earthquake Victims

Humanitarian organizations are stepping in to help communities recover following major earthquakes in Colombia and Indonesia.

The earthquake in Western Colombia—one of the largest the country has seen in years—has resulted in around 300 deaths, more than 4,000 injuries, and the destruction of over 26,000 homes. And in Indonesia, just days before independence day celebrations, a major earthquake struck the island of Flores. More than 60 people have died and around 5,000 people have been displaced from their homes. Landslides have made it harder to deliver much-needed aid as fears of starvation grow. 

The United Nations announced it is scaling up humanitarian assistance in Colombia to reach those affected by the disaster. Done directly to the World Food Programme’s efforts clicking HERE. And World Central Kitchen is on the ground in Colombia and Indonesia, working to serve meals to people in need as quickly as possible. Support their work at wck.org.

Women Fishers in sub-Saharan Africa Cut Post-Harvest Losses

In parts of sub-Saharan Africa, many women fishers face limited access to the technology, storage facilities, processing equipment, and business training. This leads to higher post-harvest losses compared to their male counterparts and leaves them with lower quality products and reduced incomes. WorldFish wants to change that.

In Tanzania, for example, the research center is helping seaweed farmers and entrepreneurs connect with equipment to develop products that can be sold for more than raw seaweed. Women are also receiving training on certification, marketing, and business management. And along the coast of Kenya, new solar-powered freezers are helping fishers reduce spoilage, giving women more flexibility over when they sell their product.

“The seaweed milling machine has saved me time and money,” says Tanzanian seaweed processor and trader Rehema Mkweka. “I can now process my seaweed close to home and produce higher-value products.”

New Resource Helps Decision Makers Target Crops for Investment

The new Priority List from the Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition (GAIN) is helping decision makers identify the crops that are most worth investing in.

GAIN’s resource uses a holistic system to analyze nearly 800 locally available foods in low- and middle-income countries in sub-Saharan Africa, South and Southeast Asia, and Latin America. The assessment will help decision makers identify the most nutritious ones to support through programs and policies. Many of the top scorers from GAIN’s list are traditional foods with particularly high nutrient density, such as the African star apple and amaranth leaves. 

GAIN also offers two complementary tools to ensure the Priority List has the greatest possible impact. One allows users to compare foods to understand how they’ll perform when matched with a particular program or policy goal. The second compares nutritional value with environmental impact, focusing on food systems in three countries: Indonesia, Kenya, and Rwanda. 

California Begins Phasing Out Paraquat

The state of California is beginning to phase out the use of paraquat, a weedkiller linked to Parkinson’s disease, thyroid disease, childhood leukemia, non-Hodgkin lymphoma and birth defects.

The California Department of Pesticide Regulation announced that all manufacturers of pesticide products containing the active ingredient paraquat have voluntarily cancelled their product registrations, which allow them to sell the chemical in the state. 

The move sends “a powerful message that there is no place for paraquat in modern agriculture,” says Bernadette Del Chiaro, Environmental Working Group’s Senior Vice President for California. 

The last companies to cancel their registrations now have two years before they must stop selling paraquat-based products.

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Photo courtesy of Jame Baltz, Unsplash

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For nearly a year now, Food Tank has been bringing our live storytelling series “Voices of Farmers: A Love Story” around the world.

On sold-out stages across three continents just in the past year alone—including Sundance, London Climate Action Week, SXSW, Smock Alley Theatre in Dublin, Climate Week NYC, and Adelaide Fringe in Australia—farmers have shared moving personal stories of deep connections to the land and to our food.

I love this storytelling style, because it accomplishes something bigger than just a one-night event. For farmers, it’s a launchpad to help audiences understand the many ways farmers power the food system, nourish their communities, and lead climate-smart innovation. And each of us listening can channel the emotion and passion we’re hearing onstage into transformative action steps in our own communities and professional worlds.

Next Tuesday, Aug. 25, we’re heading to Minneapolis for Celebrating Minnesota’s Farmers: A Love Story, in partnership with the City of Minneapolis, the Minnesota Farmers Union, and Niman Ranch. The event starts at 6 p.m. at the gorgeous Minneapolis Central Library, and you can reserve your FREE spot by CLICKING HERE.

Our farmer storytellers include fourth-generation organic dairy farmer Emily Zweber, food systems advocate and urban farmer Sina War, regenerative farmer and on-the-ground educator Trisha Zachman, organic farmer and trailblazing Hmong entrepreneur Mhonpaj Lee, third-generation Cameroonian farmer Anita Nain Fondikum, and seventh-generation livestock farmer and advocate Maddie Hokanson. They are all amazing!

In addition, we’ll have a fireside chat with celebrity chef and U.N. Goodwill Ambassador Andrew Zimmern and hear remarks from speakers including Ed Eiffler-Jaramillo, City of Minneapolis Mayor’s Office; Victor Stefanescu, Star Tribune; Zoe Hollomon, Midwest Farmers of Color; Gary Wertish, Minnesota Farmers Union; Mark Ritchie, Former Minnesota Secretary of State; Thom Petersen, Minnesota Commissioner of Agriculture; and State Representative Pam Altendorf. We’re also honored to have video remarks from Senator Amy Klobuchar, Governor Tim Walz, and Congresswoman Kelly Morrison.

The whole show is dramaturged and directed by my Food Tank co-founder Bernard Pollack! We’ll also be debuting original Food Tank shorts created by filmmaker Haven Worley to accompany the farmers’ stories. (Haven also directed Food Tank’s original documentary short “Irish Farmers: A Love Story,” which began as a farmer storytelling theater event in Dublin and is now being accepted into major festivals. You can watch it HERE with the special password Irishfarmers.)

As someone who grew up in the Midwest, I know firsthand that this part of the United States is not a monolith or “flyover country”—it’s home to resilient, complex, forward-looking communities that are globally connected but deeply rooted. I’m so excited to hear these farmers’ stories and to share them with all of you!

If you live in Minnesota, I hope you’ll join us. And if you don’t live in Minnesota, this event is worth the drive—and if there’s one thing I know, it’s that we Midwesterners aren’t afraid of a good road trip! So CLICK HERE again to grab a free ticket, and I’ll see you next week.

And looking forward to the rest of the year, we hope you’ll join us for more farmer storytelling. To kick off Climate Week NYC, in partnership with Whole Foods on Sunday, September 20, we’re excited to present “Putting Farmers First: How Young Farmers are Shaping the Future of Food,” which you can find out more about HERE. And as part of the International Year of the Woman Farmer, we’re heading to Capitol Hill in partnership with the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) on December 7 as part of the 2nd Annual Food and Agriculture Policy Summit Week. Registration will open soon HERE.

We also bring you on-the-ground stories of family farmers as part of our regular Farmer Friday series, which you can find on FoodTank.com.

Articles like the one you just read are made possible through the generosity of Food Tank members. Can we please count on you to be part of our growing movement? Become a member today by clicking here.

Photo courtesy of Frances Gunn, Unsplash

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The TomKat Ranch Educational Foundation in California is working to scale regenerative land management to improve climate stability while promoting the health of humans, animals, and the planet. 

The Foundation’s home base is an 1,800-acre grass-fed cattle ranch in the San Francisco Bay Area, known as TomKat Ranch. The site serves as a “learning laboratory about regenerative practice to de-risk and broadcast it,” Founder Kat Taylor tells Food Tank. Their goal is to provide an evidence base demonstrating that regenerative models are environmentally beneficial and economically viable. This work is complemented by efforts to advance good policy and build strong markets. 

“Every farm and ranch is a business first,” Taylor explains. “If we don’t sustain them that way, they become imperiled personally, the practice doesn’t scale, and they are subject to competition from the incumbent system.” 

As multiple crises, from wealth consolidation to climate change, come to a head, building regenerative models is a way to create an alternative future that is grounded in resilience. Taylor believes that the time is right to drive these efforts forward, stating, “We have this incredible moment in history to redesign civilization, to protect our values, to still harness the power of capitalism and create an economy that serves civilization, not vice versa.”

But the Foundation realizes they can’t do this alone. “Almost everything we do, we try to do in coalition,” Taylor says. “We are crowdsourcing design solutions at a time that it’s important to rethink and redesign, and we don’t have all the answers.”

This also means working alongside people they may not always agree with. “We are trying to listen deeply, empathize completely, and work with people where they are,” Taylor tells Food Tank. All people, she believes, want the same thing: thriving economies, a healthy planet, land that can be passed on to future generations. 

Listen to the full conversation with Kat Taylor on “Food Talk with Dani Nierenberg” to hear more about the ways that the TomKat Ranch Educational Foundation is helping to mitigate risk for food producers, Taylor’s work to advance school meals for all, and how we return to healthy, safe, and vibrant food and farming systems. 

Articles like the one you just read are made possible through the generosity of Food Tank members. Can we please count on you to be part of our growing movement? Become a member today by clicking here.

Photo courtesy of William Milliot, TomKat Ranch

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This article is part of Food Tank’s primer series, “Food Tank Explains.” Each installment unpacks the ideas, innovations, and challenges shaping today’s food and agriculture systems, offering clear insights into complex topics. To explore more articles in the series, click here.

Land tenure is the legal or customary framework governing the ownership, control, and transfer of land. Land tenure systems determine who can use land, for how long, and under what conditions.

Secure land tenure refers to the assurance that individuals and communities can exercise recognized rights to access and benefit from land without fear of eviction, displacement, or competing claims. Tenure security varies with local conditions, including legal protections, social recognition, and the institutions that uphold land rights.

Ownership, tenure, or use rights are formally documented for just 35 percent of the world’s land, according to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). And almost one in four adults worldwide, or 1.1 billion people, believe they may lose rights to some or all of their land or housing in the next five years.

Historically marginalized groups are particularly susceptible to tenure insecurity, often facing disproportionate challenges in accessing and securing land rights. 90 percent of landholdings in low- and middle-income countries are not documented.

Indigenous Peoples and other customary tenure holders hold ownership rights for only one of the 5.5 billion hectares of land that they occupy. And men are more likely than women to own or hold secure rights to land in almost every country with available data.

Meanwhile, population growth and urbanization are driving demand for land, degradation is reducing suitable farmland, and, according to the World Resources Institute, administrative barriers to ownership are growing.

According to international organizations including FAO, UN-Habitat, and Global Alliance Against Hunger and Poverty, and research published in the Journal of Land Use Policy and Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems, clear, secure, and equitable land tenure and property rights are fundamental to improving food security, reducing poverty, supporting climate resilience, and advancing gender equality.

Land insecurity can lead to lower productivity, says FAO Chief Economist Maximo Torero.

Many practices that increase production require investments that may take years to produce returns. Growers may hesitate to invest in infrastructure or soil improvements without certainty that they will retain long-term land access, Nikhita Jain, Senior Urban Agriculture Program Associate at LAFPC, tells Food Tank.

For many rural communities, access to land underpins livelihoods, and insecure tenure can limit economic opportunities and perpetuate poverty. Informal arrangements can also make it harder to access certain grants and government programs that require documentation of land tenure, Jain explains.

By supporting investment in agricultural productivity, improved access to credit and financing, and more stable livelihoods, secure tenure can help reduce vulnerability to poverty and food insecurity. “Secure land tenure is the difference between short-term survival and long-term food security,” says Torero.

Secure land tenure can also support more sustainable agriculture and climate action. Clear, protected rights can encourage farmers to invest in sustainable land management. Clear tenure can also make it easier to identify and manage land for conservation, restoration, and other climate initiatives.

Women produce more than half of all grown food, but rarely own the land they work and often have limited control over its use. “Women feed the world, but we would say that they feed it on somebody else’s land,” Michael Taylor, Secretariat Director of the International Land Coalition, tells Food Tank.

Discriminatory laws and social norms, inheritance and marital property rules, and weak enforcement can limit their rights, contributing to a gender gap that exceeds 20 percent in nearly half of countries with available data.

According to Landesa, an organization that has strengthened land rights for more than 700 million people, at least one-third of married women believe they would lose their land rights if their marriage ends. This insecurity not only restricts economic opportunities, but also increase vulnerability to poverty, hunger, displacement, and violence.

Land tenure is increasingly reflected in global development and climate commitments. U.N. Sustainable Development Goals 1, 2, and 5 address secure land rights, including access for small-scale producers and women, while the FAO’s Voluntary Guidelines on the Responsible Governance of Tenure (VGGT) establishes international guidance for governing tenure. At COP26, the U.N. Climate Conference 2021 (COP26), 141 countries pledged US$1.7 billion to secure Indigenous Peoples’ and local communities’ land rights.

Experts recommend multiple paths to stronger tenure security. The Global Alliance Against Hunger and Poverty highlights recognizing Indigenous and traditional territories and supporting community-based management. WRI calls for simpler processes for communities to formalize their rights, and measures to reduce imbalances between communities and companies competing for land.

Landesa points to several approaches for strengthening women’s land rights, including improving legal literacy and expanding women’s access to and role in governing land under customary tenure systems.

Society for Conservation Biology researchers caution against one-size-fits-all approaches, recommending that interventions account for local conditions, traditional governance, and customary practices.

Articles like the one you just read are made possible through the generosity of Food Tank members. Can we please count on you to be part of our growing movement? Become a member today by clicking here.

Photo courtesy of Luiza Braun

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As the dusk of summer nears, I feel embodied with a renewed sense of possibility. Summer has a way of inviting us into our bodies and the landscapes we inhabit. With each hike, I feel stronger. I am acutely aware of my heartbeat on steep inclines, sweat rising and drying almost instantly in the summer sun. I am in awe of the orchestra of wildflower bloom, the air alive with aromas of sage, grass, and juniper. Immersion in forests is itself a practice of health.

Summer can bring another kind of abundance through food. Vegetables and fruits that we eagerly await all year pop with the flavors of the landscape. For our family, the long-awaited fruits of the summer are Flathead cherries. Plump, sweet, tart, and minerally. We eat more whole foods grown close to home, carrying memories of soil, season, interactions with other life, and the hands of our community.

This summer, an unknown about my own health shifted the intensity with which I listen to my body. Health is something we wonder about and manage every day, yet sometimes an unknown can bring it into extraordinary focus, reminding us how deeply we value each other and participating in life. It brought me back to three deceptively simple and connected questions: What is health? How do we know what is healthy? And how do we cultivate health?

Across cultures, people have cultivated traditions of health grounded in different epistemologies, worldviews, observations, and forms of evidence. The field of medical anthropology explores this question, examining how health and healing are understood and experienced.

Ayurveda understands health, or svasthya, through balance among body, mind, food, behavior, season, and environment. Food and medicinal plants are integral to maintaining health and treating illness, with transformation central to their effects. The Ayurvedic concept of agni, often translated as digestive fire, considers what we eat and our capacity to digest and transform it, while prana speaks to the vital life force that sustains us. Agni reminds us that the same food may result in different biological exposure in different people depending on their constitution.

Traditional Chinese Medicine and Tibetan medical systems offer their own understandings of balance, including relationships among food, medicinal plants, individual constitution, season, and environment.

Years earlier, during fieldwork with Piaroa and Yekuana Amerindian communities in Venezuela’s Amazonas, I had asked this same question: What is health? Their responses expanded health beyond the individual. Health was collective, expressed through the vitality of families and communities, including the number of people in a community, and through relationships with the landscapes that sustained them. In Amazonian shamanic traditions, health extends further into cosmology. Plants, animals, people, spirits, and landscapes inhabit relational worlds in which healing extends beyond the individual body.

Since 1948, the World Health Organization has defined health as “a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity.” The NIH Whole Person Health framework similarly considers the whole person, emphasizing interconnected biological, behavioral, social, and environmental domains.

These ways of knowing reveal health as biological, personal, collective, and relational, shaped by what we eat, what our bodies make of it, the communities to which we belong, the living world we inhabit, and what we have access to.

And how do we know what is healthy? People have come to know what heals through observation and experimentation, taste and experience, and knowledge and evidence accumulated across generations. Humans learned to navigate landscapes of bitter, astringent, and potentially toxic plants through their senses and trial and error, discovering that some compounds that deter consumption can also have medicinal properties. This knowledge has shaped what people eat, avoid, and use for healing along a food-to-medicine continuum. This chemical diversity continues to shape medicine, with roughly half of small-molecule drugs tracing their structural origins to natural products.

Biomedical and molecular sciences expand how we know what is healthy through measurement. As a first-year doctoral student, I heard the late food chemist Edwin Frankel lecture on inflammation as a root of disease and the role of foods in exacerbating or mitigating inflammation. Over two decades of evidence later, inflammation has emerged as a biological thread across many chronic diseases, while diets rich in fruits, vegetables, whole grains, legumes, nuts, and seeds are associated with lower inflammation and chronic disease risk. Beyond essential nutrients, these foods contain prebiotic fibers, peptides, and diverse bioactive metabolites that interact with inflammatory pathways, metabolism, and the gut microbiome.

Human health also relies on planetary health. Understanding what is healthy means understanding what health looks like in the living landscapes that produce our food, from soil and biodiversity to the fungi, microbes, and other organisms that sustain food systems.

Omics technologies enable precise characterization of the molecular diversity of foods and their interactions across complex diets, revealing distinct biomolecular signatures. These same tools can measure biological responses to what we eat through biomarkers. AI can also connect food molecular patterns to human proteins and pathways. We can further build new evidence by backtracking to existing epidemiological and clinical studies to link molecular signatures of foods and diets with health outcomes. Predictions can then be tested experimentally and clinically, taking us from food molecular composition to biological exposure and health outcomes.

Ultimately, this growing evidence base is powerful for establishing intake ranges for food molecules whose structures and functions we may not yet know and, where scientifically supported, thresholds for harmful and health-supporting biomolecules to inform dietary guidelines and public health recommendations.

Collectively, this is the frontier of understanding food as biological exposure, one where we should dedicate resources, investments, and capacity strengthening toward healthier food systems. This is perhaps what excites me most about this emerging chapter of my career: the possibility of finally understanding the continuum of soil to food to health at unprecedented resolution and translating that knowledge to improve lives for all.

As our capacity for discovery grows, so must our capacity for stewardship. Access and Benefit Sharing, Indigenous Data Sovereignty, and attribution must advance alongside discovery.

I also thought deeply about what it means to cultivate health this summer while developing an opening keynote for the WSU Bread Lab’s Grain Gathering, Cultivating Health and Nourishing Community with Food Intelligence. Amid the dreamy, diversified farms of the Skagit Valley, the idea came alive. At six in the morning on the second day of the gathering, farmers, breeders, millers, bakers, researchers, and makers gathered around a wood-fired oven making whole-grain bagels. At the center was one of humanity’s most ancient and essential crops: wheat.

Wheat offers a lens into how we cultivate health. A breeder selects for flavor, resilience, nutrition, and performance. A farmer cultivates that potential through soil, biodiversity, climate, and management. A miller determines what flows through the system, and a baker transforms flour with water, microbes, and heat. Our emerging work through The Periodic Table of Food Initiative (PTFI) is revealing how the molecular and health attributes of wheat vary among varieties and shift with production and processing practices, including fermentation. This transformation continues when we eat. Our gut microbes transform components of wheat into metabolites that interact with our immune system, metabolism, and cells.

During the bagel breakfast at the Grain Gathering, I was asked many incredible questions, but one made me stop and reflect: What makes you hopeful? In the face of uncertainty, tragedies, suffering, inequity, and threats to human and planetary health, hope itself can feel audacious. I find hope in the expansive possibility of knowing the continuum from soil to food to health at a resolution we have never known before, toward better lives for all. I find hope in gratitude for this beautiful living world. In love, higher purpose, the greater good, and faith in the goodness of humanity.

I have come to understand cultivation as creating the conditions for flourishing. Health is cultivated in much the same way. We cultivate health through the seeds we select, the landscapes we steward, the foods we grow, the knowledge we generate, the ways we move and rest, and the relationships we nourish. We cultivate it by expanding access, integrating healthy food into healthcare, and creating food systems where the healthy choice becomes the easy choice. Health is deeply personal and collective. Our health cannot be separated from the health of our communities and the living planet we share.

As the dusk of summer nears, I am grateful for the remarkable gift of participating in life. To cultivate health is to cultivate the conditions for life to flourish.

This essay is part of Food Tank’s Flourish Series: Food and Health from Molecules to Systems, authored by Selena Ahmed, exploring how food connects us to the living world while asking what it means to flourish. For more in the series, click here.

Artwork courtesy of Jeannie Ortiz commissioned for The Periodic Table of Food Initiative (PTFI) and Food Tank’s Flourish Series. All rights reserved.

The post Op-Ed | Cultivating Health: Food, Relationships, and the Living World appeared first on Food Tank.

Researchers at the International Centre of Insect Physiology and Ecology (icipe) in Kenya are using advanced satellite imaging data to improve food security. According to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization, East Africa currently faces the greatest burden of acute food insecurity globally. Across the continent, nations continue to face substantial food crises driven by climatic fluctuations including drought and flooding as well as economic pressures like high food and fertilizer prices.

“Accessibility is the first step towards governance,” Tobias Landmann, Senior Research Scientist at icipe, tells Food Tank. “If you want to be independent of the Global North, you must have control over that analysis-ready data.”

icipe recently assumed full ownership and operation of the geospatial observation platform Digital Earth Africa (DEA). “This transition represents a powerful step toward sustained African ownership, ensuring the program continues to deliver critical Earth observation data and insights for the continent,” remarks Lisa-Maria Rebelo, Managing Director of DEA.

“icipe has an African mandate, working in all 54 countries to provide bio-efficient, biological solutions to farmers,” Landmann tells Food Tank. “[DEA] coming to icipe underpins that concept because now we can use big data that’s co-developed in Africa for Africa.” Digital Earth Africa’s technical advisory committee has included organizations such as the U.N. Economic Commission for Africa as well as the African Regional Institute for Geospatial Information Science and Technology.

By working with entirely Africa-led data, the platform completely changes how continental trends are studied. Containing some of the most ecologically diverse regions on Earth, Africa offers an unparalleled frontier for geospatial and topographic analysis, providing food system researchers and actors with the comprehensive data needed to safeguard community ecosystem health.

The Waterbodies Continental Service, for example, monitors over 750,000 water bodies across the continent with a minimum spatial resolution of 10 meters. As a part of DEA, this high-resolution imaging data allows researchers to track variables including nutrient enrichment across streams, rivers, and lakes as well as the proliferation of invasive plant species.

“Prosopis juliflora is an invasive shrub that we are mapping in Kenya and Ethiopian drylands. The shrub is basically invading all the water bodies, impeding biodiversity, aggravating drought… we don’t know where the intervention areas are,” explains Landmann. He notes that the platform’s analysis-ready data is designed directly to improve policy reporting. But because the African continent is dominated by small farms, the degree to which satellite imaging can improve agricultural productivity is context-dependent.

An FAO report finds that nearly 75 percent of all farm holdings in sub-Saharan Africa are two hectares or less—with just over half of all farms less than a single hectare. “We run a procedure based on Earth observation satellite data to see the deficiencies unique to certain [crop] fields,” states Landmann. “And that is a challenge because very often the fields are very small, smaller than the minimum mapping unit.”

“The most important stressor [icipe] can map is actually drought, water deficiency, or in irrigation terms, ‘water use inefficiency’ or deficits,” says Landmann. Extreme weather events such as El Niño can exacerbate drought and flooding across different parts of Africa, meaning that having up-to-date, accurate satellite imaging is crucial to analyze the spatiotemporal effects of such events on African farms.

“We scaled a very unique concept that was actually developed by Digital Earth Australia and then transferred to Africa called ‘geo-medians.’ So, our geo-medians are legendary. It’s a game changer,” says Landmann.

Geo-medians work by stitching together images captured by satellites at different times. This means that even when cloud cover obstructs a single photo, researchers still have a clear view of the entire landscape.

According to Landmann, policy frameworks and regional actors can immediately ingest this perfectly harmonized, long-term historical data into their systems. This allows them to bypass complex pre-processing and efficiently track macro-trends like deforestation, crop intensification, or changing water cycles over several years to inform long-term climate legislation.

Beyond agriculture, satellite data can also help researchers monitor water quality, air quality, urbanization trends, biodiversity loss, carbon neutrality, and value chains, Landmann adds. “There are so many kinds of use cases that you wouldn’t necessarily think about. There’s always a bias towards agriculture and food systems, which is understandable, but multiple thematic areas can benefit from this great data set.”

Articles like the one you just read are made possible through the generosity of Food Tank members. Can we please count on you to be part of our growing movement? Become a member today by clicking here.

Photo courtesy of U.S. Geological Survey

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The recent disruption of global fertilizer supplies motivates reassessing key myths that shape perceptions of agricultural policies. A century into modern conventional agriculture, still unfolding impacts on soil, water, biodiversity, farmers, and consumers fuel growing recognition of the need for farming and food system reform. Regenerative farming systems focused on building soil health offer the potential to reshape agriculture and chart a new path toward a sustainable future, but challenge the wisdom underpinning conventional, degenerative farming practices. My new book, ReGen: A New Future for Farming, Food, and Health, shares how regenerative farming practices that upend conventional thinking can reverse the age-old pattern of soil degradation.

In studying the history of soil degradation around the world I came to see how conventional farming today involves both physical and chemical disturbance of soil and soil life. As soil degradation from physical disturbance (tillage) reduced natural fertility, farmers came to depend on synthetic fertilizers to maintain high yields. Whereas organic farming eliminates chemical disturbance and no-till farming eliminates physical disturbance, regenerative farming systems do not rely on routine tillage or agrochemical use and instead minimize or avoid both styles of disturbance.

Over decades studying and writing about soil depletion and regenerative farming systems around the world, I’ve learned to see through key myths of modern agriculture that undermine progress to addressing one of humanity’s oldest problems—and our collective future. Three myths in particular stand out.

Myth 1 is that we must choose between protecting the environment and feeding the world. In my experience, conventional agronomists, journalists, and policymakers tend to assume inherent conflict between sustainable farming and the challenge of feeding everyone. But while commonly cited studies report 10 to 20 percent higher yields in conventional crops compared with organic crops, a 1990 study that compared organic and conventional yields found that in almost half the direct comparisons, organic yields were comparable to or exceeded conventional ones. And a subsequent 2007 global study expanded the comparison and found that organic yields were less than 10 percent lower on average than conventional yields in the developed world but exceeded conventional yields in the developing world. The study estimated that organic farming using legumes as cover crops could supply enough nitrogen to offset synthetic fertilizer use and still meet global food demands on currently farmed land.

Similarly, a 2015 review found that diversified organic crop rotations decreased the yield difference to less than 10 percent and concluded that enhanced investment in organic research could potentially eliminate the difference. And a 2018 study found that yield differences declined over time, with just several years of soil building in organic systems sometimes fully closing the yield gap. I’ve seen this first-hand on regenerative farms around the world that matched or exceeded conventional yields on neighboring farms—after restoring soil health.

In short, rebuilding healthy soils could sustain high yields—just not with now-conventional practices. We don’t have to degrade soil health to feed the world.

Myth 2 is that regenerative farming can’t scale up to replace conventional methods. While mainstream commentators tend to reflexively question whether or not regenerative farming can be done at scale, I’ve visited huge farms I’d consider regenerative. The largest covers 20,000-some-odd acres in South Dakota. On this highly mechanized farm the transition to no-till, cover crops, and diverse rotations dramatically improved soil health relative to that on neighboring farms. The effect on the soil was obvious across a dirt road at the edge of the farm. The neighboring, routinely tilled conventional field was bare, cracking, and pale, in stark contrast to the moist, mulch-covered dark earth of the regenerative field.

While this shows that large, highly mechanized farms can build healthy soils, lots of small farms present another way to scale up regenerative farming. Making small farms more profitable and economically viable could scale out soil-building farming systems. Both large and small farms can regenerate healthy, fertile soil but different approaches work best for different places and sizes of farms. Large farms are well suited for regenerative production of grains and row crops suitable for mechanized farming (such as soybeans, sunflowers, and canola), whereas small farms are well suited for regenerative vegetable production.

Moreover, large farms are not inherently more efficient or productive. A 2021 global review found that small farms produced higher yields, grew a greater diversity of crops, and harvested more food per acre than large farms. In other words, scaling up regenerative farming could entail supporting both large and small farms in different settings. The real question isn’t so much whether regenerative farming can scale up as it is about how to tailor practices on farms large and small to build rather than degrade soil health.

Myth 3 is that we need genetically modified (GM) crops to feed everyone. GM crops are a well-known flash point in agriculture, and it is common to hear their proponents claim we need them to feed the world. Indeed, when first introduced, GM crops were promoted as ways to boost crop yields and reduce pesticide use. Neither promise panned out.

Despite faith that GM crops would increase yields, corn yields in Europe, where GM corn is not allowed, increased at the same pace as in the United States. This means the GM character of U.S. corn was not what boosted yields. Instead, the parallel increases in Europe and North America came from crop breeding that benefited farmers on both sides of the Atlantic. This raises the question of what could be achieved if we dedicated research support to breeding crops for performance under organic or regenerative farming systems at levels comparable to what society showered historically on conventional agriculture and GM crops.

Among the most commercially successful GM crops are those engineered to tolerate the herbicide glyphosate. Crops engineered for resistance to glyphosate provided farmers with an easy button for weed control, boosting adoption of no-till farming. As a result, global herbicide use increased, causing cascading, inadvertent changes to soil life that harm soil health.

Still, I can see potential applications for which GM crops could prove useful for building soil health. For example, GM crops might enhance drought tolerance or nutrient density if we applied the technology toward such goals. So far, however, GM crops have tended to enable and rely on the use of products that scramble soil life, enhance pest resistance, and produce unintended consequences that create demand for more agrochemical products. That’s a better agribusiness model than agricultural strategy. While building soil health is not necessarily incompatible with GM crops, it matters how the technology is deployed.

Looking beyond the myths that fueled conventional thinking about agriculture over the past century, regenerative farming can help usher in a new, soil-health building future for farming, food, and health. To sustain intensive farming into a post-oil future, we need to integrate what we’ve learned about soil ecology in recent decades into soil-building farming systems based on minimizing both physical and chemical disturbance.

Conventional thinking misses critical aspects of how farming affects soil, soil life—and us. Soil degradation stems from farmers approaching soil ecology backwards, undermining soil life instead of enabling and engaging trillions of tiny farmhands.

Like it or not, agriculture will change this century as a growing global population confronts a shifting climate and ongoing soil loss and degradation. Business as usual risks the wellbeing of generations to come, we’ve got to do something different with our soils. Fortunately, regenerative agriculture could turn the tide of soil degradation. The hardest step may prove to be seeing through key myths of modern agriculture.

Articles like the one you just read are made possible through the generosity of Food Tank members. Can we please count on you to be part of our growing movement? Become a member today by clicking here.

Photo courtesy of Satish Chand, Unsplash

The post Op-Ed | A New Future for Farming, Food, and Health appeared first on Food Tank.

Each week, Food Tank is rounding up a few news stories that inspire excitement, infuriation, or curiosity.

HHS Announces Policy Reforms Targeting Food Safety and Nutrition

This week, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) announced two policy reforms targeting food safety and nutrition. 

The agency, alongside the U.S. Department of Agriculture, submitted the first proposed definition of ultra-processed foods. They say that the absence of a definition has limited research consistency across the federal government. 

The other proposal would require manufacturers to notify the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) when concluding that the use of a substance added to human or animal food is Generally Recognized as Safe (GRAS).

For the last two decades, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has allowed food and beverage industries to self-certify that a new food chemical is safe, or legally GRAS, without federal oversight. Whether companies inform the FDA of the new ingredient is voluntary. This loophole has allowed an unknown number of GRAS determinations every year. 

Some food and nutrition advocates aren’t impressed by the actions of HHS. Author and nutritionist Marion Nestle responded to the announcement, asking, “You have to be kidding. That’s all?” She says, “food advocates for years have called for making GRAS notifications mandatory.  So this move is obvious, and long-awaited.” Nestle also points out that even if the new requirement is an improvement, companies are still responsible for the science “and will still be hiring its own experts to say the additive is safe.”

Senate Farm Bill Fails to Advance

The Senate Agriculture Committee failed to advance a Farm Bill last week. 

The Committee’s Chair, Senator John Boozman (R-Ark) says they will reconvene for another vote in September. But he says it will be a “miracle” if the legislative package is signed into law before the midterm elections in November.

Zippy Duvall, President of the American Farm Bureau Federation, expressed frustration with the outcome, stating that the country needs a “strong, bipartisan bill” at a time when food producers and rural communities “are facing multiyear losses.”

Some advocates were relieved to see the Farm Bill fail in its current state. Milton Jones, President of the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union said it “cowers to powerful agricultural interests and leaves working families out to dry.” And Food & Water Watch’s Food Policy Director Rebecca Wolf calls the legislation “deeply flawed.”

Now, Wolf says, “Congress should use this opportunity to create a new Farm Bill that builds a resilient food system – not double-down on the same corporate model that created these problems in the first place.”

Microorganisms Offer Hope to Boost Sustainable Farming in Mexico

Researchers have identified microorganisms that show promise for improving crop productivity, restoring soils, and reducing dependence on artificial fertilizers and pesticides in Mexico. 

The findings come from a project led by the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), in partnership with Michoacan’s Agrosano program from the Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development, the National Institute of Forestry, Agricultural and Livestock Research, and the Universidad Michoacana.

Scientists discovered native microorganisms in soils found in Michoacan and Oaxaca, as well as in marine environments, which can promote plant growth, improve nutrient availability, and offer protection against pests and diseases.

The research is focused primarily on small producers, who will be able to reproduce and apply biological inputs in their own fields. Participating farmers are already reporting gains in productivity even as they reduce the use of agricultural inputs and lower their production costs. 

COP31 Focuses on South-South Collaboration

Ahead of the U.N. Climate Change Conference (COP31), Turkiye is pitching a new initiative to strengthen south-south cooperation. 

If established, the South-South and Triangular Cooperation Climate Initiative will focus on helping countries with practical solutions, expertise, technologies, and financing while supporting climate resilience and the implementation of their nationally determined contributions.

“COP31 presents a timely opportunity to demonstrate how South–South and triangular cooperation can drive climate implementation,” Dima Al-Khatib, Director of the United Nations Office for South-South Cooperation, said during a recent policy dialogue in Ankara. 

The initiative is still a proposal, and decisions need to be made around funding and governance, but the Turkish Cooperation and Coordination Agency (TIKA) see it as an extension of work that’s already underway in Turkiye under the country’s Zero Waste Initiative. 

TİKA’s President Abdullah Eren says a practical roadmap can “transform ideas into concrete partnerships” and “deliver tangible outcomes for COP31.”

Extension Model Brings Solutions for Nigerian Farmers

Smallholder farmers in the northern and northeastern parts of Nigeria are increasingly exposed to climate shocks and violent conflict. To help, the Sasakawa Africa Association (SAA) is bringing them a solution that combines demonstration plots, community guides, post-harvest storage, and market connections to empower farmers and improve yields while building climate resilience. 

New research shows that in a single year, SAA’s Value Chain-Based Extension (VCBE) model reached 455,200 producers across Nigeria. Their demonstration plots introduce farmers to new agriculture techniques that build climate resilience and result in bigger harvests.

Targeted training, focused on developing community guides, helps to spread knowledge even further. These guides teach farmers about climate-smart practices that protect their land from degradation. SAA is also showing households how to use local crops to prepare healthy meals and introducing storage bags and containers that keep grains safe from pests and weather. 

CGIAR researchers say that these aren’t short term fixes. Instead SAA is “creating a lasting ripple effect that lifts entire communities.”

Articles like the one you just read are made possible through the generosity of Food Tank members. Can we please count on you to be part of our growing movement? Become a member today by clicking here.

Photo courtesy of Dylan de Jonge, Unsplash

The post Food Tank’s Weekly News Roundup: Senate Farm Bill, Soil Microorganisms, and South-South Collaboration appeared first on Food Tank.

From 4 to 8 August 2026, La Via Campesina was present in Cotonou, Benin, responding to the mobilisation of its members and allies in Africa and joining the activities surrounding the arrival of the West African Caravan.

The post Building Peasant Internationalism: La Via Campesina in Cotonou appeared first on La Via Campesina - EN.

Hannah Greenshields was pursuing a career as an opera singer when the COVID-19 pandemic changed her plans. Now, as co-founder of The Food Farm on Australia’s New South Wales Central Coast with her partner, Tim, she raises regenerative beef, chickens, and eggs while building a farming business centered on soil health, biodiversity, transparency, and community.

“You might be wondering how an opera singer becomes a farmer,” says Greenshields. “It all started in 2020 when I was on my first-ever regional tour…it got cut short because of COVID. And so, like a lot of people at the time, I had to pivot.”

Without farming experience or land of their own, she and Tim leased a quarter-acre plot to begin growing potatoes. They soon realized they had no equipment to harvest, so they invited members of their community to dig up the crop themselves. What started as a small local gathering became something much deeper.

“The people didn’t leave,” says Greenshields. “They stayed, playing in the mud. Adults were laughing with each other. Children were rolling around in it. And they were connected…to each other, themselves, and connected to something they didn’t even realize that they’d lost. There was a connection to being part of the living world.”

The experience convinced Greenshields that farming could not only produce food but also help connect people with one another, nature, and the origins of their meals. She believes openness helps people build trust in agriculture. Today, The Food Farm processes everything it produces on-site and welcomes customers to visit the farm shop and see how food is raised.

“People often ask us, ‘how can you eat an animal that you knew?'” she says. “And we ask with curiosity, ‘how can we continue to eat food and animals that we don’t know?'”

For Greenshields, reconnecting people with food means acknowledging that humans are part of the ecosystems that sustain them: “It’s something that the modern food system hides from us. We are part of the cycle. We are part of the living human biodiverse cycle,” she says.

The farm is also creating opportunities for people who, like Greenshields, never imagined a future in agriculture. Its team of 13 is made up largely of young women with no previous farming experience who “inspire us every day,” says Greenshields. “It’s a beautiful example of what happens when you invite young people back to the farm.”

And Greenshields’ musical background continues to shape how she thinks about healthy ecosystems. She compares regenerative farming to resonance in music, where harmony depends on every part working together.

“Resonance happens when breath moves through the body, and it becomes alive. When there’s tension, the song can get louder, the sound can get louder, but it becomes less alive. And that’s the same way that soil works,” says Greenshields, describing her farm as a beautiful ecosystem of microbes, fungi, worms, humans, and animals working in coherence.

For Greenshields, nourishment is ultimately rooted in presence, which means being connected to the food, the land, and the people who make meals possible.

“We all know the feeling when we bite into a tomato that truly lived,” she says. “You pick it off the vine. It’s warm. It’s juicy. You bite it, and it drips down your throat, and it tastes like literal sunshine. And that nourishment requires presence.”

Watch Greenshields’ story below and find others from our farmer storytelling events on Food Tank’s YouTube channel.

This article is part of Food Tank’s ongoing Farmer Friday series, produced in partnership with Niman Ranch, a champion for independent U.S. family farmers. The series highlights the stories of farmers working toward a more sustainable, equitable food system. Niman Ranch partners with over 500 small-scale U.S. family farmers and is committed to preserving rural agricultural communities and their way of life.

Articles like the one you just read are made possible through the generosity of Food Tank members. Can we please count on you to be part of our growing movement? Become a member today by clicking here.

Photo courtey of Hannah Greenshields

The post How an Opera Singer Found Connection Through Farming appeared first on Food Tank.

A version of this piece was featured in Food Tank’s newsletter, released weekly on Thursdays. To make sure it lands straight in your inbox and to be among the first to receive it, subscribe now by clicking here.

I want to share something that’s really been bugging me lately. We don’t always take insects—black soldier fly larvae (BSFL), in particular—as seriously as we should in farming.

Earlier this year, when I was doing ground-truthing research in Kenya, our partners at the International Centre of Insect Physiology and Ecology (icipe) shared their research on how black soldier fly larvae can be used to drive the development of a more sustainable circular economy. It’s really fascinating stuff.

To be honest, I have always been skeptical of BSFL. It seemed like something that worked well in research stations but not actually on farms. But I think changing one’s mind is one of the greatest superpowers we have as humans. And my visit to icipe helped me understand how useful BSFL can be for farmers.

The director-general of icipe, Abdou Tenkouano, compared the larvae to municipal workers “cleaning the cities by taking away all the organic refuse…and then they turn that into high-value products.”

If you’re a home composter, you might already be familiar with black soldier fly larvae, which have been shown to efficiently convert organic wastes into high-quality essential nutrients.

But we can’t confine them to backyards, because these larvae have pretty wide-ranging benefits across the food chain. That nutrient-production is a food waste solution, giving new life to scraps by producing protein-rich feeds for pigs, cows and fish. For poultry, feed made with larvae’s help can actually increase animals’ beneficial gut bacteria and cut down on the need for antibiotics, icipe research shows.

Black soldier fly larvae also produce an organic fertilizer called frass, which has been shown to increase crop yields by as much as 27 percent over similar artificial fertilizers!

And just like farming livestock in certain agricultural systems, rearing insects is becoming a pathway toward employment and resilient livelihoods in places like Kenya. I was particularly struck by these findings—that certain insects don’t just have the ability to help the land but also the people who live on it.

Of course, like any solution, these insects are not a silver bullet. No one approach will fix everything—but black soldier fly larvae can give a much-needed boost to a variety of food system approaches we’re already taking. And with such a powerful partner right under our feet, how can we continue to ignore them?!

“We cannot substitute entirely for agrochemicals,” Abdou tells me, “but we have a combination of options that can reduce the amount of destruction that we could be causing to the environment by using purely chemical approaches.”

We’re talking about black soldier fly larvae because they’re worth paying attention to on their own, but I’m also using them to illustrate a larger point.

To be quite frank, I know that black soldier fly larvae are not quite as pleasing to look at as ‘cute’ animals like butterflies and bumblebees, and we sometimes tend to ignore really beneficial plants and animals that we find uncomfortable. But black soldier fly larvae are a good example of how this only ends up hurting us in the end, because we lose out on the exact benefits we’re talking about here.

Food systems transformation means getting down into the dirt, into the nitty-gritty, and working alongside ecosystem partners like insects to help rebuild these complex ecosystems!

Today on the Food Talk podcast feed, we’re dropping a conversation I had with Abdou Tenkouano of icipe about not just insects but a wide variety of solutions to build more resilient food systems. I hope you’ll give it a listen:

Articles like the one you just read are made possible through the generosity of Food Tank members. Can we please count on you to be part of our growing movement? Become a member today by clicking here.

Photo courtesy of Geoffrey Moffett, Unsplash

The post Want Better Food Systems? Let’s Make Friends With Insects appeared first on Food Tank.

A new state bill in Pennsylvania aims to restrict construction of data centers on prime farmland.

If passed, House Bill 2588 will prohibit local officials from designating farmland as the only type of land where a municipality can build hyperscale data centers. It will also ban data centers of any size from being built on land where at least half of the soil is suitable for farmland, per the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s soil classification for land use.

House Representative Marla Brown introduced the Bill. It was referred to the Pennsylvania House of Representative’s Local Government committee, but has not yet been voted through, according to Brown.

 “I have a large farming community in my district in Western Pennsylvania,” Brown tells Food Tank. “I started investigating data center development, and in my community one of them is actually in a residential area, and some of it would be on farmland. That raised huge red flags for me in terms of the risk for future development.”

Data centers—facilities made up of large servers that store and process information—are in high demand as digital services, including generative artificial intelligence, continue to grow. They require large, reliable sources of energy and in the United States, are mostly being built in rural areas. Pennsylvania is the country’s second largest electricity-producing state, and 75 percent of its land is rural.

Leading up to the passage of the state budget last month, data center regulation was the focus of several bills proposed by Pennsylvania lawmakers, including Brown’s. Agriculture is one of the state’s biggest industries, generating US$132 billion per year and housing nearly 600,000 jobs, according to Pennsylvania’s Department of Agriculture.  

“Why the need to go to farmland? Maybe because they see it as an easy sell to the farmer, [who] could make some quick money,” Brown says. “That’s what scares me—we’re making harsh decisions and overlooking very important needs for the future.” 

In Salem Township, which has a population of around 4,000, nearly 100 Pennsylvanian families made an average of US$5.5 million by selling their land to the same developer. In other parts of the state, community members—citing concerns about rising land costs, the loss of natural resources, and the erosion of local lifestyles—have rejected data center proposals. Earlier this year, one 86-year-old Pennsylvanian was praised for turning down the US$15 million a developer offered for his 261-acre farm.

Brown’s Bill, if passed, will make it more difficult for data center developers to obtain farmland, particularly in areas with high concentrations of land suitable for agriculture. But for farmers, the influx of proposals is just one of the latest additions to an already complex network of challenges.

“Beginning farmers are struggling to find farmland after they get training, and access to farmland is a real issue,” Jeff Tkach, CEO of the Pennsylvania-based Rodale Institute, tells Food Tank. “How do we get new and aspiring farmers when farmland is so expensive and frankly unattainable? And now this added pressure from data centers and even the warehouse industry is making that even more complex.”

The Rodale Institute, located outside of Allentown, is a research hub and farmer training program that specializes in regenerative, organic agriculture. Tkach believes legislation like Brown’s can play a part in preserving Pennsylvania’s farmland and other natural resources. But it must be part of a “broader strategy,” he says, to increase public investment, farmer retention, and the viability of regenerative farming operations.

“It’s not just about keeping data centers out of our community, and making sure we have good legislation in place to protect farmland—that should go without saying,” Tkach says. “But how do we build on that and make our farms better for everyone, including the farmers themselves?”

Articles like the one you just read are made possible through the generosity of Food Tank members. Can we please count on you to be part of our growing movement? Become a member today by clicking here.

Photo courtesy of Geoffrey Moffett, Unsplash

The post Data Centers Want Pennsylvania’s Farmland—This Bill Could Protect It appeared first on Food Tank.

From CLOC La Via Campesina South America, we call on social organisations, popular movements, trade unions, youth and all peoples to strengthen international solidarity and remain vigilant in the face of the consequences of this catastrophe.

The post Colombia Earthquake: CLOC South America expresses its solidarity with the Colombian people appeared first on La Via Campesina - EN.

AFSA remains firm that regulations must be truly scale-appropriate to ensure the survival of small-scale, agroecological and regenerative farming businesses.

The post Australia: The Agroecology & Food Sovereignty Alliance (AFSA) Calls for Appropriate Regulation in Tasmania’s New Horticulture Standards appeared first on La Via Campesina - EN.

The strength of our agriculture lies in its diversity, complementarity and solidarity, as we demonstrated during health crises or the most intense periods of fires.

The post France: Confédération Paysanne Puts Forth 22 Demands to Address the Climate Crises appeared first on La Via Campesina - EN.

This article is part of Food Tank’s primer series, “Food Tank Explains.” Each installment unpacks the ideas, innovations, and challenges shaping today’s food and agriculture systems, offering clear insights into complex topics. To explore more articles in the series, click here.

Food justice recognizes food as a human right and seeks to address the structural causes of inequity throughout the food system. The movement’s goal is to foster equal access to nutritious, culturally appropriate food, fair treatment of food and farm workers, and opportunities for all communities to shape their own food systems.

According to the Global Alliance for the Future of Food, the struggle for food justice has never been more pressing. Despite sufficient food production to feed the global population, one in four people worldwide are not food-secure.

Women produce approximately half of the world’s food and constitute 40 percent of the agricultural labor force, according to the United Nations. Yet research shows that women often lack secure access to land and natural resources and remain underrepresented in agricultural decision-making.

In the U.S., 38 million people, including 12 million children, lack reliable access to nutritious food. Food system workers are twice as likely to experience food insecurity as workers in other industries. And Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) communities experience disproportionately high rates of food insecurity. Black children are three times more likely than white children to be food insecure. Indigenous communities are two to three times more likely to face food insecurity than white communities.

Ericka Huggins, a human rights activist, educator, and former Black Panther leader as well as Devita Davison, Executive Director of FoodLab Detroit, emphasize that current food inequities reflect historical systems of colonization, racial discrimination, and economic exclusion. “History informs the present,” Huggins says.

The modern food justice movement emerged during the civil rights era of the 1960s and 1970s, catalyzed by the 1962 Greenwood Food Blockade. Amid broader efforts in Mississippi to suppress Black political participation, Leflore County ended a federal program that supplied winter food to 90 percent of local Black sharecropping families, leaving over 20,000 people without a vital food source.

Community members organized, and students successfully petitioned the U.S. Department of Agriculture to reinstate the program. These communities’ mutual aid and solidarity underlined the connection between food justice and political participation.

The Black Panther Party built on these efforts by launching its Free Breakfast for School Children Program in 1969. The initiative expanded from a single church to at least 45 sites serving thousands of children each day. Although law enforcement efforts ultimately dismantled many of the Black Panther Party programs, they helped build public support and ultimately drove increased federal funding for school meals.

At the same time, movements to further labor rights, environmental health, and racial justice were gaining momentum. The United Farm Workers (UFW), led by César Chávez and Dolores Huerta, organized agricultural workers in the 1960s, securing rights for tens of thousands of farm workers, including higher wages, restricted pesticide use, and requirements for clean drinking water and rest facilities.

In 1987, the United Church of Christ’s Commission for Racial Justice published a report, documenting that hazardous waste facilities were disproportionately located in Black and Hispanic communities, revealing the connections between structures of racial injustice and environmental inequities.

Realizing the interconnected nature of these issues, the food justice movement expanded in the 1980s and 1990s beyond food access to encompass labor conditions, racial justice, and environmental protections.

Organizations today pursue food justice in many ways. Some expand access to nutritious food through local agriculture. Urban Tilth has established over 60 community gardens in California, while Just Food connects farmers with New York markets.

Other prioritize food sovereignty and self-determination in the food system. The National Black Food & Justice Alliance strengthens Black-led food systems, while Soul Fire Farm in New York offers reparations and land back initiatives and programs that train aspiring Black and Latinx farmers.

The Native American Food Sovereignty Alliance seeks to restore and reclaim Indigenous food systems through education and advocacy, and the First Nations Development Institute helps Native communities strengthen local food economies. According to historian Dr. Frederick Douglass Opie, “One of the most offensive things someone can do to you is deny you a place at the table.”

Other organizations focus on worker justice. Coalition of Immokalee Workers organizes to improve wages and working conditions, the Food Chain Workers Alliance advocates for workers across the food supply chain, and Restaurant Opportunities Centers United promotes better workplace conditions in restaurants.

Going forward, food justice advocates highlight that the importance of acknowledging and addressing the structural barriers that have shaped food systems for generations, and questioning how change is pursued. Rather than asking what can be done for communities, the movement encourages governments, nonprofits, researchers, and philanthropies to work with communities by supporting locally led solutions and sharing decision-making power.

“We cannot free ourselves until we feed ourselves,” says Devita Davison.

Articles like the one you just read are made possible through the generosity of Food Tank members. Can we please count on you to be part of our growing movement? Become a member today by clicking here.

Photo courtesy of Wikimedia

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Faced with enormous challenges, the experience of 2025 demonstrates our resilience and our ability to unite diverse struggles towards a common goal: unity in diversity, internationalist solidarity.

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Federal agencies are investigating four ongoing cyclospora outbreaks in the United States. This year has seen a record number of cases, prompting concern among consumers and experts.

In its latest update, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reports 13,895 laboratory-confirmed domestic cases of the parasitic infection across 45 states since May. They are also tracking an additional 10,455 cases that have yet to be confirmed. There have been two deaths in individuals with underlying health issues.

The biggest outbreak now spans 15 states and has a confirmed case count of over 6,000 people, according to CDC. The agency is still investigating Taylor Farms iceberg lettuce as the likely source after previously declaring their testing a false positive. Taylor Farms has voluntarily recalled their products in 27 states across the U.S.

Agencies are also investigating three additional outbreaks that have already ended.

Cyclospora is a parasite that often contaminates fresh produce, infecting those who eat it. May through August is considered cyclosporiasis season in the U.S. Symptoms usually appear one week after exposure, and most commonly include watery diarrhea, nausea, and fatigue. While treatable, many cases clear up on their own, and aren’t diagnosed, says Glenn Morris, Professor of Infectious Diseases at the University of Florida College of Medicine and Founding Director of the Emerging Pathogen Institute.

“Because fresh produce items typically have short shelf lives, outbreaks of Cyclospora tend to appear suddenly, and gradually fade as the product is consumed out of the marketplace,” Craig Hedberg, a Professor at the University of Minnesota who focuses on foodborne illness and infectious disease outbreaks, tells Food Tank.

Better and more widely available diagnostic testing methods in clinical laboratories may lead to higher case counts, according to Hedberg. And when awareness of an outbreak grows, more people are likely to seek medical care.

Morris points to an additional explanation: a breakdown in the country’s food safety programs.

Last July, CDC made it optional for The Foodborne Diseases Active Surveillance Network (FoodNet) to track most pathogens, including Cyclospora. Salmonella and STEC (E. coli) are still mandatory. Although FoodNet is not intended to detect outbreaks of foodborne illness, it better prepares federal agencies to deal with them. Morris thinks that while the outbreak would likely still have occurred, funding cuts, loss of experienced staff, and reduced laboratory capacity within FoodNet, CDC, and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) have hampered the investigative process.

“All of the tools that would normally be applied, both in terms of preventing the outbreak… [and] investigating the outbreak, have seen major cuts from the current administration,” Morris tells Food Tank.

FoodNet is a CDC program that tracks common foodborne infections to collect baseline data. It uses active surveillance, meaning it contacts clinical laboratories in ten states to identify cases and provide a basis for prevention efforts. “Public health surveillance for foodborne illnesses is a foundation for effective food control,” says Hedberg. But because cyclosporiasis is difficult to diagnose, it can take longer to trace to a source.

Morris notes that oversight of food safety is further complicated by the involvement of multiple federal departments. “We’re the only major Western country that does not have a [single] food safety agency,” he says.

The CDC handles cases of foodborne illness within people but lacks regulatory authority at the state level. Regulation of food is controlled by FDA and the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), depending on the product. While these agencies communicate with each other, the U.S. does not have a single federal food safety agency. Morris believes that the country should create one and conduct strong active surveillance on a federal scale.

“We need to invest in public health agencies to better prepare them to respond to outbreaks when they are small, to help prevent them from growing large,” Hedberg tells Food Tank—a point Morris echoes.

Morris advises that consumers can protect themselves from cyclospora by avoiding foods identified as likely to be contaminated, shopping local, and following the latest CDC updates.

Articles like the one you just read are made possible through the generosity of Food Tank members. Can we please count on you to be part of our growing movement? Become a member today by clicking here.

Photo courtesy of Zolfeqar Fatihzadeh, Wikimedia Commons

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