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“On the Ground with Dani Nierenberg” is an ongoing series documenting Food Tank President Danielle Nierenberg’s ground-truthing work. Read more by clicking here. 

I talk about the Green Revolution a lot in my work, but I had never been to the place where so much of it began until early this August. I visited Texcoco, Mexico, where the Rockefeller Foundation-funded Mexican Agricultural Program eventually led to CIMMYT, the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center.

CIMMYT is dedicated to building food security, resilient agriculture, and scientific collaboration across the Global South. And its history is complex and complicated.

It was here that Norman Borlaug and his colleagues researched and promoted high-yielding cereal varieties and the use of artificial fertilizers to increase food production. The Green Revolution helped avert famine in Mexico, India, and elsewhere. But we also know that these practices often displaced traditional, biodiverse, locally rooted systems of cultivation and increased farmers’ dependence on expensive inputs.

What struck me during my time with CIMMYT is how much the organization is trying to learn from that history.

Today, CIMMYT talks about a green evolution, instead of a revolution—one that is less about delivering a package of technologies to farmers and more about co-creating and sharing knowledge with them.

There is “no universal recipe” for sustainable and resilient food systems, says Jelle Van Loon. What works for a farmer in one community may not work for a farmer somewhere else. The science has to meet farmers where they are, Van Loon adds.

In addition to investing in breeding programs for new varieties of wheat, maize, and other crops, CIMMYT is also recognizing that farmers are safeguarding biodiversity on their farms every day. And they are holding the future of food on their shoulders.

I’ll give you an example. In Oaxaca, I got to see the milpa system in action.

Milpa is often described as the three sisters—maize, beans, and squash grown together so they strengthen one another and the soil. Farmers growing food this way can have as many as 27 different crops on just a few hectares, without pesticides and with very little or no artificial fertilizer. Sunflowers attract beneficial insects and give farmers extra income. Cowpeas and other legumes help farmers cope with drought.

This isn’t diversity for diversity’s sake. It’s resilience.

Oaxaca’s farmers are dealing with increasingly difficult drought conditions. One farmer-technician told me that when those challenges become overwhelming, “families start losing hope.”

But diversified farming systems like milpa give farmers more ways to survive a bad season. If one crop fails, another may succeed. They can provide food, animal feed, healthier soils, protection from pests, and income—all while allowing farmers to maintain cultural traditions and identities that have existed for generations.

And farmers using milpa are usually growing native maize varieties. Mexico is the birthplace of maize and home to extraordinary genetic diversity. CIMMYT’s gene bank houses the world’s largest collection of maize germplasm—and that seed bank is very cool, no pun intended. It’s kept at -15°C (5°F) and holds hundreds and hundreds of varieties of wheat and maize. The corn seeds are like small jewels—purple, blue, red, black, yellow, white. That seed bank, like thousands of others around the world, is protecting the future of humanity.

While not as fancy, the small seed banks I saw in farmers’ houses in Oaxaca are just as—if not more—important. Because preserving a seed is not only about putting it in a vault. It is about planting it. Eating it. Sharing it. Selecting it. Passing it to your children and your neighbors.

When communities lose their seeds, they risk losing part of their identity along with them.

In Oaxaca, I met farmers like Francisca Canton and her husband, Jacoba Benitez, who are still farming in their late 60s. They described seed saving as “un trabajo duro”—hard work. And it is a year-long process, from planting to harvest to measuring and storage.

They use oil or soda bottles to store roughly 50 varieties of maize, legumes, and squash. They are using traditional seed-saving methods, they explained, while also learning from CIMMYT technicians about seed selection and more efficient ways to dry seeds.

CIMMYT staff talked repeatedly about consistency and presence—about showing up, listening, learning from farmer networks, and building trust over years. Their recommendations, they say, increasingly depend on context: What works best, where, for whom, and under what conditions?

That is a very different philosophy from assuming there is one technological package—or silver bullet—that can transform agriculture everywhere.

And perhaps that’s one of the lessons we can take from the Green Revolution itself. Science matters enormously. Innovation matters. Technology matters.

But so do culture, biodiversity, economics, relationships, and the knowledge farmers have accumulated over generations.

Farmers are the stewards of biodiversity that is—literally—the future of humanity. Every time farmers share knowledge that strengthens their resilience, a community becomes stronger.

During my time in Oaxaca, I met Víctor López Leyva, the state’s agriculture minister. His message has stayed with me:

“Creer en el campo, creer en las campesinas y los campesinos.”

Believe in the countryside. Believe in farmers.

I could not agree more.

It’s why I am always so excited—and not surprised—to see agricultural innovation being led by farmers, for farmers.

And I also know that a better food system depends on collaboration among farmers, researchers, scientists, policymakers, advocates, cultural experts, and so many others. But collaboration also requires us to recognize who knows the land best.

The Green Revolution taught the world that agricultural science can accomplish extraordinary things. Maybe the green evolution can teach us something equally important—innovation doesn’t begin with a technology or a scientist. It begins by listening to farmers.

Learn more about Food Tank’s ground-truthing work and recent visit with CIMMYT in this video by filmmaker Haven Worley:

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 Haven Worley

The post On the Ground with Dani Nierenberg: Believe in Farmers appeared first on Food Tank.

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.

Dryland farming is a practice used to cultivate crops in regions where water supply is limited, seasonal, or unpredictable. Dryland systems use no irrigation and depend entirely on rain. They work by capturing and storing as much rainfall as possible and ensuring that crop water demand does not exceed what’s available.

According to the Dry Farming Institute, success depends less on total rainfall and more on how much is captured in the soil. To prevent loss to runoff, dryland farmers apply techniques including contour farming, where crops are planted across slopes in terraces, and land shaping, which involves changing the topography of the land.

Captured rainfall can evaporate from the soil surface before it reaches crop roots, particularly in hot, dry, and windy regions. To keep water in the root zone, dryland systems prioritize practices that reduce evaporation and increase soil water-holding capacity.

Often, part of dryland farms will lie fallow in alternate seasons or years, to accumulate water for subsequent crop cycles. Increasing soil organic matter can also improve water retention. Practices such as crop rotation, cover cropping, and mulching build and maintain organic matter while reducing erosion and evaporation.

To ensure crop water demand does not exceed supply, dryland farmers align planting and harvesting dates with local rainfall patterns, rather than a fixed calendar date. And they select crops based on seasonal conditions and characteristics such as drought tolerance, adaptability, and the timing of a crop’s water needs.

Common dryland crops include pigeonpea, which both tolerates drought and improves soil fertility, and tepary beans, which are protein-rich and can withstand varying levels of water stress.

Sorghum—which the International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas (ICARDA) calls an underutilized crop that has significant potential for nutrition, climate resilience, and economic stability—can conserve water during dry periods by temporarily suspending growth.

“Wild desert plants have a remarkable number of adaptations to cope with heat, drought, unpredictable rainfall, and poor soils,” Erin Riordan of the University of Arizona tells Food Tank.

Drylands are a vital but overlooked resource with untapped economic potential and environmental value, according to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).

They make up 46 percent of the planet’s land area and support 44 percent of global food systems, including half of the world’s livestock. They are home to more than 2 billion people and support the livelihood of 1 billion people in 100 countries.

Drylands are “strategic landscapes rich with the potential to drive resilience, economic vitality, and sustainable prosperity for millions,” Éliane Ubalijoro, CEO of the Landscape Alliance and Director General of World Agroforestry (ICRAF), tells Food Tank.

But these regions, which already face some of the world’s harshest conditions, are under threat. Increasing water scarcity, land-use change, and extreme weather events are transforming drylands into barren landscapes, according to Ismahane Elouafi, Executive Managing Director of CGIAR. Research published in Nature Ecology & Evolution estimates that up to 20 percent of drylands are already degraded or at risk.

And, according to the U.N. Convention to Combat Desertification and research published in Communications Earth & Environment, these pressures will intensify in the coming decades.

Heat, drought, and unpredictable rainfall are all stressful growing conditions likely to become more common, Riordan tells Food Tank. The U.N. Environment Programme estimates that land degradation in drylands could cut global food production by 12 percent over the next 25 years.

Impacts fall disproportionately on the 2 billion people who live in drylands, which include some of the world’s poorest and most climate-vulnerable communities, according to CGIAR.

ML Jat, the Director of Resilient Farm and Food Systems at the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT), tells Food Tank these communities are often “the first to face hunger, thirst, and the devastating effects” of declining soil and environmental conditions.

Despite these pressures, researchers and organizations highlight the potential of restoration. Investments in drylands can return as much as US$30 for every dollar spent, Ubalijoro tells Food Tank, describing drylands as “places of deep opportunity.”

But drylands need greater recognition in policy. FAO Assistant Director-General Abdulhakim Elwaer calls for integrating dryland agriculture into national development plans, climate action strategies, and food security policies. Researchers in Nature Ecology & Evolution call for stronger safeguards, finding that only 12 percent of drylands are protected.

Other recommendations focus on how solutions are developed and scaled. CGIAR’s Global Strategy for Resilient Drylands emphasizes partnerships among researchers, governments, businesses, and local communities to adapt agricultural innovations to dryland conditions. FAO recommends combining traditional knowledge with modern technologies.

Ubalijoro argues that these efforts can help redefine what drylands represent. “This is an opportunity for all of us,” she says, “to make these thrivelands not only a source of prosperity but also a source of peace.”

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 Brett Meliti

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Wendell Berry, a farmer, writer, and advocate whose work challenged industrial agriculture and defended the ties between land, food, and community, died at his home in Port Royal, Kentucky, according to the New York Times (NYT). He was 92.

A poet, novelist, essayist, teacher, conservationist, activist, and farmer, Berry resisted easy categorization. “Berry has refused to specialize,” Charles Hudson wrote in the Georgia Review.

Throughout his five-decade career, Berry argued that agriculture was inseparable from the health of the land and the communities that depend on it. He questioned the consolidation and industrialization of farming while championing small farms, local economies, and responsible stewardship.

Born in Louisville, Kentucky, in 1934, Berry grew up in Henry County, where his family had farmed for generations. He earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in English from the University of Kentucky before joining Stanford University’s creative writing program as a Wallace Stegner Fellow.

He later traveled to Europe and taught in New York, but felt increasingly drawn back to his roots. Berry returned to Port Royal in the 1960s. He and his wife, Tanya, settled on a 125-acre farm, where they raised sheep and crops. He spent the rest of his life there writing and farming.

Living in his native landscape kept him accountable to the place and people he described, Berry told the NYT in a phone interview in 2018 for his obituary.

From his home, Berry analyzed the consequences of an agricultural system increasingly defined by consolidation, mechanization, chemicals, and soil degradation. He examined the disappearance of small farms and rural communities, and how their absence threatened individual liberty, local autonomy, and economic independence.

Those concerns became the foundation of his body of writing. Berry published more than 50 books of poetry, fiction, and essays, all written by hand during daylight hours. His farmhouse had electricity, but he refused to use electric lights because, he said, the power was supplied by strip-mined coal.

His 1977 book The Unsettling of America: Culture & Agriculture argues that agriculture is the foundation of America’s culture. The book questioned U.S. policies promoting practices that he argued lead to overproduction, pollution, and soil erosion.

Berry examined these ideas further in The Gift of Good Land and Home Economics, collections that examining organic farming. He argued that the values driving industrial agriculture were eroding family farms and weakening what he regarded as a foundation of American society.

In a New Perspectives Quarterly interview Berry commented that large-scale agriculture is morally as well as environmentally unacceptable: “We must support what supports local life, which means community, family, household life—the moral capital our larger institutions have to come to rest upon. If the larger institutions undermine the local life, they destroy that moral capital just exactly as the industrial economy has destroyed the natural capital of localities—soil fertility and so on. Essential wisdom accumulates in the community much as fertility builds in the soil.”

The issues that animated Berry’s essays also shaped his fiction. Through novels and short stories set largely in the fictional Kentucky town of Port William, he chronicled generations of farmers, families, and neighbors confronting the economic and technological changes reshaping rural life.

Berry also carried his convictions beyond the page. He joined protests against the Vietnam War, nuclear power, mountaintop-removal coal mining, coal-fired power plants, and the death penalty.

In 1979, Berry was arrested for trespassing while protesting the Marble Hill Nuclear Power Plant in Madison, Indiana. Recalling the episode in 2010, he said, “People asked if I wanted to be arrested and I said, ‘Hell No’ but I was willing to be.”

The National Endowment for the Humanities described him in 2012 as “cheerful in dissent” and a person who “writes to document and defend what is being lost to the forces of modernization.”

His writing and advocacy earned more than 30 honors. President Barack Obama awarded Berry the National Humanities Medal for his achievements as a poet, novelist, farmer, and conservationist, and the National Book Critics Circle honored him with its Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award in 2016.

He also earned honors including the T.S. Eliot Prize, the Aiken Taylor Award, the John Hay Award and the Richard C. Holbrooke Distinguished Achievement Award of the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, according to the Poetry Foundation.

His ideas continue through The Berry Center, established in 2011 to put Berry’s “writings to work” by supporting farmers, land-conserving communities, and healthy regional economies.

Food Tank Co-founder and President Danielle Nierenberg had the privilege of both meeting and hearing Berry speak over the last two decades. She says that he inspired so many of us as food and agriculture system advocates not only with his poems and books, but his love of the land and farmers.

In addition to his wife and daughter, Berry is survived by his son, Pryor, who goes by Den, two sisters, Mary Jo Berry and Martha Baxter, five grandchildren, and four great-grandchildren.

“There’s not enough I could say about him to do him justice,” his daughter, Mary Berry, told the Associated Press.

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Photo courtesy of Wikimedia

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On Tuesday afternoon, Sept. 22, Food Tank and Diestel Family Ranch will host “Nourishing the Future: How Farming Practices Shape the Food We Eat, the Health We Build, and the Longevity We Seek” at Climate Week NYC 2026. The invitation-only event will explore how the way food is grown, raised, and produced directly shapes human health and longevity.

Through farmer stories, regenerative and organic production models, emerging nutrient-density research, and clinical perspectives on food as fuel, speakers will examine how better farming practices can produce better food—and why the next frontier in food systems may be measuring value not just by cost, yield, or convenience, but by nourishment.

“What happens on the farm doesn’t stay on the farm. Decisions about soil, feed, animal health, and how food is produced ultimately show up on our plates,” says Heidi Diestel, fourth-generation family farmer at Diestel Family Ranch. “What excites me about ‘Nourishing the Future’ is that we’re bringing farmers, scientists, food companies, and health experts into the same conversation to better understand those connections.”

Sessions will include fireside chats with industry leaders and chefs exploring nutrient density as the next frontier in food, farming, and health. Panel discussions will cover how farming practices, animal health, soil biology, and production choices shape the nutritional value of food and impact human health, as well as what it takes to bring better food to more people.

“We’ve spent decades asking people to care about where their food comes from,” says Diestel. “I hope this summit gets them asking the next question: What happened to my food before it arrived on my plate and why does that matter?” 

The event will kick off at WNYC-NPR Studios’ The Greene Space in New York City at 1:30pm with food, drink, and live musical performances, and a reception will follow until 4:30pm.

Confirmed speakers include Melissa Clark, Food Reporter and Columnist, The New York Times and NYT Cooking; Heidi Diestel, Fourth-Generation Farmer and Executive Vice President, Diestel Family Ranch; Anne Marie Hourigan, Quality Standards Principal Advisor for Sourcing Standards, Whole Foods Market; Danielle Nierenberg, President, Food Tank; and Chef Andrew Zimmern.

“Nourishing the Future” will feature a special musical performance by Clair Rachel Howell, a Broadway performer who made her Broadway debut in Wicked, where she played Nessarose, and is now performing on the Wicked National Tour. She will be joined by Broadway Music Director Noah Turner.

This summit will be streamed live on FoodTank.com and Food Tank’s YouTube channel, here. Join the Food Tank newsletter list for reminders, and click here for Food Tank’s full lineup of events at Climate Week NYC 2026.

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The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) recently announced a US$500 million investment to expand domestic mineral fertilizer production. While this funding aims to boost local manufacturing, environmental groups argue that the administration should focus on regenerative solutions like legume cover crops to fundamentally reduce the nation’s reliance on synthetic inputs.

The USDA states the move will “improve supply chain resilience.” By increasing domestic manufacturing capacity, the agency hopes to shield American farmers from the extreme price volatility and geopolitical supply shocks that have plagued global fertilizer markets in recent years.

But domestic fertilizer production heavily relies on fossil fuels. Environmental conservation groups like the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) and Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) argue that American agriculture can benefit more from incentivizing the adoption of regenerative practices like cover cropping rather than fertilizer expansion.

According to the UCS, U.S. farmers apply 30 to 50 percent more nitrogen fertilizer than their crops can effectively absorb. A recent UCS report notes that this overapplication results in substantial environmental, economic, and public health-related costs—particularly in the U.S. Corn Belt.

“When nitrogen runs off into water bodies, it creates algal blooms…algae multiply very quickly in the presence of nitrogen and use up a lot of the water’s dissolved oxygen, which can then create low oxygen zones, also called dead zones,” Omanjana Goswami, lead author of the UCS report, tells Food Tank.

Besides impacting aquatic ecosystems, soil nitrogen can break down into nitrous oxide, a super-pollutant 270 times more powerful than carbon dioxide in trapping heat. Soil nitrification is currently the leading cause of nitrous oxide emissions in the U.S., and Goswami notes that agriculture is the world’s largest unmitigated source of nitrous oxide pollution.

“We’ve seen that overall, about one-third of input costs for corn farmers are budgeted towards fertilizer. So, that’s about 33 percent at a bare minimum of what farmers spend on growing,” Goswami tells Food Tank.

Across the country, farmers are “dramatically cutting nitrogen pollution without sacrificing productivity,” states a recent report by the NRDC. This can be achieved by avoiding overapplication of fertilizers and adopting practices such as adaptive nitrogen management, cover cropping, edge-of-field pollution control, and diverse crop rotation.

The UCS and NRDC hope to see more producers move away from carbon-intensive practices, but economic uncertainty makes shifting a risky move.

“Farmers [are] already operating on very thin margins; [they] need to be getting very high yields to make a profit,” William Burke—an agricultural economist at the University of Maryland Eastern Shore—tells Food Tank.

“From a public good perspective, research into green ammonia and phosphorus recovery from waste streams—that’s where the structural changes are going to come from, where you can realistically think about decoupling our fertilizer that we use and our food markets from fossil fuel markets,” explains Burke. These emerging technologies provide pathways toward long-term fertilizer infrastructure sustainability.

But nutrient management strategies like legume cover crops offer a more immediate pathway to separating our agricultural systems from fossil-fuel dependencies. Mark Peoples, agriculture and food scientist at Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation, notes that integrating legumes into cereal rotations naturally enhances soil structure and improves nutrient availability. “The inclusion of legumes in a cropping sequence generally results in greater microbial biomass, activity and diversity in soils,” Peoples tells Food Tank.

Nitrous oxide emissions tend to be lower from legumes compared to nitrogen-fertilized cereal crop systems as well. Properly managed systems “generally have a lower risk of leaching or runoff,” explains Peoples.

The UCS directly advocates for greater crop diversification through the USDA Environmental Quality Incentives Program. “We need to diversify farming operations by moving away from corn-and-soy monoculture and toward incentivizing best practices instead of maximum production of commodity crops,” Goswami notes in the report.

The UCS and NRDC suggest that expanding federal conservation program funding from the USDA can encourage crop diversification and incentivize resilient practices. “Building cover crops [and] tree cover, diversified cropping systems all help farmers move away from that fertilizer treadmill,” Goswami tells Food Tank.

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The Food Security Leadership Council (FSLC) is calling on the United States to launch a once-in-a-generation effort to boost agricultural innovation. In a recent report, they outline a proposal for US$100 billion in new public research and development (R&D) investments over the next ten years to strengthen domestic food systems, improve farm profitability, and restore global leadership.

The call comes at a critical time for American agriculture. Farmers across the country face soil degradation, water limitations, and extreme weather driven by climate change, while the U.S. leans on concentrated foreign supply chains for critical inputs like fertilizer.

Meanwhile, domestic agricultural productivity growth has slowed. According to the report, the U.S. share of global public agricultural R&D spending fell from 20.2 percent in 1960 to 11.5 percent by 2011. It also notes that China now spends roughly double what the United States does on public agricultural research.

“I am not sure many U.S. policymakers appreciate the full nature of the importance, and cascading benefits, of agricultural innovation,” Anna Nelson, Executive Director of the Food Security Leadership Council, tells Food Tank. “Food and agricultural innovation is not only a farm issue. It matters for our entire economy through its effects on employment, producer profitability, and consumer prices… It affects our environment by shaping land use, emissions, and pollution.”

Public investments in agricultural research generate an estimated US$18 in societal benefits for every dollar spent, according to the report.

Recent data from the Economic Research Service at the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) underscores the importance of technical progress. Between 1948 and 2021, U.S. farm output nearly tripled even as total input use slightly declined, demonstrating an efficient use of resources.

The report demonstrates that new innovations can support the transition toward long-term sustainability, but Nelson is careful to note that new tools require careful design with input from communities. “Agricultural production is local—so is consumption,” she tells Food Tank. “Any innovation needs to be informed by the people who will ultimately implement or benefit from it.” Small and midsize farms cannot be left out of the picture when it comes to distributing R&D investments.

Nelson also cautions against treating high-tech breakthroughs and nature-based practices as opposing forces. “I wish people did not see them as inherently at odds with each other,” she says. “Both tech-based and nature-based solutions can offer important means of accelerating sustainable productivity growth. Producers should use all the tools available to them.”

Recent investments suggest that government agencies are interested in supporting alternative approaches to industrialized agriculture. Earlier this year, the USDA, alongside the Department of Health and Human Services and the Environmental Protection Agency, announced more than US$1 billion for farm modernization and food supply security. This includes US$700 million for regenerative agriculture pilot programs.

The FSLC argues that sustained public grants remain essential to move new agricultural technologies from the lab to the field.

“The United States has the resources to make this investment if we can summon the political will to do so,” Nelson tells Food Tank. “US$100 billion over ten years is a drop in the bucket of the federal budget and would provide structural support to help transform U.S. agriculture over time.”

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.

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

FEWS NET Halts Reporting on Food Insecure Countries

The Famine Early Warning Systems Network (FEWS NET) is no longer reporting on three of the countries most at risk of hunger: Afghanistan, Somalia, and Yemen.

For the last 40 years, the resource has provided timely, accurate information on acute food insecurity. Rajiv Shah, President of The Rockefeller Foundation, says that he has seen firsthand how the tool has been used to mobilize resources and save lives before a crisis hits. It also saves money: According to the World Food Programme, every US$1 invested in anticipatory action yields up to US$7 in avoided losses and benefits. 

In early 2025, the Trump-Vance Administration abruptly took FEWS NET offline for several months, raising alarm among international aid organizations and governments. Now, the administration is targeting the platform again. In response to questions about the change, a spokesperson from the U.S. State Department says they are “focusing on countries that align with the Secretary’s broader policy priorities.” 

But Shah points out that this data is essential for addressing food insecurity in nations deemed “hunger hotspots” by WFP. “We cannot prevent the world’s hungriest people from starving if we are flying blind,” he says.

Global Land Restoration Gains Ground

Over 124.3 million hectares of land—an area roughly twice the size of France—are under restoration, according to a new report from the International Union for Conservation of Nature.

East Asia, South Asia, and sub-Saharan Africa are leading efforts as countries work to revive forests; shift farming practices; and restore drylands, rangelands, and agricultural landscapes. 

“Restoring degraded ecosystems strengthens climate resilience and addresses biodiversity loss, while delivering significant economic and environmental returns on investment,” says IUCN Director General, Dr Grethel Aguilar.

Countries have pledged to restore 1.2 billion hectares as part of their national targets under four major international frameworks. Yasmin Fouad, Executive Secretary of the U.N. Convention to Combat Desertification, encourages the move from commitments to implementation at scale to achieve their goals.

It May Be Getting Easier to Hold Fossil Fuel Companies Accountable

A new study in Earth’s Future suggests that it’s possible to tie emissions from particular companies to specific harms. Researchers hope this can help advocates hold fossil fuel companies responsible for climate impacts.  

The study ran over 150 simulations to show how carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere influence the odds of extreme heat and rain—and the role fossil fuel emitters played. Author Christopher Callahan says, “What this science tells us is that there is a direct relationship between how much an entity emits and…[the] extreme events that alter people’s lives.”

The fossil fuel industry accounts for 68 percent of greenhouse gas emissions and almost 90 percent of carbon dioxide emissions globally, according to the United Nations. And food and farming systems are a part of this: Food production accounts for at least 15 percent of fossil fuels used annually. 

Many questions around climate liability linger, but some experts believe legal cases supported by this new research have the potential to “[rock] the courtroom.”

U.S. Farmers’ Struggle to Access Resources Continues

Farmers across the United States are facing as they try to access resources from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the New York Times reports.

In many parts of the country, skeleton staff remain at local offices and in some counties, there’s nobody at all. 

More than 20,000 workers out of more than 110,000 left the agency during the first half of 2025. And recent data show that the rate of departure is even higher in divisions that work directly with farmers and rural residents. Rural Development, a subagency at USDA, has lost more than a third of its staff since January of last year. 

The staffing and budget cuts leave farmers and charity organizations facing delays as they wait to receive federal funding. USDA is also approving fewer loans and grants. In the past three fiscal years, the agency made investments that total between US$24-40 billion. This fiscal year, with just a month left, the agency has approved US$15.8 in investments. 

Farmers are feeling the disappearance of expertise and institutional knowledge as well. Amanda Butterfield, a rancher in Pennsylvania, says, “We’ve completely lost a whole group of experts within our communities across the United States that can no longer help and support us.”

Water Rises in African Sahel

The African Sahel region is seeing more water than it has in decades. Wells are filling up and water tables have risen by 13 feet or more in some places. Areas that have been affected by drought for decades seem to be recovering. 

Farmers are seeing the benefits. One farmer in Chad said that in the past, there wasn’t enough water to irrigate crops, leading to small harvests, but now, he says, “Now our lives have changed.” And as producers grow crops like millet and sorghum, they’re leaving more moisture in the soil than grasses they replace. 

Shifting rainfall patterns and heavy monsoons are partially responsible for the changes, but scientists say that more is at play. They believe that practices such as traditional water harvesting methods and projects like the Great Green Wall have also helped.

Encouraged by the results, Nigeria is considering restoring an irrigation project on the shores of Lake Chad, which it was forced to abandon due to drought. It promises to improve food security and create jobs.

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.

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The post Food Tank’s Weekly News Roundup: Ecosystems Recovery, Aquifers Replenishing, and USDA’s Staffing Shortages appeared first on Food Tank.

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When I was invited to speak at the Chautauqua Institution a couple weeks ago about the future of agriculture, food and technology, four words bounced around my head.

They come from the philosopher William MacAskill: “We are the ancients.”

It’s a simple phrase but a powerful one, because it’s a reminder that although we tend to think of ourselves as descendants of the past—which we certainly are!—we’re also ancestors of the future.

And I think, in a really fundamental way, we’re misunderstanding the future. When I think about the future of food, I don’t start with technology itself. I start with the people using it.

I’ve spent more than two decades traveling around the world and talking with farmers, scientists, entrepreneurs, policymakers, fishers, food workers, community leaders, and so many others. That’s become my work and my passion: I’m a professional listener.

And I listen to a lot of farmers. Typically, they’re not looking for the next silver bullet technology. They want solutions that quietly improve their lives. Because in the end, technology isn’t the destination. It’s a tool.

People often ask me whether I’m excited about artificial intelligence. I am, for the most part. They ask about biotechnology. Robotics. Precision agriculture. Gene editing. Digital tools. My answer is almost always the same: Yes, with guardrails and intentionality. Artificial intelligence is helping reduce food waste. Digital platforms are helping farmers reach new markets. Weather forecasting tools are helping producers deal with the impacts of El Niño. Traceability systems are removing opaqueness from agricultural and marine supply chains.

What’s necessary to make these emerging digital technologies into forces for good is that they solve problems people actually have, not imaginary ones. And that they’re shaped by the people actually experiencing the problems the technologies aim to solve.

Because what I’ve heard from farmers around the world is that people rarely wake up wishing for a new technology—they’re looking for solutions. They’re trying to grow food with less water. They are trying to protect their crops from existing and emerging pests and diseases. They are trying to reduce backbreaking labor. They are trying to counter the impacts that will come from El Niño. They are trying to simply feed their families. They are trying to build a future their children want to be part of.

Too often, we talk about the future as if we have to choose between high-tech and low-tech agriculture. Between artificial intelligence and Indigenous knowledge. Between robotics and agroecology. Between biotechnology and biodiversity. Too often, we talk about technology as if what’s happening in farmlands in Zambia and conference rooms in Silicon Valley are totally unrelated.

But this is a dangerously false dichotomy. Those aren’t competing ways of knowing; they’re complementary. One expands what we can measure. The other deepens what we understand.

The future belongs to agriculture that combines innovation with experience, scientific discovery with practical wisdom, and new ideas with generations of accumulated knowledge. The future is defined by our ability to bring together the best of what we already know: The knowledge of farmers. The insights of scientists. The wisdom of Indigenous communities. The creativity of entrepreneurs. The leadership of women. The energy of young people. And the power of technology when applied thoughtfully and responsibly.

The next agricultural revolution won’t be judged by how sophisticated our technologies become. It will be judged by whether future generations inherit healthier soils, healthier communities, healthier ecosystems, and healthier food systems because of the choices we make today.

And perhaps that’s the most important lesson I’ve heard over the past 20 years of listening: Food systems transformation isn’t powered only by the technologies we invent but also by the relationships we build with one another. That’s how innovation spreads, how communities become more resilient, how we truly nourish both people and the planet.

Another question I get asked all the time is whether I’m optimistic about the future. And I don’t think optimism is quite the right word; hope is. Hope is seeing people respond to extraordinary challenges with creativity, determination, and courage. That’s what gives me confidence. The future of agriculture is not something that happens to us. It’s something we create, every day, from a foundational place of hopefulness.

After more than 20 years of traveling the world, I remain hopeful. Not because I think someone is coming to save us, but because I’ve seen what people are capable of when they are trusted, supported, invested in, and connected to one another. Technology matters—but relationships matter more.

The future of food is already being built. Our responsibility is to make sure the people building it have the resources, opportunities, and respect they deserve. If indeed “we are the ancients,” we need to start thinking and behaving like the stewards we’d hope to be remembered as being.

Watch Danielle’s full keynote address at the Chautauqua Institution below:

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The post To Build the Future of Food, Technology Matters. Relationships Matter More appeared first on Food Tank.

Growing up in Iowa, Elle Gadient spent early spring mornings with her mother watching the sunrise over their family farm. Cattle woke in the cornfields as songbirds returned from their winter migration and buds emerged from tree branches. For Gadient, the promise of new life, the beauty of the land, and the work required to care for both are what make farm life meaningful.

“I love that every day on the farm is full of excitement, renewal, and hard work,” says Gadient.

Today, Gadient is a fifth-generation Iowa cattle farmer who farms with her husband, Steve Besler. Off the farm, she serves as the farmer advocate to the Niman Ranch network, a cooperative of independent family farmers committed to high standards for animal welfare and environmental stewardship.

But if it weren’t for one calf, in particular, Gadient may not have returned to farming as an adult.

On a cold, rainy evening when she was 10 years old, Gadient recalls one of her family’s cows struggling to give birth. By the time her parents delivered the calf, the newborn was weak and struggling to survive. The Gadients did everything they could to save her, bringing towels from their home’s dryer to warm her.

The calf soon began to regain her strength. Gadient bottle-fed her twice a day and named her Sugar Plum, and a tender relationship quickly formed. Gadient would sometimes spend so much time caring for Sugar Plum before school that she missed the bus. The calf eventually grew and moved out to pasture, but Gadient continued visiting her, often bringing treats—Sugar Plum had a particular fondness for fig newtons.

Over the years that followed, Gadient watched her family work through illness, extreme weather, drought, floods, and financial uncertainty on the farm. She learned about the deeper responsibilities and less playful realities of caring for animals.

“Not every cow is like Sugar Plum, and not every day farming is fig newtons and sunshine,” says Gadient.

The difficulties made Gadient question whether she wanted to continue farming. She saw how hard her parents worked and how much they sacrificed to keep the farm going. Both worked jobs off the farm to support their agricultural livelihood, often sleeping very little. “I’d have to be crazy to choose this way of life,” Gadient remembers thinking in high school.

After school, Gadient moved to Denver, Colorado. She worked for Niman Ranch, supporting a network of more than 600 independent farm families—including her own—from a distance.

Despite leaving the farm, her connection to it remained. And when Sugar Plum died, Gadient learned that distance could not protect her from the losses that come with farming, or the grief that comes with loving an animal.

“We enjoyed 14 years together,” says Gadient. “Sugar Plum’s death taught me something. Being away from the farm didn’t spare me the heartache. Distance didn’t take away from my connection back to my home.”

With that lesson, Gadient eventually made her way back to the farm. She married Besler, a fellow cow lover, in 2024 and moved to the Iowa farm where he grew up. Today, they raise cattle of their own while Gadient continues working with Niman Ranch to support other farm families. The familiar long days, uncertainty, and the constant demands of caring for animals remind Gadient of how farming, for her, feels like home.

Now, in the evenings, Gadient watches the sun set over the horizon, not far from where her parents watch the same sunset.

“This is the life we choose,” says Gadient. “This is our life on the farm.”

Watch Gadient’s 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.

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Photo courtesy of Elle Gadient

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When the United States shuttered the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) last year, programs building climate resilience were terminated. The loss is pushing climate experts to consider how to fill the gaps and keep this essential work going.

USAID invested in a range of adaptation and mitigation efforts, from drought-resistant crops to the restoration of forests that protected against storm surges, explains Alice C. Hill, the David M. Rubenstein Senior Fellow for Energy and the Environment at the Council on Foreign Relations. 

The funding required was “modest” compared to the federal budget, she tells Food Tank, but this work had “lasting consequences in terms of helping communities remain stable.” But when the agency was dismantled, nearly all projects related to climate suddenly disappeared. 

“I think it comes at a high cost overseas when we cut these programs,” Hill says. “It comes at a high cost to our preparations here, and it also comes at a high cost of our standing in the world as scientific leaders.” Annual losses from physical climate risks may total as much as 5 percent of the global GDP by 2050, according to S&P Global. 

“We need to make choices now to keep ourselves safer,” Hill tells Food Tank. That means investing more, not less, in climate solutions like early warning systems and infrastructure improvements to lessen the blow. “It’s simple measures—comparatively—taken on the ground that leave people in a better place.” 

Despite the challenging political environment, Hill remains optimistic that this will be possible. “And that’s a good thing,” she says. “We should all be optimists. It helps us deal with these things.” 

Everyone feels angst, Hill believes, but tackling these urgent challenges head on can help keep it at bay. “One of the things about working on catastrophic risk is the ability to be involved with something that matters…working with people trying to find solutions brings me great joy,” she tells Food Tank. “That gives me meaning.”

Listen to the full conversation with Alice C. Hill on “Food Talk with Dani Nierenberg” to hear more about how we move forward after the loss of USAID, why trust lies at the heart of successful solutions, and what the COVID-19 pandemic can teach us about building resilience to the climate crisis. 

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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.

Food fraud is the intentional deception regarding a food or food ingredient for economic gain. These practices include substituting a cheaper or unauthorized ingredient, misrepresenting a product’s quality or origin, or otherwise altering what buyers believe they are purchasing. Fraud can occur anywhere along the food supply chain, from raw materials and ingredients to finished products, labels, and packaging.

Food fraud, which the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization describes as an uncomfortable and unfortunate part of agrifood systems, takes many deceptive forms, each posing unique public health, economic, and environmental risks.

Adulteration is the addition of unauthorized and often harmful substances, while substitution and dilution involve replacing or reducing a valuable ingredient with a cheaper alternative—mixing lower-cost vegetable oil into olive oil, adding inexpensive syrups to honey, or selling a cheaper fish species as a more expensive one.

Mislabeling misrepresents characteristics such as a food’s identity, origin, quality, or production method. Examples include selling conventional products as organic or farmed seafood as wild-caught. Other common forms of food fraud include fraudulent packages resembling popular products, and the sale of stolen or diverted products.

These practices pose significant risk to food safety and public health. Undeclared substituted ingredients can expose consumers to allergens, while adulterants may introduce toxic substances.

In 2023, hundreds of U.S. children were poisoned after consuming applesauce made with cinnamon adulterated with lead chromate, a lead-based pigment used to enhance color. Formalin, a product used to preserve human bodies, is illegally used to preserve meat and milk, and has been linked to cancers of the nasal cavity and leukemia.

Methanol, a product typically used in a variety of industrial and household products, is added to alcohol to increase the alcohol content. According to a Médecins Sans Frontières database, ethanol-adulterated alcohol has caused more than 1,000 poisoning incidents in over 80 countries, with consequences including permanent blindness, brain damage, and death.

Responding to food fraud imposes a significant burden on the global economy and food producer livelihoods. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) estimates US$10–15 billion per year, while noting that more recent estimates reach US$40 billion. According to the World Trade Organization, food fraud can also create an unfair competitive advantage for fraudulent businesses, diverting significant revenue from legitimate producers.

“Consumers are falling victim to a bait and switch, and the fishers who play by the rules are paying the price,” says Max Valentine, campaign director of Oceana’s illegal fishing and transparency campaign in the United States.

Food fraud can also pose significant environmental risks. The unreported use of highly toxic chemicals and pesticides in food production, and the proliferation of illegal and unregulated fishing, is driving overfishing and biodiversity loss.

And food fraud erodes confidence in the food system. Food supply chains rely on businesses, regulators, and consumers being able to trust representations about what products contain and where they come from, and deliberate falsification undermines that trust.

New and improving technologies are expanding the tools available to identify fraud. Analyzing chemical bonds or isotopes can now be used to assess a product’s composition or geographic origin, according to research published in Trends in Food Science & Technology.

According to the FDA, analytical DNA sequencing and barcoding can help detect species substitution in products such as seafood. And emerging tools such as portable testing equipment and machine-learning models may allow faster authenticity checks.

Traceability technologies can also create more detailed records as products move through supply chains. The more data collected and added to the blockchain, the harder it is for a company to lie about their product, Jayson Berryhill, Co-Founder of Envisible, tells Food Tank. “You have an immutable ledger of what was claimed at a certain time, which creates a disincentive for fraud,” Berryhill says.

But prevention and detection remain a global challenge. Fraudulent practices are designed to escape notice, and fraudulent products often closely resemble authentic ones in appearance, taste, and composition. And, according to research published in the Journal of Food Protection and PNAS, increasingly complex, opaque, and global food supply chains are amplifying opportunities for fraudulent practices.

According to FAO, the FDA, and research published in Trends in Food Science & Technology and Food Packaging and Shelf Life, technology cannot prevent food fraud on its own. Data and data-based tools are unlikely to be a complete solution because food fraud ultimately involves human behavior, FAO explains. A response requires a blend of regulatory measures, enforcement, industry cooperation, and consumer education, according to the World Trade Organization.

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El Niño will likely increase in intensity through the end of 2026 and into 2027, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Extreme weather, including drought and heavy rainfall, threaten farmers’ livelihoods, but food security and policy experts say it’s still possible to mitigate losses. 

The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) is urging governments to prepare agriculture, water systems, and vulnerable communities before El Niño reaches its peak. The agency is strengthening seasonal forecasting to help countries avoid disaster. 

“We have the data and it is not too late for early action,” Lifeng Li, Director of the Land and Water Division for the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), tells Food Tank. WMO states that these early measures help governments protect both livelihoods and food supplies preventing crises when extreme weather arrives.

For farmers, preparation cannot wait until harvest, says Andrew Kruczkiewicz, Senior Researcher at Columbia University and Principal Investigator within the National Center for Disaster Preparedness (NCDP) at Columbia Climate School. “Governments should combine seasonal forecasts with local community knowledge to make practical decisions that translate into actions before disasters unfold,” he tells Food Tank.

Kruczkiewicz highlights the importance of accurately communicating risk and understanding farmer’s needs during the early planning. He also wants to see governments distribute drought-tolerant seeds, expand irrigation, improve water storage, and strengthen agricultural extension programs. 

Flooding also puts logistics and infrastructure at risk. “Damaged roads, bridges, and storage facilities can prevent farmers from bringing food to market even when harvests survive,” Kruczkiewicz tells Food Tank. Infrastructural improvements to protect these systems can help keep food moving during extreme weather. 

Regions including South America, South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa are some of the regions most likely to be hit hardest by El Niño’s effects. Adam Scaife, Head of long-range prediction at the UK Met Office, also expects worsening drought and flooding across parts of India, Australia. These regions produce many of the world’s staple crops, including maize, rice, soybeans, wheat, coffee, and cocoa. 

El Niño is expected to arrive as global food systems are already under pressure from geopolitical conflicts, volatile input costs, and fragile supply chains. Sarah Kapnick, Global Head of Climate Advisory at JPMorgan, warns that the climate pattern could compound these existing disruptions.

Fertilizer markets illustrate how these pressures can amplify challenges, according to Kapnick. Delays in nitrogenous fertilizers shipments by the war in Iran may reduce yields. If lower harvests align with further disruptions, she states commodity prices and food inflation may rise for months afterward. 

The World Bank recommends strengthening international cooperation to maintain stable global food supplies. Coordinated action on trade, fertilizer supplies, market monitoring, food reserves, and climate preparedness can help countries respond to disruptions before they escalate into broader food insecurity. Global cooperation can also help scale the solutions.

The International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) highlights the importance of building resilience into long-term growth architecture. “Investing in resilience now will allow a more sustainable transition into the future” Sara Mbago-Bhunu, Director of East and Southern Africa Division at the IFAD, said during a recent episode of Food Talk with Dani Nierenberg. Mbago points at promoting agroforestry, protecting water sources and supporting soil fertility to strengthen agricultural systems and deliver long-term resilience. 

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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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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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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

The post In Minnesota, Hear Stories from the Present and Future of Farming appeared first on Food Tank.

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

The post TomKat Ranch Educational Foundation Wants to Build a Food System Grounded in Resilience appeared first on Food Tank.

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

The post Food Tank Explains: Land Tenure appeared first on Food Tank.

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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