Book Review: "Perilous Bounty" Charts Our Off Balance Course - Can Vilsack Help Save Us?

Today Washington moved forward with the all but assured confirmation of Tom Vilsack as the next Secretary of Agriculture, a post he held for eight years under the Obama presidency, where he was widely criticized by progressives for shoring up Big Ag. 

His reputation for supporting the status quo--resource depletion ag--is likely to get him in hot water, as he wades into the big muddy of fighting climate change and finding ways to help farmers get with the new program (whatever it will be) in the Biden administration. 

Environmentalists, including Scott Faber of the nonprofit Environmental Working Group, are already cautioning the new administration against policies that rely heavily on carbon credits.

Is Vilsack an old dog who will be asked to learn new tricks (and sell them to the powers that be in ag) or a trailing edger who will try slow down progress to a glacial pace that corporate stakeholders prefer? Time will tell. 

But the big muddy is indeed Big. Just how big of a quagmire ag is is the subject of Perilous Bounty, a new book from Tom Philpott, who writes on food and ag for Mother Jones, farms in North Carolina, and teaches journalism in Austin, Texas.  

The book is subtitled: The Looming Collapse of American Farming and How We Can Prevent It.

Philpott depicts the big bones of American agriculture, simplifying a helluva mess into a narrative we can all "get"--our depletion of soil and water could be our undoing, wearing out precious resources we depend upon. In fact, this could all happen with or without climate change, although climate change is accelerating the decline.

His story of ag focuses on two key regions--California, the nation's produce center, and the Corn Belt, growing corn and soy (raised for meat production). 

CALIFORNIA

California produces $49 billion of food annually. "That number is nearly double the haul of its closest competitor among U.S. states, the corn and soybean behemoth Iowa," he writes. 

"Whereas California's farms are essentially mining nonrenewable water," he writes in the introduction, "Corn Belt operations are quietly exhausting an even more tenuous resource: soil." The book focuses on, as he describes it, "the way industrial agriculture...threatens the food security of everyone who now relies on it for sustenance."

In California, he focuses first on the almond industry's exponential growth. "One reason almond acreage doubled in the San Joaquin Valley between 2000 and 2018 is that almonds require essentially no hand labor: planting, irrigation and harvesting are all done by machines," he observes. "...But when densely planted over vast expanses, they require titanic amounts of irrigation water." 

One million acres of California is now planted to almonds, he tells us, consuming "four times more water than the city of Los Angeles."

MEGAFLOODS AND MEGA TOXICS

I was surprised to learn that it wasn't just water shortages that were a threat to California, with its six years of drought between 2003 and 2015. Floods are also an historically persistent issue, he tells us - a surprising fact unearthed by a team of scientists who themselves were shocked to learn of California's history of mega floods. This "precipitation whiplash" of 2016-2017 provided us with the most recent evidence of this. Remember the Oroville Dam story?

Philpott quotes Lucy Jones, chief scientist at the USGS's Multi Hazards Demonstration Project, whose team was assigned the task of modeling California's most extreme floods. The Great Flood of 1862 is no longer forgotten, due to the ARkstorm's recent research. Says Jones, "none of us had ever heard of it" and yet it was "by far the biggest disaster ever in California and the whole Southwest."

These mega floods could create a sea of toxic substances, from all that's been applied to the land, scientists say. 

Writes Philpott, "In a 2015 paper, a team of USGS researchers tried to sum up the myriad toxic substances that would be stirred up and spread around by massive storms and floods...the report projects a toxic soup of 'petroleum, mercury, asbestos, persistent organic pollutants, molds and soil-borne or sewage-borne pathogens'...along with "concentrated animal manure, fertilizer, pesticides, and other industrial chemicals."

He goes on to point out that in Kern County, more than 30 million pounds of pesticides are applied each year. And that's just one county. The introduction of big money investors into the San Joaquin Valley bodes no good either for those looking for positive approaches. Depletion is the name of the game and the faster the better. Suddenly the word "sustainability" seems irrelevant, given the size of the impending catastrophe. Total transformation is what is needed. And/or what will come, unbidden.

CORN BELT

Philpott explores the horror story that is Iowa ag with the same kind of truthful yet depressing insights as his California chapters, writing "Pesticides, synthetic and mined fertilizers and large machines replace work once done by bodies, brains and biodiversity in the field."

It might not sound like this is a good book to read given its apocalyptic truths But perhaps it is cathartic to hear the facts. Here are a few on the Corn Belt:

• John Deere makes as much on financing its tractors as it does manufacturing and selling them. 

• Four massive companies control the $11 billion U.S. fertilizer market.

• "Corteva, Syngenta and Bayer also control 60 percent of the $2.9 billion global pesticide trade."

• "In essence, the Midwest is emerging as the industrial-scale farm for China and other countries with rising demand for meat," he writes. "The Corn Belt is to industrial pork as Shenzen is to the iPhone."

WINE

How does this relate to wine, you say? Wine grapes use fertilizer, they mostly depend on irrigated water, and they contribute to resource depletion. And now big money--from investment firms and endowments - is betting big on wine grapes.

And just as 37 percent of Americans have a meal a day from a fast food chain, more than 80-90 percent of America's 35 million wine drinkers are drinking industrially farmed wine from California.

POSITIVE SPIN, REAL PROGRESS OR SELF DELUSION

Can regenerative and organic ag turn things around? Or are we just kidding ourselves? Organic farming retains water in the soil far better than conventionally grown wines making them more resilient in a drought. If soil health is the new priority, organic is the raciest car on the runway--better and faster. At this point, organic vineyards in California are just 3-4 percent of the total. 

In Europe, the annual organic wine fair, Millisime-Bio, attracts thousands and features in-depth presentations on organic topics from grape growing to organic wine markets. France, Spain and Italy all hover around the 10% certified organic mark and each year add significant growth, far outpacing conventional vineyard growth rates. 

From 2018 to 2019, in the Languedoc, organic vineyard acreage grew 23% to 94,265 acres, which is at least four times more organic vineyard acres than in the entire U.S.

At Unified Wine & Grape Symposium in California, I have never seen an organic panel on the program during the three day event run by the California Association of Winegrape Growers. Typically most coverage at the State of the Industry panel features at best one mention of the word "organic" on one slide in a Nielsen data powerpoint. There was one exception last year with an excellent panel on herbicides. 

It was only in 2020, that California opened its first organic ag institute, with a budget of just $1 million to serve all farmers for all crops, not just wine grapes. Fifty percent of the money came from private funding. We are in the midst of the biggest climate horror story and we have not devoted resources to promote the agriculture that  sequesters carbon most efficiently? In 2021?

At the same time, big wineries, like Torres and Jackson Family, have formed a new group called International Wineries for Climate Action, with a focus on reducing carbon emissions. Will it be like the international version of the California's own CSWA, the Wine Institute's sustainability program? (The group has published its emerging standards here if you want to dive in to the details. (Interestingly enough, it does not include carbon sequestration in vineyards). In comparison, the COMET sustainability calculator from the USDA offers the most rewards for carbon sequestration from applying compost to the vineyard. (COMET measures only agricultural practices, not wine processing operations.) Are you confused yet? I am.

If organic is the gold standard in climate change farming, one might expect these two founding wineries to widely engage in it in their native countries. Not so. Jackson does not have any certified organic vineyards. Jackson uses tons of chemicals, especially in its coastal vineyards in central California, as a quick glance at the Central Coast pesticide use reports shows.  

In Sonoma, Marimar Torres decertified her organic vines, after deciding to use fungicides in her then newly acquired west Sonoma vineyard and went "sustainable." The Torres family has a limited line of organically grown wines from Chile where it has 350+ organic acres and in 2014-2015 produced an organically grown Spanish wine - Habitat - which is no longer made. It formerly had 600 organic acres in Europe. This year it released one 2019 wine from Penedes grown on head trained vines.

But in fact the greater irony is the deforestation that Jackson Family was responsible for. According to Will Parrish of the Anderson Valley Advertiser, 

"Most of the acreage was previously forested, so the trees were removed and their roots ripped out prior to the vineyard plantings. Often, the hilltops were flattened out by massive bulldozers, removing vast amounts of soil and rock. Pesticides were applied in copious amounts. The vineyards not only require irrigation, but they command a massive amount of frost protection water due to their cool climates. That often means damming up all the available streams and building huge water reservoirs. Soil erosion invariably has resulted from the removal of trees and other anchoring vegetation. With the steepness of the sites, the soil washed down into creeks and streams."

What does it mean when a guy like Jess Jackson can buy 14,000 acres of vineyards - with 11,000 of them on land classified as mountaintops or hillsides (as Parrish says)?

Today Jackson is paying organic farmers in Mendocino more money to grow "certified sustainable" grapes, luring them away from the organic standard. (Now under Chilean ownership, Bonterra, which used to support Mendocino's organic growers, is buying cheaper organic grapes from growers in other regions and letting go much of its long time Hopland staff.)

Torres has come out publicly against the organic standard, saying it makes the use of copper obligatory in the regions he grows in, but in fact, in California, almost all of the copper fungicides applied to wine grapes are used by conventional vineyards. 

According to a carbon footprint report from the Wine Institute, the biggest source of emissions comes from glass bottles. I could not find any alternative packaging - bag in box, for instance - for either winery. Jackson reduced its bottle weight by 2 ounces, which was commendable and reduced their glass costs by 15%. Others (in Napa) reduced bottle weight by as much as 25%. New packaging types can reduce weight much more for supermarket wines like Jackson's.

The second biggest--biochemical field emissions--includes GHG emitted from the application of fertilizer--and the fourth biggest--raw materials--includes the production of synthetic fertilizer and pesticides.

So how committed about decarbonizing wine can these two giant wineries really be? 

The same goes for the Wine Institute's CSWA program. There has been no noticeable increase in organic farming in the state for years (with the 8,000 acre exception of Fred Franzia). And there's been no notable decrease in pesticide use, despite the marketing and PR campaigns touting sustainable wines. Here is the state data for 2018 (the most recent year published) showing that the use of insecticides and fungicides on wine grapes is still rising.

(More detailed data is available here.)

At the same time that organic wine grapes are dramatically increasing each year in Europe, in California organically grown wines appear to be perfectly acceptable to put down, as was illustrated in one classic moment a year ago, when international wine market researcher Lulie Halstead spoke at the 2020 Wine Market Council's meeting in downtown San Francisco (pre-Covid). 

At that meeting, before hundreds of leading vintners, Halstead showed data (see slide 20 on link or above) from her company, Wine Intelligence, ranking organically grown wines as number one on the company's "Opportunity Index." But, she said, wineries would do just as well with consumers by avoiding the regulation and costs of actually farming organically, she said. She recommended that vintners should instead try to achieve the number two opportunity - sustainably farmed wines. No one gasped and said, "But, oh - climate change needs us to address real soil health." Does faux soil health work just as well when Mother Nature comes calling?

At last week's Unified Wine & Grape Symposium, the news was glass half empty and glass half full. More than 30,000 acres of vines in California were ripped out in the past year. (Will they all be planted to almonds? Let us pray not.) Smoke taint reduced a lot of bulk wine supply, giving the industry a temporary lift and depleting backed up inventory. Online sales, like those at wine.com, provided a digital path forward, but even the $329 million in wine.com sales represented only 0.6% of wine retail. (Yes, that is less than one percent). 

The future still doesn't look that great. There will be more fires. The pandemic will not disappear soon, keeping restaurants and bars down to 25% capacity for indoor dining. Hard seltzer is making the fight for wine's market share harder. Health and wellness is a topic that interests consumers, Nielsen data tells us (thank you, Danny Brager, and the Nielsen number crunchers), but a number of consumers seem to want wine to morph into flavored products that mimic some thing that sounds more and more like hard selzer - low cal, zero sugar, gluten free, etc.

Note: It's worth clarifying what the data on organic above means. 

Nielsen data does not track organically grown wine unless the wine is bottle labeled with the word organic on it (following any one of the three organic wine standards in the US). It's estimated that only about 50% of wines made solely from certified organic vines are bottle labeled. 

And Nielsen data only covers a portion of the overall wine sold.

I asked Nielsen researchers how organic sales (dollars) were compared to conventional wine sales for the last 10 months of 2020. (The data above were for a different time period--they were for the 13 weeks prior to Jan. 9, 2021). Organic edged a tiny bit ahead--with an increase of 23.5% in value versus 20.7% for overall wine sales. 

Organic during the 13 week period accounted for $41.3 million in off premise wine sales. 

According to Nielsen spokesperson, Greg Doonan, Nielsen has "500 brand families in our measurement with an organic product claim [on the label]." Fifty four had more than $100,000 in sale during the 13 week period, he stated in a followup email. 

Labeling is an ongoing issue. Many complain that the TTB applies regulations erratically and has prevented many certified organic growers from bottle labeling their estate wines "Ingredients: Organic Grapes" on the back labels even when they are legally entitled to do so. 

THE BOOK AND THE BODY POLITIC

Anyone in ag should read Philpott's book for a reality check. We've suffered horribly under the Trump years with big lies and "faux" news and immigration laws that ruined available labor and tariffs that hurt our farmers and our markets. 

Now a new day is dawning. Climate change is real--again--and we're into truth telling, as painful as it might be, as we try to actually heal our systems. Ag included. (And though wine is often a chemist's paradise, wine is, of course, ag). 

But we've got to steer this boat on a compass that measures true magnetic north, not some idea that pesticides, and fertilizers, and tons of water have a role to play in being "sustainable." 

There's a dead zone where the fish producing Gulf of Mexico used to be. "Between 1999 and 2016, Iowa alone contributed on average 29 percent of the nitrogen entering the entire Mississippi River--and as much as half in some years," Philpott writes. before going on to quote Richard Manning, an environmental writer who says, "a high-quality source of low-cost protein is being sacrificed so that a source of low-quality, high-input subsidized protein can blanket the Upper Midwest."

Yes, we're different, but how much so? We squander our biological biodiversity, our insect populations (including those that are feed for birds), our bees, our water (and our fish) and our soil in the name of cheap wine. 

How many vineyards have been carved out of former pastureland or fertile farm-filled valleys, ripped and irrigated, and plundered for a corporation's profit and poverty wage jobs for Mexican farm workers? 

We say wine is a natural product, terroir is important, and yet we spray thousands of pounds of fungicides on vines killing the very organisms - micorrhyzal fungi - that give wine its true flavors. 

California's been a leader so many times. We know how to grow wine grapes with minimal tillage (using under vine cultivators). We know where to buy crimpers. We've got the most know-how in wine grape cover crops of any place in the country. And now we've even got the Monarch tractor. We've got carbon accounting consultants. And smart researchers at U.C. Davis and Fresno State trying to create the most efficient mechanized organic farming systems.

Government was not idly standing by when we created the crazy systems we have today. No, government created them. As Philpott writes, "Goaded on by farm interests, the federal and California governments poured billions of dollars into building out irrigation infrastructure...enabling a hyperefficient agriculture industry...undercutting fresh produce growers in other regions. In the Midwest, an interlocking set of corporate oligopolies presides over a veritable empire of meat." The midsized farmer was squeezed out, says Philpott, who counts himself as one of them.

Near the end of the book, the author quotes Elizabeth Warren's desire for an ag program designed to "make agribusiness pay the full costs of the environmental damage they wreak." Others advocate for  farmers to get subsidies based on sequestering carbon. (Organic definitely has an edge there.) Choosing Vilsack to lead the USDA doesn't make one feel hopeful about the former, but it might bode well for the latter. But that still won't solve the problem.