Watchdog groups say chickens used by Costco are bred to grow so quickly, many of them cannot stand under their own weight, and recent lawsuits against the company have put the spotlight once again on Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations.

There are more than 3,000 such poultry operations in North Carolina, growing hundreds of millions of chickens a year.

Chris Heaney, associate professor of environmental health at Johns Hopkins University, said breeding cheap chickens comes with a host of negative public health impacts.

"They include concerns around the role of antimicrobial use, promoting antimicrobial resistance, which can be transmitted between animals; and between food, animals and people who live in regions where there is intensive livestock production," Heaney outlined.

Heaney stated the large operations also generate air pollution, which can trigger respiratory problems, nausea, neurological issues, and anxiety and depression in residents living near them.

In a statement to investors, Costco said it has no significant evidence of any adverse impacts to chickens grown in its factory farms, which are mostly located in Nebraska, and emphasized it is "committed to the welfare of animals in its supply chains."

Heaney pointed out consumers are not typically aware of all the costs to the air, water, and soil, which come with purchasing a rotisserie chicken priced at less than $5.

"The open question is the degree to which the consumer, in terms of purchasing meats and the price that they pay, is actually reflecting a lot of those adverse impacts," Heaney noted.

Large operations are also vulnerable to climate impacts. One analysis by the Environmental Working Group and the Waterkeeper Alliance found in 2016, when hurricane Matthew flooded waste lagoons and livestock confinement barns, nearby waterways became contaminated with animal urine and feces, which contains pathogens such as E.coli, hormones, antibiotics and industrial chemicals known to cause illness in humans.

Big players in the beef and poultry industry face pressure to prepare for a new federal rule for "Product of USA" labels. And advocates for smaller farmers and ranchers see an opportunity for those operations to reach more customers. Companies selling meat products in grocery stores have until early 2026 to comply with the USDA rule announced this spring. "Product of USA" labels are sometimes slapped on a meat item for sale. Firms that outsource production overseas have been doing it because the item was packaged in the U.S. But now, all of the animal production has to be done domestically to use the label.

Mark Watne, North Dakota Farmers Union President, likes the move.

"In some respect, it should give a U.S. producer a distinctive advantage to the consumer that desires a product that is born, raised, slaughtered, processed in the U.S.," he said.

Watne said non-corporate farms and small processors won't have to worry about big meatpacking companies - who opt for cheaper, less regulated production in foreign countries - making the claim. While the rule is binding, use of the label is voluntary. Watne added advocates still have a long way to go in getting stronger mandates under country-of-origin labeling. Critics of such moves worry about disrupting international markets.

Watne said the revised rule being phased in should make things less confusing for shoppers willing to pay a little extra if given assurances of where the product was produced.

"So, if you want something that's labeled product of the U.S., then you want to know that it went through the same and equal standards, rules and regulations that a U.S. producer goes through, " he contended.

Supporters of the USDA action suggest removing the loophole means consumers won't be taken advantage of or have to second-guess the packaging information they look at. The move comes amid new federal data showing the number of farms shrinking around the country as market concentration remains a force within agriculture.

By Jennifer Bamberg for Investigate Midwest.
Broadcast version by Terri Dee for Illinois News Connection reporting for the Investigate Midwest-Public News Service Collaboration

During the 2023 harvest season, one of Jake Lieb’s tractors quit working. A week later, his combine stopped working, too. Both were new — and he was locked out from making any repairs himself because of software restrictions embedded in the machines. 

Instead, a technician from John Deere was dispatched to diagnose and repair the problems. While waiting for the technician to come out, Lieb fired up a 20-year-old tractor he hadn’t used for harvesting in years. Crops are vulnerable to the weather, and had he not, Lieb could have lost at least a day of harvest. Some of the crop might have dropped to the ground, rendering it unsalvageable, potentially costing him thousands of dollars.

“Meanwhile,” Lieb said, “we’ve got over a million dollars of equipment in the field, inoperable.” 

When the technician from John Deere arrived at his farm in central Illinois, it took about 30 minutes total to plug in a diagnostic tool, see which sensor was bad, unscrew it, replace it and close everything up in the combine. 

“If I knew what sensor was bad in that combine, I could have had it fixed in five minutes,” Lieb said. “But if you don’t have the software, it’s impossible to know what’s wrong.”

For more than a decade, farmers like Lieb haven’t been able to fix their high-tech equipment. Until recently, manufacturer restrictions meant only company-authorized representatives could own and use diagnostic tools, and make fixes when needed.

In March 2023, in an attempt to address farmers’ frustrations, the American Farm Bureau Federation signed a memorandum of understanding with John Deere and four other farm equipment manufacturers. The farm bureau called it a “private-sector solution to the right to repair issue.”

In the agreement, Deere, Kubota, Case New Holland, AGCO, and CLAAS of America promised to give farmers and independent repair shops access to customer diagnostic tools. In exchange, the Farm Bureau agreed not to support any federal or state repair legislation. 

However, advocates for repair legislation say that the nonbinding agreement and the customer versions of tools provided by the companies fall short of needed protections that legislation would ensure. These same advocates are supporting bills across the country, including one introduced this year in the Illinois Senate. 

The Illinois bill (SB2669) proposes to establish an agricultural equipment bill of rights. It would require manufacturers to make software, firmware and all other tools needed to repair machines accessible to independent repair shops and owners throughout the state at a reasonable cost.

The bill directly addresses the MOU, and says that agricultural equipment owners are entitled to any tools or software not covered by the MOU. The bill’s sponsor, Sen. Jil Tracy (R-Quincy), declined to comment after multiple attempts by email and in person to reach her. Deere and the other farm equipment manufacturers also did not return multiple requests for comment. 

The bill is languishing at the statehouse. According to a spokesperson from the Illinois Corn Growers Association in an email to Investigate Midwest, there’s no chance the bill will pass this year. 

The cost of repair 

The demand for new tractors and combines ebbs and flows, but a consistent source of profit growth for John Deere is the sale of parts and services. Despite a 19% drop in sales of new ag equipment sales from between 2013 and 2019, supply chain disruptions and food system upheaval in 2020, and a month long labor strike of 10,000 workers across five states in 2021, Deere’s profits swelled the past three years, totaling a nearly 270% increase from 2020, according to the company’s SEC filings. 

According to Bloomberg, the sale of parts helped buoy the company’s portfolio — parts sales grew by 22% between 2013 to 2019.

While Lieb’s fifth-generation family farm operates on annual tractor trade-ins so his machines stay on a warranty, which includes free parts and services, he’s in the minority. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, only 20% of farmers in the U.S. regularly buy new machines. 

The rest hold on to their equipment for longer periods of time or buy second-hand machines, which come with limited warranties or none at all, making repair restrictions more consequential. 

Equipment made before 2014 doesn’t have as much complicated software, and there are more repair workarounds. Still, the costs of repairing older machines add up. 

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the cost of parts and labor, for ag equipment of all ages, has nearly doubled in the past two decades and spiked 41% since 2020. (Farm machinery is grouped together with construction and mining equipment by the bureau.)

In 2023, Kevin O’Reilly, then with the Public Interest Research Group, conducted a study of the cost of repairs directly tied to downtime and repair restrictions imposed by equipment manufacturers. He found that farmers lost an average of $3,348 per year to repair downtime. 

The study of 53 farmers in 14 states estimated that if every farmer in the country faced similar losses, repair restrictions placed on them would cost U.S. farmers more than $3 billion a year.

“Even with our older machines — the stuff without software,” said one farmer in the study, “we were paying more because we were running up the hour counts. When stuff gets old, it breaks down more often.”

Curbing pollution leads to digital transformation

In the mid-1990s, the Environmental Protection Agency introduced emissions standards for agriculture diesel equipment as part of a growing effort to curb air pollution. The agency gave manufacturers nearly two decades to meet certain benchmarks in a set of four tiers, each with increasingly stringent regulations. The final set of standards rolled out in 2014. 

To meet those emissions standards, complex computers were installed in agricultural machinery, which manage a wide range of functions and systems in the machines. This, in part, led to a technological revolution in farm equipment manufacturing, and drove the shift from mechanical operations to electronic controls. 

In addition to monitoring emissions output, combines and tractors are now loaded with digital sensors that measure everything from humidity in the air to the density of the soil on a centimeter-accurate grid, instantaneously sharing those metrics with the cloud via satellite and GPS imaging. Deere’s quest to create optimum efficiency is driving the company to develop a fully autonomous fleet by 2030.

In reality, a faulty sensor in Lieb’s case caused his combine to shut down. And up until the MOU last year, farmers like him and independent repair technicians couldn’t access the necessary software tools to make their own repairs or clear a code once the repair was completed.

But why was the MOU even necessary? Over the years, Deere has argued in court that a farmer may own a tractor, but they don’t own the software that makes it run. 

In a seeming win for farmers seeking the right to repair, the Library of Congress ruled in 2015 that repairing agricultural equipment is not an infringement on copyright. However, the ruling fell short of requiring equipment manufacturers to make their diagnostic tools publicly available. 

Customer tools leave much to be desired

With nearly 6 million members nationally and 400,000 in Illinois, the American Farm Bureau Federation is the largest organization of farm and ranch families in the country and a powerful agriculture industry lobbying group. (The Census of Agriculture counts about 3 million farmers total in the U.S.; the farm bureau invites non-farmers to apply to be members.) The organization has drawn the ire of repair advocates over the memorandum of understanding.

The 2023 MOU was brokered between the farm bureau, John Deere, CNH Industrial, CLAAS, AGCO, and Kubota. The companies agreed to release customer diagnostic tools, which range in annual subscriptions, for example, between $1,500 from CNH to $3,100 from John Deere.

Repair advocates with the Public Interest Research Group, a federation of nonprofits focused on consumer protection issues, compared the John Deere customer tool to the authorized company tool, and said the customer version leaves much to be desired. That is why state or federal regulation is required, advocates argue. 

PIRG Director Nathan Proctor said he took it personally when he saw the differences. “It was almost like (the customer’s tool) is redacted or obfuscated,” he said. 

The tool provides a lot of information, Proctor said, but it’s inferior compared to what dealers have, and requires customers to go through extra steps in order to accurately diagnose issues and clear codes once the repair is complete. This leaves independent technicians and farmers at an unfair advantage in the market of equipment repair, he said.

“Essentially, the dealers have a privileged level of access,” said O’Reilly, former right-to-repair campaign director for PIRG. “They can get through a digital door to press a button that you need to press in order to fix the thing, and farmers either don’t have access to that door, the door was locked, or they had to go through three, six, nine different doors just to get to the same place that the dealer was able to get to, right away.” 

PIRG focused their study solely on Deere tools because of the company’s dominance in the market. “When people think of agriculture or farming, John Deere is one of the first brands that comes to mind,” O’Reilly said. “They definitely have a level of dominance both as far as in the market but culturally as well.”

Only three companies control the highly concentrated U.S. market for agricultural equipment — CNH, AGCO and Deere — and Deere commands nearly half of that. Globally, Deere controls a quarter of the market share of all ag equipment sales worldwide. 

An influential giant in agricultural equipment

The first right-to-repair bill was introduced in Illinois in 2018. It would have applied to a broad category of electronic equipment, including electric wheelchairs, laptops, smart phones, and medical equipment, had it passed. After lining up nine bipartisan co-sponsors and hearing debate, it died on the House floor. It was opposed by numerous associations and large agribusinesses, including John Deere and CNH. 

Deere & Company has been headquartered in Moline, Illinois, for the last 176 years, growing into the agricultural giant it is today with more than 80,000 employees worldwide and profits topping $10 billion in 2023. 

As the nation’s leader in soybean crops and second in the nation for corn production, Illinois exports millions of bushels around the globe, generating billions of dollars of revenue. And when farmers profit, John Deere profits. 

Some of that money flows into the state capital. The John Deere Political Action Committee donated more money to Illinois politicians since 2017 than politicians in any other state by tens of thousands of dollars each year. In 2022, the most recent year of the most available comprehensive data, the John Deere PAC gave $183,500 total to 47 Illinois politicians, while the median donation for all other politicians in the country was only $15,000. 

The company’s rapid technological innovations over the past decade coincided with an aggressive merger and acquisition strategy, which the federal government has said erodes competition. Deere has acquired multiple machine learning and artificial intelligence companies over the last decade and recently announced a partnership with SpaceX, all but dissolving the categorical differences between Big Tech and Big Ag.

As for its competitors, Deere’s net income surpasses its competition by the billions. The company made more in the first quarter of 2024, which ended Jan. 28, than AGCO and CLAAS combined for all of 2023.

These trends worry elected officials in the White House and around the country. In 2021, President Biden issued an executive order promoting competition and targeting repair restrictions that violate anti-trust laws. The order was supported by the Federal Trade Commission, which enforces federal consumer protection laws. In 2023, Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul led a coalition of attorney generals around the country urging Congress to pass right-to-repair legislation, specifically for farm equipment. And 15 states are currently considering right-to-repair bills that cover agriculture equipment, after Colorado passed the first in the country in 2023. 

In the meantime, the Illinois farm bureau said it will work with the MOU. 

“The MOU led by AFBF a year ago was a solid step in the right direction for an individual to perform maintenance on their own equipment,” wrote DeAnne Bloomberg, Illinois Farm Bureau’s director of issue management, in a written statement to Investigate Midwest. “In the meantime, the Illinois Farm Bureau will honor the Memorandum of Understanding signed by AFBF.”

Why groups oppose legislation

Equipment manufacturers and private business interest groups such as the Illinois Chamber of Commerce have spent the past seven years lobbying against proposed right-to-repair legislation in Illinois, according to witness slip records on the state’s General Assembly website.

They’re concerned about safety and emissions tampering, whether intentional or accidental, according to those records. 

A spokesperson for the Association of Equipment Manufacturers said in a written statement to Investigate Midwest that current legislative proposals go further than what is safe and could “increase the likelihood of cybersecurity attacks on equipment…and leave equipment vulnerable to untrained or unauthorized parties looking to steal or use it for an unintended purpose.” 

Mark Denzler, president of the Illinois Manufacturers Association, said that he’s not opposed to farmers repairing their equipment, he’s opposed to modifications. “You can get in and either accidentally or intentionally, for example, change coding, and suddenly you're emitting past what you're supposed to.” 

Farmers, and the Environmental Protection Agency, which regulates emissions standards, say this isn’t the point of repair advocacy. 

The EPA sent a letter to the National Farmers Union in August 2023 stating that the Clean Air Act and the EPA’s policies of implementing regulations are “aligned in preventing tampering, not by limiting access to independent repair, but rather by enforcing the prohibition against tampering against any party that does so.” 

“We're not looking to turn our tractors into hot rods and soup them up,” said Lieb, the central Illinois corn and soybean farmer. “We need them for longevity, and when you start turning up horsepower and messing with things that they're not designed to do, inevitably, you're going to shorten the lifespan.”

‘The people calling for change are farmers’

Last October, members of the National Farmers Union, an organization representing 200,000 farmers and ranchers across the U.S., went to Capitol Hill to meet with lawmakers about the impact of what they say are monopolies in the ag sector. 

Mike Stranz, vice president of advocacy at National Farmers Union, said that passing right-to-repair legislation will bring more competition, openness and transparency to the market for farm equipment repair.

“Having more choices in the marketplace and a more open repair market that drives competition makes things work better for farmers,” he said. “What big companies are pushing against is more competition — they want less.”

Farmers aren’t the only ones who depend on John Deere. The state of Illinois has paid the company $42.8 million in contracts since 2005, according to state comptroller records. The state mostly depends on John Deere machines for lawn service, trail maintenance, highway and roadside mowing.

All off-road diesel engine machines, such as construction equipment and forestry machines, have internal computers and repair restrictions similar to tractors and combines. However, the difference between a $500,000 John Deere combine and a $40,000 utility tractor for landscaping is that the software isn’t as integrated into the utility tractor and most repairs are still analog. 

Farmers are concerned with repair restrictions because of the differences in the distribution models. Farmers typically own their equipment, while construction companies generally rent equipment for the duration of a project. The overhead, the budget and the time scale of farming and construction also is different, said O’Reilly, formerly with the Public Interest Research Group.

Ultimately, O’Reilly hopes that right-to-repair laws will pass across industries, including construction and forestry. 

“But right now,” he said, “the people calling for change are the farmers.”


Jennifer Bamberg wrote this article for Investigate Midwest.

By Naoki Nitta for Civil Eats.
Broadcast version by Suzanne Potter for California News Service reporting for the Solutions Journalism Network-Public News Service Collaboration

It's no wonder that hospital food gets a bad rap, says Santana Diaz, executive chef at the University of California Davis Medical Center, a sprawling, 142-acre campus located in Sacramento, California. As a seeming compromise between nutrition and institutional efficiency, food has long been dished up as an afterthought to patient care. “That was never the focus of hospitals,” he adds.

But for Diaz, good food is key to good health. Since taking the helm of the facility’s nutrition and dining services in 2018, he has worked to revamp the cuisine, including sourcing almost half of ingredients from farms and ranches within a 250-mile radius of the Sacramento Valley. Food grown in local fields, orchards, and pastures with healthy soil management practices simply make for healthier, more nutritious, and more flavorful meals, he says—the perfect ingredients for changing the “stigma” associated with hospital fare.

Diaz is not alone in making this shift, but he may be ahead of the game. In 2022, the University of California (U.C.) system—a network of 10 campuses and five medical centers—committed to supporting regenerative farming as part of U.C. President Michael Drake’s vision to mitigate the effects of climate change and drive a more equitable food system. And as an advisor to an initiative lead by the nonprofit organization Roots of Change, Diaz is helping to steer the larger institution toward local agriculture—through the system-wide procurement of regeneratively ranched beef.

The term, a general reference to pasture management that prioritizes soil health and perennial plants by grazing livestock through rotated paddocks, encompasses a set of practices that advocates say results in healthier animals and pastures. Research also shows that beef from cattle raised strictly on grass is more nutritious than conventional beef, although it’s not yet clear how regenerative practices may impact those findings.

Cumulatively, the U.C. dining system serves more than 600,000 meals a day during the academic year. By ensuring reliable demand for regeneratively raised meat, proponents of the system’s new procurement pledge see the sizable volume giving the state’s independent ranchers and rural economy a huge boost, and bolstering the local and regional meat supply chain.

It’s a tall order, but Diaz knows the sway that comes with institutional demand. The former executive chef at the Sacramento Kings’ Golden 1 Center and the San Francisco 49ers’ Levi’s Stadium is also a founding member of Beef2Institution, a non-profit program helping K-12 schools, hospitals, and sports venues in California source beef from local, family-owned ranches.

Institutions are the perfect outlet, says Diaz, for ground, braising, and stewing meat and the other lower-value, secondary cuts that make up nearly two-thirds of every beef carcass. So featuring hamburgers, boneless short ribs, and carne asada as part of a local farm-to-fork menu offers nearby ranchers a prime bread-and-butter opportunity, he says—all the while exposing a captive audience to the value of beef raised on regenerative pasture.

“Obviously, we’re not going to change patient behavior . . . in [one] hospital stay,” Diaz notes. But because diet plays a major role in raising the risk of heart disease, diabetes, and other chronic conditions, there’s huge merit, he adds, in educating them about preventative and nutritional approaches to health management.

And with his kitchen alone churning out 6,500 meals a day—along with patients, the medical center feeds an army of clinicians, staff, and medical and nursing students—the appetite of the entire U.C. system will likely have a resounding impact on the larger beef market in the state. “That’s how institutions can flex their buying power,” Diaz says.

A Premium Product

Despite research showing that eating less beef has significant health and environmental benefits, including shrinking an individual’s carbon footprint by as much as 75 percent, America’s steak and burger consumption is on the rise.

Currently, the vast majority of U.S. beef comes from cows raised on pasture for about the first year of their lives, then moved to concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs)—large-scale industrial facilities that grain-finish cattle in confinement for six to eight months before slaughter. Along with concentrated levels of environmental pollution, critics deride beef feedlots as places where hundreds if not thousands of cattle are crowded together. These conditions typically require antibiotics to prevent herds from getting sick; subsequently, this “subtherapeutic” use has also been linked to antibiotic resistance.

Nevertheless, CAFOs are also the basis of a “hyper-efficient” commodity system, says Renee Cheung, managing partner at Bonterra Partners, an impact investment advisory firm for regenerative agriculture and co-author of a market analysis of grass-fed beef. These operations pump out a consistent, year-round supply of beef for the meatpacking industry, a sector dominated by a handful of multinational giants that control more than 80 percent of the country’s beef market.

Grazing cattle on pasture for the entirety of their lives, on the other hand, is far less productive. As such, strictly grass-fed or grass-finished operations tend to be modest in scale, says Cheung, with the majority of ranches in the U.S. herding around 50 heads. The smaller volumes and seasonality of pastures create more variability in slaughter weight and harvest windows, running counter to the conventional year-round commodity model.

As a result, non-CAFO operations don’t benefit from the economy of scale built into the heavily consolidated processing and marketing infrastructure, Cheung says. With limited access to centralized meatpacking facilities, these producers are often saddled with high overhead for transport, cold storage, and market delivery—all of which add to premium prices at the meat counter.

The cost, however, also reflects a more superior product. Compared to conventionally raised beef, studies show that strictly pasture-fed beef contain higher nutrients with less fat, often with lower levels of antibiotics, hormones, and risk of food contamination. And grass-fed cuts simply taste better, according to Chef Dan Barber, sustainable and ethical farming advocate and author of The Third Plate, who extols its rich, complex, and “undeniably beefy” flavor.

Not all pasture-based ranchers have adopted paddock-based regenerative practices, but the number appears to be growing. That’s in part because the holistic principles of regenerative ranching go hand in hand with land stewardship and animal welfare, says Michael Dimock, executive director of Roots of Change. By “mimicking nature,” the grazing patterns of ruminants benefit from natural forage and room to roam, all the while “maximizing soil health and biodiversity” of plants, insects, and other animals.

Regardless, recent research shows that 100 percent grass-fed cattle have a larger carbon footprint than those finished on grain because they fatten at a slower rate, yet also weigh as much as 20 percent less at maturity. And while regeneratively managed pastures have been shown to sequester carbon, the science behind the potential for “carbon-neutral beef” has been overblown. Still, Dimock adds that well-managed, rotational grazing enhances pasture productivity, helps restore spent cropland, and prevents wildfires by keeping invasive grasses and dry brush in check.

It’s also a highly efficient use of marginal land, notes Dimock—a classification of the 70 percent of the world’s arable regions unsuited for crop production due to poor soil, aridity, or steepness. As he sees it, regenerative ranching is also accessible and practical for smaller operations because it’s scalable, and lowers the financial risks associated with compliance-centered practices like organic farming.

The Power of Procurement

Making regenerative beef a more attainable business model requires developing a resilient supply chain, says Dimock, one that caters primarily to smaller producers. The COVID-19 pandemic exposed the vulnerabilities of a heavily consolidated industry, including bottlenecks in meat processing due to labor shortages and transportation breakdowns. Along with the USDA’s recent $1 billion investment in expanding the nation’s meat and poultry processing capacity, he sees California’s $600 million Community Economic Resilience Fund (CERF) giving a major boost to the state’s meat supply infrastructure.

The targeted funding includes shoring up the network of smaller, regional harvest, processing, and storage facilities, he adds, and will help rural communities develop stronger economic hubs that decentralize the current top-heavy model. But those new and expanded facilities won’t succeed if there isn’t a consistent market for the kind of meat they process.

“If we want to give small-scale ranchers a fair shot,” Dimock says, “we have to break up [the current corporate stronghold].”

Going up against the commodity system, however, comes with additional challenges. While grass-fed beef accounts for roughly $4 billion, or 4 percent of the overall U.S. market, an estimated 80 percent of the supply consists of imports, largely from Australia, Uruguay and Brazil—countries where raising livestock on pasture is far more economical. Passed through a USDA-inspected plant, these products can be labeled “domestic,” leaving true domestic producers at an economic disadvantage.

In fact, the general lack of standards and regulations for the grass-fed sector has created a Wild West landscape of labels, says Bonterra’s Cheung. For its part, the USDA has recently announced stepping up its labeling guidelines, which distinguish true grass-fed beef from confusing claims such as “pasture-raised,” “50 percent grass-fed,” and “grass-fed and grain-finished.” These are highly misleading terms, she notes, given that most cattle are pastured for the first year of their lives. And “there has been a lot of outright cheating in the industry,” she adds—for instance, grass-fed labels can still apply to confined cattle raised on grass pellets.

The fundamental practices of regenerative ranching align with California’s efforts to promote farming “in a manner that restores and maintains natural systems,” says California Department of Food and Agriculture (CDFA) Secretary Karen Ross. The approach also complements the state’s climate smart initiatives and efforts to advance social equity through the support of small-scale farms and ranches.

Still, Ross acknowledges that the term’s inherent flexibility can make it a fuzzy concept. That’s especially true in California, where regional variations in microclimates, precipitation levels, and soil structure reflect a wide practice spectrum—some ranches in the state’s mountainous reaches, for example, may winter their herds on dried silage when fields are bare, while others may have the means to transport them to greener pastures.

“If you talk to 12 people about regenerative [practices], you’ll get 12 different definitions,” Ross says.

Currently, several certifications such as the American Grassfed Association (AGA), Regenerative Organic Certified, and Land to Market provide a range of overlapping criteria that ensure the regenerative provenance of meat. By outlining transparent measures, these voluntary labels are intended to legitimize and safeguard the premium nature of regeneratively produced beef.

Last month, the CDFA began work on officially defining regenerative ranching and agriculture. Rather than developing standards for state certification, and the goal is “to make sure that when we use the term, we have a shared understanding of what the practices are,” says Ross. The “inclusive” set of parameters will help inform state policy around regenerative food production, she adds—including public procurement initiatives.

Public institutions are “a ready-made way” to spur and ensure market demand for healthy food from sustainable sources, adds Ross, who has been involved in discussions about the UC initiative. “We’re investing in better outcomes for farmers, the community, and the environment,” she says. “That’s the power of procurement.”

Building the Supply Pipeline

Balancing supply and demand is nonetheless a delicate endeavor, says Tom Richards, co-owner of Richards Grassfed Beef in Yuba County, California. The fifth-generation rancher has been a key voice in both the UC initiative and Beef2Institution.

Most of California’s pasture-grazing operations focus on a premium, direct-to-consumer market. Between online sales, farmers markets, restaurants, and specialty retailers, year-to-year demand tends to be stable—and manageable.

The supply of better beef “isn’t something you can just dial up,” says Richards. Increasing herds is a risky investment—“it takes three years to raise one of these animals,” he notes—so clear market forecasts are imperative. “The biggest thing that we need from the industry is for somebody like a Santana [Diaz] or UC to say, ‘we’re committed to [helping you] map out a three- to five-year plan to grow your supply,’” he says.

“Right now, the market’s operating on a push,” Richards adds. “But what the industry needs is the pull”—with heavy strings attached.

For smaller-scale operations in particular, committed relationships all along the supply chain are essential to staying afloat. Yet that business model runs counter to industry approach, says Clifford Pollard, the founder of Cream Co. Meats. The Oakland, California-based meat processor “bridges the gap” between regenerative ranches and broadline product distribution on the West Coast, and has played a central role in promoting Beef2Institution’s efforts.

Conventional meat processors “trade in commodities,” Pollard says, sourcing raw material at the lowest price possible. Cream Co., on the other hand, cultivates its supply pipeline “over many years of sustained [purchasing] commitments” to individual operations, he says.

Ultimately, with demand driving supply, the large-scale procurement will undoubtedly influence the equation. Nevertheless, even incremental steps by institutions can pave the way for meaningful change, Pollard notes. “There’s often a hesitation that it has to be all or nothing, but shifting even a small portion of your spend towards [regeneratively minded sourcing] is impactful,” he says, and U.C.’s commitment really gives regenerative producers “a seat at the table.”

“We don’t need the whole table,” Pollard adds. “Just a seat.”


Naoki Nitta wrote this article for Civil Eats.


get more stories like this via email