Cookies help us run our site more efficiently.

By clicking “Accept”, you agree to the storing of cookies on your device to enhance site navigation, analyze site usage, and assist in our marketing efforts. View our Privacy Policy for more information or to customize your cookie preferences.

Accept Deny

GoGreenNation news

Will Disaster Relief Come Through for North Carolina’s Small Farms?

News Feed
Wednesday, November 27, 2024

When Hurricane Helene ripped through North Carolina this September, Nicole DelCogliano sheltered with her two daughters in Asheville, while her husband rode out the storm alone on their 16-acre organic vegetable farm, Green Toe Ground, in nearby Yancey County. After the storm subsided, DelCogliano fretted for hours until finally a text came through from an unknown number: “Farm flooded,” her husband, Gaelan Corozine, wrote. “I’m safe. Love you.” The next day, Corozine—who drove over 50 miles of washed-out roads to reunite with his family—told them that everything was gone. Green Toe Ground farm in Yancey County, North Carolina, after Hurricane Helene. (Photo courtesy of Green Toe Ground) “We were all hugging and sobbing together,” DelCogliano later recalled, her voice quavering. Road closures blocked their return to the farm, so the family hiked over hills and hitched rides. Arriving there felt like seeing the aftermath of an earthquake, DelCogliano said. “The whole landscape was different, trees everywhere . . . barn rubble everywhere, our van on the side of the road and the tunnels a mess of plastic and metal.” Green Toe Ground Farm is nestled into a bend of the South Toe River, which crested at 30 feet above its normal height during Helene, inundating the farm. When the river ebbed from their fields, it took all their crops, scoured the topsoil from one field, and left sand deposits in two others. The storm destroyed their four high tunnels, two utility buildings, and barn. It swept away the potatoes, winter squash, and dried flowers for wreath-making, stored in the barn, and their 20-year-old horse, Star Darling, which they found wrapped in barbed wire and badly injured. Their home, which is set back from the river, was spared, though many neighbors weren’t so lucky, DelCogliano said. DelCogliano estimates they lost 30 percent of their annual revenue because the farm was fully planted. The infrastructure will cost $150,000 to replace, and tree removal and land grading will add further costs. All told, the storm will cost the family roughly $300,000. Green Toe Ground is one of many small, diversified farms serving local markets in western North Carolina that was devastated by Hurricane Helene. The full extent of regional agricultural damages is unknown, but “many [farms] have had 50 to 100 percent of their crops wiped out, infrastructure destroyed, and lots of topsoil loss and soil contamination from the flooding,” said Aaron Johnson, co-director of policy at the Rural Advancement Foundation International-USA (RAFI). Farmers who didn’t lose everything are struggling to find markets for crops that were spared.   “Every farm in our network will be impacted by the storm, either by direct damage or through loss of market outlets,” said Sarah Hart, communications coordinator at Appalachian Sustainable Agriculture Project (ASAP), a membership organization with 900 farms and 400 food businesses. A Limited Federal Safety Net In the storm’s immediate aftermath, neighbors offered DelCogliano a lifeline. “People came together to clear the roads, bring out chainsaws . . . help each other navigate basic food and water,” she said. “The only thing we had was each other.” Vermont farmers lost $44 million due to extreme weather in 2023, but received only $1.5 million in USDA relief funds. Over the short term, western North Carolina’s tight-knit food and farming community is helping farmers recover. RAFI, ASAP, and other groups are offering small grants and helping connect farmers to markets for products not destroyed by the flood, including relief organizations. Other organizations are raising money to pay farmers who have been donating products to relief groups. Wendy Burgh, co-owner of Dry Ridge Farm, a small poultry and livestock operation in Mars Hill, North Carolina, donated $4,000 worth of eggs the first week after the storm and was later repaid by Farm Connection. “Getting paid was a game changer, both emotionally and for the financial stability of the farm,” she said. Over the longer term, however, North Carolina farmers face a limited safety net to help them recoup losses and rebuild their operations. Charitable aid can only go so far. Some state aid is available for farmers, but the bulk of disaster assistance comes from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA)—the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) covers personal losses only. Yet there are many obstacles to obtaining USDA relief, including onerous paperwork, low payouts, coverage exclusions, and a shortage of staff. Also, some of the agency’s emergency relief funds depend on ad hoc congressional approval, which means payments can arrive years after a disaster. What’s more, USDA’s federal crop insurance, commodity support, and disaster relief programs were designed for, and largely benefit, big commodity-crop growers. “Most farmers in the United States are small or mid-sized family farmers, but these are the producers that are left behind from the USDA programs that are supposed to help in the aftermath of disaster,” said Billy Hackett, a policy specialist at the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition (NSAC) and author of the report “Unsustainable: State of the Farm Safety Net.” Navigating USDA’s Relief Programs It’s still early days for USDA’s response to North Carolina’s disaster. The experience of Vermont farmers after epic flooding in 2023 and 2024, however, offers a window into the shortcomings of a federal disaster relief system that may be further weakened under a second Trump administration. Vermont farmers lost $44 million due to extreme weather in 2023, but received only $1.5 million in USDA relief funds, according to the Vermont Agricultural Recovery Task Force. What’s more, only 30 percent of the state’s 6,800 farms carry crop insurance. Ansel Ploog, co-owner of Flywheel Farm in Woodbury, Vermont, standing at the edge of the creek that swelled in 2023, taking all of the farm’s crops. (Photo credit: Meg Wilcox) For small farmers in the wake of disaster, getting USDA relief can be daunting—especially when they’re coping with traumatic loss. Trauma can lead to cognitive impairment, lack of concentration, and difficulty with problem solving or even just reading complex forms, noted Ansel Ploog, co-owner of Flywheel Farm in Woodbury, Vermont, which flooded in 2023. Ploog said she was too exhausted by the paperwork requirements, which were hard to translate to her two-acre farm, and hardship in her community, to apply for relief. “The harder part [of recovery] is navigating all the resources,” DelCogliano said. “I felt paralyzed every time I opened my computer, like, let me go drag some shit around. It’s way easier.” “There’s no one in this area who isn’t traumatized in some way,” said Wendy Brugh, co-owner of Dry Ridge Farm, a small poultry and livestock operation in Mars Hill, North Carolina, whose farm lost a hoop house and much of its fencing. Her biggest problem has been finding ongoing markets for the thousands of eggs her farm produces daily. “Being in the presence of that kind of destruction [in the community] on a regular basis is heavy.” Farmer support organizations are helping farmers with USDA paperwork and deadlines—but they can only do so much, notes Roland McReynolds, executive director of Carolina Farm Stewardship Association, which compiled a comprehensive listing of relief resources for farmers. The USDA held webinars last month to explain its relief programs, noting on October 7 that it had embedded staff with FEMA and had more than 200 people involved in the response. “We’re looking for ways that we can streamline, that we can enhance our flexibility to get folks in, that we can reduce barriers . . . to make it easier for folks to take advantage of our programs,” said Robert Bonnie, USDA’s Under Secretary for Farm Production and Conservation. While that’s encouraging, Maddie Kempner, policy and organizing director at the Northeast Organic Farming Association (NOFA) Vermont cautions, “the availability of a lot of these [USDA] programs ends up being like a mirage,”  because farmers learn that exclusions make them ineligible, or the payouts are too small to make the applications worth the trouble. Federal programs that can help smaller, diversified farms recover from extreme weather include the noninsured crop disaster assistance program (NAP) and the Whole Farm Revenue Protection program (WFRP). For both, farmers must be enrolled before disaster strikes. USDA also offers cost-share programs for needs such as land cleanup and tree removal, and for losses in livestock, feed, and grazing land. Emergency loans are sometimes available, too. Farmers access all these programs, except WFRP, through USDA’s Farm Service Agency (FSA) network. The Noninsured Crop Disaster Program (NAP) NAP is a hybrid crop insurance and disaster assistance program designed for farmers unable to access traditional crop insurance, which is geared for big farms. It offers free basic coverage for new and socially disadvantaged farmers, including women. But NAP has been relatively under-enrolled in western North Carolina, said McReynolds. “Anticipating a one in 100-, 500- or 30,000-year flooding event just wasn’t on folks’ radar.” Moreover, crops must be planted before certain dates under NAP, and those dates don’t match up with southern Appalachian crop seasons. Green Toe Ground did not have NAP protection. The program requires farmers to enroll each crop individually, which is a burden for farmers like DelCogliano, who grows 30 different organic vegetables and raises a few animals to create compost for soil health. “The most cumbersome aspect with diversified vegetable farming is, it’s hard to fit into the USDA boxes,” she said. Other farmers have had mixed experience with NAP. Digger’s Mirth Collective Farm in Winooski, Vermont, for example, lost $250,000 in revenue after 2023’s massive floods, but thus far has been reimbursed only $1,300, according to Hilary Martin, one of its members. “I spent so many hours, I had literal back pains from the paperwork involved in submitting all our crop information and losses,” she said. After the farm flooded again in July 2024, Martin said the collective decided not to bother filing a claim until their FSA agent urged them to file. But when Martin filed for 2024 losses, she learned they weren’t eligible because they had replanted before their agent visited the farm. “We were just way more aggressive about replanting,” this year, she said. While they had taken pictures and documented everything they had done, they had violated the terms of coverage. That means they will not receive any reimbursements from USDA for their 2024 losses. Instead, they have relied on state and local charitable funds. Having to wait for an FSA agent to visit your farm makes it that much harder when the staffing at those offices is minimal, said Kempner. USDA has waived that requirement for farmers impacted by Helene. David Marchant, co-owner of River Berry Farm in Fairfax, Vermont, a diversified vegetable and fruit grower, makes NAP work for him, which he receives for free. “The federal programs are good,” he said. “[But] they’re very, very slow. The amount of paperwork is extraordinary. You got to know how to figure it out.” Whole Farm Revenue Protection The Whole Farm Revenue Protection program (WFRP) was created in part to address NAP shortcomings. It allows farmers to enroll in crop insurance based on their overall revenue rather than on a crop-by-crop basis. Nevertheless, participation remains low, with only 1,967 U.S. farmers (.01 percent of farms) purchasing a policy in 2023. Complicated rules and paperwork, farmer skepticism, and disinterested insurance agents who make more money from policies covering one or two crops on large farms discourage farmers from enrolling, according to the NSAC report. Crop losses also have to be substantial for a payout to make a difference, noted Marchant. Tiny Bridge farm in Hendersonville, North Carolina, before Hurricane Helene. (Photo courtesy of Ed Graves) DelCogliano was not covered by WFRP, which is not uncommon in western North Carolina. In fact, less than five percent of the farmers in ASAP’s network are covered by any crop insurance, said Hart. Ed Graves, however, was motivated to purchase the coverage after experiencing bad flooding on his Hendersonville farm in  2021. His five-acre organic vegetable farm, Tiny Bridge, lost all its fall plantings to Hurricane Helene—broccoli, cauliflower, potatoes, leafy greens, carrots, radishes, and turnips. He pays $1,500 annually to carry WFRP and hopes to be reimbursed $10,000 from it, based on his earnings the past three years. Tiny Bridge immediately after Hurricane Helene. (Photo courtesy of Ed Graves) “I know how to fill out paperwork,” he said. “Maybe it’s because I worked in civil service for 20 years, so I understand how to ask for what I need from a bureaucracy.” Cost-Sharing and Emergency Loans Several USDA disaster relief grant programs are a good fit for smaller farms, such as the Emergency Conservation Program (ECP) and the Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP), both of which help farmers clean up and regrade disaster-impacted land. Neither of these programs covers the costs of soil testing or rebuilding, although farmers can seek assistance for longer-term soil health improvement, such as cover crop planting, through USDA’s Natural Resources Conservation Services (NRCS). RAFI has been most successful helping farmers apply for ECP, Johnson said, noting that some farmers have already received preliminary approval for land clearing and grading work. They’ll be reimbursed for 75 percent of the costs up to a $125,000 cap, depending on their farm size, though it’s unclear how quickly they’ll receive that money. “While we cannot predict the exact timing of payments being issued, we can assure that every effort is made to provide the resources needed to get the assistance to those who need it as soon as possible,” a USDA spokesperson said in an email to Civil Eats. DelCogliano filed an application for ECP funds but has not yet received approval and does not know how much money the farm may receive. Brugh estimates it will cost $100,000 to get all the dangerous trees removed from her farm, and she is exploring multiple sources of funding, including ECP. For farmers who don’t have prior NAP or WFRP coverage, and whose major losses are crops, equipment or buildings, a USDA emergency loan is about all that is available to them. “It’s shocking for a farmer who has hundreds of thousands of dollars in losses, who has maybe had to lay off their entire crew, especially at the peak of harvest season, to be told all they can offer you is a loan,” Kempner said. USDA’s emergency loans become available when the agricultural secretary or president declares a disaster in their county, but these are historically underutilized, in part because they often have higher interest rates than USDA direct loans, a USDA spokesperson said in an email to Civil Eats. In other words, if a farmer qualifies for private credit, they are not eligible for a USDA emergency loan. For Joie Lehouillier, co-owner of Foote Brook Farm in Vermont, it “was a real kick in the teeth” to be told that her good relationship with a private lender disqualified her from a lower-interest USDA loan. Lehouillier’s farm lost 95 percent of its crops and more than half a million dollars in equipment and supplies in the 2023 floods, she said. “Even though we got a tremendous amount of help through [state funding], it’s going to be a struggle for the next few years to just get back on our feet,” especially with the high-interest debt, she added. The Farm Bill, the Future, and Prospects for Reform  In addition to the programs above, USDA provides supplemental emergency disaster funds to farmers when approved by Congress. Prior to the Biden Administration, that aid went only to farmers enrolled in a crop insurance or disaster program, leaving out most small farms. Congress has not yet appropriated such aid for 2023 or 2024 disasters. President Biden recently asked Congress to authorize $24 billion in emergency relief funds for USDA, appealing for that aid to reach all impacted farmers, including those not enrolled in a USDA program. Hackett told Civil Eats that there is considerable momentum to pass a relief bill, and that it’s “very possible” that the current Congress will authorize disaster assistance inclusive of all farmers. That possibility becomes “less likely” with the next Congress, Hackett said.  Advocates have proposed changes to the farm bill to make USDA’s safety net more inclusive of small farmers hit by extreme weather. But Congress will likely not pick up the bill until later in 2025. With Republicans regaining control of the U.S. Senate, Congress has bigger fish to fry, such as a tax overhaul package, Johnson said. In the meantime, a USDA spokesperson said, “the farm bill expiration does not impact the ability of FSA and NRCS to support producers impacted by hurricanes,” and that “hurricane recovery efforts will continue through the administration transition.” “There’s no one in this area who isn’t traumatized in some way.” Kempner, of NOFA Vermont, is pessimistic that a Republican farm bill will embrace the reforms that are needed to help small-scale, diversified farmers remain resilient in the face of climate change. She is also concerned about Trump’s history of withholding aid for communities that don’t support him politically. Nevertheless, she said, “It’s important that we’re talking to each other across state lines about the kinds of structural changes that we need to be pushing for long term,” such as the creation of a permanently available disaster relief program within USDA based on farm revenue and with a short turnaround of, say, 30 days. DelCogliano, meanwhile, awaits the results of soil tests to learn what remediation may be necessary as she plans how to rebuild Green Toe Ground. “It’s a lot of things to figure out—the barn, the greenhouses, all the systems.” On top of that, she has to figure out how to rebuild for resiliency to increasingly extreme weather. The whole riparian zone has changed, she said. “Any big rain event is going to be much higher impact than before, because there’s nothing on the sides of the rivers holding it [within] its banks anymore. What would a rebuild look like in a way that could mitigate risk? Where’s our safety valve?” Like many other farmers, DelCogliano and Corozine are waiting for USDA approval of their application for land cleanup reimbursements. Meanwhile, they’re relying on a personal GoFundMe account and local charitable aid to pay their bills. “I still don’t have an idea of what [federal support] is going to look like,” DelCogliano said. “And that’s challenging.” The post Will Disaster Relief Come Through for North Carolina’s Small Farms? appeared first on Civil Eats.

After the storm subsided, DelCogliano fretted for hours until finally a text came through from an unknown number: “Farm flooded,” her husband, Gaelan Corozine, wrote. “I’m safe. Love you.” The next day, Corozine—who drove over 50 miles of washed-out roads to reunite with his family—told them that everything was gone. “We were all hugging and […] The post Will Disaster Relief Come Through for North Carolina’s Small Farms? appeared first on Civil Eats.

When Hurricane Helene ripped through North Carolina this September, Nicole DelCogliano sheltered with her two daughters in Asheville, while her husband rode out the storm alone on their 16-acre organic vegetable farm, Green Toe Ground, in nearby Yancey County.

After the storm subsided, DelCogliano fretted for hours until finally a text came through from an unknown number: “Farm flooded,” her husband, Gaelan Corozine, wrote. “I’m safe. Love you.” The next day, Corozine—who drove over 50 miles of washed-out roads to reunite with his family—told them that everything was gone.

The aftermath of a flooded farm, with crops destroyed and wires hanging haphazardly

Green Toe Ground farm in Yancey County, North Carolina, after Hurricane Helene. (Photo courtesy of Green Toe Ground)

“We were all hugging and sobbing together,” DelCogliano later recalled, her voice quavering.

Road closures blocked their return to the farm, so the family hiked over hills and hitched rides. Arriving there felt like seeing the aftermath of an earthquake, DelCogliano said. “The whole landscape was different, trees everywhere . . . barn rubble everywhere, our van on the side of the road and the tunnels a mess of plastic and metal.”

Green Toe Ground Farm is nestled into a bend of the South Toe River, which crested at 30 feet above its normal height during Helene, inundating the farm. When the river ebbed from their fields, it took all their crops, scoured the topsoil from one field, and left sand deposits in two others. The storm destroyed their four high tunnels, two utility buildings, and barn.

It swept away the potatoes, winter squash, and dried flowers for wreath-making, stored in the barn, and their 20-year-old horse, Star Darling, which they found wrapped in barbed wire and badly injured. Their home, which is set back from the river, was spared, though many neighbors weren’t so lucky, DelCogliano said.

DelCogliano estimates they lost 30 percent of their annual revenue because the farm was fully planted. The infrastructure will cost $150,000 to replace, and tree removal and land grading will add further costs. All told, the storm will cost the family roughly $300,000.

Green Toe Ground is one of many small, diversified farms serving local markets in western North Carolina that was devastated by Hurricane Helene. The full extent of regional agricultural damages is unknown, but “many [farms] have had 50 to 100 percent of their crops wiped out, infrastructure destroyed, and lots of topsoil loss and soil contamination from the flooding,” said Aaron Johnson, co-director of policy at the Rural Advancement Foundation International-USA (RAFI). Farmers who didn’t lose everything are struggling to find markets for crops that were spared.

These eastern North Carolina counties were heavily impacted by Hurricane Helene in 2024. The map shows more than a dozen counties in eastern North Carolina, plus two farms included in the article, that were affected by the rains and flooding from the hurricane. (Source: Civil Eats research)

 

“Every farm in our network will be impacted by the storm, either by direct damage or through loss of market outlets,” said Sarah Hart, communications coordinator at Appalachian Sustainable Agriculture Project (ASAP), a membership organization with 900 farms and 400 food businesses.

A Limited Federal Safety Net

In the storm’s immediate aftermath, neighbors offered DelCogliano a lifeline. “People came together to clear the roads, bring out chainsaws . . . help each other navigate basic food and water,” she said. “The only thing we had was each other.”

Vermont farmers lost $44 million due to extreme weather in 2023, but received only $1.5 million in USDA relief funds.

Over the short term, western North Carolina’s tight-knit food and farming community is helping farmers recover. RAFI, ASAP, and other groups are offering small grants and helping connect farmers to markets for products not destroyed by the flood, including relief organizations.

Other organizations are raising money to pay farmers who have been donating products to relief groups. Wendy Burgh, co-owner of Dry Ridge Farm, a small poultry and livestock operation in Mars Hill, North Carolina, donated $4,000 worth of eggs the first week after the storm and was later repaid by Farm Connection. “Getting paid was a game changer, both emotionally and for the financial stability of the farm,” she said.

Over the longer term, however, North Carolina farmers face a limited safety net to help them recoup losses and rebuild their operations. Charitable aid can only go so far. Some state aid is available for farmers, but the bulk of disaster assistance comes from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA)—the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) covers personal losses only.

Yet there are many obstacles to obtaining USDA relief, including onerous paperwork, low payouts, coverage exclusions, and a shortage of staff. Also, some of the agency’s emergency relief funds depend on ad hoc congressional approval, which means payments can arrive years after a disaster.

What’s more, USDA’s federal crop insurance, commodity support, and disaster relief programs were designed for, and largely benefit, big commodity-crop growers. “Most farmers in the United States are small or mid-sized family farmers, but these are the producers that are left behind from the USDA programs that are supposed to help in the aftermath of disaster,” said Billy Hackett, a policy specialist at the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition (NSAC) and author of the report “Unsustainable: State of the Farm Safety Net.”

Navigating USDA’s Relief Programs

It’s still early days for USDA’s response to North Carolina’s disaster. The experience of Vermont farmers after epic flooding in 2023 and 2024, however, offers a window into the shortcomings of a federal disaster relief system that may be further weakened under a second Trump administration. Vermont farmers lost $44 million due to extreme weather in 2023, but received only $1.5 million in USDA relief funds, according to the Vermont Agricultural Recovery Task Force. What’s more, only 30 percent of the state’s 6,800 farms carry crop insurance.

A woman wearing flannel and a cap is a farmer, standing in front of the woods

Ansel Ploog, co-owner of Flywheel Farm in Woodbury, Vermont, standing at the edge of the creek that swelled in 2023, taking all of the farm’s crops. (Photo credit: Meg Wilcox)

For small farmers in the wake of disaster, getting USDA relief can be daunting—especially when they’re coping with traumatic loss. Trauma can lead to cognitive impairment, lack of concentration, and difficulty with problem solving or even just reading complex forms, noted Ansel Ploog, co-owner of Flywheel Farm in Woodbury, Vermont, which flooded in 2023. Ploog said she was too exhausted by the paperwork requirements, which were hard to translate to her two-acre farm, and hardship in her community, to apply for relief.

“The harder part [of recovery] is navigating all the resources,” DelCogliano said. “I felt paralyzed every time I opened my computer, like, let me go drag some shit around. It’s way easier.”

“There’s no one in this area who isn’t traumatized in some way,” said Wendy Brugh, co-owner of Dry Ridge Farm, a small poultry and livestock operation in Mars Hill, North Carolina, whose farm lost a hoop house and much of its fencing. Her biggest problem has been finding ongoing markets for the thousands of eggs her farm produces daily. “Being in the presence of that kind of destruction [in the community] on a regular basis is heavy.”

Farmer support organizations are helping farmers with USDA paperwork and deadlines—but they can only do so much, notes Roland McReynolds, executive director of Carolina Farm Stewardship Association, which compiled a comprehensive listing of relief resources for farmers.

The USDA held webinars last month to explain its relief programs, noting on October 7 that it had embedded staff with FEMA and had more than 200 people involved in the response.

“We’re looking for ways that we can streamline, that we can enhance our flexibility to get folks in, that we can reduce barriers . . . to make it easier for folks to take advantage of our programs,” said Robert Bonnie, USDA’s Under Secretary for Farm Production and Conservation.

While that’s encouraging, Maddie Kempner, policy and organizing director at the Northeast Organic Farming Association (NOFA) Vermont cautions, “the availability of a lot of these [USDA] programs ends up being like a mirage,”  because farmers learn that exclusions make them ineligible, or the payouts are too small to make the applications worth the trouble.

Federal programs that can help smaller, diversified farms recover from extreme weather include the noninsured crop disaster assistance program (NAP) and the Whole Farm Revenue Protection program (WFRP). For both, farmers must be enrolled before disaster strikes. USDA also offers cost-share programs for needs such as land cleanup and tree removal, and for losses in livestock, feed, and grazing land. Emergency loans are sometimes available, too. Farmers access all these programs, except WFRP, through USDA’s Farm Service Agency (FSA) network.

The Noninsured Crop Disaster Program (NAP)

NAP is a hybrid crop insurance and disaster assistance program designed for farmers unable to access traditional crop insurance, which is geared for big farms. It offers free basic coverage for new and socially disadvantaged farmers, including women.

But NAP has been relatively under-enrolled in western North Carolina, said McReynolds. “Anticipating a one in 100-, 500- or 30,000-year flooding event just wasn’t on folks’ radar.”

Moreover, crops must be planted before certain dates under NAP, and those dates don’t match up with southern Appalachian crop seasons.

Green Toe Ground did not have NAP protection. The program requires farmers to enroll each crop individually, which is a burden for farmers like DelCogliano, who grows 30 different organic vegetables and raises a few animals to create compost for soil health. “The most cumbersome aspect with diversified vegetable farming is, it’s hard to fit into the USDA boxes,” she said.

Other farmers have had mixed experience with NAP. Digger’s Mirth Collective Farm in Winooski, Vermont, for example, lost $250,000 in revenue after 2023’s massive floods, but thus far has been reimbursed only $1,300, according to Hilary Martin, one of its members. “I spent so many hours, I had literal back pains from the paperwork involved in submitting all our crop information and losses,” she said.

After the farm flooded again in July 2024, Martin said the collective decided not to bother filing a claim until their FSA agent urged them to file. But when Martin filed for 2024 losses, she learned they weren’t eligible because they had replanted before their agent visited the farm.

“We were just way more aggressive about replanting,” this year, she said. While they had taken pictures and documented everything they had done, they had violated the terms of coverage. That means they will not receive any reimbursements from USDA for their 2024 losses. Instead, they have relied on state and local charitable funds.

Having to wait for an FSA agent to visit your farm makes it that much harder when the staffing at those offices is minimal, said Kempner. USDA has waived that requirement for farmers impacted by Helene.

David Marchant, co-owner of River Berry Farm in Fairfax, Vermont, a diversified vegetable and fruit grower, makes NAP work for him, which he receives for free. “The federal programs are good,” he said. “[But] they’re very, very slow. The amount of paperwork is extraordinary. You got to know how to figure it out.”

Whole Farm Revenue Protection

The Whole Farm Revenue Protection program (WFRP) was created in part to address NAP shortcomings. It allows farmers to enroll in crop insurance based on their overall revenue rather than on a crop-by-crop basis. Nevertheless, participation remains low, with only 1,967 U.S. farmers (.01 percent of farms) purchasing a policy in 2023. Complicated rules and paperwork, farmer skepticism, and disinterested insurance agents who make more money from policies covering one or two crops on large farms discourage farmers from enrolling, according to the NSAC report. Crop losses also have to be substantial for a payout to make a difference, noted Marchant.

a farm with rows and white canopy over a lot of green with a pink sky

Tiny Bridge farm in Hendersonville, North Carolina, before Hurricane Helene. (Photo courtesy of Ed Graves)

DelCogliano was not covered by WFRP, which is not uncommon in western North Carolina. In fact, less than five percent of the farmers in ASAP’s network are covered by any crop insurance, said Hart.

Ed Graves, however, was motivated to purchase the coverage after experiencing bad flooding on his Hendersonville farm in  2021. His five-acre organic vegetable farm, Tiny Bridge, lost all its fall plantings to Hurricane Helene—broccoli, cauliflower, potatoes, leafy greens, carrots, radishes, and turnips. He pays $1,500 annually to carry WFRP and hopes to be reimbursed $10,000 from it, based on his earnings the past three years.

An image of brown water flooding a farm in North Carolina

Tiny Bridge immediately after Hurricane Helene. (Photo courtesy of Ed Graves)

“I know how to fill out paperwork,” he said. “Maybe it’s because I worked in civil service for 20 years, so I understand how to ask for what I need from a bureaucracy.”

Cost-Sharing and Emergency Loans

Several USDA disaster relief grant programs are a good fit for smaller farms, such as the Emergency Conservation Program (ECP) and the Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP), both of which help farmers clean up and regrade disaster-impacted land. Neither of these programs covers the costs of soil testing or rebuilding, although farmers can seek assistance for longer-term soil health improvement, such as cover crop planting, through USDA’s Natural Resources Conservation Services (NRCS).

RAFI has been most successful helping farmers apply for ECP, Johnson said, noting that some farmers have already received preliminary approval for land clearing and grading work. They’ll be reimbursed for 75 percent of the costs up to a $125,000 cap, depending on their farm size, though it’s unclear how quickly they’ll receive that money.

“While we cannot predict the exact timing of payments being issued, we can assure that every effort is made to provide the resources needed to get the assistance to those who need it as soon as possible,” a USDA spokesperson said in an email to Civil Eats.

DelCogliano filed an application for ECP funds but has not yet received approval and does not know how much money the farm may receive. Brugh estimates it will cost $100,000 to get all the dangerous trees removed from her farm, and she is exploring multiple sources of funding, including ECP.

For farmers who don’t have prior NAP or WFRP coverage, and whose major losses are crops, equipment or buildings, a USDA emergency loan is about all that is available to them.

“It’s shocking for a farmer who has hundreds of thousands of dollars in losses, who has maybe had to lay off their entire crew, especially at the peak of harvest season, to be told all they can offer you is a loan,” Kempner said.

USDA’s emergency loans become available when the agricultural secretary or president declares a disaster in their county, but these are historically underutilized, in part because they often have higher interest rates than USDA direct loans, a USDA spokesperson said in an email to Civil Eats.

In other words, if a farmer qualifies for private credit, they are not eligible for a USDA emergency loan. For Joie Lehouillier, co-owner of Foote Brook Farm in Vermont, it “was a real kick in the teeth” to be told that her good relationship with a private lender disqualified her from a lower-interest USDA loan.

Lehouillier’s farm lost 95 percent of its crops and more than half a million dollars in equipment and supplies in the 2023 floods, she said. “Even though we got a tremendous amount of help through [state funding], it’s going to be a struggle for the next few years to just get back on our feet,” especially with the high-interest debt, she added.

The Farm Bill, the Future, and Prospects for Reform 

In addition to the programs above, USDA provides supplemental emergency disaster funds to farmers when approved by Congress. Prior to the Biden Administration, that aid went only to farmers enrolled in a crop insurance or disaster program, leaving out most small farms. Congress has not yet appropriated such aid for 2023 or 2024 disasters. President Biden recently asked Congress to authorize $24 billion in emergency relief funds for USDA, appealing for that aid to reach all impacted farmers, including those not enrolled in a USDA program.

Hackett told Civil Eats that there is considerable momentum to pass a relief bill, and that it’s “very possible” that the current Congress will authorize disaster assistance inclusive of all farmers. That possibility becomes “less likely” with the next Congress, Hackett said. 

Advocates have proposed changes to the farm bill to make USDA’s safety net more inclusive of small farmers hit by extreme weather. But Congress will likely not pick up the bill until later in 2025. With Republicans regaining control of the U.S. Senate, Congress has bigger fish to fry, such as a tax overhaul package, Johnson said.

In the meantime, a USDA spokesperson said, “the farm bill expiration does not impact the ability of FSA and NRCS to support producers impacted by hurricanes,” and that “hurricane recovery efforts will continue through the administration transition.”

“There’s no one in this area who isn’t traumatized in some way.”

Kempner, of NOFA Vermont, is pessimistic that a Republican farm bill will embrace the reforms that are needed to help small-scale, diversified farmers remain resilient in the face of climate change. She is also concerned about Trump’s history of withholding aid for communities that don’t support him politically. Nevertheless, she said, “It’s important that we’re talking to each other across state lines about the kinds of structural changes that we need to be pushing for long term,” such as the creation of a permanently available disaster relief program within USDA based on farm revenue and with a short turnaround of, say, 30 days.

DelCogliano, meanwhile, awaits the results of soil tests to learn what remediation may be necessary as she plans how to rebuild Green Toe Ground. “It’s a lot of things to figure out—the barn, the greenhouses, all the systems.”

On top of that, she has to figure out how to rebuild for resiliency to increasingly extreme weather. The whole riparian zone has changed, she said. “Any big rain event is going to be much higher impact than before, because there’s nothing on the sides of the rivers holding it [within] its banks anymore. What would a rebuild look like in a way that could mitigate risk? Where’s our safety valve?”

Like many other farmers, DelCogliano and Corozine are waiting for USDA approval of their application for land cleanup reimbursements. Meanwhile, they’re relying on a personal GoFundMe account and local charitable aid to pay their bills. “I still don’t have an idea of what [federal support] is going to look like,” DelCogliano said. “And that’s challenging.”

The post Will Disaster Relief Come Through for North Carolina’s Small Farms? appeared first on Civil Eats.

Read the full story here.
Photos courtesy of

Related News

Red Tractor ad banned for misleading environmental claims

The Advertising Standards Authority upheld a complaint by environment charity River Action.

Red Tractor ad banned for misleading environmental claimsRed TractorThe Red Tractor advert was last shown in 2023 but will now be banned for future use unless it is updatedA TV advert by Red Tractor, the UK's biggest certifier of farm products on supermarket shelves, has been banned for exaggerating the scheme's environmental benefits and misleading the public.The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) ruled the organisation had provided "insufficient evidence" that its farms complied with basic environmental laws to substantiate the claims in its ad.Environmental group River Action, which brought the complaint in 2023, said the ruling showed the scheme was "greenwashing" and urged supermarkets to stop using it.But Red Tractor called the watchdog's decision "fundamentally flawed" and argued that the scheme's focus was animal welfare not environmental standards.In 2021, Red Tractor aired an advert in which it said: "From field to store all our standards are met. When the Red Tractor's there, your food's farmed with care."You can watch it below.Watch: the ad banned by the Advertising Standards AuthorityThe environmental charity River Action took issue with the ad, which ran for a further two years, and complained to the watchdog that it suggested to consumers that Red Tractor farms will "ensure a high degree of environmental protection".The charity pointed to a report by the Environment Agency, released in 2020, which looked at how many breaches of environmental law there were on Red Tractor farms in the previous five years. The report concluded that these farms were "not currently an indicator of good environmental performance".After more than two years of investigation - one of the longest running - the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) upheld the complaint.It said that Red Tractor had failed to provide "sufficient evidence" that its farms met "basic" environmental laws and had a good environmental outcome to substantiate the claims in the ad.It also ruled that as a result the advert was "misleading" and "exaggerated" the benefits of the scheme.River Action welcomed the decision by the ASA and called on supermarkets to act."What this shows is that for their environmental credentials Red Tractor has been misleading the public and their supplies," said Amy Fairman, head of campaigns at River Action. "So, we're looking for suppliers like supermarkets to really examine and take stock of what is on their shelves."She added that challenging such adverts was important because of the pollution risk to the environment from agricultural pollution.In 2022, the Environment Audit Committee concluded that agriculture was one of the most common factors preventing rivers from being in good health - affecting 40% of them. The risks to the environment include from slurry and pesticide runoff.BBC News/Tony JolliffeAmy Fairman represents environmental charity River Action which campaigns for clean and healthy riversBut Red Tractor, which assures 45,000 farms in the UK, have pushed back strongly, calling the finding by the ASA "fundamentally flawed".Jim Mosley, CEO of Red Tractor, told the BBC: "They believe that we have implied an environmental claim. Nowhere in the voiceover or the imagery is any environmental claim actually made."He argued that the ASA only found a minority of people would think the advert meant Red Tractor farms had good environmental standards, and in fact the scheme is focused on other issues."Red Tractor's core purpose is food safety, animal welfare, and traceability. Whilst we have some environmental standards, they are a small part. And as a consequence, we leave that entirely to the Environment Agency to enforce environmental legislation," said Mr Moseley.When asked if that meant Red Tractor does not know if its farms are complying with environmental law, he said: "Correct".But many supermarkets do refer to the environmental benefits of Red Tractor farms.Natalie Smith, Tesco's head of agriculture said last month, on the 25-year anniversary of Red Tractor: "Certification schemes play a key role in providing reassurance for customers, and over the past 25 years, Red Tractor has established itself as a mark of quality, standing for… environmental protection."On Morrisons' website it states: "100% of the fresh pork, beef, lamb, poultry, milk and cheddar cheese we sell in our stores comes from farms certified by Red Tractor, or an approved equivalent scheme, giving customers assurance… environmental protection."Both supermarkets were asked if they stood by the Red Tractor logo.Morrisons did not respond to comment and Tesco referred the BBC to their industry body the British Retail Consortium.The consortium said that "retailers remain committed to working with Red Tractor", but that the organisation themselves are owners of the scheme.

Agriculture
Animals
Food

Tunnel Farming Helps South Dakota Farmers Extend Growing Season by up to 4 Months

Some farmers in South Dakota are using farm tunnels to extend their growing season

When snow covers the frozen ground, and most South Dakota farmers have sold or stored their products for the season, the operators of Cedar Creek Gardens are still able to grow vegetables and harvest a lucrative crop.Located in a remote area southwest of Murdo, about 12 miles south of Interstate 90, the sprawling farm is one of dozens in the state that utilize what are called farm tunnels to extend the planting and growing seasons.The tunnels are fortified above-ground hoop buildings covered in plastic that capture heat from the sun, creating a greenhouse effect. Many of the tunnels at Cedar Creek are covered with two separated layers of plastic and have fans that circulate warm air between the layers, creating even warmer growing conditions.The tunnels differ from greenhouses in that crops are grown directly into the soil rather than in raised boxes or beds, and they are watered from the ground up instead of from above.Cedar Creek is run by Peggy Martin and Bud Manke, who are business partners and good friends. Martin and Manke were some of the first South Dakota farmers to install tunnels after reading about them online in the early 2000s.“At first, we were just going to grow food for our families,” Martin said. “But it’s become a passion, and they (the tunnels) have helped us grow to what we are now.”Beyond extending the growing season by up to four months each year, the controlled weather conditions and targeted water use also allow them to produce top-quality, organically grown vegetables.One-pound tomatoes that are firm, filled with nutrients and free of blemishes. Banana peppers as long as bananas and so crisp they snap. Sweet onions the size of softballs. Kale plants that top 5 feet in height. Tunnels part of a diversified operation On their farm, they grow crops on 14 acres, have about 1,400 free-range laying chickens, and Manke raises cattle. The farm is dotted with about a dozen tunnel buildings, the largest of which are up to 14 feet tall, 30 feet wide and 200 feet long.Martin said the tunnels have enabled them to expand their farm and its output over the past 25 years and help them grow into the largest South Dakota specialty farming operation west of the Missouri River.Martin, Manke and the farmhands they hire grow a wide variety of seasonal produce, including tomatoes (the primary cash crop) as well as pumpkins, melons, sweet and green onions, red and green peppers, kale, cabbage, broccoli, sugar-snap peas, radishes, lettuce and zucchini.The foods they grow and raise are sold at area farm stands and farmer’s markets but also through a weekly wholesale business that serves West River grocery stores, restaurants and a buyer’s group.The tunnels have allowed them to plant vegetables as early as March and maintain growth of some hearty varieties for picking as late as mid-December. The first frost date in their region is typically around Sept. 15, Manke said.“There can be snow out here in the wintertime and it’s 20 degrees when the sun comes up, but it can be 100 degrees inside the tunnels,” Manke said. “It can actually get too hot sometimes, so we have to be careful and open things up.” Higher productivity, higher profits Martin did the math to show how the tunnels can increase productivity and profits.In a 200-foot tunnel, they can place three rows of 100 tomato plants, each of which can produce 40 pounds of fruit, more than double a typical household tomato plant, she said. At an average of $2.25 per pound, and even with 20% waste, that single tunnel can produce $21,600 of tomatoes in a single grow-out.Rachel Lawton, the South Dakota urban conservationist for the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Natural Resources Conservation Service, runs the federal program that provides financial assistance to qualified individuals and operations that want to install tunnel farms.Lawton, based in Sioux Falls, said the tunnels aren’t suitable for high-production farms that raise thousands of bushels of corn, soybeans or wheat. But they work well for specialty crop farmers or backyard gardeners who want to produce a stable, almost year-round crop of vegetables, she said.“The season extension with high tunnels is beneficial, but it’s even more beneficial when you look at the quality of produce they’re producing while also getting protection from wind, hail, frost, chemical drift and pests,” she said.NRCS accepts applications for financial assistance in development of tunnel gardens each fall, with recipients receiving up to 75% of the cost of a project, Lawton said. In addition, successful applicants receive NRCS help in developing a wider-ranging conservation plan for their commercial farms or home gardening projects, she said. Interest in tunnels growing in South Dakota Lawton said she has seen increased interest in tunnel farming in South Dakota in recent years.In recent years, the agency has provided funding for about 10 to 15 tunnels projects a year with money from the USDA Environmental Quality Incentive Program, or EQIP.The largest tunnels, up to about 3,000 square feet, can cost more than $20,000, though smaller tunnels with fewer amenities cost far less, Lawton said. Tunnels cannot be used for equipment storage or livestock handling, and NRCS applicants must own or rent land, be U.S. citizens and make less than $900,000 a year, she said.Lawton cautioned that people who consider construction of a tunnel should be aware that they require frequent maintenance and are susceptible to damage from the elements.“As wonderful and as cool as they are, I wouldn’t say they are the solution to everything,” she said. “There can be a lot of pitfalls and a lot of work if you aren’t an experienced grower.” Martin now a ‘resident expert’ on tunnels The tunnels come in three basic sizes, from “high tunnels” that are the tallest and widest to “caterpillar tunnels” that are shorter and more narrow to “low tunnels” which are light enough to lift and change positions quickly.Lawton refers to Martin as South Dakota’s “high tunnel resident expert” because she has more high tunnels than most South Dakota farmers and because she has more than two decades of operating them.Martin likens the tunnels to “problematic 2-year-old kids” that require patience and wisdom to manage properly. “You can’t just plant them and then leave home,” she said. “If there’s bad weather coming, you have to roll down the sides and get them buttoned up.”But for those who accept the hard work and risk, the payoff in extended growing time, improved quality of products and protection of natural resources can far outweigh those drawbacks, Lawton said. Conservation benefits include soil conservation and reduced water, pesticide and electricity use, she said.“You can do multiple successions of crops, and you have a better growing environment, which essentially translates into dollars because you can grow more and sell more or grow more food for your own family,” Lawton said. “It all starts with conservation, but the end product is something that is more efficient, more productive and more financially beneficial all at the same time.”This story was originally published by South Dakota News Watch and distributed through a partnership with The Associated Press.Copyright 2025 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.Photos You Should See – Oct. 2025

Agriculture
Business
Chemicals

Trump’s Tariffs Should Force a Reckoning With America’s Soy Industry

Usually, the best thing about being in the American soy business is the predictability. Buy seeds from the same companies, sow them, water them, harvest the crop, and sell to the same buyers who have been buying it for decades. The last few years have been particularly profitable, with historically high prices and a consistent client in China, the world’s biggest buyer of soy. The United States is the world’s second-biggest producer of soy, after Brazil, growing over 80 million acres of the oily bean across vast swathes of the country’s farmland. About a quarter of all that crop goes straight to China, bringing in $13.2 billion last year alone.Now that market is gone, as is any predictability. After the U.S. levied heavy tariffs on Chinese imports in April, China responded by refusing to buy American soy. That was in May. Now, with the American soy harvest nearing the end of its season, American farmers are panicking. As the global soy value chain rearranges in real time, Brazil has become China’s biggest supplier while Americans go hat in hand to small markets like Nigeria and Vietnam hoping to cut some deals. The Trump administration has hinted at a bailout. And, to add insult to injury, Argentina, which the administration just promised a $20 billion currency swap to rescue its flailing economy, is now selling shiploads of soy to China.This agricultural drama has been getting a lot of media attention over the past few weeks, in part because it is exemplary of the helter-skelter policymaking of the Trump administration and its unpredictable global implications. The bigger story about soy, though, isn’t the current trade war, but the fact we’re producing far too much of the crop—not so humans can eat it, but so animals can.In 1962, China’s per capita GDP was $71 and the average Chinese person ate about 9 pounds of meat per year. But as the country industrialized and urbanized in the wake of Deng Xiaoping’s economic reforms, increased consumer spending power fed a growing appetite for meat, especially pork. That, in turn, drove the country to pursue agricultural modernization, replacing smallholder farms with industrialized ones and embracing an “industrial meat regime” rooted in factory farming pork and poultry. In remaking its economy, China also remade its diet. Today, China’s per capita meat consumption is 154 pounds. The country has grown into the world’s biggest pork producer and pioneered massive pig production facilities like a 26-story mega-farm in Hubei province. Factory farming entails taking animals out of fields and growing them for the entirety of their lives in enclosed warehouses where their diets can be optimized to maximize quick growth for slaughter. But to feed all those animals, the fields need to be used to grow feed like corn and soy in massive quantities. China embraced soy production, but soon its demand for meat far outstripped its supply of available land. Today it imports 85 percent of the soy it uses, representing 60 percent of all global soy imports.While China’s embrace of a meat-heavy diet is remarkable in its speed and scale, it is only catching up to Europe, which has long practiced factory farming, and still lags the United States, which pioneered industrial animal farming and where per capita meat consumption is 220 pounds per year (and more if you count fish). The geographer Tony Weis calls the remaking of food systems to serve factory farming “meatification,” which entails diverting grain and oilseed production from human food toward animal feed. In the U.S., 35 percent of all corn and over 90 percent of soy becomes animal feed. In fact, 67 percent of all crops go to animal feed while 27 percent go directly to humans (the rest goes to biofuels). (Globally, 77 percent of all soy goes to animal feed; only 7 percent goes to human food like soy milk and tofu.) While this is inefficient and environmentally dubious, at least the U.S. can handle its domestic demand. The EU and China can’t. Hence the huge market for American soy abroad and Brazil’s and Argentina’s massive soy economies.As China’s demand for foreign soy grew, American farmers grew more of it: U.S. soy production and exports have double over the past 30 years, roughly tracking increases in Chinese meat consumption and soy demand for feed. The same was the case in Brazil. Importing soy amounts to offshoring demand for land. And that means offshoring deforestation. Most deforestation to create new soy farms takes place in South America. And with the U.S. cut off by China, Brazil is ending a moratorium on deforestation to cash in. This is just one of the many harms caused by a global appetite for meat. The recently-released “EAT–Lancet Commission on healthy, sustainable, and just food systems”—a collaboration between the Swedish food NGO EAT and the prestigious British medical journal The Lancet—shows that the global food system is outstripping planetary boundaries, driving unsustainable climate change, land use change, and eutrophication of water. The single biggest culprit by far is meat. China may have offshored deforestation, but its glut of factory farms have caused a series of crises at home as well, such as widespread pollution and animal disease outbreaks, including a swine fever epidemic in 2019 that killed tens of millions of animals.The irony here is that soy itself is an incredible crop and food. It’s hardy, adaptable, cheap to grow, and it fixes nitrogen in the soil, minimizing the need for fertilizer. The soybean is highly nutritious, packed with 35 percent protein and easy to cook or process into a variety of products, from oil and soy milk through to edamame, tofu, tempeh, and plant-based meats like Impossible burgers. This polyvalence and ease of use is precisely why it’s so widely used in animal feed. It’s just that feeding it to animals, beyond the environmental downsides, is inefficient. Any animal will consume far more calories and protein over its lifetime than it will yield as meat; the average pig will only yield about 9 percent the protein that it consumes. Eating soy directly requires far less soy (and land) than feeding it to animals. It’s not that soy is inherently harmful. It’s how we use it that’s harmful.Yes, American soy farmers are suffering. But we should take this moment to reflect on why we use so much American farmland to feed pigs both at home and in China, giving fuel to an environmentally destructive industry. How much soy we produce shouldn’t be a barometer for how well our agriculture sector is doing, but for how unsustainable it is.

Usually, the best thing about being in the American soy business is the predictability. Buy seeds from the same companies, sow them, water them, harvest the crop, and sell to the same buyers who have been buying it for decades. The last few years have been particularly profitable, with historically high prices and a consistent client in China, the world’s biggest buyer of soy. The United States is the world’s second-biggest producer of soy, after Brazil, growing over 80 million acres of the oily bean across vast swathes of the country’s farmland. About a quarter of all that crop goes straight to China, bringing in $13.2 billion last year alone.Now that market is gone, as is any predictability. After the U.S. levied heavy tariffs on Chinese imports in April, China responded by refusing to buy American soy. That was in May. Now, with the American soy harvest nearing the end of its season, American farmers are panicking. As the global soy value chain rearranges in real time, Brazil has become China’s biggest supplier while Americans go hat in hand to small markets like Nigeria and Vietnam hoping to cut some deals. The Trump administration has hinted at a bailout. And, to add insult to injury, Argentina, which the administration just promised a $20 billion currency swap to rescue its flailing economy, is now selling shiploads of soy to China.This agricultural drama has been getting a lot of media attention over the past few weeks, in part because it is exemplary of the helter-skelter policymaking of the Trump administration and its unpredictable global implications. The bigger story about soy, though, isn’t the current trade war, but the fact we’re producing far too much of the crop—not so humans can eat it, but so animals can.In 1962, China’s per capita GDP was $71 and the average Chinese person ate about 9 pounds of meat per year. But as the country industrialized and urbanized in the wake of Deng Xiaoping’s economic reforms, increased consumer spending power fed a growing appetite for meat, especially pork. That, in turn, drove the country to pursue agricultural modernization, replacing smallholder farms with industrialized ones and embracing an “industrial meat regime” rooted in factory farming pork and poultry. In remaking its economy, China also remade its diet. Today, China’s per capita meat consumption is 154 pounds. The country has grown into the world’s biggest pork producer and pioneered massive pig production facilities like a 26-story mega-farm in Hubei province. Factory farming entails taking animals out of fields and growing them for the entirety of their lives in enclosed warehouses where their diets can be optimized to maximize quick growth for slaughter. But to feed all those animals, the fields need to be used to grow feed like corn and soy in massive quantities. China embraced soy production, but soon its demand for meat far outstripped its supply of available land. Today it imports 85 percent of the soy it uses, representing 60 percent of all global soy imports.While China’s embrace of a meat-heavy diet is remarkable in its speed and scale, it is only catching up to Europe, which has long practiced factory farming, and still lags the United States, which pioneered industrial animal farming and where per capita meat consumption is 220 pounds per year (and more if you count fish). The geographer Tony Weis calls the remaking of food systems to serve factory farming “meatification,” which entails diverting grain and oilseed production from human food toward animal feed. In the U.S., 35 percent of all corn and over 90 percent of soy becomes animal feed. In fact, 67 percent of all crops go to animal feed while 27 percent go directly to humans (the rest goes to biofuels). (Globally, 77 percent of all soy goes to animal feed; only 7 percent goes to human food like soy milk and tofu.) While this is inefficient and environmentally dubious, at least the U.S. can handle its domestic demand. The EU and China can’t. Hence the huge market for American soy abroad and Brazil’s and Argentina’s massive soy economies.As China’s demand for foreign soy grew, American farmers grew more of it: U.S. soy production and exports have double over the past 30 years, roughly tracking increases in Chinese meat consumption and soy demand for feed. The same was the case in Brazil. Importing soy amounts to offshoring demand for land. And that means offshoring deforestation. Most deforestation to create new soy farms takes place in South America. And with the U.S. cut off by China, Brazil is ending a moratorium on deforestation to cash in. This is just one of the many harms caused by a global appetite for meat. The recently-released “EAT–Lancet Commission on healthy, sustainable, and just food systems”—a collaboration between the Swedish food NGO EAT and the prestigious British medical journal The Lancet—shows that the global food system is outstripping planetary boundaries, driving unsustainable climate change, land use change, and eutrophication of water. The single biggest culprit by far is meat. China may have offshored deforestation, but its glut of factory farms have caused a series of crises at home as well, such as widespread pollution and animal disease outbreaks, including a swine fever epidemic in 2019 that killed tens of millions of animals.The irony here is that soy itself is an incredible crop and food. It’s hardy, adaptable, cheap to grow, and it fixes nitrogen in the soil, minimizing the need for fertilizer. The soybean is highly nutritious, packed with 35 percent protein and easy to cook or process into a variety of products, from oil and soy milk through to edamame, tofu, tempeh, and plant-based meats like Impossible burgers. This polyvalence and ease of use is precisely why it’s so widely used in animal feed. It’s just that feeding it to animals, beyond the environmental downsides, is inefficient. Any animal will consume far more calories and protein over its lifetime than it will yield as meat; the average pig will only yield about 9 percent the protein that it consumes. Eating soy directly requires far less soy (and land) than feeding it to animals. It’s not that soy is inherently harmful. It’s how we use it that’s harmful.Yes, American soy farmers are suffering. But we should take this moment to reflect on why we use so much American farmland to feed pigs both at home and in China, giving fuel to an environmentally destructive industry. How much soy we produce shouldn’t be a barometer for how well our agriculture sector is doing, but for how unsustainable it is.

Agriculture
Animals
Business

When Is It Right to Kill a Wolf?

Usually, after a night of carnage, the phone rings early in the morning. It sounds first at the Departmental Directorate for Territorial Affairs, or DDT, in an eyesore of a governmental building on the outskirts of Digne, a small town nestled between the lavender fields of Provence and the sharp peaks of the Alps. The farmer on the line is usually distraught, recounting how many sheep were mauled and how the wolves attacked. Was there just one or a whole pack? Did they jump the electric fence, fight off the guard dogs? As the farmer tells his story, a government employee issues an alert, and the administrative procedure starts rolling.Sébastien Dubois takes it from there. As a royal wolf-catcher, Dubois is the latest in a centuries-long line of guardians entrusted by the rulers of France to rid the country of troublesome wolves. They did so in the 800s under the Emperor Charlemagne, and they do so in 2025 under the local prefects. Long gone are the gold-trimmed uniforms, the silver hunting knives, the throngs of hound dogs; now it’s technical outerwear, thermal cameras, high-tech rifles with night vision scopes—and tons of paperwork.Dubois starts his missions with paperwork, too. He does a background check: Does the farmer qualify for wolf-catchers’ protection? Does he have the appropriate authorizations? If all the boxes are checked, Dubois goes to the farm, sometimes hiking for hours to remote Alpine locations. He arrives long before sunset so that he can scout the terrain. He checks the weather, the direction of the wind, and the distance to the nearest woods. He checks the wolves’ tracks and the position of the neighboring houses. Then he waits.Often he stays out all night, always within 1,000 feet of the flock (the rules again). Usually, he hunts alone. He prefers it that way. It allows him to focus on the animal, immerse himself in its mind. “I shoot wolves, yes—that’s the job,” he told me. “But I respect them. We humans, we are fools compared to them. They are always one step ahead.”Most nights, he doesn’t fire a single shot. He strikes only when the wolves are close and about to attack. One time they were preparing to charge an exhausted sheepdog that had been barking up wolves every night for a week. “The dog was drained,” Dubois remembered. “It had lain down. And I saw the wolf; it was mid-attack. I think I shot it just before it pounced.”France is at a dangerous point. There is just too little land and too much bloody history for human-wolf relationships to be easily settled.With his slight frame, in jeans and a polo shirt, Dubois doesn’t look like someone you’d describe with the words “royal” or “wolf-catcher.” Yet over the last five years he has probably spent more than 100 nights hunting wolves, killing many. (He doesn’t like to keep count, he told me.) About 20 of those nights were at a farm owned by Julien Giraud, a stout, middle-aged man with a weathered face and hands cracked from years of fieldwork. When I visited in April, the place was postcard-perfect. Snowy peaks on the horizon framed rolling fields of shortly cropped lavender. The air smelled of dry grass and sun-heated soil. Dozens of sheep grazed behind an electric fence, watched over by a giant tan dog appropriately named Simba, Swahili for lion.The scene may have been peaceful, but Giraud’s voice was tense. Everything changed on June 16, 2019, he told me. More than 100 sheep killed in three nights—a massacre. When his daughter woke up for school, there were dead bodies all around the house. She was only four at the time. “It was horrible,” Giraud said. To protect the sheep, he started sleeping in his car, which he parked near the flock. In five months, he stayed home only a couple of times. He’s not sure why his wife hasn’t left him. “These dates are burned into my memory,” he said, and started to cry.That June, Dubois came over to Giraud’s farm many times. He slept in the car near the flock, too, so that Giraud could go home, get some rest. To the farmer, Dubois is a friend, a helping hand. Yet to many others, especially those on the political left, the wolf-catcher is a symbol of all things wrong: human dominance over nature, speciesism, pointless killings. There are about 1,700 wolf-catchers in France, and some have faced threats and hate mail, Dubois said. He asked me not to use his real name because he felt it would be too risky. He wanted to protect his family.Across Europe, conflicts over wolves have intensified in recent years, and the situation in France is particularly dire. You are either pro-wolf (protect it at all costs), or anti-wolf (get rid of it), with little in between. Fake news proliferates. Wolves have been used as a scapegoat for farmers’ struggles by French politicians, and as a bargaining chip during farmers’ protests. In the United States, tensions flared after wolves were reintroduced into Yellowstone National Park and then Idaho in the mid-1990s, after a decades-long absence. But there are less than half as many wolves in the contiguous United States and far more land. It’s possible to let them roam national parks and other nature preserves, where they’ll have little interaction with humans. “The situation in Europe is much more complicated,” said Dries Kuijper, a wildlife ecologist at the Polish Academy of Sciences. There’s just not enough space for humans and wolves to avoid each other. The land has to be shared.By the end of 2024, the Standing Committee of the Bern Convention approved the European Commission’s proposal to downgrade the wolf’s protection status at the international level, a ruling that went into effect in March 2025. In May, the EU changed another law, allowing member states greater flexibility in managing their wolf populations. And on September 23, the French government relaxed the rules governing when wolves may be shot. Starting in 2026, farmers will be allowed to kill wolves attacking their livestock without prior authorization—an announcement that was met with an outcry from environmental organizations. The changes are unlikely to fix the problem, however. In human-wildlife conflicts, of which European wolves are a classic case, “most efforts have focused on finding rational solutions,” said Alexandra Zimmermann, a conservation biologist at the University of Oxford. However, she pointed out, such conflicts don’t exist on the rational level alone; they go much deeper, into “the sense of not being heard, of identities clashing.” To her, France is at a dangerous point. There is just too little land and too much bloody history here for human-wolf relationships to be easily settled.In a world dominated by the inflammatory black-and-white discourse of social media, conflicts over wolves are a perfect tool to polarize people even further for political gain: to draw them, outraged, to one side or the other.While there are many human-wildlife conflicts across the globe, those involving wolves are among the hardest to solve, Zimmermann said. They have arisen in Wisconsin, in Montana, in India—and now, more frequently and perhaps intensely than anywhere else, in Europe. Humans have a long history with wolves, full of myths, stories, misunderstandings, and violence. The fact that our best friend, the dog, descends directly from the Big Bad Wolf only fuels this love-hate relationship. And in a world dominated by the inflammatory black-and-white discourse of social media, conflicts over wolves are a perfect tool to polarize people even further for political gain: to draw them, outraged, to one side or the other.The gray wolf appeared in Europe about 400,000 years ago, then crossed to North America over the Bering Land Bridge, which linked the continents during ice ages. The species was remarkably successful. Split into over 30 subspecies, from the bulky Yukon wolf to the slender Arabian, it has colonized the Northern Hemisphere. Roughly 40,000 to 15,000 years ago, some wolves became dogs, either because humans selected the docile ones as companions or because certain wolves domesticated themselves for easy access to leftover food.Things were more or less OK on the human-wolf front as long as Homo sapiens stuck to hunting and gathering. Once our ancestors started farming, though, wolves became a problem—especially considering that livestock was often guarded by children. Add rabies into the mix, a disease that makes wolves more aggressive, and it just went downhill. Sheep got killed. Kids got killed. So we told stories of Red Riding Hood, of the Three Little Pigs, teaching children that wolves are to be feared. “A lot of narratives have been built around that, and they are perpetuated to this day,” observed Ugo Arbieu, a social ecologist at the Paris-Saclay University.In ancient Greece, prizes for killing wolves were offered as early as the sixth century BCE. In Rome, hunters called luparii scattered poisoned meatballs to rid the countryside of wolves, but the practice was likely uncommon. At the time, the wolf was often admired in Europe. The Romans believed the founders of their city were nursed by a she-wolf. Then Christianity changed everything with its idea of Jesus as the lamb of God. The wolf became a symbol of evil, a threat to the holy flock—and the hunting began in earnest.The institution of the royal wolf-catcher was created in France by Emperor Charlemagne, a devout Christian. Depending on whom you ask, it happened either in 812 or 813, which makes wolf-catchers one of the oldest branches of the French administration. The position was paid: first in grain from royal coffers, then in bounty collected from villagers for each beast killed, a practice that soon led to abuses and conflicts. The hunts were often grand affairs, with horses, packs of dogs, horns, and nets. Some wolf-catchers had at least a dozen servants, including, at one point, a baker for the hunting dogs’ bread. By the dawn of the French Revolution, the institution cost the country dearly: the equivalent of five years of a mason’s salary to kill a single wolf. And so it was abolished. Napoleon brought wolf-catchers back, but with more regulation. In 1815, for instance, the official uniform was decreed to be blue, with velvet cuffs trimmed in gold and yellow metal buttons embossed with a wolf. The position was strictly voluntary.By the 1930s, effectively no wolves were left in France, however, and very few in the rest of Europe. (In the lower 48 U.S. states, wolves were nearly decimated by the 1960s.) They were driven to extinction by habitat loss, poaching, and, yes, wolf-catchers. Yet bizarrely, the positions survived, as wolf-catchers took to chasing deer off crops instead. The only thing wolf-related was their name—and the buttons on their uniforms.Contrary to rumors circulating online, the government didn’t release the wolves, they returned on their own. Once legal protection was introduced in 1979 under the Bern Convention, and then in 1992 under the Habitats Directive, the wolves that still survived in pockets of Europe, in Italy, in Poland, in the Balkans, returned to their old territories. A single wolf can settle more than 900 miles from its birthplace. “We’ve found wolves that were born in Croatia, traveled through Slovenia and Austria before settling in Italy, in only 98 days,” Arbieu said.There are now more than 20,000 wolves across 23 EU countries. (In the contiguous United States, there are around 8,000.) In France, the official number for 2024 was 1,013, up from zero in 1991. Yet Adrian Treves, an environmental scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, doesn’t like such precise numbers. “To give the public one number is to treat the public like idiots,” he explained. “We never know the exact number of wolves. Never.”Wolf packs are fluid; individual wolves join and leave, walking long distances. Their nighttime habits and their tendency to avoid humans make counting them hard. To get some idea of the numbers, scientists use camera traps, which take photos of passing animals, track wolves via radio collars, and genetically sample wolf poop. In the winter, they use snow-track surveys, following paw prints in the snow. And in the summer, to count the litters of pups, they howl.Jérémy Lopez, the head of the pastoralism unit at Digne’s Departmental Directorate for Territorial Affairs, whose name fittingly derives from Latin for wolf, found himself in the middle of a howling survey in 2019. “It was very strange,” he told me. There were several teams trained to imitate wolves, spread out across Alpine slopes. After the sun set, the humans started howling, each person going on for about 30 seconds. Lopez joined, too. “It looked like a bunch of people hanging about trying to sound like wolves, with traffic cones for megaphones,” he laughed. Then, the wolves responded: first one pack, then another. “We ended up in the middle of two packs answering each other, and that went on for like 45 minutes,” Lopez said. It was at once silly, awesome, and humbling.While howling surveys may seem bizarre, they are commonly used to count wolf packs and their litters. Although the howls of adult wolves blend together into one voice, the pups can’t howl, and yelp instead. Such yelps can be counted, giving researchers an idea of how fast the animals are breeding.And they do breed fast, at least in Europe. The numbers of wolves across the continent, as imprecise as they may be, are up more than 50 percent over a decade. In Germany, between 2015 and 2023, the number of wolf packs increased over four times. For some, that breeds fear. What also breeds fear are media reports on wolf attacks, many of them inaccurate. A 2021 study by Arbieu and his colleagues found that articles in which the victim was allegedly bitten by a wolf tend to be more misleading—the headlines exaggerated and sensational—than those describing dog attacks.Elia Pergolizzi, a cattle farmer with large blue eyes and a large crease between them, doesn’t hide her fear of wolves. Since the attacks on her farm, which is north of Digne, started several years ago, she dreams of wolves, of hunting. “It’s fascination mixed with terror,” she said. As we talked over coffee at her wooden dining table, Pergolizzi kept getting up and walking to the wall of windows overlooking a gently sloping Alpine meadow beyond her house, dotted with rust-colored cows. Her daughter was playing out there on her own, and Pergolizzi was worried. With wolves, you just never know.Over the past decades, no humans were killed by wolves in Europe. That’s not to say it couldn’t happen. Europeans did fall victim to wolves’ jaws in the past, as evidenced by data from parish death registries. There were plenty of legends, too, such as that of La bête de Touraine, a monster of a wolf that supposedly terrorized France sometime in the late seventeenth century. It was said to have devoured more than 250 people.Folktales aside, such a fate likely wasn’t common. French historian Jean-Marc Moriceau calculated, based on public and private archive records, that wolves in France claimed only about 18 victims per year over five centuries, starting in 1575. What’s more, research suggests that rabies, which was widespread in seventeenth-century France, might have been responsible for many of the attacks—and tales of monster wolves. Yet France has been rabies-free since 2001, and the disease is now very rare across the rest of Europe, too. No rabies, no monsters.While modern Europeans are unlikely to fall victim to wolves, that’s not the case for their livestock. In 2023, wolves killed more than 10,000 farm animals in France, about a fifth of the total number of those killed across the union. That’s between two and three sheep, cows, or goats per wolf—and much more than claimed by their American cousins. (In Montana, which has an estimated wolf population of 1,096, only 31 cattle and sheep were killed in 2023.)Yet, taken alone, these numbers still don’t explain the ferocity of the European war on the wolf. For one, in absolute terms, 56,000 mauled farm animals is not that much—there are 271 million livestock in the EU. And two, farmers do get reimbursed for their losses. “Per sheep, it’s now somewhere around 260 euros,” Lopez said, “which is in general above market value.” The government also pays for indirect damages: the loss of genetic material, the stress to the rest of the flock that can result in miscarriages or lower output of milk. In 2024, wolves cost the French government about 43,000 euros per wolf in compensation to farmers and grants for livestock protection measures, such as electric fences.Julien Giraud appreciates the compensation he gets for the sheep he loses to wolves. Yet he believes that all this talk about money misses the point. “People say, ‘You’re compensated—what are you whining about?’ But until you’ve experienced it, people can’t understand,” he said. For him, it’s about the trauma of seeing your sheep gutted and bleeding all over your fields. It’s about having to finish them off to end their suffering. It’s about feeling alone with that trauma and about no one listening, really listening. It’s about governments making decisions up there in Paris and Brussels and pushing them onto farmers like him. “It’s not about the money,” he told me, shaking his head.Between 2022 and 2024, farmers’ frustration erupted into protests across Europe. In Switzerland, to decry the return of the wolf, farmers dumped dead sheep in front of a government building. In the Netherlands, they performed mock wolf hangings. In western France, pro-wolf protesters faced anti-wolf protesters. The protests weren’t just about the wolves, of course. In each country, the reasons behind the unrest were different, but there were common threads: discontent with low food prices paired with high price tags for fertilizer and feed, concerns about cheap imports of farm products from outside the EU, resentment over tightening environmental rules, and, above all, frustration with low incomes. “Farmers feel that they are stuck in liberalized markets on which they have to produce for the lowest price possible,” explained Jeroen Candel, a political scientist at Wageningen University in the Netherlands. “They have relatively little bargaining power vis-à-vis retailers and food processors.”Two triggers for the protests were the new Common Agricultural Policy, formally passed in January 2023, and the European Green Deal. In order to make the continent’s agriculture more planet-friendly, these policies required farmers to set aside more land to support biodiversity, rotate crops, and reduce pesticide use, all while adding red tape. To many farmers, it sounded like making a tough life even tougher.As Europe was due for elections to the European Parliament in June 2024, favorable policies were exchanged for electoral support, Candel said. Environmental legislation turned into “a new political cleavage both within the member states and in Brussels, where especially the conservatives and right-wing groups portray the Green Deal as a leftish, elitist project,” he said. A study of German online media revealed that the far-right populist party Alternative for Germany, or AfD, made the wolf its campaign issue. In readers’ comments, being anti-wolf was strongly linked to anti-EU sentiments and to a belief in conspiracies by “elites,” such as scientists falsifying data to encourage nature protection. In 2019, Julia Klöckner, then a minister of agriculture from the German Christian Democratic Union party, called the wolf “a campaign booster for the AfD.” The predator became a symbol of an urban hobby that threatens farmers’ livelihoods, a symbol of left versus right, of nature versus human. “Wolves are very high in symbolism,” said Fabien Quétier, the head of landscapes at Rewilding Europe, a nonprofit.The EU changed the law to make killing wolves easier apparently to placate farmers and preserve “rural livelihoods.” Some critics said that the move was not really about the farmers, but the result of a personal vendetta of Ursula von der Leyen, the European Commission president, whose beloved pony, Dolly, was killed in 2022 by a wolf in Beinhorn, Germany. Later, von der Leyen was quoted as saying that European wolves had “become a real danger for livestock and potentially also for humans.” Many researchers and environmental NGOs were appalled by the weakened protections, calling them a “major blow to science.” Wolves are not the enemy, they said—they bring important benefits to both nature and humanity. Take road accidents, for example. A study in Wisconsin showed that wolves make roads safer: Their presence in the state reduced collisions with deer by almost a quarter. It’s not simply that wolves eat prey so that there are fewer deer caught in literal headlights. With large predators around, the prey “start behaving differently,” Kuijper said. Deer, moose, and boars have to be on a constant lookout, which also includes paying more attention while crossing roads.Fear also forces prey to avoid spots where they may be exposed to danger, with benefits to biodiversity. “If you don’t have any predators, deer can just walk wherever they like, and they go to the places with the best food. Once you add a predator to the system, they don’t do that anymore,” Kuijper said. As a result, some parts of forests are intensely browsed by deer, while others are left to flourish. In Wisconsin, one study showed, areas inhabited by wolves are particularly rich in shrubs and wildflowers, from honeysuckles and hazelnuts to bog orchids and bluebead lilies. The differences are obvious to the naked eye: Compared to forests teeming with wolves, areas without them look as if someone had mowed down the vegetation.Yet the problem with downgrading protection of wolves, critics say, is not simply that these predators benefit ecosystems; it’s also that killing them often does little to actually protect farms (even if you wiped them all out, other predators would likely replace them). Slovakia is a case in point. A study in this central European country found no relationship between the number of wolves hunted down and the number of sheep lost by farmers. In France, the results of similar studies were mixed. On three sites, killing wolves brought the desired effects (sheep spared); on five sites, there were no effects; and on one site, the hunting actually backfired, with more livestock devoured by wolves.That is less impossible than it may seem. Wolves hunt best when they do so in large, intact packs. Kill a few individuals, and the packs break up, making the remaining wolves less efficient. “Like in a sports team, if you remove one or two members, the team will not function as it used to,” Treves said. Livestock make for easier prey than wild animals do, and so that’s what the wolves from broken packs go for.Scientists and NGOs argue that instead of simply killing wolves, we should focus on nonlethal control options, such as electric fencing, guard dogs, and shepherds. “If you don’t protect livestock, you can forget about preventing conflicts with wolves,” Kuijper said. One effective technique is fladry—a rope with flags that flutter in the wind, scaring off wolves. Electric fencing works, too, but it cuts through landscapes, preventing wildlife from moving freely. To complicate matters, wolves are fast learners. Fences can be jumped over or dug under. In one study, fladry worked for two months, and then it didn’t: The wolves figured out thxat it was just flapping cloth.Jérôme Bach, a livestock farmer north of Digne, believes that if you want to protect livestock, guard dogs are a great option. “You have to have dogs. If you don’t, the wolves will realize quickly it’s an all-you-can-eat buffet,” he said. A decade ago, Bach quit the circus where he worked as a juggler, took his beloved sidekick, a border collie, and started herding sheep. He liked the idea of being alone in nature. Now he is still in nature, but less alone. He lives with his wife and four kids on a farm in a community where everyone knows each other. He breeds guard dogs for local farmers and assists with training.On the day I visited, Bach’s barn smelled of fresh hay. Among a group of brown goats, three cream Anatolian shepherd puppies played with an empty bucket, their thick legs uncertain on a carpet of straw. They were born here, right within the herd. To be a good guardian, Bach tells me, a dog has to identify with the herd—not as a sheep or as a goat, but as their family. “Before his eyes even open, he hears the sounds of sheep, the sounds of goats, and he smells them,” Bach said. The dog gets attached to livestock, and his protective instincts, hardwired within the breed, kick in. If one day a wolf approaches the herd, the dog will feel the sheep’s distress—and he will do anything to protect them. One time, Bach heard sheep bells in the middle of the night, going off in every direction. He jumped out of bed and ran outside in his underwear. “The dogs were going wild,” he said. They barked, and they won. The wolves gave up.Yet guard dogs are not a perfect solution. The wolves often outsmart them, tricking the dogs to follow one predator while the rest of the pack attacks in a different spot. In direct combat, the dogs lose. They bother neighbors. They attack hikers. What’s more, they cost a lot of money and time. “It adds a lot of work. It’s really restrictive for us. And we already have a lot to do,” Bach said, shaking his head. Bach, like Giraud, like Pergolizzi, simply feels tired. Tired and ignored. “I’m worn out, both physically and mentally,” Pergolizzi said.For Zimmermann, these feelings—the exhaustion, the frustration, the sadness—mean that the whole discussion of the pluses and minuses of different methods of controlling wolves misses the point. It’s not about the efficacy of fladry versus fencing, or whether shooting a certain number of wolves would limit attacks. Using ideas from peace-building, Zimmermann and her colleagues identified three levels of human-wildlife conflict. The first, and the mildest, is when things are just beginning to stir, when people are still willing to talk, and practical measures such as fencing can fix the problem. That’s where human-elephant conflicts in northeast India stand. At level two, the waters become muddier: Some hurtful things were said in the past, other things were not done, and resentment is growing. At level three, the conflict becomes about identities, not animals. You know when you’ve hit level three when people start using polarized language, when they talk about threats to their way of life, about not being heard. “There is deliberate blaming of each other, hostility, completely different realities,” Zimmermann said. That’s wolves in Europe. “Wolves do seem to be an extreme case, where they’re more polarizing than any other wildlife that we’ve studied,” Treves observed.Trying to solve a level-three conflict as if it were a level-one may be self-defeating. Rational fixes come naturally to conservation scientists, Zimmermann said, but you may end up stomping on that sense of not being heard. Say an NGO turns up and tells farmers that it’s found the perfect new solar fence that is going to solve all their problems—“They will not be impressed. It’s clumsy,” she said. “The farmers might feel that they have not been heard on this, that they are always being told what to do by the scientists.” This may also explain why research shows that compensation for wolf-inflicted damages often does little to increase acceptance of these predators, and sometimes even adds fuel to the fire. “In decision-making circles, they look down on us,” Pergolizzi said. “Because for us, this is our life. It’s not just a financial matter. It’s not just, ‘Oh, I lost an animal, and it cost me this much.’ I don’t care about that—they paid me for it. It’s not about the money. It’s about physical and psychological integrity. And it goes deep. It goes very, very deep.”Pergolizzi is not your stereotypical right-wing farmer. She is anti-pesticide and worries about climate. Her house is dotted with organic products. She produces meat, but tells people to eat less of it: In her view, meat should be nature’s gift, celebrated on special occasions. In the wolf debate, she feels she is caught in between the conservative rural right and the green urban left.She didn’t believe in shooting wolves—until a few years ago, that is, when she saw one of her pregnant cows disemboweled by wolves. The cow was still alive, licking her dead calf. “I had a lot of nightmares after that,” she said. Last year, the attacks started again, even though she changed her farming practices and built a shed where the cows could calve indoors. And so she called DDT in Dinge, and a wolf-catcher came. He stayed one night, then another. He observed. It was always the same pack, and the same wolf that would initiate the attacks. So he shot that wolf, and the attacks ended. But Pergolizzi was still shaken. She felt it was a deep moral failure that she couldn’t keep her animals safe. “Psychologically, it was terrible,” she said. That’s why one day Dubois turned up at her doorstep with a psychologist. He saw that she needed to talk.Sometimes Dubois plays the therapist himself. “I’ve seen farmers—tough guys, hardened types—who’ve been holding it together for months, but when I called them, I found them in tears,” Dubois said. “There are farmers—the wolves have broken something in them. We’ve seen it happen. Sometimes the wolf-catcher goes to meet the farmer before a nighttime patrol and never leaves. He stays to talk for hours.”When Lopez interviews candidates who want to be wolf-catchers (their term is five years, but can be renewed), he tries to weed out “would-be cowboys,” he said. He is looking for people who have a sense of duty toward their community. “We don’t only ask them to go and be good shooters. We also ask them to be our eyes and ears in the field … to call the farmers, spend a couple of minutes talking with them, see how they’re doing.”Talking and listening are also at the heart of mediation—one thing that, according to Zimmermann, can actually help solve human-wildlife conflicts that have reached level three. “You really need to start bringing in people who know how to resolve conflicts, do mediation work—that’s a completely different skill set from your classic natural scientist,” she explained. Such mediators need to get to the bottom of things. Is it about cheap food imports from outside the continent? Is it about subsidies going to the wrong places? Or is it about feeling ignored? In Denmark, “The Wolf Dialogue Project,” which involved a group of people from across the political spectrum, took over two years, but ended up reducing polarization and producing several potential solutions to test, such as DNA identification of problem wolves. A similar approach, based on a method called Multicriteria Decision Analysis, showed promise in Italy.But mediation can be scary. You have to let the other side suggest solutions, even if that solution is shooting wolves. “Without even allowing that to be discussed, you are never going to get further anyway,” Zimmermann said. Simply considering shooting as an option could bring people closer—and maybe, just maybe, when people feel they’ve been heard, a compromise might emerge.Pergolizzi accepts that sometimes wolves may need to be shot, even though she doesn’t like the idea. “I’m not anti-wolf, despite everything. If I see one among my cows and I can legally kill it, I will. But I would really like us to talk about this—about the killing, about that violence—because it’s part of nature, too,” she said. She feels that, so far, there is not much real discussion about wolves in France, just two sides shouting at each other. “What exhausted me was feeling judged, unsupported, misunderstood,” she said. Everything is black and white, and so polarized. “It’s insane,” she added.But nature is not black and white—just like the wolf, it’s all about shades of gray. Yes, nature is wild, it’s beautiful, it’s free—but it’s violent, too. Nature is full of complexity, Pergolizzi said, and that complexity is what we need right now in the public discourse on wolves. “There is no easy solution,” she reflected. “We just need to understand each other.” The phone at Digne’s DDT keeps ringing.

Usually, after a night of carnage, the phone rings early in the morning. It sounds first at the Departmental Directorate for Territorial Affairs, or DDT, in an eyesore of a governmental building on the outskirts of Digne, a small town nestled between the lavender fields of Provence and the sharp peaks of the Alps. The farmer on the line is usually distraught, recounting how many sheep were mauled and how the wolves attacked. Was there just one or a whole pack? Did they jump the electric fence, fight off the guard dogs? As the farmer tells his story, a government employee issues an alert, and the administrative procedure starts rolling.Sébastien Dubois takes it from there. As a royal wolf-catcher, Dubois is the latest in a centuries-long line of guardians entrusted by the rulers of France to rid the country of troublesome wolves. They did so in the 800s under the Emperor Charlemagne, and they do so in 2025 under the local prefects. Long gone are the gold-trimmed uniforms, the silver hunting knives, the throngs of hound dogs; now it’s technical outerwear, thermal cameras, high-tech rifles with night vision scopes—and tons of paperwork.Dubois starts his missions with paperwork, too. He does a background check: Does the farmer qualify for wolf-catchers’ protection? Does he have the appropriate authorizations? If all the boxes are checked, Dubois goes to the farm, sometimes hiking for hours to remote Alpine locations. He arrives long before sunset so that he can scout the terrain. He checks the weather, the direction of the wind, and the distance to the nearest woods. He checks the wolves’ tracks and the position of the neighboring houses. Then he waits.Often he stays out all night, always within 1,000 feet of the flock (the rules again). Usually, he hunts alone. He prefers it that way. It allows him to focus on the animal, immerse himself in its mind. “I shoot wolves, yes—that’s the job,” he told me. “But I respect them. We humans, we are fools compared to them. They are always one step ahead.”Most nights, he doesn’t fire a single shot. He strikes only when the wolves are close and about to attack. One time they were preparing to charge an exhausted sheepdog that had been barking up wolves every night for a week. “The dog was drained,” Dubois remembered. “It had lain down. And I saw the wolf; it was mid-attack. I think I shot it just before it pounced.”France is at a dangerous point. There is just too little land and too much bloody history for human-wolf relationships to be easily settled.With his slight frame, in jeans and a polo shirt, Dubois doesn’t look like someone you’d describe with the words “royal” or “wolf-catcher.” Yet over the last five years he has probably spent more than 100 nights hunting wolves, killing many. (He doesn’t like to keep count, he told me.) About 20 of those nights were at a farm owned by Julien Giraud, a stout, middle-aged man with a weathered face and hands cracked from years of fieldwork. When I visited in April, the place was postcard-perfect. Snowy peaks on the horizon framed rolling fields of shortly cropped lavender. The air smelled of dry grass and sun-heated soil. Dozens of sheep grazed behind an electric fence, watched over by a giant tan dog appropriately named Simba, Swahili for lion.The scene may have been peaceful, but Giraud’s voice was tense. Everything changed on June 16, 2019, he told me. More than 100 sheep killed in three nights—a massacre. When his daughter woke up for school, there were dead bodies all around the house. She was only four at the time. “It was horrible,” Giraud said. To protect the sheep, he started sleeping in his car, which he parked near the flock. In five months, he stayed home only a couple of times. He’s not sure why his wife hasn’t left him. “These dates are burned into my memory,” he said, and started to cry.That June, Dubois came over to Giraud’s farm many times. He slept in the car near the flock, too, so that Giraud could go home, get some rest. To the farmer, Dubois is a friend, a helping hand. Yet to many others, especially those on the political left, the wolf-catcher is a symbol of all things wrong: human dominance over nature, speciesism, pointless killings. There are about 1,700 wolf-catchers in France, and some have faced threats and hate mail, Dubois said. He asked me not to use his real name because he felt it would be too risky. He wanted to protect his family.Across Europe, conflicts over wolves have intensified in recent years, and the situation in France is particularly dire. You are either pro-wolf (protect it at all costs), or anti-wolf (get rid of it), with little in between. Fake news proliferates. Wolves have been used as a scapegoat for farmers’ struggles by French politicians, and as a bargaining chip during farmers’ protests. In the United States, tensions flared after wolves were reintroduced into Yellowstone National Park and then Idaho in the mid-1990s, after a decades-long absence. But there are less than half as many wolves in the contiguous United States and far more land. It’s possible to let them roam national parks and other nature preserves, where they’ll have little interaction with humans. “The situation in Europe is much more complicated,” said Dries Kuijper, a wildlife ecologist at the Polish Academy of Sciences. There’s just not enough space for humans and wolves to avoid each other. The land has to be shared.By the end of 2024, the Standing Committee of the Bern Convention approved the European Commission’s proposal to downgrade the wolf’s protection status at the international level, a ruling that went into effect in March 2025. In May, the EU changed another law, allowing member states greater flexibility in managing their wolf populations. And on September 23, the French government relaxed the rules governing when wolves may be shot. Starting in 2026, farmers will be allowed to kill wolves attacking their livestock without prior authorization—an announcement that was met with an outcry from environmental organizations. The changes are unlikely to fix the problem, however. In human-wildlife conflicts, of which European wolves are a classic case, “most efforts have focused on finding rational solutions,” said Alexandra Zimmermann, a conservation biologist at the University of Oxford. However, she pointed out, such conflicts don’t exist on the rational level alone; they go much deeper, into “the sense of not being heard, of identities clashing.” To her, France is at a dangerous point. There is just too little land and too much bloody history here for human-wolf relationships to be easily settled.In a world dominated by the inflammatory black-and-white discourse of social media, conflicts over wolves are a perfect tool to polarize people even further for political gain: to draw them, outraged, to one side or the other.While there are many human-wildlife conflicts across the globe, those involving wolves are among the hardest to solve, Zimmermann said. They have arisen in Wisconsin, in Montana, in India—and now, more frequently and perhaps intensely than anywhere else, in Europe. Humans have a long history with wolves, full of myths, stories, misunderstandings, and violence. The fact that our best friend, the dog, descends directly from the Big Bad Wolf only fuels this love-hate relationship. And in a world dominated by the inflammatory black-and-white discourse of social media, conflicts over wolves are a perfect tool to polarize people even further for political gain: to draw them, outraged, to one side or the other.The gray wolf appeared in Europe about 400,000 years ago, then crossed to North America over the Bering Land Bridge, which linked the continents during ice ages. The species was remarkably successful. Split into over 30 subspecies, from the bulky Yukon wolf to the slender Arabian, it has colonized the Northern Hemisphere. Roughly 40,000 to 15,000 years ago, some wolves became dogs, either because humans selected the docile ones as companions or because certain wolves domesticated themselves for easy access to leftover food.Things were more or less OK on the human-wolf front as long as Homo sapiens stuck to hunting and gathering. Once our ancestors started farming, though, wolves became a problem—especially considering that livestock was often guarded by children. Add rabies into the mix, a disease that makes wolves more aggressive, and it just went downhill. Sheep got killed. Kids got killed. So we told stories of Red Riding Hood, of the Three Little Pigs, teaching children that wolves are to be feared. “A lot of narratives have been built around that, and they are perpetuated to this day,” observed Ugo Arbieu, a social ecologist at the Paris-Saclay University.In ancient Greece, prizes for killing wolves were offered as early as the sixth century BCE. In Rome, hunters called luparii scattered poisoned meatballs to rid the countryside of wolves, but the practice was likely uncommon. At the time, the wolf was often admired in Europe. The Romans believed the founders of their city were nursed by a she-wolf. Then Christianity changed everything with its idea of Jesus as the lamb of God. The wolf became a symbol of evil, a threat to the holy flock—and the hunting began in earnest.The institution of the royal wolf-catcher was created in France by Emperor Charlemagne, a devout Christian. Depending on whom you ask, it happened either in 812 or 813, which makes wolf-catchers one of the oldest branches of the French administration. The position was paid: first in grain from royal coffers, then in bounty collected from villagers for each beast killed, a practice that soon led to abuses and conflicts. The hunts were often grand affairs, with horses, packs of dogs, horns, and nets. Some wolf-catchers had at least a dozen servants, including, at one point, a baker for the hunting dogs’ bread. By the dawn of the French Revolution, the institution cost the country dearly: the equivalent of five years of a mason’s salary to kill a single wolf. And so it was abolished. Napoleon brought wolf-catchers back, but with more regulation. In 1815, for instance, the official uniform was decreed to be blue, with velvet cuffs trimmed in gold and yellow metal buttons embossed with a wolf. The position was strictly voluntary.By the 1930s, effectively no wolves were left in France, however, and very few in the rest of Europe. (In the lower 48 U.S. states, wolves were nearly decimated by the 1960s.) They were driven to extinction by habitat loss, poaching, and, yes, wolf-catchers. Yet bizarrely, the positions survived, as wolf-catchers took to chasing deer off crops instead. The only thing wolf-related was their name—and the buttons on their uniforms.Contrary to rumors circulating online, the government didn’t release the wolves, they returned on their own. Once legal protection was introduced in 1979 under the Bern Convention, and then in 1992 under the Habitats Directive, the wolves that still survived in pockets of Europe, in Italy, in Poland, in the Balkans, returned to their old territories. A single wolf can settle more than 900 miles from its birthplace. “We’ve found wolves that were born in Croatia, traveled through Slovenia and Austria before settling in Italy, in only 98 days,” Arbieu said.There are now more than 20,000 wolves across 23 EU countries. (In the contiguous United States, there are around 8,000.) In France, the official number for 2024 was 1,013, up from zero in 1991. Yet Adrian Treves, an environmental scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, doesn’t like such precise numbers. “To give the public one number is to treat the public like idiots,” he explained. “We never know the exact number of wolves. Never.”Wolf packs are fluid; individual wolves join and leave, walking long distances. Their nighttime habits and their tendency to avoid humans make counting them hard. To get some idea of the numbers, scientists use camera traps, which take photos of passing animals, track wolves via radio collars, and genetically sample wolf poop. In the winter, they use snow-track surveys, following paw prints in the snow. And in the summer, to count the litters of pups, they howl.Jérémy Lopez, the head of the pastoralism unit at Digne’s Departmental Directorate for Territorial Affairs, whose name fittingly derives from Latin for wolf, found himself in the middle of a howling survey in 2019. “It was very strange,” he told me. There were several teams trained to imitate wolves, spread out across Alpine slopes. After the sun set, the humans started howling, each person going on for about 30 seconds. Lopez joined, too. “It looked like a bunch of people hanging about trying to sound like wolves, with traffic cones for megaphones,” he laughed. Then, the wolves responded: first one pack, then another. “We ended up in the middle of two packs answering each other, and that went on for like 45 minutes,” Lopez said. It was at once silly, awesome, and humbling.While howling surveys may seem bizarre, they are commonly used to count wolf packs and their litters. Although the howls of adult wolves blend together into one voice, the pups can’t howl, and yelp instead. Such yelps can be counted, giving researchers an idea of how fast the animals are breeding.And they do breed fast, at least in Europe. The numbers of wolves across the continent, as imprecise as they may be, are up more than 50 percent over a decade. In Germany, between 2015 and 2023, the number of wolf packs increased over four times. For some, that breeds fear. What also breeds fear are media reports on wolf attacks, many of them inaccurate. A 2021 study by Arbieu and his colleagues found that articles in which the victim was allegedly bitten by a wolf tend to be more misleading—the headlines exaggerated and sensational—than those describing dog attacks.Elia Pergolizzi, a cattle farmer with large blue eyes and a large crease between them, doesn’t hide her fear of wolves. Since the attacks on her farm, which is north of Digne, started several years ago, she dreams of wolves, of hunting. “It’s fascination mixed with terror,” she said. As we talked over coffee at her wooden dining table, Pergolizzi kept getting up and walking to the wall of windows overlooking a gently sloping Alpine meadow beyond her house, dotted with rust-colored cows. Her daughter was playing out there on her own, and Pergolizzi was worried. With wolves, you just never know.Over the past decades, no humans were killed by wolves in Europe. That’s not to say it couldn’t happen. Europeans did fall victim to wolves’ jaws in the past, as evidenced by data from parish death registries. There were plenty of legends, too, such as that of La bête de Touraine, a monster of a wolf that supposedly terrorized France sometime in the late seventeenth century. It was said to have devoured more than 250 people.Folktales aside, such a fate likely wasn’t common. French historian Jean-Marc Moriceau calculated, based on public and private archive records, that wolves in France claimed only about 18 victims per year over five centuries, starting in 1575. What’s more, research suggests that rabies, which was widespread in seventeenth-century France, might have been responsible for many of the attacks—and tales of monster wolves. Yet France has been rabies-free since 2001, and the disease is now very rare across the rest of Europe, too. No rabies, no monsters.While modern Europeans are unlikely to fall victim to wolves, that’s not the case for their livestock. In 2023, wolves killed more than 10,000 farm animals in France, about a fifth of the total number of those killed across the union. That’s between two and three sheep, cows, or goats per wolf—and much more than claimed by their American cousins. (In Montana, which has an estimated wolf population of 1,096, only 31 cattle and sheep were killed in 2023.)Yet, taken alone, these numbers still don’t explain the ferocity of the European war on the wolf. For one, in absolute terms, 56,000 mauled farm animals is not that much—there are 271 million livestock in the EU. And two, farmers do get reimbursed for their losses. “Per sheep, it’s now somewhere around 260 euros,” Lopez said, “which is in general above market value.” The government also pays for indirect damages: the loss of genetic material, the stress to the rest of the flock that can result in miscarriages or lower output of milk. In 2024, wolves cost the French government about 43,000 euros per wolf in compensation to farmers and grants for livestock protection measures, such as electric fences.Julien Giraud appreciates the compensation he gets for the sheep he loses to wolves. Yet he believes that all this talk about money misses the point. “People say, ‘You’re compensated—what are you whining about?’ But until you’ve experienced it, people can’t understand,” he said. For him, it’s about the trauma of seeing your sheep gutted and bleeding all over your fields. It’s about having to finish them off to end their suffering. It’s about feeling alone with that trauma and about no one listening, really listening. It’s about governments making decisions up there in Paris and Brussels and pushing them onto farmers like him. “It’s not about the money,” he told me, shaking his head.Between 2022 and 2024, farmers’ frustration erupted into protests across Europe. In Switzerland, to decry the return of the wolf, farmers dumped dead sheep in front of a government building. In the Netherlands, they performed mock wolf hangings. In western France, pro-wolf protesters faced anti-wolf protesters. The protests weren’t just about the wolves, of course. In each country, the reasons behind the unrest were different, but there were common threads: discontent with low food prices paired with high price tags for fertilizer and feed, concerns about cheap imports of farm products from outside the EU, resentment over tightening environmental rules, and, above all, frustration with low incomes. “Farmers feel that they are stuck in liberalized markets on which they have to produce for the lowest price possible,” explained Jeroen Candel, a political scientist at Wageningen University in the Netherlands. “They have relatively little bargaining power vis-à-vis retailers and food processors.”Two triggers for the protests were the new Common Agricultural Policy, formally passed in January 2023, and the European Green Deal. In order to make the continent’s agriculture more planet-friendly, these policies required farmers to set aside more land to support biodiversity, rotate crops, and reduce pesticide use, all while adding red tape. To many farmers, it sounded like making a tough life even tougher.As Europe was due for elections to the European Parliament in June 2024, favorable policies were exchanged for electoral support, Candel said. Environmental legislation turned into “a new political cleavage both within the member states and in Brussels, where especially the conservatives and right-wing groups portray the Green Deal as a leftish, elitist project,” he said. A study of German online media revealed that the far-right populist party Alternative for Germany, or AfD, made the wolf its campaign issue. In readers’ comments, being anti-wolf was strongly linked to anti-EU sentiments and to a belief in conspiracies by “elites,” such as scientists falsifying data to encourage nature protection. In 2019, Julia Klöckner, then a minister of agriculture from the German Christian Democratic Union party, called the wolf “a campaign booster for the AfD.” The predator became a symbol of an urban hobby that threatens farmers’ livelihoods, a symbol of left versus right, of nature versus human. “Wolves are very high in symbolism,” said Fabien Quétier, the head of landscapes at Rewilding Europe, a nonprofit.The EU changed the law to make killing wolves easier apparently to placate farmers and preserve “rural livelihoods.” Some critics said that the move was not really about the farmers, but the result of a personal vendetta of Ursula von der Leyen, the European Commission president, whose beloved pony, Dolly, was killed in 2022 by a wolf in Beinhorn, Germany. Later, von der Leyen was quoted as saying that European wolves had “become a real danger for livestock and potentially also for humans.” Many researchers and environmental NGOs were appalled by the weakened protections, calling them a “major blow to science.” Wolves are not the enemy, they said—they bring important benefits to both nature and humanity. Take road accidents, for example. A study in Wisconsin showed that wolves make roads safer: Their presence in the state reduced collisions with deer by almost a quarter. It’s not simply that wolves eat prey so that there are fewer deer caught in literal headlights. With large predators around, the prey “start behaving differently,” Kuijper said. Deer, moose, and boars have to be on a constant lookout, which also includes paying more attention while crossing roads.Fear also forces prey to avoid spots where they may be exposed to danger, with benefits to biodiversity. “If you don’t have any predators, deer can just walk wherever they like, and they go to the places with the best food. Once you add a predator to the system, they don’t do that anymore,” Kuijper said. As a result, some parts of forests are intensely browsed by deer, while others are left to flourish. In Wisconsin, one study showed, areas inhabited by wolves are particularly rich in shrubs and wildflowers, from honeysuckles and hazelnuts to bog orchids and bluebead lilies. The differences are obvious to the naked eye: Compared to forests teeming with wolves, areas without them look as if someone had mowed down the vegetation.Yet the problem with downgrading protection of wolves, critics say, is not simply that these predators benefit ecosystems; it’s also that killing them often does little to actually protect farms (even if you wiped them all out, other predators would likely replace them). Slovakia is a case in point. A study in this central European country found no relationship between the number of wolves hunted down and the number of sheep lost by farmers. In France, the results of similar studies were mixed. On three sites, killing wolves brought the desired effects (sheep spared); on five sites, there were no effects; and on one site, the hunting actually backfired, with more livestock devoured by wolves.That is less impossible than it may seem. Wolves hunt best when they do so in large, intact packs. Kill a few individuals, and the packs break up, making the remaining wolves less efficient. “Like in a sports team, if you remove one or two members, the team will not function as it used to,” Treves said. Livestock make for easier prey than wild animals do, and so that’s what the wolves from broken packs go for.Scientists and NGOs argue that instead of simply killing wolves, we should focus on nonlethal control options, such as electric fencing, guard dogs, and shepherds. “If you don’t protect livestock, you can forget about preventing conflicts with wolves,” Kuijper said. One effective technique is fladry—a rope with flags that flutter in the wind, scaring off wolves. Electric fencing works, too, but it cuts through landscapes, preventing wildlife from moving freely. To complicate matters, wolves are fast learners. Fences can be jumped over or dug under. In one study, fladry worked for two months, and then it didn’t: The wolves figured out thxat it was just flapping cloth.Jérôme Bach, a livestock farmer north of Digne, believes that if you want to protect livestock, guard dogs are a great option. “You have to have dogs. If you don’t, the wolves will realize quickly it’s an all-you-can-eat buffet,” he said. A decade ago, Bach quit the circus where he worked as a juggler, took his beloved sidekick, a border collie, and started herding sheep. He liked the idea of being alone in nature. Now he is still in nature, but less alone. He lives with his wife and four kids on a farm in a community where everyone knows each other. He breeds guard dogs for local farmers and assists with training.On the day I visited, Bach’s barn smelled of fresh hay. Among a group of brown goats, three cream Anatolian shepherd puppies played with an empty bucket, their thick legs uncertain on a carpet of straw. They were born here, right within the herd. To be a good guardian, Bach tells me, a dog has to identify with the herd—not as a sheep or as a goat, but as their family. “Before his eyes even open, he hears the sounds of sheep, the sounds of goats, and he smells them,” Bach said. The dog gets attached to livestock, and his protective instincts, hardwired within the breed, kick in. If one day a wolf approaches the herd, the dog will feel the sheep’s distress—and he will do anything to protect them. One time, Bach heard sheep bells in the middle of the night, going off in every direction. He jumped out of bed and ran outside in his underwear. “The dogs were going wild,” he said. They barked, and they won. The wolves gave up.Yet guard dogs are not a perfect solution. The wolves often outsmart them, tricking the dogs to follow one predator while the rest of the pack attacks in a different spot. In direct combat, the dogs lose. They bother neighbors. They attack hikers. What’s more, they cost a lot of money and time. “It adds a lot of work. It’s really restrictive for us. And we already have a lot to do,” Bach said, shaking his head. Bach, like Giraud, like Pergolizzi, simply feels tired. Tired and ignored. “I’m worn out, both physically and mentally,” Pergolizzi said.For Zimmermann, these feelings—the exhaustion, the frustration, the sadness—mean that the whole discussion of the pluses and minuses of different methods of controlling wolves misses the point. It’s not about the efficacy of fladry versus fencing, or whether shooting a certain number of wolves would limit attacks. Using ideas from peace-building, Zimmermann and her colleagues identified three levels of human-wildlife conflict. The first, and the mildest, is when things are just beginning to stir, when people are still willing to talk, and practical measures such as fencing can fix the problem. That’s where human-elephant conflicts in northeast India stand. At level two, the waters become muddier: Some hurtful things were said in the past, other things were not done, and resentment is growing. At level three, the conflict becomes about identities, not animals. You know when you’ve hit level three when people start using polarized language, when they talk about threats to their way of life, about not being heard. “There is deliberate blaming of each other, hostility, completely different realities,” Zimmermann said. That’s wolves in Europe. “Wolves do seem to be an extreme case, where they’re more polarizing than any other wildlife that we’ve studied,” Treves observed.Trying to solve a level-three conflict as if it were a level-one may be self-defeating. Rational fixes come naturally to conservation scientists, Zimmermann said, but you may end up stomping on that sense of not being heard. Say an NGO turns up and tells farmers that it’s found the perfect new solar fence that is going to solve all their problems—“They will not be impressed. It’s clumsy,” she said. “The farmers might feel that they have not been heard on this, that they are always being told what to do by the scientists.” This may also explain why research shows that compensation for wolf-inflicted damages often does little to increase acceptance of these predators, and sometimes even adds fuel to the fire. “In decision-making circles, they look down on us,” Pergolizzi said. “Because for us, this is our life. It’s not just a financial matter. It’s not just, ‘Oh, I lost an animal, and it cost me this much.’ I don’t care about that—they paid me for it. It’s not about the money. It’s about physical and psychological integrity. And it goes deep. It goes very, very deep.”Pergolizzi is not your stereotypical right-wing farmer. She is anti-pesticide and worries about climate. Her house is dotted with organic products. She produces meat, but tells people to eat less of it: In her view, meat should be nature’s gift, celebrated on special occasions. In the wolf debate, she feels she is caught in between the conservative rural right and the green urban left.She didn’t believe in shooting wolves—until a few years ago, that is, when she saw one of her pregnant cows disemboweled by wolves. The cow was still alive, licking her dead calf. “I had a lot of nightmares after that,” she said. Last year, the attacks started again, even though she changed her farming practices and built a shed where the cows could calve indoors. And so she called DDT in Dinge, and a wolf-catcher came. He stayed one night, then another. He observed. It was always the same pack, and the same wolf that would initiate the attacks. So he shot that wolf, and the attacks ended. But Pergolizzi was still shaken. She felt it was a deep moral failure that she couldn’t keep her animals safe. “Psychologically, it was terrible,” she said. That’s why one day Dubois turned up at her doorstep with a psychologist. He saw that she needed to talk.Sometimes Dubois plays the therapist himself. “I’ve seen farmers—tough guys, hardened types—who’ve been holding it together for months, but when I called them, I found them in tears,” Dubois said. “There are farmers—the wolves have broken something in them. We’ve seen it happen. Sometimes the wolf-catcher goes to meet the farmer before a nighttime patrol and never leaves. He stays to talk for hours.”When Lopez interviews candidates who want to be wolf-catchers (their term is five years, but can be renewed), he tries to weed out “would-be cowboys,” he said. He is looking for people who have a sense of duty toward their community. “We don’t only ask them to go and be good shooters. We also ask them to be our eyes and ears in the field … to call the farmers, spend a couple of minutes talking with them, see how they’re doing.”Talking and listening are also at the heart of mediation—one thing that, according to Zimmermann, can actually help solve human-wildlife conflicts that have reached level three. “You really need to start bringing in people who know how to resolve conflicts, do mediation work—that’s a completely different skill set from your classic natural scientist,” she explained. Such mediators need to get to the bottom of things. Is it about cheap food imports from outside the continent? Is it about subsidies going to the wrong places? Or is it about feeling ignored? In Denmark, “The Wolf Dialogue Project,” which involved a group of people from across the political spectrum, took over two years, but ended up reducing polarization and producing several potential solutions to test, such as DNA identification of problem wolves. A similar approach, based on a method called Multicriteria Decision Analysis, showed promise in Italy.But mediation can be scary. You have to let the other side suggest solutions, even if that solution is shooting wolves. “Without even allowing that to be discussed, you are never going to get further anyway,” Zimmermann said. Simply considering shooting as an option could bring people closer—and maybe, just maybe, when people feel they’ve been heard, a compromise might emerge.Pergolizzi accepts that sometimes wolves may need to be shot, even though she doesn’t like the idea. “I’m not anti-wolf, despite everything. If I see one among my cows and I can legally kill it, I will. But I would really like us to talk about this—about the killing, about that violence—because it’s part of nature, too,” she said. She feels that, so far, there is not much real discussion about wolves in France, just two sides shouting at each other. “What exhausted me was feeling judged, unsupported, misunderstood,” she said. Everything is black and white, and so polarized. “It’s insane,” she added.But nature is not black and white—just like the wolf, it’s all about shades of gray. Yes, nature is wild, it’s beautiful, it’s free—but it’s violent, too. Nature is full of complexity, Pergolizzi said, and that complexity is what we need right now in the public discourse on wolves. “There is no easy solution,” she reflected. “We just need to understand each other.” The phone at Digne’s DDT keeps ringing.

Agriculture
Animals
Climate

Ocean Acidification Threshold Pushes Earth Past Another Planetary Boundary

Earth has breached a critical boundary for ocean acidification, with potentially grim effects for ocean ecosystems and human livelihoods

Our planet is sick, and its life-threatening symptoms are getting worse, a new report warns.Earth has been pushed past multiple physical and chemical boundaries crucial for keeping the world a livable place. Beyond already exceeded thresholds set by scientists for rising temperatures, biodiversity loss and chemical pollution, we have now also breached the boundary on ocean acidification. The milestone comes with grim ramifications for marine ecosystems and human livelihoods.“More than three-quarters of the Earth’s support systems are not in the safe zone,” Johan Rockström, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) in Germany, said in a statement announcing the 2025 evaluation of the planetary boundaries. “Humanity is pushing beyond the limits of a safe operating space, increasing the risk of destabilizing the planet.”On supporting science journalismIf you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.Humans and many other species evolved to thrive in the climate of the Holocene, a period that began around 10,000 years ago. But as societies industrialized and began widely burning fossil fuels in the 19th century, greenhouse gases built up in the atmosphere, trapping heat and transforming Earth and its climate in many ways besides raising global temperatures.Beginning in 2009, PIK flagged and prioritized research on nine geophysical limits that make up a sort of planetary life-support system; staying within these limits, they argue, is the best hope for maintaining the clement climatic conditions we and most of Earth’s other denizens have adapted to. In 2023 researchers published a study that quantified those boundaries and established where we are in relation to them. At the time, six of the boundaries had been surpassed, with many well into what the scientists called a “zone of increasing risk.”“It’s like blood pressure,” said the 2023 study’s lead author Katherine Richardson, an earth systems scientist at the University of Copenhagen, in an interview with Scientific American at the time. “If your blood pressure is over 120 over 80, it’s not a guarantee that you’re going to have a heart attack, but it does raise the risk, and therefore we do what we can to bring it down.”Among the nine boundaries is of course climate change, which is measured in part by the amount of world-warming carbon dioxide in Earth’s atmosphere. Carbon dioxide concentrations reached a record global high of 422.7 parts per million (ppm) last year, compared with 280 ppm prior to the industrial revolution and the 350 ppm that many scientists consider a “safe” limit (which was surpassed in 1987). The burning of fossil fuels is the indisputable culprit.Fossil fuels are also behind the new boundary breaching—the ocean absorbs some of the atmosphere’s excess carbon dioxide, causing waters to become more acidic. Since the industrial revolution, the ocean’s surface pH has dropped by 0.1; this may seem minuscule, but because the pH scale is logarithmic, it reflects roughly a 30 percent increase in acidity.Ocean acidification can have profound impacts on marine ecosystems by depleting seawater of certain carbon compounds that corals and other shell building animals need to construct their protective homes. At low enough pH levels, corals and shells can even begin to dissolve. These effects could destabilize entire ecosystems and devastate many commercially valuable species, such as oysters. A 2020 report by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration found that ocean acidification would cost the country’s economy billions of dollars.“The movement we’re seeing is absolutely headed in the wrong direction. The ocean is becoming more acidic, oxygen levels are dropping, and marine heatwaves are increasing. This is ramping up pressure on a system vital to stabilize conditions on planet Earth,” Levke Caesar, co-lead of PIK’s Planetary Boundaries Science Lab, said in the new evaluation’s press statement.The not-so-short list of other boundaries we’ve blown past is sobering. Excess phosphorus and nitrogen from the widespread use of fertilizers flows into rivers and seas to spark toxic algal blooms. Artificial chemicals, such as plastics, dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane (DDT) and “forever chemical” perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) disruptively accumulate in food chains. Agriculture and other changes in land use strip away forests and diminish available fresh water. And as all these problems grow, more and more of Earth’s biodiversity is disappearing.According to the new report, just two of the nine limits remain intact: ozone depletion and aerosols in the atmosphere. Only the former shows clear progress away from the planetary boundary, as a result of the success of the Montreal Protocol, the international agreement through which countries are phasing out chemicals that erode Earth’s protective ozone layer. Aerosol emissions have declined globally—partly from efforts to reduce pollution from global shipping—but absent any unified policy framework for reductions, levels could easily surge back.The overall prognosis for the planet’s health is poor, given that a number of countries, including the U.S. in particular, are moving away from meaningful action to tackle environmental problems.“We are witnessing widespread decline in the health of our planet. But this is not an inevitable outcome. The drop in aerosol pollution and healing of the ozone layer, shows that it is possible to turn the direction of global development. Even if the diagnosis is dire, the window of cure is still open,” Rockström said in the press statement. “Failure is not inevitable; failure is a choice. A choice that must and can be avoided.”It’s Time to Stand Up for ScienceIf you enjoyed this article, I’d like to ask for your support. Scientific American has served as an advocate for science and industry for 180 years, and right now may be the most critical moment in that two-century history.I’ve been a Scientific American subscriber since I was 12 years old, and it helped shape the way I look at the world. SciAm always educates and delights me, and inspires a sense of awe for our vast, beautiful universe. I hope it does that for you, too.If you subscribe to Scientific American, you help ensure that our coverage is centered on meaningful research and discovery; that we have the resources to report on the decisions that threaten labs across the U.S.; and that we support both budding and working scientists at a time when the value of science itself too often goes unrecognized.In return, you get essential news, captivating podcasts, brilliant infographics, can't-miss newsletters, must-watch videos, challenging games, and the science world's best writing and reporting. You can even gift someone a subscription.There has never been a more important time for us to stand up and show why science matters. I hope you’ll support us in that mission.

Agriculture
Animals
Chemicals

Suggested Viewing

Voices of Transition

Voices of Transition is an enthusiastic documentary on farmer- and community-led responses to food insecurity in a scenario of climate change, peak oil, and economic crisis. Concrete examples from Cuba, France, and the United Kingdom tell of a future society where our monoculture deserts will be restored to living soil, where fields will be introduced into our cities, and where independence from oil will help us live a richer, more fulfilling life.

Agriculture
Food
Climate

Better Bites with Bugs

The practice of eating bugs -- entomophagy -- has a lot to commend it. You may disagree. But try to put your preconceptions aside!

Agriculture
Food

Ground Operations: Battlefields to Farmfields

Combat veterans from the wars in Iraq & Afghanistan find a new mission and personal healing with new careers as organic farmers and ranchers.

Health
Agriculture
Government

Kumu Niu

The island of O'ahu is covered with coconut palms, but for fear of liability the vast majority of these sacred trees have been stripped of coconuts. The grassroots movement "Niu Now" is on a mission to restore the "niu," or coconut, as a fundamental food crop in Hawai'i and spread the Indigenous wisdom of "aloha 'āina:" loving land and serving people.

Land Use
Indigenous
Food

The Peaceful Revolution

The concern of some young people in Vancouver, Canada, about an uncertain future in the face of climate change or a possible global catastrophe leads them to take the initiative to learn how to grow food on an urban plot. They embark on an adventure that surprises them not only for the power to feed themselves through their work on the land, but also for the community and health generated by the constant contact with nature. Finishing by knowing that growing food is within the reach of whoever wants it.

Agriculture
Plants
Inspirational

Join us to forge
a sustainable future

Our team is always growing.
Become a partner, volunteer, sponsor, or intern today.
Let us know how you would like to get involved!

CONTACT US

sign up for our mailing list to stay informed on the latest films and environmental headlines.

Subscribers receive a free day pass for streaming Cinema Verde.
Thank you! Your submission has been received!
Oops! Something went wrong while submitting the form.