Tom Philpott

Ye almond-loving hipsters, rejoice! The revered—and lately quite expensive—nut is likely to get cheaper soon. The wholesale price for almonds—the one paid by supermarkets to stock their bulk bins, or by processors to make their trail mixes—has fallen from a high of $4.70 last August down to $2.60, reports the Financial Times.

And the reason has nothing to do with a viral screed against almond milk penned by a certain wag in 2014. Rather, it's the same set of forces that triggered California's massive almond boom in the first place: the vagaries of global demand.

The state's growers, who churn out 99 percent of almonds grown in the United States, have rapidly expanded their almond groves over the past decade and a half.

But that expansion didn't happen just to satisfy your trendy almond-milk latte habit. California farmers are almond growers to the world: They supply about 80 percent of the almonds consumed globally, and export demand has risen steadily for most of the past 15 years. About 70 percent of California's almonds are exported. According to the Almond Board of California, the great bulk of this massive outflow goes to Asia, the destination of 44 percent of California's almond exports, and Western Europe, which gets about 40 percent. 

As a result of that booming global demand, the price farmers get for almonds has risen dramatically despite the big acreage expansion.

But in recent months, the global appetite for almonds has plunged. Here's the Financial Times:

Last year's surge in prices depressed demand, and buyers in China, the Middle East and India, who have led consumption over the past three to four years, have disappeared. Trading has ground to a halt as prices continue to decline and the number of rejected containers by buyers refusing to honor contracts has jumped.

"It's a bloodbath," one California-based nut trader told the Financial Times. What happened was that California's multiyear drought took a bite out of crop yields, making almonds more scarce and pushing up their price. And then, in 2014, the US dollar began to rise in value against major Asian currencies and the euro, making US exports, including almonds, even more expensive in those regions.

"It's a bloodbath," one California-based nut trader told the Financial Times.

To make matters worse, the European economy stagnated, and China—the globe's biggest almond importer—saw its economic growth slow and its stock market tumble. Snack makers in Asia and Europe began to balk at pricey almonds, putting fewer in nut mixes and reducing the portion size of almond offerings, the FT reports. In 2015, almond exports to Asia and Western Europe fell 12 percent and 7 percent, respectively, according to the Almond Board of California.

And now, with a historic El Niño triggering a wet and snowy winter in California, the market expects a big harvest in 2016. Econ 101 tells us that abundant supply and weak demand means lower prices going forward. That likely means you'll soon be getting at least a slight break on that bag of salty roasted almonds you keep at your desk. But what does it mean for California's almond boom?

In previous posts, I've questioned whether the state has the water resources—or access to sufficient bee hives for pollination—to continue devoting ever more land to the crunchy treat. Unlike, say, vegetables or cotton, which can be fallowed during dry years, planting an almond grove requires farmers to commit to finding a steady water source for about 20 years, or risk losing a very expensive investment. (According to the Almond Board of California, establishing an almond grove—paying for land, saplings, an irrigation system, etc.—costs about $8,700 per acre, or about $2.6 million for a new 300-acre grove.)

During the drought, water from California's massive irrigation projects, which deliver melted Sierra Nevada snow to the state's farms, was largely cut off. Farmers responded by fallowing a portion of annual crops like cotton and vegetables and irrigating the rest—including their ever-expanding almond groves—with water drawn from finite underground aquifers. While the current El Niño might spell the end of a drought that has haunted California since 2012, California agriculture has gotten so ravenous for water that aquifers in its largest (and most almond-centered) growing region, the Central Valley, have been declining steadily for decades.

For my deep dive into the almond boom last year, I asked David Doll, an orchard adviser with the University of California Cooperative Extension, how long growers could keep devoting ever more land to almonds despite the long-term water crunch. He told me it would only stop "when the crop stops making money."

If the Asian and European appetite for almonds returns to normal growth rates, the almond boom will likely continue unabated.

I checked back in with him to see what he thought about the current price drop. He said under normal conditions, when water is flowing from the state's irrigation projects, the break-even farmer price for almonds is about $1.45 per pound—at that price, farmers neither lose nor make money. But when water is scarce, farmers face higher irrigation costs, and the break-even price rises to somewhere between $2.60 and $2.85—roughly where prices are now. So even with the current price drop, most almond growers are breaking even. But if we get another wet winter this year, water prices could drop by 2017 and almond farmers will be right back to profitability.

If the Asian and European appetite for almonds returns to normal growth rates, Doll added, the almond expansion will likely continue unabated, which will in turn limit large upward price swings as supply rises to meet demand. The limiting factor, of course, is water. Back in 2014, California shook off a history of Wild West aquifer stewardship and passed the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act, which requires that by 2025, the state's aquifers can't be drawn down faster than they're recharged—a dramatic reversal of the status quo. "From my observations, there are many [almond] operations that are not planning for this policy," Doll said, meaning they're not prepared for a future when aquifers can't be tapped at will.

But 2025 is nearly a decade away. Enjoy those relatively inexpensive almonds, you ignorant hipsters.

If you're nodding off as you read this, don't blame my prose style. You probably didn't sleep enough last night, or maybe you just slept poorly. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, between 50 million and 70 million US adults have some kind of sleep disorder—think insomnia, apnea, or narcolepsy. This troubled slumber, in turn, is linked to increased risk of everything from car accidents to Alzheimer's.

It turns out your diet might be to blame for restless nights, a new study by Columbia University researchers suggests. The team subjected 26 normal-weight adults to a controlled food regimen—high in dietary fiber and low in saturated fat and added sugars—for four days. On the fifth day, I'll call this the dietary "free-for-all" day, they let the participants eat whatever they wanted. Each night, they monitored both sleep duration and quality—the number of times the participants woke up during the night, and the amount of time they spent in "slow-wave sleep," the most restorative sleep stage.

Meals low in fiber and high saturated fat were associated with lower quality sleep, while higher levels of sugar led to more wake-ups.

The result: While total time spent snoozing didn't change over the course of the experiment, sleep quality declined the more people spent their free-for-all day loading up on fiber-light, fat- and sugar-heavy foods. Meals low in fiber and high in saturated fat were associated with significantly less slow-wave sleep, while higher levels of sugar led to more wake-ups. The study subjects also fell asleep faster (an average of 17 minutes versus 29 minutes) on the controlled diet than they did on the self-selected one.

That's bad news for the average American, who tends to have a horrible diet—lacking in fruits and vegetables and chock-full of ultra-processed crap and excess sugar.

The study doesn't speculate about why these dietary choices messed with sleep, but a growing body of science links diet to the health and diversity of the gut biome—the trillions of microorganisms that live in our digestive tracts—which in turn affect brain processes. Dietary fiber essentially feeds these vital organisms, and diets low in it have been shown to reduce biome diversity. High-sugar diets, meanwhile, appear to alter the gut biome in ways that seem to promote obesity. The relationship between the gut biome and sleep, however, remains little studied. 

Research suggests that sleep deprivation interferes with the hormones that tell us when we're full—meaning that bad sleep can lead to bad dietary choices.

Even so, the Columbia study offers a new twist on the sleep-diet nexus. People who chronically experience poor sleep are more likely to endure diet-related conditions like obesity and diabetes, the CDC states. Previous research suggests that sleep deprivation interferes with the hormones that tell us when we're full—meaning that bad sleep can lead to bad dietary choices. The Columbia study suggests a vicious circle: Bad dietary habits can also muck up sleep.

All the more reason to steer clear of the supermarket's chips and cookie aisles. "The finding that diet can influence sleep has tremendous health implications, given the increasing recognition of the role of sleep in the development of chronic disorders such as hypertension, diabetes and cardiovascular disease," the study's lead author, Columbia's Marie-Pierre St-Onge, said in a press release.

In 2011, agrichemical giants Monsanto and Bayer CropScience joined forces to sell soybean seeds coated with (among other things) an insecticide of the neonicotinoid family. Neonics are so-called systematic pesticides—when the coated seeds sprout and grow, the resulting plants take up the bug-killing chemical, making them poisonous to crop-chomping pests like aphids. Monsanto rivals Syngenta and DuPont also market neonic-treated soybean seeds.

These products—buoyed by claims that the chemical protects soybean crops from early-season insect pests—have enjoyed great success in the marketplace. Soybeans are the second-most-planted US crop, covering about a quarter of US farmland—and at least a third of US soybean acres are grown with neonic-treated seeds. But two problems haunt this highly lucrative market: 1) The neonic soybean seeds might not do much at all to fight off pests, and 2) they appear to be harming bees and may also hurt other pollinators, birds, butterflies, and water-borne invertebrates.

Neonic seed treatments actually reduce yields in slug-infested fields.

Doubts about neonic-treated soybean seeds' effectiveness aren't new. In 2014, the Environmental Protection Agency released a blunt preliminary report finding that "neonicotinoid seed treatments likely provide $0 in benefits" to soybean growers. But the agrichemical industry likes to portray the EPA as an overzealous regulator that relies on questionable data, and it quickly issued a report vigorously disagreeing with the EPA's assessment.

Now the seed/agrichemical giants will have to open a new front in their battle to convince farmers to continue paying up for neonic-treated soybean seeds. In a recent publication directed to farmers, a coalition of the nation's most important Midwestern ag-research universities—Iowa State, Kansas State, the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, North Dakota State, Michigan State, the University of Minnesota, the University of Missouri, Ohio State, Penn State, Purdue, South Dakota State, and the University of Wisconsin—argued plainly that "for typical field situations, independent research demonstrates that neonicotinoid seed treatments [for soybeans] do not provide a consistent return on investment."

"Independent research demonstrates that neonicotinoid seed treatments [for soybeans] do not provide a consistent return on investment."

The reason is that neonic-treated soybeans wield the great bulk of their bug-killing power for the first three weeks after the seeds sprout; the major pest that attacks soybean plants, the aphid, doesn't arrive until much later, when the soybean plants are full-grown. "In other words," the report states, aphid populations "increase to threshold levels weeks after the short window that neonicotinoid seed treatments protect plants."

And not only are neonics useless against soybeans' major field pest, aphids; they may actually boost the fortunes of another important one, the slug, which is "emerging as a key pest" in the soybean belt, according to the report. Pointing to a 2015 study from Penn State researchers, the report notes that slugs aren't affected by neonics, so they can gobble neonic-treated soy sprouts at will, accumulating the chemical. But when insects called the ground beetle—which has a taste for slugs but not soybean plants—eat the neonic-containing slugs, they tend to die. So slugs transfer the poison from the crops to their natural predator, the ground beetle, and throw the predator balance out of whack, allowing slugs to proliferate. As a result, the Penn State researchers found, neonic seed treatments actually reduce yields in slug-infested fields.

Of course, the most celebrated "non-target" insect potentially affected by neonics is the honeybee. As I reported last week, the EPA recently released an assessment finding that one particular neonic that's widely used on soybean seeds, imidacloprid, likely harms individual bees and whole bee colonies at levels commonly found in farm fields. That's because plants from neonic-treated seeds don't just carry the poison in their leaves and stalks; they also deliver it in bee-attracting nectar and pollen.

While cotton is the imidacloprid-treated crop most likely to hit bees hard, soybeans, too, may pose a threat, the EPA found. The agency couldn't say for sure, because data on how much of the pesticide shows up in soybeans' pollen and nectar are "unavailable," both from Bayer and from independent researchers.

That information gap may be cold comfort for beekeepers, but the agrichemical industry will no doubt seize upon it to argue that its blockbuster chemical is harmless to bees. The rest of us can savor the bitter irony that this widely used pesticide may be more effective at slaying beneficial pollinators than it is at halting crop-chomping pests.

Arizona rancher LaVoy Finicum guards the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge on Tuesday, January 5, 2016, near Burns, Oregon.

On January 2, a band of armed militants—led by Cliven Bundy's son Ammon—stormed Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon, seizing the visitor center both to protest the tangled legal plight of two local ranchers convicted of arson on public land, and to defy the federal government's oversight of vast landholdings in the West. (You might remember that Cliven launched his own successful revolt against federal authorities in 2014 to avoid paying grazing fees on public land in Nevada.)

For all the slapstick comedy on display at the still-occupied government complex—rival militias arriving to "de-escalate" the situation, public pleas for donated supplies including "French Vanilla Creamer"—the armed and angry men behind the fiasco are pointing their rifles at a real problem. In short, the ranchers who supply the United States with beef operate under razor-thin, often negative profit margins.

The ranchers who supply the United States with beef operate under razor-thin, often negative profit margins.

It's not hard to see why grazing rights are an issue. Ranchers' struggle for profitability gives them strong incentive to expand their operations to increase overall volume and gain economies of scale. A 2011 paper by the US Department of Agriculture found that the average cost per cow for small (20-49 head) operations exceeded $1,600, while for large ranches (500 or more head), the average cost stood at less than $400. Large operations are more efficient at deploying investments in labor and infrastructure (think fencing), the USDA reported.

To scale up, ranchers need access to sufficient land. And in the West, land access often means obtaining grazing rights to public land through the Bureau of Land Management. Hence the bitter dispute playing out in Burns, Oregon: The ranchers accuse the federal government of ruining their businesses through overzealous environmental regulation of that public land.

Now, it's clear that what the Malheur militiamen appear to be demanding—essentially laissez-faire land management based on private ownership and overseen by local politicians—is a recipe for ecological ruin. In a recent New York Times op-ed, environmental historian Nancy Langston described what happened last time such a policy regime prevailed in the area: "By the 1930s, after four decades of overgrazing, irrigation withdrawals, grain agriculture, dredging and channelization, followed by several years of drought, Malheur had become a dust bowl."

But the real beef that struggling ranchers should take up with the federal government involves not zealous federal regulation, but rather its opposite: the way the feds have watched idly as giant meat-packing companies came to dominate the US beef production chain. Ranchers run what are known as cow-calf operations—they raise cows up to a certain weight on pasture, sell them to a feedlots to be fattened on corn and soybeans (and other stuff), and from there the cows are sold to companies known as beef packers that slaughter and prep the meat for consumers. As the University of Missouri rural sociologist Mary Hendrickson points out, after a decade of mergers and acquisitions, just four companies slaughtered and packed 69 percent of US-grown cows in 1990. By 2011—after another spasm of mergers—the four-company market share had risen to 82 percent, Hendrickson reports.

Such consolidation at the top of the value chain gives farmers less leverage to get a decent price for their cows. A market dominated by a few buyers is a buyer's market. The Colorado rancher and rural advocate Mike Callicrate has been making this point tirelessly for years. Callicrate thinks the Bureau of Land Management has been overly burdensome for ranchers in the West, he tells me, but there's a bigger problem that is "rarely mentioned" either by the gun-toting ranchers or the media covering them: "the historically low, below break-even market prices for livestock."

As the big beef packers scaled up and consolidated their market share in the 1980s and '90s, giant retailers led by Walmart did the same. The result has been steady downward pressure on the beef supply chain: The retail giants pressured the beef packers to deliver lower prices, and the beef packers in turn pressured ranchers. The result has been a big squeeze.

Just four companies slaughtered and packed 82 percent of US-grown cows in 2011.

In the chart below that Callicrate created for a 2013 blog post, drawn from USDA data, the trend is clear: Compared with 40 years ago, nearly a third less of every dollar you spend on beef goes into the pocket of the rancher who raised the cow.

Chart by Mike Callicrate

Under pressure from this squeeze, ranchers have had little choice but to scale up or exit the business altogether—as tens of thousands have done:

Chart: USDA

 

Rather than demanding unfettered access to public land, the Malheur rebels could be agitating for federal antitrust authorities to take on the beef giants. As the New America Foundation's Barry C. Lynn has shown repeatedly, since the age of Reagan, US antitrust regulators have focused almost exclusively on whether large companies use their market power to harm consumers by unfairly raising retail prices. Those regulators have looked the other way when companies deploy their girth to harm their suppliers by squeezing them on price. So antitrust authorities okayed merger after merger, even when deals left just a few giant companies towering over particular markets. As a result, writes Lynn, "In sector after sector, control is now more tightly concentrated than at any time in a century." The meat industry is a classic example.

Rather than demanding unfettered access to public land, the Malheur rebels could be agitating for federal antitrust authorities to take on the beef giants.

During the 2008 election, Barack Obama vowed to challenge the big meat packers and defend independent farmers and ranchers from their heft. As Lina Khan showed in a 2012 Washington Monthly piece, President Obama actually made a valiant effort to do just that—before surrendering to a harsh counterattack from the industry's friends in Congress.

The current presidential election would be an ideal time for beleaguered ranchers to bring corporate domination of meat markets back into the public conversation. Armed occupations of bird refuge visitor centers won't help with that struggle.

Bees are dying in record numbers—and now the government admits that an extremely common pesticide is at least partially to blame.

For more than a decade, the Environmental Protection Agency has been under pressure from environmentalists and beekeepers to reconsider its approval of a class of insecticides called neonicotinoids, based on a mounting body of research suggesting they harm bees and other pollinators at tiny doses. In a report released Wednesday, the EPA basically conceded the case.

The report card was so dire that the EPA "could potentially take action" to "restrict or limit the use" of the chemical by the end of this year.

Marketed by European chemical giants Syngenta and Bayer, neonics are the most widely used insecticides both in the United States and globally. In 2009, the agency commenced a long, slow process of reassessing them—not as a class, but rather one by one (there are five altogether). Meanwhile, tens of millions of acres of farmland are treated with neonics each year, and the health of US honeybee hives continues to be dismal.

The EPA's long-awaited assessment focused on how one of the most prominent neonics—Bayer's imidacloprid—affects bees. The report card was so dire that the EPA "could potentially take action" to "restrict or limit the use" of the chemical by the end of this year, an agency spokesperson wrote in an emailed statement.

Reviewing dozens of studies from independent and industry-funded researchers, the EPA's risk-assessment team established that when bees encounter imidacloprid at levels above 25 parts per billion—a common level for neonics in farm fields—they suffer harm. "These effects include decreases in pollinators as well as less honey produced," the EPA's press release states.

The crops most likely to expose honeybees to harmful levels of imidacloprid are cotton and citrus, while "corn and leafy vegetables either do not produce nectar or have residues below the EPA identified level." Note in the below USGS chart  that a substantial amount of imidacloprid goes into the US cotton crop.

Imidacloprid use has surged in recent years. Uh-oh. US Geological Survey

Meanwhile, the fact that the EPA says imidacloprid-treated corn likely doesn't harm bees sounds comforting, but as the same USGS chart shows, corn gets little or no imidacloprid. (It gets huge amounts of another neonic, clothianidin, whose EPA risk assessment hasn't been released yet.)

Soybeans could expose bees to dangerous levels of imidacloprid, but data on how much of the pesticide shows up in soybeans' pollen and nectar are "unavailable."

The biggest imidacloprid-treated crop of all is soybeans, and soy remains an information black hole. The EPA assessment notes that soybeans are "attractive to bees via pollen and nectar," meaning they could expose bees to dangerous levels of imidacloprid, but data on how much of the pesticide shows up in soybeans' pollen and nectar are "unavailable," both from Bayer and from independent researchers. Oops. Mind you, imidacloprid has been registered for use by the EPA since the 1990s.

The agency still has to consider public comments on the bee assessment it just released, and it also has to complete a risk assessment of imidacloprid's effect on other species. In addition to their impact on bees, neonic pesticides may also harm birds, butterflies, and water-borne invertebrates, recent studies suggest. Then there are the assessments of the other four neonic products that need to be done. Meanwhile, a coalition of beekeepers and environmental groups filed a lawsuit in federal court Wednesday pointing out that the agency has never properly assessed neonics in their most widely used form: as seed coatings, which are then taken up by crops.

Delicious treat, or the devil's crustacean?

Ah, shrimp. Americans can't get enough of it: Per capita consumption has doubled since the early '80s, and we now eat on average about four pounds per year of the briny crustacean. Not even tuna and salmon (about 2.3 pounds each) outshine the shrimp on the US dinner table.

But the all-you-can-eat specials and fish counter fire sales ride on a massive shrimp-farming boom in the developing world, mainly in Asia. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization, global farmed shrimp production leapt from 154,00 metric tons in 2000 to 3.3 million metric tons in 2013. Imports now account for 90 percent of the shrimp we eat.

Yet for all its abundance, the diminutive shellfish carries some heavy baggage you might want to consider before consuming your next shrimp cocktail. Since its inception, the farmed-shrimp industry has been plagued by reports of unsavory working conditions and ecological destruction. Last month's Associated Press blockbuster on slavery in Thai shrimp-processing factories is only the latest chapter. Here are six more problems with America's favorite seafood:

• Awful conditions on Thailand's shrimp farms are nothing new. Staffed largely by migrant workers from Cambodia, Laos, and Burma, Thailand's shrimp farms, the source of 11.7 percent of US imported shrimp, have a labor rap sheet as long as the line at an all-you-can-eat buffet. In 2012, the Washington Post found that "overseas demand for shrimp products in greater volume has fueled a culture of exploitation in the Thai industry," including teenagers working "16-hour shifts, seven days a week, for less than $3 a day." A 2013 investigation by international labor groups found a variety of abuses on facilities owned by a major supplier to the US market, including including illegal use of underage workers and illegal wages cuts. And a 2008 report from the US labor rights group The Solidarity Center found child labor, debt bondage, and wage theft on both Thai and Bangladeshi shrimp farms. 

• Farmed shrimp has a massive carbon footprint. Mangrove forests are engines of biodiversity along tropical shorelines—the very site of the shrimp boom. A 2012 UN report found that one-fifth of the globe's mangroves have been destroyed since 1980, and "many remaining mangrove forests are considered degraded." As much as 38 percent of that loss can be attributed to the spread of shrimp farming, the report found. And since healthy mangrove forests sponge up huge amounts of carbon, killing them contributes significantly to climate change. The Oregon State University ecologist and mangrove expert J. Boone Kauffman estimates farmed shrimp has 10 times the carbon footprint of beef raised in cleared rainforest land.

• Farmed shrimp often has traces of antibiotics and antibiotic-resistant bacteria—and the FDA barely tests it as it comes in. Shrimp farms rely on antibiotics to speed up growth and control disease. For a 2015 investigation, Consumer Reports bought shrimp from retailers across the country and tested them for chemical and bacterial residues. Of 205 imported raw, farmed shrimp samples, 11 tested positive for one or more antibiotics, and 6 turned up with an antibiotic-resistant staph bug called MRSA. For a 2012 study, FDA scientists found that roughly 10 percent of samples tested showed resistance to no fewer than eight different antibiotics. The researchers concluded that "imported shrimp is a reservoir for multidrug-resistant Klebsiella," which can trigger urinary tract infections and pneumonia. Yet the FDA's inspection of incoming farmed shrimp is so weak and "ineffectively implemented" that the General Accounting Office gave it this harsh assessment in 2011.

• Eating it doesn't help with overfishing. Shrimp farms not only harm wild fish stocks by destroying mangroves, which are essentially the oceans' nurseries in tropical areas; they also contribute to overfishing. That's because most shrimp species are carnivorous, and it takes about 1.3 pounds of wild fish—in the form of processed fishmeal—to produce a pound of edible farmed shrimp.

• Cheap farmed shrimp is helping kill the wild US shrimp fishery. "A surge of imported shrimp from Indonesia, Ecuador, and India has sent [US] prices plunging by more than a third in the past year," BloombergBusiness reported in September. That's good news for shrimp fans, but rotten news for shrimpers in US coastal waters. "If something doesn't change and prices don't rise, fishermen cannot continue to work for these prices," the president of the Louisiana Shrimp Association told Bloomberg. Battered not only by cheap foreign competition but also by recent cataclysmic hurricanes and oil spills, the Gulf shrimp industry—the source of the most US-caught wild shrimp—is in crisis. The annual harvest is down 35 percent from five years ago, and the "number of permits for shrimping boats is down 24 percent since 2007," Bloomberg reports.

• Then there's wild shrimp's bycatch problem—and also mislabeling. In 2014, Oceana named the Gulf of Mexico shrimp fishery one of the nine "dirtiest" in the United States in terms of bycatch. Commercial shrimp boats use "nets as wide as a football fields" and inadvertently "catch millions of pounds of sharks and other reef fish such as snappers and groupers" and "injure tens of thousands of sea turtles." And while eating wild shrimp means fewer antibiotic residues and a lower carbon footprint than farmed fish, the stuff marketed as "wild" is often falsely labeled farmed product, according to another 2014 Oceana study.

All of which makes me hungry for oysters and sardines.