Tag Archives: DS4G

DMI’s DS4G sees dairy feed, cropping, cow care as ‘big hammers’ for net-zero

Posted on by
1

‘Grant’ will start ‘measuring’ air, soil around dairy cropping practices in nine U.S. regions

This is the third and final part of the multi-part series about DMI’s Net Zero Initiative and Dairy Scale for Good implementation. Parts one and two in Farmshine covered some of the 12- to 13-year history, the ‘scale’ approach for getting the industry to net zero faster, and the impact of manure processing, digester models, and renewable energy policies and technologies in the NZI scheme.

By Sherry Bunting, Farmshine, May 7, 2021

ROSEMONT, Ill. — How dairy feed and forage are produced are the “biggest hammers” that are “ripe for innovation in dairy emissions reduction,” said Caleb Harper, executive director of DMI’s Net Zero Initiative (NZI) Dairy Scale for Good (DS4G) implementation.

He and Dr. Mike McCloskey, chairman of the DMI Innovation Center for U.S. Dairy’s Sustainability Initiative, presented information about the Net Zero Initiative (NZI) and ‘implementation on the farm’ during last month’s Balchem real science lecture series.

Much of the presentation used the ‘spreadsheet exercise’ of the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) white paper laying out the “business case for getting to net zero faster”, based on a 3500 cow dairy (a Fair Oaks site with 3000 milking and 500 dry). In fact, Harper’s DS4G work will exclusively pilot and model on dairies about this size.

After explaining that the DS4G goal is to make maximum impact on the entire supply of milk in the short-term using “the consolidation going on in the industry” and the idea of “scale to drive down the risk … and spread the benefit across the industry,” Harper dug into each area and showed how the models tend to work best when multiple areas are combined.

Harper said no till farming, cover crops, innovative crop rotations, renewable fertilizer, precision agriculture all fall into this feed production area of emissions.

“It all boils down to measuring the emissions,” he said, showing a slide of boxes in potato fields in Idaho, where USDA ARS has a project that monitors the air around the crop to show the emissions from a field and mitigation that can be attributed to cropping practices. He said DMI has a grant to do the same thing with dairy cropping practices beginning this year.

The key, according to Harper, is to show that the emissions are being reduced. In addition to boxes in fields measuring emissions around crops, Harper said soil core samples will be taken to determine carbon sequestration of dairy feed cropping strategies.

“This is open science, (meaning still in the proving stage),” said Harper, known for his Open Ag science project growing food in computer controlled boxes at M.I.T. That project ended amid controversy last April a few weeks before Harper was hired by DMI to lead its NZI DS4G.

During the real science lecture in April, Harper said DMI has a grant program starting this year, along with Foundation for Food and Agriculture, to do this type of field box emissions monitoring and soil core sequestration monitoring across nine different U.S. geographies to test conservation tillage practices in terms of carbon emissions and sequestration over the next five years.

Harper said he sees this area as “huge” for innovation and for generating carbon credits that are valued by markets and for reducing one-third of dairy’s ‘field to farm’ emissions while improving soil health and the ability of soil to hold water.

He projects the bottom line potential annual farm revenue on this at $70,000, saying the industry will have to combine this with other strategies, like manure processing, renewable energy generation and such to get the combination of environmental impact toward ‘net-zero’ GHG and the economic revenue stream impact for the dairies.

“Some strategies are more impactful than others,” he said about the WWF models.

In this diagram, which was also shared by DMI leaders in a Pa. Dairy Summit breakout session about what dairy checkoff has done for producers lately, Harper illustrated how WWF models show farms will have to combine areas to merge emissions reduction potential with revenue potential. This shows feed production represents 26% of field to farm emissions reduction potential but just 3% of farm revenue potential; Cow care encompassing feed additives, efficient rations and genetics represents 33% of emissions reduction potential and just 5% of farm revenue potential; but conversely, renewable energy production on the farm represents just 5% of emissions reduction potential and 23% of farm revenue potential.

The ‘hammers’ on the emissions side do not line up with hammers on the revenue side, and the question remains, where will individual dairy farms sit in terms of decision-making as supply chains scale these combinations.

Yet again, the question arises around selling or monetizing the carbon credits generated by the farm once these cropping practices are “measured” and added to models. How does the sale of these credits, or bundling with sales of milk, then change the carbon profile of the farm selling the credits vs. the buyer in the dairy supply chain. Again, as mentioned in Part II on manure technologies and energy generation, this is an important detail that the WWF, NZI and DS4G modeling has not dealt with or worked through.

So, while discussions have already progressed to model how carbon credits and milk could be bundled to milk buyers, with pilots funded by supply chain grants to model how scale can spread impact over the industry and the entire milk supply, the holes in the value proposition are more obvious in this area where farms are already doing great things for land, air and water, by keeping something green and growing on the land as part of dairy feed production: How do farmers get credit for what they are already doing?

Harper also said “amazing things” are happening in the feed additive aspect of reducing enteric emissions, but he acknowledged “it’s early” on the carbon credit side for that.

This area of feed production and feed additives in the DS4G ‘value proposition’ has been spreadsheet-modeled to account for one-third of dairy’s field to farm CO2 equivalent emissions, and yet, at the same time, carbon credits based on this area are still in the research and measurement stage, needing documentation to be ‘monetized.’ 

Harper cited an example paper from University of California-Davis showing significant reductions in enteric emissions in beef cattle with certain feed additives.

As this work in the area of feed production and feed additives continues, said Harper: “Continuing to optimize rations (for production efficiency) remains important, while feed additives and selecting genetics for lower emissions will become important.”

Author’s Notebook:

The WWF Markets Institute released the dairy business ‘case study’ for scaling to net-zero faster on Jan. 27, 2021. A mid-February Farmshine report revealed the WWF mathematical error that had inflated the magnitude of CO2 equivalent pounds contributed by all U.S. milk production. WWF on Feb. 25, 2021, corrected its baseline to show the much smaller collective impact of 268 billion pounds CO2 equivalent (not 2.3 trillion pounds).

Both Harper and McCloskey serve on the WWF Market Institute’s Thought Leadership Group.

DMI confirms that dairy checkoff had a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with WWF from the inception of the Innovation Center for U.S. Dairy around 2008 through 2019. McCloskey has chaired the Innovation Center’s Sustainability Initiative since 2008.

In 2008-09, two MOU’s were signed between DMI and USDA via former U.S. Ag Secretary Tom Vilsack — the Sustainability Initiative and GENYOUth. At the end of the Obama administration, Sec. Vilsack was hired by DMI dairy checkoff to serve as president and CEO of USDEC 2016-2021, and earlier this year he became Secretary of Agriculture again after President Joe Biden said Vilsack ‘practically wrote his rural platform and now he can implement it.”

Aside from both serving on the WWF Market Institute’s Thought Leadership Group, McCloskey and Harper have another connection. According to the Sept. 2019 Chronicles of Higher Education, Caleb Harper’s father, Steve Harper, was a grocery executive. He was senior vice-president of marketing and fresh product development, procurement and merchandising from 1993 to 2010 for the H-E-B supermarket chain based in Texas. According to a 2020 presentation by Sue McCloskey, H-E-B was their first partner in the fluid milk business in the 1990s, followed by Kroger. According to the Houston Chronicle, the McCloskeys also partnered with H-E-B in 1996 during Steve Harper’s tenure to produce Mootopia ultrafiltered milk, an H-E-B brand. This was the pre-cursor to fairlife, the ultrafiltered milk beverage line in which DMI invested tens of millions of dollars in checkoff funds through the Innovation Center for U.S. Dairy partnering with the McCloskeys, Select, and Coca Cola.

Harper also previously served as a member of the Board of Directors for New Harvest for at least three years (2017-19). New Harvest is a global nonprofit building the field of cellular agriculture, funding startups to make milk, meat and eggs without animals.

-30-

DMI’s NZI DS4G eyes climate policies, supply chain partners in net zero fastlane: but who gets the carbon credits?

Posted on by
1

Author’s Note: This is part two in a multi-part series about DMI’s Net Zero Initiative and Dairy Scale for Good implementation. Part one previously covered some of the 12- to 13-year history as well as the ‘scale’ approach for getting the industry to net zero faster. 

By Sherry Bunting, Farmshine, April 30, 2021

ROSEMONT, Ill. — The official launch of DMI’s Net Zero Initiative (NZI) in October 2020, and World Wildlife Fund’s (WWF) dairy net zero case study published in January 2021 (and corrected in February for a math error that overestimated the industry’s total CO2 equivalent emissions) are two of the mile-markers in farm visits and partnership development since Caleb Harper was hired by checkoff in May 2020 as executive director of Dairy Scale for Good (DS4G).

In those 11 months, Harper reports visiting 100 dairy farms representing over 500,000 cows in 17 states, processing 350 manure samples, and gathering over 8000 ‘data points.’

Earlier this month, Harper, along with Dr. Mike McCloskey, presented a “value proposition” for the dairy industry during a Balchem real science lecture about ‘net zero carbon emissions implementation on the farm.’

McCloskey of Fair Oaks Farm, Fairlife and Select Milk Producers has chaired the DMI Innovation Center for U.S. Dairy’s Sustainability Initiative since inception 12 to 13 years ago.

In short, DS4G pilots are setting up through “sponsorships” from large dairy-buying partners on large farms within their own supply chains. DMI’s former MOU sustainability partner, the WWF, makes the case in its report that “achieving net zero for large farms is possible with the right practices, incentives and policies within five years (by reducing) emissions in enteric fermentation, manure management, feed production and efficiency, and energy generation and use.”

“This value proposition for dairy cuts two ways,” said Harper. Farms of 2500 cows or more can go toward digesters tied to renewable fuel production, while farms 2500 cows and fewer can move toward a digester model that handles food waste, receives tipping fees and generates electricity.

Both models will depend on a combination of government subsidies, low carbon renewable fuel standards, electrification of the U.S., supply chain sponsorship and sale of resulting carbon-credits, according to information presented by Harper and McCloskey.

NZI aligns with climate policies announced and anticipated from the Biden administration, which mirrors what is coming out of the United Nations’ Food Summit, and World Economic Forum (WEF) Great Reset.

WWF has long been tied closely with WEF setting a global agenda and with the World Resources Institute (WRI) that evaluates science-based targets for companies making net zero commitments to “transform” food and agriculture.

“Innovative models are just now starting to bear fruit,” said Harper, citing McCloskey as a forerunner of “building out” the anaerobic digester concept.

For his part, McCloskey said they “counted on incentives” back in 2008 to be able to grow and “be the catalyst.” He talked about a future sustained by marketing the new products created as substitutes for fossil fuels, mined fertilizers and other products, as well as continuing to take in other carbon sources instead of landfills.

“We have the vision to set this all up, to perfect the technology and get it cheaper… so when we’re all doing the same things, incentives won’t be needed,” said McCloskey looking 10 to 20 years down the road when he sees this “surviving on its own.”

Harper described distributive models from the WWF report. One “being born” in California incorporates separate large scale dairies in a cluster – up to 20 or 30 farms within a 20-mile radius — each with its own digester that can “drop compressed methane into a transmission line to a centralized gas cleaning facility.” In this model, dairies either have a manure or land lease contract or an equity position in the operation.

This model, he said, relies on “societal values of green energy.”

Another distributive model being born in Wisconsin is described as a central digester with adjacent gas cleaning and upgrading. In this model, the manure from multiple farms is sent to the centralized digester by pipe or truck.

“These dairy clusters become ‘green’ clusters,” Harper elaborated. “So, it’s not just about the milk. They become a primary source of green energy inside of a state or nation.”

Food waste co-digestion is part of a different DS4G model driven by states adopting regulatory policy to keep organic material out of landfills. Harper said dairy farms can take advantage of such policies by centralizing waste collection for co-digestion.

“As we think about reducing emissions… a big part of that is bringing things grown off farm on farm, destroying their greenhouse gas potential, and taking credit for that ‘sink,’” Harper explained. 

However, in this example, the co-digestion is what gives the dairy its carbon credits, so technology that can handle higher waste-to-manure ratios and state / local regulations allowing farms to handle the off-farm waste are necessary. Such details were not discussed by Harper, and are presumed to be what large scale dairy pilots address.

The WWF case study showed bottom line profit and loss of $500,000 annually for a 3500-cow dairy. Harper believes this is a “conservative” estimate based on electricity production. With the right policies in place, the renewable natural gas value proposition would produce higher returns, according to Harper.

The renewable natural gas market will still be building over the next five to 10 years, he said, so these models also rely on renewable fuel credits and other fixtures they expect to be part of the Biden administration’s climate policies.

Manure handling technologies apart from the digesters were also discussed, which according to the WWF case study, represent one-third of both emissions-reduction and income potential.

Harper is actively engaged in studying the differing chemical profiles of manure between farms, regions, and states — saying he wants to “understand manure” — with and without digester.

Looking at scale, Harper talked about adapting municipal human waste treatment systems for processing manure on large dairies. He highlighted what is called the “omni processor” — a Bill Gates investment to separate small scale municipal waste and create drinking water using a spindle with multiple discs heated to where nonvolatile solids are in the dry matter and the rest are captured as they volatize.

One “off the shelf technology” Harper is focusing on is already in use to produce discharge quality water. It is the membrane system of ultrafiltration (UF) and reverse osmosis (RO) — the same UF RO technology McCloskey pioneered in milk processing to remove water from milk for transport and refine elements for value-added products.

Stressing the large amount of water in dairy manure, Harper said UF RO “is a process designed exactly for de-watering.” Whether this process occurs before or after the digester, he said it is part of “the technology train, so whatever you are tagging onto is working more efficiently, processing less water and more nutrients and refining more things to find value in.”

All of these technologies, according to Harper, can build on each other and tie together with “electrifying” the United States, strengthening low carbon renewable fuel standards, adopting renewable fertilizer standards, and monetizing carbon. 

One unsettled aspect in this regard, however, appears on page 9 of the WWF case study and was not mentioned by McCloskey or Harper in their presentation. 

What happens to farmers when their carbon reductions and removals become part of the supply chain in which they sell their milk, or are sold to companies as part of a milk contract?

The WWF report makes this observation: “There could be significant interest from large dairy buyers in reducing embedded carbon in their products by purchasing value-added carbon ‘insets’ directly from farmers or cooperatives within their supply chains. Were companies to work closely with the dairy industry to advance these initiatives and enable greater GHG reductions, they could potentially use these measures toward meeting their own reduction targets … and incentivize dairies to embrace net zero practices through long-term contracts or other purchase or offtake agreements.”

That’s an aspect of the tens of millions of dollars in dairy pilot partnerships pledged by Nestle, Starbucks and potentially others for their own supply chains through DMI’s NZI DS4G.

WWF explains further in its report that, “Such agreements could provide stability and collateral as dairies consider investing in technology like anaerobic digesters. Some of these companies might even be interested in finding ways to bundle and purchase carbon credits produced on dairy farms where they buy milk.”

Such incentives, contracts and bundling – starting with DS4G pilots — leave dairy farms exactly where in the supply chain?

The WWF report states it this way: “Such purchases would shift the emissions reductions from the farmer to the company. This would result in the dairy essentially selling the credits that would enable its net zero status, as the emissions reductions cannot be double counted. 

“So, if the reductions are sold, the farmer can no longer be considered net-zero. This is a conundrum that is beyond the scope of this paper,” the WWF report admits.

This important detail in the NZI DS4G implementation was not mentioned by Harper or McCloskey.

Meanwhile, these initiatives also rely on climate policy, with former DMI executive Tom Vilsack now having crossed back over into government as U.S. Ag Secretary just 20 months after seeking pilot farm funding and Net Zero target policies when he testified before the Senate Ag Committee in June of 2019 while employed by checkoff as CEO of the U.S. Dairy Export Council.

President Joe Biden has said USDA is a key department in his administration’s climate action policies.

To be continued

-30-

New face, new position, ties ‘Undeniably Dairy’ to ‘milk without cows’

Posted on by
6

NEW HOLLAND 092206

By Sherry Bunting, Farmshine, July 31, 2020

CHICAGO, Ill. – A new face has “joined” Undeniably Dairy with direct ties to the effort to produce milk without cows.

Caleb Harper is the new hire for a new position via Dairy Checkoff. It was created within the DMI Innovation Center for U.S. Dairy’s Net-Zero project. His title as of May 1, 2020 is executive director of Dairy Scale for Good (DS4G).

On April 30, 2020, as reported last week in Farmshine, Harper left his position as the principle researcher at the M.I.T. Media Lab where he spearheaded the Open Agriculture Initiative, described as a “food computer” project. The lab came under scrutiny last fall for certain financial ties.

According to the May 13 New York Times, Harper’s OpenAg project “was quietly closed amid allegations that its results were exaggerated to sponsors and the public, the university confirmed. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology also announced that it would pay a $15,000 fine to the State Department of Environmental Protection because the project… improperly disposed chemicals into a well at a research center outside Boston where it conducted some experiments.”

For dairy farmers, that’s not even the worst of it. Harper has been a prolific writer and speaker touting cellular agriculture – milk, eggs and meat without animals.

Public Disclouser Copy for New Harvest.pdf

According to the most recent IRS 990s (2017 and 2018) for New Harvest Inc., Harper was a New Harvest board member during those two years.

This new DMI executive will head the work of scaling up the ‘climate-friendly’ practices dairy farms will implement in the future, when his past is rooted in cell ag to replace them. His direct association with New Harvest as part of their 5-member board is troubling.

New-Harvest-screenshot

New Harvest describes its purpose as “support for education and scientific research that advance technologies that make animal products (meat, eggs, milk, etc.) without the animals in order to reduce animal suffering, improve human health, and protect the environment.”

We reached out to DMI through Scott Wallin, vice president of industry media relations and issues management. We also sent questions to the DMI chair.

— We asked whether this newly created position filled by Harper had been advertised and if other candidates had been interviewed.

— We asked what are the responsibilities and qualifications for this “executive director of Dairy Scale for Good (DS4G)”? (For his part, Mr. Harper has the following description listed on his resume at Linked-In, that he is “part of an initiative working to help U.S. Dairies pilot and integrate new technology and management practices to reach net zero emissions or better while increasing farmer livelihood.”)

— We asked whether Harper had prior connections to DMI or any member of staff or leadership before getting this position.

— We asked for confirmation of how Mr. Harper’s salary is paid, through what sub-agency of DMI or partnership?

— We asked to know his starting salary, given his listing with a speakers agency showing he charges between $30,000 to $50,000 as a speaker – a speaker who frequents events side-by-side with the executive director of New Harvest, such conferences sponsored by the United Nations, World Government Summit, EAT Forum and other entities on planetary diets, “future of food” and cellular agriculture – milk without cows, eggs without hens, beef without cows.

— We also messaged Mr. Harper to ask him how a board member of New Harvest that funds research and supports technology specifically for milk without cows gets a job paid by mandatory checkoff funds from American dairy farmers who feed, care for and milk cows?

— We asked him what are his interests and qualifications in dairy?

— We asked if he was tapped for this position by someone within the DMI organization or one of DMI’s “partners” or did he simply respond to a job posting and interview for the position?

— We asked DMI how it came to be that a person who is an obvious supporter of technology to create milk without cows became the person hired by dairy checkoff — with dairy farmer money — to help develop, scale and implement environmental practices for real dairy farmers?

So far, the only response we have received was a brief general email from DMI’s Wallin, as follows: “Caleb Harper joined on May 1 to support U.S. dairy’s growing commitment to environmental stewardship and the development of new, scalable technologies and practices to support U.S. farmers.”

Harper, who goes by the handle @CalebGrowsFood on Twitter, has deep connections to cellular agriculture, a new sector populated with Silicon Valley “tech food” startups that the largest global dairy and meat integrators and food giants are now investing in to ramp up to scale. They use false science on human health and environment, especially climate change, as the angle to push these new product investments so they take root in retail and foodservice sectors across the nation, the world.

In fact, the continuation of status-quo low-fat and fat-free diets via the Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee’s unscientific “Scientific Report,” July 15 is a key in the cell ag arsenal. A primary vegan on the saturated fats subcommittee alluded to “making way for new foods coming” that will deliver the nutrients the government-sanctioned meal patterns leave lacking.

New Harvest has funded and supported research with donations to companies making bovine DNA-altered yeast that excrete “dairy replacement” proteins that companies claim are “interchangeable” with real dairy protein in any food processing application. Companies like Perfect Day tout their B2B model of working with large dairy companies to scale, to provide replacement dairy protein that reduce the need for real dairy protein and thus reduce the need for cows and the “pressure” on the environment.

These “cell ag” companies and non-profits work together to seek from FDA the ability to label their creations as the dairy and meat they replace because they declare them to be biological replicas — achieved through gene-editing and modifying.

They seek the new “healthy” icon FDA is creating with its ongoing development of a Nutrition Innovation Strategy to meet dietary goals, such as low-fat. They say their replacements are superior because they reduce the impact of livestock on the planet and can be genetically customized to meet goals for the low-fat DGA recommendations.

Even the USDA bio-engineered (BE) labeling implemented in January is all set and ready for this, and guess what? Dairy producers helped lobby for it, thinking it applied to the crops they grow. Our industry leaders used producer reactions to non-GMO labeling to get grassroots support for label language that now does not require bio-engineered replacements to be labeled as such unless the engineered DNA is detectable within the final edible food.

A visit to the New Harvest web page at new-harvest.org will make your hair stand on end. Seeing the motto so boldly proclaiming: “Milk without cows. Eggs without Hens. Beef without Cows,” offers the realization that their goal – in concert with World Wildlife Fund (WWF), DMI’s “sustainability partner” — is the end of animal agriculture through cell agriculture.

Don’t get angry and don’t be depressed. Have hope. Be bold.

If every Farmshine reader does some of the suggestions below, maybe the Titanic can be steered away from the iceberg:

1)      Send this article to your Congressional representatives with a short note stating that this is just one example of how your rights as an American dairy farmer are being violated by the 15-cent mandatory dairy checkoff. Ask for his or her help in getting you an exemption from paying the checkoff, or in allowing you to assign your checkoff “tax” to another promotion, research and education entity.

2)      Call, email, or write to the cooperative director who represents you and ask what your cooperative is doing to protect its members from even more FARM requirements, considering an obvious supporter of “milk without cows” will be implementing the “Undeniably Dairy” environmental piece as executive director of DS4G.

3)      Call your state or regional dairy promotion representative or CEO and ask them to keep all of your dime in regional promotion instead of sending those 2.5 to 3 extra cents to DMI’s Unified Marketing Plan. They have the nickel. That’s enough.

4)      Watch for opportunities to support a dairy checkoff referendum. The law states that when 10% or more of the dairy producers and importers subject to the checkoff request a referendum, the Secretary of Agriculture must oblige.

At best, DMI did not do its homework on this, and other decisions that have influence over the future of rank-and-file dairy producers footing the bill.

At worst, DMI’s “pre-competitive” alliances with global food giants and WWF are steering efforts toward dilution in order to meet some ethereal environmental goal.

Meanwhile hard working, conscientious dairy farmers have done and are already doing more good for health, climate, water and soil than the combined efforts of billionaire Silicon Valley ‘tech-food’ startup investors, multinational food corporations, gene-altering animal replacers, plant-based imitators, high-paid future food fast-talkers, sly and cunning dietary do-gooders, cows-and-climate catastrophe exaggerators, and so-called ‘sustainability’ WWFers.

In times like these, dairy checkoff unity could mean circling the wagons to protect dairy farmers with a locked-and-loaded promotion, education and research front that keeps the cunning wolves from getting in, but instead it gives them an opening and some leverage to devour.

Business is business. But dairy farmers should not be forced to fund their own dilution and demise.

-30-

What’s this? DMI hires ‘director of DS4G’, Resume looks impressive if the goal is to keep on diluting dairy

Posted on by
2

By Sherry Bunting, Farmshine, July 24, 2020

CHICAGO, Ill. – Dairy Management Inc (DMI) has a new hire at the Innovation Center for U.S. Dairy, under the leadership of Tom Vilsack and Mike McCloskey,  as part of the big push to make “sustainability” center of the plate. The definition could surprise us.

We know the goal on climate is to get “U.S. Dairy” to “net-zero” emissions across the supply chain by 2050 or sooner, but for me, this looks like a smoke screen to ramp up the rate at which the dairy food industry giants seek to scale dairy production and fill in the gaps with a little Perfect Day.

No announcement, but an occupation change and new Undeniably Dairy logo’d cover photo on his twitter feed signals that Caleb Harper — the former principle researcher and founder of the now closed Open Agriculture Initiative at M.I.T.’s embattled Media Lab — is the new DMI “Executive Director Dairy Scale for Good.”

Our initial inquiry for DMI’s vice president of media relations and issues management about the position and whether other candidates were interviewed — and other questions — was emailed earlier this week and not answered.

Harper has a long history of advocacy for urban food production in the sense of digitized, software-programmable, particalized and reconstituted food.  He wrote opinion pieces and did TED Talks about how the cutting edge of this movement is agri-‘culturing’ companies making lab-created dairy protein from DNA-engineered yeast and meat replacements from gene-edited muscle cells, stating that these are the food innovations needed to be sure the world does not go hungry.

In a National Geographic opinion piece in 2017, Harper even mentions and advocates for companies like Perfect Day and Modern Meadow, makers of replacement dairy protein from bovine-DNA-altered-yeast, as the future of food production because, according to Harper, people will move to cities and the rural lands will lose population.

Yes, he’s a guy who believes in true factory farms, the kind of factory farms where fermentation vats feed yeast and collect their excrement to separate out interchangeable dairy components, like protein, and where gene-edited muscle blobs grow in bioreactors instead of as animals on farms.

All part of the WWF (World Wildlife Fund) plan, I might add. They want to move everyone to the cities, re-wild the farms and rural lands, and they’ve already begun.

Harper, who goes by the handle “CalebGrowsFood” on Twitter, is part of the WWF “Thought Leadership Group.” In fact, Mike McCloskey of Fair Oaks, fairlife, and Select Milk Producers as well as a key leader in DMI’s Innovation Center for U.S. Dairy is also on the WWF Thought Leadership Group. Harper’s association with WWF goes back a long way.

For his part, Harper’s OpenAg Project at MIT set out to prove people in cities could grow their own food in LED boxes controlled by computers. Trouble is, it appears that despite the glowing reviews in 2016-18 when models were featured, the boxes never really worked. Some of the photos and demonstrations were allegedly fudged with plants purchased from local stores, according to Oct. 2019 and May 2020 articles in the New York Times, Propublica, WBUR public radio and several reports in science and technology publications.

On April 30, 2020, Caleb Harper left his position as the lead researcher for the OpenAg Project at MIT.

His departure coincides with the Institute’s investigation into the entire Media Lab at MIT amid the brewing scandal that first came to light last fall when the MIT Media Lab’s main director Joichi Ito was found to have financial ties to Jeffrey Epstein. Epstein is the international financier and socialite, who was a previously-convicted sex-offender and committed suicide last year in prison awaiting trial on new charges of human trafficking.

According to the New York Times, and other sources, the OpenAg project, led by Harper, was being used through various meetings between Ito and Epstein to get Epstein to invest more than the half million the MIT Media Lab was already receiving from him in “discretionary” funds — funds MIT was not aware of. As this became known, the work of the lab itself came under scrutiny, and that scrutiny is still in progress even though the lab shut down at the end of April with Harper’s departure.

Here’s the clincher. MIT began a thorough investigation of its Media Lab after firing the director over the Epstein financial ties, and along with that, is investigating Harper’s OpenAg project. Portions of the investigation were reported on in May of 2020 by various science journals and even the New York Times, indicating Harper’s OpenAg project released water from its “computerized plant boxes” with too much nitrogen, well beyond the levels they were permitted to release, and it went to an underground well. A researcher on-site blew the whistle with local authorities, resulting in a $25,000 fine. He was reprimanded in an email from Harper for jeopardizing the future of the project, the report indicated.

In addition, Harper’s computerized artificial intelligence plant boxes, that were showcased on 60 Minutes and National Geographic as well as other high profile outlets, never really worked, according to researchers in the lab, who were interviewed by ProPublica, a non-profit journalism entity judged high in their accuracy based on evidentiary reporting.

What we are learning is concerning. Harper, in this Undeniably Dairy Scale for Good position, may be the very person to work with Vilsack and McCloskey on what practices dairy farmers (most likely via the FARM program) must implement in order to remain part of “U.S. Dairy” by meeting their environmental benchmarks on soil, air, and water. That’s being funded with dairy producer checkoff funds, and there is a big question mark behind the name of the new hire on implementation. Does he really know anything about those three resources – and how to really produce real food while stewarding those resources?

To be continued in the July 31, 2020 edition of Farmshine

-30-