Wild Blueberries and Climate Change with Dr. Rachel Schattman
The following interview was recorded for the Poor Proles Almanac podcast with guest Dr. Rachel Schattman from the University of Maine. Dr. Schattman is a renowned authority in the field of sustainable agriculture, with a rich background that includes a transition from working with vegetables to specializing in wild blueberry production. Her research focuses on the ecological significance of these tiny but mighty berries and their adaptation to climate change. As we navigate through the lush landscapes, Dr. Schattman provides invaluable insights into her climate change research, revealing how different genotypes of wild blueberries may adapt to evolving environmental conditions. Check out her work at the Agroecolab here.
Andy:
Thanks so much for joining us. I'm really excited to talk about blueberries as a New Englander who grew up around blueberries and who takes his kids foraging for wild blueberries. It's a great crop that has a really interesting history. That is really hard to believe today that it's, historically speaking, a new domesticated crop because it's so popular, right? So tell me a little bit about your work, how you got into blueberries, and what you do.
Dr. Rachel Schattman:
Yeah, sure. Well, first of all, thank you so much for having me on the podcast. My work has historically not been in blueberry. Before I moved to Maine, I worked in vegetables and small fruit for UVM Extension and the USDA Northeast Climate Hub, and I also had my own commercial vegetable farm for about 11 years in Vermont.
Since moving to Maine to take my current position at the University of Maine, I've gotten to know wild blueberries as a production system, and I think I just fell in love with blueberries in general.
I didn't know what wild blueberries were until I moved here. I had heard of them, and I knew they were smaller than highbush blueberries, but I didn't understand how different their growing environment was or how different their management was. I also didn't have as much of an appreciation for the risk, culture, cultural significance, and kind of living culture that there is around them. So it's been a wonderful immersion over the last four or five years getting to know them.
I think one of the things that I find the most compelling about them is just how robust they are and how these plants can weather extreme conditions and come through pretty well. Now, whether they continue to yield as many commercially saleable fruits as people whose livelihoods depend on them through the harsh conditions is another matter entirely, but just from an ecosystem perspective, they are really resilient and robust and can handle a lot, so that's part of what I find so amazing about them.
Andy:
Yeah, I think blueberries are, at least around here, the most important pollinator bush for the ecosystem in terms of the diversity of pollinators that use them. It's something wild, like 100, 120, somewhere in that ballpark of identified pollinators that use blueberry, which is just like crazy.
Dr. Rachel Schattman:
It is. It's amazing, isn't it? I have the good fortune of working with an entomologist here at UMaine named Phil Fanning, who is doing pollinator research for some of my wild blueberry trials, we were out in our plots this spring, and there were just a gazillion different types of bumblebees everywhere, and it was considering the size of our trial, which is pretty small compared to some of these vast blueberry fields that you'll see in different regions of Maine. I was not expecting the number of pollinators or the diversity of pollinators to be there, but it is. It is quite incredible.
Andy:
Yeah, I mean, even here, I'm near the pine barrens, and if you look at it topically, the ecosystem doesn't look great. When you go into the pine barrens because you've got these sparse pine trees, it seems kind of like this monocrop of wild blueberries, huckleberries, and then like openings where there's other stuff. But you're like this; this can't be that good. But in reality pines are also hugely beneficial pollinator trees, the scrub oaks that are here also. You know they're oaks, so they're incredible too. And then blueberries also fit that like the wide scope of pollinators or vaccinium in general, so including the huckleberry. So there's this deceivingly high support, ecosystem support from that, that structure, which I think is really interesting.
And again, it's cool to see this bush that, like we consume so easily as a wild food, there's no processing involved. It's not like a lot of other things where it's like, well, yeah, like acorns, you can eat acorns, but you have to do all this stuff to do it. And you know there's some debate about like the flavor, quality like no, you go outside, and you pick a wild blueberry. It's delicious like there's nothing to it.
Dr. Rachel Schattman:
It's like wow, is this like the perfect bush or like what? The answer is yes. The answer is yes, it is the perfect bush.
Andy:
Tell us a little bit about the trials that you're doing.
Dr. Rachel Schattman:
So a lot of my work is in climate change research, both from a social science point of view and also from a field science point of view, from an, as you put it so well, ecosystem point of view. Really, so the main question that my research team is asking right now that's relevant to wild blueberries is how are they going to fare both physiologically and in terms of the way that they support things like pollination in ecosystems, considering climate change?
So, we have set up an experiment here in Old Town, Maine, where we have transplanted blueberry plants of different genotypes into an experimental design. Then, we apply treatments, which are heating chambers and different precipitation treatments. It looks crazy. It looks like aliens have landed on this old cornfield.
Basically, we have these mounds of gravel that we have put because blueberries do well in very, very well-grained, coarse soil that we have then laid the blueberry sod on top of and mulched, and then put plexiglass chambers that are open at the top over a third of the berries, so that will kind of create an elevated ambient temperature without cooking them, and then another third get those chambers plus a heating coil, so we actually have electricity out in the field, and we're elevating the temperature to a higher degree and every plot is covered with a little greenhouse.
It's about 12 feet by 12 feet. In some of our experiments they're smaller, six foot by six foot, and that is designed to not keep out all the weather but to exclude kind of most of the rainfall that's happening. But then we go in with a hose and a meter, and we apply, you know, irrigation, but basically, simulated rainfall that is aligned with a really, really wet year, a really, really dry year, or something that we are calling a probable future scenario, which is the amount of water that we get in a really really wet year like 2023, which I bet it was the same for you as it was for us up here just incredibly wet.
With the seasonal distribution of 2020, which for us was a big drought year, we started out relatively okay. Then, in the later part of the summer, we just had long periods with no rainfall, and that's this year exactly.
So that's kind of what we're anticipating. Future conditions might look like more rain overall over the course of the year, but many more periods of this kind of extended dry season. So, the things we are looking at, we call them the response. Variables are things like the number of stems that the blueberry plants put out, the number of leaves, the total leaf area, and how well those leaves are photosynthesizing.
We have a wonderful mycologist on our team named Shana Annis who's looking at the mycorrhizal associations with the blueberry roots and seeing if there are any differences with the different treatments that we're applying. And then, of course, things like yield, fruit quality, fruit quantity. I think I mentioned Phil Fanning's work on pollination, so he's looking at the number of visitations of bees, the nectar quality, all sorts of things, but really trying to take a full ecosystem approach to it.
Andy:
Awesome. I'm assuming you don't have research results yet, but I'm curious what you're seeing so far.
Dr. Rachel Schattman:
Yeah, we don't have any results yet, but what we do have are preliminary studies that our team did kind of in preparation for this project. So, the heating chambers without the precipitation treatments are designed by a scientist named Yangcheng Zhang, who is in our School of Biology and Ecology in field settings and have kind of verified that they do, in fact, change the temperature and that it changes things like the timing of bloom, the duration of bloom, which are, you know, really important for people who are commercially managing these plants.
I did some preliminary work in the precipitation arena with strawberries rather than blueberries, looking to see oh and we also did a study with blueberries, looking to see how different precipitation patterns may or may not affect things like the photosynthetic ability of the plant's chlorophyll concentration of the leaves, and what we found is that there are differences, but those differences might be mediated by the different genotypes of the plants themselves. So for folks who haven't seen, like a full wild blueberry barren is what they're called, they're quite beautiful, but you can look out on the landscape and see different color hues across this, like a patchwork of low-lying blueberry plants.
They're not planted, they don't grow in rows, it's just like a single mat that goes out across a whole, you know, large acreage. Every time you see a shift in color, that's a different plant. So these plants are like 25 feet square. They're huge, and each plant we, we think, we assume is a genetic individual. So, there's really been no research done about how the genetic differentiation between these plants influences things like their ability to withstand drought, their ability to withstand extreme storms or saturated soil. There's a lot to do there, but that part of what we are also trying to figure out is how much it has to do with how these plants are responding to climate change.
Andy:
Yeah, so give it to me straight. Are we screwed? Cannot tell you that? Am I going to have blueberries in 25 years?
Dr. Rachel Schattman:
Well, I mean, again, the question is, for what purpose? So, will these plants survive? I mean, as I said at the beginning of our conversation, I think they will. They are incredibly tough plants and if you are going out and doing subsistence foraging, if you are looking for blueberries and not having it be your commercial business, I think you're going to have blueberries for the foreseeable future.
If you are a grower and you're depending on it for your livelihood, then you always have to ask yourself the question: does the investment justify the return? And I think everybody's situation is so different. There are so many different kinds of wild blueberry farms, and I'm sure in the high-bush blueberry industry, it's the same thing. People vary by the amount of capital that they put into the business, the amount of risk they can withstand, and what kind of market they're a part of really really depends on kind of their ultimate return.
So, I think that's part of what I'm trying to do with my research: get the industry some hard numbers that they can look at and put into their own business model so they can make that determination for themselves regarding the whole climate change component.
Andy:
Do you and the research that you're doing, do you foresee that there will be a little bit more human selection with wild blueberries given like that there's? I'm assuming, and maybe I'm wrong, and you can tell me if I'm wrong, that climate change will cause some kind of bottleneck. It sounds too extreme but like some compression of that genetics as a very specific trait for these irregularities. Warming climates do shift what can survive and thrive in these environments.
Dr. Rachel Schattman:
That's a good question. I really don't have many insights into how the high-bush blueberry industry is thinking about this. I imagine that they are thinking about variety selection in a way that creates a more robust and resilient industry.
Andy:
Yeah. For wild blueberries, there's no variety breeding that happens.
Dr. Rachel Schattman:
I haven't heard of anyone moving in that direction.
My crystal ball is very foggy and there are a lot of people who are doing really interesting work in wild blueberries, both in the US, in Maine, but also in Maritime Canada, where it's a very important crop. Dalhousie University has a really strong research team in Maine, but also in Maritime Canada, where it's a very important crop. Dalhousie University has a really strong research team. So I don't know if somebody somewhere is thinking about genetic improvements and turning this into a planted crop. I don't see a way to do it currently with the technology that we have. That would make financial sense. We definitely got questions when we started our project about whether or not we were aiming to make a variety of selections, but the cloning potential would have to happen over such an extended period of time. These plants don't like to propagate, uh, super quickly.
Andy:
I'm just thinking more, like, you know, as if there's a lot, well, I don't know. I mean, if there's a lot of genetic diversity, then hopefully, whatever die-off exists from extreme climate events is filled in. But also, to your point, blueberries, wild blueberries are such slow growing plants. Can these slow-growing plants with wild, wide genetic diversity overcome those repeated once-in-a-lifetime events that will probably continue to happen over the next century?
Dr. Rachel Schattman:
Well, again, I'm not sure that we have any evidence that the die-off is really in the future.
Andy:
Not for wild blueberries.
Dr. Rachel Schattman:
I think the concern is more economic profitability, so let's imagine a future where some proportion of wild blueberry lands are no longer commercially viable from an ecosystem perspective. Those lands will just kind of continue in through their succession, right? Or they'll be put towards different land uses, which is a whole other conversation, um, but I think that the industry has a long way to go before they reach that point.
There is, you know, because so many wild and buried soils are so well-drained, severe rainstorms, which are a problem for a whole lot of ag sectors, you know, affect them a little bit less dramatically. Drought is really the big thing for them. But a lot of wild blueberry farms haven't invested in irrigation yet. So you know, they've got like some big guns to pull out before I think we start to see huge uh tips in the industry. Awesome.
Andy:
That's comforting, yeah.
Dr. Rachel Schattman:
I think so too.
Andy:
So, one thing I wanted to ask—and I didn't include this when we were chatting earlier—has anyone been involved with any fire management techniques, and have you seen any, or got any feedback from the utility of prescribed fires?
Dr. Rachel Schattman:
Oh, that's so interesting. I know that prescribed fires and burning was one of the ways that traditionally wild blueberry fields were managed, but there and this far predates my kind of moving to this area; my understanding is that there were some real air quality concerns and that there were some state legislation that addressed it, and now it's much more common for people to mow their wild blueberry crop to do that every other year, pruning that most commercial growers do, in order to ensure good production the following year.
For your listeners who don't know, the wild blueberry crop is only harvested every other year. After harvesting every fall, you then go in after the leaves drop and prune back the entire crop by mowing it. So I know some people still burn.
Andy:
I don't know how prevalent it is, though. Yeah, I was curious because it does seem like the prescribed fire concept has been catching on in the last 5 or 10 years or so. I wasn't sure if it made its way back up to Maine, as people realize it is a very effective tool for all.
Dr. Rachel Schattman:
I mean, they're trade-offs. Yes, it's fabulous at controlling disease. It destroys all of your organic matter, at least at the very surface. So, there's no perfect management practice in any agriculture. You're always going to give something up when you gain something.
Andy:
Shifting gears a little bit, it sounds like you're you're cautiously optimistic about the future of the wild blueberry. Is that correct?
Dr. Rachel Schattman:
I am, yeah, yeah. I think every agricultural industry is going to be challenged by climate change. There's just like no way that you can have such intense ecological shifts without businesses and livelihoods that are based on natural resources and the environment. Like, of course, they're going to be affected. I think the question is, do they have the resources that they need to adapt? Have the resources that they need to adapt? And you know, adaptation can happen at different degrees or to different degrees, so some industries are going to get put past their capacity to adapt. I don't think wild blueberries are one of those industries.
Andy:
And what's been the feedback from farmers when talking about, like, well, hey, this is kind of what the future of wild blueberries may look like. And here are some of the tools that we think are probably your best efforts. Have they been very resistant to it, or is it becoming obvious that the way things are going probably is not indefinite?
Dr. Rachel Schattman:
It's a great question. I know it's different in different parts of the country, but my experience with farmers across many different sectors in Maine is that climate change is at the forefront of everybody's awareness. It might not be the thing that drives everybody's decision-making all the time, but most people are aware that conditions are changing.
I did a series of focus groups on behalf of the Department of Ag Conservation and Forestry a couple of years ago about experiences with drought across different ag sectors. Obviously, there's some self-selection there, and who decides to come to those conversations, but I think it's safe to say that across all ag industries, potato, blueberry, and vegetable livestock, everybody sees the environment changing. A lot of those conversations were very specifically about water management, which is one of the areas that I focus on most closely because I think it's such a huge deal for agriculture in the context of climate change.
While blueberry growers are kind of divided into two groups from that perspective, the folks who have already invested in irrigation, which are in the minority, but also managed the people who have invested and can afford to invest, tend to manage much larger pieces of land and smaller operations, some of whom have some irrigation capacity but a lot of whom don't.
One of the big challenges in Maine is its ability to develop water sources. To think well and have it yield anything that is actually going to be meaningful for their crop. And then, of course, the irrigation, piping, and delivery system. On top of that, the state of Maine, I think, recognizes this as a need, and they set up a new program that's in the final stages of being kind of rolled out called the Farmer Drought Relief Program, and this was kind of under the offices of which I was doing.
These focus groups were to gather information about how the state could best roll out this price support program. One of the cool things about it is that it will make funds available to farmers to first do their planning process. So, how much water do you actually need to meet your needs?
A lot of people don't know the answer to that. How would you size a pond, or where would you site it? Well, all the logistical parts and pieces, you know, part agronomic, part engineering, it all needs to come together.
Before you invest a lot of money into developing a water source or installing an irrigation system, I would say that the legislature needs to fund that program in proportion to its need. I think I can say this because I'm outside of DACF. I think it's underfunded currently, and I would advocate for additional state support.
Andy:
Yeah, that sounds about right for most things related to climate change. It's just a little underfunded, and it's not going to get any better. And talking about this on November 6th is particularly disenfranchising.
Dr. Rachel Schattman:
One of the most amazing things that has happened in recent years for agriculture and climate change is the funds allocated to the USDA through the Inflation Reduction Act. I have a friend who referred to it as agriculture's New Deal moment, and I think he was really spot on with that analogy.
The natural resources conservation service, which operates in every state and makes funding available to farmers to use conservation practices on their farms, got just this incredible slog of extra funding to the point where they had to hire a lot more people to make sure that they could reach the farmers who needed access to those funds to do things that were specifically related to climate change mitigation.
And that was really powerful, in part because a lot of mitigation practices can double as adaptation practices. Right, they're not always one-to-one. Adaptation does not equal mitigation, but in the ag world there are some things that overlap. So that love of funding has been, and I think will continue to be, tremendously impactful for agriculture in the Northeast and across the country. What that looks like going forward, considering the election result, I cannot say, but I think we'll see the ripple effects of the money that has already been spent in the coming years.
Andy:
That's awesome. I live near lots of cranberry bogs, and I have such. Because of that, I have such a contentious relationship with certain types of agricultural funding because a lot of I don't know what you know about cranberry as a crop assuming a bit, but there's, they produce much more than we need and a lot of it is just the continuation of growing cranberries because the land has been specifically designed for that and it's, you know, this giant subsidy for this industry that doesn't really need it, just because of, like this quote-unquote cultural value and kind of keeping these jobs where they exist. And given the ecological destruction that has happened in places like Eastern Massachusetts, it is a bit frustrating not to see that money being reallocated to rewilding efforts. That would be really beneficial.
But, especially with the work you're doing, where it's like these are wild environments and to an extent, cranberry bogs can be considered, you know, compared to like a veg crop or wheat or whatever, a more wild environment. So it is like, hey, would you rather have a monocrop of corn here? No, this is objectively better, but also better, but also, it is kind of a tenuous thing to like, look at, and say, I'm glad that it's not being turned into subdivisions, but also like this is not the ideal use for it either. But yeah, so, uh, it is interesting to hear that I haven't heard a whole lot about the Inflation Reduction Act in terms of agriculture, so that is interesting. And how has that affected your industry? Like, specifically, the wild blueberry area?
Dr. Rachel Schattman:
Well, it's interesting because I serve on the NRCS technical committee, which consists mainly of people who are not USDA employees. We serve as an advisory body to NRCS to keep them connected with the needs of local growers and the perspectives of the broader ag community and their state.
So it's a really interesting group to be a part of, to hear firsthand what NRCS is contending with this giant influx of funds that they then need to distribute to different groups in the agricultural sphere and to hear people's perspectives on the best use of those funds in so much of their flexibility, which serves like a ton of flexibility to kind of alter the course of the money.
My understanding from Maine and RCS is that they would like to be directing more Inflation Reduction Act funds and conservation funds for the wild blueberry industry than they have. They also recently just awarded a grant called an RCPP, a Resource Conservation Partnerships Project grant to the Wild Blueberry Commission of Maine to the tune of $15.5 million. That is the largest grant that the industry has ever received, to my knowledge, and its entire effort will be based around increasing access to conservation practices and NRCS support to wild blueberry growers a lot of it around water management.
So it's a huge success and, I think, a huge step forward for the industry in the state. I think other industries have historically felt a little bit more comfortable accessing NRCS programs, partially because a lot of conservation practices that NRCS will support have to do with soil and kind of sustainable and conservation-minded management of soil. But wild blueberries don't till, or wild blueberry growers don't till. They don't manage their kind of soil resources in as intensive a way as, say, a potato grower or a vegetable grower.
Andy:
Like I said, where I live there's tons of blueberries. I, for a long time, had sheep, and I would just let them browse over the blueberries every couple years, and they would do the same thing, and they loved it, and like it was a win-win like you'd see them all come down in nubs and you're like, oh man, they hit those pretty hard. Are they going to come back? But the next year, they came right back. They probably loved it.
You know, you can tell when you deal with blueberries a lot, but for folks that don't, you can look at a blueberry bush, and you can tell pretty quickly whether or not it's been pruned a year or two before or not. And if it hasn't, it just kind of looks worn down. It's splotchy, it's very woody, the material of it, and then when the next year comes back, you can tell it's kind of got like that nice fresh vigor to it. The leaves are usually lighter green, there's just more life to the plant, and it's like, oh, you are happy this happened to you.
It's very obvious when you see them next to each other. If I have the fence line in one spot, I can tell, all right, this is the side I grazed last year just because of the plant's coloring.
Dr. Rachel Schattman:
Yeah, yeah, I think you're absolutely spot on.
Andy:
So you've been also involved in some research around food security, which I think dovetails really well with this idea of wild foods. I don't know if you could speak a little bit about that and maybe how this all is part of this, like a greater narrative about food access, wild foods, and all. I guess like this bigger picture of like what autonomy, what responsibility, what ownership do people have on the landscape in these communities where, with the case of wild blueberries, there's this very long historical component of access to land, and also like this idea of like having relations with the landscape, right.
Dr. Rachel Schattman:
I love this line of questioning. Let me take it piece by piece. So, yes, I have been involved in a really interesting, very collaborative research initiative that has been led out of the University of Vermont by Meredith Niles, looking at food insecurity experiences after COVID-19, and the project started out as a multi-site investigation. We had lots and lots and lots of different collaborators from across the country, and I think we published a paper in 2021 that kind of compared across the United States what people's experiences were with not just food insecurity post-COVID but job loss where they were going to get food, whether that was grocery stores or other sources.
Their interactions with the charitable food system, with programs like SNAP, the Supplemental Nutrition, food Assistance Program or there was a special pandemic version of SNAP that helped people's benefits and made benefits more widely acceptable. So, all of those kinds of coping strategies following the pandemic. Since 2020, I've continued working with that group, but in a much more geographically narrowed range. So we focus mostly on Vermont and Maine to New England state, and our research has revised and reissued that same survey, so we have some ability to look back in time and compare people's experiences from 2020 onward.
Our most recent iteration of that survey was just this past summer, and then we've also been interviewing folks. we'll start another round of interviews actually this week, looking at people's responses and coping mechanisms. The reason that we're doing this is both because I think our initial surveys raised some really compelling questions about how people were accessing food, specifically how they were gardening, hunting, fishing, foraging, and canning, all of these activities that we group under the term home and wild food procurement and we can just call it home and wild food for the purpose of this conversation but also because we expect that, after any kind of big social or economic disruption, that there's going to be fits in how people get their food and that that will have a kind of residual effect over time.
We saw this with the Great Recession in 2008 as well. There was this big drop-off in food security that slowly rebounded much more slowly than other economic indicators, which I think is important. So what we are looking into now is really kind of how people's experience with food insecurity does or does not interact with their willingness and ability to do these home and wild food practices.
Now, not all of these practices, I think, are equally accessible to people. So, for example, one of the things that we found is maybe a little bit of common sense. The outcome is that a lot of people practice gardening for the first time after the pandemic. So, if they did it more than they had done in the past, it's fairly economically non-intensive to get started with gardening. You can get seeds pretty cheaply at the grocery store or the hardware store. People might not know you can actually use SNAP benefits to buy seeds, and some people do that, and you need a container with a little bit of soil.
Or if you live in a rural area, you're probably more likely to have access to an actual place where you can put a garden in. Things like hunting and fishing require permits and require equipment and required skills, and knowledge, and there's a bigger barrier to access. Now, some of these skills and kind of cultural norms around these types of practices are very well rooted in rural communities. So you know, people are practicing them all the time, but it's harder to get into for the first time, and that's, you know. That's an example of some of the dynamics that we, that we started to see through through our studies.
I was originally trained as a qualitative social scientist, which means doing things like interviews and focus groups which allow people to really kind of get into the nitty gritty of why they do what they do and what they think. The important thing to remember with that kind of study is that it's not representative of wide swaths of people. But what I really love is hearing people's stories about why they might start relying more on gardening or fishing, hunting or foraging relying more on gardening or fishing or hunting or foraging I think there are some important lessons that we have been learning and hearing, and it has to do with how prevalent food insecurity really is in our country.
It's something that I think a lot of people don't see and don't think about and don't hear about, but it's very much with us, and something like COVID really kind of brought it to the forefront of, I think, more people's minds and certainly more people's lived experiences. And now I'm just rambling, so you should stop me.
Andy:
No, it's really interesting, and you know, I did kind of try to bring these kind of disparate ideas together into one question because I do think this is kind of, and I may be stepping on your toes a little bit the future of, as you continue to do, this research kind of. Where does that communal aspect of, like, hey, we're talking about a wild food that has a long history for not just industry? Well, it has a fairly short history of industry but a long history of communal access that has been privatized, even though there are still some protected lands, and like the reason why people harvested blueberries 100 years ago was that you could can them, you could store them for long term storage. It offered food security that was free. All it took was time and really not a lot of skill.
It's not rocket science to create a jam to jar something or to freeze something today. So it does offer a way to mitigate some of those issues that you're bringing up. It also relates to the fact that you do have this industry that exists and what you know. How, how do you pair a wild food industry with a community that also has historically relied on that same wild food, if you almost can't talk about one without talking about the other on a longer timeline, where increasing food security exists, Absolutely, absolutely.
Dr. Rachel Schattman:
You make excellent points. This also comes up a lot when we think about tribal access to traditional lands and the ability to continue food sovereignty and food security practices for their communities. I think all of these issues that you bring up are really important in that conversation as well.
Andy:
Yeah, so do you have any thoughts about kind of where? I mean, I don't want to put you on the spot, but also, you are very knowledgeable about both sides of this coin. How do you see this kind of moving forward, or are you seeing it going? Do you have an inkling that there's this trajectory of a nexus point where something has to shift or that things are shifting?
Dr. Rachel Schattman:
Yeah, in terms of privatization of land and people's willingness to allow food subsistence activities on it, yeah, and how, to your point about COVID-19.
Andy:
There's also been an influx of foraging as a popular activity for younger people, especially those who like it; this is a way for me to re-engage with the world.
I had a month off at the beginning of COVID. I didn't know what to do. I was worried about food. I started following this person on TikTok, whatever it might be right, and suddenly they're like, I love going out and harvesting blueberries and huckleberries and chanterelles and whatever it might be.
They've created this new engagement with the landscape, and suddenly, when you have that engagement with the landscape, you notice more that, huh, like all this land that I could be harvesting on has been privatized, or they're federally owned, but contracted out as used for this company that has paid for the rights to this access, um, and given again that food inflation all these things are happening right now it seems like we're entering this point of contention from all the perspectives. You brought up from an Indigenous access point that the industry is going to struggle with profitability and have to put greater investment into making these farms profitable.
And then individuals that are more interested in access and the ability to feed themselves, right? You've got these three disparate lines that are kind of going to the same point of limited access to the land, and I'm curious, as the resident specialist, what your thoughts are on that.
Dr. Rachel Schattman:
Well. So I think it's a lot, of, a lot of important ethical questions that you're raising. I do not see the function of private property changing meaningfully in the Northeast.
I do have friends who work here who have moved from out west to find themselves a little at a loss and they're like where are my public lands, where do I go? We're very much in private land, dominated space in the Northeast when and the reason that I say that I don't see this shifting is that we have some pretty kind of novel, at least for the US, pretty kind of novel, at least for the US legislation that has been enacted in the last like five, ten years that specifically addresses our ability to eat what we want to eat, forage what we want to forage, hunt what we want to hunt In Maine.
I don't know if you're aware of the the right to food legislation that was passed a few years ago food sovereignty law. We were the first state in the country to pass one.
It says all individuals have a natural, inherent, and unalienable right to food, including the right to save and exchange seeds and the right to grow, raise, harvest, produce, and consume the food of their own choosing for their own nourishment, long as an individual does not commit trespassing, theft, poaching or other abuses of private property rights, public lands or natural resources in the harvesting, production or acquisition of food. So, this law is very much just beginning to be tested in the courts. There are some really interesting legal arguments, I think, to be made.
One of the earliest court cases had to do with the ban that Maine has on Sunday hunting. You're not allowed to hunt in Maine on Sundays, and the plaintiff basically argued that that was disrupting their food sovereignty and their ability to access food. The plaintiff did not win because the state was able to argue successfully that Sunday hunting constituted poaching and, therefore, was excluded from the Food Sovereignty Act. But I think we'll continue to run into these interpretive questions. The act itself is pretty vague and a very large umbrella that I think folks are going to look at very carefully in the coming years and try to see if they can use it in many different ways and many different interpretations. But to your point, they're very much protected even within this kind of new, fragile, cutting-edge statutory guidance.
What occurs to me, though, is that I have never run into folks here who didn't feel like they could ask someone for permission to hunt on their land or ask someone for permission to forage on their land to supplant personal relationships and that there's still really significant respect for people's ability to access their own food, at least in our part as Northeast.
It might be different where you are, and certainly, I imagine it might be different in more highly urbanized areas where fewer people have kind of a longstanding practice of things like foraging or gardening or hunting or whatever, but at least up here it doesn't seem like people are feeling like their food sovereignty is being challenged by lack of access to land. I think what they feel more challenged by, and I had a student who brought this up in class yesterday in such a clear way where he said you know, so many waterways in Maine are contaminated with PFAS, and that's been documented, and really couldn't be eating the fish out of there I feel like my food sovereignty is being diminished by PFAS contamination and who's responsible for that, and I think that's really a foresight into what the future might hold in terms of, like environmental regulation or litigation.
Andy:
I think it's a really good point, and as you were talking, I was thinking about two things. The first is that in Maine, I believe from my friends who hunt there, you can actually hunt anywhere unless somebody explicitly tells you you can't, which is a really interesting way to do things. To your point, people still ask for permission even though they don't have to because it does set a certain expectation of clear boundaries and respect and so on.
And then the second part of that is that you know, we have the same issue here in Massachusetts with waterways being contaminated where, and that's because of mills, and I grew up in a mill city that is now the home of a Superfund site. So it's, yeah, it's not great. The certain neighborhoods near where I grew up have like absurdly high rates of rare cancers and things like that. And that is really disheartening.
When you say, like, I want to go catch some fish, and I want to eat them because I want to have this relationship, and Massachusetts basically says, in these certain ponds and rivers, which is basically all of them on the East Coast, they do not recommend eating more than like one fish a month, and honestly I would say that is being generous and it's really sad and, to your point, it is an infringement on our rights as citizens in a landscape to not have access to it in all of these ways that humans have historically been able to.
Dr. Rachel Schattman:
I so agree Absolutely.
Andy:
So, Rachel, this has been a really fascinating talk. Where can I send folks who want to learn more about the research you guys are doing, see updates on your cool greenhouses, or do any of that kind of fun stuff?
Dr. Rachel Schattman:
We have a website for our group that describes much of our work, both our research and our outreach. We also run programs for farmers and agricultural advisors. The website is agroecolab.com A-G-R-O-E-C-O-L-A-B.com, so people can check us out there.
Andy:
Awesome. If people want to get involved, they live in Maine and love blueberries. Is there anything they can do to help you guys out? I'm sure there's always a need for some free labor.
Dr. Rachel Schattman:
We always have volunteer opportunities. So, yes, there's a Contact Us form on the website.
Andy:
They should just reach out, and we'll put them on our list. Awesome, awesome, Rachel. This has been really fun. I'm looking forward to seeing the results of your studies, and I'm sure we will cross paths again soon.
Dr. Rachel Schattman:
I hope so. Thank you so much, Andy; it's been a pleasure.
To listen to this interview, tune into episode 235 of the Poor Proles Almanac.