France Imports a billion dollars of butter a year its citizens eats so much of it that it's led to shortages in Asia sales for duri and fruit are booming China alone spends billions on them each year we traveled the world to see how billion dooll Food Industries work and meet some of the people powering them our first stop is the Dominican Republic where the world's largest aloe vera Farm Harvest and juices the thorny leaves Universal Alo Farm covers 5,000 acres here in the Dominican Republic while there are hundreds of types of aloe plants this Farm chose aloe barbadensis Miller because it has 20 amino acids minerals vitamins carbohydrates hormones and other bioactive substances once the baby plants are in the ground it takes about 8 months for them to mature about 750 people harvest these fields they're dispatched in groups harvesting section by section like the cut leaves won't grow back but the plants will grow new ones it will take them about a week to harvest just this one area one by one workers pick up all the harvested leaves and toss them into a truck those leaves head to a processing plant 2 miles up the road the leaves go through a bath of chlorinated saltwater to kill off any Little Critters from the field that may be hanging around then they get trimmed this jiggly fillet is the gel inside the Alo Leaf that's what's used in real aloe vera juice gel or skin care products to do it they need a really good knife they might make it look easy but filling takes precision and they have to move fast baying 3500 leaves a day many Alo companies use machines for [Music] fing the leftover Leaf bits go back out into the field as compost and the buckets of fillets those get weighed then poured onto this big table workers here Will insect them for any leftover Leaf bits which they'll then slice off once it's all clear the fillets head to the shredder which grinds them into a pure aloe gel at this point ascorbic acid is added to extend the shelf life [Music] the gel flows into this spillproof [Music] bag this bag is then vacuum sealed and put into a bigger metal box the whole process from Leaf to this container takes only about 3 hours but before the shipment can leave the factory its contents have to be tested for quality assurance only when a container passes the lab test can it be released for shipment these ones are bound for roddam in the Netherlands there the gel will be pumped into bottles for Forever Living Products but not every bottle of aloe is made like this in 2015 consu lab.com tested 10 aloe products for ingredients half of them failed our tests a 2016 Bloomberg investigation found that Walmart CVS and Target's aloe products contain no evidence of aloe at all it's so easy to put out a fake aloe product so there are all kinds of synthetic gels often you'll see the word like carbomer is a synthetic gel and if you see a clear gel you have no idea if it's really aloe or carbomer most aloe products aren't closely regulated by the FDA that's because they're considered supplements or Cosmetics not drugs so a product can say it contains aloe but it could mean a range of things it really does contain Alo filt or it's the whole Leaf ground up and not just that inner filt or it's a synthetic gel and there's actually no aloe which won't hurt you but doesn't have any of the supposed benefits of aloe there's not a lot of Regulation or oversight of aloe products it's also hard to regulate because aloe grows naturally all over the Americas and its gel has been used for thousands of years to heal Burns and reduce inflammation the challenge is Translating that history to our current rigorous medical examination another problem is there isn't clear scientific proof of Alo healing Powers some Studies have shown it helps soothe Burns and speed up healing While others show no effect on burns so it's not that Alo doesn't help the evidence isn't there right now the outer rind of the leaf has been found to have a laxative compound called aloin one study found that it caused cancer in rats while another found it helped with constipation but the FDA has banned aloe from being sold as an over-the-counter laxative drug there's no patent on aloe and so there isn't a lot of incentive for companies to be putting lots of money into clinical studies they don't really need to do those studies to get these products on the Shelf still consumers worldwide are flocking to aloe as they Embrace more natural products Universal aloe saw a 30% increase in demand in 2020 as consumers navigate this growing Market how can we identify the products made with real aloe vera well Todd says it's actually really tricky but he did have a few suggestions first you should always check the ingredient list you want to see aloe you want to see it's first you really need to be super careful on the wording because if it just says Leaf it could be any part of the leaf you could be getting the latex which you don't want unless you want to laxative effect look out for tricky wording like 100% gel that could mean there is 100% gel but not all of it is Alo fillet so you really need to know what part of the leaf is being made when they say Alo gel is it a gel that's made from blending up the whole leaf or is it truly just pure Alo gel despite these uncertainties experts don't expect the demand for Aloe to dip anytime soon all of mushroom Life Starts Here with compost the mushrooms here are very picky eaters the mushrooms eat a strict diet of recycled mulch hay wheat straw poultry litter and corn cob so this is the material near the end of the composting process it's dark caramelized it's soft it has a lot of water the mushroom spores or seeds are added in then it's aged pasteurized and trucked to Farms across the count like this one I'm Chris and I'm a third generation mushroom farmer Chris's family has been growing white button and crey mushrooms since 1938 mushrooms are grown indoors so that we can control the environment it all happens on vertical shelves workers use this machine to lay the compost down then comes a layer called casing with Pete Moss Limestone and water this equipment allows us to have the machine do the heavy work it helps get a perfect 1 and three Quin layer so the mushrooms don't grow unevenly or come up dirty this panel controls the growing conditions they want a perfect combination of carbon dioxide humidity and temperature after 16 days we're ready to harvest but it's Harvesters who are hardest to find we're always harvesting the only day we don't work is Christmas that did not stop because of the pandemic our workers were considered essential now that the economy started to pick back up we're down 20% on our Workforce and it's been a Major Impact on our business the mushrooms are grown and harvested in three breaks or phases meaning each room will get picked from three times starting with the biggest mushrooms then they'll wait for the little ones to [Music] mature mushrooms double in size every 24 hours so Pickers have to move quickly each arm armed with a knife a cart and tons of boxes they harvest every mushroom by hand you kind of twist the mushrooms you don't put in the door 220 mushrooms fill up a 10B box 10 in an hour do that give you a good Prospect some people they do more than 15 16 an hour the F Danielle beltron and his daughter Sonia run Mazda Farms just up the road I'm the second Mexican they grow mushrooms in the whole United States Danielle worked as a mushroom picker for over 12 years and I was thinking on my mind I say I hope one day get a farm today he and Sonia own 25 mushroom houses we probably need close to about 80 Harvesters every day and we today Harvesters work up to 12h hour days to pick as many mushrooms as they can but they still can't keep up we should be harvesting 10 rooms of mushrooms every day and we usually only can get to seven or eight rooms in the leftover rooms the mushrooms will be steamed off meaning they'll be destroyed it's a Race Against Time because mushrooms grow so quickly waiting even one day means and customers don't like that so the value decreases about 35 cents a pound instead of a dollar a pound kind of like hurts a little bit thinking of seriously there's nowhere that we could probably put this and there really isn't there's nothing you can do it gets even worse for specialty mushrooms that require even more labor like these shitake at Philips mushroom Farms it usually takes 3 days to pick the whole house it's still all all done by hand so it's still labor intensive or these my talkis each one of these logs has to be moved by hand put them on a shelf to spawn run then we take them off the shelf and bring them down here put them on this shelf to pick and then we have to pick them and then we also have to throw it away there's six touches in the course of this thing's life cycle every touch is a person which are hard to come by nowadays but the labor issues don't just stop at Harvest they can also be felt at the packing level Megan is the third of her family to run Mother Earth organic mushrooms this pet of mushrooms was just brought in from our farms and then we get it into one of our two coolers everything is labeled so that we know exactly what farm it came from the date it came in and how many pounds are brought in and it's all in our system so we can easily Trace back all of our product Megan has machines to wash and cut the mushrooms and even to wrap and label the boxes but everything in between from topping up a box to tracking and weighing is done by hand and then it'll get put in a flat at the end and get pal tized to go out to the customer Mother Earth delivers mushrooms as far as Denver Texas and Boston but getting them there is tough with so few workers so it used to just be Harvesters that were harder to get now it's at our harvesting level at our supervisor level at our quality assurance level even our office staff level truck drivers have been really hard to find as well the problem is is if they can't get them harvested at The Farms that means we don't have the mushrooms for the packing facility it's a complete ripple effect so how did the industry's labor problem become so dire well it starts with kennet Square's history of immigration Quakers a Protestant Christian group were the first to grow mushrooms here in 1885 as The Story Goes originally a Quaker farmer who grew carnations tried to grow mushrooms under the beds of the carnations and he was successful the Quakers then hired Italian immigrants to do the hard manual labor the Italians then started hundreds of mushroom Farms of their own in the area from the 1950s to the' 70s former sugarcan work workers from Puerto Rico settled into kennet square and took over picking the mushrooms but when they began asking for higher wages and better working conditions Farm owners fired them and hired Mexican immigrants instead in 1986 President Ronald Reagan signed an immigration bill that gave legal status to certain undocumented agricultural workers who came into the country before 1982 that really really help for all the Mexican workers most of Mexican work on the Maron industry for I would say at least 40 years they built kennet square into America's mushroom Capital it now produces 60% of the country's product but that population of Mexican immigrants is aging out of this work and their kids have chosen other career paths we started getting people from Central America now even before the pandemic these new workers began leaving for other Industries there's people that say oh like you go to construction or you go to Landscaping you make more money to make things worse strict immigration laws in the US have suffed compated the legal flow of Central and Latin American workers because mushrooms are a year- round crop the industry doesn't qualify for the h2a temporary worker program which allows immigrants to come into the US and work in seasonal agriculture the labor crunch is affecting every mushroom farm both small and large to entice the few Pickers left Farm owners are offering perks higher pay housing and transportation to and from work our Harvesters work on a peace rate we pay them per box my average Harvester earns over $14 an hour but I have some Harvesters that make over $20 an hour I would like to pay them more the company just can't afford to yet agriculture in general and mushroom Farms specifically work on very thin margins so when we can't Harvest 10% of our product we're definitely losing money Chris is losing $4,000 in Revenue a week for this current year we probably have lost somewhere in the middle of $250,000 it's millions of dollar yes there not thousands it's Millions realistic it is painful if this happens Farms will either have to reduce their scale and fill less growing rooms or they'll eventually would have to shut down Al together Chester County's mushroom Farmers lost $168 million in 2020 and that has a significant effect on the market which is booming in popularity for the last 10 years we're seeing a demand increase of 3 to 5% every year sales in grocery stores have gone up by 15% in 2021 customers are asking every day to fill their orders and we just don't have enough mushrooms to do that so it's difficult to want to expand want to provide all the orders that they want and then see mushrooms just go to waste the solution for the labor issue isn't an easy one Farmers have already automated much of the process some have turned to growing bigger mushrooms if you grow a larger mushroom it actually makes it a lot faster for the Harvesters to pick them so we can get them quicker here and get them out to our customers and do it with less labor the American mushroom Institute is pushing the Senate to pass the farm Workforce modernization act the bill would extend the h2a temporary worker program to the mushroom industry that way immigrants could get an agricultural worker visa to pick mushrooms we need more migrant workers we need more ability to bring people up to the country just like our grandparents did they came up and worked two jobs and worked hard to make a better life for ourselves and we need to continue to have America do that for new immigrant populations others in the industry are considering robot Pickers though not everyone thinks they're the best option you can't really get a machine to be as delicate as a person's hand to choose exactly which mushroom you also have to have like the eye to see which one is ready to pick robots like this are still 3 years away until then farmers will keep putting out the call for anybody to come help help pick mushrooms next we head to Thailand where Farmers Harvest a million metric tons of the world's most expensive durian fruit each year durian is native to several tropical climates around the world including Thailand Thailand alone grows over 300 varieties but the most expensive durians are grown in nury Province they're known as not durian not makes up the highest grade of durian in Thailand and is often given as a token of respect but even among not durian two varieties stand out the most expensive Kano durian and the slightly more affordable monong durian non durian is described as having refined and sweet pulp with a mild fragrance and creamy texture whereas other lesser grade durians are said to have a stronger smell and a watery texture not durian has a distinct taste and smell for two main reasons n the B's environment and the growing practices of its Farmers nanab burri province has been a center for durian farming in Thailand for over 300 years farmers in this region have been honing their technique for Generations using their resources and skills to grow the highest quality durians possible one of the resources they depend on is the chiao Freya river which flows through n theb and fertilizes the soil but the river water isn't used to water the Duan trees themselves farmers in NB prefer to buy fresh water which they believe improves the final quality of the [Music] [Music] durian for after planting it takes about 6 years for a healthy durian tree to bear fruit once the trees start to flower Farmers count the days until the fruits are ripe depending on the breed this can span 90 to 150 days but it's not only the time and labor that make non durian so pricey the cost to provide this kind of care add up just the water costs about $2,200 per year Farmers have to constantly check the trees and look for any infections or insects and they wrap each durian in plastic to protect it they must harvest the durian one by one when each fruit is perfectly [Music] ripe these timeconsuming and labor intensive techniques have a major impact on the flavor and final value of non durian a 2 and 1 12 kgam monong durian from Aida Farm can cost over $100 that's about a third of the price of Cano making it a more popular and affordable option for customers Cano on the other hand is the most expensive non durian you can buy depending on its size Cano durian from AA Farm can range from about $380 to $530 per fruit but despite Cano steep price demand for this variety is growing and Supply can't keep up [Music] [Music] one of the main challenges is the climate [Music] crisis [Music] for the tropical climate required to grow durian also makes the Farms susceptible to floods storms and Other Extreme weather in 1995 and 2011 floods destroyed almost all of the durian trees in N the birie in 2011 about 1100 Acres of durian trees were leveled and only 17 Acres survived after this benat had to start the six-year process over the global market for durian is expected to reach over $28 billion by 2025 and that means aana and other nonth theb Farms will likely continue selling out of not durian in the years to come Larry's a fifth generation farmer in Fort me Florida we've been growing citrus in my family since the 1850s when I first started in the industry Citrus occupied over 900,000 acres in the State of Florida in fact some years we had too much fruit and market prices were depressed just 15 years ago his family packed a million orange cartons a year mostly Valencia oranges the big sweet juicy kind you planted a Grove expecting that to last for multiple Generations the first case of citrus screening was reported in China back in 1919 it quickly spread across the continent devastating Citrus Groves in India and Saudi Arabia as well no one knows exactly how the Asian citrus CID made it to Florida but in 1998 it showed up on an orange jasmine plant in a backyard in Palm Beach County and it quickly spread throughout the state on Infected root stocks but it would take another 7 years before Florida's orange tree showed signs of Greening it spreads throughout the state before you even know it's present and in 200 5 Larry found his first infected tree it was a real Challenge and an eye opening for us we knew what a threat it could be to our operation and we were fearful there were more infected trees that just had not been detected at first Larry tried removing all the sick trees but the insect move faster soon infecting too many to control when a CID munches on a citrus tree it leaves behind the bacteria that causes Greening here in the vascular tissue the bacteria replicates and blocks this important Highway for moving nutrients underground the root systems thin and die out above ground you notice the yellow pattern the dark green spots if you can see me through the canopy of this tree that means this tree is really really siick while the trees do keep bearing oranges for a few years the fruit essentially never ripens you see it's small in size it remains green and when I cut this fruit you see an odd shape you can still eat the fruit it's just not as sweet the orange juice from this fruit uh has lower sugar content or bricks than normal fruit but there's nothing wrong with the juice it's awful and 40% of those oranges fall off the tree sooner than usual the bacteria is actually starving and kills the tree over time today researchers estimate 90% of all orange trees in the state have the bacteria no longer do you see citrus trees abundant in the landscape Larry has kept his trees alive and producing for 15 years using a combination of Horticultural techniques developed by scientists at the University of Florida some of our work that is going on right now is finding ways to keep those trees that do have the disease still producing fruit that are usable you guys want to see what some sads look like yes all right so they're very small oh there's an escape actually they're small they kind of jump around a little bit so we use this thing called a an aspirator or the more fun term we use with children is pter we just suck them up it's basically a little vacuum in my hand here Lauren deep and Brock can study the SIDS movement to learn what might keep them off a citrus tree using the aspirator is actually a really efficient way to collect cids she's figured out a few things that detract SIDS first this pink clay it's sprayed on the trees to hide the leaves from the insect which uses light wavelengths to see one study showed the clay was more effective than insecticides the second thing Lauren is researching is these 8ft wide sheets of plastic called reflective mulch the idea is that it should make it where the Sid can't find the host plant it could be that it blinds them or causes a visual deterrent how's it work uh somewhat we do get SIDS we do get them but we do get them at a reduced rate a few years ago Farmers discovered that putting plastic bags around baby trees could help them grow stronger before infection Lauren is now studying how effective these individual protective covers or ipcs actually can be so this is IPC mesh and as you can see there's little holes in it you can see my hand very clearly wind Sun rain it all gets through here the goal is to really keep that Asian citrus CID off the tree and then if you look underneath this is our irrigation the baby trees will grow in the ipcs for 2 years so you can see the trees aren't perfect we're still going to have some stuff on them we do have some pest issues in here but you know they look really good compared to what's in the open field and this will actually give our trees a Fighting Chance once they're out in the environment and they could potentially get infected with Cass scientist trip T vashish thinks the key is in the soil we have been learning that the trees need uh these nutrients to fight infection the citrus trees because of this disease have very small roots or fewer root so they are not very efficient in picking up the nutrients it's like a job of 10 people needs to be done by one person same with the roots she figured out that that giving smaller doses of fertilizer and water more frequently helps the sick Roots absorb nutrients better and it's similar like us at six small meals each day rather than three big meals are better same is with the fertilizer and irrigation smaller doses are better than big doses Larry uses fertilizer custom designed for his trees he's also planning more young ones one of our strategies for dealing with with Greening is to plant uh The Groves at higher densities we're planting 300 trees per acre compared to 140 to 150 trees per acre before we were dealing with the disease so if he knows all the trees will get infected with more planted hopefully some Will Survive Growers have also tried releasing Predator wasps and spraying insecticides while there's no Silver Bullet in combination these short-term Solutions have sort of worked you can slow down the decline we've been battling Citrus Greening for 15 years and while the industry is not thriving we're definitely surviving but the problem is all these approaches tack on an extra $600 per acre onto production costs for Growers our revenues are down by more than half on an individual growth basis Growers are losing money and many couldn't swallow the losses by early 2022 half of Florida's orange growers had left the industry so while he waits for a long-term solution Larry's taking hit so he can keep harvesting the same way his family always has workers quickly pick the oranges and drop them into bags once they've got a good batch Pickers dump them into baskets in the Grove workers then truck the oranges to the packing facility just down the road we have eight digital cameras that takes a picture of each piece of fruit as it travels through the packing line we use an electronic sorder to divide the crop by color if they're orange enough the fruit gets cleaned and hit with a layer of natural wax it preserves the fruit uh extends its shelf life today because of hlb Larry packs half as many boxes as he did 17 years ago if the oranges are a bit too green Larry knows they'll be hard to sell on the Fresh side so he sends them to get Juiced at the Florida's natural plant in Lake Wales Larry owns the juicing plant along with other local Growers as part of the company's Cooperative about 90% of the fruit grown in the steak goes to orange juice but just like Growers the factory has been getting fewer oranges so less efficiency in the plant with a lower fruit volume the factory had to shut down one of its three processing lines nowadays 60,000 boxes of oranges arrive at the plant from Cooperative Farms across central Florida that's about 30,000 fewer than before hlb within 24 hours of harvesting the we juice the fruit this machine squeezes the juice out of every orange we pull out any seeds and we also collect the pulp where we can add that back to whatever degree we want to do that the juice gets pasteurized and then pumped into cartons but remember Greening affects Orange's natural sugar content so Florida's natural has to blend infected oranges with sweeter ones from different regions or even Seasons it still tastes like orange juice it's just not quite as sweet today the factory pumps out about a third less than preg Greening they need a home for their fruit where they can get maximum value that hopefully can sustain their operations until a solution to Greening is found many scientists believe the long-term solution lies with re-engineering nature either genetically changing the bug itself or naturally breeding citrus trees ultimately a tree that's resistant or tolerant to the disease will be key that's the project Fred gitter and his team are working on at the University of Florida they're trying to breed for an hlb resistant orange variety meaning even if the disease shows up the tree won't get sick to do that he takes two different types of trees maybe one with yummy oranges and one that's resistant and essentially has the mate and their kid will hopefully still taste good but won't get hlb that's really the Holy Grail of of citrus screening research but that's not easy finding a resistant orange is like looking for a genetic needle in a hay stack it's extremely difficult to breed new oranges we know of some kinds of trees related to oranges that are resistant and we're trying to access the genetics of those resistant types by making crosses Fred says it could take more than a decade so it's long term there's always an element of serendipity in this but armed with that Miracle resistant tree they could be better prepared to tackle future diseases it's a global interconnected world we live in people and plant diseases move about pretty freely and so there will be another problem another disease come along I believe science will continue to deliver new tools that will make growing citrus easier over time I look forward to those days I'm sure we'll have other challenges that we'll face in time but today Citrus Greening is here to stay Fran's family has been making cheese in the town of zutu valde for over 150 years every day he starts by warming over 600 gallons of milk pumped in from the milking Barn milk floating in now is like a a 37° inre just the body temperature of a cow for every batch of cheese he adds renit enzymes that make the proteins in the milk Clump together into solid curds leaving behind the liquid way Ren is um like a pair of scissors cutting through the milk after 30 minutes a giant curd has formed it should break open like that it's good this machine starts cutting it into pieces and we cut it real small in order to have very little moisture in the cheese in order to make a cheese which can AG for years Frank's parents taught him how to make cheese when he was 22 years old my brother and I had a 7 generation ctin producing cheese and milking cows and uh well there was there will be at least seven generations of cows walking on this Farm as well he took over the family business with his brother in January of 2022 I think um 50% of the Dutch people has a great-grandfather who's been a farmer Farmers shaped the landscape in the Netherlands in the 13th century nearly a fifth of what is now the Netherlands was underwater over the centuries the Dutch built dkes to hold back the sea Farmers drained large portions of the reclaimed land to plant crops but one of the only things that would grow on the wet soil was grass so raising cattle for meat milk and cheese became big business the dairy industry eventually became a symbol of the Netherlands as much as tulips and windmills milk and cows Grace Dutch masterpieces by vermier in Ben go by the 20th century the Netherlands was producing so much cheese it was a valuable export today almost all Dutch Dairy Farms sell their milk to Big factories that pasteurize it and use machines to make cheese on a large scale but Fran only works with raw milk just 4% of Dutch Dairy Farms make Howa in house like he does we still produce it on the way like my great grandfather did and I don't know if it's extra good but I like it and what machines do at factories he still prefers doing by hand like checking the consistency of the curds himself now it's just uh warm way it's it's like uh almost 30° and the curd is real soft now and now all the curd over here is just like this deep under the way and over there there's no curd anymore but I'm just checking if the curd is a bit um equally divided uh equally uh spread he can start draining out some of that liquid way but nothing goes to waste he skims the fat to make butter and feeds the way to his pigs the pigs already happy with just weight and I like butter on my sandwich in the morning he slices the leftover curd into sections large enough for a wheel of cheese he gauges the right amount by feel meanwhile Fran's employee savan prepares the old buckets most of which were Fran's grandfathers they're only handful of farmers in the nland who still use wooden buckets Fran drifts a cloth below the surface and piles the curds on top the cloth will help the last bit of way drain out they repeat the process for 12 wheels of [Music] cheese uh there's a lot of weigh in so I think about 25 30 kg something like that and it's gozy these presses squeeze out the remaining [Music] liquid all this cheese comes from the milk of Frank's 200 female cows the Netherlands has nearly 1.6 million of them and they produce lots of nitrogen because of what they eat fertilizer grown grass in the summer and imported grain and soy year round their pee is full of nitrogen too and when it mixes with their poop it creates a gas called ammonia the plumes of ammonia drop down onto nature Reserves and acidify the soil some nitrogen loving plants like grass take over while other native plants can't absorb proper nutrients from there it's a domino effect many native plants grow weak or die out snails can't get enough nutrients to build their shells the birds that eat the snails can't develop eggs where their chicks are born with frail bones inside one of the Netherlands largest national parks Rangers like anamik fer say Oak and pine trees are dying out they're all sick there's n not one that I would say oh you know that's very very fit or very uh a healthy tree you can say that the trees are starving it's not getting all the nutrients that it needs to be a very healthy full growing oak tree that it can be environmentalists say 14 habitats in the country are on the brink of collapse the dairy sector is one of the drivers of biodiversity loss in the Netherlands back in 1992 what is now the European Union adopted a law known as the habitats directive requiring countries to designate nature areas for conservation in order to comply the Netherlands introduced policies to cut nitrogen on these protected lands back then Dutch Farms had one of the highest ammonia emission rates in Europe by 2019 the industry had cut its emissions by almost 2/3 covered manure storage like below this slatted floor has helped if it stays sealed underground for enough time the ammonia won't evaporate as much everywhere we were standing there's 2 m deep basement full of manure and PE but these efforts alone weren't enough the Farms releasing the most ammonia sat near those protected nature reserves the nation's highest court said the Netherlands needed to do more the government scrambled to comply some lawmakers suggested cutting the number of animals in the country in [Music] half farmers were outraged they protested for weeks dumping manure on streets and blocking roads with tractors by early 2023 the government lowered the goal to a 50% cut but by then a pro- farer political party named The Farmer citizen movement had swept provincial elections Rick lutters is a party leader in this area we have a nitrogen law which is rigid and is fully focused on on on Dairy farming uh and we want that this law is gone soon after the government announced a $1.6 billion plan to buy out and close up to 3,000 High emitting farms near nature reserves a farmer can voluntarily take the buy out and possibly get more than their Farm is [Music] worth but for Fran selling his seven generation Farm isn't an option he says his cows are like family this is Gina she's the highest ranking and she's the leader of the earth she just buses other C CS away with her head mainly so uh when she wants to drink and there's another cow Bo move aside I'm Gina here I am and I want to drink he even got married on this Farm surrounded by his cows and it's tradition in his family to name cows after relatives and uh I named the cow after my daughter as well Frank and his brother milk the cows twice a day first we clean the teeth start starting at left front right front front right rear and left rear and then we um connect the milking claw there's a little bit of vacuum underneath so it SS the milk away Fran gets about 8 gallons of milk a day from each cow what he can milk in 15 minutes would have taken his grandfather an entire day new technology helped Dairy and livestock Farms consolidate beginning in the mid 20th century little Farmers Teese makers they quit and the and the bigger ones they grow bigger to this day between 70 and 80% of the country's Dairy is sent abroad mainly to other European countries that's all in the region of between let's say uh London Paris and Berlin within an area of 800 kilometers in the USA you would call that a local product the Netherlands is also the eu's largest exporter of meat it trades about $9 billion dollar worth of pork beef and poultry internationally every year and it does it all on land not much bigger than the US state of Maryland for much of the world the Netherlands became a road map for how to farm efficiently at scale but environmentalists like Natasha orlans from the World Wildlife Fund see it differently I see the Netherlands as an example of where everything went wrong exporting the meat and dairy and having a huge amount of manure here in the Netherlands causing all these environmental and societal problems the farmers we spoke to said saving the environment should go hand inhand with preserving their centuries old traditions Traditions like flipping the cheese in the first 24 hours of the cheese we turn it like six times [Music] flipping ensures both sides of the wheel will be round like the curve of the bucket see it already turning yellow so um it's a good sign then he moves the cheese wheels into a salty brine the salt bath is mainly for making a crust around the cheese a little bit of salt salt will get deeper into the cheese for a little bit of taste Fran ages his specialty Hela for up to 10 years at a consistent 59° F this is one is from 2013 so uh 10 years old now and still looking shiny still looking young here he stores hundreds of Wheels over $100,000 worth of cheese every day we turn them put an extra layer of coating on on top of it that liquid plastic coating seals in the moisture and of course to uh to uh keep uh mold away you hear it when I I lift it it gets stuck on the shell so that's why that's why you flip it as well as it ages friendly bacteria build up amino acids these crystals that's where the flavor of the cheese comes from Fran can tell it's aging well from The Sound it's nice flat here you hear it Fran is one of over 45,000 people working in the Dutch dairy industry if you just take out half of the farmers and half of the jobs and half of the income uh where do these people going to work they go to the cities probably and the whole uh villages at the countryside will um become ghost cities I think within 10 or 15 years I'm worried who's going to produce our food and where is it coming from many farmers now face a tough decision take the buyout decrease their herds move their Farms or make pricey upgrades to try to cut nitrogen emissions but not everyone can afford costly Innovations many farmers are working on narrow margins or are already in debt Farmers don't get an uh loan from from the bank because they say oh we don't know if you can still Farm after this reg due to these regulations plus Farmers don't even know yet if Innovations could actually save their farm from closure researchers at vingan University are hoping they can this is not a commercial dairy farm it's a research center that's Keys D coning he runs the University's Dairy campus his team is testing different iterations of the slatted floor Fran has we can run trials where we separate the urine and the solids they're also studying the effect of robotic scrapers and poop vacuums by quickly moving waste into closed storage vacuums reduce methane and ammonia loss but Keys estimates one like this could cost over $20,000 and a farm of 120 cows would need two he says changing cow's diets is a cheaper option so can we feed cows such a way that we have less ammonia emission or less nitrogen losses his team feeds the cows different combinations of food then they use these troughs to test how much the animals eat and their emissions the electronic ID system is uh identified so we know exactly which cow is uh in the [Music] box so if Innovations can't help farmers still have the option of the buyout as of November 2023 nearly 1,000 livestock Farms had registered for it almost a quarter were dairy farms but the government won't pay them out for a while that will take at least another 6 months to a year before that is uh uh finalized that same month a new right-wing party pvv won the most seats in the country's parliamentary elections cared Fiers the party's leader spoke at Farmer protests earlier in the year they killing our Farmers for some idiotic leftish liberal soal nitrogen problem in the Netherlands the party has signaled it wants to stop government spending on initiatives to curb nitrogen including the fund for the buyout plan Rick hopes the pbv will form a coalition with other pro- farer parties we can make new laws it's it's quite simple but a coalition could take months the World Wildlife Fund says this delay will only lead to further deterioration of nature meanwhile farmers are in limbo it's the limbo that paralyzes the agricultural sector and and that limbo is very dangerous for nature as well because it's still suffering it's horrible and um I can feel for them this problem isn't unique to the Netherlands Dairy Farmers in Ireland might have to decrease the size of their herds because of unsafe nitrogen levels in rivers which are causing algae blooms New Zealand has some of the most polluted waterways in the world Dairy farming is one of the biggest sources of these dangerous nitrate levels in drinking water and in the US state of California Agriculture has contributed to hazardous air pollution all of these countries will have to contend with the same questions the Netherlands faces today how do we feed ourselves preserve tradition keep economies running and protect our planet I don't see myself as being opposing to Farmers I'm opposed to the system the way it is now it's ecologically a disaster and it's also not bringing Farmers a proper income so basically it's a a system that's being broken and that system needs to be fixed Bron seems open to a fix too if it helps uh nature or climate bring it on maybe then his family can continue making cheese for another seven generation ations I hope that Dairy Farmers have a future in the Netherlands I think we're really connected to the landscape I hope the Farms won't grow too big so it can be run on a family scale uh I think that's a beautiful way of living you probably know the Cavendish banana you can find this type of banana in every supermarket around the world they're so popular because they're yummy they look nice and they ripen as they transport it's quite yielding that's got quite a thick skin and so travels well and tastes pretty good comes in its own package but there's a problem they are sterile they don't have seeds No Seeds means Cavendish bananas are clones of each other so the only way to propagate them is in vitro or by taking new growths called suckers from the base of an older plant but since they're all genetic copies Cavendish are really vulnerable to disease the domino effect if you have everything wrong with just one clone one disease can kill everything plant by plant that's exactly what's happening with TR4 one of the deadliest plant diseases out there the fungus doesn't spread to humans but it does eventually kill the banana plant so no more fruit grows scientists guess the fungus probably started somewhere in Southeast Asia in the '90s and quickly spread across the globe then in 2019 it hit Latin America combined with the Caribbean that area grows 75% of the world's bananas to make sure the fungus doesn't spread Farms across Colombia have implemented biocurity measures evanor 2 was one of the first farms in the country to detect TR4 workers wash down and disinfect the underside of any car that comes in just in case there's infected soil hiding in the treads Antonio's team built cement path throughout the farm so on their way to harvest workers aren't walking on open soil once they've reached the area ready to be harvested workers walk through a sanitizing foot bath made of ammonium out in the field workers measure the banana fingers to make sure they're ready to harvest they're usually ready about 12 to 13 weeks after the fruit stem shows up one worker cuts down a 65lb bundle while the other catches it and carries it to the cableway that cable W system brings all those banana bunches to the packaging plant first workers sanitize the bunches with [Applause] chlorine then they check the bananas for quality and any signs of ferium damage they cut off and throw bushels into a huge tank that bath not only preserves the bananas but washes off any of the latex that naturally occurs on the peel the bananas get cut into smaller Bunches of five to seven next Come Those famous stickers workers wrap the banana carefully so they don't bruise that wrapping has holes in it so the bananas can ripen as they travel no more than 4 hours after the bananas are harvested those boxes end up on pallets loaded onto trucks the bananas are trucked to the nearby Port where they're moved onto ships this shipment is headed to the US with equipment bananas and people moving along this Global Supply Chain it's easy to see how the fungus could spread if TR4 does sneak into a farm the Colombian government has laid out strict guidelines for containing the fun Fus that means they found symptoms like the yellowing of the leaves spitting the once tier 4 is identified in a plant you can't just kill that one plant the fungus goes about 10 ft deep into the soil once the pathogen is in the soil is almost impossible to eradicate so you have to kill off all the plants in that [Music] area to keep operating the rest of the farm Evan Norte 2 followed the government's three Zone plan the injected herbicide kills all the plants in zone a that tarps so Birds won't land on the fungus and spread it around there are also canals around the zone to keep any water away from the infected area in zone B called the buffer zone finally in zone C plants are allowed to grow but they're constantly monitored for signs of TR4 Jose estimates biocurity has cost this Farm as much as $5 million since 2019 so they're pricey but the measures are working at keeping the fungus at Bay these biocurity measures have contained the fungus in Colombia and kept it from spreading to Ecuador the largest exporter of bananas in the world but fungus can wipe out an entire fruit variety if not stopped we know because it's happened before in the early 1900s a banana called gross Michelle was the most popular but by the 1950s one a strain of the Panama disease wiped out the whole production of gross Mell luckily Cavendish was resistant to that first trrain so it took over as the banana of choice the problem was banana companies built their entire Supply chains around this one Cavendish Variety in 2019 they exported 20 million bananas and supported millions of jobs globally but now the Cavendish is also vulnerable the history repeats itself now with the tropical race for and the cavies cooking bananas like plantains are also at risk for TR4 a risk for food security because the plantains are staple food in Latin America in Africa and many other countries they are part of our daily diet so yeah the newest race of ferium is scary for both Cavendish and plantains but this time around we have advanced science researchers across the globe are working toward one goal this guy actually invented a banana that did just that back in 2019 Dr James Dale announced that his team had successfully injected the DNA from a resistant banana into a cend dish and it worked we found the solution we have a line of Cavendish which appears to be completely resistant to TR4 the thing we haven't done yet is a taste test and that's because GM they look smell feel exactly the same as every other banana we've only changed one je but no one would buy his Miracle banana because it was genetically modified in the EU most member countries have either partly or fully banned GMOs in the US they're allowed but feared one argument against GMOs is that these modified plants would quickly spread their genes and kill out biodiversity but with bananas that's not a problem the genes don't move because they are sterile you can grow a GM banana next to a non-gm banana for 50 years and the gene will not move from one to the other incredibly frustrating there's the solution but it's it's a scientific solution but not a political solution so scientists had to go back to the drawing board using what they learned from James to play the non GMO game Fernando is a breeder for Keene a genetics company in the Netherlands and he thinks the best way to get around GMO regulations is through traditional breeding meaning you take two different types of bananas the Cavendish and one that is resistant and you essentially have the mate and their kid is hopefully resistant to Panama disease but still tastes good like Cav dish cross breeding or traditional breeding is something that happens every day in nature so the bees are pollinating the different flowers with other flowers so that's what we are doing here we are acting as bees Fernando has found a few resistant bananas to cross with Cavendish but most of them are not even edible bananas are the bananas that are full of seeds like these ones and AC cross those with a Cavendish is hard they are sterile very difficult to breathe is not impossible so you can try to cross but you need to do it many many many times to get only a few seats for James to make that first GMO banana it took him nearly 10 years since our first field TR for those future bananas that are traditionally bred it'll take just as long it will take lots of years because the life cycle of the banana is quite slow but the longer it takes to traditionally breed a resistant Cavendish the more the disease spreads and the more strains of ferium could be released Fernando says there's a bigger picture your way to attack this problem diversity take tomatoes for example you go to the grocery store and there maybe 10 or more different types of tomatoes Cherry Vine beef Roma that's diversity so if one tomato gets in trouble it won't be a huge loss Fernando and his colleagues have the same vision for bananas we have red bananas pink bananas why not try to incorporate that into the market so that you can go to the supermarket and have a complete bench of different options of bananas that you can choose there are hundreds of different banana varieties around the world a friend of mine collected one up in Pap Guinea that he said if you didn't know it you think you're eating a strawberry yeah so amazingly different flavors and diversity would also help Farms but if you have different types of bananas grown together probably one banana will be more resistant than the next one so that one can stop the spreading of the disease to the next Plant so why haven't companies Diversified because it's too expensive and complicated to change a $25 billion industry built around a monoculture so until a solution is found these biocurity measures will have to be the short-term fix for keeping the big business of bananas alive making the batter begins off site to make a metric t of butter vanam fills this churn with 2,400 L of cream as the churn spins the fat collides and sticks together forming butter grains after 30 minutes of spinning the churn is open and inspected vanon then cleans the butter grains with the filter buttermilk and the churn is left to run for another 15 to 30 minutes until all of the grains become a single Mount of butter before the batter can be needed it's left to rest for a couple of days to develop [Music] flavor at the mes or butter house 50 kg blocks of butter are unwrapped and sliced into smaller pieces the butter is needed with a wooden roller on a rotating table using a 19th century technique known as malax this removes the excess buttermilk and creates a silky smooth texture it was introduced into the process by Meson bers founder janif B yeah at larger workshops centrifuges are typically used to remove the remaining buttermilk but here it is done entirely by hand this process requires so much skill the B requires people to Apprentice for a year [Music] for [Music] the final step is adding fine [Music] salt during this process the butter will lose one to two lit of water when the butter has reached the right level of flexibility it's shaped into a block cut and checked for [Music] color for [Music] when the butter reaches the ideal consistency it's ready to be shaped the needed butter is placed into this machine called The Pusher The Pusher squeezes the butter through a cylinder and onto a table where it's sliced with a guitar string cutter nicknamed Mar antoanet the cut butter is shaped with titanium paddles by a team that works up to 5 tons of butter a day another signature of B it's a use stamps bourier makes around 13 different butter recipes throughout the year some of the most popular flavors bourier makes are seaweed butter smoked salt butter vanilla butter and espet pepper butter but true to form each of these Butters can be slightly adapted depending on the request has also been busy creating new recipes like this SP with infused butter [Music] behind this passion is the previous owner janiv who retired a few years ago and while he may no longer work in the shop his Philosophy for making a top tier product remains a powerful [Music] tenant [Music] [Music] and at the end of the day it's the pleasure that customers get buying the batter that motivates bourier to continue our next stop is Spain which produces the world's costliest ham black aarian pigs descend from Wild boes and have been considered a delicacy since long before our times in the year 77 Roman right plan the Elder placed their superior quality in 1493 when he sailed across the Atlantic for the second time Christopher Columbus had Iberian pigs aboard these Caravel the most expensive of them all sells for € 4,100 which is over $4,500 but despite the high price this ham remains a local favorite black Iberian pigs can be found in the southern and western regions of the Iberian Peninsula which comprises Spain and Portugal in Spain aam production is confined to the provinces of salanka huela Cordova caseres and bados Portugal also produces it under the name presunto IO Spanish iberham is protected by the use protected designation of origin the five Spanish provinces where it is produced are split into four different protected destinations of origin out of the total production of iberham only 6% comes with a black label indicating it's the 100% Iberian pure breed a baron pigs are raised in an ecosystem known as the [Music] DEA the pigs live in the wild roaming freely in the DEA per regulations there shouldn't be more than two pigs per hectare of grassland the deesa is rich in olives nuts and berries but especially in acorns called botas in Spanish which are rich in nutrients and fatty acids basically a super food for [Music] pigs so after learning all about the black Iberian Pig and why it's such a special Pig and different from any own the breed we are at a local company here in corana Lazo to find out about the making process of the hams ham comes from the rear leg of the pig most companies would also cure the front leg called paleta and use the rest of the meat for other products like chizo lasso stores over 150,000 legs in its cellers some of the hands made here come from an even rer breed of the aarian pig the manado de habo which has black patches on its skin and can only be found in the Sierra de wva the pigs are killed when they're 15 months old the hams and palettas are then buried in salt for 15 to 20 days depending on weight after salting the process starts to gradually slow down the legs spend about two months in a temperature controlled room then they're moved to an ny room for six to 9 [Music] months the final stage of curing and also the longest is the one in sellers on average anaran ham needs a couple of years to reach its Pak flavor but some legs can cure for much longer to get a better understanding of how Iberian ham is labeled on the market we visited productos deerra a shop in Seville that sources local products from andalia and no farther than 250 km [Music] for how we know if it's a good H needs to be you know soft and the fat needs to melt with a little bit of temperature so is a is a good one as with its origin and environment aanam is carved using a specific technique which can take a lot of time to [Music] [Music] learn [Music] so this one is our homeo this one is 100% Iberico which is the highest grade it's cut in like such a Divine shape I've never seen a h cut like this you know you use used to those like very long just a bit sad slices this one looks like kind of Royal and the room smells so nice smells so nice and actually before I try it I just want to point out how shiny is this spot so good so good I have no words my voice is gone is so good it's not salty but like that's the thing that astonishes me every time that I have like good quality ham or meat in general that it doesn't taste like salt even though it's a main stage of the production of course it's just nice and flavorful taste is nauy like you can taste the a corn in here it really traces back to the actual pig that made this it's really nice and especially the fat you should keep it it's very nice and greasy adds a bit more of a battery texture and the marbling as well because these pigs are smaller than usual pigs we used to and they there is more muscles in your legs rather than fat it's very very tender and it really has a different flavor compared to other hams in Switzerland we see how they produce authentic swiss cheese one of the five most eaten cheeses in the US I'm actually in the village of aalton in emal which is in a region just east of burn 80% of all emala production comes from this region with 150 producers and its name comes from here there's a nearby River em and tal meaning Valley in German in the US it's known as Swiss cheese emala has iconic holes in it and it's also the world's largest cheese emala aop can only be produced in these regions in Switzerland it was granted aop protection from the EU in 2002 meaning that these areas are the protected designation of origin but there are a few qualifications for this the milk has to be from dairy farms no fewer than 20 km away and it must be produced using raw milk 177,000 700 tons of emala are produced each year in this region by 150 family dairies cheese production started in this area over 200 years ago it's a hilly region so good for cattle grazing the emala shal quazer show Da was opened in 1989 the process of cheese starts at the farmer so uh we need a high quality raw milk then we heat up the milk on 32° we put inside the the bacteria the renit we have to wait because the renit make a relationship between the fat and protein you are cutting the Curts down to a size of four up to 6 mm and then you heating up another time to 53° you pumping up to the forms and then you are pressing that for 12 [Music] hours the cheese is pressed under hydraulic pressure for up to 12 hours it then spends 8 weeks in the warm fermentation Cellar at 22° C it then goes into a storage seller for up to 2 months before it's collected by the wholesaler this makes the famous sweet taste and smooth texture of the cheese the world famous holes they're created by a reaction in the bacteria after 1 month of storage a strain of bacteria propon bacterium Sherman consumes lactic acid and releases carbon dioxide these bubbles become trapped in the cheese rind and form holes also known as eyes but why are the cheeses so large the size of emala Wheels is heavily regulated as most have a diameter of 80 to 100 cm they need to be a minimum of 75 Kg for cheese produced here a kilogram costs 19 Swiss Franks or $19 so one wheel could cost over $1,900 we have to pay taxes also in Switzerland and 200 years ago they have the reglementation you have to pay taxes on a piece and not on kilogram so they make a big cheese wheel and they have to pay only once the taxes and still 200 years we producing this at minimum 75 kgam Wheels the cheese is matured into a 4month classic 8mon Reserve 12 month aop extra and the 24mon lair deal the taste of of the the M entire aop uh it's Unique um in compare to um copies it's comparing if you take a a red wine and a good red wine we visited the shaer restaurant to try the cheese and we go for the classic it's 4 month age what you can see is the springy kind of rubbery texture to it uh let's give us a try it's so much more flavorsome than other emala that I've had it has a really full flavor to it because it's made with raw milk not pasturized milk that you might get in the states uh it's just a very very kind of full Rich milky flavor that uh it's very tasty but how does this differ to the 12 Monon aged it's a lot less kind of spre and bouncy to the touch um but that rich nutty flavor is really starting to come through this room downstairs when we went into here in the dairy was the room that as the minute you walk in this is beautiful nutty Aroma that hits you and that is exactly what you can get in the cheese now it's gone from sort of like a fruity mild cheese to something which is has you know this texture to it and it's very nutty to be an authentic emala cheese it needs to have the emala logo and a bespoke cheese number on the r we put uh our brand on top before we press the cheese and this is something like a tea bag and this is growing directly into the R so if you are cutting the cheese wheel into pieces um on each R you should find um a part of this emal Switzerland logo and you find also a little number on top and with this number our customers can go on our website m point CH and give this number inside um and Google Maps shows you where this product was produced in which da and the dairies need to have this protection emala is the world's most copied cheese so 95% of that what is sell as a Swiss cheese or a cheese with Hol called ental are fake emal so the Emer Switzerland um the brand is protected by the aop label and we have also a bacteria inside our cheese we are the only brand cheese brand who are using this one and so we can um not only look on the package if it's original mentar aop um we can also analyze this uh this product and so these are our activities and the brand um itself we have people who are working only for searching the origion between the copies so it's a big um work behind [Music] here Ramirez hauls in its catch from private fishermen in the bustling MOS Harbor but with warming ocean temperatures sardine populations have dropped by more than 80% it got so bad that in 2004 Regulators banned fishing during the Spring spawning season in the years that followed the government shortened the entire fishing season to just 6 months and set a fishing quota last year fishermen caught only 30,000 tons compare that to the 1980s when they hauled in over 100,000 tons a year it's caused recent sardine prices to double during the season the fish arrive fresh at the factory and go directly to get cleaned we know that the the good quality of Sardine for example is the summer time and and during this time we we intensify the activity to do as much as possible but to keep producing year round when fishing's Bann Ramirez introduced this freezing system in 2015 first the fish go into a brine for 30 minutes and then into the freezer held at about 0° Fahrenheit f is in charge of quality control and food safety they'll remain in the freezer for up to 6 months but Fatima says it doesn't affect the fish much because sardines are naturally so fatty at 400 p.m. workers pull the fish out of the freezer so they can defrost overnight from here on out the defrosted fish go through the same machines as the fresh ones it removes the head and cuts off the tail this used to all be done by hand but this machine has tripled the speed of guts removal but some of the products like the filets are too delicate for the machines workers on these specialty lines still hand cut them using Century old techniques once packed they add on a lid and group them into batches they get cooked for 30 minutes first in hot Steam and then dry heat once done the workers add in other natural ingredients like spicy sauce Peppers or carrots next the cans get weighed then this machine splashes in a bit of either water to tomato sauce or olive oil the cans drop into baskets in this pool of recycled rainwater workers then push the cans into this sterilizing machine to kill off any bacteria on the outside in theory one can of fish could last for more than a decade it was actually a french guy who invented canning in the early 1800s when Napoleon put out a call for a way to feed his Army and the method took off in popularity with its long stretch of Coastline and abundance of fish Portugal was primed to get in on the market and in 1853 Manuel's great great grandfather opened the world's first fish canery in Villa Ro de Santo Antonio by the 1920s there were hundreds of competing factories along the coast and during World War II there was room for all of them Portugal was neutral so it exported cans to both sides some cans were found at the bunker of Hitler some of them were Portuguese and were from from our company and in 1940 the Founder's grandson opened up a new Factory where it is now in monush by then the Sardine had become a cultural icon but after World War II the industry started declining we were a revolution in 1974 and lots of companies had no freezing area they had tough times of course so no Frozen possibilities climate change and over fishing were also big contributors to the decline by 2013 there were only 20 canaries left so how did Ramirez stay afloat first because of its loyal staff spanning Generations Ramirez runs an on-site daycare and many of its current employees graduated from it the second reason the original cans opened with a key and were often made of tin which rusted more easily so Manuel's grandfather switched to aluminum cans in the' 70s we developed together with uh with our can supplier easy open way of uh opening kind of sardines or tuna along with the freezing system fish cutting and seaming machines Ramirez also added this finishing lineality lab pulls nearly 100 sample cans throughout the day they test for pH levels and check that seaming and sterilization were done right all these machines have tripled the company's production speed from 100,000 cans every day in 2015 to 300,000 cans per day now finally to stay competitive when sardine populations dropped Ramirez added new products tuna salad mackerel salmon and codfish so this difficulty became you know an Oort to to do other very interesting products today the company sells 70 different products and is introduced an online shopping platform we export almost to 50 countries spread it all over the world while stting populations could fall again Manuel doesn't seem worried you have been here for almost two centuries so I think we will overcome these are sugar maple trees and the maple Guild has 460,000 of them spanning across the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont and into Canada starting in December each year Crews spend two months putting plastic Taps into each one of these trees by hand the same tree can be tapped for decades next year we reuse everything and uh we tap 8 in is high or low and 8 in over so that we never harm a tree it always allows it to heal the sugaring season usually runs from February to April but that's completely dependent on the weather forecast obviously when the uh weather cooperates and when mother nature gives us sap to to pull and that's when the temperature is above freezing during the day and below freezing at night that's when the sap runs when the sap is running it's extracted either through vacuum tubing or gravity 6,000 miles of plastic tubing carry the sap from the trees to pump stations these are called reverse osmosis houses this is where the sap is collected and the water in the sap is filtered out leaving a high sugar content concentrate sap has 2% sugar concentrate has 20% sugar so what we're doing in the reverse osmosis process is we're pulling water out of the sap and concentrating the maple syrup into another solution because so much water is removed during this process it takes about 44 gallons of sap to make just one gallon of maple syrup that Sugar concentrate is loaded up into trucks and brought to the Sugar House where it's finally turned into maple syrup in traditional sugaring techniques turning sap into syrup means boiling it over direct heat so the water evaporates but the maple Guild pioneered a new method that speeds up the process it's called steam crafting instead of boiling the sap it's steam heated at a lower temperature using coils with this system the maple Guild can make 55 gallons of maple syrup in just 90 seconds while in traditional boiling techniques it can take anywhere between 9 and 56 hours to produce just 1 gallon of syrup not only is the steam crafting method quicker but the company says it also produces a more nuanced maple flavor because sap can go bad quickly it has to be transported to the sugar house within 3 hours of being tapped and usually within 6 hours it will become that golden maple syrup when the sap is running it can run for a day it can run for a week and then it can stop for two days or 3 weeks and it's really whatever the weather gives us but whenever that sap is running we will have people at this plant 18 24 hours a day nonstop while that sap is running because we can't afford to lose any of it once the Sap's turned into syrup it's tested to make sure the sugar levels are right next it sent through filters to remove impurities and it's tested for grading the lighter the color of syrup the higher the grade because the maple Guild syrup has a short cooking time it's lighter in color giving it a consistent grade a golden rating the golden syrup is then pumped into stainless steel barrels where it's stored until it's time to be bottled up each bottle is filled capped cleaned and labeled by hand here the company expects to fill over a million bottles this year the Maple Guild is vertically integrated meaning it owns every step of this process from tree to table the maple industry has been stagnant for decades upon decades upon decades it's all small farmers doing their own thing on their own property selling to the big Gators and those guys making syrup mostly mostly private labels some branded and selling it out to the industry until we came along and we're a vertically integrated we own the trees right through the manufactur ing very Capital intensive which is probably the barriers to entry for anybody else to do this in the Last 5 Years the maple syrup industry has undergone somewhat of a revolution and at the Forefront are companies like the maple Guild Canada has historically dominated this Market producing 70% of the world's maple syrup and while it still owns a top spot the US is gaining Ground United States production has doubled in the last decade rising from 1.9 million gallons produced in 2008 to 4.16 million in 2018 and leading the charge is Vermont dubb the maple syrup capital of the US the tiny state produces 40% of the maple syrup in the entire United States in fact Vermont's production has grown 24% since 2000 so the market was set for a large scale production but no one in the Vermont maple industry had taken on the unconventional sugaring model until the maple Guild it entered the scene as demand was taking off breweries across the state had started using maple syrup in their products oversee interest in pure maple syrup had spiked and Americans on a health food kick were turning to maple syrup as a natural alternative to refined sugar and the maple Guild is still riding that wave selling branded products across 50 States and infusing its syrups with flavors like coffee pumpkin spice and bourbon you got original vanilla Bourbon Coffee and salted caramel smells like the woods which is where it came from tastes like sugar I'm in and while it all depends on what Mother Nature gives them the maple Guild does have an annual production goal our goals are 150 to 200,000 gallons of maple syrup uh we'd be okay with the company's not only bottling it up as syrup but using it in about 17 other Maple based products first there's the maple butter maple syrup is cooked down and then poured into this mixer until it becomes a luscious cream that stuff is cooked and Jarred by hand and then hits the assembly line to be capped and labeled this is what I've been waiting for this whole time it's like icing that's so good there's also naturally fermented Maple vinegar eight different Maple sweetened teas and S unique Maple sweetened Waters the maple Guild hopes that by introducing Maple into as many categories as possible it can show the versatility of the product and bring attention to where the golden syrup comes from here in a Vermont Forest next we head to New Zealand home to one of the world's priciest Honeys Manuka Honey is known to being earthier richer and more viscous than many other Honeys it comes from the nectar of the flower lepto sper and scaparo also known as Manuka which is only native to New Zealand and Manuka in fact is a marry word the fact that it comes from New Zealand that gives it a premium just to start with because the bee travels up to about 6 kilm to collect this honey and so this honey is representative of the environment and that environment is of New Zealand the plant itself and the Honey is very very rare out of all the Honeys in the world it probably represents 1% of all the world Honeys it's difficult to harvest it's only a 2 to 6 week harvesting period and the flower is only open for any for 12 days and in New Zealand we have wind and we have rain and all the rest of it so there's a lot of luck involved and getting the bee or a lot of effort from The Beekeeper and for some years there are no uh there's no honey production for some beekeepers and we have to go to the big extent also of using helicopters to collect this honey although Manuka bushes can can also be found in Australia New Zealand accounts for almost all of the world's production with exports worth $24 million and expected to quadruple to 800 Million by 2028 New Zealand's honey is protected by a quality standard that safeguards Manuka special properties this honey is an expensive honey and anything that is expensive people will try and copy people will try and mimic or people will try and cheat so a lot of the cost here is and actually in the protection of it all the research so we know it's Unique we know it's from New Zealand we can identify it we've put labs around the world to be able to do this identification the New Zealand government has set up a standard to say what is manukan so how does the grading system work and what exactly are you looking for in Manuka honey we spoke to Dr Adrien Charlton from Farah science a lab in the north of England where Manuka Honey is tested to identify its unique compounds a standard we we will test for um three compounds um dihydroxy acetone which is known as DHA methy gloxy known as MGO and hydroxymethyl fuol HMF these are the basic tests that we we would undertake to make sure that um Manuka Honey contains the antimicrobial characteristics that um the consumer would expect we can detect them but we can also measure the concentration of them um and that's done using UV light um to detect particular wavelength individual compounds each compound has slightly different properties but because of the issues um in the past with potential fraud there's a suite of other tests including tests for compounds such as lepto sparin which is a marker that's unique to the nectar of leptum scoparium we can trace then the honey back to its its Botanical origin the plant that it came from when you pick up a jar of Manuka Honey the markers can be confusing so how do you know that it's the real deal so in some cases they're labeling for the concentration of a compound so MGO 300 would indicate 3 mg of methy glyoxal in that particular pot of honey per kilogram NPA which is non-peroxide activity now that's that's related to the mythy gloal concentration but it's a more direct um measure of the antimicrobial activity of the py um other other marks such as umf a quality Mark that if you can see a particular stamp on a product that has been tested and assured to a certain standard so that's different to actually labeling it with the concentration of a particular compound another Factor that's driving up the price is the use of Manuka honey in health and beauty products it's antibacterial and anti-inflammatory properties are said to soothe and nourish the skin and it's also said to help with blemishes and acne but is that really the case there there's been a number of studies that have tried to um determine the help benefits of Manuka honey and there are some very positive results and certainly in terms of ant antimicrobial activity we can show that that um that Manuka Honey has antimicrobial activity in the laboratory that those clinical trials over a long period of time have not have not been undertaken to Des of yet but um there there are lots of reports that indicate um that that Manuka Honey has benefits but um as yet unproven so the jury still out on Manuka medicinal properties but that hasn't stopped its popularity and Manuka Honey is Serious Business the prices and demand for the honey are so high that the New Zealand Police have received hundreds of reports of beehives or honey being stolen and even reports of bees being poisoned so if you do manage to get your hands on a jar does it actually taste different from normal honey oh my God that is delicious the flavor is really strong wrong it's very like very thick compared to normal honey it's got a kind of chest nutty flavor it's not as sweet as usual honey it's really smooth and The Taste is pretty similar to what I'm used to the texture is really interesting it's very very thick almost like creamy is manuka honey really worth a 100 times more than other honey that's for you to judge but what's for certain is that no other honey in the world is so rare and unique that it needs to pass by a lab before being sold Oda is the oldest tofu factory in America and at this shop they're slicing up 3,000 lb of it a day and that's Jason a former pro baseball player who took over Oda 3 years ago Jason learned how to hand mold tofu the traditional Japanese way from the original owners it is very cheap to just buy a machine and just push buttons and out comes a block of tofu but to actually handcraft it it is definitely a lot start but because of a growing tofu industry and a spike in soybean prices Jason is juggling tradition with demand I put in 11 and 12h hour days you know 6 days a week so it is my mom we visited the Portland Factory to see how Jason's turning buckets of beans into this welcome to Oda tofu I get here at 2:30 in the morning Monday through Saturday to make tofu and start the day the night before workers pull out giant bags of soybeans sourced from Iowa and they're dried soybeans so they are very hard you could hardly break it with a hammer we soak them the night before then they become really soft it takes 10 hours of soaking depending on the temperature of the outside we tend to soak them longer if it's colder or shorter if it's hotter we want that pure white in the soybeans yeah these are still pretty good Cooks transferred the soft soybeans to one of two grinders we grind the soybeans make a really a slush then we put it into are cookers which cook to about 100° C then the mixture flows through a giant pipe into a filtering bag in the pressing machine this machine squeezes out the soy milk the milk comes out the other end and drops into another filter so we double filter it to get as pure of soy milk as we can okay this is hot what's left is a byproduct called okata basically the leftover bits from the beans like the shells so this nylon that catches the rest of the Oka people use it in like baking recipes and stuff like that but also we give it to Farmers to feed their cows and pigs some of the soy milk gets bottled by hand it's sold across Portland but the rest gets turned into tofu our tofu is made out of three ingredients soybeans water and coagulant the mixture first gets a splash of coagulant so we use our nigadi traditional Japanese coagulant we can adjust the amount of coagulant that we use to make the firmness that we want I will actually make a firm so I'm going to add some more coagulant because it could be separated from the curds in the water a little bit more it's kind of like making cheese right like in cheese the coagulant separates the Whey or liquid from the proteins which Clump up into curds that takes about 15 minutes so this is what it looks like after it's curded so these curds are actually nice and like fluffy and soft that scrambled egg looking mixture is spooned into molds Jason handshapes it using a cheesecloth so now we just got to press them into the firmness that we want it's pretty soft almost like a water bed we make medium firm and extra firm it depend on how much water we squeeze out the curds on the firm and the extra firm Are finer and harder so it's easier to get water out the medium's nice and soft a hydraulic press then helps squeeze out the water after it's pressed Jason carefully flips the tofu into a giant bath he slices it along the lines from the molds tofu headed to restaurants is placed in buckets some of it gets fried into what's called aay so he is a master at Chopsticks yeah that is not easy to do with a flimsy tofu blocks Bound for stores get fish from the water and put in boxes I'm soak soy beans to the final product probably about an hour everything else is really controlled by hand although tofu originates from China using nigadi to coagulate is uniquely Japanese oda's recipe and hand molding techniques come from Japan and take back to the founding of the company so Oda tofu started in 1911 Sao Oda immigrated to Portland from okama Japan shortly after saizo and his wife Sheena opened a tofu shop using the same three ingredience Jason uses back then Oda was one of many tofu factories serving the Japanese and Chinese American communities in East Portland but then Pearl Harbor happened and 120,000 Japanese Americans were forced into internment camps Sheena and cizo were sent to a camp in Idaho there cizo died a year after arriving in the 3 years of internment all japanese-owned tofu shops were closed many were seized looted or sold off but the odas landlord honored their lease and when Sheena returned to Portland alone in 1945 the shop and all its equipment was waiting for her that they came back and wanted to start the company again shows Testament to the OT family for wanting to do that and then also the customers that wanted to buy the tofu and really kept the business Alive Jason bought the business from sheena's grandson Co and his wife eileene in 2019 because I heard that they were closing and I thought it would be such a shame that a business like this would close her doors especially with all their history Co a and eileene OT really taught me everything there is to know about making tofu this is their equipment I inherited all of this Jason's continued the handmade Oda tradition there's a reason why people or businesses don't make tofu the way that we do right now long hours hard work everything that has to do with tofu I am involved with the whole entire process you are the tofu genius yeah I feel like I am the tofu Master now because Jason's production process is slower it's hard to compete with big factories Mass manufacturing tofu all they have to do is push a button and out comes tofu from the soak beans to packaging to pressing everything is very automated it is very different than our process really I mean that's what we're competing against cuz they're low cost and the competition is getting harder as soybean prices sore China is usually one of America's biggest soybean buyers but in 2019 tariffs on soybeans cornered China out of the market it helped prices for our soybeans go down because the demand wasn't there but when tariffs were dropped in 2021 China re-entered the market scooping up soybeans and causing prices to Skyrocket soybean prices haven't been this high in 7 years soybean prices have gone up drastically 40% in the past couple months so I've had to increase pricing and I think every tofu manufacturer had to increase pricing you just can't eat that much of the cost but Jason's customers don't seem bothered we don't mind to spend more because we want high quality food been do business with them 20 years and customer love it we can never change to other brand to keep up with competition and Supply costs Jason has made small changes first he redesigned the package then he bought that packaging machine he also launched Oda on social Med media and his strategy has worked attracting new Young restaurant owners like Chef Tai he's gotten a lot of Buzz for his Sandos made with Oda tofu I'm from Japan when I had their tofu I feel like I was in Japan so I'm going to make miso tofu cat which is vegan the catchy for Instagram you know people love it Jason now sells Oda tofu and soy milk in over 150 restaurants around Portland we are making about 80% more and tofu is expected to keep getting more popular in 2020 the global market was worth $746 million and it's projected to grow by more than 5% in the next 6 years nutritionists say that's because it's rich in protein amino acids and nutrients people are I think starting to be aware of that Jason thinks he has two options to face growing demand moving to a bigger space or opening up factories in other cities but his biggest goal making sure tradition isn't sacrif riced for innovation in Miyazaki Japan we learn where Farmers grow Harvest and auction the world's most expensive mangoes mangoes farmed in Miyazaki are from the Irwin mango variety a type often referred to as apple mango as it turns red when ripe Irwin mangoes are actually pretty common and are also grown in other parts of the world and sold at much lower prices this is because the exclusivity of Tao no tomago is not tied to which type of mango it is but rather to the care it receives in order to generate Buzz at the auction a mango needs bees to increase their odds of success Farmers like takuya usually rent bees during the flowering season these are flowering mango plants these play a crucial role in the pollination of the plants as without them mangoes would not grow as big as desired if a plant keeps flowering as the farmer wants it can survive as long as 35 years takuya's plants are 20 years old however even if these do pollinate the plants it doesn't necessarily mean that all mangoes will qualify as Tao not tomago this season only those that are in good shape visibly contain pits and are in good position will be given a chance to successfully grow one everything in the greenhouse needs to run smoothly temperature must be constant the room ventilated the air dehumidified and the mangoes protected from Gravity when everything else is in place takuya's priority becomes the sunshine if a mango slumps into the shade takuya will tie it with a string to bring it back up and to make sure that sunlight touches every part of the fruit equally he developed these light reflectors Out of Milk curtain for regardless of how much it's worth takuya treats every mango with respect in return every mango repays him with a unique [Music] flavor tuya has been growing mangoes for 16 years a craft he learned from his father this year he grew 9500 mangoes in his Greenhouse they're now ready to be inspected to see how many of them have earned the coveted Tao not tomago [Music] title the first inspection is done by human eye inspectors closely analyze each Mango's appearance to ensure they are read all throughout with no hints of green at the bottom then a machine sorts them according to sugar content weight and [Music] size these inspections sort the mangoes into five grades two of which are Tio the mangoes will now make their way to Miyazaki Central wholesale market for the auction all the Care and hard work that takuya and other farmers in the prefecture put into their fruit are leading up to this very moment the hope is to match or exceed the previous figure of 500,000 [Music] yen [Music] the auction has officially begun at the Miyazaki Central wholesale [Applause] [Music] Market this year's 500,000 yen is 300,000 Yen higher than last year and matches the 2019 record and the farmer who grew these mangoes is [Laughter] takuya it's the third year in a row his mangoes fetched the highest price at the auction they have been bought by a department store in Fukuoka [Music] today's outcome was a successful one for takuya but even in a country with a strong giftgiving culture like Japan it's not always guaranteed that such a luxury fruit will find a buyer at [Music] auction after flowering fruiting harvesting and auctioning takuya's mango plants are ready for a new season and the hard work isn't over [Music] [Music] yet [Music] [Music] Japan is also where an exclusive number of soy sauce makers still produce the famous seasoning the authentic way what makes the soy sauce special is the wooden barrel called kioke one can last for over a century youo makes bamboo strips to wrap around the barrel because the saltiness of the soy sauce can corrode metal it takes at least three people to assemble one barrel but not many do this anymore after Modern Machinery took over the market almost all kioke makers in Japan went out of business so yuo learned to make his [Music] own before these barrels are put to use crushed wheat and steamed soybeans are mixed with Koji the fungus that will kick start the fermentation process this giant vat regulates temperature so the fungus can grow after 2 days the mixture goes to the moromi house this is where the wooden barrels help create the breeding ground for the bacteria over one ton of the soybean mixture fills each Barrel along with saltwater while yuo and his team stir the soybeans bump up against each other and create tiny tears so that other bacteria can get in and start to break them down the workers pump air into the barrel to make the aerobic yeast more active even though yuo says the microbes do most of the work his part of the job is still demanding he checks on the soybeans every day to see if they need mixing and based on their scent and appearance he can tell where they are in the process the soybeans will ferment here for at least a year and a half yuo has 87 barrels in different phases he believes a good Barrel is one that will outlive him these types of Barrels have been in production in Japan since at least the 17th century but everything changed during World War II when materials became more scarce and expensive in Japan the government knew its people couldn't live without their staple seasoning so they ordered factories to make production cheaper and faster cutting the process from years to months so while many Brewers expanded and modernized small businesses like Yo's families could barely keep [Music] up yuo stepped in in 2003 just before his father suddenly became sick and had to retire so we had to take over and pull a struggling business out of debt he also had to teach himself a lot of the process like how to use the Press after a year and a half of fermentation yubo pipes the soybean mixture into this machine he layers on a piece of traditional wrapping cloth then the machine slowly squeezes out the soy sauce over 10 days some industrial factories press it all at once but yuo says getting a quality product is all about patience after this stage some of the soy sauce goes back into the barrel with more soybeans and wheat for two more years to make Yu's main product saishi a darker stronger tasting soy sauce when the microbes have enough time to naturally ferment the soybeans it gives the soy sauce a sweeter aftertaste some industrial Brands mimic this by adding [Music] sweeteners that balanced Umami flavor is what chefs like itoshi Kishimoto are after he's been running his restaurant kyomi in shodoshima for 5 years for almost every dish he cooks with naturally fermented soy sauce including Yu's brand in order for traditional soy sauce to continue Barrel production needs to keep up that's why yuo holds Barrel making workshops every [Music] year he sells his authentic soy sauce to people all over the world a bottle goes for $35 on Amazon around triple the price of a commercial alternative for yuo passing down the legacy of barraged soy sauce is part of his life's mission is a third generation matagi Farmer on his farm in t m prefactor you will find only virgin female cows it's the primary requirement for any of the 0 Matsu Saka wagu Farms here in the M [Music] prefecture matsusaka beef has long been praised for its extremely low melting point which is half that of the types of wagu this means that when cooking the fat melts in a shorter [Music] time to reach this intense marbling old generations of farmers like hi hii's dad used to feed cows with beer although there's no evidence that this practice increases a cow's appetite many associate Matsu Saka wagi with it the fact that Matsu Saka has kept a relatively low profile International Al has almost transformed this practice into a Legend hiroi doesn't practice this anymore instead he has perfected the feed and is practicing circular agriculture [Music] for [Music] the cost of feed is an important factor that drives the prices up to reach that soft marbling matsusaka cows need to eat a lot they also need to eat for a much longer time than other cows matsusaka cows are raised for 30 to 32 months 6 months longer than other Japanese black cattle everything adds up over time for hiroi the costs of feeding temperature control air circulation and cleaning the enclosures regularly to avoid flies Farmers here call this raising period fattening for the first 3 to 4 months cattle eat grass to develop a strong digestive system this is called the belly creation period Then then comes the finishing period where cattle gradually switch to concentrated feet and rice straw to fatten up hoki is now experimenting with even longer periods of fattening raising his cattle from 35 up to 40 months but raising cows for such a long time can also be dangerous for hioki as a cow could get sick and die [Music] a cow at the end of its fattening period is a true treasure every year matsusaka cows get auctioned off and one gets crowned queen of matsusaka while the highest ever price for one of these cows was 50 million yen in 2002 this auction has never really seen a low price averaging around 20 million yen events like the auction have also fostered another legend that farmers in matsusaka massage their cows with alcohol this time it is not to improve their appetite but they [Music] appearance [Music] [Music] it's not just adult cows that cost a lot carves can be very expens [Music] expensive hiroi doesn't raise his cattle from birth at 10 months old carves are also sold at auctions throughout Japan hiruki spends almost half of his time at work buying carves and he's very [Music] demanding [Music] fors bms2 is the highest marbling grade for Wu in Japan the more intense the marbling the higher the price for customers in Tokyo 100 G of sirloin costs 10,000 Yen but that's still much less than what parisians are paying at Maria Gia where the same cut is sold at 360 the most premium cut tenderloin sells for €5,000 per [Music] [Music] kilogram [Music] the Paris restaurant was the first to successfully export matsusaka wagu out of Japan and include it on its menu its most expensive tasting menu costs € [Music] 520 matsusaka wagu is heavily regulated to include matsusaka beef on the menu the restaurant had to follow strict rules the Paris restaurant needed to apply for a license which took a year to be accredited to maintain it the restaurant needs to have a high rating on Google Maps and there can't be another restaurant serving Matsu Saka wagu within an 840 M radius as of 2023 hiroi has shipped only only three cows did Maria caner due to this limited Supply the 520 menu with ethor ranch's premium tenderloin is served to only one table per day this exclusivity is set to get a little bit looser in the last 10 years Japan has been a major importer of us beef importing an average of 1.83 billion dollar a year meanwhile Millions worth of Wu made the opposite Journey as it reached International Fame a decline in tourism after the covid-19 outbreak and a change in consumer Behavior toward cheaper Meats exacerbated this and now Japanese cattle farmers are looking outside the country's borders the export quote for Matsu Saka has jumped from 24 in 2022 to 700 in 2024 of those it's the most Premium Cuts that are exported going to highend R restaurants like mariaa in Paris this is pushing farmers who want to ship abroad to bet on those lucrative but dangerous long fattening [Music] [Music] periods people across the Andes have been eating quinoa way before it hit the shelves at Gourmet markets for centuries perubian have ground the grain to make flour and ferment chicha a popular drink quinoa was sacred to the Inca who called it the mother grain that's because it grew well under harsh conditions and flourished in areas where other crops struggled the grain has adapted as weather patterns have changed in recent years but growing it is still a [Music] struggle Osio is one of around 68,000 quinoa producers in Peru he's been out in the fields with his family since he was just 10 years old the season to plant quinoa starts at the end of the summer workers gather early in the morning and they pass around handfuls of cocoa leaves then they call to Pacha mama or Mother Earth to help them get the job done quickly Osio says the plant acts as a mild stimulant that gives them strength Osio and his family sew the seeds after the soil has been harrowed and fertilized about 7 months later they harvest the crop by hand then they cut the branches and remove the edible parts of the grain they shake the grain to remove any leftover dirt and then transfer the quinoa to a small Warehouse about a decade ago Osio and his family would have traveled across the country to sell their quinoa but that's now the job of Copan Cabana a Cooperative that represents more than farmers in southern [Music] Peru representatives from cooperatives like usio visit the Farms to inspect the grains the cooperatives pay Farmers like ignasio about $150 per [Music] kilo [Music] about 12200 tons of quinoa are processed every year at The Cooperative facilities once a quinoa reaches their warehouse workers thoroughly wash it twice to remove a bitter chemical called saponin they split the quinoa into categories remove any impurities and then package it it'll make its way overseas The Cooperative says it exports to the US the European Union and Japan in the US the product has become increasingly popular America Imports about a third of all the world's quinoa but it wasn't always this way quinoa used used to be mostly unknown outside of the Andes but it all began to change in 2009 when the Peruvian government started establishing free trade agreements it became easier for companies to export to the US and Beyond over the next few years commerce between Peru and the US reportedly boomed word spread about the nutritious superfood that was gluten-free and high in protein this was when like the keto diet were taking off and there was this kind of this conventional wisdom that hey look among all of those grains that you can be eating quinoa probably packs the the strongest punch in terms of protein the United Nations even declared 2013 the international year of quinoa to celebrate the ancestral practices of the andian people basically shining a big bright Spotlight on quinoa as something that people should consume for their health and that really led to the whole thing the average price price of quinoa in Peru almost doubled between 2012 and 2014 and it wasn't just producers who benefited the rise in quinoa sales helped locals who didn't even work with the crop there was probably some kind of trickle down effect in the economy where the quinoa price rise led to the people who were selling it being significantly better off and spending some of those funds on the economy in 2011 almost 80% of the country's quinoa was produced in the region of puno but farmers in other parts of the country tried to cash in too some reportedly relied on chemical fertilizers to cultivate the Grain in 2014 Peru set a record for quinoa production but trouble lay ahead for Peruvian Farmers for centuries the grain had mostly been harvested in the Andes because it thrives in high altitudes but quinoa Farmers started popping up in other parts of the world I think globalization is a double-edged sword in a case like this these households can benefit from the global demand for that product but it also means that it has really pushed other regions of of the globe to experiment with growing quinoa themselves the market was flooded with quinoa that caused prices to plunge by the end of 2015 farmers in Peru reportedly began to struggle and some had to sell livestock to survive others held on to their quinoa hoping that prices would rise again but by 2020 the price of quinoa in Peru had dropped to about half of its 2014 high meanwhile farmers in Peru are producing more quinoa than ever but the type sold in supermarkets represent just a fraction of the 3,000 varieties that can be harvested [Music] here Farmers would traditionally cultivate different types of quinoa to make sure that at least some thrived if weather conditions were harsh but some have abandoned this practice to focus on the most lucrative strains and experts worry this may mean losing many varieties of the ancient crop that's why many are brought here to the National Institute of agricultural innovation some of those less common strains could have uses Beyond food ignasio says he would eventually like to sell baked goods like cookies made of quinoa but for now he has to focus on what sells today Steve and his team are working on a test shoot for Burger King they'll use it to try and land the client yeah good Brett curtz whale is a veteran food stylist it's his job to make the burger look like a Whopper he usually has a budget of a couple thousand and he always buys a lot more than he'll use so he can pick out the perfect looking bun Patty and veggies then he gets to work but he doesn't cook the meat all the way through because I didn't want to shrink too much I wanted to get as much volume out of this piece of meat as I could get even perfect patties need final touches so he uses a colorant made of gravy darkener and soap to add a charred look he only has to paint half the burger because the camera films from just one one side a mixture of Vaseline and pulverized meat helps fill in any holes and those grill marks another trick of the trade Brett heats up metal skewers and then I just pushed into the burger with the hot hot metal and it seared next he melts the cheese using a clothes steamer how did you change it to make it forood I just ch I I just said you're for food but I also I'm I'm trying to um control how much comes out so I've covered up some of the holes he cuts the onions and tomatoes on a slant so they lie flatter I you would have been a really good surgeon in another life well yeah my mother would have been happier some other tricks denture cream to hold up ingredients for condensation on cans we'll use glycerin yeah not that much too far too far while Brett finishes up Steve's team is making sure everything is ready on set the trickiest part is combining what the client wants in the commercial with what's technologically possible they have no idea about engineering yeah they're just like robots are cool we want a robot but since today he's working on a test shoot he just has to implement his own Vision I'll be one of those people that wears the uh protection then he turns to master rigger Matthew Huber he says half the time he has to build the rigs completely from scratch they provide the structure for the specialized equipment that makes food dance across the screen his work goes hand inand with the robots the robot obviously is a hugely complicated and expensive thing that's used for a lot of what we do but if you only just need a straight line movement pulling back it's easier to set up a a simple machine that just does a single type of movement like these air Pistons he uses to launch food or these catapults to save on buying new parts he uses a lot of the the same base pieces it's like Legos you know you just put stuff together um take it apart do something different with it the next time so we've used like a lot of these pieces probably like hundreds of times meanwhile paa Andreas Ramirez is finalizing the set from the tables to the ketchup bottles off to the side I want it to feel real so if it's blank it won't feel like it's it's a real commercial kitchen every inch visible to the camera matters so paa's team built this tile wall just for this shoot but they said it still felt empty so we just added this new these two floating shelves up there we plan for something and then we just have to be ready for the unexpected her typical props budget is $40,000 a shoot but she can pull a lot from her Personal Collection this has been 20 years of collecting and this is like Salvation Army garage cells years and years of hoarding I always like to have um extra so if you're shooting an example a glass of soda I need to have at least six of the same glasses for quick changes if they're scratched uh cuz it's video so it's a little bit one breaks exactly so when that burger arrives it's game time I got to go on set yay Burger now it's a race against the clock the tomatoes to the angle feels right can we melt the cheese a little more anywh to get a little heat in there go ahead and roll [Applause] camera and push in a little bit closer all right good today they have custombuilt water cooled lights that don't torch the food we used to have to have like these really hot lights that would like cook the food and it would die really quickly so like the ice cream would be like impossible to shoot in slow motion cuz it would just melt the second you turn the lights on but that lettuce will start to wilt in a matter of minutes hotlights are not so quick moving robots and tons of planning are essential to keep us shoot on schedule because any delay could mean running over budget the first action uses a dolly Zoom to create something known as the Hitchcock effect but the whole background is like warping around it you the robots they're actually the same kind that build cars this robot cost $150,000 and it can pretty much do any move you can think of sometimes you can program the robot pretty quickly some moves take a whole day here's the second shot Steve envisioned the camera moving through a field of burgers as each gets pulled out of frame we're probably only like an inch and a half away from that burger when we land so to try to do that with people would be almost impossible it's a really complex move that the robots do really easily and they do it the same exact way every time but speed is not the only challenge every shot has to be identical if a bur burer is even a centimeter off or if something on set gets bumped between takes they might have to start over the fries don't want to behave this laser helps them keep track of the Burger's position or sometimes you might do a job where there's you know 100 takes the same move like think that will be a neare they also have to be really flexible on set there's always curve balls that happen cuz there a lot of problem solving which I for the last shot Steve ties all the ingredients on a fishing wire and a robot slices the string and the camera catches the perfect drop this exact move was actually Steve's claim to fame in 2016 did this famous burger Drop video that went viral all over the Internet he slowly raked in millions of views across platforms and Global Publications started covering his work all that social media Buzz earned him a lot of viewers and new clients and he was able to launch the garage in 2019 the the burger drop was kind of like the spark that started the path towards where we are today and now Tik Tok is like crazier than Instagram ever was for me Steve is a former food photographer but he wanted to combine his love of engineering food and video and amazingly there's a job that lets me do that there a lot there's a lot of different jobs that my guidance counselor did not tell me about including my own today his team films 40 advertisements a year billing over five million annually kind of feels like CGI but it's actually done in camera and I think to accomplish that like larger in the Life feeling takes just a lot of technology and skill Steve says they know they've done a good job when viewers can't tell a whole production is hidden behind a shot they have no idea what we do at the end of the day it is fun for me to for people to understand how complex this stuff is but all that complexity is worth it because there's a lot of money on the line fast food companies poured $5 billion into advertising in 2019 and for good reason they know just how valuable the power of food suggestion can be a yel University study found that visual cues like food ads can have an effect on food cravings another study showed visual cues can influence overeating and even weight gain and that can convert into traffic and impressions for a brand you're responsible for a lot of people breaking a diet be included these Brands led the pack and AD spending in 2019 and budgets just keep ballooning in September Burger King announced it'll invest $400 million in restaurant Renovations and advertising a 30% increase from 2021 which is why Steve and his team filmed this Whopper pitch hoping to hook a new client with their dancing robots and Juicy [Music] Burgers [Music] he oh
