Hello, Temperature readers!
A couple of weeks ago I headed to Pueblo for a local agriculture workshop thinking I’d talk to Colorado producers about the federal funding freeze. Instead, after a quick breakfast and introduction, curiosity took over. I wandered into a test kitchen where school lunch operators from the southeastern corner of the state were talking about how to build a cafeteria menu using local ingredients: fingerling potatoes, dried beans, mushrooms, beef.
All ingredients I’ve cooked with, but never considered in the ways that the school chefs must. They talked about the challenge of measuring fingerling potatoes when they come in all different shapes; what happens if a rock ends up in the beans; how to streamline shaping hamburger patties for 1,500 students; and will kids really eat the mushrooms and quinoa?
“Mushrooms are a passion project of mine,” said Taylor Frederick, the culinary programs manager for Nourish Colorado.
Elsewhere, there is a lot of focus on loss right now — rolling back laws, cutting jobs, closing schools. It can be hard to remember that there are also a lot of people trying to create something entirely new. That’s what the team at Nourish Colorado is doing, anyway, which you can read more about below.
Pull up a seat and let’s dig into these veggies.
Reporter
TEMP CHECK
AGRICULTURE
A new model to bring local agriculture into rural school lunches
If you’ve ever wondered about how an apple falls from a tree and lands on a school lunch tray, Jessica Wright is the person to ask.
Wright is a professionally trained chef who worked in restaurants for 15 years before joining Nourish Colorado, a food advocacy group, where she leads the Healthy Food in Institutions department.
Over the past few years, Wright has been dreaming, scheming, coordinating, communicating, grant writing, and all sorts of wrangling to create a first-of-its-kind program that will move more local produce into schools in southeastern Colorado.
The resulting Southeast Colorado Regional Bid is similar to group purchasing organizations commonly found among college campuses, hospitals and other institutions that procure large amounts of food and supplies. By joining up, the institutions can increase their purchasing power and negotiate lower prices.
That’s the model, but Wright’s process differs in a couple of key ways.
First, the buyers are a mix of schools, adult meal programs and rural grocers. Group purchasing organizations don’t typically involve various industries, and don’t mingle for-profit businesses (like a grocery store) with federally funded institutions (like schools).
But after spending time working in southeastern Colorado, the Nourish team quickly realized that schools aren’t the only ones having trouble getting local food at an affordable price.
“That’s when we started looking at older adult meal programs. They’re buying apples, schools are buying apples,” Wright said. “Then there’s the rural grocer. That came about by looking at the incredibly important role they’re playing, but they’re struggling to get a truck from a large distributor to deliver. It started snowballing from there.”
The other way the regional program differs is by synchronizing the needs of rural institutions with those of small and medium-sized local producers, as opposed to only large producers with the best price.
“The current system is effectively designed to maintain the status quo. You work with large distributors, you put together bids, they respond to it, and you just go through the movements,” Wright said, about the way schools typically purchase food. “Ultimately, the vision, the goal we’re trying to work towards is that we want farm-to-school to not only be the norm in our state, but we want it to be the easy choice.”
Lining up these interests benefits the schools, which will get access to healthier, more reliable food options, and producers, who can lock in contracts ahead of time.
In a word, the process has been: tedious.
What are the core local products available?
Which ones should be prioritized?
How can they be prepared for a school lunch menu?
Does the school have the right kitchen equipment? Enough kitchen staff?
How much of each item will students next year eat?
“Many of (the institutions) are small, rural schools who are just trying to keep their heads above water,” Wright said. “They’re trying to figure out how to feed students every single day, let alone thinking a year in advance about how many apples they will need to buy and when they’ll need to buy them.”
The Nourish team tried to streamline the process by analyzing historical purchasing data. They gathered a cohort of interested parties in 2022 and have hosted regular workshops to work through the details for how this could actually work.
They’ve plotted distribution networks, talked through menu items (will fourth graders actually eat local mushrooms?) and ironed out “shared risk strategies,” or what happens if a school agrees to buy a bunch of mushrooms, but it turns out no one will eat them.
All of that came together in the first-ever “bid,” a document that outlines the specific needs of the institutions. Local producers had until Tuesday to submit their proposals to fulfill those orders, and the first set of contracts will be awarded March 14.
“I want to do it right. This is people’s money and people’s livelihoods on both sides, and I don’t want to be making false promises or setting expectations too high,” Wright said. “But now we’re really working through it. Should we decide to move forward and try this in other regions, it will still be time consuming work, but hopefully it will be a little easier.”
Section by Parker Yamasaki | Reporter
AIR QUALITY
Colorado unrolls new methane regulations for the oil and gas industry, Congress rolls them right back up
$900 per metric ton
A fee on excess methane emissions that oil and gas producers were slated to pay this year, before Congress voted Thursday to repeal it
Colorado boasts a lot of firsts when it comes to methane reduction.
In 2014, it became the first state in the U.S. to regulate methane emissions in the oil and gas industry.
In 2021, the Air Quality Control Commission created a first-of-its-kind program to slash emissions based on production volume. That led to measurement guidelines in 2023, which the commission figured out how to actually implement just last year, keeping the state at the forefront.
In February, the state logged another first, when the commission passed revisions to one of its emissions protocols, Regulation 7, requiring oil and gas companies to swap out certain devices for cleaner technologies.
These devices, pumps and valves that move liquid through production, run on and emit natural gas as they work. The rule requires companies in nonattainment areas — the Front Range region that regularly records toxic levels of ozone — to replace those pieces with devices that run on electricity, nitrogen or compressed air by May 2027. Half of the production sites outside nonattainment areas will need to do the same, with all of them complete by 2029.
Once fully implemented, the new measure will eliminate an estimated 16,000 metric tons of methane per year, the equivalent of 104,000 gas-powered vehicles, according to a news release by the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment.
The move continues cranking down the potent greenhouse gas emitted largely by oil and gas producers in Colorado, but it’s also a gesture to the Environmental Protection Agency’s Methane Emissions Reduction Program, commonly referred to as the methane rule.
The methane rule was created by the Biden administration under the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, which the Trump administration has been hustling to disassemble — leaving Colorado to comply with a protocol that is being quickly chipped away at the federal level.
Part of the program requires states to present their reduction strategies to the EPA by March 2026. By adopting the EPA’s own provisions into state regulations last month, Colorado is, once again, ahead of schedule.
Meanwhile, at the federal level, Congress voted Thursday to repeal the waste emissions charge, one of the methane program’s major provisions. The charge was slated to hit facilities emitting more than 25,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide annually this year, based on 2024 reported methane emissions. The fee would have started at $900 per metric ton, and increased to $1,500 per metric over the next two years.
It’s one of a handful of environmental regulations discussed last week under the Congressional Review Act, which gives Congress the authority to “review” major rules issued by federal agencies before they take effect.
Federal legislators are looking at 45 rules under the Congressional Review Act so far, according to a left-leaning advocacy center that set up a resolution tracker. Repealing the methane fee was the first resolution to pass both the House and Senate, and will likely be signed by President Trump.
Nini Gu, from the Environmental Defense Fund, sees the state level regulations as a safeguard against federal rollbacks.
“Colorado has always taken its own state level authority to put together regulations, and it can continue to do so,” Gu said. “We don’t want the state to wait for everything to settle at the federal level before it takes the necessary steps. We want the Air Pollution Control Division and the Air Quality Control Commission to keep taking proactive steps by themselves.”
Section by Parker Yamasaki | Reporter
MORE ENVIRONMENT AND HEALTH NEWS
CHART OF THE WEEK
Here at the Temp, we talk a lot about Colorado’s net-zero emissions goals. Say it with me: reducing greenhouse gas emission by 50% by 2030, and 100% by 2050 compared to 2005 levels.
They’re ambitious numbers, and there are a lot of ways to get at them. One of the latest approaches was presented by the Colorado Energy Office last week in the 254-page Carbon Management Roadmap.
The roadmap was mandated by a 2023 bill that asked the energy office to plot a way forward by analyzing a range of strategies for capturing carbon — removing it from the atmosphere, preventing it from leaving facilities, storing it underground — and provide policy recommendations based on the findings.
What they found includes 68 recommendations spanning 15 state agencies, that range from specific technologies to sweeping regulatory changes, and touch on economic incentives, public engagement strategies and workforce development along the way.
“The roadmap is pretty ambitious,” Will Toor, executive director of the Colorado Energy Office, said. “This is not a document that says every one of these things is going to happen, rather, it’s more analogous to the state’s greenhouse gas roadmap. It’s not an enforcement document, it’s a strategic plan.”
Quinn Antus, program manager at the energy office, said she’s most excited about the plan’s recommendation to create carbon management “zones.”
“What would it take to deploy (carbon storage) in Colorado? We heard the same things consistently: access to renewable energy, feedstocks, geology and community response,” Antus said. “There’s an opportunity for us to overlay a tremendous amount of data that the state has access to. We unlock these zones that would not only help project developers, but also streamline how we can speak with communities.”
Dig into the carbon management roadmap here.
Track House Bill 1165, which addresses underground carbon storage, here.
Section by Parker Yamasaki | Reporter
That wasn’t so bad, was it? You’ve earned some dessert. Let me suggest a couple of Colorado Sun events coming up this month, like the wolf reintroduction panel, or the Unaffiliated politics meetup. If you’re feeling really indulgent, tickets are on sale now for Colorado SunFest 2025, a full day of expert panels full of people who care about Colorado.
— Parker & John
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