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Organization

Recirculating Farms Coalition

Also known as: RFC, Recirculating Farms

A New Orleans-based national coalition advocating for sustainable water-recirculating food production — aquaponics, hydroponics, and small-scale aquaculture systems that recirculate water rather than discharging effluent. Founded in 2009 by Marianne Cufone in the years after the BP Deepwater Horizon spill, partly as a response to the threats facing Gulf-of-Mexico-dependent food economies. Provides legal advocacy, policy work, training, and grants to U.S. water-recirculating farm operations and the practitioners who run them.

Why this listing

Knowledge-care because Recirculating Farms Coalition’s role is the policy-and-legal-advocacy substrate behind small-scale water-recirculating food production. The coalition supports practitioners, advocates with regulators, files legal briefs, and runs training programs that make this category of food production viable for small operators.

Practical

  • Policy advocacy — engages with federal, state, and municipal agencies on regulations affecting aquaponic, hydroponic, and recirculating-aquaculture operations.
  • Legal work — files comments, briefs, and litigation on regulatory questions affecting water-recirculating food production; led the Center for Food Safety’s USDA v. National Organic Standards Board hydroponics-organic-eligibility advocacy.
  • Training and grants — provides training programs and small grants to water-recirculating farm operations, particularly those serving disadvantaged communities.
  • Coalition building — connects U.S. recirculating-farm operators across regions and scales.

Cultural

Marianne Cufone is an environmental attorney and longtime ocean-and-fisheries policy advocate (formerly with Food and Water Watch, the Environmental Defense Fund). The shift from oceanic-fisheries-policy work to recirculating-farms-coalition work after the BP spill was deliberate: the coalition is partly a response to the realization that Gulf-fishing-economy livelihoods may not be recoverable on the timescale fishing communities need.

The hydroponics-organic-eligibility question has been the highest-profile policy fight RFC has been part of: industry-aligned advocates argued hydroponic crops should be eligible for [[organic-agriculture|USDA Organic]] certification; soil-based-organic advocates argued they should not (organic depends on soil-microbiome relationships that hydroponics bypasses). The 2017 NOSB vote went against soil-based advocates; RFC’s position was that the question is more nuanced and the coalition’s small-grower members deserve regulatory clarity regardless of how the larger fight resolves.

Lenses still to grow

  • Marianne Cufone’s biographical arc from ocean policy to recirculating farms
  • The hydroponics-organic-eligibility policy fight in detail
  • Specific RFC-supported practitioner case studies
  • The Gulf BP-spill-and-fisheries-collapse context

See also

Auto-generated from this entry’s typed relations: frontmatter, grouped by relation type so the editorial signal isn’t flattened.

  • Enables: [[aquaponics]]
  • Shares approach with: [[navdanya]]
  • Located in: [[new-orleans]]
  • Member of: [[organization]]
  • Enabled by: [[controlled-environment-agriculture]] · [[hydroponics]]

Sources

  • Recirculating Farms Coalition (recirculatingfarms.org) annual reports and policy publications
  • Coverage in [[civil-eats|Civil Eats]], Mother Jones, The Counter
  • USDA NOSB hydroponics decision documentation

Rooted in life.

A listing in the 0mn1.one [[directory]].

What links here, and how

Inbound connections from across the wiki, grouped by lens and by relationship. These appear automatically — every entity page declares what it links to, and that data populates here on the targets.

Practical

pioneer of

  • Aquaponics RFC is the leading US trade and policy organization for aquaponic and hydroponic growers

enables

  • Controlled-environment agriculture the Recirculating Farms Coalition is the US trade and policy organization for hydroponic and aquaponic CEA growers
  • Hydroponics the Recirculating Farms Coalition is the US trade and policy organization for hydroponic and aquaponic growers

3 inbound links · 4 outbound