By Diana Marcum,
Los Angeles Times
Reporting from Fresno—

As Californians savor their Thanksgiving feasts, the states’ farmers are especially thankful.
California’s agriculture sector is on track for a record year, a rare bright spot in the state’s economy.

Prices for cotton, grapes and other crops are near all-time highs. Foreign buyers are gobbling California almonds, grapes, citrus and dairy products. Agricultural exports through September are up 16%  over the same period last year. Net farm income is projected to post strong gains in 2011 after nearly doubling over the previous decade.

At a time when other Golden State industries are struggling, times are good down on the farm. Just ask Steve Moore. The Fresno County pistachio farmer recently completed the harvest on his 480-acre spread near Huron, part of what’s estimated to be California’s second-largest pistachio crop ever. Prices are
strong, at around $2.10 a pound, driven by growing demand in places including China and Israel. Moore started with 160 acres in 1982, planting trees that take seven years to produce.  “Looking at those bare sticks in the ground, I thought I must be nuts,” he said. But the crop is so lucrative he’s looking to expand again.

Indeed, prices for all manner of farm products are so high that Vernon Crowder, an agricultural economist with Rabobank, a major agricultural lender, has been seeing some
unfamiliar faces at industry events.

“When you go to ag conferences you now have venture capitalists hanging around,” he said. “But they find it very difficult to beat out another farmer for land, and that shows you how strong the
market is. There’s been a fundamental shift as the global market demands more food and more expensive food.”

That’s good news for California, the nation’s leading agricultural state and the fifth-largest producer worldwide. In contrast with the grain-and-livestock focused Midwest, California farmers  cultivate more than 400 commodities, including more than half of the nation’s fruits and vegetables.

Looking for artichokes? Dates? Kiwi? Pomegranates? California accounts for more than 99% of the U.S. production of each of those crops, according to the California Food and Agriculture Department.

“You ask the average person what California does better than any other place in the world, where we have the most innovation and natural advantage and they’ll probably say Hollywood or high-tech. But, it’s farming,” said Stuart Woolf, president of Woolf Farming & Processing, with cotton and tomato fields near Huron.

“Bakersfield to Sacramento is like a giant greenhouse with really good soil,” he said. “The big picture is that we are going to be perpetually stretching our resources as California feeds more people around the
globe.”

The world’s population just hit 7 billion, and emerging middle classes in countries such as India and China are putting more on their plates. California farmers, always looking for new markets, are finely attuned to shifting economies and tastes worldwide. Pistachios are a perfect example of such entrepreneurial farming.

California is now the world’s top producer, knocking off longtime leader Iran three years ago.  This year the state’s crop is expected to be more than 460 million pounds, but 30 years ago the crop barely existed here.  Then came the 1979 Iranian hostage crisis, which led to a ban on imports from Iran, a major supplier to the U.S. market. Some Central Valley farmers saw an opportunity. They gambled on planting pistachio trees. Innovation followed.

Iranian pistachios traditionally are dyed a distinctive red to cover blemishes left by bits of the
hull sticking to the outer shell. California researchers found a way to remove the outer hulls, leaving the tan shells smooth and flawless. Soon California pistachios were favored by consumers worldwide. The 2010 crop — a record 522 million pounds — was worth $1.16 billion. In the Central Valley, which grows about 95% of the nation’s pistachios, the crop is expected to nearly double by 2017 as more trees mature.

“That’s a huge increase. But we think we’ll be able to create demand ahead of production,” said Richard
Matoian, executive director of American Pistachio Growers in Fresno.

Moore, the pistachio farmer, is willing to roll the dice. He’s looking to add more trees. “It’s a moon shot – a trajectory of seven years. You water, you fertilize, you keep the critters away, and you hope and you pray the demand grows as your trees grow,” he said.

The country’s largest pistachio farm, Paramount Farms, is capitalizing on Hollywood glitz to build a
bigger domestic market. Located in Kern County, Paramount is owned by Stewart and Lynda Resnick, who created the national pomegranate juice craze in part by putting their POM Wonderful brand juice bottles in gift bags at entertainment awards shows. Paramount is now pushing pistachios with “Get
Crackin” TV spots featuring personalities such as Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, who had accused Facebook Inc.’s Mark Zuckerberg of stealing their idea for the social network, promoting “the
lowest calorie nut.”

“California farmers have guts,” Matoian said. “They  take risks on new crops.”

Sometimes they return to old ones.

California was once a major cotton grower, transplanting the “white  gold” empires of the South to the American West. But cotton slowly disappeared as drought and water wars drove farmers to abandon it for other crops.

Then prices spiked in 2010, largely because of poor harvests in China and Pakistan, which are major
cotton growers. Some Golden State farmers rushed to plant cotton anew. Now, the  Texas drought is expected to push high-end pima cotton prices to the $3-a-pound mark again. California farmers are harvesting 454,500 acres of cotton, almost 50% more than last year.

“Anything, anywhere in the world, affects us,” said Ryan Jacobsen, a raisin grower and executive director of the Fresno County  Farm Bureau.

So far the concurrence of events has California agriculture prospering and poised for long-term growth. China is still a surging market, and the U.S. recently signed a trade deal with Korea that is expected to boost exports of wine, beef, dairy products and tree nuts.

But Jacobsen said it would be hard to find a big-spending California farmer who would freely admit to
being flush. “You know how you make a small fortune in farming? Start with a large fortune,” he said.

The most splurging that raisin grower Steve Spate will do is an occasional dinner out with his wife, even though raisin prices are at an all-time high of $1,700 a ton, more than double what they were in 2002.

Fall rainstorms almost ruined this year’s crop. And immigration crackdowns and ongoing violence on the U.S.-Mexico border have left him struggling to attract enough farmhands.

Spate plans to invest this year’s profits to strengthen trellises to prepare for the switch to mechanical
harvesters. “In farming what you buy is the ability to keep farming,” he said.

On a recent November afternoon, Hermelinda Hernandez, who had spent 27 years packing cauliflower and cantaloupes from the farms of the Imperial Valley, found herself fourth in line for the monthly distribution of emergency food at the New Life Assembly Church in Calexico.

Hundreds of residents had lined up behind her, but Hernandez had arrived around 10 a.m. – nearly five hours before the church doors opened – because she knew that last month, people had been turned away when the rations of canned goods ran out.

Hernandez, 62, is one in a legion of Californians who either go hungry or worry about where they will get their next meal. It’s a persistent and ongoing concern in the Imperial Valley, which has the highest unemployment rate [PDF] in the state and where 23 percent of the population lives in poverty.

According to an analysis released this month by California Food Policy Advocates, an estimated 20,000 Imperial Valley residents struggle to afford food.

That struggle is a growing problem statewide. The recent report, based on UCLA’s 2009 California Health Interview Survey data, found that the number of people with limited access to healthy food had grown by 30 percent since 2007, and it’s now a problem that affects 3.7 million Californians. In a study slated for December publication, the National Latino Research Center at CSU San Marcos surveyed residents of rural California communities most affected by the economic crisis. It found access to food is a top concern in all nine counties studied.

Food stamp use, another indication of the struggle for food, is also is on the rise [PDF] in California. Between 2006 and 2011, the number of Californians who signed up for the program has nearly doubled to more than 3.8 million. And in 2010, California received $28 million from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Emergency Food Assistance Program – the most funding [PDF] for emergency food of any state – with more than $223,000 going to Imperial County.

The county with the highest rate of hunger is Contra Costa. Larry Sly, executive director of the Food Bank of Contra Costa and Solano, said high unemployment in cities like Pittsburg and Antioch have contributed to the problem.

“It’s very disconcerting,” Sly said. “It’s people who used to have pretty good jobs who are coming to our distributions. They have never been in a position to ask for help, and they are humiliated. I don’t see it leveling off, which is the scary part.”

In Imperial County, the bitter irony of hunger is that it’s the home of a $1.5 billion agriculture industry.

“Much of the economy relies on agriculture, and many other economic sectors that have tried to move into the area have not created opportunities that provide a livable wage,” said Arcela Nunez-Alvarez, research director of the National Latino Research Center, who has spent a decade studying Imperial County. “The lack of access to food is an expression of the economic challenges the community has faced over the course of many years, and it has been exacerbated by the economic situation.”

That means those who have worked to get fresh fruits and vegetables into grocery stores often can’t afford to buy them for themselves.

“The healthier food is more expensive,” Hernandez, the former produce packer, said in Spanish through an interpreter. “I can’t keep my eyes on that. Instead of a healthy meal, I prepare what I can afford.”

Sara Griffen, executive director of the Imperial Valley Food Bank, said the extent of hunger can be hard to identify.

“The biggest clue is someone who is willing to stand in line for hours for a couple cans of food,” she said. “Hunger, or food insecurity, is a silent thing. It’s difficult to spot. People don’t want other people to know, and it’s difficult to know by looking at them.”

Those who are hungriest actually might be obese, what some health researchers have called the hunger-obesity paradox [PDF].

“They are living on processed food and empty calories and food that will not fill you, but it’s cheaper to spend money on Doritos than prepare a meal,” Griffen said. “We grow amazing produce here in Imperial Valley, but we are so detached from the land.”

Some local growers are trying to help through the California Association of Food Banks’ Farm to Family program, which gleans and donates produce from the fields that aren’t picture-perfect enough for market. Last year, 102 million pounds of fruits and vegetables were offered to food banks across the state through the program, but the need still outstrips what’s available.

“Everyone knows someone who has lost a job,” said Steve Sharp, a third-generation farmer in Imperial County who solicits produce for the Farm to Family program.

At the November distribution at the New Life Assembly Church in Calexico, volunteers spent nearly three hours handing out food. But as the afternoon progressed, bags containing items like beef stew and applesauce began to dwindle, and those still in line had to make do with a box of cereal, crackers and a bag of potatoes.

By the time the sun had set, most of those provisions had run out, and the last dozen people were given a plastic sack of potatoes and a bag of marshmallows. Rachel Espejo, a food bank volunteer, jokingly suggested that everyone could go home and make potatoes with chorizo, even though many wouldn’t be able to afford the meat.

Espejo, her husband and her two school-aged children spent most of the day packing and handing out 384 bags of canned and dried goods to others, but they also were among the 36 households that didn’t get an allocation of emergency food that evening.

As transplants from the greater Los Angeles area, Espejo has come to rely on the food bank because she only recently landed a part-time job at Marshalls at the mall in neighboring El Centro. Her husband, a former deputy sheriff, bolsters their household income through a part-time job at the church, where he does maintenance and janitorial work. They now make too much to qualify for welfare and food stamps, but they make too little to live comfortably. By the end of December, the family will no longer receive $560 in food stamps each month, and Espejo says she’s not sure what they’ll do.

“It’s hard to explain to the kids,” she said. “They ask if we can have milk, and I have to tell them there is no milk. They understand that it’s hard. They don’t ask for many things.”

Although she didn’t get any of the canned goods she had given away to others that evening, Espejo had reserved a box of crackers and cereal for her family. And there were plenty of leftover potatoes, which she would use to make soup.

“You feel better that people got something to eat that day,” she said, surveying the room of empty food cartons. “It’s nice to give hope that there is one more meal, even if it’s just potatoes.”

A new report suggests that California agriculture already uses water efficiently and disputes the notion that conservation could free up large amounts of water for other uses.

Increasing water efficiency would generate only 330,000 acre-feet per year of new water, according to the study [PDF], which was conducted by the Center for Irrigation Technology at CSU Fresno. That represents about 0.5 percent of the state’s water use.

Switching from flood irrigation to less water-intensive methods, such as drip irrigation, usually will not make more water available in a given region because runoff may be reused by other farmers or fish and wildlife, the study says. Flows that seep into the soil but are not used by crops may replenish the groundwater supply.

In addition, improving agricultural water conservation may have unintended consequences. For instance, the study notes that many cities are dependent exclusively on groundwater, so boosting agricultural efficiency may result in less water seeping into underground aquifers, thereby depleting city supplies.

The only way to significantly reduce farm water consumption is to take some land out of production or change the types of crops, which is not a true water savings, but rather a diversion of water to other uses, the study concludes.

Not everyone agrees with the report’s analysis.

While it’s true that water systems are interconnected, more intensive farm water use has consequences beyond the total volume of water available, said Rebecca Nelson, lead researcher for the Comparative Groundwater Law and Policy Program at Stanford University.

“If a farmer uses water, generally, the quality of that water will decrease when it goes to the next use,” she said.

More water application means more pesticides and fertilizers as well, and nitrogen-rich runoff from farms seeps into groundwater supplies and can contaminate wells with nitrates, she said. Nitrates might cause blue baby syndrome, which causes infants to carry less oxygen in their blood. That can be a particularly tough problem in poor communities where people cannot afford to dig deep wells that bypass nitrate contamination, she said.

Tracking water use is notoriously tricky, but there is room for efficiency improvements, said Heather Cooley, co-director of the water program at the Pacific Institute, which advocates for greater water use efficiency. Available data from 2001 suggests that many farmers in the state still rely on wasteful watering methods, such as flood irrigation. A 2009 report by the institute found that wider use of water-sparing techniques, such as drip or scheduled irrigation, could save up to 17 percent of the total agricultural water applied to fields.

In addition, the new report does not account for the fact that more efficient farming practices have other benefits, Cooley said. More efficient water use may improve crop yields and reduce the need to invest in water infrastructure, she said.

A big part of solving the water shortage in the state is to improve storage and capture systems, said Quinn, of the water agencies association. In wet years, places like the San Joaquin Valley are unable to adequately store surplus water for drier years, when the valley depletes groundwater supplies.

Swapping water-intensive crops such as rice for less-thirsty crops such as grapes can decrease farms’ water consumption, though the consumer demand and costs of switching to different crops can be a deterrent, the study notes.

Stanford’s Nelson contends that farmers plant water-guzzling crops because water is not priced appropriately. While some farmers pay for water use, many pump from wells on their property and pay only for the electricity to draw water from the ground. That makes crops like rice seem artificially cheap to produce, Nelson said.

“There’s no water pricing scheme that says, ‘What are the environmental impacts of using this water, what are the social impacts of using water?,’ and in my view, that would be a sensible way of making sure the use of water is optimal,” she said.

Factory farming may not be pretty, but we all need to take a step back, look at how we got here and try to understand the industry on a scientific, nonemotional level.

On Oct. 31, the world population hit 7 billion. Our food animal industry has had to
modify production methods to safely and efficiently meet the growing demand.

Yet our population is becoming increasingly urbanized, with little or no exposure to
farming. As a veterinary student, I entered school with people who had gone their entire lives without stepping foot on a farm prior to our large-animal rotations.

People who have not been exposed to large production farming have a difficult time
understanding its current state. We have become an urbanized society susceptible to
emotional reactions and extreme animal-rights propaganda.

In light of recent events regarding and Mercy For Animals (MFA), let’s take the
poultry industry as an example. The American Veterinary Medical Association
has released a chart comparing housing methods in poultry.

The choice comes down to cramped housing that minimizes disease and injury but
sacrifices natural behavior, or preserving natural behavior but increasing the
incidence of disease, injury and subsequent suffering among the flock.

Disease and injury also mean a decline in food supply in the face of increasing
demand. It is clear why agricultural practices have become what they are.

As a vegetarian who plans on being a small-animal practitioner, I can say that there are aspects of modern agricultural practices I don’t like. But I have also learned that they aren’t quite as bad as they seem. I see room for improvement, along with the importance of providing food for our population.

Reporting from Beijing — Here is a nightmare assignment for a restaurateur:

Cook for 250 people using all-organic ingredients procured locally in a country infamous for its tainted food supply. Create a romantic setting in a latter-day fortress, the fluorescent-lighted U.S. Embassy.

Alice Waters’ celebrated Berkeley restaurant, Chez Panisse, was transported to Beijing last week as part of a four-day U.S.-China Forum on the Arts and Culture. Berkeley and Beijing don’t have much in common except as food writer Michael Pollan, another delegate, sarcastically put it, “both are socialist paradises.”

But to replicate the Berkeley experience in Beijing? It wasn’t just a matter of flying the ingredients from California. Waters’ philosophy centers on eating local and buying directly from the farm.

“Knowing the person who grows the food is the best way to find food you know isn’t contaminated,” said Waters, sinking into a chestnut-colored leather sofa in her hotel near Tiananmen Square.

If Waters was turned off by China’s wave of stomach-churning food scandals — the cooking oil recycled from sewers or the steroid-laced meat — she was too diplomatic to say. She responded to questions on the subject with a tight-lipped “Mona Lisa” smile.

She did acknowledge that Beijing’s northern climate was a challenge to her exacting standards for local ingredients, so she had to widen her range — to southern China’s Guizhou province for the organic oranges in the dessert, apple and candied orange galette with honey ice cream.

Given there are only a smattering of organic farms in China, procuring her ingredients would require some serious “foraging” — the term Waters prefers for what the rest of us call “shopping.”

The original menu called for the entree to be duck. Notwithstanding the ubiquity of Peking duck, Waters’ team couldn’t find organic duck in sufficient quantity. They found instead two organic farmers who were each able to deliver a 440-pound pig to the embassy kitchens.

“We knew pork is the meat that Chinese usually eat, but it meant I had to cook it better than they do,” Waters said. She braised it with red wine sauce and served it with a puree of turnips and a garden salad.

Samantha Greenwood, Waters’ special-events chef, said some of the organizers were critical of the use of simple ingredients for a VIP dinner, which was hosted by U.S. Ambassador Gary Locke and attended by many of the ambassadors in Beijing, as well as cultural luminaries such as cellist Yo-Yo Ma, writer Amy Tan and filmmaker Joel Coen.

“They thought we should be using luxury ingredients: steak, lobster, foie gras. They didn’t understand that is the reverse of the approach we take,” Greenwood said.

Banquets in China are served on large round tables with Lazy Susans in the middle. Waters insisted on long, narrow tables to facilitate conversation. Instead of the copious toasts of bai jiu, a strong clear liquor, they served only wine, donated from California vineyards. The blanc de blancs sparkling wine from Calistoga-based Schramsberg vineyards happened to be the same wine Henry Kissinger brought in 1972 for a toast by President Nixon and Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai.

Aside from the wine, the only imported ingredients were the olive oil — also from California farms — and vinegar. Waters and her staff also brought their own tablecloths, menus and napkins that were recycled from a party held this year marking the 40th anniversary of the founding of Chez Panisse.

As a rule, Chez Panisse does not cater. In fact, the staff rather sniffs at the idea, but the restaurant has done several events outside its California comfort zone: in Berlin and Austria, a private party in the Caribbean (the restaurant will not disclose the client) and a luncheon for First Lady Michelle Obama at a Chicago hotel.

The skill level of Chinese sous chefs hired to help out in Beijing made things easier here. The second course of the dinner was consomme with butternut squash tortellini, which is technically very difficult.

“But we figured if there’s anywhere it can be done it’s here because they all have dumpling-making skills,” Greenwood said. “We put them on it, and they just got it immediately. We fell in love with the cooks.”

The U.S. Embassy had never done a large dinner before and Waters had never cooked in an embassy before, so there was some stumbling on both sides to make it work.

“They were open and welcoming, but it was like you can do anything you want if you give us three months’ notice,” Greenwood said. “If you wanted to unscrew a light bulb, it took 20 emails.”

In the end, though, they were able to remove the fluorescent lights. Improbably enough, Waters received permission to burn small bundles of rosemary in the courtyard to warm the atmosphere.

And one aspect of U.S. Embassy security was definitely appreciated: Visitors had to surrender all their electronic devices at the front gate. At Chez Panisse, Waters said, “we can only ask politely that you don’t use your cellphone.”

barbara.demick@latimes.com