I am honored to lead a delegation from California today on a seven-day visit to South Africa to exchange information on climate smart agriculture.
A report from the United Nations this week gave new urgency to a challenge we have been facing for years – how to assist food producers in the face of climate change. The UN report sounded an alarm – the world’s food supply is in jeopardy, but it also states that remedies are possible if the nations of the world work together.
California and South Africa have much in common. We are two of just five global Mediterranean-style climates that are uniquely suited for agricultural production. Like California, South Africa has strong specialty crop production and similar production challenges related to drought and climate variability. There will be a strong emphasis on water management as a key element of building resiliency.
This trip will allow California agricultural representatives to meet directly with specialty crop growers, research institutions, farm organizations, and government representatives to evaluate on-farm strategies and management practices being used to address climate change.
Cattle grazing outside Sokoto, Nigeria. Luis Tato/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images, via the NY Times
By Christopher Flavelle
The world’s land and water resources are being exploited at “unprecedented rates,” a new United Nations report warns, which combined with climate change is putting dire pressure on the ability of humanity to feed itself.
The report, prepared by more than 100 experts from 52 countries and released in summary form in Geneva on Thursday, found that the window to address the threat is closing rapidly. A half-billion people already live in places turning into desert, and soil is being lost between 10 and 100 times faster than it is forming, according to the report.
Climate change will make those threats even worse, as floods, drought, storms and other types of extreme weather threaten to disrupt, and over time shrink, the global food supply. Already, more than 10 percent of the world’s population remains undernourished, and some authors of the report warned in interviews that food shortages could lead to an increase in cross-border migration.
A particular danger is that food crises could develop on several continents at once, said Cynthia Rosenzweig, a senior research scientist at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies and one of the lead authors of the report. “The potential risk of multi-breadbasket failure is increasing,” she said. “All of these things are happening at the same time.”
The report also offered a measure of hope, laying out pathways to addressing the looming food crisis, though they would require a major re-evaluation of land use and agriculture worldwide as well as consumer behavior. Proposals include increasing the productivity of land, wasting less food and persuading more people to shift their diets away from cattle and other types of meat.
“One of the important findings of our work is that there are a lot of actions that we can take now. They’re available to us,” Dr.Rosenzweig said. “But what some of these solutions do require is attention, financial support, enabling environments.”
The summary was released Thursday by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, an international group of scientists convened by the United Nations that pulls together a wide range of existing research to help governments understand climate change and make policy decisions. The I.P.C.C. is writing a series of climate reports, including one last year on the disastrous consequences if the planet’s temperature rises just 1.5 degrees Celsius above its preindustrial levels, as well as an upcoming report on the state of the world’s oceans.
Some authors also suggested that food shortages are likely to affect poorer parts of the world far more than richer ones. That could increase a flow of immigration that is already redefining politics in North America, Europe and other parts of the world.
“People’s lives will be affected by a massive pressure for migration,” said Pete Smith, a professor of plant and soil science at the University of Aberdeen and one of the report’s lead authors. “People don’t stay and die where they are. People migrate.”
Between 2010 and 2015 the number of migrants from El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras showing up at the United States’ border with Mexico increased fivefold, coinciding with a dry period that left many with not enough food and was so unusual that scientists suggested it bears the signal of climate change.
Barring action on a sweeping scale, the report said, climate change will accelerate the danger of severe food shortages. As a warming atmosphere intensifies the world’s droughts, flooding, heat waves, wildfires and other weather patterns, it is speeding up the rate of soil loss and land degradation, the report concludes.
Higher concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere — a greenhouse gas put there mainly by the burning of fossil fuels — will also reduce food’s nutritional quality, even as rising temperatures cut crop yields and harm livestock.
Those changes threaten to exceed the ability of the agriculture industry to adapt.
In some cases, the report says, a changing climate is boosting food production because, for example, warmer temperatures will mean greater yields of some crops at higher latitudes. But on the whole, the report finds that climate change is already hurting the availability of food because of decreased yields and lost land from erosion, desertification and rising seas, among other things.
Overall if emissions of greenhouse gases continue to rise, so will food costs, according to the report, affecting people around the world.
“You’re sort of reaching a breaking point with land itself and its ability to grow food and sustain us,” said Aditi Sen, a senior policy adviser on climate change at Oxfam America, an antipoverty advocacy organization.
In addition, the researchers said, even as climate change makes agriculture more difficult, agriculture itself is also exacerbating climate change.
The report said that activities such as draining wetlands — as has happened in Indonesia and Malaysia to create palm oil plantations, for example — is particularly damaging. When drained, peatlands, which store between 530 and 694 billion tons of carbon dioxide globally, release that carbon dioxide back into the atmosphere.Carbon dioxide is a major greenhouse gas, trapping the sun’s heat and warming the planet. Every 2.5 acres of peatlands release the carbon dioxide equivalent of burning 6,000 gallons of gasoline.
And the emission of carbon dioxide continue long after the peatlands are drained. Of the five gigatons of greenhouse gas emissions that are released each year from deforestation and other land-use changes, “One gigaton comes from the ongoing degradation of peatlands that are already drained,” said Tim Searchinger, a senior fellow at the World Resources Institute, an environmental think tank, who is familiar with the report. (By comparison, the fossil fuel industry emitted about 37 gigatons of carbon dioxide last year, according to the institute.)
Similarly, cattle are significant producers of methane, another powerful greenhouse gas, and an increase in global demand for beef and other meats has fueled their numbers and increased deforestation in critical forest systems like the Amazon.
Since 1961 methane emissions from ruminant livestock, which includes cows as well as sheep, buffalo and goats, have significantly increased, according to the report. And each year, the amount of forested land that is cleared — much of that propelled by demand for pasture land for cattle — releases the emissions equivalent of driving 600 million cars.
Overall, the report says there is still time to address the threats by making the food system more efficient. The authors urge changes in how food is produced and distributed, including better soil management, crop diversification and fewer restrictions on trade. They also call for shifts in consumer behavior, noting that at least one-quarter of all food worldwide is wasted.
The California Department of Food and Agriculture is celebrating its 100th anniversary as a state agency in 2019. Throughout the year this blog will feature a number of items to commemorate this milestone. Today we continue with the Centennial Reflections video series, featuring CDFA employees remembering their histories, and the agency’s.
American Farmland Trust (AFT), the organization behind the national movement No Farms No Food®, has released four case studies that show that healthier soil on farmland brings economic benefits to farmers and environmental benefits to society. These case studies were developed in partnership with USDA’s Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS).
“Increasingly, we understand that better soil health – and specific practices aimed at building soil organic matter, fostering microbial life in the soil, reducing nutrient loss, and protecting soil from erosion – lead to higher net income for farming operations. These case studies contribute to the growing body of quantitative evidence that improving soil health increases farmer profitability,” said Dr. Perez.
The two-page case studies focus on corn-soybean production in Illinois and Ohio, almond production in California and a diversified rotation (sweet corn, alfalfa, corn for silage or grain) in New York. The four farmers featured implemented soil health practices like no-till or strip-till, nutrient management, cover crops, compost, and mulching.
“When it comes to conservation, producers have to make decisions based on what makes the most sense for their operations,” said NRCS Chief Matthew Lohr. “These case studies provide information on the economic benefits of using soil health management systems, demonstrating the value of adopting these systems.”
With soil health management, producers can increase their yield, decrease their risk and input costs, and improve their profits, all while conserving our nation’s resources for the public at large, on their farms, in their watersheds, and beyond. Soil health management systems are good for farmers and for the public.
“Increased implementation of soil health is critical to AFT’s holistic approach to saving the land that sustains us. Ensuring a sustainable future for this planet and our society requires we value the land, the practices on the land and the people who steward that land. AFT’s case studies showcase farmers who took the risk and are now enjoying the benefits of implementing practices that will support food production for a growing population while improving our environment and sequestering carbon. Farmers across the country can now embrace these practices and, with the help of staffers from AFT and our partner NRCS, put them into practice with greater confidence and profitability,” says John Piotti, AFT president and CEO.
Highlights from the case studies include:
All four of the farmers profiled saw improved yields ranging from 2% to 22% that they attributed, in part, to their soil health practices. The average return on investment was 176% for the four farms in the study and ranged from 35% to 343%. The study accounted for other factors at play in increased yield such as improved seed varieties and increased seeding rates.
All four farmers saw improved water quality outcomes, both by witnessing reduced soil and water runoff and as estimated by USDA’s Nutrient Tracking Tool (NTT). NTT estimated that nitrogen reductions ranged from 40% to 98%, phosphorus reductions ranged from 74% to 92%; and sediment reductions ranged from 76% to 96% from specific fields in each farm.
All four farmers saw improved climate outcomes, as estimated by USDA’s COMET-Farm Tool. The tool estimated that total greenhouse gas emission reductions from specific fields in each farm ranged from 16% to 560%, corresponding to taking three-fourths of a car to 17 cars off the road.
All four farmers have been implementing different soil health practices over different time frames and a variety of cropping systems. With these case studies and the ones that will be released in the fall, AFT is building a diverse library of on-farm examples of soil health investments that have led to economic gain.
We hope that farmers who have been considering adding soil health practices to their operation will be able to use these case studies to approach their existing landowners, from whom they rent their land, to discuss sharing the risks and rewards of the soil health investments. We think farmers may be able to use the case studies with a new landlord to add new fields. Should that materialize, we hope farmers will also share the case studies with their bankers to secure additional financing for the farm expansion.
Farmers across the country can reach out to their local NRCS and Soil and Water Conservation District staff to help them implement soil health practices on their farm. In the watersheds featured in the four case studies, farmers can reach out to both the local NRCS and SWCD staff as well as the four AFT authors of the case studies.
We hope our conservation partners at NRCS, SWCD and Extension, plus our partners in the private sector, crop consultants, cover crop seed dealers, and strip-till equipment providers, use these case studies with their customers to help answer questions about the costs and benefits of adopting soil health practices.
CDFA’s role at Certified Farmers Markets is to facilitate the sale of California-grown agricultural products while maintaining sufficient regulatory control to ensure they’re of acceptable quality, and that selling activities are conducted honestly and fairly.
What differentiates a Certified Farmers Market from other farmers markets? It is in a location approved by the respective county agricultural commissioner and its California-grown agricultural products are sold directly to the public by producers and certified producers.
Background
Regulations once required California farmers to pack, size and label their fresh fruits, nuts and vegetables in standard containers to sell in markets anywhere other than the farm site. Then, in 1977, CDFA Direct Marketing regulations exempted farmers from these standardization requirements when certified producers directly market their California-grown agricultural products to the public at Certified Farmers Markets. Benefits include providing consumers the opportunity to meet the farmer and learn how their food supply is produced, as well as the ability for small farmers to market their products without the added expenses of commercial preparation.
CDFA inspects Certified Farmers Markets to ensure quality of agricultural products and that selling activities are honest and fair.
Today
Certified Farmers Markets are regulated by CDFA’s Direct Marketing Program
of the Inspection and Compliance Branch in the Inspection Services Division, in
collaboration with California’s 58 county agricultural commissions. There are
currently 675 Certified Farmers Markets throughout California, and
approximately 60% of them are seasonal. That equates to more than 28,000 annual
marketing events. Certified Farmers Market inspectors conducted approximately
2,800 inspections and investigations this past year.
Click
here to learn more about starting a Certified Farmers Market in your area,
becoming a certified producer, or learning which certified producers already
are in your county. There also is information about the Certified Farmers
Market Advisory Committee, including dates of upcoming meetings as they’re
determined, previous meeting minutes and how
to apply to be a member of the committee, which is composed of six certified
producers, six Certified Farmers Market managers, one public member, one
agricultural commissioner and alternates.
Additional CDFA Connections to Farmers Markets
The California
Nutrition Incentive Program (CNIP) in the CDFA Office of Farm to Fork
(CDFA-F2F) encourages the purchase and consumption of California-grown fresh
fruits, vegetables and nuts to CalFresh shoppers through a dollar-to-dollar
match at Certified Farmers Markets. For every CalFresh benefit dollar spent,
CalFresh shoppers receive an additional CNIP dollar that can be spent on fruits
and vegetables at the market, within set parameters.
The CDFA Senior Farmers
Market Nutrition Program provides low-income seniors a $20 check booklet to
purchase produce, herbs and honey at Certified Farmers Markets. CDFA encourages
more certified markets and producers to participate
in this program by applying for free, attending an interactive training and
accepting the checks at their market/farm stall.
CDFA secretary Karen Ross along with Washington director of agriculture Derek Sandison (center) recently toured CDFA’s Mediterranean fruit fly rearing facility in Hawaii, on the island of Oahu. With them, from left, are CDFA employees Aaron Frank, Song So and Rosalie Nelson. Secretary Ross and Director Sandison were in Hawaii for a meeting of WASDA, the Western Association of State Departments of Agriculture.
The program breeds and sterilizes Medflies and transports them to Southern California, where they are released aerially as an exclusionary measure to prevent Medfly infestations. The Preventive Release Program, a joint project with the USDA, is an example of the innovative biological solutions that help make integrated pest management a successful approach.
The California Department of Food and Agriculture is celebrating its 100th anniversary as a state agency in 2019. Throughout the year this blog will feature a number of items to commemorate this milestone. Today we continue with the Centennial Reflections video series, featuring CDFA employees remembering their histories, and the agency’s.
The long road to a more perfect avocado certainly didn’t begin in Parlier, Calif. But the tiny agricultural town 30 minutes southeast of Fresno is where a U.S. Department of Agriculture flavor scientist has been pushing samples through sliding doors into evaluation booths, for a panel of tasters to individually consider.
The goal of the study is to figure out how people describe the flavor of a good avocado and what components in the fruit contribute to that perceived flavor, said Mary Lu Arpaia, a leading avocado researcher and director of UC Riverside’s avocado breeding program.
Every Tuesday and Thursday morning, the nine trained participants spend an hour evaluating avocado samples in a University of California sensory science building specifically designed for testing like this, just down the street from an agricultural research service division of the USDA.
The tasters are paid $10 an hour, plus all that free avocado, and their ranks include a few retired schoolteachers and an IT professional. They’re given no more than three avocado samples during each session to avoid burnout, and answer around 14 questions about each sample.
Their analysis is concentrated on two varieties of avocado, Hass and GEM.
The black-skinned Hass variety (rhymes with “class”) is the current gold standard on the market, and accounts for 95% of avocados consumed in the United States. The GEM is a newer species produced out of Arpaia’s lab at UC Riverside, aimed to be better adapted to grow in the San Joaquin Valley, which — if successful — could potentially mean California avocados produced more months of the year. (California avocados are typically in season from spring to late summer or early fall, with production largely limited to coastal Southern California. They account for roughly 90% of all U.S.-produced avocados, but just a fraction of the overall avocados consumed across the country.)
Year-round avocado dishes may dominate your Instagram feed, yet its current nationwide post-seasonal ubiquity is heavily dependent on a delicate balance of geopolitics. But first, let’s backtrack.
Avocados have been cultivated in what is now Mexico and Central America since 500 B.C. The California avocado industry began in earnest around 1915, about a decade before a California postman accidentally originated the Hass avocado in his La Habra Heights backyard.
When the North American Free Trade Agreement was ratified in 1994, the vast majority of avocados consumed in the U.S. were still California grown, and therefore limited to a short seasonal window. NAFTA opened the door for mass avocado importation from Mexico, but it wasn’t until 1997 that an eight-decade ban on importing the fruit from Mexico into the U.S. was lifted.
U.S. avocado consumption has generally trended upward since 1970, but the post-NAFTA influx of access to a year-round supply — coupled with broader culinary and health trends, along with a fast-growing Latino population across the country, and their cultural influence — fueled explosive growth among American consumers. (A 1990s-era concerted effort by avocado marketers to integrate guacamole into the Super Bowl experience is also said to have played a crucial role in boosting sales.)
California still overwhelmingly dominates U.S. avocado production, but imports now account for roughly 85% of all avocados consumed in the U.S., with the vast majority of those coming from Mexico.
California has had a smaller-than-average crop this year, making the country more reliant on Mexican avocados, and prices spiked dramatically in April after President Trump threatened to close the border. Due to a confluence of factors, prices remain so high that some L.A. taqueros have resorted to providing a faux-guacamole that substitutes Mexican squash for the avocados, as Javier Cabral recently reported for L.A. Taco.
The quest to cultivate an avocado that can consistently bear fruit year-round in California has long been a kind of the Holy Grail for horticultural researchers like Arpaia, but it takes on new urgency with the fate of NAFTA potentially hanging in the balance.
Meanwhile, the panel of Central Valley tasters who meet twice a week in Parlier for the USDA’s research have become true avocado evangelists. The group has become friends through the yearlong process, and recently gathered for an avocado-themed potluck, complete with homemade avocado ice cream, avocado cream pie and avocado deviled eggs.
Agricultural insect pests seek out familiar scents to find their plant hosts. However, they can also be repelled by odors from other plant species.
A new study from the University of Vermont published in Scientific Reports offers a novel framework for exploiting plant odors to repel insect pests. The study is the first to show how the similarity of plant odors and phylogenetic relatedness can predict insect repellency.
The team applied this conceptual framework to swede midge, a tiny fly that is becoming a major problem for Northeastern growers of broccoli, kale and other cabbage-family crops. They found that particular essential oils – garlic, spearmint, thyme, eucalyptus lemon and cinnamon bark – were most effective at repelling the midge. The findings come as good news to organic farmers who are without an effective solution for managing the pest.
While essential oils have long been used in pest management, determining which oils are effective has followed a “trial by error” approach, said senior author Yolanda Chen, associate professor in UVM’s Department of Plant and Soil Science.
“People often think more aromatic plant oils, like mint, basil and lavender will repel insects, but usually there is no rhyme or reason for choosing,” said Chen, who is also a fellow of UVM’s Gund Institute for the Environment. “It turns out that as we go along the family tree, plants that are more distantly related from the host plant are generally more repellent.”
Headless crops
Swede midge is a recent invader on vegetable farms in the Northeastern United States. Midge larvae must feed on the brassica plant family in order to survive, which includes many popular vegetables like broccoli, kale, cauliflower, cabbage, brussels sprouts, kohlrabi and collards. Making a mistake and laying eggs on the wrong plant would result in the death of the midge’s offspring.
“Smell plays a major role in host location,” said Chase Stratton, the study’s lead author, who recently completed his PhD at UVM. “Just one landing of one fly is enough to cause marketable damage,” he said.
The larvae “hijack the plant’s control system” resulting in distorted growth, such as headless broccoli and cauliflower, puckered leaves, and brown scarring. Unfortunately for farmers, the damage is not observable until it’s too late and the midge have already dropped off the plant. In areas where the midge has become well established, including parts of Canada, New York, and Northern Vermont, the midge can cause 100 percent crop losses.
To manage the midge, conventional growers have turned to neonicotinoid insecticides, which have been implicated in honeybee decline. With no methods for killing the pest, some organic farmers have simply stopped growing vulnerable brassica crops. This led Chen and Stratton to explore new control options for organic farmers.
A sustainable solution
“It’s hard to get away from using insecticides because they’re good at killing insects,” said Stratton, who is now a postdoctoral researcher at the The Land Institute in Salina, Kansas. “But plants have been naturally defending against insect herbivores for millions of years. Why are we so arrogant to think we can do it better than plants?”
Fascinated by the complexity of plant odors and species interactions, Stratton identified essential oils from 18 different plants that vary in their degree of relatedness to brassica host crops. He and Chen hypothesized that oils from plants that are more distantly related to brassicas would have more diverse odors and be more repellent. Comparing the chemical structures of the odors might hold clues for predicting repellency, they thought.
To test the theory, the researchers observed how female midges behaved when presented with broccoli plants that had been sprayed with each of the essential oils. They found the midges were less likely to lay their eggs on broccoli plants that had been treated with essential oils, compared to the untreated plants, and avoided flying towards certain oils more than others. In general, oils from plants that were more distantly related from brassicas on the plant family tree were more likely to repel the midge. They also found that odors that were more chemically different were also more likely to be repellent. However, the oil that was most repellent – spearmint – actually had odors more similar to the brassica crop.
“Biologically, it makes sense that midges would be able to detect and avoid these plants because the similar odors would make it easier for them to misinterpret these plants as hosts, which would be deadly for their offspring,” said Stratton. “For swede midge, garlic appears to be one of the most promising repellents, particularly because certified organic products using garlic are already available for growers.”
The study suggests a new sustainable solution for this new invasive pest and provides a novel framework for testing pest management strategies in other species.
