By CDFA Secretary Karen Ross

CAPE TOWN, SOUTH AFRICA – At the height of the drought (April 2018) in this amazing city, residents were restricted to 50 liters (13 gallons) of water per person, per day, and that allowed Cape Town and the Western Cape province to avert an unprecedented catastrophe, Day Zero, the day this city of four-million residents could have run out of water.

The threat made conservation the new normal, resulting in practices like hotel showers with minute timers, closed water taps in public places, and informational slogans/campaigns throughout the city.

As we became familiar with all that on our first day here, we also had an opportunity to meet with U.S. Consul General Virginia Blaser and her team at the U.S. Consulate in Cape Town. We learned that the Western Cape–smaller than the state of Texas–is the fifth largest agricultural producer in all of Africa, and the eighth largest wine producer in the world. 

Agriculture is the primary industrial sector in the Western Cape, and the recent drought left its mark with an estimated impact of more than 20,000 jobs lost in agriculture.

We also met with the Western Cape Department of Environmental Affairs and Development Planning for a first-hand briefing about the challenges of Day Zero, the climate variability that the Western Cape is experiencing (floods, fires, higher temperatures), and the impact on agricultural producers. It reminded me completely of our own drought episode and the challenges we encountered in California.

In wrapping up our day, we visited the Agricultural Research Council (ARC), a similar organization to USDA’s Agricultural Research Service. Here the partnership between specialty crop growers and academia is the same as in California – focusing research on crop resilience, soil health and optimization of soil-water management.  The potential for research collaboration is strong and I look forward to making connections with our academic institutions in California.

The visit so far is inspiring – California and the Western Cape have many similarities from agriculture (wine & citrus), to weather and water management. There are many policy parallels that can be drawn. I am definitely looking forward to our visits tomorrow, which will include meetings with agricultural organizations, discussions with farmers, and tours of fruit orchards.

By Allen Sano, Fresno County Farmer

Many farmers probably haven’t read the new report from the United Nations warning of threats to the global food supply from climate change and land misuse. But we don’t need to read the science — we’re living it.

Here in the San Joaquin Valley, one of the world’s most productive agricultural regions, there’s not much debate anymore that the climate is changing. The drought of recent years made it hard to ignore; we had limited surface water for irrigation, and the groundwater was so depleted that land sank right under our feet.

Temperatures in nearby Fresno rose to 100 degrees or above on 15 days last month, which was the hottest month worldwide on record, following the hottest June ever. (The previous July, temperatures reached at least 100 degrees on 26 consecutive days, surpassing the record of 22 days in 2005.) The heat is hard to ignore when you and your crew are trying to fix a broken tractor or harvest tomatoes under a blazing sun. As the world heats up, so do our soils, making it harder to get thirsty plants the water they need.

The valley’s characteristic winter tule fog is also disappearing, and winters are getting warmer. Yields of many stone fruits and nuts that feed the country are declining because the trees require cool winters and those fogs trap cool air in the valley. Warm winters also threaten the Sierra Nevada snowpack, which provides 30 percent of California’s water. We had a good wet winter this year, but a few years ago the snowpack was at its lowest level in 500 years. We also worry that last year’s record California wildfires, which blanketed the valley with smoke for weeks, might become the new normal. I don’t get sick much, but that summer I had a hard time breathing because of the congestion in my lungs.

The latest report from the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reinforces our anxiety. It warns of declines in food yields, instability in food supplies, increased soil erosion and threats to water availability in coming decades. The global food supply system is a big contributor of the greenhouse gases that are warming the planet, the report added. As The Times reported on Thursday (August 8), without “action on a sweeping scale” the warming climate will intensify “the world’s droughts, flooding, heat waves, wildfires and other weather patterns” and speed up “the rate of soil loss and land degradation.”

The good news is that farmers can be part of the solution. At our 4,000-acre farm, where we primarily grow tomatoes, we started planting winter crops that require less water, like garbanzo beans and garlic. When necessary, we leave some fields unplanted for part of the year to save water for our high-value almond and pistachio trees. We switched to drip irrigation long ago, which efficiently delivers water to crops at their roots under the soil, protected from the hot sun.

We try to take great care of our soil’s health and we keep learning how to do it better. A living soil with lots of organic matter absorbs and holds more water and nutrients, retains more topsoil and grows healthier plants that survive increasing pressures from pests and diseases.

After harvesting our fall crops, we now use cover crops that return carbon and nitrogen to the soil and nourish the microbes and fungi essential for a living soil ecology. The plants and soil organisms work together to pull carbon out of the atmosphere and draw it down into the root zone. We minimize disturbance of our land by decreasing tillage, which protects these microorganisms and keeps carbon in the soil, where it belongs. Rather than being a source of carbon emissions, farms could store carbon where it’s needed to grow food.

This has been good for our business, too. We spend less on water, energy and fertilizer and are getting good yields. 

We and other farmers here are constantly experimenting with new approaches to keep soils healthy. We’re part of a work group at the University of California, Davis, Cooperative Extension, where we learn about the science and share successes and failures with other farmers. Research and education like this are essential for farmers who are too busy growing food to keep up with the latest science and technologies.

The science is clear that the challenges facing agriculture will only become more difficult, and in unpredictable ways. Farmers will need more financial incentives to adopt practices that encourage healthy soils and water conservation, like government grants or cost-sharing arrangements. That kind of support would lower the barriers of cost and risk that farmers now face in trying new, climate-friendly ways of farming. With state-of-the-art science, innovation and sound public policy, farmers here and elsewhere in the United States can work to make sure this latest dire warning about the warming planet does not become self-fulfilling.

Link to article in the New York Times

By CDFA Secretary Karen Ross

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.

I’ll report back from South Africa!

Link to CDFA Climate Smart Agriculture programs

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.

Link to story in the New York Times

The California Department of Food and Agriculture is celebrating its 100^th 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.

By Lori Sallet

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).

The case studies were developed as part of a 2018 NRCS Conservation Innovation Grant (CIG) project, “Accelerating Soil Health Adoption by Quantifying Economic and Environmental Outcomes and Overcoming Barriers on Rented Lands,” and feature farms in California, Illinois, Ohio and New York.

“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.

AFT’s first four case studies can be found on AFT’s “Accelerating Soil Health” webpage.

During National Farmers Market Week August 4-10, we encourage you to visit one of the 675 CDFA Certified Farmers Markets in California.

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.

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.

Learn More about CDFA’s Alternative Manure Management Program

The California Department of Food and Agriculture is celebrating its 100^th 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.