Several years ago, the late public television personality Huell Howser produced a series of reports called California’s Golden Fairs. One of the segments featured the Amador County Fair in Plymouth, which begins its four-day run tomorrow.
California’s Golden Fairs #101 – AMADOR COUNTY from Huell Howser on Vimeo.
External video – no longer available
“Managing for Wildlife Habitat on Rangeland” is one of a series of videos on conservation from the USDA’s Natural Resources Conservation Service. The series is called, “There’s a Plan for That.”
Secretary Ross (L) visits the urban farming exhibit at the California State Fair along with Nancy Koch, manager of “The Farm,” and CDFA Undersecretary Sandra Schubert (R).
I was pleased this week to make a return visit to the California State Fair, which is now 160 years old and still going strong as a vibrant destination and showplace for the best that California has to offer. From the very beginning, farming was a major part of the fair, and I am proud to say that this tradition is as robust as ever.
While farming at the State Fair has been faithfully represented by generations of 4-H and FFA youth showing off their prized animals, there is also an actual working farm on the grounds – three acres on which 17 different crops are grown.
“The Farm,” as it is known, is careful to keep track of current changes in food and farming and then profile them in some of its exhibits. For example, there is the “Dirt to Dish” outdoor kitchen, featuring chefs preparing dishes using produce from The Farm to show how quick and easy it can be to prepare healthy, nutritious meals with fresh ingredients. There is also an urban farming exhibit, showcasing container gardening, edible landscapes and various methods of growing produce in limited space. This entire area is a big draw for families visiting the State Fair, and I’m encouraged by the ag education opportunities it provides. The Farm, like all farming and ranching, requires a lot of work and the partnership Farm manager Nancy Koch and her team has created with students and faculty at American River College to keep everything going is impressive!
One of my favorite features about The Farm is its partnership with food banks. Last year, it donated more than 8,360 pounds of fresh produce to two local food banks. This year, that commitment continues, with hundreds of pounds already donated and many, many more to come with harvest season ahead for a number of crops.
The Farm is just a small part of this wonderful fair. If you haven’t visited this year, I hope you will. If you have already been, well, why not go back? There are plenty of amazing things to see.
Secretary Ross congratulates winners of the pygmy goat competition at the California State Fair.
In this May 23, 2013, photo, field operations manager Matthew Rossow tests the lettuce bot in Salinas, Calif. In the Salinas Valley, the lettuce capital of the world, entrepreneurs with the Silicon Valley company Blue River Technology are testing the Lettuce Bot, a boxy robotic machine that can thin fields of lettuce, a job that now requires detailed hand work by 20 farm workers. Photo: Marcio Jose Sanchez
By GOSIA WOZNIACKA and TERENCE CHEA, Associated Press
SALINAS, Calif. (AP) — On a windy morning in California’s Salinas Valley, a tractor pulled a wheeled, metal contraption over rows of budding iceberg lettuce plants. Engineers from Silicon Valley tinkered with the software on a laptop to ensure the machine was eliminating the right leafy buds.
The engineers were testing the Lettuce Bot, a machine that can “thin” a field of lettuce in the time it takes about 20 workers to do the job by hand.
The thinner is part of a new generation of machines that target the last frontier of agricultural mechanization — fruits and vegetables destined for the fresh market, not processing, which have thus far resisted mechanization because they’re sensitive to bruising.
Researchers are now designing robots for these most delicate crops by integrating advanced sensors, powerful computing, electronics, computer vision, robotic hardware and algorithms, as well as networking and high precision GPS localization technologies. Most ag robots won’t be commercially available for at least a few years.
In this region known as America’s Salad Bowl, where for a century fruits and vegetables have been planted, thinned and harvested by an army of migrant workers, the machines could prove revolutionary.
Farmers say farm robots could provide relief from recent labor shortages, lessen the unknowns of immigration reform, even reduce costs, increase quality and yield a more consistent product.
“There aren’t enough workers to take the available jobs, so the robots can come and alleviate some of that problem,” said Ron Yokota, a farming operations manager at Tanimura & Antle, the Salinas-based fresh produce company that owns the field where the Lettuce Bot was being tested.
Many sectors in U.S. agriculture have relied on machines for decades and even the harvesting of fruits and vegetables meant for processing has slowly been mechanized. But nationwide, the vast majority of fresh-market fruit is still harvested by hand.
Research into fresh produce mechanization was dormant for years because of an over-abundance of workers and pressures from farmworker labor unions.
In recent years, as the labor supply has tightened and competition from abroad has increased, growers have sought out machines to reduce labor costs and supplement the nation’s unstable agricultural workforce. The federal government, venture capital companies and commodity boards have stepped up with funding.
“We need to increase our efficiency, but nobody wants to work in the fields,” said Stavros G. Vougioukas, professor of biological and agricultural engineering at the University of California, Davis.
But farmworker advocates say mechanization would lead to workers losing jobs, growers using more pesticides and the food supply becoming less safe.
“The fundamental question for consumers is who and, now, what do you want picking your food; a machine or a human, who with the proper training and support, can” … take significant steps to ensure a safer, higher quality product, said Erik Nicholson, national vice president of the United Farm Workers of America.
On the Salinas Valley farm, entrepreneurs with Mountain View-based startup Blue River Technology are trying to show that the Lettuce Bot can not only replace two dozen workers, but also improve production.
“Using Lettuce Bot can produce more lettuce plants than doing it any other way,” said Jorge Heraud, the company’s co-founder and CEO.
After a lettuce field is planted, growers typically hire a crew of farmworkers who use hoes to remove excess plants to give space for others to grow into full lettuce heads. The Lettuce Bot uses video cameras and visual-recognition software to identify which lettuce plants to eliminate with a squirt of concentrated fertilizer that kills the unwanted buds while enriching the soil.
Blue River, which has raised more than $3 million in venture capital, also plans to develop machines to automate weeding — and eventually harvesting — using many of the same technologies.
Aquaculture–the cultivation of aquatic animals for food consumption–is an important part of California agriculture, offering a local, reliable, easily accessible, protein-rich food source that can be produced in or near populated urban centers. As the world’s population grows and the demand for fish follows suit, there will be significant opportunity ahead for our fish farmers.
Unfortunately, aquaculture production in California has declined in recent years, spurring an effort by local government to reverse that trend. It started in the food policy office of former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and was implemented by Paula Daniels, the mayor’s Senior Advisor on Food Policy, who received a Stanton Fellowship from the Durfee Foundation specifically to work on urban aquaculture. On behalf of the mayor, she recently coordinated an aquaculture resolution, titled “Support for Urban Aquaculture Development,” that was adopted unanimously at the 81st Annual Meeting of the U.S. Conference of Mayors, of which Villaraigosa is immediate past president.
The resolution highlights the importance of fish as a nutritious food source, notes the growing demand for aquaculture products in the U.S., recognizes the limited availability of marine fish production, and states the need for federal, state, and local investment in urban aquaculture. This is an important first step in propelling California to become a world leader in the production of fish products in an environmentally sustainable manner.
We know that fish is a part of a balanced diet and provides numerous health benefits, including vitamins, micronutrients, and omega-3 fatty acids that may contribute to heart health. California agriculture, which is already world-renowned for wholesome, healthy foods, has an opportunity to place itself in prime position to take full advantage of the opportunities ahead and make aquaculture a greater part of the food portfolio that contributes to the economic and social sectors of our state.
Bob Hawthorn, 84, still works his 2,000 acre farm in Iowa. (From the Kansas City Star)
http://www.kansascity.com/2013/07/09/4335760/the-aging-american-farmer-who.html
The American farmer is graying in the center.
According to the U.S. census, the average age of the U.S. farmer is 57, and the fastest growing age group is those over age 65. That demographic shift puts the agriculture industry on the precipice of a transition.
Though many farmers are clearly working well into the traditional retirement years, thousands of farms soon will be changing hands. How that occurs could reshape the industry that drives much of the economy in middle America.
Working longer
Working beyond retirement is a fairly common refrain these days — but farmers seem to work longer than most. In the last Agriculture Census, 25 percent of all farm operators were over age 65 compared with 5 percent of the overall U.S. work force.
Why do farmers keep working? For one thing, modern machinery makes it easier to work longer.
“It’s more you use your mind rather than your back, so you can go longer,” said Mike Duffy, an agricultural economist at Iowa State University.
Duffy said there’s also an economic incentive. Many farmers are making more money today than just about any time in their careers thanks to higher yields and high grain prices.
But there’s something else about farmers. In surveys of farmers in Iowa, Duffy has learned that regardless of the money or new technology, some farmers will just never quit.
“Farmers are farmers,” Duffy said. “And that’s who they identify themselves as. They’ll leave horizontal.”
Bob Hawthorn is that kind of farmer. At 84, Hawthorn’s hands and face are weathered. This year, spring came late, so on a bright April afternoon he was in a hurry to get corn and soybeans planted on his 2,000-acre farm in the Loess Hills of western Iowa.
Hawthorn braced himself against the wind in the back of his red pickup and unstrung the top of a bag of seed corn. After nearly 60 years on the farm, he said, neighbors ask how long he plans to continue.
“They keep bugging me,” Hawthorn said. “They say, ‘When are you gonna quit?’ I think I’ll tell ’em I won’t quit farming till all hell freezes over. Something like that.”
The farm was started by his great-grandfather, Trapper Hawthorn, in the late 1870s. Bob Hawthorn left for a brief career in aerospace before returning to Iowa in 1955 to farm with his father, Fred, who worked on the farm into his 90s and lived to be 98 years old. Longevity runs in the family.
But after four generations, the Hawthorn family farm will come to an end. He has had foster children, but he never had biological children and never married. No one is lined up to take over the farm, but then, Hawthorn has no plans to quit, either.
“I’d be bored not having anything to do,” Hawthorn said. “I’ve also noticed that farmers, when they retire, buy a house in town and die of a heart attack about in the next year. It seems like farmers have to keep going or they just fade away.”
Psychologist and retired farmer Mike Rosmann calls it the “agrarian imperative,” the drive to keep farming even when your body might be ready to quit. In fact, Rosmann said, studies show over half of aging farmers don’t have a will or an estate plan.
“I think it reflects perhaps a denial of the fact that somebody’s got to take over and I need to have a plan for that,” Rosmann said.
Turmoil in transitions
Randy Hertz, a financial planner with Hertz Farm Management, in Nevada, Iowa, says even as the average age of farmers creeps ever upward, few families make all the plans they could for smooth transitions.
“It’s pretty ominous the number of farmers that plan to retire in the next five to 10 years,” Hertz said. “Some of them have no plan, and the default succession plan is, well, I guess we’ll just rent it to somebody in the neighborhood.”
The 2008 Iowa Farm and Rural Life poll found that 42 percent of farmers surveyed said they planned to retire in the next five years. But Paul Lasley, an Iowa State University sociologist who conducts the poll, said it’s tough to define retirement with farmers.
“The retirement process for many farmers may take years, even a decade or so,” Lasley said. “They slowly phase out of farming, and allow their adult children, who are often middle age, to take over, but they remain somewhat involved to ‘make sure the kids do it right.’”
That’s how it is working out for the Arganbright family in the western Iowa town of Panora.
Jim Arganbright, 83, three years ago started renting his cropland to his son Tom, the only one of his eight children who farms full time. Now, all Jim Arganbright has to worry about is the livestock — and he doesn’t have too much of that.
“I only have 12 cows and a bull and eight calves,” he said.
Tom Arganbright farms his parents’ 160 acres, several other rented fields and his own farm — in all, about 1,500 acres. He bought some of his acres from one of his uncles.
“It’s not just any ground you’re purchasing, it’s part of the original Arganbright land, and it’s up to you to keep hold of it through good times and bad and be able to pass it along to the next generation,” Tom Arganbright said. One of his five children currently farms with him.
Though Jim Arganbright is no longer farming, he said he has not yet established a formal plan for how ownership of his land will transfer to the next generation, something he knows he ought to do. He expects his children to keep it in the family.
Farmers in waiting
More farmers staying on the farm into their old age is one reason younger farmers struggle to find their place.
“We’re not short of young people who want to farm,” said Duffy, at Iowa State. “We’re short of old people who want to move over.”
One reason farmers are working long past the age when others might retire is that their golden years turned out to be boom years.
“Often they’re the only people that have enough money that they can keep doing it and can keep buying land that comes up for sale,” Rosmann said.
The ability to buy land is a big hurdle keeping many young people from entering the agriculture industry as producers.
“There’s no way I’ll ever be able to own my own ranch,” said Bo Bigler, 25, a graduate student at Colorado State University. He’ll graduate at the end of the summer with a master’s degree in beef management.
“The price to buy into it, it’s too much,” Bigler said. “The only way that somebody can get into it is if a ranch was handed down to them, unless they’re millionaires to begin with.”
A 2011 survey from the National Young Farmers Coalition showed access to land and capital to be the single biggest factors keeping young people from getting into farming or ranching. The results also indicated young people were concerned about the environment and interested in small-scale operations.
In Longmont, Colo., Eva Teague, 31, has learned how difficult it can be to start a financially sound pig farm. Teague is a grad school dropout turned farmer, originally from the East Coast. Jaded with academia, she moved to Colorado and began working as a farm apprentice. She bought her first pigs a couple of years ago and now leases 15 acres at the base of the Rocky Mountains.
“Didn’t have that much cash, so I paid for feed with the credit card just to get going,” Teague said.
Right now, her biggest challenge, like that of many other young farmers, is access to capital. She recently secured a low-interest loan from the federal Farm Service Agency, but it’s not enough to get her business off the ground completely. Teague still spends her days on the farm, and every evening working full time as a waitress. Next year she’s taking a big leap, quitting her off-farm job and relying on her farm income to sustain herself.
“I think a lot of young people want to work outside in sort of a ‘farm camp’ fun experience,” Teague said. “There are fewer people who would like to work really hard, like 50-60 hours a week for not a lot of money, which is what working on a farm is.”
Even though small farmers aren’t making large profits, the U.S. Department of Agriculture says the largest increase in farm numbers by far is for small farms, with annual sales less than $10,000 a year.
The latest segment in the Growing California video series, a partnership with California Grown, is “The Mysterious Artichoke.”
Litzi Reyes, 12, works in the garden at Bell Gardens Intermediate School. Every public school in Bell Gardens has an urban farm run by members of the Environmental Garden Club. (Gary Friedman, Los Angeles Times / June 25, 2013)
Karen Segura dug her hands deep into the soil of an onion patch at Bell Gardens Intermediate School as cars zipped past the nearly empty schoolyard.
The 14-year-old was busy uprooting weeds in the school’s edible garden, while around her five other students watered, tilled and pruned a lush assortment of fruits and vegetables. There were tomatoes, avocados, apples, pineapples, pumpkins, zucchinis, lavender, lettuce, Swiss chard and artichokes.
Every public school in Bell Gardens has just such an urban farm run by members of the Environmental Garden Club, an after-school program that started at the intermediate school and now includes a rotating roster of 8- to 18-year-olds.
Members learn about nutrition, physical education and farming techniques. The project is one of a number of grassroots efforts sprouting in schools across the nation, as communities that lack access to healthful foods try new ways of combating soaring rates of nutrition-related illnesses.
For many of the mostly poor, predominantly Latino residents in Bell Gardens, school-based urban farms are the only source of affordable, pesticide-free produce.
The city, covering about 2.5 square miles in southeast Los Angeles County, has three supermarkets and 141 liquor stores and fast-food outlets that serve 42,000 residents, according to a community-led assessment of the area.
Some residents say these limited food options are partly why their city has one of the highest rates of obesity and diabetes in the county, with nearly 30% of children and more than 30% of adults considered obese.
There is the “pressure to not be another diabetes statistic,” said Eva Cupchoy, the co-director of the intermediate school’s garden club.
Teaching children the benefits of adding more fruits and vegetables to their diets in turn helps educate their parents, Cupchoy said. “I’m so proud of that.”
Every club member at the school has a relative with diabetes. One member’s mother, grandmother and grandfather have the disease, she said.
“I don’t like it because it’s very hard on all of us, especially kids,” said Karen Segura, who works in the school’s garden with her 12-year-old brother, Rafael.
The siblings say their father and aunt have diabetes. A few years ago, their grandmother died from it.
Their father, Rafael, 46, said his Type 2 diabetes is the result of genetics and his former diet, which tended toward carne asada, burritos, pork, hamburgers and fast food. “I eat a lot healthier now,” he said.
The elder Segura, who immigrated to the United States from Mexico 20 years ago, attributes his new eating habits, which include more fruits and vegetables, to his children’s involvement in the school garden.
Before they joined, he said, he never bought organic food from the grocery store because it was too expensive.
His wife, Elizabeth, added that the flavor of produce from the area’s few stores was more bland than that of the fruits and vegetables her children grow at school. Longtime Bell Gardens resident Maria Cruz Vazquez agreed. “Even the cilantro here tastes sweeter than the cilantro they sell at the grocery store,” said Vazquez, 50, whose daughter was a garden club member more than a decade ago.
Club members say they don’t use pesticides to grow their food, which also affects the taste.
Other club members have noticed an improvement in their parents’ diets since they joined. “I changed my dad,” said 16-year-old Yarely Macias, explaining that her father mostly ate “mollejas,” or sweetbreads, before she became a club member in sixth grade.
Teachers say the gardens also have helped enhance their students’ work ethic. “Their attitude is a lot more positive,” said Ricardo Ramirez, a fifth-grade teacher at Bell Gardens Elementary, where an urban farm also thrives. Ramirez and Cupchoy said every club tries to recruit special-needs students and students with behavioral problems.
At the intermediate school, Litzi Reyes, 12, said that if she weren’t coming to the garden every week, she would “just be laying down on the couch.”
Cupchoy, who’s worked as a teacher in the area for 35 years, created the garden club in the early 1990s with fellow teacher John Garza. “There was nothing here,” Garza said, pointing to a stretch of the schoolyard where rose bushes are now planted atop red brick-lined plots. “This was just blacktop and dirt.”
The club’s initial aim was to help beautify the school. But students began sharing agricultural techniques they had learned from their grandparents, Cupchoy said, so they began growing food. The club received money from the school district and fundraisers. Other schools opened chapters after the Campaign for a Healthy Bell Gardens, a group of community organizers, secured financial grants that have since ended.
At the intermediate school, Cupchoy helps club members with their homework and teaches them meditation, Tai Chi and sometimes salsa dancing. She also hosts cooking demonstrations, where students learn how to substitute ingredients from the farms into traditional recipes.
“We want to teach our students that they can raise their own food and not have to ask for outside help,” Ramirez said.
Formerly, garden club members from every public school gathered every few months to sell their excess produce at what was the city’s only farmers market.
But a lack of money has brought that to a halt, Ramirez said. The last farmers market was in May. Ramirez and another teacher, Feliciano Rodriguez, are now supporting the elementary school’s garden on their own.
“We want to continue it as long as we can,” Ramirez said.
Litzi Reyes, 12, works in the garden at Bell Gardens Intermediate School. Every public school in Bell Gardens has an urban farm run by members of the Environmental Garden Club. (Gary Friedman, Los Angeles Times / June 25, 2013)
