Alameda County Fair

6/17/2015 to 7/5/2015
Pleasanton, CA

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Colusa County Fair

6/4/2015 to 6/7/2015
Colusa, CA

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El Dorado County Fair

6/18/2015 to 6/21/2015
Placerville, CA

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Kings Fair

6/11/2015 to 6/14/2015
Hanford, CA

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Merced County Fair

6/10/2015 to 6/14/2015
Merced, CA

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Placer County Fair

6/25/2015 to 6/28/2015
Roseville, CA

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Redwood Acres Fair

6/25/2015 to 6/28/2015
Eureka, CA

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San Diego County Fair

6/5/2015 to 7/5/2015
Del Mar, CA

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San Mateo County Exposition & Fair

6/6/2015 to 6/14/2015
San Mateo, CA

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Shasta District Fair

6/17/2015 to 6/20/2015
Anderson, CA

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Sonoma-Marin Fair

6/24/2015 to 6/28/2015
Petaluma, CA

By Amy Graff

Slide show with the 10 myths 

California is in the midst of a four-year drought, the worst in 106 years. The Sierra snowpack is dwindling; lakes and reservoirs are reaching historic lows. The lush green lawns of the suburbs are turning brown and parched. Vast swaths of the Central Valley farmland are sitting idle. Mandatory water cutbacks are now in place for both residential consumers and agricultural users.

What does the future hold for the drought-gripped Golden State? What can we do to solve the problem?

The answers to these questions are spreading across the Internet like a wildfire blazing through the water-starved Santa Ana brush. Some of them are true, others exaggerated, and many downright wrong. No, you won’t be paying $20 for a little carton of California-grown strawberries this summer, even at that ubiquitous grocery store that loves to suck up whole paychecks with beautiful produce.

To help you determine fact from fiction, we checked in with Jay Lund, a University of California at Davis professor in civil and environmental engineering. Lund is on the forefront of drought research, predicting our state’s future and determining the best plans of action. He helped SFGate debunk a few of the most common California drought myths and the good news is that he says, “Don’t panic.”

“Water is going to get tighter,” Lund says. “We’re going to be reminded that we live in a dry state. But we can make some changes to better manage our water and we have a lot of ground water to help us out.”

The Myths:

1) Farmers suck up the majority of the state’s water. Of the water available, roughly 40 percent goes to farmers, 10 percent to urban uses and 50 percent environmental uses such as rivers, lakes, wetlands and refuges. There’s no true villain in California water policy. All sectors need to better use and manage water.

2) Treated sewage water is undrinkable. “Toilet to tap” water can be cleaner than bottled water, some experts say, and many Californians are already drinking it. Orange County has an indirect potable reuse system to purify human wastewater. More than 200 wastewater treatment plants dump effluent into the Colorado River, a primary source of drinking water for Southern California.

3) Food prices will go through the roof. When farmers face higher prices due to drought conditions, retail prices rise only slightly. A 10 percent increase for the farmer, usually means about a 2 to 3 percent increase for the consumer. Four years into the drought, many farmers aren’t even facing higher prices as they’re dealing with the conditions by pumping ground waters and shifting crops, most of which are buffered by being part of a global market.

4) Agriculture hasn’t faced water supply cuts. Last year, residential consumers made voluntary cuts while many farmers with junior water rights saw 100 percent reductions. This year residential consumers face mandatory 25 percent cutbacks while agricultural users are being cut back far more.

5) Shorter showers will save us. Water conservation is important, but its effectiveness is often overstated. Consumers can make the biggest impact by not watering their lawns.

6) We have an endless supply of groundwater that we can depend on. The water tables are dropping so the supply is not infinite but there’s enough to get us through a few more years of drought. Right now, some 70 to 80 percent of lost surface water in agriculture is being made up by pumping ground water. The key is to adopt better methods for managing this crucial water supply.

7) Building more desalination plants will fix the problem. Only if you want to spend a lot of money. In the midst of a 12-year drought in Australia, many big cities built big expensive plants that are now sitting idle while taxpayers still pay them off. Residential customers typically pay $900 to $1,000 per acre foot for water while they’d pay $2,000 to $3,000 for water from a desalination plant.

8) An El Nino year will end the drought. We need several years of heavy rain, not just one, to replenish surface supplies. This weather phenomenon that brings a warm band of water to the Pacific Ocean doesn’t always lead to storms on the West Coast but when it does, our past records show that it doesn’t put an automatic end to drought conditions.

9) California knows how to manage droughts. “We do and we don’t,” says Jay Lund, a University of California at Davis professor in civil and environmental engineering. “Every drought is different as California is a dynamic place. You never step into the same drought twice. We still have a lot to learn.”

10) Environmental regulation is causing the water shortages. Yes, the environment uses the largest share of California’s water with 50 percent going to everything from wetlands to Delta outflow. But it’s important to know that a lot of the water that’s allocated to the environment is reused by humans for drinking water and irrigation.

Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack has announced that the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) is now accepting applications to provide technical assistance to socially-disadvantaged groups in rural areas.

“These grants will help socially-disadvantaged business owners develop the tools and skills they need to grow their enterprises and succeed at creating jobs and expanding economic opportunities in rural areas,” Vilsack said. “American agriculture is becoming increasingly diverse in many ways, with more minorities and women seeking to enter the field, as well as greater diversity in the age of farmers, the size of operations, in production methods, and in the types of crops being grown. All of these forms of diversity help strengthen U.S. agriculture for the future.”

Funding will be made available through USDA’s Socially-Disadvantaged Groups Grant Program (formerly the Small, Socially-Disadvantaged Producer Grant Program), which assists organizations that provide technical assistance to socially-disadvantaged groups in rural areas. Examples of technical assistance are conducting feasibility studies, developing business and strategic plans, and providing leadership training.

USDA plans to make up to $3 million in grants available. The maximum award under this notice is $175,000. More information on how to apply can be found on page 28937 of the May 20 Federal Register. Applications submitted by mail must be postmarked by July 20, 2015. Electronic applications must be submitted atwww.grants.gov no later than midnight Eastern Time July 14, 2015.

Eligible applicants include groups of cooperatives, cooperative development centers and individual cooperatives that serve socially-disadvantaged groups. The cooperatives or centers can be located in any area, but the groups assisted must be located in an eligible rural area. Also, the majority of the governing body of the organization must be compromised of individuals who are members of socially-disadvantaged groups.

USDA Rural Development is encouraging applications for projects in census tracts with poverty rates of 20 percent or higher. All grants are awarded through a national competition.

The program is making a difference in many rural areas. For example, in 2013, the Southern California Focus on Cooperation (SCFC) received a $200,000 Small, Socially-Disadvantaged Producer Grant to provide technical assistance to help 95 refugee immigrant and minority farmers improve their productive capacity, increase revenue, and strengthen their ability to govern and manage their cooperative businesses.

Many of the farmers benefiting from the project had little or no access to formal schooling and had been persecuted and oppressed for years in their native land. The International Rescue Committee (IRC), in concert with SCFC, developed marketing channels including various farmers markets and restaurants where the refugee farmers could sell their produce. Farmers have learned how to manage these marketing channels themselves, without assistance from IRC, and have gained new clients. They have also increased the level of cooperation among Hispanic, Korean and African farmer groups. These groups are working toward merging their efforts to form a single cooperative. The technical assistance provided by SCFC has enabled these farmers to build skills that have truly been life changing.

Link to news release

During the next several weeks, U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Agricultural Statistics Service (NASS) will conduct two major mid-year surveys, the June Agricultural Survey and the June Area Survey. The agency will survey more than 2,600 operations across California and Nevada to determine crop production and supply levels in 2015.

“Due to the widespread impact of its results, the June Agricultural Survey, also known as the Crops/Stocks Survey, and the June Area Survey, are two of the most significant surveys NASS conducts,” explained Vic Tolomeo, director of the NASS Pacific Regional Field Office. “Information growers provide serves as the first clear sign of the prospective production and supply of major commodities in the United States for the 2015 crop year.”

NASS gathers the data for the June Agriculture Survey online, by mail and/or by phone. For the June Area Survey, agency representatives will visit randomly selected tracts of land and interview the operators of any farm or ranch on that land. Growers will provide information on crop acreage – including biotech crops—as well as grain stocks, livestock inventory, cash rents, land values, and value of sales.

NASS will compile and analyze the survey information and publish the results in a series of USDA reports, including the annual Acreage report and quarterly Grain Stocks report, both to be released June 30, 2015. Survey data contribute to NASS’s monthly and annual Crop Production reports, as well as the annual Small Grains Summary and USDA’s monthly World Agricultural Supply and Demand Estimates.

As with all NASS surveys, information provided by respondents is kept strictly confidential, as required by federal law.

“NASS safeguards the privacy of all responses and publishes only state and national-level data, ensuring that no individual operation or producer can be identified,” stated Tolomeo. “We recognize this is a hectic time for farmers and ranchers, but the information they provide is essential to everyone involved in U.S. agriculture. I urge them to respond to these surveys and thank them for their cooperation,” said Tolomeo.

All reports are available on the NASS website: www.nass.usda.gov. For more information on NASS surveys and reports, call the NASS Pacific Regional Field Office at 1-800-851-1127.

By Elahe Izadi

Add this to my nightmare list: A creature that turns prey into a zombie, then eats it alive.

That’s pretty much the M.O. of Ampulex dementor, a wasp named after the mythical “Harry Potter” creatures that suck souls with abandon. Dementor wasps inject venom into cockroach prey, right in the belly, rendering it a “passive zombie,” according to a new report from the World Wildlife Fund. The report details 139 new species discovered in the Greater Mekong region during 2014.

“Cockroach wasp venom blocks receptors of the neurotransmitter octopamine, which is involved in the initiation of spontaneous movement,” according to the report. “With this blocked, the cockroach is still capable of movement, but is unable to direct its own body. Once the cockroach has lost control, the wasp drags its stupefied prey by the antennae to a safe shelter to devour it.”

The red-and-black wasp is only known to live in Thailand. It has marked wings and “belongs to an ant-mimicking group of species with attractive coloration and rather bizarre habitus and probably also behavior,” authors write in a 2014 research article published in PLoS One.

The Museum für Naturkunde, a natural history museum in Berlin, asked 300 visitors to pick the wasp’s name from among four options: “Bicolor,” after its red-black pattern; “Mon,” after a local ethnic group where the wasp lives; “Plagiator,” since it mimics, or “plagiarizes,” ants; and “Dementor,” described to visitors as “magical beings, which can consume a person’s soul, leaving their victims as an empty but functional body without personality and emotions.”

Link to article

In a landmark step in the fight against citrus greening disease, also known as hunaglongbing (HLB), the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has approved an application from Southern Gardens Citrus of Florida for an Experimental Use Permit under the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide and Rodenticide Act. This allows researchers to move forward in the development of the possible use of a spinach protein to help control this devastating disease.

Ricke Kress, president of Southern Gardens, said this latest development is a milestone in efforts to fight off HLB.

“A final solution to eliminating this disease may still take some years,” Kress said, “but the latest EPA action and continuation of all research projects are major steps in the right direction.”

Research conducted by Dr. Erik Mirkov, a plant pathologist at the Texas A&M AgriLife Research and Extension Center at Weslaco, resulted in the production of proteins that appear to provide effective control of citrus greening disease.

“Citrus greening is a bacterial disease that affects the vascular system of the tree,” Dr. Mirkov said. “It basically shuts off the tree’s ability to take up and use water and nutrients, causing the tree to die. We were able to improve the transgenic trees by having the genes express themselves in the vascular system.”

HLB is the most serious citrus disease in the world. It was first identified and confirmed in Florida in 2005. HLB is now found in every Florida county where citrus is grown commercially. There are no successful control programs yet available for this disease. (NOTE – HLB has been detected just once in California, at a residential property in Los Angeles County in 2012)

Consistent with the conditions established by EPA, researchers may now move forward with field tests to evaluate the efficacy of the spinach protein against HLB in citrus plant tissues and continue generating the environmental, health and safety data that are required under federal law to support a fully registered product for commercial use.

Link to article