By Manuela Tobias

Maximina Molina Sanchez is worried about going hungry this winter.

She depends on the food bank in Huron to feed her husband and two kids. But with most agricultural workers out of jobs during the winter, demand is bound to increase, and she worries the food won’t suffice.

Sanchez and her family are among the 22 percent of people in Fresno County who could not afford the groceries they needed in the past year. Fresno ranks third in the country for food insecurity, according to the Food Research and Action Center.

At the same time, the county leads the nation in agricultural production. And a new study from Santa Clara University revealed that a whopping one-third of the hand-picked crops grown in the state are left to rot in the field.

Food banks are addressing shortages on a piecemeal basis and startups are expanding sales avenues for farmers’ surplus. But there is no solution in sight to bridge the food insecurity and crop overproduction that plague the Central Valley because it takes money and labor to harvest the surplus produce and haul it to food banks.

Todd Hirasuna, vice president of Sunnyside Packing Company in Selma, said he was not surprised by the study’s finding. The company regularly leaves a third of its produce in the field.

“When you lump the whole Valley together, it’s a pretty staggering number at the end of the day,” Hirasuna said.

HUNGER IN THE VALLEY

The U.S. Department of Agriculture estimated that 10.6 percent of households across the state were food insecure in 2018. In 2016, over a fifth of Fresno residents received food stamps and 10.6 percent of Californians. It’s unclear whether those are the same groups of people. However, according to the Food Research and Action Center, people on food stamps may still be food insecure because the aid doesn’t always cover the cost of the food they need. And many families experiencing food insecurity have incomes higher than the CalFresh threshold.

Second Harvest Food Bank of Silicon Valley found that 27 percent of residents in Santa Clara and San Mateo counties are at risk of hunger – yet live next to two of the most productive agricultural valleys in the country.

The food bank brought up the issue with food waste researchers at Santa Clara University, who in turn quantified the amount of surplus in those fields.

“We wondered whether there may be some opportunities to salvage the food left in the fields and direct it to people on food assistance,” said Greg Baker, executive director of the Center for Food Innovation and Entrepreneurship at SCU.

The team of CFIE researchers looked at 20 hand-harvested crops on 123 Central and Northern California fields in 2016 and 2017 and found that 34% of edible produce never makes it off the farm. Loss rates varied widely among crops. Cabbage, romaine lettuce and strawberries were among the most lost.

Researchers refer to the leftover produce in the study as “loss”, not “waste,” because unlike food that ends up in the landfill, that produce can feed livestock or fertilize the soil.

Loss rates are likely constant throughout California, according to Baker, but machine-harvested produce experiences much lower levels because machines leave little behind – that is mostly left behind at the packing sheds. Produce that can be canned or converted to other foodstuff, like raisins, also has lower loss rates.

Baker found that farmers tend to overproduce to fulfill their contracts with buyers. They plant about a third more than they need in case of weather, pests, plant disease, labor availability, field stability and over- or under-sized crops. If after delivering, price is too low, they leave the rest to rot.

This year, Bowles Farming Company in Los Banos harvested close to 85% of its cantaloupes because market demand was high, according to Cannon Michael, company president. However, last year his company left about 80% of its cantaloupes in the field because prices were too low to justify harvesting.

“Food waste is a big concern of ours,” Michael said. “It’s really frustrating.”

Lisa Johnson, a researcher at North Carolina State University who specializes in food loss and waste, found that in the Southeast, 40% of crops are lost. This is particularly concerning, she said, because the losses stack atop the 30% to 40% of food USDA estimates is wasted each year at the retail and household level.

‘WHY NOT DONATE IT TO PEOPLE IN NEED?’

Sanchez has seen the loss first-hand. She was a picker until her son, now 9 months old, was born. Life has been difficult since her husband fell off a truck while he was packing lettuce and injured his back a few months ago.

Westside Family Preservation, a food bank in the roughly 7,000-person town of Huron, keeps most of the town’s agricultural workers from starving by supplying such staples as milk, corn flakes, pasta, rice, beans and canned fruits and vegetables. But the food bank regularly lacks the fresh produce grown in the Valley, which Sanchez said she feels is necessary to keep her sons healthy.

“Instead of throwing it away, why not donate it to people in need? The cold is coming, it’s going to rain, and these people, we are in need.”

But getting food out of the fields and into the households that need it is far costlier than simply growing it, Johnson explained. And with limited budgets, food banks can’t offset the full cost of labor.

The Central California Food Bank serves about 280,000 families in the Valley, including Sanchez’s family. They share surplus and trade vegetables with over 200 food banks nationwide. But supplies often fall short.

“It’s feast to famine,” said Jaclyn Pack, food acquisitions manager at the Central California Food Bank. “During the summer we’re very feast. I can’t keep our cold storage empty. And during the winter it’s very famine, where I’m constantly trying to figure out how to get product in.”

The food bank provides farms with cardboard boxes and picks them up in their trucks, and the state gives farmers a tax credit worth 15% of the wholesale value. But Baker said many of the farmers he talked to for the study don’t participate because they either didn’t know about the tax incentives or found the compensation too low. It made more sense to write off the crop as a loss than to donate it.

“It’s not their business,” Baker said. “They’re not running a charity along with their farm. They’re very happy to contribute but it can cost them too much money because they’re operating on slim margins as it is.”

Food banks have tried to get volunteers to glean the produce off the farms but it didn’t work. Frequently there wasn’t enough time to organize enough volunteers and gleaners take far longer and harvest much less than professional field workers.

‘THE POTENTIAL FOR FOOD TO BE LEFT IN THE FIELD IS INCREASING’

Steve Linkhart, director of Farm to Family, at the California Association of Food Banks, is working on a statewide solution. He plans to hire the labor the farms already contract to get all the product off the field that could go to food banks. Funding, again, is the main roadblock.

“We have to find a way to offset the labor fees,” Linkhart said.

Growers and researchers say reducing the surplus calls for a seismic shift. They suggested more open communication within the supply chain. Baker said the retailers could shift the status quo by being more flexible on what they accept. That is, taking more produce that is off-size or has imperfections. That way, growers wouldn’t have to overplant.

Last year, investors spent over $125 million on startups looking to address food loss and waste. Imperfect Produce, for example, delivers otherwise unmarketable produce to homes, and recently began delivering boxes in Fresno, Merced and Modesto.

Full Harvest works with growers across California to deliver imperfect fruits and vegetables to food processors across the state and country.

“These are products that didn’t have any channel for incremental revenue,” said Christine Moseley, who runs Full Harvest. “It’s a win-win because the farms are happy to sell it because it would’ve been disced under.”

But a lot more needs to be done to curtail waste at a bigger scale, or get more of it to people in need, and no one has even a roadmap just yet.

Farmers like Michael at Bowles suspect the problem will only worsen as produce prices stay low and labor costs rise.

“The potential for food to be left in the field is increasing because of the increased human cost,” Michael said. “That’s why a lot of the big folks are trying to move as much production out to Mexico and Central America, because the cost of labor is so much less.”

In this video Cannon Michael, President of Bowles Farming Company in Los Banos, talks about the issue of food loss and possible solutions going forward.

Link to story in the Sacramento Bee

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.

October is National Farm to School Month and we’re highlighting the work of CDFA’s Farm to School Program!

Time and again, research shows that students who plant, grow and harvest fruits and vegetables can’t wait to eat them. With hopes of converting that enthusiasm into lifelong healthy eating habits, Farm to School programs throughout California encourage and facilitate school gardens. Here’s an example at Silverado Middle School in Napa.

By Peter Fimrite

If ever there was a glaring example of the havoc and heartache climate change can cause to a farming family, the assortment of chain restaurants, stores and 300 apartments on El Camino Real in Sunnyvale is the one.

The 16-acre development in the heart of Silicon Valley is where Stanford Professor Mark Jacobson’s family had a cherry orchard and fruit stand, called C.J. Olson Cherries, that was a landmark for about a century in the agricultural region once known as the Valley of Heart’s Delight.

The orchard, at the corner of El Camino and Mathilda Avenue, was bulldozed in 1999, one of the last farms in Sunnyvale to be plowed under. But Jacobson said it wasn’t high-tech urbanization that compelled the family to develop the land after more than a century of farming it.

“For five years, from about 1991 to 1996, we didn’t get any cherries,” said Jacobson, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford University, who blamed a sudden, dramatic decrease in the number of cool, frosty nights that cherries need to blossom. “It had everything to do with climate change. It was the 1990s and it was getting warmer already.”

That’s the kind of collapse that climate scientists are predicting could become common in California over the next few decades, as average temperatures increase anywhere from 3 to 7 degrees Fahrenheit.

Every degree of warming is expected to worsen what, in many ways, is already a crisis for the state’s multibillion-dollar agricultural industry. And a crisis here is a problem everywhere, given that California produces 50 percent of the nation’s fruits and vegetables and 90 percent of its nut crops.

But agriculture is beginning to fight back, employing groundbreaking technology and techniques that experts believe will dramatically reduce greenhouse gas emissions, improve the health of livestock, increase food production and maximize the effectiveness of the state’s over-tapped water delivery system.

The Golden State is a role model for the rest of the nation in the deployment of water recycling systems using reverse osmosis, drip irrigation and the seasonal rotation of crops to improve the soil. Grazing is being altered in many places so that it mimics the way native ungulates once used the land; riverside farmland is being flooded during the off-season to help fish spawn; and improvements in livestock nutrition are being developed to reduce methane emissions.

“The ag industry has the capacity to be one of humanity’s great hopes for dealing with climate change, but it’s really going to have to shift course,” said Jacob Katz, lead scientist at the conservation group California Trout, who works with rice farmers to create floodplain habitat for salmon and restore the once carbon-rich peat soils in the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta.

Adaptations could protect California agriculture from the worst effects of climate change, but the industry will still face problems due to more droughts, less snowfall and shorter winters as global warming ramps up.

Studies have shown that temperatures have already increased 3 to 4 degrees Fahrenheit in some parts of the Central Valley — like Chico, Davis and the Sierra foothills — since the 1940s. And various studies have also shown dramatic declines since 1950 in tule fog, resulting in fewer hours of temperatures below 40 degrees in growing regions.

That, as Jacobson’s family found out, can be a killer for tree crops like cherries, apricots, peaches, almonds and pistachios. They all rely on the cold to bring on dormancy, a physiological process that helps them produce buds, flowers and fruit during the growing season.

“The last four years have been the four warmest in historical record keeping, and the temperatures are only getting higher and higher,” said Jacobson, who transitioned from family farming in his youth to climate modeling, with a concentration on how warming impacts agriculture. “This is going to keep going on and it’s going to manifest itself in the form of droughts, and in some places, more extreme weather.”

What exactly will it mean for California farmers and ranchers?

Josué Medellín-Azuara, the associate director of the UC Agricultural Issues Center at UC Merced, said the biggest issue will be irrigation. Decreases in the Sierra snowpack mean less melting in the summer, so more rainwater will need to be stored in the winter. Hotter temperatures would also mean crops and orchards will retain less moisture.

“Plants may actually lose water more quickly because of the heat, so they may actually need more water than they need now to survive,” Medellín-Azuara said. This at a time when California is expected to experience more droughts.

Christopher Field, director of the Stanford Woods Institute and the former co-chairman of a U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change working group, projects crop losses of up to 40 percent by 2050, depending on the location.

Field’s color-coded models show reductions in crop output, or yield, in virtually every growing region — particularly in the Sacramento and San Joaquin valleys and in Santa Barbara and Ventura counties, where oranges, walnuts and avocados are grown — even if warming is kept below the accepted international target of 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit.

Wine grapes and almonds would have to be moved farther north, and most other California crops would either disappear or yield a small fraction of their current production if the Earth warmed 7.2 degrees Fahrenheit, which could happen by the end of the century if nothing is done to curb emissions, according to his studies.

“There are likely to be places where farming occurs that will stop,” Field said of his worst-case projections. “You might see a decrease in vineyards in the Sierra foothills, where it is already quite hot for vineyard production. … In general, the places that could still support agriculture tend (in the models) to be in mountainous counties in the northeastern part of the state, where it isn’t suitable for agriculture.”

With 7.2 degrees Fahrenheit of warming, more than 95% of the land in California currently used to grow crops — excluding wine grapes and possibly marijuana — will no longer be usable.

Exacerbating the situation is the shift by California farmers over the past 25 years away from annual crops to nut trees, which require year-round watering.

Farmers can fallow fields of lettuce and other annual crops during droughts and replant them later. That’s not an option for nut trees, which need 10 years of growth and a steady supply of water before they yield enough to pay for themselves.

But there likely won’t be enough water to keep all the trees alive, and farmers from Fresno to Sacramento face higher prices for precious water. It is why implementation of the state’s Sustainable Groundwater Management Act is so important, said Ellen Hanak, an economist and director of the Water Policy Center for the Public Policy Institute of California.

The law was passed in 2014 in response to the alarming depletion of groundwater reserves in the Central Valley during the five-year drought.

Hanak said recharging the overused California aquifer will require investment in programs to recycle and inject water into the ground and necessitate a 10 percent reduction in farming acreage over the next 20 years.

“This region has been using more groundwater than it has naturally replenished for decades,” Hanak said. “Fixing that is going to be a heavy lift, but it’s going to be better for the economy and for jobs.”

But if projections are accurate, hardly any land will be suitable for agriculture where crops are currently being grown unless major investments are made in adaptive farming and conservation.

Frank Mitloehner, a professor in the UC Davis animal science department, said that is why sensors are being installed to monitor water use, and more ranchers are adopting regenerative farming and grazing techniques that ensure the land sequesters more carbon than it emits.

Mitloehner said new anaerobic digesters, which convert manure into energy, and advances in nutrition are reducing methane from manure and burping cows. He said the dairy and livestock industries are on pace to meet the requirements of a 2016 law that requires agriculture to curb methane emissions 40 percent by 2030.

Link to story in the SF Chronicle

CDFA Secretary Karen Ross recently took representatives of the Governor’s Office and Cal-EPA on a tour of two Central Valley farms to show how they are successfully utilizing CDFA Climate Smart Agriculture grants and benefiting from the work that CDFA and its partner agencies are doing to facilitate adaptation to climate change through public policy.

At the Magneson Dairy near Ballico in Merced County, the group learned about the dairy’s use of an Alternative Manure Management Program (AMMP) grant to reduce methane emissions by converting to dry manure management practices. The dairy installed a solid separator, built a concrete slab for composting, purchased a compost turner and build a compost pack barn for their heifers. The compost is  spread on pastures to increase fertility and improve forage quantity, thereby increasing pasture time for the cattle and avoiding manure accumulation in the barns.

Gemperle Farms in Turlock is involved in two Healthy Soils Program grant projects. An incentives grant supports the planting of cover crops to enhance carbon sequestration and improve soil fertility and water penetration. A demonstration project, in partnership with Community Alliance with Family Farmers and UC Davis, seeks to measure the net greenhouse gas flux in a cover cropped orchard. 

CDFA wishes to thank CalCAN—the California Climate and Agriculture Network—for its assistance in setting up the tours.

CDFA’s Office of Environmental Farming and Innovation supports agricultural production and incentivizes Climate Smart Agriculture practices, resulting in a net benefit for the environment through innovation, efficient management, and science.