By Dana Goldstein

It will take huge efforts, according to experts, to avert disasters related to climate change. Commitments from reluctant leaders to reform the global economy. Shifts in the daily routines of citizens. And research from the world’s greatest minds — lots of it.

To help pay for that research, the billionaires Stewart and Lynda Resnick are set to announce on Thursday the second-largest donation ever to an American university: $750 million to the California Institute of Technology for environmental study, much of it focused on technological solutions to combat climate change.

The Resnicks own the Wonderful Company, whose brands include Fiji Water, Pom Wonderful, Wonderful Pistachios and Teleflora, the flower delivery service. Their businesses are large consumers of water and plastic, and have at times been criticized by environmentalists.

The donation comes less than a week after millions of young people took to the streets in climate strikes across the globe, demanding faster action to address the warming planet. Climate change is also a growing focus in the Democratic presidential primary.

But Mr. Resnick, who described himself as a moderate who currently leans Democratic, said he did not see the donation as political. He said he and his wife were committing money to protect future generations — including their own children and grandchildren — and because they had seen the devastating impact of climate change in their own business, growing fruits and nuts.

“No one likes to deal with something that is unpleasant if they can kick it down the road,” Mr. Resnick said. But “no experts are saying take your time. It’s happening now.”

The money will be used to build a research center and to support a broad range of projects. Among them are attempts to sequester carbon from the atmosphere and store it in the ocean; capture and reuse rainfall; make plants more resistant to drought; and create plastics that are easier to recycle, according to Thomas F. Rosenbaum, president of Caltech.

Mr. and Mrs. Resnick have been active philanthropists in California’s Central Valley, especially in providing aid to the families of their employees. They have founded charter schools and health clinics, distributed college scholarships and given to cultural institutions.

But the Resnicks’ business practices have sometimes come under fire from environmental activists.

The bottled water industry is not considered sustainable given the plastic waste it produces and the energy used to ship water long distances across the world, often to consumers who have access to free, safe water just by turning on a tap.

The Wonderful Company also grows and sells pistachios and almonds, which are especially water-hungry crops. A Mother Jones investigation in 2016 found that the Resnicks’ businesses were California’s largest consumers of water during a time of drought.

Mr. Resnick responded to those critiques by saying large-scale farming was more efficient and less wasteful. “You can’t grow healthy food without water,” he said. “We use that water to create crops that create food and jobs for people.”

Research funded by the Caltech donation could make global agriculture more sustainable, he added. In a sense, the gift — the largest since Michael R. Bloomberg gave $1.8 billion to Johns Hopkins University in November — could go toward mitigating some of the very problems the Resnicks’ companies are accused of perpetuating.

“If we had an alternative to plastic we would use it,” Mr. Resnick said of his bottled water business — a problem Caltech researchers may try to solve. He said Fiji Water had committed to using 100 percent recycled plastic by 2025.

Mr. and Mrs. Resnick previously contributed nearly $38 million to Caltech, the university said. About $100 million of the new $750 million donation will go toward construction of a building called the Resnick Sustainability Resource Center. An additional $250 million will finance research immediately, while $400 million will be placed into the university’s endowment for future environmental research.

The scholars funded by the Resnicks will retain complete independence over their work, said Dr. Rosenbaum, the Caltech president.

The federal government spent about $9 billion on the research, development and use of clean energy technology in 2017, according to the Government Accountability Office.

David Hart, director of the Center for Science, Technology, and Innovation Policy at George Mason University, said private donations could be most helpful in finding real-world applications for new technologies — ones that can make daily activities, like farming or using air-conditioning, less damaging to the climate.

Donors should “foster new ideas that could turn into companies,” Professor Hart said. “Ultimately, we need clean energy to be really cheap and really easy to use, and help people live lives they want to live.”

Link to story in the New York Times

Hundreds of people from throughout the state celebrated the history of California’s Native Americans at the 52^nd Annual Native American Day event that took place at the west steps of the State Capitol.

California Governor Gavin Newsom spoke at the event shortly before issuing a proclamation declaring today Native American Day.

CDFA joined nearly a hundred state departments and agencies in hosting a booth to provide information about various programs and services, including its Tribal Affairs liaison, Office of Grants Administration, and its Plant Health and Pest Prevention Services Division, which shared important information about invasive species that threaten agriculture and the environment.

College student Andrea Levinson applied for a summer internship this year at the California Department of Food and Agriculture (CDFA) to gain hands-on experience in her field of study. After three months at the agency’s Division of Inspection Services (ISD), her greatest takeaway is a better understanding of CDFA’s wide range of projects and programs.

“The average Californian may not realize the reach of this agency,” Levinson said. “CDFA inspects our produce, regulates the movement of invasive plants or pests, makes sure consumers get what they pay for, provides quality control for fertilizer, and provides leadership in adaptation to climate change. And the list goes on.”

Levinson, a senior, is majoring in environmental studies with a minor in physics at Sacramento State University. She and Cal Poly San Luis Obispo senior Brent Oge were 2019 summer interns at ISD. Oge is majoring in agricultural business with a minor in Spanish.

“CDFA strives to support innovation and agricultural diversity,” said ISD director Natalie Krout-Greenberg. “One way to support these efforts is through working with upcoming generations. The goal of our summer internship program is to engage students in agriculture and equip them to become future agriculture ambassadors. We find the program also serves as a recruitment opportunity for CDFA.”

Offered annually, the ISD internship/mentorship program matches interns with rank-and-file staff members as mentors. Staff apply to be mentors to gain leadership experience. The selected mentors help with application review, interviewing candidates, and coordinating with division and branch leadership to determine intern projects.

Field tours are a highlight of the program, and this year’s tours included the Division of Plant Health and Pest Prevention Service’s Truckee Border Station, a visit to pear processing facilities under the auspices of ISD, and shadowing a fertilizer investigator from the ISD Feed, Fertilizer and Livestock Drugs Regulatory Services (FFLDRS) branch.

“My favorite day in the field was observing a fertilizer inspector during reviews of a compost producer, an organic fertilizer manufacturer, and a synthetic fertilizer retailer,” Oge said. “After gaining a better understanding of fertilizer materials in the office, I was able to apply that knowledge to what I was seeing.”

Oge interned with the Fertilizer Research Education Program (FREP). His project was to discover how FREP-funded research could get into more growers’ hands. Oge conducted various interviews and learned that farmers often are interested in learning about the beneficial practices highlighted by FREP. His findings, made during a presentation at the end of his three-month tenure, included a recommendation that FREP should continue to increase its exposure to California farmers through strategic and personal connections that incorporate social media.

Levinson interned at ISD’s Center for Analytical Chemistry (CAC) branch. With a background in computer coding, her project was to redesign the layout and accessibility of a CAC Standards Repository database created in 1992. Levinson’s success was shown during a presentation at the end of her internship.

College students interested in being a 2020 summer intern for the CDFA Division of Inspection Services should look for a position announcement of Agricultural Technician I (Seasonal) to be made around January, with applications accepted through the middle of February.   

By Nancy Matsumoto

EXCERPTED

Anthony Myint vividly recalls the moment he encountered the idea that would shift his life’s path. In 2014, the San Francisco chef and his wife and business partner, Karen Leibowitz, visited California carbon ranching pioneer John Wick at Nicasio Native Grass Ranch in Marin County.

“He had a bunch of whiteboards out and he was just wrapping up a talk with some U.N. people,” Myint recalls. Wick had been working on the Marin Carbon Project, the now well-known collaboration with U.C. Berkley scientist Wendee Silver that examined whether or not several “carbon farming” practices—such as managed grazing and adding a thin layer of compost to the land—could in fact pull greenhouse gases from the atmosphere.

Wick talked about the difference between durable carbon—deposited and locked into the ground for up to centuries by plant roots and decaying and dead microorganisms—and carbon that routinely circulates from above to below ground. Hearing of the work the couple was doing helping restaurants offset their greenhouse gas emissions, Myint recalls, Wick “told us we weren’t thinking big enough.” Atmospheric carbon wasn’t just something to avoid emitting, or to pay others to scrub from one’s environmental footprint, Myint and Leibowitz now understood: farming itself could regenerate the land.

That day, Myint and Leibowitz joined a much larger movement to bring regenerative agriculture to the mainstream and help farmers, chefs, and eaters understand the value of healthy soil. “We’re in the midst of a massive cultural change in response to global warming, and farming and healthy soil are probably the most practical and biggest solutions we have,” says Myint.

Myint and Leibowitz have spent the last five years figuring out how to help the competitive, thin-margin, high-burnout world of creative chefs, restaurants, and their fickle diners play a role in regenerative agriculture. Their first effort was the nonprofit Zero Foodprint, which helped restaurants offset their greenhouse gas emissions. Their recently shuttered restaurant, The Perennial, sought to serve food produced regeneratively and educate consumers about the role food plays in absorbing carbon.

“We assumed people would be excited about optimistic solutions, and would line up for the Tesla of food,” says Myint. But the public wasn’t ready. They learned that “we couldn’t rely on one consumer, one chef at a time to create system change.” They needed, as Wick encouraged them, to think bigger.

Now, under their nonprofit The Perennial Farming Initiative (PFI), Myint and Leibowitz have started laying the groundwork for a program, Restore California. Participating restaurants add an optional “1 percent for healthy soil” surcharge to customer tabs. PFI has already signed 30 restaurants up for the Restore California surcharge; if 1 percent of the state’s restaurants follow suit, the group estimates it could generate $10 million per year in funding for healthy soils.

The project is a collaboration between the California Air Resources Board (CARB), the California Department of Food and Agriculture, and PFI; when it is fully up and running, proceeds will go directly to farms and ranches working to improve soil health as a complement to the state’s Healthy Soils Program. 

Read more on the Civil Eats web page

 From Morning Ag Clips

For years more than 15 bacterial species have ruined millions of dollars worth of onion crops across the United States. That is bound to change, as a group of 24 researchers from 12 states across the country, including one researcher from South Africa, plan to take on these bugs, armed with more than $8 million over the next four years.

The USDA Specialty Crops Research Initiative recently announced the award of $4 million to the group in their project entitled, “Stop the rot: Combatting onion bacterial diseases with pathogenomic tools and enhanced management strategies” (Award No. 2019-51181-30013). The project comes with a match of $4.2 million match from onion growers, universities and seed companies all recognizing the severity of bacterial diseases on America’s onion crops.

“They all have skin in the game,” said Lindsey du Toit, principal investigator for the project and a professor and extension plant pathologist with the Department of Plant Pathology at Washington State University. “This is a stakeholder-driven need. It’s not driven by academics in their ivory towers thinking they need money to fund their pet projects.”

“For five to six years, I’ve been jotting down notes about key things that could be looked at, in relation to hearing many stories about losses due to bacterial diseases,” du Toit said. “I became increasingly aware of the need to pull together a team to really focus on how we can do a better job, and the importance of the stakeholders being involved in that planning.”

The project could help reduce the annual $16 million-plus losses to America’s onion industry through this coordinated, multi-state evaluation “to determine how specific production practices, environmental conditions, and inoculum sources can be managed using practical, economically viable and environmentally-sound strategies to limit losses from bacterial rots,” du Toit said.

America’s onion farmers and researchers have yet to fully get a handle on bacterial rots, which can affect an onion at all stages of growth. Typically the only way to eliminate these pathogens is through getting rid of the affected onions. Sometimes an entire load of onions can be affected but not detected until that load has shipped across the country, which can devastate smaller, family-run farms, the backbone of America’s agriculture industry.

At present, onion growers do not have highly effective bactericides to rely on to eliminate bacterial diseases.

“These diseases are not easy to manage,” du Toit said. “If they were, growers would have figured it out by now. They’re ingenious and pretty creative.”

An important aspect of this research will be on the use of cultural practices to manage the problem such as modifying irrigation practices. Part of this project also will be identifying ways of screening for resistance in onion varieties to develop stronger cultivars.

“We know from experience that cultural practices can make a big difference at increasing or reducing the risk of these diseases,” du Toit said. “A lot of it comes down to managing irrigation, nitrogen levels, the timing on when you undercut the onions, and how you cure then in the field and manage the soil.”  In turn, that may be the most economical tool in this war on bacteria.

Researchers had to wage a herculean effort to get this project off the ground. Though they were notified in January that the pre-proposal submitted in December was accepted for submission of a full grant, they weren’t aware of the new reinstatement of a 10-year-old requirement for a 100 percent match in funding, authored under the new Farm Bill. The researchers had just three months to figure out how to come up with at least $4 million in funding to match the federal funding requested in the proposal.

Those involved dug deep, and from in kind donations of farming and implement costs as well as professor’s and other staff and student salaries or assistantships, they were able to come up with it, du Toit said. About $2 million of that came from growers alone.

“They looked at the value of their projected in-kind contributions to the project, whether it be land, the value of the crop used for trials, and the cost of the farm work done to maintain the trials, and tallied all that up to come up with their matches,” du Toit said.  “This is the perfect example of the kind of problem this Specialty Crops Research Initiative program was developed to address.”

The Co-Principle Investigators in the project are Bhabesh Dutta, University of Georgia; Christine A. Hoepting, Cornell University; Brian Howard Kvitko, University of Georgia; Mark Uchanski, Colorado State University; and Brenna J. Aegerter, University of California.

The Specialty Crops Research Initiative is a part of the USDA National Institute for Food and Agriculture, and addresses the critical needs of the specialty crops industry by awarding grants to support research and extension that address key challenges of national, regional, and multi-state importance in sustaining all components of food and agriculture, including conventional and organic food production systems.

Link to story in Morning Ag Clips

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.

After Terry Garrett witnessed his ailing brother lose the ability to pursue his love of gardening, he took it upon himself to ensure that anybody—regardless of whether they are confined to a wheelchair—could keep their green thumbs in the dirt.

Garrett is the mastermind behind the Elevated Garden: a tabletop garden that has been designed specifically for people in wheelchairs. The idea for the elevated garden was born after his brother was diagnosed with Stage IV chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.

“He loved gardening but could no longer handle the physical demands of traditional gardening,” says the veteran. “I designed and built my first elevated garden… and by the end of the year, my brother was taking care of 40 units and growing all his produce for the winter.”

“I saw how it benefited him with an improvement in his quality of life, and an increased sense of self worth and accomplishment,” he continued.

“This spurred me on to developing, patenting, and trade-marking what we are currently manufacturing and marketing.”

Standing at just 30 inches tall, the gardens have been used in nursing homes and assisted living facilities because they limit the amount of bending and physical activity that is typically required by traditional gardening.

The components are made and manufactured in Tennessee, by the veteran’s company, T&L Group. Additionally, the mobile gardens are built on wheels so they can be used indoors through all seasons.

Garrett, who was recently named a “Horticultural Hero” for his design, is now looking to develop handicap-accessible gardening tools so his company can continue to uplift disabled and geriatric patients who want to garden ‘outside the box’.

Link to story