CDFA’s State Water Efficiency and Enhancement Program, SWEEP, provides grants to implement irrigation systems that reduce greenhouse gases and save water on California agricultural operations. Eligible system components include (among others) soil moisture monitoring, drip systems, switching to low pressure irrigation systems, pump retrofits, variable frequency drives and installation of renewable energy to reduce on-farm water use and energy.
CDFA has selected 725 projects for grants, covering over 127,100 acres. $72.2 million has been awarded to date, with more than $47.7 million in matching funds contributed by awardees.
As we take this moment to note the 50th anniversary of Earth Day, I’d like to call attention to our farmers, ranchers and farm workers; and the great work they do every day, no matter what Mother Nature throws at them. The twist that they—and all of us—are dealing with this year brings a whole new test of their adaptability and resiliency.
They are meeting the challenge the only way they know how – through hard work and dedication in working with their employees to deliver food to grocery stores and food banks while simultaneously contending with a collapse of other parts of the supply chain. And they’re doing all that while maintaining all-important environmental stewardship.
The livelihood of farmers and ranchers is tied to the land and to our communities – the understanding of natural cycles; sowing, tending and harvesting; conserving, recycling and streamlining; learning and improving. These cycles and so many more are at the heart of farming.
Every day is Earth Day in agriculture. Our farmers and ranchers are restoring the health of our soil, turning dairy emissions into energy, conserving water, reducing and optimizing fertilizer use, protecting pollinators, incorporating wildlife conservation into their business plans, and doing dozens of other things that contribute in real, quantifiable ways to combating climate change. And because of California’s leadership role in agriculture, we are also a beacon for other growers around the world to learn about what works and multiply our successes on their own land.
I’m proud of everything our farmers and ranchers and farm workers are doing, and I’m honored to be part of a department that helps them achieve these goals. I want them to know that we’re here for them through this crisis, and we will move forward with them when it’s over.
I wish you all a 50th anniversary of Earth Day that is full of progress and optimism.
As international observers of Earth Day recognize its 50th year this week, CDFA would like to note an essential relationship between farmers and the Earth that goes back many centuries.
Farmers and ranchers are stewards of the land while providing for sustainability of life and the Earth itself.
CDFA offers several grant programs to help facilitate that stewardship, including the Healthy Soils Program.
Join CDFA and the Governments of Denmark and the Netherlands
The State of California, Denmark and the Netherlands are all actively working to reduce methane gas emissions, capture methane gas from dairy operations, and utilize that gas as a renewable energy source. This webinar will focus on climate-warming greenhouse gases from dairy and livestock operations, and new technologies to mitigate emissions.
Learn more about the many different new and existing technologies that reduce methane gas emissions through adjustments in housing, manure storage, and feed or animal genetics; and technologies that capture and use dairy biogas.
This international webinar will also highlight recent policy efforts to use dairy methane as a renewable natural gas and energy source.
DATE: April 21, 2020
TIME: 8:30-10 a.m. in California (5:30-7 p.m. in the Netherlands and Denmark)
The first few days of the coronavirus crisis revealed that the veneer of civilization may be thinner than we assumed.
Americans quickly stripped supermarket shelves of toilet paper, paper towels and other household commodities. The panicky, almost riotous, invasion of shoppers even moved one Sacramento grocery chain to hire off-duty police officers to stand by and keep order.
Several weeks later, toilet paper is still in short supply, but stores still have adequate, if not overly abundant, stocks of a much more important commodity — food. Farmers, farmworkers, truckers, food processors and grocers have continued to do their vital work, often at the personal risk of becoming infected.
What would happen were the situations to be reversed, with shelves of food empty while those with toilet paper still stocked? It would get very ugly very quickly and history tells us that the survival instinct would kick in and other commodities folks also have been stockpiling — guns and ammunition — would come into play.
That scenario, thankfully, is highly unlikely to occur, but we should be aware that the incredibly complex system that delivers foodstuffs to stores and then to our tables is feeling the strain.
The closure of restaurants, schools and other commercial purchasers of food is a heavy financial blow to everyone in the system. Farmers are plowing up fields of lettuce and other fresh produce for a lack of workers to harvest them, and customers to buy what they harvest. Dairy farmers still must milk their cows, but many are dumping what they produce due to sharply reduced demand not only for fluid milk but cheese and other dairy products too.
California is, as everyone should know, the nation’s top agricultural producer, but we have often tended to take that fact for granted. In certain circles — especially among environmental and social justice activists — farmers are dismissed as greedy despoilers. They wrongly imply that there’s no need for large-scale industrial agriculture, and that small-scale organic farmers can meet our needs.
This crisis should tell us otherwise and whenever it ends, we should emerge with a new appreciation for those who grow, harvest, process and deliver our food — and show that regard in tangible ways.
We should end the decades of bickering over water and build the new storage and conveyance projects that will give farmers what they need to maintain and enhance production as well as meet the demands of families and other water users.
We should honor the men and women who work in the fields while most of us shelter in place to avoid infection. They should be fairly paid for performing the difficult and often hazardous tasks that put food on our tables, even if it means higher retail prices.
We should, as with water, end the decades of bickering over immigration and provide undocumented immigrants — as many as three million in California alone — who work in the fields, in construction and in myriad other important industries a dignified pathway out of the shadows and into legalized status and citizenship.
Concurrently, we should make it easier and more lucrative for foreign nationals who wish to work seasonally in California agriculture to come here. It’s shameful that President Donald Trump’s administration is contemplating a reduction in guest worker wages to ease the financial burden on farmers. That sends precisely the wrong message because a shortage of reliable labor is one of agriculture’s biggest headaches.
Some say the coronavirus crisis changes everything. It should change our complacent and sometimes hostile attitudes about agriculture.
An Open Letter to Our Nation’s Retailers and Food Distributors from CDFA Secretary Karen Ross
Thank you! As much of our daily lives has changed in significant ways, you continue to serve in providing an essential function for all of us. What we once took for granted as normal routine, going to the grocery store, has fundamentally changed. You – retailers, your stores, and all team members throughout the food distribution system – are our heroes and we thank you!
Our California farmers, ranchers and farmworkers understand the challenge this crisis has delivered to our retailer partners: to manage adequate supply, maintain efficient distribution, and most of all provide a safe shopping environment for customers and employees. All of this has been accomplished with a level of care, service and dedication that makes us proud to be part of your supply chain.
We are thankful for the warehouse workers pulling double shifts, the truck drivers who are adding routes, the direct-to-customer services that are being offered, and the new outlets being created to provide food. We are grateful for retail employees in-store, delivery drivers, and those working at headquarters who have helped us adapt to a new way of life by providing a sense of order in these uncertain times.
California producers are here for you. Each harvest provides a brighter future, and together we will do what we’ve always done to provide healthy nutritious food (and beautiful flowers) for your customers, our neighbors and communities across this state and nation.
We commend you for your ongoing efforts. Your work and service has been nothing less than world class.
I pulled on my surgical gloves, readjusted my face shield and took a deep breath. Waiting in a line facing me were unmasked seniors and young people. Their primary worry is not the coronavirus pandemic. Nor is it toilet paper. It’s food.
Every Tuesday and Friday about 300 Bay Area families count on the Richmond Emergency Food Bank to provide them with a month’s supply of food. That’s 1,200 families a month. Since the coronavirus outbreak, every Tuesday and Friday may be their only chance to receive food one month.
I heard about the Richmond food bank through a senior in my community, who called to see if I would replace her and other volunteers who pack and distribute food twice a week. I signed up and assured them I could find others. But, volunteers are not as easy to find during this foreboding pandemic.
As the COVID-19 threat continues to shut down the nation, food banks are not exempt. Although allowed to remain open, about 100 food pantries have closed in the San Francisco Bay Area in the last month. The primary reason for the closures is that most of the volunteers are also those most vulnerable to the pandemic: people over 65.
On my first day at the food bank, me and two other volunteers put one carton of eggs, one canister of oatmeal, two slabs of cheese, and an unidentifiable pastry in a white plastic bag. We did this one hundred times. By my third day, the bi-weekly load of grocery store donations had dropped. No bread this time and the bananas are more black than yellow. Also the lines to receive food had grown longer. We turned down five people, one of them because they had picked up some food earlier in the month, the other four because there just wasn’t enough food to hand out.
As panic buying empties out shelves, grocery stores have less and less food to donate. Similar to most public health issues, COVID-19 is not just a threat to one’s immediate health. Like a ripple effect, it has extended its tentacles into issues of food, housing and income, as well as domestic safety and mental health. As tens of thousands of Californians experience job loss and growing financial instability during the statewide shelter-at-home orders, many will join the ranks of the unemployed, undocumented, single-parent, homeless, sick, elderly and disabled who cannot afford food.
How you can help: Check your local food bank’s website for what support it needs. If healthy and able-bodied, you could volunteer. If you have extra food, you could donate it. If you are self-isolating, donate money online, raise awareness by sharing food bank messaging on social media, and advocate for support at the federal level.
And be mindful: the first week of every month is a critical time because WIC/SNAP benefits — food stamps — are received by low-income families. Give these families a chance to stock up. Be aware of a WIC shelf tag and try to limit purchases of those items.
After safely removing my gloves before heading home, I thought about viruses and trees. A cluster of trees acts as an ecosystem and sacrifices nutrients for sick or struggling trees in an effort to keep all of the trees healthy. Our human community is struggling in the battle against COVID-19 and, like the cluster of trees, we need to do what we can to help those in our cluster.
As we practice social distancing in the fight against the coronavirus, let us not forget those in our community. ____
Farrah Lynn Ezzeddine is an epidemiology masters student at the Harvard School of Public Health, ezzeddine@hsph.harvard.edu.
Onions going to waste in Idaho. Photo: Joseph Haeberle for The New York Times
By David Yaffe-Bellamy and Michael Corkery
In Wisconsin and Ohio, farmers are dumping thousands of gallons of fresh milk into lagoons and manure pits. An Idaho farmer has dug huge ditches to bury 1 million pounds of onions. And in South Florida, a region that supplies much of the Eastern half of the United States with produce, tractors are crisscrossing bean and cabbage fields, plowing perfectly ripe vegetables back into the soil.
After weeks of concern about shortages in grocery stores and mad scrambles to find the last box of pasta or toilet paper roll, many of the nation’s largest farms are struggling with another ghastly effect of the pandemic. They are being forced to destroy tens of millions of pounds of fresh food that they can no longer sell.
The closing of restaurants, hotels and schools has left some farmers with no buyers for more than half their crops. And even as retailers see spikes in food sales to Americans who are now eating nearly every meal at home, the increases are not enough to absorb all of the perishable food that was planted weeks ago and intended for schools and businesses.
The amount of waste is staggering. The nation’s largest dairy cooperative, Dairy Farmers of America, estimates that farmers are dumping as many as 3.7 million gallons of milk each day. A single chicken processor is smashing 750,000 unhatched eggs every week.
Many farmers say they have donated part of the surplus to food banks and Meals on Wheels programs, which have been overwhelmed with demand. But there is only so much perishable food that charities with limited numbers of refrigerators and volunteers can absorb.
And the costs of harvesting, processing and then transporting produce and milk to food banks or other areas of need would put further financial strain on farms that have seen half their paying customers disappear. Exporting much of the excess food is not feasible either, farmers say, because many international customers are also struggling through the pandemic and recent currency fluctuations make exports unprofitable.
“It’s heartbreaking,” said Paul Allen, co-owner of R.C. Hatton, who has had to destroy millions of pounds of beans and cabbage at his farms in South Florida and Georgia.
The widespread destruction of fresh food — at a time when many Americans are hurting financially and millions are suddenly out of work — is an especially dystopian turn of events, even by the standards of a global pandemic. It reflects the profound economic uncertainty wrought by the virus and how difficult it has been for huge sectors of the economy, like agriculture, to adjust to such a sudden change in how they must operate.
Even as Mr. Allen and other farmers have been plowing fresh vegetables into the soil, they have had to plant the same crop again, hoping the economy will have restarted by the time the next batch of vegetables is ready to harvest. But if the food service industry remains closed, then those crops, too, may have to be destroyed.
Farmers are also learning in real time about the nation’s consumption habits.
The quarantines have shown just how many more vegetables Americans eat when meals are prepared for them in restaurants than when they have to cook for themselves.
“People don’t make onion rings at home,” said Shay Myers, a third-generation onion farmer whose fields straddle the border of Oregon and Idaho.
Mr. Myers said there were no good solutions to the fresh food glut. After his largest customer — the restaurant industry — shut down in California and New York, his farm started redistributing onions from 50-pound sacks into smaller bags that could be sold in grocery stores. He also started freezing some onions, but he has limited cold-storage capacity.
With few other options, Mr. Myers has begun burying tens of thousands of pounds of onions and leaving them to decompose in trenches.
“There is no way to redistribute the quantities that we are talking about,” he said.
Over the decades, the nation’s food banks have tried to shift from offering mostly processed meals to serving fresh produce, as well. But the pandemic has caused a shortage of volunteers, making it more difficult to serve fruits and vegetables, which are time-consuming and expensive to transport.
“To purchase from a whole new set of farmers and suppliers — it takes time, it takes knowledge, you have to find the people, develop the contracts,” said Janet Poppendieck, an expert on poverty and food assistance.
The waste has become especially severe in the dairy industry, where cows need to be milked multiple times a day, regardless of whether there are buyers.
Major consumers of dairy, like public schools and coffee shops, have all but vanished, leaving milk processing plants with fewer customers at a time of year when cows produce milk at their fastest rate. About 5 percent of the country’s milk supply is currently being dumped and that amount is expected to double if the closings are extended over the next few months, according to the International Dairy Foods Association.
Before the pandemic, the Dairymens processing plant in Cleveland would produce three loads of milk, or around 13,500 gallons, for Starbucks every day. Now the Starbucks order is down to one load every three days.
For a while after the pandemic took hold, the plant collected twice as much milk from farmers as it could process, keeping the excess supply in refrigerated trailers, said Brian Funk, who works for Dairymens as a liaison to farmers.
But eventually the plant ran out of storage. One night last week, Mr. Funk worked until 11 p.m., fighting back tears as he called farmers who supply the plant to explain the predicament.
To repurpose those plants to put cheese in the 8 oz. bags that sell in grocery stores or bottle milk in gallon jugs would require millions of dollars in investment. For now, some processors have concluded that spending the money isn’t worth it.
“It isn’t like restaurant demand has disappeared forever,” said Matt Gould, a dairy industry analyst. “Even if it were possible to re-format to make it an 8-ounce package rather than a 20-pound bag, the dollars and cents may not pan out.”
Those same logistical challenges are bedeviling poultry plants that were set up to distribute chicken to restaurants rather than stores. Each week, the chicken processor Sanderson Farms destroys 750,000 unhatched eggs, or 5.5 percent of its total production, sending them to a rendering plant to be turned into pet food.
Last week, the chief executive of Sanderson Farms, Joe Sanderson, told analysts that company officials had even considered euthanizing chickens to avoid selling them at unprofitable rates, though the company ultimately did not take that step.
In recent days, Sanderson Farms has donated some of its chicken to food banks and organizations that cook meals for emergency medical workers. But hatching hundreds of thousands of eggs for the purpose of charity is not a viable option, said Mike Cockrell, the company’s chief financial officer.
“We’re set up to sell that chicken,” Mr. Cockrell said. “That would be an expensive proposition.”
The Packer’s Tom Karst visited April 6 with Scott Horsfall, CEO of the California Leafy Greens Marketing Agreement.
Horsfall related how the staff of the LGMA has adapted to the shelter-at-home guidance in California related to the COVID-19. He also paid tribute to the grower community.
“Growers are in the midst of this difficult time; they are trying to follow the various advisories that come out that both state and federal level, and yet they’re out there harvesting crops and shipping crops to provide food to consumers, and I think they should be applauded for that,” Horsfall said.
Horsfall said the work of the Leafy Greens Marketing Agreement continues on in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“We’re determined to continue our food safety oversight,” he said. “It is essential that these crops get harvested and shipped, and what we do has been deemed essential as well, in terms of making sure that crops are safe and for doing what we can to protect consumer health.”
At the same time, the LGMA is looking at ways to minimize human contact during food safety audits.
“(Auditors) still go to the farms but we working to do as much on a remote basis as we can do,” Horsfall said.
Every LGMA audit includes a great deal of documentation relative to water records, soil amendment records, pre-harvest assessments, and more.
We’re looking to take as much of that off-site as we can,” Horsfall said. “There’s no real reason for two people to sit in a room and pass papers back and forth.”
Horsfall also spoke of the ongoing work to update the food safety metrics of the LGMA.
Western Growers has launched an interactive website that allows the public to participate in discussions relating to leafy greens food safety while allowing the industry to follow the process to strengthen those guidelines.
The site, www.leafygreenguidance.com, will track changes to the Commodity Specific Food Safety Guidelines for the Production and Harvest of Lettuce and Leafy Greens adopted by the California/Arizona Leafy Greens Marketing Agreements.
Horsfall said California industry leaders are hopeful that the COVID-19 pandemic made ease but said there are plenty of uncertainties ahead.
“Here in California, we’re seeing a definite flattening of the curve and some of the drastic steps that were taken out here, obviously have helped in that regard,” he said.
CDFA’s Division of Measurement Standards (DMS) remains on the job during the COVID-19 crisis to ensure a safe, reliable supply of fuel for consumers and for commodities being transported from farm to fork. DMS staff are also on the lookout for credit card skimmers at gas stations and truck stops.
