The California Department of Food and Agriculture is celebrating its 100th 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.
By Amanda Little
“I’ve done so many presentations I just never get nervous anymore, but I was nervous before this one — so much new material,” Al Gore said (earlier this month) as he launched into the latest iteration of “An Inconvenient Truth,” the slide show that won him an Oscar, a Nobel Prize and a Grammy. Gore had invited 300 guests — chefs, farmers, food executives and activists — to “The Climate Underground,” a two-day conference last week at his family farm here that explored the intersection of food, climate change and sustainable agriculture.
Some 40 panelists, most of them farmers and scientists, took the stage to discuss topics from healthy soil to carbon sequestration, but the main event was Gore’s slide show, delivered with his characteristic mix of bravado and humility, detailing the impacts of climate change on food systems worldwide.
“This is in Georgia; a heat wave cooked these apples before they could be harvested,” he said, issuing forth rapid-fire examples alongside bone-chilling images and video. “This is the Australia wine region that’s going to be untenable. . . . Rice yields in 80 percent of Japan have declined due to the rising temperatures. . . . In nearby Murfreesboro, Tenn., we’ll see a quarter decline in soybean yields within the next 30 years.”
Gore spent the better part of 90 minutes detailing the pressures of drought, heat, flooding, superstorms, “rain bombs,” invasive insects, fungi and bacterial blight on food producers. “We may be approaching a threshold beyond which the agriculture that we’ve always known cannot support human civilization as we know it,” he declared in a low growl. “That’s something we need to avoid.”
Alice Waters, who Gore said catalyzed his interest in food and who had volunteered to cook the vegetarian lunches served to attendees (using local, seasonal and organic ingredients, natch), said the presentation was bittersweet: “I am deeply depressed. But on the other hand, the solution seems so, so unbelievably transformational. . . . We can restore the health of the planet while also restoring the health of people and communities.”
Naomi Starkman, editor-in-chief of Civil Eats, which covers news on sustainable agriculture, was similarly fraught: “Gore spoke with such devastating and fierce clarity, connecting the dots between the ways agriculture is implicated in and impacted by the climate crisis. But it also felt like a hopeful moment wherein agriculture, and farmers in particular, are taking a front-and-central place in solving one of the most urgent issues of our time.”
Mark Bittman, the former New York Times food columnist, was more circumspect: “There are ways in which the conversation here isn’t quite realistic. Regenerative agriculture is not about increased yield, it’s about producing more of the right food in the right ways. … But kudos to Al Gore for taking it on. There’s no more important conversation to have.”
I sat down with the former vice president to dive deeper into the details. Edited excerpts of our conversation follow:
Q: The main way most humans will experience climate change is through its impact on food: Is this a fair statement?
A: Ever since 2015, it’s been clear that the impact on the food system was underestimated in previous years. And there is a natural resistance that many of us have had to getting too concerned about the food system. Food insecurity had been declining steadily for the last couple of decades, just as extreme poverty had been declining. But in the last couple of years, that too has changed, and the principal reason is the climate crisis. Africa, by mid-century, will have more people than either China or India. And by end of century, more people than China and India combined. And you combine that with the impact of the climate crisis on subsistence agriculture in Africa, the importance of subsistence agriculture in Africa, the poor quality of the soils, the persistent problems of land tenure, and the economic and social structures that discourage good stewardship of the land, then, wow. We really need to wake up quickly to the serious crisis that could develop there.
Q: What are the most crucial policy measures that need to be taken to encourage regenerative farming in the U.S. and climate-smart agriculture broadly?
A: We need leadership to completely refocus USDA to completely change the system of farm subsidies to stop the massive subsidies for crops that are not eaten by people, that go to biofuels, that go to animal feed. We should eventually work our way toward a system for compensating farmers for the buildup of soil carbon. That’s not possible yet, partly because we are still developing a measurement of soil carbon buildup that is necessary for the confidence of policymakers and voters that this is not some boondoggle. But eventually, that’s where we need to be.
Q: On one hand you have Bill Gates saying, “The time has come to reinvent food,” and on the other you have Alice Waters and others saying, “Let’s de-invent food, let’s go back to preindustrial agriculture,” essentially. What do you think the role of tech should be?
A: We want a single, magic answer that’s going to solve a big, complicated problem, and I think that in agriculture and food and climate, these systemic approaches are usually more likely to be successful. But technology and science has an important role to play. Measuring soil carbon is one. That team at the Salk Institute has a really interesting proposal to modify roots to sequester more suberin, a form of carbon that stays in the soil for a long time. If their hypothesis is correct, the root structures of food plants can be made much more robust in a way that simultaneously sequesters more organic carbon and increases yields. So that’s technology that is worth exploring and evaluating. In general, the solutions in agriculture are more to be found in going back to some traditional approaches that worked but were discarded because of the pressure for short-term profit maximization. And that includes crop rotation. It includes cover crops to put key chemicals and nutrients back in the soil after it’s been used for a particular cash crop. It includes rotational grazing, which is not without controversy but has been proven to work, at least on farms of this scale.
Q: What role must consumers play in the shift toward sustainable food systems and climate resilience?
A: There’s a danger in focusing on consumer behavior. There’s a danger of giving the impression that the solutions to the climate crisis have to be shouldered by women and men who care enough about it to change their personal choices. They do. But as important as it is to change a lightbulb, it is way more important to change policies. And in order to change policies, we have to have new policymakers. So the most important role that individuals can play is in taking their concern and passion for a better world into the voting booth and turning out in large numbers to overcome the dominance of our political system by big money.
Q: Some permaculture and regenerative farmers that I met with have said that it’s more expensive to farm this way. They can’t afford their own products. How do we address that?
A: I don’t want to deny the premise of your question, but some regenerative farmers have saved a lot of money on their input costs. Now, how do we develop markets for healthier, organic, regenerative-agriculture food? That’s one of the reasons we’re incorporating efforts to get school systems and hospitals and nursing homes and long-term care facilities to provide markets for healthier food.
Q: Still, there are real concerns from middle- and low-income consumers that this is an elitist movement.
A: It hasn’t been very many years since solar panels were considered an elitist movement. And you heard exactly the same critique. “For those who can afford them, that’s fine. But don’t tell me that’s going to be a significant development, because only the wealthy elite are doing it.” Well, that’s not true anymore, because that was the beginning of a movement that drove scale and accelerated the cost reduction curve. And now you’ve got people putting rooftop solar on and community solar, and it is really taking off dramatically. But it started as an elitist movement. The same thing is beginning to be true of electric vehicles. If we can democratize and widely distribute the soil carbon assessment technologies, I don’t think it’s that hard to imagine technology driving the cost down to the point where this can spread more rapidly.
Q: The agriculture industry is so interesting because it is a major driver of the climate problem, but it is also more vulnerable than any other industry to the pressures of climate change.
A: Many pioneers of regenerative agriculture are finding that their farms are more resilient to drought and flood and extreme weather than with the older established farming techniques. Building the health of the soil does not mean just more organic carbon. It also means building the ability of the soil to absorb the higher rainfall events and to withstand drought events more effectively.
Q: One scientist said to me the most delicious fruits are dying because the specialist crops, the ones that we love the most, are hardest to adapt to new circumstances. Of all the crops that are most vulnerable, which would be the hardest for you to live without?
A: Chocolate. Cacao. Absolutely.
Link to article in the Washington Post.
October is National Farm to School Month and we’re highlighting the work of CDFA’s Farm to School Program!
CDFA supports Farm to School efforts across California in order to improve student nutrition and sustain local farming and ranching. The Napa Valley Unified School District is a great example of what works well.
Fairgrounds in Sonoma, Marin, Napa, Mendocino and Alameda counties, as well as the California state fairgrounds in Sacramento, are offering emergency shelter to people and animals in the path of the Kincade Fire. Nearly 200,000 people have been under evacuation orders. More than 1,600 of them are sheltered at fairgrounds.
CDFA is coordinating with the Sonoma County Animal Control Department for animal care resource needs. Horses, goats, chickens, sheep and donkeys are among the animals currently being sheltered. They will be cared for as long as necessary and then every effort will be made to reunite them with their owners.
More information about emergency shelters may be found at this link from Sonoma County.
With Fall now in full swing, Californians are again turning their attention to El Dorado County’s Apple Hill, which is in the midst of its 2019 production season. Here’s an encore presentation on Apple Hill’s draw as a agritourism destination, from CDFA’s award-winning Growing California video series
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.
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.
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.
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.
The California Department of Food and Agriculture is celebrating its 100th 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.
