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.

By Cristina Davies

Big research is happening at the Kearney Agriculture and Extension Center in Fresno County.

Sorghum, a crop that looks similar to corn, is under a microscope.

Jeff Dahlberg, director of the center, said that sorghum is very drought tolerant.

“What we are looking for is the mechanism behind the drought tolerance in sorghum and if we can elucidate the genetics behind that, what we believe is we can use those genetics to see if the genetics in corn, or in rice, or in wheat,” he said.

Dahlberg said they ultimately want to figure out if they can make other crops like sorghum drought tolerant.

“I think the genes may be there. We just don’t have the tools yet to search for the genes in those crops,” he said while talking about other cereal crop,” he said.

Dahlberg mentioned sorghum can be used as animal feed and a corn substitute in the ethanol market.

He added sorghum uses less water, leaving more water for other crops.

Dahlberg explained doing the study in California is the perfect spot because we don’t see too much rain in the summer. So they can control how much water the crop gets.

“We’ve been really thrilled with the data that’s been coming out of this, like most research, we are learning so many things we don’t understand. We are finding things like ‘Wow, why is this happening’,” he said.

He mentioned that there are over 100 genetic markers that the center is looking at to figure out what makes the crop drought tolerant.

Besides the amount of water it soaks up, scientists are also studying what’s happening in the soil.

Devin Coleman-Derr, research scientist with the United States Department of Agriculture, said their goal is to help other plants survive under drought stress.

“Like humans take probiotics, there may be a use for microbes in sort of promoting better and better yields in the field,” he explained.

Coleman-Derr was helping to collect samples and researchers were cutting up the roots to put them into tubes.

“There’s a lot of potential benefits that is captured under there, various bacteria and fungi that the plant normally brings in to help it when it undergoes periods of stress. We like to figure out who those are and try to capture some of those so we can bring it back to the field in the following year,” he said.

Dahlberg said they are still in the early stages of their research and have a long way to go but are excited about their current findings.

Watch the story below,

October is National Farm to School Month and we’re highlighting the work of CDFA’s Farm to School Program. Stay tuned for weekly posts!

When school cafeterias develop relationships with local farmers and ranchers, students and families may be in a position to make healthier food choices. That’s the first step in a process we call “Farm to School.” It’s an approach that starts local and also helps the environment by reducing food waste and sequestering carbon in soil.

For example, at King Middle School in Berkeley, the Edible Schoolyard Project (a recipient of CDFA grant funding) sequesters carbon by adding compost to the school garden – a process that provides science lessons for students. The compost piles are created in part from leftover lunch food, and the result is healthier garden soil.  

Compost is a viable alternative to food waste at a time when up to 40 percent of the U.S. food supply is wasted, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). In 2010, that led to 133 billion pounds of food sent to landfills–with a value of $161 billion.

The food waste challenge also raises concerns about the waste of land, water, and energy inputs to create that food; as well as air pollutants created while transporting and disposing discarded food.

As our nation becomes more educated about food waste and its environmental impacts, the USDA and U.S. Environmental Protection Agency have set a goal to cut our nation’s food waste by 50 percent by 2030. California and CDFA are committed to reaching that goal.

By Lauren Smiley

The Central Valley of California doesn’t begin so much with a gradual change in the landscape as with an abrupt line. Suddenly, a barren plain that looks like an apt cue for “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly” theme song is interrupted by the first row of leafy, irrigated crops.

Since the 1930s, the region has run on human control of water, carefully distributing the melting mountain snowpack through reservoirs and dams, pumping stations and irrigation pipelines, through drips, sprinklers and intentionally flooded fields. Combined with groundwater pumps, the system turned the valley’s Mediterranean and desert climates into the country’s produce basket, producing one-fourth of the country’s food on just 1 percent of its land.

Recent years have brought severe droughts that have forced farmers to become more efficient with water use. With nearby Silicon Valley teeming with the promise of efficiency and data-fueled intelligence, a natural relationship between technology and agriculture has developed.

For decades, many farmers let the irrigated water flood over their soil to sink in. Some still do. They would inspect rows of fruit-bearing trees to try to spot the thirsty ones. They dug up soil samples to feel in their hand. It was all very analog and imprecise.

“We were taken aback by the fact that some of our best ranch managers, who we thought had it all figured out, still had quite a bit of error going on under their watch,” said Zac Ellis, a senior agronomist at Olam International, a multinational grower that farms 12,000 acres of nuts throughout California. “Through no fault of their own — just the lack of visibility.”

Growers are getting help in making their field conditions more visible with venture capitalists sinking billions in recent years into a growing number of agtech start-ups.

A share of this new crop of businesses is dedicated to what’s known as precision agriculture — the Platonic ideal of providing just enough water, fertilizer and pesticide that a crop needs for maximum yields in an era of climate change and increasing global population. The United Nations estimates that the world’s growers will have to produce 70 percent more food using just 5 percent more land by 2050 — and technology is seen as the force that will get them there.

Among the new start-ups are those flying planes over fields to capture highly detailed images, seeing factors that the naked eye and even satellites cannot. The flyovers use heavy, sophisticated imaging cameras that provide growers with an unprecedented level of data about their crops, including where they need water or, just as importantly, where they already have enough.

One company, Ceres Imaging, began in 2013 while its founder, Ashwin Madgavkar, a Texas-raised engineer, was working on his M.B.A. at Stanford University. Ceres uses high-resolution cameras to capture various wavelengths of the electromagnetic spectrum — measuring the amount of light reflected by the crops in near-infrared as well as green, blue and red edge. A separate thermal camera measures the radiation emitted by the crops, which allows the company to calculate their temperature within a degree Celsius.

Software then runs this data through proprietary algorithms to calculate the water stress down to the individual crop level. Artificial intelligence interprets the resulting patterns to identify what is causing water shortages. For example, a row indicates a problem with that particular irrigation line. Another algorithm generates a chlorophyll index — which can help detect a lack of iron or nitrogen, showing where plants may need more fertilizer.

The company’s tools rank the issues that the farmer should consider, and Ceres reps can also consult with growers on the phone or in person, and visit fields to investigate issues.

The increased use of the imaging has been striking: A Ceres survey revealed about 30 percent of specialty crop acres in California — with products like nuts, grapes, broccoli, artichokes and cucumbers — are being imaged aerially, half of those with Ceres. TerrAvion, a competitor also based in the Bay Area since 2013, is imaging fields in the United States, Canada and Brazil.

“There’s a myth out there about the slow-to-adopt farmer,” said John Bourne, Ceres’ vice president of marketing. “Name another industry where you’ve had A.I.-powered technology adopted this quickly.”

Ceres has 100 employees, the majority based in its Oakland, Calif., headquarters — with small teams in the Midwest, Argentina and Ukraine — and has expanded to irrigated crops throughout the West, to the Pacific Northwest’s apples, potatoes and pears, corn and soybeans in central states, and is experimenting with tropical crops in Hawaii. The company originally used drones, yet quickly realized planes were better for hauling the heavy imagery equipment and allowed them to cover more customers during peak sunlight.

Another reason for the quick uptake is simple economics. The wine grapes and nut industry have higher profit margins than commodity crops, so have more incentive to spend money trying new technology.

Alex Bergwerff, a 32-year-old Central Valley grower, was well-primed to be one of those early adopters. After studying at California State University, Fresno, he worked at a series of agtech start-ups, landing as a sales manager for an app that let growers digitally control and monitor their irrigation lines. Now as a farm manager of Winters Farming, Inc., he drives out to almond, walnut and grape fields in his Chevy truck with his Samsung tablet and smartphone plugged into his dash to check the apps that help him run his ranches — an Oakley-sunglass-wearing version of Matthew McConaughey’s farmer of the near-future in “Interstellar.”

The Ceres flyover of his almond ranch in Oakdale, Calif., in June revealed a couple rows of trees showing up as red, the color that indicates severe stress. After investigating, Mr. Bergwerff found those rows’ drip irrigation tubes had, for whatever reason, been shut off. Images from other farms showed what turned out to be a twisted irrigation line that was preventing water from flowing, or that trees on hills weren’t getting as many nutrients as the ones on flat land.

“What it allows more than anything is for us to be more efficient,” he said. The imaging allows his workers to focus on the problem spots, rather than endlessly driving and walking the rows.

Mr. Ellis, the agronomist at Olam, said he had hired Ceres to fly over the company’s pistachio, walnut and almond farms in California for years: “We nerd out to the images once a month.” He said now that the ranches were more efficient with irrigation, there was less room for error given the surrounding soil had less of a reserve of water. The images helped him pinpoint problems before it affected his yield.

He was able to detect that fertilizer put in the irrigation stream was not reaching half a field in the middle of growing season. Before imaging, Mr. Ellis said “we would have figured it out at harvest, but it would have been too late.”

Also useful, he added, was the Ceres tool that calculated a crop’s estimated yield, allowing him to calculate whether intervening in low-performing areas with more water or fertilizer was worth the cost.

“I wanted to fix those areas and make them better producers, but after crunching the numbers, it didn’t make sense,” Mr. Ellis said. “So I, in a sense, saved a lot of money by not doing that.”

The only drawback to the service itself, Mr. Bergwerff said, was the price: about $4 an acre, though he said it did pay for itself. Depending on the frequency, type of crop, and level of analysis, the service can run up to $30 an acre.

“I wish we could do it more,” he said. Still, he admitted that daily or weekly flights could make for an overload of information. Already, between interpreting the aerial images, joined with his other technological tools like remote irrigation apps, a spreadsheet of watering times and weekly sample tests, the nature of work for farmers like Mr. Bergwerff had changed.

By the end of a workday buried in analyzing information on screens, Mr. Bergwerff said he felt the same as many desk toilers: He just wanted to unplug.

Link to article in the New York Times