USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack has announced the availability of more than $66.5 million in funding for research and extension activities to address the needs of America’s specialty crop industry and solve critical organic agricultural production issues. The grants will be funded through the Specialty Crop Research Initiative and the Organic Agriculture Research and Extension Initiative. Both programs are administered by USDA’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA) and made available through the 2014 Farm Bill.

“Investments in projects to help organic producers and specialty crop growers are an important way USDA helps American farmers establish new business opportunities throughout the country,” said Vilsack. “The projects funded by these programs will build on USDA support for local and regional markets. And strengthening local markets grows the rural economy while improving access to healthy food for millions of children and supplying farmers markets, restaurants and other businesses with fresh, high-quality fruits and vegetables.”

Specialty crops are defined in law as “fruits and vegetables, tree nuts, dried fruits and horticulture and nursery crops, including floriculture.” The Specialty Crop Research Initiative (SCRI) develops and disseminates science-based tools to address the needs of specific crops. The projects funded address research and extension needs for crops that span the entire spectrum of specialty crops production, from researching plant genetics to improving crop characteristics; identifying and addressing threats from pests and diseases; improving production and profitability; developing new production innovations and technologies; and developing methods to respond to food safety hazards.

SCRI pre-applications are due March 30, 2015, and full applications are due July 2, 2015. Please see the request for applications for specific program requirements.

Additionally, in fiscal year 2015, NIFA will make $25 million available through the Citrus Disease Research and Extension (CDRE) program, a subset of SCRI focused on research and extension activities to improve citrus health. NIFA will issue a supplemental Request For Applications for CDRE subsequently.

The purpose of the Organic Agriculture Research and Extension Initiative (OREI) is to fund high-priority research, education, and extension projects that enhance the ability of producers and processors who have already adopted organic standards to grow and market high quality organic products. Priority concerns include biological, physical, and social sciences, including economics.

Funded projects will aid farmers and ranchers with whole farm planning by delivering practical research-based information and will improve the ability for growers to develop the Organic System Plan required for certification.

A Notification of Intent to Submit an Application is due on April 1, 2015. Full applications are due April 30, 2015. Please see the request for applications for specific program requirements.

Link to full news release

Fresno farmer Rodney Wells.

By Bob Rodriguez

Every farmer has a story about how they got into agriculture. Some are born into it, while others, like city kid Rodney Wells, jumped into it as a second career.

Wells, the owner of Rancho de Rodney, a certified organic farm in southwest Fresno, grew up in Compton where his only connection to farming was a vegetable garden his father tended. But Wells wouldn’t make the city his home for long. At age 17 he joined the Navy as a way to escape a dismal future.

“I got out of there before I needed to choose which gang I need to be in,” Wells says. “In those days you either chose what gang to join or you ended up on a curb somewhere and none of those options appealed to me.”

Wells excelled in the Navy. At the peak of his 30-year career he supervised about 200 men as command master chief of the USS Pogy submarine.

After retirement, Wells and his wife Sherril, a lawyer, settled in Southern California. They moved to Fresno eight years ago when Sherril Wells became a judicial attorney with the Superior Court. After three decades in the Navy, it wasn’t easy for Rodney Wells to find a job that was challenging. He tried working at a hardware store and the Internal Revenue Service. He took several agriculture-related classes at Reedley College, where developed an affinity for farming.

“I began to see that food and farming were going to be critical in our futures,” Rodney Wells says. “And farming is no easy task. I learn something new all the time.”

Rodney Wells started off with an herb garden that Sherril helped develop about four years ago. Wells admits his first few times selling at a downtown farmers market were not successful.

“We have a card table and no tent or shade and it was the middle of the summer,” he says. “It was pretty awful.”

The couple learned from other farmers about marketing and choosing what sells.

Now, Rancho de Rodney is producing more than 120 types of herbs and vegetables on about 4 acres. The farm produces several varieties of lettuce, carrots, turnips, kale, heirloom tomatoes, bell peppers, hot peppers, fennel, thyme, mint and basil.

“We grow what you can’t find at Save Mart,” Wells says with a smile.

Rancho de Rodney sells at the Kaiser Permanente farmers market, 7300 N. Fresno St., on Wednesdays from 9 a.m. to 1:30 p.m.

Avid cook Sherril Wells encourages the farm’s customers to experiment with the herbs and offers several recipes at the Kaiser market.

“When you start using fresh herbs, it gives you so much flavor to whatever you are cooking,” she says. “And I think our customers appreciate a few suggestions.”

Although the couple are relatively new to the Kaiser market, they already are gaining customers.

Sam Mediati, of North Fork, was buying fennel from Wells recently. He and others are excited about the variety and quality of the farm’s produce.

“This is about the best that you can buy,” Mediati says.

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Story by John Holland

The rented bees arrived to find quite a feast in Mike Silveira’s almond orchard north of Oakdale.

He had sown mustard seeds between the tree rows in the fall, and by mid-January, they had burst out in flowers full of pollen and nectar for the bees to eat. This helped them gain strength for the almond pollination, now well under way up and down the Central Valley.

Silveira is among about 150 almond growers taking part in this research effort for the bees, which have struggled with disease and other challenges over the past decade.

“If you have this for a month before the almond bloom, then you build up a lot of bees,” said pollination researcher Christi Heintz, executive director of the sponsoring group, Project Apis m. It is named for Apis mellifera, the scientific name for the European honeybee, the species at issue.

Almonds are among the top-grossing farm products in the Northern San Joaquin Valley and statewide, and the largest users of commercial colonies in the nation each year. About 1.7 million bee boxes are delivered to the orchards for the pollination, which runs from mid-February to mid-March.

Beekeepers expect to lose some of their colonies each winter, but many have had much larger losses in recent years. Researchers say the causes could include diseases, parasites, trucking stress, pesticides or poor nutrition where drought has reduced flowering plants. Even when rain is abundant, winter does not provide much food.

“Those are times of dearth for bees, when there isn’t much for them to eat,” said Heintz, who works out of Tucson, Ariz., and previously was with the Almond Board of California, based in Modesto.

Heintz talked about the effort during a visit Wednesday to Silveira’s orchard, on 40 hilly acres along Twenty-Six Mile Road. The seeds he sowed came free from Project Apis m., which operates on about $100,000 in grants each year. The mix includes a few varieties of mustard, which put out yellow flowers before the almond bloom, and clover, which bear red, white or purple flowers afterward.

Heintz said the diverse food in the orchard, combined with nearby drinking water, “is exactly what we need. This is a bee spa.”

Almond blooms still are the favored food for the bees, she added, and they will not fill up on the supplemental plantings at the expense of pollinating the crop.

The effort so far covers only about 3,000 of the 860,000 acres of almonds in California, but Heintz said she would like to see it become a common practice. She is collecting data on how the supplemental food sources affect nutrition, colony population and other factors.

Silveira has taken part for two years. He said some almond growers might worry about these plants taking soil moisture from the trees, but that has not been a problem. He also noted that the mustard and clover protect the ground from erosion and take up nitrate from fertilizer, reducing the risk of tainted groundwater.

Silveira plans to mow the plants when the flowering in done, so they will decompose well in advance of the almond harvest. The nuts are shaken to the ground by machines, and growers do not like to have too much debris lying there.

Silveira rented the colonies from Hughson-area beekeeper Kevin Peavey, who is taking part in the effort for the first time this year.

“The bees are going to have more pollen and nectar to gather,” Peavey said. “The more they are fed, the stronger they are.”

U.S. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack has announced that the U.S. Department of Agriculture is accepting public comments on its interim final rule for the new Agricultural Conservation Easement Program (ACEP), designed to help producers protect working agricultural lands and wetlands. The 2014 Farm Bill consolidated three previous conservation easement programs into ACEP to make it easier for diverse agricultural landowners to fully benefit from conservation initiatives.

“Since 2009, USDA has worked with producers and private landowners to enroll a record number of acres in conservation programs. This interim final rule takes into account recommendations from agricultural landowners and conservation stakeholders about how to better streamline and enhance conservation easement processes,” Vilsack said.

The USDA’s Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) administers ACEP, a voluntary program created in the 2014 Farm bill to protect and restore critical wetlands on private and tribal lands through the wetland reserve easement component. ACEP also encourages farmers, ranchers and non-industrial private forest landowners to keep their private and tribal land in agricultural use through the agricultural land easement component. ACEP also conserves grasslands, including rangeland, pastureland and shrubland.

ACEP’s agricultural land easement component offers many benefits to landowners and citizens. The easements protect the long-term viability of the nation’s food supply by preventing conversion of productive working lands to non-agricultural uses. Other benefits include environmental quality, historic preservation, wildlife habitat and protection of open space.

The official notice of the proposed ACEP interim final rule can be found in the Federal Register. Electronic comments during the 60-day comment period must be submitted through regulations.gov. Comments also can be hand carried or mailed to Public Comments Processing, Attn: Docket No. NRCS-2014-0011, Regulatory and Agency Policy Team, Strategic Planning and Accountability, U.S. Department of Agriculture, Natural Resources Conservation Service, 5601 Sunnyside Avenue, Building 1-1112D, Beltsville, MD 20705.

Please visit the ACEP page or Farm Bill Program Rules page for more information on the ACEP statutory changes.

Link to news release

Secretary Karen Ross hearing about water usage and conservation at a Santa Cruz County farm this week.

By Donna Jones

The first step toward finding solutions to long-standing groundwater overdraft in the Pajaro Valley was to acknowledge the problem and agriculture’s contribution to it, said Miles Reiter, chairman and CEO of Driscoll’s Strawberry Associates Inc.

Reiter’s remark came during a visit by California Food and Agriculture Secretary Karen Ross to Driscoll’s Watsonville headquarters Tuesday.

The visit, which also included a stop at a raspberry farm on Holohan Road, showcased Driscoll’s efforts to tackle the groundwater problem in advance of a campaign aimed at raising the profile of the business community in the state conversation about water. The push, organized by Ceres, a nonprofit advocate of sustainable economies, is set to launch in March.

“We’re still more of the problem than the solution, but we have a tremendous amount of motivation,” said Reiter, who’s involved in water policy at the state level as well. “We absolutely need this resource for our business, and we live in the communities where we operate.”

The Pajaro Valley has been consuming about 12,000 acre-feet more groundwater than is recharged by annual rainfall for decades. The result has been dropping levels of fresh water in the aquifer and saltwater intrusion.

An acre-foot is about 326,000 gallons of water, or enough, on average, to irrigate a half-acre of strawberries.

After years of strife over the issue, Driscoll’s spearheaded the formation of the Community Water Dialogue, a coalition of farmers, landowners and resource agencies, to find answers.

The issue is crucial for Driscoll’s, Reiter said, because its crops are almost all grown in areas that rely on groundwater and overdraft is not confined to the Pajaro Valley. He said he came to believe the problem could be solved, and that the best solution would come from the people who helped create it.

In the Pajaro Valley, agriculture is responsible for about 85 percent of water consumption.

Emily Paddock, water resources manager for Driscoll’s Northern District, detailed the accomplishments of the coalition, such as installation of a wireless network that allows farmers throughout the valley to monitor irrigation remotely to ensure efficient water use.

Paddock also said since 2013 Driscoll’s has required its growers to track and report water use through electronic devices installed on wells. The tracking aims to identify problem areas to fix and successful practices to share, she said.

Ross said Californians are rethinking water policy in light of the drought, and there’s a potential for more holistic policies than in the past. For example, when the state adopted storm water regulations, capturing runoff wasn’t part of the conversation.

“The issue has renewed everyone’s focus on reusing water, recycling water, knowing where every molecule of water is going,” Ross said. “This is an opportunity for us.”

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