We share the concerns over the recent reports of salmonella illness connected to poultry and wish to convey our empathy for the people who have contracted illness and their families.

Food safety is a primary concern of California food producers and for California government as it works with food producers to provide a wholesome, nutritious and safe food supply for all people. All of agriculture and the food-supply chain have a responsibility to protect people from food-borne illness, and I am determined to do all I can as secretary to accomplish that to the best of our ability. The key is a commitment to continual improvement. We have that in California.

The California Department of Public Health (CDPH), which has jurisdiction over food recalls, has not requested Foster Farms to recall chickens because, with proper handling and preparation, CDPH says the product is safe for consumption. A key message for consumers is that they should follow safe food-handling practices with raw poultry, as it is a raw animal protein that is expected to have some level of naturally-occurring bacteria present. It is important to understand that cooking chicken fully to 165 degrees Fahrenheit will kill the bacteria that are present. According to Dr. Ron Chapman, director of CDPH, chicken is safe to consume as long as consumers follow that guideline and do not cross-contaminate fully cooked chicken with raw chicken juices.

The illnesses being investigated by CDPH, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the USDA have been detected over a seven-month period. These agencies are working with Foster Farms to ensure proper manufacturing processes, and to ensure proper interventions are in place to reduce the presence of naturally-occurring bacteria. Additionally, Foster Farms is continually working to implement improved processes to reduce the presence of bacteria.

The next segment in the Growing California video series, a partnership with California Grown, is “Here’s the Beef,” a story about Harris Ranch.

http://www.latimes.com/local/la-me-urban-agriculture-law-20131003,0,3253879.story

SAN FRANCISCO – Sandwiched between rows of homes in the fog-kissed Mission Terrace neighborhood, Little City Gardens provides salad greens and fresh-cut flowers to local restaurants from what was once a weedy vacant lot.

Like many of California’s urban agriculture practitioners, however, Caitlyn Galloway is plagued by a key uncertainty: She is on a month-to-month lease with a landlord who must recoup the lot’s steep property taxes and may soon sell or develop.

Now, California cities and counties eager to encourage community gardens and small-scale farms in urban pockets have a novel tool at their disposal that could help solve Galloway’s problem. Legislation recently signed by Gov. Jerry Brown will allow municipalities to lower the assessed value — and property taxes — on plots of three acres or less if owners pledge to dedicate them to growing food for at least five years.

“As urban farmers one of the biggest obstacles we’ve faced is land tenure,” said Galloway, 32. “It’s a huge step for urban agriculture.”

The legislation authored by Assemblyman Phil Ting (D-San Francisco) arose from this city’s rich blend of urban ag interests: community gardens with long waiting lists, nonprofits that offer hands-on nutritional education, and small enterprises like Galloway’s that took root when officials here changed zoning laws.

The program is voluntary: Interested cities can now move forward to create “urban agriculture incentive zones.” County supervisors must then sign off. (Counties can also directly create their own zones.)

It passed the Senate unanimously and garnered just six no votes in the Assembly. Sole opposition came from the California Assessors’ Assn., which cited potential for abuse by corporate property owners who might cut deals with local government. The bill was later amended to curtail lot size.

Local governments that opt in would feel most of the pain of lost property tax revenue, while the Senate Appropriations Committee estimated the general fund hit at “less than $1 million” in increased school aid annually.

Ting, a former San Francisco assessor, described it as “a subsidy with a very limited fiscal impact. We’re trying to drive better land use for people who might have a parking lot or an empty lot they’re waiting to develop.”

For years, Ting had backed cutting-edge San Francisco policies that helped transform eyesore parcels, raising property values on entire blocks. The idea spread.

“We started to see a movement in cities all over California that have really decided they want to be growing their food,” he said. “They want to have access to agricultural space.”

The concept for the zones is a hybrid of the Wiliamson Act, which offers tax subsidies to owners of rural land maintained for agricultural purposes, and the Mills Act, under which cities may enter into contracts with private owners who receive subsidies in exchange for restoring and preserving historic buildings.

It was conceived by Nicholas Reed and Juan Carlos Cancino, Stanford Law School grads who helped launch the San Francisco Greenhouse Project, an effort to turn a lot dotted with 18 decrepit greenhouses in the Portola district into an urban agriculture showcase.

The pair also took an interest in Little City Gardens, helping Galloway with number crunching. Even if she could afford the million-dollar cost of the property she cultivates, property taxes could easily sink her. The property owner wrote a letter in support of the bill but his next steps are unclear.

They concluded that if the city wanted urban farms that didn’t rely on public land, or heavy philanthropic support, “we need to see some change in the tax law that would recognize a different use — that this wasn’t a residential or commercial use but an agricultural one,” Cancino said.

They turned to Eli Zigas, food systems and urban agriculture program manager for SPUR, a San Francisco urban planning organization. Zigas is also a member of the San Francisco Urban Agriculture Alliance — which ultimately became the bill’s sponsor — and invited Ting to hear Cancino and Reed present their idea.

Support flowed in from organizations in Sacramento, Oakland, East Palo Alto and San Diego, as well as more than half a dozen in Los Angeles County.

“Land is a premium, particularly when you have empty parcels going for hundreds of thousands of dollars,” said D’Artagnan Scorza, executive director of the Inglewood-based Social Justice Learning Initiative, who called the law a “huge market incentive for land owners who are not intending to do development.”

Scorza’s organization has already created 40 gardens in Los Angeles that donate the food they grow to needy families who live where supermarkets are scarce. They are predominantly located at schools or on other public land as well as in private yards. But the organization hopes to create a commercial farm that will create jobs while funding its educational efforts and food giveaways.

His next step is to lobby Los Angeles lawmakers to get onboard.

Elsewhere, Sacramento city officials supported the bill and have expressed interest in participating in the program, as has San Francisco Supervisor David Chiu, who is moving forward to seek local approval.

“We simply want to create the impetus and awareness for property owners that this is a viable and productive use of land,” Chiu said. “This is an option many communities are excited about.”

Read the original story from the Washington Post

Hunkered down in a converted shipping container stationed in a San Francisco parking lot, three young entrepreneurs are tinkering with the DNA of ordinary plants in the hopes of being able to mass produce a variety that glows in the dark.

If all goes well, their start-up company will begin mailing out the first batch of seeds next spring to the 8,000 donors across the country who helped them raise nearly $500,000 in a phenomenally successful online fundraising campaign through Kickstarter.

The distribution of an estimated 600,000 seeds would be, by far, the largest release of a synthetically engineered organism to the general public. The recipients will be able to plant the seeds in any standard flower pot and, with enough light and water, grow a glowing version of a small winter annual with oval-shaped leaves that is related to mustard.

It is an event that supporters are looking forward to with giddy excitement but also one that has sparked worry in Washington about whether existing laws and statutes are adequate if something goes wrong and the seeds upset the balance of the environment.

The team is confident they can grow a plant that gives off light — scientists have been able to create glowing plants as far back as in the 1980s. What they don’t know yet is how bright they can make it. They plan to announce Friday that they have successfully created an early prototype of glowing seeds.

For Antony Evans and his colleagues, the experiment represents the first step toward the ultimate goal of creating sustainable natural lighting. They imagine a world where light bulbs are filled with DNA from fireflies and jellyfish and bioluminescent trees replace streetlights.

“Our project is a demonstration of what’s possible,” said Evans, 33, who has an MBA and is the Glowing Plant Project’s manager.

A generation ago, the process of manipulating an organism’s genes required millions of dollars in sophisticated equipment and years of trial and error. Now it can be done in a garage with secondhand parts ordered off the Internet in a few days. Thanks to advances in computational power, the cost of reading 1 million base pairs of DNA (the human genome has approximately 3 billion pairs) has fallen from upwards of $100,000 to a mere 6 cents.

That has allowed entrepreneurs to enter the field with minimal investment. The team, keeping their exact location a secret because of worries about activists potentially destroying their work, is starting its first experiments this month on hundreds of seedlings lined up on tables in their makeshift lab.

The team is not looking to reinvent the wheel. Working off previously published papers, they have decided to take genes from a bioluminescent marine bacterium and insert it into seedlings of a small flowering plant that’s known as Arabidopsis.

The process of creating the glowing plant, as the team describes it, is simple: They input the DNA sequences from the bacterium into a computer and a program modifies the DNA sequence to make it work in plants. The team then e-mails the file containing the sequence of letters (G, T, C, A) to a company in China, wires $8,000, and a few weeks later they get in the mail the DNA, synthesized by Chinese technicians. They then take the DNA and use a machine called a gene gun — because it’s earliest version was a modified air pistol — to insert it into the plant.

The challenge, according to Evans, is trying to figure out how to make the plant brighter. Is it the gene expression? The oxygen? The amount of sunlight? Earlier experiments produced plants that were so dim the light could be seen only in completely blacked-out rooms.

“We’re not expecting extremely bright. We’re aiming glow-in-the-dark, stars-on-the-ceiling-type light. The first batch is not going to replace your bedroom light, but in the longer term that’s the goal,” Evans said.

That kind of future thinking was why the Glowing Plant Project’s Kickstarter fundraising campaign, which officially began in April, was wildly popular from the start. While the company had hoped to raise a modest $65,000, it brought in $484,013 in just 44 days. A typical comment from a donor: “My dreams of having a greenhouse rose garden/glowing Avatar-like wonderland will soon be realized!”

The project soon ran into trouble, however. Deeming it “a new biotech threat coming from Silicon Valley,” the environmental watchdog ETC Group started an online petition calling on Kickstarter to shut down the project. Nearly 14,000 people signed it.

In August, Kickstarter responded to the debate by announcing that it had amended its rules to ban all genetically modified rewards for donors, putting such gifts in the same category as drugs and firearms. While donors who supported the Glowing Plant Project would still get their genetically modified seeds, they would be the last. Kickstarter said it recognized it had sparked discussion within the scientific community about whether its platform was the best place to release synthetic or genetically modified organisms.

The Glowing Plant Project is at the forefront of an emerging field known as synthetic biology. Known as genetic engineering on steroids, the research aims to create new life-forms for practical purposes. The definition is still evolving, but the science — which lies at the intersection of biology, engineering and computational bioinformatics — usually involves modifying organisms to transform them into miniature factories for producing things such as medicine, food flavorings or even biofuels.

While genetically modified organisms (GMOs) are created with DNA from natural sources, the products of synthetic biology are often brought to life with DNA sequences invented on a computer.

Critics warn that the untested and unmonitored release of the seeds is ill-advised because no one would be able to control what happens to the plants once they leave the lab. Adding to the concern is that the genes that make the plants glow will be passed from one generation to the next.

“What if someone decides it would be cute to light up a national forest?” asked Arthur Caplan, a bioethicist at New York University and an adviser to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency on synthetic biology.

A coalition of more than 110 environmental watchdog organizations has called on international regulators to demand independent risk assessments for these types of projects. But it’s not clear which U.S. agency should take the lead.

The various groups within the Department of Interior that oversee land and ecological issues — the Bureau of Land Management and Fish and Wildlife Service — say it’s outside their purview. The Food and Drug Administration says it is not involved because the plant is not meant to be eaten. The Environmental Protection Agency says it’s a Department of Agriculture matter.

In an e-mail exchange with the Glowing Plant Project’s founders, the USDA acknowledges that this particular project may be outside its powers, too, because of the way the glowing plant is being created. Because the scientists are shooting the DNA into the plant tissue by using a gene gun instead of using older methods, the federal framework for regulating biotechnology doesn’t cover this process.

The government guidelines were finalized in 1986. The gene gun wasn’t unveiled until the following year, 1987, in the journal Nature.

Dana Perls, a food and technology campaigner for Friends of the Earth, said that this interpretation of U.S. statutes could mean that dozens of other synthetic biology projects in the pipeline could also escape regulation.

“What they’re doing is taking the glowing plant developers’ word that it will be safe without knowing what risks might be involved,” Perls said. “This is precedent-setting.”

Evans says concerns are overblown. He said the company has taken numerous precautions — in plant species selection, how it transports the materials — to prevent any issues: “We are being very prudent in how we are doing this.”

Even before the controversy erupted, project partner Kyle Taylor — who said the environmental concerns are “constantly in the back of my mind” — had been tinkering around with various biocontainment methods. For instance, he said, he could try to make the plant deficient in a certain kind of vitamin such as B7 so that their caretakers would have to regularly give them an infusion of the nutrient. If they were to escape into someone’s garden, they would likely not survive.

“Where I come from, there’s this idea of stewardship, of taking care of land you grow,” said Taylor, 30, a Stanford-trained plant biologist who is from the farming community of Abilene, Kan. “I think it applies in this case.”

Evans argued that a highly regulated process for synthetic biology might have prevented entrepreneurs such as him from getting involved in the first place and, like many others in the biotech industry, thinks that oversight needs to be scaled back, not built up.

We need to find cost-effective ways for more start-ups to bring these kinds of products to market,” he said. “Only if we do this can the economic and social promise of the technology be realizable.”

And those who missed the Glowing Plant Project’s Kickstarter campaign won’t have long to despair. Taylor, Evans and their colleague Omri Amirav-Drory, 35, quickly announced that supporters could still buy a packet of 50 to 100 seeds for $50 or an actual plant itself for $100 from the company’s Web site. And for those willing to wait until 2015, the company said it hoped to have a new product on the market: a glowing rose for $150.

————————

Some bacteria glow in the dark. Such bioluminescenceis an expression of six genes from a section of the bacterium’s DNA known as the LUX operon, which the engineers can isolate and sequence.

The engineers tack on promoterand terminatorgenes, which would tell the plant when to start and stop reading the genes. The sequence is sent to a manufacturer, which mass-produces the genes.

Nanoparticles of gold and tungsten are coated with the manufactured genes and, using compressed air, are shot into cultured cellsfrom mouse-ear cress, a small mustard plant native to Europe. If not destroyed by the bioballistics, some of the cells absorbing the pellets might integrate the engineered sequence into the cell’s genome.

Whole plants are grown from the tissue culture. A glowing plant reaching maturity would be able to transfer its bioluminescence to future generations through the DNA found in its chloroplasts, photosynthetic cell organelles passed to offspring. Seeds from those plants would be collected and propagated.

Scientists are exploring the possibility of adding a biocontainmentfeature to the glowing plant to address environmental concerns. For instance, they could make the plant deficient in biotin (Vitamin B7) so that owners of the plant would have to feed the plant biotin on a regular basis. If the plant were to escape into the wild, it would likely not survive.

http://www.cdfa.ca.gov/egov/Press_Releases/Press_Release.asp?PRnum=13-032

As part of the ongoing effort to ensure that California is prepared for the impacts of climate change, the Climate Change Consortium for Specialty Crops has produced a report, Climate Change Consortium for Specialty Crops – Impacts and Strategies for Resilience, which identifies recommendations to address the challenges posed by climate change to producers of specialty crops.  As a member of the Governor’s Climate Action Team, the California Department of Food and Agriculture (CDFA) convened the Consortium to prepare the report. Climate change is expected to have significant and widespread impacts on California’s economy and environment.

“This is essential work as we prepare for a future that will require significantly greater food production while using fewer natural resources,” said CDFA Secretary Karen Ross. “I commend the Consortium for its efforts to clearly identify the challenges we’ll face and strategies to address them.”

The Consortium, a diverse group of individuals involved in California specialty crop agriculture, addressed climate change impacts in the areas of temperature, water resources, pests, and pollination, with the understanding that growers will face changes in environmental averages, trends, variability, and extremes.  Impacts to agriculture from changes in weather will be felt differently in different parts of California. Rainfall, humidity, and wind are some other common weather variables.

There was a general consensus within the Consortium that growers are already managing their lands in consideration of dynamic environmental variables. However, for specialty crop agriculture in California to adapt and be prepared for the effects of climate change, growers will require technological innovation,  scientific answers to fundamental climate change impact questions, investment in planning and preparedness, and agricultural support services.

“Although California specialty crop growers are exceptionally innovative, there are valuable lessons to learn by looking at climate patterns over time,” said Jocelyn Gretz, a Consortium member and director of environmental sciences and resources at Rio Farms in King City. “This document provides growers, policy makers and researchers with a summary of already-observed climate impacts on agriculture and an outline of potential solutions.”

California is the nation’s largest specialty crop producer. Funding for the report was provided by the Specialty Crop Block Grant Program, which is funded by the USDA and administered by CDFA. Specialty crops are defined as fruits and vegetables, tree nuts, dried fruits, horticulture, and nursery crops including floriculture.  California is the United States’ sole producer of several crops such as Clingstone peaches, olives, pistachios, walnuts, almonds and artichokes. The state’s unique environmental zones and Mediterranean climate allow for a diversity of crops to be produced throughout the year for local, national, and global distribution.

This report and the efforts of the Climate Change Consortium are an extension of Ag Vision, a blueprint for sustainability developed by the California State Board of Food and Agriculture in 2010. One of Ag Vision’s key strategies is to assure agricultural adaptation to climate change.  The Climate Change Consortium report is also part of a broader body of research about the impacts of climate change in California and how the state can prepare for them. Other recent reports include:

• Indicators of Climate Change in California, a report by the California Environmental Protection Agency that tracks 36 indicators of climate change and its effects.
• Preparing California for Extreme Heat, a Climate Action Team report on how the state can be better prepared from a public health perspective for increasing temperatures and extreme heat events.

CDFA is one of several state agencies involved in drafting an update to a statewide climate adaptation strategy. The new Safeguarding California Plan will address how California can protect against a variety of climate-related risks. Public meetings are being conducted this week and next to get input from Californians on key issues and approaches. A schedule of those meetings is available here.

 

This is a reprise post from our Growing California video series. Apple Hill is now open for its annual fall run in El Dorado County.

News release from Lund University in Sweden:

A Lund University research team has made an astounding discovery – bees have a battery of healthy bacteria in their honey stomach that protects them. Giving these lactic acid bacteria back to bees boosts their natural immune system, helping them fight off disease.

Watch the video on YouTube.

CCD, or Colony Collapse Disorder, is a mysterious mass death of honey bees that has wiped out 10 million beehives worldwide in the past six years. Around two-thirds of the global food supply depends on bee-pollinated crops.  It is believed a combination of pesticides, parasites, poor nutrition, and the stress of large-scale pollination is weakening bees’ immune systems, making them susceptible to disease.

The Lund University-developed product, SymBeeotic, is a natural supplement containing lactic acid bacteria, and is given to bees as nutrition, ideally before and after their winter hibernation.

“This is the only existing product that boosts bees’ natural immune system so they can fight multifactorial diseases”, says Dr Tobias Olofsson, who developed the product together with Dr Alejandra Vasquez.

It is currently common practice for example in the US to give bees antibiotics against bacterial diseases, in an attempt to prevent the disastrous decline of bees around the world. As resistance to antibiotics increases, the need to find alternatives is urgent. Lactic acid bacteria from bees could be one, and the research team has tested how the lactic acid bacteria in SymBeeotic influence the entire colony by producing bioactive substances that function as defence against bee pathogens.

SymBeeotic is a product of years of research, a journey that began for Tobias when he was a child. His grandfather was a beekeeper for 81 years, before he passed away at almost 99 years old earlier this year, actively keeping bees until he was 98.

Read the original news release

As we work together to embrace a future that will require a substantial increase in food production while using fewer natural resources, it is critical that we look for new ways to emphasize the importance of sustainability, which we define as an agricultural production system that meets the needs of the current generation without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. That’s why I applaud California Rangeland Trust for its partnership with Whole Foods. The retailer has committed to donating five percent of its net sales on September 25th from its stores in Northern California and Reno to the Trust.

I like this partnership because it underscores the importance of ecosystem services, which are the multiple benefits we gain from farming and ranching, including crop and livestock production.  This means that, in addition to valuable open space and wildlife habitat, the management decisions and conservation practices of farmers and ranchers enhance environmental quality, provide recreational opportunities, and offer social benefits.

Ecosystem services match up very well with the work of the California Rangeland Trust -conserving the open space, natural habitat and stewardship provided by California’s ranching families. The Trust has protected more than 275,000 acres of productive grazing lands across the state through the use of conservation easements.

California’s ranching heritage is important to our landscape, our economy and our environment. Ranchlands help to sustain us and feed us, and we’ll benefit from their protection for many years to come. I hope we’ll see more partnerships like this in the future, giving consumers an opportunity to see the connection between food and agriculture and enabling them to do something on its behalf.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/18/business/media/a-magazine-for-farm-to-table.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

By CHRISTINE HAUGHNEY

HUDSON, N.Y. — When a fledgling magazine gets former President Bill Clinton to contribute an article, you would think he would be featured on the cover. But the cover model for the current issue of the quarterly Modern Farmer is a sleepy-looking goat. Mr. Clinton is mentioned between articles on outer space farming and soil cuisine.