Two California projects are included in the mix of 33 that were recently awarded funding by the USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS).

The agency is investing $22.6 million in projects nationwide through the competitive Conservation Innovation Grants (CIG) program. The aim is to help develop tools, technologies, and strategies to support next-generation conservation on working lands including market-based solutions to resource challenges.

Two projects for just under $2.65 million are being awarded to California ventures.

Leveraging water markets to secure water for nature and agriculture. Photo courtesy of the Nature Conservancy, California.

The California chapter of the Nature Conservancy is receiving $1,869,439 to explore market-based approaches to water management for nature and agriculture. Two initiatives in the Central Valley and in western Ventura County, will explore the use of advanced metering infrastructure to facilitate water quantity trades as part of a solution to meeting new state groundwater regulations.

Streamlining regulatory compliance and conservation planning. Photo courtesy of the Freshwater Trust

The Freshwater Trust (TFT) is receiving $779,959 to develop an integrated planning, tracking, and adaptive management system for agricultural producers and regional coalitions in Solano County. Farmers and coalitions engaged in  multi-objective programs will be able to demonstrate progress in improving surface water and groundwater quality and quantity. The completed system would be broadly transferable and will be made publicly available.

Complete USDA NRCS News Release and Interactive Map

By Dave McIntyre, Washington Post

The Smithsonian recognizes five families who have worked their way up in the U.S. wine industry

Outside Robledo Family Winery, south of Sonoma, on a cool April Sunday, the U.S. and Mexican flags whipped a stiff salute in the wind blowing off the San Pablo Bay. A third banner bore the winery logo. The flags represent three themes central to the lives of Reynaldo Robledo and many other Mexican migrant workers who have helped shape California’s wine industry: heritage, opportunity and family.

Robledo is part of a small but growing community of Mexican American families who started as migrant workers and now have their own wineries. They have emerged from the invisible workforce of laborers who prune the vines in bitter winter cold and tend them under searing summer sun. We read about them when they collapse from heat exhaustion in California’s Central Valley or perish in a winery accident. But they rarely appear in the glossy magazines that extol the luxury wine lifestyle, except as cheerful extras in harvest photos.

Five Mexican American families are helping craft the next chapter in the story. They started as migrant workers and now have their own wineries.

They came from Michoacan or Jalisco, two agricultural provinces near Mexico City. Their fathers left for El Norte as migrant workers — some under the Bracero guest-worker program, others crossing the border illegally but gaining legal status in a time when papers were easier to come by. They worked in California’s burgeoning agricultural industry before settling in wine country. They encountered some of Napa Valley’s most celebrated winemakers and contributed to California’s wine revolution in the 1970s and 1980s, a period that saw dramatic changes in viticulture and food culture as the United States became a wine-loving nation.

“Their story is the journey,” says Steve Velasquez, associate curator at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History, which honored the families during its annual winemakers’ fundraising dinner in May. “A journey from Mexico to the U.S. to work in agriculture, from a handful of families to a thriving community of Mexican Americans, from vineyard workers to winery owners. . . . These families represent Mexican Americans who once just supported an industry but now help shape it.”

Reynaldo Robledo

Robledo Family Winery

Reynaldo Robledo, center, came to California in 1968 to work in the fields of Napa Valley. Nearly 50 years later, he runs his own vineyard, with the help of his children. Lazaro Robledo, one of Reynaldo’s seven sons, manages the tasting room at Robledo Family Winery. Also pictured is Reynaldo Robledo’s girlfriend, Leticia Trejo. Photo by Marvin Joseph, Washington Post

Reynaldo Robledo tears up with pride as he describes how in 2003, he became the first Mexican American migrant worker in California to open his own tasting room to the public. He displays mementos of other career highlights, including those White House dinners and a 2008 visit to the winery from Mexican President Felipe Calderón.

Robledo’s story began more modestly, and he related it to me in quiet, hesitant English as we sat at a large table made of wood from his native Michoacan state while his youngest son, Lazaro, prepared to welcome the day’s first customers to Robledo Family Winery, in the Carneros region a few miles south of Sonoma.

Even as a young boy in Mexico’s agricultural Michoacan state, Reynaldo was used to being in charge. He was the oldest of 13 children whose father, grandfather and uncles spent eight months of every year working in apple orchards and vineyards in El Norte, and he assumed family responsibilities in their absence.

So as a teenager in Napa Valley, he was quick to seize opportunity, which was plentiful in those heady early years of California’s wine boom. Napa was rapidly transforming from a sleepy agricultural region of prune and walnut orchards into a viticultural powerhouse. An Italian American vineyard manager taught him how to graft vines, a skill that earned him as much as $4.75 per vine. He learned to drive a tractor. Before long he was a crew chief for a vineyard management company planting and managing thousands of acres of vineyards.

Learning the wine business literally from the ground up was not enough. Robledo dreamed of owning his own vineyards and putting his family name on a label. In 1984, he purchased a 13-acre junkyard in Carneros no one else wanted for about $126,000. He cleaned it up, planted vines and sold the grapes to Mumm Napa for sparkling wine. Today, Robledo Family Winery owns or leases 350 acres of vineyards in Carneros and Lake County.

While growing his business, Robledo was also raising a family. He married his childhood sweetheart, Maria, in 1970, and they raised seven sons and two daughters. It wasn’t all bliss and harmony. He and Maria divorced in 2012, and Reynaldo hints at some strong disagreements with his children.

“The boys didn’t understand the business,” he says. “In wine, you invest your money and you don’t see it for a few years. When people don’t understand the business, they want money right away.” Even so, in 2014 he formally turned ownership of the winery and vineyard management firm to five of his sons, including chief executive and winemaker Everardo and tasting room manager Lazaro Robledo, 64, also struggled with the clash of American culture and the patriarchal traditions he brought from Mexico.

“When we first made a sauvignon blanc, I told the family I wanted to call it Seven Brothers for my sons. That was a mistake,” he says with a laugh. “My two daughters were very angry.”

Another wine was less contentious. Los Braceros is a blend of cabernet sauvignon, syrah and merlot. “Braceros means strong arms,” Robledo explained. “A worker could bring his wife and one son. These grapes represent the family: father, mother and son.”

Amelia Morán Ceja

Ceja Vineyards

Amelia Morán Ceja of Ceja Vineyards and her daughter, Dalia. Amelia is the first Mexican American woman to be president of a California winery. Photo by Marvin Joseph, Washington Post

When young Amelia Morán moved from Jalisco, Mexico, to Rutherford, Calif., in September 1967, she worked in the vineyards after school. Her father, Felipe, was a manager for Oakville Vineyard Management, which tended the now-famous To Kalon vineyard for Robert Mondavi Winery. Mondavi, who would become the most influential vintner in California, was just in his second harvest, and the winery was not yet finished.

Amelia, 12 at the time, remembers enjoying the work and meeting a young boy her age who had just arrived from Mexico, Pedro Ceja, whom she would later marry. And she remembers liking the To Kalon cabernet.

“Pedro tells everybody I ate the grapes for the first two hours,” she says. “It’s true!”

Her other impressions of food in her new home were not positive. “It was all processed food,” she recalls. She began making her own lunches from recipes her grandmother taught her back in Mexico.

Today, Ceja is an enthusiastic ambassador for Mexican cuisine, filming instructional videos and demonstrating recipes in television appearances. “I want to take the best of Mexican culture — not the macho stuff, that’s no good — and incorporate it with the best from my adopted country,” she says.

Ceja, 61, is the first Mexican American woman to be president of a California winery. She co-founded Ceja Vineyards in 1999 with Pedro and his brother, Armando, the winemaker. They own or lease 150 acres in Napa and Sonoma counties and plan to break ground this year on a winery on their property in the Napa section of Carneros.

Two years ago, Ceja lobbied in Washington for revisions in worker protection regulations that had not been updated since 1992. Her activism grew out of the turbulent labor movement of the 1970s led by Cesar Chavez, who would stay with her family when her father was president of the local United Farm Workers chapter. “I marched with them on Route 29,” she recalls.

“People understood that in order to live a life of dignity, they needed the support of someone to advocate for them,” Ceja says. “Even today, the farmworkers are invisible, and we need to advocate for them. Through our wines we are paying homage to the true artists of wine — the workers.”

Though still a young winery, Ceja Vineyards is preparing for generational change. Amelia’s three children are all involved; Dalia Ceja, with an executive MBA, is sales and marketing director, and Armando’s daughter is assistant winemaker.

“There is an expression in Spanish, ‘Aun hay mas,’ ” Ceja says. “There is much more to come.”

Continue the article and meet three additional wine families here.

In addition, here’s a Growing California video featuring Ceja wines – ‘Love on the Vine’

Carbon-collecting machinery is now online in Hinwil, Switzerland

By Jason Daley

The Swiss company Climeworks this week switched on its first carbon capture plant—a machine designed to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. The company hopes to quickly scale up its technology and capture one percent of the global carbon dioxide produced by burning fossil fuels by 2025, reports Bobby Magill for Climate Central.

Located near the Swiss village of Hinwil on the roof of a garbage incinerator, the direct air capture technology uses a proprietary filter to absorb atmospheric CO2 as it passes through the plant, according to a press release. Once the filter is saturated, it is heated to 100 degrees Celsius, causing it to release the gas. The CO2 is then redirected to a greenhouse where it will help grow vegetables like tomatoes and cucumbers. The carbon boost could improve the lettuce harvest by up to 20 percent, according to the company’s website.

To achieve their goal of one percent, the company estimates they will need 250,000 plants the same size as the Hinwil unit, Magill reports.

Though the plant doesn’t result in net negative emissions, it is recycling the carbon dioxide for other uses, Magill writes. In order to actually achieve negative emissions the removed CO2 would have to be sequestered via capture in underground chambers or transformation into substances like rock.

In the future, the technology could also be used to capture and sequester carbon dioxide. But for now, the plant is giving CO2 emissions a function, rather than simply letting them go in the atmosphere. The company also sees potential in selling the captured CO2 to the beverage industry to carbonize drinks or producing a renewable hydrocarbon fuel.

“CO2 capture from air has been a very controversial topic in research for a long time,” Valentin Gutknecht, a business development manager at Climeworks tells Pultarova. “There was a belief that the cost can’t get down below $600 per ton of CO2 even at the mass scale. But we have managed to break this barrier.” As Magill reports, the company hopes to get the price down to about $400 per ton.

But the technology is controversial for more than its cost. Last year, leading climate scientists, including Glen Peters, published a paper in the journal Science arguing that the nascent technology directs focus away from reducing overall emissions. And it could cause complacency in some global leaders who believe that a future technological breakthrough could readily solve the climate crisis.

But Climeworks co-founder Christoph Gebald has no scruples about his project, he tells Magill. With effects due to climate change increasingly apparent, we need to use all tools possible to clean up global emissions.

Link to story

By Andrea Thompson

The Earth’s rising temperature is expected to knock the global water cycle out of whack, but exactly how it will change is uncertain. Scientists, though, can look for clues as to what the future might bring in the major climate swings that have happened in the past.

A new study that does just that suggests that Earth’s rain belts could be pushed northward as the Northern Hemisphere heats up faster than the Southern Hemisphere. That shift would happen in concert with the longstanding expectation for already wet areas to see more rain and for dry ones to become more arid.

The study, detailed Wednesday in the journal Science Advances, “adds to the large body of evidence that climate change is going to mess with the large-scale motions of air and water in the atmosphere. And this matters, because those patterns largely determine where it’s rainy or arid, broadly speaking,” NASA climate scientist Kate Marvel, who wasn’t involved with the study, said in an email.

These changes in rain distribution could have implications for future water resources, particularly in areas where water supplies are already stressed, such as the western U.S. and parts of Africa.

From the basic physics of the atmosphere, scientists expect that as the planet heats up from ever-mounting levels of greenhouse gases, net global precipitation will increase because a warmer atmosphere holds more moisture. But that increase won’t be uniform and is likely to be concentrated in the already moist tropics. And because higher temperatures also increase evaporation, other areas, such as the already dry subtropics, are likely to dry out further.

But which regions are wet and dry are also determined by the locations of the Earth’s main rain belts. The positions of those rain belts, in turn, are tied to that of the so-called thermal equator (the ring around the planet’s middle where surface temperatures are highest). And the location of that equator is impacted by the balance of temperatures between the Northern and Southern hemispheres.

Because the Northern Hemisphere has more landmass, it is heating up faster than the Southern Hemisphere, and, as some climate models have suggested, this could push the thermal equator northward, and along with it those key rain belts.

Aaron Putnam, a paleoclimatologist at the University of Maine, and Wally Broecker, a Columbia University climate scientist, looked for clues as to whether such shifts have happened before in various paleoclimate records, including the shorelines of ancient lakes and cave stalagmites.

The lakes they examined are so-called closed-basin lakes, which have rivers feeding into them, but not draining them, meaning that changes in lake levels are governed solely by precipitation and evaporation.

During the Last Glacial Maximum when the Earth was much colder, closed-basin lakes in currently dry parts of western North America, the Middle East and South America were much larger than they are now, as evidenced by radiocarbon dating and other testing of their ancient shorelines. The precursor of Utah’s Great Salt Lake, for example, was more than 11 times larger than the current lake.

Studies of the dynamics of these lakes point to increased precipitation in these regions as the likely reason these lakes reached such massive extents. This suggests more precipitation fell away from the tropics in a colder climate, the opposite of what is expected as the world warms.

Those same lakes, along with other evidence from around the world, also points to the shifting of rain belts after a rapid loss of Arctic sea ice about 14,600 years ago that saw the Northern Hemisphere heat up faster than the Southern.

Layers of sediment off the coast of South America, for example, show changes in the amount of rain-fueled river water dumping into the ocean, while cave stalagmites, which need an influx of mineral-laden rainwater to grow, also show changes in precipitation over time.

These and other paleoclimate records indicate that rain belts shifted northward along with the thermal equator because of the global heat imbalance. Over the western U.S., for example, the Pacific subtropical jet went from providing moisture to southern California and the Great Basin during the glacial era to dumping it over northern California and Oregon as it does today.

While the warming happening now has a different cause than the past periods they studied, the authors think this past change could be a guide to the future and that same Pacific subtropical jet could move further north still.

Kevin Trenbeth, a climate scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., said the study didn’t account for changes in sea surface temperatures, which are the main drivers of changes in the position of the rain belts (as is seen during an El Nino event, when Pacific warming pushes the subtropical jet over the Western U.S. southward). Trenberth was also not involved in the study.

Putnam said the study was more focused on how the difference in warming between the hemispheres impacted the rain belts.

The changes in rain dynamics could also depend on the seasons, as climate records over recent decades suggest that the difference in heating between the two hemispheres is most pronounced during the Northern Hemisphere, or boreal, winter.

What this could mean, the authors posit, is that as the boreal winter continues to warm disproportionately, the thermal equator and therefore the rain belts won’t travel as far south as they currently do during the winter. This could have major impacts on areas, such as the western U.S., which get the bulk of their rain during the winter.

Conversely, in the boreal summer, when the difference between the two hemispheres isn’t as great, the “wet get wetter, dry get drier” effect of warming will dominate, meaning more rain in the tropics and less in the subtropics.

Of course, like any single study, this one is far from the final say. “This will evolve,” Putnam said, as more paleoclimate records emerge and are paired with climate models to “try to see if climate models can reproduce the patterns that we see in those datasets.”

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