This month the Planting Seeds blog is featuring stories on food security, nutrition, and efforts to reduce food waste. CDFA’s Office of Farm to Forkis committed to helping all Californians access healthy and nutritious California-grown food by connecting consumers, school districts, and others directly with California’s farmers and ranchers. This story is about CalRecycle’s program to enlist Californians in limiting food waste.

Californians throw away nearly 6 million tons of food scraps or food waste each year. This represents about 18 percent of all the material that goes to landfills. In order for California to reach its goal of 75%source reduction, recycling and composting, food waste must be addressed.

California’s Mandatory Commercial Organics Recyclinglaw requires businesses to recycle their organic waste. The links below provide more information on food waste management as well as examples of how various business groups and public entities are managing food waste.

Everyone has a role in saving resources and wasting less food. Creative food rescue projects like the UglyFruitAndVeg Campaignwork to save healthy fruits and vegetables from becoming waste. Rather than throwing away excess food, find ways to manage it more thoughtfully, such as working with groups to ensure that it goes to disadvantaged people, and composting for soil restoration. To further educate the public about food waste, the Natural Resources Defense Counciland the Ad Councilhave initiated a food waste reduction campaign known as Savethefood.com. Their web site offers a complete media kitwith posters, videos, social media postings, and more.

CalRecycle conducted two workshops in support of a proposed Food Waste Prevention and Rescue grant program; follow the progress of that program.

CalRecycle has been working to reduce food waste since at least 2002, when its predecessor agency conducted a Food Diversion Summit.

• Hotels/Restaurants

  Information for restaurants on managing food scraps.

• Households

  Information for households on managing food scraps.

• Schools

  Information for colleges/universities and K-12 on managing food scraps.

• US EPA’s Food Recovery Hierarchy

• Stadiums/Special Events

  Information for stadiums, fairs, festivals, and catered events on managing food scraps.

• Health Care Industry

  Information for the health care industry on managing food scraps.

• Grocery Stores

  Information for grocery stores on donating edible food to disadvantaged communities.

This month the Planting Seeds blog is featuring stories on food security and nutrition. CDFA’s Office of Farm to Fork is committed to helping all Californians access healthy and nutritious California-grown food by connecting consumers, school districts, and others directly with California’s farmers and ranchers. 

UC Merced is relaunching its branch of the Blum Center for Developing Economies with a focus on food security, with a hope to make it a hub for food-security-related research and outreach.

Economics Professor Kurt Schnier, with the School of Social Sciences, Humanities and Arts, and Karina Diaz Rios, a nutrition specialist in the UC Cooperative Extension, will lead the rejuvenated Blum Center, with administrative help from the Health Sciences Research Institute (HSRI).

“We want to create a community on campus to address issues of food security,” Schnier said. “We want to help engage students, faculty members and the community to have a direct effect on people’s lives.”

Merced County’s economy is largely based around agriculture, yet many people there do not have food security. The food insecurity rate in the area is 15.5 percent, according to the Merced County Food Bank, compared to a statewide average of 13.9 percent. Nearly 30 percent of those considered food insecure in Merced County are children. Food insecurity is defined as a lack of reliable access to a sufficient quantity of affordable, nutritious food.

The Blum Center at UC Merced started in 2013 and is affiliated with the Blum Center at UC Berkeley, which was founded by a gift from investment banker and UC Regent Richard C. Blum.  There are Blum Centers on several other UC campuses, including UCLA, UC Davis and UC Berkeley, the school from which Blum graduated. Each center has a slightly different focus, though all work toward the betterment of the global society.

Link to UC Merced blog post

Recent snowfall in the Sierra.
Photo by Michael Macor, San Francisco Chronicle

By Peter Fimrite

The blizzards that ravaged the Sierra Nevada in the past month wiped out more than a third of the California snowpack deficit that built up over five years of drought, a team of scientists said Monday, while encouraging state residents to continue conserving water.

The storms deposited roughly 17.5 million acre-feet of frozen water in the Sierra, or 37 percent of what’s called the “snow water deficit” in the state, according to a study by the University of Colorado and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

“This winter, from my viewpoint, dropped an impressive amount of snowfall and made a significant dent in the water deficit, but it certainly didn’t come close to relieving the total deficit for the entire drought period,” said Noah Molotch, a research scientist at the NASA Laboratory and director of the University of Colorado’s Center for Water, Earth Science and Technology.

The snow water deficit is defined as the amount of frozen water below what is normal for a period of time. California’s average yearly deficit during the drought was 10.8 million acre-feet, according to the study, or 54 million acre-feet from 2011 to 2016, said Molotch, who led the study.

One acre-foot of water is enough to cover an acre of land in a foot of water — generally enough to supply a single family with water for a year.

The storms in January dumped enormous amounts of rain and snow, breaking records and filling almost every major reservoir. In the northern Sierra, more rain has already fallen this winter than during an entire average year. The water content of the snowpack across the Sierra is now about 180 percent of normal for this time of year.

The heaping snow drifts prompted the government’s Drought Monitor to classify 49 percent of California as free of drought last week, a recovery from the 5 percent figure a year ago. All of the Bay Area, except for a tiny portion of Santa Clara County, was drought-free, according to the federal index, as was the northern half of the state, from San Francisco to the Oregon border.

The problem, Molotch said, is that California pumped huge amounts of groundwater to keep people and crops hydrated during the drought, depleting what is essentially a water savings account.

“It’s pretty clear that we aren’t going to be able to put water back into that savings account as fast as we were able to take it out,” he said. “For three weeks’ worth of snowfall it was pretty amazing, so there is reason for optimism, but one snowy winter will not be able to reverse multiple years of drought.”

Link to story

In 2015 California’s farms and ranches received approximately $47 billion for their output. This represents a decrease of nearly 17 percent compared to 2014. California remains the leading US state in cash farm receipts.

California’s agricultural abundance includes more than 400 commodities. Over a third of the country’s vegetables and two-thirds of the country’s fruits and nuts are grown in California. California’s top-10 valued commodities for 2015 are:

• Milk and Cream— $6.29 billion
• Almonds — $5.33 billion
• Grapes — $4.95 billion
• Cattle and Calves — $3.40 billion
• Lettuce — $2.26 billion

• Strawberries — $1.86 billion
• Tomatoes — $1.71 billion
• Flowers and Foliage — $1.08 billion
• Walnuts — $977 million
• Hay — $945 million

Statistics

California agricultural statistics derive primarily from the United States Department of Agriculture/National Agricultural Statistics Services (USDA/NASS) reports. The California Department of Food and Agriculture also publishes statistics related to California dairy production and, in cooperation with the University of California at Davis, statistics for California agricultural exports. For most timely research into California dairy statistics, please see our dairy pages under Division of Marketing Services. Please see also links in the right hand column for USDA National Agricultural Statistics and Economic Research Service reporting. For county-level reporting please see the CDFA County Liaison site.

Annual crop year reports have been reproduced below for your convenience. Export reports are typically published within the corresponding crop year report. While data is made available throughout the year, crop year and export reports are published typically about one year following the given crop year.

Link to report

CDFA’s State Organic Program (SOP) is pleased to announce a federal funding opportunity of $12.5 Million for eligible applicants under the Organic Cost Share Program (OCCSP).  The SOP has applied to the Farm Service Agency (FSA) under the United States Department of Agriculture to assist in distribution of these funds.  This money assists organic producers and handlers by offsetting costs related to SOP registration, certification, and transitional fees paid to certifiers as producers transition to organic.The cost-share payments May not exceed 75 percent of costs up to a maximum of $750 per producer/handler for each scope (registration, certification, transitional).

The FSA, in addition to administering the program, will also be directly accepting applications for reimbursement of funds. Operations will be subject to the same eligibility criteria and calculation of cost share payments regardless of whether they apply though the SOP or FSA local office.

For producer or handler Applications, FSA county offices will accept applications producers and handlers for FY 2017 starting on March 20, 2017 and ending October 31, 2017.

In fiscal year 2015/16 CDFA processed and distributed a total amount of $1,543,929 to 1,917 producers and handlers.

For eligibility requirements and further details please visit the following website https://www.cdfa.ca.gov/is/i_&_c/organic.html or you may contact the SOP at (916) 900-5030.