The U.S. Department Agriculture (USDA) has announced that nearly $300,000 will be awarded to regional organizations in California to train and educate new and underserved farmers and ranchers on Farm Service Agency (FSA) programs and services.

The University of California-Davis will receive $75,000 to provide financial literacy training to small-scale, new and specialty crop and livestock producers in the Northern California foothills.  State Center Community College District will concentrate its $20,000 in funding toward outreach and education efforts to California’s Central Valley. California Farmlink will receive $75,000 to establish financial management workshops offering participants access to important business tools and resources.

Additionally, Fresno’s Valley Small Business Development Corporation will receive $50,000 to provide outreach to Central Valley farmers and ranchers seeking support and services from FSA programs; $20,000 will be provided to National Hmong American Farmers of Fresno to work with underserved growers and help them obtain crop insurance; and Sustainable Agriculture Education of Berkeley will receive $58,727 to help new farmers and ranchers develop business plans, obtain crop insurance and improve the success of their operations.

The announcement is the latest in a series of cooperative agreements between USDA FSA and organizations designed to promote agriculture. To date, $2.5 million has been awarded to 60 nonprofit organizations, universities and foundations in 28 states.  FSA administers farm commodity safety net, credit, conservation and emergency assistance programs for farmers and ranchers. To learn more about the cooperative agreements and participating organizations, visit www.fsa.usda.gov/outreach or contact your local FSA county office.  Local FSA offices can be found by visiting http://offices.usda.gov.

With the first day of Fall arriving this week, Californians are again starting to turn their attention to El Dorado County’s Apple Hill, which is now in the midst of its 2016 production season. From CDFA’s award-winning Growing California video series, here’s an encore presentation on Apple Hill’s draw as a tourism destination.

Photo by Diana Baldrica, Fresno Bee

By Robert Rodriguez

The Kings River Water Quality Coalition along with several other South Valley water quality coalitions received a $2 million grant from the federal government to address nitrate leaching from irrigated agriculture.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture grant will be used to launch a program to quantify and minimize the nitrate leaching from farming operations in the southern San Joaquin Valley, including portions of Fresno, Kings and Tulare counties.

The funding that came from the USDA’s Conservation Innovation Grant program will be implemented over 1.8 million acres of irrigated agriculture from Fresno to Kern counties. The goal of the program is to increase the use of conservation practices to protect water quality.

The project includes several partners, including the University of California Cooperative Extension, California State University and California Department of Food and Agriculture.

“This project provides support to growers in their efforts to continue to improve their operational efficiency while addressing groundwater quality objectives recently established for irrigated agriculture,” said Casey Creamer, coordinator of the Kings River Water Quality Coalition, which is administering the grant program in partnership with the six other water quality coalitions.

The coalitions partnering in the grant include the Buena Vista Coalition, Cawelo Water District Coalition, Kaweah Basin Water Quality Association, Kern River Watershed Coalition Authority, Kings River Water Quality Coalition, Tule Basin Water Quality Coalition and Westside Water Quality Coalition.

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By Bill Disbrow

We may someday have to stop calling our drought a temporary phenomenon and just label it the new normal. Climate change could lock the state into a dry pattern lasting centuries or even a millennia if history repeats itself, according to a new study out of UCLA.

Researchers correlated findings from Sierra Nevada soil samples and found that energy changes from natural occurrences like a shift in the Earth’s orbit or sun spots may have triggered prolonged dry weather in California. In the Nature.com journal Scientific Reports, the team argues that current radiative forcing – energy change  brought on by greenhouse gas emissions – may create a similar prolonged dry pattern in the Golden State.

“Radiative forcing in the past appears to have had catastrophic effects in extending droughts,” UCLA professor Glen MacDonald said in a university publication. “When you have arid periods that persist for 60 years, as we did in the 12th century, or for millennia, as we did from 6,000 to 1,000 B.C., that’s not really a ‘drought.’ That aridity is the new normal.”

From 6,000 to 1,000 B.C., the core sample indicates a 5,000-year dry period in California that had been suggested by previous research. That period was linked to a slight change in Earth’s orbit that resulted in increased solar energy in the Northern Hemisphere and creating La Niña conditions.

MacDonald’s team correlated historic radiative forcing with increased water temperatures in our oceans, likely creating more La Niña and El Niño weather patterns during previous dry spells. If greenhouse gasses persist, MacDonald warns that we could see more of these boom-or-bust winters, potentially bringing a significant change to California’s ecosystems.

“In a century or so, we might see a retreat of forest lands, and an expansion of sagebrush, grasslands and deserts,” MacDonald said in the UCLA release. “We would expect temperatures to get higher, and rainfall and snowfall would decrease. Fire activity could increase, and lakes would get shallower, with some becoming marshy or drying up.”

MacDonald stressed that his study can’t be used to predict the future, but it does offer cause for concern.

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