The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) has announced that incentives will resume this summer for farmers, ranchers and forest landowners interested in growing and harvesting biomass for renewable energy. The support comes through the Biomass Crop Assistance Program (BCAP), which was reauthorized by the 2014 Farm Bill. BCAP provides financial assistance to establish and maintain new crops of energy biomass, or who harvest and deliver forest or agricultural residues to a qualifying energy facility.

Financial assistance is available through BCAP for costs associated with harvesting and transporting agriculture or forest residues to facilities that convert biomass crops into energy. Eligible crops may include corn residue, diseased or insect infested wood materials, or orchard waste. The energy facility must first be approved by USDA to accept the biomass crop. Facilities can apply for, or renew, their BCAP qualification status beginning today. $11.5 million of federal funds will be allocated to support the delivery of biomass materials through December 2015. Last year, more than 200,000 tons of dead or diseased trees from National Forests and Bureau of Land Management lands were removed and used to produce renewable energy, while reducing the risk of forest fire. Nineteen energy facilities in 10 states participated in the program.

Farmers, ranchers and forest landowners can also receive financial assistance to grow biomass crops that will be converted into energy in selected BCAP project areas. New BCAP project area proposals will be solicited beginning this summer and accepted through fall 2015, with new project area announcements and enrollments taking place in early spring 2016. The extended proposal submission period allows project sponsors time to complete any needed environmental assessments and allows producers enough lead time to make informed decisions on whether or not to pursue the BCAP project area enrollment opportunity. This fiscal year USDA’s Farm Service Agency (FSA) will allocate up to $8 million for producer enrollment to expand and enhance existing BCAP project areas. Additionally, in accordance with the 2014 Farm Bill, underserved farmers are eligible for a higher establishment cost share. BCAP projects have supported over 50,000 acres across 74 counties in 11 different project areas.

BCAP was made possible by the 2014 Farm Bill, which builds on historic economic gains in rural America over the past six years, while achieving meaningful reform and billions of dollars in savings for taxpayers. Since enactment, USDA has made significant progress to implement each provision of this critical legislation, including providing disaster relief to farmers and ranchers; strengthening risk management tools; expanding access to rural credit; funding critical research; establishing innovative public-private conservation partnerships; developing new markets for rural-made products; and investing in infrastructure, housing, and community facilities to help improve quality of life in rural America. For more information, visit www.usda.gov/farmbill.

By Mark Bittman

Just about everyone agrees that we need more farmers. Currently, nearly 30 percent are 65 or older, and fewer than 10 percent are under 35. The number of farmers is likely to fall further with continuing consolidation and technological innovation.

But displacement of farmers is neither desirable nor inevitable. We need to put more young people on smaller farms, the kinds that will grow nourishing food for people instead of food that sickens us or yields products intended for animals or cars.

The problem is land, which is often prohibitively expensive. Farmland near cities is prized by developers and the wealthy looking for vacation homes, hobby farms or secure investments. Many farmers have no choice but to rent land for a year or two before being asked to move and start all over, because the purchase of even the smallest plot is out of their reach.

There are credible efforts to provide farmworkers new opportunities, like land trusts for preserving farmland. There are also dozens of federal and state programs aimed at helping farmers get started, as well as farm business incubators like the one run by Glynwood in the Hudson River Valley. But the barriers to obtaining land remain high.

A new bill proposed by Representatives Joe Courtney, a Connecticut Democrat, and Chris Gibson, a New York Republican, and devised with input from the National Young Farmers Coalition, would improve the situation by forgiving the balance of student loans of those who spent 10 years as farmers and made loan payments during that time.

The bill would add farmers to the Public Service Loan Forgiveness Program, which already forgives student loans for police officers, prosecutors, nurses and others, so perhaps its best aspect is the cultural shift it represents, grouping farmers with others in public service.

“Conceptually, this isn’t radical or symbolic,” says Courtney. “It’s recognizing a huge work force need.” And, as Gibson says, it addresses megafarming: “In the five years from 2007 to 2012 we only gained a little over 1,200 farmers. Since we aren’t going to stop eating, we have to reverse that trend, or we’ll see even more consolidation, more corporate farms, or increasing food imports; none of that is in our interest.”

All of this is true. And arguing against a bill like this would be counterproductive. But there are a couple of immediate objections here. The first is that the program is only focused on helping people who’ve gone to college, a particular slice of the American pie that skews white and well off. (There is of course the obvious question of why we can’t provide free college education to anyone who wants it.)

Second, the terms seem onerous: It’s difficult enough to make a living farming, especially when starting out. Why not (as some state programs do) forgive the loan after a couple of years, with an agreement to keep farming?

“It’s a step in the right direction, but it’s not transformative,” says Blain Snipstal, an ecological farmer on Maryland’s Eastern Shore and a member of the Southeastern African-American Farmers’ Organic Network. As everyone knows, it’s difficult to pass anything creative and progressive in Washington right now, so seeing this bill through would be positive movement.

Still: The question of getting land into the hands of all who want and deserve it has been plaguing the United States since Reconstruction, when President Andrew Johnson rejected every effort to compensate former slaves with land. Remember “40 acres and a mule”? It didn’t happen.

Farming is — or should be — a social enterprise as much as a business, one that benefits all of us and uses the land conscientiously and ecologically. Thus in the long run we’ve got to expand our vision to include some kind of land redistribution that would give those who want to work the land for our mutual benefit the ability to do so.

Let’s remember that much of “our” land was acquired though the displacement and murder of millions of Native Americans, and that it was made productive by enslaved, indentured and undervalued labor; providing farming opportunities to more people would partially redress those issues.

We can continue to pretend that megafarmers who produce for export and nonfood purposes need public support, or we can create new policies that invest in a better kind of farming — and lots of new farmers eager to do it.

Link to article

By Nathanael Johnson

There’s so much confusion about California’s drought, and a lot of my colleagues in the media, I’m sorry to say, have been amplifying that confusion. The proliferation of stories showing how much water various food products use implies that people should be eating water-thrifty foods — but that would do precisely nothing to fix the problem. The real solutions are within reach (I’ll get to those), but they will require the hard work of politics to achieve, rather than simplistic, consumer-focused fixes.

A recent survey from the Public Policy Institute of California found that, for the first time in the history of its polling, Californians say drought is the most important state issue, and 69 percent of Californians say water supply is a big problem in their part of the state.

When there’s this kind of concern about an issue, we in the media hustle to provide information. And there’s an obvious set of data for us to transform into engaging infographics: The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, Wired, and, er, Grist, along with many others, have been explaining how much water it takes to produce various food items. There’s nothing wrong with these until outlets try to spin that raw, context-less data into buzzy proscriptions about what to order at a restaurant. (In our defense, we tried to present the data without focusing on the California drought, and when Grist’s science editor Amelia Urry went on TV to talk about it she did a great job of pointing out that context mattered and “skipping that sirloin or chocolate cake isn’t going to put water back into depleted aquifers.”)

Here are the problems with trying to diet our way out of drought:

There are lots of reasons a farmer chooses a crop

Many “water guzzling” crops make sense if you consider a farmer’s ecological context.

The Los Angeles Times pointed out that lentils are “a thirsty food.” True, they take more water than other crops to grow. But they are also ideally suited to drought-prone regions. As Liz Carlisle, author of Lentil Underground, writes: Lentils “are content without irrigation, even in areas that frequently see droughts. Lentils grow when it rains, and pause their growth cycle when it’s dry. Instead of overshooting and wilting, they stage their growth to fit their water resource, and they stay low to the ground rather than bolting up in flamboyant amber waves.”

Then there’s alfalfa, which also sips a lot of water. But alfalfa is a great choice for farmers worried that they might not get their water, because if you stop irrigating, it simply goes dormant — then it springs back to life when the rains return. It’s also cheap: One planting can produce hay for six years, so it’s not a not a mortal wound if a farmer has to give up a few cuttings. Both alfalfa and lentils fix their own nitrogen, which makes them great rotation crops for farmers who want to reduce pests and diversify their farms.

Consider rice, another supposed water guzzler. Rice takes tons of water, because the fields are flooded. But that water doesn’t simply disappear — it seeps into the ground, and some of it goes back into the rivers. The water table in northern California is in good shape, in part because of all the rice paddies recharging the aquifers. Rice farmers flood their fields as a means of weed control, which allows them to dramatically reduce their pesticide use. And those fields provide important habitat for birds and fish — so important that the USDA’s Natural Resource Conservation Service is offering farmers money to continue flooding their fields to give migrating waterfowl a chance to survive the drought.

The value of water depends on location

If you’ve been paying attention to these factoids, you’ve learned that it takes a lot of water to grow beef. But knowing that does nothing to differentiate the cattle raised in the middle of a drought from the cattle raised by a rancher in a place with plentiful water, like Montana or North Dakota. It also hides the fact that California cattle subsist primarily on grain freighted in from the soggy Midwest. If you want to count the virtual water flowing out of the state, you also should count all the millions of gallons coming in every day on the rails.

The water footprint of beef also depends on what the beeves eat. In the hilly grasslands, where it’s often hard to grow crops, cattle can be an important part of a ranch’s ecosystem: They clear the grass before it has a chance to go to seed and oxidize, and they fertilize as they go. Remove the animals, and there may not much to do with the land except build houses.

There are other reasons to eat less meat, and I’ve suggested in the past that it would be environmentally beneficial to reduce global meat consumption. But it’s not a solution for California’s drought. We shouldn’t be asking individual eaters to outsmart a complex global market with every purchase.

What actually happens if people boycott California crops?

Farmers chose to grow the crops that will make them a living. If people stop eating California avocados and almonds and rice, it would make it harder to farm in the state. It would speed the conversion of farmland to suburbs and golf courses. And it would probably shift a lot of production overseas: More tomatoes might come from Chile than California.

An export ban would be similarly ineffective. Exports are the most offensive aspect of California agriculture to many: It feels crazy to be turning water into alfalfa and then shipping that to China in the middle of the drought. But the fact is, setting up some kind of trade barrier — even if it were politically possible — wouldn’t put more water into rivers. Farmers still have legal control over a lot of water, and they would put it to use. If we banned almonds, or stopped selling rice to Asia, the farmers would just use that water for something else.

What’s a better solution?

Instead of asking eaters to wade through this complexity every time they pick up a fork, we need policies that make water expensive for farmers in places where it’s scarce. A market price for water would simply eliminate inefficient crops.

And, in fact, California already has a functioning water market … with one massive market failure: It’s still legal for landowners to pump as much water out of their ground as they can in many places. And it’s that market failure that is causing the true shortages in poor farming towns.

However, the state is on its way to correcting that market failure. The legislature regulated groundwater last year, and water districts around the state are currently figuring out how to make sure they put as much water into the ground during wet years as they take out in dry years.

I am not arguing that an untrammeled market will fix everything. I’m arguing that a heavily, heavily trammeled market (there’s a lot of protections for those who might be injured by the sale of water in California) could fix almost everything.

It won’t fix the inefficient and environmentally damaging way the state moves water through the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta (the delta is the swamp that mires politicians for life). And it won’t save beleaguered fish, which are really suffering in the drought. Several policy wonks have suggested adding a tax to water use to discourage overuse and help pay for fixes to these environmental problems — they are also market failures, and a tax could bring them into the system.

But, that’s not a satisfying solution!

Politics and policy are not as exciting as a technical fix, but in this case they are the only thing that will actually work. You could try for a complete overhaul of the water rights system, but the experts tell me that just isn’t going to happen.

I just want a future that doesn’t suck for my daughters as they grow up in California. I’d like them to have healthy, rushing rivers to swim in; a diversity of fish species to marvel at, and eat; clean drinking water, available to everyone, equitably; and then, way down on the list, I’d like them to grow up in a state that still has farms, and produces great food.

All of that is within reach — if California can just implement its groundwater law. Instead of haphazardly picking foods to boycott or stockading the almond-eaters, let’s let farmers read the market signals and grow what’s appropriate for their circumstances. Then, when water is scarce and prices rise, farmers may find it’s most profitable to sell their water to serve rivers, cities, and fish.

A well-regulated market will push out the water uses that just don’t make sense. Drop-per-crop infographics won’t.

By Lesley McClurg

Because of California’s historic drought, the state’s rice crop will be 30 percent below normal –- at 375,000 acres. Experts say the smaller planting will hurt the economy and wildlife that depend on shallow flooded fields.

Tim Johnson, the President of the California Rice Commission says the largest impact will be felt in the small towns like Colusa, Marysville and Yuba City where farmers and workers depend on the rice industry for jobs.

“But, also in places like the Port of West Sacramento where we export our rice internationally and the rice mills and rice driers you see around the community,” says Johnson.

The ripples will be felt statewide. Johnson says the fallowed acreage will costs California’s economy hundreds of millions of dollars.

Dry fields are also bad news for ducks and geese that depend on flooded rice fields for food and breeding grounds. Mark Bittlecomb is the Ducks Unlimited Western Regional Director.

“We’re fearful that disease could happen. Avian botulism outbreaks were just starting last December, and that could happen again this year if (waterfowl) are concentrated,” he says. “And it (disease) can go through the population rather quickly and you can see massive die-offs.”

Biologists and engineers are working with landowners to increase water efficiency so more habitat is available using less water.

This year’s planting is the smallest since 1991.

Link to Capital Public Radio

The Sand County Foundation, the California Farm Bureau Federation and Sustainable Conservation are accepting applications for the $10,000 California Leopold Conservation Award. The award honors California farmers, ranchers and other private landowners who demonstrate outstanding stewardship and management of natural resources.

“The Leopold Conservation Award celebrates the people and places where innovative and creative thinking and experimentation are taking place,” said Judith Redmond of Full Belly Farm, recipient of the 2014 Leopold Conservation Award. “If you or a friend include conservation in your daily decision making – I hope you’ll submit a nomination. It’s okay to brag about good land stewardship.”

“Good intentions and luck take no farmer down the road to profitability and improved land health. Leopold Conservation Award recipients epitomize the creativity, drive and heartfelt conservation commitment it takes,” said Sand County Foundation President Brent Haglund.

Given in honor of renowned conservationist Aldo Leopold, the Leopold Conservation Award inspires other landowners by example and provides a visible forum where farmers, ranchers and other private landowners are recognized as conservation leaders. In his influential 1949 book, A Sand County Almanac, Leopold called for an ethical relationship between people and the land they own and manage, which he called “an evolutionary possibility and an ecological necessity.”

“California’s future gets brighter only if we all do our part,” said Sustainable Conservation Executive Director Ashley Boren. “The Leopold Conservation Award celebrates those deserving, but often overlooked, landowner heroes who do their part every day to steward our environment in ways that benefit people and the planet. All California farmers and ranchers committed to sound stewardship should consider applying to show how they’re leading the way to a more vibrant state.”

“The Leopold Conservation Award recognizes unique yet replicable strategies a farmer or rancher has developed in managing their land, to be the best steward of the natural resources on their farm or ranch. California farmers and ranchers are the most productive in the world and are trend setters at maximizing the fullest potential of their land to produce food and other agricultural products with the least environmental impacts,” said California Farm Bureau Federation President Paul Wenger.

Nominations must be postmarked by July 10, 2015, and mailed to Leopold Conservation Award c/o Sustainable Conservation, 98 Battery Street, Suite 302, San Francisco, CA 94111. The 2015 California Leopold Conservation Award will be presented in December at the California Farm Bureau Federation’s Annual Meeting in Reno.

The California Leopold Conservation Award is possible thanks to generous contributions from many organizations, including The Nature Conservancy, American AgCredit, the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, DuPont Pioneer and The Mosaic Company.

For application information, please visit www.leopoldconservationaward.org.

ABOUT THE LEOPOLD CONSERVATION AWARD
The Leopold Conservation Award is a competitive award that recognizes landowner achievement in voluntary conservation. The award consists of a crystal award depicting Aldo Leopold and $10,000. Sand County Foundation presents Leopold Conservation Awards in California, Colorado, Kansas, Kentucky, Nebraska, South Dakota, Texas, Utah, Wisconsin and Wyoming.

ABOUT SAND COUNTY FOUNDATION
Sand County Foundation is a non-profit conservation organization dedicated to working with private landowners to advance the use of ethical and scientifically sound land management practices that benefit the environment. www.sandcounty.net

ABOUT CALIFORNIA FARM BUREAU FEDERATION
The California Farm Bureau Federation works to protect family farms and ranches on behalf of more than 74,000 members statewide and as part of a nationwide network of more than 6.2 million Farm Bureau members. www.cfbf.com

ABOUT SUSTAINABLE CONSERVATION
Sustainable Conservation believes promoting a healthy environment can be good for business. Its award-winning air, water, wildlife and climate initiatives promote practical solutions and tangible results for California and its people. Founded in 1993, Sustainable Conservation’s effectiveness lies in building strong alliances with business, agriculture and government – and establishing models for environmental and economic sustainability that can be replicated across California and beyond. www.suscon.org

Link to news release

By Foon Rhee

With California stuck in a historic drought, there’s no shortage of blaming and shaming on who’s using how much water.

Homeowners wag their fingers at farmers, farmers bash developers, environmentalists say fish need more water and so on. We’re all making value judgments on the best uses for precious water.

Within California’s huge and important agriculture industry, distinctions are being made between crops eaten domestically, ones that are exported and those consumed by animals, not people.

In this food fight, researchers at the UC Davis Center for Watershed Sciences are doing some very interesting work, available at California WaterBlog. In studies that flew under the radar, they looked at how much water is needed to grow various crops – but in terms of the return on that investment in revenue and jobs.

“Pop per drop,” they call it, which has a nice ring to it.

A category of crops that include vegetables such as carrots and lettuce, along with garden plants and strawberries, produce the highest revenue for net water used ($14,318 per acre-foot). The broad category of fruits and nuts also ranks high ($2,392). Combined, these two categories account for nearly 90 percent of crop revenue, but less than half of irrigated acreage.

Grapes – table, wine and raisins – generate $3,129 per acre-foot. Corn and cotton are more in the middle of the pack. Rice ranks lower, but also provides important habitat for waterfowl.

Alfalfa ($357) and other pastureland ($91) provide the least revenue per acre-foot of water. Overall, livestock feed directly produces only 7 percent of revenue, but uses nearly 37 percent of water consumed by agriculture.

But before you tar them as villains, the researchers point out that ranches and dairies that rely on the feed generate nearly a quarter of the state’s agriculture production value.

Measured by jobs created for water consumed, the category of vegetables, garden plants and non-tree fruits also ranks highest (75 jobs for every 1,000 acre-feet). Melons and cucumbers do well (70 jobs), as do fresh tomatoes (62 jobs).

The job numbers fall off rather dramatically for other crops, including grapes, oranges and lemons. Much-vilified almonds and pistachios produce a paltry 4.6 jobs per 1,000 acre-feet. Alfalfa and pastureland again rank lowest because they are highly mechanized and require little labor in the fields.

The main takeaway is that it’s much more complicated than purely how much water it takes to produce a single almond, or head of lettuce or glass of wine – comparisons very popular these days, especially on the Internet.

As a whole, the state’s agricultural economy is getting whacked by the drought, now in its fourth year.

In preliminary estimates released this week by the UC Davis team, farmers are expected to have a net water shortage of 2.5 million acre-feet, 1 million more than last year. That would force them to fallow a projected 560,000 acres, or about 6 percent of average irrigated cropland.

The results: a $1.8 billion cost to agriculture (lost crop and livestock revenue and additional groundwater expenses) and 18,600 fewer jobs than if there were no drought.

These are the numbers that grab more headlines. They’re a good reminder that while city dwellers may not like brown lawns, in farm country, the lack of water is about people’s livelihoods.

By Padma Nagappan

California almonds and the farmers who grow them have received a lot of bad press in recent months as city dwellers facing mandatory water restrictions turn their ire on the thirsty crop.

While almonds and pistachios consume 10 percent of the state’s agricultural water supply, they also generate 20,800 jobs and $4.2 billion in annual revenues, according to a new study by researchers at the University of California, Davis.

Alfalfa, on the other hand, consumes more water than the nut trees and is planted on just as many acres, but employs only 5,000 workers.

“It’s not high in value like other crops, but it’s important because we need it to feed dairy cows, and milk is a high-value commodity in California,” said Josué Medellín-Azuara, a water economist with the Center for Watershed Sciences at UC Davis.

Milk brings in $9.4 billion annually, according to the California Department of Food and Agriculture, and is the farm industry’s No. 1 cash cow.

“There’s so much talk about how much water is used for a single almond,”  said Medellín-Azuara. “But a lot of other sectors also rely on the crops grown in California. They’re used as feedstock, as food, they go to food processing, so there are many downstream sectors that rely on agriculture.”

The report calculated that agriculture employs about 400,000 workers and generates $37 billion across 9.4 million acres of irrigated farmland. That represents 4 percent of California’s jobs and 2 percent of its economic output.

Not all crops are water hogs. Vegetables, horticulture, and non-tree fruits consume the least water and collectively employ the most workers—130,000—while generating $12.8 billion in combined sales.

The top five crops in revenue per unit of water use are grown on about 25 percent of California’s irrigated cropland and account for 16.4 percent of water use, the report says. Those crops are responsible for two-thirds of all crop-related employment.

A new report from the same institute released on Tuesday shows that California’s drought will lead to half a million acres of farmland being fallowed, resulting in a loss of 18,500 jobs and $2.7 billion in revenues.

Link to article

By Geoffrey Mohan

David “Mas” Masumoto settles on a patio chair on a cool San Joaquin Valley evening, perhaps the last one before summer converts the valley into a kiln. The author and organic farmer has just sold the last box of his “organic, ugly, fabulous” Gold Dust peaches and Rose Diamond nectarines, varieties that ripened early and came in small in this drought year.

Two of those sobriquets attached to his fruit are hard to dispute — they were cultivated organically on his 80-acre farm south of Fresno, and they are hard to call anything but fabulous, the petite stone fruit offering back a sweetly distilled fraction of the water that went into them. That water, and its parsimonious yield, are on the mind of Masumoto, whose literary ruminations on the fate of the peach and of small-scale farming cast him as the industry’s moral agronomist.

As someone who advocates sustainable farming, what lessons do you take from the drought?

My latest thing about the whole water situation is seeing this as an opportunity. Because it’s a driver of change, like sometimes natural disasters are. You know: out of a tornado, a town rebuilds itself as green. An earthquake happens and everyone realizes they have to bring things up to a seismic safety level.

It was a gradual disaster that “suddenly” hit now — as if it suddenly hit! People are saying, we have to be conscious of this, and what can we do to be sustainable? So all these questions are starting to arise, like, where should you be farming? Where should you not be farming? Based on water.

Why is this realization that California is in a drought happening now, as opposed to last year or the year before?

It was partly when urban people suddenly realized there’s something going on. As a writer, I love it, because it’s the power of story…. You have drama, you have tension, you have the conflict. Everyone starts to say, who’s the protagonist, the antagonist. Who’s the good guy? Who’s the bad guy?… You have characters.

Who are the characters, then?

[Gov. Jerry] Brown suddenly became this main character. Of course, he’s the governor, but he’s defending ag! This is a little twist in this story line, this plot. Out of this, is there going to rise a single voice as a spokesperson, either in ag or in urban use or the environment? The environmentalists, I sense, have been very quiet in this drought…. I think they’re trying to lay low, so no one will start saying, well, wait a minute. That’s why they love the statistics of ag using 80% of the state’s water. And it’s truly only 40%. It’s 80% of the developed water. What does that mean? It means a lot of water is still used in natural sources and it’s not counted. That’s why you get these number games — it takes a gallon of water for an almond! Again, as a story, it became the metaphor. It is, in one sense, the wrong metaphor…. Suddenly you have almonds becoming this character. I thought, wow, I’m glad it wasn’t peaches!

But I think because it has now become a story, suddenly people are interested in public policy. Because there is no clear political good or bad guy yet, they’re actually talking policy more.

How has the drought changed your cultivation practices?

We’ve been experimenting with this petite peach method this year, where we’re cutting back water use 30%, 40%, 50% on some select areas of the orchard to see how it responds. Part of my thinking initially was: How much are we over-watering to chase a cosmetic quality? And it’s mainly size. Can you not grow a small, water-efficient peach that has just as intense flavor? And you can.

I realize all these years I’ve been pumping them up with fertilizer and water to try to get them artificially big. So we backed off on the water. They’re small this year, but, good god, the flavor is great. It’s fantastic. It’s probably the most intense I’ve ever had.

Will consumers buy them or will they look for the big, cosmetically perfect fruit?

We’re trying to get the markets, our buyers, to understand it, and hopefully someone to eat one and say it doesn’t matter, the size…. A lot of the buyers are saying: This is great. Good, that means their consumers are kind of getting over the size issue. We’re calling them petite peaches, because if I called them drought-tolerant peaches, or water-deprived peaches, it doesn’t sound the same…. Part of it is branding. They trust our brand. They’ll go, “Oh, this is a Masumoto peach, let’s try it.” They are not seeing the big versus small.

If you look at fresh market grapes, every year they’ve gotten bigger and bigger. Think of strawberries. Do you remember there used to be little ones? They’re huge. They’re like a little fist. Because size is just driving it all. We don’t think of that in terms of what it’s costing us. What are we paying for to get that size? And I contend that a lot is water.

So, what’s the natural use of water? If these peaches are naturally small, I don’t need to water them as much. Let me just grow them naturally. I realized, I don’t think these peaches want to be big. What’s the matter with that? That’s my breakthrough: Oh, my god, I may have been over-watering all these years. Why? Because we had access [to water]. It was cheap. It was supposedly free. And it’s not now.

Link to article

According to USDA’s Farm to School Census, 36 percent of the U.S. public school districts that completed a questionnaire reported serving at least some locally produced foods in school lunches or breakfasts during school years 2011-12 or 2012-13. While fruits and vegetables topped the list of local foods served in schools in 2011-12, 45 percent of the school districts that used local foods reported serving locally produced milk, and 27 percent reported serving locally produced baked goods. Some States have State-produced foods, such as fruits and vegetables, grains, meats, and dairy products included in the products donated by USDA for use in school meals (a program called USDA Foods).

The DoD Fresh Program allows districts to use USDA funds to obtain fresh fruits and vegetables through the Department of Defense, which provides information to districts on foods that are sourced locally. The above chart appeared in “Many U.S. School Districts Serve Local Foods” in the March 2015 issue of ERS’s (Economic Research Service) Amber Waves magazine.

Link to USDA blog post