By Cathie Anderson

Chef Patrick Mulvaney and his team at Mulvaney’s B&L restaurant in midtown Sacramento regularly butcher whole hogs themselves, carefully ensuring that they use every element of the animal, because food waste translates into lost revenue in the restaurant business.

So the cost-conscious restaurateur was stunned when he received research showing that 10 million tons of food goes unharvested or gets discarded on U.S. farms annually, even as one in seven Americans are insecure about where they will find their next meal. Here was a situation that Mulvaney – and indeed other chefs across the nation – wanted to help change.

“Everybody says there are going to be 9 billion people in 2050, and four or five years ago, people were saying, ‘We’re going to have to grow 40 percent more food to feed those 40 percent more people,’ ” Mulvaney said. “This (research) changes that conversation. Now people are saying it’s a problem with distribution, not a problem with growth, because we have enough calories.”

By Chris Mooney

In a surprising new study, Stanford researchers have found that drought-ravaged California is sitting on top of a vast and previously unrecognized water resource, in the form of deep groundwater, residing at depths between 1,000 and nearly 10,000 feet below the surface of the state’s always thirsty Central Valley.

The resource amounts to 2,700 billion tons of freshwater, mostly less than about 3,250 feet deep, according to the paper published Monday in the influential Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. And there is even more fresh or moderately salty water at more extreme depths than this that could potentially be retrieved and desalinized someday for drinking water, or for use in agriculture.

“There’s a lot more fresh groundwater in California than people know,” said Stanford’s Rob Jackson, who conducted the research with the university’s Mary Kang, the study’s lead author. “It’s like a savings account. We can spend it today, or save it for when we really need it….There’s definitely enough extra groundwater to make a difference for the drought and farmers.”

But two other groundwater researchers contacted by the Post questioned aspects of the findings, or their framing, suggesting that the freshwater portion of the resource may already have been used, or that its existence would do little to change California’s water plight. The response suggests the new research could prove controversial among scientists trying to interpret what it means for a state that has battled over water, and its distribution, going back many decades.

The problem is the type of water involved: groundwater, which accounts for 95 percent of the planet’s freshwater that is not contained polar glaciers and ice sheets. This is the water originating as rain and snow that does not end up in lakes or rivers, or getting drawn up by plants. Instead, it slowly penetrates ever deeper into the ground, so long as there are still cavities that can hold it.

The vast groundwater resource at question in the study is, in many cases, very deep — and the deeper in the ground it lies, the more likely it is to be salty. The resource’s huge size, Jackson said, is related to the mountainous terrain — water cascades off mountains and pools in deep underwater pockets over very long periods of time.

But extracting this deep groundwater could be expensive and would run the risk of causing considerable land subsidence, as the empty cavities that once held it collapse. It would also mostly be a one-time fix, according to Jackson: The deep groundwater resource would not replenish for hundreds to thousands of years.

And perhaps most troubling of all — oil and gas companies, whose data provided the basis for the discovery, may already be despoiling some of this water with their activities, the research suggests.

The new study “improves the estimates for the total possible volume of groundwater, and how deep it is, and a little bit about its quality, primarily salinity,” said Peter Gleick, a water resources expert and president of the Pacific Institute, who also edited the study for the journal. “But it doesn’t say anything about whether that stuff’s going to be economic to pump, or sustainably managed in the long run, or an important contributor to solving our water problems. Those are unresolved issues still.”

To uncover the new finding, Jackson and Kang pored over data reported by what Jackson calls “really the only industry that cores deeply into the Earth” — oil and gas. The researchers say that they examined data from nearly 35,000 wells, as well as 938 “oil and gas pools,” spread across eight counties in the Central Valley and beyond.

The study then extrapolated for the entire Central Valley. Most pertinently, it found 2,200 billion tons of fresh and somewhat salty water within about 3,000 feet of the surface, making it the most accessible.

Still, the study suggests that desalinating this water would actually be cheaper than withdrawing larger amounts of salt from seawater, as a new California desalination plant in the San Diego area has begun to do.

At the same time, the research also wades deeply into ongoing social and political controversy by suggesting that there is likely to be at least some overlap between oil and gas extraction activities in the state, and these previously unknown deep groundwater repositories. And here the research is singling out not only hydraulic fracturing or fracking, but also the practice of wastewater disposal in deep geological reservoirs.

“Oil and gas activities happen a lot out West directly into and around freshwater aquifers,” Jackson said. “And there aren’t any restrictions to that practice.”

To be clear, Jackson is merely noting this risk — he is not asserting that any specific damage has been done. While some deep or shallow freshwater in the Central Valley may have been contaminated, he said, “I think most of it is fine. But I don’t really know.”

In a statement, Sabrina Lockhart, communications director for the California Independent Petroleum Association, countered that “It is not accurate to say that underground injection is not regulated.” Lockhart noted that wastewater injection wells require permits and state and EPA permission for siting, saying these regulators “have strict criteria that ensures that there is no harm to potential sources of drinking water.”

The new research prompted skeptical reactions from two researchers asked to comment by the Post.

“A lot of the water that they’re talking about may actually be gone, when you think about the Central Valley, right now, where the average depth of the water table is already at 2,500 or 3,000 feet,” said Jay Famiglietti, a water expert with both NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the University of California, Irvine.

Famiglietti did agree about the deeper, saltier water sources, though, and praised the study for “highlighting that brackish groundwaters may eventually be an important water source.”

“Just because they’ve seen that the depth of freshwater in this basin is deeper than people thought, does not mean that you can go pump more freshwater out of this system at all. It unequivocally does not mean that,” added Graham Fogg, a hydrogeologist with the University of California-Davis. Fogg did not dispute the new study’s overall numbers, so much as whether the finding would be useful in the context of trying to supply more water to the state.

The problem, Fogg said, is that there is a difference between the amount of water that may exist below the ground and the amount that can be extracted either safely — without major ecological impact — or sustainably.

Stanford’s Jackson agreed that when it comes to replenishing of the deep groundwater resource, “very little of it, at that depth, is sort of immediate.” But he still thinks the state has an unexpected resource that it can now decide how to use — and manage.

“I hope it prompts a conversation about monitoring and safeguarding our groundwater,” Jackson said. “We’re lucky that we have more than we expected. Now we need to use it wisely and take care of it.”

Link to article

From the Apps for Ag website:

Apps for Ag is a series of agriculture focused hackathons. Our purpose is to bring together the seemingly disparate worlds of software development and commercial farming into a collaborative event.

Our mission is to develop useful technology to address the needs of today’s grower, and to seed new enterprises in the AgTech and FoodTech sectors which will create new jobs.

The series will travel throughout the agricultural production areas of California and beyond. We welcome developers with diverse backgrounds, levels of experience and specialties to our events.

Our next event (July 15-17 at UC Davis) is going to be hosted by University of California Agriculture and Natural Resources (UC ANR), with the final round of judging to take place at the California State Fair.

Hackathons are a time tested Silicon Valley tradition. The purpose is not at all to “hack” into computer systems for malicious purposes. Rather, the term is based on the positive connotation of the word “hack”: to write clever software programs that solve an old problem in a new and optimal way.

Hackathons are typically 24-48 hours long and are an endurance challenge of ideation, iteration, collaboration and focus. Participants will put in long hours, some don’t even sleep, as they rush to develop as much of the concept as possible before judging. The event culminates in a judged contest, or “Pitchfest”.

The makeup of the judging panel reflects all of the respective industry stakeholders. It will include experienced growers, software engineers, entrepreneurs and investors. Judges are asked to rate each team on 1.) the impact of the concept, 2.) a compelling story of collaboration and 3.) the technical merit of the concept. Participating growers benefit by giving voice to their needs during the “Industry Panel” that kicks off each event.

The growers and industry representatives who participate may very well realize a purpose-built software application to address their stated challenge. They also get to observe what software development looks like, to see how challenging it can be, to learn a new vocabulary, to try something different and to discover many commonalities with another industry. Developers benefit by showing off their skills, networking within their industry, obtaining domain expertise in a new industry, learning about the technology that already exists in agriculture and, ideally, making a productive impact on the nation’s food chain.

Link to more information

Secretary Ross at the Financial Innovations Lab at the Milken Innovation Center in Israel. State Board of Food and Agriculture president Craig McNamara is at the far left.

Secretary Ross traveled through Israel this week with a California delegation interested in adaptation strategies for climate change and drought

Yesterday, as our travels through Israel neared their conclusion, our delegation participated in the Financial Innovations Lab of the California-Israel Global Innovation Partnership, sponsored by the Jerusalem Institute for Israel Studies Milken Innovation Center.  The topic of the day was accelerating the growth of agricultural technology in Israel and California, a focus resulting from the 2014 M.O.U signed by Governor Brown and Prime Minister Netanyahu.

Given our week of travels learning about Israel’s water solutions, the subjects of technology, increased efficiency, and recycled water utilization were all top of mind for us Californians!  But the discussion was much broader – identifying the conditions, barriers and opportunities facing agricultural producers, and the range of technologies that could be deployed to ensure global food security in the face of climate change.  Meeting future global demand will require investments in a combination of yield improvements, resource optimization and loss reduction.

A discussion about the barriers to Ag tech financing really focused on the issue that Ag tech doesn’t generate the rate of return compared to other elements of the tech industry, and the discussion touched on the need for patience due to the seasonality of production agriculture.

In addition to talking about the need for investment to stimulate accelerated and wide-spread adoption of Ag technologies, there was a spirited discussion about infrastructure: the importance of objective third-party-generated data and demonstration projects; the value of publicly funded research; new opportunities for public-private-philanthropic partnerships; the critical role of getting government policies right; and the proven success of offering incentives to accelerate the adoption-curve of new technologies.

Over and over again, we stressed how important it is to clearly understand problems from the growers’ point of view and develop technology solutions in concert with growers to shorten the cycle for commercialization. Too often in recent years, technologies have been presented that are disconnected from the realities in the field and time is lost to screening the sheer number of new technologies being offered. This is where the value of incubators and the example of the Western Growers Innovation Center were offered as solutions.

It was a stimulating discussion, and I look forward to a report on the session and draft recommendations. Following all that, our final afternoon in Israel ended with a tour of Old City Jerusalem before our 9 p.m departure for Ben Gurion Airport.

Secretary Ross with members of the delegation for the California Climate-Smart Agriculture Policy Mission