Join Poppy at the California State Fair! Visit the fair’s web site for more information.

Aquaculture–the cultivation of aquatic animals for food consumption–is an important part of California agriculture, offering a local, reliable, easily accessible, protein-rich food source that can be produced in or near populated urban centers. As the world’s population grows and the demand for fish follows suit, there will be significant opportunity ahead for our fish farmers.

Unfortunately, aquaculture production in California has declined in recent years, spurring an effort by local government to reverse that trend. It started in the food policy office of former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and was implemented by Paula Daniels, the mayor’s Senior Advisor on Food Policy, who received a Stanton Fellowship from the Durfee Foundation specifically to work on urban aquaculture. On behalf of the mayor, she recently coordinated an aquaculture resolution, titled “Support for Urban Aquaculture Development,” that was adopted unanimously at the 81st Annual Meeting of the U.S. Conference of Mayors, of which Villaraigosa is immediate past president.

The resolution highlights the importance of fish as a nutritious food source, notes the growing demand for aquaculture products in the U.S., recognizes the limited availability of marine fish production, and states the need for federal, state, and local investment in urban aquaculture. This is an important first step in propelling California to become a world leader in the production of fish products in an environmentally sustainable manner.

We know that fish is a part of a balanced diet and provides numerous health benefits, including vitamins, micronutrients, and omega-3 fatty acids that may contribute to heart health. California agriculture, which is already world-renowned for wholesome, healthy foods, has an opportunity to place itself in prime position to take full advantage of the opportunities ahead and make aquaculture a greater part of the food portfolio that contributes to the economic and social sectors of our state.

 

http://www.kansascity.com/2013/07/09/4335760/the-aging-american-farmer-who.html

The American farmer is graying in the center.

According to the U.S. census, the average age of the U.S. farmer is 57, and the fastest growing age group is those over age 65. That demographic shift puts the agriculture industry on the precipice of a transition.

Though many farmers are clearly working well into the traditional retirement years, thousands of farms soon will be changing hands. How that occurs could reshape the industry that drives much of the economy in middle America.

Working longer

Working beyond retirement is a fairly common refrain these days — but farmers seem to work longer than most. In the last Agriculture Census, 25 percent of all farm operators were over age 65 compared with 5 percent of the overall U.S. work force.

Why do farmers keep working? For one thing, modern machinery makes it easier to work longer.

“It’s more you use your mind rather than your back, so you can go longer,” said Mike Duffy, an agricultural economist at Iowa State University.

Duffy said there’s also an economic incentive. Many farmers are making more money today than just about any time in their careers thanks to higher yields and high grain prices.

But there’s something else about farmers. In surveys of farmers in Iowa, Duffy has learned that regardless of the money or new technology, some farmers will just never quit.

“Farmers are farmers,” Duffy said. “And that’s who they identify themselves as. They’ll leave horizontal.”

Bob Hawthorn is that kind of farmer. At 84, Hawthorn’s hands and face are weathered. This year, spring came late, so on a bright April afternoon he was in a hurry to get corn and soybeans planted on his 2,000-acre farm in the Loess Hills of western Iowa.

Hawthorn braced himself against the wind in the back of his red pickup and unstrung the top of a bag of seed corn. After nearly 60 years on the farm, he said, neighbors ask how long he plans to continue.

“They keep bugging me,” Hawthorn said. “They say, ‘When are you gonna quit?’ I think I’ll tell ’em I won’t quit farming till all hell freezes over. Something like that.”

The farm was started by his great-grandfather, Trapper Hawthorn, in the late 1870s. Bob Hawthorn left for a brief career in aerospace before returning to Iowa in 1955 to farm with his father, Fred, who worked on the farm into his 90s and lived to be 98 years old. Longevity runs in the family.

But after four generations, the Hawthorn family farm will come to an end. He has had foster children, but he never had biological children and never married. No one is lined up to take over the farm, but then, Hawthorn has no plans to quit, either.

“I’d be bored not having anything to do,” Hawthorn said. “I’ve also noticed that farmers, when they retire, buy a house in town and die of a heart attack about in the next year. It seems like farmers have to keep going or they just fade away.”

Psychologist and retired farmer Mike Rosmann calls it the “agrarian imperative,” the drive to keep farming even when your body might be ready to quit. In fact, Rosmann said, studies show over half of aging farmers don’t have a will or an estate plan.

“I think it reflects perhaps a denial of the fact that somebody’s got to take over and I need to have a plan for that,” Rosmann said.

Turmoil in transitions

Randy Hertz, a financial planner with Hertz Farm Management, in Nevada, Iowa, says even as the average age of farmers creeps ever upward, few families make all the plans they could for smooth transitions.

“It’s pretty ominous the number of farmers that plan to retire in the next five to 10 years,” Hertz said. “Some of them have no plan, and the default succession plan is, well, I guess we’ll just rent it to somebody in the neighborhood.”

The 2008 Iowa Farm and Rural Life poll found that 42 percent of farmers surveyed said they planned to retire in the next five years. But Paul Lasley, an Iowa State University sociologist who conducts the poll, said it’s tough to define retirement with farmers.

“The retirement process for many farmers may take years, even a decade or so,” Lasley said. “They slowly phase out of farming, and allow their adult children, who are often middle age, to take over, but they remain somewhat involved to ‘make sure the kids do it right.’”

That’s how it is working out for the Arganbright family in the western Iowa town of Panora.

Jim Arganbright, 83, three years ago started renting his cropland to his son Tom, the only one of his eight children who farms full time. Now, all Jim Arganbright has to worry about is the livestock — and he doesn’t have too much of that.

“I only have 12 cows and a bull and eight calves,” he said.

Tom Arganbright farms his parents’ 160 acres, several other rented fields and his own farm — in all, about 1,500 acres. He bought some of his acres from one of his uncles.

“It’s not just any ground you’re purchasing, it’s part of the original Arganbright land, and it’s up to you to keep hold of it through good times and bad and be able to pass it along to the next generation,” Tom Arganbright said. One of his five children currently farms with him.

Though Jim Arganbright is no longer farming, he said he has not yet established a formal plan for how ownership of his land will transfer to the next generation, something he knows he ought to do. He expects his children to keep it in the family.

Farmers in waiting

More farmers staying on the farm into their old age is one reason younger farmers struggle to find their place.

“We’re not short of young people who want to farm,” said Duffy, at Iowa State. “We’re short of old people who want to move over.”

One reason farmers are working long past the age when others might retire is that their golden years turned out to be boom years.

“Often they’re the only people that have enough money that they can keep doing it and can keep buying land that comes up for sale,” Rosmann said.

The ability to buy land is a big hurdle keeping many young people from entering the agriculture industry as producers.

“There’s no way I’ll ever be able to own my own ranch,” said Bo Bigler, 25, a graduate student at Colorado State University. He’ll graduate at the end of the summer with a master’s degree in beef management.

“The price to buy into it, it’s too much,” Bigler said. “The only way that somebody can get into it is if a ranch was handed down to them, unless they’re millionaires to begin with.”

A 2011 survey from the National Young Farmers Coalition showed access to land and capital to be the single biggest factors keeping young people from getting into farming or ranching. The results also indicated young people were concerned about the environment and interested in small-scale operations.

In Longmont, Colo., Eva Teague, 31, has learned how difficult it can be to start a financially sound pig farm. Teague is a grad school dropout turned farmer, originally from the East Coast. Jaded with academia, she moved to Colorado and began working as a farm apprentice. She bought her first pigs a couple of years ago and now leases 15 acres at the base of the Rocky Mountains.

“Didn’t have that much cash, so I paid for feed with the credit card just to get going,” Teague said.

Right now, her biggest challenge, like that of many other young farmers, is access to capital. She recently secured a low-interest loan from the federal Farm Service Agency, but it’s not enough to get her business off the ground completely. Teague still spends her days on the farm, and every evening working full time as a waitress. Next year she’s taking a big leap, quitting her off-farm job and relying on her farm income to sustain herself.

“I think a lot of young people want to work outside in sort of a ‘farm camp’ fun experience,” Teague said. “There are fewer people who would like to work really hard, like 50-60 hours a week for not a lot of money, which is what working on a farm is.”

Even though small farmers aren’t making large profits, the U.S. Department of Agriculture says the largest increase in farm numbers by far is for small farms, with annual sales less than $10,000 a year.

The latest segment in the Growing California video series, a partnership with California Grown, is “The Mysterious Artichoke.”

Karen Segura dug her hands deep into the soil of an onion patch at Bell Gardens Intermediate School as cars zipped past the nearly empty schoolyard.

http://www.californiareport.org/archive/R201307051630/b

More than two years into a quarantine on citrus trees in much of Southern California, the Asian citrus psyllid continues to spread. This spring researchers discovered the tiny insects on the 140-year-old Eliza Tibbets tree in Riverside, known as the parent of navel orange trees the world over.

To control the insects’ spread, researchers already have introduced a parasitic wasp that preys on the psyllids and their larvae. Southern California growers also are using a rotating regimen of pesticides to protect the state’s $2 billion citrus crop. But protecting the Eliza Tibbets tree will require special measures, and friends of the tree are raising money to build a specialized mesh enclosure around the canopy.

Riverside citrus historian Vince Moses says the seedless navel oranges we know so well today are “a mutant of a Brazilian variety called the Selecta.” Eliza Tibbets, one of Riverside’s founders, introduced two of the Selecta’s mutant offspring to California in the 1870s. Beside her house in Riverside, the trees yielded America’s first seedless fruit: large, brightly colored and easy to peel.

One tree died in 1921, and the lone survivor now stands nearby at an ordinary intersection ringed with small apartment buildings and a strip mall. But in the late 19th century, the area was transformed by Tibbets’ introduction. “There were thousands of acres of navel orange groves, with streetcar lines, with irrigation canals,” Moses says.

Tibbets’ neighbors used cuttings from her two original trees to establish the first navel orange orchards in California. Over the years, mutations of their offspring provided new varieties to farmers from South Africa to Pakistan. California became a global hub for citrus, and by the turn of the 20th century, Riverside was the wealthiest city per capita in all the United States.

But today the tree that made it all possible is at risk of contracting citrus greening disease, caused by a bacterium called huang long bing. In Chinese, Moses says, huang long bing translates roughly as “the yellow shoot disease. If the psyllid bites this parent tree, and injects huang long bing, they’re gone. There’s no known cure.”

Citrus greening curls the leaves of new growth on orange trees and causes the fruit to have a bitter metallic taste. The psyllids in California aren’t yet infected with huang long bing, and growers here have not experienced any losses. But the disease already has spread throughout all 32 citrus-growing counties in Florida and much of Texas.

Tracy Kahn, a botanist who curates UC Riverside’s Citrus Variety Collection, explains that most infected trees die within a few years. “They’re losing trees in Florida left and right,” she says, “and it’s really hard to keep an industry going because trees have a very short life.” The Citrus Variety Collection is the largest in the world, with more than 1,000 kinds of fruit, many of them descendants of the Tibbets tree. To guard against citrus greening, clones of every variety in the collection are now being kept in a nearby greenhouse, too, as a botanical backup.

Giorgios Vidalakis, a citrus virologist with the university’s Citrus Clonal Protection Program (CCCP), says it’s only a matter of time before citrus greening spreads to orchards in California.

“We know it’s not a question of if, it’s a question of when,” he explains. Inside a large greenhouse at the CCCP’s quarantine site in Riverside, researchers use cuttings to propagate new varieties for California citrus growers in a pathogen-free environment.

Vidalakis says that citrus greening is an example of a pathogen getting around the quarantine system. “We believe that a single tree, brought into Miami, Fla. — right now, that one tree is destroying the $10 billion Florida citrus industry,” he says.

To protect the Tibbets tree, Vidalakis says, “We have created a buffer zone, removing citrus relatives and ornamental plants. For huang long bing, we don’t have the solution yet. The best solution now, to buy us time until science finds a more permanent solution, is to build a protective structure” around the tree. Such a structure would keep infected psyllids from feeding on the tree’s sap and could cost as much as $50,000. The city has pledged to cover part of the cost, but additional donations are welcome.

“Right now, it really keeps me up at night,” Vidalakis says. “We don’t want to be the generation that loses that tree. But if the mesh plan works, Vidalakis thinks they can keep the tree alive indefinitely: “I don’t see any reason we can’t go on forever.”

 

http://www.cdfa.ca.gov/egov/Press_Releases/Press_Release.asp?PRnum=13-017

The following statement is from CDFA Secretary Karen Ross, UFW President Arturo Rodriguez, California Farm Bureau President Dave Wenger, and Western Growers Association President/CEO Tom Nassif:

“The Senate’s passage of Immigration Reform is a significant and compassionate step forward for this nation. Those working in the agricultural sector acknowledge that the majority of farm workers in California and across the nation are unauthorized, and yet they contribute to providing safe and wholesome food to our families and homes. This bill provides earned legal status with a process for possible citizenship for agricultural workers and respects national immigration and border security concerns, while acknowledging a continued commitment to our nation’s farm economy.

“We applaud the Senate’s work and encourage the U.S. House of Representatives to take similar action – our farm workers, our family farmers, and our nation deserve no less.”