Out of the 33 million tons of plastic we generate every year, less than 10 percent actually gets recycled.

Recycling plastic is a no-brainer these days. Theoretically, it should be pretty easy. Use up the product, rinse out the container, toss it in the recycling bin. Voila! Off it goes to its inevitable reincarnation. Simple, right?

Not so fast. The reality is unfortunately far more complicated. Americans are locked into a dysfunctional relationship with plastic. Collectively, we generate approximately 33 million tons of plastic trash each year, but less than 10 percent of that actually gets recycled. And even if you wantto recycle the stuff, the multiple types—polyethylene, polypropylene, polystyrene, and so forth—lead to confusion about how and what plastics can successfully be accepted by most recycling programs. This is a common problem with food containers: Are those plastic clamshells that contain greens recyclable? What about that yogurt container? And that ketchup bottle—can the lid go in the blue bin, too? It’s confusing.

“I think the public cares, but they have no idea what the numbers at the bottom of plastics mean,” says Mitch Hedlund, executive director of Recycle Across America, an advocacy group that has created a standardized labeling system for recycling bins. “There is a lack of national communication to help the public know the difference between plastics—what is recyclable and what’s not.”

So what’s an ecologically minded person to do? Crucially, the less plastic you can use, the better. And when it comes to the old “paper or plastic?” question, there’s no debate: “Paper and cardboard are amazing if they’re recycled,” Hedlund says. That’s because paper can be easily remade, and more people understand how to properly recycle it. (Though, as Hedlund points out, paper should be kept separate from other recycling to avoid touching food residue and other contaminants.)

Consuming less overall, choosing paper when given the option, and making recycling easier to understand may sound like simple solutions for the plastic problem, and that’s exactly the point. “We’re in a great position to make a change,” says Hedlund. “But we need everybody to start unifying around common-sense solutions.” Eventually, she explains, a critical mass of people changing their habits creates change. “My five-year goal is for people to say, ‘Remember when recycling was confusing? Remember when most manufacturers weren’t closing the loop? Remember when there was more plastic going into the oceans than there was going into remanufacturing?’” It’s a noble dream—and, with a collective effort, a possible reality.

Want to make sure you’re recycling correctly? The first step is to check with your recycling hauler to make sure you understand their rules—every program is different. With that said, Recycle Across America has pulled together some general guidelines. Below, we’ve pulled those that specifically relate to food and beverage containers:

• Make sure all items are rinsed and clean before going into the recycling bin. Absolutely no food, liquids, or other contamination allowed. Yes, that means that the bottom of your pizza box needs to go in the compost (or the trash). You can, however, tear-off any non-greasy parts for disposable in the recycling bin.
• Separate glass jars from their metal lids.
• Inquire about how to recycle the lids of plastic bottles. In bigger, mixed systems, it’s often preferred to keep them together, but many smaller programs only want the bottle, so the lid should go in the trash.
• Keep aluminum foil, plastic utensils, Styrofoam containers, plastic wrap, or plastic wrappers (including baggies and bags) OUT of the recycling bin. Those items need to go into the trash unless your recycling program specifically gives the green light.
• If you must collect your recycling in a plastic bag, use a clear or see-through blue bag.
• Compostable plastics are great but they don’t belong in a recycling bin (and not even in a home composting bin—only industrial or commercial composting options can take these items).

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By Ross Marowitz, The Canadian Press

Generations of farmers have relied on knowledge and family expertise to grow food, but the sector is set for a surge of disruption at the hands of made−in−Canada artificial intelligence−powered systems.

AI is now helping farmers across the country to increase yields, save costs and minimize environmental damage. Instead of spreading fertilizer across acres of fields or spraying entire orchards with herbicides, they can now target their efforts for maximum effect.

SomaDetect Inc. of Fredericton is preparing to deliver commercial systems this fall that will test milk and use AI to provide insights to maximize a farmer’s profitability, dairy farmers monitor their herds through the “internet of cows.”

Sensors installed at each milking stall identify each cow, test their milk and quickly provide farmers metrics such as protein and fat counts, indicators of disease, hormones that manage reproduction and antibiotic residuals.

“We are in a fourth revolution in agriculture and AI is absolutely critical,” said co−founder Bethany Deshpande.

However, Deshpande said the use of the technology is at an early stage where farmers are just starting to understand its power and the potential difference it can make on their operations.

“A lot of farmers have been demanding better technology, demanding better products for a long time and I think AI is huge part of how they’re going to get that.”

Montreal−based Motorleaf Inc. has developed a system that acquires data from indoor growing operations and applies artificial intelligence and machine−learning algorithms to identify growing patterns in the greenhouse, which can then be used to predict the size of future harvests.

It’s like giving farmers a virtual assistant, said co−founder and CEO Alastair Monk, who formed the company two years ago with Ramen Dutta, an agricultural engineer.

“All of those ingredients are going to get mixed up into soup and out the other end comes an algorithm specifically for that greenhouse … so they can make smarter decisions instead of rolling the dice and risking what happens after they make those decisions.”

Yield forecasts are crucial for growers because they indicate how much produce will be available for pre−sold contracts.

Traditional counting methods can be off by 20 to 30 per cent because farmers estimate the yield for the entire crop after counting samples of vegetables, leaves and flowers in a small area.

SunSelect, a California greenhouse customer that cultivates tomatoes, is one customer that abandoned manual predictions after Motorleaf’s algorithms doubled the accuracy of its weekly yield projection, resulting in significant savings for the grower, Motorleaf said.

Systems incorporating machine learning, a type of artificial intelligence, are able to make millions of calculations to detect patterns imperceptible by humans that are required for precision planting, autonomous vehicles and robotics, says Graham Taylor, associate professor of engineering at the University of Guelph and faculty member at Toronto’s Vector Institute for Artificial Intelligence.

AI researchers are largely focused on applications for deep−pocketed businesses and tech firms, but its use in agriculture is attracting global interest because of the pressing need to feed a growing global population amid increasing water shortages and a changing climate.

“Everybody’s interested in AI right now and agriculture is a major concern for us as humanity,” he said.

“When faced with these sorts of really scary potential problems that’s going to make (the adoption of AI in agriculture) move a little quicker,” Taylor said in an interview.

A combination of drones and AI technology have helped to alleviate stress on California pistachio and almond crops by watering only where it’s needed, said David MacMillan, CEO of Toronto−based Deveron UAS, that is building one of North America’s largest network of drones.

“In a place like California where your water costs are over $1,000 an acre, there’s all these different value propositions,” he said.

The technology can also be used in Ontario corn fields to target the use of fertilizers to areas that require extra help, saving farmers money.

Canada is well−positioned to be a leader in the field because it has disproportionate strength in artificial intelligence that is supported by government, Taylor believes.

The federal government has earmarked $950 million in funding on technology “superclusters” designed to encourage academia and businesses to work together on strategies to boost fast−growing sectors.

The five selected superclusters include an agriculture group based in the Prairies that will work to make the country a leading source of plant proteins.

The technology carries a potential downside, however: the systems could eventually replace farm jobs such as manual picking and weeding, Taylor said.

Robots can milk cows, pick apples and weed cabbage patches. Yet farming jobs that require physical activity or the operation of machinery in unpredictable environments are moderately threatened by automation, according a McKinsey report.

“Things like weeding, those tasks might be replaced,” Taylor said.

“But I don’t think you’re going to see completely automated farm facilities in the near future.”

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Rice is a crop that is losing important nutrients as carbon dioxide levels rise.

By Merritt Kennedy

Plants need carbon dioxide to live, but its effects on them are complicated.

As the level of carbon dioxide in the air continues to rise because of human activity, scientists are trying to pin down how the plants we eat are being affected.

Mounting evidence suggests that many key plants lose nutritional value at higher CO₂levels, and scientists are running experiments all over the world to try to tease out the effects.

Rows of controlled chambers that look kind of like industrial refrigerators are testing how plants react to different levels of CO₂ at the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Adaptive Cropping Systems Laboratory outside of Washington, D.C.

On a recent afternoon, Lewis Ziska, who’s a plant physiologist with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, demonstrates an experiment there with a crop important to many of us — coffee.

The chamber is really bright to mimic the sun. A few neat rows of green coffee plants are growing. The air that they’re absorbing has about the same amount of CO₂ as in the preindustrial age, about 250 years ago.

Across the hall, we can see a possible glimpse of the plant’s future. Here, there’s a chamber with plants growing at CO₂ levels projected for the end of this century.

“Some of the varieties, you ought to see that they’re bigger,” says Ziska. They’ve all been growing for the same amount of time, but the high CO₂ coffee plants are larger. The extra CO₂ seems to be making them grow faster.

Scientists have noticed that in many kinds of plants, higher CO₂ produces bigger crops. That sounds like a good thing.

But there’s a problem. Bigger doesn’t necessarily mean better. And while they’re still testing what this means for coffee’s quality, scientists have seen that other crops have lost some of their nutritional value under higher CO₂conditions.

One example is rice, a primary food source for more than 2 billion people.

Ziska recently teamed up with an international group of scientists to study whether high CO₂ had an effect on the rice’s nutrition. “Was it changing not just how the plant grew, but the quality of the plant?” he asked.

They tested how 18 different kinds of rice responded to CO₂ levels that are projected by the end of the century, based on conservative estimates, Ziska says.

The technique they used, called free-air CO₂ enrichment, allowed them to grow the rice and add CO₂ to the air immediately surrounding the plants using a big hoop in the middle of a field, Ziska explains. They did this over multiple years in facilities in Japan and China.

And the effect was clear: Higher CO₂ reduced multiple key measures of rice’s nutritional value. Across the different types of rice, they observed average decreases of 10 percent in protein, 8 percent in iron and 5 percent in zinc. Four important B vitamins decreased between 13 and 30 percent. The research was recently published in Science Advances.

Higher carbon dioxide is not just affecting rice. There’s evidence that the scope of this is much bigger. Harvard’s Sam Myers, who studies the impact of climate change on nutrition, has tested CO₂‘s impact on the protein, iron and zinc of a number of staple crops using the same free-air CO₂ enrichment technique.

“Most of the food crops that we consume showed these nutrient reductions,” Myers says.

The effects varied somewhat — he says wheat showed declines in protein, iron and zinc, and soybeans and field peas showed declines in iron and zinc. Maize and sorghum were less affected.

These studies are enough to raise concerns about the impact on human health, he says.

“Under what circumstances would this be a big problem?” Most likely, he says, it would be in situations where someone is “living relatively near a threshold of nutrient insufficiencies, so you’re just barely getting enough of that particular nutrient.” And secondly, it would more harmful when that person gets a meaningful amount of a nutrient from the crop that’s losing nutritional value.

“There’s quite high global vulnerability to these effects, and we’re likely to see really significant health impacts from these nutrient changes,” he adds.

At the same time, the exact health effects of this are still unclear, says Naomi Fukagawa, the director of the USDA’s Beltsville Human Nutrition Research Center, who was part of the team researching rice. She says it’s hard to know how a person’s health will be affected by changes to the nutritional quality of a specific food in a mixed diet. “We don’t quite have all the answers yet,” she says.

But if this is indeed found to negatively impact people’s health, she says, “what we need to then know, is what else do we have that’s part of their diet that’s culturally sensitive that can make up for those differences?”

Scientists also don’t understand what it is about higher CO₂ that causes plants to become less nutritious, Ziska says, though they have some theories.

“We don’t have one simple explanation as to what might be happening,” he says. One possibility is that it could be a simple dilution effect – “as the plants grow more, they become carbon-rich but nutrient-poor.”

However, Myers notes that if this were the cause, all of the nutrients would be decreasing at approximately the same rate. And that’s not necessarily the case. For example, with the recent rice study, most of the minerals and vitamins tested went down, but vitamin E went up.

Another theory, Ziska says, is that the rising carbon dioxide levels change how water moves through the plant, which could also affect some of the nutrients.

“There’s a lot about this that we don’t understand yet,” he says. “And the need to understand this in terms of the potential implications for food quality, and of course for human health, are imperative.”

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California Agriculture Secretary Karen Ross joined members of the public, citrus farmers and food bank advocates today at the State Capitol to celebrate the third annual Citrus Stride – a one mile walk around Capitol Park to raise awareness about hunger and celebrate the positive impact that citrus has on the health, economy, and environment of California.

For each participant who registered for Citrus Stride, California Citrus Mutual growers pledged to donate 1,000 pounds of citrus to California food banks.

In California, the first recorded citrus orchard was planted in 1804 at the San Gabriel mission, east of Los Angeles. Over 200 years later, the production value of California’s citrus industry is now worth more than $2 billion, with over 3,000 growers farming 270,000 acres. 

By Kristen James

RED AND PURPLE berries ripening in vast fields. The sun shining in a blue sky as workers in broad-brimmed hats pluck the best berries from the strawberry tufts and blackberry vines.

The bucolic scene in Ventura County along the Southern California coast belies the exacting science and sharp business decisions involved in the farming underway here, where many grow for Driscoll’s Berries and water availability can make or break a season.

Driscoll’s and its farmers don’t leave much to chance, having weathered drought conditions through much of this decade. And now they’re working on the next big challenge – implementing the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA) and working to recharge the aquifer through a water recycling program.

Among a variety of studies and data collection efforts to inform better farming techniques, Driscoll’s research station located among the fields looks for the best methods for irrigating and careful use of water, with an eye on adapting to climate impacts.

For instance, given the increased evaporation of surface water in a warming climate, some area farmers now use micro sprinklers – tiny, precise sprinklers that deliver water to a part of the plant near its roots to establish transplants. Other farmers are moving berry growing to substrate farming or tabletop planters in controlled settings such as high tunnel greenhouses.

On a recent visit to Driscoll’s research station, I listened as James duBois, senior manager of Global Environmental Impact for Driscoll’s, explained how substrate farming has environmental and water-saving benefits. Substrate farming reduces water needs by 30 percent and often allows for lower pesticide and fertilizer use, he said. I was visiting because Driscoll’s is a member of Ceres’ Connect the Drops campaign, a group of 35 companies that advocate for smart water management policies in California.

Water has long been top-of-mind for Driscoll’s and Ventura County growers. In fact, area farmers established a groundwater management plan for the Oxnard Plain in the early 1990s, long before SGMA was passed in 2014.

Still, during the recent drought that left many farmers in Ventura and around the state with reduced water supplies, they realized the Oxnard basin was still in severe overdraft and more needed to be done. Many in the community, including Driscoll’s and its largest grower in the area, Reiter Affiliated Companies, welcomed SGMA.

“Water management within the Oxnard basin is very complex. This is one of the reasons we supported SGMA,” duBois said, adding that because local users have the most knowledge of a water basin, Driscoll’s and its growers particularly “supported the local control and consensus-building spirit of SGMA.”

With SGMA guidelines, the farmers and communities in the region started on the path to formalize and fortify their groundwater management plan. The Oxnard Plain and Pleasant Valley Agricultural Overliers Group, of which duBois is an advisory member, has developed a draft proposal that calls for allocations based on growers’ historical needs over the past three years, as well as replenishment of the groundwater basin and the development of lower-impact, recycled water supplies. They hope the proposal will be approved by the governing body for SGMA implementation, the Groundwater Sustainability Agency, in the near future.

“We want the allocation to be real and relevant,” duBois said. In accordance with SGMA – and the spirit of sharing in the community – they also hope their groundwater management plan will address the environmental and water scarcity issues that could threaten the way of life in this region.

And the proposed plan allows water districts to enter water transfer and pumping agreements with each other. DuBois estimates there are currently eight to 10 such transfer transactions in the works in Ventura County at any one time, and this could increase under the new proposal.

Beyond Managing Water

The growers realize, however, that allocating and trading finite amounts of water from an overdrafted groundwater basin isn’t going to solve their water shortage problems.

So the Oxnard groundwater management plan integrates groundwater allocation with a plan to develop “new” water resources through recycling water. Oxnard’s water recycling plan was christened the Oxnard Groundwater Recovery Enhancement and Treatment program (GREAT). The system includes tertiary-level wastewater treatment through an advanced water-purification facility and then groundwater injection to help replenish the aquifers.

The GREAT plan calls for making recycled water available for both groundwater replenishment and irrigating agricultural fields. Although the program has had hiccups, farmers are on board and already using this water.

The efforts around management in the Oxnard groundwater basin appear to be shaping up as a very detailed and advanced example of how California’s groundwater sustainability agencies are developing long-term sustainability plans.

Agriculture is a mainstay of the economy here and careful management of water resources through SGMA implementation is key to keeping it this way, while ensuring the needs of the community and environment are maintained.

Other groundwater sustainability agencies could pull ideas and strategies from the Oxnard Basin’s playbook – not only the content in the plan but also the lessons learned on how to reach this stage successfully.

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June 18-24 is “Pollinator Week,” a time to spotlight the need to maintain pollinator health, including the serious issue of declining bee populations. Pollinator Week was originally created by Congress 11 years ago and has now grown into an international celebration of the valuable ecosystem services provided by the “B’s:” birds, butterflies, bees, bats and beetles.

Governor Brown has recognized the significance of pollinators in California with a commemorative letter in honor of the week:

“Pollinator species such as birds and insects are essential partners to farmers and ranchers in producing much of our food supply. Pollinators also provide significant environmental benefits necessary for maintaining biodiversity and healthy ecosystems.

“The health of our national forest and grasslands depends on pollination. These open spaces provide forage, fish and wildlife, timber, water, mineral resources and recreational opportunities for communities and the vital industries that serve them.

“The state of California provides producers with conservation assistance to promote wise stewardship of lands and habitats, including the protection and maintenance of pollinators on working and wild lands.

“As Governor of the state of California, I urge all citizens to the recognize the important role that pollination plays in our state’s economy and ecosystems.”

Pollinator health is behind CDFA’s new Bee Safe Program, which will begin on July 1, 2018 with a $1.85 million budget appropriation intended to improve the health and survival of honeybees by increasing foraging opportunities, reducing pesticide exposure, and providing funds for enforcement of existing laws at the local level to promote and protect California’s beekeeping industry.

Each year, thousands of shipments carrying more than 650,000 beehives are transported into California in time for the almond bloom. Honeybees help pollinate at least 90 different crops in addition to almonds, including berries, cucumbers, cantaloupes and apples.

CDFA highlighted ongoing concerns with declining bee populations in its award-winning Growing California video series. Here is “Blossom Buddies,” parts one and two.

As the weather warms up and mosquitoes become more prevalent, California horse owners are advised to consult their veterinarian to ensure their horse’s vaccination status is current for maximum protection against West Nile Virus.

Even though the disease peaked in California a number of years ago, it remains a risk. In 2017 it was confirmed in 21 California horses, eight of which died or were euthanized. According to California’s West Nile Virus website there were 553 human cases of the disease in the state last year.

“Outbreaks of West Nile Virus are still a risk for horses,” said California State Veterinarian Dr. Annette Jones. “Horse owners should contact their veterinarians as soon as possible to make sure their animals’ vaccination status is current. Vaccination will provide optimal protection against the disease.”

Signs of West Nile Virus include stumbling, staggering, wobbling, weakness, muscle twitching and inability to stand. Horses contract the disease from carrier mosquitoes and are not contagious to other horses or people.

The best way to minimize the threat of West Nile Virus is to control mosquito populations and prevent exposure to them:
• Reduce or eliminate sources of stagnant or standing water that can serve as a breeding ground for mosquitoes, including old tires, buckets, wading pools and other containers.
• Stall horses during peak mosquito periods (i.e., dawn and dusk);
• Use equine-approved mosquito repellants and/or protective horse gear such as fly sheets, masks, and leg wraps;
• Place fans inside barns and stalls to maintain air movement, as mosquitoes cannot fly well in wind.

CDFA is working with the California Department of Public Health to detect and respond to the disease in California. Horses provide an additional sentinel for West Nile Virus detection. For more information click here.