This month the Planting Seeds blog is featuring stories on food security, nutrition, and efforts to reduce food waste. CDFA’s Office of Farm to Fork is committed to helping all Californians access healthy and nutritious California-grown food by connecting consumers, school districts, and others directly with California’s farmers and ranchers.

The USDA estimates that 30 percent of the food supply is lost or wasted at the retail and consumer levels. One source is of this consumers or retailers throwing away wholesome food because of confusion about the meaning of dates displayed on the label.

What is Food Product Dating? 

Two types of product dating may be shown on a product label. “Open Dating” is a calendar date applied to a food product by the manufacturer or retailer. The calendar date provides consumers with information on the estimated period of time for which the product will be of best quality and to help the store determine how long to display the product for sale. “Closed Dating” is a code that consists of a series of letters and/or numbers applied by manufacturers to identify the date and time of production.

Link to USDA web page

The Bureau of Medical Cannabis Regulation (BMCR) today announced that it is now accepting applications for the Cannabis Advisory Committee to advise the bureau on matters relating to both medical and adult recreational use of cannabis.

The committee will advise BMCR and the other licensing authorities – the California Department of Food and Agriculture and the California Department of Public Health – on the development of regulations that protect public health and safety while ensuring a regulated market that helps reduce the illicit market for cannabis. In addition, starting January 1, 2019, the committee will also publish an annual public report describing its activities the previous year, including any recommendations it makes to the state licensing authorities.

Committee members are selected by and serve at the pleasure of the Director of the Department of Consumer Affairs. The committee will consist of representatives from diverse backgrounds, including the cannabis industry, labor, state and local agencies, public health experts, representatives from the Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control with expertise in regulating intoxicating substances for adult use, individuals with expertise in the medicinal properties of cannabis and representatives from communities disproportionately affected by past federal and state drug policy, among others.

Members will not be paid but will be reimbursed for any necessary travel for approved advisory committee meetings.

Individuals interested in serving on the committee can access the application online at http://www.bmcr.ca.gov/about_us/documents/commitee_application.pdf

For additional information about BMCR, or to subscribe to email alerts to hear about updates as they become available, please visit our website – http://www.bmcr.ca.gov/.

The robot bee being developed in Japan looks nothing like a bee, but scientists hope it can pollinate like the real thing.

By Amina Khan

One day, gardeners might not just hear the buzz of bees among their flowers, but the whirr of robots, too. Scientists in Japan say they’ve managed to turn an unassuming drone into a remote-controlled pollinator by attaching horsehairs coated with a special, sticky gel to its underbelly.

The system, described in the journal Chem, is nowhere near ready to be sent to agricultural fields, but it could help pave the way to developing automated pollination techniques at a time when bee colonies are suffering precipitous declines.

In flowering plants, sex often involves a threesome. Flowers looking to get the pollen from their male parts into another bloom’s female parts need an envoy to carry it from one to the other. Those third players are animals known as pollinators — a diverse group of critters that includes bees, butterflies, birds and bats, among others.

Animal pollinators are needed for the reproduction of 90% of flowering plants and one third of human food crops, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Natural Resources Conservation Service. Chief among those are bees — but many bee populations in the United States have been in steep decline in recent decades, likely due to a combination of factors, including agricultural chemicals, invasive species and climate change. Just last month, the rusty patched bumblebee became the first wild bee in the United States to be listed as an endangered species.

Thus, the decline of bees isn’t just worrisome because it could disrupt ecosystems, but also because it could disrupt agriculture and the economy. People have been trying to come up with replacement techniques, the study authors say, but none of them are especially effective yet — and some might do more harm than good.

“One pollination technique requires the physical transfer of pollen with an artist’s brush or cotton swab from male to female flowers,” the authors wrote. “Unfortunately, this requires much time and effort. Another approach uses a spray machine, such as a gun barrel and pneumatic ejector. However, this machine pollination has a low pollination success rate because it is likely to cause severe denaturing of pollens and flower pistils as a result of strong mechanical contact as the pollens bursts out of the machine.”

Scientists have thought about using drones, but they haven’t figured out how to make free-flying robot insects that can rely on their own power source without being attached to a wire.

“It’s very tough work,” said senior author Eijiro Miyako, a chemist at the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology in Japan.

Miyako’s particular contribution to the field involves a gel, one he’d considered a mistake 10 years before. The scientist had been attempting to make fluids that could be used to conduct electricity, and one attempt left him with a gel that was as sticky as hair wax. Clearly this wouldn’t do, and so Miyako stuck it in a storage cabinet in an uncapped bottle. When it was rediscovered a decade later, it looked exactly the same – the gel hadn’t dried up or degraded at all.

“I was so surprised, because it still had a very high viscosity,” Miyako said.

The chemist noticed that when dropped, the gel absorbed an impressive amount of dust from the floor. Miyako realized this material could be very useful for picking up pollen grains. He took ants, slathered the ionic gel on some of them and let both the gelled and ungelled insects wander through a box of tulips. Those ants with the gel were far more likely to end up with a dusting of pollen than those that were free of the sticky substance.

The next step was to see if this worked with mechanical movers, as well. He and his colleagues chose a four-propeller drone whose retail value was $100, and attached horsehairs to its smooth surface to mimic a bee’s fuzzy body. They coated those horsehairs in the gel, and then maneuvered the drones over Japanese lilies, where they would pick up the pollen from one flower and then deposit the pollen at another bloom, thus fertilizing it.

The scientists looked at the hairs under a scanning electron microscope and counted up the pollen grains attached to the surface. They found that the robots whose horsehairs had been coated with the gel had on the order of 10 times more pollen than those hairs that had not been coated with the gel.

“A certain amount of practice with remote control of the artificial pollinator is necessary,” the study authors noted.

Miyako does not think such drones would replace bees altogether, but could simply help bees with their pollinating duties.

“In combination is the best way,” he said.

There’s a lot of work to be done before that’s a reality, however. Small drones will need to become more maneuverable and energy efficient, as well as smarter, he said — with better GPS and artificial intelligence, programmed to travel in highly effective search-and-pollinate patterns.

Link to story

CDFA is in the midst of a series of Farm Bill listening sessions to discuss California’s priorities in advance of next year’s consideration of a new Farm Bill. The first sessions occurred this week in Modesto and Chico, with the final three on February 16 in Tulare, February 22 in Salinas, and February 23 in Los Angeles. In this video following last night’s meeting, CDFA Secretary Karen Ross discussed how the Farm Bill truly impacts every Californian.

This month the Planting Seeds blog is featuring stories on food security, nutrition, and efforts to reduce food waste. CDFA’s Office of Farm to Forkis committed to helping all Californians access healthy and nutritious California-grown food by connecting consumers, school districts, and others directly with California’s farmers and ranchers. This story is about CalRecycle’s program to enlist Californians in limiting food waste.

Californians throw away nearly 6 million tons of food scraps or food waste each year. This represents about 18 percent of all the material that goes to landfills. In order for California to reach its goal of 75%source reduction, recycling and composting, food waste must be addressed.

California’s Mandatory Commercial Organics Recyclinglaw requires businesses to recycle their organic waste. The links below provide more information on food waste management as well as examples of how various business groups and public entities are managing food waste.

Everyone has a role in saving resources and wasting less food. Creative food rescue projects like the UglyFruitAndVeg Campaignwork to save healthy fruits and vegetables from becoming waste. Rather than throwing away excess food, find ways to manage it more thoughtfully, such as working with groups to ensure that it goes to disadvantaged people, and composting for soil restoration. To further educate the public about food waste, the Natural Resources Defense Counciland the Ad Councilhave initiated a food waste reduction campaign known as Savethefood.com. Their web site offers a complete media kitwith posters, videos, social media postings, and more.

CalRecycle conducted two workshops in support of a proposed Food Waste Prevention and Rescue grant program; follow the progress of that program.

CalRecycle has been working to reduce food waste since at least 2002, when its predecessor agency conducted a Food Diversion Summit.

• Hotels/Restaurants

  Information for restaurants on managing food scraps.

• Households

  Information for households on managing food scraps.

• Schools

  Information for colleges/universities and K-12 on managing food scraps.

• US EPA’s Food Recovery Hierarchy

• Stadiums/Special Events

  Information for stadiums, fairs, festivals, and catered events on managing food scraps.

• Health Care Industry

  Information for the health care industry on managing food scraps.

• Grocery Stores

  Information for grocery stores on donating edible food to disadvantaged communities.

This month the Planting Seeds blog is featuring stories on food security and nutrition. CDFA’s Office of Farm to Fork is committed to helping all Californians access healthy and nutritious California-grown food by connecting consumers, school districts, and others directly with California’s farmers and ranchers. 

UC Merced is relaunching its branch of the Blum Center for Developing Economies with a focus on food security, with a hope to make it a hub for food-security-related research and outreach.

Economics Professor Kurt Schnier, with the School of Social Sciences, Humanities and Arts, and Karina Diaz Rios, a nutrition specialist in the UC Cooperative Extension, will lead the rejuvenated Blum Center, with administrative help from the Health Sciences Research Institute (HSRI).

“We want to create a community on campus to address issues of food security,” Schnier said. “We want to help engage students, faculty members and the community to have a direct effect on people’s lives.”

Merced County’s economy is largely based around agriculture, yet many people there do not have food security. The food insecurity rate in the area is 15.5 percent, according to the Merced County Food Bank, compared to a statewide average of 13.9 percent. Nearly 30 percent of those considered food insecure in Merced County are children. Food insecurity is defined as a lack of reliable access to a sufficient quantity of affordable, nutritious food.

The Blum Center at UC Merced started in 2013 and is affiliated with the Blum Center at UC Berkeley, which was founded by a gift from investment banker and UC Regent Richard C. Blum.  There are Blum Centers on several other UC campuses, including UCLA, UC Davis and UC Berkeley, the school from which Blum graduated. Each center has a slightly different focus, though all work toward the betterment of the global society.

Link to UC Merced blog post

Recent snowfall in the Sierra.
Photo by Michael Macor, San Francisco Chronicle

By Peter Fimrite

The blizzards that ravaged the Sierra Nevada in the past month wiped out more than a third of the California snowpack deficit that built up over five years of drought, a team of scientists said Monday, while encouraging state residents to continue conserving water.

The storms deposited roughly 17.5 million acre-feet of frozen water in the Sierra, or 37 percent of what’s called the “snow water deficit” in the state, according to a study by the University of Colorado and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

“This winter, from my viewpoint, dropped an impressive amount of snowfall and made a significant dent in the water deficit, but it certainly didn’t come close to relieving the total deficit for the entire drought period,” said Noah Molotch, a research scientist at the NASA Laboratory and director of the University of Colorado’s Center for Water, Earth Science and Technology.

The snow water deficit is defined as the amount of frozen water below what is normal for a period of time. California’s average yearly deficit during the drought was 10.8 million acre-feet, according to the study, or 54 million acre-feet from 2011 to 2016, said Molotch, who led the study.

One acre-foot of water is enough to cover an acre of land in a foot of water — generally enough to supply a single family with water for a year.

The storms in January dumped enormous amounts of rain and snow, breaking records and filling almost every major reservoir. In the northern Sierra, more rain has already fallen this winter than during an entire average year. The water content of the snowpack across the Sierra is now about 180 percent of normal for this time of year.

The heaping snow drifts prompted the government’s Drought Monitor to classify 49 percent of California as free of drought last week, a recovery from the 5 percent figure a year ago. All of the Bay Area, except for a tiny portion of Santa Clara County, was drought-free, according to the federal index, as was the northern half of the state, from San Francisco to the Oregon border.

The problem, Molotch said, is that California pumped huge amounts of groundwater to keep people and crops hydrated during the drought, depleting what is essentially a water savings account.

“It’s pretty clear that we aren’t going to be able to put water back into that savings account as fast as we were able to take it out,” he said. “For three weeks’ worth of snowfall it was pretty amazing, so there is reason for optimism, but one snowy winter will not be able to reverse multiple years of drought.”

Link to story