CDFA has released a letter to dairy processors and producers announcing a permanent adjustment in the price for milk sold for cheese production. Producers will receive an increase in payments from processors, estimated at an average of 96 cents per hundredweight (100 pounds) over a five-year period. This change is not expected to impact retail pricing for fluid milk.
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Dear Dairy Industry Stakeholders:
Today, I have ordered a permanent change to the dry whey scale of the Class 4b pricing formula, effective June 1, 2016. Once dairy product markets improve, this adjustment will provide a needed increase in revenue to producers to promote a stable milk supply.
I still believe adjustments to the pricing formulas are inadequate to address long-term structural challenges facing the dairy industry. However, we must continue to respond to changing conditions in our industry by using the only tools available through the current milk pricing system.
Financial conditions for producers in California and the U.S. are especially challenging right now due to declining milk prices caused by strong global milk production; high levels of dairy product inventories; and, decreased dairy product sales to key import countries. I also realize that manufacturers of California’s dairy products have made significant investments in this state and they are operating within a much more competitive environment due to weakened global demand. Milk prices and marketing conditions are not expected to recover until the balance between global supply and demand improves.
As I have frequently stated, we must collaboratively work together to address the issues impacting our industry. Although there could be potential changes pending decisions at the federal level, we must not let that stall efforts now to work within the limitations of the pricing system to promote long-term growth and prosperity of the California dairy sector. Our dairy families and processors who have committed to California deserve no less.
When Gabe Brown and his wife bought their farm near Bismarck, North Dakota, from her parents in 1991, testing found the soil badly depleted, its carbon down to just a quarter of levels once considered natural in the area. Today the Brown farm and ranch is home to a diverse and thriving mix of plants and animals. And carbon, the building block of the rich humus that gives soil its density and nutrients, has more than tripled. That is a boon not just for the farm’s productivity and its bottom line, but also for the global climate.
Agriculture is often cast as an environmental villain, its pesticides tainting water, its hunger for land driving deforestation. Worldwide, it is responsible for nearly a quarter of all greenhouse gas emissions. Now, though, a growing number of experts, environmentalists and farmers themselves see their fields as a powerful weapon in the fight to slow climate change, their very soil a potentially vast repository for the carbon that is warming the atmosphere. Critically for an industry that must produce an ever-larger bounty to feed a growing global population, restoring lost carbon to the soil also increases its ability to support crops and withstand drought.
“Everyone talks about sustainable,” Mr. Brown said. “Why do we want to sustain a degraded resource? We need to be regenerative, we need to take that carbon out of the atmosphere and put it back into the cycle, where it belongs.”
Since people began farming, the world’s cultivated soils have lost 50 percent to 70 percent of their natural carbon, said Rattan Lal, a professor of soil science at the Ohio State University. That number is even higher in parts of south Asia, sub-Saharan Africa and the Caribbean, he added. Globally, those depleted soils could reabsorb 80 billion to 100 billion metric tons of carbon, reducing atmospheric carbon dioxide by 38 to 50 parts per million, Mr. Lal said. That does not include the carbon that could be simultaneously sequestered into vegetation, but the numbers are significant on their own, equaling up to 40 percent of the increase in concentrations since pre-industrial times. Last year, atmospheric carbon dioxide for the first time hit a monthly average of 400 parts per million, a symbolic threshold but one that many experts say could indicate that warming will soon spiral beyond control.
When carbon escapes from soil, it combines with oxygen to form carbon dioxide. Sometimes the loss is gradual, the result of plowing that leaves upturned layers of earth exposed to the elements, or of failure to replant or cover fields after harvest. Sometimes it happens more suddenly. The thick prairie sod of America’s Great Plains was a rich carbon store until settlers tore it up for farms, leaving hundreds of millions of tons of topsoil to be blown away in the Dust Bowl years. The destruction of millions of acres of carbon-rich Indonesian peatlands for palm oil plantations is helping to drive climate change today.
Low carbon levels leave the ground nutrient-poor, requiring ever-greater amounts of fertilizer to support crops. They also make for thin soil that is vulnerable to erosion and less able to retain water, so yields suffer quickly in times of drought. To bring levels back up, a set of techniques known as carbon farming, or regenerative farming, encourage and complement the process by which plants draw carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, break it down and sequester carbon into soil. They include refraining from tilling, or turning, the soil; mixing crops together rather than growing large fields of just one type; planting trees and shrubs near or among crops; and leaving stalks and other cuttings on fields to decay.
Mr. Brown keeps his fields planted for as much of the year as possible to minimize nutrient loss. When he mixes clover and oats in the same field, the clover fixes nitrogen into the soil. After the oats are harvested, livestock graze the clover and leave their manure behind. Such strategies have allowed him to stop using synthetic fertilizers and pesticides, reducing costs. And the rich soil not only yields higher volumes, but the crops are more nutritionally dense than those grown on depleted land, he says. “Economically, it’s much, much, much more profitable,” he said. Mr. Brown’s approach is very different from the techniques of industrial-scale farming that have taken hold in the United States and other wealthy countries, where single crops stretch over many acres, and fertilizers and pesticides are used heavily.
Things are worse in poorer nations, where farmers’ desperation often means they are unable to care for the soil, Mr. Lal said. He recalled seeing a Mexican sharecropper carting corn straw away from the fields to sell: “I said, ‘Why don’t you leave it on the land? The land will be better next year.’ And he said, ‘This land will not be mine next year, and I need money now.”’
There is some momentum behind a shift. The French government, which helped broker last year’s landmark Paris Agreement on climate change, is pushing an effort to increase soil carbon stocks by 0.4 percent annually, which it says would halt the rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide levels. Mr. Lal called the target unrealistic, but said achieving just a quarter of that sequestration would be meaningful. In a generation, he said, agriculture could become carbon neutral, removing all the emissions it creates, for example through the energy used by farm equipment.
Worldwide, 5 percent to 10 percent of growers are using regenerative, climate-friendly techniques, said Louis Bockel, a policy officer at the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization. That number is likely to increase, he said, as multinational institutions and wealthy nations start incorporating carbon sequestration incentives into existing aid to farmers in poor countries. “More and more additional funding will be available” to encourage such efforts, Mr. Bockel added. “We are moving quite quickly on this.”
Farmers need financing to help them adopt new techniques, though generally only through a two-to-three-year transition period, said Eric Toensmeier, author of “The Carbon Farming Solution.” That money could come through a higher price charged for foods whose cultivation encourages sequestration, via a carbon tax or through trading systems in which polluters buy credits to offset their emissions, he said. Programs known as payment for environmental services, in which governments or others pay farmers for stewardship of land, are another potential avenue.
With that kind of support, the industry could be ready to do things differently, said Ceris Jones, a climate change adviser at the National Farmers Union in Britain. “People say that farmers are pretty conservative, but actually practice can change quite quickly,” she said.
Another obstacle is the lack of an agreed-upon system for measuring carbon sequestration in soil, which will be required as the basis for any payments, Mr. Toensmeier said. Technically, though, many elements of carbon farming are ready to be put into practice quickly, he said. Something as simple as planting trees around fields drastically increases the amount of carbon fixed into soil, Mr. Toensmeier said. “I would love to see a huge, major transformation of agriculture in the industrialized world, but if we started with just adding trees to the system we have, it’s a huge gain,” he said. “We can sort of meet farmers where they are”
It’s not just crops. The earth beneath the world’s grasslands, from America’s Great Plains to the Tibetan Steppe and the Sahel of Africa, holds about a fifth of all soil carbon stocks, the Food and Agriculture Organization estimates. In many places that soil is badly depleted. “This land is waiting to be filled up again with carbon if we could manage it sustainably,” said Courtney White, author of the book “Grass, Soil, Hope.” That means moving livestock frequently so each patch of land is grazed just once a year, mimicking the patterns of the native bison that once roamed the American West, he said. The combination of stimulation during animals’ brief presence and long periods of rest encourages plants to lay down more carbon, Mr. White said. With policies that encourage change, Mr. Toensmeier said, agriculture could benefit the climate rather than harming it. “There do seem to be a remarkable number of win-win opportunities, which is great news,” he said. “You don’t hear a lot of great news about climate change.”
With an estimated 40 percent of all California state employees eligible to retire in the next five years, and nearly 50 percent here at CDFA, the agency recognizes a substantial need to recruit new employees and this week held its first annual career fair at its Gateway Oaks office in Sacramento.
Invitations went out to local schools and Ag industry affiliates through several means of communication, including social media. The target audience included high school seniors, college students, and people interested in a career change. The response has been quite enthusiastic. Nearly 200 people attended the career fair and more than 1,600 others have inquired about jobs on a recruitment web page maintained by CDFA.
“It is absolutely essential to get Millennials interested in a career with the State,” said CDFA analyst Dana Eagle, one of the Career Fair organizers. “Retiring Baby Boomers have a wealth of institutional knowledge, which makes it critical that we invest in our current workforce and get people interested in coming work for us today.”
CDFA Deputy Secretary Kevin Masuhara speaks to an interested group of potential job seekers.
Current and future job openings cover the full spectrum of programs at CDFA, including plant health; animal health; dairy food safety; weights and measures – including work in alternative fuels; information technology; marketing; climate smart agriculture; oversight programs for certified farmers markets and organic agriculture; and administration and other support functions.
The agency will need scientists and other subject matter experts as well as veterinarians, entomologists, chemists, technical specialists, analysts, and a full complement of support personnel.
Future inquiries about jobs at CDFA may be directed to the Examination Unit by calling 916-654-0790 or via e-mail at exams@cdfa.ca.gov.
Here are some scenes from CDFA’s 2016 Career Fair.
Upcoming graduates of the CSin3 program gather for a group photo as their family members snap pictures.
By Krista Almanza
An unlikely class of college graduates will walk the stage on Saturday. They’re the product of intensive three-year bachelor’s degree program in computer science called CSin3. We first told you about it when it launched three years ago.
This joint venture (formerly called CSIT-in-3), between Hartnell College and Cal State Monterey Bay, aims to train students from California’s agricultural Salinas Valley to compete for careers in nearby Silicon Valley.
In a field dominated by white and Asian men, this first cohort of graduates defies the demographics. It’s more than 80 percent Latino and nearly 50 percent women.
“The skeptics and the doubters should know this is a program that truly works,” says Teresa Matsui of the Matsui Foundation. She’s the daughter of Salinas Valley orchid farmer Andy Matsui, who had the initial idea for the program and then paid for it by giving every student a full-ride scholarship.
The Matsuis wanted to help families similar to those who helped their orchid business grow. Many of the students in this cohort are the children of farm workers or immigrants themselves.
The hope was to prepare them for jobs at Silicon Valley tech giants like Apple, Uber and Salesforce, and some have accepted jobs at those big-name companies.
But since the program launched three years ago, a new opportunity has emerged to do high tech work here in the growing field of agricultural technology.
Two students, Jose Diaz and Monse Hernandez, spent their summer interning at Cisco in Silicon Valley, but later took a second internship at local agriculture tech startup HeavyConnect. It creates software to help farmers streamline administrative tasks.
Diaz and Hernandez built a program that unlocks a tractor’s ignition only after the driver completes a series of safety checks.
“I’m not only doing this project to help the owners, the farmers themselves, but also figure out ways to help the employees because of all the hard work they go through, all the long hours in the sun,” Hernandez says.
While she’s still weighing her post-graduation options, Diaz has accepted a job with HeavyConnect.
“Over at Silicon Valley, I feel I would be another worker maintaining a company. But with HeavyConnect, it’s going to make big change,” Diaz says. “And that’s what I want to do — help the community.”
HeavyConnect co-founder Patrick Zelaya has been so impressed with the CSin3 students that he held off filling full-time positions until graduation. He says it’s an added benefit that they bring both computer science skills and knowledge of the agriculture industry.
“It was just luck that there’s this talent mill of students that are proving themselves to be technical rock stars by completing a four-year degree in three years in the same town that we’re starting this business,” Zelaya says.
CSin3 co-director Joe Welch says some of the students came to the program from rural parts of the Salinas Valley, where they hadn’t been introduced to computer science in high school.
“Absent the program they wouldn’t know how successful they could be if they just worked and worked and worked,” Welch says.
In the Cal State system, only about 28 percent of students transferring from a community college finish on time. In the CSin3 program it’s 69 percent, and almost all the others will finish within the next year.
Leticia Sanchez is one student who will be graduating in December. When she started the CSin3 program, she was still developing her English language skills; the majority of her schooling had been in Mexico. Now she’s also considering a career in agriculture technology.
“I feel like if I stay in Salinas, I will be able to give back to my community,” she says.
When Sanchez started the program she had a goal of earning enough so her mother could stop working in the fields. Now she sees that happening in the near future.
“We’re seeing the embodiment of grit,” Welch says. And that grit is proving inspirational to others. Some younger family members of this year’s graduates are part of the next cohorts already underway.
The bees crawled up the thief’s arms while he dragged their hive over a patch of grass and through a slit in the wire fence he had clipped minutes earlier. In the pitch dark, his face, which was not covered with a protective veil, hovered inches from the low hum of some 30,000 bees.
The thief squatted low and heaved the 30kg hive, about the size of a large office printer, up and on to the bed of his white GMC truck. He had been planning his crime for days. He knew bees – how to work them, how to move them, and most importantly, how to turn them into cash.
He ducked back through the fence to drag out a second box, “Johnson Apiaries” branded over the white paint. Then he went back for another. And another.
After the thief loaded the ninth hive, he sat behind the wheel, with the driver’s-side door open. The truck was far from full, and there were almost 100 more boxes behind the fence for him to choose from. That meant a lot of money. The exact value of a hive is not standard – it depends what you do with them – but nine hives can bring in about $5,000 in just one year. And they are worth considerably more in the hands of a capable beekeeper who can maintain them season after season.
Suddenly, a wall of white light hit the thief from behind. He froze.
A security guard stood next to his patrol car’s spotlight, keeping his distance. The guard, whose name was Dre Castano, inched forward, wary of being ambushed. He thought there was no way just one guy had got all of those big boxes into the truck on his own.
The thief climbed out of the car and turned into the light. He stood there alone, his eyes glazed over and sullen. Maybe a drunk driver, Castano thought. He asked for the man’s ID.
Pedro Villafan, 5ft 2in tall, and 46 years old. He lived 20 minutes south, in Newman, another little town at the base of the foothills. He looked flushed, half-asleep. But he kept calm and answered Castano’s questions. Yes, those were bees. No, they were not his. No, he did not work for Orin Johnson. Yes, he was stealing them.
These are strange times for the American beekeeper. In California, the centre of the industry, members of this tight-knit community find themselves enjoying an economic boom while trying to cope with environmental turmoil. And now they’re dealing with a new kind of criminal: the bee rustler. Every year, at the height of pollination season in the spring, dozens of nighttime thieves – nobody knows exactly how many – break into bee yards all over California to steal hives.
Farmers depend on bees, but they do not keep their own – it is too costly, too time-consuming and too painful. So, they lease their pollinators from the commercial beekeeping industry, a fast-growing, national trade that underpins American agriculture.
That Villafan was even caught is remarkable. Thieves in the Central Valley rarely end up in handcuffs, let alone face prosecution. Witnesses do not drive by often. At 42,000 square miles, the area is vast and isolated, yet still connected by freeway arteries – helpful to thieves looking to make a fast getaway. With the right equipment, know-how, and a buyer already lined up, stealing hives is easy. A truck full of bees boosted at midnight in Stanislaus can be unloaded in a Kern County orchard, 200 miles away, by the morning.
The state beekeepers association offers a reward for anyone who helps catch a thief. The security guard who accosted Villafan in January 2015 got $1,000, although the sum can be as high as $10,000.
Detective Rowdy Jay Freeman – a backyard beekeeper himself – drives out to meetings, conferences, bars and bee yards to meet the keepers. Hunting down bee thieves is a frustrating job, given the dearth of evidence. Where dozens or even hundreds of humming boxes sit one day, there are “nothing but tyre tracks in mud” the next, said Freeman. “There are no witnesses out there in the country.” In three years investigating rural crime, Freeman had not caught a single bee thief.
But that changed this year when he got a tip two counties south. Jacob Spath, a young beekeeper short on his contracts after a tough winter, had backed a flatbed truck into a bee yard and made off with 60 hives. Two days later, Spath was negotiating prices with a broker, when a friend of the victim spotted the boxes, recognised the name, and called the police. Freeman arrested him that week.
Now the district attorney is looking to make an example of Spath by charging him with grand animal theft, a felony that carries a much higher possible sentence than ordinary grand theft. Spath pleaded guilty in April and could serve three years in prison – possibly more, depending on the judge’s valuation of the bees. The specific penal code only mentions large animals, including horses, goats, cows, mules, sheep, hogs and boars. This will be the first time in the history of California that someone is charged with grand animal theft for stealing bees.
A beekeeper checks a hive at San Francisco’s Fairmont Hotel.
By Kristin J. Bender
At the Clift Hotel in San Francisco, there are more than 370 rooms inside and 100,000 bees buzzing above in rooftop hives outside.
Yes, honeybees.
Aware of the well-publicized environmental threats to honeybees that have reduced numbers worldwide, seven San Francisco hotels have built hives on their rooftops. The sustainability effort also benefits the hotels as the bees produce honey for cocktails, food and spa treatments. It’s the latest in a series of environmental programs at hotels that includes low-flow toilets and aggressive recycling programs.
“This is not about making money, it’s really about raising awareness about sustainability,” said Melissa Farrar, spokeswoman at the Fairmont in San Francisco. “There’s not one solution so we wanted to do our part to help. It’s part of the bigger effort for helping the planet.”
Farrar said the four hives on the rooftop garden support about 250,000 bees and produce about 1,000 pounds of honey each year.
In this foodie city, the honey is used in such things as the Clift’s Purple Haze drink with gin-infused lavender, honey syrup and lavender bitters, and their compressed watermelon salad with lavender-infused honey and goat cheese. Honey is used in beer at the Fairmont Hotel, and the jars of the product are sold in the gift shop. At the W, they make honey ice cream.
The bee hives at hotels are not new, but the effort is growing every year.
Fairmont’s first beehives were built in 2008 at the company’s hotels in Toronto and in Vancouver in an effort to help combat Colony Collapse Disorder. Since then, dozens have been installed at Fairmonts from Seattle to China and Africa.
At the Clift, high above the city on the rooftop garden, 10 hives are buzzing with activity. Most guests don’t even know they are there. But the fruits of their labor are evident in the cocktails and food. You won’t find the squeezable honey bear container in Chef Thomas Weibull’s kitchen.
“Since we are chefs in California, we like to use a lot of things that are local,” he said, talking about his pork adobo appetizer with a honey glaze. “Ninety five percent of our products are local and sustainable.”
The bees produced more than 70 pounds of honey last year and are on track to do much more this year. The colony is expected to grow to 800,000 by next year, said General Manager Michael Pace.
His interest in bee hotels started last year when he took on the job of chairman of the Sustainability Committee for the Hotel Council of San Francisco. He spearheaded a larger effort between numerous local hotels to put bees on their rooftops as well. There are now seven hotels from Nob Hill to Fisherman’s Wharf with rooftop hives.
At six of the hotels, the man who tends the hives is Roger Garrison, a waiter at the W San Francisco turned bee keeper. At the W, Garrison, who seems to like serving bees as much as people, configured the boxy hives like miniature skyscrapers to mimic the city grid below, with the gold dome of City Hall in the distance.
Sometimes the job is painless.
“Most of the time you just open the hives and everything is copasetic,” he said.
Other times, it’s not. He gets stung almost daily.
“It’s like taking a daily vitamin,” he said.
But the payoff is big. Last year, the hotel produced 300 pounds of honey.
Garrison cares for and tracks the bees. He said they have a natural GPS system that allows them to fly up from the 32nd floor up to two miles daily to forage for pollen and find their way back to the hive. “There’s a lot of gardens in San Francisco that aren’t visible to the eye but are visible to bees,” he said.
Rice farmer and California State Board of Food and Agriculture member Bryce Lundberg in an Imperial Valley quinoa field – courtesy LA Times.
By Geoffrey Mohan
Bryce Lundberg is elated, which is saying a lot for a California farmer these days.
“Hop on in,” he says, wading into eight acres of ragged stalks, their seed tassels turning russet in the desert sun.
Lundberg, 54, soon is chest-high in quinoa, a crop that is thriving in an unexpected place: on a patch of mediocre soil that lies below sea level in the scorching-hot Imperial Valley, more than 4,500 miles removed and some 10,000 feet down in elevation from its native range in South America’s Andes Mountains.
If the harvest proves profitable here, California could dominate yet another niche crop, as the grain-like seed graduates from health-craze fad to a popular ingredient in energy bars, cereals and even drinks. Acreage dedicated to quinoa may reach into the thousands in the next two years in California, a state that already is a hub for quinoa imported from South America. That’s about where kale was in 2007 before it took off.
All Lundberg wanted to do was find a crop to rotate with the 19 varieties of organic rice his family already grows on about 6,000 acres in the Sacramento River Valley.
Lundberg decapitates a tassel of oro del valle quinoa and rolls it between his broad palms. “It looks so healthy. It’s really robust,” he says. “You can see it’s full of nice, white seed.”
Anthony Stiff, who manages the acreage, stands aloof. He hasn’t tried quinoa and isn’t eager to change that. But he already knows more about it than the average foodie.
“It’s a weed,” he says, his humor as dry as the soil. “I fight all day long to get rid of it; now I plant it. What the heck’s up with that?”
Stiff’s homegrown botany isn’t far off. Chenopodium quinoa is not a grain, but a pseudo-cereal, an herbaceous annual that’s a cousin to beets, chard and spinach and offers a balanced suite 10 amino acids. Its leaves make a sweet pesto, but it’s the seeds that land on consumers’ plates.
There are at least 120 varieties of quinoa, and plant scientists have sifted through most of them trying to figure out which can grow well outside the high and dry altiplano that sprawls across Peru and Bolivia. In the U.S., quinoa has taken root in Colorado, the Pacific Northwest, Idaho, Northern California, and now, Brawley, just 20 miles from Mexico in the heart of the Sonoran Desert. Lundberg already dominates U.S. West Coast production of organic quinoa, with 800 acres contracted out on small farms scattered from the Washington’s Olympic Peninsula through northern California.
What worries Stiff is that quinoa also is nearly identical to lambs quarters (Chenopodium album), an invasive weed that can be toxic to livestock and hosts a virus that can ruin alfalfa, which is planted on more acreage in Imperial Valley than any other crop, and ranks second in sales value only to the cattle that eat it. The acreage Lundberg visited harbored both plants, though the quinoa had the upper hand. Still, quinoa seeds won’t last to next year. Lambs quarters will sprout again in spring.
That makes Stiff much less enthusiastic than Lundberg or even his employer, Benson Farms, which agreed to try out quinoa on Lundberg’s behalf, on a forsaken plot they rented from a hay baler who hadn’t grown anything on it for nearly a decade.
When the crop began to show in early winter, a neighbor came up to Stiff and said, “Can I ask you why you’re growing a weed?”
If all he has to abide is some ribbing, Stiff will be getting off lightly. Quinoa’s history in North America has been so checkered that some early adapters came to believe it might carry an Incan curse.
One researcher was shot to death in 1986 while visiting a ruin in Bolivia, where he had gone seeking seed to bring back to Colorado’s San Luis Valley. Bolivia accused Colorado State University of “biopiracy” after its researchers patented a hybrid derived from Bolivian seed in 1994. Bolivia since has enshrined “food sovereignty” — the right to protect culturally important food from the economic pressures of international corporations — in its 2009 constitution. The university has let the patent expire.
U.S. growers, meanwhile, watched their crops produce seed that crumbled into powder. Even when quinoa thrived, buyers were few, particularly before growers found a way to remove the seed’s soapy coating.
With a reputation for ruin and not much of a market, quinoa was a miracle food in need of a miracle until the mid-2000s, when food shows, social media and Oprah’s diets pushed it into the mainstream.
That’s when California transplant Sergio Nuñez de Arco became the king of quinoa. A former development worker at the United Nations, Nuñez de Arco returned to Bolivia, where a few exporters were packaging quinoa in retail-sized bags under their own labels. Nuñez de Arco had more ambitious plans. He would pool the crops of subsistence farmers and create a reliable supply chain for big bulk shipments of quinoa, stretching from the Andes to California and beyond.
In 2005, he sold only $25,000 worth of quinoa through his company, Andean Naturals. Today, the Yuba City importer sells $26 million from its facilities in Bolivia and about $40 million from other facilities, and recently partnered with agro-industrial giant ADM.
“That’s how you ended up seeing it in Trader Joe’s, Costco,” he said. “Now, it’s in Quaker bars and Kellogg Special-K cereals.”
Andean nations now export more than 40,000 tons of quinoa, valued at $111 million — a nearly 40-fold increase since 2002, according to the United Nations Food and Agricultural Program. More than half of that goes to the United States, according to the program.
If the story of quinoa ended there, Americans would be healthier and impoverished subsistence farmers would be better off.
But major media soon questioned that story line, suggesting the new diet obsession was stealing food from the mouths of the indigenous Aymara and Quechua who had cultivated it for centuries and could no longer afford the inflated prices, which had nearly tripled, to about $3 a pound.
Guilt-ridden foodies began pointing fingers.
“I get that a lot — hey, don’t you feel crappy doing what you’re doing?” Nuñez de Arco said. “I say: well, what is it I’m doing? … Basically what we did was prove the small-holder farm didn’t have to sit back and be part of just the farmers’ markets and sell on the weekends. It could be part of the industrial food supply, just like the mega-large factories that you see here in the U.S.”
About two years ago, Lundberg said, Whole Foods suggested it might be more politically palatable to market home-grown quinoa. Lundberg was ready. After three years of failed experiments in the Sacramento Valley, Lundberg Farms produced its first 40 acres of commercial product, a tri-colored quinoa, in 2014, in Northern California. That swelled last year to about 250 acres. The Richvale-based company now cultivates close to 800 acres on farms from the Canadian border to Brawley, where the Bensons say they may add as many as 500 acres next year.
Consumers worried about the plight of Andean cultures now can feel better buying U.S.-grown quinoa.
“Isn’t that noble?” said Marc Bellemare, an agricultural economist at University of Minnesota. “It’s mighty compelling. It tells a nice story.”
Unfortunately, the data don’t support it, Bellemare found. Overall household consumption in Peru, a common proxy economists use to gauge well-being, improved during the price spiral, even for those not making money on exports. “The rising tide lifted all boats, however modestly,” he said.
Lundberg Farms says it is not crowing from the moral high ground, however squishy it may now seem.
“It’s not like we’re wrapping an American flag around the whole package and saying ‘buy USA’,” said Todd Kluger, Lundberg’s vice president of marketing. “It’s really about if you want to know where your crop is coming from.”
Lundberg and Nuñez de Arco also don’t see themselves as rivals. Lundberg is even considering processing his quinoa at Andean Naturals’ state-of-the-art mill, newly constructed in Yuba City.
“I’m so new in this — maybe I don’t want to be naive — I think there’s a lot of room.” Lundberg said. Quinoa may just be the new brown rice, he said. “I think everybody finds their own place and works their own space and I think that will be the case in quinoa.”
But Bellemare has a fresh warning. With so much more quinoa being grown outside the Andes highlands, prices have come back down to 2010 levels, and many farmers appear to be hoarding supply in hopes that the good old days will return.
“I just don’t expect the price to go back up, which is pretty sad,” he said. “That’s kind of a downer end to the whole tale. ”
