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This year, all San Diego Unified School District schools are taking part in a program where the entire lunch meal is grown in the state.

Jonathan Lashchuk looks forward to harvesting vegetables with his 5th grade class at Torrey Pines Elementary.

“If they’re smooth and dark green they’ll be really fresh,” Lashchuk said.

From snap peas, to rainbow chard, taking care of their school garden gives the students great pride and teaches them the importance of eating right.

“It keeps me healthy, I’ll have a nice strong body,” Lashchuk said.

The garden isn’t just part of their curriculum, it’s also part of their lunch.

Students harvest more than 100 pounds of fresh produce a year. They say the best part about it is being able to eat what they grow.

While the salad bar has always been a hit, the highlight about hot lunch on Thursdays is that now the entire meal, including the entree is grown right here in the state.

SDUSD’s “California Thursdays” nutrition program has now expanded to all of its schools.

Last year, only 20 schools participated.

The district says buying poultry and other protein sources in-state boosts the economy and ensures students eat the freshest foods.

“I think it really gets kids excited about their food and where it comes from,” said Bill Jenkins, Torrey Pines Elementary Garden Coordinator.

The district works with farmers up and down the state to provide a variety of fresh food options.

After all that work in the garden, Lashchuk and his buddy can’t help but chow down – enjoying the fruits of their labor.

“It’s just really cool to know that you’re eating stuff that came from your school and you’re growing it right there,” Lashchuk said.

San Diego Unified’s “Farm to School,” which is the umbrella program, started in 2010 and is one of the nation’s most progressive programs.

By Louisa Burwood Taylor

Secretary Ross is speaking at next month’s World Agri-Tech Investment Summit in San Francisco and shares some of her thoughts about the agtech market.

Why are you attending the World Agri-Tech Investment Forum in San Francisco next month?

It’s an impressive group of people who are affiliated with the event. Technology and agriculture, especially in California, have always been necessary for each other. We’ve also seen so much interest from the investment community and others; I have never seen so many people with money discover agriculture as the new shiny object, especially in the past few years as we’ve been struggling with drought. Almost daily we are getting emails or calls from entrepreneurs with a great idea, but they’re not always well connected to the reality for farmers, who need to make decisions on an hourly basis. So I appreciate when people can come together and have the potential to network to get connected to that reality of what goes on at the farm.

What will you be speaking about?

I will be focusing on what we’re doing here in California regarding policy. I think we’re very progressive, and we certainly have very forward-thinking farmers here. So I will be talking about the policies we’re working on, specifically regarding climate change and what we’ve done to respond to the drought. I think in California we have done very well on many of our environmental issues specifically thinking about resources and the kinds of policies that give clear signals to the private sector that tech and innovation changes are needed to help us achieve our policy goals. I will talk about what we’re doing on climate change, climate-smart agriculture, the water use efficiency program, our dairy digester program, and our healthy soils initiative, and then the role of tech in all of those.

How does your department support agtech innovation?

For the first time, my department has dollars available to incentivize farmers for on-farm practices which are being made available under the state government’s proposed budget. Specifically, we have funds available for improving efficiency in water use, and we’ve already invested almost $20 million into 233 projects of this nature. It is interesting the mix of people who are converting their irrigation systems to drip or subsurface drip using sensor technology to improve the precision of their irrigation scheduling and incorporating evapotranspiration modeling to further improve efficiency.

The range and variety of California’s crop mix means that there is no single solution, so we are seeing farmers and researchers and app designers and a whole host of other innovators work together to design tailor-made solutions from drip tape all the way to fully automated, sensor-driven systems that can be run remotely from a farmer’s cell phone or tablet.

We also have funds for dairy digester projects and began funding digesters in 2014. This segment is in line for a significant increase in investment because of our need to address methane as a priority pollutant. What we’re hoping to signal there is the need for anaerobic digesters that can generate low-carbon transportation fuel. There are offsets available for that in California which could be significant. We need more development of that technology in the state and technology to help us quantify what true reduction in greenhouse gas emissions comes from healthy soils, which hopefully our healthy soil program will be funded to help. 

Our healthy soils initiative is driven by science; we know that increased carbon in soils gives us benefits ranging from increased water-holding capacity, increased crop yields and decreased sediment erosion. The California department of food and agriculture(CDFA) is coordinating this initiative, and our goal is to do the research, the education, and the ground work to get to real-world, on-farm practices that protect and restore soil organic matter.

Which technologies are you and your team most excited about?

I have to start with the dairy digester. We have two million cows in the state creating significant methane challenges. The ability for dairy digester technology and waste management to provide an additional revenue stream for the dairy farmer is significant, as well as improving environmental conditions. We’re very excited about this technology especially as we’re seeing very promising numbers around the production of low carbon fuel for transport.

On the water front, we have a combination need of low tech and high tech. On the low-tech side, we really need the infrastructure and technological support to work with farmers who come in all shapes and sizes. There are 80,000 farms in California and on some, English is not the first language, so how do we bring them all up to speed to use precision irrigation technology? And how do we help them understand how to maintain drip lines or use the right pump size and so on? 

Once it is up-and-running on the farm, all of this new machinery is going to generate a steady flow of data that is much more refined than what we’ve had in the past, so our farmers are also going to need high-tech tools, apps and innovations we haven’t even thought of yet to monitor, quantify, verify, optimize and compare those results.

I have also been on some roundtables and panels talking about the opportunity to lower the cost and improve the efficiency of wastewater treatment so that manufactured water can be reused again and again. The first approach to improving water efficiency is that we all have to have a conservation ethic.

What regulatory challenges do you see cropping up for agtech startups?

Obviously, when we think about the future, we think about climate change, drought, and water salinity conditions. Plant breeding is critical, but there are already existing regulatory challenges if you have a solution that involves genetic modification. You have two challenges: getting through the federal regulatory system in a timely manner, and the pushback and reluctance of the population not to accept GM as a solution; that’s really frightening to me. Part of it is that I want to preserve choices for consumers, but also choices for farmers to have marketing channels. We’ve got to come to grips with this without making it an either-or situation; it shouldn’t be framed that way. Secretary Vilsack is trying to bring people together for coexistence, but I am worried about how it will play out.

It’s also very challenging to have a new disruptive technology when the federal government structure and statutory charges and regulations do not respond the way markets move, which is much faster. I think that’s an issue all across government; it’s regulating for the 20th century, but needs to be more forward-thinking. In California, we have helped to make some significant changes, and it’s been a combination of sending policy signals to the federal government. Coming from a state with a lot of consumers really helps us.

Our farmers lead in terms of growing crops and feeding people, but our consumers — 38 million of them and counting — tend to lead by example as well. Trends start here, like the ongoing wave of interest in food and where it comes from and how it is grown and new ways to prepare and serve it. Our proximity to such a huge consumer base means California’s farmers and ranchers aren’t just leaders in terms of agricultural production — we are also in the best position to understand our consumers. They expect us to be innovators whether that means irrigation technology, or new crop varieties, or being responsive to global markets, or making sure our regulatory framework remains adaptable to this dynamic industry.

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Congratulations to the Future Farmers of America, FFA! This is National FFA Week, a tradition that began in 1947 when the National FFA Board of Directors adopted the week of George Washington’s birthday in recognition of his legacy as an agriculturist and farmer.

I was fortunate to be able to meet earlier in the week with this year’s state FFA leadership team.  They are bright, well-informed, optimistic, energetic and inspiring!  I unfailingly come away from my meetings with FFA students reassured that the future of agriculture in all its dimensions is in very good hands. They clearly understand the opportunities and challenges ahead and are prepared to embrace them.  We are all beneficiaries of this outstanding youth leadership development program.

In another meeting this week with members of Coro, a leadership training program for civic leaders, I met a former member of 4-H, another fantastic youth leadership program that fosters future farmers and others who will serve agriculture.  This young woman asked me, as a former 4-Her myself, how I use my heart, my head, my health and my hands in my current job.  It was very thought-provoking, because I have often recited the 4-H pledge invoking those elements at the beginning or end of speeches.  I told her I definitely lead with my heart and that it’s critical for someone in my position to have compassion for all who may be impacted by our programs and our decisions. In using my head I believe I must never stop learning. I read a lot and am accused of being an information hound, because it is important to gather a diversity of perspectives and be inclusive in our decision making. I am dedicated to living a healthy lifestyle through diet and exercise to make sure I can give 100 percent every day. As for my hands, well, I don’t use them much unless I’m operating a keyboard or gesturing while talking, which is ironic given the multitude of hands necessary to plant, nurture, harvest, process and prepare the food humanity depends on!

FFA Week is a good time for all of us to consider the critical need to support our youth and applaud their enthusiasm for agriculture – its future as well as its legacy.

Researchers from UC Davis, CalTrout and Cal Marsh and Farms count, weigh and measure juvenile Chinook salmon that are going into experimental rice fields at Knaggs Ranch on the Yolo Bypass in February 2016. Credit: Carson Jeffres/UC Davis

An annual experiment to “plant” salmon in Yolo County rice fields aims to better explain how floodplains support strong salmon populations. Dubbed the “Nigiri Project” for its sushi-like marriage of fish and rice, the research is a collaborative project among the UC Davis Center for Watershed Sciences, the California Department of Water Resources and nonprofit organization California Trout.

For the first time this year, the agricultural floodplain habitat experiment will compare food web productivity and fish growth in three different kinds of river habitat.

For the course of the experiment, a group of juvenile Chinook salmon will be held in underwater pens on flooded rice fields, as in years past; a second group will be held in pens floating in an agricultural canal; and a third group will be held in floating pens nearby in the Sacramento River. The experiment began on Feb. 19, and the fish will be released after approximately four weeks.

“At this point, we feel confident that giving native fish access to the food-rich environment of the floodplain will play a critical role in recovering imperiled salmon,” said Carson Jeffres, field and lab director of the UC Davis Center for Watershed Sciences. “Now we are interested in how food made on the floodplain can benefit the entire river and Delta.”

Floodplains a ‘bug buffet’ for salmon

Born in the gravel of mountain streams, Central Valley salmon migrate to the ocean where they grow for one to three years before returning to rivers to spawn. Juvenile fish that are larger and healthier when they enter the ocean have better odds of returning as adults.

“Floodplain habitats are essentially a bug buffet for small fish,” said Jacob Katz, Central California director for California Trout. “Our previous results have shown that the food-rich floodplains appear to act as an important pit stop for juvenile fish, where they can fuel up on their downstream journey to sea.”

Unfortunately for hungry salmon, more than 95 percent of natural floodplain wetlands have been eliminated by the development of the Central Valley for farms and houses. In previous years, the Nigiri Project has shown that off-season agricultural fields can provide critical floodplain habitat for endangered fish.

“Fish have little opportunity to reap the benefits of floodplains because they are nearly all cut off from river channels,” said Louise Conrad of the California Department of Water Resources. “The Yolo Bypass is one of the last remaining active floodplain areas in the Central Valley. Enhancing the opportunity for salmon to access and use its floodplain areas could make a huge difference for salmon while also helping to recharge groundwater and improve flood safety.”

Four years of fast-growing fish

For four consecutive winters, experiments conducted on rice fields at the Knaggs Ranch property on the Yolo Bypass documented the fastest growth of juvenile Chinook salmon ever recorded in the Central Valley. These results suggest that through better planning and engineering, farm fields that produce agricultural crops in summer could also produce food and habitat for fish and wildlife during winter when crops are not grown.

The experiment suggests that floodplains on farmland can also be thought of as “surrogate wetlands” that can be managed to mimic the Sacramento River system’s natural annual flooding cycle, which native fish species evolved to depend upon. Agricultural runoff water is used to flood the fields for the duration of the experiment. This recycled water fuels the floodplain food web before being flushed back into the Delta ecosystem through agricultural canals, adding to the food supply for all fish living in the system. No new water is used to conduct the experiment.

This natural process of slowing down and spreading out shallow water across the floodplain creates the conditions that lead to an abundant food web. Sunlight falling on water makes algae, algae feeds bugs, and bugs feed native fish and birds. In contrast, very little food to support aquatic life is produced when rivers are narrowly confined between levees.

“California’s water supply for both people and fish will be more secure when our water policy works with natural processes, instead of against them,” Katz said. “This work leverages ecology as technology and points us toward efficient and cost effective real-world water solutions that support both fish and farms.”

The project was funded this year by the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, California Trout, and California Department of Water Resources.

Link to blog post

California is the nation’s leading agricultural state, with 76,400 farms producing more than 400 commodities with a farm-gate value of $54 billion. The mission of the California Department of Food and Agriculture (CDFA) is to promote and protect agriculture. It’s a complex job — and one that is getting more complex as the climate changes.

With the current drought in its fourth year, California has already started to experience some of the anticipated impacts of climate change. With drought, we have seen economic losses including job losses, fallowed land, and greater demand for a limited amount of water. A concerted approach is urgently needed to prepare California agriculture for future climate change impacts. One essential approach is embracing and implementing the concept of climate smart agriculture.

Practicing climate smart agriculture means following three principles: developing agricultural systems that are resilient to climate change; reducing greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture; and preparing for climate change in a way that keeps farms productive and profitable.

I heard a lot about climate smart agriculture during a recent visit to the Netherlands with a delegation of agricultural leaders from California. The Netherlands is a leading agriculture distributor in Europe and the world’s second largest (after the United States) agricultural exporter. Climate smart agriculture is already strongly integrated into Dutch economic and food security strategies. Our delegation not only heard about the threats from higher precipitation, but also about how overly dry conditions in the summer threaten the stability of peat dikes, which dry up to the point that they may simply float away, compromising the levee structure in a region where most of the land is below sea level.

In California we can prepare for such multi-faceted impacts through our own climate smart agriculture initiatives. At CDFA, we have a variety of programs and efforts underway to support agricultural sustainability, build resilience to climate change and reduce greenhouse gas emissions:

The State Water Efficiency and Enhancement Program (SWEEP) is an emergency drought program implemented at the direction of Gov. Jerry Brown to assist farmers in moving to efficient water irrigation systems that save water, conserve energy and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. To date, SWEEP has funded 233 projects totaling almost $18 million with $10.5 million in matching grower funds. The program is built on a strong scientific foundation and supported by a collaborative partnership involving other agencies, resource conservation districts, the California State University (CSU) system and UC ANR Cooperative Extension (UCCE). The academic institutions play a key role in providing technical evaluations of applications for water savings and reductions in energy consumption.

More-efficient irrigation technologies — like this drip system in an almond orchard in Yolo County — save water, conserve energy and reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

The Dairy Digester Research and Development Program, launched in 2014, provides incentives for dairy operations to install manure digesters. Digesters capture methane from dairy lagoons, allowing the gas to be used to generate electricity. Methane is a short-lived climate pollutant that is 28 times more potent as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. In 2015, CDFA awarded $11.1 million for the development of five digesters at California dairies. Matching funds by developers totaling $19 million were allocated to these projects. The digester program is supported by several scientific experts from the University of California as well as a technical advisory sub-committee. The program highlights the many opportunities to use agricultural byproducts for multiple benefits, including the generation of electricity.

Manure from dairy cows — like these in Fresno County — is typically collected in lagoons, which generate the potent greenhouse gas methane. Dairy digesters capture the methane produced by microbial manure decomposition so that it does not escape to the atmosphere and can be used as a source of renewable energy.

The Fertilizer Research and Education Program</em> has a long-standing collaboration with UCCE to provide growers with cost-effective practices to improve the efficient use of fertilizer and minimize environmental impacts. Improving the timing and rate of nitrogen fertilizer application can help to prevent leaching and runoff as well as emissions of nitrous oxide (N₂O), another potent greenhouse gas. Efficient use of fertilizer also reduces the amount applied, saving money for the grower.

Under the Healthy Soils Initiative, Gov. Brown has directed CDFA to lead an interagency collaboration to promote the development of healthy soils that sequester carbon on working lands. The health of agricultural soil influences its ability to build and retain adequate organic matter via the activity of plants and soil organisms. Adequate organic matter helps to enable the soil to function as a vital living ecosystem and provide the foundation for sustainable agricultural productivity. Carbon sequestration has been difficult to quantify in soils given the long time period for the accumulation of stable soil carbon pools. However, recent work by the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) has yielded results that allow for the scientific estimation of greenhouse gas reductions associated with several soil management practices ( comet-planner.com/). These management practices can be implemented on a wide range of croplands and rangelands. We are eager to collaborate with UCCE, NRCS, resource conservation districts and other researchers to advance this important work as part of climate smart agriculture.

No-till and cover cropping strategies help to build soil organic matter and sequester carbon, while also improving soil quality and retaining soil moisture. In a no-till field that will soon be planted to processing tomatoes, Fresno County UCCE advisor Dan Munk uncovers the residue from a winter cover crop of triticale.

These are a few examples of practices that can reduce greenhouse gases and increase climate resilience on our farms and ranches. Gov. Brown’s 2016–2017 proposed budget signals California’s ongoing support for these initiatives, including $20 million for SWEEP, $35 million for the dairy digester program and $20 million for the Healthy Soils Initiative. In addition, the proposed budget includes $40 million for the Sustainable Agricultural Lands Conservation Program, overseen by the Strategic Growth Council and administered by the Department of Conservation, and which supports the protection and sustainable management of California’s agricultural lands through planning and conservation via agricultural easements.

Going forward, CDFA’s climate smart agriculture initiatives will be coordinated through the newly created Office of Environmental Farming and Innovation.

There is no doubt we can do more in the climate smart agriculture arena. As we continue to expand our work in this area, CDFA will continue to work closely with our partners, including the scientific and technical experts at the CSU and UC systems. We are fortunate in California to have such expertise available to support our food production system with sound research, an extensive technical support infrastructure and an enormously accomplished agricultural extension service.

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Late last year the FDA published the final Produce Rule, which is a key component of new federal food safety laws under the Food Safety Modernization Act, or FSMA.

Video courtesy of the California Leafy Greens Marketing Agreement.

Link to Leafy Greens Marketing Agreement blog post

CDFA’s Border Protection Station along I-10 at Blythe.

By Hailey Branson-Potts

State officials have announced the arrest of a Baldwin Park trucker who they said hauled more than $13,000 worth of out-of-state bottles and cans into California in a case of recycling fraud.

On Jan. 15, agents with the Department of Food and Agriculture arrested Daniel Rosales, 45, after inspecting his 53-foot semi-trailer, the California Department of Resources Recycling and Recovery (CalRecycle) said in a statement. Rosales had been stopped at a border checkpoint in Blythe, officials said.

(Learn more about CDFA’s Border Protection Stations)

Inside Rosales’ truck, which was marked as BNS Trucking out of Baldwin Park, agents discovered 6,622 pounds of aluminum and 2,606 pounds of plastic beverage containers with a potential California Redemption Value of $13,550, according to CalRecycle, which has administrative authority over the state’s beverage container recycling program.

Rosales produced a bill of lading — a document issued by a carrier that details a shipment of merchandise — that indicated he was hauling bottle caps, officials said. He was unable to produce an imported materials report, which is legally required for anyone transporting used beverage containers into California, CalRecycle said.

Rosales entered the state from Arizona, according to Michelle Gregory, a spokeswoman for the state’s Department of Justice, which investigates and prosecutes criminal cases on behalf of CalRecycle.

Rosales was arrested and his truck impounded, officials said. He was scheduled to be arraigned Tuesday in Riverside County Superior Court in Indio on charges of felony recycling fraud and attempted grand theft. He faces six months to three years in prison if convicted, CalRecycle said.

“Truck drivers need to understand that CalRecycle will not tolerate recycling fraud, which essentially steals money from the honest Californians,” CalRecycle Director Scott Smithline said in a prepared statement.

Consumers pay California Redemption Value (CRV) when they purchase beverages from a retailer, and receive CRV refunds when they redeem the containers at a recycling center.

“Anyone who helps these criminal organizations haul out-of-state used beverage containers into our state to make fraudulent CRV redemptions will be caught and punished,” Smithline said.

In 2015, CalRecycle and its enforcement partners (including CDFA) arrested eight drivers who brought 85,646 pounds of out-of-state used beverage containers into California, with a potential redemption value of more than $108,000, said Lance Klug, a CalRecycle spokesman.

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