Farmers and ranchers are a self-reliant group. They can tune and service tractor engines, repair irrigation systems, and find a way to fix all kinds of broken farm equipment. But there are other kinds of problems they face where they can use some outside assistance – issues with loans, creditors, and USDA agencies. The California Agricultural Mediation Program (CALAMP) is a new service that provides free mediation to the agricultural community in California on a variety of issues.

Mediation is a way to resolve all kinds of problems by utilizing a neutral person to keep the dialogue constructive, overcome challenges in communication, help the parties develop options, evaluate those options, and reach an agreement. Unlike arbitration or the court system, mediation is voluntary. The mediator doesn’t make an order or impose a solution on the parties. If you don’t like any of the options discussed at mediation, you can simply walk away and be in the same situation as you were prior to the mediation.

CALAMP is certified by CDFA and the USDA as the official agricultural mediation program for California. The most common issues where CALAMP can help involve adverse decision letters or other compliance issues with USDA agencies such as NRCS, farm loans regardless whether the lender is FSA, a Farm Credit System bank, or a private lender, and credit issues.

CALAMP’s director Matt Strassberg anticipates that in particular they will be able to help many small and medium sized farms with credit issues. According to Matt Strassberg, “farms that are behind on accounts are often charged interest and after awhile that interest really adds up. CALAMP can help the parties reach an installment payment plan that is affordable and acceptable to the creditor. Even though the creditors often make some compromises, they are usually willing to enter into settlement agreements because they know they will be paid.”

For more information about CALAMP, their website is www.calamp.org, or (916) 330-4500 ext 101 or info@emcenter.org.

By Charmayne Hefley

Animals have been known to be able to use their senses to detect things that humans require extensive technology to detect. Mary Palm, USDA Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) national coordinator for citrus pest programs, said dogs have been successfully trained to detect canker disease, and now Huanglongbing disease (HLB), in citrus.

“Over the past four to five years,” Palm said, “a researcher in Florida first determined dogs could actually detect canker, began training dogs,” Palm said, “and then trained different sets of dogs to detect it. It turned out that they were very good at it. In a demonstration there, none of the people could find any symptoms in a particular citrus tree, but the dogs came through and found the symptoms. Once the people came back and looked very closely, sure enough, it was there.”

Palm said the USDA Huanglongbing Multi Agency Coordination (MAC) Group funded research to determine if dogs could detect HLB in citrus as well as they detected canker. There are now five dogs being trained and tested daily. If grower demand increases, the use of canines in pest management could increase.

Palm said they will probably come up in the next year or two with certification criteria for other companies to train dogs and certify them as detectors. Palm said, “They would be able to get a certificate to show they had conducted all of the tests necessary with the [proper] degree of accuracy.” Palm said the dogs in this program have a 99 percent success rate at detecting HLB disease.

Palm said approximately 80 trees are put inside every night, the positive ones in one greenhouse and the negative ones in another. The trees are taken out the next day and positioned in different patterns for dogs to inspect throughout the day. When the dogs are brought out, even their trainers don’t know which trees are positive or negative. The trained dogs are more than 99 percent accurate.”

Link to article

By Natasha Geiling

Though it’s just an hour south of California’s Silicon Valley, the Salinas Valley — better known for churning out lettuce and tomatoes than the world’s newest tech devices — might as well be a world away. In Silicon Valley, companies like Apple, Hewlett-Packard, Intel, and Google reign supreme. In Salinas, the biggest names are those of fruit and vegetable producers — Dole Foods, Chiquita, Driscoll Berries, Taylor Farms.

But the distance between the two places could soon seem a little smaller, thanks in part to a new effort on the part of the agriculture industry to attract technology companies to the Salinas Valley. Last month, the Western Growers Association — a trade association representing local and regional produce growers from California, Arizona, and Colorado — opened the Center for Innovation and Technology in Salinas, CA. The space — which has room for 34 startups to work, take classes, and meet with farmers — hopes to serve as a midway point between the innovative ideas of tech companies and the technical know-how of industry experts.

“Demand for food is increasing dramatically across the world because of increased population,” Tom Nassif, CEO of the Western Growers Association, told ThinkProgress. “You also have diminishing natural and human resources, and you’ve got to increase your production by 70 percent in 40 years to feed the world’s population. How do you do that?”

The answer, according to Nassif, is through technology that helps farmers use as few resources as possible to produce the largest amount of food — from reducing the amount of water needed to grow certain crops to reducing the amount of wasted product left in the field.

Nassif and the Western Grower’s Association are far from the first to suggest that technological innovations could help propel agriculture into the future, nor is this the first time in history that agriculture and technology have entered into a close relationship. In the 1960s, scientists like Paul R. Ehrlich — Stanford professor and author of the best-selling Population Bomb — issued grave warnings of impending mass starvation due to population growth. Instead, thanks to a slew of technological innovations in crop breeding, the world was able to significantly increase the amount of yield per acre for key crops like maize, wheat, and rice. Dubbed the Green Revolution, technological advances helped double the yields of rice and wheat across Asia, sustaining a population that grew over the same period of time by 60 percent. Though not without controversy — especially with regard to the rapid adoption of chemicals in agriculture — over the course of a few decades, the Green Revolution succeeded in steering the world away from earlier predictions of global starvation.

But those predictions have begun to resurface in recent years, stirred by the potential for climate change to disrupt agricultural systems at a time when the world’s population continues to grow.According to the United Nations, the world will need to feed more than 9 billion people by 2050, meaning that food production will need to increase by 70 percent. That creates a huge potential for new technologies that can either boost agricultural production, efficiency, or both.

In the United States, federal funding for agriculture technology peaked in the years following the Dust Bowl and around World War II, when 40 percent of federal research and development expenditures went towards agricultural research. Today, with just 2 percent of federal research and development spending going towards agricultural research, private investment companies are looking to fill a void left by shifting governmental priorities.

“All indications are that this is the new industry for investment in high tech,” Nassif said. “We’ve only been open a month, and we already have a number of tenants, more coming in every day, and more people indicating a desire to sponsor the venture as well as invest in agricultural technology.”

Created as California looks to leave behind the historic drought that has plagued the state for the past four years, the Center for Innovation and Technology is especially interested in technology to help farmers maintain crop yields in the face of diminishing access to water.

“Obviously using less water and using less labor are our highest priorities,” Nassif said, citing technology like drones that can map where exactly on a field water is needed most, or technology that can help a crop retain more water in its roots, as examples of the kinds of innovation he hopes to see come from the center.

Jeffrey Orrey, president and CEO of GeoVisual Analytics — one of six start-ups working out of the Center right now — is already engaged in creating technology that would help farmers use drones, as well as smaller manned aircrafts, to create high resolution images of their fields — technology similar to work that he used to do for NASA. By giving farmers a way to better monitor how their crops are grown, Orrey says, farmers are able to use inputs — like water, or fertilizer — as efficiently as possible on their land.

“Over time, with resource shortages and increasingly severe changes in weather and climate, it’s going to become imperative that we are more quantitative and better at monitoring how crops are grown to better understand how to respond to these drastic changes,” Orrey told ThinkProgress.

Giving farmers better access to quantitative data in the field also has co-benefits for the environment — the more real-time information a farmer has about their field, the more precise they can be with their application of things like pesticide, fertilizer, and water. That could help reduce the amount of excess fertilizer that ends up degrading water quality as runoff, the amount of water used throughout an operation, or the amount of pesticide needed to treat a field.

Orrey was drawn to the Center, he said, because it allowed his company a chance to interact directly with farmers and industry — a piece of the puzzle that can be missing for some entrepreneurs hoping to create new technology for agriculture.

“Unless you come from a farming background, we saw that there was a disconnect between high tech companies that think they have solutions but really don’t appreciate the nuance of making them applicable to the farm,” he said. “[The Center creates] the opportunity to bring the tech together with people who are doing farming and know the complexity.”

Nassif said that the Center’s location — close to the farmers of the Salinas Valley and within driving distance of both Silicon Valley and San Francisco — makes it an ideal first location, but he hopes that more Innovation and Technology Centers will open throughout the state in the near future.

“I think we’ll outgrow the Center very quickly, and that’s a good thing,” he said. “I think that given the appropriate attention and investment, the Center has nowhere to go but up, and to attract more and more innovators through employment and high tech jobs in agriculture.”

Link to article

By David Boule’

This winter growing season marks the 140th anniversary since the Washington navel orange was first picked and enjoyed in California. Its success and heritage – by way of Goa, Portugal and Brazil – is one of the Golden State’s great stories.

The introduction of this especially large and flavorful orange transformed just about everything in California – from the state’s economy to its image – and started the second gold rush.

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Visit the California Water Fix web site

Each year Governor Brown sponsors GEELA, the Governor’s Environmental and Economic Leadership Awards, which recognize individuals and organizations for exceptional achievements in conservation and environmental stewardship. It is the state’s highest environmental honor.

GEELA is a partnership with Cal-EPA, CDFA, the Natural Resources Agency, the Labor and Workforce Development Agency, the Health and Human Services Agency, the State Transportation Agency, and the Business, Consumer Services and Housing Agency.

At the annual GEELA awards ceremony this week in Sacramento, it was my pleasure to help honor two great recipients from agriculture: Prather Ranch of Shasta County, for minimizing waste from animal food products and creating conservation easements to protect endangered species, and the Sonoma County Winegrowers, for advancing a goal to make Sonoma County the first fully sustainable wine region in the country by 2019.

Two years ago, when I first heard the Winegrowers’ leadership talk about this, I appreciated the ambition but wondered how they could reach that goal in five years. It seems they are well on their way thanks to the leadership and commitment of Sonoma County winegrape growers  – 49 percent of vineyard acres have been certified sustainable, so far. Sustanability is defined by a set of standards on environmental stewardship, economic viability and and social responsibility, what we call the triple bottom line.

Prather Ranch operates on approximately 40 thousand acres in five Northern California counties. More than 50 percent of the land is enrolled in conservation easements, meaning the properties will continue to be used for cattle grazing . The dry-aged natural beef operation embraces a philosophy of “Deep understanding of the importance of low-stress cattle handling, responsible stewardship of the land, and a desire to provide a stable and satisfying life for those who work on the ranch.”

Agriculture has great stories to tell! Programs like GEELA bring those stories to the forefront. I urge all of our farmers and ranchers to consider GEELA recognition in the years ahead.

California air quality should get a boost from farmers using lower emission harvesting equipment, according to USDA’s Natural Resources Conservation Service in California.  Beginning in 2016, the agency is offering a new incentive option for almond and walnut farmers (and potentially others) to use cleaner harvesting technology.

According to Carlos Suarez, State Conservationist for NRCS in California, eligible farmers may receive an incentive of  $10.52/acre for up to three years to adopt harvesters that have been certified through peer-review research to reduce particulate matter (PM) associated with harvest by at least 30 percent. The new low-emissions harvesting opportunity is funded through the NRCS Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP).   Information on the specific models of harvesters currently covered by the program can be obtained at the NRCS Service Centers.

The new cleaner harvest technology joins a list of other on-farm air quality options for which NRCS provides technical and financial assistance. Such options include cleaner stationary and mobile engine equipment (e.g. irrigation pumps, tractors etc.) road treatment options, conservation tillage, smart sprayer technology, and incentives to chip rather than burn orchard debris.

The cleaner harvest technology was studied in part using the NRCS Conservation Innovation Grants (CIG). The grants are designed to stimulate the development and adoption of innovative conservation approaches and technologies. “In this case the CIG grants have functioned precisely as intended to bring California farmers new opportunities to protect natural resources,” said Suarez. 

Those interested in conservation planning and in Farm Bill programs should contact their local NRCS field office. Applications are taken year-round at all NRCS field offices. Eligible projects will be periodically evaluated and prioritized for funding.

Link to news release

Story from Upworthy.com

By Morgan Shoaff

What happens to the apples no one buys at the grocery store?

You’ve been there: looking at apples (or other produce) and examining what’s in front of you before deciding on “the one.” The first apple you grabbed wasn’t ripe enough, and the second one had a weird shape. The third was too mushy. But that last one? It was perfect. Into the cart and on you go.

But what happens to the apples and the other food you didn’t buy — and no one else did either? Too often, that perfectly good, unsold food ends up in the trash.

That’ll soon be changing in France.

The country just passed a bipartisan bill that prohibits grocery stores from throwing out unsold food.

Instead of discarding food items that are approaching their sell-by date, French supermarkets will be required to donate the food to charities or to turn it into animal feed or compost.

On the heels of the Paris climate change agreement, France is hoping to find a solution that helps the hungry while also helping the environment.

Many families in the world struggle to find food to eat.France is said to throw away almost 8 million tons of food every year, and grocery stores are a big contributor. Between people being picky about the aesthetics of their food, overstocked shelves at the store, and sell-by dates that don’t actually mean that much, there is room to explore how to keep more food in tummies and less in the landfill.

The law, which passed on Dec. 10, 2015, will make it possible for charities to have access to more edible food, like crates of yogurts, that would otherwise be destroyed. It’ll target stores with retail space of over 4,300 square feet (so … big ones) and is expected to go into effect once the Senate votes on it in early 2016.

According to the United Nations, if wasted food became its own country, it would be the number-three contributor to greenhouse gas emissions in the entire world. That’s pretty wild when you think about it. Throwing away leftovers or seeing food in a grocery store’s dumpster doesn’t seem like that big of a deal until you see what it’s doing on a global scale.

The United States should take note. We waste enough food to fill a 90,000 seat football stadium every day.

Yes, just let your head wrap around that for a second.

We’re throwing away more than one-third of all the food that’s produced in the country every year. Consumers do play the biggest part in that food waste, but grocery stores are responsible for throwing away 10% of it. We’re using as many tricks as possible to reduce the waste, but there’s more that can be done.