By Ezra Klein and Susannah Locke

The future of the nations will depend on the manner of how they feed themselves, wrote the French epicurean Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin in 1826. Almost 200 years later, how nations feed themselves has gotten a lot more complicated. That’s particularly true in the US, where food insecurity coexists with an obesity crisis, where fast food is everywhere and farmer’s markets are spreading, where foodies have never had more power and McDonald’s has never had more locations, and where the possibility of a barbecue-based civil war is always near. So here are 40 maps, charts, and graphs that show where our food comes from and how we eat it, with some drinking thrown in for good measure.

 

By the Kitchen Sisters and Lisa Morehouse

In 1898, the U.S. Department of Agriculture created a special department of men called Agriculture Explorers to travel the globe searching for new food crops to bring back for farmers to grow in the U.S.

“These agricultural explorers were kind of like the Indiana Joneses of the plant world,” says Sarah Seekatz, a California historian who grew up in the Coachella Valley, the date capital of the U.S.

These men introduced the country to exotic specimens like the mango, the avocado and new varieties of sweet, juicy oranges. But of all the exotic fruits brought, the story of the biblical date — and its marketing, cultivation and pollination — remains one of the most romantic of all.

David Fairchild, a botantist who helped found the Agricultural Explorer program, was one of the first to travel to Baghdad to investigate dates.

“He chose Baghdad,” says Seekatz, “in part, because he remembered One Thousand and One Arabian Nights, and … stories of Aladdin, Sinbad the Sailor and Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves. The book was a well-known childhood tradition for generations of Americans.”

In 1900, Fairchild’s colleague and fellow USDA explorer Walter Swingle studied date-growing in Algeria. As Swingle took temperature readings and soil temperature, he decided that the conditions were very much like those in California’s hot, arid Coachella Valley, sometimes referred to as the American Sahara. Deep aquifers existed under the California valley providing perfect conditions for dates.

Unfortunately, planting date seeds does not yield commercially viable dates. Seeds vary, and you never know what you’ll get. So Swingle brought back large offshoots cut from the bottom of the palms that would produce trees identical to the parent tree.

“It wasn’t easy,” says John Popenoe, a horticulturist whose grandfather, Fred Popenoe, owned a nursery at that time in Altadena, a few hours from the Coachella Valley. “These date offshoots are 60 pounds or so. They have to be cut off the mother palm with a big chisel.”

Swingle’s date palm offshoots thrived in the Coachella Valley and farmers began clamoring for more. In 1911, John Popenoe’s grandfather sent his sons Paul and Wilson on a world tour, including a stop in Iraq, to collect date palms to sell at his nursery. They kept separate accounts of their travels, some of which are maintained by the Coachella Valley Historical Society.

“In Basra, the port from which Sinbad the Sailor always set sail on his hair-raising adventures, we entered the world’s greatest date growing country,” wrote Paul Popenoe.

The Popenoe brothers encountered some hair-raising adventures as well. Paul almost died of typhoid fever. Wilson suffered from malaria. As they traveled by camel to the Wadi Samali region of Oman, searching for the delicious Fard date, they were shot at.

“After Paul’s recovery from typhoid,” Wilson Popenoe wrote, “we bought several thousand young date palms along the banks of the Shatt-el-Arab River [in southern Iraq]. We went up to Baghdad and bought several thousand palms in that region. After having been shot at once more, we experienced relief when our 9,000 palms were safely stowed on board a tramp steamer and headed down the Persian Gulf.”

In the Red Sea, some of the offshoots washed overboard in a storm. The ship was short of drinking water, and Wilson had to trade his typewriter to the captain to keep the date palms watered.

The Arabian palms finally landed at Galveston, Texas, and were shipped overland in 17 freight cars to California. It was the first commercial introduction of date palms to the Coachella Valley.

“Between 1900 and 1930, America has a love affair with the Middle East going on,” says Seekatz.

In order to market this new fruit and promote the region, Coachella Valley date growers began capitalizing on the exotic imagery and fantasy many Americans associated with the Middle East.

“The Arabian theme was a way to interest people in coming to what otherwise was a rather forbidding, trackless desert,” says Pat Laflin, whose family has owned Laflin Date Gardens since 1912. “It made it seem more exotic, more romantic. They needed something to dress up the dry sand.”

They also dressed up the towns.

“In 1904, Walters became the town of Mecca. There was Oasis, Arabia and Thermal. Investors from Los Angeles would take the train out to the Coachella Valley, where they’d be greeted by guides dressed in Arabian costumes and taken on camelback out to a proposed development called The Walled Oasis of Biskra,” Seekatz says.

Hollywood stoked the craze, says Seekatz. Films like The Queen of Sheba, Cleopatra and the blockbuster 1921 silent movie The Sheik, starring Rudolph Valentino, inspired women’s fashion, architecture, jewelry, packaging and ad campaigns.

In 1922, the discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamun fueled peoples’ interest and imaginations even more. Along with the mummies and priceless treasures found in the tomb, one item in particular caught the attention of people in the Coachella Valley: preserved dates.

“One man from the area,” says Seekatz, “actually wrote to try and obtain dates from King Tut’s tomb to put on display in his date shop.”

During the 1950s, date shops dotted California Highway 111 from Palm Springs to Mecca, attracting tourists. There was the Pyramid Date shop, where you could purchase your dates in a pyramid. Sniff’s Exotic Date Garden set up a tent like those used by nomadic tribes of the Sahara.

One of the most well-known date shops that still exists today is Shields Date Garden, established in 1924. Floyd Shields lured in customers with his suggestively named lecture and slide show.

“For miles along the highway,” says Seekatz, “there were large yellow billboards urging people to see ‘The Romance and Sex Life of the Date.’ ”

The Sex Life Of The Date

“There are pictures in the pyramids of priests doing a ceremony around the female palms, waving the male flowers to increase the pollination,” says Doug Adair, owner of Pato’s Dream Date Garden in Thermal, Calif.

And they still hand-pollinate dates today to ensure a reliable, successful crop. Francisco Paniagua was a palm worker, or palmero, for decades and is now a farmer with an orchard neighboring Adair’s. During the spring pollinating season, he climbs up into the fronds of 50-foot female date palms. He works his way around the spiky branches of the crowns, spraying little puffs of yellow pollen gathered from the flowers of a male palm tree onto each flower of the female trees.

Adair grows several kinds of dates, including Bahri dates, which are golden yellow and can be eaten unripe or ripened. “The Bahri comes from southern Iraq around Basra. The tradition in that area goes back thousands of years to when Alexander the Great passed through … This is what he would have been eating, Barhi dates — the fruits of his victory when he conquered the Persian Empire,” says Adair.

In the late 1940s, the Coachella Valley farmers and boosters revved up their marketing strategy by hosting an annual International Festival of the Dates. Business and civic leaders encouraged townspeople to dress up for the duration.

“If you went to a movie in Indio, your ticket might be taken by someone in harem pants,” says Seekatz. “At a restaurant, your waitress might be wearing one of those little boleros. Or the produce guy at the grocery story would be dressed as a genie.”

“The first Date Festival I went to was in 1950,” says Pat Laflin. “The pageant uses the Arabian Nights theme. They chose Queen Scheherazade and the princesses. And they always had a genie, elephants and camels. Lots of chiffon, sequins, and the costumes showed quite a bit of flesh.”

An outdoor stage was constructed with domes and minarets designed by a Hollywood set designer. “It was supposed to look like Baghdad,” says Laflin, “or something people imagined Baghdad looked like.”

The camel races were a huge draw. And there were elaborate exhibits of all varieties of dates in the Taj Mahal building.

“I think people were really trying to pay homage to the place where their new crop had come from. But it’s an exotification of an entire group. It’s problematic, but it reflected popular conceptions in America of how the Middle East was,” Seekatz says.

Today’s World

The Coachella Valley High School sports teams have been known as the Arabs since the 1930s, a moniker that has become controversial in recent years.

“The picture is of an Arab that looks rather fierce. Which is what you want your football team to be. But in today’s world, there’s an Arab group that felt it was offensive. So the high school is in the process of re-evaluating,” says Laflin.

Since the 1970s, the demographics of the Coachella Valley have been changing.

“A lot of these mom-and-pop date growers sold their date groves to large-scale, industrial agricultural producers,” says Seekatz. “Newcomers were not attached to the story of the date gardens and the region’s long connection with the Middle East. The area began to market itself as a place where industry could grow.”

During the 1970s and ’80s, the American perception of the Middle East was changing as well. Politics and the media brought the region into sharp reality. The fantasy images of harem dancers and genies gave way to TV coverage of the oil embargo and the Iranian hostage crisis.

“People were concerned that it would hurt to be associated with the Middle East,” says Seekatz. “But a lot of people were still invested in the agricultural heritage of the date and its Middle Eastern origins.”

Returning To The Oasis Of Boudenib

Gardens of date palms stretch mile after mile through the Coachella Valley. More than 90 percent of the dates harvested in the U.S. are grown here. One of the most popular varieties is the Medjool date.

“All the Medjool dates can be traced back to a single oasis in Morocco,” says Doug Adair. Nine offshoots taken from the Oasis of Boudenib, Morocco, are the source of all the present trees.

But now, in Morocco and Algeria, where the Medjool originated, the palm has been wiped out by disease. Some Americans are trying to help by giving back. Laflin and her husband, Ben, have sent back healthy stock from their date garden to the areas where the Medjool once flourished.

The Laflins visited Boudenib in 1995. It’s over the Atlas Mountains from Marrakesh and far out into the desert.

“When we got to Boudenib, the mayor came out to greet us. It was a big occasion,” remembers Pat Laflin. “He said, ‘Why would anyone from the United States want to come to Boudenib?’ We had worked with the Medjool dates for so many years, and to see where they originated was very meaningful to us.”

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By Eliza Barclay

If you’re a scientist and you work for a pest control company, you’re used to thinking about bugs as the enemy you’re trained to kill.

Now try putting one in your mouth.

It took some mental rearranging for Nancy Troyano, an entomologist for Ehrlich Pest Control. But on Wednesday she did it for the first time in her life.

“I’m used to looking at grasshoppers under a microscope,” Troyano tells The Salt. “I know what their internal organs and the spines on their legs look like, so I was kind of thinking about them.”

Troyano actually had no intention of eating any insects at the event. Her company sponsored the tasting at the Occidental Grill in Washington, D.C., just a half block from the White House, and she was there to talk about what the company does.

But then her boss, Ehrlich CEO John Myers, pressured her into it. And she was pleasantly surprised: “It didn’t taste so bad — kind of like baked potato chips.”

Troyano was among many skeptics who found much to like about the pop-up Pestaurant, which drew tourists and Washingtonians onto the Occidental’s patio for about four hours Wednesday to taste grasshopper burgers, roasted crickets, Mexican spice mealworms and ant lollipops. It was one of 12 Pestaurant events sponsored by Ehrlich and its parent company around the world.

John Mongini, from Flagstaff, Ariz., initially winced at his first taste of cricket. But after a few chews, he relaxed, describing them as “kind of like sunflower seeds.”

Perhaps the greatest gastronomic success of the snacks laid out for the noshing were the turkey burgers with ground-up and whole grasshoppers mixed in.

The juicy, grilled burgers were garnished with peppers and lettuce and served with an array of gourmet condiments. And there were two key reasons they were delicious: They’d been concocted the night before by Rodney Scruggs, the Occidental’s executive chef. And they included a brilliant secret ingredient: duck fat, to keep them moist.

“I’ve never cooked with insects before, so this was new territory for me, but it took on a life of its own,” Scruggs says. “The grasshoppers gave the burgers a musty, earthy flavor, like a dried mushroom.”

The match-up, however, of one of Washington’s most iconic grand dame restaurants and a pest control company headquartered in Reading, Pa., was a bit puzzling.

Why exactly would exterminators throw a free luncheon to give out grasshoppers, mealworms and scorpions?

“We’re not recycling insects that were captured in people’s homes,” Ehrlich’s CEO John Myers insists.

Moreover, says Troyano, the only bugs being served that could be considered pests would be the crickets: “They’re occasional home invaders.”

Instead, Ehrlich was there for three reasons: “to have fun, raise awareness about the serious business of pest control and raise money for hunger,” says Myers.

The idea, Myers says, came from Ehrlich’s parent company, Rentokil, which sponsored the first Pestaurant in London in 2013. “They expected 200 people and got 2,000,” he says.

For the charity part of the event, Ehrlich had committed to donate a few dollars for everyone who tried the bugs to D.C. Central Kitchen, a local non-profit. And while Ehrlich isn’t in the business of raising insects or directly promoting their consumption, Myers notes that he does see them as a viable solution to hunger.

As we reported last year, insect cuisine isn’t just a kooky San Francisco fad anymore. The U.N.’s agricultural arm has been speaking up about why insects should be an option for dinner.

Among the attendees of the D.C. Pestaurant was Sonny Ramaswamy, director of the National Institute of Food and Agriculture at the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

In an email to The Salt, Ramaswamy says he was pleased to see so many people partaking in bugs at the event. After all, insects are nutritious, and more efficient and better for the environment than other protein sources.

“Edible insects are going to be part of the toolkit for us to achieve global food security,” he says. “Unfortunately in Western countries we will need to overcome the ‘yuck’ factor, and events like Pestaurant will go a long ways to help people overcome the same.”

USDA, too, is now on the entomophagy bandwagon. In May, Ramaswamy gave the keynote address at the Insects as Food Conference, hosted by the Food and Agriculture Organization and Wageningen University in the Netherlands. (He also recently wrote this blog post about why everyone should get on board with eating bugs.)

 

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Alameda County Fair
6/18/2014 to 7/6/2014
Pleasanton, CA

El Dorado County Fair
6/12/2014 to 6/15/2014
Placerville, CA

Kings Fair
6/12/2014 to 6/15/2014
Hanford, CA

Merced County Fair
6/11/2014 to 6/15/2014
Merced, CA

Placer County Fair
6/19/2014 to 6/22/2014
Roseville, CA

Redwood Acres Fair
6/19/2014 to 6/22/2014
Eureka, CA

San Diego County Fair
6/7/2014 to 7/6/2014
Del Mar, CA

San Mateo County Exposition & Fair
6/7/2014 to 6/15/2014
San Mateo, CA

Shasta District Fair
6/11/2014 to 6/14/2014
Anderson, CA

Sonoma-Marin Fair
6/18/2014 to 6/22/2014
Petaluma, CA

CDFA’s Division of Fairs and Expositions

By Nick Miller

If Sacramento is truly the nation’s farm-to-fork capital, then the state Capitol has an opportunity this week to prove so by putting millions of budget dollars where its mouth is.

Here’s what’s at stake: California’s cap-and-trade carbon tax is expected to generate a cool $850 million next fiscal year. This money needs to be spent on projects that reduce greenhouse-gas emissions. Gov. Jerry Brown’s budget proposes that $25 million of this nut go toward agriculture. That’s not a ton of funding, but it is direly needed, and would be spent on fertilizer management, methane mitigation at dairy farms, biofuels, farmland preservation, plus other sustainability programs that combat climate change.

The catch is that some Democrats in the Senate and Assembly have the governor’s ag money in their crosshairs. They want to use the millions for their own pet projects: urban infill, mass transit, etc. To that end, both houses of the Legislature have proposed their own budget plans.

This concerns sustainable-agriculture advocates. Since most lawmakers represent urban areas, not rural districts, they fear that farmers might end up losing out on some of the state’s first ag-related funding in years. Lawmaker’s budget deadline is next Sunday, June 15.

“I can’t predict how this will go,” said Jeanne Merrill, a policy director with California Climate and Agriculture Network, or CalCAN. But what she does know is that “you can’t seek agriculture solutions to climate change without protecting land.”

 

When most Californians think of the fight against climate change, they picture doing so by switching out lightbulbs and not running the air conditioner, or by buying hybrid cars and driving less.

“But agriculture’s total emissions … are roughly about 7 percent of the state’s total emissions,” said Ryan Harden, a staff researcher at UC Davis who works on studies for the California Air Resources Board and the California Energy Commission.

He concedes that 7 percent is “not very much compared to electricity use and cars.” But it can make a dent. “Every little bit helps.”

For sure, agriculture has definitely been part of the mix when California’s leaders look at ways to reduce emissions and meet the celebrated Assembly Bill 32’s global-warming goals.

“Natural- and working-land strategies to reduce greenhouse gases aren’t at the top of the list in the building,” said Merrill, “but I think we’ve seen good progress.”

One of the main ways agriculture addresses climate change is with fertilizer. Almost all crops in California need it. But UCD’s Harden said, “One of the bigger sources of greenhouse-gas emissions from agriculture is nitrous-oxide emissions from soils,” which comes from chemicals in fertilizer. Some 50 percent of ag’s overall emissions derive from this, he explained.

Harden and others aren’t saying we should stop using fertilizers, however. Farming is too complex and vulnerable to advocate for that, he said. The state does encourage farmers to adopt greenhouse-gas-mitigation tactics on a voluntary basis.

Brown’s budget would allocate $5 million to research ways to improve fertilizers and manage their emissions. Again, that’s not a huge chunk of change. But it’s needed, experts say.

“There are a 400 different kinds of crops in California, with different soil and different watering systems,” said Karen Ross, head of the California Department of Food and Agriculture. She argues that there’s “a huge need to develop a research road map” for how to manage fertilizers, and this funding will help pave the way.

But the feud over farm-to-fork’s funding future is over more than just fertilizer.

Democrat leaders in the Assembly have a different plan. They want to split the $850 million in cap-and-trade money into two pots: Some of this would eventually go toward reducing agricultural waste and “carbon farming,” a method of reducing emissions that is popular with farmers. But there aren’t any guarantees, and critics of the Assembly plan remain uncertain that money will be set aside for priority projects.

The governor’s plan would be managed by Ross’ Department of Food and Agriculture, while the Assembly’s would be under the Strategic Growth Council’s purview (of which Ross is a member).

Over in the Senate, lawmakers recommend setting aside a specific amount of the cap-and-trade revenue, $30 million, but for nonspecific emissions-reduction and water-efficiency projects. This plan builds off the governor’s drought bill, and the California Wildlife Conservation Board would oversee it.

Sustainable-ag groups put up a good face and say they are happy to have any state monies. “We want to make sure some funding goes to agriculture,” Merrill said. “And we’re pleased all three proposals recognize the agriculture as a solution to climate change.”

In a perfect world, however, farmers and advocates would like to see more investment in farmland preservation. This means investing in ag land and ending sprawl policies.

“If you look at the rate of emissions for an urban area, they tend to have 70 times higher emissions than your typical plot of agriculture land,” said Harden. This means that the more farmland conservation takes place, the more Sacramento and the rest of the state can stabilize—and hopefully reduce—emissions.

But, no surprise, conservation often takes a backseat to industry. This is why a large piece of the governor’s budget, $12 million, will go to big-time dairy producers, who hope to install pricey digesters to reduce methane emissions.

That’s not a bad thing. And Ross says it’s a priority, “considering that we have almost 2 million dairy cows in the state and only a handful of dairy digesters.”

But she also advocates for strategic growth, conservation and sustainability: investment in modernization of water irrigation, renewable energy on farms (more than 5,700 state farms primarily use renewable energy, she said), alternative fuels and soil health.

“We can do all these things, and we know they’re the right things to do,” Ross said. But it comes down to money and time.

“When I think about the next generation, I think we’re really going to see tremendous change,” she said.

 

 

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By Tamara Lush

University of Florida researchers say they’ve found a possible treatment for a disease that’s devastating citrus trees around the state, but caution that it could be years before the cure could become commercially available to growers.

The team from UF’s Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences said that it has discovered a chemical that kills the citrus greening bacteria (also known as huanglongbing or HLB).

The chemical — benzbromarone — has been used to treat gout in humans but has never been approved for use in the United States because of concerns over reports of acute liver injury. Researchers sprayed greenhouse tree shoots infected with greening with three different chemicals, and the benzbromarone halted the bacteria in 80 percent of the infected trees’ shoots.

The researchers published their findings in the journal PLOS Pathogens.

But researchers caution that this good news is the first step in a years-long process.

“We are getting closer and closer,” said Claudio Gonzalez, an associate professor at UF who is part of the three-person team in the microbiology and cell science department.

The chemical appears to break down the bacteria’s cellular structure — it doesn’t allow the bacteria to survive in the vascular system of the tree, the research found.

They’ve only tested the chemical in the lab. Researchers now must test the chemical in the real world — mature trees planted in a grove — and if that goes well, will eventually seek federal approval to use the chemical commercially. One of the key things to determine, said Gonzalez, is whether the chemical affects the taste of the citrus fruit.

The researchers will begin field experiments this year.

Ken Keck, the president of the California Citrus Research Board in Visalia, said that he’s read about the UF research and is measured with his optimism.

“Our industry growers are a sober bunch,” he said. “In that they realize that panaceas, magic bullets, when it comes to this challenging disease, they’ve been once bitten twice shy.”

Keck points out that if the chemical were to be effective on greening, it would still need USDA approval and approval from different states’ regulatory agencies.

Greening affects Florida’s $9 billion citrus industry. Florida growers are seeing the bacteria’s effects this season. This year’s orange crop is approaching the fruit’s lowest harvest in decades, and experts say greening is to blame.

Greening first enters the tree via the Asian citrus psyllid — which are jumping plant lice. The psyllid sucks on leaf sap and leaves behind bacteria. The bacteria starve the tree of nutrients which leads to sour, mottled fruit. The tree eventually dies.

Until now, greening has vexed researchers because there is seemingly no cure. It’s affected a large part of Florida’s orange crop and threatens the state’s entire citrus industry.

Other citrus growing regions, such as California, haven’t been as affected by greening as Florida. But researchers in California are also working to stave off the disease that threatens the state’s $1.8 billion citrus industry. Psyllids have been found in Fresno County, Tulare County and other parts of the state, and a 901-square-mile area in Tulare and Kern counties is under quarantine.

And state officials have confirmed that a psyllid had been found in a trap near Farmersville.

 

By Amina Khan

Akif Eskalen steps through the dense, damp leaves in a wooded neighborhood, scrutinizing the branches around him. He’s looking for evidence of an attack: tiny wounds piercing the bark and sap dried around them like bloodstains.

The victims are box elders, sycamores and coast live oaks, all in some state of suffering. Eskalen approaches a tree riddled with 1-millimeter holes, as if someone used it for miniature target practice. It’s time to nab a perp. He selects a hole, pulls out a large knife and expertly levers out a chunk of wood.

There, in his hand, is a glossy beetle no larger than a sesame seed: the polyphagous shot hole borer.

Though small and sluggish, its appetites are wide and its spread is relentless. It attacks forest trees, city trees and key agricultural trees. It has defied all conventional and chemical weapons. No one seems to have a way to stop it.

This cul-de-sac, in the foothill community of Pasadena Glen, has been particularly hard-hit. One giant tree was so weak that one of its trunks toppled from one resident’s yard across a creek and crashed into a neighbor’s. Another tree was filled with green jelly, its insides completely digested.

Anxious residents cluster around as Eskalen examines a wounded sycamore.

“We’ve got a canyon full of highly educated people who want answers,” said longtime resident Linda Williams, a retired business owner.

Eskalen, a plant pathologist at UC Riverside, wants to contain this invasive bug before it spreads throughout Southern California. Already the beetle has been sighted as far south as San Diego, as far west as Santa Monica, as far east as the Riverside County city of Eastvale.

Eskalen tips the beetle into a glass vial. He detaches a pink spray bottle from his backpack and administers a few lethal squirts of ethanol before twisting the vial shut.

These beetles have a strange M.O. They don’t eat wood, like termites; instead, they drill circular tunnels toward the heart of the tree. They carry fungal spores in their mouths and sow them like seeds as they go. Then they harvest the fungus to feed their larvae. It’s a deadly partnership: The beetles attack, but the fungus also helps to kill, colonizing the wood tissue and spreading through the plant.

The beetles have easily evaded the authorities. Inside the tree, they’re well protected from pesticide sprays. The incestuous offspring mate with their siblings inside the trunk, so sex pheromones do not lure them out.

“If we can’t control them,” Eskalen said, “they are going to wipe out all our trees.”

Eskalen’s first contact with these devious bugs was in 2012, triggered by a desperate email from South Gate resident Chelo Ghaly. The real estate closer’s avocado tree had been oozing white spots all over its trunk.

Local gardening authorities were of no use. Suggestions to try fungal sprays failed. Frustrated, she scoured the UC Riverside website and found Eskalen, who studies avocado diseases. She sent him pictures of the damage.

Eskalen said he looked at the strange symptoms and grabbed his car keys.

After examining the fungus in Ghaly’s tree, he took his findings to the California Avocado Commission. To date, they’ve given UC Riverside scientists a total of $800,000 to broaden his investigation into this mysterious species of ambrosia beetle. His survey came to a head when he reached the Los Angeles County Arboretum and the Huntington Botanical Gardens — two repositories of healthy, well-kept trees.

They’re not so healthy anymore.

At the Huntington in San Marino, Eskalen spied a diseased specimen. He hopped up, grabbed a high branch with both hands and bounced until it snapped off.

“Ach, Akif, really?” said Tim Thibault, the Huntington’s curator of woody collections. It didn’t matter: The plant was probably a goner.

Such pests typically feast on a small group of plants. But this one doesn’t seem to discriminate.

When Eskalen and his colleagues surveyed the 335 species at the Huntington and the Arboretum, in Arcadia, they found the beetle had attacked 207 of them and 54% of these victims were infected with fungus. Nearly two dozen of the trees were being used as reproductive hosts — places where the beetles can raise their brood.

The consequences of a wide-ranging infestation could be enormous. Common city trees, such as American sweetgum and maple, would become public branch-dropping hazards. Native trees such as the California sycamore and the coast live oak have started to succumb, creating a fire risk in the form of dead, dry tinder. Avocados and other crops could face huge financial losses.

“California Chrome”

With the Belmont Stakes on June 7 and racing’s Triple Crown at stake, Northern Californians are again turning their attention to their very own California Chrome, an 11-foot, 2,500-pound chrome horse outside Safeway at 19th and S streets in midtown Sacramento. After the real horse won the Kentucky Derby and the Preakness, admirers adorned this one with roses. May it happen one more time.

Born at Harris Ranch and co-owned by a Yuba City family, California Chrome the thoroughbred is truly California Grown.

U.S. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack today announced that farmers, ranchers and landowners committed to protecting and conserving environmentally sensitive land may now sign up for the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP). The Secretary also announced that retiring farmers enrolled in CRP could receive incentives to transfer a portion of their land to beginning, disadvantaged or veteran farmers through the Transition Incentives Program (TIP).

“CRP is one of the largest voluntary conservation programs in the country,” said Vilsack. “This initiative helps farmers and ranchers lead the nation in preventing soil erosion, improving water quality and restoring wildlife habitat, all of which will make a difference for future generations.”

Vilsack continued, “The average age of farmers and ranchers in the United States is 58 years, and twice as many are 65 or older compared to those 45 or younger. The cost of buying land is one of the biggest barriers to many interested in getting started in agriculture. The Transition Incentives Program is very useful as we work to help new farmers and ranchers get started.”

The Conservation Reserve Program provides incentives to producers who utilize conservation methods on environmentally-sensitive lands. For example, farmers are monetarily compensated for establishing long-term vegetative species, such as approved grasses or trees (known as “covers”) to control soil erosion, improve water quality, and enhance wildlife habitat.

CRP consists of a “continuous” and “general” sign-up period. Continuous sign up for the voluntary program starts June 9. Under continuous sign-up authority, eligible land can be enrolled in CRP at any time with contracts of up to 10 to 15 years in duration. In lieu of a general sign-up this year, USDA will allow producers with general CRP contracts expiring this September to have the option of a one-year contract extension. USDA will also implement the 2014 Farm Bill’s requirement that producers enrolled through general sign-up for more than five years can exercise the option to opt-out of the program if certain other conditions are met. In addition, the new grassland provisions, which will allow producers to graze their enrolled land, will enable producers to do so with more flexibility.

The Transition Incentives Program provides two additional years of payments for retired farmers and ranchers who transition expiring CRP acres to socially disadvantaged, military veteran, or beginning producers who return the land to sustainable grazing or crop production. Sign up will also begin June 9. TIP funding was increased by more than 30 percent in the 2014 Farm Bill, providing up to $33 million through 2018.

As part of the 2014 Farm Bill, participants meeting specific qualifications may have the opportunity to terminate their CRP contract during fiscal year 2015 if the contract has been in effect for a minimum of five years and if other conditions are also met.

The USDA Farm Service Agency (FSA), which administers CRP, will coordinate the various CRP program opportunities. For more information on CRP and other FSA programs, visit a local FSA county office or go online to www.fsa.usda.gov.

Both the CRP and TIP were reauthorized by the 2014 Farm Bill. The Farm Bill builds on historic economic gains in rural America over the past five years, while achieving meaningful reform and billions of dollars in savings for taxpayers. Since enactment, USDA has made significant progress to implement each provision of this critical legislation, including providing disaster relief to farmers and ranchers; strengthening risk management tools; expanding access to rural credit; funding critical research; establishing innovative public-private conservation partnerships; developing new markets for rural-made products; and investing in infrastructure, housing and community facilities to help improve quality of life in rural America. For more information, visit www.usda.gov/farmbill.

Link to news release