California First Partner Jennifer Siebel Newsom picks cilantro for tacos with third and fourth grade students in the Summer Culinary Academy at C.L. Smith Elementary School in the San Luis Coastal Unified School District. The visit this week was an opportunity to showcase a summer culinary initiative that teaches students how to prepare California-grown fruits and vegetables in delicious and nutritious ways. The initiative was funded in part through CDFA’s California Farm to School Incubator Grant Program, which supports projects that cultivate equity, nurture students, build climate resilience, and create scalable and sustainable change in school food service models.
CDFA Secretary Karen Ross swore-in Kayla Ungar today as the agency’s new Special Advisor for Climate, Water and Drought. Ungar was previously an assistant cabinet secretary in the office of Governor Gavin Newsom and prior to that worked for SGR Consulting, a finance strategy and political consulting firm in San Francisco. Ungar is a graduate of UC Berkeley and received a Master of Public Administration degree from Northwestern University. Welcome, Kayla!
CDFA Undersecretary Christine Birdsong recently joined representatives from the California Fresh Fruit Association, California Olive Committee, California Milk Advisory Board, Raisin Administrative Committee, Wine Institute and the California Agricultural Export Council in promoting California Grown agricultural products in the Philippines. The Philippines is California’s 10th largest agricultural export market, valued at more the $300 million.
Speakers featured in the video below include Undersecretary Birdsong, Mark Hanzel (USDA Foreign Agricultural Service) and Elizabeth Carranza (California Olive Committee).
Undersecretary Birdsong was in the Philippines as part of a USDA Agricultural Trade Mission. The purpose of the visit was to help build economic partnerships and foster stronger ties between the United States and the Philippines. The Taste of California event was supported by the Western United States Agricultural Trade Association and CAGROWN.
CDFA secretary Karen Ross visited what is believed to be California’s only commercial wasabi production facility today in Half Moon Bay. Pictured with the secretary is grower Jeff Roller (r) and a chef from the United Arab Emirates, Hattem Mattar, who is working on a documentary that will include visits to California, Texas and Louisiana. Mattar is a barbecue chef who makes international connections with an approach he calls “Culinary Diplomacy.” His trip is an initiative of the US and the UAE. California Grown helped to facilitate his travels in California.
The USDA today announced an increase in funding to help schools continue to serve kids healthy meals this coming school year and provide financial relief for schools and child care providers.
Effective July 1, 2022, the reimbursement schools receive for each meal served will increase by approximately $0.68 per free/reduced-price lunch and $0.32 per free/reduced price breakfast. Other reimbursement rates, including rates for paid school meals and child care meals, are available online.
The action will provide support for schools and child care providers dealing with rising food costs, and is part of the Biden Administration’s work to lower costs and provide American families some additional breathing room.
This increase includes both a required annual adjustment in reimbursement rates to reflect the cost of food and an extra temporary per-meal boost in reimbursements from the recent Keep Kids Fed Act. Combined, this will pump an estimated $4.3 billion more into school meal and child care meal programs across the nation this school year, in addition to the nearly $2 billion in additional funding USDA has already provided. Note — California will receive more than $720 million in additional funding.
“The boost in reimbursements will help provide financial relief for schools so they can continue serving high-quality meals to students amid higher food costs and persistent supply chain challenges,” said Stacy Dean, deputy under secretary for food, nutrition, and consumer services.
California’s historic drought may leave the state with the largest amount of empty farmland in recent memory as farmers face unprecedented cuts to crucial water supplies.
The size of fields intended for almonds, rice, wine grapes and other crops left unworked could be around 800,000 acres, double the size of last year and the most in at least several decades, said Josue Medellin-Azuara, an associate professor at University of California Merced.
The figure is preliminary as researchers continue to look at satellite imaging and other data. An official estimate remains a few weeks away, said Medellin-Azuara, who is leading an economic study on farm production and droughts with funding from the California Department of Food and Agriculture.
Much of the idle land is in California’s Central Valley, which accounts for about a quarter of US food production. Mile after mile of farmland reveals withered crops next to fields of lush green plants, a testament to the tough decisions growers are forced to make on how much and what to produce, and whether to keep farming at all.
Surface water rights are seeing sharp cuts amid the drought and reserves are declining because of critically low snowmelt and depleted storage from last year.
“What’s really concerning is for the first time we are fallowing at least 250,000 acres in the Sacramento Valley,” Karen Ross, secretary of the California Department of Food and Agriculture, said in an interview. “Those are the most senior water rights holders.”
Last year, some California farmers were stunned to find their so-called senior water rights restricted. Water laws in the state are governed by a complex system that dates back to the Gold Rush era. Senior rights holders — which include companies, growers and cities with claims that were acquired before 1914, and landowners whose property borders a river — are the last to see their supplies curtailed.
Sacramento Valley typically “acts a funnel” that provides key water supplies to the broader region, according to the Northern California Water Association.
New regulation of the use of groundwater is also complicating the supply picture in the state, Medellin-Azuara said.
California has roughly 9 million acres of irrigated land. Drought last year directly cost the local agriculture industry and state about $1.7 billion, according to UC Merced researchers.
As California and the west contend with challenges brought by and climate change and drought, it is noteworthy that the state’s farmers and ranchers have been working for improved water efficiency for decades.
In the first 11 days of 2017, California’s six-year-long drought ended in deluge. During that time, the state saw a quarter of its average annual rainfall. Record snowfall shut down ski resorts. In San Jose, people evacuated their houses in boats. The state’s reservoirs couldn’t contain it; the water gushed through spillways and toward the Pacific Ocean.
But the relief was temporary. The next year, California quickly sank back into drought.
This tale of extremes is California’s new normal, says Graham Fogg, a hydrogeologist at the University of California, Davis. To survive this climate-changed future, the state needs to capture those torrents—and the tools to do so are right beneath our feet. In California, hidden under the ground are aquifers that have the capacity to store an estimated 1.3 billion acre-feet of water—26 times all of the state’s reservoirs combined. All California needs to do is guide the floods caused by torrential rainfall into the ground, instead of out to sea. “If we just capture the upper 5 to 10 percent of flood flows, that is enough water to compensate for the loss of water due to climate change,” says Fogg.
Here’s the problem: We don’t know where to build this infrastructure. Because we can’t see groundwater, our understanding of it—where it is, which direction it flows, and how it connects to the surface—is limited. “It’s been out of sight, out of mind,” says Fogg.
That’s beginning to change. In 2021, California’s Department of Water Resources began an ambitious collaboration with a team of scientists to map the state’s complex groundwater network. The project will provide the data that local municipalities can use to begin harnessing the floods when they come.
On a late-spring day, a helicopter dragged a huge metal hoop high over Redding, California. It was the last stop in a year-long series of flights across rural California—from Ventura to Siskiyou County. The hoop, which generates an electric current, sent electromagnetic waves into the earth below, generating a kind of electromagnetic call-and-response. When hit by those waves, the material under the ground’s surface responds by creating its own unique electric current and corresponding electromagnetic wave. That response, which a device inside the helicopter receives and records, tells a story about the material that generated it: “Just like you’d get a snapshot of your body with an MRI,” says Ian Gottschalk, a hydro-geophysicist at civil-engineering firm Ramboll. Freshwater generates a signal different from saltwater, he says, and clay generates a signal different from gravel.
The composition of the ground beneath our feet affects how much water the subsurface holds and how readily water percolates down through the sediment. Groundwater aquifers aren’t giant cavities under the ground. They’re more like sponges, made up of a coarse mixture of materials, such as silt, gravel, clay, and sand. Water rushes through the gaps between gravel and leaks slowly through clay. How quickly water moves through these materials varies by a factor of a million, says Fogg: “Anywhere from meters per day to centimeters per year.” By telling us about the composition of the earth, data from these surveys, called aerial electromagnetic surveys, or AEM, also tell us where we can “recharge” the aquifers most quickly during a rainstorm.
California has already invested millions in groundwater recharge, and projects are already underway across the state. On the Orange County coastline, heavy machinery injects water straight into the ground. Throughout Los Angeles County, engineered wetlands called “spreading-basins” percolate water down into the water table. But a strategy called Flood-MAR is what Don Cameron, a farmer who cultivates 5,500 acres near Fresno, is most excited about. (NOTE — Cameron is president of the California State Board of Food and Agriculture).
Cameron first noticed the water table under his land dropping more than three decades ago. His well motors strained harder and harder to pump the same amount of water. So in 2011, Cameron came up with what was then a brand-new idea: He would flood his wine grapes. To do so, Cameron installed a network of pumps and canals that push water up from the Kings River, which abuts his land, onto his fields. Raised banks called berms hold the water in place. “At one time, this was all a flood plain,” Cameron says. “We’re essentially reconnecting it.”
When Cameron first applied for a grant to test the idea, researchers he consulted warned that a flooded vineyard would kill the plants. But as Cameron saw it, his grapes would drink up some of the water; the floods would keep the weeds down and reduce the need for herbicides; and some of that water would trickle into the aquifers below. Win-win-win.
The plan worked. That August, Cameron picked a crop of perfect wine grapes, and the water table had risen 40 feet.
These days, Cameron is known as the “father of flood-MAR.” (To which Cameron says, “I’m too old; you can call me the grandfather.”) The practice, which specifically refers to flooding agricultural fields, is well known throughout the agricultural community in California and is slowly gaining recognition in other states that rely heavily on groundwater, such as Texas. Under California’s 2014 Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA), local coalitions of stakeholders, called Groundwater Sustainability Associations (GSAs) were required to submit to the state step-by-step plans to make sure they don’t further deplete groundwater in their area. Most of those plans involved Flood-MAR, says Yan Tang, a professor of governance and public policy at the University of Southern California. But in developing their sustainability plans, GSAs didn’t consider the geology of their aquifers. “This is where the AEM survey comes in,” Tang says. “You need the information to come up with a sensible sustainability plan.”
Cameron got lucky, land-wise. His farm is separated from the aquifer beneath it by a relatively permeable layer of sand, silt, and gravel. If his vineyard sat above dense clay, the water used to flood it might just sit at the surface, evaporating in the hot sun or causing damage to his plants. Others are luckier still—Fogg is optimistic that the AEM surveys will uncover underground formations called paleovalleys: areas where the subsurface is characterized by unusually coarse material, ideal for groundwater recharge. “Finding a paleovalley is kind of like finding the artery for an intravenous injection,” Fogg says.
Experts haven’t begun analyzing or implementing AEM data yet. Once they have, says Ajay Goyal, an engineer at the California Department of Water Resources, data from these surveys might help GSAs identify land ideal for recharge and zone it accordingly. Land that otherwise might be mined for gravel might instead be preserved as an access point for aquifers below. State agencies might also use the data to identify farmers who grow crops on suitable recharge areas, says Kamyar Guivetchi, also a civil engineer at the California Department of Water Resources, and pay them to implement flood-MAR.
Flood-MAR, and groundwater recharge in general, is popular among farmers—so popular that Guivetchi and Fogg anticipate the eventual construction of additional infrastructure to pipe excess floodwaters from the wetter, northern parts of California into the arid southern parts of the state. “Farmers recognize that over the next few decades, some farms may not be able to cultivate as much as they do now because of low groundwater supply,” Guivetchi says.
But first, the data. You can’t manage what you can’t see, says Gottschalk. “Otherwise, we’re more or less taking shots in the dark.”
Spotted Lanternfly eggs and the firewood in question being inspected in Truckee.
The Spotted Lanternfly, an invasive species originating in China, has been detected in 11 eastern states in recent years, and California is working diligently to keep it away.
As part of that effort, personnel at CDFA’s Border Inspection Station at Truckee recently detected lanternfly egg masses on a trailer carrying firewood from New Jersey — one of the infested states. The firewood was confiscated.
The Spotted Lanternfly threatens a number of trees–including almond, apple, cherry, walnut and pine–as well as grapevines.
CDFA has 16 Border Inspection Stations throughout California for the detection and exclusion of invasive species.
The ongoing drought continues to impact agriculture and rural communities.
By Ian James and Sean Greene
California regulators have begun curtailing the water rights of many farms and irrigation districts along the Sacramento River, forcing growers to stop diverting water from the river and its tributaries.
The order, which took effect Thursday (July 7), puts a hold on about 5,800 water rights across the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers’ watersheds, reflecting the severity of California’s extreme drought.
Together with a similar order in June, the State Water Resources Control Board has now curtailed 9,842 water rights this year in the Sacramento and San Joaquin watersheds, more than half of the nearly 16,700 existing rights.
“The need to take these curtailment actions is in many ways unprecedented. And it reflects just how dry things have been in California over the last three years,” said Erik Ekdahl, deputy director of the state water board’s water rights division. “After three years of really unprecedented drought, reservoir storage is at record lows for much of the state. And there’s just simply not enough water to go around.”
The number of water rights that fall under this year’s orders is slightly less than the 10,200 curtailed in 2021. But the latest cuts have come earlier in the summer, affecting many farmers at the peak of their growing season, when they typically irrigate more.
A long list of agricultural water suppliers were emailed notices this week ordering them to stop water diversions from rivers and streams. They included Glenn-Colusa Irrigation District, Browns Valley Irrigation District and Nevada Irrigation District.
Cities from San Francisco to Sacramento to Redding have also been told to stop diverting water.
In all, more than 4,300 water rights holders are affected by the curtailments, many of them farmers.
California’s water rights system allows for regulators to curtail rights and halt diversions based on the year a rights holder started using water.
In the Sacramento River watershed, Ekdahl said, “we’re curtailing down to a priority date of about 1910,” while those with older rights will be able to continue taking water.
While the initial cuts in June primarily affected those in the San Joaquin watershed, the latest order affects more than 5,000 water rights along the Sacramento River and its tributaries.
“Curtailments are never our first option, and yet we kind of need to go this route,” Ekdahl said.
He pointed out that much of Northern California has received only about two-thirds of the average rainfall over the last three years.
“We’re now in a really tough scenario where we have to look and evaluate how much supply and demand is there, and implement the water rights priority system like it was designed back in 1914,” Ekdahl said. “That’s important for just ensuring that there is water available and for providing a stable and orderly way to administer a very limited supply during drought.”
Those who have been told to stop diverting water have largely been complying, he said.
“It shows that people do recognize that we are in this scenario, we have to work through it all together. But it’s going to get harder,” Ekdahl said.
The cuts are intended to help preserve water supplies as much as possible, he said, not only to get through this year but also in case the state ends up enduring a fourth year of severe drought.
According to the state water board, the curtailments will reduce water diversions by about 789,000 acre-feet during July — more than the nearly 500,000 acre-feet that the city of Los Angeles supplies to customers annually.
Farms and cities across California have already been grappling with cuts in supplies from two large water-delivery systems, the State Water Project and the Central Valley Project.
The drought has taken a toll on California’s agriculture industry, which produces a range of crops including nuts, fruits, rice and hay for cattle.
Researchers at UC Merced estimated that reduced water deliveries last year resulted in 395,000 acres of cropland left dry and unplanted. And growers have been leaving more land fallow this year in the Central Valley.
Karen Ross, secretary of the California Department of Food and Agriculture, said initial projections point to more than 800,000 acres of farmland probably being left dry this year, including about 250,000 acres in the Sacramento Valley, which previously had largely been spared cutbacks.
“It’s a tremendous impact to the farms and to whole communities,” Ross said.
She said farms have effectively reduced water use over the last two decades while also increasing productivity.
Over the last 10 years, the amount of irrigated farmland has also gotten smaller, Ross said, and in the future, “we’re going to be farming a smaller footprint.”
That’s partly because of the gradual implementation of groundwater pumping limits under a 2014 California law intended to combat chronic problems of excessive pumping and declining aquifers.
The state’s $49-billion agriculture industry also is contending with drought years that are being compounded by warmer temperatures fueled by human-caused climate change.
Ross said that reality underscores the need to conserve now and adapt to hotter, drier futures.
She said the drought is a huge “punch in the gut because it’s so heart-wrenching.”
“It’s a very stressful time in ag,” she said. “But we are also very, very resilient.”
In addition to the curtailments of water rights, rice farmers who are part of a group called the Sacramento River settlement contractors have voluntarily reduced water use. Ekdahl said they are receiving about 18% of their full contractual allotments.
He said the state water board doesn’t have data on how the cuts will affect different crops in the Central Valley.
In the last year, many of the large irrigation districts have been able to use water stored in reservoirs, which isn’t subject to the curtailments, Ekdahl said. Many also continue to have access to groundwater, and some are able to buy water from other growers.
Ekdahl said who is affected and who isn’t is going to be a “site-specific kind of question.”
What’s clear is that without enough water to go around, he said, it will be difficult for some growers to find enough for their crops this summer.
