food growing

Water crisis slams tomatoes

Kim Chipman, WASHINGTON POST

Tomatoes are getting squeezed.

California leads the world in production of processing tomatoes – the variety that gets canned and used in commercial kitchens to make some of the most popular foods. The problem is the worst drought in 1,200 years is forcing farmers to grapple with a water crisis that’s undermining the crop, threatening to further push up prices from salsa to spaghetti sauce.

“We desperately need rain,” Mike Montna, head of the California Tomato Growers Association, said in an interview. “We are getting to a point where we don’t have inventory left to keep fulfilling the market demand.”

Lack of water is shrinking production in a region responsible for a quarter of the world’s output, which is having an impact on prices of tomato-based products. Gains in tomato sauce and ketchup are outpacing the rise in U.S. food inflation, which is at its highest in 43 years, with drought and higher agricultural inputs to blame. With California climate-change forecasts calling for hotter and drier conditions, the outlook for farmers is uncertain.

“It’s real tough to grow a tomato crop right now,” Montna said. “On one side you have the drought impacting costs because you don’t have enough water to grow all your acres, and then you have the farm inflation side of it with fuel and fertilizer costs shooting up.”

Read more at https://www.pressdemocrat.com/article/business/spaghetti-sauce-is-under-threat-as-water-crisis-slams-tomatoes/

Agriculture/Food System, Water, , ,

School Garden Network bringing virtual Earth Day event to local students

Heather Bailey, HEALDSBURG TRIBUNE

This Earth Day, April 22, from 5 to 6 p.m. the School Garden Network will host a live and silent auction, a cooking demonstration with Handline chef Natalie Goble as well as a storytelling event.

The live virtual fundraiser hosted by Clark Wolf, a Sonoma County radio personality, will weave together colorful stories of the many school gardens here in Sonoma County, the people who care for them and the children they serve.

In between, exciting vacation getaways, wine, art and gardening gifts will be auctioned off in real time, and chef/owner Natalie Goble from Handline will offer up a cooking demo that is both accessible and delicious.

The silent auction will begin on April 12 and run through the event.

Tickets are $10 per household. You can also be a sustaining supporter of the event by purchasing a ticket at $50 or $100. Every additional dollar will help set children up for success when they’re back in the classroom by giving them the opportunity to have practical outdoor experiences after a year of virtual learning.

The first 25 people to buy $100 tickets will receive a bottle of wine from local wine producers, The Hobo Wine Company. For more information and to purchase tickets go to: https://springbloom2021.eventbrite.com.

The funds raised will help support programs like Healthy Roots Grow Kits, which includes plants, seeds, training modules for teachers, compost tea kits and more. It is hoped these kits will jump-start school garden programs this fall. Funds will also support schoolyard habitat designs and installations, the teen apprentice program that trains high school youth to sustain garden spaces, and professional development opportunities for educators to use the garden in STEM and in other cross-curricular ways.

Source: https://www.sonomawest.com/the_healdsburg_tribune/news/school-garden-network-bringing-virtual-earth-day-event-to-local-students/article_702806f4-933c-11eb-9127-c3409d0b8455.html

Agriculture/Food System, Sustainable Living, ,

Crops of the past

Janet Balicki Weber, THE PRESS DEMOCRAT

Harvest season is underway in Sonoma County and for those living in Wine Country that means grapes.

But let’s not forget the multitude of other crops that have jockeyed for the title of top crop through the years. Hops, apples and prunes have all taken turns dominating the economy at one time.

And there were other crops, too: walnuts, cherries and berries were once part of a diverse agricultural landscape that in recent years has become more grape-centric.

Agriculture has always been important to Sonoma County. In the 1920s, Sonoma County was ranked eighth in the country in agricultural production. In 1931, it was 10th, with all this coming from around 7,000 farms, 5,100 of which were 50 acres or smaller.

The small family farm usually grew multiple crops; producers often grew three or four to back up their primary yield. When prices dipped for one, they were prepared.

Of course, there also are animal products. Although crops like hops have nearly disappeared from the county, poultry and dairy continue to be big producers from Cloverdale to Petaluma.

View photos at https://www.pressdemocrat.com/news/8756663-181/historic-photos-of-harvest-in?sba=AAS

Agriculture/Food System, Land Use, , , ,

Toby Hemenway, leading permaculture promoter, dies at 64 

Clark Mason, THE PRESS DEMOCRAT
Toby Hemenway, a leading writer, teacher and crusader for permaculture, died Tuesday at his Sebastopol home because of complications from pancreatic cancer.
Hemenway, 64, wrote a top seller on permaculture, a term coined in the late 1970s mixing “permanent” and “agriculture” to describe a new approach to agriculture and community design bringing together elements that sustain and support each other.
“He was really a big deal,” said Kellen Watson, senior programs coordinator with Daily Acts, a Petaluma-based sustainability education program. “He wrote the top-selling permaculture book in the world,” for many people their first introduction to the subject.
That book, 2009’s “Gaia’s Garden — A Guide to Home-Scale Permaculture,” was considered the most easily understandable book on the topic, presenting basic permaculture concepts and principles with clarity and elegance, as well as detailed how-to tips for implementing them in a garden.
It was named by the Washington Post as one of the 10 best gardening books of 2010 and has sold more than 250,000 copies.
Hemenway could talk about soil from a cosmic perspective — how the elements of life were molded during the Big Bang, inside stars, and in explosive supernovae.
Then he would bring it down to earth.
“Soil is miraculous,” he wrote in “Gaia’s Garden.” “It is where the dead are brought back to life.”
Read more at: Toby Hemenway, leading permaculture promoter, dies at 64 | The Press Democrat

Agriculture/Food System, Sustainable Living, , ,

Tips, tricks to debugging your garden

Jeff Cox, THE PRESS DEMOCRAT
If you discover that some kind of insect is damaging your garden, what should you do?The best thing you can do? Keep calm and carry on. The worst thing you can do? Spray your garden with insecticide. Here’s why.
First of all, a little insect damage is actually good for your crops, whether edible or ornamental. It stimulates growth hormones to repair damage and stimulates the plants to produce insect-repelling compounds.
But what if a pest is so numerous that it threatens to destroy your crop? That’s a signal you need to encourage more beneficial insects to live in your garden, the kind that eat pests for breakfast, lunch and dinner. You can invite them in by planting nectar and pollen-producing plants, especially ones with umbrella-shaped flower and seedheads, like fennel, dill, and carrot, even the wild carrots called queen anne’s lace.
Insect scientists also suggest leaving about 10 percent of your garden space planted in whatever happens to grow wild there (except blackberries and poison oak). This will be habitat for native pest-eating insects.
Pests are food for beneficial insects, so by spraying insecticide on your garden, you are wiping out the pests and the good guys. Pests, however, are designed by nature to be the first ones back into a garden that has been sprayed. After all, they eat plants, so the table is set.
Until pest populations build up, there’s not much for beneficials to eat, so they show up last. The result is that your pest problem will be worse than before.
Read more at: Tips, tricks to debugging your garden | The Press Democrat

Agriculture/Food System, Sustainable Living, Wildlife, , ,

Troubled Delta system Is California’s water battleground

Erica Goode, THE NEW YORK TIMES
Fighting over water is a tradition in California, but nowhere are the lines of dispute more sharply drawn than here in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, a 720,000-acre network of islands and canals that is the hub of the state’s water system.
Giant pumps pull in water flowing to the delta from the mountainous north of the state, where the majority of precipitation falls, and send it to farms, towns and cities in the Central Valley and Southern California, where the demand for water is greatest.

For decades, the shortcomings of this water transportation system, among the most ambitious and complex ever constructed, have been a source of conflict and complaint.

But in the fourth year of a profound drought, the delta has become a central battle zone, pitting north against south, farmers against environmental groups, farmers against one another and many local residents against California’s governor, Jerry Brown, whose plan to fix the delta’s problems upsets them almost as much as the drought itself.

“In major battles, crossroads are always fought over,” said Steve Mello, who farms in the north delta. “And this is the crossroads for most of the water in the north state that they are seeking to export south.”

Water pumped from the delta, the largest estuary on the West Coast, accounts for only about 15 percent of the total water from aboveground sources that is used in California.

But the delta pumps help feed more than three million acres of farmland, much of it in the San Joaquin Valley, the agricultural heartland of the state. The estuary’s water is also home to hundreds of wildlife species, including fish — like the winter-run Chinook salmon and the delta smelt — that are listed as endangered and federally protected.

Casualties in this tug of war are counted in fallowed fields and the loss of species. And as the drought has intensified, so has debate over how the delta’s limited supply of water should be apportioned. Farmers in the Central Valley call it a “man-made drought,” complaining that water needed for crops is going to fish instead. This month, an environmental group filed suit against the state and federal governments, claiming that endangered species were being sacrificed to agricultural interests.

Read more at: Troubled Delta System Is California’s Water Battleground – The New York Times

Agriculture/Food System, Sustainable Living, Water, Wildlife, , , , , , , ,

Op-Ed: It’s time to protect the Delta

Jon Rosenfield & Gary Bobker, THE SACRAMENTO BEE
California is at high risk of permanently losing key species and habitats in the West Coast’s largest estuary, the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta and San Francisco Bay.
Some describe these grave outcomes as “ecosystem collapse,” others prefer the less descriptive term “ecosystem change.” Whatever words we choose, the decline of the Bay-Delta is part of the global loss of biological diversity described in Elizabeth Kolbert’s Pulitzer Prize winning book “The Sixth Extinction” – a tragedy that’s happening not just in coral reefs and rainforests but right in our backyard.
Focusing on semantics rather than biology threatens to overshadow important points:
▪  Several species native to the Delta could soon disappear;
▪  These and other permanent and negative outcomes are directly related to human activities – in particular, the diversion of more than 50 percent of the estuary’s inflow; and
▪  We can still protect this ecosystem and the values it provides to us, if we act decisively.
Six of the estuary’s unique populations of fish are listed as endangered and others are declining rapidly. In 2014, endangered winter-run and commercially valuable fall-run Chinook salmon were devastated by failure to provide cold water required by eggs incubating below Central Valley dams and the minimum freshwater flows that young salmon need as they migrate to the ocean. Cuts to freshwater flows also devastated species such as Delta smelt, longfin smelt and starry flounder that are at or near record low population levels. Yet the same failures to enforce minimum flow and temperature protections are being repeated this year, pushing native species ever closer to extinction.
When species that were once the estuary’s most abundant are on the verge of disappearing, everything that depends on them suffers, too – from commercial fishing communities along the California and Oregon coasts; to the tourism, recreation and seafood businesses of Northern California; to Orca whales in the Gulf of the Farallones.
“Ecosystem collapse” refers to a sudden loss of key ecological functions, processes, species or habitats. Those who apply that term to the Delta are simply using shorthand to describe consequences we should avoid. Quibbling over word choice risks shifting attention away from the frightening reality on the ground.
For example, an alternative description like “ecosystem change” is misleading. Characterizing extinctions and other major, potentially permanent, negative transformations as merely “change” is like an EMT describing the victim of a hit-and-run by saying “this patient’s health is changing” – true, but not very informative.
Let’s move past the semantics and focus on achieving outcomes that reflect our values – the same values that have repeatedly led Americans to adopt laws to protect our clean water, clean air, endangered species, vibrant fisheries, wildlands and wild rivers for the benefit of future generations.
…

Op-Ed: It’s time to protect the DeltaRead More »

Agriculture/Food System, Climate Change & Energy, Sustainable Living, Water, Wildlife, , , , , , , ,
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