- Author: Jeannette E. Warnert
UCCE's media services manager Mike Poe recently shared a video success story with the Communications Services team. Sacramento UCCE was struggling to maintain county funding. At budget hearings, the 4-H advisor in Sacramento County, Marianne Bird, handed out copies of a five-minute video that Poe had helped put together about the 4-H Water Wizards project.
Bird e-mailed Mike last week: "Our acting county director just came in to tell me that the Department of Water Resources has committed $20,000 to Sacramento UCCE as a result of seeing the Water Wizards DVD."
This experience definitely shows how a visual communications piece can pay dividends. Here is the video:
- Author: Jeannette E. Warnert
Escaped nitrogen from agricultural production has "huge potential to contribute to climate change," according to the director of the Agricultural Sustainability Institute at UC Davis, Tom Tomich. He was quoted in "The Smog Blog," written by Mark Grossi of the Fresno Bee, in a post about $2.8 million in grant funding ASI received to research agricultural nitrogen. The story appeared in his blog last week and on the front page of the newspaper's Local News section yesterday.
According to an ASI news release announcing the new funding, many...
- Author: Jeannette E. Warnert
Under any of six models of climate change, in 100 years there will be no new trees in Joshua Tree National Park and a significant number of existing trees will be dead, according to a recent Riverside Press-Enterprise story. The climate models, developed by Ken Cole, a biologist and geologist with the U.S. Geological Survey in Flagstaff, Ariz., and plant ecologist Kirsten Ironside of Northern Arizona University, suggest a temperature increase of seven degrees.
Joshua Trees were prolific and widespread 11,000 years ago, Cole told newspaper reporter Janet Zimmerman. Their seeds were carried long distances from Mexico to...
- Author: Jeannette E. Warnert
This month, the UC Cooperative Extension office in Marin County released a carefully researched and written report on The Changing Role of Agriculture in Point Reyes National Seashore. PRNS is unusual in the National Park system because it has contained a "pastoral zone" with working cattle ranches, dairies and other farms since its establishment in 1962.
Now, some area residents and environmentalists are questioning the existence of commercial farming in the park, particularly an oyster farm in Drakes Bay. A controversy generated by the release of the new UCCE report was covered in yesterday's
- Author: Jeannette E. Warnert
The University of California issued a news release about a new Animal Welfare Council on May 19. Jim Downing of the Sacramento Bee picked it up, writing in a story published today that "The University of California, hoping to insert itself as a peacemaker, formed a new animal welfare council last month."
Downing's article focused on voters' overwhelming support of Proposition 2 last November, which, among other things, requires farmers to give egg-laying chickens room to spread their wings. However, the story says the battle over hen housing has "only just...
