Agritourism Intensive 2021; Virtual class starts soon in SLO County

University of California Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education Program (UC SAREP) and UC Cooperative Extension have partnered with SLO Farm Bureau, FARMstead ED, SLO Farm Trail, Visit SLO CAL, Paso Robles Wine Country Alliance, SLO County Small Business Development Center, experienced local agritourism operators and other local partners to offer a six-session agritourism planning course for farmers and ranchers in SLO County and the central coast region. Farmers and ranchers who are considering, starting or expanding agritourism or nature tourism enterprises on their farms or ranches are invited to register for this low-cost participatory course.

Agritourism is a commercial enterprise at a working farm or ranch conducted for the enjoyment and education of visitors, and that generates supplemental income for the owner or operator. Agritourism can include farm stands or shops, U-pick, farm stays, tours, on-farm classes, workshops, tasting rooms, fairs, festivals, pumpkin patches, corn mazes, Christmas tree farms, winery weddings, orchard dinners, youth camps, barn dances, hunting or fishing, guest ranches, and more.                

“Agricultural operations in the Central Coast region can offer visitors a diversity of natural beauty and unique experiences with local farmers and ranchers. It can be difficult for small-scale farmers and ranchers to make a living when dealing with production challenges, uncertainty and lack of economies of scale. Our workshops will give agricultural producers contacts and tools to understand regulatory requirements and to develop and market their agritourism enterprises, adding to their income and helping spread the risk of tough production years,” said Penny Leff, UC SAREP Agritourism Coordinator.

Participants will evaluate their own farms or ranches for agritourism potential and consider the costs and potential benefits of various activities. Each will receive the UC ANR published handbook, “Agritourism and Nature Tourism in California,” which will be used as the text for the class. Attendees will hear from experienced agritourism operators and experts in business planning, risk management, regulatory compliance and marketing. Class instructors will provide individual guidance and help participants form a supportive network as they plan their own agritourism or nature tourism businesses.

Registration is now open.

Important: The SLO region Agritourism Intensive classes is open only to farmers, ranchers and others involved in or planning agritourism in San Luis Obispo, Monterey and Santa Barbara Counties.

Registration:http://ucanr.edu/agtourslo

Format: 6 participatory 2-hour Zoom meetings, every Tuesday from January 12, 2021 through February 16, 2021, 9 a.m. to 11:00 a.m. each day (with a possible in-person field day Jan. 26). Shared zoom participation will be available at the SLO Farm Bureau office for those with poor internet access.

Workshop fee: $40 (for 6 class sessions, including class text mailed to each participant)

Information & scholarship options: Penny Leff, paleff@ucanr.edu, 530-902-9763 (cell)

 HollyOber. UC Riverside News, holly.ober@ucr.edu

https://news.ucr.edu/articles/2020/11/19/robot-tells-growers-when-water-crops-way

A robot that tells growers when to water crops is on the way

Every backyard gardener knows how hard it can be to tell when to water the plants. Multiply that by tens or hundreds of acres and it's easy to see the challenges growers face keeping their crops healthy while managing water resources wisely. 

To determine water needs accurately, growers hand-pluck individual leaves from plants, put them in pressure chambers, and apply air pressure to see when water begins to leak from the leaf stems. That kind of testing is time consuming and means growers can only reach so many areas of a field each day and cannot test as frequently as needed to accurately determine optimal irrigation scheduling patterns.

A group of researchers from UC Riverside and UC Merced have received a grant for more than $1 million from the U.S. Department of Agriculture through the National Science Foundation's National Robotics Initiative to address these challenges. From UC Riverside are Assistant Professor Konstantinos Karydis and Professor Amit K. Roy-Chowdhury, both from the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. UC Merced, which leads the effort, is represented by Stefano Carpin, professor of computer science; and Joshua Viers, professor of environmental engineering.

As part of the project, the group is developing a robotic pressure chamber that can autonomously sample leaves and immediately test them on site to provide the freshest data. The system will work to gather data even in large fields, and over a period of time, rather than just providing a snapshot.

The base robot for the new plant-moisture-measuring system researchers are developing will navigate rows of crops to reach individual leaves and stems.

Frequently updated data can help growers better plan irrigation schedules to conserve water, optimize the time and effort spent by crop specialists tasked with determining and analyzing lead water potential, and help decrease some of the costs in the food-production chain.

Current measuring techniques involve collecting leaf samples and transporting them to an off-site location, where testers can use very accurate, expensive pressure chambers; or sampling and analyzing leaf samples in the field using hand-held pressure chambers.

“In the first category, leaf samples can get mixed up, making it impossible to track them back to the specific areas of the field they came from, Karydis said. “In addition, the properties of the leaf might vary given the time elapsed between being sampled and being analyzed, which in turn may yield misleading results.”

Hand-held instruments in the field can be less accurate, but testing can be done multiple times with different leaves from the same plants. This method is time- and labor-intensive, and must be undertaken by specially trained personnel.

Carpin has already worked with colleagues at UC Davis and UC Berkeley to create the Robot-Assisted Precision Irrigation Delivery, or RAPID, system, which travels along rows of crops adjusting irrigation flows according to sensor data that tells the robot precisely what's needed for each plant.

The project will use the same mobile base robot as in RAPID but equip it with a custom-made robotic leaf sampler and pressure chamber being designed by the researchers at UC Riverside, and pair it with drones that can survey the fields and direct the robot to areas of interest.

“Using this process, growers could survey plants all day long, even in large fields,” Carpin said.

The four-year project will support graduate students as well as summer research opportunities for undergraduates. The project has four phases: development of the chamber; developing machine vision so the robot can “see” the water coming from the leaf stems; coordinating multiple robots — in the air and on the ground; and evaluation.

The researchers plan to have the first set of automated pressure chamber prototypes fabricated by spring 2021, and to evaluate their performance and refine designs in controlled settings over spring and summer 2021. They expect to have a completed setup by winter 2022, so they can begin controlled field testing.

“We have to be quick about it because if we miss a peak growing season, we have to wait another nine months for the next one,” Carpin said. “We'd like to be able to start testing next summer and test every summer, and we need to be able to maximize the tests.”

When all of the components have been designed, the designs and code will be made open source, and all the data collected during the project will be made available to the scientific community, the researchers wrote in their proposal.

The project came about after Carpin and Viers, director of the Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society, or CITRIS, at UC Merced, had been talking with area farmers about the challenges of growing almonds and grapes. Karydis and Roy-Chowdhury had been hearing the same challenges from citrus and avocado growers in the Riverside area, so the four partnered up.

“California agriculture presents a challenge in terms of scalability,” Carpin said. “But this an exciting collaboration because we'll get to develop a system that will work on different kinds of crops.”

Every backyard gardener knows how hard it can be to tell when to water the plants. Multiply that by tens or hundreds of acres and it's easy to see the challenges growers face keeping their crops healthy while managing water resources wisely. 

To determine water needs accurately, growers hand-pluck individual leaves from plants, put them in pressure chambers, and apply air pressure to see when water begins to leak from the leaf stems. That kind of testing is time consuming and means growers can only reach so many areas of a field each day and cannot test as frequently as needed to accurately determine optimal irrigation scheduling patterns.

A group of researchers from UC Riverside and UC Merced have received a grant for more than $1 million from the U.S. Department of Agriculture through the National Science Foundation's National Robotics Initiative to address these challenges. From UC Riverside are Assistant Professor Konstantinos Karydis and Professor Amit K. Roy-Chowdhury, both from the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. UC Merced, which leads the effort, is represented by Stefano Carpin, professor of computer science; and Joshua Viers, professor of environmental engineering.

As part of the project, the group is developing a robotic pressure chamber that can autonomously sample leaves and immediately test them on site to provide the freshest data. The system will work to gather data even in large fields, and over a period of time, rather than just providing a snapshot.

The base robot for the new plant-moisture-measuring system researchers are developing will navigate rows of crops to reach individual leaves and stems.

Frequently updated data can help growers better plan irrigation schedules to conserve water, optimize the time and effort spent by crop specialists tasked with determining and analyzing lead water potential, and help decrease some of the costs in the food-production chain.

Current measuring techniques involve collecting leaf samples and transporting them to an off-site location, where testers can use very accurate, expensive pressure chambers; or sampling and analyzing leaf samples in the field using hand-held pressure chambers.

“In the first category, leaf samples can get mixed up, making it impossible to track them back to the specific areas of the field they came from, Karydis said. “In addition, the properties of the leaf might vary given the time elapsed between being sampled and being analyzed, which in turn may yield misleading results.”

Hand-held instruments in the field can be less accurate, but testing can be done multiple times with different leaves from the same plants. This method is time- and labor-intensive, and must be undertaken by specially trained personnel.

Carpin has already worked with colleagues at UC Davis and UC Berkeley to create the Robot-Assisted Precision Irrigation Delivery, or RAPID, system, which travels along rows of crops adjusting irrigation flows according to sensor data that tells the robot precisely what's needed for each plant.

The project will use the same mobile base robot as in RAPID but equip it with a custom-made robotic leaf sampler and pressure chamber being designed by the researchers at UC Riverside, and pair it with drones that can survey the fields and direct the robot to areas of interest.

“Using this process, growers could survey plants all day long, even in large fields,” Carpin said.

The four-year project will support graduate students as well as summer research opportunities for undergraduates. The project has four phases: development of the chamber; developing machine vision so the robot can “see” the water coming from the leaf stems; coordinating multiple robots — in the air and on the ground; and evaluation.

The researchers plan to have the first set of automated pressure chamber prototypes fabricated by spring 2021, and to evaluate their performance and refine designs in controlled settings over spring and summer 2021. They expect to have a completed setup by winter 2022, so they can begin controlled field testing.

“We have to be quick about it because if we miss a peak growing season, we have to wait another nine months for the next one,” Carpin said. “We'd like to be able to start testing next summer and test every summer, and we need to be able to maximize the tests.”

When all of the components have been designed, the designs and code will be made open source, and all the data collected during the project will be made available to the scientific community, the researchers wrote in their proposal.

The project came about after Carpin and Viers, director of the Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society, or CITRIS, at UC Merced, had been talking with area farmers about the challenges of growing almonds and grapes. Karydis and Roy-Chowdhury had been hearing the same challenges from citrus and avocado growers in the Riverside area, so the four partnered up.

“California agriculture presents a challenge in terms of scalability,” Carpin said. “But this an exciting collaboration because we'll get to develop a system that will work on different kinds of crops.”

California Horticulture Sales Reach $2.63 Billion in 2019

U.S. Horticulture Operations Report $13.8 Billion in Sales

Sacramento, CA, Dec. 9, 2020 – On Tuesday, December 8, the U.S. Department of Agriculture's National Agricultural Statistics Service (NASS) released the 2019 Census of Horticultural Specialties report, the only source of detailed production and sales data for floriculture, nursery, and specialty crops for the entire United States. The data show that horticulture operations in California sold a total of $2.63 billion in floriculture, nursery and specialty crops in 2019, down 9% from the sales in 2014. California sold 19% of the total U.S. horticulture sales of $13.8 billion in 2019, more than any other state. In addition to sales, the number of horticulture operations in California decreased 22% during this time to 1,331, and the number of operations in the United States decreased 11% during this time to 20,655.

“The horticulture census is a vital tool that highlights the contribution horticulture growers bring to our local, state, and national economies,” said Pacific Region Director Gary R. Keough. “It shows changes and trends in the industry over the past five years and beyond.”

Horticulture production occurred primarily in 10 states, which accounted for 66% of all U.S. horticulture sales in 2019. California ($2.63 billion), Florida ($1.93 billion) and Oregon ($1.02 billion) led the nation in sales.

The top five commodities in California horticulture sales in 2019, and compared to 2014, were:

• Nursery stock, $831 million, down 13%
• Potted flowering plants, $322 million, up 7%
• Transplants for Commercial Vegetable and Strawberry, $266 million, up 4%
• Cut flowers & cut lei flowers, $249 million, down 26%
• Annual bedding/garden plants, $232 million, up 6%

Other key findings for California from the 2019 Census of Horticultural Specialties report include:

• Family- or individually-owned operations made up the largest number of operations, accounting for 48%, but corporately-owned operations accounted for 80% of sales ($2.11 billion).
• Total industry expenses were at $2.21 billion in 2019, with hired labor being the largest cost, accounting for 36% of total expenses.

The Census of Horticultural Specialties is part of the larger Census of Agriculture program. It provides information on the number and types of establishments engaged in horticultural production, value of sales, varieties of products, production expenses and more. All operations that reported producing and selling $10,000 or more of horticultural crops on the 2017 Census of Agriculture were included in this special study.

For more information and to access the full report, visit www.nass.usda.gov/AgCensus. 

Plants get bacterial infections, just as humans do. When food crops and trees are infected, their yield and quality can suffer. Although some compounds have been developed to protect plants, few of them work on a wide variety of crops, and bacteria are developing resistance. Now, researchers reporting in ACS' Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry have modified natural plant alkaloids into new compounds that kill bacteria responsible for diseases in rice, kiwi and citrus.

Currently, no effective prevention or treatment exists for some plant bacterial diseases, including rice leaf blight, kiwifruit canker and citrus canker, which result in substantial agricultural losses every year. Scientists are trying to find new compounds that attack bacteria in different ways, reducing the chances that the microbes will develop resistance. Plant compounds called tetrahydro-β-carboline (THC) alkaloids are known to have antitumor, anti-inflammatory, antifungal, antioxidant and antiviral activities. So, Pei-Yi Wang, Song Yang and colleagues wondered whether derivatives of THC alkaloids could help fight plant bacterial diseases.

The researchers used a THC alkaloid called eleagnine, which is produced by Russian olive trees and some other plants, as a scaffold. To this framework, they added different chemical groups to make a series of new compounds, two of which efficiently killed three strains of plant pathogenic bacteria in liquid cultures. The team then tested the two compounds on rice, kiwi and citrus plant twigs and leaves and found that the new alkaloids could both prevent and treat bacterial infections. The researchers determined that the compounds worked by increasing levels of reactive oxygen species in the bacteria, which caused the bacterial cells to die.

How it works

The abstract that accompanies this paper can be viewed here.

Antibacterial Functions and Proposed Modes of Action of Novel 1,2,3,4-Tetrahydro-β-carboline Derivatives that Possess an Attractive 1,3-Diaminopropan-2-ol Pattern against Rice Bacterial Blight, Kiwifruit Bacterial Canker, and Citrus Bacterial

Hong-Wu Liu, Qing-Tian Ji, Gang-Gang Ren, Fang Wang, Fen Su, Pei-Yi Wang*, Xiang Zhou, Zhi-Bing Wu, Zhong L and Song Yang*