- Author: Jeannette E. Warnert
Johnson traces his interest in insects to a visit with a family friend on the outskirts of his hometown, Roanake, Va., when he was 10 years old. He was intrigued by a copy of “A Golden Guide to Familiar American Insects,” and the friend gave it to him. “That’s how I got started,” Johnson said. He never looked back.
Johnson earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in entomology at North Carolina State University and in 1974 completed a Ph.D. in entomology at UC Riverside. After conducting short stints of entomological research at two locations on the mainland, he moved to Hawaii in 1983 to serve as a professor and focus his research on biological control.
In Hawaii watermelon production, Johnson was able to help farmers reduce pesticide use by 90 percent by showing that pesticide applications were killing natural enemies of a Liriomyza leafminer pest they were trying to control. He also worked on biological control of pests on cucumbers, tomatoes, green onions, pineapple, papaya and coffee.
In 1995, Johnson took a six-month sabbatical leave to UC Davis and realized how much he missed living on the mainland. He started looking for a new job and eventually was offered the combined extension and research position at his alma mater, UC Riverside, based at the off-campus research center in Parlier, Calif.
Johnson’s arrival coincided with the introduction of olive fruit fly in California, a serious pest that has devastated olive production in the Mediterranean region for more than 2,000 years. Olive fruit fly was detected in Los Angeles in 1998, and by 1999 had made its way into the San Joaquin Valley, the leading producer of the state’s olives.
To the great relief of valley olive growers, Johnson and his biological control colleague Kent Daane, UCCE specialist in the Department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management at UC Berkeley, found that hot summertime temperatures in the valley depress olive fly populations. But that didn’t provide a statewide solution.
Johnson and Daane worked together to introduce exotic natural enemies of the pest from Africa. The beneficial insects have been released from quarantine and introduced at several locations in California, with recovery of one species in the San Luis Obispo and Redwood City areas.
“We think it’s on the way to establishment. That’s a good sign,” Johnson said. “Now we're waiting to see if the parasite’s presence will have an impact on olive fly populations.”
Johnson was also involved in research that showed the Central Valley isn’t as hospitable to glassy-winged sharpshooters as other parts of the state. When it gets very cold, GWSS cannot move or feed. They either starve or get dehydrated.
“About every 2 out of 10 years, it gets cold enough in the valley that glassy-winged sharpshooter populations are reduced 90 to 95 percent,” Johnson said. “It is unlikely glassy-winged sharpshooters would ever become well established in the Sacramento Valley or the northern San Joaquin Valley. But it is well established in the Bakersfield area.”
Johnson ended his career with a video production project designed to raise awareness about integrated pest management. Posted on the website Extending Orchard IPM Knowledge in California, the videos include interviews with IPM practitioners, researchers and farmers plus overviews of specific pest control techniques, such as biological control, cultural practices and pheromones.
For his research and extension efforts, Johnson received numerous awards and honors over the years. Most recently, he was named “Distinguished Scientist of the Year,” by the International Organization for Biological Control. He is an elected fellow of both the Entomological Society of America and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He was author or co-author of more than 200 peer-reviewed articles, book chapters, and extension publications.
During retirement, Johnson plans to spend more time pursuing the art of photography, mainly landscapes and seascapes, which he captures during travels around the United States. Johnson also plans to continue cataloging the history of the family of his mother, whose maiden name was “Marshall.” He has already traced his lineage back to a 1729 immigrant from Ireland. An earlier ancestor, a member of the provincial council in Pennsylvania, was governor for one day when William Penn was absent from the colony, Johnson said.
- Author: Jeannette E. Warnert
Lynn-Patterson earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in geography/climatology at Fresno State University and taught weather, climate landforms and global information systems classes there as a full-time lecturer for five years and part-time at State Center Community College for 10 years.
In 1990, while still teaching part time, she took a new position as a climatologist with a crop insurance firm.
“We were embarking on a brand-new initiative in the crop insurance business using remote sensing and spatial imagery to appraise losses from weather events,” Lynn-Patterson said.
In 2000, she again broke ground by introducing geospatial technologies to agricultural research at Kearney. Geospatial technologies now allow scientists to take a broader view of landscapes than is possible from the field level.
For example, Lynn-Patterson worked with Pete Goodell, UC Cooperative Extension advisor with the Statewide Integrated Pest Management Program, to understand the migration of lygus bugs through the San Joaquin Valley’s mosaic of diverse crops. In the spring, lygus can reproduce in lush vegetation on foothills surrounding the San Joaquin Valley. As the plants dry when the weather warms and rain stops, the lygus begin looking for a new home in valley agriculture, including cotton, which suffers severe economic losses from lygus.
By combining observations made on the ground with GIS mapping technology, Goodell was able to determine the areas in the San Joaquin Valley where cotton is most likely to have lygus problems in mid-summer. Where alfalfa is scarce, cotton fields absorb the migrating bugs. But where alfalfa is close to cotton fields, the alfalfa acts as a lygus sponge and spares cotton most of the damage.
Recently, Lynn-Patterson and her staff, in collaboration with the Citrus Pest and Disease Prevention Program, have been engaged in mapping cropping patterns in the Central Valley citrus belt. This geographic database will provide information needed to ensure quick action when Asian citrus psyllids or huanglongbing disease is found.
Last year, the Kearney GIS program became part of a larger UC Agriculture and Natural Resources statewide program called Informatics and Geographic Information Systems. IGIS is organizing and preparing data pertaining to agriculture and natural ecosystems statewide and making the information accessible on the web.
Lynn-Patterson has a full retirement planned. She is establishing a non-profit animal rescue organization, “Four Feet Inn,” that will connect homeless dogs, horses and other animals with foster families.
“My goal is to find a path to get animals off the street and into no-kill shelters,” Lynn-Patterson said. “I love animals and I love people who want to help animals, so facilitating this connection is what my spirit wants to do.”
Lynn-Patterson is also pursuing a writing career. She has already completed the first novel in a trilogy and begun work on the second. Both of these hobbies she plans to combine via the Internet with travels around the United States and Canada in a motor home.
- Author: Jeannette E. Warnert
As a young community college teacher in his native Bakersfield, Molinar first learned about the mission and role of UC Cooperative Extension in the agricultural industry. He immediately knew what he wanted to do with his life and never let go of his dream.
Molinar had earned a bachelor’s degree in crop science at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, and then volunteered in rural Honduras with the Peace Corps for two years helping farmers improve practices and techniques.
“This had a huge impact on my life,” Molinar said. “That’s when it all started. I loved helping people.”
He returned to the United States and, after a stint with a chemical company, began teaching classes in crop science, soils, vegetable crops, beekeeping and organic gardening at Bakersfield Community College. With advice from UC Cooperative Extension colleagues, he set his sights on a career as a farm advisor.
Molinar returned to school for a master’s degree while working for a weed abatement firm in Bakersfield. He never tired of his UCCE job search and in 1986 was selected to be the environmental horticulture advisor for UC Cooperative Extension in Alameda County. Nine years later he transferred to Fresno County.
“This has been a job I have thoroughly enjoyed,” Molinar said. “I’ve been able to work out in the field, directly with farmers and live in Reedley, the ‘fruit capital of the world.’”
Throughout his tenure in Fresno, a large fraction of his time and efforts were devoted to helping the county’s 1,300 Southeast Asian refugee farmers, a job that was facilitated with the language and culture skills of his assistant Michael Yang, an immigrant himself from Laos.
Molinar has accumulated a litany of awards during this 27-year UCCE career for “meritorious service,” “distinguished service,” “lifetime achievement,” “IPM innovator,” and “leadership,” but the honor he most cherishes, he said, was being presented a Hmong name by the Hmong Farmers of Fresno in 2011.
Molinar’s Hmong name is Vam Meej, which means “giving prosperity.”
Among Molinar’s first goals in working with Southeast Asian farmers was teaching them modern production practices that hadn’t been used in their homelands, such as pest control using integrated pest management techniques. IPM involves nurturing beneficial insects.
“When we introduced good bugs and bad bugs, they all laughed at us,” Molinar said. “They thought all bugs were bad. We’ve been teaching about this concept for years now and we’re not laughed at any more.”
Molinar has helped Southeast Asian farmers navigate rules and regulations established by government agencies, such as the San Joaquin Valley Air Quality District and the California Department of Occupational Health and Safety Administration.
For example, Molinar and Yang helped farmer Zia Thea Xiong, a Southeast Asian immigrant and father of 12, when Cal OSHA issued a $750 citation for insufficient toilet facilities. Molinar and Yang took pictures at the farm and accompanied the Xiong to Sacramento to appeal Xiong’s citation, which was reversed.
“We’ve helped farmers comply with workers’ compensation insurance, the injury and illness prevention training plan, and acquiring the 16 or so different posters they have to display,” Molinar said.
He also worked with Southeast Asian farmers to open new markets for their produce, taking them on market tours in San Francisco and Los Angeles. More recently, he has been collaborating with other agencies to pave the way for placing Southeast Asian farmer-grown vegetables into upscale markets like Whole Foods.
In recent years, food safety has been an increasingly important arena for extension activities with small-scale producers. In this case, the farmers do not have to cope with government regulation, but with retail and wholesale fruit and vegetable outlets that require growers to provide written food safety plans. With the director of the small farm program, Molinar developed a template the farmers can use to write a comprehensive plan by simply filling in information specific to their operations.
Molinar has maintained a one-acre demonstration and research plot at the UC Kearney Agricultural Research and Extension Center since 1995, where he conducted cherry tomato and mini watermelon variety trials, research projects comparing irrigation techniques, and experiments involving integrated pest management of weeds, insects and vegetable diseases. Crops that were grown for demonstration or research purposes over the years were nopales (cactus pads), capers, jujube trees, a wide variety of Southeast Asian vegetables and 50 kinds of Hmong medicinal herbs. The herbs, many which had not been documented as having been grown in California before, were submitted to the UC Herbarium at UC Davis to be pressed, dried and archived.
In the early 2000s, the Molinar and Yang transitioned the one-acre research and demonstration plot to organic production. Molinar also worked with the Kearney research advisory committee to set aside 10 acres at the field station for larger organic studies.
Molinar has reached out to Hispanic and African American and organic small scale farmers in Fresno. Every other year he teamed up with Manuel Jimenez, UCCE advisor in Tulare County, to offer a “Conferencia para agricultores,” a conference on agricultural production conducted entirely in Spanish. He gave presentations at the Fresno farm of Will Scott, a leader in the African-American Farmers of California.
Though he retires June 30, with emeritus status, he said, he will continue to serve the family farmers who have been his clientele in Fresno County. He is also interested in taking up some small-scale farming himself. An Allis Chalmers garden tractor is already parked in the Molinar backyard and he is negotiating with landowners to secure a half-acre to one-acre site where he can grow food to be direct marketed to people in the Reedley community.
- Author: Jeannette E. Warnert
For more than a quarter century, Johnson conducted experiments with peach trees growing in the lysimeter, which allowed him to calculate precisely how much water evaporates from the soil and transpires from the tree on an hour-by-hour basis. Results of this research helped growers properly manage their irrigation strategies to improve fruit quality and yield.
A native of Utah, Johnson earned a bachelor’s degree in biology at the University of Utah. He earned a Ph.D. at Cornell in 1982 and that year moved his family to the San Joaquin Valley to begin a 31-year stint as UC Cooperative Extension specialist in the Department of Pomology at UC Davis, based at the Kearney facility in Parlier, Calif.
Using the lysimeter, Johnson discovered that some common fruit tree irrigation strategies being used in the San Joaquin Valley were significantly impacting fruit quality and yield.
“We found that growers should not cut back on water after harvest, if they can help it,” Johnson said. “Anytime we cut back on water applications, we developed some sort of problem – diseases, sunburn, mites and fruit disorders in the subsequent crops, like doubling and deep sutures.”
Despite the importance of the irrigation research, Johnson had perhaps his greatest impact on growers’ practices from his research on nitrogen fertilization. Many growers, he said, were over fertilizing their stone fruit orchards.
“We did a survey and found the average rate of nitrogen fertilization was 150 pounds per acre,” Johnson said.
However, much of that fertilizer stimulated vegetative growth, which shaded the fruit and prevented the desired reddening; and required more pruning in the winter, labor that added to the expense of growing fruit. In addition, the high fertilizer rates caused more problems with fruit quality, insect pests and diseases.
“I started working on this right at the beginning and harped on this same thing my whole career,” Johnson said. “Today, farmers are using about a half or a third of the fertilizer they did decades ago.”
Johnson also worked on understanding fruit trees’ need for other nutrients, such as zinc and calcium.
“It was pretty common for growers to apply zinc every year,” Johnson said. “From research we conducted at Kearney, we learned that orchards don’t need zinc every year. We also compared materials and found the cheapest zinc products work just as well as expensive ones. We’ve saved growers a lot of money with these results.”
Calcium research also helped farmers’ bottom line.
“Save your money,” Johnson said. “Peach trees don’t need calcium. It doesn’t help anything.”
Over the years, Johnson contributed to 70 peer-reviewed journal articles. He was an active contributor to the International Horticulture Society’s meeting proceedings, titled Acta Horticulturae, having authored or co-authored 30 articles.
Johnson worked closely with his colleagues Ted DeJong, UC Cooperative Extension specialist in the Department of Plant Sciences at UC Davis, and Kevin Day, UCCE farm advisor in Tulare County, on these and many other orchard research topics, including rootstocks, pruning, training systems, thinning, girdling, irrigation and fertilization. In 2011, Johnson took a sabbatical leave to organize and aggregate all the research findings on a comprehensive website called The Fruit Report.
“Everything is there on the website for growers establishing and managing fresh market peach, plum and nectarine orchards,” Johnson said.
Johnson has already sold his home in California and plans to move immediately back to Utah, where two of his children have settled with their families. The Johnsons will volunteer, travel, garden and, in a year, embark on a humanitarian mission with their church. Johnson has been honored with emeritus status and, though will be living out of the area, has plans to continue work on orchard fertilization management.
“There’s a great deal of interest today in reducing the potential for nitrogen to percolate down to the groundwater,” Johnson said. “You can get some nitrogen into a peach tree by spraying it on the leaves. It doesn’t get to the soil so there is less of a possibility of groundwater contamination. There may be some interest in this idea in the future, particularly in areas where the soil is very sandy or the orchard is near a stream.”
Though Johnson said he had some misgivings about working off campus when he first took the job with the University of California, he leaves with no regrets.
“I loved working at Kearney,” Johnson said. “To me, it turned out to be the ideal job.”
- Author: Jeannette E. Warnert
“I started and just kept going,” said Charlie Summers, a research entomologist who was first affiliated with UC Berkeley and later affiliated with UC Davis. Summers ends a 42-year stretch at Kearney when he retires June 30.
Summers grew up on a family farm in Utah and always knew he wanted a career in agriculture. He said he decided at age 12 to go to college, “when I was at the wrong end of a short-handled hoe.”
Summers earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in zoology and entomology respectively at Utah State University in Logan, Utah, and a doctorate degree in entomology at Cornell in 1970, the same year he started at Kearney.
“The job at Kearney was an absolutely perfect fit for me,” Summers said. “It was a dream job. I look forward to coming to work every morning and would sometimes shake my fist at the sun going down at night. I’ve loved every minute I’ve been here.”
Summers studied a wide range of pest problems in field and vegetable crops. He developed economic thresholds for more than a dozen pests and management strategies for equally as many crops. Among the most challenging pests was the alfalfa weevil, he said. It has been particularly unresponsive to biological control and host plant resistance.
“It is one of the insects that has defied everything we’ve thrown at it except pesticides,” Summers said.
Silverleaf whitefly also posed a tremendous challenge during his career. Silverleaf whitefly was first found in the United States in Florida poinsettia crops during the mid-1980s. Eventually it made its way to a wide range of crops in California, resulting in severe economic losses to growers. Heavy applications of traditional chemicals needed to control the pest caused growers’ costs to increase. The production of some crops ceased altogether because of the extent of silverleaf whitefly damage.
In time, Summers and his colleagues developed a protocol for monitoring and managing the silverleaf whitefly. Light populations are controlled by native and introduced parasites and predators. More severe infestations must still be treated with pesticides.
Another major challenge was the corn leafhopper. The pest first made its way to California in the early 1940s, but didn’t become a serious problem until the end of the 1990s, when it was found to transmit corn stunt disease.
“Corn stunt disease caused plants to form few or no ears of corn. Some farmers’ yields were cut in half,” Summers said. “We worked out a strategy for scheduling planting to avoid the most serious damage. That’s worked out well for growers.”
Crops grown on silver mulch produced significantly higher yields of marketable fruit than did those grown on bare soil, the researchers concluded. Reflective mulch has been used by organic and conventional farmers up and down the valley and in Southern California to grow vegetables. Home gardeners have also applied these research results to garden beds by using aluminum foil as mulch.
Although Summers did not technically have a Cooperative Extension component to his position – he was among the last scientists hired to devote 100 percent of their time to research – Summers made it a point to work closely with farm advisors and specialists to convey research results to farmers.
“Extension work has been one of the most enjoyable things I’ve done,” he said. “I’ve worked with farm advisors on research projects, farm calls and given hundreds and hundreds of extension talks at their grower meetings.”
Summers has also authored more than 200 articles, book chapters and research papers, most of them peer reviewed.
Over the years, Summers said, the objective of his job – to help farmers develop successful pest management strategies – stayed the same, but technological advances dramatically changed the way he did his work.
“We’ve had the advent of computer technology, the use of mathematical models, work that can now be done at the DNA level. It’s put a whole new face on our ability to do research,” he said.
Nevertheless, he said, nothing can replace what he considers the essence of the Agricultural Experiment Station model: to personally assist growers.
“To me that’s the most important job we performed,” Summers said. “I hope this work continues.”
In retirement, Summers plans to move back to Utah to live near his sister and nephews and spend time pursuing his favorite pastime, fly fishing.
“I’ll be living 15 minutes from the Wasatch Mountains,” Summers said. “There’s a lot of good fishing there.”