- Author: Pamela Kan-Rice
To enhance funding for food and agriculture businesses in the Central Valley, more than 60 people involved in small business finance gathered at the AgPlus Funders Forum Dec. 12 to contribute ideas.
Representatives from financial institutions, economic development organizations, universities, government agencies and innovative funders like community development financial institutions (CDFI) attended. Participants shared innovative financing tools for business and discussed obstacles for people in rural communities to access capital at the forum at the UC Agriculture and Natural Resources building in Davis.
Two primary challenges faced by people trying to start a new business are figuring out how to get started – such as their supply chain – and gaining access to capital to finance their endeavor, according to keynote speaker Glenda Humiston, University of California vice president for agriculture and natural resources.
“There are actually an array of sources of capital beyond just the traditional bank loan, the problem is people don't know about them or how to access them,” Humiston said. She added that much more capital could be available to Central Valley businesses if residents would invest locally. “If you had brought home just one percent of the retirement accounts held by people in the AgPLUS region back in 2010, you would have had over $1 billion to invest in this region,” she said.
Marc Nemanic of 3CORE, Carrie Ellinwood of U.S. Small Business Administration, Ismael Herrero of Fresno State's Office of Community and Economic Development, and Catherine Howard of Northern California Community Loan Fund discussed some of the challenges for financing new businesses and alternatives to traditional bank loans.
Nemanic noted that many millennials are carrying student loan debt, which may make them averse to taking on more debt or prevent them from qualifying for business loans.
Howard said her organization is creating a tool to help people satisfy collateral requirements for credit.
To build their businesses, entrepreneurs often need technical assistance so Herrera's office pairs young companies with experienced mentors and other services. Herrera said he is working to create public and private partnerships in rural communities, such as commercial kitchens for people to turn farm produce into value-added products to sell at farmers markets.
Panelists pointed out that jobs in the gig economy, such as driving for Uber or Lyft, don't provide the stable income that tradition lenders seek in borrowers so they need to create a flexible product.
In the afternoon, participants split into four groups to focus on identifying opportunities for supporting economic development, supporting small business and microenterprises, effective intermediaries to connect investors with entrepreneurs, and regional finance funds. Each topic was discussed by a diverse group of people as peers and experts, bringing their own expertise to the table.
To address the interplay between higher education, student debt and the structural changes in the nation's economy, Meg Arnold, who moderated the session, said she could foresee policy implications.
“Student debt is not forgivable,” said Arnold, managing director of Valley Vision. “At the same time we are making a four-year university degree both more necessary and less affordable, the economy is also changing, to the point that some graduates may need to think of self-employment or gig economy employment.”
“We need everybody who participated today to share those examples of where something kind of unique or innovative is really working,” said Humiston.
Ideas generated during the forum will be used to inform the work of the Central Valley AgPLUS Food and Beverage Manufacturing Consortium, which hosted the AgPlus Funders Forum. The information will also be used by Humiston to update the 2012 Access to Capital Report by California Financial Opportunities Roundtable (CalFOR). The report highlights financial needs for businesses in California, reviews financial tools and capital sources and provides policy recommendations. Humiston will also convey the outcomes to the California Economic Summit.
The AgPlus Funders Forum was sponsored by Chase Bank, Valley Vision, the Center for Economic Development, First Northern Bank, the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, Employment Training Panel, Blue Tech Valley, Fresno State Community and Economic Development and UC ANR.
- Author: Ricardo Vela
For more than 200 youngsters in California, including 45 Latinos, the last weekend of January was a unique experience, full of physical activities and workshops that will help them build a successful future. Under the theme “Be a leader, Be a hero,” they participated in the 4-H Youth Summit carried out in several California counties. The event showcased the efforts of UC Agriculture and Natural Resources to increase the participation of young Latinos in its 4-H Youth Development Program.
“We are very excited that for the first time 45 Latino youths participated in the Youth Summit,” said Lupita Fabregas, 4-H assistant director for diversity and expansion.
The participating youths, ages 11 to 19, enjoyed hiking and other outdoor activities at the various 4-H camps. Among the camps were Mountain Center, located in the San Jacinto Mountains in Riverside County; YMCA Camp Jones Gulch in La Honda, located in the Santa Cruz mountains in San Mateo County; and Wonder Valley Ranch in Sanger, located in Sierra Nevada Mountains in Fresno County.
The adolescents had the opportunity to learn skills to help them develop their potential in addition to other topics of interest.
“Participants also had the opportunity to learn about engineering design process and the importance of bees to the environment,” said Claudia Diaz-Carrasco, 4-H advisor in San Bernardino and Riverside counties.
The increase of Latino youth in these 4-H camps, is the result of an initiative that has been implemented within the last couple of years.
Seven California counties including Kern, Riverside, Merced, Monterey, Orange, Santa Barbara and Sonoma were selected to participate in a pilot model to increase the number of young Latinos participating in the 4-H program.
The model was designed to ensure that young people living in urban areas could receive the same benefits as those who have participated in 4-H since it was founded in 1902 in Ohio.
“The original goal was that young men and women learned leadership skills through interaction with farm animals and food conservation,” added Fabregas.
For the 21st century, 4-H has designed new methods for young people in rural communities, urban and suburban areas based on the same original principles – offering leadership skills to its participants.
"The 4-H participants learn about issues of global importance such as food security, climate change and sustainable energy. It also teaches them about other issues, such as childhood obesity, and basic finance," said Diaz-Carrasco, who has seen a considerable increase of Latino participants in the 4-H programs in the Inland Empire.
“It was hard, we had many challenges,” said Diaz-Carrasco, who works in a county that is 50 percent urban and its young population is almost 59 percent Latino. Lack of transportation, time and money were the biggest threats to the success of the pilot model.
In 2016, Diaz-Carrasco was selected to participate in UC ANR's Latino initiative, under the direction of Lupita Fabregas. The first step taken was to hire the first bilingual educator of the 4-H program and establish the first bilingual club in a community center in a heavily Latino populated part of the city of Riverside.
"These new models have had an impact on the program in the seven pilot counties," said Fabregas. Two years later, there are three bilingual clubs in the county.
The response from the Latino youth has exceeded expectations. In 2015, the California 4-H program worked with less than 1 percent of children in the state. By 2017, participation in the program grew 16 percent and the participation of Latino children increased 89 percent.
Parents of these young Latinos participating in the 4-H program are seeing positive changes in their kids. According to the parents, 4-H gives their kids an opportunity for social and personal interaction. “It enables young people to understand who they are and prepares them to choose what they are going to do with their life as adults,” said Sergio Sierra, whose children are participating in the 4-H program in Indio, California.
Studies have shown that young people participating in the 4-H program are 1.9 times more likely to get better grades in school and 2.1 times more likely to report being engaged in school activities.
California leads the country with more participants in the 4-H Latino Initiative than other states. In spite of the gains achieved, there is still more outreach to be done, Fabregas said.
- Author: Jeannette E. Warnert
Dignitaries from the Baja California department of agriculture were recognized along with representatives of the UC Agriculture and Natural Resources 4-H program by the California State Senate on April 2 for an agreement the two organizations forged last year to bring 4-H to children across the border.
In presenting a resolution, Senator Ben Hueso, whose district includes the entire 156-mile border of California with Mexico, said the two countries share an agricultural legacy that has faced growing challenges in recent years, such as drought and climate change.
“This requires California and Mexico to share resources by providing access to outstanding educational opportunities what will prepare leaders, scientists, educators, entrepreneurs and professionals with the knowledge and commitment to address these very important issues,” Sen. Hueso said to his colleagues in the State Senate.
Sen. Hueso said education isn't the only issue addressed by the 4-H-Mexico accord.
“This is also a food scarcity issue, addressing food scarcity in our communities and in the world,” he said. “Both Imperial County and Baja California are very big players on the world stage for feeding people.”
The first group of children in the Mexicali 4-H program learned where their food comes from. A second cohort will undertake a project related to science. The program is a model for establishment of similar 4-H experiences for youth in the rest of Baja California and Mexico.
Sen. Hueso introduced the delegation from Mexico, led by Manuel Vallodolid Seamaduras, Secretary of Agriculture Development in the State of Baja California, Mexico (Secretaría de Desarrollo Agropecuario del Estado de México - SEDAGRO), and others in attendance to accept the resolution, including:
- Hortencia Medellin Acosta, Director of Rural Entrepreneurship, Mexicali, Baja California
- Carlos Orozco Riesgo, Member of the UC ANR 4-H Multicultural and Community Engagement Advisory Committee, former Undersecretary of SEDAGRO
- Belem Avendaño Ruiz, Director of Inspection, health and safety SEDAGRO
- Guillermo Gonzalez Rubio, Director, Livestock health department SEDAGRO
- Agustin Manuel Velazquez Bustamante, Legal Advisor SEDAGRO
- Mark Bell, Ph.D., Vice provost, UC Agriculture and Natural Resources
- Shannon Horrillo, Ph.D., 4-H Youth Development statewide director
- Lupita Fabregas, Ph.D., 4-H Youth Development assistant director for diversity and expansion
- Claudia Diaz Carrasco, 4-H Youth Development advisor, Riverside and San Bernardino counties
“I hope that California, the nation's leading agriculture producing state, will continue to foster cooperation with Mexico and train future leaders through the launch of the 4-H Club in Mexicali,” Sen. Hueso said. “Please join me in welcoming them to the California State Senate and thanking them for their work in advocacy in helping educate the future.”
/h2>Click here to read the California State Senate resolution recognizing the establishment of a 4-H program in Mexicali, Mex.
- Author: Jeannette E. Warnert
Nutrition education has stretched into a garden at a Fresno facility where women are putting their lives back together.
The UC Cooperative Extension UC CalFresh nutrition education program in Fresno offers its five-week series “Plan, Shop, Save and Cook" at Rescue the Children, a residential program where women who were abused, homeless, previously incarcerated or faced other challenging life circumstances stay for 18 months to learn life and job skills, plus nurture their spirituality.
Rescue the Children is a program offered by the Fresno Rescue Mission. Women with young children or without are referred by such agencies as child protective services, the county probation office and courts. The women make a personal commitment to stay for a year and a half.
“We're not a shelter where they come and go,” said Priscilla Robbins, Rescue the Children director. “We're a ministry.”
Rescue the Children is a safe place for women to get away from destructive lifestyles, where they can heal, learn, grow and become productive members of society.
UC CalFresh reaches out to a variety of community programs and schools with nutrition, garden and physical activity education to teach recipients of CalFresh (formerly called food stamps) and those who are eligible for CalFresh how to make safe, healthful and budget-friendly dietary and cooking decisions. CalFresh benefits – which are part of USDA's Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program – can be used to buy food, edible garden transplants and vegetable seeds.
During a nutrition education session last year, one Rescue the Children resident asked whether an unplanted garden area in the facility could be restored to grow vegetables, said Nancy Zumkeller, UC CalFresh nutrition educator. As a UC Cooperative Extension program, it was easy to connect with the UC Master Gardeners and collaborate to provide garden and nutrition education.
Several Master Gardener volunteers and the UC CalFresh garden team provided classroom gardening training and worked with the women to clear weeds, update irrigation, and sow seeds and transplants in four raised-bed plots.
The Master Gardeners donated gardening books to the Rescue the Children library, including the Master Gardener Handbook, a definitive guide to environmentally sound gardening practices with chapters on soil, fertilizer and water management, home vegetable gardening, and detailed information on number of specific garden crops.
As part of their structured schedule of classes, work, meals and Bible study, the women spend one hour each Wednesday working in the garden, a time that residents have come to relish.
“Aunty Shirley had a garden in Madera,” said Debriana*. “I would go and help her. It's a soothing process.”
Adriana said she values her new gardening knowledge.
“This is a great experience for learning the skills for outside life,” she said. “It will be a complete transformation from where we came from.”
Resident Darcy has lived at the facility for nine months, and been involved with the garden for six months' time.
“It's nice to watch things grow. It feels successful,” she said. “You plant all this stuff and there's nothing there. You come out a couple weeks later and, oh my gosh, my box is growing all this stuff. It's very cool to be able to learn these tools. When we go out on our own and have our own place, we can grow our own fruits and vegetables.”
- Editor: Julie Gipple
- Author: Nate Seltenrich
Jennifer Sowerwine helps restore culturally relevant food systems to immigrant and Native American populations
The Karuk Tribe once lived on more than a million acres in remote Northern California. Legally, their ancestral land along the middle section of the Klamath River in Siskiyou County was in the public domain, as the Karuk did not have a reservation. But on May 6, 1905, when President Theodore Roosevelt created the Klamath Forest Reserve, the tribe lost any claim to its aboriginal territory.
Less swiftly but just as conclusively, the tribe also lost access to much of what the rivers and mountains provided: deer and elk, salmon, tan oak acorns, mushrooms, berries, medicinal herbs. And it lost its ability to manage the landscape through prescribed fire in order to ensure the survival of the plants and animals it needed. The Karuk's food system had been broken almost overnight, and has yet to recover. But Jennifer Sowerwine — UC Cooperative Extension specialist in the UC Berkeley College of Natural Resources — believes it still can.
In direct collaboration with Karuk tribal leaders and community members, as well as with the nearby Yurok and Klamath Tribes, Sowerwine has helped put millions of dollars from USDA to work restoring food security — defined as access to sufficient, healthy, and culturally appropriate foods — among those from whom it was once taken.
While this is a challenge to which one could easily dedicate a career, Sowerwine's broader mission to support equitable food systems across the state has also led her to other projects and other communities. In the Central Valley, she has spent years working with Southeast Asian farmers. Closer to home, she recently began studying how community farms and gardens improve food security among at-risk populations in the urban East Bay.
Restoring ancient relationships to food
Sowerwine's body of work is a manifestation of the University of California Cooperative Extension's long-standing mandate to aid the “welfare, development, and protection of California agriculture, natural resources, and people.” CNR is the home of Cooperative Extension at UC Berkeley, which — now celebrating 150 years since its founding as a land-grant university — is intended to benefit all residents of our increasingly populous and diverse state.
That includes California's first residents: Native tribes like the Karuk, the Yurok (located along the lower stretch of the Klamath River), and the Klamath (upriver, across the border in Oregon). All three were traditionally non-agrarian, hunter-gatherer communities. Loss of ancestral lands that had sustained them for millennia affected not only their diet — leading to a reliance on institutional and heavily processed foods that have contributed to persistent health problems —but also their culture.
In working with the tribes, Sowerwine first had to listen.
“One of the main philosophical approaches in my work is to collaborate with the community to identify what the problems are, co-create research questions, and then support, on the extension side, the kinds of programs they need to attain their goals,” she said.
Among the Karuk, the tribe with which Sowerwine works most closely, “the community is actively engaged in exploring ways to revitalize their eco-cultural system,” she said. “That includes managing the landscape with traditional methods to improve the productivity and availability of cultural foods and fibers, and restoring some of the relationships around Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK).”
Beginning in 2012, through a five-year, USDA-funded grant, Sowerwine partnered with all three tribes to help them reclaim control over their food systems using a holistic, community-centered approach. This took a variety of forms, including designing K–12 curricula for local schools around traditional food systems; opening two new herbaria to preserve and share specimens of native food plants; hosting workshops on subsistence skills like butchering, bread making, and canning; and finding appropriate ways of reintroducing sustainable local agriculture into communities for whom traditional farming is linked with colonialization.
This work now serves as a model for tribes across the country.
“There's a lot of interest in all of our programs,” says Karuk tribal member and Pikyav Field Institute program manager Lisa Hillman. In particular, the tribe created a digital library to offer easy access to information about traditional foods and ecological knowledge, which has attracted significant acclaim and earned Hillman invitations to discuss it at national conferences. “Working with [Jennifer] opened a whole lot of doors for our tribe,” Hillman says. The project's success also led to a second, three-year USDA grant that should continue to point the way forward and help mitigate some past harms for the Karuk Tribe.
Interventions for Southeast Asian refugee farmers
Sowerwine began her career studying food security among marginalized residents of a very different part of the world, who nonetheless have much in common with her current collaborators. As a doctoral candidate in the Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management (ESPM) at Berkeley, she spent two years in the highlands of Vietnam learning how land-use laws and economic policies affected indigenous local farmers from the Mien minority ethnic group and their ability to sustain agrarian practices that were vital to their culture and food security.
After earning her PhD, Sowerwine continued at Berkeley as a postdoctoral researcher. A vibrant community of Mien immigrants exists not far away, in Sacramento, where refugees of the Vietnam War first arrived from Laos in the late 1970s. They were joined by fellow refugees from the Hmong ethnic group, many of whom settled in Fresno. Both groups had traditionally worked the land in Southeast Asia, and they soon developed robust farming networks here in California.
Using a proficiency with the Vietnamese language honed overseas, Sowerwine initially set out to assess the productivity and economic viability of these small farms operated by Southeast Asian refugees.
“I wanted to understand the barriers they were facing in terms of farming in the Central Valley of California, which is arguably the most industrialized agricultural landscape in the world,” she said.
Approximately 100 Mien farmers — part of a Sacramento-area Mien population of about 15,000 — work small plots of land, averaging about eight acres each, outside the state capital. They primarily grow strawberries to sell at roadside stands, but also produce a wide variety of traditional foods, like “sticky” corn, yu choy, gai lan, purple long beans, and bitter melon — mostly for home consumption.
Hmong farmers, who are concentrated in Fresno and Sacramento counties, grow conventional vegetables like cherry tomatoes, green beans, onions, and lettuce — in addition to their own cultural and traditional foods — to sell at farmers markets, Asian grocery stores, and wholesale markets.
The two groups' successes have not come easy, owing to such challenges as language barriers, differences between traditional and modern farming techniques, and informal labor practices that often clash with state regulations.
In response, Sowerwine designed and led an array of interventions to support the farms' continued viability. These included offering hands-on, native-language training to help Hmong and Mien farmers comply with complex labor and food-safety regulations; teaching farmers how to achieve organic certification or to make and sell “value-added” foods like jams; and providing assistance in accessing new markets for fresh produce, including schools, farmers markets, and wholesalers.
Throughout her career, Sowerwine has worked closely with UC Cooperative Extension advisors around the state, including Richard Molinar — a now-retired small farms and specialty crops advisor in Fresno County — and his successor, Ruth Dahlquist-Willard.
“We accomplished a lot, and we helped hundreds, if not thousands,” Molinar said.
Protecting farmers' livelihoods is only the start, Sowerwine notes. Positive outcomes ripple out to the broader immigrant community, which sees strengthened food security through a steady supply of affordable, culturally appropriate produce, and to the entire regional economy and food system, which benefit from a robust and diverse network of local food producers.
“The land-grant universities were founded for the ordinary people, and not just the elite,” Dahlquist-Willard said. “The original idea was to provide support and training for people in professions like agriculture. It's part of the health of rural communities.”
The power of small-scale urban agriculture
Yet as Sowerwine's work in the East Bay has shown, small-scale agriculture can also be critical to the health and well-being of urban residents — especially recent immigrants. In 2016, she and a team of 12 undergraduate research assistants surveyed more than 100 community, school, and for-profit farms and gardens between Hayward and Richmond. A dozen of the community gardens were included in a subsequent pilot study to learn more about how urban farms can provide immigrants with reliable access to affordable traditional foods.
Despite a combined area of just 10.5 acres, these plots were producing more than 300 distinct crops. Many of these plants have direct ties to specific culinary and medicinal traditions, including nine varieties of edible cactus used for nopales (cactus pads) and tuna (cactus fruit) in Mexican cuisine, and even as a diabetes remedy; gandana, also known as Afghan leek, a critical ingredient in the traditional dishes bolani and ashak; and chinsaga (Cleome gynandra), a plant used by Kenyan women for postpartum healing and infant health.
Late last year, in collaboration with the Berkeley Food Institute, Sowerwine received a grant from the national nonprofit Foundation for Food and Agriculture Research to further promote and study Bay Area urban farming. Along with ESPM faculty members Timothy Bowles and Céline Pallud, as well as Charisma Acey from the College of Environmental Design, she'll delve even deeper into urban agriculture across the Bay Area.
The team plans to address a diverse and thought-provoking array of questions, most of which have never been studied so thoroughly in the Bay Area. For example, what is the role of urban farms in supporting beneficial insects and improving soil health? How does food from urban farms find its way to consumers and how can waste along the way be minimized? What cultural or structural barriers may prevent locals from accessing urban-farming products?
As with all of Sowerwine's work, from the Oregon border to the East Bay, the goal is not simply to learn more, but to make a difference.
“There's a need to elevate an understanding of the value and importance of these spaces to local, state, and national government, to figure out ways of securing them for the long-term benefit of our diverse California public,” Sowerwine said. “The goal is to inform policy and create opportunities for tribal communities and small-scale family and urban farmers, to maintain the continuity of their cultural food heritages.”