- Author: Rachael Freeman Long
Have you seen the blaze of super blooms popping up alongside orchards and field crops in our rich agricultural Central Valley? The corridors of poppies, tidy tips, yarrow, baby blue eyes, and redbud planted by farmers, dazzle us with color, but they serve a purpose, too.
The flowers provide nectar and pollen for the pollinators, including honey bees, bumble bees and carpenter bees. Look beyond the buzz, and you'll see other beneficial insects, such as lady beetles (ladybugs) and their larvae devouring aphids, and tiny parasitoid wasps preying on stinkbugs and armyworms. They're (unpaid) pest control agents at work.
Farmers are taking notice. Knowing that most beneficial insects rely on floral...
- Author: Julie Van Scoy
As policy liberalization rapidly transforms the multi-billion-dollar cannabis agriculture industry in the United States, the need for regulation and assessment of environmental impacts becomes increasingly apparent.
A recent study led by UC Cooperative Extension specialist Van Butsic used high resolution satellite imagery to conduct a systematic survey of cannabis production and to explore its potential ecological consequences.
Published this spring in Environmental Research Letters, the study...
- Author: Zac Unger
- Contact: Julie Van Scoy
On June 3, 2004, a small trickle of water started to flow through a levee on the Jones Tract, a patch of farmland west of Stockton that sits below sea level. Of California's 27 million acres of irrigated croplands, the tract's 12,000 acres weren't exactly at the forefront of anyone's mind. But within a few hours the rivulet had become a deluge, opening a 350-foot-long gash in the wall that was built to hold back the waters of the Sacramento–San Joaquin Delta. The land quickly became a lake, submerging asparagus fields, corn silos, and dozens of homes beneath 60 million gallons of water. Repairing the break required six months of constant pumping and cost approximately $100 million; farmers throughout the Central Valley, who depend...
Rangeland is where deer and antelope play. It is also home for grazing livestock and many other animals. “Almost half of the land on Earth is rangeland and one-third of the United States is rangeland,” the latest issue of Jr. Animal Scientist tells its young readers. A UC Agriculture and Natural Resources (UC ANR) advisor is among the scientists who contributed to the rangeland issue of the children's magazine.
Jr. Animal Scientist is published by the American Society of Animal Science for children aged 5 to 12 who are interested in animals. For the September 2015 issue, members of the Society for Range Management...
- Author: Marissa Palin
Sustainability has become a buzzword. Everywhere you look it's sustainable this, sustainable that. But what does it really mean? What makes something truly sustainable? And what does it mean in terms of food production?
April's Global Food Systems Forum invigorated the conversation. The event convened some of agriculture's leading experts to address the plethora of challenges that face our global food systems. The conversation brought forward several hot topics: GMOs, large scale vs. small scale production, nutrition and more.
But even with the riveting debate, the question remains: What is sustainability? Is it focusing more on natural ecosystems? Is it being...
