UC ANR Climate Smart Agriculture Educator team assisted growers to win CDFA grants that reduced greenhouse gases equivalent to removing roughly 7,000 cars off the road, supporting UC ANR's public value of building climate-resilient communities and ecosystems.

The Issue

Increasingly extreme and erratic weather patterns caused by climate change threaten crop yields and farm profits across the state. Growers must continue to adapt to climate stressors, such as increased temperatures and occurrences of drought, and can aid in reducing climate change through their farming practices.

How UC Delivers

A collaborative partnership between the Strategic Growth Council, California Department of Food and Agriculture (CDFA), and University of California Agriculture and Natural Resources (UC ANR) teamed up to support 10 Climate Smart Agriculture Community Education Specialists (CSA CES) throughout the state to provide technical assistance and outreach to promote Climate-Smart Agriculture Incentive Programs. These programs include:  

• The Healthy Soils Program, which incentivizes the implementation of climate-smart agriculture practices such as cover cropping, composting, crop rotation, and mulching which reduce erosion and greenhouse gases
• The State Water Efficiency and Enhancement Program (SWEEP), which encourages farmers to install more efficient irrigation systems that decrease water consumption and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions; and
• The Alternative Manure Management Program (AMMP), which awards funds to livestock producers who decrease their methane emissions by changing the way they manage manure.

Healthy Soils Demonstration Project field day in Bonsall, CA

Since establishing this partnership in 2019, the UC ANR Climate Smart Agriculture Educator team has provided hands-on assistance to over 200 farmers and ranchers through the complex application process. Collaborating with other CDFA technical providers to host workshops, field days, and events has expanded reach to a greater number of growers, over 120 of whom were able to receive funding after receiving technical assistance. UC CSA CES efforts don't stop at the outreach or application phase; educators work year-round to ensure successful implementation of climate-smart projects.

After the award process, educators assist awardees in completing grant invoicing and contract reporting requirements and connect them with vendors, industry experts, and service providers. UC CSA CES also engage in a variety of additional support activities. For example, to help establish successful cover crop adoption, one educator created a cover crop decision-making tool. A different educator started a small compost spreader rental program to assist small growers in spreading compost. Another facilitates full project management through translation services to a cooperative of Cantonese-speaking awardees.

Esther Mosase Plants Hedgerows

 The Impact

Through assisting awardees in the adoption of practices such as cover cropping, installing solar panels, and installing dairy manure solid separator systems, the 10 UC CSA CES have collectively supported growers in reducing 33,000 MT/CO2 per year, as measured by California Air and Resources Board (CARB) Green House Gas Emission reduction calculator (SWEEP GHG Calculator on CDFA's website), and the HSP Comet planner tool. That's equivalent to removing 7,000 cars from the road per year.

Table A provides an overview of how much GHG has reduced in counties where the UC Climate Smart Agriculture Educator team has helped farmers implement climate-smart practices. Totals for all projects are much higher.

CSA Eduactor Dana Yount With Glenn County Grower

Glenn County grower, Shannon Douglass says, “When producers have the support from the UCCE office that they already know and trust, they are more willing to implement new practices. The application process is intimidating, but with the help from UC, soil healthy practices are becoming much more widely adopted.”

Research shows that Healthy Soils Program practices such as compost application increases the amount of organic matter in soil, amongst numerous other benefits such as increasing the water and nutrient retention capacity of soils, providing a reservoir of nutrients for plants, improving aeration, improving water infiltration, reducing soil erosion, and supporting the abundance and diversity of soil organisms, which can improve plant health. Compost application is just one fundable practice farmers can implement to help reduce greenhouse gases on their operation.

Thanks to this unique partnership with CDFA, UC ANR is able to provide hands-on support to farmers statewide so that they can improve the health of their soils, reduce livestock methane emissions, and improve water use efficiency. In this way, the Climate-Smart Agriculture program contributes to UC ANR's public value of building climate-resilient communities and ecosystems.

Findings from a unique study site affirm the value of using the core soil health management principles of conservation agriculture to improve soil function, climate resilience, and increase the ecological sustainability of agriculture.

The Issue 

California farmers overall recognize the theoretical benefits that might come from implementing basic soil health management principles, but they lack concrete information and experience on how to actually use these principles at their farms and they also are in general, not currently implementing them. In other words, despite the now widespread high visibility that soil health is receiving from government programs, actual adoption of the prescribed core principles of soil health management occurs on very little California crop acreage. Ongoing estimates of the UC ANR Conservation Agriculture Systems Innovation (CASI) Center indicate for example, that in CA's annual cropping systems very little reduced disturbance soil management is employed whatsoever and there is virtually zero production that occurs in high surface residue, “soil cover” conditions. Further, farmers lack detailed information to guide cost-benefit economic analyses of soil health management approaches. 

UC ANR's Cooperative Extension Cropping Systems Specialist, Jeff Mitchell, sharing information with farmers and private sector participants at public educational field day at the site of the long-standing conservation agriculture systems study at the UC West Side Research and Extension Center in Five Points, CA

How UC Delivers

In 1999, UC ANR established the long-term University of California Conservation Agriculture Systems Project at the West Side Research and Extension Center in Five Points, CA with a group of San Joaquin Valley farmers, the U.S. Department of Agriculture National Resources Conservation Service (USDA NRCS), private sector, and university partners to measure changes in soil and crop productivity with implementation of the key soil health management practices of cover cropping and no-tillage. The original intent was to investigate farming practices that would reduce particulate matter emissions and increase soil carbon relative to the historically high soil disturbance practices that had been used in the region for over 80 years. At that time, no till practices were used on less than 2% of annual crop acreage in the San Joaquin Valley and informal estimates indicated that the extent of cover cropping and high surface was at similar low levels of adoption. Based on this project and the multitude of public educational events that it has conducted for over 3,000 people since its inception, UC ANR organized a group of about 20 California farmers and private sector supporters who are now working together on a USDA NRCS Conservation Innovation Grant Program project aimed at increasing the adoption of reduced disturbance cropping systems at organic vegetable production farms.

After 20 years of consistent soil health management at the UC ANR study site involving reduced soil disturbance, surface residue generation and preservation, and the use of cover crops, overall soil function improved dramatically compared to standard practices. Our findings indicate that dedication to the now widely touted and highly visible principles of soil health in ways that are uncommon in current production systems in the region results in not only changes in several soil chemical, physical, and biological properties, but also in improvements in the ecological and environmental services that the soil provides. After 20 years, nitrogen in the top 3 ft of soil increased 10%, water holding capacity and carbon in surface layers of the soil increased 20 and 30%, respectively, while overall soil biodiversity also increased in functionally significant ways in the no-till with cover crop system relative to the standard till without cover crop approach. Importantly, the period of the year with “green cover” of over the soil also increased by 3 months by the no-till cover crop system and dust emissions were generally reduced by more than 70% by the reduced disturbance systems. 

Public extension education field day on June 6, 2016 attracting over 220 participants on soil health at the NRI Project field at the UC ANR West Side Research and Extension Center in Five Points, CA

The Impact

This group of 20 farmers are now taking advantage of the findings of the unique UC ANR long-term work at their own farms and are enthusiastically sharing information about their own efforts at reduced disturbance approaches. Farmers have made structural changes to their practices such as reducing disturbance, increasing residue cover, cover cropping, and reducing tillage intensity. These changes have the potential to preserve natural resources and reduce pollution as described in the research findings above.

This study and the changes in practice align with new government focuses on soil health. Reliance on ecosystem services that result from healthy, functioning soils rather than the synthetic, non-renewable inputs and high disturbance practice is increasingly seen as a publicly desirable and environmentally sustainable way to improve our food production systems. Because preventing further degradation of soil function and productivity is often less expensive than remediation, the common good costs of achieving such sustained ecosystem improvement rightly need to be borne by our food system at large, rather than farmers themselves. 

In this way, UC ANR contributes to increasing ecological sustainability of agriculture and the public value of protecting California's natural resources by evaluating alternative management approaches and determining tradeoffs that might be associated with their implementation.

Our findings from a unique study site in one of the historically most productive agricultural regions of the world clearly affirm the value of using the core soil health management principles of conservation agriculture to improve soil function, climate resilience, and climate change mitigation.

Organic vegetable farmers who are part of the ANR NRCS Conservation Innovation Grant Program visiting farmers, Scott and Brian Park of Park Farming in Meridian, CA, to learn about reduced disturbance equipment, March 2019