- Author: Kristen Farrar, UC Sustainable Agriculture Research & Education Program
Projects will support socially disadvantaged farmers, increase urban access to healthy food and more
The UC Sustainable Agriculture Research & Education Program (SAREP) is pleased to announce the recipients of the Sustainable Agriculture and Food Systems 2024-25 Small Grants Program. This grant program will fund planning, research and education projects that support the development of sustainable community food systems and environmentally sound and economically viable farming enterprises.
Of the 33 eligible applications, eight applicants were selected to receive approximately $80,000 in combined funding to support their work. Individual grants are limited to $10,000. “The Small Grants Program is an important part of our mission,” said Ruth Dahlquist-Willard, interim director of UC SAREP. “By facilitating these grants, SAREP is able to support ANR in engaging a wide range of food systems stakeholders, outcomes show that a small financial investment can have a large impact in improving the lives of Californians.”
The eight recipients of this year's grants are:
Planning
Building Capacity and Resiliency Among Networks of Socially Disadvantaged California Farmers
Fresh Approach will establish a network of pooled learning and technical support that will aid emerging food-aggregation businesses in accessing sustainable market channels, including emergency food distribution. As part of the project, they will enhance an interactive GIS mapping tool of value chains to streamline market opportunities for socially disadvantaged farmers and aggregators. (Project lead: Andy Ollove, Fresh Approach)
Sustainable Urban Resident Food Gardens Expansion Planning Project
Growing Hope Gardens will systematize the process of outreach, discovery, design, planning and implementation in creating new urban resident food gardens. The project will document Growing Hope Gardens' garden development process into a training and implementation manual to more effectively duplicate food garden programs in more low-income urban communities. (Project lead: Carolyn Day, Growing Hope Gardens)
Research
Evaluating Best Management Practices for Cover Crops to Minimize Nitrogen Losses in California's Salinas Valley
This project will quantify the effectiveness of cover cropping at different planting times and termination dates to scavenge excess nitrogen in the soil and reduce nitrate leaching in a Salinas vegetable cropping system. The results will inform Ag Order 4.0 for cover crop credits and help stakeholders in the Salinas Valley better understand crop management for efficient nutrient cycling. (Project lead: Scott Fendorf, Stanford University)
Implications of American Kestrel Diet, Dispersal and Migration on Pest Control in Northern California Farming Systems
Investigators will study how the diet, post-breeding dispersal, and migration of nesting kestrels influences biological pest control on Northern California farms. The project will generate management recommendations for using the predatory bird for biological pest control in sustainable agriculture programs across California. (Project lead: Breanna Martinico, UC Cooperative Extension)
Education and Outreach
EAT! Community Farms Market Access and Promotion Project
This project helps socially disadvantaged and indigenous farmers in Riverside County create pathways for realizing economic return. EAT! will provide mentoring for marketing strategy development, connect farmers to buyers, promote the farmers market so it's more profitable for farmers, and provide a cooperative farm stand in the city of Norco for farmers to sell produce directly to consumers. (Project lead: Patrick Mitchell, Ecological Agricultural Training Cultural Center [EAT!])
Cultivating Cooperative Education, Stewardship and Connection at the Agroecology Commons Cooperative Incubator Farm
Agroecology Commons aims to address challenges faced by young, first-generation, BIPOC, queer and femme farmers at the Agroecology Commons Cooperative Incubator Farm in the Bay Area. The project will focus on education and outreach, providing technical assistance and training in regenerative agriculture practices such as soil health, pest management and crop diversification to socially disadvantaged farmers. (Project lead: Jeneba Kilgore, Agroecology Commons)
Signage and Mural Refurbishment for Southeast Asian Farmers to Improve Direct-to-Consumer Marketing
This project will build new, long-lasting farm signs for Southeast Asian farmers growing diversified vegetables and berries in the Sacramento region. Improving the appeal and durability of farm signs will increase the profitability of the farm stands as these resource-limited farmers rely on direct-to-consumer marketing strategies to promote their businesses. (Project lead: Margaret Lloyd, UC Cooperative Extension)
Community Nutrition Security and Education Program
Farm Discovery at Live Earth will increase access to organic produce for individuals and families experiencing food and nutrition insecurity in the Santa Cruz and Monterey Bay area. This will be accomplished through farming, outdoor education and nutrition education programs focusing on regenerative agricultural practices to connect youth and families to their regional agricultural and ecological systems. (Project Lead: Jessica Ridgeway, Farm Discovery at Live Earth)
The UC SAREP Small Grants Program has a big impact! Help us fund more projects that support sustainable community food systems and environmentally sound, economically viable farming enterprises. To support this program, please donate here. Choose SAREP Small Grants Program for the designation.
Dahlquist-Willard named interim SAREP director
The past few years have intensified challenges to sustainability in California agriculture. At the same time, new opportunities for UC ANR programs to meet these challenges have arisen. Large-scale hiring, successfully competing for several multimillion-dollar grants, and expanding our reach to meet the needs of Californians are among UC ANR's recent positive developments. As we look ahead, the challenges to achieve sustainability, food security and economic development present new opportunities for our programs to work together.
UC ANR's Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education Program is a leader in promoting safe, sustainable farming practices across the state. The recent retirements of SAREP's director and business manager, as well as multiple recent large grant awards for statewide and regional projects, have created an opportunity to integrate key programs under SAREP to meet grant deliverables and provide administrative support efficiencies. Thus, we are integrating the Small Farms Network and UC Master Food Preserver program with SAREP to form a new framework for support and administration.
These three programs have multiple shared areas of focus and activity such as local food production and marketing, diversified farming systems, food safety and enhancing equity. By integrating these units, we will not only accomplish economies of scale but also foster collaboration on shared focus areas to strengthen overall program delivery to clients and communities. The programs will retain their individual names and identities under this new framework.
Due to the substantial changes to the SAREP director position, the search for a new SAREP director is on hold while we consider how best to integrate the three programs. I have appointed Ruth Dahlquist-Willard to serve as interim director of SAREP for three years effective July 1, 2023.
Over the next six to nine months, Ruth will coordinate brainstorming sessions with academics and staff to gather input on how best to leverage shared interests and resources across the units. She will remain based in Fresno during the interim role. Recruitment will begin soon for the UCCE small farms and specialty crops advisor position in Fresno County, and Ruth will be dedicated 100% to the SAREP director position following this transition.
I am confident that this new structure will strengthen each individual program while also creating new synergies within a powerful statewide unit that can support multiple projects and attract new funding opportunities.
Please join me in congratulating Ruth and lending your support to her in establishing this new framework to accomplish our collective goals.
Glenda Humiston
Vice President
- Author: Pamela Kan-Rice
UC Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education Program (UC SAREP) has released the request for proposals for the 2023-24 UC SAREP Small Grants Program. The program funds research projects, education and demonstration programs of research-based technologies and systems, and projects that support the development of sustainable community food systems.
Apply by 12 p.m. PST on Jan. 10, 2023.
For more information and to apply, visit https://sarep.ucdavis.edu/grantsFY23-24.
Previously funded projects are posted at https://sarep.ucdavis.edu/ucsarep-grants.
- Author: Mike Hsu
UC SAREP's Sustainable Agriculture and Food Systems grant helps support Second Chance garden
Fifteen-year-old Xavier knows the anger within him will never leave. “I can't ever get rid of it,” he said.
“I've always wanted to just fight for no reason; I just had an anger issue, losing my temper quick with people,” added Xavier, a ninth-grader in San Diego County. “I have high expectations of myself.”
Xavier is working to keep his emotions under control, and he has found a sense of calm through his volunteer work. He was an intern – and then a peer supervisor – in the youth-run garden of Second Chance, a San Diego-based organization that works to break the cycles of poverty and incarceration by providing housing and job training to adults and young people.
Operating their garden as a small farm business, youth in the program, ages 14 to 21, offer produce to the community through their farm stand and a CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) model.
“The project incorporates a ‘farm to fork' approach in which youth not only experience how to grow food, but how to cook and eat healthfully,” said Gail Feenstra, director of the University of California Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education Program, which has a grant program that funds research and education projects – such as the youth garden – supporting sustainable food systems.
“Second Chance works primarily with youth in communities of color, providing them with training and also helping them develop confidence in themselves,” Feenstra said.
Filling a critical need for fresh produce
Caelli Wright, program manager of the Second Chance youth garden, said that grant funds from SAREP – a program of UC Agriculture and Natural Resources – have been used to purchase the supplies needed to sustain the program. The garden has filled a critical need for produce during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“After the pandemic hit, we recognized the increased need for fresh food in our neighborhoods,” Wright said. “That need was already there – southeast San Diego is considered a ‘food swamp' or ‘food apartheid', if you will – and with the onset of COVID, that need just escalated with unemployment and complications in our food production systems.”
Through a partnership with UC San Diego Center for Community Health and Encanto Elementary School (located down the block from the garden), donations enabled the program to give its CSA shares to about 25 families at Encanto. Over the course of the pandemic, the youth have grown 10,000 pounds of produce to donate.
At the same time, the program helps the young participants grow. For Xavier, being outdoors with peers empowered him to develop positive relationships. Previously, as a student in a charter school program, he was not accustomed to interacting with people and groups. Volunteering in the youth garden has given him a fresh perspective and understanding of others.
“Learning to be patient with people and [to] accept sometimes that if I don't know something, I need to ask about it, because I used to be so in my ego that I thought I knew everything,” Xavier explained. “But I don't know everything – I just learned to accept some things…that's just being part of life. And that's something that the garden has helped me with, personally.”
Opportunities for personal, social growth
Developing – and redeveloping – social skills are especially important for students, as they return from the disconnections associated with remote learning.
“Right now, with a lot of students facing the aftermath of COVID and being restricted to learning at home and not getting as much social interaction in their daily lives, it's led to a lot of challenges, mental health-wise, and social and emotional learning-wise,” Wright said. “The garden program provides that opportunity that some youth have been missing out on.”
In southeast San Diego, such crucial opportunities for personal growth and career exploration are harder to come by, and Second Chance started the garden in 2012 to give youth a unique work experience and valuable skills. About 400 young people have participated in the program.
“The youth that we serve are coming from low-income neighborhoods that are underserved with resources,” Wright said. “They just are not exposed to the same opportunities [as those in higher-income areas] to build skills or be ready for the workforce or to reach higher education – so that's where our program comes in and helps deliver those needed services.”
Xavier, who originally came to the garden because he heard that landscaping could be a lucrative career, recently finished his second stint as a peer supervisor in the youth garden. With his new skills, he and his cousin are looking to start a business of their own, cutting grass and doing yardwork in their community.
And, late last month, Xavier transferred to a more traditional high school environment.
“Being in a charter school after two, three years,” he said, “I've realized I miss being around more people.”
/h3>/h3>/h2>- Author: Mike Hsu
When agricultural advisors came to the Cochiti Pueblo in New Mexico during the 1940s, they lined the irrigation ditches with concrete, in the name of boosting efficiency and productivity. But in single-mindedly focusing on water delivery, they neglected to consider how the previously inefficient seepage sustained nearby fruit trees.
Their actions, as well-intentioned as they might have been, disrupted the local ecosystem and killed the trees that had fed many generations, according to A-dae Romero-Briones, who identifies as Cochiti and as a member of the Kiowa Tribe.
“In my language, we call the extension agents ‘the people who kill the fruit trees,'” said Romero-Briones, director of the Food and Agriculture Program for the First Nations Development Institute, a nonprofit that serves Tribal communities across the mainland, Alaska and Hawaii.
The historically tense relationship between Indigenous peoples and government-affiliated programs is one of the many complex dynamics discussed in a six-part webinar series, “Racial Equity in Extension,” facilitated by UC Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education Program.
Making communities of color in the agricultural sector more visible is a priority for Victor Hernandez, a sociologist and outreach coordinator for the USDA's Natural Resources Conservation Service. Hernandez, who has organized “Growing Together” conferences for Latino and Black farmers, is trying to get more farmers of color to participate in the upcoming 2022 Agricultural Census.
“If we cannot quantify the demographic, we cannot justify the need,” emphasized Hernandez, explaining that his office uses the data to direct resources that advance equity in service, program delivery and distribution of funds.
A legacy of mistrust
At the same time, however, Hernandez also acknowledged the challenges in registering growers of color for the census, conducted by the USDA's National Agricultural Statistics Service. (According to Brodt, USDA's most recent agricultural census, dating to 2017, counts approximately 25,000 producers of color among 128,535 total producers in California.)
“Many of us that are considered socially disadvantaged or historically underserved…a lot of times our peoples come from [nations with] oppressive governments,” Hernandez said. “And so when you come to the United States and you begin to build your life here, to go and engage with the federal government is not the first knee-jerk reaction.”
On top of government mistrust and fears of deportation or detention, other immigrant groups have seen mainstream agriculture – borne by the “Green Revolution” wave across the globe – replace deep-rooted cultural practices, said Kristyn Leach of Namu Farm in Winters.
“It just makes these small farmers distrust our own knowledge, the knowledge that's existed for centuries – before the kind of current iteration of agriculture that we're situated within right now,” said Leach, who works to preserve the agricultural heritage of her Korean ancestors, and facilitates a farmers' collaborative called Second Generation that adapts Asian crop varieties to climate change.
According to Romero-Briones, a collective memory of supplanted culture also lingers in Indigenous communities. In the Cochiti Pueblo, “primarily a subsistence agriculture community” with a long history of corn cultivation, their practices are distinct from those in the mainstream – including regenerative and sustainable agriculture.
Building relationships takes commitment
Given that legacy of cultural displacement and appropriation, how do extension professionals and other agricultural advisors slowly rebuild trust with communities of color? For Romero-Briones, it begins with a genuine respect for Indigenous practices, and she urges interested people to contact their local tribal historic preservation officer to begin strengthening those connections and understanding – beyond a couple of phone calls.
“As someone who works with Indigenous people all day, even I need to recognize sometimes I have to meet with people up to 12 times before we actually start talking about the work that I initially wanted to talk to them about,” Romero-Briones said.
In a similar vein, Chanowk Yisrael, chief seed starter of Yisrael Family Farms, encouraged listeners to reach out to members of the California Farmer Justice Collaborative – an organization striving for a fair food system while challenging racism and centering farmers of color.
“To use a farm analogy: we've got this ground, which is the farmers of color who have been neglected for a long period of time,” said Yisrael, who has grown his farm in a historically Black neighborhood of Sacramento into a catalyst for social change. “It's not just going to be as simple as just throwing some seeds and things are going to come up; you're going to have to do more – that means you got to get out and do much more than you would do for any other community.”
Investing time in a community is one thing – and backing it up with tangible resources is another. Technical expertise is only the “tip of the iceberg,” Leach said, as historically marginalized groups are also seeking land access and tenure, more affordable cost of living, and access to capital.
“All of those things are actually much bigger burdens to bear for most communities of color than not having the knowledge of how to grow the crops that we want to grow, and not knowing how to be adaptive and nimble in the face of climate change," Leach explained, highlighting California FarmLink as an essential resource. (“Understanding Disparities in Farmland Ownership” is the next webinar in the SAREP series, set for Nov. 19.)
Bringing diverse voices to the table
Another key is ensuring that farmers and farm workers of color are represented in management and decision-making processes. Samuel Sandoval, a professor in the Department of Land, Air and Water Resources and UC Cooperative Extension specialist in water management, develops outreach programs in English and Spanish for everyone from farm workers to the “boss of the boss of the boss.”
“It has to be changed,” he said, “because at the end, the person who is going to operate the irrigation system and turn on or off the valves, the person who is looking if there's a leak or not – that's the person who's not being informed, or has not been informed on purpose.”
That exclusion of certain groups can lead to a loss of invaluable knowledge. Leach said there is a real danger in ignoring the wisdom of communities that have contributed so much to the foundation of food systems in California and around the globe.
“These really kind of amazing, sophisticated and elegant agroecological systems that we don't often legitimize through the scientific language and perspectives aren't seen as being really technically proficient – but, in many ways, they're more dynamic and more resilient than the things that we're perpetuating right now,” she said.
As a concrete example, Sandoval said that while extension advisors and specialists conduct studies to remedy a plant disease, farm workers might be developing – separately and in parallel – their own solutions by asking for advice from their social networks via WhatsApp, a phone application.
A reimagining of collaboration, Sandoval said, would include (and compensate) people working in the field for sharing their perspectives – bringing together academics and farmers, integrated pest management experts and pesticide applicators, irrigation specialists and those who do the irrigation.
A need to look within
Concerns about inclusion and validating alternate sources of knowledge apply also to the recruitment process in extension. Leach said that she has seen listings for advisor jobs that would require, at a minimum, a master's degree – which would automatically disqualify her, despite her extensive knowledge of Asian heirloom vegetables.
“When you look at a job description and you see ‘Asian crop specialist,' only required qualification is a master's degree, and then somewhere down the long list of sort of secondary desired, recommended things is some knowledge of Asian crops or communities…you know that just says a lot in terms of what has weight,” Leach explained.
Before organizations can authentically connect with communities of color, they should prioritize diversity in their own ranks, said Romero-Briones. First Nations Development Institute had to ensure that they had adequate representation across the many Tribes that they serve.
“Before we start looking out, we have to start looking in,” she explained, “and that means we have to hire Indigenous people who know these communities.”
For extension professionals and other members of the agricultural community in California, the UC SAREP webinar series has helped spark that introspection and a meaningful reevaluation of institutional processes and assumptions.
“These discussions have been tremendously illuminating and eye-opening,” Brodt said. “But hearing and learning is just the start – it's incumbent on us, as an organization and as individuals, to take action to ensure that farmers of color and their foodways are truly respected and valued.”
/h2>/h2>/h2>/h2>