- Author: Saoimanu Sope
In California, natural and working lands make up 95 million acres of the state and play a vital role in building resilience to the impacts of climate change. University of California Agriculture and Natural Resources was awarded $1.7 million for the California Next Generation and Equitable Climate Action Plan, as part of the state's Natural and Working Lands Climate Smart Strategy and California's 30x30 Initiative, an effort to conserve 30% of the state's lands and coastal waters by 2030.
Natural and working lands include both unmanaged and managed areas actively used for agriculture, forestry or production purposes.
Chandra Richards, UC Cooperative Extension agricultural land acquisitions academic coordinator for Southern California, and Cristina Murillo-Barrick, UCCE's Black, Indigenous and People of Color community development advisor for the Bay Area, are leading the California Next Generation and Equitable Climate Action Plan project.
To build capacity and technical assistance for climate-smart action planning, Richards and Murillo-Barrick will use the Climate Smart Land Management Program funding, awarded through the California Department of Conservation, to focus on two of the most pressing climate action issues: equitable land access and land management diversification.
According to the 2022 U.S. Department of Agriculture census, demographic data indicates that California agricultural land ownership and production is concentrated within an aging and mostly White demographic. However, research suggests diverse management practices promote healthy landscapes. This has been shown to benefit the environment, human health and climate resilience in multiple ways.
For this reason, this project centers on “historically underrepresented communities,” a term that includes California Native American Tribes, communities of color, landless farmers, immigrant and non-English speaking communities and other agency-designated minority groups (racial, ethnic and non-male groups, socially disadvantaged farmers and ranchers, and California designated severely disadvantaged communities).
Focusing on Southern California, UC Cooperative Extension scientists will identify barriers to land access, management and opportunities to increase land manager diversity. They also will engage historically underrepresented communities in coalition building, capacity assessment and climate action planning.
Within the last few decades, Californians have faced increased ecosystem stressors and decreasing diversity of natural systems. This pattern continues to damage already-vulnerable communities (disproportionately historically underrepresented communities), while also worsening and intensifying climate impacts, including drought, wildfire, flooding and disease. Overcoming these kinds of systemic and structural challenges will require the next generation of land managers to reflect California equitably, while preparing them to take on climate resilience. The project will determine clear solutions and plans that enable long-term, strategic land use and protection.
To do this work, UCCE is collaborating with the Community Alliance with Family Farms (CAFF), California Association of Resource Conservation Districts (CARCD) and the California Bountiful Foundation, all of whom serve as subgrantees and will deepen connections with communities.
Organizations like CARCD have long served as “boots on the ground” personnel and have close relationships with landowners and land managers. “RCDs have been hearing the land equity need for a long time and are actively collaborating with different partners to tackle this pressing issue,” said Qi Zhou, program manager of Justice, Equity, Diversity and Inclusion at CARCD and member of the Strategic Growth Council Land Equity Task Force.
“California RCDs are excited about this project because it will allow major California agriculture and conservation partners to collaboratively develop plans and implement projects centering on equity land access and land management diversification,” Zhou added.
Project lead Richards said $270,000 of the grant will be reserved for new partnerships with organizations in Southern California that have experience with, and strong ties to, historically underserved communities.
UC ANR is collaborating with the California Department of Food and Agriculture as well as California Climate and Agriculture Network (CalCAN), and World Be Well, a Southern California nonprofit.
Tawny Mata, CDFA's director of the Office of Environmental Farming and Innovation, described technical assistance providers as being grounded in their local agricultural communities and recognized their importance to partners in the success of CDFA's incentive programs.
“When we do succeed in reaching historically underserved farmers and ranchers with our grant programs, it is often with the thoughtful support and planning of a technical assistance provider,” Mata said. “I look forward to this project helping us refine our own technical assistance funding programs and bringing technical assistance providers together to network and share best practices for improving land access and promoting climate-smart agriculture.”
“The successes of this project will elevate the voices of historically underrepresented communities, strengthening efforts in these communities to support climate action,” said Richards. Additionally, the project will increase sharing of regional reports, needs assessments and community plans surrounding climate-smart management practices. Finally, it will boost technical assistance for these groups specifically.
To learn more about the Climate Smart Land Management Program and this year's awardees, visit:
- Author: Saoimanu Sope
The first time Chris Wong ever laid eyes on Romanesco broccoli was while he was selling it at a farmers market in Davis. Although the broccoli was marketed as locally sourced and organically grown, Wong remembers reading the label on the produce box: Holtville, California – 15 minutes from Wong's hometown, located more than 600 miles south of Davis.
Wong, CalFresh Healthy Living, UC Cooperative Extension community education supervisor for Imperial County, grew up in the community he now serves. In his role, he identifies opportunities to improve community health whether it be increasing access to healthy food, making neighborhoods more conducive for exercise, or simply educating the public.
But it was his college experience at UC Davis that catapulted his career focused on food systems and community health. Because he lived in UC Davis' Student Co-op Housing, he found himself surrounded by peers studying food science or agriculture.
“I was heavily influenced by the things they spoke about,” he said, adding that he was inspired to get involved with the local farmers market in Davis. “I started working at a farmers market, selling local, organic produce at very high prices to very privileged people in Davis, including students.”
He was troubled that the produce was transported from Imperial County – from towns like Brawley and Holtville, where Wong grew up – and yet he had never seen some of the products he was selling in Davis.
After spending a few years going back and forth between Davis and his hometown, Wong moved back home to Calexico fulltime in 2015. Eager to locate the nearest farmers market after his experience in Davis, he learned that the nearest one was in a city north of Calexico.
A grant provided by the U.S. Department of Agriculture helped a Calexico based non-profit organization establish a farmers market in a neighboring community of El Centro, identified as a food desert, yet the farmers market was in a different city.
“It wasn't the same as the one in Davis. They didn't even have produce, just food and craft vendors,” he said. Wong felt motivated to make a change.
“I asked the coordinators of that farmers market if I could volunteer with them. I asked them about the process of establishing a farmers market. Then I started sending Facebook messages to city council members and other community leaders and was able to get a meeting with them,” Wong said.
A fresh start for his hometown
On Oct. 6, 2013, Wong and a few others launched the first-ever farmer's market in Calexico. Wong described opening day as “almost a failure” because of the lack of available produce. “It was really tough; we had a lot of build up for it. We had a distributor who came to provide produce, but it took a while before we got produce vendors to the site,” he said.
Even though Wong's hometown is also home to 500,000 acres of farmland, many of the farms in the Imperial Valley are commercial or industrial farms. This means that the crops have already been contracted to end up at stores like Costco before they're even planted.
“We even got the Romanesco broccoli to be sold in Calexico,” said Wong.
For six years, Calexico had a farmers market that community members benefitted from. When he wasn't securing vendors, Wong was attending community alliance meetings to promote the market and its effort to bring healthy, fresh options to the kitchen table. In 2019, the market shut down after the City of Calexico's Community Services Department Director retired and the department restructured.
Determined to succeed
During his first year at UC Davis, Wong, an anthropology major at the time, struggled as a student and felt ill-prepared to manage the intense coursework that lay ahead. “I just couldn't get the right grades or write good papers,” he said. Before the spring semester of his first year concluded, Wong was academically dismissed from UC Davis.
“There's a joke in my hometown that people say to students who go off to college,” said Wong. “Before you leave, people will say ‘see you next year' because a lot of us don't finish college and return home.”
Returning home was never an option for Wong. He was determined to stay the course, noting that he couldn't return home with student debt and no degree. To get himself back on track, Wong took summer courses at UC Davis and enrolled in remedial English classes at Sacramento City College. In total, he spent an entire school year and two summers making up for his academic shortcomings.
Wong's efforts at Sacramento City College paid off. He was able to reenroll at UC Davis and graduated with a bachelor's degree in Spanish Literature with a minor in Latin American Hemispheric Studies.
Remembering his roots
There's no doubting that the California/Mexican border holds a special place in Wong's heart. His father, of Chinese descent, and his mother met in Mexicali, where Wong's mother is from, and got married against their parents' will.
“They got married in secret and had me in secret because my Chinese grandmother did not approve of the relationship,” said Wong, describing her as “traditional.”
Growing up, Wong remained connected to his Mexican heritage but not so much his Chinese culture. Wong, along with his three younger siblings, are all fluent in Spanish but if you speak to him in Cantonese, like his paternal grandmother does, he'd only be able to make out a few words and phrases.
Wong's father grew up speaking Chinese in his home in Mexicali. When he would attend school in Calexico, however, most students spoke Spanish. The constant shift in language confused Wong's father, causing him to flunk the third grade. To ensure his children didn't experience the same challenges, Wong's father purposefully withheld from teaching Wong or his siblings Cantonese.
Wong's ability to speak Spanish, the language of the community he serves, has empowered him to connect with residents on a deeper level. Of the many things that Wong has accomplished, he is most proud to be giving back to the community that raised him. In 2017, he joined UC ANR as a UC Cooperative Extension community education specialist for Imperial County before becoming a community education supervisor in 2022.
Despite the setbacks that could have easily derailed Wong, he remains steadfast and is always looking for ways to improve his community's health. “I'm eternally grateful for the opportunity to serve my home community as a representative of the UC,” Wong said. “Visiting my old classrooms and teachers to provide their current students with quality educational experiences I may not have had growing up, brings me the utmost joy.”
- Author: Jeffrey P Mitchell
August 16, 2020
Announcing the webinar, Healthy Soils for Healthy Profits - How do we get to $2.50/lb cotton in the SJV? slated for September 17, 2020 from 9:00 AM to Noon. Registration is now open at: https://ucanr.edu/sjvcottonwebinar
A short introductory video including interviews with presentingSJV farmers is available at
Sign up now!
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- Author: civileats.com by Muna Danish, Farming, Food and Farm Labor
Source: Published originally on civileats.com, More Latinx Farmers Own Their Land. Could They Make the Food System More Sustainable? by Muna Danish, Farming, Food and Farm Labor, April 15th, 2019.
Moving from farmworker to farm owner has long been a challenge for Latinx farmers. But with support, more are making the leap, increasing the number of diverse, small-scale operations.
It wasn't until 2009, when Javier Zamora was in his 40s and living in California, that he started to consider farming as a career. After moving to the U.S. from Mexico in 1985 and working in the restaurant industry in Southern California, Zamora attended Cabrillo Community College in Santa Cruz, where he studied agriculture, reconnected with his farming roots—and realized he had a passion for growing organic food.
At first, Zamora worked for others, but the pay was low, and he had a family. “I needed to be financially stable, so making $12 an hour was not going to cut it,” he recalls. In 2012, he struck out on his own.
In just a few years, Zamora made a name for himself by establishing a business, JSM Organics, and growing it from one-and-a-half acres to more than 100. He sells his vegetables, flowers, and berries to retail outlets as well as farmers' markets all over the Bay Area—and was recently recognized with the 2018 Rising Star Award from the Organic Trade Association.
Zamora's story is exceptional, however; most Latinx farmers still have a long way to go to achieve this level of success. While Latinx people make up about 83 percent of field laborers in the U.S., they own only about 3 percent of the farms.
The low number of Latinx farm owners is “misrepresentative of who's farming now and who's got the talent and desire to farm,” says Chris Brown, Development Director at the Agriculture and Land-based Training Association (ALBA), a nonprofit in Salinas that incubates mostly Latinx-run farm operations.
Brown points to the fact that the official numbers of new and beginning farmers have not been keeping up with the number of those who are retiring in the U.S., adding that skilled farmworkers are rarely considered in that equation. “You want new farmers, and you have droves of them already in the field,” he says.
There are a number of factors at play: Latinx farmworkers face an array of challenges when they try to start their own farms, including language barriers, lack of knowledge about the market, and for the more than half who are undocumented, an inability to access government resources such as subsidies and grants from the U. S. Department of Agriculture (USDA).
While Latinx farm ownership grew at the beginning of this century, it has since plateaued. According to the USDA's 2012 Census of Agriculture, the proportion of Hispanic farm owners increased by 21 percent between 2007 and 2012, to 3 percent of all U.S. farm owners. This increase doubled that of other groups and ran counter to the overall decrease in farm ownership in the country.
The 2017 Census released last week, however, reveals that while the number of Hispanic farm producers increased from 90,344 to 112,451 between 2012 and 2017, the number of total producers also increased, meaning the proportion of Hispanic farm producers remained steady at 3 percent over the five-year period. (Important to note: the USDA changed the demographic data collected from farm operators to farm producers, defined as someone involved in making decisions for the farm, which could increase the number of people identifying.)
Laura-Anne Minkoff-Zern, an assistant professor of food studies and agriculture researcher at Syracuse University, believes the census numbers likely do not fully represent the number of Latinx farmers. “Most farmers I've interviewed, who identify as first-generation Latino or Hispanic farmers, have not filled out [any USDA] census,” she says.
The Challenge of Moving from Worker to Owner
California's agricultural industry is especially dependent on immigrant labor, with nine in 10 agriculture workers coming from Mexico. Over 40 percent of the country's Mexican-born crop workers are in California, according to data from the National Agricultural Worker Survey.
California also employs the most agricultural workers compared to any other state, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. But the instability of farm work, coupled with a desire to have more autonomy and upward mobility, has caused Latinx farmworkers to look increasingly toward farm ownership.
And many of them are already primed for the job, coming from farming regions where practices such as planting diversified crops and growing food with little or no pesticides are common. Minkoff-Zern says many Latinx immigrant farmers seek to reproduce the farming they did in their home countries, which “resembles what we think of as a homestead: growing food for consumption, and basically living on the land.”
But in trying to establish their own operations, these farmers often find themselves up against daunting challenges. The increasing consolidation and mechanization of large farms in the U.S. has made accessing land and capital difficult, and small-scale farmers like Zamora have to find ways to stand out in order to survive. Many Latinx farmers choose to farm organically, Brown says, in part because the higher market value allows them to build their own businesses and have autonomy over their work. But, in California's competitive market, going organic isn't enough; farmers have to grow new and niche foods and get their products successfully to market. Farmers' markets in urban areas often have long wait-lists, and new vendors have to offer something that isn't already there.
In addition, many Latinx farmers want to remain small-scale, making it difficult for them to compete in an increasingly monocrop-focused, industrialized industry, says Minkoff-Zern. “Scaling up is tough because they have to change their way of production. Most first-generation farmers … are not necessarily interested in doing that,” she says.
Language access is another problem for primarily Spanish-speaking farmers, especially when it comes to USDA programs and loans. Lorette Picciano, executive director of The Rural Coalition, a Washington, D.C-based advocacy group that works with Latinx farmers all over the country says these farmers often see the USDA solely as a regulatory agency and not a source of resources and loans. Minkoff-Zern adds that “because Latino growers are culturally separated from the type of farmers working with the USDA, they don't know about those opportunities.”
For example, the USDA's Outreach and Assistance to Socially Disadvantaged and Veteran Farmers and Ranchers Program and the Beginning Farmer and Rancher Development Program offer outreach, technical assistance, and loans to minority and beginning farmers. Those programs were recently combined in the 2018 Farm Bill and will receive up to $50 million in funding by 2023, as well as permanent baseline funding for the first time.
However, Minkoff-Zern says that in order for Latinx farmers to truly take advantage of those opportunities, the USDA needs to employ more bilingual staff and do intentional outreach to Latinx immigrant communities, where she says information often spreads by word of mouth rather than through online channels. Many Latinx farmers might also miss out on government loans and organic certification because they require extensive record-keeping that they may not be accustomed to completing due to language and education-related barriers.
When it comes to accessing markets for what they grow, Minkoff-Zern adds that a type of “veiled discrimination” can happen in farmers' markets and other alternative food spaces such as co-ops, where Latino farmers don't have the same social networks as white farmers.
In Javier Zamora's case, the support of local organizations such as ALBA and Farmlink made all the difference. He received his first loan of $10,000 from Farmlink after being turned away from banks due to bad credit. He also farmed his first piece of land through ALBA's incubator farm.
Supporting Minority Farmers
ALBA, which grew out of the work of the Rural Development Center founded in 1985, helps low-income, minority farmworkers become organic farm owners in rural Salinas. ALBA's primary program, Programa Educativo para Pequeños Agricultores (PEPA), or Farmer Education Program, is a year-long training that combines classroom instruction and field-based work.
After graduating, participants can apply to be part of the organic farm incubator, which rents them up to five acres of land at a subsidized rate and helps farmers launch and grow their businesses over four years.
Victor and Veronica Cortes have a small, two-and-a-half-acre farm just around the corner from ALBA. Victor participated in the ALBA program in 2013 and has been farming independently with his wife since then.
On a recent fall day at the farm, Veronica was in a shed packing up boxes of serrano peppers to send to their distributor. “The hardest part is selling the products,” she says. “The last four years we sent a lot of product to the garbage. We didn't sell it because the market is full.” This year they've fared better. They diversified their offerings and started growing niche products like gherkins and jicama.
Victor, who worked as a manager for the berry-growing giant Driscoll's for nearly a decade before launching the farm, is kneeling behind a single tall row of corn plants as he picks jicama roots. He says left Driscoll's because he didn't see any way to advance at the company. “For a worker like me, that was it. I am limited in English, in my education,” says Cortes.
Nationally, community-based programs that focus on providing technical assistance to Latinx farmers are few and far between. Latinx farmers in in Washington can work with Viva Farms, a nonprofit farm-business incubator that is similar to ALBA. The Farmworkers Association of Florida has also done trainings geared toward Latinx farmers, and FARMroots, a program of Greenmarket farmers markets in New York, provides technical assistance and mentorship to primarily immigrant farmers. Still, Picciano of the Rural Coalition says there is an “urgent need” for more investment in technical assistance to Latinx farmers.
Cortes says he is seeing more Hispanics becoming farm owners, but the most significant barrier is confidence. “When you come here from Mexico, you think you will be a laborer,” he says. In order to increase the number of Hispanic farm owners, he thinks immigrants need to learn that there are other options. “We can change our situation, we can be on the other side,” he says.
For that shift to happen, farmworkers need to be viewed as a priority in terms of farm ownership, “rather than just as workers,” says Minkoff-Zern. That could mean more economic incentives for farmers to sell their land and machinery to their workers, especially as the average age of primary farm operators is 59.4, according to the 2017 Census of Agriculture, and many are thinking about retirement.
Erin West, federal policy director of the National Young Farmers Coalition, says young farmers are already more diverse than the general farming population, but there needs to be more opportunities for those groups to access federal support. “If we want agriculture to be successful and want young farmers to be successful, that means including Latinx farmers and other socially disadvantaged producers,” she says.
Ultimately, both Minkoff-Zern and Picciano believe that more Latinx farmers could also mean stronger rural communities and a shift to a more sustainable food system, especially as Latinx farmers tend to opt for diverse, small-scale operations that sell direct to eaters. But Picciano adds that Latinx farmers also need to be thinking about succession. “We need to work with them on transition plans so they can also pass farms on to the next generation,” she says.
That next generation is something Zamora has just recently started to think about. While he shows no signs of slowing down, he says that his daughters, 22-year-old Cynthia and 23-year-old Selena have started working at the farm five days a week. “My hope is that once I turn a bit older, then they can carry on with it,” he says.
- Author: Julia Van Soelen Kim
- Editor: J. M.