This week Ventura County UCCE’s director, Rose Hayden-Smith travels to Washington DC! Rose is a W.K. Kellogg/IATP Food & Society Fellow and is in Washington this week to attend meetings on National Food and Ag Policy. She will be sharing with us on this important topic throughout the week.

I was up early this morning, eating breakfast with Wisconsin dairy farmer Jim Goodman, a national advocate for small organic family farms.  Each time I talk to him, I learn more about the challenges facing small family farm operators in the U.S.

Immediately after breakfast, I walked to the 32^nd annual National Food Policy Conference, which is being presented by the Consumer Federation of America and the Grocery Manufacturers Association.  This year’s theme is “Assuring a Safe and Nutritious Food Supply: On the Threshold of a New Era in Food Policy.”  The conference was peopled by a large and diverse group of attendees.

The first panel discussion centered around the Food and Drug Administration’s “modernization” legislation; it was moderated by Gardiner Harris, a science reporter with the New York Times.  Much of the discussion focused on HR 2479, the proposed Food Safety Enhancement Act of 2009.   The discussion was heated, but civil, with one panelist arguing that the legislation was too narrow and would penalize smaller farm operators because of the traceability requirements.  One of the panelists was from Pew Research, which just today released a poll that indicates that American consumers are much less confident about the quality and safety of food than they have been previously.  Concern about the safety of imported food is astoundingly high.  Despite differences about the HR 2479 legislation, there was consensus on some fundamental principles, including focusing on preventing the outbreak of food borne illness.  How to accomplish this (increased inspections, etc.)? Not so much agreement.  There was also agreement that the private verification agreements that some major retailers require of their food vendors have developed because of a vacuum at the federal level.  Change is clearly needed.

The second panel discussion focused on the WIC and Childhood Nutrition Reauthorization.  This legislation, which requires congressional reauthorization every five years, is currently under review. This is big legislation, with far-reaching impacts. Currently one in nine Americans is receiving USDA food benefits…and more than half of those are children.  Millions of American children participate in federal school lunch programs at more than 100,000 schools, per Cindy Long of the USDA.  More than 14,000 comments about the reauthorization were received by the USDA (I sent a multi-page comment letter in myself). There is broad-based consensus on what needs to occur:

• Increase access and participation in the school lunch program, including summer feeding programs;
• Improve the nutritional quality of the food in school lunch programs; and
• Simplify program administration.

There were some nuances, however.  Some advocates favor improving the nutritional quality of foods throughout the campus, not just improving what’s served in the cafeteria.  This makes sense: it’s estimated that 30-50% of the calories children consume (on school days) are consumed at school.  One of the panelists spoke about how some foods that were forbidden in the cafeteria could still be sold elsewhere on school campuses.  Her argument: there needs to be a stronger link to overall school wellness policies that incorporate good nutrition and physical activity.  However, due to the focus on health care reform in Washington, DC, not enough time and attention is going to the reauthorization.

The obvious question came up: why isn’t childhood nutrition considered as part of an overall health reform effort? Derek Miller, who is a senior staff member for the Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition, and Forestry for the U.S. Senate, views it as an “integral component of broader health care reform efforts.”  He also said that if we are to slow childhood obesity, we need “multi-sectoral” approaches. (All the speakers I heard today were excellent; however, I found Miller’s comments throughout the day particularly compelling and resonant).

There was also discussion of soon-to-be released childhood nutritional recommendations from the Institute of Medicine (IOM), which will be provided to the USDA, and will feed into the 2009 reauthorization.  The IOM recommendations, I learned from Dr. Eduardo Sanchez, an IATP Fellow, are key.  They will likely suggest new meal patterns that will impact school lunches (perhaps suggesting more food choices that are low fat, whole grain, and more fruits and vegetables).

All panelists noted that the health care reform issue is slowing other legislative agendas.  Our evening meeting with Ed Cooney and friends at the Congressional Hunger Center confirmed this.  Ed and others who are working on the reauthorization expressed a sense of urgency around this legislation, and I agree.

At lunch, Deputy Agricultural Secretary Kathleen Merrigan spoke to us.  She spoke  about the importance of childhood nutrition and school lunch programs, sharing with us that the current administration has a goal of ending childhood hunger by 2015.  Merrigan also talked about farmland preservation/conservation, and the challenges facing dairy farmers (she noted her recent visit to California, and how the dairy farmers they met with wore red shirts to reference the deficits they are running).  She shared the USDA’s concern with repopulating the nation with farmers (the average age of the American farmer is 57).  I liked hearing about the USDA’s commitment to encouraging young people to begin farming, but I’d like to see some more concrete ideas, programs and resources addressing this need.  We aren’t doing nearly enough to teach youth about agriculture, nor are we providing enough resources to beginning farmers.

A new census of agriculture has recently been released, and is shows in starker detail what we already know are trends.  The smallest of small farms are thriving, and many are women-led.  Very large farms are thriving.  But there is a “disappearing middle” that ought to concern us all.

I met dozens of people today, from different parts of the country, from different professions.  All share a concern about food systems and agriculture. About childhood nutrition.   It’s clear that all these things are linked.

It’s been nearly an eighteen hour day, and it’s time to post this and sign off.

On Wednesday’s schedule:

• Breakfast (in 7 hours!) with garden advocates (as we prepare for our visit to the USDA);
• Listening to Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius speak at 9:00 a.m.;
• Meeting with key USDA staff about a national gardening initiative;
• Touring the People’s Garden at the USDA (I’m looking forward to seeing the progress made since my last visit in March and hope to borrow a baggie full of compost to bring home to share);
• Listen to the President’s address (on TV)
• Share a dinner with a couple dozen of the nation’s pre-eminent authorities on food systems at the Founding Farmers restaurant.

Random observations:  Weather here is mid-seventies, overcast, some occasional sprinkles.   Sticky, but great walking weather.  While entering the elevator to go downstairs to the Congressional Hunger Center this evening, Newt Gingrich came around the corner and was only about ten feet away from us.  Turns out Fox News is in the same building.

 

 

The RESTOR Project - Research for Students and Teachers about the Ormond Beach Wetland Restoration Project - will begin this year in October (exact date to be announced shortly).  We are looking for a few more interested 6-8th grade science teachers to participate. Teachers serving primarily multicultural populations have first priority. The project is fully funded by the National Marine Sanctuary BWET Program and will include:

*Teacher workshops with classroom and field instruction by a variety of local experts about the Ormond Beach Wetland Restoration, watersheds and water quality

*Standards-based curricula from the California Coastal Commission and National Marine Sanctuary

*A classroom visit and water quality instruction by a Channelkeeper scientist

*A fully funded field trip to Ormond Beach with water quality monitoring and wetland restoration activities

*A fully funded field trip to Anacapa Island

This project is in partnership with Cathy Reznicek at the Ventura County Office of Education, Channel Islands National Marine Sanctuary, Santa Barbara Channelkeeper, Nature Conservancy and the Ormond Point Native Plant Nursery.

Interested teachers, please contact Valerie Borel, RESTOR Project Program Representative, as soon as possible: email: vtborel@ucdavis.edu,  phone: 323-260-3851.

This week Ventura County UCCE’s director, Rose Hayden-Smith travels to Washington DC! Rose is a W.K. Kellogg/IATP Food & Society Fellow and is in Washington this week to attend meetings on National Food and Ag Policy. She will be sharing with us on this important topic throughout the week.

(Please note: This post in a special bonus. Another article was posted earlier today.)

I have not posted since July on my Victory Grower blog.  It’s been – at times - a difficult and disheartening summer.  Like many Californians, I will remember this period as the “summer of our discontent” here, a period when we struggled with the realities of limitations.   Limitations imposed by a crushing state budget deficit, a dysfunctional system of state governance, double digit unemployment, furloughs, and a lack of water to support California agriculture and residents.  It’s been a surreal period when we’ve seen further erosion in public funding to things Californians have taken as a birthright, including one of the best systems of higher education in the world.  It’s been a summer of strange weather, of wildfires, a period when the Golden State has seemed dusty, limp, directionless.  Even some of the most optimistic people I know (myself included) have seemed tired, a bit jaded, and wondering where we will go from here.  The budget die are cast: the game will be played out with new rules, new expectations, new outcomes.

For me, the shoot of green poking through a parched landscape of uncertainty has been the amazing degree of interest in gardening.  My phone is ringing off the hook, and my email inbox has been jammed with requests for support for home and community garden efforts.  The UC Master Gardener helpline is reporting a high volume of calls from home gardeners and others seeking support for gardening projects.  As Californians face hard times, they are responding creatively and innovatively.

What is remarkable to me is the nature of these gardening projects requesting support and assistance from UC.  It has ranged from homeowners determined to rip out lawns and put in edible landscape to major public agencies.   From a young graduate student sitting in my office seeking ideas on how to garden with schoolchildren in Ecuador (you'll be great, Megan!) to hearing Mayor Weir of Ventura share her vision for a gardening community.  It has been a top-down and bottom-up movement, simultaneously.   The world as Californians know it may be falling apart and changing, but many believe these gardening and civic agriculture projects will redeem the situation, will improve our communities, our world, our lives.

Here’s a short list of recent activity.  The County Public Health Department requested a meeting to discuss a collaborative project with UCCE in Ventura County.  This public agency views gardening as a tool, a vital component even, in chronic disease prevention, the fight against obesity, improving nutrition and other Public Health efforts. Could our Master Gardeners develop and deliver a gardening training for those engaged in community outreach?  The county’s food bank, Food Share has also met with us.  Food Share has started a Garden Share program, encouraging home gardeners to share excess produce with the county’s hungry, now estimated at 1 in 6 residents (this in one of the more affluent counties in California).  Food Share is also encouraging backyard gleaning projects, and is working with the County Agency on Aging to promote a garden to supplement senior nutrition efforts; we’ve been asked to provide support there, as well.

A new community garden has started in Camarillo; this effort was led by citizens, one a Master Gardener.  The Community Roots Garden, based at the North Oxnard  United Methodist Church in – a full acre – is bringing farm workers into community with volunteers who are supporting the effort.  Everyone is learning together.  Another agency has recently contacted us to see about revitalizing an abandoned orchard to use it as a source of food for the hungry.   A local group of volunteers, the Grow Food Party Crew, has provided free labor and expertise to plant numerous home gardens, home gardens that demonstrate organic gardening practices.  The Ventura City Corps youth group, some trained by UC staff and Master Gardeners, has put a garden in the front of their building, where it can be easily viewed from City Hall.  And at Ventura City Hall last Friday, the day before Labor Day weekend, about fifty people gathered and took the first steps to create a Ventura City chapter of a A LEAN VC.  This will create a broad-based community coalition to support health and wellness in the city of Ventura, and one of the four pillars of activity will center on local food systems and gardening. To cap off last week, a terrific article in the Star, written by Lisa McKinnon talked about the growing CSA movement in the county.

Ventura is just one county in California, which is just one state in the Union. There are thousands of these efforts occurring across the United States, as a passion for gardening grips the nation.   Much of this interest can be attributed to the White House vegetable garden planted by First Lady Michelle Obama, and the USDA’s People Garden, sited on the National Mall.

I’ve been invited to visit both of those gardens this week, and will be blogging daily from Washington, DC.  (I’ve even brought plastic bags, hoping to snag some compost from the First Pile and also some of the compost at the USDA’s People’s Garden, which came from Rodale Farm in Pennsylvania, which has been so center in the modern sustainable farming and organic movement).

Whatever the problems facing residents of Ventura, Portland, Peoria, Lansing, or even Washington, DC, gardening certainly provides part of the solution.

More tomorrow.  On Tuesday, I’ll be attending the National Food Policy Council Conference and also visiting the Congressional Hunger Center.  There, I’ll have a chance to learn more about hunger and food policy in America from leading advocates, including one of my personal heroes, Ed Cooney, whom I met on a previous trip to Washington.  Ed is an expert on food stamp and nutrition policy, and these are policies that have more impact on our children and communities than you can imagine.  (BTW, Congress is currently discussing the Childhood Nutrition and WIC Reauthorization Act of 2004.  This act encompasses all of the federal child nutrition programs, including the School Breakfast and the National School Lunch Programs, the Summer Food Service Program, the Child and Adult Care Food Program and the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children.  This is American food and public policy, writ at its largest).

We’ll undoubtedly be talking some about how community gardening and urban agriculture efforts can help address food security issues, childhood nutrition and poverty.

See you tomorrow.

 

Ventura County UCCE Farm Advisor, Ben Faber shares his knowledge of avocados. Today’s topic:

There are over 900 named varieties of avocado…how do you pick one?  Well, first, the selection at retail nurseries is somewhat limited, compared to what is offered by nurseries that supply commercial avocado growers.  But you do have options.  In general, avocado trees are big and need room.  ‘Hass’ has an umbrella-shaped canopy, but ‘Reed’ is more columnar and needs less room.  ‘Holiday’ is a much smaller tree than ‘Hass’ and “Littlecado’ is a somewhat smaller tree.  You can also choose on the basis of when you want to pick your fruit.  For example, ‘Fuerte’ is a winter fruit and ‘Reed’ is a summer fruit.  That means they taste best in those periods, but they will hold on the tree for a much longer period of time.  You can also choose on the basis of taste.  Of course, this is very subjective, but ‘Zutano’, ‘Bacon’ and ‘Stewart’ have a lower oil content than ‘Hass’, ‘Pinkerton’ and ‘Reed’.  Many consider ‘Nabal’ the best tasting fruit.  It’s a summer variety and hard to find in retail nurseries, but sometimes you can order them for delivery later.

You can read more about varieties at this website: http://ucavo.ucr.edu/AvocadoVarieties/VarietyFrame.html#Anchor-47857.  But remember, most of these are not available at retail nurseries.