Posts Tagged: January 2024

Names in the News

Schweikert joins UC ANR as controller 

Lana Schweikert joined UC ANR as controller on Jan. 15. She will join other senior leaders and managers to help formulate and implement UC ANR's strategic plans and objectives, especially in matters related to financial controls, financial systems and reporting policies.

Schweikert will have lead responsibility for organization-wide business services, compliance, and internal controls. This includes primary responsibility for regental policy compliance, enterprise risk management and internal controls initiatives. She also will be responsible for coordination of risk assessment and management with leaders across UC ANR.

As controller, she will report to the associate vice president of business operation, with a dotted-line reporting relationship to the UC systemwide controller in matters relating to accounting and financial reporting policies.

She brings experience as a controller in the private sector and, most recently, as director of general accounting at UC Irvine.

Schweikert holds a bachelor's degree in accounting from the University of Portland and an MBA from the UCLA Anderson School of Management. She is a certified public accountant.

Schweikert is based at UCOP in Oakland and can be reached at lana.schweikert@ucop.edu and lschweikert@ucanr.edu. 

Agyeman joins UCCE as economics advisor for Butte, Glenn and Tehama counties 

Domena Agyeman joined UCCE Jan. 3 as an agriculture and natural resources economics advisor for Butte, Glenn and Tehama counties.

Prior to joining UC ANR, he was a postdoctoral associate at the Virginia Seafood Agricultural Research and Extension Center at Virginia Tech University.

As a UCCE advisor, Agyeman will provide insights that ensure economic profitability of all agriculture activities, including orchards, rice, forestry and other natural resources-based businesses in those counties. He will also promote broadband access and contribute to regional economic development.  

“I am excited to leverage my expertise to highlight the economic contributions and impacts of the agriculture and natural resources industries in Butte, Glenn and Tehama counties,” Agyeman said, “and to provide producers and other stakeholders in the region with research-based information that will help them navigate their business challenges and opportunities.”

His research interests encompass natural resources and environmental policy impact assessments, economic contributions and impacts analyses, producer decision-making assessments, and consumer preferences assessments. 

“To get started, I will be doing a needs assessment, focus group meetings and surveys of target groups,” he said.

Agyeman earned a Ph.D. in agricultural economics from the University of Kentucky, a master's degree in agricultural economics from Mississippi State University and bachelor's degree in agricultural science from University of Cape Coast in Ghana.

Agyeman is based at the UCCE office in Oroville and can be reached at dagyeman@ucanr.edu.

Marsh named UCCE rice advisor for Colusa and Yolo counties 

Sarah Marsh joined UCCE on Jan. 3 as a rice farming systems advisor serving Colusa and Yolo counties.

Prior to joining UCCE, she worked in rice breeding research and integrative pest management with several row crops in the Upper Gulf Coast region.

She earned a master's degree in horticulture and agronomy at UC Davis, where she worked with Kassim Al-Khatib, professor of plant sciences, studying weeds and herbicide resistance in rice agroecosystems. She holds a bachelor's degree in plant and environmental soil science from Texas A&M University. 

“I grew up on a diversified row-crop and orchard farm in Arbuckle and am grateful for the opportunity to serve the community in which I was raised,” Marsh said. “I hope to spend the first few months getting to know the growers and community of this region and learning what the unique needs of our area are.”

Marsh is based at the UCCE office in Colusa and can be reached at smarsh@ucanr.edu and (530) 415-7052. 

Woelfle-Hazard joins UCCE Humboldt-Del Norte as fire advisor 

Cleo Aster Woelfle-Hazard joined UCCE on Jan. 3 as a fire advisor for Humboldt and Del Norte counties. He will support residents, landowners, planners, land managers, tribes and Native fire practitioners in making North Coast communities more resilient in the face of intensifying wildfires.

His research and extension programs focus on climate resilience, cultural burning, fire-water interactions and training a diverse fire workforce.

Woelfle-Hazard collaborates on research with Native nations, agencies, citizen scientists and local community members. In collaboration with the Karuk Department of Natural Resources, he is exploring future fire scenarios in the Klamath Basin and how streamflow would change. They are also exploring how fire and flooding can be renewed to revitalize habitat for ecocultural species such as willow, grape, salmon, elk and eel.

His past projects have included community-directed river research with frontline communities in Seattle, the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta and Sonoma County. Using his expertise in home water and wastewater systems, he evaluated health and economic aspects of water delivery in Oakland and Hubli-Dharwad, India.

As a co-investigator on the Humanities Education for Anti-Racism Literacy project, Woelfle-Hazard collaborated on creating pathways to higher education for Native youth, and for training students to engage in respectful collaborations with Native partners.

He earned a master's degree and Ph.D. in energy and resources at UC Berkeley, where he convened scientists and Sonoma County residents to experiment with capturing winter rain to increase summer streamflow to benefit juvenile salmon, and exploring the possibilities of working with beavers to create cool refuges for coho. He also holds a bachelor's degree in interdisciplinary geosciences from the University of Montana.

As a UC President's Postdoctoral Fellow in Feminist Studies at UC Santa Cruz, Woelfle-Hazard drew field experience together with queer, transgender and Indigenous theory. His book “Underflows: Queer Trans Ecologies and River Justice” argues that rivers' future vitality requires centering the values of justice, sovereignty and dynamism.

“As a White settler who identifies as queer and transgender, I have experienced privileges and discrimination in natural resources work,” Woelfle-Hazard said. “I am deeply committed to the never-ending work of uprooting racism and settler colonialism in the university and society.”

“I am excited to continue this work at UC ANR,” he said. “In the future, I also hope to develop a QTREX program to train and support queer and trans fire practitioners, modeled on the WTREX (Women-in-Fire Prescribed Fire Training Exchange) and Indigenous Women's TREX programs.”

Woelfle-Hazard is based in Eureka and can be reached at cwhaz@ucanr.edu.

Wauters joins UC SAREP to advance climate adaptation 

Vivian Wauters joined UC SAREP as a project scientist on Jan. 1.

In this role, Wauters is working with Sonja Brodt on a project to support co-learning and institutional capacity-building within a multi-organizational network to help accelerate adoption of climate-adaptive and climate-mitigating practices among California farmers.

Activities within this project include strengthening the California Farm Demonstration Network through institutional capacity-building and applied, participatory on-farm research. She will be facilitating a soil health assessment that will support farmer decision-making and establish a baseline for continued investigation of California-specific soil health and resilience indicators. 

Wauters is interested in how we can foster agroecological transitions and transformations, and how the collaboration of multiple forms of knowledge and expertise can build capacity for stewarding multifunctional agricultural systems. 

Prior to joining UC SAREP, she was a postdoctoral researcher at UC Davis. Wauters, who grew up in the Sierra Nevada foothills, also has been a vegetable farm worker in Minnesota and California.

She holds a Ph.D. in applied plant sciences–agronomy/agroecology from University of Minnesota-Twin Cities and a master's degree in linguistics from UC Berkeley.

Wauters is based in Davis at the UC ANR building and can be reached at vwauters@ucanr.edu and (530) 240-3527.

Leauthaud joins UCCE as agroecology specialist at UCSC 

Crystele Leauthaud joined UC ANR on Dec. 1 as a UCCE agroecology specialist based at UC Santa Cruz working on agroecology, climate change and water management. Her research and outreach activities address the socio-environmental crisis related to climate change and water resources. She works with local, regional, state and national partners and clientele on grower-focused, applied research and outreach. 

“I am interested in how to take into account irrigation and water management needs as we design the agroecological transition of agricultural systems in a climate-changing context,” Leauthaud said, “as well as working with farmers to quantify water usage and building new ways of managing irrigation.”

Her areas of expertise are holistic and systemic approaches to characterize farming systems, agroecological practices such as compost teas and agroforestry, Mediterranean agriculture, participatory research, irrigation monitoring and scheduling with a focus on open-source, low-cost, do-it-yourself sensors. 

Leauthaud brings over a decade of experience in research and extension activities, including studying wetland systems in semi-arid Africa (Tana River Delta, Kenya), hydrological modeling of natural and crop systems in the Sahel region in West-Africa, and agronomy applied to water management in North Africa. From 2016 to 2023, she researched agronomy of hydrosystems at the CIRAD institute in France. Read more at https://sites.google.com/site/leauthaud/research-projects?authuser=0. 

She earned a Ph.D. in water and environmental sciences from the University of Montpellier, France; a master's degree in ecology from the Museum National d'Histoire Naturelle, France; and an engineering degree in agronomy from AgroParisTech, France.

“I am really excited to be part of a larger community working on sustainable agriculture and water management in California,” Leauthaud said. “I look forward to learning from and contributing to building and sharing knowledge and experiences with you all!”

Leauthaud is based in the UCSC Center for Agroecology and the Department of Environmental Studies and can be reached at (831) 499-5016 and cleautha@ucsc.edu and on Facebook and LinkedIn. 

UCCE nutrition specialist Smilowitz focuses on early life stages 

Jennifer T. Smilowitz joined UC ANR on Nov. 1, 2023, as a UC Cooperative Extension specialist in nutrition and health equity in the Department of Nutrition at UC Davis. Smilowitz's research and outreach are focused on identifying and addressing gaps in health equity, health skills and education; access to healthful foods; and other factors that contribute to health and community resilience and chronic disease risk reduction.

Specifically, Smilowitz emphasizes the continuum from pregnancy through a child's 2nd birthday or first 1,000 days – a critical period in life when diet largely influences long-lasting health in both women and their children. 

“I'm motivated to empower families with early-life diet and lifestyle interventions and education and to improve health policies that lead to optimal health trajectories of Californians,” she said.

Smilowitz's new multidisciplinary community-health program, Outreach & Research Implementing Advancements in Nutrition Equity (ORIANE, a French/Latin word meaning “sunrise”), aims to implement and test evidence-based nutrition interventions with a focus in the first 1,000 days. In addition to creating educational programs on nutrition and health using multimedia to empower families (especially within racially diverse, low-income communities), ORIANE also seeks to deliver professional training on nutrition-related topics to health care providers, community professionals, educators and advocates. 

Smilowitz attained her bachelor's degree in molecular, cell and developmental biology at UCLA and holds a doctoral degree in nutritional biology with an emphasis in endocrinology from UC Davis. She completed her postdoctoral research fellowship in the Department of Food Science & Technology at UC Davis in 2013. 

Since becoming a certified lactation education counselor in 2015, Smilowitz has conducted lactation education for women during pregnancy and in the postpartum period. She conducts outreach on the benefits of breastfeeding through lectures and webinars for health-care practitioners across Northern California hospitals and clinics and for Women, Infants and Children (WIC) Program staff.

Smilowitz can be reached at jensm@ucdavis.edu; she is on X (Twitter) @UCDavis_MOM and LinkedIn.

Costa named UCCE rural community disaster preparedness specialist 

Lais Costa joined the UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine on Aug. 1, 2023, in the Department of Population, Health & Reproduction as an assistant professor of Cooperative Extension for rural community disaster preparedness.

Costa's research is focused on animal health and welfare, safety and disaster preparedness. 

Costa has held a variety of clinical academic positions, predominately as an equine internist, research specialist or associate veterinarian at Tufts University, Mississippi State University and UC Davis. In 2018, she was hired as the lead veterinarian for the UC Davis Veterinary Emergency Response Team and in 2021 she also assumed responsibilities as the Director of the International Animal Welfare Training Institute.

Costa received her master's in veterinary medicine from São Paulo State University, Brazil and her master's degree at the University of Kentucky, Lexington. She completed her doctor of veterinary medicine equivalence from the American Veterinary Medical Association Educational Commission for Foreign Veterinary Graduates. Costa received her Ph.D. from Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge. She also attained dual Diplomate status with the American College of Veterinary Internal Medicine (Large Animal, 1999) and the American Board of Veterinary Practitioners (Equine Practice certification 2006, recertification 2016).  Costa is certified as a veterinary acupuncturist with the International Veterinary Acupuncture Society.

She can be reached at lrcosta@ucdavis.edu.

 

Celebration Corner

Goodhue named Agricultural and Applied Economics Association fellow 

UC Davis agricultural economist Rachael Goodhue was named a 2024 fellow of the Agricultural and Applied Economics Association for her significant contributions, leadership and scholarship.

Her research focuses on agriculture and includes contracts, economics of pesticides and industrial organization.

“Goodhue has compiled an enviable record of accomplishment, combining excellence in teaching, research, and outreach with exemplary leadership in public and university service, very much in the land-grant tradition,” nominators wrote in a letter. “Both by being an outstanding role model and through her funding, advising, and mentoring of graduate students and post-docs, Professor Goodhue has done much to advance the status of women in the profession.”

Read more at https://caes.ucdavis.edu/news/rachael-goodhue-named-fellow-prestigious-agricultural-economics-association.

EcoFarm honors Jimenezes for social justice

Manuel Jimenez, UCCE small farms advisor emeritus, and his wife Olga received the EcoFarm Justie award on Jan. 19. The award honors people who advocate for social justice as a critical aspect of ecologically sustainable agriculture and food systems. 

The couple grew up in migrant farmworker families in the little town of Woodlake, east of Visalia. They fell in love, married young and started a family. Manuel earned a bachelor's degree in plant science from Fresno State University while supporting his family picking fruit. 

In 1980, he joined UC Cooperative Extension as the small farms advisor for Tulare County. Over his 33-year UC career, Jimenez conducted pest management research, developed blueberry cultivars suited for growing by family farms in the San Joaquin Valley and shared farming information with listeners of Fresno-based KGST "La Mexicana."

While he was working for UC ANR, Olga and Manuel remained dedicated to their Woodlake farmworker community, developing a youth leadership program around beautification, funded by a large sweetcorn patch. Four decades strong, with hundreds of young hands and community support, their 14-acre Woodlake Botanical Garden remains the pride of Woodlake and Tulare County. The garden showcases nearly every crop grown in the valley and the farmers and farmworkers who developed them.

International Plant Propagator's Society meets in Temecula

The International Plant Propagator's Society annual conference was held in Temecula Jan. 23-26. The UC Nursery and Floriculture Alliance co-hosted. The California Citrus Nursery Society joined the conference for special sessions and activities on Jan. 25 and 26.

Among the attendees were Emma Volk, UCCE production horticulture advisor for Ventura County; Grant Johnson, UCCE urban agriculture technology advisor for Los Angeles and Orange counties; Kosana Suvocarev, UCCE biometeorology specialist at UC Davis; Johanna del Castillo Munera, UCCE Plant Pathology specialist at UC Davis; Loren Oki, emeritus UCCE environmental horticulture specialist at UC Davis; Bruno Pitton, UCCE environmental horticulture advisor for Placer County; Gerry Spinelli, UCCE production horticulture advisor for San Diego County; and Don Merhaut, UCCE nursery and floriculture crops specialist at UC Riverside.

Webinar: Leverage social media for Extension Feb. 8

Learn how to leverage the power of social media to reach and engage diverse communities effectively. “Telling Our Story: Enhancing our Extension Story Through Social Media Strategy Targeting Diverse Audiences” is a free webinar hosted by Extension Foundation for all Cooperative Extension employees Feb. 8 at 11 a.m.

The dynamic webinar will focus on using social media strategy to enhance the Extension narrative for diverse audiences. In this session, Doralicia Garay, UC Agriculture and Natural Resources social media strategist, and her team will explore innovative approaches to crafting and sharing stories on social media that resonate with a variety of communities. 

The expert speakers will share insights, tips and real-world examples to inspire participants in refining their Extension story. Whether you're aiming to connect with different cultures, communities or demographics, this webinar provides a roadmap for creating inclusive and impactful content.

Register at https://pages.extension.org/extensions-skills-2024.

Upcoming Extension Foundation webinars:

March 14 - Telling Our Story: Visualizations in Effective Storytelling
Speaker: Deanna Schneider
Topic: Leveraging visualizations to enhance the impact of your Extension story

April 11 - Telling Our Story: Communicating with Local Officials
Speaker: Anne Megaro, UC ANR government and community relations director
Topic: Strategies for effectively communicating your Extension story to Local Officials

Schell, Lambert explore justice-centered conservation in cities in new book

A new book edited by UC Berkeley Rausser College researchers centers equity and justice while delving into the complex elements that support or constrain biodiversity in cities.

For centuries, cities and urban environments have reshaped biodiversity across the globe. Buildings, roads and other pieces of urban infrastructure have replaced natural habitats and sources of food, water and shelter.

Research continues to show that development has created environmental hazards like factories, freeways, or power plants that are often disproportionately placed in low-income areas or communities of color, and that remaining natural resources in urban areas, like trees and parks, are concentrated in wealthier neighborhoods. With renewed attention placed on the role of conservation, researchers are exploring new ways to make cities and their inhabitants active partners in preserving biodiversity and mitigating climate change. 

A new book edited by Rausser College researchers delves into the complex elements that support or constrain biodiversity in cities — including human-wildlife interactions, climate fluctuations, landscape diversity, and environmental racism. Edited by Environmental Science, Policy and Management professor Christopher Schell and former postdoctoral researcher Max Lambert, Urban Biodiversity and Equity: Justice-Centered Conservation in Cities offers scientists, decision-makers and practitioners a new model to develop solutions for managing urban biodiversity while centering social justice, environmental justice, and civil rights.

Rausser College spoke to Schell and Lambert about their book ahead of its Dec. 19 release in the United States.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. 

What inspired you to create this book? 

Max Lambert: We were invited to put together a book on urban ecology and biodiversity. We knew there were other books out there, but we knew we wanted to write a book through a different lens: specifically, we're building off a Science paper led by Chris that centers equity and justice as the primary axis for conservation work. That was our guiding principle for taking this from journal publications to something that people can hold. 

Christopher Schell: This is something that Max and I have been discussing since 2018. After our Science paper came out in 2020, Max contacted me to discuss what it would look like to expand that paper as a larger volume. We connected with folks who reached out about the paper and others whose work spans the urban-ecological spectrum to coalesce their contributions into a book that integrates equity throughout.

We didn't want to fall into the trap of thinking that academic institutions somehow have a hold on all this knowledge. Max led our efforts in trying to convey how applied this field is and emphasize the field's interconnectedness. We were excited to get folks who could span what it looks like to think of these theoretical applications in biodiversity science in relation to a city. 

Lambert: And because urban ecology has blossomed so much as a field during the past 20 years, we spent a lot of time determining what topics we knew we wanted to emphasize in this book and what we would put on the back burner. We also wanted to bring in people from different backgrounds, walks of life, career stages, or parts of the world who can tie the threads of equity and justice together with this science.

How would you say the field of urban ecology has evolved over time?

Lambert: There have been pockets of people studying urban ecology from the 60s onwards, but their research never became part of the dominant mantra. By the 90s, we had the National Science Foundation (NSF) support two Long Term Ecological Research stations in Baltimore and Phoenix, which helped blossom and lead this area of research. But in my experience, even when I started my doctoral work a decade ago, urban conservation wasn't really a thing—there were still tons of folks saying we needed to protect nature from the city.

Schell: For us, the question is, when do we recognize that urban ecology has entered the public consciousness to the point that folks outside the academic sphere are thinking about it? We're certainly getting there in the Bay Area, as well as in a handful of cities across the country and globe. Folks in these communities are thinking more and more about their relationships with wildlife, biodiversity and nature inside these urban spaces. But sometimes folks look at us like we're crazy when we talk about the critically endangered species that are encased in a metropolitan area, or when we tell them about the large carnivores that roam their backyard. Some people have not yet fully understood that cities are hubs of nature that we created on top of existing biodiversity hotspots.

How does this approach differ from traditional models of conservation research?

Schell: We're leveraging a past research framework called the ecology in, of, and for cities to propose something called conservation in, of, for and with cities. We're still thinking about the many ways in which we maintain biodiversity across different axes; incorporate biological, social, and built elements of cities to manage ecosystem processes; and implement justice-centered approaches as we build sustainable practices. But all that felt unidirectional, where scientists or practitioners are doing things for the people who live in the city. 

Conservation in, of, for and with cities is the new atom. It's explicitly calling out co-production, how we have equitable resource distribution, and how we fold in the other paradigms. We're emphasizing that if we don't have conservation with cities, none of the other components are going to work. In our minds, this is the linchpin to all those other pieces. We're not the only knowledge holders in this conversation, and by no means do you need to be of a certain age, race, class or ethnicity to participate in it. We're all in this together and have something to add to the conversation. 

Lambert: You can't do conservation work without cities. You can't grey out urban areas and focus conservation work elsewhere. It's all part of the mix. Conservation with cities means engaging in conservation work at any scale — from state to national to international. You can't set goals just for remote places; you have to bring them into urban areas as well. All this goes back to our fundamental principle of centering equity and justice in all conservation. It is heavily pronounced in urban areas, but it's central to conservation work anywhere in the world. 

Ecology and evolutionary biology are fundamental fields of biology, but they don't exist in a vacuum. Our Science paper showed that we need to be mindful of how society, culture, and politics influence life on Earth. We're doing the same thing here with conservation.

Can you think of any people, cities or organizations that are taking the principles you describe in your book and using them to improve urban biodiversity?

Schell: Max and I often riff off of Singapore being the mecca of urban ecology because of how that city is designed and embedded inside of nature, but we're starting to make improvements on the West Coast, too. One of the local organizations that has been pushing urban ecology forward is the California Academy of Sciences. Their Reimagining SF initiative brings together researchers and practitioners from across the Bay Area to think about San Francisco not as an urban environment with nature sprinkled in, but as a city inside of nature — one built in collaboration with ecosystem processes. It's a clear departure from the ways in which cities have thought about urban ecosystems in the past, which was strictly concerned about providing municipal services to its people. 

Lambert: I went to Canberra, the capital of Australia, in 2016. It's a highly built place, but they've embedded trails and green spaces throughout the city; there are kangaroos, wallabies, and all kinds of parrots everywhere. It's very clearly designed, as Chris said, in collaboration with nature. The Presidio of San Francisco has also been an interesting nexus of urban conservation work. The Presidio Trust, which manages the park with the National Park Service, has done tremendous work with communities nearby. They've replaced non-native plants that have overgrown the area, cleaned up a bunch of pollution in the pond, and reintroduced endangered plants within the Presidio.

I also work closely with the City of Tacoma in Washington. Maintenance workers — the folks who take care of the concrete, asphalt, and sewers—are not the type of people you traditionally think of as doing conservation work, but in Tacoma, they are so impassioned to make sure biodiversity can thrive, and people can experience it everywhere they live. 

Have you found engaging with policymakers or community members difficult while conducting your research?

Schell: The flagship species that my lab studies is coyotes, a species that garners a lot of interest in the Bay Area. In SF, a good chunk of folks have a real love-hate relationship with them. They think that their cats have some agency to stay outdoors indefinitely or that their dog can stay off-leash in an on-leash area, which often results in conflicts with coyotes. And as we start doing more of this work, it seems as if everybody has a story about a coyote — or a bobcat, raccoon or a fox — doing something they adore or disdain.

These fine-scale human-animal interactions bring everybody to the table. They want to hear more about how these are connected to the larger universe of stories around urban biodiversity, environmental justice, equity and resilience because it impacts them at this individual level. 

Lambert: Maps will become essential to these conversations and are what entice people to join. For so long, the image of conservation was just David Attenborough in the middle of the world somewhere, in a place we can't necessarily relate to. But now, I can set up a map on iNaturalist that everyone can contribute to and access for free. Whether it's a map of all the trees in their city or observations of turtles, frogs or hawks, people will be able to put themselves in the context of their city. They can actually paint that picture of the landscape — they can see the asphalt, they can see trees — and place their community in the broader grand scheme of the universe.

Schell: One of our flagship projects deploys camera traps across urban to wildland spaces. We put up placards that give out our contact information if people are interested in the project; we've had over a dozen people in the last year reach out to us who are interested in learning more about the camera traps, including city officials. A figure from our Science paper created by co-author Dr. Simone de Roches was recently republished in the New York Times, and after reading that, some folks from the City of Piedmont's Recreation Department reached out. This small example highlights how far-reaching and continually helpful the work has been in creating collaborations across the Bay. 

Lambert: I think that's the power of urban areas for conservation and getting people engaged. They know where they fit into much more easily than if you were to ask, “How do we protect tigers inMumbai?” It matters in the grand scheme — people generally care about tigers — but they have no context for it. People have context for their backyard coyote: almost everyone has a story about something in their urban area; they're just looking for someone to tell it to.

Do you think it's possible to create policies that improve urban biodiversity without first addressing the inequities like redlining?

Lambert: There are two panels to the figure that was just republished in the New York Times. The panel on the right shows conservation embedded in a cycle of social justice, environmental justice, and civil rights: that's the foundation for which successful conservation efforts will ever be possible. You can try to chip away at it in small ways, but you will always fight an uphill battle unless you center equity and justice because the things that cause injustice and inequities also degrade the natural world. These things are inherently intertwined.

Schell: If we can't figure ourselves out and figure out how we got to this point while centering equity and justice —which is something we said in the Science paper and at the beginning and end of this book, and also urged all of our co-authors to talk about it — then we will never get to our goals. This book was something that we wanted to get out into the world because this is not something we're alone in; there are other folks who are also interested in this, who also feel the same way, and who have been beating this drum in their communities. It's been a good journey to be able to put this into words and have folks understand how important it is to be able to restore ourselves as a means of then going on to continue to restore the natural world.

Food waste, nutrition in prison focus of webinars Feb. 22, 29

The UC ANR Sustainable Food Systems Strategic Initiative Panel will be hosting two 90-minute public webinars in February about food waste (Feb. 22) and nutrition in correctional systems (Feb. 29). UC ANR staff and academics, collaborators and partners and the public are invited to participate in the free webinars.

The UC ANR Sustainable Food Systems Emerging Issues Webinar Serieswill first cover food waste on Feb. 22.

“The Sustainable Food Systems strategic initiative panel aimed to highlight innovative solutions to emerging issues within the food system from field-to-fork,” said Danielle Lee, UC Nutrition Policy Institute director of communications and research engagement. 

“Over one-third of all available food in the U.S. is uneaten through food loss or waste – totaling up to over $160 billion – which has negative impacts on food security and the climate,” she said. “Households could save over $370 per person each year by reducing or preventing food waste. Additionally, when uneaten food ends up in the landfill, it generates greenhouse gases, and landfills are now the third largest producers of methane in the U.S.”

“California's adoption of SB 1383 aims to solve these problems,” Lee said. “You'll meet experts who are implementing consumer education and organic waste recycling programs aligned with SB 1383.”  

The second webinar, on Feb. 29, will focus on nutritious foods for residents of correctional facilities.

“We also wanted to touch on novel, local food distribution systems that can be used to support nutrition security through improved access to affordable, healthy and nutritious foods for underserved communities,” Lee said.

“We chose incarcerated people as our case study population for two reasons – the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation is the single largest public purchaser of food in the state and studies have shown that 63% of incarcerated individuals rarely or never have fresh vegetables and 55% rarely or never have fresh fruit.”

California has two policies that can support institutional procurement of fresh produce – AB 822 and AB 778.

“The Harvest of the Month program is an innovative solution to implementing these policies while supporting improved nutrition security for incarcerated individuals,” Lee said. “Prison gardening programs can not only provide therapeutic benefits to residents, but also reduce recidivism rates and serve as workforce development opportunities to better prepare residents for returning to their communities post-incarceration.”

Part 1 - Harvesting Solutions: A Trio of Perspectives on Addressing Food Waste from Field to Fork

Thursday, Feb 22, at 10-11:30 a.m. PT

To minimize food waste, three experts explore factors influencing food loss and waste, delve into innovative recycling techniques, and explore statewide initiatives targeting household food waste. Experts in postharvest handling, food waste recycling and community education will share research findings and strategies.

Agenda:

• An overview of food waste in fruits and vegetables
  Deirdre Holcroft, Holcroft Postharvest Consulting
• Exploring means to extract embodied energy and lower greenhouse gas emissions in food waste recycling
  Michael Cohen, UC Cooperative Extension organic materials management and agri-food systems advisor for Santa Clara County
• The opportunities in statewide programs in reducing household food waste: Results from UC ANR household food practice needs assessment
  Yu Meng, UC Cooperative Extension youth, family and community advisor in Riverside, San Bernardino and Imperial counties

Part 2 - Farm to Corrections: Cultivating Justice through Nutrition and Gardening Initiatives

Thursday, Feb. 29, at 10-11:30 a.m. PT 

Experts share insights on groundbreaking initiatives for justice-involved individuals' access to California-grown produce and nutrition and gardening education. Innovative initiatives such as a “Harvest of the Month” program by the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation in collaboration with the Nutrition Policy Institute and Impact Justice aim to increase access to fresh, locally grown fresh fruits and vegetables and trauma-informed nutrition workshops. They also highlight the impact of UC Master Gardener projects on rehabilitation and workforce development.

Agenda:

• Produce during and after prison: Increasing justice-impacted individuals' access to California-grown produce and nutrition education
  Carolyn Chelius, UC ANR Nutrition Policy Institute; Heile Gantan, Impact Justice; Lance Eshelman, California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitations
• UC Master Gardeners Prison Gardens Projects
  Missy Gable, director of the UC Master Gardener Program

Learn more and register at https://ucanr.edu/sites/StrategicInitiatives/Sustainable_Food_Systems/Events.

 

Read more