Safe, healthy and happy Thanksgiving
Fresno Bee drought story highlights UC expertise
Fresno Bee reporter Robert Rodriguez opened a story in yesterday's paper about the impending drought with the thoughts of UC Davis pomologist Kenneth Shackel. According to Rodriguez' lead, Shackel is "feeling more like an emergency room doctor than an agricultural researcher."
"It's like triage," Shackel was quoted. "For some, this isn't about controlling diseases or yields, it's about survival."
Shackel was one of several UC experts whose imput was sought on the desperate efforts being planned by farmers to save water and keep their valuable permanent crops alive. Valley growers are already taking "drastic action to cope with the drought," the article said, such as bulldozing older trees, cutting off trees' canopies, and spraying chemicals that prevent fruit and nut development.
"I'm telling people that if you don't have enough water to set a crop, don't spend $150 a hive to pollinate your trees," the story quoted Brent Holtz, the Madera County UCCE farm advisor, Holtz is planning a meeting for March 31 where UC's resident deficit-irrigation expert, David Goldhamer, will speak. Goldhamer is currently working in Spain, so the reporter had Holtz explain the concept.
"What happens is that the trees will become stressed and not set much of a crop," Holtz was quoted. "But the trees stay alive."
Rodriguez spoke to Fresno County UCCE farm advisor Dan Munk about irrigating West Side crops with well water. Almond trees, unlike pistachio trees, do not tolerate high-salt, high-boron groundwater very well.
"And you could have some situations where the water is so bad that you may not want to irrigate your crop at all," Munk was quoted. "This is a tough situation."
Goats can be green weed whackers
Interest in using goats to clear unwanted vegetation on rangeland is growing in popularity, according to UC Cooperative Extension livestock farm advisor Roger Ingram. In a Sacramento Bee story published today, Ingram confirmed writer Ramon Coronado's central thesis: Goats can be a green answer to wildfire prevention.
Coronado reported that more than 60 people attended a recent forum where Ingram discussed the pros and cons of using goats instead of machinery, chemicals and weed whackers.
The use of goats for weed abatement has drawbacks, however. Here are some of the concerns:
- Left unchecked, the animals can overgraze, leading to erosion and flash flooding
- The weeds targeted by goats are the first to grow back and the first to dry up and die, which could create more wildfire fuel
- The goats will produce CO2 during their munching and the trucks that deliver and move them around will also contribute to pollution
Ingram countered, according to the story, "You have to look at the big picture."
Goats on rangeland.
Colgate professor holds UCCE up for example
Author Chris Henke used UC Cooperative Extension in Monterey County as an example of how agricultural science has helped the farm industry respond to problems, but that technology transfer can get stuck in a power struggle.
Henke explained the case study in The World's Fair: All Manner of Human Creativity on Display. From what I can tell, the blog is essentially an Oprah-style book club for high-brow, academic tomes and the posts typically are a transcribed Q&A session with an author. The book featured in the blog today is Cultivating Science, Harvesting Power: Science and Industrial Agriculture in California, authored by Henke, an assistant professor of sociology at Colgate University.
"The specific case that I describe [in the book] is an institution known as Cooperative Extension, which is a system of county-based agricultural experts employed by the University of California and most other states in the US," the author said in answer to one of blogger Benjamin Cohen's questions.
In his book, Henke said, he shows how the Cooperative Extension experts became enmeshed in the power structure of the farm industry, enabling its creation and helping it weather numerous crises throughout the twentieth century. However, Henke said it's commonly thought that experts in such situations are in the pocket of vested interests. He emphasized in his book, he said, ". . . the ambivalence on the part of both scientist and growers to work together on some of these problems."
I had to stop here and wonder, who is Henke calling "ambivalent"? This doesn't sound like the farm advisors and farmers that I know.
In answer to another question, the author describes a case study in his book. (I'll use bullet points to present Henke's main points.):
- The EPA designated US agriculture the largest non-point source of water pollution in the country
- Water running off farm fields or seeping into groundwater can carry pesticides and fertilizers
- This is especially true in the Salinas Valley, where chemical inputs are used in heavy doses
- Several areas in the county have drinking water with unsafe levels of nitrate, a key ingredient in fertilizer
- Many suspect that nitrates have made their way into the water supply from farm fields
- UCCE scientists addressed the problem.
- Experiments showed that reduced fertilizer use had no impact on crop yields
- Growers tended not to trust these results - and believed using less fertilizer was too risky
Henke said he developed the concept "ecology of power" to analyze how power structures are created that block the implementation of science.
"You can have all the knowledge in the world, but if you can't use it, it won't make you powerful. What I show is that the kind of power that growers or agricultural scientists can be said to have is literally grounded in the interaction of farming places and the ways that people farm there," Henke was quoted in the text.
Not light reading.
The cover of Hemke's book.
More women in agriculture
The Fresno Bee reported over the weekend that the number of female farmers in the United States grew by nearly nearly 30 percent and the number of Hispanic farmers grew by 10 percent over the past five years. The number of Native American, Asian and black farm operators also rose according to the article, written by reporter Robert Rodriguez. The figures are from the recently released 2007 Census of Agriculture.
In the central San Joaquin Valley, the number of female farmers grew by 22 percent in Fresno County, 16 percent in Madera County, 15 percent in Tulare County and 6 percent in Kings County, the story said. In Fresno County, the number of Hispanic farmers grew 17 percent and Asian farmers grew 29 percent.
For the article, Rodriguez spoke to UC Cooperative Extension small farm advisor Richard Molinar. Molinar told him the growth in the ethnic categories is understandable, but in some cases doesn't reflect change.
"They have always been there, they just weren't being counted," Molinar was quoted.
This time, he said, agriculture statisticians made a great effort to get ethnic farmers to fill out the census forms.
Another reason to love California
After the raucous California budget struggle and an impending drought, Californians might enjoy a tidbit from the Early County News in Blakeley, Georgia. The story notes that the world's expert on brown recluse spiders is a UC Riverside scientist and he is certain there are no populations of the frightening aracnid anywhere in California.
UC Riverside entomologist Rick Vetter has actually published a 4,000-word manifesto on the Web about brown recluse spiders titled "Myth of the Brown Recluse: Fact, Fear, and Loathing." At the end of the tirade, he emphatically states in red, all caps, THERE ARE NO BROWN RECLUSE SPIDERS LIVING IN CALIFORNIA.
A disclaimer notes that the article does not contain the opinions of the University of California, Riverside, rather "the opinions of a highly volatile arachnologist who is bloody tired of everybody claiming that every little mark on their body is the result of a brown recluse bite and who believe with a religious zeal that brown recluses are part of the California spider fauna despite the incredibly overwhelming evidence to the contrary."
Judging from the article in the Early County News, some of this same zeal can be found in Georgia, which also is not considered to be brown recluse habitat. It said University of Georgia spider expert Nancy Hinkle tracked verified brown recluse reports in Georgia from 2002 to 2008. (Hinkle was formerly a veterinary entomologist at UC Riverside.) Only 19 brown recluse spiders were identified in that time and there was only one confirmed brown recluse bite.
I'm still terrified.
Brown recluse spider.