Safe, healthy and happy Thanksgiving
U-pick and U-grow blueberry bargains
The Riverside Press-Enterprise may have the last word on blueberries for the 2009 season. Reporter Sean Nealon wrote two stories for last Saturday's paper about the Inland Empire's fledging blueberry industry.
One story reported on a Temecula blueberry farm where most of the fruit is harvested by the consumers themselves. The other story suggested that blueberries can make nice landscape plants. Both stories proffer the antioxidant-rich fruit with less strain on the pocketbook.
In the U-pick article, the reporter related information from UC Cooperative Extension's resident blueberry expert, farm advisor Manuel Jimenez of the UC Small Farm Program. He said California's blueberry acreage has increased from less than 20 to 5,000 to 6,000 in the past 12 years, most in the San Joaquin Valley. Blueberry production is labor intensive. A U-pick system cuts farm labor costs and the savings are passed on to consumers. In the store, blueberries are about $10 for 18 ounces. For Temecula U-pickers, the price is $5 per pint.
For the second story, Nealon spoke to Don Merhaut, an assistant UC Cooperative Extension specialist for ornamental and floriculture crops at UC Riverside. Merhaut started researching blueberries while a doctoral student at the University of Florida. After arriving at UCR in 2000, he began thinking more about blueberries' ornamental qualities -- their leaf texture, canopy, pink flowers, and, of course, delicious and healthful fruit, according to Nealon's article.
Merhaut recently completed a five-year study of 13 blueberry varieties in agricultural fields. He found 10 blueberry varieties that would make excellent landscape plants and plans to post a paper with his findings on the Internet.
Blueberries.
It's a sad day for UC
In the last month or so, I interviewed four retiring UC academics about their education, their beginnings with UC, their accomplishments (there were many) and their retirement plans. In all, the quartet represent 126 years of service to the California agricultural industry. All of them retire today. You can read all about the retirees by going to the news releases, linked to their names. Here, I'll share the fun part: their retirement plans.
Fred Swanson, director, UC Kearney Research and Extension Center
Swanson and his wife Cheryl will stay in their new Kingsburg home during retirement, but they have many plans for travel and recreation. The Swansons will spend more time at their cabin at Huntington Lake, play more golf at the Kings River Golf and Country Club and maintain a busy schedule of fishing and hunting trips. Swanson already has plans for two more fishing trips this year in Alaska, pheasant hunting in South Dakota, duck hunting in Tulelake, dove hunting in Kingsburg and a first-time elk hunting trip in Colorado. “Life is really good!” Swanson said.
Mick Canevari, director, UC Cooperative Extension in San Joaquin County
Canevari said he and his wife will continue to operate her specialty clothing store in Stockton and he will manage the family farm. An avid outdoorsman, Canevari already has plans for a two-week hunting trip in Canada this summer, and the local fishing and hunting he has enjoyed all his life will continue, but with greater frequency. “The one thing that will change is that now I won’t have to come home on Sundays,” Canevari said.
(The Stockton Record ran a story on Canevari over the weekend titled "Outstanding in his field.")
Don Lancaster, director, UC Cooperative Extension in Modoc County
Lancaster said retirement will provide more time for hunting and fishing, pastimes he has enjoyed going back to his days in Beegum, Calif., when venison and trout were frequently on the family dinner table. Today, Lancaster is already fishing at a favorite resort in British Columbia, Canada.
Mario Moratorio, farm advisor, UC Cooperative Extension in Yolo and Solano counties
Moratorio has plans to visit his undergraduate alma mater in Uruguay in July to present a seminar on the UC agricultural extension system. “The dean of the college is a close friend of mine,” Moratorio said. “He has been trying to develop an extension system like ours in Uruguay and would like to have another voice carrying his message.” Moratorio’s home base will remain the Solano County community of Cordelia Village, where he also plans to support local farmers during his retirement by connecting them with low-income residents in order to enhance their access to fresh fruits and vegetables.
The power in the picture
UCCE's media services manager Mike Poe recently shared a video success story with the Communications Services team. Sacramento UCCE was struggling to maintain county funding. At budget hearings, the 4-H advisor in Sacramento County, Marianne Bird, handed out copies of a five-minute video that Poe had helped put together about the 4-H Water Wizards project.
Bird e-mailed Mike last week: "Our acting county director just came in to tell me that the Department of Water Resources has committed $20,000 to Sacramento UCCE as a result of seeing the Water Wizards DVD."
This experience definitely shows how a visual communications piece can pay dividends. Here is the video:
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More on global warming
Escaped nitrogen from agricultural production has "huge potential to contribute to climate change," according to the director of the Agricultural Sustainability Institute at UC Davis, Tom Tomich. He was quoted in "The Smog Blog," written by Mark Grossi of the Fresno Bee, in a post about $2.8 million in grant funding ASI received to research agricultural nitrogen. The story appeared in his blog last week and on the front page of the newspaper's Local News section yesterday.
According to an ASI news release announcing the new funding, many people, including politicians. are unaware that escaped nitrogen from agricultural production affects climate change and air, water and soil quality.
Earth's atmosphere is 78 percent nitrogen by volume, according to the Wikipedia entry on the chemical element. And in fact, "Mike D." commented on Grossi's blog posting, "I'm a bit confused as to how nitrogen could be a greenhouse gas when it already exists in abundance in the atmosphere."
This confusion perhaps underscores the need for more research and extension efforts on the topic. According to the ASI news release, data on agricultural nitrogen pollution are limited, and some nitrogen pollution forms are difficult to monitor. Measurements can be labor-intensive and expensive and are influenced by variables such as weather conditions, irrigation timing and method, and crop-specific fertilization practices.
I trust that, as the ASI's research is conducted and results are publicized, much more information about the role of agricultural nitrogen in global warming will become widely available.
Joshua Trees could vanish in Joshua Tree National Park
Under any of six models of climate change, in 100 years there will be no new trees in Joshua Tree National Park and a significant number of existing trees will be dead, according to a recent Riverside Press-Enterprise story. The climate models, developed by Ken Cole, a biologist and geologist with the U.S. Geological Survey in Flagstaff, Ariz., and plant ecologist Kirsten Ironside of Northern Arizona University, suggest a temperature increase of seven degrees.
Joshua Trees were prolific and widespread 11,000 years ago, Cole told newspaper reporter Janet Zimmerman. Their seeds were carried long distances from Mexico to Nevada in the dung of the Shasta ground sloth. Now, seeds are transported only short distances by rodents.
Climate change is expected to combine with other human impacts to threaten Joshua Trees. Factors mentioned in the Press-Enterprise article include:
- Non-native grass species, such as red brome and cheatgrass, are transported along roads by passing cars.
- The non-native grasses are fertilized by nitrate and ammonium deposited in the soil by car emissions. Edith Allen, a UC Riverside professor of plant ecology, has found that the levels of those chemicals in the park are 15 to 30 times higher than those in an undisturbed ecosystem.
- Dirt patches that separated native plant species are being replaced with a continuous carpet of non-native grass.
- Wildfire is increasing in frequency and intensity as the continuous bed of tinder dry grass carries fire long distances from plant to plant.
A possible bright side: Joshua Trees are taking root in areas to the north, such as Tonapah, Nev., where none existed a century ago because it was too cold.
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