Safe, healthy and happy Thanksgiving
Searching for green strawberries
Most consumers like their strawberries bright red and juicy through and through, but some seek fruit that is a little bit green, at least in the ecological sense. Fresno Bee food writer Joan Obra ran a front-page column in the paper's food section yesterday that makes it easier to find the local low-input strawberries.
To determine why strawberry stands are scarce in Fresno, Obra turned to UC Cooperative Extension small farm advisor Richard Molinar. He said Fresno County's strawberry acreage has dropped from about 500 to 100 acres in the past nine years. Only about 25 local strawberry farmers are left.
"The processors aren't paying a premium, and they're not buying as much from local farmers as they used to," Molinar was quoted in the story.
But if you can find them, eating Valley-grown strawberries will probably shave a few pounds off your carbon footprint. Molinar said Valley strawberry growers, because of the drier climate, use far less pesticides and fungicides than growers who produce the fruit on the coast. Coastal berries are sprayed at least half a dozen times. Fresno strawberries, on the other hand, "if they're even sprayed, they might only be sprayed once," Molinar was quoted in the story.
Photo by Kathy Keatley Garvey
Earth Day dawns with good news
At its Earth Day celebration today, the USDA will share expanded plans for a People's Garden at the department's Washington Mall headquarters that will encompass all of the facility's grounds, according to an article in the Washington Post. The plan includes a 1,300-square-foot organic vegetable garden, ornamental flower gardens and bioswales (mini-wetlands designed to reduce pollution and surface water runoff).
According to the Post story, written by Jane Black, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack got the idea to include the entire six-acre facility in his plans on one of his daily runs on the Mall. Originally, he planned a small vegetable garden in Washington and some type of garden at every USDA facility across the country. The positive public response to the idea and a March meeting with horticulture and garden groups convinced him to broaden the plan, he told the reporter.
One of the people at that March meeting was UC Cooperative Extension's own Rose Hayden-Smith, the director of the Ventura County office and an enthusiastic advocate for the resumption of a national Victory Garden movement. Victory Gardens were an important source of vegetables for Americans during World War II.
Black quoted Hayden-Smith in her article:
"I kept having to pinch myself in this meeting. We're not the kind of people who have been invited to Washington, D.C., before. We're the guerrilla gardeners, the pollinator people, the seed savers. It wasn't our usual cast of characters. People were grinning from ear to ear."
The USDA's Peoples Garden plan.
UC ANR nutrition professor still eats the other white meat
Elena Conis of the Los Angeles Times "Nutrition Lab" was puzzled when pork, billed for years as "the other white meat," was lumped in with beef for a study that linked their high consumption to heart disease and death.
According to Conis' story, the pork industry adopted the white meat slogan after breeding leaner pigs in the 1970s. Scientists, however, generally consider "white" meat to be poultry and "red" meat to come from mammals because saturated fat is generally higher in mammal meat than in fowl.
"If this sounds really confusing, that's because it is," Conis quoted UC Davis nutrition professor Judy Stern. "Heck, I'm confused."
Authors of the new study, which was published in the March Archives of Internal Medicine, haven't nailed down the reason why a diet high in red and processed meats (including pork) was linked to a higher death risk, particularly from heart disease and cancer. They speculated that the association was due to high levels of saturated fat in meat generally, presence of cancer-causing compounds formed in meats cooked at high temperatures, or the fact that people who eat more meat may eat fewer fruits and vegetables, the article said.
Stern told the reporter that she'll still eat pork, but not every day. "Will this study change the way I eat pork? No," she was quoted.
The story also appeared on Newsday.com.
Swine.
Pinching pennies when planting food at home
It was widely reported by the news media -- such as in this piece from the Washington Post -- that installing the 1,100-square-foot vegetable garden on the White House south lawn cost about $200, not including labor. For the President and First Lady, that's probably petty cash. But the cost might deter America's low-income families from gardening.
UC Cooperative Extension can help Californians cut the cost of home-grown food. The UCCE Master Gardener program offers free gardening advice in many California counties. Information is available on the Master Gardener Web site and many county programs have free demonstration gardens and call-in gardening advice phone lines. A new, expanded California Gardening Web site will be launched by the Master Gardener program soon.
An article that ran over the weekend in the San Diego Union Tribune gathered frugal gardening advice from a variety of sources, including the local UCCE office.
Here are a few of the more novel ideas from the article:
- Don't buy fertilizer. Compost instead.
- Don't buy chemicals. Use integrated pest management.
- Use "found art" as garden containers, such as old sinks, troughs or tubs, tires, boots or buckets – anything with drainage holes will work.
- Grow your own herbs. (Small quantities are expensive in the supermarket.)
The academic coordinator of the statewide UC Master Gardener program, Pam Geisel, recently shared some additional ideas with me for cutting the cost of gardening:
- Throw some 4-inch tomato plants within your existing landscape -- as long as it is in full sun and gets some water -- and you will have some tomatoes (total investment $2.50)
- Use recycled materials - wood for raised beds, old posts or pipe for trellises, newspaper as mulch, containers for seedlings, etc.
- Irrigate using a hand sprinkler instead of installing an expensive drip system (though it may cost you more in time, and water costs could be significantly higher if you forget to turn it off)
- Share tools at a community garden plot
- Grow from seed (though failure rate is pretty high)
A UC ANR programmer based at UC Davis and avid home gardener, Karl Krist, spent about $600 over two years to develop his vegetable garden, even though he used recycled wood to make planting beds, discarded barrels as containers, home-grown seedlings, free used coffee grounds from Starbucks and homemade compost. Because the garden is new, he doesn't have complete information yet on the impact on the family's food bill, but he says, they already are reaping the benefits.
"I do think of my garden as more than just a producer of food…it’s landscaping!" Krist said.
Basil is easy to grow, but expensive to buy.
Climate change reports don't panic Kings County farmers
Reports about climate change in the current issue of California Agriculture journal are taken with a brave face by Kings County farmers and officials, according to a story published in the Hanford Sentinel. Reporter Sean Nidever provided highlights in the newspaper of the research presented in the UC ANR's 50-page publication titled "'Unequivocal' How climate change will transform California."
Despite the fact that Nidever reported that the county's agricultural industry could face "tough times," Kings County farmers and agricultural officials "declined to panic," the story said.
"Really all that we can say is that farmers would have to adapt, like with any other issue," the article quoted Diana Peck, Kings County Farm Bureau executive director.
One result of climate change predicted in the journal is that more precipitation will fall in California as rain, overwhelming reservoirs and forcing water to be released at times when agriculture can't use it. At least two local growers said that makes a good case for building more reservoir capacity.
"If their projections are correct and the climate is indeed warming, then this report makes the best argument I know of in favor of building water storage, reducing regulatory barriers on agriculture and investing in genetic technology," dairy operator Dino Giacomazzi told the reporter.
Nidever also wrote a separate article, published yesterday, that touched on another issue raised in the journal, dairy greenhouse-gas emissions. The reporter apparently spoke to the journal article's author, UC Davis Cooperative Extension livestock air quality specialist Frank Mitloehner, who told him dairies will soon face regulation for greenhouse gases under California's landmark greenhouse gas reduction law passed in 2006.
Possible solutions to the dairy air emission problem presented in the Sentinel article are the development of specially engineered food and probiotics that will reduce the amount of methane cows belch and capturing dairy cow emissions to generate energy.