But Paddock pays especially close attention to water usage, as much for environmental reasons as economic ones. For instance, he knows that he uses 0.87 gallons of water to grow one individual almond. “Every gallon I pump, it’s like running a taxicab meter that just keeps chipping away.” 

He’s tinkered with different irrigation systems, moving from a sub-surface drip setup to his current above-ground micro-sprayer, which he says has the best distribution of water with the least waste. For Paddock, maximizing “crop per drop”—getting the most yield with the least amount of water—is important. 

It’a not just because it’s cheaper and not just because Capay Hills Orchard, his farm just north of Sacramento, is in an area of California that is increasingly drought-prone. It’s also because he’s on a mission to prove that almonds are a viable crop, now and into the future.

Almonds are notorious for being a thirsty crop. It’s a reputation that Paddock and other growers say isn’t deserved, but the idea has circulated for years just the same. The Atlantic took aim at almonds in 2014. Mother Jones put out a series of now legendary (within the almond industry, at least) stories around the same time. Forbes wrote about them last year. The New York Times has run op-eds on almonds, along with the Los Angeles Times.  

The thing is, those reports are correct. The “water footprint” of one almond—how much water it takes to grow a single nut—is generally anywhere from one to three gallons, if you include rainwater (Paddock is proud to point out that he sits below average when it comes to water use). That’s hard to ignore. It’s similar for pistachios, which use a little under a gallon, and even worse for walnuts, which clock in at close to five gallons per nut. Almonds use a lot of water, but just how much of the state’s precious resource they use is contested. The Almond Board of California has said the nuts use nine percent of the state’s agricultural water. The nonprofit California Water Impact Network says that figure is actually closer to 17 percent. 

It’s also true that California farmers need to increasingly rely on groundwater from wells during periods of drought, when there’s not enough rain or surface water at their disposal. As the Forbes article points out, thousands of wells across California have dried up in the past decade. 

With the majority of all almonds grown in California, there are increasingly uncomfortable questions for the drought-prone state. California is responsible for 80 percent of the world’s almonds, and they bring billions of dollars into the state. They are the biggest agricultural export in the state by far. But if California has limited water, why keep growing almonds? Is it sustainable? Is it ethical? 

Aerial view of almond groves. Photography courtesy of Simple Mills.

“I gotta tell you, one of the worst days in my career is when the Mother Jones article came out. Absolutely wrecked my world,” says Joe Gardiner, a nut farmer and VP of business development with Treehouse Almonds. 

Treehouse Almonds sources nuts from roughly 50,000 acres in California’s Central Valley, and Gardiner’s family farm provides about 20,000 of them. The farm has changed a lot since his grandfather ran it and grew tomatoes and potatoes. When his dad took over, they transitioned to cotton and other row crops. And now, they grow mostly almonds, with some pistachios as well. 

Having worked with other crops, Gardiner says the idea that almonds use more resources than anything else is simply not true. They may use a lot of water, but so do most crops. It’s one of the building blocks of agriculture. 

It takes more than three gallons of water to grow a single tomato. More than five gallons are needed for a head of broccoli. One orange will soak up nearly 14 gallons of water. But something about the amount of water almonds use has made a much bigger impact. 

 “I don’t want to pin one crop against another,” says Gardiner, emphasizing that this isn’t about which crop is “better” than another. It’s about the utility of the crop and the broader picture. Almonds are a shelf-stable source of protein, for one. Plus, there are multiple uses for each nut harvested. “The outer almond hull, which is over 50 percent of the weight of the almond, is sold as cattle feed,” he says. “And guess what it replaces? Alfalfa, which uses more water than almonds.” The shells are used in cosmetics, as bedding for livestock and in biofuels. 

Still, the pushback against almonds that began nearly a decade ago rattled Gardiner. “I think that’s really what pushed me into my own internal journey of looking at our own farm family operations to say like, this isn’t our story. That’s not the whole picture here… It was definitely a moment of questioning, is this correct? If it is, how can we make it better?” 

Almonds are certainly at risk. There are the water issues, of course. In drought-prone California, water is more limited and consumer perception of a crop that seems to take up more than its fair share is dangerous. 

There’s also the loss of farmland due to a confluence of factors. Some studies show California’s farmland acreage will be reduced by about 20 percent by 2040. Yields are predicted to drop as well, with almonds and walnuts losing 20 percent and avocados potentially cutting 40 percent of their yields. 

Some of that loss comes from rising temperatures. The state estimates that average annual temperatures could rise by as much as 2.7 degrees in the next 15 years. Beyond that, to 2069, temperatures could climb another 5.8 degrees. By mid-century, state reports estimate that the Central Valley, where many growers and farmers are located, could experience extreme heat waves that last two weeks longer, and heatwaves could occur four to 10 times more often in the northern part of the state. So, as temperatures rise, growing regions in the hottest and driest areas of the state may shrink, as growers are no longer able to produce as much on the same tracts of land. 

Almonds will be hit hard by a lack of winter chill hours—the period when trees go into dormancy. Less chill time means the tree will go into bloom early, or experience bud failure, if the tree hasn’t had enough time in cooler temperatures to build back its resources for another growing season. There is initial research looking into heat-tolerant almonds, as well as pistachios and walnuts, with researchers at the University of California, Davis looking to breed more resilient and heat-tolerant genes into future trees, but that work takes time.

Some of the land will be lost to development, or it will be used to store wind or solar energy facilities. But a lot of those losses will come down to water. 

“I think that, especially in the case of water availability, the writing’s on the wall at this point,” says Renata Brillinger, executive director of the California Climate and Agricultural Network. “I think growers are pretty clear now that whether it’s water availability or regulations, they’re going to need to find ways to adapt and modernize their approach to farming.” 

Gardiner, for his part, is working at just that. In April of 2022, he partnered up with The Almond Project, a collective made up of nut brands, scientists, land trusts and now, the Gardiner family farm. They sectioned off four plots and got to work. There are the comparison plots of 75 acres each, one farmed conventionally and one farmed organically. Then, there are two plots where they focus in on soil health practices in both conventional and organic farming. They’re implementing a range of strategies to reduce water use and are testing as they go. There are sheep grazing between the trees, cover crops of grasses and legumes, spot irrigation and increased composting. It’s a lot of changes, but Gardiner says they’re throwing a bunch of things at the wall to see what sticks. 

Sheep grazing in almond groves. Photography courtesy of Burroughs Family Farms.

Some of what the Gardiner farm is doing with The Almond Project is already being done elsewhere but on a much smaller scale. Paddock is an advocate of cover cropping on his farm, where he rotates in a mixture of vetch, clover, pea, radish and mustard, and he brings in sheep to graze every spring. It’s all in an effort to build up his soil health. 

“My orchard has a lot of trees,” says Paddock. “I’m not looking at the trees. I spend half my time looking at the dirt.” 

That sentiment is shared by Benina Burroughs Montes, co-founder and managing partner of Burroughs Family Farms in Denair, California. The 650-acre almond farm is certified with the Regenerative Organic Alliance, and Burroughs Montes follows the major principles of regenerative farming, including use of cover crops, hedgerows and extremely limited soil tilling. 

“[Cover crops act as] natural weed suppression. They compete with weeds for nutrients, sunlight and space, minimizing the need for herbicides and manual weed control,” says Burroughs Montes  in an email. She notes that the regenerative practices she follows on her farm also help regulate temperature at the ground level, something increasingly important for California crops. “Healthy soils with good organic matter content can act as natural insulators, moderating the temperature of the soil surface. This can contribute to more stable ground temperatures, preventing extreme heat or cold conditions that can impact plant health and productivity.”

Jessica Chiartis examines a section of soil at the Gardiner Farm. Photography by author.

Jessica Chiartis specializes in soil as a post-doctoral fellow at UC Davis and is a consultant on The Almond Project. She says soil health can be measured in a number of ways, with one of the most important being how water filters into the ground. “That matters not just because you want to avoid the pathogens and potential pathogens that come from sustained flooding. But also, from a water storage perspective, they’re getting that water infiltrated and stored.” 

It might seem like common sense, but healthy soil can store more water than unhealthy soil. A healthy soil is able to hold its shape well when dug or disturbed, which means it is strong enough to hold water without collapsing and letting the water drain away. Crops can draw upon that water in times of drought, letting farmers ease up on irrigation. 

That’s why Paddock, Burroughs Montes and Gardiner are all working to build the strongest soil they can. For Gardiner, applying these techniques at scale will certainly be an undertaking and a change from the conventional wisdom in the industry. 

“For as long as I’ve been in the industry, the understanding was that your orchard floor needs to be clean,” says Gardiner. One of the biggest buyers of almonds has historically been confectionery and chocolate companies. “When they would receive almonds, if they found rocks, sticks, stones, anything in those almonds, they would go back to a handler..and reject [the order.] It’d be a big, big food safety issue.” In order to avoid fines or rejected shipments, Gardiner says growers preached clean orchards. They got rid of all grasses and weeds. “When it comes time to harvest, the only thing you’re picking up is almonds, nothing else.”

But with improved electronics and x-rays on the processing side, the food safety issue is not nearly as dire today. “So now, the focus is going back to rebuilding our soils,” says Gardiner.

And Chiartis thinks cover cropping in orchards, or agroforestry in general, could have a future in California. Just as the focus on crops is often the water they’re using, Chiartis says we don’t think about the water they’re putting back in the environment. “When you think about the future climate of California, we need to think about reducing evaporation.” That can be done with cover crops and by co-planting companion crops in orchards. Dill helps attract pollinators; catnip and scallions can deter pests. By placing these crops in hedgerows or around the trees, the soil gains more nutrients, stays a more consistent temperature and grows stronger. “Water cycles are far more complicated than just water in, water out,” says Chiartis. “What better use for water than agriculture? I worry that with climate change, we’re expecting agriculture to bear the burden, when it’s the one industry that’s literally required for survival.”

But the big question is: Is any of this happening fast enough? Are we finding ways to get smarter about water or work within more effective systems fast enough to outpace the droughts? 

For regenerative farmer Burroughs Montes, the answer is clear. “The industry is behind. Everyone needs to start today. We can’t think that the government is going to bail us out or that we can buy ourselves out of this,” she says. “Like the majority of independent farmers, our priority has always been the health of our land, animals and community. Regenerative agriculture provides a workable pathway for us to ensure the health of the industry for future generations.”

For Renata Brillinger at CalCAN, the answer is more complex. “The state of California has put in place quite a number of programs, not just in agriculture, but across the economy. They’ve got very ambitious targets that are in line with the scientific imperative,” they say. “It’s incredibly complicated. And when it comes to farming, which is operating in a biological system, it’s even more complex because it’s not mechanistic, like figuring out how to build a new electric car. And when we’re talking about working within the constraints of water and soil and biodiversity, then it’s even harder.” 

With all of those issues to consider, and in the face of rising temperatures and recurring droughts, some farmers have been ripping out their almond groves as they’re simply not able to grow in these conditions. 

“A lot of people are looking at just fallowing fields, because they’re worried about water use or water allocation,” says Chiartis. “There does need to be a huge shift in how we think about and how we grow food. Instead of just throwing our hands up and saying ‘California just won’t be able to produce as many crops in the future’, we can start looking at how we can improve soil health and build resilience, think a little more outside the box of how to develop a diversified system. You know, we could be developing technology and equipment that allows for things like agroforestry to happen at a large scale.”

California will lose farmland, and there will be further restrictions on water usage. But people are trying to find ways to lessen the damage—without resorting to abandoning crops or letting fields fallow. One weapon in the fight is stronger soil, capable of withstanding the floods, droughts and heatwaves of the near future. Those big changes would require getting large, conventional farmers on board. Some huge growers, such as Gardiner’s family farm and Treehouse Almonds, are already testing out different methods and making future plans based on their findings.

Still, many smaller farmers such as Paddock are concerned. “When I drive to Sacramento or something, and I look to the left, to the right… [I think] ‘that used to be farmland.’”

This story is part of State of Abundance, a five-part series about California agriculture and climate change. See the full series here.

The post Almonds are Under Threat. The Key to Saving Them Could Be in the Soil appeared first on Modern Farmer.

For that, blame wildfires. 

Amid the pandemic lockdowns and restrictions that limited wineries’ ability to operate, drastically reducing income for regions almost completely built on tourism, Northern California’s wine country faced another enormous setback in 2020. The Glass Fire tore through Napa and Sonoma counties, on the heels of the LNU Complex Fires that decimated areas in Mendocino, Santa Cruz and Lake counties, all of which also produce wine and supply grapes to Napa and Sonoma winemakers.

Although some of Napa’s grapes had already been harvested, a huge portion of that year’s Cabernet Sauvignon, the wine for which the area is best known for and which can sell for thousands of dollars a bottle given the right year and the right winery, was lost.

Wine growers and winemakers will feel the financial impact of that loss for years to come. But as the inevitability of future wildfires becomes all too real for the state’s massive wine industry, winemakers are looking to solutions to mitigate the worst fallout in the future, from new research to technology to better land management—including embracing fire itself.

The year 2020 was California’s worst fire season on record, accounting for nearly 40 percent of the national total acreage burned for the year. In the Glass Fire, Castello di Amorosa winery in Calistoga lost 10,000 cases (120,000 bottles). Fairwinds Estate Winery next door burned to the ground, as did Chateau Boswell in St. Helena. Cain Vineyards & Winery in Sonoma lost all of its 2019 and 2020 vintages in the blaze. Thirty wineries were physically damaged, and many more were affected by smoke and had no choice but to scrap their 2020 vintage. 

In a place as famous for its wine as Napa, it’s easy to assume that everything is owned by winemaking corporations with deep pockets like Gallo, but many wineries are small, family-owned businesses that rely on on-site sales for the bulk of their income. 

“It’s psychologically pretty terrible because you can go through this whole growing season,” says Jim Duane, winemaker for St. Helena’s family-owned Seavey Vineyard, “starting from bud break in late February, early March and have this whole great season and then get to October when everything’s basically done, and even then it can still be ruined when fires break out.”

Vineyards can actually be helpful in stopping the spread of fire. (Photo courtesy Medlock Ames Winery)

Since 2017, there has been a catastrophic series of megafires in California’s wine country. The Tubbs Fire that year burned parts of Napa and Sonoma counties. In 2018, the Mendocino Complex Fire burned Lake County, which supplies grapes to winemakers in Napa and Sonoma, and sent smoke over the valleys. The Kincade Fire demolished parts of Sonoma in 2019. But 2020’s LNU Complex and Glass fires hit the area’s wine production hardest.

It was October, and many of the grapes had already come in for the season. Chardonnay and other white wine grapes were off the vine, their juice already fermenting in tanks. Some of the red wine grapes had come in. But Cabernet Sauvignon stays on the vine longer, and most of Napa’s Cab grapes were still ripening when the Glass Fire hit. 

It’s not impossible to find California reds from 2020, and those that made it to market are exceptionally good, because of the ideal growing conditions prior to the fires. Still, Napa lost about 43 percent of its Cabernet grapes, and Sonoma lost about 30 percent of its Pinot noir grapes from the 2020 fall fires, per Wine Spectator. 

But those numbers are lower than they should be. They don’t take into account grapes that were harvested and later discarded due to smoke taint.

Fires in wine regions don’t even have to touch a vineyard to destroy grapes. The smoke can do it all on its own. Grapes have thin skins that can absorb volatile phenols released into the air when trees burn. Depending on who you ask, that can be called smoke taint or smoke effect. It’s different—much more harsh and acrid—from the appealing smoky notes wine picks up from aging in toasted oak barrels. 

The characteristics of smoke-tainted wine can vary, says Anita Oberholster, an enology specialist at the University of California, Davis. “Smokey is one, but it can also have a sweet barbecue character, a very medicinal character.” Oberholster is one of the world’s foremost experts on smoke taint, a new field of study and one with more questions than answers. “Can you imagine licking an ashtray? When wines are heavily impacted, it can taste like that.”

Somewhere around 20 percent of people can’t taste smoke taint, but for those who can, it’s overpowering. “It’s definitely unique,” says Oberholster. “If you’ve tasted it once, you’ll never forget it.” Part of her work is studying exactly how much smoke is still palatable to the consumer. “If we have those values, it will help winemakers make decisions about treatment options.” 

Sometimes, smoke taint is easy to detect in the grapes themselves, but in other instances, it doesn’t present until wine has been fermented, and sometimes, only after it’s been aged in bottles. Currently, Oberholster is working on a collaborative project to develop a sensor network across multiple sites in California, Oregon and Washington that will measure how smoke and other volatile organic compounds affect vines. “The idea of this is [to discover whether] any of the parameters that get captured by these sensors actually correlate with smoke risk.” 

If winemakers know that a certain air-quality level means smoke taint will present after fermentation, they can decide to use or scrap their grapes without the expense of harvesting and making the wine. Better access will also democratize the data, lessening the need for expensive lab tests, which can easily run in the thousands of dollars, and making it easier to provide concrete information for insurance claims. 

There are developing technologies to assist growers and winemakers, such as sprays that can be applied directly to grapes to fend off smoke damage and automated systems that allow winemakers to control tanks and other equipment remotely or with reduced staff, who often need to evacuate in wildfires depending on where they live.

But it’s a three-year financial hit to lose a vintage—and that’s just if the winery is dealing with smoke taint. When actual vines burn, a vineyard will feel the effects for six or seven years: the time it takes the vines to reach maturity, and then the time to properly age the wine before it can be released. According to the California Association of Winegrape Growers, the losses from ruined or unharvested grapes in 2020 totaled $601 million. The total loss to California’s wine industry in 2020 was $3.7 billion, according to one estimate.

Because of their lush vegetation and widely spaced plants, vineyards are actually helpful in stopping the spread of fire itself, according to Richard Casale, a post-wildfire restoration specialist who works with the USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service. “Grapevines are very resilient,” he says. “I can say from experience, they do not burn easily in most cases. They’re well pruned. There’s no dead wood, and the green leaves hold a certain amount of moisture. They’re almost like mini-fire breaks on the landscape.”

Indeed, one way to avoid devastating megafires in areas such as California’s wine country may be to embrace smaller fires.

“Fire is a natural part of those ecosystems,” says Alison Blodorn, Ph.D., principal forestry program manager for the Napa County Resource Conservation District, which provides technical and financial support to the community and educates people about being better stewards of the land.

She says that much of Northern California is a “fire-adapted space,” but one that hasn’t been allowed to have smaller, naturally occurring wildfires. Those lower-intensity fires reduce the underbrush that fuels megafires.

“The situation we’re dealing with is a result of 200 years of fire suppression, which has led to overstocked forests that aren’t healthy or able to withstand fire as they should be able to,” she says. “With compounding heat and drought and other stressors, it’s created a really challenging environment.” 

Napa RCD promotes conservation as a whole, but its work in fire resilience started after the 2017 wine country fires. “There’s just a huge need, particularly with so many vineyards having large amounts of forested property surrounding their vines,” says Blodorn. “Much of that forested land has not received the kind of care that it needs to be healthy and fire resilient.”

Napa RCD’s Forest Health team works with landowners to develop forest management plans and connect them to funding to implement vegetation management activities, improving the overall health and fire resilience of their forests.

“You never know when the next fire’s going to come, and we are all bracing ourselves every season,” adds Blodorn. “It can be hard for landowners because it’s not a fast process to go through, developing a plan for your property, seeking the funding, securing the funding, getting contractors out to do the work. We’re not going to fix 200 years of inaction in a year or two years. It’s really a long game that we’re playing here.” 

When the Kincade Fire burned part of his property and claimed a huge portion of his 2019 harvest, Ames Morison, co-founder of Sonoma’s Medlock Ames Winery, had to do some soul searching. 

“I always thought organic was the right thing and that I was doing enough, but that fire made me rethink everything,” says Morison. Most of the 340-acre ranch is undeveloped, and Morison purposely kept it that way for 25 years. “My philosophy before was, ‘let’s just let that be in its native, wild state; that’s the best way to preserve nature,’ but it’s already disturbed by our presence here. By doing nothing, it’s actually worse than actively managing it.”

Ames Morison of Medlock Ames Winery was forced to reconsider his hands-off approach after a wildfire in 2019. (Photo courtesy Medlock Ames Winery)

Morison added streamlined processes into the winery after the Kincade Fire, but his main focus has been on being a more conscientious steward of the land and understanding his role as a property owner. “It was this devastating thing, but it made us learn a lot about wildfire and why it happens and understand that it’s actually part of California’s ecology,” he says. “It’s a very powerful force, but it belongs here and we’re just in its land. We need to respect it and try to figure out how to work with it rather than fight it.”

Fred Seavey, part of the family-owned Seavey Vineyards, has a similar philosophy about ecological stewardship. After his family’s ranch burned in the 2017 Tubbs Fire, he became much more active in caring for their land. He took a forestry class at UC Davis, and worked with a registered professional forester to create a forest management plan. “Our goal is to try to make our forest more fire resilient, climate change resilient and drought resilient,” he says. For Seavey, that includes changing the footprint of the vineyards to allow sheep to graze under the vines and keep the undergrowth down, as well as creating burn piles. Last winter, he estimates he burned 225 of them across the ranch. Seavey says he intentionally kept them small, less than 20 square feet per fire, because bigger fires can create hydrophobic soil that won’t absorb water and isn’t hospitable to new growth. 

He has also volunteered on prescribed burns, which eliminate vegetation under the tree canopy and reduce the risk of small fires growing out of control. Many communities in California have Prescribed Burn Associations, but Napa is just in the process of forming its association now. 

“It just feels meaningful to be able to do it in a very concrete way with your own hands and see the effects on your immediate surrounding environment,” says Seavey.

To proactively protect grapes, Seavey winemaker Duane also periodically sprays his grapes with a clay mixture to prevent smoke taint and protect the grape skins—which can burn in sunlight just like a sunburn—and keep their internal temperature cooler. 

In the winery, he added in newer systems to process wine, such as dedicated pumps on each tank, which make the process more automated and ensure the time-sensitive winemaking process can continue in the event that some workers can’t make it in due to fires. An issue often left out of the conversation about wildfire impact on winemaking is the crews who harvest the grapes, who make the bulk of their annual income during September and October. Winemakers and vineyard owners interviewed in this story all stressed that worker safety is paramount and they would never require employees to come to work in a dangerous situation. More automated systems can fill the gap in emergencies where a fire may be blocking the route to work or a worker’s neighborhood is being evacuated. 

Fire, says Duane, “is a big problem. It’s tough to solve, but I think there’s no easy grand solution. It’s going to be people trying to do all these different individual mitigating factors.”

Casale says that he’s seeing more interest in wildfire management and restoration than ever before.

“I would say definitely there is more consciousness now,” he adds. “It’s not like fires are going away. Every year, we see the largest fires in California’s history, then the next year comes along, and then we have the next largest fire in California. We’re not seeing fires in the tens of thousands of acres. We’re seeing them in the hundreds of thousands of acres now.”

But he also sees positive momentum for the future. “I tell the growers it’s an opportunity to build back better with fire-resistant materials and to look at it in a whole new light.” 

Despite many businesses investing huge amounts of time and effort into fire resistance, they’re finding it hard to maintain the insurance that will see them through a natural disaster. Many insurance companies are refusing to renew policies for vineyards that have experienced loss from wildfire, and others are increasing premiums to unaffordable levels. Jim Duane says that Seavey’s insurance tripled from 2022 to 2023, despite all of the preventative improvements. 

Part of Anita Oberholster’s work, too, is establishing better information for insurance companies to utilize when offering crop insurance. “We don’t have baseline numbers for what is normal for different regions and varieties in the US,” she says. “Something we’ve been working on since 2021 is getting what is the normal range for these compounds in grapes without smoke exposure. Because we don’t have that data yet, crop insurance providers haven’t adapted their numbers because they don’t know what to adapt them to.”

“Right now, we’re in a cycle of regulate, retreat, regulate, retreat. There is this entire space in between regulate and retreat, which is partner, innovate, collaborate,” says Jennifer Gray Thompson, founder and CEO of After the Fire, a nonprofit that helps communities in Northern California rebuild by providing aid, information and resources to residents and businesses, as well as advocating for those people to policy-makers.

A large part of Thompson’s work is trying to educate insurance companies about the preventative strategies businesses are employing—everything from applying flame-resistant paint to changing landscaping away from plants that easily ignite to implementing wildfire-resistant modeling. “One of the things that insurance doesn’t recognize enough is what’s actually true about wineries and vineyards, which is that they’re great firebreaks.”

Like many others, Thompson understands that we can’t eradicate wildfire—we just need to learn better strategies to manage it. 

“The number one thing for people to understand is we do have to live alongside wildfire,” she says. Accepting wildfire and working with it could be key in preventing more serious megafires. “It is an absolute necessity moving forward. We have no choice.”

This story is part of State of Abundance, a five-part series about California agriculture and climate change. See the full series here.

The post Why California Wineries are Embracing Fire to Avoid Disaster appeared first on Modern Farmer.

“Back then, gosh, it was amazing to see the fish when the fish ran during the fall,” says Hockaday, a traditional fisherman and council member of the Karuk Tribe. “The salmon were huge.” On average, he says, you could catch fish ranging from 40 to 50 pounds—although members of his grandparents’ generation were known to catch 100-pound Chinook salmon at Ishi Pishi Falls, the tribe’s sacred fishing grounds. “Nowadays, our average is anywhere from 15 to maybe 25 pounds. We catch a 30-pounder and that’s a hog, that’s a big fish.”

A slow-motion disaster for tribes, commercial fishermen and conservationists, the decline of California’s once-abundant salmon population has been unfolding for decades. The crisis has its roots in decisions about the state’s water use made a century ago and, like so many stories of water wars in the West, it has pitted stakeholders against one another in a seemingly zero-sum contest over a dwindling natural resource. 

The outlook is grim, but there are bright spots. As a future of increasingly hot and dry weather hangs over the state, can change come quickly enough to save the imperiled salmon from extinction?

Salmon are the epitome of endurance and resilience. Spawned in cold, high-elevation mountain streams, they navigate downriver as juveniles, fattening up as they make their way to coastal estuaries, where they undergo a remarkable transformation from freshwater to saltwater fish before entering the ocean. Depending on the species, they can spend years maturing at sea, where commercial fishermen vie for the valuable catch. Then, governed by an unshakeable biological imperative, they reverse the journey, this time propelling themselves against the current to return to their spawning grounds, where they’ll lay their eggs and then die, their nutrients enriching the river ecosystem. 

Or, at least, that’s what salmon have historically done. But ever since white settlers made their way westward, a barrage of man-made challenges has disrupted the salmon’s natural journey. In the late 1840s came the gold miners, whose use of hydraulic mining clogged waterways with sediment. Then, a growing population began to reshape the state’s water systems, building channels and levees to control where water flowed. In the 20th century, ambitious dam projects rose up to store and divert water for cities and farming, cutting salmon off from hundreds of miles of upriver habitat. 

“In a way, it’s amazing we have as many salmon around as we do,” says Peter Moyle, associate director of the Center for Watershed Sciences at the University of California, Davis and a distinguished professor emeritus in the university’s Department of Wildlife, Fish and Conservation Biology. He estimates that, prior to the Gold Rush, there were one million to two million salmon a year coming up through the Central Valley alone, and another half a million or more in other rivers. But a confluence of factors, including water diversions that erased more than 90 percent of the state’s wetlands and large dams that blocked 70 percent of salmon’s historic spawning grounds, have decimated the wild salmon population.

A mature Chinook salmon. (Photo: Ryan Hagerty/USFWS)

Today, the state’s salmon fishery is reliant on hatcheries that produce millions of fish and release them into the wild. “What we see today, the reason we have as much salmon as we do today, is hatcheries. But the hatchery fish are in decline,” says Moyle. “They keep producing more hatchery fish, and the numbers keep going down, partly because hatchery fish are poorly adapted for life in the wild.” 

Warming waters present another threat, and one that increases in severity during drought, when surface water supplies falter. Warm freshwater can contribute to the proliferation of algal blooms and harmful bacteria, and temperatures above 70 degrees Fahrenheit can be lethal to salmon; ocean acidification and marine heatwaves also imperil the fish. That’s bad news for California, where, despite a winter of heavy rainfalls that refilled reservoirs and lifted the state out of a severe multi-year drought, human-caused climate change continues to accelerate the frequency and severity of extreme heat events and drought conditions.

And those recurrent drought conditions have forced salmon, and the people who rely on them, closer to a breaking point. 

This spring, for just the second time in history, the ocean commercial and recreational salmon fishing season was canceled, impacting a swath of the West Coast, from northern Oregon to the border with Mexico. The decision came after last year’s Sacramento River fall-run Chinook, the principal salmon stock harvested in California’s fisheries, returned to the Central Valley at near-record low numbers—estimated at just 169,767 adults.

“Those numbers were abysmal,” says Glen Spain, executive director of the Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen’s Associations. “What happens three years ago determines how many adults come back this year, so what we’re seeing was the worst part of the [2020] drought, which essentially dried up the rivers or created hot water conditions, and that just killed lots of eggs and lots of young salmon before they could even get to the ocean.” 

Without the salmon season, many fishermen are losing their livelihoods. “There are over 1,000 boats out there with permits, and they’re basically in dry dock,” he says, noting that the closure could extend beyond this season, and up to another two years, creating uncertainty in an already challenging industry.

“It used to be that we could rely on a salmon season to buffer us from potentially a slow crab season,” says Dick Ogg, a commercial fisherman who operates out of Bodega Bay. “But with the seasons being compressed and getting smaller and smaller, and opportunities becoming less and less … the impact is significant.” 

Fishing boats in Bodega Bay, CA. (Photo: Shutterstock)

In addition to salmon, Ogg holds permits to fish for black cod, albacore, Dungeness crab and rockfish. The days when a fisherman could rely on just the salmon fishery are “almost a thing of the past,” he says, but the cost of diversifying with multiple permits can become a barrier,  especially for new fishermen entering the business. “The cost of each permit, the cost of owning your own vessel, the insurance that’s required, the slip fees that you have to pay, the taxes that you have to take care of, the crew that you need to maintain … it just is devastating.”

In April, California Governor Gavin Newsom submitted a request to the US Secretary of Commerce asking for a Federal Fishery Disaster Declaration, which would provide relief for businesses and fishermen impacted by the closure of the salmon season. In the meantime, Spain says, “There is the edge of desperation in a lot of our communities.”

“We all know why this is happening … but what we don’t know is how to get around it, at a family-by-family and port-by-port level,” says Spain. “And the sad thing is this was once a billion-dollar fishery.”

The formidable challenges facing California’s salmon population are prompting efforts to get creative with everything from building a controversial “fishway” around the Yuba River’s Daguerre Point Dam to exploring the reintroduction of fish transplanted to New Zealand more than a century ago, as the Winnemem Wintu Tribe has proposed.

In the Central Valley, one project has a particularly grand vision for transforming water management systems to support native fish. Called the Nigiri Project for its fish-on-rice concept, it’s a collaboration between researchers and farmers that floods rice fields in the winter, helping to break down rice straw while offering juvenile salmon and waterfowl conditions that mimic the bug-rich floodplain ecosystems to which they’re adapted. 

It’s a win-win that researcher Jacob Katz hopes proves that a paradigm shift is possible. “We actually have the capacity to manage the Sacramento Valley in a way that is good for both fish and for farms,” says Katz, a senior scientist at California Trout, a nonprofit aimed at restoring waterways and wild fish. “One of the major reasons we’ve so diminished our fisheries resources is not necessarily an inevitable consequence of development but a specific and direct consequence of the way in which we developed.” 

Juvenile Chinook salmon. (Photo: USFWS/Flickr)

Levees that block rivers from adjoining wetlands have benefits, such as flood protection and creating farmland, but they also cut fish off from essential food sources in floodplain wetlands, turning rivers into food deserts. The Nigiri Project, along with a related initiative that drains food-rich fields back into rivers, provides a blueprint for what Katz hopes could be a large-scale reimagining of the system. It’s ambitious, but Katz says that, “if you look at the science, we have no right to expect a population-level recovery of salmon if we aren’t actually changing the real world at landscape scale. To have a postage stamp here and a postage stamp there, why would we expect that to lead to population recovery? That’s not how it works.”

But rethinking the levee model to provide food for salmon would address just one of the two biggest problems facing the fish, says Katz. The other is the large-scale dam infrastructure that blocks salmon’s upstream migration. “The fact that we have essentially dammed all of the [Sacramento] Valley’s rivers, cutting off that critical cold water refuge, is ultimately a death sentence, an extinction sentence, for our salmon if something isn’t done.”

While most dams are built for a 50-year lifespan, the average age of California’s nearly 1,500 dams is 70 years old, according to the American Society of Civil Engineers, which gave the state’s dams a grade of C- in its most recent infrastructure report card. But that wasn’t what prompted the Klamath River tribal communities to launch a campaign to remove the four aging dams sitting upriver from them.

In 2002, upwards of 70,000 Chinook salmon died as part of a massive fish kill caused by low flows on the Klamath, the result of low flows caused by water diversions by farmers and ranchers upstream. “Tens of thousands of adult salmon died before spawning and just littered the banks of the river,” says Craig Tucker, a natural resource policy consultant for the Karuk Tribe. “And for tribal communities, that was sort of the breaking point.”

What followed was a grassroots effort by tribes and other advocacy groups to remove the dams, as well as to broker a water-sharing deal between the tribes and Klamath Basin irrigators that required an act of Congress to pass. Ultimately, the arduous, multi-decade campaign was successful: Demolition recently began on the first dam, and the remaining dams are set to come out by the end of 2024 in what’s been billed as the largest dam removal project in history.

Klamath Basin tribes and allies staging a dam-removal rally in 2006. (Photo: Patrick McCully/Flickr)

“These should be easy,” says Tucker of the tortured process. “The Klamath River dams are what we call ‘deadbeat dams.’ They don’t pay their own way, there’s no flood control, no irrigation diversions, they’re not making a lot of money for anybody. They have this devastating impact on fisheries and water quality. It should be a no-brainer. And it’s taken us 20 years to get to dam removal.” 

As most of the state’s dams are approaching or past their engineered life spans, Tucker says we’ve reached a critical inflection point for the future of salmon. “Now is that moment of reckoning: Are we going to have wild salmon or not? If we’re going to have wild salmon, we have to remove some dams.”

The situation reflects the complexity of a system that aims to control and deliver a limited resource—water—that just happens to also be the foundation of life on earth. For farmers, water is necessary for growing crops. For fishermen, it’s essential for supporting fish. And for the Karuk and other tribes, those fish form the basis of their entire cultural identity. “It’s not just a fish, it’s a way of life,” says Kenneth Brink, another Karuk council member and traditional fisherman. “It’s our ceremonies. It’s our cross on top of our church. Some people just look at fish as a food. Some people look at it as money. We look at it as a way of life.”

It remains to be seen whether that way of life—and the fish on which it relies—can continue. But for the people who are fighting for salmon’s survival, the only option is to carry on.

This story is part of State of Abundance, a five-part series about California agriculture and climate change. See the full series here.

The post California’s Salmon Are Teetering on the Brink appeared first on Modern Farmer.

And once the tree reaches that point, there’s no coming back. The tree will die within a few years no matter what intervention you try. That’s why when growers see trees infected with Huanglongbing, known as HLB or citrus greening, they immediately look to remove the tree. There’s no other option. 

“We’re destroying all the trees that get infected. We’re monitoring and eradicating those where we can. We’re using biological controls with the loss. We’re using every tool in the bag,” says Jared Plumlee, senior vice president of farming at Booth Ranches, in Orange Cove, CA. Plumblee oversees about 7,000 acres in the central San Joaquin Valley, growing navel oranges, valencias, mandarins and even some lemons and grapefruits. There’s no sign of HLB in the Booth orchards yet, and Plumlee aims to keep it that way. The ranch also has its own packing house onsite, where they pack only their own product. That’s both to foster trust with consumers, so they know every piece of fruit in a Booth box came from that farm, and to keep potentially infected fruit out. 

HLB is a disease spread by the insect Asian citrus psyllid, which infects trees with a slow-growing bacteria while it feeds on their shoots. It’s commonly spread as the insect travels across borders in fruit or tree cuttings, but a warming climate is speeding things along. The transmission of citrus greening depends on temperature—both to ensure that the psyllid survives and that the host trees are at their most vulnerable. Temperatures between 60 and 90 degrees Fahrenheit allow the disease to thrive. Research has shown that areas that stay within that range for at least half of the year have the most cases of HLB. 

As global temperatures rise, citrus greening infestations can—and will—move further north. Tracking the spread of HLB is, in some ways, tracking the warming climate. 

Growers can often, unknowingly, graft an infected tree limb onto their otherwise healthy stock. That’s how citrus groves in Texas, and most especially Florida, fell victim to the disease. HLB was first discovered in Florida in 2005, where it promptly tore through the state’s orange and grapefruit groves, infecting close to 90 percent of the citrus. Nearly 20 years later, last season’s orange production is a mere 16 percent of the yield in 2003. And overall citrus production continues to fall, every year for the past five years. This year’s orange yield is predicted to be 25 percent lower than last years’ final production. 

A Florida citrus tree afflicted with HLB. (Photo: Citrus Pest and Disease Prevention Program)

Across the country, California growers have paid close attention to what their colleagues in Florida experienced, and they have no desire to go down the same road. “We see those numbers [from Florida], and it’s very, very frightening,” says Plumlee. As California’s annual temperatures fall squarely in the range for optimal HLB transmission, growers are as proactive as possible, even getting state legislation passed that allows citrus growers to essentially tax themselves and put the money towards research and eradication programs. “We’ve been fairly successful thus far; it still hasn’t been found in commercial orchards,” says Plumlee. 

California is home to roughly 300,000 acres of citrus production across the state. There have been infected trees found in California, throughout Los Angeles and Orange counties and along the coast near San Diego. But, so far, the bacteria has stuck to residential trees or others easily removed. 

“Last year, some nursery stock was sent from South Carolina from a nursery that had citrus canker,” says Victoria Hornbaker, director of the Citrus Pest and Disease Prevention Division at the California Department of Food and Agriculture. “But our team was able to react incredibly quickly to get out to those locations, collect that nursery stock, destroy it and do a one-mile survey of all citrus around those locations to make sure that we didn’t see any symptoms of citrus canker in the environment. So, that is a good example of how quickly we can mobilize and respond to potential issues regarding citrus.”

The citrus industry isn’t just important within California, but across the country. Florida may be known for oranges, but it’s primarily grown oranges for juice. California has historically been the home of fresh citrus, growing 85 percent of the nation’s table fruit. “If we lose California citrus, we also lose our national and international market,” Hornbaker says. That means importing more citrus from outside the country, raising prices, and losing a tremendous amount of revenue all around. 

That’s why California growers have such a focus on proactivity, and why there’s an incredible amount of research into citrus greening coming out of California institutions. University of California, Riverside is working on a treatment that effectively kills the bacteria, although it’s still being tested within industry. Growers are experimenting with higher-density planting, putting more trees in the ground per acre, to get a higher yield in a shorter amount of time. Although, as Plumlee explains, that also has a significant drawback. “The longevity of planting like that might not be 50 years; it may only be 25. Because once the trees fill in, you kind of hit this plateau on what your production level can be. So, in the face of HLB, you’re going to turn the ground over faster.”

Yellowing leaves are an early sign of HLB infection. (Photo: Citrus Pest and Disease Prevention Program)

Breeders are also working to find new varieties that are less susceptible to HLB. The Sugar Belle mandarin, the hybrid of a clementine and a Minneola, has shown promising resistance. The new variety was born out of research from the University of Florida and released to growers across the state in 2009. More than a decade later, the Sugar Belle is among the top-grown varieties in the state.

Oddly, there does seem to be a correlation between the size of the citrus and the resistance to the bacteria, although it’s not clear if size is a determining factor or simply a coincidence. But Neil McRoberts, a professor of plant pathology at University of California, Davis, says that grapefruit and large oranges are less resistant to the disease, with smaller mandarins showing more disease resistance. “Because our citrus comes from so few different progenitor lines, they don’t have any natural resistance to the bacterium. So, none of our favorite citrus types and varieties have much resistance in general,” McRoberts explains. 

There could be a cure out there. But it won’t be on the horizon in five years or even 10. “I can see that, maybe in 20 years, we’ll be in a position where, if we don’t actually have a cure, we’ll at least have citrus that is able to stand up and keep producing a crop,” says McRoberts. “There are some promises out there, but it’s slow work.”

In the meantime, Plumlee and other growers have no choice but to keep going and keep growing. “You can’t just throw up your hands and quit. You keep doing the science and the trials and try to solve this puzzle. But, in the short term, there’s not a whole lot that you can do that we haven’t already done.” Growers like Plumlee have a crop that’s vital to the state and the nation and a disease that they are fighting to keep at bay. For now, they simply have to hold on—for a decade or two—until more effective methods are available. 

“That is the scary part,” says Plumlee. “If we had something today, right out of the lab that works, we’re still 10 or 15 years from proving it out that it actually works. And then another 10, probably before it’s all implemented out in the industry. So, we know that time is not our friend.”

This story is part of State of Abundance, a five-part series about California agriculture and climate change. See the full series here.

The post There’s No Cure for Citrus Greening. California Growers Have No Choice But to Keep Going appeared first on Modern Farmer.

But the epic flooding this past March was simply unprecedented, says the owner of Lerda-Goni Farms. After a winter of record snow in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, a sudden warm spell melted the lower reaches, unleashing nearly 40,000 acre-feet of water—a volume equal to more than a tenth of Las Vegas’ annual supply—in 48 hours. The torrent overwhelmed dams, swelled rivers and crumbled levees, inundating entire farming communities, including Lerda-Goni and a dozen other ranches, and reawakening a long-dormant lake lying beneath the vast agricultural region.

With floodwater breaching six-foot high banks, “I don’t know what we could have done to prevent it,” says Goni. “It was just an insane amount of water in such a short amount of time.” Months later, he’s still shell-shocked from having to relocate his herd of 2,400 cows in the middle of the night—a Herculean effort pulled off by his team of 11 long-time employees, neighbors and countless volunteers, some who hailed from as far away as Nevada.

The reemergent Tulare Lake is not expected to drain for up to two years. (Photo courtesy of Lerda-Goni Farms)

All told, one official estimate pegs the dairy industry’s losses at $10 billion. While the lake has drained down to about 168 square miles, a chilly spring also kept the high-elevation snowpack at a slow melt, helping to avert an even greater calamity in the low-slung basin. Yet, as whole farming communities dig themselves out of the muddy ruins, the growing uncertainty of climate change is darkening a cloud over the future of the region’s largest industry—one valued at nearly $2 billion annually.

Following multiple years of drought, the diluvian whiplash is just the latest in a mounting list of burdens facing the basin’s largest industry, which pumps out 54 percent of California’s milk supply. As environmental adversity—along with the strain of rising costs and regulations—tightens the squeeze, many smaller, family-owned ranches have been caving to consolidation pressure. And that’s tipping the landscape in favor of mega-dairies—the large-scale operations that critics point to as disproportionate contributors of human-induced climate change.

At this point, “our farm is pretty self-sufficient,” says Goni, as he rushed to plant summer feed corn on his barely dry fields. His 580-acre farm grows enough forage to supply the herd, so “I’m good with where I’m at,” he adds. Still, the trend of getting big or getting out is all too real, adds the farmer, who’s seen plenty of small dairies pushed out in his lifetime. “But I’ll leave that [decision] for my nephews, for the next generation.”

Located in the southern reaches of the San Joaquin Valley, about 200 miles north of Los Angeles, Tulare Lake was once the largest body of freshwater west of the Mississippi River. Fed by four rivers flowing from the Sierra Nevadas, the shallow inland sea covered 1,000 square miles—more than four times the surface area of Lake Tahoe. Vast tule marshes surrounded its banks, creating a rich ecosystem teeming with fish and birds that, in turn, supported the Tachi Yokut and other Native American communities.

As westward expansion swept across the region in the late 1800s, settlers began draining the 40-foot deep lake for farmland. Within decades, a network of dams, levees and canals had dried up the basin, transforming the fertile crater into an agricultural hub. Today, the four counties sitting in the lake bed account for more than $25 billion in food and crop production, with Tulare County ranking number one in the nation for milk and oranges. Neighboring Fresno and Kern Counties top the list for almonds, while Kings County rules the state in cotton production.

But thirsty crops and cattle have taken their toll: Amid California’s cycles of drought, excessive groundwater pumping has left Central Valley basins the most overdrafted in the state. Although California’s Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA) aims to recharge them by regulating draws, the dried-up lake bed has long been collapsing under the massive weight of industrialized agriculture—to the tune of a couple of inches per month.

As climate change fuels more extreme swings in weather patterns, subsidence further compounds the region’s issues, says John Abatzoglou, professor of climatology at University of California, Merced, with arid years advancing the sink and wet ones expanding flood risk.

The tanking basin is also wreaking havoc on the region’s extensive canal system and levees. Corcoran, a community of 22,000 in Kings County with a sizable population of agricultural laborers and a large state prison, is scrambling to raise its 14-mile-long embankment, which has already collapsed by several feet since getting a $10-million boost just five years ago. As future deluges become more severe, maintaining, repairing and upgrading valley infrastructure will require greater investment, says Abatzoglou. 

Dairy farmer Joseph Goni’s grandfather witnessed the 1955 deluge that flooded their farm. (Photo courtesy of Lerda-Goni Farms)

Since the 1983 flood, changes in farming patterns have also raised the basin’s economic risk, he notes. Orchards, vines and other perennials cultivated as long-term investments have steadily replaced ephemeral crops such as tomatoes and cotton, which are far less costly to sacrifice or replace. Meanwhile, the consolidation of dairies has led to a sharp increase in herd size despite a plummeting number of farms, reflecting a national trend. 

“It’s a different playing field,” says Abatzoglou. Ultimately, the altered landscape means that climate-related disasters including floods, wildfires and drought will all take a deeper toll on agriculture—fruit and nut farmers having to abandon decade-old trees, for instance, or cattle ranchers needing to relocate hundreds of thousands of cows at a moment’s notice. And that’s on top of less snowpack and quicker melts thanks to a warming climate, as well as shrinking milk production from heat-stressed herds.

As individual farmers reel from the most recent disaster, many are up against the consequences of a new normal, says Anja Raudabaugh, chief executive officer of Western United Dairies, a Fresno-based industry trade organization. “Insurance carriers are not going to tolerate this again,” she adds, so farmers in floodplains are bracing themselves for a range of costly upgrades, including raising the elevation of entire feed lots and barns. 

In an industry known for razor-thin margins and a grueling, 365-days-a-year schedule, Raudabaugh sees consolidation accelerating. Although herds of 1,200 used to be the norm not too long ago, small family dairies are increasingly merging into 4,000- to 6,000-head operations. Larger players have more buying power and efficiency to manage rising operational costs, she says, so “becoming bigger is like a risk buffer.”

And in recent years, the soaring cost of feed and water scarcity—both compounded by drought and SGMA regulations—have made consolidation pressure all the more acute in California. “Despite the resilience of family [farms], the mega-trend is undeniable,” says Raudabaugh.

With the growing scale comes a ballooning environmental footprint: More inputs of feed and water increase output, which includes greater methane emissions. Dairy and livestock account for more than half of California’s production of the powerful greenhouse gas (GHG), one that traps 84 times more heat than carbon dioxide.

In Tulare County, where nearly half a million milk cows live on 222 dairies, the sheer density of large operations also magnifies other impacts, says Andrew deCoriolis, executive director of Farm Forward, a Portland-based humane farming advocacy organization. Concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) have been linked to numerous environmental issues such as nitrate contamination of groundwater and bacterial runoff, as well as dust storms and poor air quality (the county ranks among the worst in the nation).

“On a local and regional [level], it would be hard to point to another industry—except maybe oil and gas refining—with as much emissions and pollution,” he adds.

For their part, dairy farmers are duly engaged in sustainability efforts, says Raudabaugh. She points to wide-scale implementation of anaerobic digesters, which capture methane from sealed manure lagoons to create biogas. “They’re currently the only technology in the entire state that reduces methane,” she adds. Under a California Department of Food and Agriculture (CDFA) program aimed at slashing the state’s GHG emissions by 40 percent, she estimates that dairy farms have installed more than 200 projects, with an additional 25 currently in development.

Bio-digesters can help dairies cut emissions, but they’re costly. Critics say they create the wrong incentives. (Photo: Shutterstock)

A recent County report shows that, in the last decade, bio-digesters helped Tulare’s dairies and feedlots reduce their emissions by nearly 20 percent. And because the entire system is sealed, dairy digesters went unscathed during the spring floods, Raudabaugh notes, preventing vast acres of effluent from escaping.

Harnessing methane also helps farmers build economic resilience. At the federal level, participants can earn clean fuel credits through the Renewable Fuel Standard program, while in California, biogas producers can also sell their carbon credits to oil and gas companies. All told, the added revenue could boost a dairy’s earnings by as much as 50 percent.

Critics, however, remain skeptical. With one digester costing anywhere from $400,000 to $5 million to install and operate, smaller operations often find them cost prohibitive. Yet for those that can afford them, it’s an enticing cash cow, says DeCoriolis, with a return on investment that scales up with increased methane production. “The value of the energy is great enough that it’s creating these perverse incentives to grow CAFOs.” 

And it’s not just the manure, he adds—cows also burp 220 pounds of methane annually. “We’re subsidizing [the expansion of] these megadairy operations, all [in the name of] renewable energy,” says DeCoriolis. “And it isn’t going to do anything to reduce the other negative impacts.”

Size is relative, says Daniel Sumner, professor of agricultural and resource economics at the University of California, Davis. With the country’s average herd ranging around 300 heads, “just about all dairies in California are considered large by U.S. standards,” he writes in an email. But, he adds, the scale helps keep the Golden State’s dairy prices in check.

California’s small, pasture-based, organic dairies—many of which are clustered on the state’s North Coast—have a lighter environmental footprint, and they contribute just a sliver of the industry’s overall methane emissions. Yet that comes with high production costs that run 50 percent greater than Tulare County operations, says Sumner.

Although the premium operations fill a niche market, large-scale ones keep dairy accessible to Californians far beyond the grocery aisle, says Western United’s Raudabaugh. Consumer groups include food assistance services, including school nutrition and the Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) programs, as well as food banks, prisons and other public institutions. “There’s more cheese, yogurt and milk being consumed in these [services] than ever before,” she adds.

Dairy is also tightly woven into the fabric of California agriculture. Despite competing for land and water, the region’s orchards and milk farms have developed an unlikely partnership, says Sumner. Cows consume vast amounts of agricultural by-products, including almond hulls, citrus peel and other food-processing leftovers; the supplemental feed keeps crop waste out of landfill and “the dairy business afloat in the Valley,” he adds.

The field is further ingrained in the local and state economy. California produces nearly 42 billion pounds of milk annually, which, together with dairy products, total nearly 15 percent of California’s $51-billion annual agricultural production. And because the fresh fluid is costly to transport, dairy processing is highly regional, says Sumner. Statewide, the industry is responsible for almost 180,000 jobs, he notes, and supports another 132,000 indirect ones through trucking and hauling, veterinary services and other ancillary sectors.

Nearly half a million milk cows live on 222 dairies in Tulare County. (Photo: Shutterstock)

But a resilient industry needs a strong foundation to keep it from getting too top-heavy. And that means fostering a diverse range in the scale of farms, says Jeanne Merrill, the former policy director for the California Climate and Agriculture Network. “Agriculture [prospers] when small and mid-scale family operations can not just survive but thrive economically.” In other words, policy measures aimed at sustainability need to also support economic viability.

Merrill points to CDFA’s suite of climate smart solutions that promote agronomic benefits through financial incentives. The multi-pronged approach fosters conservation management practices that improve soil health and sequester carbon, as well as irrigation measures that reduce on-farm water and energy use. The Alternative Manure Management Program also offers a more cost-effective and greener alternative to bio-digesters, minimizing methane at the source by up to 90 percent and simultaneously generating compost.

And dairy farmers are increasingly engaging in recharging over-pumped basins. The California Department of Water Resources LandFlex program incentivizes growers to fallow fields during drought or, as the case may be this year, flooding them in years with heavy rain to replenish regional aquifers.

These state incentive programs all help to keep family farms in business while advancing innovations. “It keeps the land [active] and on [a farmer’s] asset sheet,” says Raudabaugh, “so he can still pay his employees, bank notes and property taxes—all of which keep the local community going.”

The programs also help mitigate some of the risks of implementing innovation, adds Merrill. California farmers are a highly motivated group, she says. With program demand far exceeding available funding, “we’re seeing that they really want to engage in practices that’ll make a difference on their operations.”

Still, the looming challenges of climate change are daunting, Merrill concedes, and require much more ambitious action. “We have to bend that emissions curve in order to avoid some of the worst impacts, and in agriculture… these changes take time,” she says. “So, we have to invest now in order to reap the rewards later.”

ThThis story is part of State of Abundance, a five-part series about California agriculture and climate change. See the full series here.

The post ‘An Insane Amount of Water’: What Climate Change Means For California’s Biggest Dairy District appeared first on Modern Farmer.

In this Modern Farmer feature series, we dig into how climate is impacting California’s producers through the lens of five of the state’s most iconic food products: dairy, citrus, salmon, wine grapes, and almonds.

‘An Insane Amount of Water’: What Climate Change Means For California’s Biggest Dairy District

by Naoki Nitta

Tulare County is the largest dairy producer in California and the U.S. But as climate change exposes the region’s vulnerability, could the industry collapse under its own weight?

There’s No Cure for Citrus Greening. California Growers Have No Choice but to Keep Going
by Emily Baron Cadloff

The bacteria is fatal to citrus trees, and has decimated citrus groves in Florida and Texas. Now, California growers are holding the line to keep producing the vital crops.

California’s Salmon Are Teetering on the Brink

by Rose Garrett

The state’s prized salmon have a will to survive against the odds. Can we get out of their way?

Why California Wineries are Embracing Fire to Avoid Disaster

by Julie Tremaine

The California wine industry has been rocked by years of destructive wildfires. Now, it’s working to adapt before the next big one ignites.

Almonds are Under Threat. The Key to Saving Them Could Be in the Soil

by Emily Baron Cadloff

Rising temperatures, lack of water and encroaching development are creating tough conditions for the crucial California crop. Their continued viability could all depend on strengthening the lands on which they sit.

Series edited by Rose Garrett and Emily Baron Cadloff
Illustrations by Adam Ming

The post State of Abundance appeared first on Modern Farmer.

In February, their efforts bore fruit. When residents, including many farmworkers, lost work due to weeks of rainstorms, the county agreed to spend one third of a $3-million disaster relief fund to provide impacted individuals with one-time, $600 payments.

While the fund wasn’t large enough to cover all of the workers’ losses, its creation was a big win, according to Aura Aguilar, an organizer with North Bay Jobs with Justice, a local coalition of labor and community groups leading the campaign. 

For the farmworkers advocating for the disaster relief, “it was a really big deal to be able to access these funds and to see the results of their hard work and their fight be seen on a countywide level,” says Aguilar.

The creation of the fund fits into a larger movement pushing for stronger protection and compensation for workers impacted by climate change-fueled disasters. In addition to disaster reimbursements, advocates are pushing for improved social safety net programs for vulnerable workers, hazard pay for those working during climate disasters and greater workplace protections for those impacted by heat, rain or polluted air.

In March, a month after Sonoma County decided to distribute $1 million, the state announced plans for a statewide program to pay undocumented individuals impacted by the storms. However, it ultimately didn’t begin until early June.

A flooded vineyard in Sonoma County. (Photo: Shutterstock)

Michael Méndez, an assistant professor at the University of California, Irvine, who has studied the health effects of wildfires on farmworkers, says that one-off disaster reimbursement programs are a step forward but ultimately insufficient now that the impacts of climate change are so apparent.

“In California, we’re experiencing a major climate change crisis. Year after year, month after month, we’re experiencing climate-induced disasters such as wildfires, heat waves, drought and now, of course, flooding,” says Méndez, adding that, again and again, undocumented workers are hardest hit in part because they are not covered by many social safety net programs.

What’s needed, according to Méndez, is “a permanent stable disaster fund that is readily available whenever these disasters strike instead of waiting months or even a half a year to provide the necessary resources needed to these workers and their families.”

[RELATED: California Farms and Farmworkers Attempt to Recover From Record Floods]

With a new bill, SB 227, California could set up a more permanent “safety net” for farmworkers, 75 percent of whom are undocumented, according to the UC Merced Community and Labor Center. On May 30, days before the state announced its program to reimburse those impacted by floods, the state Senate approved the bill, which would allow undocumented workers to collect unemployment insurance of up to $300 per week for up to 20 weeks. 

However, Méndez isn’t holding out hope that California Gov. Gavin Newsom will sign the legislation. The governor vetoed similar legislation last year and the state is currently facing a massive budget deficit.

Another proposal North Bay Jobs with Justice and other groups advocate for is hazard pay for workers working in areas with low air quality or other dangerous conditions.

Hazard pay policies were popular in the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, with dozens of California municipalities passing laws temporarily requiring some employers to boost wages for front-line workers at greater risk of infection from the virus.

However, despite being considered “essential,” agricultural workers were largely left out of those policies. A list of local hazard pay ordinances maintained by the UC Berkeley Labor Center shows that, out of 35 laws, only one, passed in the Central Valley city of Coachella, gave farmworkers hazard pay. Most of the ordinances boosted pay for grocery and retail employees.

While governments have not mandated hazard pay, at least two employers have agreed to offer it. Wine industry giant E. & J. Gallo Winery reportedly agreed to hazard pay in its latest contract with the United Farm Workers. And Sonoma Valley’s Eco Terreno Wines & Vineyards, a high-end, eco-friendly winery, announced it will offer hazard pay when air quality levels get to unsafe levels.

Smoke from 2020’s Walbridge Fire floats over a Sonoma County vineyard. (Photo: Shutterstock)

Looming in the background of the current movement for farmworker rights is a decades-long legal tradition of treating farmworkers differently from other workers, according to John Logan, a labor history professor at San Francisco State University.

Several foundational pieces of legislation, including the National Labor Relations Act of 1935, specifically excluded farmworkers from protections extended to workers in other industries.

That legal history has contributed to making agriculture one of the least unionized sectors of the American economy, with only a few states, including California, passing laws protecting farmworkers’ right to organize unions. Even in California, union organizing among farmworkers has declined for decades.

“The United Farm Workers Union has been most closely associated with farmworker organizing, and [it] has declined dramatically since the peak in the ‘60s and ‘70s,” says Logan. “At its height, it had between 50,000 and 60,000 members, down to about 5,000 or 6,000 today.”

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 10.1% of all American workers were union members in 2022, compared to 3.9% of workers in agriculture and related industries. Other estimates put the rate of unionized farmworkers even lower.

Last year, Newsom, under pressure, signed a law that allows farmworkers to vote in union elections by mail-in ballots rather than in person, a change that labor advocates hope will shield workers from possible intimidation by employers. It’s too soon to tell how much of an effect the law will have.

For Aguilar, the North Bay Jobs with Justice organizer in Sonoma County, the struggle comes back to how crucial farmworkers are.

“The wine industry would not exist without the skilled labor of farmworkers. That’s the reality. So any sort of compensation or any sort of funds that can go towards just respecting and dignifying farmworkers, I think that should be the priority,” she says.

The post In California, Climate Change Fuels Disasters—and a Push For More Farmworker Protections appeared first on Modern Farmer.

But the annual influx of seasonal cannabis farm workers is a thing of the past. Known locally as “trim-migrants,” crowds of energetic young folks would pass through each year to clip buds from the plants, once so prolific in the area’s single-crop gardens. 

Another way to visualize the change to “the ridge”—as the area between the middle and south fork of the Yuba River is known—is via Google Maps or a real-estate site such as Trulia. Zoom in using the satellite view to find an array of garden beds and greenhouses tucked back in the woods; search available properties and note all those advertising that the place comes with a “complete garden infrastructure.”

This is the fallout of California’s Proposition 64. In November 2016, the state legalized the growth and regulated sale of marijuana. And while it seemed to present an opportunity for the silent backbone of this and many other local economies across California, the actual effects of the regulation presented a much different cautionary tale.

In the fall of 2022, Nevada County, which stretches from California’s central valley to the state border with Nevada, counted fewer than 20 canopy acres of cannabis growing across 112 assigned permits. Darlene Markey, owner of Sweetland Garden Mercantile, knew of 25 local growers who registered with the county and tried to make a living growing and selling legal cannabis; today, she can think of only four who are actively growing and selling product. Those who kept their business on the black markets haven’t fared any better, she says.

According to the dozen or so growers I spoke with for this story, the new regulations, not to mention the plummeting prices from the commercial grow operations, have effectively boxed them out. The government has implemented a host of tests for THC potency and pesticides that growers find both arduous and often capricious. Even the building codes seemed targeted at keeping black market growers from making the transition to legality; all buildings on a grow property have to be fully permitted. While this is a standard requirement for any legal business, growers had been keeping their operation under the radar; to comply with the new regulations meant a sudden investment of big dollars. 

“I was excited at the beginning,” says Markey. “I thought a lot of these guys can finally have legal jobs. But it just backfired on everybody.”

Sweetland Garden Mercantile. Photography by Caleb Garling.

Ridge life

Growing pot on the ridge, an area I’ve called home since 2020, dates back to at least the 1960s, when those homesteaders looking to escape city life took an interest in the psychoactive plant.  Cultivating fruits and veggies in the Sierra Foothills comes with numerous environmental challenges—late frosts, blights, armies of deer and gophers—but the copious summer sun and font of springs and creeks meant the weed, so to speak, was a relatively easy crop. 

But in the early 1990s, the area started to see gardens move into heavier production levels. Growers didn’t yet have the legal cover of medicinal use and had to work beneath the canopy in complete secrecy. But the payoff was high. A pound of dried marijuana, which can be harvested from a plant or two, could sell for upwards of $6,000—big dollars anywhere, but especially for a rural area dependent on the ups and downs of mining, logging and ranching.

Pat, who spent 15 years as a grower on the ridge, and like the other former growers in this story elected to use a pseudonym in order to protect his employment opportunities, calls the early ’90s on the ridge a “very risky outlaw time” when “people had to grow a lot of plants for modest yield.”  

Then, in 1996, California legalized medicinal-use marijuana. Finding a doctor who could write a “prescription” to legitimize a grow was trivial, and by the early 2000s, word was out that there was money to be made in them hills. The area soon flooded with operations cultivating their allocated six plants. 

“The county had a different feeling then,” says Pat. “We would take our trim crews out for end-of-year celebrations and fill up restaurants. It was loose and free and even though the old guard curmudgeons would rail about pot publicly—it did attract some bad energy—they knew it was a golden goose.”

The money flowed not just for the local economy but for the seasonal workers. Trim-migrants skilled with a pair of scissors—there is a technique to cutting away the buds properly—could make up to $1,000 in a day. Yet the vibe was much less migrant working and far more party or Burning Man. The average trim-migrant tended to be young, free-wheeling, twenty- and thirty-somethings, from the US, Europe, Israel and affluent parts of Central and South America, using the earnings as a launching pad for more adventures abroad.

“I could make in two weeks what I’d spend in a year,” a former trim-migrant using the name “Conway” told me.

Conway eventually used the earnings to start his own grow operation. He and his crews would spend blistering summer afternoons agonizing over soil quality, staking the plants, catching pests, fixing irrigation systems and all the other ins and out of maximizing the plants’ yields—and then blow off steam at night, post up along the banks of the Yuba River for a swim or to plan their next trip. 

“I saw so many people attached to the lifestyle of growing,” says Conway, “despite the market.”

Preparing for harvest season at Hill Craft Farms. Photography courtesy of @hill_craft_farmsnc

Not that easy

The picture presents as a kind of libertarian, Wild West fun—and to many it was—but there were consequences. Most growers had stories of break-ins, robberies and plants being ripped off; there is the infamous tale of a kidnapping and deadly car chase down Highway 49. I had heard rumors of Mafia henchmen and cartels, and while such characters probably did get involved downstream, no one I spoke with could corroborate the idea they were running around causing problems on the ridge. 

“It was all decentralized and under the radar,” says Pat. “So, the big gangs and the mob didn’t have any central pressure point where they could extort money or lean on people.”

Law enforcement had a similar problem, but it was more active in tackling it. Even though grow operations were legal in the eyes of the state, federal law enforcement—whose laws supersede the state, according to the US Constitution—would spread through the hills (often with a supportive nod from the county) and arrest growers for their possession and intent to distribute a Schedule 1 substance. 

“People we knew went down every year,” says Pat. “Either in raids or in selling and transporting. The county and the feds were aggressive and relentless. It was a target-rich environment. I spent a while on my knees in the driveway with an AR15 to my head. [Law enforcement] loved doing that kind of stuff.”

Photography courtesy of @hill_craft_farmsnc

Seed the light

The bottom dropping out on cannabis growing wasn’t entirely due to legalization; the way cannabis was grown also went through a seismic shift. Light deprivation—or “light dep”—is the practice of planting in the winter months, as opposed to May and June, and allowing the plant to grow only for a short window of time, perhaps eight weeks. Growers then simulate shorter days—in other words, they simulate fall—by shielding the plant from the sun and induce the plant to flower early. (The cannabis flower is what’s harvested and smoked.)

This drastically changed the economics of selling. Typically, the market flooded with supply during the fall harvest. As such, prices tended to be at their lowest. But if a grower was “smart or able,” as a former grower using the name “Paul” put it to me, they held onto their product until the winter or spring, and sold when prices had come back up due to the dwindling supply. Conway, for instance, would bury his harvest in the woods for months until he was ready to sell.

But because light dep didn’t need the full summer to grow, cannabis began flooding the market in the off-months. With less scarcity, the bounceback in price weakened and the price curve flattened. In addition, says Paul, connoisseurs of marijuana, especially those in the club scenes, started to prefer light-dep weed over that grown in natural cycles.

“Yeah,” Conway grumbles when I ask how the technique changed business, “light dep fucked things up.” Essentially, he says, “People became addicted to freshness.”

What’s next

Many of the growers I spoke with have taken the change like any other in life; they’ve returned to their previous vocations as yoga instructors, builders, timber fellers and herbalists. Pat returned to his work as a music technician, Paul as a lawyer; Conway now sells solar energy systems.

Here and there, I did encounter some resentment among former growers towards the lack of public outcry for their cause. Despite the fact so many Californians and Americans abide or consume marijuana, there’s a comeuppance vibe many of them encounter when describing their story. “We were treated like criminals,” a grower told me. 

There’s also overwhelming frustration with the county and state. According to growers, county planners and legislators made appearances of taking their transition to legality into consideration, but, in the end, they released regulations that catered to commercial farms with big investment capital. 

The Cooper Brothers. Photography courtesy of @hill_craft_farmsnc

Daniel Cooper and his twin brother David have made the jump from black market growers to running the above-board Hill Craft Farms today. “The state regulations pulled the carpet from beneath us,” he says.

One of the deepest frustrations I’ve heard is that growers must sell to dispensaries, rather than be able to sell directly from their farms. Reminiscent of the “three-tier system” of alcohol distribution, where breweries and distilleries must sell to a third party distributor to reach stores and restaurants, the state argues the rule is to keep a close eye on a psychoactive substance. Still, it is a tough pill to swallow when California roads brim with stands selling fruits and veggies, not to mention the legions of microbreweries across towns and cities. 

Sweetland’s Markey hopes some day the ridge can be a place where connoisseurs come to taste and sample. “They do it in wine country,” she says with a wave towards Napa and Sonoma County. “Why can’t they do it with herb?”

When we spoke in January, the Cooper brothers said they were getting close to finding their groove in this new world of legal growing, even if, like many farmers, the profits are razor thin. But they came to the ridge 16 years ago to do this and they have no plans of giving up now.

“It’s not just growing,” says Daniel. “It’s a whole culture. We’re holding it down because it’s what we love.”

The post California’s Artisanal Cannabis Farms Were Supposed to Help Build The Legal Market. Then the Bottom Dropped Out appeared first on Modern Farmer.

After a year of intense negotiations, the states along the Colorado River have reached a deal to solve one of the most complex water crises in US history. The solution to this byzantine conundrum is deceptive in its simplicity: pay farmers—who collectively use 80 percent of Colorado River deliveries—to give up their water.

Representatives from Arizona, Nevada, and California announced on Monday that they had agreed to reduce their states’ collective water usage by more than 3 million acre-feet over the next three years. That equals around a trillion gallons, or roughly 13 percent of the states’ total water usage. Under the terms of the deal, cities and irrigation districts in these so-called “Lower Basin” states will receive around $1.2 billion from the Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act, or IRA, in exchange for using less water. Most of the reductions are likely to come from farming operations.

Many had anticipated a more painful resolution to the crisis. Rather than taking mandatory cuts and losing out on billions of dollars from crop sales, irrigators in the southwest will get millions of dollars to reduce their water usage for just three years—and will cut their usage by less than half of what federal officials demanded last year.

This rosy outcome is only possible because of a wet winter that blanketed the river basin with snow and stabilized water levels in its two main reservoirs, Lake Powell and Lake Mead. Thanks to the ample runoff, the states could lower their target enough that the federal government could afford to compensate them for almost all of it.

This deal also resolves a key dispute between Arizona and California, the two largest water users on the river, which have clashed over how to respond to the water shortage. California has argued that Arizona should take the most cuts as the most junior user on the river, while Arizona argued that the cuts should be spread more evenly between all the states. The disagreement caused negotiations to drag out for months, and it’s only thanks to the payout from the federal government that they reached an accord.

These compensated cuts are larger than anything the river states have ever implemented before, but they are temporary, a Band-Aid for a crisis that is not going away any time soon. When the three-year agreement expires in 2026, the states will have to come back to the table again and address the elephant in the room: If water use is growing, and the river’s size is shrinking, some people are going to have to make do with less—not temporarily, but for good.

“This is a step in the right direction but a temporary solution,” said Dave White, a professor at Arizona State University who studies sustainability policy. “This deal does not address the long-term water sustainability challenges in the region.”

The basic blueprint of the deal is not new. Federal and state agencies in the Colorado River basin have tried to pay farmers to use less water before, but they have had difficulty scaling up these compensation measures. That’s in part because many farmers view the measures as an affront to their industry, even when they’re compensated. When a group of states in the river’s Upper Basin relaunched a dormant conservation program earlier this year, offering farmers money to leave their fields unplanted, just 88 water users across four states ended up participating.

The other issue is that conserving water is expensive. In order to convince farmers to plant fewer acres, officials need to give them more money per acre-foot of water than they would have made from selling crops on a given field. In California’s Imperial Valley, the “salad bowl” region that grows almost all the nation’s winter vegetables, irrigation officials have paid growers to invest in technology that makes their farms more efficient. But farmers in the valley have balked at the idea of taking money to leave their fields unplanted, especially as vegetable prices have remained high.

“Water is a valuable asset, and I think people are nervous about parting with it, because it kind of suggests that you don’t really need it after all,” said George Frisvold, an extension specialist at the University of Arizona who studies agricultural policy. “I think there’s real concern that this is voluntary now, but it could come back and bite you.”

The Biden administration has resolved those issues for the moment by offering a very generous price for conservation under the new deal. The compensation arrangement in the new deal works out to about $521 an acre-foot on average—three times the price in the Upper Basin pilot program and almost twice the conservation rate in the Imperial Valley’s program.

Frisvold says these payments will be hard to maintain over the long term.

“We have a bunch of IRA money to pay for this right now,” he told Grist. “But is this going to be an ongoing thing? It’s kind of up in the air.”

Until recently, these experimental conservation programs were just that—experiments. But over the past two years, as a once-in-a-millennium drought has all but emptied out the river’s two main reservoirs, the river states have scrambled to cut their water usage and stop draining the river. It is all but impossible to do that without using less water for agriculture.

The Biden administration kicked off the scramble last summer by delivering an ultimatum to the river states. While testifying before Congress in June, a senior official from the US Bureau of Reclamation ordered the states to cut their water consumption by between 2 and 4 million acre-feet, or as much as a third of the river’s normal annual flow. The administration threatened to impose unilateral water cuts if the states couldn’t reach a deal on their own.

The states tangled for months over who should shoulder the burden of reducing water usage. The so-called Upper Basin states of Colorado, Utah, Wyoming, and New Mexico pointed the finger at Arizona and California, which together consume the majority of the river’s water. Meanwhile, representatives from California insisted that legal precedent shields the Golden State from taking cuts and that Arizona should bear the pain. (It isn’t clear whether the other four states on the river’s Upper Basin will make any corresponding reductions.)

In the end it was a very wet winter rather than a diplomatic breakthrough that helped ease tension between the states. Thanks to historic snowpack in the Rocky Mountains, it’s likely that water levels at Lake Powell and Lake Mead will stabilize this summer, even if just for a few months. This plentiful runoff has made the worst-case outcomes for the river much less likely and has given the states some breathing room to negotiate smaller cuts.

The new target was just small enough to make voluntary conservation feasible with the money from the Inflation Reduction Act: In the final hours of the debate over the bill last year, Senator Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona negotiated a $4 billion tranche of funding for “drought response.” That money will anchor the deal for the next three years, but it’s unclear whether payments will continue after that.

The big question now is what happens at the end of 2026, when the conservation deal will expire and when states and tribes will gather to negotiate the river’s long-term future. At that point, the river’s water users will once again debate the big questions that this deal has allowed them to punt on: How much water use can a shrinking river support? Who should use less water to account for the river’s decline? How can the government make whole the tribal nations that still don’t have their water?

Even amid the relief surrounding Monday’s deal, some water officials were already looking ahead.

“This proposal protects the system in the short term so we can dedicate our energy and resources to a longer-term solution,” said Brenda Burman, the manager of the Central Arizona Project water authority, which delivers water to Phoenix and Tucson, in a press release. “There’s a lot to do and it’s time to focus.”

This article originally appeared in Grist. Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Learn more at Grist.org.

The post At Last, States Reach a Colorado River Deal: Pay Farmers Not to Farm appeared first on Modern Farmer.

On busy weekends, crowds of locavores routinely swell to 15,000. “Customers come from all over,” says Gha Xiong, owner of Xiong Farm. He’s one of nearly 150 regional farmers, ranchers and food purveyors who set up Sunday shop in the sprawling parking lot, in clear view of the Prairie-style dome and spire designed by Frank Lloyd Wright.

For nearly two decades, Xiong and his wife, Kou Yang, have made the weekly, three-hour trek from their family farm outside of Fresno, where they grow a diverse range of Hmong and Asian produce such as bitter melon, bok choy and daikon. While business is normally brisk, an overly wet and drawn-out winter drowned their low-lying fields and delayed spring planting by nearly six weeks. Consequently, recent offerings have been slim. “People say, ‘You sold out so early today.’ No, [it’s just that] we don’t have enough to fill our tables,” he says, gesturing to the thinning pile of greens.

The Sunday Marin Farmers Market is the third largest in California. (Photo: Naoki Nitta/Modern Farmer)

For California farmers, relentless precipitation and a late spring are just the latest in a mounting list of challenges exacerbated by extreme climate, spiraling costs and increased environmental regulations. But the pressures exact a larger toll on independent producers like Xiong, many of whom lack the resources of the industrial giants that dominate the landscape. As a result, the state loses an average of four small-scale farms every day.

The recently proposed California Local Food Producers Bill (AB 1197) aims to stop the hemorrhaging by giving independently owned farms an official state designation and better support those who grow food for their communities. Although the bill isn’t directly tied to funding or other assistance, proponents say the legal definition would help target resources, state programs and future policies to help bolster the local food economy.

Small-scale producers play a vital role in supplying not just farmers markets but restaurants, community-supported agriculture (CSA) programs and food hubs, says Jamie Fanous, policy director at Community Alliance with Family Farmers (CAFF), a California-based, non-profit advocacy group and a major bill sponsor. “This is a path to designate who they are, so we can figure out how to protect those facing the highest pressures.”

A top-heavy landscape

The bill assigns values to “Local Food Producers,” defining them as independently owned farms in California that operate on less than 500 acres and sell more than 75 percent of products to their local community. (“Local,” however, remains a less-precise category, extending to the whole state.) The California Cattlemen’s Association, a non-profit trade group representing the state’s beef and dairy interests, has opposed the acreage limit, citing greater land needs for grazing cattle. In response, Assemblymember Gary Hart (D), who introduced the bill, is working to create a separate threshold to accommodate ranchers. “I am confident we will find the common ground to earn [their] support,” he told Modern Farmer in an email.

According to the 2017 Census of Agriculture, farms measuring less than 500 acres make up the backbone of U.S. agriculture, accounting for 85 percent of the overall landscape. Although that number inches up to 90 percent in California, two-thirds of its growers operate on less than 50 acres, helping to make the country’s biggest food producer also its most diverse.

Yet the largest five percent of properties make up more than half of the Golden State’s nearly 25 million acres of cropland, while 37 percent of fields and pastures are leased out by non-farmers. “So there’s a pretty significant power imbalance, where the majority of land is really owned by a few [parties],” says Fanous.

That shifts the foundations of California’s agricultural system away from individual and family growers to large companies and absentee landlords, many with weak ties to the local community. Often backed by speculative investment and run by farm management companies, she adds that these deep-pocketed operations are better equipped to weather the challenges of farming. 

California faces a particularly unique set of issues that heighten the impacts. Like the rest of the nation, the state contends with extreme weather and temperatures, pest infestations and decreased crop resilience. “But our farmers are constantly dealing with the whiplash of drought, wildfires and floods,” says Fanous. “It seems like every two to three months, there’s something new.”

Additionally, development pressure gobbles up 50,000 acres of cropland every year. And for independent growers, the majority of whom lease their fields, skyrocketing land prices continue to take a larger bite out of their profit margins; Xiong, the Fresno farmer, reports that the rent on his five-acre farm has nearly tripled in the last decade.

“And we only anticipate things to get worse as a result of the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act,” adds Fanous, referencing California’s strict limits on pumping groundwater. Enacted to replenish the state’s overtapped basins, research shows that the regulations could end up fallowing as much as 900,000 acres of farmland along the way.

Many small-scale growers—immigrants and historically underrepresented groups in particular—lack robust safety nets, says Fanous. Only eight percent of California farms receive public subsidies, few carry crop insurance and government aid is often laden with paperwork, bureaucracy and delayed payouts. That leaves them highly vulnerable to consolidation, which, she notes, has ramped up in recent years, further tipping the balance of power in favor of big industry.

Labels matter

“It often feels like we go from one [crowdfunding] to another, just so we can keep farmers in California,” says Andy Naja-Riese, chief executive director of the Agricultural Institute of Marin (AIM). The non-profit operates nine farmers markets throughout the San Francisco Bay Area, including its flagship at the Marin County Civic Center, drawing more than 350 farmers, food purveyors and artisans from 40 California counties. They also serve 47,000 shoppers who use CalFresh—California’s version of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP)—annually.

A recent survey reveals that this past winter’s storms hit AIM vendors hard: More than 75 percent missed market days, with a quarter experiencing property damage and 40 percent losing inventory. “The majority of producers rely on the markets and other local sales outlets to make their living,” says Naja-Riese. With many operating on razor-thin margins, “missed days and delayed sales have a huge impact on their business.”

Crop Swap LA operates three micro farms located in residential yards. (Photo courtesy Crop Swap LA)

In the past decade, California has seen nearly a fifth of its farmers markets and a third of its certified producers vanish. Giving local producers a legal designation is a key step in reversing the trend, says Fanous. “In order to protect a community, you need to first define [them], then map them to know where they are.”

The Farmer Equity Act, for instance, set the foundation for promoting equitable agricultural policies by identifying socially disadvantaged groups. Similarly, a local food producer designation allows effective inclusion or exclusion in measures such as water restrictions, grant and relief programs and technical resources, adds Fanous. “We could utilize this definition to exempt these producers from X, or prioritize for Y when it comes to, say, water or land issues.”

The label is every bit as relevant to urban growers and their communities, says Jamiah Hargins, executive director of Crop Swap LA, another bill supporter. The South Los Angeles-based CSA operates three micro farms located on slivers of residential yards. At just over one acre, Crop Swap LA grows a range of produce such as leafy greens, tomatoes and okra and distributes them weekly to 70 families within a tight, one-mile radius. The hyper-local system, says Hargins, ensures subscribers—many from underserved communities of color—with direct and reliable access to fresh, affordable and sustainably grown food.

Urban farms are an important investment in not just food security but community well-being and the local economy, says Hargins. “But in a city like LA, [real estate] is a money game,” he says, of the relentless threat that development poses to their existence. “So, hopefully, the bill will create a solid structure that helps us hold onto and guarantee our gains.”

While California grows most of the country’s produce, “the whole food system is set up to support industrial agriculture,” adds AIM’s Naja-Riese. “We can create better standards for what it means to feed your local community and put some meaning behind that.”

The post California’s ‘Local Food Producers’ Hope Proposed New Label Will Boost Support  appeared first on Modern Farmer.