UCCE’s Sierra Foothill Research and Extension Center has posted the entire January 29th seminar, “Drought Mitigation in Livestock Production” on YouTube. To access all 14 seminar videos, visit: https://www.youtube.com/user/ucsfrec?feature=watch.
EPA has created a new area on its website containing all of its information on Pesticide Registration. Pulling from existing material, the new pesticide registration area is designed to help users find what they need easily and quickly.
Under clearly defined topic headings, visitors to this new Web area will have easy access to information on:
Under the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act (FIFRA), EPA regulates all pesticides that are sold and distributed in the United States.
The term “pesticides” includes pesticides, herbicides, rodenticides, antimicrobial products, biopesticides, and other substances used to control a wide variety of pests.
A pesticide product is defined as a pesticide in the particular form (including composition, packaging, and labeling) in which the pesticide is, or is intended to be, distributed or sold and includes any physical apparatus used to deliver or apply the pesticide if distributed or sold with the pesticide.
The League of Women voters will host two seminars focusing on current issues in agriculture during the month of March.
The first seminar, “Agriculture’s Economic Health,” is scheduled to take place on Wednesday, March 5.
Panelists include Paul Betancourt, grower; Jerry Prieto, former Fresno County agricultural commissioner; Dr. Daniel Sumner, UC Davis agriculture economist; and Jeff Yasui, USDA Risk Management.
The second seminar, “From Animal Management to Food Safety,” will take place Wednesday, March 19. Panelists include Bill Griffin, Fresno County Department of Agriculture; Charlene McLaughlin, a bovine veterinarian; Kiel Schmidt, organic farmer; and Paul Wenger, California Farm Bureau Federation president.
Each seminar will take place from 11:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. at the Community Media Access Collaborative (CMAC), 1555 Van Ness, Fresno.
The seminars are free and open to the public. Participants should bring lunch; a snack and beverage will be provided. Relevant articles can be found at http://fresno.ca.lwvnet.org/.
Today, USDA finalized changes to the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children (WIC) to further improve the nutrition and health of the nation’s low-income pregnant women, new mothers, infants and young children.
The changes – which increase access to fruits and vegetables, whole grains and low-fat dairy – are based on the latest nutrition science. Today’s announcement marks the completion of the first comprehensive revisions to the WIC food packages since 1980.
Along with a more than 30 percent increase in the dollar amount for children’s fruits and vegetables purchases, the changes also:
Over 8.5 million participants receive WIC benefits each month. Recent research by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has identified changes to the WIC food packages as a contributing factor in the decline in obesity rates among low-income preschoolers in many States.
United Fresh Produce Association President & CEO Tom Stenzel issued this statement Today in response to USDA’s publication of the Final Rule on the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC): Revisions to the WIC Food Package:
We applaud USDA’s emphasis on increasing fruit and vegetable consumption among low-income, nutritionally at-risk pregnant and breastfeeding women, and their infants and young children who participate in the WIC program. The final rule increases the cash-value of the fruit and vegetable vouchers for children to $8 per month; allows WIC mothers to receive a voucher for fresh fruits and vegetables instead of jarred baby foods for their infants; and allows WIC mothers to add cash (split tender) at check out to their fruit and vegetable vouchers to maximize their purchases. All of these provisions will increase fruit and vegetable consumption among WIC mothers and their young children.
Our only disappointment is that we continue to believe that WIC vouchers should include all fresh fruits and vegetables, without added fats, sugar or sodium, including fresh white potatoes.
For more than a decade, United Fresh has been a leading advocate for including fruits and vegetables in the WIC food packages. United played a leadership role in urging USDA and Congress to update WIC food packages to include fruits and vegetables, and has worked with the National WIC Association and advocates to increase the value of the fruit and vegetable vouchers for mothers and children.
The CDC has recently recognized the important role that the WIC Program’s nutrition education and food package changes that added healthy items like fruits and vegetables has played in decreasing childhood obesity by 43 percent among 2-5 year olds.
Founded in 1904, the United Fresh Produce Association serves companies at the forefront of the global fresh and fresh-cut produce industry, including growers, shippers, fresh-cut processors, wholesalers, distributors, retailers, foodservice operators, industry suppliers and allied associations.
United Fresh and its members work year-round to make a difference for the produce industry by driving policies that increase consumption of fresh produce, shaping critical legislative and regulatory action, providing scientific and technical leadership in food safety, quality assurance, nutrition and health, and developing educational programs and business opportunities to assist member companies in growing successful businesses.
As 2013 came to a close, the drought was reported to have been the driest year in California since records began to be kept in the 1840s. That was, academically speaking, not quite the truth.
“This could potentially be the driest water year in 500 years,” says B. Lynn Ingram, a UC Berkeley paleoclimatologist professor of earth and planetary science and geography.
B. Lynn Ingram
As a paleoclimatologist, Ingram analyzes sediments and archaeological deposits to determine how climates change over the course of millennia. And according to the width of old tree rings (which can record the coming and going of wet or waterless stretches), California hasn’t been so parched since 1580.
“These extremely dry years are very rare,” she says.
But soon, perhaps, they won’t be as rare as they used to be. The state is facing its third drought year in a row, and Ingram wouldn’t be surprised if that dry stretch continues.
“If you go back thousands of years, you see that droughts can go on for years if not decades, and there were some dry periods that lasted over a century,” Ingram said in a recent interview with Steve Hockensmith, UC Berkeley NewsCenter. “The 20th century was unusually mild here, in the sense that the droughts weren’t as severe as in the past. It was a wetter century, and a lot of our development has been based on that.”
Ingram continued, “The late 1930s to the early 1950s were when a lot of our dams and aqueducts were built, and those were wetter decades. I think there’s an assumption that we’ll go back to that, and that’s not necessarily the case. We might be heading into a drier period now. It’s hard for us to predict, but that’s a possibility, especially with global warming.”
“When the climate’s warmer,” she said, “it tends to be drier in the West. The storms tend to hit further into the Pacific Northwest, like they are this year, and we don’t experience as many storms in the winter season. We get only about seven a year, and it can take the deficit of just a few to create a drought.”
“Yet, if you look at the past, you realize that our climate is anything but reliable. We’ve seen these big fluctuations. Extreme droughts and extreme floods.”
The co-authors want the public to know that if you’re going to buy a house in the Central Valley, you should know about these floods. “And we have to start assuming that we could go into one of these longer droughts and maybe start doing some serious conservation and rethinking of agriculture here,” Ingram commented.
Together, B. Lynn Ingram, Professor of Earth & Planetary Science and Geography, UC Berkeley; and Frances Malamud-Roam, Associate Environmental Planner and Biologist, Caltrans; Visiting Scholar, UC Berkeley; co-authored The West Without Water: What Past Floods, Droughts, and Other Climatic Clues Tell Us About Tomorrow, which was released by the University of California Press last year.
The West without Water documents the tumultuous climate of the American West over twenty millennia, including past droughts and deluges and predictions about future climate change and water resources. Looking at the region’s current water crisis from the perspective of its climate history, the authors ask the central question of what is “normal” climate for the West, and whether the relatively benign climate of the past century will continue into the future.
The authors show that, while the West may have temporarily buffered itself from such harsh climatic swings by creating artificial environments and human landscapes, our modern civilization may be ill-prepared for the predicted climate changes and warn that we must face the realities of the past and prepare for a future in which fresh water may be less reliable.
The co-authors will present their ideas and research at The Commonwealth Club’s “In conversation” with Lisa Krieger, Science and Medical Research Reporter, San Jose Mercury News on Tuesday, Mar 11, 2014 at 6:30pm at the Lafayette Library, 3491 Mt. Diablo Blvd., Lafayette.
Join Ingram and co-author Frances Malamud-Roam for a discussion on California’s current water crisis, the region’s climatic past and predictions about the future of climate change and its effect on water resources.
For the second consecutive year, the University of California, Davis, ranks No. 1 in the world for teaching and research in the area of agriculture and forestry, according to rankings released today by QS World University Rankings.
The organization — which provides annual rankings in 29 other subject areas — also ranked UC Davis among the top 15 in environmental sciences and among the top 35 in civil and structural engineering.“We are proud to receive these outstanding rankings because they reflect both the long-established and emerging strengths of our university,” said UC Davis Chancellor Linda P.B. Katehi. 
“Our agricultural programs date back more than 100 years to the very founding of the Davis campus and cover an amazingly broad spectrum of disciplines that support agricultural endeavors throughout the nation and abroad,” she said.
UC Davis’ College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences was founded in 1905 as the University of California’s University Farm. Today, it has more than 6,200 undergraduate students in 27 majors and more than 1,000 graduate students in 45 graduate groups and programs. Its programs have characteristically received top-tier rankings from the Chronicle of Higher Education, U.S. News & World Report and ISI Essential Science Indicators.
More than 3,000 acres of UC Davis’ 5,000-acre campus are devoted to agricultural research.
UC Davis also is home to the World Food Center, established in 2013 to increase the economic benefits from research across campus; influence national and international policy; and convene teams of scientists and innovators from industry, academia, government and nongovernmental organizations to tackle food-related challenges in California and around the world.
UC Davis, overall, was ranked ninth in 2013 among the nation’s public universities by U.S. News & World Report.
The QS World University Rankings by Subject this year evaluated a total of 2,838 universities and ranked 689 institutions. The rankings are prepared by Quacquarelli Symonds (QS), a British firm that previously was the data provider for the annual Times Higher Education rankings. The firm is widely considered to be one of the most influential international university rankings providers.
About UC Davis
For more than 100 years, UC Davis has been one place where people are bettering humanity and our natural world while seeking solutions to some of our most pressing challenges.
Located near the state capital, UC Davis has more than 33,000 students, over 2,500 faculty and more than 21,000 staff, an annual research budget of over $750 million, a comprehensive health system and 13 specialized research centers.
The university offers interdisciplinary graduate study and more than 100 undergraduate majors in four colleges — Agricultural and Environmental Sciences, Biological Sciences, Engineering, and Letters and Science. It also houses six professional schools — Education, Law, Management, Medicine, Veterinary Medicine and the Betty Irene Moore School of Nursing.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) will provide close to $3 million in technical and financial assistance for interested farmers and ranchers to help improve the health of bees, which play an important role in crop production, particularly in California.
The funding is a focused investment to improve pollinator health and will be targeted in five Midwestern states, Michigan, Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Wisconsin, where California farmers procure their bees.
USDA reports that Honey bee pollination supports an estimated $15 billion worth of agricultural production, including more than 130 fruits and vegetables that are the foundation of a nutritious diet.
California’s 800,000 acres of almond orchards typically require 1.8 million domesticated bee colonies, just to pollinate its almond trees alone.
The future security of America’s food supply depends on healthy honey bees,” said Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack. “Expanded support for research, combined with USDA’s other efforts to improve honey bee health, should help America’s beekeepers combat the current, unprecedented loss of honey bee hives each year.”
Funding will be provided through the Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP) to promote conservation practices that will provide honey bees with nutritious pollen and nectar while providing benefits to the environment. Recent studies have shown that beekeepers are losing approximately 30 percent of their honey bee colonies each year, up from historical norms of ten to fifteen percent overwintering losses experienced prior to 2006.
This assistance will provide guidance and support to farmers and ranchers to implement conservation practices that will provide safe and diverse food sources for honey bees. For example, appropriate cover crops or rangeland and pasture management may provide a benefit to producers by reducing erosion, increasing the health of their soil, inhibiting invasive species, providing quality forage and habitat for honey bees and other pollinators, as well as habitat for other wildlife.
Midwestern states were chosen because from June to September the region is the resting ground for over 65 percent of the commercially managed honey bees in the country. It is a critical time when bees require abundant and diverse forage across broad landscapes to build up hive strength for the winter.
Applications are due March 21, 2014.
February 26th is a day for all to celebrate National Pistachio Day. It is a day that has been set aside for all pistachio lovers to eat their favorite nut all day long.
Besides their great taste, pistachios are an excellent source of vitamin B6, copper and manganese and a good source of protein, fiber, thiamin, and phosphorus. In July 2003, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved the first qualified health claim specific to nuts lowering the risk of heart disease: “Scientific evidence suggests but does not prove that eating 1.5 ounces (42.5g) per day of most nuts, such as pistachios, as part of a diet low in saturated fat and cholesterol may reduce the risk of heart disease”
In addition to all the health benefits that pistachios offer, the empty pistachio shells are useful for recycling in several ways. Practical uses include as a fire starter, just as kindling would be used with crumpled paper; to line the bottom of pots containing houseplants, for drainage and retention of soil for up to two years; as a mulch for shrubs and plants that require acid soils: as a medium for orchids; and as an addition to a compost pile designed for wood items that take longer to decompose than leafy materials, taking up to a year for pistachio shells to decompose unless soil is added to the mix.
Shells from salted pistachios can also be placed around the base of plants to deter slugs and snails. Many craft uses for the shells include holiday tree ornaments, jewelry, mosaics, and rattles. Research indicates that pistachio shells may be helpful in cleaning up pollution created by mercury emissions.
Source: National Day Calendar
The ninth Farm & Nutrition Day, sponsored by the Fresno County Farm Bureau, the Big Fresno Fair and Friends of the Fair, is scheduled for March 21, from 9 a.m. to 12:45 p.m., at the Fresno Fairgrounds. This year’s program is experiencing record registration from schools throughout the county!
Farm & Nutrition Day will provide facts about food and fiber production in Fresno County, with a focus on proper nutrition and healthy eating to more than 4,000 third grade students, teachers and chaperones. The sponsoring organizations are seeking individuals to participate as presenters, sponsors and volunteers.
Additionally, donations, both monetary and in-kind of any amount, go a long way to help offset event costs. Many contributions will go towards transportation reimbursements for participating schools that qualify.
Donations to Farm & Nutrition Day are tax deductible and can be made payable to: Fresno Regional Foundation, tax ID# 77-0478025. Mail check to: Farm & Nutrition Day, c/o Fresno County Farm Bureau, 1274 W. Hedges Ave., Fresno, CA 93728.
Donors will be recognized in advance publicity for the event, on signage at the event, and in follow-up publicity about the event via FCFB’s monthly newspaper Agriculture Today, and via news releases. Those donors who wish to remain anonymous will have their wishes honored, as well.
For additional details, please contact Katie Rodgers at 559-237-0263 or via email at info@fcfb.org, or visit www.fcfb.org to sign up today.
IRVINE, Calif., Jan. 28 (UPI) — Irrigation in California’s Central Valley doubles the amount of water vapor in the atmosphere, increasing rainfall across the U.S. Southwest, researchers say.
Scientists at the University of California, Irving, report when moisture on the vast farm fields evaporates, the vapor is blown over the Sierra Nevada mountains and dumps 15 percent more than average summer rain in numerous other states.
While the additional water falling on adjacent states can be beneficial, they said, it can also increase the strength of storms and other potentially destructive seasonal weather events.
“If we stop irrigating in the Valley, we’ll see a decrease in stream flow in the Colorado River basin,” which provides water for about 35 million people and the cities of Los Angeles, Las Vegas and Phoenix, climate hydrologist Jay Famiglietti said.
But the extra water vapor also accelerates normal atmospheric circulation, “firing up” the annual storm cycle and drawing in more water vapor from the Gulf of Mexico, the researchers wrote in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.
When the additional amounts of moisture are fed into developing storms, Famiglietti said, “it’s like throwing fuel on a fire.”
Understanding irrigation’s impact on changing climate and water availability could improve emergency planning in parched or flooded areas, the researchers said.
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