Western Growers Has New Innovation VP

Western Growers Hires Walt Duflock as
Vice President, Innovation

Increasing its industry-leading efforts to quicken the pace of technology solutions for the fresh produce industry, Western Growers has added Walt Duflock as Vice President, Innovation. In this role, Duflock will be singularly focused on accelerating agtech for Western Growers (WG) member companies, including expanding the footprint of the Western Growers Center for Innovation & Technology (WGCIT), a premier agtech incubator located in Salinas, Calif.

“The need for innovative technology in our members’ fields and facilities has never been more urgent,” said WG President and CEO Dave Puglia. “Walt Duflock has guided many technology entrepreneurs and brings a demonstrated ability to propel growth in the agriculture technology sector. I am thrilled that Walt will now join WGCIT Director Dennis Donohue, who is driving tangible progress on key agtech initiatives such as automation and food safety enhancement. Together, Walt and Dennis will further strengthen our ability to drive rapid commercialization of the technologies our members need to thrive into the next generation.”

Duflock brings over 25 years of experience in the agriculture and technology sectors, with an emphasis on startup development. In addition to his involvement in his fifth-generation family ranch in Monterey County, Duflock has dedicated his career to building programs and strategies at high-growth Silicon Valley startups, including eBay, MerchantCircle (now Reply) and APTARE (now Veritas). In his most recent role, Duflock served as Executive Innovation Leader for SVG Ventures THRIVE.

“I am excited to be joining the WG team and look forward to working with farmers and startups to increase the speed and scale of solutions, especially for food safety and labor automation,” said Duflock. “My decades of experience in agriculture and working with Silicon Valley startups, along with building a successful agtech accelerator, give me the right set of skills to lead WG’s innovation initiative.”

Duflock earned a B.S. degree in Business from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo and a law degree from Santa Clara University. He is active in his local community and serves on several volunteer boards, including the Los Gatos United Soccer League and Rancho Cielo, which aims to transform the lives of at-risk youth. In 2019, Duflock launched SAGE, a 501(c)(6) that focuses on sustainable ag and energy and vibrant rural economies.

California Ag Today2020-10-29T14:06:49-07:00October 29th, 2020|

Almond Orchard Recycling Research

Farm Advisor and Almond Grower Working on Orchard Recycling

By Patrick Cavanaugh with the Ag Information Network

A farm advisor is working with a grower on an almond recycling program. Mae Culumber is a UCANR nut crop advisor in Fresno County. And she’s working on orchard recycling.

“ I have several different trials going on. One is on orchard recycling. We been working with a commercial grower where his trees have got to third leaf,” Culumber said. “And so they were doing their first shaking harvest of a Nonpareil and the Monterey variety and he was nice enough to when he planted the orchard, he let us set up a replicated experiment where we had control areas in the orchard where no chips were spread.”

Now, the chips are there because when the trees were pushed over and run through a chipper, the chimps were put back in the orchard as a orchard recycling program.

“They let us cordon off areas for different one acre plots where there were no wood chips applied. So now we’ve been able to go back in and look at yield differences between what would be like a normal planting versus one was wood chips,” she said. “And we’re still in the process of doing the crack out and analyzing the data. But we’ll be looking to see if there’s any early on yield differences.”

“We’ve been looking at differences in tree growth, you know, things like that,” she said.

California Ag Today2020-10-28T12:50:13-07:00October 28th, 2020|

Natural Habitats Help With Pest Control

How Surrounding Natural Habitats Can Shape Pest Outbreaks and Pesticide Use in Vineyards

Photo at top is Daniel “Dani” Paredes

Natural landscapes surrounding vineyards can decrease pest outbreaks and depress pesticide use, according to a UC Davis paper published in the current edition of the journal Ecology Letters.

A five-member team led by postdoctoral researcher Daniel “Dani” Paredes of the Daniel Karp lab, UC Davis Department of Wildlife, Fish and Conservation Biology (WFCB), analyzed a 13-year government database to assess how the landscapes surrounding 400 Spanish vineyards influenced European grapevine moth (Lobesia botrana) outbreaks and insecticides application rates.

The article, “Landscape Simplification Increases Vineyard Pest Outbreaks and Insecticide Use,” is now online.

“At harvest, we found pest outbreaks increased four-fold in simplified, vineyard-dominated landscapes compared to complex landscapes in which vineyards are surrounded by semi-natural habitats,” said lead author Paredes, who holds a doctorate in environmental sciences (2014) from the University of Granada, Spain. “Overall, our results suggest that simplified landscapes increase vineyard pest outbreaks and escalate insecticide spray frequencies. In contrast, vineyards surrounded by more productive habitats and more shrubland area are less likely to apply insecticides.”

Vineyard in Montilla Spain

Landscapes around farms are rarely managed to suppress damaging crop pests, partially because researchers rarely measure the key variables that drive farming decisions. This paper, however “shows how using really huge datasets—in this case generated by government employees working with farmers in Spain–can reveal how natural habitats surrounding agriculture can shape pest outbreaks and pesticide use in vineyards,” said co-author Jay Rosenheim, distinguished professor in the UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology.

Their results suggest that landscape simplification could affect not only farm yields, but also environmental and human health. They noted that insecticide applications doubled in vineyard-dominated landscapes but declined in vineyards surrounded by shrubland. “Habitat conservation thus represents an economically and environmentally sound approach for achieving sustainable grape production in Spain,” said Karp.

Why might pests be more of a problem on vineyards surrounded by more vineyards? One possibility is that vast stretches of vineyards allow pest populations to build up quickly. Another possibility is that simple vineyard landscapes may not contain enough resources to support predatory insects that natural control vineyard pests. Whatever the reason, it seems clear that “cultivating crops in monoculture creates the perfect conditions for specialist pest outbreaks,” they related, so “farmers have consistently turned to insecticides to maintain high yields under constant pest pressure.”

A solution? At an individual level, farmers may better control L. botrana populations through planting native vegetation in and around their farm. Ideally, they would coordinate with each other to maintain and/or restore large patches of productive, shrubland habitats in the surrounding landscape.

Other co-authors are Rebecca Chaplin-Kramer, Natural Capital Project, Stanford University; and Silvia Winter, Institute of Plant Protection, University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences, Vienna, Austria.

Their work was financed by the research project SECBIVIT, or “scenarios for providing multiple ecosystem services and biodiversity in viticultural landscapes,” and a National Science Foundation/USA grant.

California Ag Today2020-10-26T10:52:39-07:00October 26th, 2020|

Smoke Taint May Impact 2020 Vintage

2020 Winegrape Vintage May be Impacted by Smoke Taint

By Tim Hammerich with the AgInformation Network

As the 2020 grape finishes up , so do concerns about how smoke-tainted grapes might impact wine quality. Growers are getting samples tested, but labs are inundated.

“The backlog at labs are now like around anything from 5-30 days, depending on what lab you’re sending it to,” said Dr. Anita Oberholster a cooperative extension specialist in enology.

She says many of the results are falling into a grey area which can really limit a grower’s options.

“What sometimes happens is because there’s this huge gray area a winery would say: Okay, I will accept your fruit. However, if the wine ends up being impacted, I will pay you only this percentage of the value of your fruit. Or I will send you the fruit back and you need to pay me for my processing costs,” said Oberholster.

That grey area is due to the fact that there are not industry standards for how much of these compounds are tolerable in the fruit. In some cases growers have insurance that can help recoup some of their costs.

“If you have a higher end contract, some insurance contracts will give you some money for decrease in quality. So if it gets rejected down the line, you can potentially still put a claim in, but it really depends on your specific insurance,” Oberholster said.

California Ag Today2020-10-21T12:51:52-07:00October 21st, 2020|

New Reporting Obligations For COVID-10

Employer’s New Notice and Reporting Obligations for COVID-19 Workplace Exposure

Written by The Saqui Law Group and Jorge Lopez Espindola

In response to the Coronavirus Pandemic, the California Legislature passed Assembly Bill (“AB”) 685, requiring employers to notify every employee of potential COVID-19 exposure at the workplace. Governor Newsom signed AB 685 into law and it will go into effect on January 1, 2021. AB 685 will bring the following changes to employers in California:

Expand Cal/OSHA’s Power to Issue Stop Work Orders
AB 685 expands Cal/OSHA’s authority to issue Stop Work Orders for workplaces that pose risk of an “imminent hazard” in relation to COVID-19. This “imminent hazard” is a hazard that threatens immediate and serious physical harm. This allows Cal/OSHA to prohibit entry into a section of a business or place of employment where there is an imminent risk of COVID-19 exposure and requires the immediate area where the imminent hazard exists to be prohibited. Violation of this law order is considered a criminal offense.

Employers Must Notify Employees of COVID-19 Exposures
AB 685 establishes a comprehensive notice procedure that employers must follow, within one (1) business day, when they receive notice of potential exposure to COVID-19:

Provide written notice in a manner typically used to communicate to all employees, employers of subcontracted employees, and employee-representatives (e.g., unions), where they may have been exposed to the virus. Employers may send a letter, email, or text message, but only if employees anticipate receiving communication from the employer in this manner. The notification must be in writing and a phone call will not satisfy this requirement. Also, written communication should be in English, and the language understood by the majority of the employees;
Provide written notice to all employees and employee representatives regarding COVID-19 related benefits that employees may receive, including paid sick leave, workers’ compensation, and anti-retaliation protections;
Notify all employees regarding the Company’s disinfection protocols and safety plan to eliminate any further exposures;
Notify California’s Department of Public Health if there are sufficient COVID-19 positive cases that meet the definition of a COVID-19 outbreak.

Fast-Tracks Cal/OSHA’s Citation Procedure
Normally, when Cal/OSHA intends to issue a serious citation, they give an employer some notice of the imminent citation to allow the employer to defend itself before the issuance of the formal citation. AB 685 disperses with the employer’s opportunity to defend itself before the formal issuance of a COVID-19 related-serious citation. Therefore, if Cal/OSHA issues a serious citation, employers should closely monitor the statute of limitations to respond to the citation in a timely manner. Employers should also contact counsel to evaluate the citation since penalties can be shocking.

COUNSEL TO MANAGEMENT
Employers should have a COVID-19 preparedness plan. Employers should develop a plan NOW on how to comply with AB 685—January 1st is looming near. If you have any questions about how this new law will affect your company, contact the experts at The Saqui Law Group.

California Ag Today2020-10-20T11:02:43-07:00October 20th, 2020|

Pistachio Industry Stellar!

Pistachio Industry is Solid on Production and Pricing

By Patrick Cavanaugh, with Ag Infomation Network

Mark Sherrell is the Chief Operating Officer for Touchstone Pistachio Co, a family-owned pistachio growing and processing operation located in California’s Central San Joaquin Valley.

“We’re looking at the largest global supply ever. We’re also looking at the largest American supply of pistachios and pricing remains pretty firm at $3.70 to three $3.75 a pound,” said Sherrell. “Quality of the crop looks really good and we look forward to a good shipping season,” he said.

And Touchtone is building a new pistachio processing plant.

“The new Touchdown Pistachio plant will incorporate state-of-the-art automation, efficiencies, color, sorting, electronic sorting, x-ray technology, roasting and salting, and will be the most modern plant built to date,” he said. “It’s all about producing quality products for the customers in an efficient manner.”

And of course, when you build a plant food, safety is top of mind.

“Yes, it is one of the great things about Touchdown is that it’s a Greenfield-built plant, and we’re able to design a plant around food safety rather than design a food safety plan around a plant. So we feel that we have a huge upside in being able to design a facility that incorporates food safety at every level,” Sherrell said.

California Ag Today2020-10-16T09:38:05-07:00October 16th, 2020|

Fiscalini Dairy Produces Power

Dairy Produces Electricity to Power 300 Homes

By Tim Hammerich, with the Ag Information Network

A lot of great things come from your local dairy: milk, cheese, and ice cream, just to name a few. But some dairy producers like Modesto-based Brian Fiscalini are also supplying their community with electricity.

“What we do is we collect the waste from our farm. So we collect all of the cow manure, we collect any spoiled feed, and then we also bring in a few waste streams from other industries that would normally either go into a landfill or would have to travel quite far for someone to be able to process,”Fiscalini said.

This waste is stored in concrete tanks and the lid captures methane gas.

“Then what we do is we convert that methane gas, with the help of an internal combustion engine, into electricity. So that electricity is used to power our facility as well as selling electricity to our local utility, which equates to enough power to take care of 300 homes in our community,” noted Fisalini.

This is one more way that our California farmers are providing us with delicious food, and a whole lot more.

California Ag Today2020-10-14T09:42:18-07:00October 14th, 2020|

Dairy Markets Prove Resilient

Consumers Turning to Comfort Food Has Helped

By Tim Hammerich with the Ag Information Network

It’s been a volatile year for most agricultural commodities, but dairy might have experienced it most intensely. Prices started the year very strong, but were hit hard in the spring as the pandemic spread. Since that time though, they have recovered.

UC Davis Agricultural Economist Dr. Dan Sumner, said cheese has led the way. “One of the issues is cheese markets have boomed and other markets haven’t. We’ve shifted from people consuming their cheese on a cheeseburger they grabbed at the fast food place to now consuming their cheese in their grilled cheese sandwich they eat at home. Or the macaroni and cheese as we went all back to comfort food in the spring,” explained Sumner.

“These kinds of volatilities are partly because of the shutdown and the milk market, even though there were some videos showing people dumping milk, that was not particularly common. It was terrible. It’s emotional for me and everybody else who cares about the milk market,” said Sumner.

“You hate to see milk poured out. But it was a headline because it was rare. And I do think that was a temporary thing; it got settled pretty quickly. And the dairy industry has really been remarkably resilient. And the marketing side of the industry just did a great job.”

Dr. Sumner applauded the dairy producers and marketers for their resilience during this difficult time as they’ve had to pivot from food service to accommodate consumers eating at home.

California Ag Today2020-10-08T11:07:19-07:00October 8th, 2020|

NO on Proposition 15 Campaign – CALL FOR ACTION

If Passed, It Would be the Largest Tax Hike in California’s History

The largest tax hike in California’s history is on the ballot, and if passed would create $12.5 billion in new taxes, the largest tax hike in our state’s history.

It is known as Proposition 15, and it would eliminate the 1% cap on property taxes for businesses throughout the state, including agricultural processing facilities such as tree nut hullers and processors. In addition, it would trigger annual reassessments for agricultural fixtures, such as irrigation systems, solar installations on farms and processors, barns, and even permanent crop trees and vines.

In a year like 2020, it is difficult to fathom we are facing something like Proposition 15. For tree nut growers, hullers and processors, the time to take a stand is right now! We need your help! We need every member to contribute!

Therefore, we are respectfully asking each of our members to send us a check for $500 to $1,000 to help specifically on this effort. We have raised over $35,000 to date towards our goal of $50,000!

We want to thank members that have stepped up to help so far, like Central California Almond Growers Association, Horizon Nut, Superior Almond Hulling, JSS Almonds, River Oak Orchards, Gold River Orchards, Cortina Hulling and Shelling, Kern Pareil, Inc, Alldrin Farms, and Andersen & Sons Shelling. I also want to thank our Associate members like Fresno Rack and Shelving, Boer Commodities, Daniel C. Salas Harvesting and North Valley Ag Services for helping as well. Lastly, we want to thank individuals and farms like AJ Carvalho & Sons, Pretzer Farms, Barton Ranches, Bill and Dan Prosperi, Clausen Almonds, David Munro and Donald Milburn for their efforts too!

Please fill out the attached form and make the check payable to Alliance of California’s Farmers and Ranchers and mail it back to our office at 1785 N. Fine Avenue, Fresno, California, 93727. If you should have any questions, please call our office at (559)455-9272.

California Ag Today2020-10-07T12:54:28-07:00October 7th, 2020|

Preparing for the 2021 Almond Crop

Think About the 2021 Budget

By Patrick Cavanaugh, with the Ag Information Network

Franz Neiderholzer is a UCANR Orchard System Farm Advisor based in Colusa County and he also helps growers in Sutter and Yuba counties. He said over the next couple of months, it’s good to budget for next year.

“The price looks like it might be coming up a little and that’s good, but careful budgeting needs to be stated—basically everything you do now, other than watering, the trees in preparation for the 2021 crop,” Neiderholzer said.

Neiderholzer spoke about the potential less water available for growers, next year. “There’s talk about a La Niña winter, which isn’t a guarantee of anything, except it’s more of a chance of a light rainfall year. So what that means to growers is possibly reduced surface water application,” noted Neiderholzer.

“So when you’re budgeting for next year, start with your, paying for water or whatever you need to do to have good quality water available that could cut into your budget for next year, but it’s critical for good production,” he explained.

“So basically build your budget for the 2021 season on stuff that you know is going to bring you value,” he said.

California Ag Today2020-10-05T13:30:27-07:00October 5th, 2020|