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NEWS FEED
Youth speak, we listen: Youth voices in urban agriculture and building the UC connection
Steven Palomares is one of those youth. As an intern at WOW Farm in 2016, Steven grew and harvested produce, delivered it to local restaurants, and participated in a weekly business management class.
"I like to think of this garden as very important to the community,” said Steven. “Since most of [Oakland] is low income neighborhoods, this farm provides access to fresh organic produce. It also teaches the youth a set of job skills they can apply to other jobs, and teaches them a bit more about nutrition.”
Many youth echo Steven's sentiment, finding skills, purpose, community, and good food at the sites they are a part of.
The UC Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education Program (UC SAREP) and UC Cooperative Extension Los Angeles County have been working together to better understand the ways the University of California can support urban agriculture through the lens of youth participants.
These two videos, funded by the UC Global Food Initiative, are part of an ongoing effort to build strong connections between the University of California and urban agriculture programs. They highlight the community-based work of these programs and show some of the challenges they face.
In this video, Bay Area youth share their experience at urban agriculture programs, and program manager share their goals and challenges.
In this video, youth give us a tour of Southern California urban agriculture programs, their visions, and needs.
Currently, UC Cooperative Extension has two advisors dedicated to working with urban agriculture. Rob Bennaton works as an urban agriculture advisor in the Bay Area, and Rachel Surls works with urban farms as Los Angeles County's sustainable food systems advisor. UCCE hosts a growing website of resources for urban farmers, urban agriculture advocates, and policy makers.
"Our hope is that, by listening to people working in urban agriculture and building partnerships with them, we can find long term, meaningful ways to support their work,” said Gail Feenstra, deputy director of UC SAREP. “They share so many of the same goals as the UC — they're really focused on developing leaders who will make our cities healthy, prosperous places to live."
Steven Palomares may just be one of those leaders. In fall of 2015, Steven began his freshman year at UC Davis majoring in biological sciences and political science, interested in pursuing work that integrates science and policy. Also on his mind: someday Steven wants a home garden growing all the necessary produce for salsa and guacamole.
Organic produce growers sought for research study
“The goal of our study is to provide organic farmers with science-based strategies that effectively limit food-safety risks when using raw manure-based soil amendments,” said Alda Pires, UC Cooperative Extension urban agriculture and food safety specialist in the School of Veterinary Medicine at UC Davis.
To study the survival of pathogens in soil and soil health, UC scientists are recruiting California growers who use raw or untreated manure in organically grown crop fields.
Pires is leading the project in California with Michele Jay-Russell, a veterinary research microbiologist and manager at the Western Center for Food Safety at UC Davis.
The researchers will visit participating farms eight times over the 2017-2018 growing season.
“We will collect produce, water, soil and manure samples,” said Jay-Russell. “All of the samples will be tested for bacterial indicators such as nonpathogenic E. coli and pathogens. We will ask the farmers to complete a short survey. The study is voluntary and all locations and names will be kept confidential.”
Eligible California farms must be certified as organic by the National Organic Program or California Certified Organic Farmers and fertilize with raw manure or untreated manure from dairy cattle, horses or poultry. The farms can grow any of the following produce: lettuce, spinach, carrots, radishes, tomatoes or cucumbers.
For more information or to enroll in the project, please contact Pires at (530) 754-9855 or apires@ucdavis.edu, or Jay-Russell at (530) 219-4628 or mjay@ucdavis.edu.
This study is being conducted in other states by the University of Minnesota, University of Maine, USDA Agricultural Research Service's Beltsville Agricultural Center, USDA Economic Research Service's Resource and Rural Economics Division, Cornell University and The Organic Center. The project is funded by a U.S. Department of Agriculture Organic Research and Extension Initiative grant.
Weather radar helps researchers track bird flu
The same weather radar technology used to predict rain is now giving UC researchers the ability to track wild birds that could carry the avian influenza virus. Avian influenza, which kills chickens, turkeys and other birds, can take a significant economic toll on the poultry industry. In 2014- 2015, the United States experienced its worst bird flu outbreak in history, resulting in more than 48 million birds dying in 15 states, including California.
“We use the existing network of weather radar stations in the U.S. in the same way that radar is used to track rain, except that we process the data to allow us to interpret the radar signal bouncing off birds instead of raindrops,” said Maurice Pitesky, UC Cooperative Extension poultry specialist. “The data can be interpreted to track birds.”
“By tracking mass bird movements remotely in real-time, we hope to gain novel strategic insights with respect to surveillance and prevention of avian influenza transmission to domestic poultry,” said Todd Kelman, a veterinarian and engineer who co-leads the project with Pitesky, who is also in the School of Veterinary Medicine at UC Davis. They are exploring how the information might be used to prevent an outbreak.
In California, waterfowl migrate by the millions from September through March via the Pacific Flyway, where they winter in wetlands, rice and corn fields. The Central Valley alone is home to 3 million waterfowl at the height of migration.
“Using NEXRAD and various other approaches, we hope to be able to produce monthly or quarterly maps that will alert poultry producers as to the locations of waterfowl in the Central Valley of California,” Pitesky said.
“Waterfowl populations can have different habitat based on the amount of precipitation in a given year,” said Pitesky. “Therefore, we need to use these types of monitoring tools to understand where waterfowl are located. Landsat, or satellite-based land imagery, and NEXRAD are two remote tools that may be very useful, as opposed to flyovers and banding, which are more expensive and not practical for large geographical areas.”
The project — funded by UC Agriculture and Natural Resources — is a collaboration between UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine and Jeff Buler, University of Delaware wildlife ecologist whose team first developed the NEXRAD approach in the Central Valley of California. They are also working with the U.S. Geological Survey, the California Department of Food and Agriculture, the California Poultry Federation, the Pacific Egg and Poultry Association and Point Blue, an organization that focuses on conservation science.
Wild horse over-population is causing environmental damage
Most Americans envision healthy mustangs galloping free on the range when they think about the country's wild horse population. But UC Cooperative Extension rangeland advisor Laura Snell sees another image.
In conducting research on the over-populated wild horse territory at Devil's Garden Plateau in Modoc County, she witnesses a group of horses visiting a dwindling and damaged pond.
“Maybe there is enough for the lead stallion and the lead mare to drink. The rest stand there and look longingly at the diminished water source,” Snell said. “They do not seem content.”
The research Snell has underway at Devil's Garden was chronicled in the current issue of California Agriculture journal by executive editor Jim Downing. The federal government has determined the ideal horse population on the 230,000 acres of wild horse territory is no more than 402, however, more than 2,000 wild horses are running on the land.
Snell began working in the remote northeast corner of California in 2015.
“I had Modoc County ranchers coming up to me on my second day of work asking me how to solve the wild horse issue,” she said.
She realized that agencies and authorities responsible for policies that determine the horses' fate, and advocates who lobby strongly that the horses should be cared for humanely, don't see the poor conditions suffered by the horses and the environmental degradation of the land.
“The area is a quarter million acres in size. There are no main roads, so you have to take ATVs to see the horses,” Snell said. “We realized we needed to provide visuals to show people the horses and what the landscape looks like due to unmanaged grazing by the wild horses.”
Snell places wildlife cameras for two-week periods near 24 remote water sources in wild horse territory in Modoc and Lassen counties. At each site, the camera takes a burst of three pictures automatically every 15 minutes; motion detectors on the cameras also trigger a shot whenever an animal enters the field of view.
Preliminary data from 2015 show some striking findings. At one spring site, for instance, more than 71 percent of all animals detected over the sampling period were horses. Cattle accounted for 19 percent and the rest were pronghorn antelope, deer and hawks. The study will continue through 2017.
Wild horses are running in the Devil's Garden territory, and outside the territory, on private and tribal land. Fences don't hold the horses in, Snell said. Federal wild horse management areas are intended for multiple uses, including livestock grazing, hunting, and wildlife habitat. But in Devil's Garden, livestock have been excluded because of the environmental degradation.
“It was never intended to be single use area,” Snell said. “The horses are gorgeous animals, but I also like to see pronghorn, elk and mule deer. Some groups of wild horses are getting large and studs are getting aggressive. I know people who no longer ride their personal horses because it's not really safe with the territorial nature of the stallions.”
The images and data from Snell's research are designed to inform management and policy decisions in hopes of easing the expensive and environmentally harmful wild horse over-population. Already U.S. Representative Doug LaMalfa (R-Oroville) has brought the study to the House Committee on Natural Resources and preliminary results have been shared with Bureau of Land Management's Wild Horse and Burro Advisory Board.
Is 'palmageddon' coming to California?
Representatives from the date and ornamental palm industries, arborists and pest managers, parks and recreation officials, and home owners are uniting behind a University of California, Riverside initiative to slow the spread of the South American palm weevil, a palm tree-killing insect that has established in San Diego County.
“Everyone recognizes the threat and agrees it is significant,” said Mark Hoddle, UC Cooperative Extension specialist in biological control based at UC Riverside.
However, Hoddle said, action is hampered significantly by a lack of financial support at the state and federal level for research to answer questions about the distribution of the weevil in Southern California, how far it can fly from infestation zones, control options, and the most efficient and sensitive ways to monitor and trap it.
Hoddle recently helped organize a symposium just outside San Diego on the South American palm weevil. Recent detection in California of the weevil, which has traditionally been found in South and Central America, the Caribbean and Mexico, has scientists, farmers and nursery industry officials worried because it threatens California's $70 million ornamental palm industry and $68 million commercial date industry.
“My personal feeling is we might be on the verge of a crisis now,” Hoddle said. “The big problem is we don't know how far the weevil has spread. We really need help from the public in tracking its spread.”
The South American palm weevil (Rhynchophorus palmarum) is not to be confused with the palm weevil Rhynchophorus vulneratus, which originated from Indonesia and was incorrectly identified as the red palm weevil, Rhynchophorus ferrugineus, when it was found killing palm trees in Laguna Beach in 2010. R. vulneratus was declared eradicated from California on Jan. 20, 2015.
Feeding by larvae of the South American palm weevil damage the growing area of the crown of palm trees. The tree is then unable to produce new fronds, and within months it dies. Canary Islands date palms are particularly vulnerable and it is likely date palms will be attacked too. California also has a native palm species (Washingtonia filifera), which grows in desert oases and may be vulnerable to attack.
Detection of the South American palm weevil was officially confirmed May 9, 2011. Seven additional detections were made in July and August 2011. These initial detections by the USDA were in San Ysidro in San Diego County, about two miles from the Mexican border. It is likely that the weevils flew from Tijuana, Mexico, where infestations and dead palms had been detected in December 2010.
As a result of those detections, weevil traps were set up throughout California, Arizona and Texas with financial support from the USDA. A total of 111 South American palm weevils were captured in California; 109 in San Diego County and two in Imperial County. They were also found in Alamo, Texas, and Yuma, Ariz.
The traps were monitored from 2011 to 2013. Then, monitoring stopped when federal funding for the program expired.
Since monitoring stopped, it appears the problem has worsened, said Hoddle, who is also director of UC Riverside's Center for Invasive Species Research. In May 2016 he did a casual eight-hour driving survey in Tijuana, Mexico and found about 125 dead Canary Islands date palms that had been killed by the South American palm weevil.
In August, 2016, Hoddle placed 10 weevil traps at Sweetwater Regional County Park, about 15 miles east of San Diego. Since then, he has been catching about five to seven weevils per trap per month. In the coming months, he plans to start monitoring the heath of the palm trees in Sweetwater Regional Park using a drone.
Hoddle considers the South American palm weevil situation more dire than what he encountered with Rhynchophorus vulneratus because he fears the South American palm weevil has spread further and it spreads the red ring nematode (Bursaphelenchus cocophilus), which also kills palm trees.
Red ring nematodes, which have not yet been detected in California, can enter palm trees through the damage South American palm weevils do to the trees. The nematodes can also enter the bodies of the weevils when they are larvae. Then, the larvae turn into adult weevils which are strong flyers and they can then spread the nematode to other palms when the feed or lay eggs on them.
