KUSP Reports: Environment

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Farmer Dirk Giannini points out irrigation installed on a seeded lettuce bed. New regulations put greater pressure on farmers to limit pollution running off their fields. Photo: Danielle Venton

By Danielle Venton | KUSP News

A new law is phasing into effect that changes how farmers manage water on their farms. It’s designed to cut down on water pollution from fertilizers, pesticides and nutrients. But, while farmers say they want to be good environmental stewards, they claim the new regulations go too far.

Dirk Giannini is a prominent Central Coast farmer. It seems everything in his life is big. He’s tall, he has a large truck, he grows 3500 acres of carrots, onions, and other crops.

He sells to some of the biggest buyers in the country. Last year he was one of McDonald’s featured farmers, and appeared in a national TV add.

Hot Topic

Giannini’s crops are irrigated with well water. Water that’s not absorbed by crops or the ground is mostly caught in a pond, where it can be pumped and re-used. But during heavy rains, some of water inevitably leaves his fields and enters local streams and rivers. That water is the focus of tough new regulations aimed at stemming water pollution.

“It’s the most rigorous law that our region is facing right now,” Giannini says. “And it’s the hot topic.”

The rules, known as the “Agricultural Order,” guide how farmers manage and reports water quality on his farms. The regulations are renewed every five years, and allow farmers to legally comply with the Clean Water Act. It’s an important piece of legislation since, according to the EPA, agriculture is the nation’s biggest source of water pollution. are slowly phasing into effect. While most farmers are complying, almost all of them are unhappy about it. Some academics are too, including Marc Los Huertos, an environmental studies professor at California State University, Monterey Bay

“It’s a little bit like putting your trash out in the front yard and then having someone decide they were going to investigate it all and put it on the web,” Los Huertos says. “It just seemed pretty intrusive.”

Rules May Punish Those Who’ve Done the Most to Clean Runoff

Los Huertos helped growers propose an alternate plan to the water board, one that emphasized collective monitoring and allowed reporting information to remain private. The requirement for some farmers to publicly report pollution levels is a key point of the new regulations and possibly it’s most controversial.

Growers worry that if members of the public can access pollution records, farmers will become targets of unjust criticism. It’s the larger growers who, Los Huertos says, tend to be doing the most to improve water quality who’ll bear the brunt of this.

“Now they have to do all this extra reporting that likely is going to show significant amounts of pollution without any kind of context of their farm,” he says. “Yet they’ve been spending the most money to improve water quality in the last 10 years.”

But regulators say the law had to change. Central Coast streams and rivers are some of the most impaired in the nation and they want to protect water for people and wildlife. The previous order, they say, just didn’t give them enough information. Lisa McCann is overseeing the new order’s implementation. She says there was anecdotal evidence that many people were doing good things, but says, “our evidence for what level, where, how effectively, was absent.”

Many parts of the growers’ proposal were accepted, not all. As for the key point of contention – public reporting – it’s already state law, a relatively recent one.

“Ultimately the main reason it still wasn’t ripe is it wasn’t consistent with some aspect of the California water code and the state’s policy on non-point pollution
control,” McCann says.

Regs Aim for Improvement, not Perfection

She says that some farmers are over-worried about the new regulations. Regulators want to see pollution improving overtime, they’re not expecting that water leaving farms will be drinkable. But the new requirements still seem heavy handed to farmers like Giannini.

“I agree with regulations and checks and balances, but usually regs are for low hanging fruit, the people who are not complying. This is affecting every farmer in the region.”

Some of the Agricultural Order has begun taking effect, including, as of March, a requirement that growers install devices preventing contaminated water from backflowing into their fresh water supply.

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UCSC students help others borrow heirloom seeds at a seed exchange last May. Credit: Melissae Fellet

By Melissae Fellet

Glass jars filled with speckled beans, tiny mustard seeds and dried corn kernels line tables in a cozy cottage at the UC Santa Cruz farm on a Saturday afternoon in mid-October. College students and some local gardeners rifle through the selection. UCSC student Elan Goldbart holds up a large jar of black beans, called Cherokee Trail of Tears, collected from plants grown over the summer.

“We planted about 15 to 20 plants,” he says weighing the jar in his hand. “Now this feels like probably 5, 6, 7 pounds of seed, which is a lot.”

Goldbart and other students run a seed bank on campus, called the Demeter Seed Library, to promote growing heirloom plants and saving the seeds. They hold these seed exchanges every quarter to share seeds with the community and give gardeners a chance to return seeds they’ve saved.

Andrew Whitman started the UCSC seed bank when he was a student at the university with the goal of creating a living seed library. “A lot of the seeds we have aren’t being grown out commercially anymore and are at risk of going extinct,” he says.

Seed banks, like the Demeter Seed Library, aim to preserve the genetic diversity found in plants adapted to a particular region – be it the cold weather in Alaska or the heat in Florida. Those genes are protection against a changing climate or pest invasions.

But it’s not clear how much crop genetic diversity we need to protect – or how much we’ve lost. Fewer varieties of crops are grown in fields today, but the amount of genetic diversity lost with those varieties is unknown.

Nonetheless, preserving plant genetic diversity through seed saving is a growing trend. There’s a global seed vault  on an island in Norway. Closer to home, seed banks in Oakland, Berkeley and Richmond are part of the eleven  that serve the San Francisco Bay Area. Monterey Bay area residents can also pick up seeds in Santa Cruz from the Museum of Art and History and a branch of the county library.

Whitman estimates the UCSC collection contains about 250 different grains, vegetables, and flowers, including the seashell-like seeds of teosinte, the ancestor of corn, and an Ethiopian grain called teff.

People borrowing from the library can take as many seeds from as many varieties of plants as they want at no cost. They plant them and collect the seeds from the healthiest plants in their crop.

In return, Whitman says the library asks that gardeners return 20 times amount of seeds that you borrow for two varieties of plants. That’s pretty easy to do, he says, because one seed produces hundreds of seeds.

For beginning seed savers, the easiest plants to grow include beans, lettuce, tomatoes and peppers. These plants pollinate themselves and their seeds reliably grow plants that are genetic clones of their parents.

Plants like kale, squash or melons are pollinated by insects or the wind. Experienced seed savers separate varieties of these plants to prevent an accidental gene swap. Cross pollination is a problem when plants grow too close together – even for beans.

Goldbart explains what happened to a recent crop of scarlet runner beans, typically a black seed with purple and magenta mottles on it. “This year we got some seeds that had white mottles on it,” he says. “Some white colored bean must have gotten into the genome and now we have some white scarlet runner beans.”

Goldbart welcomes these spontaneous crosses as a chance to find plants with more vigor or perhaps more drought tolerance. But he says it’s also important to prevent crosses to preserve the genes already in these seeds.

“Each year that the seeds are grown out, it’s receiving all this information from the outside, all the weather conditions, the soil types,” he says. “It’s adapting, changing every single year. These seeds are living, breathing, evolving. And so, over the hundreds of thousands of years that seeds travel around the world, through wind pollination and people migrating and bringing their seeds to different places, things change. And it’s just this diversity that’s created.”

By planting, saving and sharing seeds these students are protecting a future for cultivating heirloom plants adapted to the Monterey Bay area.

More information: Seed Library Social Network at seedlibraries.org.
Highlight photo courtesy of: demeterseedsproject.org.

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By Melissae Fellet

Part 2 (see part 1)

Ned Conwell and his former business partner moved to old cattle ranch in Pescadero about seven years ago.

“It had basically fallen into a state of disrepair,” Conwell says. “It was pretty derelict. Some of the outbuildings, a barn, are still falling over. But there was a house and fields and a creek.”

Ned Conwell hopes creative lease agreements will help open space remain in agriculture for future generations of farmers Photo: Melissae Fellet

Now he lives there with his wife. The couple leases the land from the Peninsula Open Space Trust, a Palo Alto-based nonprofit organization that protects land from being developed. Besides leasing land directly to their partners, the land trust also holds conservation rights on other properties to prevent people from building on that land.

While conserving land for agriculture is important, Conwell says, it’s more important to ensure farming continues on these lands through lease agreements that are favorable to the farmer for the long term.

Land trusts conserve land in the public’s interest, so some groups refer to it as public land even though some of that land is not publically accessible like a state park.

“Public lands can be a really good option for farmers,” says Reggie Knox, executive director for California FarmLink, a Santa Cruz-based nonprofit that helps beginning farmers statewide find land and develop business plans. “Where land values are really high, like in California and coastal California in particular, it may be really more strategically wise for the business to lease than to own.”

Farmers often have other expenses to consider when leasing too. Conwell says that his barn is falling over and probably needs to be rebuilt.

“It’s central to our packing and our washing and our cooling and where we house equipment,” he says. “There’s really no incentive for us to fix it up if we don’t have some way to actually build equity in these investments.”

Land trusts are starting to address the issue.

“We have had a shift recently in our thinking about what it means to protect agriculture and what is necessary to protect agriculture,” says Paul Ringgold, vice president for Stewardship at POST.

The land trust has always worked to protect agricultural land from development, but not worked to ensure that farming continues on protected lands, he adds. Now that’s becoming more of a concern. More people are able to purchase conserved land, though they may not have the intention to farm it, Ringgold says.

“We would like to address that and somehow increase the level of protection so that we can be assured that productive row crop farmland remains in farming and available to farmers for use,” he says.

The land trust is looking at two ways to do that. They could continue to own the land and write long-term leases to farmers. These new leases would separate the value of the land from the value of the improvements to the land.

When farmers lease land, it’s hard for them to build equity when they build a fence, water system or repair a barn. This new way to write a lease transfers the value of these improvements to the farmer while assuring that the land remains protected from development.

The land trust could also add additional restrictions to the land requiring it to be used for agriculture. Some of these ideas have been tested in Massachusetts, Vermont, and New York. And, farmer Ned Conwell says: “There’s good work now starting to happen in California. We’re starting to see open space trust organizations and other entities that own this land really looking at new models to allow for long term security, affordability, and agricultural land staying in farming in perpetuity.”

And using these new models, Conwell hopes leasing conserved land will be sustainable for the next generation of family farmers and beyond. “So that when we leave this earth, so that our family or whoever the next generation is takes over, they have access to a farm, they can afford it and the community knows that this farm will continue to produce food for the population,” he says.

From NPR’s Food Blog - The Salt
by DAN CHARLES

A clampdown on contamination in growing fields has pushed out wildlife and destroyed habitats. Adam Cole/NPR

NPR has an in-depth article on the Leafy Green Marketing Agreement that seems to have made spinach safer – and raised other environmental concerns.

See/hear full story.