KUSP Reports: Environment

Grassy drainage ditches like this one have been shown to clean pesticides and fertilizers from agricultural runoff. Vegetable shippers, though, often demand that farms have no plants other than crops. Photo: Danielle Venton

By Danielle Venton | KUSP News

Between strict new regulations and demands from food buyers, farmers are caught in a tug between reducing pollution and food safety. Bringing both sides together will be difficult, but not impossible, say researchers.

Dirk Giannini is a vegetable grower in Salinas. On his farm is an old pond.

“This is part of the regulation, as far as trying to keep all this water on your ranch, if possible,” he says.

Solving an Old, Growing Problem

The regulation he’s talking about, the “Agricultural Order” was renewed with new conditions last fall. It’ll phase into full effect over the next few months and years. It’s part of the regional water board’s attempt to limit pollution.

The pollution that is targeted has already caused widespread trouble. It’s a likely culprit in some deaths of marine life. And it’s gotten into wells, causing health problems and forcing some people to buy bottled drinking water.

The biggest problems are from pesticides, sediment and excess nutrients, like nitrogen and phosphorous. One of the best ways to keep pollution out of streams and rivers? It’s an old idea — keep as much water as possible on site, with a catch basin, like Giannini’s.

“This pond has been up on here by our ancestors and we use it for watering our roads during the spring and summer time,” he says.

Legacy of 2006 E. Coli Outbreak

While it’s not used to water produce, it can go on cover crops or for preparing fields before planting. This catch basin is staying put. But Giannini doesn’t expect the new runoff rules to result in many new basins along the Central Coast. That’s because food brokers and food buyers also place demands on farmers. They want fresh produce, free from contamination by animals or bacteria. The difficulty for farmers is that food safety demands don’t always jive with anti-pollution strategies.

“As far as more catch ponds going in, I think they’re combative to the food safety world,” Ginannini says. “It’s interesting to see the ag order and food safety go head to head with each other. And the farmers are just sitting here saying, ‘OK, we’ll follow the food safety,’ but it’s contradicting water quality, so we go back and forth. That’s frustrating too.”

Some food safety inspectors worry catch basins might shelter frogs or attract other wildlife. They’re afraid those animals could, potentially bring bacteria into the fields or even get caught in machines that clip bagged lettuce.

That’s the same reason why inspectors don’t like to see grassy, crop-free areas on a farm. These vegetated areas can filter water and prevent erosion. But, after the E.coli outbreak of 2006, some food buyers rejected crops from farmers if they had these areas.

Scott Horsfall of the Leafy Greens Marketing Agreement says the organization encourages farmers to manage for both water quality and food safety. Cases of crop rejection can be down to the preferences of the individual buyer or inspector. This is frustrating researchers for like John Hunt, a toxicologist who studies the effects of pesticides in the region’s water.

“A lot of the systems that are effective in removing pesticides from run off involve vegetation. There has been a push recently by the large food brokers to remove all non-crop vegetation on farms,” Hunt says. “There’s a sense that that harbors perhaps rodents, perhaps amphibians that could get into the crops and cause food safety issues. I don’t think there’s real good data to support that. So that’s a big problem that a lot of people are working on right now is to resolve the pesticide treatment use of vegetation with the concerns of brokers for food safety.”

Cleaning Runoff in the Ditch

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

Michael Cahn, at the UC Cooperative Extension in Salinas, is one of those people. He’s interested in how water can be cleaned as it moves across a farm through wide, grass-filled ditches.

“And the idea is, can we treat this run off as it moves through either by slowing it down and holding it and let the biological processes break down the pesticide,” Cahn Says, “or by providing enough organic material where it will absorb the pesticide and hold it.”

In a preliminary trial, plantings of native red fescue, a common lawn grass, was shown to reduce pesticide load by 70 percent, compared with 14 percent in bare ditches. The grass doesn’t have a lot of seeds, so animals aren’t very attracted to it. He says, even though there’s little evidence non-crop vegetation is an actual food safety hazard, he understands why farmers are cautious. It’s just too risky. 10 acres of lettuce can be worth $100,000 dollars to a farmer.

“Would you take a chance of loosing $100,00 just to have some vegetation out there?” Cahn says. “That’s the type of business decision farmers have to make.”

But Cahn doesn’t believe the situation is hopeless. He’s seeking funding for follow up studies, and he believes that with more research, and a greater understanding among growers, regulators, food buyers and environmentalists, we can have cleaner water and safe food too.

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Maria Nuño’s taps pours nitrate-contaminated water into her sink. She drives 8 miles to get bottled drinking water. Photo: Danielle Venton

By Danielle Venton | KUSP News

Water quality on the Central Coast is fraught with problems. After decades of intensive farming, chemical fertilizers have trickled through the soil into underground aquifers, polluting many of the wells rural areas rely upon. As part of our series on agriculture and water.

Maria Socorro Nuño lives eight miles outside of Salinas, near a plant nursery greenhouse where her husband works. She welcomes visitors into her trailer, past a porch filled with pet parakeets and offers them water.

For people like the Nuños with contaminated water, water becomes a significant expense. Photo: Danielle Venton

If you say yes, she’ll handle you a plastic water bottle. That’s what they drink around here. Nuño is one of the quarter million people in the Salinas Valley and Tulare Lake Basin living with nitrate-contaminated water. University of California toxicologist John Hunt says this contamination affects many Californians.

“The main problems on the Central Coast with regard to water pollution start with nitrate,” he says, “which is in fertilizers that is used in agriculture and it’s also in fertilizers that people put on their laws and their gardens. It’s very water soluble, so it moves around with water. It’s very difficult to remove from water.”

Farms are the Main Source of the Pollution

A 2012 report by U.C. Davis concluded 96% of nitrate pollution comes from agriculture. Most of that begins as synthetic fertilizer applied to crops. Nitrate pollution is a danger because it can lead to brain damage and death in infants, through a condition known as blue baby syndrome. In adults nitrate contamination is linked with skin rashes, thyroid troubles and stomach cancer. As of last year the Central Coast Regional Water Board placed farmers under a new set of guidelines for monitoring and controlling their runoff, including nitrates. The board wants to slow the rate of pollution, but no one thinks it’s going to be easy.

“Some of the nitrate coming down into the groundwater now may have been applied over 50 years ago,” Hunt says. “So it’s a problem that’s going to take along time to solve.”

In fact, authorities expect the pollution to get a lot worse before it gets better. The U.C. Davis report estimated that more than half of residents in Tulare Lakes Basin and Salinas Valley were using public water systems that recently registered unsafe levels of nitrate. By 2050 they estimate 80 percent of the population will be affected.

For people like Maria Socoro Nuño, that means long drives to the store. Nitrate can’t be removed through counter top water filters, so she buys bottled. Before it became contaminated 15 years ago, she used this water for everything. Community worker Jeanette Pantojas joined me as a translator so I could ask what nitrate contamination has meant to Maria.

Cruel Irony: An Expensive Problem for Low-Income People

“It’s meant a lot, a lot,” Pantojas translates. “She used to be able to comfortably use her water for everything and now she can only use it for washing dishes and clothes. There are times when she’s fully stocked on everything else and they have to drive the 8 or 9 miles into Salinas so she can cook that day or have drinking water that day.”

And it’s a big slice of her monthly budget. Ideally, according to EPA guidelines, people wouldn’t spend more than 1.5% of their monthly income on water. But nitrate-affected communities often spend five to 10% of their income on bottled water. Michael Marsh, the directing attorney at California Rural Legal Assistance in Salinas calls this an unfortunate irony.

“The people who can least afford to buy bottled water are the exact communities that are being forced to buy bottled water,” he Marsh says. “They didn’t contribute to this problem of nitrates in the groundwater. What makes the ag order so important is that it’s the first time the regional board has really tried to put teeth into their ordinance, into their regulation.”

While the farming community, regulators and even some academics are deeply divided over how to best address the problem, everyone agrees something must be done. Closely monitoring the nitrates coming off farms seems like a good start to some, but for residents like Maria, her tap water will remain undrinkable for many years to come.

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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.

Ecologist Josh Adams (kneeling in white shirt) plants native plants in an area cleared of ice plant near the entrance to Natural Bridges State Park. Photo: Melissae Fellet

By Melissae Fellet | KUSP News

With its ocean views, walking path, and ice plant-covered cliffs, many in Santa Cruz consider West Cliff Drive to be a jewel of the community. Now a couple of scientists want the community to help them restore native habitat to the coastal bluffs.

They’ve started the non-profit West Cliff Ecosystem Restoration project to help organize the restoration. Last winter, volunteers with the group ripped out ice plant in a small bed near the entrance to Natural Bridges State Park.

“Having the community participate in it is really important,” says Bill Henry, an ecologist at Moss Landing Marine Laboratory, who helped start the non-profit. “Oftentimes projects happen where people come into a community and do some point change and then leave. And a lot of times that model doesn’t really work. A lot of projects take some follow up.”

Locals Pitch In to Restore Local Habitat

On February 1, Henry was back with volunteers, working to widen the original bed and adding more native coastal bluff plants.

“This way we’re trying to get community members to help out and have a vested interest in their backyard,” Henry says. “That automatically sets the stage for care taking of our environment and of our backyard. And this is a perfect place because so many people from our community use the West Cliff corridor.”

Oikonos Ecosystem Knowledge, a small non-profit conservation organization, is one of the partners in this local habitat restoration effort. Ryan Carle, a project ecologist with the group, said that people were stopping all the time to ask about what they were planting. Some of those people wanted to know why they were removing ice plant, he says.

“A lot of people don’t realize that the ice plant is a non-native invasive species and don’t know about our local native species,” Carle says. So he stopped to talk to them about the difference between ice plant and a native habitat. “When they learn about our local native species, how beautiful they are and what they’re bringing to the ecosystem, then they’re excited.”

The yellow or pink flowers on plants like yarrow, gumweed and sea pink attract wintering monarch butterflies and other insects. They also shelter lizards and salamanders. Birds may nest in the grown shrubs.

The community helped bring these native plants from seed to seedling as well. California State Parks provided seeds from plants native to coastal bluffs and scrub. Ecologists at the University of California in Santa Cruz grew the seedlings in their greenhouses. The City of Santa Cruz helped the scientists figure out how to truck tons of removed ice plant to the dump. And on this work day, volunteers from the Patagonia store in Santa Cruz are helping to plant more seedlings.

Josh Adams, an ecologist with the United State Geological Survey who worked with Henry to start the restoration project, says that school groups, of all ages and class levels, can get involved too.

Restoration Project Provides Outdoor Education

In late January, students from the Gateway School helped to restore a site at Pelton and West Cliff across the street from the surfer statue. Adams says the project is a chance for students to learn about math, ecology and native species.

The junior high math class mapped out the site and calculated the area so that the workers could determine the density of the planting, he says. The fifth grade class was in charge of growing the seeds.

“They came in with their plants that had been growing since the fall and in one fell swoop they planted that little section out,” Adams says. “What could be funner than coming out, sticking your hands in the dirt and seeing a plant that you’ve shepherded along for nine months put into the ground and then to drive by that and see it in the future? It’s great.”

Community participation is important to their habitat restoration efforts, Henry says. “We all enjoy this, and most times we’re not active participants,” he says. “So you get out here, and you get people working and then they’re a part of the environment. And we are. We can’t take ourselves out of nature or ecology. We’re a part of it one way or another.”

And working as a community, we can return a human-influenced environment back to its native state.

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Photo: Kaometet / flickr

By Wes Sims

At issue is whether cities and counties have the authority to ban single-use plastic bags from grocery and retail stores, to keep them from reaching the ocean, where they can be ingested by marine wildlife. Plastic bag-bans began in San Francisco, and spread through Santa Cruz and Monterey Counties, all the way to Los Angeles.  Why does Stephen Joseph care? A 2008 founding document states that the Save the Plastic Bag Coalition includes plastic bag manufacturers, plastic bag distributors, retailers, and concerned citizens.  But the current website says the Coalition is totally independent and … quote … the only organization that is questioning and challenging misinformation, myths, exaggerations, and hype spread by anti-plastic bag activists.  The page also declares that environmental policy should be based on facts.  Fair enough!  So in this report, we go to the academic community to examine specific claims from Stephen Joseph.

Joseph told us: “the worst case that we have seen of mis-information is in Santa Cruz County.”

“For instance,” he said. “They say that plastic bags that are used in this country use over 12-million barrels of oil in their production. That assumes that plastic bags are made of oil.  Plastic bags are not made of oil. It’s a total myth.“

To answer this question, we went to U.C. Santa Cruz to speak with Dr. Rebecca Braslau; a chemistry professor who specializes in organic polymers and plastics.

“Plastic bags are made of polyethylene, and the grocery-type bags are high-density polyethylene,” Braslau said. “And they are made exclusively from ethylene, which is a small organic molecule and all of the ethylene production in the world comes ultimately from fossil fuels.”

We also asked Professor Braslau about Joseph’s challenge of a statement from Santa Cruz County that plastic bits in the ocean … not bags, but bits absorb dangerous compounds …

“In an aqua environment of the ocean, anything that’s a greasy molecule, and polyethylene is very greasy compared to water, it’s what we call hydrophobic,“ she said. “I would expect that polyethylene bag bits would absorb organic hydrocarbons that shouldn’t be in the aqua environment.”

As to the danger posed by plastic bags, Stephen Joseph sites a London Times article that marine mammals are being killed by discarded fishing nets.  But a UC Santa Cruz marine biologist says plastic bags don’t get a free pass.

Dr. Terrie Williams is a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology.  Her office is at Long Marine Lab, which invites children to visit the outdoor sea pools where Professor Williams does some of her research.

“I’ve seen bags around the necks of pinnipeds, you know, sea lions and seals,” Williams said. “And even on one occasion, was at the necropsy of a sperm whale that had come up in Hawaii on the beach and we had to determine cause of death. The cause of death in that case after I reached my arm into the stomach of this animal was plastic debris in the stomach and it eventually caused the animal to starve and then die.”

And finally, there’s Stephen Joseph’s primary complaint with the Santa Cruz County Board of Supervisors:

“They know that they based their ban on misinformation but they simply don’t care. “

District 4 County Supervisor Ellen Pirie said:  “I’m very interested in getting accurate information. But what was important to me was really the undisputed fact that the plastic bags end up as litter all over our county, and many end up in the ocean where they do a great deal of damage.“

The debate may not be over, but more than two months after the plastic bag ban went into effect in Santa Cruz County, bringing your own bags into grocery and retail stores, is the new normal.

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Dr. Melissa Miller performs a necropsy on a dead sea otter. Photo: Julia Scott

By Julia Scott

Transcript:

SCOTT: This is the story of a murder mystery, and how one woman solved it.

MILLER: can I grab a scalpel and a knife and stuff? So I am gonna open up her chest here.

SCOTT: Dr. Melissa Miller sees a lot of bodies. Her job is to determine cause of death. Sometimes the culprit is a little… unusual.

MILLER: What we see in the center of the laceration on her arm is fragment of a tooth. The obvious cause of death for this otter is shark bite.

SCOTT: There are no human victims at this lab. Miller is a medical examiner for sea otters at the Marine Wildlife Veterinary Care and Research Center in Santa Cruz. And until five years ago, she thought she’d seen it all.

That’s when dead sea otters starting coming in with symptoms Miller had never seen before. First just a few, from around Monterey Bay.

A Rash of  Symptoms Prompt Further Investigation 

MILLER: And when I was looking at them externally they were bright yellow. The whites of their eyes, instead of being a nice healthy color, they were yellow.

SCOTT: Then, more sea otters, all with liver failure. By the end of 2007, there were 12 altogether. By 2008, that number nearly doubled. The California sea otter is a threatened species, with a population of 2,800 animals. Losing so many of them got everyone’s attention.

MILLER: What scares people like me is when I start to see lots of those otters dying and I’m seeing something that I haven’t recognized before as a cause of death.

Signs at Pinto Lake warn visitors of the hazards in the water. Though, this sign was posted after DDT was found in the lake.

SCOTT: Unbeknownst to Miller, the summer of 2007 also brought one of the worst reported algal blooms in the United States. It was in Pinto Lake in nearby Watsonville. But no one had made the connection – yet. Back at the lab, Miller couldn’t figure out the otters’ liver problems. So she sat down and made a list of murder weapons.

At the top of the list was a bacterial infection that affects California sea lions.

MILLER: I was so sure that it had to be that, that I actually did every test for this bacterium.

SCOTT: She was wrong. The tests came back negative. Next, she considered really unlikely suspects – like poison mushrooms and the possibility that the sea otters were struck by lighting.

MILLER: So that only left me with one thing. And the one thing at first seemed so farfetched that I didn’t believe myself.

Cyanobacteria Becomes Prime Suspect

SCOTT: That one thing was a kind of blue-green algae known as cyanobacteria. One common form of blue-green algae produces a kind of toxin, called microcystin, which attacks the liver.

Algal blooms are common. But this kind of toxin had never been found in an ocean environment, nor detected in any marine mammal, ever – including sea otters. But when Miller ran the test for microcystin, the sea otters tested positive. All of them.

Twenty-two miles away, that same year, Robert Ketley with the City of Watsonville was getting really worried about thick green pond scum on Pinto Lake. It was producing toxic bacteria he’d never heard of, and he didn’t know what to do about it.

KETLEY: I had a number of concerns that there was a potential human health problem.

Jaime and Isabella Manriquez feed ducks swimming in the green algae at the edge of Pinto Lake. Photo: J.D. Hillard

Making the Local Connection

SCOTT: For her part, Miller had no idea how a bacteria normally found in farm ponds could be killing sea otters in Monterey Bay. On a hunch, she called a friend, who remembered hearing ab out an algae problem in Pinto Lake. Then she sent a colleague to take a look.

MILLER: Once she got out there she called me on her cell phone and her first comment to me was ”this is gnarly.”

SCOTT: It IS gnarly. In summertime, the water is bright green and smells like old gym socks.

KETLEY: I think the best way to describe it is like automobile antifreeze with chunks of steamed broccoli floating in it.

SCOTT: Fed by phosphorous and sunlight, it thickens in summer and washes away in the October rain.

Miller and some colleagues at the University of California, Santa Cruz decided to follow the microcystin trail. It wasn’t long before they found it at the mouth of the Pajaro River, downstream from Pinto Lake. That’s where sea otters feed on what Miller thinks is poisoned shellfish.

MILLER: These toxins are strong enough and potent enough that they can cause death within 24 to 48 hours.

SCOTT: This problem goes way beyond the Central Coast. Water officials are finding toxic cyanobacteria in other California lakes and reservoirs. Which means more wildlife could be affected – birds or fish, or even another group of sea otters.

WARD: It seems as though the more researchers look, the more they find them.

SCOTT: That’s Kim Ward, an environmental scientist at the State Water Resources Control Board.

Not Unique to Pinto Lake 

WARD: This affects the San Francisco Estuary. There are areas of Southern California that have similar problems. South Africa, Japan, China, Brazil, Europe. You name it, everybody’s looking at it.

SCOTT: Scientists aren’t sure whether the cyanobacteria may have been there all along, or it it’s getting worse. Ward says dozens of California water bodies could be affected, including reservoirs we count on for tap water.

WARD: What worries me is that other toxins are out there that we’re simply just not able to test for yet.

SCOTT: Ward wants to develop a statewide monitoring program. But removing the toxin is tricky. Ketley’s office is building a lab at Pinto Lake to test out different treatment technologies. But he says whatever they choose will only be a Band-Aid solution.

KETLEY: It’s sort of like a big vat of Miracle Gro. The plant, in this case the cyanobacteria, thrives regardless of what you do with it.

SCOTT: To really solve the problem, scientists will need to figure out what’s boosting phosphorous and nitrogen in lakes and reservoirs covered with blue-green algae.

KETLEY: Even if we were to shut down most of the inputs from the watershed, the lake itself has sufficient nutrients internally to continue to bloom.

SCOTT: Pinto Lake lies in valley below old farms and ranches. Manure and fertilizer are possible culprits, but so are the houses that surround the pond: Ketley worries about things like lawn fertilizer and leaky septic tanks.

Or it could be something in the pond already. If humans are the problem, finding solutions may be an even greater challenge than solving the mystery of what’s killing the sea otters – because it goes back to the source. And if more Pinto Lakes exist than we know of, more sea otters may be affected in the years to come. For KUSP, I’m Julia Scott.

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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.

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By Melissae Fellet

Part 1 (see part 2)

Nestled in a forested valley in Pescadero and surrounded by 20,000 acres of open space and parkland, Ned Conwell’s farm looks more like a park than agricultural land.

“We don’t have many agricultural neighbors,” Conwell says. “We’re certified organic, so we don’t haven any drift issues or contamination issues. It’s a very, very clean place to grow food, which is pretty cool.”

Much of the land along the coast of the San Francisco Peninsula is protected as state parks and open spaces. Often this land is conserved by private nonprofit organizations called land trusts.

Ned Conwell's farm in Pescadero is surrounded by open space and parkland. Photo by Melissae Fellet

It’s common to think of these land trusts as preserving natural resources like habitats, pristine rivers and endangered species. But many groups also conserve land for another purpose: agriculture. And in doing so, these organizations are creating new ways for humans to interact with nature.

“The food that we eat is a natural resource,” says Paul Ringold, vice president for stewardship at Peninsula Open Space Trust (POST). “It’s something that comes from the land.”

POST, a land trust based in Palo Alto, has protected more than 70,000 acres of land along the San Francisco Peninsula and Santa Cruz Mountains since 1977.

“We think that keeping local farms in business is part and parcel of a smart conservation ethic,” Ringgold says. “For that reason, we’ve always had agriculture as part of our mission and now are looking to really bolster that and to make it a real active part of our mission.”

Peninsula Open Space Trust currently leases land to seven farmers, including Conwell, and four ranchers. The organization also holds conservation rights to other agricultural land that prevents the fields from being covered with condos or other development.

Looking back at the history of Silicon Valley, we can see how agricultural land ended up in the hands of these conservation organizations. Before it earned the nickname Silicon Valley, the rich agricultural region was known as the Valley of Heart’s Delight. Orchards there were paved over to support the growing population, and conservation organizations rushed to purchase remaining undeveloped land along the coast. Some of those parcels were wilderness, others were historic grazing lands or farming lands.

Fast forward to the local and organic food movement today, says Conwell. There’s a resurgence of farming as a viable lifestyle, and a recognition that local food systems can feed adjacent urban populations, he adds.

Conservation organizations are welcoming farmers onto their land. Some state parks, like Wilder Ranch in Santa Cruz, have leased land to farmers for more than a decade. And Conwell says that increasingly land trusts and other state organizations are doing the same.

They are beginning to recognize that their conservation goals and maybe even their recreation goals are compatible with, and possibly enhance, their agricultural goals, he says.

And the land trusts that are doing this well are able to engage the public in a whole new way, says Jessy Beckett, who serves on the board of Sacred Community Land Trust, a new land trust in Silicon Valley. If you think of a park as a fenced off area, she says, people only experience wilderness based on what they see from a hiking trail.

“But when you have agriculture, you have people who are intimately working with that landscape everyday,” Beckett says. “I think that’s a much bigger teaching moment, when you can have people go out and taste part of what that land is, or have a dinner that overlooks a field.”

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.

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A Save Our Shores mural at the Safeway in Aptos aims to save shopper the trouble of arriving at the check stand without reusable bags. Photo: Wes Sims

By Wes Sims

Grocery shopping in unincorporated areas of Santa Cruz County has changed since late March, when a ban on single-use plastic bags went into effect.  Customers of the Aptos Safeway store are now expected to bring their own bags or pay 10-cents apiece for paper bags … a price that will go up in the future, until shoppers get the message that  plastic, and to a lesser degree, paper, can be environmentally hazardous.

Santa Cruz County Supervisor Ellen Pirie represents a large mid-county district that stretches from the Santa Cruz Mountains to the shores of Monterey Bay.

“Plastic bags often find their way into the ocean. Some of the fish eat them, they get caught up in things, they can really do a lot of damage,” Pirie Says.

Spearheading the effort to ban single-use plastic bags is Save Our Shore; a non-profit organization focused on keeping harmful products from reaching the ocean. 

“Our goal at Save our Shores is to get every jurisdiction around our sanctuary to have bans on Styrofoam and plastic bags,” says Save Our Shores executive director Laura Kasa.

“Sanctuary” refers to the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary … 276 miles of federally protected off-shore water stretching from Cambria to north of San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge.

San Francisco was one of the first cities to actually put forth a ban.  And now they’re finding resistance from Stephen Joseph and the Save the Plastic Bag Coalition, trying to fight them on that.”   

San Francisco attorney Stephen Joseph represents a long list of plastics and packaging companies which oppose restrictions on plastic bags. 

“We oppose plastic bag bans for a number of reasons.  The primary reason is that the bag have been based on mis-information.  And in fact the worst case that we have seen of mis-information is in Santa Cruz County, ” Joseph says. “For instance, the Santa Cruz Board of Supervisors say that the production of disposable plastic bags causes the deaths of thousands of marine mammals each year. That is not true. The London Times exposes as a myth.  It is based upon a typographical error. The report on which it’s supposed to be based never mentioned plastic bags.  It says that the mammals are being killed by discarded fishing nets.”

Lawsuits filed by Stephen Joseph are the reason that restaurants can still put “to-go” orders in Styrofoam containers and plastic bags in Santa Cruz County.  Joseph promised to drop his challenge to the plastic bag ban, as long as the county agreed to exempt restaurants.

“So what the county decided to do was say, ok, we’ll take the restaurant piece out. We’ll separate it out. And then we’re going to go back and add the restaurants in later, so that if he wants to sue us, it’ll just be on that restaurant piece. ” Kasa says

Environmentalist, Dan Haifley headed-up Save Our Shores back in the 1990’s.  He says it’s a matter of getting back to things that are re-usable, and not harmful to the environment.

“Thirty, forty years ago we all used re-usable bags to go shopping with.  You go back even a hundred years.  People carried a basket to carry their items in. And we can go back to doing that and there can be an industry in this and it can create jobs,” Haifley says.

Meanwhile, back at the Aptos Safeway. A checker offers a customer assistance carrying groceries to her car.

“We don’t charge for that,” she says.

The customer replies, “You’re not charging for that? Thank god!”