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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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.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

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.”

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Kent Hibino explains how a wider tractor tool reduces fuel use. Photo Danielle Venton

If you’re traveling through the Salinas Valley, especially ahead of planting season, you might see a machine that can do what three machines did previously. It’s a wild looking piece of equipment. With metal parts twisted like corkscrews, rotating blades, claws that dig into the ground and extensive hydraulics, its a farm tool for the new millennium.

Kent Hibino: In the front you have these disk blades that chop things up, in the back this roller thing that mulches up the dirt, so we’re accomplishing two or three different things with this one piece of equipment, it costs a lot of money but we’re making fewer passes through the field.

By investing in machinery like this Kent Hibino, a vegetable grower in the Salinas Valley, can reduce the number of times his machines pass through the fields. His motivation? Saving on fuel. Gas prices have risen sharply for farmers, like they have for all of us. But with thousands of acres to work, and machines that use 12 to 15 gallons per hour, farmers look to cut their fuel consumption by all means possible.

Hibino: We have purchased new equipment, wider equipment, we make less passes through the field.

Some of Kent’s tractors also have GPS on board. The drivers know where they’ve passed through the field to an accuracy of seven inches. They can make sure they don’t miss sections of a field, or pass over the same area twice, saving on time, money and energy.

He’s also switched from diesel-powered water pumps to electrically-powered ones, with help from a program through his electrical utility.

Hibino: They give us  discounted rate for a couple years, we’re saving a lot more money when we’re going to these new systems, we’re saving money on electricity, water and inputs.

Norm Groot: Everyone is becoming much more conscious of the effect, how it’s grown in the footprint, trying to conserve as much as they possibly can.

That’s Norm Groot, Executive Director of the Monterey County Farm Bureau. The Salinas Valley, he says, is at the forefront of using new technology and techniques for growing. Norm says farmers trying to save money, and reduce their impact on the earth in lots of ways. Their use of chemicals, their affect on water and their carbon footprint.

Groot: There is a lot more consciousness. There are a lot of farmers that are actively embracing these new concepts to who are trying to conserve as much as possible.

Hibino: Land is expensive right? Some of the most expensive dirt in the world: we have to make sure we get every efficiency down, to make sure we have a good yield.

Minimizing his footprint by conserving energy, water and chemical inputs, says Kent, is good for business, and good for the planet. For KUSP, I’m Danielle Venton.

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By Danielle Venton

Science has made it increasingly clear that agricultural runoff harms the environment. Regulation and techniques for controlling that runoff have followed. In Monterey County, growers use satellite and other 21st century technologies along with a bit of just giving nature some room to work. KUSP’s Danielle Venton reports.

This broccoli seedling is watered first by sprinklers then by drip tape. Photo Danielle Venton.

April Mackie: Hola, buenos dias, OK.

April Mackie works at Martin Jefferson and Sons, a large, family-run farm in the Salinas Valley. It’s her job to make sure the farm complies with food safety and environmental regulations. From the height of her Truck, she looks out over two water basins that collect runoff from the farm. The ponds contain a few cat tails, and maybe a bird here or there.

Mackie: All of the water on this ranch gets collected into these two basins instead of getting up into a water way  On this farm, and on many others in Monterey County, growers are becoming more aware of their water. Environmental scientists have developed an increasing understanding that when fertilizers, pesticides and topsoil leaves farmlands and enters waterways it harms the health of life downstream. As this understanding grows, regulations are following.   Benny Jefferson, of Martin, Jefferson and Sons is a fifth generation family farmer, he says the change is for the better.

Jefferson: So much more conscious than we were a couple generations ago. We are creating our own ecosystem, earthworms coming back, ducks, hawks, proof is in the visual as well as the measuring.

Norm Groot: Everyone thought weeds are bad, now we think weeds are good, engineered wetlands.

That’s Norm Groot, executive director of the Monterey County Farm Bureau. Water management will continue to improve, Norm believes, as new technologies come online. For example, soil moisture can now be tracked by automated sensors and GPS technology, translating into less waste and runoff. This is the sort of advancement that he hopes will appeal to the next generation of farmers.

Groot: And that will allow more computerization of irrigation schedules based, not putting thumbs in the air. Computer modeling may becoming part of that solution in the near future.   On Kent Hibino’s lands they haven’t started consulting satellites or computers yet, but in the past 10 years they have installed acres of drip tape, better sprinkler heads, and they check the fields before deciding to water.

Hibino: I’ve been in business since 95, in the past 10 years there has been a lot of chance in terms of technology, (more drip, more efficient ways to lay the drip, tractors, higher tech tractors, and implements). to find the moisture.

Farming accounts for 70 percent of all water used worldwide, according to the UN. In the face of a California water supply already stretched to its limit, farmers like Kent will keep looking for ways to get the most out of their water use. For KUSP, I’m Danielle Venton.