The amount of carbon in the atmosphere has arrived at 400 parts per million. 

The last time it was at that level was in the Pliocene Era, about 2.5 to 5 million years ago.  At that time, a Los Angeles Times article notes, sea levels ranged from 16-131 feet higher than they are today and global temperatures were upwards of 18 degrees Fahrenheit hotter. 

“For the previous 800,000 years, CO2 levels never exceeded 300 parts per million, and there is no known geologic period in which rates of increase have been so sharp.  The level was about 280 parts per million at the advent of the Industrial Revolution in the 18^th Century, when the burning of fossil fuels began to soar.” 

With such a rapid increase in the rate of greenhouse gas emissions having been released, there is a potential that the full effects of climate change will lag behind the statistics of how much carbon, methane and other contributing gases are in the atmosphere.  By the time the effects of climate change become apparent, and there is an effective consensus to enact regulatory and policy solutions to confront the problems, it may be difficult to meaningfully reduce the already accumulated gases and cascading ecological outcomes.

Yet, the process to instigate these solutions is underway – even in the San Joaquin Valley.  A recent Fresno Bee editorial acknowledges a “new normal” where projected temperatures for the Southwestern United States are poised to “rise 2-6 degree Fahrenheit by 2041-2070 even if global emissions of greenhouse gases are substantially reduced.”  This will directly impact snowpack and riparian flows, diminishing water availability for cities, agriculture and fisheries.  Additional effects include impacts on high value crops, increased flood events and higher tides.

The paper exhorts local leaders to take the threats seriously – “To adapt to a changing climate, cities and counties will have to be proactive in planning for more extreme floods, droughts and fires, even if it means changing their general plans that were developed under the ‘old normal’.”

Bees are fundamentally important for human food production – and they increasingly stressed by die-offs and colony collapse. 

A Fresno Bee article and a Sacramento Bee editorial acknowledge the importance of bees for food production and emphasize the threats to them.  Citing the United Nations, the editorial notes that “more than two-thirds of the 100 crops providing 90 percent of food worldwide depend on bee pollination.”  For the agricultural economy in the United States, bees pollinate $20 to $30 billion in crops annually yet, since 2006, approximately 30% of hives have been lost each year. 

While a number of potential causes have been identified – including poor nutrition, loss of forage diversity, parasites, viruses, mites, disease and drought – the primary attention has focused on pesticides, and in particular neonicotinoids.  The neonicotinoid controversy has become an international issue as the European Union is poised to restrict the use of three compounds found in neonicotinoid pesticides as a precautionary measure until the threat they pose can be determined.  Conversely, the U.S. Department of Agriculture and Environmental Protection Agency have been slower to respond, seeking to have more conclusive scientific evidence before making a regulatory decision. 

California annually demands sixty percent of the bees in the United States, much of them bound for the state’s almond orchards which produce eighty percent of the world’s crop.  So more than other regions, almond growers in the Central Valley are anxious about the potential loss of honey bees as they are dependent on the pollinators for their nut production.  A Sacramento Bee article notes that most of California’s 820,000 acres planted in almonds is located in the Valley.   In the region, not only are bee colonies collapsing, those that are available are weakened and “substandard” for industry standards; still, with diminished supplies, growers are paying high prices for these colonies.  A Valley bee broker estimates that there is demand for 2.5 million hives for almond pollination, but believes that there are currently only about one million hives. 

Another Fresno Bee article hints at the looming crisis as California beekeepers have lost between 20% to 50% of their colonies this year.  A Madera keeper exclaimed, “It is unbelievable what has been happening.  Last winter we lost about 42% of our bees and the winter before we lost 66%.”

Bob Heuer brings two decades of experience writing about agriculture, finance and regional economies to his work as a public policy and marketing consultant.  He represents the Evanston/Skokie School Dist. 65/202 legislative committee as a gubernatorial appointee to the Illinois Local Food Farms and Jobs Council.

Local and sustainable constituencies feed the growing consumer demand for transparent supply networks that shorten the geographic distance between farm and fork.  Hindering this fundamental redesign of the marketplace is limited farm-production capacity. 

Small-scale farming can drive development of a food system that promotes public health, self-reliant communities and the creation of jobs that can’t be outsourced. Here’s a three-point plan:    

• Take advantage of food policy councils.  
• Embrace a wide range of training methods, such as SPIN Farming.
• Get acquainted with Farm Credit System.

Food Councils 

The good food movement’s biggest challenge is growing the number of farmers profitably supplying nearby markets, farmer David Cleverdon told last fall’s Healthy Farms Healthy People forum in Springfield, Illinois. He envisioned a bottoms-up “farm by new farm” effort to build “a foundation of knowledge, experience, wisdom, talent and relationships.”

Recreating farming’s social capital could be job one for the many food councils springing up nationwide.  According to Harvard University’s Food Law and Policy Clinic, these “much-needed mechanisms” are forming at the municipal, county, regional and state levels in order to “identify and advocate for food system change.”

The Illinois Food Farms Jobs Council —a community-led coordinating body authorized by state law—acts as a conduit between state government and the many entities seeking to grow local food demand, access, production and/or infrastructure.   Our farmer-training working group promotes cooperation between University of Illinois Extension, community colleges and NGOs around the goal of creating 5,000 Illinois farmers by 2020.  

Alternate Training Methods   

USDA’s national goal is to create 100,000 new farmers within five years.  Part of the solution is a do-it-yourself learning series called SPIN—a.k.a. Small Plot IN-tensive.  SPIN’s explicit goal is to teach people how to make money farming without having to initially invest in land or expensive equipment. The SPIN-Farming learning series was created by a Canadian farmer and developed with a U.S. entrepreneur.  The business model enables people to generate revenue by producing commercial-grade crops from multiple garden-size plots for direct-market outlets. SPIN’s web-based support group provides a peer-to-peer mechanism for professional development.  

“Incorporating the SPIN-Farming learning series into existing training programs can increase their effectiveness and produce measurable, bottom-line oriented results,” SPIN co-author Roxanne Christensen says.

Full disclosure: This article is an outgrowth of a SPIN marketing project. I became acquainted with SPIN years ago while consulting for Farm Credit Council —the Washington, D.C.-based trade group for Farm Credit System   .

Farm Credit System

FCS is a government-sponsored, agricultural-lending network created by Congress nearly a century ago.  There had been a national outcry that private banks weren’t meeting farmers’ needs. FCS was envisioned as a financial institution to serve American agriculture in good times and bad.  FCS has evolved into a vital asset to agribusiness—and an enigma for many others it was intended to serve.

In February 2008, as a consultant for their lobbying organization, I co-authored a report that sought to inform FCS affiliates about the local food marketplace. “Growing Opportunity” definitely caught the eye of FCS’ regulator, the federal agency Farm Credit Administration.   

Two months ago, FCA began requiring FCS lending associations to create annual marketing plans showing how they serve all segments of agriculture.  FCA’s “diversity and inclusion” regulation  encourages FCS lenders to reach out to “local food farmers and other new generation farmers” through training programs in management, business planning, and finance.  

Get “more seeds in the ground”

 Increased farm production will spur investment throughout the food supply network—aggregation, processing, distribution, marketing and waste management.  Thriving regional-scale food systems would provide high-volume wholesale channels with an ample supply of “healthy, green, fair and affordable” products.

There’s consumer-education work to be done to support what we might call foodshed economics.  The more familiar term “reducing carbon footprint” could become the organizing principle to integrate foodsheds within the policy framework of watersheds.

The key is growing the number of local-food farmers. As farmer Gary Tomlin told a recent Illinois Council meeting: “we have to get a lot more seeds in the ground.”

 “At SPIN-Farming, we’ve seen that new farm businesses track the experience of any other small business startup,” Christensen observes. “For the hundreds that make it, thousands fail. Success is therefore a numbers game. The more farming talent that can be developed, the more new farm businesses will be created. As locally-based farming becomes more commonplace, it will become obvious why real food is worth the price.” 

New town development is a problem throughout the Central Valley of California.  Recently, when the Sacramento County approved the Cordoba Hills project, concern was raised throughout the region that the intent and substance of California’s recently passed climate-related legislation (SB 375) was not having a substantive effect on poorly planned development projects inconsistent with the emission reductions proposed under the law.  A Sacramento Bee Editorial makes this case as new towns propose thousands of new homes with tens of thousands of residents, which in turn corrodes the purpose of SB 375’s Sustainable Communities Strategy goal of reducing vehicle miles traveled.  The Cordova Hills development will be watched with interest as similar projects are being proposed in other counties, including Yokohl Valley in Tulare County, Friant Ranch in Fresno County or Tesoro Viejo in Madera County.

The Tulare County Board of Supervisors, after receiving recommendations from its Agricultural Policy Advisory Committee, voted to protect more farmland from conversion to solar photovoltaic development.  The Visalia Times Delta reports that more than 650,000 acres of farmland will be more protected because of the policy.  The crux of the policy is that solar development should not be placed on farmland designated as prime farmland under the California Farmland Mapping and Monitoring Program (FMMP), identified as Class I Soil by the National Resources Conservation Service (NRCS), or land that was farmed in permanent crops for at least one year out of the preceding decade, unless designated by the county on a case by case basis.  The Tulare County Farm Bureau and its Executive Director Tricia Stever Blattler were instrumental in achieving the Tulare farmland protection policy.

The effort to alter the California Environmental Quality Act is underway.  Senator Rubio will lead a committee that proposes to change this cornerstone legislation, as detailed in this Sacramento Bee article. 

In response, through his Bakersfield California Op-Ed, Gordon Nipp of the Kern Kaweah Chapter of the Sierra Club, details the democratic structure of CEQA in its design to inform the public of potential adverse outcomes from development projects, mitigate for significant impacts, and demand redress, through litigation if necessary, when the law is violated.

As changes in CEQA are foreseeable, citizens and interests on all sides need to weigh in to ensure that potential reform is in the public interest.

A San Joaquin Valley advocacy collaborative of public interest organizations working on SB 375 implementation in the region has articulated a platform to better explain the mulitple benefits of climate policy. 

A concise 2-page platform and more detailed 4-page platform were recently completed to assist community members in understanding how SCS policies may improve the quality of their lives.  The collaborative also hopes that the platform will be a vehicle to begin conversations with policy makers and elected officials as valley residents seek to be involved in crafting and adapting the policy to their lives, neighborhoods and communities.

The SCS platform may also represent a vision for how we will adapt, respond, grow and prosper in an era of more limited resources and changing environment.  Rather than a static document, the platform is meant to be a starting point to promote citizen engagement in the meaningful policy arenas that affect their lives.

Take a look.  Get involved.  Joint together.  Educate eachother.  Engage the change.

Two new reports are the focus of attention ahead of the California Air Resources Board Meeting in Bakersfield on January 24^th:  (1) “A Home for Everyone: San Joaquin Valley Housing Preferences and Opportunities to 2050” written by Arthur Nelson for the Council of Infill Builders, and (2) “Saving Farmland, Growing Cities” by the American Farmland Trust. 

Newspapers in the San Joaquin Valley have carried stories related to the AFT’s report, including the Modesto Bee, Fresno Business Journal and Bakersfield Californian.  Also, bloggers writing on the region and advocating for policy re-direction, like ClimatePlan and Amanda Eaken, have also picked up the research and forwarded it to constituencies throughout the region.

The CARB meeting in Bakersfield (Kern County Board of Supervisors, 1115 Truxtun Avenue at 9am) will be discussing both air quality related to particulate matter and the status of SB 375 implementation in the region related to Sustainable Communities Strategy requirements.

Granville Homes continues to invest in downtown development in the City of Fresno.  The Fresno Bee reports that the builder recently purchased 2.12 acres, which includes the entire block around the Fresno Metropolitan Museum (except for the museum itself).  Granville President Darius Assemi proposed a future mixed-use project for the site including 69 residential units and 10,500 acres of commercial space.  Architecturally, the project will try to incorporate the historic character its location.

A recent Merced City Council decision to permit beer and wine consumption outside adds to an already evolving identity of downtown as an entertainment district.

Residents sense a renaissance in the city, reports the Merced Sun Star.  The University of California at Merced has brought renewed vigor to the culture and economy.  More young people are downtown as are bikers, shoppers and pedestrians.

A downtown steering committee, formed in 2007, has prioritized entertainment and cultural activities in the city’s center.  Entertainment oriented businesses are seen as the linch-pin of the downtown evolution.

Residential developments, including high density multi-family housing, are also seen as an important part of the downtown revitalization.