Posted on Categories Agriculture/Food SystemTags Leave a comment on Far from the tree

Far from the tree

MADE LOCAL MAGAZINE

apples-Nana-Mae's
Nana Mae’s apples

Apples! Such an innocent fruit. The sturdy globe of a red-cheeked apple is American shorthand for student affection of favored teachers, wholesome homespun values, patriotic pies and good health.
Apples! Such cunning tricksters. Leave an apple tree ungrafted and it will produce an apple entirely its own, of a kind unknown anywhere else in the world. With small exception, its native fruit will be bitter and unpleasant.
Apples! Replaced by grapes.
via Made Local Magazine

Posted on Categories Agriculture/Food System, Sonoma Coast, WildlifeTags Leave a comment on Sardine fishing limited as population crashes

Sardine fishing limited as population crashes

Jason Hoppin, SANTA CRUZ SENTINEL

Environmentalists are claiming victory after federal fishery regulators on Sunday tightened fishing restrictions amid evidence the sardine population is in steep decline.

The 7-6 vote brought unusual drama to a meeting of the Pacific Fishery Management Council, which met over the weekend in Costa Mesa. California and Washington officials led the charge to set 2014 sardine fishing limits at the lowest level in a generation.

"This decline is fairly rapid," said Geoff Shester, California program director for Monterey-based Oceana. "A lot of people have started to compare it to the sardine collapse of the 50s and 60s."

via Feds tap brakes on sardine fishing – Santa Cruz Sentinel.

Posted on Categories Agriculture/Food System, Sustainable LivingTags Leave a comment on CropMobster shares the harvest

CropMobster shares the harvest

Rachel Dovey, NORTH BAY BOHEMIAN

http://www.cropmobster.com/

Nick Papadopoulos is a farmer now, but he has a professional background in conflict resolution. So, standing in a vegetable cooler on a Saturday night last March, surrounded by surplus produce that hadnt been sold, his mind began to wander.

"We had all this food that wasnt going to people," the general manager of Bloomfield Farms in Petaluma recalls. "Its edible and its grown for the purpose of feeding people, and we dont make any money when its wasted."

Later that week, he posted a message on Facebook advertising farmers market leftovers at a reduced price. That was the beginning of CropMobster.com, a social media hub addressing local farm waste and hunger—both issues hinging on a centralized, assembly-line food system that, according to Papadopoulos, is full of holes.

via Harvest Share | Dining | North Bay Bohemian.

Posted on Categories Agriculture/Food SystemTags Leave a comment on What's up with the state grange?

What's up with the state grange?

Andrea Granahan, THE PRESS DEMOCRAT

The California State Grange Master, Bob McFarland, is in Sebastopol this week for the annual State Grange Convention. He was willing to discuss what is happening on the national level with the venerable agricultural organization.

 Is the National Grange suing the California Grange?

Yes. The National Grange Master Ed Lutrell tried to kick me out, but the California Grange membership that had elected me refused to do so. Then Lutrell revoked California’s 143-year-old charter and tried to seize the bank accounts, offices and other assets, but a court injunction stopped him. So he is suing us, and the trial will come up in late spring I think.

 Why would Lutrell do that?

He supports industrial agribusiness, while in California we support family sustainable farming. We took a stand against GMOs and he favors it, saying there is no difference. He has done the same thing to the Wyoming State Grange, revoked their charter and tried to seize their assets.

via 5 Questions for Bob McFarland, California's grange master.

Posted on Categories Agriculture/Food System, Sustainable LivingTags Leave a comment on Grains go local

Grains go local

Diane Peterson, THE PRESS DEMOCRAT

North Bay chefs and growers have long been at the forefront of the movement to eat local, championing the return to the table of heirloom tomatoes and grass-fed beef.

Nowadays, the farmers are starting to grow grains like rye, farro and wheat as well, providing chefs with whole-grain, freshly milled flours for their breads and pasta.

“Grains are the logical next step,” said Debra Walton of Canvas Ranch in Two Rock. “Were really moving totally local, from vegetables and meat to grain and breads and beer.”

via Grains go local | The Press Democrat.

Posted on Categories Agriculture/Food System, Land UseTags , Leave a comment on Goldeneye: Anderson Valley’s Mercenary Vineyard?

Goldeneye: Anderson Valley’s Mercenary Vineyard?

Will Parrish, ANDERSON VALLEY ADVERTISER

If you want to mark a point-of-no-return in the Anderson Valley’s transformation into a full-on satellite of the Napa-Sonoma industrial viticulture complex, as good a choice as any is Duckhorn Vineyards’ takeover of three properties outside of Philo and Boonville in the late-’90s. Founded by a Napa investment banker named David Duckhorn in the 1970s, Duckhorn had by then established itself as one of St. Helena’s most successful vintibusinesses. Wine Spectator put it thusly: “Duckhorn Vineyards’ arrival in Mendocino County… caps the emergence of the Anderson Valley as a prime, Pinot noir appellation.”

In one of the wine industry’s characteristic superficial nods to local cultural artifacts and the natural environment, Duckhorn named its local wine label Goldeneye, after the black and white seaduck whose northward migratory pathway includes the Anderson Valley.

via Goldeneye: Anderson Valley’s Mercenary Vineyard? | Anderson Valley Advertiser.

Posted on Categories Agriculture/Food System, Land Use, WaterTags , Leave a comment on When They Came For The Navarro

When They Came For The Navarro

Will Parrish, ANDERSON VALLEY ADVERTISER

The North Coast wine industry has long acted out a pathological conviction that it is entitled to virtually every single drop of water in every watershed it touches. As in the case of Sonoma County’s recent frost protec­tion ordinance, which I detailed in the December 14 Anderson Valley Advertiser, the industry routinely rises up as one — along with their local government allies — to quash any restrictions on its ability to draw water with accustomed impunity, though that particular ordinance is now threatened by disagreements, it seems, about the degree of non-regulation the big corporate growers find acceptable. Yet, there are few industries more in need of restrictions on their water use.

In the past 20 years, the North Coast’s alcohol farm­ers have dried up countless creeks and streams, while choking off rivers and filling in their spawning pools with monumental amounts of sediment (entire hillsides worth). They have, moreover, poisoned what water remains with the full menu of chemical fertilizers, soil fumigants, growth hormones, herbicides, defoliants, fun­gicides, pesticides, and systemic poisons most growers use to ensure the bounty and sterility of their crops.

via When They Came For The Navarro | Anderson Valley Advertiser.

Posted on Categories Agriculture/Food System, Land UseTags , Leave a comment on Anderson Valley, Tentacle Of The Wine Grape Octopus

Anderson Valley, Tentacle Of The Wine Grape Octopus

Will Parrish, ANDERSON VALLEY ADVERTISER

“When at last the land, worn out, would refuse to yield, they would invest their money in something else; by then they would have all made fortunes.”

— Frank Norris, The Octopus, 1901

One of California agribusiness’ oldest traditions is clearing huge swaths of land to plant orchards and vineyards. On the western slopes of the Santa Clara Valley, the newly-arrived class of prospector capitalists felled the dense chaparral and oak savannah to make way for the state’s first commercial vineyard in 1850, as well as the apple, date, prune, and apricot trees. The valley was the west coast’s banner fruit-producing region up to the 1960s. In the 1870s, out-of-towners arrived on the newly-constructed Southern Pacific rail line in the hamlet of Los Angeles, where they cleared the abundant native grasslands and chaparral of the San Gabriel foothills. For many years thereafter, that future megalopolis was the US’ primary citrus growing area.

Massive water diversions have always followed soon after the land clearances. Donald Worster’s Rivers of Empire and Marc Reisner’s Cadillac Desert most famously chronicled California’s damming and moving of prodigious amounts of water, primarily to meet the demands of the state’s much-vaunted industrial farmers.

via Anderson Valley, Tentacle Of The Wine Grape Octopus | Anderson Valley Advertiser.

Posted on Categories Agriculture/Food System, Land UseTags , Leave a comment on On Memory & Forgetting in Wine Country

On Memory & Forgetting in Wine Country

Will Parrish, ANDERSON VALLEY ADVERTISER

Soon after I became outspoken in my criticism of the regional wine industry, I began having conversations with local people for whom this issue is deeply personal. Across recent decades, the sprawling North Coast booze sector has recklessly reconfigured landbases, sucked waterways dry, killed off scores of wildlife, drenched the land with chemicals, and imposed its particular brand of sterilized country life on previously more vibrant pastoral settlements — all of this on the basis of exploited migrant labor, which comprise the industry’s main contribution to the local job base. Although you would never know it by reading the Santa Rosa Press Democrat or tuning into local TV newscasts, these practices have not actually endeared Big Wine to most people — especially those who have experienced them first-hand. Some North Coast residents refer to the pervasive change from forest and rangeland to vineyards as “grape rape.”

Yet, for all of the deep-seated resentment the wine industry has bred, opposition to it has never been part of an insurgent social movement. That’s in contrast to organized resistance to the timber industry, which was a significant regional political force throughout the ’90s.

via On Memory & Forgetting in Wine Country | Anderson Valley Advertiser.

Posted on Categories Agriculture/Food System, Land Use, WaterTags , , Leave a comment on The North Coast Wine Industry’s Latest Coup De Grace: Draining Our Rivers Dry

The North Coast Wine Industry’s Latest Coup De Grace: Draining Our Rivers Dry

Will Parrish, ANDERSON VALLEY ADVERTISER

The latest in the North Coast wine oligarchy’s long series of legislative coups de grace occurs on December 14th, as this issue of the Anderson Valley Advertiser goes to press. In what will surely be a 5-0 vote, the Sonoma County Board of Supervisors will rubber-stamp new regulations on frost protection in the Russian River water basin, now in its death throes after having been continuously ravaged by several generations of extractive enterprise.

In recent decades, the once-simple act of protecting new bud growth on grape vines from frigid temperatures has become tantamount to a war on rivers. The predominantly corporate alcohol farmers who wield executive authority over the North Coast’s land and politics almost universally combat frost damage via systems of overhead sprinklers that sprawl out across each row of grapes, dowsing them with a continuous coat of water on spring nights when local temperatures drop into the 20s.

via The North Coast Wine Industry’s Latest Coup De Grace: Draining Our Rivers Dry | Anderson Valley Advertiser.