California

Snowpack in parts of the Rocky Mountains is at record lows because of warmer than usual weather, “raising concerns about water supplies and economic damage,” says Inside Climate News.

Growers and contractors in California recruited 14,252 foreign guestworkers last year, according to a Los Angeles Times analysis of data from the U.S. Department of Labor. The figure was up 28 percent from the previous year.

Hurricane Irma pummeled Florida’s citrus crop in September, and now a hard freeze is possible in the northeastern portion of the citrus belt, says weather consultancy Radiant Solutions.

As farmworkers become harder to find, California growers are providing better pay and benefits, attracting some U.S.-born workers. Still, experts say, mechanization will be the long-term answer.

State officials are expected to fight the Trump administration’s proposal to “maximize water deliveries” through the Central Valley Project to Southern California, including farmers in the Westlands Water District, the largest agricultural water district in the nation, says the Sacramento Bee.

In a preliminary estimate, Ventura County agriculture commissioner Henry Gonzalez said two-thirds of the 10,000 acres of county farmland burned by the Thomas fire are avocado groves, reported The Packer.

It's a very small undertaking, about 30,000 trees on three dozen farms. Yet Californians are willing to pay $18 for a cup of locally grown coffee, says the Food Observer, produced by the University of California. "To make the most of their precious water, Southern California farmers have begun experimenting with coffee plantings and producing beans that fetch a premium."

Thirteen agricultural states filed suit in U.S. Supreme Court in hopes of overturning a Massachusetts law that effectively bans the sale of eggs, pork, and veal produced by farms that use “battery” cages for hens, sow crates in hog operations, and veal-calf stalls.

The USDA cut its estimate of Florida’s orange crop for the second time in two months, raising the possibility that California will be the No. 1 orange grower in the country this season.

Effective Jan. 1, California farmers will be prohibited from spraying pesticides within a quarter-mile of public schools and licensed day-care centers from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. on school days under a rule issued by the state Department of Pesticide Regulation. Regulators say the rule is among the strictest in the country, according to The Associated Press.

Undocumented immigrants have become cautious of seeking food aid in the Trump era because of fears they could be targeted for deportation, said a panel of food security experts last week in San Francisco.

The state Fish and Game Commission voted unanimously to ban sport fishing of abalone in Northern California in 2018 in an attempt to preserve the imperiled marine snail, said the San Francisco Chronicle.

Mexican drug cartels, operating illegal marijuana farms on public lands, are polluting forests and saddling the federal government with millions of dollars in clean-up costs. Trespass marijuana farms are thought to number in the hundreds of thousands in California alone. The sites “wreak havoc on the land, leaving behind hundreds of thousands of pounds of garbage, leaching caustic chemicals, polluting watersheds, and damaging the habitat of endangered and at-risk species,” reports High Country News.

With the commercial crab-fishing season approaching, California officials warn that toxic algae might delay this year’s catch. “Domoic acid is the naturally occurring toxin caused by algal blooms that delayed the past two Dungeness crab seasons,” explains the San Francisco Chronicle. “According to test results from the California Department of Public Health, elevated levels of the toxin have shown up in samples of Dungeness crab collected in recent weeks at several North Coast ports.”

The California Supreme Court unanimously upheld a 2002 state law that allows mediation of deadlocked contract negotiations between growers and farmworker unions, including the power of mediators to set the contract terms, reported the Associated Press. The decision was a victory for "the union launched by iconic labor leader Cesar Chavez against one of the largest U.S. fruit farms," said AP.

Congressman Doug LaMalfa, a Republican representing Northern California's first district, joined a bipartisan effort to increase funding for the USDA Organic Agriculture Research and Extension Initiative (OREI). The bill, originally sponsored by Reps. Chellie Pingree of Maine, Dan Newhouse of Washington, and Jimmy Panetta of California, seeks to renew OREI and increase its funding to $50 million per year.

California regulators violated the Constitution by requiring warning labels on glyphosate containers saying the herbicide is a carcinogen, says a federal lawsuit filed by Monsanto and a dozen farm and agribusiness groups.

In FERN’s latest story, published with Switchyard Magazine, reporter Robert Kunzig takes us to the upper Mississippi River Delta, where the idea of growing more fruits and vegetables — to ease the burden on California in the climate-change era — is taking root.