Tell the federal government what to do about the Colorado River.
The Colorado River’s use is governed by an agreement among the seven states that draw water from it, and that agreement is overseen by the Bureau of Reclamation, a part of the Department of the Interior. The current arrangement is completely inadequate to meet the growing demands of the water users and the dwindling water in the river. After the states blew past a couple of deadlines without putting together a new plan, the Bureau came up with a couple of ideas of their own and — this is the good part — they’ve published the plan and have opened it for comment. Wide open. You can comment.
“Reclamation is particularly interested in receiving specific recommendations related to the analyses or alternatives that can be considered and potentially integrated into the SEIS.” (Quote from Reclamation’s page linked in the next paragraph.)
Brace yourself. It’s over 400 pages not counting the appendices. There has also been a lot in the press about the river’s woes lately, including a flurry of new articles about Reclamation’s proposals. Google is your friend. And there will be Zooms on May 4, 8, 10, and 16. Details are on that same page I linked to above.
The USDA wants to make it easier for schools to purchase food directly from local producers. As part of an effort to bring their rules into line with recommendations in their publication Dietary Guidelines for Americans, 2020-2025 they’re proposing to make it easier for schools to employ a “geographic preference” for local foods in their bidding process. School districts themselves decide whether this is something they want to do, and they define for themselves what “local” means.
I love it!
If you love it (or hate it) you have until April 10 to comment.
Scratch Cooking
There’s something else I found interesting in the proposed rule changes. They’re recommending that the salt allowed in school meals be further reduced. So far schools have been able to meet the low sodium requirements with processed foods that are readily available, but lowering salt even more would make that difficult. The alternative is scratch cooking — that is, cooking from scratch at the school or district site. Most schools don’t do that, and don’t have the staff, the skill, the time or the equipment for it. The USDA has therefore estimated the cost of remedying all that and included it in their proposed budget.
Scratch cooking is a big deal! When you buy ready-made food, that puts a lot of steps between you and the farmer. That gap is where giant food corporations live. They buy from farmers in huge quantities, process food pulled from all over the country and imported from other countries, and ship it everywhere for sale. Then they lobby the government with their generous profits to bend food policy in their favor.
The average farm size in Iowa is over 300 acres, and they grow a lot of corn and soy. No one is going to plant 300 acres in field corn to supply a local market, but if there IS no local market, what choice do they have? Schools (and hospitals and just plain folk) all doing scratch cooking could support a friendlier, healthier local food system.
Even if you are not interested in being a part of the committee, you can still fill out an application to be eligible to vote or nominate someone else.
How County Agriculture Committees Are Selected
County Urban Agriculture Committees are a relatively new initiative, but they are an extension of the well-established system of County Agriculture Committees. These original committees were created in the 1930s to help farmers in the era of the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression. Farmers who have already worked with the USDA and been assigned a farm number are eligible to nominate candidates for the committee (including themselves) and to vote.
How County Urban Agriculture Committees Are Selected
County Urban Agriculture Committees were created by the 2018 Farm Bill. Members do not need a farm number and can come from diverse backgrounds such as researchers, professors, and community composters or gardeners as well as producers. This means the USDA cannot rely solely on their database of numbered farms to reach all interested parties.
Apply to Run, to Nominate Candidates or to Vote
As someone who is passionate about urban agriculture, I’m eager to see the urban committees succeed, and that means the USDA has to reach people who have never dealt with them before. If you’re a farmer, run a food bank, work with community gardens, do community composting, run a farm-to-school program, manage a hydroponic farm, or teach or do research in any of these or related areas, and you’re working in an urban area of Los Angeles or Orange Counties, you may be eligible to be a part of the Los Angeles County Urban Agriculture Committee.
The deadline to apply is April 14.
For more information, call Brooke Raffaele, the State Outreach Coordinator at the California Farm Service Agency, U.S. Department of Agriculture at (530) 219-7747.
The U. S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) is opening a new office in Compton to support urban agriculture in the greater Los Angeles region, and they’re establishing a committee to help.
They’re calling it a committee, but I think of it as a mechanism for Greater LA ag people to meet, listen to each other, find common cause, and work together to grow food and feed people. And please note: “Greater LA includes Los Angeles County and the more urbanized northern portion of Orange County. The USDA will dispense advice and help fund projects; that’s certainly worth a lot. But if we’re lucky, the committee will form a stable platform for people to meet, converse, plan, build relationships and get fruitful things done.
If you’re a farmer, run a food bank, work with community gardens, do community composting, run a farm-to-school program, manage a hydroponic farm, or teach or do research in any of these or related areas, and you’re working in an urban area of Los Angeles or Orange Counties, you may be eligible.
The deadline to apply is April 14. Call now for more information:
Brooke Raffaele
State Outreach Coordinator
California Farm Service Agency
U.S. Department of Agriculture
(530) 219-7747
“The urban and suburban county committees will work to encourage and promote urban, indoor, and other emerging agricultural production practices. Additionally, the county committees may address areas such as food access, community engagement, support of local activities to promote and encourage community compost, and food waste reduction.”
He intends for the Department of Agriculture to toughen enforcement of the Packers and Stockyards Act by making rules that clearly identify unfair and unjust practices, reinforce the interpretation that a violation of the act doesn’t need to show harm to the whole industry – just one farmer is enough, dial back the practice of poultry companies controlling every aspect of a contract farmer’s operation while the farmer shoulders all the risk, updating the definitions and criteria for determining what is unfair under the Act, and shore up anti-retaliation protections for complainants under the Act. (The USDA had already announced on June 11 that it would begin work on the Packers and Stockyards Act.)
He has directed the Department “to devise a plan to ensure that farmers have greater opportunities to access markets and receive a fair return for their products.” The order includes a list of suggested ways of doing this and ends with, “any other means that the Secretary of Agriculture deems appropriate.”
In an attempt to ” to improve farmers’ and smaller food processors’ access to retail markets,” he is asking for a report on the effect of retail concentration “including any practices that may violate the Federal Trade Commission Act, the Robinson-Patman Act (Public Law 74-692, 49 Stat. 1526, 15 U.S.C. 13 et seq.), or other relevant laws” and also on “on grants, loans, and other support that may enhance access to retail markets by local and regional food enterprises.”
And he’s ordered a report on ways in which intellectual property rights may “unnecessarily reduce competition in seed and other input markets.”
The Community Alliance with Family Farmers (CAFF) is a California nonprofit. Their mission is: “To build sustainable food and farming systems through policy advocacy and on-the-ground programs that create more resilient family farms, communities, and ecosystems.”
I was recently involved in my first attempt at making a public comment to a federal agency, in this case The Department of Agriculture. It was a great learning experience, though I’m sure we could do a much better job the second time around. My first lesson was that we need to allow LOTS of time for any collaborative effort. We were hard-pressed to meet the comment deadline, and that seriously constrained our efforts.
This resource will help us (the San Fernando Valley and Los Angeles chapters of the Climate Reality Project) do a better job next time. And there will be a next time. The opportunity for public comment is too good to pass up!
I don’t have a lot of well-formed opinions on food policy. I’m learning as I go. But I do have thoughts on meat. While I’m opposed to the way animal agriculture is usually done in the United States, I’m not against meat per se, and I’m troubled by the argument that meat, just by virtue of being meat, is bad for the environment. I’m sympathetic to many reasons people give for being vegetarians, but I think the environmental argument is a mistake and does harm.
For me the climate crisis comes down to two related issues. First, there are just too many people. That’s a huge topic, and I’m not going to pursue it any further here other than to say woe be unto us if we try to ignore it indefinitely. Two, industrial civilization is in need of a thoroughgoing overhaul if not a complete replacement. Tinkering isn’t going to cut it. Books have been written about all this, I’m sure; I’m not about to write another one. I’m just talking, briefly, about food and how meat fits into the food puzzle.
Food is a natural outgrowth of a flourishing ecology. Our preferred food production approach shouldn’t be to sacrifice square miles of land, killing every living thing on that land except for corn that’s been engineered to survive an onslaught of herbicides and pesticides in order to produce feed to finish cows in concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs). I’ve read that corn fields are eerily silent except for the sound of wind rustling in the stalks. No crickets, no toads, no birds. Not even any bees. Corn is sometimes self-pollinated, otherwise cross-pollinated by the wind; who needs bees?
That’s not an ecological system, it’s a corn factory.
One of the basic principles of a healthy ecological system is diversity, and that diversity must include a balance of plant and animal life. In theory you could take the manure and urine of the cow in the CAFO and spread it on the corn field to inch a bit closer to a natural system, but that turns out to be a challenge. Instead farmers rely on synthetic fertilizer.
A simpler approach is to put the cow in the field. Add a few chickens and pigs, sheep and goats. Grow some grain here and some vegetables there. Welcome the toads and the crickets, the ladybugs and gopher snakes and the cattle egrets. Put in an orchard; perennials are good news.
A factory producing fake meat from genetically engineered, industrially raised, trucked-in plant products is NOT a flourishing ecosystem any more than that cornfield is. It’s just another step away from a lifestyle in which people are an intimate part of the natural world around them.
I know. There are arguments, there are opposing facts, there are fears that more people will go hungry… but after mulling the issue for many months, I realized I could never amass enough data or do enough analysis to answer every question or calculate the one right path. I did a lot of reading and thinking, but eventually I chose to rely on what looks to me like common sense: your dinner should be a natural product of your own flourishing ecosystem. That may mean haggis in Scotland, gumbo in New Orleans, or jollof rice and egusi soup in Nigeria — all dishes that draw on foods suitable for the regions from which they spring — but it doesn’t mean artificial meat concocted from industrially-grown plants, packaged in a high-tech facility run by an international corporate giant and transported around the world on ships so big they may have trouble getting through the Suez Canal.
On March 23, 2021, the Ever Given ran aground in the Suez Canal, blocking traffic in both directions for 6 days.
Today AB 125 passed the Assembly Agriculture Committee. The $3 billion agriculture bond is now awaiting hearing by the Committee on Natural Resources.
There seems to be strong support for the bill. Some groups objected to the portions of the bill that deal with meat because, meat. It’s a polarizing issue. And then Assemblyman Adam Gray (D-Merced) withheld his support until such time as more is done to ensure water for agriculture. Another legislator, who nonetheless voted to pass, thanked Gray for bringing up the issue. Rivas, who introduced the bill, said he’d handle it. I’m curious to see how that works out. Water is more polarizing than meat.
Yesterday AB 125, a multi-billion dollar bond proposal creating an entirely new agriculture-related division in California’s Public Resources Code, was amended in the Assembly’s Agriculture Committee, increasing it by $180 million to a new total of $3,302,000,000.
What next?
Making it out of the Agriculture Committee where it was introduced by committee chair Robert Rivas (D-Hollister) is the first step in a long slog through both the Assembly and the Senate, which, if successful, will culminate in a vote of the California citizenry in the general election of November, 2022.
What’s the new money for?
Thirty million dollars of the new money is earmarked for prescribed grazing (a method of grazing animals that promotes soil health and the sequestration of carbon), $100 million to upgrade food processing plants, and $50 million for fire-related improvements.
Food Policy for Climate Activists 