Monthly Archives: June 2014

By Alice Daniel Beekeeper Chris DePrada wears protective clothing to check the health of the bees for Bradshaw Honey Farm.(Alice Daniel/KQED) These are hard times for honeybees; colonies are collapsing for reasons ranging from pesticides to parasites. And with this year’s pitiful rainfall in California, bees are facing another plight: There’s a lot less natural forage to make honey. Second-generation …

By Julie Cart There’s not much anyone can tell Barry Sorensen about Idaho’s Big Desert that he doesn’t know. Sorensen, 72, and his brother have been running cattle in this sere landscape all their lives, and they’ve weathered every calamity man and nature have thrown at them — until this drought came along. Sitting recently in a rustic cabin where …

The California Department of Food and Agriculture (CDFA) is now accepting applications for the State Water Efficiency and Enhancement Program (SWEEP), authorized by emergency drought legislation (Senate Bill 103).  An estimated $10 million in competitive grant funding will be awarded to provide financial assistance to agricultural operations for implementation of water conservation measures that result in increased water efficiency and …

Note – The farmer profiled in this story, Vonita Murray, was featured last year in CDFA’s Growing California video series. The segment can be viewed at the end of this story. ———————————————-      By Blair Anthony Robertson Farming wasn’t Vonita Murray’s first choice, but after making a drastic career change, the 38-year-old Navy veteran, former office manager and longtime fitness enthusiastic …

By Ezra Klein and Susannah Locke The future of the nations will depend on the manner of how they feed themselves, wrote the French epicurean Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin in 1826. Almost 200 years later, how nations feed themselves has gotten a lot more complicated. That’s particularly true in the US, where food insecurity coexists with an obesity crisis, where fast …

  By the Kitchen Sisters and Lisa Morehouse In 1898, the U.S. Department of Agriculture created a special department of men called Agriculture Explorers to travel the globe searching for new food crops to bring back for farmers to grow in the U.S. “These agricultural explorers were kind of like the Indiana Joneses of the plant world,” says Sarah Seekatz, a …

  By Eliza Barclay If you’re a scientist and you work for a pest control company, you’re used to thinking about bugs as the enemy you’re trained to kill. Now try putting one in your mouth. It took some mental rearranging for Nancy Troyano, an entomologist for Ehrlich Pest Control. But on Wednesday she did it for the first time …

Alameda County Fair 6/18/2014 to 7/6/2014 Pleasanton, CA El Dorado County Fair 6/12/2014 to 6/15/2014 Placerville, CA Kings Fair 6/12/2014 to 6/15/2014 Hanford, CA Merced County Fair 6/11/2014 to 6/15/2014 Merced, CA Placer County Fair 6/19/2014 to 6/22/2014 Roseville, CA Redwood Acres Fair 6/19/2014 to 6/22/2014 Eureka, CA San Diego County Fair 6/7/2014 to 7/6/2014 Del Mar, CA San Mateo …

By Nick Miller If Sacramento is truly the nation’s farm-to-fork capital, then the state Capitol has an opportunity this week to prove so by putting millions of budget dollars where its mouth is. Here’s what’s at stake: California’s cap-and-trade carbon tax is expected to generate a cool $850 million next fiscal year. This money needs to be spent on projects that …