California Agriculture

California's water wars aren't about scarcity. Even with 37 million people and the nation's most irrigation-intensive agriculture, the state usually has enough water for both people and crops, thanks to the brilliant hydrological engineering of past Californians. But now there is a new element in the century-old water calculus: a demand that the state's inland waters flow as pristinely as they supposedly did before the age of dams, reservoirs and canals. Only that way can California's rivers, descending from their mountain origins, reach the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta year-round.

California's cornucopia of fresh fruits and vegetables accounted for about half the state's $2.8 billion in agricultural exports last year, but those sales are handicapped because of trade barriers unique to these crops, according to a report released Monday by the California State World Trade Commission. Producers of these crops also find themselves caught in cross-fires from escalating trade disputes and penalized by trade barriers unique to perishable commodities, the study said.

California agricultural officials will release hundreds of tiny, stinger-less wasps this month to combat the fruit- and leaf-eating light-brown apple moth, in a move to find alternatives to aerial pesticide spraying. The California Department of Food and Agriculture will deploy the wasps, no bigger than a grain of rice, in San Luis Obispo and Sacramento counties and may expand the program to other counties with more serious infestations. The wasps lay their eggs inside light-brown apple moth eggs, where they incubate until the larvae emerge and kill the developing moths.

The double whammy of spiraling natural gas prices and costly power interruptions has slammed many sectors of California agriculture, making tough times even worse for businesses already feeling the pinch of low commodity prices. Dairy farmers may be able to get consumers to shoulder part of their growing financial burden through price increases.

A couple of crops with exotic-sounding names may be inching closer to commercial production in California. University of California researchers are reporting progress on guayule, a plant that can produce natural rubber, and kenaf, a potential source of newsprint. Guayule, a desert shrub, was a source of natural rubber early in this century before synthetic rubber became popular and again during World War II when rubber was scarce.

A federal initiative to reduce the use of farm pesticides promises to put California farming under a microscope, because fruits and vegetables, widely grown here, are the most reliant on the chemicals. The policy shift, announced Friday by the Clinton Administration, and a cautious report on how pesticides effect children, released Monday by the National Academy of Sciences, may also raise consumer interest in foods grown organically, without the use of synthetic pesticides.

The relentless spread of foot-and-mouth disease among livestock in Europe has stirred alarm and dredged up bitter memories in agricultural communities across California, from northern cattle country to the vast industrial dairies of Chino. State officials estimate a broad outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease, a hardy virus that spreads quickly among animals, could cause more than $13.5 billion in damage to California's livestock producers and the dairy industry, the nation's biggest.

While farmers in the drought-stricken Midwest watch helplessly as their parched crops wither and die, many growers in California are looking forward to a robust year of sufficient water and inflated profits. Unlike the Midwest, where agriculture depends heavily on rainfall, most California agriculture is irrigated and was spared the drought's first wrath.

The return of the Mediterranean fruit fly--the little insect the government has spent 17 years and more than $170 million trying to kill--is prompting some to suggest that the state stop swatting flies and start learning to live with them. Since Sept. 8, 129 of the blue-eyed insects have been trapped in Los Angeles County, a number that rises sharply every day.

The two Republicans at the top of California's November ticket fanned out across the Central Valley this week, denouncing government dysfunction and asserting that their business experience would help them rescue the region's unemployed workers, small firms and struggling family farms. "I have spent a lot of time in the valley, and what is going on here due to lack of water is a humanitarian crisis," gubernatorial nominee Meg Whitman told scores of supporters on a recent afternoon in a sweltering feed warehouse in Lemoore, about 30 miles south of Fresno.

A tiny disease-carrying insect that could bring down California's $1.6-million citrus industry continues an inexorable march north into one of the nation's premier orange and lemon growing regions. State officials said Wednesday that they now have found the bug in Echo Park, the most northern spotting yet. Routine traps captured a single Asian citrus psyllid on a citrus tree at a home in the Los Angeles neighborhood Monday. The California Department of Food and Agriculture is now setting up hundreds or more traps in an eight-square-mile area around the home where the insect was discovered.

Is it trespassing when bees do what bees do in California's tangerine groves? That is the question being weighed by state agriculture officials caught between beekeepers who prize orange blossom honey and citrus growers who blame the bees for causing otherwise seedless mandarin oranges to develop pips. "Both sides are unwilling to give any ground, and both have valid points," said Jerry Prieto, a former Fresno County agricultural commissioner who has spent six months mediating the dispute.

China's booming economy has spelled trouble for many U.S. farmers who have lost market share to low-cost Chinese imports. But some California growers are cashing in on China's increasing wealth and growing hunger for table grapes, almonds and other high-quality fruits and nuts that don't grow as well in the Asian nation. Such high-priced commodities helped drive the value of U.S. agricultural exports to China from less than $1.9 billion in 2001 to nearly $6.7 billion last year.

A hulking, nameless creature lumbers among the citrus trees, its eight arms and eyes in constant motion, searching for its prey: oranges. Part robot, part tractor, the contraption is an unusual combination of one internal-combustion engine, four rubber tires, eight digital cameras, eight electronic arms and an excruciating number of computer algorithms that choreograph every movement.

The agriculture industry's exemption from clean-air controls may be nearing an end as federal air quality officials announced this week that they will move ahead with plans to begin regulating farms in California. The California Farm Bureau, however, quickly filed suit to block the action. Unlike most other industries, agriculture is exempt from stringent smog controls, a loophole the state Legislature granted a generation ago and that air quality officials tacitly honored until now.

It was not a California Chamber of Commerce kind of day. Missing from the August meeting of the chamber's Economic Advisory Council was any sign of boosterism. Gloomily, the economists gave their reports, each seeming to paint a worse picture of the state's economy than the one before. "I was the only optimist . . . the only one saying things were not quite so bad," remembers Ray Borton, senior agriculture economist at the state Department of Food and Agriculture.

Ask any Los Angeles schoolkid, and you're liable to hear that agriculture is a breeze: cotton grows on sheep, chocolate milk is produced by brown cows and white milk comes from a carton at Ralphs. It's not surprising, then, that California's diverse agricultural interests have teamed up to shine some factual light on the state's largest industry.

A loophole that allowed California farms to escape federal air pollution controls has been closed as part of a legal settlement Tuesday that will cause the state's agriculture to be regulated the same way it is in the rest of the country. Although agriculture is a major source of air pollution in California, the state Legislature in 1976 granted farmers an exemption from federal Clean Air Act requirements to secure permits before operating or expanding. While California pioneered many air pollution controls, it was alone among the states in granting agriculture, its largest industry, a waiver from federal air quality regulations.

The National Academy of Sciences has determined that federal regulators erred by sharply limiting water to the Klamath Basin's drought-stricken farmers last summer to save endangered fish. The academy concluded that there is "no substantial scientific foundation" for a decision by federal biologists that led to water cutbacks last April to agriculture fields to help endangered salmon and suckerfish.