Weed scientists at the University of California are offering the Diagnosing Herbicide Symptoms 2018 course on July 10-11, 2018. This 1-1/2 day course will focus on how an herbicide injury situation can arise, what types of information can help diagnose herbicide problems during field investigations, and what herbicide symptomology tools are available to you.
The course provides a rare opportunity for professionals to update their understanding of herbicide symptoms and injuries and interact with experts in this field. Cooperative Extension specialists Kassim Al-Khatib and Brad Hanson along with farm advisor John Roncoroni are a few of the course instructors.
Topics include herbicide mode of actions :: how symptoms develop and progress :: recovery from herbicide injury :: relationship between symptomology and economical damage :: symptoms from several classes of amino acid synthesis inhibiting herbicides :: symptoms from herbicides that mimic plant hormones and the synthesis of fatty acids :: symptoms from herbicides that affect photosystem I, photosystem II, or that act by disrupting cell membranes :: biotic and abiotic symptoms that resemble herbicide symptoms :: herbicide symptomology tools :: what happens during a field investigation :: what happens in an herbicide injury legal case.
This program is intended for pest control advisers, sales representatives for chemical companies, field investigators, and insurance adjusters.
Take advantage of the early-bird registration fee ($465.) The fee goes up after June 10 to $495 and then to $525 after June 26. The registration fee includes lunch, refreshments and course materials.
The course is approved for DPR and CCA continuing education credits–PCA, QAC, QAL, Private Applicator: 8.0 Other; Certified Crop Adviser: 7.0 IPM, 1.0 PD
More information, visit the UC Weed Research & Information Center website (http://wric.ucdavis.edu/) and click on DIAGNOSING HERBICIDE SYMPTOMS.
Washington, D. C., (April 19, 2018) – The Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) was built, quite literally, from the ground up. Originally known as the Soil Erosion Service in 1933 then the Soil Conservation Service starting in April of 1935, the agency was created in response to the high rates of soil erosion seen across the Great Plains during the Dust Bowl of the 1930s.
A dust storm rolling across the Littlefield Farm in Swisher County, Texas in 1935. Dust storms were common across the Great Plains during the Dust Bowl, when severe drought and extensive tillage caused unprecedented rates of soil erosion. Photo Credit: Littlefield Family Album, USDA-NRCS Texas
Then and now, NRCS is comprised of a network of people working together to fulfill one common mission: helping people help the land. As we pause this month to celebrate our roots, we look at where we’ve been, where we’re at and where we’re going to conserve one of our nation’s most valuable natural resources – our soils.
Dave Hoover, Director of the National Soil Survey Center, provides a unique glimpse into the progression of soil conservation across the nation. Hoover has been a soil scientist with NRCS for over 40 years. He has mapped over one million acres of soils throughout the United States, and has seen more than 50,000 unique soil profiles during his career with the agency.
Soil Mapping: Past to Present – Soil surveying is a cornerstone of NRCS, both historically and currently. “Technically,” says Hoover, “the National Soil Survey Program has been mapping the soils of the United States since 1899. This included some of the early mapping work done by Hugh Hammond Bennett, Father of Soil Conservation and our agency’s founder, and extends to currently include the majority of land acres across the country.”
The above soil profile is from a field in North Carolina. The visible layers are called soil horizons. Photo Credit: John A. Kelley, USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service
Technology has changed many things since Bennett’s days of mapping, particularly public access to soils information. We now have the Web Soil Survey, a public online tool that provides soil maps and data for over 95 percent of all counties in the United States. Web Soil Survey is designed to help any user, regardless of experience level, find information on soils across a given tract of land.
Soil Surveys: Tools for Conservation – “Web Soil Survey provides soils data, maps and interpretations for general users and experts alike,” explains Hoover. “If a landowner is interested in finding the soil type of her cropland, for instance, she can use Web Soil Survey on a home computer to access that information. If she then chooses to work with NRCS to adopt conservation practices across her operation, the Soil Conservationist working with her can use Web Soil Survey to learn more. Properties of the soil and associated site characteristics play a large role in determining the appropriate conservation practices we as an agency might recommend to any given landowner.”
Beyond supporting one-on-one work with producers, NRCS soil scientists use Web Soil Survey data to predict the suitability and limitations of soils for a variety of uses. For instance, critical Gopher Tortoise habitat can be identified for targeted conservation through the use of site suitability rankings based on soils data. This application – interpretation – is a large function of NRCS’s Soil Science Division. Many interpretations are available to the general public through the Web Soil Survey.
As technology advances, more interpretations will become available for increasingly small land areas. “Eventually,” says Hoover, “we will likely develop tools that provide suitability interpretations based on the exact characteristics of specific sites. We aren’t there yet, but we’re working towards that goal.”
The Future of Soil Conservation – As the global population grows towards a projected 9.8 billion people by 2050, so too does demand for the food, fuel and fiber grown in America. Our nation’s farmers, ranchers and foresters will rely on the productivity of one common resource – their soil – to meet this need. Put simply, soil conservation has never been more important.
“Through this work,” says Hoover, “we are helping people understand and better manage one of the most important – but often unseen – resources available throughout the country. We can see air and water, but people rarely see the soil. And, though we don’t always see it, can you name a single thing that isn’t tied to it? I have asked that question to many people; no one yet has been able to give me an answer. The soil is tied, in some way, to every single thing we use as a society. I can think of no charge more important than helping to conserve it.”
Yuba City, Calif., (April 13, 2018) – Recent research has shown we may have a new tool to protect trees and vines from vole damage. However, this product is not currently registered for such a use. We need your response to know whether there’s enough interest in a new way to control vole damage to warrant seeking registration.
Voles are short, stocky rodents that often cause extensive girdling damage to a variety of tree and vine crops throughout California. Effective management has often relied on some combination of vegetation removal, exclusion using trunk protectors, and rodenticide application.
However, all these management solutions have shortcomings. Vegetation removal doesn’t always eliminate all problems in an area. Trunk protectors should be buried at least 6 inches below ground, increasing the labor required to protect trees and vines. Rodenticide applications are generally not allowable within an orchard or vineyard during the growing season, when it is most needed. See the following link for more details on voles and vole management: http://vpcrac.org/files/4314/7612/1259/Meadow_vole_chapter.pdf.
Clearly there is room for a new tool to be added to the proverbial IPM toolbox when it comes to managing voles in orchard and vine crops. In recent experiments with a chemical repellent, anthraquinone, on citrus trees, we found that anthraquinone was highly repellent following trunk application (sprayed or painted on), with a >90% reduction in girdling damage observed following application regardless of the season when it was applied. Anthraquinone exhibited substantial longevity, with no increase in girdling damage observed for the entire summer (5 weeks) and spring (6 weeks) sampling periods. This clearly indicates substantial repellency for anthraquinone applications, with repellency to last for at least two months, and likely for much longer.
These results clearly indicate effective repellency of voles following anthraquinone applications, but at this time, anthraquinone is not registered for use against any mammalian species. We are hoping to gauge the interest of growers for the registration of this repellent against voles in orchard and vine crops. This is where we need your help. We have developed a very short survey (will take less than 3 minutes to complete) to gauge this interest. Please take this very quick survey to assist in this effort:
Davis, Calif., (March 23, 2018) – UC Davis Venture Catalyst and TechAccel LLC, a Kansas City-based technology and venture development company, today announced an expanded partnership that provides increased support for the university’s Science Translation and Innovative Research (STAIR™) Grant program, which provides funding for proof-of-concept research aimed at demonstrating commercial feasibility of university-generated technologies.
TechAccel will commit $50,000 in grant funding to an expansion of the Venture Catalyst STAIR grants, which are in their fifth year of enabling the commercial translation of UC Davis research and technologies through proof-of-concept funding.
This promise of additional funding is intended to elicit more agricultural-focused technologies. TechAccel’s additional funding will support a sixth STAIR grant this year focusing exclusively on a technology in plant or animal agriculture, animal health, animal nutrition, or technologies to reduce postharvest food waste and increase food safety. If successful, this expanded program may be repeated.
“We are proud to collaborate with the world-class talent at UC Davis,” said Michael Helmstetter, president and CEO of TechAccel. “Together, we see opportunities to make a greener, healthier future by helping advance agriculture, animal health and food safety technologies to market.”
Dushyant Pathak, associate vice chancellor for research and executive director of Venture Catalyst at UC Davis, agreed.
“We’re thrilled with this generous enhancement to our existing collaboration with TechAccel which has already provided support for novel translational research at the university,” he said. “TechAccel’s unique focus and its combination of business and technical expertise provide the perfect complement to our strengths at UC Davis in technology development and product innovation for societal impact.”
TechAccel is a technology and venture development organization focused in agriculture, animal health and food technology. The company invests in innovative technology and funds science advancement programs to accelerate readiness for commercialization.
TechAccel began its collaboration with the university in 2016 with participation in the UC Davis Venture Catalyst STAIR-Plus™ program, which supports STAIR grant recipients who successfully achieve their commercialization milestones.
As part of the program, TechAccel executives participate in the review and assessment of grant applications in agriculture, animal health, food and nutrition. TechAccel executives provide mentorship to grant-winning researchers, who may also be considered for future TechAccel emerging company investments.
TechAccel also recently announced an investment in a science advancement project underway at the Siegel Lab in the Genome Center at UC Davis. This project, led by Justin B. Siegel, assistant professor of chemistry biochemistry and molecular medicine as well as faculty director of the Innovation Institute for Food and Health at UC Davis, is directed toward identifying mutations in a wheat enzyme to produce plants capable of thriving in warmer temperatures.
Parlier, Calif., (March 6, 2018) – The nonprofit organization CENIC has awarded the UC Division of Agriculture and Natural Resources its 2018 Innovations in Networking Award for Broadband Applications. The award recognizes work to extend high-speed broadband to University of California researchers in rural communities across California by connecting UC ANR sites to the California Research and Education Network (CalREN).
“The internet at Kearney was like a drinking straw delivering and retrieving information, when what we needed was a fire hose,” said Gabe Youtsey, chief innovation officer for UC ANR. “High-speed, broadband Internet at our Kearney Research and Extension Center, just south of Fresno, will allow UC ANR to lead innovative, on-farm agriculture technology research and extension for UC in the Central Valley. It will allow UC researchers to share big data and big computing with colleagues at campuses and globally.“
Project leaders being recognized include Tolgay Kizilelma, chief information security officer; Tu Tran, associate vice president for business operations; and Youtsey.
Until now, UC ANR facilities have been hamstrung by poor Internet connectivity, hindering their ability to support campus-based researchers and UC Cooperative Extension scientists who are engaged with community and industry partners to ensure that California has healthy food systems, environments and communities.
Extending from the Oregon border in the north, through the Sierra foothills and Central Valley, along the Pacific Coast and south to the Mexican border, UC ANR’s research and extension facilities are situated among California’s rich and unique agricultural and natural resources. This allows for the application of scientific research to regional challenges and issues. Today, nearly all research and data analysis involves remote collaboration. To work effectively and efficiently on multi-institutional projects, researchers depend heavily on high-speed networks and access to large data sets and computing resources. The high-speed broadband connection also provides a new way for Cooperative Extension advisors to collaborate with farmers, naturalists and others in these rural regions.
In 2016, CENIC began working with UC ANR to connect its nine research and extension centers to CalREN, equipping them with internet speeds comparable to those found on UC campuses. For example, the UC Hopland Research and Extension Center in Mendocino County and the UC Desert Research and Extension Center in Imperial County are both connected at 500 Mbps, five times their previous level of connectivity.
Due to the remote location of most of these facilities, the work involved in identifying suitable pathways for connections between each site and the CalREN network has been extensive. Engineers from CENIC and UC ANR collaborated on network design, deployment, and troubleshooting to equip these facilities with the high-speed internet they need. High-speed connectivity with significant bandwidth now allows researchers to use equipment like infrared cameras to collect data on how crops respond to heat, among many other electronic tools. Farmers who are unable to visit the Research and Extension Centers can now connect virtually and tune in to real-time video streams, gaining access to the latest knowledge.
In addition to the Research and Extension Centers, the Citrus Clonal Protection Program in Riverside is now connected to CalREN. Elkus Ranch, the environmental education center for Bay Area youths, the UC ANR administrative offices in Davis and 30 UC Cooperative Extension sites are in the process of being connected.
“You can’t do big data with dial-up Internet speed,” said Jeffery Dahlberg, director of Kearney Research and Extension Center. “Before this upgrade, our internet was slower than my home internet speeds. Now we have speeds more like you will find on UC campuses.”
Dahlberg noted that high-speed internet will become a powerful research tool allowing researchers to collect and share data in real-time. “For instance, a researcher can use an infrared camera in a field collecting readings to determine how a crop responds to heat as it changes throughout the day, but even this modest instrument needs significant bandwidth,” he said. “We now have the bandwidth to do that.”
“The impact of these newly established broadband connections is significant,” said Louis Fox, president and CEO of CENIC. “UC ANR researchers and educators can now enhance and share the creation, development, and application of knowledge in agricultural, natural and human resources, bringing practical, science-based answers to Californians and California industry.”
Innovations in Networking Awards are presented each year by CENIC to highlight the exemplary innovations that leverage ultra-high bandwidth networking, particularly where those innovations have the potential to transform the ways in which instruction and research are conducted or where they further the deployment of broadband in underserved areas.
Left – Ross Buckenham, CEO, CalBio and right – Felix Echeverria, Carlos Echeverria & Sons Dairy
Bakersfield, Calif., (March 5, 2018) – For second generation dairy farmer Felix Echeverria, dairy farming is a family affair. His father, an immigrant from Spain’s Basque country, began milking cows in Southern California in the early 1950’s. Since then, Mr. Echeverria and his brother Johnny, have spent most of their mornings on dairy farms, waking early to milk the cows, put out the feed and check the water.
Yet for the next generation of Echeverria dairy farmers, there will be a new addition to the sights and sounds of an early morning on the farm – the humming of a dairy digester producing electricity.
Located outside Bakersfield, California, the Carlos Echeverria and Sons (CE&S) Dairy Biogas project will use anaerobic digester technology to produce energy, reduce greenhouse gas emissions, comply with environmental regulations and increase nutrient availability to crops. The project is funded through CDFA’s Dairy Digester Research and Development Program (DDRDP) and the California Energy Commission.
The CE&S digester will work by using a high-density synthetic cover to capture methane from the dairy’s manure lagoon. The captured methane will be stored and then combusted in a high-efficiency generator, producing renewable electricity. By using this system, the CE&S Dairy Biogas is expected to cut its methane emissions by approximately 75 percent and reduce energy costs by 15-20 percent.
Although initially cautious of digesters, Mr. Echeverria says he was ultimately convinced by his trust in neighboring farmers already embracing digesters and the partnership developed with California Bioenergy (Cal Bio), who will own, operate and maintain the digester system.
“At first, we were very skeptical because this is something we knew very little about,” said Mr. Echeverria. “But having trust in my neighbors and seeing the changes that digesters bring led us to building our own.”
Alongside reducing emissions, the CE&S Dairy Biogas project also advances California’s efforts to connect energy providers and fuel created by state supported incentive programs. In this case, the CE&S digester will deliver approximately 7.6 million kWh of renewable electricity annually to PG&E, enough energy to fully power 705 homes.
The CE&S project is also part of the Kern County Dairy Biogas cluster, a group of sixteen dairies with approximately 100,000 cows, that would collectively produce 2.5- 3 million cubic feet of biogas per day and 1.5- 2.5 million diesel gallon equivalents per year. The renewable energy created through the cluster would support the state’s sustainable transportation efforts and generate enough fuel to power 100,000 cars across the country every year.
Mr. Echeverria applauds the state’s desire to work collaboratively with industry in developing digester projects. To date, the DDRDP has helped fund 24 projects across California, capturing an estimated 5.7 million metrics tons of CO2e over ten years.
“I am truly delighted about the partnership between industry and government.” said Mr. Echeverria. “It’s a huge step in the right direction.”
Sacramento, Calif., (March 2, 2018) – Circles on the California Waterfowl Tracker map shows where waterfowl are feeding and roosting. Red indicates a high density of birds, orange is medium density and yellow is low density.
To reduce potential exposure to avian influenza, a new interactive website is now available to help California poultry producers, backyard poultry enthusiasts, regulators and risk managers assess the locations of waterfowl relative to poultry farms in the Central Valley.
While not all waterfowl carry avian influenza, the migratory birds are the primary reservoir of the virus that kills chickens, turkeys and other birds and can take an economic toll on the poultry industry. During an outbreak of a highly pathogenic strain of avian influenza in 2014-15, nearly 50 million birds had to be killed to contain the disease in the United States.
“Avian influenza is such a devastating disease, in an abundance of caution, we want to limit any interaction between waterfowl and domestic poultry,” said Maurice Pitesky, UC Cooperative Extension poultry specialist.
From September through March, geese, ducks and other waterfowl migrate by the millions via the Pacific Flyway and winter in California wetlands, rice and corn fields. At the height of migration, the Central Valley is home to 3 million waterfowl.
Migrating waterfowl stop at Yolo Bypass. UC Davis research has shown that 5 percent to 20 percent of waterfowl carry avian influenza.
The Central Valley is also home to the majority of the state’s commercial egg-laying hens, broiler chickens and turkey flocks.
Using the web app to understand when and where waterfowl are feeding and roosting, poultry farm managers and other stakeholders will be able to consider waterfowl in their decision making. They may decide to place pasture-raised poultry in a region of the state that has less wetlands, such as Fresno. If a large number of Canada geese take up residence nearby, poultry owners may decide to move their domestic birds indoors to reduce their exposure until the migrating waterfowl move on.
Using a machine-learning approach developed by Jeff Buler, University of Delaware wildlife ecology professor, the web app produces a waterfowl density map of California’s Central Valley that is automatically updated daily with both satellite and weather station information.
“The model doesn’t tell us whether waterfowl are carrying avian influenza, but it helps poultry producers and regulators understand where those interfaces could happen,” Pitesky said.
By law, organic and cage-free production must give birds access to the outdoors. While they are outdoors, poultry are at a higher risk of exposure to diseases carried by wild birds.
Additional waterfowl habitat and next-generation radar analysis of waterfowl are integrated into the web app. Users can search one or more addresses to anticipate their farms’ interaction with waterfowl. Based on the proximity of waterfowl and wild bird monitoring information from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, poultry owners can make biosecurity decisions.
“While the current version of the website is designed for California, the long-term goal is to develop and expand this system for the continental U.S. to promote health and safety of poultry flocks nationally,” Pitesky said.
Poultry producers who would like to be notified by UC Cooperative Extension if there is an avian influenza outbreak in their area can sign up on the California Poultry Census page at http://ucanr.edu/sites/poultry/California_Poultry_Census.
Navel Orangeworm (NOW) continues to be a growing pest for almond, pistachio & walnut growers all over California. Last year was an especially difficult year, as there were growers that experienced significant crop loss who have historically not had issues with the pest before. Bob Klein with the Pistachio Research Board recently reported on a field trial they will be conducting utilizing sterile insect technology to minimize NOW populations in the orchard. Watch this video and read more about it in Pacific Nut Producer Magazine.
Enjoy our Ag video news? Be sure to let our sponsor Duarte Nursery know and thank them for their industry support!
At the recent Almond Board Conference in Sacramento, Bob Curtis shared a new tool growers have to control Aflatoxin levels in nut crops, other than just effective Navel Orangeworm management. Known as AF36, watch this brief interview with Bob, and read more about it in Pacific Nut Producer Magazine.
Davis, Calif., (January 25, 2018) – MORNING, 2047: WORK IS WELL UNDER WAY as day breaks on this farm in California’s Central Valley. A robotic tractor drives along rows of tomato plants, with a snip-snip-snip as weeds are cut away. A drone hovers over a field, looking for signs of disease. In the feedlot, sensors show which cattle are thriving and which are eating less – an early sign of illness.
From her office, the farm’s manager checks data flowing in on crops and livestock, what is being done and what needs attention. Across the farm, skilled workers tend to machines as well as to plants and animals.
Thanks to technology, this farm of the future produces more food, measured by inputs of land, labor, energy or materials than ever before and does so with less water and less impact on the environment and climate. And it also provides skilled careers for a new generation of farmworkers.
That’s the vision behind the Smart Farm Initiative at the University of California, Davis, one of the “Big Ideas” that the campus hopes will capture the attention of collaborators, donors and supporters.
“Smart Farm is about addressing the grand challenges in agriculture, using technology to increase production of food and renewable energy in the face of a changing climate,” said David Slaughter, professor of biological and agricultural engineering at UC Davis, who is leading the initiative. “What will a farm look like in 50 or 100 years? We have to address population growth, climate change and labor issues, and that has brought a lot of interest in technology.”
Slaughter is working to attract funding that will move Smart Farm from a collection of ideas and programs to an integrated initiative. He hopes to establish a physical presence for the initiative on campus west of Highway 113, with labs and workshops, experimental fields, educational space and a “droneport” for working with unmanned aerial vehicles. Other items on the wish list include new facilities for plant sciences and a “vertical farming” facility for experimenting with ways to grow crops in very limited space. New funding from private philanthropy, foundations or government grants could support researchers and students, including one or more endowed professorships.
“What will a farm look like in 50 or 100 years? We have to address population growth, climate change and labor issues, and that has brought a lot of interest in technology.”
By bringing together a diverse group of researchers, Slaughter hopes Smart Farm will accelerate the development of agricultural technologies such as robotics, plant science and animal care. At the same time, Slaughter and colleagues want to create a new generation of high-tech farmworkers while the current workforce transitions to jobs less dependent on hard manual labor.
“David’s approach is refreshing, because he is considering how the workers and the machines work together,” said Professor Adela de la Torre, vice chancellor for Student Affairs at UC Davis, who studies health and development in Latino and Chicano communities.
Some of those robots can already been seen out in the fields at UC Davis. For example, with support from the US Department of Agriculture, Slaughter’s team has built an automated cultivator to replace weeding by hand. Towed behind a tractor, the machine identifies weeds in a row of crop plants and cuts them out of the soil.
The cultivator can distinguish crops from weeds because the crop seeds are coated with the fluorescent dye that transfers to the young plant as it shoots and grows. The dye gradually wears away, but there is enough on younger plants to enable the cultivator to pick them out and snip out the non-glowing weeds.
Another robot in field trials at UC Davis is a box on rails with a telescopic neck armed with cameras. The robot zips through a stand of sorghum taking pictures and collecting data on the plants and how much light they capture. The data goes back to a plant breeder who can use it to make new selections for the next round of breeding crosses.
“Farmers will have knowledge right down to the level of individual plants,” Slaughter said.
Plants have some obvious advantages for robotic management: They don’t move, and they aren’t going to, say, kick over a robot or try to eat it. But there’s still plenty of scope for new technology in raising livestock.
“What we see are opportunities for technology to amplify care,” said Cassandra Tucker, professor of animal science. Tucker specializes in the care of beef and dairy cattle and she sees opportunities to use sensors and information technology to better manage large herds and individual animals.
In production animals, she said, the first sign of ill-health is when an animal’s appetite drops off.
“If we can use sensors on individual animals to monitor food intake and rumination, we could see if an animal is getting sick days before we see other clinical signs,” she said.
In California, beef cattle begin their lives on grass and then fatten on feedlots. The feedlot system brings cattle to market faster, produces less greenhouse gas emissions and uses land more efficiently. But animals can also develop health problems with the change in diet when they come to feedlots. Having more information about individual animals would allow ranchers to optimize their systems based around animal welfare, Tucker said.
Poultry specialist Maja Makagon is using new technology as a tool to understand bird behavior, which could lead to better animal welfare and productivity.
“With poultry, we have not had the technology to look at individual birds, so we have been limited to studying flocks,” she said. “A lot of this data is hard to get at without technology.”
Makagon, for example, is using sensors on individual hens to record when they bump their keelbone (breastbone) against something. Keelbone damage is a significant problem that can affect egg production.
The key to this kind of “smart farming” is making all this information available in ways that are accessible and useful to farmers and workers, Tucker said.
“You need to deliver information to users in some useful way,” she said.
Robots in the fields and sensors in the barn might be attention-grabbing, but there could be a downside for farmworkers. In the past, introducing new technology has meant lost jobs and displaced communities.
In the mid-1960s, for example, UC Davis developed both the mechanized tomato harvester and tomato varieties suited to mechanical harvesting. Mechanization was prompted partly by the end of the “Bracero” program that bought guest workers from Mexico, and also came at a time when the United Farmworkers Union was trying to organize workers and bargain for better pay and conditions.
Historically, new technology is introduced when labor becomes more expensive, de la Torre said.
“Much of the approach of agricultural colleges has been to consider labor as an input of production,” de la Torre said. “But that labor input is a human being. If you only think of technology in terms of production, you don’t consider what it means for workers.”
As a result, introducing new technology has tended to displace workers – especially unionized workers.
“The big plus about the Smart Farm approach is that there can be intentionality in how we introduce technology,” de la Torre said. “We can optimize it for both farmers and workers.”
As well as thinking about how machines and people can best work together, the initiative is developing new thinking about careers in agriculture.
“We’re thinking of a big bold new perspective on how agricultural work is done,” said Mary Lou de Leon Siantz, professor of nursing and director of UC Davis’ CAMPOS program, which promotes opportunities for female and minority scholars in STEM fields. “The next generation of ag workers will be scientists and engineers and we need to start preparing students for that kind of work.”
Traditionally, agricultural labor is hard, grueling work.
“People don’t choose it as a career, they do it for survival,” Slaughter said.
“We’re thinking of a big bold new perspective on how agricultural work is done”
Ray Rodriguez, a professor in the UC Davis College of Biological Sciences, has lived that experience. From the age of six Rodriguez experienced picking cotton, grapes, cantaloupes and tomatoes with his family in the Central Valley.
“You had a bag called a choke-sack that went over the head and shoulder, 50 pounds for the kids, 100 pounds for women, 150-pound sacks for the men. My dad would compete with the other men to see how much they could pick in a day, 300, 400 or 500 pounds,” Rodriguez said.
His last farm work was in 1965, when he picked grapes to raise tuition to attend Fresno City College.
“And I said I’m never doing this again. It’s nothing you want to expose people to unless you have to.”
From Fresno City College, Rodriguez transferred to CSU Fresno for his bachelor’s degree and UC Santa Cruz for his Ph.D. in genetics. He can look back on a career of research and teaching in plant genetics and molecular biology, biochemistry, nutrition and genomics. In 2010, he co-founded the Global HealthShare Initiative, which aims to speed commercialization of low-cost, effective health care solutions in developing countries.
Now Rodriguez and de Leon Siantz are putting together education and training proposals aimed at transforming farm work into a high-tech, high-skills occupation.
Tomorrow’s farmworkers could spend their time repairing machinery, analyzing data or debugging code from a robot. Tasks like those are going to need a wide range of skills and training, from certificate programs to graduate degrees.
“Without a transformation of the farm labor workforce, we are going to see massive displacement of farmworkers and their families,” Rodriguez said. “We have to make this a win-win for farmers, workers, their children as well as for consumers.”
Rodriguez and de Leon Siantz foresee a pipeline that includes middle and high schools, community colleges and universities that provides training for different levels of ability and attainment.
De Leon Siantz has studied the successes and problems of farmworkers and their children in the Central Valley: What keeps the kids in school, what makes them drop out. Creating a new agriculture workforce means engaging with the community, she said.
“We need to reach parents and kids, and help them visualize how their big dreams can be implemented,” de Leon Siantz said.
De Leon Siantz hopes to partner with the national 4-H organization to develop new programs for K12 schools – and which connect to a pipeline of community college, extension, undergraduate and graduate programs that can work for students at every level of ability.
“We have to think in broad ways about working with communities to make broad changes,” de la Torre said. “These communities are very aware of their self-interest, and they are aware when a program is not of benefit to them. If you meaningfully include people in the discussion, you will be far more successful.”
With a long track record in agricultural innovation, UC Davis is naturally well-positioned to invent the future of farming, from crop improvement to robotics. But more significantly, the campus culture of collaboration and cross-disciplinary work can bring a diverse group of people – biologists, engineers, educators, sociologists – to make a transformational shift in agriculture that benefits industry, consumers and communities.
The future of farm work is not about picking but about managing technology. Through the Smart Farm Initiative, Slaughter and colleagues hope not only to invent the technology, but develop the training and career paths that will open up new opportunities in agriculture.
“What better place to train them than UC Davis?” Slaughter said.
Agricultural engineer David Slaughter is leading the Smart Farm Initiative.This mobile robot collects data on plant growth and light intensity in a stand of sorghum.
Professor Cassandra Tucker says technology can put animal welfare at the center of farm decision making.
The tomato harvester developed by UC Davis engineers reduced demand for farm labor to pick tomatoes. (UC Davis Special Collections)
In the past, new technology has benefitted farmers but displaced workers, says Adela de la Torre. Smart Farm aims to optimize technology for farmers and workers.
