There is no doubt that climate change will have serious and widespread impacts on agriculture throughout California. New state legislation is intended to assist farmers in coping with those changes. Lori Abbot reports.

At right: Three generations of Burroughs family farmers walking their pastureland.

As October begins, pollination season has largely ended and many commercial beehives are having their  harvested. Now for the first time, beekeepers have a new tool to track just how much energy their efforts take, and the amount of greenhouse gases those efforts emit. With growing consumer interest in the carbon footprints of products and cap-and-trade legislation under AB32, emissions-tracking is becoming increasingly important for agricultural producers - including beekeepers and honey makers. 

Beekeepers truck some 1.5 million bee colonies around the state to help pollinate California’s 760,000 acres of almond orchards and 50 other fruit and nut crops. They continue to pollinate vegetable crops throughout the summer and early fall. But beyond pollination, bees are big business here. California is the second largest producer of honey in the country, producing over 27 million pounds of honey in 2010.

The chain of production leading to pollination and honey processing is long. Apiaries require hive construction and management, bee travel for nectar and pollination, honey extraction, processing and packaging. And each stage requires energy inputs in the form of fuel, electricity or nutrients.

Researchers at UC Davis and the UC Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education Program (SAREP) have created a way to calculate how much energy is required to produce a honey product, and the amount of greenhouse gas emissions that are created throughout the process. Looking at the chain of production for an entire operation, researchers can estimate the carbon footprint for a single kilogram of honey.

Recently, SAREP released a honey carbon calculator to help individual beekeepers, both hobbyist and commercial, track the greenhouse gases of their own apiaries.  The calculator is based on a life cycle assessment (LCA) of honey production, a cradle-to-grave accounting system used to track the energy requirements of products as diverse as cement, hybrid cars and almonds.  

A truckload of beehives prepares to hit the road“With agriculture, a life cycle has to include all of the upstream materials acquisition and energy acquisition before you even get to the agricultural field. So we’re looking at the impacts of all of that,” said Sonja Brodt, program coordinator at UC SAREP.

The LCA of honey production is the first of its kind in the U.S. Alissa Kendall, assistant professor in Civil and Environmental Engineering, spearheaded the effort to assess honey’s greenhouse gas impact. To her surprise, “the big finding was the role of transportation in the life cycle.” Transportation of bee colonies for pollination and over-wintering uses the greatest energy and creates the greatest emissions.

Tracking these emissions is ultimately a benefit to a farmer’s bottom line, said Kendall. “There’s occasionally hostility to climate change and greenhouse gas research because it’s a very politicized issue," she said. But researchers find that “efficiency in operations is often well aligned with reducing greenhouse gases and climate footprint . . . and often goes hand in hand with reducing energy use and dependence on fossil fuels and oil.”

Elias Marvinney, a graduate student researcher focusing on agriculturally-produced greenhouse gas emissions said there are concrete financial rewards for being a net-carbon sequesterer. "If you can put a carbon negative sticker on your product, then you just expanded your market," Marvinney said.

Currently, honey producers and processors can input their records into the carbon calculator to determine which part of their operations have the greatest emissions and see where the greatest improvements can be made. The calculator can be found here. It comes with a guide. 

Now that California has officially designated a series of offshore coastal areas as Marine Protected Areas, the state needs to monitor them. Lori Abbot has this report on how that's being done.

At right, an underwater fish survey in progress. Photo courtesy of Reef Check California.

by Aubrey White

Lately, I’ve seen the familiar signs of back-to-school. The school bus noisily pulls away from my neighbor’s house before the sun has fully risen. The neighborhood kids are inside a bit earlier in the evening (probably to finish that pesky homework), and I see throngs of students walk down the street with heavy backpacks slung low over their shoulders. But there are a few new signs in my neighborhood that school is back in session; kids with dirty jeans, mud stained at the knees from time spent in the school garden. 

Interest in school gardens in California is high, and institutions are working to provide the resources to make school garden development a success. The UC Davis Children’s Garden Program, in collaboration with Life Lab Science Program, has been working for over a decade to train those who wish to start school gardens that can provide positive experiences for students, but can also serve to enhance academics in the classroom. Beyond just a site for planting and harvest, the garden can be used, for example, as a space for young children to practice math skills like measuring, for middle school students to study civilizations of the world and for high school students to work on culinary arts, agricultural skills and entrepreneurship. 

The Creating and Sustaining Your School Garden workshops teach the nuts and bolts of starting a garden, but also provide trainees with curriculum designed to bring many state-mandated education requirements into the garden. Between 2012 and 2014, the workshops aim to train approximately 700 school educators from throughout California.

 “School gardens really should be regionally mentored,” says Carol Hillhouse, director of the UC Davis Children’s Garden Program. “California is so geographically diverse. The way that we garden in the Central Valley is different from how we garden in the Imperial Valley or the Sierra foothills. So training new regional trainers has meant really effective mentors in different parts of the state. And our training materials provide a really simple way to get information out there that is easy for new trainers to use.” 

Between 2007 and 2008, the workshops trained 180 trainers, who went on to train an additional 664 people in the practice of starting a school garden. The participants in those workshops represented nearly 300 schools, with a school population of 93,879. The sustained level of interest in these workshops and in school gardens in general over the years has been impressive. 

School budget cuts, threats to school programs and teacher salaries are a grim reality in California. But in the face of those challenges, school garden interest seems to grow. ”School gardens have held their own even in a very difficult economic climate and that says a lot and frankly has surprised me because I know how hard it is in schools these days," Hillhouse said. "The response now is as strong, if not stronger than it was when we first started these workshops in 2007. And at that point, through state legislation, schools were getting reasonable grants to develop their school gardens. There are not those same grants for these programs today, yet the interest is there.” 

Still, gardens are not yet institutionalized within school budgets, and so their success depends on staff members, community and parent volunteers. Hillhouse advocates for gardens becoming more than expendable extras within schools.

“There’s a real power in gardening. Whenever you’re gardening, people want to see what’s happening and get their hands dirty. They get excited and want to start gardens in  their own schools; this is a tangible way they can make their schools a better place," she said. “If we help hone that attitude from ‘we can put a garden here’ to ‘we can put a garden here, and it can help support our science curriculum, and it can help kids understand what to eat in the cafeteria, and it can even produce roses that we can put on the principals desk,’ then we have a viable program. Not just a garden, but a program that enriches a school in many ways”

Creating and Sustaining Your School Garden workshops along with workshops in other topics will be offered several more times around the state between now and June of 2014. Visit the UC Davis Children’s Garden Program website for information on dates and locations as they are scheduled and links to workshop registration.