Ag conference set to provide look at future of industry

Change is coming to Central Valley agriculture one way or another.

Whether it’s driven by regulations, shifting weather patterns or new financial opportunities, how well local growers fare — along with the businesses, nonprofits and government agencies that support and benefit from their work — may depend on how well all parties anticipate and prepare for what’s ahead.

Help is coming from a free, daylong event taking place Thursday online and in person at Fresno State that will share insights by participants ranging from academics and subject-matter experts to valley farmers large and small.

The event is expected to touch on key topics now in play, from above- and underground water storage, evolving pest management strategies, changing crop mixes and upcoming policy decisions on how inevitable fallowing of farmland will or won’t promote alternative land uses like wildlife habitat, carbon management and renewable energy.

Kern County will be represented at the conference, not only through the overall involvement of Cal State Bakersfield, but more directly by one of its professors, ag-economics specialist Aaron Hegde. He will lead a five-person, hourlong panel focusing on the future and current state of farming in the Central Valley, with an emphasis on production-side impacts of climate change.

California’s top ag official, Karen Ross, will be there, too, delivering the day’s keynote address. Last week, she and Hegde took time to offer previews of their comments during separate interviews with The Californian.

Hegde, chairman of the university’s economics department and co-director of its Grimm Family Center for Agricultural Business, said one lesson sure to come through Thursday is that certain crops, like table grapes, will become harder to grow in the valley. Also, less water will be available to support farming in general, partly because of pumping restrictions resulting from California’s Sustainable Groundwater Management Act, he added.

But the discussion will go deeper and wider than that, he said: Food safety will be a topic, as will shifts being forced on the state’s ag industry by the European Union’s growing concern about pesticides generally and anti-fungal aflotoxins in particular.

Growing preference for organic farming and a push for greater sustainability in ag production raise concerns about global food insecurity, Hegde said, because of their potential to cut production. He said similar fears arise from the

kind of pest infestation that has devastated Florida’s citrus industry, raising the price of orange juice nationwide.

Already changing climate patterns have had an effect in the valley, such as smaller fruit size, he said, and it might not be long before rising temperatures alter crops in other ways.

The state’s orchards — and small growers that plant them — may well take a hit as fluctuating water supplies make long-term investments riskier, leaving only deep-pocketed investors with the ability to withstand up and down years, Hegde said.

On the other hand, row crops becoming a safer alternative to orchards require greater use of farm labor, he said, which faces its own long-term challenges as costs rise along with an aging workforce.

Ross, secretary of the California Department of Food and Agriculture, said recent erratic weather underscores the need for region-wide resiliency in the form of additional above-ground reservoirs, a ramp-up in groundwater storage and increased water recycling.

She said new techniques give hope, like water flooding and underground injection as means for replenishing reservoirs, along with advances in plant breeding that may reduce the number of cold hours orchards need to produce their best.

Challenges remain, she conceded: Large-scale projects like the proposed Sites Reservoir have proved slow and tricky. But progress has been made in groundwater recharge thanks to recent mapping, on-field experimentation and soil research.

Ross expressed optimism about pest control, saying preventative steps such as border inspections, insect trapping and monitoring have cost-effectively limited the spread of invasive species. Meanwhile, the state has found success with traditional approaches like removing all fruit from trees after harvest, as well as tech-enabled strategies like pheromones and releasing irradiated pests to prevent infestation.

The secretary had several thoughts to share about farmland fallowing, a topic of growing interest in the Central Valley as water supplies have become increasingly strained in recent years, present conditions notwithstanding.

She said careful planning should be undertaken to avoid arbitrary, patchwork fallowing, which could end up worsening pest problems while limiting the effectiveness of farmland conversions to alternative uses.

“It should be the least productive grounds wherever possible,” she said.

Other considerations she mentioned were the effects fallowing will have on farmworker communities, local government revenues and the potential for installing electrical transmission capacity needed to expand farmland owners’ options for capitalizing on the state’s conversion to greater production of photovoltaic solar and other renewable sources of energy.

Neither did Ross hold back when asked about competing ideas for putting farmland to use in burying carbon in service of California’s ambitious climate goals.

The state has an “exciting opportunity,” she said, for sequestering carbon dioxide through composting, mulching, hedge rows and no-till farming. Deep-rooted grasses and other plants may prove especially effective at supporting such activities, she said.

But whether orchard wood and ag trimmings are best disposed of through grinding and reintroduction to soil, as opposed to gasification for production of hydrogen or renewable natural gas in combination with underground CO2 injection, she was not inclined to judge — “nor do I think it’s a function of the state to choose one or the other,” Ross said.

Thursday’s conference, hosted by the Maddy Institute, Livermore Lab Foundation and Climate Now, runs from 8:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Details are available online at https://www.fresno. climatenowevents.com.

Sign up for online participation at https://www.fresno.climatenowevents. com/event-details/virtual-registration. Otherwise, tickets for in-person attendance are available at https:// www.fresno.climatenowevents.com/ event-details/in-person-registration.