By Nicholas Christen and Craig Miller

Craig Miller / KQED

Even tomatoes can only take so much heat. A belt from Bakersfield to the northern Sacramento Valley produces a third of the nation's canning tomatoes.

Autumn is here, so says the calendar. Living on the coast, it might be easy to think that California escaped the heat wave suffered by much of the nation this summer. While that may be true for most of the large coastal population centers, it was a different story for much of the state’s interior farm belt.

Throughout June and July, even Central Valley spots escaped much of the heat felt by the Great Plains, though Cal Expo officials blamed the heat, in part, for tamping down attendance at the state fair. Then things heated up quickly — especially in the Sacramento and San Joaquin Valleys — through August and into September.  Valley towns including Redding, Red Bluff, Sacramento, Merced, Madera, Fresno, and Bakersfield, have been on the order of three-to-five degrees above normal for the duration of August and September.

Fresno saw 27 days above normal during August and most of those days were at least three degrees above normal, a string one meteorologist at the National Weather Service in Fresno called, “pretty amazing.”

Even Central Valley farmers, who are used to triple-digit days, were taken aback.

“Yeah, this summer has been one of the hottest that I remember,” said Don Cameron, who runs 7,000 acres of crops for the Terranova Ranch, southeast of Fresno. He’s been farming the Valley for 30 years.

“Our tomatoes have taken a little bit of a beating from the 110 degree weather we’ve had, but with the drip irrigation we’re able to keep them a little fresher, a little cooler when it does get hot like that.”

On the day we visited Cameron, the fever seemed to have broken. “Yeah, we’re in the low 90s today,” he snorted. “It’s like — like a spring day.”

“We had just a couple of weeks on end where we were 109, 110, 111 degrees. Just brutal. The nights don’t cool down, it’s hard on the plants, it’s hard on the people.

There has been a plus side to all this.

“I can remember we used to get a lot of real severe frosts during the spring growing season,” recalled Cameron. “I can’t remember the last time we had one that was actually a killing frost during April.” That’s created an opportunity of sorts for growers. “We’ve been able to plant our tomatoes earlier in the year for earlier harvest, which extends the, the season for the cannery.”

The roast continued well into September, bringing with it an unusual late-season streak of 90-plus-degree days in downtown Sacramento. This year could eclipse the September record of 20 days, set back in 1899.

August was more than four degrees above average in Sacramento.

See more on how climate change is challenging California farmers on the documentary, Heat and Harvest. It premieres Friday evening on KQED TV.

New pests, a shrinking water supply and rising temperatures will alter agriculture in California.

Craig Miller

Tightening water supplies, encroaching pests and dwindling winter "chill hours," vital to many crops, are just some of the climate challenges facing California farmers.

Heat and Harvest, a new series from KQED Science and the Center for Investigative Reporting looks at the multiple climate challenges confronting California farmers. It’s no trivial matter. California’s Central Valley is widely known as “the nation’s salad bowl,” and there’s more than bragging rights at stake. Ag contributes more than $30 billion a year to the state’s economy.

Previously, Climate Watch has focused on efforts in the ag sector to conserve water or lower the carbon footprint. Some farmers are trying new technologies, others are experimenting with renewable energy. But meeting climate challenges on multiple fronts will, for some farmers and ranchers, be a matter of survival.

Here are links to some previous reporting from Climate Watch, from ag’s potential role in California’s emerging cap-and-trade program for carbon emissions, to innovation on the renewable energy front and new conflicts over land use.

Planting the Seeds for Greener Farms
Supporters of sustainable agriculture are looking forward to some “sustenance” of their own, after an eleventh-hour win in Sacramento. The new bills lays out an approach for ensuring that all proceeds from the sale of cap-and-trade permits be used to further reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Among the eligible activities listed in the bill are farming and ranching practices that reduce greenhouse gas emissions and sequester carbon.

Satellites Help Save Water on California Farms
Engineers at NASA and CSU Monterey Bay are developing an online tool that can estimate how much water a farm’s field might need. Satellites orbiting the earth take high-resolution pictures which are combined with on-the-ground data from farms.

Making Hay While the Sun Shines: A Flap over Solar Panels in Farm Country
Sun and open land make the San Joaquin Valley ideal for growing crops. But they’re also attracting an increasing number of large-scale solar power developers to the region. And that’s generating debate over whether farming the sun is really farming.

Making Renewable Energy from Farm Waste
California is just a few votes away from changing the rules to allow farmers to connect machines that create bioenergy to the electrical grid, a privilege that has thus far been reserved for farm-generated wind and solar energy.

New Map for Gardeners Won’t Help California’s Green Thumbs
It’s been more than two decades since the U.S. Department of Agriculture updated its Plant Hardiness Zones Map, used by gardeners across the country to determine what will grow in their yards. The new GIS-enabled map unveiled this week is a boost to people who live in places that get a lot of cold weather and may be seeing slightly warmer average winters now. Despite the new level of detail in the map, gardeners in California and the Bay Area in particular, won’t learn much from it.

Craig Miller

Reducing tillage is one technique farmers are trying out to cut carbon emissions.

Supporters of sustainable agriculture are looking forward to some “sustenance” of their own, after an eleventh-hour win in Sacramento. Just as the state’s last legislative session was drawing to a close, Assembly Bill 1532 passed by a vote of 51-28, sending to the governor’s desk a system for allocating cap-and-trade auction revenues, which are expected to reach into the billions of dollars by the end of next year.

AB 1532, authored by Assembly Speaker John Pérez, lays out an approach for ensuring that all proceeds from the sale of permits be used to further reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Among the eligible activities identified in the bill are farming and ranching practices that reduce greenhouse gas emissions and sequester carbon, such as reducing soil tillage, improving energy and water efficiency, and reducing synthetic fertilizer use through compost, cover crops, and crop rotation.

“A lot of these practices also have a number of co-benefits such as reducing air and water quality, reducing erosion, and improving soil quality,” said Renata Brillinger, executive director of the California Climate & Agriculture Network (CalCAN), which lobbied to have sustainable agriculture included in the bill.

In addition to promoting specific farm practices, AB 32 auction revenues could also go toward researching and developing new approaches, providing technical assistance to farmers, offering financial incentives to help them transition to climate-friendly methods, and helping to shield California’s farmland from urban development. A study released in July by the California Energy Commission and the California Natural Resources Agency and performed by researchers at UC Davis found that urban land accounts for 70 times more greenhouse gas emissions per square acre than cropland.

CalCAN has been angling to secure sustainable farming’s piece of the AB 32 pie since 2010, when Senator Lois Wolk (D-Davis) introduced a bill that offered guidelines for spending cap-and-trade revenues on agriculture. The bill got held over in committee, and CalCAN and Wolk tried again in 2011 — with the same result.

The legislature preferred to take a more comprehensive approach toward appropriating cap-and-trade revenues, said Brillinger, and that’s just what happened with AB 1532. Now Brillinger and her colleagues — along with their partners at Community Alliance with Family Farmers, Ecological Farming Association, and California Certified Organic Farmers — hope that Governor Jerry Brown will take the next step and sign it into law.

If he does, the law will go back to the legislature next year for further tinkering, then be passed along to the state Air Resources Board for implementation. Only then will we get any sense of just how much money could go to sustainable agriculture, or even begin to calculate the sort of greenhouse gas emissions that could be achieved statewide. “Everyone wants to have those hard numbers, but it’s proving elusive,” Brillinger said.” For now, the basics will have to do.

“It’s a sector that is very susceptible to climate change impacts, and has some potential that some of the other sectors don’t. It’s one of the only sectors, forestry being the other, where there’s some carbon sequestration possible. We’ll continue to plug away at that message.”

Look for in-depth reporting on how climate change is affecting California’s farm economy in the upcoming multimedia series, Heat and Harvest, a joint project of KQED and the Center for Investigative Reporting.

Craig Miller

Watering fields in the Sacramento Valley: traditional irrigation methods have required a lot of guess-work.

By Vinnee Tong

Near the Central Valley town of Los Banos, Anthony Pereira opens a tap to send water into the fields at his family’s farm. Pereira grows cotton, alfalfa and tomatoes. And he is constantly deciding how much water is the right amount to use.

“Water savings is always an issue,” he says. “That’s why we’re going drip here on this ranch. We gotta try to save what we can now for the years to come.”

Thanks to some new technology, that might get a little easier. To help farmers like Pereira, engineers at NASA and CSU Monterey Bay are developing an online tool that can estimate how much water a field might need. Here’s how it works: satellites orbiting the earth take high-resolution pictures — so detailed that you can zoom in to a quarter of an acre.

“The satellite data is allowing us to get a measurement of how the crop is developing,” says CSUMB scientist Forrest Melton, the lead researcher on the project. “We’re actually measuring the fraction of the field that’s covered by green, growing vegetation.”

Those images are combined with data they’re collecting right now at a dozen California farms from Redding to Bakersfield and from Salinas to Visalia.

In Pereira’s fields a tractor carrying tomato seedlings leads the way as farm workers nestle the plants into the dirt. Alongside them the researchers drill holes in the ground to put sensors underneath and around the crops. The sensors measure wind temperature, radiant energy from the sun and how thirsty the soil may be on a given day.

Walking through the field, researcher Chris Lund is carrying equipment that will collect all that data.

“Once a minute it’ll take a measurement of all the sensors that are attached to this,” he explains, “the soil moisture sensors, the soil water potential sensors, and in this case the capillary lysimeter, which measures how much water is going out the bottom of the system.”

Using this information with the satellite images that are updated about once a week, the researchers have come up with a formula that can estimate how much water a field might need. Farmers will soon be able to access estimates for their fields online and eventually they’ll be able to use their cell phones.

That means Pereira will no longer have to rely on the old-school way of deciding how much water to use.

“Before, everything was furrow-irrigated or flood-irrigated, and we’d just schedule depending on what the weather is,” he told me. “If it’s warm, we say, ‘OK we’re going to try to irrigate every two weeks.’ If it’s cooler, then let’s try to stretch it out another week, 10 days or so to make the water stretch out more.”

The California Department of Water Resources estimates water savings could amount to hundreds of dollars per acre, and the crop yield could be better, too. The joint research team sees its water-saving tool as something that could be used by any farmer. At the Ames Research Center in Mountain View, NASA’s Rama Nemani studies a map of the world mounted on a wall.

“If you look at the map like this, there are a lot of areas that are like California that are starved for water but need to still produce food,” he says. “So we have to figure out how to use whatever limited water each place has to the best possible extent.”

This online water saving tool could be available at no cost to farmers around the state as soon as next year, and eventually to farmers around the world.

Hear the radio version of this story from KQED’s The California Report.

mhall209/Flickr

Climate change -- and the ensuing heat waves -- will create more volatility in the corn price market.

By Michael D. Lemonick

Farmers know all too well that the prices they get for what they grow can fluctuate from one year to the next, sometimes wildly. Drought or heat can reduce crop yields; so can frost and floods. For corn producers, the Renewable Fuel Standard, which mandates the addition of ethanol to gasoline, is yet another source of volatility. It puts extra demands on whatever supply there is, making corn more expensive for consumers even as it puts more money in farmers’ pockets. And overlaid on top of it all is climate change, which exerts its on push on the ups and downs of weather.

Scientists have looked at different pieces of this equation, but researchers from Stanford and Purdue have analyzed the entire equation, in a paper just published in Nature Climate Change, and determined which factor causes the most trouble: it’s climate change, and for Stanford’s Noah Diffenbaugh, that came as a surprise. “I genuinely expected that climate would be a minor player relative to these other influences,” he said in a telephone interview.

The reason, he explained, is that the study looked out only about 30 years, a time when most climate models project that the temperature should only have risen by about 1°C, or 1.6°F, above where it is now. “My expectation,” Diffenbaugh said, “was that on that time scale, socioeconomic policy” — in other words, biofuel mandates, which almost entirely apply to corn-based ethanol —  “would have a much greater influence.”

Climate’s outsize effect on the volatility of corn prices comes from the fact that warming temperatures trigger extreme events, including severe heat waves. “Warmer temperatures actually lead to greater crop yields,” Diffenbaugh said, “but only up to a point.” If the mercury rises too high, yields plummet. “Even over the next three decades,” he said, “instances of extreme heat during the growing season are projected to become more common. There will be many more bad years.”

There will also be good years, where prices drop. But the swings between them will be greater than they are now, making the corn market more unstable. That’s bad news for farmers and consumers alike. And because biofuel mandates divert some of the crop even whether it’s a good or a bad year, that just adds extra stress.

“By limiting the ability of commodity markets to adjust to yield fluctuations, biofuels mandates work in exactly the wrong direction,” Thomas Hertel, a Purdue agricultural economist and Diffenbaugh’s co-author, said in a statement. When oil prices are high, moreover, the demand for biofuel becomes even greater, and the problem gets even worse.

Since the warming expected by 2040 is already built into the climate system thanks to the greenhouse gases already in the atmosphere, reducing emissions wouldn’t have any effect on the study’s results (although they undoubtedly would in a study that went out to the end of the century).

Given climate’s outsize influence on volatility, the authors say, the only options are to breed corn with up to an extra 6°F of heat tolerance, or prepare for the corn belt to move north to the Canadian border.

A version of this post also appears at Climate Central, Climate Watch’s content partner.

REUTERS/Robert Durrell/Pool

The San Joaquin River flows from the Sierra Nevada to the Central Valley, where much of its water is diverted to aqueducts.

UPDATE: The House has passed the bill, with a vote of 246-175. It now goes to the Senate.

Meandering through the halls of Capitol Hill is a bill that would dramatically change California’s water picture. Sponsored by Tulare County Congressman Devin Nunes, the sweeping proposal would pipe more water to farms, and challenge the largest river restoration project in U.S. history.

Environmentalists and farmers tangoed for 18 years in federal court over the fate of the San Joaquin River, finally agreeing to restore water to some 60 miles of dry riverbed, and bring back the salmon that died off when the river was dammed just above Fresno.

“Most people associate the San Joaquin as a dry toxic river,” says Chris Acree, director of Revive the River, a Fresno-based non-profit. “Now that this water is back in that river, it allows us to identify ourselves with this river as a living river. This restoration program really is the broadest collaboration between agencies, landowners, stakeholders, and water users, where everybody has a voice.”

But Congressmen Devin Nunes says many Central Valley farmers have been left out of water decisions that put fish before farmers. His bill would not only reverse plans to restore salmon to this river, it would relax pumping restrictions in the Delta designed to protect other endangered fish.

“This is a case where the environmental radicals have overstepped their bounds, broken deal after deal after deal to where they’ve left entire communities without water,” he says. “And that simply was never the intent of the endangered species act, and never the intent of of Congress to begin with. This is just common sense.”

Some 70 water districts and a number of farm groups are supporting the Nunes bill. But legislators from Delta communities say the plan is a water grab designed to overturn 150 years of California water rights to benefit a small group of powerful Central Valley farmers.

Even if the bill passes the house, its supporters face an upstream fight to win in the Senate. And the Obama administration has threatened a veto, saying the Nunes bill would unravel decades of work to solve some of California’s most complex water challenges.

Read More:

• Follow the status of H.R. 1873

• Legislative Summary of The Sacramento-San Joaquin Valley Water Reliability Act (PDF), by Congressman Devin Nunes
• Statement from the White House (PDF), opposing the bill

Sasha Khokha/KQED

Pistachio trees on a drip irrigation system. Drip systems can dramatically reduce water loss from evaporation.

UPDATE: Despite snow closing Interstate 5 over the Grapevine Pass on Monday, state snow surveyors returned from the Sierra today with more forlorn figures. The third snowpack measurement of the season showed water content in the accumulated snow at just 30% of the average for this date and 26% of the average for April 1, typically when the snowpack reaches its peak for the season.

Even though more snow is on the way, as I explain in my radio story for The California Report, Central Valley farmers are getting ready to face a fourth dry year in the last five.

I visited with Fresno County farmer Ryan Ferguson in his pistachio orchard near the Lemoore Naval Air station, to ask him how he’s coping with the news that he may get just 30% of the water he’s asking for from the canals of the federal Central Valley Project.

Despite the carry-over in the state’s reservoirs from last year’s healthy snowpack, this year is looking bleak, and water managers have to plan conservatively. That particularly impacts farmers like Ferguson, who’s land is part of the Westlands Water District, which relies entirely on federal Bureau of Reclamation for surface water.

Even though they are politically powerful, and control some of the nation’s wealthiest farms, Westlands growers are low on the totem pole when it comes to water rights. That, coupled with pumping restrictions to protect endangered fish in the Delta, means they’re unlikely to get their full allocation of federal water. In 2009, Westlands farmers got ten percent and fallowed thousands of acres. With last year’s bountiful snowpack, they got 80%.

The capricious weather means farmers like Ferguson can get whipsawed back and forth. “It makes it really difficult to plan,” he told me.

Sasha Khkha/KQED

Ryan Ferguson uses his iPhone to check the soil moisture in his Fresno County fields.

“You can’t gear up to farm 100% of your ranch one year, and 50% the next year. It makes it difficult to plan how much equipment to buy, even to decide whether we can put in more drip irrigation.”

Ferguson is part of a generation of young farmers that’s getting its start during some intensive years of drought. He’s invested in water-saving technology, including drip irrigation he can monitor from his iPhone.

One thing Ferguson’s likely to do this year: pump groundwater with his new million-dollar well. That well water comes at a far steeper price than what he buys from the feds, because he’s got to pay for electricity to power the well and bring the water to the surface. The groundwater here is salty and has to be cleaned up before it can be used on crops, which also requires expensive filtration.

But the biggest uncertainty is how much groundwater is left in the aquifer under these farms, or how quickly it could get sucked dry, especially if lots of farmers turn on their wells this summer.

Now that the state’s revamped Central Valley Flood Protection Plan (big PDF) is out for public perusal, the question is whether the political will — and the cash — will be there to make it happen.

David McNew/Getty Images

California's status as an agricultural powerhouse is largely due to the fertile lands in the Central Valley, which are also prone to floods.

The Sacramento and San Joaquin river basins run through the valley and can overflow their banks threatening more than a million people and an estimated $69 billion in assets, according to the report. The current flood management system has been in place for about a hundred years and was designed specifically to keep water from the rivers off the land so that people could grow crops. Now the system has varied uses including conservation of habitat, water supply and water quality. The old system really isn’t up to the job anymore and almost everyone agrees that it will take a serious investment to bring it up to snuff.

“The system itself is beyond its design life,” says civil engineer Mike Mierzwa. “Think of it like an automobile. If you have a car it’s not going to run at top efficiency for 300,000 miles.” Mierzwa, who advises the state Department of Water Resources (DWR) explained to me that, “We’ve put a lot of ‘flood miles’ on the Central Valley’s flood management system and it’s really time for us to go through and find additional capital to actually improve its level of performance to today’s current design standards and needs.”

DWR outsiders are cautiously optimistic about the ambitious report. “This plan is really a framework. It’s not a plan,” says Jeffrey Mount, a geologist who directs the Center for Watershed Sciences at UC Davis. Mount says he considers the plan to be a step in the right direction. “If I could tweak anything it would be that this would be more integrated with other planning processes happening right now,” he told me. He’s concerned that the report punts on some serious questions about how climate change will impact the system and how conservation can be encouraged. The framework does mention those things, but leaves them to be studied more intensely down the road.

Mierzwa and Mount both seem excited by the idea of more bypasses — swathes of land next to rivers, set aside to carry excess water overland before returning it to the river. “They are very expensive because as you are going through and expanding you literally have to buy land,” said Mierzwa to explain why there haven’t been any new bypasses for 100 years. “But as you go through and you buy that land, you get a flood risk reduction benefit, you get an environmental benefit, and the benefits are shared throughout the entire system,” he concluded. The problem, however, is that the same land is highly coveted by real estate developers.

Mount is a huge proponent of bypasses. He’s not content to see the levees strengthened. He wants California’s long-term plan to recognize that restoring wetlands and other biologically diverse landscapes is not at odds with agricultural goals. ”People have this perception that you are going to let the water run wild across the farms and ruin everybody’s livelihood,” he sighed. “Nobody’s talking about that. We’re talking about some strategic areas to set the levees back, to expand bypasses, which will in some cases impact agriculture, but in many cases it won’t.”

Craig Miller/Climate Watch

The Yolo Bypass, which rarely floods to this extent, relieves flooding throughout the system and can become a wetland habitat.

Some farmers are already seeing benefits from allowing their land to be used for bypasses. Those who farm the Yolo Bypass, for example, got one-time lump-sum payments from the state, for use of the land (though some have suggested that a yearly payment would better serve farmers in planning for uncertain futures). Most of the time farmers can still grow crops — often rice — and they can do it on land that effectively costs them a lot less. They may lose their crops in a really big flood year, but the state’s payment is intended to make up for those infrequent occurrences.

The Central Valley Flood Protection Plan has to be approved by the flood board in July before it can take affect. During the next couple of years Mierzwa says DWR will focus on working with local groups to assess specific project needs, build capacity and talk about financing strategies. Mount says the cost of this plan is the “big, scary 800 pound gorilla” in the room. “It’s going to be hugely expensive. And we’ve come into a time when the federal government is no longer showing up with a fistful of cash for flood control projects.”

DWR put a price tag on its plan ranging between $14 – $17 billion dollars and insists that the state will only be responsible for part of that money. Mount says that’s an underestimate. “One of the big dangers is that local plans are often driven by development,” he explained. “It tends to be kind of ad hoc, rather than system-wide.”

Hear the companion radio feature Wednesday morning, on The California Report.

Sasha Khokha/KQED

Aaron Barcellos and his yellow lab, Maddox. Barcellos hopes to plant rows of pomegranate trees next to rows of solar panels.

Farmer Aaron Barcellos bristles at the idea that putting solar panels on his land is “paving it over,” as some critics have contended. Harvesting electrons, he says, is not the same as pouring concrete to build houses or a shopping center. Solar isn’t permanent: he can simply pull out the posts holding up the panels when he wants to plow the land under again. In the meantime, using a small part of his farm to generate power for the grid is a good way to bring in some guaranteed income, helping him weather the ups and downs of drought and crop prices.

But on Barcellos’s farm, the ground closest to a PG&E substation is considered “prime” farmland. That means he has to get permission from county supervisors to take his land out of the Williamson Act, which gives farmers a tax break for keeping prime farmland in agriculture. I explore that controversy in my radio story on today’s California Report.

A new joint report from UC Berkeley and UCLA (a big pdf) estimates that California could need 100,000 acres of land to meet its renewable energy targets by 2030. But it warns that the state needs to define which land is optimal for solar development, or else it risks losing prime farmland.

Sasha Khokha/KQED

A new kind of harvest: workers install more than 16 thousand posts that will hold up solar panels on this PG&E-owned solar farm in Western Fresno County. This field used to grow tomatoes.

That’s exactly the fear of the California Farm Bureau. It’s suing Fresno County over its decision to allow a solar development on land protected by the Williamson Act. The fight places the Farm Bureau, usually a fierce defender of property rights, in the odd position of squaring off against willing property owners over what they should be able to do with their land.

Fresno County Farm Bureau President Ryan Jacobson says the sheer magnitude of the 30-or-so projects proposed for Fresno County is a threat to the nation’s most productive farm county. (Check out a recent map of proposed solar projects in the county.)

“The reason Fresno County is the number-one agricultural county in the world is because of our large tracts of uninterrupted land,” says Jacobsen.  “We’re concerned about these industrial uses breaking that up. [Farming] is one of the very few bright spots in our economy right now and unfortunately, we’re paving it over.”

Jacobsen also warns solar panels don’t necessarily make good neighbors in farm country. Bees that pollinate orchards can gum up the surface with sticky pollen. Layers of dust from neighboring farms can settle on panels, reducing their output.

But Barcellos says he’s not concerned.  “We’re fourth generation farmers,” he says. “If I thought this was something that wasn’t compatible with farming, my family just wouldn’t be interested in it.”

Courtesy of SolarGen USA

Barcellos wants to see if the shade from solar panels can actually benefit crops like pomegranates.

In fact, he’s one of the first farmers planning to experiment with planting crops next to solar panels – using the shade to protect his delicate pomegranates from sunburn. “The plan is to have two rows of pomegranate trees between two rows of panels. They’d get sunlight 55 percent of the time, and be shaded the rest of the day,” explains Barcellos. It’s an experiment researchers at San Diego State plan to follow closely, to see if it can be duplicated elsewhere.

Farmland conservation advocates say they’re not against renewable energy. Their ideal solution would be to put solar on less productive farmland. But that doesn’t always work logistically, especially if that land is far from transmission lines. The UCLA/UC Berkeley study recommends upgrading electricity infrastructure to make it easier for more remote, less productive fields to connect to the grid.

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this post identified Aaron Barcellos as “Tom Barcellos.” We apologize for the confusion — especially to Tom Barcellos, who alerted us to the discrepancy.

Katrina Schwartz

Cast off walnut shells await the "biogasifier." Lester has more than enough for an entire year stored in his warehouse.

By Katrina Schwartz

California is just a few votes away from changing the rules to allow farmers to connect machines that create bioenergy to the electrical grid, a privilege that has thus far been reserved for farm-generated wind and solar energy.

Passage of the bill — SB 489 — would mean they could use the byproduct of their crops as fuel to create electricity.

Russ Lester, the owner of Dixon Ridge Farms, has been leading the charge to get the rules changed. He has gone to extraordinary lengths to shrink the carbon footprint of his organic walnut farm and processing plant in Yolo County. Brian Jenkins of the California Biomass Collaborative at UC Davis calls Lester the “guinea pig” of bioenergy.

Katrina Schwartz

Seemingly endless rows of walnut trees on Dixon Ridge Farm.

Lester has installed a 50-kilowatt biogasifier that burns walnut shells at high temperatures to create fuel to run his generator, and heat to dry his walnuts. Lester has demonstrated his contraption to many people, including legislators, members of the California Air Resources Board and countless interested farmers. He’s been making the case for SB 489 as the only way to make this type of environmental commitment pay off for farmers. He predicts that many farmers will follow suit if state policy and regulations support farmers to use alternative energy in their businesses.

Beyond creating heat and power to become sustainable, Lester also mixes the char ash leftover from burning walnut shells into the soil where it sequesters stable forms of carbon for hundreds of years and fertilizes his walnut trees. He’s even looking into using walnut oil—another byproduct of processing—as a fuel to replace diesel to run his machinery. Lester says he’s on pace to meet his goal of being energy-neutral by 2012.

“We’re still not 100 percent,” he told me on a recent visit to the farm. “We’re probably at about 45% reduction in our energy usage, but it’s a substantial improvement. So the naysayers who say you can’t do that are really not correct.”

One of the biggest challenges Lester has faced is air quality regulation. It seems that every air quality district in California has different restrictions based on the particular challenges in that neck of the woods. So, the regulations that Lester must meet in the Yolo-Solano Air Quality District are quite different from those a farmer would face in the San Joaquin Valley Air Pollution Control District. That can pose a problem for farmers operating in districts with chronically bad air quality as any emissions they create will be closely watched.

Kevin Hall, a co-founder of the Central Valley Air Quality Coalition, says he supports efforts by farmers to produce renewable energy, but he’s wary of the potential effect on air quality. As long as producers like Lester keep their systems under the one-megawatt limit set out in SB 489, says Hall, it shouldn’t be a problem. It’s conceivable that many small growers could produce the same amount of pollution as a large power plant if they aren’t regulated. Very few California farmers have a biogasifier like Lester’s, so Hall isn’t too concerned just yet.

Katrina Schwartz

Russ Lester, owner of Dixon Ridge Farms with the walnut shells that fuel his operation.

The biggest opposition to SB 489 comes from utilities. In its opposition letter, PG&E claimed that net-metering (allowing sale-back to the grid) of all renewables would cost the average ratepayer more. The California Public Utilities Commission found the opposite in its analysis [PDF]; that SB 489 would likely reduce the cost to the average consumer. That’s because farmers and commercial consumers of electricity already pay some costs that residential consumers don’t, like the cost to distribute and transmit the power. Those embedded fees make net metering for bioenergy less expensive than net metering for residential solar. PG&E’s numbers are based on the performance of solar net metering.

The other problem utilities point to is the net-metering cap. Right now, utilities buy no more than five percent of their peak energy load through the net-metering program. If more types of technology are eligible for the program, that could mean reaching the cap more quickly. If that happens, legislators might be tempted to raise the cap. For utilities, that would mean managing lots of small producers instead of a few big ones.  Nor does the energy produced through net metering count towards the utilities’ state-mandated renewable energy targets. Right now, no utility is close to reaching the cap. Most are still buying less than two percent of their power from net metering.

Katrina Schwartz

The Biomax 50 produces heat and power for Russ Lester's organic walnut farm. Lester hopes that SB 489 will allow him to hook the biogasifier to the electrical grid soon.

Supporters of SB 489 are close to reaching their goal. The bill has a broad range of environmental and agricultural supporters, including the California Climate and Agriculture Network (CalCAN) and the California Farm Bureau Federation. It won significant bipartisan support as it moved through various committees in both the Senate and the Assembly. The next hurdle will be a full Assembly vote and another full Senate vote to reconcile some small changes. Senate sponsor Lois Wolk (D-Stockton) says Governor Jerry Brown has been supportive of the bill and that if it gets to his desk before the end of the legislative year on September 9th, he’s likely to sign it.