Sierra2theSea

By Cecilia Parsons

Matt Leider, supervisor for Laux Management of Porterville, inspects late-season navel oranges near their shop, which stands outside the five-mile-radius restricted zones created to halt movement of the Asian citrus psyllid. Citrus growers inside the zones are being advised to treat their trees to knock down possible psyllid infestation.

Citrus growers, packers, nursery operators, applicators and grove managers, as well as state and county inspectors, continue to sort out the implications of an Asian citrus psyllid infestation in the heart of the California citrus belt—even as they move into the peak of the billion-dollar Central Valley navel orange harvest.
The two psyllids found in Tulare County citrus groves last month and the one found earlier in Lindsay marked the pest’s first detected foray into the San Joaquin Valley. The psyllid, which can carry the deadly citrus disease huanglongbing, has previously been found in San Diego, Imperial, Los Angeles and Ventura counties.
Huanglongbing, also known as citrus greening, has not been detected in Tulare County, but was found to infect a citrus tree in the Hacienda Heights area of Los Angeles County earlier this year.
A statement from California Citrus Mutual said the circumstances of the psyllid finds in Tulare County dictate a different course of action than taken in Ventura and other Southern California counties where the insects have been trapped. The finds in Tulare County were more isolated, Citrus Mutual said, and intense trapping and surveying since the initial finds have not turned up any additional psyllids.
For those reasons, the California Department of Food and Agriculture has restricted fruit movement only within a five-mile radius of the psyllid finds in the Terra Bella and Strathmore areas. Previously, 20-mile quarantine areas have been implemented.
Growers were still trying to find out exactly where the boundaries for the five-mile restricted zones are located. The interim restrictions on fruit movement will be in place for the next six months, unless more psyllids are found.
Kevin Severns, manager of the Orange Cove-Sanger Citrus Association and CCM vice chairman, said the belief is that the trapped psyllids were hitchhikers and random finds on the exterior of a citrus grove.
Eradication of the psyllid is the goal, not merely control and suppression, said CCM President Joel Nelsen. The significantly smaller eradication zones would better serve that goal, he added.
Citrus growers and packinghouses with trees inside a five-mile radius of the two locations where psyllids were discovered will have the most responsibility in the eradication effort.
Packed fruit is free to move anywhere, but bins of citrus straight from harvest cannot move outside the restricted zones unless all leaves and stems are removed from bins and equipment. The fruit can be moved to packinghouses inside the restricted zones, or the leaf and stem removal can be done in the field.
Grower and grove manager Gary Laux of Laux Management in Porterville said the added costs of precleaning oranges inside the five-mile restriction zones could tip the profit scales for some growers.
If their packinghouse is also inside the same zone, they won’t have the cost. If not, their options are having an in-zone packer clean and re-bin the fruit before trucking to their own packinghouse, or manually or mechanically removing the debris in the field. Either way, they bear the cost of the operation.
Fruit coming from the restricted zones must be accompanied by a compliance agreement with the county, verifying that all cleaning requirements have been met.
“If they have to spend $5 to $10 a bin for cleaning and are only getting $50 to $60 a bin for low-quality fruit, they still have to take out production costs and they could be right on the line,” Laux said.
Nick Arcure, general manager of Magnolia Packing near Porterville, agreed that there would be additional costs to clean fruit and said he doubted there is enough packinghouse capacity inside the restricted zones.
Severns, who also sits on the committee that determines grower assessments to eradicate the psyllid, said it might be possible to substitute inspections and pesticide treatments for the dry-brush cleaning.
Packinghouses inside the restricted areas will also have to double-bag and dispose of field trash from citrus inside the eradication zone at a designated landfill.
Some mandarin growers leave a leaf or two and the stem on the fruit for certain markets, Laux said.
“For some reason, the Canadian market likes those leaves,” he said.
Under the new restrictions, that won’t be allowed.
Citrus nurseries inside the five-mile zone are also affected. Unless their trees grow indoors, their movement is restricted.
In the restricted or eradication zones, citrus growers are being contacted and asked to apply pesticide to their trees. Laux said last week that he had already been contacted by the county about applying a treatment. Unless growers are going to make a routine pest application, the extra one is another expense, he said.
Bob Blakely of California Citrus Mutual said growers are expected to comply with orders to treat and otherwise do their part to contain the psyllid.
Tulare County began last week treating backyard citrus trees within a five-mile radius of the two psyllid finds to control the insect’s spread, but if it appears growers are not treating their own trees, Blakely said, CDFA has the option to back off its control operation.
“Growers need to step up and do their part,” he said.
Currently, farmers pay a 9-cent assessment on each 40-pound carton of fruit they sell, to fund the psyllid eradication effort.
(Cecilia Parsons is a reporter in Ducor. She may be contacted at ceciliaparsons8@gmail.com.)

CFB News

Hanford dairy farmer Dino Giacomazzi, a founding member of UC Conservation Agriculture Systems Innovation (CASI), received the prestigious 2012 Leopold Conservation Award for California in acknowledgement of his exemplary land stewardship and management.
The $10,000 Leopold Conservation Award is named in honor of world-renowned conservationist Aldo Leopold. The award, presented annually in eight states, recognizes farming and ranching families who are actively committed to living a land ethic.

Giacomazzi manages the dairy and forage production operations at Giacomazzi Dairy, established in southeastern Hanford in 1939. He lives on the 300-acre dairy property and oversees milking, animal nutrition and feed production.

In the spring of 2005, Giacomazzi initiated a demonstration evaluation of strip-till corn planting in a 28-acre field as part of an Environmental Quality Incentives Program contract he had received from the USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service.
“Dino virtually guaranteed his ultimate success with conservation agriculture by the sheer intensity of this effort and the comprehensive nature of his attention to detail,” said Jeff Mitchell, UC Cooperative Extension specialist in the Department of Plant Science at UC Davis. Mitchell is the chair of CASI.
Though no one realized it at the time, Giacomazzi was beginning to formulate a conservation agriculture systems approach. The systems approach would later become, as he has said, “completely new forage production systems for the entire dairy industry.”
Following this successful trial, Giacomazzi established all of the dairy’s corn acreage using strip-tillage in 2006. However, rather than take a single approach, he set out a comprehensive array of strip-tillage evaluations that included three different strip-till implements, strip-till corn varieties, and twin-row versus single-row planting configurations.
Later that year, he opened his dairy to the public for a Strip-Till Field Day that attracted more than 150 farmers.
“To this day, CASI considers this field day to be the most successful and impacting extension education event that our workgroup has been involved with during the past decade,” Mitchell said.
Over the course of the strip-till evaluations at his dairy, Giacomazzi also shared his expertise with a number of visitors, including representatives of Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s office in Washington, D.C., and the USDA NRCS Regional Agronomist for the Western U.S.
In his quest for the optimal CT forage corn system, Giacomazzi investigated twin-row planting options and is now one of the state’s primary authorities on twin-row production. The idea is to stagger two lines of plants 7.5 inches apart in 30-inch row spacing, giving plants optimal access to resources – nutrients, light, water, etc. From 2007 to 2009, Giacomazzi rigorously tested this hypothesis in a series of comprehensive on-farm studies.
Since the fall of 2008, Giacomazzi has also been collaborating with scientists from the USDA Agricultural Research Service National Soil Tilth Lab in Ames, Iowa, on a major, large-scale quantification of particulate matter emissions under traditional and conservation tillage at his dairy. He worked with Jerry Hatfield, the research director of the Tilth Lab, and a large group from Utah State University. This group quantified dust emissions using LIDAR, laser beam and dispersion modeling technologies and has found significant reductions in particulate emissions in Giacomazzi’s strip-till system relative to his former standard tillage approach.
Last spring, Giacomazzi began using a twin row Monosem planter on his farm that enables GPS precision guidance and application technologies from Trimble Corporation. This instrumentation allows for precision application of seed and nutrients in the same planting pass. He recently showcased his progress on his CT silage production systems by opening his farm to still another public field day that attracted several farmers and media coverage.
“Dino’s contributions to our collective efforts in CASI have been unparalleled,” Mitchell said. “He has made huge contributions to the development of knowledge and to the expansion of conservation agricultural systems in California’s Central San Joaquin Valley

Candy canes have been linked with holiday festivities for more than 100 years. The red and white-striped shepherd’s staffs brighten up the Christmas tree, flavor seasonal lattes, and are found in children’s stockings on Christmas morning.

Many people enjoy the cool and refreshing peppermint flavor without knowing there are ingenious farmers and agricultural researchers working year-round to produce the naturally spicy bite of this holiday icon. Candy canes get their distinctive taste from the oil secreted under the leaves of Mentha × piperita, the bright green herbaceous perennial herb known as peppermint.
Peppermint, a cross between spearmint and wintermint, is America’s most popular mint flavor. Peppermint oil is an important ingredient not just in candy; it is used in toothpaste, mouthwash, gum, pharmaceuticals and beauty products.
The majority of U.S. peppermint is cultivated in the Pacific Northwest, where summer days are warm and long and nights are cool, minimizing the presence of a chemical that imparts a bitter taste in the mint oil. In far northern California – near the University of California’s Intermountain Research and Extension Center in Siskiyou County, plus in Lassen County and in the Fall River Valley of Shasta County – the soil and climate are equally hospitable to mint production.
UC researchers have experimented with mint for more than 50 years, said Rob Wilson, UC Cooperative Extension advisor and director of the Intermountain REC. But it wasn’t until the mid-1990s that interest in commercially producing California peppermint took off. The 2010 peppermint acreage in northeast California was more than 3,500 acres and valued at about $7 million.
“Farmers are excited to have a new cropping choice like mint,” Wilson said, “especially given the fact that we have fewer choices than most areas of California because of our short growing season. Mint has given our farmers a new crop to add to their rotations.”
California peppermint oil producers have stiff competition. A significant quantity of peppermint oil is now produced in China and India. But U.S. growers see the opportunity to set their product apart by applying their agricultural skill to producing exceptionally high quality oil. To do so, the growers rely on research to inform their decisions on irrigation, fertilization and pest control. Extensive work on ideal mint management has been conducted in the Pacific Northwest, but there is a need for additional research to study mint production and economic viability under California conditions.
Peppermint is grown in a fashion similar to other field crops common in the intermountain region and can be harvested with some of the same equipment used for alfalfa and forages, Wilson said. Farmers plant certified verticillium wilt-free rootstock in the fall, and the peppermint stand produces a crop for about five years.
When mint has reached maturity, farmers swath the field like alfalfa and leave the plants to dry a few days before raking them into windrows. Using a forage harvester, the peppermint crop is chopped into small pieces and blown into tubs. At the distillery, steam is forced through the tubs to extract the oil.
“In harvest season, there’s a fragrant aroma of peppermint in the air,” Wilson said. “Even driving by a still along the highway, you immediately notice the smell.”
Peppermint begins bearing a crop the first year after the fall planting, producing 40 to 90 pounds of mint oil per acre. In subsequent years, the crop produces 60 to 120 pounds of oil per acre.
Wilson and Dan Marcum, UCCE advisor in Shasta and Lassen counties, developed a cost study for establishing and producing peppermint oil in the intermountain region. The UC study notes the importance of determining a market channel for the oil before the mint is planted. Annual contracts for the oils are generally negotiated in the winter for the following season at a fixed number of pounds at a set price. It is risky to grow the crop without a prearranged contract because on the spot market growers are competing with imported mint oil, which can be produced in areas where lower wages and limited regulations cut the production cost.
A major risk associated with peppermint farming, the study reported, is producing oil of poor quality, for which there is little or no demand. For example, weeds harvested with the mint lower the quality of oil. Pigweed and other broadleaf weeds contaminate the peppermint oil with a weedy flavor note. Plant stress caused by inadequate water or nitrogen or by insect damage can also reduce oil quality.
IREC has more than five acres of peppermint and a small peppermint still for studying production and evaluating the quality of oil. Wilson, along Intermountain REC superintendent Don Kirby, is using this acreage to compare irrigation, fertilization and harvest management strategies in order to maximize peppermint oil yield and oil quality under local soil and climatic conditions.
The IREC peppermint acreage is also used to study insect management. Among the pests that can reduce peppermint oil quality are spider mites and a recently introduced insect pest, mint root borer. These pests prompt significant pesticide use. Given the highly sensitive watersheds and environment of the intermountain area, wide usage of pesticides is considered problematic. Propargite and chlorpyrifos, the most commonly used pesticides for spider mite and mint root borer control, are under regulatory scrutiny.
In 2010, with funding from a California Department of Food and Agriculture Specialty Crop Block Grant, Larry Godfrey, UC Cooperative Extension specialist in the Department of Entomology at UC Davis, and Kris Tollerup, UC Davis post doctoral researcher, along with Marcum and Wilson, began investigating mint yield and quality response to spider mite infestation, spider mite management methods in mint, and reduced-risk insecticides for mint root borer management.  In addition, a study is under way to determine if sex pheromone mating disruption is a plausible tactic against mint root borer, and whether adjusting the timing of the insecticide improve mint root borer control. These research projects will continue in 2013.