California is experiencing its third year of drought, statewide, and the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, which provides two-thirds of California’s fresh drinking water and yields a giant portion of the nation’s food supply, is dangerously close to running dry, water conservationists and water managers say.

Yesterday, federal officials vowed to act. During a visit to Sacramento, Deputy Secretary of the Interior David Hayes met with local interests – farmers, fisheries, families and municipalities in the region – and promised to free up more water for their use. He acknowledged that the drought has compounded a pre-existing condition – the overall degradation of the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta.

Hayes said that restoration of the vital delta is as significant as the restoration of Florida’s Everglades or the East Coast’s Chesapeake Bay.

“Not only is it a crucial ecosystem that is in peril, but more than 20 million Americans in the most populated state in the nation rely on it for their drinking water,” Hayes said. “The status quo is not sustainable.”

Help can’t come too soon. In Fresno County alone, thousands of farmers have lost income and crops due to the drought, which is now ending its third year. According to a county request for a gubernatorial “State of Emergency” proclamation in April,  due to “surface water allocations (that) have been reduced to zero percent… Fresno County farmers (will have to) fallow thousands of acres  of crop land… (and) 250,000 acres will not be farmed in 2009 due to lack of water.”

The Sacramento-San Joaquin estuary is where two of California’s largest rivers converge and intermingle with saltwater from the Pacific Ocean. It is the West Coast’s largest estuary, hosting 500 species of wildlife, including 20-plus endangered species (the salt harvest Suisun Marsh mouse and the Delta smelt among them; it also is a critical migratory channel for regional salmon). It serves cities and farms from the Bay area to the Central Coast to Southern California – encompassing approximately 738,000 acres of farmland, yielding crops such as asparagus, grain, pears, corn, hay and tomatoes, and bringing in over $500 million each year.

But with the current drought, those contrasting needs have become more pronounced. Consider that over the past three years, California’s rainfall has been 35 to 25 percent below average. The state received 63 percent of average rainfall in 2007-2008; 72 percent of the average in 2008-2009; and 75 percent by the end of June 2009 for the 2009-2010 water year.

The timing of Deputy Secretary Hayes’s visit to Sacramento couldn’t have come at a less convenient time for the city itself. After a report last week that municipal water usage has spiked over the past three years while residents’ has been restricted,  capital city officials are scrambling to figure out what happened – What caused, for instance, a 76 percent increase at one city property alone over the past two years?

The story, which appeared in the Sacramento Bee on Sunday was based on three years’ worth of metering records. It reported that at city properties overall, expenditure of the precious resource jumped by 22 percent.

The two biggest city guzzlers were a golf course and public park, and the city’s historic cemetery, where the Bee reporter noted antiquated watering systems that left wasteful pools of water.

The office of Sacramento Mayor Kevin Johnson has not yet responded to a request for comment by GreenRightNow. But with the U.S. Department of the Interior finally weighing in on California’s water woes – something the Bush Administration artfully dodged for eight years  - the California capital is most likely putting its nose to the grind – and trying to figure out its own civic water balance.

Copyright © 2009 Green Right Now | Distributed by Noofangle Media

Birds, bees and frogs. We’ve known for a long time that they’re affected by pesticides and chemical pollution.

In the last few years, many scientists have come to see frogs, whose populations are in steep decline, as one of the most vulnerable; humankind’s canary in the coal mine.

Now researchers at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale are illuminating why frogs are in such deep trouble. They’ve found that just a few grains of a pesticide ingredient commonly used in California agriculture can make mountain streams lethal to frogs.

Don Sparling, a professor of zoology at SIU, recently discovered that the neurotoxin pesticides used on crops (peaches, grapes, nuts, tomatoes) in California’s Central Valley are making their way into the snow and streams of the nearby Sierra Mountains, contaminating the environment for the native frogs that breed there.

Sparling’s study, being published this month, found that Pacific tree frogs and foothill yellow-legged frogs are declining in population because natural waterways are polluted with of endosulfan — the active ingredient in many pesticides used in the area.

Sparling and his team found that .3 parts per billion of endosulfan in water was enough to kill half of the frogs exposed. At higher concentrations, the waters were lethal.

“At 0.8 parts per billion, we lose all of them,” Sparling said in a news announcement.  “We always thought there was an association between pesticides and declining amphibian populations, and we’re building up a body of evidence to show this is the case.”

Sparling and his team discovered that the most likely way the chemicals used in the agriculture-intense Central Valley found their way into the Sierras was by wind.

“These pesticides are applied by airplanes and we found that the wind would blow some of it up into the mountains, for instance,” Sparling said. “In other cases, these chemicals would volatize after being applied, turning into a gaseous state, which could also be picked up and spread into the mountains by wind.”

With only a tiny amount needed to alter the water — literally only a few grains were enough to infect 500 gallons of water — the pesticides appeared to be playing a big role in the frogs’ decline, he explained. The agricultural calendar which calls for pesticide applications in late winter and early spring, also contributes to the problem because this is when the frogs’ larvae are most vulnerable.

Even “sub-lethal” concentrations of the pesticide result in fatal outcomes for the frogs, with tadpoles growing off-center tails that render them incapable of swimming away from predators or paralyzing muscles, creating frogs with impaired mobility.

Sparling said he believes pesticides are needed in growing crops – not everyone agrees – but that the levels and types of chemicals being used should be examined.

Losing frogs creates a weak-link in the ecosystem that can devastate the ecology of the area, and also serves as a warning to humans of the potential damage from chemically grown or treated foods.

The study is being published in the August edition of Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry.

(Photo credit: Don Sparling and graduate student David Dimitrie show tadpole research tanks, SIU.)

“Just the thought of tomato blight sends fear into the heart of every farmer.”

Those are the words of organic farmer Charlie Reid, who operates two small farms in southeastern New Hampshire. “We’ve been lucky this year … so far,” says Reid. “Lots of farmers have had to pull (dig up and destroy) their entire tomato crops. But with all this rain and so little sun my luck could change (for the worse) overnight.”

Blight is a highly contagious fungus that hits both tomatoes and potatoes. The Potato Famine in Ireland in the late 19^th century was caused by blight. And now blight is killing both tomato and potato crops in New England and in some mid-Atlantic states. It’s not yet an epidemic, but cause for concern for both farmers and consumers, as well as home garden growers who unwittingly used infected seedlings.

The Vermont Agency of Agriculture’s “Agriview” has this alert for farmers:

“It (blight) appears on potato or tomato leaves as pale green, water-soaked spots, often beginning at leaf tips or edges. The circular or irregular leaf lesions are often surrounded by a pale yellowish-green border that merges with healthy tissue. Lesions enlarge rapidly and turn dark brown to purplish-black. During periods of high humidity and leaf wetness, a cottony, white mold growth is usually visible on lower leaf surfaces at the edges of lesions.”

There are two culprits in this year’s late blight: too much rain and consumer nurseries selling starter plants, which unwittingly spread the ailment.

Tomatoes Need Sun To Shake Blight

Rainfall has varied across the country at seemingly excessive rates: for example, too little in Texas and too much in the Northeast. While early blight in lesser amounts  is normal each year, this season’s heavy rains have soaked many farms and there hasn’t been enough sun to dry the fields.

Add wind to the rain and the situation worsens: Late blight spores are carried by wind from one plant to another. And while one plant might be infected and the one next to it untouched, eventually the entire crop in a field or backyard garden will be affected and die.

Although nothing can save your tomatoes once they become blight-infected there are a wide variety of preemptive organic and natural ways to prepare your crop. Go to Garden Web to start your search.

Organic farmers and organic home gardeners can also find natural and organic compounds at most feed and hardware stores.  Conventional farmers try to prevent blight by spraying with herbicides, fungicides and pesticides but even they don’t guaranteed success.

A second blight culprit this summer was the mass marketing of tomato plants sold at big-box stores like Wal-Mart, Lowe’s and Home Depot. An unknown number of plants were distributed by these stores via Bonnie Plants, a wholesale gardening company in Alabama that buys many of its plants from growers in other parts of the country.

Bonnie Plants has recalled seedlings that remained on store shelves but it was too late for others that had been bought and planted earlier.

Bonnie’s General Manager Dennis Thomas told the New York Times that only five of the recalled plants had blight. “This pathogen did not come from our plants,” he said. “This is something that has been around forever.”

Bonnie explains on its website that this year’s blight was worse than in previous years because of cool, wet conditions and refers home growers to the Texas A & M horticulture website, Aggie Horticulture, and its section on tomato problems. The notes on late blight help gardeners identify diseased plants; other tomato diseases are covered in the tomato guide at well.

An article in Growing Produce by a Cornell professor of plant website about this issue reports its discovery in commercial fields in Long Island in June, followed by reports on plants in retail stores.
The article notes that the problem could spread, depending on the weather: “All tomato and potato crops are at high risk of developing late blight this season, especially if the rainy weather continues. All growers should assume their crops eventually will be affected and thus should be on a weekly schedule to both thoroughly inspect their potato and tomato plantings…,” writes Margaret Tuttle McGrath.

Home Growers Should Dispose of Affected Plants

“We are urging home gardeners, especially those who may have recently planted tomato seedlings from a big box store, to check for this disease,” said Jim Dwyer, University of Maine Potato Specialist. “Because the tomato fruits will be ruined by this fungus and the threat of late blight spreading to potatoes, home gardeners that find late blight on their plants should pull, bag and throw out these plants. They should not put them on the compost pile.”

According to Jon Turmel, Vermont State Plant Regulator, “The stores across the state have been more than helpful at removing plants from their shelves.”

This summer in New Hampshire field tomatoes are selling for around $2.45 a pound but continued rain there and in Maine and Vermont hold the key to late blight and New England’s tomato crop. In the Hudson Valley agricultural region of New York late blight has been described as “explosive” and “never seen … on such a widespread basis.”

Late blight has not been common in New England but when it does occur it is very destructive. In Colchester, Vt., Laurie Mazza is still selling her greenhouse tomatoes for $2.99 a pound. “We’re a week or so away from our field tomatoes and while they look good now, especially the cherry tomatoes, something could happen.”

(Photos of healthy tomatoes and plants by Green Right Now.com; late blight tomato, photo credit: Texas A&M University)

Copyright © 2009 Green Right Now | Distributed by Noofangle Media