Month: April 2025

Calling UCSC’s programs “near and dear to my heart,” Farr said there was no place he would rather have been than on campus among the pioneers and contemporary leaders of sustainable agriculture. Farr hailed UCSC’s spirit of innovation and ability to accomplish a lot with minimal resources, and he credited UCSC leaders with fighting for agroecology, even when it meant taking on vested interests within the University of California system who wanted to confine agriculture programs to the Davis and Riverside campuses. Reading from remarks he entered into the Congressional Record on October 4 to honor the 40th anniversary of sustainable agriculture programs at UCSC, Farr called the Center for Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems “one of the most prominent centers of agricultural research and education in the world.” In Congress, Farr has helped secure more than $3 million to support CASFS research and extension projects. Farr has been a proponent of organic farming since his service in the Peace Corps in Colombia in the 1960s, when he saw the importance of helping people improve their ability to grow food. In UCSC’s programs, he recognized the relevance of developing small-scale, intensive, organic food production systems. Over the years, Farr has made several landmark contributions to UCSC’s programs, and CASFS director Patricia Allen thanked him for his commitment to sustainable food and agriculture research and education. As host of the program, Allen read from remarks prepared by environmental studies professor Stephen Gliessman, who was unable to attend the ceremony because he was teaching a class. “We owe the existence of agroecology and CASFS to Sam, and it is up to us to continue to carry his vision of sustainable food systems forward,” Allen read on behalf of Gliessman, who was the first director of agroecology and who holds the Alfred E. Heller Chair in Agroecology.

Farr also authored the 1990 state law that established standards for organic food production and sales in California, square plastic plant pots which became the basis for recent federal organic food standards. In Congress, he has insisted that U.S. Department of Agriculture research stations include a focus on organic agriculture. Former CASFS director Carol Shennan, a professor of environmental studies, thanked Farr for his recent support of research efforts, including UCSC’s Central Coast water monitoring project that has helped farmers reduce pesticide runoff into the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary, and for research on regional food systems. As part of the celebration, Farr and garden manager Christof Bernau planted an heirloom climbing rose—the first in a new rose garden established in Farr’s honor. An adjacent plaque honors Farr for his “visionary support of sustainable food and agriculture research and education.”The second national conference on Facilitating Sustainable Agriculture Education, held July 11–14 at Cornell University in New York, brought together nearly 200 educators and students to share ideas for improving sustainable agriculture education at colleges, universities, apprenticeship programs, and other settings. Center for Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems graduates, students, and staff have played key roles in developing this new organization, whose mission is to “. . . promote and support the development, application, research, and exchange of best teaching and learning practices in sustainable agriculture education and curricula through communication, training, development, and collaborative activities for teachers and learners.”

The burgeoning interest in sustainable agriculture education prompted the founding of the SAEA. “We did a survey of stakeholders around the U.S. before moving forward with developing the association,” says Albie Miles, former curriculum editor at CASFS who helped organize the first national conference, held at Asilomar in 2006. “It was clear from that survey that there was a lot of interest in creating an organization that would help promote educational opportunities and move sustainable agriculture forward as a mainstream academic discipline,” he says. Although the SAEA was originally envisioned as a group that would promote sustainable agriculture programs at post-secondary schools, this year’s conference attendees broadened that scope to include education at a variety of levels. “I was impressed by how enthusiastic everyone was about not defining ourselves too narrowly,” says Katie Monsen, a UCSC graduate student in Environmental Studies who has helped develop the new organization. “We had people there from universities, but also growers and others with educational programs. For example, people are really interested in getting high school students involved in order to increase enrollment in college agronomy programs; other say we need to start sustainable agriculture education even earlier—this opens us up to work with a broad range of folks.” That range was reflected in this year’s group of conference participants, who came from throughout the country to share resources, discuss teaching methods, and create new networks. Monsen notes that despite the geographic differences, attendees found common ground in their educational goals. “We didn’t have a lot of conversations about ‘what is sustainable agriculture,’” she says. “Although there are certainly differences in regional cropping systems, people from across the country had very similar interests when it comes to creating educational opportunities.” In contrast to the typical “top down” approach to education, students have had a major voice in SAEA’s development. UC Davis graduate student Damian Parr, a graduate of UCSC and the CASFS apprenticeship program, is a leading advocate for giving students an equal voice in developing sustainable agriculture programs.

That goal is reflected in SAEA’s statement of values, which include, “A focus on learning and the development of communities of co-learners,” and “The democratization of knowledge and learning.” Next steps for the new organization include developing an online resource directory. “We want to make the web a place where people will be able to put up curricula, ask questions, post ideas and resources,” says Miles. That effort is already underway, with resources shared at this summer’s conference now available online .SAEA subcommittees are also working on student outreach, fundraising, and developing plans for next summer’s conference, which will take place in the Midwest.In Together at the Table, Patricia Allen provides a comprehensive and critical analysis of the potential for alternative agrifood movements to create substantial change in the entire food system. She looks in particular at the sustainable agriculture and community food security movements as examples, weighing the strengths and weaknesses of each. The UC Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education Program was, happily, accurately showcased in the discussion of sustainable agriculture programs. Then, in the final chapter , she suggests specific strategies for how we can all work together to improve and build the capacity of these movements for creating lasting changes that address all aspects of sustainability—ecological, economic viability, and social equity for all people in the food system. In her conclusions, Allen points out two key areas we, in the sustainable food systems research/practitioner communities need to work on: • Develop a broad-based vision for an alternative agrifood system that goes beyond the traditional ideological framework, and • Continue to broaden constituencies and engage them in democratic processes that can provide political power to move us toward significant change in the agrifood system. Developing a broad-based vision. In Chapter 4, Allen articulately describes the dominant epistemological approach that guides research and education in sustainable agriculture programs. In a nutshell, this is a focus on natural sciences, production innovations, and farm-level projects, mostly at the expense of resources devoted to social equity issues . She points out that sustainable, square pot plastic agrifood systems research and education must be larger in scope and more truly interdisciplinary than the current involvement of mostly production-oriented natural science disciplines. Broadening constituencies. Allen also makes the case that we clearly need constituents that participate in local food system actions, and those that help us link local efforts in larger movements that involve national and international politics. Some of this is happening already through sustainable food and farm advocates that are working on the Farm Bill. We also need to be vigilant about enlarging our “circles” to include those left out of the discussion. The new Agricultural Sustainability Institute at UC Davis is one new promising organization for addressing the above concerns in California. Through its strategic planning process, the ASI is developing a broad-based vision that includes diverse stakeholders and encourages participation at all levels. Its vision, core values and operating principles attest to its commitment to be inclusive . This may be one example of what Allen is saying in Together at the Table—that we need to work at many levels in the food system simultaneously from the local to the international.

To do that well, we need many kinds of people with different expertise and local knowledge to be involved. Moreover, we need to acknowledge the importance of each of our contributions and communicate with each other effectively if we really want to make a lasting difference in changing our food system to one that is more sustainable and equitable.Conventional strawberry growers rely on multiple applications of pesticides per year to control lygus bugs , a pest capable of damaging berries badly enough to make them unacceptable for fresh market sale. According to CASFS entomologist and extension specialist Sean Swezey, typical control programs entail 6–8 biweekly calendar applications of insecticide per season, with costs capable of exceeding $500/acre. Yet even these efforts are beginning to fall short of controlling the pest, as lygus has started to display resistance to commonly applied insecticides in California. Swezey and Charlie Pickett of the California Department of Food and Agriculture’s Biological Control Program recently received a two-year grant from the USDA’s Pest Management Alternatives Program to extend trap crop techniques developed in organic systems to conventional strawberry operations in an effort to reduce the need for insecticide applications. Trap crops of alfalfa offer lygus a preferred “host” plant: by establishing strips of alfalfa in strawberry plantings, growers can concentrate the pest in one place and control it with either a vacuum system or conventional sprays. The PMAP grant will fund efforts by Swezey, Pickett, and CASFS research associates Janet Bryer and Diego Nieto to fine tune techniques they’ve developed over the past several years in organic operations using alfalfa trap crops combined with periodic trap crop vacuuming, supplemented by an introduced lygus parasitoid. In the organic research site, the team will determine the number of vacuum passes over an alfalfa trap crop that will optimize lygus removal. “We want to find out whether a significant or economically important number of lygus bugs are removed after each successive vacuuming pass,” says Swezey. “We may find that the first pass or two removes the majority of the lygus present, and that further passes don’t make enough difference in decreasing the remaining number of lygus to be justified.” Establishing an optimal ratio of lygus bug reduction-to-tractor expense will help prevent unnecessary passes, thereby lowering labor costs and tractor operation expenses. The research team will also determine the extent to which an introduced parasitoid of lygus, the braconid wasp Peristenus relictus, is helping control lygus populations in strawberry rows planted between strips of alfalfa. Introduced into a Central Coast organic strawberry operation in 2004, the wasp is now established at the site. Research efforts over the next two years will focus on the percent of lygus parastized by P. relictus in strawberry rows 1, 5, 10, 15, 20, and 25 . In the 40-acre conventionally managed strawberry system, the researchers want to determine whether treating a trap crop with insecticides will control the pests effectively enough to decrease or eliminate the need to spray the crop itself. They also hope to determine the best way to manage a trap crop in a conventional system. “We want to optimize the way alfalfa plantings are managed to make them effective ‘traps’ for lygus throughout the season,” says Swezey. This will entail mowing the crops to stimulate new growth and flowering during the summer as a way to enhance the alfalfa’s attractiveness to lygus. Alfalfa plantings have already been established for the upcoming field season at the organic and conventional research sites. Results of the study will appear in future issues of The Cultivar, and will be presented at grower field days planned for late 2009 and 2010.As interest in farm-to-college programs designed to bring local, sustainably produced food into college cafeterias grows, there is also a growing need to understand how to best address the interests and needs of the consumers served by such programs.

And after the Forest Service absorbed range research a few years later, the interests and priorities of forestry would dominate the fledgling field of range science for decades to come.Frederick Vernon Coville was the son of a bank director in upstate New York. After graduating from Cornell, he was hired as Assistant Botanist in the USDA in 1888, and five years later he succeeded George Vasey as Chief Botanist and honorary Curator of the National Herbarium. He is most famous for his work as a botanist, especially in connection with the Death Valley Expedition of 1891, and for his path-breaking research on the blueberry, which helped make it a commercial crop in the northeastern US. Although less well known, his role in charting the course of rangeland research and administration must be considered among his most enduring accomplishments. For Roosevelt’s Public Lands Commission, he wrote the blueprint for the grazing lease system subsequently adopted by the Forest Service , and his fieldwork and reports in the decade after 1897 set the terms of engagement for public range grazing research. As Pinchot succinctly put it years later, “Until the Forest Service developed a body of experts of its own, Frederick V. Coville was the first and the earliest authority on the effect of grazing on the forest” .Struggling to define and assert management authority over the forest reserves, the General Land Office had banned all livestock grazing in 1894, believing it necessary to protect forest regeneration and reduce fires. The move provoked resistance from sheep and cattle owners throughout the West, and at the end of June 1897, new policies were announced rescinding the ban for cattle nationwide but retaining it for sheep, blueberry grow bag size except in the reserves of Oregon and Washington, where “the continuous moisture and abundant rainfall…make rapid renewal of the herbage and undergrowth possible” .

A week before announcing the partial rescission, the Secretary of Agriculture instructed Coville “to make an investigation of the alleged damage to forests by grazing of live stock [sic], more especially the effects of sheep herding in the Cascade Forest Reserve of Oregon,” which had been created in September 1893. His subsequent report clearly articulated the empirical and analytical framework from which the CoyoteProof Pasture Experiment would later be designed. Coville’s field methods were both ecological and ethnographic,8 and he came to see fencing, herding and predators as tightly inter-related elements of the problem of the western range.Coville firmly rebutted two widespread claims about sheepherders: first, that they were “aliens” or non-citizens who represented “a comparatively low class of humanity” ; second, that they were responsible for starting forest fires. These were politically volatile arguments to make, and they stood in sharp contrast to the prevailing views of many prominent figures, such as John Muir, who famously described sheep as “hooved locusts” and whose vision of wilderness erased and excluded both non-whites and laborers of all kinds . Coville sidestepped the polemics, apparently considering both of his claims to be settled by the facts on the ground. Instead, he focused his analysis elsewhere, detailing the herders’ management techniques, their knowledge of the value of different plants for sheep growth, and the variation in their skills. He noted that “The acreage per sheep required for grazing throughout the summer is exceedingly variable, depending on the kind and character of the vegetation” .Overgrazing in the Cascades had occurred, according to Coville, but it was neither ubiquitous nor longstanding, and it had not yet altered the composition of vegetation in the reserve. He attributed the damage he observed not to the herbivory of the sheep but to their physical movements. “The principal bad effects of overgrazing are to be attributed rather to trampling than to actual close cropping” . This could be prevented, he believed, by securing sheep owners’ access to the range resource.

Open access for all made each herder rush to use the range ahead of the others, “to get all the grass possible without reference to the next year’s crop, for he [the herder] is never certain that he will be able to occupy the same range again. Where the competition is close the difficulty of insufficient forage is increased by the haste of the herder in forcing his sheep too rapidly over a grazing plot, the result being that they trample more feed than they eat. So year after year each band skins the range” . A system of permits to graze specified areas would relieve this competition, and also enable the government to impose other terms, such as stocking rates and rules regarding fires.Coville conducted similar fieldwork in Arizona in 1900 at the invitation of Pinchot. The conflict there also concerned sheep grazing, but in relation less to timber and fires than to watershed conditions above the Salt River, whose waters were being developed for irrigation in the Phoenix basin below. The trip was proposed and hosted by Alfred F. Potter, a prominent local sheep owner and secretary of the Arizona Wool Growers’ Association. After a three-week wagon tour of the Mogollon Rim country, Coville and Pinchot concluded, as in Oregon before, that sheep grazing should be permitted but carefully regulated. Shortly thereafter, Pinchot recruited Potter to come to Washington as Assistant Forester in charge of the Branch of Grazing. Potter and Coville would later author key parts of the Public Land Commission’s 1905 report, making the case for exclusive leases to graze fenced allotments of the Western range. The trip also cemented a long-lasting friendship between Coville and Pinchot.In late March of 1907, Pinchot and Potter met with C. V. Piper, Chief Agrostologist in the BPI, to discuss “the range investigations which they would like to have undertaken by this Bureau.” In a memo the following day, Piper reported to Bureau Chief B. T. Galloway that the Forest Service had reduced stocking on northwestern sheep ranges by about 25 percent, “by agreement with the stockmen. It is however the desire of the Forest Service to increase the carrying capacity of these summer ranges and consequently the allotment of stock to each district as rapidly as possible,” and “to permit as many stock as possible to run on these summer ranges.”

Experiments were needed to determine whether degraded ranges could be reseeded, and to determine “what system of range management both with cattle and with sheep will best permit the more valuable native grasses to re-seed themselves and thus increase the carrying capacity and maintain it at a maximum.The investigations will not only be necessary to the best administration of these range lands but will result in enormous benefit to the live stock interests of the West.” Piper recommended that J. S. Cotton, who had studied range conditions in central Washington be put in charge of the experiments. It appears Pinchot overrode this suggestion in favor of Coville. An inter-bureau agreement was reached that the BPI would cover Coville’s salary and expenses, while the Forest Service paid the rest of the costs. In mid-May, Coville headed west to set up the experiments. From his hotel in Lincoln, Nebraska, he wrote to Pinchot: “After a conference with Professor [Charles] Bessey and Professor [Frederic] Clements, and with the prospective appointee himself, I have secured one of the men we want for the forest grazing experiments. He is Mr. Arthur W. Sampson, a resident of the state of Nebraska, and a graduate student of the University. He is an expert in plant ecology and should be appointed as such.” Sampson’s training under Bessey and Clements was critical for Coville because it meant that the other men he hired would not need expertise in botany or ecology; its importance for the future of range science was even greater, because it helped install Clementsian ecological theory as the foundation for the discipline. Five dayslater, in Logan, Utah, Coville hired Jardine, describing him thus to Pinchot: “Mr. Jardine is twenty-five years old, a graduate of Utah agricultural college, and now an instructor in that institution. He was brought up on a ranch in southern Idaho and is familiar with the handling of cattle, horses, and sheep. He is well qualified both by his personal characteristics and his training to take part in the forest grazing investigations.” En route from Lincoln to Logan, Coville stopped in Laramie, Wyoming, blueberry box to interview a prominent sheep owner by the name of Francis S. King. An immigrant from England, King and his brothers owned or leased some 120,000 acres of private land in Wyoming and were famous for their prize-winning purebred Merino, Rambouillet, and Corriedale rams and ewes . Coville’s notes from the meeting suggest that King’s ideas and opinions played a significant role in refining the details of the imminent experiments in Oregon. King saw two advantages to protecting sheep within a predator-proof enclosure: reduced labor costs and improved animal performance.On June 3, Coville reported to Pinchot that he had selected a site with good forage, ready access by wagon, and “an abundance of coyotes, wild cats, and bear, with an occasional cougar and lynx.” “The stockmen” in the area, he wrote, “are greatly interested in the experiment, the consensus of opinion being that under a pasture system the carrying capacity of the range will be doubled.” He had found a “thoroughly efficient hunter” to hire for the project, and he recommended some modifications to the fence design based on his conversations in Wyoming . He had also met with the press to promote the experiment. One reporter wrote: “It is believed that the same amount of grass will support many more sheep when they are pastured than when they are herded. Should this theory be proved, the result will revolutionize the entire policy of the department in regard to the reserves and will have a great bearing upon the stock industry.”10 .By mid-June, Jardine and Sampson had reported for duty, the fence was under construction, and Coville soon returned to Washington. The fence—an imposing and elaborate combination of barbed wire, wire mesh, and stout posts —was completed too late for a full season’s research, but a band of sheep was placed in the new pasture for one month and observations were made both of their behavior and of the effectiveness of the fence at repelling predators. As for the latter, “the fence proved successful as a protection against coyotes, not successful as a protection against grizzly bears, doubtfully successful against black and brown bears, still problematic against cats, and not successful against badgers” . The hunter and his hounds patrolled the perimeter each day, recording signs of predators and, when possible, pursuing them . But just as Merriam had feared, one coyote was trapped inside the completed fence, and two sheep were lost to predators—one to a bear and another to the coyote . These predators interfered with efforts to observe “the action of sheep when they are allowed perfect freedom in an inclosure [sic] and protected from annoyance by animals” , but Jardine nonetheless judged that “the test was very satisfactory. They [the sheep] retained, more or less, the natural instinct to mass, but from the first day the tendency to open, scattered grazing, with little or no trailing, increased” . While conceding that solid data had yet to be collected, Jardine concluded: “That the experimental system will materially increase the carrying capacity of the range is not to be doubted” .The following summer, after repairs had been made to the fence, a band of 2,209 sheep were turned into the coyote-proof pasture without a herder. The hunter resumed his daily patrols, and the behavior of the sheep was monitored all day, every day from June 21st to September 24th. Only 15 sheep died during the 96 days, none due to predation. The objective was to induce “open grazing,” as Jardine termed it. “Whether sheep are in large or small bunches it is essential for the protection of the range that they be well scattered and graze quietly. Close-bunched grazing, massing, running, and trailing one after another should be prevented if possible, not only for the good of the range but for the good of the sheep. In this respect there was marked change during the season” . Here, the predators were not the only culprits: herders themselves, and especially herders’ dogs, were like predators in that they could provoke fright in sheep and cause them to bunch, mass, and run.