Ernie Atencio

The Albuquerque Journal ran a story on May 11 about a shortage of growers at local farmers markets. In a world evermore obsessed with buying local and reducing our carbon footprint, this is a troubling missing link in the system.

New Mexico has about a thousand small farmers, ranging from “backyard growers and dabblers” to dedicated full timers just squeaking by. There are more than 40 farmers markets across the state, as well as roadside farm stands and community gardens. Still, “we’re not even close to being close to being close to having enough farmers,” says Monte Skarsgard, owner of Los Poblanos Organics in Albuquerque. I imagine the same is true in other Western states.

(Read on …)

Felice Pace

California Governor Schwarzenegger wants to build two new dams - Sites and Temperance Flat. They are being sold as necessary to cope with the reduction in Sierra Nevada, Cascade and Klamath Mountains snowpack expected as a result of climate change. New and “enhanced” storage is being marketed by Lester Snow, director of California’s Department of Water Resources (DWR) as part of a “portfolio approach” which also calls for urban water conservation, better groundwater facilities, improved wastewater processing and research into lowering the cost of desalination. The dams are to provide increased capacity in order to catch earlier runoff that – according to climate change data and predictions - will no longer be held in mountain snowpack.

Schwarzenegger and Snow are counting on the climate change predictions to be fairly accurate. If the actual climate does not follow the predictions, the new and “enhanced’ reservoirs might never fill. Furthermore, increasing surface storage would result in more extensive water loss through evaporation. In 1998 the measured evaporation from California reservoirs was about a million acre feet - that’s enough water to cover a million acres of land with a foot of water. That’s a lot of water but the amount will rise if new and “enhanced’ reservoirs are developed. Furthermore, if climate change results in higher summer temperatures evaporation from all reservoirs will increase.

(Read on …)

Rebecca Clarren

Today, the Senate passed the Farm Bill. Much can and will be written about the benefits and problems this mammoth piece of legislation will inspire. The $307 billion farm bill however does much more than grant subsidies to farmers and provide funds to nutrition programs like food stamps. In a small dark corner of the bill is an important piece of reform legislation that deals, not with food, but with natural gas prices. Let me explain.

If you use natural gas at home, you’ve probably noticed that your bills have been getting bigger. In some parts of the country they’ve almost doubled in the past six years. You might assume that rising gas prices are the stuff of Econ 101: Gas reserves in the Gulf of Mexico are dwindling, the cost of crude oil is sprinting upward, creating demand for other energy sources and hurricanes Katrina and Rita damaged refineries, cutting supply and jacking up prices. But what’s partly behind spikes in your gas bills are the financial traders who capitalize on a dysfunctional regulatory system and an energy market that’s devised to confound consumers.**

(Read on …)

Rebecca Clarren

I hate to mow the lawn. My yard spans a hill and cutting the grass with the electric mower I borrow from the neighbors is some strange hybrid of yoga and modern dance. (Flick the yellow power cord to the left over my shoulder, now to the right, under my leg.) My neighbor Allison, the one who so kindly lends me her mower has a solution: a neighborhood goat. We could all keep the goat for a week at a time and then, at the end of the summer, we’d slaughter and grill her up for one fantastic neighborhood block party.

The BBQ-part aside, using goats in lieu of lawn mowers or insecticides is gaining traction all over the West. For several years, Wilsonville, Ore. has hired a herd of 450 grazers to chomp down invasive plants at city parks. Clackamas County, not far from Portland, has used goats to manage weeds near reservoirs. This past May, the Getty Museum in Los Angeles hired several dozen goats (and a goatherd and a few dogs) to chew up the flammable brush around its 110-acre hillside. Ranchers in New Mexico have used hundreds of goats to eat and kill off tamarisk.

Claudia Ingham, a doctorate in rangeland ecology and management at Oregon State University, is studying the impact of grazing on landscapes rife with invasive English ivy. So far her results indicate that goats are the most effective at controlling the ivy so that native plants have space to flourish.

Using insecticides and fuel-powered mowers increasingly make little sense with raising gas prices and data about the impacts of toxic chemicals on humans and the environment. Call your local officials and get them to hire a flock of goats. It’s an idea that should take root.

Marty Durlin

Online Editor

Bamboos are part of the grass family, and estimates of the number of species range from 200-1,200. Some bamboos reach heights of 60-90 feet, with stalks up to 8 inches in diameter. Canebreaks, once common in the southeastern U.S., are native North American bamboos.

“Gregarious flowering” is common to bamboos: all members of a particular species flower, produce seeds and then “die in synchrony.” Bamboos produce only once every 3 to 120 years, creating seed crops numbering in the thousands. Between flowerings, they reproduce via rhizomes, which develop underground and send up shoots that emerge from sheaths to grow into stalks.

(Read on …)

Felice Pace

Was anyone surprised by the article about the abuse of conservation easements which appeared in the March 31^st edition of HCN? If you were, you have not been paying close attention to what has been going on in our society.

In a country where energy traders collude to rip off customers, corporate leaders cook the books to deceive investors, brokers sell mortgages to folks they know can’t afford them and federal regulators wink at usury and worse, what else should we expect?

Stay tuned for the carbon credit scandals to come.

This is all the product of a society in which the highest good is making obscene amounts of money and in which one can sin all week and get forgiven on Sunday without penance or consequences.

(Read on …)

Jodi Peterson

Associate Editor

The New York Times has a story today on the growing importance of native species of bees in agriculture. The European honeybee, which pollinates millions of dollars’ worth of U.S. crops, is buzzing off into the sunset, beset by mites and a mysterious malady called Colony Collapse Disorder (see our story “Silence of the Bees“).

So farmers and orchardists are now turning to the humble native bees, which are often hardier and better pollinators. However, these bees are in trouble too, hit by habitat loss and overuse of pesticides. See our story about the native bees last year, in “Native Hum“.

Rebecca Clarren

I have a white bandana that I carry around with me. It’s thin cotton; it offers the smallest of comfort when I cry or sneeze or spill something. However for thousands of immigrant women who weed, prune and harvest fruits and vegetables throughout the West, bandanas such as mine are their singular shield from sun, pesticides and a more formidable threat: sexual assault and harassment from their coworker or boss.

Patricia Zavella, a professor of Latina American and Latino Studies at UC Santa Cruz revealed in a 2003 journal article that bandanas and baggy clothes help women to mask their beauty and figures. Yet very often, these shields aren’t sufficient. I report in High Country News this week [Plowing Under the Fields of Shame] that sexual abuse and harassment of farm worker women is a serious problem.

The abuse - and dismissal - of immigrant women who work in agriculture is epidemic. In a 1997 study, 90 percent of female farmworkers in California reported sexual harassment as a major problem. Ten years later, those who work with farmworkers say that abuse - which ranges from obscene jokes and sexual innuendo to inappropriate rubbing, pinching and even rape - affects thousands of women. Workers in Salinas, Calif., refer to one company as the field de calzon, or “field of panties,” because so many supervisors rape women there. In several recent cases brought before federal court in California, women who resisted advances were fired or suspended without pay.

(Read on …)

Marty Durlin

Online Editor

My grandpa was a beekeeper in Delta County, and I remember collecting honey with him in the orchards and fields. Grandpa gave me pieces of honeycomb to chew as we bumped along in his rickety pickup to the next set of hives. We ate a lot of honey in those days, spreading it lavishly on toast, pouring it on ice cream…the pungent smell of the thick amber liquid, its wild sweet taste and sticky pleasure, will always be with me. In those days, the big worry over bees was that they might sting you. Nowadays, the worry is that there won’t be any bees left to pollinate the crops.

In the past decade, bees in the U.S. and around the world have succumbed to bloodsucking mites, pesticides, declining habitat, and Colony Collapse Disorder.

Now comes the latest sad buzz from Washington state, where nosema ceranae, a microsporidian fungus that has killed bees in Europe since at least 2000, is decimating the bee population. Losses are as high as 80 percent, according to an article in the Seattle Times. Nosema ceranae attacks the bee’s gut, making it impossible to process food, so the bee starves to death.

Nosema ceranae has been linked to colony collapse, but is not considered the primary cause — in fact, there is no answer to the question of what is causing the bees’ demise, or even if there is one major causative factor. (See HCN articles The Silence of the Bees and Native Hum, as well as a recent GOAT blog by Rebecca Claren for more information.)

What is certain it that the bees’ mass die-offs spell disaster for agriculture. For example, Washington state’s top crop is apples, worth more than $1 billion per year — and there will be no apples if there are no bees to pollinate the orchards. About a third of the nation’s food supply depends on bees for pollination.

One beekeeper said he was “scared, and I don’t mind saying so.”

Rebecca Clarren

As a rule, I don’t go east to find out about the west. But on a recent trip to New York City, just around the corner from Central Park, I learned many new things about water in our region and beyond. At the American Museum of Natural History, past the displays of stuffed hippopotami and condors, is H20 = Life, overflowing with information about, well, water – who uses it, how it’s used, and how we in this country can use less of it. Did you know, for example, that the average person or municipality in the US uses151 gallons of water per day, compared to the 31 gallons on average used in the UK, or the three gallons in Ethiopia? A basic primer on water conservation, the exhibit, with excellent photos and displays, also helps place Western water issues in a global context: Las Vegas has the same annual rain fall as the United Arab Emirates.

Luckily, you don’t have to go to New York City to glean this information. The Museum has a great website, with special content for both educators (find articles and activities to enhance curriculum for specific grades) and kids (travel virtually to the bottom of the ocean, a Mangrove ecosystem, or play a game with polar bears). If you do find yourself in New York, H20 = Life will be up through May 25.

Felice Pace

Few in the West are unaware that the federal crackdown on immigration has had an impact on western industries. The March 3rd edition of HCN, for example, included this comment on the situation from Bill Crooke’s essay for Writers on the Range:“There are upsides to the employment crunch (in Cody, Wyo.): It’s harder to get fired, and the increasingly desperate business community has to keep raising wages and incentives.”

Crooke may have been thinking more about the energy boom, but the loss of immigrant labor is affecting wages and employment not just in Wyoming but throughout the West. Even Silicon Valley is feeling the pinch. But the largest impacts are on low wage service industries and agriculture. From California to Colorado and Arizona to Idaho growers are wondering who will pick the fruit, prune the vines and hoe the weeds while motel owners wonder who will clean the rooms and restaurateurs are in search of cooks and dish washers. .

Another western industry which has “suffered” as a result of the immigration crackdown is the ski industry.

(Read on …)

Francisco Tharp

While a nice, fresh pesticide can be just ravishing as a spicy kick to sliced peaches or tossed spinach, a recent study published on the BMC Neurology website suggests that some pest killing compounds are–gasp!–terrible for our health.

More specifically, the study has correlated Parkinson’s disease to pesticide exposure. The guiltiest culprits in this study were herbicides and insecticides, such as organochlorides (which include the now-banned DDT) and organophosphates, says a Washington Post report.

The suggestion that some pesticides contribute to Parkinson’s disease is nothing new, but the study did break ground by reducing the genetic variable. Researchers studied pesticide exposure in people with the disease compared to their healthy relatives.

Despite the finding, the study’s lead researcher says “biological evidence is presently insufficient to conclude that pesticide exposure causes PD,” reports the Post. Nonetheless, it probably couldn’t hurt to go for organic next time you head to the market (or garden, if you’re the home-grow type).

Rebecca Clarren

Outside the trees bloom pink, yellow daffodils cluster near the sidewalk and my lawn has suddenly sprouted into a large bushy rug that has prompted chilly looks from my neighbors. To my untrained eye, spring has arrived in its usual showy fashion, but I’m missing something. We all are.

New data by bee biologists indicate steep declines of three common bumble bees species, including the Western Bumble Bee, found from the Rocky Mountains and California up into Alaska. These native populations of bees are important pollinators of wild flowering plants and crops. Though there are a number of plausible reasons for these shrinking populations, such as climate change, habitat loss and pesticides, Dr Robbin Thorp, an entomologist at U.C. Davis, suspects a more acute cause.
(Read on …)