Conservation agriculture news
No-till Garbanzo Field Day Video Available at CASI Website and You Tube
Following the public field day that took place at the UC Field Station in Five Points, CA on Monday, April 18th, Station Superintendent, Merf Solorio, provided a field interview in which he provided observations of the no-till garbanzo study early in the 2016 season. The video interview may be seen at the CASI website or at the You Tube link provided below.
A summary of the field day will appear in the California Farm Bureau Federation's AG ALERT in an upcoming issue.
https://youtu.be/9NE3a_gYyaM
Video of Dr. Li Hongwen’s April 15th seminar presentation
The video of Dr. Li Hongwen's April 15th seminar presentation at the University of California, Davis on “Residue Handling for No-tillage Seeders in the World” is now available at the CASI website or at the You Tube link https://youtu.be/q9nPRqX3Ic4
SJV CASI Farmers host soil biology researcher from Ghent University in Belgium
Three San Joaquin Valley CASI farmers, - Jesse Sanchez of Sano Farms in Firebaugh, Tom Willey of T & D Willey Farms in Madera and Michael Crowell of Bar-Vee Dairy in Turlock, - graciously hosted Gisele Herren, a soil biology PhD researcher from Ghent University in Belgium at their farms on Tuesday, April 5th. The farm visits were conducted as part of Gisele's ongoing research that is seeking to characterize communities of nematodes related to the various functional services they provide in soils that have received various organic amendment materials and that have been managed with reduced disturbance practices.
This work is being coordinated in conjunction with Gisele's team in Ghent and also with UC Davis mentorship of Howard Ferris. Gisele's family has a farm in the Capay Valley in Yolo County and her father, Hans Herren, was the first Swiss to receive the 1995 World Food Prize and the 2013 Right Livelihood Award for leading a major biological pest management campaign in Africa, successfully fighting the Cassava mealybug and averting a major food crisis that could have claimed an estimated 20 million lives https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Rudolf_Herren.
2015 CT Farmer Innovator Award Recipient Charlie Rominger Recognition Ceremony
2015 CT Farmer Innovator Award Recipient Charlie Rominger Recognition Ceremony
December 2, 2015
Video available at YouTube
The story about Charlie Rominger is posted in a blog article below. A video of the recognition ceremony honoring Charlie Rominger as the 2015 Conservation Tillage Farmer Innovator Award recipient is available at the following YouTube site.
UC Davis Hydrology Team Visits NRI Study Field in Five Points and Four Cover Crop San Joaquin Valley Farms
The group visited cover crop evaluation sites at the Five Points farm of Scott Schmidt, the Firebaugh farm of Alan Sano and Jesse Sanchez, the Madera farm of Kirk Texeira and Lucero Farms, and the pistachio orchard of Jacob Sheely near Lemoore. Alyssa and Samuel are part of a team that also includes UCD Hydrologist, Daniele Zaccaria, UC Merced Climate Change scientist, Tapan Pathak, UCCE Advisors Dan Munk, Gene Miyao, and Roger Duncan, and Jeff Mitchell, of UCD's Department of Plant Sciences. This team is conducting work to evaluate tradeoffs of winter cover crops with respect to soil water depletions, costs, carbon capture and soil improvement in a range of orchard and tomato production systems. A variety of data collection efforts are now underway including the use of soil water content sensors and dataloggers, neutron probe soil water content determinations, and commercial field ET measurement instrumentation that is also being installed at the study sites. The project began in the fall of 2015 and hopes to expand to additional sites that will be intensively monitored during the coming two years. Additional information on the preliminary findings for the 2015 – 2016 winter period will be available soon.