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IN THIS ISSUE – “We’re adjusting for survival”
Farmer Mike Machado explains California’s crazy new crops
- Newsom Confronts Growing Revenue Shortfall in FY23-24 State Budget With Cuts & Delays; No New Spending
- Where “Suspense” Means DOA (In the Legislature, Where Else?)
- Voters Trending No Party Preference & Democrat
- State Dept of Water Resources Launches Emergency SJV River Diversions
- Mangoes…Agave…Yangmei? California’s $52-Billion Ag Industry Plants Surprising New Crops Adapting to Climate Change
Capital News & Notes (CN&N) harvests California policy, legislative and regulatory insights from dozens of media and official sources for the past week. Please feel free to forward this unique client service.
FOR THE WEEK ENDING MAY 12, 2023
Sacramento Bee
Gov. Gavin Newsom today released a $306.5 billion budget with a growing shortfall he will need to address while also maintaining social safety net programs and other policy priorities.
In January, Newsom announced the state faced an estimated $22.5 billion budget gap after years of being flush with surpluses. That shortfall has ballooned to reach $31.5 billion during the past four months.
“We are walking into a budget where we need to maintain our prudence,” Newsom said during a news briefing in Sacramento. The governor’s revised budget opens what is expected to be an intense month of negotiations with the Legislature.
It’s the first time Newsom and many lawmakers have confronted a financial shortfall. They must reach a budget agreement by the start of the new fiscal year on July 1.
Legislative leaders and the governor have been weighing different options for keeping the state’s commitments to fund healthcare, poverty, homelessness and infrastructure while fixing the so-called “budget problem.”
The governor in January proposed a $297 billion plan with a combination of cuts, spending deferrals and borrowing to close the gap. He suggested $5.7 billion in reductions from a handful of different sources, including housing, climate and workforce initiatives.
Newsom also wanted to defer $7.4 billion in spending on child care, transportation and education capital improvements. In addition, the governor planned to enact $3.9 billion in “trigger reductions,” or budget cuts he would restore if the state sees better financial conditions down the road.
Newsom further proposed borrowing or shifting $5.5 billion to pay for additional expenses. The governor wanted to avoid dipping into the state’s budget reserves to fill the fix the shortfall. He also prioritized maintaining social services and keeping commitments to allocate funds for homelessness and other issues important to the administration.
Lawmakers have floated their own ideas for fixing the budget. Senate Democrats in April released “Protect Our Progress,” a plan that proposed a tax cut for small businesses and a hike for the biggest corporations doing business in the state, including Coca Cola and Walmart.
Senate Budget Chair Nancy Skinner, D-Berkeley, said the corporate tax increases would be a partial reversal of federal cuts former President Donald Trump signed into law in 2017. The plan would raise billions of dollars every year, but Newsom quickly expressed his disapproval.
Anthony York, a Newsom spokesman, said the governor would not support more ongoing spending or tax hikes. “It would be irresponsible to jeopardize the progress we’ve all made together over the last decade to protect the most vulnerable while putting our state on sound fiscal footing,” York said in a statement.
https://www.sacbee.com/news/politics-government/capitol-alert/article275315916.html#storylink=cpy
GOVERNOR’S MAY REVISE BUDGET SUMMARY:
https://www.ebudget.ca.gov/FullBudgetSummary.pdf
Where “Suspense” Means DOA (In the Legislature, Where Else?)
CalMatters
If you’re the author or supporter of a bill pending in the California Legislature, this is one list you dread: While getting sent to the “suspense file” doesn’t seal a measure’s fate, it does put it at some risk of being killed for the year.
Leading up to the big suspense file decision day next week, the Assembly and Senate appropriations committees are putting together lists of bills — and lots of high-profile ones are on them.
A reminder of how the suspense file process works: Twice a year, the two appropriations committees bulldoze their way through hundreds of bills that include more than negligible spending and that they must consider before the end of the legislative session.
In May, the committees go rapid-fire through bills from their own house. In August, legislators will cull bills that have passed from the other house. Last year, they killed about 200 on each day of marathon hearings.
Holding a bill in the suspense file is a convenient way for lawmakers to essentially kill a bill, without a recorded vote or explanation. That’s particularly useful on controversial measures, where a public vote or comment could be weaponized against legislators in campaign ads.
Voters Trending No Party Preference & Democrat
Public Policy Institute of California
California has grown steadily more Democratic over the last decade, according to an analysis of voter registration by the nonpartisan Public Policy Institute of California.
Between 2012 and 2020, 4.2 million people registered as Democrats and 3.5 million declared No Party Preference, according to the PPIC analysis. That’s compared to 1.8 million who registered as Republicans.
The analysis also found that more people dropped from Democratic Party voter rolls (2.2 million) than NPP (1.5 million) or Republican (1.6 million).
“Democrats may account for many dropped records, but California has more Democrats in the first place,” the PPIC noted.
All told, there was an overall increase of 2 million each for Democratic and NPP voters, while Republican voters grew by only 200,000.
According to the PPIC, the largest source of party transition in California has been from new voters, whether they are new to the state or new to voting entirely.
“These new registrants show a marked preference for No Party Preference and smaller party registration — and a slight preference for Democratic registration — over registering Republican. If these trends continue, Republican registration will continue to fall in years to come,” the analysis concluded.
State Dept of Water Resources Launches Emergency SJV River Diversions
Dept. of Water Resources
The Department of Water Resources (DWR) is implementing an emergency program to divert high river flows away from flood-prone Central Valley communities and into groundwater recharge basins. DWR is working with local agencies and equipment vendors to provide funding and secure much-needed temporary diversion equipment, including pumps and siphons, and will support their deployment by local agencies.
CalMatters
Mangoes may never become a mainstream crop in the northern half of California, but change is undoubtedly coming. Hustling to adapt, farmers around the state are experimenting with new, more sustainable crops and varieties bred to better tolerate drought, heat, humidity and other elements of the increasingly unruly climate.
In the Central Valley, farmers are investing in avocados, which are traditionally planted farther south, and agave, a drought-resistant succulent grown in Mexico to make tequila.
In Santa Cruz, one grower is trying a tropical exotic, lucuma, that is native to South American regions with mild winters. Others are growing tropical dragonfruit from the Central Coast down to San Diego.
Some Sonoma and Napa Valley wineries have planted new vineyards in cooler coastal hills and valleys to escape the extreme heat of inland areas. And several Bay Area farmers have planted yangmei, a delicacy in China that can resist blights that ravage peaches and other popular California crops during rainy springs.
Near the town of Linden, farmer Mike Machado, who served in the state Assembly and Senate from 1994 to 2008, is one of many growers in the arid San Joaquin Valley who have replaced some stone fruit and nut trees with olives, historically a minor California crop mostly produced in Mediterranean nations.
“We’re adjusting for survival,” Machado said.
Climate change essentially means that Southern California’s conditions are creeping north up the coast and into the valley, while Oregon and Washington are becoming more like Northern California. Precipitation, winds, fog, and seasonal and daily temperature patterns — all of which determine which crops can be grown where — have all been altered.
“With climate change, we’re getting more erratic entries into fall and more erratic entries into spring,” said Louise Ferguson, a UC Davis plant physiologist.
Researchers predicted that “climatic conditions by the middle to end of the 21st century will no longer support some of the main tree crops currently grown in California.…For some crops, production might no longer be possible.”
“Fruit growers all around the world in the warm regions are worried about” warming trends, particularly in winter, said Eike Luedeling, a coauthor of the study and a professor of horticultural sciences at Germany’s University of Bonn.
UC Davis researchers are at the cutting edge of the push to adapt, working to make California’s lucrative walnut, pistachio and stone fruit orchards more resilient by selectively breeding for heat, disease and drought tolerance.
About three-quarters of the nation’s fruits and nuts are grown in California, but fruit and nut trees are among the most vulnerable crops to climate change.
Claire Heinitz, a U.S. Department of Agriculture research leader, said trees are sampled with an instrument that measures photosynthesis. The idea is to find unique individuals that maintain basic functions under brutal heat conditions.
This year, she said, the project, led by researchers Andrew McElrone and Mina Momayyezi, might be expanded to include grapes, which are highly prone to heat damage, as well as pistachios and almonds.
Heinitz said much of the research aims to create hardier root systems, which can protect the trees against soil pathogens, salts and other stressors. However, breeding drought resilience into California’s major crops may be a more elusive goal.
UCLA climate scientist Daniel Swain said last month that the low temperatures of the past several months were “a fluke” amid a long-term trajectory of increasingly warm winters. In fact, he said, “this may well be the coldest winter that some places will see now for the rest of our lives.”
If true, that could mean smooth sailing for Chiles Wilson Jr. and his family. A fifth-generation Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta farmer, Wilson has planted thousands of avocado trees of a dozen varieties near Walnut Grove and Cortland. Now the fruit, harvested almost year-round, is a key component of the family’s fruit-packing company, Rivermaid.
Most California avocados are grown between San Diego and Santa Barbara, covering nearly 50,000 acres and producing more than $300 million in direct farm sales.
Wilson recalls that when he pitched the avocado idea to his family nearly a decade ago, they discouraged him.
“They said, ‘Nah, they won’t produce here,’” he said. “And I said, ‘But that one does.’” He pointed to a large, fruit-laden avocado tree within sight of the farm’s main office. They gave it a shot, planting more than 600 avocado trees per acre.
Wilson knows, even in an era of warming, that his avocado orchards are a gamble. “We’re one killer freeze away from being wiped out,” Wilson said.
However, this winter, the temperature dipped below freezing 16 times in the Wilsons’ avocado groves, yet the trees survived and are producing fruit.
Still other fruits, barely known to most Americans, could rise to greatness in a warmer California. Charlie Lucero, a home orchardist in Menlo Park, is helping introduce Californians to yangmei. Lychee-like red orbs with pits inside like a cherry and a taste like pomegranate and pine resin, yangmei are typically grown in China.
Now Lucero is serving as a consultant and marketer for several Northern California growers who are preparing to harvest their second crop.
Lucero said the fruit — a relative of the bayberry — has “zero chill requirement” and is also resistant to fungi and bacteria that can plague stone fruit growers.
“If we get a late rain, it doesn’t hurt us,” Lucero said of his small yangmei collaborative, called Calmei. “These trees are well suited for California, where the weather is becoming less predictable.”
Lucero said they’ve been retailing for about $60 a pound. Last year’s crop totaled about 2.5 tons; this year, he expects about twice that.
An orchard project near Santa Cruz offers another glimpse into California’s possible future of farming.
Nate Blackmore of Wildlands Farm and Nursery is planting several acres with subtropical fruits, mostly from Central and South America — white sapote, ice cream bean, cherimoya, uvaia, dragonfruit and guabiroba.
All these species are tolerant of frost — but just barely.
Yet another tropical crop could gain an advantage from California’s warming climate: coffee.
It’s being grown at orchards in Santa Barbara, Ventura and San Diego counties, and it’s not cheap: One company is selling organic coffee beans for $286 per pound. But the trees are hardly sustainable in those regions, which are reliant on water imported from Northern California and the Colorado River: Watering them takes at least several feet of water per year.
Another tropical fruit more suitable for drought-prone land is the pitaya, or dragonfruit. Grown from tropical cactus plants, it can be farmed in California with as little as 1.5 feet of applied water — a third of what citrus and avocados need, according to Ramiro Lobo, a San Diego County farm advisor with the UC Cooperative Extension program.
Among all the pressures for California farmers, none is so persistent and serious as water supply. The agriculture industry uses about 80% of the water Californians consume. During droughts, farmers — especially those growing some 4 million acres of grapevines and fruit trees — pump water from the ground.
This has caused thousands of drinking water wells to run dry and land to sink as aquifers shrivel. The state passed a new groundwater law in 2014 that is beginning to take effect, and could force as much as 900,000 acres of irrigated cropland, mostly in the arid San Joaquin Valley, out of production.
This is inconsequential to farmers like Tristan Benson. Based in western Sonoma County, he practices dry farming.
Benson and his partners usually harvest 20 to 30 tons of heirloom wheat and barley from loamy hillsides, selling the grain for use in bread, beer and distilling. To grow these staples, they just need a little rain, forgoing the irrigation that other growers, like those in the Central and Imperial valleys, rely upon.
Even through recent droughts, Benson said, he has always pulled in a crop. “The closer to the coast we are, the better we do,” he said. Fields are planted in October or November, and about a week after the first heavy rain, the seeds germinate, and usually the ground stays moist until the summer harvest time.
Benson thinks a smart farming model is to grow winter crops without irrigation, and when reservoirs are full — as they are now — plant irrigated fields with annual summer fruits and vegetables. Apples, tomatoes, pears, grapes and potatoes can all be dry-farmed in cooler regions; farther inland and to the south, dry farming is more challenging, at least for most crops.
Daniel Sumner, a UC Davis professor of agricultural and resource economics, said California’s agricultural identity already has changed drastically over time. In its earliest days of statehood, California was a major producer of rain-watered wheat, grown on several million acres. When irrigation became ubiquitous, so did specialty crops that thrive in a hot, dry climate but need water in the summer.
Almonds now cover more than 1.6 million acres of the Central Valley, and pistachios have seen explosive growth, “from almost nothing to a $2 billion crop in a few decades.”
He said predicting what crops will be trending in California in several decades is impossible, “but it’s hard to picture that we wouldn’t stay a specialty crop producer,” he said.
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