Another
lawsuit aims to stop Willits bypass work [Santa Rosa Press Democrat]
Environmentalists
have filed another lawsuit aimed at stalling work on the Willits bypass. They
will be asking a Mendocino County judge on Wednesday for an injunction to stop soil
from being moved from timber company property to wetlands Caltrans is filling
as part of the $210 million, 5.9-mile Highway 101 bypass around Willits. The
bypass, conceived more than five decades ago, has increasingly sparked
opposition as it verges on reality. It generated another lawsuit last year and
a multitude of protests since construction began early this year.
Kings
Co. blocking high-speed rail soil work [Fresno Business Journal]
The
Tulare County Board of Supervisors is being asked to approve a permit for
California High Speed Rail Authority (CHSRA) engineering contractors to do soil
borings — geotechnical sampling — along county rights-of-way, mostly roads. The
work is already under way in Fresno County along the expected path of the
proposed bullet train, part of the first 29-mile segment that appears closest
to breaking ground. A Tulare County staff report says that in Kern County, an
application to do the same has been made from the Tulare/Kern county line south
to near Bakersfield on what would be the third leg of the Central Valley 120
mile segment. Kings County is a different story.
Growers
get cracking on almond harvest [Chico Enterprise Record]
The
mostly tranquil back roads of the county will be busier from now until the end
of the season. Almond harvest has begun, with shakers, sweepers, and trucks
bringing the nuts from orchards to hullers to storage facilities. The No. 2
agricultural crop will soon be followed by rice and walnuts, the other top dogs
in the ag economic hierarchy. George Nicolaus started shaking his trees along
the Midway about 10 days ago with the Nonpareil almonds raining down to the
orchard floor. He talked in the dappled shade of his trees this week as his
crew gathered the nuts from tidy rows and filled trucks just down the road.
Nonpareils are the earliest to be harvested, and fetch the highest price for
growers. The "pollinator trees" nearby were ready for harvest, and
when Nicolaus jiggled a thin branch, the nuts fell. But he doesn't want to mix
them with the other varieties already on the ground.
Modesto
area irrigation districts anticipate sooty aftermath from blaze [Modesto Bee]
Even
valley water leaders are talking about the Rim fire. The fire itself doesn't
threaten mountain water going to thousands of farmers and hundreds of thousands
of Modesto water customers, all of whom rely on Tuolumne River flows. But the
aftermath could provoke headaches, Modesto Irrigation District board members
heard Tuesday. That's because soot and ash and blackened trees eventually will
wash into Don Pedro Reservoir, the main holding pot for the MID and the Turlock
Irrigation District, when snow melts next spring. Tons of icky residue from the
burned "lunar landscape look of the land," the Stanislaus County Farm
Bureau's Tom Orvis told the board, will settle in Don Pedro, leaving less room
for its main mission of storing water.
Unanswered
questions in the water tunnel analysis [California Focus]
Backers
of the water tunnels at the heart of the proposed $25 billion plan for updating
and replumbing the Delta of the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers thought they
had played a trump card the other day when they presented a 244-page economic
impact report. The analysis authored by UC Berkeley economist David Sunding
puts the state’s profits from building the tunnels at $84 billion over the
first 50 years after the project is completed (http://ht.ly/nEobp).
Long before it’s finished, the project would be a jobs bonanza, Sunding
asserted, producing 177,000 jobs over 10 years of construction. And yet… there
was confirmation, too, that this expensive plan would not produce much more
water than comes through the Delta today, somewhere between 4.7 million and 5.2
million acre feet of water yearly. The difference, said Sunding and his
sponsor, California Natural Resources Secretary John Laird, is that the flow
would be steady – everyone involved knowing from year to year how much water to
expect.
Smarter
Food: Does big farming mean bad farming? [Washington Post]
In
high summer, fields of wildflowers bloom at Tony Thompson’s Minnesota farm: gray-headed
coneflowers, phlox and white prairie clover. Those plants are designed to do
more than just beautify. They prevent water runoff and block nutrients, such as
nitrogen and phosphorus, from spilling into and polluting the Mississippi
River. It’s just the kind of farming that inspires the kind of folks who shop
at Whole Foods. That is, until you tell them that Thompson grows 3,000 acres of
corn and soybeans from genetically modified seed. That classifies Thompson as
an “industrial” farmer — and in today’s debates on agriculture, big usually
equals bad. Size, as they say, isn’t everything. As shorthand, the
big-equals-bad equation is convenient. But it obscures an inconvenient truth:
Plenty of small farmers do not embrace sustainable practices — the Amish
farmers I know, for example, love their pesticides — and some big farmers are
creative, responsible stewards of the land. “Tony’s is a fantastic operation,”
says Helene Murray, executive director of the Minnesota Institute for
Sustainable Agriculture. “And he just happens to grow a lot of corn and
soybeans.”
Ag
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