West Coast Nut - November 2023

WEST COAST NUT

NOVEMBER 2023 ISSUE

SPOTLIGHT:

NEW AUTONOMOUS SHAKER HIGHLIGHTS POTENTIAL FOR NEW TECHNOLOGY SEE PAGE 28

IN THIS ISSUE:

TAKE AN INTEGRATED APPROACH TO MANAGE PHYTOPHTHORA ROOT AND CROWN ROT IN ORCHARDS SEE PAGE 4

THE FUTURE FOR AI TECHNOLOGY IN CALIFORNIA TREE NUTS SEE PAGE 12

PRODUCED IN THE HEART OF

BY REAL CALIFORNIANS

PUBLICATION

Publisher: Jason Scott Email: jason@jcsmarketinginc.com Editor: Marni Katz Email: marni@jcsmarketinginc.com Associate Editor: Cecilia Parsons Email: cecilia@jcsmarketinginc.com Production: design@jcsmarketinginc.com Tel: 559.352.4456 Fax: 559.472.3113 Web: www.wcngg.com

Contributing Writers & Industry Support Vicky Boyd Contributing Writer Kathy Coatney, Contributing Writer Lori Fairchild Contributing Writer Roger A. Isom President/CEO, Western Agricultural Processors Association

Rich Kreps CCA, SSp., Contributing Writer Mitch Lies Contributing Writer Steve Pastis Contributing Writer

Kristin Platts Digital Content Editor

Theresa Kiehn President and CEO, AgSafe

Award Winning Editorial By the Industry, For the Industry

IN THIS ISSUE 4

Take an integrated approach to manage Phytophthora root and crown rot in orchards

8

New Pistachio Pollinizer Ready for Low-Chill Years

12

A Future for AI Technology in California Tree Nuts

16 OSHA Proposing New Walk-around Regulations for Inspections 20 Industry Works to Stay Ahead of Record Pistachio Production 24 Almond Soil Summit Goes Deep into Soil Health 28 New Autonomous Shaker Highlights Potential for New Technology at Recent Demonstrations

36 Bacterial Blast Hit Much of the State 40 What is a Good Working Definition of Biostimulants?

44 From the Orchard: Wylie Farms Focuses on Regenerative

UC Cooperative Extension Advisory Board Surendra K. Dara Director, North Willamette Research and Extension Center Kevin Day County Director/UCCE Pomology Farm Advisor, Tulare/Kings Counties Elizabeth Fichtner UCCE Farm Advisor, Tulare County

Katherine Jarvis-Shean UCCE Area Orchard Systems Advisor, Yolo and Solano

Agriculture to Improve Orchard Health

50 DPR’s Sustainable Pest Management Roadmap and The Future of Pesticides

Steven Koike Tri-Cal Diagnostics

54 Resistance Management Strategies in Hazelnuts

Jhalendra Rijal UCCE Integrated Pest Management Advisor, Stanislaus County

58 A Post-SGMA California Could See Half a Million Fewer Acres of

Mohammad Yaghmour UCCE Area Orchard Systems Advisor, Kern County

62 What You Need to Know: I-9 Form Updates

View our ePublication on the web at www.wcngg.com

Farmland

64 Pistachio Growers Can Monitor, Prune and Shake During Dormancy to Prepare for the Coming Season

The articles, research, industry updates, company profiles, and advertisements in this publication are the professional opinions of writers and advertisers.

West Coast Nut does not assume any responsibility for the opinions given in the publication.

New Autonomous Shaker Highlights Potential for New Technology Orchard Machinery Corporation recently demonstrated a prototype autonomous shaker that it estimates could provide calculated savings of up to 60% over four years at harvest.

See page 28

November 2023

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Of the two, crown rot is more rapid and kills trees by damaging plant tissue that carries water and nutrients from the roots. A telltale symptom of Phytophthora crown rot is leaves on infected trees wilt and dry but remain attached, though there are other diseases which can also produce this symptom, so it is always worth double-checking a field diagnosis.

Root rot, on the other hand, is a chronic problem that slowly kills roots, resulting in decreased tree vigor, stunted tree growth, reduced yields and early leaf drop. Eventually, trees may succumb.

Worst Phytophthora in Memory

A branch from a Yolo County almond tree that succumbed to Phytophthora this spring (photo by J. Cook.)

‘THE WORST PHYTOPHTHORA IN MEMORY’ TAKE AN INTEGRATED APPROACH TO MANAGE PHYTOPHTHORA ROOT AND CROWN ROT IN ORCHARDS

By VICKY BOYD | Contributing Writer

C

aused by a group of water molds, Phytophthora root and crown rot in almonds can be a continual challenge brought on by contaminated surface water supplies or poor irrigation practices.

But this year’s near-record rains that caused flooding, prolonged standing water and water-logged soils in late winter and early spring compounded problems, causing substantial damage or mortality to some orchards.

Although a handful of fungicides 4

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are labeled to manage Phytophthora root and crown rot, they should not be viewed as standalone treatments but instead part of an integrated approach.

It should include selecting tolerant rootstocks, avoiding poorly drained soils, enhancing drainage and proper sprinkler placement and irrigation timing.

Phytophthora crown and root rots are caused by a handful of naturally occurring water molds that favor wet soil conditions.

Jim Cook, who heads research for Colusa County Farm Supply, said the amount of Phytophthora he saw in almond orchards this spring was the worst he could remember. He quit counting after checking 30 almond orchards, and laboratory tests confirmed his visual observations in all 30.

In addition to the near-record rains, which at times caused creeks and drainage ditches to overflow across rural roadways, Cook pointed to several other possible reasons for increased Phytophthora infections. They include overall larger almond acreage and new orchards planted on marginal soils such as former rice fields that may not have the best drainage. Even some growers who planted on berms to try to keep tree roots and crowns above the water line were unsuccessful, he said.

Water Management is Critical

Jaime Ott, who spent eight years studying Phytophthora before joining UCCE earlier this year, said she was a bit surprised she didn’t receive more grower calls about the disease than she did.

“It may have to do with how prevalent it is in the orchards,” said Ott, who serves Butte, Shasta, Tehama and Glenn counties. “A lot of trees are going to be functioning at a lower capacity even if they don’t show the disease outright.”

As part of her doctoral research, she worked in USDA-ARS Plant Pathologist

Continued on Page 6

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Continued from Page 4 Greg Browne’s laboratory studying the water mold.

Even in the absence of massive storms, Ott said irrigation practices such as running sets longer than 24 hours and having drip lines next to tree trunks may promote Phytophthora infections within an orchard.

Small trees also are more prone to lethal infections because their smaller trunk circumferences are more easily girdled by the disease than those of mature trees, she said.

This should be kept in mind for potted trees for replants or new orchards that require drip lines to be placed close to the trunk shortly after planting.

After about a month, gradually begin moving the lines away, Ott recommended.

“I’ve seen second- or third-leaf trees that still have driplines right against the trunk; you’re just inviting the pathogen,” she said. “Certainly, from a pathology standpoint, you don’t want

Almond trees don’t like wet feet. Even flooding for as short as 24 hours can begin to cause problems once trees have begun to leaf out, as these had near Escalon. Many of these trees died due to Phytophthora (photo by V. Boyd.)

the dripline right up against the tree because that’s the most susceptible part, the Achilles heel.”

Rootstocks also play a big role in susceptibility, with Marianna 2624 providing the most resistance, followed by intermediate susceptibility from Krymsk 86, Lovell and Nemaguard.

Peach almond hybrids like Hansen 536 have high susceptibility.

Although Ott said some consider

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Krymsk 86 resistant to Phytophthora, she said it hasn’t been proven. Where Krymsk 86 does perform better than some others is in water-logged soils.

But in the presence of Phytophthora inoculum, Krymsk 86 can still become infected.

Each rootstock also comes with tradeoffs that growers must weigh.

Marianna 2624, for example, is not compatible with Nonpareil or Independence.

Hansen, on the other hand, is compatible with those scion varieties, and is likely why it is so widely planted in the south San Joaquin Valley. But it is highly susceptible to Phytophthora.

Heading into what could be an El Niño winter, Ott recommended growers prepare by performing maintenance to drains, culverts and other conduits that move water away from orchards.

She also pointed to ground cover, whether planted cover crops or native vegetation, as a tool to increase water penetration compared to bare soil in orchards.

“It helps move the water deep into the soil and keeps water from puddling on the surface,” she said.

Based on research from Browne’s lab, she said a single postharvest application of phosphite a month before leaf fall or a single foliar spring application after leaf-out provides trees with several months’ protection from Phytophthora.

It’s also fairly economical and “could be enough to move the balance in your favor,” Ott said.

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November 2023

This year’s atmospheric rivers al-

These orchards west of Stockton went underwater for several weeks after a power outrage prevented the grower from pumping out water.

Most of the trees eventually died likely from lack of oxygen to the roots and Phytophthora (photo by V. Boyd.)

lowed Cook to conduct a large-scale field trial using Orondis in a Yolo County almond orchard with many Phytophtora­-infected trees. A group 49 fungicide from Syngenta, Orondis contains the active ingredient oxathiapiprolin and received California registration for use on almonds in late 2021. It is labeled for up to two applications per season in established almonds. It also is registered for use at planting on replants and new orchards.

In mature orchards, the label recommends two applications to coincide with root growth flushes, typically February and September. In the trial, Cook said they were about a month late making the spring application because they planned to run it through the irrigation system. The soil was so saturated the grower didn’t want to apply any more water, and they had to wait until the ground dried out a bit.

Out of 50 trees treated with Orondis in the trial, 31 were alive and pushing new growth this summer. Of 50 untreated trees, only four were alive. After one treatment, Cook said the results looked promising, but he was quick to qualify his assessment.

“With some of these young trees that are damaged, the real question comes from an agronomic standpoint of can we make them into productive trees?” he said. “Yes, the trees are alive, and that’s a good thing. But the bottom line is the next part we’re going into now is the production portion and rebuilding the tree.”

Cook compared the current situation to those encountered during a freeze, when trees lose vegetation and hormones promote flushes of new sprouts. To rehabilitate those trees, crews must choose main scaffolds, redo tree architecture and prune out excessive vegetation, a process that may take years. Even then, he said, the trees may never be productive.

“Is it salvageable or should I jerk it out? Am I going to be babysitting that tree for the next 15 years?” Cook said he’s asked by growers. And he doesn’t have an answer.

Even if growers can rehabilitate the above-ground structure, he said they need to keep in mind the root system has been compromised and will be more susceptible to Phytophthora and other soilborne pests for the rest of its life.

The Almond Board of California also is funding research led by UC Riverside Professor Jim Adaskaveg looking at Orondis and two unregistered products, Presidio and Elumin, that could potentially help manage Phytophthora strains that have grown resistant to phosphites.

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New Pistachio Pollinizer Ready for Low-Chill Years

By MITCH LIES | Contributing Writer

U

C Westside, a new pollinizer for Peters, a large male that produces Kerman pistachios, has been a lot of pollen, has performed well released to help boost pistachio for many years, according to Parfitt. yields in low chill years, years that are “Peters has been a good male over the becoming increasingly common in years because it’s vigorous, it produces California pistachio production. a lot of pollen, and it flowers over quite Released this spring, the pollinizer a long bloom period,” he said. “But over has high-quality pollen and a lot of it, the last few years, it’s become more according to Dan Parfitt, emeritus poapparent that there’s an overlap bloom mologist in the UC Davis Department problem with Peters basically lagging of Plant Science. It is also precocious, Kerman several times.” flowering a year, and sometimes even According to an article in the UCCE two years ahead of Peters, the standard publication Kern Pistachio Notes, (C. pollinizer for Kerman. And it flowKallsen, Kern County Farm Advisor) ers sooner in the season than Peters, Peters bloomed as much as 10 days helping ensure good pollination for behind Kerman in 2014 and 2015. “AdKerman in low-chill years. ditionally, many Peters inflorescences “The intention with UC Westside were nonfunctional, especially on the was basically to provide another option south side of trees, producing no viable for growers,” said Parfitt, who has been pollen,” the June 2023 article stated. involved with the UC Pistachio BreedFurther, the article stated the flowing Program since its start in 1990. “It ering period of UC Westside has been is basically a supplement to Famoso, coincident with Kerman in years with which is an earlier release that people moderate to high chill. And in years used for Kerman, and also for our of low chill, the cultivar has produced mid-season females.” a dense bloom that overlaps the later Famoso, which was released by the bloom period of Kerman.

UC Breeding Program in 2016, has a “For comparison, in trees of the more synchronous flowering period for same age and in the same location, UC Kerman than Peters in low-chill years, Westside will be at full bloom five to Parfitt said. “But in more moderate seven days after the male pollinizer chill years, or more normal years, FaRandy,” the article stated. moso tends to be a little bit too early for Randy, a pollinizer developed for Kerman, so UC Westside was brought Golden Hills and released in 2005, also out as a possible alternative.” has been used as an early season pollinizer for Kerman, but, according to ‘Just Not There’ Parfitt, it generally is thought to be too The need for earlier flowering polearly for Kerman. linizers for Kerman came to the forefront in 2014 and 2015, when low-chill Highly Synchronous years led to poor yield in orchards that Famoso, released as an alternative were relying on Peters for pollination. to Peters in low-chill years, is highly “We had low-chill winters, and the synchronous with Kerman in very low Peters just was not there when the chill years, according to the article.

Kerman female was ready,” said Louise And like UC Westside, Famoso has a Ferguson, UC Davis pomology speshorter juvenility period than Peters, cialist. “Peters was not showing up on producing flowers three to four years some of the lower-chill years, and that after budding. “However, in the inwas a problem.” creasingly infrequent high-chill years, 8

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The UC Westside is designed to supplement Famoso especially during low chill years.

Flower development on seventh-leaf Kerman. UC Westside and Famoso pollinizers were developed after low-chill years started leading to poor yield in orchards that were relying on Peters for pollination (photo by Craig Kallsen, UCCE.)

the bloom period of Famoso may be too early to cover fully the latest bloom of Kerman,” the article stated.

Still, Famoso has a place in a

Continued on Page 10

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Despite gains from newer varieties, there is still a lot of Kerman acreage that growers are looking to cover with pollinators (photo by Themis Michailides, UC Davis.)

Kerman orchards. “As the fogs decrease, and the winters become warmer, we want to make sure we hit the bloom of Kerman, because there is still a lot of Kerman acreage out there,” Ferguson said.

According to information from the UC Davis Foundation Plant Services, Famoso produces good quantities of viable pollen, and more closely matches the flowering dates of Kerman than Peters, especially when the Kerman bloom is extended. Bloom density is higher in Famoso than in Peters, the Foundation Plant Services states, and in low-chill years, Famoso has maintained better bloom synchrony with Kerman, especially in blocks that have been ‘oiled.’

Other Pollinizers

Flower development on male pollinizer Peters, a large male that produces a lot of pollen and has performed well for many years, according to Dan Parfitt, UC Davis pomologist emeritus (photo by Craig Kallsen, UCCE.)

Continued from Page 8 Kerman orchard, UC researchers said, particularly when planted in combination with UC Westside.

The Kern Pistachio Notes noted that a 50-50 mix of UC Westside and Famoso in new Kerman commercial orchards “will provide a higher quantity of pollen and better bloom synchrony as the trees move from juvenility to maturity and under all foreseeable 10

West Coast Nut

winter chilling scenarios in the Central Valley of California.”

The Pistachio Notes article further states that existing older Kerman orchards that are dependent solely on Peters for pollination would benefit by incorporating Famoso and UC Westside as additional pollinizers.

Ferguson, too, said that a combination of pollinators is desirable for

November 2023

Other pollinizers available through the UC Pistachio Breeding Program include Tejon, an early flowering male pistachio released in 2016 that may be used as the principal pollinizer for the Gumdrop cultivar. “It has flowering synchrony with Gumdrop and produces good quantities of viable pollen,” according to information from Foundation Plant Services. “Tejon may be planted as an early flowering male in orchards of Golden Hills and Lost Hills to improve pollination in years with low winter chilling.”

Randy, according to Foundation Plant Services, may be used as a pollinizer for Golden Hills and Lost Hills.

It has flowering synchrony with the two female cultivars, the information states, “and may be used to cover the earlier part of the Kerman flowering period during seasons in which Kerman flowering is extended,” an occurrence that generally happens during seasons of low chill. Randy was selected for high pollen viability, pollen durability and a high level of pollen production, and it flowers one to three weeks earlier than Peters.

As for UC Westside, Parfitt noted the cultivar’s budwood is now available and some licensed nurseries are growing it out.

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A simple collage of mummy nut trees which can show an example of what the robotic system sees (photo courtesy R. Ehsani and Darren Ng, UC Merced.)

A Future for AI Technology in California Tree Nuts

By KATHY COATNEY | Contributing Writer

R

esearch is being conducted with robotics in nut crops, focusing on automation for water, fertilization and pest control that could be done with robots, sensors or robots with sensors. Rather than one person doing these jobs, they could be paired with a fleet of robots. An old saying from the 1950s goes, ‘If you want to do robotics, they should do the DDD jobs: dangerous, dirty, and dull.’ This saying is particularly important with the current labor shortage in agriculture that’s unlikely to change.

Xiaoyi Lu, assistant professor at UC Merced, has research that is building a small-scale, campus-shared, cloudmode Experimental Smart Farm Simulation (ESFSim) platform. This platform collects real-world data from the UC Merced Experimental Smart Farm (ESF), allowing researchers to run experiments and gather data more quickly. Many experiments can be run within a simulation, allowing researchers to pursue ideas that may not be feasible to test on a real farm due to cost or scale.

Some examples of specific mummy nuts that can pose difficulties for human eyes and further push the ideal of robotic automation (photo courtesy R. Ehsani and Darren Ng, UC Merced.)

Mummy Nut Research

Lu also worked with Professor Reza Ehsani at UC Merced on detecting mummy nuts in almond trees by photographing the mummy nuts in a tree, then uploading them to The Cloud or a computer.

“We ran object detection models on top of those pictures and identified 12

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A better-formatted visual for showing why mummy nuts are a straining task to manually search for (photo courtesy R. Ehsani and Darren Ng, UC Merced.)

A robot navigating an almond orchard (photo courtesy UC Merced robotics lab, S. Carpin and Ettore Sani.)

whether a tree had enough mummy nuts that they need to be “We are in the very early stages of applications for agriculremoved,” Lu said. ture, and I believe we can go much further,” Lu said, adding To do this work, researchers must have models, and with agriculture having a smaller and smaller labor pool to data, and they have to train the models, and then you must draw from, the benefits of AI will manifest themselves as we have expertise from agriculture to determine which trees go along. have high enough numbers of mummy nuts that need to be removed.

“We need a profile tool to annotate these things easily, and Continued on Page 14 we need to provide a system to store this information as well,” Lu said.

The research is looking to run this system through an orchard to identify the trees with a certain level of mummy nuts that need to be removed, then the information would be sent to a grower via a smartphone or computer to tell them which trees need to have the mummy nuts removed.

Providing growers with this information would help with the labor shortage because they would only shake specific trees and reduce labor and gas, ultimately saving money.

“So far, we just did that one pilot project, but in the future, we will probably do more, and actually, in my group, we are collaborating with some other agriculture scientists,” Lu said.

The mummy nut research started in 2022. “We have students still working on the interface and other agricultural related research tasks,” Lu said.

Artificial Intelligence

Lu sees an unlimited future with artificial intelligence (AI) for agriculture, and there will be many applications for it.

“I feel almost everything can be assisted by AI; humans still have to be there, too, but AI can assist,” Lu said.

"

We need a profile tool to annotate these things easily, and we need to provide a system to store this information as well.”—Xiaoyi Lu, UC Merced

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13

Continued from Page 13

focus is on high-value commodities like walnuts, grapes, almonds and pistachios.

The Internet of Things for Agriculture

Stephano Carpin, professor of computer science at UC Merced is working on a project called the Internet of Things for Agriculture (IoT4Ag) (www.iot4ag.us) funded by the National Science Foundation in conjunction with the University of Pennsylvania, Purdue University and the University of Florida.

The goal is to provide better information to farmers so they can produce more food or the same amount of food, but use less resources, Carpin said.

There are three main pillars to the project: 1) data acquisition, which is where Carpin is most involved because of his work in robotics; 2) data transmission, because after data has been collected, oftentimes in remote locations, it has to be transferred to The Cloud; and 3) data consumption or data processing. This is where AI comes into play and turns the data into actionable information, which is then passed on to farmers.

“It’s a very large project as you can imagine, and my role in this is mostly to develop robotic systems for the data acquisition,” Carpin said, adding his

Collecting Data

“In the IoT4Ag paradigm, the idea is that we could blanket the system with lots and lots of sensors that then can connect data, transmit and consolidate it. The problem with agriculture is that, so far, data collection continues to be very sparse,” Carpin said.

Farmers may set up a weather station and have some soil moisture sensors, but the technology is expensive. “If you want to assess soil moisture content, oftentimes what happens is [growers] will have just very few sensors that you can use to collect a few data points that would then be extrapolated and draw conclusions for a hundred acres,” Carpin said.

Carpin is working on methods for collecting the data via a robot, sensors or a robot with sensors that would be cheaper than having humans do the work.

“One of the aspects I’m not directly involved with because I’m not someone who develops sensors is to somehow say, ‘Can we develop new sensors that are cheaper and maybe less precise.’

If we can deploy a lot of them, then there is power in multitude,” Carpin

said, adding some of the sensors being developed are biodegradable and could be left in the field.

“The other aspect is, ‘Okay, what if we can bring the cost down, but it’s not a disposable sensor?’ If we can mount the sensors on the robot, which is what we’re doing, then all of a sudden we don’t have a sensor on every tree, but we have a few sensors and a few robots, and we can bring those sensors to each and every tree and collect all the data we want,” Carpin said.

Drones are another option for collecting data. They’ve become extremely cheap, they can provide imagery flying over orchards that is very valuable, but they also have drawbacks: liability, limited flight time, and they only provide photos from the top of the tree. That’s where Carpin’s research comes in.

“Our approach is coordinated, whereby we will have drones flying over an orchard, but also unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs) that traverse orchards and collect other types of data that are not accessible from a drone,” Carpin said.

UGVs can take pictures at close range, cut leaves from trees and perform some analysis, which is very high quality for determining stem water potential and how much water is in the leaves, Carpin said.

This image was taken from a test run in an almond orchard in Merced county. On the left, an image from the camera placed on top of the robot after it went through a trained neural network that classifies every pixel il the image as traversable, obstacle or unknown. Green pixels have been classified as traversable, red pixels have been classified as obstacles and pixels that are neither red nor green have not been classified (i.e., they are neither determined to be obstacles nor traversable (photo courtesy UC Merced robotics lab, S. Carpin and Ettore Sani.)

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"

...when it comes to data collection, what we are seeing is that there is not one modality that is going to become dominant, but there’s a combination of different ones.

– Stephano Carpin, UC Merced

“So, when it comes to data collection, what we are seeing is that there is not one modality that is going to become dominant, but there’s a combination of different ones,” Carpin said.

As fertilizer prices continue to increase, precision application becomes very important. Too little equals less production, too much could mean leaching into the soil and contamination, so knowing exactly how much to apply would save growers time, and money, and be good for the environment. The challenge is collecting the data in a way that isn’t labor intensive.

This could be done by measuring nitrates in the soil that would provide growers with information on whether they have a fertilizer deficit or excess.

“You need to know how much fertilizer was taken out, so we need to somehow be able to assess the amount of nitrogen,” Carpin said. “And again, this goes back to perhaps the other problem, which is scouting for this information is currently at a coarse scale.”

With a reduced labor force, workers need to be utilized effectively. Highly capable humans should be doing things that only humans can do. Repetitive tasks like taking pictures or walking up and down the orchard searching for water leaks should be outsourced to machines that aren’t impacted by extreme heat or fatigue, Carpin said.

The latest robots have RTK GPS, so with the right infrastructure in place, these machines will provide the information within three centimeters of the location. “There is no ambiguity. If they tell you it’s there, it is there, and that information can be passed to the worker,” Carpin said.

engineering to use it, he said.

“Everyone can use an iPhone, and that is what we need to strive for so that the robots become widespread on farms,” Carpin said. “I see progress, but they’re complicated to use, so we need to do better.”

Somewhere in the future, Carpin envisions robots at a price where people could have several that would monitor their orchards with a small staff of employees to fix issues found by the robots whether it’s irrigation repair, spraying for pests or fertigation.

“You may have considerably less employees and still get the same work done,” he said.

“It just makes sense to have several robots because it will be faster and more robust. If you rely just on one robot, and it breaks down, you’re toast,” Carpin said.

Having multiple robots may seem counterintuitive, but they are less expensive than a single robot. “Five simple robots probably cost less than one that does everything,” Carpin said, adding he foresees a hybrid model with larger farms purchasing several machines and smaller farms leasing or renting them from a service the same as they do with custom harvesting.

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15

OSHA Proposing New Walk-around Regulations for Inspections

By ROGER A. ISOM | President/CEO, Western Agricultural Processors Association

Currently, third parties to aid inspections are representatives of employees, but that may change under new regulations opening facilities to outsiders.

H

old on folks; Federal OSHA is about to open your doors to outsiders during inspections! OSHA is proposing to amend its “Representatives of Employers and Employees” regulation to clarify that the representative(s) authorized by employees may be an employee of the employer or a third party; such third-party employee representative(s) may accompany OSHA when they are “reasonably necessary to aid in the inspection.” OSHA is also 16

West Coast Nut

November 2023

proposing clarifications of the relevant knowledge, skills or experience with hazards or conditions in the workplace or similar workplaces, or language skills of third-party representative(s) authorized by employees who may be reasonably necessary to the conduct of OSHA’s physical inspection of the workplace. OSHA has preliminarily determined that the proposed changes will aid OSHA’s workplace inspections by better enabling employees to select a

representative of their choice to accompany OSHA during a physical workplace inspection.

Currently, federal regulations grant a representative of the employer and a representative authorized by employees the opportunity to accompany OSHA during the physical inspection of the workplace for the purpose of aiding the

Continued on Page 18

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Continued from Page 16 inspection. However, that representative must be an employee of said employer. If an employee wants an outside representative, that individual must have specific safety knowledge such as a safety engineer or industrial hygienist.

OSHA is proposing to revise its regulations to clarify the types of individuals who can be a representative(s) authorized by employees during OSHA’s physical inspections of the workplace (also referred to as the “walk-around inspection”). In other words, they are going to “open it up” and expand it.

OSHA is proposing two revisions to its regulations. First, OSHA is proposing to clarify that the representative(s) authorized by employees may be an employee of the employer or a third party. Second, OSHA is proposing to clarify that a third-party representative authorized by employees may be reasonably necessary to the conduct of an effective and thorough physical inspection of the workplace by virtue of

18

West Coast Nut

The proposal would significantly change OSHA’s third party walk-around inspections.

their knowledge, skills, or experience.

This revision truly broadens the qualifications and no longer limits the third party to be the two examples provided in existing regulatory text: Industrial Hygienist or Safety Engineer.

November 2023

Currently, when the representative(s) authorized by employees are not employed by the employer, they may accompany the OSHA inspector during the inspection if in the judgment of the inspector, good cause has been shown why they are reasonably necessary to the conduct of an effective and thorough physical inspection of the workplace. OSHA proposes to revise the regulations to clarify that third-party representatives authorized by employees may have a variety of skills, knowledge or experience that could aid the inspector’s inspection.

This includes knowledge, skills or experience with hazards or conditions in the workplace or similar workplaces as well as any relevant language skills a representative may have to facilitate better communication between workers and the inspector. Therefore, OSHA proposes to delete the examples of industrial hygienists and safety engineers currently in the regulation so that the focus is on the knowledge, skills or experience of the individual rather than their professional discipline. This is where it goes south. OSHA goes as far as to suggest union leaders or agents as potential candidates for third party representatives. OSHA also highlights several scenarios where they believe a third-party representative may be necessary including multi-employer sites (i.e., farm labor contractors), situations when the employee may not be fluent

‘If it passes, companies need to prepare for attempts at unionization.’ in English and occasions where the employee may be experiencing cultural barriers or fearing retaliation from their employer.

OSHA invited stakeholders to comment on all aspects of this proposal. OSHA sought input on whether to maintain the existing requirement for a third-party employee representative to be “reasonably necessary to the conduct of an effective and thorough physical inspection of the workplace.”

Should OSHA defer to the employees’ selection of a representative to aid the inspection when the representative is a third party (i.e., remove the requirement for third-party representa-

tives to be reasonably necessary to the inspection)? Why or why not?

Should OSHA retain the language as proposed, but add a presumption that a third-party representative authorized by employees is reasonably necessary to the conduct of an effective and thorough physical inspection of the workplace? Why or why not?

Should OSHA expand the criteria for an employees’ representative that is a third party to participate in the inspection to include circumstances when the inspector determines that such participation would aid employees in effectively exercising their rights under the OSH Act? Why or why not?

If so, should OSHA defer to employees’ selection of a representative who would aid them in effectively exercising their rights?

OSHA opened this proposal for comments for 60 days ending in October. There is a lot of employer opposition as one might imagine, but with the current Federal Administration, who knows where this one ends up. If it passes, companies need to prepare for attempts at unionization. For us here in California, OSHA has preliminarily determined that, within six months of the promulgation of a final rule, State Plans would be required to adopt regulations that are identical or “at least as effective” as this rule unless they demonstrate that such amendments are not necessary because their existing requirements are already “at least as effective” in protecting workers as the Federal rule.

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INDUSTRY WORKS TO STAY AHEAD OF RECORD PISTACHIO PRODUCTION

By KRISTIN PLATTS | Contributing Writer

I

t looks as though odd-numbered years are the new on years, according to Richard Matoian, president of American Pistachio Growers (APG), and that, in large part, has helped drive another consecutive record crop.

Matoian said the industry is looking at a significant increase from about 884 million pounds produced in 2022 to the 1.3-billion-pound mark in 2023, and those record crops are likely to keep coming according to a recent industry report.

A production report commissioned

by APG in late September by Dennis H. Tootelian of the Tootelian Company of Sacramento, forecasted annual pistachio production from 2023 through 2031. The report projected the total number of acres in California will grow by 28,489 per year from 2023 through 2031 to total nearly 811,300 acres. It also said as new orchards mature, bearing acreage is expected to grow by 5.1% annually, meaning the 2031 crop will come from 668,850 bearing acres.

“Since the year 2000, walnuts have grown three-fold, almonds have grown four-fold and we have grown seven-fold,” Matoian said.

All this growth begs the question: how to move increasingly large crops while maintaining prices to growers.

Those in the pistachio industry are holding out hope that the price doesn’t decline in the same way as some other commodities have, but time will tell.

“What we do see is that it took us 30+ years to get our first billion-pound crop,” Matoian said. “In less than 10 years, we’re going to hit our second billion pound, doubling the size of the crop by 2031.”

This year’s crop is also producing larger-sized nuts than an average on year.

Larger Crops and High Quality

“Typically, with a larger crop, the

20

West Coast Nut

According to a production report commissioned by American Pistachio Growers in late September by Dennis H. Tootelian of the Tootelian Company of Sacramento, as new orchards mature, bearing acreage is expected to grow by 5.1% annually, meaning the 2031 crop will come from 668,850 bearing acres.

individual size of the nuts would be smaller, just because the tree has to support more nuts, but it looks like we are also blessed with larger sized nuts,” he said.

There are likely a few reasons for that.

An adequate water supply, thanks to a very wet winter, allowed trees to grow and nuts to thrive, while cooler spring temperatures helped produce those larger nuts.

Overall, nut quality going into the beginning of harvest was looking very good as well, Matoian said. Insect damage from pests like naval orangeworm (NOW) was relatively low, the open in-shell split percentages were high, and staining, which could have been a big issue after such a wet winter and August’s Tropical Storm Hilary, was lower than expected.

“Fortunately, while staining is up, it’s not as bad as it could have been,” Matoian said.

Justin Wylie, who grows both conventional and certified organic in Madera, Calif., said the winter soak, followed by a nice spring, was great for his crop.

November 2023

“The trees came out a lot happier, a lot healthier, salts are down in the soil,” he said, “Honestly, it’s been a pretty good season.”

Processors have also spent the last year anticipating the large crop. Rudy Placencia, Chief Operations Officer at Touchstone Pistachio, says they geared up ahead of the busy season expecting to have very little downtime during the seven-to-ten-day window when loads come in.

“What that means is, have we done the right preventative maintenance, do we have the appropriate spare parts in place in the event that something needs to be replaced, so kind of going through that exercise and making sure that seven to ten days, that we’ve made the necessary preparations to ensure minimal downtime and maximum throughput,” Placencia said.

One of the biggest handicaps of the industry, Placencia says, is processing capacity as it relates to hulling, drying and silo storage. From a processor standpoint, he said his operation had to look at their efficiencies on the hulling

The 2023 pistachio crop is expected to be a record 1.3 billion pounds

and drying side to determine what improvements had to be made, knowing that with such a large crop this year, processors wouldn’t have the luxury of counting on a backup hulling line if something broke down.

He said those preventative measures, which required close coordination with their farming operation, ensuring they had full visibility on loads coming in, and understanding load counts, paid off.

“It showed,” he said, “we didn’t have some of the same issues we’ve had in the past.

to be impacted by the implementation of SGMA, so future production could be affected,” he said.

On the pest front, NOW, which has seen a large uptick in damage to walnuts and almonds this year, could also be a growing threat to pistachios. Wylie said while all their loads had been clean of the pest midway through harvest, he was concerned because trap counts

had been extremely high in the months leading up to harvest.

“Our trap counts around here have been consistently higher than we’ve ever seen, so that’s one of the reasons were scrambling to try to get everything out, because we would assume

Continued on Page 22

Success Isn’t Without Challenges

Although most of the American pistachio supply is grown in California’s southern San Joaquin Valley, Matoian said they are seeing a trend of more acreage being planted in the Sacramento Valley and even further up north.

While growers in those areas will have to navigate their own set of challenges, the industry as a whole will be keeping an eye on many of the same issues like water and pests.

The future of crops grown in the southern San Joaquin Valley “white lands” areas that rely solely on single-source groundwater will eventually start to feel the effects of Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA) regulations. Matoian said a study conducted by Land IQ last year determined that about 25% of APG’s growers fall within those affected regions.

“Growers that have any commodity in those areas are going to be the first November 2023

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21

Continued from Page 21 there’s some potential for damage,” he said.

By the last week of September, Wylie said his first shake averaged 0.47% insect damage, with still a few weeks to go for final shaking. On the certified organic end of his operation, he said his biggest issue to controlling pests is trying to metabolize the nitrates out of the trees, so keeping a close eye on balancing the nutrients is key.

As the market demand for pistachios has grown, another major issue Wylie said growers are dealing with is the cost of shipping containers.

“The price of containers shot up something like 10 times during COVID-19,” he said. He added they had been consistently outbid on containers by other industries who can afford to compete overseas, like electronics companies.

American Pistachio Growers President Richard Matoian said with current production trends, the crop will double in size to 2 billion pounds by 2031.

Holding on to the Success

As walnut and almond markets are reeling from a downturn and low prices, it leaves the question of how the pistachio industry will avoid a similar fate. With pistachio-loving markets like China and the EU, the trademark green nut has plenty of places to land right now. There are some challenges there as well though, like having to work with tight pesticide residue rules in the EU and high tariffs in places like China.

Still, about 70% of pistachios produced in the Western US are exported and that rate could continue to grow.

With such a large crop and even larger crops expected in the coming years, Matoian said there will be a focus on preventing an oversupply situation and keeping it from suffering like other nut industries have. He said APG’s focus will include continuing to market their products to ensure the industry feels the positive momentum of this record crop and the ones to come.

Marketing ahead of the anticipated production is a distinctive aspect of the pistachio industry, Matoian added, since trees have a long lead time from planting to production.

APG will be focusing on marketing in new parts of the world, like Mexico, which APG sees as a gateway into South America, as they plan for larger crops,

Justin Wylie, who grows both conventional and certified organic in Madera, Calif., said the winter soak, followed by a nice spring, was great for his pistachio crop this year.

“We have a sense of what the crop size is going to be for several years out, and because of that we also plan for our marketing and consumer education campaigns to address the production that’s coming,” he said.

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November 2023

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Almond Soil Summit Goes Deep into Soil Health

By MITCH LIES | Contributing Writer Soil testing is a vital part of achieving soil health, according to agriculture consultant Bill Brush. “You can’t fix what you can’t measure, so we have to measure what’s in the soil,” Brush said (all photos courtesy Almond Board of California.)

A

griculture consultant Bill Brush said he wants growers to stop looking up when they enter an orchard and start looking down.

“They look up because that is where the crop is,” he said.

“But I always say take that vision and look down because down is where all this crop is made from. The nutrients are down in the soil.”

Brush, an orchardist and CEO of B&B Ag Consulting in Modesto, presented a theme that resonated across presentations at the Almond Board’s 2023 summit: Soil is the most important factor in a healthy cropping system.

“I want to get a generation of people that are looking down first seeing that soil tilth, the soil health and how my soil is working,” he said. “And then we’ll see how well it’s doing in the field.”

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November 2023

that provided an overview of the different components of soil health and set the stage for the summit.

“Healthy soils store water,” said Wingate. “They sequester carbon. They resist erosion, which is very important now as we’ve had some record storms, and we expect that severe weather events will continue.” And, she said, healthy soils help growers optimize yield potential and water use.

At its most basic, soil needs two elements to function, Brush said: air and water. “If the microbiology can’t get air, it’s not going to survive. It’s going to sit there in a spore form or in some form that will come back to life when it gets the proper amount of air and water,” he said.

Healthy soils also need balanced soil biology, including mold, yeast, fungi, bacteria and microbes, which help in nutrient cycling, breaking down crop residue and plant growth stimulation.

“And if you don’t have your soil balanced, where you can get air down into that soil and get water to move through that soil profile, you’re not ever going to be really successful at growing the top yields and sustaining yourself for the long haul,” Brush said.

Soil Profile

Use of compost, cover crops and whole orchard recycling all can assist in creating a balanced soil profile, according to presenters.

Josette Lewis, chief scientific officer of the Almond Board, noted that Almond Board research has shown continuous soil coverage afforded through cover crops, for example, is correlated with increased levels of the mycorrhizal fungi that play important roles in plant nutrition. “And it helps with some of those properties like nutrient cycling, combating soil pests and so forth,” she said.

“We have also done research on compost, and we have some additional research that is just getting started this year,” she said. “We have mixed results in terms of actual yield benefits for compost, but some good evidence that it can be an important way to achieve some of the nutrients that you need in the orchard.

“Then we have whole orchard recycling,” Lewis said, “and there is no practice that can add that much organic matter in such a short time. Obviously, you only do it once in the life of an orchard: When you take an orchard out and plant a new one. But it is a really valuable practice. It is expensive and logistically sometimes complex, but it is a valuable practice when it comes to adding significant organic matter and really giving a shot in the arm in that soil for the next orchard.”

Lewis’ comments were followed by a presentation that included first-hand experience from orchard managers

who work with cover crops.

Donnie Hicks, a grower who works in grower relations with RPAC Almond Growers and Processors, said he initially looked into utilizing cover crops to provide food for bees for his 18-acre almond orchard.

“And then also, we have a sandy loam soil, which is great, but when we get into the later summer months, the soil seems to close up and I can’t get water to infiltrate past about a foot,” he said. “So, I heard cover crops would help that.”

Two years into using cover crops, Hicks said the practice has helped increase soil organic matter and improve water infiltration. The cover crop also helped him get access to his orchard in the dormant season despite winter storms that brought so much water.

“That was a great benefit,” he said.

“I definitely plan to do this every year,” he said. “It’s definitely worth your while, for big and small farms to do

cover crops, not just for the pollinator benefits but the soil benefits as well.”

Multiple Benefits

Zac Ellis, senior director of agronomy for Olam Food Ingredients, who manages 14,000 acres of orchard crops including mostly almonds, said he has seen significant benefits from working extensively with cover crops over the past seven years.

“When I was just starting with Olam, we were one of the first orchards that developed different trial work with the Xerces Society and on what mixes of cover crops they wanted to deploy commercially to their certified body,” he said. “So, right out of the gate, we were doing trials on different types of mixes, planting depths, how to irrigate, when to irrigate, when to plant.

“So, over the years, we’ve really tried to understand why we’re doing these

November 2023

Continued on Page 26

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25

Cover crops have been shown to provide multiple benefits in almond orchards including increasing biodiversity both in the soil and above ground for pollinators.

Continued from Page 25 things and what the benefit is,” Ellis said.

Ellis said the company eventually came to realize the best way to benefit from cover crops was in relation to IPM, or integrated pest management.

The system included discontinuing use of some broad-spectrum insecticides.

“What we are seeing is that by eliminating some of the harmful pesticides, in addition to permanent and annu-

al cover crops, we could see a huge increase in six-spotted thrip, and over two or three years of doing that consistently, now we don’t spray for mites.

Even at hull split, there are no miticides in the tank,” he said.

“The biggest issue I see [with cover crops],” Ellis said, “is that it takes multiple years for you to see a lot of benefits.

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November 2023

“Once you get to that critical mass in building that soil health, you see a huge benefit in multiple ways, including nutrient use efficiencies, and we’ve been able to cut our irrigations without any detriment to our crop. There is just a host of things that are now starting to really click for us.”

The summit also included presentations on pest and weed management and organic soil amendments as well as cost share opportunities available for soil health programs. Among cost share programs highlighted were the California Department of Food and Agriculture’s Climate Smart Land Management Program, a Healthy Soils Incentive grant program, which provides up to $100,000 to increase soil organic carbon and reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and a State Water Efficiency Enhancement Program (SWEEP), which provides up to $200,000 for projects that can show an increase in water-use efficiency.

“Our incentive programs through the healthy soils program allow farmers and ranchers to adopt these practices while minimizing financial risks to their operations,” said Virginia Jameson, CDFA deputy secretary for climate and working lands in a presentation at the summit. “Farmers can improve the health of their soils and reduce greenhouse gas emissions.”

And maybe, as Brush would like, farmers will start looking down rather than up when first entering an orchard.

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Orchard Machinery Corp. demonstrated its new autonomous Shockwave X shaker in commercial almond orchards throughout the Central Valley (all photos by V. Boyd.)

New Autonomous Shaker Highlights Potential for New Technology at Recent Demonstrations

By VICKY BOYD | Contributing Writer

W

hen Orchard Machinery Corp. launched a nut shaker with self-steering capabilities and sensor-driven tree positioning a few years ago, it was only a matter of time before the company developed a fully autonomous machine.

The Yuba City manufacturer of orchard equipment did just that with the new Shockwave X, a self-driving machine that uses vision guidance and 28

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November 2023

a patent-pending head to continuously shake nut trees.

“It’s really going to be a game changer for the industry,” said OMC President and CEO Tobbie Wells. “One of these machines can replace a driver and shake seven, eight, even nine trees per minute. With commodity prices, you’re not going to see it on the revenue side. It’s on the expense side where we’re looking to get traction.”

A certified public accountant by trade, Wells said the machine should provide calculated savings of up to 60% over four years.

During this year’s harvest, OMC demonstrated a prototype model in almond orchards up and down the Central Valley to strong grower interest.

Ryan Winters of Winters Farming Inc. in Manteca said they decided to host a demonstration because they saw

the technology as a potential way to address labor issues.

“Anything we can do to try to advance a solution to that need, we’re all about it,” he said. “It’s pretty intriguing.”

Dave Wheeler and his son, Wrangler, who farm almonds and row and forage crops near Modesto, said there’s no doubt they’ll eventually buy one of the autonomous shakers.

“With the way labor is and the liability and availability, you can’t afford not to,” Wrangler Wheeler said.

Even their best operators only shake five trees per minute, and “at the end of the day, they’re tired,” Dave Wheeler said.

Both also said they were impressed Wrangler Wheeler (left), who farms with his father, Dave, near Modesto, checks out the Shockwith the new Shockwave design. Rather wave X during a demonstration in an almond orchard near Manteca. than stopping at each tree to extend the shaker arm to clamp onto the trunk and shake the tree, the machine contin- alone in their concerns about finding in available farm labor throughout the ued to move throughout the process. workers. Walt Duflock, vice president specialty crop industry are driving the of Innovation with Western Growautonomy revolution.

The Autonomy Revolution ers and a fifth-generation Monterey Winters and the Wheelers aren’t County farmer, said massive decreases Continued on Page 30

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www.wcngg.com

29

Continued from Page 29

“All of this new technology creates bigger and bigger skill-set problems,” he said. “We need more people as farming operations do more with ag technology.”

Already, Duflock knows of larger grower-packer-shippers who have begun to retrain crew members to support the latest technology.

In the 1950s, the nation’s farmers employed about 10 million farm workers, he said. Currently, about 2.4 million people plant, till and harvest crops.

Some of the decrease is due to mechanization. Taking up some of the remaining slack are an increasing number of H-2A temporary ag workPatent-Pending Shaker ers, which has risen from about 48,000 Head System nationwide in 2005 to 371,000 in 2022.

The first formal Shockwave X model But they haven’t made up the entire gap. rolled off the OMC assembly line in Minimum wages also continue to early fall, and an additional 12 are climb in a number of large specialty slated for completion in time for winter crop producing states, increasing grow- sanitation and shaking mummy nuts, ers’ overall costs and affecting the H-2A Wells said. Software and hardware prevailing wage. upgrades to the shaker are available via “It’s a massive economic challenge an annual subscription. for specialty crops, and the only way Currently, the shaker can navigate out of that is to automate,” Duflock autonomously down the tree row but said. needs a human to turn it and guide it Where he has seen the largest techinto the next row. nological growth is on the processing OMC already has self-turning techfruit and vegetable side with autononology in its 200 hp Aftershock AR500 mous weeding, planting and harvesting. shuttle truck that has a 9-foot turning While growing and harvesting nuts radius. The modular rear-frame system already was already fairly mechanized, also allows users to hook up sprayers, he said there’s still room for growth. spreaders or other implements.

“Nuts are probably leading the pack,” Autonomous shakers purchased this he said. “ winter and bundled with the annuDuflock said he doesn’t necessarily al service subscription will be fully see technology eliminating farm workupgradeable in the future to allow for er jobs but instead shifting responsibilities from manual labor in fields to servicing machines.

Continued on Page 32

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West Coast Nut

November 2023

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November 2023

self-turning, and units manufactured in 2024 will come standard with the feature, Wells said.

OMC has taken a shaking arm mounted on a slider and pivot and added novel shaking heads to develop a patent-pending system. Wells said each of the components individually isn’t necessarily earth shattering. What is innovative and worthy of a patent is the combination that allows the machine to continually move while shaking.

As the shaker arm approaches a tree, the right-hand head is extended nearly straight out from the arm and makes first contact with the trunk. It is followed by the left-hand head that closes around the trunk from about a 90-degree angle.

Shaking ensues, after which the right-hand head releases first. All of this occurs as the machine continues moving down the row and the shaker arm slides and pivots. By the time the shaker reaches the next tree, the heads have returned to their starting positions.

With 14-foot tree spacings and a shaker speed of 1.5 mph, the machine can harvest almost eight trees per minute, said OMC Vice President Brian Andersen. That’s far more than the industry average of less than five per minute.

‘It Literally Has Eyes’

Earlier this year, San Jose-based Bonsai robotics approached OMC about a collaboration, and Wells said it made sense. After all, Bonsai founder and CEO Tyler Niday had previously worked for OMC before joining John Deere’s Blue River Technology, where he led various autonomy projects, including the autonomous 8R tractor, for more than six years.

Bonsai also has an 800-acre orchard and vineyard near Davis where the company can conduct real-world tests on technology.

The Shockwave X relies solely on vision guidance from five ruggedized automotive-grade cameras for navigation and 360-degree coverage, Niday said.

“It literally has eyes,” Wells said.

It does not use GPS or LiDAR (light detection and ranging), so it can work under tree canopies, under dusty conditions or at night where other technologies might fail, Niday said.

Users simply enter a georeferenced orchard boundary, but they don’t need to map every tree row using GPS as part of machine guidance, he said.

Machine-mounted cameras feed information to an on-board computer, which turns the data into 3D images.

In a fraction of a second, the computer uses machine learning and artificial intelligence (types of high-speed computing on steroids) to compare the images to those in one of the world’s largest databases of orchard images.

Based on the results, the computer instructs the shaker on the next move.

The more the shaker operates, the more images it collects and the more machine learning improves its operation.

It has an accuracy of plus or minus 2 inches.

“As we collect more data, we get smarter and smarter,” Wells said.

She compared it to watching a movie you’ve seen before a second or third time; you naturally pick up on details you may have missed the first time.

The computer also is able to differentiate between telephone poles and tree trunks, Niday said. It also can tell whether it’s approaching a mature tree or a thin-trunked replant. In the future, he said they plan to have a function that will automatically raise or lower the shaker head to accommodate for low tree crotches or low-hanging branches.

The camera system is designed with safety redundancies and will stop the machine if it detects humans, obstacles or unusual movements, he said.

The computer simultaneously sends a stoppage alert via cell signal to the supervisor, who can determine whether to restart the machine remotely or visit the site in person to remove the obstacle.

In addition, OMC has partnered with Topcon for telematics that allow users to remotely monitor operations, including alerting them to engine maintenance and monitoring operator efficiency, fuel efficiency, drive patterns

and upcoming repairs.

A 174 hp Cummins Tier 4 diesel engine powers the Shockwave X. The engine also is Stage 5 compliant for use in the European Union, Andersen said.

Based on average fuel consumption, the 54-gallon diesel tank can run for more than 14 hours before needing a refill.

Shaker operations can be monitored

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Blasted almond shoot and blossoms. Cold, high rainfall and even snow in parts of the state created problems for growers and set the stage for widespread bacterial blast (photo courtesy J. Adaskaveg.)

Developing blast on cherry blossom. Bacterial blast damages the flowers, leaves and shoots (photo courtesy J. Adaskaveg.)

BACTERIAL BLAST HIT MUCH OF THE STATE

By KATHY COATNEY | Contributing Writer

W

eather played havoc on the 2023 almond crop. Cold, high rainfall and even snow in parts of the state created problems for growers and set the stage for widespread bacterial blast.

Jim Adaskaveg, professor and plant pathologist at UC Riverside, said, bacterial blast in almonds was widespread in the Central Valley.

Bacterial blast depends on how

36

West Coast Nut

November 2023

cold it gets. Places where temperatures reached 28 degrees F and frost occurred are perfect for blast, Adaskaveg said.

Blast in the South

Mohammad Yaghmour, orchard systems advisor for Kern County, said conditions in the south were very wet but lacked the conducive environmental conditions that would have brought on bacterial blast during almond bloom.

Leaf blast on almond trees. The continuous rain during almond bloom and thereafter resulted in significant blossom and jacket rot (photo courtesy J. Ott.)

“We only saw very small incidents of bacterial blast on sweet cherries,” Yaghmour said.

However, the continuous rain during almond bloom and thereafter resulted in significant blossom and jacket rot.

“We have seen blossom rot caused by Monilinia fructicola, and we saw jacket rot too caused by Monilinia or Botrytis. In certain cases, we found both pathogens at the same time,” Yaghmour said.

The wet weather also made it difficult for growers to get into the orchard and make spray applications, he continued.

“Some orchards, especially certain varieties like Wood Colony and Butte, had significant damage,” Yaghmour said.

Some growers did manage to make aerial applications, but weather made that difficult too. “We had quite a bit of rain all the way from bloom through spring, so pretty much the growers did not have a break.”

Yaghmour didn’t see much damage on the Nonpareil, but orchards that have Wood Colony as a pollinizer, had a significantly high incidence of disease.

Harvest is running late in the southern part of the state by about 10 days to two weeks, so it’s still too early to determine the full level of damage.

Kasumin

Many growers used Kasumin (kasugamycin) this year to manage blast in their orchards. “There were various reports that some people said it worked and some people said it didn’t work,” Adaskaveg said.

Continued on Page 38

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Continued from Page 36 Performance is dependent on several things: application timing, application rates and application volume. This could account for the wide range of responses Adaskaveg received.

Bactericides aren’t like the newer fungicides that provide 100% control. For example, some of the newer fungicides used for brown rot blossom blight eliminate the disease. With bacterial diseases, whether it’s fire blight, walnut blight or bacterial blast, there are significant reductions, but never 100% control. Growers still see blast even when they’ve sprayed and think it wasn’t controlled, but in reality it did work, Adaskaveg said.

“We have had multiple trials where there are untreated controls that have had high incidence of blast, and the Kasumin treatment significantly reduced [but not eliminated] the disease.”

Copper

Copper has been the treatment of choice for decades, but the Pseudomonas syringae pathogen is well known to have copper resistance in certain populations.

“How widespread is copper resistance? It’s pretty common, but it’s not everywhere. Some growers report they got benefits using copper, but most growers report that there were no benefits,” Adaskaveg said, adding that he hasn’t seen benefits in his research.

Some growers are applying mancozeb with copper, and that combination also has some benefits, he continued. Mancozeb is approved in almonds, and it’s used in combination with copper, which is effective against all kinds of bacteria.

“There is benefit to it, but I don’t think it’s as widespread a benefit as we would hope it to be,” Adaskaveg said, and he reminds growers mixing with mancozeb increases costs and copper can cause phytotoxicity to leaves.

In Adaskaveg’s trials, he’s seen benefits with copper/mancozeb, but kasugamycin was more beneficial against bacterial blast. None of these treatments resulted in zero levels of disease, he stressed.

“That’s the problem; I think people expect a lot because their fungicide sprays really work well, and they think bacte-

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West Coast Nut

November 2023

ricides should work as effectively,” Adaskaveg said.

Jaime Ott, UCCE orchard systems advisor for Tehama, Glenn, Butte and Shasta counties, said, “Cold and wet is what usually triggers blast, and we were expecting to see a really big problem with it this year. We had cold weather, we had the snow, we had the freezing temperatures, we had the wetness, and so we were quite surprised that we didn’t see a bigger problem with bacterial blast in the flowers.”

To Ott’s surprise, blast damage showed up in the spring when it killed leaf bundles. The leaf defoliation looked awful, and growers were worried about it, but in reality those leaf bundles fell off and were replaced by new leaves, she said. “It probably didn’t have much effect.”

Most North state growers didn’t spray kasugamycin because it’s expensive, and very few were even able to spray because of the weather, Ott said.

“We did have some growers that were spraying copper,” she continued. “But this is really important and something I really try to stress to people: We have so much copper resistance in Pseudomonas syringae that even if you’ve sprayed copper, if you saw symptoms, you probably had a resistant population.

“Growers spray copper and then feel confident that they are protected, and I think that is not the case. Those bacteria, they’re good at doing what they do. They’re good at evolving.

“Copper is used because it’s less expensive, but it is also decidedly less effective,” Ott said, adding resistance is so common that it’s hard to encourage growers to use copper.

Cankers

Bacterial blast damages the flowers, leaves and shoots, but it can also cause cankers on the tree. “This is when it gets into the branches and trunks,” Adaskaveg said, adding it’s thought to get in when there’s cold damage or the trees are stressed from other injuries such as nematode root damage.

When it warms up in the spring, canker symptoms such as gumming around the affected tissue will begin to form on the trunk. It’s the same organism but a different phase, so it’s called bacterial canker, Adaskaveg said.

This bacterium is epiphytic, meaning it lives on plant surfaces, and if the conditions are favorable, it will invade the host tissue. “Usually, the canker phase is more related to root stress, water-stressed roots or damaged roots from nematodes, these types of stresses,” Adaskaveg said.

Spraying helps reduce the inoculum so the pathogen can’t invade the injured tissue. Still, if it is too cold, the tissue will die, but it doesn’t form a canker, doesn’t cause a blasted flower, and the flower may freeze and abort if it gets down to 26 degrees F or below. With application of a bactericide, there’s no pathogen present to cause the disease, but with extreme cold, there is still flower death, Adaskaveg said. This is another possible explanation for variable results observed this past spring with the use of Kasumin.

Damage

Some areas reported crop loss from bacterial blast, but Adaskaveg hasn’t received details of how and when chemicals were applied. For the best results with kasugamycin, it needs to be applied within a week before the frost event. So,

right before a freeze event.

“These are the challenges because these types of compounds degrade by sunlight, wetness and other environmental factors” Adaskaveg said.

If an application of kasugamycin was made, and the freeze event came 10 days later, it would be less effective. This is a big problem for growers trying to make effective applications because the bactericides are designed not to persist, and that means they have a short residual lifespan, Adaskaveg said.

The industry plans to seek a Section 18 for Kasumin again for the 2024 spring season.

Section 18

for example, if a frost event is predicted for next Monday, it should be applied Wednesday, Thursday or Friday of the current week, he said.

Bactericides like kasugamycin have what is termed a diminishing effect, meaning they don’t have great residual activity. They usually have just a few days, which is why it must be applied

Adaskaveg applied for an Emergency Registration (Section 18) for Kasumin for the 2023 season. “It’s very frustrating on my end because the EPA was supposed to rule on this three years ago for the full registration (Section 3), but they keep changing the PRIA (Pesticide Registration Improvement Extension Act) date,” he said.

The law that says the EPA has to act by a specified date is circumvented be-

cause they found a loophole in the law where they can change the date. “We’ve been through at least four or five of these PRIA date changes that have been six months at a time,” Adaskaveg said.

Unfortunately, the EPA is postponing registrations of several new pesticides due to their efforts to consider the Endangered Species Act (ESA) for many existing registrations and the lack of personnel at the agency because of retirements during COVID-19 in 2020-22.

Adaskaveg is planning to apply for another Section 18 for Kasumin for the 2024 spring season. “They told me that if you want it, you just have to keep applying for a Section 18, which is very disappointing,” he said, adding it’s a time-consuming process that takes three to four months of review before receiving approval.

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WHAT IS A GOOD WORKING DEFINITION OF BIOSTIMULANTS?

By RICH KREPS | CCA, SSp., Contributing Writer

B

iostimulants are natural or synthetic substances cial.” It’s a pretty vague definition although I’m glad to see that can be applied to seeds, plants and soil. These subpeople have created some. What does that really mean? We stances cause changes in vital and structural processes in are attempting to apply a product to change the biological order to influence plant growth through improved tolerance processes in the plants, with some sort of stimulation, for to abiotic stresses and increase seed and/or grain yield and gain. Sounds like a fertilizer. But wait, we want to help quality” (Vasconcelos and Chaves 2019). the plant handle its ability to adapt to stress by applying a “A plant biostimulant is any substance or microorganism specific product. Sounds like a plant protection product. So, applied to plants with the aim to enhance nutrition efficiency, which is it? JCS and their team recently assembled a panel at abiotic stress tolerance and/or crop quality traits, regardless the Crop Consultant Conference in Visalia last month that I of its nutrient content” (Rouphael 2020). had the pleasure to sit on. The states are attempting to create In my best “Church Lady” voice: “Well, isn’t that spelegislation to classify biostimulants to regulate them a bit but make it easier to get certain products to market to help our growers succeed. We want better quality, stress tolerance and yields. Seems simple enough. We discussed it a bit but only scratched the surface.

A bit of the concern stems from defining the products. We don’t want them to be classified as a fertilizer or a pesticide if we can help it. Inoculating our ground with active microbiology can be labeled a biostimulant. It has been proven again and again that beneficial biology can help create systemic acquired resistance to plant stressors. It can also mine nutrients in the soil and change their structure to make them more plant ready. Making fertilizer more efficient will help. This can certainly stimulate a response in the plant. Changing the immediate area around a plant root with the interaction of the biology and the root exudates

‘A bit of the concern stems from defining the products. We don’t want them to be classified as a fertilizer or a pesticide if we can help it.’

40

West Coast Nut

November 2023

can also trigger responses. Biology can create microscopic adjustments to pH levels in that immediate rhizosphere.

Many companies have kelp products that contain plant growth regulators and biologically absorbable plant nutrients. Several species exist that have extractable compounds that have shown beneficial responses in trial data. Their differing extraction methods, growing regions and PGRs within the liquid are biostimulants. The trace minerals from

the ocean can be highly absorbable.

Biochemicals in seaweed have been shown to trigger responses within the trees and their own PGRs they produce.

Several companies have created fermentation processes that transform waste, food and nutrients into more stable and/or absorbable biostimulants.

Often, the byproducts of biological reactions stimulate beneficial responses in our crops. The active biology that inhabits some of these mixes have

been proven to be effective at creating induced systemic resistance for plants.

Remember, we used molds to make penicillin and changed medicine forever. Our bodies are constantly fermenting and digesting our food to make nutrients more available for our system.

If the biology in our individual guts weighs as much as 5 pounds, how much

Continued on Page 42

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Continued from Page 41 does biology weigh in an acre of soil?

Composting systems have created new use products to make our soils more productive. A typically well cured compost, one that has been digested for a year or more, still should have active biology in it that can inhabit the ground and propagate itself. Pistachio hulls, almond hulls, walnut husks, dairy waste, etc. have all been incorporated into beneficial compost. There are companies now burning that waste at 900 degrees F to turn that waste into biochar: A stable carbon source to reinvigorate our soils with holding capacity and structure. A 1% increase in soil organic matter can hold 20,000 more gallons of water per acre.

Nutrients such as phosphite, elements such as silica, cobalt, molybdenum and nickel, and compounds of nitrogen like polyamines, peptides, protein hydrolysates, triacontanol and chitosan, (to name a few) have all

seen an interest spike in recent years.

Specific responses have been seen with the use of many of these products to a variety of stressors or beneficial growth traits. We are just scratching the surface of creating ways to promote healthier plants with fewer inputs per pound of yield. The per pound of yield part is the kicker. There are so many people on Earth now and it’s growing exponentially. We must feed them. As the EU creates higher MRLs and we follow suit, more and more products will come to the fore that will attempt to fill the need to create higher yields with less traditional inputs.

Do your homework. Ask the reps and then read some research articles.

Are you building the soil? Are you feeding the crop? Are you eliminating a stressor or suppressing a negative?

Don’t just take our word for it. Then question if it’s the right time for that response or reaction in your tree’s growth cycle. There are many great products out there with more coming on board every day. As growers, we can’t just sit

'As the EU creates higher MRLs and we follow suit, more and more products will come to the fore that will attempt to fill the need to create higher yields with less traditional inputs.’ back and rely on the crop advisor to give us all the answers. Companies, universities and independent researchers have spent billions of dollars testing products and trialing the responses.

Other companies take those products and blend them to certain specs to try to create products where the whole is much more than the sum of the parts.

Do a little research of your own. The information is out there and changing all the time. Stimulate your brain, if even just a little bit, and you’ll get much more out of your biology.

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References Vasconcelos, Ana. Chaves, Lucia.

Biostimulants and their role in improving plant growth under abiotic stress. Biostimulants in Plant Science, www.intechopen.com, 17 July, 2019 Rouphale, Youssef and Colla, Guiseppe. Plant biostimulants: Rationale, State of the Art and Evolution. Plant Science, frontiersin.org, 04 February 2020 Comments about this article? We want to hear from you. Feel free to email us at article@jcsmarketinginc.com

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November 2023

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From the Orchard Wylie Farms Focuses on Regenerative Agriculture to Improve Orchard Health

Justin Wylie and his wife, Tiffany.

By LORI FAIRCHILD | Contributing Writer

J

ustin Wylie of Wylie Farms grew up in a farming family but didn’t always plan to work in the industry.

He graduated from UC San Diego and shortly thereafter felt a pull back to his roots, joining the family ranch management business at age 25.

After the birth of his son, he began to rethink the way he approached farming. His son faced multiple health challenges, which led to his family learning about clean eating and healing the gut. Their success in helping his son overcome his health challenges led Wylie to wonder if the same approach could be beneficial in his orchards.

“All of a sudden, I had made a connection between what I’m doing on my ranches and what we were trying to do at home with our son,” Wylie said.

He learned about regenerative agriculture, where the focus is on building healthier soil, which results in healthier plants and trees. Beginning with his own 40 acres, Wylie has implemented regenerative practices on citrus and pistachio orchards with promising results. Wylie claims he has been able to greatly reduce crop protection sprays and reduce water usage by 20% while maintaining production and crop quality. Wylie, along with his dad, Craig, 44

West Coast Nut

and brother, Chase, have extended their regenerative farming practices to 600 acres of both their own land and land the company manages.

We asked Wylie to share with us his thoughts on regenerative farming and the tree nut industry.

Q. What is the history of your business?

My dad and uncle, Craig and Chris Wylie, were at Chico State going to school up there. They’re from Chico originally, and they started coming down to the San Joaquin Valley for a summer job with Bob Peterson. They worked alongside several other prominent growers including Dave Peterson, who’s up in Chico now, a farmer, and Bill Seaman, a well-known farmer, nurseryman and ranch manager. They budded some of the first pistachio orchards around the early 70s, which was the early days when the pistachio industry was first picking up steam.

After college, they all got into pistachios. At that point, just from learning it during college and under Bob Peterson, that’s where it started. My dad grew up on walnuts then we have some family that were corn farmers from Nebraska. So, we’re fifth-generation,

November 2023

A focus on soil health is at the core of regenerative farming practices. Better soil health can lead to more resilient trees and improved water-holding capacity (all photos courtesy J. Wylie.)

technically, but first-generation pistachio growers. I guess my brother, Chase Wylie, and my cousin, Ryan Wylie, and I would all be second-generation pistachio growers.

Q. How did you get into tree nut farming?

I left for school and took some time away from the industry, not really sure

if I would return. Southern California is pretty tough to leave as college kid!

I rejoined the family business in 2007 and moved back to the valley a few years later when my wife and I were pregnant with our second child.

We’re ranch managers in Madera, and then we farm some of our own pistachios and citrus.

Q. How has your focus on regenerative farming changed your outlook on farming?

Before I looked at it like when your trees have a disease, a fungal disease, or you have a pest issue, the pest and the disease is the problem. Maybe we’re unlucky. If I’m 44 and I’m getting sick all the time and I’m not healthy and I’m tired and fatigued or whatever else is going on, would I necessarily think that I just got unlucky with my genetics?

Or would I really do some searching at some point and say, ‘Is there something I can change in my exercise routine or sunlight exposure, my diet, whatever else?’ But we don’t look at our farms

Cover crops are a key piece of regenerative farming because they can reduce the need for some inputs and improve soil health.

like that. We look at a disease pressure or a nutrient deficiency in the soils almost like we’re unlucky, that it’s a crazy year and we have no control, like we’re floating in the wind.

I’ve come to discover in the last five to seven years that’s not the case.

Just like we would treat our health as humans, we can treat our fields the same way. There’s always going to be

problems and diseases, but the way our crops respond to those pests and diseases is a function of the health of the soil.

Q. What is it about regenerative ag that’s so appealing?

I’ve gone down that path the last five

Continued on Page 46

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Farming is a family affair at Wylie Farms, and Justin Wylie hopes that regenerative farming will entice younger generations to stay on the farm.

Continued from Page 45 to seven years, and I’m really excited about the future. Prior to learning about regenerative ag, I had heard those stories about the children leaving the farm, not being interested in farming or getting a job in town and doing both because many kids of farmers weren’t seeing a future in farming.

That’s been multiple generations now, whether you’re a corn farmer in the Midwest or in California. You have a lot of farmers here, even successful farmers, whose kids may or may not be coming back after leaving for college.

A lot of kids are just looking at it going, ‘That’s not the life I want,’ and one of the really cool things about regenerative ag is it’s so exciting to the next generation. Young people are looking at regenerative ag going, ‘Wait, I want to stick around.’ There are even professionals switching careers to join our industry because of the excitement around regenerative farming, and you just didn’t hear many stories like that 10 years ago.

There’s something to this idea of reconnecting with your food and growing food in a manner that focuses on balance and regeneration instead of elimination of pests and disease. It’s a completely different way of looking at overcoming challenges.

Q. How does regenerative ag provide hope for the future?

On the family ranch management

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side, we still farm quite a few acres conventionally. Unfortunately, there are often problems that are difficult to manage with conventional sprays and fertilizers. For example, this is one of the worst thrip years we’ve ever had in citrus, in the history of citrus in California. There’s a lot of acreage out there where the farmer just gave up trying to protect the crop and turned it into insurance because, despite their best efforts, it was too damaged to harvest.

In this case, many farmers used all the tools available to them. Some treated up to six or seven times instead of the usual once or twice and still couldn’t save their crop. The thrips just kept coming and coming and coming, and there was no answer for it. Almond growers faced something similar. We’re hearing nightmare stories about almond loads coming in at 10% to 15% navel orangeworm damage. That’s unheard of.

This is the new reality we’re facing.

Maybe we don’t run into a thrip or navel orangeworm problem like this for another 25 years because it was just a crazy year. Hopefully. But it seems like the pest pressure is only increasing in most crops. I’m sure there are many reasons for this, but we’re being told there aren’t a lot of new chemicals coming down the pipeline in the event our current products are either banned or become less effective.

It’s California and the European Union leading the charge on banning chemicals. So, as growers, we’re not

Improving the fungal to bacteria ratio in the soil is one of the core tenets of improving soil health.

only facing increasing pest pressure but also the possibility of losing access to some of our tools soon. I’m addressing this with the APG board because it’s something we’re all concerned about as an industry. We’re concerned about the constantly changing standards overseas, which in California could create a lot of problems for the conventional grower, even though we are compliant

by American standards.

One reason for optimism, on both the regenerative and conventional side is companies are switching their focus over to biological inputs for crop protection and improving fertility and crop resiliency. Biostimulants improve plant immunity and fight pests with products that have a 0-day PHI and no risk of leaving a residue. I spent the last few days at the Crop Consultant Conference in Visalia, and I was amazed at all the advancements in that sphere. I would highly recommend that conference for any grower or consultant looking for a new way.

The point is it’s very easy to be pessimistic from a conventional grower standpoint. Crop prices have not been good in the nut crops especially, but in a lot of other markets, there’s overplanting, too. So, from a bird’s eye view, it’s depressing. You’re looking at all these issues and that’s not including labor and water shortages. With the cost of power going up, our equipment prices have skyrocketed. I see that side, but having discovered this whole new

realm, attending regenerative seminars and farm tours, it’s full of people who are highly optimistic about the future of farming. We have the ability and opportunity to take on these very complex issues when you start with soil health.

Q. Talk a little bit about what you mean when you’re talking about improving soil health.

No. 1, increase soil organic matter.

No. 2, in permanent crops specifically is the microbial balance in the soils between fungi and bacteria. For most soils in California the ratio is roughly 500:1, bacteria to fungi. In a permanent crop like pistachios, increasing the fungal to bacterial ratio improves nutrient cycling and disease resiliency. In other words, more nutrients are available in the soil for your trees to uptake, which means reduced fertilizer inputs and better results. I’ve been building my soil health for five years now, and I’m excited to see my ratios now at 1:1.

To increase microbial activity in the soil, there are a few things we can do.

Build soil structure with cover crops.

Avoid suppressing or killing microbes with heavy applications of high-salt fertilizers. Avoid tillage. Keep the soil covered with as much of a variety of plants as possible. Eventually this will recreate the pore spaces in the soil so the soil can breathe again. As you go, I would recommend continually re-inoculating the soil with biologicals along with food sources like humic and molasses. Over time, you will see soil organic matter increase, water infiltration improve and nutrient cycling change completely.

I fully believe that there are things we can do to bring it above the native soils. My native soils on my fence lines are at 5% organic matter, and in the middle of our orchards, I’m sitting at a half to 1%. So, at the very least, I think I can get back to 5%. And if I do, that’s about an additional 100,000 gallons per acre of water-holding capacity.

I’m doing everything I can to avoid hurting the fungal populations in my soil. Not tilling would be the first one, then not using anything, any crop protection, chemical or anything that would actually harm the fungal populations in my soil, anything that oxidizes

my soil, anything that would harm fungi, like a copper sulfate. A lot of the water districts are using copper sulfate to keep their systems clean, and growers may not know how much of that is ending up in their soils and whether or not it has an effect.

Q. Why do you think regenerative farming is an answer for some of the problems facing tree nut growers?

We’re starting to see more nutrient cycling happening in the soils, and that allows us to reduce our fertilizer use.

The question here is can I continue to pay for the inputs and three fungicides and three or four herbicides and spend that amount of money per acre with the cost of inputs and the cost of power and labor in California and still be profitable?

I think the average farmer would say, ‘No, I don’t see a future there. We need to invent our way out of this.’

And up until now, replanting with new varieties has succeeded in doing so.

The advancements we’ve made in just total production and the quality we can produce has been phenomenal. But what’s happening is now the system is catching up to the economics because look at what has happened to the price of ground. And what happens to all the other inputs and now labor and everything else? Costs are rising and crop prices are not keeping pace.

We’re at a point now where if you’re a new farmer and you’re not inheriting ground, what do you do? The economics don’t work. You do the math as a farmer. It’s no wonder these kids don’t want to stay. If they’re going to get into the ground to farm nuts, if that’s their passion, you’re talking about a negative return right now.

So that’s the question here: Will

Continued on Page 48

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47

Continued from Page 47 this new system of farming work? And that’s what I’m really working through myself and trying to figure out. I’m optimistic about the future because I think, ‘If I can do it in our lower fertility soils in Madera, if we can start improving nutrient cycling, reducing disease pressure, reducing the number of passes through the field with foliars and pest control sprays, if we can grow a more resilient tree and more resilient crop, not lose production, all while reducing costs significantly, that’s the future.’

Maintaining or increasing production and quality with few inputs is the key. They call it the J curve, and the J curve is basically you go organic or regenerative and you see a big dip in production initially. Eventually production comes up, but that could take years.

The way many growers traditionally treated transitioning to organic was to farm the exact same way, but with an organic fertilizer or pesticide product that was less effective, took longer to work and cost more.

What we’re doing in regenerative agriculture is different. We are trying to mitigate those issues by focusing on soil health and improving the biology that makes nutrients more available, which adds pest and disease resistance to our crops. This is what helps us avoid that J curve. It’s a lot of fun hearing success stories all over the world. We’ve seen it work in our own fields, that even in the worst conditions where I had major hail events and things like that a couple years ago, I expected a total loss in my pistachios. It’s anecdotal, but I believe that because of our growing practices, we didn’t see a drop in production at all that year.

Cover crops blanket the ground beneath trees in Justin Wylie’s orchards as part of his focus on regenerative farming practices.

Cows graze the cover crop in Justin Wylie’s orchard.

Q. What kind of successes have you seen with regenerative farming practices?

We had some trees wake up with severe phytophthora this spring, and normally phytophthora is a death sentence. Yet those trees still have a crop on them now and are continuing to recover, even with the summer stress.

Another fun thing we’ve seen in our orchards is our soil managing our

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November 2023

Justin Wylie of Wylie Farms is excited about the future of regenerative farming and its focus on soil health to help build more resilient orchards.

noxious weeds. Eliminating nitrate nitrogen from our soils has created an inhospitable growing environment for early successional noxious weeds like fleabane, malva, nightshade, prickly lettuce and horseweed. Instead, our soil favors clovers and perennial grasses. A few years back, my neighbor asked me what I had sprayed to kill off the mare’s tail. He was shocked when I told him I hadn’t sprayed a thing, my soil had done that all on its own.

Q. What about the cost?

In our regenerative blocks, we’re 15% to 20% cheaper and using 15% to 20% less water than in our conventional blocks. We’re saving on the passes. We’re not applying fungicides, not applying herbicides and we have full ground cover. We’re doing a lot of things differently in our fields where we’re able to reduce expenses.

Q. What do you think the biggest challenges are for the tree nut

industry, and what are the tree nut industry’s biggest assets?

I’m a huge fan of APG’s generic marketing programs. I don’t think there’s any other way to raise the base demand of our crop, not only domestically, but internationally, too. That’s the way forward. Generic marketing is showing the American farmer, showing the clean, nutrient-dense crop that we’re growing.

Whether you’re farming an almond, pistachio, walnut, pecan, whatever, in a world where we’re trying to get people away from potato chips to eating something healthier, the way to do that and expand markets overseas and domestically is through a generic marketing program.

As for challenges, the biggest one is water. There’s still a lot of uncertainty as we figure out how SGMA will be enacted. At the end of the day, their focus is sustainability and there’s a lot of pressure coming in from the outside.

I also think labor in California is

difficult from a direct operator standpoint. I think it’s kind of an old cliche, but for me, those two, water and labor, are still the big ones.

Q. What advice would you give a young person just getting into the tree nut industry?

There are excellent programs out there for beginning farmers with the FSA. I would suggest they look into those, but even those could be difficult to use right now because of interest rates being so high. Leasing and crop sharing could be good options until interest rates come back down. In short, my advice would be don’t overextend yourself, and get creative until the economics make better sense.

Comments about this article? We want to hear from you. Feel free to email us at article@jcsmarketinginc.com

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DPR’s Sustainable Pest Management Roadmap and The Future of Pesticides

By KRISTIN PLATTS | Contributing Writer

N

early a year ago, the California Department of Pesticide Regulation (DPR) unveiled the Sustainable Pest Management Roadmap for California (SPM), a plan that aims to speed up the state’s transition into sustainable pest management and to eliminate high-risk pesticides by the year 2050. Now, as the California ag industry is left to contemplate a different looking future for pesticides in less than two decades, industry experts are coming together to help pesticide users fill in some of the blanks.

The 2023 Crop Consultant Conference, held in Visalia, Calif. in late

September, gave attendees the chance to sit in on a panel discussion to address the future of pesticides in California once many of the familiar go-to’s are no longer an option under SPM. A press release published by the SPM workgroup in January laid out the bold plan, calling it “the way to a phase-out and replacement of the highest-risk pesticides to build a healthy and safe California.”

Panelist Roger Isom, president of both Western Agricultural Processors Association (WAPA) and California Cotton Ginners and Growers Association, said SPM is just a fancy name for eliminating

pesticides.

The plan also includes the implementation of a notification system to begin in 2024, which DPR says will provide the public with “advance, transparent and equitable access to information about pesticide applications.”

While the panelists at September’s meeting were resigned to accept the upcoming changes, they collectively agreed that they were rigid and would take extensive time, money and research to develop strategies for the ag industry to find its footing under the plan.

Renee Pinel, president and CEO of Western Plant Health Association, served as the panel moderator. Western Plant Health Association, a trade association that represents Pesticide fertilizer manufacturers, ag biotechnology providers, and agricultural retailers in California, Arizona and Hawaii, regularly works with DPR on pesticide issues.

Isom said sustainability already exists for California growers who are

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Panelists outlined the future of pesticides and pest management as DPR adopts its Sustainable Pest Management Roadmap in coming years.

working to minimize input costs as part of traditional pest management programs.

“There isn’t a grower or PCA or CCA in this room who hasn’t tried to reduce pesticide use, minimize pesticide use and find a better way to do it. It’s what we’ve been doing for years,” Isom said.

“We’ve called it integrated pest management.”

Isom referred to the elimination of Chlorpyriphos as an example of what the pesticide roadmap could lead to: An elimination of products without providing any alternatives. He said the goal of SPM is to reduce priority pesticides, which he said more or less consists of every product the ag industry uses.

WAPA represents 180 tree nut hullers and processors of walnuts, almonds, pecans and pistachios throughout California, and both associations Isom represents work on regulatory and legislative issues as well as compliance and research. He said that they have always been about reducing or minimizing pesticides.

“Every dollar we spend is a dollar less we make,” Isom said. “If we don’t have to spray for anything, we won’t. That’s what we do. But that’s not what this is about.”

Panelist Daniel Hartwig, director of sustainability for Woolf Farming, said that sustaining the business means keeping it viable to succeed for generations to come.

“If we are spending thousands of dollars an acre on pesticides, that’s not very sustainable, and if we have to spend thousands of dollars to convert to SPM, that’s also not very sustainable,” he said.

Woolf Farming is a vertically integrated company that grows almonds and pistachios among numerous other crops and deals with energy, regulatory, sustainability and water issues.

Hartwig said the company prides itself on sustainability and is even a certified B Corp, which requires it to adhere to an exceptional standard of environmental accountability.

When it comes to the definition of SPM versus sustainability, Hartwig said there are already a lot of ways growers are trying to be sustainable such as improving microbiomes in soils and strengthening plants rather than having to treat them with pesticides.

“There’s multiple ways that we can be sustainable without potentially going down the road that the state is looking for us to go down,” Hartwig said.

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SPM as Community Management

Pinel said that while sustainability has always been viewed as what takes place on the farm and between the fence posts, SPM is more of a community-wide view of pesticide management.

“It goes beyond the farm itself, and that’s where you’re going to see more and more influence of community members and interest groups whose agenda is not to minimize risk, it’s to eliminate risk, in their view,” she said.

She recommended the grower community start thinking about sustainability and pesticide use more holistically as far as who’s going to know what’s taking place and the justification for

Continued on Page 52

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November 2023

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Continued from Page 51 each product used. With the notification aspect of SPM, she added that more is going to be known to the community about what is being used.

“You’re not just thinking in terms of, ‘How does this meet the needs of this farm,’” she said, “it’s, ‘How is this going to be frankly perceived by a wider community?’”

Another thing the panelists agreed on was SPM is just a new term for IPM, something the ag industry has already been doing for years, said panelist Surendra Dara, an entomologist, director and professor at North Willamette Research and Extension Center at Oregon State University.

“Based on my volunteering in different countries around the world, I can confidently say that California is ahead of everybody else,” Dara said. “Not just because of regulations, but because growers care about the environment and care about purchasing healthy crops.”

Considering a possible consequence

of an ultra-organic way of farming, Dara referred to the catastrophic outcome on Sri Lanka’s economy when the country attempted to go fully organic in 2021.

Dara said that preparing the state or nation for a change without alternatives was like preparing for surgery without having tools.

“Organic agriculture is not sustainable,” he said. “Without pesticides, we cannot produce food.”

Research and Education Will be Key

The goal of the panel at September’s conference was not to dump on SPM, Pinel told the audience, but to talk about how the plan can be successful. She said she sees opportunities for agriculture through it, but to get to that point, it will be important to understand what the challenges are with the plan.

She said for agriculture to move on to new chemistries as opposed to traditional pesticides, it’s going to require more products to replace conventional ones, requiring a lot of research and education for growers and consultants alike.

PECAN

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November 2023

Dara agreed there is a significant need for increased research and training, not only for crop care professionals but also for researchers like himself. That research includes understanding the biology of products and learning how each one does its job to kill or infect an insect, since each one reacts differently.

He also stated this type of research takes time and money, often three to five years depending on the crop.

“When we are talking about non-synthetic materials, you need to develop a strategy; it is not just efficacy alone,” he said, “It has to be a strategy that requires several years of research and involving a lot of money.”

Isom said he believes it will be crucial to fund the entomology side of the UCCE system to build up its research programs going forward to help growers implement the plan and understand what they need to do to succeed.

Adjusting to What’s Available Comes at a Premium

As growers move forward under SPM, they will need to adapt to what products are available. In Hartwig’s experience, that often means dealing with products that are less effective than their previous counterparts. He said they are finding the need for more passes to be as effective, which is counter intuitive to their goals of sustainability and improving their carbon footprint, which he says goes against the intended goals of SPM. “When we look at those tools, that’s a huge problem,” he said. “We don’t see things that are as effective coming on the market.”

Strategy will be necessary to figuring out how to utilize what’s available, noted Dara, who said it will be difficult, but if a tool you’re used to using isn’t available, you must adapt.

“If pests can adapt to the environment, so can humans,” he said. “We can adapt to the regulations and move on.”

For many crops, Hartwig said strategy will need to include making decisions about what varieties to grow from year to year as products go off the market. He said he has heard from almond growers up north this year who chose not to plant Monterey, a late variety, due to the unavailability of products to treat later pest flights.

Dara said that when he was conducting research on strawberry plots in California, he would often invite friends and the public out to pick berries, talking to them about his practices, pesticides and sustainability.

He said growers need to use every opportunity to explain what they do to the public.

“This is the public education part I am talking about; farming community knows, regulators and researchers know what it means, but the public doesn’t know,” he said.

The Roadmap will likely lead to reductions in available crop protection tools and more expensive alternatives to manage standard pests in orchards.

“There is so much misinformation and the public needs to understand.”

Isom said solutions won’t be short-term, so everyone needs Moving forward under SPM, Pinel said the ag community to look at the long term. As an example, he said on the tree must be able to demonstrate that what it does is explainable nut side, his organizations are heavily involved in sterile insect and fully defensible. technology research as a potential solution.

“SPM Roadmap is here,” she said. “There are positives that “We have to look at every single thing we can, turn over can come out of it; it’s just up to us to adapt to it.” every rock, to try to find solutions,” he said.

Comments about this article? We want to hear from you. Feel As pesticide reductions and eliminations take place and free to email us at article@jcsmarketinginc.com growers begin to use new products, they will no doubt feel the financial impacts, and some already have. Hartwig said his operation has tested biologicals, some of which have been effective, but the costs were up to eight times higher than with a conventional pesticide. He added that while they try to grow sustainably, there is no premium associated with being sustainable and there are only so many costs that can be built in.

While he knows it’s unlikely, Hartwig said he would like to see California crops earn some sort of premium if they are going to go down the path of SPM. “These costs are going to impact what we are able to grow and what we’re willing to grow,” he said.

Isom said his growers are already being impacted by the costs as well, noting every cost for growers has gone up, while their commodity prices have not. He said he’s seen costs this year keep almond growers from spraying as much for NOW as they normally would and cotton growers spending upwards of $300 per acre trying to control lygus bugs. He added he even saw a couple cotton growers walk away from their fields entirely this year.

“We don’t see that in California,” Isom said. “You hear about people abandoning fields in Texas and the mid-south from hurricanes and things like that, but it just doesn’t happen here, and we’ve had it happen here.”

Moving Forward and Adapting

Wrapping up the discussion, Pinel referred back to the idea of community interaction and asked the panelists to talk about how to deal with a public that often has a much stronger and louder voice and how best to address and recognize their concerns.

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Resistance Management Strategies in Hazelnuts

By MITCH LIES | Contributing Writer A Willamette Valley hazelnut orchard in early August. Incorporating resistance management strategies in pest control programs is key to preserving the efficacy of a shrinking number of pest control options in hazelnuts, according to OSU Extension Orchard Specialist Nik Wiman (all photos by M. Lies.)

I

n a sweeping presentation on hazelnut pest management at the Nut Growers Society Summer Tour in July to August, Oregon State University Extension Orchard Specialist Nik Wiman urged growers to use pesticides judiciously and to rotate modes of action.

“There are 36 different modes of action that have been identified in insecticides, so it is good to rotate them wherever you can,” Wiman said.

Rotating modes of action is key to slowing development of resistance and preserving the efficacy of a decreasing number of pesticides available for pest management in hazelnuts, Wiman said.

Using full rates when applying insecticides, especially premixes, is also important, Wiman said.

“Premix products are a real trend in the pesticide market, and a lot of these have reduced rates in them,” Wiman said. “So, you have to watch the actual level of active ingredient you are applying with these applications because if 54

West Coast Nut

you are applying a reduced rate, you are development. maybe getting more survival of the pest “Neonicotinoids are under fire from and more likelihood of development of regulators because of their nontarget resistance.” effects on pollinators, particularly,” he Also, use of selective insecticides said. “But in hazelnuts, as long as we’re such as Intrepid can help slow resisnot exposing pollinators, I think it is a tance development: Growers should very selective use.” consider using them despite their Steps to prevent exposing pollinahigher cost, Wiman said. And, he said, tors when using neonicotinoids include when using Intrepid, growers need to avoiding insecticide drift. “Also, make be patient and not expect immediate sure that when we’re watering it in, it is results. not going past the root zone, that it is “It’s a very good selective material. It staying in the tree and not getting into is going to kill eggs, it is going to kill water that can run off into other surlarvae, but it’s not going to kill adults,” face water and cause problems for bees Wiman said. “But the thing to think and other organisms,” Wiman said. about here is that residue is very longBiological, botanical and behavioral lived and it’s still out there working for insect controls, while also more expenyou even though you’re still capturing sive than broad spectrum insecticides, moths in your traps.” also should be considered, Wiman said.

Wiman also pointed out that neon“For example, for filbert worm, we have icotinoids, while shown to be harmful excellent mating disruption products,” to pollinators, are selective insectihe said. cides and should also be considered as But ultimately, Wiman said, the another option for slowing resistance most important step growers can take

November 2023

to slow resistance development, is to use them judiciously. “The most important thing a grower can do is to treat only when needed,” he said.

Three Pathways

Insects develop resistance in three ways, Wiman said. “There is either a target-site resistance where the insect actually is able to modify a receptor so that it no longer receives chemical.

There is also behavioral adaptation where maybe the insects will leave an orchard when you spray and then come back when it is safe,” he said. “The brown marmorated stink bug will do that.

“And by far the most common mechanism for resistance is metabolic resistance where the insect upregulates certain molecules that help detoxify the insecticide in the body of the insect,” Wiman said.

A pest like aphid is particularly susceptible to resistance, Wiman said, because of its season-long presence in an orchard, which exposes it to several different pesticides, including those targeting other pests.

“For example, we’re using imidacloprid for a few different pests,” he said.

“It is very commonly applied and it’s relatively inexpensive. So, there is frequent exposure of the (aphid) populations and a lot of times you are getting a low dose, which is even more risky.”

Also, Wiman said, because the filbert aphid, one of two prominent aphid species in hazelnuts, was previously resistant to insecticides before the emergence of the samurai wasp in the 1990s, the chance it will become resistant again is high.

“There were some studies that show that filbert aphid was very resistant to a lot of the chemistries of the time,” Wiman said. “They were spraying carbaryl and not getting control. They were spraying diazinon and not getting control of aphids. And since they already have developed resistance once, that makes it more likely they can do it again.”

Wiman added that multiple growers are now telling him they are no longer

getting control of aphids with imidacloprid.

“So, again, there’s always the risk of resistance, especially with the aphid population because they are out there all season and getting exposed to everything that we throw at any insect in an orchard,” he said.

The filbert worm, on the other hand, is less likely to develop resistance, he said.

“There is probably only one generation per year. There is a wild population that is in oaks and other sites, which keeps the gene pool relatively diverse,” he said. “So, with filbert worm, developing resistance would be very unlikely.”

Same with the brown marmorated

Continued on Page 56

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Speaking at the Nut Growers Society’s Summer Tour in Albany, OSU Extension Orchard Specialist Nik Wiman emphasized the importance of incorporating resistance management strategies in insect control programs

Few New Insecticides

Continued from Page 55 stink bug. “It is moving around in the landscape, so it has a very low probability of developing resistance,” Wiman said.

Among issues that are aligning to increase the importance to preserve efficacy of existing pesticides are that chemical companies are showing a reluctance to sink millions of dollars

into the development of new pesticides and the current regulatory climate surrounding use of pesticides is not particularly favorable to growers, Wiman said.

“Basically, we are going to keep losing insecticides,” Wiman said in closing his hour-long presentation. “If you look at the regulatory environment, it is not very kind to the grower.

“Neonicotinoids are on the chopping block. And we’ve had initiatives to limit our ability to air-blast spray. And there are just so many regulatory obstacles.

And you talk to these chemical companies, and they don’t have a lot coming down the pipeline,” he said.

“It’s gotten so expensive to register new chemicals that a lot of them are getting out of the business. What we’re seeing is continued repackaging and release of old materials,” Wiman said.

“So, we need to conserve the tools that we have now,” he said. “Use them as judiciously as possible.”

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OSU has developed several information tools to help growers use insecticides judiciously, Wiman said, including apps and pest management guides that inform on sampling techniques and action thresholds.

For example, the mobile friendly Hazelnut Pest Management Guide is available for growers to access via an app or through a smartphone.

“They keep coming out with new features,” he said. “So, I think it is getting better and better. And for those who like to be really organized, it’s quite nice to see all the active ingredients and have all those labels in one place. It also has a lot of images of the different pests.”

Growers can access the app on the home page of OSU Extension’s Hazelnut Pest Management Guide for the Willamette Valley.

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A POST-SGMA CALIFORNIA COULD SEE HALF A MILLION FEWER ACRES OF FARMLAND

By KRISTIN PLATTS | Contributing Writer Groundwater recharge is one solution to reaching sustainable basins.

K

ey takeaways from a report published by the Public Policy Institute of California (PPIC) and Fresno State’s California Water Institute found water trading, smart farmland repurposing and supportive regulations should be among a few of the most crucial actions in a post-Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA) California.

The report comes during a year of plentiful water thanks to a very good winter, but it also comes on the heels of years of extreme drought and expected future droughts. While the plan includes ways to bring in new supplies of water to the valley in coming years, it says 500,000-plus acres of farmland will still need to come out of intensely irrigated production.

PPIC held a live panel conference in September on the “Managing Water and Farmland Transitions in the San Joaquin Valley” report to consider how San Joaquin Valley farmers might be able to best address looming water scarcity amid future droughts while also dealing with the implementation of SGMA. Andrew Ayres, a research fellow with the Public Policy Institute of California, presented a two-part plan to understand the opportunities and challenges of alternative land uses and what funding, incentives and institutional consid-

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erations need to be thought about to make it successful.

Water scarcity impacts by 2040 will vary across the state and come from three sources, Ayers explained: SGMA, reductions in some surface water availability from new environmental flow proposals on some tributaries in the valley, and from climate change, primarily made up of increased evaporative demands.

“All told, these cutbacks total about 20% of applied water in the valley,” Ayers said.

Water Trading

Water trading was one of the elements discussed to tackle the shortfall, and the report examines three ways water might be traded. Local trading would include growers trading surface water and groundwater in new groundwater markets with their neighbors, basin trading, which would happen within a groundwater subbasin, and valley trading, where groundwater would stay local within a basin but surface water could move throughout the valley.

“The two key takeaways are that water trading doesn’t reduce the cutbacks that need to be made,” Ayers said. “This isn’t going to reduce fallowing, but it is going to make it less

Grower Don Cameron said growers have to shift their thinking but will find solutions for managing groundwater (photo by M. Katz.)

Different ways water could be traded to reduce the costs of fallowing (image courtesy PPIC.)

costly.”

He added that across these scenarios, the total cost of adapting to the new scarcity could be reduced by about 30% to 50%. Other scenarios examined to bring water to the valley included considerations as to whether an additional 500,000 acre-feet or up to 1 million acre-feet of water could be brought in. Ayers said this method would decrease the number of cutbacks in applied water needed and the amount of fallowing, generally improving conditions in the valley.

“Being able to trade water, in some ways, spreads out the fallowing across the valley, and also it reduces the cost by allowing that water to move to the more profitable crops,” he said.

The report took into great consideration the effects water trading would have under SGMA and considered a wide range of potential impacts on the valley and its communities, Ayers said. Concerns about trading included shifts in groundwater pumping and on fallowing, which could cause undesirable impacts. Other considerations centered on drinking water levels and subsidence as well as increased dust exposure in rural communities.

“The bottom line is that managing water scarcity is a balancing act, and trading water, in practice, is tricky,” he said.

“Careful design is going to be needed in the development of new groundwater markets, but trading can help reduce the negative impacts of these transitions.”

Repurposing Fallow Land

The report also examined how to repurpose fallowed land, which includes a look at solar development, water-limited crops, upland habitat, recharge basins and new housing. Of these, solar development seemed to be most promising, but only if transmission bottlenecks can be addressed. Ayers noted that even with the ambitious climate and renewable energy goals of the State of California, some projections suggest about 135,000 to 215,000 acres of land could be necessary to meet renewable energy goals.

The report’s overall recommendations also included align-

ing regulatory and fiscal incentives with SGMA, since many of the relevant regulations for water and land use were created long before its 2014 passage, Ayers said, adding counties will play a big role in that.

Continued on Page 60

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Continued from Page 59 Three panels were hosted during the PPIC event. A “Managing Water in the SGMA Era” panel was moderated by Alvar Escriva-Bou, an assistant professor at UCLA, who has been working with PPIC for the past eight years. He asked panelists to weigh in on how the SGMA process is going, the goals of groundwater recharge and how they see water trading being implemented in the future.

North Kings Groundwater Sustainability Agency (GSA) was a GSA that received a conditional pass from DWR when many others did not. Panelist Kassy Chauhan, executive officer at North Kings Groundwater Sustainability Agency (GSA), spoke to the successes and challenges her agency has dealt with during the plan process.

She said while it was exciting when their plan was approved, the 60-page document that gave them their approval also required some very specific corrective actions.

“The work has in some ways just begun, but we are able to continue with implementation of that plan,” Chauhan said.

She added one of the key things that made the plan successful for North Kings GSA was the fact that they held fast in their coordinated effort during the process.

Clockwise from left, panel moderator Alvar Escriva-Bou, panelists, Aaron Fukuda, general manager, Tulare Irrigation District, Don Cameron, vice president and general manager, Terranova Ranch, Inc., Sonia Sanchez, senior community development specialist, Self-Help Enterprises, and Kassy Chauhan, executive officer, North Kings Groundwater Sustainability Agency.

Panelists Perspective

Escriva-Bou looked to longtime valley farmer Don Cameron, vice president and general manager at Terranova

Andrew Ayers, a research fellow with the Public Policy Institute of California (PPIC), discussed the opportunities and challenges of alternative land uses under SGMA during a Managing Water and Farmland Transitions in the San Joaquin Valley even in Fresno, Calif.

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Clockwise from left, panel moderator Caitlin Peterson, panelists, Eric Averett, chief executive officer, Atlas Water, LLC., Allison Febbo, general manager, Westlands Water District, Erica Brand, project manager of land use and infrastructure policy, California Energy Commission, and Ann Hayden, vice president of climate resilient water systems, Environmental Defense Fund.

Ranch, Inc., for some historical perspective on groundwater issues.

Cameron, whose operation has been involved in groundwater recharge for some time, said historically, growers have felt if they owned the land, they owned the water beneath it also.

Calling SGMA a game changer, he said growers have had a swing in perception and understanding.

“I just think that it’s been a real learning process, historically, a real mind-changer from what growers were used to doing in the past to really where they are today,” Cameron said.

He said he has seen a mind shift in attitude and responsibility among growers, who have been overwhelmingly supportive of helping fund solutions for continued farming within their GSAs. “I think we have a future in California and even in some of our basins that are critically overdrafted. We’re going to find solutions,” Cameron said.

Two more panels at the event discussed land management questions that revolve around SGMA and how everyone can work together going forward.

Caitlin Peterson, PPIC Water Policy Center associate director and research fellow, said the panel she moderated, “Farmland Transitions: Where are They Now?” was about how to bring groundwater basins into balance, working on water supplies and finding ways to enhance them while reducing the transaction cost of SGMA. As momentum builds around land repurposing, Peterson asked panelists how they’re seeing it play out day to day in their areas of expertise.

Allison Febbo, general manager for Westlands Water District, said early on they saw regulatory requirements that were reducing their water reliability and that now they’re seeing the effects of climate change and drastic weather patterns with very wet years and very dry years.

“So, our reliability, again, is not really there or predictable,” she said.

Febbo said their district so far has acquired close to 100,000 acres, which they intend to repurpose into solar and groundwater recharge opportunities.

Eric Averett, chief executive officer

at Atlas Water, LLC, which works on managing large areas of land for habitat restoration, said people need to think in terms of scale when discussing land repurposing. He said when looking at land use transitions, most of the GSAs are looking to individual landowners to implement pumping restrictions, but at the same time, they aren’t coordinating at a higher level.

“As we look at land use planning and the need to fallow and transition, 40acre parcels patchworked throughout the region doesn’t necessarily get us to where we need to be,” Averett said.

He added that their goal is to work with landowners to create incentives so they can find larger-scale plots for things like solar developments and habitat conservation flyways.

The tone of PPIC’s final panel was optimistic and focused on collaboration as the best and most productive way forward.

“In terms of collaboration, there’s no other way to do it,” said Rey León, mayor of Huron, Calif., adding climate

resiliency cannot happen without social cohesion.

Karla Nemeth, director at California Department of Water Resources, said she’s feeling very optimistic.

“We’ve got this terrific history of fighting over water in California, we’re going to have that forever, but at least from my vantage point, because we now are getting more and more information about the challenge of getting these groundwater basins to a sustainable point,” she said, “it just opens up conversations we weren’t really able to have in a serious way. I think that is intensifying, and that is a good sign.”

The PPIC event video is available to watch on PPIC’s YouTube channel and the Managing Water and Farmland Transitions in the San Joaquin Valley report can be downloaded and read in its entirety on PPIC’s website.

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What You Need to Know: I-9 Form Updates

By THERESA KIEHN | President/CEO, AgSafe

I

n August, the U.S. Citizen and Immigration Service (USCIS) released an updated Form I-9, which included some substantial changes. Many of the changes were welcomed as the new form has been streamlined, accounts for remote hiring practices and is compatible with digital devices. The updated form is required to be used for new hires beginning November 1, 2023. In this article, we discuss the changes in Form 1-9 and common mistakes to avoid.

USCIS utilizes the Form I-9 to verify the identity and employment authorization of individuals hired for employment in the U.S. All U.S. employers must ensure proper completion of the form for each individual hired for employment in the U.S., including citizens and noncitizens. All employers must complete and retain the I-9 for every person they hire for employment after November 6, 1986 in the U.S. as long as the person works for pay or other type of payment. Form I-9 is required to be completed for part time, full time, regular, seasonal and temporary employees.

Updated Form Highlights

Section 1 and Section 2 were reduced to a single-sided page. Multiple fields were combined, and others were eliminated.

The Preparer/Translator Certification area was moved to a separate Supplement A document for use when needed.

The Reverification and Rehire (For62

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All employers must complete and retain the I-9 for every person they hire for employment (photo by C. Parsons.)

merly Section 3) was also moved to a separate Supplement B document to be used when needed.

Removed use of “alien authorized to work” in Section 1 and replaced with “noncitizen authorized to work” and clarified the difference between “noncitizen national” and “noncitizen authorized to work.”

The form which is designed to be fillable, can now be downloaded on tablets and other mobile devices (use of Adobe Acrobat Reader free app).

No longer required to enter N/A in certain fields.

There is new guidance on the List of Acceptable Documents page to include acceptable receipts and the auto-exten-

November 2023

sion of some documents.

Includes a checkbox allowing employers to indicate they examined Form I-9 documentation remotely under a DHS-authorized alternative procedure rather than via physical examination.

Common Mistakes

There are more than a dozen common mistakes employers make when completing the Form I-9. While these mistakes may seem minor, they could result in a fine if USCIS were to conduct an audit. ▶ Failure to fill out Form I-9 for current employees.

▶ Missing digits on dates. All dates on the form must be documented in the following format: mm/dd/yyyy. ▶ Providing PO Box information rather than a physical address. ▶ Missing employee or employer signature. ▶ Failure to complete Section 2 within the 3 business days from the date of hire. ▶ Improperly completing Section 2 documents (incomplete information or too much information, not examining acceptable documents, or listing expired documents). ▶ Failure to audit Form I-9s for administrative errors on an annual basis. ▶ Inability to write information requested legibly on form. ▶ Failure to provide Form I-9 to ICE when requested for audit (usually within 72 hours.) ▶ Illegible forms because of use of pencils or gel pens to complete.

Black or blue pen colors are recommended when filling out the form manually. A .pdf fillable form is available for easier completion. ▶ Utilizing a highlighter or white out on the form.

Another critical element of Form I-9 involves the proper storage of these documents. Forms must be on file for all current employees and stored securely in a way the meets your business needs. Because these forms contain personal information, only authorized employees should have access to these documents. Additionally, as mentioned previously, these documents must be made available within three days of an official request for inspection by ICE. Another frequently asked question involves how long the Form I-9 must be kept after an individual is no longer

The red circles on the Form I-9 depict some of the areas in which employers commonly have errors. Ensure you have the correct version of the form and the employee inputs the date correctly (mm/dd/yyyy) and provides their signature in Section 1.

employed. If an employee worked for less than two years, you must retain the form for three years after the date entered in as the first day of employment.

However, if you have an employee who has worked for more than two years, you must retain their form for one year after the date they stopped working for you.

For additional details on the Form I-9, please visit USCIS at uscis.gov/i-9central. If you should have specific questions regarding your Form I-9 or your hiring best practices, please con-

tact the AgSafe team at 209-526-4400 or email safeinfo@agsafe.org.

AgSafe is a 501c3 nonprofit providing training, education, outreach and tools in the areas of safety, labor relations, food safety and human resources for the food and farming industries. Since 1991, AgSafe has educated over 85,000 employers, supervisors and workers about these critical issues.

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Pistachio Growers Can Monitor, Prune and Shake During Dormancy to Prepare for the Coming Season

By STEVE PASTIS | Contributing Writer

D

ormancy is an important time es and unharvested nut mummies from for pistachio growers to prepare trees, and shred or disc them into the their orchards against critical soil.” pests: diseases, insects, rodents and Themis Michailides, Ph.D., plant paweeds. UC ANR suggests an Integrated thologist with UC Davis, also advised Pest Management (IPM) program for “pruning the affected shoots that have dormancy that includes removing and cankers.” He recommended waiting destroying mummy nuts from the trees until April to use any fungicide. and the orchard floor, as well as pruning “Spraying before then is not benefiout dead or infected wood, and removcial,” he said. “The fungicide can’t reach ing or destroying the wood and any the inside tissues [of the trees] during brush piles from the orchard floor. dormancy,” he said.

Diseases

The main diseases affecting pistachio trees during dormancy are Botryosphaeria panicle and shoot blight, and Botrytis blossom and shoot blight, according to Mae Culumber, UCCE orchard crops farm advisor in Fresno County.

“Dead and dying branches, fruit-bearing rachises (stalk-bearing stems) and nut mummies provide inoculum sources for diseases,” she said.

“Dormant-applied fungicides are not effective for control.”

Instead, Culumber advised to “prune out and destroy infected branch-

Alternaria late blight, one of several diseases that affect dormant pistachio trees (photo by T. Michailides.)

Insect Pests

“Some of the main pests impacting pistachio are navel orangeworm (NOW), Gill’s mealybug and, increasingly, pests like stink bugs and leaffooted bugs,” said Culumber. “Navel orangeworm deposit eggs inside, splitting pistachios, and emerging larvae feed on the kernels. The [larvae] will overwinter in any unharvested nuts and continue their lifecycle, pupating and developing into the next generations of adults in spring of next season.

“Gill’s mealybug feed with piercing-sucking mouthparts on pistachio clusters and leaves,” she continued.

Dead and dying branches, fruit-bearing rachises (stalk-bearing stems) and nut mummies provide inoculum sources for diseases, according to UCCE’s Mae Culumber (photo by T. Michailides.)

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“The feeding produces black sooty molds, which degrades kernel development and can increase shell staining.

After harvest, adult females migrate from any remaining clusters to the trunk and main scaffolds where they form white, fuzzy aggregations on the bark. Stink bugs and leaffooted bugs are generally a problem earlier in the season. After nuts set and before the pistachio shell hardens, stink bugs and leaffooted bugs can pierce the developing shell.

“Sanitation is key for control of navel orangeworm, Gill’s mealybug, stink bug and leaffooted bug,” said Culumber. “Make sure to remove and destroy as many mummies and as much plant debris as possible. For mealybug, monitor and mark areas where black sooty mold or white aggregations are found. Check these same areas for adult females and crawlers at bud break and in late spring to make treatment decisions.”

To manage navel orangeworms, UC ANR recommends that growers remove unharvested nuts in the fall and winter, and then destroy any nuts on the ground. Many pistachio growers in California have benefitted by the practice of double shaking their trees as part of their winter sanitation.

Growers are advised to wait to use insecticides.

“The most effective timing for insecticides to control mealybug is from late May to early June,” said Culumber. “Avoid postharvest treatments as they will reduce populations of natural mealybug predators that are abundant in the fall. Monitoring and management of stink bugs and leaffooted bugs begins in the following spring when stink bugs begin to emerge around April, although overwintering leaffooted bugs may be found even earlier in the year. The best cultural approach for controlling these small bugs is to clean debris in and around the orchard after harvest and during dormancy.”

ogy at UC Davis, adding that rodents and other small animals can be a threat to a pistachio orchard, with ground squirrels and pocket gophers the most serious problems.

“We recommend that growers focus on Integrated Pest Management, just like they do for weeds and insects,” he said.

Two-pronged pincer traps, such as Macabee, Cinch or Gophinater, work best when there are little or no other food options for rodents. Bait stations

are most effective for rats and mice during the winter months. Bait application for gophers is most effective within their burrow systems.

With pocket gophers, bait should be placed in the main tunnel. After locating an active tunnel, bait can be carefully deposited. Strychnine-treated grain is the most effective bait for pocket gopher control. Zinc phosphide baits can also be used and, like strych-

Continued on Page 66

Rodents

“Monitoring is always key to see what kind of pests are in the orchard,” said Roger Baldwin, Ph.D., wildlife specialist with the Department of Wildlife, Fish, and Conservation BiolNovember 2023

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65

Pocket gopher mound. Bait application for gophers is most effective within their burrow systems (photo by R. Baldwin.)

Continued from Page 65 nine, they are lethal after a single dose.

Anticoagulant baits can also be used but must be placed in larger amounts because they require multiple feedings to be effective.

Pocket gophers are a bigger threat to some orchards than to others, according to Baldwin. “We can see substantial

Ground squirrel damage to dripline. Unless the rodent population is high and/or damage is noted, action may not be needed as ground squirrels hibernate during pistachio dormancy (photo

by R. Baldwin.)

damage in young orchards,” he said, explaining gophers can seriously damage the roots. “They have less impact in a 25-year-old orchard.

“Unless the rodent population is high, maybe action is not justified,” he said, noting many ground squirrels hibernate during dormancy. “Most are not active,” he said, recommending that burrow fumigation not be done until

springtime.

Weeds

Managing weeds “depends on your attitude,” according to Phoebe Gordon, UCCE orchard crops farm advisor in Madera County.

“Some growers prefer complete control, and it would be best to apply an early winter preemergent herbicide mix that controls the ‘problem’ weeds in a particular orchard, with some post products mixed in to kill any weeds that emerged between your preharvest burndown and when you get your winter preemergent application on,” she said. “I think that this is costly, and it’s perfectly fine to leave a band of untreated weeds (aka resident winter vegetation) between the rows to get some of the benefits of cover crops and save on herbicide costs. You would of course need to treat the tree rows with preemergent herbicides.”

The advantages and disadvantages of herbicides are “a really complex topic,” said Gordon. “You need to weigh the cost of the product and application, the risk of pesticide resistance (are you rotating chemistries?), the need to treat the pest at hand, and any other environmental concerns. I know UC has strongly discouraged the use of certain pesticides during the dormant period because winter rains would wash pesticides out of orchards.”

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