September 8, 2017
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California
Harvey relief won’t jeopardize dam funds
By TIM HEARDEN
Capital Press
OROVILLE, Calif. — The
massive relief effort underway
for victims of Hurricane Har-
vey won’t jeopardize funding
to rebuild the Oroville Dam, a
Federal Emergency Manage-
ment Agency official told the
Capital Press.
While the cost of cleaning
up after Harvey’s flood wa-
ters in Texas and Louisiana
has been estimated to be in
the billions of dollars, relief
for damage from California’s
storms last winter is treated as
separate, said Victor Inge, a
FEMA external affairs officer
for the West Coast region.
“In the immediate sense,
nothing has changed here,”
said Inge, a member of an
incident management team
sent to California in February.
“We’re proceeding as busi-
ness as usual.”
FEMA did send some re-
lief workers from Califor-
nia to the Gulf Coast to help
while “at the same time we
retained enough staff so that
it would not affect the opera-
tion here and enough staff that
we’re poised for anything that
can happen,” Inge said.
Rep. Doug LaMalfa,
R-Calif., whose district in-
cludes the Lake Oroville area,
said he’s received similar
assurances from FEMA offi-
cials.
“We’ve just met with
FEMA yesterday and it’s
an ongoing issue but I think
(it) is being handled OK for
now,” LaMalfa said Aug. 30
in a message via Facebook.
State Department of Wa-
ter Resources spokeswoman
Erin Mellon said it’s “our
understanding as well” that
Oroville funding won’t be af-
fected by Harvey.
The assurances come as
crews are in the midst of a
$275.4 million repair and re-
construction project at the Or-
oville Dam, whose spillways
nearly failed in February.
Spillway ruptures led to the
two-day evacuation of about
188,000 area residents and
threatened a large portion of
the Eastern Sacramento Val-
Prune harvest starts slowly
as fruit gains in size, flavor
By TIM HEARDEN
Capital Press
RED BLUFF, Calif. —
The harvest of an anticipated
105,000-ton prune crop is off
to a late start as growers wait
for fruit with the desired size
and flavor.
A failed crop last year left
trees with such a heavy load
this season that many grow-
ers thinned their crops, but
they’re still having a hard
time getting the remaining
fruit to size, said Dani Light-
le, a University of California
Cooperative Extension farm
adviser.
“Many of them even after
thinning couldn’t get their
numbers down to where they
needed to be,” Lightle said.
In addition, the big loads
and hot afternoons have
slowed the prunes’ process of
sweetening on the tree.
“We’re getting off to a
slow start,” said Tyler Chris-
tensen, a grower in Red Bluff.
“It’s kind of late. The sugar is
still coming up in the fruit.”
While some growers are
waiting a few extra days to
send the shakers into the or-
chard, they can only wait so
long.
“You’re looking at firm-
ness to decide when to har-
vest,” Lightle said. “Once
you get to that point, it’s time
to go.”
This year’s prune crop
is expected to be more than
double the 51,000 tons of
plums that came out of dry-
ers in 2016, according to the
Tim Hearden/Capital Press
A worker pushes flats of harvested plums along a track at the Mill
Race Dryer in Red Bluff, Calif., on Aug. 29 as a bin full of finished
prunes sits in the foreground. The harvest of a heavy prune crop is
underway in California.
National Agricultural Statis-
tics Service. Rain and wind
during last year’s bloom
spoiled the crop.
This year, plum trees for
prunes took advantage of
breaks in the rain to achieve
decent pollination.
Like many fruit produc-
ers, prune growers use a re-
fractometer to measure the
sugar content in prunes. The
goal is to reach 24 meters,
or brix, of sugar, but heavy
tree loads can hinder the fruit
from reaching that goal.
ley’s $1.5 billion agriculture
industry, including rice and
tree crops and several proces-
sors along the Highway 99
corridor between Chico and
Yuba City.
While the dam’s refurbish-
ment will take several years to
complete, work on the main
spillway recently passed the
midway point for this summer
and is on track to be finished
by Nov. 1, officials said.
The ongoing construction
has complicated water allo-
cations by the State Water
Project, for which Lake Or-
oville is the main reservoir.
The project irrigates more
than 600,000 acres of Central
Valley farmland and serves
20 million customers in the
San Francisco Bay area and
Southern California.
So far, FEMA has allocat-
ed $43 million in relief for
California, which includes
Oroville and numerous other
repairs of roads, bridges and
other facilities throughout the
state that were damaged by
last winter’s heavy storms and
flooding, Inge said.
President Donald Trump
has committed up to $274
million for the Oroville proj-
ect, but the grants will come
in phases as work proceeds,
LaMalfa noted. The federal
commitments came before the
Category 4 Hurricane Harvey
made landfall in Texas on
Aug. 25, creating a flood zone
the size of Lake Michigan
and causing one of the most
expensive natural disasters in
American history.
Joel Myers, founder and
president of AccuWeather, be-
lieves Harvey will end up being
costlier than hurricanes Katrina
and Sandy combined. He pre-
dicts the disaster will cause a
$190 billion hit to the American
economy, or 1 percent of the to-
tal gross domestic product.
“The disaster is just begin-
ning in certain areas,” Myers
said in a statement. “Parts of
Houston, the United States’
fourth largest city, will be
uninhabitable for weeks and
possibly months due to water
damage, mold, disease-ridden
water and all that will follow
this 1,000-year flood.”
Almond advocates seek farm bill funding
By TIM HEARDEN
Capital Press
MODESTO, Calif. — An
advocacy group for the al-
mond industry is pushing
for more money in the 2018
Farm Bill for trade promo-
tion, conservation, research
and other initiatives.
There have been no fund-
ing increases for several
important programs in the
last two farm bills while the
challenges facing agriculture
“have exploded,” said Kelly
Covello, president of the Al-
mond Alliance of California.
On the subject of trade,
Covello said the Market Ac-
cess Program, the Foreign
Market Development Pro-
gram and Technical Assis-
tance for Specialty Crops are
among the programs that are
crucial for continued eco-
nomic growth.
However, funding for
MAP hasn’t increased since
2006 and Foreign Market De-
velopment hasn’t had a boost
since 2002, she said.
Covello wants Congress
to increase MAP funding
from $200 million to $400
million annually and bring
Foreign Market funding from
$34.5 million to $69 million
a year. She said she under-
stands it’s a tall order.
“Under the current admin-
istration there is pressure to
reduce costs within the feder-
al government, so Congress
has work to do to balance
these two objectives as they
draft the 2018 Farm Bill,”
she told the Capital Press in
an email.
Covello recently made
her pitch at a recent farm bill
listening session in Modesto
attended by several mem-
bers of the House Agriculture
Committee, including chair-
man Mike Conaway, R-Tex-
as, Doug LaMalfa and Jeff
Denham, both R-Calif., and
Dwight Evans, D-Pa.
About 75 speakers gave
three hours of testimony on
all aspects of the farm bill.
“California provides the
country with an abundance
of products, including fruits,
vegetables, dairy, nuts, live-
stock and nursery products,”
Conaway said. “This wide
cross-section of U.S. agricul-
ture makes California a crit-
ical stop as we travel across
the country hearing from pro-
ducers about improvements
to our nation’s farm policy.”
Almond production di-
rectly and indirectly con-
tributes more than $21.5 bil-
lion annually to California’s
economy and creates more
than 100,000 jobs, accord-
ing to University of Califor-
nia-Davis researchers.
Bearing acreage is expect-
ed to reach the 1 million mark
this year, more than double
the 418,000 acres that bore
almonds in 1995, according
to the National Agricultural
Statistics Service.
As growers have become
more environmentally con-
scious, of importance is the
Environmental Quality In-
centives Program, which
provides funding for meet-
ing certain standards, Cov-
ello said.
For instance, the industry
has used EQIP to upgrade
agricultural motors in the
San Joaquin Valley to help
the region meet federal air
quality standards, she said.
The difficulties come as
the industry has been trying
to market California prunes
as a higher-quality alterna-
tive to those from competi-
tors such as Chile and Argen-
tina.
Industry insiders say that
South American growers’
practice of sun-drying plums
rather than putting them in
dryers produces prunes that
are smaller, less sweet and
less nutritious, but they can
be sold for about half the
price of California prunes.
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