Author Archives: arubin

Almonds

Overview

The almond is actually an edible seed, not a nut, harvested from a flowering almond tree. These trees were originally cultivated in Southwestern Asia and the Mediterranean around 4000 BCE. They arrived in North America through Spanish settlers who brought them to California in the early 18th century. Today, the almond has become California’s top tree nut and production of the crop has grown rapidly due to the ideal temperate growing conditions. In 2002, 6,000 growers in California’s Central Valley produced one billion pounds of almonds, while in 2017, California grew a record crop estimate of 2.25 billion pounds.[1] As the California almond industry has expanded during in the 20th century, the state has risen to dominate international almond production.

 

Health Benefits and the Almond Boom

The boom in almond production over the past decade in California can be attributed to the rising popularity of “health trends” in which consumers have demanded increased production of healthy alternative proteins and snack options. Chung Yen Chen highlights in the Journal of the Science of Food and Agriculture that almonds have numerous health benefits derived from the nut’s high content of healthy fats, fiber, protein, magnesium, and vitamin E.[2] These vitamins and nutrients are helpful in preventing heart disease, lowering both blood pressure and cholesterol, improving skin health, and helping with weight loss. Given both the nut’s health benefits and its rich flavour, almonds have emerged to fit many different culinary purposes as a key ingredient in consumer products. Some consumer products that have become very popular on U.S. shelves include almond butter, almond flour, almond milk, almond protein, and almond bread.

 

California Almond Production

According to the Almond Board of California, the state is responsible for 82% of international almond production.[3] The San Joaquin valley is the center of California’s almond crop – Kern county alone has 157,000 standing almond acres. This lucrative crop has quickly become the state’s top agricultural export on a value basis, averaging $5.14 billion in annual foreign sales. As demand increases both in the U.S. and abroad, prices continue to rise every year.  The U.S. consumes 31% of the world’s almonds, the EU consumes 28%, and China consumes 12%. China is the newest and most-rapidly growing consumer on the market, with national imports of the crop growing from 50 million pounds in 2007 to nearly 250 million pounds in 2011.

 

Problems Associated with the Almond Boom

Honey Bees

Almond production is closely tied to healthy honey bee populations. However, pesticide poisoning, management practices such as the transportation of bee colonies to multiple farm locations, and exposure to new pests and pathogens have led to the significant fall in worker bee populations known as colony collapse disorder. As a result, the dependence of the almond industry on the 1.4 million bee colonies required for the pollination process, which will only expand as almond production further increases, means that the industry may face a significant future problem due to bee shortages.[4]

Land Use and Water Intensive Production Process

The recent growth in the demand for almonds has led to a 44 percent increase in land used to farm the nut over the past ten years.  Furthermore, almonds are an extremely water intensive crop; it takes twelves years to grow an almond tree to its full nut producing capacity. As a result, an incredible 1.1 gallons of water is required to produce a single almond.[5] Given that almonds are farmed in the same section of southern California that has been hit the hardest by California’s worst drought on record, almonds have been accused as an unnecessary driver of California’s water emergency. As demand for the higher-valued almond crops has grown, farmers have replaced more water-efficient crops like lettuce and strawberries with the almond. [6] Almond trees also have no fallow period and, thus, have to remain watered even during the most intense years of drought. Overall, almonds take up approximately ten percent of California’s water annually.

Elite Control of Almond Industry

Due to this high water use, the industry has been critiqued as a “lucrative multibillion dollar industry in the middle of the state’s worst drought in recent history.”[7] The few elites in control of the almond industry benefit from California’s water usage at the expense of the majority. For example, billionaires Lynda and Stewart Resnick control the San Joaquin valley’s largest groundwater bank that irrigates their 125,000 acres of almonds and pistachio farms in the region.[8]  Some critics of the almond industry have thus argued that California’s almond elites are essentially profiting by shipping out “virtual water” to places like China during a severe water crisis, as 68 percent of almonds produced in California end up overseas.[9]

Harm to Other State Industries

Finally, the almond industry’s use of water has directly harmed other state industries, especially California’s fisheries. Currently, thousands of endangered king salmon in northern California’s Klamath River are threatened by low water levels caused by the diversion of water from northern California to almond farms in the southern portion of the state.[10] Facing a multi-year drought, California’s rivers have become too shallow and warm for salmon at the same time that record production of almonds has been diverting more and more water from the Sacramento delta.

 

Are Almonds Really to Blame?

Others have argued that California’s almond farmers face too much of the blame for the state’s water crisis. The meat and dairy industry substantially surpasses the almond industry in water use, as the crop that requires the most water in California is alfalfa grown for dairy cow feed. Additionally, a kilogram of beef requires 15,000 liters of water to produce in comparison to the 8,000 liters of water used to produce a kilogram of almonds. This suggests that almonds may be a less water-intensive alternative source of protein.[11] Almond farmers have also made substantial investments in better technology to manage water use. Additionally, the high profits farmers earn from almond production enables them to continue growing less profitable crops, such as tomatoes, which are an important part of the food system.[12] Finally, a study published by Yale revealed that almonds have a remarkably small carbon footprint, as its co-products are used as sources of renewable energy.[13] This suggests that there are tradeoffs in almond production between its water intensive production and its relatively low CO2 footprint.

California Waterfix Lawsuit

In 2017, a coalition of environmental groups, local governments, and others in the Sacramento Delta area attempted to halt the construction of Gov. Jerry Brown’s Delta Tunnels Project that would divert water away from the Sacramento Delta in northern California. The controversial state project, which is known as the “California Waterfix,” is part of an effort to maintain high levels of fresh water delivery to almond farmers in the San Joaquin Valley and Southern California cities.[14] A lawsuit was filed against the state by a diverse group of plaintiffs. This group = included an alliance of fisherman whose livelihoods depended on ensuring healthy water levels in the Delta, the Winnemem Wintu Native American tribe dependent on salmond for sustenance and continuance of the tribe’s cultural traditions, local cities afraid of losing their water, and environmental groups including Restore the Delta and the Sierra Club California who feared that the tunnels would bring environmental harm to the Delta’s fragile ecosystem by inevitably robbing the delta of more fresh water.[15] Gov. Brown’s tunnels have become an extremely divisive environmental issue in California, as it pits almond farmers against fishermen, Northern California against Southern California, and agribusiness against environmentalists. Brown has supported the tunnels due to the belief that California’s prosperous almond industry cannot afford to gamble on an unreliable water supply that does not meet its needs during times of drought. He thus believes that the tunnels would help to stabilize the state’s enormous agricultural economy.  Although the California Waterfix Lawsuit is still being contested in court, construction of the Delta Tunnels Project could begin as soon as 2019.

Foot Notes

[1]Almond Board of California, “Industry Statistics and Maps,” 2018, accessed April 19, 2018, http://www.almonds.com/processors/resources/crop-forecast.

[2]  Chung Yen Chen, Karen Lapsley, and Jeffery Blumberg, “A nutrition and health perspective on almonds,” Journal of the Science of Food and Agriculture 86, no. 14 (2006): 2245-2250. https:doi.org/10.1021/acs.jafc.6b00857.

[3]Almond Board of California, “Almond Almanac 2015,” 2015, accessed April 19, 2015, http://www.almonds.com/sites/default/files/content/attachments/2015_almanac.pdf.

[4]Francis Ratnieks and Norman Carreck, “Clarity on Honey Bee Collapse?,” Science 327, no. 5962 (2010): 152-153. https:doi.org/10.1126/science.1185563.

[5]James Hamblin, “The Dark Side of Almond Use,” The Atlantic, August 28, 2014, https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/08/almonds-demon-nuts/379244/.

[6]Amy Westervelt, “Is it fair to blame almond farmers for California’s’ drought?,” The Guardian, April 13, 2015, https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2015/apr/13/is-it-fair-to-blame-almond-farmers-for-californias-drought.

[7]Hamblin, “The Dark Side of Almond Use.”

[8]Westervelt, “Is it fair to blame almond farmers.”

[9]Dan Charles, “Beyond Almonds: A Rogue’s Gallery of Guzzlers in California’s Drought,” NPR, April 12, 2015, https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2015/04/12/398757250/beyond-almonds-a-rogues-gallery-of-guzzlers-in-californias-drought.

[10]Alastair Bland, “California Drought Has Wild Salmon Competing With Almonds For Water,” NPR, August 21, 2014, https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2014/08/21/342167846/california-drought-has-wild-salmon-competing-with-almonds-for-water.

[11]Avery Kamila, “Meat and dairy products stampede past almonds in water-use arena: to save on water, eat a veggie burger,” Portland Press Herald, September 23, 2015, https://www.pressherald.com/2015/09/23/vegetarian-kitchen-meat-and-dairy-products-stampede-past-almonds-in-water-use-arena/.

[12]Tremayne Wilkons, “The drought through the eyes of an almond farmer,” The Pioneer, July 8, 2015, https://thepioneeronline.com/27145/artsentertainment/the-drought-through-the-eyes-of-an-almond-farmer/.

[13]Alissa Kendall, “Life Cycle-based Assessment of Energy Use and Greenhouse Gas Emissions in Almond Production,” Journal of Industrial Ecology 19, no. 6 (2015): 931. https://doi.org/10.1111/jiec.12332.

[14]Andrew Gumbel, “Nut empire battles conservationists over water tunnel for California orchards,” The Guardian, August 22, 2015, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/aug/21/california-water-drought-almond-pistachio-tunnel.

[15]Dale Kasler, “Dozens are suing to block Delta tunnels. Will it Matter?,” The Fresno Bee, August 21, 2017, http://www.fresnobee.com/news/state

 

Bibliography

Almond Board of California. “Almond Almanac 2015.” Accessed April 19, 2015. http://www.almonds.com/sites/default/files/content/attachments/2015_almanac.pdf.

 

Almond Board of California. “Industry Statistics and Maps 2018.”  Accessed April 19, 2018. http://www.almonds.com/processors/resources/crop-forecast.

 

Bland, Alastair. “California Drought Has Wild Salmon Competing With Almonds For Water.” NPR, August 21, 2014. https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2014/08/21/342167846/california-drought-has-wild-salmon-competing-with-almonds-for-water.

 

Charles, Dan. “Beyond Almonds: A Rogue’s Gallery of Guzzlers in California’s Drought.” NPR, April 12, 2015. https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2015/04/12/398757250/beyond-almonds-a-rogues-gallery-of-guzzlers-in-californias-drought.  

 

Chung Yen Chen, Karen Lapsley, and Jeffery Blumberg, “A nutrition and health perspective on almonds,” Journal of the Science of Food and Agriculture 86, no. 14 (2006): 2245-2250.   

 

Gumbel, Andrew. “Nut empire battles conservationists over water tunnel for California orchards.” The Guardian, August 22, 1015. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/aug/21/california-water-drought-almond-pistachio-tunnel.

 

Hamblin, James. “The Dark Side of Almond Use.” The Atlantic, August 28, 2014. https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/08/almonds-demon-nuts/379244/.

Kamila, Avery. “Meat and dairy products stampede past almonds in water-use arena: to save on water, eat a veggie burger.” Portland Press Herald, September 23, 2015. https://www.pressherald.com/2015/09/23/vegetarian-kitchen-meat-and-dairy-products-stampede-past-almonds-in-water-use-arena/.

 

Kasler, Dale. “Dozens are suing to block Delta tunnels. Will it Matter?” The Fresno Bee, August 21, 2017. http://www.fresnobee.com/news/state/california/article168497632.html.

 

Kendall, Alissa.“Life Cycle-based Assessment of Energy Use and Greenhouse Gas Emissions in Almond Production.” Journal of Ecology 19, no. 6 (2015): 931-1102. https://doi.org/10.1111/jiec.12332.

 

Ratnieks, Francis and Norman Carreck. “Clarity on Honey Bee Collapse?” Science 27, no. 5982 (2010): 152-153. https:doi.org/10.1126/science.1185563.

 

Westervelt, Amy. “Is it fair to blame almond farmers for California’s drought?” The Guardian, April 13, 2015. https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2015/apr/13/is-it-fair-to-blame-almond-farmers-for-californias-drought.  

Wilkoms, Tremayne. “The drought through the eyes of an almond farmer.” The Pioneer, July 8, 2015. https://thepioneeronline.com/27145/artsentertainment/the-drought-through-the-eyes-of-an-almond-farmer/.

 

Yen Chen, Chung, Karen Lapsley, and Jeffrey Blumberg. “A nutrition and health perspective on almonds.” Journal of the Science of Food and Agriculture 86, no. 14 (2006): 2245-2250. https:doi.org/10.1021/acs.jafc.6b00857.

 

Strawberries

Overview
The strawberry is a genus of over twenty species of low growing plants in the rose family and are found throughout the temperate regions of the Northern Hemisphere.[1] The crop consists of white flowers that produce a red edible piece of flesh on the enlarged flower receptacle, which technically classifies the strawberry as a seed rather than a berry.[2] Although initially the strawberry was cultivated in Europe during the 18th century, by the 19th century, countries consuming strawberries developed their own varieties specifically suitable for the climate, day length, altitude, and type of production required in the particular region. The plant succeeds in a wide variety of soils, climates, and situations and is highly perishable, which leads strawberries to have to be sold soon after they are harvested. There is a market for both frozen and fresh strawberries, with a current shift in production towards the more lucrative fresh strawberry market.

Health Benefits of the Strawberry
Demand for the strawberry has increased as a result of its numerous health benefits, which are a product of the crop’s low caloric content and significant amount of phenolics and micronutrients including vitamin C, folate, and vitamin K. As reviewed extensively by Sadia Afrin, these properties of the strawberry provide the crop with the ability to help combat the growth of cancerous cells, prevent anemia, aid in the prevention of obesity, and reduce the risk of high blood pressure.[3]

Issues of Pesticide Residues
Despite their natural health benefits, strawberries once again topped the Environmental Working Group’s 2018 list of the “dirty dozen” fruits and vegetables. The non-profit and non-partisan environmental organization randomly sampled 38,000 non-organically sourced strawberries and found that ⅓ of all samples contained ten or more different pesticides, with one sample containing residues of twenty-two different pesticides.[4] Pesticide use on strawberries is extremely high since the crop remains in the ground for one to two years and must be protected from pests. In 2014, although the USDA found that “overall pesticide chemical residues on strawberries were not at levels to be a safety concern to consumers, the scientists at EWG disagree and encourage consumers to buy organic as a way to protect themselves from the harmful effects of pesticides.[5] Pesticide application can also entail environmental justice issues, since strawberry harvesters are often Mexican immigrants and people living, going to school, and working near farms where pesticides are applied.

National Strawberry Production
The US produces 1.5 million tons of strawberries annually, which accounts for ⅓ of total world production. The strawberry is an extremely lucrative commodity and can yield more money per acre than any other US crop.[6] The dominant state producer of strawberries is California (61 percent of all US strawberries produced).[7] Just five counties, including four in California and one in Florida, account for over 75 percent of the nation’s strawberry acreage. California’s most significant regions of production overlap with the areas of the state that have been most affected by the drought, which has led to a 10 percent decline in total strawberry acreage in the state since the drought began. The country receiving the largest amount of US strawberry exports is Canada (83 percent of total exports) and the top importer of strawberries to the US is Mexico (82%). The closeness of the top exporting and importing countries to the US is a result of the crop being highly perishable.

Strawberry Farming – Small Scale Agriculture
As Miriam J. Wells highlights in her ethnographic account Strawberry Fields, specific commodity characteristics of the strawberry encourage small scale farming.[8] Timing and coordination of tasks for successful strawberry farming are important since times for planting, harvesting, and applying pesticides are extremely precise and crucial to obtaining a high crop yield. Strawberries are also in the ground longer than a lot of vegetable crops and must be picked by hand in a heavily supervised harvesting process since the crop is extremely fragile. As a result, fresh shippers like Driscoll generally stay out of the growing business. This gives farmers an edge, especially since fresh shippers are often short on fruit, and has led them to leverage their advantages through advisory boards including the California Strawberry Advisory Board (CSAB) and the Processing Strawberry Advisory Board (PSAB).[9] Finally, many strawberry growers on the West Coast are immigrants, often of Chinese, Japanese, and Mexican descent who have worked their way up as families from farmers to growers over generations. The strawberry industry over the years has thus been a way for immigrant families to achieve success in the US through hard work and dedication to farming.

Centrality of Harvest Labor and the Reliance on a Migrant Peasantry
Properties of strawberries, including most importantly the fragility of the fresh commodity, have discouraged mechanized harvesting of the crop.[10] As a result, while technological advancements in the industry have increased productivity and decreased the need for non-harvest labor, the need for harvest labor has only increased as strawberry farms have become more productive. As a result of the centrality of labor to the strawberry harvest, labor has become the largest single component of farmer costs and can span from 50 to 70 percent of the total costs of business.
Unfortunately, as highlighted in the revealing ethnographic accounts Strawberry Fields and Eric Schlosser’s “In the Strawberry Fields,” work on the California strawberry farms is extremely hazardous and reliant on immigrants, both legal and illegal, who are often taken advantage of. Schlosser best describes the hardships of work by writing that “the average migrant worker is a twenty-eight-year-old male, born in Mexico, who earns about $5,000 a year for twenty-five weeks of farm work. His life expectancy is forty-nine years.”[11] Referred to as the fruit of the devil by workers, the harvest takes an enormous toll on workers’ backs and lungs, exposes them to thirteen hours of work daily in a hot dry climate, and leaves them susceptible to the long-term health risks of exposure to pesticides on the farm.[12] Labor camps that are extremely minimalist and provide a bed and two meals a day for $80 a week are also common and strongly resented by workers who often have no other choice for living arrangements.

Cost Cutting Strategies
There are numerous strategies that farmers adopt to decrease cost inputs of labor and thus expand profit margins. The simplest strategy is to pay workers, who are often illegal immigrants with little leverage, less than minimum wage. Additional tactics include paying on a piece-rate wage and a long history of sharecropping seeking that shifts the financial risks of strawberry farming off growers and onto migrant workers, who often do not understand the contracts they are signing and get heavily in debt.[13] While it is important to know that not all growers are doing this, by relying on poor migrants from Mexico, California growers have developed a wage structure that discourages American citizens from seeking farm work since wages are too low to provide for a family in the US. As a result, migrants have an enormous effect on the California and US economy and are integral to the success of the strawberry industry.

Protest and Change
Recently, strawberry workers have made headlines in the news by forming unions such as Familias Unidas por la Justicia in Washington and La Alianza in San Quintin Mexico.[14] These unions focus their efforts on revealing what life is like for harvesters and the hardships that they endure with the hopes of fostering changes within the strawberry industry through nonviolent action. The unions have sought to expose issues of wage theft, child labors, issues of migrant labor, lack of work breaks, and cramped housing conditions at Sakuma Brothers Farm in Washington and Berrymex in San Quintin. Familias Unidas por la Justicia organized the Boycott Driscoll campaign, which consisted of various protests on the West coast and led the union to reach a tentative deal in 2017 with Sakuma Brothers Farms to increase workers’ wages. President of Familias Unidas Ramon Torres called it a great deal for berry pickers and described the tentative deal as achieving some of the best wages farm workers have ever received in the state of Washington.[15] In contrast, not much has changed despite workers unionizing in San Quintin, where some workers are still making around six dollars a day for twelve hours work.[16] This could incite a shift in strawberry production from California to the other side of the Mexican border, since unions have so far had less influence in Mexico and thus the input costs of labor remain significantly lower in the country than in the United States.

Foot Notes

[1]Encyclopedia Britannica, sv. “Strawberry,” Chicago:Encyclopedia Britannica, 2016, accessed April 18, 2018, https://www.britannica.com/plant/strawberry.

[2]Ibid.

[3]Sadia Afrin, “Promising Health Effects of the Strawberry: A Focus on Clinical Studies,” J. Agric. Food Chem.64, no.  22 (2016): 4435–4449.

[4]Susan Scutti, “Strawberries again top 2018’s ‘Dirty Dozen’ Fruits and Veggies,” CNN, April 10, 2018, https://www.cnn.com/2018/04/10/health/2018-dirty-dozen-fruits-and-veggies-ewg/index.html.

[5]Ibid.

[6]US Department of Agriculture, “US Strawberry Industry,” datasheet, updated through June 2013. http://usda.mannlib.cornell.edu/MannUsda/viewDocumentInfo.do?documentID=1381.  The data describes the fresh and processed strawberry markets, including average yield, production, value, and trade and also contains state level production sheets.

[7]California Strawberry Commission (website), accessed April 18, 2018, http://www.calstrawberry.com/. This source provides extensive up to date statistics and information on California strawberry production.

[8]Miriam J Wells, Strawberry Fields: Politics, Class, and Work in California Agriculture (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996), 39.

[9]Ibid., 43.

[10]Ibid., 49.

[11]Eric Schlosser, “In the Strawberry Fields,” The Atlantic, November 1995, https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1995/11/in-the-strawberry-fields/305754/.

[12]Ibid.

[13]Ibid.

[14]Esther Yu Hsi Lee, “Berry Farmworkers Toil 12 Hours a Day for $6. Now they are demanding a raise,” Thinkprogress,April 1, 2017. https://thinkprogress.org/berry-farmworkers-toil-12-hours-a-day-for-6-now-theyre-demanding-a-raise-ea4f5800caf8/.

[15]Jim Brunner, “Farmworker union reaches tentative contract deal with Sakuma berry farmers,” The Seattle Times, June 11, 2017. https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/union-says-it-has-reached-contract-deal-with-sakuma-bros-berry-farm/.

[16]Lee, “Berry Farmworkers Toil 12 Hours a Day.”

Bibliography

Afrin, Sadia. “Promising Health Effects of the Strawberry: A Focus on Clinical Studies.” J. Agric. Food Chem. 64, no. 22 (2016): 4435-4449. https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.jafc.6b00857.

Brunner, Jim. “Farmworker union reaches tentative contract deal with Sajuma berry farmers.” The Seattle Times, June 11, 2017, https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/union-says-it-has-reached-contract-deal-with-sakuma-bros-berry-farm/.

California Strawberry Commission (website). Accessed April 18, 2018. http://www.calstrawberry.com/.

Encyclopedia Britannica, sv. “Strawberry,” Chicago:Encyclopedia Britannica, 2016, last modified September 14, 2016, https://www.britannica.com/plant/strawberry.

Schlosser, Eric. “In the Strawberry Fields.” The Atlantic, November 1995. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1995/11/in-the-strawberry-fields/305754/.

Scutti, Susan. “Strawberries again top 2018’s ‘Dirty Dozen’ Fruits and Veggies.” CNN, April 10, 2018. https://www.cnn.com/2018/04/10/health/2018-dirty-dozen-fruits-and-veggies-ewg/index.html.

US Department of Agriculture, “US Strawberry Industry,” datasheet, updated through June 2013. http://usda.mannlib.cornell.edu/MannUsda/viewDocumentInfo.do?documentID=1381.

Wells, Miriam J. Strawberry Fields: Politics, Class, and Work in California Agriculture. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999.

Yu Hsi Lee, Esther. “Berry Farmworkers Toil 12 Hours a Day for $6. Now they are demanding a raise.” Thinkprogress, April 1, 2017. https://thinkprogress.org/berry-farmworkers-toil-12-hours-a-day-for-6-now-theyre-demanding-a-raise-ea4f5800caf8/.