Madera CountyFarM Bureau

July 2015 Vol. 5, No. 7agriculture today

See Page 4 See Page 2

Madera county FarM Bureau seeking executive director see

joB description on page 2 or visit MaderaFB.coM For More

inForMation.

the internet versus the great caliFornia drought

CaleNdarJuly

21 MCFB Board of Directors Meeting, 12:00 p.m., MCFB Ben Hayes Hall, 1102 South Pine Street, Madera (559) 674-8871, info @ www.mad-erafb.com

august

4 Executive Committee Meeting, 1:00 p.m., MCFB Conference Room, 1102 South Pine Street, Madera (559) 674-8871, info @ www.maderafb.com

2 | July 2015 Madera County Farm Bureau

Madera County Farm Bureau news2015 - 2016 executive Committee

President: Jay MahilFirst Vice President: Vacant

Second Vice President/Treasurer: Michael NaitoSecretary: Nick Davis

Appointed by President: Dennis Meisner JrAppointed by President: Tom Rogers

directors at largeMathew Andrew

Ryan CosynsStephen ElgorriagaMichele LasgoitySteve MassaroNeil McDougald

Pat Ricchiuti

Robert CadenazziH. Clay DaultonJason Erickson

Jennifer MarkarianScott MaxwellJeff McKinney

Robert SahatjianChris Wylie

California Farm Bureau - district 9 director Anthony Toso

California Farm Bureau CommitteePolicy Recommendation – H. Clay Daulton

Air & Environmental Issues – H. Clay Daulton

California Farm Bureau Commodity representativesBee – Ryan Cosyns

Beef – H. Clay DaultonGrape – Jay Mahil

Specialty Crops – Tom Rogers

Office StaffExecutive Director: Vacant

Executive Assistant: Normalee G. Castillo

Madera County Farm Bureau1102 South Pine Street

Madera, CA 93637(559) 674-8871; www.maderafb.com

advertising/PublishingMid-Valley Publishing

1130 G Street, Reedley, CA 93654

advertising SalesDebra Leak

(559) 638-2244

editorNormalee G. Castillo

Periodical PostagePaid at Fresno, California 93706

POSTMaSTerSend address changes to:

Madera County Farm Bureau1102 South Pine Street, Madera, CA 93637

The Madera County Farm Bureau does not assume responsibility for

statements by advertisers or for productsadvertised in Madera County Farm Bureau.

To BECoME A DoNoR CALL 674-8871

new MCFB donors

robert G. Toschidarrell Vincent Farmsed le Tourneau dVM

randolph Milesdarren G. Bishel

elgorriaga Harvesting Inc.Michael C. Horasanian

Tri-Iest dairyag Industrial Supply

Michael S. NaitoVictor Packing Inc.

antonio Vitoria

MCFB would like to thank all of our members who help support our work through their voluntary contributions

for the months of June & July.

Farm Bureau Membership Benefits

InsuranceAllied Insurance,

Nationwide Agribusiness, VPI Pet Insurance

News and entertainmentAgAlert, California Country Mag & T.V.

VehiclesGMC Trucks, Vans and SUV’s, Vehicle Rentals,

Avis, Budget, Budget Trucks, Hertz

do-It-YourselfGrainger, Kelly-Moore Paints,

Dunn Edwards Paints

TravelChoice Hotels, Wyndham Hotels

Business ServicesAnderson Marketing, Farm Bureau Bank,

Farm Employers Laborers Service, Land’s End Business Outfitters

Health ServicesClear Value Hearing,

Farm Bureau Prescription discount program, LensCrafters, Preferred Alliance

Contact the MCFB Office at (559) 674-8871or www.maderafb.com for details.

Hello all July is starting off to be a hot one with temps expected to be above 100 for the next few weeks so plan on staying cool. Also with that being said make sure everyone has their heat stress policies in effect and most importantly make sure your employees have proper shade and ample drinking water. The crops are starting to progress very quickly, looking at almonds on our ranch we have started our hull split spray 1

week earlier than last year which was even early last year. Same goes with our grapes they are softening early this year as well. Hopefully with this harvest we will start sooner so we all can have harvest com-

pleted before this year’s El Niño season??? I would like to take this moment to con-

gratulate and wish our Executive Director Anja Raudabaugh on her new position with Western United Dairyman. She has helped serve and direct the mission of this Farm Bureau very well and she will be greatly missed! Please check our website for information on the open position and qualifications.

I would also like to introduce the newest member of the Madera County Farm Bureau family.

Executive Assistant Norma and her husband Roy Castillo welcomed Roy Jr. on April 26, 2015.

I hope everyone had a great and safe 4th of

July while we celebrated this great country Happy 239th Birthday.

President’s Message

Jay MahilPresident

Roy Castillo Jr.

To BECoME A MEMBER CALL

674-8871

new MCFB Members

NAME CITY P/C/BPacific Metal Fab Design Madera Business SupportAgrian Inc. Fresno ProducerRoger Belden Madera ProducerDarren Bishel Madera ProducerEsther Bishel Madera ProducerRex Dhatt Stockton ProducerCharanjit Mahil Chowchilla ProducerSohalia Mojadaddi Madera ConsumerSynagro Earthwise Organics Chowchilla ProducerRudolf Walker Madera Producer

MCFB welcomes the following new agricultural (producer), associate

(consumer) Collegiate, and Business Support members who joined in

June & July:

Madera county Farm Bureau seeking executive directorQUALIFICATIONS and JOB REQUIREMENTS:

• Background in Agriculture• Bachelor’s Degree from an accredited university• Highly organized with excellent verbal, written, and

public speaking skills

• Fluency in Microsoft Office is mandatory, QuickBooks proficiency is a plus

• Multimedia and social networking skills a plus

Salary will be based on experience. Health, Vision, Dental and Retirement Benefits provided in a package.Candidates must submit a 1 page cover letter and 1 page resume to office@maderafb.com

APPLY BY JULY 16th, 2015

Madera County Farm Bureau July 2015 | 3

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See Rights; Page 11

Lawsuits over California water rights are a fight a century in the makingBy Bettina Boxall Los Angeles Times

The lawsuits hit the courts within days of the state mailing notices to some Central Valley irrigation districts: They were to stop diverting from rivers and streams because there wasn’t enough water to go around.

Unsurprising as the move may be in this fourth year of drought, to the districts, the notices amounted to an assault on water rights they have held for more than a century.

“This is an attempted water grab,” said Steve Knell, general manager of the Oakdale Irrigation District, one of several San Joaquin Valley agencies suing the state to block the curtailments. “It is a power move and we will fight tooth and nail to make sure that this doesn’t happen.”

The drought has highlighted the arcane workings of California’s water rights system, one that rewards those who got here first and underpins agriculture’s position as the state’s dominant water user.

The irrigators’ rush to court shows how deeply entrenched the system is — and how any attempt to substantially remake it would encounter a legal and political minefield.

In California and much of the West, most rights to surface water are based on when flows were first diverted and used, a priority system known as “first in time, first in right.” The most senior rights predate 1914, when

the state started to issue diversion permits. In times of drought, those with junior rights are cut off first to leave water for more senior diverters.

This year and last, the State Water Resources Control Board told thousands of junior rights holders in the Central Valley to stop drawing water from rivers and streams. Then on June 12, regulators reached further back, sending curtailment notices to more than 100 districts and growers with rights dating to 1903.

On Friday, it issued additional orders curtailing four of San Francisco’s early 1900s rights as well as others that date to the mid-1800s. More are expected as flows continue to decline this summer.

Regulators had halted senior diversions once before, in the severe 1976-1977 drought. But it is unclear how widely those curtailments were enforced or whether any legal challenges were filed.

This time, irrigation districts lost no time challenging the state. They have already filed four separate lawsuits with multiple claims.

Chief among their arguments is that because California didn’t start administering water rights until 1914, the state has no jurisdiction over pre-1914 rights. It is up to the senior rights holders themselves to enforce the rights’ pecking order, the irrigators say, and the oldest districts have not complained that others are taking their

water.Moreover, the districts say the state hasn’t

fully enforced this year’s junior curtailments: The state board revealed last week that compliance forms had been filed for about a third of the notices issued this year, the vast majority of which deal with junior rights.

“The state … is coming in trying to regulate people who cannot be regulated for the benefit of people who don’t want to be regulated,” said attorney Steve Herum, who filed one of the lawsuits on behalf of the Banta-Carbona Irrigation District.

Federal and state agencies have in recent decades restricted senior diversions for environmental reasons: to protect imperiled fish and maintain water quality. But in many respects, senior diverters have been left alone. The state board doesn’t even know how much water many of them are taking from California’s rivers and streams.

Although reporting requirements have been on the books since 1966 and were

beefed up by the Legislature in 2009, they have been largely ignored. According to the state board, a majority of senior rights diversions aren’t being measured and reported, a fact that prompted lawmakers this month to again tighten the filing regulations.

“Water-use data in California is a huge problem,” said attorney Eric Garner, an adjunct professor of water law at USC. “You cannot manage a resource without data.”

The lack of good diversion information raises the question of how the state board can determine what rights to curtail and when. “We know well enough from the reports we get and from other estimates available,” said Andrew Sawyer, the state board’s assistant chief counsel. “We definitely could use better data.”

Sawyer called the lawsuits premature, because the curtailments are technically notices, not orders. But if the districts

4 | July 2015 Madera County Farm Bureau

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The Internet Versus The Great California DroughtBy Aaron TilleyForbes Magazine

Richard Martinez keeps a close eye on his soil. The manager of organic production at Deardorff Family Farms in Oxnard, Calif. used to walk his celery fields, grabbing fistfuls of dirt and rubbing them between his palms to tell if the earth was moist enough. Now he just takes out his iPhone. With a dose of technology Martinez is doing his part to reduce his water use and–joined by dozens of cases like his–helping save America’s biggest economy from environmental ruin.

California is going through one of the worst droughts in the state’s history–entire lakes, rivers and reservoirs are drying up. California Governor Jerry Brown called for a statewide reduction in water usage by 25%. Inspectors are fanning out and could levy fines of $1,000 per day and $2,500 per acre-foot of water for those taking more than they’re allotted.

While Californians may not be happy with this predicament, the drought is a gusher for a growing number of tech startups in the emerging world of the Internet of Things, the buzzy term for the trend of connecting devices and data in the physical realm to the Internet. Getting more sensors into the environment will help thousands of farms, businesses and cities figure out where water is going and how it can be diverted for the most

efficient use. Agriculture is the area most ripe for collecting more and higher-quality data. Farming accounts for nearly 80% of human-related water usage in the state, according to the Public Policy Institute of California.

“Water so far has pretty primitive technology being applied to it,” says David Sedlak, co-director of the Berkeley Water Center at the University of California, Berkeley and author of the book Water 4.0: The Past, Present, and Future of the World’s Most Vital Resource . While tech is no cure for the West’s extensive water crisis, it’s one of the more powerful tools we have.HORTAU

Deardorff Family Farms has been in Richard Martinez’s family since 1937. He grows organic lettuce, kale and water-intensive crops such as celery on 350 acres outside of Oxnard. Having suffered through two previous droughts, he’s never seen conditions this bad. Martinez is under strict limits and has to figure out where he can cut back on water just enough before it starts killing off his crops.

In 2013 Martinez bought his first solar-powered soil sensors, but with the drought under way last year he bought seven more, installing them throughout the fields. Made by Hortau, a company in San Luis Obispo, Calif., the hubs have a cellular radio and are crammed full of interchangeable sensors for measuring variables such as temperature, humidity, oxygen, rainfall intensity and

solar radiation. Hortau builds its own sensor to measure soil’s ability to retain water, crucial for understanding precisely how much water is needed to keep a crop going.

“You can cut water, but if you cut too much, two days later you could come back and your crop could be gone,” says Martinez.

Farmers using the system can achieve on average 20% to 30% of water savings, Hortau says. Sensors cost between $10 and $50 per acre per year depending on the crop. The company’s growth was sluggish in its first several years, but since 2008, once cellular modems got cheap enough to put into each sensor, Hortau has been growing more than 50% a year on average. Some 80% of its sales are in California.WATERSMART

For most homeowners and small businesses, the quarterly water bill is an enigma shrouded in a mystery. It goes up and down, and there’s not much you can do about it. WaterSmart is trying to demystify usage in order to get people to cut back. The San Francisco startup engages with water utilities to hoover up all their customers’ meter readings and mashes up this information with dozens of related data points on the placement and age of homes, climate and occupancy rates. The startup collects nearly 700 million data points each hour to help utilities find leaks and identify which homes or neighborhoods are the heaviest or most anomalous water users.

Just as Opower does with “electricity bill-shaming,” WaterSmart sends homeowners and businesses personalized reports that show them how much water they’re using compared with customers nearby and scores them based on their thrift. WaterSmart also sends customers messages on their smartphone if there’s a leak or if they’re allowed to water the garden on a particular day. On average, WaterSmart can cut a utility’s water usage by 5% annually.

Much of the data WaterSmart is collecting from utilities is from regular dumb old water meters, but “smart meters” (those with wireless modems attached) are rolling out widely. Smart meters were 18% of the total in North America in 2013 and are estimated to increase to 29% by 2020, according to research firm IHS . Says WaterSmart CEO Robin Gilthorpe, “The more sources of fine-grained data, the better.”WELLNTEL

Once people start to run out of water on the surface, they begin looking underground. Typically, California depends on groundwater for 30% to 35% of its consumption. During droughts that usage can shoot up to 60%. The big problem: Nobody knows how much water is down there.

The traditional way of measuring well-water levels has been to send down a tap with a moisture probe at the tip. Data is

Madera County Farm Bureau July 2015 | 5

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Why smaller means sweeter for this summer’s fruitBy Russ ParsonsLos Angeles Times

If you think this summer’s fruit seems smaller than you remember, you’re right. And if you think it tastes better, you’re probably right as well. The two things are connected and both are caused by the crazy winter that wasn’t.

Almost across the board, farmers say, peaches, plums, nectarines, apricots and even cherries are much smaller than normal. But smaller does not mean lesser. While that fruit may not be quite as impressive to look at as in the past, the flavor more than makes up for it.

“Fruit this year is running one to 1½ sizes smaller than normal,” says popular farmers market stone fruit grower Fitzgerald Kelly. “But boy, it has been eating really good.”

Partly the smaller size is due to a lack of water brought on by irrigation restrictions caused by the four-year drought. When fruit is deprived of water, it’s naturally smaller — most peaches, for example, are almost 90% water.

“That would tend to make the fruit richer in flavor, up to a certain point,” says David Karp, a principal with Andy Mariani at Xanadu Orchards in Santa Clara County and a longtime farmers market columnist at

the Los Angeles Times.He offers as an example the dry-farmed

Royal apricots from Force Field Farm near Santa Paula, which made a brief appearance at the Santa Monica farmers market this spring.

“They looked like hell,” Karp says. “They were tiny and scruffy looking with spots. They were sunburned. But it was like tasting apricot candy or apricot jam. They were rich and complex, the best apricots in the market if you like intensity of flavor.”

But it’s more complicated than just lack of water, says Kevin Day, a pomologist with the University of California’s Cooperative Extension. Day has studied tree fruit for more than 30 years and has been recognized by the National Peach Assn. for his work.

Day says a more important factor was how warm this winter was. That pushed fruit to go through the early stages of its development more rapidly than it normally would, winding up smaller.

Think of fruit growth this way: First, there is the building of the balloon — the creation of all of the cells that will make up the eventual piece of fruit. When that ends, the filling of the balloon begins — with water, sugar and nutrients.

The eventual maximum size of the fruit is set within the first few weeks. After that,

even if the trees were given the maximum amount of water, the fruit would still only grow so big.

“The pumps that pump sugar later in the season run at the same rate no matter how big the fruit is,” Day says. But this year “instead of filling a big reservoir, they’re filling a smaller reservoir, so naturally the fruit tastes sweeter.”

Because of the exceedingly warm winter, he says, most fruits were “just destined to be runts this year, and as a consequence, they’re destined to have a higher sugar potential.”

It’s not like farmers didn’t see this coming. In fact, famed Fresno peach farmer David Mas Masumoto and his artist-farmer daughter Nikiko devised a marketing trial around it, calling these fruits “Petite Peaches” and glorifying the whole “smaller is better” aesthetic.

This summer they deprived certain portions of each orchard of water, giving them just enough to keep the trees alive, and knowing that the resulting fruit would be even smaller. They say they were able to reduce water use by 25% without harming flavor. In fact, Nikiko Masumoto says, “in all of the varieties, the fruit either tasted just as great or, in a couple of varieties, we thought the small fruit actually tasted better.”

U.S. Visa System Back OnlineBy Felicia Schwartz and Miriam JordanWall Street Journal

WASHINGTON—All overseas embassies and consulates are able to issue visas again after a system failure earlier this month disrupted their ability to do so across the globe.

“It is too soon to get an exact estimate” of the financial losses caused nationally by the delay in the arrival of thousands of farm laborers, said Jason Resnick, general counsel for Western Growers, a large association. “In California, we know that crop losses were at over a million dollars a day for over two weeks of the delay.”

The losses were primarily in strawberries and other berries. Employers also had to pay for lodging and food for workers stranded at the border, he said.

The State Department began repairing the technical problem last week and brought the system fully back online

See onine; Page 6

6 | July 2015 Madera County Farm Bureau

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Recycled oil field wastewater is clean, Chevron test results showBy Julie CartLos Angeles Times

Results of the most recent testing of recycled oil field wastewater that Chev-ron sells to Kern County farmers for ir-rigation showed no traces of methylene chloride, an industrial solvent that had appeared in previous testing conducted by a clean water advocacy group.

Chevron sells 21 million gallons of treated oil field wastewater per day to the Cawelo Water District, which pro-vides water to 90 Kern County farmers. Before releasing it to the district, Chev-ron treats the wastewater in settling ponds and other processes designed to remove contaminants.

Chevron officials have said that the recycled water is clean and complies

with state regulations. On Wednesday, the company said its program provides water for the “benefit of California agriculture.”

Samples collected by the water advocacy group, Water Defense, raised concern that methylene chloride, which is a toxic chemical, was present in water used on thousands of acres of farmland in the Central Valley. The group’s tests detected significant levels of methylene chloride in samples collected both in 2014 and last March from the water district’s distribution canal. Acetone, also a solvent, was also detected in samples taken in 2014.

The company, however, contested Water Defense’s testing methods and the results of its analysis, which used water collected from various depths and

taken over a long period of time. Scott Smith, who collected the sample for Water Defense, has said his methods provide a more complete analysis than standard tests.

In April, the Central Valley Regional Water Quality Control Board, which oversees Chevron’s oil field wastewater recycling program, ordered comprehen-sive screening of the irrigation water to check for the presence of chemicals used in oil production.

Chevron’s test results were provided to the board in reports submitted June 15 and June 26 and in a subsequent report this week that specifically con-tained data about methylene chloride.

Chevron’s previous lab results showed the recycled water contained small amounts of potentially harmful chemi-

cals, including acetone and benzene, a carcinogen. This week’s results reported that the lab did not detect methylene chloride in any of the samples provided.

In a statement Wednesday, Chevron said the presence of acetone in earlier tests was probably the result of natural biological processes. “We know of no operational source of acetone within Chevron’s oil field processes in the San Joaquin Valley,” said Chevron spokes-man Cam Van Ast.

All test results to date, including those conducted by Water Defense, show that water supplied by Chevron to the Cawelo Water District is in compliance with the company’s permit from the water board.

julie.cart@latimes.com

Monday, spokesman Mark Toner said. The State Department has cleared most of the visa request backlog, which resulted from the failure of a system that stored biometric data, Mr. Toner said. That data, which includes documentation such as

fingerprints, is used for security screening of applicants.

The problem with the U.S. visa system began on June 9, and the U.S. had been able to issue only a relatively small number of visas to those affected by the outage, including seasonal and humanitarian workers.

Mr. Toner said the U.S. issued remaining

H-2 visas for temporary workers that had been pending between June 9 and June 19. Mexican posts are processing H-2 visas normally, he said.

David Douglas, a grower in Mesa, Wash., said 92 out of 112 H-2A workers he had expected June 6 have arrived since Thursday. “They effectively missed the entire cherry harvest,” he said. “But we are thankful they are here. We have a lot of work yet to be done.”

To save his cherry crop, Mr. Douglas redeployed workers who would normally have been thinning apple trees and doing other preparation ahead of the apple harvest, which begins in a week.

“It will have a big impact on tree growth and fruit yield and quality,” said Mr. Douglas, of J&B Orchards. The third-generation farmer said it was too early to quantify the losses but deemed them “significant.”

He said he has been advertising locally for workers. “There just aren’t enough who would want to do the work,” he said.

World-wide, U.S. posts issuing visas normally handle 50,000 applications a day. In the 2014 fiscal year, the State Department’s 235 posts issued 9.9 million nonimmigrant visas, including those for workers and tourists. It issued another 467,370 permanent or immigrant visas.

It is the second consecutive year in which a computer problem has affected visa processing.

“I was one of the people stuck,” said Maria Stander of Kazakhstan, who has incurred financial losses due to the delay and still hasn’t managed to travel to the U.S. “How can this happen for the second time, around the same time of the year, to the greatest country in the world?”

Corrections & Amplifications: David Douglas is a grower with J&B

Orchards. An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated he was with R&B Orchards. (June 29)

Write to Felicia Schwartz at felicia.schwartz@wsj.com and Miriam Jordan at miriam.jordan@wsj.com

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Some addresses may be hidden as California well reports become publicBy Ryan SabalowSacramento Bee

After more than six decades of secrecy, the reports that water well drillers file with the state are set to become public under a bill signed into law this week.

But because of privacy concerns, it’s still not clear whether the public will get to see the precise locations of the thousands of wells that pull water out of

the ground to irrigate farms and supply drinking water.

This week, Gov. Jerry Brown signed Senate Bill 83, a trailer bill attached to the state budget. It reverses a ban on releasing what are known as well logs to anyone but the well’s owners, govern-ment officials and those cleaning up toxic spills. Drilling companies have to file the reports when they create new

wells. The reports detail the composition of the subterranean layers the drillers encountered and how far down they hit water.

Water scientists and advocates had long pushed for making the reports public, since they provide critical infor-mation about underground features and depth and quality of a water supply. The reports, they say, are even more impor-tant now as groundwater increasingly is being overtaxed amid years of drought. About 40 percent of California’s fresh-water supply comes from underground sources – a percentage that’s growing as the state’s reservoirs shrivel.

California is the last Western state to make its well logs public. Some states, including Texas, even post them online.

The secrecy dates back to the late 1940s, when the state’s well drillers fought to protect prime drilling spots from competitors. The state keeps an es-timated 800,000 logs. As water supplies have shrunk, even some well drillers have begun to argue they need to be made public – so they, too, can bet-ter understand the state’s aquifers, and where they can find clean water.

Not everyone in California was happy about the push to open the logs up, however. Some water agencies feared

they could be used by terrorists to poison a city’s water supply. Farmers also expressed concern. Danny Merk-ley, director of water resources for the California Farm Bureau Federation, said Friday that releasing the specific loca-tion of a farmer’s wells provides a “road map” for militant animal-rights activist saboteurs, metal thieves and water-waste wary neighbors who might switch off a farmer’s irrigation pumps without permission.

SB 83 appears to address at least some privacy concerns. It says the water agency must abide by the Information Practices Act of 1977, which prohibits the release of some types of personal information.

Eric Senter, a senior engineering geologist with the state Department of Water Resources, said Thursday that the names and addresses of well owners would be considered private under that provision, although the well’s location will be identified. So what if the owner’s address and the well’s location are the same? Senter said his agency’s attorneys are now trying to figure out what can legally be released.

“There’s a lot of nuances of how we’ll actually go about that while still protect-

See Reports; Page 10

Madera County Farm Bureau July 2015 | 9

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9203See Eggs; Page 10

Egg prices on the rise? Blame avian fluBy Tabitha SodenEureka Times-Standard

Although a state law increasing chicken cage sizes came first, it’s avian flu that’s hatching higher egg prices nationwide.

“Prices are probably going to continue to escalate for a while but there’s no saying to what degree or how much,” California Grocers Association spokesman Dave Heylen said.

He said that even though prices in California went up earlier this year due to the implementation of Proposition 2 — the voter-approved measure to give chickens space to stretch their wings and turn in their cages — avian flu is currently influencing prices the most.

Heylen attributed the price increase to the high number of egg laying hens, mostly in the Midwest, that had to be put down due to the flu.

He said that prices rose as much as 120 percent between May and June.

In California this year, the avian flu virus has affected approximately 247,000 birds out of just over 48 million nationwide, according to U.S. Department of Agriculture reports.

Despite the high number of infected birds, risk to the general public from the virus is low, and no human cases have been detected worldwide, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Even so, consumers may continue to see a rise in pricing even at locally owned grocery stores.

Jo Pumpkin, the dairy buyer for the North Coast Co-op, said there are currently around 16 brands of eggs on the Co-op shelves, and only one of those is a factory-farmed egg.

“All the eggs’ prices have gone up,” Pumpkin said.

Though he said all egg prices have increased, it is the factory-farmed egg prices that change most from week to week.

“(Egg prices have) been pretty steady for the last few years,” Pumpkin said. “It doesn’t seem like their prices go up and down like gasoline or like the other groceries, and they didn’t go up as much as I thought they would with everything going on, but I did notice a change.”

Egg prices also went up at Murphy’s Market earlier this year, but have remained pretty stable since, employee Jaime Graves said.

“There was the new law about cage

10 | July 2015 Madera County Farm Bureau

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sizes, so yes prices did go up a few months ago,” Graves said. “But strangely enough for the natural free-range eggs, if you look at egg prices on the shelves, the gap in pricing has narrowed.”

Despite the smaller price difference between factory-farmed eggs and free-range eggs, Graves said she has not observed a discernible change in consumer behavior.

“Nobody’s really complained, and we haven’t made changes to our ordering,” Graves said.

Heylen said the statewide market is reflecting a similar trend in consumer behavior.

“The last reports I read that just came out the other day, is that retail demand is light to moderate and supplies are moderate,” he said. “There’s certainly not a shortage of eggs.”

Sarah Brunner, owner of Fieldbrook’s Brunnner Family Farm, said local consumers

also have the option to buy from small local farms, whose prices are less dependant on the market.

Brunner’s small family-owned farm keeps 30 birds and is able to produce about two dozen eggs per day. She sells her eggs at local farmers markets and sells wholesale to the Fieldbrook General Store, and said her prices depend more on the quality of feed she uses, and less on market egg prices.

She also said that the disease and other problems that come with large-scale factory farms just strengthen her belief in local small-scale farming techniques.

“It just reaffirms why we do it the way we do, and why we try to get people to support local, pastured eggs,” Brunner said. “The factory farm environment easily spreads diseases and sickness and it is a shining example of why that’s not the best way to raise our food.”

Tabitha Soden can be reached at 707-441-0510. tsoden@times-standard.com

rePortsContinued from Page 8ing personal information,” he said Thursday.

Supporters of the law say they hope state water officials will tilt toward releasing as specific infor-mation as possible on where wells are located. But they acknowledge that a general description of a well’s location – rather than a specific ad-dress – can also help scientists.

Thomas Harter, a groundwa-ter hydrologist at UC Davis, said underground aquifers can be huge and uniform, so it’s not always necessary to know a well’s exact location to get an accurate picture of what’s underground.

He said that depending on what’s being studied, approxima-tions of up to a quarter mile from a well can still be helpful.

Debi Ores, attorney and legisla-tive advocate for Visalia-based Community Water Center, agreed. She said that even without an exact location of some of the wells, the data in the reports will still be im-mensely useful in the quest to find clean drinking water.

“Even having an approximate location of where there’s a well drawing out safe water could help identify new well locations,” she said. “It’s a lot more than what we currently have.”

Ryan Sabalow: 916-321-1264, @ryansabalow, rsabalow@sacbee.com

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rightsContinued from Page 3continue to withdraw water, the board could issue enforcement orders, subjecting diverters to steep fines and even court prosecution.

“This is about diverting when there’s no water available under your water right priority,” Sawyer said. “What the water board is trying to do is implement the priority system.”

He cited three recent court cases, unrelated to the drought, in which diverters challenged the board’s oversight of pre-1914 rights, as well as riparian rights, under which landowners can pump supplies from streams and rivers flowing by their property. “The water board won all three,” Sawyer said.

Although some Northern California cities have senior rights, irrigation districts and growers hold far more. That mismatch of water and population has led some to suggest it is time to revamp a rights system that dates to the Gold Rush. They point to Australia, which recently overhauled its water rights after a devastating drought.

But legal experts don’t see any radical changes on the horizon.

“I don’t think the water rights system is going to be blown up this year or any time soon,” said Holly Doremus, a UC Berkeley law professor of environmental regulation.

“I’ve always thought the people who say, ‘Let’s just become Australia’ — that’s incredibly naive,” she said. “Because it would require extraordinary political changes and because they didn’t have the property rights protection that we do. It

would be such a mess in terms of takings claims.”

Still, mounting pressure on California’s water supply will inevitably turn more attention to how and by whom water is used in the nation’s most populous state.

“No water right is set in stone,” Garner said. “I think that all water rights and all water users are going to be getting greater scrutiny.”

The most likely vehicle for that scrutiny is Article X, Section 2 of the California Constitution, a core principle of state water law that says every water use must be reasonable and beneficial. The state Supreme Court has ruled that what is considered beneficial can change with conditions.

Citing that provision, the state board this month approved an emergency drought regulation that includes a ban on watering

lawns in the watersheds of four creeks that feed into Northern California’s Russian River. The prohibition is intended to reduce water use — and thus diversions and well withdrawals — that is diminishing stream flows crucial to the survival of endangered Central California Coast coho salmon and steelhead trout.

The board “is starting to say certain kinds of uses are unacceptable, even if you hold senior rights, at least under dry conditions,” Doremus said.

“I think every time the board says these specific things are not reasonable uses of water, they are waste — I think … they become more likely to do it again,” she said.

bettina.boxall@latimes.com, Twitter: @boxall

Tulare County part of heat-warning regionBy Dennis TaylorVisalia Times-Delta

California worker safety regulator Cal/OSHA is urging all employers, particularly those in the Central Valley and adjacent foothills, to protect their outdoor workers from heat illness.

The National Weather Service has issued an excessive heat warning for these areas, where temperatures are expected to rise to highs of 115 degrees in the Sacramento Valley and just over 100 in Tulare County through Friday morning.

Heat warnings are issued when weather conditions pose a threat to life, Cal/OSHA said in a news release.

“We want to ensure that the rules in lace are followed to protect outdoor workers during soaring temperatures,” said Christine Baker, director of the Department of Industrial Relations. or DIR. The Division of Occupational Safety and Health, known as Cal/OSHA, is a division of DIR.

California’s heat regulation requires all employers with outdoor workers to protect

outdoor workers by taking these basic steps:• Train all employees and supervisors about

heat illness prevention.• Provide enough fresh water so that each

employee can drink at least 1 quart, or four 8-ounce glasses, of water per hour, and encourage them to do so.

• Provide access to shade and encourage employees to take a cool-down rest in the shade for at least 5 minutes. They should

not wait until they feel sick to cool down.• Develop and implement written

procedures for complying with the Cal/OSHA Heat Illness Prevention Standard.

“Heat illness can be life threatening,” said Cal/OSHA chief Juliann Sum. “That’s why employers are required to make sure outdoor workers have enough shade, water and rest, even if they don’t see visible symptoms of sickness.”

When temperatures reach 95 degrees, as

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collected once maybe every six months. Wellntel of Milwaukee has built a $500 contraption that sits on top of wells and sends a digital ping (it sounds more like a blip) down the drill hole, similar to how a submarine uses sonar. Each blip has a unique signature to distinguish it from the others. Data can be gathered as often as the user wants. All of that sounding data goes to a cloud server to produce a detailed, living map of the well interior. People who manage wells need to make sure they don’t

overdraw well water. If a well is totally depleted, that area of land can collapse in on itself or lower the water table, requiring deeper wells to be dug.

“We should think about groundwater as a bank account,” says Wellntel cofounder Nicholas Hayes. “We supply information to folks who depend on the bank being balanced.” Wellntel has been running a pilot for the past year and a half in Templeton, Calif. and is sending out final versions to hundreds of California well operators for installation.HYDROPOINT DATA SYSTEM

Keeping all those big lawns, hotel

grounds and golf courses nice and green across California’s cities requires buckets of water. Some 60% of urban water use goes to outdoor irrigation. But the irrigation systems are typically dumb pieces of equipment that run only on timers, which HydroPoint Data System cofounder and CEO Chris Spain calls “a great example of analog stupidity. They’re resource-blind. They don’t care if they’re applying resources in an intelligent fashion.”

HydroPoint in Petaluma, Calif. is putting sprinkler use on the Internet to make sure lawns aren’t wasting tons of gallons because of overwatering. Its system crunches solar radiation, temperature, wind and humidity data from weather stations all over the country (8 million pieces of data every day) to determine something called evapotranspiration, which is the measurement of evaporation

and transpiration of water from the Earth to the atmosphere. If evaporation is slow, the sprinklers don’t have to come on as quickly or for as long. HydroPoint produces a more targeted on-off cycle for each sprinkler by combining its evapotranspiration score with 13 other parameters that include sprinkler type, shade, slope, soil type and root depth. HydroPoint’s sprinklers also contain flow sensors to keep a close eye on what exactly is happening on-site. HydroPoint claims its system can cut a location’s water bill by 30% on average. HydroPoint targets big customers with large landscapes to irrigate. Half of its business is in California.

“When water was cheap and abundant, people thought, ‘Who cares?’ ” says Spain. “ The biggest barrier for us was that water was so cheap. Not anymore.”

Follow me on Twitter @aatilley or send me an email: atilley@forbes.com

predicted in Northern California, special “high heat” procedures are also required. These procedures include:

• Observing workers for signs and symptoms of heat illness.

• Providing close supervision of workers in their first 14 days of employment to ensure acclimatization.

• Having effective communication systems in place to be able to call for emergency assistance if necessary.

Cal/OSHA will inspect outdoor worksites in industries such as agriculture, construction, landscaping, and others throughout the heat season. Through partnerships with various employer and worker organizations in different industries, Cal/OSHA will also provide consultation, outreach and training on heat illness prevention.

Cal/OSHA’s award-winning heat illness prevention campaign, the first of its kind in the

nation, includes enforcement of heat regulations as well as outreach and training for California’s employers and workers.

Online information on the heat illness prevention requirements and training materials can be obtained at Cal/OSHA’s Heat Illness web page or the Water. Rest. Shade. campaign site. A Heat Illness Prevention e-tool is also available on Cal/OSHA’s website.

Cal/OSHA helps protect workers from health and safety hazards on the job in almost every workplace in California. Cal/OSHA’s Consultation Services Branch provides free and

voluntary assistance to employers and employee organizations to improve their health and safety programs. Employers should call (800) 963-9424 for assistance from Cal/OSHA Consultation Services.

Employees with work-related questions or complaints may contact DIR’s Call Center in English or Spanish at 844-LABOR-DIR (844-522-6734), or the California Workers’ Information Hotline at 866-924-9757 for recorded information in English and Spanish on a variety of work-related topics.