Why Sonoma is the only Bay Area county stuck in the strictest reopening tier [San Francisco Chronicle]
California has achieved notable success corralling the coronavirus pandemic while cases have again surged nationwide. The Bay Area in particular is a standout, with eight of nine counties progressing to less-restrictive levels in the state’s four-tier reopening system. The exception: Sonoma County, still stuck in the purple tier indicating “widespread” virus risk. It’s one of just 12 counties in California with that designation, which places tight restrictions on businesses and other public activity….Sonoma’s agricultural industry sets it apart from the Bay Area and brings it more in line with the coastal and valley counties that power California’s farming sector. And many of those counties, too, have struggled during the pandemic. “All of the agricultural parts of the state still have high rates,” said UCSF infectious disease expert George Rutherford. “Sonoma is just like a lot of other big agricultural communities: There are lots of cases in the Latinx community, lots of cases in farmworkers.”
Farmers need to adapt crops to climate change to stay profitable, experts say [Marketplace]
Climate change has become more and more real for Americans over the past few decades. Sea level rise has been a problem on the East Coast, wildfires have been getting more intense on the West Coast. And weather in the Midwest and South has been getting more extreme. This has major implications for American agriculture. Change is not just coming; it’s here. It’s harvest season, and Don Cameron is out in his field in Fresno, California. His mechanical tomato harvester is moving its way along, picking up to 50 tons of tomatoes per hour. “The tomatoes though have had a tougher time during the summer when we have continuous days of temperatures over 110 degrees, and the blossoms tend to fall off,” Cameron said. “Just one of the many crops we grow here that’s being affected by changes in our climate.”
Belching cows and endless feedlots: Fixing cattle’s climate issues [New York Times]
Randy Shields looked out at a sea of cattle at the sprawling Wrangler Feedyard — 46,000 animals milling about in the dry Panhandle air as a feed truck swept by on its way to their pens. Mr. Shields, who manages the yard for Cactus Feeders, knows that at its most basic, the business simply takes something that people can’t eat, and converts it into something they can: beef. That’s possible because cattle have a multichambered stomach where microbes ferment grass and other tough fibrous vegetation, making it digestible….Researchers within and outside the industry are working on ways to reduce emissions from fermentation, through feed supplements or dietary changes. Other efforts aim to lower emissions from the animals’ waste — a source of methane as well as another powerful greenhouse gas, nitrous oxide — through improved manure storage and handling.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/21/climate/beef-cattle-methane.html?searchResultPosition=1
As wildfires explode in the West, Forest Service can’t afford prevention efforts [Los Angeles Times]
…It’s not just the one forest. Throughout California, Oregon and other Western states, the Forest Service has a growing backlog of millions of acres of forest management projects that are ready to go, requiring only funding and manpower to complete. This work involves thinning out small trees, clearing dry brush and intentionally setting beneficial fires, known as prescribed fire, to prevent flames from leaping out of forests and into nearby communities….The Forest Service’s backlog exposes an uncomfortable truth for the Trump administration. Although President Trump has repeatedly blamed deadly wildfires in California on the state’s forest management, neither his administration nor Congress has given the Forest Service adequate funding to clear dead trees and brush from federally owned land.
PG&E didn’t prioritize meaningfully reducing fire risk, monitor says [Bloomberg]
…Among the court-appointed compliance monitor’s findings: The company failed to conduct detailed climbing inspections of 967 transmission structures in high-fire-risk areas before the start of the peak wildfire season. Wind damage to one such tower was the cause in 2018 of the state’s deadliest wildfire, which killed 85 people and destroyed the town of Paradise. U.S. District Judge William Alsup said in a court filing Tuesday that the monitor has uncovered numerous shortcomings due to human error and a failure to escalate problems. The failures are “the same problems that offender PG&E has long had,” Alsup wrote. He set a Nov. 3 deadline for the utility to respond.
California labor traffickers dodge convictions after state crackdown, report says [Sacramento Bee]
More than 3,000 California survivors of labor trafficking sought help from a state-funded program between 2016 and 2019, according to a new report from the Little Hoover Commission. More than a third of the survivors came either from Fresno or Sacramento county, according to the report….In one case in 2018, a Fresno man was convicted of human trafficking and extortion, after holding the victims’ passports and threatening to report each of them to immigration officials if they didn’t continue to work for him on farms. But such prosecutions and convictions remain rare in the state, the commission said.
https://www.sacbee.com/news/politics-government/capitol-alert/article246564643.html
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