Episode 10: California Water Policy and Extension

 

“Sticking to the science doesn’t always mean that you are neutral…whether we like it or not, we are presenting our results in ways that are trying to push policies and we need to spend a little more time helping the community.”

doug parker


A conversation with Dr. Doug Parker about climate-smart agriculture, nitrogen & water management, the paradox of irrigation efficiency, and the current/future role of CA extension in water policy and management. Recorded June 23, 2020.


guests on the show

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Dr. Doug Parker

Dr. Doug Parker is the Director of the California Institute for Water Resources, part of a nationwide network funded by the US Geological Survey. He coordinates water-related research, extension, and education efforts across the 10 UC campuses, the UC ANR system, and other academic institutions within California. To improve the understanding of water issues, Dr. Parker serves as a key spokesperson on California water issues, working with federal, state, regional, nonprofit, and campus stakeholders on advocacy and outreach programs. Learn more here.


TRANSCRIPT

Mallika Nocco  

Welcome to Water Talk from the University of California Division of Agriculture and Natural Resources. I'm Dr. Mallika Nocco, a cooperative extension specialist in soil plant water relations and irrigation management.

Sam Sandoval  

Hi, I'm Sam Sandoval. I'm a faculty and extension specialist in water resources.

Faith Kearns  

And I'm Faith Kearns, the academic coordinator for the California Institute for Water Resources.

Mallika Nocco  

Thank you for joining us on Water Talk. In today's episode, we're going to be talking about climate smart agriculture, irrigation efficiency and extension in water generally with our guest Dr. Doug Parker. He's the director of the California Institute for Water Resources, which is part of a nationwide network of research centers. Doug coordinates water related research, extension, and education efforts across the University of California system. So thanks for joining us, Doug. We're happy to have you here.

Doug Parker  

Thanks. Great to be here, Mallika.

Sam Sandoval  

Could you tell us a little bit more about what is the California Institute of Water Resources? What is the mission, vision, and also what is your role in the institute?

Doug Parker  

I would be happy to. So, the California Institute for Water Resources was actually founded in 1957. So we're one of the older institutes or water centers out there in the state. It was actually when they were getting started on the State Water Project. The state actually put money into the University of California to create a water institute to help coordinate water use across California, but also help support the beginning of the State Water Project itself. So we were started in, the funds were allocated in 1956, we were started in 1957 as a multi campus research unit of the University of California.

Back then it was called the Water Resources Center, and it was called that for many years. Many people actually remember the Water Resources Center as the genesis of the California Institute for Water Resources. Then in 1964, the federal government passed the Water Resources Research Act, and that's when we became part of the national program. So what that act has done ever since 1964, is it's created a series of water institute's or centers, one in every state, plus the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, Virgin Islands, and Guam. So there's 54 of us actually. And we're located at a university in each state and our job is to help coordinate water research, education, extension, across all academic institutions in our state. So not just within UC, but I work with the Cal States, we work with Stanford, we work with other institutions to try to help increase impact from water resources research.

Then the other area we spend a lot of our effort on, I mentioned before, is communication and engagement. And what we really see our role here is to try to lift the science, the water science, community in California and diversify that community. There's a lot of people doing a lot of interesting things. But that doesn't always get heard about. Newspapers and the general media tends to try to pick up on the big things that will get clicks or whatever it is they need. And that's fine. They need to do that. But we're always trying to promote new voices, new science, new ideas, in the water community.

Mallika Nocco  

Doug, I want to ask you about a specific program. And that is the Climate Smart Agriculture program that has this water component. But I think some of our listeners out there might not even be familiar perhaps with what climate smart agriculture is. So maybe you could tell us a little bit about what climate smart agriculture is, and why should those of us who care about water care about climate smart agriculture?

Doug Parker  

Yeah, so climate smart agriculture is something that's been being kicked around for quite a while now, last 10-15 years. But it's basically how can we use agriculture as part of the solution to climate change, not just as part of a problem of climate change? So it's looking at agricultural practices that - I look at it as two different things. You know, one is, of course, what are those practices? How can we do things that help mitigate the impacts of agriculture? So if we're doing feed studies on animals in order to increase efficiency and reduce methane emissions or something of that nature, that's more of a mitigation type of side of it, of course. And then there's also the sequestration side. So agriculture, of course, has the ability to sequester carbon in soils. So what are the things we can do there, such as cover crops, compost applications?

A lot of it comes down to agricultural efficiency as well of course, because I mean, certainly on water with irrigation efficiency, there's going to be different amounts of emissions from needing power to run your irrigation systems or how efficient you are with fertilizers and the emissions that go along with fertilizers and things. So climate smart agriculture is really looking at ways to increase mostly efficiency in agriculture in all kinds of operations. So it's not just kind of say, you know, are we doing a good job getting a lot of out, but you know, how are we doing with various inputs? And what are the climate impacts of each of those inputs? So this program, we started, I guess, two years ago now, where we got funding from the Strategic Growth Council and from the Department of Food and Ag in California, to help promote those kinds of practices across the state. And the Department of Food and Ag, over the last several years has actually had several cost share programs that have been created for growers to help increase those efficiencies and reduce their carbon emissions and sequester carbon too. And these are the SWEEP program, which is the Statewide Water Efficiency Enhancement Program, I hope I got that right, the Healthy Soils Program, and the AMMP program, the Alternative Manure Management Program.

The genesis of our program was those programs are hard to apply to, they get pretty complicated because you actually have to do a carbon emissions analysis and say how much you're going to change carbon, beyond the usual programs where you just have to kind of look at what what's my efficiency going to be. So we got funding to create a program to assist growers to apply to those programs. And they've had technical assistance in the past to assist growers but we took it another level further and said, you know, it's one thing for them to apply to the program, but then how do they implement the program? Who does the follow up to help them with the paperwork? Especially if you're trying to reach disadvantaged growers or small farmers that don't have the resources to always spend a lot of time on all that kind of paperwork.

We've hired 10 Community Education Specialists, and they are located in Cooperative Extension county offices across the state, everywhere from Glenn County to Imperial. Those specialists work with to growers on that, they're supervised by a Cooperative Extension advisor in the county, so they benefit from that. And they spend time during signup periods, basically, they spend almost all their time just working with growers doing paperwork, trying to get them signed up for the program. But after the sign up programs, then they're able to help the growers carry this through and implement those climate smart farming practices. And then in addition, because we don't want to only just rely on cost share programs to meet all of our needs, they're out there promoting these practices even without the programs, because some of these practices just make sense. With the right education with the right tools, and the right background, growers will do some of these things voluntarily because it makes sense for their farming operation.

Mallika Nocco  

So is it fair to say, to kind of think about like lumping and splitting all of this, that there are several statewide programs and those programs like SWEEP, Healthy Soils, they have specific umbrellas of practice under them, but the climate smart educators that are in every county office, they're promoting just generally the program, or they're promoting general practices that could fall under a variety of state programs and kind of matching growers with the program or the incentive that could best fit the practices they want to implement? 

Doug Parker  

To an extent. I don't think they spend like they don't spend a lot of time helping growers get like an equip grant from Natural Resources Conservation District. I mean, if they know about it, they would steer him in that direction, and they do know about them, but they wouldn't actually help with that paperwork per se. I think what they're trying to do is broaden it beyond just the programs and say, you know, cover crops a good idea whether somebody gives you money or not, because it's increasing your soil health, and it's giving you these other benefits. How do we get people and how do we learn why people don't do these things or how do we help them jump over the hurdle and say, you know, I'm going to do a cover crop because It's actually going to help my bottom line.

Sam Sandoval  

Yeah, and I think it's also kind of giving the bigger bang for the buck. So basically, even so they can apply for certain, this program is to extend, to educate, to provide, to communicate those benefits to the entire a grower community. Similarly, related to some of those climate smart agricultural practices, I know that you are also the PI, you're leading an effort on training for nitrogen management with CDFA. Could you explain us about that one?

Doug Parker  

Yeah, so we have been working actually on nitrogen management for, you know, maybe five years now with Department of Food and Ag. So, back in the, you know, 5-8 years, longer than that, almost 10 years ago now, when the studies started coming out showing the nitrate issues in groundwater, the state started looking at how are we going to regulate growers and how are we going to control nitrates in these systems. And they came to the University of California, to the water institute, and said can you help us design a training program? We're going to have California Certified Crop Advisors sign off on people's nitrogen management plans, but they need to be certified to do that.

So we created a series of workshops essentially to train people to do that and we did those workshops for about five years. The first year, we did like six, in the next couple of years, we did three. And then now we're down to sort of one a year because we caught up with the pipeline of people needing the training, but that training continues, you know, new people are always entering the pipeline wanting to get involved. And we didn't really see that we wanted to keep doing these workshops year after year after year, we wanted to find a new model. So this new grant that we just got last year, and we've been working on now, is to create an online course in nutrient management, nitrogen management, talking about nitrogen budgets, the nitrogen cycle, and you can't talk about fertilizers and nitrogen without talking about irrigation, because that's the transport mechanism for a lot of that as well.

We're in the process of taking the materials that we've already created, we've got a day and a half worth of lectures, we've annotated all those PowerPoints, we've actually published chapters on each of those sections. And now we're trying to move that into more of an online content, which, of course, you know, is tricky. Nobody wants to listen to a 50 minute lecture online. So we're trying to figure out how to chop it up, make it interesting. We're working with the international society on the testing aspect of it. So they're going to take over the testing, it's going to be an online test for Certified Crop Advisors that they will be able to do in a testing facility, similar to how they take their original test to get to be a Certified Crop Advisor. So it's the same group running that.

Mallika Nocco  

That's really interesting. I think it's cool that there are these very specific projects that you're kind of involved in that are designed to really try to address the gap between knowledge and action, you know, or knowledge-action gaps, I feel like is the term that you hear? You know, you've been here for a while and you have some, I'm hoping perspective, on some of these kind of broader issues. So a question that that I have, especially in light of recent events is what is the role of extension related to kind of policy and environmental justice? And how can we as water professionals who are trying to serve the greater needs of the community participate related to issues of policy and justice? How should we participate?

Doug Parker  

I think that's a great question. It's certainly something that Extension has dealt with for a long time, but maybe not always done a great job at it. I've been in extension, I have been in this position for 11 years, but I've been an extension since 1993 actually, in different places and forms. One of the things I think about when I think about that policy and environmental justice is sort of there's the fairness issue, obviously, you know, extension is about trying to stick to the science. But sticking to the science doesn't always mean that you're neutral. And it doesn't always mean that the science has impact, or what the science tells us is impact, I guess is a better way.

I'm an agricultural economist by training. So I spent most of my career being an extension economist. And to me, what was interesting about being an extension economist is your job is to not just say, hey, if we do this, this will be the impact. Your job is to say, if we do this, this will be the impact and this is how that impact is going to impact different communities or different users. You know, it's how it's going to impact farmers, how it's going to impact farmworkers, how is it going to impact rural communities? And that's always been sort of a part of my job as an economist is to say, well, the interesting thing isn't like it's going to make us 100 million dollars. But the question is like, is it going to make everybody better off, or some people are going to be better off and some people were worse off? And I think we have to be a little more forward thinking on it.

I think in the past a lot of people, even when I did some of that work, it was like, okay, well, this is what's gonna happen, and this is how it's gonna affect communities. Okay, my job's done, I get to walk away now on somebody else's problem. I think we need to take that a little further at this point. And, not necessarily advocate for certain things, because we're not really here to be advocates. But we are advocates of science. And we're advocates of what are the impacts and making sure people understand that. I mean, we're not the policy makers, we're the scientists, so we have to find where that boundary is.

You may want the policy makers to follow a certain action and certain our own implicit biases are going to come into play when we're presenting our results. We present them in ways that kind of, hey, I know I want them to think and get to here so you know, whether we like it or not, we're probably presenting our results in ways that are trying to push policy in certain directions. And I think we have to recognize that but, you know, we do need to spend a little more time helping this community. You know, whether it's Black Lives Matter, whether it's farmworkers, whatever is important in your work in extension, be mindful of those communities and find ways to make sure your science actually benefits to the extent that it's possible.

Sam Sandoval  

Yeah. As you were discussing this, I was thinking about the nature of extension and that we are involved in the communities. So we do actually, and we are part of the community, so we can actually see what will be the impact. And I think also I agree with what you're saying, which is not just leave it as I'm doing my due diligence to understand what will be the impact, but also to make it transparent, accessible, to communicate, so it is running not the two or three extra miles after the marathon but continue running it as well with the community.

I do want to pick your brain about this in terms of what is the role, shat is the vision that you see of Cooperative Extension and water in California? So what are our opportunities? What are the partnerships that we can bring? Can you elaborate a little bit on this? Sure.

Doug Parker  

I think, certainly across Cooperative Extension, we have a role with water in California. And there's, and that role has been there all along. I actually was looking back at some documents. This is a Cooperative Extension. But I was looking at some historic documents and actually, in 1880, a faculty member at UC Berkeley started doing research on water use in California. So that's always been an issue obviously, and Cooperate Extension is at the center of it. I think we need to do a couple of things. One is we do put a lot of focus on sort of the agricultural side - water efficiency, water use, all of that. The natural resources side, of course, is equally important and we are doing more, I think now on stream flows and stream ecology and stream health and trying to make those linkages between them. And now we're starting to see, as we saw from our Nutrition Policy Institute, you know, looking at drinking water, you know, and childhood obesity and soda consumption, and why don't we get more water out there to people, things of that kind of nature.

There's a lot of different areas across Cooperative Extension, I think, where we need to link better. I found my favorite meetings in Cooperative Extension are the ones where I've got people from all these different perspectives talking about water, and we have that unique ability to do that. But we are also based in the counties and 80% or whichever way you want to play with the numbers, water goes towards agriculture and that is a big portion of it. And I would actually like to see a stronger presence there in Cooperative Extension for us in water. And I look at the IPM program, the Integrated Pest Management Program, as a model because we have area advisors in IPM. We don't have that in water, we have advisors in different counties, and they cross county lines because they get dragged back and forth and if there's a need, but I would like to see a system where we kind of blanketed the state with an area water advisor, in whatever spatial aspect needed to do that, because I found that all of the other advisors out there in those counties touch on water at some point, and then having a resource for them to tap, to help them. I mean, you may be a pest advisor, you may be an orchard system advisor, you may be doing food and nutrition, but water somehow is going across your program at some point. And how do we create that network that allows us to better support those people in all of that.

That's a piece of it is I'd like to see more of that. And that doesn't just mean in the agricultural communities. It's having a water advisor who understands streams and biology and you know, not everybody has to do everything, everywhere because we can't. But you know, up into the forest, into the watersheds, and watershed health and then down into, also in the urban areas, right? We've got a lot of people doing landscape irrigation and other stuff, do they have enough support they need in those urban communities for those programs as well? The other thing I wanted to kind of talk a little bit about is sort of the policy part of it. When I started in California, 10 years ago, there were advisors and others who didn't want to work with policy makers because they were afraid of regulation. And they're afraid of being seen as somebody who supports regulation. And we've seen a big change in that in the last 10-15 years in extension where people have actually recognized that regulators are going to regulate whether you want them to or not, but if you don't do all the good science, how can you expect them to do a good job right? And regulations aren't all bad. I mean, we like to bash regulations, but regulations protect us from many different things, but doing it right is what's important. And that's where I think Cooperative Extension can really play a role is to help those regulators understand what that's going to mean on the ground, both positive and negative, to different groups of people. And I see a lot more extension people getting involved in that regulatory aspect.

Mallika Nocco  

Yeah, I mean, that you bring up a really good point, just in terms of as someone who is early career. When I was first kind of trying to understand what extension is about, I didn't even necessarily think that there was a place for those types of interactions that you were discussing. That's how rare they used to be. And it's really kind of exciting, that we are seeing a change in the way extension is done and even the definition of what it means.

Sam Sandoval  

I also think that we always think about the two sides of the coin in terms of the carrots and the sticks. I think you have helped quite a lot in terms of these programs that you are developing for SWEEP and from CDFA and those kind of carrots and make sure that they get in there. But at the same time also be aware that what you're saying is not regulations for the sake of regulations, it's actually to provide some clear rules or protections so everyone place plays nice, plays safe. So yeah, I think those two points are very well taken.

We've discussed this and there was actually a very influential open editorial that you did for me, it was Morning Ag Clips or something like that related to the California water paradox. In terms of if you make more efficient use of water, then that water will be used somewhere else, and then you become more efficient and then you keep going and using water somewhere else and so on? Could you could you talk about or could you explain us about this water paradox and this specific characteristic of efficiency, water use efficiency in California?

Doug Parker  

That's sort of an interesting paradox there is that people don't really kind of wrap their heads around this. This all started in the middle of the drought, where Faith and I were having conversations about water use efficiency, and people were very much down on agriculture for all the water they use, claiming, you know, agricultural wastewater, all of these kinds of things. And I was reading some work coming out of UC Berkeley at the time that was looking at efficiency versus demand management. And what they were sort of coming at is, you know, the traditional idea is that if people are more efficient with water then there's more water leftover for like the environment for instance, right? Or, you know, if people are more efficient with their water then they need less water. So we need less dams and we need less water storage. That was, you know, in economics it's a tradeoff we would talk about.

But what we were actually starting to see was that those actually didn't go in opposite directions, they went in the same direction. That as people became more efficient with water, they actually demanded more water. And as people became more efficient with water, they wanted more water storage. And so we were kicking around ideas about why that might be, Faith and myself, and we ended up writing this article, it was in The Conversation, which is a great site - if people don't look at that you should be looking at it and you should be writing for it for you academics out there, they do academic articles for people, for all of us. So we wrote this article for The Conversation in the middle of the drought, and it turned out to be their number one drought related article. What they allow is creative licensing so other people can take it and publish it elsewhere and just give credit back to The Conversation. So that piece got published, you know, on the BBC website, in Newsweek, and elsewhere. And you're supposed to report back the reads too. So it was something around 80,000 reads or something, which I think back to my academic journal articles and obviously, there's a big difference between those kind of numbers.

But the idea behind it was that becoming more efficient at water use in agriculture means you're increasing the value of the water, right? You're making the water more valuable, because you're getting more out of it. When you increase the value of the water, people want more water because they can create more value with that water. And that kind of leads to this dynamic of increased efficiency actually increases demand. And there's a couple of different pieces to that. One is of course, suppose you go and install an irrigation system, so you just spent thousands of dollars upgrading your system on your farm. Well, then you want to be darn sure that you're going to have water next year for your irrigation system because otherwise you just went wasted a whole lot of money. So that actually increases your demand for storage because you want to be sure you can repay the bank for that system you just put in and if you don't have any water, you can't repay the bank. So it actually increases the demand.

The other thing to consider is, the other big piece of it is, California is a big state. We're land rich, we have a lot of land out there that is not farmed, that is just sitting there because we don't actually have that much water in the state. We've got a lot, but not enough. You drive down I5, you'll see land that is just native habitat, which is fine. But if you're being more efficient, and you're saving water, that water doesn't just stay in the stream, because somebody has a water right to that water. That person says oh, now I can use the water to do this. So one of the problems is people tend to look at like water use per acre, and it really needs to be water use per unit of food produced, right? So you're producing more food with the water so that's fantastic, but you're not actually selling saving water, what you're doing is you're repurposing the water to produce even more food. Because we're land rich, there's always going to be more land available in California than there is water. And that's where the paradox comes in is that you know, enough, we said enough will never be enough. No matter how much water you give me in California, I'm still going to have some land I could bring into production or some way I can produce even more food, which is a positive thing, we like producing food, feeding the planet. That's good.

Obviously we need to balance that with the environment and other things. And it kind of is similar to the paradoxes of freeway building, right? You build a freeway, it's two lanes in each direction. People start building houses all around it, people start commuting and the freeway gets all clogged up. Department of Transportation comes in, builds another lane in each direction. The freeway lightens up, everybody's happy for a few years. But in the meantime, we're building some more houses because there's less traffic, and then we end up with more traffic again. And that's a cycle just repeats itself and it's similar in agriculture.

We can increase the amount of water available to agriculture, bring more land into production, produce more food, that's wonderful. But we're still going to have a drought year where we're going to have to cut back and fallow land. Because water is variable in California, we could never build enough storage that it's like every year, everybody gets, you know, the same amount of water. We're always going to have years where we have more water and years where we have less water. And the idea behind this argument was, how do we design a system that takes advantage of that more water some years, less water other years, rather than a system that says, we want more water in all years and years where we have less water, it's just a lot of pain.

Sam Sandoval  

And you know, for me reading that article was kind of realizing that at some point I was thinking that I was on a treadmill. That it was like running, running trying to get to be more efficient and running, running, trying to get more water and then all of a sudden, like, wait a minute, there is no ending here. If we're more efficient, we'll keep using it. So you I think it was a good wake up call for me, to actually step out of the treadmill and think this more critically.

Doug Parker  

Yeah, I mean, I think it's trying to basically tell us that we need to look at the full picture of the system. I've given this talk, and talked to some people about it, and some people may look at it and say, without thinking further down the line, so what you're saying is that we should just get over it and not deal with this? And we're not saying that. We're not saying it's that, you know, because we can't solve this problem in the way we think we want to solve it we have to give up and do nothing. It doesn't actually even mean we might not need more storage. I'm not arguing for or against storage. What I'm saying is that those things don't always trade off against each other like we think and we need to design our programs to know that and take advantage of that and adapt to that, so that we don't find ourselves scratching our heads later on when we thought we solved the problem.

Mallika Nocco  

Doug, I want to ask you one last question. Just what would you like our listeners to know about what you do? And how can we support your work?

Doug Parker  

Yeah, so I think what I really like is, you know, if you go back to the beginning of the show today, when we were talking about trying to create a more diverse water community, I think that's what I really want to hear from the listeners out there is how do we do that? How do we lift voices that aren't currently heard in the water arena? How do we diversify the type of work we're doing, where it isn't all just about, like how to fine tune a drip irrigation system, not that that's not important, but you know, there's a lot of other issues out there that involve water. So I'm really looking for people to you know, share your voice, find ways to communicate what you're doing, don't be afraid to get involved in the policy arena. Of course, at the same time trying to keep that line, you know, wherever it is, whether you're a scientist or maybe you are an advocate, and that's fine. That's your role.

But really, how can we kind of listen more to each other? And listen more to you know, don't just read papers within your own field, listen to people working in other areas of water and then think about, you know, how is that important? How might that might impact me? This idea of sort of, you know, the watershed to the sea or the watershed to the groundwater. But there's a whole lot more beyond that as well. When we talk about water quality. We talked about drinking water, we talked about communities with water, communities with poor quality water, etc. And really, that's kind of my pitch. You know, we're trying to create sort of a more diverse water community in California. And, you know, jump in and communicate with us and let us be part of that with you.

Mallika Nocco  

We are so happy to have you as a guest today. And I'm just really happy to have you in our community, happy to have you as a resource.

Thanks for listening and join us next time on Water Talk.