Delta Science Center: Repairs on greenhouses

Thursday, May 23, 2013

Repairs on greenhouses

May 4, 2013

Temperature: 52/90

Wind speed: 20/23 mph

Cleaned up the greenhouses a little today and made shore everything was tightened down. We are due for another few days of cool temperatures and wind. Hopefully everything will fair well now that we were beginning to have some good luck.

In a few days the Freedom High School students will be coming out and doing some air, soil and water testing. The UC Davis folks are going to come out and teach the student how to do the testing and take samples to be sent to the University for further testing.

We've been working hard with Cheryl Ochinero from Freedom High School to make all the plans. This will be the first time all the students are getting to come on the island at once to check out the site and learn more about the program first hand.

Thanks to Cheryl for all her help.

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Introduction

About two thirds of the 740,000 acres in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta (Delta) are in agriculture. The drained peat soils of the Delta have provided fertile soils for agriculture since the late 1800s when these lands were reclaimed from existing wetlands. Since then, the Delta environment has dramatically deteriorated as evidenced by subsidence. 2.5 billion cubic meters of peat soils have oxidized causing subsidence up to 20 feet or more below sea level on many Delta islands.

Subsidence has been indicative of other severe consequences: extensive greenhouse gas emissions, construction of a 110 mile levee network, risks to California’s water supply through the California State Water Project, degradation of water quality. If current agricultural practices remain unchanged, things will only get worse. Peat oxidation will continue resulting in further subsidence over decades; GHGs will continue to be emitted with an additional estimated 158 Mtonnes CO2eq of C and N2O will be lost to the atmosphere by 2050; levee failure risks will increase from deterioration and from increasing hydraulic gradients across the levees from the superposition of sea level rise and subsidence; and water quality will continue to be degraded. Clearly, agriculture needs to change in the Delta.

The primary long-term goal of this project is to demonstrate rice based cropping systems as an agricultural solution in the Delta with important environmental benefits: mitigating subsidence and concurrently mitigating GHG emissions and soil loss; reducing risks to California water supply, including the agricultural users throughout the San Joaquin Valley downstream of the Delta; and protecting water quality.

This project will assess the technical, engineering, logistic, and economic and policy constraints and opportunities to expanding rice throughout the Delta and the regional and state-water project scale impacts.

This project was awarded in 2011 under the National Institute of Food and Agriculture Climate Change grant program.

DSC Board of Directors

President

Dr. Michael Painter

Ironhouse Sanitary District

Vice President

Keith Nance

Resident at large

Secretary

Janess Hanson

Delta Group of the Sierra Club

Chief Financial Officer

Russ Belleci

Resident at large

Treasurer

Linda Hardcastle

Resident at large

Directors at Large

Ron Gawer

Pacific Gas and Electric

Barney Parsons

Resident at large

Karyn Cornell

Representative Supervisor Mary Piepho

Contra Costa County District 3

Carol Boyd

Retire, Oakley Union Elementary School District

Dave Adler

Garaventa Enterprises

Local Representatives

Satinder Malhi

Representative Senator Mark DeSaulnier

Erica Rodriguez-Langley

Representative Assemblyman Jim Frazier

Rico Cinquini

Representative Diablo Water District

DSC Executive Director

Roni Gehlke