The UC Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education Program is collaborating with Verliant Energy Partners to launch a new approach, called solutions centers, to showcase the latest sustainable solutions to critical issues in agricultural and food systems.

The UC Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education Program (SAREP) has awarded $150,000 in grants to 14 projects that focus on sustainable food systems research and outreach. 

While all of the projects explore and support sustainable food production and marketing, this year's grant recipients' projects range in subject from health food access issues to rangeland stewardship. 

ASI director Tom Tomich and Food Systems Coordinator Gail Feenstra will be facilitating a course on food systems analysis for the winter 2010 quarter. Here is some information about the course.

Food Systems Analysis
Winter Quarter 2011
Mondays 2-5pm in 27 Wellman Hall

We recently contributed to the UC Food Blog and wrote about nitrogen. Check out a sample here, and read the rest over at the blog:

What makes food grow - and why that matters

There’s a lot of attention paid to where food comes from nowadays. Less attention has been paid to what helps that food grow, but that’s an important part of the equation. Whether organic or conventionally grown, the tomatoes, lettuce, plums and other food we eat rely on nutrients in order to grow. One of the most important nutrients for plant productivity is nitrogen.

Rayne Pegg, from the USDA will visit the Davis Joint Unified School District on March 8 to observe one of the nation’s most-promising public school-lunch models.

District officials are honored to host the visit and showcase Davis’ pairing of commodity foods with local produce as well as community partnerships with Davis Farm to School, the Agricultural Sustainability Institute at UC Davis, Sutter Davis Hospital and the Davis Farmers’ Market. 

At the request of the California State Legislature, the University of California established the UC Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education Program (SAREP) in 1986 both to help Californians understand the significance of participating in a sustainable food system and to assist farmers and ranchers in developing and implementing sustainable production and marketing systems.

In celebration of  SAREP's 25th anniversary, we asked present and past collaborators to reflect on their work with SAREP, and on SAREP's history with California agriculture.

 The top 100 questions of importance to the future of global agriculture / Las cien preguntas mas importantes para el futuro de la agricultura global

A recent paper co-authored by ASI Director Tom Tomich has been translated into Spanish.

Dozens of scholars from around the world contributed to "The top 100 questions of importance to the future of global agriculture." The author list includes ag and food experts from major agricultural organizations, scientific societies and academic institutions.

Turlock, CA dairies share knowledge, experience.

California dairies have a lot of cows. Therefore, they also have a lot of cow urine and feces to deal with. How this nitrogen-rich waste is managed can have a lot of impacts on how nitrogen moves around and through the dairy. 

There are general principles to manure management, but on-dairy specifics may vary. Members of the California Nitrogen Assessment team visited two large dairies in Turlock, Calif., to learn more about how those dairies, and dairymen generally, are managing their manure.