Each school day millions of children eat at school. Meals can be brought from home, or prepared by staff on-site. All meals have the potential to cause a foodborne illness. The National Coalition for Food-Safe Schools (NCFSS) is a collection of organizations working together to improve food safety in U.S. schools.

From their website:

“The National Coalition for Food-Safe Schools (NCFSS) is an alliance of representatives from a variety of renowned national organizations, professional associations, and government agencies that have interest or active involvement in reducing foodborne illness in the U.S. by improving food safety in schools. NCFSS is a voluntary and informal working group that focuses specifically on improving food safety in U.S. schools through information sharing, networking, and strategic planning of activities.”

Their site has many free resources for administrators, team leaders, school nurses, Health Departments, school food service workers, teachers, families, and students work together to reduce the risk of foodborne illness.

The National Coalition for Food-Safe Schools has many free resources to improve food safety in schools.

The spring edition of California Agriculture has a varied collection of articles. You can read about solutions for nitrate in drinking water, protecting California forests form catastrophic fire, agricultural advances, and the history and legacy of the Morrill Act.

Articles include:

• No-tillage and high-residue practices reduce soil water evaporation 
• Research and adoption of biotechnology strategies could improve California fruit and nut crops 
• Regulatory status of transgrafted plants is unclear 
• New quality index based on dry matter and acidity proposed for Hayward kiwifruit
• Honoring 150 years of accessible higher education 
• For 150 years, UC science and agriculture transform California 
• UC’s land-grant mission fuels nation’s growth, prosperity 
• Report seeks solutions for nitrate in drinking water 
• UC leads effort to protect California forests from catastrophic fire 
• Conservation tillage achieves record acreage, yields 
  

  No-tillage and high-residue practices reduce soil water evaproation among other benefits.

Cal/OSHA’s 2012 Heat Illness Prevention Campaign provides multiple approaches to protect outdoor workers from heat illness. The campaign is a combination of education, outreach and enforcement efforts.

Education resources for employees are available in English, Spanish, Hmong, Punjabi and Mixteco. These free resources include DVD that features workers from agriculture, construction and landscaping occupations.

Employers can also find resources to help minimize heat illness.

In addition to the online resources, Cal/OSHA will be providing free, one-day programs designed for educators and leaders from community organizations who can help reach workers at risk for heat illness. These “Train-the-Trainer” programs will be held throughout the state, with a class in Ventura on June 15. To learn more about the training program please see the following links in English and Spanish.

The need for heat illness prevention increases as the temperature rises.

We have many highly salt sensitive crops in Ventura County: strawberry, avocados, blueberries. Rainwater, the purest kind, is excellent for leaching salts, but, in years with low rainfall, salt accumulation and resulting toxicity is a big concern.

Plant reaction to salts varies among varieties, stages of growths and environmental conditions and, perhaps most importantly, with the type of salts that they are exposed to.  We typically determine salinity of water and soil by measuring Electrical Conductivity (EC): the more salts are present the greater is the capacity to conduct electric current. In fact, there are guidelines for most crops that show at which EC level you would expect negative effects on plant growth and productivity.  Yet there seems to be a discrepancy between the guidelines and what actually happens in the field. For example, University of California (UC) guidelines suggest that strawberry injury and yield reductions can occur at EC=1 dS/m. However, in several Ventura County fields we have healthy productive strawberry in soils with EC >4 dS/m. These large differences in tolerable EC levels result from the fact that the guidelines were developed using sodium chloride, while Ventura county soils/waters most frequently have calcium and sulfates as primary components of EC. Recent studies at UC Riverside showed the specific negative chloride effect on strawberry fruit production, while studies elsewhere have documented that sodium can also be more harmful than other ions such as calcium and potassium. Because we have calcium-rich soil, and even irrigation water often contains calcium sulfate, our crops can manage well even with EC levels well above 1 dS/m. In fact calcium and magnesium help to counteract the negative effects of sodium in the soil salt solution.

In a demonstration, we wanted to show that a very salty water (EC=20 dS/m) will have different effects on mature strawberry plants depending on the ion composition of the salts in that water. Indeed, after four days of watering with sodium chloride solution, the plants had severe injury symptoms and were dying. However, the same salt concentration of potassium sulfate only resulted in slight marginal leaf burn and mild stunting. Plants irrigated with distilled water (that imitated rain water) looked perfect, of course.

The important points of these demonstrations and field evaluations were:

• EC values in water or soil analyses only show total salinity and one needs to look at specific ions in the report to evaluate the potential effects on sensitive plants.
• Sodium and chloride are a lot more damaging that potassium and sulfate and we’re planning to evaluate several other salts and develop realistic thresholds for safe strawberry production in their presence.
• At high concentrations in the root zone fertilizers (such as potassium sulfate, a ‘safer’ salt) can injure plants and reduce their productivity
• Typical irrigation with drip lines placed between planting rows does not affect salts in the root system, unless excessive amount of water are applied to induce leaching.
  

  Ventana strawberry irrigated with water with Electrical conductivity=20 dS/m; Salt: Sodium chloride, NaCl

  

  Ventana strawberry irrigated with water with Electrical conductivity=20 dS/m; Salt: Potassium sulfate, K2SO4

  

  Ventana strawberry irrigated with water with Electrical conductivity=0 dS/m; Distilled water, H2O