Wow!  It's not too often that's hotter in San Francisco than it is on the farm, but it's happened several times this fall.  With the Bay Area having its second week of Indian Summer 2010, we decided to put together a mostly-summer produce box this week.  Having learned our lesson from the late September coastal heatwave we mostly omitted the leafy greens, salad mix, and other heat-sensitive vegetables that are currently growing on the farm.  Even so, it would still behoove all subscribers to pick up your boxes in a timely fashion this week.  If your vegetables -- even tomatoes or peppers -- are hot to the touch when you open your boxes, rinse or soak the produce in cool water briefly.   With cooler weather coming back next week, you can look forward to a more difference box that includes plenty of greens.

          Thanks,
                     Pablito

An article in the San Francisco Chronicle this week documents a series of hugely embarrassing mistakes and gaffs by the Air Resources Board in their analysis of the environmental impact of off-road diesel vehicles:  tractors and construction equipment, primarily.  Among other problems, the ARB's lead scientist on this issue was found to have lied about his PhD credentials.  More telling was that their data overestimated the air pollution impacts of these vehicles by over 300%, and failed completely to factor in the effect of the recession on emissions.
ARB rules based on this bad data were going to require farmers and other owners of off-road diesel vehicles to spend hundreds of millions of dollars retrofitting their engines and installing expensive and untested scrubbing equipment.
I don't know many farmers with PhDs, real or faked.  But I do know that it doesn't take an advanced degree to understand that a diesel tractor working its way across a farm field, a few times a year, has a tiny impact on the large volume of air around around it.  Yet under the ARB regulations, agricultural tractors are being held to the same standards as construction equipment used in urban and suburban areas. 
The way federal air quality rules are enforced in California makes no sense. Rural areas here don't produce lots of vehicular air pollution.  Instead, they receive it courtesy of the freeways that bisect them and the prevailing wind patterns that blow it in from cities on the coast.  But the rules say if the air in Yolo county is polluted, local agencies must try to control the pollution.    They have no jurisdiction over Interstates 80 and 5,  nor over the millions of cars and trucks that dump their exhaust here as they pass through.  That leaves them cracking down on local sources:  tractors, pump engines, auto repair shops and the like.   But you could eliminate every tractor in the county (and thus every farm) and still not make a dent in the air pollution.  Making farmers spend thousands of dollars on pollution control equipment for each tractor is not just unfair, but completely pointless.
When regulators like the ARB make mistakes like this it only serves to reinforce the belief of many farmers and other rural  people that scientific data is never objective; that it is often manipulated to serve the political interests of those who are funding the studies.  At its worst, this view leads to a skepticism that is often mistaken for ignorance, especially by university educated urbanites.  At its best, it creates a deep and profound hatred of environmental regulation, which appears to be arbitrary or biased.  And then there is the seething resentment of people forced to pay -- literally -- for problems that are not their fault.
I believe that a coherent and comprehensive air quality policy would reward rural counties for policies that prevent the conversion of farmland and open space into urban and suburban development.  An acre of well-managed farmland produces a tiny percentage of the air pollution that a subdivision does, to say nothing of a city, commercial zone or industrial park.  An orchard of mature trees might even cause a net reduction in air pollution.
The ARB has been forced to postpone its new regulations for off-road vehicles, until at least 2014.  It should abandon them altogether, and start looking at the problem of air pollution from a completely different point of view, preferably one that doesn't make it harder for farmers to earn a living from the land and encourage them to sell out to developers.

          Thanks,
                     Pablito