MODESTO, Calif. – The Almond Board of California partnered with the California Department of Food & Agriculture, Wine Institute and Monarch Tractor at Climate Week NYC to showcase to the world how California’s spirit of innovation and its ag community are creating landscape-scale climate solutions and are working to inspire other industries to do the same.
California’s 7,600 almond farmers, who produce 80 percent of the world’s almonds, are leaders in fighting climate change – from planting millions of trees and adopting climate smart practices like whole orchard recycling to producing a zero waste, low carbon food.
By partnering with other California leaders at Climate Week NYC – the largest climate event in the U.S. – they could tell their positive story to the world and pass forward what they learned to an international audience of government officials, food and beverage companies, thought leaders on climate change and investors in the field.
“As farmers, we operate at the whims of the weather, and climate change is making our once-normal patterns more extreme, especially in California,” said Danielle Veenstra, an almond farmer and senior manager of global stewardship and impact for the Almond Board of California (ABC). “Farmers, and how we grow food, are not just impacted by the climate, the large scale of all of our farms together can affect the climate. California farmers are taking a huge range of actions to help the climate, and we believe we can help others do the same by showing all that we’re doing, how we got there and the ways we’re working to do more.”
The partnership at Climate Week NYC was a confluence of California vineyards and orchards and Silicon Valley, three powerhouses of the state’s economy and of efforts to address climate change. Along with individual networking through the week, together they hosted an exclusive event to showcase how their work, forward-thinking policies, and investment from food and beverage companies are collectively making measurable progress in reducing greenhouse gas emissions, improving soil health and benefiting water and air quality, biodiversity and local communities.
The session featured Food & Ag Secretary Ross, ABC vice president and chief scientific officer Dr. Josette Lewis, Allison Jordan, vice president of environmental affairs for the Wine Institute and the executive director of the California Sustainable Winegrowing Alliance, and Praveen Penmetsa, co-founder and CEO of Monarch Tractor, the world’s first fully EV tractor.
“By teaming up,” said Jordan, “California Wines had the opportunity to share the wine community’s contributions to the many ways in which California agriculture is innovating climate change solutions and how our winegrowers and vintners are making a measurable difference.”
“California wines had the opportunity to share its contributions to the many ways in which California agriculture is contributing to innovative climate change solutions and how our wine growers and vintners are making a measurable difference.”
In a LinkedIn post, Ross said she appreciated the impressive audience for the session, which included domestic and international officials, decision makers and funders for climate action. She said she was especially pleased they could hear about “what is happening in California, not as a pilot but at scale.”
ABC’s Lewis said a big part of the story is that so many California almond farmers, like many other farmers in California, are family operations making a collective impact on a large scale. “These are family farms and 70 percent of those families farm 100 acres or less,” said ABC’s Lewis. “They're individual farmers making choices to change practices with peer reviewed research showing the benefits of those practices.”
Climate Week NYC is run in partnership with the United Nations General Assembly and annually brings together business leaders, political change makers, local decision makers and civil society representatives of all ages and backgrounds from all over the world to help speed up progress and to champion the changes that are already happening.
