Saturday, April 11

Up and out the door for the Saturday Market, about a 20 minute walk.  Cinnamon and pecan rolls for breakfast and an interview about sheep farming by some undergrads at UC Davis.  They recorded our answers to their questions and got an earful from all of us regarding the term “organic” as applied to food in stores, the butchering of animals and other topics.  Chuck was particularly disgusted with the use of the term organic as applied to commercially grown foods, seeing it as a marketing ploy that prices food higher, uses more land than necessary to grow and does not improve the quality of the food due to the allowed use of chemicals on the fields three years before the harvest.  Particularly irksome to Chuck was the organic lobby’s stand against genetically modified foods.  Chuck genetically modified walnut trees in the 90’s so their leaves have bacillus theringenisust in their leaves, toxic to catepillars, but harmless to man.  Because the trees have not been allowed to be brought to market, farmers still spray pesticides to kill the catepillers, a environmental hit that could be avoided if Chuck’s tree’s were used.  He pointed out that all Mango’s coming from Hawaii are genetically engineered. Without the gene alteration that was done, no Mangos would survive the insect onslaught.  You find them in co-ops and health food stores and no one seems to know or care and the world continues to turn.  He also pointed out the sugar beets have been genetically modified to be resistant to Round Up herbicide.  Now farmers can spray Round Up directly on their crop.  The weeds die, but the sugar beets survive.  Farmers don’t have to run their tractors up and down the rows all season tilling, burning fossil fuels and using other herbicides.

Back from the lesson on organic farming and cinnamon rolls, Chuck and I headed to extract some walnut pollen from the male flowers of specific trees for his walnut breeding program, then off to his acres of walnut trees to see his genetically altered trees and the trees that are being artificially pollinated for breeding purposes.  His team puts bags over the female flowers on the trees to be breeder to stop random wind pollination.  When the female bud is fertile, they spray the male pollen collected from the trees with the desired traits into the bad to fertilize the female flowers, then mark the limbs with the test nuts to be harvested in the fall.  These nuts are planted the next spring and 7 years(!) later he can see if his breeding created nuts with the desired properties.

After returning to his house we climbed on our bikes and rode to his lab on campus to see his labs and get walnuts for us to take home.  We loaded 5-1 gallon bags of shelled walnut halves and rode home to chicken dinner that Sadie had prepared.  After dinner we walked down to College Place to see this upscale older neighborhood adjacent to the university campus.  Chuck and I spent an hour or so getting him up to speed with Siri and other aspects of his iPhone, then called it a night about 11:30pm