Yet another incredible week of weather! Blizzards last week in southern California and the Sierra Nevada mountain range made for tough travels and snow bound families. More winter weather this weekend and early in the week has many peoples' patience worn thin. Here are good thoughts for the temps to hold out for months to allow slow melting of snow. For anyone traveling please remember to pack a double helping of patience, water and plenty of supplies. Winter survival kits are critical given all our snow pack.
Believe it or not, baseball season opening day is a month away! I can already taste the peanuts and look forward to a trip to the ballpark. Speaking of which, that's one of the activities during the All ANR Conference. Register for the conference and meet the new members of the ANR family! The agenda looks fantastic and we're starting our visioning process.
This week was very exciting with our Technical Assistance rollout webinar for those working on conservation. As mentioned previously, the Memorandum of Agreement for the California Conservation Partnership Planning (C2P2) was signed last year. Tuesday was our first meeting of the partner agency staff. CDFA, NRCS, CA RCD and UC ANR presented their areas of contribution to the agreement. UC ANR provides extension education and engagement, technical assistance (trough Climate Smart and Small Farms CES and academics), outreach, implementation, evaluation and impact analysis. Additionally, all members of the partnership can relay questions about practices back to UC for additional research. Basic and applied research will be identified and done (by UC ANR, Ag Experiment Station faculty, others at UC and through NRCS Conservation Innovation Grants). This provides a phenomenal feedback loop from asking driving questions to analyzing implementation to determine if practices meet desired goals and if they are cost effective. This is a terrific opportunity for staff at all agencies to understand each agency's superpower and identify who is better qualified to efficiently deliver technical services. It's possible that multiple agencies should participate in technical assistance.
This last week part 2 of programmatic orientation concluded. Thank you to all those who helped share information with our new colleagues: Igor Lacan, Rebecca Ozeran, Mark Hoddle, Kelly D Scott, Kathy Nolan, Jim Farrar, Nicole Marshall, Kate Lyn Sutherland, Darren Haver, Lynn Schmitt-McQuitty, Katherine Webb-Martinez,Fadzayi Mashiri, Yana Valachovic, JoLynn Miller, Aparna Gazula, Julia Kalik aand Vikram Koundinya. Kudos to Greg Ira, Daniel Obrist, Sherry Cooper and Julia for all your efforts to organize and deploy orientation.
I look forward to the week ahead where mentors and mentees will be meeting in Davis to kick off academic mentoring.