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South Coast REC studies pesto profitability for small-scale basil growers
UC ANR advisors, staff research methods in conserving highly perishable product
If you visited the greenhouse at the University of California South Coast Research and Extension Center in early fall, you would have smelled a sweet aroma with notes of lemon, pepper and licorice.
In one of the conservatories, a team of UC Cooperative Extension advisors and staff grew seven varieties of basil and by the end of October, the plants stretched nearly two feet tall with leaves large enough to warrant a closer look. The wonderful smell would soon become delightful tastes, as the team planned to turn the basil into pesto.
“The rationale was to provide a high-value crop and a value-added solution for urban horticulture, transforming a highly perishable product into something that can be conserved,” said Gerardo “Gerry” Spinelli, UC Cooperative Extension production horticulture advisor for San Diego County, who initiated the passion project.
After noticing a sign at South Coast REC asking consumers to use produce grown onsite in their everyday cooking, Spinelli felt inspired. The sign also requested photos of homemade dishes be sent to South Coast REC's interim director, Lindsey Pedroncelli, to generate content for the REC's Instagram account.
Envisioning a “bigger picture” for this effort, Spinelli turned to Pedroncelli for support. The two agreed that the basil project demonstrates a viable pathway for urban growers who have limited space, and positions South Coast REC as an ideal partner for such endeavors. Uniquely located in urban Irvine, South Coast REC has nearly 200 acres of land reserved for agricultural research and is one of nine RECs housed under UC Agriculture and Natural Resources.
“Urban growers are constantly looking for new ways to grow food and market their products. Growing plants using the Kratky hydroponic system is a low-input method that is simple to establish and easy to maintain,” said Pedroncelli.
Aside from its research purposes, the project was the perfect opportunity to engage other advisors and staff at South Coast REC. The extra hands and taste buds that helped with this effort would later be known as the South Coast REC Pesto Task Force.
Growing in hydroponics
Given Spinelli and Pedroncelli's Italian ancestry, it was no question that the basil would be used to make pesto – a traditional sauce originating from Genoa, Italy that's commonly consumed on pasta. In just about two months, the following basil varieties flourished in a hydroponic system: cinnamon, Mrs. Burns' Lemon, Kapoor Tulsi, Thai Towers, Amethyst Improved, Red Rubin and the traditional Genovese. With these varieties, Spinelli and Pedroncelli were also interested in testing how taste and color affect the pesto.
Since learning about the Kratky method, a passive hydroponic technique developed by Bernard Kratky at the University of Hawai'i, Spinelli has championed it as an easy and affordable way to grow food. He has produced several videos in English and Spanish about the technique on his YouTube Channel and created a fact sheet that can be downloaded from his website.
Some of its advantages are the low initial capital investment, excellent water and nitrogen use efficiency, short cycle of production and the fact that it is modular and easy to set up, move and store – a major advantage for growers who only have access to space for a limited time and investments on immobile structures are not justifiable.
For the setup, eight 2'-by-3' tubs were used, and each was filled with 20 gallons of water before adding a fertilizer mix that contains one ounce of calcium nitrate, one ounce of magnesium sulfate or Epson salt and 0.6 ounces of lettuce formula. With the additional steps of seeding, drilling holes into the Styrofoam, and placing the net cups with seedlings into each hole, Spinelli estimated about 30 minutes of setup for each tub.
Estimating potential profit for urban growers
Although prices per quantity vary, he also estimated about $25 for the 20-gallon tub, a panel of Styrofoam and net baskets, which can all be reused. In addition, the fertilizer and propagation materials, including seeds and pellets, will cost roughly $68. When breaking these materials down according to the number of growing cycles, about one to two months each, the cost amounts to approximately $5 per tub for 25 cycles.
Using basil sold at Trader Joe's for reference, Spinelli estimated that each ounce of basil grown is worth about 70 cents. The “million-dollar question,” as Spinelli puts it, is how much profit one can earn from this endeavor. Because the Amethyst Improved and Red Rubin varieties had the lowest yields of 12 and 18 ounces, they were combined to make 40 ounces of pesto. In contrast, Genovese had the highest yield of 51 ounces of basil – which produced 64 ounces of pesto.
Using a ratio of 0.7 to 0.9 ounces of basil for every liquid ounce of pesto, and calculating projected value based on Trader Joe's pricing, the Amethyst Improved and Red Rubin combined pesto had a projected value of $21, whereas Genovese had a projected value of $36. Without being combined with any other variety, however, the smallest projected value was the Kapoor Tulsi variety which had a yield of 22.5 ounces, making 28 ounces of pesto and resulting in a $16 projected value.
There are a few costs that Spinelli and Pedroncelli could not account for, such as hypothetical transportation to the market for sale, and the various prices of ingredients used to make pesto – almonds and walnuts, for instance, could be used as a cheaper alternative to the traditional pine nuts.
“With a traditional recipe you spend $5 for the basil and $25 for the other ingredients to produce eight 8-ounce jars of pesto. If you can sell each jar for $10 at the farmers market, there are $50 for profit – maybe more if you can sell one jar for $15, or you can save with non-traditional ingredients,” Spinelli explained.
An additional advantage, which may come with additional expenses, is that pesto can be conserved. The business model could be that the grower sells basil at the farmers market and transforms the unsold product into pesto before it goes bad.
“Getting involved in agriculture can be intimidating and costly, so researching and showcasing inexpensive methods that can easily be scaled to fit your needs is incredibly helpful for both new and seasoned growers,” Pedroncelli said.
South Coast REC staff offer taste buds at ‘pesto party'
Following their harvests in October, Spinelli and Pedroncelli hosted two “pesto parties” for staff at South Coast REC. Although traditional pesto is made with Genovese basil, pine nuts, garlic, Pecorino cheese and olive oil, Spinelli and Pedroncelli experimented with different cheeses and nuts across the seven varieties of basil. Staff offered their taste buds and critical review of each pesto, advising the two chefs to add more or less of a particular ingredient.
Eager to share their progress and vision with UC ANR's senior leadership, Spinelli and Pedroncelli carefully preserved and packaged eight jars of homemade pesto and had it specially delivered to Vice President Glenda Humiston.
“This is a creative way to demonstrate innovation and a fantastic opportunity to support our urban communities. It's not just practical, but economically feasible,” said Humiston, who was pleasantly surprised by the pesto delivery. “Plus, I love pesto!” she added.
What started out as a passion project quickly turned into an opportunity to show how a resource hub like South Coast REC can empower its urban clientele both educationally and economically. It was also the perfect opportunity to engage South Coast REC staff in an activity outside of their day-to-day responsibilities, making for excellent photo ops and social media posts.
Los Angeles Fire Disaster: 'Bee Platoon' to Help the Beekeepers and the Bees
First responders are fiercely battling five raging wildfires in Los Angeles County, wildfires...
Bees are classified by the federal government as livestock government because products from apiculture enter the human food chain. These include honey, propolis, pollen, and royal jelly. (Photo by Kathy Keatley Garvey)
Floods, droughts, then fires: Hydroclimate whiplash is speeding up globally
New research links intensifying wet and dry swings to the atmosphere's sponge-like ability to drop and absorb water
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Key takeaways
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Los Angeles is burning, and accelerating hydroclimate whiplash is the key climate connection.
After years of severe drought, dozens of atmospheric rivers deluged California with record-breaking precipitation in the winter of 2022-23, burying mountain towns in snow, flooding valleys with rain and snow melt, and setting off hundreds of landslides.
Following a second extremely wet winter in southern parts of the state, resulting in abundant grass and brush, 2024 brought a record-hot summer and now a record-dry start to the 2025 rainy season, along with tinder-dry vegetation that has since burned in a series of damaging wildfires.
This is just the most recent example of the kind of “hydroclimate whiplash” – rapid swings between intensely wet and dangerously dry weather – that is increasing worldwide, according to a paper published Jan. 9 in Nature Reviews.
“The evidence shows that hydroclimate whiplash has already increased due to global warming, and further warming will bring about even larger increases,” said lead author Daniel Swain, a climate scientist with UC Agriculture and Natural Resources and UCLA. “This whiplash sequence in California has increased fire risk twofold: first, by greatly increasing the growth of flammable grass and brush in the months leading up to fire season, and then by drying it out to exceptionally high levels with the extreme dryness and warmth that followed.”
Global weather records show hydroclimate whiplash has swelled globally by 31% to 66% since the mid-20th century, the international team of climate researchers found – even more than climate models suggest should have happened. Climate change means the rate of increase is speeding up. The same potentially conservative climate models project that the whiplash will more than double if global temperatures rise 3 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. The world is already poised to blast past the Paris Agreement's targeted limit of 1.5 C. The researchers synthesized hundreds of previous scientific papers for the review, layering their own analysis on top.
Anthropogenic climate change is the culprit behind the accelerating whiplash, and a key driver is the “expanding atmospheric sponge” – the growing ability of the atmosphere to evaporate, absorb and release 7% more water for every degree Celsius the planet warms, researchers said.
“The problem is that the sponge grows exponentially, like compound interest in a bank,” Swain said. “The rate of expansion increases with each fraction of a degree of warming.”
The global consequences of hydroclimate whiplash include not only floods and droughts, but the heightened danger of whipsawing between the two, including the bloom-and-burn cycle of overwatered then overdried brush, and landslides on oversaturated hillsides where recent fires removed plants with roots to knit the soil and slurp up rainfall. Every fraction of a degree of warming speeds the growing destructive power of the transitions, Swain said.
Many previous studies of climate whiplash have only considered the precipitation side of the equation, and not the growing evaporative demand. The thirstier atmosphere pulls more water out of plants and soil, exacerbating drought conditions beyond simple lack of rainfall.
“The expanding atmospheric sponge effect may offer a unifying explanation for some of the most visible, visceral impacts of climate change that recently seem to have accelerated,” Swain said. “The planet is warming at an essentially linear pace, but in the last 5 or 10 years there has been much discussion around accelerating climate impacts. This increase in hydroclimate whiplash, via the exponentially expanding atmospheric sponge, offers a potentially compelling explanation.”
That acceleration, and the anticipated increase in boom-and-bust water cycles, has important implications for water management.
“We can't look at just extreme rainfall or extreme droughts alone, because we have to safely manage these increasingly enormous influxes of water, while also preparing for progressively drier interludes,” Swain said. “That's why ‘co-management' is an important paradigm. It leads you to more holistic conclusions about which interventions and solutions are most appropriate, compared to considering drought and flood risk in isolation.”
In many regions, traditional management designs include shunting flood waters to flow quickly into the ocean, or slower solutions like allowing rain to percolate into the water table. However, taken alone, each option leaves cities vulnerable to the other side of climate whiplash, the researchers noted.
“Hydroclimate in California is reliably unreliable,” said co-author John Abatzoglou, a UC Merced climate scientist. “However, swings like we saw a couple years ago, going from one of the driest three-year periods in a century to the once-in-a-lifetime spring 2023 snowpack, both tested our water-infrastructure systems and furthered conversations about floodwater management to ensure future water security in an increasingly variable hydroclimate.”
Hydroclimate whiplash is projected to increase most across northern Africa, the Middle East, South Asia, northern Eurasia, the tropical Pacific and the tropical Atlantic, but most other regions will also feel the shift.
“Increasing hydroclimate whiplash may turn out to be one of the more universal global changes on a warming Earth,” Swain said.
In California this week, although winds are fanning the extreme fires, it's the whiplash-driven lack of rain that suspended Southern California in fire season.
“There's not really much evidence that climate change has increased or decreased the magnitude or likelihood of the wind events themselves in Southern California,” Swain said. “But climate change is increasing the overlap between extremely dry vegetation conditions later in the season and the occurrence of these wind events. This, ultimately, is the key climate change connection to Southern California wildfires.”
Under a high warming scenario, California will see an increase in both the wettest and driest years and seasons by later this century.
“The less warming there is, the less of an increase in hydroclimate whiplash we're going to see,” Swain said. “So anything that would reduce the amount of warming from climate change will directly slow or reduce the increase in whiplash. Yet we are currently still on a path to experience between 2 degrees and 3 degrees Celsius of global warming this century — so substantial further increases in whiplash are likely in our future, and we really need to be accounting for this in risk assessments and adaptation activities.”
The research was supported with funding from The Nature Conservancy of California and the Swiss National Science Foundation.
UC wildfire expert: Lack of rain ‘primary factor’ in L.A. fires
Siting, design of communities key to limiting catastrophic damage
Jan. 8 statement about wildfires in Southern California by Max Moritz, University of California Cooperative Extension statewide wildfire specialist based in Santa Barbara
“Santa Ana winds can be expected at this time of year, but this episode seems unusually strong. Some people are focusing on climate change and higher temperatures drying out the vegetation, but that's not really the primary factor here. It's the lack of rainfall that's unusual, and that's likely also related to climate change. More erratic and extreme precipitation patterns – drier dry periods and wetter wet periods – are extending the fire season. We still haven't started our typical fall and winter rains, and it's January! By this point of winter, usually it has rained so fuels contain more moisture and are not as flammable.”
How to prevent catastrophic wildfires?
“We can reduce the various sources of ignition, especially during red flag conditions, but we really need to treat wildfire as a public health concern and address it through urban planning.
We can retrofit existing communities to better withstand such events. Providing better water supply and distribution systems, hardening homes, establishing evacuation plans for communities, and training community members how to live with fire and reduce risks.
We should prepare for the inevitable by building and rebuilding differently, such as in the siting and design of communities in fire-prone environments. Placement of communities on the landscape, such as near bodies of water and agricultural buffers, and how they are laid out can minimize their exposure to wildfire. This goes well beyond structure-level building codes.”
Bohart Museum Welcomes You to Next Open House
You can meet the scientists, examine the collections, look through microscopes, hold walking...
UC Davis entomology major Kaitai Liu chats with budding entomologist Eden Jett of Berkeley as she holds a walking stick. (Photo by Kathy Keatley Garvey)
