Our Blog
Sustainable Conservation SDI Partnership Honored at Annual Dairy Sustainability Summit
Each year, the California Dairy Sustainability Summit hosts the best and brightest of the global dairy industry to share knowledge and spotlight the accomplishments that drive sustainability and positive environmental impacts. Watch Ashley Boren, John Cardoza & Ryan Flaherty thank our partners for this great honor, and speak to how our work with dairies across…
Spotlighting 5 Years of Critical California Restoration
Photo: K. King/FWS California faces many challenges this year. Climate change has spurred the worst wildfires our Golden State has ever seen. Over a million acres of wildlife habitat have burned in 2020 alone, and our “fire season” stretches on. Thanks to the hard work of our firefighters and community members, California’s resilience capacity is…
Meet the 2020 California Leopold Conservation Award Finalists
When it comes to keeping California leading in conservation, our landowners are key front-line defenders of the environment. Over 50% of all land in California is privately owned, and how people manage this land has a dramatic effect on our environment, from combatting climate change, to boosting clean air and water, to protecting wildlife. Leopold…
Drinking Water Webinar Tackles Challenges, Solutions to Clean Water For All
Missed our latest webinar? We’ve got you covered! We sat down with a panel of experts to talk about what California’s doing to ensure access to safe, clean drinking water for all our residents. Over 1 million Californians don’t have access to clean drinking water, and many rural (and some urban and suburban) communities are…
SDI Podcast Double Feature
We’ve got a pair of podcasts to share with you, starting with Dairy Stream’s recent chat with Ryan Flaherty, Sustainable Conservation Director of Business Partnerships and our friends Richie Mayo, farm manager at De Jager Farms and Domonic Rossini, agronomic relationship manager at Netafim USA. They talk about scaling the system from idea to industry…
Habitat & Clean Water Wins Make the News
We’ve been in the news recently, and we thought we’d take a moment and share a few stories with you. Our teams are hard at work every day moving the needle on our programmatic work, and it’s a joy to take a pause and celebrate how much we’ve accomplished – and the possibilities in front…
Dairy’s shrinking water footprint: a key piece of the SGMA puzzle
This article originally appeared at Dairy Cares. All photos courtesy of Dairy Cares. The implementation of the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA) and and other anticipated water restrictions pose major challenges for California agriculture. Without effective solutions, economists have estimated that up to one million acres of farmland will be fallowed, resulting in a revenue…
Farms and Fish: A Dooley Family Tradition
Behind every environmental win in California are the people who work to make collaboration and progress possible. We couldn’t do what we do every day without folks who are willing to think differently, see possibilities, and make change together. As part of our new Check in & Connect series, Michael Behrens, our Chief Development officer,…
Balancing California’s Water Future
A Vital Resource California’s groundwater – a critical resource in times of drought – is disappearing faster than we’re replenishing it. Our underground savings accounts are tapped, and we face a host of challenges like land subsidence, storage capacity loss and, most importantly, a dwindling water supply for California’s dry times. To address groundwater reliability,…
Black Lives Matter
We bear witness to Black lives extinguished by police and vigilantes. These losses are singular and cannot be conflated. Each person killed deserved a life of joy and safety, not one cut short by anti-Black, state-sanctioned violence. In each instance, a family was robbed of a loved one, a community stripped of a unique mind and soul. We condemn the brutal actions of individual perpetrators –…
Accelerating Conservation in Marin County
Salmon photo courtesy of the National Marine Fisheries Service/Southwest Fisheries Science Center; Salmon Ecology Team. Right now, it’s more important than ever to celebrate environmental successes. This month, we’d like to spotlight how a coalition of restorationists in Marin County is bringing a holistic, watershed-level approach to salmonid habitat in Lagunitas Creek – and how…
Groundwater: The charge to recharge water needs to be data driven
Article by Lois Henry, CEO/Editor of SJV Water, a nonprofit, independent online news site covering water in the San Joaquin Valley. Reach her at lois.henry@sjvwater.org and visit/subscribe at www.sjvwater.org May 12, 2020 – In the world of groundwater recharge, not all dirt is created equal. Where, when, how much and how fast water can best…