Winter, 1990 (v2n2)
	LISA Funds California California fared well in the second round of competitive grants funded by the USDA's new Low-Input Sustainable Agriculture (LISA) Program. Bill Liebhardt and Jill Auburn of UC SAREP, UC Davis extension weed ecologist Tom Lanini, and Oregon State University's Alan Cooper received $90,000 to develop information on cover crops. Funds will be used for regional meetings, databases, publications, and videotapes. Ron Voss, director of UC's Small Farm Program and a UC Davis vegetable crops extension specialist, is heading a five-state project with more than a dozen investigators. The project received $112,000 to collect and disseminate information on a range of topics including farm diversification, specialty crops, marketing, sustainable organic practices, and education methods. A farming systems comparison study involving a team of UC Davis researchers was awarded $174,311. The project is comparing conventional, low-input and organic systems and is headed by entomologists Ted Wilson and Mike Hoffman, and agronomist Steve Temple. (For more information on the project see Sustainable Agriculture News, volume 2, no.1, page 6.) A comparison of low and high-input vegetable production systems in California, awarded $215,300 in LISA funds in 1988 for two years, is well underway. Fourteen farms growing fresh-market tomatoes in Yolo, Sutter, and Sacramento counties are being intensively monitored for their soil, plant, water, pathology, and insect effects by Laurie Drinkwater and Carol Shennan of UC Davis' vegetable crops department, UC Davis plant pathologist Ariena van Bruggen, UC Santa Cruz ecologist Deborah Letourneau, and Phil LeVeen, an independent economist. Projects funded in other states in the Western Region are also of interest to California producers. Nancy CalIan and Don Mathre of Montana State University received a grant to study an alternative to chemical control of "damping-off," a seedling disease in vegetables. In their initial trials, seeds coated with a particular strain of Pseudomonas bacteria provided equal or better control of damping-off than did chemical treatment when seeds were planted into cold soil. Linda Hardesty at Washington State University is joining a commercial grower in studying a "silvopastoral" system in which sheep graze in a fruit orchard. Index for Sustainable Agriculture Winter, 1990