by Val Dolcini, state executive director, California Farm Service Agency

One hundred and fifty years ago, in the midst of a great Civil War, President Lincoln signed legislation to establish a Department of Agriculture to “acquire and to diffuse among the people of the United States useful information on subjects connected with agriculture … and to procure, propagate, and distribute among the people new and valuable seeds and plants.”  Armed with these broad mandates, the “People’s Department,” as he called it, set about to serve American farmers and a mostly rural American landscape. Read more (Western Farm Press).