Beaver Vineyards

BY TARA CORONADO

hen the voice of agriculture called out to Tara Coronado, she responded. In fact, she W may have been waiting for that voice.

Now, as owner of Beaver Vineyards in Northern California, she realizes the voice that reached out to her helped her realize how much she wanted to farm, and that’s where her desires at. From planting to harvesting to the Ag lifestyle, Coronado is now a happy part of the agriculture family.

The 29-year-old Californian grew up on a farm in Northern California. Her father comes from a family of farmers but, according to her “considers himself a first-generation farmer because he did not inherit a farm and he built what he has from the ground up,” Coronado said. “Neither of my dad’s parents were farmers.”

Strange as it may seem, she never considered being a farmer – that voice had been silenced. A studio arts major in college, she considered being a teacher because she enjoyed photography and working with kids. Upon a return home during the corn harvest, everything changed.

“I realized how badly I wanted to farm. I went back to my job and put in my notice,” Coronado said. “I officially started full time on the farm in February of 2015.”

The final hook that brought her back to her family roots was the agriculture lifestyle, she said.

“I think one of the things I love the most about agriculture is the lifestyle. It isn’t just a job, it really is a lifestyle,” Coronado said. “It isn’t the easiest, but there is something that pulls me to it. It’s how I grew up, and it’s how I would like to raise my family.” “People do not choose to be farmers and ranchers for the money. We chose this lifestyle because we love and can’t picture our lives any other way. We are stewards of the land, we want to take care of the planet, and we want to provide the best product we can to our customers. I want people to see that I’m a human trying my best to live my life, and have a successful career. But if all I cared about was money, I wouldn’t be working in Ag”

Coronado chose to go into farming grapes, encouraged by her parents to find her own path in farming. “My dad didn’t want me to only grow corn and alfalfa,” she said.

She took a course called California Farm Academy that opened her eyes to the extremely wide spectrum of agriculture. She completed the course with a business plan called Beaver Vineyards (her full name is Tara Beaver Coronado). Living in the middle of three well known wine regions – Napa, Lodi and Clarksburg – it only felt natural to dive into the vineyard business.

“I was able to find a few really great mentors that have helped me so much along the way,” Coronado said. “I had my first harvest this past September and it went better than I could have ever imagined.”

Coronado began her vineyard with 50 acres, more than just a handful to take care of. She admits that she may have started out a bit big, but because of her location, starting small, however, wasn’t really an option.

“It wasn’t like I could plant just 2-3 acres and make a living off of it. There are areas you can do that, especially if you make your own wine. But it wasn’t realistic for me,” she said. “I may have bit off more than I can chew by planting 50 acres. But I’ve

“If you can start small, start there. Hopefully you’ll be less stressed this way, and can grow as you can afford it.”

Her website, tarabeavercoronado.com, has a intriguingly interesting and wide array of topics, from, of course farming, to mental health rresources and to a deeper look into her life. Two of her blog posts are personal journeys, one describing how and why she forgave the man who murdered her grandfather and another that unleashes a secret into the discovery of her being stricken with a rare heart condition “called WPW that was causing me to pass out. This is my journey of discovering the problem and going through heart surgery.”

“I try to be a positive, but real, voice of Ag There are so many different aspects of Ag and I’m trying to share my story,” she said when asked how she uses social media to spread the word of Ag. “I want to inspire people to start their own farms. I want to inspire women to get into agriculture. I try to be honest about when things get tough, but I also want to share my wins so people see they can do this too. I love building community, and I’ve been able to do that with social media.”

And, just like the voice inside of her put Conrado on the farming path, she knows there area lot of women who can use their voices for similar goals.

“There are so many women in Ag, we just need to raise those voices up and make sure they’re heard.”

To control mosquito populations and prevent them from transmitting diseases such as malaria, many researchers are pursuing strategies in mosquito genetic engineering. A new Texas A&M AgriLife Research project aims to enable temporary “test runs” of proposed genetic changes in mosquitoes, after which the changes remove themselves from the mosquitoes’ genetic code.

The project’s first results were published on Dec. 28 in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, titled “Making gene drive biodegradable.”

Zach Adelman, Ph.D, and Kevin Myles, Ph.D., both professors in the Texas A&M College of Agriculture and Life Sciences Department of Entomology are the principal investigators. Over five years, the team will receive $3.9 million in funding from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases to test and fine-tune the self-deleting gene technology.

“People are wary of transgenes spreading in the environment in an uncontrolled manner. We feel that ours is a strategy to potentially prevent that from happening,” Adelman said. “The idea is, can we program a transgene to remove itself? Then, the gene won’t persist in the environment.

“What it really comes down to is, how do you test a gene drive in a real-world scenario?” he added. “What if a problem emerges? We think ours is one possible way to be able to do risk assessment and field testing.”

Many genetic engineering proposals revolve around inserting into mosquitoes a select set of new genes along with a “gene drive.” A gene drive is a genetic component that forces the new genes to spread in the population.

“A number of high-profile publications have talked about using a gene drive to control mosquitoes, either to change them so they can’t transmit malaria parasites anymore, or to kill off all the females so the population dies out,” Adelman said.

In the project’s first publication, the colleagues describe three ways for an introduced genetic change to remove itself after a designated period of time. The time period could, for instance, be 20 generations of mosquitoes, or about a year. The team modeled how the genes would spread among mosquitoes based on generation times and parameters of an average mosquito’s life. Of the three methods, the team has chosen one to pursue further.

This method takes advantage of a process all animals use to repair damaged DNA, Adelman said. Inside cell nuclei, repair enzymes search for repeated genetic sequences around broken DNA strands. The repair enzymes then delete what’s between the repeats, he said.

So, Adelman and Myles’ team plans to test in fruit flies and mosquitoes a gene drive, a DNA-cutting enzyme and a small repeat of the insect’s own DNA. Once the introduced enzyme cuts the DNA, the insect’s own repair tools should jump into action. The repair tools will cut out the genes for the gene drive and the other added sequences. At least, that’s what should happen in theory.

The team has already started lab work to test different gene drives and determine how long they last in flies and mosquitoes. The goal is to see a gene drive spread rapidly through a lab insect population. After a few generations, the added genes should disappear and the population should again consist of wild-type individuals.