LAKEPORT, Calif. – Tickets are now on sale for Lake County Farm Bureau’s Love of the Land Harvest Party.

The party will take place on Saturday, Nov. 10, at Rancho de la Fuente, 2290 Soda Bay Road, Lakeport.

If you are a farmer who has been working hard during this harvest season, you deserve a chance to kick up your heels, and if you are a consumer who enjoys the fruits of local agricultural producers, then you need to join the party.

At 5:30 p.m. there will be a social time and local tastings followed by dinner at 6:30 p.m., prepared by Rosey Cooks, winner of the 2012 Cattails & Tules People’s Choice Award. Entrée choices will be beef tenderloin and champagne chicken.

Following dinner, enjoy dancing to LC Diamonds, participate in a lively auction and have fun.

To purchase tickets, contact any Lake County Farm Bureau director or call the office at 707-263-0911.

The United States Department of Agriculture announced funding this week for the 2012 Specialty Crop Block Grant Program (SCBGP).

California received more than $18 million out of the total $55 million awarded nationwide.

The SCBGP provides grants to states to enhance the competitiveness of Specialty Crops, which are defined as fruits, vegetables, tree nuts, dried fruits, horticulture and nursery crops (including floriculture).

Research, marketing and nutrition proposals were solicited and selected through a competitive process.

The 68 projects funded under the 2012 SCBGP reflect the diversity of California’s specialty crops across the state.

This year they include, but are not limited to: the development of a quick drying method that reduces energy usage for almonds and pistachios while improving product quality and safety; customized training and counseling on trade and export needs to assist industry stakeholders; offering low-income families access to fruits and vegetables at Certified Farmers’ Markets through weight management and diabetes clinics; researching strategies for efficient nitrogen management; and researching management strategies to mitigate diseases affecting the citrus industry.

In addition, CDFA partnered with the Center for Produce Safety in the evaluation and recommendation of food safety-related projects.

These projects represent an ongoing effort to minimize outbreaks by proactive research.

“California agriculture is known for its innovators,” said California Department of Food and Agriculture Secretary Karen Ross. “We have identified projects that will take advantage of this tremendous opportunity for our researchers, educators and others in our agricultural community to improve the prospects of California’s specialty crop farmers. This block grant program is a wise investment in making our crops safer, more competitive and more accessible.”

Project abstracts are available online at www.cdfa.ca.gov/grants .

KELSEYVILLE, Calif. – The Kelseyville Pear Festival’s annual pear dessert contest brought in a record number of participants this year, vying for top honors using their most delicious recipes.

Contest Chair Janice Stokes said 37 contestants took part year, a record for the event. The contest  sponsor this year was Lake Parts.

Judges Madelene Lyon, Marcie Cadora and Chris Mansell had the delicious task of choosing the contest winners.

Martha Rose, who runs a Lakeport preschool, still manages to find time to create some tasty treats, and she entered three of her very special pear desserts.

Rose took first place and won a $200 gift certificate for the Saw Shop Gallery Bistro for her “Autumn Pear Cheesecake” and also won third place and a $100 gift certificate for Studebaker’s Coffee House for her “Old Fashioned Pear Dessert.”

Sasha Reynolds took place for her “Kelseyville Pear Strudel 2012,” winning a $150 gift certificate for Lyndall’s Sports Spot Grill.

Fourth place went to Heather Malley’s spiced pear cheesecake,” with Malley receiving a $50 gift certificate for LuLu’s Ice Cream.

Bonnie Riley took fifth place and received a $25 gift certificate for Studebaker’s Coffee House for her ginger pear cup cakes with lime cream cheese frosting.

The Kelseyville Pear Festival Committee thanked all of the 2012 contestants for participating.

Research at Imperial College London examining influenza transmission in ferrets suggests that the virus can be passed on before the appearance of symptoms.

If the finding applies to humans, it means that people pass on flu to others before they know they’re infected, making it very difficult to contain epidemics.

The research was supported by the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) Imperial Biomedical Research Centre.

Knowing if people are infectious before they have symptoms is important to help authorities plan for an epidemic, but is has been difficult to establish this from data collected during outbreaks.

Previous research using mathematical models estimated that most flu transmission occurs after the onset of symptoms, but some happens earlier.

The new study, published in the open access journal PLOS ONE, is the first to investigate this question experimentally in an animal model. Ferrets are commonly used in flu research because they are susceptible to the same virus strains and show similar symptoms to humans.

Ferrets with flu were put in contact with uninfected ferrets for short periods at different stages after infection. Transmission occurred before the first symptom, fever, appeared, both when the ferrets were in the same cage and when they were in adjacent cages.

Professor Wendy Barclay, the study’s lead author from the Department of Medicine at Imperial College London, said: “This result has important implications for pandemic planning strategies. It means that the spread of flu is very difficult to control, even with self-diagnosis and measures such as temperature screens at airports. It also means that doctors and nurses who don’t get the flu jab are putting their patients at risk because they might pass on an infection when they don’t know they’re infected.”

The flu strain used in the study was from the 2009 swine flu pandemic, which killed almost 300,000 people worldwide.

The researchers found that ferrets were able to pass on flu to others just 24 hours after becoming infected themselves. The animals did not suffer from fever until 45 hours after infection and began sneezing after 48 hours.

The results are consistent with earlier studies which found that sneezing is not necessary to transmit flu – droplets of virus are expelled into the air during normal breathing.

In the late stages of infection, after five or six days, flu was transmitted much less frequently, suggesting that people can return to work or school soon after symptoms subside with little risk of passing flu on to others.

The first author, Dr Kim Roberts, who is now based at Trinity College Dublin, said: “Ferrets are the best model available for studying flu transmission, but we have to be cautious about interpreting the results in humans. We only used a small number of animals in the study, so we can’t say what proportion of transmission happens before symptoms occur. It probably varies depending on the flu strain.”