In a world of worsening heatwaves, flooding, drought, glacial melting, megafires and other calamities of a changing climate, Gary Gragg is an optimist.

As California warms, Gragg — a nurseryman, micro-scale farmer and tropical fruit enthusiast — looks forward to the day that he can grow and sell mangoes in Northern California.

“I’ve been banking on this since I was 10 years old and first heard about global warming,” said Gragg, 54, who has planted several mango trees, among other subtropical trees, in his orchard about 25 miles west of Sacramento.

Gragg’s little orchard might be the continent’s northernmost grove of mangoes, which normally are grown in places like Florida, Hawaii and Puerto Rico.

Northern California’s climate, he said, is becoming increasingly suitable for heat-loving, frost-sensitive mango trees, as well as avocados, cherimoyas and tropical palms, a specialty of his plant nursery Golden Gate Palms.

“Climate change isn’t all bad,” Gragg said. “People almost never talk about the positives of global warming, but there will be winners and losers everywhere.”

Mangoes may never become a mainstream crop in the northern half of California, but change is undoubtedly coming. Hustling to adapt, farmers around the state are experimenting with new, more sustainable crops and varieties bred to better tolerate drought, heat, humidity and other elements of the increasingly unruly climate.

In the Central Valley, farmers are investing in avocados, which are traditionally planted farther south, and agave, a drought-resistant succulent grown in Mexico to make tequila.

In Santa Cruz, one grower is trying a tropical exotic, lucuma, that is native to South American regions with mild winters. Others are growing tropical dragonfruit from the Central Coast down to San Diego.

Some Sonoma and Napa Valley wineries have planted new vineyards in cooler coastal hills and valleys to escape the extreme heat of inland areas. And several Bay Area farmers have planted yangmei, a delicacy in China that can resist blights that ravage peaches and other popular California crops during rainy springs.

“People almost never talk about the positives of global warming, but there will be winners and losers everywhere.”
— Gary Gragg, Sacramento Valley farmer

Near the town of Linden, farmer Mike Machado, who served in the state Assembly and Senate from 1994 to 2008, is one of many growers in the arid San Joaquin Valley who have replaced some stone fruit and nut trees with olives, historically a minor California crop mostly produced in Mediterranean nations.

“We’re adjusting for survival,” Machado said.

Climate change essentially means that Southern California’s conditions are creeping north up the coast and into the valley, while Oregon and Washington are becoming more like Northern California. Precipitation, winds, fog, and seasonal and daily temperature patterns — all of which determine which crops can be grown where — have all been altered.

“With climate change, we’re getting more erratic entries into fall and more erratic entries into spring,” said Louise Ferguson, a UC Davis plant physiologist.

Researchers predicted that “climatic conditions by the middle to end of the 21st century will no longer support some of the main tree crops currently grown in California.…For some crops, production might no longer be possible.”

“Fruit growers all around the world in the warm regions are worried about” warming trends, particularly in winter, said Eike Luedeling, a coauthor of the study and a professor of horticultural sciences at Germany’s University of Bonn.

UC Davis researchers are at the cutting edge of the push to adapt, working to make California’s lucrative walnut, pistachio and stone fruit orchards more resilient by selectively breeding for heat, disease and drought tolerance.

About three-quarters of the nation’s fruits and nuts are grown in California, but fruit and nut trees are among the most vulnerable crops to climate change.

Luedeling’s research suggests that high winter temperatures could severely reduce walnut yields about once a decade.

Katherine Jarvis-Shean, an orchard advisor with the UC Agriculture and Natural Resources program, said that effect will be magnified farther south: “That’s probably one in five years in the southern San Joaquin Valley,” she said.

Searching for genetic resilience

Pistachios have grown to one of the state’s mightiest crops, with acreage of mature trees now covering more than 400,000 acres. The 2021 harvest totaled about 577,000 tons and was valued at nearly $3 billion.

Now crop scientists are working to save these valuable orchards from the effects of warming.

Warmer winters can cause male varieties to bloom and release pollen too late, after the female flowers have opened. This means less pollination and less fruit, and in 2015 many orchards suffered total crop failure.

Patrick Brown, a UC Davis nut crop breeder, said farmers have solved this problem, at least for now, by grafting additional male varieties with different blooming schedules into the groves. “It’s a fairly easy hedge against that problem (of warmer winters),” he said. “No matter when the females bloom, there should be some pollen for them.”

Breeding programs to reduce nuts’ chill requirements are underway, but Brown said these trees have trade-offs: They tend to wake up earlier from winter dormancy, which can put premature foliage at risk of frost damage and expose young leaves to rainfall that causes blight.

Gragg’s farm near Winters grows an array of crops, including citrus (shown above) and less-traditional ones like tropical fruits. Photo by Rahul Lal, CalMatters

Brown is now leading a hunt for genetic resistance to walnut blight in the shady groves of the Wolfskill Experimental Orchard, a repository of nearly 9,000 grapevine and tree fruit varieties from around the world. This genetic bank, owned by UC Davis and jointly run with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, includes walnut trees of several species and hundreds of varieties.

Brown’s experiment involves showering the walnuts with sprinklers in spring and summer and observing which develop the symptoms of blight — oil-black stains on the leaves and fruit.

His research is focused on walnut trees grown from seeds collected in the Republic of Georgia, where humidity creates conditions amenable to the disease. This likely has created localized genetic resistance — what Brown hopes to find.

“It gets pretty hot and humid (in Georgia) during the growing season, and if there’s resistance to blight anywhere, that would probably be a good place to look,” he said.

“Drought tolerance is a really tough nut to crack, because it doesn’t just involve roots — it involves every system of the plant.”
— Claire Heinitz, U.S. Department of Agriculture

Still other problems are emerging as California’s weather patterns grow more erratic.

Early fall rains have been a problem for walnuts, spoiling ripening fruits. And heat waves — especially when they follow a rain event — can cause fruit to drop or spoil. Almost 40% of last fall’s walnut crop was lost when Central Valley temperatures approached 115 degrees, according to Robert Verloop, executive director of the California Walnut Board and the California Walnut Commission.

Walnut growers “are worried about heatwaves, and they should be,” Jarvis-Shean said.

Another UC Davis study at the Wolfskill orchard aims to identify genes for heat tolerance in European walnut trees. Claire Heinitz, a U.S. Department of Agriculture research leader, said trees are sampled with an instrument that measures photosynthesis. The idea is to find unique individuals that maintain basic functions under brutal heat conditions.

This year, she said, the project, led by researchers Andrew McElrone and Mina Momayyezi, might be expanded to include grapes, which are highly prone to heat damage, as well as pistachios and almonds.

Heinitz said much of the research aims to create hardier root systems, which can protect the trees against soil pathogens, salts and other stressors. However, breeding drought resilience into California’s major crops may be a more elusive goal.

“Drought tolerance is a really tough nut to crack, because it doesn’t just involve roots — it involves every system of the plant,” Heinitz said.

Researcher Andrew McElrone uses a porometer on an almond tree leaf at the Wolfskill Experimental Orchards near Winters. Photo by Rahul Lal, CalMatters

California’s subtropical future?

The winter of 2023 was an unusually cold one, but it hardly suggests a trend toward nut-friendly weather.

UCLA climate scientist Daniel Swain said last month that the low temperatures of the past several months were “a fluke” amid a long-term trajectory of increasingly warm winters. In fact, he said, “this may well be the coldest winter that some places will see now for the rest of our lives.”

If true, that could mean smooth sailing for Chiles Wilson Jr. and his family. A fifth-generation Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta farmer, Wilson has planted thousands of avocado trees of a dozen varieties near Walnut Grove and Cortland. Now the fruit, harvested almost year-round, is a key component of the family’s fruit-packing company, Rivermaid.

Most California avocados are grown between San Diego and Santa Barbara, covering nearly 50,000 acres and producing more than $300 million in direct farm sales.

Wilson recalls that when he pitched the avocado idea to his family nearly a decade ago, they discouraged him.

“They said, ‘Nah, they won’t produce here,’” he said. “And I said, ‘But that one does.’” He pointed to a large, fruit-laden avocado tree within sight of the farm’s main office. They gave it a shot, planting more than 600 avocado trees per acre.

Wilson knows, even in an era of warming, that his avocado orchards are a gamble. “We’re one killer freeze away from being wiped out,” Wilson said.

However, this winter, the temperature dipped below freezing 16 times in the Wilsons’ avocado groves, yet the trees survived and are producing fruit.

Gragg holds Pinkerton avocados that he grows in the Sacramento Valley. Photo by Rahul Lal, CalMatters

Still other fruits, barely known to most Americans, could rise to greatness in a warmer California. Charlie Lucero, a home orchardist in Menlo Park, is helping introduce Californians to yangmei. Lychee-like red orbs with pits inside like a cherry and a taste like pomegranate and pine resin, yangmei are typically grown in China.

Now Lucero is serving as a consultant and marketer for several Northern California growers who are preparing to harvest their second crop.

Lucero said the fruit — a relative of the bayberry — has “zero chill requirement” and is also resistant to fungi and bacteria that can plague stone fruit growers.

“If we get a late rain, it doesn’t hurt us,” Lucero said of his small yangmei collaborative, called Calmei. “These trees are well suited for California, where the weather is becoming less predictable.”

Lucero said they’ve been retailing for about $60 a pound. Last year’s crop totaled about 2.5 tons; this year, he expects about twice that.

An orchard project near Santa Cruz offers another glimpse into California’s possible future of farming.

Nate Blackmore of Wildlands Farm and Nursery is planting several acres with subtropical fruits, mostly from Central and South America — white sapote, ice cream bean, cherimoya, uvaia, dragonfruit and guabiroba.

The main attraction of his up-and-coming orchard will be lucuma trees. Native to western South America, lucuma resembles a round avocado with a pointed bottom, with mealy, sweet flesh like a yam.

All these species are tolerant of frost — but just barely.

“It’s so scary having all these subtropical fruit trees, and wondering how many would survive a bad freeze,” Blackmore said.

Yet another tropical crop could gain an advantage from California’s warming climate: coffee.

It’s being grown at orchards in Santa Barbara, Ventura and San Diego counties, and it’s not cheap: One company is selling organic coffee beans for $286 per pound. But the trees are hardly sustainable in those regions, which are reliant on water imported from Northern California and the Colorado River: Watering them takes at least several feet of water per year.

Another tropical fruit more suitable for drought-prone land is the pitaya, or dragonfruit. Grown from tropical cactus plants, it can be farmed in California with as little as 1.5 feet of applied water — a third of what citrus and avocados need, according to Ramiro Lobo, a San Diego County farm advisor with the UC Cooperative Extension program. His program has distributed about 50,000 dragonfruit cactus cuttings to small farmers from San Luis Obispo down to San Diego and at least 1,000 acres are in production.

Dry farming to cope with water scarcity

Among all the pressures for California farmers, none is so persistent and serious as water supply. The agriculture industry uses about 80% of the water Californians consume. During droughts, farmers — especially those growing some 4 million acres of grapevines and fruit trees — pump water from the ground.

This has caused thousands of drinking water wells to run dry and land to sink as aquifers shrivel. The state passed a new groundwater law in 2014 that is beginning to take effect, and could force as much as 900,000 acres of irrigated cropland, mostly in the arid San Joaquin Valley, out of production.

But this is inconsequential to farmers like Tristan Benson. Based in western Sonoma County, he practices dry farming.

Benson and his partners usually harvest 20 to 30 tons of heirloom wheat and barley from loamy hillsides, selling the grain for use in bread, beer and distilling. To grow these staples, they just need a little rain, forgoing the irrigation that other growers, like those in the Central and Imperial valleys, rely upon.

Even through recent droughts, Benson said, he has always pulled in a crop. “The closer to the coast we are, the better we do,” he said. Fields are planted in October or November, and about a week after the first heavy rain, the seeds germinate, and usually the ground stays moist until the summer harvest time.

Benson’s methods could be a model for sustainability for other California growers, who have “planted millions of acres of trees that always need water, and our reservoirs have at most a three-year supply,” he said.

Claire Heinitz, a scientist with the U.S. Department of of Agriculture, helps manage the Wolfskill Experimental Orchards, a collection of thousands of crop varieties used for breeding experiments. Photo by Rahul Lal, CalMatters

Benson thinks a smart farming model is to grow winter crops without irrigation, and when reservoirs are full — as they are now — plant irrigated fields with annual summer fruits and vegetables. Apples, tomatoes, pears, grapes and potatoes can all be dry-farmed in cooler regions; farther inland and to the south, dry farming is more challenging, at least for most crops.

Geoff Vanden Heuvel, director of regulatory and economic affairs at the Milk Producers Council, said winter farming of grain and feed crops, with just a few inches of irrigation water, could help feed livestock with less groundwater use.

More than a quarter of the state’s feed crops are grown in areas entirely reliant on groundwater, and this dependency will likely translate into fewer California cows in the future, he said. By the 2040s, when the groundwater law takes full effect, dairy herds are expected to drop by about 10%. “That’s about 130,000 fewer cows,” Vanden Heuvel said.

Ferguson of UC Davis said Central Valley farmers have grown accustomed to harvesting maximum yields because “we had more reliable water. Maybe now, when we don’t have the water or it’s more expensive, they’ll have to settle for a lower yield.”

Daniel Sumner, a UC Davis professor of agricultural and resource economics, said California’s agricultural identity already has changed drastically over time. In its earliest days of statehood, California was a major producer of rain-watered wheat, grown on several million acres. When irrigation became ubiquitous, so did specialty crops that thrive in a hot, dry climate but need water in the summer.

Almonds now cover more than 1.6 million acres of the Central Valley, and pistachios have seen explosive growth, “from almost nothing to a $2 billion crop in a few decades.”

He said predicting what crops will be trending in California in several decades is impossible, “but it’s hard to picture that we wouldn’t stay a specialty crop producer,” he said.

Economic turbulence, too

It’s not just the changing climate that’s guiding the future of one of California’s top industries. In the decades to come, growers will experience economic shifts, competition from imports and rising labor costs.

The increasing minimum wage, for example, has made even some high-value crops, like table olives, unprofitable to grow in California unless machines prune the trees and pick the fruit. Hand-based labor can suck up 45 to 60% of gross revenue, largely because olives must be carefully handled.

Spain, the world’s superproducer of olives, generates a cheaper product and has forced California growers to adapt, said Dennis Burreson, a vice-president at the Musco Family Olive Co., based in Tracy.

Burreson said machine harvesting is now becoming standard for many tree crops, adding, “eventually, I think hand-harvesting of many orchard crops is going to be in the rear-view mirror.”

Meanwhile, the state’s mighty walnut industry has been knocked on its side as oversupply and competition from China have sent prices crashing. In 2013, a ton of walnuts sold off the farm for $3,700. Now it’s about $700 per ton. On top of that, growers “are still sitting on 130,000 tons of the 2021 crop,” Verloop said, with some of that excess distributed to food banks.

So many walnut growers are now reportedly scheduled to have their trees uprooted and chipped that removal services can’t keep up.

Sumner said the economic upheaval of the walnut industry “doesn’t look like it’s turning around.”

Brown suspects that labor costs and land values will be just as strong drivers of agriculture’s evolution as the changing climate. Other regions of the world are producing crops for less, he said, which means California’s specialties will be niche and higher-quality produce.

“Whatever is going to be grown in California in 50 years,” he said, “is what can’t be grown elsewhere or what can be grown better here.”

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CalMatters.org is a nonprofit, nonpartisan media venture explaining California policies and politics.

It is with great sadness that our beloved wife, mother, daughter and sister, Davina Renee Ou, passed away April 27, 2023 at the age of 44.

Davina was born on December 3, 1978 to Donald and Mellie West in Eureka. She is survived by her husband, Mingwha Ou, and their three children, Mingwha Jr. (Toa), Tautua, Leilahanna Ou and her precious Lulu. She is also survived by her sister and brother-in-law, Amanda and Pago Neemia, as well as her brother and sister-in-law, Jared and Amy West. Her nieces and nephews: Tuutuuimalo, Lolua, Talamoni and Waiatupu Neemia along with a multitude of aunties, uncles, nieces and nephews.

Davina was born and raised here in Eureka and attended Lincoln Elementary School, Winship Middle School, Eureka High School and College of the Redwoods. Davina played many sports throughout her youth and high school years, including basketball, softball and volleyball. She was remembered by many for her athletic abilities.

In 1995, she met the love of her life, Ming, and tied the knot in 2004. They then began their family in 2006 and had three beautiful children. Davina worked at Hat World and successfully managed the store for nine years. She then started working at the Eureka Housing Authority, where she formed numerous friendships and impacted many lives. Throughout the years, Davina coached many youth sports beginning with coaching her brother, Jared. She then went on to coach her children and nieces and nephews. Davina took pride in coaching the children of the community. She treated each and every one of them as her own, and was loved and respected because of it.

As her children grew, you could always find or hear her in the stands cheering the kids on at every sporting event while being sure to give the referees and coaches a piece of her mind. When she wasn’t at sports games or spending time with her family she enjoyed going to Bear River Casino or dining at one of her favorite restaurants. She never missed the opportunity for a day trip to the river or camping with her friends and family. Davina made a friend wherever she went and was loved by many.

We were blessed to have you in our lives, Davina. You will forever be missed and in our hearts always.

We want to give a special thank you to Dr. Dieker and the medical staff for their care and support of our loved one, Davina. Also to all of our family and friends who came to be with us during this difficult time. We love and appreciate you all!

We will be having a celebration of life in honor of our Davina on Saturday, May 20 at 3 p.m. at Bear River Recreation Center in Loleta.

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Verne Leslie Skjonsby Jr. passed away on May 2, 2023, in Cutten. He was lovingly cared for by family members spending his final days at home. He was also given amazing care by Hospice of Humboldt.

Verne was third-generation born in Honolulu. His grandfather Jason was born under the reign of King Kalakaua. The family was originally from the Azores and Madeira.

He attended Punahou High School and the Lawrenceville School and graduated from the University of Colorado with a degree in anthropology. He had a wide range of careers that generally were always involved with education.

He started teaching the gifted and highly gifted in science in the seventh and eighth grades. The students’ learning experiences took place flying rockets in the air and traveling on the R.V. Inland Seas on the San Francisco Bay.

He became fascinated with the early computers and taught a large company’s employees to use those very large computers. He went onto working for Tandy doing the final assembly of computers and again training people how to use their computers. His last job in computers was to teach bid estimating to contractors all over the United States. He especially liked doing it in Alaska, as the contractors would take him out in small planes to see different areas of Alaska.

He was a lay assisting minister in the Lutheran Church for 35 years — first in Burlingame, being trained by Pastor Peter Garrison, and then at Calvary Lutheran Church in Eureka. He spent the last years of his life training new Lay Assisting Ministries at Calvary, leaving a strong legacy behind. He served on Lutheran Homes for the Aging Board for fifteen years, and many years on Calvary Council.

He served on the Pacific Union School board for nine years and when he moved to Cutten he served on the Cutten School Board for four years. Every election he could be found doing a wide range of activities from being a poll worker to being a supervisor of several polling places. He felt it was very important to be a blood donor and was honored by Peninsula Blood Bank, in Burlingame, for his ten-gallon donation. When he moved to Humboldt, he gave seven gallons of blood to the local blood bank. Ill health stopped him from being a donor, which he was very disappointed about.

Verne was an avid reader, which made the Mensa book club one of his favorite activities. He was a faithful member of the group the 22 years he lived in Humboldt County. He liked being the host of the Book Group. He attended many of the other activities that Mensa provided.

He learned camping from his wife, Dorothy and most summers were spent camping in most of the Western United States and Canada. The family’s favorite spot was Yosemite, during both summer and winter. One winter even being caught in a blizzard while cross country skiing with his family. Being five stubborn individuals the family all made it back safely.

His father, Lieutenant Commander Verne Leslie Skjonsby, and his mother, Dorothy Marie Andrade Skjonsby, preceded him in death. He leaves behind his wife of 52 years, Dorothy Eda Svennngsen Skjonsby; his children, Johannes Skjonsby, Jason Skjonsby, and Kierstine Escalante; his daughters-in-law, Surya Skjonsby, Fern Dalton, and Stacy Escalante; and grandchildren, Karishma Skjonsby, Beorn Skjonsby, Phelan Escalante and Luca Escalante.

In place of flowers donations can be made to the Eureka Mission or Hospice of Humboldt, in memory of Verne Leslie Skjonsby, Jr.

Remembrance services will be held May 27 at 2 p.m. at Calvary Lutheran Church 716 South Ave. (across from Alice Birney) in Eureka. Fellowship will follow the service.

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Joan VanCleave was born in Billings, Montana on December 4, 1936 and fell asleep in death on March 27, 2023 at Redwood R&R in Eureka. She was the youngest of five children. She married William “Bill” VanCleave on December 31, 1953, and they enjoyed 61 years together until Bill’s death on October 25, 2015.

In the early 1960s, Joan and Bill moved from the coast to help establish a congregation of Jehovah’s Witnesses in the Hoopa and Willow Creek area. They loved sharing their Bible-based hope of the time, soon, when God’s Kingdom under the rulership of Jesus Christ will bring peace earth-wide. Over the years, they studied the Bible with others, some of whom also came to love and serve Jehovah God.

Some, including her niece and a friend from the coast, fondly recall summer visits and going with Joan and Bill inner tubing, swimming, camping and making homemade cookies.

Occasionally, Joan liked playing pranks. One friend related the time Joan made delicious pancakes covered in syrup for the friend’s sons, but they were unable to cut them because Joan had put rolls of cotton in them for a laugh.

Joan was a school bus driver for many years. Some who rode her bus as children still called her “Mrs. VanCleave” after they grew up, and some of their children also rode her bus.

Joan appreciated her kind and loving neighbors, Gary and Karen Madsen and Hiedi and Keir Johnston, who checked in on her and brought her food.

Joan was preceded in death by her parents, four siblings, one nephew, and her husband, Bill. She is survived by her one niece and her family.

Many thanks go to Joan’s caregivers at Redwood R&R and Hospice of Humboldt for their compassionate care.

A memorial for Joan VanCleave will be held on Saturday, May 13, 2023 at 2 p.m. at the Kingdom Hall of Jehovah’s Witnesses, 65 Blue Jay Lane, Willow Creek. To attend via Zoom, please use this information: ID: 834 5987 6618 Passcode: 546832.

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Celeste Marie Bruner, 82 passed away on May 2, 2023.

Mom was born July 30, 1940 to Manuel and Lena Machado. She grew up on a dairy farm in Arcata. At the age of five she was driving tractors. One day she was driving into the hay barn and the floor started to give way. Boy, did grandpa yell, but only because he thought she was hurt.

When she went to Arcata High she enjoyed singing in the choir. Mom lettered in basketball. Anyone who knew her is probably laughing right now because she was little — she was only 5’1” — but she was fast. She graduated in 1958.

In 1959, mom met Oliver Bruner at a Fireman’s Ball. They were married February 21, 1960. They spent 50 wonderful years together until Daddy passed away on October 10, 2010. If mom wasn’t at home you could find her at the local casinos.

Celeste is survived by her daughter, Cheryl Quigley, and her favorite and only son-in-law Gary; her brother, Manuel (Audrey) Joe; John Machado; and several nieces and nephews. Mom was preceded in death by her husband, Ollie, her parents Manuel and Lena Machado, and her sister, Eleanor Machado.

Celeste’s family would like to invite you to attend her services. Visitation will be at Paul’s Chapel Arcata on Thursday, May 11, from 4 p.m. to 7 p.m. A funeral service will be held at the same location Friday, May 12 at 11 a.m. Following the services there will be an interment in the Veterans Garden at Ocean View Cemetery.

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ED. NOTE: Today the Outpost is delighted to kick off its first maybe-annual “San Marino Week” of programming, in which we seek to strengthen the bonds between Humboldt County and the tiny European country.

All this week, if everything goes according to plan, our John Kennedy O’Connor will be filing dispatches — or “despatches,” as he might call them — from San Marino’s rocky slopes, in between his duties as the country’s official vote-reader for this week’s Eurovision Song Contest, of which he is a world-renowned expert. 

Speaking of which: Tuning in for the Contest this year? O’Connor has prepared the following precis of this year’s festivities, aimed at the novice American viewer. Please enjoy.

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‘This Saturday, the global TV audience will have all eyes on the former industrial port city of Liverpool on England’s Western coast as the UK hosts the 67th Eurovision Song Contest — an annual competition inaugurated in 1956 to find Europe’s best new popular song by the national TV broadcasters across the continent. Two hundred million viewers across the globe are expected to tune in.

For most Americans, if they’ve heard of it all, they certainly will have little interest in sitting down for what is now a four-hour-plus live broadcast that encompasses nations from well beyond Europe’s borders and is regarded with much disdain and loathing by the millions who’ll tune in. Many freely admit they will be watching just to see how bad it’s going to be this year, and despite the winner being chosen mainly by the viewers watching, almost nobody will agree with the result.

However, yet again, NBC will be carrying the live broadcast on their Peacock platform, and for the very first time American viewers will be able to vote by phone for the songs. This year, a “rest of the world” vote will be added to those of the competing 37 nations.

NBC’s involvement in the contest began in 2006, when one of their star presenters, Maria Menounous, was parachuted into the show as the co-hostess of the edition staged at the Olympic stadium in Athens.

Despite purchasing the rights to the format for American viewers, Maria’s star turn did nothing to get the concept of an interstate American version of the show off the ground and NBC shelved plans to get it going.

All that changed in the last decade, when NBC started airing the contest on the fledgling Peacock platform, complete with an American commentator explaining for the small number of viewers exactly what was going on.

The attempts to get an American version of the show at long last came to fruition in the spring of 2022, when The American Song Contest finally made a much heralded appearance in the NBC schedules.

In fact, what NBC imported was not so much the Eurovision Contest itself, but the Swedish domestic competition that is used annually to select Sweden’s entry. The multi-week interstate contest hosted by Kelly Clarkson and Snoop Dogg turned out to be of little interest to American viewers … and the show is widely reported to be the worst-performing entertainment show NBC have ever broadcast and indeed, the most expensive. The second season was postponed until 2024, although most industry insiders doubt it will return even then.

Whether the American viewers will take any interest in this year’s Eurovision Song Contest is yet to be seen, despite the added allure of viewers getting a say in the result. It is hard to imagine folks tuning in for an international contest with no American involvement at all if they weren’t interested at all in watching an interstate U.S. competition. Doubtless, the network is encouraged by the success of recent winners Duncan Laurence and Måneskin in the US charts, scoring considerable hits despite the lack of viewers or interest in the competition.

The scoring of the contest is notoriously complex and may leave US viewers baffled. The European Broadcasting Union, which is in charge of the competition, has provided a video guide to how it all works… but even that may still leave those familiar with the contest hopelessly confused.

Normally, the broadcaster that wins the contest hosts the next edition, but with the war in Ukraine still raging, the idea that Ukraine would host this year’s show following their victory in Turin last spring was a non-starter.

As the UK had earned their record 16th second-place in the show’s history, the BBC stepped in as the runners-up to bring the show back to the UK for the first time since 1998. It is in fact the first time since 1980 that the winning nation was unable to host the following contest.

A bidding war between multiple British cities took place to decide which venue would end up with the multi-million pound poisoned chalice, and in the final reckoning, Liverpool beat out Glasgow for the dubious honor.

Liverpool city council were beside themselves with joy to get the gig and estimate that fifty million pounds will be flowing into cash registers across the city this week as the world’s media and those lucky enough to have scored tickets for the shows descend. A week-long festival of events is taking place outside of the competition itself for all those visitors to enjoy.

The tap to the American audience is also clear in the BBC’ choice of presenters for the show, as Ted Lasso star Hannah Waddingham is one of the four celebrities selected to compère the finals.

The contest kicks off on Tuesday at noon on the West Coast with the first of two semifinals, when ten songs will be chosen to appear in Saturday’s final. A second semifinal selects the next ten on Thursday. These qualifiers then join the six nations that automatically qualify for the final (the previous year’s winner and the big five nations of Germany, France, Italy, Spain and the United Kingdom). All three shows will be live on Peacock, with live tele-voting for the US viewers to have their say.

For who that would like to see the shows but don’t have a Peacock subscription, some of the European nations participating provide international live feeds, but their commentaries provided in their own language may be too much for US viewers.

San Marino RTV will be providing a free telecast, with commentators Lia Fioro and Gigi Restivo whipping their domestic audience into an excited frenzy in Italian.

For any potential viewers who’d like to know what they’ll be in for, the BBC have put together a guide for the uninitiated, which can be found here. If you’d like to see and hear all 37 entries, a full guide is available at this link.

If you’d just like a quick skim through all 37 songs… there’s a compilation of about 20 seconds of each song here:

There will be a brief moment in the contest on Saturday that Lost Coast readers may be marginally interested in catching. Each of the participating nations contributes a jury vote to the proceedings and a local celebrity gets to read out that score for the millions of viewers. The tiny enclave of San Marino is light on celebrity, so they have imported one for the purpose, although the term “celebrity” is stretching credibility thin, for sure. The 30-second appearance may be worth tuning in for, but if you blink… you may be disappointed.

Regardless, Humboldt Today will be presenting the newscasts from the tiny Republic in the run-up to the contest, and the Outpost will be having Humboldt Conversations with local dignitaries illuminating life in the microstate for the Lost Coast audience, including the former San Marino ambassador to the USA.

The TV competition that gave the world ABBA, Céline Dion and Måneskin — and made embarrassed losers out of Julio Iglesias, Engelbert Humperdinck, Bonnie Tyler, Olivia Newton John and t.A.T.u., seriously impairing their credibility and previous hit making status in the USA — is upon us. You have been warned.

HUMBOLDT TODAY: Hopefully that’s the last li’l storm of the season, yeah? We have a quick roundup of the minor carnage; the California Reparations Task Force has approved their recommendations which could amount to millions of dollars for eligible Black Californians; plus, don’t even think of leaving your couch on Arcata’s streets, kids! Those stories and more in today’s online newscast with John Kennedy O’Connor.

FURTHER READING: 

• PLEASE DON’T DUMP YOUR SH*T: With Cal Poly Humboldt Graduation Approaching, The City of Arcata Reminds Folks to Dispose of Their Unwanted Stuff Legally and Responsibly
• Two Arrested on Drugs, Weapons Charges After ‘High-Risk’ Traffic Stop Near Blue Lake Yesterday, Sheriff’s Office Says
• Eureka City Government Moves to Acquire Still Another Piece of Land for Proposed Bay-to-Zoo Trail
• Reparations Panel Recommends Possible Millions for Eligible Black Californians

HUMBOLDT TODAY can be viewed on LoCO’s homepage each night starting at 6 p.m.

Want to LISTEN to HUMBOLDT TODAY? Subscribe to the podcast version here.