No Bananas in the Delta? MC Hammer shows DWR experts are wrong

MC Hammer, the rap-pop icon, is among the biggest celebrities of the over half million people that live in the Delta.  He lives on a few acres near Tracy, and he sometimes blogs and tweets about his beloved banana plants.  On the A&E reality show "Hammer Time", you can see his bananas, and he also takes his dad and kids fishing in the Delta.

I mention this because I have been working my way through lots of correspondence on the DPC Economic Sustainability Plan.  The Department of Water Resources wins the detail prize with 58 pages of single spaced comments.

In one surprisingly lengthy section of comments, DWR staff makes a very big deal out of the fact that we have included bananas in our appendix list of the 80 different crops in the Delta recorded in our database in an apparant attempt to discredit us and make us look silly.  They are unaware of bananas in the Delta and say they have been studying the area for years.  So, I had our analyst track down and confirm our less than 1 acre "crop" of bananas, and he tracked it to a location off 205 near Tracy.  It isn't MC Hammer, but apparantly we have some very small scale commercial growing of banana plants, perhaps to serve hobbyists like MC Hammer, or perhaps someone is trying to appeal to the growing number of locavores who crave tropical fruit.  All we know is someone is making pesticide filings for very small amounts of bananas, that it has no bearing on our results at all, and our crop data is more detailed than DWR.

But thanks to DWR picking through all the fine print, I now have learned some new Delta trivia and have the opportunity to be inspired to write this post by MC Hammer's own banana blogging (hat tip to VQ).

I love these trees (plants)...they multiply themselves continously. Each of these groups started off as one plant. The more you cut them back, the taller and stronger they grow....

In life, it is the moments that we are cut back, that we should look forward to new growth in our lives. Bigger, better, stronger and multiplying ourselves by sharing what we have learned with others....

--Hammertime