Sludge Watch ==> How Safe is Your Salad?

[Maureen Reilly]

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/12/16/CMMQSSF81.DTL


How Safe Is Your Salad?
New industry rules for leafy greens aim to protect consumers from E. coli. 
Farmers and conservationists question the science behind the standards
Carl Nagin

Sunday, December 16, 2007


    More... Late in August 2006, the federal Centers for Disease Control and 
Prevention in Atlanta began investigating cases of severe food poisoning 
reported by health officials in 26 states and one Canadian province. Over 
the next six weeks, a rare and particularly virulent strain of Escherichia 
coli 0157:H7 sickened more than 200 people across North America, 
hospitalizing half of them, some with severe kidney damage, and killing two 
elderly women and a child. For epidemiologists, the outbreak presented a 
breakthrough because a DNA-fingerprinting system enabled CDC investigators 
to trace the source of the infections from clusters of cases nationwide.

Bacteria in stool samples of hospitalized patients were genetically matched 
to pathogens in packaged, "ready to eat" Dole brand spinach that they had 
recently purchased and consumed. Further, product codes on the bags 
indicated that the contaminated greens had been processed during one shift 
on Aug. 15 at a plant in San Juan Bautista then owned and operated by 
Natural Selection Foods. The company's records showed that the spinach had 
been harvested from four fields in Monterey and San Benito counties.

Just how the spinach became contaminated and where in the process from field 
to package the bacteria originated will probably never be known. An 
investigative report released in March by the Food and Drug Administration 
could make "no definitive determination" as to "how E. coli 0157:H7 
pathogens contaminated spinach in this outbreak."

The consequences of the crisis fell heavily on California's Central Coast 
farmers, who are now being pressed by buyers to comply with a 
con{fllig}icting array of new food-safety measures, some of which, according 
to the Environmental Protection Agency and other regulatory agencies, are 
costly, scientifically unproven and environmentally harmful. Some violate 
state regulations, and may even be counterproductive to food safety. But the 
growers must follow these measures in order to market their crops to the 
larger contractors or handlers.

The new set of rules is jeopardizing the future of sustainable agriculture 
and of the habitat and clean water it supports, according to the Nature 
Conservancy's Monterey Project Director Chris Fischer: "Farmers and 
conservationists in California have been working together for more than 20 
years to develop practices that help protect water quality and wildlife 
habitat, but since last fall, farmers have been under enormous pressure from 
their buyers to go the other direction. To stay in business, they are being 
forced to build miles of fences along streams, cut down trees and bulldoze 
ponds. Some actions, like creating bare-earth buffers along waterways, may 
actually increase the risk of contamination downstream."

Search for the source
The E. coli outbreak of August 2006 was "one of the worst ever reported in 
produce," stated a 2006 "Critical Issues" report by the nonprofit Organic 
Center, which conducts peer-reviewed scientific research on organic food and 
farming. It prompted investigations by the FBI and FDA and led to one of the 
largest product recalls in U.S. history: On Sept. 14, 2006, the FDA issued a 
consumer and retailer advisory not to eat or sell any bagged or fresh 
spinach. The product was pulled off store shelves and was not served in 
restaurants. This advisory remained in effect until Sept. 22.

Hank Giclas, vice president for science and technology for Western Growers, 
a produce industry group, remembered the day the nation's spinach industry 
was shut down. "I was in my office, and we were frantically summoned to a 
conference call with FDA officials. Their advisory took everyone by 
surprise. It was an unprecedented action. They'd never before issued any 
kind of blanket 'Do not consume spinach' warning. The industry ground to a 
halt."

Members of Western Growers in California and Arizona grow, pack and ship 
nearly half the nation's fresh fruits, vegetables and nuts. Giclas estimated 
that the shutdown cost the spinach industry roughly $100 million and 
affected other bagged salad produce as well.

On Sept. 20, five weeks after the Natural Selection Foods plant had 
processed the spinach for Dole, FDA investigators began taking soil and 
water samples from four of the ranches where it had been grown and 
harvested. Samples from one ranch in San Benito County had E. coli pathogens 
indistinguishable from the strain identified by the CDC's DNA-fingerprinting 
system, PulseNet. These were found in soil, river water and cow and feral 
pig feces at Paicines Ranch, a large grass-fed beef operation that had 
leased a small amount of its land to a spinach grower. But these E. 
coli-infested samples were found nearly a mile away from the implicated 
spinach field. None were found on the plot itself.

Whatever the origin and pathways of the outbreak, the washing procedures at 
the processing plant failed to eliminate the pathogens, and its 
quality-assurance protections failed to detect it after the processing. The 
FDA report was heavily redacted in a way that limits public access to 
details of Natural Selection Foods' processing operations. NSF chief 
operating officer Charles Sweat was quick to divert attention back to the 
fields and away from the manufacturing end.

In an Oct. 15, 2006, article in the New York Times ("The 
Vegetable-Industrial Complex"), author and UC Berkeley Graduate School of 
Journalism professor Michael Pollan, who has written widely about food and 
its production, noted that "a great deal of spinach from a great many fields 
gets mixed together in the water at that plant, giving microbes from a 
single field an opportunity to contaminate a vast amount of food. The plant 
in question washes 26 million servings of salad every week. In effect, we're 
washing the whole nation's salad in one big sink."

The FDA had known about contamination problems in spinach and other Central 
Coast and Salinas Valley produce for years. Over the past decade, nine other 
E. coli outbreaks associated with the area's leafy greens had been 
documented. Prior warnings from the FDA and the California Department of 
Public Health included letters to Salinas packers, Western Growers and other 
industry groups, calling for implementation of safer manufacturing and 
sanitation practices and, more recently, alerts about wells and irrigation 
systems contaminated with animal wastes.

However, the FDA has little enforcement authority over the food industry, in 
contrast with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which monitors and 
regulates meat, poultry and eggs. While the USDA has on-site inspectors at 
the nation's slaughterhouses who can shut them down on the spot if they fail 
inspections, the FDA lacks comparable manpower and does not have that 
authority. The FDA's food-safety oversight has been the target of intense 
criticism from congressional critics, including Rep. John Dingell, D-Mich., 
chair of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, and from advocacy 
groups who complain about its coziness with the produce industry. The FDA's 
inspection capacity has been hit hard by budget cuts in recent years. 
Between 2003 and 2006, the number of safety tests for U.S.-produced food 
decreased nearly 75 percent, from 9,748 to 2,455, according to FDA 
statistics. Last April, Robert E. Brackett, director of the FDA's 
food-safety division, told the Washington Post that he believes 
manufacturers are better equipped to "build safety into their products 
rather than us chasing after them."

Industry shapes a safety plan
Immediately after the outbreak, prompted by the FDA and California's public 
health and agriculture departments, Western Growers began developing a Leafy 
Greens Marketing Agreement, with guidelines that would serve as a standard 
for certifying the safe handling, shipment and sale of produce marketed by 
its signatories. This agreement would be administered by the California 
Department of Food and Agriculture, which would use a USDA-designed 
inspection program that has been applied in other states.

Food and Agriculture Secretary, A.G. Kawamura, is a past president of 
Western Growers. In February, he appointed an advisory board for the 
marketing agreement composed almost exclusively of representatives from the 
bigger "handlers" - those who process, package, ship and distribute leafy 
green products. Conservation groups and resource agencies that had been 
working for years with Central Coast farmers had complained from the outset 
that the Western Growers' initiative was a closed-door process designed to 
serve the interests of handlers and big buyers. California Certified Organic 
Farmers, one of the nation's oldest and largest certifiers of organic 
produce, criticized the "lack of transparency in the process."

When word got out about some of the measures proposed in discussions, such 
as plowing up riparian buffers, eliminating wildlife and erecting high 
fences around fields, alarm spread through the farming, regulatory and 
conservation communities.

On Oct. 25, 2006, Roger W. Briggs, executive officer of the Central Coast 
Regional Water Quality Control Board, aired his agency's concerns in a 
letter to Brackett at the FDA, with copies sent to Giclas at Western Growers 
and other industry groups. The emerging guidelines (known variously as 
metrics and GAPs - good agricultural practices), "may con{fllig}ict with the 
[RWQCB's] mission to protect water quality and may increase water quality 
violations in farming areas," Briggs wrote. "We are aware of concerns that 
riparian or on-farm vegetation may attract wildlife that may spread the 
0157:H7 E. coli, but are not aware of any research to support those 
concerns." He requested a meeting with the FDA and the opportunity "to 
review any future proposed food safety guidelines or suggested farm 
practices that may affect water quality."

Almost three months later, on Jan. 10, 2007, with Briggs still awaiting a 
response to his letter, the water board's chairman, Jeffrey Young, wrote to 
CDFA and Western Growers, noting that 92 percent of the region's total 
irrigated acreage - including all the acreage farmed by the large growers of 
leafy greens - was enrolled in collaborative programs designed to improve 
water quality. "We know that vegetated conservation practices are among the 
most effective tools for protecting and improving water quality," Young 
wrote. "Millions of federal and state taxpayer dollars have been invested in 
researching and promoting conservation practices, and in assisting farmers 
in implementing such practices." He warned that a "major accomplishment on 
the part of the agricultural industry" was now at risk.

Not until after Young's letter, as well as letters from the EPA, the 
Department of Commerce and other agencies were fired off, did Western 
Growers respond to these concerns. It amended an early draft of the 
marketing agreement to incorporate the conservation concerns and comments of 
resource agencies, including this language:

"Fencing, vegetation removal and destruction of habitat may result in 
adverse impacts to the environment. Potential adverse impacts include loss 
of habitat to beneficial insects and pollinators; wildlife loss; increased 
discharges of sediment and other pollutants resulting from the loss of 
vegetative filtering; and increased air quality impacts if bare soil is 
exposed to wind. It is recommended that producers check for local, state and 
federal laws and regulations that protect riparian habitat, restrict removal 
of vegetation or habitat or restrict construction of wildlife deterrent 
fences in riparian areas or wildlife corridors."

The Marketing Agreement addresses a wide range of food-safety issues, 
including sanitizing farm equipment; preventing transfer of pathogens from 
field workers; wildlife encroachments from deer, goats, pigs, cattle and 
sheep; soil amendments; and water usage. (See Western Growers' Web site, 
www.wga.com, for the June 2007 draft.)

Among those who thought that the agreement fell short of what was necessary 
was Charles Benbrook of the Organic Institute, who sent comments to Western 
Growers, some of which, he acknowledges, were adopted in various drafts of 
the agreement. But Benbrook found the document remains most seriously 
{fllig}awed with respect to water-testing requirements. The required test is 
based on the wrong organism, and the standard applied to testing for E. coli 
in irrigation water is "unscientific and indefensible," because it relies on 
"an outmoded recreational water quality risk assessment" from the mid-1980s 
used by the EPA to test swimming water, he states in a June 2007 report, 
"Unfinished Business: Preventing E. Coli 0157 Outbreaks in Leafy Greens" 
(available at www.organic-center.org).

The metrics do not require testing irrigation water specifically for E. coli 
0157, only for generic E. coli, Benbrook states. He concludes: "Water with 
detectable levels of E. coli 0157 should not be used to irrigate leafy 
greens. Period."

Numerous phone calls to Giclas, of Western Growers, asking for comment went 
unaswered.

The Marketing Agreement went into effect in April, and as of June, 111 
produce handlers, who process nearly all the leafy greens produced in 
California, have signed on to it. However, the con{fllig}ict over ways to 
ensure safety is far from over, and farmers are hard-pressed in its midst. 
Some major handlers and contractors who have signed the agreement, including 
packaged salad giant Fresh Express, are individually demanding that farmers 
take additional safety measures, including some that have little science or 
common sense behind them.

No dogs, no frogs
Fresh Express, purchased in 2005 for $855 million by Chiquita Brands 
International, is the nation's top producer of packaged salads, producing 40 
percent of those sold in supermarkets. Last year the company processed 1.2 
billion pounds of raw lettuce and spinach. Although it signed the Western 
Growers agreement in April, Fresh Express has its own far more demanding 
requirements for greens it buys.

Jim Lugg, senior food-safety scientist with Fresh Express, has worked with 
the Salinas company since 1963. He said the company supplies growers with 
its own set of field-management guidelines and good agricultural practices, 
but would not provide me with these, saying they are a "proprietary document 
protected by copyright." Instead, he referred me to an Oct. 23, 2006, 
article in USA Today ("Fresh Express leads the pack in produce safety") that 
outlines some general requirements.

According to this article, Fresh Express will not accept produce from fields 
grown within a mile of a cattle feed lot or dairy operation, or if they are 
within 150 yards of rivers or habitats that attract wildlife. Fields that 
show evidence of wild pig visitation cannot be harvested for two years. The 
company also demands fences and rodent traps every 50 feet around field 
perimeters.

"If we find animal tracks in a field," Lugg told me, "then we don't believe 
that the product is safe to harvest." That means, he said, any animals - 
from frogs to dogs. "We don't like to see animals in a field of lettuce. We 
don't think people like the idea." Asked if this was more about cosmetic 
issues than food safety, he replied: "What you need to realize is that many 
more bovine intestines have been studied than mice to see if they are 
carriers of E. coli. Maybe mice and kangaroo rats are just as risky as large 
animals." He added that among studies the company has funded is one to 
examine whether insects are disseminating 0157.

Asked whether he had talked with environmental agencies about the impact of 
Fresh Express-food-safety guidelines on riparian habitats in the Salinas 
Valley, Lugg responded: "It's not our place to do that. Some public agencies 
need to do that."

Steve Church is a co-owner of the Salinas-based Church Brothers, a large 
grower, shipper and processing company known for its True Leaf Farms brand. 
Shortly after the outbreak, Church Brothers announced that it would install 
6 miles of additional fencing around its lots "to prevent any wildlife 
intrusion into our fields." In late May, the company announced a price 
increase of 20 cents per package on all True Leaf and Church Brothers 
produce. It justified the increase as a cost of its new food-safety 
measures, including fencing. Church is a member of the California Leafy 
Green Handler Marketing Board, which makes recommendations to the secretary 
of agriculture and the CDFA on the operation of Western Growers' Marketing 
Agreement and the inspection program intended to give it teeth.

I asked Church about the apparent contradiction between the Marketing 
Agreement and Fresh Express's more aggressive stance toward fencing and 
wildlife.

"We [Church Brothers] adhere to Fresh Express guidelines," he said. "You 
gotta do that if you want to be a vendor, or not sell to them. If you grow 
for Fresh Express, you're more limited in the land you can use. Their 
recommendations go beyond the agreement."

Farmers in the crossfire
Bob Martin, a past president of the Monterey County Farm Bureau, is general 
manager of Rio Farms, one of the largest growers and employers in King City. 
These days he spends much of his time trying to make sense of demands 
imposed in the name of safety by various buyers and handlers who contract 
for his produce and market it.

"I grow for several different companies, and each one is requiring a 
different level of compliance," he said. "They're fighting for customer 
bases in the big-box stores, Costco and Wal-Mart. They're battling for those 
accounts by saying 'My product is safer than yours.' "

"I understand we have to get consumers' confidence back. Spinach sales 
haven't recovered. We're only selling 75 to 80 percent of our produce, and 
bagged salads have taken a big hit. But a lot of this is all smoke and 
mirrors. We need good solid research that will tighten up some of these 
metrics. How long does the bacterium survive in soil? In water? Are deer 
really an issue? How far will E. coli 0157:H7 travel in the wind? People are 
looking for answers."

In April, speaking at a conference on water quality and food safety in San 
Luis Obispo, Martin told of farmers being asked to fence their fields and 
tear out riparian habitat that they have restored to comply with 
environmental regulations. He pleaded to his audience, which included 
researchers from the National Science Foundation, the USDA and the FDA, as 
well as academic microbiologists, environmental scientists and crop and food 
safety specialists: Farmers need help, now. He urged the researchers to talk 
to industry leaders.

Safeguards or marketing ploys?
The crisis has everyone involved in the leafy-greens business, especially 
farmers, on high alert - and nervous. "Maybe some of these things we should 
have been doing years ago," said a Salinas Valley grower who asked not to be 
identified. Keeping cattle pasture a distance away from crops was a good 
idea, he said. How great that distance should be is another question. 
Another farmer told of a grower who was asked to remove a grassy waterway to 
get rid of frogs and rodents. A story is going around that the crop of one 
field was rejected because crows had been seen {fllig}ying over it.

Kirk Schmidt, executive director of the nonprofit Central Coast Water 
Quality Preservation Inc., which is involved in environmental monitoring and 
helping farmers preserve water quality, believes that the debate over safety 
measures for leafy greens is being driven by people who work in risk 
management and the legal departments of the big producers and supermarket 
chains - people "who don't understand that crops are grown outside in the 
dirt." That's bad news for water quality and sustainable agriculture in the 
Central Coast.

Liability, along with branding and creating a positive image for produce, is 
not a trivial concern for big handlers and packagers such as Dole and Fresh 
Express, which together control 90 percent of the retail market for packaged 
salads, according to the Produce Marketing Association. The Seattle law firm 
Marler Clark successfully represented victims of last fall's E. coli 
outbreak in lawsuits against Dole. Since 1973, the firm has won settlements 
and verdicts for food sickness victims totaling $300 million. That amount is 
nearly three times the total production value of Monterey County's entire 
spinach crop in 2006. Monterey County's $3.5 billion agriculture industry 
has been turned upside down by the food safety crisis.

Amid the distress and anger in the farming community, Martin relies on 
caution and vigilance. "I look to our workforce," he said, "anyone in the 
field. The awareness of employees is so heightened that I think if it had 
been at that level before, this wouldn't have happened. They see a deer - 
they bring it to the managers' attention. They find lettuce with bird poop 
on it - where before they might have just taken off the leaf, now they drop 
it."

Fencing the river
In June, I drove with Martin along a stretch of the Salinas River to see 
firsthand what some of the new, so-called clean farming practices imposed by 
buyers and contractors were all about. (Martin asked that I not identify any 
of the growers whose fields we observed.) We took a dirt-and-gravel backroad 
to a field of spring mix planted near the riparian thicket of cottonwoods, 
willows and grasses that marks the outer edge of the Salinas 
{fllig}oodplain. What was striking about those plots of red and green baby 
lettuces were the new 8-foot-high chain-link fences installed to guard and 
tower above them, like some satellite yard of Soledad Prison, 20 miles 
north. "To keep out the deer," Martin said.

Deer were not implicated in the FDA's March 21, 2007 investigative report on 
the matter, which focused on cows and feral pigs roaming the ranches close 
to the suspect spinach plots and on conditions at the processing plant. The 
fencing I saw going up along river corridors of south Monterey County, much 
of it visible only from secondary roads, runs about $5 per foot, Martin 
said, or $45,000 per mile. For the bigger growers that can add up to 
$150,000 in new costs, not a penny of which will be paid for by their buyers 
and contractors, who now require it.

A boom in orders for fencing and rodent traps is part of the new world of 
clean farming around King City, where, as Martin points out, none of the 
nine E. coli outbreaks associated with Salinas Valley agriculture in the 
past decade have occurred. It is hotter here, he explains, and one thing 
scientists do know about E. coli is that, airborne, it's very unstable: It 
can be irradiated and neutralized by sunlight and hot winds.

Terry Palmisano, a senior wildlife biologist with the California Department 
of Fish and Game, warns that food-safety concerns have the potential to 
create a 100-mile stretch of fencing on both sides of the river. If that 
happens, "you lose that as a corridor, a way for wildlife to come down out 
of the hills and cross the river," she said. "And when it {fllig}oods, the 
wildlife can't escape."

On June 7, Martin attended a workshop with the agency's wardens and chief 
biologists at the Monterey County Agricultural Center in Salinas. Scores of 
farmers packed the room, along with officials and representatives of 
industry groups and environmental agencies concerned with what's happening 
to Central Coast agriculture.

"Buyers are concerned about animal tracks from deer, pigs, cattle, sheep and 
goats," Martin told the gathering. "Say you've got a 20-acre block of head 
lettuce or romaine out there, and all of a sudden you're two days from 
harvest, and you go to the field and there's a lot of animal tracks. The 
deer came in the night before. They may not have done anything. They just 
walked through the field. But it's up to the scrutiny of the buyers, who can 
say: 'You know what? I don't want that deal.' So we're forced to protect our 
ground from these 'animals of significant risk' and put up fences. You can't 
[fence around] every little bend [in the river], and you don't want to 
forfeit a bunch of farmland that you're already using. So you're going to 
cut some corners in riparian habitat. Nobody wants to talk about this issue. 
We've never had to be concerned about this before."

Martin was a leader in voicing farmers' concerns to Western Growers as it 
developed its guidelines, and he now serves as a technical adviser to the 
organization. Over the years, he has worked with a number of nonprofit 
organizations and governmental agencies that seek to protect water quality 
in the Salinas Valley. Like many growers, he finds himself in the cross fire 
between environmental and food industry interests. He worries that the 
buyers who are demanding stricter measures are far removed from the 
realities and consequences of what they are asking.

His views were echoed by many growers at the Salinas workshop, including 
Benny Jefferson, another member of the Farm Bureau Board and chairman of the 
Salinas River Channel Coalition. "Anyone from Costco here?" Jefferson asked 
from the podium. "Wal-Mart? Safeway?" Nobody answered.

Nobody from the industry was there to help the farmers who feel trapped 
between food-safety guidelines they must follow to earn their livelihood and 
resource agencies' rules they must violate to comply with industry metrics. 
Nor have Fish and Game or Water Quality Board staff provided clear answers 
to the farmers' dilemma.

Local regulations prohibited fencing more than 6 feet high along the river 
until July 10, when the Monterey County Board of Supervisors, under pressure 
from processors, passed an "interim urgency" ordinance allowing 8-foot 
fences. The Monterey County Herald noted that the new ordinance waived both 
50-foot setback requirements and state environmental regulations.

The pressures on growers are mounting. Vegetation removal in the name of 
food safety is also a concern for the California Department of 
Transportation, which has warned growers about encroachments on land 
abutting state highways. Caltrans District Director Richard Krumholtz wrote 
the Monterey County Farm Bureau last spring that his department had observed 
an increasing number of ranchers and farmers removing plant life "in direct 
violation of Caltrans vegetation management policies, environmental law and 
permits."

It's counterproductive
"The industry is still in crisis mode, and they are making tremendous errors 
in standards," said Kirk Schmidt, a former owner of Quail Mountain Herbs, 
who represents agriculture on the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary's 
Advisory Council. "It will take at least a year to undo the screwups before 
we can talk about restoring environmental requirements to the (food-safety) 
auditing standards. The most important single thing you can do to improve 
water quality is to keep the sediments on your field, and the second most 
important thing is keep irrigation on your fields. And that's easier with 
grassy buffer strips and grass roadways." Farmers along the Salinas River 
are being forced by the bigger produce buyers to remove these, according to 
Schmidt, even though such vegetative buffers mitigate the hazards of toxins, 
including E. coli.

"There's a ton of evidence," said Benbrook, "that buffers are effective in 
filtering out pesticides contained in runoff, and recent studies suggest 
that 40-foot-wide riparian shrubs and thick grass cover filter out large 
quantities of E. coli."

That view was supported in a UC Santa Cruz research brief published in fall 
2006 by the Center for Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems. Citing more 
than 80 studies, it noted that removing vegetation-based practices, such as 
filter and contour buffer strips, grassed waterways, vegetative barriers and 
constructed wetlands, "would not only reverse progress towards addressing 
water quality issues, but could also potentially increase the presence and 
transport of pathogens." Although food safety and environmental protection 
are interconnected, the research brief argued, they are now on a collision 
course in the Salinas Valley.

"Millions of dollars of taxpayer money have been invested in helping farmers 
develop sustainable agriculture and address non-point source pollution," 
said Jovita Pajarillo, associate director of EPA's Region 9 water division. 
"Now we're hearing horror stories about growers going out with bulldozers to 
remove hedgerows. You can't blame them; they've lost millions. But such 
practices may result in an enforcement action against them because of 
water-quality concerns."

Pajarillo works with the California Roundtable, a coalition of environmental 
groups and agencies that, along with food-safety and agricultural industry 
representatives, is trying to address the con{fllig}ict. They hope to bring 
the major buyers to the table and begin a dialogue. So far that hasn't 
happened.

"I see both sides digging in their heels," said Michael Payne of the Western 
Institute for Food Safety and Security at UC Davis. "What's needed here is 
common sense and individualized risk assessment for a particular farm. ... 
Some practices are no-brainers, and others we don't have research on." Payne 
hopes the money that industry is now pouring into the Institute's research 
will help it become a meeting ground.

Benbrook was less enthusiastic about the priorities of the industry-funded 
research. "Are people being honest about what farmers need to do?" he asked. 
"I'm not super-impressed with the lack of focus on critical variables such 
as managing cow manure. There's been a systematic effort to leave the cattle 
industry out of the dialogue. 'Let's not look under that rock.' And that's 
ridiculous. ... There's no feral pig lobby, and pigs are a convenient 
scapegoat for this. Let's learn something new about this bacterium [E. coli 
0157:H7] and find some different ways to prevent and deal with it."

The science of how E. coli gets into produce is still in its infancy. 
According to Linda Harris, a UC Davis food-safety researcher, "It's less 
than a decade old." She believes that "we will never eliminate food-borne 
illness entirely." Meanwhile, the con{fllig}ict between food safety and 
environmental protection has left Central Coast growers twisting in the 
wind.

If and when the next outbreak occurs, will the onus again be put on them?

E. coli Updates Nearly a year after the 2006 spinach recall, Dole was 
involved in another E. coli outbreak. Last September, it issued its own 
voluntary recall of more than 5,000 bags labeled Dole Hearts Delight after a 
random screening of the packaged salad mix in Canada tested positive for E. 
coli 0157:H7. Although they refused to name the source fields, Dole 
officials confirmed that Salinas-grown product had been mixed with butter 
lettuce from Ohio and romaine from Colorado. The outbreak spotlights the 
problem of some packaged produce available in the nation's supermarkets. FDA 
data from multiple outbreaks since 1999 show that 98.5 percent of the E. 
coli 0157:H7 illnesses associated with California leafy greens have been 
traced to processed, packaged, so-called "ready-to-eat" produce. Meanwhile, 
Western Growers' President Thomas A. Nassif has challenged a rival set of 
food safety standards developed by the Food Safety Leadership Council as 
"excessive and scientifically indefensible." The council includes 
representatives from such retail giants and food-service providers as 
McDonald's Corp., Wal-Mart Stores, Inc., Publix Super Markets and the Walt 
Disney World Co. In a November letter to Publix, Nassif warned that the 
council's standard "marks the beginning of a destructive food safety 'arms 
race' " with different produce buyers competing by claiming they have safer 
products than the next and imposing ever more stringent standards on 
growers. These so-called "super-metrics" are at the heart of the controversy 
for growers and conservationists. The USDA is now considering national 
regulations for leafy greens. In response, directors of EPA region 9 and two 
Regional Water Quality Boards wrote that any such regulation should focus on 
bagged "ready-to-eat" greens only and cited the FDA data on E. coli 
outbreaks. The letters also noted that despite acceptance of the Leafy 
Greens Marketing Agreement, many chain grocery stores have imposed their own 
food safety programs that go beyond it. As a consequence "farmers are being 
put in jeopardy for violating long-standing regulations that protect water 
quality and threatened and endangered species," wrote EPA Water Division 
director Alexis Strauss. Small farmers, Strauss added, have largely been 
left out of the discussion. Their "needs and circumstances must also be 
considered to avoid the damage of an irrelevant one-size-fits-all approach" 
to food safety. The EPA calls the Leafy Greens Marketing Agreement standards 
an ideal starting point for a national program; it has also called for caps 
on what retailers can require of growers beyond the standards. For 
background on E. coli and up-to-date information on outbreaks: Centers for 
Disease Control and Prevention: www.cdc.gov/ecoli . For more on how food 
safety impacts small farmers and conservation efforts: Community Alliance 
with Family Farmers: www.caff.org . Jovita Pajarillo, assistant director, 
water division, EPA Region 9: Pajarillo.jovita at epamail.com . -C.N.

Carl Nagin is a Berkeley reporter whose work has appeared in the New Yorker 
and on the PBS documentary series "Frontline." An earlier version of this 
story appeared recently in California Coast & Ocean, www.coastandocean.org. 
E-mail magazine at sfchronicle.com.


http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/12/16/CMMQSSF81.DTL


How Safe Is Your Salad?
New industry rules for leafy greens aim to protect consumers from E. coli. 
Farmers and conservationists question the science behind the standards
Carl Nagin

Sunday, December 16, 2007

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    More... Late in August 2006, the federal Centers for Disease Control and 
Prevention in Atlanta began investigating cases of severe food poisoning 
reported by health officials in 26 states and one Canadian province. Over 
the next six weeks, a rare and particularly virulent strain of Escherichia 
coli 0157:H7 sickened more than 200 people across North America, 
hospitalizing half of them, some with severe kidney damage, and killing two 
elderly women and a child. For epidemiologists, the outbreak presented a 
breakthrough because a DNA-fingerprinting system enabled CDC investigators 
to trace the source of the infections from clusters of cases nationwide.

Bacteria in stool samples of hospitalized patients were genetically matched 
to pathogens in packaged, "ready to eat" Dole brand spinach that they had 
recently purchased and consumed. Further, product codes on the bags 
indicated that the contaminated greens had been processed during one shift 
on Aug. 15 at a plant in San Juan Bautista then owned and operated by 
Natural Selection Foods. The company's records showed that the spinach had 
been harvested from four fields in Monterey and San Benito counties.

Just how the spinach became contaminated and where in the process from field 
to package the bacteria originated will probably never be known. An 
investigative report released in March by the Food and Drug Administration 
could make "no definitive determination" as to "how E. coli 0157:H7 
pathogens contaminated spinach in this outbreak."

The consequences of the crisis fell heavily on California's Central Coast 
farmers, who are now being pressed by buyers to comply with a 
con{fllig}icting array of new food-safety measures, some of which, according 
to the Environmental Protection Agency and other regulatory agencies, are 
costly, scientifically unproven and environmentally harmful. Some violate 
state regulations, and may even be counterproductive to food safety. But the 
growers must follow these measures in order to market their crops to the 
larger contractors or handlers.

The new set of rules is jeopardizing the future of sustainable agriculture 
and of the habitat and clean water it supports, according to the Nature 
Conservancy's Monterey Project Director Chris Fischer: "Farmers and 
conservationists in California have been working together for more than 20 
years to develop practices that help protect water quality and wildlife 
habitat, but since last fall, farmers have been under enormous pressure from 
their buyers to go the other direction. To stay in business, they are being 
forced to build miles of fences along streams, cut down trees and bulldoze 
ponds. Some actions, like creating bare-earth buffers along waterways, may 
actually increase the risk of contamination downstream."

Search for the source
The E. coli outbreak of August 2006 was "one of the worst ever reported in 
produce," stated a 2006 "Critical Issues" report by the nonprofit Organic 
Center, which conducts peer-reviewed scientific research on organic food and 
farming. It prompted investigations by the FBI and FDA and led to one of the 
largest product recalls in U.S. history: On Sept. 14, 2006, the FDA issued a 
consumer and retailer advisory not to eat or sell any bagged or fresh 
spinach. The product was pulled off store shelves and was not served in 
restaurants. This advisory remained in effect until Sept. 22.

Hank Giclas, vice president for science and technology for Western Growers, 
a produce industry group, remembered the day the nation's spinach industry 
was shut down. "I was in my office, and we were frantically summoned to a 
conference call with FDA officials. Their advisory took everyone by 
surprise. It was an unprecedented action. They'd never before issued any 
kind of blanket 'Do not consume spinach' warning. The industry ground to a 
halt."

Members of Western Growers in California and Arizona grow, pack and ship 
nearly half the nation's fresh fruits, vegetables and nuts. Giclas estimated 
that the shutdown cost the spinach industry roughly $100 million and 
affected other bagged salad produce as well.

On Sept. 20, five weeks after the Natural Selection Foods plant had 
processed the spinach for Dole, FDA investigators began taking soil and 
water samples from four of the ranches where it had been grown and 
harvested. Samples from one ranch in San Benito County had E. coli pathogens 
indistinguishable from the strain identified by the CDC's DNA-fingerprinting 
system, PulseNet. These were found in soil, river water and cow and feral 
pig feces at Paicines Ranch, a large grass-fed beef operation that had 
leased a small amount of its land to a spinach grower. But these E. 
coli-infested samples were found nearly a mile away from the implicated 
spinach field. None were found on the plot itself.

Whatever the origin and pathways of the outbreak, the washing procedures at 
the processing plant failed to eliminate the pathogens, and its 
quality-assurance protections failed to detect it after the processing. The 
FDA report was heavily redacted in a way that limits public access to 
details of Natural Selection Foods' processing operations. NSF chief 
operating officer Charles Sweat was quick to divert attention back to the 
fields and away from the manufacturing end.

In an Oct. 15, 2006, article in the New York Times ("The 
Vegetable-Industrial Complex"), author and UC Berkeley Graduate School of 
Journalism professor Michael Pollan, who has written widely about food and 
its production, noted that "a great deal of spinach from a great many fields 
gets mixed together in the water at that plant, giving microbes from a 
single field an opportunity to contaminate a vast amount of food. The plant 
in question washes 26 million servings of salad every week. In effect, we're 
washing the whole nation's salad in one big sink."

The FDA had known about contamination problems in spinach and other Central 
Coast and Salinas Valley produce for years. Over the past decade, nine other 
E. coli outbreaks associated with the area's leafy greens had been 
documented. Prior warnings from the FDA and the California Department of 
Public Health included letters to Salinas packers, Western Growers and other 
industry groups, calling for implementation of safer manufacturing and 
sanitation practices and, more recently, alerts about wells and irrigation 
systems contaminated with animal wastes.

However, the FDA has little enforcement authority over the food industry, in 
contrast with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which monitors and 
regulates meat, poultry and eggs. While the USDA has on-site inspectors at 
the nation's slaughterhouses who can shut them down on the spot if they fail 
inspections, the FDA lacks comparable manpower and does not have that 
authority. The FDA's food-safety oversight has been the target of intense 
criticism from congressional critics, including Rep. John Dingell, D-Mich., 
chair of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, and from advocacy 
groups who complain about its coziness with the produce industry. The FDA's 
inspection capacity has been hit hard by budget cuts in recent years. 
Between 2003 and 2006, the number of safety tests for U.S.-produced food 
decreased nearly 75 percent, from 9,748 to 2,455, according to FDA 
statistics. Last April, Robert E. Brackett, director of the FDA's 
food-safety division, told the Washington Post that he believes 
manufacturers are better equipped to "build safety into their products 
rather than us chasing after them."

Industry shapes a safety plan
Immediately after the outbreak, prompted by the FDA and California's public 
health and agriculture departments, Western Growers began developing a Leafy 
Greens Marketing Agreement, with guidelines that would serve as a standard 
for certifying the safe handling, shipment and sale of produce marketed by 
its signatories. This agreement would be administered by the California 
Department of Food and Agriculture, which would use a USDA-designed 
inspection program that has been applied in other states.

Food and Agriculture Secretary, A.G. Kawamura, is a past president of 
Western Growers. In February, he appointed an advisory board for the 
marketing agreement composed almost exclusively of representatives from the 
bigger "handlers" - those who process, package, ship and distribute leafy 
green products. Conservation groups and resource agencies that had been 
working for years with Central Coast farmers had complained from the outset 
that the Western Growers' initiative was a closed-door process designed to 
serve the interests of handlers and big buyers. California Certified Organic 
Farmers, one of the nation's oldest and largest certifiers of organic 
produce, criticized the "lack of transparency in the process."

When word got out about some of the measures proposed in discussions, such 
as plowing up riparian buffers, eliminating wildlife and erecting high 
fences around fields, alarm spread through the farming, regulatory and 
conservation communities.

On Oct. 25, 2006, Roger W. Briggs, executive officer of the Central Coast 
Regional Water Quality Control Board, aired his agency's concerns in a 
letter to Brackett at the FDA, with copies sent to Giclas at Western Growers 
and other industry groups. The emerging guidelines (known variously as 
metrics and GAPs - good agricultural practices), "may con{fllig}ict with the 
[RWQCB's] mission to protect water quality and may increase water quality 
violations in farming areas," Briggs wrote. "We are aware of concerns that 
riparian or on-farm vegetation may attract wildlife that may spread the 
0157:H7 E. coli, but are not aware of any research to support those 
concerns." He requested a meeting with the FDA and the opportunity "to 
review any future proposed food safety guidelines or suggested farm 
practices that may affect water quality."

Almost three months later, on Jan. 10, 2007, with Briggs still awaiting a 
response to his letter, the water board's chairman, Jeffrey Young, wrote to 
CDFA and Western Growers, noting that 92 percent of the region's total 
irrigated acreage - including all the acreage farmed by the large growers of 
leafy greens - was enrolled in collaborative programs designed to improve 
water quality. "We know that vegetated conservation practices are among the 
most effective tools for protecting and improving water quality," Young 
wrote. "Millions of federal and state taxpayer dollars have been invested in 
researching and promoting conservation practices, and in assisting farmers 
in implementing such practices." He warned that a "major accomplishment on 
the part of the agricultural industry" was now at risk.

Not until after Young's letter, as well as letters from the EPA, the 
Department of Commerce and other agencies were fired off, did Western 
Growers respond to these concerns. It amended an early draft of the 
marketing agreement to incorporate the conservation concerns and comments of 
resource agencies, including this language:

"Fencing, vegetation removal and destruction of habitat may result in 
adverse impacts to the environment. Potential adverse impacts include loss 
of habitat to beneficial insects and pollinators; wildlife loss; increased 
discharges of sediment and other pollutants resulting from the loss of 
vegetative filtering; and increased air quality impacts if bare soil is 
exposed to wind. It is recommended that producers check for local, state and 
federal laws and regulations that protect riparian habitat, restrict removal 
of vegetation or habitat or restrict construction of wildlife deterrent 
fences in riparian areas or wildlife corridors."

The Marketing Agreement addresses a wide range of food-safety issues, 
including sanitizing farm equipment; preventing transfer of pathogens from 
field workers; wildlife encroachments from deer, goats, pigs, cattle and 
sheep; soil amendments; and water usage. (See Western Growers' Web site, 
www.wga.com, for the June 2007 draft.)

Among those who thought that the agreement fell short of what was necessary 
was Charles Benbrook of the Organic Institute, who sent comments to Western 
Growers, some of which, he acknowledges, were adopted in various drafts of 
the agreement. But Benbrook found the document remains most seriously 
{fllig}awed with respect to water-testing requirements. The required test is 
based on the wrong organism, and the standard applied to testing for E. coli 
in irrigation water is "unscientific and indefensible," because it relies on 
"an outmoded recreational water quality risk assessment" from the mid-1980s 
used by the EPA to test swimming water, he states in a June 2007 report, 
"Unfinished Business: Preventing E. Coli 0157 Outbreaks in Leafy Greens" 
(available at www.organic-center.org).

The metrics do not require testing irrigation water specifically for E. coli 
0157, only for generic E. coli, Benbrook states. He concludes: "Water with 
detectable levels of E. coli 0157 should not be used to irrigate leafy 
greens. Period."

Numerous phone calls to Giclas, of Western Growers, asking for comment went 
unaswered.

The Marketing Agreement went into effect in April, and as of June, 111 
produce handlers, who process nearly all the leafy greens produced in 
California, have signed on to it. However, the con{fllig}ict over ways to 
ensure safety is far from over, and farmers are hard-pressed in its midst. 
Some major handlers and contractors who have signed the agreement, including 
packaged salad giant Fresh Express, are individually demanding that farmers 
take additional safety measures, including some that have little science or 
common sense behind them.

No dogs, no frogs
Fresh Express, purchased in 2005 for $855 million by Chiquita Brands 
International, is the nation's top producer of packaged salads, producing 40 
percent of those sold in supermarkets. Last year the company processed 1.2 
billion pounds of raw lettuce and spinach. Although it signed the Western 
Growers agreement in April, Fresh Express has its own far more demanding 
requirements for greens it buys.

Jim Lugg, senior food-safety scientist with Fresh Express, has worked with 
the Salinas company since 1963. He said the company supplies growers with 
its own set of field-management guidelines and good agricultural practices, 
but would not provide me with these, saying they are a "proprietary document 
protected by copyright." Instead, he referred me to an Oct. 23, 2006, 
article in USA Today ("Fresh Express leads the pack in produce safety") that 
outlines some general requirements.

According to this article, Fresh Express will not accept produce from fields 
grown within a mile of a cattle feed lot or dairy operation, or if they are 
within 150 yards of rivers or habitats that attract wildlife. Fields that 
show evidence of wild pig visitation cannot be harvested for two years. The 
company also demands fences and rodent traps every 50 feet around field 
perimeters.

"If we find animal tracks in a field," Lugg told me, "then we don't believe 
that the product is safe to harvest." That means, he said, any animals - 
from frogs to dogs. "We don't like to see animals in a field of lettuce. We 
don't think people like the idea." Asked if this was more about cosmetic 
issues than food safety, he replied: "What you need to realize is that many 
more bovine intestines have been studied than mice to see if they are 
carriers of E. coli. Maybe mice and kangaroo rats are just as risky as large 
animals." He added that among studies the company has funded is one to 
examine whether insects are disseminating 0157.

Asked whether he had talked with environmental agencies about the impact of 
Fresh Express-food-safety guidelines on riparian habitats in the Salinas 
Valley, Lugg responded: "It's not our place to do that. Some public agencies 
need to do that."

Steve Church is a co-owner of the Salinas-based Church Brothers, a large 
grower, shipper and processing company known for its True Leaf Farms brand. 
Shortly after the outbreak, Church Brothers announced that it would install 
6 miles of additional fencing around its lots "to prevent any wildlife 
intrusion into our fields." In late May, the company announced a price 
increase of 20 cents per package on all True Leaf and Church Brothers 
produce. It justified the increase as a cost of its new food-safety 
measures, including fencing. Church is a member of the California Leafy 
Green Handler Marketing Board, which makes recommendations to the secretary 
of agriculture and the CDFA on the operation of Western Growers' Marketing 
Agreement and the inspection program intended to give it teeth.

I asked Church about the apparent contradiction between the Marketing 
Agreement and Fresh Express's more aggressive stance toward fencing and 
wildlife.

"We [Church Brothers] adhere to Fresh Express guidelines," he said. "You 
gotta do that if you want to be a vendor, or not sell to them. If you grow 
for Fresh Express, you're more limited in the land you can use. Their 
recommendations go beyond the agreement."

Farmers in the crossfire
Bob Martin, a past president of the Monterey County Farm Bureau, is general 
manager of Rio Farms, one of the largest growers and employers in King City. 
These days he spends much of his time trying to make sense of demands 
imposed in the name of safety by various buyers and handlers who contract 
for his produce and market it.

"I grow for several different companies, and each one is requiring a 
different level of compliance," he said. "They're fighting for customer 
bases in the big-box stores, Costco and Wal-Mart. They're battling for those 
accounts by saying 'My product is safer than yours.' "

"I understand we have to get consumers' confidence back. Spinach sales 
haven't recovered. We're only selling 75 to 80 percent of our produce, and 
bagged salads have taken a big hit. But a lot of this is all smoke and 
mirrors. We need good solid research that will tighten up some of these 
metrics. How long does the bacterium survive in soil? In water? Are deer 
really an issue? How far will E. coli 0157:H7 travel in the wind? People are 
looking for answers."

In April, speaking at a conference on water quality and food safety in San 
Luis Obispo, Martin told of farmers being asked to fence their fields and 
tear out riparian habitat that they have restored to comply with 
environmental regulations. He pleaded to his audience, which included 
researchers from the National Science Foundation, the USDA and the FDA, as 
well as academic microbiologists, environmental scientists and crop and food 
safety specialists: Farmers need help, now. He urged the researchers to talk 
to industry leaders.

Safeguards or marketing ploys?
The crisis has everyone involved in the leafy-greens business, especially 
farmers, on high alert - and nervous. "Maybe some of these things we should 
have been doing years ago," said a Salinas Valley grower who asked not to be 
identified. Keeping cattle pasture a distance away from crops was a good 
idea, he said. How great that distance should be is another question. 
Another farmer told of a grower who was asked to remove a grassy waterway to 
get rid of frogs and rodents. A story is going around that the crop of one 
field was rejected because crows had been seen {fllig}ying over it.

Kirk Schmidt, executive director of the nonprofit Central Coast Water 
Quality Preservation Inc., which is involved in environmental monitoring and 
helping farmers preserve water quality, believes that the debate over safety 
measures for leafy greens is being driven by people who work in risk 
management and the legal departments of the big producers and supermarket 
chains - people "who don't understand that crops are grown outside in the 
dirt." That's bad news for water quality and sustainable agriculture in the 
Central Coast.

Liability, along with branding and creating a positive image for produce, is 
not a trivial concern for big handlers and packagers such as Dole and Fresh 
Express, which together control 90 percent of the retail market for packaged 
salads, according to the Produce Marketing Association. The Seattle law firm 
Marler Clark successfully represented victims of last fall's E. coli 
outbreak in lawsuits against Dole. Since 1973, the firm has won settlements 
and verdicts for food sickness victims totaling $300 million. That amount is 
nearly three times the total production value of Monterey County's entire 
spinach crop in 2006. Monterey County's $3.5 billion agriculture industry 
has been turned upside down by the food safety crisis.

Amid the distress and anger in the farming community, Martin relies on 
caution and vigilance. "I look to our workforce," he said, "anyone in the 
field. The awareness of employees is so heightened that I think if it had 
been at that level before, this wouldn't have happened. They see a deer - 
they bring it to the managers' attention. They find lettuce with bird poop 
on it - where before they might have just taken off the leaf, now they drop 
it."

Fencing the river
In June, I drove with Martin along a stretch of the Salinas River to see 
firsthand what some of the new, so-called clean farming practices imposed by 
buyers and contractors were all about. (Martin asked that I not identify any 
of the growers whose fields we observed.) We took a dirt-and-gravel backroad 
to a field of spring mix planted near the riparian thicket of cottonwoods, 
willows and grasses that marks the outer edge of the Salinas 
{fllig}oodplain. What was striking about those plots of red and green baby 
lettuces were the new 8-foot-high chain-link fences installed to guard and 
tower above them, like some satellite yard of Soledad Prison, 20 miles 
north. "To keep out the deer," Martin said.

Deer were not implicated in the FDA's March 21, 2007 investigative report on 
the matter, which focused on cows and feral pigs roaming the ranches close 
to the suspect spinach plots and on conditions at the processing plant. The 
fencing I saw going up along river corridors of south Monterey County, much 
of it visible only from secondary roads, runs about $5 per foot, Martin 
said, or $45,000 per mile. For the bigger growers that can add up to 
$150,000 in new costs, not a penny of which will be paid for by their buyers 
and contractors, who now require it.

A boom in orders for fencing and rodent traps is part of the new world of 
clean farming around King City, where, as Martin points out, none of the 
nine E. coli outbreaks associated with Salinas Valley agriculture in the 
past decade have occurred. It is hotter here, he explains, and one thing 
scientists do know about E. coli is that, airborne, it's very unstable: It 
can be irradiated and neutralized by sunlight and hot winds.

Terry Palmisano, a senior wildlife biologist with the California Department 
of Fish and Game, warns that food-safety concerns have the potential to 
create a 100-mile stretch of fencing on both sides of the river. If that 
happens, "you lose that as a corridor, a way for wildlife to come down out 
of the hills and cross the river," she said. "And when it {fllig}oods, the 
wildlife can't escape."

On June 7, Martin attended a workshop with the agency's wardens and chief 
biologists at the Monterey County Agricultural Center in Salinas. Scores of 
farmers packed the room, along with officials and representatives of 
industry groups and environmental agencies concerned with what's happening 
to Central Coast agriculture.

"Buyers are concerned about animal tracks from deer, pigs, cattle, sheep and 
goats," Martin told the gathering. "Say you've got a 20-acre block of head 
lettuce or romaine out there, and all of a sudden you're two days from 
harvest, and you go to the field and there's a lot of animal tracks. The 
deer came in the night before. They may not have done anything. They just 
walked through the field. But it's up to the scrutiny of the buyers, who can 
say: 'You know what? I don't want that deal.' So we're forced to protect our 
ground from these 'animals of significant risk' and put up fences. You can't 
[fence around] every little bend [in the river], and you don't want to 
forfeit a bunch of farmland that you're already using. So you're going to 
cut some corners in riparian habitat. Nobody wants to talk about this issue. 
We've never had to be concerned about this before."

Martin was a leader in voicing farmers' concerns to Western Growers as it 
developed its guidelines, and he now serves as a technical adviser to the 
organization. Over the years, he has worked with a number of nonprofit 
organizations and governmental agencies that seek to protect water quality 
in the Salinas Valley. Like many growers, he finds himself in the cross fire 
between environmental and food industry interests. He worries that the 
buyers who are demanding stricter measures are far removed from the 
realities and consequences of what they are asking.

His views were echoed by many growers at the Salinas workshop, including 
Benny Jefferson, another member of the Farm Bureau Board and chairman of the 
Salinas River Channel Coalition. "Anyone from Costco here?" Jefferson asked 
from the podium. "Wal-Mart? Safeway?" Nobody answered.

Nobody from the industry was there to help the farmers who feel trapped 
between food-safety guidelines they must follow to earn their livelihood and 
resource agencies' rules they must violate to comply with industry metrics. 
Nor have Fish and Game or Water Quality Board staff provided clear answers 
to the farmers' dilemma.

Local regulations prohibited fencing more than 6 feet high along the river 
until July 10, when the Monterey County Board of Supervisors, under pressure 
from processors, passed an "interim urgency" ordinance allowing 8-foot 
fences. The Monterey County Herald noted that the new ordinance waived both 
50-foot setback requirements and state environmental regulations.

The pressures on growers are mounting. Vegetation removal in the name of 
food safety is also a concern for the California Department of 
Transportation, which has warned growers about encroachments on land 
abutting state highways. Caltrans District Director Richard Krumholtz wrote 
the Monterey County Farm Bureau last spring that his department had observed 
an increasing number of ranchers and farmers removing plant life "in direct 
violation of Caltrans vegetation management policies, environmental law and 
permits."

It's counterproductive
"The industry is still in crisis mode, and they are making tremendous errors 
in standards," said Kirk Schmidt, a former owner of Quail Mountain Herbs, 
who represents agriculture on the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary's 
Advisory Council. "It will take at least a year to undo the screwups before 
we can talk about restoring environmental requirements to the (food-safety) 
auditing standards. The most important single thing you can do to improve 
water quality is to keep the sediments on your field, and the second most 
important thing is keep irrigation on your fields. And that's easier with 
grassy buffer strips and grass roadways." Farmers along the Salinas River 
are being forced by the bigger produce buyers to remove these, according to 
Schmidt, even though such vegetative buffers mitigate the hazards of toxins, 
including E. coli.

"There's a ton of evidence," said Benbrook, "that buffers are effective in 
filtering out pesticides contained in runoff, and recent studies suggest 
that 40-foot-wide riparian shrubs and thick grass cover filter out large 
quantities of E. coli."

That view was supported in a UC Santa Cruz research brief published in fall 
2006 by the Center for Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems. Citing more 
than 80 studies, it noted that removing vegetation-based practices, such as 
filter and contour buffer strips, grassed waterways, vegetative barriers and 
constructed wetlands, "would not only reverse progress towards addressing 
water quality issues, but could also potentially increase the presence and 
transport of pathogens." Although food safety and environmental protection 
are interconnected, the research brief argued, they are now on a collision 
course in the Salinas Valley.

"Millions of dollars of taxpayer money have been invested in helping farmers 
develop sustainable agriculture and address non-point source pollution," 
said Jovita Pajarillo, associate director of EPA's Region 9 water division. 
"Now we're hearing horror stories about growers going out with bulldozers to 
remove hedgerows. You can't blame them; they've lost millions. But such 
practices may result in an enforcement action against them because of 
water-quality concerns."

Pajarillo works with the California Roundtable, a coalition of environmental 
groups and agencies that, along with food-safety and agricultural industry 
representatives, is trying to address the con{fllig}ict. They hope to bring 
the major buyers to the table and begin a dialogue. So far that hasn't 
happened.

"I see both sides digging in their heels," said Michael Payne of the Western 
Institute for Food Safety and Security at UC Davis. "What's needed here is 
common sense and individualized risk assessment for a particular farm. ... 
Some practices are no-brainers, and others we don't have research on." Payne 
hopes the money that industry is now pouring into the Institute's research 
will help it become a meeting ground.

Benbrook was less enthusiastic about the priorities of the industry-funded 
research. "Are people being honest about what farmers need to do?" he asked. 
"I'm not super-impressed with the lack of focus on critical variables such 
as managing cow manure. There's been a systematic effort to leave the cattle 
industry out of the dialogue. 'Let's not look under that rock.' And that's 
ridiculous. ... There's no feral pig lobby, and pigs are a convenient 
scapegoat for this. Let's learn something new about this bacterium [E. coli 
0157:H7] and find some different ways to prevent and deal with it."

The science of how E. coli gets into produce is still in its infancy. 
According to Linda Harris, a UC Davis food-safety researcher, "It's less 
than a decade old." She believes that "we will never eliminate food-borne 
illness entirely." Meanwhile, the con{fllig}ict between food safety and 
environmental protection has left Central Coast growers twisting in the 
wind.

If and when the next outbreak occurs, will the onus again be put on them?

E. coli Updates Nearly a year after the 2006 spinach recall, Dole was 
involved in another E. coli outbreak. Last September, it issued its own 
voluntary recall of more than 5,000 bags labeled Dole Hearts Delight after a 
random screening of the packaged salad mix in Canada tested positive for E. 
coli 0157:H7. Although they refused to name the source fields, Dole 
officials confirmed that Salinas-grown product had been mixed with butter 
lettuce from Ohio and romaine from Colorado. The outbreak spotlights the 
problem of some packaged produce available in the nation's supermarkets. FDA 
data from multiple outbreaks since 1999 show that 98.5 percent of the E. 
coli 0157:H7 illnesses associated with California leafy greens have been 
traced to processed, packaged, so-called "ready-to-eat" produce. Meanwhile, 
Western Growers' President Thomas A. Nassif has challenged a rival set of 
food safety standards developed by the Food Safety Leadership Council as 
"excessive and scientifically indefensible." The council includes 
representatives from such retail giants and food-service providers as 
McDonald's Corp., Wal-Mart Stores, Inc., Publix Super Markets and the Walt 
Disney World Co. In a November letter to Publix, Nassif warned that the 
council's standard "marks the beginning of a destructive food safety 'arms 
race' " with different produce buyers competing by claiming they have safer 
products than the next and imposing ever more stringent standards on 
growers. These so-called "super-metrics" are at the heart of the controversy 
for growers and conservationists. The USDA is now considering national 
regulations for leafy greens. In response, directors of EPA region 9 and two 
Regional Water Quality Boards wrote that any such regulation should focus on 
bagged "ready-to-eat" greens only and cited the FDA data on E. coli 
outbreaks. The letters also noted that despite acceptance of the Leafy 
Greens Marketing Agreement, many chain grocery stores have imposed their own 
food safety programs that go beyond it. As a consequence "farmers are being 
put in jeopardy for violating long-standing regulations that protect water 
quality and threatened and endangered species," wrote EPA Water Division 
director Alexis Strauss. Small farmers, Strauss added, have largely been 
left out of the discussion. Their "needs and circumstances must also be 
considered to avoid the damage of an irrelevant one-size-fits-all approach" 
to food safety. The EPA calls the Leafy Greens Marketing Agreement standards 
an ideal starting point for a national program; it has also called for caps 
on what retailers can require of growers beyond the standards. For 
background on E. coli and up-to-date information on outbreaks: Centers for 
Disease Control and Prevention: www.cdc.gov/ecoli . For more on how food 
safety impacts small farmers and conservation efforts: Community Alliance 
with Family Farmers: www.caff.org . Jovita Pajarillo, assistant director, 
water division, EPA Region 9: Pajarillo.jovita at epamail.com . -C.N.

Carl Nagin is a Berkeley reporter whose work has appeared in the New Yorker 
and on the PBS documentary series "Frontline." An earlier version of this 
story appeared recently in California Coast & Ocean, www.coastandocean.org. 
E-mail magazine at sfchronicle.com.