USDA Holds Hearings On Its Evil Leafy Greens Policy

by: Jill Richardson

Thu Sep 03, 2009 at 22:02:24 PM PDT

The LGMA was only put in place in California, but there's been talk recently of extending it across the country. The USDA is now holding hearings around the U.S. to get opinions on it. Below, see the Cornucopia Institute's action alert on this.  

ACTION: Speak Out Against the LGMA!

by: Jill Richardson

Tue Jul 28, 2009 at 11:58:33 AM PDT

Please give a quick phone call to the committee at 202-225-6427 or fax them at 202-225-2392. The good news is that the subcommittee chair is Dennis Kucinich. If you call, tell the briefly that you oppose the LGMA and any expansion of it because it is harmful to the environment and sustainable agriculture and it is also ineffective. If you want to give them a longer message, either send a fax, or call and ask for an email address you can write your comments to.

Mass Stupidity Alert: Scorched Earth Food "Safety" Tactics

by: Jill Richardson

Mon Jul 13, 2009 at 06:30:44 AM PDT

Dick Peixoto planted hedges of fennel and flowering cilantro around his organic vegetable fields in the Pajaro Valley near Watsonville to harbor beneficial insects, an alternative to pesticides.

He has since ripped out such plants in the name of food safety, because his big customers demand sterile buffers around his crops. No vegetation. No water. No wildlife of any kind.

"I was driving by a field where a squirrel fed off the end of the field, and so 30 feet in we had to destroy the crop," he said. "On one field where a deer walked through, didn't eat anything, just walked through and you could see the tracks, we had to take out 30 feet on each side of the tracks and annihilate the crop."

In the verdant farmland surrounding Monterey Bay, a national marine sanctuary and one of the world's biological jewels, scorched-earth strategies are being imposed on hundreds of thousands of acres in the quest for an antiseptic field of greens. And the scheme is about to go national.

Galvanized by the spinach disaster, large growers instituted a quasi-governmental program of new protocols for growing greens safely, called the "leafy greens marketing agreement." A proposal was submitted last month in Washington to take these rules nationwide.

A food safety bill sponsored by Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Los Angeles, passed this month in the House Energy and Commerce Committee. It would give new powers to the Food and Drug Administration to regulate all farms and produce in an attempt to fix the problem. The bill would require consideration of farm diversity and environmental rules, but would leave much to the FDA.

There are several good things in this food safety bill, HR 2749, the Food Safety Enhancement Act. But this is NOT one of them. If they actually want to address the root causes of the 2006 spinach E. coli incident, they should crack down hard on factory farms - not wildlife.

"It's all based on panic and fear, and the science is not there," said Dr. Andy Gordus, an environmental scientist with the California Department of Fish and Game.

Preliminary results released in April from a two-year study by the state wildlife agency, UC Davis and the U.S. Department of Agriculture found that less than one-half of 1 percent of 866 wild animals tested positive for E. coli O157:H7 in Central California.

Frogs are unrelated to E. coli, but their remains in bags of mechanically harvested greens are unsightly, Gordus said, so "the industry has been using food safety as a premise to eliminate frogs."

Farmers are told that ponds used to recycle irrigation water are unsafe. So they bulldoze the ponds and pump more groundwater, opening more of the aquifer to saltwater intrusion, said Jill Wilson, an environmental scientist at the Central Coast Regional Water Quality Control Board in San Luis Obispo.

Wilson said demands for 450-foot dirt buffers remove the agency's chief means of preventing pollution from entering streams and rivers. Jovita Pajarillo, associate director of the water division in the San Francisco office of the Environmental Protection Agency, said removal of vegetative buffers threatens Arroyo Seco, one of the last remaining stretches of habitat for steelhead trout.

"In 16 years of handling nearly every major food-borne illness outbreak in America, I can tell you I've never had a case where it's been linked to a farmers' market," Marler said. [emphasis mine]

Please, Uncle Sam, Leave Our Salad Alone!

by: Jill Richardson

Wed Jun 10, 2009 at 06:00:00 AM PDT

The part where this analogy breaks down is that E. coli comes from manure, and spinach doesn't poop. Cows do. Also, E. coli dies at 165F and whereas we (usually) cook beef, we don't always cook leafy greens. At the time of the spinach/E. coli outbreak, somebody jokingly said to me that this was meat-eaters way of killing off the vegetarians (i.e. having their food taint our food, which we would then eat uncooked while they would cook theirs and avoid getting sick).

Obviously, having repeated E. coli outbreaks from leafy greens isn't acceptable. But it's no more acceptable to put in place measures that are bad for organic producers and the environment, which appears to be a distinct possibility in our near future.

Our next step on this will be to wait for a post on the Federal Register from the USDA, and we can send comments there. For now, the only action we can take is to inform ourselves and spread the word.

New USDA Appointment - Organics Has a New Boss

by: Jill Richardson

Tue May 12, 2009 at 09:42:36 AM PDT

I don't have much info on her besides what you see below in the USDA's press release. However, based on that information, I'm not a fan. She's got two strikes against her. One is her participation in the WTO and free trade negotiations. Maybe it was just her job and it doesn't mean that she's pro-free trade. I don't know. It's an area where I'll be looking for more information, and that's probably all I can say for now.

The second strike is the California Leafy Greens Product Handler Marketing Agreement. This was one of the stupidest, most counterproductive, idiotic "food safety" reforms ever made. The basic idea was to attempt to make farm fields sterile like hospitals and laboratories. Here's an excerpt from a statement by the Cornucopia Institute about the Leafy Greens Marketing Agreement:

[In California] farmers have been asked to take extreme measures with little or no scientific justification. While the rules themselves do not directly eliminate biodiversity on farms, they discourage wildlife and vegetation. As a result, some large produce buyers, such as processors, supermarkets and fast food chains, are using those rules as a precedent to come up with their own standards-often extreme measures without scientific backup.

For example, farmers have been told to destroy hedgerows and other non-crop vegetation around farms that provide important habitat for beneficial wildlife, and to erect fences around their fields, which negatively impacts wildlife corridors. Such measures have not been shown to eliminate or reduce the likelihood of E. coli contamination. "We know natural vegetation surrounding farm fields, which is excellent habitat for birds and beneficial insects, reduces dependence on chemical pesticides and decreases possible ground- and surface-water contamination," Vallaeys stated.

Many growing practices that are the cornerstone of organic and sustainable agriculture would also be discouraged or banned.  In California, the rules discourage the development of microbial life in the soil, an outcome that has not been shown to reduce the risk of harmful bacterial contamination. In fact, sustainable farming methods, which promote healthy microbial life in soil, have been shown to reduce E. coli 0157, a deadly variant of the microbe, because the organism has to compete with other microbes and is therefore less likely to thrive.

Farmers already report demands by large corporate buyers not to use certain organic fertilizers. "The aim of these rules seems to promote sterile fields that support few forms of life, except for the leafy greens," added Vallaeys.

After the fact, it was shown that the vast majority of wild animals shot in the name of safe leafy greens were not carrying E. coli 0157:H7 anyway, and posed no danger to safe food. Let's hope this is not they type of "reform" Pegg brings to the USDA.