[MPWG] Fw: [Pollinator] Another challenge to pollinator habitat? and Organic farming, and caonservation, and water quality, and...

[Patricia_DeAngelis at fws.gov]

FYI

----- Forwarded by Patricia De Angelis/ARL/R9/FWS/DOI on 07/14/2009 09:51 
AM -----

"Matthew Shepherd (Xerces Society)" <mdshepherd at xerces.org> 
Sent by: pollinator-bounces+patricia_deangelis=fws.gov at lists.sonic.net
07/13/2009 05:48 PM
Please respond to
mdshepherd at xerces.org


To
"Pollinator list" <pollinator at lists.sonic.net>
cc

Subject
[Pollinator] Another challenge to pollinator habitat?






An interesting article from today's San Francisco Chronicle about demands 
for "clean farming" and the impact on environment, including beneficial 
insect habitat
 
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/07/12/MN0218DVJ8.DTL
 
Crops, ponds destroyed in quest for food safety
Carolyn Lochhead, Chronicle Washington Bureau
Monday, July 13, 2009
(07-13) 04:00 PDT Washington -- 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.
Invisible to a public that sees only the headlines of the latest 
food-safety scare - spinach, peppers and now cookie dough - ponds are 
being poisoned and bulldozed. Vegetation harboring pollinators and 
filtering storm runoff is being cleared. Fences and poison baits line 
wildlife corridors. Birds, frogs, mice and deer - and anything that 
shelters them - are caught in a raging battle in the Salinas Valley 
against E. coli O157:H7, a lethal, food-borne bacteria. 
In pending legislation and in proposed federal regulations, the push for 
food safety butts up against the movement toward biologically diverse 
farming methods, while evidence suggests that industrial agriculture may 
be the bigger culprit. 
'Foolhardy' approach
"Sanitizing American agriculture, aside from being impossible, is 
foolhardy," said UC Berkeley food guru Michael Pollan, who most recently 
made his case for smaller-scale farming in the documentary film "Food, 
Inc." "You have to think about what's the logical end point of looking at 
food this way. It's food grown indoors hydroponically."
Scientists do not know how the killer E. coli pathogen, which dwells 
mainly in the guts of cattle, made its way to a spinach field near San 
Juan Bautista (San Benito County) in 2006, leaving four people dead, 35 
with acute kidney failure and 103 hospitalized. 
The deadly bug first appeared in hamburger meat in the early 1980s and 
migrated to certain kinds of produce, mainly lettuce and other leafy 
greens that are cut, mixed and bagged for the convenience of supermarket 
shoppers. Hundreds of thousands of the bug can fit on the head of a pin; 
as few as 10 can lodge in a salad and end in lifelong disability, 
including organ failure.
Going national
For many giant food retailers, the choice between a dead pond and a dead 
child is no choice at all. Industry has paid more than $100 million in 
court settlements and verdicts in spinach and lettuce lawsuits, a fraction 
of the lost sales involved.
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.
An Amish farmer in Ohio who uses horses to plow his fields could find 
himself caught in a net aimed 2,000 miles away at a feral pig in San 
Benito County. While he may pick, pack and sell his greens in one day 
because he does not refrigerate, the bagged lettuce trucked from Salinas 
with a 17-day shelf life may be considered safer.
The leafy-green agreement is based on available science, but it is just a 
jumping-off point. 
Large produce buyers have compiled secret "super metrics" that go much 
further. Farmers must follow them if they expect to sell their crops. 
These can include vast bare-dirt buffers, elimination of wildlife, and 
strict rules on water sources. To enforce these rules, retail buyers have 
sent forth armies of food-safety auditors, many of them trained in indoor 
processing plants, to inspect fields.
Keeping children out
"They're used to working inside the factory walls," said Ken Kimes, owner 
of New Natives farms in Aptos (Santa Cruz County) and a board member of 
the Community Alliance With Family Farmers, a California group. "If 
they're not prepared for the farm landscape, it can come as quite a shock 
to them. Some of this stuff that they want, you just can't actually do."
Auditors have told Kimes that no children younger than 5 can be allowed on 
his farm for fear of diapers. He has been asked to issue identification 
badges to all visitors.
Not only do the rules conflict with organic and environmental standards; 
many are simply unscientific. Surprisingly little is known about how E. 
coli is transmitted from cow to table.
Reducing E. coli
Scientists have created a vaccine to reduce E. coli in livestock, and a 
White House working group announced plans Tuesday to boost safety 
standards for eggs and meat. This month, the group is expected to issue 
draft guidelines for reducing E. coli contamination in leafy greens, 
tomatoes and melons. 
Some science suggests that removing vegetation near field crops could make 
food less safe. Vegetation and wetlands are a landscape's lungs and 
kidneys, filtering out not just fertilizers, sediments and pesticides, but 
also pathogens. UC Davis scientists found that vegetation buffers can 
remove as much as 98 percent of E. coli from surface water. UC Davis 
advisers warn that some rodents prefer cleared areas. 
Produce buyers compete to demand the most draconian standards, said Jo Ann 
Baumgartner, head of the Wild Farm Alliance in Watsonville, so that they 
can sell their products as the "safest."
State agencies responsible for California's water, air and wildlife have 
been unable to find out from buyers what they are demanding.
They do know that trees have been bulldozed along the riparian corridors 
of the Salinas Valley, while poison-filled tubes targeting rodents dot 
lettuce fields. Dying rodents have led to deaths of owls and hawks that 
naturally control rodents.
Unscientific approach
"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.
Turning down clients
"It's been a problem for us trying to balance the organic growing methods 
with the food safety requirements," Peixoto said. "At some point, we can't 
really meet their criteria. We just tell them that's all we can do, and we 
have to turn down that customer."
Large retailers did not respond to requests for comment. Food trade groups 
in Washington suggested calling other trade groups, which didn't comment.
Chiquita/Fresh Express, a large Salinas produce handler, told the advocacy 
group Food and Water Watch that the company has "developed extensive 
additional guidelines for the procurement of leafy greens and other 
produce, but we consider such guidelines to be our confidential and 
proprietary information."
Seattle trial lawyer Bill Marler, who represented many of the plaintiffs 
in the 2006 E. coli outbreak in spinach, said, "If we want to have bagged 
spinach and lettuce available 24/7, 12 months of the year, it comes with 
costs."
Still, he said, the industry rules won't stop lawsuits or eliminate the 
risk of processed greens cut in fields, mingled in large baths, put in 
bags that must be chilled from packing plant to kitchen, and shipped 
thousands of miles away.
"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.
"Could it happen? Absolutely. But the big problem has been the 
mass-produced product. What you're seeing is this rub between trying to 
make it as clean as possible so they don't poison anybody, but still not 
wanting to come to the reality that it may be the industrialized process 
that's making it all so risky." 

 
______________________________________________________
The Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation
The Xerces Society is an international nonprofit organization that 
protects wildlife through the conservation of invertebrates and their 
habitat. To join the Society, make a contribution, or read about our 
work, please visit www.xerces.org.
 
Matthew Shepherd
Senior Conservation Associate
4828 SE Hawthorne Boulevard, Portland, OR 97215, USA
Tel: 503-232 6639 Cell: 503-807 1577 Fax: 503-233 6794
Email: mdshepherd at xerces.org 
______________________________________________________
 _______________________________________________
Pollinator mailing list
Pollinator at lists.sonic.net
http://lists.sonic.net/mailman/listinfo/pollinator
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.plantconservation.org/pipermail/mpwg_lists.plantconservation.org/attachments/20090714/acc83ae3/attachment.html>