[Market-farming] manures/GAP training

Road's End Farm organic87 at frontiernet.net
Wed Mar 3 12:32:28 EST 2010


On Mar 2, 2010, at 5:27 PM, KAKerby at aol.com wrote:

> The science behind the new guidelines were based on recent studies  
> which have tracked how long E. coli lived either in the soil or on  
> surfaces.  They provided details from one of the studies, which  
> tracked soil, onion and carrot contamination, on four test plots per  
> vegetable along with a control plot.  If you want the exact name and  
> authors of the study, I can provide that but the title was pretty  
> long.

If you have a link to the full study, I would be interested to see it.  
I do have a batch of questions, many of them having to do with whether  
they ran this in a number of different areas, climates, soil types,  
types of farm management, etc.; if so, what if any was the variation  
in results? if not, are they following up the preliminary study with  
additional studies checking these variables, are any of those results  
in, and what do those show? (It's interesting that they apparently  
referenced "recent studies" but provided details from only one study.  
Did the others have significantly different results? If so, do they  
have any idea what factors produced the difference? -- While it's  
possible this was just a result of their having only minimum time for  
the presentation, it can happen that only the studies that back up  
what the presenter wants to happen to be mentioned, while multiple  
studies with other results don't get referenced, or don't get  
published in the first place.)


I also have another major question I haven't seen addressed in all of  
this: did they test specifically for pathogenic eColi, or just for E  
Coli in general?

Everyone in this discussion (unless I missed something) has just been  
saying "E coli, E coli". Most strains of E Coli are neutral or even  
beneficial. If "10 cells of E Coli" generally made anyone deathly ill,  
we'd all be dead. Your gut is full of E Coli right now -- every  
mammal's is -- and is in fact structured to function in that state.  
And one of the things I was told repeatedly at the FDA meeting was  
that there is considerable doubt that the presence of the "indicator  
organisms" generally checked for (faster and cheaper, I gather, than  
testing for specifically pathogenic species) genuinely indicates  
anything about the presence of pathogens.

The fact that the presence of E Coli usually does not mean the  
presence of pathogens most likely explains the fact a number of others  
in this discussion have pointed out: that hordes of people are every  
day eating produce grown in non-sterile conditions, including produce  
grown in fields that deer walk into, birds fly over, mice inhabit,  
etc.; but significant illness is actually quite rare. The major  
outbreaks that hit the news aren't due to the pathogenic bacteria  
being all over the place: they're due to a small amount of pathogen  
that may have originally been on only a few plants or in one animal  
being mixed in processing plants with huge amounts of other meat or  
produce, packaged (in the case of greens) in conditions conducive to  
its growth, and shipped all over the country; so that one corner of a  
spinach field can make people sick in twenty states. (I don't know if  
the pathogen in that particular spinach was ever even definitively  
traced to contamination of the field, as opposed to the possibility of  
its having been spread by a worker at the farm, or even a worker at  
the processing plant.)


-- Rivka; Finger Lakes NY, Zone 5 mostly
Fresh-market organic produce, small scale



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