[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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