Healthy soil and sustainable growing

["Don Bowen" <don.bowen@earthlink.net>]

Recently the E. Coli contamination of organic spinach was mentioned and I brought up that the accepted contamination vector was wild hogs.  Some have rejected this so I decided to do a little research.  I took an online class on safe food handling and I am currently helping out on an organic vegetable farm in the San Benito Valley near Hollister, California.  The contamination took place just a few miles from where I am writing this, in fact I have seen the field.  The field is surrounded on two sides by cattle grazing and scrub land, home to the wild hogs.

 

The ancestors to these hogs were imported by the early Spanish and are a problem in many agricultural areas of California.  There is a continuing battle between hunters who want to keep a population for hunting, farmers who want to eliminate a major expense and environmentalists who want to reduce back country damage cause by hogs, and animal rights people who want to leave them be.

 

The wild hog vector is a construct of the FDA.  There is no proof, no sightings of hog tracks or spoor.  No hogs have been found with that strain of E. Coli 57.  The FDA chose that vector as a way to close the investigation and they are sticking to it no matter what the facts.  As a result large purchasers such as COSTCO, Safeway, WalMart, and others are forcing unneeded and unscientific changes on the organic food producers.  These requirements consist of a 50 foot buffer zone.  This will do nothing to stop the hogs from munching on the nice vegetables and destroys beneficial insect habitant.

 

Where the E. Coli came from in unknown but how it spread is a direct result of industrial agriculture.  You may have an image of organic farming as a farmer in the field doing hand work but it is not so.  About the only difference between the organic farmer and the chemical counterpart is in the use of chemicals.  Organic farmers build soil and use compost, beneficial insects, cover crops, etc instead of strip mining soil and using chemical fertilizers, insecticides, and GMO seeds.  The use of expensive and high tech machinery is almost the same for large organic farmers as for chemical farmers.

 

In order tot he E. Coli to be spread, it had to get inside the plant.  It cannot grow there so it has to be introduced.  Much harvesting is done by a bandsaw like mechanical harvester.  The saw blades cut anything and everything so if there was a contaminated piece of feces, the saw teeth would carry it to all the plants cut.  The sorting and cleaning process tumbles the plant, bending it in such a way that opens small cracks, and another source of spreading contamination.  Delivery long distances makes temperature control important so if stored or transported above 41 degrees for even a short period of time can cause explosive bacteria growth.

 

The farm I am helping out on uses manual pickers, workers with a knife who can see what the knife is about to touch.  Manual picking also rejects as they go along eliminating the bending of mechanized sorting.  Plants are washed and spun out in a process that does not introduce cracks in the plant and spread contamination. 

 

Don Bowen      KI6DIU
http://www.braingarage.com/Dons/Travels/journal/Journal.html