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market-farming - Re: [Market-farming] manures/GAP training

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  • From: Garth & Kim Travis <gartht AT txcyber.com>
  • To: Market Farming <market-farming AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [Market-farming] manures/GAP training
  • Date: Tue, 02 Mar 2010 16:58:31 -0600

Greetings,

But not all manures are the same. Using manure from grain eating cattle can be deadly, I would not allow that on my property, period. Our cattle don't eat grain, but we would not use their manure anyway, it is busy fertilizing the pastures, where it belongs. We use rabbit and worm castings, that is all. The problem is that everything is being lumped together, one size fits all. 210 days at rest would mean I could use my garden beds every second year, since I don't have them empty that long, I have a long growing season. I do follow the 120 day rule, which for rabbit manure seems perfectly reasonable.
My manure is under landscape fabric and mulch, no root crops grown in those beds. I basically don't grow root crops for sale.
I am glad I am direct sales to my customers and yes, they do know exactly what I am doing. They are very happy with it, and with my results.

Bright Blessings,
Kim

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. Those results were published in the Food Microbiology journal in 2005. In that study:
1) After the soils were innoculated, they then watched to see how long the populations would live in the soil, along with carrots and onions grown in the soil. With the population numbers on a graph, the numbers stair-stepped down a few times throughout the experiment but quite a few were still alive at Day 120, with those final holdouts dying off between Day 180 and Day 205. Furthermore, carrots and onions harvested from that soil continued to have viable E. coli survive on the surface of those roots for another long period - carrots harvested on day 126 still had viable E coli on them on Day 168.
2) Only 10 E. coli cells are sufficient to cause illness in human beings. So having even extremely low counts still alive in the soil can provide for a 'bloom' later if the right conditions are met.
3) E coli is extremely mobile in irrigation water, which means that any soils containing E coli which are splashed or sprayed onto crops can carry the E. coli to any wetted surface.
Someone asked whether the organic standards would be changed to reflect these findings. The WSDA Organic Certification staffer replied "I sure hope so". When the WSDA scientists were asked whether these policies were going to eventually move from being guidelines to being requirements, they replied that regulatory action may never occur. But they also pointed out that large-scale buyers such as Walmart and Costco are already putting requirements like this into practice from the farmers and brokers they buy from. Once those big-box buyers make decisions like that, the smaller grocers and other retailers quickly follow suit. The WSDA staffers said once the bigger retailers all jump on that bandwagon, these guidelines economically become a requirement even if they are not yet a regulatory requirement. These are still "suggestions", to be sure. And perhaps they always will be. But the reasons for what they're recommending seemed pretty straightforward to me. Having watched a few illness cycles bring down producers during past E. coli scares, I'd like to be able to look my customers in the eye and say 'yes, I am familiar with the risks and yes I take best management steps to minimize that risk.' I've been asked that before and I'm not going to stop answering that question now. If we didn't rely so heavily on animal manures and composts here to maintain soil fertility, I probably wouldn't be quite so interested. But using those tools I felt the need to be respectful of when they can create problems.
Kathryn Kerby
Frog Chorus Farm
Snohomish, WA





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