Concern for Crop Safety Leads to Damaging Farming Practices

Concerned about outbreaks of E. coli bacteria, farming groups and food buyers have instituted a series of environmentally damaging agricultural practices in California and could soon be replicating the program nationwide, the San Francisco Chronicle reports. The practices — spurred by a 2006 E. coli outbreak in spinach that killed four people and left 35 with acute kidney failure — include poisoning or draining irrigation ponds, creating 450-dirt buffers around fields, and killing amphibians and wildlife in and around cropland. The new practices are being implemented by the large growers and major corporate buyers of greens that are washed, bagged, and distributed nationwide. So far the new practices are mainly being carried out in California, but the prepackaged greens industry has submitted a proposal to have similar rules apply at farms nationwide. Critics contend the new agricultural practices not only cause environmental harm, but do little to improve food safety. “Sanitizing American agriculture, aside from being impossible, is foolhardy,” said author Michael Pollan who has written extensively on the food industry.