California Coast & Ocean

Safeguards or Marketing Ploys?
The crisis has everyone involved in the leafy greens business, especially farmers, on high alert--and nervous. "Maybe some of these things we should have been doing years ago," said a Salinas Valley grower who asked not to be identified. Keeping cattle pasture a distance away from crops was a good idea, he said. How great that distance should be is another question. Another farmer told of a grower who was asked to remove a grassy waterway to get rid of frogs and rodents. A story is going around that the crop of one field was rejected because crows had been seen flying over it.

Kirk Schmidt, executive director of the nonprofit Central Coast Water Quality Preservation, Inc., which is involved in environmental monitoring and helping farmers preserve water quality, believes that the debate over safety measures for leafy greens is being driven by people who work in risk management and the legal departments of the big producers and supermarket chains--people "who don't understand that crops are grown outside in the dirt." That's bad news for water quality and sustainable agriculture in the Central Coast.

Liability, along with branding and creating a positive image for produce, is not a trivial concern for big handlers and packagers like Dole and Fresh Express, which together control 90 percent of the retail market for packaged salads, according to the Produce Marketing Association. The Seattle law firm Marler Clark successfully represented victims of last fall's E. coli outbreak in lawsuits against Dole. Since 1973, the firm has won settlements and verdicts for food sickness victims totaling $300 million. That amount is nearly three times the total production value of Monterey County's entire spinach crop in 2006. Monterey County's $3.5-billion agriculture industry has been turned upside down by the food safety crisis.

Amidst all the distress and anger in the farming community, Martin relies on caution and vigilance. "I look to our work force," he said, "anyone in the field. The awareness of employees is so heightened that I think if it had been at that level before, this wouldn't have happened. They see a deer--they bring it to the managers' attention. They find lettuce with bird poop on it--where before they might have just taken off the leaf, now they drop it."

Fencing the River
In June, I drove with Martin along a stretch of the Salinas River to see first-hand what some of the new, so-called "clean farming" practices imposed by buyers and contractors were all about. (Martin asked that I not identify any of the growers whose fields we observed.) We took a dirt-and-gravel backroad to a field of spring mix planted near the riparian thicket of cottonwoods, willows, and grasses that marks the outer edge of the Salinas floodplain. What was striking about those plots of red and green baby lettuces were the new eight-foot-high chain-link fences installed to guard and tower above them, like some satellite yard of Soledad Prison, 20 miles north. "To keep out the deer," Martin said.

Deer were not implicated in the FDA's March 21, 2007 investigative report on the matter, which focused on cows and feral pigs roaming the ranches close to the suspect spinach plots and on conditions at the processing plant. The fencing I saw going up along river corridors of south Monterey County, much of it visible only from secondary roads, runs about $5 per foot, Martin said, or $45,000 per mile. For the bigger growers that can add up to $150,000 in new costs, not a penny of which will be paid for by their buyers and contractors, who now require it.

A boom in orders for fencing and rodent traps is part of the new world of clean farming around King City, where, as Martin points out, none of the nine E. coli outbreaks associated with Salinas Valley agriculture in the last decade have occurred. It is hotter here, he explains, and one thing scientists do know about E. coli is that, airborne, it's very unstable: It can be irradiated and neutralized by sunlight and hot winds.

Terry Palmisano, a senior wildlife biologist with the California Department of Fish and Game, warns that food safety concerns have the potential to create a 100-mile stretch of fencing on both sides of the river. If that happens, "you lose that as a corridor, a way for wildlife to come down out of the hills and cross the river," she said. "And when it floods, the wildlife can't escape."