Food Safety
A series of food-borne illnesses in the past several years (particularly E-coli O157:H7 and salmonella) have brought a tightening of restrictions targeting food safety. Some of these restrictions are laws. Others are requirements imposed on growers by retailers and other large consumers. These restrictions continue to change the nature of agriculture in the Salinas Valley.
The San Francisco Chronicle had a fine article by Carolyn Lochhead in July of 2009 ("Crops, ponds destroyed in quest for food safety") about how the demands for sterile corridors around organic fields, for example, impact the best-practices farming of one of the organic growers who has worked with Ag Against Hunger's gleaning project, Dick Peixoto. Here is an excerpt from the article:
Dick Peixoto planted hedges of fennel and flowering cilantro around his organic vegetable fields in the Pajaro Valley near Watsonville to harbor beneficial insects, an alternative to pesticides.
He has since ripped out such plants in the name of food safety, because his big customers demand sterile buffers around his crops. No vegetation. No water. No wildlife of any kind.
"I was driving by a field where a squirrel fed off the end of the field, and so 30 feet in we had to destroy the crop," he said. "On one field where a deer walked through, didn't eat anything, just walked through and you could see the tracks, we had to take out 30 feet on each side of the tracks and annihilate the crop."
In the verdant farmland surrounding Monterey Bay, a national marine sanctuary and one of the world's biological jewels, scorched-earth strategies are being imposed on hundreds of thousands of acres in the quest for an antiseptic field of greens. And the scheme is about to go national.
Invisible to a public that sees only the headlines of the latest food-safety scare - spinach, peppers and now cookie dough - ponds are being poisoned and bulldozed. Vegetation harboring pollinators and filtering storm runoff is being cleared. Fences and poison baits line wildlife corridors. Birds, frogs, mice and deer - and anything that shelters them - are caught in a raging battle in the Salinas Valley against E. coli O157:H7, a lethal, food-borne bacteria.
In pending legislation and in proposed federal regulations, the push for food safety butts up against the movement toward biologically diverse farming methods, while evidence suggests that industrial agriculture may be the bigger culprit.
Worker Safety
There are approximately one million farm owners, farm family members, and farm workers in California. Hired farm workers do about 85% of the work done to raise crops and food animals.
UC Davis's Western Center for Agricultural Health and Safety has factsheets on California farm workers and their health and safety.
See also: Sustainable Table, "Workers"
The Law
National Ag Safety Database (NASD) Federal Laws and Regulations Affecting Farm Safety
Partially Funded by the California Council for the Humanities, UC Santa Cruz, and INTA - TrainingWeal.