http://www.aglinenews.com

" I heard it
through the
AgLine"

 

October 3, 2011

 

 

·       Produce miles increase disease risk

·       Dole building new facilities in China

·       Analysis: What’s next for E-Verify?

·       Broccoli Brigade heads N. Mexico project

·       Globetrotting couple ‘good bug’ hunting

 

 

Produce miles increase disease risk

 

WASHINGTON (AP) — The recent listeria outbreak from cantaloupe shows that large-scale occurrences of serious illnesses linked to tainted food have grown more common over the years, partly because much of what we eat takes a long and winding road from farm to fork.

 

A cantaloupe grown on a Colorado field may make four or five stops before it reaches the dinner table. There's the packing house where it is cleaned and packaged, then the distributor who contracts with retailers to sell the melons in large quantities. A processor may cut or bag the fruit. The retail distribution center is where the melons are sent out to various stores. Finally it's stacked on display at the grocery store.

 

Imported fruits and vegetables, which make up almost two-thirds of the produce consumed in the United States, have an even longer journey.

 

"Increasingly with agribusiness you have limited producers of any given food, so a breakdown in a facility or plant or in a large field crop operation exposes thousands because of the way the food is distributed," says Dr. Brian Currie, an infectious disease specialist at Montefiore Medical Center in New York.

 

The Colorado cantaloupe crop that's linked to 84 illnesses and as many as 17 deaths in 19 states has traveled so far and wide that producer Jensen Farms doesn't even know exactly where their fruit ended up.

 

The company said last week that it can't provide a list of retailers that sold the tainted fruit because the melons were sold and resold. It named the 28 states where the fruit was shipped, but people in other states have reported getting sick.

 

A Kansas-based processor that purchased cantaloupes from Jensen, Carol's Cuts, didn't provide a notice to its customers that it had sold the farm's cantaloupes until nine days after the original recall.

 

"The food chain is very complex," says Sherri McGarry, a senior adviser in the Food and Drug Administration's Office of Foods. "There are many steps, and the more steps there are the harder it can be to link up each step to identify what the common source" of an outbreak is.

 

Fewer and larger farms and companies dominate food production in the country. That has driven some consumers to seek out farmers markets and locally grown produce. Supermarkets now highlight food grown nearby, while farmers markets have soared in popularity.

 

But many in the produce industry have come together to try and improve the ability to quickly trace food from field to plate.

 

This is good business. Large recalls, such as spinach in 2006, peanuts in 2009 and eggs in 2010, tend to depress sales for an entire product industry, even if only one company or grower was responsible for the outbreak.

 

Recent outbreaks of salmonella in peanuts and eggs, which are ingredients in thousands of foods, have been more widespread and sickened more people than have the tainted cantaloupe.

 

"There has been a laser focus on improving traceability so any recall can identify the affected product immediately and not have an effect on the rest of the entire category," says Ray Gilmer of United Fresh Produce Association, which represents the country's largest growers.

 

Gilmer says that larger food companies have no choice but to take food safety very seriously.

 

"The stakes for a large company to have a food safety incident are huge," he said. "It could destroy their company."

 

Listeria, a bacteria found in soil and water, often turns up in processed meats because it can contaminate a processing facility and stay there for a long period of time. It's also common in unpasteurized cheeses and unpasteurized milk, though less so produce such as cantaloupe.

 

The disease can cause fever, muscle aches, gastrointestinal symptoms and even death. One in five people who have listeria can die.

 

A food safety law passed by Congress last year gives the FDA new power to improve tracing food through the system. Food safety advocates say the law will help make the food network safer by focusing on making every step in the chain safer and making it easier to find the source of outbreaks.

 

For the first time, larger farms are required to submit plans detailing how they are keeping their produce safe.

 

Erik Olson, director of food and consumer safety programs for the Pew Health Group, says it is critical that those improvements are made to prevent more, larger outbreaks as the system grows more complex.

 

"Clearly the food industry has just changed enormously in the last several decades," Olson said. "It would be virtually impossible to sit down and eat a meal and eat food that hasn't come from all over the world."

 

Return to Top

 

 

Dole building new facilities in China

 

(fruitnet.com) – Dole Food Company, the world's largest fresh produce company, is working with government officials in China to develop new production and processing facilities in the country, the company's chairman David Murdock has revealed.

 

Speaking at a special event in Oslo to mark the 125th anniversary of Norwegian fresh produce importer-distributor Bama-Gruppen, Murdock said he had spent three weeks in China in late August and the first half of September, visiting a number of different locations.

 

"Eight or nine days ago I was all over China," he explained. "We are doing a very large amount of new facilities with the Chinese government."

 

Dole currently owns processing and distribution centres in the Chinese cities of Shanghai and Qingdao.

 

The group's Worldwide Packaged Food Division operates three processing centres for tinned products in Asia – two in Thailand and one in the Philippines.

 

In terms of its overall Asian operations, Dole sources bananas, pineapples, asparagus, mangoes, papaya and other fruits and vegetables from the Philippines and Thailand, transporting them to markets principally in Asia, New Zealand and the Middle East.

 

The company also sources citrus, deciduous fruit and vegetables, including asparagus, broccoli, tomatoes, cabbage and lettuce from North America, Australia, New Zealand, China, Korea, South Africa, Chile and other parts of the world for distribution in Asian markets, primarily Japan.

 

In Japan, Dole also distributes domestically sourced fruits, vegetables and value-added products such as fresh-cut fruit, vegetables and salads.

 

Return to Top

 

 

Analysis: What’s next for E-Verify?

 

(Forbes) – On September 21, 2011, H.R. 2885, legislation to make E-Verify mandatory across the nation, passed the House Judiciary Committee by a party line vote of 22-13. Does that mean the bill is on a smooth path to become law?

 

The major hurdle to be cleared for any House legislation is to receive time for debate on the floor of the House of Representatives. It is up to the House leadership to decide whether a bill gets that far. Unlike spending bills, which are considered “must-pass” pieces of legislation, bills on other topics are not guaranteed floor time.

 

If E-Verify legislation passes the House, it faces an uncertain future in the U.S. Senate. No Democrats voted for the bill in the House Judiciary Committee. While that does not mean the same will happen in the Senate, it’s reasonable to assume the bill would get limited Democratic support.

 

What does E-Verify legislation have going in its favor? In its favor, the legislation sports a surface appeal as a way to prevent the hiring of illegal immigrants and has the support of anti-immigration groups. H.R. 2885 would make mandatory for all employers an electronic employment verification system to check (primarily) whether new hires are eligible to work in the United States. Also, in its favor, the legislation has the support of business organizations that include the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, since it would establish a single national standard for E-Verify, rather than a patchwork of state requirements. Finally, the bill has gained support among Republicans, in part because it is seen as a technological fix to a difficult to solve problem.

 

What is working against mandatory E-Verify legislation? The biggest obstacle a mandatory E-Verify bill faces is it lacks support among Democrats, which is a particular problem in the Senate. Many Democrats see H.R. 2885 as legislation that will make life more difficult for legal workers, due to the potential for false “positives” when using the system. They also believe to the extent E-Verify affects illegal immigrants it will push them further into black market employment. Democrats would likely support mandatory E-Verify if coupled with ways to make it easier to work legally in the United States and to legalize many of the those now working in the country without legal status.

 

Another factor working against mandatory E-Verify legislation is vocal opposition to the bill from the agriculture industry. The primary large agriculture organizations, including the Agriculture Coalition for Immigration Reform (ACIR), oppose the bill. Rep. Dan Lungren (R-CA) said in the Judiciary Committee that making E-Verify mandatory would “devastate” California’s agriculture industry unless a workable agricultural temporary visa system was instituted at the same time. Since the agriculture industry has been an important Republican supporter it remains to be seen whether Republicans in the House or Senate want to fight for legislation opposed by growers.

 

The bill has also engendered opposition from libertarian and conservatives concerned that mandatory E-Verify would represent a significant expansion of federal authority. (See letter here.)  A Wall Street Journal editorial (September 13, 2011, registration required) on E-Verify legislation was titled “Republican Overregulation.”

 

There has been no action on the bill in the past week, since the House of Representatives has not been in session. Judge Gideon Tucker (and later Mark Twain) once said, “No Man’s life, liberty or property is safe while the legislature is in session.” The House is back in session this week.

 

Return to Top

 

 

Broccoli Brigade heads N. Mexico project

 

(Las Cruces Sun-News) LAS CRUCES – A new collaboration between local growers and the New Mexico State University College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences could result in more broccoli on local dinner tables and more money in the pockets of Las Cruces area small farmers.

 

Broccoli seedlings in this NMSU pilot project, planted from seed in early July, are being transplanted from flats into fields this month, even as some other local vegetable crops are being harvested. Like other members of the mustard family, broccoli does best during the cooler spring and fall seasons in this climate zone.

 

Broccoli is not a crop that is commonly grown in the Mesilla Valley, which is one reason it was chosen for this demonstration project. The broccoli project is an example of NMSU outreach aimed at helping small producers diversify their operations by identifying, producing and marketing new crops. Broccoli is a popular and highly nutritious vegetable that has been shown through previous NMSU research to do well in southern New Mexico.

 

The project involves approximately 20,000 plants that are being transplanted into one NMSU field and at five other area locations. The harvest from these plants is likely to begin in late October or early November and may extend into December.

 

The project is being implemented by a team dubbed the "Broccoli Brigade" by Connie Falk, professor in the Department of Agricultural Economics and Agricultural Business. In addition to Falk, the NMSU team includes AEAB colleagues Eduardo Medina, small farm and ranch outreach coordinator, and Paul Gutierrez, Extension specialist; assistant professors Mark Uchanski and Kulbhushan Grover and master's student Alex Benitez, in the Department of Plant and Environmental Sciences; and John Idowu, Extension agronomist in the Department of Extension Plant Sciences. Community partners are Shahid Mustafa, manager of the Mountain View Market Co-op in Las Cruces, and Patricia Salas of the Colonias Development Council.

 

The Broccoli Brigade came into existence in early 2011.

 

"We were all getting together to talk about how to move the agenda of local agriculture forward," Falk said. "Shahid Mustafa, the G.M. of Mountain View Co-op, said he could sell all the broccoli we could produce and it was a pity we couldn't grow broccoli in Las Cruces, and I replied, 'Of course we can; we did for five years at OASIS.' And then we just started planning a broccoli project from there."

 

According to Falk, OASIS, or Organization of Aggie Students Inspiring Sustainability, is a student club at NMSU that began as an organic production class, which was also named OASIS (Organic Aggie Students Inspiring Sustainability).

 

"In that class, students learned the Community Supported Agriculture model of agriculture, and in five years grew more than 550 cultivars of organic vegetables, flowers and herbs," Falk said. "Broccoli was a successful crop at OASIS, which was taught during spring and fall seasons 2002-2006."

 

Uchanski and Falk also investigated season extension technologies in broccoli production for two years.

 

By mid-summer 2011, the Broccoli Brigade project, with a fall harvest in mind, had been fleshed out. Medina and Salas identified four community gardens and one private producer to participate as growers. Two of the community gardens, in Anthony and Chaparral, are affiliated with the CDC. Also participating are the Soil and Water District Youth Farm in Anthony and the SOLAR Garden in Chaparral. The private producer is Jesse Bustamante of Mesilla.

 

The main summer activity, July 7-8, was to start 22,000 broccoli plants from seed in plastic flats with the help of some of the local producers. The brigade chose Arcadia, one of the broccoli varieties OASIS had successfully grown, for the project. The seedlings were sheltered from the extreme heat and rain in the Fabian Garcia lath house for the September transplanting. An additional 4,000 seedlings were started in late August to help replace casualties lost to insect damage.

 

Information about this project, and about growing broccoli more broadly, has been incorporated into NMSU classes taught by some of the Broccoli Brigade members, and some of the students are involved in the project as volunteers. Some in Uchanski's vegetable crop management class and Grover's principles of crop production class have been among the individuals transplanting 13,000-14,000 broccoli seedlings in an organic research plot at NMSU's Fabian Garcia Science Center in Las Cruces. Uchanski oversees the plot, which he says was certified as organic in 2004 and has been maintained using organic principles since then.

 

The broccoli in this plot is involved in a replicated field experiment on broccoli fertility as part of Benitez's thesis project. All of it will be grown organically, with four fertilization treatments: fish emulsion injected through the drip irrigation system; locally available vermicompost applied as a side dress; a compost tea, made from the same compost material, applied through the drip system; and the control group with no fertilization. While Benitez doesn't expect the unfertilized plants to have a high yield, he thinks it is reasonable to expect some of the experimental rows to produce a pound of broccoli per plant.

 

The cooperating growers are not involved in replicated field trials, but will be using growing techniques appropriate to their operations. The local collaborators are supplying growing space and will share in the profits of a successfully grown crop. If all of the plots achieve optimal production, the team estimates the result will be between 12,000 and 14,000 pounds of broccoli harvested over several weeks' time.

 

Patricia Salas is a project coordinator for the Colonias Development Council and works with a "promotora" at each of the participating CDC community gardens.

 

"We got involved in the project after Eduardo Medina brought the opportunity to our attention," she said recently at the group's Las Cruces office. "We have participating families in both Anthony and Chaparral who are planting broccoli in their community garden plots, and the other families want to see how it turns out. We think it might be a good crop for backyard gardening, both as a healthy food for the families to consume and for them to sell at farmers' markets to increase their incomes."

 

Broccoli Brigade members assume that Mountain View Market will receive the bulk of the harvest. If the production is very robust, some of it may be passed on, through Mountain View's network, to La Montanita in Albuquerque for statewide distribution. According to Falk, some of the participating growers may arrange to market their harvest through other outlets.

 

"We've also been contacted by NMSU's food service," Falk said. "The new food service provider, Sodexo, is very interested in serving local food as much as possible, and so they are very interested in also purchasing some of the broccoli. We'd love to see some of it served on campus."

 

Economic analysis will be an important aspect of this project. If local producers are to be convinced that raising broccoli can be profitable in the Mesilla Valley, they will need to see the numbers. To this end, Falk and Gutierrez have been developing a cost-and-returns template.

 

The Broccoli Brigade does not expect growers to flock to broccoli immediately. They plan to repeat the project in the fall of 2012, involving what they hope will be a larger set of community collaborators. In addition, for broccoli to be grown on more than just a few acres, post-harvest handling infrastructure will need to be developed, because broccoli is usually iced soon after harvest to remove field heat and extend shelf life. Working out the logistical aspects of the enterprise, including storage, transport and broader marketing, will happen over the next couple of years.

 

"If we do well with the broccoli project, then we'll probably consider what the next crop is, in consultation with farmers and looking at what might sell well in the market. So it's a long-term kind of effort," Falk said.

 

Return to Top

 

 

Globetrotting couple ‘good bug’ hunting

 

An entomologist couple at UC Riverside travel the world searching for parasites to counter imported pests. Their lab is a high-security warren of trick doors and rooms within rooms.

 

By Amina Khan, Los Angeles Times

 

Mark Hoddle waits for the door to click into place. A magnetic sensor won't let him open the next door, just an arm's length away, until the first has been sealed shut.

 

 Then he's walking through a maze of darkened corridors. Black lights — positioned to lure and then zap any fugitive bugs — cast a dim lavender glow that suggests rather than reveals the way forward.

 

Finally, Hoddle reaches a high-security laboratory. Inside, behind a wall of glass, his wife and fellow entomologist, Christina, hunches over a microscope. Ornate green earrings from Pakistan, picked up on a recent parasite-hunting expedition, dangle above the lapels of her lab coat.

 

 When Hoddle raps on the glass, quarantine officer Imad Bayoun stops him: The alarms could go off.

 

 Christina, looking up, brandishes a vial the width of a pinkie.

 

 "See that little black speck?" Hoddle says. Trapped inside are tiny parasitic insects that the couple traveled halfway around the globe to find.

 

 California, like many other states, is under attack by insects from foreign lands that destroy crops, prey on native plants and compete with indigenous creatures for food and shelter. They cost the U.S. about $20 billion annually in agricultural losses, environmental damage and pest control.

 

 "Each year, California acquires at least six new exotic species. At least six," said Hoddle, 44, director of UC Riverside's Center for Invasive Species Research.

 

 They arrive on ships, in produce, on unsuspecting humans and animals. Many are harmless, but some wreak havoc, often because they're no longer held in check by parasites that afflicted them in their native habitats.

 

 That's where entomologists like the Hoddles come in. They believe the solution is to make life miserable for invasive critters by importing their natural enemies. It's an approach called "biological control," and it has taken the couple around the world in search of exotic parasites, which they bring home in Rubbermaid containers. They've grown accustomed to grillings by airport security officers.

 

 Much about their life mirrors their professional obsession. They were married six years ago at the Mission Inn in Riverside, where California entomologist Harry Scott Smith coined the term "biological control" in 1919. Paintings of insects adorn the walls of their home. They keep a mealworm colony in their kitchen to feed orioles and lizards in the backyard. Christina, 36, drives a bright yellow VW Beetle, though the couple bikes to the university's quarantine facility each day.

 

 The complex, with gleaming greenhouses on each level, looks distinctly modern from the outside. Inside, it's a warren of trick doors and rooms within rooms designed to securely hold insects until they've been thoroughly studied.

 

 "Anything that goes into that building can't escape," Hoddle said.

 

 At least not until the Hoddles have the all-clear to unleash a pest against its enemies.

 

 Insects are among the most troublesome of invasive species. They multiply quickly, can travel far and are hard to detect. Controlling them with pesticides is costly because the chemicals have to be sprayed on crops every season. Pesticides can't be used in uncultivated areas because they would kill all bugs, good and bad.

 

 California, Hawaii and Florida are especially prone to insect invasions because their long coastlines and mild weather attract trade and tourism.

 

 "They do well for the same reasons we like living here," Hoddle said of the interlopers. "Great climate, pretty much all year-round; lots of food. And, most importantly, they've escaped their natural enemies."

 

 Finding those enemies isn't easy. First, the Hoddles have to figure out where a pest came from. Then they have to go there and find it. The final step is to identify parasites that prey on the offending bug and bring them back to UC Riverside for study.

 

 With funding from the state and federal agriculture departments and the citrus industry, the Hoddles have traveled to Pakistan's Punjab province several times, most recently this year, looking for natural enemies of the Asian citrus psyllid. The bug has been sucking the fluids out of citrus trees in California since 2008 — and spreading a bacterial disease known as huanglongbing (Chinese for "yellow dragon disease") through Florida.

 

 In studying the problem, Mark Hoddle came across an obscure 1927 paper in which researchers reported finding parasitic wasps that fed on the citrus psyllid in Punjab, which has a climate similar to that of California's citrus-growing regions.

 

 In Pakistan, the couple spent hours tramping through citrus groves in triple-degree temperatures, armed with pruners, scissors and soda-bottle crates in which they placed vials stuffed with snipped branches. At night, they brought promising insects back to a local lab. Frequent power outages cut off the lights and ventilation. The Hoddles would pull out headlamps and continue peering into microscopes as sweat rolled off them in the dark.

 

 They flew home with a Rubbermaid box full of specimens of two kinds of stingless wasps that prey on the psyllid.

 

 Alarms buzzed when Mark's passport went under the scanner at London's Heathrow Airport on the way back to Los Angeles. This wasn't unexpected: The couple had told security officials about their cargo ahead of time. After probing questions, they were allowed to board the plane. Their sealed container, full of hundreds of insects, sat above them in the overhead bin.

 

 After further questioning at LAX, the pair rushed to the UC Riverside quarantine facility, where they deposited the insects on laboratory plants to get them breeding.

 

 They hope the newly discovered parasitoids (the technical term for parasitic creatures that ultimately kill or sterilize their hosts) will help eradicate the citrus psyllid as successfully as another critter wiped out the glassy-winged sharpshooter in French Polynesia six years ago.

 

 The sharpshooter, native to Mexico and the Southeastern United States, exploded in numbers after arriving in California in the 1980s, infecting crops with a bacterial blight called Pierce's disease.

 

 In 1999, shipments of ornamental plants, probably from Southern California, accidentally took the sharpshooter to French Polynesia. The insects — which can suck 100 times their volume in fluids in a single day — soon blanketed plants all over Tahiti. Their waste fell from trees like rain, baffling passersby. In some parts of the island, 300 of the insects could be picked off a single hibiscus plant in a minute.

 

 Hoddle and his colleagues released a parasitic wasp from their collection into the wild there. The wasp preys on the sharpshooters by laying eggs inside sharpshooter eggs; these then hatch and eat the sharpshooter eggs from the inside out.

 

 Within seven months, the sharpshooters had practically vanished from French Polynesia. "We were like rock stars in the newspapers," Hoddle said.

 

 "Bye-bye, peeing fly," a newspaper headline crowed in French.

 

 As the sharpshooter populations plummeted, so did the newly introduced parasitoids. Now, Hoddle said, "they just play hide-and-seek around the island." That's the beauty of biological control, he said — the two populations keep each other in balance.

 

 Despite such successes, some scientists express concern about opening the Pandora's box of pest-on-pest combat. Peter Stiling, an ecologist at the University of South Florida, cites the case of the weevil Larinus planus, which was released in Western and Midwestern states in the 1990s to control the invasive Canada thistle. It ended up feeding on a rare thistle native to Colorado and Utah as well.

 

 And then there is the case of the cactus moth, whose larvae eat the prickly pear, a cactus from the Americas that has invaded other parts of the world. After the moth was released in the Caribbean in the 1960s to control the prickly pear, it spread to the Florida Keys and fed indiscriminately on native cactuses, reducing one to near-extinction, Stiling said.

 

 "It's like releasing the genie out of the bottle," he said. "You can never get it back in."

 

 Hoddle is aware of such "friendly fire" risks. "We don't want our good guy to wipe out another good guy," he said.

 

 That's why all waste products in the UC Riverside testing facility are cooked for days, why whole floors between each level are dedicated to plumbing and electricity so that maintenance workers never enter testing floors, and why every inner room has slightly less air pressure than adjacent rooms, so that any AWOL bug will get sucked back in, Hoddle said.

 

 Fellow UC Riverside entomologist Raju Pandey wears a bodysuit and hood when working in the facility's highest-security levels — and then takes further precautions. He fashions discount ladies' nylons into wrist guards to keep insects from hitchhiking out of the building under his sleeves. He uses only white or brown nylons, so that stray bugs will be visible.

 

 The Hoddles and coworkers are now testing their Punjabi wasps on the citrus psyllid during long hours in the high-security quarantine. It is a grueling process. They grow trees, in pots, on which the insects are bred. Then they sic the parasitoids on them.

 

 They grow more trees, breed more insects and test them again, and again.

 

 "Bugs don't take weekends," Christina Hoddle said, "so neither do we."

 

 If the tests pass muster with the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the North American Plant Protection Organization, which sets standards for the U.S., Canada and Mexico, the tiny wasps should be ready for release at sites in Los Angeles County early this winter.

 

 But until the parasitoids prove their worth, the scientists are stuck with their captives in rooms within rooms, behind walls of glass and metal.

 

Return to Top

 

 

End Transmission