They’ve turned the Rocky Mountain snow machine back on. Someone told me the Old Farmers Almanac says the date of the first snowfall will determine how many times it will snow this season.
Denver’s first snowfall was Oct. 25, which according to Old Farmers means we will see 25 snowstorms this season. We’ve already seen two, and we can only hope that 23 more will be enough.
Since there are only about 100 days a year when you cannot ski in Colorado, you would not think that reporting on the first snowfall of the season would require such drama. But every media outlet saw the need to deploy a platoon of reporters to the interstates, airports, mountain passes and downtown plazas.
All the reports were done standing the snow with traffic or airplanes or whatever in the background. The more snow and wind the better. You get the picture.
I learned via a discussion on the local media this week that the reason for all these multiple reports is “backpack journalism.” It used to be that a remote broadcast required: one on-air reporter, one cameraman, one sound engineer, one producer and a big van equipped with up-links and down-links to satellites over head.
A single journalist carrying everything needed in that backpack now plays all of these roles out alone. They do their own camera and sound work, and use the Internet instead of expensive satellite time to “go live.”
Journalism schools – the ones that survive – are teaching the “backpack” methods as seriously as they use to introduce us to lead type. The print versus broadcast decision we had to make 30 years ago no longer exists.
News21 is one such cutting edge J-school program involving Arizona State University, University of Maryland, University of Missouri, University of Nebraska, and Harvard University in which graduate students produce in-depth stories, photos, video graphics and interactive graphic databases.
Last month News 21 turned out some excellent work on food safety that was originally distributed by the Washington Post and msnbc.com. Our plan is to republish some of it in Food Safety News to give our readers exposure to this rare national investigation into food safety in America.
It’s great to see the quality that “backpack journalism” can produce. So much of it is just about speed. Consider for example that:
– YouTube users upload two days of video every minute, and YouTube receives up to 3 billion views per day.
– Twitter users generate over two million daily “Tweets,” 2,200 new Tweets every second.
– Facebook’s typical user creates 90 pieces of content each month. More than 30 billion pieces are shared monthly, an average of over 7 billion a week.
– Google takes in 8.5 billion search queries each month for those trying “to find relevance in it all.”
The YouTube, Twitter, Facebook and Google numbers came from Chris Perry at the public relations firm of Weber Shandwick. They are included here to demonstrate the vastness of the universe in which Food Safety News exists.
Remember what I said before. We are trying to use these tools to gather readers who want to remain informed about food safety. We’ve been pretty certain that audience exists and its major elements can be identified: state and federal regulators, health officials, academics, the food industry, consumers and others.
We keep track of all this of course. I tend to like quarterly or annual figures. It helps, I think, if numbers are seen with the spikes and dips ironed out a bit. For the 12 months ending in October, our traffic was just a hair short of 1.6 million. Our trend continues upward.
We fully realize these are not “Drudge” numbers. These are niche numbers, but oh what a niche it is. Food Safety News is not only producing numbers, but it is also gathering an audience of food safety decision makers.
One of the ramifications of getting numbers is that Food Safety News is now a commercially viable entity. That means we’ve begun to accept paid advertising. Since our startup more than two years ago, our founding sponsor has been Marler Clark, the food safety law firm in Seattle.
As we move to a multiple sponsored entity, we will continue to keep a solid wall separating our news-editorial and advertising functions. On that, have no doubt.
Alan Frost, one of our most alert readers, responded to a story I wrote this week on the possible return of horse slaughter for human food in the U.S. by pointing out “the subject of food safety does not appear the 21st paragraph (and there is no 22nd paragraph.)”
Mr. Frost made a good point. We need to stay on subject here, and the subject is food safety.
About five years ago when Congress was trying to shut down the last three horse slaughterhouses for human food in the U.S., it withdrew funding for the required USDA inspectors. The Belgium owners wanted to pay USDA to keep the inspection, but the closures followed instead.
If through state action, a horse slaughter operation starts up again in the U.S. for either domestic or export food for humans, there are going to be food safety issues we will want to explore. The story we wrote this past week was to note the interest of several states in the subject, the horse population problem, and the rough anniversary of the end of horse slaughter in the U.S.
Beyond that there are myriad issues around horse slaughter that flare passion from both sides and we’d prefer that if you have further interest in the subject you go someplace else. For us to do more is just too much of a reach from our primary mission and, thankfully, Mr. Frost is watching to keep us on the straight and narrow.
Likewise in February 2010, we published one of those “fair and balanced” stories looking at whether or not the oil and natural gas industry’s practice of “fracking” to unlocked deep deposits is responsible for well water pollution on the surface.
We’ve passed on other “fracking” stories just because the food safety angle is pretty thin. This is another one where the propaganda campaigns on both sides can swallow you up. There is no shortage of places to go to fulfill your “fracking” needs, but it need not be here.
I’ve written here before about our approach to subjects like organic and genetically modified (GM) foods. We strive to bring you major developments in these areas and we emphasize whatever can be said about food safety.
I’ve also done my share of complaining about how much, especially when it comes to GM crops, involve “process” not “settled science.” It’s pretty much unavoidable, but it does not mean I cannot keep complaining.
Horse slaughter, fracking, GM crops are just examples of the kinds of subjects we will get into and hopefully out of quickly to let you know we are on top of things, but we are not going to stray very far from our pathogens.
The food safety menu is a long one including such items as additives, apple juice arsenic, bisphenol A, child nutrition, nanotechnology, pesticides, poultry litter, Round Up ready and veal calves. But if we treat everything as an entree, we are going to lose focus and we are not going to let that happen.
If we do, I hope Mr.Frost and other readers will speak up. We have thick skins and always do appreciate genuine comments on the content we should or should not be including.
Another reason we have to draw the line so we know where food safety topics begin and end is that we have had so much to focus on that is right down our centerline.
Who could have imagined that 2011 would see a pathogenic E. coli strain that was previously unknown outside of a few laboratories and the first Listeria contamination of cantaloupes both causing deadly and costly outbreaks?
Both Europe’s E. coli O104:H4 outbreak and the 26-state Listeria outbreak in the U.S. generated enough mystery that we will be reporting on them for some time to come. I was surprised at how much new there was in “Profile of Germany’s Catastrophic ‘Sproutbreak’” by Mary Rothschild, which we published last Friday.
We’ll eventually publish how Listeria went from lunchmeat and soft Mexican cheese to cantaloupes that were grown without problems since the 1880s.
That will be as soon as somebody a lot smarter than we are figures it out.
Cherry Central, a domestic cooperative of hundreds of fruit and vegetable growers, announced last week it’s now using IBM analytics technology to achieve “true visibility” as their products move from their co-op farms on through the supply chain.
In the announcement, IBM noted that the high cost of foodborne illness outbreaks — an estimated $152 billion annually in the U.S. — has led to partnerships between technology and food companies to solve the problem.
In the wake of dozens of high-profile outbreaks “governments around the world are proposing more stringent regulations to better protect consumers from food borne illnesses,” says IBM. “A breakdown at any point in the food system on the farm-to-table spectrum can cause catastrophic harm to the health of consumers and great disruption and economic loss to the food industry.”
They note that more than six billion cases of fruits and vegetables alone travel across the U.S. each year.
“As it travels through various points of the supply chain, there are possibilities of this food being exposed to temperatures or other factors that could lead to its contamination.”
Cherry Central is collaborating with IBM and business partner N2N Global. The company is now able to track data from the time fruit is harvested, sorted or processed, sent to distribution warehouses, and finally unloaded and placed on display counters at grocery stores or ingredient buyer locations.
All of this activity data is now collected, viewed, aggregated and analyzed in real time.
“Cherry Central and its trading partners are a microcosm of the entire food supply chain,” said Steve Eiseler, vice president of operations at Cherry Central Cooperative. “This collaboration is helping us create a well-connected and visible food supply chain to make it easier and faster to track the food items we market, while allowing us to spot trends as they’re occurring real time. This visibility is enabling is to take proactive measures to ensure food safety and ultimately protect the consumer.”
Last year, IBM partnered with the Thailand government to launch traceability programs for chicken processors and mango growers in the country. See Food Safety News‘ coverage here.
For large farming operations, food safety audits are commonplace. Most buyers require them before purchasing produce. However, small farms are rarely inspected by auditors, because the cost of implementing a safety plan can be too expensive.
That’s where Bridging the GAPs – a program designed to help small and mid-sized growers find a way to meet food safety guidelines – comes in.
Organized by the Washington State Department of Agriculture (WSDA), the initiative will allow modest-sized operations to reach broader markets such as schools, grocery stores and restaurants, most of which now require Good Agricultural Practices certification.
Good Agricultural Practices (GAPs) is a set of protocols approved by the U.S. Department of Agriculture that farmers can follow to prove they’re growing and harvesting in a way that minimizes the risk of crop contamination.
However, because these standards require extra time, equipment and sometimes land, they are often daunting or even prohibitive to small and mid-sized farmers.
At a farm in Bellingham, WA this month, farmers, state and local health officials and community members gathered to begin a dialogue on how to make GAPs easier for modest farms to swallow. The group toured Cedarville Farms, a family-operated, 7-acre organic farm, in order to get a first-hand look at the obstacles that stand between small farms and GAPs certification.
At the event, auditors and food safety experts spoke about what it takes to meet these requirements. Key elements include:
- Employees must be educated in sanitation practices and have access to clean hand-washing and waste facilities
- Sick workers are not allowed to handle food or processing surfaces
- Irrigation water has been tested and does not flow from an uphill source that could be contaminated with human or animal feces
- Livestock are not in close proximity to crops, and fences around fields keep out wild animals
- Raw manure is applied to crops at least 120 days before harvesting and records are kept of composted manure treatment
- Records are kept of what crops are planted in what field, what date they’re planted and harvested and where they were sold, so that produce can be traced back to its origin in the case of a recall
But farmers weren’t the only ones doing the learning. Representatives from WSDA’s Fruit and Vegetable Inspection Program, Food Safety and Organics programs and Farm-to-School initiative made it clear that they were there to learn what aspects of these policies are difficult – or even impossible – to achieve on a small farm with diversified crops.
For example, GAPs regulations specify that animals must be housed at least a half-mile from growing fruits and vegetables. But on a farm such as Cedarville, which is 1/10 of a square mile, this would mean that either the livestock or the produce would have to go.
Chuck Dragoo, district assistant manager of GAPs monitoring, explained that alternatives exist for many of these regulations. In this case, a natural barrier between animals and crops – such as a road or drainage ditch – would be acceptable.
That goes for controlling potentially contaminated runoff as well, he explained.
“We like to see a natural barrier between compost piles and farmlands,” he explained. Fields should also be protected from water flowing from ponds or streams, and sewage must be properly contained.
Cedarville Farms’ chickens are located feet from the zucchini beds, with no natural barriers, a situation that Dragoo said give him “heartburn” as an auditor, and would need to be remedied before the farm were to undergo a GAPs audit (something it has not yet done).
Another problem farmers raised was the requirement that storage containers be new or sanitized before use, and not stacked if they’ve touched the ground. Buying new crates is expensive, and not stacking clean crates that have been on the ground next to crops drags out the harvesting process.
For this problem, auditors – who again deal mostly with large, commodity farms – didn’t know the solution. One farmer, however, suggested laying out a tarp on which to set containers to keep them clean, a solution Dragoo said would work well.
This sort of question and suggestion exchange created a way for auditors and growers to work through problems they often didn’t know existed before talking to one another at the meeting.
“Auditors need to know what the reality is on small farms,” Tricia Kovacs, a WSDA education and outreach specialist, told the group. “We need to start serving smaller and midsized farms better in terms of GAPs certifications, and it hasn’t come up a lot yet,” she said.
Farmers expressed hope that after this gathering, regulatory officials would have a better understanding of what it takes for them to become eligible for certification.
“As is made evident by this tour and the conversations that are occurring, the cultures are very different and they were very unfamiliar with many of the sets of problems that we’re confronted with,” said Greg Reede, a farmer on Vashon Island who is currently developing a food safety plan so that he can sell to the school district there.
But, he says, it’s a two-way street. “We [farmers] are trying to increase our awareness of what’s going on,” he told Food Safety News. “We’re unfamiliar with the culture that they’re used to seeing, and so we need to come together in the middle somewhere.”
One of the things these farmers are unfamiliar with is the documentation needed to prove that they’re taking measures to meet GAPs. Letting raw manure compost for 120 days doesn’t mean anything if you don’t record the dates on which it was added, turned, checked for temperature and then applied to plants, Dragoo explained.
And that goes for documenting any part of the process, whether it’s results of water tests or where and when each crop was planted and harvested.
Mike Finger, owner of Cedarville Farms, who has been working toward GAPs certification for almost a year, says that viewing wildlife as a danger rather than an asset was a hard adjustment.
“When I got here and saw that the pond had ducks and fish and beaver, you know, I’m a wildlife biology major and I thought ‘Way cool, man!’ Then I thought, ‘Cool, I’ve got a built-in fish fertilizer. Every time I irrigate I’m getting all this poop sprayed on the crops,” he recounted. “And now it’s like ‘Oh my God. Let’s nuke the whole thing. Let’s just cover it with a concrete lid.”
The message of the day from food safety officials was don’t be intimidated. There’s a happy medium between raw feces as fertilizer and filling in the pond, and with some work and compromise, it’s do-able.
“A lot of the standards are written in such a way that it allows that interpretation and it allows flexibility, so I just want to remind everybody not to close your mind on GAPs certification or organic certification,” said Brenda Book, program manager for WSDA’s Organic Program, which requires a separate certification from GAPs.
Despite reassurance from officials, however, some farmers remained skeptical about their ability to meet GAPs standards.
When asked how many thought they would be able to attain GAPs certification within the next year, only one farmer raised her hand. When the timeline was extended to 3 years, a handful more said they could, but this group was still in the minority.
Cost seems to be one of the biggest barriers. Audits cost money, as does getting clean water to fields for hand washing, maintaining bathroom facilities, and setting up covered facilities for harvested food so that animals can’t reach them.
“I know as a farmer I’m very willing to invest money to make my farm safer,” said Finger. “But when Chuck [Dragoo] said today that some operations might be required to have closed facilities, I said ‘OK, now the rubber’s really meeting the road.’ That’s where this all gets very interesting for small-scale farmers is those sort of investments and infrastructure. Those are going to at least make it hard for people to get in.”
When Food Safety News asked Reede if he found GAPs certification daunting, he replied, “Yes, absolutely.”
But state officials made it clear that they would be bringing farmer’s concerns back to the office to share with other auditors and try to shape a system more sensitive to small farm capabilities.
“This is what Bridging the GAPs project is all about. If we hear concerns that you have as far as the ability to market your commodities and be competitive in the marketplace, those are questions I’d be more than willing to take back to our program managers and say ‘Listen, I think we need to talk about this and give them some options.’ “
More information on GAPs auditing and a copy of the audit checklist is available on the Washington State Department of Agriculture’s website.
One of the nation’s largest fresh fruit and vegetable organizations, the Produce Marketing Association, just wrapped up its annual “Fresh Summit” in Atlanta with a warning from its chief executive officer.
Bryan Silbermann, PMA president, told his members their biggest challenge is combatting deadly foodborne illness outbreaks during a time of rapidly growing demand for healthier foods.
In his “state of the industry” report, Silbermann said produce growers and shippers are under a microscope because of recent fatal outbreaks involving sprouts and cantaloupes.
“It does not matter whether you grow, ship or sell along this supply chain,” he said. ”I want you to consider some fundamental truths we must accept as we look for ways to turn this tide around. It must be turned around. Our future depends on it.”
The 2011 “Fresh Summit” was “eerily” like the lead up to the PMA summit in 2006, according to Silbermann. At that time, the spinach-caused E. coli outbreak “hung like a black cloud over us,” he said.
The PMA chief said the industry finds itself back in the same place with the current cantaloupe-caused Listeria outbreak that has killed at least 25 people out of 123 sickened in 26 states to become the most deadly food poisoning in the U.S. in 25 years.
PMA is the leading trade association for companies involved in every segment of the global produce and floral supply chain. The group also elected its officers and board to serve for the next year during its meetings at the Georgia World Congress Center.
Attendance was estimated at 18,500, more than 200 over the previous summit.
Sharon Mills, the mother of 5-year-old Mason Jones, who died in 2005 in the largest-ever E. coli O157:H7 outbreak in Wales, has been nominated for Mum of the Year.
Mills, 36, is being recognized for her efforts to improve food safety since losing her son. Mason became the face of the Wales outbreak, which sickened more than 150, mostly children, and sent 31 to area hospitals.
Mills most recently has worked to make the display of restaurant food hygienic scores mandatory. The Welsh Government has said it will introduce legislation to require all restaurants, including those that sell only take out foods, to display their inspection scores.
Mills, who has two surviving sons ages now 7 and 14, also played a role in the outbreak investigations, including the independent inquiry conducted by Professor Hugh Pennington.
“I’m extremely pleased with the nomination and I am very proud, ” she said. “This is quite an achievement for us and my little boy. There have been a considerable amount of changes made (in food hygiene laws) since 2005 and there are more tools for parents to find out more about where they and their children are eating.”
Her father, Robert Mills, said: “Sharon has campaigned tirelessly for a change in the laws governing food safety.
“Her belief that Mason’s death must not be in vain and her efforts to stop such an outbreak ever occurring again deserve true recognition.
“And on top of everything, she continues to be a perfect mum to her other two boys.”
The selection panel will include: Olympic athlete Denise Lewis, choreographer Arlene Phillips, television presenter Emma Forbes and Ultimo founder Michelle Mone.
