Food Scare

Why a fragile food system makes a strong case for buying from local growers

It wasn’t easy, but Tougas Family Farm of Northboro recovered from both of those scenarios and is having one of its best pick-your-own seasons in years. Other area growers are unlikely to face substantial financial impacts from the spinach scare, since it is not a crop that they focus on. But Tougas and other farming experts say, the recall is food for thought - if you will - about where our food comes from.

"It’s a reminder to people how fragile the entire food system is and how important it is that the local growers remain in business," Tougas says. Fortunately, he notes and statistics show, Massachusetts farmers have an outstanding customer base supporting them in their backyard

The local argument

The huge California growers from which the tainted spinach that sickened 175 people and killed one is suspected of coming are factory-type farms with little local control, Tougas and other agricultural experts note. "If there was ever a story that made a case as to why people should buy local," this is it, says Annie Cheatham, executive director of a group called the Community Involved in Sustaining Agriculture, which runs a "Buy Local" marketing campaign for farmers in Western Mass. and the western reaches of Central Mass.

Rich Bonanno, vice president of the Mass. Farm Bureau Federation and past president of the N.E. Vegetable and Berry Growers Association, says the argument for buying from Mass. farmers is logistical: "Local versus something coming from 3,000 miles away where there’s a lot more things they can’t control...The more you deal with local farmers, the less capacity for contamination that’s going to affect 23 states," he says.

A lot of times, Bonanno says, California growers negatively influence the consumer market. If some weather-related problem hurts their crops, consumer prices go up. This time, the problem coincides with the peak of local farmers’ selling season. Even if the warning does keep shoppers away from the local fall spinach crop, Bonanno says, consumers can buy other locally grown greens for salads from area farms. And some supermarkets are also shifting to local options.

Bonanno says one week into the spinach scare competing supermarket chains were seeking to buy lettuce from his 50-acre wholesale farm in Methuen. Julie Rawson, executive director of the 4,000-member Northeast Organic Farming Association and a certified organic grower in Barre, says some of her group’s members have gotten inquiries from health-food retailers seeking alternative greens to spinach.

Reacting to speculation that the spinach contamination in California may have stemmed from runoff or irrigation water containing waste from cattle, Rawson says some organic growers do use cow manure to fertilize the soil here. But, she says, the proper practice is to wait at least 120 days before planting in such soil, which in New England means the following growing season. Growing in raw manure, she says, is simply a poor farming practice.

Tougas says he doesn’t know of any local vegetable growers who fertilize with cow manure. For one thing, he says, it isn’t widely available locally.

Ronald Labbe, a professor of food microbiology at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, says it’s hard to say if locally grown produce is safer than that grown on factory farms across the country until it is determined what caused the spinach contamination. He suspects the culprit, if found, will be cattle-related. But that still doesn’t mean small local farms are always safer, he says. Before using manure for fertilizer, farmers are supposed to compost it so that the heat from the combustion process kills pathogens, he notes.

On the other hand, Labbe says, it would be better to have a less centralized food system to avoid large-scale safety problems. The trade-off for that, he says, would be higher costs and less availability of out-of-season produce.

The tainted spinach problem Labbe says, was exacerbated by the trend of people eating more of it uncooked as part of a dietary trend toward raw foods. In fact, he says, sales of such fresh-cut, packaged produce have doubled in the past five years.

Even before the spinach situation, local farmers benefited from a "small" cultural shift nationwide toward buying locally produced food, Cole says. Ever since 9-11, people have begun to think more about where their food is coming from, agrees Lynn Hartman, owner of Hartman’s Herb Farm in Barre and president of the Mass. Association of Roadside Stands, an Acton-based nonprofit which promotes roadside farm stands.

But farmers in Massachusetts, and particularly Worcester County, have long had a close connection with consumers. In fact, based on the last U.S. Agricultural Census in 2002, Worcester County ranked fourth in the country in direct sales from farmers to consumers, with $7.64 million in total sales. It has some 1,094 farms and 131 farmers markets, according to the Mass. Department of Agricultural Resources, and accounts for 20 percent of the total farmland in the state.

Massachusetts ranked No. 1 in New England and seventh in the nation in terms of direct sales of farm products to consumers in the 2002 census. The total direct sales statewide for 2002 were $31.3 million, up 53 percent from the 1997 census figure of $20.4 million. That figure has grown in recent years, according to David Webber, spokesman for the MDAR, though an updated figure won’t be available until the 2007 census.

Part of the reason Worcester County does so well with direct farm sales, Tougas says, is that Worcester County growers have been promoting the notion of buying local for some 30 years. Another factor, says Bonanno, is the fact that the county has a high population and a lot of agriculture. While you may expect counties out in the Midwest to have more direct farm sales, he notes, they simply don’t have the population to match Massachusetts. "For farmers in Worcester County and Massachusetts in general, you basically have a very nice connection between population and agriculture," Bonanno says.

CISA, based in the Pioneer Valley, has been trying to extend its Buy Local campaign into Worcester County to further strengthen the consumer-farmer bond here. Cheatham says the nonprofit group, which has had success in its seven-year campaign in that region, is seeking grants to extend the advertising effort east. She hopes the added attention on locally grown food will help that effort. Thus far, CISA has some members from Barre and Hardwick.

Awaiting spinach findings

While local farmers swing into their biggest selling season of the year, as consumers flock to festivals and farm stands for apples, pumpkins and fresh vegetables, they are keeping watch on what comes out of the spinach investigation across the country.

Kent Lage, assistant commissioner for the MDAR, notes that a crop-wide recall, like the FDA’s call for all spinach to be avoided, is unusual. It would have had much more dire local consequences, he says, if it was sweet corn, tomatoes or pumpkins – the Commonwealth’s largest local crops. While some Mass. farmers may have a fall spinach crop coming in, since spinach thrives here in cooler weather, it represents a small portion of the state’s farm acreage and growers have a variety of other crops.

Cider scare hit home

But one New England tradition you won’t find on many local farm stands, including Tougas’, is apple cider. After E. coli was discovered in cider from a Fall River farm stand that was traced to 23 illnesses in 1991, the FDA stepped up regulations in a move that drove many small cider mills out of business. Although the outbreak was linked to a single producer that failed to properly wash apples, federal regulations required that cider makers either purchase costly pasteurization equipment or label their cider as potentially hazardous to consumers. Tougas halted its cider presses for good, which cost the farm an estimated $30,000 a year in cider sales.

Just a few years before that, Tougas and other apple growers faced the Alar scare, which received similar media play to the current spinach situation when 60 Minutes aired a program citing an alleged health danger to children. Alar spray was used by growers to keep McIntosh apples on the trees longer to allow for better ripening and harvesting. Most now agree, including Bonanno and Tougas, that scare was based on insufficient data. Nonetheless, Bonanno notes, the maker of Alar yielded to pressure and took the product off the market.

Tougas says he can’t place a dollar figure on what the Alar scare cost his farm, but notes that it had to tear up entire orchards of McIntosh and replant other apple varieties. As a result, the stand actually ran short of fruit for a few seasons. Overall, the Alar scare cost apple growers an estimated $250 million, according to news accounts.

Bonanno says the Alar scare effectively "killed" what had been a very vital McIntosh industry in the region.

Tougas says he thinks the tainted spinach situation is "probably getting blown up more than it should be." He considers the U.S. food supply safe, "there’s no question about that, when you look at the relatively few incidents (of problems.)"

Micky Baca can be reached at mbaca@wbjournal.com