This link has been bookmarked by 1 people . It was first bookmarked on 04 Apr 2007, by Steve Leckie.
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04 Apr 07
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Unless water quality goals become an integral part of food safety reforms, cleaner crops could mean dirtier water. And that water flows into streams that flow into the bay, potentially contaminating marine life—including the things that we eat. If the next E. coli scare comes from seafood, farmers may scramble to vegetate their banks with the same fervor that they’re stripping them today.
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Not only are the food-safety measures bad for water quality, they also spell trouble for wildlife. Mountjoy says that some independent retail auditors have encouraged farmers to install bait stations to poison squirrels and other rodents that may carry E. coli. Hawks who eat the poisoned critters often die as a result, he says. Auditors have also suggested that growers fence their land, which could disrupt wild animal migration.
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The new food safety measures could also provoke farmers to use more pesticides. Landowners are likely to remove bankside vegetation with herbicides such as Roundup, which is known to harm aquatic life. And under the water quality improvement program, many farmers had planted hedgerows to attract insects that prey on pests, thus reducing the need for pesticides that can pollute streams. Removing those hedgerows to reduce the risk of E. coli contamination could mean applying more pesticides to crops.
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The environmental consequences of removing non-crop vegetation from farms are manifold, according to Danny Marquis of the NRCS. Without roots to stabilize the banks of an agricultural ditch, the soil will erode faster, depositing nitrates into the water. Those nitrates travel downstream and suck up oxygen, which can kill fish, and contribute to algal blooms that can poison marine life. In addition, plants bordering ditches tend to filter and break down pollutants that would otherwise contaminate the water. Finally, Marquis says, pathogens such as E. coli are more likely to travel over bare soil and into water when there isn’t vegetation to filter them out.
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In the wake of the FDA’s September warning about E. coli-contaminated spinach—which has been traced to a cattle and horse ranch adjacent to a farm in San Benito County—the agricultural industry has been scrambling to regain consumers’ trust in leafy greens. And since experts don’t know exactly where the deadly E. coli strain came from, some independent produce auditors are pressuring growers to eliminate all potential sources of contamination, including rodents. That means pulling out non-crop plants that could harbor wildlife—including the hedgerows and erosion control grasses that water quality agencies have painstakingly convinced farmers to plant.
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