E. Coli, Organic Farms, and Industrial Agriculture

The outbreak of an uncommonly toxic strain of E. coli in Germany has been in the news for a week now. This rare strain of the bacteria has killed at least twenty-three people in Europe and has made over two-thousand quite ill. In their rush to pinpoint the cause of the outbreak, German authorities first labeled cucumbers grown in Spain as the culprit. These same authorities retracted this accusation only a few days later, but enough time had passed to cost Spanish farmers hundreds of millions of dollars in lost sales and rotted crops. Still scrambling to locate the origin of the outbreak, German authorities next pointed to sprouts grown at an organic farm in northern Germany. On Monday, however, they once again backtracked on their claims after tests were unable to find any instances of E. coli bacteria on samples taken from the farm (1).

So, organic farmers can breathe freely once more, safe in the knowledge that they will not be wrongly implicated in the deadliest E. coli outbreak in modern history, right?

Wrong.

Even though German authorities have retracted their accusation, it seems that, like the innocent farmers in Spain, organic farmers have already suffered undue damage to their public perception. For example, an article posted on the Reuters website on Monday raises questions about the safety of organic farming (2). In fact, the article quotes a British professor of public health as saying that organic produce carries an extra risk because organic farms do not use non-organic chemical fertilizer. It boggles the mind to attempt to understand how produce can be more dangerous because it is not treated with poisonous chemicals!

The suggestion seems to be that the use of manure on organic farms causes a heightened risk of an E. coli outbreak, because E. coli is know to originate in animal intestines. This is wrong for a number of reasons. First of all, non-organic farms also use manure, but they are not regulated to the same degree. In fact, the federal regulation concerning the use of manure on organic farms is the strictest of its kind (3). It requires, for instance, that manure on organic farms be composted long enough to kill all bacteria. It comes as no surprise then that a study conducted at the University of Minnesota in 2004 concluded that organic produce was no more likely to be contaminated by E. coli than non-organic produce (4). Moreover, of all sprout recalls in the U.S. over the last two and a half years, ninety percent have come from non-organic farms (5).

Ultimately, the problem is twofold. First of all, evidence suggests that the wide-spread practice in conventional (i.e. non-organic) farming of feeding cows high-grain rations rather than the grass they were evolved to eat may be tied to increased instances of E. coli. These high-grain rations raise the pH in the cows’ rumen, which seems to lead to the creation of more deadly strains of E. coli (6).

On a much greater level, the recent E. coli outbreak is a symptom not of organic farming, nor even of conventional farming per se, but rather of the enormous scale of our industrial agricultural system. Our food system is not too big to fail; it is too big NOT to fail. When our food must travel a long and complicated path simply to reach our tables this not only increases the likelihood that somewhere along the way it will be contaminated, it also makes it difficult to trace the source of any contamination. This is evidenced by the recent blundering of the German authorities. Simply put, when our food is grown locally we know exactly where it comes from and we can quickly pinpoint and isolate any contamination.


__________

1) http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/E/EU_CONTAMINATED_VEGETABLES_EUROPE?CTIME=2011-06-05-07-43-44&SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT

2) http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/06/06/us-ecoli-beansprouts-idUSTRE7552N720110606

3) http://www.ota.com/organic/foodsafety/ecoli.html

4) Ibid.

5) http://www.cornucopia.org/2011/06/news-advisory-90-sprout-contamination-conventional-not-organic-linked-to-factory-farm-livestock-production/

6) Ibid.