12/12/07 Food Safety part 3

Food Safety Part 3. I'm Greg Martin with today's Line On Agriculture. We have been talking about food safety issues all week and have been talking with Charles Sweat, President of Earthbound Foods Natural Selection about the spinach recall in September last year due to e.coli. Many people believe that food is an extremely vulnerable area that has only recently come under scrutiny and according to Sweat, it will result in regulatory actions. SWEAT: We so think national standards should come and we do think it should be by commodity. We don't think the leafy green program necessarily fits the apple program perfectly. There are certain aspects of it that are very parallel. It will be a collaboration between us and the government before it's over. We will be regulated  it's a matter of when, not if. And the real question is "on what?" Sweat says their company has seen a shift in employees due to the outbreak. They now have many more scientists on staff. He also says they decided to really study and understand both the bacteria and environment. SWEAT: I had one grower ask if we should put monitoring cameras in the fields so we can see if deer or wild pigs run through the fields at night time while we're all asleep. What about migratory birds flying in during the winter as they're coming from Canada down to Arizona and Mexico. We see a higher propensity of salmonella in Arizona and Mexico than we do e. coli. We also see a higher propensity of migratory birds. So as we begin to understand our ecosystem, we may begin to understand more and more about how this bacterium behaves and where the risks are. Right now the Senate is debating a food safety program but these programs have to get to ground zero. They start in the fields. SWEAT: It does start in the field. Good agricultural practices and the higher risk of the environmental contamination risk happens in the field. We're looking at our seed, our irrigation, our soil. We look at sanitation protocols for workers. I can tell you anytime you have employees that come in contact with the food, it adds risk. We've increased our audit staff and we're doing industry wide unannounced third party audits much more frequently. It will be interesting to see how this issue affects farming as we know it. SWEAT: The farm environment is the biggest risk. That's the area we can't control. You can't control birds from flying into your orchards, you can't control deer from running through in the middle of the night, but I definitely think the open farm environment is your highest risk because you can't control it 24/7. That's today's Line On Agriculture. I'm Greg Martin on the Northwest Ag Information Network.