A disturbing trend sweeping across California’s salad farms: farmers are taking to the gun to hunt down and kill all wildlife (wild pigs, rabbits and deer) near their fields. These drastic measures have come about because of the 2006 salmonella spinach contamination. Farmers of spinach, lettuce, and other salad greens, are now terrified of losing all that business again and are making sure to get rid of any animals that might contaminate their crops with E. coli in their fecal matter.
Although nobody knows for sure what caused the E. coli outbreak, some farmers are even going so far as to remove native trees on their fields to make the land completely uninhabitable to wildlife. One spinach farmer even poisoned nearby ponds to kill the frogs that might get caught in harvesting machinery, because of the risk they might carry unwanted bacteria on their webbed feet.
This is a far cry from the sustainable practices of organic or smaller family farms, and brings to light the very frightening war between industrial farming and nature. It seems counterintuitive to destroy nature for the sake of growing plants, but considering all the chemicals used, conventionally-produced spinach and lettuce hardly seem like plants at all. More motivation to grow my own garden.
Source: MSNBC
Image: jingly jon