Growing PR problem related to agricultural use of biosolids

The E. coli in this burger may not come from it being under cooked, but from the lettuce or onion that was possibly irrigated with effluent water from a municipal wastewater treatment plant that did not adequately filter out all bacteria prior to being used to irrigate farmland.

An ag industry newspaper called The Packer is reporting the discovery of E. coli in Romaine Lettuce coming out of the Salinas Valley in California. While this bit of news is not attached to reports of human illness preceding such a recall, this news serves as another black eye for California’s vegetable industry.

According to the article, the Andrew Smith Co. of Salinas recalled 1,000 cartons of lettuce on May 7 “after tests showed the presence of E. coli in a bag of romaine lettuce, the day after another company recalled romaine products — but the two recalls are apparently unrelated.”

While the article does not address it, it’s been reported that farms in the Salinas Valley have for several years now used treated sewage water from municipal wastewater treatment plants as a means of irrigating their crops. The move, according to one website, came in response about a decade ago to the intrusion of salt water in wells that irrigated the high-value vegetable crops grown in the Monterey and Salinas area of Central California.

Just a couple years ago more cases of E. coli were reportedly linked to spinach and other crops coming out of the same growing region of California.

This political and PR nightmare is not what Central Coast growers — or any farmers for that matter — need. But it’s one that farmers have invited upon themselves by agreeing with cities to take toxic water from wastewater treatment plants and use it to irrigate the crops we eat.

It was for this very reason that about a decade ago farmers in neighboring counties of Central California got together and banned the land application of sewage sludge and the use of treated effluent water on farmlands in agriculturally rich counties such as Stanislaus, Merced and San Joaquin. At the same time, farmers in Kern County California were being exposed in newspaper articles there about their practice of having sludge trucked in from nearby Orange and Los Angeles counties for use as “soil amendments.” That news surprised some vegetable farmers in Kern County, who immediately denied using sludge — the industry term is “biosolids” — on their farmland and tried to get an ordinance similar to other counties in order to ban the import and use of sewage sludge on farmlands there. Their fears not only stemmed from the possible contamination of their crops, but from the associated public relations nightmare they feared would befall them once word got out that municipalities were using carrot crops and other farmland to dispose of their municipally treated sewage.

Fast-forward a decade and we see the seeds of these fears bearing fruit in the form of tainted lettuce, spinach and other crops coming out of the nation’s salad bowl. In the expedience of getting rid of treated sewage solids and liquids, farmers have become an easy target for the cities as they push biosolids as a safe and cheaper alternative to other kinds of soil amendments.

The counties that argued against the land application of sewage sludge did so on the grounds that there are truly no guarantees that the treatment processes used eliminates all of the toxins and heavy metals that are part of the municipal waste stream. In short, it’s not just the human waste that gets flushed down all those toilets, but everything else from the petroleum products to the dangerous chemicals illegally dumped by businesses and clandestine drug labs that makes it into the waste stream at the municipal waste treatment facilities that is also a big part of what gets dumped on farmland through these agreements between the cities and farmers.

When are farmers going to learn that they can’t play roulette with cities and expect to not lose when the public learns of these practices and stops buying their produce? The cities surely have no stake in farms losing their ability to sell their crops; it’s the farmers who have everything to lose when consumers decide to stop buying their produce. What happens when packing industry efforts to move more fruits and vegetables through the USDA school lunch program are successful and we wind up with thousands of sick or dead school children because of a few bags of tainted lettuce or other commodities — all because cities coerced farmers to use treated sewage products on their farmland?

Paying protection money or suicide by politician: Either way American citizens and consumers lose

I don’t pick it or grow it, weed it or water it, spray it or till it. I don’t stay up nights to make sure the wind machines and water are running to keep it from freezing. I don’t worry about the rain during the spring bloom or the late-summer harvest. I don’t stress over whether to buy millions of dollars of insurance to cover crop damage from thunderstorms and hail. I don’t worry about the fluctuations of feed prices and milk prices, or even about the availability of bees to pollinate my orchards.

As an American consumer I, like all other American consumers, take for granted that my grocery store shelves will be stocked with ample supplies of safe and healthy food produced here in the United States. My only concern when I peruse the bins of fruits and vegetables in the store is the source of my broccoli, apples or melons (did American farmers grow them or were they imported from foreign countries?). I’m appreciative of labeling laws that make it so I can make an educated choice of whether to buy fruit that was grown in Chile or in the United States.

What I do worry about is my country’s ability to sovereignly govern itself. I worry that my country is losing its sovereignty through policies that believe we’re better off buying oil from foreign nations than mining our own domestic sources of oil; I also worry that these same mental midgets and their political supporters will someday soon regulate the American farmer out of existence and force us to go begging for food from third-world nations. The irony is that some of these same political supporters are the very farmers that right now feed this nation.

I know many farmers. I’ve worked closely with farmers as a journalist and even worked with them for a period of time to promote American agriculture. They appear to be hard working and honest people. They prefer the farm to stuffy meetings and they would much rather do what it takes to produce quality agricultural commodities than have to wade through piles of regulations that stifle productivity and cut profits.

So why do farmers continue to support politicians who regularly vote to cut their water supplies, take their land, and regulate their ability to do business because some well-paid whiner claims that growing the food that feeds the nation isn’t as important as some bug, fish, mammal or reptile?

Today the California Farm Bureau Federation announced its support for Carly Fiorina for US Senate to replace Barbara Boxer. While I’m not arguing that Boxer doesn’t need to be sent out to pasture herself, the choice of Fiorina is certainly puzzling, given her reluctance to really come out and tell the voters what she stands for. What we do know about her is she’s closely tied with Arizona Senator John McCain, who we all know would run from his own shadow if it appeared to his right. That alliance alone makes me as a voter suspicious of her and much more likely to vote for one of the other Republican candidates for US Senate.

I’ve long been puzzled by agriculture’s decisions to financially support Liberal politicians, then a year or two later when those same Liberals vote to shut off water supplies or for more stringent rules to the Endangered Species Act, or for some other anti-business, anti-farming piece of legislation, they complain as if that vote came as a complete shock and surprise.

Maybe it’s because farmers are coy and they know that Liberal politicians like to spend money that’s not theirs to buy favors that will help them during their reelection campaigns, and maybe, if farmers don’t squirm too much and agree to pay ample amounts of protection money for the reelection campaigns of these same politicians, then maybe a well-placed farmer might be awarded with a political appointment or some other financial stocking stuffer.

Meanwhile, America’s ability to be agriculturally self-sufficient suffers and it becomes more necessary for us to import food from nations that are a military coup away from deciding that the United States is not a favored trading partner anymore and should pay much more if we want to buy the food they produce.

We know what it’s like to be held hostage by the price of a barrel of oil that’s set by a cartel that doesn’t have America’s best interest in mind when it meets in secret. Imagine a world where similar tyrants gather in seclusion to decide who gets to buy the food supply they control and how much that food will cost. Sadly, we appear to be on the slippery slope to that end, and the announcement by California’s leading farm organization to support another Liberal politician (albeit one with an “R” behind her name) is just that much more grease on the slide.

Buying politicians or paying protection money: They’re one in the same

Some of the farmers who's water deliveries were eliminated last year have been regular contributors to the same politicians voting to cut those deliveries. © Todd Fitchette

There’s a common storyline in old gangster movies where the mob boss goes into someone’s store and tells the store owner that it would be a shame if something bad happened to him or his store. In this case of explicit implication, the store owner decides to “buy” the rather expensive protection services of the local mob boss. It might work, but it’s extortion nonetheless. Politicians play a similar game with their constituents, particularly those who represent groups of like-minded constituents.

Take for example the farm groups that consistently gives money to Democrats thinking that maybe someday these Democratic lawmakers might, kind of, maybe see things their way and stop writing laws that take their water, land and livelihoods. As much as the Supreme Court has ruled that political contributions are protected under the First Amendment as free speech, the case can be made that such donations to sitting politicians are nothing more than legalized extortion. If nothing else, these political donations do not generate the return on investment that the farmers would expect. So the question then becomes, why continue donating to and supporting these wasted causes?

It happens on a regular basis. Farmers contribute to many of the same politicians who then side with the environmental extortionists and further strip farmers and the rest of us of our private property rights and extort more money from us in the way of taxes, fees and levies. I’ve seen it happen with Dianne Feinstein, who claims to enjoy support from farmers, only later to reportedly threaten physical harm against the head of one prominent ag-based organization who also happens to be one of her constituents. Read the story “Breakdown” in High Country News for one such example.

This puzzled me when I used to work for one ag organization and was a reporter and editor covering the ag industry. I could never understand allegedly conservative farmers and ranchers donating richly to the coffers of folks like Feinstein and other Liberals. The line of defense was similar to the honest storekeeper who admits to his closest friend that he doesn’t like paying the mob, but if he doesn’t the cost to him, his family and his business would be worse.

I’ve written in the past on the national security implications such votes have. Farmers and ranchers in America not only provide the safest and best food and fiber produced anywhere in the world, but they contribute in a large way to our national sovereignty by making us agriculturally independent from the rest of the world.

California agriculture (and its larger American ag industry cousin) would do well to end this practice of voluntarily contributing to these criminals. While blackmail is an ugly word, what other word aptly describes the implied threat that if you don’t give to my campaign I’ll vote against your wishes, but then again when the time comes around to call on those favors, the politician suffers a lapse in short-term memory and still votes in favor of legislation that further restricts farming and ranching and adds one more nail to the coffin that will someday be eulogized as “American Agriculture.”

Farm water a national security issue

The ability to capture water to irrigate farms has always been a human consideration. Even with water storage facilities such as Shasta Lake and its 4.3 million acre feet of storage, water policy in California allows most of the water captured in storage facilities in California to flow out to sea unused by the agriculture which feeds and sustains the United States and much of the world. ©Todd Fitchette

I have long argued that our battle over water for agriculture has much larger ramifications than the economy of California’s Central Valley. The cheap and ready access to irrigation water is not only vital to for the existence of farms and families in California, it’s imperative if we’re going to remain a sovereign nation.

Discussions over water have become a crusade here in Central California. The reason it’s become such an issue (again) is because the bureaucrats who control the flow of irrigation water believe that protecting the Delta Smelt, a tiny fish with no commercial value, is more important than growing the crops we eat and export.

Farmers have long been innovators in many ways. In fact farmers from around the world will gather next week at the World Ag Expo in Tulare, CA to consider the purchase of new technologies that will further make them more efficient. They’ve had to be more efficient. Profit and loss margins tend to be thin in agricultural production, and in most cases are reliant on things out of control of farmers: the weather and world markets dictate whether farmers will even have a crop and what those crops will be worth once they’re harvested.

It doesn’t help when bureaucrats and do-gooders looking for a cause change the rules after the bets have been placed. You could rightly understand the outrage people would have in Las Vegas if the house called for the bets, and after the bets were placed, the house completely changed the rules in their favor and swept the table clean. That’s what happens on a regular basis as the federal government repeatedly violates the contract it has with farmers to provide water in the Central Valley. These failed water deliveries and cutbacks always happen after predictions of water are made and farmers have borrowed money from the banks to plant their crops. But lately farmers have stopped planting in California’s fertile Central Valley because the predictions of water deliveries have continued to drop to levels unsustainable for agricultural production.

Agriculture has always been the lifeblood of our nation. Even after the industrial revolution moved people off the farm and into the factories, we’ve been self-sufficient when it comes to our food production. What’s even more remarkable is that fewer and fewer people continue to produce more than enough food for the rest of us here in the United States.

Ours isn’t a problem of a lack of water in California, but a lack of water when and where we need it. Much more water falls on California each year through rain and snow than we’re able to store. The ability to collect more of that water and make it available for agricultural and urban uses doesn’t take any water away from the Delta. In reality, it would stabilize flows through the Delta by giving us the ability to slow the runoff and release it in a more controlled manner. There’s another phrase for this: it’s called flood control.

Before Shasta Dam was built, much of the Sacramento Valley was uninhabitable during certain times of the year. Now with facilities like Shasta and Keswick dams, we’ve not only allowed agriculture to flourish in the Sacramento Valley, but we’ve allowed for urban development as the flood plains became livable thanks to the ability to control the flow of water down the Sacramento River. As an added perk, we created a whole host of recreational opportunities for people.

While we could do well to increase the storage capacity of lakes Shasta, Keswick and Oroville, we need similar storage facilities along the west slopes of the southern and central Sierra — facilities that would collect and store water for farmers and cities alike. Water that could even be used to restore the San Joaquin River.

We can do what it takes to build the storage and conveyance systems necessary to provide ample water for agricultural production and urban uses, or we can let a very loud minority have its way and kill agriculture in California. If this happens, we’ll cede our agricultural self-sufficiency to other countries that likely won’t have the best interest of the United States at heart when we go begging for food.

Democrats create environmental hazard

Follow the bouncing ball on this one folks…

Today’s 50-plus mph winds along the I-5 corridor in California’s San Joaquin Valley kicked up enough dust to stop traffic, cause illnesses, snarl traffic, cause vehicle accidents and generally wreak havoc on the region. While the act of nature was not a direct result of politicians in Sacramento and Washington, the size of the dust storm certainly was.

You see, this land has been sitting fallow now for an entire growing season, and should still have crops planted on it. Why, you ask, was thousands of acres of the richest farmland on the planet left fallow for an entire growing season? It’s simple: farmers had their water allotments stripped from them last year by a government beholden to environmental activists who believe it’s more important to protect a prolific species of fish than it is continue to grow the food that feeds this nation and provides jobs for thousands of people in the Golden State.

So to put it bluntly, Rep. George Miller, D-CA, Senators Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein, and others including Rep. Jim Costa, D-CA, are directly to blame for millions of tons of top soil that became airborne in places like Mendota and Firebaugh and brought traffic to a stand-still on a major interstate.

So the next time you feel like voting Democrat, look around you at those who suffered asthma attacks and had to be hauled away in ambulances because of the public health hazard created by blowing dust that could have been contained had Democrats allowed farmers to irrigate the crops that feed the world.

It’s not the point, but if it works…

KMJ Radio’s Ray Appleton almost had another stroke, this time on the air, as he expressed his outraged over a San Francisco Chronicle article that accuses Central Valley Republicans of trying to “steal” Democrat voters by targeting Latinos in their efforts to get more water for agriculture.

While this might be a legitimate strategy of some political pundits, linking this issue to the fight over farm water here in the Valley is, as Mr. Appleton put it: “Fightin’ Words!”

The issue to restore water flows to Central Valley farms has been, in the classic sense of the term, a true bipartisan effort here in the Valley. It hasn’t mattered what political viewpoints people bring to the debate, the end has and remains water, and more of it for Central Valley agriculture. While Appleton (a Republican) and Rep. Devin Nunes (also a Republican) have taken up the cause to turn on the spigots to Valley farms, others such as Comedian Paul Rodriguez, a Democrat and Central Valley farmer, along with a host of other Democrat Latinos — many of them farmworkers — have literally stood beside and marched along with Republicans with one goal in mind: to restore water flows to Valley farms. The tough thing is that while politics has not been the object of this effort, the sad fact is that this issue must be played out in the political arena if water is going to flow once again to Central Valley farms.

One glaring irony in this issue has been the behind-the-scenes efforts of Democrat politicians, including Rep. Jim Costa, D-CA, to derail efforts for more water. Still that hasn’t deterred folks like the Latino Water Coalition and Appleton from pushing ahead.

While Appleton’s outrage is completely understandable and shared by many, the article by Chronicle Staff Writer Joe Garafoli does point out a very obvious fact: Democrat leaders could care less about the Latino population here in the Valley; Latinos, to the Democrats, are mere pawns in their effort to gain dictatorial control of California and the United States.

This seems more apparent to a growing number of Americans of all shades that the Democrats aren’t really out to help the little man as much as they’re out for their own power and their own gain at the expense of those they claim to support.

If Garofoli’s opinion comes true, then it’ll be the fault of local Democrats, including those claiming kinship with groups like the Latinos and Portuguese here in the Valley, who will wind up driving voters away from their cause and towards the Republicans.

Hannity part 4 of 5

Hannity part 3 of 5

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Thank you Sean Hannity Part 1 of 5

Fox News and the Sean Hannity show definitely put the Central Valley of California on the map with this show. Share it with your friends; talk about it around the water cooler then contact your elected representative and tell them that this kind of egregious behavior on the behalf of the federal government WILL NOT STAND.

Our livelihoods and our national sovereignty are at stake.