Tom Philpott

UPDATE: Marler Blog reported Wednesday afternoon that agribusiness behemoth Cargill is behind the tainted turkey. The company will soon announce a voluntary recall of nearly 36 million pounds of ground-turkey products, the blog reports, all of which emerged from a single processing facility in  Springdale, Arkansas. This latest fiasco does not mark the first time Cargill has sent out massive amounts of product potentially tainted with antibiotic-resistant salmonella. In 2009, a beef processor owned by the company had to recall 826,000 pounds of hamburger meat laced with a resistant strain called salmonella Newport. For good measure, the same plant had to recall another 22,000 pounds for the same reason a few months later. A USA Today investigation revealed that the troubled plant was a major supplier to the national school lunch program. Cargill, among the globe's largest privately held companies, processes about 25 percent of the beef consumed in the United States, along with 14 percent of the turkey and 9 percent of the pork.

Once again, a drug-resistant "superbug" has infiltrated the national food supply. This time, the culprit appears to be tainted ground turkey, although federal investigators have not been able to definitively identify the source and thus have not issued a recall. The Centers for Disease Control reports that 77 people in 26 states have fallen ill; one person has died. Here's how the CDC describes the situation:

The outbreak strain of Salmonella Heidelberg is resistant to many commonly prescribed antibiotics; this antibiotic resistance can increase the risk of hospitalization or possible treatment failure in infected individuals. [Emphasis added.]

"Treatment failure," of course, is a polite way of saying "death."

Such outbreaks are almost certainly related to the meat industry's practice of giving confined livestock daily antibiotic doses, both to keep them functioning under cramped, unsanitary conditions and to make them grow faster. Will this outbreak finally force federal regulators to crack down on this practice? Doubtful.

As I reported last week, the USDA recently acknowledged the factory farm/antibiotic-resistance link in a "technical review" of the latest peer-reviewed science on the topic. But instead of throwing its weight behind a crackdown of factory-farm antibiotic abuse, the agency unceremoniously stepped on the report, removing it from its website without explanation after meat-industry groups complained about it.

Then there's the FDA. As the agency that regulates pharmaceuticals, the FDA could act to protect the public from drug-resistant pathogens by limiting their use at factory farms. The agency strongly and publicly acknowledged the link back in 2009. Yet it maintains its official stance that antibiotics should be "used judiciously" on factory farms, and it leaves it to the industry to define what that means.

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Every year in the Chesapeake Bay, an algae bloom spreads out, sucking oxygen out of the water and destroying fish habitat. This year's "dead zone" stretches from Baltimore Harbor to south of the Potomac River, the Washington Post reports. It's on track to become the bay’s largest ever. Already, fully a third of the bay—once one of the globe's most productive fisheries—is incapable of supporting sea life.

Meanwhile, down the Gulf of Mexico, the same thing is happening on an even grander scale. According to Texas A&M University researchers, this year's Gulf dead zone blots out 3,300 square miles of our nation's most important fishery—"roughly the size of Delaware and Rhode Island combined," they calculate. Before the year's out, it could as much as triple in size, the researchers fear, which would make it the Gulf's largest hypoxic (oxygen-depleted) area ever.

Why such huge dead zones this year? The immediate cause is heavy rains in both the Midwest and the Northeast, which wash vast amounts of nutrients down streams and rivers and into the sea at key river delta areas like the Chesapeake and the Gulf. There, the nutrients provide a feast for algae, and voilà, dead zones.

But the ultimate source of the nitrogen and phosphorus that feed the algae blooms is industrial agriculture: millions of acres of fertilizer-guzzling corn farms in the Mississippi River watershed and massive concentrations of chicken farms right on the banks of the Chesapeake.

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The organic farm at the University of California at Santa Cruz.

Over on the Scientific American blog, Christie Wilcox set out to expose the "myths" of organic farming. Frankly, the piece was so poorly reasoned that I read it with a yawn. But people take Scientific American seriously (as they should—it's a great publication) and the piece was received with credulity on Matt Yglesias' influential blog and at my former employer, Grist. (Grist has since published a critique of the Wilcox piece by Tom Laskawy).

Since some smart people seem to be buying what Wilcox is peddling here, let's look at her central claims.

1) Organic farms are seething hotbeds of toxic pesticide use. Wilcox notes, correctly, that organic farms are allowed to use certain non-synthetic pesticides. I agree the practice is problematic. Organic farming is built on the principle of on-farm ecological balance—that crop biodiversity should provide habitat for a variety of "beneficial insects," which should in turn keep crop-eating ones under control. Use of pesticides, even non-synthetic ones, represents a breakdown of that principle, and should be avoided by organic farmers.

But how much of a problem is pesticide use on organic farms? To hear Wilcox tell it, buyers of organic food are unwittingly getting all manner of pesticide traces on their produce. To back that up, she drops this dud of a bombshell:

Furthermore, just over 1% of organic foodstuffs produced in 2007 and tested by the European Food Safety Authority were found to contain pesticide levels above the legal maximum levels—and these are of pesticides that are not organic.

Just over 1 percent, eh? That means that just under 99 percent were found to be ok. Scary! It would be interesting to see how non-organic food fared in that study; Wilcox doesn't see fit to compare the two. Meanwhile, back here in the United States, the USDA collects data on pesticide traces on produce. In 2009, reports the Organic Center, the USDA analyzed 386 samples of organic lettuce, "by far the most extensive sampling of an organic food crop for pesticide residues ever carried out in the world." Again, "just over 1 percent" of the samples contained a pesticide residue not approved for use on organic farms, the OC reports. As for pesticides approved for organic use, 78 samples carried traces of those, meaning that 20 percent of organic produce carried a residue. 

By contrast, the most recent USDA data on non-organic lettuce showed that the average sample carried residues of nealy four four distinct pesticides, the Organic Center reports.

Thus, despite Wilcox's bluster, organic food is clearly consumers' best bet for avoiding pesticide traces on their food. (For more information on the pesticide-residue cocktails that coat conventional vegetables, see my analysis of Environmental Working Group's recent report on the topic.)

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While I have been fixating on the USDA's decision to ramp down oversight of the genetically modified seed industry, another federal agency has been quietly asking hard questions about the business practices of the industry's dominant player, Monsanto.

The SEC is investigating Monsanto's tactics for defending the market for its herbicide, Roundup. The news emerged just before the July 4 holiday weekend, during Monsanto's press conference about its quarterly financial earnings. Company execs boasted of a 77 percent increase in profit before dropping a mini-bombshell, The Wall Street Journal reported:

Monsanto said it was cooperating with a previously undisclosed US Securities and Exchange Commission probe into its customer incentive programs for herbicides in fiscal years 2009 and 2010, and had received a subpoena to provide related documents.

Neither the SEC nor Monsanto will comment on the ongoing investigation. But Monsanto did issue a terse press release after the earnings call explaining that the probe "relates to financial incentives Monsanto offered to distributors who carry its glyphosate products and the financial reporting of those incentives."

Glyphosate is the active ingredient in Monsanto's flagship Roundup herbicide, and "distributors" refers to the seed industry's middlemen, the companies that buy seeds and agrichemcals from suppliers like Monsanto and sell them to farmers. So what the company is saying its that it gave "financial incentives"—presumably, discounts—to somehow promote Roundup sales in 2009 and '10.

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