I wish I could buy irradiated salad which would solve this problem. Organic cannot be treated this way and people are convinced organic is better so I can't get what is really safe.
A co-worker (I work for John Deere) went to look at a lettuce farm during harvest. He had to wear gloves and a hair net. He looked up and there were birds flying overhead with not even a diaper!
Moral of this story: all greens are contaminated with feces - wash your greens.
Birds typically poop as they take off to fly. Less weight to carry. E. coli outbreaks are typically caused by animal farm runoff, especially from hog or cattle farms.
Birds can poop in the air at anytime. Takeoff is the most common one of course - but that isn't even an out as the birds are feeding in that field and thus landing.
Oh, I gotcha. I thought the birds were only flying above, not landing and eating. In that case, wouldn't the onus be on the harvester to not pick produce that has obvious bird poop on it?
yeah, but the rain last week washed the visible poop off - but there are invisible residues left. (others have pointed out you cannot wash e.coli off - I'm not qualified to evalueate that claim but if true washing isn't enough)
A biology major coworker explained that it’s even deeper than that. Most birds optimize for weight by not having muscles for controlling bowel movements. Rather they take advantage of inertia and let their initial dive provide the bulk of the energy for solid waste evacuation.
Why not require the animal farmers to irradiate all poop that they put into their lagoons?
For context, it is my understanding that E. coli breakouts are caused by those lagoons overflowing during rainstorms if they are not managed correctly.
Most of the fresh greens at the grocery store nearest to me are not organic. None are irradiated. Whatever prevents romaine from being irradiated, it's not exclusive to organic certification.
The only grocery items I can specifically recall seeing marked irradiated are spices. I'm speaking of grocery stores in Oregon and Washington.
This paper from 2010 has some info on why this may be the case [0]: "These results indicate that the protection of bacteria on the leaf surface by biofilm formation and stomatal colonization can reduce the antimicrobial efficacy of irradiation on leafy green vegetables."
This is despicable. The cost difference is 9 fold between the consumer-end medical expenses vs the producer-end safety testing.
In the US where we have a flimsy excuse for a safety net, and still-too-high uninsured rate, the fact that this regulation has been pulled off of businesses, and instead the burden placed onto the consumer is shameful.
There are certainly families who have been harmed economically and irreparably so because of this.
Now that I'm done ranting, why is so much of the romaine lettuce market concentrated in Yuma, AZ?
You can basically grow all year there. Land is cheap and you have the Colorado river. And it is close enough to Mexico that you can get cheap farm labor.
Read up on the history of the west.. it's all about water rights. Yuma exists and that's where they grow lettuce. I don't understand what you mean by water rights being easy to get? These farmers, in some cases, have (state) constitutional rights to water.
Most romaine is grown in the Salinas Valley in California, during a long growing season where product is ready from April to November [1]. In the winter months [2], coastal areas get too wet and the Sonora Desert becomes ideal. Production shifts to areas like Yuma, El Centro and the Imperial Valley, the Coachella Valley, and Blythe.
> The cost difference is 9 fold between the consumer-end medical expenses vs the producer-end safety testing.
This seems to assume that all outbreaks would be prevented by mandatory testing. However, the article says that the farm involved in the latest outbreak was already doing the same type of testing (on a voluntary basis). Clearly it's failed to stop at least one major outbreak. Maybe testing irrigation water is not actually that useful in preventing the consumer-end medical expenses.
But they only test once monthly, meaning any excess runoff from a nearby farm into the irrigation after that test and before the next leaves a very large window of shipping produce before you know anything is wrong.
I can't be 100% sure if the FDA regulations would have caught it, but I know I would feel safer knowing there were consequences and minimum safety levels that could be verified.
The proposed FDA rules would have them taking 5 samples a year [1]. I agree that it would be great to have regulations that made produce safer, just not sure these are the right regulations.
It'd be interesting to look at the economics of growing leafy greens like this under artificial light (vertical/automated) farming. IIRC, leafy greens are currently the main mainstream (i.e non pot) product which is economically viable to grow indoors.
Japan turned a shuttered semi factory[1] of some sort into an automated leafy greens farm. One would hope in this case there is no indirect contamination, if the actual soil beneath the campus was contaminated.
In the Netherlands, in Spain and many other places leafy greens are grown in greenhouses. So you only need to supplement with artificial light. Up north where I live in Sweden we also have greenhouses, but there are quite a few pilot projects with vertical farming indoors (not in greenhouses) including a side project of mine with aquaponics in an old barn.
The thjng that throws a wrench into the economics of this in the US is that land in semi-arid regions is very cheap, and imported farm labor is also cheap, so those close to a water source and cheap labor, can be very competitive compared to anything else.
- you can have a crop of fancy lettuce in 3 weeks with medium light intensity, simple flourescent tubes will do the trick for about one KWh per square yard per day- about 15$ to produce roughly 20 heads of ~gourmet lettuce retails about 3$ a head, or better if you have a restaurant and serve salads.
that being said, a big part of the problem is irrigation with liquified fecal waste that has not fallowed properly as a bare minimum
this just in ...
a high school student can do this and it is regularly set up and maintained by said highschool students, all you need to remember as a core concept is P.L.AN.T. photosynthesis light atmosphere nutrition temperature.
cannabis cultivators are not the brightest or most adept bunch but they seem to struggle through and make millions as the tax revenue would suggest
I recall hearing that sunlight sterilizes E.coli. Not sure what can be made of this. Here is an example of the claim from an article[1]
>In 1890, the German microbiologist Robert Koch (who had isolated and described the tuberculosis bacterium in 1882), showed that sunlight killed TB bacteria. Later on, research showed sunlight also killed E. coli bacteria in twelve feet of seawater and in waste stabilization ponds.
"The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has estimated that every year at least 2,000 Americans are hospitalized, and about 60 die as a result of E. coli infection and its complications.
A study published in 2005 estimated the annual cost of E. coli O157:H7 illnesses to be $405 million (in 2003 dollars), which included $370 million for premature deaths, $30 million for medical care, and $5 million for lost productivity."
US GDP is $20T/yr, 325 Mpopulation.
The cost of E.coli is 1/50K of US GDP, affecting about 1 person per 150K per year, killing 1 in 5 million.
Meanwhile, second-hand is claimed to kill 7000 people per year and cost $5B/yr.
I don’t think that’s necessarily true, since it could even cause problems during their lifetime (~20 years?). It could cause problems for their children, friends, society, loved ones, and so forth over the next 100 years and that could be construed to be a personal risk. However the heat death of the universe can’t possibly affect with certainty any entity we now know, even the earth itself or solar system. The difference between 10^2 years and 10^100 years is significant enough for me to discount that comparison.
I'm never sure how to think about this kind of "numbers only" analysis.
On one hand, I've seen these kinds of analyses carried out to explain that people who worry about exogenous terrorists are "irrational" because other things (e.g. second hand smoke, or a mistake in a prescription medication, or a traffic accident) are more likely to kill an innocent person than such terrorists.
On the other hand, people have a value system and a system of priorities. Some kinds of risks just seem unacceptably horrifying to people while other kinds of risks seem tolerable.
Is a simple numerical analysis enough to label a line of thinking "irrational" or is it reasonable to make "irrationality" a function of arithmetical division and people's values?
Large-scale urban farming via large rooftop greenhouses could dramatically lower the total cost of growing some foods, especially if you consider the future environmental cost of land-use and fossil fuel emissions from transportation.
I'm not talking about every family having their own little "plot" on their own little roof. I'm talking about large greenhouses covering large buildings.
Still doesn't work? It takes 300-400 sq ft of greenhouse per person to feed them. An apt house roof could feed how many? 20? 50? And 2000 people may live in that building. Make the building taller, now 3000 people life there, and the greenhouse is no larger. That's what 'not scaling' looks like.
We have commercial farming because it takes that to feed us.
Who said anything about eliminating all large-scale rural farms? (And FWIW what I imagine would still very much be commercial farming)
Even barring any future innovation in city planning (better distribution of sunlight, etc), architecture (tiered building design, whatever), and agriculture (crops optimized for greenhouses), we would still benefit from growing food on rooftops, so why wouldn't we?
Oh and by the way, you can use electricity (realistically from a mix of renewable and nuclear power) to keep "sunlight" on in your greenhouses; they don't need to be on rooftops.
I don't disagree that it doesn't scale vertically nearly as obviously as it does horizontally, but why make perfect be the enemy of better?
Its hard enough to keep roofs watertight. Add wet soil for months at a time and the corrosion, leaking, mold etc become a problem.
If you want a farm, put it on a farm. If you want a solar generator, put it in a clean well-lighted place. All this hybridization (rooftop farming, solar roads etc) is not sound engineering.
Every problem you describe sounds like a solvable engineering problem.
We may need to design our buildings to accommodate these kinds of problems, but that doesn't mean they should be dismissed outright -- The potential energy benefits are substantial.
It takes a just a small leap of imagination; we're not talking about magic.
If you take anything away from this discussion, let it be this:
> [Climate change effects] threaten future gains in commodity crop production and put rural livelihoods at risk. Numerous adaptation strategies are available to cope with adverse impacts of climate variability and change on agricultural production. These include altering what is produced, modifying the inputs used for production, adopting new technologies [emphasis mine], and adjusting management strategies. [1]
If the cost for food goes up precipitously (e.g. lots of engineering needed to get modest amounts) then people will starve. Lots of people. That's my takeaway
Cities are way more efficient than spread-out rural towns and villages[1], but we still mostly rely on rural land for food, so they continue to exist. Because rural needs and daily experiences are very different from the average city-dweller, so too are their political beliefs.
The less we need to depend on rural land for food, the more people move into cities, the more efficient everything becomes.
[1] I'd recommend reading the chapter on Dense Cities from Whole Earth Discipline - totally changed my perspective on cities.
Do you believe we should continue mining and burning coal? It's bad, but if we close all the coal mines and factories, a lot of people will lose their way of life.
Large-scale farming (which vastly dominates the rural land mass of the US) has similarly dramatic downsides.
Like I said, I know nothing about the coal industry so I can't offer an informed opinion. Commercial farming covers an order of magnitude more land and employment than energy extraction. There are alternative energies to coal. There are not alternatives to food. Urban agriculture is a logistical impossibility without removing all meat, dairy, corn, wheat, and soy from the world's food supply.
Why must everything be absolute? You can have urban farming and rural farming. Urban farming would obviously have to happen gradually, so start with easier stuff. It's not "impossible". The point is that it will reduce pressure from rural areas which are going to be stressed significantly in the coming decades.
The urban farms would have the same risks if they're relying on greywater for irrigation (and if they're not, then they're needlessly wasting potable water).
Indeed they would; I wasn't clear in my comment, but basically the less we rely on rural farming, the less dogmatic fear of government regulation. (But mainly there's a ton of efficiency gains we could reap if we saw more large-scale urban farms)
It's definitely a city thing, in my experience/observation (but that experience/observation is limited to American cities, so it might be an American city thing). Rural areas tend to (for obvious/intuitive reasons) be at least slightly more cognizant of where their food comes from, since they're in much closer proximity to it.
This is a classic example of incorrectly blaming Trump for everything bad. The breathless media made it seem like Trump had halted ongoing testing despite that it had never actually started in the first place.
The testing would have started well before this outbreak if the administration hadn't postponed the rule change:
> After several high-profile disease outbreaks linked to food, Congress in 2011 ordered a fix, and produce growers this year would have begun testing their water under rules crafted by the Obama administration’s Food and Drug Administration.
> But six months before people were sickened by the contaminated romaine, President Donald Trump’s FDA – responding to pressure from the farm industry and Trump’s order to eliminate regulations – shelved the water-testing rules for at least four years.
I don't understand how "it had never actually started in the first place" is relevant at all. There were plans to help address this problem, but those plans were delayed by the Trump administration.
"I don't understand how "it had never actually started in the first place" is relevant at all. There were plans to help address this problem, but those plans were delayed by the Trump administration."
It's relevant because of a comment another user made here, which explains why the tests are not effective and would almost certainly have not resulted in catching this:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18536230
The full Tweet thread linked to in that comment provides more info but the base theme is that the tests are not an appropriate solution because spot checks would not catch events like this.
https://mobile.twitter.com/SarahTaber_bww/status/10670960981...
In any event, the original comment was regarding journalistic misrepresentation. The comment I responded to brought up the issue of relevance given an apparent solution. My comment merely addresses the issue of relevance that was raised.
It's relevant because the whole thing was just a timing issue, not some program that had been operating and was halted. The USA in its 242 years had never done such a thing. Further, since such testing had never been performed, there's little or no evidence that it would have been effective in this instance. And why the 5 year delay under Obama?
This is precisely my point that people incorrectly blame anything and everything on Trump.
Maybe the right answer here is to cook (or otherwise sterilize) our food before we eat it, or else accept that not doing so is risky? The prevalence of contagions in uncooked/undercooked meat is already well-known; uncooked/undercooked lettuce apparently warrants similar treatment.
Sure, if it's easy and cheap to test and sterilize irrigation water, then let's do so. I strongly doubt that's the case, though, and requiring farms to do so is one of those regulations that would be a small dent in a large corporate farm's checkbook and a gaping hole in that of a small independent farm.
Restaurants have had similar problems with sprouts (like mung bean sprouts) and their solution largely has been to stop serving them. Except Jimmy Johns, which makes users click a button that confirms it's a health risk. https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/01/raw-sprouts-at-jimmy...
I've eaten bean sprouts cooked on the street in dubious conditions in various Asian countries and never contracted anything as a result. The risk to health must be vanishingly small.
You can say the same thing about meat (especially fish). I love me some good nigiri or sashimi. I also know full well that by eating nigiri or sashimi instead of, say, a cooked filet, I'm increasing my risk of contracting food-borne illnesses.
The farmers (at least the ones growing lettuce) aren't the ones who are externalizing their costs, though. By imposing the expenses of testing and sterilization on them, they're bearing the costs that other farmers further upstream (literally) are externalizing by allowing their livestock to contaminate the water. If we're to try to fix this with regulation, that's where we need to start. Making lettuce farmers bear the brunt of this is like issuing a traffic ticket to a driver because he got pushed through a red light by someone else.
Meanwhile, testing is only half the battle. Let's say the water is contaminated. Unless you're okay with not having water (and therefore not having crops), you'd need to sterilize that water somehow. You'd need a machine that can boil and re-cool the water; just boiling it isn't enough unless you want to pre-cook your crops before the leave the farm ;) (but you could certainly let it cool in a reservoir before sending it to crops). Or maybe you have some fancier machine that uses something like radiation to do the sterilization. Either way, that costs money. Big corporate farms can easily afford that. Small independent farms typically cannot.
The idea that regulation like this can completely kill small-scale agricultural practices ain't far-fetched; this has quite literally happened again and again. I'm personally/intimately familiar with the case of Loyalton, CA, which used to have a thriving dairy (particularly milk and cheese) industry up until the middle of the 20th Century, when new pasteurization requirements made continued operation too expensive for all these small-scale dairies. As a result, they all switched to beef and alfalfa, and now that's all you see.
So if we are going to go ahead and make testing and sterilization mandatory, then we'll definitely want to subsidize it (whether for all farms or just for ones below a certain size). Given that it'll save the country money in the long run, as you say, this should be easy to justify budget-wise.
In Arizona, at least, I'm pretty sure you could use a simple, passive (and, relatively, very cheap) evaporation-condensation cycle to radically cut down on almost any contamination, but that's almost not even the point. What is the point, which you correctly note, is that this is largely a case of people taking turns kicking their respective externalities down-stream (in this case literally), until it kills someone, exacerbated by ineptitude at the highest levels.
To that end: how about any industry that has potentially harmful externalities be compelled to carry insurance against those things demonstrably causing harm, the premiums of which are determined significantly by how competent the policy holder's mitigation strategies are.
Then we can, as needed, subsidize those mitigation strategies, applying the solution at the point of the problem, where it's not only going to be the least expensive, but also the most effective. Thus, if the rancher upstream of the lettuce farmer isn't taking care of his shit, he pays, not the farmer whose crops are contaminated by the rancher's negligence. The subsidy money ultimately goes not to incumbent insurance interests, but to the people and organizations creating new and better ways not to fuck ourselves up — which is, I think, something worth subsidizing a bit...
Either that, or you pay for the damages your cost-cutting externality-imposition causes out-of-pocket, with strong statutory preferences for compensating victims over everyone else in the event of bankruptcy, because I suspect that would kill a whole lot of farms and businesses.
In fact, one of the ways we got here to a world with gigantic animal feedlots is that people keep zoning away the locations where modest scale and more safely manageable feedlots can be built.
A manure lagoon for 200 animals is much easier to manage safely than a lagoon for 8,000 animals. Yet, laws keep making it harder to build anything else.
You can't test your way to safety. Here's a thread from a real expert:
"All a sample can tell you is that one sample, from that place, on that day, was clean."
"A lot of water contamination events are very temporary: a rainstorm washes manure into a well or canal, and then it's gone within a day or two. Testing only catches that if you target your testing program for it. Guarantee you most farms aren't doing that; they test on schedule."
Is there an engineering solution for this, or is it something beyond that?
For instance, could we have almost everything that pushes water to plants contain some kind of low-cost sensor that sends data about the water going through it back to some base station for analysis?
We would need to spend some money to:
* develop the technology
* deploy the technology, including ensuring either the sensor can be self-powered (solar?) or we can hook up electricity to the water outputs easily (and electricity + water = not an easy solution!)
* monitor the data
However... all of this seems do-able if we want to reduce health problems like this.
I imagine, like most everything, it comes down to tradeoffs: how frequently do outbreaks like these happen? What is the monetary cost when they happen? Would constant monitoring tech like this actually help us detect it? Who would pay?
I'd argue this is exactly what something like the FDA should be helping with - ensuring our food is safe, and that means helping deploy state-of-the-art sensors to reduce the chance of contamination. With government money going to some group that can make this a reality, the risk of developing this on their own and hoping that food producers would choose to pay for it goes away.
> Testing your irrigation water won't keep the feedlot next door from blowing dried-up cow shit dust all over your lettuce. (Or, you know, into your irrigation water on a day when you're not testing). [1]
> It won't keep harvest crew co's from putting so much time pressure on crews that they can't clean their harvest rigs properly between shifts. [2]
> And it sure won't solve our traceability problem. There's no way in hell we're having this much trouble tracing the lettuce to its source, unless there's massive supply chain fraud going on. We should be worried about THAT. [3]
This one reminds me of a situation I ran into once:
> (You also have to ask, WHY would a farm or any other business target their testing towards when they're likely to get red flags? They don't want that. Any time you do testing, there are lots of ways to game it to lean towards clean results. Which is what farms & companies want.) [4]
We were installing a drinking water monitoring system at a rural retirement home (on well water), probably a couple hundred residents.
Up to that point, one of the tests they did was a manual daily chlorine level check. Essentially you need to have a certain amount of residual chlorine in the water at the point of use, which lets you know you you are putting enough in (if you put too little in, it gets used up as it's breaking down organics in the water, and you end up with a zero). If the level is too low, you have to report it and explain what happened and how you fixed it, and if it happens too much, inspectors will start looking closely at your practices and forcing fixes and basically nobody likes that.
The new system had continuous monitoring of several parameters, one of them being chlorine, and would record everything as well as send alerts to people if anything dangerous happened. The chlorine monitor was installed at the opposite end of the building from the water supply, trying be representative of the worst case 'point of use' level.
As soon as it was online, it started sending alerts every night in the middle of the night. The free chlorine level would drop starting late in the evening (as the usage dropped), and then somewhere between 2 and 5 am would drop below the alarm threshold, and around 6-7 am jump back to normal. The owner was pissed that we had screwed the system up, because they didn't have this problem before the monitoring system was in.
Of course what was happening was not new, it was just that as usage dropped off as the residents went to bed, the water in the pipes just sat stagnant, and residual chlorine was slowly used up to the point there was none left. The daily checks were usually done mid-morning, after there was a lot of use as everyone woke up, and so all the water in the lines was freshly chlorinated when the check was done.
For years, anyone getting water in the middle of the night was drinking technically unsafe water (it still had been treated and likely posed no real health risk, so long as there was no contamination in any of the pipes or fixtures), and all that happened was the situation was exposed.
We eventually added a solenoid to the end of the line, and programmed it so it would open and dump water when the chlorine level got low but before the alarm threshold, at least getting fresh water into the main distribution lines of the building and avoiding the alarm condition.
It always stuck with me that the owners reaction was not "Oh, thank you for finding and fixing a problem I didn't even know about before it got someone really sick" but more like "your stupid system made things WORSE, we should rip it out and go back to how it was before."
Thank you for sharing your story. I hope you don't mind if I turn it into a thought experiment, because I find it a good example of how tricky finding and fixing a problem can be. I know nothing about water quality standards, so they might be naive, but the following questions stick out to me:
* Is there a reasonable contamination hazard from water sitting in pipes that are flushed daily with chlorinated water? In other words, is it vital that there always be residual chlorine 100% of the time, or were the standards designed to accomodate this sort of periodic lapse?
* If the dips were harmless, would the inspectors be willing to accept that?
* Was the dump solenoid effective at flushing the entire network of pipes, or just the branch containing the sensor?
Depending on the answers, the end result could range all the way from "the new system let us eliminate a serious hazard", through "we were probably fine before but now we can be sure at a little extra cost", down to "now we have to waste water to avoid tripping a sensor so we don't get fined, with no actual improvement to the water quality". It's a great example of how what we want, what we test, and what we enforce can get just a little out of alignment, and make a hinderance out of what ought to be a definite improvement. Thanks again for sharing.
Caveat: I come from the monitoring and control system side, so I've only learned about the actual water treatment part as a side effect from working on monitoring and control systems for it.
1)
My understanding is there is very little actual hazard here, provided the pipes are in reasonable shape and there isn't a source of contamination.
One example of a source of contamination: dead ends in plumbing (eg, an old branch that's been capped off). The stagnant water can grow bacterial colonies which can then contaminate everything downstream from where the dead end branches off. The residual chlorine can fight this but it's of course better to not have the dead end at all.
2)
The problem with the dips is it's not possible to distinguish between the "expected" nightly dips and real problems.
For example: do you just ignore all alarms between 3am and 6am? or should that be 7am? Is there another check (+alarm) to be sure the clock is correct (and do you now need a secondary clock source for that) and that DST is respected?
Or do you build something very complex that checks against recent flow rates before raising the alarm -- in which case, how do you test that code and ensure it never breaks (keeping in mind it's safety-related and it's very hard to unit test real-world flow meters, chlorine sensors etc). This gets difficult because you might have different plumbers / maintenance people doing things (adding branches, fixing leaks, etc) that might change the physical layout and not even realize there is control software that might be affected by changes. You can add more sensors to try to check for some of these potential conditions but each sensor costs even more money and adds more complexity.
A lot of this is really "CYA". If something ever did happen and a resident got sick (or worse) from the water, and it came to light that not only were there alarms every night but they were specifically suppressed, even though that might be a rational decision given the facts, at best, that decision would still be faced with a lot of scrutiny and at worse it could be considered criminally negligent.
3)
It's basically not possible to flush the ENTIRE building, because you'd have to open every fixture (every sink, shower, and flush every toilet). In this case, the solenoid dumped water from what was effectively the main line through the building which everything branched from, so from any apartment running the water for maybe a minute would get you fresh water from that main line.
So I'd rank this in the middle of what you said: "quality was probably (usually) fine before, definitely more likely to be fine now, and if an alarm goes off at any time it's real".
> "Testing only catches that if you target your testing program for it."
Seems like a contradiction to me.
That said, just because testing alone isn't good enough doesn't mean it's better than nothing.
The political argument always comes in the form of "regulation bad!" vs "safety good!" without much attention to the actual policies. Thank you for bringing our attention to some of the problems with the proposed regulations, but the real issue is that we're politicizing something that we should clearly do _something_ about.
Maybe consumers can rise up to demand the change if the government doesn't.
Boycott all growers who do not test their waters. If one farm can start testing and do marketing around that and consumers show a preference, the rest will follow.
How could you ever do that realistically? You can't consistently know which farm/grower the produce came from. Sure, sometimes it is labeled. But a lot of times it is not. Or a brand buys multiple farms and uses their combined output to create their brand name that they put forward to the world. The only case I see is when a grower has their stuff labeled or has the end-supplier label it and it is never combined with any branding with other growers.
You also have no control over what any business buys and it would be virtually impossible to find out. You'd never know, for example, where the Romaine used at your local Chipotle was purchased.
I also think you're giving way too much credit to human beings if you think they care enough to take action on this and boycott over this (even if they had full information that was easily available). They didn't even demand that the US government stop spying on them and jail the perpetrators within the CIA after the Snowden incident and after an investigative panel during Obama's administration acknowledged that the acts committed by the CIA's PRISM program were illegal.
I wouldn't draw the parallel to the spying. Thats not something ordinary people have direct control over. What I am suggesting is to make the change by determining where your dollar is spent. A consumer has direct control over that dollar. Eg. "Organic" food. Consumers have shown a preference for it and that has led to more supply of "Organic" food. (I put it in quotes, since its sometimes questionable how organic it really is)
But you are right, it's hard to track down individual suppliers/farms/grower. Maybe blockchain does have a use-case!
So then we can add the of the cost of health care, on top of the legal cost, and not to mention time wasted of all those involved. Sounds great! It's probably better to come up with an effective regulation if possible.
Also it seems the farms being affected are actually literally being shit on by other farms and it's not even them in the first place.
Isn't the issue here waste entering the water supply from upstream animal farms? Unless everything went 100% vegan (please don't take that bait), you can have the best processes you want on a given farm and still be at risk.
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