Your carbon footprint

A presentation by Paul Hepperla, director of Supply Side Energy, Verisae, Inc., presented this powerpoint on June 17 at the FMI Sustainability Summit.

The Blame Game

As an addendum to Tom Karst's remarks...

...at this point I don't particularly care what agency was incompetent when, who caused this whole fiasco and where we go from here. You know that the politicians, the lobbyists and the Federales would rather drink battery acid then point a finger at a fellow government agency, for fear that somewhere down the line, they might be in the crosshairs.

Here's the deal. We bought & sold multiple loads of tomatoes under an implied 'warranty of merchantability'. Then, after arrival at destination, an agency representing the health of the United States of America comes out and states that said product is 'unfit for human consumption'. Sure, the government could argue the difference between an advisory and a recall. Semantics, I say, and frankly the chances of a dumbed-down American public picking up on that is nil. Heck, last Thursday, Chicago news media began trumpeting on the morning shows that the FDA had pinpointed a 'cluster of illnesses' that came from a popular North Side restaurant. Wanna know what the public heard? That cluster tomatoes are bad now!

That, my friends, is what we're dealing with now.

But I digress. The Florida mature green tomato market was $16.00 FOB on 5x6lgr tomatoes when the you-know-what hit the fan. I assume that most growers are & will be sympathetic to every link in the chain here when putting all this behind us. But sadly, a couple of the shippers are posturing as to holding the distributors' and repackers' financial feet to the fire when settling up on perishable product that lain stagnant for over a week, getting redder & decaying. Not our problem, they say. You bought 'em, you had 'em in your house.

Kinda wish they'd concentrate their energies on getting product moving again via promotion rather than inevitably doing the opposite.

Later,

Jay

Bees and colony collapse

There was a hearing today by the House Agriculture Committee, hort subcommittee on "pollinator health and colony collapse disorder." See the opening statements from the hearing.

Here is an excerpt from the written testimony of Steve Godlin, S.P. Godlin Apiaries, Visalia, Calif.

Currently there are 660,000 acres (of almonds) producing and would be more if not for the water crisis in our state. This eequires about 1,300,000 hives of bees to pollinate them. The number of managed hives in California has dropped to around 400,000 hives despite beekeepers’ efforts to meet growers’ demands. Bees are now being shipped into California from everywhere in the U.S.; even Australia is trying to get in the game. Now I have to go to national bee conventions and defend my state as beekeepers from New York or Montana disparage us and call us a gutter for bees. We have created the biggest experiment ever performed on the honey bee. Take bees from all over the continent and stick them in the valley to mingle and forage together with mites and diseases and apparently a list of viruses as long as your arm and see what happens. Or maybe this isn’t what is wrong -- haven’t we been hearing that bees around the world are having a problem? And beekeepers here in the U. S., who do not ship bees to California are losing hives as well.

We began to notice these losses in recent years. We have had rough years from time to time with higher than usual losses, and in history there have been a few epidemics in the bee world. But nothing has been on the levels we are facing now. This is why there has been all this attention on us. People now realize that the $15 billion dollars worth of food that requires pollination to exist is a lot of pretty delicious stuff. We appreciate this attention and have been encouraged by the legislations actions. At home, the Bee Lab at U.C. Davis is up and running again thanks to generous contributions by beekeepers, almond growers, and companies like Haagen Daz Ice Cream who donated $250,000 to honey bee research and is running a priceless “save the bee” ad campaign. Researchers across the country have been collaborating on projects in an attempt to find answers. Beekeepers themselves have put aside their differences and are working with the scientific and governmental communities as well as each other on an unprecedented level. I know the fact that our two national organizations had a shared conference this year speaks volumes to the importance of this issue. I am here today to ask that you would vote to continue helping to fund honey bee research. There are some very important projects just getting up and started, and we really haven’t time to waste, or money. We need results. We need a united effort by all and shared knowledge from a variety of fields.

I hope we are getting there; the middle of July is looming and I am more than a little worried. We are providing our bees all the supplemental nutrition and fresh queens we can. We are treating for nosema ceranae aggressively and hope for a better fall than this last one.

Odds and ends

I'm looking forward to the guest blogging contributions of Russian produce consultant Ksenia Evdokimova and several members of United's Leadership Class, all of whom I have recently extended invitations to. Not to mention our new star Jay Martini and recent staff contributor Fred Wilkinson.....

I talked to Jane Proctor of CPMA and the Produce Traceability Initiative today - she said the time line for industry adoption of case-level traceability systems has not yet been released for public consumption by the group but it was extensively discussed and tentatively established at the June 12 meeting of the task force.

The Fresh Produce Industry Discussion Group continues to add members, and I've also moved the archive files of Fresh Talk chats, Tk headlines, and Fresh Talk poll results to the group's pages. Here is the link to join the group, if interested.

Tomatoes and salmonella: avoiding ambiguity

I talked to a distributor of Mexican tomatoes in Nogales today who said they were now selling about 60% of their production from Sonora at depressed prices, leaving 40% behind in Mexico.

No word yet about the FDA investigative team in Mexican, other than the fact they are apparently traveling with their Mexican counterparts and super secretive about where they are going and what they are looking for.

The distributor's biggest concern is that the FDA will come up with an ambiguous result, with no certainty of where the contamination occurred and what caused it. He also chafed at the idea that the FDA's David Acheson is using the occasion to ask for more authority for the agency. "We have all been 100% cooperative."

Meanwhile, the FDA said they may have another conference call this afternoon. A little illumination, gentlemen?

At this point, can we call the FDA's management of the salmonella investigation incompetent, as some have said? Certainly, the FDA's advice to consumers has been confusing. Many loads of good tomatoes have been thrown away. Yet the contention by some critics that the outbreak is over doesn't seem to be supported by facts. The CDC today pushed the number of victims of salmonella saintpaul higher again, to 707.

I think the industry should tread lightly in respect to damning the agency's efforts. I don't think you will hear PMA or United describing the FDA investigation with the term "incompetence."
Frankly, I would be shocked if they ever did. Until I hear United's David Gombas and PMA's Bob Whitaker call the FDA incompetent, I tend to discount any such talk by anyone else.

Don't forget that one of the big hurdles the agency faced in their traceback investigation was the apparent absence of an effective industry traceability/record keeping system for fresh tomatoes.

The most unsatisfying result for the FDA's traceback investigation would be ambiguity. If that is the result of these weeks of travail, perhaps "incompetence" may not be too strong a characterization.

Sad nanner

I've heard it said that emotionally, people are like bananas -- they bruise on the inside.

I always thought that was a sappy (though true) sentiment.

Nevertheless, this banana could use a hug.