Chris Goodson squats on the bare dirt and cups a single tuft of creeping wild rye in his palm. “Come on, little buddy!” he encourages it, only half joking. The five-inch sprout is the only green on the otherwise brown bank of an agricultural ditch bordering Carl Dobler & Sons’ lettuce farm on West Beach Road in Watsonville. Just a few months ago, this same ditch was lush with grasses.

“This is one fatality from the food safety scare,” Goodson says.

As program coordinator for the Central Coast Agricultural Water Quality Coalition, Goodson works to convince area growers to vegetate the banks of their agricultural ditches. The vegetation reduces erosion and pollution runoff into streams that flow into the Monterey Bay. After about a decade of grower education and incentive programs—and tens of millions of taxpayer dollars in subsidies—about 80 percent of the Central Coast’s growers have undertaken voluntary water quality improvement projects.

At the root is a perceived contradiction between food safety and water quality.

The Dobler farm was one of them, using a subsidy to plant grasses along its roadside ditch. Goodson was pleased with the farm’s improvement—until, he says, the grower called to apologetically announce that he was going to spray the banks with herbicide to kill the grasses. “It’s been three steps forward, two steps back,” Goodson says.

At the root of Goodson’s frustration is a perceived contradiction between food safety and water quality goals. In the wake of the FDA’s September warning about E. coli-contaminated spinach—which has been traced to a cattle and horse ranch adjacent to a farm in San Benito County—the agricultural industry has been scrambling to regain consumers’ trust in leafy greens. And since experts don’t know exactly where the deadly E. coli strain came from, some independent produce auditors are pressuring growers to eliminate all potential sources of contamination, including rodents. That means pulling out non-crop plants that could harbor wildlife—including the hedgerows and erosion control grasses that water quality agencies have painstakingly convinced farmers to plant.

This puts growers in a sticky position. If they take steps to improve water quality and wildlife habitat, they’re in danger of breaching new industry standards meant to ensure food safety. If they comply with the strict regulations imposed in the wake of the E. coli scare, they may be forced to undo water and wildlife conservation measures.

Desperate to regain consumer confidence, lettuce and spinach growers will soon have to prove the cleanliness of their crops to two sets of inspectors: independent auditors who work for retailers, and state inspectors checking for compliance with a recently approved set of “best management practices” under a new state-run food safety certification program. Failure to pass by either standard could prevent a farmer from selling crops.

But the economic vise squeezes farmers from the conservation angle as well. Under Central Coast Regional Water Quality Control Board rules, growers can waive out of a water discharge permit if they submit a farm plan, attend 15 hours of conservation classes per year, and undertake voluntary efforts to improve discharged water quality, often with the help of taxpayer-funded subsidies. Because the discharge permit application process is expensive and time-consuming, most Central Valley growers have chosen the waiver program.

If those same growers remove the vegetative strips and hedgerows they planted to improve water quality, they may inadvertently violate their contracts with the conservation agencies that had subsidized their water quality enhancement projects—and lose their wastewater discharge permit waivers. Or, face litigation.

“It puts them in a really tough spot,” says Daniel Mountjoy, assistant state conservationist for field operations for the USDA’s Natural Resources Conservation Service in Salinas. “The farmers have to choose between being in breach of their contracts and not being able to sell their crops. We’re trying to be very sympathetic to that.”

The environmental consequences of removing non-crop vegetation from farms are manifold, according to Danny Marquis of the NRCS. Without roots to stabilize the banks of an agricultural ditch, the soil will erode faster, depositing nitrates into the water. Those nitrates travel downstream and suck up oxygen, which can kill fish, and contribute to algal blooms that can poison marine life. In addition, plants bordering ditches tend to filter and break down pollutants that would otherwise contaminate the water. Finally, Marquis says, pathogens such as E. coli are more likely to travel over bare soil and into water when there isn’t vegetation to filter them out.

 “Some of the food-safety concerns would have farmers eliminate the buffer zones and the vegetative strips that are good for water quality,” Marquis says. “To my way of thinking, that runs counter to what we intuitively know about our environment: that things need to be in balance.”

The new food safety measures could also provoke farmers to use more pesticides. Landowners are likely to remove bankside vegetation with herbicides such as Roundup, which is known to harm aquatic life. And under the water quality improvement program, many farmers had planted hedgerows to attract insects that prey on pests, thus reducing the need for pesticides that can pollute streams. Removing those hedgerows to reduce the risk of E. coli contamination could mean applying more pesticides to crops.

Not only are the food-safety measures bad for water quality, they also spell trouble for wildlife. Mountjoy says that some independent retail auditors have encouraged farmers to install bait stations to poison squirrels and other rodents that may carry E. coli. Hawks who eat the poisoned critters often die as a result, he says. Auditors have also suggested that growers fence their land, which could disrupt wild animal migration.

Western Growers Association spokesman Tim Chelling says that the industry is working with natural resource agencies to protect water quality along with food safety. “The beauty of this marketing agreement process is that you can go in and make your case and make amendments,” he says. “[Water quality] is one of the major elements of food safety. You need water to grow crops, and water to be clean.”

But Mountjoy says that the conservation community was initially left out of the state and industry’s collaborative effort to craft the new food safety regulations. Propelled by a sense that the E. coli scare is undoing a decade of the NRCS’s work, Mountjoy is on the phone every day trying to convince regulators to make water quality conservation an integral part of stricter food safety guidelines.

The irony dogs Mountjoy: Unless water quality goals become an integral part of food safety reforms, cleaner crops could mean dirtier water. And that water flows into streams that flow into the bay, potentially contaminating marine life—including the things that we eat. If the next E. coli scare comes from seafood, farmers may scramble to vegetate their banks with the same fervor that they’re stripping them today.  

To learn more about the Central Coast Agricultural Water Quality Coalition, visit awqa.org/farmers/monterey.html. To view the joint report about E. Coli released by the federal Food and Drug Administration and the California Department of Health Services on March 23, visit dhs.ca.gov.