Watch children’s first reactions at a dairy farm and you’ll see their hands quickly going up to their faces and their fingers pinching their nostrils shut.
“What’s that awful smell,” they’ll ask the farmer.
For a farmer who hasn’t hosted groups of students before, the first expression crossing his or her face might be one…
“The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind.” — Bob Dylan
The question in the case of food safety is: “What’s blowing in the wind?”
Turns out it can be dangerous pathogens such as E. coli, Campylobacter and Salmonella when manure is spread on the land, which is a common agricultural practice. At…
Federal officials want input on one of the loose ends they left dangling when they published the new produce safety rule this past fall — the use of raw manure in fresh produce growing operations. 
Pushback from industry led the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to hold off on including specific manure regulations in the…
Many farmers refer to manure as “black gold” and rightly so because it adds nutrients to the soil, which helps crops grow and be more productive.
In earlier times, before the advent of synthetic fertilizers, crop farmers would often buy a cow solely for the manure it would produce and use the manure for fertilizer. …
(This article by Phillip Tocco of Michigan State University Extension was first published here on March 4, 2015, and is reposted with permission.) Manure can be a significant benefit to growing fresh produce or a potential threat to food safety when applied on produce farms. Raw manure should never come into contact with harvested produce,…
A summary judgment has been awarded to the plaintiffs in lawsuits against four industrial dairies in the Lower Yakima Valley of Washington state for violations of environmental protection laws. The Community Association for Restoration of the Environment (CARE) and Center for Food Safety (CFS) argued that the dairies’ leaking lagoons and over-applied manure cause nitrates…
