The Buggy Secret to Making Food Safer to EatTakepart.com
By Steve Holt | October 31, 2014 5:38 PM
Over the course of the next two years, Matt Jones will be living out of his van, driving up the West Coast from Central California to the Canadian border, visiting farms to collect manure and insect samples.
To be clear, Jones is loving evey minute of this trip. An entomologist studying at Washington State University, he is interested in the potential role dung beetles and other insects that dine on fecal matter may have in reducing pathogens such as E. coli on farms, thus making our food safer.
“Most of the way that people deal with food safety is trying to exclude wildlife from getting into the fields through fencing, and then postharvest, by washing produce to eliminate pathogens,” he said. “There’s not much data that says that’s the best course of action for reducing pathogens.”
Nearly 80 million Americans come down with a foodborne illness of some form every year—costing $15.6 billion annually, according to new USDA numbers—and each outbreak intensifies the pressure on growers from supermarkets and other buyers, as well as the federal government, to produce uncontaminated food. But common methods for combating pathogens in the soil are not always grounded in science, according to Jones, and may actually threaten the biodiversity of the soil, killing off beneficial bugs and bacteria too.
While working toward his master’s in entomology at University of Maine, Jones found that the presence of dung beetles, which dine on fecal matter, in agricultural fields lowered the amount of E. coli found in the soil. Now pursuing his Ph.D. in entomology from WSU, Jones is exploring the impact common farming practices—the use of fertilizers and insecticides, for instance—have on the insect communities that live in the dirt, specifically those that feed on animal waste, a major source of the pathogens that can make us sick. His two-year study is funded by a $500,000 grant from the USDA’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture’s Organic Agriculture Research and Extension Initiative.
“Now that we know that dung beetles are beneficial, we’re trying to understand how the ecological community of organisms is influenced by farm management and subsequently what role they play in human pathogen suppression,” he said.
The results could have major implications for farmers and could help shape the practices they depend on to control soil contamination.
Dung beetles, Jones’ master’s research showed, appear to naturally clean the waste. For the current project, he is studying other above-ground feeders such as flies and isopods, as well as soil microbes. Jones, who just finished his first growing season of data collection, is working with 40 farms of all shapes and sizes—organic and conventional produce farms, as well as diverse farms that raise both livestock and produce—in California, Washington, and Oregon. On each farm, he studies the insect community and collects soil samples that will be tested for E. coli levels.
He’s also monitoring each farm’s manure removal practices to see how taking waste off of the land impacts the insect and microbe biodiversity in and on the soil. Under current best practices, many farmers keep wild animals out by installing high deer fences or bulldozing the edges of the field—work that can be prohibitively costly for small growers. Raising livestock and growing vegetables in close quarters has been criticized in some food safety circles for potentially contributing to more contamination, but Jones said there’s very little data to support that.
“For a lot of growers, it’s really economically viable for small growers to have vegetables and livestock as a source of income,” he added. “We’re trying to understand how that system contributes” to pathogen level.
Dung beetles and similar insects, he suspects, may provide a more natural, less costly solution for lowering contamination levels on the farm.
Jones said he’s grateful that farms of all sizes and philosophies have come on board, because it will allow him to seek biologically based solutions that will hopefully benefit producers and buyers alike.
“Growers as well as consumers only have so many options for making sure their food is safe,” he said. “Very good, scientifically grounded data that can help to offer a new perspective on food safety.”
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