We still don’t know the cause of 32-state E.coli outbreak — the only solution is more science

After four nervous months, it’s safe to eat Caesar salad again. The end of the E.coli outbreak that spread across 32 states and resulted in 172 cases of food poisoning and one death, however, comes not from technological advances in food safety and monitoring, but only because lettuce has a short shelf-life. While scientists found where the outbreak originated — Yuma, Arizona —they were not able to determine the cause of the outbreak.

And so, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (USDA) can announce with certainty that the outbreak has concluded only because the area’s growing season has concluded and any lettuce that came out of Yuma from earlier this year is no longer fit for eating. 

{mosads}Yuma calls itself the “Winter Lettuce Capital of the World” and produces 90 percent of all leafy vegetables grown in the U.S. from late fall through early spring. Yuma is also home to facilities that produce bagged lettuce and salad mixes and cooling plants that house vegetables before they are shipped — all areas where contamination can occur.

The agricultural sector is the leading industry in Yuma, the last county that the Colorado River passes through in the United States. The Colorado is the primary source of water for Yuma’s irrigated crops, and yet, hiding behind the bad news of the E.coli outbreak, was even more bad news — the river is drying up, with peak flow this spring at a historic low. 

Water shortages upstream in Colorado are quickly travelling downstream towards Yuma. The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation recently predicted a major water shortage on the Colorado River by 2020, with Arizona suffering the most.

While the growth of Yuma as an agricultural powerhouse is a celebration of modern science, Yuma also shows us that we have bumped up against the limitations of modern science as well. 

Every other agricultural region in the country faces its own limitations. Drought-fueled wildfires plague the cattle herds of the High Plains. Citrus Greening Disease has decimated the Florida orange groves. And a recent avian flu outbreak compelled farmers to cull tens of millions of chickens and turkeys around the country.

Researchers in the food and agricultural sciences are not sitting still, of course. Teams at the University of California, Davis are developing specially designed antimicrobial plastic films to prevent bacterial contamination of fresh produce from the surfaces of equipment at production plants, and chemical-free sanitation solutions for maintaining fresh produce. 

Researchers from the University of Nebraska, Lincoln have developed technologies that conserve water and energy while boosting farm productivity. These technologies have then been applied in over 1.7 million acres of irrigated croplands across Nebraska.

Both research projects were funded by the USDA’s flagship source of science funding, the Agriculture Food and Research Initiative (AFRI). Its grants are awarded through a competitive peer-reviewed process, and the program’s funding have helped scientists develop new cultivars for crops to survive changing growing seasons, genetic resources for row crops and livestock, and new diagnostic methods for animal diseases.

The scope of AFRI’s resources, however, has not kept pace with its successes. While the program’s budget has grown incrementally and, at $400 million, is at the highest amount of funding in its 10-year history, it has never reached the $700 million target designated for it in the 2008 farm bill. As a result, AFRI has only funded one quarter of all the grants recommended by its peer-review process.

AFRI’s scant resources are indicative of how the USDA’s research activities have not been prioritized over the past few decades — especially in comparison with China, our biggest competitor in international agricultural markets. While the Chinese government’s annual investments in agricultural research have increased over the last decade and now approach $10 billion, the U.S. has not responded to this challenge and spends less than $5 billion each year.

It’s not just agricultural research that gets the short end of the stick. The USDA’s entire budget has not kept pace with the growth seen in other agencies. It is difficult to push for more agricultural research funding in the agency when the broader budget for federal agriculture programming for this year might only increase by less than 1 percent.

Farming communities like Yuma depend on science to solve its most fundamental problems. It is critical that we invest in research that will keep their farms and processing plants productive and disease-free. It is also critical that we keep these farms working in the face of increasingly limited water supplies.

Foodborne illness has been the target of agricultural invention since the invention of farming, but we haven’t generated enough science to stomp out E.coli and other pathogens at the source. Our government needs to respond to the needs of farmers and rural America and step up to fund agricultural research. The safety of everyone’s dinner table depends on it. 

Tom Grumbly is the president of the Supporters of Agricultural Research (SoAR) Foundation. He has held leadership roles in the Department of Agriculture, Energy, the Food and Drug Administration, and the White House Office of Management and Budget.