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Comment by jermaustin1 | Hacker News Reader

This is despicable. The cost difference is 9 fold between the consumer-end medical expenses vs the producer-end safety testing.

In the US where we have a flimsy excuse for a safety net, and still-too-high uninsured rate, the fact that this regulation has been pulled off of businesses, and instead the burden placed onto the consumer is shameful.

There are certainly families who have been harmed economically and irreparably so because of this.

Now that I'm done ranting, why is so much of the romaine lettuce market concentrated in Yuma, AZ?

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Most romaine is grown in the Salinas Valley in California, during a long growing season where product is ready from April to November [1]. In the winter months [2], coastal areas get too wet and the Sonora Desert becomes ideal. Production shifts to areas like Yuma, El Centro and the Imperial Valley, the Coachella Valley, and Blythe.

[1] https://apps1.cdfa.ca.gov/FertilizerResearch/docs/Lettuce_Pr... [2] https://anrcatalog.ucanr.edu/pdf/7216.pdf

It'd be interesting to look at the economics of growing leafy greens like this under artificial light (vertical/automated) farming. IIRC, leafy greens are currently the main mainstream (i.e non pot) product which is economically viable to grow indoors.

Japan turned a shuttered semi factory[1] of some sort into an automated leafy greens farm. One would hope in this case there is no indirect contamination, if the actual soil beneath the campus was contaminated.

[1]https://www.scmp.com/magazines/style/travel-food/article/209...

In the Netherlands, in Spain and many other places leafy greens are grown in greenhouses. So you only need to supplement with artificial light. Up north where I live in Sweden we also have greenhouses, but there are quite a few pilot projects with vertical farming indoors (not in greenhouses) including a side project of mine with aquaponics in an old barn.

The thjng that throws a wrench into the economics of this in the US is that land in semi-arid regions is very cheap, and imported farm labor is also cheap, so those close to a water source and cheap labor, can be very competitive compared to anything else.

- you can have a crop of fancy lettuce in 3 weeks with medium light intensity, simple flourescent tubes will do the trick for about one KWh per square yard per day- about 15$ to produce roughly 20 heads of ~gourmet lettuce retails about 3$ a head, or better if you have a restaurant and serve salads.

that being said, a big part of the problem is irrigation with liquified fecal waste that has not fallowed properly as a bare minimum

this just in ... a high school student can do this and it is regularly set up and maintained by said highschool students, all you need to remember as a core concept is P.L.AN.T. photosynthesis light atmosphere nutrition temperature. cannabis cultivators are not the brightest or most adept bunch but they seem to struggle through and make millions as the tax revenue would suggest

And a non-trivial amount of time and skill to set up and maintain such a system.

Kind of like soil growing?

Soil growing consists largely of putting a seed on or in soil. And nothing else.

I say largely consists of, as this is still the dominant way plants go about seeding soil (plus animal and insect vectors).

I recall hearing that sunlight sterilizes E.coli. Not sure what can be made of this. Here is an example of the claim from an article[1]

>In 1890, the German microbiologist Robert Koch (who had isolated and described the tuberculosis bacterium in 1882), showed that sunlight killed TB bacteria. Later on, research showed sunlight also killed E. coli bacteria in twelve feet of seawater and in waste stabilization ponds.

[1] http://sunlightinstitute.org/sanitizing-with-sunlight-the-be...

> The cost difference is 9 fold between the consumer-end medical expenses vs the producer-end safety testing.

This seems to assume that all outbreaks would be prevented by mandatory testing. However, the article says that the farm involved in the latest outbreak was already doing the same type of testing (on a voluntary basis). Clearly it's failed to stop at least one major outbreak. Maybe testing irrigation water is not actually that useful in preventing the consumer-end medical expenses.

But they only test once monthly, meaning any excess runoff from a nearby farm into the irrigation after that test and before the next leaves a very large window of shipping produce before you know anything is wrong.

I can't be 100% sure if the FDA regulations would have caught it, but I know I would feel safer knowing there were consequences and minimum safety levels that could be verified.

> But they only test once monthly

The proposed FDA rules would have them taking 5 samples a year [1]. I agree that it would be great to have regulations that made produce safer, just not sure these are the right regulations.

https://www.fda.gov/downloads/Food/GuidanceRegulation/FSMA/U...

That is a terrible regulation then, if it is less safe than the current situation that keeps getting people sick, we need to do better than that.

You can basically grow all year there. Land is cheap and you have the Colorado river. And it is close enough to Mexico that you can get cheap farm labor.

You might be assuming water rights are easy to get.

Read up on the history of the west.. it's all about water rights. Yuma exists and that's where they grow lettuce. I don't understand what you mean by water rights being easy to get? These farmers, in some cases, have (state) constitutional rights to water.

https://www.waterboards.ca.gov/waterrights/board_info/water_...

I think reading this gives a pretty good picture of the situation from a bureaucratic point of view.

Yuma is in Arizona dude. The specifics of water rights between States was codified by Congress.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colorado_River_Compact

This is what you get when the government is not incentivized to keep its population as healthy as possible (private healthcare system).

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