The University of Arizona, including Dr. Channah Rock, food safety specialist within the Cooperative Extension, conducts research focused on addressing problems that farmers might see in the field. As Yuma County is the leafy green vegetable capital of the United States during the winter months, it is valuable to do studies here because it can provide data to the industry and help stakeholders make better decisions.
Food safety is extremely important in leafy greens production because it is a crop that grows low to the ground, oftentimes packed in the field without washing, and is mostly consumed raw, without a kill step such as cooking, which may increase the risk for consumer exposure to food borne pathogens.
Natalie Brassill with the University of Arizona Cooperative Extension in Yuma and Maricopa explains the food safety research that her team is performing at the Yuma Agricultural Center.
“So today we’re out here applying non-pathogenic bacteria to the romaine crop that acts like a pathogen that could cause a food safety outbreak, and we’re going to measure how they die off over time when they’re exposed to the sun and the environment.”
“The surrogate bacteria we are using today acts like the bacteria that makes you sick, but is actually harmless to humans. In the science community we run tests that use a different strain of E.coli that behaves the same way but can’t hurt you. We planted leafy greens in Yuma and Maricopa and applied it to the leaves and are watching how it dies off to better understand how the pathogenic E. coli survives in the wild. These ‘die-off’ studies are important for us to develop and test new methods of treatment that mitigate the risk of these pathogens surviving an exposure event like animal feces in the irrigation water or poorly composted animal manure.”
