>Field margins and habitat is NOT in short supply.

I also see a goodly amount of country.  In many areas, I see unmowed, non
herbicided margins to be in short supply.

Re Calif farmland, view this chilling fact:

"The benefits of integrating farms into native ecosystems may be widely
known, but a contrary movement is taking hold in California’s Central
Valley, where virtually all of the country’s commercially produced leafy
greens are grown.

In September 2006, spinach contaminated with a virulent strain of bacteria,
E. coli O157:H7, killed three people and sickened hundreds of others.
Although neither the U.S. Food and Drug Administration nor the California
Department of Health Services could determine the source of the
contamination, the produce industry reacted swiftly.

By early 2007, the Western Growers Association (WGA), the nation’s largest
agricultural trade association, had developed a marketing agreement
requiring produce handlers (companies that move produce from farm to
market) to accept leafy greens only from growers who adopt certain
practices. Those practices are detailed in the Commodity Specific Food
Safety Guidelines for the Production and Harvest of Lettuce and Leafy
Greens and commonly are referred to as the “Metrics.”

The Metrics assume that isolating cropland from wildlife and wild areas
will make food safer. They call for farmers to dismantle conservation
buffers, remove trees in riparian zones and windbreaks, fill ponds, drain
wetlands, fence fields, install trapping and poisoned bait stations, and
scrape their field margins bare of vegetation.

Handlers of more than 99 percent of the nation’s commercially grown leafy
greens have signed on to WGA’s marketing agreement. Eager to show how
serious they are about reducing risk, some handlers have devised their own
“Super Metrics,” which mandate even higher fences, bare earth buffers of
several hundred feet, and more extreme efforts to eliminate nearby natural
habitat.

To maintain access to the market, farmers have had little choice but to
meet these new requirements. Nearly 90 percent of those responding to a
recent Monterey County survey acknowledged having taken action to comply.
But these growers also are wary about the call for increasingly radical
measures to detach their farms from the natural environment."

http://www.pccnaturalmarkets.com/sc/0902/sc0902-farmwild.html


-- 
Randy Oliver
Grass Valley, CA
www.ScientificBeekeeping.com

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