158 | How millions of tonnes of organic produce were affected by years of fraud in the fertiliser industry | Mushroom Foraging + AI = Uh Oh |
What could possibly go wrong?
Boar’s Head Criminal Investigation?
How millions of tonnes of organic produce were affected by years of fraud in the fertiliser industry;
AI Mushroom Guidebooks (what could possibly go wrong?);
What I’m reading;
Food fraud news and recent incidents
Hi everyone!
Welcome to Issue 158 of The Rotten Apple where I unpack how years of fraud in the US fertiliser industry should have caused massive problems for organic producers, but somehow didn’t, and feel grateful that no one died after using an AI-generated book for mushroom identification (what could possibly go wrong).
Plus, juicy news from the Boar’s Head outbreak investigation, what I’m reading, and food fraud news for paying subscribers.
Thank you for being here.
Karen
P.S. If you love this newsletter, please tell your friends and colleagues about it and help grow our community of global food safety champions.
Boars Head Crime Investigation?
Reminder: Listeriosis linked to liverwurst produced by Boar’s Head in the US has killed 9 people and resulted in dozens of hospitalisations. Claims of extreme sanitation violations over a number of years have come to light in recent weeks.
CBS News has just reported there is a nationwide law enforcement investigation into Boar’s Head’s operations. It requested records for the company’s plants in Michigan, Arkansas and Indiana of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Food Safety Inspection Service (FSIS) but was told they are being ‘compiled for law enforcement purposes’ and cannot be released as that might hinder the investigation.
By the way, reader Adriana wrote to tell me that Boar’s Head has declared their root cause analysis a success, saying the problem which caused the Listeria contamination and deaths was limited to “a specific production process that only existed at the Jarratt facility and was used only for liverwurst”. Unfortunately, they didn’t say what that process was. Thanks for the heads up, Adriana.
Organic Fertilisers That Weren’t
How millions of tonnes of organic produce were affected by years of fraud in the fertiliser industry
When I first started researching food fraud in 2015 I realised there were serious vulnerabilities in the organic food supply chain of the USA. The problems seemed obvious to me – an outsider – but weren’t being talked about in any public forums. They stemmed from the requirement to feed animals raised for organic meat exclusively on non-GMO (not genetically modified) feed, combined with a serious undersupply of non-GMO corn and soy in the US.
Although we didn’t know it at the time, there were a number of fraudsters taking advantage of those vulnerabilities, with a series of major frauds in which conventionally grown corn and soy were misrepresented as organic and diverted into the organic supply chain. Many such frauds only came to light years after the fact. Check out Issue 14, Issue 116 and Issue 131 for examples.
Now I’ve learned about another type of fraud that was happening at around the same time, and which was also designed to benefit from the growing demand for organic food.
It’s large-scale fertiliser fraud. And it was perpetrated on hundreds of organic farmers over multiple years by at least two business owners.
One man, the owner of Califonia Liquid Fertilizer (CLF), started out with a legitimate organic product. He fermented fish bycatch in large tanks, turning the resulting slurry into organic-suitable fertilizer to be delivered through irrigation tubes onto organic crops.
The problem with delivering fish slurry through irrigation tubes is that it blocks the holes in the tubes, disrupting water flow.
When CLF began to struggle financially, its owner started breaking the organic rules by adding an ingredient that is banned under organic fertiliser guidelines to one of his products. The aim was to increase its nitrogen content to make it more effective and more attractive to farmers. The banned material was derived from soybean processing waste and contained ammonium chloride.
Unfortunately, as well as being an unapproved ingredient in organic fertilisers, the ammonium chloride damaged his customers’ crops, further hurting his business. He switched to a different ingredient, also not organic-approved. It was another soybean waste product derived from lysine production, and containing ammonium sulphate. This material was already sold by the lysine producer as a liquid fertiliser for conventional (i.e. not organic) farming.
Reminder: ammonium compounds contain nitrogen.
The second ingredient worked well in the fish slurry product. Farmers loved its high nitrogen content and it didn’t clog the irrigation tubes as much as other organic liquid fertilisers. In fact, it was so good that the manufacturer soon abandoned fish fermentation: the neat ammonium sulphate liquid was simply packed straight into containers labelled as organic fish-meal based fertiliser, called Biolizer XN.
The product was a roaring success and soon accounted for almost one-third of the Californian fertiliser market. Millions of gallons were sold, including to some of the country’s biggest organic producers.
Says AgWeb of the wonder product “Everyone in the industry knew a fish crud fertiliser at a minimum of 6% nitrogen could never flow properly through drip irrigation systems—but Biolizer XN did.”
As well as being wildly successful for growing crops, the new formulation was much cheaper to make. The lysine waste, containing ammonium sulphate, cost just 5% of the price of the fish meal which was supposed to be the main source of nitrogen in the product.
Brian Baker, who worked at an organisation responsible for the organic status of agricultural inputs like fertilisers, the Organic Materials Review Institute (OMRI) during the time of the fraud, says the fraud was easy to hide. The plant manager at one Biolizer XN production site later told the FBI that he knew its only ingredient was a brown liquid called XN but didn’t know what it was.
XN was ammonium sulphate, shipped directly from the lysine manufacturer, and pumped straight into the fermentation tanks. No fishmeal or other ingredients were added.
Baker inspected CLF’s production facilities and saw railcars full of ammonium sulphate being pumped into fermentation tanks, but when he questioned its use was told those tanks were for the production of conventional fertilisers. He told AgWeb that there was no analytical test that could definitively prove the source of the nitrogen in the ‘organic’ fertiliser and that it was unlikely laboratory test results would hold up in court. He also believed that CLF’s owner, who was a qualified microbiologist, was sometimes using fishmeal to pass laboratory tests, adding enough fish solubles to make the results of stable isotope tests appear plausible.
CLF wasn’t the only business selling fraud-affected fertiliser. At around the same time, from 2003 to 2008, another business owner was perpetrating a similar fraud with his organic fertilisers. He was also buying unapproved materials including aqueous ammonia, ammonium sulphate and urea, and using them in his range of liquid organic fertilisers.
He perpetrated his fraud with the help of a 1 million gallon tank hidden in a neighbouring property. When inspectors visited the fertiliser manufacturing site, the fence between it and the neighbouring property was in place, but when the inspectors left, the fence was moved, pumps and hoses were pulled out of hiding and the synthetic ingredients were pumped into tanks where the organic products were made.
The hidden tank was kept secret from officials in the organic supply chain like the Organic Materials Review Institute (OMRI). But the company’s use of aqueous ammonia was known to at least one other agency. A local government agency actually fined the company $18,000 over failures to store and handle the chemical safely.
Like his counterpart at CLF, the owner of this second business had great success with his artificially boosted products. His products made more than $40 million in six years.
The frauds were eventually revealed. In 2004, an employee of CLF sent a letter to the California Department of Food & Agriculture (CDFA) saying the company was using ammonium sulphate in its ‘organic’ products.
Investigators from the CDFA performed a mass balance to compare the quantities of ingredients purchased by the business with amounts that were supposed to be used in its conventional and organic products. They couldn’t account for the tons of ammonium sulphate that had been purchased by CLF and obtained evidence that the ingredient XN in Biolizer XN was the same as the ammonium sulphate sold by the lysine producer.
However, if this was enough to prove fraud at CLF, the wheels of justice turned slowly. Production of tainted fertiliser, which is thought to have begun around 2000, stopped in 2006 but the owner of CLF wasn’t arrested until 2010, more than six years after the CDFA first learned about the fraud.
He pled guilty to two counts of mail fraud, over false statements made on the OMRI annual renewal forms stating there had been no changes to the formulation of his organic fertilisers.
The second man, the one with the hidden tank, was indicted in 2011 and pled guilty to four counts of mail fraud.
Both men received prison sentences and financial penalties.
It’s believed that other fertiliser companies were doing the same thing at the same time but were never charged. Baker told AgWeb they felt compelled to do so because it was impossible to compete with the market-leading fraudulent fertilisers unless they also used synthetic nitrogen sources in their products. Baker also claims that buyers and agronomists knew the CLF fertiliser was not made from fish meal because it didn’t clog their irrigation tubes.
With huge quantities of inauthentic fertilisers being used by so many growers for so many years, the long-term impact on organic production should have been catastrophic.
Under the National Organic Program rules, says AgWeb, the USDA should have made every organic farmer that had used the tainted fertilisers let their fields lie fallow for three years. But they did no such thing. By the time the accusations became public, more than three years had passed since the frauds had ceased.
Perhaps that was why the teams which investigated these crimes waited for so long before they acted against the perpetrators. We don’t know.
No farmers lost their organic certifications and no one, apart from the two business owners in this story, was ever caught or punished.
Takeaways for food professionals
Is fraud like this still happening today? Perhaps. Where there is demand for high-performance agricultural inputs and cheap ways to deliver such performance there is motivation for people to break the rules. And all it takes is for their customers to turn a blind eye to products which seem too good to be true. Says Baker “The lesson here is to stay awake to fraud in any type of agriculture. Will something like this happen again? Sure could.”
In short: 🍏 An article published in AgWeb Journal describes large-scale fraud perpetrated by at least two suppliers of organic fertiliser in the US in the early 2000s 🍏 The frauds involved the use of synthetic ammonium compounds to boost the nitrogen content of the fertiliser in contravention of organic rules 🍏 Authorities did not act against the perpetrators until years after the frauds had stopped, meaning organic farmers who had used the tainted fertilisers did not need to withdraw products, lose their certifications or halt production 🍏 Frauds like this could happen again 🍏
Main source: Bennett, C. (2024). Organic Implosion: How Two Grifters Cooked $50M In Fake Fertilizer and Rocked Agriculture. [online] AgWeb. Available at: https://www.agweb.com/news/business/organic-implosion-how-two-grifters-cooked-50m-fake-fertilizer-and-rocked-agriculture [Accessed 30 Sep. 2024].
Throwback: AI Mushroom Guidebooks
In Issue 151 I wrote about AI-generated recipes and discovered that some knuckleheads were publishing AI-generated books about mushroom foraging. Y’know, that super dangerous pastime that could get you killed if you mix up a death cap with a straw mushroom. What could possibly go wrong 🙄.
Last year mycologists urged people to avoid mushroom foraging books on Amazon that appear to be written by AI and which contain dangerous advice about mushroom identification.
Unfortunately, their fears were realised last month when one of those books caused a mass poisoning in the United Kingdom. A family was hospitalised after eating toxic mushrooms they had identified using a book purchased online. One of the victims shared their experience on Redditt, saying they think the book must have been generated using AI because it contained inaccurate information and sentences like this:
"In conclusion, morels are delicious mushrooms which can be consumed from August to the end of Summer. Let me know if there is anything else I can help you with." (Quote from the victim’s mushroom book)
The book’s online retailer was particularly helpful (not), when told about the problem, immediately deleting all traces of the book from its systems, deleting the book from the purchaser’s order history and telling them they must return the book by a certain date or their account will be deleted. Oh and by the way they also may not take any photographs or make copies of the book “due to copyright issues.”
One commentator says this is the first credible evidence of harm caused by AI-generated content and could be used for a legal test case. Fortunately, the family seems to have recovered.
🍏 Read more about AI-generated content: The Best Normal Dish For Getting Screwdrivers Out Of Your Food (AI Recipes) – Issue 151 🍏
What I’m Reading
We’re taking a break from food safety news this week - don’t worry I’ll catch you up on anything we missed next week. Instead here’s what I’m reading this week.
How the EU Deforestation Rules are changing business operations (Food Navigator). When an EU operator imports any of the commodities covered by the soon-to-be-enforced EU Deforestation Rules (coffee, cocoa, soy, palm oil or beef), they will have to show that every farm plot which contributed to the shipment complies with the rules. For example, if a 250 tonne shipment of cocoa from West Africa is made up of beans from 4,000 farms, the operator would have to provide 4,000 geolocation data points to prove the consignment is not from recently deforested land.
Is MSG really safe? (The Conversation) It’s an oldie but a goodie: does food containing MSG cause side effects in consumers or is it all in our heads - a look at the science.
How to Design a Behavior-Based Training Program (Quality Assurance Mag) Behaviour-based training aims to effectively change behaviour rather than simply impart knowledge. This post explains why so much training fails to achieve the desired results and how to design training that works.
Below for paying subscribers: Food fraud news, horizon scanning and incident reports
📌 Food Fraud News 📌
In this week’s food fraud news:
📌 Vodka decoder;
📌 Sustainability claims intelligence request;
📌 Tomatoes warning;
📌 Frozen chicken, salt.
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