A Maine Farm Scraps 2022 Vegetable Production After Discovering Contamination
April 12, 2022 An organic vegetable farm in Maine has discovered a problem that many other farms may be facing, the Washington Post reports. As recently as 20 years ago, farms across the country used municipal and industrial sludge as fertilizer, wrote Keith O’Brien in his article. Some of that sludge was laced with perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), including what was used on the Maine farm years before Adam Nordell and Johanna Davis purchased Songbird Farm from another organic farm.
PFAS has been linked with cancer are linger in the environment much longer than most chemistries.
Tests Reveal Extreme Levels of PFAS
After a customer notified them that their farm fell within a state-created map of areas contaminated with PFAS, the couple tested their crops and their blood levels. The food was contaminated, and they had levels 250 times greater than the average American, O’Brien reports.
“We hired a private soil scientist to sample and test our well water, and soil and produce. All three tests came back positive,” Nordell and Davis wrote in a letter to their customers.
The main culprit was their water. It tested at 400 times higher than state guidelines, O’Brien writes.
The result? Songbird Farm scrapped originally ambitious production plans for 2022 on that site.
“We feel it is critical that we stop our sales and have requested that our retail outlets pull our products from their shelves for now. This is not a product recall. This is a precautionary product pause while we gather more info,” the pair wrote in their letter.
Maine has no guidelines for acceptable levels of PFAS in vegetables, but the Maine CDC is working on creating those guidelines, Nordell and Davis say.
There are many contaminated sites across the country — at least 2,800 sites, O’Brien writes. To see if your farm falls within any of these sites, check out the map provided by the nonprofit Environmental Working Group.
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