I realize that of all the animals in the world mice do not exactly get a lot of sympathy and most people are pretty comfortable with killing them especially when they inhabit and muss up, if not partly destroy, parts of our houses. The mouse that Robert Burns turns up in her nest with his plow in his famous poem about mice and men is, I would think, more of a poetic mouse representing the ways “…man’s dominion/ Has broken Nature’s social union”. My mouse stands in for wildlife that have been wrongly implicated in the presence of harmful bacteria on our salads. At least in California- for now
As great as the impact of our food production is on water, air, and soil quality and on the other creatures trying to live in spite of our agriculture industry, great strides have been made towards planting additional vegetation along waterways and crops to lessen this impact. These efforts have even been put in large non-organic farms. It is a little effort that goes a long way in protecting wildlife and our own health in terms of water quality. Much more about Farmscaping here.
In a post on Civil Eats I wrote about the dubious reasons the majority of the leafy green industry in California (providing a good deal of the rest of the country’s greens especially this time of year) has decided to remove these good farmscape efforts and blame non-crop vegetation and the creatures who inhabit it for harmful bacteria like E. Coli. Most farmers need to sell their crops to a buyer (versus being able to sell directly to the consumer via Farmer’s Markets and relationships with some restaurants) and 99% of California buyers are requiring that wildlife not come in contact with crops. This requirement is not based on good science, nor is it even a reasonable expectation, and farms are having to poison birds and wild rodents as well as remove the vegetation that ensures clean water through agricultural areas.
Robert Burns lamented over the destruction of a mouse’s simple nest and forgave her for taking an occasional ear of corn. Not to get too poetical but these best laid plans of trying to feed people has truly gone awry. The hugeness of our production system means it is harder to produce safe food and to make up for this reality we are furthering the problems caused by our agriculture with these backwards efforts rather than changing that scale.
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