[USCC] CONSULTANT-NEW PROJECT

[Nestor Alvarado]

I am in the process of developing a yard waste composting facility here in 
Puerto Rico. This facility will market mulch and compost.
I will like to know how much it will cust to hire a consultant to help in 
the design,developing and operation of this facility.
This information will help me with the feasibility study.
Please be accurate with the information.
Thank You.
Nestor Alvarado


>From: Jim McNelly <jim at composter.com>
>Reply-To: US Composting Council Compost Discussion List 
><compost at composter.com>
>To: compost at composter.com
>Subject: [USCC] Fwd: The Vegetable Industrial Complex
>Date: Tue, 17 Oct 2006 12:48:20 -0500
>
>U.S. COMPOSTING COUNCIL 15th ANNUAL CONFERENCE AND TRADESHOW
>Wyndham Orlando Resort | Orlando, FL | January 21-24, 2007
>The National forum for those involved in the development and expansion of 
>the composting and organics recycling industry
>CONFERENCE PROGRAM, REGISTRATION FORMS, WORKSHOP AGENDAS,
>EXHIBITOR INFORMATION AND SPONSORSHIP OPPORTUNITIES ARE AVAILABLE AT THE 
>USCC WEBSITE: www.compostingcouncil.org OR CALL THE USCC AT 631-737-4931
>
>
>
> >
> >
> >October 15, 2006
> >
> >The Way We Live Now
> >
> >
> >The Vegetable-Industrial Complex
> >
> >
> >
> >By MICHAEL POLLAN
> >
> >Soon after the news broke last month that nearly
> >200 Americans in 26 states had been sickened by
> >eating packaged spinach contaminated with E.
> >coli, I received a rather coldblooded e-mail
> >message from a friend in the food business. “I
> >have instructed my broker to purchase a million
> >shares of RadSafe,” he wrote, explaining that
> >RadSafe is a leading manufacturer of
> >food-irradiation technology. It turned out my
> >friend was joking, but even so, his reasoning
> >was impeccable. If bagged salad greens are
> >vulnerable to bacterial contamination on such a
> >scale, industry and government would very soon
> >come looking for a technological fix; any day
> >now, calls to irradiate the entire food supply
> >will be on a great many official lips. That’s
> >exactly what happened a few years ago when we
> >learned that E. coli from cattle feces was
> >winding up in American hamburgers. Rather than
> >clean up the kill floor and the feedlot diet,
> >some meat processors simply started nuking the
> >meat — sterilizing the manure, in other words,
> >rather thaan removing it from our food. Why?
> >Because it’s easier to find a technological
> >fix than to address the root cause of such a
> >problem. This has always been the genius of
> >industrial capitalism — to take its failings and
> >turn them into exciiting new business opportunities.
> >
> >We can also expect to hear calls for more
> >regulation and inspection of the produce
> >industry. Already, watchdogs like the Center for
> >Science in the Public Interest have proposed
> >that the government impose the sort of
> >regulatory regime it imposes on the meat
> >industry — something along the lines of the
> >Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Point
> >system (Haccp, pronounced HASS-ip) developed in
> >response to the E. coli contamination of beef.
> >At the moment, vegetable growers and packers are
> >virtually unregulated. “Farmers can do pretty
> >much as they please,” Carol Tucker Foreman,
> >director of the Food Policy Institute at the
> >Consumer Federation of America, said recently,
> >“as long as they don’t make anyone sick.”
> >
> >This sounds like an alarming lapse in
> >governmental oversight until you realize there
> >has never before been much reason to worry about
> >food safety on farms. But these days, the way we
> >farm and the way we process our food, both of
> >which have been industrialized and centralized
> >over the last few decades, are endangering our
> >health. The Centers for Disease Control and
> >Prevention estimate that our food supply now
> >sickens 76 million Americans every year, putting
> >more than 300,000 of them in the hospital, and
> >killing 5,000. The lethal strain of E. coli
> >known as 0157:H7, responsible for this latest
> >outbreak of food poisoning, was unknown before
> >1982; it is believed to have evolved in the gut
> >of feedlot cattle. These are animals that stand
> >around in their manure all day long, eating a
> >diet of grain that happens to turn a cow’s
> >rumen into an ideal habitat for E. coli 0157:H7.
> >(The bug can’t survive long in cattle living
> >on grass.) Industrial animal agriculture
> >produces more than a billion tons of manure
> >every year, manure that, besides being full of
> >nasty microbes like E. coli 0157:H7 (not to
> >mention high concentrations of the
> >pharmaceuticals animals must receive so they can
> >tolerate the feedlot lifestyle), often ends up
> >in places it shouldn’t be, rather than in
> >pastures, where it would not only be harmless
> >but also actually do some good. To think of
> >animal manure as pollution rather than fertility
> >is a relatively new (and industrial) idea.
> >
> >Wendell Berry once wrote that when we took
> >animals off farms and put them onto feedlots, we
> >had, in effect, taken an old solution — the one
> >where crops feed animals and animals ™ waste
> >feeds crops — and neatly divided it into two new
> >problems: a fertility problem on the farm, and a
> >pollution problem on the feedlot. Rather than
> >return to that elegant solution, however,
> >industrial agriculture came up with a
> >technological fix for the first problem —
> >chemical fertilizers on the farm. As yet, there
> >is no good fix for the second problem, unless
> >you count irradiation and Haccp plans and
> >overcooking your burgers and, now, staying away
> >from spinach. All of these solutions treat E.
> >coli 0157:H7 as an unavoidable fact of life
> >rather than what it is: a fact of industrial agriculture.
> >
> >But if industrial farming gave us this bug, it
> >is industrial eating that has spread it far and
> >wide. We don’t yet know exactly what happened
> >in the case of the spinach washed and packed by
> >Natural Selection Foods, whether it was
> >contaminated in the field or in the processing
> >plant or if perhaps the sealed bags made a
> >trivial contamination worse. But we do know that
> >a great deal of spinach from a great many fields
> >gets mixed together in the water at that plant,
> >giving microbes from a single field an
> >opportunity to contaminate a vast amount of
> >food. The plant in question washes 26 million
> >servings of salad every week. In effect, we’re
> >washing the whole nation’s salad in one big sink.
> >
> >It’s conceivable the same problem could occur
> >in your own kitchen sink or on a single farm.
> >Food poisoning has always been with us, but not
> >until we started processing all our food in such
> >a small number of “kitchens” did the
> >potential for nationwide outbreaks exist.
> >
> >Surely this points to one of the great
> >advantages of a decentralized food system: when
> >things go wrong, as they sooner or later will,
> >fewer people are affected and, just as
> >important, the problem can be more easily traced
> >to its source and contained. A long and
> >complicated food chain, in which food from all
> >over the countryside is gathered together in one
> >place to be processed and then distributed all
> >over the country to be eaten, can be
> >impressively efficient, but by its very nature
> >it is a food chain devilishly hard to follow and to fix.
> >
> >Fortunately, this is not the only food chain we
> >have. The week of the E. coli outbreak, washed
> >spinach was on sale at my local farmers’
> >market, and at the Blue Heron Farms stand, where
> >I usually buy my greens, the spinach appeared to
> >be moving briskly. I tasted a leaf and wondered
> >why I didn’t think twice about it. I guess
> >it’s because I’ve just always trusted these
> >guys; I buy from them every week. The spinach
> >was probably cut and washed that morning or the
> >night before — it hasn’t been sitting around
> >in a bag on a truck for a week. And if there
> >ever is any sort of problem, I know exactly who
> >is responsible. Whatever the risk, and I’m
> >sure there is some, it seems manageable.
> >
> >These days, when people make the case for buying
> >local food, they often talk about things like
> >keeping farmers in our communities and eating
> >fresh food in season, at the peak of its flavor.
> >We like what’s going on at the farmers’
> >market — how countryy meets city, how children
> >learn that a carrot is not a glossy orange
> >bullet that comes in a bag but is actually a
> >root; how we get to taste unfamiliar flavors and
> >even, in some sense, reconnect through these
> >foods and their growers to the natural world.
> >Stack all this up against the convenience and
> >price of supermarket food, though, and it can sound a little. . 
>.sentimental.
> >
> >But there’s nothing sentimental about local
> >food — indeed, the reasons to support local food
> >economies could not be any more hardheaded or
> >pragmatic. Our highly centralized food economy
> >is a dangerously precarious system, vulnerable
> >to accidental — and deliberate  ”
> >contamination. This is something the government
> >understands better than most of us eaters. When
> >Tommy Thompson retired from the Department of
> >Health and Human Services in 2004, he said
> >something chilling at his farewell news
> >conference: “For the life of me, I cannot
> >understand why the terrorists have not attacked
> >our food supply, because it is so easy to do.”
> >The reason it is so easy to do was laid out in a
> >2003 G.A.O. report to Congress on bioterrorism.
> >“The high concentration of our livestock
> >industry and the centralized nature of our
> >food-processing industry” make them
> >“vulnerable to terrorist attack.” Today 80
> >percent of America’s beef is slaughtered by
> >four companies, 75 percent of the precut salads
> >are processed by two and 30 percent of the milk
> >by just one company. Keeping local food
> >economies healthy — and at the moment they are
> >thriving — is a matter not of sentiment but of
> >critical importannce to the national security
> >and the public health, as well as to reducing
> >our dependence on foreign sources of energy.
> >
> >Yet perhaps the gravest threat now to local food
> >economies — to the farmer selling me my spinach,
> >to the rrancher who sells me my grass-fed beef —
> >is, of all things, the governmentâ’s own
> >well-intentioned efforts to clean up the
> >industrial food supply. Already, hundreds of
> >regional meat-processing plants — the ones that
> >local meeat producers depend on — are closing
> >because they can’t afford to comply with the
> >regulatory requirements the U.S.D.A. rightly
> >imposes on giant slaughterhouses that process
> >400 head of cattle an hour. The industry insists
> >that all regulations be “scale neutral,” so
> >if the U.S.D.A. demands that huge plants have,
> >say, a bathroom, a shower and an office for the
> >exclusive use of its inspectors, then a small
> >processing plant that slaughters local
> >farmers’ livestock will have to install these
> >facilities, too. This is one of the principal
> >reasons that meat at the farmers’ market is
> >more expensive than meat at the supermarket:
> >farmers are seldom allowed to process their own
> >meat, and small processing plants have become
> >very expensive to operate, when the U.S.D.A. is
> >willing to let them operate at all. From the
> >U.S.D.A.’s perspective, it is much more
> >efficient to put their inspectors in a plant
> >where they can inspect 400 cows an hour rather
> >than in a local plant where they can inspect maybe one.
> >
> >So what happens to the spinach grower at my
> >farmers’ market when the F.D.A. starts
> >demanding a Haccp plan — daily testing of the
> >irrigation water, say, or some newfangled
> >veggie-irradiation technology? When we start
> >requiring that all farms be federally inspected?
> >Heavy burdens of regulation always fall heaviest
> >on the smallest operations and invariably wind
> >up benefiting the biggest players in an
> >industry, the ones who can spread the costs over
> >a larger output of goods. A result is that
> >regulating food safety tends to accelerate the
> >sort of industrialization that made food safety
> >a problem in the first place. We end up putting
> >our faith in RadSafe rather than in Blue Heron
> >Farms — in technologies rather than relatiionships.
> >
> >It’s easy to imagine the F.D.A. announcing a
> >new rule banning animals from farms that produce
> >plant crops. In light of the threat from E.
> >coli, such a rule would make a certain kind of
> >sense. But it is an industrial, not an
> >ecological, sense. For the practice of keeping
> >animals on farms used to be, as Wendell Berry
> >pointed out, a solution; only when cows moved
> >onto feedlots did it become a problem. Local
> >farmers and local food economies represent much
> >the same sort of pre-problem solution — elegant,
> >low-tech and redundant. But the logic of
> >industry, apparently ineluctable, has other
> >ideas, ideas that not only leave our centralized
> >food system undisturbed but also imperil its
> >most promising, and safer, alternatives.
> >
> >Michael Pollan, a contributing writer for the
> >magazine, is the author most recently of “The
> >Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals.
>_______________________________________________
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