Minding Your Business; 399; Agroterrorism

K-R-W-G-T-V presents Mining Your Business. A look at the people, places, events, and issues that impact the business and economy of Southwest New Mexico, with your host, Charles Comer. Hello and welcome to Mining Your Business to show where we explore business, economic development, community resources, and events, and issues that impact our region. This week on Mining Your Business, we hear a lot about the U.S. fighting terrorism in the Middle East, but a group here in the land of enchantment is working to prevent terrorism of a different kind, called agro-terrorism. Here to tell us all about it is BioSecurity Director for the New Mexico Department of Agriculture, Jeff Whitty. Jeff? Hi, Charles. Thanks. And something for me in on the show? Oh, my pleasure. And it's great to have New Mexico Department of Agriculture on the show. Last guest was the big guy. Was Miley Gonzalez, Dr. Gonzalez. So thanks for keeping the ball rolling within MTA, and far too important a topic, an economic development topic, to ignore here on the show.

So where'd you grow up? Where'd you go to school and how'd you end up doing this kind of stuff, a little bit about your background in the industry, maybe? All right, let me start. I grew up on a ranch in northern New Mexico, between Santa Fe and Las Vegas, kind of out in the middle of no place, as we say, I traveled a lot of school, plus 50 miles each way to school. After graduating from where I already came down to New Mexico State, I'm a Aggie. Got my bachelor's and master's from here in Aggie Economics and Economics and Ag Business Management. Went to work for the New Mexico Farm Bureau for a few years as a director of governmental affairs and did some lobbying in Santa Fe. Did that for about seven years, and then I went to work at the New Mexico Department of Agriculture, and I've been there, I've been doing this particular job for about the last five years. It's hard to say how I got into this. It's one of those evolving things that we had to address a need out in the state and country, and this is the path we're taking.

Now we're here to talk about agro-terrorism. Let's start with a definition. Agro-terrorism is the use of chemical, radiological, biological, explosive, nuclear events to impact either the pre-harvest or post-harvest phases of agriculture, anywhere from the point of production all the way to the table. To disrupt the economy, hurt the psychology of America or of the world, basically to just derp and disrupt the economy. Because Doug Reins from NMDA said it's something that's extremely susceptible. One of the easiest ways to attack a country is attack what they eat. Absolutely. If you think about agriculture as a whole, think about how accessible the farm community is, the retail establishments are, and without going into a whole lot of detail, let's think about the most recent non-terrorist events, but how they impacted the economy, the E. coli

and spinach. That was a year, maybe about two years ago. Two years ago. And no one could eat spinach. You couldn't find it. You could not find it. You could not find it. Exactly. You could not find spinach. If you want to spinach, you couldn't find it. This most recent event with tomatoes and jalapenos and the suspected jalapenos never reached jalapenos in New Mexico, but FDA found it in one jalapeno in McAllen, Texas, in a warehouse. But yet, if you went to a restaurant or you went to a grocery store, you could not find tomatoes on the market. Even today, we've done some work with a grocery chain up in the northeast corner of the country, the United States. Today, two and a half years later, after the spinach outbreak, they allocate 60% less space in their stores to spinach than they did prior to the E. coli outbreak in spinach. So think about that. That was unintentional.

Was not a terrorist event and happened in one location in California that spread throughout the country. Had it been a terrorist event and happened in many locations around the country, think about the economic ramifications there. It's absolutely huge because I don't want to go into a church. Too much because another show I'm going to do within MDA, that's one thing we're going to talk about with Craig Maple and food safety, but both agro-terrorism and food safety come down to huge economic impact if there's some sort of negative event. Now, you had listed a few, what kind of forms can these attacks come in? You said even nuclear attacks? You could take some of the scenarios being studied around the country. You could take nuclear items, bombs at such end, and they fall out with spread over food production areas, agricultural areas, fields, think about the Mesilla Valley and all the

lettuce, onions, fresh vegetables that we grow. That could have an impact on your market. Global issues, if the wrong type of chemical were to be applied to a food product out in the field, same kind of thing, an example of a chemical issue, malamine, malamine in dog food, malamine now in baby food coming out of China, we're getting reports daily about finding more and more sources of malamine, which is a chemical in infant formula or flavored drinks and those kinds of things. So we need to really pay attention to the impacts that could happen with chemical issues as well. I've recently heard a report on NPR talking about Chinese milk and the domestic Chinese dairy industry is devastated because some unscrupulous farmers were adding some sort of powder to it to up the protein content and get more money, so some kind of thing can happen

here. Absolutely, and keep in mind that malamine did not improve the protein, all it was given indication that the protein was enhanced. So there's a lot of science behind that, but yeah, there is a tremendous amount of potential out there. If you think about a retail establishment, grocery store, and how easy it is, everybody goes in and picks up the fruit vegetables before they pick it, well, make sure you watch that stuff before you go home. No. In historical sense, do you know of anyone who's actually done this before and are we talking about groups, nations, individuals, what kind of folks have done this? All the above. We've had examples, there's been examples in the past, World War I, the Germans use Glanders to impact the draft animals. No, I read about that. What are Glanders? It's a livestock disease that will basically take them out of production. In World War II, they use the potato beetle to, they sprayed potato beetle virus over

their food crops in England to basically do, you know, take, devastate the people. We've had cases here in the United States. In 1984, the Rajinisi cult up in Oregon were plotting to control an election, and by doing that, they were going to contaminate a salabar and make people sick, so they couldn't vote. Now they got caught and it didn't happen, but 700 people did get sick in their trial run. And that's a massive impact, you know, when we're talking, talking 750 people in a small town. In a small community. Exactly. That could definitely sway, and an election, and so it's scary stuff. I have to admit that I read a federal report when I was researching the question list for the show, I got kind of scared. It was a little depressing that this would be very easy for someone to do. But we are eventually going to talk about what is being done.

Now you had touched on this in a little more detail, some factors that increase the agriculture industries' susceptibility to being attacked, and you had talked about rural areas, unprotected areas in your words. Well, the agriculture industry is basically what we call a soft target. We are very open. If you consider driving between here and El Paso, you drive past a number of dairies right by the side of the freeway. You go to a grocery store, a retail store here in the Las Cruceso area, or anywhere's in the nation, and everyone comes in and they can, you know, feel the produce. Pick it up by it, take it home, whatever. If you consider a hamburger, one hamburger has a potential of having up over 160 different ingredients coming into that one-finished hamburger product.

That's supposed to be 100% beef. It's 100% beef, but it also includes the sesame seeds on the bun, the flour, the pickles, the cucumbers in the pickles, the lettuce, the tomatoes, et cetera, you know, on and not, and every one of those has the opportunity to have contamination at some point in the food supply chain. And that's some of the work that we do is promote protecting that supply chain from farm to fork or soil to stomach as some people like to say. Soil to stomach. I like that term, I like that term. Now how much of a threat is this to New Mexico specifically? We've talked about the nation, we've got border proximity, those kind of things. How much of an actual threat? Keep in mind that it's a huge threat to any particular area at any given time and it does not have to happen here in New Mexico to be a threat here. Case in point is the tomatoes and jalapenos this year. The threat came from Mexico, but if you were producing jalapenos at that given time in

New Mexico, you could not sell them. We had a cow, the Christmas cow 2003 with the mad cow, head and mad cow disease up in Washington State, closed the international borders, and we're just recently opened this year. And so, you know, five years later, where the impact is here, we, with our proximity to the U.S. Mexico border, and let me tell you, the folks that we work with in Mexico do a terrific job of protecting their supply chains down there. We have a great working relationship with the Mexican cattlemen and the produce growers in Mexico. But there's a lot of folks that come through that area just like they come through New Mexico across the border illegally. Foot and mouth is rampant in South America. The border patrol folks have told us that 40% of the people they catch are not from Mexico that are coming through the area. They're from countries like Brazil and Argentina, where foot and mouth is running crazy, rampant down there.

And so, those folks could be potential carriers. We get one case of foot and mouth in New Mexico or anywhere in the United States, livestock industries devastated. That is terrifying. Now, we can terrify you. No, but like I say, we want to end this on a happy note because things are getting done about this, now, we just talked about who and what can be affected, which is my next question on the list, some ripple effects. Now, certainly, we're talking about producers, the workers on the farm itself, and certainly retailers. Any other ripples? It goes all the way to the consumer. In England, when they had the case of foot and mouth disease in 2001, tourism industry dried up. The rural areas in England have not recovered today. Their income is 16% less than anybody else's income in England. Tourism industry never returned.

Businesses that relied on tourism, motel industry, restaurants, those kinds of things, went out of business. The population shift was massive from the rural areas to the city areas. Same thing can happen here. It goes all the way to the consumer, the business folks in town. They can all be impacted if we have that one big case that hits the area. Now, how much does it help to have that good working relationship with Mexico? Because a lot of times when there's a problem just here this side of the border, we immediately start looking across the border because many people have heard of agua negra and the growers who use it, and we've all, who've traveled in Mexico, seen the warning signs, don't eat raw fruits and vegetables, those kind of things. How much does it help to have that relationship? And did that help track down the jalapenos and the serrano peppers that were suspect? It has helped tremendously because if you keep in mind what I tell people across the country,

Guatemala is not another country to us, it's another state. It's our neighboring state, just like Arizona and Texas, and there's a tremendous amount of trade and goodwill between the two countries. Being able to pick up the phone and know who you're calling and knowing that they know what we're asking for and about is key. Emergency response personnel, we have conducted tabletop exercises and functional exercises with the six states along the U.S. Mexico border on the Mexican side and the four states along the U.S. side, together, those two groups have spent two weeks together working exercise issues in emergency response and agriculture. No place else in the country how they've done that. That has really formed a great partnership when you're talking about issues relating to animal and plant health diseases and things like that. Anyone who to call, wind to call and that action will be taken appropriately. Now we've certainly talked about accidental outbreaks, accidental infections and in the

case of Oregon, very purposeful and heinous actions. Now New Mexico is doing something about this. We told us about the tabletop exercise, the six state meeting and conference, but specifically New Mexico Department of Agriculture and I know you've brought some visual aid stuff. Tell us some of the things you guys are up to. Well, let me tell you, I'll just throw this one up on the table right away. Guys with gals, pardon me, everyone out there. The Department of Agriculture and the College of Agriculture at New Mexico State University and my colleague, Billy Dixon, who's their director of bioscurity for the college, he and I work as a partnership with the Southwest Border Food Safety and Defense Center and we have created a umbrella called what we call Aggregard and that's a partnership between us, the State Department of Homeland Security and Emergency Management and the New Mexico Livestock Board, the Police and Sheriff's Association, the State Police Department of Public Safety and Industry and basically what that program has allowed us to do is create a training

umbrella so that we can reach industry, law enforcement, the traditional law enforcement who are not typically agricultural first responders as such and we've taken that program now a step further and we've created these, what we call these animal health emergency kits and we created one of these, we put together 4,000 of these kits. We have given one to every 4-H and FFA family that shows livestock in the state of New Mexico along with a DVD video about animal health issues, animal welfare issues, how to property care for an animal because we feel that reaching those kids at that level will eventually down the road pay huge dividends for the state in identifying livestock diseases. The key to fighting agitarism or any kind of livestock issue is proper identification and quick. For every hour we do not identify foot mouth is going to cost us a million bucks to catch up.

Every hour? Every hour. Our mouth may not show up evidence itself for anywhere from 2 to 14 days. So it takes a while to incubate and show up. So 14 days is a lot of hours to catch up, a lot of spread. So we've taken the tactic of using these kits to train the kids to identify animal diseases and report. We've created a veterinary program that we call a New Mexico Alert, Agricultural Lifestyle Incident Response Team, taking 25 private vets from across the state, trained them on a foreign animal disease diagnostic work and evaluation and they can act as agents of the state in a livestock emergency response for the livestock board. So the livestock board has only a handful of vets and they've got 25 others that they can reach out to. In the plant area we created their diagnostic kits for plant disease and they don't need quite as much as the livestock. I was going to say you've got a lot of stuff in there.

What are some of the things you're going to find in there? Oh, you're going to find some basic animal health kits or tools, some wraps, some medicines, some liniment that you can put on a livestock, some stock bleed that you can put on to stop the bleeding so that you can assess what the wound is about. Oh, okay. That kind of stuff. The plant disease, we've got some vials to take that problem. And the plants kit, we've got some, the tools that you would require to make cuttings so that you could send the plant samples to Natalie Goldberg, Dr. Natalie Goldberg at the, who's the Extension Plant Department Head, for identification of the disease. And these kits went out to master gardener trainers. And so they, they gives them a tool to then report any suspected plant diseases. And then we went one step further and we created these backpacks with a lot of different

family emergency response items in there. And again, this is all with the support of the Department, New Mexico Department of Homeland Security and Emergency Management. This goes out to the grade school kids. And it has things about how do you prepare for an emergency at home? Things that we tell the kids could take this home and work with your parents and talk about if you had an emergency, a flood or a power outage or whatever, what types of materials would you need to protect yourself for, you know, three to five days? If you had a flood and you had to evacuate, where would you all meet and get back together? That was one of the issues that happened in New Orleans is that families were separated and had no means of reconnecting for, you know, several months in cases. So we use this program with the school kids to get to the rest of the families as well. Now you also have a reporting to focus a little bit more or to come back a little bit more to agro terrorism. You have a reporting system that's all part of the agro guard too.

Tell us a little bit about that. We have, what we call the syndromic surveillance system and our veterinarians take, lifesaq disease syndromes, runny noses, cattle that exhibit sluggishness or, you know, whatever the case may be, they put that into a system and that into a report and that goes into a central database here on campus and it will eventually allow us then to basically try to predict what might be happening out there down the road. Look at historical syndromes, they do this in the human population. Now in the human side, if you go to, if the grocery stores get a run on sinus medicine, the hospitals are tipped off that they may be having a flu hit pretty quick. Well we don't have that kind of means for livestock. So this syndromic surveillance program will allow us to start doing that. Now what about suspicious activity? I saw a poster for reporting suspicious activity. Through the agro guard program.

We have these bill signs that we put up around it, there's steel signs that put up around the state. They have the 800 police number. If you see somebody suspicious, we encourage folks to call that 800 police number. They will then route you to the local authority or you can always call 911. But we wanted to make sure that people who saw something suspicious had a number who they could call and report something. Now anyone who catches the show says, that's something I need to know, that's something my business needs to know. Who do they contact? Where do they contact? How do they get that training? You can call myself at airycode 575-646-5949, Billy Dixon with the College of Agriculture and Home Economics at 646-4402 and we will hook you right up. Well that is very good news and any closing thoughts? We got about 30 seconds. You know, agriculture is a huge industry in New Mexico and the country, but the thing that people don't remember is that it affects every one of us three times a day at least.

We all eat and it's an industry in a substance that we have to protect and keep our eyes open and report if you see something suspicious. Jeff, thanks so much. Thank you. Great to see you and great information. Appreciate it. Well, it's time for our weekly piece here on Mining Your Business. It showcases some of the hardworking entrepreneurs and business people in our area. We call it the NYB Local Business Feature on the Road and Silver City. A Valerie's been in business in art galleries for, I believe, over 20 years. She started in Gig Harbor, Washington and she's been in this location, I believe, for five years. She has a long background in art and she paints, makes her gourd art and we also run a framing

shop together. They'll find Valerie's paintings and gourd art, the Masks and Vessels, they'll also find very fine selection of pottery from Montortees in Chihuahua, Mexico and they'll find local and regional art. We handle a represent a number of different artists in this area, so there's a variety of ceramics, paintings, so different media. Very much Southwestern, very much handmade, even a jewelry right down to the chains on the pendants are all linked together, one link at a time. That's what we focus on, what is made by hand and what is not just Southwestern but also contemporary Southwestern. We have a number of abstract paintings by Southwestern artists but because of the colors and just really the design, it works very well in a Southwestern environment.

You no longer have the classic Southwestern or rugs and pottery and that's really the only accent pieces, all miskept furniture. People are branching out, people are moving here and discovering that there's a good fusion between other types of art, other colors or the media that can come into the Southwestern field. The galleries here are not so much competitive as they are complimentary, so when you walk into someone else's gallery, you're not going to see the same thing that you'll see in here. So we're set apart by our selection as the gallery next door is set apart by their selection. But what makes it special, we care, we care about the customers, we care about finding a good home for the art that we have, we care a lot about the artists that we deal with. I also enjoy the lifestyle, you know I do work seven days a week, I was an engineer for many years, enjoyed that, this is in a way more demanding but in other ways for more rewarding. Coming to Visit Silver City we're very friendly people, it's a beautiful area and a great

place to cool off in the summer. That just about does it for this week. If you have a question or comment about the show, you can call the mind in your business hotline at 646-730 or email me at Charles Comer at Yahoo.com. For information on upcoming shows and an archive of past shows, you can log on to www.krwgtv.org. Again I'd like to thank my guest Jeff Whitty from the New Mexico Department of Agriculture for coming on the show and thank you so much for watching. I'm Charles Comer, here's hoping you have a great one. Minding your business is provided by support from Seal Levitino of Emeryc Realtors, proud

to be associated with the quality programs and community service projects of PBS and KRWG TV. By commingery all builders, a committed partner with KRWG Broadcasting, providing educational, informative and entertaining programs to our region. And by the New Mexico Humanities Council, working with local groups to bring programs about their culture and the human experience to all communities in New Mexico. That'll teach you to play hard to get.

There are poor flopsies dead and never called me mother, and soon you will all be dead. Dead, dead, dead. And because I'm so evil, you will all die the slow way under that rule. It's one o'clock, so it is, lunch break everyone back here at 2 o'clock. Hello. Give me the British Dental Association and fast. You see, I knew there was something going on. Of course, the big cheese made two mistakes. First of all, he didn't recognize me, lemming, alpha lemming, specially investigator, British Dental Association. And second, spit. By the time I got back from lunch, I had every dental surgeon in SW1 waiting for them to fall in the broom cupboard. Funny, isn't it, how naughty dentists always make that one fatal mistake? Life for now.

Keep your teeth clean. Lemming, lemming, lemming of the BDA. Lemming, lemming, lemming of the BDA. Lemming of the BDA. It's a man's life in the British Dental Association. Right, no. I won't. No. I warned you about the slow gun. Right. That's the end. Stop the program. Stop it. Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh.

Fuckin' the lad. Good afternoon. Over you go. This program was made possible by contributions to your PBS station from viewers like you. Thank you. If you can't get enough fish slapping, dead parents, singing lumberjacks, and upper class twits, then perhaps you should visit the PBS Monty Python website, conveniently located at pbs.org. To order the complete DVD set of Monty Python's Flying Circus, call PBS Home Video at 1-800-Play-PBS. To order the complete DVD set of Monty Python's Flying Circus.