MARKET REPORT - OCT. 26TH, 2018

So………we will start out with this:Isn’t this what we’ve been telling our customers for decades?  You spray food with chemicals our body doesn’t know what to do with, so it stores them up for a rainy day, and something bad will happen.  Unfortunately it takes years /decades to turn that hypothesis (and common sense) into provable science.You can cut your cancer risk by eating organic, a new study says By Susan Scutti, CNN(CNN)You can protect yourself from cancer by eating organic, a new study suggests. Those who frequently eat organic foods lowered their overall risk of developing cancer, a study published Monday in JAMA Internal Medicine finds. Specifically, those who primarily eat organic foods were more likely to ward off non-Hodgkin lymphoma and postmenopausal breast cancer compared to those who rarely or never ate organic foods.Led by Julia Baudry, an epidemiologist at Institut National de la Sante et de la Recherche Medicale in France, a team of researchers looked at the diets of 68,946 French adults. More than three-quarters of the volunteers were women, in their mid-40s on average. These volunteers were categorized into four groups depending on how often they reported eating 16 organic products, including fruits and vegetables, meat and fish, ready-to-eat meals, vegetable oils and condiments, dietary supplements and other products.Follow-up time varied for each participant but lasted slightly more than four and a half years on average, and during that time, the study volunteers developed a total of 1,340 cancers. The most prevalent was breast cancer (459) followed by prostate cancer (180), skin cancer (135), colorectal cancer (99), and non-Hodgkin lymphomas (47).The authors calculated cancer riskComparing the participants' organic food scores with cancer cases, the researchers calculated a negative relationship between high scores (eating the most organic food) and overall cancer risk. Those who ate the most organic food were 25% less likely to develop cancer. Specifically, they were 73% less likely to develop non-Hodgkin lymphoma and 21% less likely to develop post-menopausal breast cancer.Even participants who ate low-to-medium quality diets yet stuck with organic food experienced a reduced risk of cancer, the authors found.The authors theorize a "possible explanation" for the negative relationship between organic food and cancer risk stems from the "significant" reduction of contamination that occurs when conventional foods are replaced by organic foods."If the findings are confirmed, promoting organic food consumption in the general population could be a promising preventive strategy against cancer," Baudry and her colleagues concluded.Dr. Jorge E. Chavarro, an associate professor in the Department of Nutrition at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, said in a podcast that the new study is "incredibly important." He co-authored a commentary published with the study.Most people who are not employed in agriculture are exposed to pesticide residues through food, said Chavarro, who was not involved in the study.The new findings are consistent with those of the International Agency for Research in Cancer, which found pesticides are cancer causing in humans, noted Chavarro. They also align with those of another study that showed a negative relationship between eating organic food and non-Hodgkin lymphoma, he said……….In other news:We will transition quickly over the next two weeks south to California and Mexico on a variety of wet veg crops.  With on and off rain and no heat units expected as of today, nothing much is going to grow in local fields, so it’s really clean-up time.  We always hit this transition at the same time as the always rocky transition in California from coastal growing areas around Salinas to the southern deserts.  With different ripening times on every type of veg, that move comes first on lettuce and broccoli, followed quickly by cauli, cilantro, kale, chard and dry items like parsley, and then eventually to the slowest growers like celery.Just for fun, go to google Earth and look at how ridiculously small the southern deserts are:  that lower circle on the picture above is Imperial Valley, the larger growing area to the south in Mexicali, and the somewhat much smaller little corner on the right that is Yuma.  Yup – 80% of America and Canada’s veg come from this tiny corner of California.     You will notice it is surrounded by desert.  Quick background:  100+ years ago, land owners who had bought that vast tract of sand paid to move the Colorado River enough (40 km.) to irrigate this flat as a pancake desert floor, creating a good sized growing area.  They called it the Imperial Valley hoping the name alone would entice growers to re-locate there.            From the same Google Earth elevation here’s a comparison between the Fraser Valley and Imperial / Yuma.I didn’t circle the growing areas on the Mexican side because only a fraction is used for growing green veg besides a few thousand acres of green onions, celery etc.While I’m in Google Earth and pasting up pictures, we will also start transitioning all cherry tomatoes, roma’s, zucchini and cucumber south to Mexico this week, with the last of BC coming out of greenhouses.  OriginO winds down on LE cukes in the next few days.Here’s another snip – on your left - Imperial and Yuma, circled again for your reference at the top, showing where the growing areas are in Mexico we talk about so often, are in relation.  On the right picture, Hermosillo up in the middle of the desert (Divine Flavor, Rico Farm, etc.) and then the huge area in red from Guaymas at the north to Culiacan in Sinaloa in the south – a healthy 6 or 7 drive from one end to the other.  Not just hothouses growing our bell peppers, most of this vast area is a primary winter grain and corn growing area for Mexico.  Unfortunately they’ve been dealt a heavy hand over the past few weeks with 3 hurricanes doing major damage.  There….your geography lesson is over!