Sunday, September 18, 2011 ❘ the gazette ❘ A5

cantaloupe scare

tion said the Rocky Ford melons are “legendary.”

The problem is, there’s not an actual “Rocky Ford” mel-on variety. What’s grown in Rocky Ford and neighbor-ing towns are hybrids, like the Athena melons growing at Hanagan’s farm.

Because the Rocky Ford name is not trademarked, and no rules regulate where cantaloupes using that brand can be grown, some-one in Colorado Springs could plant melons in a backyard plot and call them “Rocky Fords.”

“We probably should have gotten together years ago as producers and trademarked the name,” Chuck Hanagan said. “But we’re not lawyers; we’re farmers.”

And so, Jensen Farms in Holly, an hour and a half east of the Hanagan farm, was free to call its melons “Rocky Fords.” And when public health officials declared that Jensen Farms’ melons were the source of the listeria outbreak, each cantaloupe grown in and around the town of Rocky Ford became suspect.

“The thing that drove it home to me was, on the national news, they held up a cantaloupe and said, ‘This came from the Rocky Ford growing region.’ No, it didn’t,” said Julie Worley, director of the Rocky Ford Office of Economic Devel-opment. “It came from 80 miles east of here.”

All produce affected Many farmers in Otero

County feel burned, not

only by the persistent refer-ral to “Rocky Ford” melons as the source of the con-tamination, but by public health officials’ announc-ing that cantaloupes from the region were to blame before they’d homed in on Jensen Farms.

“I call it ‘listeria hysteria,’” said Kent Lusk, a fifth-gen-eration farmer and owner of Lusk Farms. “They’ve made us guilty without a trial.”

Now, farmers and others who work in the area’s agri-cultural industry are scram-bling to rebuild the Rocky Ford reputation, but they say the damage has been done and could take awhile to repair. Chuck Hanagan, who sells cantaloupes at the Bancroft Park Farmers Mar-ket in Colorado Springs on Saturdays, recently ended

“I call it ‘listeria hysteria.’ They’ve made us guilty without a trial.”kent lusk — a fIfTh-generaTIon farmer and owner of Lusk farms

up with leftovers.“I never bring cantaloupes

home from the market,” he said.

And it’s not just can-taloupes taking a hit. It seems any produce labeled “Rocky Ford” is ripe for a black eye. Lusk says he’s had grocery stores cut off watermelon orders, and Eric Hanagan points to an empty parking lot usually filled with people coming to pick their produce from his fields.

“It’s hard to sell anything associated with Rocky Ford,” Hanagan said. “It’s just a stigma now. They as-sociate anything with Rocky Ford as not being safe at this time.”

But they all note that not one case of listeria has been reported in the Rocky Ford

area, or anywhere along the Arkansas Valley, for that matter. The Colorado cases have been from El Paso County north, along the Front Range.

“My family, my friends, my workers eat it all day. We don’t even wash it in the fields. You cut it open and you eat it,” Eric Hanagan said. “Why is no one sick down here? I’m not going to sell anything I wouldn’t give to my own family.”

In a show of solidarity, residents in the Rocky Ford area are supporting the farmers. Locals are buy-ing armfuls of cantaloupes, Lusk said, and some people seem almost defiant in their response.

“I’m not afraid of them at all. In fact, I’m on my way to stop off and get a few,”

Fowler resident Dorothy Sallee said as she finished lunch at a Mexican restau-rant.

High stakesThe stakes for the area’s

economy are high. Last year, 2,200 acres of cantaloupe was harvested in Colorado, most of it in the Rocky Ford area, for a value of $8 mil-lion, according to the state Agriculture Department. Farmers have taken some heart that the outbreak and its aftermath occurred toward the end of the canta-loupe season.

Still, they worry about the long term.

“It’s devastating, because it not only impacts us for this week or the rest of the cantaloupe season,” Worley said. “It could affect us next year when the markets open again.”

Just about the time the listeria headlines were breaking, Worley had pro-

posed to Rocky Ford’s city manager that something be done to protect and regu-late the name as it pertains to cantaloupes, much as the Vidalia name is regu-lated for onion growing in Georgia.

“It’s like copyrighting a name. You can say that in order to be called Vidalia, you have to be grown in county a, b and c,” said Mike Bartolo, a Colorado State University vegetable crop specialist who works at the CSU Extension Research Facility in Otero County.

It may be worth the effort. Bartolo says that growing conditions around Rocky Ford cannot be duplicated anywhere. The hot days, cool nights and soil com-bine to create the melons’ signature sweetness.

“So it’s been an iconic, integral part of the culture,” Bartolo said. “It’s more than a crop; it’s an identity.”

Rocky Ford melons are harvested thursday at lusk Farm, not far from Rocky Ford. Rocky Ford is in Otero County, where there has not been a case of listeria. phOtOs by JeRIlee bennett, the GAZette

scare: The Rocky Ford name is not trademarkedfrom page 1—

aBoVe:� Many cantaloupes in Colorado fields are going unharvested because of the listeria scare. LefT:� Dorothy sallee, of Fowler, buys melons at hanagan Farmers Market on thursday.

pumpkin shortage in the northeast

NEW YORK • Northeastern states are facing a jack-o’-lantern shortage this Hal-loween after Hurricane Irene destroyed hundreds of pumpkin patches across the region, farmers say.

Wholesale prices have doubled in some places as farmers nurse their surviving pumpkin plants toward a late harvest. Some farmers are trying to buy pumpkins from other regions to cover orders.

“I think there’s going to be an extreme shortage of pumpkins this year,” said Darcy Pray, owner of Pray’s Family Farms in Keeseville, in upstate New York. “I’ve

tried buying from people down in the Pennsylvania area, I’ve tried locally here and I’ve tried reaching across the border to some farmers over in the Que-bec area. There’s just none around.”

Hurricane Irene raked the Northeast in late August, bringing torrents of rain that overflowed rivers and flooded fields along the East Coast and into southern Canada. Pray saw his entire crop, about 15,000 to 20,000 pumpkins, washed into Lake Champlain.

But pumpkin farmers had been having a difficult year even before the storm. Heavy rains this spring meant many farms had to postpone planting for two or three weeks, setting back the fall harvest.

The Associated Press—

Hurricane destroyed hundreds of patches

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