A circumspect customer emailed Liz Willey with two questions about her farm in Kingston last Monday.
One probed the kind of fertilizer she applies to her land; the other dealt with a probability: “Do you think there’s any chance you could have it?”
Willey, owner of Wild Fern Farm, answered what she knew about Cyclospora, the parasite dominating headlines nationwide and capturing perverse curiosity with its notable symptom of explosive diarrhea.
“It’s endemic to tropical regions, so it can’t originate in this climate. No farm is immune, but we’re trying to mitigate the chance of a contaminant, a pathogen, entering our food chain. And we have a huge food safety plan to mitigate that risk,” Willey said.
Since May 1, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has registered 1,645 lab-confirmed cases of cyclosporiasis, the intestinal illness caused by Cyclospora. More than 5,100 cases require further analysis before they’re confirmed as domestically acquired, the organization said last week. The outbreak is currently concentrated in Indiana, Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio and West Virginia. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy characterized the outbreak on Tuesday as being “under control.”
Although New Hampshire has recorded six Cyclospora infections so far this year, none have been linked to the national outbreak, the state Department of Health and Human Services said on Saturday. A fear of unwittingly consuming tainted produce — lettuce in particular — has spread across the country at viral speeds.
Willey, a vendor at the Portsmouth Farmers Market, said business is flourishing as customers turn to local food producers for assurances of food safety. Her sales at the past three markets have surged, increasing 60% over the same time period last year. She’s observed neighboring booths experience the same boon.
“We’re so excited. We’re so grateful for all the support and acknowledgment. Customers innately know they can trust their local farmer; they can look you in the eye and know where their food is grown,” Willey said.
Contamination can enter the food supply chain at a few fault lines, and each vulnerability is accounted for with a raft of food safety precautions, explained James Stever, president of the Northeast Organic Farming Association of New Hampshire.
Since Cyclospora spreads when people eat food or drink water contaminated with feces, prevention begins at the water source and is ensured by routine water testing, as with all water-borne pathogens.
“If the farm you’re getting your produce from is using a well, versus, for example, getting water out of a river, it’s harder to control what’s in the river over what’s in your well,” Stever said.
Risk continues after produce leaves the farm, especially in packing facilities that may aggregate produce from many different sources. Contaminated greens can co-mingle with non-contaminated greens and compromise an entire assembly line of lettuces, he said.
Smaller farms, like Stever’s Generation Farm in Concord, have a more manageable orbit of oversight. In other words, size matters.
“It’s hard when you have a massive farm with tens of thousands of acres and hundreds of employees; it can be hard to really enforce those standards. You see signs in restaurants like ‘wash your hands,’ but it’s easier to do that on a small operation,” said Stever.
He said his farm irrigates using the same water his family drinks.
“I pack every single box of greens with my wife,” he said. “We have no employees. It’s just us. There’s a level of care that you may not be able to do on a large scale.”
Generation Farm provides greens and microgreens wholesale to restaurants, natural foods stores and co-ops, including the Concord Food Co-op, which has not seen a significant difference in its lettuce sales since the outbreak, according to spokesperson Rachel Becker.
“But customers are generally shopping with confidence because they trust we have a commitment to quality, especially working with mostly local growers,” Becker said. “The main message is that situations like this reinforce why it’s important to support the local food system.”
The only recall in recent memory, Becker said, occurred when Boar’s Head recalled deli meats in 2024. The Co-op was forced to pivot to preserve consistency and customers’ trust in the safety of their products.
The Co-op carries local growers, like Generation Farm, as well as the Massachusetts-based regional distributor Little Leaf Lettuce, which has said its crops have not been affected by the Cyclospora outbreak but that its sales have suffered nonetheless.
For Willey, the outbreak has underscored lessons learned several years ago during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“If we want our farms to be here producing food when there is a food supply issue, we need to be there in the good times, too,” Willey said. “We had not planned for a surge in the desire to get lettuce, and it takes 60 days to get from seed to lettuce mix. It takes time. So, unless the customer is always there saying, ‘Yes, we want your product every week,’ we can’t always plan.”
