Complete Collapse

Industrial farms are having a hard time regulating themselves.

MIAMI (Reuters) - Florida's tomato industry is in "complete collapse" and $40 million worth of tomatoes will rot unless federal regulators quickly trace the source of a salmonella outbreak and clear the state's produce, an industry official said on Tuesday.

"We probably have $40 million worth of product we can't sell. We've had to stop packing, stop picking," said Reggie Brown, executive vice president of the Florida Tomato Growers Exchange.

How hard is it to find out which farm has the problem? Is it like meat packing plants? Where thousands of cows are in the same batch.

The FDA has said it does not know where the contaminated tomatoes originated.

The infections have struck most often in New Mexico and Texas.

The tomatoes In Texas and New Mexico are coming from Texas not Florida. Perhaps if we had some government organization to check produce from these large industrial farms before the produce leaves. It would certainly cost less than 40 million dollars.