Still, it must be awesome to have a professional excuse to drool over the seed catalogues.
I have an organic farming question - my sister said that she read in the New Yorker that all the brain and spinal cords removed from cattle lately to prevent the spread of mad cow disease are being turned into bone meal fertilizer, which is considered organic. (And as it contains carbon, it certainly is, but that's another thing.) Help! Am I going to get mad cow from my organic vegetables?

An excellent question! Bone meal is an approved soil amendment under the federal organic regulations, and bone meal does come from animal remains.

We do not use bone meal on our farm, mostly because it is expensive and is considered a somewhat quick fix way to build fertility. We, and most small organic farmers, try to build fertility through the use of a balanced composting system and green manures (i.e., cover crops). In spirit, using bone meal is not that far removed from using chemical fertilizers, in that you are introducing some short lived, water soluble fertility, and not really addressing your long term soil needs.

But I digress. My understanding is that bone meal is processed by being both fire dried, and then steamed to eliminate any pathogens, and to stabilize the product so that bacteria will not cause it to continue to bio-degrade. I have not extensively researched the problem, but I have never heard of anyone being exposed to disease from either using bonemeal on their farm, or by eating plants that came from such a farm. Given how bone meal is processed, and then spread to a field, and then processed by the plant, and then washed by the farmer, and then washed by you, I have to think any risk is infinitesimal. Personally, I think the risk from continually ingesting low levels of pesticide and herbicide residue from non-organic produce has to be greater than the bone meal exposure. But of course I would think that -- I am committed to organics.

But if you are worried, ask your local farmer who produces your food if he or she uses the stuff. That is the beauty of buying local, like you guys do through your CSA. I am always eager to talk about farming whenever customers (or anyone else for that matter) expresses even the slightest interest. I know you have said your farmer is not really a social butterfly, but you might discover he doesn't use the stuff, thereby making any concerns moot.

And although I haven't really had time to research this question, and I haven't seen the New Yorker article, I know Maryellen wrote our friend Karen for some insight as well. I'll let you know if we find out anything more.

So I did some research into this and found out some possibly helpful information.

The short version is that it is very, very unlikely you could get mad cow from vegetables because the processing of the bone meal kills anything alive in there and there is no way for anything in the bone meal to get into the veggies. If you want to make sure the soil in which your veggies were grown was not supplemented with bone meal, buy from a farmer you know (like us!) who doesn't use bone meal, or buy certified Biodynamic (biodynamic farms are organic plus other requirements, including no bone meal).

This is the long version.

1. There is no shortage of people worrying about this issue on the internet.

2. The folks at ATTRA, "the national sustainable agriculture information service operated by the National Center for Appropriate Technology under a grant from the Rural Business-Cooperative Service, U.S. Department of Agriculture" say this on their website at http://attra.ncat.org/attra-pub/potmix.html

The Mad Cows and Potting Mixes
Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE), or "Mad Cow Disease," is a fatal brain disorder that can infect humans, where it is recognized as Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (CJD)—a very devastating illness. According to authorities, BSE is not a problem in the United States (24). However, the fear of BSE and CJD has prompted the Demeter Association—which certifies Biodynamic farms—to completely prohibit the use of bone meal and blood meal, since these could be avenues of infection for BSE (25).

Blood meal, bone meal, and other animal by-products are permitted in certified organic production as soil amendments, though they cannot be fed to organic livestock. As a precaution, dust masks and gloves should be worn when handling these materials.

I called ATTRA to ask if they had any other info, and the guy who answered their phone said that he had no concerns about Mad Cow Disease from bone meal because it is processed at such high temperatures as to kill anything alive in there and because it seems unlikely it could go from the soil into a vegetable. He said that the reason their website recommends a mask and gloves when using bone meal is not because of fears of Mad Cow, but because it can have such fine particles that the farmer could breath them in leading to asbestosis type problems.

3. Our friend Karen, who tipped me off that I could call ATTRA, said this "I don't have anything conclusive for you on the BSE fertilizer issue. It seems that the risk would be for farmers who would be handling the bone meal rather than consumers who might eat produce fertilized by the meal. That seems to have been ATTRA's conclusion as well, since the web site you found focuses on masks and gloves when "using" the bone meal. Other than residual bone meal that might survive the growing season and cling to the produce and not be washed off by the consumer (a rather tenuous chain), I have a hard time believing that the bone meal could be a risk to a consumer. It doesn't seem that whatever it is that makes BSE deadly would remain a threat after being broken down in the soil, absorbed by a plant, and converted into plant tissue. But hey, I'm a lawyer not a pathologist, so what do I know. "

Hope this is helpful!

Karen is a lawyer at Farmer's Legal Action Group (FLAG), I forgot to mention that.