‘Salmon-safe’ label launched this week

SEATTLE – Environmentally conscious shoppers have long made special efforts to buy local, organically grown produce. Now there’s a new label that makes it possible to buy vegetables, fruit, herbs, and wine whose production has been certified as “salmon-safe.”

Signs on Seattle-area buses this week began promoting one of the latest “salmon-safe” products: eggs. Andy Wilcox, a fourth-generation egg and dairy farmer in Pierce County, is among the farmers counting on consumers to look for the salmon-safe label.

“Salmon-safe lets us communicate to customers that we are doing things that are good for salmon and the local waterways,” said Wilcox, 34.

It’s a 45-minute drive from the downtown bus signs to the Snoqualmie River Valley in eastern King County, where a nonprofit group called Stewardship Partners has enlisted 15 farms in the “salmon-safe” program. Elsewhere in the Puget Sound region, Wilcox and 16 other farmers and winemakers have allowed inspectors to verify that they take precautions to keep streams healthy for salmon.

A fall promotional campaign at PCC stores was well received by consumers once it was explained, said Laurie Lombard, PCC’s director of marketing. At first, she said, customers wondered how lettuce could be salmon-safe. “When you explain it’s the farm and their practices, they’re into it. It’s so Washington,” Lombard said.

Actually, the program started in Oregon in 1995 under the Pacific Rivers Council. It now has its own group, Salmon Safe Inc., which in 2004 approved Stewardship Partners to oversee the program here.

More Washington wines will get the salmon-safe label next month, and in spring the program will probably expand to other groceries, said Larry Nussbaum, who manages the salmon-safe program for Stewardship Partners.

The program is part of a growing trend to promote environmental responsibility through market mechanisms.

“The regulations only go so far,” Nussbaum said. “In order to really improve the environment and recover the species, you need to engage private landowners and provide them with incentives.”

Stewardship Partners operates on government and private grants, providing hands-on help for farmers who want the salmon-safe label, such as planting native vegetation along streams. The goal is to prevent development from swallowing the 20 percent of land in the Puget Sound region still in agriculture.

“The way we’re going to keep this valley in agriculture is using farming practices that protect the streams, that protect the habitat, that protect the water quality, and use that as a tool for farms to market themselves,” Nussbaum said.

One of the earliest and biggest supporters of Washington’s salmon-safe program was organic farmer Andrew Stout, who built Full Circle Farm in eastern King County from a $40,000 annual gross a decade ago to nearly $4 million this year.

“Agriculture can be a progressive and environmentally sensitive and profitable operation,” Stout said. “Because of the marketing and the way we have positioned ourselves, our business can thrive.”

Consumers Union, the publishers of Consumer Reports, judged the salmon-safe label “meaningful and clear with standards that are consistent with the concept of sustainable agriculture and protecting salmon habitat.”

Inspectors under contract to Stewardship Partners rate farms on water use, erosion control, animal management, pesticide and fertilizer use, management of sensitive areas and preservation of biological diversity.

The six criteria don’t bar every practice that’s bad for salmon. The goal is ensuring a positive score across the board, Nussbaum said.

For example, inspectors have a list of more than three-dozen pesticides known to be harmful to salmon. The guidelines say the pesticides “require special consideration,” but don’t ban them. Their use could be permitted under certain conditions.

Pesticides are barred already by many salmon-safe farms because they’re also certified organic, a more demanding standard.