Photos by Guy Kitchens / Special to The Star Customers Rose Marie, left, and Barbara Chenery purchase produce at a recent Ventura Farmers Market.

Baby bok choy is purchased at the Ventura Farmers Market. Growers of leafy greens in California are following safety rules they have set.

The nation's farming industry, led by California, is doing the unexpected: creating regulations for itself at a time when federal regulators aren't.

The agricultural industry got to work after last year's E. coli spinach contamination, which caused 104 hospitalizations and three deaths. It was a crippling blow to farmers, who lost more than $100 million in sales and are still losing money with Mexico still hesitant to buy American spinach.

In the aftermath, it became clear to industry officials that the federal Food and Drug Administration didn't have the manpower or funds to act swiftly to prevent another contamination and recall.

"We needed to move quickly and nobody else was doing it, so we had to do it ourselves," said Tom Nassif, president and chief executive officer of the Western Growers Association, which represents more than 3,000 farmers in Arizona and California.

"The entire spinach industry was shut down," said Kathy Means, spokeswoman for the Produce Marketing Association in Delaware. "It was a spider web of effects for businesses. So when we say why should any one company care about what others are doing, there's a reason."

Industries are typically loathe to welcome new regulations, but that thinking is evolving in the United States as entire industries — from toys to pet food to vegetables — suffer the fallout from individual cases of shoddy manufacturing or production.

"You're only as good as the weakest link," said Marty Ordman, spokesman for Dole Food Co. Inc., based in Westlake Village. Some of the contaminated spinach from last year's outbreak was packaged under the Dole label and it is Dole's position that food safety is an industrywide issue that calls for a national plan designed with industry involvement.

The model being eyed for this plan is the Western Growers' Leafy Greens Marketing Agreement, which is a voluntary system in California that Dole last year agreed to abide by.

"We feel that we've tightened our protocols and testing, and I think everybody in the industry is doing that," Ordman said.

Western Growers has been promoting legislation that would give federal regulators power to enforce a similar system nationwide for handlers of leafy greens.

At the same time, the U.S. Department of Food and Agriculture is considering two options: a marketing agreement that requires handlers to comply after voluntarily entering the program, or a marketing order that would require mandatory compliance for all handlers. It posted a notice of its proposed rule Oct. 4 in the Federal Register. The public can comment about the proposal until Dec. 3.

The idea is to combine the best science with industry involvement, and state and federal inspections and enforcement, according to Paul Simonds, spokesman for Western Growers.

Industry leaders would like to see the standards applied to imported produce as well, because Americans are eating more imported fruits and vegetables, according to Dr. Randall Lutter, deputy commissioner for policy at the FDA.

Testifying before a House committee last month, Lutter said predictions are that the nation's food import volume will triple by 2015. Currently, about 15 percent of the U.S. food supply is imported, and fresh-fruit imports account for 50 to 60 percent of that portion.

The imports are of concern to American farmers who don't want their regulated products getting bad publicity should any of their imported competitors' standards not be up to par.

"We need regulations and we need them to apply to imports," Means said.

Without a level playing field, Nassif said, American farmers will be at a competitive disadvantage because regulations are expensive for companies to comply with.

There is legislation being debated, he said, that would require produce to be labeled with its country of origin.

"The question is," he said, "will the buyers go for the lower-priced product promoted, or will they buy the more expensive product from the States?"

Retailers, who might have sold lower quality foreign produce for the same price as domestic produce in years past, are becoming concerned, too, Nassif said.

"I don't think they'll change the prices," he said. "I just think they'll buy more domestic."