One of my challenges in writing about the case of Dawn Sharts, the New York farmer fighting the state’s allegation that her raw milk was contaminated with listeria, was that there were so many weird occurrences I couldn’t fit them all into the article I wrote for BusinessWeek.com, because of space considerations.

The main point I communicated in the article, via both words and Dawn’s video segments, was that the state’s inspection procedures were questionable and possibly careless. But there were other things—coincidences you might call them—that are worth noting:

–Test result discrepancies between the state lab and her milk processor’s lab that Sharts says raise questions about the accuracy of state lab tests. She points to one case in early March, a few weeks before the listeria finding, in which a state test of somatic cell counts—counts of white blood cells and generally harmless bacteria common in milk, used by processors to assess overall milk quality—showed the cell count from her farm to be as much as ten times higher than counts measured by the processor that regularly buys her milk for pasteurization. The same discrepancies showed up in late April, she says. Sharts says processors often pay her farm a premium based on its low counts.

She attributes the wide differences to the fact that the state lab does manual counts and her processor uses newer equipment to do electronically-based counts. “It’s inexcusable to have inadequate equipment when you are testing for human consumption,”she says.

The state’s spokesperson argues that “the manual method” is “the ‘gold standard’” and that the discrepancies could be attributable to “different milkings, different times…the only way to truly compare is to take one sample and split the sample and do the same test.”

–The coincidence that a farm 25 miles away from Beech Hill, that Sharts has had no contact with and that received a raw milk permit the same time as she did, also tested positive on March 26 for the listeria pathogen. These two cases of listeria raw milk contamination represented only the second and third such cases in New York in at least three years, the state says. The tests were administered by the same inspector, and Sharts wonders if this individual inadvertently contaminated the two milk samples.

The state spokesperson says that is highly unlikely, since the state lab found that the listeria at the two farms “contain two different strains of listeria,” based on genetic tests.

–The irony that the state’s inspector conducting the test was a woman in advanced pregnancy. “If they’re so worried about listeria, why whould they have a pregnant women, who is most susceptible to listeria, doing the testing?” asks Sharts. “She could inadvertently ingest some of the milk.”

The state concedes the inspector “was pregnant at the time of sampling.” In what sounds like a change of tune about listeria’s dangers, the spokesperson adds, “Listeria is fairly ubiquitous and collecting a sample from a dairy farm is no riskier than anything else she does in the course of a normal day. However, as an extra precaution, when we realized she was pregnant, (she) was reassigned…”

As I said in my previous posting, I’m not suggesting anyone at the state was intentionally dishonest. It’s just curious what you find when you poke behind the official-sounding state press release that shreds a farmer’s lifelong reputation.