Skip to Content.
Sympa Menu

market-farming - [Market-farming] New produce laws Prohibiting sale of certain items

market-farming AT lists.ibiblio.org

Subject: Market Farming

List archive

Chronological Thread  
  • From: "Wyatt Jones" <wyatt_jones AT netzero.com>
  • To: <market-farming AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: [Market-farming] New produce laws Prohibiting sale of certain items
  • Date: Mon, 3 Oct 2011 10:36:30 -0400

I'm not sure if this is an Ohio or  a national issue but I talked to a health inspector at the Farmers market on Saturday and was told there are laws going into effect next year prohibiting the sale of items such as cut lettuce, greens, Chard, anything with multiple cuts and certain other items because of the listeria hysteria.  For example, one could sell head lettuce or whole plant leaf lettuce but one could not harvest leaves off of the head lettuce for sale, same for items such as kale, spinach, chard etc.  You can make one cut to harvest a plant and that's it.  Supposedly the more cuts the higher the chance for Listeria infection.    He also said it hasn't been decided about herbs such as basil, dill etc that are also cut but that they would probably also be prohibited for such sale without a processing license of some sort.  A number of vendors base most of their sales on these items as they are pretty lucrative and are pretty upset about this new turn of events.  I looked on the net but didn't find much thought I did find some items of interest.  I've heard about washing certain items causing the items to be considered a processed product and requiring a specific license but this seems to go beyond that.
 
It seems that many articles I saw about listeria are trying to blame it on Local produce but these same articles don't give any evidence of that and in fact point to mulistate outbreaks from a single source.  Also most of the outbreaks seemed to be from items such as Cantaloupe and strawberries, not cut greens.  Also I thought the most of the problems with many of these diseases like listeria and salmonella were more linked to big business operations.   An example is an article I saw yesterday that tried to blame the recent cantaloupe outbreak on local producers but, as a comment to that article pointed out, the cantaloupes came from a single area, the Rocky Ford region of Colorado and were in fact shipped from there all over the country.  Another involved what were claimed to be widely spread local strawberries produce from small farms in Oregon but turned out to be from single megafarm that sold strawberries to vendors who resold them in various local markets in several states as "local" strawberries.
 
I'm not saying that small local farmers can't have these problems but the way things are progressing only large producers with specific licenses are going to be allowed to sell much of anything when they are the largest contributors to these problems.  Since these new regulations are supposedly going to be enforced next year it seems to me that they should be more widely publicized and the farmers affected should be better notified so they can mitigate any negative effects by at least planting different crops that they are allowed to sell. 
 
Most of the vendors I've talked to were not aware of any of this though a few said they had heard something about it, even so none seemed to know any specific information.  I looked on the Ohio Dept of Agriculture Food safety website and didn't see anything about these laws and am wondering why, if what these health inspectors say is true, they don't have notices jumping out all over the site spelling all this out.  If what these health inspectors are saying is not true then these Ohio State Health inspectors are spreading inflammatory rumors which is a big problem in and of itself and one has to wonder why.
 
At any rate this could possibly cause a LOT of problems for small local market farmers, we have already seen the inspectors show up every single week for the last couple of months at our markets with a somewhat hostile attitude.  Many of the vendors are pretty angry about these recent events and some have even advocated removing the inspectors physically from the market but that seems like asking for a LOT of trouble to me and have found myself trying to calm some of them down, not my usual role in life but I guess all things come around eventually. 
 
Anybody else heard about such things?  It seems to me this is going to be a major milestone and a real problem to  our profession.  I can't help but feel part of this is that the bigger guys are blaming their problems on us and both diverting blame and eliminating competition from the recent upsurge in the trend to local food.  I expected these sorts of things but it seems its progressing faster than I thought. 
 
Wyatt
 
Jamestown, Ohio
 
 


____________________________________________________________
Online Masters Degrees
AA, BA, BS, MA, MS, PhD Programs
DegreePath.com



Archive powered by MHonArc 2.6.24.

Top of Page