Healthy soil and sustainable growing

["Tradingpost" <tradingpost@lobo.net>]

Maybe this is a broader perspective on the subject. Thoughts?
paul tradingpost@lobo.net


Don’t Punish Small Farms for the Crimes of Industrial Ag
by Jill Richardson at 12:19 pm April 19, 2010
http://blogs.alternet.org/speakeasy/2010/04/19/dont-punish-small-farms-for-the-crimes-of-industrial-ag/

In the next few weeks, we will likely see the passage of the food safety bill 
in the Senate. It’s already passed the House so this is one of the last steps 
before it hits Obama’s desk. It’s also one of our last chances to influence 
the bill. In my view, the goals of the bill are two-fold: First, to make food 
safer; and second, to NOT harm small businesses and small farms that don’t 
pose a threat to the safety of our larger food system. I think the bill does 
the first item very well. Admittedly, in many ways it is fighting the last 
battle, closing loopholes that were apparent problems in last year’s peanut 
butter salmonella outbreak. But they are loopholes that should have been 
closed long ago.

What the bill doesn’t do is promote a more decentralized, regional food 
system in which people buy food directly from local farms or local 
businesses. While perhaps that is one of the best ways to improve food safety 
(because, for one thing, a small business is simply not capable of sickening 
hundreds or thousands of people across the country, resulting in the recall 
of nearly 4000 products, like the peanut butter outbreak did), it’s not where 
U.S. politics are right now. Therefore, the best thing we can do for local 
food right now is to make sure the bill will not put small farms or small 
businesses out of business by burdening them with regulations that are not 
appropriate for farms or businesses of their size.

Sen. Jon Tester, an organic farmer himself, has proposed two amendments that 
will do this. You can send a fax to your Senators asking them to vote for 
Tester’s amendments here. First, he proposes an exemption for all farms 
selling a majority of their produce directly to consumers, restaurants, 
schools, etc, from a part of the bill requiring the FDA to set safe produce 
standards. While it may seem sensible to set safe produce standards, several 
previous attempts by government to do this have been unrealistic and even 
harmful, particularly to small farms. A major problem is that any sustainably 
run farm is teeming with microbes of all kinds – bacteria, fungi, nematodes, 
you name it – whereas the government seems to think that “safe” means 
“sterile.” Spray whatever pesticide you want on it, but for god sakes, don’t 
let a bacteria or bug anywhere near it! Sustainable farms rely on these 
microbes (as well as larger critters) to do all of the heavy lifting, from 
fertilizing the plants to preying on or competing with pest species.

The second exemption goes to processing facilities, which may include farms 
that do processing (like making jam or sundried tomatoes). Any facility that 
grosses under $500,000 per year will be exempt from laws requiring them to 
write a food safety plan (”HACCP” plan) and to participate in a new 
traceability system. With regards to the traceability system, the will still 
have to keep records of one step forward and one step back in the supply 
chain (i.e. “I bought these tomatoes from Green Valley Farm and then sold my 
tomato paste to ABC Grocery”). As for the food safety plan, again, it may 
sound like a sensible idea. However, in practice it’s quite a bit of work to 
carry out – work that is likely unnecessary for a business so small that it 
doesn’t require a major analysis. Furthermore, the cost and time involved to 
the business to identify all potential hazards, document how to reduce their 
likelihood, and then measure to make sure the controls are working could be 
huge.

Imagine a jam business. Making jam safely is a rather simple process. Follow 
the recipe exactly, make sure your jam is acidic enough by adding lemon juice 
if needed, and boil your jam for long enough to kill anything that may be in 
it. Do we really need a tiny Mom ‘n Pop jam business to routinely send jam 
samples to a lab for analysis to make sure their process is working? The goal 
of this amendment isn’t to say that all small businesses are inherently safe 
but rather, they pose relatively little threat to our larger food safety 
system compared to companies like Kraft, Nestle, and Kellogg’s, and their 
suppliers. The small businesses often provide far more benefit to our economy 
and our food system than they do in risk. So let’s focus on the big guys with 
this bill to make the vast majority of our food safer without putting small 
businesses out of business.

Last, we have an illustration of how a food safety bill impacted small 
business and food safety in the 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act. Upton Sinclair’s 
The Jungle came out in 1906 and it’s widely credited as the impetus for the 
bill. However, canned foods were largely a new thing in America (they got 
their big launch in the Civil War some 40 years before) and many cans were 
chock full of wholesome ingredients like sawdust and food dye. 
Understandably, food safety concerns abounded. At first big business resisted 
any food safety reform. Then they came around… not because they were for 
safer food per se, but because they realized that the bill’s effect would be 
putting their smaller competition out of business while reassuring the public 
that their products were safe. And they were right. Let’s not have a replay 
of the 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act. To take action, fax your Senators here.
~~~~~~~~~~~~

Jill Richardson got involved in food policy activism after working for 
several years in health care and observing the high rate of diet-related 
chronic illness among the American patient population. She blogs at La Vida 
Locavore and her first book is Recipe for America: Why Our Food System is 
Broken and What We Can Do To Fix It