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[Market-farming] New produce laws Prohibiting sale of certain items
- 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
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-
[Market-farming] New produce laws Prohibiting sale of certain items,
Wyatt Jones, 10/03/2011
-
Re: [Market-farming] New produce laws Prohibiting sale of certain items,
Owsley lucy, 10/03/2011
- Re: [Market-farming] New produce laws Prohibiting sale of certain items, Jay Sleichter, 10/03/2011
-
Re: [Market-farming] New produce laws Prohibiting sale of certain items,
Richard Stewart, 10/03/2011
-
Re: [Market-farming] New produce laws Prohibiting sale of certain items,
Richard Stewart, 10/03/2011
- Re: [Market-farming] New produce laws Prohibiting sale of certain items, Andy Fellenz, 10/03/2011
-
Re: [Market-farming] New produce laws Prohibiting sale of certain items,
Richard Stewart, 10/03/2011
-
Re: [Market-farming] New produce laws Prohibiting sale of certain items,
Owsley lucy, 10/03/2011
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