North American Fruit Explorers mailing list at ibiblio

["Mark & Helen Angermayer" <hangermayer@isp.com>]

Hi Folks,

 

A situation has come up that has me a little disturbed.  I've never traded scionwood before, but have purchased some from the Catholic Homesteading movement.  This winter I have the opportunity to trade some wood with another Nafexer in MD and a fruit explorer in OR.  I remembered Oregon has some funky laws about plant material coming in because like CA and WA they want to protect their fruit industry.  So looked up some of their regs. on line and discovered they have quite a few rules regarding shipping plant materials to their state.  I called Oregon and explained my situation and the representative was comfortable and said I didn't need to do anything special.  I took that to mean he gave me an exemption. 

 

I then wondered what my own state's policy was so I looked it up.  Again there were some regulations.  Plant materials have to have a photosanitary certificate.  I called my state, explained the situation and the guy told me technically I had to have a photosanitary certificate to bring material in, but under the circumstances he didn't have a problem with it.  Again another exemption.

 

I looked up Maryland.  Same thing a bunch of hoops to jump through.  After contacting them, the rep. said I could only ship the material if I was a licensed nursery or if I obtained a photosanitary certificate.  After explaining a certificate is cost prohibitive for one scionwood mailing, the man said he would waive the requirement for this one time.  And he was very specific that he would only waive it this one time, that if I wanted to ship scionwood into MD again I would have to have a nursery license.

 

My question is, is there anyone else out there who was aware these requirements?  It's frustrating because a big part of the mission of Nafex is to share our discoveries.  How long have these laws been on the books?  Did our Nafex forefathers know about them and just ignore them?  It's disappointing because of the obvious difficulty in doing something so simple as sharing scionwood.  The regulations seem to have the intent of slowing/preventing artificial movement of disease/pests and I can appreciate that, but I wish there was a simple/do-able policy for the little guy to share plant material.

 

If you'd like to find out your own state's policy go to:

 

http://www.nationalplantboard.org/

 

Type your state in the search bar.

 

Mark

KS