Deliberations in Washington about food safety have local farmers concerned that they may be lumped in with massive agribusinesses facing more stringent reporting and inspection requirements.
Senate Bill 510, which would rework a number of provisions, is meant to better safeguard the nation’s food chain in the wake of large recalls and salmonella contaminations in the past few years.
The bill already contains several exemptions for small farms and restaurants, but Piedmont farmers and those who follow the industry said they are worried that the exemptions aren’t explicit enough. New regulations, they said, could drive down a growing movement to buy food locally through co-ops and farmers markets.
Toward that end, U.S. Sen. Kay Hagan, D-N.C., is pushing an amendment, along with Sen. Jon Tester, D-Mont., that would more explicitly exempt small farms from new reporting requirements through the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
She said that the amendment, which had not been finished yesterday afternoon, will set the dividing line between small and large farms at $500,000 in gross income, a figure that local farmers said should spare them from the costs of increased reporting, planning and inspections.
Because most contamination problems come from large farms and grocery- store chains, which may have difficulty tracking just where a batch of lettuce or a bushel of tomatoes came from, it makes sense to tailor the legislation and exempt farmers who sell directly to customers, Hagan said.
Cheryl Ferguson said that without such protection, her family’s Plum Granny Farm in Stokes County “might as well fold up the tent and go do something else” after 150 years.
Ferguson said that the U.S. Department of Agriculture already inspects her organic farm each year, and that the new bill seems to “be crafted with large industrial farms in mind,” rather than her 54-acre farm. Plum Granny Farm sells food at farmers markets, including the weekly one at Krankies coffee shop in downtown Winston-Salem.
“We don’t take our products and comingle them with some other farm that we don’t know who they are or how they manage their crops,” she said. “We have kind of the ultimate in traceability. It’s not like I’m shipping (vegetables) off to a warehouse, and we don’t know what happens to them.”
Many of the regulations proposed in the food-safety bill deal with food tracking, but there also are requirements for hazard-analysis plans that could take farmers a lot of time to produce.
Jeff Tucker of Sugar Creek Farm in Davie County said he understands that creating a hazard-analysis plan would take 100 hours to prepare.
“When you’re a little small farm, 100 hours is a long time,” Tucker said. “Especially when you consider ... most of the problems are on large farms.”
Along with the effect on small farming operations, there are concerns that the bill will give the federal government too much power to decide what people should and should not be eating. There also are concerns about the cost of enforcement, though the Congressional Budget Office has put that at a relatively low $1.4 billion over 10 years, according to the office of Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill.
Debate is likely to continue for some time, though the bill did move forward a bit in the Senate yesterday on a procedural vote. Hagan said that the rules need an overhaul, but that small farms can be better regulated by local and state authorities, along with the self-regulation that comes from being local.
“We have honest, hard-working farmers in our state, and this amendment is going to protect those producers who pose less risk to our food supply,” she said.
North Carolina’s other senator, Republican Richard Burr, said through his office yesterday that the United States’ food-safety system “was designed 100 years ago” and needs to be modernized “to address issues that stem from our nation’s increasingly global food supply.”
“Any final food-safety bill must not be a ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach,” Burr said in the statement. “I will continue to work to include key provisions for small processors and farms.”
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