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2009 Version of Victory Garden Could Sprout Success for U.S.

March 1, 2009
By Roger Doiron
Chicago Tribune

In Jerzy Kosinski’s novel and award-winning screenplay, “Being There,” the U.S. president turns to a plain-spoken gardener named Chance for wisdom at a time of economic crisis. The insight Chance offers is as simple as it is reassuring: Growth has its seasons and, as long as the roots of growth are not severed, all will be well.

President Barack Obama would be wise to add a gardener or farmer to his team of advisers. I already know what advice I’d offer if called to serve: Launch a new victory garden campaign starting with one on the White House lawn.

To some, this idea might seem too small to have an effect on anything as large as the country’s economy, environment or health-care system, but you need to dig into U.S. history a bit to grasp the idea’s full potential. The last time a victory garden was planted at the White House was by First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt in 1943 when the country was at war and the economy was struggling. Roosevelt’s leadership inspired millions of Americans by giving them something tangible and meaningful they could do to make their own lives better and their country stronger.

But the victory garden movement did much more than simply lift America’s spirits. It also grew tons of healthy, affordable food (nearly 40% of the nation’s produce at its peak), encouraged millions of citizens to become more physically active, and helped conserve natural and financial resources at a time of crisis.

That season of crisis has come again, and the idea of relaunching a new homegrown movement is once again winning hearts and minds, not to mention contests. A year ago, well before anyone knew who the next “eater in chief” would be, I entered the proposal to replant a food garden at the White House in the “On Day One” contest, an online project sponsored by the United Nations Foundation to generate policy recommendations for the new administration.

To my own surprise and many others’, the proposal won first prize, beating out more than 4,000 other entries including ones by a Nobel Peace laureate and a Spice Girl. Whenever you can finish ahead of a peace star and pop star in a popularity contest, I think you’re on to something. What the idea needs now is some star power of its own, and I can’t think of anyone better than the Obamas for planting the seeds of the next victory garden movement.

Time will tell whether the First Family decides to plant the first vegetables, but I can already tell you that my first veggies are looking promising. Last fall, I planted a few rows of salad greens in a cold frame that poked their green noses out of the ground an inch or two before the cold, Maine winter sent them into a deep slumber. I recently shoveled out my cold frame and gently pulled back the blanket of mulch I had put over the greens. With the sun now rising higher in the sky and taking daytime temperatures with it, those greens are starting to wake up and begin a new season of growth.

Skeptics may read this and say that that my garden and other new ones won’t add up to much, but my findings suggest otherwise. Over the course of the last growing season, my wife and I weighed every item that came out of our garden and calculated that we grew $2,200 worth of organic fruits and vegetables, which we’re still happily eating our way through. And that’s not counting all the sweet peaches, snappy snap beans and drip-down-your-chin tomatoes that never made it as far as our kitchen scale. If you take into consideration that there are more than 50 million American households with modest yards like mine who could be making healthy, homegrown savings of their own, those are no small potatoes.

It is true that keeping a garden takes time and occasionally requires some hard work, but what worthwhile thing in life doesn’t?

Roger Doiron is the founding director of the non-profit group Kitchen Gardeners International. He lives and gardens with his wife and three sons in Scarborough, Maine.

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/chi-perspec0301gardenmar01,0,7242582.story

Why Urban Farming Isn’t Just for Foodies

Urban gardening is Empowerment for Self Reliance.

March 22, 2009
by Clive Thompson
Wired News

This year, Carol Nissen’s crops include mesclun, cherry tomatoes, strawberries, and assorted herbs. When she sits down to dine, she’s often eating food grown with her own two hands.

But Nissen isn’t tilling the soil on a farm. She’s a Web designer who lives in Jersey City, New Jersey—one of the most cramped, concrete-laden landscapes in the nation. Nissen’s vegetables thrive in pots and boxes crammed into her house and in wee plots in her yard. “I’m a micro-gardener,” she says. “It’s a pretty small townhouse. But it’s amazing what you can do without much space.”

The term for this is urban farming—the art of growing vegetables in cities that otherwise resemble the Baltimore of The Wire. It has become increasingly trendy in recent years, led by health-conscious foodies coveting just-picked produce, as well as hipsters who dig the roll-your-own vibe.

But I think it’s time to kick it up a notch. Our world faces many food-resource problems, and a massive increase in edible gardening could help solve them. The next president should throw down the gauntlet and demand Americans sow victory gardens once again.

Remember the victory garden? During World Wars I and II, the government urged city dwellers and suburbanites to plant food in their yards. It worked: The effort grew roughly 40% of the fresh veggies consumed in the US in 1942 and 1943.

These days, we’re fighting different battles. Developing nations are facing wrenching shortages of staples like rice. Here at home, we’re struggling with a wave of obesity, fueled by too much crappy fast food and too little fresh produce, particularly in poorer areas. Our globalized food stream poses environmental hazards, too: The blueberries I had for lunch came from halfway around the world, in the process burning tons of CO2.

Urban farming tackles all three issues. It could relieve strain on the worldwide food supply, potentially driving down prices. The influx of fresh vegetables would help combat obesity. And when you “shop” for dinner ingredients in and around your home, the carbon footprint nearly disappears. Screw the 100-mile diet—consuming only what’s grown within your immediate foodshed—this is the 100-yard diet.

Want to cool cities cheaply? Plant crops on rooftops. This isn’t just liberal hippie fantasy, either. Defense hawks ought to love urban farming, because it would enormously increase our food independence—and achieve it without the market distortions of the benighted farm bill. You don’t need tomatoes from Mexico if you can pluck them from containers on your office roof.

Better yet, urban farming is an excuse to geek out with some awesome tech. Innovations from NASA and garage tinkerers have made food-growing radically more efficient and compact than the victory gardens of yore. “Aeroponics” planters grow vegetables using mist, slashing water requirements; hackers are building home-suitable “aquaponics” rigs that use fish to create a cradle-to-grave ecosystem, generating its own fertilizer (and delicious tilapia, too). Experts have found that cultivating a mere half-acre of urban land with such techniques can yield more than $50,000 worth of crops annually.

But what I love most here is the potential for cultural transformation. Growing our own food again would reconnect us to this country’s languishing frontier spirit.

Once you realize how easy it is to make the concrete jungle bloom, it changes the way you see the world. Urban environments suddenly appear weirdly dead and wasteful. When I walk around New York City now, I see the usual empty lots and balconies and I think, Wait a minute. Why aren’t we growing food here? And here? And here?

In fact, that’s precisely what occurred to me when I came home and looked at the window of my apartment. So now it holds three pots balanced on the ledge: One with herbs, one with lettuce, one with tomatoes.

I should have my first crop in about a month. And I expect my victory salad to taste very sweet indeed.

http://www.wired.com/techbiz/people/magazine/16-09/st_thompson

Drought Reignites Dust Bowl Fears

March 21, 2009
R. Scott Rappold
The Gazette, Colorado Springs, CO

ELKHART, Kan.• This empty stretch of prairie, broken only by the stony ruins of a long-demolished basement, is where Floyd Coen learned that you can eat tumbleweeds if you have to.

Photo: Joe Hartman, District Ranger with the Cimarron National Grassland in Kansas, sifts through sand on the side of Highway 56 . “It’s as fine as flour,” he said. (Bryan Oller, The Gazette)

The basement, today just a ring of rocks around a pool of sand, was where his family lived in the 1930s, on a farm his father chiseled out of the arid grassland.

It’s where the family took shelter when “dusters” swept through — “Let’s all go in the house and die together,” they would say.

It’s where seven older brothers watched helplessly as their 2-year-old sister succumbed to dust pneumonia.

This was the epicenter of one of the worst ecological disasters in American history, the Dust Bowl. Drought and unsustainable farming methods left 83 percent of Morton County, home to Elkhart, in extreme southwestern Kansas, barren, and fierce prairie winds blew much of the land away. No other county in the six Dust Bowl states had a greater portion of its land devastated.

Seventy-five years later, the land is blowing again.

The past two years have been among the driest since the Dust Bowl days. This winter, nearly 10 percent of the Cimarron National Grassland, a swath of former farmland bought by the government in the 1930s, has been stripped bare, federal officials say. Dunes cover many fences. Tumbleweeds pile up higher than houses.

The “drouth” — that’s how they say it in southwestern Kansas — is the topic of conversation in restaurants and on the street. And if you ask an old-timer such as Coen, he’ll tell you he’s seen it all before.

“Anybody that has been here very long knows it, with the wind all the time, and it sure looks a lot now like it did in the early ’30s,” Coen said.

But in a place where folks always look to the sky with optimism, waiting for the next rain, they aren’t yet battening down the hatches.

RUSSIAN THISTLE BLOOMS

Five inches of rain fell in October, the wettest month here since June 2004.

There has been 0.65 inches of moisture since.

The fall precipitation caused a bloom in Russian thistle, a plant brought to the region when German Mennonites fleeing czarist Russia settled here in the early 20th century. The soil dried, and the fierce prairie winds blew the thistle away, which is why they call it tumbleweed.

“People today, this winter, it’s been a daily chore to go out and move the tumbleweed from their homes so they’re not a fire hazard and dispose of them,” said Joe Hartman, U.S. Forest Service district ranger of the national grassland. The tumbleweeds choke fishing ponds and blocks roads. Road crews have plowed more tumbleweeds than snow this winter.

Equally disconcerting are the patches of bare earth spreading across the landscape. Hartman estimates that at least 10,000 acres of the national grassland have lost their cover, places where the hardy sagebrush and yucca have died.

“It’s hard to kill a yucca. That tells you how severe this drouth is,” Hartman said.

In 2007, Elkhart received a little more than half its average precipitation, 11.68 inches. Last year saw 14.81 inches. In an average year, 19.33 inches of precipitation falls.

Farmers without irrigation have lost their winter wheat, and without any rain, some have decided not to plant milo this spring, Hartman said.

“Some people are saying they dig down 7 feet and can’t find any moisture,” Hartman said.

The lack of crops makes the fields blow like the barren prairie. On windy days, the air in Elkhart tastes granular and leaves a film of dust on cars and windows. Last spring, the Forest Service had to replace 27 miles of fence line buried by dust.

This has always been an arid region. Before settlers arrived, the section of the Oklahoma Panhandle just to the south of Elkhart was known as “No Man’s Land,” for its lack of water and trees. It was a hardy ecosystem of tall prairie grasses and massive buffalo herds, all adapted to survive in the arid climate. The land had supported American Indians for 12,000 years.

White settlers nearly destroyed it in fewer than 10.

PARENTS HOMESTEADED

At 84, Coen is among the dwindling number of people who can say they remember the Dust Bowl.

His parents moved to the empty southwestern Kansas prairie from Garden City in 1913, lured by cheap land where they could raise cattle, encouraged by federal policies that favored settlement of the last big empty spot on the American map. They lived in a dugout, a primitive underground bunker the settlers carved out of the prairie.

“When they homesteaded here, they couldn’t see any farms from the place. The next year, they could count six,” Coen said.

The same year, the town of Elkhart was founded, and within seven years, its population numbered 3,177. A series of wet years, combined with high prices for farm commodities, soon transformed the southern plains into an American get-rich-quick scheme, and farmers swarmed the region.

Coen’s parents began building a new house in 1929. They never finished it.

That year, the stock market crashed. Food prices plummeted, and farmers couldn’t even make up the cost of planting. So they plowed under more land.

One of Coen’s earliest memories of the coming trouble was when the family went to Elkhart to sell what eggs and cream they could and buy groceries. On the way back, his mother cried because she couldn’t afford a stamp to send her mother a letter.
At the time, the price of a stamp was 2 cents.

DUST TURNED DAY TO NIGHT

When the first “dusters” hit, nobody knew quite what to make of them.

A dark cloud appeared on the horizon. Sometimes, the sky would get so dark that the chickens laid down, thinking it was night. For those unlucky enough to get caught in a storm, dust choked the lungs, blinded the eyes and burned the skin. The storms could generate enough static electricity to kill crops and stall cars.

“You had a feeling a freight train was going to run you over,” Coen said. “Everything you could see was coming right at you.”
“You thought the end times had come. It’s an awesome sight,” said Twylah Gore Fisher, 77, who grew up in Elkhart and still lives there.

Still, the first storms in 1932 were a curiosity.

“The fine earth jots sifted through windows and doors and the colored design of the rug was dimmed into a leaden gray,” reported The Tri-State News, Elkhart’s newspaper, on Aug. 10, 1933. “The spirit of the housewife was broken.”

Just 13 inches of rain fell in Elkhart in 1933. Only 9 inches fell a year from 1934 to 1937. Farmers couldn’t grow anything, and even if they could, there was no market for it, so the land was left bare.

And it blew away.

“For more than an hour the light of the sun was completely shut out by the blanket of dust and the day ended without a slight decrease in the intensity of the dust,” reported Tri-State News after “Black Sunday,” on April 14, 1935, considered the worst dust storm.

The paper’s optimism, though, continued.

“Some time it will rain again and bumper crops will be raised. And no place can stage a quicker recovery and forge the hard times faster than the Southwest.”

In May 1937, a dust storm delayed Elkhart’s high school graduation. In January 1938, a storm left Elkhart without train service from the east or west, a first for the young town. An April 1938 “snuster” — a dust storm mixed with snow, buried Elkhart in falling mud.

“Youngsters had the time of their lives snatching handfuls of mud out of the air and making mud pies,” reported the newspaper. “Truly, a variety of paradoxical weather may be had in this country.”

POPULATION DWINDLED

Most people didn’t share the hubris.

Fisher’s class at school dwindled from 24 students to nine in the span of a few years. Her father took odd jobs such as shoveling coal from trains to get by.

“Most families that stayed had various ways of making a little bit of money. You had to have a little bit of money, and you weren’t going to make it on the farm,” Fisher said.

The population of Morton County dropped by half, from 4,092 to 2,186.

Coen’s family stayed, even when they had to stop building the house because money ran out and they lived in the basement.

Even when they had to wear gauze masks to school.

Even when Coen had to learn how to find his way by landmarks, in case he couldn’t see through the dust.

Even when there was nothing to eat but pickled tumbleweeds, which his mother tried to make palatable with mustard.

Even when little sister Rena Marie developed dust pneumonia, which killed perhaps thousands of babies and the elderly in the 1930s, their lungs clogged with grit that blew in the air and was impossible to keep out of houses.

He remembers how the doctor came to see her, how he heard, from the next room, the doctor ask his father for a board. They got the leaf from the dining table.

“When they came out of the bedroom, Rena Marie was tied to that table leaf,” he said. She was dead.”

Coen’s voice choked with pain that seven decades has not dulled.

“I’m the only one of the brothers who can even talk about that.”

Still, they stayed. His father refused to leave.

“He would say, ‘Why would I leave here? Everything I’ve got is here,’” Coen said.

“We never had much, but we had each other.”

To this day, Coen doesn’t like mustard.

DEBT LEADS TO LOSS OF LAND

Overwhelmed by debt, Coen’s father signed away the 320-acre homestead to a creditor in 1939. He cried that day.

Today, it’s part of the Cimarron National Grassland. In the 1930s and ’40s, the government bought hundreds of thousands of acres of farmland on the plains, part of a grand experiment to hold down the soil and give destitute farmers some cash to survive. In some places, that land has not fully recovered.

Coen’s family settled on another farm. His father eventually climbed out of debt. Coen never left Elkhart and kept farming. Rains eventually came. He raised a family and still lives on the farm he bought in 1950.

Morton County’s population is around 3,000 today, down 1,000 from 1920. It lost 460 people between 2000 and 2007.

In the aftermath of the Dust Bowl, experts debated whether people should even remain in the region. These days, that debate could resume if the rain doesn’t begin to fall and farms go under. “We’re expecting even more drouth situations, more people having to sell their farms,” said Hartman, the district ranger.

Last year, the national grassland prohibited cattle grazing, so dry were the conditions in a region that usually grazes 5,000 cattle. The Forest Service probably won’t allow grazing this year, either.

Beneath the talk of drought is a deeper concern, that perhaps the region is seeing a long-term trend, a symptom of global warming.

And, locals wonder, could several more years mean a return of the “Dirty Thirties”?

Not yet, local officials say.

For one thing, farming methods have changed. Farmers no longer plow up the land and leave it as dirt, exposed to the wind. They leave shoots and stalks to hold the soil in place. They leave parts of a pasture unplowed. They cooperate with other farmers in soil-conservation plans. Much of the county is not plowed, as part of the national grasslands or conservation easements.

But, Hartman pointed out, even fields with stalks are blowing this spring. And just 38,203 acres of the 92,163 in crop production in the county are irrigated.

On the national grassland, the shifting dunes and dying yucca are alarming, and it is getting worse with each rainless day this spring. But officials say it is a relatively small area, compared with what occurred here 75 years ago.

“The fact we only have 10,000 acres that are in danger is refreshing. We’re doing something right,” Hartman said.

He was standing at a place called Point of Rocks, a rare bluff in the otherwise flat landscape. The Santa Fe Trail passed by here, and it is said the Spanish explorer Coronado carved his name into a rock.

On clear days, you can see to Colorado and Oklahoma. Federal officials in the 1930s came here to survey the blighted landscape.
“We look around here and say, ‘We’ve done something right. We’ve made a difference,’” Hartman said. “I imagine they looked around and said, ‘Can we make a difference?’”

OPTIMISM NEVER DIES

Bill Barnes is one of the last cowboys.

His father grazed cattle on the national grassland, as did he for 41 years, until last year. When grazing was banned, he sold his stock, one of the hardest things he’s ever done.

But this cowboy without cows, standing with Coen and Hartman at the old Coen family homestead, expressed the hope of generations that have tried to carve a living out of this unforgiving land.

Prosperity is only a thunderstorm away.

“If it would rain, it would change,” Barnes said. “A 2-inch rain, it would make all this look a lot better than it does.”
Said Coen, “It’s a next-year country. It’s going to be better next year.”

http://www.gazette.com/articles/reignites_50389___article.html/bowl_drought.html

Safeguard Food Supply But Respect Small Farms

March 23, 2009
The Tampa Tribune

The mass production of food creates risks of sickening the masses, whether through unsanitary conditions, unhealthy additives, or even intentional tampering.

This nation needs to modernize oversight of food production and give itself the power to recall unsafe food products.

Recent contamination of pet food here and baby food in China, along with salmonella scares in peanut butter, are reminders that some producers are willing to cut corners to make a profit, if the guardians of the public health let them get away with it.

And the inability to quickly isolate a major source of a food-borne illness can hurt the innocent, as Florida tomato growers learned when bad produce from out of state spooked shoppers out of buying Florida-grown tomatoes that had never been tainted.

Finding the right level of regulation is difficult. Some proposals in Congress do too little and others go so far they could put some small farmers out of business.

Congress should take time to listen to voices beyond the lobbyists employed by the industrial farms and big importers. Carefully crafted reforms will improve food safety without sharply raising prices or sending the food police snooping around every vegetable patch and pasture.

Lawmakers should listen, for starters, to the catfish farmers throughout the South who are proud of their reputation for bringing clean, healthy fish to market.

They are in competition with increasing amounts of Chinese imports, some of which have been found to contain traces of all sorts of chemicals U.S. farmers don’t use, including melamine, fungicide, and antibiotics.

The U.S. catfish farmers can’t understand why the Food and Drug Administration doesn’t test imported seafood products for the possibly dangerous drugs and chemicals. The importers are allowed to hire labs that do the testing, which is a conflict of interest. U.S. farmers suspect a lab could keep testing until it gets a clean result, and then submit that.

With some 4.5 million fish farms in China sending fish to one million processors, it’s hard to feel confident that the system of self-regulation is good enough.

Now, about two percent of imported catfish are tested by private labs. The catfish farmers are pushing for 10 percent tested in government labs, and the request seems reasonable.

Such details are important. One proposed bill would require all imported foods to adhere to the same standards of safety and quality that are enforced by the FDA. It sounds good but allows importers to document their own safety.

Another proposal would create a new Food Safety Administration. Another would create a national tracking system for food. There is no shortage of ideas.

The challenge is to improve safety without raising the price so much that small producers are plowed under and market choices diminish. One bill would require that each food operation write its own food safety plan that lists all the likely hazards and methods to overcome them.

Some small, organic farmers sense an effort here by the industrial farms to put them out of business. The bill would regulate “growing, harvesting, sorting, and storage operations, minimum standards related to fertilizer use, nutrients, hygiene, packaging, temperature controls, animal encroachment, and water.”

The biggest risk to public health isn’t from small producers who tend to stress quality, freshness and short travel times from field to table. That market is too diverse to be effectively policed and is no threat to the nation’s food security.

The risks that need mitigating come from the industrial-scale operations, especially the shiploads of imports whose origins are mysterious.

That’s where the emphasis should be, and not on the local family farms that have historically done a good job of producing wholesome food.

http://www2.tbo.com/content/2009/mar/23/na-safeguard-food-supply-but-respect-small-farms/

ALERT!!!
Action Needed

Will Congress Wipe Out Home Gardens, Growers Markets?

related: Lose Your Property for Growing Food?
Myths and Facts: HR 875 - The Food Safety Modernization Act
Response to "Myths and Facts H.R. 875 – The Food Safety Modernization Act"
Myths and Facts: .R. 875 The Food Safety Modernization Act
Food Safety Modernization Act of 2009 – bill status

March 23, 2009
By Sarah Foster
News With Views

The Internet’s buzzing about a bill in Congress its sponsor and supporters say is vital for protecting consumers from food-borne illnesses, but critics claim would place all U.S. food production “from farm to fork” under control of federal bureaucrats, effectively destroying family farms and farmers markets in the process and hijacking the burgeoning organic food movement.

“This bill will not just sweep up commercial food operations,” warns Tom DeWeese, who heads the American Policy Center in Virginia, in a Sledgehammer Alert, “[It] will subject hobby gardeners, home canners, anyone with a few chickens, or anyone who ‘holds, stores, or transports food’ … to registration, extensive management, and inspection by a huge new bureaucracy, the Food Safety Administration, even if the food items will only be consumed personally.”

“The truly chilling language lays out civil and criminal penalties of up to $1 million per day, per infraction, and imprisonment of five or 10 years, or both, depending how serious the violation(s),” De Weese adds, characterizing the bill as “over-the-top in its overreach.”

Particularly attention grabbing: the bill would bring in the National Animal ID System through the back door, opponents claim.

Introduced Feb. 4 by Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.), in the middle of the peanut-product recall, the Food Safety Modernization Act of 2009 (HR 875) was assigned to both the House Committee on Agriculture and the Energy and Commerce Committee. It has 41 co-sponsors. Although not yet scheduled for a hearing, proponents have been forced into damage control mode because of public outrage coming from a politically diverse opposition.

Spokesperson in DeLauro’s office offer assurances: “The bill does not apply to vendors at farmers markets, and therefore will not change the way this business runs. It is meant to address food sold in supermarkets.”

The non-profit Food and Water Watch weighs in: “There is no language in the bill that would result in farmers markets being regulated, penalized by any fines or shut down. Farmers markets would be able to continue to flourish under the bill. In fact, the bill would insist that unsafe imported foods are not competing with locally grown foods.”

A “Major Threat” to Local Food

But in an extensive analysis the Farm-to-Consumer Legal Defense Fund – a DC-based advocacy group that champions locally grown and organic food production – foresees HR 875 fueling “a tremendous expansion of federal power, particularly the power to regulate intrastate commerce” and warns:

“While the proposed legislation tries to address the many problems of the industrial food system, the impact on small farms if the bill becomes law would be substantial and not for the better HR 875 is a major threat to sustainable farming and the local food movement.” [Emphasis added]

If enacted, there would be a reshuffling within the Department of Health and Human Services. The Food and Drug Administration, a division of HHS, would be split into two agencies – one to deal with food, the other with drugs and medical devices. This second agency would be titled the Federal Drug and Device Administration and keep the acronym FDA.

Food-safety functions would be transferred to a new Food Safety Administration, headed by a food tsar (Administrator of Food Safety) appointed by the President for a five-year term, with Senate approval. The Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition (CFSAN) and the Center for Veterinary Medicine – both presently part of the FDA -- would move into the new Food Safety Administration, along with the National Marine Fisheries Service from the Department of Commerce.

That’s for starters.

The shakeup at Health and Human Services would be accompanied by tremendous expansion of federal regulatory power over the nation’s food producers, with mandated surveillance and monitoring of all farming, processing, transporting, and selling operations. The new agency is to “modernize and strengthen Federal food safety law,” making certain that food establishments are able to guarantee “that all stages of production, processing, and distribution of their products under their control satisfy the requirements of this law.”

The food tsar is tasked with developing and implementing a national food safety program, one that can ensure “that persons who produce, process, or distribute food meet their responsibility to prevent or minimize food safety hazards related to their products.”

This nationwide program is to be based on a “comprehensive analysis” of “hazards” – including identification of “the sources of potentially hazardous contamination or practices extending from the farm or ranch to the consumer that may increase the risk of food-borne illness.” The Administrator will also set up a national system for the registration of food establishments and foreign food establishments.

Defenders of H.R. 875 insist it wouldn’t overburden small farming operations; that the law is aimed at “Food establishments” – facilities where food is actually processed and packaged, where food-borne illnesses begin. Indeed, there’s a subsection under “Definitions” (Section 3) that at first reading appears would exclude farms from the onerous regulatory provisions of the law. Specifically:

“(13) FOOD ESTABLISHMENT (A) The term ‘food establishment’ means a slaughterhouse (except those regulated under the Federal Meat Inspection Act or the Poultry Products Inspection Act), factory, warehouse, or facility owned or operated by a person located in any State that processes food or a facility that holds, stores, or transports food or food ingredients.
“(B) EXCLUSIONS: For the purposes of registration, the term ‘food establishment’ does not include a food production facility as defined in paragraph (14), other retail food establishments, …“(14) FOOD PRODUCTION FACILITY – The term “food production facility” means any farm, ranch, orchard, vineyard, aquaculture facility, or confined animal-feeding operation.”

The devil’s in the details, and these are in Section 206 which deals with Food Production Facilities. According to FTCLDF, the only thing farms and the other food production facilities don’t have to do is register with the FSA as food establishments must. The agency has sweeping powers to regulate farming practices, and is directed to issue regulations establishing “minimum standards related to fertilizer use, nutrients, hygiene, packaging, temperature controls, animal encroachment, and water.”

“The Feds would control to a much greater degree the inputs farmers can use as well as the products farmers can produce (raw milk). Unannounced federal inspections of small farms will be the order of the day, reducing the level of protection provided by the Fourth Amendment.”

Here’s a taste of what farmers and other food producers can expect from H.R. 875 if it becomes law:

• Each food production facility – no matter how small – would have to have a written food-safety plan describing “the likely hazards and preventive controls implemented to address those hazards.”
• Farmers selling directors to consumers would have to make their customer list available to federal inspectors.
Federal inspectors would be authorized to:
• inspect food production facilities to make sure the producer is “operating in compliance with the requirements of the food safety law;”
• conduct “monitoring and surveillance of animals, plants, products, or the environment, as appropriate;”
• access and copy all records to determine if food is “contaminated, adulterated, or otherwise not in compliance with the food safety law or to track the food in commerce.”

FTCLDF stresses that these regulations and requirements apply even if the farm is engaged in only intrastate commerce – that is, within state boundaries. Under the existing Federal Food, Drug and Cosmetics Act, the FDA can only inspect farms that produce food destined for commerce across state lines. HR 875 changes this – all production and commerce becomes “interstate.” Section 406 provides: “In any action to enforce the requirements of the food safety law, the connection with interstate commerce required for jurisdiction shall be presumed to exist.”

“Traceability” and the National Animal ID System

Under Section 210 – “Traceback Requirements” – the Food Safety Administration is charged with setting up a national traceability system requiring farmers to keep extensive records that would enable inspectors to track “the history, use, and location of an item of food.”

This system is to be “Consistent with existing statutes and regulations that require record-keeping or labeling for identifying the origin or history of food or food animals,” including “The National Animal Identification system (NAIS) as authorized by the Animal Health Protection Act of 2002 (AHPA).”

The problem is that NAIS was not authorized by the AHPA; it’s never been authorized by congressional legislation.

Jim Babka, editor of DownsizeDC.org, a political action website, regards this as a “bureaucratic initiative,” a “de facto authorization” of NAIS.

“This false assumption gives NAIS the aura of congressional approval,” he writes. “Instead, this is another step on the road to converting NAIS from a voluntary program to a mandatory one. This is exactly what we predicted three years ago when we launched our anti-NAIS campaign.”

Could “Raw” Milk Take a Hit?

Many critics are wondering whether they'll be able to buy "raw" milk if HR 875 becomes law. According to the FTCLDF it’ll depend on the regulations, but the future doesn’t look good. Right now it’s illegal to sell unpasteurized milk across state lines, but some states allow its sale within their boundaries, albeit grudgingly and with heavy restrictions. HR 875 puts even this limited market in jeopardy.

FTCLDF explains:

“FDA has long wanted a complete ban on the sale of raw milk. The agency’s mantra is that raw milk should not be consumed by anyone at any time for any reason. The agency does not consider this subject to be debatable…Under HR 875, FSA is given statutory authority to unilaterally impose a ban.” [Emphasis added]
“Under HR 875, FSA has the power to adopt “preventative process controls to reduce adulteration of food” [Section 203], and to issue regulations that “limit the presence and growth of contaminants in food prepared in a food establishment using the best reasonably available techniques and technologies” [Section 203(b)(1)(D)]. FDA has long made it clear that in its opinion the best available technology to limit contamination in milk is pasteurization.”

Even if the FSA doesn’t issue an outright ban, raw milk producers could be harassed out of business instead. HR 875 designates dairies and farms processing milk as Category 2 Food Establishments – and these are to be “randomly inspected at least weekly.”

$1 Million-a-Day Fines for the Food Police

On March 14, during his weekly radio broadcast, President Barack Obama accused the Bush administration of having created a “hazard to public health” by not solving food contamination problems, adding he planned to set up set up a “Food Safety Working Group” to “upgrade our food safety laws for the 21st century.”That’s going to cost money, and Obama said he’d ask Congress for $1 billion to pay for added inspectors and new laboratories.

If $1 billion isn’t enough, HR 875 has its own built-in money generator to make up any deficit. Fines can be assessed at up to $1 million a day per violation – and each day a violation continues is considered a separate offense. That’s for civil offenses. Criminal offenses – those causing illness or death -- mandate lengthy jail terms for those deemed responsible.

Fines collected by the agency are to be deposited in an account in the Treasury, and the agency “may use the funds in the account without further appropriation or fiscal year limitation . . . to carry out enforcement activities under the food safety law.” The agency may also use the funds “to provide assistance to States to inspect retail commercial food establishments or other food or firms under the jurisdiction of State food safety programs.

As FTCLDF see it: “This would give the States reason to support the bill despite the fact that it dilutes much of what is left of their Tenth Amendment police power to regulate food.”

“Great for Factory Farming”

“How did they get this far with such a scheme to apply insane industrial standards to every farm in the country?” asks Linn Cohen-Cole. “Through fear of diseases and of outbreaks of food borne illnesses, both of which they [the multi-national food corporations] cause themselves.” Cole-Cohen, self-described “leftist” and Democrat, isn’t alone in linking the food industry to food control bills like HR 875.

HR 875 would be “Devastating for everyday folks but great for factory farming ops like Monsanto, ADM, Sodexo and Tyson to name a few,” writes Lydia Scott at Campaign for Liberty. “I have no doubt that this legislation was heavily influenced by lobbyists from huge food producers. … It will literally put all independent farmers and food producers out of business due to the huge amounts of money it will take to conform to factory farming methods.”

The role of agribusiness in actually writing HR 875 is a valid question. The fact that DeLauro’s husband Stanley Greenberg, a powerful Democratic political strategist and consultant, counts pesticide and biotech giant Monsanto among his many clients has helped fuel a growing bipartisan opposition to the bill itself, as has the revelation that DeLauro received over $186,000 from agribusiness for her recent re-election campaign.

Critics like Cohen-Cole, Scott and DeWeese say HR 875 has little or nothing to do with food safety and everything to do with government and corporate control of the food supply, and ultimately over the population. As former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger famously observed: "Who controls the food supply controls the people; who controls the energy can control whole continents; who controls money can control the world."

For More Information and to Take Action

1. HR 875 has not been set for a hearing. Opponents hope to keep it from getting out of committee and are urging phone calls and emails to committee members and congressional representatives.
2. Tom DeWeese’s Sledgehammer Alert provides excellent analysis, with contact information and phone numbers on committee members and other members of Congress.
3. The Analysis by Farm-to-Consumer Legal Defense Fund.
4. A PDF version of HR 875 is here. It’s over 100 pages.
5. See also the Q&A section on HR 875.
6. Linn Cohen-Cole and Sue Diederich, of the Illinois Independent Consumers and Farmers Association, take a "Solemn walk through HR 875 at OpEd News, a site self-described as “liberal…tough…progressive.”

http://www.newswithviews.com/NWV-News/news133.htm