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The end of Farmers Markets?
geckahn
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
Bill introduced that would effectively destroy Farmers Markets:
http://cryptogon.com/?p=7362
To say that I've been disappointed on the issue of food by democrats would be putting it lightly. Reducing our heath costs starts with reforming the dept. of agriculture. Not making the problem worse by introducing steaming piles of shit like this.
http://cryptogon.com/?p=7362
What this will do is force anyone who produces food of any kind, and then transports it to a different location for sale, to register with a new federal agency called the “Food Safety Administration.†Even growers who only sell only fruit and/or vegetables at farmers markets would not only have to register, but they would be subject inspections by federal agents of their property and all records related to food production. The frequency of these inspections will be determined by the whim of the Food Safety Administration. Mandatory “safety†records would have to be kept. Anyone who fails to register and comply with all of this nonsense could be facing a fine of up to $1,000,000 per violation.
I’ve bought food at several farmers markets for years and I have yet to meet any vendors who are fond of the government. I think it’s pretty safe to say that most vendors at farmers markets won’t go along with this. The problem will be that the people who run the farmers markets will be forced to make sure that vendors are “registered†with the government.
To say that I've been disappointed on the issue of food by democrats would be putting it lightly. Reducing our heath costs starts with reforming the dept. of agriculture. Not making the problem worse by introducing steaming piles of shit like this.
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Seems like a pretty good way to get rid of the last of the family farmers. No all of their income does not come from small markets, but many that I knew in northern California would go to farmers markets, open markets and events to sell fruit and stuff as snacks. It didn't make them a fortune but it was money directly in their pocket, which apparently selling wholesale is a little slow to do.
Edit: This is basically the opposite of what I want. I'd rather see them tell big corn to fuck the hell off and stop subsidizing an unhealthy and harmful crop. Then give direct market farmers an incentive to keep food they grow local, to save on energy cost and stuff.
But still something to take note of.
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Seconded. This sounds exactly like a combination of the Food Standards Agency and the Health and Safety Executive in the UK.
FSA inspections aren't too bad. the inspector arrives (you usually get 24-48 hours notice, not always, and they aren't obliged to give any) they poke around, have a look through the records, and leave.
It's only a problem if you're doing something unsafe, in which case you get notified and they work with you to sort it out, or dangerous, in which case they shut you the hell down there and then and you get a summons.
In short, whackjob is whacked, and needs to get out more. There's nothing wrong with this bill (and honestly, we've needed it for some time now), unless you're always scanning the horizon for black helicopters.
It has 31 co-sponsors.
But on closer examination / some distance from my hysterical friend, I don't think this is particularly bad.
This is why you keep some distance from the conspiracy nuts. When you see comments talking about "codexes" like we're living in a real-life game of Warhammer 40K, you should just slowly walk away.
When a farmer's market goes wrong, it's only hitting a couple hundred people at most, all in a pretty small area. When a factory goes wrong, it can hit half the country and affect millions. I don't disagree with you; just saying that problems might be happening in farmer's markets and people just don't hear about it because it's such a small scale.
It reads a lot like the current UK legislation, which would mean that you have to register if you run a business that handles food (which doesn't seem to be particularly onerous), you need to assess the risks in your handling of food and come up with procedures to mitigate them,and you have to keep records to show that the procedures are being followed.
All of it applies to growers and wholesalers, but there isn't really a lot of risk involved with either, so the requirements are pretty light (In practice, I suspect all they'd have to do is keep cleaning records and temperature logs of any refrigeration equipment).
Underground farmers markets?
'Stash that squash, Fats! The fuzz are here!'
Processed foods are different. If they don't wash the shit off the tomato before putting in in a jar of salsa, then you've got a problem. But these products are already regulated.
This is shock doctrine. Big ag using their peanut problem (and their beef problem, and their pepper problem, and their spinach problem) to force regulation on others to somehow account for their own negligence. And reading the posts here, it seems to be working splendidly.
If you apply the same regulations to small local farms as you do to large corporations and industrial farms, it's going to hit the small businessman harder. Economies of scale. Lucky for the local farmers, these regulations aren't necessary at a farmer's market, because you have transparency. You don't need the government to protect you there. You see the vegetables, you see the farmer. You can see what you're getting, unlike the peanuts that went into your walmart brand granola bar. If you don't like what you see, go somewhere else. There are no layers of obscurity like you get in a supermarket. The ingredients aren't processed to the point where you can't even see what went into your oreo cookies. There's no fancy marketing to cover up unsavory conditions.
(Also, to the poster above, if the produce from Whole Foods is cheaper than your local farmer's market, you either need to find another farmer's market, or a math textbook.)
I'm hardly an expert, but I think they go through more than getting a permit and being inspected every now and then.
And your numbers are fucking ridiculous. Literally everyone at the market would have to buy from the same stall for five weeks to get those kind of numbers.
Also, I wonder what the frequency of inspections is likely to be, as it's my understanding that inspections for other reasons tend to be once every several years.
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My company makes most of its money from government contracts. On one contract, we had to develop an official safety plan to make sure that government-owned assets on our property were protected. It had to meet the standards of roughly two dozen different regulations and other random criteria, and each thing referenced was something like 50 pages of gibberish. Almost all of them pertained to the handling of hazardous materials, which we don't even handle, yet I had to reference specific passages of specific regulations just so I could say, "Yeah, this doesn't apply." All told, it took something like 50 hours to cobble this thing together. And now auditors will go over it with a fine-toothed comb. I do not doubt that I fucked up something, somewhere, and I'll have to go back and correct it.
This doesn't bother me, because it's basically my job to deal with this crap. It isn't, and shouldn't be, a farmer's job to deal with this crap. Do we know that this plan isn't going to require farmers to prove that they meet the standards of dozens of obscure regulations somewhere? Do we know that the many who inevitably fail to cross a T somewhere aren't going to be fined right out of business? Because that seems like useful info to have, and the bill doesn't provide any answers.
This could be tame and reasonable, or it could be stupid and onerous. And without some explicit laying-down of what-all is required, I'm forced to assume the latter.
RTFB
This means family farm. Also, factory farm. Also, warehouse. Also, peanut butter factory. Also, corn cannery. Also, the place where they freeze asparagus and put it in bags, whatever you call that. The factories were they make oreo cookies, potato chips, cheerios, twinkies.
Except for the family farm, these places already jump through gov't regulation hoops (or they're supposed to at least). They've got a lot of this in place already. Also, due to the aforementioned economies of scale, the cost of anything additional this bill requires can be spread across the larger amount they produce. The family farms are starting from scratch. Their produce may be perfectly clean and safe, but there's infrastructure that needs to be in place to prove it to the government. And these new costs will have to be spread out among the few bushels of tomatoes they sell each week at farmer's markets during a few summer months, rather than the millions of boxes of Life cereal shipped out of a General Mills factory year round.
I'm willing to pay more for my market vegetables if they pass the cost on to me (and family farms aren't so lucrative that they really have any other choice). I'm not against this for selfish reasons. I'm against it because it's unnecessary, anti-small farmer, and also fucking stupid.
(edited to add the replied to post for clarification)
2-3 others! My god man, think of the children.
No, this bill is stupid. It is punishing local producers for a problem that doesn't even exist. Any cost of compliance is going to push some entrants out of the market. And this market is already stacked to the gills with agribusiness via subsidies all over the damn place. Well, and I never, it has Monsanto associated with it as well. I never would have guessed.
Also, it is going to be a hell of a lot easier to identify an outbreak confined to a limited geographical area as compared to the entire country. It takes months because when people are sporadically getting sick of one of the multitudes of institutional goods, it is hard to figure out a common denominator. It is a lot easier when you can just ask 'where have you bought your food recently' and lo and behold they almost all bought from the same farmer's market.
Basically this.
We already have a federal agency whose chartered mission includes ensuring food safety. That agency is underfunded and broken. So why create a second agency to do the same job instead of fixing the first agency?
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
I suppose any regulation could be used to nitpick suppliers into economic oblivion, but that obviously doesn't have to be the case. Also, a lot of local farms already focus quite heavily on transparency and accountability. If this goes hand in hand with a general and much-needed reform of the FDA, I don't think it's a big deal at all.
I don't see how this new one would be any different.
So the status quo is already working fine? Why fix something that isn't broken then?
I might have more sympathy if there were A) Any outbreaks even associated with Farmer's Markets in the first place and
It was e coli IIRC (flood waters washed some poop into the spinach fields, I think?), and it was from factory farms. Local farmers don't sell spinach that's been marinating in poop water, because they're going to see those same customers next Saturday, and they're going to have to explain to them why they sold them tainted spinach that made the customers' kids sick.
And even though it's obvious, I think it's important to state that farmer's markets aren't as common as supermarkets. Even if this bill forces out 5% due to government-hating farmers, and another 5% who simply can't afford the additional cost, that's still a pretty big hit to an industry of this size. (And anyone who's ever spoken to a vendor at their local farmer's market knows these %s are laughably low.)
edit- made the customers' kids sick.
The fact that Monsanto seems to be connected to this is sketchy. But I'm just judging this based on the bill's own merits, not who proposed it.
Edit: to be clear, though, I definitely think "fixing the FDA" is a much higher priority than "regulating farmer's markets" right now.
I'm all for regulating where it is protecting us. Those not in favour, who in my opinion, couldn't give a damn about what they sold.