Back in the end of January I got a call from a colleague of mine, Roger Noonan of Middle Branch Farm in Milford, NH. Rog wears two hats; one as the owner of a family farm growing organic produce and the other as the President of the New England office of the National Farmers Union, a federal lobbying organization and ag watchdog. We got to know each other when working on understanding the Food Safety Modernization Act about 10 years ago, when the FDA decided to get in the agricultural oversight aspect of food safety. It took many years to hone the proposal to make what it is today. However, what was proposed in 2011 was draconian oversight and expense for small farms, so much work had to be negotiated on the original mandates. We had help from State and Congressional representatives, the University of New Hampshire Cooperative Extension Service, the NH Department of Agriculture, Markets and Food, our State and National Farm Bureau, and a host of farmers writing comments and pleading cases. Many farms had to recapitalize for this additional federal oversight, and put protocols in place for ensuing inspections. It has been a long and arduous road to compliance.
So Roger was agitated, as he often is when called to Washington for endless meetings (Zoom and otherwise) with the bureaucrats and scientists who craft these laws. What he had to report to me was this: In November the FDA had come out with a revised plan for product traceability. By way of example, this is essentially what it was intended to do: everything that goes out of our fields and pack barn must be traceable back to the source. If you feel you got sick because of a cabbage you ate that was one of ours, we must be able to identify that cabbage, what day it was harvested, what day it was delivered, from which field it was harvested, and have a record of how it was grown in the field. That is currently required.
However, the FDA wanted to fine tune the requirements. Thus in November they released a Washington-area press release with an attached 800-page document for which the comment period would be about two months. These two months would be the two months which are devoted --on our farm— to packing root crops, winterizing greenhouses, getting seed orders for 2021 going, as well as finding time to celebrate a holiday season. Not a lot of time for a farm family to digest 800 pages of gumbo while trying to make a living.
Rog had been involved from the start, and our State University Ag Extension team had been trying to read and get through the proposed rules themselves. Clarity is never generated in any federal proposed legislation. Most of us have to wonder why any additional proposal ruling on produce traceability could not have been reduced to a 20 page paper, instead of 800 pages. I never even attempted to access the document on the internet, much less read it and understand it in the 10 days that was left in the comment period. Ultimately, comments were sent from interest groups and individuals. Outcomes are awaited. I can’t wait to find out what GPS coordinates…and how specific they need be- will be required of us to trace a quart of berries back to where in a given field they were harvested.
Ok, I admit to being a bit of a grump about this stuff. Why not just 20 pages? Do the authors of this 800-page report really think that most farmers (or small businesses) hire HR people who sit around following this stuff and reading reports that may affect their livelihoods? If Roger hadn’t called me, how was I supposed to know we might be whacked by this legislation?
We farmers and small businesses spend increasing amounts of time and money filing reports with bureaucracies that justify their existence by exerting oversight. We have quarterly water-use reports to DES, annual Pesticide Reporting for the annual issuance of a license to be an applicator, an endless parade of USDA Statistical Surveys, paperwork filed to get our Jamaican laborers here, documentation of worker training for the State of NH, as well as for the FDA, regarding personal hygiene , pesticide and food safety and all the documentation related to that. Time is spent accommodating insurance and workmans’ comp inspection. Soon we will be filing annual nutrient management programs for our farms. That is going to be a time-burner for a farm like ours.
When the first Food Safety Mandates came out back in 2013, the FDA held an open meeting locally. A Vermont farmer stood up and said that there was disproportionate capital expense for small farms to absorb in order to come into compliance. The FDA response to him? “You should factor it in to your cost of doing business.” The farmer shot back, “I see it factored into an expanding hole in my profitability.”
Oversight usually comes about because of abuse. When there is a need for oversight, politicians may address it or not, depending how strong lobbying elements come into play. But it can be handled inappropriately in an effort to appear to be taking action. For example, the USDA (US Department of Agriculture) already had developed, and had in place, an extensive food safety plan. Produce buyers could require this plan to be utilized by farmers so as to enforce an extra level of food security for the buyers. . The more recent FDA program was to be mandatory of every farm whom grosses $25,000 annually, but differed very little, and the FDA never utilized or built on the program or science the USDA already had in place. They spent extra taxpayer money keeping everything in house. Seems a discouraging waste of taxpayers money and I complained about that. . Now many farmers have to comply with two different bureaucracies in order to sell the same product.
I know this issue is not going away, nor get throttled back, nor should it be. Everybody wants as much food safety as possible. Food safety is important, and there is no doubt that understanding FSMA has been productive in changing our cultural mindset, as well as in helping us understand the pathways of contamination. I think, though, that it is important for the consumer to understand that oversight and enforcement is yet another billable hours exercise contributing to the cost of food. That cost eats a proportionately bigger hole in the profitability of a small farm than it does of a larger farm. If we continue trying to become more food secure regionally, and to encourage new small enterprises, we must be mindful of these administrative and capital costs and the disproportionate burden they place upon small regional family farms.
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