So long, small-and-sustainable: critics say new Food and Drug Administration regulations implementing the Food Safety Modernization Act could render uneconomic the immemorial practice of using spent beer grains to feed livestock. Both farmers and brewers are upset. [Bangor Daily News/Lewiston, Me., Sun-Journal; proposed rule] More: Glenn Lammi, WLF.
Posts Tagged ‘agriculture and farming’
Food roundup
- Warnings dismissed at time: FDA rules implementing FSMA (Food Safety Modernization Act) of 2011 imperil practices common to organic, small growers, “such as using house-made fertilizers and irrigating from creeks” [Los Angeles Times] Oh, how D.C.’s “public-interest” establishment and its co-thinkers in the press jeered when we and others tried to raise such concerns before the bill passed!
- Related: pursuit of locally grown/artisanal meat options collides with USDA regs that put squeeze on small slaughterhouses, overbroad recalls also a problem [Baylen Linnekin, earlier here, here, and here]
- “America’s Obesity Problem: Legal Mechanisms for Prevention,” Duke Law School conference I spoke at (but did not write a paper for) last year, now online [Duke Forum for Law and Social Change].
- Related: “Wellness programs addressing obesity could lead to litigation, lawyers say” [ABA Journal]
- Looser regulation of microbrewing has already proved boon to Maryland, lawmakers now consider extending it further [Beth Rodgers, Frederick News-Post]
- “Bill introduced to undo California’s ‘glove law’ for food preparers” [KPCC; earlier]
- Sorry, I’ll stay home and thumb through old cookbooks instead: recent American Studies Association Food Studies Caucus program included “Food, Debt, and the Anti-Capitalist Imagination,” “Archives of Domesticity and Dissent: Cookbooks, Cooking Culture, and the Limits of Culinary Exchange,” and “Pedagogies of Food and Eating: Teaching Debt, Dissent, and Identity through Food” [Mary Grabar, Pope Center on “food studies” fad]
Farm and food roundup
- California Medical Association, which seems unruffled by growth of regulatory state when docs are not its targets, backs bill to require warning labels on soda [Governing, AP, Sacramento Bee, Monterey Herald]
- “The Farm Bill Came Surprisingly Close to Fixing Some Protectionist Regulations” [K. William Watson, Cato]
- “New York Alcohol Bill Benefits Big Business at Consumers’ Expense” [Michelle Minton, CEI; earlier; my upcoming Feb. 27 Bastiat Society panel in Charlotte on alcohol regs]
- Lawmakers to OSHA: hands off small farms [Insurance Journal, US News]
- States cheat the system through “heat and eat” food stamp scam [USA Today editorial]
- Why so few chickens are raised in Montana [Baylen Linnekin]
- Comic-book interpretation of Quebec’s great maple syrup heist, including background of legally enforced cartelization [Modern Farmer]
- Seen on “farm tourism” outing: “The USDA requires that only the farmer feed us” [Ira Stoll]
- Next frontier of public-health disapproval: grilled, smoked, and fried food? [Brian Palmer, Slate]
Department of Labor vs. family farms, cont’d
Farms are not supposed to face OSHA regulation unless they have 10 employees, but the agency has tried to get around that rule by declaring that grain storage and handling facilities on farms aren’t really part of the farm. Now 43 Senators have signed a letter warning the agency to back off. [Future of Capitalism; another family farm labor controversy from last year]
“Small Farmers Revolt Over FDA’s Proposed Food Safety Rules”
When Congress passed the Food Safety Modernization Act in 2011, some (I included) warned that it would lay serious regulatory burdens on small producers and distributors of food, threatening to drive many of them out of markets even when their products posed no actual material risk. Lawmakers gestured toward relief for small producers in an amendment, but apparently “gestured” is the operative word. “Now that those who will be regulated under the Act have had time to review and consider the FDA’s proposed FSMA rules, small farmers …are panicking. And with good reason.” [Baylen Linnekin, Reason, earlier; Daren Bakst, Heritage; “New federal regulations could threaten local farms,” Michael Tabor and Nick Maravell, The Gazette (suburban Maryland)]
John Steinbeck, “The Grapes of Wrath,” on crop destruction
In one of the most powerfully felt scenes of his novel The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck indicts the private business system for engaging in a practice as foolish and wicked as the willful destruction of food crops while children went hungry. Did any of the novelist’s New Dealer friends inform him that it was in fact a deliberately planned element of FDR’s agriculture policy? [David Henderson; more from Henderson on John Kenneth Galbraith and the dire effects of FDR’s policy on tenant sharecroppers]
Farm-bias lawyers get $90.8 million
In April, an extensive New York Times investigation by Sharon Lafreniere confirmed and extended what writers associated with the late Andrew Breitbart had been charging for more than two years: the so-called Pigford settlement, in which the U.S. Department of Agriculture agreed to make payments to persons charging racial bias in agriculture programs, is riddled with fraud. If you thought this might stand in the way of a payday for plaintiff’s lawyers in the case, you’re wrong: U.S. District Judge Paul Friedman has just approved a payout of $90.8 million to the lawyers, over objections. That represents the maximum (7.4 percent) of what was being asked for: “The deal set out a fee range between 4.1 percent and 7.4 percent.” [BLT]
“…in five years there’d be a shortage of sand.”
In Argentina, famed for agricultural bounty, government folly leads to shortages of wheat [Bloomberg; original Milton Friedman quote]
Bans on farm-filming, cont’d
“Even though I was always on public property when I filmed the horrors I saw outside that slaughterhouse in February, I became the first person charged under one of these ‘ag-gag’ laws.” [Amy Meyer, Washington Post, Utah]
Environment roundup
- Slate: it’s “fascinating, in a horrified head-shaking …way” to hear RFK Jr. spin his “delusional and dangerous” theories about vaccines [Slate and more, my two cents on the wayward scion]
- What insurance industry behavior tells us about climate change [Eli Lehrer]
- Concern that EU regulations on registration of seed varieties could squeeze smalls, locals, heirlooms [Glyn Moody, TechDirt; Domenic Berry]
- Environmental suits as backdoor grab for policy control [U.S. Chamber, Ron Arnold, DC Examiner and more (“sweetheart litigation”), WLF]
- Symposium on conservatives and the environment: Jonathan Adler, Eli Lehrer, Shi-Ling Hsu and others [Duke Environmental and Policy Law Forum]
- U.K. study: cancer rates and mortality rates among pesticide workers are below the norm [Health and Safety Executive via Angela Logomasini, CEI]
- “Wi-fi made us sick” suit cost city of Portland $172K, but at least voters didn’t put sponsor on school board [Will Radik, Bad Skeptic]
- “EPA acknowledges releasing personal details on farmers” [Fox News] GOP senators introduce bill to curb EPA wetlands overreach [Ilya Shapiro]
- Attorneys’ fees often amount to 80-90% of settlement amounts: latest annual Prop 65 report is out [California attorney general’s office, background]