Shut Down Industrial Ag, before they shut down your choices!
The USDA's Agricultural Marketing Service, an agency with no food safety expertise or authority, is proposing to establish a set of food safety regulations for leafy greens (spinach, lettuce and cabbage). This "National Leafy Greens Marketing Agreement" is being pushed by the most powerful "Big Ag" players in the industry. It adds a second, conflicting layer of food safety standards and audits on top of FDA food safety rules.
The NLGMA, as proposed, would give the large conventional produce industry the ability to use its own worldview to dictate farming practices. Small scale and organic farmers would have a very small voice in the standard-setting process.
The NLGMA is modeled on state food safety agreements in California and Arizona. In those examples, the conventional produce industry has pushed through food safety regulations that are biased against organic and small-scale farmers, have led to the destruction of wildlife habitat and discouraged good conservation practices on farms.
Diversified farming operations with complex rotations have been shown to be beneficial to the environment. Yet crop-by-crop food safety regulations, such as the NLGMA, are an economic disaster for diversified farming operations, and are biased toward large mono-cultural operations. For a farmer with 40 crops on 100 acres to comply with 40 different food safety regulations is prohibitively burdensome. Crop specific food safety regulations, such as NLGMA, will drive farmers out of environmentally sensitive diversified crop production, and toward chemical-intensive mono-cultural operations. This is counter to the goals of food safety and more environmentally sound agriculture.
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