Food safety bill passes with exemption for small farms

The Food Safety Modernization Act passed by the U.S. House Tuesday strengthens government oversight of food processing facilities and farms, but a controversial part of the bill exempts small farms from most safety oversight.

The exemption means the farmers who sell at farmers markets or to restaurants and sell less than $500,000 a year do not have to adhere to the same new safety regulations as larger farmers under the new food safety bill.

That provision doesn't make Apple Valley farmer Gary Pahl very happy. He says to be safety certified under the USDA's Good Agricultural Practices or GAP is costly. He has one employee whose sole job is working on GAP. Pahl talked about the food safety bill in an interview last month:

I'm not too fond of what they came up with the $500,000 cap. Being as we're a mid size farm, it puts us at a disadvantage since we have to be GAP certified and a smaller grower doesn't have to be GAP certified.

If I were writing that bill I would put those dollars toward educating, make a standardized GAP program for everybody, whether you be a small scale farmer or a large scale farmer, so everybody's food and packages are traceable back to the farm field that it was picked in.

Tracing food back to the source is key in case of recalls. The new food safety bill gives the Food and Drug Administration more power to force recalls when food poisoning outbreaks occur. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that nationally 48 million people are sickened by tainted food every year.

Joellen Feirtag is a food safety specialist at the University of Minnesota Extension. She teaches farmers and food processors how to handle food safely. She says all farmers should have some safety training, no matter how much food they sell.

If you're going to expand and make these farms community farms or larger then more issues come up as you make things bigger.

You should be concerned about anybody who makes food and is giving it to the consumer. So there's no difference, it's the same food safety risk.

But some argue that customers can hold farmers accountable for the quality of their food without making it harder on small producers. John Mesko is a farmer and executive director of the Sustainable Farming Association of Minnesota. He says small farms can lose their exemption from safety regulations if they sell tainted food.

And that's really what the bill is saying. We're going to give you this right to exercise some freedom of operation if you're a small operator, but if there's a problem, we reserve the right to take that right away from you and I think that's really what it is.

Mesko notes that farmers who are not exempt and want to make a living farming will still find a way to meet safety regulations, despite the increase in paperwork and expense.

Even with the exemption, however, small producers are under some pressure from such buyers and grocery chains to ensure that their food is safe by, for example, obtaining GAP certification.

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