“I can fight the bugs, I can fight the lack of rain, but when the guy comes with a clipboard what are you going to do?”, asks farmer who’s shutting down his business, thanks to the Obama FDA:
Bessemer called it quits out of frustration with pending federal food safety regulations that likely will require farmers to very specifically track their produce and how it is handled from seed to sale, among other things.
The new rules are part of the Food Safety Modernization Act, sweeping changes within the Food and Drug Administration aimed at making our food system safer by being able to pinpoint where contamination occurs. The federal law was passed in 2011, but how it will be implemented is still a work in progress.
It will be a few years before the regulations are finalized and a few more years before farms are required to follow them, but Bessemer believes there are just too many layers of government red tape and paperwork that would cost him too much.
At 70, Bessemer said he would rather throw in the towel than continue.
“We don’t want to quit, we were forced out of the business. We can’t spend enough money to comply,” he said. “We’ve been farming for 117 years. I’m the third generation and we’re being put out of business by the government. We can’t comply with all of the safety laws. We haven’t poisoned anybody with an ear of corn for 117 years and we’ve shipped it all over,” he said.
“I can fight the bugs, I can fight the lack of rain, but when the guy comes with a clipboard what are you going to do?” Bessemer said.
— “Bessemer Farms calls it quits, says new farm rules too cumbersome,” from Ohio.com (the Akron Beacon Journal Online), today. As Jon Gabriel of the Exurban League once tweeted in 2009, “Just finished Amity Shlaes’ The Forgotten Man today. Obama’s team thinks it’s an economics textbook rather than a cautionary tale.”
(Via SDA.)
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