Farmers’ Market Management Network, Inc. Working cooperatively to enhance Ohio farmers’ markets both large and small to create unity, consistency, and sustainability through collaboration and education.

Food Safety Bill Statement

Congress is considering a number of food safety bills. We encourage you to write your representative to urge them to include language in the law to focus on the problem areas without impacting small farmers and entrepreneurs.

Urge your representatives to:

  1. Provide funding and resources to allow the FDA to enforce existing regulations
  2. Focus on large producers and processors where problems have occurred
  3. Include clear language to specifically differentiate definitions of “farms” and “facilities”.
  4. Insert scale appropriate fees and requirements for smaller producers
  5. Exempt very small producers and on-farm value-added processors that sell at farmers markets or direct to consumers
  6. Exempt  farmers’ markets or cooperatives that provide a site for direct to consumer sales from the registration fee.
  7. Exempt from mandatory traceback systems direct-to-consumer sales of properly labeled, low risk
    farm-processed food products.
  8. Keep Good Agricultural Practices (GAPs) voluntary, not mandatory, for direct-marketing
    producers, and provide practical, affordable GAPs certification options for those farms seeking
    certification
  9. Ensure that standards to the maximum extent possible do not discriminate against diversified
    farming operations
  10. Minimize undue hindrance on the free flow of direct farmer-to-consumer commerce


H.R. 2749 is moving toward a vote in the House. Here is a good level headed analysis of the implications of this particular bill.
http://www.nofa.org/policy/hr2749.php
This bill was reported by Committee and recommended for vote by the full House. The status can be tracked at:
http://www.govtrack.us/congress/bill.xpd?bill=h111-2749

When writing your representatives, a hand written letter has the most impact, followed by a hand-written fax and an email. Many representatives now have online forms to handle the online correspondence.  The following links have information on how to find and contact your representative.
http://www.govtrack.us/congress/findyourreps.xpd?state=OH
or      http://www.visi.com/juan/congress/cgi-bin/newseek.cgi?site=ctc&state=oh

Below is a sample letter to get you started:

Sample Letter in .txt

Sample Letter in .doc