Earlier this week, the Senate somewhat surprisingly passed the Food Safety and Modernization Act (S510) with the so-called Tester Amendment to protect small farmers from FDA scrutiny for the most part. Those of us who've been following this bill on it's long journey rejoiced. Unfortunately there is still a long way to go in terms of funding and one Constitutional screw up that needs to be sorted out. This map shows the breakdown of how the votes went down. Frankly, I'm still in shock that it passed by such a large margin considering all the lobbying that was going on at the last minute funded by Big Ag.
I've been trying to write a concise and informative blog post on this for several days now, but this blog post from the Connecticut chapter of the Northeast Organic Farming Association does a much better job than I ever could.
Living in an agricultural community, it was really important to me that the small farmers (according to the new amendment any farm with revenues less than $500,000 and who delivers only within 250 miles of the farm) be protected so that I can continue to buy my eggs locally and have no worries eating raw cookie dough. I mean really people, priorities!
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