By Mike Adams – The Health Ranger

NaturalNews

How will the new Food Safety Modernization Act actually impact small, local farmers who grow food for CSA’s, local restaurants and grocers? To find out, I took a road trip to Texas and interviewed several small, local farmers to ask them, face to face, how the S.510 Food Safety Modernization Act would impact them.

I spoke to Farmer Brad from HomeSweetFarm.com and captured the conversation on video. You can watch it here:

Here’s a quick excerpt from our conversation about S.510 and the small farm exemption in the Tester Amendment: 

Farmer Brad: To me, that’s so un-American to say hey, you’re going to stay in this box, and you can never grow your business bigger than that. $500,000 [in revenue] is your cap.

Health Ranger: It’s destroying farming jobs.

Farmer Brad: It has made us start to totally re-look at our business plans and how we’re going to sell our food. We’re no longer going to sell wholesale, no longer going to sell to chefs or restaurants, it’s consumer direct only.

Health Ranger: So you’re actually pulling back from some of your expansion plans?

Farmer Brad: We are. We have actually, this last year as we’ve been watching this happen, we’ve been putting plans on hold, and pulling back our business… so again, that’s how this is going to affect the local food system.

Health Ranger: Right.

Farmer Brad: Because we don’t want to get too successful.

If you ever wonder who is destroying America’s economy…
The answer, of course, is the U.S. Congress. By slapping onerous new paperwork and reporting requirements on small farmers (who aren’t even the source of the food problem to begin with), the U.S. Congress is forcing farmers out of business and causing agriculture jobs to be shifted to Mexico and elsewhere.

When you hear American farmers saying they are going to “scale back” their businesses because they “don’t want to get too successful” (to fall under the authority of expanded FDA tyranny over the food supply), you know the country is headed for economic disaster.

America was once founded on ideas of opportunity and that hard work is supposed to pay off. People who invest in their small businesses and grow them should be rewarded, not punished. But now, thanks to the U.S. Congress and the Food Safety Modernization Act, small farmers who find even a little bit of success selling food (because selling $500,000 worth of food is still a very small scale operation, and the actual profit on that might only be $50,000 for a full year of work) are about to find themselves punished for being successful.

So much for free enterprise in America. So much for local food production. Watch for food prices to skyrocket in the coming years, and watch as America’s local food security collapses under the iron fist of the FDA driving small farmers out of business.

But that’s what the empire wants, of course: Complete control over food production so that people are forced to buy their food from the sources Big Government tells them to. Those monopolistic sources are, of course, the powerful, centralized mega-corporations planting GMO crops and spraying them with chemical pesticides. Thanks to the FSMA, we are now living under a bona-fide system of food fascism.

But don’t take my word for it: Ask the farmers yourself! That’s what I’ve been doing, and their answers reveal a disturbing truth: America’s food security is headed South.

And it might be a good idea to start buying some heirloom seeds while you still can, by the way. Before long, local food prices are going to skyrocket, and you’ll need to grow some portion of your own diet. That is, unless you want to eat mega-corporate “food” sprayed with Roundup and containing transgenic “biotechnology” approved by the FDA.

I bet that makes you hungry just thinking about it. GMO corn, anyone?

(C) 2010 Mike Adams

HEIRLOOM ORGANICS SEED PACKS

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6 Responses to “How the Food Safety Modernization Act will destroy American jobs, farms and local foods”

  1. Jim Paulson says:

    I believe we are almost totally beyond being able to reason with the federal government and the greater share of the senators and representatives we send to Washington, D.C..

    So what do we do? We mount campaigns to steer our state senators and representatives into unhinging us from federal pressure through Tenth Amendment nullification. That is to say that we refuse to go along with a federal law or mandate because it infringes on our individual and state Rights.

    We can more easily lean on our state representatives and the Tenth Amendment nullification process is totally constitutional. We need not feel like prisoners! But we MUST get busy and stay busy working toward this end!

    That we even consider the possibility that anyone has a right or the authority to tell us that we cannot provide a garden or food for our families is idiotic and totally unacceptable!

    WAKE UP! STAND UP! SPEAK UP! OR PREPARE TO LICK THE BOOTS OF YOU MASTERS!

  2. Kev Coleman says:

    Nearly forgot. Well written suggestion Esther. Lets see if the groups of people can not gather their collective efforts into a concerted counter attack against all this corporate control.

  3. Kev Coleman says:

    I watched this on Mikes site the other day and the message couldn’t have been clearer. If the small farmers are to survive they will have to scale back so much that they will create an artificial shortage by staying under the half million dollars threshold and that will cause chaos for the growing population of organic and local grown food advocates who have finally got wise to the truth about factory and chemical farming.

    All I can say is maybe these same farmers could encourage the same customers to grow some things for themselves like the stuff that is easy whilst the farmers concentrate on growing the more difficult but equally important food crops. By doing that they will achieve a triple whammy. First they will empower the people to become semi-self sufficient. They will also maintain the market for organic and small farm grown food and finally they will stay below the threshold set by the government.
    At least this way the market will not be totally lost and it may well encourage a bit of lobbying by all the people involved in this venture to get the senate to raise that pathetically low threshold and allow the farmers to feed the people with healthy food without the unnecessary and thuggish involvement of the FDA.

    We can only but hope that this will happen.

  4. InTheKeyOfE says:

    When I drive up to Portland, OR to visit my kids and grandson I pass my The State of Jefferson, a spot prior to the border where someone has designated their property as its own entity. I do not know the politics of this self-labeled “State” but I like their moxie. This is another thing that can be done. Like-minded people coming together and apart. As I have been nomadic all my life, and have never found a place where I truly felt that I belonged, I have kept an eye out for such a place. I have looked into intentional communities around the world, but not being a joiner, and always coming up against a fairly rigid set of beliefs which various communities have, that has never come to fruition. Now, a new set of forces is coming into being. Surveillance and monitoring and legislation geared to force people from the small farm and community, and to herd them into the city where control is easier. The fight is on and I will still be on the lookout for people who are into organic, wholesome food, music, nature, and compassion. I can build. I can till. I can play.

    dag154@gmail.com

  5. Andrea says:

    The bottom line for all of this farm control is to corral
    people into the GMO market even though the majority who
    have a brain do not want this poison forced upon them.
    Dictatorship.

  6. Esther Cook says:

    This is too serious to do nothing more than righteously complain about or or say that congress seems to be out to destroy the country.
    There is a WAR between BigGuvCorporations and those who support natural means of doing things. Big Guv has advantages like The Law on their side, and funds for lobbyists.

    BigPharma, BigAg, and all other BigGuvCorps, multinationals are made so big not DESPITE government, but with its help, just as in this example. One of the most important counterattacks is to recognize and promote that fact.

    Meanwhile Farmer Brad and others like him need to take advantage of the fact that corporations as such are easy to create, no limit to the number of them you can form, own or invest in. You do need to keep them somewhat separate, but you can certainly form local farmer organizations to help counteract the excessive clout of the corrupt BigAgs.

    Brad, Inc. can own, say, the chicken operation, while his wife Mary is the principal stockholder of MarySmith Farms, Inc. and runs all the beef, son James owns the alfalfa fields, etc. etc. Employees can be owners, too, to help maintain the legal separations so the group can do $4 million and every corporation stays under $300k (to allow for unexpectedly profitable years).

    We HAVE to think of things like that. The American people are barely starting to catch on, but we have to survive the efforts to crush all raw milk (BigAg farms cannot safely produce it; their milk MUST be pasteurized) and other healthy things until most of the people “get it.”

    We are simply not fighting a fair war, based on fair competition. We have to be clever then.

    BigGuvCorp’s various products are toxic to people and earth. It is a matter of life and death to be clever in this battle.