This is the text of the message I sent regarding the horrendous farm bills and attack on food freedom. To call the current bills HR 875, HR 814, SR 425, and HR 759 outrageous would be wrong. The correct word is obscene. To which I could add vile, disgusting, and repugnant without engaging in overstatement. The implications and impact of these bills upon small family farms, and even backyard gardeners producing only for their own use, is totally unacceptable. The small family farm, which Congress says it supports, would be made unviable by regulatory fiat and thus destroyed. These bills are so broad and so inclusive in their micromanagement that through a regime of regulation it would require the small farmer to be a lawyer as well as a farmer. Certainly the small farmer cannot retain a large legal staff as used by large corporate combines and thus would be driven out of business. The new labyrinth would literally require a farmer to file a report to the Federal Government for a farm animal straying out the yard or face draconian fines.
As always the question that must be asked is: Cui Bono? (Who benefits?) WHO BENEFITS? That is the question that must be addressed to understand the push behind these bills. These bills are solely and only for the benefit of large multinational agribusiness combines as they are the only ones with the money, lawyers, and connections to navigate this Byzantine Labyrinth . The perfidy of even allowing these bills out of committee speaks volumes. And those are neither pretty nor enlightened volumes.
These bills would not enhance food safety but degrade it, by preventing, through the creation of that maze of confusing, and needless, regulation and paperwork a legal preference only for those products produced by the major corporate players. The result is, predictably, it would drive small farms out of business and thus preventing access to wholesome locally grown farm produce. By imposing an unnecessary, and irresponsible, regulatory burdern impossible to navigate by the small farmer it makes farming unprofitable and and, because draconian fines and land seizure, even personally dangerous. Consequently it would end in killing family farms (particularly Organic Producers).
Even further the power to enforce this tyrannical regimen is invested in a non-elected "Agriculture Czar" (called an “Administrator” and no doubt well controlled by major agribusiness). The maze of counterproductive regulations would enshrine petrochemical based farming while imposing draconian penalties for non-compliance with these fundamentally unsound farming practices. And to what effect? What it would enshrine by de-facto fiat is the use of toxic pesticides, non-renewable strip mine farming, and place farmers wishing to produce a wholesome product at the mercy of well heeled corporate agribusiness effectively preventing them from saving their own seed (the processing requirements and certification, never before necessary and not now, are such as to be beyond the means of small producers) thus forcing them to purchase their seed, fertilizer, and pest control in the most toxic forms. Thus it is control and profit by a few at the expense of wholesome food production by a growing natural farming movement at which this bill is aimed. No, far from enhancing food safety, the dishonest pretext for these bills, these measures would degrade food safety while accruing to the profit only of a small clique of already massive, and rapacious, agri-combines such as Monsanto and Cargill.
The bills are so broad, and so onerous, as to effectively provide for the elimination of backyard gardens kept by those of use who learned long ago that what we could grow through our own efforts was better tasting and HEALTHIER than the mass produced, nutrient deprived, product of corporate farms.
I cannot believe that Congress Members from an agriculturally dependent State, with a rich heritage of small farms, could in good conscience support these bills. They should not be supported but opposed; and stoutly at that. I will do whatever is within my means to appraise others of these bills and the danger they offer to liberty and true food safety.
Sincerely,