smaller farms may be exempt from proposed food safety laws
A law proposed to ensure safer food nationwide could make local farms financially insecure. But revisions to the bill, which is likely to pass this week, would exempt small farms.
Andre Cantelmo, co-owner of Heron Pond Farm in South Hampton, said smaller farms would have trouble complying with some of the bookkeeping regulations. “We’re not equipped to do it,” he said. “It would probably put us out of business.”   
Besides, he added, small farms are already held to high standards by the people they meet at the market or on the farm. “We’re more accountable to our customers,” Cantelmo said. “They know us and know where they’re getting their food.”
If the bill passes as it stands before the legislative session comes to a close, it will include amendments to exempt small farms that sell locally and make less than $500,000 a year. These farms would remain under state regulations.
Known as the Food Safety Modernization Act, the proposal requires that the Food and Drug Administration conduct an increased number of inspections of food facilities, farms follow new produce safety standards, importers verify the safety of their imported foods, and food facilities develop hazard analysis plans. The bill also gives the FDA mandatory recall authority, calls for the agency to develop an enhanced food safety surveillance system, and provides it with the ability to suspend a faulty food facility’s registration.
With several notable food recalls in recent years, it’s no wonder legislators are doing something about it. 
But, Lorraine Merrill, commissioner of the New Hampshire Department of Agriculture, said a “one size fits all” approach to regulation would be problematic.
“Everybody wants to make sure that our food is safe,” Merrill said. But, she added, the regulations are designed for large farms and retailers, and it would be “burdensome and expensive” for small farms to meet the same requirements.
“You’d almost have to hire a person just to deal with safety laws,” she said. “It’s just prohibitive.”
The latest Centers for Disease Control and Prevention findings on food-borne illnesses were just released on Dec. 15, updating information that was more than 10 years old. It reported about 48 million people—one in six Americans—get sick from food-borne illnesses. About 128,000 are hospitalized and 3,000 die each year.
While those are significant numbers, it’s an improvement over the previous figures that included 5,000 deaths from both known and unknown pathogens. But, the CDC says in a press release, the two shouldn’t be compared because of improved data and methods.
Merrill noted that the higher numbers of illnesses had been used frequently in discussions of the bill, although the accuracy had long been disputed.
She also said the majority of food-borne illnesses are due to contamination that occurs after food leaves the farm and that a lack of basic safety at home, such as washing hands and surfaces, storing properly and cooking thoroughly, is also to blame.
“We have a very safe food supply,” she said. “It’s really remarkable.” But she said “risk-free” food isn’t possible.
The bill has traveled back and forth between the House and Senate, and was most recently attached to a shell bill, giving it more time. The Senate passed a revised version of the bill on Dec. 19. It goes back to the House this week, with exemptions for small farms.
Kate Donald, of Stout Oak Farm in Epping and Seacoast Eat Local, agrees that the exemptions are important to local farms. She said she called her senator weeks ago to encourage the inclusion of exemptions. The majority of New Hampshire’s farms would qualify for an exemption.
Rob Johnson, executive director of the New Hampshire Farm Bureau Federation, said the organization worked with the staff of retiring Sen. Judd Gregg, who was a primary sponsor of the bill, and Sen. Jeanne Shaheen to minimize its effect on smaller farms. Their support for the Tester-Hagen amendment was pivotal, exempting farms that sell more than half of their products directly to consumers, restaurants, and retailers within the same state, or within 275 miles, and have sales of less than $500,000 per year.
Johnson said growers have expressed concern about the costs in terms of dollars, effort and time required for compliance, including new documentation and recordkeeping, audits, new infrastructure and fees. 
“The Farm Bureau’s position has been that farmers and processors who sell directly to consumers and end users have a direct relationship with their customers, which helps ensure quality, safety, transparency and accountability,” Johnson said, in an e-mail. “Potential risk is inherently limited by their size.”
Also, Johnson said, preventive controls in the meat industry have so far focused only on processing, and the bill gives the FDA oversight into other areas. Johnson said the agency has little expertise to do this.
“Safe food is of primary importance and we believe new regulations should be limited to where the supply chain is far removed from the farm… where the problems have existed, where, by sheer size, problems could pose a substantial risk,” he said. “Regulation with the potential to concentrate the food supply is not a good thing. In the end, this law has that potential.”

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