FDA regulating feed

Sorry, I thought we got to pick people to represent us and they do our bidding. I don't pretend that it always is perfect, but by the length of the list of folks that want to leave their country and live in ours, we aren't doing as bad as the "sky is falling" crowd might have you think.

But that isn't really the topic, is it?
The topic is FDA looking for input on proposed regulation of food/feed production. Recently, we dealt with Mad Cow, melamine in dog food, salmonella in peanut butter, and dozens of other contaminates. Creating some sort of regulation, blending manufacturer's policies and procedures with independent inspections, seems reasonable. Focusing only on larger production facilities, because they impact more people, also seems reasonable.

Some have speculated this would impact the waste product of breweries, spent brewer's grains. I contend that the current proposal excludes those that produce under $500,000 in animal feed. Based on what is written into this proposal, I believe most breweries would be exempt, by a huge margin. Even if that exemption were removed and total income from all sources were used to push such businesses into the over $500,000 category, splitting the business into two separate businesses, one that makes beer and one that markets spent brewers grain. Not rocket science.
Several of my comments and counter comments has focused on this exception.

Whether we need more or less regulation, this deal bothers me.

Why is FDA involved? This is an ag issue, not a food issue.

Animal feed should not be regulated by unelected people that are accustomed to regulating human foods.

If we need more regulation, have the proper beauracratic agency do it?

Not FDA. I should have been more clear in my openning message.

Paul

The FDA is not elected. They lord over us with no connection with votes. We don't pick them. They don't represent us.

None of that has anything to do with the local brew pub giving its spent barley to farmers, stores giving their spent produce, bakeries giving their dated bread yet all of these things will fall under the FDA's FSMA. Even a VERY VERY small brew pub, restaurant, store or bakery has annual gross sales greater than the $500K exemption.

You keep saying that but you are not understanding the regulations. It is $500K of TOTAL GROSS SALES for all aspects of the business. Not $500K of animal feed. This makes it cover almost everyone.

Won't work. They specifically do not allow that. This came out in the Q&A sessions with the FDA.

No, but not allowed either. You're proposing doing something illegal to skirt the law. Won't work. They said we may not do that. Pay attention.

__________________
SugarMtnFarm.com -- Pastured Pigs, Poultry, Sheep, Dogs and Kids

Do we really get to do that?

Not perfect, but yes, if we want to make our wishes known, we elect people to represent us. They, in turn, control FDA.

Go to the original FDA web site on this thread. Read down to B.proposed 597.3, then continue down to Effect on proposal 507.5(e) and(f). Now, find Other effects. Then go to Less than $500,000........animal food. It says animal feed, not a combined total of beer, whiskey or pasture raised pork chops.

This is what is proposed, but as it stands, a brewery, or any other business that produces under a half million dollars of Animal feed is exempt from any new regulation.

Who knows what will be allowed and what is skirting the law. as you know, some states prohibit raw milk sales, but allow herd shares. So, skirting the law is clearly allowed.

You are entirely too trusting and misconstruing. What the FDA has said in Q&A sessions is that all activities of a business will be considered in the GROSS ANNUAL SALES figure. Once a government agency gets their hooks in you they don't let go. It benefits them to gain more and more control because that grows their department and funding which in turn grows the bureaucrats's annual pay.

The exemption is not as you're claiming.

$500K is an extremely low gross annual sales threshold. That's $1,400 a day which is trivial for most small businesses.

The USDA is the rightful manager of things related to livestock, not the FDA.

There is no problem to be solved here with this regulation. We're fine without it.

There is no need for government intervention.

I vote but I never voted for the FSMA. In fact I've argued against it for years. FSMA is an imposition of the few on the many, of the select urbanite on the rural folk. We don't need it.

FSMA is just government expansion which will hurt small farmers, small brewers and other people as well as hurting consumers, waste more organic materials, increase the cost of things, etc.

If they wanted to actually improve food safety there are a lot of things they could do that they are not doing and a lot of things they are planning to do that they should not do and they are attacking the wrong scale of producers.

FSMA is badly planned or a clever plan to hurt people. Take your pick.

__________________
SugarMtnFarm.com -- Pastured Pigs, Poultry, Sheep, Dogs and Kids

I would say no to no more regulations.

If they must do something put an label on whatever saying it is not inspected and the dangers. If you still want to buy the item go for it. If your worried about the quality don't buy it. Or the industry can regulate itself.."new packaging" tested safe for..whatever and charge a premium for this "tested" product.

I wonder if this new law has something to do with the PEDV in pigs.

I have never seen evidence that "we" get to elect anyone. We are just told we do. It's the same idea that makes people feel that there's a good intention involved when the government wants to regulate what we can obtain to feed our livestock....but it's just an idea. There's no real evidence of good intentions or an ability to effect government decisions through any avenue they advertise.

The paragraph below that they say they are seeking comment as to if this should be modified to include human food sales.

Typically this means the final rule will be so modified, it is their intent to include all feed/food for human or animal use.

I see where your comments come from, but you need to be able to understand their processes in expanding the initial rules.

Paul

I don't think so. The new regulations of FSMA came into effect long before PEDv showed up in the United states. Most of the FSMA is related to trying to fix problems that occur with Big Ag practices. Unfortunately they are being applied in an overly broad heavy handed manner to small farms. A lot have people have spent a lot of words pointing out that a lot of FSMA won't achieve what the FDA claims but will instead burden small farms and drive them out of business. The FDA has delayed implementing the FSMA in order to do a second round of listening sessions, Q&A and comment period. This next comment period ends March 31st so now is the time to let them know what you think about the program. Here is a good link to find some of the many problems with the FSMA:

http://www.google.com/search?q=probl...utf-8&oe=utf-8

Here is how to comment on the rules:

http://www.fda.gov/Food/GuidanceRegu.../ucm261689.htm

__________________
SugarMtnFarm.com -- Pastured Pigs, Poultry, Sheep, Dogs and Kids

Wake up.

__________________

Honesty and integrity are homesteading virtues.

If you think that the lobbyists have nothing to do with writing this legislation you are sadly mistaken. The biggest beneficiaries would be the large mega-brewers who can easily absorb the cost by adding another 2 or 3 cents to a bottle of beer. It's well known that the craft brewers are eating into their margins.

On the political side, the federal government (which is a misnomer because with "incorporation" is actually a national government) has grown grossly out of scale of what was intended. From Article I, "The Number of Representatives shall not exceed one for every thirty Thousand, but each State shall have at Least one Representative"

With 300 million citizens that means each representative is elected by roughly 500,000 citizens. I don't think my voice really matters above the lobbyists and 499,999 other citizens.

__________________
It's not me it's spell check.

If they really was worried about our health they would open all the slaughterhouses that were bought up and closed down. Their is less risk of a mass contamination if it is not a mega slaughterhouse like they have now.

I share everyone's frustration with govt regulations.

I have been very involved in the FSMA for my job. I spent the day with the main authors a few months back and found they were quite appreciative of feedback. Honestly from my perspective they are trying to make the food system in this country safer. Some of it is overboard and some of it doesn't go far enough. Like it or hate it increased regulation is being called far across the board due to people literally dying from eating food because sometimes people aren't good at self regulation.

The price cutoffs for the FSMA are, in my opinion, a major benefit to small farmers and put most of the burden on medium producers. This is the federal govt way of doing things - help the giants, leave the small guys alone and put all the weight on the middle class or medium sized grower.
Why a benefit to small producers? Because the exemption allows them to more easily compete with the middle sized farmer. We small guys know we can't beat out Tyson chicken and we usually don't try to BUT having to do less work then the medium sized guy will make it easier to sell on the local market and thus force him/her into the commodity market. I am not saying this is good but I think this is what's going to happen.

So why the income separations? Because FDA is trying to impact the largest number of consumers. They figure small producers don't affect that many people while medium and large do. Small scale producers don't usually get their product far from home and are easy to corral in case of a food born illness - medium and large are trickier.

I've been in farming my whole life and to me $500,000 is not a small farmer but a medium sized farmer (or in this case feed seller).

I get pretty worked up this time of year because I fall into the middle class tax bracket and get hammered in taxes. However I don't see the FSMA act as govt overstepping, although I encourage everyone to read the act and comment.

How did the human race survive thousands of years without government regulation in every facet of their lives? It's really amazing. We should be extinct.

The thing is, government does all it can to promote ignorance in people and separate them from common sense and then when people can't make simple decisions to not kill themselves, government steps in and offers their almighty protection.

Why, just WHY do we believe it's really about benevolence?

I'm rather weary of society's love affair with safety. No one can really Live life in a bubble.

The government does not have any authority to open slaughterhouses that private businesses bought up and closed down.
If there were no mega slaughterhouses there would not be any huge recalls, but there is nothing to support that food would be safer. Just be lots of small quantities of contaminated meat, etc. Do you think that when there is a million pounds of recalled ground beef announced on the news, that there isn't also hundreds of small operations getting written up for their food safety violations?
Might be an easy way to understand the world if big was bad and small was safe. But as much as we might wish it were so, it just isn't so.

The uncomfortable truth is freedom is messy and chaotic. People have to pay attention and be vigilant for their own well being in a free society. Even still, bad things happen to good people in free societies as well as in ones with a smothering government.

Some people, do not want to pay attention to their food source, buy from their local farmer, ask questions or grow some of their own food. They crave the nanny state.

I'll say it again. Regulations like these at the state level make some sense. If Ohio wants to create extremely strict farm feed laws, Ohioans will need to judge whether their laws strike the right balance between food safety and the risk of increasing the operating costs of their state food industry. An improvement in food supply safety would benefit the state's industry making it a net benefit as long as those regulations didn't drive many producers out of business or drive up the cost of food higher than what consumers are willing to pay. In other words, the regulation would necessarily be EFFICIENT. If the regulation is a success, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Nebraska model their laws around Ohio's feed supply law. This is the way FEDERALISM is supposed to work.

__________________
'Emergencies' have always been the pretext on which the safeguards of individual liberty have been eroded.

Friedrich August von Hayek

And so, the govt does its job very well. Anyhow from their point of view.

It creates class warfare and we squabble amongst ourselves pointing fingers back and forth, instead of hold their feet to the fire and make them make good, intelligent regulations that actually do something positive.

Paul

I'd make a rather large bet that it was government regulation that lead to those same slaughterhouses being sold to mega-corp. That's how all this works.

Mega-corp lobbyist gets new regulation introduced or piggybacked onto other things in the name of Safety, Security, "The Children" or any other means that the government uses to scare the hell out of sheeple. On it's face it can even make sense. "How can you oppose safer food?"

To mega-corp that regulation will mean pennies on a pound of ground beef. To the mid size producer that same regulation will mean 50 cents or a dollar. The mid-size producer who was probably already struggling to compete can no longer make a profit but has enough volume that mega-corp can buy them up and operation quite profitably. Or mega-corp just let's them die knowing that they will get the bulk of the business.

Small producers are just fleas annoying the dog to mega-corp hence the exemptions. it makes it more palatable to sell to the sheeple.

__________________
It's not me it's spell check.

Those darn evil Capitalists. The government should just take control. Make this country a Worker's Paradise. Then build every slaughterhouse exactly the same size, spaced evenly across the country in order to give everyone equal access. But first we need to murder the Czar.

The top 10 meat companies control about 90% of the meat in this country. They aren't the least bit interested in the mom and pop places that dot the countryside. Just not economical.
What fictional rule is cheap for a big slaughter plant but adds 50 cents to others? Just say you hate rich people and then leave it alone.