FDA boss to be part of LI farm tour

The head of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration is expected to tour Long Island farms next week as part of the Food Safety Modernization Act signed into law in January, the Long Island Farm Bureau announced Tuesday.

The FDA said it hadn't finalized Commissioner Margaret Hamburg's schedule, but plans call for her to drop by next Tuesday during an eight-farm tour being taken by other officials from the FDA and the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The tour concludes Wednesday, and an FDA spokeswoman said the deputy commissioner, Michael Taylor, will attend.

The visits are designed to let small and midsized growers here give federal regulators a taste of farm practices before detailed regulations are crafted for the food safety act.

“I wanted them to come to Long Island to see how we farm,“ bureau board member Bob Nolan said Tuesday from his family-owned Deer Run Farm in Brookhaven, one of the tour stops. “I'm not a thousand-acre farm. I'm a 30-acre farm. I can't afford to hire a food safety person on staff, where some of the bigger companies in California have a team of food safety people. I am the food safety guy, I'm everything.“

Nolan said he was on the USDA's fruit and vegetable advisory panel in March when he pitched the tour. He'd heard about regulators visiting other regions before writing new rules.

The tour covers potato, fruit and organic vegetable farms.

New regulations are expected to touch practices such as workers' training, safety checks of water and use of manure.

Nolan thinks the rules won't be extreme but added, “The issue is: Are we going to be able to handle all the regulations and still make a living?“