FDA should consider small farms
On the North Fork, a farm tractor plows for the spring crop (March 13, 2008) Credit: Newsday/Michael E. Ach
The produce we eat needs to be safe, affordable and, if at all possible, local. But that's easier said than done.
The Food and Drug Administration is working on a "produce rule," to make fruits and vegetables safer. If the federal agency is not careful in writing the rule, it could impose excessive safety requirements on small farms like those on Long Island. That could make our local food less affordable and imperil our farming industry.
Happily, the FDA is showing signs that it does not plan to issue the regulation from the bureaucratic Mount Olympus without consulting actual farmers. Their two-day visit to Long Island farms this week was an excellent sign that the agency is aware of the balance it needs to strike between safety and economic viability. Still, it won't be easy to write a rule flexible enough to cover both huge lettuce farms in California and far smaller ones on Long Island.
Agriculture represents about 6 percent of the Island's total regional economic product. The number of working farms in Nassau is negligible, but in Suffolk, there are about 600 farms, on 34,000 acres. That's a decrease from the more than 50,000 acres under cultivation in the 1970s. Even with the loss of farmland to advancing development, Suffolk is still the biggest agricultural county in the state, in terms of the dollar value of the crops. While a good chunk of that is ornamental nursery stock and sod, our farmers grow a lot of potatoes, sweet corn, tomatoes, cabbage, lettuce, spinach, cucumbers, broccoli and other produce.
Like everyone else on the Island, farmers have to cope with high costs of energy and taxes, along with the pressure of development. The agriculture business here is very different, say, from the vast swaths of industrial land in California. The first farm that officials from the FDA and the U.S. Department of Agriculture visited on Tuesday was the 30-acre Deer Run Farms in Bellport. It's smaller than most here, but representative of the difficulties our farmers face in bringing us local produce, which provides greater nutrition than food from far away, supports Long Island's economy and reduces the environmental impact of cross-country trucking.
Deer Run's Bob Nolan has already started getting ready for the produce rule: making sure that, if there's ever an outbreak of food poisoning, it can be traced back to a small section of his farm; instructing his workers constantly on the need for hand-washing, and shipping his produce in new boxes, instead of used ones. And he wants to learn more about handling the horse manure he uses to help make the farm's sandy soil more productive. But he doesn't want the FDA to mandate that he hire someone exclusively to oversee food safety.
After a salmonella outbreak in eggs in 2010, this page argued forcefully for passage of the Food Safety Modernization Act. Congress passed it late last year. That important law is what's driving the FDA to write the produce rule. The visit of key agency officials here this week, to observe local farming practices and ask questions, was encouraging. When they sit down to write the rule, they should remember what they saw here and make it stringent -- but fair and flexible, so our farms can prosper.
