I have been working with a committee on limiting agricultural over-regulation in our county. Whether we will be successful, and how long it will take, only the future knows. I am encouraged by the drive and focus of our group despite Department of Agriculture suggestions that if we are having problems when one inspector shows up on small farms, they will send two. . . .

I am not sure where the crux of the matter lies, but I suspect it is partly because inspectors are over-worked, underpaid, lack the correct knowledge to perform their job correctly or that authority filled regulatory positions such as this attract morons. And it is not just the inspectors who are to blame. The rule-makers at the State level also play their part in driving the idiocy forward.

What I am calling over-regulation is from the view point of a small farmer.1  This same farm-gate bureaucratic nightmare might be called inadequate regulation by the Department of Agriculture, or seen as no regulation at all by the consumer. Herein lines a major problem in today’s climate. When the news headlines flash “Food Scare” across the nation’s screens worried citizens cry “Regulate! Regulate!” and their toadying political representatives seek to pile on more regulation without any of them trying to understand the problem, the scale, or the needs.

From the consumer point of view, food–especially when connected with something so filthy sounding as a “farm”–needs to be clean (read, white styro trays and lots of cling film or flashy packaging), healthy, safe (Really, two issues which have been combined. We all know most Americans wouldn’t know healthy food if it bit them. . .) and cheap. If a consumer stops to think about what they are buying, these are likely the first categories of consideration.

From the farmer’s point of view, producing food needs to cost less, involve less hassle for more gain, and the regulations need to be guidelines which are easy to follow and make common sense. Here is the disconnect. The Department of Agriculture is on the side of the consumer, protecting them, while heaping inane legislation on farmers to the point of breaking them. Talk about biting the hand that feeds you.

Let’s take a for-instance. If I have chickens and I want to sell some eggs to my neighbors, I can without any hassle. I don’t need a license as long as I sell from the farm and have less than 3000 birds. There are no regulations which I need to follow, or even any best-practice guidelines. I can re-use egg cartons, wash the eggs in my kitchen sink, and put them out with with the veggies for sale on the corner of the farm. I don’t have to candle the eggs. I could, if I really had no common sense, put them out in an old mailbox–you’ve seen them, those gigantic ones which must become ovens in the summer. I’ve passed plenty of these with EGGS brightly painted on the sides out in front of rural properties. I can store the eggs I have for sale in my home refrigerator and legally sell to anyone except restaurants and retail establishments. My customers are my regulators. If they get a rotten egg, or one with a half-formed chick, they call up or stop by quickly and let me know. Either I hear back from them or I don’t. In 16 years of trading in eggs this way–via direct farmhouse sales, not the roadside oven–we have only had a complaint twice due to chicken embryos, and both times the customer was one back with apologies and an extra free dozen of eggs. Word of mouth sales keep up busy with more customers than we have capacity for.

Now, say I wanted to sell my eggs at a farmers’ market or the little corner store or to a local restaurant. I then step from the realm of the small farmer into the giant catchall of the industrial egg producer. It doesn’t matter that my flock, at it’s biggest, is 50 chickens and that generally I will only sell two or three dozen eggs a week for 8 months. To sell to the general public you must play with the big-boys. It doesn’t matter that the customers–the restaurant chefs, the general store owner and the farmers’ market shoppers–seek me out, and know and understand the provenance of my eggs. That isn’t enough. Full compliance with all the egg regulations and nit-picky inspections are the order of the day. No adjustment for scale of production. No pandering to common sense, self-regulation, or market access.

To be a licensed, legitimate “egg dealer” one must pay a yearly $30 fee, contend with a minimum of 4 annual inspections, and dance to the tune of whatever the inspectors say–usually under threat of fines and loosing your licence. Gone are the quaintly, farmy mis-match of eggs in recycled cartons. Every egg must be graded and in a fresh box with a state seal on it. Eggs must now be washed under a litany of rules and procedures–I especially love the last one where each egg must be dried by a fresh paper towel. . . .2 In addition to this you must carry liability insurance and label your egg cartons, not only with your farm’s information but also the helpful reminder that the eggs must be refrigerated. Also, eggs should be marked as potentially hazardous due to their capacity to harbor disease. But complying with these minimum requirements isn’t always enough. On a recent visit to a friend’s egg “dealership” the inspector required either a locking door on her refrigerator–a special one just for the eggs–or on the outbuilding it resides in, as if someone in this remote location was going to tamper with the eggs. The inspector also inquired into the farm’s bio-security practices, failing to note the out-of-the-way location, lack of traffic and less than 40 hens. This same inspector forgot to bring their own boots, and had no sanitizer to clean the forgotten boots or vehicle tires before heading to the next farm. . . Another burden on the small farmer. After severely rattling my friend. the inspector threatened to show up unexpected, for the next visit, to make sure that full compliance with their whims had been achieved. All of this to be able to sell some eggs at the local grocery in a small community.

So which is it to be?  Do we do our best to promote local, small scale agriculture and community food-security, or do we cave in to panicy pencil-pushers covering their butts from liability by inventing more and more useless rules? Rules which have little to do with safety, health or common sense and more to do with enforcement for enforcement’s sake. If I bought eggs from a large corporate egg-farm then perhaps the rules and the scale they aim to protect me from are valid. But I, and many of my neighbors, prefer to live on the edge and to buy food from people we know and can trust. Surely for those such as us there can be a means of lightening the regulatory burden.

Technorati Tags: eggs, egg production, chickens, laying hens, egg dealers, wsda, farm fresh eggs, eggs for sale, farm regulation, overregulatory burden, small farms

1. For the sake of making it painfully obvious I am distinguishing between a small-scale farmer who may farm up to 100 acres, but probably a lot less, and the industrial-scale agribusiness man.
2. In truth, eggs shouldn’t be washed or scrubbed at all unless absolutely necessary. The cleaner the egg is naturally the better and shows the mark of good husbandry. Eggs are coated in a natural, waxy film. Any washing rubs this protective coating off the porous eggshell exposing it to contamination from outside. Think about that as you read the rules for the sanitizer in the wash water. What exactly is in commercially processed eggs?