Leave My Food Alone

This has just come to our attention:

www.leavemyfoodalone.org is a petition designed to stop HR 875. In its current form, the bill could prevent small local organic farms and community gardeners from growing and selling you nutritious, truly fresh, organic produce. It would crush our small local food producers by imposing heavy government regulation that only large corporations could adhere to and make a farmers market almost impossible. It's sort of like NAIS, but for farmers & gardeners.

Please take a moment to read and sign the petition!

Wooohoo! The Obamas will Eat the View!

According to the New York Times, today 23 third graders will join First Lady Michelle Obama on the South Lawn of the White House to break ground on an 1100 square foot kitchen garden that will provide food for family dinners and formal dinners.


The Obamas’ garden will have 55 varieties of vegetables grown from organic seedlings started at the executive mansion’s greenhouses. Almost the entire Obama family, including the President, will pull weeds, “whether they like it or not,” Mrs. Obama said laughing.

Thanks to Roger Dorion at Kitchen Gardeners International who started this idea and promoted it through OnDayOne.org and EatTheView.org, to all who voted and signed petitions, to Michael Pollan for his wonderful letter to the "Farmer-in-Chief", and the two guys who drove around the country in a crazy bus promoting the idea--We did it! What a wonderful example this will be to inspire Americans to start growing their own local, organic food again!

New York Times article
Washington Post article
ABC News article

Bill Filed in the Texas House to Stop Mandatory NAIS

This information comes from FARFA (Farm and Ranch Freedom Alliance) and was sent to us by Healthy Harvester Jerry S. of Shudde Ranch:


Representative Kleinschmidt has filed HB 3322 to stop the Texas Animal Health Commission from making NAIS mandatory. HB 3322 is identical to SB 682, filed earlier this session by Senator Eltife.

If it is made mandatory, NAIS would require that every person who owns even one chicken, horse, cow, sheep, goat, pig, or other livestock animal register their property, tag each animal (in many cases, with electronic forms of ID), and report their movements to a database within 24 hours.

NAIS is an unprecedented expansion of the government bureaucracy into people's private lives and infringes on our property rights. NAIS will impose heavy burdens on livestock owners, driving many small and medium-size farmers and ranchers out of business and discouraging people from owning horses and other livestock as pets. Despite spending over $100 million dollars on NAIS since 2004, the USDA has not released a cost/benefit analysis of NAIS nor has the TAHC.

NAIS will not increase the safety of our food supply. Most food-borne illnesses are from contamination at slaughterhouses or in food handling and preparation. NAIS tracking ends at the time of slaughter, so it will not address these issues or increase our ability to trace contaminated meats once they are in the food supply chain. By driving small farmers out of existence, NAIS will increase the consolidation of our food supply into a small number of large companies, destroying consumers' food purchasing options and increasing prices.

The New York Times published a great Op/Ed that explains the small farmer's view on NAIS.

Ultimately, we must fight NAIS at both the state and the federal level. By passing this bill in Texas, we not only provide important protections for Texans, but we send a signal to Congress that Texans are opposed to the NAIS, helping us at the federal level. Please call your State Senator and Representative this week to urge him or her to co-sponsor SB 682 and HB 3322! For a list of contacts of your Representatives, please enter your physical address at http://www.fyi.legis.state.tx.us/

Neither bill has been set for a committee hearing yet, and we anticipate significant opposition to getting the bills out of committee. So it is critical that more legislators step forward to co-sponsor these bills, to provide the impetus to move them forward!

You can read the bill and follow its progress here.

Big Win for Sustainable Foods

Good news! (And we all know we can use some!) The President recently chose Kathleen Merrigan, director of the Agriculture, Food and Environment Program at Tufts to serve as the Deputy USDA Secretary. Merrigan made the "sustainable dozen" list of deputy secretary candidates put forward by Iowa-based Food Democracy Now.

Over the years, she has been involved in sustainable agriculture policy in organics, conservation, food access, and small farm issues. Most impressively, while a Vermont senate staffer, she drafted the Organic Food and Production Act of 1990 and then went on to work at the USDA's agricultural marketing service (AMS), which runs the organic program.