I know this is offtopic, but given the crucial nature of this information, I hope Bruce or others will be willing to forgive me.

There is currently a bill pending before the American House of Representatives; HR 875.  This bill threatens to make organic agriculture completely illegal, and will also outlaw individual subsistence farming, (the ability to have a vegetable patch in a home garden) as well.

The relevant link is here.  Please read the bill and contact/forward this information to whoever you consider appropriate.  This bill must be stopped, and not merely for Americans, but for everyone else as well, because of the precedent it sets.

Thanks Petrus,

I eat organic as much as possible and feel that good health and cleanliness is necessary in order to do retrievals and other non-physical explorations. However HR 875 is a food safety act, allowing for inspectors to make sure that food is not being developed in filthy conditions.
www.govtrack.us/congress/billtext.xpd?bill=h111-875

I've never seen filthy organic food. Are you concerned organic fertilizers are a contaminant?  I don't think they are-- they are aged before being used and leave no trace of their origins in the food's flavor.

What am I missing here?

Bets

Petrus:

I believe this is important. The big part of my diet consists of organic vegetables and fruit.  I believe there is a war between non-organic farmers and organic farmers. Some people want to place greed before health and freedom. If they take away organic vegetables I'll become a farmer. I emailed the link Petrus provided, and hopefully they'll do the same.

Well I cant say I read the whole thing as it would have put me to sleep. What I did see is that this seams to be addressing something that is a concern. Food Safety. It is directed towards organic  food producers and not really the home garden. That is a bit of of a push. Not all farmers use properly processed organic waste to fertilize their crops. People end up getting effected by such things as e-coli among others. That has to be addressed. If a farm is producing food for public consumption, sale, then regulation is required. Samanala doesn't stop just because you feed our chickens organic grain.  So although as usual the proposed regs go over the top, they are needed. I also doubt if they are looking for a constitutional amendment. The organic food industry needs to be overseen just as the rest of the food industry. Without it we might as well be drinking milk from China.

I emailed my two state Senators and President Obama, and asked them to please "not" support this bill, with a brief explanation as to why I feel this way. If our legislators get enough emails, they might respond. Often the universe responds to the energy that is put into it.

Sponsor of the bill is married to an exec at Monsanto - now *that* fills me with confidence.

If I buy turnips at a farmer's market, I know they were grown in somebodies market patch, and wash accordingly.  Since all the recent e. coli etc. outbreaks have been courtesy of big ag, who already have rules in place that weren't followed, this isn't giving me a warm fuzzy feeling.

I figure that the bugs that appear on organic produce are healthier than pesticides and such. If pesticides kill bugs, won't they harm us?


Cricket wrote on Mar 20^th, 2009 at 7:50pm:

Sponsor of the bill is married to an exec at Monsanto - now *that* fills me with confidence. If I buy turnips at a farmer's market, I know they were grown in somebodies market patch, and wash accordingly.  Since all the recent e. coli etc. outbreaks have been courtesy of big ag, who already have rules in place that weren't followed, this isn't giving me a warm fuzzy feeling.

Just an aside here --

Some time ago I bought some spinach that smelled like sewage.  :P It wasn't organic though. Shortly after that, one of the e.coli outbreaks occurred because agribusiness in CA wasn't giving their workers potty break time or place, so the workers were going in the vegetable rows.  :-[

I had a belief system crash when all this happened but it was just my beliefs about Dept of Ag, FDA, etc.  >:(

May that never happens to anyone again!

Yucky, why did I feel the need to share that!

http://www.cnn.com/2009/POLITICS/03/20/white.house.garden/index.html

This is all very interesting, seeing as the Obama's have broken ground on a 'kitchen' garden in the tradition of the American Victory Gardens years ago, and the children are also involved. Many of us have friends or relatives who, at times, have subsisted on much of what they could grow in their own gardens. Although I have no knowledge in this area, the more people who do, who promote the need for this, as I see it, fundamental right to grow your own food, well, who can really stop it. I can't really imagine that people would give up such a fundamental occupation as tending a 'natural' garden of their own. How would that be enforced? People are very good at finding ways to do the things they really really want to do. And so, if people can't sell, what do they do? I'm not knowledgable on this issue, as I have said, but it sure doesn't sound very practical to me to limit this kind of food production.

Out here in the country it'll mostly go on as it always had - I'll swap the neighbor some tomatoes for plowing my driveway, he'll swap some of them for some dirt bike parts, I'll get some corn from another neighbor for shoeing their horses.

And when the gummint shows up, they can try to prove it (especially since none of us will really have any idea who, exactly, got what for what - just being neighbors).

It's people who are trying to stay "on the grid", where the government wants people (for mostly legitimate reasons, but still...) that will be punished.  Smart, government, create an off the grid underclass.  That never works well.

Shouldn't this be whisked off to Off Topic?