Wednesday, December 1, 2010Why the Tester Amendment Does NOT Help Small Food Producers Under S.510
The Tester "Small Farm" Exemption to S.510 Exposed as a Scam: Part 1


Dark Days for Small Farmers (photo: Life.com)
Eric Blair
Activist Post

Some of our readers and others have requested that we reference specific sections of the Tester Amendment to food safety bill S. 510 to outline why this does not help or exempt small food producers. The amendment has been sold to the critical public as "exempting" small farms and food producers from the entirety of the heavy-handed regulations of the Food Safety Modernization Act. Yet, nothing could be further from the truth.

These small producer exemptions are only for "qualified facilities" and only pertain to subsections (a) through (i) and subsection (n) of S.510 -- as outlined on page 5, line 15 in the Tester Amendment:

(2) EXEMPTION. --A qualified facility--
(A) shall not be subject to the requirements under subsections (a) through (i) and subsection (n) in an applicable calendar year.
Therefore, even a "very small business" making less than "$500K per year," doing business "within 275 miles" and directly with "end-user customers" is still required to adhere to all of the regulations in the remaining subsections of the bill. That's point number one which I'll return to in Part 2 of this essay


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