Don't Let Vilsack Toss Your Local Salad

Today the USDA and Big Ag are conspiring to implement a set of rules that favor giant industrial growers while placing small, diversified farms at risk. Known as the National Leafy Green Marketing Agreement, this set of rules was designed by industrial growers to protect their market share while harming their main competition, the growing local and organic food movement. The Leafy Green agreement, drafted by the largest vegetable growers’ lobbyists in an effort to whitewash their growing food safety problems, would implement draconian practices that saddle farmers with one-size-fits-all rules and would drive local and organic farmers out of business with expensive regulations.

Tell Secretary Vilsack that it's time to protect family farmers and stop letting Big Ag write the rules.

A version of the points below will be submitted with your comments to the USDA on July 28th.

To have more impact, please take a moment to write a personalized message about how important it is that the USDA protect America's family farmers and stops allowing Big Ag lobbyists to write the rules.

HOW TO COMMENT:

The USDA is seeking written comments from the public on the National Leafy Green Marketing Agreement proposal by July 28th.

As a farmer/ consumer I strongly oppose the National Leafy Green Marketing Agreement:

1. As a deeply flawed approach to handling food safety. The majority of harmful food safety outbreaks in the U.S. are the result of an overly concentrated, centralized food and agricultural system and not the results of bad practices by America’s family farmers.

2. The National Leafy Green Marketing Agreement creates one-size-fits-all standards that unfairly places an undue financial and regulatory burden on America’s small and mid-sized leafy green producers.

3. By focusing on false “audit metrics” and “control points”, the agreement, designed by agribusiness lobbyists, ignores the true problems of excessive scale and consolidation in our food system, while harming local and organic growers who make up the fastest growing and most vibrant sector of the farm economy.

4. The USDA’s Agricultural Marketing Service is NOT a food safety agency and is not legally charged with regulating food or agricultural products nor is its staff composed of food safety scientists.

5. The one-size-fits-all standards proposed under the Leafy Green Marketing Agreement harm family farmers and give giant agribusiness monopolies an unfair competitive advantage in the marketplace without making food safer for American consumers.