USDA-Disapproved: Small farmers and big government

National Review, Jan 27, 2003 by Rod Dreher

Jenny Drake was a Virginia state health inspector until five years ago, when she and her husband moved to rural Tennessee and started Peaceful Pastures, a small livestock farm. They raise free-range beef, pork, turkey, veal, lamb, goat, duck, and chicken -- without jacking the animals up with hormones and antibiotics, as is common practice at factory farms. Their meat goes through a USDA processing facility, as government regulations require -- all except the poultry. And because of those chickens, the Peaceful Pastures have been troubled. Therein lies a tale about government regulation, the decline in food quality, and the end of family farming in America.

"The state says no bird in Tennessee can be sold without USDA inspection of the processing facilities," says Drake. "Here's what kills all of us small poultry farmers: There are no USDA custom-kill processing plants in the entire Southeast."

Drake says she looked into building a small processing facility on her farm, but the cost of meeting government standards made it impossible. If all she had to do were to construct facilities strictly for meat processing, Drake figures she could have done so for $20,000; but as the law stands now, a building that met minimal federal guidelines would cost about $150,000.

"The Americans with Disabilities Act, for example, means a small producer has to put in restrooms that are handicapped-accessible," Drake says. "I'd have to build an office for the inspector. That office has to have its own phone line. I'd have to put in a paved parking lot. We have to meet the same physical standards as a Tyson's, and we just can't do it."

In the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, Joel Salatin and his family run Polyface Farms, a highly regarded small producer of meats raised according to traditional farming practices ("like God intended," says the evangelical Christian farmer). Salatin tells a similar story of battling regulators.

"The code said we had to have bathrooms for our employees. I told them we were 50 feet away from two houses with bathrooms, and besides, we're a family operation: We don't have employees. It didn't matter to them. Then they said we had to have twelve changing-lockers for employees -- even if we didn't have employees.

"See, this is bureaucracy in action," he says. "It has nothing to do with the quality of our meat. They just want to follow the code. This is happening all over the country. A lot of it is being done under the guise of protecting the general welfare and guaranteeing clean food. But what it really does is protect big agribusiness from rural independent competition."

State and federal regulations governing the nation's meat and dairy supply are supposed to guarantee safe, quality food products. But the rules are actually tailored to benefit mass agriculture producers at the expense of small farmers. Also hurt are consumers -- who are being denied the opportunity to purchase meat and dairy products that taste better, and which may be better for them (or, at least, not as harmful as the government fears).

Chefs, food writers, and gourmets are mobilizing against what Patrick Martins, president of the activist group Slow Food USA, calls "these overworrisome hyper-hygienist laws, whose point is to standardize everything that's produced." If traditional methods of cheese-making and meat-curing have worked for centuries in Europe, the argument goes, why ban them in America?

Small farmers and their advocates in culinary circles sound a similar anti-regulatory refrain, though their complaints sometimes have as much to do with economics and rural tradition as with the foodie hunger for artisanal meats and cheeses.

It's no secret that the small family farm is nearly extinct in the United States, quashed by economies of scale that make it virtually impossible for small farms to survive. Some milk and dairy farmers are attempting to stay afloat by serving the tiny but growing market for premium meats (typically free-range and free of hormones and antibiotics), specialty cheeses, and the like.

But what's happening to independent beef farmers in Wyoming shows how the health code can stymie their efforts. It is illegal, for example, to ship across state lines meat processed at a non-USDA-inspected facility. Yet Wyoming's meat-processing plant is only state-approved. To sell meat out of state, beef farmers have to transport their cattle over hundreds of miles for slaughter, which adds tremendously to their costs. Large operators are in a better position to afford this. Wyoming may follow the lead of Washington state, which recently purchased the nation's first mobile USDA-certified slaughter facility, a 24-foot trailer that will travel the state processing meat on farms.

USDA approval is economically crucial in other ways too: It allows farmers to sell directly to stores, realizing two to three times more profit than if they used a processing plant -- and it thus removes the greatest barrier to providing non-factory-farmed meat to consumers at affordable prices.