FDA wants new manure regulations for organic farms

While thousands of Americans continue to die each year from taking government-approved pharmaceutical drugs, the Food and Drug Administration is busy investigating actual bullsh*t.

FDA officials announced last week that the agency isn’t so sure that fertilizing food crops with animal manure— something human beings have been doing since the advent of agriculture— is safe.

“The FDA is planning to conduct a risk assessment to determine how much consumer health is put at risk by the use of raw manure as fertilizer in growing crops covered by the final [Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA)] Produce Safety rule, and what can be done to help prevent people from getting sick,” the agency said. “Before starting the assessment, the agency wants the help of stakeholders in the produce industry, the animal agriculture industry, academia and members of the public in developing the model for this work.”

When it was passed in 2011, the Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA) was touted by lawmakers as an update of food safety laws designed “to ensure the U.S. food supply is safe by shifting the focus from responding to contamination to preventing it.”

The rule paved the way to allow armed FDA regulators to inspect American farms that sell produce and other agricultural products to the public.

Critics of the legislation argue that it is allowing the FDA to meddle in processes already regulated by the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

And because the FDA lacks any real understanding of how farms of different sizes operate, many of its proposals would place onerous and unnecessary new regulations on the nation’s smallest agricultural producers.

The current attempt to figure out whether it should ban the use of animal waste for fertilizer, a process already regulated by the USDA, is just one example.

The worst part is that the FDA realizes its efforts are unnecessary.

“At this time, the FDA does not object to farmers complying with the USDA’s National Organic Program standards,” the agency noted.

But that doesn’t mean this is the last you’ll hear about the FDA’s attempts to increase government regulation over natural fertilizer. The FDA backed down on a similar effort to ban and regulate manure for certain farming applications in 2013 after receiving a wave of public comments about the benefits of natural fertilizer to organic farmers.

Now that they’re re-interested in pushing the rules forward, it’s not likely that FDA officials will back down until they succeed.

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