Brian

Do You have a direct link to the main document?  You posted the  
summary twice.

As a beekeeper and a produce grower and a commodity farmer I am always  
worried about more laws.

Looking over the summary I find this to be a mixed bag.  We most  
certainly need country of origin and a need to better fund and devise  
ways of testing food coming into this country (foreign shippers/ 
producers get away with so much...organic honey and transshipped  
Chinese honey for instance).  I do not see a need to heavily regulate  
small scale producers.  I sell to a local market, my neighbors.  They  
know where their food comes from and who to go to if something is  
wrong AND they know that it is my best interest to sell them QUALITY  
product.  Hate to say it, but my bottom line is far more flexible than  
a company dealing with dividend returns and meeting the pressures of  
filling the needs of Wholefoods and Walmart.  I don't cut corners.

That said, I also produce about 20K bushels (or more) of corn or  
soybean each year that goes into the local grain elevator.  It'll be  
curious if that is considered part of the food chain.

In Ohio, its easy for me to sell honey.  I simply need to label where  
it was bottled and amount IN the bottle AND 75% of the material  
contain within has to be produced on my farm.  That's it.  No fee,  
nothing else.  Maybe I need to wait to build my new honey house.

In the end if they simply enforced their existing policies things  
would be MUCH better.  As it is now, funding, not new laws would be  
all that is needed.

In the end I think we will find that it is too big to manage and too  
costly to try.

Richard Stewart
Carriage House Farm
North Bend, Ohio

An Ohio Century Farm Est. 1855

(513) 967-1106
http://www.carriagehousefarmllc.com
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