Help protect small farmers and growers

Thanks to your phone calls and emails the Tester-Hagan Amendment is now attached to the Food Safety Bill known as S510! Read about it here. That is wonderful progress but we still have work to do! Now that we know this amendment is at least attached, we can urge Senators to vote NO on the whole bill. Here is a great website that explains why this bill is bad overall and has a link where you can send emails right to your senators. If the bill passes, we at least know there are some safeties put in place to help protect our small farmers. The best things is still to defeat this bill entirely. But, now we at least have a better version, should it pass. Thanks for anyone who made calls/emails. If you can make one more telling them to VOTE NO on S510 that would be awesome!!! Food safety is critically important but this bill does not help protect our food supply.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

There is legislation that is being negotiated today that, if passed without this amendment would severely cripple local growers. I for one am much more comfortable buying my family's food from local growers whom I can meet, ask about their growing procedures, etc. than I am the giant food producers who see our food simply as dollars going out the door. Our food supply should be diverse, as it was intended to be, and we should have local options available to us. Consumers should make the choice to support small, local growers if we want. Legislation should not mandate unrealistic requirements suited to large scale producers, it would effectively shut down most local growers. If legislators want to "protect" our food supply they should focus on things like removing the hidden sources of MSG (a known neurotoxin and chemical designed to addict people to their food) and other chemicals that most consumers don't even know about rather than shutting down the local farmers who are producing the real, healthy food we should be eating. Call your senator today and ask them to support the Tester-Hagan Amendment!! Here are links explaining the issue more.

Letter from an organization supporting the Tester-Hagan Amendment.

Information on what the existing legislation would require and what the Tester-Hagan Amendment would change.

For those in Arizona, our Senators are:

John McCain (602) 952-2410
Jon Kyl (602) 840-1891