Make rules on farmers markets reasonable

Friday, Aug. 15, 2008

The governor, his wife, the secretary of agriculture and others cited freshness, quality, the environment and economic support for farmers in encouraging Marylanders to buy healthy local produce, plants and baked goods.

Meanwhile, just before Maryland Farmers Market Week, state health officials were warning Southern Maryland farmers that they might inadvertently be selling dangerous products and pushed them to follow a series of state regulations to guard against that.

Farmers can be forgiven if they feel exasperated. This appears to be contradictory behavior on the part of the state government.

State health officials argue that it really isn’t; that the rules on food preparation and sales are to protect both consumers and the reputations of farmers markets and produce stands.

Health officials met recently with dozens of farmers and their families across the bridge in St. Mary’s to try to explain all this. Many of the farmers who sell their products at farmers markets in the region are Amish, and they want nothing more than to go about their business and be left alone by the government.

That’s what most everybody says they want, but there’s a difference. Amish and Mennonite families pay their taxes but ask for nothing in return. Not schools, not roads, not most of the other services government provides. They may benefit from things like police protection, but as farmers they didn’t take the state government tobacco buyout and expect no government subsidies of any kind.

They are also admired and respected neighbors of others who live in Southern Maryland, which means it is politically difficult for the government to bully them.

But they want to obey the law. So the middle ground is making sure that the law is reasonable. Expecting these families to travel to Annapolis for an eight-hour training session on rules established in 2004 was ludicrous, so that has been changed. Now health officials will come to the farms where the products sold originate. The fee for licensing was also reduced.

However, vendors must submit a recipe and pay a fee to be able to sell some products, with a separate recipe and a separate fee for approval to sell different-sized jars of the same thing. That’s not reasonable. Telling farm families not to sell jars of pickles because of concerns about water quality, or raw cheese or milk, is reasonable. Insisting that eggs be refrigerated, even if those sold by these families are never more than seven days old, is not.

Many who live in Southern Maryland would be far more willing to trust produce and other food from farmers markets here than toothpaste made in China. So some have suggested that signs saying that certain products don’t meet state regulations might be an option.

Really, though, it is not, since food-borne illnesses can be deadly serious. Soon enough a sign like that could be put up by anyone anywhere in the state and regulations that really do protect the health of citizens would become meaningless.

The solution in Calvert is going to be communication and agreement, and perhaps a start has been made on that.

The goal must be to support farmers markets, not hamstring them with rules.