FDA Produce Food Safety Listening Session, McGeary

FDA Produce Food Safety Listening Session, Stufflebeam

Hug Farm Video

When you are running a CSA farm, it's always good to have a sense of humor.

The Rude Food Police

Jenny got an interesting phone call today.  A gentleman calls up without introducing himself (of course we have caller I.D.) asking if we buy any seed from Monsanto (of course not, does this guy know anything about us?).  He continues to challenge Jenny saying that anyone can easily lie.  Jenny invites him to come out during the next Market Day to see the farm and to ask any questions that he has during our free farm tour.  He continues to threaten Jenny saying that he intends to buy some produce and to have it tested for GMOs, which if it tests positive he would be happy to put us out of business.  Well thanks a lot!  Everyone who knows us appreciates the fact that we operate with great transparency, besides our website, blog, facebook, workshops, volunteers, monthly farm tours, radio, newspaper and book interviews not to mention the the time we spend building relationships with our members and volunteer time working to develop sustainable agriculture across the state, its good to know that someone is out their working so diligently to ruin small family farms.

Hey, we encourage folks to ask questions and to get to know their farmer and to visit the farm, but this is the wrong attitude to have.  It's not enough to worry about the government regulations out to get small farmers, but now we have aggressive and rude public inspectors  looking to snuff us out.  So why is our family working so hard to provide righteous food to our community?  Good question.

Rather than have an aggressive attitude that the farmer is the bad guy out to deceive people, maybe you should take the time to get to know your farmer before you make that threatening phone call and accusations.  However, to make it easier for you, here is a link to a lab that tests for GMOs... http://www.genetic-id.com/
Of course you need to realize that GMO crops on the market include corn, soy, cotton, canola, papaya, zucchini, squash, alfalfa, rice, sugar beet and tobacco.  Out of these, we only grow zucchini and squash, but of course the varieties we grow are NOT GMO.  Just hope to save you some money testing our vegetables as the test runs about $500 each and our zucchini and squash will not be available for another month.

I'm glad that our members are generally exceptionally good people looking for REAL food and that we have the right to refuse to do business with such individuals as this over aggressive food policeman.  Maybe he was bored and just trying to be funny, but it is not appreciated.  One word of advise, as a local food inspector you should invest in a brixometer rather than waste money sending vegetables to a lab for GMO testing, but feel free to do both if you see local farmers as untrustworthy individuals and you got the money to waste, just please don't threaten our family farm in the future, we would prefer to do business with people who trust us and believe in the work we are doing.  Life is too short to have to deal with such rude people.