Storm for Utah's small farmers
In a perfect example of panic budget cutting that ultimately hurts more than it helps, the Utah Agriculture Department eliminated its nationally recognized organic certification program.
Of course, this sounds like hippie nonsense to conservative lawmakers, who need to get past the "organic" hot-button term — it's about beef; it's about patriotic food. This was a program that not only kept small Utah farmers alive, but was a burgeoning growth sector of Utah's agricultural market.
As one local-food activist puts it:
You would think if legislators respected their roots, they would support the small farmer. [This program] is the only thing that gave them an edge over the big producers from out of state.
The craziest part is the Ag bureaucrats don't even know if or how much the program cost! The Utah producers say they would have paid what it would take to make the inspection program self-sufficient. A spokesman for the Ag Department lamely said officials didn't have time to figure out what would be needed to make the program self-sufficient.
Organic beef grower Russell Taylor told the Tribune:
Private inspection companies can fill the void, but it will cost the farmers, who survive on lettuce-thin margins, thousands more.We were not informed, there was no cost analysis and there were no efforts to make any kind of adjustment to keep it. By any standard, that's not a good way to do business.
3 Comments:
Agriculture and mining are the only two ways to create new wealth.
Unfortunately we live in a culture that wants to be the self appointed middle managers of the Universe and that only creates administrative overhead and is contrary to creating new wealth.
This 'Glen-WarcWHORE' dumbass 'BLOG'-thing is all about to end, anyway. Why waste the time in deriding it??
Once again we see that all government has become an unnecessary burden on us.
Its time to burn down all government and dust off the founding documents and start using them.
Meanwhile we need to round up all judges, police, prosecutors and lawmakers who refuse to follow the Constitution and hang them in public to show what happens when you mess with our rights.
Tyranny will not be tolerated.
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