Episode 143: What happens when your homestead isn’t compliant with food laws?

Introduction

Hi, everyone, and welcome back to the Homestead Education Podcast. As many of you know, one of my favorite things to do on this show is to teach people the questions that they don’t know how to ask. And a lot of you know that my biggest love is food safety and food laws.
So today, I have Alexia Kulwiec from the Farm to Consumer Legal Defense Fund to talk to us a little bit about who they are and what they do and how that relates to what I’m always talking to you guys about. So welcome.
Great, thanks so much for having me.
I’m really pleased to be here. My name is Alexia Kulwiec, and I am the executive director, I think, as you said, of Farm to Consumer Legal Defense Fund. And we are a membership-based nonprofit organization for homesteaders.
It’s $75 a year. And what we do is provide legal representation, legal consultation to our members, and also try to work on policy matters to make things easier on homesteaders, food producers, and to help consumers obtain the foods of their choice. We find that a lot of food laws, as you pointed out, you’re a fan of and follow food law, a lot of them are not what I would call…
I said I teach them.
Oh, okay. A lot of them are not what I would consider scale appropriate, right? So we represent a lot of regenerative farms that face a lot of legal challenges in production and sales of their products. But we also have a homestead membership where homesteaders are faced with challenges and problems legally from their states, their counties, their townships, that sort of thing.

Policy vs. Lobbying

So you bring up a really good point there. And I love that you guys also do some… You didn’t say lobbying, you used a different word.
I said policy.
Policy. Thank you. I love that you guys are really focusing on policy too, because I think that’s the most frustrating thing as a small-scale farmer.
I’ve been doing small-scale farm consulting for almost a decade now. And it is exhausting, because the laws that are out there, like you said, don’t fit the scale.
Correct.
Yeah. And even though there’s technically the laws to meet the scale, the, quote, white sheets that either the federal or state governments provide you are so vague and unintelligible that you don’t know what to do with them half the time.
Right.
Yeah. And so for the average farmer or food producer or something that is trying to follow these white labels, what happens when they don’t get them right?
Yeah. Well, they end up in legal troubles, right? And that’s why we do the representation and consultation on the flip side.

Federal vs. Small Producer Realities

I’ll just say, I mean, I can’t agree more that particularly at the federal level, but the state level as well and county levels where most food law really hits the homesteaders. But particularly at the federal level, our system is set up to govern food safety of these humongous corporate food producers, right? So these CAFOs, these hundred acres produce farms, not what folks are trying to do in their communities on a smaller scale. And so they become very burdensome to a smaller producer.
You can’t meet the same kind of expensive, say, facility requirements that a really large producer can. And so it’s a real problem. And we have homesteaders that will face issues, say, with county or state agencies, a notice of violation because they haven’t satisfied some requirement that you couldn’t understand and doesn’t seem to even apply to a smaller farm.
And then poof, you find out it does. And we’ll try to sort of help resolve that with the county. We will sometimes have to provide legal counsel at an agency hearing to try to resolve it, but really just help those small producers through the process.

Real-Life Example: Rendering Lard and Confusing Guidance

I really appreciate that you guys do that, because even as somebody who has worked in this field for years, my husband says that I’m my own worst enemy on it, because I will decide I want to sell something off of our farm. And I looked it up, and the white sheets for our state were literally written on a Word document, and it’s like somebody just wrote notes and published it. And I was like, I don’t know what this means.
And so I found a document that the State Land-Grant College put out 10 years ago, which we know a lot of stuff has changed in the last 10 years. And so it said that this particular part of it would be governed through our county health department. So I called the county health department, and I said, Hey, can we? Well, what it was is rendered beef lard, or beef lard, pork lard.
Okay.
And there’s a lot of farmers around here who sell and they market it as home rendered pork lard, and they’re selling it in like the farm markets and from their houses and that type of stuff. And I was like, everything about all of my training is screaming right now.
Right.
And so yeah, I called the county health actually, I mean, my kids call the county health department, because that’s how I do it. But I mean, I don’t have any problem calling it, but they’re teenagers.
So I think that it’s a really great place for them to do it, especially when my daughter does most of our rendering.
Yeah.
And so she called them and he was like, well, walk me through your process.
And so she walked him through her whole process. And he goes, I have no clue if you can do that at home or not. I’ll have to get back to you.
Yeah. So uncommon, unfortunately.
Yeah.
And so her and I chatted a little bit about it. And I said, did he say anything about whether or not our pork has to be USDA processed, which I’m sure it did, you know? And does it need to? Do we have to be a USDA plant to sell a meat product?
Right.
And so she’s like, okay, so she’s ready when he calls back.
He calls back and he goes, well, you need to process it in a commercial kitchen. And I’m like, okay, fair enough. We have friends that let us rent their commercial kitchen.
And she goes, but does it need to be, our meat is from a USDA plant, but do we need to be USDA because it is a meat product? And he’s like, I don’t know. I’ll have to call you back.
And we never did hear back from him.
And it’s been like a year.
Okay. Well, my interpretation of that then is no, you don’t personally need to be USDA if that meat is from a USDA facility, and you’re doing the processing in a commercial kitchen, you should be fine.
That’s what I’ll say.
Yeah. And you know, so then I start, you know, asking myself that is, if it’s a, so does that just make it a cottage food? Can I only sell it to my neighbors? Or can I ship it because it’s shelf stable, you know, like, right, right.
And I’m going into all these next steps. And I realized that, you know, like my husband says that I’m my own worst enemy. But I’m like, man, there’s so many other people out there that are coming into the, you know, home setting regenerative farming fields.
And they may not even know what a cottage food law is, let alone taking it all the way back to that USDA level. Because like, if I want to process meat, and like even if I buy or get my primals from my USDA plant, and say, make bacon, and sell it, that’s a processed product where I have to be a USDA facility.
Yeah, yeah.
So, but if I were to bring it home, make bacon and sell it to somebody who’s eating it right there, then I’m at a restaurant.
No, it gets you dead on. I mean, it really gets crazy.

Licensing Layers: USDA, Food Processing, Cottage Food

And I would say, you know, you might not need to be a USDA facility to make it into bacon, but you might need a food processing license of some kind, right?
Okay, like to get a food manufacturing license to make life even more complicated, right?
Right. It’s true. I mean, like a smaller producer and homesteader.
The not only is the system set up to regulate the smaller folks, but you’re right that your inspectors in your state employees are so used to working with these small, bigger producers, that even when there are exceptions or things for smaller folks, they don’t, they haven’t been well defined, the inspectors don’t know what the law is. I find a lot of these, you call them sort of white pages or white papers or guidance documents, often exaggerate the authority of the agency, like they’ll, they’ll do what you want. But it’s beyond what the law itself or the regulations say.
So I find that these agencies then overstep and are trying to make it even harder. And one inspector to another will interpret it differently.
Yeah, it’s a crazy area.

Inspector Personalities & Inconsistent Enforcement

Yeah. And you know, even when I worked in food plants, I mean, I worked in a large food plant. And I had it wasn’t a USDA inspector, it was for a GMP inspection, for those listening, the good manufacturing procedures, and you can get third party audits on your stuff.
And I was showing him our pest mitigation. And he’s like, yeah, that’s all great. He’s like that, but a six pack of beer and a BB gun does the same thing.
I was like, God, seriously, we were a very rural facility, but still a very large facility. And he’s like, winks at me. And I’m like, Well, I won’t write that into our procedure.
I was like, that sounds like a great evening activity.
Wow, if I shared that with any of the other enforcement agencies I work with on a regular basis, they’d want to know immediately who I was talking about. I’m not gonna share that.
You know, it’s one of those ones where we would build a rapport, but I just had to laugh about it. Because I had other inspectors come in that you couldn’t even joke with them.
So no, yeah, no, I understand that.
Yeah. Like, I couldn’t even joke that, you know, we were looking at it as a US or organic inspector, and we’re going through paperwork. And I had made some just little jokes about something about the filing cabinet, like everything getting messed up.
And then she just glared at me and went back to what she was doing. And I was like, my bad. I won’t say that again.
Yeah, that’s terrible.
Yeah, they it’s. And it’s unfortunate because food safety is important.
But we do need to scale appropriate items. And then when you compare what the smaller producer goes through to some of the super unhealthy ultra processed foods that are deemed safe. It’s just mind boggling, right?
Yeah.

Eggs, Cartons, and ‘Small’ Requirements That Stack Up

Like, you know, it does blow my mind that I can’t like to walk out to my chicken coop, grab an egg, stick it in a box and sell it to somebody without some sort of regulation.
When, depending on where you are, you might be able to but I hear you.
Yeah.
Yeah. I mean, I think here we’re in Idaho. So we have the best laws.
Yeah.
But I still think, you know, are still technically I’m supposed to write on there, you know, like, our name, the name of our farm that that type of thing. So there’s still a regulation with it.
It’s just not to be licensed, but there’s a regulation.
Yeah. And you know, that’s just you know, as a farmer, those are a lot of extra steps that cost a lot of extra sometimes.
Because I either have to sit there and write on every single carton that we sell, or I have to buy labels, print labels, stick the labels to the cartons, and they don’t stick.
Yeah.
And then you’ll get a notice of violation because it didn’t have your stuff.
Exactly. I’m like, I don’t know that carton said Safeway. I think they got those at Safeway.
Yeah. I mean, luckily, we’ve never had any type of violation. But I hear about it a lot.

Pastured Poultry, USDA Plants, and Hidden Exemptions

And what really frustrates me is, as home, you know, homesteaders, I deal with a lot of the homestead people. I deal with small scale regenerative farmers a lot. And they’re like, well, you know, yeah, we really wish that we could sell pastured poultry, but there’s not a USDA plant in our state. So there’s nothing we can do.
And I’m like, no, there are things you can do. But they don’t like advertising that.
Right?
Oh, yeah.
I mean, you can do poultry processing, as long as you’re under 10 20,000 birds, and do it yourself. You don’t need that USDA plant. Now the thing is, plenty of producers don’t want to be processors, right? They don’t necessarily want to have to do that work.
But you know, for those that can, there’s certain there are options, but you’re right, they’re not advertised. And working, you know, you said, calling your agency for assistance can be frustrating. And even just finding the rules, if you if you’re trying to like go on the agency website, you’re not going to find that like, if you know what you’re talking about, you will find the poultry exemptions.
But if you’re just like, looking around, you’re not going to see that.
Yeah, you’re definitely not.

What Happens When You Get It ‘Wrong’

So kind of give me a rundown of what it would look like if, you know, a new or even seasoned homesteader were to let’s go back to the Lord just did they? Oh, I’m gonna start rendering my own art and selling it, but they weren’t doing it right. Like what would end up happening with something like that?
Yeah, I mean, most likely most often, if your state agency and in your example, I believe it was your county health agency hears about it, they’re likely to show up and start asking questions. And a lot of times, they’re not even clear that they’re engaged in an investigation, which is, you know, another issue that I have a problem with. But in any case, they will likely investigate it.
And if they understand that you’re actually doing this without the commercial kitchen license, they will issue a notice of violation typically, with a cease and desist telling you that you have to stop and potentially with some kind of a fine, fine or penalty to be paid back to the county, typically. And a lot of times those are simply issued. And there will be the opportunity to appeal that notice of violation.
If somebody reads it carefully and follows the timelines involved, they can appeal that. But it’s a little bit, to me, it’s frustrating, because a lot of legal matters, you have to first find that the person was in violation, you have the hearing before there’s some kind of determination, right. But a lot of these smaller, lower level, I might call them civil violations, they just issue the notice of violation and expect you to pay unless you appeal it and try to set it aside.
Now, if I’m working with someone, I might do the notice of appeal to protect someone’s timelines. But then I’ll just call the county and try to work something out, right? I’ll just be like, well, what’s the real problem here? So like, in your example, what’s the problem? How did I violate the law? I had no idea. I thought I could do this under cottage food.
I’m just a homesteader, right? Like whatever. And they’ll say, and in that case, they would probably explain, well, meat is usually an exemption to or exception rather to cottage food laws. So for meat, any kind of a meat product, which I guess they would consider rendering meat to be a meat product, you’re going to need that commercial kitchen license, because you’re processing food that’s not covered by the cottage food law.
So somebody could say, okay, great, like going forward, and you’ll find a solution, right? But I will say, I see a lot of people. That’s like when I’m working with someone, I see a lot of people that ignore it, or they ignore it several times. And then by the time they find out to call someone like us, which I know is hard, they may not know about it.
You know, they’re in deeper trouble, and it’s harder to resolve, right? Or they don’t realize that there might be a way to just work it with the folks. And then, you know, then they’re just angry, because they have to shut down the operation. And you know, don’t try to find that resolution.
So it is really important that folks, if they hear from someone, they pay attention, they take it seriously. And you can usually try to get it resolved. If folks are willing to get it sometimes it has to do with the proper permits and licenses and stuff.
And some people really don’t want to do that. And if you’re going to do that, then it could be a tougher thing to resolve.
Right?
Yeah.

Costly Compliance: Septic, Buildings, and ‘Easy’ Fixes

And sometimes, you know, it’s as simple as you just have to follow their suggested list. And get garbage service and put a filter on your water. And then they come and sign you off, and you’re good to go.
Right, right.
Other times, like, for us, the building that we want to make a commercial kitchen, we don’t have a septic connected to it. So I have to put a septic in.
After that, it’ll be easy, but a septic is $10,000.
Yeah, that’s not easy.
Yeah, yeah.
You know, we do live in a really great community where we don’t have a lot of building laws. And we have friends that do the digging and that type of stuff. But that’s not an option for everybody.
And some states and counties have exorbitant building permit laws and things like that, you start and that’s where you get into that scalability. Like, I just want to be able to sell my friends and neighbors some bacon, or right, you know, whatever it may be. And that was just how we saved a little extra money to pay for our feed to raise a hog every year.
Versus now, that’s just not an option anymore for them. Like, it’s absolutely not worth it. But then there’s, you know, a large producer where it would be worth it.
They say, Okay, let’s do it. Let’s get the loan. That’s the whole thing.
But then there’s those ones in the middle that just, they have to make that choice. Because they don’t have the option of scaling, or they may not have the option of scaling larger. But this has been a solid base for them for a long time.
Yeah, no, absolutely. And a lot of people don’t necessarily want to quote scale up, like you said, right, they want a homestead, they’re doing other things in life, they want to do some sales to cover those expenses, right? Or it’s just a bit of extra income.
Yeah, and so they don’t even want to scale up and have to meet these requirements.

Zoning, Urban Sprawl, and Right-to-Farm Conflicts

And, you know, you touched on the building permits, and I’ll just sort of throw in there. Another thing that I think homesteaders face a lot is the different zoning ordinances and zoning regulations, right? So how their land is zoned restricts what they can do on your land.
You know, we deal a lot with right to farm laws and noise ordinances and odor ordinances and that kind of thing.
You know, particularly in these areas that are perhaps not quite urban, but not quite rural, right? How urban sprawl is taking over and people are in areas that used to be pretty rural. And now you have neighbors that don’t like hearing dogs bark or something, right? So it’s tricky.
Yeah, it definitely is.

What Are Right-to-Farm Laws?

Can you cover real quick what a right to farm law is? Because I was reading about those recently. And I think a lot of people don’t even realize that’s a thing.
Yeah, it’s really interesting to me, I will preface my comments by saying that I don’t like how they came into being.
In other words, right to farm really started as a when operations started growing, right, and expanding what was maybe, you know, I don’t know, 5000 cow operation into a big CAFO states started passing laws.
Wasn’t it a CAFO in South Carolina or something that really got that?
I don’t know the state, but it was definitely CAFOs. And so it was definitely when it was passed, it was passed to protect these large industrial farm operations, typically CAFOs, but they could be other things as well.
Concentrated animal feeding operations, just to be sure to let them operate and be free from allegations of a nuisance, right? So most states or counties have things like noise ordinances that include public or private nuisances that could be filed against somebody based on noise or odor, or, you know, trash, sometimes these kinds of things that would be considered a public or private nuisance. And the right to farm laws were passed to protect these operations from those kinds of allegations. So you can be this huge CAFO with horrific odors coming from it, and there’s nothing that folks can do because of the right to farm law.
Now, what I will say is, we then can use that and take advantage of them, and it can be extraordinarily helpful to small folks as well. So what I mean by that is, if you are engaged in farming practices, typically it’s along the lines of as long as you’re following accepted management practices on your farm, agricultural practices, and you are engaged in some commercial activity, in other words, there’s some selling of product, then you too, even as a very small operation, are protected from these public and private nuisance actions.
So when counties come in and say, for example, the fact that you use a livestock guard dog to protect your poultry is a nuisance because they bark in the middle of the night.
I use this example because this one comes up all the time.
Oh, and my Great Pyrenees barks all night.
They’re doing their jobs.
Yeah, I mean, and that’s a lot of how Great Pyrenees do it. They’re more sit back, and I’m just going to sit here and sound an alarm because we have a lot of coyotes in the area and stuff, so he’ll just sit and bark, and that’s how he does it, and he only goes into aggressive mode if he needs to.
Right, right.
But sometimes you’ll have a homeowner make a complaint, like a neighbor makes a complaint, and then county will come out and want to investigate and issue a violation under the noise ordinance, and we can defeat that by pointing out that the state right-to-farm law protects the use of these dogs as an accepted agricultural management practices, right? So that’s where it comes into play for us, and sometimes as well, like having certain, I’ve also seen like you can’t have debris, you can’t have stray garbage, this kind of stuff, and then they consider your rain barrels, and we had a case in Gary where wood chips were being used to regenerate the land, and they said that somehow that violated something, right? I don’t even remember.
Oh, goodness.
Like the aesthetics, you know, you weren’t supposed to, I don’t know, and so then you can rely on the right-to-farm law there to try to get some help, yeah.

Wood Chips, Maggot Farms, and Rural Reality

I have to laugh at that one. We live next door to a maggot farm.
Which is?
A maggot farm.
Yeah, so they raise maggots, and they send them down to like California to pollinate in the big greenhouses.
Okay.
Because they ship them as like a cold, stable, like pupae, and then they turn into the flies, and they pollinate, and then after they pollinate, and rather than like bees pollinating and then bees dying, the flies die, and then they like vacuum them up and just use them as compost.
It’s really great.
Oh, that makes a lot of sense.
Yeah, it’s a really great concept.
They stink a lot.
Yeah, but we’re big farmers, so I can’t complain too much.
Right, right.
But they raise the maggots on wood chips, but it has to be a very fine wood chip, and so the guy buys it, and he sifts it, and then he has this giant pile of wood chips always on his property, and the other day he was saying, man, I need to move all those wood chips. I don’t know what I’m going to do with them because I need to like to access this other area, and we’re like, oh, you know, like, I mean, we’re mud season, and we have pigs. We’ll totally take some wood chips, and he’s like, great, I’ll have my guy run them up to you.
Yeah, they brought a pile of wood chips that is taller than our barn.
Oh my gosh, wow.
I think he brought like nine loads up with their big backhoe, and we’re sitting there watching it happen, and we’re like, I don’t know if I should be thankful or annoyed right now.
Well, at some point, I would say you would have had the right to go out there and be like, that’s enough.
Right, well, and we’re, you know, we’re on 40 acres, and it’s, it’s, it’s fine. We will use all of them, but just we weren’t expecting that, and I am, you, you can see it from the highway and stuff, you know, and I’m like, I couldn’t imagine in North Idaho somebody being like, your wood chips are aesthetically displeasing.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, so it’s, it’s crazy, like, you know, you, particularly in city limits, right, you have these things about what you can have on your lots, and that, you know, if you’re a homesteader, you might want a hoop house, and you can’t have that, or you can’t do front yard gardening, or things that are just crazy.
Yeah, I worked in real estate for a while, and, you know, even in our very rural area, if you lived in a, there’s a lot of people that bought up land here, 25 years ago, and then now they’re turning them into mini ranchettes.
Yeah, and they’re marketing them as ranchettes, come live in the country and live the country life.
But then you’re only allowed to have, like, one head of livestock, which, yeah, for people who don’t know, one head can be like one cow calf, or I think it’s three sheep or five goats or something like that. But it’s like, how do you advertise for people to come live the country life, and then they literally aren’t even allowed to do it?
Right.
Yeah, that’s very problematic. And, you know, and one thing that I will say is, you know, you mentioned people may not be aware of what different rules and regulations in their area are, it can be very helpful to, well, A, obviously, folks should find out, and then B, when they’re unreasonable like that, take efforts in your city council in your, in your, you know, county township leadership to change some of these things can be really helpful for homesteaders to try to improve that kind of thing. But I agree with you.
And I don’t know about, you know, the kind of ranchettes you’re talking about. But I do also really advise people to stay away from anything that’s in a homeownership. What do you call HOA on HOA?
Yeah, what is the homeowners association?
Yeah, homeowners associations.
And gosh, I can’t think of it. It’s like a CCC or something like that. It comes with, it’s attached to the land.
Oh, yeah, some kind of restriction.
Yeah.
Oh, CC and R’s.
Covenants, something and restrictions.
Right.
Yes.
Yeah. So those, I mean, you might, you could buy 100 acres in the country, and attached to the deed, whoever sold it at some point might say, and I never want it to be farmed.
Right?
Yeah.
Now, some of those are not enforceable. I’m not going to really opine. So some of those restrictions are not pretty much your neighbors would have to complain or something. But there certainly are some that can be upheld. And certainly homeowners associations are allowed to have rules that are much stricter than your local regulation.
And so then, you know, somebody buys this fantastic piece of land, it happens to be in the hands of the homeowners, they didn’t think about that. And, you know, now they’re being told what they can plant and not plant and where they can have a side building. And it’s, it’s very, yeah, it’s complicated.
Yeah, it really is.

Proactive Help from FCLDF

So you mentioned a little bit, like how you guys step in. And that was if they definitely had violated.
If there’s like, you know, somebody said, Hey, I’m going to want to make sure I follow the rules. And I go to their county health and their county health advises them. And then turns out they were just overstepping or something in that type of thing.
Do you guys like that’s probably something you guys really?
Yeah, well, I guess I am not entirely certain. What I will say is we absolutely like to get involved before people are in trouble.
Right? So we do a lot of counseling. Can I do this? What do I need to do, that kind of thing.
And so if you’re saying like, that somebody needs a consultation before there’s a violation, absolutely. If they have contacted their county health department to learn something and then determine that the county health department is overstepping their bounds, that yeah, we can step in in that situation and try to mediate even if there’s no say notice of violation, but be like, Hey, you know, you told this person that they may need a commercial kitchen license, have you seen the latest copy of the cottage food law, you know, something like that, right, that allows you to process certain foods in your home kitchen and and try to fix the situation before there’s a notice. Absolutely.
We’ll try to help with that.

When Local Agencies Don’t Really Know the Rules

Because yeah, we definitely, we like for us, we live in a very rural area where our county health department is part of like a regional health department. I mean, they’re focused more on WIC and making sure people are getting their vaccines and those types of things.
They are very they don’t pay a lot of attention to like what’s going on with the cottage food laws and things like that. And that’s kind of just their side.
You know, even half of our commercial kitchens here are just somebody’s cafe that’s been running for 100 years out of a shed on the side of their house.
Yeah, sure.
And so we definitely run into the issues that they don’t know how to help us at all.
So my next question would be if somebody is wanting to find out what their laws are, how would you suggest they go about finding those?
Yeah, I mean, typically, well, first, I’ll say for our members, we will help folks do that.
So I just want to make that little plug.
Nice.
But if somebody were looking, I mean, depending on what you’re discussing, you know, your township or your county typically has their, you know, municipal code or township code of ordinances, that kind of thing published online.
And you can look through there to find information. Typically, your departments of agriculture will have decent guidance and information for small farms for small producers that I think might apply for homesteading as well. Public Departments of Health, I don’t know that they have the same kind of guidance geared towards a smaller producer, like you said, I think they there may be some, you know, they’re, they’re assigned to be the ones that would have to inspect and give you a commercial kitchen license, or they may be the ones that have to enforce some of these laws on public health.
But for the most part, their focus is on agriculture. So a lot of times, even if your issue is local, I might start with a State Department of Agriculture that might at least have some helpful guidance in terms of things like, you know, the state rules for what you need, if you’re selling eggs, right, you’ll find that at the state level, not your and your Department of Health won’t even necessarily have that published. So the Department of Agriculture, you had mentioned previously, I think your state extension program, many universities have state agricultural extension programs, those folks tend to be helpful, but I, but I find that sometimes we, that’s sometimes that’s kind of why we exist.
But oftentimes, we see state or local agencies really taking it upon themselves to require more than the statute or regulation provides and state extension programs pretty much will educate people as to what the agencies want. So it’s going to be, in my view, kind of a conservative answer. In other words, you have to get this permit, you have to follow these rules.
And if somebody comes to me, sometimes I’ll find I don’t agree with that. I don’t see that in the law, for example. But I mean, those are typical ways to look at the Department of Ag, your local county, you know, municipal code of ordinances, your state extension programs, other local universities sometimes have some decent information, that kind of thing.

FCLDF Website Resources

All right. I feel like and I meant to look this up. I feel like when I went to your website, previously, you guys have a few helpful things.
I believe it was raw milk? You have one that’s a
Yes, I will also say, Oh, I think I have frozen myself. There I am. So we have, we’re in the process actually, of improving some of our resources.
So I will say that. But what I will say is, yes, if you go to our website, farm to consumer.org, we have some public resources, some of which are set up by maps. So for maps, we have cottage food laws, state meat process, state meat processing issues, raw milk issues and poultry processing.
And so both meat and poultry start at the federal level. But then there are some things that states get involved in. And we’ll provide some of that information.
And yeah, we have those four topics, we have maps where you can scroll down and read more details on a specific state about whether something is legal or how something is legal in those four categories.
Yeah, because it’s definitely helped me a couple of times when I’m doing some of my consulting, I do nationwide consulting, and people will say, like, can I do it? Can I sell raw milk here on my farm? And I’ve definitely shot straight to your guys’ website.
Yeah.
To get that answer in a quick, you know, this is what I’m seeing. So let’s go with that. And we can look into it further from there.
Because we’ll do the consulting call. And then afterwards, I’ll follow up with extended research. But that’s always been a really good place for me to go.
Because I feel like you just haven’t broken down so nicely.
Oh, well, thank you. And it’s true that the challenge here is that so much of what regulates local and smaller food production is at the state and county level.
So if you’re doing national consulting, same with us, it’s complicated, right? I don’t have people from all 50 states on staff. So yeah, a lot of my consulting is more how to just, you know, make money off your business, some of those side hustles and stuff. But I always want to advise them on what the laws are.
So I don’t get them all excited that, yes, you can sell milk from your sheep that you’re also sharing, like, and then they can’t, you know?
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And, you know, like I said, for our members, we will look into the I would say the map includes those for the maps include those four topics, frankly, because those are the ones that folks, I think, most easily get into trouble with raw milk, poultry, meat, but you know, we do a lot with produce laws and with zoning laws and all kinds of things, but it can get more detailed if somebody needs it. But yeah, those tend to be sort of your go to problem areas that we initially have people right, those are the ones that really fall under those exemptions that get so confusing.

Federal Framework: Meat, Milk, Eggs, and Exemptions

And you know, for the listeners, it’s meat, milk, and his eggs federal to there’s a federal egg law that says under 3000, you don’t need any kind of permit or license.
Okay, so dates can make it more stringent.
So yeah, meat, milk and eggs fall under FISA, which is the Food Safety Inspection Act stuff.
And that’s all federal.
And then they have exemptions like the, you know, 3000 egg or 10,000 bird exemption, or that you can, you know, sell me through your state inspected plant as long as you’re not breaking it down into retail cuts. And I mean, there’s all these like little exemptions, that that’s where it gets so gray and so murky, that it’s hard to, you know, you look up the law, and it says, No, you can’t sell meat out of your garage, you know, and I go, I absolutely sell meat out of my garage.
Well, hopefully, it’s in the freezer, right?
Well, yeah. And it’s actually not my garage. It’s a shop on my property that, you know, we have a little store in and we sell, we have freezers and fridges in there, we have our milk and eggs.
And yeah, we sell a lot of pork and lamb. But yeah, I mean, if you get down to it, yeah, I’m selling meat out of my garage.
Yeah, yeah.
And I’m doing it 100% by the book.
Right. And it’s and sometimes that’s what a lot of people need some kind of extra license for that.
And some just to like, literally inspect your freezer.
Okay, yep. Still cold.
Right? Well, you know, we, you know, for our own personal in our state, we don’t have to have there’s not an extra law for that I have to get, you know, once it leaves their facility, it’s under my thing to say that it maintained a certain temperature from that point on. So what we do is, you know, in the wintertime here, we literally just load all the boxes up in the truck and come home because it’s, you know, negative 30 here. But in the summer, I just make sure we have a freezer, we stick in our trailer and run a generator and get it home.
And then I have those thermometers that go in my freezers, and they’re connected to my phones.
So I know if I lose a freezer, because I’ve lost way too many freezers, and I’m over it. We lost a freezer with 50 meat birds for our own consumption last year.
And it was devastating. And I don’t want to eat my own retail meat because that’s our income. So we literally ate an old sow for like six months.
It was terrible.
Oh, horrible.
Yeah.
I mean, we don’t mind the old sow. We make a lot of sausage and that type of stuff. But it really got boring after a while.
I’m sure. And we hadn’t had beef in two years, because we decided to let the cow go dry for a year. So we didn’t have any calves to butcher.
And that fall, we decided we’re not going to hunt this fall because we really want to focus on all of the harvesting on our property and get it all in the freezers and then lose a freezer with all of our poultry for the year. So I mean, it was just devastation. I was like, I’m done.
But back to the food safety part of that is I keep those in my freezers now. And they will send me an alert if my freezers go down. But they also keep a constant log that I can download of my temperatures.
Oh, that’s fantastic.
It really is because then if I do have somebody, I’ve never had it happen. And I rarely hear of it.
But working in big food, I know exactly what they’re going to go for first. And that can prove to me that your freezers stayed at a good temperature the whole time. And I remember, you know, before we had that type of technology, even 15 years ago, that I literally was constantly on workers’ butts, because I was the quality assurance really annoying lady in the plants, being like, you need to walk into that freezer and sign off on the log every hour.
And there was literally we had to have somebody put eyes on those thermometers, like sometimes every hour, and then they’d have to lock it down at night and in the morning, check it first thing. And yeah, it was a it was a lot. And so that was something that I was like, if we’re gonna have like five freezers running and a milk cooler, like I need, I need those numbers that I don’t ever look at them, as long as I’m not getting an alert, I’m happy.
But if anything were to ever happen, I can download it like that.
Yeah, that’s fantastic. And I will just say that.
Because I think you have listeners that are across the country, not just in Idaho, but in a lot of locations. Even if your meat is processed at a USDA facility, you may still need either some kind of a meat storage license or you know, to make sure that you have it at the right temperatures, or even a meat transportation license so that you literally need some sort of license to drive it from the USDA facility back to your own freezer. I’m glad Idaho doesn’t have it.
Some states do. And it’s folks should know that I think that people fall into the false security that if it was USDA, then they’re totally fine. And I just wanted to mention that in some places, yes, you are.
And in some places, no, you’re not and it’s something to look into.
Yeah. And so if there’s a license involved, they probably are going to require some sort of freezer inspection.
Ours was by choice, both because we’ve lost money and then hey, it’s just an extra. I know what they’re going to look for. So let’s
Yeah.
Because I would advise.
Yeah, I worked in a raw food facility. It was nuts.
But a raw food facility during the time that there was all the deaths from the outbreak in with cantaloupe and being a food safety specialist in that time was very scary because when they came in and found that there was criminal charges involved, it literally went like, you know, owner, you know, operations manager, quality assurance manager, and I was like, I think it always like it’ll stick with me for sure.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You know, my kids run my run our raw dairy and I’m like, constantly like, you know, wash your hands or I’m going to jail.
So yeah, I mean, raw dairy can be so good for you. And it’s so wonderful, but you really do have to do it right.
Absolutely. I made my kids all take the raw milk Institute course and get served safely certified.
Wonderful.
That makes perfect just for that, even though it is safe, they aren’t working in a kitchen or something. But I figured that was, you know, it’s fairly inexpensive. It’s $30 or something like that.
And that you can do it online. And it gave my kids an opportunity to learn those skills. We’re homeschoolers too.
So we’re always looking for new ways of teaching the kids something. So, yeah, that’s awesome.

Membership Details and What $75 Covers

So, I mean, we are kind of getting to the end of our time.
So there’s a couple of questions I want to make sure we hit on one that costs $75 a year. Does that cover if you guys have to like to step in and help too?
Yeah. So $75 a year is our homesteader level.
So we will do legal consultations for that. We will, if there’s an agency action, like a hearing in it and the issue involved falls directly within our mission, then we will provide counsel at that agency hearing. And I’ll just say that within our mission, we’re talking about the ability to produce and sell food from your land or as a food of your choice.
So we’re very focused on food production and sales to the community and sales to the public, as opposed to, say, forming your LLC or some kind of a land construction permit or something like that. So we’re very focused on food production and how government overreach creates challenges to food production and sales. But yeah, if it’s right within our mission, then we will, we’ll provide them consultation, we’ll provide them representation at a hearing level.
We are even known to at times litigate in court on behalf of homesteaders, as well as on behalf of a small farm. We don’t guarantee that or promise that that’s going to depend on sort of whether that has like a broader ramification or something that we care about that might impact others in addition to the one individual. But we will provide the consultation and representation at earlier stages for everyone.
Yeah. That’s awesome.

Farmer vs. Homesteader Membership

So you also mentioned that you guys handle regenerative farmers.
Does that also just include small, like large, small scale farmers? Like, I call them commercial homesteads. That’s kind of my like, thing that I was like, I don’t feel like we fit under any other thing.
Sure.
Yeah, homestead because we feed our family completely off of our homestead. But I’m also selling. I raised 350 hogs a year on pasture.
Okay, but I’m not a regenerator.
I guess I’m a regenerative farmer, but I don’t, you know,
yeah, our organization would consider that to be at the farmer level, which when I talk about our farmer level is $125 a year. So it’s still very much geared towards representing smaller regenerative farms. Our homestead membership really is more geared towards homesteaders that are raising, you know, food for their own families, right? So when they look, they run into zoning problems, because, you know, they’re trying to homestead on their property.
They’re told they can have one, you know, livestock head or what have you write that kind of thing. As opposed to commercial sales, when you’re engaged in commercial sales, we’d really consider you to be at a ranch or farm membership level, which is still an incredibly reasonable price, which is still incredibly reasonable, I think.
Yeah, I mean, we do, you know, about half of our revenue is from our dues and our membership dues.
And the other half is from fundraising efforts, because, you know, what goes along with a small regenerative farm is not necessarily a huge income, right? So we want to be supportive of that and do what we can.
Yeah, it definitely there’s, there’s years when it just covers the feed. And there’s your you know, and that’s for us.
We’re a family of six, if we can cover all of our feed and still have full freezers all year long and be able to trade with our neighbors for other things we need and stuff. That’s okay.
Yeah.
And then wonderful. And there’s quality, right?
Yeah, right. And then there’s years where, you know, like, we don’t lose any fair piglets, because they’re all born in January, and they die from the cold, you know.
So we don’t lose any fair piglets and stuff. And I can start our year off like really strong and be able to feed out more pigs for the year. And I’m like, wow, like we’re able to afford a new UTV this year or something, you know?
Great.
Yeah. So it’s, you know, farming is farming is what farming is.
Right? It’s difficult.
I grew up on a ranch myself. So there’s always those challenges.

How to Contact FCLDF

Do you want to tell everybody where they can find you guys? And?
Sure, I would love to do that.
So like I said, the easiest place to find us if, if your folks are online is at farm to consumer.org. We have some resources there we def I would definitely advise anybody if you go on our website, to do the subscribe now and you will get on to our email alerts and emails. We’re very careful we do not inundate people. But I will say if you look at our website, we do action alerts on a regular basis for policy that’s being proposed.
So either supporting say raw milk being, you know, legalized or being in opposition to some new legislation. And we contact people by state typically for that, those things, unless obviously you’re at the federal level. And then a little advice for me on that one.
Once you subscribe to them, and this goes for anybody who you feel like you really want to know their stuff. Platforms like Google automatically put that into a promotions folder, and you don’t see it in your regular inbox.
Yeah, this is an I’ve only learned to figure this out just recently.
So I guess we need to do something to tell folks they need Marcus, how do you put it into your regular? My business coach suggested I ask everybody to do this. And it always feels a little spammy to me in general. When they sign up for your email, one of the first emails you send them suggests to them that they either like to add you to their address.
Or if it goes into promotions, you can go in there and say something like not promotional or something. Each of those platforms are a little different. But you can even do a small little thing like figure out how to do it yourself and do a small little video clip or something with it.
That’s really helpful. And we’re improving some communications as we speak. So I feel like under advisement.
Yeah, I feel like something like this, I would want to know those laws regularly. And as they’re coming up, and even myself this morning, I was looking for our email interaction for the meeting. And I typed it in and all these emails popped up.
And I was like, I haven’t seen those. And I was really bummed. And so that’s something that you know, whether it’s you guys following me, or you’re following a new place like this, make sure you do that for those people that you really want to see what they have to offer.
Thank you for that. Yeah, that’s very good information. I’ll just want to add quickly, folks can also just telephone us, of course, if they want.
Oh, yeah.
But doing the contact in the email, you know, we do have info at, farmtoconsumer.org. If people like that, you can call us at 703-208-3276. 3276 spells farm.
And yeah, the info at farm to consumer.org is just going on our website and using the contact us always works really well as well.
That’s great. I’ll be sure to put that because I do know that we have a lot of people that don’t use Yeah, the internet in the same way.
So I understand we have a lot of members who don’t. So it’s important to get that out there.
Yeah.
Yeah.

Closing & ‘Keep Growing’

So man, thank you so much for coming on today. I feel like this is really going to help a lot of people who are trying to branch out or may have not even known that they could branch out.
Right? Yeah and would you just tell everybody what keep growing means to you?
Keep growing means to me?
Yep. It’s my favorite question for everybody.
Oh, well, I would take that as keep growing real, real healthy local food and caring for your families and your communities.
Oh, I love that. Thank you so much for your time.
And thanks for having everybody go check them out and see what they can do to help you.
Great. Thank you.