Small farmers drove county's holdout vote against livestock board

Athens was the only county in Ohio to vote against Issue 2 last Tuesday. According to a source with a close involvement with local agriculture, this is because Athens County citizens have a better understanding of agricultural issues, with a long history of family farms and local food production, as well as a 37-year-old farmers market.

"We have such a well-developed local food system already. Issue 2 was about supporting local farms, but we already do support local farmers down here," said Ronda Clark, director of Community Food Initiatives in Athens.

Issue 2 paved the way for the Ohio General Assembly to create a 13-member Ohio Livestock Care Standards Board. Members will be appointed by the governor and the speaker of the house to cover a variety of backgrounds, and the board will endeavor to "maintain food safety, encourage locally grown and raised food, and protect Ohio farms and families."

The Ohio Farm Bureau hopes the board will be up and running by spring of 2010, said Joe Cornely, spokesperson for the Ohio Farm Bureau Federation.

"We have to live up to our promises to the citizens of Ohio," he said. "In our view, driving local economies, providing safe local food, caring for animals and preserving family farms are certainly issues important enough to be addressed in our (state) constitution."

Warren Taylor, the owner of Snowville Creamery in Pomeroy, worries that the board will be an instrument for industry lobbyists and heap high costs onto small farmers in the form of national identification tags and restrictions on food labeling and pasture grazing.

For example, the National Animal Identification System, currently voluntary in Ohio, issues licenses to help track diseased animals. They are issued to individual animals on small farms, but the system allows corporate farms to tag by the herd, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Web site. In this case, if the board were to adopt the system as a required form of maintaining food safety, they could simultaneously be discouraging locally grown food, because it will be very costly for some farmers to acquire licenses for all their animals, Taylor said.

He argued that there aren't any significant problems with the production and sale of local food, and instead the safety issues lie with Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations, or CAFOs. Proponents of the amendment spread fear and propaganda in their "Is your food safe?" campaign to otherwise uninformed Ohioans, he alleged. Many voters who supported the legislation saw supporting local farmers as logical, but few considered the board might instead favor the agribusinesses that poured $4 million into supporting it, Taylor added.

"It's an insult to the people of Ohio to feed them lies like this," he said. "It's fundamental to the ideas of democracy that people make informed choices."

Clark said that she doesn't think that the people who voted in favor of the amendment realize the impact of the choice they made.

"We're all adults here. I think we should all be presented with all the options," she said.

As for Athens County, she said the background of the area helped citizens see the real motives behind the legislation.

"We're so far ahead of the rest of the state on local food issues that we saw past the façade," she said.

Now that the amendment has passed, Taylor said the only way that anything positive can come from the establishment of the board is if those who voted against it keep the members honest.

"This board promised us transparency; let's make sure they give us transparency. They promised to promote local foods; make sure they promote local foods," he said.

Cornely argued that the General Assembly has the authority to keep the board in check, and members of the General Assembly are elected officials accountable to their constituents.

"If a bunch of people think the board is doing something inappropriate or thinks it should do something differently, then the public has recourse by working with their lawmakers," he said.

Athens County has the most successful farmers market in Ohio, and the strongest local food production and awareness of food issues, said Taylor.

"Athens people are informed, they're engaged, they can think for themselves," he said.