Marathon Pundit: Stop the regulatory overreach: Farming is everybody's bread and butter

Tuesday, October 18, 2011

Stop the regulatory overreach: Farming is everybody's bread and butter

Michigan wheat farm

In the 1970s I remember seeing hats and T-shirts emblazoned with the phrase, "Farming is everybody's bread and butter."

What did you have for lunch today?

It's not just factories that are under assault from the overrreaching White House environmental regulations--so are farms.

From the House Oversight Committee website:

While American families deserve clean air and water, America's two million family farms live or die by it. Sustainable ecosystems power the more than $300 billion agriculture industry, feeding America and supporting about 1.2 million jobs. Just as overfishing puts fisherman out of work, poisoned land puts a farm out of business. Tom Deardorff II - Oxnard, CA small business owner and fourth generation family farmer - put it another way.

"We are the first environmentalists."

"My father created a sustainable, good business. We feel a very strong connection to the land and all our resources for that matter, whether land, water or labor," Deardorff said during an AmericanJobCreators.com visit to his family's small produce packing facility. "It's important for us to not only operate our business in a way that acknowledges and respects those resources, but also sustains them and makes them available for future generations."

The next generation depends on Mr. Deardorff both caring for his piece of California and providing for his 120 full-time workers and their families. A goal shared, in theory, by the 81,205 pages of federal government regulations. But as these government dos-and-don'ts travel the 2,777 miles from Washington to reality, many turn into costly burdens, saddling small businesses like Deardorff Family Farms with higher costs and uncertain futures. Worse, meddling from the bureaucrats enforcing federal government regulations erodes the economic freedom and predictability on which Mr. Deardorff's great-grandfather built the farm.