S14: Freedom of Farmers to Farm Freely Act (Statute)

Summary as follows.

Part 1 is just the name.

Part 2 defines farmers for the purpose of this act.

Part 3 ends the practice of mandatory marketing boards. Think of these as farm unions. IRL if a minimum number of farmers of a particular product vote to form a marketing board, ALL farmers of that product must join and pay dues, even if they don't want to. SCOTUS has been all over the place on legality recently, with them finding a Mushroom Board illegal compelled speech, but a Cattle Board legal as government speech.

Part 4 removes the power of voluntary marketing boards to fix prices or make rules which bind non-members.

Part 5 prohibits mandatory crop set asides. IRL a program like this for Raisins was struck down by SCOTUS a year or 2 ago, suggesting they are of dubious constitutionality.

Part 6 prohibits mandatory participation in the IRL National Animal Information System (NAIS), which requires mandatory microchipping of animals and is cost prohibitive for small farmers and violates their privacy.

Part 7 is basically a middle finger to Monsanto (Fu<k you Monsanto). They make farmers sign license agreements to use their (admittedly superior) GMO seeds. These agreements usually do awful things life preventing farmers from not planting the seed. Most GMO hybrids won't breed true after a few generations, which means Monsanto is going out of its way to make sure farmers are constantly dependent upon them for seed, since they aren't allowed to set any aside for a rainy day. Since plants are grown outside, sometimes pollen from their GMO plants is carried airborne and it is not uncommon for it to pollinate or sprout on farm land not under licensing agreement, through no fault of the farmer. This section protects Monsanto's rights to go after farmers who knowingly use seeds they didn't sign a license for while offering vastly higher recovery amounts for innocent farmers who Monsanto harasses, hopefully reducing the tendency of Monsanto going after innocent farmers.

Part 8 is a mild exemption for child labor on small farms, because that is an American tradition. Still requires such children to go to school and not use unsafe machinery they aren't trained in.

Part 9 allows the Amish/Organic foodies to get raw milk if they want it, provided the raw milk is labeled. Basically muh freedom and that's how we drank milk for millennia, so who cares what people do.

Part 10 allows for the use of a great pesticide in the event of a declared emergency, which hopefully will never happen.

Part 11 is a study on the costs/benefits of subsidizing small farmers who participate in farmers markers. I hate farm subsidies but if they are to be done, I feel like this would be a good method, rather than just paying a fixed rate for commodity crops, thereby encouraging factory farms to price out small farmers through scale economies.

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