Red Tape shouldn't divide consumers from producers

We've seen popular Facebook posts promoting the idea of teaching gardening in public schools as a way of letting children find out where food comes from, and even how to grow it for themselves.

McCook has been home to a couple of community gardens, with varying involvement and success, and gardeners suffered a blow when one of the local nurseries went out of business just when seedlings should have been planted for this spring.

At first blush, a headline that the Legislature is getting involved with gardening seems like unnecessary red tape, but a closer look at the proposal seems to make sense.

It's red tape that the bills, LB544 and LB558, hope to eliminate.

One would give local governments authority to designate vacant city land for community gardens.

Currently, such gardens sit on private property, mostly land owned by churches. The bill creates a task force to find ways to convert public-school grounds or rights-of-way purchased by the Nebraska Department of Roads into community gardens.

It would also exempt free seed exchanges, or seed libraries, from regulations that apply to commercial seed operations. Seed libraries work just like book libraries; people check out seeds and return them at the end of the growing season, with the added benefit that such seeds are naturally adapted to local conditions.

Sponsors worry that state agriculture departments will interfere, which is what happened in Pennsylvania, where regulators shut down a 10-year-old seed library last June by enforcing commercial requirements that seeds be labeled and tested in 400-seed batches. The bill would exclude seed libraries from regulations in the Nebraska Seed Law.

The second bill would allow non-hazardous foods such as fresh produce, baked goods and jams to be prepared in personal kitchens and sold on a small scale -- they are already legal to sell at farmers markets.

One such small-scale baker testified that he had a booming business for the farmers market season, six months of the year, but didn't have the funds to build a commercial kitchen to provide his product the rest of the year.

That idea drew fire from the Nebraska Grocery Industry Association, which provided testimony that consumers might be endangered by the use of unregulated home kitchens.

We shouldn't downplay the role of government regulation when it comes to food safety -- such regulations were created for good reason.

But government shouldn't get in the way of people who want to create a closer connection between consumers and those who provide the food they consume.