Assembly Bill 224 (Gordon)
A bill regulating the use of the term “CSA,” requiring CSAs to register with the state, and prescribing certain required practices related to food safety, passed the California Legislature in 2013 and will be implemented by the California Department of Food and Agriculture (CDFA) in 2014. CDFA is currently writing the rules and preparing a registration form.
You can download a pdf with a complete text of the bill at http://caff.org/programs/csas/regulations/
If you have questions about the bill, please contact Dave Runsten at dave@caff.org.
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In the bill, the definition for a "single farm CSA producer" refers to the Latin term (de minimus) when talking about how much product can be sold from another producer. The legal dentition seems to vary from 'of no significance, to 10%, to 25%. Does anyone know which definition CDFA will use? Richard
ReplyDeleteDave Runsten at CAFF says "We haven't seen any rules yet. But CDFA objected to 10%, which we had in the bill before. It was changed to "de minimus" at their request. So I am pretty sure the answer is that as of now it is less than 10%. There is no downside to calling yourself a multi-farm CSA. You can still use the term CSA. We are trying to fix the FDA FSMA rules so that a multi-farm CSA would not be considered a "facility" for packing CSA boxes with others' produce.
ReplyDeleteWe are also trying to get the CSA registration form changed so it is clear that the Food Safety GAPs are guidance as we intended."