Senate Bill 863, Seed Preemption passed both the house and the senate this past week!! It is headed to the Governor’s desk! I can’t tell you how much this meant to me as a farmer here in Oregon! As I have written in the past couple of weeks, this goes a long way in showing that our state believes in helping farmers utilize tools in the future to feed this ever growing world!! All the while protecting us from regulations county by county and keeping 1 Department of Agriculture in Oregon, not 36!
Here are the two blog posts from the weeks past….
Thanks to our Governor who allowed this to be in the special session package to begin with, legislators who worked on getting this passed, all our hard working lobbyists, to those who contacted their legislators, testified, and spoke out on how important this issue is, not just for farmers, but for our state!
NuttyGrass 
Would like to know how a ‘one size fits all’ policy for the state, likely dictated by the voters of Portland and Eugene, will benefit farmers. Scratching my head on your and the Farm Bureau favoring that over local control. With the Governor’s promise to bring statewide GMO labeling and statewide crop regulation to the Legislature in 2015, how is this a good thing?
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I don’t think that this necessarily means that it will be a “one size fits all” situation. I believe that having the Oregon Department of Agriculture in charge to make decisions will be important, vs. having counties who don’t have the resources to manage these large and very complex issues. For example Oregon Department of Ag has already worked on the canola issue which has set different standards for different areas of the state. I’m using this example to say it turned out perfect, all I’m saying is that one department in control doesn’t always mean a one size fits all approach.
As for the promise of a return in 2015, to me this says that if you’re against GMO labeling and statewide crop regulation of GMOs then we will have a fight at one level, not at 36 different counties levels along with 36 department of ag’s telling us how to farm.
Thanks for your comment Jason!
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