Impending regulations cause an Akron fixture to stop growing and selling food

By Tom Blumer | For Ohio Watchdog

The owner of Akron’s only working farm who will no longer sell his output to the public is blaming out-of-control government regulation.

Don Bessemer of Bessemer Farms, an outfit with roots going back to before the turn of the 20th century told Lisa Abraham at the Akron Beacon Journal that he, in her words, “has stopped growing vegetables for local tables” and laid off all of his workers because of “frustration with pending federal food safety regulations that likely will require farmers to very specifically track their produce and how it is handled from seed to sale.”

In other words, the Food and Drug Administration is inexorably moving towards forcing  farmers to employ the batch processing and reporting methodologies it requires of pharmaceutical manufacturers.

This means, in Bessemer’s own words, that “we’re being put out of business by the government,” even though “we haven’t poisoned anybody with an ear of corn for 117 years.”