The San Francisco Chronicle reports that farmers in California are tearing out hedges of fennel and cilantro that organic growers use around their fields to to repel harmful insects. Why? Food safety. The companies that contract for their produce demand “sterile buffers” instead.

The article goes on to list other demands the food giants are making on farmers that most of us feel are worse than counterproductive. Farmers are destroying row after row of crops if they catch a squirrel nibbling nearby or if a deer runs through. They are poisoning ponds, ostensibly to prevent the possibility that frog poop carrying e coli will contaminate the crops, but more likely to avoid offending consumers who might find frog parts amid the mechanically harvested spinach leaves.

The reality, of course, is that the virulent strains of e coli that are finding their way into our food might better be prevented by banning CAFOs, those industrial Confined Animal Feed Operations that are little more than incubators for dangerous pathogens. Instead the food giants are dictating terms for their growers that run counter to everything that organic and sustainable agriculture stands for. And their lobbying powers risks enshrining those practices as the law of the land in proposed new food safety laws (HR 875 and HR 2479). In thier current form, these laws would mean that a farmer could no longer take the family dog along while touring the fields. In the Chronicle article, one farmer reports that the company he contracts with has told him that no child under five can accompany him into the fields, apparently for fear of diaper leak.

The corporate mindset often ends up using a sledgehammer where a scalpel would do. The goal of the middle manager is to solve the problem quickly and cheaply, to keep the superiors happy. Yet the challenge is that these draconian and often counterproductive solutions often end up enshrined as best practices later. Meanwhile, the corporate mindset pushes companies to stretch regulations such as what can be called organic to the point where they may snap and become meaningless.

When U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack visited a farm in Charlotte, Michigan, this week, I heard him trying to explain the complex balancing act that legislation and regulation require. We all want safe food. Exempting small growers from some of the most burdensome new food regulations or tailoring them to their needs would be difficult. What’s a small farm? By size, by number of employees, by volume of sales, by net profit?

Yet something must be done to allow small growers to avoid being treated as clerks who just follow orders from government and corporate bureaucrats unduly influenced by bottom-line profits. Many organic growers have developed creative solutions to the myriad of problems that they face in raising a variety of different crops. We do not want them to be forced to abandon these hard-won solutions, in the hope of solving problems better solved by other approaches. If the law cannot recognize that small is better, then the law is indeed an ass. And the growers may need to find ways to organize a push-back against government and their corporate contractors.

The problems are indeed easier to identify than the solutions. But the first step is for farmers to reach out to consumers who care so that we can work together to make the folks at the top of the government agencies and corporate headquarters listen to and accept these concerns.