CLEWISTON, Fla — Farms like C&B in Clewiston are going high-tech - new food traceability laws coming in 2025 will have them tracking everything from field to fork, in part to help you know where your food comes from, and to keep you safe.
But this isn't an easy task, and a Florida Congressman is pushing for changes to help small farmers meet the new laws.
As Fox 4’s Hendry County Community Correspondent, I work in this area every day, so I went to C&B to check out what this tech looks like.
Watch my report here...
From barcodes to Bluetooth, C&B farms have been upgrading their tech to stay ahead of the law.
“The scanner is downloaded into the system,” commented farm owner, Chuck Obern, over the beeping barcode scanners.
Obern walked me through how they track the “food chain”.
“He fills the data and information, he hits a button, then the stickers are printed. The stickers have every harvesters name, the crew, the PTI. The stickers are then given to the harvester - he harvests a box, he puts a sticker on the box. Then, when the boxes are being picked up and put on a transport truck there’s a barcode reader,” Obern explained.
The FDA says it’s all about safety - being able to trace food borne illnesses back to their source. But, Obern said the tech doesn’t come cheap - it cost him more than $500,000.
Obern said he worries smaller farmers won’t be able to afford it.
“So, what’s going to happen to him? He’s either going to have to join with a sales outfit that has the wherewithal, that has the software, but then he’s giving up some of his independence - how he has to sell his product through somebody else. Or, the other option is go out of business,” said Obern.
United States Representative, Scott Franklin, said the costs could be passed to consumers if small farms survive at all. So, he’s pushing for changes to ease the burden.
“We’re asking for some test projects that would enable us to test some other technologies that might be cheaper and easer for them to implement, and also get a sense of what the real process is going to look like to comply with this - to see if it’s feasible,” Franklin explained.
Franklin’s team plans four test projects, and after evaluating the results, believe full implementation is still two year out.
“We want to make sure that in the course of trying to do something good, we don’t end up doing something bad with unintended consequences,” said Franklin.
Obern said even for larger farms like his, every dollar counts. “It’s not like our margins are huge,” he said. It’s why this change matters for everyone in the food chain.
