Sneaky tax on food: Please write you legislator to VOTE NO ON SB5911

As if farming is not hard enough, now WA State legislators are trying to sneak the B&O tax onto farmers. This really is a tax on food, which is not taxed in Washington State.

The Capital Press published this story last week, Ag legislator sends out alert about proposed B&O tax. Kudos to Rep. Mark Schoesler, R- Ritzville, ranking Republican on the Senate Agriculture and Rural Development Committee and also a member of the Ways & Means Committee.

The B&O tax taxes Washington State businesses selling within Washington State on the GROSS income not the NET income. It is probably the one tax in Washington that hurts businesses the most. However, if you sell your product outside of the state, you do not pay it on that income, and if you import product into the state, you do not pay it on that income, either. This tax has the potential to cripple or even destroy the locally grown food movement in Washington State.

To read the bill and follow it, click SB5911 progress.

I urge you to steal this letter, which I cribbed from Jackie Aitchison the Manager of the Poulsbo Farmers Market and the director of the Washington State Farmers Market Association. It does not matter which part of the state you live in, please write. If you are outside of the state, go ahead and write too. Plaster the legislature with VOTE NO ON SB5911

HERE IS the letter I sent my state legislators. I sent it to Representatives and Senators alike, since what goes through one chamber tend to go through the other.

I am farmer in Kitsap Country and I ask you to VOTE NO on SB5911.

This bill is a direct tax on food and violates the spirit of the sales tax law that does not tax food.

This bill would be a major setback. It comes at a time when we are trying to nurture and support our local farming community. Our local farming community provides us with family wage jobs, healthy locally grown food, an alternative to the big box economy, and a beautiful rural landscape that can survive in an economically viable form.

This gross income tax ignores the fact that local Washington State farmers are in, at best, a breakeven situation, and may be losing money.

This bill would subject Washington farmers who gross over $200,000 to the state B&O tax. Since the tax is based on gross, rather than net, it completely disregards costs. For most small farmers, meaning most of our farmers here in Kitsap County, this is a regressive tax that puts them at a great disadvantage.

A $200,000 gross represents no personal income for many local farmers because expenses and risks inherent to the business are extremely high.

My husband and I are struggling to grow our small farm income to a level that we are not at risk to support it. We both work outside of the farm to support ourselves. We believe that we will be able to make the farming operation profitable; however this type of regressive taxation makes that task vastly more difficult. This tax allows companies that import food to our state that raised outside of our state, and even outside of our country. Because they will not pay this tax, those companies will be able to compete more effectively against us and sell their product for less than we are able to sell it.

If you are interested in finding out more about how farming in Kitsap County and other counties in our state contributes to our community or hearing the concerns of our farmers and our farmer's markets, I would be happy to arrange something.

Thank you,
Marilyn Holt, Owner
Abundantly Green
1146 NE Madison Road
Poulsbo, WA 98370

The trigger amount looks to be large number to kick in this tax, but it's not: $200,000 Gross receipts is still not enough when it cost more to product that much food, or if you are at break even, or even if you have a marginal profit -- 1% of $200,000 is $2,000 -- can you live on that a year?

Thank you for helping,
Marilyn

Liars, Cheats, and Thieves Hurting Us Again

Business runs on trust. TRUST. Period. However over the past several years the trust that the customer needs to have in the products she/he buy has been sorely tried.

It did not start with the tainted dog and cat food from China, but that brought it to the attention of the American public. Since then we have had tainted baby food from China; tainted milk and chocolate bars from China. These were cheats that the Chinese do to their own people, and from what I read, the people who do them seem to have a hard time understanding that what they did was wrong. Luckily many more millions of Chinese think this is wrong, and are trying to fight back. This, however, is by no means a Chinese problem.

Here in the US and Canada, most of the tainted problems stemmed more from system contamination rather than malicious cheating. Escherica (E.) coli 0157:H7 in spinach, then in lettuce from all over. Then there were the E. coli infected tomatoes, but wait it wasn't the tomatoes it was the peppers, but wait it was none of those things. (I have read so much on this I think there never was an E. coli 0157:H7 problem, but I simply do not know.) The regulators made a hash of their testing and product recalls, wasting millions of tons of produce in the process, in a world filled with hunger. So we loose confidence it everything, which creates a major problem.

Now we have a major manufacturer of organic fertilizer using a prohibited substance to improve their "certified organic" fertilizer. California Liquid Fertilizer illegally cheated certified organic farms and their customers by tainting their fertilizers with ammonium sulfate, one of the worst of the synthetic fertilizers rightfully prohibited from from organic gardens. You can read here the story from the Sacramento Bee, Organic farms unknowingly used a synthetic fertilizer. This is a story that dovetails with our financial crisis: where were the regulators? This tainting of the fertilizer by California Liquid Fertilizer went on for seven (7) years! OMG! But it gets worse: The article says:

According to documents obtained by The Bee through a Public Records Act request, California Department of Food and Agriculture officials were notified of the problem in June 2004 but didn't complete their investigation and order the company to remove its product from the organic market until January 2007.

This is an organic grower's nightmare. Being told that something is organic, because we have to trust our suppliers to tell us the truth because we do not have a chemistry lab with a spectrometer to test the products with the OMRI (Organic Materials Review Institute), WSDA (Washington State Department of Agriculture), which we stick to, or Oregon Tilth, or CCOF (California Certified Organic Farmers),or other organic certification.

This is not the first time (or the second or third) that organic farmers who are doing their darnedest to keep their food organic are screwed by big business. In the late 1990's, Monsanto decided to these GMO wheat that was Roundup Ready (Roundup is something you do not want to use around food, it is super poisonous), and it crossed with organic wheat. These were field tests, out in the wind and weather. What did Monsanto expect? This was a major disaster that was also a cross between a fiasco and a tragedy. You can start reading about it in this report by the Canadian Organic Consumers Association Organic Consumers Association. An Update On The GMO Controversy from November 2001. However, it was Monsanto's response to the problem that is so egregious: I read that they sued the organic farmers over using their GMO, patented seed. The organic farms were decertified and had to go back to being transitional organic farms for several years. Here is a link to the sins of Monsanto Millions Against Monsanto. Read it and be amazed, or one of those other "A" words.

We work very hard to keep our food pure. So do the farmers who used California Liquid Fertilizer. One of the agricultural companies lied to, cheated on, and thieved from was Earthbound Organics. They are probably still the biggest supplier of organic produce, and millions of people depend on their organic vegetables. In the winter, when we have no vegetables, we buy them in the store like non-farmers, and we buy from Earthbound among others. Everyone throughout the organic food/value chain was betrayed.

The purposeful tainting of a product crosses all boundaries of decency: it is illegal, immoral, and unethical. It endangers people's lives. This cavalier attitude by those companies that perpetrate these cheats is so disrespectful of all of us. As a customer I do think about these problems as I stand in the grocery store or over the sink preparing dinner. As a farmer I fear this type of thing happening to our farm. As a business woman, I want to rip these liars, cheats, and thieves limb from limb. The ancient punishment of drawing and quartering seems about right for those who do this. No bailout bonuses for those guys. Do you think I'm angry? Oh yes.

Abundantly Green now listed on LocalHarvest

Local Harvest is a national website that allows people in the "lower 48" to find farmers' markets, family farms, and other sources of sustainably grown food in their area.

Abundantly Green is proud to join other Puget Sound and Washington State farms on Local Harvest. You can see our listing here.

I encourage you to click through and see this wonderful site started by Guillermo Payet, "a software engineer and activist dedicated to generating positive social change through the Internet." I also suggest that you Google Guillermo Payet and read more about him.