This week U.S. Senator (D-NJ) and Democratic presidential candidate Cory Booker unveiled legislation he says will "revitalize independent family farm agriculture and ensure a level playing field for all farmers and ranchers." According to the announcement, the Farm System Reform Act of 2019 would "strengthen the Packers & Stockyards Act to crack down on the monopolistic practices of multi-national meatpackers and corporate integrators, place a moratorium on large industrial animal operations, sometimes referred to as concentrated animal feeding operations and restore mandatory country-of-origin labeling requirements."

"Our independent family farmers and ranchers are continuing to be squeezed by large, multinational corporations that, because of their buying power and size, run roughshod over the marketplace. We need to fix the broken system — that means protecting family farmers and ranchers and holding corporate integrators responsible for the harm they are causing," says Booker. "Large factory farms are harmful to rural communities, public health and the environment, and we must immediately begin to transition to a more sustainable and humane system."

The Farm System Reform Act of 2019 aims to:

This isn't the first time Booker had unveiled agriculture legislation. Booker is the author of legislation that he and Sen. Jon Tester (D-MT) recently reintroduced that would place an immediate and indefinite moratorium on acquisitions and mergers in the food and agriculture sector. He's introduced a bill that would support stewardship practices on more than 100 million acres of farmland by investing tens of billions of dollars through existing voluntary USDA conservation programs.

Booker has joined Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) to introduce bipartisan legislation to reform commodity checkoff programs and another piece of legislation that would reform the Environmental Quality Incentives Program, which provides farmers and ranchers with federal cost-share grants to implement environmentally-beneficial conservation practices on working agricultural lands.

During the farm bill debate in the Senate last year, Booker introduced amendments to protect contract farmers from retaliation from firms if they speak to their members of Congress or USDA officials, and to require large integrators to provide more transparency in their payments to contract farmers.

Source: Cory Booker, U.S. Senator for New Jersey, who is solely responsible for the information provided, and wholly owns the information. Informa Business Media and all its subsidiaries are not responsible for any of the content contained in this information asset.