POLISH RULES
This is my last day in Poland; today I'll be talking to about 40 farmers in a brand new walk-in cooler made out of hemp blocks and powered by solar panels. It's on a farm that's the hub of a cooperative that assimilates products from members and distributes them both at farmers' markets and through a subscription service (CSA), about half and half.
I've been here a week and am still trying to suss out the Polish and EU rules for value adding; as you know, that's where the money is and also my personal interest in food emancipation. And the ultimate secret to integrity food.
Here's what I THINK I learned yesterday after talking to Piotr, my host and interpreter at the farm where I'll be today. Poland has an almost blanket exemption from government inspection and all taxes if you meet two criteria.
First, your net profit needs to be under $25,000 per year. Realize that any smart business person and accountant can figure out how to end the year without profit. You can rent things to yourself, pay yourself more, buy things--lots of ways to bleed off money to show no net profit; multi-million dollar businesses can adhere to this stipulation. All the caps I'm aware of in similar cottage food laws in the U.S. use gross income, not net. So this is pretty cool.
Second, you can only have a certain number of animals. There are no numeric caps on vegetables, fruit, and produce; only animals. You can have 350 laying hens and 500 broilers at any one time. So what people do is the husband has 350, wife 350, child 350, etc. And you each run simultaneous 500-bird batches, so if each person runs 4 batches a year, that's 2,000 birds per season.
It's interesting how Poland's history as a Soviet state (47 years) taught its people how to cleverly circumvent government rules. Socialists, of course, pile on rules but it just makes people more and more clever figuring out work-arounds. In the U.S. the clean food producers by and large have lobbied for government grants and borrowed money to comply with regulations; here people just put their head down and practice guerilla commerce.
What about chicken pot pie and other value added products? All you need is a once-in-a-lifetime kitchen inspection, which I'm told is easy. I saw the kitchen yesterday at Piotr's house and it was as plain as any household kitchen. He can make ferments, canned foods, meat pies--virtually anything you want in a processed, heat-n-eat format in his home kitchen without any inspection. He said they never come back to re-inspect.
Beef and pork become a bit of a gray area regarding home processing. Apparently the law allows you to home butcher and sell it to friends and family, but you can't transport it more than a certain distance and you can't sell it to a third party, like a grocery store. Again, this has numerical caps but apparently that's a bit gray too. For example, with poultry you can have birds in a brooder and in the field, but they don't count the ones in the brooder.
The biggest problem is that all chickens in the field must be protected from any contact with wild birds. So even Eggmobiles must be completely netted where the chickens run, which defeats the whole purpose of the pasture sanitation behind the cows. But then again, some farmers don't net and just risk it--they don't allow anyone to take pictures in order to stay under the radar from government watchdogs, who scour the internet looking for rogues.
Vaccination is mandatory on cattle. I haven't found anyone here who has figured out how to get around it. All cattle must be registered with the state and apparently that's one of the more aggressively enforced requirements.
If you fall under these two stipulations, even your customers don't have to pay sales tax. It's all an interesting concession to give room for direct sales unimpeded by food police that includes escaping all taxes and measures financials with net instead of gross. The gymnastics supposedly "first world" countries go through regulatorily to give space for market access and yet keep the consumer safety advocates and industrialists at bay is truly remarkable.
Every farmer I've talked with has a different tolerance level for the regulations. Some are cowed and others are more aggressive and savvy. Like tyrannies everywhere, the bureaucracy appears more interested in checking a box than in actually policing things on a day-to-day basis. And a LOT of subjectivity exists within the regulations, which then translates to quite different experiences with bureaucrats. Get a good one and life is fine; get a bad one, and life is horrible.
How much are regulations holding back the integrity food movement?
