No, the FDA Isn't Targeting Brewers or Farmers

Over the past couple days, the Internet, and especially the conservative blogosphere is dizzy with the

story that the FDA is targeting the relationship that some brewers have with local farmers, donating their spent grain for cattle feed. This is not true, it's simply another example of Internet gossip gone wild.

Talk Is Cheap when the Story Is Good

In case you haven't figured this out by now, the Internet is like a bunch of old gossips with nothing better to do than pass on things they've heard, adding more juicy bits as they do so. And that's what happened with this story. If, for example, you read the Hit-and-Run, blog, you find out that:

FDA Moves to Stop Sharing Between Beer Makers and Farmers

OMG, I can't believe that regulation is so out of hand in this country that the FDA would target brewers like that!

Of course, if you look at the article cited by the blogger from Boing Boing, the esteemed Cory Doctorow decided to put a headline on a few quotes, with maybe a sentence of his own thrown in there:

FDA rules make it nearly impossible for beer makers to give their grain to farmers for feed

Now, at least we're beginning to see that it's not that the FDA isn't actually specifically moving to target brewers. It's just making rules about animal feed that add hardship to brewers.

And if we look at Doctorow's source, the rhetoric cools down a little to a mild fever:

New FDA rules may cut long-standing ties between beer makers, farmers

And if you look in the actual article, you can see the source of the fear. An unquoted statement by the writer of the article that the FDA's proposal would require brewers to dry and package their grain before they ship it
But there's no evidence that this is actually what the FDA is proposing.

Is the FDA Really Taking Food from the Horse's Mouth?

What evidence do we have of what the FDA is really going to require of brewers? An actual quote from the FDA says, "FDA understands that many breweries and distilleries sell spent grains … as animal food. Because those spent grains are not alcoholic beverages themselves, and they are not in a prepackaged form that prevents any direct human contact with the food, the Agency tentatively concludes that subpart C of this proposed rule would apply to them."

So . . . looking at subpart C, we find that it says:

"The Agency proposes to require that the owner, operator, or agent in charge of a facility have and implement a written food safety plan that includes as applicable:

• A hazard analysis;
• Preventive controls;
• Monitoring procedures;
• Corrective Action procedures;
• Verification procedures; and
• A recall plan."

There's nothing in the plan about having to dry the grain, unless, of course, passing wet grain creates hazards that could only be prevented by drying the grain, which, as brewers point out is not likely to be the case. And it's worth noting that at this point, this is just a tentative finding, not part of the final rule, which won't be decided until after the FDA hears all the input from relevant industries, including brewers.

Undue Hardship or Due Diligence?

The truth of the matter is that the new rule probably won't create much hardship at all for brewers. The Brewers Association would probably come up with a boilerplate set of guidelines consistent with good brewing practices, such as regularly testing spent grain, which is often recommended for QC purposes anyway. How often testing would be required would depend on the level of the threat, so, again, it likely won't be much.

If you look at the Brewer's Association statement about  the regulation, it says, " The proposed FDA rules on animal feed could lead to significantly increased costs and disruption in the handling of spent grain." But, as this blogger points out, it seems that the Brewer's Association hasn't actually done any math on the question, which means that it's definitely premature to enter freak-out mode about the proposed regulations.

And, of course, the statement forwards the absurd assumption that if brewers can't give their grain for cattle feed, it'll have to go to a landfill, when the Brewer's Association's own solid waste recommendations note that there are many options for using spent grain, including using them in baking, giving them to ethanol plants, and composting them on their own farms or other farms.

Furthermore, based on the experience in other markets, it likely won't have much effect on the economics of using spent grain for animal feed.

Actual Brewers' Experience with Regulating Spent Grain

The US is not the first country to regulate spent grain coming from breweries. In 2006, a law went into effect requiring brewers to be licensed before giving or selling spent grain to farmers. The law actually lifted the previous ban on the practice that was issued in 2001, because it had been linked to the 2001 foot and mouth outbreak which resulted in more than 2000 documented cases of the disease, resulted in the wasted slaughter of millions of animals, and cost the UK an estimated $16 billion.
Although spent grain wasn't likely the cause of the outbreak and the practice was outlawed just out of an excess of caution, this does show that there are very real harms that can come from the use of unregulated feed.

So, have British brewers been forced to dry and package their spent grain before giving it to farmers? Not at all. Have they been burdened by excessive processing costs? Not at all. In fact, if you look at this exchange on a brewer's forum, there's no question that selling grain to farmers is highly profitable for brewers. Not only that, but the eagerness of the farmers to buy the spent grain suggests that it's still an economic alternative for farmers as well.

In fact, this 2011 study of the practice suggests that the primary factor in the profitability of the practice is the shipping, which is pretty similar to considerations in the US.

I don't blame bloggers (much) for trying to sensationalize their stories. After all, a blogger's gotta eat, and many of them have revenue based on clicks and page views. Original ideas are scarce and research is hard, so it's easiest to just try to "sex up" somebody else's story.
But I would think that by now we would all be smart enough to know that's how their game is played and that the rest of us should check out the facts before we believe their overblown claims.