Slaughterhouse Grand Opening & 4th Amendment Dispute

Slaughterhouse Grand Opening & 4th Amendment Dispute

I’m Lacy Gray with Washington Ag Today.

On August 29th the Cattle Producers of Washington Livestock Processors Cooperative Association will be hosting a grand opening for its new slaughter facility near Odessa. The facility, which has been in the making over the last several years, will give small cattle,hog, sheep, and goat producers another place, other than the often overbooked small USDA plants, to take livestock for processing. The grand opening ceremony will take place at the slaughter facility’s location in the Odessa Industrial Park at 3 p.m., and will include discussions on scheduling livestock and marketing local product. For more information on LPCA membership visit www.livestockprocessors.com.

According to a federal judge there’s an exception to the 4th amendment called “the open fields exception”, which means that the constitutional prohibition against unreasonable search and seizure does not apply when one is outside. The ruling came about as a result of a dispute last month between the Blue Mountain Farms of Burbank and the U.S. Department of Labor over worker interviews during blueberry harvest. Washington Farm Labor Association’s Dan Fazio had this to say on the issue.

FAZIO: I guess that federal investigators can wander into orchards whenever they want and literally just grab up workers and tell them to come with them and sit down and talk to the workers without even informing management or the owners that they are on farm property. So naturally, that’s kind of a bad development for us.

Tomorrow Fazio will talk in depth about what lead up to the ruling and what it might mean for farmers in the future.

I’m Lacy Gray and that’s Washington Ag Today on the Ag Information Network.