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California law restricts antibiotic use in livestock

A bill signed into law this week will make California the first state in the nation to ban the routine use of antibiotics in animal agriculture.

California Farm Bureau director of natural resources and commodities Noelle Cremers says the move towards banning drugs used to promote growth in livestock started a few years ago.

“The FDA announced guidance 213 saying that they were asking pharmaceutical companies to faze out the use of antibiotics in feed and water for growth promotion, so that antibiotics could only be used for disease prevention purposes.”

She tells Brownfield media coverage portrayed the FDA guidelines as voluntary, even though all the pharmaceutical companies agreed to implement it.

Legislation was then proposed in California to make FDA’s requests mandatory, while also banning the preventative use of antibiotics.

“Ultimately, one of those bills got to the Governor’s desk and he vetoed it last year saying it didn’t go far enough.  (adding) Antibiotic resistance is a significant issue and the Governor asked his administration to work on this and come up with a solution.”

Earlier this year, Senator Jerry Hill introduced a bill that was recently signed into law by Governor Jerry Brown.

“Senator Hill worked with the medical community and representatives of the livestock community to try and come up with a solution that would address the issue of resistance, but do it in a way that didn’t overly burden our members in California.”

Cremers acknowledges what the bill does to livestock producers is significant by requiring a prescription or veterinary feed directive for antibiotic use.

She says other states need to make sure agriculture has a seat at the table if and when these changes are proposed.

“We really need to be at the table and engaged, because this is coming at us and if we’re not there, we could see some of the problematic provisions (like what was being pushed in California) that we stopped.”

Some of the provisions Farm Bureau worked to remove from the final bill included restrictions on the use of preventative antibiotics, additional fees and a monitoring program.

The California law goes into effect in 2018 and will also eliminate the availability of livestock antibiotics for over-the-counter sales.