With 7 weeks left in the Texas legislative session, we have some great news!

SB 541, the first of the cottage food expansion bills, unanimously passed the Senate last week!  

And SB 1864, to allow farmers to sell ungraded eggs to restaurants and retailers, was unanimously approved by the Senate Health & Human Services committee!

Both bills still have many hurdles to overcome before they become law, but these are major steps forward.  Some of our other bills are also progressing, while others are struggling … but everything is still in play at this point in the session!  Check out all the details below.

But first -  there are two steps you can do right now to help:

1 - Join us for our FINAL Lobby Day of the Session - Can you make it to Austin for our final grassroots lobby day on Tuesday, May 6?  We can really use your help in fighting to get these bills through the final weeks of session!  Register here.

2- Call your State Representative and State Senator NOW! Read through the bills below, and decide which one(s) really matter to you. Your call can be super short, just a couple of minutes. Identify yourself as a constituent, provide the bill number(s) that you care about, and share just a couple of sentences about why it’s important to you.  And then close by asking that the Representative or Senator “sign on as a co-author to help the bill move forward.”

You can look up who represents you here.

---

Now on to the bill news:

Regenerative Ag research bill: HB 5339 would direct the Higher Education Board to develop a grant program to fund research into regenerative agriculture at Texas universities. It would prioritize universities that work with groups and farmers already implementing regen ag, as well as departments that get less than 25% of their funding from companies that sell farming inputs (pesticides, fertilizers, or patented seeds). This would provide critically needed scientific research, untainted by conflicts of interest, to help support Texas farmers move to regenerative agricultural methods!

Cottage foods: SB 541, the first cottage food expansion bill, unanimously passed the Senate last week. It raises the sales cap to $100K, allows the sale of perishable baked goods direct to consumers, addresses the problems with local health departments improperly requiring permits, and allows limited wholesale sales (but excludes baked goods from wholesale).

In the meantime, HB 2588 received a House committee hearing, but has yet to be voted on by the committee.  It does all that SB 541 does, plus (1) indexes the cap for inflation; (2) allows a wide range of time-and-temperature controlled for safety foods to be sold directly to consumers; (3) includes non-TTCS baked goods to be sold wholesale, and (4) has various clean up items on sampling, donating, etc.

Now, SB 541 will go to the House.  We may end up with SB 541 or HB 2588 or something in between …or, of course, nothing.  A lot depends on the work we do in the next few weeks!

Raw Milk: HB 1669 also got a hearing in the Public Health Committee and they grilled the witness from the Dairymen’s Association and FARFA’s Exec. Dir. for over an hour.  The bill, as filed, would have allowed off-farm sales without pre-orders and “coordinators” for group purchases/ buying clubs.  It became clear that the coordinator provision would most likely pass only if the bill included new requirements for permits, regulatory standards, and inspections.  So there will be an amended version that focuses solely on off-farm sales, so that farmers can sell at places like farmers’ markets without having to take pre-orders.

Eggs:  SB 1864, to allow the sales of ungraded eggs to restaurants and retailers, had a hearing last week, which went great.  Senator Hughes signed on to Senator Johnson’s bill, making it a joint bill between an urban liberal D and a rural conservative R! It passed unanimously out of committee, and now we are waiting for it to be scheduled for a floor vote.  The version approved by the committee is broader than the version that was filed (and linked to above); as passed by committee, it allows sales of up to 500 dozen/week to restaurants and retailers (with continued unlimited direct-to-consumer sales) of ungraded eggs from the farmer’s flock.

The Poultry Federation is opposing the bill, especially the sales to grocers, and we anticipate a tough fight on the House side with the House companion, HB 2953.

Duplicative permits: HB 5459 got a late start, but our bill sponsor is committed to pushing it forward.  The bill would prevent local health departments from requiring farmers & food businesses with less than $1.5 million in gross annual sales from getting a local permit if they already have a state health department food retailers or food manufacturers permit.  Stay tuned for a hearing in the House Public Health Committee, hopefully coming soon!

Home Food Security: HB 294, to protect people’s rights to have front yard gardens and backyard chickens and rabbits, was unanimously approved by committee and is now in the Calendars Committee, awaiting a date for a vote by the full House.

Property tax reform: The bill sponsors in both the House and the Senate have requested hearings on HB 2930 and SB 2168, but nothing has happened, which – candidly – is not a good sign.  But we will continue to push for the hearings, and nothing is settled yet at this point in the session.

Sewage sludge: The PFAS bill, HB 1674, has garnered an impressive number of co-authors – 75 in total, half of the Texas House of Representatives!  Although no hearing has been scheduled yet, we expect it to happen soon given the array of support for the bill.

Glyphosate: HB 1637, which would ban glyphosate on school grounds, is also awaiting a hearing.  We had hoped that its assignment to the Public Education committee (rather than the Agriculture committee) would give it a better chance of progressing … but the companies that profit from pesticides have undoubtedly been putting major pressure to keep this bill from having an open hearing.  But, again, nothing is dead yet ….

mCOOL: The bills to require mandatory Country of Origin Labeling of meat at the state level (HB 1374, HB 1385, and SB 823) have gained about two dozen co-authors, far more than any previous session, but also have yet to get hearings in either chamber.

Compost: There was a bad anti-composting bill introduced due to a dust-up between an Austin-based composting company and Lee County residents. SB 2078, as originally filed, would have allowed local officials to ban any composting operation within a kilometer of any kind of water feature, for any reason (including behind-the-scenes lobbying by landfill companies). FARFA worked with the bill sponsor to find a solution that addressed the immediate controversy without impeding compost operations, which are so valuable to our farms! The revised bill requires that if a city mandates composting of food waste (as Austin does), then that mandated waste must be composted at a facility within a county that has a city with such an ordinance.  It effectively brackets the bill’s impact to Central Texas, and doesn’t impact composting operations that aren’t receiving food wastes that were collected subject to a city mandate.

Read more about these bills and keep track of them on our website at 2025 Texas Legislative Session Priorities - Farm and Ranch Freedom Alliance

###