New regs for Tuesday: Organic dairy cows and insured deposits

Tuesday’s edition of the Federal Register contains news rules from the Agriculture Department for dairy farmers who want to start producing organic milk and a request for public comments from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. on whether large banks should have to insure deposit accounts.

Dairy cows: The Department of Agriculture is considering a new rule that would allow dairy farmers to transition dairy animals into organic production.

The proposed rule would allow farmers to make this transition once. Any animals introduced into production after that would have to be managed organically starting in the womb or sourced from dairy animals that already completed their transition into organic production.

“This proposed rule would update the regulation by explicitly requiring that milk or milk products labeled, sold or represented as organic be from dairy animals organically managed since at least the last third of gestation, with a one-time exception for transition,” the rulemaking said. “This exception would allow a producer, as defined by the regulations, to transition nonorganic dairy animals to organic milk production one time, under specific conditions.”

The public has 90 days to comment.

Deposits: The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) wants the public to weigh in on whether banking institutions that have a large number of deposit accounts  – more than two million – should be required to insure those funds if the bank were to fail.

The insurance would be to ensure that depositors have access to their money in a timely manner, which is typically within one business day of a bank failure.

FDIC is asking the public to comment on whether these banks should be required to improve their recordkeeping to maintain accurate information on each depositor’s ownership interest and develop and maintain the ability to calculate the insured and uninsured amounts for each depositor by deposit insurance capacity for all or a substantial subset of deposit accounts at the end of any business day.

The public has 90 days to comment.