An increasing number of customers are bringing animals with them when they visit farm markets, pick your own farms, or agritainment activities. Animals can pose a food safety risk to produce, introduce disease to farm animals, frighten or upset farm animals. Outside animals can pose a risk to employees, and other visitors. Farms need to consider compliance with regulations and buyer requirements specific to food safety and biosecurity to protect their farm animals. The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) governs what you are legally allowed to do in regards to service animals on your farm.  This post will cover the specifics of the ADA regulations, identify animals that are not covered by the ADA regulations, provide sample policies for farms to follow regarding customer animals on the retail farm, and how to reduce risk on your farm from outside animals.  Farm posters and consumer handouts will be made available statewide to assist you in communicating with customers about animals on your farm.  Contact Wes Kline or Meredith Melendez for details.  Farm Bureau will be assisting with the distribution of these materials at County Board of Agriculture meetings.

What do the ADA regulations cover?
While many types of animals provide comfort and emotional support to their owners, only service animals are protected by the ADA, specifically title II and III. The ADA regulations define “service animal” as dogs, and less commonly miniature ponies, that are individually trained to do work or perform tasks for people with disabilities.  These activities can include guiding a blind person, alerting people who are deaf, assisting a person in a wheelchair, alerting and protecting a person who is having a seizure, reminding a person with mental illness to take prescribed medications, calming a person with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) during an anxiety attack, or other duties. The work or task that a service animal has been trained to perform must be directly related to the persons disability. Some of these disabilities are obvious, others are not.

What questions can you legally ask?
When it is not obvious to you that an animal is a service animal you may ask just two questions to determine if the animal is a service animal.
1) Is the service animal required because of a disability?
2) What work or task has the service animal been trained to perform?
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