§ 96.004.Certain Marketing or Labeling Excluded

An exclusion protecting comparative marketing claims.

A person is not liable for marketing or labelling an agricultural product in a manner indicating that it was grown or produced by using or not using a chemical or drug, was organically grown, or was grown without the use of any synthetic additive.

The exclusion addresses an implication rather than a statement. Labelling a product "organic" or "no added hormones" says nothing false about anyone else — but it plainly implies that the alternative is less desirable, and a producer of the alternative might argue it implies the alternative is unsafe.

Since the liability section reaches information that states or implies a product is unsafe, that argument was available without this section.

Note the phrase "by using or not using". The exclusion runs both ways — a producer may label a product as having been grown with a particular treatment as freely as without one.

The three categories are the standard differentiators in agricultural marketing, and between them they cover most of what a producer says to distinguish its methods.

The provision keeps the chapter to what it was written for: knowing falsehoods about food safety, not the ordinary competitive claims producers make about how they farm.