Old McDonald Had a Farm…and He Got Arrested?
Just in time for the holidays, four beef carcasses hang from the improvised slaughterhouse at Greg Niewendorp’s 160-acre farm outside East Jordan, in the north of Michigan’s lower peninsula. It should be a happy Thanksgiving because, for the first time in eight months, his farm isn’t under quarantine by Michigan’s Department of Agriculture (MDA) and Niewendorp is free to slaughter cattle from his herd of twenty and fulfill contracts in time for the holidays to the couple dozen friends and neighbors who prize the specially bred grass-fed beef he produces.
Yet it’s also a bittersweet time, because the scars from his battle with the MDA are still fresh. Last February, he refused to subject his cattle to a mandatory state program to test cattle in his region of Michigan for bovine tuberculosis–a program he argues, among other things, is unnecessary because he distributes his beef privately to people who trust is animal-raising techniques, but which the state insists is essential to ensure the beef isn’t tainted.
The state immediately slapped a quarantine on his farm, prohibiting the movement of animals onto or off the property. Then, in August, an MDA inspector arrived, escorted by two Michigan State Police officers, and attempted to convince Niewendorp to have his cattle tested by a vet waiting down the road. Niewendorp angrily ordered the inspector and police off his property, telling them that, without a search warrant, they were trespassers.
Finally, in early October, a team of MDA inspectors and vets arrived again, this time with a search warrant and two sheriff’s deputies–and backed up by a half-dozen state trooper SWAT team members and three emergency medical vehicles down the road.
Niewendorp is convinced that “they would have liked to have killed me,” but this time he didn’t resist, so the vets did their deed and left. All the tests came back negative and the state lifted its quarantine last month.
While the matter is over for the state, Niewendorp says it’s just begun for him. “They’ll need a search warrant to do the test next year.” He’s also organizing the Michigan chapter of the National Independent Consumers and Farmers Association and says next year more Michigan farmers will refuse the test.
These should be happy times for owners of small farms. Not only are commodity prices way up, but the buy-local movement has caught fire around the country. Rapidly growing numbers of people are embracing the romantic notion of buying food directly from area farmers, sometimes driving hours into the countryside to buy veggies, meat and milk.
The number of farmers markets over the last five years has increased more than 50 percent, to nearly 4,500 from 2,800, according to the US Department of Agriculture. Since the European idea of Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) was adopted by a handful of US farms twenty years ago, enabling consumers to buy shares in the output of local farms, the concept has been adopted by as many as 3,000 small farms across the US. Thousands of consumers are trekking out to dairy farms to purchase suddenly popular unpasteurized milk for its perceived health benefits over the pasteurized stuff, according to the Weston A. Price Foundation, a promoter of raw (unpasteurized) milk consumption. (Retail sales of raw milk are prohibited in most states).
Cracking down
But as the re-emergence of a farm-to-consumer economy draws increasing amounts of cash out of the mass-production factory system, the new movement is bumping up against suddenly energized regulators who claim they want to “protect” us from pathogens and other dangers.
Federal and state agriculture and health authorities say farmers are violating all kinds of regulations to meet fast-growing consumer demand, such as slaughtering their own hogs and cattle instead of using state and federally-inspected facilities, and selling unpasteurized dairy products and cider without the proper permits. Farmers feel there are other issues lurking in the background and driving the regulators–for example, the National Animal Identification System (NAIS) under which farm animals are tagged with computerized chips for tracking; in most states the federal program is voluntary, but in Michigan it is mandatory, so the regulators who tested Greg Niewendorp’s cattle for bovine TB also affixed radio frequency identification tags to their ears.
Whatever the immediate cause, the result is the same: regulators are cracking down on small farms with a ferocity that has their new urban customers aghast.
In just the last few weeks, there have been at least a half-dozen notable incidents. In Virginia’s Nelson County, ten agriculture agents, aided by state police hauled off 62-year-old custom hog farmer Richard Bean, and his 60-year-old wife, Jean Rinaldi, for slaughtering their own hogs, charging them with a felony and eleven misdemeanors. Bean and Rinaldi were frustrated with the expense of having to haul their hogs more than two hours to the nearest slaughterhouse, and felt they could do it as well or better themselves.
In New York, health authorities shut down Munir Bahai’s apple cider operations in Victor on his busiest weekend of the season in early October, costing him $4,500 in sales because he wasn’t pasteurizing his juice. He says consumers travel thirty miles or more to buy his cider simply because it isn’t pasteurized.
Also in New York, the Department of Agriculture and Markets a few weeks ago quarantined the raw milk yogurt and buttermilk at Barbara and Steve Smith’s Meadowsweet Farm outside Ithaca, saying the state’s raw-milk permit program allows the direct sale only of milk, and prohibits other dairy products. Barbara Smith says she doesn’t sell the dairy products, but rather distributes them to 130 consumer shareholders of a limited liability company (LLC) she set up as the owner of her farm’s eight-cow herd, and therefore is outside the purview of the state’s raw-milk permit system.
Some farmers are responding as Greg Niewendorp did in Michigan, with outright civil disobedience. In Pennsylvania, dairy farmer Mark Nolt continues in a standoff with agriculture authorities because he refuses to sell his raw milk under a state license. In August, they confiscated thousands of dollars worth of milk products using a court order. He argues that because he has private contracts with his area customers, he doesn’t need a license, and he continues to sell directly to consumers, despite the fact he could be arrested at any time.
The situation has gotten so bad that a group of consumers and lawyers banded together last summer to provide legal support to besieged farmers via the Farm-to-Consumer Legal Defense Fund. Its first two cases involve farmers in New York and Pennsylvania-both distributing unpasteurized milk privately to consumers.
Protecting Who?
As much as regulators like to talk about protecting consumers, when you speak with them, it sometimes sounds more like they want more to protect corporate interests.
Bridget Patrick, who is Michigan’s Bovine Tuberculosis Eradication Project Coordinator, told me recently that the case of Greg Niewendorp resisting testing of his herd “is a human health issue as well as an industry issue.” Bovine tuberculosis can be passed on to people, she stated. Moreover, the fact that Michigan is one of a few areas in the US that still has evidence of bovine TB “has been a problem for the whole country” because some foreign markets won’t buy American beef as a result.
She strongly suggested that Niewendorp was a spoilsport for not going along with the testing. ” We need to have everyone participate in the program” to prove bovine TB has been eradicated.
Dairy regulators use the protection argument to justify their crackdown on raw-milk producers, though they tend not to mention the obvious: If consumers are buying milk unpasteurized, then that doesn’t leave much for processors to do.
Nor do any of the regulators like to talk much about the new economic model that is emerging in the farm-to-consumer model. Farmers who sell their cattle to processors may receive $2 a pound, compared to anywhere from $5 to $18 a pound, depending on the quantity purchased and the cut of meat, when they do their own slaughtering. Similarly, when dairy farmers sell milk to processors for pasteurization, they receive in the neighborhood of $1.50 to $2.50 a gallon (depending on bacteria counts and whether the milk is organic). When they sell direct, they receive $5 to $10 a gallon.
Such discrepancies help explain why the farm-to-consumer model is “the gateway to farm prosperity,” says Pete Kennedy, a lawyer who represents farmers both for the Farm to Consumer Legal Defense Fund and the Weston A. Price Foundation.
Lawyers like Kennedy argue that buying food directly from local farmers amounts to a contract between private parties, covered by the U.S. Constitution.That argument won the day in Ohio earlier this year, when a state court overturned an Ohio Department of Agriculture revocation of a dairy farmer’s milk license, ruling her “herdshare” arrangement, whereby dozens of consumers bought shares in the farmer’s cows so as to gain access to raw milk, was legitimate.
But this battle has a long way to go. The wide discrepancy in prices farmers receive by selling direct, and cutting out corporate distributors and processors, not to mention grocery chains, may help explain why the government is coming down as hard as it is on farmers. Regulators and their legislator bosses are clearly prepared to use intimidation to put a halt to such nonsense before it gets completely out of hand.
David E. Gumpert is a columnist with BusinessWeek.com, specializing in health and business. He covers nutrition and food issues at his blog.
Copyright © 2007 The Nation
Given the knee-jerk response by corporate government, the farmers are doing the right thing and MUST be supported. History shows the regulators were brought in by big business to police the bad habits of big business in the whole universe of food production (examples are the FDA and ICC), and today tainted foods are sourced to big business, not local independent producers. Like the 1930s, the great radicalism is likely to start on the farm.
Monopoly big business eats competitive small business.
Well since meat and dairy contribute to global warming and a thousand other ills including the obvious unethical reality of unnecessary killing(if it were necessary vegetarianism wouldnt exist) I cant really sympathize with the subject of the essay.
The story of the canadian farmer who was forced to pay for the contamination of his field by GMOs is far worse than a few farmers who want to cater to a tiny organic meat market.
Reality check: if all meat and dairy went organic we would still have all the misery and wasted resources and destruction that you have with factory farms.
SARS came from small farming practices in Asia after all.
“We will always have wars as long as we have slaughterhouses.”
hunter turned vegetarian Leo Tolstoy
Maybe the farmer should turn to religion!
We live in a farming community where people flock to the Amish farms for produce. I don’t know but something tells me their religion might exempt the Amish farms from such mandated testing. Anyone know for sure?
Kelmer…How do you feel about the indigenous people of North America who had a more or less sacred relationship with the buffalo to supply food, warmth and other necessities for their way of life prior to the white/christian SLAUGHTER of those noble creatures?
Creeping fascism—-parents in Maryland forced to immunize their kids under threat of jail, now the farmers…. this isn’t a question of whether or not you are a vegetarian. It’s a matter of recognizing that any rights we still hold intact, are being stripped from us, one test case at a time. And who is calling the shots? Who, indeed!
I don’t understand why he didn’t just let them do the test the first time? If he knew his cattle were Okay, let em test. If he didn’t know they were Okay, let them test. What was the harm other than the inconvenience? It seems as if he was really inconvenienced after he refused the simple test. ___ Did I miss something?
KEM:
I think he thought of it as something akin to the ‘if you have nothing to hide…’ arguments used by the silly folks who don’t mind being wiretapped, or don’t mind you and me being wiretapped. Personally, I think he figured it was none of their damned business what business he had with his friends.
Right or wrong, I can still see from his point of view here.
KEM, and all others that are interested.
Go to David’s blog, the link is above, and you can read the ongoing story (and many other stories of government harassment of small farms) about Greg Niewendorp being harassed by the MDA. You’ll read exactly why he was against his animals being tested. You’ll read that the inspectors, themselves, sometimes transmit TB by not disinfecting their boots between visiting various farms.
Why is it that some vegetarians think they have the answer? And that answer always includes the statement that eating meat is unethical? Choosing to eat meat is not a moral issue, it is a dietary choice.
I choose to eat meat that is locally raised and grass fed, in a responsible and ecologically sustainable manner. Many vegetarians simply go to the nearest grocery and buy factory farmed produce which is genetically modified, sprayed with pesticides and shipped thousands of miles by the burning of fossil fuels. Which is more ethical, the former or the latter?
The larger issue is the food supply which agribusiness CEOs have been manipulating and trying to dominate domestically and worldwide. Independent farmers provide vital food diversity and wholesomeness and have been systematically squeezed out since the 50’s. This latest agribusiness maneuver, NAIS, is another manipulative power-grab attempt. (A key question to consistently ask is: Who benefits?) Farmland has been disappearing domestically and internationally at alarming rates due to the bankrupting of family farms, visionlessness, poor planning, greed and a sense of entitlement, sprawl, backroom real estate deals, tax abatements (i.e., taxpayer fraud) for corporations, etc.. Further, when an independent farmer goes bankrupt, hundreds of acres of priceless farmland is at stake. Thus a CONTRIVED dependency on corporations for so-called food is in the making. Do you have children or grandchildren, care about children? Innocent children for generations to come are going to need farmland for food. It’s to us to remember them, leave the children a legacy we can be proud of. City dwellers, too, depend on independent farmers or…Cargill? The same gang who recently recalled a million pounds of ground beef? (Search The Guardian UK.) It’s high time to stop squabbling, start asking better questions, pull together, rally and actively support independent and local farmers and workers to whom we owe a tremendous debt of gratitude for whatever wholesome food we have to eat. We can also do amazing work with visionary comp. plans and local zoning ordinances that include sustainability and waste reduction of every kind. If you eat food and care about others who do, too, some preliminaries:
foodandwaterwatch.org
nonais.org
“Compromise, Hell” by Wendell Barry
www.grist.org/comments/soapbox/2004/10/20/berry/
“One thing is for sure. If we don’t stand up now – by rejecting the corporate farming model and enabling local communities to eliminate and control corporate farms – we will no longer have a choice about the kind of agriculture that we want in this country.”
www.celdf.org/GuestEditorials/PushingFamilyFarmersOverTheBrink/tabid/182/Default.aspx
See “agribusiness” entries at www.coopamerica.org/programs/rs/
An astoundingly brilliant, readable book on the subject of our relationship to the land and its food, to our communities and workplaces:
A Pattern Language by Christopher Alexander and several other Berkely Profs.
A poll tax is when everyone, rich or poor, must pay the same amount of tax.
In this case the small farmer is required to jump through the same legal hoop as the rich absentee farmer. It’s just as much hassle for small as for large.
Any hassle from the state is an intellectual type of poll tax.
A poll tax is regressive. It is antidemocratic. It’s monopolistic or oligopolistic, the antithesis of what we need to support a free market.
I favor special protections and reduced fees for the small merchant in every domestic endeavor, recognizing that they are more cost-efficient than large merchants in many subtle ways, recognizing that they are the force that keeps oligopolistic corporations honest long-term. Governments shall not hassle the little guy.
For example, the patent office has a special reduced price for the little guy.
In my government, the government will help set up worthy new little guys in business with training, with legal and bureaucratic assistance, and with 2% interest rate loans. Near-monopolies will pay a special oligopoly tax, to encourage them to split themselves into two or more competitors.
“… farmers markets over the last five years has increased more than 50 percent …”
Yes, but unfortunately due to the high costs imposed by organizers on sellers, which is often prohibitive for small scale growers, very few really local farmers ever are present at many of these sham Farmers’ Markets.
Congratulations to everyone who’s helping to put an end to this grotesque gilded age by producing and consuming locally. Please cooperate with regulators but insist that the regulation be driven by reason, not dogma. Call your liberal political reps and tell them if they want big government they will have to ensure that it is competent and not hijacked by capital. You have to start with a cooperative attitude but quickly halt your cooperate when it becomes obvious that the regulator is acting in bad faith. Small local enterprises have to cooperate with regulators to help ensure food safety but also to prevent the capitalist beast from exploiting the non-cooperation.
The entrenched institutions are starting to run scared. They see that the only way we will save ourselves and this planet is to readapt to human scale economies. Agribusiness, Big Pharma, Biotech want control of our bodies and our lives.
The story here in agriculture is being repeated in medicine. Doctors who practice alternative medicine are being treated the same way these farmers are being treated.
If you don’t know about Codex check out www.healthfreedom.org (website currently being moved because the multinationals are trying to shut it down). This describes the takeover of health and agriculture under the guise of international trade regulations. Hint: The doctor who is a main developer and implementer of these “rules”, believes nutrients (supplements) should be regulated as toxins.
Ron Paul is the only presidential candidate in the forefront of speaking out against these assaults on liberty. He has introduced legislation to permit transportation of raw milk across state lines as long as it is legal in those states and to prohibit the FDA from regulating supplements as drugs. He also believes alternative medicine should be allowed to flourish.
Ron Paul is the only presidential candidate in the forefront of speaking out against these assaults on liberty. NOT!
Dennis Kucinich is also for these same issues. Maybe he hasn’t specifically stated that raw milk should be transported across state lines…but it is in the framework of his ideology. If asked he would give the same answer as Paul, with out consigning all of us to the Libertarian self suffiency.
I have been forced into a Libertarian lifestyle by my small SS income, and the fear of i-coli poisoning by the big food corps, as well of avoidance of high fructose corn syrup allowed in ALL our produced foods. As an artist, I need 10-15/7 to produce my own work.
Instead I am gardening, making my own bread etc.
The Commonwealth, or Socialism.means shared tasks, a good bread maker providing for one who makes candles etc.
If every household made it’
s own bread….it would be a horrendous energy use!
At 68, I can’t wait for these greedy corporations to get their comeupance so that I can go back to living my own life, doing what I do best. I’m exhausted!
ANd Oh BTW quousquo, Our local farmers markets are very much done by our local farmers!
I did the sign, ( what I do best) for our goat cheese producers. They are fighting thebattle against the ID chips. It is a terrible time iomposition onsmall farmers. They have mayv=be 20 goats. They woukd have to provide WRITTEN notice 24 hours before removing the animal from the premises.
What if you needed to take that animal tothe vet in an emergency situation???
My daughter has a hobby flock of chickens & guinea fowl. SHe would have to do that written notiice too.
The US and it’s policies of contradiction is evident as this piece points out. The supermarket can sell you cloned animal meat without stating that it’s cloned. Way too much grains and produce doesn’t even state country of origin as Congress fights the people who want to be informed in packaging and labeling requirements. Easy to pick on the little farmer whose independence is something the government person has a hard time tolerating. Look at the overkill they use by bringing the swat team. Fuck that animal ID tag, before long they’ll want one for you.
Today is the last day of deer season in MN. For 30 years we have butchered, cut up our own deer meat. Many people pay up to $80 to have their deer packaged. The reason we take the deer in the first place is to save money on food, so we do it ourselves.
Okay, I get it. Thank you.
QUOUSQUE. I know a man who owns a refrigerated big rig. He hauls produce from Nogalas, Arizona to the New Youk areas. Instead of deadheading out, he hauls a load of garbage to Pennsylvania or Ohio. Sometimes there are chemicals in the garbage and his trailor smells of chemicals, even though he washes it out before picking up another load of veggies to haul to New York.
Sometimes, the inspector at a recieving warehouse won’t accept his load due to the smell of chemicals or for any of several other reasons, such as the load is not cool enough, the veggies are not all fresh and some have begun to rot, etc. When that happens, he hauls the veggies to an outlet that WILL accept flawed produce at a reduced price. There it is sold at a lower than the market value price to people who are “organic farmers”. They then sell the crap at “farmers markets” and or flea markets. Some of the stuff is also grown in China, so unless one is very aware, they don’t really have a clue of what they are buying at “farmers Markets” in some areas of the U.S.
I think we need help! Just sent this to Michael Moore figuring he’s a much better choice than my U.S. Representative!
Hi Mike:
Since you have quickly and effectively raised health care awareness for millions, I’m writing to ask you to do the same with food (a primary component of health care, anyway).
“The Nation” has recently published an article titled: “Old McDonald Had a Farm … and He Got Arrested?” by David Gumpert. Mr. Gumpert is looking at the growing tempest of yet another perfect storm – this one in our food supply. Briefly, through land acquisition, genetic engineering, patent law, government regulation and economics, “we” are losing our control over food production, quality, cost, and sustainability.
I grew up on a Midwest farm and watched the first waves of this storm take out family farms in the 1980s. It would take a documentary of the sort you can produce to expose the damage that has multiplied since then – GMO contamination and patent control, etc. Gumpert’s article talks a little about how ill-advised government colludes (intentionality beside the point) with agribusiness to shut down a growing, sustainable food countermovement. While reading Gumpert’s article, I realized that countermovement individuals will be marginalized and turned into a geographic patchwork of “legal precedent” by which government and agribusiness will continue to strengthen and perpetuate the status quo.
Food supply control is a complex topic rooted in human transitions from hunter-gatherer methods to agrarian production. Finding or growing food has always been hard work (and it gets harder as population grows). But the chore of feeding ourselves was originally shared by small communities of people working together. Now, as human economy has grown more specialized, our pursuit for leisure and easy work more intense, we have slowly and consistently ceded control over our food to “machines”.
There’s a great deal of good work on this topic already out there, including work by Wendell Berry, Jim Hightower, Daniel Quinn, and Barbara Kingsolver. We need someone like you to package what’s out there and blend it for mass consumption. If you can help us lead more people to the trough, perhaps people will get a good taste of real food and then demand no less.
Thank you for taking this on. If I can help in any way, please let me know.
I’m surprised that CD didn’t cover this, but here in PA, the PA Dept of Agriculture has banned all dairy products with labeling that states: “rGBH free” or even: “our milk comes from farmers who have pledged not to use Bovine growth Hormone” or such.
http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/07318/833643-85.stm
They claim to have done it as a “consumer protection” and at the request of “consumer advocates”.
However, in this case, I don’t think this cattle farmer was at all justufied in his “libertarian” resistance, because this is a contagious disease that presumably could be carried to adjoining farmers herds and affect the public at large.
I agree that there are a lot of agricultural regulations written for Monsanto or other big-ag corporations, but we don’t want to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
A re-reading of Sinclair’s “The Jungle” may be on order for a look at what the meat industry (and workers conditions) looked like before government regulation.
I’ve gotten back into gardening and canning recently.My parents raised us on mostly home grown food and clothing.My grandmother was poorer than a chuch mouse so they made everything themselves. It was nearly lost in my generation.My siblings and I are scrambling to presrve the wealth of information my mother had (but of course we took for granted.)
I remember gardens ,fruit trees ,grape vines and livestock everywhere in the small central PA. town I grew up in during the 60s and 70s.
We can still( and must) turn back.
Anytime I get a chance to plug Jane Goodall I do.
So if you haven’t yet read “Harvest for Hope” A guide to mindful eating You may want to give it a look.
We can no longer allow Corps. to provide our food least we end up corpses.
Just what is in the Soilent Green?
I’d garden too but unfortunatly so many of us live in apartments and its just not possible. Housing market in my area is still too expensive.
Soilent Green is human flesh, mixed with the brains, organs, blood and bone. You see, you rid the planet of a few billion humans and convert their bodies to a Spam like substance. ___ Yum yum, served hot or cold, have a bite.
BTW ___ that is not my idea.
“However, in this case, I don’t think this cattle farmer was at all justufied in his “libertarian” resistance, because this is a contagious disease that presumably could be carried to adjoining farmers herds and affect the public at large.”
PJD -
Have you read all the details about this case? Or are you just going from what was written in this one article that he wasn’t justified? If you haven’t done so, please go to David Gumpert’s blog for the rest of the story.
Dcbeltway “I’d garden too but unfortunatly so many of us live in apartments and its just not possible. Housing market in my area is still too expensive.”
Shoot all you need is a few pots (5 gallon buckets if you can’t afford pots, use the green ones) a balcony or small porch, some good dirt and you can grow just about anything. I would suggest though that you stick with things like tomatoes (oh how I love vine ripe tomatoes), leaf lettuce, eggplants, squash, etc.
Several apartments could work together with each one of you specializing in a different vegetable and trading with each other. The farmers market I associate with are mostly local growers with one or two buying from out of state but they don’t try to hide it. The biggest problem with farmers markets is the local government. The one I shop at and it’s the only place the city will allow it to take place have to pay $50.00 a day for a parking space size area and they are only allowed to sell on Saturdays and Wednesdays. You can visit their farms and buy on any day but you have to travel to get there.
We are fortunate to have a full one acre organic garden and small orchard. We usually have 20 tomato plants of different varieties. We give bushels of tomatoes, squash, eggplant and beans away to our friends and for the local food bank kitchen and we can enough food to last a year.
That was until this year. This year, we didn’t have anythng. The weather was perfect, rainfall was better than average and we didn’t change a thing, except we used the area we had planted with soil builder soybeans for our crops, as we do every year, rotate the area for planting. We didn’t have any crops, NO BEES, no bugs, no birds, and no tomatoes. We got about half a bushel and they were stunted. The same thing happened to all in our area. Something is very wrong and I bet it will continue next year. We don’t have the normal amount of widlife this fall and the few deer we do see are sick looking. Of course there are no acorns or mesquite beans for them.
I read a story a couple of weeks ago by a person who lives in an area that has hundreds of apple trees. He gave about the same report as K.Patrick above, no bees & no crops this year. It’s ery disconcerting.
The fact that our major news corporations don’t sound some very loud alarm over this is revealing. They couldn’t care less. Their minds are in the gutters.
=======================================
“Man must change or die.
There is no other course.”
The World Teacher
You might find this article on NAIS of interest.
http://www.populistamerica.com/nais_regressive_offensive_and_unconstitutional
As to Soylent Green, that was an excellent movie with perhaps prophetic overtones as we continue to overpopulate and destroy our productive farmlands for either agribusiness or dense housing developments.
As We the People of the world seem unable to stop walking up the teeter totter and are rapidly approaching the “tipping point,” I fear that the only way is down. It will take perhaps thousands of years for Earth to become another Venus, but virtually all life forms will be gone from Earth long before that. Our beautiful blue marble, which, so far, seems unique in the universe, will be no more.
We used to buy our milk from a local dairy farmer at a third of the cost in the local supermarket and, as an added bonus, we got the cream which would rise to the top and be skimmed off for coffee and desserts… yum! Suddenly, in the interest of consumer protection, farmers were prohibited from selling their milk directly to consumers. The government claimed we might get sick, though the farmers had been serving unpasteurised milk to their own family for generations without any problem. Our neighborly farmer was very distraught that he had to turn us away.
My dad fed his cows soybeans, and we had the hightest graded cream in Michigan. The dairy didn’t sell it though, ___ their employees used it.
Shopping is Voting: http://ithacahours.com/archive/9906.html
I’ve written a booklet about regulation of insurance in Pennsylvania, likewise serving corporate insurers at the expense of genuinely nonprofit and/or governmental plans: “A Crime Not a Crisis: Why Pennsylvania Health Insurance Costs So Much.” http://www.healthdemocracy.org/painsure.html
I’d like to answer Kem Patrick, who wonders, why didn’t Greg Niewendorp just allow the authorities to test his cattle for bovine TB, and be done with it? I didn’t explain that point real well in the article, because there are several answers that are each kind of complicated. To summarize the reasons: Greg didn’t want his animals injected with an unknown testing substance, potentially contaminating his beef; he felt the testing program is a government boondoggle; he resents the government’s unwillingness to examine other ways of countering bovine TB, such as through improved mineral supplementation of cattle; and most of all, he resents the government’s intrusion into his private relationships with customers.
For more background about Greg Niewendorp’s struggle with Michigan authorities, go to my blog and do a search under his name.
David Gumpert
www.thecompletepatient.com
Thank you very much for the reply DAVID. I understand.
Has anyone thought of the health risks associated with un-inspected, un-pasteurized food items?
Rebuttals that start with, “When I was a child… My grandparents… We lived on a farm…” are good for their historical significance only. Today we live in a world of drug resistant pathogens, primarily due to widespread use of antibiotics and disinfectants. Most of us live a more urban lifestyle, and are not exposed to these pathogens, subsequently, a small amount can be serious.
These laws were enacted to eliminate, or greatly reduce the spread of disease. Diseases that were prevalent at the time, reduced now to footnotes in medical texts. By circumventing these laws through loopholes, the diseases may, and can resurface.
Raw milk and raw dairy products may carry many types of disease-causing germs such as Campylobacter, Escherichia coli, Listeria, Salmonella, Yersinia, and Brucella.
About the bees, the main symptom has been the mass abandonment of hives. And the variety of fungi, viruses and mites found in collapsing hives suggests a widespread failure of the bees’ immune systems.
Looks like AIDS.
Research is pointing to neonicotinoids. A synthetic nicotine pesticide. A virus, Israeli Acute Paralysis Virus (IAPV) could be the cause, or a marker. IAPV arrived in the US from Australia, where the US began importing honeybees in 2004 - the very year that CCD appeared in US hives.
This is where a lapse in inspection, to appease large agricultural interests, failed to protect.
Look at the big picture, whether it is the mega-corporations or the small business man, health laws need to be enforced for our collective good.
There may be many perfectly safe farm-to-consumer outlets, but how do you know which? Will you risk your health, or your childrens?