What should David Hochstetler, the Amish Indiana dairy farmer who supplies the Family Farms Cooperative’s raw milk, do about the warning letter he received from the federal Food and Drug Administration (FDA)?

Well, when I posted the previous item about David Hochstetler’s anguish on a political site, Free Republic, lots of people thought he should tell the FDA to get lost. Unfortunately, it’s not that simple when you are dealing with the FDA.

It’s extremely difficult to advise Hochstetler, since a warning letter from the FDA is unlike nearly any government action I know of. It’s nearly Kafka-esque–a murky kind of activity most easily associated with a dictatorship.

There is no appeal process. There is no expiration of the letter. So essentially, the warning letter amounts to an open-ended justification of “enforcement” action, such as a court-ordered injunction requiring a farmer to refrain from an activity, like distributing raw milk, or even to shut down the farm entirely. FDA agents can enforce the court order themselves, or bring along federal marshals to help them.

No one wants to go up against the full force and fury of the U.S. government, so warning letters in practice serve as intimidation devices, designed to isolate farmers and strike fear into their hearts so they’ll obey the commandments of the bureaucrats.

Moreover, there’s no way to know if or when the FDA might use the warning letter as an excuse to take action. It’s entirely at the FDA’s discretion, mood, or whatever else might drive it, even years after the letter is written.

When Hochstetler tries to figure out what to do about the FDA warning letter he received last week ordering him to discontinue sending raw milk into Michigan and Illinois, he might logically examine what the FDA has done in previous cases similar to his own, to try to predict future FDA actions. Well, if you look up other FDA raw milk warning letters sent to producers of raw milk, you’ll find three cases.

–In case of Dee Creek Farms in Washington, the FDA worked with state officials to shut it down beginning in December 2005 after several customers became ill, so it felt full wrath of the government. (It’s now trying to re-open.)

–In case of Organic Pastures, the California dairy responded to a 2005 warning letter by changing the labeling its out-of-state raw milk mail orders as for pets only. The FDA hasn’t bothered Organic Pastures since.

–In the case of Double O Farms in Kentucky, Gary Oaks experienced symptoms of post-traumatic stress syndrome after he was confronted in a Cincinnati parking lot last spring by FDA agents, along with those from the Indiana and Kentucky agriculture departments. His Ohio shareholders responded to these heavy-handed tactics by organizing transport brigades to fetch milk from his Kentucky dairy and bring it back into Indiana. Oaks eventually settled his case with Ohio by paying a small fine, and there’s been no sign of FDA enforcement since then.

In a BusinessWeek.com column I wrote about FDA warning letters sent to 29 cherry farmers in Michigan, I described how the letters serve as a kind of “scarlet letter,” since they remain posted online indefinitely—a potential black eye for a farmer who receives one, since anyone who Googles the farmer and doesn’t understand the peculiarities of FDA warning letters will assume the farmer is a questionable character.

Unfortunately, the FDA seems impervious to public outcries, perhaps because the agents who write the letters are life-long bureaucrats, without political responsibility. Michigan Sen. Carl Levin has been trying to get the FDA to respond to his questions about the Family Farms Cooperative case for several months, thus far without any apparent success.

So what should Hochstetler do? If he accedes to the FDA’s orders, the co-op will lose its raw milk supply, and Hochstetler will lose a key source of ongoing support. If he does nothing, he MAY be all right, since the FDA may ignore him. Then again, the authorities may decide to come down hard on him and shut down his farm. There is no way to know for sure. The answer to this question really shouldn’t be his decision alone. He should be able to look to the Family Farm Cooperative, the people who lease his cows, for help. Based on the responses to my most recent posting about Hochstetler, I suspect there will be some serious soul searching.