JoyceBrown-HighlandHaven

Joyce Brown, DVM

There are all kinds of reasons members leave a raw milk herdshare—perhaps they aren’t drinking as much milk as they once did, or they find an alternative source of milk closer to home, or they don’t like the farmer’s sanitation practices, or they are moving to another state. Whatever the reason, people who leave herdshares usually depart quietly, end their contract and move on.

For some reason, though, when Joyce Brown decided to leave the herdshare run by Highland Haven Farm in Hillsboro, OH, last fall, after four-and-a-half years of membership, she turned her departure into a nasty experience, publicly trashing the farm’s owner, Adam Hershberger, with other members and with a number of outside organizations.  Among her actions:

  • She commandeered the herdshare’s email list and began using it as her own, sending out long messages accusing Hershberger of arbitrarily changing the herdshare’s contract, of using unsanitary practices in his milk bottling procedures, and an assortment of other transgressions.
  • She set up an opposition web site (highland haven herdshare dot com) and Facebook page (search in Facebook for Highland Haven Herdshare).
  • She suggested on her new web site and in emails she circulated that she had support for at least some of her legal views from the Farm-to-Consumer Legal Defense Fund.
  • She blamed Hershberger’s decision to use an online ordering system from FarmMatch for seriously undermining the terms of the herdshare, which she contended made members vulnerable to unspecified legal action.
  • She complained to a dairy official at the Ohio Department of Agriculture about the farm’s sanitation practices.
  • She threatened to file complaints with the Ohio Attorney General.
  • She emailed meat regulators at the Ohio Department of Agriculture complaining about the farm’s slaughtering practices.

If she wanted to upset Hershberger, a 33-year-old Amish farmer, she succeeded. “There were times when I couldn’t eat or sleep,” says the father of five.

She scared off about half a dozen herdshare members with her email warnings that listeria contamination could occur.

Beyond the upset and fear, it’s difficult to know what other destruction she has left in her wake. The Farm-to-Consumer Legal Defense Fund declines to comment on her suggestions that it supports her legal allegations that Hershberger has seriously violated the herdshare agreement and put members at legal risk. By Brown’s own admission, the Ohio Department of Agriculture let her know it wasn’t interested in becoming involved in regulating Hershberger’s dairy, or any raw milk dairy. The state sanctioned herdshares beginning in 2008, after losing a 2006 court case brought by a raw dairy and its lawyer, Gary Cox, who was then in private practice (and is now with the Farm-to-Consumer Legal Defense Fund).

She did apparently convince an ODA agent to briefly visit the farm a couple weeks ago about Brown’s claim of meat problems. According to Hershberger, when he asked the agent for his evidence of problems, the agent pulled out an email from Brown accusing Hershberger of illegally butchering and selling lamb, pork, and beef. When I inquired with the ODA it declined comment except to say it was “looking into this case/operation.”

Why would a herdshare member launch the equivalent of a scorched-earth campaign against an unassuming farmer, whose dairy hasn’t  been associated with any illnesses or other notable problems? Indeed, Joyce Brown had been a loyal and enthusiastic member, by all accounts.

Trying to understand Joyce Brown is a difficult undertaking, because it requires dealing with a tedious communication style in which Brown seemingly has an answer or objection to any point being made. An associate of Hershberger notes that she and others at the farm eventually took to referring to Brown’s lengthy emails as “books.” “Instead of saying we received another email from her, we’d say we received a book,” says the associate.

All agree, the immediate problems began last September, when Adam Hershberger sought to make several changes to the herdshare operations. A key one was shifting ordering from a clunky old online system to one custom developed by FarmMatch. Making that change entailed a change in how bottles were handled—instead of always re-using the same bottles, shareholders would return their bottles for washing and receive new bottles randomly.

Finally, and this is key, Hershberger wanted to make a change in the personnel who handled herdshare administration—membership, ordering, deliveries. He wanted to bring in a new coordinator to work with the existing coordinator, who appeared to be having difficulty tending to all the tasks that needed doing. When that didn’t work, he decided to go with the new coordinator.

While Joyce Brown has complained at length about violations of the herdshare contract stemming from the decision to go with FarmMarch, the decision about administrators seems to be the one that sent her onto the war path. She seemed to somehow think that, as a herdshare member, she was the one to determine who ran the herdshare.

In an email to members in September, she said, “With [the previous administrator] no longer acting as our watchdog, I have no confidence in safety going forward. [The previous administrator] had advocated against rushing into this system, and had advocated against the shared bottling system entirely. Without going into all the other legal and management issues, my concern is that Adam now has managers with no experience with these issues (Morgan is 16 and her mom Diane, who works with her, told me directly in this meeting last week that she, Diane, has no prior experience with herdshares and no experience with any businesses with legal issues.)”

Hershberger attempted to answer Brown’s concerns about the change in administration in an email response to members (sent by his administrator), in which he listed some of Brown’s concerns/complaints. With regard to Brown’s allegation that  “the herdshare significantly increases the risk of health and safety issues,” he replied: “I want to make it clear that our production practices HAVE NOT CHANGED AT ALL. Absolutely no one has contacted me indicating that there is an increased health or safety risk, now or ever. I have personally tightened up the glass bottle sanitation policy. My objective is to REMOVE any possible health or safety risk. How could one conclude this?” After sending that message, Hershberger says now, he did hear from “a few” members who expressed concern about the cleanliness of bottles, and he says any problems were fixed. He acknowledges that Brown’s expression of concerns “made us step back and look at our whole operation and look for weak links,” though he insists that would have happened if she had made her complaints directly to him instead of going public.

It’s interesting, I “met” the current coordinator, Morgan Phelps, during a phone conversation last week, and she introduced me to the sorry mess of the herdshare battle with Joyce Brown. Phelps called me because she said Hershberger had a legal question he wanted my opinion about. After I rendered my opinion, we got to talking about what prompted the question, and Morgan provided me with a concise and organized explanation of the Joyce Brown campaign—how it came to be, what forms it has taken, what the accusations have been—without expressing any judgments or characterizations of Brown. At the end of her recitation, before I had a chance to respond, she paused, and said, “You should know, I’m 16 years old.”

She wasn’t bragging, but just alerting me to a fact I might want to consider in assessing what I had just heard.  I wasn’t put off, simply amazed. I have continued to be amazed by her maturity and smarts at such a young age, as she has answered some of my requests for documentation.

I relate that story by way of pointing out that the fact that Adam Hershberger chose a 16-year-old to handle coordination duties somehow threw Joyce Brown for a loop.

In a 2,600-word email to me Thursday, following a 20-minute phone interview we did Wednesday, Brown ranted about legal problems associated with Morgan’s age, along with a litany of seemingly endless ethical, business, tax, and other issues she says taint Adam Hershberger.  She added she had been in touch with Gary Cox of the Farm-to-Consumer Legal Defense Fund about some of the issues, and is a member of the organization. The FTCLDF declined formal comment, president Pete Kennedy telling me, “It’s not appropriate to discuss publicly a matter involving a member.”

Beyond the system change last September, is there a larger issue, like perhaps a political agenda, involved here? After years as one of the most hostile states for raw milk, Ohio transformed itself over the last seven years into a national success model for herdshares. Dozens of herdshares serve raw milk drinkers, and conflict and charges about illnesses have faded away.

One of the things I find curious about Brown is how skillfully she has used her knowledge about various organizations/institutions involved in raw milk in Ohio—the herdshare model, the Farm-to-Consumer Legal Defense Fund, FarmMatch, the Ohio Department of Agriculture— via an anti-raw-milk slant. If the conventional dairy industry or a national regulatory agency wanted to create an updated anti-raw-milk campaign with credibility, Joyce Brown’s approach of fear and accusations of legal wrongdoing might well be what the campaign looked like.

I asked her several times during our interview if she was being paid for her activities, and if she was an agent for a dairy association or the FDA or some other agency, and she vehemently denied my suggestion. “I am not being paid,” she said. She insisted she is motivated entirely by the lifelong oath she took upon receiving her veterinary degree from the University of Tennessee, which included a commitment “to protect the public health. I take that oath very seriously.”

If she’s not a hired gun, then perhaps her sudden about-face on raw milk last fall was simply a matter of a health-care professional being unable to let go of anti-raw-milk teachings that are part and parcel of the education of doctors, public health professionals, and veterinarians in the United States.

The good news is that  Hershberger appears to be well on the path to recovery from the Brown assault. Recovery began, he says, when he decided last November to not engage further with Brown. Other shareholders have followed suit, and Brown’s Highland Haven Facebook page consists nearly entirely of her own assertions, and has five members besides herself.

The herdshare is back on the upswing, with 150 to 175 active members—its most ever. Hershberger credits the FarmMatch system with helping improve efficiency and ease of ordering.

Are there lessons for other herdshare or private food club operations in the Joyce Brown episode? I see at least three:

-Closely guard your email list. Highland Haven had apparently sent out at least some emails last summer with the names of the recipients visible to everyone. That made it easy for Brown to copy the emails and use the list as her own.

-Be wary of accepting health care professionals as members. I know there are open-minded professionals out there, and they are certainly entitled to their raw milk and good food as much as anyone. Just be aware that you never know when they might return to the teachings that guided their professional education, and quickly forget about their commitment to privately settle concerns within a private organization like a herdshare or food club.

-Watch out for Joyce Brown, or any imitators, at your herdshare. She says she has joined another Ohio herdshare. I don’t know which it is, but the farmer who serves it may want to stay alert to her activities.

Adam Hershberger says he harbors no bitterness. “In looking back, I am thankful I went through this experience. It has broadened my horizon. It’s made me more comfortable dealing with obstacles in the future. We felt the fear and we went through it and it didn’t hurt us long term.”