When I first began writing about raw milk back in 2006, it was as a business writer. I had written half a dozen books about starting and running a business (several of which are listed here). One of the things I strongly advised prospective business owners in my books was to steer clear of industries that are heavily regulated, because of the uncertain costs associated with complying with frequently changing rules.
What I saw in the nascent raw dairy business wasn’t just heavy regulation, but arbitrary government regulation, much of it being taken against farmers seeking to escape the dying conventional dairy business. I’d never witnessed such arbitrary regulator bullying of law-abiding and entrepreneurial business owners. And so I wrote about any number of cases of crazy raw milk regulation, which led to three books having to do with raw milk and food rights.
I had little interest in reporting on the conventional dairy business, though. Whatever I read and saw told me this was a dying industry, one that stubbornly refused to embrace change, and instead wanted to recreate some romantic vision of the past. Periodically, NPR and other media outlets would report on how dairy farming was in crisis, with all kinds of hand wringing about whether the federal government might help or industry might help. I could never understand what kind of help was being sought. Subsidies? Tax breaks? Price supports? What was the long-term goal?
From all I could tell, the dairy farmers were doing little or nothing for themselves to adjust to slowing demand for their products. Not even anything like what you hear out of France or Quebec about farmers organizing and protesting unfair government treatment, and gaining consumer and government support in the process. Maybe because American dairy farmers think they have nothing to learn from foreigners.
There’s been little in the way of innovativeness. I’ve met a few conventional dairy farmers who have moved to do their own processing, enabling them to bypass the commercial processors and sell directly to retailers, and thereby revitalize their businesses. And, of course, there are farmers like Mark McAfee and Edwin Shank, who have escaped the commodity system by going their own way, to raw milk. But those examples are far and few between.
Almost everything I’ve read, including in the comments from my previous blog post, has been about looking backwards. Holding onto land. Exposing the industry’s corruption. Getting rid of the Fed. The challenge seems to be framed something like this: How do we revert to dairy farming the way it used to be, when grazing cows were everywhere alongside the open road and when the milk man brought your milk to the house twice a week? So, nearly a dozen years after I started writing about this industry, and 60 years after the downward spiral began, it’s the same old same old.
I’m sorry if I sound unfeeling. I’ve been a big supporter of local food initiatives. But the reality remains that farming, no matter how it’s conducted, is a business. There’s no rule or law or regulation that says farmers are entitled to make a living from working the land and raising animals. I have the same reaction to stories that surface periodically about city people who decide to farm, and then are disillusioned when it doesn’t work out.
Unfortunately, it’s very difficult in any area of business, or of life, for that matter, to go back, except maybe at high school or family reunions. If you look at America’s history, this country has prospered by looking forward, not looking backward. You may not like modernization or big corporations, but from textile factories to railroads to cars to telephones to televisions to computers to the Internet, it’s been progress and innovation that have created prosperity and wealth. A big part of that progress has involved the consolidation and automation of agriculture, for better or worse.
What I find disturbing in many of the arguments that have taken hold is the focus on going backwards, unfortunately led from our country’s very top leadership (“Make America Great Again”). Carried to its logical conclusion this seemingly innocuous nostalgia becomes the nectar of fundamentalism, of places in the Middle East and Africa. Here in the U.S., we see the nostalgia parade extending well beyond the dairy industry to the point where we’re rejecting solar for coal and oil, promoting trade wars despite the fact they triggered the Great Depression of the 1930s, and taking it upon ourselves to opt out of international agreements, including being the only country on the planet to forsake the Paris agreement that seeks to slow climate change.
Fundamentalism, whether it is religious or ideological or some combination, is nearly always rigid, and thus resistant to new ideas or new ways of doing things. Many dairy farmers are contemptuous of new/old ideas that have taken hold in recent years, like grass feeding or even organic farming, not to mention raw dairy.
Because fundamentalism is usually described in the context of religion, as in Islamic fundamentalism, we in the U.S. tend to look down our noses at fundamentalists. They are “over there”—religious and political fanatics in the Middle East and Africa who go around beheading their enemies.
But make no mistake, fundamentalism is infecting our society. It may have a secular rather than religious tenor, but it is fundamentalism all the same, in terms of rejecting modernism, expressing disgust with foreigners, and somehow harkening back to a simpler time.
Fundamentalists are characterized by a rigidity of views, an unwillingness to compromise. The rigidity of views may be linked to religion— Muslim fundamentalists want to go back to a 13th century brand of Islam. Jewish fundamentalists base their claims to Palestinian land on passages from the Bible and other religious texts. Christian fundamentalists focus on getting rid of abortion rights and putting religion into schools. Political fundamentalists in North Korea cling to a war-based zealotry.
America’s drift toward fundamentalism appears to be based on the following components:
-Embrace of conspiracy theory. Any event that runs counter to a preferred fixed narrative is a conspiracy, or a false flag event. The big “conspiracy” these days are school and church massacres, which are seen by the fundamentalists as some kind of government rehearsal for a military takeover. Survivors of mass shootings now face vicious psychological assaults by the fundamentalists.
-Denigration of education. I used to assume home schooling was a noble alternative for those who don’t care for the public school system. But increasingly, home schooling is being positioned as a necessary alternative to public schools, which are no longer safe because of all the massacres (which can’t be dealt with by reducing gun violence because of our worship of guns). In the fundamentalist scheme, you blame the victim and argue for your choice in life as superior to all others. So for education you demonize public education, despite its huge positive role over more than a century in preparing millions of young people to be upwardly mobile and adapt to a modernizing workplace. The denigration of education goes deeper, though, to a questioning of all experts who disagree with the fundamentalist views.
-Scapegoating. In our secular fundamentalism, liberals are akin to infidels or nonbelievers in the Middle East, except we don’t call those who resist the fundamentalism “infidels,” but rather “libtards”, for liberal bastards. Immigrants are scapegoated as well, by our Fundamentalist in Chief, as “rapists” and “criminals” who must be kept out with a great wall.
-Xenophobia. Fundamentalists have nothing to learn from foreigners. Indeed, foreigners are seen as scheming and leaches. So we exit international agreements and treaties, as if doing so allows us to more easily move backwards toward that wonderful time of yesteryear. Much to our surprise, the rest of the world is moving on without us. Asians have negotiated a TransPacific agreement without the U.S., and now American farmers are wondering why it’s suddenly much tougher to sell their products in Asia.
The problem with trying to work out compromises in such an atmosphere is that fundamentalism is by its very nature set in stone. So there is no room for rational discussion aimed at exploring alternative options. To the extent that fundamentalism becomes more attractive to more people, we dig ourselves into a hole that is very difficult to escape from. Witness the dairy industry. And I do hope the American dairy farmers who Mark McAfee reports are finally organizing themselves do succeed. Financial prosperity does a lot to counter fundamentalism.
First Dairymen need to embrace a culture of smart planned cooperation.
The Canadian system is based on farmers controlling their futures based on a system of cooperative intellectual planning.
That means being smart and not just greedy, hopeful or lucky.
Biggest piece of trash you’ve written yet, David. Just because people like to drive out in the country and see cattle grazing (nostalgia, as you put it) does not mean they don’t want the industry itself to thrive, for God’s sake. You are just being petty. Everyone who drinks raw milk wants to see that industry thrive but we aren’t all dairy farmers and we don’t have answers to their problems because we aren’t close enough to them. We are all in different businesses with problems of our own.
Selling heritage land/farms/acreage is not the answer to their problem, nor is getting nostalgic, for a bit, for the way things used to be before this country was more concrete than green grass.
Get a grip.
Other than that, D, you loved the post. 🙂 I don’t expect any of us to have real answers for the conventional dairy farmers, but I do expect the farmers themselves, who are losing money year after year, to come up with some answers before they become suicidal. I didn’t mean to suggest their challenge is trivial, by any means. Part of what I was getting at is that dealing with business change is difficult, and getting more difficult as the pace of change quickens. I suspect there are solutions for at least some of the dairy farmers whereby they can continue to live on and work the land. But they need to embrace change, which means embracing the power of education and new ideas and perhaps cooperation with other similarly open-minded farmers. As you suggest, nostalgia won’t cut it.
I’ll add fundamentalist to the list of trigger words the press has created to discredit and in many cases defame people who are trying to preserve a way of life based on Christian values handed down to them from their ancestors. Dairy farmers are not alone in facing Federal, State, and University alignment with a communist world government made up of tribalists bent on destroying national governments in order to establish their one world totalitarian dictatorship. Many of us have learned about and fought back on the U.N. Agenda 21 and all its tentacle organizations. Bottom line, they do not believe in the private ownership of land. That alone should cause people to be deeply concerned about the land trusts that purport to be our friends. Confiscation of land, as well as destroying local food independence; is behind the demise of dairies; not the failure to embrace technology. During the raw milk movement of 15 years ago, I thought conventional dairies were “an enemy”. Sadly they are more victims of this international tribal destruction of local food production than we are.
Quote:
“We are grateful to the Washington Post, the New York Times, Time Magazine and other great publications whose directors have attended our meetings and respected their promises of discretion for almost forty years… It would have been impossible for us to develop our plan for the world if we had been subjected to the lights of publicity during those years. But, the world is more sophisticated and prepared to march towards a world government. The supranational sovereignty of an intellectual elite and world bankers is surely preferable to the national autodetermination practiced in past centuries.”
— David Rockefeller, Speaking at the June, 1991 Bilderberger meeting in Baden, Germany (a meeting also attended by then-Governor Bill Clinton and by Dan Quayle
John, you have a reputable source for that supposed David Rockefeller quote? I can’t find real-world documentation. Or might it be a creation of the conspiracy world? Here’s one site’s assessment: https://www.metabunk.org/anyone-care-to-debunk-these-two-rockefeller-quotes.t431/
I have no doubt that this quote was likely real, but all traces of it appear to have been wiped from youtube at least. It was originally a recording smuggled out of the secretive Bilderberg meeting in 1991. Even a child realizes that the United Nations was formed for the future world order. U.N. agenda 21 takes quotes right out of Marx on how land should not be owned by individuals. There are countless examples of how the globalist and UN organizations have influence regulatory policy in the U.S. to the detriment of farmers. I recently read a document produced by the Catholic Diocese of Quebec calling alarm to the plight of farmers back in the 1940’s. At that point farmers had been reduced to 35% of the population. Today it is more like 2% at least hear in the U.S. I’ve gone back and read some on century’s old Catholic promulgations on how land ownership should be widely dispersed, so that families could provide for their members. However, landowners are more independent and the ruling class knows it. This rural cleansing is international in scope and by design. David at this point, almost everyone knows that the major press are fake! Lol. Here is a quote right out of David Rockefeller’s Memoir.
“For more than a century, ideological extremists at either end of the political spectrum have seized upon well-publicized incidents…to attack the Rockefeller family for the inordinate influence they claim we wield over American political and economic institutions. Some even believe we are part of a secret cabal working against the best interests of the United States, characterizing my family and me as “internationalists” and of conspiring with others around the world to build a more integrated global political and economic structure – one world, if you will. If that’s the charge, I stand guilty, and I am proud of it.”
Sales of raw milk on the rise as food watchdog raises health concerns
There are now 180 registered raw cows’ drinking milk producers in England, Wales and Northern Ireland compared to just 114 two years ago.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/03/24/sales-raw-milk-rise-food-watchdog-raises-health-concerns/
Interesting websearch for Rockefeller and Raw Milk
Clocklike Habits Prolonged His Life
He also produced, on his estates, the fresh milk he drank, in order to be assured of its purity and quality.
https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/98/05/17/specials/rockefeller-habits.html
Churchtown Dairy, A Castle for Cows
“There’s always the question of scale when it comes to dairy farming,” Rockefeller explains. “If you have too many cows it throws off the whole pricing system because you need more people to run the farm. It’s that piece of the economy that has driven human beings away from farming. There has to be a balance.”
“Abby’s vision for the Churchtown Dairy was very close to what we are trying to do with our farm,” says Ben Davis, director of operations at Triform and who ran a biodynamic raw milk dairy farm for 12 years in England. “She was interested in a small, raw milk dairy with a real emphasis on the quality and health of the animals.”
Read the rest here:
http://ediblehudsonvalley.ediblecommunities.com/shop/churchtown-dairy-castle-cows
Thanks for this link, Joseph. I’ve been fortunate to know Abby Rockefeller for some years. She lives in Cambridge, MA, and keeps a low profile, but she is a great supporter of raw milk and food rights.
There must be a kind of symbiotic relationship between cows and the dairy farmer. The owner of an artisanal cheese maker told me about when he was out looking for a farm to buy he often heard the same story over and over about why the farm came up for sale: “The farmer sold the cows and six months later he died.”
That is quite true Dr. Heckman, here where I live I have seen quite a few dairy farmers die after selling their cattle, I know the very thoughts of selling my cattle( beef, not dairy) stresses the hell out of me!! I really don’t know the mechanics of it, but I know the thought scares the hell out of me!! There is some kind of connection there, maybe cause cows are way more honest and trustworthy than most people?? I just love the “smell” of cows and always have, there is something so calming by being around them too. This type of death happens more than thought I would bet.
I believe that there is a symbiotic relationship between a farmer and his or her cattle as well as between their children and the cattle… That being said, the farmers that I know of that died after they sold their cattle, knew they were on deaths door before they sold them… And also it is not that uncommon to hear of a farmer that was killed by his cattle, or bull to be more precise.
I also have known Abby for more than 12 years. She is very committed to Raw Milk. Her work with challenged youth through management of cows and consumption of raw milk is a national model.
The Triform communities are really special.
All of this talk about agenda 21 makes we really want to puke. Conspiracy crap is an excuse for blaming others ( that we imagine are bigger and stronger than we are ) and lack of American leadership.
We control our futures. Period.
If our futures don’t look so great it’s because we are not standing up and leading in our generation.
Right now as we speak there is strong movement towards a supply management system for American Dairymen. Finally, there has been enough pain and agony that we have begun to take some initiative to change our disasterous dairy non system.
Agenda 21 is no conspiracy Mark, it is, an in your face real life to-do-list (17 goals to be exact) put forward by the United Nations with regard to so-called sustainable development… If countries such as the United States value their sovereignty they would do well to distance themselves from Agenda 21…
Ken,
Here is a link that has a different p.o.v. on Agenda 21
https://www.splcenter.org/20140331/agenda-21-un-sustainability-and-right-wing-conspiracy-theory
So much bullshit out there, hard to know what is true!!
George H.W. Bush signed onto Agenda 21 in 1992, been 26 years since, any changes to your life over it? Mine has not changed, other than I’m 26 years older, don’t think I will hold my breath waiting on this one either. Sounds like more paranoid propaganda horseshit.
go ahead and puke ’til you feel better, Mister McAffee, then maybe admit there a few things you DON’T know. Having studied this topic for over half a century, I assure you = there’s an overwhelming body of evidence to substantiate the FACT of an ages-long, intergenerational grand conspiracy to rule the world … but only those who can muster the intellectual integrity can deal with it. Agenda 21 being one of the many proofs of such. The Progressive Economic Plan of the Fabian society, being another. In which state-dictated control of certain industries, was essential, particularly, the milk supply. Entitled The NRA / National Recovery Act, the PEP was foisted on the Republic of the US of A, during the reign of Franklin D Rooseveldt. Ruled Un-constitutional by the Supremes. I have to wonder if you have what it will take to get you to open your eyes? Meanwhile, cogitate on what Herbert Spence had to say about guys with your mindset … who actually boast about their “bigotry”
“There is a principle which is a bar against all information, which is proof against all arguments, and which cannot fail to keep a man in everlasting ignorance—that principle is contempt prior to investigation.”
I’ve read numerous books and articles over the last thirty or more years with respect to this globalism agenda/conspiracy. There is a lot of ambiguity surrounding the topic and as such, this makes it near impossible to draw a cohesive conclusion on the matter. At best, the most one can do is rely on his or her gut instinct and the basic truth of freedom.
My thoughts with respect to this ongoing attempt to implement a one world geopolitical and economic system, is that in doing so, we are setting ourselves up for a fall of epic and historical proportions. It is imperative that individual countries control their own economic and political destiny. This will in turn, provide a check and balance scenario that will better serve the world as a whole. I am not advocating doing away with conjoined international efforts to solve problems, but rather, with doing away with this insane notion of absolute control. Socialist left wing political ideologies tend to translate into absolute control and with absolute control comes absolute political, economic and spiritual oppression… I share Jamaica Kincaid’s frustration, “Why people insist that globalism, after its hideous history, is a good thing, I do not know.”
Ken,
Ain’t gonna happen in OUR lifetime!!
The RAWMI community welcomes its 16th Listed raw milk dairy. This week Gods Speed Hollow becomes the newest member of the RAWMI community to be Listed. It appears that safe raw milk may be the Lone Survivor in the dairy meltdown
oh, so I guess you’ll now be Petitioning the California Legislature for a supply management scheme for raw milk … is that it, Mister McAffee? If not, then = given your predilection for state regulation = why not? If a centrally-directed command economy is such a wonderful concept … as demonstrated in the USSR / Cuba / Red China and every shithole country blighted by communism, then why not start right at home? HEY! now’s your chance to “be the change you envision”!! Go on down to your local Ag official, and — bowing low and tugging your forelock …. pray they start telling you how to run your dairy. And of course … offer them good 20% commission right off the top of your gross handle, for doing you that favour.
the Jesuits boast “give us a child for the first 7 years and we own him” … Mark McAffee being living proof of how well such indoctrination works early in life. But for those who want the facts and are able to think for demselves about the anti-christ system known as ‘communism’ …. I recommend the work of Dr Henry Makow, as an antidote for what we suffered in the Public Fool System
You are so very entertaining Watson,LMAO!!
Timely article: “Canadian dairy industry booming as supply management policies draw Donald Trump’s ire” http://business.financialpost.com/commodities/agriculture/boom-time-for-dairies-in-canada-as-protections-draw-trumps-ire
Dear Watson,
The proof is in the last forty years of dairy history. Canadian dairies are thriving with out any government subsidies and USA dairymen get suicide hot line numbers along with their bankruptcy begging 50% less than required milk checks.
Your labeling of the Canadian system as socialist or communistic is inflammatory and unjust. If the Canadian dairy system is communism….bring it on. The Chinese are supposedly communist, yet they are the most shrewd capitalists in the world. Rethink your labels dear Watson.
The Canadian dairy system puts the farmers in charge of their milk prices. I don’t call this communistic at all. This is responsible cooperative management and a country that cares about its food systems. In fact, I don’t think America gives one damn about its food systems by the way it treats its dairy farmers. We lost 4% of Americas dairies last year. We will lose another 5% this year.
The only thing I would change about Canada’s dairy system is to allow a niche for legal raw dairy products. That’s the only error I see.