Its been a year since the criminal trial of Wisconsin raw milk farmer Vernon Hershberger, and his acquittal by a jury of all licensing charges.
Things have been very quiet on the enforcement front since then .almost as quiet as the recent discussion on this blog. Its almost as if someone flicked a light switch, and said, Okay, lay off the farmers for now. Aggressive enforcement in places like Wisconsin, Minnesota, Maine, and California against small farms selling raw milk and other farm-raised food on a private basis suddenly ceased.
Is it an indication the regulators and politicians who control them have had a change of heart, have decided to encourage and accept private food sales? Or an indication of a shift in tactics by Big Ag, and the regulators they control?
I am inclined to go with the second option. I believe we are seeing a shift in tactics. The regulators and their corporate overseers came to the conclusion that going after small farms with buying clubs and herdshares wasnt good public relations .in fact, it was disastrous public relations.
I choose that option because the regulators and legislators have refrained from enacting legislation in any of the state hot spots that would back small-farm sales of raw milk. Indeed, the FDA and medical establishments have worked hard to sidetrack or defeat initiatives in all these states that would have suggested a desire for a real solution.
What that means is that we havent seen the end of pressure on small farms, simply a change in tactics. It could be well see a resumption of the enforcement under the guise of the Food Safety Modernization Act. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration went back to the drawing boards last year after massive opposition to its plans to implement highly restrictive safety measures affecting how farmers make compost and use water.
In April, Newsweek ran a cover article about farmer suicides. The lengthy piece mainly speculated about the pressures of loneliness and droughts as the causes of a rising tide of farmer suicides, not only in the U.S., but around the world. The suicide rate for American farmers is nearly twice that of the general population. India has had more than 270,000 farmer suicides since 1995 and in France a farmer commits suicide every two days, according to Newsweek.
What the article didnt touch on to a significant extent was the impact of Americas expanding food oligarchy, and its spreading international tentacles, as a cause. Oligopolies (control of markets by just a few entities) eliminate competition so they can control markets. Controlling markets means paying low rates to suppliers and charging high rates to consumers, so as to maximize profits.
In agriculture, the suppliers are farmers. The spread of oligopolies (run by oligarchs) in agriculture has had a devastating effect on dairy and meat farmers, in particular, because these are the areas of agriculture with the greatest amount of economic concentration.
Farmers selling food privately via herdshares, food clubs, and farmers markets threatens these oligopolies by introducing competition into the equation. Oligarchs despise competitionit threatens their control of marketsand will do anything to get rid of it (short of competing based on who has the better products). Pushing the state and federal regulators to shut down small farms on the pretext of not having retail, food handling, and dairy licenses was an effort to send a message to small farms to stay away from selling privately. Of course, the opposite happened as more farmers learned about the opportunities for improved emotional and financial satisfaction via escaping the commodity system.
So we wait for the other shoe to drop.
Okay, Ingvar, maybe not the neatest way of communicating the other shoe dropping.
As for my opinion about the other shoe dropping….great question. It is hard to know what is about to happen next. We all know that regulators that are stretched thin…tend to enforce by exception. In other words…no body gets sick and no body complains and generally no enforcement. I also know that here in CA the herd share micro dairy situation is really in limbo. With AB 2505 dying in committee, the delicate 2 year cease fire between CDFA and literally 500 cow shares is now without a mediated future. There is nothing pending…no litigation, no legislation….nothing. CDFA admitted in the Small Herd working group meetings that they had no idea what a Herd Share was in fact they are undefined under CA law. Yet…some if these herd shares operate with many more than 3 cows, the dairy definition limit. Does the constitution and private property rights protect these operations??? What re the standards for these small dairies? AB 2505 set standards and answered the questions about labeling and testing etc…now there is nothing. I just do not know how comfortable CDFA will be with just ignoring this huge food system. So far, several of the Herd Shares have gone ahead and self imposed all of AB2505 union themselves and then sought out RAWMI Listing to assure against state action. I am not sure about that level of assurance either. Just a whole lot of questions with nothing certain.
One thing that is certain…RAWMI is buried in applications from all over the USA and a bunch from Canada. Our biggest problem is not bring able to work through Listing quick enough to serve all of the interested famers. The 6 farmers we do have Listed are showing remarkable results month after month. We even have had some really great learning opportunities with discovery of interesting sources of high coliform…and it is not from fecal origins.
One thing for sure….RAWMI will stand behind its farmers as they go forward into this uncertainty. It is our goal that state agencies and hopefully the FDA will come to respect the work done by this community of Listed farmers and leave them alone as they may or may not enforce against others.
We are not going to be the exception that they need to come visit.
Heres hoping that the various mind-fogs wear off of our fellow citizens and that they will simply walk away from these clothing-optional emperors of our food and will crack the whip of their vote and put an end to this corruption of government for commercial ends with the end result that there will be nobody around to hear the second shoe of the goofballs on the next floor up.
Science is getting beat up pretty badly here as well. These clowns seemingly will grab anything on any pretext and pretzel it to maintain their income stream when this market was shaky from the start and now that the chickens are coming home to roost is simply gone away.
(By “pretzel” I mean three things: 1. lie outright, 2. omit relevant information, 3. shade the truth when in the neighborhood of saying something true.)
Mr. J. Ingvar Odegaard
If the use of the word nascent was intended to define the emerging efforts of the RAWMI community of farmers….your imagination has got the best of you. RAWMI is a farmers tool to circle the wagons and protect against the attack of oligarchs. RAWMI is an emerging community of like minded farmers that are developing a technology that will allow farmers to safely produce a healing whole and deliver it to humanity. If you think this is a nascent oligarchy…you are eating our young. Chill dude.
Pete, it’s the existing food oligarchs who are prodding the regulators to find ways to keep the boot heel on the necks of small dairies. True oligopolies reign in the businesses of meat, cereal, dairy…and seeds. RAWMI has a long ways to go, a very long ways to go, so long a ways that it shouldn’t distract from all the other priorities associated with survival and growth.
Does anyone here have a degree in Law of Unintended Consequences? And just what the heck is an omen.
The Coming Raw Milk Oligarchy:
Step 1: “FDA will come to respect the work done by [RAWMI] and leave them alone as they… enforce against others.” – Mark M.
Step 2: The FDA hears Mark’s repeated denigration of small and independent farmers and his claims that RAWMI certificated raw milk is safe and all the others dirty.
Step 3: State/Federal laws are passed allowing raw milk sales only if you’re a member of RAWMI.
Of course they accomplished this de facto with step 1 exactly as Mark hopes. And after step 3 is all the usual bad affects of monopolies, parasites, and control structures.
This very thing has happened many times before in many industries from ag to medicine to interior design. The state is as much or more interested in control as they are in protecting any given power group. If they can’t stop raw milk they will seek to control and co-opt it. This is their fall-back position. And the more it looks like we’re winning the more they’ll work to make something like this happen.
“It is our goal that state agencies and hopefully the FDA will come to respect the work done by this community of Listed farmers and leave them alone as they may or may not enforce against others. ”
The state enforcing raw milk bans against all farmers EXCEPT those in RAWMI. That is de factor oligarchy though not de jure.
So who is eating whose young here really? It is you that has repeatedly denigrated small independent family farmers who don’t want to bend the knee to the government. It is you who was been working with the government. It is you who has repeatedly stated it is only by RAWMI standards that raw milk is produced safely. And it is you who who hopes to set your organization up as immune to government enforcement while others hang in the wind.
Is there an Olichat somewhere? Now that could be interesting.
Pete, interesting scenario you envision. Fortunately or unfortunately, it’s all a lot more complicated than that. Just for your Step 1 to come about would require the approval of Big Dairy, and I don’t see that happening any time soon. FDA isn’t going to act without the dairy oligarchs going along, even if its bigwigs shifted.
I think the other thing you aren’t taking account of is that RAWMI, whether it views itself this way or not, is part of a political activist movement. It’s a dispersed movement, with lots of activity and groups around the country. In my view, all this activism is essential for real change to come about. Indeed, I probably should have made more of it in my post–that it’s the growing amount of activism, from Maine to California, which has been largely responsible for the backing off we’ve seen in enforcement activities. I sense this activism has caught the authorities by surprise. But it has helped embarrass them by exposing their heavy-handed tactics.
Pete is this hyperbolde or do you actually believe it? I don’t think Mark thinks he is beyond the law, on the opposite I thinks he is an easy target, realizes it and speaks out in public but becomes much more vulnerable that way. He is doing what many of us are calling for, because he can while we don’t.
There’s always something we call proof if you’re so inclined. Dust in the wind is all I ever hoped to be.
Most doctors and pharmaceuticals make money by deceiving u doesn”t that just inspire trust? I’ll take my dog any day.
Being listed on rawmi is free? To be listed, aren’t you required to have tests done? If so, then it is not free.
But I don’t think you’re right about the ‘approval of Big Dairy’ part. Laws on raw milk sales are already loosening in many states despite intense pressure from the FDA and big dairy.
Whether this exact tact or something else, they’ll come up with some sort of fall back position where raw milk is available but tightly regulated/controlled. This is the tact the dairy establishment in Canada fell back on when Michael Schmidt initially won his case. They were dead set against raw dairy but if it was going to be available they wanted it regulated and folded into the existing control structures.
I think they are all caught by surprise because they are used to consumers being sheep, easily herded around by the mass marketing and pronouncements from on high. And this raw milk thing is hitting a major blind spot for them. They can’t even understand what motivates them because to understand that would require them to admitt to themselves that people are dumping their product because it tastes bad and makes people sick. And thats the last thing they can mentally handle.
Remember, when a movement can’t be ignored to death or outright suppressed the next stage is to co-opt it. And those efforts to co-opt usually begin before the average person has heard of it. Based on the US Gov’s past co-option efforts in things like the tea-party and occupy wall-street and the current level of media penetration on raw milk it is possible that the co-option efforts are already well under-way.
This isn’t an attack on RAWMI, I’m sure they’re all wonderful people who mean well. But I’m learning from the lessons of history here. Almost if not every time an organization has come to a monopolist position in the food distribution chain, or becomes required training or certification, it abuses it position for power and/or profit; either against its own members or against outsiders who would wish to enter the industry.
And what of a raw milk producer disagrees with RAWMI’s approach? Even though he produces safely he’d be shut out. Or what if a producer disagrees with the results of RAWMI’s approach? Or with the politics or politicking of RAWMI. He’d be funding his enemies. [not that that is my issue with RAWMI, it just often happens]
I do believe that consumers should have basic knowledge about all aspects of where their food comes from and how it is processed. They do need to learn what to look for when seeking healthy foods. CAFOs milk are tested, and they are not impressive nor something I’d want to consume.
I do believe that if a dairy wants to sell to the majority of the public in stores, like OP and Claravale, then yes, they should test and fall under whatever regulations for ALL dairies (their regulations should be no different than the ones for boiled dairy.)
But farmer John/Jane and their less than 50 head dairies or the small cow share,(who are not selling to the general public) no I don’t believe they should have to test unless they want to.
One question for you?? What kind of power comes out of an under funded non profit with all volenteers dedicated to preventing illness associated with raw milk ?? There is no way that RAWMI can support the infrastructure of hundreds of Listed raw milk dairymen. RAWMI is out to prove a point and change history using hard data and testing results.
Join us or not…it does not matter. We are on a mission to prove a point and change history.
The activism is only a by-product of the larger benefit of RAWMI though. The greater benefit is the flow of information to farmers who seek to reliably and consistently produce high quality and low risk raw milk. RAWMI serves hundreds of raw milk farms with information through their trainings, with absolutely no strings attached. RAWMI listing is not a requirment to benefit from the information.
Sylvia, cost is not the limiting factor to RAWMI listing. Milk testing is not cost prohibitive to even the one-cow farm. The limiting factor is farmer’s desire to pursue listing, and perhaps eventually, as the requests for listing grow, the organization’s ability to assist each farm.
As far as the question of “should” every raw milk farmer be testing their milk, I’m not crazy about the word “should” but I do think that in most cases, raw milk farmers and their customers do benefit from milk testing. In most cases, the costs associated with creating and implementing a thorough and tested food safety plan will be a very good investment to the farmer. I receive frequent emails from raw-milk customers around the country asking me if I can refer them to a comparable raw-milk farm.
I’ve no doubt that the majority of farmers have their own set of unwritten standards and they’ve been working just fine. For anyone to imply that those farmers are ignorant and/or have no standards is no different than that dude that likes Russian Roulette with his raw milk.
I don’t think any are against teaching safe practices, what kills it, is his attitude and verbiage that basically sends the message; his way or the highway.
My own motivated self-interest comes from living in a place where raw milk sales are illegal (both federal and provincial law), it’s a “health hazard” (provincial law), and it’s illegal to “supply” raw milk to anyone other than a processing plant (provincial law) so even cowshares are illegal. RAWMI, or an organization like it, is our chance to break this deadlock. How we’re going to deal with the Milk Marketing Boards, I don’t know – but convincing the government that raw milk is not a health hazard and convincing them to repeal that law is going to require something organized like RAWMI.
= Prohibition via over-regulation.
You’re right, Shelly. The Illinois Dept of Public Health has apparently gotten orders from the FDA to do whatever it takes to eliminate the state’s raw milk farmers….despite an absence of any illnesses. It will be up to the state’s raw milk consumers to stand behind the farmers who are willing to defy the state, and test out the sanctity of private contracts…..much as Vernon Hershberger did in WI and Alvin Schlangen did in MN. I believe IL farmers will get support from around the country.
http://www.lewrockwell.com/lrc-blog/free-market-regulation/