It was a sight to warm the hearts of all in DATCP (the Wisconsin Department of Agriculture, Trade and Consumer Protection), not to mention the FDA (U.S. Food and Drug Administration).
There was Vernon Hershberger, basking in the warm afternoon sunlight outside the Sauk County Courthouse in Baraboo, feeling relief at having emerged from the one-hour-45-minute sentencing hearing, and a three-year fight with DATCP, with only a $1,000 fine and $513 in court costs. In his pocket was a check from one of his members for $1,513 to pay for everything. And before you could say, “Way to go, Vernon,” there were four members of the jury that convicted him of the single count of violating a DATCP hold order to stop him from selling food back in 2010–a hold order he readily acknowledged he had violated because he refused to let huge amounts of food rot and go to waste. (Hershberger’s lawyers plan to appeal the conviction, so the slate could be wiped completely clean, to go with the acquittals on the three licensing charges.)
The jurors were telling him how sorry they were to have come back with the guilty verdict. They were saying they were upset the hold order was so severely redacted they didn’t know it was based on the farmer not having the licenses the jurors ruled he didn’t need. They were meeting his wife, Erma, and some of his ten children. The jurors were asking about becoming members of his food club AND buying raw milk. They were talking about organizing a group excursion to his farm. (For a fuller account of the jury’s actions on behalf of Hershberger at the sentencing hearing, see my article in Modern Farmer.)
DATCP had spent more than three years pursuing Hershberger, spending untold millions in its obsession, and what the agency came away with was a farmer cleared by a jury of his peers to sell food privately to his food club members, slapped on the wrist by a judge who had clearly had enough of the farmer who stood his ground, and, in the ultimate slap, a cadre of new converts from among individuals who came to the case with nary a passing interest in raw milk and nutritionally dense foods.
The Sauk County Court had arranged for the jurors during the trial two weeks earlier to be bused into town from a remote parking lot. “They were afraid for our safety,” said Michele Bollfrass-Hopp, a juror. “I was kind of scared. I thought his supporters were possibly dangerous. I found out what nice people they are…Now we are radicalized.”
Inside the courthouse, Hershberger offered in a statement to the judge to try to work with DATCP, and come to understandings about what would be appropriate organization and oversight for his private operation. Afterward, he and his lawyers conversed with DATCP chief counsel, David Meany, and Wisconsin Department of Justice attorneys, about ways to get started. They wouldn’t comment, but one of Hershberger’s lawyers said Meany had discussed the possibility of DATCP encouraging regulation that would allow for alternative private organizational schemes. It was clearly all very tentative.
After talking with the jurors at length, Hershberger finally left the victory celebration. “It’s time to get back to farming,” he said with a grin.
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The legal defense of Vernon Hershberger took a mammoth, and expensive, effort by the Farm-to-Consumer Legal Defense Fund. You can help in that effort by supporting the FTCLDF’s annual fund drive…and you’ll receive a copy of my new book, Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Food Rights: The Escalating Battle Over Who Decides What We Eat” (or Sally Fallon’s new book or a movie).
I encourage any farmer on my lease contracts and any on herdshare programs to NOT make any contracts or agreements. I have seen what those governmental agencies do. They get farmers to agree to agency oversight, gaining jurisdiction over them, then change the regulations to untenable. I have seen them backrupt 23 farmers that way. Those families lost their farms and livelihood.
I REPEAT, FARMERS AND MEMBERS, PLEASE DO NOT MAKE ANY AGREEMENTS OR NEGOTIATIONS WITH THE GOVERNMENT REGARDING OUR FARMING CLUBS. If you have already begun any negotiations, please write a letter that negotiations have ceased, you decline any oversight and jurisdiction, and thank them for their time.
http://online.wsj.com/article/PR-CO-20130611-909875.html?mod=googlenews_wsj
“New Studies Confirm: Raw Milk A Low-Risk Food”
Don’t know if the above link was posted here or not. Felt it worth repeating. Wonder if policies will be updated?
Congrats to the Hershbergers. They took one for all of us. Please support them in recovering from the fire and also FTCLDF! The lawyers were just wonderful! (We watched Mr. Smith Goes to Washington with our boys and they agreed that Mr. Reynolds’ closing argument was reminiscent of Mr. Smith’s filibuster.). A huge thank you for all their hard work!
We were also able to attend the passing of a local food ordinance by the Town of Troy here in Wisconsin on Wednesday evening. It’s the first of more towns to come!
What hypocrites! And yet, the reputed “extreme danger” of raw milk has never been proven as ‘fact.” If you look at the statistics, the myth of it being “very dangerous” completely falls through (Green leafy vegetables for example are more dangerous). But yet, they based sentencing on this?
Here’s an interview — http://www.cfax1070.com/Media/CFAX-Podcasts/Frank-Stanford/June-13-2013-1pm – go to the 35-minute point and begin listening to the “House of Common” radio show. And the presentation given to the BC Centre for Disease Control by the same researcher – http://phsa.mediasite.com/mediasite/Play/b54b4be24bab4f4581ef0fdd8023d38d1d .
Plus there were other analyses too: David Gumpert here, and Chris Kresser both shot down the CDC “report.” So the “sentence” was based on a wrong assumption.
You have a bigger heart and soul than most Americans I know or have ever known. If Americans conducted themselves more like you…America would be filled with freedom, love and healthy families and the likes of the FDA, Monsanto and DATCP would be irrelevant.
Big hugs to you and your family and your extended family of co-owners of your farm!!
Mark
DATCP should haev been asked, what about pasteurized milk and the 8 kids that have died since 1998 directly as a result of perfectly pasteurized milk!!! What about the 70 plus people that have died from pasteurized milk and the zero deaths from raw milk since 1972.
Raw Milk Safety…the greatest bull shit argument to ever be sold to the media dazed unconscious American public. It is hollow, baseless, missleading and a lie. The CDC data clearly shows it to be a lie….yet the FDA claims the oposite. How can they sleep at night? How about those EU QMRA’s…the facts are clear, raw milk is in the low risk or very low risk category of risk. Where are the FDA QMRA’s…they do not have any!!!!
http://www.city-data.com/forum/alternative-medicine/1885138-germ-theory-fallacy.html
Ken
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DATCP’s head lawyer(What was his name Dave. David Meany?) sat way off to the side watching our reactions and basically filing his nails. Outside the courthouse he said to me; not to be flippant but you are not the people your representatives are.
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The prosecution insists this is common practice and that they have a long history of food regulation and in the next breath they admit that this is the first time they have ever tried to prosecute someone under these statutes. They have yet to prosecute someone for selling raw milk, by the way. The state should be ashamed of it’s history. In the 1800’s the state was in the swill milk business which was the beginning of this, for lack of a better word, holocaust. When pasteurization of milk first started around 1900 it was done in secret until, because of public outrage, they were forced to label it. It took 50 years of propaganda supporting the pasteurization of milk before it could be mandated for store bought milk and by that time that’s all that was being sold in Wisconsin’s stores. You don’t need an exemption to allow farmers and their employees to drink there own milk raw since there is no law against drinking raw milk. The raw milk statute would have never passed without an incidental sales exemption. The public outcry would have been enormous. Most Wisconsin farms are still small. They were much smaller and much more plentiful in 1957 and they all sold raw milk to their neighbours and passers by on a regular bases.
The first thing I didn’t like was they called all the positive things we know about raw milk myths simply because there are no resent medical studies to support them. Why would there be. Who would pay for them. To call them myths suggests that they are unfounded or false. You can’t say they are unfounded or false just because the proof is unpublished. That’s worse than calling them anecdotal.
After talking to DATCP’s chief consul it became obvious that he didn’t understand the meaning of the word representative. And to use his own words, he was flippant about it which also showed in his demeanor and his posture in court. In the case of any food prohibition we don’t need to know the specific intent of the representative that drafted the statute or administrative rule because they are just that our representative. Food production is supposed to be regulated on behalf of the people not on behalf of a few powerful processors and special interests. That is what’s meant by consumer protection. If DATCP were in the business of protecting us from unhealthy food why do they say nothing about any of the foods that we all know are unhealthy? The only thing DATCP says about raw milk is that it is the second safest food, that it is at least slightly healthier than pasteurized milk, and may be a lot healthier because of all the anecdotal evidence and the lack of any evidence to the contrary. What is more credible, the hyperbole(to put it mildly) coming from thousands of raw milk’s competitors or the anecdotal(meaning not published in medical journals) evidence of millions of actual raw milk consumers?
The regulation of raw milk sales in the first half of the 20th century proved to be a major public health disaster in this country. Pasteurization started before 1900. By 1920, milk regulations had reached every part of the country, with regulations beginning to appear in state statutes. Beginning in
1925, the Public Health Service published summaries of outbreaks of gastrointestinal
illness attributed to milk. In 1938, it added summaries of outbreaks caused by all
foods.
By 1938, milk-borne outbreaks constituted approximately 25% of the disease-outbreaks from contaminated food and water. The Wisconsin’s raw milk statute was passed in 1957. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention began tracking outbreaks starting in the 1973. Surveillance increased in 1998 quadrupling the number of confirmed cases to 14,700 per year. That’s 14,700 cases of diarrhea out of the 936 million or 0.002%. No standard criteria exist for
classifying a death as being FBDO-related(food borne disease outbreak related). This determination is made by the reporting
agency.
In a 1914 decision, the Illinois Supreme Court said, “There is no article of food in more general use than milk; none whose impurity or unwholesomeness may more quickly, more widely, and more seriously affect the health of those who use it” Koy v. City of Chicago , 104 N.E. 1104 (1914).
In the representative case of Pfeffer v. Milwaukee, 171 Wis. 514 (1920), milk dealers claimed that a Milwaukee ordinance requiring that all milk sold within the city be pasteurized would hurt their business, and that the ordinance was an invalid exercise of the police power because it did not promote the public health. The Wisconsin Supreme Court, however, disagreed. Public health demands that milk and all milk products should be pure and wholesome. It is also common knowledge that milk containing deleterious organisms is an unsuitable article of food. Milk is known to be a product easily infected with germ life and to require special attention and treatment in its production and distribution for consumption as an article of food. Scientific knowledge concerning these facts and the best method of pasteurizing milk for human use in course of production and distribution as a pure and wholesome food is so generally understood and known that courts take judicial notice of these facts.
Pasteurization was therefore meant at best to alleviate the symptoms of the disease of food industrialization, but wasn’t meant to cure it. Indeed, it was designed to help perpetuate a fundamentally filthy and unhealthy system. Meanwhile the idea of cleanly producing milk in the first place was rejected as too expensive for the producers. But the associated sterilization ideology was brought back later as an accompaniment to the pasteurization regime. But only to be applied to milk which wasn’t pasteurized. That’s also why “germ theory” is favored by the system over terrain theory. Pasteurization allegedly kills malign germs, while the sterilization idea can be applied to raw food producers in an out-of-context, instrumental, selective way, focusing only on the existence of so-called “harmful” microbes while ignoring the more holistic (that is, naturally more clean) production terrain.
So these court decisions, and the pasteurization policy in general, give a good example of the general decadent pattern, including the way do-gooders exemplify it:
1. Destroy the natural system which works and replace it with an unhealthy and unsustainable industrial system.
2. This system must be preserved and aggrandized, no matter what problems it inevitably causes.
3. Within the framework of industrialism’s imperative and prerogative, try to ameliorate the problem as best you can, but ONLY within that framework.
4. If that doesn’t work, lie and say it is working.
5. Use the phony “solution” as a weapon against those opposing the destructive system and trying to rebuild the healthy natural system.