Carol Schmitmeyer, the mother of five children whose entire livelihood was placed on the line by the Ohio Department of Agriculture’s aggressive anti-raw-milk stance (described in a BusinessWeek.com article I wrote last November), can finally breathe easier.
She had in December won a court appeal of the ODA’s revocation of her dairy license the previous September—an appeal in which the judge chided ODA for its haphazard approach on cowshare agreements. Among other things, the judge observed: "If the herd share agreement is a circumvention of the law, so is the Department’s inexact practice of allowing owners and their families, etc. to consume raw milk.” Despite the judge’s clear unhappiness with ODA’s procedures, the department filed an appeal of the decision last month. (For a detailed writeup about the decision in December, and a link to the judge’s decision, see my blog posting of December 31.)
It turns out that the ODA’s appeal was likely just a technical move, according to Gary Cox, Schmitmeyer’s lawyer, designed to preserve the state’s legal options and give the ODA’s new administrators brought in as a result of the change in Ohio’s governor a chance to review the case. In one of the briefest court documents I’ve ever seen—a single sentence—the Ohio attorney general asked the appeals court to withdraw the ODA appeal.
The turnaround by the ODA apparently came at the direct order of new Democratic governor Ted Strickland, elected last November as part of the national sweep by Democrats. Gee, elections really can make a difference to ordinary people.
The implications of this turnaround in Ohio are significant, if only providing legal credibility to herdshare agreements as a means of distributing raw milk to consumers. That state’s agriculture officials had gone out of their way to establish Ohio as the toughest in the country in going after raw milk producers. So maybe, as Ohio goes, so will some others…
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