Tough Government Stance May Be Achieving Its Goal: Driving Raw Milk Producers “Underground”

The latest legal news on the raw milk front isn’t encouraging. Raw milk producer Michael Schmidt has been fined $55,000 on contempt of court charges in Canada in connection with legal moves against him and his cowshare.

He vows not to pay the fine, but governments have a way of obtaining their pound of flesh. Michael said at the Weston A. Price Wise Traditions conference screening of a documentary about him last month that legal expenses have been a major factor in reducing the size of his farm to 100 acres from 600 acres over the years.

This episode comes on top of the U.S. government’s suit against Organic Pastures Dairy Co. and its owner, Mark McAfee, along with a negative decision in New York’s Meadowsweet Dairy case.

The buzz I’m hearing is that more raw dairy producers are going “underground” rather than trying to fight The Man. The way we used to express it when I was a kid growing up in a tough neighborhood, and often confronted with overwhelming force, was this: "Better to be a live chicken than a dead hero."

Going underground means different things in different places. I don’t want to get too specific about what’s happening in specific locations or with particular dairy producers, since I don’t want to give the regulators any help in their enforcement efforts.

Going underground can mean selling raw dairy products without a license in states that do license raw milk. It can mean having a license that limits sales to the farm, and delivering large quantities of milk to distributors and groups of customers. It can mean having an unpublicized herdshare in states that both prohibit raw milk and license raw milk producers.

These underground operations are what is supplying ever more milk to big cities in the East and Midwest, in particular. And my guess is that they will grow ever larger as the shadow of the FDA and state ag regulators grows longer. After all, it’s tough enough to make a living the honest way in this economic environment—who wants to add the time and energy and expense of fighting mindless regulation?

Of course, the obvious big risk in all this is that the supposed goal of the regulators (in states that allow raw milk), which is to improve the safety of raw milk supplies, will become ever more elusive, since they’ll be inspecting ever less of the milk.

From the regulators' perspective, though, driving raw milk underground makes "the problem" of raw milk less visible, and thus less pressing. And my guess is that's what they really want--a low buzz instead of loud shouts.

Comments

[Don Wittlinger]

Tough Government Stance HMMM Could one also state that as Government Takes Tough Anticitizen Stance? Has the government taken any other anticitzen stance? The so called bailout has exceeded $8.5 trillion dollars a lien has been placed on our unborn great grandchildrens future earnings, could this be called an anticitizen act? Some are labeled antigovernment if we point out actions that limit individual freedom of choise but isnt it possible that TPTB at times do things that are anticitizen? Just some friendly questions to ponder.

[Alexis Bogue]

The problem with underground is it's so hard to find. I've got a sneaking suspicion I might be able to find a raw milk supplier in my area, this place is just way too rural and I see small farms all around with a few cows and goats. They can't ALL be selling to a co-op.

I guess this is going to be a case of who you know trumping what you know. Looks like it's time for me to go out and meet some new people, and make friends at the farmers' markets.

[Mark McAfee]

Two things:

What is up with the media and why have they not picked up on Manna House? David you have contacts with the media...could you call them and pitch the story....something is really wrong here.

Secondly, When ever I have spoken in Canada or Australia or Ohio or any place, I have always been able to drink delicious raw milk.

It is everywhere Underground....

My blood is boiling about SWAT teams, with the ODA, entering some farm families home....this will not stand. This story must be told.

Farmers...please own video cameras and do not forget to use them....video footage is the best protection when the armed "boot strapped" thugs come.

Mark McAfee

[john d]

Further to Mark's comments, having a video camera at the ready proved to be more than worthwhile for Michael Schmidt when the regulators decided to crack down twelve years after he'd told them he was going to keep on supplying raw milk.

And on the Manna Storehouse front -- what a story. It's being picked up by lots of rural survivalist and homeshooling bloggers. And as I mentioned before, the two posts I've done on that story are generating massive traffic on the Bovine blog. What it's looking like from here is that unofficial sources of food are being "discouraged".

Maybe behind-the-scenes "authorities" are hoping to centralize control of food so wiping out large swatches of the population will be that much easier. People won't know they're "drinking the Kool-Aid" if it's just in the form of additives in the their food.

What I've been picking up on lately is the idea that there's an agenda out there to further depopulate the rural areas of America and return them to wildlife habitat. This (see link below) is the kind of stuff I find by tracking back to see who's linking to my Manna Storehouse posts. This is a page about a UN agenda for the "re-wilding" of rural America.

http://crossroad.to/text/articles/Food-Land96.html

I guess it's easier to control people if you can collect them all together in cities and feed them in soup kitchens.

That said, I think the success of those kind of agendas is far from being a done deal. People like Mark McAfee and Michael Schmidt can help give us courage to stand up to authoritarian agendas that don't respect the real needs of people.

While the following is not one of my most popular posts, I'd like to interject it here because it directly speaks to the issues of how to deal with tyranny in a spiritually effective manner:

http://thebovine.wordpress.com/2008/12/02/the-strange-persistence-of-tyranny-useful-ideas-from-out-of-this-world/