People are starting to get worked up about regulators taking away their food.
As you’ll see on the video here, about thirty people confronted two agents from the Minnesota Department of Agriculture yesterday outside Minneapolis when the agents confiscated raw milk the people had already purchased. The agents got involved because the milk came from the farm of Michael Hartmann. who has been under a state agriculture department order restricting him from distributing milk; he has argued that since he doesn’t have a dairy license, he’s not under the department’s jurisdiction.
Apparently he decided to fill orders from his customers, and the agents obtained a court order to go after him, and moved in to confiscate the milk being delivered by his brother, Roger. What you see on the video here are a lot of very upset people confronting two very uncomfortable agents. It’s a lot different scene from that in Georgia in September 2009, when several dozen consumers meekly disposed of milk they had purchased from South Carolina, which was confiscated by the Georgia Department of Agriculture.
Many of the people have taken Mark McAfee’s advice, and turned on their video cameras. But there are also a number of angry questions and remarks being fired at the agents, which essentially boil down to this: Why are you doing this to us? At one point, one of the agents says, “I don’t have to respond to your questions. You’re not part of this investigation.” To which some of the people respond by reminding the agent, “You work for us. We pay your salary.” Oh, and the handicapped parking tag in the state’s car is a nice touch as well.
Hartmann has been accused by the state of raising his cows in unsanitary conditions, and producing milk that allegedly sickened 15 people last spring and summer. But that hasn’t deterred many of his loyal customers from continuing to demand his milk.
All of which raises in very dramatic form a question we’ve been debating here on and off: What is our right to access foods we want, which the government doesn’t want us to have?
The government won this one, but possibly at a high price now that people are on to the routine. “You’re not going to get away with this!” one of the customers says several times.
If this video is any indication, the struggle for food rights is moving to a new stage.
***
The federal government’s campaign against raw milk cheeses continues unabated. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has been on a kick to find listeria, the most commonly found pathogen, in small cheese-producing facilities around the country.
The FDA’s clear goal is to make a case to change, or eliminate, its 60-day aging requirement. But the campaign may be coming up short, according to a survey of members of the American Cheese Society, which I report on in an article on Grist.
S 510 HAS BEEN SLIPPED INTO THE HOUSE CONTINUING RESOLUTION – the bill that continues funding for the government into 2011.
VOTE EXPECTED IN HOUSE THIS AFTERNOON.
It has to go back to the Senate after that.
PLEASE CALL YOUR SENATORS NOW TO STOP THIS BILL. http://Senate.gov
Debbie
Thank you too Debbie! Can the Senate pull S. 510 out of the continuing resolution? What are their options?
Thanks,
Blair
Debbie
Depends how hard we are willing to fight for those rights!
And its not just about government, its also about agri-business. Just watch as big agri-business, after fighting tooth and nail to hold back the tide on raw milk, tries to co-opt the raw milk market from small farms, using high-tech milk processing techniques other than pasteurization (like ultra-filtration).
The battle for REAL raw milk will be shifting back to Wisconsin in the next few months. Keep an eye out.
Thanks for the alert. I've corrected the post.
David
me, i'm underground. want good food? go underground to find it circa 2012 -14 as this gets implemented.
The people need to show how they can not drink the dead stuff and all they were doing was trying to follow the newest USDA initiative and "Get to Know Your Farmer and Get to Know Your Food".
All the people need to say is….how in the hell I am supposed to "Get to Know My Farmer and Get to Know My Food" if all the farmers are located at some unknown Biosecure CAFO location behind "No Tresspassing Signs" with a security gate.
The people need to say…."I know my farmer and I know his food". Get the hell out of the way. Start getting a little pushy and a little nastier…..who says we need to be nice.
These bastards stole your food.
In some countries if some person wearing a Beret took your families food or raw milk….that Beret wearing fascist would be taken out back and taught a real lesson in manners or worse. The act of taking food away from your family, lands at the foundation of Maslows heriachy of needs. Nothing else matters if food is taken away.
http://stpauls-youthgroup.blogspot.com/2009/01/maslows-hierarchy-of-needs.html
Mark
It's time to stand up to these goons.
When we stand there and try and guilt them…we still lose.
The raw milk movement can do well to look back at the civil rights movement and see how uncooperation advances a cause.
I have a dream!!!! That dream had some blood and dog bites in and on it.
Mark
Yes, law enforecement was there. There were 2 police cars and one female officer was helping carry/transfer the milk. At 53 seconds in the camera pans the crowd and you can see the squad cars.
Deborah, please e-mail me privately or phone me. I need to know who your sources are in the current congress/senate ~ perhaps I can help.
Kind regards,
Violet
http://www.kilbyridgefarmmaine.blogspot.com
folks went to the gas chambers willingly…
will americans be willing to be arrested over food? some for sure. but no, all of marks hundreds of moms will stand there and let it happen again and again and again.
it will take extreme economic pain to get people that desperate, and by then it's won't matter cause gov't won't be there to raid you in the first place. heck you'll be lucky to bave a bicycle and a place to ride it to that you can call a home.
case in point of denial. "the economy will recover soon" no it won't.
start here http://www.chrismartenson.com/ read the daily digest… daily.
here http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com/ fast moving current events.
here http://www.theburningplatform.com/http://www.theburningplatform.com/ the raw truth. very real and very entertaining.
i want you all to continue to fight the system, but i worry that few here (and in america as a whole, because we're all programed to believe/behave x or y and … or deny reality.) really understand what happened in 2008.
basicly the western worlds economies peaked. a toppy peak that makes any past peak look like a mole hill.
please read and learn why this time we won't / can't recover. it is a complex intertwined global system we live in and every aspect of it has gone exponential.
government isn't interested in helping the people anymore it is focused on helping itself. we have casinos everywhere sin taxes and all taxes rising, wages falling. real cost of basics climbing fast. be secure in the knowledge that these crackdowns are funded with federal money via the backdoor. be certain that government will do much more damage in the near/mid term.
but also be sure that a crisis of epic proportions is arriving now and government has thrown out the rule of law to try and prevent it. but their cure. more debt for a disease of debt will not work.
basically the money system is over. it may take a few years before tshtf but it's coming as sure as can be.
don't worry folks i'l fade awy again soon and stop poundding this drum here. i know deniial is much more comfortable. but hopefullyy a few of you will benefit a lk into the current state of the world and see it fr what it is.
i get fustrated reading here anymore beecuse it's the same circle over and over. this fine ii guess. if and only if at the same time you are focusing much energy toward buckliing down and preparing for the day your government struggles disapear and everybody has to depend on their wits to survive the months or more it will take to pickup the pieces.
you all need to be there, on the other side of this to make sure many pieces are left on the floor. like the police state aka big government.
fighting them in the meantime is truly futile. go quietly underground. survive the storm. own old us coins pre 1965 silver coins are 90% silver.
build a deep pantry and learn how to manage it. it takes years to get good at it. hope we have a few years for ya all to get up to speed.
get protected. get out of debt as fast as possible.
when complex systems fail they fail spectacularly.
The Four Horsemen of the Modern Health Apocalpse by Tony Isaac
Is S510 one of the evil tenacles of this story?
We lock our doors to prevent a burglary, we understand it could happen. Yet until you are actually robbed, you do not understand how unsettling this invasion truly is.
Likewise, I think the folks in MN need chance to absorb what has occurred. They have been preparing, but up until now, the enemy has been theoretical.
So in a sense, they were blindsided by the first strike of the battle.
Give them the grace to meditate on this new reality.
Almost universally, all organisms in nature will fight to defend their young, defend their food, to defend their nests…
They will fight. Many, many will surprise you, when the brain stem instincts kick in, with how formidable they will become. They will not only be willing to risk arrest, they will be willing to fight to the death.
"It is not for glory, nor riches, nor honours that we are fighting, but for freedom for that alone, which no honest man gives up but with life itself."
From The Declaration of Arbroath 1320
Dmitry Orlov wrote a dissertation comparing the Soviet Union at its collapse to the U.S. The people living under Soviet rule were much better prepared to survive an economic implosion than we are today:
https://docs.google.com/Doc?docid=dtxqwqr_25g7bchc
Preparing for the worst is the best and only thing to do. Collapse is coming, and probably sooner than later.
But until people aren't willing to give up their milk, and are willing to indeed say NO…this kind of stuff will keep happening.
How do you think it will play on the 6 oclock news that 10 people were arrested for 'wanting their milk'….
It's time to stop being passive…Hartmann farms decision to keep producing is the right way to go….that type of resolve needs to be seen in those who consume it.
Could not agree more. Groups of people must risk arrest
More effectively. Large groups of good people must rise up and forcefully and physically be stronger than the fascist robots. Keep those cameras rolling. The social media is a tinder box ready to be lit.
Martin Luther King advocated non violence. I advocate the same. Along with nonviolence comes lots of very physical and powerful resistance and even blood shed.
Mark
This was a police assisted action.
What is most bothersome to me is that the Health Officer ( serving the notice and documents ) was trying to look like a cop or some other official psuedo para-military type person. Since when do Health Inspectors or Health Officers wear military type Berets?
The fat guy with the Beret must be highly insecure and wants to look bad ass ( insecure people need that to be secure ) when actually he is is a very little, pathetic, petty, non-thinking, unresponsive "tax paid for" Robot or Paycheck Puppet.
I hope the good people of MN get pissed….but it does not appear that this is happening. I say that the Hartmans should light the tinder box and let it burn nationally…. we need this for SB 510. Produce some more raw milk and announce the delivery outloud to the media and invite the cops and the Paycheck Puppet with his Beret. Tease them into your media and video ambush.
Also…invite about 500 people as well with their video cameras and raw milk stories. Invite CNN and Dr. Sanja Gupta. We need escalation not passiveness.
Let this be the Raw Milk Wounded Knee. The tribe needs to make a stand. Do it with loud voices and stories told to the media and huge numbers of people from all arround the world. We will (and I will ) come if you tell us when the milk delivery is being made!!! This is going to stop!!
See if they try this again.
Mark
Why didn't the police question that?
The so-called Food Safety bills, and the related raids and shut-downs of small farms and buying clubs, do nothing to address the huge food safety problems of factory farming, confined animal feeding operations (CAFOs), genetically modified organisms (GMOs), and the gargantuan amounts of contaminants used in our commercial food supply (pesticides, herbicides, hormones, antibiotics, preservatives, additives, endocrine disruptors, rancid machine-made oils, dangerous refined ingredients, etc.). The FDA currently does have the authority to enforce the safety of food to a much greater degree, but it is populated by people with ties to Big Ag and Big Pharma, so its efforts are directed at supporting those interests. The status quo is interested in maintaining the status quo. Meanwhile, smaller state agencies are being pressured into pursuing small farmers, harassing their network of consumers, and burdening them with voluminous paperwork and crippling legal fees. Small farmers need our support, as does consumer access to their safe, nourishing foods!
The amendments like Tester-Hagan, which are attempts to provide a measure of protection to small farms and the consumer access to their foods, may not go far enough and need to be strengthened, not weakened or compromised. The $500,000 provision is for gross sales, not net sales, and could leave out and imperil many small-scale farms, and certainly will be a disincentive for them to expand and hire more employees.
Keep in mind that states like Minnesota and its legislators feel beholden to prop up corporations in their respective locales, like Cargill, Archer Daniels Midland, General Mills and the like in Minnesota. These companies are every bit as big and powerful and influential as the oil companies.
But maybe, just maybe, enough voices and enough messages from real people, in a repeated and sustained manner, will allow us to change the direction of our national and local policies, and save the small farms and producers who produce the safest, short-supply-chain food, who are directly accountable to their customers, and who respect the people, land, animals and community they impact.
By the way, I was disappointed (no, make that outraged) to see that the so-called food safety bills are supported by the likes of Michael Pollan as well as Ken Cook, founder of the Environmental Working Group. Heres Pollans NY Times piece:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/29/opinion/29schlosser.html
And Ken Cooks post, in which he says that the concerns regarding the accelerated demise of small farms and consumer access to their foods amount to "internet rumors":
http://www.enviroblog.org/2010/09/yes-we-can—and-should—make-our-food-safer.html
Argh! Many people hold these influential gentlemen up on a pedestal and look to them for sound guidance, but are they being hoodwinked and influenced by Big Food Inc now? They need to hear from us as well, so after you contact your members of Congress in both the House and Senate, consider contacting these men as well.
That is exactly why you people in minnesota sat at the sidelines years ago and quietly allowed raw milk to be taken from yon
Passive citizens get what Monsanto and Cargil and Tyson want them to eat.
Stand and fight or starve. Time to get a spine
Mark