Erma Hershberger was explaining to me today’s episode of “Life on an Idyllic Wisconsin Dairy Farm”.

Around 8 a.m., she and her husband, Vernon, were finishing up a late breakfast, when a couple of cop cars and a car with two inspectors from the Wisconsin Department of Agriculture, Trade, and Consumer Protection pulled into the driveway. The sheriff’s deputies surrounded the store and asked three of the couple’s teenage children, who were outside, to open the locked doors.

Vernon got on the phone, reached  the sheriff’s office, and complained that the deputies were on private property, and he wanted them removed immediately . A few minutes later, they sped away, DATCP inspectors in tow. And a few minutes after that, a DATCP inspector telephone Vernon and asked to set up an appointment to return. All agreed the DATCP inspectors would come at 10 a.m.

At 10, Jackie Owens and Cathy Anderson, the DATCP inspectors, were back. By now, a handful of customers were there, along with Max Kane, the Wisconsin buying club owner whose own civil disobedience case is under appeal. The DATCP inspectors said they had an “inspection warrant” and wanted to enter the store.

The store was locked. Vernon sat on a camping chair outside the store and relaxed. “If you show me where it says in the warrant I have to assist you, I will,” he told them.

As Max Kane filmed the exchange, Jackie Owens reprimanded him for holding the video camera too close to her. “You’re violating my personal space,” she told him.

“So, sue me,” Max responded. “Oh wait, I forgot, you already are suing me.” Jackie Owens seemed not to appreciate Max’s humor.

She then told Vernon her crew would be leaving, but promised to return to a state judge and tell him the dairy owner refused to help them do their inspection. And off the posse went, having been at the dairy less than ten minutes.

“These repeated visits are very stressful,” Erma Hershberger told me.

Definitely so. Normal hard-working citizens like the Hershbergers aren’t used to being targeted by the cops. Talk about role-reversal. The Hershbergers, like most of us, expect to call on the police to go after the bad guys. The police aren’t supposed to be going after the good guys.

And that is a big part of the problem confronting DATCP. Indeed, this seeming cat-and-mouse game being played out between DATCP and the Hershbergers has a number of intriguing subplots.

First, there’s the issue of a search warrant. Now, DATCP has to go back to a judge and try to justify breaking down the doors to the Hershberger farm store. An alert judge might inquire as to the urgency of such a drastic step. He might well wonder, are we talking about illegal firearms, or a heroin stash? Now, DATCP ideally would love to be able to say that the milk samples they took during their raid last week showed pathogens–a clear danger. But surely the samples showed nothing, or DATCP would have used that excuse already. So what do they say now to justify breaking in? They may well come up with something about some sort of legal violation of Wisconsin restrictions on raw milk, and get their warrant, but each step up the “force” ladder tends to receive ever more judicial examination.

Then there’s the matter of media attention. The Madison, WI, area media are following this situation closely, and one Madison TV station seems to have a regular reporter assigned to the case. The video Don Wittlinger linked to is worth a look, if only to see Max Kane and one of his shots of Jackie Owens.

The Sauk County District Attorney, Patricia Barrett, can’t be feeling real good about what’s going on, either. Her phone has been ringing off the hook from raw milk drinkers and other sympathizers for the Hershbergers. Her problem is that she is an elected official, and picking on hard-working farm families is generally not a good way to accumulate material for those 30-second TV spots pols like to show during re-election season. In fact, Patricia Barrett might want to pick up the phone and chat with Victor Fitz, the Cass County prosecutor in Michigan who was presented with the Richard Hebron case in late 2006 and 2007, and finally tossed it back to the Michigan Department of Agriculture like a hot potato.

Finally, there’s the problem of morale. Now, maybe Jackie Owens likes harassing small farms–I met her at a conference in 2008, and she seemed to be looking forward to the time when DATCP would take off the gloves and go after raw milk dairies. But I can guarantee that sheriff’s deputies and other law enforcement types don’t like clamping down on good people. Each time Jackie Owens and her cronies call the sheriff for help, the deputies are likely a little less enthusiastic. Who knows, maybe one of them has a situation like that described by Mom to Boys following my previous post, and is desperate to maintain his raw milk supply.

Besides all the challenges I’ve described, there’s an even bigger fear the DATCP people are certainly dealing with when they go home at night: that all the news media coverage will piss off ever more people, and other dairy farmers will feel emboldened to do what Vernon and Erma Hershberger have been brave enough to do. If you think one Vernon Hershberger is a problem, what about three or five or eight such cases. DATCP wouldn’t be able to handle the situation.

All of which helps explain why DATCP is in a tight spot. Not enough of a tight spot to make one feel badly for them, in the least. Wisconsin farmers and consumers have a golden opportunity to tighten the screws on their tormenters. 

(I have a further analysis of the Wisconsin situation on the Huffington Post site.)

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When last we left the Massachusetts clampdown on raw milk buying clubs, the commissioner of the state’s Department of Agricultural Resources was promising a broadened inquiry into raw milk within 30 days of a May 10 hearing, and the Organic Consumers Association had complained to the state’s attorney general about violations during the hearing of the state’s Open Meetings Law.

As I said on a previous post, Massachusetts politics can get awfully weird. So in that spirit, we have the Northeast Organic Farming Association of MA announcing on its raw milk web site, as if it’s the MDAR’s press outlet, that MDAR won’t hold hearings and will continue its clampdown on buying clubs. There’s lots of stuff there about “discussions” within MDAR. Sounds like MDAR didn’t like all the pro-raw-milk stuff it heard at the May 10 hearing, and so decided to ignore it…and got NOFA-Mass to announce it.

And OCA says it heard back from the MA attorney general about the organization’s complaint that many consumers were denied entrance to the May 10 hearing. It says in part, “… we have determined that there was no Open Meeting Law violation because the Department of Agricultural Resources is not a governmental body subject to the law.” Since MDAR is part of the executive branch, it is subject to a different law regarding hearings, not the Open Meetings Law. The MA AG bureaucrats wouldn’t be sticking up for their buddies at MDAR, would they?