I’ve been wanting to say something more about the Organic Valley decision to throw raw milk sellers out of the co-op, but the Wisconsin/Vernon Hershberger civil disobedience thing interrupted my musings. Then, when I read through some of the recent comments by Michael Schmidt, Amanda Rose, Concerned Person, miguel, WI Raw Milk Consumer, Pete, Bob Hayles, and others, about raw milk safety and rights, I suddenly realized the Organic Valley and Wisconsin situations may all be more connected than I initially realized.
My initial reaction to the Organic Valley decision was that the milk co-op may actually be doing raw milk producers a favor by forcing them to make a long overdue business decision: stay with the highly regulated commodity business model that governs the majority of food production in this country, or go the niche route, which Joel Salatin has labeled the artisenal approach.
All of which harkens back to some fundamental principles of business startups, something I’ve researched and written much about (articles and books) before becoming obsessed with raw milk and food rights. Two big red flags associated with starting any business:
— Highly regulated markets. You lose too much freedom of movement, and enforcement can be capricious. Government regulators tend to favor the big guys and go after the little guys because the little guys don’t have expensive lawyers and thus don’t fight back as hard. Sound familiar?
— Commodity markets. No matter what the industry, it’s very difficult, unless you possess some technological advantage, to gain the economies of scale possessed by the big boys. More often than not, entrepreneurs add value via improved quality, convenience, and so forth, but not via lowering the cost and increasing output of production. That’s why entrepreneurs are best at developing high-margin niche, or specialized, markets, rather than competing with commodity products. And even if smaller producers are successful at taking market share from the commodity producers, they invariably react badly, often retaliating by lowering prices below production costs to drive out the little guys.
So here you’ve got raw dairies, which are small enterprises, cast into this sea of regulation and commodity markets. If I was a small business consultant who knew nothing about raw milk, my first reaction to learning about their situation would be, “Oy.” And once I learned more, it would be “Double Oy.” Would that they weren’t there, but that’s where they are.
So the fallback question becomes: how do we make lemonade out of all these lemons?
Well, the big thing the raw dairies have going for them is that so-called “primary demand” for unprocessed foods is growing. Increasing numbers of people are learning about the dangers of processed foods and foods produced with antibiotics and pesticides. They want real milk, meat, and eggs produced locally by pastured cows and chickens, without the antibiotics, hormones and pesticides of the commodity segment. Similarly, they want organic fruits and veggies.
Also pushing primary demand is that more consumers are coming to understand that the commodity producers and their supporters rig the system. Big Dairy uses its pull to get the governor of a major dairy state (WI) to veto small-potatoes legislation that would open a tiny window of business opportunity for the little guys. The public health officials of a large urban state (MA) push for a crackdown on raw milk delivery services even though there’s not been a public health case in over a decade. A Big Dairy commodity producer thought to be friendly to farmers and consumers (Organic Valley) tries to squash raw milk producers that are grabbing more market share.
The result? Ever more interest and sympathy for the small producers. Stronger primary demand for raw milk and other such unprocessed products.
In the context of running a small business, safety is a business risk. The legal system is pretty clear. If your product makes someone sick, you could very well be held financially liable for damages. The smart business decision: reduce that risk via close attention to safety, and insurance. But even here, the commodity producers and their regulator backers and lawyers are at work, pressuring the insurance companies to help stamp out raw milk producers by denying coverage. They’re pushing major retailers (Whole Foods) to refuse to sell product. These are serious, but not insurmountable problems. When insurance becomes very expensive or unobtainable, companies sometimes self-insure by setting aside money to cover possible claims, or they get together with competitors and develop private insurance arrangements. And if some retailers won’t carry your product, you go out and find others that will, or you develop alternative distribution methods.
As a raw milk producer, though, your trump card is that you’ve got more and more consumers who like your product, and like you as well. But what the hell do you do with all these forces arrayed against you? You use whatever assets you can muster to fight back, and serve the market. In a place like Wisconsin, where the regulators and commodity producers are so totally hostile, there aren’t many assets.
In such situations, business challenges sometimes morph into political problems. A good example is slavery. This was originally a business problem. While free labor helped keep plantation owners’ production costs down, slaves cared ever less for being treated as property. So intense was resistance by slave owners to adjusting the business system that it took the ultimate political crisis– a civil war — to get rid of slavery. The union movement of the early 1900s — an effort by workers to organize themselves for better pay and benefits — similarly spilled over into the political realm via violent strikes and other clashes.
The unfolding civil disobedience in Wisconsin, then, might be seen as a business problem morphing into a political one. Small Wisconsin producers of raw milk are coming to the view that one of the few options they have is to organize themselves and resist. Their best chance of success lies in getting the politicians to order the regulators and commodity producers to lay off, since now votes are at stake in piling on these “good guys.” It worked for the labor union movement in the 1930s and for the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s and the migrant workers in California in the 1970s and 1980s.
Yes, there may well be some “injuries” along the way. Fines and arrests of dairy producers, as the regulators do the commodity producers’ bidding and try to deter mass rebellion. However, if the pain on the regulators and the commodity markets becomes great enough, they’ll have no choice but to relent. The big unknown: how much pain must be inflicted? Was the Acheson/FDA blog post I discussed in my previous post an indication the pain level is rising? Possibly.
I’ve long felt that the Organic Pastures outsourcing that Amanda Rose keeps coming back to and gets so upset about is a business problem. While I personally don’t approve of it, that is really unimportant. All that matters is the extent to which the marketplace cares, assuming there’s no violation of regulations and no one is becoming ill. If California raw milk consumers were to continue buying OPDC milk knowing some components of certain products were outsourced, well, that’s all that really counts in the U.S.of A. Maybe if there were more competitors to Organic Pastures in California, consumers would switch allegiance, but there aren’t.
Does anyone care that cereal makers target little kids with advertisements for sugary cereals? Or that pharmaceutical companies advertise on national television powerful drugs with side effects that can injure or kill patients? Or that people get sick and even die from contaminated spinach, ground beef, and peanut butter? Sure, people care about these things, but mostly, the marketplace solves the problem — consumers avoid certain products, or switch brands, or trust in producer assurances the problems aren’t really so serious or have been resolved.
For reasons that have been discussed at great length on this blog, safety problems with raw milk get magnified way beyond those of any other food. Once again from a business perspective, it’s incumbent that raw dairies pay very close attention to safety, not so much because the marketplace becomes frightened (quite the opposite), but because the business and political forces arrayed against raw milk use such problems as an excuse to try to limit or eliminate production.
But markets being what they are, I foresee the day when, once the regulatory silliness is dispensed with, raw dairies will compete with each other, as Tim Wightman suggests, on the basis of the quality of their milk, much as cheese producers compete. They may well compete on the basis of safety and according to how much outsourcing occurs, and criteria we can’t yet imagine.
I think having this business perspective is most immediately important for two groups: those Organic Valley members who sell raw milk now trying to decide whether to leave or stay with the cooperative, and those Wisconsin dairy farmers trying to decide whether to follow Vernon Hershberger on the civil disobedience path. I don’t mean to suggest these are easy decisions. They aren’t. In some cases, they require serious financial pain and “bet-the-ranch” business strategies. Which brings me to one final principle of entrepreneurship: passion, commitment, and persistence are key determinants of business success.
It might be that the people who want control of the land do have a business plan in mind.I wonder what they will do with poisoned land, water and air?
If they are about poisoning the land, water, and air, along with the people, there wouldn’t be anything to do with the wasteland that remained when the last poisoned person died off…there would be no end result, good or bad, to b working towards.
I agree that the end result, poisoning every living thing, is going to be the end result if something doesn’t change, drastically and soon, but I disagree that that is the purpose. If it were they would just be intentionally putting themselves out of business…which they are, but not intentionally.
Bob BubbaBozo Hayles
The problems of which you speak are indeed troubling.
This pattern of destruction of the land by monocultures to feed a bloated civilization is nothing new in human history. It has been going on since the dawn of sedentary agriculture.
What better example of this is there than "the fertile crescent"? Mesopotamia, the cradle of civilization, was the site of the earliest domestication of cereal grains — barley and wheat. In the not too distant past (at least in ecological time scale) it was a lush green savanna that gave rise to the first human civilizations and empires.
Today it is a war-torn desert, rife with sectarian strife, a foriegn occupying military force, and an exploited and demoralized populace. I am of course talking about Iraq.
What happened? The clearing of biodiverse natural habitats to raise more and more grain crops for these early civilizations gave rise to competition over resources. With the accumulation of durable wealth (aka cereal grains) to replace natural abondance and feed non-productive classes (priests, armies, beurocracies, rulers, etc…) these civilizations became polarized into class divisions. In time, soil errosion and desertification because of the agricultural practices causes these civilizations run up against the natural limits of their habitat, and the subsequent scarcity leads to war, class conflict, and eventual collapse.
We in America are going to run up against this natural limit of our civilization within a relatively short time, because of peak oil.
This boom and bust pattern of civilization, follows very much in the pattern of an annual grain crop. Rapid growth, total dominance of the landscape, followed by rapid collapse and the storage of all available energy into its seeds (ever wonder why some people are so obssessed with investing in Gold?)
BUT there is an alternative — by moving away from annual crops into perennial crops, planting commercially productive cultivars in intentionally designed polycultures that mimic natural symbiotic relationships, we can create a highly productive PERMACULTURE system, and at the same time we can fundmanetally alter the very structure of human civilization as we have known it for the last 5,000-10,000 years.
OK, I realize this is a lot to take in, BUT the issue of the hog monoculture driving people off the land — yeah, that strikes a chord brother. There is a way to keep people on the land. Raw milk is but one part of this equation.
When people can no longer be controlled through fear and greed then the controllers will become fearfully aggressive and aggressively greedy.
If history has shown us anything, this struggle is far from over.
Ken Conrad
Try searching under: PFGE profiles indistinguishable What do you find?
Here is an example: http://www.promedmail.org/pls/otn/f?p=2400:1001:80787::::F2400_P1001_BACK_PAGE,F2400_P1001_ARCHIVE_NUMBER,F2400_P1001_USE_ARCHIVE:1001,20061005.2849,Y
"Discussion
——-
Outbreaks of VTEC O157 have been uncommon in London. These 2 outbreaks
occurred within a few miles of each other, closely one after the other, and
in similar settings. Phage type 21/28 is the most common phage type of VTEC
O157 in the UK (1) and causes general and household outbreaks and sporadic
infections. Strains can be differentiated by PFGE profile. While profiles
within each outbreak were largely indistinguishable, there were clear
differences in profiles between the outbreaks. This supports the
epidemiological findings indicating that both outbreaks were not linked.
[PFGE was needed to distinguish the 2 outbreaks, which might otherwise be
thought to be linked. It is interesting that in the Bromley cluster there
were almost as many cases of asymptomatic infection as there were overt
cases. A similar breakdown in the Bexley cluster is not stated. Both
strains had genes for Stx2. As previous noted in a ProMED 4 Oct 2006 post
(20061004.2840), with some genotypes of Stx2, the lack of production of the
mucus-activated Stx2d-activatable or the production of Stx2D or Stx2e are
associated with strains with a much higher propensity towards the
asymptomatic state or only mild diarrhea."
In this report PFGE is being used properly to distinguish one outbreak strain from another.Notice that they use the word" indistinguishable" to indicate that the PFGE profiles appeared to be the same.We don’t know if they are the same or not,only that we cannot distinguish between them.They say it this way because PFGE can only be of use in distinguishing between strains,Never in matching strains.
Now search under the words: PFGE fingerprint matching
http://www.pritzkerlaw.com/section-foodborne-illness/food-safety-lawyer/PFGE.html
"If the PFGE pattern of a food product matches the PFGE patterns of those sickened in an outbreak, it is highly likely that the food product is the source of the outbreak. Matching PFGE patterns are an important part of proving causation in a food poisoning case seeking money damages. "
Notice that this lawyer uses the word matching instead of indistinguishable.He is being intentionally deceptive.But ,he is a lawyer so what do you expect.The last sentence tells us that he is after the "money".
Books for further reading in this subject area:
Tree Crops- A Permanent Agriculture by J. Russell Smith
Against the Grain: How Agriculture Has Hijacked Civilization by Richard Manning
SAHARASIA: The 4000 BCE Origins of Child Abuse, Sex-Repression, Warfare and Social Violence, In the Deserts of the Old World by James DeMeo
I emphatically am enjoying the recent ‘aggressive’ tenor of your posts….and encourage you you to keep using your whetstone..for it is easier to cut to the heart of the matter when you have more of an edge.
Raw milk can take the lead in the inevitable change that must occur to our agriculture, and our food delivery systems. But that potential will not be reached if we fail to see the shortcomings of the way we do it now. Multitudes of small farms, with farmers who know their customers is the way…and the emphasis on profits…which lead to mass production and outsourcing…must become secondary to serving the greater public health.
As the truth gets out to more, and the opponents get even more desperate, the battle will become more intense….we must keep the pressure on, and continue to encourage more small farmers to go raw. The Raw Revolution, while no longer in its infancy, has yet to reach puberty. Isn’t it fun watching it mature…..
Keep up the good work.
milkfarmer (who uses an alias so he can stay off the terrorist no-fly list…lol)
Milkmen USA
Something that is sorely missing from your analysis is the need for raw milk farmers to diversify.
Rather than simply milking cows twice a day for commodity milk, they should cut back to once-a-day milking (stop wasting money on grain for maximizing production!) and start raising beef steers, hogs, bees for honey, and organic vegetables. They should make long-term investments in fruit and nut bearing trees, planted on contour with a water-harvesting swale-and-berm system. They can plant these trees in poly-cultures with their organic vegetables. Eventually, as the orchards mature, the hogs and beef cattle can be finished on orchard, and the second-rate apples can be pressed into cider.
As for the additional labor that may be needed to get these projects going, just reach out to your consumers. Many would be glad to help out in exchange for milk, meat, and vegetables, if you reach out to them in a constructive way.
ETC
ETC
We are in this battle for the long-haul, are we not? Don’t make a short-term problem into a short-term solution. That is how big bussines thinks. We have to think about things in a total ecological enviromental global universal approach, while still acting on a local situation-specific context.
Think Globally, Act Locally. The saying may be cliche, but it is still very relevant.
The demise of the American small farmer did not happen by radom chance or the so called business cycle it was and is being caused by design.
Watch the video TORN FROM THE LAND.
http://anticorruptionsociety.com/2010/05/07/torn-from-the-land/
You raise important points about crop/product diversification. Normally, entrepreneurs are well advised not to try to diversify too much or too quickly. The rationale is that it’s tough enough to effectively produce and market one or two products, and you just multiply the difficulties with four or five products. Besides, entrepreneurs are always coming up with new ideas, and it’s essential they remain focused and avoid the distractions inherent with new products.
All that being said, It seems clear that small farms are an exception. In producing a heavily regulated product like milk, especially, there is a huge risk you can be put you out of business if some regulator has a bad-hair day. Moreover, it’s fairly easy to determine demand for additional products like meat, eggs, veggies, nuts, fruits. Given the growing demand for fresh nutrient-dense foods in general, there’s a good chance you can sell whatever you produce. Plus, it’s all much more beneficial for the soil and environment than producing ever more of one crop or product. Win-win all around.
David
I’d like to add mushrooms to your list. There seems to be a shortage (more like a dearth) at the farmers markets and when available, they fetch a premium.
While I like the idea of bringing customers into the farming process the reality is most will have other jobs and duties and not be able to devote significant time and energy or perhaps only on certain days (weekends). Livestock care is a daily event and you need people who can see what they are looking at (observant and knowledgable). When we hire new personnel it can takes months for them to be self sufficient and effective.
As in most agricultural enterprises the concepts are wonderful, but the logistics are a bitch (how to get things done on a timely basis in the proper sequence with appropiate equipment) In addition, to produce a quality product that will bring customers back for more requires knowledge and expertise to get it right (which means making costly mistakes and enduring the learning curve). This is why most of us can only do a few things well.
I am sorry to be a wet blanket, but the world is a dark and gloomy these days.
If you are with Organic Valley, do you know Mark Shepard? Granted, Mark does not milk dairy animals (he is part of OV’s organic produce program) but he does raise hogs, steers, and chickens, as well as a plethora of fruit and nut bearing trees. His farm is a model for diversification, with hard apple cyder at the center as his value-added product. (If you think the commercial dairy regs are bad, try the alcohol production regs on for size… OHHH boy)
Here’s something to think about — in order to diversify while doing raw milk, you need to first start transitioning your herd to once-a-day milking. Place less demand on the volume of cow output, stop feeding grain, and you also get a higher-quality product. I’m sure Scott Trautman could give you some tips on how to accomplish this.
Most consumer know how to plant a garden. They may not be able to manage a herd of cows, but they certainly can plant cucumber seeds, which you can pickle in the fall.
Its easy to be all doom and gloom, but there is opportunity for those who care to seize on it. It just takes more creative thinking and more work to start out with. But the long-term pay-offs are much greater. If you invest all your eggs in one basket, don’t be surprised if you lose them all. If you diversify, you now have the ability to be resiliant in even the most adverse circumstances.
Food safety has become a joke. I don’t even bring it up, my patients do. My coworkers do. What the FDA has done by these scares is to sensitize people. Raw milk and local food is less scary; sausage, peanut butter, spinach and salami are all less safe. If I trade a jar of beets at work for someone’s grandpa’s tomato sauce, how is that the FDA’s business?
The Civil War discussion caught my attention. I am on a historical committee of a historical peace church. I have seen secret abolitionist meeting minutes from pre-Civil War times, prior to them being sent off from someone’s attic to a museum. Abbey Kelley’s biography changed the way I view civil disobedience. There IS unrest. The business model satisfies what is happening to some degree, in a useful way (within context, my feelings aside). Those of us who don’t like the way things are, don’t necessarily want a war, but the unrest will inevitably lead that direction when sides won’t compromise, whether or not we intend it. We’re talking about food here. People have to eat, and the population has grown beyond the ability for local communities to raise their own food; for people to have the personal responsibility to "survive" and live by subsistence the way that was once necessary for most living people; and there may not be enough land for the number of people in our country to do this, even if they were willing to. There’s a problem there. It AIN’T going to be solved by over regulation of our food! Those big business guys need to tighten their fat bellies and grow up a little.
One of the main reasons I have avoided this blog the past few months is that we joined a local herd share. We’d be milking our own more even if we hadn’t joined, but it sure is nice to be able to just pick up the milk once a week instead of milking once or twice per day. Even though it is legal where I live, I feel there are raptors here on this blog, perched ready for a kill, armed with GPS cameras (paranoid, I know, but irrationally?). I have a tendency to write about what I think about. But I’ve discovered something in the very short time we’ve belonged to our share.
I discovered that the local community was much more tenuous and interconnected than I had realized. There are more people than I ever imagined who are interested in co-op’ing local food; people I didn’t think would be remotely interested. I worked in this area as a home care nurse for several years. I picked the brains of the elderly, the infirm, and those who cared for them. Even if the government raided any one person’s farm, the rest would quietly pitch in and replace them. Gosh, in some ways not even dealing with food, but with home care, they already have! It is a huge discovery for me. I don’t NEED to think of it as a black market. Plus, after you trade and lend animals with a few neighbors, you begin to forget who exactly owns what. By the time the gov’t. shows up, I think the more complicated that is, the better. I’d like to see them TRY to sort out some of our agreements in court.
Something to think about: the power went out 2 autumns ago for only 3 DAYS. People STOLE the food from a local grocery store and cleaned their shelves, in a nearby small town. When I watched the Jericho series, they portrayed this happening after I think a couple of weeks. It only took 3 DAYS!!! I don’t know what folks went through in New Orleans, but most people around here; most people I work with, and most of the patients I have cared for don’t give a hoot about the FDA or food safety. It is a joke, in real life.
Nature moves towards entropy, and we all have to eat. Lawyers, pipers or whatever you are, stay in California and D.C., or wherever it is you stay.
Well, it helps if you work with nature instead of fighting it, you have less to do. And it helps if you ignore most of the time and money wasting standard advise. Many of the things that monopolize producer time are unnecessary. And it helps if you sell direct all your food and demand a fair price, you don’t have to produce as much. And it helps if you stay out of debt. You don’t have to make as much with no bank payments to make. And it helps if you live simply and reduce expenses. You are a farmer, you should rarely have to spend any money on food, medicine or utilities.
Somebody on one of my local lists directed me to this blog yesterday and its flurry of comments from the past few days as part of a discussion over whether OPDC is really safe. I don’t understand the dismissive tone towards Amanda Rose. This is the only place I have heard that Mark McAfee is STILL outsourcing–something which his press release (which mysteriously disappeared shortly after I had read it in 2008 following the cream recall) stated he had stopped. So, I think it is safe to say that the vast majority of OPDC consumers do NOT know that some or all components of our milk are outsourced! Is it me, or is this not false advertising? Let me type for you what the label on my milk jug says:
"100% Organic, Grass Fed; Family Owned & Sustainable (Animal Welfare Approved)"
That last parenthetical statement is, of course, enclosed in a bubble pointing to the mouth of a cute cartoon cow. Now, this all may be true, and, yes, nowhere on the label does it say, "100% from my own herd" but if you think we are all drinking this knowing that our jug may have come from a Clover cow which was milked with the intent to pasteurize, regardless of whether it was raised organically or not, then you are sadly mistaken.
This is not just an academic discussion for those of us who live in certain parts of California–Claravale (the only other commercially available raw milk in the state) is not distributed as far south as San Deigo County, and grassfed cowshares are difficult (if not impossible) to come by. Our only other choice is grain-fed raw dairy or something non-local. I have been drinking gallons of OPDC milk and feeding it to my children, aged 2 and 6, for the past few months (prior to that I lived where I could buy Claravale, and never even considered buying OPDC, so your business argument is partially correct). What would you have us do here in San Diego County? Just continue to drink it unless (or until) there is an outbreak? And I don’t think Amanda Rose is far off the mark when she implies that this is not just about individual consumers who unwittingly drink milk intended for pasteurization–if there is a fatal outbreak (and blame it on what you wish–some poor sap’s poor gut or compromised immune system–it doesn’t matter how questionable germ theory is to the person who dies, their anguished family, or the public eye) then we WILL lose legal access to raw milk and presumably drive it underground.
"So, I think it is safe to say that the vast majority of OPDC consumers do NOT know that some or all components of our milk are outsourced!"
As I understand it, Mark has said that he does not outsource for his milk which is sold as milk – cheese and butter are different products which by law can be outsourced. I am not making any claims on what Mark does or does not do, I am just stating how I understood the issue. I could be wrong on my understanding.
The dismissive tone is because it is the same message over and over from Amanda. If she has a problem with Mark, go talk to Mark. This topic has been hashed and rehashed and then beaten again – the horse has been dead for a long while now. As far as if he outsources, Amanda has only said she thinks he does. If you have a concern, go talk to Mark or send him an email.
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