Sentient Times Dec 07/Jan 08

As the re-emergence of a farm-to-consumer economy draws increasing amounts of cash out of the mass-production factory system, the new movement is bumping up against suddenly energized regulators who claim they want to “protect” us from pathogens and other dangers.

These should be happy times for owners of small farms. Not only are commodity prices way up, but the buy-local movement has caught fire around the country. Rapidly growing numbers of people are embracing the romantic notion of buying food directly from area farmers, sometimes driving hours into the countryside to buy veggies, meat and milk.

The number of farmers markets over the last five years has increased more than 50 percent, to nearly 4,500 from 2,800, according to the US Department of Agriculture. Since the European idea of Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) was adopted by a handful of US farms twenty years ago, enabling consumers to buy shares in the output of local farms, the concept has been adopted by as many as 3,000 small farms across the United States. Thousands of consumers are trekking out to dairy farms to purchase suddenly popular unpasteurized milk for its perceived health benefits over the pasteurized stuff, according to the Weston A. Price Foundation, a promoter of raw (unpasteurized) milk consumption. (Retail sales of raw milk are prohibited in most states).

But as the re-emergence of a farm-to-consumer economy draws increasing amounts of cash out of the mass-production factory system, the new movement is bumping up against suddenly energized regulators who claim they want to “protect” us from pathogens and other dangers.
Federal and state agriculture and health authorities say farmers are violating all kinds of regulations to meet fast-growing consumer demand, such as slaughtering their own hogs and cattle instead of using state and federally-inspected facilities, and selling unpasteurized dairy products and cider without the proper permits. Farmers feel there are other issues lurking in the background and driving the regulators—for example, the National Animal Identification System (NAIS) under which farm animals are tagged with computerized chips for tracking (in most states the federal program is voluntary, but in Michigan it is mandatory).

Whatever the immediate cause, the result is the same: Regulators are cracking down on small farms with a ferocity that has their new urban customers aghast.

There have been at least a half-dozen recent notable incidents. In Victor, New York, health authorities shut down Munir Bahai’s apple cider operations on his busiest weekend of the season in early October, costing him $4,500 in sales because he wasn’t pasteurizing his juice. He says consumers travel thirty miles or more to buy his cider simply because it isn’t pasteurized.

Also in New York, the Department of Agriculture and Markets a few weeks ago quarantined the raw milk yogurt and buttermilk at Barbara and Steve Smith’s Meadowsweet Farm outside Ithaca, saying the state’s raw-milk permit program allows the direct sale only of milk, and prohibits other dairy products. Barbara Smith says she doesn’t sell the dairy products, but rather distributes them to 130 consumer shareholders of a limited liability company (LLC) she set up as the owner of her farm’s eight-cow herd, and therefore is outside the purview of the state’s raw-milk permit system.

Some farmers are responding with outright civil disobedience. In Pennsylvania, dairy farmer Mark Nolt continues in a standoff with agriculture authorities because he refuses to sell his raw milk under a state license. In August, they confiscated thousands of dollars worth of milk products using a court order. He argues that because he has private contracts with his area customers, he doesn’t need a license, and he continues to sell directly to consumers, despite the fact he could be arrested at any time.

The situation has gotten so bad that a group of consumers and lawyers banded together last summer to provide legal support to besieged farmers via the Farm-to-Consumer Legal Defense Fund. Its first two cases involve farmers in New York and Pennsylvania—both distributing unpasteurized milk privately to consumers.

As much as regulators like to talk about protecting consumers, when you speak with them, it sometimes sounds more like they want more to protect corporate interests.

Bridget Patrick, who is Michigan’s Bovine Tubercu-losis Eradication Project Coordinator, told me recently it “is a human health issue as well as an industry issue.” Bovine tuberculosis can be passed on to people, she stated. Moreover, the fact that Michigan is one of a few areas in the United States that still has evidence of bovine TB “has been a problem for the whole country” because some foreign markets won’t buy American beef as a result. “We need to have everyone participate in the program” to prove bovine TB has been eradicated.

Dairy regulators use the protection argument to justify their crackdown on raw-milk producers, though they tend not to mention the obvious: If consumers are buying milk unpasteurized, then that doesn’t leave much for processors to do.

Nor do any of the regulators like to talk much about the new economic model that is emerging in the farm-to-consumer model. Farmers who sell their cattle to processors may receive $2 a pound, compared to anywhere from $5 to $18 a pound, depending on the quantity purchased and the cut of meat, when they do their own slaughtering. Similarly, when dairy farmers sell milk to processors for pasteurization, they receive in the neighborhood of $1.50 to $2.50 a gallon (depending on bacteria counts and whether the milk is organic). When they sell direct, they receive $5 to $10 a gallon.

Such discrepancies help explain why the farm-to-consumer model is “the gateway to farm prosperity,” says Pete Kennedy, a lawyer who represents farmers both for the Farm to Consumer Legal Defense Fund and the Weston A. Price Foundation.

Lawyers like Kennedy argue that buying food directly from local farmers amounts to a contract between private parties, covered by the US Constitution. That argument won the day in Ohio earlier this year, when a state court overturned an Ohio Department of Agriculture revocation of a dairy farmer’s milk license, ruling her “herdshare” arrangement, whereby dozens of consumers bought shares in the farmer’s cows so as to gain access to raw milk, was legitimate.

But there is a long way to go. The wide discrepancy in prices farmers receive by selling direct, and cutting out corporate distributors and processors, not to mention grocery chains, may help explain why the government is coming down as hard as it is on farmers. Regulators and their legislator bosses are clearly prepared to use intimidation to put a halt to such nonsense before it gets completely out of hand.

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Animal, Vegetable, Miracle
A Year of Food Life
By Barbara Kingsolver
with Steven L. Hopp & Camille Kingsolver
HarperCollins, 2007

In Animal, Vegetable, Miracle bestselling author Barbara Kingsolver and her family chronicle a year during which they ate only locally produced food.

“Our family set out to find ourselves a real American culture of food, or at least the piece of it that worked for us, and to describe it for anyone who might be looking for something similar,” Kingsolver writes. “This book tells the story of what we learned, or didn’t; what we ate, or couldn’t; and how our family was changed by one year of deliberately eating food produced in the same place where we worked, loved our neighbors, drank the water, and breathed the air. Our highest shopping goal was to get our food from so close to home that we’d know the person who grew it.”

This year also provided Barbara Kingsolver and her family with an opportunity to explore the way agribusiness has changed the way Americans eat. Whether by eating ingredients we may not want, or even recognize, in prepared foods, or by burning fossil fuels in producing and transporting them, the book explains why eating locally, even just part of the time, can save millions of barrels of oil and provide a more delicious and nutritious diet. Reminding us of the vastly superior tastes of fruits and vegetables fresh from the farm, Kingsolver’s family describes how their efforts affect the quality of the food they prepare while also assisting them in developing a deeper connection with their own land, as well as with the food chain.

A combination memoir and investigative report, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle is intelligent and entertaining reading which will inspire many of us to reconsider our priorities, and encourages all of us to discover for ourselves that food that is healthy for our families is also healthy for our communities and the planet.