Joel Salatin

In the national struggle to legalize marijuana in more states, surprise opposition has come from a group you’d think would welcome the shift: illegal pot growers. Alas, many of these growers worry that legalizing pot will encourage more growers, leading to more supply and…..lower prices for them.

Many pot farmers actually opposed legalization in their states.

I suspect that is part of what we are seeing in the deafening farmer silence that has accompanied the filing of a citizen petition with the FDA to legalize interstate raw milk sales. While consumers have contributed more than $30,000 to a crowdfunding campaign to support the petition, dairy farmers who produce milk that is sent around the country in potential violation of the existing prohibition of interstate raw milk sales have been notably absent from the campaign.

I first posted last spring about the filing by a prominent Washington, DC, law firm of a citizen petition with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration proposing the legalization of interstate raw milk sales. As part of the ending of the prohibition on interstate sales, all raw milk sold across state lines would carry a warning label informing consumers about the home pasteurization option. The blog posting stimulated considerable debate about the merits of the proposed warning label.

Liz Reitzig, the founder of the Real Food Consumer Coalition, reminds us in a new Facebook video (her third in a series; look under “Videos” on the Facebook page) about the history of raw milk, that the citizen petition is due to be decided on by the FDA before the end of next month, based on the official six-month window the agency has to rule on such filings. (Of course, the FDA could announce a delay in its decision.)

One explicit indication of farmer unhappiness with the citizen petition has come from Joel Salatin, the Virginia celebrity farmer known for his support of raw milk and other food rights issues (though he doesn’t offer raw milk to customers of his highly popular direct-to-consumer farm operation). In an article published late last spring for a Virginia food rights organization, he said he thought the RFCC-inspired citizen petition suggested raw milk is inherently unsafe, and he thought it sanctioned home pasteurization of raw milk as the best approach for consumers.

He argued that “this completely yields all the ground raw milk advocates have tried to gain by showing that raw milk is inherently SAFE if it’s produced well. To cave in on such a foundational point is a travesty. I can think of lots of other ways to prevent food borne illness, like not confining the cows in a factory, letting them graze on pasture instead of grains and artificial feedstuffs, keeping their immune systems high rather than using antibiotics. This list could go on, but you get the picture.”

Salatin concluded: “Because the petitioners really want choice but play clever-speak word-games to arrive there, the whole campaign is fraught with non-sequitors and themes that must make the ‘pasteurize only’ crowd feel like they’ve won the battle. This label utterly and completely condemns raw milk consumption and puts advocates on a low road dancing with the FDA instead of the high road, dancing with liberty.”

I’ve been unable to extract opinions about the citizen petition from a number of dairy farmers who actually serve consumers coming from neighboring states or in private food clubs with raw milk across state lines. Many of these are Amish and Mennonite farmers, who generally try hard to avoid government involvement of any kind. When they get into legal trouble, their inclination is to seek advice from so-called “sovereign man” legal advisers rather than real lawyers.

In the matter of the citizen petition, several such farmers have indicated privately they’d rather lie low than actively support lobbying and other efforts to help move it through either the FDA or through the process of gaining legislative approval. Like many pot growers, the raw milk producers seem more inclined to stick with a financial model they know well and have learned to work with than to encourage a new, and possibly less profitable, approach.

While the FDA hasn’t given any hint of its position, it almost certainly would also rather not upend the status quo on raw milk. In that respect, I think Salatin’s argument that the citizen petition gives in to processed milk arguments is naive. The anti-raw-milk crowd cares not a whit about even engaging in an intellectual or policy argument. They simply want raw milk to disappear from the scene, period, end of sentence. In a real world sense, they want to keep control of the dairy marketplace as best they can. Like anti-pot interests, the anti-raw-milk types will continue to work against legal availability until forced by the politicians to do otherwise. Bottom line: If consumers want wider access to raw milk, they’re going to have to fight for it, even if it means fighting their own farmers.