Any politician worth his or her salt is good at charades–you know, the game where you pretend you are something that you’re not.
Maine’s governor, Paul LePage, has given a masterful performance as a supporter of small farms since he was elected as a Republican in 2009. In September 2011, after receiving complaints from farmers about a crackdown by the state’s Department of Agriculture to end a decades-long tradition whereby Maine’s small farms were able to sell raw milk directly to friends and neighbors, without needing a dairy license, LePage wrote a memo questioning the crackdown. He expressed his support for legislation to restore the traditional practice. (Dairies that want to advertise their raw milk, or sell via retail, need to obtain a license to sell raw milk.)
During the legislative session just ending now, the Maine legislature passed a version of the legislation he said he supported in his 2011 memo, to allow raw milk sales of up to twenty gallons daily for unlicensed dairies. And suddenly, the governor seemed to vacillate, and as Deborah Evans notes in a comment following my previous post, he vetoed the legislation.
Maine, of course, has been a hotbed of activity for food sovereignty, and ten towns have passed ordinances permitting direct food sales by local farmers to individuals, outside state and federal regulation. A state court recently struck down one of the ordinances.
One of the original organizers of the food sovereignty initiative, along with Deborah Evans, has been Heather Retberg, a dairy farmer, and in her ongoing efforts to push state legislation to help small farms, she has gotten to know the governor. Yesterday, when he seemed to be vacillating on the raw milk legislation, she wrote him a letter expressing concerns, recalling an exchange her husband had with him when he was seeking votes.
“My husband asked you a question while you were campaigning…He asked what you might do to offer protection to farmers from the pressure of federal agencies. You interrupted him to say that you would personally show ‘the Feds’ to the border of the state of Maine. I was given to think after our meeting with you (last) January that your administration would offer strong support to small farms this session.”
Shortly after emailing the letter, she told me, “I got a very surprising phone call…from the governor! He told me he likes the bill and wants to make it work, but is still trying to work out a detail with the Department of Agriculture on the farmers market inclusion [allowing direct sales at farmers markets]. They are worried about the chain of custody of the milk at the markets, that another farm could be doing one farm a favor and selling milk or an apprentice or employee and not the farmer….I mentioned the track record in New Hampshire on this bill. He’d been given to understand that there IS a licensing requirement in New Hampshire on their raw milk exemption and that Maine’s law ‘goes further.’ He had plans to talk to folks in New Hampshire this afternoon or tomorrow so he can get this resolved…”
Since I spend a lot of time in New Hampshire, and sometimes buy raw milk at farmers markets, I knew that the governor’s information was wrong. Small dairies are allowed to sell up to twenty gallons of raw milk a day, without need of a license, either direct from the farm or at a farmers market. I looked up the rules, and forwarded them to Retberg, who immediately sent them on to the governor. (The last paragraph of page 1 explains the exemption for small dairies, direct from the farm or at farmers markets.)
According to Retberg, the proposed Maine legislation actually went further than New Hampshire’s rules, since “our legislature added a testing requirement for milk ten times a year and water twice a year. After our conversation (with the governor) I was convinced the governor was looking for a way to sign this bill, but still had to work out the Department of Agriculture’s objections. He repeated his support for small farms, that he liked this bill, and he’d work on it and talk to folks in New Hampshire to find out more.”
Late last night, the governor vetoed the legislation, saying in part, “I support the vast majority of changes to Maine law contained in this bill.” He was hung up, though, on the farmers market sales. He would support a revised version of the legislation to address the farmers market sales. “If farmers market sales are to remain, a mechanism to verify chain of custody must be included.” Huh?
The matter of “chain of custody” had never before come up before from the governor or anyone before yesterday, says Retberg. It was clearly an idea planted in his mind by his Department of Agriculture.
What finally convinced Gov. LePage to veer away from signing the legislation? We’ll never know for sure, but his views definitely changed after he spoke with Retberg, and after he learned that New Hampshire has long done what Maine was proposing to do, with no ill effects or reports of problems.
He was probably convinced by the same things that convinced the governors of Wisconsin, California, and Nevada to veto raw milk legislation after overwhelming votes in favor by the legislatures–threats that it would cost them money, via federal grants to their states and/or contributions to their campaigns. Gov. LePage has just announced he is running for re-election. He must have made a calculated decision that any votes he’d lose from the raw milk/food sovereignty supporters could be made up for with the campaign contributions he’d keep by vetoing the legislation.
The food rights movement is definitely learning its way through the ways of the political world. Maybe the lesson of these vetoes is that, when it comes to serious politics and decisions that affect corporate revenues, you have to pay to play.
Meanwhile back in CA we had huge dat in Sacramento, attorney Ajna Wilson ( for Vernon Hreshburg and James Stewart ) Nutritional Chef Marcos Munoz and myself all attended and testified at the Dairy Council hearing. We were each given 20 minutes to express our opinions on dairy research and nutritional investments made in CA….several members of the dairy council spoke along with a representative of the CA PTA and a Nutritional PHD from CA State SLO. The message was sent….raw milk is on the map!!! Consumers are demanding it! The reasons for his demand was clearly explained….allergies and lactose intolerance with pasteurized milk and non for raw milk. The SLO professor even mentioned raw milk as a good choice….I was blown away when she said this.
At the end of the hearing….we had made some real friends. One of the high ups in one of the biggest dairy owned cheese makers is a pilot and we are making arrangements to go flying together. He had purchased 1477 acres owned by my dad years ago!!… Had much in common and he is a member of the council. All of the testimony became officially part if the record. Our request was for he council to invest in raw milk safety, nutritional outreach, and rapid pathogen testing technologies.
This was a big day!! Seeds planted, friends made.
This is a good case study: Even when the fungible politician is “personally” sympathetic, he’s going to listen to those he works with every day, within his own system, and act accordingly. The only way to handle that is for your faction to become part of the system, which is of course impossible for those whose principles and interests are inherently opposed to the system.
The alternative is to organize outside the system, while seeking opportunities to force it to do things against its will through direct bottom-up pressure and political wedges. But in order to do this effectively we first have to do the work of organizing ourselves.
I have only one question:
How would you suggest we organize ourselves outside the system? Let’s get started. Never mind that NSA is reading all this.
Mark, I agree with you about food rights showing “real progress” in Maine. The fact that the governor was even talking to the food rights side is an accomplishment. Gaining political influence, as well as legal influence, is part of a long-term process. To the extent the food rights organizers are willing to stick with it, and demonstrate growing support and influence, the tide will turn. And it may require financial donations to key politicians from strategic sources.
Please leave your comment and lets talk about this. It has been said…”it is always cheaper when you steal something”
CA lost 105 conventional dairies in 2012 alone. Suicides, bankruptcies??!! This is worse than stealing!! It is market corruption and processor greed compounded with pasteurization intolerance and lies being spread by the FDA….another huge topic that I will not visit again right now.
Raw milk when produced with high standards and with solid ethics is not cheap. But consider the price of immune depression and illness…consider the cost of your own cow!!
Quality raw milk is literally priceless.
http://www.rawmilkpro.com/2013/07/is-your-raw-milk-priced-for-the-long-run.html#comment-47
What Charlotte is talking about, most fundamentally, is what I refer to as “economic emancipation” for dairy farmers. They have been enslaved for years by predatory commodity pricing controlled by the huge processing corporations. Now that they have the opportunity to sell a premium product directly to consumers, they also have the opportunity to make farming sustainable, and profitable, so they can live a truly free life, and be part of a community of producers of nutrient-dense food.
So when a governor vetoes emancipating legislation like in Maine (or Nevada, Wisconsin), he is doing the corporations’ dirty work of trying to keep dairy farmers enslaved economically.
As for how to do it, I’ve already said it here a hundred times. Why bother going through it again? People who want to do it will do it. I’m really saying it more to help encourage people who want to take action, rather than to persuade people who simply do not want to. But I’ll answer it again.
1. Get together with other people who are passionate about some element of community food. These elements include organic growing/husbandry, seed-growing, local/regional politics, gathering economic statistics, opposing corporate incursions, herbal medicine, and every kind of teaching and publicity.
2. Practice that aspect, learn others, work together in a systematic way to sustain and enhance the movement, publicize the ideas, recruit more people.
3. If people are already conscious of the government’s evil intent, then organize civil disobedience. If they’re not yet ready for that, then publicize what the government does as education toward building that consciousness and that will to resist. An historical analogue is the way the Farmers’ Alliance learned about money, how the existing banking system was absolutely hostile to their very existence, and how they became full-scale greenbackers, through their bitter experience trying to get credit for the Alliance Co-ops from system banks and suppliers. So it’ll often have to be with the Food Police.
4. Do all of this toward the goal of restoring natural, sustainable, local/regional demand-based food economies.
5. Confederate with similar organizations, across regions and eventually continents and globally. Via Campesina and Campesino a Campesino already provide models for everything here. We just need to do the same thing here within the West. Confederates may eventually broadly, formally agree on principles and grand strategy. Tactics and finance must remain at the local/regional level of responsibility.
6. This can run parallel to and in complementary fashion with an anti-GMO abolition movement.
So there’s what needs to be done, in a nutshell. And the best part is that citizens really can do all this stuff at will, which isn’t the case with so many other causes. So the only question is how much determination and willingness to work in a disciplined way exists out there.
Perhaps we should all realize that if we took the milk prices of the 1930’s and fast forwarded their dollar values into 2013 prices….$18-20 dollars per gallon is very close to real costs and not inflated at all.
The value of $1000 dollars in 1930 when discounted to 2013 dollars is about $12,900 dollars. That is a 13 fold change. The value of milk in 1930’s was about 20-25 cents per quart. In 2013 money that would be about $3 per quart or $12 per gallon. That was not high quality raw milk…..that was pasteurized milk.
So…the price of super high quality raw milk is “right-on” at $18-20 per gallon with testing, pasture feeding and etc. This is exactly why conventional pasteurized CAFO operations are going BK. They are being paid like they are selling in 1920. Todays dairy is getting $1.40 per gallon on the farm. They have pasteurized themselves into a very sad monument of food history. They apparently can not create any value added except if they can race faster to the bottom than the next CAFO. Not a good plan.
http://www.holsteinusa.com/holstein_breed/holstein101.html?tab=2#TabbedPanels1
“With a standard lactation lasting 305 days, that comes out to 75 pounds, or almost 9 gallons of milk per cow per day.”
305 days is @ 43 weeks. $18/gal X 9gal= $162 per day per cow or $1134/week per cow. If you have 300 head of lactating cows that comes to $340200.00 per week.
Times 43 weeks = $14628600.00 gross Damn that’s a hefty profit in there!
The place for yr hypothetical family wanting REAL MILK, to start, is : strict rejection of the poison of “usury”
I’m not aware of anyone who “creates real wealth” rather than stealing it who could afford $600 a month for milk. Please educate me by naming some SPECIFIC examples.
Meanwhile, the only people I know of who sit around waiting for Big Brother’s check are the recipients of corporate welfare and, like you say, usury, a term I don’t think you understand.
Your query about a family creating wealth so as to afford the amount of $$ it takes to buy the REAL MILK they consume, is in the same category as the perennial taunt, when I was out on the street as a ( so-called) Pro-lifer. Our adversaries faulted us about “not caring for women with an unplanned baby”. To which the comeback is : “give me real people in a real predicament, and I’ll give you real answers”. Versus = hypothetical arguments.
as for “why am I not rich?” : come on up to British Columbia, and get some facts with which to form a fully-informed opinion. My forte is ; as a pioneer / a boffin who proves the concept. In 2007, I chose to be the political activist on the cowshare issue, letting someone else do the heavy lifting. While I made sure that those people got paid properly. I’m perfectly happy that my efforts for the first year were ‘a labour of love’. I boast that – before we got shut down by ‘the idiots and communists in high places’ / the “race traitors” – our little private enterprise was grossing $40,000 per month, employing 6 people. If we could do that here – in one of the most expensive places to live on the planet – it can be done anywhere, by shaking-down the numbers ( $$$ amounts) to fit local conditions. Use the spot price of silver as the reference-point.
I think you “would hate to say what that sounds like” because you’re terrified = plus, lack the intellectual integrity = to voice your innermost feelings … about “the R word”. I seem to recall your federal Attorney General saying “Americans are cowards. What we need is an honest conversation about race” But whenever I fold-in to the dialogue the FACT that the Campaign for REAL MILK is, first and last, white people awakening to our heritage, then rejecting globalism (as our ancestors did in ancient Eygypt) … oh well!, your conditioned reflexes kick-in!!
If the only ones you know who “sit around waiting for Big Brother’s cheque’, are the recipients of corporate welfare, then you’re woe-fully out of touch with what’s really going on … the FACT that the majority of people in the U S of A, are on welfare of one form or another. Such as = 100 million citizens who take food stamps.
If you’re thinking in terms of transcending and getting rid of planned economy money, in favor of restoring natural economies, that’s more like it.
As for food stamps:
1. For every measly cent of food stamps there’s millions of dollars of corporate welfare. But look how easily Wall Street and Monsanto turn you around, because your racism makes you so gullible.
2. Food stamps themselves, like farmer subsidies (and why wasn’t that your lead example, praytell? It seems to me that industrial “farmers” better fit your description), are really laundered corporate welfare as well. The economy is intentionally destroyed to the point that rising numbers of people can’t afford food, but the government gives out money in a way set up to ensure that most of it is spent on processed crap. So it really goes into the coffers of industrial food. Again, your racism blinds you to the real character of things. From the system’s point of view, the food stamp recipient is what Hitchcock would call a “McGuffin”, a meaningless but distracting detail.
3. Since corporate agriculture has enclosed the land and driven the millions of people who belong on the land off of it; and since Wall Street and corporatism have gutted the economy and rendered it increasingly impossible for growing numbers of people to “find work”, and thus we have the spreading ghetto phenomenon here just as with shantytowns around the world, what do YOU think these people should do, or “should be done with them”? As a racist you probably think they should be killed. There too, you agree with Monsanto’s buddy, the Rockefeller Foundation. They sure know how to keep racists like you on call for when they want to give you your marching orders.
Hobbes, at least, would agree that the shantytowns should rise up and revolt. Is that what you think they should do? Food stamps, meanwhile, are also part of keeping economically surplus people in a state of quietism, though the way the system’s rolling back what little is left of this safety net, it sounds like it too would prefer mass violence.
Please, be gentle There are children reading this. And don’t forget it’s all about milk.
The Christian scriptures say that the whole world lies in the evil one, that Satan told Jesus that the glory of this world was Satans to give to whoever he wanted to give it to, that in the end Jesus succeeds completely in destroying the works of Satan. But where is the individual? Subsumed? The same scriptures say that we exist on a case-by-case base before the creator of all, each of us relevant as an individual whatever the circumstances of birth and life may be. And that we are each recoverable from being part of the darkness of the evil one because that self-same creator has a great love for each one of us.
What am I getting at? It is this: that from the point-of-view (POV) of the aforementioned scriptures this is a world of confusion (in large measure) but that there is a creator-defined line available to each of us through this world and that is a line that is bright and hopeful and alive. Real food is on that line, isnt it? And it is on that line in so many ways that I rejoice, if I may say so.
Were Donald Rumsfeld and Monsanto deeply involved in a manner fairly characterizable as wicked in bringing Aspartame (aka Nutrasweet, Equal) into the food supply of the world? If so, they inhabit a very dark place indeed.
What a mess.
Have a wonderful Sunday wherever you are.
Mr. J. Ingvar Odegaard
p.s. thats pretty funny Ora Moose!
That you find my thoughts and Gordon’s endlessly repeated racism to be rationally and morally equivalent is a testament to your kind of middle-of-the-road liberal lukewarmism.
Where can one find data on the history price of milk? I see it quoted but never cited.
1
: a breeding stock of animals
2
a : a family, tribe, people, or nation belonging to the same stock
b : a class or kind of people unified by shared interests, habits, or characteristics
3
a : an actually or potentially interbreeding group within a species; also : a taxonomic category (as a subspecies) representing such a group
b : breed
c : a category of humankind that shares certain distinctive physical traits
4
obsolete : inherited temperament or disposition
5
: distinctive flavor, taste, or strength
As politically-incorrect as it is, my job is to tell people what they need to hear = that the raw milk controversy is the hot-spot in a pending religious war = as the white race remembers our heritage, then separates ourselves from the Babylonian commercial system.
I get the distinct impression that you – raw milk Mike – are NOT someone with whom I can have an intelligent discussion on this topic. We don’t even share the same vocabulary on this topic
Oh ya, and Gordon just one question: Who tells you what you need to hear?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_teams_and_cyclists_in_the_2013_Tour_de_France
Hope this helps. manipulation at its finest.
http://www.ers.usda.gov/media/306483/aib761_1_.pdf
Perhaps a change of terminology will help … so I’ll talk about the “genome” rather than the good old word “race”. Meaning : the more hard science we get out of the human genome project, the more UN-deniable are the differences in race. Prime example being, that white people metabolize raw milk, easily and throughout our life-span, because the pancreases of Caucasians keep on making the appropriate enzymes. Second : that that trait is dominant, thus, my nephews – whose mother is white and whose father is Negro – love the taste, and thrive on, REAL MILK. My old mentor, Marshall McLuhan said “information overload brings pattern recognition”. Go out to the places where REAL MILK is actually changing hands, and you’ll notice how very different is the skincolor of the clientelle, from – say – the denizens of N’Orleans
Just a hint to anyone who might ever think of actually wanting to fight a political fight: You’ll probably want to exclude overt racists a prioiri, since they’re not only morally corrupt but political poison as well.
Your latest cheap-shot = so comically far-removed from who I am and what I preach = adds to suspicion that you’ve been sent-in to this forum by your pal, that other dis-information agent … what was his name? the one who got barred for his relentless Marxist propaganda …. as one of those whom the Bible warns us, whose job is : “to wear out the saints”
http://www.kjonline.com/opinion/letters/raw-milk-could-be-al-qaida-plot-after-all_2013-07-14.html