I have to admit I sometimes feel sorry for Scott Soares, the commissioner of the Massachusetts Department of Agricultural Resources. This guy, by all accounts, has been a supporter of small farms in Massachusetts. As recently as last December, he sent a strong letter of support for dairy farmer Doug Stephan to the Framingham Department of Public Health.
“It is no secret that the size of the dairy industry in Massachusetts has decreased over the years,” he wrote in the December 15 letter. “Availability of land based on property values and federal milk pricing rules that affect profit margins have played a significant role in this transition. One silver lining on this cloud has been the success of a number of dairy farmers who have dedicated a portion (if not all) of their operation to producing raw milk for retail sale. There is a growing demand for raw milk by enthusiasts who have been willing to compensate farmers at rates that provide a profitable enterprise for dairy producers. Consequently, there has been an increase in the number of raw milk dairies in Massachusetts now represented by 15%, or 27 of the dairy farms in Massachusetts. The Department is keen on ensuring this economically viable option remains open to producers throughout the
Commonwealth.”
As it turns out, the MDAR remained “keen” on supporting raw dairy producers for only another few weeks. Beginning in January, MDAR began its crackdown on buying clubs, and in the process, threatened that fragile “silver lining,” as described by Soares, in an otherwise depressed, and depressing, dairy industry.
Soares has conjured up a number of reasons for the change of heart. He’s spoken at various times about protecting the Massachusetts “dairy market,” a euphemism for Big Dairy, and he’s talked about concerns that raw milk transported by buying clubs won’t be kept at appropriate temperatures, and then he’s seemed to back off these excuses. But on two matters, he has remained consistent:
1. He says he wasn’t reacting to pressure from the Massachusetts Department of Public Health.
2. He argues that the buying clubs “have always been illegal” and that he began cracking down on them as soon as he learned of their activities earlier this year.
Now, some documents have become available that indicate Soares hasn’t been forthright about these matters, either.
On the first issue, that he wasn’t reacting to pressure form MDPH, it turns out that agency on January 7 wrote MDAR a letter essentially demanding that MDAR crack down on buying clubs. “The MA Department of Public Health (DPH) has become aware that existing Department of Agricultural Resources (DAR) regulations…which limit the retail sale of raw milk to farm locations, may be being circumvented, through the distribution of raw milk buying clubs such as Just Dairy Farm Direct Buying Club and Granny B’s Raw Milk Buying Club. The result is that consumers are being supplied with a product that is known to be dangerous to public health, without the minimum safeguards that exist for on-farm sales of raw milk. DPH is concerned that consumers are being misled by the proponents of raw milk.”
Within three weeks, MDAR sent its cease-and-desist letter to Just Dairy and Granny B’s.
As for the second contention, that buying clubs have always been illegal, Soares has said a number of times, including to me, that he had no awareness of their existence until January of this year. Yet Cyndy Gray, the owner of Just Dairy, says she has had regular communication with a number of MDAR officials who preceded Soares since she started up in 2003. She also produces minutes of a meeting Soares attended with the Northeast Organic Farming Association of MA in 2008, when he was assistant commissioner. He attended with at least four other MDAR officials, and the minutes show MDAR recommending that NOFA/Mass “encourage consumers to buy directly from the farm and not through a buying club,” but that “drivers of buying clubs should have HACCP plans.”
That hedging may well have been prompted by MDAR’s appreciation that Massachusetts laws and regulations don’t explicitly prohibit buying clubs. Indeed, an email that has just become available has a high-ranking MDAR official explaining to MDPH just that reality. The January 21 email from Michael Cahill, MDAR’s director of animal health, and the individual who signed the cease-and-desist letters to the buying clubs, is addressed to three MDPH officials and seems to be a response to the Jan. 7 letter demanding MDAR crack down on the buying clubs:
“After reviewing the Department’s regulations, there appear to be deficiencies within the existing framework when addressing issues like carpooling raw milk. There is no direct language that requires the sale of raw milk to be directly from the farm…With the assistance of my legal services division, we have submitted amended regulations to the secretariat for approval.”
A proposed regulation, explicitly prohibiting buying clubs, was submitted, and then abruptly withdrawn a week ago Friday, just prior to a scheduled hearing last Monday.
It’s been assumed that the proposed regulation was withdrawn because of overwhelming opposition from consumers. But that may be overly simplistic. More on that upcoming.
As I said at the start of this post, I sometimes feel badly for Soares, since he seems to have been a friend of farmers. Unfortunately, the guy has contradicted himself and misled others so often, I don’t suppose he knows what the real story is any more behind his turnaround from raw milk supporter to opponent. The effort by NOFA/Mass. to throw the commissioner a bone in its decision described in my previous post to discourage consumers from attending the hearing last week was clearly misplaced, since he’s not calling the shots on this issue. To illustrate the point, I dusted off an illustration I last used two years ago, during the California hearings over SB201; can you guess who represents MDAR and who represents MDPH?
It does seem clear, though, that he fears the people in public health who have become obsessive about raw milk over the last year. What’s behind that obsession? It can’t have anything to do with public health, since Massachusetts hasn’t had any illnesses attributed to raw milk in a dozen years or more.
No, I feel much more badly for Cyndy Gray, the owner of the Just Dairy buying club. She started her enterprise seven years ago from the back seat of her car, with tacit MDAR approval, and has seen it grow into a serious operation, along with the booming interest in raw milk. Now, Soares is willing to sacrifice her and other buying clubs, along with the state’s raw dairy farmers, presumably to ease pressure from MDPH and save his own job. The good news for Cyndy, if it can be called that, is she has documentation from MDAR that its cease-and-desist letters are a bunch of hot air. As the cop who gives you an unwarranted traffic ticket might say: tell it to the judge.
It would be nice if the challenge around raw milk and food rights were really about safety, as Concerned Person and Lykke argue. Then, you could push for greater cooperation by public health officials and dairy owners. But clearly, what’s going on in Massachusetts has nothing to do with safety, and a lot to do with the political, power, and business agendas of a few people. The whole thing feels rotten. And we’re not even near the core of this bad apple yet.
(Thanks to Cyndy Gray and the Organic Consumers Association for obtaining the MDPH letter and MDAR email.)
***
Supporters of raw milk in Wisconsin are planning a rally tomorrow at noon on the Capitol steps in Madison, urging Governor Jim Doyle to sign legislation passed by both the Assembly and the Senate, that would allow dairy farmers to sell raw milk directly to consumers on their farm. The governor is reportedly under growing pressure by the same kind of political, power, and business pressures at work in Massachusetts, and has wavered from his earlier commitment to sign the legislation. Under the Wisconsin legislation, farmers would be required to have a Grade A dairy license, and a special permit from the Department of Agriculture, Trade and Consumer Protection (DATCP). Monthly testing of the milk would be required, and farmers would have to keep a customer list and log of who purchased milk.
***
I saw a disturbing documentary last evening, “Collapse”, that relates to many of the discussions on this blog. It’s essentially a gripping monologue by author Michael Ruppert (who wrote the book, Confronting Collapse), arguing that the notion of unlimited growth is running up against the reality of limited oil supplies. It’s something many of us have long sensed, but what makes the documentary so compelling is that he makes a strong case it’s all happening right now, before our eyes, and will only get much worse over the next few years. What made me take notice was his allusions to the debt problems of Greece and other European countries…a year ago, when the documentary was produced.
He also argues against the notion that our scientists and economists can somehow “fix” the rapidly escalating problems of dysfunction. The obsessive push by public health people to limit or ban raw milk availability is symptomatic of this notion, and the catastrophic Gulf oil spill an obvious argument against. In the coming chaos, the most valuable commodities will be locally produced food and gold coins, argues Ruppert.
Which never made sense even at an early age, and now as I approach my later years, well Collapse does a nice job of wrapping it up.
When DATCP came knocking at our milkhouse door, well bardged in one saturday morning sheriffs deputy in tow, the insueing 5 years of "the administrative process" my resolve was to understand the process that lead DATCP to this point in order to understand better the foe they had become.
This lead me to understanding peak oil, peak water, NAFTA, 1952 Farm Bill, Farm Bureau, Glass Steagal Act, State Rights, FDA oversite and its wide ranging oversite of everything, CDC and its ties to the Food industry, The food /agribusiness/pharmacutical industry and its control over much of what is our choice, or lack of it as you see it, how politics really work, and what freedoms we really have left…just to mention a few.
Leaving me with the feeling that personal choice can be the most radical act one can affect against the above mentioned.
Raw milk is one of the keys to the Food movements understanding of personal responsibility.
Which is the key to our understanding what has really been taken from us.
If we are told we do not need to understand what our food/health/consumer choices have as an effect on the world, we buy more and care less.
If everyone had a picture of the power source and its result on the environment above your AC control or light switch, would we be so careless as to its use.
If the exoctic trace minerals and its health affects on the children used to mine those elements, used to create this 8 year old computers replacement were given to us prepurchase….would we be so quick to get the new model?
Responsiblity is what every raw milk producer should be selling, the white stuff is just a tangable perk.
Consumers are joining in the responsible care of the land animals and community by buying local, and it does not stop there.
Pretty soon all involved are feeling the ties to that which sustains us, and are committed to keeping that tie alive and growing, so more can partake.
This is what our elected leaders and their money suppliers do not want us to know.
Remove reasponsiblity and create a dependent society which will only change when we run out of that we have come dependent on.
That time is coming rather near, and if we do not use our resources to kick start our ability to become sustianable in a conscience manner, we will simply not be able to.
We can change the world three times a day, and every glass of milk brings us closer to the original balance, and strengthens the ties we create with our families, producers, land and community.
We do not need to ask permission to be responsible, in doing so we have just given our responsiblity away.
Tim Wightman
David,….I agree so much with what you have said. The chaos is now. Pure Capitalism is not allowed to be pure. Protections have been put into place to protect the free exchange of new ideas and dollar voting against old ideas.
This is why I am so connected to our "Share the Secret" education and outreach program here in CA. In the last week I did another three of them. This is grass roots activism at its best. It can not be corrupted and it is forever.
Educating the common people directly is the key. The FDA and Bid AG can not visit 50,000 peoples homes and extract raw milk information and their positive raw milk experience from their brains and guts.
America will be re-engineering itself and social consciuosness and nutrition will rise up in the value chain as we find that food drives our morals, our educational potentional, our fertility, our soil……it drives everything.
Chaos is now…..is so true and by the way….you do not need to shoot with guns in this revoluion when you are in the grass roots movement. The paradigm simply becomes changed because dollar voting bankrupted the broken choice and financially encouraged the better choice. No violence….just local change. Inevitable change.
As dollar voting continues….expect more collapse. Think about those relationships that are dear to you. If eating and health is important to you… the "farmer" will be close to the top.
All energy comes from the sun….every last bit of it. The closer your connection to the sun and soils the better off you are and the planet is. You want very few things and people between you and the sun.
Ignore CP, Bill Marler, Lykke, and Sheehan and others, they are just cheerleaders during the collapse…they are but court jestures for the emporur with no clothes.
Mark
http://milkwar.com/workinprog.html
I attended a NOFA Winter Conference and watched Cyndy Gray receive a NOFA award for the tremendous financial benefit that her perfectly legal buying club, Just Dairy, provided the raw dairy farms of Western Massachusetts by facilitating the urban consumer’s access to raw milk.
Imagine my dismay on May 10th in the MDAR hearing room as I watched Winton Pitcoff, NOFA Dairy Coordinator, and Jack Kittredge, a founder of NOFA, never budge from their seats to testify against the MDAR/MDPH/FDA attack against access to legal raw milk in Massachusetts. Where’s the social justice in that?
Do you think that once Cyndy Gray and the other buying clubs are gone that the MDAR/MDPH/FDA won’t turn their attention to other "problems"? What about organic vegetable farms or free range chickens? Who will speak out for Jack Kittredge or the Many Hands Farm? Scott Soares? Soares will probably be working for Monsanto by then.
First they came for the communists, and I did not speak out–
because I was not a communist;
Then they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out–
because I was not a socialist;
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out–
because I was not a trade unionist;
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out–
because I was not a Jew;
Then they came for me–
and there was no one left to speak out for me.
— Martin Niemller
This is WAR…!
Lets never forget this.
The FDA and corporate big Agriculture and big Pharma has tens of thousands of dead American bodies laying before it as a direct result of highly processed foods, pesticides, GMO, toxins in our fake foods, antibiotic abuse, superbug creation, condemnation of the value of nutrition, pharma side effects etc….and they are never required to account for the immune depression and outright human slaughter that results.
Oh…and thank you John Sheehan ( FDA Dead Milk Tsar ), you just streteched the OPDC marketing budget and gave me at least a few months of extra value this year in todays LA Times article. Every time that the FDA says do not drink raw milk….the sales in CA rage upward. Don’t you get it….you have lost all respect and integrity with the CA consumer…they hate your guts and distrust you completely!! You tell everyone that one drop of raw milk kills…yet the consumers know that after they drink gallons of it they are healed from asthma and immune depression….they are thriving. Not dying. They do the oposite of your recommendations just as a matter of personal policy, personal precaution and safety. Your FDA "Food Inc" ideas and science suck and kill people. You are a total waste of our tax dollars. You should have nothing to do with our food. All food should should be regulated fairly by the USDA…not the FDA. At least the USDA says "get to know your farmer and your food". The FDA ignors and suppresses any notion that nutrition is even slightly relevant to health and see this concept as a direct threat to drug pushing and pharma profit. Words can not describe the horrific health crimes that the FDA has brought on our country and its people.
http://www.latimes.com/news/health/la-he-milk-20100517,0,2927209,full.story
Tim Wightman is quoted in the LA Times article today….go Tim!!!
Raw Milk Rocks!!!
Mark
They are the roots of the raw milk grass roots revolution.
Mark
No one is hospitalized and it becomes LA Times FDA food for a bleeding story???!!
What ever hapened to the 54 people that died from MRSA and the 15 people that died from Asthma today.
Now a story about diarrhea…. trumps massive death…..something is so very wrong with this sick reality.
Mark
Someone (I don’t remember who) in the last week pointed out that the functionality of JuicyMaters.com wasn’t very good, making it hard to find info that is there but hard to locate…and they had pointed that out once before.
That is about to change. When I started the blog I knew what to write, but that’s all. The last 8 months have been a learning experience, and that is about to show results. By weeks end, the "getting around" part will b greatly improved, less photos, and the photos will be back in another week.
Folks, thanks for bearing with me through the learning curve of blogging software, and I hope you enjoy the sites improvements. If you want to know about yurts, cooking, homesteading, politics in general…and of course the Raw Milk Wars, keep visiting http://www.JuicyMaters.com
BH
I recommend a book called
The Long Emergency: Surviving the End of Oil, Climate Change, and Other Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century
by James Howard Kunstler. No explanation needed, I think. He also has a blog along the same lines.
Not surprisingly, access to local food becomes even more key.