I was a little worried about not being able to contact Greg Niewendorp. But then I saw that he has issued a statement (see the comments on my previous post), and I felt better. Usually when a protester like Greg has to issue a statement, it’s because there is so much media interest, he doesn’t have time to speak with each reporter individually.
The bigger worry some of his supporters have, though, is how the Michigan Department of Agriculture will even the score with Greg. Despite the outrage many individuals feel about what happened at Greg’s farm yesterday, the MDA likely has an entirely different view of the situation. Greg hints at that in his statement, suggesting that his protest may have contributed to the departure of one MDA director.
Whatever actually happened with the director’s departure, the reality is that Greg has gotten the MDA publicity it would much rather not have had. Then he threw its representative off his land a couple months back. To do what the agency did yesterday, it had to go to court and arrange for sheriff’s deputies and state police to sit around and drink coffee all day. Adding insult to injury, he made the inspectors and veterinarians trudge around his fields for several hours in the warm weather, looking for cattle. And based on Greg’s statement, they’ll have to go through the same routine on Thursday when they go looking for the test results.
Take it from me, these people don’t take well to being pushed around. They way they see it, they’re supposed to be doing the pushing.
Based on what we’ve seen in the raw milk arena, the agriculture agencies are experts at getting even. After all, they spend much of their working lives complicating other people’s lives. It’s no big challenge to them to focus their energies on complicating one person’s life. Greg’s supporters can envision all kinds of scenarios the regulators might come up with to make Greg miserable, and I won’t go into them here, since I don’t want to give the regulators more ideas than they likely have already.
The best way for Greg to head off the busy-bee regulators is to take the legal offensive, his supporters say. Demand a notice from the MDA that his farm has been declared a TB-free zone and, if such a declaration is not forthcoming, get a court order to force its issuance. Seek criminal complaints against any MDA people who come onto his property after such a declaration is made. From his statement, it seems as if Greg has a few thoughts in mind as well.
Of course, an even more productive tactic would be for half a dozen other farmers to do what Greg has done. “These guys are vulnerable and their budgets are vulnerable,” says one supporter.
I worry that tomorrow when the goon squad goes back to Greg’s they will "find" the results they want, that is positive TB tests, and cart his cows away or worse.
In the southern part of Michigan, the Department of Agriculture is conducting "random" tests for TB. Can we make them disclose which farms have been selected so far so that we can see if their sample has truely been random? From talking to other farmers and past actions of the dept of Ag ,I am suspicious that they are avoiding testing the Amish farms so as not to stir up resistance. The Amish farms object to RFID tagging on religious grounds,so they have an agreement with the Ag dept that the cattle are only tagged when they enter a commercial market. To do a TB test the cattle would necessarily have to be tagged to identify them. Also I would bet they are avoiding the factory farms also because their testing gives too many false positive results(4%) and any test of a herd of 4000 cows would necessarily result in a retest of at least 160 cows of which 4% would also result in a false positive result. The protocol at that point would be to butcher those 6 cows or quarantine the herd and retest in 60 days. At any rate to test a herd of that size would be a huge nightmare.
I strongly suspect that the department is concentrating their "random" testing on the smaller herds. I know for a fact that people who have never sold milk commercially nor beef through the commercial markets and who only have one family milk cow have been selected for a "random" test. Wouldn’t it be more important to be testing the factory farms where at least 80% of the public milk supply comes from?
Are they using the TB eradication program to eradicate the farms who have an independant market for their products?