I take heart from comments on my most recent posting, suggesting that individuals who go to the trouble of shining a light on arrogant regulators can make a difference.
Don Neeper’s comment about Arlie Stutzman, an Ohio raw milk farmer, is particularly instructive. I wrote about the pathetic efforts of the Ohio Department of Agriculture (ODA) to entrap Stutzman into selling raw milk to an investigator for $2. I knew the department later issued him a Grade A dairy license, but didn’t appreciate the connection to unfavorable local publicity about the matter.
Dave Milano captures well the historical trend toward regulatory edicts made by nameless and faceless bureaucrats, replacing judicial actions. Yes, it is possible to scare off some of these arrogant bureaucrats via publicity, but such a trend is troublesome because super powerful bureaucracies are commonplace in societies where dictatorships hold sway and the judiciary has been undermined. Often in such societies, farmers and others aggrieved pay sizable bribes to keep the bureaucrats away.
This was the way of the old Soviet Union, and is the way of today’s China. In the latter, media exposes and public demonstrations can sometimes overturn bureaucratic edicts, but such edicts are like weeds—you get rid of them in one corner of your yard and they are back in another.
Hopefully a process similar to what occurred in Ohio with Arlie Stutzman will unfold in Michigan in connection with the case of Richard Hebron. Michigan supporters have turned up the heat in their letter writing and their efforts to engage the media. What can evolve is a template whereby supporters in various places under siege by regulators have tried and true techniques for turning up the heat and intimidating the intimidators.
Speaking of the media, there was an intriguing segment about Organic Pastures and its owner, Mark McAfee, on CBS Evening News yesterday.
It was intriguing simply because it treated raw milk as an acceptable product, without all the caveats about Russian roulette. It was curious because it approached the subject of raw milk from a “probiotic” and business perspective—in addition to Organic Pastures, a yogurt was featured, along with Whole Foods saying that probiotics are a growing category. As a journalist, I would venture that this segment began as a story about Organic Pastures and the growing popularity of raw milk, and was “re-positioned” as a piece about the more mainstream idea of probiotics. If that’s what it takes to get the message out…
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