Some further thoughts from my BusinessWeek.com column about the sting operation against a Michigan co-op of three farms…
As Annette Hebron described the experience of having five agents combing through her family’s papers and personal belongings in executing their search warrant last Friday, I felt creepy. It sounded like the worst possible invasion of privacy because, of course, not all the papers on her desk and in her files were co-op related. Some of the papers were the type we all have around—investment summaries, credit card invoices, hardware store receipts.
After taking the family’s computer, with its built-in fax, there was a question of whether to also grab the family’s last remaining means of communication with the outside world—its phone and answering machine. After much discussion among the agents, they finally decided the answering machine wouldn’t yield useful information, so they left it. There was a question of whether a chicken in her freezer was intended for sale or was part of the family’s grocery. And on and on.
But there is a potential silver lining in the ordeal the Hebrons are living through. “For the three hours or so the investigators hung around, the phone kept ringing,” recalls Annette. It was customers calling in, wanting to know where their orders for raw milk, chicken, eggs, and butter were.
“I told the guy in charge, ‘You don’t know how many people you are making angry.’ He rolled his eyes.”
Food co-op members are a committed bunch. They are committed to buying locally-produced products, and are willing to organize their lives for the weekly food sorting and pickups. They disdain the corporate agriculture system that serves most of us. And they disdain the authorities who go to bat for that system, like the Michigan Department of Agriculture. So look for the Family Farms Co-op to retain most of its members, and likely add new ones as information about the state’s legal offensive gets around. It’s a little like a fundamentalist religious group ganging up on a book or movie for being too sexually oriented. All the publicity usually backfires on the fundamentalists, and helps sales of the book or movie.
Marketing is always tough, but dealing with agents serving search warrants is about the toughest way I know of to market.
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