Is the government out to get Dawn Sharts?
Dawn is a dairy farmer in upstate New York trying to sell, you guessed it, raw milk, and the state’s agriculture department has come down hard against her…giving her the modern-day version of tarring and feathering. Yet, the state’s Department of Agriculture and Markets did find listeria in milk it tested from her farm last March 26.
So I kept asking myself that question as I researched her situation over the last month. I suggest you take a look at my article about Dawn at BusinessWeek.com, and decide what you think. I especially encourage you to view the secret videos from Dawn’s milk house the article links to.
My feeling is that the government is out to get Dawn, though not in any kind of isolated personal way. Dawn’s Beech Hill Farms is one of three farms in New York that have been found since March 1—the day the federal Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the Centers for Disease Control posted new warnings about raw milk, along with the FDA’s new PowerPoint attack—to have pathogens in their raw milk. Now, mind you, in the previous two years, only one farm was found to have pathogens, and that was last December. For at least two years, all was quiet on the New York raw milk front, no pathogens.
Moreover, Pete Kennedy of the Weston A. Price Foundation tells me the same thing has occurred in Pennsylvania—suddenly out of nowhere, four cases of raw milk dairies have been publicly identified as having pathogens in just the last few months.
The key point here is “publicly identified.” The governments of New York and Pennsylvania are going around supposedly finding farmers with pathogens in their milk and then issuing press releases that these farms can’t sell raw milk and their milk should be discarded. Because so many of these releases are coming out, it almost seems as if there’s a plague on raw milk. And these are supposedly liberal states on raw milk. It’s enough to make even a committed health food nut a bit nervous.
But what if the government is fabricating the results? I don’t mean fraudulently producing false results (though, who knows…?) But I’m talking about being a little careless. Inspectors unnecessarily opening bulk tanks. Failing to wash their hands before taking a ladel of milk to sample. Rolling up their dusty pants legs in the milk house, and then rubbing their hands on a bulk tank spigot. Listeria, after all, is ubiquitous, and who knows, maybe a little will get into the milk.
It’s not a totally crazy notion. Especially when you realize that in both New York and Pennsylvania, no one is reported to have become ill from all that supposedly tainted milk.
So I try to look at the big picture. When governments oppose something many people badly want, the fight typically begins with a government display of brute force. We saw that equivalent in the search and seizure of Richard Hebron’s property in Michigan and the brutal questioning/forced confession of Gary Oaks in Cincinnati last year.
The idea is to intimidate, and hope the problem quietly goes away.
But when that doesn’t work, the authorities are forced to switch tactics, usually becoming a little more subtle in their approach. Instead of using brute force, they rely on character assassination, innuendo…and fear. That’s what I think is going on in New York and Pennsylvania.
Fortunately, one farmer, Dawn Sharts, decided to stand up and speak out. I know how difficult it was for her, and I applaud her courage.
"WASHINGTON, June 29, 2007 – State of Tennessee Cook Chill, a Nashville, Tenn., firm, is voluntarily recalling approximately 2,768 pounds of ready-to-eat chicken products that may be contaminated with Listeria monocytogenes, the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Food Safety and Inspection Service announced today."
http://www.fsis.usda.gov/Fsis_Recalls/Open_Federal_Cases/index.asp
Food gets contaminated all the time in the US. Why does the Government act like raw milk is a special problem?
How well publicized are these recalls? The chicken was in the product stream two months before it was recalled. The beef was fresh, though how many people are going to know about it? How much of this meat is actually returned to the manufacturer and what do they do with it? It seems as if it should be classified as hazardous waste if it has human pathogens in it.
4-20 Pennsylvania
5-10 Minnesota
5-10 Michigan
6-3 California (5.7 million pounds)
6-8 Texas
How many cows does it take to produce 5.7 million pounds of beef?
It takes approx 10500 cows to make 5.7 million lbs of beef
As an aside, I was just in beautiful upstate NYS visiting my family in the Capital District. I thoroughly enjoyed a drive out to Scholarie Valley with my son and nieces to the Sap Bush Hollow Farm to buy pastured eggs, pork ribs, and sausage. Yum! The farm is owned by the parents of Shannon Hayes, author of The Grassfed Gourmet and The Farmer and the Grill cookbooks (for pastured meat, poultry, and dairy products).
While my location in Southern California is a cornicopia of great year round local produce, NYS seems to have a lot of small family farms with great pastured animal products and artisan/farmstead foods (cheese, etc.).
What better way to casually infect a tank with pathogens?
Jenny