Posted on 05/29/2013 5:38:03 AM PDT by Tolerance Sucks Rocks
Raw-milk proponents celebrated a Wisconsin farmer's acquittal on three of four counts related to selling unpasteurized milk and cheese, bolstering their hopes of legalizing the products in America's Dairyland.
Jurors found Vernon Hershberger, a 41-year-old Loganville, Wis., farmer, innocent of producing milk without a license, selling milk and cheese products without a license, and operating a retail establishment without a license. He was found guilty of one count of breaking a holding order issued by the state in June 2010, which barred him from moving any of the food he produced without a license.
The verdict means Mr. Hershberger can continue to sell his farm's products to members of the buying club he started, said one of his attorneys, Elizabeth Rich. He faces as long as a year in jail and $10,000 in fines for the one guilty count; a sentencing date has yet to be announced.
"This is a huge win for food rights," said Liz Reitzig, a founder of Farm Food Freedom Coalition, a group advocating for greater consumer access to natural, unprocessed food. The case "should give small farmers renewed courage to continue to operate within their communities."
Milk is commonly pasteurized to remove harmful bacteria, but advocates of raw milk say the process also wipes out many beneficial nutrients. Raw milk can be consumed on the farm but can't be sold legally in many states, including Wisconsin.
The case followed a nearly four-year investigation of Mr. Hershberger and his farm, Grazin Acres LLC, by the state, the No. 2 dairy producer after California. During deliberations, which capped a five-day trial in Sauk County Circuit Court, dozens of farmers, food-rights activists and Hershberger family members filled the courthouse, sharing raw milk from Mr. Hershberger's farm.
(Excerpt) Read more at online.wsj.com ...
Someone needs to look into what politicians have been eating.
Thanks for the ping!
No, he's using facts, something you don't appear to be familiar with. No matter how hard you may try, there is absolutely no way to completely sterilize the udders. There will always be a risk of infection in raw milk from outside sources. Additionally, there are pathogens that exist inside the cow that only pasteurization will eliminate. I can list them for you if you like. It's a long list.
And yes, children are normally the ones who pay the price from unpasteurized products because their immune systems are not fully developed. Drink raw milk if you want, but don't try and tell us that there is no risk in doing so.
By the way, your fear of bovine growth hormone isn't justified. The hormone they give cows to increase yield is biochemically identical the the hormone produced by the cow naturally. Besides, bovine hormones do not dock with human hormone receptors, so fears of any ill effects are unfounded.
I don’t think posting pics from a radical vegan site helps make your point.(tryvegan.com)
The article about the Family Cow outbreak you linked to describes the worst outbreak of food borne illness in PA history. Four dead and 650 ill. That was from green onions from Chiles.
So remember, stay away from green onions, that stuff could kill you!
Remember that he has yet to be sentenced on the remaining charge, which could be unpleasant if the judge is vindictive. Likewise, I would not be surprised if the government seeks a restraining order against him, effectively putting him out of business.
There is some real hate, and some real big money and political power here, from the dairy industry.
The trend or fad is rooted in the efforts of the big-money-controlled foundations and non-governmental organizations. They work hand-in-hand with the State Dept USAID to get into third world countries and completely takeover their food systems. This is dovetailed in with control of their international trade, banking and medical sectors.
In the US, it’s the same deal but the takeover was accomplished a century ago. The top echelon of wealthy families in America long ago brought the top colleges under their control through finance and set up foundations which carry on their agendas, the big three being, of course, Rockefeller, Ford and Carnegie, but there are now thousands of foundations with aligned goals.
Now it was quite easy for these powerful interests that have controlled the Ivy League educations of corporate directors for many decades to include a little “organic” side movement within all their other “movements”. Eating food without it being adulterated is nothing new, but having their own workerbee activists from the left leading a enough pro-organic organizations enables the big money folks to then control the movement and keep it from really catching on and making life difficult for their big food industry companies.
Too many conservatives see that young long hairs and liberals are eating organic foods and instinctively oppose the movement.
Part of understanding what’s really going on is understanding that big business does not have a problem with big government regulators. This is because the big money and power people who simply want to continue to financially dominate have the government in their pocket. They a) expand government control to keep out small competitors, b) preserve a tax code that enables big companies to pay little or no tax and c) preserve big government spending that largely gets rung up as sales for big businesses.
Control of a publicly-held company is had by having people working in your interests on the board of directors. The board is the ultimate decision maker on how the company’s resources are deployed, so one does not need to own every share then of a company to direct its policies and strategies.
Little by little, the food industry is shutting down direct access from farmer to consumer. Pasteurization is so-called safety, the easy way: kill all organisms in the milk, instead of handling the cows and milk properly. Trouble is, we only want to kill bad ones if they’re actually in the milk, and usually they are not in the milk. Hmmm, so it benefits the food industry to be able to have bad bacteria in the milk as a result of their bad practices - pasteurization just cleans up all their mistakes. They can now comfortably have feces in the milk and know that the pasteurization machine will still output a product that won’t cause the milk drinker to immediately get sick and thus blame the milk for their sickness. But Americans now are missing out on the biggest health benefit in the milk, the organisms (oh, no, I’d have to actually have to read and understand to know about that health benefit). With today’s technology, we should instead be working towards good milk handling - and (duh) efficient testing of milk prior to being sold to the consumer. But instead we continue with the cheap and dirty.
Most people are so brainwashed they outright refuse to consider anything other than pasteurized milk. Not only that, we outright refuse to read up on what’s really going on in our gut. How many people realize that everyone has bacteria in their gut and have an inkling as to what essential functions they perform ? Wait, I’m talking about science outside of the food and medical industry “accepted science”, something conservatives are forbidden to speak of. God forbid I want to get off the “pill train” once I realize that the food man is making me sick and the medicine man has me in a lifetime of pills trap, er, allows me to “live with” my sickness.
The big money folks floated out the idea from the beginning of their takeover of the medical industry that they were some magnificent benevolent force for good. Most people now reliably parrot the meme about how much advancement there has been in medicine and food, all a result of obedience to our corporate benefactors and their greater wisdom.
But we forget a few basics. Like the limits on variation in the diet in the old days for most people, when many people undoubtedly had various deficiencies in their diet over their lifetime. We also forget the amount of physical labor and hardship. Long working hours six days a week, drafty, cold homes in the winter, etc. We forget the simple health practices and medicines that were not common then and thus health could deteriorate or sickness could ensue because of problems with simple cleanliness, warmth, nutrition, etc., i.e., it’s far better being home with the flu today than home with the flu in a drafty house, poor sanitation, etc. It’s really not that surprising that people would often succumb to sicknesses that the body would recover from given only a better environment, food and the simplest of old-fashioned medicines.
After hundreds of billions of research spending over many decades, countless basic disease questions still persist, as the medical industry moves forward with better ways to “live with” diseases.
People are certainly waking up to all this, hopefully that trend will continue.
Health issues aside, I have had raw milk before and did not care for it.
Excellent analysis, well done.
I wasn’t endorsing the site from which one of the three pictures I posted came from, I posted them to point out that cows are often “dirty”, there can be lots of feces on them and that if you milk a cow without thoroughly washing and sanitizing the udders and sanitizing the equipment each and every time, there is a risk of spreading disease and that risk is much, much higher in unpasteurized milk.
The article about the Family Cow outbreak you linked to describes the worst outbreak of food borne illness in PA history. Four dead and 650 ill. That was from green onions from Chiles. So remember, stay away from green onions, that stuff could kill you!
Actually it was a Chi-Chi’s not a Chilies restaurant and it was an outbreak of Hepatitis A from green onions imported from Mexico. I am not saying that raw milk is the only source of food borne illness, there are been many related to vegetables and meats and it is traced to poor food handling, poor sanitation. My point still stands.
“Bovine Growth Hormone”
The article posted has to do with the safety of raw milk vs. pasteurized milk. Bovine growth hormones have nothing to do with that particular issue. But since you seem to have a hard on for Monsanto and since you brought it up, to me it sounds like you are the one using the demagogic tactics, the very same scare tactics that the leftist greenies and PITA types use. Oh, yea, a Google search of “monsanto bovine growth hormone” is going to bring up all sorts of results, most of them by leftists and greenpisser orgs.; all the usual suspects and part of the same old anti-business and anti-capitalist and anti-scientific luddite crowd – the very same folks who also promote the myth of man-made global warming, the anti-fracking crowd, the anti-nuclear energy crowd, the anti-vaccination crowd, the same crowd who says that SUV’s should be outlawed and who says that big business is trying to kill your kids, etc. whatever…
But despite the very “scary” scare tactics of the green pissers and PITA types who evidently, and perhaps some like you who think that the very existence of big dairy farms or ever any dairy cows is pure evil and that the dairy and cattle growers and by extension, any meat eaters, the non-vegans like them are contributing to those bad greenhouse gasses (cow flatulence) and therefore increasing global warming.
And keep in mind that this is the very same crowd also thinks that human population should be greatly reduced by violent force if necessary and with laws against having more than one child and that “society” would be much better off if we all reverted to substance farming and if we all became substance gathering vegans (yea, gorge yourself on all the fruits and nuts and green leafy plants and tree bark you can gather, when you can find it, but in the winter, freeze and starve to death – but what a great but eco-friendly and sustainable life you’ve got going there), gathering off of natural plants and if we starve then we starve – it’s Gia’s will; the very real plain truth and scientific fact is that bovine growth hormone (BHG) is a naturally occurring hormone, found in the milk of all cows, even the milk from cows not given additional bovine growth hormone to increase milk production and there is no scientific evidence, no evidence at all to suggest that BST present in milk can survive digestion or produce unique peptide fragments that might have biological effects. Even if BST is absorbed intact, the growth hormone receptors in the human do not recognize cow BST and, therefore, BST cannot produce effects in humans.
Growth hormones in milk: myth/fact
Bovine growth hormone: Fact or fiction
But hey, if you really want to drink raw and unpasteurized milk and are willing to take that risk on your own dime should you get sick or if you want to pay $10 per gallon of milk because its “certified organic” or “BST Free” or “100% hormone” and “antibiotic free” or “free range” or “cruelty free” or “humane” or any of the other “cool hip kid” buzz words that the gullible greenpissers and sadly some supposed conservatives who have bought into it hook, line and sinker and find it so appealing and are willing to be separated as fools from their money – go right ahead, it’s your money and your life.
And your point is absolutely correct. According to the CDC, raw milk is responsible for nearly three times more hospitalizations than any other foodborne disease outbreak. Anyone claiming that raw milk is safe to consume doesn't have any idea what he's talking about.
I grew up on a farm surrounded by dairy cows and your pics are accurate and make a very important point. There is absolutely no way you can sterilize the udders of a cow to ensure that no pathogens are transferred into your milk. Of course, even if you could, that wouldn't eliminate the many pathogens present inside the cow that only pasteurization can kill.
I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch to conclude that Monsanto is partnering with government to have absolute control on food production and distribution.
Yeah, but how about from the farmer with 2-3 cows on 10 acres of grass that has a single milking stall and washes the cows’ udders with H2O2 before milking?
It is interesting to note that even though BHG is not recognized by human hormone receptors, human growth hormones can dock with bovine hormone receptors.
It is puzzling that some conservatives will be skeptical when it comes to the "science" supporting AGW, but will lose all objectivity and become rabid leftists when the subject of Monsanto's BGH and GMO food is brought up. It's like they're selective Luddites. Weird.
Clearly, you have no idea how large, diverse, and fragmented our food supply is. If you did, you wouldn't make such ridiculous statements.
Additionally, your unusual example does nothing to mitigate the many dangerous pathogens that enter the milk from inside the cow.
Why not just pasteurize the milk and sleep at night knowing your kids aren't going to end up with Malta fever? There is little nutritional difference, and it is still an enjoyable product to drink. It just won't make you sick. Why people choose to roll the dice with their health when it comes to milk makes absolutely no sense.
From your post that I replied to:”There is little nutritional difference, and it is still an enjoyable product to drink. It just won’t make you sick.”
The fact that you want to split hairs leads me to believe that you are free from any facts supporting the consumption of raw milk. You wouldn't eat raw poultry or raw beef because it contains dangerous bacteria, so why would anyone with any common sense drink raw milk loaded with dangerous pathogens?
Like I said about common sense......
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