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Posted on 04/28/2022 7:31:20 PM PDT by Mount Athos
Last summer, The Liberty Loft brought you the story of Amos Miller, an Amish farmer who operates Miller’s Organic Farm in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania.
Miller has been a target of an ongoing campaign by the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) to destroy small family farms as the government agency acts as a protection racket for the corporate powers.
Going through the government’s case and the corporate propogandist, you’ll find that there was no crime committed by Miller. His crime was having happy customers who want organic food. Not one customer had a complaint. There are no victims, except the corporate farms that don’t want to compete against local farmers who are independent.
Still, Miller was ordered to pay $250,000 last summer by a federal judge, was threatened with arrest and prohibited from operating some of his farming as he was told not to slaughter animals at his farm. This, all despite Miller’s attempts to work with the USDA, willing to pay a $25,000 fine despite not committing a crime.
Miller’s legal battle continues including a recent court appearance this month. Daily Newz 365 described Miller’s “crimes”: “Slaughtering and processing the meat he raises on his own farm and selling it fresh-frozen to members of his private food buying club, who’ve all signed contracts stating they understand the meat is not processed in USDA-inspected plants, or treated with USDA-required chemical preservatives… because that’s how they want it, and the very reason they are willing to go to such great lengths to get it. But the USDA thinks his customers are too stupid to think for themselves and need them to come in and protect them from themselves. You probably don’t know… that all USDA-licensed processing plants are required to treat ALL meat (even the local, grass-fed, organic variety) with synthetic preservatives.”
Miller told Daily Newz 365: “Often they use citric acid, which you’d think comes from oranges or lemons, but it’s a modified substance made from corn… and they don’t even have to label it on the meat.”
The costs are piling up for Miller and is facing the end of his business, according to Daily Newz 365. A GoFundMe page update stated Miller “will go through a period of several weeks during which we will be required by Court Order to halt our sales of meat and poultry products,” and with “the combination of greatly reduced sales and significantly increased debts, the farm is facing a crisis in financing.”
And the end of a small, independent farmer may just be what the government wants. Remember the strange rise in food processing facilities going up in flames as a food crisis worsens.
Since 2020 and the rise of the medical tyranny, farmers have had to cull herds and destroy the food we rely on because of the supply chain crisis. And the amount of fires at food facilities worldwide since 2020 is in the hundreds, according to The COVID Blog:
“Of course, vaccines are the leading cause of coincidences. But there’s no way all these food processing plant and barn fires, along with strange new laws incentivizing farmers not to work since 2020, can’t be coincidences. It appears most of the food processing plants and farms, especially in the chicken industry, were destroyed in 2020, while the new laws took effect in 2021-22.”
If anyone believe this is all coincidence, that the government is just incompetent and really wants to help us, I’d like to talk with you. I might just have a bridge in Brooklyn to sell you.
Pennsylvania Ping!
Please ping me with articles of interest.
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WTH?
Then we rely on china for our food..works out perfectly for the dems
When communists take power, they immediately ration almost everything. I’ve mentioned previously this great book by author Shirley Christian “Nicaragua, Revolution in the Family.”. Before the Sandinista communists took over, there were thriving Farmers Markets in every large and small town in Nicaragua. Farmers would bring their crops to sell and barter. The day after the commies took power, those Farmers Markets were illegal, and all food, and food production, belonged to ‘the people’ (government).
He’s playing the sovereign citizen game.
Bookmark
https://nationalaglawcenter.org/state-compilations/meatprocessing/
States with or without a state equivalent of USDA inspections.
The state version is cheaper and depending on the state, less arduous. I can drive to a farm 20 miles and buy grass fed beef that’s state inspected by Missouri, take it home and eat it and everyone’s happy. Penn doesn’t have a state meat processing agency so it’s fed only. Some other states also don’t have their own agency but allow farmers to sell direct from the farm to consumer. The sale has to take place on the farm.
I’m not sure if this farm up the road from me can sell off-farm but I think they can. The meat just can’t be sold or travel outside the state of MO. That would make it contraband meat.
He’s a gamer? I thot he was a farmer. spelling error?
Penn doesn’t have a state meat processing agency so it’s fed only.
So that’s the issue?
Seems playing a game called sovereign citizen is more important that being a farmer.
So much of our food comes from China. They actually ship meat to China for processing and ship it back (Hello? Earth to Climate Change nuts!) Hardly any produce from here anymore, most anywhere but here. Remember years ago when grocery stores began to be required to tell you where produce was from? Slowly someone had them stop doing that. Certainly didn’t want anyone to know how far outsourcing had gone. America literally does not sustain itself- that’s insane!! Right now feel very fortunate- in Florida we have so many small farms everywhere that provide beef chicken eggs milk and produce. They are small businesses. So we’ll see how long it takes government to chip them away.
The process is the punishment. I fear I can see 1776 approaching from here.
I wonder how deeply ANTIFA is involved in the food processing
plant fires.
They are awfully quiet right now. I suspect they are looking
for more effective ways to help control us.
I wouldn’t rule them out of what is taking place at these
plants.
Ping
“Often they use citric acid, which you’d think comes from ora
rnges or lemons, but it’s a modified substance made from corn… and they don’t even have to label it on the meat.”
Meh, another organic farmer misrepresenting science... again. 99% of commercial food grade citric acid is made by a fungus and has been for over a hundred years. It’s fed with cheap, subsidized, high fructose corn syrup.
That said, it is high time to rip meat processing regulations out of the cold dead hands of the USDA. They absolutely are pwned by the meat packing industry they pretend to regulate.
Ugh… a modified substance made from corn.. lol are they preserving our meat with ethanol. It must be the Russians.
BUMP For later...
A Lancaster County farmer is balking at a $250,000 fine federal prosecutors are proposing after he was found in contempt of court for violating a 2020 consent decree.
Amos Miller, who owns Miller’s Organic Farm in Upper Leacock Township, wants to pay $25,000, or 10% of the proposed fine. And he wants 60 days, rather than the 30 days the government is proposing, to pay the fine and $14,436 the government is seeking to cover its enforcement costs.
A $250,000 fine would complicate Miller’s efforts to come into compliance with federal regulations, his attorney, Steven Lafuente of Dallas, Texas, wrote earlier this month in a court filing in which Miller and the farm objected to other proposed sanctions.
Those sanctions concern conducting an inventory of meat and poultry at the farm, how that meat and poultry can be sold or destroyed, and record keeping.
Miller was found in contempt of the consent decree because he was selling meat from animals he slaughtered at his farm, which isn’t federally approved as a slaughterhouse.
Miller wants to seek a custom exemption that would allow him to operate a slaughterhouse, and he suggested in the filing that he should essentially be granted the exemption so he can show that he’d be operating as required.
“The best way to execute a plan is to set it in motion,” Lafuente wrote in the filing.
Miller also took issue with the U.S. Department of Agriculture Food Safety and Inspection Service’s requirements for record-keeping.
“It is not Miller’s choice, but rather, Miller’s religion that prohibits the use of computers that would facilitate the creation of records as FSIS requires,” Lafuente wrote. ‘The implementation of the sort of records sought by FSIS is very difficult for an Amish farmer.”
In their filing last month, federal prosecutors said the FSIS has successfully worked with other Amish farmers.
“FSIS has not singled out Miller’s or denied it any accommodation that FSIS has extended to similarly situated farmers. Other Pennsylvania Amish/Mennonite meat and poultry farmers and sellers routinely submit to FSIS inspection and other statutory and regulatory requirements,” the government wrote.
Prosecutors also noted that they could have sought fines well over $1 million, depending on how Miller’s violations of the consent decree were calculated.
U.S. District Judge Edward G. Smith has scheduled a July 19 hearing on the government’s proposed sanctions and Miller’s objections to them.
Miller’s came to the attention of federal authorities in 2016, when the Food and Drug Administration said it identified Listeria in samples of Miller’s raw milk and found it to be genetically similar to the bacteria in two people who developed listeriosis — one of whom died — after consuming raw milk.
That led to the FSIS investigating and suing Miller’s over the meat and poultry issue in 2019, leading to the 2020 consent decree.
In Missouri, he could sell raw milk as long as he sold it as not for human consumption. For livestock and pet consumption only. It can be sold on farm or delivered direct to customer at a meeting spot. What the buyer does with it when they get home is another thing.
https://www.nichemeatprocessing.org/meat-inspection/
27 states have state meat processor inspection equivalent to USDA inspection that allows you to sell as described below.
Retail exemption allows a meat processor to sell meat at its own retail storefront (or direct to consumer via other methods such as farmers market sales or a restaurant) without developing a HACCP plan or being inspected daily by USDA FSIS. However, the processor is still subject to periodic, risk-based inspection by USDA FSIS and/or state and county authorities (e.g. county health departments). In addition, the meat used to produce retail products (fresh cuts or processed meats) must come from livestock inspected by USDA FSIS or the state inspection agency in the processor’s own state.
"USDA FSIS or State inspection agency" which Missouri has and unlike USDA, you don't have to have an inspector on hand 8 hours a day. You pay for them at $25/hr iirc plus you need good liability and other insurances to cover that. That's one of the reasons it costs upwards of half a million dollars to start a USDA inspected facility. The game has been tweaked and designed by and for the big guys by the type of people that have revolving door employment between retail and the agency overseeing that retail, sort of like Monsanto people rotated in and out of the FDA and now we have GMO foods or Lloyd Austin/Raytheon and now sending weapons to Ukraine.
I have a farm up the road that sells as Retail-Excempt and their prices are in line with grocery store prices.
This is interesting and something I didn't know about but had thought to myself in the past as being something that should happen. Neighboring states allowing meat from a neighboring state to be sold. If they both have the state equivalent of fed inspected, why not? Especially helps those producers that live close to a state line.
The Cooperative Interstate Shipment Program, authorized by the 2008 Farm Bill and launched by USDA-FSIS in 2012, allows state-inspected meats from qualifying plants to be shipped across state lines. The goal of the program is to expand market opportunities for small meat and poultry processors.
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