Illegal contraband
Posted on 07/14/2010 12:49:09 PM PDT by Lorianne
When the 20 agents arrived bearing a search warrant at her Ventura County farmhouse door at 7 a.m. on a Wednesday a couple weeks back, Sharon Palmer didn't know what to say. This was the third time she was being raided in 18 months, and she had thought she was on her way to resolving the problem over labeling of her goat cheese that prompted the other two raids. (In addition to producing goat's milk, she raises cattle, pigs, and chickens, and makes the meat available via a CSA.)
But her 12-year-old daughter, Jasmine, wasn't the least bit tongue-tied. "She started back-talking to them," recalls Palmer. "She said, 'If you take my computer again, I can't do my homework.' This would be the third computer we will have lost. I still haven't gotten the computers back that they took in the previous two raids."
As part of a five-hour-plus search of her barn and home, the agents -- from the Los Angeles County District Attorney's office, Los Angeles County Sheriff, Ventura County Sheriff, and the California Department of Food and Agriculture -- took the replacement computer, along with milk she feeds her chickens and pigs.
While no one will say officially what the purpose of this latest raid was, aside from being part of an investigation in progress, what is very clear is that government raids of producers, distributors, and even consumers of nutritionally dense foods appear to be happening ever more frequently. Sometimes they are meant to counter raw dairy production, other times to challenge private food organizations over whether they should be licensed as food retailers.
The same day Sharon Palmer's farm was raided, there was a raid on Rawesome Foods, a Venice, Calif., private food club run by nutritionist and raw-food advocate Aajonus Vonderplanitz. For a membership fee of $25, consumers can purchase unpasteurized dairy products, eggs that are not only organic but unwashed, and a wide assortment of fermented vegetables and other products.
The main difference in the two raids seems to be that Palmer's raiding party was actually much smaller, about half the size of the Venice contingent: Vonderplanitz was also visited by the FBI and the FDA.
In the Rawesome raid, agents made off with several thousand dollars worth of raw honey and raw dairy products. They also shut Rawesome for failure to have a public health permit, though the size and scope of the raid suggests the government officials might have more in mind. Regardless, within hours the outlet reopened in defiance of the shutdown order.
Earlier in June, agents of the Minnesota Department of Agriculture, escorted by police and also bearing search warrants, raided and shut down Traditional Foods Warehouse, a popular food club in Minneapolis specializing in locally-produced foods. They also raided two farms suspected of illegally selling raw milk. And in a national first among such raids, agents searched a private home and made off with computers; the family's offense appears to have been that it allowed one of the raw dairy farmers to park in its driveway to distribute raw milk to area residents who had ordered it.
The Minnesota Department of Agriculture has declined comment on such raids, saying they are part of an ongoing investigation into raw milk distribution in the state in lieu of eight illnesses in May linked to raw milk.
Meanwhile, the Wisconsin Department of Agriculture, Trade, and Consumer Protection has launched three raids over the last three months on the dairy farm and farm store of Vernon Hershberger, near Madison. The day after DATCP agents placed seals on his fridges storing raw dairy products in July, Hershberger cut the seals, and announced he was going to challenge the agency's contention he needs a dairy and retail license to sell his products. Obtaining such licenses would be problematic, though, since Wisconsin prohibits sale of raw milk, except "incidental" sales, and defining "incidental" has been a bone of contention for many years. In any event, Hershberger contends he sells only to consumers who contract privately for his food.
What's behind all these raids? They seem to stem from increasing concern at both the state and federal level about the spread of private food groups that have sprung up around the country in recent years -- food clubs and buying groups to provide specialized local products that are generally unavailable in groceries, like grass-fed meats, pastured eggs, fermented foods, and, in some cases, raw dairy products. Because they are private and limited to consumers who sign up for membership, these groups generally avoid obtaining retail and public health licenses required of retailers that sell to the general public.
In late 2008 and early 2009, the representatives of state agriculture agencies in Wisconsin, Indiana, Michigan, and Illinois met via phone conferences with representatives of the FDA to map a plan for targeting raw-milk buying clubs in the Midwest. The meetings came to light after Max Kane, the owner of a Wisconsin buying club who was subpoenaed by Wisconsin authorities for the names of his customers and suppliers, obtained email accounts of the sessions via a Freedom of Information request to Wisconsin's Agriculture, Trade, and Consumer Protection department. (Kane has since been prosecuted by Wisconsin authorities for contempt of court for failing to give up the names; his case is under appeal after he was found guilty last December.)
Now, the Midwest program seems to have gone national, and the recent spate of raids suggests a quickening pace and broadened scope. While most raids before the Midwest government meetings had been related to raw-milk distribution, some, like a December 2008 armed raid of Manna Storehouse, an Ohio food club near Cleveland, have been about licensing issues. In that raid, armed law enforcement officers held a mother and eight young children being home-schooled at gunpoint for several hours while they searched the home and food storage areas. A legal challenge to the raid by the family is still tied up in court.
The current uptick has Pete Kennedy of the Farm-to-Consumer Legal Defense Fund concerned, not only about the spreading of the raids, but about the seemingly easy willingness of judges to hand out search warrants. While the U.S. Constitution's fourth amendment suggests judges should exercise tight controls over search warrants ("no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause..."), Kennedy observes, "I haven't seen an agency turned down yet" over the last four years in requests for search warrants connected with raw milk and other food production and distribution.
Given that the targets of search warrants don't get a say in court as to whether they should be issued, legal experts and those who have been raided say the most that food producers can do is take steps to prepare themselves to weather the raids as best they can.
Here are five suggestions they offer:
(excerpted)
Foo producers? I had to grin at that ;) I love foo...
You’re living very dangerously ... ain’t it great? I am poisoning my husband with supper tonight that is totally home grown/hunted/baked. Life on the edge, huh?
I strongly believe that it is unsafe to consume unpasteurized milk products.
I believe just as strongly that it is the right of a free people to eat whatever they like, regardless of the results. If the government has a right to tell you not to eat raw milk, what about saturated fats? What about HFCS? Artificial sweeteners? The list is endless.
Either we possess our own bodies or we do not. If we don't, there is literally no end to what the government can and will do to "for" us.
Yeah, it’s a procedure/function name that many CS majors use in examples.
{Though I really meant to type ‘food.’}
And how do you tell the animal is free from these bacteria? Cows can carry many pathogens without any outward appearance of illness.
95% of all bulk milk tanks test positive for coxiella burnetii. 90% of dairy herds have at least one infected cow. You'd have to test each batch (bucket) of milk to be certain there were no pathogens present. Unless you were testing grandma's milk every time, you'd have no idea which bugs were present and which ones weren't.
RR, you got your first victim...
Rhoda, the little “/s” denotes SARCASM
“What happened to the kulaks in the ‘20s?”
Kulak (people who had assets) farmers hoarded food from the good soviets, so maximum leader Stalin had to root out that evil. Only 25 million or so starved or were executed.
Pasteurization was started in the first couple of decades of the last century. My grandfather was a microbiologist who worked with Emil Berliner [the man who invented the Victrola flat record] to get pasteurization laws in place. By the way, granddad died from TB (as did my father) from being infected through his research. There weren’t many test for the disease in cattle or people back then. I don’t know what it’s like today.
TB is coming back in hard-to-treat forms, but it is no way as wide spread [yet] as it was at the beginning of the last century. Kids died from all sorts of diseases then that are largely forgotten now thanks to modern science and public-health efforts: TB, typhoid, typhus, diphtheria, rheumatic fever, blood poisoning, polio and so on.
When we had cows, I remember straining the milk through cloth to filter out the small pieces of cow shit and other dirt. I don’t know what they do nowadays in large dairies. I guess it’s all mechanized.
Pennsylvania is having similar issues.
It’s been known for a while that some problems, like pneumonia, respond better to penicillin (a natural product) than to raw food.
And, the trade value of medicine over other things can’t be ignored. You might not use it yourself, but someone else might trade a brick of .22 ammo for nine amoxicillin pills.
“I strongly believe that it is unsafe to consume unpasteurized milk products.”
For six thousand years people drank raw milk with nothing but beneficial effects, then along comes pasteurization and makes the milk unfit for consumption, causing inflammation due to its undigestability, and all the fast killing diseases that come with it, and you think natural milk is unsafe?
Did you vote for O?
Invaders and drug traffickers shoot back. Americans don’t. >>>>>
Police/Feds much rather write traffic tickets or do these raw food raids than go after the real crooks and drug pushers out there
Thank you for the link.
I agree completely. We have to be careful to watch so-called conservatives who have our "best interests at heart" with regards to the food chain, too.
I was outraged in 2005 when Rick Santorum pushed a bill (iirc, it was called PAWS) which was approved of by the US Humane Society (the animal rights organization, not your local Humane Society) and sponsored by Dick Durbin (D) & Arlen Spector (eventual D), which would have placed the burden of fees and "compliance expenses", plus invasive home inspections and record keeping on people who raise pets (and probably small farmers). He tried to pass animal rights-related legislation at least 3 times.
Thankfully, it failed every time, as it would have federalized small breeders would have created a paperwork and record keeping nightmare. Who would want to breed animals, even a few, if it gave the federal government the right to come into your home?
His attempts had everything to do with animal "rights" and nothing to do with animal welfare. This from a so-called "conservative" who thinks he knows better than the rest of us how to do things.
They died. (by the thousands)
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