Protecting Whom?

As much as regulators like to talk about protecting consumers, when you speak with them, it sometimes sounds more like they want more to protect corporate interests.

Bridget Patrick, who is Michigan's Bovine Tuberculosis Eradication Project Coordinator, told me recently that the case of Greg Niewendorp resisting testing of his herd "is a human health issue as well as an industry issue." Bovine tuberculosis can be passed on to people, she stated. Moreover, the fact that Michigan is one of a few areas in the US that still has evidence of bovine TB "has been a problem for the whole country" because some foreign markets won't buy American beef as a result.

She strongly suggested that Niewendorp was a spoilsport for not going along with the testing. " We need to have everyone participate in the program" to prove bovine TB has been eradicated.

Dairy regulators use the protection argument to justify their crackdown on raw-milk producers, though they tend not to mention the obvious: If consumers are buying milk unpasteurized, then that doesn't leave much for processors to do.

Nor do any of the regulators like to talk much about the new economic model that is emerging in the farm-to-consumer model. Farmers who sell their cattle to processors may receive $2 a pound, compared to anywhere from $5 to $18 a pound, depending on the quantity purchased and the cut of meat, when they do their own slaughtering. Similarly, when dairy farmers sell milk to processors for pasteurization, they receive in the neighborhood of $1.50 to $2.50 a gallon (depending on bacteria counts and whether the milk is organic). When they sell direct, they receive $5 to $10 a gallon.

Such discrepancies help explain why the farm-to-consumer model is "the gateway to farm prosperity," says Pete Kennedy, a lawyer who represents farmers both for the Farm to Consumer Legal Defense Fund and the Weston A. Price Foundation.

Lawyers like Kennedy argue that buying food directly from local farmers amounts to a contract between private parties, covered by the US Constitution. That argument won the day in Ohio earlier this year, when a state court overturned an Ohio Department of Agriculture revocation of a dairy farmer's milk license, ruling her "herdshare" arrangement, whereby dozens of consumers bought shares in the farmer's cows so as to gain access to raw milk, was legitimate.

But this battle has a long way to go. The wide discrepancy in prices farmers receive by selling direct and cutting out corporate distributors and processors, not to mention grocery chains, may help explain why the government is coming down as hard as it is on farmers. Regulators and their legislator bosses are clearly prepared to use intimidation to put a halt to such nonsense before it gets completely out of hand.

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