No-Till Veggies in Permanent Cover Crops

7. April 2008 by P. Leslie Riley.

I like real life farm success stories much more than university research . . .
Check this out :
http://cedarmeadowfarm.com/default.html

Steve Groff and his family, farm 200 acres of vegetables and crops on hilly land in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. He has pioneered the “Permanent Cover Cropping System”, which includes no-tillage, cover crops, and effective crop rotations as a way to increase profits, enhance soil and water quality, and reduce pesticides.

The cornerstone of this system is a unique emphasis on maintaining a permanent cover of crop residues and cover crops on the soil surface and having something living in the soil at all times. All vegetables and crops are then seeded or transplanted into the organic mulch. This permanent cover aids in weed control, has virtually eliminated soil erosion on the farms 3-17% slopes, and has increased soil and water quality.

A passionate advocate for sustainable agriculture soil conservation, soil health, and food quality, Steve started no-tilling in the early ’80s. He later began using cover crops as another soil conservation measure and now plants cover crops based on the succeeding crop that will planted the next year. Some fields have not been touched by any tillage equipment for over 30 years!

Posted in Soil & Fertility, Alternative Crops & Enterprises, Organic vs Conventional Faming, Agrarianism, Family farm Opportunities | Print | No Comments »

On Site Processing of Timber Waste Bio Fule ???

6. February 2008 by P. Leslie Riley.

Could this be an opportunity for botom-up economic development ?

http://www.nextenergynews.com/news1/next-energy-news2.5c.html

New Chemical Process Turns Forest Waste into Bio-Crude

CSIRO and Monash University have developed a chemical process that turns green waste into a stable bio-crude oil.The bio-crude oil can be used to produce high value chemicals and biofuels, including both petrol and diesel replacement fuels.

“By making changes to the chemical process, we’ve been able to create a concentrated bio-crude which is much more stable than that achieved elsewhere in the world,” says Dr Steven Loffler of CSIRO Forest Biosciences.

“This makes it practical and economical to produce bio-crude in local areas for transport to a central refinery, overcoming the high costs and greenhouse gas emissions otherwise involved in transporting bulky green wastes over long distances.”

The process uses low value waste such as forest thinnings, crop residues, waste paper and garden waste, significant amounts of which are currently dumped in landfill or burned.

“We’ve been able to create a concentrated bio-crude which is much more stable than that achieved elsewhere in the world.”Dr Steven Loffler

“By using waste, our Furafuel technology overcomes the food versus fuel debate which surrounds biofuels generated from grains, corn and sugar,” says Dr Loffler.

The plant wastes being targeted for conversion into biofuels contain chemicals known as lignocellulose, which is increasingly favoured around the world as a raw material for the next generation of bio-ethanol.

Lignocellulose is both renewable and potentially greenhouse gas neutral. It is predominantly found in trees and is made up of cellulose; lignin, a natural plastic; and hemicellulose.

Posted in Alternative Crops & Enterprises, Biofuels from Farms, Rural Development, Family farm Opportunities, Alternative Energy | Print | No Comments »

NZ Economy Helped by Dairy Farms — Thriving, Subsidy Free, Grass Based

4. January 2008 by P. Leslie Riley.

Mississippi’s once prosperous dairy industry is at crisis levels & may not exist much longer. Commissioner Spell in the Mississippi State Debate said this was a natural consequence of market forces.

Conventional “wisdom” big governement/ big corporation/ big land grant-USDA “experts” agree with this. The belief that they share with all is :
1) Dairy farms must be on a mega scale, confinment oriented, in dry climates, corporate owned heavily financed & with heavy inputs. And that there will be fewer and fewer.
Because of this, Mississippi cannot compete with new non-traditional dairy areas like California, Arizona, Wesr Texas, and Idaho where the arid conditions are “ideal” to put 4000 or 5000 head confinement dairy operations on 40 to 100 acres. Hire lots of help & “efficiently” run it like a factory.
2) This same folks also push for heavy subsidies on milk to “help” family farms ( they never quite say why the number of farms has decreased in direct proportion to the size/ number of dairies)
3) And, “conventional wisdom” is that Agriculture is at worst an impediment and at best a afterthought/ minor component of a healthy & growing economy.

Turning this “conventional wisdom” on it’s head with facts is New Zealand.
New Zealand’s dairy farms are almost exclusively grass based/ family owned
New Zealand got rid of subsidies 10 years ago — and are thriving.
And, according to the article below, New Zealand’s economy is in a slow down, but it being proped up by : the dairy industry.  Go Figure.

There is no reason that Mississippi can’t have a thriving dairy industry again that offers prosperity for hard working family farmers; produces healthier milk, cheese, butter, etc. for  Mississippians (which would, in turn, drive health care cost down); provides better Stewardship of God’s Creation; and is a vital part of economic growth for rural communities.

BUT, as we all know, one definition of insantiy is to continue doing the same thing, the same way, and expecting different results.

 http://www.nzherald.co.nz/topic/story.cfm?c_id=195&objectid=10484890

 Dairy bonanza likely to soften slowdown

5:00AM Tuesday January 01, 2008
By Brian Fallow 

The housing market is at a standstill.

The country ended 2007 with some respectable numbers on its economic report card.

The economy expanded 3.3 per cent in the year ended September, while inflation over the same period was 1.8 per cent.

The unemployment rate is 3.5 per cent, a record low.

The terms of trade - relative prices of the kinds of things we export compared with the kinds of things we import - are the most favourable since 1974.

The Government’s coffers are overflowing.

But the outlook is less rosy than these numbers would suggest. On a quarterly basis growth peaked back in March.

The economy expanded as much in the first half of 2007 as it had over the previous year and a half.

But it has slowed markedly since then as households, whose consumption represents more than 60 per cent of economic activity, battle higher mortgage rates and global inflation in oil and food prices.

The consensus among economic forecasters is that private consumption growth will run around 1.6 or 1.7 per cent through 2008 and 2009, the weakest rate since 2000.

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That is in spite of household incomes being underpinned by brisk wage growth, the prospect of tax cuts and a tsunami of dairy cash.

The problem is that the necessities of life - housing, food and energy - are gobbling up a larger share of people’s incomes, leaving less to spend on other things.

The housing market has flipped from one in which house prices were climbing and borrowing costs were low to one where house prices are flatlining but borrowing costs are rising.

After doubling over the the previous six years house prices, as measured by the Real Estate Institute’s national median, have been going sideways since May.

But the long boom has pushed the average house price to six times the average household disposable income, nearly twice its long-term average.

Households with mortgages are consequently carrying much more debt relative to their incomes than they used to and are more exposed to interest rates.

And with fear and suspicion now the dominant sentiment in international credit markets, the days when New Zealand banks could tap cheap money offshore to fund home loans are over.

Two-year fixed mortgage rates are now the highest they have been for nearly 10 years.

The average mortgage rate being paid is around 8 per cent, the highest since October 1998, and the Reserve Bank expects it to approach 9 per cent by 2009.

About 30 per cent of all fixed-rate mortgages, representing a quarter of all mortgage debt, come up for an interest rate reset over the next 12 months. At currently available mortgage rates these borrowers will face increases of 0.7 to 1.5 percentage points.

Meanwhile the plateau in house prices is expected to turn off a phenomenon which has turbocharged the domestic spending side of the economy in recent years: the wealth effect.

That is when people borrow and spend some fraction - a few cents in the dollar - of the increase in the value of the equity in their homes, allowing spending to grow faster than incomes.

The biggest new factor on the positive side of the income ledger is the prospect of a bumper dairy payout.

It will pump about $4 billion more cash into the economy than last season, says Westpac chief economist Brendan O’Donovan. And it will all get spent, he believes.

While some farmers will take the opportunity to reduce their debt, others will borrow to expand their operations. Rural land prices have already risen sharply as farmers do what they always do and capitalise improved returns, O’Donaovan says.

“In aggregate they won’t be paying down debt, they will be leveraging up.”

But it takes time for higher farm incomes to flow through the rural towns to the big cities.

And every silver lining has its cloud.

The global “agflation” that is boosting dairy farmers’ incomes is also making trips to the supermarket an increasingly expensive business.

Likewise the tightness of the labour market underpinning wage growth is partly because of a dwindling of net migration inflows as a widening income gap lures more and more New Zealanders across the Tasman.

The Reserve Bank forecast inflation to be above 3 per cent all through this year.

Crucially, it also expects it to remain in the top quartile of its target band of 1 to 3 per cent through 2009 as well, even with interest rates and the dollar remaining at their current elevated levels.

Those projections assume $1.5 billion worth of tax cuts, which may well prove to be on the low side, and do not include the impact of the emissions trading scheme on transport fuel costs from the start to 2009.

This makes for an environment in which the central bank has little”headroom” to accommodate further upward pressure on inflation.

Yet the international environment might deliver just that.

The global credit crunch could well get worse before it gets better.

If 2007 is anything to go by, when global risk aversion goes up the kiwi dollar goes down and investors lose their appetite for the carry trades which underpin the exchange rate.

That might be blessed relief for exporters but it pushes up the cost of imported goods.

The biggest uncertainty overhanging the economy in 2008 is how the global credit crunch, arising from the US sub-prime mortgage crisis, will play out. Rising global interest rates would be bad news for us, a country up to our neck in debt.

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This story was found at:
Copyright ©2007, APN Holdings NZ Limited

Posted in Foriegn Agriculture, Alternative Crops & Enterprises, Organic vs Conventional Faming, Over Regulation of Agriculture, Sale of Meat Direct to Consumers, Lester Spell, Mississippi Politics, Grass Farming, Dairy Farming, How Agriculture affects Everything else, Smaller Government, Freedom in Agriculture, Rural Development, Farm Subsidies, Difficult Issues in Agriculture & Rural Life, Agrarianism, Big vs Small Farms, Mississippi Agricultural News, Family farm Opportunities | Print | No Comments »

Researchers May Prove Campaign Claims Right about Farm Scale Ethanol Production

22. December 2007 by P. Leslie Riley.

During the Campaign I talked a good bit about a decentralized system for Biofuel prodction that would provide maximum benefit for farmers & rural communities & maximum independence from foriegn oil/ big government/ big business.
This was built upon a market based, bottom up approach and centered on the production and farm level processing of sugar/ sweet sorgum based fuel.

This idea was detailed in this post :
BioFuels #2 - Ethanol Produced on Farms
Farm Scale Fuel Production would mean economic boom for rural communities and less dependance on oil from the Middle East

And was met with some skecticism. However, according to this piece in Next Energy News researchers agree with the basic premise — that Sugar is a much better source of biofuels than what is currently being pursued . . . .

“Production of energy, such as ethanol, from sugar is more efficient than production from grains in both cost per unit and energy efficiency,” Da Silva says. “Sugarcane is ranked first among all other crops for biomass production and can be a key component of biomass supply. Technology for producing ethanol from sugarcane is well established in tropical countries such as Brazil, where energy independence has been achieved.”

Why is such a strategy not being pursued ?

Likely because it doesn’t offer more power/ controll to politicians & more $$$ in the hands of the multinational corporations that feed them . . .

 The election is over, but our fight for family farmers & more freedom has only begun

The entire article is here :

http://www.nextenergynews.com/news1/next-energy-news10.30a.html

Researchers Search for Perfect Crop for Biofuel Researchers have been studying fuels from biomass for years. Now, with growing dependency on foreign oils and an energy-conscious society emerging, biofuels are fast becoming part of a fuel revolution that could reach pumps all across America. Ethanol blends are already available at some gas stations. However, their availability varies from state to state, depending on the volume of ethanol produced. Sources of biomass for biofuel production in each state also vary widely.”To see it everywhere, we have to make more of it on a regional basis,” says Dr. Bill Rooney, professor of plant breeding and genetics, Soil and Crop Sciences Department, Texas A and M University. “The best source for biofuel in a region is contingent on the environment, growing season, water and fertility availability, stress resistance, and processing and conversion techniques. In any location, there will be several species grown for biomass.”Approximately 20 percent of grain sorghum is now used for ethanol production. Rooney is currently developing sorghum varieties specifically for bioenergy. He will discuss this topic on Wednesday, Nov. 7 during his talk, “Sorghum Breeding for Bioenergy Traits,” at the International Annual Meetings of the American Society of Agronomy (ASA), Crop Science Society of America (CSSA) and Soil Science Society of America (SSSA). He will speak at 2:30 pm during the symposium “Breeding and Genomics of Crops for Bioenergy” at the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center in New Orleans, room 207.Another presentation related to biofuels, “Sweet Fuel for the U.S.”, will be given by Dr. Jorge Da Silva, associate professor of molecular genetics and plant breeding, Soil and Crop Sciences Department, Texas A and M University, on Tuesday, Nov. 6 at 10:15 am. His presentation will be during the symposium “Agronomic Aspects of Biofuel Crop Production” in room 214 of the Convention Center. “Production of energy, such as ethanol, from sugar is more efficient than production from grains in both cost per unit and energy efficiency,” Da Silva says. “Sugarcane is ranked first among all other crops for biomass production and can be a key component of biomass supply. Technology for producing ethanol from sugarcane is well established in tropical countries such as Brazil, where energy independence has been achieved.” Although there is no finite development timeline, there is clearly a race for biofuels as the cost of petroleum reaches previously unimaginable levels, reserves diminish, and environmental concerns soar. If won, this race could bring about a revolution as significant as Henry Ford’s creation of the Model T car.

Posted in Sweet Sorgum & Sugar, Biofuels from Farms, Rural Development, Family farm Opportunities | Print | No Comments »

Could Algae become the Ultimate Alternative Crop for Family Farms ?

22. December 2007 by P. Leslie Riley.

33000 gallons of oil per acre — sounds like a profitable farm enterprise for some enterprising farm family . ..

http://www.nextenergynews.com/news1/next-energy-news12.17c.html

High Density Algae Test Delivers 33,000 Gallons of Oil Per Acre
The Vertigro Joint Venture has released initial test results from its high density bio mass (algae) field test bed plant located at its research and development facility in El Paso, Texas.

During a 90 day continual production test, algae was being harvested at an average of one gram (dry weight) per liter. This equates to algae bio mass production of 276 tons of algae per acre per year. Achieving the same biomass production rate with an algal species having 50% lipids (oil) content would therefore deliver approximately 33,000 gallons of algae oil per acre per year.

The primary focus of the 90-day continuous production test was determining the robustness of the field test bed. Other secondary tests were also conducted including using different ph levels, CO2 levels, fluid temperatures, nutrients, types of algae, and planned system failures. It is important to note that the system has not been optimized for production yields or the best selection of algae species at this time.

The next phase of development will include increasing the number of bio reactor units from 30 to 100 and then continuing a number of production tests that may further increase production as well as initiating various extraction tests. The results released today are in keeping with data previously announced from the Joint Venture’s laboratory proof of concept test bed. Subsequently, the joint venture intends to build out a one acre pilot plant with engineer design work underway at this time.

As a comparative, food crop such as soy bean will typically produce some 48 gallons oil per acre per year and palm will produce approximately 630 gallons oil per acre per year. In addition, the Vertigro Bio Reactor System is a closed loop continuous production system that uses little water and may be built on non arable lands.

Glen Kertz and Dr. Aga Pinowska, who head the research and development program, commented, “This is a major milestone for us as we have demonstrated the robustness of the Bio Mass System with satisfactory production results from a system that has not yet been optimized for algae production, which will become part of the next phase of testing.” They also noted, “We have learned how to produce a very large algal bio-mass under varying environmental and operating conditions in our continuous process photo bioreactors. We believe these initial results are amongst the best achieved to date, and we are confident we can now increase the productivity.”

“We are extremely pleased with the robustness and performance of the Vertigro technology in sustainably producing commercial quantities of algae biomass,” states Doug Frater, Global Green Solutions CEO. “Over the coming months we will further optimize the technology and demonstrate economic algae production for biofuel feedstock purposes.”

The Vertigo system may be a solution to the renewable energy sector’s quest to create a clean, green process which uses mainly light, water and air to create fuel. The Vertigro technology employs a proprietary high-density vertical bio-reactor that produces fast growing algae which may yield large volumes of high-grade algae oil. This oil can be refined into a cost-effective, non-polluting diesel biofuel, jet fuel and other applications. The algae derived fuel may be an energy efficient replacement for fossil fuels and can be used in any diesel powered vehicle or machinery. In addition, 90% by weight of the algae is captured carbon dioxide, which is “sequestered” by this process and so contributes significantly to the reduction of greenhouse gasses.

Posted in Rural Development, Family farm Opportunities, Alternative Energy | Print | No Comments »

Fuel from Timber Wastes

22. December 2007 by P. Leslie Riley.

Mississippi researchers at USM & MSU have been working on similar concepts. It would be nice to see someone in the private sector come up with model that could be profitable for family businesses in rural areas of our state.

http://www.nextenergynews.com/news1/next-energy-news12.21a.html

Quote:

Biomass Harvester Eats Trees to Make Bio-diesel A new machine to harvest forest underbrush for use as fuel had its first public demonstration Wednesday in woods east of New Bern. About 50 people in hard hats watched as the machine gobbled trees in the forest off County Line Road. Those watching the one-of-a-kind bush eater represented the gamut of public and private forest-related industries and service in North Carolina. The big red processor, pushed by a tractor on treads, uses carbide teeth to pulverize everything in its six-foot path. As the 56,000-pound behemoth cuts a trail, a belt-driven vacuum sucks the ground-up cuttings through an extended chute over the cab and into an agricultural silage wagon hitched to the tractor. Despite its weight, the machine produces ground pressure of only 7.1 pounds per square foot, so it moves easily over soft forest bed and pocosin. The biomass harvester is being developed by North Carolina State University for Fecon Inc., manufacturer of the heavy equipment and attachments including Bull Hog commercial mulchers, in cooperation with Tim Tabak, a Craven County forestry management consultant. The new harvester allows more of the forest’s organic products — bushes, leaves and needles, and trees under 6 inches in diameter — to be used for bio-diesel and ethanol in addition to its present market in steam-generated electric production, Roise said. “It is powerful,” he said. The machine has a 440-horsepower engine. When perfected, it is expected to be used mostly for plantation thinning in tree farming, for clearing between the rows, and for forest management, said Roise. Roise has been working since the summer with Tabak and NCSU Forestry graduate students Lindsay Hannum and Glen Catts to correct design flaws. But Roise said the work thus far has produced “results much better than we ever thought. It’s done remarkably.” Croatan National Forest District Ranger Lauren Hillman sees potential for forest management in fire prevention and habitat preservation or restoration. Camp Lejeune’s efforts to restore habitat for red-cockaded woodpeckers might be able helped by the machine, said Danny Marshburn, base forest manager. John Duff of Rankin Timber Company in New Bern said, “I think it will be useful tool on a lot of forest land that is tough to manage.” The machine can now harvest between two and four tons of forest bulk an hour and it’s real profitability lies in harvesting brush for bio-diesel and ethanol. Its advantage for that use is that it blows underbrush upward without picking up the dirt. The product saved from just being mulch on the forest floor contains both oil and sugar, said Roise and fellow NCSU professor Dennis Hazel. The oil would be used for bio-diesel or the sugar for ethanol. The professors are already debating which element of the biomass grabbed by the harvester will make it pay off first.

_________________

Posted in Rural Development, Family farm Opportunities, Alternative Energy | Print | No Comments »

Family Dairys vs Industrial, Globalist “MegaFarms”

3. December 2007 by P. Leslie Riley.

During my 2007 campaign for Ag Commissioner , two themes that repeatedly came up were how to best help Mississippi’s family farms & the possibly pending disapperance of the Dairy industry in Mississippi

I found the piece below on John Phipps’ excellent blog; is this just market forces at work ? Is the consolodation & even globalization of dairy farming a market-driven inevitability ? For at least two dozen reasons, I sure hope not.

You call that big?…

The injection of enormous new profits into agriculture should be the answer to the survival of small farms, right? I’m not so sure.

We’re just beginning to grasp that the economies of scale for industrial ag are over the horizon. From new module-building cotton pickers, to Class MMDXVL combines, fewer actual people are needed to reap those higher profits.

While smaller agrarian farms will flourish, the middle cannot hold, I believe. It cannot occur overnight, because of land ownership patterns, but the trend to consolidation is immune to government policy. The economics are simply too powerful to tolerate irrational business models.

Proof #16 - This announcement from EU dairy giant Danone:

Quote:

Danone is mulling the creation of several giant dairy farms around the world in order to secure supplies amid rising milk prices.The farms could be similar to that run by Al Safi, its partner in Saudi Arabia. Al Safi runs reputedly the biggest dairy farm in the world, situated 40 kms from Riyadh with a herd of 32,000 cows imported from Europe and the US. Danone uses milk from the farm to produce yogurts.

I will be in Las Vegas this week talking to the top of our dairy industry at the Elite Producers Conference. Those guys can teach the grain industry a few things, I’ll bet.

Posted in Agrarianism, How Agriculture affects Everything else, Big vs Small Farms, Difficult Issues in Agriculture & Rural Life, Rural Development, Family farm Opportunities | Print | No Comments »

Freedom-loving Farmer Arrested in Mich

3. December 2007 by P. Leslie Riley.

If this doesn’t make your blood boil, then you have no idea what this country was founded upon — if it does, get involved.

Even though the election is over, our battles have just begun :
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20071203/gumpert

Old McDonald Had a Farm…and He Got Arrested?

Just in time for the holidays, four beef carcasses hang from the improvised slaughterhouse at Greg Niewendorp’s 160-acre farm outside East Jordan, in the north of Michigan’s lower peninsula. It should be a happy Thanksgiving because, for the first time in eight months, his farm isn’t under quarantine by Michigan’s Department of Agriculture (MDA) and Niewendorp is free to slaughter cattle from his herd of twenty and fulfill contracts in time for the holidays to the couple dozen friends and neighbors who prize the specially bred grass-fed beef he produces.
Yet it’s also a bittersweet time, because the scars from his battle with the MDA are still fresh. Last February, he refused to subject his cattle to a mandatory state program to test cattle in his region of Michigan for bovine tuberculosis–a program he argues, among other things, is unnecessary because he distributes his beef privately to people who trust his animal-raising techniques, but which the state insists is essential to ensure the beef isn’t tainted.

The state immediately slapped a quarantine on his farm, prohibiting the movement of animals onto or off the property. Then, in August, an MDA inspector arrived, escorted by two Michigan State Police officers, and attempted to convince Niewendorp to have his cattle tested by a vet waiting down the road. Niewendorp angrily ordered the inspector and police off his property, telling them that, without a search warrant, they were trespassers.
Finally, in early October, a team of MDA inspectors and vets arrived again, this time with a search warrant and two sheriff’s deputies–and backed up by a half-dozen state trooper SWAT team members and three emergency medical vehicles down the road.

Niewendorp is convinced that “they would have liked to have killed me,” but this time he didn’t resist, so the vets did their deed and left. All the tests came back negative and the state lifted its quarantine last month.

While the matter is over for the state, Niewendorp says it’s just begun for him. “They’ll need a search warrant to do the test next year.” He’s also organizing the Michigan chapter of the National Independent Consumers and Farmers Association and says next year more Michigan farmers will refuse the test.

These should be happy times for owners of small farms. Not only are commodity prices way up, but the buy-local movement has caught fire around the country. Rapidly growing numbers of people are embracing the romantic notion of buying food directly from area farmers, sometimes driving hours into the countryside to buy veggies, meat and milk.

The number of farmers markets over the last five years has increased more than 50 percent, to nearly 4,500 from 2,800, according to the US Department of Agriculture. Since the European idea of Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) was adopted by a handful of US farms twenty years ago, enabling consumers to buy shares in the output of local farms, the concept has been adopted by as many as 3,000 small farms across the US. Thousands of consumers are trekking out to dairy farms to purchase suddenly popular unpasteurized milk for its perceived health benefits over the pasteurized stuff, according to the Weston A. Price Foundation, a promoter of raw (unpasteurized) milk consumption. (Retail sales of raw milk are prohibited in most states).

Cracking Down

But as the re-emergence of a farm-to-consumer economy draws increasing amounts of cash out of the mass-production factory system, the new movement is bumping up against suddenly energized regulators who claim they want to “protect” us from pathogens and other dangers.

Federal and state agriculture and health authorities say farmers are violating all kinds of regulations to meet fast-growing consumer demand, such as slaughtering their own hogs and cattle instead of using state and federally inspected facilities, and selling unpasteurized dairy products and cider without the proper permits. Farmers feel there are other issues lurking in the background and driving the regulators–for example, the National Animal Identification System (NAIS) under which farm animals are tagged with computerized chips for tracking; in most states the federal program is voluntary, but in Michigan it is mandatory, so the regulators who tested Greg Niewendorp’s cattle for bovine TB also affixed radio frequency identification tags to their ears.

Whatever the immediate cause, the result is the same: regulators are cracking down on small farms with a ferocity that has their new urban customers aghast.

In just the last few weeks, there have been at least a half-dozen notable incidents. In Virginia’s Nelson County, ten agriculture agents, aided by state police hauled off 62-year-old custom hog farmer Richard Bean, and his 60-year-old wife, Jean Rinaldi, for slaughtering their own hogs, charging them with a felony and eleven misdemeanors. Bean and Rinaldi were frustrated with the expense of having to haul their hogs more than two hours to the nearest slaughterhouse, and felt they could do it as well or better themselves.

In New York, health authorities shut down Munir Bahai’s apple cider operations in Victor on his busiest weekend of the season in early October, costing him $4,500 in sales because he wasn’t pasteurizing his juice. He says consumers travel thirty miles or more to buy his cider simply because it isn’t pasteurized.

Also in New York, the Department of Agriculture and Markets a few weeks ago quarantined the raw milk yogurt and buttermilk at Barbara and Steve Smith’s Meadowsweet Farm outside Ithaca, saying the state’s raw-milk permit program allows the direct sale only of milk, and prohibits other dairy products. Barbara Smith says she doesn’t sell the dairy products but rather distributes them to 130 consumer shareholders of a limited liability company (LLC) she set up as the owner of her farm’s eight-cow herd, and therefore is outside the purview of the state’s raw-milk permit system.

Some farmers are responding as Greg Niewendorp did in Michigan, with outright civil disobedience. In Pennsylvania, dairy farmer Mark Nolt continues in a standoff with agriculture authorities because he refuses to sell his raw milk under a state license. In August, authorities confiscated thousands of dollars’ worth of milk products using a court order. He argues that because he has private contracts with his area customers, he doesn’t need a license, and he continues to sell directly to consumers, despite the fact he could be arrested at any time.

The situation has gotten so bad that a group of consumers and lawyers banded together last summer to provide legal support to besieged farmers via the Farm-to-Consumer Legal Defense Fund. Its first two cases involve farmers in New York and Pennsylvania–both distributing unpasteurized milk privately to consumers. 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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Posted in Over Regulation of Agriculture, Efforts to Harm Rural Interests through "Divide & C, Beef Cattle, Sale of Meat Direct to Consumers, Grass Farming, Food Safety, Agrarianism, Freedom in Agriculture, Smaller Government, Difficult Issues in Agriculture & Rural Life, Big vs Small Farms, Family farm Opportunities | Print | No Comments »