Here’s evidence that Ontario raw milk crusader Michael Schmidt is not the only farmer willing to go to jail in support of people’s right of access to healthy food. As I’m sure you’ve heard by now, the USDA has been holding listening sessions around the country in recent weeks to help build public consensus in support of the implemetation of NAIS (National Animal Identification System). And consensus has certainly been building, but it’s a consensus that NAIS is not needed or wanted in any form whatsoever. Here’s a report from the session in Kentucky, by Kristen M. at the Food Renegade blog:
Poet/farmer Wendell Berry speaks at NAIS listening session in Kentucky.
“The National Animal Identification System (NAIS) listening sessions taking place across the country came to Kentucky last month. Wendell Berry, the agrarian poet and small farm activist, was there.
Story after story from these listening sessions has confirmed one thing: small farmers across the country are 100% opposed to the NAIS legislation. As you probably already know, NAIS promises to require every single livestock animal in America to be identified and tagged — no matter the size of the operation. So, you’ve got a few backyard chickens? Some milking goats? A small free-range pig farm? Say hello to expensive tagging & government paperwork. Not only will NAIS be so burdensome as to put many small scale farmers out of business, but it is a huge infringement on our liberties…”
“….Read the text of his testimony:
The need to trace animals was made by the confined animal industry – which are, essentially, disease breeding operations. The health issue was invented right there. The remedy is to put animals back on pasture, where they belong. The USDA is scapegoating the small producers to distract attention from the real cause of the trouble. Presumably these animal factories are, in a too familiar phrase, “too big to fail”.
This is the first agricultural meeting I’ve ever been to in my life that was attended by the police. I asked one of them why he was there and he said: “Rural Kentucky”. So thank you for your vote of confidence in the people you are supposed to be representing. (applause) I think the rural people of Kentucky are as civilized as anybody else.
But the police are here prematurely. If you impose this program on the small farmers, who are already overburdened, you’re going to have to send the police for me. I’m 75 years old. I’ve about completed my responsibilities to my family. I’ll lose very little in going to jail in opposition to your program – and I’ll have to do it. Because I will be, in every way that I can conceive of, a non-cooperator.
I understand the principles of civil disobedience, from Henry Thoreau to Martin Luther King. And I’m willing to go to jail to defend the young people who, I hope, will still have a possibility of becoming farmers on a small scale in this supposedly free country. Thank you very much. (applause, cheers)
Did you catch that? Wendell Berry will go to jail if NAIS becomes law!…”
Read the rest of her Kristin’s post and listen to the audio link here.
The Bovine 
Good for you Wendell! Sadly, the time for civil disobedience is upon us yet there are far too few aware of the need for it.
Incidentally, there is a lot of talk of our liberties, consumer rights and so on with the raw milk debate, yet I have not read any arguments about our loss of culture. The family dinner table is (was) the locus of culture since the dawn of humanity… the corporate agricultural production and distribution system backed by government legislation is taking this integral piece of our culture out of our homes and away from us. The famous anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss said that food is equivalent in order of magnitude to each culture as is its language. It is downright criminal what is being done to our food in general, and thus our culture overall. It should not only be our right to choose to drink raw milk but also looked upon as our right to maintain our cultural heritage. I would like to see a lawyer take up this argument; it is a strong one and should be quite easily defended. If Sikhs can win the right to carry their traditional knives in Canada with the cultural argument, then why should any European, African, Indian, (or anyone with a cultural background whose food incorporated dairy animals like goats, cows, sheep, oxen, and so on) not also be able to defend their cultural rights to drinking/having access to/selling raw milk and their products? Why are we North Americans giving up our traditions and cultures so easily?
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