About that new raw milk drinker

It’s a boy! Oliver Jakob VanderHout was born September 21, 2008 at home at Glencolton Farms. This is raw milk farmer Michael Schmidt’s second child with his new young wife, Elise. The midwife arrived just in time for the birth and Michael was also on hand to catch the baby and share in the experience.

All of Michael’s children have grown up drinking raw milk, and some are even giving raw milk to their own children. Michael and Elise were expecting a girl, but it turned out to be a boy. As Michael says, “There are more boys born in times of war, and this is a ‘milk war'”.

Two poems from the cow-share meeting

As part of his contribution to last weeks meeting of cow share members in Richmond Hill, Michael Schmidt opened the meeting with the following excerpt from a 1998 poem by Ben Okri titled “Mental Fight, an anti-spell for the 21st century”:

III
Or might we choose to make
This time a waking up event
A moment of world empowerment?
To pledge, in private, to be more aware
More playful, more tolerant, and more fair
More responsible, more wild, more loving
Awake to our unsuspected powers, more amazing.

We rise or fall by the choice we make
It all depends on the road we take
And the choice and the road each depend
On the light we have, the light we bend,
On the light we use
Or refuse
Or the lies we live by
And from which we die.

And then again, at the close of the evening’s proceedings, Mr. Schmidt offered another verse, this time by Rudolf Steiner, titled “For this Michael age”:

Intervener status sought at Michael Schmidt’s raw milk trial in January

It was noted at a recent cowshare members meeting that raw milk activist James Maclaren is or will be seeking intervener status in Michael Schmidt’s main trial on charges related to the Health Protection and Promotion Act (HPPA) . James is from the Ottawa area and has been involved with the the realmilk website.

At the meeting there was a buzz of discussion around the possibility of cow share members also seeking intervener status at the trial, since they are clearly a class of people who will be seriously affected by the outcome of the court proceedings. Doing so would clearly highlights the reality of the cowshare arrangement and get away from the false idea that this is all about Michael Schmidt. It’s not all about Michael Schmidt; it’s a community affair. There was further discussion about details of how such an application could be put together and how many people would need to get involved at what levels.

We heard that James had been told by someone at Health Canada that you can have clearer legal standing (or they take you more seriously) if you own a whole cow than if you own only a fraction of a cow. Someone at the meeting suggested that that was “nicely discriminatory”.