NFU will double your donations to Cow Share Canada to help legalize raw milk

With a little help from our friends... Michael Schmidt talks with a couple of supporters after being sentenced in late November of 2011.

The Grey Local Executive of the National Farmers Union has decided to support the Cow Share Canada campaign to legalize direct-farm sales of milk.

They say they will match up to $5,000.00 in donations made by February 1, 2012.

If you would like to support this cause, make cheques payable to the “National Farmers Union – Grey Local” and send them to:

Kristine Hammel,
Grey Local Secretary/Treasurer,
R.R. #3 Allenford, Ont.,
N0H 1A0.

Chicken processor, Maple Lodge Farms, is now facing sixty criminal charges

From The Toronto Star:

“The Canadian Food Inspection Agency has laid 60 criminal charges against Brampton-based Maple Lodge Farms, Canada’s largest independent chicken processor, alleging violations of federal animal health regulations.

The CFIA alleges that between December 2008 and February 2009, and then December 2009 and April 2010, thousands of chickens died from exposure to cold conditions during transportation from farm to slaughterhouse, often because of proximity to a truck trailer’s floor or walls.

Two of the counts have been heard in a series of six hearings at the Ontario Court of Justice, in Brampton, which began in September. The hearings continue on Monday.

Get dirty and avoid vaccinations…

From Dr. Lawrence Solomon in the Financial Post:

“We can’t suggest we become dirtier and expose our children to more bacteria,” said Dr. Moshe Ben-Shoshan of the Division of Allergy and Clinical Immunology at Montreal Children’s Hospital. Our determination to prevent disease may lead to more allergies, he believes, but if so, it would be worth it. “If the price of having fewer allergies is more infection, I don’t know any parent who would expose their child to more infection.”

Dr. Ben-Shoshan, lead author of a study just published in the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology, is both wrong and wrong-headed. Wrong because parents in their thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, willingly expose their children to infection. Wrong-headed because he has no basis to assert that dirt and bacteria hurt children more than they help them. Evidence abounds to the contrary.