Celebrating 20 yrs of Michael Schmidt’s struggle for raw milk freedom and food rights in the province of Ontario

It’s been 20 years since the first Grey-Bruce County health department raids on farmer Michael Schmidt over raw milk in 1994. To mark the occasion some friends held a party for Michael Schmidt last Saturday. This poem was from one of the presentations:

Raw Milk Sting

Poet Judith McGill with Michael Schmidt and friends at a party last Saturday to celebrate 20 years of the struggle for raw milk access and food rights in Ontario.

A poem by Judith McGill

We’ve known for some time through surveillance cameras

The comings and goings

of the bovine milk runners

the corridors they transverse

under the cloak of darkness

We know how they enter and deliver the stuff in its purest form

Then proceed silently back to the sunlit fields where it is grown in abundance

We have seen them fertilize the crop and then carry it under their coats to him

We know how it is stored in large vats and packaged in litre jars with white lids

ready to take to the streets

We know that there are no safe handling practices used in the plant

We wonder at the care taken to preserve every drop of the white stuff.

We watch the clandestine movement of this intoxicating white substance from afar

We have mapped out the trafficking of this material the direct route it takes from the fields into the city

We know the ports of entry and the distribution network like the back of our hands

We have interrogated and warned farm neighbours

We have assigned protectors of the public interest to ready their guns and

Obtain the required vestments to safely handle and dispose of this hazardous substance

We believe, we must believe that it is not safe for human consumption and that only careless radicals would pay the black market price to imbibe

Though our memories take us back to the days when a sip of the white stuff could cool a summer eve

We have notified the politicians the law makers and secured their consent and good wishes

We have paid off the lobbyists for a job well done.

We have written and gained proper approval of our media campaign

We have printed signs of prohibition to post on the doors of the manufacturing plant

We have nothing left to do but go in for the kill

Or are we meant to call it the sting?

For sting it shall be, disarm the combatant, remove his livelihood, subdue his spirit,

Charge him and keep him in court forever more

Michael Schmidt –The Don of Raw Milk