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
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