Grass-fed fluid milk producer in Ohio takes on the big-dairy monopoly

This story about Snowville Creamery is originally from Graze magazine and appears on the Snowville Creamery website under the title “Grass-Fed Fluid Milk in Danger“:

Building a dream for grass-fed fluid milk:  Snowville Creamery wants to return taste and value to milk

By Joel McNair

Pomeroy, Ohio

The dream is big, the vision wide, the obstacles great. Warren Taylor wants nothing less than to resurrect American fluid milk quality and consumption from sorrowful depths.

Warren believes that a product that has become a standardized, industrialized and sometimes sterilized shadow of its former self can be returned to the wonderful food that so many mothers and children enjoyed in the days of his youth. Milk made with grain, hormones and stressed-out cows can instead come from contented animals grazing lush pastures.

Manna Storehouse Coop SWAT raid #7 — The Stowers tell their story

Ohio’s Buckeye Institute for Public Policy Solutions is taking legal action on behalf of the Stowers of Manna Storehouse Coop. Here’s a statement about the case published today on the Buckeye Institute website.:

“Columbus – The Buckeye Institute’s 1851 Center for Constitutional Law today took legal action against the Ohio Department of Agriculture (ODA) and the Lorain County Health Department for violating the constitutional rights of John and Jacqueline Stowers of LaGrange, Ohio. The Stowers operate an organic food cooperative called Manna Storehouse. ODA and Lorain County Health Department agents forcefully raided their home and unlawfully seized the family’s personal food supply, cell phones and personal computers. The legal center seeks to halt future similar raids. The complaint was filed in Lorain County Court of Common Pleas.

Manna Storehouse #6, and speaking up for the kind of world we want, without “drinking the kool-aid of fear”

Manna sheep in happier days

NEW DEC. 17: Manna Storehouse 7: The Stowers tell their story.

Here’s  a summary of the Manna Storehouse story so far, fact-checked and verified by the Weston A. Price Foundation’s very own publicist, Kimberly Hartke. To my knowledge the Stovers who run Manna Storehouse have still not come out with a statement to the media regarding the raid, so there may yet be further revelations to come in the week(s) ahead.

Valuable intelligence from Project Camelot

But before we proceed with Kimberly’s story, I’d like to add a few words about the excerpts which follow. The interview they are from provides a helpful framework with which to understand how the Manna Storehouse raid could be seen as a kind of “test-marketing” for a new style of policing (or repression). And according to that interview, the planners would be carefully monitoring everyone’s response through internet and telephone traffic, as well as through the more public media, to see how they could “model” this “perturbation” they’ve caused to the status quo, all the better to better roll out their “program” smoothly when the time comes.

Manna Storehouse raid pt 5, 5a, 5b — Big brother and the holding company? — or the tip of a much bigger “iceberg”

Free with vaccination? -- compulsory NAIS

Part 5a added at bottom 2:30 pm.

Part 5b added Wednesday 6:15 am

In her intro to the Manna Storehouse story, Linn Cohen-Cale of OpEdNews.com has some fascinating things to say about NAIS now becoming mandatory. Involuntary “induction” into the program apparently takes places when a farmer brings an animal to a vet to be vaccinated. Even more scary, she talks about “premises ID” being an instrument by which farmers sign away title to their land to the World Bank, as collateral for the U.S. debt. These issues ultimately affect everyone, but farmers are on the front lines, so to speak. Unfortunately, the link she gives in this story no longer works. If readers have any further leads on this topic, please comment on this post or email thebovine at gmx dot com. Here’s some of what Linn says in her preamble to her report on the Manna Storehouse raid:

Manna Storehouse SWAT, part 4: Did police really enter “with guns drawn”?

Manna Storehouse sheep - from Manna Storehouse website

NEW DEC. 17: Manna Storehouse 7: The Stowers tell their story.

On the Complete Patient blog, “An Observer” asked the question  whether “...with weapons drawn and trained on Katie Stowers and her children.” was an accurate description of the “event”.

David E. Gumpert  replied: “An Observer’s questioning of my description of the event raises an important journalistic issue. The problem is I only had one side of the story: Katie’s. I tried three government sources to try to obtain their side of the story, especially as regards the law enforcement tactics. ODA wouldn’t talk about it, and referred me to Lorain County Health Department. Those people wouldn’t talk about it, referring me to county prosecutor. He didn’t return my call. In that situation, I could say it’s not clear what happened, since I didn’t have the government’s side. But isn’t that really giving the government’s refusal to discuss the matter preference over Katie’s version? I decided it was, and went with Katie’s version. If someone from the government told me the officers hadn’t drawn their weapons on women and children, and simply requested they stay seated in the living room while a search warrant was executed, I would have said that. But the government officials clearly didn’t want to talk about it….”

Manna Storehouse “S.W.A.T.”, part 3

"Sheep may safely graze?" -- Manna Storehouse photo

NEW DEC. 17: Manna Storehouse 7: The Stowers tell their story.

NOTE: This story was updated 12 noon Sunday (scroll to bottom for latest additions — Part 3a)

By now it seems the story of the SWAT team raid on Manna Storehouse coop in Ohio is “going viral” on the interwebs. A Google search for “Manna Storehouse coop raid” yields 3500 results. The story is being posted or discussed on countless blogs, boards and websites. Here’s one site that’s done a good job of aggregating the available data on the case. And here on the Bovine, this story alone accounted for something like 1,200 hits — and that would be just from yesterday. So it’s definitely a story people care about, even if it’s almost totally ignored by mainstream media. The one local paper that carried the story mentioned nothing about the SWAT team or the family being held at gunpoint.

Some significant new information came to light about the case on Friday, when journalist David E. Gumpert called Katie Stover and learned that while she and her family were being held at gunpoint in their own home by American authorities, her “head of the household” was serving his country in Iraq. Read David’s excellent analysis here on the Complete Patient Blog titled “Seems U.S. forgot to tell Navy Seabee Chad Stover the real war is being fought here … and he’s the enemy.”

Here’s a little from that report:

More on ODA’s Manna Storehouse raid

Manna Storehouse photo

NEW DEC. 17: Manna Storehouse 7: The Stowers tell their story.

Our earlier post “ODA ‘swats’ Manna Storehouse co-op” is proving to be tremendously popular. Following up some of the traffic sources and ping-backs I eventually found more details on the story, which is looking more and more bizarre. Here’s some of what Berit Kjos is saying about it over on the True Discernment blog. From the looks of things, somebody up there must think Amish farmers are more of a threat than those “terrorists” we hear so much about.

“On Monday, December 1, a SWAT team with semi-automatic rifles entered the private home of the Stowers family in LaGrange, Ohio, herded the family onto the couches in the living room, and kept guns trained on parents, children, infants and toddlers, from approximately 11 AM to 8 PM. The team was aggressive and belligerent. The children were quite traumatized. At some point, the “bad cop” SWAT team was relieved by another team, a “good cop” team that tried to befriend the family.

ODA “swats” Manna Storehouse Co-op

Sheep from Manna Storehouse (pic from Manna Storehouse website)

NEW DEC. 17: Manna Storehouse 7: The Stowers tell their story.

Apparently undaunted by past legal rebukes, the Ohio Department of Agriculture recently raided a food coop in La Grange that was providing grass-fed beef, lamb, pastured poultry and other Weston-Price-style foods. Raw milk was not specifically mentioned, so we don’t know whether that might have been a factor. But the extent and style of the regulator action in this case bears a definite resemblance to what happened at Michael Schmidt’s Glencolton Farms back on Nov. 21, 2006. The Bovine learned about this incident from a comment on the Complete Patient blog by Don Neeper. Here’s part of what Don said:

Pastured chicken, Nature's Acres, Berlin Ohio, (one of Manna Storehouse's suppliers)

“Manna Storehouse, a food co-op in La Grange, providing grass fed beef, lamb, pastured poultry and other Weston A. Price foods was raided yesterday [Monday, Dec. 1st] by SWAT, ODA officials, and local authorities.

Running Moo-shine from Pennsylvania

This story about “Cowshine” is from the blog of the Midland Agrarian, who hails from Western Pennsylvania. Here’s he has to say:

Photo by Polly Pasteurize, from WAPF Wise Traditions conference, via the Haphazard Gourmet Girls blog

“Saturday, my wife and I ran over to the local dairy where we buy our raw milk. We drink about two gallons of milk a week, unless we are making cheese or cooking a lot. The dairy is a nice 15 minute country drive, and the milk is $4.00 per gallon. Over the past few weeks, I have been noticing more cars with Ohio plates, and more people buying LOTS of milk. Last Saturday, this culminated in a woman buying somewhere around 40 gallons of raw milk to take back home to Cleveland. We, and two other local people waited patiently while this lady filled her 40+ jugs one at a time from the bulk tank. She will drive the 90 miles home and fill her freezer, then thaw the milk as she needs it.

The State of Ohio, in its infinite wisdom has deemed raw milk too dangerous a substance to be sold to the general public. Our local licensed raw milk dairy is the nearest place these poor people can come to legally get milk that has not been pasturized and homogenized so it can taste like swill and probably lose its nutrients. I keep telling the dairy to send a Christmas card to the Ohio Department of Agriculture. ODA might miss the card, because they seem to be busy conducting undercover stings against anyone who would sell raw milk.

Ohio Department of Agriculture loses challenge over legal uses of raw milk

Check out this story by Tom Lotshaw of the Marietta Register. Here’s an excerpt:

“Ohio Department of Agriculture [ODA] officials engaged in illegal rulemaking and violated the constitutional rights of two local farmers in order to stop them from legally using raw milk as an ingredient in their pet food products, a Washington County judge ruled last Wednesday in Marietta.

Common Pleas Judge Ed Lane’s ruling, wholly against the ODA, ends at least for now a two-year struggle against the ODA by Washington County farmers Linda Fagan and Donna Betts.

The ruling orders the State of Ohio to pick up the tab for attorney fees and court costs that were incurred by Fagan and Betts, and leaves the two women free to resume production of their pet food products using raw milk.

In February 2006 the ODA issued stop orders against each of the two women for selling pet food products “made from milk, [which] is not recognized as a feed ingredient under the definition of [the] Association of American Feed Control Officials.”

There had been no complaints against the pet food products, and Fagan and Betts had both been licensed by the ODA to produce them using raw cow and goat milk, per ODA-approved labels, for nearly five years.