Michigan Agriculture Department Raids Small Farms, Destroys Food

[XLFD]

While people to the south of them in Detroit are having a third-world crisis in just getting water supplies to their people thanks to the bizarre public policies, the town of Standish (located due west of Saginaw Bay) has their food supplies under a more bizarre assault by the State's Department of Agriculture (MI Ag).

 

MI Ag forced Standish residents Joe and Brenda Golimbieski, the owners of  Hill  High Dairy and Jenny Samuelson, the owner of My Family Co-op, to dump  out 248 gallons of milk, to break 100 dozen eggs, and to destroy an  undisclosed amount of fresh cream, butter and cheese.

 

 

 

 

A post on the Hill High Dairy page on Facebook says the agents from the MDA stood over the family, watching as the food was destroyed. 

 

According to the owners of the dairy, the  MDA threatened to arrest the co-op owner, Jenny Samuelson,  for “selling  food without a license.” However, the farm is a co-op, where people  must buy shares. The MDA, however, said that the co-op contracts were  invalid, and therefore, instead of being shared, the food was being  sold. Because co-op members had paid for their shares, technically the  MDA stole food that belonged not just to the Golimbieski family, but to  every single member of that co-op.
One member wrote angrily:

This is such a shame! I paid for these  products and this is what happened!!!! They are all criminals!!!  Government stealing all our food! I paid just so that Jenny and the  farmers didn’t have to carry the burden all on their own!!!! A crying  shame. Shame on Michigan's Department of Agriculture!

 

If you look at the website and Facebook page,  all you see are happy, well-treated animals, actually roaming around in  fields.  How is it that Michigan approves of the horrific conditions in  its state’s factory farms, where animals are tortured, drugged, and  crammed into cages for the entirety of their miserable lives, but  raising animals humanely and naturally is considered “dangerous”?  What kind of world do we have when real farming and products of those farms are criminalized, while unhygienic factory farms, untested food engineering, and their unhealthy products get forced on the population's dinner tables?

 

MI Ag is not acting to support  small farmers or people who wish to be self-sufficient. They are locking down the market for corporate farms. (Such as Dean Foods, who also  owns Horizon Organics – read more about the way this company does business - they own up to 90% of the corporate milk business in the state, according to an article on The Complete Patient.)

David Gumpert, a raw milk advocate and owner of the site The Complete Patient wrote:

The government-sponsored dump of nearly $5,000 of milk, eggs, butter, and cream from Michigan’s My Family Co-Op yesterday  carried a very clear and powerful political message to all Americans:  We control your food and we don’t like you buying your food outside the  corporate food system. Every now and then, we are going to remind you of  what bad children you are being by taking your food and throwing it in  the garbage. In fact, we are going to do more than remind you, we are  going to completely humiliate you by preventing you from even feeding it  to farm animals and instead forcing it to be disposed of in a landfill  or dumpster…

…If you think I am exaggerating the intent of what is going on here,  ask yourself this question: When was the last time you saw government  agents seize and condemn food from a place like Foster Farms or Taco  Bell or Del Monte or Kellogg’s or Trade Joe’s when their food has been  found to contain pathogens, or made people sick? There’s been not even a  suggestion that food at My Family Co-Op contained pathogens or made  anyone sick. (Read the rest of Mr. Gumpert’s excellent essay on the subject)

 

 

 

The above picture of a government agent of the Michigan Department of Agriculture looking on while the farmer has to spoil their milk should make one think twice about how the public's interest was promoted by the action, and whether a benevolent agency of the state would operate this way. 

[Willy]

Out of control Government once again demonstrates how insane things have gotten. This is the same scenario as the "feral pig" situations. Just think what is going to happen when they bring the hammer down with a fully implemented national health care system. It's going to be a matter of life and death for many people.

[XLFD]

Same scenario, different agency.  The MI DNR was the despotic force in Michigan's version of George Orwell's Animal Farm, declaring pigs with certain characteristics as 'feral' and in need of being destroyed, even when they have been in a farmer's pigpen all of their life, just like several generations of their pig descendants. 

The similarity to the pig situation is that Big Agriculture lobbied the two regulatory agencies into going to these extremes.  Our representatives need to put a stop to this, but enough of them also feed at the trough.