[babystrangeloop]

It's all about control. If you aren't permitted to produce food then those who are control you.

http://FarmageddonMovie.com/

"Farmageddon": Government thugs vs. organic farmers
Contraband sheep! Illicit yogurt! A new documentary explores the bureaucratic attack on crunchy farming
By Andrew O'Hehir / Salon / July 8, 2011

... A Vermont family has its entire herd of imported sheep destroyed, thanks to a completely imaginary outbreak of mad-cow disease (which is not known to occur in sheep in the first place, and definitely didn't occur in theirs). Armed agents invade an upstate New York farm to seize a cooler full of raspberry yogurt. An undercover unit breaks up an interstate trafficking ring -- one devoted to bringing USDA-certified raw milk from South Carolina across the line into Georgia. ...

It's a movie which overflows the screen and oozes out the cinema doors into the world to go on and on. An epidemic tidalwave of hysteria-inducing reality showing you that you are just some puny prisoner trapped on a ship of fools bent on going over the falls.

Paula Deen Cited For Chicken Possession
Filed by Joe Satran / Huffington Post / July 5, 2011

Last week, The Huffington Post noted that Paula Deen's backyard hens faced eviction due to zoning violations. A new dispatch from the Savannah Morning News indicates that their expulsion may be moving forward. Deen was apparently cited for her chickens by Chatham County Building Safety and Regulatory Services for their violation of county zoning codes.

The citation came after similar action against neighbors of Deen's, Bill and Jan Lynes, who keep 22 chickens. The Lynes have said that they plan to contest the current zoning laws to keep their chickens. Deen's representatives have remained noncommittal in their response to the citation, saying that Deen will comply with whatever ruling county officials ultimately reach.

Paula Deen cited by Chatham County for having [too many] chickens
By Mary Landers / SavannahNow / July 3, 2011

In fact, before local chickens got their feathers ruffled over zoning there was evidence of a growing urban chicken population here. A talk at Savannah's Earth Day Festival in April focused on how to raise chickens and there have been several tours of local chicken coops. A Facebook page called Savannah Backyard Chickens boasts 121 members. Some hail from within Savannah where it's clearly OK to keep up to five hens (or five mules, cattle, sheep, goats, rabbits, guinea pigs and oddly, hamsters, though roosters are verboten) but many others live outside city limits.

Woman Faces Jail Time for Planting Garden in Oak Park, Michigan
Evalynn J. Saeyang / Gather / July 09, 2011
A woman is facing 93 days in jail for planting a garden in front of her Oak Park home. The woman, Julie Bass, decided to plant a garden instead of a lawn after her front yard was ripped apart and underwent sewer repairs. Bass choose to plant numerous vegetables but when the city caught wind of what she had done, they asked her to replace her vegetables with only "suitable" plant material such as lawn, flowers, shrubs.

Julie Bass and her garden on TV: http://youtu.be/LhPAHhwApA4

No food production for you! Just keep eating from supermarkets where you don't know anything about the food except you can see the immense fossil fuel powered vehicles that it shows up in.

[peeker01]

have you ever lived next door to an urban chicken coop? I have, and it's no treat. It's
one thing if you are on 40 acres, and you are the only one listening to the roosters 24/7,
another if you don't appreciate them.

all civil societies have laws. without laws you have anarchy.

[dohboi]

We have had a number of roosters in our neighborhood. I find it charming though a bit startling at times. In these cases, I am fairly sure they are kept for sacrificial purposes (Hmong traditional practices).

[Sixstrings]

Does anyone actually die from unpasteurized milk? What I don't get is how did milk suddenly become dangerous in 1950.

[peeker01]

yes, many deaths, but with no cnn, who knew but the neighbors.

http://infectiousdiseases.about.com/od/ ... kborne.htm

[EnergyUnlimited]

Ech, well Americans,
Your still existing food safety laws and zoning regulations are the final fits of decadent society struggling to delay descending into Third World status.

Laws will struggle on for a while and then collapse into chaos and safety will be replaced by healthy risk taking practices which are incidentally selecting the fittest (but also the richest...) to survive.

No, unpasteurized milk is not that dangerous but on very few occasions it can be and time is coming to accept it as a matter of life.
Have drunk a lot of it and still alive and well.
It is also much tastier than a sh*t from your licensed food store.

As a kid I was also scratched by roaster on one or two occasions, that is not a life threatening (albeit must be frightening for modern man) experience.
I do not find their noise offensive.

[Cog]

Sanitation is an important consideration when using unpasteurized milk. Cleaning the udders before milking the cow, milking into a sterilized container, and having healthy animals is a consideration. Other than that, unpasteurized milk can be perfectly safe to drink.

[EnergyUnlimited]

Sanitation is an important consideration when using unpasteurized milk. Cleaning the udders before milking the cow, milking into a sterilized container, and having healthy animals is a consideration. Other than that, unpasteurized milk can be perfectly safe to drink.

Ever seen a panzer-cow which have grown a thick layer of s*** on its body due to lack of hygiene?
I have drunk much milk from these because in the past farmers in Poland did not consider to provide adequate hygiene important.
Still alive...
It is often a TB infected cow which may prove to be a Nemesis of unpasteurized milk drinker.
Well, but these are rare...

[Cog]

Ever seen a panzer-cow which have grown a thick layer of s*** on its body due to lack of hygiene?

Call me an elitist but dried cow s*** floating in my unpasteurized milk doesn't appeal to me.

[babystrangeloop]

There is no national conspiracy to crush the local food movement. Unpasteurized milk in the hands of amateur producers is dangerous.

True, you can stand with one foot in Maryland and one foot in Pennsylvania and sell raw milk. One half of your body will be a criminal and the other half will be perfectly legal.

[babystrangeloop]

Call me an elitist but dried cow s*** floating in my unpasteurized milk doesn't appeal to me.

I go to a farm of sorts which I call the "cow toilet". There a lady and her husband harness petroleum to grow hay and feed corn and feed it to bovines which stand in their own excrement in a small enclosure.
I tune into Avec Eric and see Joel Salatin of Polyface, Inc in Swoope, VA using exciting techniques for raising animals that avoid having them stand in their poop. You can see the episode on Hulu or Blip for free:

blip

I buy all of Joel's books on how to do things right for the "cow toilet lady" and she tells me after reading some of them she isn't interested because "the chickens will eat the corn".

That's the good old USA for you. Genius standing side by side with dementia.

[Loki]

infectious diseases

That link says nothing about deaths caused by raw milk. Try again.

Raw milk should be purchased and used only when informed about its potential problems and when seeing for yourself the conditions in which it's produced. If worried about, it's quite easy to home pasteurize it.

[babystrangeloop]

seeing for yourself the conditions in which it's produced

Ah yes, that procedure you cannot take when you buy from a supermarket.

[Loki]

There is no national conspiracy to crush the local food movement. Unpasteurized milk in the hands of amateur producers is dangerous. Local health department do not have the training, expertise or the budget to monitor these businesses. You willing to pay higher taxes to change this?

False choice. Raw milk is not inherently dangerous, it depends on the producer. Check out the conditions for yourself before buying, it's as simple as that, doesn't require an army of bureaucrats and a doubling of taxes.

I'd be far more worried about imported food or the garbage they serve at Taco Bell than the raw milk I get from the guy down the road with one dairy cow (Daisy). His barn is absolutely SPOTLESS by the way.

There are all sorts of rules, regulations, subsidies, policies, and other government nonsense that get in the way of small-scale local food production, raw milk is just the tip of the iceberg. The fedgov's entire food policy is meant to encourage "cheap food" and large-scale industrial producers. This comes at the expense of small farmers.

Government policies are stacked against small farmers, from "food safety" to agricultural subsidies for mega-farms (unfair competition) to immigration policies (mega-farms couldn't survive without armies of illegals) to local zoning issues to public university ag departments (mostly geared to help the mega-farms) to legalizing morally abhorrent factory animal farms and allowing them to externalize their pollution costs. The list goes on and on.

I want to dress my beef and pork on the farm where I’ve coddled and raised it. But zoning laws prohibit slaughterhouses on agricultural land. For crying out loud, what makes more holistic sense than to put abattoirs where the animals are? But no, in the wisdom of Western disconnected thinking, abattoirs are massive centralized facilities visited daily by a steady stream of tractor trailers and illegal alien workers.

But what about dressing a couple of animals a year in the backyard? How can that be compared to a ConAgra or Tyson facility? In the eyes of the government, the two are one and the same. Every T-bone steak has to be wrapped in a half-million dollar facility so that it can be sold to your neighbor. The fact that I can do it on my own farm more cleanly, more responsibly, more humanely, more efficiently, and in a more environmentally friendly manner doesn’t matter to the government agents who walk around with big badges on their jackets and wheelbarrow-sized regulations tucked under their arms.

OK, so I take my animals and load them onto a trailer for the first time in their life to send them up the already clogged interstate to the abattoir to await their appointed hour with a shed full of animals of dubious extraction. They are dressed by people wearing long coats with deep pockets with whom I cannot even communicate. The carcasses hang in a cooler alongside others that were not similarly cared for in life. After the animals are processed, I return to the facility hoping to retrieve my meat.

When I return home to sell these delectable packages, the county zoning ordinance says that this is a manufactured product because it exited the farm and was reimported as a value-added product, thereby throwing our farm into the Wal-Mart category, another prohibition in agricultural areas. Just so you understand this, remember that an on-farm abattoir was illegal, so I took the animals to a legal abattoir, but now the selling of said products in an on-farm store is illegal.

Joel Salatin's "Everything I Want to Do Is Illegal"

[babystrangeloop]

All milk should be processed in a double boiler right in your own kitchen or it will destroy you forever!

Besides once you've pasteurized it the milk can be made into tasty yogurt at home.

Bacterial culture growth follows a bell curve too just like oil production.

If you eat yogurt at the time when the bacterial culture growth is at the peak of the bell curve you get maximum health benefits.

Therefore it is a waste of time and energy for supermarket mike to be pasteurized when you will just have to consume more fossil fuels re-doing it at home.

[Loki]

It's just romantic to say that local people are more honest than big corporations. Imagine if Taco Bell poisoned you. The truth would spread like wildfire and a multi-billion company would be damaged, perhaps fatally. Now imagine if a local greasy spoon poisoned you? No one would care.

I didn't make the claim that locals are more honest than globals. I said to see for yourself the conditions in which your food is being produced, and that I'm satisfied with my local milk guy. Can't do that with supermarket grub. I switched to local raw milk not because I care about pasteurization, but out of disgust with how Big Dairy treats animals. This video put me over the edge.

By the way, the worst case of food poisoning I ever got was 15+ years ago at a Dairy Queen, 24 hours of feverish, diarrheal hell. I haven't eaten at Dairy Queen since. Should have sued the bastards.

I was a member of the Organic Trade Association way back when. Members lobbied for decades to get US federal standards to bring order and consistency to hundreds of regional and states productions systems. The National Organic labels meant transparency for the consumer and producer alike.

I'm not talking about organic standards, though I consider them quite problematic. I'm just talking about the fedgov's general preference for and encouragement of Big Ag, which acts to the detriment of small producers. I'd say the organic standards are one (relatively small) expression of that bias in favor of Big Ag.

You can kill and dress a carcass in your backyard. You can even share it with friends. You just can't retail it.

Exactly. Thanks for making my point. Small farmers dealing with livestock either have to abuse their animals by sending them off to slaughter at some "USDA-inspected" death factory staffed by illegals, or they have to break the law and hope they don't get caught. I know some guys who do the latter, and I'm happy to buy their chicken.

A few years ago the farm I work at was faced with the choice of getting out of the pastured poultry business or going a million dollars in debt in order to build a USDA-inspected processing facility. We grow vegetables now, no more pastured poultry....