by Christopher Fisher

December 22, 2011

Amidst a spate of law enforcement raids and other regulatory actions taken by local, state, and federal officials against raw milk producers across the country, an alarmed group of small California dairy farmers and consumers have recently formed the Food Rights Coalition and begun to push state regulators and legislators to take action to help them.

At a Petaluma, California meeting last week, several local members of the group sought the assistance of 6th District Assemblyman Jared Huffman in an effort to keep on milking, expressing concern for the loss of their livelihoods and rights, and fear for the safety of their families.

The Coalition came together in recent months after the California Department of Food and Agriculture (CDFA) began issuing cease and desist orders to a number of small dairy herdshares across the state, ordering them to halt operations.

The CDFA has sent out at least a half dozen of the orders to herdshares in the past year, according to Farmer “J”, a Coalition member and Petaluma farmer who attended the Huffman meeting and spoke on condition of anonymity, in order to stay “off the radar” of the agency.

Prior to meeting Huffman, Farmer J, who operates a small, five-cow herdshare with her husband, stated in an interview that the CDFA’s actions forced them to reach out to other herdshares, farmers, and advocates and begin organizing.

“It was the fear of what they were doing and where that could be heading that led us to come together and try to protect ourselves and fight for our right to do what we’re doing - milking and caring for a few cows and sharing the milk with our co-owners.”

A herdshare is a private business arrangement whereby consumers purchase a piece, or share, of a cow, goat, or herd of the animals and contract with a farmer who is compensated for feeding, caring, and milking the animals, and bottling, storing, and distributing the milk. The details of the relationship between farmers and their herdshare co-owners may vary, but they generally feature the encouragement, sometimes requirement, that co-owners make some regular contribution to the animals’ care themselves.

Herdshares are often begun simply as a means of dealing with the volume of milk that can be produced by a lone family cow. One lactating cow can produce four gallons of milk per day, often much more, an amount which would be a challenge for most families to consume. Sharing that milk with family, friends, and neighbors often seems the logical, neighborly thing to do. According to the farmers interviewed for this piece, it also fits perfectly well within the rapidly growing movements toward small-scale, sustainable local agriculture and re-localized food production that recognize the looming threats to traditional industrial agriculture posed by climate change and fossil fuel depletion.

According to Farmer J, “Since most people don’t have the space or the animal husbandry knowledge, if they want raw milk they hire farmers to care for and feed their animals and get their milk.”

The herdshare co-owners and farmers themselves are often as varied a group of people as the population of the Bay Area itself.

“We wanted to explain to him [Assemblyman Huffman] that our co-owners are mothers, lawyers, doctors, teachers…they tend towards the educated professional side.” Likewise, “a lot of herdshare farmers are retired professionals who decided to go into this because they love milk, and want to do this themselves.”

According to Farmer “A”, who has a small West Marin herdshare and also spoke on condition of anonymity, transparency is key to a successful herdshare operation, and their co-owners are generally a passionate, well-educated bunch.

“A lot of our members have developed a personal relationship with our cow…we’ve had quite a few people come out and really inspect the whole farm. It’s important to them to see how the cows are treated and they have a say in how we feed them. Good pasture-management techniques are a very big deal to them.”

“But,” she continued, the CDFA just doesn’t know how to deal with small dairy operations, treating one or two cow operations as if they’re far larger, industrialized businesses. “They only have these large dairy guidelines, so whether you have two hundred, two thousand, or one cow you’re the same in their eyes.”

Raw milk is legal for retail sale in California, but current regulations regarding its production were largely written with big producers such as Organic Pastures in mind, which has over five hundred cows at its San Joaquin Valley operation.

According to the farmers interviewed for this piece, and the Farm-to-Consumer Legal Defense Fund, it has often been the process of bottling the milk that the CDFA has objected to, stating that the co-owners of a cow or goat may drink the milk from that animal on the farm, but when they leave the farm with that milk in a bottle the farm has become a processing plant, requiring special permits. The costs of obtaining those permits can run into the hundreds of thousands of dollars, an impossibility for most small dairies, said Farmer J.

“The farmers I know…I would say all of us became farmers because we love milk, we love cows, we love farming. I don’t actually know anybody who’s making a living doing it. If we didn’t live on my mother’s property and have neighbors who let our cows graze their land, we wouldn’t be able to do this.”

As alarming as the potential loss of their livelihoods may be, it’s been the wave of law enforcement raids upon raw milk producers across the country that has small dairy herdshares living in fear.
Thanks in part to the popularity of YouTube and a widely-screened documentary called Farmageddon, herdshare owners have grown frightened for the safety of their families after numerous instances where law enforcement officials raided farms and buyers’ clubs in full tactical gear, with guns drawn, rousting families from their slumber in the wee hours of the morning in search of contraband milk.

Meeting with Assemblyman Huffman, who is a candidate for the retiring Rep. Lynn Woolsey’s seat in the House of Representatives, the farmers appear to have found a sympathetic ear.

“The fact that we have policies that discourage local, even self-food production is unacceptable,” said Huffman. “I think you’re doing a wonderful thing. I’m a big fan of community-based agriculture and this is a great example of how it can work. I want the government to be a partner with you and not an obstacle. I certainly don’t want you to live in fear of some heavy-handed law enforcement action, so I’m going to be very interested in doing everything I can to get this turned around.”

It’s possible, however, that help may already be on the way.

Last summer, CDFA Secretary Karen Ross suggested the formation of a working group on herdshares, representing all stakeholders concerned, which would make recommendations on the issue of regulating small dairies. It has become known as the Small Herd Dairy Working Group.

According to members of the Coalition, the CDFA has acknowledged that current regulations do not cover herdshares and state regulations for commercial dairies were not appropriate for them either.

Having concluded its second meeting on December 7, it remains to be seen whether the apparently open and collaborative approach embodied by the Working Group will yield results that allow for herdhshares to relax and keep on milking.

Yannick Phillips, a representative of the California State Grange who is a member of the Small Herd Dairy Working Group and who also accompanied Farmers A and J to meet Assemblyman Huffman, was cautiously optimistic.

“I think they’re [the CDFA] up for this, but they want to make everybody happy, and the big ones are the Farm Bureau and W.U.D. [Western United Dairymen]. If they feel like there’s opposition from them to these proposals, they’re going to swing the other way.”

Farmer A suggested the big dairy players in California may have deep-seeded reasons for resisting legitimizing dairy herdshares. “They might be worried about more people becoming informed about grain. It really upsets a cow’s rumen and changes the bacterial levels in milk. What you feed a cow and how you treat it really affects what comes out of the cow. I think the more people become enlightened about that process, the more they [big dairy interests] might be fearing the public’s knowledge about how they’re farming and possible regulations that might come down the channel at them.”

“There’s a lot of support for herdshares in Sonoma and Marin,” she continued, “But there’s also a lot of worry about the next steps that will be taken. Right now it’s milk, but people are worried about eggs and even community gardens. Where does it stop when they start coming after families’ source of their own food?”

One thing the farmers of the Food Rights Coalition agree upon is that they’d love to live without fear - fear of losing their farms, fear for their families’ safety, fear of being out in the open.

Said Farmer J, “It’ll be nice when everyone can come out of the barn.”

This article originally appeared at Civil Eats: http://civileats.com/2011/12/22/small-dairy-farmers-fear-coming-out-of-the-barn/

I was reminded of the farm’s significance the other day, when our local paper - the Argus Courier - printed Elaine Silver’s report on our community’s growing reliance upon food pantries for supplemental food.

Committee on the Shelterless (COTS) officer Michael Johnson pointed out to Silver that demand for food boxes from local pantries has increased by nearly 40% since 2008, with no indication that the stressful, difficult times many in our community are experiencing will improve anytime soon. The Argus report arrived one week after a study was published by Feeding America, which documented the dramatic changes that have taken place among the nation’s network of food banks. The study found that while many of the organizations’ clients still require food to fill immediate needs, most of them now rely upon the food banks for regular and frequent food supplements for their pantries, describing this change as a move from “emergency” to “chronic” food assistance. For many people, food banks are replacing grocery stores as family incomes drop and cannot keep up with rising costs.

The Bounty Farm can not only provide fresh food for those in need, it can help to teach those of us with the ability to grow our own food to do so, right here, right now, wherever we are - by replacing that under-utilized but perfectly green front yard, on our apartment balconies, the nearest community garden, and in that narrow little space between the curb and sidewalk out front. This aspect of the farm’s programs brings to mind the famous proverb often attributed to Lao Tzu, which likely has equivalents from similarly wise folks worldwide, throughout human history:

Give a man a fish,