Customers and Other Supporters to Attend Court with Farmer

 

 

URL link for this release: http://www.farmtoconsumer.org/news_wp/?p=8172

Contact: Liz Reitzig, Co-founder, Farm Food Freedom Coalition

301-807-5063, lizreitzig@gmail.com

Pete Kennedy, President, Farm-to-Consumer Legal Defense Fund, 703-208-3276, info@farmtoconsumer.org

 

Farmer Faces Jail for Feeding Community: 

Customers and Other Supporters to Attend Court with Farmer

 Baraboo, WI—May 8, 2013–GlobeNewswire–Food rights activists from around North America will meet at the Sauk County Courthouse in this tiny town on May 20 to support Wisconsin dairy farmer Vernon Hershberger and food sovereignty. Hershberger, whose trial begins that day, is charged with four criminal misdemeanors that could land this husband and father in county jail for up to 30 months with fines of over $10,000.

The Wisconsin Department of Agricultural Trade and Consumer Protection (DATCP) targeted Hershberger for supplying a private buying club with fresh milk and other farm products.

DATCP has charged Hershberger with, among other things, operating a retail food establishment without a license. Hershberger repeatedly rejects this, citing that he provides foods only to paid members in a private buying club and is not subject to state food regulations. “There is more at stake here than just a farmer and his few customers,” says Hershberger, “this is about the fundamental right of farmers and consumers to engage in peaceful, private, mutually consenting agreements for food, without additional oversight.”

A little more than a year ago, food rights activists from around the country stood in support of Hershberger at a pre-trial hearing.  They read and signed a “Declaration of Food Independence” that asserts inherent rights in food choice. This month after the trial each day, many of the same food rights activists plus others will gather at the Al Ringling Theater across the street from the courthouse and hear presentations by leaders in the food rights movement. Notable speakers include Virginia farmer Joel Salatin, Mountain Man show star Eustace Conway, and food rights organizer from Maine, Deborah Evans.

Hershberger, and other farmers around the country, are facing state or federal charges against them for providing fresh foods to wanting individuals. In recent months the FDA has conducted several long undercover sting operations and raids against peaceful farmers and buying clubs that have resulted in farms shutting down and consumers without access to the food they depend on.

Information about farm raids: http://www.FarmFoodFreedom.org

For additional information on raw milk: http://www.westonaprice.org

URL for Event:  http://www.farmfoodfreedom.org/event/vernon-hershberger-trial

Joel Salatin Makes it to Harvard with “Folks, This Ain’t Normal” at the 2012 Ancestoral Health Society Symposium

Joel Salatin — Folks This Ain’t Normal! from Ancestral Health Society on Vimeo.

Joel Salatin delivering the keynote address at the 2nd annual Ancestral Health Symposium (AHS12).

Joel is a third generation beyond organic farmer and author whose family owns and operates Polyface Farm in Virginia's Shenandoah Valley. The farm produces salad bar beef, pigaerator pork, pastured poultry, forage-based rabbits and direct markets everything to 4,000 families, 40 restaurants, and 10 retail outlets.

A prolific author, Salatin's seven books to date include both how-to and big picture themes. The farm
features prominently in Michael Pollan's NYT bestseller Omnivore's Dilemma and the award-winning
documentary, Food Inc.

Folks, This Ain’t Normal Based on his book by the same title, this whimsical performance is filled with history, satire, and prophecy. While most Americans seem to think our techno-glitzy disconnected celebrity-worshipping culture will be the first to sail off into a Star Trek future unencumbered by ecological umbilicals, Salatin bets that the future will instead incorporate more tried and true realities from the past.

Ours is the first culture with no chores for children, cheap energy, heavy mechanization, computers, supermarkets, TV dinners and unpronounceable food. Although he doesn’t believe that we will return to horses and buggies, wash boards, and hoop skirts, Salatin believes we will go back in order to go forward, using technology to re-establish historical normalcy.

That normalcy will include edible landscapes, domestic larders, pastured livestock, solar driven carbon cycling for fertility, and a visceral relationship with life’s fundamentals: food, energy, water, air, soil, fabric, shelter. We may as well get started enthusiastically than be dragged reluctantly into this more normal existence. Rather than being an abstract, cerebral, academic look at ecology, food systems, and soil development, this talk is based firmly on a lifetime spent communing with ecology, economics, and emotion in their full reality, as a farmer.

Both sobering and inspiring, this performance empowers people to tackle the seemingly impossibly large tasks that confront our generation. Historical contexts create jump-off points for the future–a future as bright as our imagination and as sure as the past.