Everything I Want to Do Is Illegal: War Stories from the Local Food Front

Chapter 1

The Original Essay-Acres USA

In 2003 I was asked to be part of an international group to visit Laverstoke Farm in Great Britain, home of former Formula 1 racing champion Jody Scheckter, to discuss and forecast the pressing needs of a heritage-based food system. American gardening icon Eliot Coleman recommended that I be included in the group, and I held onto his coattails the entire trip.

Dan Barber, owner-chef of internationally-acclaimed Blue Hill Restaurant flew over to add his culinary artistry to the storybook pastoral setting an hour’s drive from London. Jody’s idea was to assemble, in his words, “the best of the best” farmers from around the world to identify where the clean food movement had been, where it was then, and where it needed to go. Kind of a visioning forum.

Taking our meals around Jody’s magnificent 30-seat dining room table, we enjoyed the remarkable setting, a courteous and lavish host, and deep food-system conversations. On the final day, in the final session, we wrestled with the question, “What is the biggest impediment facing your farm specifically and the nonindustrial food system generally?”

We went systematically around the table as each participant critiqued current weak links. Several farmers mentioned labor; some mentioned cheap organic global trafficking; others mentioned consolidation and regulation in seed companies. As my turn approached, I was desperate for a way to succinctly capture how I wrestled with the regulatory and bureaucratic hurdles that constantly swarmed over us. When my turn came, I just blurted out, “Everything I want to do is illegal.”

Everyone at the table burst into laughter. They figured I wanted to smoke dope or run off with the neighbor’s wife. I was actually taken aback by their response, and realized how funny it would sound to the average person. After the laughs and good-natured verbal jabs subsided, I said, “I’m serious about this.” And what poured out of my soul was the accumulated frustration I had experienced with bureaucrats. Soon, every head at the table nodded in agreement and with understanding. Indeed, it was almost an epiphany for all of us as we realized this common denominator among industrialized nations – the so-called developed countries – that universally stifles what people in non-developed countries enjoy as a staple of their diet: local, indigenous, home-processed foods.

Upon returning home, I resolved to write an essay for ACRES USA magazine using the title I had blurted out in that room. It ran in the September issue of 2003, and has been by far the most quoted and most reprinted essay I have ever written. Chapter One of this book, fittingly, should be an unedited version of that original essay that always seems to bring a smile and nods of assent from anyone trying to create local food systems.

“EVERYTHING I WANT TO DO IS ILLEGAL”

Everything I want to do is illegal. As if a highly bureaucratic regulatory system was not already in place, 9/11/01 fueled renewed acceleration to eliminate freedom from the countryside. Every time a letter arrives in the mail from a federal or state agriculture department, my heart jumps like I just got sent to the principal’s office.

And it doesn’t stop with agriculture bureaucrats. It includes all sorts of government agencies, from zoning, to taxing, to food inspectors. These agencies are the ultimate extension of a disconnected, Greco-Roman, western, egocentric, compartmentalized, reductionist, fragmented, linear thought process.

1. ON-FARM PROCESSING. 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 abbattoirs where the animals are? But no, in the wisdom of western disconnected thinking, abbattoirs 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? Why is that a Con-Agra 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 more environmentally doesn’t matter to the government agents who walk around with big badges on their jackets and wheelbarrow-sized regulations tucked under their arms.

Okay, 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.

And when I return home to sell these delectable packages, the county zoning ordinance says this is a manufactured product because it exited the farm and was re-imported 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 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.

Our whole culture suffers from an industrial food system which has made every part disconnected from the rest. Smelly and dirty farms are supposed to be in one place, away from people, who snuggle smugly in their cul-de-sacs and have not a clue about the out-of-sight-out-of mind atrocities being committed to their dinner before it arrives in microwavable four-color labeled plastic packaging. Industrial abbattoirs need to be located in a not-in-my-backyard place to sequester noxious odors and sights. Finally, the retail store must be located in a commercial district surrounded by lots of pavement, handicapped access, public toilets and whatever else must be required to get food to people.

The notion that animals can be raised, processed, packaged and sold in a model that offends neither our eyes nor noses cannot even register on the average bureaucrat’s radar screen. Or, more importantly, on the radar of the average consumer advocacy organization. Besides, all these single-use megalithic structures are good for the gross domestic product. Anything else is illegal.

2. ON-FARM SEMINARS AND AGRI-TAINMENT. In the disconnected mind of modern America, a farm is a production unit for commodities; nothing more and nothing less. Because our land is zoned agricultural, we cannot charge school kids for a tour of the farm because that puts us in the category of “Theme Park.” Anyone paying for info-tainment creates “Farmadisney,” a strict no-no in agricultural zones.

Farms are not supposed to be places of enjoyment or learning. They are commodity production units dotting the landscape like factories are manufacturing units and office complexes are service units. In the government’s mind, integrating farm production with recreation and meaningful education creates a warped sense of agriculture.

The very notion of encouraging people to visit farms is blasphemous to an official credo that views even sparrows, starlings, and flies as a disease threat to immuno-compromised plants and animals. Visitors entering USDA-blessed production unit farms must run through a gauntlet of toxic sanitation dips and don moonsuits in order to keep their germs to themselves. Indeed, people are viewed as hazardous foreign bodies at Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs).

Farmers who actually encourage folks to come to their farms threaten the health and welfare of their fecal concentration camp production unit neighbors, and therefore must be prohibited from bringing these invasive germ-dispensing humans onto their landscape. In the industrial agribusiness paradigm, farms must be protected from people, not to mention free range poultry.

The notion that animals and plants can be raised in a way that their enhanced immune system protects them from kindergartners’ germs, and that the animals actually thrive when marinated in human attention, never enters the minds of government officials dedicated to protecting precarious production units.

3. COLLABORATIVE MARKETING. I have several neighbors who produce high quality food or crafts that complement our own meat and poultry. Dried flower arrangements from one artisan, pickles from anther, wine from another, and first class vegetables from another. These are just for starters.

Our community is blessed with all sorts of creative artisans who offer products that we would love to stock in our on-farm retail venue. Doesn’t it make sense to encourage these customers driving out from the city to be able to go to one farm to do their rural browsing/purchasing rather than drive all over the countryside? Furthermore, many of these artisans have neither the desire nor time to deal with patrons one-on-one. A collaborative venue is the most win-win, reasonable idea imaginable—except to government agents.

As soon as our farm offers one item not produced here, we have become a Wal-Mart. Period. That means a business license, which is basically another layer of taxes on our gross sales. The business license requires a commercial entrance, which on our country road is almost impossible to acquire due to sight distance requirements and width regulations. Of course, zoning prohibits businesses in our agricultural zones. Remember, people are supposed to be kept away from agricultural areas—people bring diseases.

Now, if we could comply with all the above requirements, a retail outlet carries with it a host of additional regulations. We must provide designated handicapped parking, government-approved toilet facilities (our four household bathrooms in the two homes located 50 feet away from the retail building do not count)—and it can’t be a composting toilet. We must offer X-number of parking spaces. Folks, it just goes on and on, ad nauseum. All to just help a neighbor sell her potatoes or extra pumpkins at Thanksgiving. I thought this was the home of the free. In most countries of the world, anyone can sell any of this stuff anywhere and the hungering hordes are glad to get it. But in the great US of A we’re too sophisticated to allow such bioregional commerce.

4. EMPLOYING LOCAL YOUNGSTERS AND INTERNS. Any power tool—including a cordless screwdriver—cannot be operated by people under the age of 18. We have lots of requests from folks wanting to come as interns, but what do we call them? The government has no category for interns or neighbor young people who just want to learn and help out.

We’d love to employ all the neighbor young people. To our child-fawning and worshiping culture, the only appropriate child activity is recreation, sitting in a desk, or watching TV. That’s it. That’s the extent of what children are good for. Anything else is abusive and risky.

And then we wonder why these kids grow up bored with life and nothing to do. Our local newspaper is full of articles and letters to the editor lamenting the lack of things for young people to do. Let me suggest a few things: dig postholes and build a fence, weed the garden, plant some tomatoes, split some wood, feed the chickens, wash eggs, prune the grapevines, milk the cow, build a compost pile, grow some earthworms.

These are all things that would be wonderfully meaningful work-experience for the youth of our community, but you can’t just employ people anymore. A host of government regulatory paperwork surrounds every “could you come over and help us ...?” By the time the employer complies with every Occupational Safety and Health Administration requirement, posts every government bulletin requirement, withholds for taxes, shoulders Unemployment Compensation burdens, medical, Child Safety regulations-he can’t hire anybody legally or profitably.

The government has no pigeonhole for this: “Hi, I’m a 17-year-old homeschooler and I want to learn how to farm. Could I come and have you mentor me for a year?” What is this relationship? A student? An employee? If I pay a stipend, the government says he’s an employee. If I don’t pay, the Fair Labor Standards board says it’s slavery, which is illegal. Doesn’t matter that the young person is here of his own volition and is happy to live in a tee-pee. Housing must be permitted and up to code. Enough already. What happened to the home of the free?

5. BUILD A HOUSE THE WAY I WANT TO. You would think that if I cut the trees, mill the logs into lumber, and build the house on my own farm, I could make it however I wanted to. Think again. It’s illegal to build a house less than 900 square feet. Period. Doesn’t matter if I’m a hermit or the father of 20. The government agents have decreed, in their egocentric wisdom, that no human can live in anything less than 900 square feet.

Our son got married last year and wanted to build a small cottage on the farm, which he now oversees for the most part. Our new saying is “He runs the farm, and I just run around.” The plan was to do what Mom and Dad did for Teresa and me—trade houses when children come. That way our empty nest downsizes and the young people can upsize in the main family farmhouse. Sounds reasonable and environmentally sensitive to me. But no, his little honeymoon cottage—or retirement shack—had to be a 900 square foot Taj-Mahal. A state-of-the-art accredited composting toilet to get away from a septic system and sewer leach field was denied.

And when the hillside leach field would not meet agronomic standards and we had to install it in the flood plain, I asked the health department bureaucrat why. He said that essentially the only approvable leach fields now are alongside creeks and streams because they are the only sites that offer dark enough colored soils. Sounds like real environmental stewardship, doesn’t it?

Look, if I want to build a yurt of rabbit skins and go to the bathroom in a compost pile, why is it any of the government’s business? Bureaucrats bend over backwards to accredit, tax credit, and offer money to people wanting to build pig city-factories or bigger airports. But let a guy go to his woods, cut down some trees, and build himself a home, and a plethora of regulatory tyrants descend on the project to complicate, obfuscate, irritate, frustrate, and virtually terminate. I think it’s time to eradicate some of these laws and the piranhas who administer them.

6. OPTING OUT OF THE SYSTEM. I don’t ask for a dime of government money. I don’t ask for government accreditation. I don’t want to register my animals with a global positioning tattoo. I don’t want to tell officials the names of my constituents. And I sure as dickens don’t intend to hand over my firearms. I can’t even use the “O” word (Organic).

On every side, our paternalistic culture is tightening the noose around those of us who just want to opt out of the system. And it is the freedom to opt out that differentiates tyrannical and free societies. How a culture deals with its misfits reveals its strength. The stronger a culture, the less it fears the radical fringe. The more paranoid and precarious a culture, the less tolerance it offers.

When faith in our freedom gives way to fear of our freedom, silencing the minority view becomes the operative protocol. The native Americans silenced after Little Big Horn simply wanted to worship in their beloved Black Hills, use traditional medicinal herbs to cure diseases, educate their children in the ways of their ancestors, and live in portable homes rather than log cabins. By that time these people represented absolutely no threat to the continued Westernization and domination of the North American continent by people who educated, vocated, medicated, worshiped, and habitated differently.

But coexistence was out of the question. Just like the forces that succeeded in making it illegal for me to use the “O” word, the western success at Wounded Knee quashed the little guy. What does the Organic Trade Association have to fear from me using the “O” word? If society really wants government certification, my little market share will continue to deteriorate into oblivion. If, however, the certification effort represents a same-old, same-old powergrab by the elitists to exterminate the fringe players, it is merely another example of fear replacing faith.

Faith in what? Faith in diversity. Faith in each other. Faith in people’s ability to self-educate, thereby making informed decisions. Faith in seekers to find answers. Faith in marketplace dynamics to reward integrity and not cheating. Faith in creation to heal. Faith in healthy plants and animals to withstand epizootics. Faith in earthworms to increase fertility. Faith in communities to function efficiently and honorably without centralized beltway interference. Faith in ACRES USA to come every month with a cornucopia of insight and information.

Our culture’s current fear of bioterrorism shows the glaring weakness of a centralized, immuno-deficient food system. This weakness leads to fear. Demanding from on high that we irradiate all food, register every cow with government agencies, and hire more inspectors does not show strength. It shows fear. It does not show faith in the natural balance between good bugs and bad bugs when plants and animals are raised in habitats that allow them to achieve their individual physiological expression. It does not show faith in relationship marketing, farm-gate sales, or Community Supported Agriculture to build protection and integrity into the food system.

Indeed, official policy views all these minority production and marketing systems that have been shown faithful over the centuries to be instead something that threatens everyone and everything. As a tee-pee loving, herb healing, home educating, people-loving, compost-building, retail farmer, I represent the real answers but real answers must be eradicated by those who seek to build their power and fortunes on a lie. The lie being that genetic integrity can be maintained when corporate scientists begin splicing DNA. The lie that, as Charlie Walters says, toxic rescue chemistry is better than a balanced biological bath. The lie that farms are disease-prone, unfriendly, inhumane places and should be zoned away from people.

Those of us who desire to opt out—both patrons and producers—must pray for enough cleverness to circumvent the system until the system cannot sustain itself. Cycles happen. And because things are this way today does not mean they will be this way next year. Hurrah for that.

Often the greatest escapes occur at the moment the noose becomes tightest. I’m feeling the rope, and it’s not very loose. Society seems bound and determined to hang me for everything I want to do. But there’s power in truth. And for sure, surprises are in store that may make society shake its collective head and begin to question some seemingly unalterable doctrines. Doctrines like the righteousness of the bureaucrat. The sanctity of government research. The protection of the Food Safety and Inspection Service. The helpfulness of the USDA.

And when that day comes, you and I can graciously offer our society honest food, honest ecology, honest stewardship. May the day come quickly.

Chapter 2

Raw Milk and Dairy

When I was a late teen and contemplating how to become a full-time farmer on our family’s farm, I remember as if it were yesterday that milking ten cows and selling the milk at regular supermarket prices would be all I needed.

We always milked a couple of Guernsey cows by hand. Few things are as relaxing as the cow’s quiet breathing and cud-chewing accompany the squirt-squirt of the milk sudsing into the bucket. Often a cat sat nearby, ready to catch a target-practice squirt aimed squarely into its mouth.

We brought the milk into the house, strained it through a paper filter to catch any hair or dirt pieces, and refrigerated it in big pots to let the cream rise. Using a shallow dipper, we skimmed off the cream and used that for butter, whipping cream, and ice cream. We made cottage cheese and yogurt with what we couldn’t drink. Sometimes we had so much milk we fed it to a couple of pigs.

We sold butter and cottage cheese to neighbors and at the Curb Market. A precursor of today’s Farmers’ Markets, the Staunton Curb market began during the depression era as a means for cash-deprived farmers to earn money. Farmers never lacked for food, but they did lack for cash.

As food safety laws proliferated during the next few decades, the Curb Market enjoyed wonderful exemptions because it was under the authority of the Extension Service. In order to sell there, vendors had to join an Extension Homemaker’s Club—originally called the Home Demonstration Clubs, until the word demonstration became a liability during the Vietnam war protest era—and men had to be involved in Extension programs. A memorandum of agreement between the food police and Extension created a congenial arrangement between the two organizations.

The food police were willing to exempt the Curb Market vendors from the infrastructure requirements because the vendors were getting the latest greatest government food safety thinking through the Extension Service. By the time I came on the scene as a 14-year-old in 1971, the once-bustling Curb Market had dwindled to two elderly matrons and was located in the old train warehouse district of town. During the 1950s and 1960s, the market dwindled as the culture became enamored of everything industrial. The allure of the supermarket, boughten bread (remember that one from the Little House on the Prairie Books?), and white sugar tempted people to abandon their roots and throw common sense out the window. Even breast feeding babies, that contemptibly barbaric act, gave way to enlightened Infamil and Similac.

Consumers summarily pulled up their food anchors and sailed for bright lights and citified facades. During the late 1960s and especially the early 1970s, of course, this trend reversed itself in the hippie movement yearning for meaning, soul, and Woodstock. But during the 20-30-year cultural love affair with everything unnatural, all of this magnificent community-based food infrastructure was lost. And the ensuing problems created by this pseudo-food alternative foisted a mountain of bureaucracy and regulation on everything involving food. That is where we are today.

Opening each Saturday morning at 6 a.m., the Curb Market at one time sported some 40 vendors and was the retail action place in the community.

I joined 4-H in order to qualify for the exemptions, and during the 1970s, my high school years, our family sold butter, cottage cheese, yogurt, uninspected fresh beef and pork that we either dressed and butchered at home or at a custom facility, and eggs. I would dress my spent laying hens at home, cook them in the oven in a big roaster pan, pull off the meat, cut it up into quart freezer containers, and sell it as pre-cooked boneless chicken. We sold vegetables and home-processed rabbit.

One of the two ladies sold potato salad, pound cake, bread, cakes, and pies. The other lady sold some baked goods but also home-processed and cured pork and lots of vegetables. This was the Viet Nam era, just before the hippies traded their pot and free love for organic food and marriage. But even then, the Curb Market was a toehold for local and artisanal fare, and attracted a steady clientele. It was an anachronism when I was there. The fledgling poultry industry was just getting started; hence the product was not yet bad enough to drive away masses of consumers like it does today. Food borne bacteria hardly existed; nobody had heard of cloning, genetic engineering, irradiation, or mad cows. Avantis and Monsanto were high-risk start-up companies.

When I went to college, we closed down our booth. During that four years, the other two ladies quit and the Curb Market was no more. Tragic. Tragic. I often wonder what would have happened had I not gone to college, but rather stayed at the curb market to enjoy grandfather status as the food laws became worse and worse. I’m confident that my presence there gave the two grandmas renewed enthusiasm for their business and perhaps kept the market going a little longer than it would have otherwise. By a long, long shot, I am now the last surviving vendor of the Staunton Curb Market, a distinction I wear with honor and pride. Those were the glory days.

That is where our family learned the power of value adding. We did not price things much above supermarket rates, but by selling retail, we made a nice gross margin even as small farmers. That was the spark that has carried our family through. Of course, at that time the American family still ate many meals around a dining room table. Chicken franks and boneless, skinless breasts had not arrived on the supermarket shelves yet. Home cooking was still home cooking, not just micro-waving heat-and-eat packages.

So here I was, late teen, dreaming of farming, trying to figure out how to make it happen. Mom and Dad worked off the farm, he as an accountant and she has a high school health and physical education teacher, to pay for the land. The mortgage had been paid. But how could I get cash? I didn’t need much—$10,000 was plenty. I had neighbors, old-timers they are called, who milked 15 cows by hand. All of them had forearms the size of vegetarians’ thighs.

I knew I could milk 10 cows by hand, earn $1,000 per cow, and make a fine living. Only one little problem: it was illegal. If there is one product that has been demonized in our modern day, it is raw milk. All sorts of diseases allegedly trace their origins to this hazardous product.

Milk-related illnesses, though, are a blip on the screen of human history. They did not exist before the industrial revolution. Here’s the nutshell. Without refrigeration, and without rural electrification and refrigerated trucks, food systems were more local in, say, 1910. Breweries grew up in the cities to service the needs of the locale. These distilleries generated byproducts. In those early days of industrial farming, large dairies sprang up around the distilleries as a garbage disposal for their byproducts called distiller’s grains.

These byproducts change the pH of the rumen to more acidic, which changes all sorts of balances within the cow. A confluence of factors created a pathogen-laden environment for humans. In the 19-teens, the biggest issue confronting cities was horse manure. In fact, many planners were prophesying that cities would literally be flooded with manure. No one at that time envisioned that it would cease to be a problem within one short decade with the advent of the automobile.

Another factor complicating things was the return of thousands of young men from foreign countries carrying exotic diseases—like Spanish Flu—in the aftermath of World War I. All of this manure, disease, lack of human hygiene, and sick cows combined to create an unprecedented pathogen proliferation. Tuberculosis, undulant fever, whooping cough, and scarlet fever are all results of this deadly confluence.

Interestingly, a new set of diseases is now threatening our population as a result of industrial food. These are primarily obesity, food borne pathogens like E.coli, camphylobactyer, lysteria, bovine spongiform encephalopathy, and salmonella, along with Type II diabetes, heart disease, and cancer. These things were unheard of before 1900, when industrial food began its steady encroachment on the world food system.

In fact, in his blockbuster book Guns. Germs, and Steel. Jared Diamond points out that the close connection between large domestic animals and people in Medieval Europe created pathogenic immunities in people. I wonder if we aren’t entering a new phase, where our culture is becoming disconnected from the physical to such an extent that we are losing immunological ground. Intuitively, we can appreciate the need for callouses, blisters, splinters, cuts, and bruises, not to mention eating some dirt on carrots or ingesting small amounts of impurities in milk or cider to keep our immune systems exercised.

That we’ve become an exercise-machine-only culture, not to mention Nintendo and cyber-creation, is probably setting us up for a collision course with newly virulent industrial-strain pathogens at the very time when we are least able to handle them. We should be rolling in the dirt, gardening, wrestling with some brambles and skinning animals for supper. These are important immune system builders.

As a culture, then, we went through a spasm of adjustment to these new pressures, worked through them, and emerged on the other side. But during this thirty-year adjustment (roughly 1915-1945), we created a body of perceptions about milk; namely, that it was not inherently wholesome when it comes out of the cow. Secondly, rather than stop feeding cows inappropriate waste products, government food safety officials imposed pasteurization rules that mandated a whole new set of infrastructure between teat and drinking glass.

As usual, rather than cleaning up our collective act, we as a culture went blindly forward with a paradigm that disrespected and dishonored nature but assumed we could technologically fix the problem such dishonor engendered. What an egocentric view. Such arrogance will naturally be attacked by bugs and bacteria to balance out the egocentrics.

As I gradually began to realize just how plausible it would be to hand milk ten cows and sell their milk at retail to my neighbors, I first became frustrated and then angry that such an option was illegal. Here again, our culture had criminalized the righteous act while requiring the evil act—mandatory pasteurization. If you want to find out more about the raw vs. pasteurized debate, plenty of material exists on that issue without me recapping it here. What I want to convey is the dream-dashing this criminalization creates.

Never mind that raw grass-fed milk is as safe and wholesome as it has been throughout human history. Never mind that customers by the thousands yearn for this unadulterated product. In fact, never mind that half the states allow its sale to some degree. It’s just illegal to sell in Virginia, period.

Even if we were to move forward with cheese or some milk product, we would still need a license and inspected facility. A friend who ran a Grade A dairy wanted to make cheese. But by the time he installed all the required machinery and hardware, it would have cost them $100,000 to make one pound of cheese. End of dream. He continues to struggle, barely making ends meet. I’d love to buy his cheese, even if he made it in the kitchen sink. And that’s important to understand.

Some might ask, “Why don’t you just put in the infrastructure and comply with the requirements? Why do you have to be such a stick-in-the-mud about all this? If you’re going to run a business, then just install what a business should have and quit refusing to comply. What’s wrong with a little investment if you want to operate a business? You just want to have all the benefits of the business without making the requisite investment. You want a shortcut. Phooey on you.”

Here’s the answer, and it deals with the whole issue of innovation. All new things start small. Mighty oak trees begin from a tiny acorn, not 20-foot baby trees. Humans are born as babies, not teenagers. Innovation demands a prototype first, and a prototype must be as small as possible.

How do I know if I have a cheese that people will want unless I can experiment with a few pounds and try to sell some to folks? How do I know I have a decent ice cream until I make some and sell it to taste testers? Innovation demands embryonic births. The problem is that complying with all these codes requires that even the prototype must be too big to be birthed. In reality, then, what we have are still-birth dreams because the mandated accoutrements are too big.

Here’s an analogy. We’re all familiar with eBay. A true American cultural phenomenon, and who would want to see it disappear? Just imagine the following requirements before you could list an item on eBay:

License certifying you are qualified to operate your computer.
Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) certificate certifying that your computer desk and office are splinter-free, handicapped accessible, and non-injurious to you.
Electrician certificate verifying that the electrical cords running to the computer are up to code.
Fire marshal license that you have a fire extinguisher in working order, properly checked, on the wall in case your hot item becomes too hot to handle.
Government labeling verification that your description of said item is indeed accurate and not misrepresented in any way.
Building inspection license indicating the structural soundness of the room and computer desk in the immediate vicinity of where you will be doing eBay business on your computer. What if the room caved in on you right when a hot buyer was on the line? The potential buyer might suffer emotional trauma in the fallout of your room falling in.
Securities and exchange commission license for your banking and accounting showing that you can indeed transact financial matters and that you are properly indemnified against product liability.

I could go on in this vein for awhile, but I think the point is abundantly clear—would eBay have ever existed, had all these requirements been placed on it? Indeed, would anyone today use it were these requirements in place? And yet it is an entirely self-policing system for all of these elements. How can that be? The reason is that it is transparent and has a dramatic feedback loop for customer comments. A shyster simply doesn’t last long in this market climate.

eBay works because anyone can try it without investing in any extra infrastructure. It utilizes already-owned computers. It’s a true free market entity, and of course drives retailers crazy. The retail industry lobbies hard to clamp down on this freewheeling phenom, but fortunately eBay freedom still exists. Because anyone with a computer and an item can launch a transaction, it epitomizes the embryonic prototype. And its dramatic success shows the validity of this concept.

The same is true with any business. Only the foolish or independently wealthy can afford to birth a 100-pound baby. Most of us need some time to grow into our adolescence. And that means we must preserve the freedom to access the market on a tiny scale or innovation cannot occur.

Today’s big food businesses began from the tailgate of a pickup truck in the 1940s and 1950s before food safety laws became as onerous as they are today. If we do not preserve this type of market access for future generations, we not only keep a generation of young people from realizing their dreams, but we deny the entire culture the innovative prototypes necessary to truly solve problems. If every baby must be born too big to be viable, the babies die. And it’s the babies that have the new ideas, that dare to question old paradigms, that move a culture forward.

And to me, one of the benchmark attitudes that distinguishes evil hearted people from good hearted people is their attitude toward the babies. In the natural progression of business, a prototype outgrows the kitchen sinks, for example, and eventually does require a separate building and some snazzy stainless steel furniture. For example, on our farm, we did not install a walk-in freezer and cooler until we had 13 home-style chest and upright freezers. Then we made the leap to the upgrade, and a huge investment it was. But we grew into it.

If my home-kitchen pound cake prototypes are well received, eventually I outgrow the kitchen and build a bigger one, with bigger mixing bowls and larger sinks. But if I must build a $50,000 freestanding commercial kitchen before I even experiment to find out if baking pound cakes is something I enjoy, I will never bake the first one. And herein lies the great conundrum of this book. My passion is to re-create in our culture a sense of loss. I lie awake at night trying to figure out how to get people to understand what we’ve lost.

I’m desperate for a food NRA (National Rifle Association). The reason the NRA exists and is such a powerful organization is because such a huge number of Americans own guns. And they don’t want to lose them. The fear of the loss motivates us to join the NRA and to passionately defend “America’s First Freedom.”

The only reason we don’t have a food NRA is because it’s hard to create a need for something that does not exist. It’s hard to get people passionately exercised about something they don’t have. In a nutshell, the goal of this book is to give Americans an insatiable appetite for something they don’t have. I want folks to leave these pages angry that they’ve been denied something righteous, something healthful. I want folks incensed that their government has sold our collective freedom birthright for a bowl of global corporate outsourced pottage.

If you’ve never tasted real homemade jams and jellies, you don’t know what you’re missing. If you’ve never tasted an on-farm processed pastured broiler, then Whole Foods organic will do just fine, thank you. But once you’ve tasted the real deal, nothing else satisfies. I don’t know how many times our customers tell us, “You’ve ruined us,” meaning that they just can’t go back to normal food, even certified empire organic. I had a restaurant chef a week ago get all weak-kneed on me when he found out that we were out of eggs. “What am I supposed to do?” he lamented.

Eye hath not seen nor ear heard, to paraphrase a Biblical description of God’s plans, what could be if local food entrepreneurs were freed up to access their neighborhoods with homemade, artisanal food. Let me just for a moment describe what would happen.

We’d enjoy muffins from our neighbor’s kitchen, pickles, salsa, and baked goods. We’d have locally-grown and cured ham and bacon. Local beef jerky would accompany our kiddos’ lunch boxes. Frozen heat-and-eat quiche made from overabundant pastured spring eggs from the neighbor’s flock would offer quickie meals on soccer night. Chicken pot pies, made with grandma’s recipe in our neighbor’s kitchen could be purchased during that mad-dash-home-from-work-what’s-for-supper panic. We could enjoy a Delmonico steak from a pastured steer that never stepped onto a trailer to be co-mingled at a slaughterhouse with animals of dubious extraction while awaiting slaughter, but rather was killed on its home farm in reverence by the farmer who cared for it. Tender and beyond description.

All of this washed down with wine from the neighbor’s grapes, fermented lovingly in his basement. Under the watchful eye of the children and the family cat. Cheese, all sorts of fresh and aged, straight from the neighbor’s ten-cow pastured dairy herd. And ice cream to die for, from heavy cream and molasses grown, milled, and canned two miles down the road. Are you salivating yet?

You see, an imbedded local food system could actually exist in the midst of subdivisions and strip malls. Wherever a few unpaved square feet poked through, edible plants and animals could be grown and processed for the neighborhood. And without the expensive labeling, packaging, and processing infrastructure requirements, this food could be sold at regular supermarket prices, and it would be infinitely better. Virtually all of the processed foods currently sold at the supermarket could be supplanted with community-based entrepreneurial fare. Does your heart ache for this? Mine does.

Well, why can’t we just have this? Because everyone is paranoid of the unscrupulous. I was eating dinner with a couple of Sustainable Agriculture professors from the University of Iowa and they were appalled that I would suggest we allow unfettered market access to cottage-based food producers. “But, but, but, you can’t just let food on the market that isn’t regulated,” they spluttered. “What about the dirty kitchens? The dishonest people?”

It was a lively discussion, and we concluded with my question, “Okay, then what would you do? Sleep on it and tell me in the morning.”

We parted amicably—my goodness, these were my friends. I realized that if I couldn’t sell them the idea of an unfettered entrepreneurial food system, then I certainly couldn’t sell the idea to anyone else. These folks knew all about the evils of industrial food systems, the environmental footprint of outsourced food, and the failure of U.S. agriculture policy. I was frankly shocked that they, too, had swallowed this paranoia that assumes everyone selling an item is untrustworthy. So I put the question to them and they promised to have an answer for me by morning on our shuttle ride to the airport.

Morning came. “Okay, what did you come up with?”

“Nothing. We don’t have an answer.” That was it. Here these people are nationally-recognized, published professors of sustainable agriculture, and they have no idea how to create a local food system. Well-versed in low-chemical production models, companion planting techniques, and composting, they failed to make the connection between stewarding the land and stewarding the farmer’s profitability; and, ultimately, the community’s sustainability via a local food web.

That conversation helped me to understand the dilemma we face as people like me preach local food systems. The current alternative food movement grew out of the back-to-the-land Mother Earth movement of communes, hippies, and Woodstock. Completely disenfranchised from Wall Street and the establishment, these visionaries sought a different direction for our country through government.

We can cure pollution with an Environmental Protection Agency. We can cure abusive animal practices with more regulations. We could heal the forests by taking land away from the private sector and expanding wilderness areas. We could end poverty with more welfare and social programs. It was virtually a top-down mentality. Indeed, this is still evidenced by the organic movement, that asked for government certification. People like me prophesied that when the government controlled the movement, the little guys would be squeezed out, the standards would gradually be adulterated until organic meant nothing, and it would simply be a way for multinational globalists to hijack organics.

And at the time, people like me were laughed to scorn by those who really believed the government could help out. A few tax dollars here and there would be wonderful. This idea is still alive and well. I was recently contacted by a leading sustainable agriculture lobbying group to sign onto a letter delineating policy positions for the new farm bill. The first part demanded a cap on subsidies to individual farms. Many people don’t realize that wealthy, wealthy land owners and mega-corporate outfits enjoy the lion’s share of farm subsidies. I was okay with caps.

But the second part of the lobbyists’ agenda demanded that the monies saved from capping would be given to sustainable farmers instead. What? How disingenuous can we be? Here our side has been decrying this inappropriate subsidy for decades, and then we demand to pig out at the public trough too? Where’s the high moral ground in that position? To the proponents of an industrial food system, if we lobby to partake we are no better than they.

Anyway, the alternate food system grew out of this “government-can-fix-it” mentality. For lack of better terms and just to push this discussion to a conclusion, I’ll call this a more liberal idea as opposed to the conservatives, who take a more limited government position.

The leaders of the clean food movement, by and large, still adhere to this liberal idea and vote Democratic. Many have voted for Ralph Nader and the Green Party. The problem with the government fix is that while it may start sincerely, by the time it gets implemented on the ground and has been through the sieve of corporate dinners, it hurts the little guys and helps the big guys.

Case in point: consumer advocates proposed several years ago to require daily testing for pathogens on poultry. Each slaughter facility would have to take a swab test. One catch: it would cost $300. Now to Tyson or Pilgrim’s Pride, that’s a spit in the ocean. Their electric bill to maintain cool drinking water is more than $300 a day. But to a small pastured poultry outfit like ours, that’s the whole day’s profit. End of the little guy. That is reality, and unless you’ve had a small business, it’s hard to appreciate the unintended consequences of these wonderful-sounding proposals.

Of course, the other side is equally discriminatory. When the Republicans propose business incentives and tax breaks for business, they end up lining the pockets of the big players. And it’s such a common occurrence now that “Corporate Welfare” is synonymous with Republicanism. And it’s rotten.

As an example, I was interviewed by Pat Buchanan on his radio show when Bill Clinton was in the White House. It was shortly after news hit the food sections that Bill and Hillary hired a French chef who vowed that he would serve only “free range chicken.” That was just too juicy for the conservatives to let go. Buchanan found me and put me on the show. He asked me what the difference was between regular chicken and free range—of course, I didn’t use free range, I used pastured.

I explained that for one thing, our chickens didn’t do drugs. “Well, why do they give drugs in the big houses?” he asked.

“For one thing, it makes them grow faster...”

He cut me off: “How could anything be bad that makes them grow faster?”

I was incredulous. Cancer is fast growth. But this shows the conservative disrespect for biological and environmental realities. For crying out loud, we should be able to all understand that if growing it faster, bigger, fatter, cheaper were a good goal, we’d all aspire to be the fattest person in the room. But this is the problem with the conservatives. They measure growth only in terms of Gross Domestic Product. Truly, if the liberals have no head, the conservatives have no heart. Okay, I have the rare joy of being able to make everyone mad at the same time. Rare gift, I know.

To just assume that the faster we can grow a chicken, the better, is ridiculous. All paradigms exceed their efficiency. Single-trait selection always creates problems in other areas. What we want is balance. But this is the mentality of America’s business climate: faster growth is better.

Back to the original question for the liberals and most people in America: How do we punch through this skepticism that assumes that if I sell you something, I’m trying to rip you off? That’s the mainline mentality. And it’s the mentality that is keeping you and me from enjoying a plethora of community-based eats and treats. I am encouraged by a new awareness within the more liberal political spectrum that maybe the government doesn’t have all the answers.

And I’m equally encouraged by an awareness among conservatives that maybe taking care of the earth is as important as taking care of chief financial officers. These are positive developments indeed, and give me reason to hope that maybe we can punch through this dilemma.

The problem is that as soon as we posit “the government is responsible” we open Pandora’s box on a host of regulations that require a host of bureaucrats and deny a host of dreamers from fulfilling their dreams.

Ultimately, this issue is about how we view the fringe, or the nonconformists. If it’s the government’s responsibility to make sure that no person can ingest a morsel of unsafe food, then only government-decreed food will be edible. And when that happens, freedom of choice is long gone, because the credentialed food will be what the fat cats who wine and dine politicians say that it is. In the name of offering only credentialed safe food, we will only be able to eat irradiated, genetically adulterated, inhumane, taste-enhanced, nutrient-deficient, emulsified, reconstituted pseudo-food from Archer Daniels Midland, “supermarket to the world.”

And we will forget all about what could have been. The ten cows, their raw milk, butter, and ice cream will be long buried in the annals of American heritage, relegated to dusty pages of history books and woodcuts of a bygone era.

Chapter 3

PL 90-492

“Your chicken processing is unsanitary and adulterated. We have to shut you down,” said the chicken policeman. Actually, he was head of meat and poultry inspection for the Virginia Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services.

We had been processing and selling chickens for a couple of decades and we had an exemption number, Va. # 1001 (the first one ever given in the state) that allowed us to process up to 20,000 head of poultry per year in our non-inspected facility.

The federal exemption, known as Public Law 90-492, delineates what is known as the Producer-Grower Exemption. This federal law allows a producer-grower to process up to 20,000 head of poultry annually without government inspection. The only stipulation is that the processing be “sanitary and unadulterated.” Obviously, those two words are completely objective. Everyone knows exactly what sanitary and unadulterated mean, I’m sure.

This exemption, written into the federal code during the major rewrite of the inspection laws in 1967, granted a numeric exemption for farmers to process their own birds and sell them. I have asked many insiders over the years how this wonderful exemption came to be, and the only answer is that at that time, the vertically integrated poultry industry did not yet exist and most poultry still came from small producers, many of whom processed the birds on the farm. Because it was politically impossible to close all of them down, a numeric concession enabled all these little operations to remain in business.

The same climate did not exist for cattle, hogs, sheep and goats, which had already gone through more marketing consolidation. And, certainly, fewer farmers processed their large animals. Rather, they used the multitudinous community abattoirs. Our county, at the time, had about two dozen neighborhood abattoirs for large animals, but these typically would not do poultry. As a result, many chicken farmers ended up processing their own birds. Since chickens and turkeys are not as heavy to pick up, they lend themselves to small-scale processing. Picking up a 1,000-pound steer to skin, gut and shove into a cooler is a big deal. To do that to a chicken is not a big deal.

As a side note, within just a couple of years after the 1967 rewrite, our county lost all but three of those neighborhood abattoirs. They did not go out of business because they suddenly became unprofitable. They went out of business because the new regulations were too onerous for the abattoirs to remain viable on their small volumes. We’ll talk about this more in the beef chapter.

At any rate, the wonderful poultry exemption, which as of this writing is still the law of the land, created an opportunity for thousands of small poultry operations to remain in business and serve their communities. The beauty of this exemption was that it did not specify any infrastructure; it only specified that the processing be done in a sanitary manner and the product could not be adulterated. Adulteration is non-chicken things on the chicken—like dog and cat hairs or hay seeds. The other requirement is that the producer apply name and address on the label. In Virginia, the inspection service also mandated that the operator be given an exemption number so that each of these would be on file in the bowels of the state capital. That particular requirement has since been terminated because it is not part of the law.

A decade prior to the incident that put us on a collision course with the chicken police, our on-farm processing had been scrutinized by the former head of Virginia meat and poultry inspection, and he was duly impressed. So much so that after touring the farm’s pastured poultry, looking at our little out-door processing shed, and hearing my vision for local food systems, he settled back on a sofa in our living room and said wistfully, “Joel, being here makes me want to be a young fellow again and stay on our family’s farm and do it your way. Maybe I could have kept the farm, which is what I really wanted to do.”

The amicable, reasonable interchange had a wonderful outcome. He quickly gave us our exemption number and a letter of commendation. Two years later he retired. And his replacement was a Pharaoh who knew not Joseph, if you get my drift. We were in a new dispensation. Now mind you, no laws had changed. Legally, everything was the same. The only thing different was a change of personnel.

Before we move forward in what ended up being a lengthy discussion, let me describe our processing shed. It’s a concrete slab about the size of a two-car garage with six locust poles sticking up through the slab to support a simple metal shed roof. The slab slopes so all the water runs off into a 10,000 gallon lagoon. The lagoon has a simple shed roof over it as well so nothing can inadvertently fall in.

The furniture in the shed consists of a homemade rack that holds eight killing cones. The blood drains into a V-shaped trough that funnels it into a couple of buckets. A factory-made scalder-dunker loosens the feathers with hot water. Then a factory-made chicken picker with a rotating bottom and 3-inch long rubber fingers gets rid of the feathers. A white enamel sink-drainboard receives the plucked birds. During the picker-to-sink transfer, we cut off the feet and pull off the heads. This old sink was originally in our kitchen when our family came to the farm in 1961. When we modernized the kitchen in the 1970s we installed a double stainless steel sink, but like most scroungers, held onto the old piece “just in case.”

Then the birds go onto a stainless steel evisceration table where we pull the innards out by hand before putting them onto the quality control table, which is our oldest piece of furniture. In about 1970, when I was only 13, I needed a chicken picker in order to process my spent hens from my 4-H laying flock. We put an ad in the rural electrification co-op magazine and got two hits. Hitching up our 1940s trailer to the 1963 Chrysler Newport with push-button console gearshift, we headed off to the Eastern Shore. Looking back on it now, I realize what a huge deal this was for Mom and Dad to empower their son with this chicken venture deal.

The Eastern Shore is a five-hour drive away. The man who had responded to the ad was a 75-year-old farmer who had raised chickens all his life and was getting out of it. He had an ancient galvanized table, scalder, picker, and bleeding cabinet with shackles, all for $75. We bought the whole kit and caboodle. The table and picker were treasures; the rest we discarded.

The table was simply a wooden table 2 feet wide and 6 feet long with galvanized sheet metal bent and soldered over it and a drain hole plumbed in the bottom. The picker was an old horizontal one-at-a-time variety, but it worked fine. We long ago outgrew the little picker, but we still use the table. It must be 70 years old. The galvanize long ago left, and it is now a beautiful antiqued rusty color, no doubt sealed forever with half a century of chicken oil. It is now our quality control (QC) table.

After the QC table, the birds go into a double-stainless steel sink from an old A&P that went out of business. Dad and I went to the auction and bought that in about 1980. From that initial chill tank, the birds go into a couple of large stainless steel chill tanks that a friend scavenged from a factory scrap metal pile for $5 apiece. That’s the setup. And with eight people we can run 200 birds per hour, which happens to be just as efficient a chicken-per-person-hour as the big industrial processing facilities.

The open processing shed has several advantages:

Direct sunlight’s radiation is the most efficacious sanitizer.
Walls would block sunlight and make lots of dingy, dark, damp corners to harbor pathogens that would then have to be sanitized with toxic cleaners.
No artificial lighting needed. We don’t process at night, so the open sides allow enough light in to enjoy natural lighting.
We can see out. Surrounded by birds singing, the adjacent vegetable garden, the nearby pond usually sporting a couple of wild ducks or a Blue Heron, it makes an enjoyable place to work.
Cool. Since our poultry processing is seasonal, we don’t want to block off natural air currents with walls, and the shed is always cool, even on the hottest days.
Simpler to build. When we built the shed, we simply didn’t have the money to build a high-falootin’ building. The construction was within my capabilities and we did it on a shoestring with poles cut from our woods and lumber scavenged from a barn demolition project at a neighbor’s place.
Conducive to education. Customers and wanna-bes can come and gather around to see the processing without cramping us inside. With walls, anyone who came to watch and learn, or get connected with their food, would be in the way.

The new chief disagreed with his predecessor: this facility was unacceptable. Of course, I immediately asked him the obvious: “Wait a minute, Bob. The law has not changed since we were issued a glowing bill of health a few years ago. What changed?”

“Me. I’m the new division head.”

“But you are administering the same law, right?”

“Yes. But I’m interpreting it differently.”

“Why now? Why today? What’s the big deal?”

“I was just going through the files and found you and realized you probably were not in compliance.” By the way, compliance is their favorite word. In any conversation with bureaucrats, they will say it about every fifth word.

“How so?”

“An open air facility is inherently unsanitary.”

“So you never go on picnics? People have been processing meat and poultry in the open air for centuries. What’s the big deal all of a sudden?”

“That’s just the way I see it. And if one fly comes in and lands on one chicken, that is now an adulterated product.”

“You mean if a fly lands on your hotdog at a picnic, you throw it away?”

“That’s not the point. The point is what I think. And I think you don’t comply with the sanitary and unadulterated standard.”

“So what would it take for me to comply?”

“You have to have walls.”

“Why?”

“Because the regulations say so.”

“Where?”

“Right here it says that doors and windows must be screened. Obviously, the assumption is that you have walls.”

“I disagree. All it says is that if you have doors and windows, they need to be screened. That doesn’t assume you have walls. Obviously, if you have walls, you have to get in somehow. And the regulation just says that those enclosures need to be screened. Now, I can go out and hang a window or a door on one of those poles, and put a screen in it if you’d like...”

For some reason, he didn’t think this was funny. For the record, the rule he was citing was not in the exemption section, but was over a few sections in the “custom” slaughterhouse rules. That’s when I’m processing some else’s chickens. The rules there are far more stringent because now I’m not processing my own birds. The producer-grower exemption allows us to sell the birds to hotels, restaurants, institutions, and in Virginia, at least, to retail outlets as long as “EXEMPT PL 90-492” is written on the label, along with our name and address.

Also for the record, it’s important to understand that these walls are not just any old walls. They must be impermeable so nothing can penetrate them and they can be washed off. Typically, that means expensive fiberglass material that comes in sheets like drywall or plywood, but is far more expensive. A guy in Ohio, unable to punch through this with the chicken police there, finally installed a hoophouse with plastic over his facility. The officials ranted and raved about it, but he just smiled and said, “It’s not permeable.” I love it when someone is creative enough to drive these dudes nuts.

Leaving the walls, I then asked him what next would be necessary for compliance. His answer, “Bathrooms.”

“Why?”

“For your employees, and it’s required.”

“I don’t have any employees. And we have four bathrooms within 50 feet—two at my house and two at Mom’s house. And if I want to go #1, I just step around behind the tractor. What are you going to do about that?”

I guarantee you that if these people could outlaw taking a leak behind the shed, they sure would. It’s gotten to where you can’t even spit without a license.

“Well, what else is necessary?” I pressed.

“You need a changing room with 12 lockers.”

“Why?”

“For compliance.”

How do you carry on a conversation with these people? It just goes from ridiculous to asinine. I didn’t bother asking him any more.

We finally arranged a showdown with his federal boss out of Philadelphia, our attorney, and the legislative aide for our state delegate. Our state senator had already made some phone calls, but could not attend the meeting.

When they all arrived, we ushered everyone into the living room and they began their noncompliance routine. Nancy, the legislative aide, was right on top of it. Many times the chief legislative aides are actually sharper than the politician they work for. I don’t know if this was the case in this instance, but she was pretty sharp. Over her half-moon glasses, she queried these two officials: “Gentlemen, is it possible that these regulations were written by bureaucrats in Richmond who could not have conceived of an operation like the Salatins are running?”

I wanted to jump off the sofa and hug her. What could they say? She nailed them. They squirmed. I then handed them a wonderful document created by a couple of upper level biology majors at our local James Madison University for a lab project. One of the girls’ families had been longtime customers of ours. Their project consisted of comparing total bacteria counts on our chicken and the numbers on supermarket birds. As part of the project, they wanted to get swab samples from the live birds, then right after processing, then from the retail location, to try to see where contamination really occurred. Was it production, processing, waiting in inventory? Good research.

No industry official or farmers would allow them to set foot on a production farm, nor would anyone let them into a processing facility. They finally settled for the only samples they could get: the retail level. They came and swabbed a couple of our chickens and bought a couple from the local supermarket and swabbed them. They cultured the swabs and results were:

Supermarket: 3,600 colony-forming units per milileter to the second permutation

Polyface: 133 colony-forming units per milileter to the second permutation

I honestly don’t know all the scientific notations on the report, but I did know enough to realize that our chickens were infinitely cleaner—25 times, to be more precise. I shoved the report over to them and they looked at it.

Now wouldn’t you think that if these guys were really interested in food safety they would have turned cartwheels over finding a model that really produced food that much cleaner? I mean, you’d think they’d get on the horn and call their bosses: “Hold the presses. Hold the presses. We’ve got the answer to everything right here. A new model promises to eliminate all food-borne pathogenic problems. Let’s rewrite the books, folks. It really is possible without irradiation and chlorine. Let’s print up a medal for this dumb farmer to recognize his culture-saving accomplishment.”

You and I wish. Yeah, right. No, they glanced at it, gave it back, and immediately started shadow boxing again: “Well, pathogens aren’t the only thing we’re concerned about. We’re concerned about the water quality, the temperature in the chill tanks, ambient temperature in the bagging room...”

I finally couldn’t stand it. “Who cares about any of that if they’re clean? If dunking them in the toilet made them that much cleaner, who cares? Are we after competency here, or infrastructure?”

Finally, after much hemming and hawing, they agreed to let us submit a written justification for our system, to argue its compliance with the federal guys. The reason the federal guys were involved is because the inspectors’ salaries are paid half by the state and half by the federal government. And a state must have “equal to” status, meaning it cannot be less tolerant than the federal allows, in order to get cost-share inspection funds. It’s more complicated than that, but to wade through all the nuances would take another book, and neither you nor I need to get bogged down in that minutiae. Just enjoy the story.

We submitted our argument for the no-walls deal and pointed out that “sanitary and unadulterated” are subjective terms. As long as we complied with that, we were in compliance and the law did not in fact give the regulators the power to further define what kind of processing facility, furniture, or appurtenances were necessary to create a sanitary product. That if it was, in fact, clean, then it was, in fact, clean. We took a strong position that if we complied with the government’s regulations, our chickens would no longer be as pristine as they were. Compliance would in fact adulterate our product.

Amazingly, the feds agreed with us, and we won that battle. But dear folks, I want you to understand what emotional and physical energy all this cost us. The late-night conversations Teresa and I had when we could have been reading to the children or getting some sleep. The constant mental pressure to wonder what was going to happen.

Here’s the point. We had ecstatic customers who would drive 200 miles to get this chicken. The whole model generated enough revenue to let us be truly viable, fulltime small farmers. Everyone was happy...except the chicken police. I say if you want to come to my farm, look around, smell around, and voluntarily opt out of government-sanctioned food, then our transaction is not a government incident.

As a postscript to this story, be assured that after our showdown, these same officials visited other farmers just like us in the state and tried to shut them down. They successfully shut down some farmers who didn’t have enough savvy to stand up to them. Other farmers held their ground and the bureaucrats backed down. But the point is that even after we proved to the government agents that their language was wrong, they continued to spout these same lies to others. These people don’t just stop when they lose.

They just take another paycheck from the taxpayer’s pool and continue about their business as if the loss never happened. And they certainly didn’t tell anyone in the system about a breakthrough model that could offer 2,500 percent cleaner poultry to the American consumer. They snuffed that light out before the match could get to the candle. At least we were free to continue serving our loyal customers.

Just to illustrate how bureaucrats ran with rules, I will quote from a Feb. 3, 2005 letter from Pam McFarland, compliance supervisor, Illinois Bureau of Meat and Poultry Inspection, outlining the requirements for the poultry exemption:

“Poultry raisers with respect to poultry raised on their farms or premises (a) if such raisers slaughter, eviscerate or further process not more than 5000 poultry during the calendar year for which this exemption is being granted; (b) such poultry raisers do not engage in buying or selling poultry products other than those produced from poultry raised on their own farms or premises; (c) such poultry or poultry’ products are slaughtered, otherwise prepared, sold or delivered to the consumer on or from the premises for which the exemption is given; (d) such slaughter or preparation shall be performed in sanitary facilities, in a sanitary manner, and subject to periodic inspection by Department personnel; (e) persons desiring such exemptions shall submit in writing a request to the Department. The exemption shall be effective upon written notice from the Department and shall remain in effect for a period of 2 years, unless revoked. Adequate records must be maintained to assure that no more than the number of exempted poultry are slaughtered or processed in one calendar year. Such records shall be kept for one year following the termination of each exemption. Any advertisement regarding the exempt poultry or poultry products shall reflect the fact of exemption so as not to mislead the consumer to presume official inspection has been made under ‘The Meat and Poultry Inspection Act’ [650/5(b)].”

This is obviously far more than what is in the federal exemption. At what point do bureaucratic protocols become law? While all this sounds fairly innocuous, it is not. Consider now the official Illinois “Review of Exempted Poultry and Rabbit Raisers” sheet. Imagine the power of the bureaucrat who can come onto a small farm and fill out the answers to the following questions:

1. “Is the procedural document acceptable? Yes No”

Did you see anything about a procedural document in the legislation above? No, it wasn’t there. What happens is that the legislature creates enabling legislation, which is quoted above. Then the bureaucrats create templates and procedures. Suddenly the fairly innocuous legislation becomes a license to create mountains of paperwork. Be assured that the inspection agency will not help the farmer write a procedural document. The government agents will not provide a template.

The farmer, who’s trying to juggle keeping the chickens alive, finding local grain, keeping rats out of it, designing a catchy logo, and answering the phone from interested neighbors who want his chickens, must stay up nights trying to create a document that the politicians never conceived. Many bureaucrats enjoy sadistic pleasure watching farmers try to comply with these kinds of things. Look, I know what is clean, what is cool, what is hot, what stinks, and what is ugly. Usually if clean, cool, hot, smelly, or ugly is handled correctly everything will be fine. And procedure doesn’t mandate integrity anyway. Now on to the next line.

2. “Valid water potability certificate? Yes No”

Here again, the requirement has no basis in fact. When our farm test revealed chicken 25 times cleaner than supermarket chicken, we had some choliforms in our well water. The government has a zero tolerance for any choliforms. In fact, the test doesn’t even indicate numeric level. It’s just a pass/fail test. If these were deadly, nobody in history would have survived drinking out of streams containing deer dung and mouse urine.

I have a neighbor whose sons went on a missions trip to South America and were the only ones of a 25-member U.S. delegation to completely escape sickness. At their farm, they drink unfiltered spring water. My wife’s grandmother lived to a healthy 100 years and 6 months old, drinking spring water all her life. We called it “crab water” because you could see little things crawling around in it. Immune systems are just like muscles. If we never exercise our immune system, it becomes lethargic. I drink out of mountain streams all the time.

Last year I had a siphon go down on a pond and in trying to restart it, sucking, the gunk in the pipe gushed into my mouth and I swallowed a couple mouthfuls of leaves, snails and who knows what else. Within 10 minutes I threw up and that was that. My body rejected it because it was an overdose. But little doses are like vaccinations. We’ve had people with all sorts of environmental allergies eat our chickens processed in unacceptable water, and we’ve never had anyone have negative reactions. These same people get rashes and terrible headaches because of the residual chlorine left on supermarket chicken. But even with all this said, I’m willing to have a water test. We did, and then installed an ultraviolet light and became compliant. Even I pick my battles. Next question on the form:

3. “Sales records reviewed? Yes No”

What’s the point? Anyone willing to lie about their numbers will fabricate sales records. Anyone who has dealt with these bureaucrats knows that they don’t have a clue what they are looking for. Anyone can just make up records, show it to these agents, and create a completely fabricated record.

The whole process assumes that the farmer can’t be trusted, and then creates a paper trail that only functions if the farmer can be trusted. What hopeless schizophrenia. And beyond that, isn’t this a little invasive? Would you want to open up all your sales records to some bureaucrat? Now the next one:

4. “Was the operation reviewed during actual production? Yes No”

I don’t have a problem with this one except that the law does not require it. And what if the bureaucrat wants to see it in operation when it doesn’t suit me? Perhaps I’m processing two days of the year—many small operators do exactly that. If a bureaucrat wants to be ornery—and many of them do—he’ll just say it doesn’t suit to come out that day. Perhaps the farmer is working a job in town and can only process on Saturdays. Bureaucrats sure don’t want to work on Saturday.

The bottom line is that even something as simple as having a chicken policeman present during processing can become a huge problem. These requirements, of course, are formulated in an inspection context that assumes massive slaughter houses operating around the clock every single day. In that climate, of course, inspectors can pop in and out at their convenience and always see something going on. But on our small farm, no processing goes on most days of the year. Now the next question:

5. “Is bleeding/picking/evisceration done in separate areas? Yes No”

Again this assumes an industrial setting. Think back to the old hatchet, stump, scald tub, and board table set on some saw horses. The whole process occurred within a few feet, right in the same area, with children frolicking after the chickens doing their headless gymnastics. What is an “area?” Is that square footage in the back yard, or is it square footage in a building, or in a shed, or in a garage? These are the kinds of things that all chicken police interpret differently.

What inspectors love to see are impermeable partitions between the kill, pick, and evisceration areas. When a chicken dies, it goes through muscular contractions and sometimes shoots manure out its vent. Quite a dramatic finish, to say the least. In the picking process, of course, feathers can flip out and land on carcasses being eviscerated. But just like anything, on an extremely small scale, these possibilities that pose real sanitation risks in an industrial setting are just not problems.

We’ve had literally thousands of people come and process with us and they never complain about filth, ugliness, or lack of sanitation. If a feather happens to flip over onto a chicken I’m gutting, I just wipe it off. In an industrial facility, that feather might ride the carcass for some time before being removed. And what is “separate?” Does that mean a curtain, a concrete wall, fiberboard, or just a spatial separation? How a bureaucrat interprets that can mean the difference between no cost and $20,000. And that is the insanity of these things: the raw subjectivity that puts the farmer at the mercy of a government agent’s whim. It’s no wonder people go postal.

6. “Facilities and Sanitation. Acceptable Unacceptable”

Here again, we have a totally subjective evaluation. And just what are acceptable facilities? Can you see the prejudicial slant on this form? And the incredible latitude it gives the field agent, indeed the department, to demand any sort of infrastructure they deem necessary? Remember, these agents live in a world of short cuts and intrigue. A world where large businesses try to shave hundredths of a penny off per chicken because the product margins are in fractions of cents.

And they live in a world where thousands and thousands of animals are killed each day. Literally tractor trailer loads of blood, feathers, and intestines must be carted away. Workers operate in surreal rooms filled with fecal water, cavernous concrete bunkers with bright overhead lights illuminating thousands upon thousands of dangling carcasses. Every day. Day after day after day after day. For these agents to step from that world into one that involves the children, pet cat, pet dog, robin chirping noisily from the shade tree, Dad, and Mom, and five neighbors stopping by to pick up their chickens... well... it’s just about impossible to understand.

7. “Running water provided? Yes No”

Now what is running water? My grandmother always said she had running water: “We ran to the creek with a bucket, dipped it in, and ran home with it full,” she’d laugh. Somehow, I don’t think that’s what the modern American chicken police call running water.

But in a serious vein, what if it’s gravity fed from a bucket or tank mounted in the ceiling of the processing shed? What is sacred about running water? Now granted, we have piped water in our facility, but that’s not how we started. The first year we processed chickens, we set up a wood fire under a pot for scald water and set our table up in the yard. I dipped water from a bucket to splash over the chickens and we went through 50 in about 4 hours. Today we do 200 in an hour. But our birds today are absolutely no cleaner than those first ones we did standing on the grass in the backyard.

If water is clean, who cares if it moves or not? This requirement alone could make a farmer trying to birth an embryonic local pastured poultry business suddenly have to spend thousands of dollars in order to sell one chicken.

8. “Hot water provided? Yes No”

For the uninitiated, all industrial inspected facilities must have foot-operated hand washing stations. Workers need to be able to wash their hands without touching a spigot or knob. And with thousands of square feet of surfaces to clean, lots of hot water is necessary.

But if I’m processing one chicken in the back yard for my mother-in-law across the fence, why do I need hot water? Maybe I’ll gut the chicken in the kitchen sink. And for anyone grossed out about that, let me assure you that I would much rather put my hands in some fresh chicken guts than handle supermarket bologna or salami. I can scarcely look at that stuff without retching.

When we clean our little facility, we just take a 5-gallon bucket down to the hot water heater, draw off a bucket full, and carry it out to the shed. We wash down the two sinks and the chill tanks with that bucket of hot soapy water and it’s plenty. Does that fill this “hot water provided” requirement? Probably not. Would the chicken police demand an on-site water heater? If so, isn’t that kind of overkill for one chicken? Do you begin to see how absurd all this is? Now onto the next question:

9. “Dressing/Evisceration. Acceptable Unacceptable.”

That’s clear as mud, don’t you think? Dear people, do you know how many ways there are to eviscerate a chicken? Whole books have been written about technique. This is as diversified as the numbers of mentors who ever dressed a chicken. As a professional chicken gutter, I’ll just throw out some of the questions I could ask about this:

Do you pull off the head or cut it off?
Do you electrocute or just slit the jugular?
How long before scalding?
Do you loosen the crop, cut it off, or leave it?
Do you cut the vent out first or last?
Do you cut out the oil gland or cut the tail clear off?
If the crop breaks off, which way do you pull it—front or back?
Do you break the large intestine before cutting out the vent?
What if you break the gall bladder? What do you do?
Do you separate the heart and liver?
What do you do with the gizzard?

Obviously, this procedure is remarkably subjective. Some chicken police will not allow table top evisceration—they require shackles. This suddenly sets up a whole different set of logistical questions and techniques. With no more to go on than this section’s title, the farmer again is completely at the whim of the bureaucrat. This is not 2 + 2 = 4. It’s gray blob plus gray puddle equals nondescript subjectivity. Which brings us to the next section:

10. “Equipment and containers. Acceptable Unacceptable.”

Talk about wide open. Is a wooden bowl unacceptable? How about Tupperware, aluminum stock pot, earthenware, galvanized tub? Before we found our stainless steel chill vats, we actually used cattle troughs as chill tanks. We’d clean them down with hot soapy water and fill them with clean well water. They worked great, but I’ll bet a sniveling bureaucrat wouldn’t accept them even if the chickens were 10 times cleaner than birds at Cargill.

Furthermore, equipment for what and containers for what? This can easily include containers for feathers, blood, and guts. At our local custom beef slaughter facility, the cow police would not allow the butcher to put the guts in our barrels. The barrels had to be especially made with lead-free epoxy coating and marked, in equally specific paint: “INEDIBLE.”

Didn’t matter that we were just bringing the guts home to compost, in our trailer, from our animals, in our barrels. What did they think we were going to do? Feed it to our kids for lunch? Give me a break. I stood there and put the guts in there, do they think I don’t know what’s in there? Yeah, I’ll get home and forget it was guts and think it’s T-bones. Hey, wife and kids, come and enjoy some grilled pooh cord. How about some barbecued stomach lining with cud-chewed ooze attached?

In our backyard chicken processing shed, we use 5-gallon buckets for the guts. But they aren’t marked “INEDIBLE.” The contents don’t really look very appetizing to me. I’m sure these buckets wouldn’t pass unless we wrote, in some sort of special high-dollar indelible ink, “INEDIBLE” on the side. What a crock.

11. “Product presented to the customer: Hot Fresh chilled Frozen.”

What difference does it make how my customer wants her chicken? We’ve sold chicken with the heads on. What business is it of the government’s how my customer wants her chicken? We’ll do it however the customer wants it, thank you.

12. “Packaging area. Acceptable Unacceptable.”

Oh boy, here we go again. The prejudicial notion that we have a building with a huge business going on. What if my packaging area is a lawn chair with some plastic bags on it next to the bucket of cold water I drop the birds in? I pull them out, stick them in the plastic bag, and off they go.

Or in our case, many of the birds aren’t packaged at all because our neighbors come on the day of processing and pick them up fresh right out of the chill vats. They throw them on a bed of ice in a picnic cooler and take them home to cut up or bag themselves. We got in trouble with the chicken police because in such cases we were not slapping a label on the carcass.

Finally the bureaucrats allowed us to put a label on the cooler. What’s the deal? Don’t you think these customers know where their chickens came from? And if someone wants to allege they got dirty chicken from somewhere, why would you trust where they said they got it? Maybe the company president made his ex-wife mad so she alleges she got junk chicken from that company. Labeling doesn’t do squat in these kinds of circumstances.

Why have a packaging area if you aren’t packaging? And what is an acceptable packaging area, anyway? I guarantee you it isn’t a lawn chair holding a box of plastic bags. It will be a room, properly screened, properly sanitized, that could easily cost thousands of dollars. To package one chicken. And this area of course is completely separate from the evisceration area. It’s just nonsense. If you go back and reread the enabling legislation, back before we started this review report, you will not see any of this stuff in there. Let’s press on.

13. “Material: Plastic bag Paper Wrap Box Customer Containers.”

Just more invasion that’s none of the government’s business. How did the agency get here from a simple sanitary product? It’s beyond me. As far as I’m concerned, if a customer wants to drop her chicken in a dog food bag, who cares? We have some customers who buy our chickens for their dogs, for dog food. What would the agent do about that? Just leave the guts in and the feathers on—makes a great extra treat for the dogs, you know. Kind of tickles the throat going down.

14. “Where/how is product marketed? (i.e. signs, hand bills, newspaper, radio, TV, etc.)”

Again, why is this any of the government’s business? At least they don’t have an acceptable, unacceptable delineation on this one. Apparently, this is just for information. But do you see how condescending, how arrogant, these agents are? But during the review process, I, as the farmer, must happily supply all this information. Meanwhile, the chickens need water and I’ve got two customers on the answering machine that want product. But I’m stuck out here being nice to an invasive pest dedicated to helping me whether I need it or not.

15. “Inedible product handling. Acceptable Unacceptable.”

This is blood, feathers, skins, viscera. I have no clue what acceptable handling means. I assume it means containers or something, but who knows? Oh, that’s right. I find out when the friendly chicken police arrive. They’ll set me straight. Thank goodness.

16. “Method of disposal: Burial Rendering Co. Pickup Sanitary Service Pickup Other.”

Notice what is completely lacking here? They don’t even offer the best choice: composting. We’ve been composting chicken offal on our farm for decades, and it’s still illegal without a permit.

Let’s get this straight. In Virginia, it’s legal to compost beef guts—as long as they are transported in crash proof containers. Sheep guts you can dump along the road. Nobody wants them due to scrapie. So even the slaughterhouses make you come and pick them up and you can dispose of them however you want to.

But chicken guts, now that’s a different story. They can only be composted in licensed facilities. The industry is paranoid about chicken diseases, and has colluded with the duplicitous politicians to decree that no chicken or parts thereof may be composted without a government permitted facility. In our run-ins with the chicken police, they have mercifully let us slip through the cracks on this one.

If you bury the guts, rodents come along and dig them up. And they don’t disintegrate for a long time. Any service that would come and pick them up will charge a hefty pickup fee. For one chicken? Give me a break. An idea I like—which we haven’t done—would be to put all the guts in a floating tub on the pond. When the flies come and lay their eggs in it, the maggots fall out of the bottom of the tub and feed the fish underneath. I call it a Grub Tub.

See, when you’re small all these wonderful micro-processes can be utilized to create circles of waste, regeneration, and renewal. But in the industrial set up, the streams of everything are too huge to handle in ecologically friendly ways. And in ways that are neighborhood friendly. As a result, these facilities are a menace to sanitation and the oversight agents naturally bring that mentality to local food systems.

That’s the end of the review process. Obviously if a bureaucrat elected to take all these portions to a heavy-handed requirement, the first chicken would never be sold to the neighbor across the street. Every day in this great country, potential local food producers receive visits from government agents demanding compliance. And cowed would-be farmer-entrepreneurs, or agripreneurs, as Ron Macher, editor of Small Farm Today magazine calls them, never get started. It’s just too hard to be legal.

Chapter 4

Custom Beef

“I’m Bill from the Virginia Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services, Meat and Poultry Inspection. We’ve impounded your beef hanging at the slaughter house because an informant told us you’re selling uninspected meat. We’ll have to conduct an investigation.”

The tall man standing in the front door of our farmhouse held a large metallic badge up by his face during this introductory monologue. I had come in for lunch, and Teresa joined me at the front door.

The week before, we had taken our entire year’s beeves over to the slaughter house and the carcasses were now hanging in the chill room waiting to be diced and sliced into T-bones, ribeyes, ground, and the regular assortment of roasts. I knew we had done everything legally, so I figured it must be a mistake. Understand, that in those days, those twelve carcasses were a third of our annual farm income.

“What’s the problem?” I stammered.

“It has come to our attention that you are selling uninspected meat. We will have to conduct an investigation to determine if that is true.”

To understand the gravity of the situation, let me put things in context. The animals are slaughtered and then hung in a chill room for a week or ten days. Then the butcher begins cutting them into steaks and roasts. Those packages go into a walk-in freezer on wire racks to speed up the freezing process. Meat cannot be hung indefinitely without going bad. This is a highly perishable product. It had already been hanging for nearly a week when this public servant showed up at our door.

“How long will this investigation take?” I asked.

“As long as necessary to determine if an infraction has occurred.”

“This isn’t the first time you’ve done this, I’m sure, so could you give me a ballpark time?”

“Maybe six months. Whatever it takes.”

I gulped. “In six months, this meat will be rotten.”

“Too bad,” he replied, completely unsympathetic. “If it takes that long, we’ll just send it to rendering for dog food.” That’s one of the things that fries me about these people. They can just waltz into your business and be cavalier about destroying your livelihood because they draw their steady paycheck, have the power of the police, and the authority of the attorney general behind them. No apologies, no feelings. Just like the Germans leading the Jews to the gas chambers. Just like the U.S. Calvalry hunting down Indians. Just like Protestants hunting down Anabaptists in Europe. “Just doing my job. Just following orders.” I am sick and tired of people who “just follow orders.”

How much evil throughout history could have been avoided had people exercised their moral acuity with convictional courage and said to the powers that be, “No, I will not. This is wrong, and I don’t care if you fire me, shoot me, pass me over for promotion, or call my mother, I will not participate in this unsavory activity.” Wouldn’t world history be rewritten if just a few people had actually acted like individual free agents rather than mindless lemmings? Anyway, I digress.

“And what if we go ahead and cut it and package it anyway?” I asked, testily.

“We’ll put 24-hour federal marshals at the slaughterhouse to make sure nobody touches it,” he said. Each carcass was identified with a vibrant pink slip. It was equivalent to a police “Do Not Cross” tape to protect a crime scene.

“So how can we facilitate this investigation, to move it forward rapidly?” I asked, now fully aware and appreciative of the gravity of the situation.

“Give me the names and addresses of all your customers,” he said, noticing the slightest hint of resignation come over my face.

“All my customers and their addresses!” I practically screamed. Digging deep within my soul for the conviction to fight city hall, I raised up on my hind legs and in no uncertain terms said, “No way. Not on your life.”

And I turned around and went over to the telephone and called my senator. The senator called the inspection bosses in Richmond. Then I called my delegate. He made the same calls.

I won’t bore you with details, but what followed was about a week of hell for us. This compliance officer practically parked at our front gate. He would come in and talk to us. We would call our politicians. A couple of hours later he would come back in with new news from “Richmond.” “Richmond says this, and Richmond says that.”

This continued from Tuesday noon until Friday late morning, at which time he walked back to the front door and said, “Richmond has informed me that we will assume this never happened.”

To which I responded, “Look, man, easy for you to say. Trust me, it will not happen again. And to make sure, we will have a meeting here of your bosses to make sure it doesn’t happen again”

Don’t stop reading; the story isn’t over. It’s rich, real rich. Stay with me on this one, because it’s the best story I have. And the sweetest victory. To set the stage, the United States has three kinds of meat slaughter and processing. For the record, meat does not include poultry. They were separated sometime around the beginning of language, I think.

The three kinds of meat processing are:

1. Custom. This is when a customer brings in an animal owned by that customer to be butchered and taken home by that customer. The operative language in the law is “an animal of their own raising.” In other words, the beauty of custom facilities is that they form the backbone of neighborhood abattoirs. They must comply with rudimentary sanitation regulations, but have very little paperwork, no testing, and enjoy low overheads. Each package they process is stamped “NOT FOR SALE.”

Envisioned as a way for people who wanted meat processed for themselves to get it done in the community, the custom designation went through a winnowing process during the late 1960s and early 1980s until the back-to-the-land movement created more local business. During the 1960s, at the height of the industrial economy, cattle farmers did not even eat their own beef. Remember, this was the height of Infamil and Similac, when breast feeding was considered Neanderthal activity. Then along came the beaded, bearded, braless revolution, Woodstock and Hippies, and La Leche League was born. This movement carried with it a newfound desire to raise my own cow and pig and have it processed in a community abattoir; indeed, this movement fueled a renaissance of sorts in the custom processing business.

And farmers like us, who began selling to these newly aware societal opt-outers, began hauling more and more animals down to these facilities because often they were the only processing game in town. Since our customers did not actually raise the animal, everyone in the system agreed that as long as the animal entered the kill chute with a name on it, the custom designation was okay.

In other words, it turned out that “of their own raising” was just too hard to police. What did that phrase mean? How long must I own it until it is of my own raising? Since the law did not specify how long an animal had to be owned to qualify, the default time period was zero. If I showed up to the custom butcher and told him that Jim Smith owned steer ear tag number 53, then who was to say Jim Smith didn’t raise that animal? It was just too hard to police.

This wonderful loophole, still used today, is the backbone of what is known as the freezer beef trade. This denotes the volume sale, where someone will buy a quarter, half, or whole animal. If a customer buys a quarter of an animal, the farmer pairs that customer with others so that when ear tag 55 goes into the kill chute, paperwork clearly denotes that it is owned by four people, each getting a quarter. Those people then tell the butcher how they want their portion cut and packaged (Custom Processed), the packages are stamped “NOT FOR SALE” and the customer picks up the packages, takes them home, puts them in her freezer and later eats them for dinner.

The safety valve in this transaction is that if I bring an animal in, live, that I’ve raised, it’s my responsibility whether that animal is sick or not. If I bring in a diseased animal, the butcher processes my diseased animal, and I get sick from my diseased animal, then that’s my responsibility. Finally, a little sanity in the system. But wait, we won’t be sane for long.

The owner can’t sell those packages to anyone. She can give them away. But she absolutely can’t sell them. That is a big no-no. It’s what’s called selling uninspected meat. Which brings us to the second butchering option.

2. State inspection. About half the states have a state-run inspection program that is similar to the federal but allows only intrastate sales. Nothing across the state lines. An inspector is on the premises at all times to sniff and visually inspect every animal. Infrastructure requirements are almost identical to federal and paperwork is less. But the packages are not marked “NOT FOR SALE” which means the meat can be sold to restaurants, retail establishments, and cuts can be sold after slaughter. All within the state.

3. Federal inspection. This is considered the highest form because it requires the greatest amount of infrastructure and the greatest amount of paperwork. As you might imagine, the average size of the facility increases as we move up the nomenclature. In common language, only state and federal are considered to be “under inspection.” When an official says meat has been butchered “under inspection,” he means either state or federal. Custom does not require an inspector on premises and that is why animals done there are not “under inspection.” Even though custom facilities are inspected a couple of times a year, and have definite infrastructure requirements, only when an official inspector is looking at the animals is anything considered “under inspection.”

Of course, meat processed under federal inspection can be sold interstate and internationally—assuming import-export requirements are met. Inspectors hold a lot of clout. They can shut down a facility at any time. The owner of the facility we use often meets me at the door with this greeting: “I don’t own this plant.” What he means is that he has all the risk, has all his life’s equity and sweat tied up in that plant, but in the final analysis, he’s not the one who sets policy or decides whether it’s open or not. It’s that federal official who draws a steady paycheck regardless of what happens.

When the bureaucrats pink slipped and impounded our beef at the custom butcher, they thought we were getting it processed, bringing the “NOT FOR SALE” packages home, and then selling them by the piece to our customers. In other words, selling them after slaughter. That is totally illegal. Once they went back over and looked closer, they realized that each of our animals had a name or names on it. Now they were in a pickle. They couldn’t just admit they had done this in error, so in order to save face, they changed their interpretation and asked me to write an affidavit that I wouldn’t sell the meat after slaughter.

I was happy to do that, because I hadn’t done it anyway. It was like agreeing to do what I’d been doing anyway. I had no problem putting that in writing. That allowed them to pull the pink slips. But the reason that wasn’t the end of the story was that they issued me a new interpretation: No matter what agreement we had with the customer, and no matter if the name was on the animal before it was killed, if the money exchanged hands after the slaughter, it was automatically an after-slaughter sale and therefore illegal.

That’s why I had to have a showdown with them. I went to our custom butcher and talked it over with him. His freezer was full of beef from farmers who were selling it exactly the way we had done. But the government hadn’t come after them. He had never heard of such foolishness.

In fact, several times I asked who their “informant” was. After all, isn’t the accused supposed to be able to face his accuser? Oh, that was confidential information. We never found out for certain who it was, but through a series of actions, we deduced that it was another farmer who had an ax to grind and concocted this allegation to cause us problems.

Unfortunately, too often the person who rats on the black market cheese maker is the one who is struggling to comply with the regulations. Or the rat on a bootleg raw milk dairy is a neighboring dairy farmer angry that someone has figured out a way to triple the price of his milk. That’s the way these things go.

The important thing to remember is that even though many, many farmers in our county were selling through this loophole that had been used since the earth hardened, we were singled out. And then the government agents concocted this interpretation that a sale could only happen when the money exchanges hands. Now folks, you know that isn’t true. Binding contracts are written all the time. If you have a contract on the house, it’s sold. And if you don’t honor that contract, you can end up before a judge.

Each of our customers had sent in an order blank. We had a name on each animal. They agreed to a price. They agreed to a date. If someone drove up to the farm and wanted an animal already designated on our order blanks, I would tell him that it was already sold. Didn’t matter that the money hadn’t changed hands yet. When the deal is signed, sealed, and delivered, the money exchange is almost academic.

The pink slips came off, but our problem remained. How were we going to sell these animals in the future with this new interpretation? Our conundrum was simple. Freezer beef prices are usually based on carcass weight. The reason is that the dress-out percentage varies substantially from animal to animal. Let’s say we have a 1,000 pound steer that dresses out 50 percent—that’s a 500 pound carcass. If another one dresses out 60 percent, that’s a 600 pound carcass. Customers don’t eat the hide and guts; they only eat the carcass. But one yielded 100 pounds more than the other. That’s a big difference.

If we sell by liveweight, these yield percentages don’t enter into the equation. If we price it to protect ourselves from the low yielding animal, then the customer who gets the high yielder will pay an unfair premium. If we price it to assume a high yield carcass, we’ll get financially hurt with the lower yielding animal. The only way to make it fair is to price it by carcass weight, but we don’t know the carcass weight until the animal is dead. Hence, we didn’t have a way to create a fair price based on a liveweight.

Finally, our state delegate, who happened to be the minority leader in the General Assembly at the time, asked if a waiver would be in order. He asked if our customers would be willing to sign a waiver absolving the government of liability and recognizing that they took full responsibility for what they were buying. I assured him they would be glad to do that. Our folks trusted us completely, and understood very well that these battles had nothing to do with food safety.

He drafted a waiver and submitted it to the state attorney general. The attorney general said waivers are a joke. They don’t stand up in court and they aren’t worth the paper they’re printed on. End of discussion.

We set a date for a meeting with the top state inspector and the federal officer responsible to oversee the state to make sure the state did not violate the “equal to or more stringent” requirements of the federal codes. The federal bureaucrats use “equal to” language to hold states hostage to federal mandates. If a state were able to grant more freedom to its citizens than the beltway crowd thought prudent, people in other states might like the new opportunities and vote themselves unimagined liberties. The feds can’t abide such a notion. It would min our socialistic country. People owning their own bodies? Their own decisions? No, that must never be.

When the bureaucrats showed up, they were half an hour early. I went out and told them they were half an hour early and could not get out of the car. My people were not here yet. My attorney and my delegate’s aide came, along with our homeschooled children and apprentices.

When our people showed up, I waved out to the bureaucrats that they could come into the house. Our children were right behind me as I welcomed them into the house with a brief introduction that this was like a field trip to see how the government works. I assured our children that these officials were here to help the citizen and to make sure farmers could continue to succeed. To insure that Americans would enjoy freedom of choice in their food, and that righteousness would prevail. We had a special gallery set up in the living room for our children and apprentices.

Of course, this introduction put the bureaucrats a little on the defensive, which was exactly what I wanted. I tell folks all the time that you don’t have to shoot these agents, but you don’t just have to roll over either. Have the self-awareness and confidence in your moral high ground to maintain your dignity in their face.

The opening salvo came from the aide and our attorney, who wanted to know the history of this new interpretation that no matter what transpired before slaughter, if the price was based on a dead weight, the sale was automatically an after-death sale and therefore illegal in a custom facility. The officials assured them that nothing prompted it at all, it was just Monday morning and time for a new interpretation. They said it was unfair for us to slip through a loophole that allowed a $30,000 facility to process beef when Kroger and Wal-Mart had to use $1 million facilities.

“These retail outlets are on us every day wanting to know why we let people like you get access to the market when they have such a high cost in compliance.”

“Well, we’re not in the same game,” I said. “Our customers received an order blank in the mail six months before these animals were ready. They ordered and signed their names that they would take a whole, half, or quarter. They had to think ahead half a year to do this. And they need a big freezer to put it all in. And they are going to be cooking this stuff in their kitchen. They have to come out to the farm to pick it up, so they see these animals and they know us. These folks know what we feed, what we don’t feed, and how these animals are raised.

“The folks you’re talking about that are putting the squeeze on you don’t sell beef this way. Their customers can come in at 5 p.m. and buy a steak on a whim. They don’t have a clue where the meat came from, who grew it, or what the cow ate. They have no relationship whatsoever with this meat. And to be sure, we have absolutely no problem with them playing in that game. But for these retailers to even think that we are in the same game is ludicrous.”

The officials responded that their retail constituency did not see it that way. Meat was meat, and they believed we had an unfair advantage in the marketplace if we were going to continue to use low-cost neighborhood abattoirs. They didn’t have an answer as to why they had singled us out but hadn’t pursued any of the other carcasses hanging in the same chill room being sold exactly the same as ours.

Things degenerated from there for awhile. Finally, in a rare stroke of genius, I asked what proved to be the pivotal question of the day: “If you were me, what would you do?” And I shut up. Everyone shut up. Deathly silence.

I learned a lot from that experience. Many times, in a rather heated disagreement, we can bleed off the heat by asking the other side, sincerely, what they would do. Suddenly they can’t just complain. In formal debate (I was on the debate team in both high school and college, and still consider that extracurricular activity to be the most valuable educational investment of my life) the affirmative side must win two elements: the case and the plan. The case is the complaint, or the problem, with the status quo. The affirmative is always asking for a change from what is.

But in order to win, the affirmative must also have a workable solution, called a plan. If the judge agrees that the status quo stinks, that the complaint is valid, he can’t vote for the affirmative until he also buys the plan. Often the affirmative will win the case, but lose because the negative team shows that the plan either won’t solve the complaint or has such serious disadvantages in its own right that the cure is worse than the disease. That is a good rule for life. Anyone can complain. That’s easy.

But what to do about it—now that’s the big question. And so I just put it to them. I was tired of hearing them complain about us. I wanted a solution. And then we all shut up. The silence was long. I will never forget it.

Then the federal guy, newly energized by being asked to help, offered this suggestion: “Why don’t you charge something by the head—an amount that every animal will generate. Then adjust the price based on carcass weight by calling it shipping and handling. That way you satisfy us with a before slaughter sale but you also can customize it to carcass yield by adjusting on a carcass per pound price based on shipping and handling.”

We all sat there, stupefied for a moment. So simple. It was profound. How could we have possibly been so uncreative at insuring that our beef would be safe for our dear customers? Forsooth, our customers could now eat in safety. Glory, glory, and my, my. The man was a genius. The meeting was over. We agreed that we would do that; they agreed to leave us alone, and we parted amicably.

The next year, we had a new pricing structure: our beef was $1 per head; half 50 cents; a quarter was 25 cents. But that shipping and handling was rough—$2 a pound carcass weight. We explained the whole charade to our customers and they thought it was a hoot. Of course, they played right along. Most folks get a deep soul level satisfaction at pulling a fast one over the authorities.

You know the funny part? Virginia collects sales tax on food and merchandise, but not on services. We were no longer in the beef business; we were in the service business. Instead of collecting and sending thousands of dollars in sales tax to Richmond, we sent a few pennies. After all, you have to be consistent. They made the rules; we were just playing their game. Isn’t that hilarious? Here the best officials the state and feds could throw at us had succeeded in bilking the capital out of thousands of dollars, and saved our customers that money as well.

It was truly a great day for all. After several years we decided we should be more afraid of the sales tax vampires than the food police. We reverted to our pre-showdown days of just selling by the carcass weight, and no one has said anything. All this hassle, attorney’s fees, mental anguish, and brouhaha, for what? Nothing really. Except a great story to tell. And hopefully a lesson learned. The lesson being that bureaucrats are not reasonable; that they have no heart; and that they are more stupid than they can possibly imagine.

I’d like to conclude this story with three points. The first is that if the custom product is safe, why can’t we sell it? If it’s safe, it’s safe. And if it’s safe to eat when your name is on the animal before slaughter, then why isn’t selling a package from that animal also safe? I can give away those packages to people who have never met me and don’t know me from Adam. I can use those packages at the local school for the kindergarten picnic. I can cook those packages for a neighborhood picnic.

But if one of those neighbors, one of those kindergartener’s parents likes it and wants to buy a pound of hamburger from me, I’m headed to jail because the package is stamped “NOT FOR SALE.” What is it about exchanging money for the package that suddenly makes it a hazardous substance? Unsafe food? When looked at this way, the thin veil called protecting people as a justification for all these regulations just melts away. I can assure anyone that those packages from our little custom facility that only slaughters a couple of days a week and operates on family labor are every bit as clean and safe as those that cost half again as much to be processed from the federal inspected facility.

You could eat off the floor of our custom facility. The inspectors made new rules demanding that every kill floor had to have a squeegee to push the blood down into the drain hole. That might be necessary in facilities processing thousands of animals a day. But in ours, where they do a couple per hour, such infrastructure is a complete waste of money. No matter, they had to buy one. It sits in the corner and has never been used. But they are under compliance. Oh, thank goodness.

In our culture, hazardous products carry prohibitions on both buyer and seller. Without getting into a full-blown discussion about drugs, the point here is that they are not only illegal to sell, they are illegal to own or use. But in food, the prohibition is only on the seller, not the buyer. And not the user.

If I talk a person into selling their “NOT FOR SALE” package of T-bone steak, I’m totally legal to buy it. And I can feed it to my children, their friends, and my neighbors. The only liability is on the poor farmer that sold it to me. My question is if it’s really a safe food issue, it should be illegal to acquire the hazardous product as well as to sell it. It’s either hazardous or not. Don’t give me this pabulum about food safety. This is not about food safety. It’s about denying market access to appropriate-scaled transparent products, and thereby insuring de-facto market protection for the current big players.

What these regulations do is to insure that whatever money is made in tomorrow’s food system, will be made by today’s players. Upstarts are not allowed. It’s the ultimate game of “I got mine and you can’t have yours” and it’s rotten to the core. The people being contaminated with food borne bacteria are not getting it from custom facilities; they are getting it from industrial-sized closed-door federal facilities where the government-corporate fraternity speaks the same language and colludes to make sure that whatever truly innovative answers exist to today’s problems will never see the light of day.

Second point. Our attorney is a lifelong Democrat. The delegate was a Republican. Our state senator who went to bat for us was a Democrat. Our Congressman who entered the fray was a Republican. Without exception, we have found that these issues excite both sides of the aisle. To the Republicans, this is small business and entrepreneurship held back by meaningless regulations.

To the Democrats, this is about environmental farming and chemical-free food accessing the marketplace. As the alternative food movement continues to gain steam, I enjoy watching the liberals squirm when they find their freedom of food choice arbitrarily quashed by their partners in the government. Those folks that are supposed to insure fairness and equality for all the citizens.

And it’s equally interesting to watch the Republicans squirm when they realize the collusion between the bureaucracy and Wall Street. The coziness between tax breaks and the seats of power. Corporate welfare. When tax-free bonds are handed out like candy to big players but little players get whacked on the nose if they have one “NOT FOR SALE” package on an invoice.

At some point, the government-loving liberals need to think about where their well-meaning government help is taking us, and the Chamber of Commerce conservatives need to appreciate the thrashing that environmental food entrepreneurs receive at the hand of Wall-Street and the USDA. All of us have plenty of learning to do.

Third and final point. At the time of this showdown, we had an apprentice here, newly graduated from the University of Colorado in Environmental Sciences. Totally committed to the government solution for everything, he was indignant at the way these bureaucrats were handling us. He knew our meat was great and that all this was an orchestrated attempt to destroy an up-and-coming player in the clean food movement. He was ready to fight.

In fact, on an extremely personal note, I will share that during one of the darkest mornings, when the inspector was camped outside our front door, I was praying and meditating in the field during chores, in great anguish of soul and spirit. My question: “What do you want, God? Have you blessed us with these customers and these environmentally-enhancive production models to just shut it down?” Realize that even though I have separated our PL 90-492 battle from our custom beef battle, they occurred at about the same time. That was a rough year. I have separated them in this book for clarity and because the issues are quite different.

And in the quietness of that moment, while I was moving broiler shelters, with the gentle chirping of the birds as a background, the answer came back: “For such a time as this.” My mind immediately went to the Old Testament book of Esther, when the Persian king had been duped by an evil courtier to command the extermination of all Jews. Esther, a Jewess, disregarded royal protocol, disregarded her life, and was admonished by her loving uncle and guardian, Mordecai: “For such a time as this.” (Esther 4:14) She conceived a plan, at peril to her life, to save her people, and it worked. In the many years since that day, I have taken great solace in that answer.

In fact, that gave me the courage, when the officials tried desperately to shut down our outdoor chicken processing shed, to look them in the eye and tell them, “When my customer carries his 90-pound wife up to my front door and says, ‘The doctor says my wife will die if she doesn’t get organic meat. Can you help me?’ I am going to make sure she gets it. Now you folks can either make life difficult or easy. It’s in your hand. You know as well as I do there is no food safety issue here. If you want to see what my pen can do from jail, then go ahead and take me there. But I am telling you today, that like me or not, like this facility or not, our customers will get food that is not adulterated by your stamps of approval.”

Immediately, I saw the officials soften. I was not screaming. I did not raise my voice. I think they saw passion like they had never seen. I was trembling inside. But this is not just a business, it is a sacred calling, a sacred ministry, serving people who seek truth and are willing to travel dirt roads to get it. Americans have been acculturated to bow before officials, and to assume that if you have alphabet soup behind your name, you are a decent, reasonable, honest individual. ‘Tain’t so, dear friend. To the liberals, I say that for every greedy, evil-hearted business owner you will find an equal in the government; and to the conservatives, I say that for every greedy, evil-hearted tree hugger you will find an equal in the government.

So our apprentice was incensed. “Call the newspaper,” he said. “This is ridiculous. The media should know about these guys. It’s not fair.”

I looked at him and said, “Tell me. If you didn’t know anything about this, and you opened the newspaper in the morning to this headline: ‘Food Inspectors Accuse Local Farmer of Selling Uninspected Meat’ what would you think?”

He responded quickly, “I’d think some scumbag farmer—after all, their cows are melting the polar caps and will soon flood New York City—is preying on unsuspecting consumers and selling them trashy food.” He paused as the reality of his paradigm broke in upon his consciousness. I think it shocked him.

“You have to pick the field of battle,” I said. “We can’t beat that headline. You and everybody like you thinks farmers don’t care about anybody, that all business people are out to pull a fast one on those poor ignorant consumers, and that whatever the government officials say is gospel.”

He had to agree, and it was a real epiphany for him. It opened the floodgates for some real cross-partisan discussions. We’d all like to think that truth will rise to the top, but that’s not always the case. Oh, it will ultimately, but ultimately can take a long time coming.

Here we are, a few gray hairs later, lots of lost workdays later, selling our freezer beef and pork just like we did before the Richmond Cavalry descended on us way more than a decade ago. And Richmond is getting its sales tax money. All is quiet—for now.

Chapter 5

Bacon

“I’d like some bacon. Why don’t you offer that?” The I customer’s question seemed reasonable enough. After all, we sold sausage, ground pork, tenderloin, spareribs, backbone, pork chops, fresh pork roasts—why not offer bacon? To the average person, bacon is just a special kind of pork.

But not to the government. Bacon comes from the belly of the hog. It’s the muscle that holds all the insides in. It’s the same muscle that has become elongated and stretched on the front side of many people.

To make bacon, of course, the hog must be slaughtered and cut up into pieces. The hind leg yields ham, the front leg yields shoulder, the back yields the loin, and the ribs yield...yes, ribs. The belly yields a piece a little more than an inch thick and about 15 in. X 15 in. Curing this piece of pork with salt, pepper, and brown sugar yields bacon. Bacon is not a fresh piece of meat; it’s a fresh piece of meat cured in some way. It can be cured with smoking.

I love bacon, and I certainly wanted to sell it to this customer. My father-in-law had a curing house and when Teresa and I were younger, the family would get together in November and have a hog-killin’. We’d dress out the hogs in the morning and let the carcasses cool down on tripod poles during lunch, which was a veritable feast.

After lunch we’d cut the hogs into their main pieces—ham, shoulder, back, belly, ribs—and begin cooking the fat for lard. The hams, shoulders, and bellies would be carried up to large wooden tables in the curing house and liberally covered with the curing recipe—usually salt, black pepper and brown sugar. We would rub this mixture into the meat.

The curing mix combines with the meat juices as it permeates. Cold nights and warm days aid the curing process by making the meat weep a little bit and then stiffen. This movement helps the tissue absorb the cure. The thicker the chunk, the longer it takes to fully cure. Hams often take four months but bacon, because it’s only a little more than an inch thick, can cure in a month. After accepting the cure, the meat is ambient temperature stable indefinitely. This procedure enabled meat to be held for long periods of time before refrigeration or freezing were available.

Common knowledge and common procedure in the countryside, home curing gradually fell into disuse with the rise of industrial curing operations, the supermarket, and the rise of government regulations. It is an extremely simple process, does not require much infrastructure, and is easy to learn.

Why not just go ahead and bring back the big pieces of belly from the slaughterhouse and cure it here on the farm like we used to? We had the ability, the desire, the market, the infrastructure. Only one problem: it was illegal. Even though we had a federal inspected seal on the meat when we brought it home from the slaughterhouse, as soon as we did anything else to that meat besides sell it, we were in the processing business. And processing meat without a license is illegal. Okay, so let’s get a license.

Well, it’s not really a license like a driver’s license. The average person is used to a license simply being a standard of competency. If you can drive the car and pass the test, you have proven competency and the license is yours. Just imagine if in addition to proving competency, you had to own a car with a certain horsepower. Suppose you had to own a garage, where you could park the car out of the weather. Suppose you could only get a license if you had a car big enough to carry five passengers. Unfair, you say?

Not at all, when it comes to on-farm bacon making. We needed an inspected curing facility. The meat needed to be transported in an approved container. This is one we’ve never been able to really pin down. We’ve been told that it’s illegal to take inspected meat from a slaughterhouse in a non-refrigerated vehicle. But if we’re only an hour from the facility and we crank down the air conditioner, it stays plenty cold.

No matter. Must be a refrigerated vehicle. Let’s say we spring the thousands of dollars necessary for a refrigerated vehicle so we can legally transport the meat home. Now it goes into a permitted facility on the farm for curing. One little problem: processing facilities are illegal in agriculturally zoned areas, because this procedure is not considered farming; it’s considered industrial or commercial use.

This curing facility needs bathrooms and an office for the bureaucrats to do their paperwork. It needs impermeable walls and washable floors, so many lumens of light per square foot, and handicapped access. It needs temperature control, with 24-hour monitoring disks. And we need to calibrate all the thermometers monthly—that only takes a few hours a month. And each calibration must be duly noted on a form with the non-transferrable thermometer delineation in order to insure efficacy.

After hearing all that, I realized we couldn’t afford to do that. So I asked the inspector for alternatives to the curing facility. He said if we had a retail establishment, we wouldn’t have to be subject to any of these requirements. Okay, so let’s have a retail facility. We already had a nice on-farm store complete with wood burning stove circa. 1920 to provide heat and ambiance.

A retail store must have approved bathrooms. Now we’re back into septics. It’s not allowed in an agricultural zone. It must have an approved parking area and commercial entrance, including appropriate site distances up the public road.

“Look,” I said. “All I want to do is salt down a pork belly to make bacon to sell to this nice neighbor customer.”

He patiently explained that bacon is a processed product. It doesn’t matter if it’s only one pound or a million, the infrastructure requirements are there to protect the customer from food poisoning.

“Well, what if I smoked it rather than the salt deal?”

“No difference. When you take that meat home, it must be received into a licensed facility. A licensed facility has certain requirements: concrete, rebar, lights, bathrooms, handicapped access, temperature controls.”

The important thing to remember here is that competency does not require any of this infrastructure. Folks around here have been curing pork for centuries, safely, in crude on-farm cabins and outbuildings. Smokehouses are everywhere.

I finally realized that curing wouldn’t happen on our farm for a long time, so I began calling businesses that cure. The big guys aren’t interested—they are part of a vertically integrated chain in which the company owns the hogs, the slaughterhouse, and the further processing facility. After many phone calls, I located a guy a hundred miles away who agreed to do it only after I convinced him that I wouldn’t try to take away his markets. He was buying tractor trailer loads of hams from the industry and curing them with his own recipe, and had a very dynamic, successful business.

He told me one day he looked out in the parking lot and saw six government cars. He told the bureaucrats that he couldn’t possibly earn enough money, and the American taxpayers couldn’t earn enough money, to pay for them to be there. He built this business over his lifetime and can make your hair stand on end with bureaucrat stories. Now he keeps a shotgun in his office and when the bureaucrats roll in, he steps out onto the porch and lets off a couple of shots in the air just to annoy them.

One catch—he’d never cured without nitrites and nitrates. These preservatives keep the fat from discoloring during and after the curing process. They reduce the skill necessary for a good cure. He said he would try to do it without these noxious preservatives. And the price? Hold onto your hats—$1 per pound to cure and $1 per pound to package. You see, he did it reluctantly. This was the only legal facility in the state where I could get this done.

Since packaging is part of the processing, he couldn’t cure it and then let us bring it home to package it. In order to be legal, the product must be under inspection all the way to the final package. Of course, we had to get him the fresh pork. Fortunately, he came weekly to the processing plant we used to slaughter the hogs. We arranged with the slaughterhouse to freeze the product for curing and hold it until he came.

Our volumes were so small it took awhile to accumulate enough product to justify turning on one of his curing rooms to do it. When the first batch was finished, he called me with the bad news that it was no good.

“It’s yellow,” he said. “You can’t sell that.”

I looked at it, cooked some, and it tasted great. The yellowing was due to the absence of nitrites and nitrates. I assured him that it was okay and our customers wouldn’t mind. He shook his head in disbelief. Sure enough, our customers loved it—and still do.

The pork shoulder cure wasn’t as successful. After throwing away about $4,000 worth of meat, we finally gave up. He could never get the process right for shoulder without the crutch of the nitrates and nitrites. We gradually cultivated a market for Boston Butts and that solved the shoulder problem. He was more successful with the ham, and although we lost some product initially, he was able to make the cure work.

When we sell a pound of bacon, we have more than $1 in butchering the animal—that goes to the slaughterhouse. Then we have $2 to the curing facility for curing and packaging. That’s $3 a pound right off the top. When we sell bacon for $6 a pound, we have only $3 left to pay for the pig, the feed, the labor, and the marketing. And that ain’t much.

The problem with all these infrastructure and paperwork requirements is that they are non scalable. They discriminate against the small operator because the big outfits have enough volume to spread the high cost over additional product.

To illustrate this point, I have a neighbor who makes old-fashioned pickles. She went to the expense of installing a commercial kitchen in her large home basement and attached two-car garage. She uses five-gallon stainless steal stock pots for cooking on two six-burner high-BTU commercial stove surfaces. She makes salsa, pickles, jams, and jellies.

For efficiency, she makes a batch of product utilizing all the cooking surfaces at one time and then makes a batch of something else. Because she has twelve burners, one batch may use six or eight stock pots. But the Food and Drug Administration inspectors do not allow her to call that one batch. Each pot is one batch. She has to check Ph, cooking temperature, time start, and time ended on each pot and laboriously fill out the appropriate square in a chart for each of these. And she dare not miss one.

A large outfit cooking in a 1,000 gallon pot has the same paperwork as she does using a five gallon pot. The labor to hire a full-time paper-filler-outer for the small outfit is 20 percent of the labor force. For the big outfit, it’s less than 5 percent. And if you happen to make a mistake, the bureaucrats will move heaven and hell to punish you.

Case in point. A friend in Minnesota operates a wonderful small slaughterhouse. He has to probe the meat and fill out a chart every hour to document the chill-down. They have a square to fill out at 1 hour post-kill, 2 hours post-kill, etc. for so many hours until chill-down compliance is achieved. One day, an employee forgot to do a mid-time check. The square was just blank. But the preceding one and the subsequent one were both right on target.

The inspector saw the blank square and demanded that $40,000 worth of hanging beef be thrown away due to the noncompliance. Obviously, this oversight had nothing to do with food safety. It was just a matter of human error. This is how intransigent and unreasonable these bureaucrats are.

I had an interesting attorney visit recently who represents the largest fast food chain in the world. He is part of that famous revolving door between Congressional staff and large corporate offices. He said the reality is that the large processor has problems with over-zealous bureaucrats too. But they have attorneys like him, on retainer, who simply fix it. His job is to contact the appropriate supervisors at Food Safety and Inspection Service and call off the dogs, so to speak.

He said bureaucrats are bureaucrats and don’t really care whether they are dealing with big operators or small ones (at least that’s his perspective). But it looks like they give the big guys a pass because the big guys can afford to hire go-betweens that use their ability to entertain, buy, bargain, or cajole to gamer concessions as necessary. The small processors can’t afford to hire a full-time attorney to do this work because they can’t spread the cost across millions of pounds. As a result, when the small outfit feels the brunt of bureaucratic unreasonableness, the only recourse is to capitulate, repent in sackcloth and ashes, ask, “What must I do to be saved?” and try to placate the officials.

According to him, it’s not really a discriminatory application of the law; it only appears to be so. If the little guys would become big guys and hire people like him, they could enjoy the benefits of retained insiders to run interference too. In other words, the solution for small businesses is to become big businesses and all will be well. He probably votes Republican.

In my years lobbying for scalable regulations in government, the common bureaucratic response is that we have to have a “level playing field.” My response to that is that we aren’t playing the same game. For them to invoke the level playing field requirement on a guy slaughtering 10 beeves a week in a facility attached to his house, when compared to a Tyson slaughtering 5,000 beeves a day in a 1,000-employee slaughterhouse is just ludicrous.

That’s like saying it would be a level playing field to allow anyone to play football as long as it was done in an NFL stadium. No backyard pickup games, no high school gymnasium adjusted-rules stuff on rainy days. We’re going to have a level playing field. If anyone wants to play football, it must be done in an NFL stadium. Now doesn’t everyone feel empowered? Give me a break.

Why can’t the rules be written to flex with the game being played? If we’re in a backyard that’s only 50 yards long, we say a touchdown happens in 50 yards, not 100. Who hasn’t adjusted rules to fit circumstances?

The problem is that the rules become requirements of system rather than requirements of competency. If a touchdown is the goal, you can have just as valid a touchdown on a short field as a long one. If food safety is the goal, you can have just as safe a food produced in a home kitchen as in a Campbell’s soup factory. If the goal is safe food, who cares what the infrastructure is as long as the food is safe?

These ludicrous requirements are an attempt to legislate integrity, and integrity cannot be legislated. A local delegate told me the biggest problem the poultry industry has in their big processing plants is that many of the workers don’t wash their hands after going to the bathroom because that is not a part of their culture’s hygiene. You can have all the stainless steel in the world, all the hot water and chill tanks you want, but in the final analysis, if you can’t get workers to wash their hands, the product will not be safe. You simply cannot legislate integrity.

But somehow the government believes that if we just require enough squares in paperwork to be filled out, we can make a system foolproof. The big food poisonings and recalls are not happening in small outfits; they are happening in large outfits. No rules or protocols can insure honesty or care.

The result of all this is that for the small producer and processor, the nonscalable regulations create a discriminatory cost structure on the price of the product or service. When the small outfit enters the marketplace, its product or service is at a competitive disadvantage. People are always asking us why local meat and poultry is more expensive than what’s at Wal-Mart that came from 1,000 miles away. It seems like it should be cheaper if it’s sold across the fence to the neighbor and doesn’t have all that transportation behind it.

The high cost of local food has nothing to do with actual costs. These costs almost always are a result of inappropriate regulations that preclude efficiencies. Like requiring a bathroom in the smokehouse.

The bottom line: most of what enters the marketplace is from large outfits. And these outfits constantly try to expand in order to spread the cost of regulations. The best way to eliminate competition in the marketplace is to stifle upstarts from ever seeing the light of day. And that is why so few pastured hog producers can offer bacon.

Just to prove my perspective, I will quote from an official document prepared by John A. Beers, Office of Dairy and Foods on May 9, 2003 as the official response of the Virginia Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services to a proposed amendment that placed goat, sheep, and water buffalo cheese on par with cow cheese regulations.

“The final regulation will ensure every person who sells cheese is competing on a level playing field. Such is not the case today. Currently, anyone making and selling cheese from cow’s milk is required to meet the requirements of the final regulation. Persons making and selling cheese made from the milk of goats or sheep are regulated under less specific requirements contained in the Virginia Food Laws. Within the group of people making and selling cheese from goat’s milk there is a division between those who are in compliance and those who are not. This situation leads to disparities between the three groups considering their respective cost of production. The current situation provides some individuals with cost advantages over others making the same or similar products.”

Notice how he uses compliance and level playing field? This is typical justification for adding more burdensome and local-food-destroying requirements.

Perhaps the more telling portion of this same report deals with the official agency response to the charge brought up during public hearings that consumers should be allowed freedom of choice to determine what they choose to eat. Here is the official agency response:

“For individuals to make a choice implies that they have some basic knowledge on which to base a decision. The Department believes that the average consumer does not possess the basic knowledge to be able to determine if milk and dairy products are safe. Less than three percent of the population lives on a farm or has any understanding of the processes required to produce milk and dairy products safely. Consumers also lack basic understanding of risk factors involved with sanitation, production and processing methods, packaging, handling, labeling, and distribution. The average consumer does not question the safety of food products offered for sale but expects them to be safe. Consumers assume food products are safe because their experience tells them so, not because of their knowledge of food safety.

“Consumers also assume that products being offered for sale at farmers’ markets or other places established by local government authorities are just as safe as products in grocery stores that come from inspected facilities. The fact that farmers’ markets are sanctioned by local government gives people the impression that the food products offered for sale have been sanctioned by local government.

“Children are one group of consumers who have no choice. Children will consume what their parents or other adults provide them to eat. Children are unable to determine for themselves what is safe or unsafe to eat. Cheese and dairy products made from unpasteurized milk are associated with a high level of illnesses in disease outbreaks traced to dairy products. Children are often the victims of these diseases.”

Do you see the condescension here? The poor, stupid consumer is too pitifully ignorant to make her own decisions. And notice the ostentatious bleeding heart for children. Oh, they care so much for children. They have no problem with parents feeding their children Twinkies and soy milk for breakfast. Sitting for hours in front of the TV after school. Consuming half a dozen cans of soft drinks per week. Pumping kids full of Ritalin and feeding them feedlot beef.

If these guys really want to do something about children eating better, they would begin a crusade against half of what’s in the supermarket. Directly quoting the department yields great insight into how these bureaucrats think. Clearly, they do not believe the American consumer is capable of making decisions. That should raise the ire of every freedom-loving citizen.

To take this one step farther, the report goes on to say that:

“The Department is unaware of any scientific evidence that supports the allegation that milk and dairy products sold directly from the farm are of superior quality or safer than commercially available products. Some individuals allege that because commercial dairy products are manufactured from the commingled milk from numerous dairy farms that they are more subject to contamination than similar products manufactured by a single farm. The Department believes that all milk and dairy products have the same potential risk of adulteration with pathogens or other organisms. The same steps needed to process milk and dairy products into safe and wholesome foods are necessary for both the individual dairy farm and the large commercial processor. Where food safety is concerned, smaller does not equate with safer.”

Notice how the bureaucrats circle the wagons around the mega-processors? The prejudicial stance is too obvious to deny, and it’s fascinating to see these viewpoints in black and white. Anyone who believes that bureaucrats love individual decision-making liberty and small, local food systems can see the opposite defended and encouraged in this report.

When coupled with all the reports that show centralization is the vulnerability point for pathogens and bioterrorism, such blind protection of the industrial food system could be described as evil intentioned, not just ignorant. Who says these folks don’t have an agenda? Of course they do. The agenda is the systematic dissection of small, local food systems. Rather than just go to an empirical standard of so many parts per million of whatever, the government agents want physical structures and mountains of paperwork to level the playing field and prove compliance. It’s obscene and un-American.

The tragedy is that these bureaucrats have equal sway over Republicans and Democrats. Both groups of politicians bow before these people as if their credentials and appointments came directly from God.

A couple of years ago I was in Richmond lobbying against a bill that would have given the Commissioner of Agriculture (the one who sat beside me and likened raw milk to moonshine) the authority to promulgate any regulation he desired on chicken farmers and chicken sales. These regulations, by statute, would have been exempted from any hearings or citizen oversight. A few of us got together and cried foul—no pun intended, and eventually succeeded in amending the bill.

Anyway, during the hearing process, people like me sat in the audience, out in the cheap seats. The industry insiders and the Farm Bureau Federation lobbyists, the lobbyists for the Agribusiness Council—all these folks were invited to pull up chairs and sit around the table with the legislators. The bald-faced, shameless cozying up that the elected politicos show to the powerful insiders is downright embarrassing. I come away from those meetings feeling like I’ve been dipped in some evil juice. I feel dirty and unclean, like I’ve become soiled with societal depravity.

If I pulled up a chair to that big oval table at the front, the Democrats, Republicans, and their industry buddies would call the state trooper over and have me summarily removed for going where I wasn’t invited. But if I were an elected official, I would be dubious toward every single report issued by the bureaucrat. I would assume that whatever the government agent said, it was designed to hurt the good folks and protect the bad ones.

I’ve been to Richmond countless times, promised by my elected delegates or senators that a hearing will extend “equal time.” Dear readers, it doesn’t exist. After one delegate actually asked me to accompany him on a day of lobbying for a bill that would exempt on-farm sales from onerous regulations, I confessed to him at the end of the day that I was frustrated with the system. All day long we could scarcely get an audience with a legislative aide.

But behind my shoulder, whenever an industry lobbyist came along, the door to the inner sanctum swung open and the politician himself welcomed the guest with open arms. It’s sick. Just sick. But the answer is not lobbying reform. The answer is for people like you, who are reading this book, to get involved. For us to join forces and scream “Enough!” and take back our government so that it serves our communities and not just ensconced global empire builders.

All of this over a piece of bacon. Yes, it really does come down to that. Until we realize that these big issues graphically and viscerally affect your freedom to have pastured bacon for breakfast, we’ll never get anywhere. And this is an issue that the environmentalists do not understand, the Chamber of Commerce folks don’t understand, the organic certification folks don’t understand, the military doesn’t understand, and the greenies and foodies don’t understand. How our culture views freedom of choice creates the climate for whether a local food system can exist. And whether you and I have an option to Wal-Mart fare. Let’s bring home the bacon.

Chapter 6

Salmonella

Ihad just stepped into the house to grab a drink of water when the phone rang: “I’m letting you know you’ll be getting a visit from USDA egg inspectors very soon. We just had a salmonella outbreak in our restaurant and they’re saying it was your eggs. I don’t think so, but what can I say? We’re closed.”

I tried to mentally process all this as it came gushing out from one of our best chef-owned restaurants. The owner was calling to give me a heads up before the egg police came.

Over the weekend, he had served an uncooked Hollandaise sauce over Eggs Benedict, from an open bowl that stayed on the counter in the kitchen for five hours. A couple of customers had developed bloody diarrhea and gone to the local hospital emergency room, where stool samples confirmed salmonella, the common thread being dining at this restaurant for Sunday brunch, and eating the Hollandaise sauce.

As the chef explained, this open-bowl sauce is a petri dish for bacteria. And he had all kinds of fresh seafood, fresh meats, fresh garden produce with dirt dangling from the roots. And, as it turned out, the kitchen did in fact have, shall we say, some cleanliness issues. The restaurant closed for a week to do a complete white glove.

When the health department regional administrator arrived, she saw our eggs in the cooler and immediately determined that they were the culprit in the outbreak. She put our eggs on the report as the cause of the contamination and ordered them destroyed.

I immediately went to the field here at the farm and collected both fecal samples and eggs, and sent them to an accredited independent lab for a salmonella analysis. We paid $200 to get the four samples analyzed and waited an excruciating two weeks for the report. Sure enough, the USDA inspectors showed up here at the farm a couple of days later. They wanted to see our eggs in the walk-in cooler.

I hauled some out and they set up their lab—about a million candlepower light, similar to the one used by the oral surgeon when you go in for surgery. It was bright. Really bright. According to government protocol, a sample is 100 eggs. To be legal for sale, only one egg per 100 may have what is called “adhering dirt.” That means anything that can be physically scraped off. It could be egg yolk from a broken egg, manure, a piece of straw from the nest box, a feather, or even a piece of cardboard from the egg carton. Anything that can be scraped off.

These two inspectors took out 100 eggs and began their analysis. It would have made a stand-up comedy routine—believe me, Laurel and Hardy had nothing on these two—if it hadn’t been so serious. They picked up each egg and scrutinized it upside down and everything but inside out. Since we use non-hybrid brown egg layers, our eggs exhibit more genetic diversity than commercial eggs. We have eggs with spots, ridges, little calcium deposits, dark shells, light shells, elongated ovals, and shortened ovals.

These inspectors looked at countless eggs, trying to decide if that was a bump, a calcium deposit, a piece of dirt, a bit of pigment on a sea of paleness. They spent a couple of hours examining those 100 eggs under the spot light. Wonder they didn’t get sun burnt under the intense lumens of that light. Anyway, when they were all done, they determined that we had two eggs out of 100 with adhering dirt, and therefore these eggs were illegal to sell. They were, in fact, inedible, which is the operative term for eggs that do not pass. Inedible eggs are illegal to sell. We were, in fact, criminals.

To help set the stage, keep in mind that we do not like to wash eggs if they are clean. When a hen lays an egg, she coats it with a shiny film that acts as a bacterial protection. It also reduces evaporation from the porous shell. If the egg is clean, it’s clean and we don’t wash it because we want to leave that protective film on it if at all possible. We have customers who ask for unwashed eggs, knowing that the film will be intact.

We process the eggs by hand, not machine. When we gather eggs, we place them in a wire basket, bring them to the egg room, and take out the clean ones from the dirties. When we’re finished packing all the cleans, we have a basket of dirties that we place in a bucket of lukewarm soapy water and sponge off each egg. We put the eggs in plastic flats with drain holes in the bottom of each molded depression. Over night they drain and dry down, and those are the first eggs we pack the next day before we start the cleans. And then we repeat the whole cycle.

These inspectors, interestingly, never candled the eggs. Candling is a procedure that allows you to see inside the egg by using an intensive light and shining it through the egg in a dark room. It illuminates the inside enough to see how big the air space is, how runny the albumen (white) is and if the egg contains any blood spots or other abnormalities. If you make a claim like “Grade A” then the eggs must be candled. If you make no claim, the eggs do not have to be candled. We make no claims.

As I looked at the stash of 1,200 dozen eggs that had just been deemed inedible, I asked the inspectors what we should do. They were actually fairly cooperative, and suggested that we just go through them, clean them better, and then be ready for a re-exam in a couple of days. The inspectors left and we hauled all the eggs out and began going through them. A fleck of straw here, a piece of our washing sponge there, once in awhile a tiny speck of dirt. We went through them all. Although I’ve not done a scientific analysis, having looked at many cartons of eggs in the supermarket, I am convinced that were this rule strictly applied, no egg producer in the country could comply.

Two days later the inspectors returned, looked at the eggs—with no bright lights. Just a cursory glance, really, and deemed them okay. Suddenly the eggs were edible again. Amazing, to go from inedible to edible—it’s almost like alchemy, turning straw into gold. Or transmutation, or something. I think these inspectors really missed their calling: they should have been magicians.

The important thing to understand here is that nobody checked the inside of the egg. When a carton of eggs says “Grade A Large” and has that identifying USDA shield on it, nothing about that inspection checks the inside of the egg. Nothing checks for the things that can hurt people. The inspection only deals with visually observable qualities: exterior shell and interior air space, thickness and blood spots. Blood spots don’t hurt anyone; they are just yucky to see when you’re eating an egg. It’s more a psychological aversion than any real potential physical harm.

The point is that anything that could make you sick is never part of the grading system. People put a lot of credence in a system that excludes the most important part. This is typical of the inspection system: it checks for the least important things and

doesn’t check for the most important things. The grading system developed as a cosmetic check, not a safety check. Candling can definitely show interior deterioration if the egg is very old, but even an old egg can’t hurt you. It might not taste very good, and certainly won’t whip into a nice meringue, but it won’t hurt you.

Finally our lab analysis arrived in the mail. I tore it open and was elated to find no traces of salmonella even in the manure. We could eat our chicken manure safely! Now I had confirmation that the salmonella outbreak was not our eggs, and eagerly waited to hear from the health department’s findings. I waited. And waited.

After another week, I couldn’t stand it, so I called the health department lady. Without telling her about our test results, I asked her: “What did your cultures show?”

“What cultures?” she asked.

“Your cultures of our eggs that you said had salmonella. I’m curious what you found.”

“We didn’t culture anything.”

“Why?” I asked, incredulous.

“Because cultures don’t mean anything. They just measure a point in time, and that has no real bearing on a pathogen outbreak. It may have been gone by the time we took a sample. Culturing the sauce or your eggs would have been meaningless.”

I paused. This was definitely not the answer I was expecting, and I had to process this before going on. “Well, if you didn’t culture anything, how do you know it was our eggs then? After all, you did put our eggs in the report.”

“When I saw unwashed eggs, I knew that was the culprit because this strain has been found on unwashed eggs.”

“Only on unwashed eggs, or other things too?”

“Other things, yes, but also on unwashed eggs.”

“Then how do you know it was our eggs? Maybe it was something else.”

“This was my determination.”

“The owner-chef told me it could have been any number of things.”

“Unwashed eggs are inedible.”

“Beg your pardon?”

“Look, consumers expect that their eggs are washed. In my opinion, an unwashed egg is inedible.”

“Have you ever seen commercial egg farms washing their eggs?” When we first ramped our egg production up to several hundred dozen a week, we would take them to a nearby egg farm. This was a typical battery caged setup with 50,000 birds in one house adjacent to the packing house. The chickens would lay the eggs on the floor of their wire cage (9 birds in a 16 inch X 22 inch cage) which slanted toward a rubber belt conveyor. The conveyor delivered the eggs straight into the processing facility. No nest, no straw, no privacy.

A gentle amalgamation technique pushed the eggs onto little rollers that carried them first into a hooded washing machine. A 100-gallon reservoir held the wash water and it sprayed over the eggs while little brushes wiped the eggs as they rolled along. Amazingly clever—and stinky. A clean batch of wash water contained soap and tons of chlorine. As the eggs came along, of course, some would break. Shortly, the water turned yellow. Of course, manure built up in the water as well.

Before long, what started as a nice pristine-looking heavily-chlorinated dish water became a putrid, smelly hot shower of yellow sulfur-smelling manure-laden gunk spraying over the eggs. And it stunk to high heavens. Remember, eggshells are porous. A tiny bit of that cleaning liquid permeates the egg.

With all this in mind, I asked the health department lady why this type of cleaning was better than just leaving a clean egg alone.

She refused to acknowledge that an egg could be clean otherwise, and refused to discuss the aforementioned fecal cleansing method. Although she admitted that the regulations did not require washing, she simply sniffed and said; “An unwashed egg is inedible.”

Then I told her we did in fact culture the eggs, including the manure, and they were clean. It was like talking to a fence post: “An unwashed egg is inedible.” End of discussion.

I hung up and immediately the phone rang, even before I could take my hand off the receiver. I answered and it was Allan Nation, editor of Stockman Grass Farmer magazine, the world leader promoting grass-based agriculture. He and his wife, Carolyn, had just returned from a fact-finding trip to Europe, with a heavy emphasis on range poultry in France.

Without any prompting from me, he started the conversation with, “Hey, guess what? In France, you can’t sell a washed egg. If it has to be washed, it must go into a pasteurized product in liquid form. Only unwashed eggs are legal to sell as shell eggs.”

Talk about a serendipitous phone call. What are the chances of that? I began laughing, and told this story and how I had just hung up the phone with the restaurant inspector who had a vendetta against unwashed eggs. He thought it was pretty funny too.

Now to tie up some loose ends in the story. The USDA egg requirements do not require eggs to be washed. We asked the inspectors specifically, and they even gave me a copy of the requirements. Absolutely nothing about washing.

When I called the USDA supervisor to talk about how to proceed with this health inspector tyrant, he was very open and explained that I was another victim of the turf war between the two oversight agencies. The USDA inspects farmers, but has no jurisdiction over restaurants. The health department inspects restaurants. He said the health department thinks the USDA is too lax and lets farmers get by with murder. He said the USDA thinks the health department is overly tyrannical and capricious.

And that’s the regulatory climate under which we work. It’s not clearly defined. When the health department sent the USDA guys out here to the farm, they didn’t trust the health department anyway. But the USDA inspectors felt obligated to find something or they would be accused of being prejudicial toward the farmer.

I wrote a scathing letter to the governor and our politicians describing the incident and asking for an apology from this slipshod health department lady. No responses. Nothing. But she got mad at us.

About a year later, our farm was featured in the Smithsonian Magazine and included in the piece were several interviews with some of our chefs. Of course, they spoke glowingly about the quality of our products, especially the pastured eggs. This lady got a copy of the article, and actually carrying it under her arm, went to the three restaurants interviewed in the article and threatened to close them down if they did not immediately discard our eggs.

What’s a chef supposed to do? Our culture has been conditioned to believe the government bureaucrat who captures the headlines with: “Eggs served at local restaurant pose health risk. Ordered to destroy allegedly inedible eggs.”

You liberals reading this, please, please, put yourself in the shoes of the average American and honestly ask yourself what you would think if you saw such a headline. You have to admit, every American except the most rank libertarian would assume that the bureaucrat told the truth. The chefs are absolutely paranoid about something like this happening. They are in a no-win situation. They can’t afford to fight it in the media, because they know they can’t win. And the bureaucrat knows the chef can’t fight it either.

The only way to deal with this is to bow, throw the eggs in the dumpster out back, and hope to goodness such a tyrant has a change of heart—or perhaps a heart attack. After the targeted visit, the chefs called us back and have been using our eggs ever since. But it’s always a cat and mouse game, and they are always glancing over their shoulder, wondering what infraction they’ll be accused of next. Egg cases, for example.

We want to recycle our cardboard egg cases. Many times when we go to the restaurant, we simply remove the flats of eggs, stow them in the refrigerator, and have a perfectly pristine egg case left over. Why throw it away? It’s illegal for us to re-use that box because the egg police call them a one-time use vessel. Their justification for this view, of course, is cross contamination.

But let’s be reasonable. If the case has some broken egg in it, fine. But cardboard boxes are one of the most benign transport containers ever known. The eggs don’t even touch the box—they nestle snugly into their cartons or flats. The cases just allow us to carry 30 dozen of them at a time. If we put the flats in plastic milk crates, we don’t have to discard or wash off the milk crates. Nobody cares what kind of vessel we bring the eggs in unless it is an actual egg case—then that is a one-use vessel.

As a result of this policy, we bring them home and re-use them as long as they look good, but we don’t send them to restaurants. What a waste. Such a requirement is immoral, in my opinion. We should encourage recycling, not discourage it.

The thing we must all understand is that government reports must be suspect. One of my overriding goals in writing this book is to impress on the hearts and minds of Americans that official pronouncements from government agents are the result of an agenda that is driven by interests who do not seek the truth.

For the life of me I can’t figure out how liberals who don’t believe anything the Pentagon says somehow believe that another department of the government, like the Environmental Protection Agency, speaks the truth. This is an example of schizophrenic reasoning. Every one of these departments has an agenda, and the bureaucrats are not interested in the truth; they are political creatures wanting to expand their power, position, and possessions. People don’t become divine or righteous just because they receive a government check and have alphabet soup credentials behind their name.

And why conservatives who don’t believe anything the EPA says would worship the ground the Pentagon walks on is the same kind of schizophrenia. But we polarize each other. If I say the EPA has an agenda and is out to destroy business, I’m howled down as a rabid anti-environmentalist. If I dare to question the policies promulgated by the Pentagon, then I’m a pacifist dove who doesn’t deserve the freedoms purchased for me by the blood of ancestors.

I think it’s a much more consistent and reasoned approach to distrust everything that comes from the government, and everything that comes from multi-national globalists, and everything that comes from the media and talk show hosts, and everything that comes from mega-charitable organizations. And why do I seem to have such a prejudice against the empire guys? Because power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

And these health inspection bureaucrats have almost absolute power in many ways. They rule fiefdoms and enjoy a complicit, duplicitous American populace that assumes all is well as long as the fridge is full of beer, the toilet flushes, the TV remote works, and the sofa holds them up. To be honest, I am far more frustrated with complacency than I am with unscrupulous bureaucrats. If this book makes us angry with unscrupulous bureaucrats, I hope our righteous indignation will stir us to cast off complacency, and that is the beginning of integrity and accountability.

Chapter 7

1,000,000 Mile Chicken

“I want to take your chicken to the DuPont Circle Farmer’s Market,” said Bev, a quintessential marketer and gourmet food innovator. We had been working together on and off for several years and he wanted to move pastured meat and poultry into the belly of the beast—Washington D.C.

The FreshFarm Market’s flagship venue was DuPont Circle on Sunday mornings. I had zero interest in going there, not just because of the time but because I didn’t want the hassle of a three-hour drive one way. Besides, our farmgate sales were entirely sufficient for success.

But Bev, with that excitement that naturally grows out of a deep soul-level yearning, insisted that it would be a wonderful venue. His dream was to take heat-and-eat artisanal foods into metropolitan areas. My response: “Let them find their kitchens.” Obviously, we shared complementary visions.

Thus began a saga that taught me much about the real world. I learned that “illegal” encompassed more than courts of law, deputies, and police. It included market rules and perceptions too ingrained to change. But let’s let the story unfold.

The market really wanted chicken. No vendors had chicken. Bev wanted to sell the entire Polyface portfolio: beef, poultry, pork, rabbit, and eggs. Beef wasn’t allowed by the market master.

“Why?” I asked.

“We already have a beef vendor.”

“But what’s wrong with a little friendly competition?”

“Might not be enough business for you both to be viable.”

“So when will you allow us to come with our beef?”

“When I say so.”

“What kind of criteria is that? It seems like you’d have some idea of when the time would be right to add another beef vendor, like when some customers begin asking for ours—which they already are—or when the other guy’s sales hit a certain number, or whatever. His product is grain based and ours is grass based, so it’s not even close to the same product, except that it is beef. It just seems to me that it would be fair to give me an idea of what criteria you are using to exclude our beef from the market, especially since we’re already coming with our chicken and eggs.”

“Are you disagreeing with me?”

“Well, kind of. How can you not have a standard on which to base our exclusion?”

“If you disagree with me, you disrespect me.”

“How can we have a discussion then?”

“You don’t understand, this is a dictatorship.”

Where do you go with that? Folks, I am not making this up. This ended up being one of the most stressful, emotionally and financially draining marketing venues in which I ever participated. It went along like this for the couple of years we were involved with the market until we quit. We hung in there for Bev and his dream. And he was far more gracious and charitable through it than I. I lose respect real fast for people who get up on their back legs and tell me they are dictators.

Since we were getting some of our beef and pork slaughtered under federal inspection, we were completely legal to sell it at the market. But the market master didn’t want beef—in fact, denied us the freedom to sell it. What she really wanted was chicken.

One small problem—Washington D.C. is across the state line. That’s interstate commerce. And our chicken was not federally inspected. Big problem.

Ever the optimist, Bev said, “Okay, let’s just get the chickens processed under inspection and we’ll be completely legal.” He began searching for facilities that would do it, and finally found one in North Carolina—more than four hours away from our farm and more than 8 hours from Washington D.C. , where the market was.

He sent an apprentice up with a flatbed trailer towed behind the refrigerated truck to pick up the birds at our farm. To put this in perspective, Bev’s center of operations were 100 miles south of us. The processing facility was 200 miles southeast of us. That meant he had to drive 100 miles north, get the birds, and then drive 200 miles southeast to the slaughter house.

The apprentice arrived an hour before dark. He drove out into the pasture and we caught and loaded the birds into the crates on the flatbed. He headed out a little after dark, around 10 p.m. Somewhere around the mid-point of the trip, at midnight, he felt a nudge and watched in horror as the flatbed trailer detached from the truck and headed toward the guardrail.

It banged against the guardrail, thumping to a stop. Many of the crates flew open and chickens went all over the side of the road. A state trooper showed up shortly and spent the next two hours corralling and catching chickens. The apprentice, of course, called Bev about 2 a.m. to report the incident and explain that the kind trooper, who had the time of his life catching chickens in the sideditch, let the apprentice ease the trailer to a welding shop where they fixed the hitch. He got back on the road in time to make the 8 a.m. rendezvous at the slaughterhouse.

The next day the birds were bagged and cut up with a bona-fide USD A inspected label—the shield of everything wholesome and good. For the first time in history, a Polyface bird was blessed with federal credentials and legal to be sold across state lines. What a monumental day!

That next Sunday, those birds, which Bev transported 200 miles back to his center of operations in southern Virginia and then north 200 miles to Washington D.C., were proudly displayed for sale at the DuPont Circle Farmers’ Market. And people loved them. They flew off the table. Bev needed more chickens. Time for another flatbed trailer trip in the middle of the night. These birds had traveled 200 miles live and 300 miles dead just to be sold at a market 150 miles from where they were raised. We hauled them at night so the birds would be more comfortable.

This time all went uneventfully. The third trip of the season, I decided to take them down because I wanted to see the slaughter facility and I wanted to help Bev out with all this pavement pounding. We loaded the birds in crates on our pickup, stacked 8 high inside cattle racks, and I headed out at 3 a. m. to make my 8 a.m. appointment.

The facility was quite small, perhaps 30 ft. X 50 ft. located in a rural area. The 15-person crew, all Hispanics, arrived and began dispatching the birds. As I move through this narrative, please understand that I had been processing birds for decades, on our farm, without inspection. To say that I was appalled at what I saw would be the understatement of the year. First, they electrocuted the birds before slitting the jugular vein. That shuts down the autonomic nervous system. The heart does not continue to pump, to push the blood out. The birds were poorly bled—this makes black around the bones.

The scalding and picking were fine—basically the same as we do it. Then the birds went onto shackles that moved slowly around an evisceration room, which was a little concrete cubicle with a slow-moving line of chickens passing along at eye level. Each person did a certain cut and the birds passed by the federal inspector, who looked at the entrails and carcasses for signs of problems.

Of course, the inspector didn’t know me from Adam and certainly didn’t know that I would put his comments in a subsequent book. I chummed up to him and engaged him in small talk. He normally worked at a large industrial plant nearby, and he said that our worst chicken was better than the best chicken he ever saw there. That was an interesting little tidbit.

The thing I’ll never forget, though, was that a large pan of livers was on a table right in front of him. In other words, the chickens were coming along slowly at eye level, and at his midsection was a table with a big pan. The worker right beside him removed the liver after the inspector looked at it.

Let’s get the context. The gallbladder is imbedded in a fold of the liver. It’s a bright green organ that makes bile, the most despicably-bitter liquid known to man. The old saying “bitter as gall” undoubtedly came from a butcher who had accidentally popped a gallbladder and tasted the splatters. Anyone who has eviscerated a lot of chickens has a gallbladder experience. It just happens.

That’s why my son Daniel tells folks who come to learn how to process chickens that his two rules are:

1. Keep your mouth closed.

2. If you feel something on your lip, don’t lick it.

Whenever we accidentally break the gallbladder and the green juice splatters over the liver, we discard the entire liver. Clean-up is well-nigh impossible. Safer to just throw the liver away.

Imagine my horror when, standing next to the inspector, this worker was just ripping the livers out and breaking numerous gallbladders, which burst into the pan of livers. Here in front of the inspector was a large pan of livers floating in green juice. It was one of the most disgusting things I have ever seen. Now get ready for the punch line. These inspectors live by temperature. They worship thermometers. I don’t know how any of them can explain human survival until the thermometer was invented.

Periodically, he would dip his little pocket thermometer into the liver pan to check the temperature. Sometimes he would say, “More ice,” and other times he wouldn’t say anything, presumably when he was satisfied that the temperature was okay. He never said anything about the green gallbladder juice in the livers. The entire chill water in that pan was dark, dark green. That didn’t bother him at all. But boy that temperature had better be right. Sure brought to my mind the parable of straining at gnats and swallowing camels. I wouldn’t want to swallow anything from that chill pan.

The whole evisceration procedure was sloppy. In our processing, we have one quality control (QC) person per pre-QC person in what we call the disassembly line. In other words, if we have an executioner, a scalder-dunker operator, and two eviscerators at the front end, we have 4 QC folks at the other end.

At this federal facility, one QC person handled the output of a dozen workers. The birds went into the chill tanks with stray feathers still affixed. I was not satisfied at all that the procedure was clean. But that apparently is okay as long as the temperature goddesses are satisfied.

Interestingly, the report for discards and blemishes showed that we had more problems than an industrial outfit. Why? Because here in this little facility, the inspector actually had time to look at the birds. They were coming by him at about one every twenty seconds. In the big plants, they go by at a fraction of a second apiece. That is why the government paperwork, which is dutifully picked up by Consumer Reports and other consumer watchdog groups, shows that small producers have more blemishes than large producers. It has nothing to do with actual fact; it’s just a factor of speed and accuracy. A paper-manufactured discrepancy that contains no reality.

And yet Americans read these reports as if they are the gospel. The reports are merely an expression of what the system deems important—or what the system sees. In other words, the reports you choose to believe are a matter of faith. If the infraction was not seen, it did not happen. And if the rules of the game can be manipulated such that the referees cannot see the infractions, then no one is the wiser.

I walked out to where the processing water went. It just went out into a little wooded area and a quarter acre dead zone around the end of the discharge pipe. Federal inspection had no jurisdiction over the discharge water, I was told. That was the health department’s problem. The health department didn’t care about this because it wasn’t human sewage. The result? Contamination and ecological disaster. Big lesson: just because an outfit is small does not make it clean or environmentally friendly. It probably does mean that by itself, it can only inflict a modest amount of damage. To that extent, small outfits have a little more saving grace than large ones, simply because they can only do a minimal amount of damage.

The owner of the facility, a hardworking entrepreneurial type, told me he could never stay ahead of the violations. It might be a tiny one-inch tear in a screen door. It might be a missed thermometer check. He said the bureaucrats never wanted to sign off on anything and just seemed to exult in badgering. A month later, he went out of business. Big lesson: asking for inspection and trying to conform to the system do not assure success. Often it just compounds the problems. Both Bev and the owner told me that the inspectors had conspired to run this little on-farm rural facility out of business.

In the inspection world, it was considered an armpit, a backwater. Right behind the inspector’s station is a red button. At any time, the inspector can touch that button and stop the entire plant. That’s how much power he wields. Wielding that power over a plant of 15 employees doesn’t give the same rush compared to a plant of 1,000 employees. Something in the heart of man yearns to swagger around a bigger outfit, and inspectors are no different. They’d rather be with their friends in the prestigious surroundings of a huge complex. Anyway, the plant went defunct.

Now what to do? Bev searched for another federal inspected poultry processing facility, and he found one in Pennsylvania—200 miles north instead of 200 miles south of us. He came by and picked up birds and took them up to that facility. To our great dismay, nearly 20 percent of these beautiful birds were discarded—thrown away—because the inspector said they had a lung problem. He said they turned their heads into the wind on the interstate and the air affected their lungs.

Now folks, I may not be the brightest bulb on the rack, but I do know a few things. We transported half a dozen loads in the identical crates from the identical field on identical roads for an identical distance the identical summer. Not a single one had this problem. Ever.

All of a sudden, for some inexplicable reason, this batch of birds happened to look into the wind instead of away from it, and were judged inedible. This can’t be a problem because the industry transports birds up and down the interstate all the time and I know the big guys wouldn’t tolerate a 20 percent discard rate. But what do you do? When the inspector makes his judgment, the bird goes in the discard can. No negotiation, no ombudsman, no mediator. Unless you’re McDonald’s and hire attorneys from the political-governmental-industrial revolving door. The poor farmer is completely at the mercy of this bureaucrat. Imagine having that kind of autocratic power at your fingertips, to just be able to make those judgment calls without any oversight. It’s downright scary.

I don’t believe a single thing was wrong with those birds. Perhaps we weren’t the only ones that happened to, because a month later, that place went out of business too. Hmmm. I wonder why. But the owners of the plant can’t buck the inspectors. If they irritate the inspectors, the inspectors have the power to make life unbearable. And of course the little outfits simply don’t have the resources to fight back. Bev and I began feeling like bringing our chickens to a plant was the kiss of death. In just one short season we had been one of the last ones through the doors of two federal plants.

What to do? We were at the end of the season and had one more batch to go. Bev located another outfit, a large processor near Harrisonburg, only 60 miles away, that he cajoled into doing 400 broilers. This outfit normally processed cull hens, but the manager said they would work us in on the front end so ours would be the first birds through for the day. He was extremely accommodating, and I found him quite sympathetic to our needs. A genuinely gracious, sweet spirited manager.

We took 400 birds, and got back five in one piece. Want to read that again? Yes, that’s right. We lost about 20 percent to the cull barrel again, but not because they looked into the wind riding up the interstate. This time it was because the automatic jugular cutter wasn’t set just right and lots of them were not dead when they hit the scald water. Yes, you got it. They were scalded to death. When that happens, they don’t bleed because their throat was never slit. The industry calls these cadavers. They are red when they come out of the picker because all their blood is still inside.

All of those went in the discard can. Of the remainder, every single one was beat up in the picking gauntlet. Dislocated legs, broken wings, tom breast skin. They were just tom to pieces. Only five came through unblemished. Bev and I looked at each other, “We can’t afford to do this again,” we said in unison.

The last two outfits we had used did not offer a complete service like the first little operation did. Although the first two facilities we had used were small, they did everything from slaughter to the final bag. The first one even cut them up and put them and packed them onto tray packs. Of course, we needed the birds in a final USDA stamped package in order to sell them at the DuPont market.

The third facility, however, was a huge industrial facility and it did not offer such a complete service. The only way this outfit packed birds was in waxed cardboard boxes with some ice on them. No individual packages or anything. That required us to take them to another facility that would bag and cut them up. And that facility had to be federally licensed too. We couldn’t do this at home.

He located a facility just over the Virginia line in Tennessee, near Bristol. So the Pennsylvania birds traveled 200 miles from our farm north to be killed. Then they went 400 miles south to be packaged. Then Bev hauled them 300 miles back up to DuPont Circle to be sold 150 miles from our farm where they were raised.

The Harrisonburg birds went through the same transport distance. This simply was not working. By the time we split our losses, and Bev paid me, and he paid for all the transportation miles, even at this upscale metropolitan market he couldn’t charge enough to cover the costs. Both of us lost big time.

That winter, during the off season, Bev concocted a plan. As a fellow conspirator, he was a great sidekick. He realized that the powers that be at the market never really checked the labels, so he decided to just take our on-farm processed chicken to sell, but display the leftover federally inspected birds.

When someone wanted a chicken, he would just reach behind him to a cooler and pull out one of our on-farm processed birds, stick it quickly into a bag, and leave the display ones there. If anyone noticed his sleight of hand, he would just put on a theatrical, “Oh My!” and disclaim: “Oh, I must have picked up the wrong one by mistake.” At the Virginia markets a couple of miles away from the D.C. market, our on-farm birds were completely legal. Amazing how those little red lines on a map can make food either safe or hazardous.

That’s exactly what he did the next year. All year, we dressed the birds here and he kept a box of display birds with the federal shield on them. The ruse worked beautifully. It was illegal as sin, but no one was the wiser. When the market masters found out, what could they say? All the customers were enjoying the game and loved the chickens—they could actually tell the difference between the federal inspected birds and the on-farm birds. The on-farm birds were cleaner and tasted better.

By the end of the season, we both split our sides whenever we looked at those poor federal inspected birds in their box, the 1,000,000 mile birds, and agreed that some day, when the danger of being fined for this infraction that threatened the sanctimonious food safety net in America was long past, we would come clean with our great chicken caper. Here we were, passionate proponents of local food, which includes shortening the distance between producer and plate, and we were putting more miles on birds than the industrial system we preached against. But they were just the display birds.

This experience, more than any other, made me fearful of joining the system. Bev said the inspector at the small plant made it clear to him that the inspectors did not like going out there and were planning to put it out of business. It did not have recreation rooms for inspectors, the camaraderie and prestige that come with being in charge of a big operation. I guess these inspectors are kind of like church pastors after all. Ever notice how pastors who move to other ministries always get “called” to a bigger church? Why don’t any of them ever get called to more humble circumstances? Amazing how that “calling” always seems to go one direction.

Oh, but I digress. So many inconsistencies to take broadsides at, no? Later, when Bev started his own slaughterhouse, the inspectors wouldn’t come because they said he was too slow. I don’t see anything in the law that says you have to be fast enough to earn an inspector. If you comply with their standards, they have to be there. But not when you’re a small, struggling dreamer. They can just kick you around like a mangy mongrel.

I asked a federal inspector once, who complained to me that he routinely went into clean places and filthy places—all inspected, mind you – about the possibility of empirical testing. I asked him why they couldn’t just put thresholds on what’s allowable. After all, the Food and Drug Administration clearly articulates how much rat manure can be in granola, so why can’t the Food Safety and Inspection Service just articulate so many parts per million of salmonella or whatever? We could just do a swab test and if it exceeds the allowable limit, an inspector shows up and we deal with the problem.

He agreed that such a plan would be completely efficacious, but immediately turned negative with this response, “Then I’d be out of a job.” Isn’t that just like life? Here you have a simple, elegant, workable solution and it all boils down to my job. Never mind that anyone willing to work can always find work. Is the goal of the system to insure job security for needless inspectors? An objective test really would put everything on an equal footing. If I can eviscerate a chicken in the kitchen sink as cleanly as the threshold, who cares if it was done in the kitchen sink? Aren’t we really interested in clean? Or are we really interested in protecting jobs, keeping our turf, and being the Grand Pooh-bah?

This reluctance to actually help food be clean is what keeps me from ever wanting to join the system. I’ve talked to numerous small operators who have been jerked around and jerked around by these inspectors. One lamented to me, “On Monday, they want the room red. Next Monday, it has to be green. And the following Monday, it must be yellow.” Average people don’t have a clue how much of the regulations are subjective.

When Bev was writing his HACCP (Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Point) plan, he pulled the template right off the FSIS website. Why not use the boilerplate from the official government source, plug in the appropriate numbers to customize it to his operation, and not try to re-invent the wheel? That approach sounded reasonable to me.

But when the inspectors came to look at it, they said it was all wrong. Incredulous, he told them he got it off their website. They said, “Oh, that doesn’t mean anything.” Folks, I can’t make this stuff up. Truth is indeed stranger than fiction. I ask you, how would you like to be a guy who’s leveraged every penny to his name for this dream, only to have bureaucrats like this just come in and jerk you around. When he asked them if they would help him, they said he just had to write it and they would tell him if it was okay. Just an arrogant, uncaring, malicious bunch of bureaucrats. A year and lots of emotional agony, and lots and lots of salary later, he had something they said was okay. It’s devious enough to make even the most optimistic yell “Conspiracy!”

They give permission for something one week and then retract it the next week. Just like they told us when we had our custom beef run-in, “We just decided to interpret it differently.” And none of this has anything to do with food safety.

The government encourages folks to go out on a 70 degree November day, gut-shoot a deer that may have Creutzfeld Jakob disease (mad cow equivalent), drag it a mile through the squirrel dung, sticks, and rocks, display it prominently on the hood of the Blazer to parade the trophy around town in the afternoon sun, bring it home and string it up in the backyard tree under where birds roost, wait a week, then skin it out, cut it up, and feed it to their children. That’s safe. Give me a break.

Is it impossible to ask the system to self-regulate? When Upton Sinclair wrote The Jungle in 1906 exposing the corruption and filth in Chicago’s meat packing industry, beef consumption dropped nearly 50 percent in six months. How long would the industry have sustained that before making changes? Not long.

Very shortly private certifying agencies would have sprung up, like AAA for beef. You join, we inspect. But instead, Americans clamored for government relief and the Food Safety and Inspection Service was born. Today, the corruption is worse, filth more deadly, and the consumer less protected. Meanwhile, the real alternatives can never see the light of day because the hoops fledgling wanna-bes have to jump through are too high to reach. And too capricious. It’s like running a race toward a moving finish line. Or playing a game in which the referees change the rules every 5 minutes.

We have chefs begging for pig’s feet. No problem, except that the inspectors have recently deemed these heritage delicacies inedible unless the hog is scalded. If the hog is skinned, the feet must go out in the offal. It must be scalded and scraped, with the skin left on, in order for the pig’s feet to be kept out of the rendering barrels. No amount of arguing can do any good. Since our processor doesn’t scald, our chefs are out of luck. Those feet could easily be scalded—even in the restaurant sink.

My point is that it’s illegal for me to even get those feet back. I cannot walk into the plant and acquire those feet—it’s illegal. I can’t give them away. I can’t cook and scald them myself, to use for myself, to eat myself. They have to go into the waste stream. These rules are unconscionable, and play into the hands of the large players that process enough hogs to afford the $100,000 machines to scald efficiently.

The 1,000,000-mile chicken illustrated the artificial barriers keeping folks from acquiring affordable, cleaner, local food. None of this had anything to do with safety; it was all bureaucratic mumbo-jumbo, paperwork, and foolishness. Probably the worst part was that the market masters were and still are unwilling to use their political pull and savvy to acquaint people with these issues.

They were too busy making sure that all of our paperwork was filled out and we weren’t competing with another vender. Since leaving that farmers’ market, we’ve never gone back. The politics of the market, the rules, the heavy-handed bureaucracy all worked together to make it an emotionally and economically draining experience. Amazingly, I’ve learned that most people involved with the market thought we made a ton of money there. That’s one of the biggest jokes around Polyface farm.

Whenever we need a good laugh, we just look at each other and say: “Remember all the money we made at DuPont Circle Farmers’ Market?” That’s a real lifter.

Chapter 8

Organic Certification

The letter arrived in the regular mail one day. “You are in violation of the organic certification law and we will begin court action if this infraction persists.” The threat from the Virginia Association for Biological Farming (VABF) was like being sued by my best friend.

My relationship with VABF was long and precious. Founded just a few years before my Dad passed away in 1988, it was the support group for non-chemical farmers. Nearly every state has one of these organizations:

Carolina Farm Stewardship Association
Ohio Ecological Food and Farming Association
Pennsylvania Association for Sustainable Agriculture
Georgia Organics
Northeast Organic Farming Association

These are just a tiny sample of the many that exist. Most came into being in the 1980s to give those of us in the clean farming movement helpful collaboration for information and inputs when this was much harder to find than it is today. Several of us could get together and order a tractor trailer load of greensand, for example. Tapping into other farmers’ experience, the collective information pool was extremely helpful.

As the movement grew, of course, the infrastructure developed along with it. Today information and ecologically-sound inputs are far more available than they were in the late 1970s. Farmers like us joined together with like-minded farmers in these early affiliations as an alternative to the extension service.

In those days, finding an environmentally-sensitive professor at a land grant university was about as rare as finding a vegetarian at a barbeque. They just didn’t exist. Today, this earth-friendly movement has penetrated the extension system and friends do exist, struggling against great odds, I might add.

One of the worst gag cases coming out of that era was when Roger Wentling, a columnist for Stockman Grass Farmer magazine and a fulltime agent with the Soil Conservation Service, began aggressively promoting grass dairying in Somerset County, Pennsylvania. An absolute evangelist for the benefits of grazing dairy cows rather than confinement feeding them, his success in that area was virtually unprecedented. He would go out and build fence for dairy farmers.

His enthusiasm literally converted the entire area into what is still today a bastion of grass-based dairying. His success, though, put him crossways to the local feed mills in the area, which saw their grain sales plummet. The feed mill operators complained to Wentling’s superiors and the agency slapped him with a gag order. He could not speak about grass dairying any longer. Stockman magazine ran a front-cover picture of Wentling kneeling in a beautiful field of clover, handcuffed, with duct tape over his mouth. It showed the power of the system to protect its turf when truth begins to invade its environs. So much for government openness to new ideas.

Our family became active in the VABF right when it began. In fact, our son Daniel was only three months old in 1981 when we went to a VABF field day and on the way heard Raymond and Dorothy Moore introduce the term homeschooling for the first time on James Dobson’s Focus on the Family radio broadcast. We immediately ordered their books and that provided the impetus to homeschool our children.

The year I left the local newspaper and returned to the farm fulltime—Sept. 24, 1982—the VABF monthly journal needed help. As with all volunteer organizations, the folks putting together the journal were beginning to wear out. I quickly volunteered and the journal committee decided to make me editor. Of course, nobody else wanted the job: no resume needed.

Without a computer in those days, I typed all the articles and physically cut and pasted them on the blueline layout sheets. Then I would take the paste-ups to a printer and someone else put the mailing labels on them. Unfortunately, a year later I caused a great schism in the group by publishing an investigative article about one of our dairy goat members being harassed by dairy inspectors. The expose was not what the anti-political VABF hierarchy wanted. As a showdown developed, I resigned rather than face the rack. I was editing the newsletter for free anyway.

A couple of years later, though, I was elected vice president and the following year, president. After being president, I remained on the board. The point here is that many of my dearest friends and associates in biological farming, endearing relationships, were forged during these formative days. I was able to tap into the wisdom of a handful of elders who had been building compost piles long before I came along. True visionaries. In fact, two of them were Plowboy interviews in Mother Earth News magazine. These were icons for me, and to be in their homes, rubbing shoulders with them, was truly an amazing experience for a young buck like me with more sap than brains.

I consider this group of A.P. Thomson of Golden Acres Apple Orchard fame (widow Scottie and son John are still operating the orchard, one of the oldest and best in the world), Ellie and Don Pruess (founders of the Bonanza restaurant franchise who escaped New York after being burgled twice in a month and began grass farming in Virginia), and Reid Putney (whose organic beef cattle operation was featured in the Wall Street Journal in the 1960s) as my mentors. These people became surrogate visionaries for me after my own Dad’s untimely death in early 1988.

Then along came organic certification. Interestingly, none of these original founder-mentor-visionaries of VABF wanted anything to do with certification. They just wanted to continue helping each other in this great common cause toward environmentally-friendly farming. Many of the younger members, who were also my friends, were confident this would be the best thing that could ever happen to our clean food and farming movement. They said it would quintuple membership. During all of this hoopla, I threw the cold water. The rain cloud on the parade. I was the dampening spirit. It strained friendships and I felt increasing ostracism.

My take on it was that it would divide the ins from the outs. It would form cliques instead of collaboration. It would create infighting and drop our membership rather than stimulating it. And if the government was involved, I predicted that it would be a political process and the smallest farmers would be hurt.

Long before all this certification discussion, we used the word organic freely and liberally to describe our farm. We hadn’t used any pesticides or herbicides in decades. We fertilized with our compost. We did buy grain from local growers that wasn’t organic, but our pastured poultry received a new salad bar every day. In the big scheme of things, we were the quintessential organic farmer.

A Washington D.C. food group contacted us about being listed in their directory of clean food farms. We agreed to be listed and wrote up a little blurb about Polyface, using the “O” word. Foodie groups, natural food stores, food coops and others used the directory to stimulate connections between buyers and producers. It was a great little pamphlet type directory, perhaps a dozen pages in size.

Now back to the VABF’s certification juggernaut. Many in the group wanted to be the official sanctioned certifying agency in the state. They believed the prestige was not only due our fledgling organization, but would establish us as the official voice for biological farming. Everyone pushing the certification agenda had desires that were as true blue, sincere, and pure as the wind driven snow. Many saw this as a real victory in official state recognition that we were a credible movement, a force to be reckoned with. After a lifetime of being pooh-poohed by the official powers, the thought of being wanted and needed was indeed a heady notion.

When I saw that my side was outvoted by a huge margin, I exercised the only option left. I made a motion that VABF become the certifying agency for one year. After one year, we would have to vote on it again to continue. This sunset clause, I thought, would give enough time to prove my concerns correct. I reasoned that within a year enough of my predictions would come true that a majority would not vote to continue, and it would be dead in the water. Then, I reasoned, the group could get back to its original intent, which was to be facilitators rather than policemen.

Of course, everyone was more than happy to vote yes to my motion, glad that the vocal dissenter had acquiesced and unity was restored. Those were difficult days of soul searching for me. I never want the reputation of being a negative person. I want to exude a can-do spirit, to be an encourager, not a discourager. I don’t even write nasty letters against the World Trade Organization. I’d much rather create change by liberating the bottom rather than regulating the top.

The group promptly put me on the certifying board. We hired an inspector for the requisite third-party independent verification and began taking applications. I attended only one certification session before resigning. We had about ten applications to process and vote on, and as each came before the board, I was immediately struck by the partisanship not only on the part of the inspector, but also on the board.

If the applicant was a big operator, a mover and shaker, as they say, the board virtually rubber stamped everything. But if the applicant was small, and especially if the applicant was known as a little bit more radical than most, we questioned, scrutinized, put on stipulations or even denied. The discussion centered not at all around real practice, but degenerated to personality profiles and political prowess. It was not at all what I had predicted: it was far worse. I never went to another session.

At that point, I kind of dropped out of the VABF. Not an enemy by any means. But I just didn’t have the stomach to throw myself, my time and energy, into a volunteer organization that I believed was really headed the wrong way.

A couple of years later, the letter beginning this chapter arrived, threatening me with legal action because someone spotted a leftover, dusty directory in a Washington D.C. health food store in which I had described our farm as organic. After all the hundreds of hours I had devoted to this organization, for them to threaten me with legal action because I had not ferreted out and destroyed every pre-certification use of the “O” word as being affiliated with our farm, was just like being sued by my best friend. The whole notion that I was legally liable for some dusty old directory written and published years before certification went into affect just didn’t seem reasonable.

I made some calls to the VABF president and the state oversight agency. At all levels, they assured me that any statement I made about our farm was considered a label. And certification at its most fundamental level is a labeling law. I could not speak the word, in connection to Polyface, without being illegal.

Well, now, that was a fine kettle of fish. Because I had not gone through the certification process, I had no right to use the “O” word. It was taboo. I assured everyone that I would henceforth and forevermore cease and desist using such a deadly word, and I repented in sackcloth and ashes that it still appeared on a directory somewhere. They agreed not to prosecute, and in the negotiations, attacked me for not being organic.

“What do you mean, not organic?” I asked.