I see here where the Wisconsin Farm Bureau testified against Wisconsin’s raw milk bill (click highlighted text for story)
“(Melvin) Pittman, who chairs the Farm Bureau’s Dairy Committee and milks 75 cows near Plum City with his wife, Pat (said) ‘If a person becomes ill from drinking raw milk, it is not only unpasteurized milk that gets a bad image, but all milk and dairy products. Dairy farmers have invested millions of dollars promoting milk and dairy products, and we can’t afford to have an incident adversely affect consumption.’”
If only the Farm Bureau would show such great vigilance in protecting consumers, and those beef farmers who are trying to do the right thing, when not one or two people, but hundreds, are sickened by feedlot-evolved E. Coli 0157 h7 contamination or Salmonella contamination of tens of thousands of pounds of beef or pork in these enormous packing houses run by the new meat trust.
The film “Food Inc.” tried to expose some of these problems of widespread systemic contamination of our industrial food system. Yet the Farm Bureau leaders go out of their way to disparage this movie. Frankly, they seem to hate it, and the filmmakers, and the people who watched the film and were moved by it. Why is that, do you think? Is it because the Farm Bureau is reluctant to criticize the meat trust, while eagerly going after small-scale dairy farmers who are trying to earn a parity price for their product by offering raw milk (which is enjoying growing consumer demand) direct to consumers?
Certainly the Farm Bureau has always been on the side of large-scale agriculture and large-scale monopolistic food processing corporations. It appears that in the Wisconsin Raw Milk Bill debate, they are once again intent on preserving this legacy of diehard defense of Big Food Processing.
I for one am strongly urging our Wisc. representatives to pass this Raw Milk bill. As a tiny-scale organic grower, I certainly know that the Farm Bureau has never represented, nor will ever represent, people at the small end of farming. We need our own farmer-labor (consumer) united organizations to represent the little guys and gals in small-scale ag.
Bobby G
Middle Wisconsin,
USA Sector of The Global Corporate Economy