Really sad for small, sustainable farming

I agree that him using the labels was beyond stupid. However, the mental image of inspectors ordering restaurant employees to POUR BLEACH over a roasting pig is vile. This scenario perfectly captures how out of touch the guberment is with ordinary life.

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"Perhaps I'll have them string a clothesline from the hearse I am in, with my underwear waving in the breeze, as we drive to the cemetary. People worry about the dumbest things!"
by Wendy

i agree with you. they were selling pork certified organic...thats wasn't certified organic. the farmer admits he was trying to get around the system. the only way he could compete was to cheat and lie.....nice.

I spoke with a man who had chickens who wanted to start processing and selling. It took him 200 bucks worth of heavy duty plastic and he made his garage a certified processing plant. He said the requirements were pretty simple and painless. I would check into what the requirements are for certification before panicking.

Goat meat is very expensive in the first place. Adding the cost of slaughter and processing, would make it even more expensive. Is it really cost effective? to compete with the big boys? My neighbor cousin has ~300 or so meat goats, and sells all she can raise. The price point is around 70$. She only sells live animals. Mostly to Middle Easterners and Hispanics. If you butcher the animal and put all the meat in neat packages, theres not much there. If a person were buying goat, and realized they were paying t-bone prices, would they still pay?

On the article, it is clear, the farmers were knowingly breaking the law. Breaking it so they could make more money. Either follow the rules, or dont. If you do start following them, always follow them. Better, imho, to never follow, and stay under the radar.

Overall, the article was fair... I liked the part where the farmers market person said he should have played fair.

Farming is a very rough business in the first place. When someone tries to expand beyond just farming, and into the marketplace, competing with others who follow the rules, things get even rougher. I feel for the man, however, if you dont like a law, change it, or break it and suffer the consequences.

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Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity. Seneca
Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival. W. Edwards Deming

This is a constant in dairy goats also. It's illegal to sell milk without a grade A dairy liscense in most states. Thousands of gals in Texas sell milk illegal every day of the week. Other than my soap everything I do with my goats except breeding stock sales and showing is illegal, it is a very strange way to run a business. Goes against everything I stand for and I have done it for 21 years.

The folks who want the animals in little white freezer bags are the same ones who want my milk raw, they don't want to know a goat died let alone see it go to slaughter...they want to see Mrs. LittleHouse on the Prarie in her oh so clean barn, but oh my god if they were ever to see a placenta even on clean shavings.

Homesteader type mentality...they are not our customers. Nothing has changed, and even in the dairy laws that I am trying to get changed, in the pit of my stomach I do know that the laws do need to be in place, alot of the people I know who milk are pigs, their goats live in filth, their milkrooms are dirty, basic goat care is non exsistant, none of the $7 to $14 per gallon of milk makes it to the goats...buyer beware isn't the half of it when you purchase raw products.

Choices...freedom of choices....all choices. You can't be for taking away one freedom and then complain when they take away alot more. Vicki

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Vicki McGaugh
Nubian Soaps
North of Houston TX
www.etsy.com/shop/nubiansoaps

A 3 decade dairy goat farm homestead that is now a retail/wholesale soap company and construction business.

Yea, that's the thing. They should allow these sales, perhaps with a disclaimer on the package that it is not government inspected. But there is no sense in the government being able to tell me I can't sell such and such to my neighbor (with the exception of manmade drugs).

What it comes down to, is the less the populace is upstanding, and taking responsibility for their actions, the more they have to constrict them. The laws are made for the lowest common denominator. To keep lunatic down the road from selling dirty meat or milk, they won't allow upstanding citizens to sell a wholesome product to an informed customer that has money and wants to buy it! Have a notice on the product, and let the customer be informed. If you sell a good product, you won't care to let your customer see your animals, where they live, and where you process the product. And if the seller doesn't want the customer to see it, then the customer can go elsewhere. It's all about the government telling people what's safe because they are too "stupid" to be responsible for themselves.

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The 7th Day is still God's Sabbath
ICOG7.ORG
Layton Hollow ADGA Nubians
Taking Reservation for 2015!

A guy in Indiana has a butcher your own place. Looks like he's doing quite well. Sells the goat and has stuff set up so folks can do the killing in their religious manner or whatever and then process it.

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Deja Moo; The feeling I've heard this bull before.

Extremely well said.

I think the saddest part of this, is these folks made the rest of us look BAD. The labeling thing is UNACCEPTABLE. There are other programs or words they could have used - for example, Certified Naturally Grown program - there are way too many folks who try to use 'natural' or 'organic' in hopes of getting a few extra bucks for their goods - and that hurts those of us who are trying to play by the rules and do the right thing.

The butchering thing - we run across this in the WV/MD area with chickens. Drive 2 hours to have birds processed under USDA inspection. So a lot of folks are breaking the law by having it done by a non-USDA place and saying they processed on farm. I see no problems with on farm slaughter if the folks know what they are getting - but Joe Smith visiting the market for the first time just buying doesn't know. It really doesn't cost THAT much more to slaughter if you compare the cost of the farmers time.

I don't think this was about 'poor local farmer' in as much as a bad business decision and pity party.

Andrea
www.arare-breed.net

I see there is quite a bit of misunderstanding in the posts on this thread about the way meat inspection works. Let me clear it up some.

There are essentially two systems of inspection in 27 states, including Virginia -- a state-run inspection system and the federal system run by the U.S. Dept. of Agriculture. The two systems are independent of each other in these 27 states. Here again is the list of state inspection states:

http://www.fsis.usda.gov/Regulations...ates/index.asp

It USED TO BE that only USDA inspected meat could travel between states. State inspected meats had to be sold within that state's boundaries. It was, and is, perfectly legal in these 27 states to sell meat that is ONLY state inspected.

Congress recently passed a law that allows intrastate transportation of state inspected meats now, eliminating the former restrictions requiring state inspected meats to stay within the state in which they were inspected. Now, meat inspected in one of the 27 states by their state system is legal for transport to other states.

OK, but what about the other 23 states, including my own state of Tennessee? In those states, there is NO state inspection system. Therefore, USDA inspection is the ONLY way to go, otherwise any meat sold outside that system is illegal. Therefore, in my own state, I cannot sell my goats as meat processed within the state to anyone, let alone larger customers like restaurants, without it being processed in a USDA inspected facility. There is no state-inspected option.

What that means for me is that I cannot get my goats processed at a small state inspected plant. In my research, I have found NO USDA plants in Tennessee (at least within 100 miles of my place) that process goat.

This deprives me of the ability to sell at a markedly higher price per pound, and restricts me in my ability to sell my product at its highest possible value. Case in point is a BBQ place that wanted goat to BBQ. They told my friend the extension agent they could not find any goat meat around -- and they are virtually surrounded by goat farms, in the second largest goat state in the U.S. My friend said he could hook them up with processed meat, but they declined because that meat would not be USDA inspected. They eventually got their meat from New Zealand, with a USDA tag. Now the irony of that is amazing to me. Surrounded by goats, yet the only United States APPROVED MEAT had to come from thousands of miles away -- and outside the United States! And so we wind up with a situation where the restaurant 15 minutes from me, which would love to buy meat from me, instead gets its goat meat from North Carolina.

Anyhow, that is how the federal and state systems work. If your meat is state inspected, it does not have to be USDA inspected, as well.

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Jim Steele
Sweetpea Farms
"To avoid criticism, say nothing, do nothing, be nothing." -- Robert Gates

I have done that with hogs. Between what I am charging for a hog (which is little profit) and the slaughterhouse fees people are better off money-wise to go down to the supermarket and buy chops. It would be very hard to compete with the big boys with hogs this way, and probably impossible with goats.

Of course we should not be trying to compete with them, we should be trying to market to people that value know where their food comes from, etc, etc... But most of the people that want to buy my meat want to put food in the bellies of their kids first, wondering where it comes from second.

The closest legal slaughterhouse is about 65 miles from me now, and if I go back to selling hogs (and goats), it will be as live animals, or as you mentioned above... but it will hurt me.

I agree that there should be some sort of exemption for the small farmer, with rules that require "Not Inspected" and other sort of safe guards that will make people aware of what they are buying. I could live with that.

The govt USDA and FDA have no business telling me what I can or can not eat.
They cant even protect us from food that is openly available on the market right now.
All the canned foods, salad greens, meat and other things at my local supermarket were supposedly ok'd by the FDA USDA but I see recalls everyday about a new food item being recalled because of salmonella, ecoli, botulism or some other food borne disease.
If they cant protect us from what they allow on our supermarket shelves what makes them think they can protect me from eating food grown in my own garden?
At least I know what was done and what chemicals, pesticides, genetically altered, cloned and other stuff was put on it at home. NONE! You cant say that about store bought ok'd by the govt food in supermarkets.
I can go kill a deer in the woods, clean it in the woods, throw it on the hood of my truck drive around town showing off to my friends and eat that and thats ok but I cant sell a goat that has been butchered in a much cleaner place than the woods to my neighbor cause that would be illegal.
Makes perfect sense to me.
NOT!

Jim~ thanks for the explanation. It helped clear up some of the things I was confused over.

Out of of curiosity~ what are the laws regarding transporting live animals across state lines? You've mentioned before that your not far from Huntsville, and I saw Alabama on the list of state programs. Could you transport across the state line to a state inspected facility and then transport back? Or are you far enough off the state line that gas prices would make it cost prohibitive? Or is there some other drawback to that I have not thought of?

Cheryl, that is what I am exploring now, since the new law was passed. It used to be illegal to transport state-inspected meats out of the state in which they were inspected. But now, that is no longer illegal.

Unfortunately, I understand the small plant nearest me that was state inspected lost that inspection because he was processing too many deer. That means my drive will be farther.

State inspection operations are required to follow the same standards as USDA does, but state inspectors will do smaller plants, whereas USDA won't.

It's no trouble to find someone to process goats, but it is trouble to find an INSPECTED facility to do so. Without inspection, you cannot legally sell.

There is a move afoot to try to get a goat plant in Eva, but that's far from me and it seems whenever it looks like things are starting to move in that direction, a new roadblock pops up.

There used to be a guy called Mountain Vittles in TN who was really getting into meat sales a lot online, buying a lot of goats, and they shut him down.

Check it out:

http://www.mountainvittles.com/

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Jim Steele
Sweetpea Farms
"To avoid criticism, say nothing, do nothing, be nothing." -- Robert Gates

Eva? I'm practically ontop of Eva here. Technically I'm in Falkville~ but Eva is closer. Hope they go ahead and put in the plant. That will be quite the drive down from Tennessee. But if you have to come all that way anyway what about the one in Cullman? Do they not do goats?

One of my nieghbors breeds Boer Goats and I want to introduce myself to him and ask about his goats. But so far I've not seen him outside where I could talk to him. In fact~ the only reason I know he has Boer goats is another nieghbor I did meet told me "them goats? Them's expensive goats! Calls them boars!"