Why $90,000 of dairy is rotting in Michigan

An affront against nature

It’s been far too long since I’ve posted, but making tens of thousands of bags of tallow fried chips a month has been occupying most of my time. However, I simply had to share the outrage you are about to read. Regular posting will return eventually, and I appreciate your understanding.

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Good food is hard to find.

And yet, $90,000 worth of the highest quality pasture raised raw dairy is rotting in Michigan right now.

This bounty of nutrient-dense of food will end up in a landfill not because of a blight, drought, listeria outbreak, or other unavoidable act of nature.

Rather, the illustrious agents of the Michigan Department of Agriculture and Rural Development (MDARD) have simply decided to throw out $90,000 worth of the finest raw cheese, butter, and milk, grown with care by the Nourish Cooperative in Southwest Michigan.

(Technically, they forced the very farmers whose labour and passion went into growing this food to do it themselves— a humiliating ritual that betrays their evil intentions, no doubt).

Watch here:

This farm is run by Ashley and Sarah Armstrong (aka the @strong.sistas), who painstakingly provide their community with nutrient dense foods that check all the boxes— low PUFA, pasture raised, no injections, unpasteurized, etc. (just look at the color on their cheese!).

A natural bright yellow color in cow dairy products comes from mindblowing vitamin A levels that can only be obtained from cows grazing rapidly growing, healthy grass. Conventional cheese of this color contains food coloring.

I’ve met them personally, and they are the real deal. I know a thing or two about the difficulty of making natural food in the modern world, but what we do is kindergarten compared to the hard work they and other dedicated farmers do.

While farmers must always contend with the capricious forces of nature, this is an unnecessary, unnatural opponent that they also must deal with— the Michigan state government.

The charge? The agents “couldn’t verify where the cheese had been inspected,” despite the sisters providing all the information requested of them.

No claims of a disease outbreak. No elevated bacteria levels. Nothing unsafe to human health— albeit unsafe to the profits of the large state dairy producers.

Suspicious Timing

The Armstrong sisters started selling raw dairy in 2021, while raw milk was illegal for human consumption in Michigan (they sold it as “pet food”, a common practice to circumvent such rules, and not an issue cited during the raid).

However, the Michigan State Legislature introduced a bill to legalize raw milk for human consumption in March of this year— mere months before the raid and the destruction of the sisters’ dairy.

If they had been operating safely and without scrutiny all this time, why would the MDARD wait until after a raw milk legalization bill was introduced to pursue them?

Perhaps to make an example. The potential approval of raw milk threatens the legal monopoly that large pasteurizing plants have on the industry by enabling small producers to compete on quality, threatening the Big Business of denatured factory milk.

Every state allows a limited number of pasteurizing plants to operate, effectively creating a legal monopoly that can grift all the small dairy farms in the state. If consumers buy their milk straight from the farm, this monopoly would be greatly weakened.

Maybe, just maybe, the dairy industry felt threatened by this potential law, and used their financial influence to extra-judicially weaponize the Ag department against the sisters.

Are the department’s actions unfounded under current Michigan law? Probably.

If this case were duly defended, would the Armstrong sisters be vindicated? Almost certainly.

But to do so, they must spend tens of thousands of dollars and years in court, all while keeping their farm afloat.

The mafia playbook

To summarize, perhaps the reason for the raid is to send a message to other small dairy farmers: “If you sell high quality food, and cut into our business, we’ll make your lives miserable.”

If you continue to feed families with raw milk, you’ll be sleeping with the (farm-raised) fishes

For most small farmers, who don’t have access to well-capitalized friends and thousands of instagram followers, that might just be enough to cause them to give up the fight, leaving families deprived of the nourishing foods they need to thrive.

However, it seems they’ve messed with the wrong farm. I’ve met the Ashley and Sarah personally and they are relentless, intelligent, and well connected.

If anyone could beat this case, and upend the machinations of Big Dairy by making an example of them, it would be the Armstrong sisters.

What we can do

When good people face hard times, helping them is simply the right thing to do.

But this is beyond charity— if they can get away with this iniquity now, then the dairy mafias in other states might be emboldened to do the same in your state.

And before you know it, we’ll all be drinking high-temp pasteurized, soy fed milk, wondering where all the good farmers went.

Ancient Crunch (the company I run which sells MASA Chips and now Vandy Crisps) has donated to their legal fight, we and will continue to support them however we can.

I encourage you to do the same, by whatever means you possess— whether that’s money, legal assistance, spreading the message, or calling in a few favors from friends in high places.

Allowing this overreach to proceed unchallenged will surely impact everyone’s ability to secure natural, healthy food for their families.

And as people like you continue to realize the value of unadulterated food, our influence will only grow.

But in the meantime, we as a community must to do what we can. Which means not letting them get away with these transgressions as they happen.

As Edmund Burke (supposedly) said,

the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.

Coda: Where do we go from here

Today, there are more than enough people who collectively control enough resources to pose a formidable fight against the regulatory capture of the processed food industry.

The only problem is that this never happens. The money is there, in theory. But because it’s spread out amongst hundreds of thousands of people, it cannot be coordinated to achieve any specific aim.

On the other hand, even a mildly successful company can coordinate all its resources to capture the regulators and institute self-serving policies.

And it’s easy for the company to do, because a single entity that controls those resources.

Sounds dismal, but there is a fatal flaw— there’s nothing stopping us from doing the same to them.

Despite the relatively high prices of our chips, as a small business our resources today are indeed quite slim.

But that won’t always be the case.

One of the advantages of growing big (while preserving our principles by only accepting investors that share our values) is that we, too will be able to exercise concentrated influence over food regulatory policies.

And we’re not the only ones. There are dozens of growing companies that sell natural products whose founders hold similar beliefs.

The bigger we all get, the better we’ll be able to influence policies for the improvement of health instead of the reduction of quality.

And the best part is, our policies are aligned with health, beauty and Truth. Theirs don’t— they’re swimming upstream, and it will always cost them more to spread lies and deception than it will cost us to spread truth.

So while this and other farm raids and injustices may be demoralizing, take heart— their time is limited.

In the same way that Proctor & Gamble single-handedly created and normalized the seed oil industry, all we need is one well-principled company to reverse the decades of damage the fake food producers have inflicted.

And at the rate this movement is growing, it’s only a matter of time.