https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5uah8LBUbfc&feature=player_embedded
Farmageddon - The truth about the food and dairy industry
Filmmaker Kristin Canty's quest to find healthy food for her four children turned into an educational journey to discover why access to these foods was being threatened. What she found were policies that favor agribusiness and factory farms over small family-operated farms selling fresh foods to their communities. Instead of focusing on the source of food safety problems — most often the industrial food chain — policymakers and regulators implement and enforce solutions that target and often drive out of business small farms that have proven themselves more than capable of producing safe, healthy food, but buckle under the crushing weight of government regulations and excessive enforcement actions.
Farmageddon highlights the urgency of food freedom, encouraging farmers and consumers alike to take action to preserve individuals' rights to access food of their choice and farmers' rights to produce these foods safely and free from unreasona-bly burdensome regulations. The film serves to put policymakers and regulators on notice that there is a growing movement of people aware that their freedom to choose the foods they want is in danger, a movement that is taking action with its dollars and its voting power to protect and preserve the dwindling number of family farms that are struggling to survive.
The documentary “Farmageddon” peddles food for thought, posing such questions as: Why is it so easy to buy cigarettes but so difficult to purchase raw, unpasteurized milk? A pack of Marlboros arguably has no benefit beyond a temporary buzz — and has plenty of drawbacks — while raw milk is loaded with nutrients but carries a small risk of E. coli, that potentially lethal bacteria we now know can crop up on bean sprouts or spinach.
That is just one of the compelling curiosities unveiled in Kristin Canty’s surprisingly engrossing documentary, a worthy addition to the growing annals of movies and books advocating for sustainable farming methods.
The topic of raw milk seems admittedly obscure. Given that it isn’t available in all states, many Americans might not have heard of it (although spend some time in Berkeley, Calif., and you might unintentionally become an expert). Regardless of the food in question, the subject serves as an effective entry point to consider a much larger, more troubling story that begs viewers to wonder why the government has spent so much time and money cracking down on small farms. Given some of the astonishing episodes of government raids in recent years, Canty is wise to simply let individual stories do the talking.
The documentary travels from Vermont to Virginia and New York to Georgia to investigate the interplay of politics and small agriculture. The film asserts that in one case, federal agents spent a million dollars surveilling a family on a small sheep farm before confiscating all of the animals and euthanizing them. The reason purportedly was mad cow disease, although there haven’t been occurrences of the disease in sheep before or since, and documents that were unsealed thanks to a court order revealed that the animals in question were not carriers.
Meanwhile, a Mennonite farmer was arrested after armed federal agents took $65,000 worth of his food and equipment, even though he had been explicitly told that his business practices were perfectly legitimate. Those are just a couple of the many strange stories that involve seemingly needless raids on small farms, some of which put the owners out of business.
