how about all the tea-partiers get off the unions backs and start harassing the USDA?

So that's that, dear readers, the Missouri Milk Board would like you to eat your Kraft Fat Free American Singles and like it. The sad conclusion of Morning Land Dairy's trail was posted on their blog (uncheeseparty.wordpress.com) a few days ago. Three inspectors from the state milk board will come to the farm Tuesday and Wednesday to "supervise ... the destruction of the condemned cheese." (You can read my first post on the topic here: http://britchen.blogspot.com/2010/11/good-news-for-people-who-love-bad-news.html)

Although this cheese (or any other cheese from the farm in the past 30 years) has made anyone sick, nor has any of the cheese tested at the farm contained any dangerous pathogens AND although the USDA has just recently taken to advocating this kind of fucking bullshit ("Food Prices to Skyrocket Riots Could Follow Suggest USDA") about rising food prices and potential food shortages, all of this cheese will be going to the landfill.

And yet, when I read the summaries of the testimony on the uncheeseparty blog, I was a little shocked to read that their SCC for the past year was between 500,000-650,000 with one spike (it doesn't say how high the spike was) above the legal limit of 750,000. I do agree with the maligned witness from the Farm to Consumer Legal Defense Fund (who testified) that this is a little bit high to be producing top quality cheese. (Again, the legal limit in Europe is 450,000 and I truly think that <250,000 is an achievable reality on just about any farm.) I don't think it really presents a hazard to the consumer, but it does cause me to want to know more about their herd and their mastitis protocol. The person writing the blog feels that it was really the testimony about the high SCC that condemned the farm and the cheese in the end, which is truly a pity. A high cell count can be lowered, a multigenerational farm with a flourishing business cannot so easily be rebuilt. Why wasn't there more testimony about this issue and were was the USDA to help the farm with lowering their SCC if it was such a critical issue?

This is a good example of a big problem I see with the USDA and the FDA here. They are seen by me and by lots of small farmers and food producers (and maybe big ones as well ... I just don't know that many people who work at Tyson) as groups interested in swooping in from nowhere and looking for any excuse to bust our asses, not as groups that are publicly funded for the good of the country to help farmers produce top quality food for America's consumption. The cheese making portion of the farm that I work on was recently part of a "study" by the FDA on small scale cheese producers that included a visit from 3 armed agents in biohazard suits swabbing everything except my butt-crack looking for listeria (they didn't find any).

This is quite different from the situation in France (that I learned about from a French representative of this agency) where the sort of equivalent of the USDA is much more an agency devoted to assisting farmers in making sure the products they are producing are safe and of high quality rather than looking to punish them for every possible infraction. (In France they also produce lots of cheese that, if you listened to the USDA, should have killed every single French citizen or at least given them crippling gi problems long ago). I feel that until we have a federal organization that fulfills this need, the destruction of small farms for questionable reasons will continue in America.