Farm-to-Consumer Legal Defense Fund

I’m a little late on this, but I wanted mention the Farm-to-Consumer Legal Defense Fund. According to its website (at the rather unpronounceable ftcldf.org):

LEGAL DEFENSE FUND TO DEFEND DIRECT FARM SALES

Our Founding Fathers saw family farms as the very backbone of American society. Yet today small farmers are an endangered species because of government laws and regulations that serve big agri-business and make it difficult for small farms to be profitable. …

"Farmers across the land are either being forced into producing factory-quality industrial food and selling it through a corporate channels or just closing down the farm," says Minneapolis activist Will Winter, DVM. "Some who’ve tried to do it the old- fashioned way have found themselves faced with huge fines and even jail time."

As well:

The FTCLDF provides affordable legal counsel to farmers and consumers in need, it will make the needs of the small farmer and the concerned consumer known to our government, and it will promote our shared vision: Sustainable farming and direct farm-to-consumer transactions.

The Farm-to-Consumer Legal Defense Fund is a non-profit organization recognized under the Internal Revenue Code as a Section 501(c)(4) organization.

A worthy cause. If you’d like to help, they’re calling for donations.

2 Comments for "Farm-to-Consumer Legal Defense Fund"

1. Lynn Cameron
   Comment posted on 02/1/08 @ 10:31 pm

   When farmers have the right to sell unprocessed ‘real’ milk and other farm-fresh products directly to consumers without a middle-man, they can make a decent living, even with small herds and limited acreage.

   Pasteurization and other laws limiting on-farm sales favor large, industrialized conglomerates and squeeze out small farmers. Let’s all increase the demand for ‘real food’ and save the small Family Farm!

2. Diane Vigil
   Comment posted on 02/3/08 @ 12:19 am

   You’re right, Lynn. Farming can’t be an easy life (at least, so it seems to this city-dweller), but small organic farms are the source of well-raised, clean, organic food that factory farms will never be.

   Unfortunately, farming does not seem to be something that scales well in terms of profitability, at least as practiced without factory farming and the production of “food-like substances”. When you look at “who benefits” by these laws, they smack of favoritism and worse.

   That said, I suspect that the current climate of consumers desiring cleaner food than that provided by factory farms and processed food producers may have led to further suppression of the small guy; such is what I suspect we’re seeing with the moves against raw milk here in California.

   Do we really need these governmental shenanigans intrusions?

   "If people let the government decide what foods they eat and what medicines they take, their bodies will soon be in as sorry a state as the souls who live under tyranny." ~ Thomas Jefferson (1778)

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