Tag: amish

‘Big Win’ for Amish Farmer and Food Freedom in Raw Milk Case

The Commonwealth Court of Pennsylvania last week ruled that Amos and Rebecca Miller, farmers who produce raw milk, may continue to sell raw milk outside the state while a lawsuit filed by the state against them moves through the courts.

The court’s ruling upheld a March 2024 decision by a Lancaster County trial court, which concluded that the Millers were not clearly violating Pennsylvania statutes by selling their raw milk products outside Pennsylvania.

That court previously issued a preliminary injunction that completely blocked the Millers from selling raw milk. However, the court later modified the injunction, limiting it to blocking Millers’ raw sales only within Pennsylvania.

The Commonwealth Court also acknowledged that the Millers raised “potentially meritorious constitutional challenges” to Pennsylvania’s Milk Sanitation Law. These challenges involve the Commerce Clause, the Supremacy Clause, the right to travel, and the fundamental right to purchase “traditional foods directly from the producer of that food.”

Robert Barnes, the Millers’ attorney, celebrated the decision on X, formerly Twitter, calling it a “big win” for food freedom.

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Amish Farmer Faces Fines, Prison Time for Refusing to Comply with USDA Regulations

For nearly 30 years, Amos Miller has owned and operated Miller’s Organic Farm, an all-natural Amish farm located in Bird-in-Hand Pennsylvania. Like many Amish farmers, Miller likes to do things the old-fashioned way. He doesn’t use electricity, fertilizer, or gasoline, and he also stays away from modern preservatives.

The farm’s reputation has grown over the years, and it now boasts a private buyers club of approximately 4,000 members. Miller has sold all sorts of food to his buyers, such as organic eggs, raw milk, grass-fed beef and cheese, and fresh produce.

“They use it as a medicine,” Miller said in a 2021 interview. “It’s very healing to the body because it’s raw.”

“They’re good people,” said one of his customers. “Their place is very clean, and their produce is excellent.”

In recent years, however, the farm has found itself in the crosshairs of the US Department of Agriculture because of its failure to comply with federal farming regulations.

It all started in 2016, when two listeriosis illnesses that occured in 2014 were traced back to raw milk sold by Miller’s Organic Farm. Both infected people had to be hospitalized, and one tragically died from the illness.

The USDA has been trying to bring the farm into compliance with federal regulations ever since, but it’s been a long hard series of court battles, in part because Miller has been, by his own admission, less than fully co-operative with the government. Miller is facing fines and jail time for his actions.

The story reached a climax in March of this year when a federal judge ordered Miller to cease and desist all meat sales and authorized armed US marshals to use “reasonable force” to gain access to Miller’s farm so a court expert could inspect it. The expert—accompanied by the armed marshals—took an inventory of all Miller’s meat, and federal inspectors are now returning every few months to make sure he hasn’t sold any of it.

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Amish Farmer Threatened for Not Giving Up Traditional Farming

Armed federal agents were used to threaten a traditional Amish farmer just 150 miles outside Washington, D.C., who does not use pesticides, fertilizer, or gas to run his farm.

In the last 100 years, there have been significant changes in the way farming is carried out. Most significant was the development of genetically modified organisms and chemical pesticides. In 1982, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA)[3] approved the first GMO product, which was developed to treat diabetes: human insulin. The first GMO foods available in the United States were alfalfa and sugar beets in 2005.

By 2015, the FDA had approved an application for genetically engineered salmon. Further bioengineered foods and plants include apples, pink pineapples, and, in 2020, the GalSafe pig, which is a genetically modified pig that eliminates detectable amounts of alpha-gal,[4] which is a sugar on the surface of pig cells that triggers a rare allergy.

As some applauded these scientific advancements, others began asking hard questions about how modifying genetic information and the application of large amounts of pesticides and herbicides will impact animal and human health. Miller[5] chose to use farming practices that have successfully provided healthy food for thousands of years.[6]

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The Verdict is In: The Amish Approach to Covid was Superior

The Amish are a Christian group that emphasizes the virtuous over the superficial. They don’t usually drive, and don’t routinely use electricity or have TVs. And during the Covid-19 outbreak, they became subjects in a massive social and medical experiment.

After a brief shutdown in the beginning, the Amish chose a different path that led to Covid tearing through the community at warp speed. It began with an important religious holiday in May of 2020.

“When they take communion, they dump their wine into a cup, and they take turns to drink out of that cup,” Calvin Lapp explained to me. He’s an Amish Mennonite living in the largest Amish community in the US centered in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.

“So, you go the whole way down the line, and everybody drinks out of that cup. If one person has coronavirus, the rest of the church is going to get coronavirus. The first time they went back to church, everybody got coronavirus.”

Lapp says the Amish weren’t denying Covid. They were facing it head-on. “It’s a worse thing to quit working than dying. Working is more important than dying,” he says. “But to shut down and say that we can’t go to church, we can’t get together with family, we can’t see our old people in the hospital, we got to quit working? It’s going completely against everything that we believe. You’re changing our culture completely to try to act like they wanted us to act the last year, and we’re not going to do it.”

That also meant avoiding hospitals. The Amish simply refused to go to the hospital, even when they were very sick, because that would mean they couldn’t see visitors. And, to them, they’d rather be very sick at home with people around them than be isolated in a hospital.

The Amish anecdotes were powerful, but solid proof wasn’t easy to find because the Amish didn’t typically take Covid tests. Their thinking, says one observer, was, “I’m sick. I know I’m sick. I don’t have to have someone else telling me I’m sick.”

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US GOVERNMENT RAIDS AMISH CATTLE FARMER, SEIZING HIS PROPERTY IN A SHOCKING DISPLAY OF OVERREACH…

Americans are watching in absolute shock and horror as our government, which is supposed to “fear” the people, runs roughshod over everyone and everything deemed an enemy. Whether that’s President Trump, U.S. voters, J6 prisoners, Julian Assange, Douglass Mackey (convicted of ‘conspiracy’ for sharing an anti-Hillary meme), or a harmless Amish farmer simply minding his own business, our government has grown too big for its britches and lost its way. And speaking of the innocent Amish farmer, that’s what this story is about today — a Virginia man who was raided by the government but is fighting back and desperately needs your support.

Townhall:

“They came with a search warrant,” softly spoke Samuel B. Fisher, a mild-mannered cattle farmer operating a 100-acre farm tucked away in Virginia’s heartland. Fisher’s bread-and-butter, Golden Valley Farms, carves out the scenic countryside that’s a hop, skip, and a jump away from historic Farmville, a postcard-perfect small Southern town with classical Main Street charm.

The father of five had graciously invited us down to his idyllic pasture to rehash the whirlwind of unforeseen events that unfolded over the cruel summer. It was a tumultuous time on the Fisher farm, an upheaval that threatened to upend the man’s livelihood.

“Then, they tagged the meat, so that we can’t touch it; we can’t sell it; we can’t feed our family with it,” Fisher told Townhall.

The government overreach began when Big Brother discovered that this health-conscious, all-natural farmer was avoiding the sometimes rather questionable “USDA” process.

The firestorm of Big Government saber-rattling ignited in mid-June when an inspector with the Virginia Department of Agriculture & Consumer Services (VDACS), without warning, paid the Fisher family a visit. Fisher has “no idea” what could have prompted VDACS’s impromptu inspection on June 14, except “maybe they just finally found us through word of mouth,” he speculated.

What was clear: The state sought to penalize Fisher for selling meat that was not processed by a USDA-inspected facility (U.S. Department of Agriculture). Fisher processes—an industry euphemism for butchering—his farm-raised meat on-site and sells it directly to his customers, feeding about 500 consumers and their families, who are part of a buying club. As members enrolled in the Golden Valley Farms membership program, they’ve bought into Fisher’s herd of 100% grass-fed golden Guernsey cows.

“They own part of the business. They own some of the herd,” Fisher explained. “My thinking was […] We can butcher their cows, process it, and sell it to them. I told the state all of this, but they said, ‘No, there’s no way around that. You can’t do that.’ They asked permission to get in here” to search the farm, a request Fisher denied. “And, they told me, ‘We’ll be back,’ and left.”

They came back, alright… this time with a sheriff, and they unleashed a full-scale raid that lasted about three hours. And as the Townhall piece goes on to point out, there is nothing illegal about Fisher processing his own meat for his own consumption.

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Another fake fact check from Facebook’s “Science Feedback”: this one about Amish Covid-19 immunity

If you’ve paid attention, you already know that Facebook’s “Science Feedback” and other health-related fact checkers are prolific distributors of misinformation and false information that typically benefits the vaccine or pharmaceutical industry.

They tend to “fact check” articles about medical studies and topics that are having an impact on the public, in hopes of tamping down the buzz and circulation of the data or details.

This week, these players are working hard to keep the public from learning that the Amish have claimed to reach “herd immunity” with Covid-19 and fared better than places that imposed drastic measures. The Amish say they did so without masking, closing, social distancing, or vaccination.

The Amish claim of herd immunity was previously reported by Associated Press and other news organizations, but didn’t get wide circulation. The propagandists and fake fact checkers didn’t challenge the topic at the time.

But my report on the same, which aired last Sunday on Full Measure, must be having an impact.

In response, Facebook’s Health Feedback propagandists have made several false and unsupported claims in an attempt to discredit The Amish approach and the reporting about it.

The fake fact-checkers, edited by a woman named Fernanda Ferreira, falsely claim that “natural immunity post-infection is variable, while vaccination provides safer and more reliable immunity.” The bulk of the scientific studies show the opposite. (You can find them here and decide for yourself.)

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Amish community may have reached COVID ‘herd immunity,’ health official says

An Amish community in Pennsylvania may have become the first group in the US to achieve herd immunity, a local health official claims.

The administrator of a medical center in the heart of Lancaster County’s New Holland Borough, which is known for its Amish and Mennonite communities, estimates that as many as 90 percent of the religious families have had at least one family member infected with the virus.

“So, you would think if COVID was as contagious as they say, it would go through like a tsunami; and it did,” said Allen Hoover, an administrator of the Parochial Medical Center, which caters to the religious community and has 33,000 patients.

The Amish and Mennonite groups initially complied with stay-at-home orders at the beginning of the pandemic — shuttering schoolhouses and canceling church services.

But by late April, they had resumed worship services, where they shared communion cups and holy kisses, a church greeting among believers.

Soon after, the virus tore throughout the religious enclave.

“It was bad here in the spring; one patient right after another,” said Pam Cooper, a physician’s assistant at the Parochial Medical Center.

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