betty i came around the corner i was at the top of the stairs and what i saw from at the top of the stairs was a man right here around the corner with his arm like this in a gun pointing up at me all they could see was a black hat and a black jacket and that's all i could see in the gun and i stood there thinking that this was the serial killer and he's yelling at me calm down know me i'm going to come down right now they came with the director of of milk control this the assistant director and our inspector and they all came in and pretended they were designed to do inspection and then they did a se they showed up at five thirty in the morning in the middle of a blizzard and they had forty two armed federal agents and u s d a official and they cleared out our entire barn they took the sheep that we brought from belgium and the netherlands they went to the sheep that i had brought over from new zealand and they took them out to ireland they killed them for disease that doesn't exist to this america first you have the industrial system factory farms and agribusiness then there's the local system consisting of small sustainable farms and  sadly most food production are designed to support the industrial operations and the current u s agriculture policies could potentially destroy our local food system i'm kristin canty mom of four a reason i set out to make this film is because when one of my sons was four years old he was a very strict child with allergies and asthma conventional medicine wasn't helping him so i did some research and found out raw milk could be a remedy i gave my son raw milk and his allergies completely disappeared i had to go directly to a small farm to get  and i started buying grass fed needs eggs vegetables and fruits from a number of small local farms as i got to know these parents they told me they were encountering a variety of legal problems from both the state and federal authorities i quickly realized that my ability to buy the healthy foods i want could be in jeopardy the industrial food system is growing and becoming more powerful vanishing every time there is a major shakeup in the food system and local food takes a hit and so now we have bills winning their way through congress example that would give the food and drug administration the right to conduct warrantless searches on farms to find out if anything is being done that is not science but just well science based you know what science based is science based is petroleum based fertilizer herbicides pesticides antibiotics irradiation cloning that's all science based you know food safety has been hitting the headlines a huge amount and i think most people who look at it agree that there are huge food safety problems with our mainstream system you know it's wrong when people die from eating peanut butter that shouldn't happen and it happens because there are huge flaws in the mainstream food safety system the problem is right now that congress has sort of taken this attitude of we've got to do something about food safety and they're out to regulate everything and everyone to the tiniest detail and so instead of focusing on the real problems instead of directing f d a to really enforce to really regulate and inspect these huge facilities which is where all of the major food borne illnesses have been traced back to they're saying everyone who process food must be registered with the government they have to pay fees and when you regulate like that are going to drive these people out of business and then consumers won't have any other options the only option consumers will be left with is the grocery store chains buying from these huge processing plants which is where these problems keep getting traced back to our regulations are barking up the wrong tree absolutely have problems in this country around food safety and food security but for regulators to prohibit small scale diversified production and processing of food when there is absolute evidence that that is the safest most secure way for us to feed ourselves as a society and to let corporations that are poisoning us scott free is completely ridiculous now i think somebody should have the choice if they want to to eat something that's bad for them that's their choice but i want to have the choice to eat something that i believe is good for me and that belief comes from thousands and thousands of years of human experience i sell a lot of leafy greens to gardeners and plants like chards i no longer trust them because they're coming out of the wilmette valley over on the west coast and they're surrounded by g m o chards and beets i think the government needs to step up to the plate and require that everything that has a g m o product in it any kind of food is a label and every single see that goes out there has to be labeled that it's g m o free government is not going to do what it's gotten their interests well i think  that there's a real struggle for the government to try and make a one size fits all kind of approach to food safety and that's just not going to work because you know we have like maybe two percent of the farms that are smaller and used to be only only small farms so that there's a there's got to be a way that we can cut taxes and biodiversity and we can we can show that sustainable farming is the only way forward and so we need to be transitioning and thinking about protecting those farms and even growing those farms and in bringing more farmers into the picture the regulations for the little farm say it's one farmer it takes as long to do all the paperwork as it does to do the farming that's ok for a huge company that employs one person to do that all the time and then has a lot of other people working but for one little farmer he doesn't have time to farm because he's got to do all the paperwork the federal government's ok hold of it what we've got to make sure it's even more burdensome for the small guy and nothing for the big guy this that's what the federal government does it takes care of the top of the pyramid there is a i believe a misperception by many that local equal safe and large equals unsafe i think that's wrong i think we have got large people who are very safe and small local farmers who are very safe and and vice versa so it's a mixture and you can't simply write legislation that is going to apply to a multi billion dollar multinational company and expect it to say to somebody who's a local farmer in maryland all massachusetts it isn't going to work of work that i have to do it's not productive i would like to see chemical farmers have to go through this alone and tell their customers what kind of chemical s if you look at the statistics are many fewer small farms today than there were forty or fifty years ago so the government really has encouraged a factory farming big  i think that the freedom to to be able to eat what you want is absolutely critical and you know part of it is the freedom to be able to get what you want you know naturally grown foods that are you know there are gammick that are clean and a knowing what you're getting it is alarming these days to hear more and more about what's happening with farmers and certain restrictions and they're running into trouble with the government when the people who are producing some of the most unnatural processed foods are just running along producing all that stuff whereas the people who are trying to do things you know the most natural way as it's been done for years are all of a sudden running into all of these roadblocks and to the extent that that makes it more difficult for us to get that product it's really who was the advisor to the e u and the british governments on mad cow disease and how to deal with it and how to make public policy dealing with mad cow disease my husband larry he has a ph d in animal science and he was doing a  postdoc in england i was working with professor lambing and he came across a british newsletter and we knew that we wanted to work together we wanted to do something in agriculture and something that would be financially viable with our children and when he found the british brought over sheep from belgium in the netherlands and set up of a family farm when we bought the sheep over they had to go through two months quarantine over in europe and a month quarantine here in the united states so that if at our farm and put us put the animals under quarantine and when wayne zelenka showed up and state that for mot showed up at our farm he handed us a quarantine papers and he said i don't mean this as a threat but let me tell you if you tell anybody about this you go to the media you get greedy you x for a bunch of money we're going to put you out of business and don't think we haven't done it  before we were threatened we went quiet for an entire year we didn't tell anybody we told my parents and larry's parents and that was it so here we're part of this great organic group of farmers working together and we're seeing them day to day and we can't even tell them these sheep are being quarantined under fear for mad cow disease and it was a really really tough year we brought over three european scientist and we had a meeting down in washington at u s d a so the three europeans all peace and in their information they said ok this is what's going on in york there's not a single sheep being killed under suspicion of mad cow disease the flocks the animals were imported from they've all been continued to be they're all perfectly healthy everything showing that our sheep are not a risk and so when we open up for questions and it was silent no one said anything and finally  torah said look i'm really sorry but we're under political pressure and you're going to have to surrender your animals the people that have the money are the packers the slaughterhouses and the feed lots and that's who control the beef industry and that's also who controls u s d a because there's a whole revolving door of people that go from the pharmaceutical in the beef industries they have positions there they go into u s d a they get legislation passed or whatever their pet project is and they just go back and forth working between the t from other science perspective from a from a medical perspective mad cow disease doesn't infect sheep sometimes what what happens with these situations is when federal authorities impact on a track it's mighty difficult to turn it around because there is well we're not going to back off we don't want to lose face and much as we all like to think of food safety is based on science and in exclusively science there's inevitably political overtones the social overtones the societal pressures on the way food safety is is run operated in and and in the way that inevitably regulators are going to interact with with the companies that they regulate be helped our son was fifteen years old at the time he was a huge james bond fan and he comes to us and says mom dad were being watched and we're like frances you know this is stressful for the tone paranoid know i know we're being watched i'm like how can you tell that you're being watched when i see these cars going by and they slow down and they watch me and sometimes are parked and we're like well this is a tourist area could be anybody so i know mom the cars are clean because in vermont nobody has a clean car and they wore a tie and they wore tight yeah but you know then we started increasingly customers would come in the store and say that they saw these guys parked up at the vista and they were just being seen more and more and you know here we were being doing sheep farming and running a little country store and you know what were they watching for what do they think we were going to do  day was broken down into fifteen minute segments and it said what each of the family members were doing where were we you know who was at the store larry felice and song frances move the she missed one anyone in the valley that they saw that had a savior she bumper sticker they wrote down their license plate and then they investigate them they also did two criminal investigations of larry linda detwiler requested this so the first one was to see if anything  importation had been illegal and then the second and they couldn't find anything so the second one was a personal criminal investigation to see if he had anything in his background i married a clean one a to court to stop them from seizing our sheep and seventeen days before our peals court hearing they showed up at five thirty in the morning in the middle of a blizzard and they had forty two armed federal agents and u s d a officials and they cleared out our entire barn they took the sheep that we brought from belgium and the netherlands they went to the sheep that i have brought over from new zealand and they took them out to iowa and they killed them for disease that doesn't exist to this day they did a basically a lethal injection they collected tissue samples put them into this lie solution to make them disintegrate because they were acting like this was such a danger even so there was absolutely nothing wrong with the sheep linda detwiler received all the test results and it showed the every single animal was negative and nobody knew about this except linda detwiler we were on aware of these results the media kept asking for test results on august third two thousand and one the very same day that she got the test results or was a press conference by u s d a that said they had no test results and that it was going to be months that they had to build a new facility and that they wouldn't know for months until the results that come in so they lied to everyone later that summer u s d a said that they wanted to take all of our equipment take a lot of the pieces off of the barn and basically take anything that we had that would allow us to continue in business and so they have a smoking pot have there's no humor parlor you know you name it and so they brought a giant dumpster here and we filled it up with a lot of the stuff trailer they just took off and what they told us is what they were taking everything down to massachusetts to be incinerated and they were also taking the hay that we were to sing off the land saying that that was dangerous as well and they needed to take that away and have that incinerated going on for a couple months yeah and i became really suspicious about that so one day they came to get a lot of the hay and i decided to follow the truck and they went to the local landfill that's only a few miles away and they dumped it right into the landfill with everything else so i guess they really didn't feel it was dangerous and we found out later that the u s d a had all the test results that prove that there was nothing wrong in the sheep before they ever started bringing those dumpsters around so they had all the evidence to show there was no danger whatsoever as we all knew from the beginning but they had the evidence and yet they spent all this money and created this facade of doing these things for public safety and all they were doing is dumping things in a local landfill wasting more resources when we were trying to get compensation they were eighteen months after the animals have been taken and it cost us five thousand dollars a head to bring the animals and they gave us a check there was thirteen hundred per animal and we said why the that makes it so that they feel that they can control it i knew we would eventually i don't know if we could save the sheep and we didn't do that but to battle a show that the whole thing was a complete fraud and house before we had a farm but i like the farm because it allows me to be with my parents and each of the children francis was fourteen the time and jackie was eleven you know jackie was particularly they're actually going onto the farm and telling farmers how to grow things so if there's a leafy greens problem because a huge processing plant is bagging leafy greens and shipping it all over the country all of a sudden your local farmer is growing leafy greens for their c s a or growing leafy greens for the farmers markets are going to be subject to growing in harvesting standards created by federal bureaucrats who frankly get all of their information just about from large industrial conventional agriculture one of the problems that small farmers have his expense there isn't a lot of government infrastructure that supports how hard it is to be a small farm and that's something that perhaps has always been as farms like ours and resume with patrons who are yearning in their soul their bodies are craving for real food and they eat this food rules wow this is actually food that i can pronounce words on the label and that i can actually make in my kitchen you know that's a pretty amazing thing that now ninety five percent of what americans eat you can't pronounce and you can't make it in your kitchen real food like butter like real milk like  been made the devil and the world of food so the point where people are afraid to eat real food and unfortunately the result of that is seventy two percent of the country is obese or overweight we have heart disease cancer and diabetes rates at all time highs and every year it's getting worse we should be able to eat and drink whatever we choose to and feed that to our family i believe that just as you can buy raw meat and choose to eat it raw which many people do or you have a warning label and you can cook it i don't understand why we can't buy raw dairy products and either choose to boil them ourselves or choose not to although i do understand why because if that was the case then the agricultural system would have to start producing real food instead of contributing to the problem if you look at the statistics between one nine hundred seventy and now you the us has lost eighty eight percent  dairy farms more than any other single food raw milk is what draws the consumer to the farm once they get there they might meat poultry produce but warm milk is what initially cause of them not to set food on the farm you know there's a there's a urban legend going around about raw milk is not good for you it's dangerous you know i wouldn't be here if it weren't for all mail because all of my ancestors had nothing but raw milk raw milk used to be an american staple but once the pasteurization process came into being everybody sort of switched over to that now raw milk is seen as something that's new you can get sick from any food by draw milk is inherently safe there are dozens of components in raw milk that kill pathogens and at the same time strengthen your own immune system is really the milk and a lot of them are in the fats why we never we always say drink whole milk don't don't drink skim milk for drink all the much much safer to drink and it does so by stabilizing that mass cell or allergy cell and preventing it from releasing the histamine so why is so much  in the mid eighty's hundreds children became sick and died after drinking milk from swill dairies the rotten milk came from cows crowded into the stables next to bear and whisk distilleries rather than grass and the blue colored milk they produced was enriched with flour and chalk to make it appear fresh it wasn't trash it was deadly the outlying of swell berries the advent every friend and of the certified clean around milk movement made milk safe again around this time and state governments supported the move towards pasteurization and passed laws making it harder to get run over time consumers accepted this move to pasteurized milk and the health benefits of dangerous to drink our bodies nowadays are more used to a lower bacteria there are lots of problems of you have raw milk it is essentially better for you because if you just all look at the enzymes and vitamins and nutrients in it but it's the pasteurization is a safeguard raw milk is whatever comes out of the cow it's a very clean it's a good it's a great product if it's not people are going to get sick and it's too dangerous to really to really do that without a pass relation raw milk yeah it's got it's got microbes in it most of those microbes that we get exposed to in that live in our gut are harmless they they don't like a sick and even if they do there's probably just low levels that that if it's just a low level exposure it's not necessarily life threatening or a huge problem but there are microbes that get into milk that we know can be deadly severe gastrointestinal illness kidney failure strokes and death and the bug i'm talking about is a choli a one five seven it's rare it's not an everyday occurrence in every gallon of raw milk that you buy years like you're playing russian roulette with with the milk at some horribly high odds ratio but it is a risk the state of maryland does not allow the sale of raw milk directly to the consumer and that does include the cow sharing programs and this is in concert in agreement with the federal drug administration f d a c d c which is the center for disease control the american academy of pediatrics the american medical association the u s animal health association the world health organization and the reason why the state of maryland does not allow the sale of raw milk is raw milk can contain a wide variety of pathogens which are disease causing agents i became  band in my state i live in maryland and initially when we first started drinking fresh milk we participated in a cow share program very similar to a timeshare where families will go in together on a cow and then get the milk from their own animal and that was legal in maryland and we first started drinking but then the health department changed the regulations to ban that really upset me because here i am trying to feed my children as healthfully as i can and the health department is completely undermining my authority as a parent all my research and same you don't know what you're doing and you can give us your family now i can go out and feed them fast food three times a day i've been through four pregnancies i could smoke through all of them and yet i can't go to a farmer near me and purchase this amazing healthful nutrient dense fresh  we decided to form a community supported dairy where we would have a small herd of cows and milk and then distribute that milk to the members of this group we did that and we had one hundred members or so but egg and markets did not like that they came and inspected us with several warrants they tried to get us through contempt of court they did several court actions to stop us from milking cows and distributing milk privately to members of our community supported dairy the state of new york started to ask the late enforcement actions against the smiths first they would send in inspectors to the smiths farm and say you need a permit for what you're doing and the smiths would say no we don't need a permit the department of ag and markets with then levy administrative fines against the smiths the department of ag and markets would then go  try to execute a search warrant against the smith's ag and markets would confiscate some dairy products and order it to be destroyed so they escalated these unfortunate actions against the smiths over the course of about a year agone markets is the department of agriculture and markets in new york state that's what they call it that's a different name in each state and in their theoretically well look a little bit through their the history of ag and markets and theoretically they were estab to support farmers so the agricultural products could get to markets and do anything they could to further that obviously that's not what they're  doing in markets kept saying we have to inspect one more time and so finally gary thought well all right we'll get one more inspection they came with the director of of control the  director and our inspector and they all came and pretended they were dispatched to do an inspection and then they did a seizure the legal way to ban us from making a yogurt other than to go through this inspection and say that it was unfit for human consumption in the estimation this place was so filthy that food fit for human consumption could not be made to be condemned about five gallons of milk and put  they had this fancy red caesar noticed they can still see where it was taped on here and they taped it across the handle bars so that we couldn't open cooler without breaking their  kids were terrified they were scared for a long time of someone else coming because we could we even though we tried not to act too paranoid we had to talk about things like next time they come what are we going to do in most of the states that allow farmers to sell raw dairy direct from the farm like places like pennsylvania and new york state they can only sell milk and ration the reason that they can't so you know butter and cream and cheeses and so forth is that those are considered to be processed foods and the more processing that's done in there or in the view of the agriculture the authorities the more chance there is for contamination throughout the making of this film i tried to contact numerous government officials to give the other side of the story i decided to travel to albany new york to confront the state department of agony markets to discuss the smith case you're actually going announce if i come back we can make an appointment but one of the things is that we have to get through these part cases in legislative history why did this lie then pass thirty nine nine hundred thirty eight those are the things we're looking into that question for you but that was also part of the court case which they can appeal ari what about if we did issue at all and just  people who the government don't really want to talk for some reason which bums me out because i think that if you feel strongly enough to shut down a farm that you should be able to talk about it the department of agriculture markets here in new york does allow the sale of raw milk or one of twenty eight states i believe that allow the sale of raw milk at our farms with certain protections in place in order to protect both consumer and the producer and so that means strict regulations and requirements on behalf of the producer limited sales and those are things that we feel strike a balance between protecting protecting both producer and consumer and so we are very open to communication with our producers about the challenges and opportunities of selling raw milk here in new york state we will continue to do those to have those conversations once this lead litigation is closed as an attorney and a former government employee i need to point out i'm scratching my head trying to figure out why is this so important to the government why are they stamping down on you know the little guy why don't they go after the foods that are inherently dangerous so to me that's the sixty four thousand dollar question is what's motivating these governmental officials to crack down on small family farms are they being financed by big agribusiness are they being financed by the dairy industry what's causing all this to these government officials come from big agribusiness companies and then going to government because we live near ethical and cornell is that you know big employer down there a majority of our members are somehow connected with cornell a lot of them are in the sciences these are all very educated people who they're not people who don't know the difference between raw milk unpasteurized there they're making very deliberate decisions to drink raw milk so it's kind of funny because i think about taking them all to the judge and saying which will stand up and introduce can obtain it and those who don't want to taint raw milk don't have to buy it raw milk is regulated on the state level and that's why we see such a hodgepodge of laws regarding raw milk in some states like california you can buy raw milk in stores some states you can buy raw milk directly from a farmer in some states it's illegal for anyone to sell raw milk i do want to state that it's illegal nowhere to buy possess or consume the f d a requires that if milk is sold across state lines it does have to be pasteurized so if its state does allow the sale of raw milk that milk has to stay within the state it cannot be sold over state lines there's a terrible regulation now it's been on the books for over twenty years that prohibits raw milk for human consumption from crossing state lines and location there were several inspectors from the department of agriculture waiting for us and they were there they were from the meat division ha think they might have been looking for looking at the meat products to make sure everything was legal there which of course it is and in the process of looking at that they entered my truck and found a bunch of coolers raw milk from south carolina u s d a grade  and a health hazard according to the state of georgia but i believe that the the freedom to choose your own food is very important and i like knowing where my food comes from so i would like to have the raw milk sales in the state of georgia and allow dairy producers to make that choice of whether they want to provide that to the consumer to understand that the government rushed to protect us and i understand that the people that that made the mosque felt like that was the only way to go and what i use for my cornbread and what i use for making my teeth cottage cheese my butter i've been working with look we've done for a while now and i've never heard of a single person getting sick on the raw milk that they purchased the hurt or anything else actually but if they did it would be much easier to trace back where that problem was than say the milk that came from who knows where it's been shipped all over the country and the know from ten thousand cows mixed together in a vacuum and trying to find the law prohibits someone from crossing state lines buying milk from a dairy and bringing it back for their own personal use in their own home so i'm not sure where we go from here there's a lot of questions still up in the air some folks  angry about it you have to understand what it is what it is this is their way of doing business they'll degrade anybody they possibly can they'll ruin anybody they possibly can to keep an agenda of where everybody is that in there are parallels and don't you dare get when i go to pennsylvania for my milk i'm getting most of my food there you know i've got four kids i don't have time to go to a different farm for every item so the maryland farmers are missing out on so much more than just milk the meat the eggs the chicken all those purchases are happening in pennsylvania as come to his farm executed search warrants at his farm confiscated some of his production equipment confiscated some of his raw dairy products and to this day is continuing to harass him into getting a permit or license so that he can under the state's eyes illegally sell all  he had actually asked the department of agriculture could he sell raw milk direct without a permit and the man in charge at that time said you can there is no law that says you have to have a permit if you're selling privately directly well someone new came into the department of agriculture and he would never answer this farmers question but his reply came in the form of three raids on th right martin old has been raided several times by the pennsylvania department of agriculture i think it's just an attempt to send a message to other farmers i mean there are a number of other farmers who are selling of raw milk without permits in that state and it's an attempt to intimidate them into going along with pennsylvania licensing requirements which mar objected to because under the licensing requirements he can only sell raw milk and raw cheese aged over sixty days he can't sell other value added products like a butter cream and yogurt need he thought he was and on an handcuffs both the p t a and the f d a say that mark refused to answer the citations that they served on him and so they had no choice in the used to be there was only one kind of milk it was just milk nobody really thought about it as people are learning that there's a difference and i'm beginning to ask what the difference is the market has been expanding rapidly i've been buying raw milk here at the farmers market for