Milk War Won (Canada)

Sally Fallon has posted a fantastic article on the now famous Michael Schmidt raw milk case. Here are extended exerpts, but the whole article is a great read.

In spite of his troubles, Michael is the only dairy farmer in the district who has not gone out of business. 
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The biodynamic farm, according to Steiner, will be the basis of true culture and the Milk War allowed the Schmid's to set the example for farms of the future.
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eventually you arrive at Glencolton Farms with its stone farmhouse, compact farmyard and painterly vistas.

The owners are Michael and Dorothea Schmidt who purchased Glencolton when they came to Canada from Germany in 1983. Michael Schmidt is an innovator and an activist. He grew up in the Waldorf education system and has a master's degree in farming. His entire practical training took place on certified organic farms in Germany. 
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Michael's search for pure breeds sent him to Quebec. The Canadienne is the poor man's cow. In the early 1900s, government policy forbade grants to farmers who had Canadiennes and no bank would give loans for any breed except Holsteins. Banks love the Holstein, explains Schmidt, because she is expensive to maintain-leading to more bank loans, more debt for the farmer, more worry and more and more emphasis on squeezing the highest level of production out of the original investment. The Canadienne, by contrast, can survive on hay. She has low production but is inexpensive to maintain.
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The cow has four teats which tradition distributes as follows: one for the calf, one for the other animals on the farm, one for the family that lives on the farm and one for families that live in the towns or cities.
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Europeans hired milkmaids who had lovely singing voices, to coax more milk from the cows and Michael notices that the Glencolton cows give more milk when it's Dorothea's turn to do the milking. 
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Schmidt's cows feed on lush green pasture from late May to early November. During the winter they receive hay from his own pastures and a supplement of weeds, sticks and herbs, finely ground and all from the farm. He purchases no grain, no feed at all from outside the farm. The modern confinement dairy cow gets all her food shipped in. At best her diet consists of hay and corn; at worst it contains foodstuffs totally unsuited to the cow-bakery waste, soy meal, chicken manure and citrus peel cake loaded with organophosphate pesticides.
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Michael and Dorothea's farm is a biodynamic farm. They follow the guidelines left by the Austrian philosopher Rudolf Steiner who described the farm as a living organism, its vitality created by the effective use of the enlivening forces of sunlight and the symbiosis of the organisms that populate the farm. The basis of biodynamic farming is composted manure and straw, swept out of the stalls at milking time, allowed to break down, then spread on the fields.

Michael does not plow his fields-a practice that turns the green matter under and encourages an anaerobic fermentation. Instead he uses a chisel plow that keeps the green matter on top but which encourages a top-down, aerobic fermentation. He also uses the biodynamic preps
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The Schmidts cows stay inside all winter but the smell of the barn is sweet and fresh. The milking parlor is kept scrupulously clean. As a precaution, Michael sends his milk to a lab for testing every month and it always tests very low in bacteria.
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Not long after the Schmidts bought their farm, word spread about their biodynamic products and people began to come from as far as Toronto to buy them. Many wanted farm fresh milk and they liked the idea of purchasing directly from the farm. Michael developed a cow-lease program wherein the consumers could lease a cow or portion of a cow to supply fresh milk. The program was called My Cow's Milk. Sales increased in 1992 when he opened a store on the farm. He was told by one farmer that the people at the Ontario Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs (OMAFRA) Dairy Inspection Branch, were aware of his program but wouldn't interfere unless it became widely known.

The Milk War began in 1994 after the filming of a Canadian Broadcast Company documentary on Glencolton. "It was our own fault," says Michael. "We should never have agreed to the publicity." CBC pre-publicity said that the documentary "would shake the entire dairy industry."

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When affairs at the farm were at their lowest ebb, Michael and Dorothea took a walk into their fields. Michael had lost his will to fight and Dorothea was discouraged. It was at that moment, when both were absorbed in thought, that he was gored by one of his bulls. The horns that he had deliberately left on his cows gave him a huge gash and caused him to spend over one week in intensive care.

Rudolf Steiner taught that the farm is a self-contained unit and that everything the farmer needs to know can be learned through patient observation of the life on the farm. The bull that gored Michael Schmidt carried the most important message of all-that his only hope was to fight back.

Fight back he did, and now he has been completely exonerated (only after he had to sell off 600 acres of his is farm to finance the fight!). The Globe and Mail reports on the victory: 

Ontario dairy farmer Michael Schmidt has been found not guilty of a stream of charges relating to a controversial raw-milk operation he runs.