Amish farmer Amos Miller’s ongoing battle with federal regulators is representative of the broader war on family farmers.
Federal marshals arrived at the doorstep of Amish farmer Amos Miller on June 24, 2021. They were putting his entire meat, pork, and poultry inventory on hold indefinitely for violating U.S. Department of Agriculture rules.
It wasn’t the first time Miller had dealt with federal marshals and the USDA, and it wouldn’t be the last. It was just the latest piece in a six year dispute between his association of small farmers, Miller’s Organic Farm, in Bird-in-Hand, Pennsylvania, and the federal government, over whether he has the right to process and sell meat without abiding the presence and proscriptions of a federal inspector. It’s a dispute that continues today.
A members-only association of several small farms in the Lancaster County, Pennsylvania area, Miller’s Organic Farm has been selling non-GMO, grass-fed, unbleached meat and dairy products since 2000. For Amos Miller’s family, however, farming goes back a lot further: more than 100 years.
Miller describes his product as “nutrient dense” and “raw”—that is, untouched by any form of preservative. In addition to Amos’s cows and pigs, the Miller’s Organic Farm association also sells poultry, cow, and pig products from other local farmers, as well as camel and water-buffalo milk, local produce, and homemade bakery items. In order to shop from the farm, interested customers have to apply to become a member of the association, which includes signing a contract agreeing to take on themselves the risk of eating the raw products, which are not regulated by the USDA. The association has approximately 4,000 members.
In 2017, the USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) brought a subpoena against Miller after he denied the federal agency access to his records and meat and poultry facilities, beginning the ongoing dispute. One month before the marshals arrested his meat in 2021, the U.S. district court in eastern Pennsylvania had ruled that Miller’s Organic Farm had violated the court’s injunction order and consent decree, and could no longer sell fresh or newly slaughtered meat, meat food products, poultry, or poultry food products, until it liquidated its existing inventory. The order also required the association to post a public notice, in agency-approved language, to its 4,000 members to let them know they could not purchase meat for the foreseeable future. Miller had disobeyed the court’s order to change his business model and instead continued to process his meat without a federal inspector, which led to the marshals’ visit. His punishment was cancellation of his livelihood, a handful of fines amounting to over $250,000, and the threat of jail time.
For Miller, it all boils down to providing meat in the hands-off way that his family has for over a century—the very reason thousands of members buy from Miller’s Organic Farm.
“The customers want to take their health in their own hands,” Miller told The American Conservative. “They don’t trust the government, because the preserved meat in the stores, farmers can put bleach and citric acid on it—not like lime or orange juice, but manufactured citric acid, which can come from corn, it could be produced in China—they can use that and it doesn’t have to be labeled on the meat to be sold. So the customers trust us, rather than the USDA labels in the store.”
I’d rather have meat or any other food from an Amish farm than from China!!! And a lot of places in this country.
You really have no idea what they have been doing to our foods, what I have discovered is unreal and I truly wish that it was not true but unfortunately I know it is, because it is all part of that Famous Plan to get rid of all us Worthless Eaters. Their goal is for us to eat Bugs which are poisonous. Better read that package because I saw where they are already starting to add these tasty critters to a bag of chips. This was a brand I had never heard of but it proves they have already started.
On a side note I found out that Organic in our Grocery Stores is the same as the regular foods they are just labeled Organic, this info came first hand from someone that was very familiar with the farming industry. Besides why bother our foods have all been sprayed as well as the grounds where it is grown. Now you know why we are all keeping our Drs. Fat and Happy as well as keeping Big Pharma Fat and Happy too. All part of that Famous Plan too.