Rogue Food ‘n’ Freedom

We’ve been organizing the spaces in the house that got a little out of control. Yesterday Colby and I tackled the electronics section in the hall closet. We got it down to a few nicely labeled zippy bags. We’re sending in videos to digitize. We tossed a lot of nonsense. One of those ol’ videos was hours of phone messages and in-person “investigations” from the FDA & WSDA. It’s because of these pieces of evidence that a big case in federal court fell flat on its face.

In 2005, what feels like a lifetime ago, I was involved in being targeted and highlighted in the media. It became national news… My biological Mom and stepdad lived next door to us and had 6 dairy cows. They had been milking and operating a milk share herd. This means that several families pooled together financially to purchase and maintain cows, giving permissions to my folks to steward the animals. In exchange for their financial contributions, they enjoyed milk regularly. That became illegal: someone other than you milking your cow for your consumption (simply put) in Washington State without a licensed Grade A raw dairy through WSDA. The law reads that you cannot even “…give away milk from any mammal” without permits and all their bells and whistles. There have been multiple attempts to change the law since, and we’ll keep working on this! Food freedom and choice is a big deal to me.

If you’re familiar with real food, you’re probably pretty familiar with the political heat around unpasteurized dairy products particularly from around 2003 through 2015. Farmers were harassed, shut down, cows & products confiscated… Heck, there were literal farm raids nationwide and beyond.

My Mom’s farm was no exception. The tricky part is that we lived so close, and I helped them more than I should have: sharing the good news about “our” family farm, marketing something I was excited about. Though we had no legal or business ties, received zero financial exchanges, had no ownership of any of the cows or having ever milked a single one of them… We were targeted. At the time, I didn’t know how to stand up for myself. And my Mom and step Dad certainly didn’t try to. You know who did? Pete Kennedy, a rogue food lawyer with the Farm To Consumer Legal Defense at the time (this is how I met and befriended Sally Fallon & Joel Salatin, who were great encouragers to me!). When Mr. Kennedy took the case, one of the first things he did was get our names removed*. He told my Mom we had nothing to do with the farm, and to completely leave us out of it.

He wasn’t wrong, but I was offended at the time. You know why? Because that carrot was dangled in front of us for years. We’d benefit from the farm they were building, they said. It’d all be ours someday. Someday when we “earned it” (with no perimeters, specifications, timeframes, goals, etc). The farm that they relied on and used us to build. The farm we made all of our decisions around. Why did we keep giving [too much, constantly] without any defined reward?

Because I believed them.

I was a fool. Why? Because I put them above my wee family. Their financial (and other) ’emergencies’ always came first. Their dreams and life goals always came first. We lived a small life so they could live however they wanted.

I look back with great fondness for Pete Kennedy. Though it took me a minute to understand his motivation at the time, he was 100% right. He separated business from pleasure, reality from imagination. That single move allowed me to begin to see how unhealthy my relationship was with my Mom and stepdad, and if we’re honest, the farm as it was.

As we began to step away, the consequences were fast and furious; severe. A glimpse of the making of Wild Roots.

My relationship with the farm customers remained (tho’ few, if any, knew of my severe relational issues or later disconnect with my family). We went on to establish our own farm business, raising pastured poultry, pork, fresh eggs and vegetables. We started from scratch.

The rewards that my Mom had promised us all of those years of sacrificing were empty promises; manipulative tools to control us. I’ll never know the intentions behind their decisions. But I started to learn how to set boundaries. How to choose to see more clearly. How to invest all of our resources more wisely. How to not enable others, yet still give extravagantly. How to know and trust Jesus. How to love others better, including my Mom and stepdad. Myself, my husband and my children. Others who lived under the same bondage I knew.

We almost lost everything, leaving that situation, particularly when our efforts to sell that neighboring parcel was being sabotaged left and right. When we gave up OUR [in]ability to control the situation and asked God for help, knowing bankruptcy was likely the outcome, He showed up (a cash offer the next day)! Moving off of that farm was one of the first times we took an extreme leap of faith, trusting God fully with the outcome. It won’t be the last, no doubt about it.

Pete Kennedy freed us.

Last month, after all these years, I was able to reconnect with Pete at the Rogue Food Conference in Vancouver. I suspect he still has no idea just how much he helped my family, not just my folks (charges were dropped in federal court, and my Mom and stepdad were able to move forward). He continues to do great things, advocating for farm families and real food.

Needless to say, we do things differently these days. We have committed to be chain-breakers. We have invested a lot into [healthy and integrity-filled] succession and business planning, and encourage others to do so as well. We joined Farm Bureau, knowing that would have all gone down much differently if we knew how to procure advocates earlier. We purpose to be a part of a beautiful community of people, places and things that all contribute together for the better. My Mom’s professed vision of agriculture on her farm wasn’t lost, but the gains may be different than we both thought they’d be for the years we spent there. Blessings multiplied.

These old video conversations with the big wigs bring back an awful lot of memories of the days when e coli threatened our life and others’. That’s quite a grand story that I think ought be told in great detail. Y’all are getting a lot of the harder stories these days. It’s freeing, truly, to be more transparent & honest with these things. Thanks for listening. I was never alone. Hallelujah.

*before Pete released us, we came up with and paid tens of thousands that were unrecovered.