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["Lynda" <lurine AT softcom.net>]

Anyone heard about this?

Lynda

----- Original Message ----- 

> ~SPECIAL ALERT TO EVERYONE THAT EATS ~
> Swat Team Conducts "Food Raid" in Rural Ohio

The USDA just released their plans to put a law into action that will put 
all small farmers out of business. Animals for the sale of meat or milk will 
only be allowed in commercial farms. December 3, 2008


If you read nothing else today please make it this article 
http://www.rwefree.com/swat. htm

http://www.christianworldviewnetwork.com/article.php/4287/Brannon-Howse/

By-John-Loeffler

SWAT TEAM CONDUCTS FOOD RAID IN RURAL OHIO

Posted: 12/04/2008

On Monday, December 1, a SWAT team with semi-automatic rifles entered the 
private home of the Stowers family in LaGrange, Ohio, herded the family onto 
the couches in the living room, and kept guns trained on parents, children, 
infants and toddlers, from approximately 11 AM to 8 PM. The team was 
aggressive and belligerent. The children were quite traumatized. At some 
point, the "bad cop" SWAT team was relieved by another team, a "good cop" 
team that tried to befriend the family. The Stowers family has run a very 
large, well-known food cooperative called Manna Storehouse 
http://www.mannastorehouse.com on the western side of the greater Cleveland 
area for many years.

There were agents from the Department of Agriculture present, one of them 
identified as Bill Lesho. The search warrant is reportedly supicious-looking 
<http://steveandpaul arunyan.blogspot .com/>. Agents began rifling through 
all of the family's possessions, a task that lasted hours and resulted in a 
complete upheaval of every private area in the home. Many items were taken 
that were not listed on the search warrant. The family was not permitted a 
phone call, and they were not told what crime they were being charged with. 
They were not read their rights. Over ten thousand dollars worth of food was 
taken, including the family's personal stock of food for the coming year. 
All of their computers, and all of their cell phones were taken, as well as 
phone and contact records. The food cooperative was virtually shut down. 
There was no rational explanation, nor justification, for this extreme 
violation of Constitutional rights.

Presumably Manna Storehouse might eventually be charged with running a 
retail establishment without a license. Why then the Gestapo-type 
interrogation for a 3^rd degree misdemeanor charge? This incident has raised 
the ominous specter of a restrictive new era in State regulation and 
enforcement over the nation's private food supply.

This same type of abusive search and seizure was reported by those innocents 
who fell victim to oppressive federal drug laws passed in the 1990s. The 
present circumstance raises the obvious question: is there some rabid new 
interpretation of an existing drug law that considers food a controlled 
substance worthy of a nasty SWAT operation? Or worse, is there a previously 
unrecognized provision(s) pertaining to food in the Homeland Security 
measures? Some have suggested that it was merely an out-of-control, 
hot-to-trot ODA agent, and, if so, this would be a best-case scenario. 
Anything else might spell the beginning of the end for the freedom to eat 
unregulated and unmonitored food http://www.westonap rice.org/.

One blogger 
http://thebovine.wordpress.com/2008/12/03/oda-swats-manna-storehouse-co-op/

familiar with the Ohio situation has reported that:"Interestingly, I believe 
they [Manna Storehouse] said a month or so ago, an undercover ODA official 
came to their little store and claimed to have a sick father wanting to join 
the co-op.

Both the owner and her daughter-in- law had a horrible feeling about the 
man, and decided not to allow him into the co-op and notified him by 
certified mail. He came back to the co-op demanding to be part of it. They 
refused and gave him names of other businesses and health food stores closer 
to his home. Not coincidentally, this man was there yesterday as part of the 
raid."

The same blog 
http://thebovine.wordpress.com/2008/12/03/oda-swats-manna-storehouse-co-op/

also noted that the Ohio Department of Agriculture has been chastised by the 
courts in several previous instances for its aggression, including trying to 
entrap an Amish man in a raw milk "sale," 
http://familycow.proboards32.com/index.cgi?board=news&action=display&thread=12013

which backfired when it became known that the Amish believe in a literal 
interpretation of "give to him that asketh thee, and from him that would 
borrow of thee turn not thou away" (Matthew 5:42)

The issue appears to be the discovery of a bit of non-institutional beef in 
an Oberlin College food service freezer a year ago that was tracked down by 
a county sanitation official to Manna Storehouse. Oberlin College's student 
food coop is widely known for its strident ideological stance about eating 
organic foods. It seems that the Oberlin student food cooperative had joined 
the Manna Storehouse food cooperative in order to buy organic foods in bulk 
from the national organic food distributor United http://www.unitedbu 
yingclubs. com/, which services buying clubs across the nation. The 
sanitation official, James Boddy, evidently contacted the Ohio Department of 
Agriculture. After the first contact by state ODA officials, Manna 
Storehouse reportedly wrote them a letter requesting assistance and 
guidelines for complying with the law. This letter was never answered. 
Rather, the ODA agent tried several times to infiltrate the coop, as 
described above. When his attempts failed, the SWAT team showed up!

Food cooperatives and buying clubs have been an active part of the American 
landscape for over a generation. In the 1970s, with the rise of the organic 
food industry (a direct outgrowth of the hippie back-to-nature movement) 
food coops started up all over the country. These were groups of people who 
freely associated for the purpose of combining their buying power so that 
they could order organic food items in bulk and case lots. Anyone who was 
part of these coops in the early era will remember the messy breakdown of 35 
pounds of peanut butter and 5 gallon drums of honey!

These buying clubs have persisted and flourished over the years due to their 
ability to purchase high quality organic foods at reduced prices in bulk 
quantities. Most cooperatives have participated greatly in the local 
agrarian economies, supporting neighborhood organic farmers with purchases 
of produce, eggs, chickens, etc. The groups also purchase food from a number 
of different local, regional and national distributors, many of them 
family-based businesses who truck the food themselves. Some of these food 
cooperatives have become large enough to set up

mini-storefront operations where members can drop in and purchase items 
leftover from case lot sales. Manna Storehouse had established itself in 
such a manner, using a small enclosed breezeway attached to their home. It 
was a folksy place with old wooden floors where coop members stopped by to 
chat and snack on bags of organic corn chips.

The state of Ohio boasts the second largest Amish population in the country. 
Many of the Amish live on acreages where they raise their own food, not 
unlike Manna Storehouse, and sell off the

extras to neighbors and church members. There is a sense of foreboding that 
this state crackdown on a longstanding, reputable food cooperative operation 
could adversely impact the peaceful agrarian way of life not only for the 
Amish, but homeschoolers and those families living off the land on rural 
acreages. It raises the disturbing possibility that it could become a crime 
to raise your own food, buy eggs from the farmer down the road, or butcher 
your own chickens for family and friends - bustling activities that 
routinely take place in backwater America. The freedom to purchase food 
directly form the source is increasingly under attack. For those who have 
food allergies and chemical intolerances, or who are on special medical 
diets, this is becoming a serious health issue. Will Americans retain the 
right to purchase food that is uncontaminated by pesticides, herbicides, 
allergens, additives, dyes, preservatives, MSG, GMOs, radiation, etc.? The 
melamine scare from China underscores the increasingly inferior and suspect 
quality of modern processed institutional foods. One blog, commenting on the 
bizarre and troubling Manna Storehouse situation, observed that:

"No one is saying exactly why. At the same time the FDA says it it safe to 
eat the 40% of tainted beef found in Costco's and Sam's all over the nation. 
These farm raids are very common now. Every farmer needs to fully eqiped 
[sic] for the possibility of it happening to them. The Farmer To Consumer 
Legal Defense Fund http://www.ftcldf. org/ was created just for this 
purpose. The USDA just released their plans to put a law into action that 
will put all small farmers out of business. Animals for the sale of meat or 
milk will only be allowed in commercial farms, even the organic ones." 
December 3, 2008 7:09 PM file://localhost/comment.g

John Loeffler

Western Bureau Chief

Steel on Steel Radio

Program

IRN/USA Radio News

P.O. Box 3358

Hayden Id 83835-3358

Tel: 208-765-8337

Fax: 208-765-2033

Email: john AT steelonsteel.com

Web: www.steelonsteel.com

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