Healthy soil and sustainable growing

["Tradingpost" <tradingpost@lobo.net>]

December 4, 2008...6:31 pm
More on ODA’s Manna Storehouse raid
http://thebovine.wordpress.com/2008/12/04/more-on-the-oda-manna-storehouse-raid/

Our earlier post “ODA ’swats’ Manna Storehouse co-op” is proving to be 
tremendously popular. Following up some of the traffic sources and ping-backs 
I eventually found more details on the story, which is looking more and more 
bizarre. Here’s some of what Berit Kjos is saying about it over on the True 
Discernment blog. From the looks of things, somebody up there must think 
Amish farmers are more of a threat than those “terrorists” we hear so much 
about.

“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 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. 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 3rd 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….”

“….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, 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!…

“….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….”

Read the whole thing here.
http://truediscernment.wordpress.com/2008/12/05/swat-team-conducts-food-raid-in-rural-ohio/

Update 12/06/2008:  Some have been questioning the authenticity of this 
story, here is a local news source link: Local food cooperative searched by 
state
http://www.morningjournal.com/articles/2008/12/03/news/mj309059.txt

The Farmer To Consumer Legal Defense Fund
http://www.ftcldf.org/

THE LATEST: Seems the head of the Stowers household was serving in Iraq while 
his family was being held at gunpoint by American authorities.