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  • From: Allan Balliett <aballiett AT frontiernet.net>
  • To: Market Farming <market-farming AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: [Market-farming] HOMESTEAD SECURITY Presents Sandor Katz, Linda Faillace and Jessica Prentice
  • Date: Tue, 7 Nov 2006 07:23:59 -0500


THIS IS A FREE EDUCATIONAL EVENT!!

If you are in the WV Panhandle and need a ride to this event, we have room in a vehicle leaving from Shepherdstown Thursday afternoon. Contact me, Allan Balliett at allan AT freshandlocalcsa.com

If you FARM or if you just EAT, Don't miss the WAPF conference in DC this weekend!-Allan Balliett

Something to Chew On this Thursday!

Join us on Thursday, November 9 at 7-9PM at Busboys and Poets in Washington DC (www.busboysandpoets.com) when the Department of Homestead Security (SLOW FOOD, Fresh and Local CSA and CHELSEA GREEN PUBLISHING) proudly present Chelsea Green author/activists:

Linda Faillace, author of MAD SHEEP: The True Story of the USDA's War
on a Family Farm
Sandor Katz, author of THE REVOLUTION WILL NOT BE MICROWAVED: Inside
America's Underground Food Movements
And Jessica Prentice, founder of the 'Locavore' Movement and author of
FULL MOON FEAST: Food and the Hunger for Connection

in a discussion led by Marsha Weiner, President Food Muse Media and Regional Governor of Slow Food USA, on developing a flavorful, clean and just food system, and on how ordinary people can resist the dominant system, revive community-based food production, and take direct responsibility for their own health and nutrition.

Visit www.chelseagreen.com for more on the Department of Homestead Security.

For more information about the event, contact Allan Balliett at allan AT freshandlocalcsa.com or (304) 876-3382 or www.freshandlocalcsa.com

MORE INFORMATION
The Department of Homestead Security proudly presents Chelsea Green author/activists
Linda Faillace, author of MAD SHEEP: The True Story of the USDA's War on a Family Farm
e-press kit here: <http://www.chelseagreen.com/2006/items/madsheep>http://www.chelseagreen.com/2006/items/madsheep

Sandor Katz, author of THE REVOLUTION WILL NOT BE MICROWAVED: Inside America's Underground Food Movements
e-press kit here: <http://www.chelseagreen.com/2006/items/revolution>http://www.chelseagreen.com/2006/items/revolution

And Jessica Prentice, founder of the 'Locavore' Movement and author of FULL MOON FEAST: Food and the Hunger for Connection
e-press kit here: <http://www.chelseagreen.com/2006/items/fullmoonfeast>http://www.chelseagreen.com/2006/items/fullmoonfeast

Mad Sheep
by Linda Faillace
reviewed by Chris Walters for ACRES

Most people remember the character of Inspector Javert, the policeman in Victor Hugo's Les Misérables whose relentless pursuit of Jean Valjean makes a hash of justice, fairness and decency. Hugo's point is impossible to miss: Javert's mania for the letter of the law is a kind of madness that moves him to murder its spirit.

The Faillace family had the misfortune of attracting their very own Javert in 1998, when Larry and Linda, who bred and raised sheep with the help of their three children, were asked to meet with a USDA functionary. They assumed it was something to do with scrapie prevention. The Faillaces had cooperated with the national effort to wipe out the brain-wasting disorder -- a prion disease in the same class as bovine spongiform encephalopathy, a.k.a. Mad Cow disease -- when they endured years of agonizing regulatory delays while assembling their herd of rare sheep, bred from imported livestock. Taking no chances, they went the USDA one better by nudging state agriculture officials to activate Vermont's scrapie prevention program, which until then had existed only on paper.
Linda Faillace remembers thinking cheerful thoughts about the person they were to meet, a senior staff veterinarian with the USDA's Animal Plant Health Inspection Service named Linda Detwiler, who was known for her involvement with the sheep industry.
"Now she was coming to see our operation, I told Larry, to congratulate us on doing such a great job: importing excellent, healthy sheep from Europe and New Zealand, getting the scrapie program up and running in Vermont, and stimulating the sheep industry, particularly the dairy sheep sector. But Larry disagreed. Something was niggling at him. 'This does not feel good,' he said."
Larry might have suspected that no good deed goes unpunished. Nevertheless, the real topic of the meeting came as a shock. Detwiler informed the Faillaces that the USDA believed their sheep might be harboring a variant of BSE, and they would have to suspend operation immediately. The implications were dire. An infected herd would have to be destroyed, and with it would go the family's fortunes as well as their emotional attachment to animals that were never raised for slaughter. The Faillaces reminded Detwiler that no sheep anywhere in the world had ever been found carrying a transmissible spongiform encephalopathy other than scrapie; moreover, they kept detailed records of every sheep's entire lifespan which proved that the USDA's claim was not only unlikely but impossible. Detwiler said she had information she could not divulge.
With that, the Faillaces were plunged into the American version of your basic Kafkaesque nightmare. By the time their worst fears had come to pass with the seizure of their flock early in 2001, they were lied to, spied on by federal agents, and run through a legal wringer. The USDA secured its final victory with the aid of a researcher whose laboratory was later exposed as a filthy mess, overrun with uncaged research mice.
Larry and Linda Faillace had devoted their lives to raising happy children and fine animals. If they had been cynical people or at least schooled in bureaucratic warfare, they would have hired a fierce practitioner of Washington, D.C., blood sport the day after that first meeting, and they might have prevailed. As it was, they fought the agency with skill and persistence that must have surprised Detwiler, her unseen superiors, and the business interests that manipulate the USDA from the shadows.
The agency had picked a fight with the wrong couple. Larry had a Ph.D. in animal physiology and Linda knew TSEs from her experience working as an assistant to a British scientist in the early '90s, when Larry taught at the University of Nottingham. They knew the horror of the British Mad Cow epidemic at first hand, they knew the USDA's safeguards against BSE were grossly inadequate, and they had every reason to believe the agency was engaged in covering its bases, to use the polite term. But they never reckoned on the malign nexus of Detwiler's personal ambition, the ethical squalor of an agency that had spent decades collaborating with the industry it was supposed to regulate, and the current bureaucratic police state. The story behind the USDA's vendetta remains untold as the Faillace's lawsuit against the agency goes into discovery. Doubtless it will confirm the pithy words of another French writer, Honor é de Balzac: "Bureaucracy is a giant mechanism operated by pygmies."

This is an infuriating book in many respects. Although Linda Detwiler has gone on to a career consulting for fast food chains, the usual gang of idiots is still in charge at the USDA. But it is also a compelling book, because Linda Faillace never lets her anger interfere with her careful rendering of the facts. She's a born storyteller who might consider a sideline as an author of political thrillers -- Mad Sheep is one of those books that makes going to sleep at a decent hour unthinkable.

-- Chris Walters

Mad Sheep: The True Story Behind the USDA's War on a Family Farm, by Linda Faillace, hardcover, 352 pages. Cost $25. This book is published by Chelsea Green Publishing Company, ISBN 1-93-339209-6.


Booklist 9/15

If this were a novel, you probably wouldn't believe it. But the story of a Vermont farming family driven out of business by a government agency is true-and truly frightening. When the Faillaces (author Linda and her husband, Larry) went into the sheep-farming business, they followed every USDA guideline. Then, once their operation was running, that same agency told them their sheep would have to be destroyed because they might spread "mad cow" disease. Despite the Faillaces' abundant proof that their sheep were disease free-and, moreover, posed no risk whatsoever-the USDA forcibly shut the farm down. The agency's actions ultimately had nothing to do with the health of the Faillaces' sheep but much to do with the health of the American beef industry, which could be adversely affected if people believed there was mad cow in the U.S. The author has every right to be bitter, but she maintains an even tone, presenting us with the evidence and letting us see what happened and why. But if you can read the book without getting mad, you're not reading it carefully.
-David Pitt
Mad Sheep
The True Story Behind the
USDA's War on a Family Farm
By Linda Faillace
Contact: Alice Blackmer 703-443-9418 blackmer AT chelseagreen.com

A gripping story of one family's fight against the USDA
MAD SHEEP is the long-awaited story of a family farm destroyed by the USDA in its effort to protect beef industry sales from the threat of Mad Cow disease. It is an unforgettable chapter in the latter-day history of the family farm.
Linda Faillace, scientist, farmer, wife, and mother of three tells the harrowing story of corruption, gun-toting federal agents, and heart-breaking loss with amazing clarity and skill.
Though no sheep had ever contracted Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE) or "mad cow" diseases, the US government at the behest of the US beef industry decided to show the world that it was serious about preventing an outbreak of the disease in the United States. At first blush the connection between the Faillace operation and this governmental goal seem unrelated. They would remain so, even as the USDA began putting together a trumped up case against the Vermont operation. First, officials claimed there was a possibility the Faillace sheep had scrapie, a disease similar to BSE that infects sheep. They decreed that the sheep would have to be destroyed.
But the Faillace's had documentation to show that their sheep came from scrapie-free flocks. Linda and Larry, scientists both, studied BSE and scrapie disease extensively while working at the University of Nottingham in England. They were able to present concrete evidence that it was impossible for their sheep to have BSE. But Linda Detweiler of the USDA-now working for McDonald's and Wendy's-and the agency she ran refused to budge. The Faillace sheep were slaughtered to prevent the spread of BSE in America .
Larry and Linda Faillace dreamed of having a small dairy sheep farm where their children could work along side them and create a family business. They discovered a niche with high-yield dairy sheep from Europe. They carefully researched and untangled all the regulations regarding the importation of sheep and soon had a thriving entrepreneurial business. Then, one day, the needs of big business and government corruption colluded to bring their operation to a screeching halt.
The USDA created a straw man to protect the beef industry-that straw man was a family. This is their story.
Linda Faillaceworked as a secretary, store clerk, lab technician, song writer, piano teacher, and astrologer, before embarking on a career in sheep farming and cheese making. The Faillaces live in Warren, Vermont.
Available September 2006 | Hardcover | $25.00 | 1-933392-09-6 | 6 X 9, 352 pages
For more information, please visit www.chelseagreen.com/2006/items/madsheep


"From the hearthside warmth of children farmer-entrepreneurs to the arrogant, hardhearted, tyranny of government bureaucracy, Mad Sheep touches the soul with tears and righteous anger. Though it reads like a fiction political thriller, this story of intrigue, bureaucratic falsehoods, and tyranny is true. Linda Faillace gives Americans yet another reason to mistrust every official announcement from the United States Department of Agriculture."

--Joel Salatin, founder of Polyface Farm and author of You Can Farm: The Entrepreneur's Guide to Start & Succeed in a Farming Enterprise, recently profiled in The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan


"[Mad Sheep] shows how far a corrupt government agency will go to protect industry. This is a truly Kafkaesque story." -Dr. Tom Pringle, founder, Sperling Foundation

"Mad Sheep documents the ugliest display of governmental ass-covering and the manipulation of questionable scientific data for political purposes that I have ever read. It will make your blood boil."

-Gene Logsdon, organic farmer and author of The Contrary Farmer among many others

"Mad Sheep will enrage you. The real crazies in this true and tragic tale are the bureaucratic bullies who tortured and tormented heroic Vermont farmers while allowing a deadly dementia-mad cow disease-to emerge in America . The sheep are dead, lives destroyed, mad cow disease here, and the worst is that these bunglers are still running the show." -John Stauber, co-author, Mad Cow U.S.A.

_______________________________________________


Fresh and Local CSA
Shepherdstown, WV
www.freshandlocalcsa.com



  • [Market-farming] HOMESTEAD SECURITY Presents Sandor Katz, Linda Faillace and Jessica Prentice, Allan Balliett, 11/07/2006

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