Save the Farmer

This is a great country for stepping in and rescuing those who need it. We as Americans do our job so well at home that we're the first called upon when need arises in other countries with their crisis. We never say no.

But now we're failing to listen to the calls for help. Even as the calls grow louder, they are being ignored. And we are going to pay a painful price for doing so.

Farmers in this country' are in a free-fall of despair unlike ever seen. The prices they receive for milk -- as set by the US government -- don't cover the cost of producing that milk. One by one, the work force that allowed this country to become independent and self-sustaining is becoming extinct.

We all know that a farming life isn't easy. Subject to the weather, farmers learn to live with bad years occasionally broken up with a good year. Get upset when a planned event doesn't go as expected due to the weather? Imaginee if your livelihood depended on the weather.

Then there are the never-ending, must be done on time chores. Not only do the cows need to be milked on a pre­dictable cycle, but they hate going away from the pasture, so let's rule out taking a vacation for the most part. -

And unlike most jobs where the adults go off to each day and leave the family behind, farming is a family package deal... Can't get your teenager to clean his room? What if you had to get him to clean the barn?

So it's not easy under the best of circumstances, and the year 2009 is hardly that. In addition to losing money as milk prices have declined, costs have gone up for farming, as farm businesses struggle to keep going in a tough economy.

What can the non-farming community do to help our neighbors survive?

Stop by farm stands and farmers markets and buy your vegetables and fruit directly from the grower. Reach for the milk in the grocery store instead of soda. Round up the kids in the neighborhood, take -them to a local farm and say, 'here, they're yours for the day. Give them some work.' Ask what you can do for them.

Also, help get the attention of those in Washington, D.C. that this is a problem that needs to be addressed now. Milk prices need to be set at a level that allows for farmers to make a profit to live on. Ask town and county officials to lend their voices to the appeals for help.

When gas prices go up, out come the arguments on how this country is dependent on oil from other countries.

Imagine if our milk supply and prices were set by another country. What if our vegetables came from elsewhere, with different growing regulations and safety requirements?

Save the farmers. It's how we'll save ourselves.

Letter to the Editor Waterville Times August 5, 2009

To the editor:

Anyone who hasn't been under a rock for the past eight months knows that dairy farmers are experiencing their lowest their lowest incomes since 1978, but their expenses are three times what they were in 1978. The experts told us to hang on until June and milk prices would increase. Guess what folks, milk prices have actually gone down.

Our milk is marketed by DMS (Dairy Marketing Services). We just received the July newsletter. It says, "Everyone in the industry is waiting for the much antici­pated change in the market­place to occur. While much of the information in this Milk Price Update sounds like what we've been telling you for some time now, factors are occuring pretty much the way we expected them to occur, The only exception is that dairy cow attrition DUE TO LENDER ACTION has not happened, although it is only a matter of time before it does."

WHAT??? The in-the-gutter price that we have been receiving is because not enough-lenders have fore­closed on farmers? I suppose that it has nothing to do with the" fact that the processors are paying us hardly anything for our milk, robbing the pub­lic by keeping the price of dairy products artificially high, and filling their back pockets with record profits-AND-the government lets them get away with it with its out-of-date pricing system.

Dairy farmers have been crying for months to our elected officials, but so far it's been all talk and no action. Farmers and consumers need to call their Congressmen and INSIST that they support the biIlS-889. It's the only bill out there that deals with the cheap imports that the gov­ernment lets the processors bring into displace our domestic supply. It also deals with supply-manage­ment and cost of production. There are several ideas out there, but the only actual bill is S-889. No other plan deals with imports, and if imports aren't controlled, then the minute that the price of milk goes up even a little bit the processors will just import more MPC's (Milk Protein Concentrates) to drive the price right back down.

Pro Ag is sponsoring a second Farmer's Rally on Aug. 14 at one o'clock at the West Winfield Middle School. We are asking all producers, agri-business people, and consumers to attend and voice your concerns to our elected officials. It will prob­ably be the one day of the week that it doesn't rain and farmers will want to hay it, but if milk prices don't turn around soon, they won't need any hay.

I scanned the Editoral and a letter to the editor from today's Waterville Times - a very small weekly newspaper in central NY - that I thought you all might be interested in. They've been good about printing our letters and at long last, the Editor is taking up the plight of our dairy farmers, who are 2nd in the US for the worst economic situation. (Only CA beats us for losing the most money in dairy farming.) Two of my closest friends own dairy farms. They are long past hanging on by their fingernails - both have had to take bank loans just to meet their monthly expenses while they try to hang on for the increase in price they were promised in June and which never came.

I will be attending the Pro-Ag Farmer's Rally and will be printing off some no-NAIS info to hand out - especially since some of our elected officials will be there. Maybe at long last our elected officials will wake up to what NAIS will do to ALL of us with farms in this area.

Karen

NAIS ~~ over estimated, over promised, over budget, unnecessary, unneeded and unwanted.

Brad Headtel

The NAIS is a years-old concept that has outlived its time and fails to recognize that economic instability is our greatest national hazard, not, if all the animals have a government number.

Mary--Fireworks Farm, CA.

NAIS is not a direct ban on meat or chicken or goat meat or ... but a slow, complex legal threat entailing loss of more and more control and then of isolated bankruptcy or of just giving up farming or ranching completely.

Linn Cohen-Cole, 2008

The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a little longer.

Henry Kissinger, former US Secretary of State
(Source: New York Times, Oct. 28, 1973)

Anything is possible if you don't know what you are talking about.

Brad Headtel-------On Bruce (USDA) Knight's pandemic projections
of national livestock catastrophic die-offs.

Bureaucracy never sleeps.

Neil Young

Makes ranchers paw the dirt----like a bull looking forward to the virtues of castration.

on NAIS-------Brad Headtel

Only Jesus loves the stupid. As He looks closer toward the DC Beltway------it's an ever increasing stretch.

Brad Headtel

You are known by the low morals of the bureaucrats you tolerate.

Brad Headtel

Phony science begets phony public policy.

Walter Williams

NAIS~~~~ Mother of all unnecessary federal job creation schemes.

Brad Headtel

The issue is not the issue. Who decides the issue is the issue. If you decide the issue you are a free man. If a politician decides the issue you can un-elect him, but if a bureaucrat decides the issues you are his pawn and practically without recourse.

Harold Hockstatter

It is sad that here in the United States of America we must fight our government to protect our own rights, but fight I will.

 Jerry Fennell--From "Shattered Dreams"

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.

On NAIS -- H.L. Mencken

Make the lie big, make it simple, keep saying it, and eventually they will believe it..

Adolf Hitler

There is no worse tyranny than to force a man to pay for what he does not want merely because you think it would be good for him.

Robert Heinlein

If a government program is not worth doing at all,   it is not worth doing well.

...on NAIS - Brad Headtel

Communism ~~ the government owns the means and method of production.  In fascism the government controls the means and method of production.

We're not happy until you're not happy...

USDA official on the Westland/Hallmark Meat recall of Feb. 17, 08

NAIS is one of those issues that everyone wishes never became an issue. It is a genie that will not go back in the bottle.

Troy Marshall, Seed Stock Digest, 1/7/08

The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.

on the NAIS program..... - Frederick Douglass

We're out here branding cattle, worrying about our best horse going blind, when all of a sudden the USDA is working at mach speed filling our saddle bags with heavy NAIS rocks.

Michelle Reid

....NAIS matters less than flea sweat.
....producer interest in NAIS is less robust than a paper pig in a barbeque pit.

Wes Ishmael, Contributing editor,
BEEF Magazine, Dec. 2007

I work day and night to prevent NAIS!

This is the first time in my life I have had the opportunity to save billions of dollars of wasted government tax for my fellow livestock producers all over the nation. As it was said about Queen Esther of old, from the great palace of Shushan, '...who knoweth whether thou art come to the kingdom for such a time as this.?'

I feel the NAIS program, as planned, will embezzle from 10 to 60% of the profit from every livestock producer, and that is not an acceptable price to pay for a naive USDA concern about future unknown or previously eradicated diseases.
Every consumer or livestock owner should spend full time to prevent the enforcement of this cost to our nation.

Darol Dickinson

NAIS will not be mandatory under my tenure. I repeat will not!

Mike Johanns on mandatory National Animal Identification Surrender.
Sec. of Agriculture Mike Johanns quit the job two months later.

NAIS will put Livestock owners under closer surveillance than terrorists, illegals aliens, drug dealers, and convicted sex offenders/child molesters. Currently, only convicted sex offenders/child molesters have to register their premises.

BSE, bovine spongiform encephalopathy takes five to seven years to develop. It's not actually a disease that you have to rush to trace. You can take about all the time you need. What you want to do is prevent it in the first place.

Reno, Nev. --- 11/29/07 Jay Truitt          
NCBA VP for governmental affairs,
on the USDA proposed 48 hour
emergency disease trace back.

Most of the stuff people worry about ain't never gunna happen.

Will Rogers . . . . on NAIS

No man's life, liberty, or property is safe while the legislature is in session.

Mark Twain

What this country needs are more unemployed bureaucrats.

Edward Langley

Each time we give up information about ourselves to the government, we give up some of our freedom. The more the government or any institution knows about us, the more power it has over us. When the government knows all of our private information, we stand naked before official power; stripped of our privacy, we lose our rights and privileges. The Bill of Rights then becomes just so many words.

Senator Sam Ervin, June 1974.

The USDA is a run away agency out of control, with total disregard for U.S. citizens, yet full regard for other countries and free trade at all costs.

Dr. Max Thornsberry, President R-CALF USA

NAIS . . . a program that somewhat resembles an expensive plan to use baseball bats to kill mosquitoes . . . when we haven't found the mosquito---and the plan was proposed by a bat manufacturer.

NAIS . . . when freedom is outlawed, only outlaws will be free.

The urge to save humanity is almost always a fake front for the urge to rule.

H.L. Menchen

Is the USDA run by smart people who are putting us on, or by imbeciles who really mean it?

NAIS is like a fat man in a swim suit - you may not appreciate what you see, but what isn't revealed is even more fearful.

NAIS Employee -- Never argue with a person whose job depends on not being convinced.

Remember - A major animal disease outbreak to a State Veterinarian is like a multi-car wreck to an auto body shop.

NAIS is the very model of how an unresponsive Executive Branch agency can cooperate with a globalist industrial agriculture and a technocratic corporate elite to force an undesired program upon an unwilling populace.

Mary Zanoni

NAIS press releases from USDA could present caviar in such a light we want to run from it like a falling meteorite.

Many associations embrace the NAIS because their paid leadership does so, regardless of what their members truly want.

Marida Favia delCore Borromeo

On NAIS - If USDA comes up with a stupid idea -- If Congress votes to fund it -- If 296,000,000 taxpayers write the check -- I'm sorry, it's still a stupid idea.

NAIS is a disease masquerading as its own cure.

NAIS is the result of looking for trouble, not finding it anywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly, and applying costly incorrect remedies.

As the government is doing wrong to us, like with NAIS, you gotta know they are doing wrong to people all over the world, right?  Why do all these countries hate the USA?

Linn Cohen-Cole

Once government gets its hands on new power, it is never relinquished.

Henry  Lamb ~~~ Sovereignty International