Editor’s note: John Klar is a Vermont grass-fed beef and sheep farmer, and an attorney and pastor who lives in Irasburg.
[In an excellent article in the March 23 edition of The Barton Chronicle (“Irasburg Farmer Challenges State”), Tena Starr has undertaken to fathom Vermont’s arcane on-farm slaughter rules, which our Legislature enacted at the behest of the Vermont Agency of Agriculture, Food and Markets (VAAFM). I am the farmer who has flagrantly violated these rules – and I will continue to do so, to protect our farmers, our food quality, and our animals.
These laws need to be repealed. As to how – we can simply permit them to expire when a sunset provision takes effect this year. As to why, I will explain here in detail.
These laws are a bureaucratic abuse of Vermont’s long-standing traditions of raising our own food, initiated by a federal government that lacks constitutional jurisdiction to regulate intrastate commerce, and so bribes state agencies to dupe their legislators into enacting laws so that those state agencies will continue to receive federal funding to violate our rights. The Vermont Agency of Agriculture Food and Markets is loyal to its own paychecks and power expansion – not to our farmers, our animals, our consumers, or our Legislature. Indeed, governors and representatives come and go, but state bureaucrats must maintain their cronyism with the federal authorities who hold their puppet-strings.
Sound too harsh? Read on.
The on-farm slaughter rules are very invasive and grant the state the power “to gather and compile information and to investigate the organization, business, conduct, practices, and management of any person engaged in intrastate commerce, and the relationship to other persons” (6 V.S.A. Sec. 3318 Investigation). How our Legislature granted such sweeping and unconstitutional investigatory powers to the VAAFM over our farmers is a question that remains to be addressed. But the state police are more limited in their investigatory powers over interstate narcotics traffickers than the VAAFM is here provided over Vermont farmers. It is under these investigatory rules that the VAAFM showed up unannounced at my farm last summer to interrogate and intimidate me. I treat my animals very well – perhaps there should be some evidence of neglect or abuse before the state drops in and harasses small farmers.
I sell halves of beef to my neighbors, as I have done for nearly two decades. But in 2013 the VAAFM duped lawmakers into compelling me to divert animals to large slaughter facilities unless my customers bought a whole animal. In their extensive experience, the VAAFM knows full well – full well — that almost no one buys a whole beef, as it is very costly, and requires both a large family and two chest freezers to store. The legislation recites “unfair competition” and “health and safety” as the government interests which justify these intrusions. But as I shall demonstrate here and in a court of law, these laws accomplish the exact opposite of what they purport: They pollute my meat, cause gratuitous suffering of my animals, and unfairly force custom processors and itinerant slaughterers out of business. And do not be deceived by the vapid bureaucratic justifications for these rules – they know exactly what they are doing here, and hired extra “compliance investigators” at taxpayer expense to shut down our small businesses and farms. And the “compliance investigator” who insulted me by his visit earns over $50,000 per year to so offend.
So for years I have sold one or two beef annually, and then have a half beef for my own larder. I have never actually made a profit, because I continue to grow my herd and so my feed costs always exceed my income from the beef sold. We are a closed herd, use no antibiotics, hormones, or even wormers, feed organic hay almost exclusively, and slaughter on-farm because that is the most humane method (the animal never knows what is coming), and the cleanest – the carcass is not exposed to other animals which may have been trucked from large confinement dairies, which routinely ship their sickly animals (pumped full of antibiotics to keep them alive in deplorable conditions) for slaughter before they “tip” into the category of downer cows, which are no longer legal to sell for meat.
Along comes the VAAFM, and says “No that is illegal – in order to keep our food safe, you must load that healthy animal onto a livestock trailer (that just delivered some CAFO – Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation – cows), torment your animal that has never seen a trailer, and expose it to potentially sickly animals while it awaits slaughter.” “But,” I protest, “that removes the local custom processor and the itinerant slaughterer that my customers and I have hired for many years from involvement, and that will put them out of business as well as eliminate our freedom of choice in the matter.” “Oh no,” says the Meat Man, “that was unfair competition. Now we are here to protect consumers and large federal meat processing facilities from those predatory small businessmen who were taking advantage of economic liberties that have long existed in Vermont to provide services at the expense of Big Ag.” This is much akin to federal laws which seek to block Vermont’s GMO-labeling efforts to “protect” us, or new VAAFM rules which seek to impose onerous restrictions on small farms to “protect” water quality even where those farms are nowhere near watercourses, and when the agency has done stunningly little to curb water pollution being caused by the real culprits — the large confinement dairies which the state has spent decades encouraging by passing burdensome requirements that small dairies cannot afford to implement. It is punishing the small farmers for the sins of the factories.
Which is what the on-farm slaughter rules accomplish. Our meat is coming from huge national slaughterhouses – 90 percent of grocery store hamburger is contaminated with antibiotics, hormones, or both; and the large CAFO facilities breed the super-vicious bacteria that cannot live in my grass-fed herd. My customers eat hamburger with body parts from a single cow: industrial burger may contain meat from hundreds or even thousands of animals, mixed and remixed at various locales, where 400 cows are slaughtered and processed hourly. My local slaughterer might process as many as four or five cows a day – unfair competition, don’tcha know …
That “next step” — an onsite custom slaughterhouse — puts Phil Brown out of business, and is a huge expense for someone who only sells four beef – the point at which they would be required to take that step.
Tena Starr’s article in The Barton Chronicle exposes the VAAFM. She quotes Randy Quenneville, chief of the meat program for the Vermont Meat Inspection Services: “Mr. Quenneville finds plenty of logic in the current regulations. Take the number three for cows. It makes sense to raise one for yourself, and a couple more to sell as live animals to pay for the grain, Mr. Quenneville said. Beyond that, if a farmer starts selling more animals, and does not want to ship them to a slaughterhouse, perhaps that person ought to take the next step and invest in an onsite custom slaughterhouse, he said … ‘These people didn’t know the animal, they didn’t know the farmer,’ he said. ‘If you’re going to allow this, the whole point is to know your farmer, to know your food.’ That’s one of the reasons why the farmer cannot do the on-farm slaughtering, but it has to be done instead by the buyer, or someone he hires – so that presumably, someone besides the farmer will look at the animal and decide if both it and the circumstances are clean and healthy. … Vermont’s meat inspection program must be at least equal to the federal government’s, Mr. Quenneville said. ‘We will only bend so much.’” (The Barton Chronicle, March 23, 2016)
Let me expose just how patently absurd this is:
• People do not know the “farmer” who “raised” their industrial beef-like substance, and if they knew what was done to that animal through life and at slaughter they would not ingest it.
• To “perhaps … take the next step and invest in an onsite custom slaughterhouse” sounds innocuous enough. But that “next step” is unnecessary when I have Brown’s Custom Meats in Glover who has done a perfectly fine job for decades. And that “next step” puts Phil Brown out of business, and is a huge expense for someone who only sells four beef – the point at which they would be required to take that step. Also, I rent my property – where shall I take my facility when my “next step” is to move?
• The buyer (who likely has no experience in slaughter) can come to my farm and kill my cow, but I can’t – it took a bureaucrat to call that “plenty of logic.”
• It is simply a falsehood to say that “Vermont’s meat inspection program must be at least equal to the federal government’s” – that is the federal government talking through Mr. Quenneville. The federal government does not have jurisdiction over my intrastate commerce, and if it did, it too would have to comply with constitutional protections of my business and food – it could not justify these idiotic laws any more than Vermont can.
Mr. Quenneville is a confirmed dissembler. As reported in Seven Days (“Emails Suggest Vermont Meat Inspector Knew About Bushway Abuse,” Seven Days, Andy Bromage, March 24, 2010), it was Mr. Quenneville who lied about his agency’s awareness of animal abuse in a highly publicized case at a Vermont slaughterhouse. The article reports: “As recently as February 4, the state’s chief meat inspector, Randy Quenneville, testified at the Statehouse that, had the cruelty been reported to Vermont officials sooner, the state could have moved in to investigate. ‘The fact that [U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Food Safety and Inspection Service] waited three months to say anything really escalated that to an out-of-control situation,’ Quenneville told the Senate Committee on Agriculture. ‘There’s no reason to not let people know that you see something that is of question.’ Now it looks as if Quenneville and a colleague did know. Emails and memos provided by a federal veterinarian-turned-whistleblower appear to show that Quenneville and state food safety specialist Terry McKenna were informed at least twice of abuses that led the plant to be suspended for violating humane slaughtering laws.”
In typical bureaucratic fashion, Quenneville earns over $70,000 annually to “Provide testimony and regulatory interpretations to Vermont Legislature to aid in rulemaking processes” (per his LinkedIn profile).
The state’s chief meat inspector has no credibility to opine about my animals, my customers, my friends’ businesses, or Vermont meat safety. None. I submit that he should be fired, and have his salary diverted to helping our dairy farmers – the small ones, who do not pollute, and who allow their animals to walk in the sunlight and eat actual grass in a field.
Finally, Tena Starr’s excellent coverage captured another sentiment. Andrea Stander, the head of Rural Vermont, is quoted as saying that “… there is concern that just one incident of contaminated meat could damage the Vermont ‘brand’.” Well, I share that sentiment. But here is the problem – there has not been a single such incident; and there won’t be if all the small producers are shut down so that consumers will have to buy their meat from the overlords of Big Ag. This is a classic case (as with the water quality rules) of throwing out the baby with the corporate bathwater. I won’t stand for it. I’m at war for my farming community, and for my children’s future. We don’t want petro-chemical food any more, trucked petroleum-dependent from poverty-wage-paying factories from far away. We want Vermont food we already trust, not bureaucrats who pretend to “save” us while they suggest we farmers cannot be trusted to sell healthy animals. These laws contaminate our meat and shut down our neighbors while unlabeled foreign “meat” fills our national grocery chains’ shelves. Large corporations do not wish to lose “market share” to the blossoming local food producers: quietly rewarding bureaucrats to concoct artificial justifications to destroy us is their “business plan.” I believe in free markets – so let us discharge from employment those who intrude into our culture and seek to destroy our way of life, and who publicly demonstrate how much they are willing to lie and thieve to do so.
The author invites comments at farmerjohnklar@gmail.com, and also invites consumers and small farmers to join his facebook pages “Vermont Farmer-Consumer Alliance,” “GMO-Free Vermont,” and “Children In Need Uganda.”
