Oregon starts Shutting Down Small Farms “to protect the people”

For all the Preppers out there in Oregon who are keeping a couple of cows around for the coming bad times, think again. For all the yuppies who follow their “farm to table” mantra of free roaming cows, mooing happily, blissfully catching some rays as they chew their cud, laying stretched out on the velvet green pasture, those days are over.

And they are using drones to roam about the countryside looking for the criminals who dare to keep a couple of cows and hunt down the perpetrators.

Here is a tale you will want to know about…..:

Small farmers are under attack in the state of Oregon, which has begun shutting down family farms throughout the state en masse under the guise of water conservation and groundwater protection.

State as bureaucrats erroneously dub small family farms as concentrated animal feeding operations, or CAFOs, in order to shut them down “for the environment.”

The rancher explains that there are two different laws that Oregon officials are using to conduct these shutdowns. One involves the state of Oregon’s broadly vague definition of a CAFO, which reads, in part, as follows:

“The State of Oregon defines CAFOs as the concentrated feeding or holding of animals or poultry, including but not limited to horse, cattle, sheep, or swine feeding areas, dairy confinement areas, and poultry and egg production facilities where the surface has been prepared with concrete, rock or fibrous material to support animals in wet weather.”

“The state of Oregon has effectively shut down small farms and market gardens on a large scale, and they’re actually sending out cease-and-desist letters to farms and they’re using satellite technology to find their victims and send them these letters that say you can’t operate,” the rancher in the video below explains.

Based on this definition, a few-acre homestead with pasture and, say, two milking cows and some chickens qualifies as a CAFO if it has any area on the property where rock or gravel is used as a pathway to get to a small barn or coop.

“The way that they have redefined CAFOs is going to impact nearly everybody,” the rancher warns about Oregon’s “updated” CAFO definition, which impacts his property as well. “Even on our property, we don’t have animals that are necessarily contained in one area (they’re roaming on pastures).”

The case was recently covered by National Review, explaining that Oregon’s government “joined forces” with the large-scale dairy industry to oppress and tyrannize Oregon’s small farmers.

Read more

Oregon wants to regulate small farms like large commercial dairies. Why? Not because of real environmental concerns, but because large commercial dairies insist that small dairies somehow have a “competitive advantage” over big ones—that is, that they don’t have to install expensive infrastructure to manage waste. (Does anyone really believe that this is what it is all about?)

But small dairies don’t need that infrastructure because the amount of waste generated can safely decompose in fields or be composted for other productive use. The state is wrapping small dairies in meaningless red tape just to please big dairies. That is protectionist, irrational and, moreover, unconstitutional. Sarah, and three other small farmers, are now teaming up with the Institute for Justice to file a lawsuit against the Oregon Department of Agriculture and save small dairy farms in the Beaver State. Source: Notes from the clip.

Of all places, Oregon would seem to be the least likely to want to institute such measures and go along with big Ag. Which leads me to think the more likely purpose is to screen out all those preppers who may be hiding a couple of Bessies in their back yard. Those small gardens must go too apparently.

Recall? Bunk’s earlier post Kerry Says Too Many Humans – We gotta go, Bessie the Cow Goes Too

We wonder why the cost of food is so high?

The best of the swamp.